When I was a child, I was taught to “know my place”, “do as I was told”, and not answer back. And that seemed alright, because we believed that the vicar, the teacher, the policeman and the government could be trusted to look after us. Then came a war that upset all the old class structures. Grown-ups fought and died alongside people to whom they had doffed their caps—and evacuated children were billeted in posh houses with indoor toilets. Everyone emerged from the nightmare of war wanting change. They even regretfully got rid of the charismatic man who had kept them going during the war with his superb rhetoric, and replaced him with the seemingly meek, unflashy Clement Attlee. As prime minister, Attlee surrounded himself with a visionary team that set about creating a more equal society, thereby totally changing the health, education and status of people from my background.
All went reasonably well, until another ruling class emerged based on obscene inequality of wealth and education. Public schools prepared mainly men to rule. Then we became aware that these people were mindlessly destroying our beautiful planet, and inequality again threatened our existence. A new underclass was created. For me, the lack of respect for this group is typified by Jacob Rees-Moggs’s comments about the people who died in Grenfell Tower. He said to an interviewer “I think if either of us were in a fire, whatever the Fire Brigade said, we would leave the building. It just seems a commonsense thing to do.”
Partygate too demonstrated the rift between the “them” who make the rules and the “us” who obey them. That patron saint of the right, Nigel Farage, is always referring to “the little people" whom he led into the disaster of Brexit. Since another global ordeal, this time the Covid pandemic, I see signs of “the little people” standing up for themselves. Emboldened and united by the miracle of social media, they are making their voices heard.
Partygate demonstrated the rift between the “them” who make the rules and the “us” who obey them
I was made aware of this by a strange little demonstration I recently took part in. It was to make the government aware of the necessity of financial support to maintain our rivers and canals. When doing a television documentary travelling the country in a narrowboat, I discovered that a lot of maintenance of the canals is done by volunteers. They undertake the clearing of the towpaths, restoring historic relics of our industrial history, generally making the canals a beautiful refuge. But the government has a duty to do its part. Thus, I boarded a rather grubby barge with a motley crew of canal boat owners and canal devotees, to support an armada of narrowboats gathering outside the Houses of Parliament. I doubt if any of them had ever been on a demo in their lives, most of them being slightly eccentric “little people”, but they vigorously hooted slightly comic horns, and shook their fists at a few bewildered MPs on the terraces. The vessel that we were in nearly capsized as we followers all rushed to the side to shout our support.
Recently, several major injustices have been revealed by the dedicated persistence of honourable, ordinary folk, bringing to light cover-ups by those in charge. These include: the cruel rejection of the Windrush generation that came over to help build up the country after the war—only to be told they must now go back to the homes they left in the 1940s. The corner-cutting and malpractice of the construction firms that caused the fire in the Grenfell Tower block that killed 72 people. The devastating Post Office scandal. The cover-up of the use of contaminated blood transfusions that have killed many patients. It is only the persistent pressure of the victims and their allies that has brought to light these scandals.
The commemoration of the 80th anniversary of D-Day, performed in Bayeux amongst the 4,000 graves of the young men and women who were killed, was heart-breaking. Talking to television interviewers, the few remaining veterans who experienced that carnage expressed their horror of war. There were no heroics from them, just regret at the waste. “Talk of peace not war” said one tearful old man. All were alarmed at the “dangerous world” we now live in.
I suspect that some of these men and women, whose lives were blighted by the horrors they endured, would be pleased that every weekend people are marching to express their opposition to the war being waged in Gaza, which we watch helplessly on our television screens.
Maybe in some wonderful future, all the young people on Earth will heed the experience of our veterans and refuse to kill one another. Instead, they will use their lives to create a better world by uniting in tackling the problems of poverty, and climate change and its inevitable, resultant, mass migration. If my fantasy world happened, our leaders would be forced to listen to the little people and learn to “talk peace, not war”.
