Changing Britain

Contemporary Review, Dec, 1999 by George Wedd

WHETHER or not the millenium correctly ends on New Year's Eve 1999, or has another year in it, the massive change of numeral is bound to promote retrospection. Articulate people who have - like this writer - seventy or so years to look back on are perhaps to be avoided. However, the Past, like some vast millefeuille, can be crumbled and cut in so many different ways that almost any fragment can throw up something of interest: so here goes.

A major trend of the last quarter-century has been the death of history. There is a paradox here, since the bookstores report that sales of historical works, especially military history and popular illustrated works, are at an all-time high, so I must justify my point. I do so with regret, since I was once a qualified historian - as Cambridge understood that concept half-a-century ago - and still regard it as one of the disciplines making for a civilised man. There are broadly two attitudes in play, one which may be described as North American and the other as Old World.

In the Old World, there is a belief that we are a society today mainly because we were a society yesterday. This implies a pessimism about other forms of social linkages, economic, religious, and so forth, which springs from seeing how mutable and fragile so many of these are. In this view, the Past becomes the cement which binds us together or - perhaps a better metaphor - the soil out of which we grow. Understanding what is in that soil, and what is lacking in it, is essential to understanding ourselves. I recall seeing a viticulteur collecting leaves from his vines. They were to be sent to a laboratory to be burnt and the ash analysed, so that he might know what elements were lacking, or in over-supply, in his soil. If we understand the soil from which we have grown, in theory, at least, we can take corrective action.

There are dangers in this approach. The first is that, admiring ourselves intensely, we may come to the conclusion that History equals Progress. (Study the Middle Ages, and Watch Feudalism - a Poor Thing - Die!) Marxists used to be particularly given to this. It flourished during the First Industrial Revolution, a very British thing, when it was in fact possible to see Progress, represented by railways, factories and urban growth, on every hillside. And the historians of this school included some of the finest writers of the English language. Macaulay, now scorned by professionals and ignored by the general reader, stands at the head of it, and in his day the public rushed to swallow the vigour and clarity of his style and kept turning the pages to see what happened next. My old headmaster, a good historian, thought there could be no better introduction to the subject for eleven-year-olds than Macaulay's Chapter Three, the state of England in 1685, and he was right. But this approach does depend on the belie f that we are better than our fathers, instead of simply better informed.

The other danger is that we become antiquarians, tourists of the past and eventually National Trust members and stately-home groupies. The one potential use of History of which we stand in no danger is of regarding it as a compendium of examples of heroism, and good (or bad) behaviour. A Battle of Britain pilot was recently invited to talk to 'students' (as school-children must now be called) and discovered not only had they never heard of the 1940 battle, but nor had their teacher.

Which brings me to the North American attitude. That continent is populated by people, or the near descendants of people, who left their original homes for good reason, and for them the Past is Bad. Irish famine, Scottish clearances, Russian pogroms, poverty on Italian hilltops and a lost war in Vietnam are the seminal events in their family stories. When a middle-class European takes his family round a stately home, or schloss, chateau or palazzo, he is imagining himself living there, in knee-breeches or in armour. To an American, the same experience is more likely to recall the graf or vicomte who lived there, and whose oppression finally made a trip to Ellis Island desirable, or possibly essential. The Past is no source of pleasure, but something to be turned away from. 'History,' said Henry Ford, 'is bunk.' This summer, an art historian was taking a group of graduate students, from Yale, on a conducted tour of the City. He explained that many of the new buildings were the result of 'the bombing'. The que stion came: 'When was London bombed?' and the answer drew a second question: 'Why, was Britain in World War II?' Before you sigh, consider the remark of the Prime Minister, Tony Blair: 'When I see pageantry, I think, that's great, but it's not what Britain is about.' History, except as the propaganda of the victors, is dead, its only use is as a stock of the other side's mistakes, to be thrown across the debating floor.

With history has died nationalism, in its classic nineteenth-century form. The old nation-states failed in the Second World War. The four European neutrals have never quite recovered from the embarrassment of not joining in; of the rest, all save Russia and Britain were defeated. Russia suffered too much to take much pride in it. Britain came out with her head held high, but so enfeebled that her Empire dropped away from her with hardly a sound. France, convinced that so great a nation deserved to have and keep an Empire, had it tom away from her in fifteen years of war, first in Indo-China and then in North Africa. What is called nationalism is now broadly a movement of regional discontents with the old nation-states, in former Yugoslavia, Catalonia, Slovakia, Corsica, Scotland and Wales, and is simply additional evidence that the old formula no longer has power. (Ireland, as always, is a special case. There, the nationalists bid so high in their determination to be Catholic, Celtic and different from Brita in in every way that they alienated the quarter of the island that was neither Catholic nor Celtic and drove it to be determinedly British, from which, much followed and more is still to come.)