The world we have lost
David WiHells
MIND THE GAP by Ferdinand Mount
Short Books,114.99, pp. 316, ISBN 1904095941
£12.99 (plus £2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848 The Whig interpretation of history, a relentlessly progressive account of the emergence of our parliamentary system, has long been out of fashion when it comes to politics. But histories of social policy are all too often complacent accounts of 'the development' or 'evolution' of state provision.
This excellent book breaks with that tradition by reminding us of what was lost as the conventional welfare state expanded. A vigorous network of working-class institutions ranging from friendly societies to dissenting chapels was bulldozed out of the way as the state moved in.
E. G. West powerfully showed how much schooling there was before Foster's Education Act of 1870. David Green showed the extent of working-class friendly societies before Lloyd George introduced National Insurance. John Carey showed in The Intellectuals and the Masses just how much modernist writers in the 20th century seem to have hated the bulk of their compatriots. But Ferdinand Mount pulls all this together in a coherent narrative that tries to explain the hollowing out of a vigorous and independent working-class culture through the 20th century. I was particularly struck by the case he makes for the tradition of dissenting Protestantism and the contempt which Anglicans display towards it. He shows how ruthlessly evangelical clergymen are caricatured in Victorian fiction.
He neatly dissects different ways in which people think about class in Britain. There are the infinite gradations of status and rank. There are the three classes — working, middle and upper which we are familiar with. And then there is the brutal contest of them and us which gave old Marxist rhetoric so much of its power. His own analysis seems to be a deceptively simple one. It is a picture of a world in which for most of us things are getting better — the uppers — but there is a dispossessed and demoralised underclass left behind — the downers. Perhaps these are the faces of the peasants we see in the backdrop of a Peter Breughel painting. But this is where I would have liked rather more empirical evidence than we get in this book. Are there not other people still in the middle, neither enjoying the surging prosperity of the long-time owner-occupiers nor in the desolation which he so eloquently describes? Aren't there a lot of people still helping out with the local scouts, negotiating arrangements for the school run with the neighbours and more passionate than ever about their football team? There are still many lives of quiet courage, made worthwhile by holding down a marriage or a job but without the riches or mobility of his uppers. How do they fit into his model? To make it really stack up we would have needed more evidence about British society today than he is willing to offer.
This sort of evidence would also have enriched his narrative about what has gone wrong. Essentially it is a story of ghastly mistakes by patronising members of the middle and upper classes who actively disliked working-class culture and used the power of the state to destroy it. Behind all this was a strand of domestic imperialism in which the British working class were treated like the natives of some distant colony. What gives this book its refreshing humanity is that it is saying it is the fault of the patricians, not the working class themselves. This is an important part of the story and the book sets it out persuasively. But we now know that the finances of the friendly societies were already very rickety before Lloyd George arrived on the scene — one of the reasons why they put up a much less vigorous fight than 20 years earlier. We know that the great London charitable hospitals were already leading a hand-to-mouth existence, one reason why the most powerful opposition to the creation of the NHS came from local authorities who wanted to control the lot, and from the GPs. The shift from working-class selfhelp to the Fabians, which Beatrice Webb describes in her autobiography, arose because the tradition of working-class self-help wasn't only under attack from outside, it also had its own vulnerabilities.
Where Britain went wrong, compared with other advanced western countries, was that we so comprehensively destroyed these institutions rather than strengthening them. On the Continent they were incorporated, protecting much more of their distinctive character and ethos even while the state moved in. Perhaps Baldwin was the only British political leader who tried such a model in Britain. The reason why we didn't was a strange combination of irrational faith in the power of state action combined with a belief in individualism so robust that the value of all the institutions between the individual and the state is not understood.
Ferdinand Mount is right to want to see standardised state action replaced by the diversity of a civil society. It is where Thatcherism was heading and was one of the most attractive features of early Blairism as well. The final chapter of the book outlines some ideas about how this might be achieved. Some are sketchy or eccentric but none the worse for that. And after such a powerful historical account Ferdinand Mount is not obliged to do the policy wonking as well. What Blair would call his most 'eye-catching initiative' is to abolish planning rules that restrict building and are such barriers to opening up land use. Housing used to be one of the big issues of British politics. It was the pledge to build 300.000 houses that moved the Conservative party from narrow defeat in 1950 to clear victory in 1951. It was selling off council houses that was one of the most powerful elements in early Thatcherism. One of our deepest social problems now is surely the inability of the next generation to get decent housing because of the sheer cost of houses in the South-East combined with the continuing desolation of our most deprived estates. Tackling those problems really would be worthwhile. This book does not crack that problem, but it shows us why it is so important to try.
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