Debbie Moss on From Anger to Apathy: The British Experience since 1975 by Mark Garnett.
Garnett's history of the rise in disengagement and voter apathy suffers from its lack of convincing explanations and an overly narrow understanding of politics.
(Mark Garnett, From Anger to Apathy, Jonathan Cape 2007, 480pp)
In From Anger to Apathy, Garnett sets out to provide an "antidote" to "nostalgia" about the 1970s, to examine the "long 1980s" and to map the social and cultural costs of the ethos of individualistic consumerism preached by Thatcher and continued under Blair. Journalistic in style, this history is traced using newspaper headlines, references to pop music, TV programmes and celebrities alongside cabinet meetings and elections.
According to Garnett, the history of the period wasn't a straight line from anger to apathy but rather the roots of both were present in the 70s. The period is presented as tumultuous, characterised by inflation, terrorism and a prevailing public anger, vocalised in the lyrics of The Clash.
Although it was no golden age for Garnett British society has been in decline ever since. His central concern is the preponderance of apathy, reflected in desperately low voter turnout and the disengagement of the young. His diagnosis of contemporary society is familiar from other recent works, ranging from the psychological self-help writings of Oliver James in Affluenza to the political theory of Colin Hay's Why We Hate Politics. Society is suffering from a hyper-individualistic, consumerist disease, he tells us, generating "passive consumers" rather than "active citizens".
Garnett links political apathy to social atomisation. Noting that in 1964 almost all voters expressed a feeling of "identity" with a specific party, he emphasises that partisan attachment to a party was often inherited from parents and reinforced by peer pressure. In the post-Thatcher era, the decline of social ties means that people now require a "positive reason" for voting.
For Garnett, recent politicians have failed miserably to provide such inspiration. He recalls that the most exciting episode in the 2001 election was, in his view, when John Prescott threw a punch at an egg-throwing protester. This displayed "genuine feeling" which set the incident apart from the rest of the campaign.
One of his central themes is that our apathy is mainly due to the contemptible and off-putting behaviour of our politicians. Indeed the "anger" most palpable in the book is Garnett's own anger with Blair. Blair's apparent sincerity in promising to "renew faith in politics by being honest" quickly gave way to the sleaze of the Bernie Ecclestone affair - a sign of things to come. "Instead of rescuing the democratic damsel", he laments, "the handsome young prince had jumped off his white horse and thrown himself into a mud-wrestling contest". Blair squandered the mandate handed to him in the 1997 landslide victory when he could have used it to behave in a way that would have restored faith in the political process.
Garnett delights in chronicling the crimes and misdemeanours of those he sees as Blair's stooges. He reminds us of the relentless list of embarrassments sustained by the "revolving doors" ministers, Mandelson and Blunkett. But in Garnett's moralistic tone it is not clear whether he is condemning Mandelson's "expensive tastes" per se or just his failure to disclose the loan from Geoffrey Robinson used to buy his fashionable West London house. Is the problem that New Labour ministers conspicuously value luxuries traditionally considered the preserve of politicians on the Right, or is that that these values lead to corruption? Garnett identifies a "fascination with the wealthy" as the explanation for Blunkett's affair with the rich American Kimberly Quinn and his acceptance of a directorship in breach of ministerial guidelines. The implication is that greed, dishonesty and unaccountability are especially unpalatable in ministers from what had once been the "workers' party". I understand the criticism of "hypocrisy". But if they are indeed now "unapologetic" in their "quest for wealth", I am no sure why this behaviour is any worse for a Labour politician than for a Conservative.
A more serious problem is how he deals with politics beyond Westminster and in particular his account of the 2003 anti-war protests. Over a million protesters in 250 cities across the UK seems unlikely in an "age of apathy". Garnett tries to argue that the Iraq war protests were individualistic rather than cooperative. He cites the popular slogan "Not in my name" to show protestors were less concerned "with the acts themselves" than that they not be held "personally responsible" .This is unconvincing. "Not in my name" is surely best understood as a powerful expression of indignation against the illegitimacy of a war that lacked public approval; the withdrawal of authorization from a state claiming to act in the public interest.
Garnett concludes that to combat apathy "something new" is urgently needed. Unfortunately he doesn't tell us what. He wonders if Blunkett's "citizenship courses" would convince young people that "voting is worth a little personal inconvenience to the consumer determined to shape his own life" but says that in the case of the recently touted compulsory voting New Labour would have to "curb its authoritarian instincts".
Garnett sweeps across the period with a light touch, zooming in on main events but never engaging deeply, flitting from one episode to the next. This helpfully emphasises the interconnectedness or political and cultural themes. But his thesis is based on a too narrow understanding of "apathy" as measured by low voter turnout when there has been a parallel rise of single issue campaign groups and record protests - not to speak of the political energy around Ken Livingstone being elected Mayor as an independent, or the success of nationalists in Scotland and Wales.
Garnett adds to a growing genre of political works lamenting how selfish, consumerist and apolitical we are. But voting for one of two identikit parties isn't the only way to "be political" and his argument would have benefited from a more convincing account of politics beyond the Westminster bubble.
