MY THREE-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER has developed the early signs of an addiction to re-runs of the American sit-com, Friends. So, whenever we pass by a particular record store near our home in central London, we look at the pile of discounted Friends DVDs in the window, where she can express her delight at recognising Ross, Rachel, Joey, Phoebe and all the gang. But when we did our usual window shopping just before Christmas, we managed to pick the very time at which one of the store’s employees was putting a sign in the window to announce that the chain concerned, Zavvi, was in administration.
The moment seemed emblematic of the sad state of the British economy, which has now officially entered a recession. Zavvi is the successor to Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Megastores; the entrepreneur sold his company to a group of senior staff in 2007. Like the venerable Woolworths, which has recently closed its stores after trading in this country for a century, it is a major British retailer that employs very large numbers of people.
During the final months of 2008, the financial meltdown spread like an aggressive ulcer to the British High Street and businesses such as these. Every day brings news of bankrupt businesses, new rounds of redundancies, a plunging pound, falling house prices and a financial system with an apparently infinite capacity to absorb public money as its malaise deepens. Unemployment is approaching two million. The pound is “finished,” according to a leading American financier. With North Sea oil drying up and the financial system in a mess, he added, the country really had nothing to attract the interest of overseas investors.
Comparisons with the late 1970s have become common: that’s how bad things are. Of course, they’re not really. It’s been a cold winter but I don’t see any piles of rubbish, I’m unaware of an outbreak of strikes, and inflation is the least of anyone’s problems. But the Labour government does look like it’s finished. After a brief recovery of political fortunes in the aftermath of the Lehman Brothers crash in September 2008, the polls again show Gordon Brown’s government to be in diabolical trouble. Not only is Labour well behind the Tories, but public confidence in the capacity of the government to deal with Britain’s economic problems has also collapsed. Indeed, Brown’s only consolation now is that the polls predict a mere drubbing rather than the annihilation that seemed in the offing during that bleak period in the middle of last year when Labour was losing by-elections in the “safest” of its seats and was virtually wiped out in local council elections. Once again, Brown and his chancellor, Alistair Darling, look like the principals in a firm of undertakers. Let’s face it: pumping billions of pounds of public money into banks seen to have failed the country both economically and morally was never going to win either of them a popularity contest.
It’s not that the Tories really deserve the public confidence that the latest polling suggests the public has bestowed in them. I came to this country in September 2007 with the distinct impression that they’d managed, more or less, to get their act together under the leadership of David Cameron. Well, as far as I can see, they haven’t. Neither Cameron nor his shadow chancellor, George Osborne, have said or done anything during this crisis to suggest they have the faintest idea of what to do about the country’s economic problems. Osborne himself was deeply damaged by claims that he had tried to solicit a large donation for the Tory Party from a Russian oligarch, and the appointment of former chancellor, Kenneth Clarke, as shadow business secretary has been widely interpreted as a response to Osborne’s failings. Clarke has been a member of parliament longer than Osborne has been alive.
At a time when governments everywhere are priming the pumps in good old Keynesian style – with limited success so far, it must be said – the Conservatives are actually advocating lower spending growth without even the pretence that it will do anything much to help drag the country out of its current economic mess. As I walked to work this morning, I noticed a massive photograph of a baby, accompanied by the caption: “Dad’s Nose, Mum’s Eyes, Gordon Brown’s Debt.” The Tory ad pointed out that every child in Britain was born with a £17,000 debt. I’m reminded of the Liberal Party’s Debt Truck, wheeled out in 1995 to dramatise Australia’s foreign debt. The appeal in this sort of advertisement is to the voter’s sense of moral responsibility, but it shouldn’t be confused with a capacity to fix the country’s economic problems.
Assessing the public mood is a dangerous business but there’s a bleakness about Britain this winter that isn’t just connected with the cold weather and drizzle. Not everyone suffers. As always in a financial crisis some are making huge profits – notably the hedge-funds that continue to bet successfully on the fall of share prices in the decaying banks. And if you have a secure job and a regular income things are not so bad. While the cost of living remains high, especially in the south-east, everywhere you turn something or other is being discounted. There’s a thriving genre of advertising whose mission seems to be to foster a gentle lowering of expectations. For instance, Marks and Spencer advertises a “Dine in for £10” promotion “that lets you get the restaurant experience for less.” You get a nice meal for two, including dessert, and a bottle of wine, and they make it look pretty good on the TV. They don’t actually say “Refrain from going to that restaurant up the road and blowing £60 in a single night, as you’ve been doing every other week for the last five years.” In a climate where most people are watching their pennies, they don’t need to.
Yet what is perhaps most puzzling to me, as a kind of outsider, is what is not happening in Britain. I can’t report a mood of national introspection because, as far as I can see, there isn’t one. Perhaps it’s because, as John Cleese recently alleged, no one in Britain really believes things are ever going to get any better. It’s true that David Cameron has been making speeches for years about Britain’s “broken society” but this notion was the unlovely progeny of the marriage of New Labour and the Tory Party over the economy. While the two of them were increasingly at one on economic management, the Conservatives claimed that the major problem with Blair’s Britain was that it had worsened already deep social, cultural and moral problems. The idea now looks faintly ridiculous, for in its moral obsessions it ignores the elephant that has inconveniently re-entered the room: the country is in dire economic straits and dysfunctional families, knife-wielding youths, “failing” schools and violent estates are hardly to blame.
But there are as yet no signs of a George Orwell coming forward, as in the The Lion and the Unicorn, to clear away the political and intellectual rubbish of an era that has passed; or even of the kind of reflection on “What’s wrong with Britain?” that came with the end of empire and the shenanigans of Mandy, Christine and friends in the early 1960s. Sure, there was a delightfully nostalgic piece in the Daily Mail by A. N. Wilson on the recent demise of yet another venerable British company, Wedgwood, of which his own father was managing director. Headed Why I Weep for Wedgwood, it was a moving elegy for a Britain that is no more, a great manufacturing country that relied on the vision and enterprise of its industrial leaders and the skill and devotion of its workers – like the rows of women who painted flowers on cups in the way learned from their mothers before them – moving, that is, until Wilson spoiled the effect by describing Stoke-on-Trent, the site of the factory, as “a wasteland, a dump, with a rising Muslim population, and a branch of the British National Party with a growing membership.”
No one seriously believes that Britain’s future lies in a return to its manufacturing era, however charming the idea. That issue was debated, and resolved, at least a generation ago and there is little apparent taste for re-opening it. As I go for a morning run through Farringdon and just past the old Smithfield Meat Market, I pass dozens of businesses that epitomise the new and service-based economy on which, for good or ill, a large slice of Britain’s immediate future will depend. It’s almost impossible to tell what most of them are trying to flog; almost any could, at a glance, pass for a hairdressing salon. But none seem to sell white goods and, assuredly, none are making them.
Recently, in the very same area, I tried to get my watch fixed. The man in the shop directed me to another man, who said he had a workshop nearby and would be happy to repair it. He took it away and phoned me a couple of days later to say my watch was fixed. When I called at the shop a few days later to collect it, I was taken up the road to another building that looked like a block of residential flats. When I entered the inner sanctum, I found several men, all working with their hands quietly at desks, all apparently fixing things – as if engaged in some underground activity like the production of a samizdat in Soviet Russia.
But I wondered how many other dissidents, behind the facade of Britain’s new, glitzy but jaded economy, might also be quietly continuing to practise old ways. •
