by Jeremy Black
Blair’s lacklustre Labour replacement, Gordon Brown, managed to take public confidence in the office of Prime Minister and the political system to renewed depths. Keen to take the credit for being Chancellor of the Exchequer when the economy grew in the late 1990s and early 2000s, he proved less willing to acknowledge the role of British governmental policies in contributing to the harsher impact of the 2008–9 recession in Britain than in many other states. The figures for July 2009 were an unemployment rate of 7.9 per cent, a fall of industrial production by 9.3 per cent, compared to a year earlier, and an atrocious trade balance. By September 2009, the national debt stood at £804.4 billion, equivalent to over £25,000 for every family in Britain. In response, David Cameron, Michael Howard’s replacement as Conservative leader, moved to emphasize austerity, reversing an earlier pledge to match Labour’s spending plans.
Brown was also criticized for problems that he did not cause but that he mishandled, notably the provision of adequate equipment for troops in Afghanistan and real and alleged corruption by parliamentarians. Both issues came to great prominence in 2009 as Brown lost control of the political agenda.
The political atmosphere is extremely uneasy. There are major concerns about the sustainability of current assumptions, whether in the shape of pension provisions (under mounting pressure from greater longevity), an NHS able to meet public requirements (and not see hospital patients killed by bugs), schools able to provide safe environments and to teach literacy and numeracy, the ability to maintain Scotland’s place in the United Kingdom, or expectations of the international influence that Britain can, or should, have.
The last point has been accentuated by the clear inability of the European Union to meet British expectations concerning the direction of European policy, by Britain’s growing marginality within the larger and more federal EU, and by particular concerns about domestic terrorism, related in large part to international tensions over Islamist fundamentalism. These concerns were strengthened by the suicide bombings in London in 2005, by later anxieties over terrorism and by pressure from some Muslims for changes to British foreign policy, pressure seen in by-elections in Brent and Leicester in 2003, and in Tower Hamlets in the general election in 2005.
None of these issues can be readily accommodated to a comfortable or conventional account of national history. Terrorism helped ensure that the Home Office mission, outlined in the Public Service Agreements issued in 2000, was greatly challenged. This objective was ‘to build a safe, just and tolerant society, in which the rights and responsibilities of individuals, families and communities are properly balanced, and the protection and security are maintained’. In 2010, the precariousness of this ‘protection and security’ remained readily apparent.
Writing about the recent past, indeed the present, let alone the future, is always a precarious activity. There is the danger that predictions will be proved misplaced, but also the risk that what appeared significant no longer seems so, while the prioritization of issues in the recent past can be contested. This ability to contest views will be addressed at greater length in the next chapter. It is, indeed, one of the defining features of modern British society and history, although scarcely a distinctive feature.
9
CONTESTING THE PAST
Using History
History is both what happened and how we see it. The second is usually implicit in popular works, unstated and revealed only by the way in which the author has handled the subject. This is mistaken, for how we see history is important not only to the impact made by the past but also to the very way in which the latter is organized, understood and thus, in a way, created and composed in action. To give a personal example, Scotland for Ever! Lady Butler’s epic painting of the heroic British cavalry charge of the Scots Greys at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, formed the endpapers of The Living World of History (1963), a popular children’s history that certainly did not suggest that Britain’s future lay with European unity, indeed made no mention of the European Economic Community; and, instead, presented the Victorian period as the great age of British achievement. That was a book I was given and read as a child, and British history then seemed so clear and comforting; as indeed it appeared to Hugh Gaitskell, the leader of the Labour opposition, when, in 1962, he contrasted ‘a thousand years of history’ with membership of the EEC, which he opposed.
Subsequently, whether with Thatcher’s ‘Victorian values’ or Blair’s ‘A Young Country’ and ‘Cool Britannia’, the teaching and contents of British history became more vexed a subject than it had been for much of the period covered by this book, and contrasting understandings of the past were actively pressed as part of political debate. Moreover, the situation has varied considerably over the last three decades. Under the Conservative governments of Margaret Thatcher and, later, John Major from 1979 to 1997, there were efforts to argue a continuation with the past, not least in terms of a robust patriotism that was particularly asserted by Thatcher.
This assertion was linked to her wish to revive appreciation of pre-1945 values and achievements, particularly those of the Victorians, whom she saw as responsible for Britain’s economic transformation and for Britain’s past strengths and glory. Her appeal to what was the less recent past also owed much to her active rejection in policy terms of conspicuous continuity with the more recent past of social welfarism, state control of the economy and national decline. To Thatcher, these were all linked, and the post-war Labour governments, those of 1945–51, 1964–70 and 1974–9, were particularly at fault. Instead, Thatcher offered an earlier Britain as a basis for identity and continuity and did so in order to argue that her political opponents represented a recent past that had been a deviation from both national interests and true Conservatism.
The Thatcher government was also committed to the role of British history in education. In 1988, history was included in the national curriculum, the state prospectus for education, in large part due to the strong advocacy of Kenneth Baker, the Education Secretary, and later an active writer of effective popular histories of Britain. This inclusion was linked to a commitment to emphasize British political history, and the working group established to advise the minister on the curriculum was instructed accordingly. The group, however, was unhappy with this, and, instead, recommended multiculturalism in the treatment of British history; but a dissatisfied Thatcher required that the report go out to further consultation, which led to a stronger focus on British history.
In academic circles, the Thatcherite account of national interests and of the past was also related to a positive re-evaluation of the Conservative leaders who preceded Churchill and of the strand of Conservatism that was displaced by him, with more favourable treatments of Neville Chamberlain, Lord Halifax and their allies. This re-evaluation, nevertheless, was certainly not linked to Thatcherism in foreign policy as her effort to increase ideological commitments, notably against communism, and to push the bounds of possibility, clashed with the pre-1940 policies of appeasement and the emphasis on prudence. Moreover, Thatcher very much identified with Churchill as the true patriot and national prophet.
In domestic policy, however, there was a clearer parallel of Conservative academics and Thatcher’s politics in terms of a self-conscious rejection of elements of the ‘big government’ of 1945–79. Thus, Correlli Barnett’s study The Audit of War: The Illusion and Reality of Britain as a Great Nation (1986) argued that Labour’s expenditure on welfarism, particularly the policies of the Attlee governments of 1945–51, compromised the economic and military future of the country by lessening investment in both industry and the armed services. This sense of betrayal drew on another historical work, Martin Wiener’s English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit (1981), which appealed to Thatcherite critics of the Conservative ‘wets’ who favoured paternalism, social welfare and Keynesian (stimulus) economics, with its argument that the economic past (and therefore future) had been betrayed by elitist liberal opposition to entrepreneu
rialism, including a cultural ‘perversion’ of entrepreneurialism.
Under Labour in power from 1997, there was, in turn, a fresh transformation in historical consciousness. The espousal of new policies under the self-conscious ‘New Labour’ platform was also linked to a process of asserting a new identity, for Labour and Britain, that included a different historical consciousness to that which had hitherto prevailed for the Labour Party. Class-based analyses and trade union sentiment were pushed aside as Blair, party leader from 1994 to 2007, made an explicit pitch for the middle ground and for an inclusive account of Britain, one in which ‘Old’ Labour and the Conservatives alike were to be marginalized as extremist. Blair deliberately broke with the past and embraced the idea of the new, as in ‘New Britain’. Indeed, in 1997, Peter Mandelson, Blair’s Svengali, declared ‘We are defining ourselves by the future.’ A decade later, in marking the re-establishment of devolved government in Northern Ireland, Blair referred to the need ‘to escape the heavy chains of history. To make history anew.’ Similar remarks were made by him on other occasions, as when he apologized for the slave trade. An unwillingness to acknowledge history while trading on it was at the root of the unsellability of the ‘Britishness’ propounded by ‘New Labour’.
These attitudes reflected a rejection of national exceptionalism and, less explicitly, of the powerful social and cultural impact of custom, tradition and heritage. Empire and war were downplayed as themes in British culture and history by ‘New Labour’, while history itself became less important as a subject at school. The Parekh Report of the Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain of 2000, a report from a commission whose chairman was to become a Labour peer, pressed for a sense of heritage adapted to the views of recent immigrants. In November 2003, Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, blamed British colonialism for many of the world’s international disputes, a view that minimized not only the good it had brought, but also the extent to which British imperialism was usually one in a sequence of imperial conquests, notably in India.
More generally, there is, in political discussion, education and the media an overly critical and somewhat ahistorical account of the British empire, one that reflects the extent to which the overthrowing of British rule is important to the foundation accounts of so many states, for example India. In particular, there is a failure to understand the extent to which Britain was not the conqueror of native peoples ruling themselves in a democratic fashion. There is also a misleading tendency to blame British imperial rule for many of today’s pressures and problems which, in reality, stem from modernization and globalization. Moreover, as an empire, Britain engaged with rival empires that are correctly seen as tyrannies, a description that does not fit the varied contours and purposes of British imperial rule. This is particularly the case with Britain’s leading role in opposition to the genocidal tyranny of Nazi Germany.
There was also, across the political spectrum, the political tendency to read the past to satisfy the present, as seen by politicians’ use of arguments about appeasement at Munich (1938) and failed intervention at Suez (1956) to justify or condemn foreign policy episodes, notably the invasion of Iraq in 2003: supporters of action against Saddam Hussein presented any failure to act as another case of Munich, while critics referred to Suez and Vietnam.
The frequent use of Churchill as a rhetorical ploy indicated the lack of knowledge of the complexity of the past: the Churchill that was seen as a point of reference was that of 1940 (ennobling defiance of Hitler) and not 1915 (failure at Gallipoli) nor 1919 (failed intervention in the Russian Civil War). Thus, the complexity of his record was collapsed into a sound bite. Thatcher frequently referred to ‘Winston’ without mentioning that he was not only a Conservative leader but also a reforming Liberal Home Secretary. Interviewed by BBC History in March 2007, John Reid, the (Labour) Home Secretary, chose Churchill as his hero, without noting his Liberal and Conservative roles. Instead, Reid sought to annex Churchill as ‘a bit of a rebel’ who became a reforming Home Secretary.
The pillaging of the past continued and also served to create an account of history. Thus, in 2008–9, the ‘lessons of the 1930s’ were much deployed in discussion of the serious recession of these years. With the Labour government resorting to deficit financing, and borrowing and spending vast sums on supporting the economy through stimulating demand by ‘quantitative easing’, there was a return of interest in the ideas of John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946), who, in the early 1930s, had turned away from the idea that markets are automatically self-correcting and, instead, urged such remedies. Both ideas and example were debated in public, for example on the radio and in the press. Moreover, the use of Keynes served critics of Conservatism who argued that Britain had taken a wrong turning under Thatcher and that this was demonstrated by their reading of the 1930s and the 2000s, a reading that, however, failed to appreciate the dangerous consequences of large-scale deficit financing for the currency, fiscal system and economy.
Patriotic Myth
That the past was both used and controversial is scarcely a surprise, but it directs renewed attention to the question of how best to write about it, and, indeed, what to cover. Past treatments also invite attention to the issue of whether there should be a major theme at the close of this book. Comforting public myths do not capture the indeterminate nature of change, nor the controversies of the past, but a powerful public myth was for long part of British culture. In particular, a progressive move towards liberty was discerned in Britain past and present. Evolutionary change was held to be the hallmark of the British political system.
Rule, Britannia, rule the waves;
Britons never will be slaves.
James Thomson’s (1700–48) lines for the masque Alfred (1740), lines that became the anthem of British maritime greatness, remained resonant while Britain was the world’s leading naval power, which it was until replaced by the US during the Second World War. These lines looked towards 1902, when Arthur Benson’s (1862–1925) words for ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, the first of Edward Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance marches, were first heard as part of the Coronation Ode for Edward VII. Three years later, the successful poet Henry Newbolt (1862–1938) produced a history, The Year of Trafalgar, capturing the mood of national celebration and exceptionalism.
As with Thomson’s lines, produced at a time of war with Spain, much of the expression of national identity was for long focused on antipathy to what was constructed as a different world, that of Continental autocracy and Catholicism, a world that by its difference defined the nature of Britishness. National identity indeed was moulded during war with France and Spain. There was declared war with the former in 1702–13, 1744–8, 1756–63, 1778–83, 1793–1802, 1803–14 and 1815, undeclared war in 1743–4 and 1754–6, and hostile relations at other times. The role of conflict with France in defining British identity helps explain the importance of conflict with Germany for the sustaining of this identity in the twentieth century and, in turn, raises the question of the consequences today of the lack of a clear national enemy in opposition to which unity and identity can be asserted.
War with France was the context in which British identity was created and the empire expanded. Just as English identity had owed a lot to the medieval Hundred Years War with France, the sense of war with Catholicism stemming from the Reformation, and to war with Spain from 1585 to 1604 and again in the 1620s and 1650s, so the Britain created with the parliamentary union of Scotland with England and Wales in 1707 was baptized in talk of national values that were at war with those of France. The experience of the Napoleonic Wars in particular underscored a patriotic discourse on British distinctiveness while simultaneously creating a new iconography of national military heroes focused on Nelson and Wellington. By the 1800s, ‘God Save the King’, originally a Jacobite song, had come to be called the national anthem.
The resonance of these wars was long-standing and particularly important throughout the nineteenth century, with London, both natio
nal and imperial capital, the setting for a memorialization of identity through victory. Nelson’s Column, Waterloo Station, the tombs of national heroes in St Paul’s Cathedral, Wellington’s funeral: sites and occasions contributed directly to a sense of national exceptionalism that was still potent at the time of the world wars but that had its last nostalgic hurrah for Churchill’s funeral in 1965 and had largely been forgotten by 2010.
At the same time, the nineteenth century also saw a fleshing out of an understanding of national greatness that did not focus so closely on triumph in war. Victorian Britain displayed a clear perception of national uniqueness, nationalistic self-confidence, and a xenophobic contempt for foreigners, especially Catholics, although the Catholic hierarchy was restored in England in 1850 and in Scotland in 1878. This xenophobia was not a matter of hostility towards foreignness itself, but rather to what was seen as backward and illiberal. The latter were defined in accordance with British criteria (a process that is more generally true), but these criteria were also seen as of wider applicability for the rest of the world. Religious toleration, freedom of speech, parliamentary government, and a free press were all regarded as important to British liberty, and as ways in which Britain set a progressive example.
For England, these values were portrayed as a seamless web that stretched back to the supposedly free and democratic village communities of Angles and Saxons, applauded by John Richard Green (1837–83) in his Short History of the English People (1874), and this tradition and belief system was still apparent in the highly popular history books of Arthur Bryant (1899–1985) in the mid-twentieth century, and in the equivalents for children by R.J. Unstead (1915–88), both of which, again, I read. Indeed, Unstead’s books were given as school prizes and Bryant was a speaker at Prize Day.
