A VICTORIAN REVIVAL?
Mrs Thatcher is winning the battle over values
PRIME ministers, being cynosures, often precipitate general debates by casual re- marks on which the media seizes. Harold Macmillan's 'never had it so good' seemed to epitomise the heedless profligacy of the 1?ng, post-war boom, and his own propen- sity to give organised labour (i.e. the NUM) the pay-settlements they deman- ded. He resented the fact that his phrase had been torn out of its warning context and used against him by his own critics within the party, who later became Thatch- ernes. This was why he took such satisfac- tion in reversing the charge over privatisa- tion, accusing Mrs Thatcher's government of genuine improvidence by 'selling the family silver'. Mrs Thatcher, in her turn, has stirred up discussion by employing the term Nieto- nan'. She has used it more than once, and there is some confusion over whether she means `Victorian virtues' or `values'; but what is important is that, for her, 'Victo- rian' is a term of approval. She thus publicised a judgment hitherto voiced by little-heeded right-wing historians, and in doing so began to roll back the tide which set in with the publication in 1918 of Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians, one of the most influential and destructive books of the century. In this case it has proved a positive advantage that Mrs Thatcher is much hated by the wordy classes because they have served her purpose by carrying on the debate relentlessly, not only in left-wing historical journals but in mass-market organisations they control like the BBC. Unfortunately for them, their response to Mrs Thatcher's praise of Victorian virtues, variously identified as thrift, industry, temperance, self-reliance etc, has been contradictory. Some on the Left have argued that Victorians did not in fact Possess these qualities; others that it was a class ramp, invented by the bourgeois to !Mpose capitalist discipline on the proletar- iat. The net result has merely served Mrs
Thatcher's purpose of suggesting that these ideals are worthy of imitation today, whether or not Victorians possessed them, though she seems to be winning the battle on the historical point too: 'Victorian' is now subtly changing its meaning, from censorious, puritanical and narrow-minded to diligent, energetic and purposeful.
The most suggestive contribution to the debate so far is a short pamphlet, Victorian Values and 20th-Century Condescension, by the American historian Gertrude Him- melfarb. * One of the ways in which Victo- rian society was superior to our own is that it produced masses of well-argued pam- phlets which were widely reviewed and discussed. Quite a number still appear today — I am sent, on average, half a dozen a week — but few attract any notice. The odd one is made the subject of quasi-sensational news-stories in the dailies but hardly any are analysed and answered systematically. Equally important, there are very few bookshops and newsagents which have them on sale.
Miss Himmelfarb's offering is particular- ly worth noting because she rejects the (quite unhistorical) notion that Victorian values were instruments of social control imposed by the middle on the working class. As she says, they were timeless and classless, indeed essentially religious values, springing from Jewish and Christ- ian teaching. Working-class Victorians were just as anxious to practise them as anyone else, and often did so with success. That was the way they `got on' and escaped their propertyless predicament.
Indeed, as Miss Himmelfarb points out, if thrift and diligence were, as some left- wing polemicists seem to claim, artificial aids of a social control system alien to the workers, what were 'real' working-class values? Were the labouring poor, in their natural, untampered-with state, lazy, profligate and drunken? Or, to put it another way, if hard work, saving, paying debts promptly, clean living and self- respect characterise middle-class capitalist society, what should characterise a socialist one? Should it merely reflect the attitudes of the shiftless poor — in which case must it not be a hell on earth? Or should the socialist state, in its turn, seek to impose the prudential values — in which case how does its social control differ, in essence, from capitalist methods?
In short, the debate over Victorian values shows a tendency to develop into a new inquiry into the nature of socialism and its claim to reflect and interpret the needs/desires of the workers. As such, it comes at an awkward or perhaps oppor- tune time for Neil Kinnock and his friends as they begin to re-examine what the Labour Party is supposed to be about. They fear they are in danger of losing the workers, or at any rate the skilled and more industrious ones, precisely because the society Mrs Thatcher is creating offers more obvious rewards to those who prac- tise the Victorian virtues she admires.
How, then, can Kinnock & Co counter her appeal? Up till now, the Labour Party, which for the past decade has reflected the values of late 20th-century middle-class intellectuals, has tried to argue either that Thatcherite materialism is wicked in itself, or that it cannot be spread widely enough to be equitable. There is a growing doubt on the second point, and the first is rejected with scorn by real workers and their families, who do not see why they should be denied advantages — owning their own houses, savings, foreign holi- days, choice in education, health care etc — which middle-class socialist ideologues have always taken for granted. Perhaps the real solution for Labour is to adopt Victo- rian values in all their plentitude: to embrace not just thrift and self-reliance, but the humanitarianism, the passion for reform, the growing hatred of cruelty and zeal in stamping it out, above all the universal desire for 'improvement', indi- vidual and collective, which was the real glory of the Victorian Age. If I were a Labour Party strategist today I would be planning to steal Mrs Thatcher's Victorian clothes, including some she has not yet got round to putting on. *Centre for Policy Studies, 8 Wilfred St, SW1. f2.20.
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