Something is happening to Britain and the British. Or has happened. We are said to be passing through a transition, or a turning point, or a transformation; nobody is quite sure which. Opinions differ sharply as to what the "it" is that we are passing through.
Seasoned observers in the US tend to identify what they see quite simply as decline. A decline in relative power must certainly play some part. This is not 1914, and Britain, though still possessing the fourth largest economy in the world, is no longer number one. It has to be admitted that a large part of what drew many foreign observers to this country was the thrill of being at the centre of affairs. For Norman Podhoretz, to visit or to live in London was once to be in the modern Athens or Rome. Now he tells us, in a melancholy essay in Commentary, that he no longer bothers to read British newspapers or keep up with the English literary world. To judge by the pop and rock stars and feminists whose images adorn the new wing of the National Portrait Gallery, he concludes that "the forces at work in the culture and politics in the second half of the 20th century had left a sorry-nay, tragic wreckage behind." Podhoretz agrees with Aleksa Djilas, writing in Prospect from Belgrade, that "the country's culture has declined... The source of England's greatness was that it was an island... its ideas and institutions were either more traditional or more advanced than in Europe or the US. Sometimes, most admirably, they were both." An accusation of cultural decline from the former Yugoslavia-things must be really bad.
Apparently Britain does not look much better when viewed from outside the metropolis. In a recent Letter from Wales in the National Interest, the editor, Owen Harries (Welsh by birth, Australian and American by residence), declares: "until quite recently, it used to be the case that Britain was a decent, civilised country with very good public services but an absolutely lousy economy. Now it has changed to a country with a brilliant economy that is seriously and progressively sick in other respects." The country which was formerly a byword for lawful behaviour, civility and respect for property now leads the world in every crime except murder. Feckless habits have bred an underclass, just as Charles Murray predicted. The NHS is sadly decayed. The people are illiterate. In a recent essay in Prospect (May 2001), Michael Elliott, former editor of Newsweek International and another expatriate Briton, takes up the theme: the British people have become rude and foul-mouthed, and nobody bothers to do anything about it. Even Tony Blair's modest efforts to remedy this incivility are dismissed as sanctimonious and patronising.
Such complaints are not limited to foreigners or expatriates. Homegrown laments, such as Peter Hitchens's The Abolition of Britain (Quartet) and Roger Scruton's England: an Elegy (Chatto & Windus), also deplore the decline in standards of civility, morality and manners. No longer do little old ladies cycle through the early morning mist to Holy Communion. These days, if little old ladies ventured forth at all, they would probably be knocked off their bikes and assaulted by some drunken yobbo left over from the night before. In any case, the church would probably have been closed down years ago.
Jeremiads of this sort come mostly from the right. They differ from, and are difficult to reconcile with, the almost equally acerbic dismissal of Britain today which comes from another quarter-from the leading generation of novelists aged about 50, notably Martin Amis, Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie. As I argued in a TLS piece last year (Farewell to Pudding Island, 28th April 2000), this group, leftish if anything, follows earlier British writers such as DH Lawrence and Lawrence Durrell in finding Britain unbearably stodgy and unexciting. Peter Hitchens's brother Christopher, long resident in the US, speaks for them in seeing "America as the great subject, the great canvas." Amis regards England as a backwater-"a little Switzerland"-although without the efficiency, if Owen Harries is to be believed.
I find these images of unrelieved decline and stagnation to be unrecognisable. Leaving aside for a moment the revival of the British economy in the Blair-Thatcher years-which is a lot to leave aside-we still have to wonder why foreigners are flooding into Britain from Europe, Asia and Africa, why house prices are almost the highest in the world, why race relations are so much more relaxed than in the US, why the arts-but I have no wish to engage in a counter-catalogue of things which are better done, or less badly done than elsewhere. There are, after all, plenty of genuine horror stories. Marc Champion's description in The Wall Street Journal-echoed in other foreign newspapers during the election-of decaying and understaffed British hospitals and schools is an accurate representation of what some of us have complained about for over a quarter of a century. But overall recent decline? No, I cannot see it and I do not believe that any careful observer who set out to be objective would see it either. Let me quote my much lamented friend Auberon Waugh, not normally thought of as a Pollyanna. He introduced a collection of his columns (The Way of the World, 1994) with these words: "There are many horrible things happening in the country, but by no means everything that happens is horrible. I would guess, in fact, that we are living in the happiest, most prosperous and carefree society in the history of Britain. Various conspiracies exist to pretend otherwise, of which the most interesting comes from the displaced intelligentsia, ranting against the standards of the new mass entertainment culture in all its undeniable ugliness and nastiness, as it replaces the humane bourgeois liberal culture of the last 150 years."
What I find so bizarre is the claim that Britain is a less interesting, less vivacious country than it used to be at some unspecified era in the 20th century. On the contrary: when I travel today to Washington or New York, to Paris or Frankfurt or Rome, my journey is like exchanging the hurly-burly of the chaise-longue for the deep peace of the marriage bed, to borrow Mrs Patrick Campbell's phrase. There is a sedateness, a formality, even a ponderousness which has all but disappeared from British life-and also, in the US at least, a religiosity which vanished over here after the second world war, if not after the first. So much the worse for Britain, you may say, although I have my doubts about non-believing conservatives who recommend religion as a civilising medicine for others, while being unwilling to swallow it themselves.
I don't mean to be dogmatically cheerful about Britain's future, but I am dogmatic about Britain's past, by which I mean the 30-odd years after the war. About that past I am pessimistic (if this is not too Irish or Yiddish a way of putting it). Perhaps there is an age element here. I suppose I must be about ten years younger than Podhoretz or Harries, and about ten years older than Martin Amis or the Hitchens brothers. For my age group, the years between 1945-80 were the years that mattered-the years of our growing up, and our 20s and 30s. And regardless of whether we were personally happy or not during that period, they are not years to look back on with much satisfaction, as far as our country is concerned. For our seniors, distanced perhaps by geography or by other preoccupations, those years may have seemed much like a continuation of the Britain they had known and been fond of when young. They may have had no uncomfortable sensations of a nation sliding or hollowing out. Our juniors, for their part, grew up into a Britain already discontented with itself; they have known little but turmoil and reform. It was our generation, I think, which experienced most copiously and directly the humiliations of going downhill.
At the end of the second world war, I was barely six years old. But curiously, my recollections of those first years after the war seem to be exactly the same as those of adults of all classes and ages at the time: namely, an overwhelming sensation of exhaustion, poverty and restriction. Almost everyone seems to have felt like this, from the highest to the lowest. King George VI wrote to his brother: "I have been suffering from an awful reaction from the strain of the war, I suppose, and have felt very tired." Everyone talked about shortages of everything-food, fuel, clothing. Our overseas investments had been snapped up by the Americans or had dwindled into insignificance. We were bankrupt and down at heel.
Of course these difficulties were trivial beside the suffering being endured at the time on the continent. The atmosphere in Britain, if it could be remotely compared to Germany, would be more like the genteel dispiritedness after the first world war, described by Thomas Mann in Disorder and Early Sorrow, than the profound and threadbare exhaustion after the second, chronicled unforgettably by Heinrich Böll.
The ordeals of an exhausted victor do not make for a dramatic chronicle. The nations of the continent had to rebuild their cities, their economies, their institutions. By contrast, we in Britain, like the dispirited upper-class couple in Mann's novella, had a position to keep up. We had our war debts to repay, our overseas military responsibilities to discharge, our empire first to administer and then to dismantle bit by bit.
So my generation-Churchill's children-grew up knowing more about the intricacies of tribal disputes in Rhodesia or Nigeria than about the politics of Lancashire or Scotland. As for domestic reform-of the trade unions, of the City of London, of parliament, of the all-too-hastily nationalised industries-it was the mark of the naive idealist or encrusted reactionary to imagine that any such thing was possible. In any case, how serious was the need to change? We had won the war, hadn't we? Those institutions we now lived under represented a kind of post-war settlement between the classes and the parties. They were not to be tampered with.
The travel restrictions of the post-war years also helped to conceal from us the dynamic process of rebuilding which was going on on the other side of the channel. It was well into the 1950s before we woke up to the fact that, far from leading the economic recovery of Europe, we were beginning to wallow in its wake. Yet still nothing happened.
In the winter of 1962-3, then in my mid-20s, I was appointed as assistant courier and general dogsbody to Selwyn Lloyd, until recently our chancellor of the exchequer. He had been sacked by Macmillan in a desperate purge to regain popularity-the Night of the Long Knives, as it was called. To keep Selwyn quiet, he had been given the task of investigating the Conservative party to find out what defects there might be in the machine.
For me, the assignment was an unforgettable experience. We travelled the length and breadth of England and Wales. To a young man from the soft south of England, who knew only the gentle undulations of Salisbury Plain and the antique serenity of Eton and Oxford, this odyssey was an education. In those narrow rainswept valleys of Lancashire and Yorkshire, it seemed as if nothing much had happened since the first industrial revolution. We passed miles of great sooty brick factories, often with broken windows stuffed with rags, apparently derelict, yet you could sometimes hear the hum of ancient machinery and a dim light might be visible through the murky panes. The local Conservatives we met- Bradford wool merchants, Halifax fireworks manufacturers, South Wales steel men-seemed scarcely less antique; most of them well advanced into middle age, swathed in waistcoats and watch-chains, robust and forthright, and yet, I sensed, with an underlying feeling that the great days of their particular industries were over. As indeed, in many cases, they were.
This odyssey was undertaken nearly 20 years after the war, but the sense of renewal was sadly absent. In the early 1960s the old businesses were mostly still in operation, clinging on to their old markets, not yet wiped out by the new competition on the continent, let alone in the far east. By the time I undertook similar journeys in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the picture was far grimmer. The main railway line to the north now passed through great stretches of devastation-industrial wastelands with rows of roofless workshops. The strong pound-thanks to North Sea oil-was the immediate cause. But the long-term causes had become familiar ones: poor quality, late delivery, trade union restrictions, timid and defeatist management.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, our politicians made absurd efforts to minimise our decline and to exaggerate our present power and future potential. Harold Macmillan declared that Britain's role was now to play Greece to America's Rome. Harold Wilson asserted that Britain's frontier lay on the Himalayas. Almost everyone who wanted Britain to join the Common Market prophesied that Britain's destiny was to "lead Europe." Those few observers who attempted, often in the kindest possible way, to nudge us towards some understanding of the realities, were treated as mischievous troublemakers-Dean Acheson, who was only stating the obvious when he argued that Britain had lost an empire and had not yet found a role, or Nicholas Henderson, in his farewell dispatch as ambassador from Paris which attempted to describe Britain as others saw her.
To most of us in our 20s, the pretensions of our leaders already seemed antiquated and fatuous. At the time, the productions of the young rebels-the plays of John Osborne, the novels of Kingsley Amis, the rebirth of British satire in print and on the screen-were more often analysed as the rude intrusion of the "new classes" who had been emancipated from deference. In part it was, but what they were also mocking-from whatever background they came-was outmoded national pretension and the escapist rhetoric of the political elites. Take the most potent images of the time: mockery of the Suez operation in Osborne's The Entertainer, or Peter Cook's immortal Beyond the Fringe sketch of Harold Macmillan fumbling with a globe. The imperial game was up, and even those of us who called ourselves conservatives-and many of the satirists were conservatives deep down, if only with a small "c"-thought that our masters were living in a time warp.
What was clear-clear to me now, although it wasn't then-is that willingness to consider change was often considered as ipso facto defeatist. It was taken for granted that anyone who had real confidence in Britain should stoutly resist change. The proposal to join the European Economic Community was often presented, even by its supporters, as a second best option: a pisaller, made necessary by Britain's reduced standing in the world.
We were, in short, stuck with an imperial mindset, dating, I suppose, from the late 19th century. In those days Goschen, a British chancellor of the exchequer who was himself of German extraction, could speak fondly but quite unhistorically of our tradition of "glorious isolation." Our earlier entanglements of the 18th and 17th centuries began to be quite forgotten. That legendary headline-Fog in Channel, Continent cut off-became increasingly close to reality. We knew a good deal about American life, literature and politics, just as we knew a good deal about Africa. But we knew less than we had for centuries about what was going on in France, Germany and Italy, despite the supposed miracles of modern communications. Even in the middle ages, those few people who were educated knew more of French and German art, literature, scholarship, theology and politics.
In literature and the arts, this process intensified rather than diminished after Britain joined the EEC in 1973. When I first came to live in London in the 1960s, some people had still thought it their duty to keep up with happenings on the Left Bank in Paris. Sartre and Camus, Moravia and Silone, Brecht and Mann were acknowledged leaders of a shared culture. Peter Daubeny's wonderful theatre seasons at the Aldwych brought companies from almost every city in Europe-from Madrid to Moscow. I saw my first Lorca, I saw Hamlet in Russian and a good deal of Schlegel Shakespeare. But this sense of a European culture opening out to us, faded rather than blossomed if anything, and a nervous, tetchy insecurity took hold.
Thus, it seemed to me, we began to get the worst of both worlds. We lacked the self-confidence to modernise our own institutions and when we joined the EEC we were indeed damaged by the worst aspects of its regulation: a common agriculture policy unsuited to our needs, excessive harmonisation where we needed diversity, and finicky regulation when we had not yet got rid of our own burdensome red tape dating back to the controlled economy of the war years.
Even well into the 1970s and later, the tangible legacy of those war years remained with us. London streets still had gaping bombsites, with ragwort and buddleia bushes turning them into strange mini- paradises of wildlife. A whole stretch of the capital along the river, from the Tower of London down to the Essex mudflats, remained derelict-the largest urban wasteland in Europe, perhaps in the world.
This sense of unfinished business remaining from the second world war was, I think, reinforced for us by our continued commitment to European security. That so many of our soldiers were still serving in the British Army of the Rhine froze our thinking. On a Sunday morning you could listen to the radio programme Family Favourites, broadcasting old-fashioned numbers sung, say, by Vera Lynn and dedicated by their loved ones to soldiers in Paderborn or Berlin, and feel that nothing much had changed in the world since the 1940s.
Certainly, little or nothing seemed to have changed at home. Edward Heath repeated Harold Wilson's efforts to tackle the trade unions, with no more success. Another attempt was made to reform the House of Lords-removing the hereditary element in order to restore its authority as a revising chamber. Reformers had been agitating for this since the end of the 19th century, but the project was always blocked, this time by a not uncharacteristic alliance of romantic republicans, led by Michael Foot, and romantic reactionaries, led by Enoch Powell.
It's not as if the House of Commons appeared capable of replenishing the deficiencies of the House of Lords. On the contrary: if anything its procedures were more ossified than ever. The most absurd example was the virtual refusal of the Procedure Committee to adjust the working practices of the House to accommodate European legislation, so that for nearly two decades MPs could only feebly bleat as they were shepherded through the lobbies to vote into law a succession of faits accomplis.
Meanwhile, in Brussels we took up a negotiating position, permanently composed in equal parts of incompetence and suspicion, regardless of whether there was a Labour or a Conservative government in London. It was by now painfully clear that those suspicions were the consequence of our lack of self-confidence in dealing with the modern world.
Then came 1979. I do not hero-worship Margaret Thatcher. For one thing, as Montaigne first observed, no man or woman is a hero to his or her valet and I was her political valet for a couple of years. She could be petty, vindictive, obtuse. Like almost all successful politicians, she never shrank from repeating herself. She was a stranger to irony. Yet far outweighing these minor weaknesses, she radiated a sense of possibility. She always believed that something could be done. And she was determined to see that it was done, if necessary-in fact preferably-by herself alone, if nobody else could be bothered to see it through to the end. Above all else, she possessed a glorious tenacity.
This can-do attitude, as the Americans call it, is perhaps her greatest legacy, a legacy which has lasted through the prime ministerships of her two successors and which may have some life left in it yet.
It is not my purpose here to rehearse the social, economic and political changes in Britain over the past 20 years. But it is bizarre that the intelligentsia should seem reluctant to take account of them. What can be the explanation-or perhaps explanations?
I would suggest two lines of thought. They may not have much to do with each other, except that, in a peculiar way, both happen to apply to Britain. The first is that, whatever they may say, intellectuals are no less vulnerable than "ordinary people" to the seductions of domination; perhaps they are more vulnerable. I use the word "domination" rather than "power" in order to be more precise than I was at the beginning of this essay. Intellectuals want to be the fleas on the top dog. Intermediate centres of power, however real and effective, are too boring to detain their attention. For example, what intellectual has spent much time in contemplating the splendours of English local government, even in its heyday? (By intellectuals, I mean generally educated persons who like to take a stand in public affairs.)
Thus Britain began to lose the attention of geo-intellectuals as soon as it began to shed its remaining pretensions to be a superpower. Loss of empire equals loss of interest, even for anti-imperialists. To be just below the bronze medal position is to be an also-ran-hence another Switzerland.
That much may be obvious to the more thoughtful intellectuals, those who have an inkling of the herd instinct which drives their kind and of the miasma of power snobbery, a disease which moves through the air more quickly than the foot-and-mouth virus. But they may be less aware of the potent conjunction of power and shabbiness. This may seem a peculiar quality to invoke. The simplest way to explain it is to refer readers to the works of Graham Greene and John le Carr?, in which seedy surroundings and squalid behaviour achieve a seductive resonance by being backed by power of huge and sinister intensity. Behind the grimy facades of post-war London, beneath the lugubrious manners and fusty clothes of her inhabitants, there lurked an imperial power-on the wane but capable of acting in a heroic, underhand or brutal fashion to achieve its ends.
Now the buildings are more or less clean, the inhabitants wear designer clothes, Britain is a magnet for inward investment and the political system is trying to digest the biggest programme of constitutional reform for 150 years. But for Realpolitiker of the old school the glamour is departed. Of course the NHS is short of money and the state schools are second-rate, but these services were far more dilapidated 20 or 30 years ago. Foreign observers then took no notice, because declinism, whether directed towards one's own country or to other people's, is a notoriously erratic pastime. It was, after all, not so long ago since every wide-awake American publisher had a hot book out on how the US was losing out to Japan on every technological frontier you could think of.
I would only ask observers to observe, and to report what they see rather than what fits their fancy. But then that is always a lot to ask. n
