These are days of turbulent politics, however as the smoke clears from the electoral battlefield it is easy imagine that little has changed. Because the media and the polls were so certain that we were facing the novelty of another hung parliament and complex negotiations to form another coalition, it can seem that a return to a majority government is a return to the status quo before 2010. Because a Labour government supported by the SNP, Plaid Cymru and the Greens seemed possible and with it a glimpse of a different social and economic policy, it can seem that the return of George Osborne to the Treasury indicates that nothing has changed. Or rather the only thing that has altered is that the Cameron government will now pursue its brand of austerity with renewed vigour and confidence and that this will have a terrifying impact on the NHS, all public services and the most vulnerable in our society.
These observations are not incorrect, but perhaps they hide deeper changes. This was the most turbulent election in a generation. Not only was it the most unpredictable, with the views of so much of the electorate being missread by the army of the pollsters, but that electorate also proved exceptionally undeferential. On the night in May 1997 when Michael Portillo was not re-elected, it was seen as the iconic moment of Labour’s landslide, because the unseating of a senior politician or cabinet minister has been so rare in British elections. After the 2015 election the battlefield is strewn with ministers and shadow ministers including Vince Cable, Ed Balls, and Douglas Alexander. There has been a remarkable rejection of much of the political class by swathes of the population on these isles.
This is best illustrated by the destruction of the Labour Party in Scotland and the amazing victory of the SNP, which also reveals how the United Kingdom is relentlessly breaking up. The voting map of the election not only represents the separation of Scotland from England and Wales. But it also shows the sharp division between the cities supporting a Labour Party that they were assured was more Left wing than at any time since the 1980s, and the country swinging behind a Conservative Party that has become increasingly Right wing in the past three years. The new Prime Minister talks of wanting to be a ‘One Nation’ leader, but that nation has not been so divided for a generation.
In the 1959 election the three main parties, Conservative, Labour and Liberal, won 99.1% of the popular vote between them. By 2005 that share had fallen slightly to 89.6%. But this year the tri-party bloc only gained 75.2% of the vote. Just under a quarter of those who voted (only 66.1% of those eligible), voted for parties outside the main three, outside the political establishment. A combined number of 5.1 million people voted for the Greens and UKIP, and only gained two seats in Westminster. Despite the renewed calls for a shift to PR, there is understandable pessimism about such a change being supported by the Conservatives, as it’s not in their interests. Furthermore there is anxiety that the Tories will push through boundary changes that will entrench their majority in future elections. However, on account of both these issues the House of Commons will increasingly fail to deliver on its most fundamental promise - to attempt to represent the people.
The disfunction of the Parliamentary structures echoes the fact that in the past five years the social tensions in this country have become increasingly extreme. It seems clear that we face several more years of turbulence as the Conservative government attempts to implement its policies. So what kind of moment is this, what is the scale of the shifts that are underway, and is something new beginning to arise?
As individuals and societies we may experience our passage through time as chaotic; any sense of a rationale or guiding hand is inconceivable. However this does not prevent us from attempting to put order into what has happened. We generate biographies and narrate our autobiographies out of a desire to perceive some logic in the past. We research histories and write commentaries in an attempt to draw out patterns. The stories we create are only one version of events, but they can assist us in the reading of the present and influence our role in the making of the future - in being part of an agency of change.
Who, or what, are the agents of change in the current times? It is relatively easy for us to describe these agents in the past, but in the thick of the present it is hard to pick them out. Preconception frames perception. I have preformed ideas of what those agents might look like, but historical images blinker my vision, making it harder for me to observe what is actually underway, and making me feel that the agents of the change I desire are too weak to bring it about. However, just because I cannot see something does not mean it does not exist: it means that I should look harder, search deeper in to how the coming years might unfold.
In trying to think about the next two decades, reflecting on the past seventy-five years can be instructive. Can we make a pattern out of a century of experience in Britain that can guide our thinking?
Reflecting on the histories of earlier generations of my family has given me a different way of exploring these questions. Realising how deeply their lives were affected by moments of epochal change makes the idea of change both more tangible and more personal.
Before and after the war
Morgan James, my partner Jane’s great-uncle, was born in 1902 in Taibach, on the edge of Port Talbot, and, like his father, he worked in the coal mines from the age of fourteen. He was involved in industrial action during the General Strike in 1926. Unemployment in the years that followed drove him to emigrate to America in search of work, with his friend Thomas Howell David. In November 1928, both were certified as ‘Qualified Miners’ in the Wyoming Valley, Pennsylvania. Morgan applied for US citizenship, but his hope of building a new life was destroyed by a rock fall in Buttonwood No 20 Mine on 24 May 1934, which fractured his pelvis. He was bed-bound for months. Morgan’s mother and brother journeyed to Pennsylvania to bring him home, and he settled back in Taibach, badly disabled, selling toys that he made in a shed at the end of the garden.
My father, Richard Marriott, was born in Bishops Stortford, Essex, in 1930. His father worked in Lloyds Bank in the City, but when he was commissioned into the war effort the family moved to Otley near Leeds. Richard was sent to the boys’ private school, Horris Hill, and in the last year of the war he won a scholarship to become a pupil at Eton College near Windsor. After school he won a further state-sponsored scholarship to Oxford University, and then did National Service in the Rifle Brigade. His desire was to run a bookshop, but lacking financial security, he started work in the City. From 1963 he was employed in Mullens & Co, the stockbroking firm that provided the link between the Bank of England and the gilt-edged market in the Stock Exchange. The senior partner of the firm was the government broker, raising money for the Treasury by overseeing the issuing of debt.
At four o’clock on Saturday 7th September 1940 Colin Perry was bicycling over Chipstead Hill, south of Croydon. He heard planes and looked up: ‘It was the most amazing, impressive, riveting sight. Directly above me were literally hundreds of planes, Germans! The sky full of them. Bombers hemmed in with fighters, like bees around their queen.’ Seconds later the docks were ablaze.
Mass Observation, September 1940
On this day, the day of the first bombing raid of the Blitz, Morgan, 38, was in his workshop in Taibach, South Wales. Richard, 10, was in class at Horris Hill School, Newbury, Southern England.
An acute, externally-driven, event can through its impact catalyse a major social transformation, during the process of which a number of agents of change can bring about the formation of a new settlement. A shock can provide an opportunity for a different sort of politics to come to the fore. The aerial raids on London, hard on the heels of the retreat from Dunkirk, were one such shock. The smoke billowed around St Paul’s. The heart of the British Empire was aflame.
The Labour Party is a Socialist Party and proud of it. Its ultimate purpose is the establishment of the Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain - free, democratic, efficient, progressive, public-spirited; its material resources organised in the service of the British people.
Labour Party manifesto, June 1945
Morgan died long before I was able to ask him for his memories of the 1945 election. But I don’t find it hard to imagine how he felt. Victory over Germany had been achieved, but Swansea and areas of Port Talbot had been devastated by bombing. After the war what needed to be built was not only a new infrastructure, but also a new social structure. Across Britain whole sets of social movements arose over issues such as housing, and on the back of these Attlee’s Labour government rode to power. What Labour offered was a ‘New Jerusalem’, with national ownership of the coal mines, the steelworks and the railways; a programme to construct social housing and schools; and a plan to found a National Health Service. These actions were part of the battle against ‘want’ that helped create the welfare state.
Morgan, still disabled from the accident in Pennsylvania, would clearly be a beneficiary of the NHS. So, in the months leading up to the July 1945 election, it is likely that he was driven not only by the hope offered by the Labour Party, but also by his fear of any return to the life of Port Talbot before the war: a life of mass unemployment and poor health provision.
In May 1951, just over a decade after the Blitz, the Festival of Britain opened on a stretch of Lambeth docklands that had been laid waste by aerial bombardment. The area became the South Bank. This celebration of a new country, through publicly funded culture, organised by the state and taking place at the heart of the capital, helped to define the era that was being constructed, to create a new sense of what the country should be, a new ‘common sense’, a new social settlement.
The building of this settlement did not take place without a fight. There was fierce resistance from some doctors against the formation of the NHS. The owners of the coal mines made sure they were well compensated in the nationalisation of what was a declining industry. And the Festival of Britain was itself a site of that struggle. Churchill, then leader of the opposition, referred to the forthcoming project as ‘three-dimensional Socialist propaganda’. When he won the 1951 election, one of his first acts was to have the Festival site dismantled. But by the mid-1950s the agency of the labour movement that had helped change the old establishment now lay at the heart of the new settlement. The civil service, the media, industry, elements of the City and - by the time of Macmillan - parts of the Conservative Party had been forced to accept a social democratic view of the world. Parts of the previous establishment, however, such as the crown and private education, continued to co- exist, largely unchanged, with this new order.
The 1970s and 1980s
"The Arab oil nations announced an eye-watering price rise of 70%. In the storm that followed no country was safe. Almost overnight Britain’s motorists faced the prospect of spiralling prices and crippling shortages ... For people who’d grown up after the Second World War, rising living standards had been a fact of life, one of the cornerstones of this affluent society had been cheap motoring for all, and now that was gone." Dominic Sandbrook, The 70s, BBC 2
The agents of change behind the Oil Crisis of 1973-4 were multiple, ranging from anti-colonial movements in the Middle East to the boards of multinational oil corporations. However the shock that was delivered to the West was acute. This accelerated economic and social shifts that had already begun, generating a series of dramatic events: the London stock market crash of 1971; and the Heath government’s attempt to close a swathe of coal mines, followed by successful industrial action by the National Union of Mineworkers.
The oil crisis contributed to rapid inflation in Britain. By October 1976 the economic situation was so severe that Labour Chancellor Denis Healey went to the International Monetary Fund in Washington and negotiated a $3.9 billion loan. In return he agreed to £2.5 billion of public spending cuts, and to generate income through the sell-off of a tranche of the UK government’s 68 per cent holding in British Petroleum. With hindsight we can see this sale of an asset that had been owned by the British state since 1914 as the ‘first privatisation’, a starting gun for the neoliberal era that would come into its own during the forthcoming Reagan and Thatcher governments.
"No one who has lived in this country during the last five years can fail to be aware of how the balance of our society has been increasingly tilted in favour of the State at the expense of individual freedom. This election may be the last chance we have to reverse that process, to restore the balance of power in favour of the people. It is therefore the most crucial election since the war.
