If Clement Attlee was so great, then why is This Boy so sad?
Alan Johnson’s memoir – out in paperback later this week – is a book of almost unbearable sorrow. Reading it was like unpacking a series of heavy crates; I kept having to stop and take a breath every few pages. Billed as the tale of the former home secretary’s childhood, it’s really the story of two amazing women: Johnson’s sister Linda, and their mother, Lily. With little money or outside help, they did everything to give the young Johnson the best childhood he could have.
Johnson was born in 1950; the book ends in 1968, but his family’s troubles feel depressingly timely. They live in a decade of growth, but they seldom see any in their pay packets. They are shuttled from a series of tumbledown, neglected dwellings run by unscrupulous landlords, with the promise of a secure tenancy in a council house always seeming just out of reach. With the family income feeling the pinch, they turn to barely legal lenders to make ends meet. Meanwhile, the streets are full of anti-immigrant sentiment, who everyone fears are out for their jobs, while Labour, led by a north London intellectual, battles to win power from a tired Old Etonian.
Getting its history wrong, the philosopher Ernest Renan once wrote, is part of being a nation. He could have added (but didn’t): for political parties, doubly so. The myth of New Labour was that this was the first time that Labour politicians had been pragmatic, supportive of private enterprise, or capable of running a pack of hounds: something that Herbert Morrison, Hugh Gaitskell, Barbara Castle, Harold Wilson, Nye Bevan, James Callaghan, Roy Jenkins, and Denis Healey might all, in different ways, find a little insulting.
Labour’s present-day delusion is that politics can be split into two eras: an age of Clement Attlee and an age of Margaret Thatcher. But the similarities between the Britain of Harold Macmillan, located slap-bang in the middle of Attlee’s consensus, and the country of David Cameron, the government at the fag end of the Thatcherite hegemony suggest that, far from being two eras of British politics, there could simply be one. Throughout the course of the book, Johnson’s mother is left out in the cold by a welfare state that simply doesn’t give enough for women and leaves far too many people below the breadline. The public institutions that ought to help them are instead unfeeling and in some cases actively destructive. The modern reader might wonder: aren’t these problems meant to have started in 1979?
That same reader might also think: if there was a consensus between Labour and Tory that the standard of living that was accepted as normal for the Johnsons and the neighbours was acceptable – remember this was the time that the then-prime minister felt able to say ‘most of our people have never had it so good’ – then it was not a particularly progressive or moral consensus. The same reader might say: if the changes necessary to avert Lily Johnson’s fate were purely managerial, then it might suggest that we dismiss mere managerialism too easily.
The illusion of New Labour was useful, for a time; it formed the basis of three election victories, two of them by thumping margins. But it also created the lie of Old Labour: an era of fictitious politicians who never retreated or trimmed or compromised. The myth of the modern Labour party may be an equally powerful electoral boon: but the promise of a transformative individual may not be enough to ensure that by 2020, the Britain of This Boy truly looks like a foreign country.
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Stephen Bush is a contributing editor to Progress, writes a weekly column for Progress, the Tuesday review, and tweets @stephenkb
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This Boy: A Memoir of a Childhood
Alan Johnson
Random House | 304pp | £16.99
Such a good article. Anyone who knows someone who relied on the welfare state of ’45 (including my family) will also know the hostility that much of it arouses. Sub-standard council housing (especially in comparison to the homes being built for the middle classes), inadequate education, universities tailored for the grammar and public school kids, a civil service that told working class kids to “take elocution lessons”. It leaves me unsurprised the people most starry-eyed are those will little or no contact with that state.
After the war very little money about and people recovering. Poor public services but improvements in the late 50’s and 60’s with new estates and the beginning of educational reforms and opportunities but as the article points out for many still very hard going and few opportunities. I lived through it and not an academic exercise on my part. Alan’s memories resonate.
I came over to England from Ireland in January 1958 as a 19 year old and it was a land of promise. I was offered three jobs within two weeks after never having a proper job in Ireland (excluding the Army). Within four years I was on a university course at a polytechnic and within seven years was a graduate of London University (on a full grant of £6 a week). There were many people like Alan in Ireland, mainly because of missing fathers, but I doubt if many could rise to be top of a trade union and a cabinet minister, as he did in England. You denigrate the Labour Governments of 1945 and 1974 despite knowing that they both struggled with enormous change that was forced on them by the legacy of the War and the collapse of Britain’s trading position in the 1970’s. Blair saved most of the public services in the UK from the bankruptcy that John Majors government had left for them. I am reminded of the lecture Bill Clinton gave at the Labour Party Conference shortly after he had left office. He, like Blair, had inherited a bankrupt economy and had restored it, only to see George Bush squander the surplus he had accumulated in tax relief for the rich.
Just how weakened the UK economy was by the end of WW2 cannot be emphasised enough, The immediate challenges were to de-mobilise the armed forces quickly and to find homes and jobs for those returning. That the Attlee government managed to do this and also establish the NHS, implement Beveridge and manage large scale nationalisation is little short of miraculous.
The early welfare state was pretty damn austere and imperfect – but rather than comparing it to the 21st century, a more appropriate comparator would be the 1930s – over which it was a considerable improvement – something which Stephen’s article does not consider.