No one could have expected liberal England to applaud the thundering market and its inequalities of wealth. But outsiders might have expected it to support the promise that human rights and democracy offered the world, and oppose the enemies of freedom when they attempted to roll them back. In their own countries, no one shouted louder against real or actual diminutions of personal liberty, yet when confronted with ultra-reactionary movements and dictatorial regimes, liberals recommended surrender.
The first years of the twenty-first century were a second ‘low, dishonest decade’: a time when the BBC was more likely to indulge supporters of oppression than Fox News; when embattled feminists from the Muslim world were more likely to be belittled by writers from the New York Review of Books than the editor of the Daily Mail; when you were more likely to find anti-Semitism by looking to the left rather than the right; and when the general secretary of Amnesty International was more likely to denigrate human rights as white, middle-class indulgences than the general secretary of the Communist Party of China.
Few progressive movements worthy of the name could survive in such a poisonous environment, and few did.
Although liberal England liked nothing better than condemning left-wing politicians for being cowards, it was no braver than its leaders. Labour in power failed to deal with the thundering market because it could not bring itself to face the economic consequences of a necessary confrontation. Liberal England stayed silent as tyranny swept by because it too wanted the quiet life.
Normally, left-wing eras end because the left loses itself in ideological excess and careers off into the margins of politics. The left of the early twenty-first century was an exception. It failed not because it was left-wing but because in crucial respects it was not left-wing enough. It forgot the lessons of the Great Depression and failed to regulate runaway markets. It forgot the best of its achievements of the twentieth century and failed to defend them from the assault of the twenty-first.
As economies crash and governments make colossal interventions to save them, it might seem reasonable to predict a revival of the better side of the left-wing tradition. I hope to see it come, not least because social democrats have the best answers to today’s financial and environmental crises. But I won’t pretend that many obstacles remain in the way of a return to reputable politics. Liberal opinion went wilder in Britain than in any other European country. Although some liberals will ‘recover their senses slowly, and one by one’, as Charles Mackay predicted, others will be stuck in their ideological prisons for the rest of their lives. Meanwhile, although Labour responded well to the crash, it cannot escape responsibility for failing to see the crisis coming and may well pay the political price for its failure.
I cannot think of a more revealing measure of that failure than the transformation of the English aristocracy from pantomime villains and chinless wonders into viable leaders of the nation. At the end of the longest period of left-wing government in British history, the Etonians were back for the first time since the fall of the Empire. A battered public seemed willing to embrace its old ruling class with something approaching relief.
A NOTE ON THE TEXT
To paraphrase Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, ‘the newspapers got small’ during my career in journalism. In selecting works for this book, I have not only tidied up ugly sentences, but also added material I could not fit into the original articles at the time of writing. Since my last collection of essays, I have published two full-length books—Pretty Straight Guys and What’s Left? I have tried to avoid overlap, and the only large repetition I have allowed is in ‘Vänster Om, Höger Om!’, the second half of which appeared in the postscript to the paperback edition of What’s Left?
Everyone is in debt now and I am no exception. I must thank Robin Harvie of 4th Estate for suggesting this book and being a model editor and Natasha Fairweather of the A. P. Watt literary agency for making everything possible. No writer can work without editors who will publish him and I am also indebted to John Mulholland of the Observer, Jason Cowley of the New Statesman, Daniel Johnson of Standpoint, Veronica Wadley of the Evening Standard, Mat Smith formerly of Arena, Johan Lundberg of Axess and Kenneth Baer of Democracy. ‘The Reasonableness of Ranters’ originally appeared in Time Out’s 1000 Books to Change Your Life. The quotes from Max Frisch’s Arsonists come from the new English translation by Alistair Beaton, which Ramin Gray directed at London’s Royal Court in November 2007. The lyrics by Joe Strummer come from ‘White Man in Hammersmith Palais’, written by The Clash. Francis Wheen talked me through problems with the text.
As ever, all errors of taste and judgement remain the sole responsibility of the author.
*Although it looked like a full-length mirror, it was in fact a video screen with a time-delay function. Why would anyone want such a thing? Well, with a memory mirror you did not have to put yourself through the momentary inconvenience of looking over your shoulder to see if a dress fitted neatly over your bottom. You could turn around and study an image of your haute-coutured derrière taken ten seconds earlier without the risk of cricking your neck.
* When her world fell apart, Kirstie Allsopp, who hosted Location, Location, Location, the most boosterish of all the property programmes, could not accept that her assumptions had been faulty but instead saw a conspiracy of doom-mongers. ‘In recent weeks I’ve been described as a “property porn queen” in the New Statesman, sniped at on the pages of the Guardian and lambasted by Panorama for excessively inflating house prices. Some of the recent gloomy headlines make me suspect that all the journalists in the country have sold up and are doing everything in their power to cause a property house price crash so that they can buy at rock bottom.’
* I get around the problem of deciding when to say ‘English’ and ‘England’ and when ‘British’ and ‘Britain’ by using whichever sounds best in the context of the sentence. I won’t pretend that this is a solution which stands up to rigorous scrutiny.
‘Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious threat to the upper classes, and probably lead to acts of violence in Grosvenor Square.’
OSCAR WILDE,
The Importance of Being Earnest, 1895
NINETEEN SEVENTY-TWO was a good year for Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy to publish The Rise and Fall of the British Nanny. At the time it seemed reasonable to predict that the institution was dying, and with it relationships that readers living in the nuclear households of the day found unnatural. They could join him in looking back with amusement and a little revulsion at aristocrats in the mould of Winston Churchill, who had greater feelings of tenderness for his Nanny Everest than for his parents. She adored him and called him ‘my lamb’. When she died, Churchill said she ‘had been my dearest and most intimate friend during the whole of the 20 years I had lived’. He was not an exception. Gathorne-Hardy said that ‘the annals of nanny literature are filled with desperate and brutal partings’ as carer and child were pulled apart by market forces or parental whims.
The nannies who shouted, ‘there are three sorts of sin: little sins, bigger sins and taking off your shoes without undoing the laces’ at the children of the upper-middle classes looked as if they were going the way of the Empire. In 1972, the second wave of feminism had yet to