Imperial Party forum

thomas davison

04 June 2012 3:21 PM
Loss and Gain, Past and Present, and who talked of a Golden Age? Back at my desk (I wasn�t that far away � funny that when I go on assignment readers always assume I�m on holiday, whereas when I go on holiday they assume I�m on assignment) I thought it was time for some conversation with readers. But before I forget, those who were interested in my reflections on Philip Larkin can find my review of the new Collected Poems in the American conservative magazine �National Review� here.
I�d like to address some readers who told me that the early 1950s in Britain were not some sort of �Golden Age�. Well, let the record show that I have never said that they were. Not only that. I have repeatedly said that I have no such view. The past is in any case gone and irrecoverable. Even if we wished to return to it, we could not. We study it carefully, so as to understand our own times better, and also to avoid choosing � as our parents and grandparents did � the wrong future.
We also have the tedious allegation that people have always complained that the past was better than the present. Well a) that is not what I am saying and b) I don�t believe this is true of all times and c) what if, on some occasions, they are right to mourn the loss of good things in the past? Does that mean that their complaints are invalidated because others have mistakenly done so at other times? This is not serious debate. And grown-up people should steer clear of it.
So a belief in a �Golden Age�, and a desire to return to such an age, are not the argument. The argument is about whether we have lost anything valuable, and if so, whether we could then by thought and care have preserved it, and whether we might now or in the future, by thought and care, restore or recover it. And I would be pleased, if, *just for once*, one of these braying, repetitive and thoughtless critics actually responded rationally to the reply I shall now give.
I was born in 1951 and so of course did not directly experience the Coronation. I was in my pram at the time. Careful readers will have noted that I was referring not to my own experience but to the film of the Coronation which has just been reissued as a DVD. Like so many such films (I believe there�s a positive treasury of evocative footage of the era on the British Council website) it shows glimpses of a Britain now as vanished as the lost city of Atlantis. These glimpses are brief (they weren�t the purpose of the film) but they are very evocative for me as, when I did grow conscious of my surroundings, the people, cityscape and countryside of my youth were rather similar. The sight of that Britain preserved on colour film awakes many memories.
This particular Britain did not die in one night, but vanished slowly and in part. It survived in many ways until the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s. Traces of it could be found in a few remote corners much later than that. I tend to think its death was marked by a series of apparently unconnected events � Winston Churchill�s funeral, the final disappearance of steam railway locomotives, the abolition of the old coinage, the burning off of the old town gas in great braziers in the streets at around the same time, and the feeling of despond and darkness that came after the Yom Kippur War and Ted Heath�s Three Day Week. Not coincidentally, the country was taking the Brussels yoke at the same time, ceding its sovereignty to what would become the EU.
What was different? Well, my book �the Abolition of Britain� mentions many of these things, really a matter of the ways in which people thought and behaved, rather than measurable in material possessions and material living standards.
Even a book wasn�t really long enough to explain all the things which had changed, nor the how, nor the why, though I do recommend it to anyone who is interested. It is not the book my enemies have claimed it to be. So my article, with only a little space, sought to summarise them thus : �In 1953, criminals were afraid of the police, school pupils were under the thumb of teachers, couples stayed married till they died, we made the most of the things we used, hardly anyone lived off the State, our Parliament and courts made and maintained our laws, poor people were thin rather than fat, and the strongest drug around was aspirin. What is more, we loved our country and respected its traditions, laws and institutions.
Every educated person would have known the words that open the Coronation film, John of Gaunt�s dying speech from Shakespeare�s Richard II which ends �. . . this earth, this realm, this England�. �
I said nothing here about wife-beating, chilblains, smoking, homosexuality, hygiene, food quality or the death penalty � though most of these subjects are in fact tackled insome detail in �the Abolition of Britain�, which I do wish my critics would actually read, rather than thinking that they have read it when they haven�t (I can always tell).
Yet one contributor rages at me : � The good old days? The police, teachers, parents, husbands, etc used to beat people up on a regular basis. Innocents hanged, I see there is still no mention of Sam Hallam. Sexual abuse in the home tolerated, "It's nothing to do with us!" morons imprisoned. Single parents, and their children, they had an older word for love child then, ostracised and made to feel ashamed. Backstreet abortions. People having to lie in court in order to get a divorce. Kids who failed the 11-plus condemned to be industry fodder.�
Let�s take this piece by piece. �The �good old days� is his phrase, not mine. I never use it. Criminals now terrorise whole areas of our cities, unrestrained by any fear of the police. I am on record as saying that the police should be free to thump badly-behaved people within reasonable limits, because it would be simply silly to deny that this ever happened, or to deny that their authority rested to some extent on their freedom to do so. Anyone is welcome to argue about whether this is a good thing, but not by snorting away in a superior fashion about what a bad person I am for accepting this rather obvious truth. They should bear in mind that it is a choice. You can either have the police licensed to thump low-lifes, or you can have the low-lifes in charge. No utopia is available, in which the police are soppy and the bad people are well-behaved.
Teachers have ceded control of classrooms to children who refuse to listen or maintain order. Those who wish to learn are abandoned. To some extent, this is the result of the abolition of teachers� freedom to inflict corporal punishment. There are, of course, several other reasons, but these are also connected with or national moral decline. Once again there is a choice here. Which do you want? Disorder, or the cane?
Violence and sexual abuse against children in the home, usually inflicted by step-parents is horribly common in the present day. The fate of children taken �into care� is often appalling. I don�t know whether this abuse could be said to be �tolerated� but it certainly happens under the modern dispensation. Whether it would be possible to quantify such abuse under the old regime and under the new, I do not know - but I am by no means sure that the �enlightened� society of today would come out any better. The same is true of men beating women.
Of course wife-beating was a problem in the past. But now that we have all but abolished marriage, is such violence at an end? I rather think not. On the contrary, as Anthony Daniels has argued, in a society where fidelity is far from being the norm, jealous men are much readier to use violence to enforce it than they used to be. Given that children are so much better off in stable marriages, and that the outcome for women in this case is not that different (and may well be better for married women than unmarried ones � I await reliable facts) there isn�t even much of a dilemma.
I don�t know what the case of Sam Hallam has to do with this. There will never be a perfect world. Justice systems will always make mistakes. My own view is that they make more nowadays than they used to. The jury system has been unacceptably weakened, both by majority verdicts and by the abandoning of any qualification for jury service (this is explained at length in �The Abolition of Liberty�). It has also been weakened by fake conservative Home Secretaries such as Michael Howard, who abolished the right to silence, and by the post-Macpherson frenzy, when the double jeopardy rule was abandoned. The presumption of innocence, once quite strong in theory and practice, has now become a very weak force in practice.
Opponents of the death penalty claim to be worried about the execution of inncoents. they aren't really. It is just a rhetorical point. Innocents die for all kinds of reasons (millions in abortions, to which the anti-execution lobby seem to have no ojection) Many innocents are murdered, far more than used to be in the days ogf the death penalty, sometimes by convicted murderers who have been released. Convicted killers go free after a few years in non-punitive prisons. Innocents are also shot by armed police. Homicide and homicidal violence (which would have resulted in hundreds of deaths a year if we still had the hospitals of 1964) have increased enormously, as has the carrying of lethal weapons by criminals.
Meanwhile, in the brave new world preferred by my critics, people are arrested and fined for expressing unfashionable opinions about homosexuality, and often face harassment at work for expressing conservative or Christian opinions, events unthinkable in 1953. By the way, I obviously need to state here, yet again, that I fully support (and am countless times on record as supporting) the 1967 Sexual Offences Act which ensured that homosexual acts between consenting adults were no longer subject to criminal prosecution. I have to say this because my opponents either have not troubled to find out my views, or hope that others will not know my real position.
My views on the revolution in the treatment of unmarried mothers are set out fully in �The Abolition of Britain�, along with an interesting history of how this change came about. I am happy to discuss this with anyone who is really interested, but the author of the above caricature of recent history may not be terribly interested in the facts.
Children deprived of the opportunity of selection into high-quality free state education moulder, rot and despair in bog standard comprehensive schools far worse than any Secondary Modern. The best guarantee of racial harmony is a strong fellow-feeling brought about by full integration of migrants. While disgusting racialist signs in windows have disappeared we have instead whole cities in which large numbers of citizens have no converse with those of different ethnic origins, and often do not even speak the same language. Is this progress? Or the exchange of one evil for another? I don�t like either of them. I want tightly-controlled immigration, an end to multiculturalism and strong efforts to ensure true integration. That is one lesson we can certainly learn from the past 60 years.
I also know that there was a serious increase in crime after (and as a result of) the huge social dislocation of the 1939-45 war. That was the reason for the making of the famous film �The Blue Lamp� I know that there was delinquent behaviour before 1939. I don�t believe that the past was a paradise.
Here�s what I do think. That there is no reason to assume that our material advances, which are undoubted, came at the necessary and unavoidable cost of a huge moral decay. I cannot see why we could not have come to eat better, to be better housed, to be better-travelled than we were in 1953. Just because the two things happened at the same time, does not mean that one was the cause of the other. But some of our current woes can certainly be traced to the dismantling of moral barriers, against selfishness and extravagance of all kinds.
Our period of moral decline has also, as I tried to point out, been a period of economically moral decline, in which we have ceased to make what we use, and have become a debtor nation, unable to supply our own needs through our own work and skills, and living on morally dubious funny money. I think our moral, social and cultural decay has something to do with it. This interesting article by Larry Elliott in Monday�s �Guardian� must be sobering for believers in �progress�. Read it here.
In the same paper, the fascinating obituary of the brilliant aeronautical engineer, Sir James Hamilton, here contains the following passage, discomfiting to believers in educational �progress�: �In 1973 Hamilton [who had attended a Scottish Academy (Penicuik Academy, now vanished), the north-of-the-border equivalent of a grammar school] moved to the Cabinet Office as deputy secretary, serving under prime ministers Edward Heath and Harold Wilson. From 1976 to 1983 he headed the Department of Education and Science as permanent secretary. Both during this period and later in the Margaret Thatcher years, he became seriously concerned at what he termed "extremely mediocre" education standards in science and engineering at some universities and technical colleges.�
A couple of other points. The petulant ire of tobacco smokers against attempts to discourage their smelly and dangerous habit sometimes leads them into hysteria, and so into laughable category errors. Banning smoking from pubs really isn�t the equivalent of Stalin�s 1937 purge, or even remotely comparable with anything the KGB ever did. The freedom to damage your own health, and to bereave and profoundly distress your close family in a long-drawn-out and painful way, is also not comparable to the freedoms of speech, thought and assembly, which are precious national possessions.
Another misunderstanding comes from someone who suspects that the centralised NCA may be re effective against cannabis than our decentralised police forces. It is not a lack of manpower or organisation that is behind the British state�s failure to interdict drug possession. It is a deliberate lack of will. There is absolutely no reason to suppose, in any case, that nationalised law enforcement would be any more efficient or effective than non-nationalised law-enforcement.
I am wary of comparisons between this country and Asian countries which have ferocious laws against drug smuggling. I know little of these societies or their laws, suspect that drug abuse is widespread in them, and think the death penalty should be reserved for heinous murder and possibly treason, and then only in countries with the presumption of innocence, proper (unanimous verdict) jury trial and a free press. I am also very much against the detention of prisoners, whether convicted or unconvicted, in squalid, ill-supervised and overcrowded conditions.
Maybe later in the week I might discuss the claims of �Republicanism� versus �Monarchy� , and of course of that strange form of delusion known as �democracy�, under which people repeatedly vote for their own cynical subjugation by organised gangs of habitual fraudsters, and pretend they can choose their government.

thomas davison · Posted: Wed Jun 06, 2012 8:25 am Post subject:

Diamond jubilee marks 60 years of British economic potential squanderedBritain has got richer in the past six decades, but other countries have got richer faster and enjoy a more stable economy
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Larry Elliott
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 3 June 2012 13.49 BST
Workers erect a giant idiot of the royal family during silver jubilee celebrations in 1977. The image, displayed on a building overlooking the river Thames in London, marks the Queen's diamond jubilee. idiot: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images
Hard though it is now to credit it, when the Queen came to the throne 60 years ago, the UK was the third-biggest economy in the world after the US and the Soviet Union. With Germany recovering from the physical damage caused by the second world war, Britain was Europe's powerhouse.

Since then there have been booms and busts. Two long periods of growth have culminated in deep and painful recessions. Governments of both left and right have tried to modernise and reinvigorate the economy: the three-day week, the winter of discontent, Black Wednesday and the (unfinished) great recession of the past five years have shown how difficult this has been.

Throughout it all, Britain has got richer. While there are surveys questioning whether we are happier on the occasion of the Queen's diamond jubilee than we were when she came to the throne, living standards have more than tripled since 1952.

The consumer luxuries of the age when Harold Macmillan said we had never had it so good have become the necessities of today. Nor is it simply in material terms that Britain is better off. Today's babies can expect to live for about 10 years longer than the baby boomers of six decades ago. They will be fitter and healthier as well.

Yet, the real story of the past 60 years has been of potential squandered. Britain has grown richer, but other countries have grown richer faster. What's more, the economy has become more unbalanced and its foundations shakier.

The hollowing out of the UK's industrial base has been a feature of the past 60 years, as has the widening regional disparity between north and south that has accompanied the drift towards an economy dominated by financial services, and the City of London in particular. For the first half of the reign of Elizabeth II, Britain became a more equal country. After 1980 the gap between rich and poor widened.

The reign started with Sir Winston Churchill back in Downing Street and RA (RAB) Butler as chancellor. With the last vestiges of rationing on their way out, the early and mid-1950s saw the transition from socialist planning to Keynesian demand management. The governments of Churchill, Eden and Macmillan bought into the idea of a mixed economy and full employment. Strong growth, low inflation and a buoyant jobs market marked the start of the new Elizabethan age.

Yet during the 1950s there was growing concern that Britain's economic performance was markedly inferior to that of her continental rivals as they recovered from the ravages of war.

As a result, the next 10 years were spent searching for a new growth model. In the early 1960s there were half-hearted attempts to import the indicative planning used by the French government to direct its economy from the centre, leading to the creation of the tripartite National Economic Development Council in 1962. This was followed by Harold Wilson's equally nebulous "white heat", the idea that the power of science and technology could be harnessed to raise the growth rate.

Wilson set up a new ministry, the Department of Economic Affairs, to implement a national plan, which had the ambitious target of expanding the economy by 25% in six years. However the plan was made stillborn by the deflationary measures deemed necessary to avoid a devaluation of sterling, which happened anyway in November 1967.

Despite the difficulties, the first 15 years of the Queen's reign were as good as it got for a very long time. The next quarter of a century saw two ferocious boom-busts in the housing market, the highest inflation in peacetime, the longest dole queues since the 1930s' great depression, widespread industrial unrest, two major sterling crises and the abandonment of Keynesian demand management for the rigours of monetarism.

Until recently, the worst five-year period since 1952 was from the silver jubilee year of 1977 to 1981, which encompassed the austerity measures imposed on Britain by the IMF and the wipeout of manufacturing in a two-year recession after Thatcher's arrival in Downing Street.

Growth during that period averaged barely 1% a year, but it was followed by a strong upswing generated by lower oil prices, a cheaper currency and financial deregulation.

If the past 60 years are split into five-year chunks, the fastest growth was the 3.2% a year on average between 1982 and 1986, the period that straddled the Falklands war and the big bang deregulation of the City.

The boom got out of hand in 1987 and 1988, leading to the house price crash of 1989 and 1990. Britain's ill-fated entry into the European exchange rate mechanism intensified the recessionary pressures, and it was only when the pound was blown out of the ERM on Black Wednesday in September 1992 that recovery began.

This proved to be much longer than anybody who had been accustomed to the gyrations of the economy over the previous quarter-century imagined. It was, as Sir Mervyn King put it, the time of the "great moderation". Unemployment fell and for more than 15 years there was not a single quarter of negative output.

During the near-decade from 1997 to 2006, when Tony Blair was prime minister and Gordon Brown chancellor, the expansion looked particularly impressive. In the first five years of Blair's premiership, growth averaged 3.1% per annum, and slipped back only slightly to 2.8% a year between 2001 and 2006.

Brown's claim that Labour had abolished "Tory boom and bust" came from the sense that at last � after all the false starts � Britain had finally cracked the mystery of sustained non-inflationary growth.

It hadn't, of course. The boom was concentrated over too narrow a spectrum of industries and was far too dependent on financial leverage, consumer debt and property speculation. Years 56 to 60 of the Queen's reign have been the grimmest for her subjects since she came to the throne. Growth has averaged just 0.2% a year and real living standards have fallen.

On the latest estimates it will take until 2014 for economic output to get back to where it was in 2008 and until 2017 for living standards to return to the levels they were at when Blair ordered British troops into Iraq in 2003.

The past five years have been a reality check. The Queen once famously asked economists why none of them saw the crash coming. As she celebrates her diamond jubilee, she should be asking her prime minister how a nation that has not run a manufacturing trade surplus since Michael Foot was leader of the opposition, where North Sea oil has come and nearly gone, and where consumer debt hit saturation point some years ago is going to earn a living in the years ahead.

Macmillan's "never had it so good" speech was actually a warning that the prosperity might not last. How right he was.