The little caesars of the welfare state

The late Sir Rhodes Boyson openly admitted that during his time as headmaster he dealt with misbehaviour in the following ways. With a boy who had climbed onto a roof: “I climbed the drainpipe, collected the boy and we came down the drainpipe together. I held him by various parts of his anatomy, thumping and kicking him all the way down.” With a group of girls smoking in the bogs: “I instructed my caretaking staff to obtain lengths of fire hose and connect these to the water hydrants.” And then hosed them down. These stories are repeated in his Telegraph obituary.

As they say, you don't need to be a Freudian to think something odd was going on there. Boyson was, in his prime, a representative type: a mid-ranking functionary of the welfare state. Short back and sides, clean collar and ties, polished shoes. People of little humour or small talk. Total belief that their own correctness and in 'the rules'. They expected the children, patient or tenants they oversaw to know their place.

These people were reliable servants of collectivism and sincere believers in public service. Boyson began his political career as a Labour Councillor and was head of a comprehensive. (His father was Christian Socialist.) But it's not hard to see how some public servants became supporters of Thatcherism, especially the appeal to restore social discipline in face of open challenge to their authority. Phil has suggested that the left in Britain believes in a 'myth of neo-liberalism' - we were all happy collectivists until an elite group of monetarists took over and ruined it. This is why the current nostalgia for the post-1945 period, extending even to calls to bring back factory work, is myopic. Both the left and the right currently conspire to not understand what all the unrest in the 1970s was actually about. 

In Jack Rosenthal’s drama about prospective London cab drivers trying to pass 'the Knowledge', Nigel Hawthorne plays a terrifying examiner, Mr Burgess. It is a perfect distillation of this social type and made me think of Martin in Brimstone and Treacle. Or perhaps he is a public sector cousin of Basil Fawlty. 20 years later a BBC documentary about 'the Knowledge' focused partly on the creepy Mr Ormes, who clearly enjoys toying with the pupils. The class hierarchies are very starkly drawn in the both the drama and the documentary. The little Caesar types were still going strong in the Public Carriage Office and perhaps elsewhere too.

Fail Again, Fail Better

Anyone with an interest in the 70s will no doubt find themselves obliged to read books on the era. At the moment there’s a glut of them, the most recent and heftiest being Dominic Sandbrook’s “State of Emergency” which focuses on but two years (at woeful length) and largely seems to be an attempt to justify the ways of Heath to man or perhaps even less nobly, restore the reputation of Enoch Powell on the basis that he was a monetarist prophet without honour and therefore an unacknowledged force-for-good. Enoch must be alright, he paved the way for Thatcherism!

Effectively “State” feels like a synthesis of two vastly superior books on the seventies Alwyn Turner's “Crisis, What Crisis?” and Andy Beckett’s “When the lights went out”. It probably feels like this because that’s exactly what it is. Reading the three books in rapid succession it will strike home quite forcefully just how derivative of the other two author’s work Sandbrook’s is. Turner gets the occasional nod in the main body of Sandbrook’s book but he has the audacity not only to plagiarise Beckett but then suggest that Beckett’s take on the Seventies as a time “when the lights went out” is the kind of clichéd conventional wisdom about the Seventies that should be overturned.

If he’s getting it wrong stop nicking his stuff then you cheeky cunt! Is the obvious response, which as a humble blogger, I can make with impunity.

So the message is effectively I’d dodge that Sandbrook book if I were you. I mean not just because he’s a Tory, or because he’s obviously a lazy, plagiarising careerist but because it doesn’t give you anything you can’t get elsewhere. Were you to read “When the lights…” which stays away from popular culture but digs deep into the lost possibilities of the Seventies, “Crisis..” which takes on the popular culture of the time very broadly and John Savage’s “England’s Dreaming” which is exhaustive on the counter culture, you’d have a pretty comprehensive road map of the times.

AHHH. Yeah. I love blogger impunity. Sandbrook, you’re wasting my time and money you thieving, lazy, Tory dullard! Will I be reading the second volume? Ho-ho! Whadayathink?


An additional and important contrast between Beckett’s and Sandbrook’s books, and one that makes his “correction” of Beckett even more grating, is that hoary old trope about Making History Come Alive. Sandbrook’s Seventies are a tedious museum piece compared to Beckett’s for a number of reasons, firstly because the Seventies seem to be important enough to Beckett for him to get out and do a bit of wandering around and wondering aloud, interviewing key people and asking pointed questions about the nature of and direction of the time, whereas with Sandbrook’s book you feel he’s basically racing against a deadline cutting and pasting other people’s work in furiously. There seems to have been a deep investment of time and thought in one, a sense that the Seventies matters and matters on a personal level as opposed to a maniacal, impersonal ploughing on through the post war decades ( Sandbrook’s already done the Fifties and Sixties) to keep your publisher happy on the other.

Secondly and most significantly, what’s both haunting and Hauntological about Beckett’s book, and the real sense in which it makes history “come alive” is its own aliveness to and quiet insistence on the possibility that it may all have gone some other way. Beckett’s book isn’t a “counterfactual” in the normal sense but it invites the reader into all kinds of speculations and reflections on alternate paths out of the Seventies: dusty inevitabilities are broken open into moments seething with latent possibility and as a result the text itself is ghosted by a whole series of alternate and parallel histories. In this sense Beckett’s work is packed with political energy, is “inspirational” not because it’s directly polemical but because it enlists the reader’s imagination, because it believes that there was and always is an alternative and that history is shaped both by chance and by the judgment and commitment of social agents at all levels. It’s a superb work of anti-Realism in other words, and as such, irrespective of the fact that it’s a book on the Seventies it is certainly a key book of our increasingly fractious times.