A Classless Society
Created | Updated Sep 11, 2008
A CLASSLESS SOCIETY
Gordon Brown’s new crusade for social mobility may be an impossible challenge because Britain has moved away from the class based society that made this kind of aspiration so crucial to the founders of the Labour Party.
When the Attlee Government was elected as the first Labour Government with a mandate for real change, the circumstances favoured the implementation of radical programme agreed the Bradford Conference over fifty years before. In the intervening period there had been progress. With interesting modern resonance Seebohm Rowntree had written in 1937- “The nation is becoming increasingly concerned at the low standard of health attained by a large section of the population. Something is being done to remedy this: the Government has just announced a three years’ plan to promote fitness by such means as physical training and the provision of playing-fields”. And by then there had already been several years of “socialist” change according to Stephen King-Hall.
THE WORKING CLASS AND THE WELFARE STATE
But, while the setting up of the Welfare State brought about much more sweeping changes, it did not create a classless society in the sense of one that had no class divisions; nor did it mean that “working class” families did not have to struggle. It merely meant that life had become a struggle that it was possible to win. “Give us the tools and we’ll finish the job!” they might have said. So, as Brian Jackson and Dennis Marsden showed in their study “Education and the Working Class” (1962), a large proportion of children from working class backgrounds who won places at Huddersfield’s grammar schools left school at 15, the working age. When interviewed they explained that felt the clash between the “middle class” culture of the school and the working class culture in which they had their roots and which had sustained their families for generations.
This was not inverted snobbery or some belief in the nobility of ignorance. It was based in a belief in oral traditions and old ways of doing things that had been “handed down”. Altogether they created a sense of being rooted in a community and a way of life that touched the immemorial. People clung on to these because the distress of the age of revolution was often associated with a loss of roots and a sense of alienation. So the late nineteenth century “working class” movement had been very closely allied with the folk movement. In Europe classical musicians, dramatists and artists were fascinated by the folk cultures of people who were struggling for national identity against imperial powers; and within the British Isles this meant a fascination with Irish, Welsh and Scottish folk traditions, as well as regional traditions within the various parts of England where a strong sense of local identity persisted.
“Working classness” therefore involved a sense of belonging more than a sense of social exclusion, and this was emphasised by the experience of those who climbed “the ladder of opportunity”. The Jackson& Marsden study showed that those working class children, who stayed on at grammar school, very often they became “star” pupils and “class acts” who did exceptionally well and went off to university. Yet, already by 1962, those who had graduated found themselves “neither fish nor fowl”. They had lost the closeness with their family enjoyed by their siblings, and yet they did not feel themselves part of the “professional middle class”. They were a new generation of the socially excluded, in many ways freer to do anything that they wanted to do and invent new life styles than any of those tied into Britain’s class system.
LEARNING HOW TO BE “CLASS ACTS”
But climbing ladders can be a risky business. Twenty years earlier Dr. Julian Huxley had written about his experience of “scholarship” students from the working class at Oxford. What he said in effect was that it was not enough to know everything about something, even if you also knew something about everything. Students really needed a wider cultural background. Huxley’s grandfather, had been the eminent biologist Thomas Huxley, and the Huxley’s were part of an interconnected small circle in which children grew up being exposed to “high culture” from an early age, so that, someone like Virginia Woolf could become a great writer without ever attending a university. They had “class”.
But what does “class” mean in this context? We tend to use it mostly in the sense of the “classifications” that divide things into groups, or people, or time. So we are familiar with the social classes, classes of pupils in a school, and even a lesson. But the dictionary links the quality of “class” to “the classics”. In this sense “class” meant anything that was associated with the classic and timeless simplicity of the Ancient Greeks.
We think of this fascination with the Greeks and Romans as going back for centuries, but it was in the middle of the nineteenth century that Matthew Arnold wrote that future ages would attach great significance to the Renaissance- the re-birth of classical civilization. His father Thomas Arnold had done much to foster a much more active study of the classics within the public school system. Consequently, when “education, education, education” became a Victorian obsession, Classics became one of the core subjects in a system designed to produce an educated meritocracy of politicians, civil servants, Imperial Administrators and legislators. But as J.H. Plumb wrote in introducing his 1963 work “Crisis in the Humanities”… “the rising tide of scientific and industrial societies , combined with the battering of two World Wars, has shattered the confidence of humanists in their capacity to lead or to instruct.”
ANTI-ESTABLISHMENTARIANISM
This crisis amongst the leaders and instructors was just one side of the coin. Students and citizens were increasingly less willing to be led, or to simply accept what they were being taught at face value; not least because the Welfare State had greatly increased the degree to which ordinary “working class” people were subject to control by “the establishment”. Two years of compulsory National Service continued into peace-time; rationing continued into the fifties. Secondary education for all meant that children were taught how to behave both as private people and as citizens, how to cook properly, and how to run homes with domestic economy. And the Health Service brought “working class specimens” into contact with lordly medical professionals, including the famous Matrons.
Not surprisingly, after a decade of “angry young men” and wild-cat strikes, the times called for a return to wartime unity and One Nation politics. In his famous Scarborough speech in 1963 Harold Wilson referred to the recent MCC decision to abolish the distinction between Gentlemen and players, and called for a national economic project that would require both sides of industry to work as part of a team along with science and government. The potential inherent in national teamwork seemed to be confirmed when England won the Football World Cup in Sixty Six. It seemed an appropriate time to finally put an end to the class based Victorian educational system. Some comprehensive secondary schools already existed and now the comprehensive system would be rolled out across the country. The ladder of opportunity would be open to all.
But what kind of education would it offer?
LEARNING HOW NOT TO BE CLASS ACTS
By the early Sixties students in universities and colleges were becoming increasingly aware of belonging to a global generation that was trying to make sense of a wartime, post-war, and Cold War reality. Professor Plumb’s “Crisis in the Humanities” reflected a much more general crisis as students in the west, who had been educated at school largely in the certainties of the pre-1914 “establishment” culture, found them selves exposed in higher education to the uncertainties of a new global understanding, or at least the crying need for one that had been felt during the inter-war period. This was to lead to another age of peace marches and to the world wide disturbances and demonstrations of 1968; but they were only just a particular tidal wave of forces that were sweeping an old world away.
But what was to replace it? As Desmond Decker sang, it was a world in which “There are more questions than answers-”: and Louis Armstrong could look at the young and realise that “they will learn more than I will ever know.”
The developing global awareness was inextricably connected to international broadcasting; and a new entertainment industry provided new careers for people like Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. It seems probable that those who channelled the talents and energies of these two boys so that they might get to “Oxbridge” anticipated that Mr. Cook would probably join the diplomatic service and that Mr. Moore would become a classical concert pianist and/or composer. In fact they became a comedy duo satirising Britain’s heritage in a classless way from its royalty down to its tramps. Eventually their humour became dark and anarchic, as befitted an age in which people expected to be able to do anything that they wanted, a society in which the internal structures, expectations, restraints and support systems of social classes disappeared, leaving “class” a mere “flag” of convenience that people would fly when it suited them.
But does a “classless” society have to be a society with no “class” in the positive sense?
In the final stages of the recent rugby international between England and New Zealand one of the commentators observed that the All Blacks were just “a class above”, using the word “class” in its increasingly common meaning of showing excellence and superior qualities. In fact the statistics of matches between these countries show that this was just a confirmation of the “natural order” of things: an order that probably reflects both a favourable gene pool and an environment that produces “high class” rugby performers in New Zealand. But it is also true that the country supports All Black rugby as a source of national pride that transcends economic, social, racial and cultural differences, for it is something that, with some justification, New Zealanders can feel that they do better than anyone else,
HEADING INTO THE UNKNOWN
In rugby, as in most fields, “high class performance”, is only achieved by those who start young; and are being taught in a situation of mutual confidence and shared beliefs.
The Sixties generation shared a belief that they did not want to merely reproduce the World of their parents and grandparents, and were often encouraged by the older generation not “to make the same mistakes” of their forebears. They did not want to follow in their parent’s footsteps as far as work was concerned: they did not want the same attitudes to sex and marriage: they did not want the same kind of holidays and social life: they did not want to bring up their children as they had been brought up; they did not want to have the same beliefs as the old ones; and they did not wish to teach either the same substance or in the same manner in which they had been taught. It made for exciting and experimental times.
Old “revolting students” became teachers and often found it very hard to accept and deal with revolting pupils; and there were times when things seemed chaotic, dark and anarchic. By the late Seventies Prime Minister Callaghan was advocating that education should get “back to basics” – in particular the 3 R’s- trying to pull education back to the Victorian roots from which the education movement and the Welfare State had sprung.
SELF-HELP AND STATE ASSISTANCE
The original 3R’s scheme had been introduced in order to help working people to deal with new political and economic realities in an age of self-help. But by the Edwardian Age, when Beveridge and the Webbs were working on the intellectual foundations of the Welfare State, conditions were so hard that there was a “submerged tenth” always living below the poverty line. Subsequently two world wars and a period of World Chaos radically changed the perception of the role of the state. So the Welfare State was an ambitious scheme to empower all of those who were menaced by the poverty line that impacted on one third of the population at some time in their lives. By dealing with Beveridge’s “giants” it would create a properly fed and housed, educated, hard working and healthy population in which everyone would be able to contribute fully to the common good according to ability.
The logo for the Welfare State showed a nuclear family enfolded by a caring state; but in practice the state did not deal with families - the building blocks of society that are usually just sub-units of extended families with their annexed “honorary members” and cousin-hoods. Bureaucracies needed something more concrete, so the system was based upon households, not least because the new economic situation envisaged a new degree of social and geographical mobility.
As the Jackson and Marsden study showed, however, there was resistance to mobility that took people away from familiar and vital support systems. Over time, however, affluence and technology reconciled people to household living in which consumer durables created a kind of independence (from people at least) while motor transport and the telephone made distance less of a barrier. Consequently social classes, extended families, and even nuclear families lost their significance as life sustaining “organisms” and became mere social categories by means of which people could be categorised and locate themselves within the overall “system”.
But it was a “solar system” that appeared to have two suns. The state, which had long been developing an ability to catch the power of the economy and direct it into dark places, had now become a life-sustaining force for those who had come to depend upon it. In making the life of “The Submerged Tenth” more endurable it had made it more endurable, for the survival instinct has created an “evolutionary adaptation” not dissimilar to the process by which life forms in the submerged depths of the oceans have adapted to exist in ecosystems based upon sulphur and the heat-energy released from the interior of the Earth. In such mini-ecosystems seemingly familiar relatives of well-known species pass their whole lives “from the cradle to the grave” without ever being able to escape to a world of freedom and free-will.
LEARNING HOW TO LIVE WITH DIMINISHED FREEDOM
The kind of freedom that used to be such a source of pride in all the peoples of the British Isles had, however, been drastically eroded by 1945. Wars to defend freedom had required the creation of unprecedented state intervention in all aspects of life in order to cope with “Darkest Hours”; and, after the inter-war “Lost Peace”, there was a new acceptance that such state power would be needed too to deal with the nasty business of peace. This included the new wars on want, idleness, ignorance, disease, and squalor at home; and the struggle for a new World Order based upon the UN declaration of the Universal Rights of Man.
But “truth is the first casualty of war” and a war effort can only be sustained by the correct diet of information. So the briefest glance at the coverage of news and current affairs reveals an obsession with these “wars” that tends to promote the idea that the individual can do nothing and that solutions can only be found at a state or inter-state level. It is taking recurring personal tragedies on our streets to produce voices that cry out for action by the community.
The idea that local nuisances and family problems were a suitable field for state action developed over a long period. In the 1860’s Matthew Arnold wrote a blast against newspaper coverage featuring speeches by local dignitaries full of mid-Victorian optimism. Tucked away in the briefest paragraph he found “The Wragg problem”. A young unmarried mother had checked out of a workhouse with her infant child one evening, and their bodies were later discovered up on a windy moor.
A hundred and forty years later we have our own state-based solutions to “the Wragg Problem”. We seek to minimise the impact of casual sex, and what Victorians would have considered debauchery, by means of a state provision for mass contraception and abortion. Alternatively we provide financial and other material forms of support for young mothers so that they can attain some level of household “mock” independence. But , as the most recent initiative highlights, this involves condemning a new generation to grow up not only in the financial poverty that seems to be inevitable in most single-income households; but also with other and more serious forms of poverty- a poverty of understanding, education and knowledge, a poverty of self-confidence and aspiration, and poverty of social experience- for “social housing” often forms concentrations of the residue that is left when those with “get up and go” have gone. This is what happened in the USA when the Black Upwardly Mobile population was able to move across the tracks. It was to lead to the emergence of the “Urban Guerrilla” movement associated with “Rap” and “Hip Hop”, which has spread to Britain and around the World. And we have the young deaths to prove it.
ENGLISH SOLUTIONS
Fortunately England is still a place where such deaths are shocking and unacceptable; but if we have avoided the “Rivers of blood” feared by Enoch Powell, and the “streets running with blood come the revolution” of the dreams of others, much credit must be given to those “on the front line”. Some, as Mark Butcher’s mother recently remarked of her own upbringing, have tried to stay true to “English values”. And, in spite of the “Crisis in the Humanities” we must include front line classroom teachers who did much to broaden the narrow Fifties curriculum in order to accommodate a new multi-cultural and multi-ethnic Britain, which would like to leave behind the divisive inheritance of racial and class divisions.
But we do not need to totally re-invent the classless society, just as we do not need to re-invent sustainable and environmentally friendly sources of power. Eighteenth century England provides a prototype for both. In his 1969 study of “The Origins of Modern English Society 1780-1880” Harold Perkins starts off with a treatment of the “classless hierarchy” of England that changed into the British class system.
Albeit imperfectly it was a society in which people were valued for themselves and their character, not for their relationship to any political or economic entity. A line from Sir Thomas More in Robert Bolt’s “A Man for All Seasons”, delivered so perfectly by Paul Schofield, said- “It profiteth a man nothing to sell his soul for the whole world…but for Wales.” It reminds us that perhaps nowhere else in Europe was the Humanist dynamic of the Renaissance more influential than in England, where it found a natural home. It is a humanist tradition that has been fighting a rearguard action for a long time especially since the onset of the Age of Revolutions, which is still with us. As Kenneth Clarke pointed out in his Civilization series (1969) it has been a rough ride, and it is not finished for we are still victims of the Fallacies of Hope.
Gordon Brown’s new crusade for social mobility may be an impossible challenge because Britain has moved away from the class based society that made this kind of aspiration so crucial to the founders of the Labour Party.
When the Attlee Government was elected as the first Labour Government with a mandate for real change, the circumstances favoured the implementation of radical programme agreed the Bradford Conference over fifty years before. In the intervening period there had been progress. With interesting modern resonance Seebohm Rowntree had written in 1937- “The nation is becoming increasingly concerned at the low standard of health attained by a large section of the population. Something is being done to remedy this: the Government has just announced a three years’ plan to promote fitness by such means as physical training and the provision of playing-fields”. And by then there had already been several years of “socialist” change according to Stephen King-Hall.
THE WORKING CLASS AND THE WELFARE STATE
But, while the setting up of the Welfare State brought about much more sweeping changes, it did not create a classless society in the sense of one that had no class divisions; nor did it mean that “working class” families did not have to struggle. It merely meant that life had become a struggle that it was possible to win. “Give us the tools and we’ll finish the job!” they might have said. So, as Brian Jackson and Dennis Marsden showed in their study “Education and the Working Class” (1962), a large proportion of children from working class backgrounds who won places at Huddersfield’s grammar schools left school at 15, the working age. When interviewed they explained that felt the clash between the “middle class” culture of the school and the working class culture in which they had their roots and which had sustained their families for generations.
This was not inverted snobbery or some belief in the nobility of ignorance. It was based in a belief in oral traditions and old ways of doing things that had been “handed down”. Altogether they created a sense of being rooted in a community and a way of life that touched the immemorial. People clung on to these because the distress of the age of revolution was often associated with a loss of roots and a sense of alienation. So the late nineteenth century “working class” movement had been very closely allied with the folk movement. In Europe classical musicians, dramatists and artists were fascinated by the folk cultures of people who were struggling for national identity against imperial powers; and within the British Isles this meant a fascination with Irish, Welsh and Scottish folk traditions, as well as regional traditions within the various parts of England where a strong sense of local identity persisted.
“Working classness” therefore involved a sense of belonging more than a sense of social exclusion, and this was emphasised by the experience of those who climbed “the ladder of opportunity”. The Jackson& Marsden study showed that those working class children, who stayed on at grammar school, very often they became “star” pupils and “class acts” who did exceptionally well and went off to university. Yet, already by 1962, those who had graduated found themselves “neither fish nor fowl”. They had lost the closeness with their family enjoyed by their siblings, and yet they did not feel themselves part of the “professional middle class”. They were a new generation of the socially excluded, in many ways freer to do anything that they wanted to do and invent new life styles than any of those tied into Britain’s class system.
LEARNING HOW TO BE “CLASS ACTS”
But climbing ladders can be a risky business. Twenty years earlier Dr. Julian Huxley had written about his experience of “scholarship” students from the working class at Oxford. What he said in effect was that it was not enough to know everything about something, even if you also knew something about everything. Students really needed a wider cultural background. Huxley’s grandfather, had been the eminent biologist Thomas Huxley, and the Huxley’s were part of an interconnected small circle in which children grew up being exposed to “high culture” from an early age, so that, someone like Virginia Woolf could become a great writer without ever attending a university. They had “class”.
But what does “class” mean in this context? We tend to use it mostly in the sense of the “classifications” that divide things into groups, or people, or time. So we are familiar with the social classes, classes of pupils in a school, and even a lesson. But the dictionary links the quality of “class” to “the classics”. In this sense “class” meant anything that was associated with the classic and timeless simplicity of the Ancient Greeks.
We think of this fascination with the Greeks and Romans as going back for centuries, but it was in the middle of the nineteenth century that Matthew Arnold wrote that future ages would attach great significance to the Renaissance- the re-birth of classical civilization. His father Thomas Arnold had done much to foster a much more active study of the classics within the public school system. Consequently, when “education, education, education” became a Victorian obsession, Classics became one of the core subjects in a system designed to produce an educated meritocracy of politicians, civil servants, Imperial Administrators and legislators. But as J.H. Plumb wrote in introducing his 1963 work “Crisis in the Humanities”… “the rising tide of scientific and industrial societies , combined with the battering of two World Wars, has shattered the confidence of humanists in their capacity to lead or to instruct.”
ANTI-ESTABLISHMENTARIANISM
This crisis amongst the leaders and instructors was just one side of the coin. Students and citizens were increasingly less willing to be led, or to simply accept what they were being taught at face value; not least because the Welfare State had greatly increased the degree to which ordinary “working class” people were subject to control by “the establishment”. Two years of compulsory National Service continued into peace-time; rationing continued into the fifties. Secondary education for all meant that children were taught how to behave both as private people and as citizens, how to cook properly, and how to run homes with domestic economy. And the Health Service brought “working class specimens” into contact with lordly medical professionals, including the famous Matrons.
Not surprisingly, after a decade of “angry young men” and wild-cat strikes, the times called for a return to wartime unity and One Nation politics. In his famous Scarborough speech in 1963 Harold Wilson referred to the recent MCC decision to abolish the distinction between Gentlemen and players, and called for a national economic project that would require both sides of industry to work as part of a team along with science and government. The potential inherent in national teamwork seemed to be confirmed when England won the Football World Cup in Sixty Six. It seemed an appropriate time to finally put an end to the class based Victorian educational system. Some comprehensive secondary schools already existed and now the comprehensive system would be rolled out across the country. The ladder of opportunity would be open to all.
But what kind of education would it offer?
LEARNING HOW NOT TO BE CLASS ACTS
By the early Sixties students in universities and colleges were becoming increasingly aware of belonging to a global generation that was trying to make sense of a wartime, post-war, and Cold War reality. Professor Plumb’s “Crisis in the Humanities” reflected a much more general crisis as students in the west, who had been educated at school largely in the certainties of the pre-1914 “establishment” culture, found them selves exposed in higher education to the uncertainties of a new global understanding, or at least the crying need for one that had been felt during the inter-war period. This was to lead to another age of peace marches and to the world wide disturbances and demonstrations of 1968; but they were only just a particular tidal wave of forces that were sweeping an old world away.
But what was to replace it? As Desmond Decker sang, it was a world in which “There are more questions than answers-”: and Louis Armstrong could look at the young and realise that “they will learn more than I will ever know.”
The developing global awareness was inextricably connected to international broadcasting; and a new entertainment industry provided new careers for people like Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. It seems probable that those who channelled the talents and energies of these two boys so that they might get to “Oxbridge” anticipated that Mr. Cook would probably join the diplomatic service and that Mr. Moore would become a classical concert pianist and/or composer. In fact they became a comedy duo satirising Britain’s heritage in a classless way from its royalty down to its tramps. Eventually their humour became dark and anarchic, as befitted an age in which people expected to be able to do anything that they wanted, a society in which the internal structures, expectations, restraints and support systems of social classes disappeared, leaving “class” a mere “flag” of convenience that people would fly when it suited them.
But does a “classless” society have to be a society with no “class” in the positive sense?
In the final stages of the recent rugby international between England and New Zealand one of the commentators observed that the All Blacks were just “a class above”, using the word “class” in its increasingly common meaning of showing excellence and superior qualities. In fact the statistics of matches between these countries show that this was just a confirmation of the “natural order” of things: an order that probably reflects both a favourable gene pool and an environment that produces “high class” rugby performers in New Zealand. But it is also true that the country supports All Black rugby as a source of national pride that transcends economic, social, racial and cultural differences, for it is something that, with some justification, New Zealanders can feel that they do better than anyone else,
HEADING INTO THE UNKNOWN
In rugby, as in most fields, “high class performance”, is only achieved by those who start young; and are being taught in a situation of mutual confidence and shared beliefs.
The Sixties generation shared a belief that they did not want to merely reproduce the World of their parents and grandparents, and were often encouraged by the older generation not “to make the same mistakes” of their forebears. They did not want to follow in their parent’s footsteps as far as work was concerned: they did not want the same attitudes to sex and marriage: they did not want the same kind of holidays and social life: they did not want to bring up their children as they had been brought up; they did not want to have the same beliefs as the old ones; and they did not wish to teach either the same substance or in the same manner in which they had been taught. It made for exciting and experimental times.
Old “revolting students” became teachers and often found it very hard to accept and deal with revolting pupils; and there were times when things seemed chaotic, dark and anarchic. By the late Seventies Prime Minister Callaghan was advocating that education should get “back to basics” – in particular the 3 R’s- trying to pull education back to the Victorian roots from which the education movement and the Welfare State had sprung.
SELF-HELP AND STATE ASSISTANCE
The original 3R’s scheme had been introduced in order to help working people to deal with new political and economic realities in an age of self-help. But by the Edwardian Age, when Beveridge and the Webbs were working on the intellectual foundations of the Welfare State, conditions were so hard that there was a “submerged tenth” always living below the poverty line. Subsequently two world wars and a period of World Chaos radically changed the perception of the role of the state. So the Welfare State was an ambitious scheme to empower all of those who were menaced by the poverty line that impacted on one third of the population at some time in their lives. By dealing with Beveridge’s “giants” it would create a properly fed and housed, educated, hard working and healthy population in which everyone would be able to contribute fully to the common good according to ability.
The logo for the Welfare State showed a nuclear family enfolded by a caring state; but in practice the state did not deal with families - the building blocks of society that are usually just sub-units of extended families with their annexed “honorary members” and cousin-hoods. Bureaucracies needed something more concrete, so the system was based upon households, not least because the new economic situation envisaged a new degree of social and geographical mobility.
As the Jackson and Marsden study showed, however, there was resistance to mobility that took people away from familiar and vital support systems. Over time, however, affluence and technology reconciled people to household living in which consumer durables created a kind of independence (from people at least) while motor transport and the telephone made distance less of a barrier. Consequently social classes, extended families, and even nuclear families lost their significance as life sustaining “organisms” and became mere social categories by means of which people could be categorised and locate themselves within the overall “system”.
But it was a “solar system” that appeared to have two suns. The state, which had long been developing an ability to catch the power of the economy and direct it into dark places, had now become a life-sustaining force for those who had come to depend upon it. In making the life of “The Submerged Tenth” more endurable it had made it more endurable, for the survival instinct has created an “evolutionary adaptation” not dissimilar to the process by which life forms in the submerged depths of the oceans have adapted to exist in ecosystems based upon sulphur and the heat-energy released from the interior of the Earth. In such mini-ecosystems seemingly familiar relatives of well-known species pass their whole lives “from the cradle to the grave” without ever being able to escape to a world of freedom and free-will.
LEARNING HOW TO LIVE WITH DIMINISHED FREEDOM
The kind of freedom that used to be such a source of pride in all the peoples of the British Isles had, however, been drastically eroded by 1945. Wars to defend freedom had required the creation of unprecedented state intervention in all aspects of life in order to cope with “Darkest Hours”; and, after the inter-war “Lost Peace”, there was a new acceptance that such state power would be needed too to deal with the nasty business of peace. This included the new wars on want, idleness, ignorance, disease, and squalor at home; and the struggle for a new World Order based upon the UN declaration of the Universal Rights of Man.
But “truth is the first casualty of war” and a war effort can only be sustained by the correct diet of information. So the briefest glance at the coverage of news and current affairs reveals an obsession with these “wars” that tends to promote the idea that the individual can do nothing and that solutions can only be found at a state or inter-state level. It is taking recurring personal tragedies on our streets to produce voices that cry out for action by the community.
The idea that local nuisances and family problems were a suitable field for state action developed over a long period. In the 1860’s Matthew Arnold wrote a blast against newspaper coverage featuring speeches by local dignitaries full of mid-Victorian optimism. Tucked away in the briefest paragraph he found “The Wragg problem”. A young unmarried mother had checked out of a workhouse with her infant child one evening, and their bodies were later discovered up on a windy moor.
A hundred and forty years later we have our own state-based solutions to “the Wragg Problem”. We seek to minimise the impact of casual sex, and what Victorians would have considered debauchery, by means of a state provision for mass contraception and abortion. Alternatively we provide financial and other material forms of support for young mothers so that they can attain some level of household “mock” independence. But , as the most recent initiative highlights, this involves condemning a new generation to grow up not only in the financial poverty that seems to be inevitable in most single-income households; but also with other and more serious forms of poverty- a poverty of understanding, education and knowledge, a poverty of self-confidence and aspiration, and poverty of social experience- for “social housing” often forms concentrations of the residue that is left when those with “get up and go” have gone. This is what happened in the USA when the Black Upwardly Mobile population was able to move across the tracks. It was to lead to the emergence of the “Urban Guerrilla” movement associated with “Rap” and “Hip Hop”, which has spread to Britain and around the World. And we have the young deaths to prove it.
ENGLISH SOLUTIONS
Fortunately England is still a place where such deaths are shocking and unacceptable; but if we have avoided the “Rivers of blood” feared by Enoch Powell, and the “streets running with blood come the revolution” of the dreams of others, much credit must be given to those “on the front line”. Some, as Mark Butcher’s mother recently remarked of her own upbringing, have tried to stay true to “English values”. And, in spite of the “Crisis in the Humanities” we must include front line classroom teachers who did much to broaden the narrow Fifties curriculum in order to accommodate a new multi-cultural and multi-ethnic Britain, which would like to leave behind the divisive inheritance of racial and class divisions.
But we do not need to totally re-invent the classless society, just as we do not need to re-invent sustainable and environmentally friendly sources of power. Eighteenth century England provides a prototype for both. In his 1969 study of “The Origins of Modern English Society 1780-1880” Harold Perkins starts off with a treatment of the “classless hierarchy” of England that changed into the British class system.
Albeit imperfectly it was a society in which people were valued for themselves and their character, not for their relationship to any political or economic entity. A line from Sir Thomas More in Robert Bolt’s “A Man for All Seasons”, delivered so perfectly by Paul Schofield, said- “It profiteth a man nothing to sell his soul for the whole world…but for Wales.” It reminds us that perhaps nowhere else in Europe was the Humanist dynamic of the Renaissance more influential than in England, where it found a natural home. It is a humanist tradition that has been fighting a rearguard action for a long time especially since the onset of the Age of Revolutions, which is still with us. As Kenneth Clarke pointed out in his Civilization series (1969) it has been a rough ride, and it is not finished for we are still victims of the Fallacies of Hope.
