Britain and the Intellectuals

Britain and the Intellectuals

Mini Teaser: A sentiment seems to have prevailed among the scribbling classes that Britain is in a general state of decline--intellectually, socially, morally. It's just not so.

by Author(s): Ferdinand Mount

NOW, of course, these difficulties were trivial beside the suffering being endured on the Continent at the time. There, many cities were three-quarters in ruin, and there was a desperate shortage of basic commodities such as potatoes and flour. The atmosphere in Britain, if it could be remotely compared to anything in Germany, would be more like the genteel dispiritedness after the First World War described by Thomas Mann in Disorder and Early Sorrow than the more profound and threadbare exhaustion after the Second, chronicled so unforgettably by Heinrich Boll.

The ordeals of an exhausted victor do not make for a dramatic chronicle. Yet that exhaustion seeped in a quiet but remorseless way into our national spirit and was to continue to do damage to us for years to come. The nations of the Continent rebuilt their cities, their economies, their political institutions. They had to; there was no alternative.

We in Britain, by contrast, like the dispirited upper-class couple in Mann's novella, had a position to keep up. We had our war debts to repay, we had our overseas military responsibilities to discharge, our huge Empire first to administer and then bit by bit to dismantle. These tasks were formidable enough to demand all the energies of a vigorous and solvent nation. For a bankrupt and depleted people, they were a crushing burden.

So it was that my generation--Churchill's children--grew up knowing more about the intricacies of tribal disputes in Rhodesia or Nigeria than about the politics of Lancashire or Scotland. As for domestic reform--of the trade unions, of the City of London, of Parliament, of the all too hastily nationalized industries--it was the mark of the naive idealist or an encrusted reactionary to imagine that any such thing was possible. How serious in any case was the need to change? We had won the war, hadn't we? Those institutions we now lived under represented a kind of postwar settlement between the classes and the parties. We were not to tamper with them.

The travel restrictions of the postwar years also helped to conceal from us the dynamic process of rebuilding that was happening on the other side of the Channel. It was well into the 1950s before we woke up to the fact that, far from leading the economic recovery of the major European nations, we were beginning to wallow in their wake. Yet still nothing happened. We remained content to rest upon our now dusty laurels.

IN THE WINTER of 1962-63, by now in my mid-twenties, I was appointed assistant courier and general dogsbody to Selwyn Lloyd, until recently our Chancellor of the Exchequer. He had been sacked by Harold Macmillan in a desperate purge to regain popularity--the Night of the Long Knives, as it was called. To keep Selwyn quiet, he had been given, by way of consolation, the task of investigating the Conservative Party to find out what defects there might be in its political machine. Of course, the real defect at that time was the Prime Minister, but in politics party organization is always a convenient scapegoat.

For me the assignment was an unforgettable experience. We traveled the length and breadth of England and Wales. To a young man from the soft south of England who knew only the gentle undulations of Salisbury Plain and the antique serenity of Eton and Oxford, this odyssey was an education. In those narrow rain-swept valleys of Lancashire and Yorkshire, it seemed as though nothing much had happened since the first Industrial Revolution. We passed by miles of great sooty brick factories often with broken windows stuffed with rags, all apparently derelict. Yet you could sometimes still hear the hum of ancient machinery; and a dim light might be visible through the murky panes. The local Conservatives we met--Bradford wool merchants, Halifax fireworks manufacturers, South Wales steel men--seemed scarcely less antique, most of them well advanced into middle age, swathed in waistcoats and watch chains, robust and forthright, yet, I sensed, with an underlying feeling that the great days of their particular industrie s were over. As indeed, alas, in many cases they were. This odyssey was undertaken nearly twenty years after the war, but the sense of renewal was sadly absent.

Yet in the early 1960s the old businesses were at any rate mostly still in business, clinging onto their old markets, not yet wiped out by the new competition on the Continent, let alone in the Far East. By the time I undertook similar journeys in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the picture was far grimmer. The main railway line to the north now passed through great stretches of devastation--industrial wastelands with rows of roofless workshops (the roofs had been removed in order to avoid liability to local taxation). The strong pound sterling--a perverse consequence of the otherwise uncovenanted blessing of North Sea oil coming on stream at just about that time--was the immediate cause. But the long-term causes were the by now familiar ones: poor quality, late delivery, trade union restrictions, timid and defeatist management.

I emphasize here the physical sights, sounds and, indeed, smells of this decadence. The sensation of failure and national senility hung in the air. It was much the same as when one sees an elderly, much-loved relation, previously vigorous and sprightly, begin to lose it. At first one says, "Well, of course, at her age you must expect a little slowing down." You compliment her when she walks to the Post Office unaided, gently suggest that in fact she might take a little more regular exercise, progressively make greater allowances for her so that her decline becomes less painful, less perceptible to the outsider. You are reluctant to admit the truth to yourself. You are even more reluctant to admit it to outsiders.

AND SO it was with Britain and the outside world. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, our politicians made absurd efforts to minimize our decline and to exaggerate our present power and future potential. Harold Macmillan declared that Britain's role was now to play Greece to America's Rome. Harold Wilson asserted that Britain's frontier still lay on the Himalayas. Almost everyone who wanted Britain to join the Common Market prophesied that Britain's destiny was to "lead Europe." Those few observers who, often in the kindest possible way, attempted to nudge us toward some understanding of the realities were treated as mischievous troublemakers; Dean Acheson, for example, who was only stating the obvious when he argued that Britain had lost an empire and had not yet found a role, or Sir Nicholas Henderson, in his farewell dispatch as ambassador from Paris, which attempted to describe Britain as others saw her.

To most of us in our twenties, the pretensions of our leaders already seemed antiquated and fatuous. At the time, the productions of the young rebels--the plays of John Osborne, the novels of Kingsley Amis, the re-birth of British satire in print and on the screen--were more often analyzed as the rude intrusion of the "new classes" who had been emancipated from deference by state education. And so in part it was, but one scarcely needs to point out that many of the brightest sparks, from Amis to Peter Cook, were educated at leading public schools and Oxford or Cambridge. What they were also mocking was outmoded national pretension and the escapist rhetoric of the political elites. Take the most potent images of the time: the mockery of the Suez operation in Osborne's The Entertainer, or Peter Cook's immortal sketch of Harold Macmillan fumbling with a globe. The imperial game was up, and even those of us who called ourselves conservatives--and not very deep down many of the satirists were conservatives, if on ly with a small "c"--thought that our masters were living in a time warp.

What was clear--or is clear to me now, though it was not then--is that willingness to consider change is often considered as ipso facto defeatist. It was taken for granted that anyone who had real confidence in Britain ought to resist change stoutly. Take "going into Europe"--that extraordinary phrase, as though the British Isles had till then constituted a continent in itself. The proposal to join the European Economic Community was often presented, even by its supporters, as a second-best option, a pis-aller, made necessary by Britain's reduced standing in the world.

At first, of course, we had pretended that the project was a fanciful dream. For the crucial initial negotiations at Messina, Her Majesty's Government found itself able to spare only a not very high-ranking official from the Board of Trade, an undersecretary named Russell Bretherton, who sat and smoked his pipe, puffing indulgent clouds of smoke into the Sicilian air while those excitable foreigners spun their absurd fantasies of ever greater union. We might have come down in the world, but we had not come as far down as that. We were, in short, stuck with an imperial mindset, dating, I suppose, from the late nineteenth century, the days when Goschen, a British Chancellor of the Exchequer--who was, oddly enough, himself of German extraction--could speak fondly but quite unhistorically of our tradition of "glorious isolation."

Essay Types: Essay