That shallow decade

In an article in the Times today Libby Purves assures us that the Tories have changed. What’s more so has Britain and we’re all the better for it. She’s talking about the Tories and the Britain of the 80s: the decade of Thatcherism, loadsamoney, Section 28, miners’ strikes and the Falklands War. She says:

[T]hat shallow decade can’t be repeated. Britain is — believe it or not — much pleasanter and more thoughtful than it was on emerging from the bruising, punkish, strikebound 1970s. During the 1980s, remember, hardly anybody in government gave a damn about the environment: debates about badgers and newts were confined to the backwaters of the House of Lords, and welfare organic farming — when we took it up in 1990 — was widely and viciously mocked. Homophobia flowered into Section 28 of the Local Government Act. Racial discrimination was technically illegal but dislike was open: who can forget Lord Tebbit’s weird remark on the Today programme about the Ugandan-Asian born Yasmin Alibhai-Brown :“This Miss Brown may think she’s British . . .”

I can’t help but admire the way Purves deftly palms off the blame for the aggressive atmosphere of ‘that shallow decade’ onto the one that preceded it, or rather its tail end when Labour were in power; but the 80s was a far more abrasive decade than the 70s. Where the 70s spat, the 80s bludgeoned. And bludgeoned and bludgeoned. It was as though Mrs Thatcher saw herself as Churchill in drag and her battles – with Argentina, with the miners, with anybody and everybody (even members of her own party) – as a second Second World War.

In a way it was a war, but Argentines aside, it was mostly a war with ourselves as we tried to work out who we were and what we believed in because this was the decade when the consensus around our national identity and culture broke down. The 70s might have been a decade of ‘socialism’ but it was also the last decade it was possible to talk unchallenged of Britain as a Christian nation. I remember the 80s as the decade in which my family stopped watching the Queen’s Speech on Christmas Day; the decade in which it became acceptable, even in the more conservative parts of the country, to live together ‘outside of wedlock’ (what a quaint expression that seems now); and the decade in which we stopped thinking of non-white Britons as ‘immigrants’, or at least started the process. It was also, courtesy of AIDS, the decade in which we started to openly discuss (and accept) homosexuality.

It’s really only now that i can see, looking back, what a time of upheaval it was. Despite the way in which Purves contrasts the 80s and the more socially enlightened times we live in now, it was the 80s when, half-hidden by the belligerent materialism of the decade, the very developments she describes began to put out shoots. It’s ironic really that the things the Tories wanted to preserve – monarchism, Christianity, marriage and so on – are the very things their economic philosophy helped to undermine. The more individuals were ‘encouraged’ to be self-sufficient, the more their dependence on (and consequently attachment to) traditional institutions weakened.

Whether or not that’s a good or a bad thing depends on your point of view. It has certainly created problems for us as a society, problems we have so far failed to find convincing solutions to. Dispersed and disconnected families, buildings in which so-called ‘neighbours’ live side by side for years without so much as speaking to one another, an increasing fear of crime – of being robbed or short-changed by A.N. Other; these are less pleasant manifestations of our modern self-oriented culture.

I wonder if we really are more ‘thoughtful’? I think we are certainly more careful in what we say about one another. But how much does that reflect progress in our attitudes and how much does it reflect the fact that without a common culture it is hard to work out what the boundaries of the acceptable are? We over-censor or we fail to censor ourselves at all. The war with ourselves has gone undercover now: it’s waged mostly anonymously via comments on news articles, and to a lesser extent on blogs and social network sites. I don’t know about ‘pleasanter’. To my eyes it looks vicious.

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More trouble in the land of penguins

Interesting that a furore has erupted over the Falkland Islands again. Apart from bringing back memories of the war in the 80s it set my mind thinking about territory and territorial claims. Who has the right to make territorial claims and why? When do the rights of those who live in a territory give way to those of others? Where does the principle of self-determination begin and end?

The current settlement dates to 1833 and is now into its sixth generation in some families. Can these people still be described as colonialists – and if so why is that not also true of the Argentines themselves? Most of the current population of Argentina descend from immigrants who arrived in the country in the late Nineteenth Century (or later) after the Falkland Islands settlement was established. The lands that many of them settled in the south of Argentina were already inhabited by indigenous peoples who were absorbed into the new state regardless of their own identities.

By contrast, there was no indigenous population on the Falklands. Certainly, there had been other settlements on the islands – the first being that of the French in 1764 – but these were all attempts at colonisation. There was no particular moral or historical claim behind them.

If the Falkland Islanders choose to identify themselves as such then why should that not be respected? Why should the islands’ real name by asserted to be Las Malvinas? If the islanders choose to speak English and choose a status as an overseas dependency of Britain (or whatever the term is) then why should that choice be disputed? Is it because they are too few of them: how many inhabitants does a place need to have a right to have a right to self-determination? Because the islands are close to Argentina: is 300 miles close? Because they are not a nation? What is the special quality of the nation state – a relatively recently developed political structure – that allows it to ride roughshod over the rights of actual people?

Here as in many other cases nationalism seems to me a covert imperialism. Where empires claim that a territory belongs to it, nations claim that a territory forms a part of it. But in both cases these claims may be made irrespective of the actual feelings of the people who inhabit it. Some South American countries assert that the failure to surrender the Falkland Islands to Argentina is imperialism. On the contrary, the settling of the islands might have been an act of imperialism, but then the same is true of the original settlement of Argentina. The settlement as it exists now though – almost 180 years later – is a society, small as it is, in its own right.

Just British?

There’s an interesting post over at Mark Easton’s UK in which he comments on the minefield which is ethnic terminology. During last week’s controversial “Question Time”, featuring Nick Griffin from the British National Party (BNP), a woman in the audience upbraided Jack Straw of the Labour Party for using the term “Afro-Caribbean”, rather than her preferred version: “African-Caribbean”.

Meanwhile, Nick Griffin, possibly the least photogenic politician since Roy Hattersley, drew flak for using the expression “indigenous British people”. One of the standard arguments against the use of terms like this is that no-one in Britain can truly claim to be indigenous. We’re all descended from migrants; the only difference is that some of those migrant ancestors arrived here sooner than others.

No population is entirely separate from the rest of humanity, goes the rhetoric. We are all members of a single species whose ultimate roots lie in Africa. That being the case, how can it be meaningful to refer to anyone as “African”? How can that word be used to differentiate the origins of any human sub-group?

Then, the second part of her term: “Caribbean”. Surely the association between this lady’s ancestors and the Caribbean is likely to be even more ephemeral than is that of the average Welshman, say, and Britain? A few hundred years as opposed to a few thousand.

As for the lady herself, surely she is “just British”? If this isn’t true, then presumably the majority white population aren’t “just British” either. In which case, what are they?