Nicky Charlish
posted 25 November 2007

The idea that things can only get better is one that hasn’t only been challenged by traditionalists. Progressives wonder, too, if things weren’t somtimes better in the bad old days. Or do the levels of change and decay remain almost the same? How do these assumptions play out when it comes to the assertation that the British have become more politically and socially apathetic than they were thirty years ago? These are the themes that this book examines by taking the last three decades of this country’s political and social life as its raw material. How good a job does it do?

At first glance it’s not easy to say. Garnett (a lecturer in politics at Lancaster University) takes us through familiar events and features over the past thirty years – such as strikes, football violence, inflation – and it becomes difficult to see the wood of his argument for the trees in which it flourishes. Despite the chapter headings (‘Anger’, ‘Greed’), Garnett takes us chronologically through the period in question – stopping off for comment along the way – whereas a stronger thematic approach might have been more useful. However, careful examination of his evidence is worth the effort. Garnett gives examples of decline. In the mid-1970s, people emigrated from Britain because of punitive taxation, but in 2007 they were leaving at an estimated rate of 1000 a per day because life abroad seemed more attractive. By 2003 one third of university students persevered with education as a way of prolonging childhood and avoiding getting a full-time job rather than seeing education either as having an intrinsic value or because it was a stepping-stone to adult life. In the 1970s organisations like the Middle Class Association sprang to the defence if the middle classes; today that class’ members grudgingly, but silently, fork out increasing amounts for private education or for houses in the catchment areas of good-quality state-schools.

Garnett points out the rise in violence in schools – the 1970s had its bad schools, but a survey in June this year indicated two thirds of all teachers had been physically or verbally assaulted – but whether he’s correct to attack the amount of testing to which pupils are subjected to as a form of decline is debatable: the grammar school pupil of thirty years ago faced a regime of daily homework, frequent testing, termly exams and a yearly re-cap exam of the previous years work. Garnett points to the decline of the traditional middle class within the years covered by the book, but, arguably, this started earlier with ‘progressive’ thought, symbolised by the beliefs of the Bloomsbury Group and its followers winning the culture wars – especially within institutions such as churches, public services and the academy – plus the glitz of American materialism as represented by several decades of Hollywood.

Meanwhile, some topics of discontent heve remained the same over the years – in 1975, people were concerned about dangerous dogs, prison overcrowding, dirty hospitals, rationing within the National Health Service, and the possibility that out-of-town ‘hypermarkets’ would have an adverse effect on small businesses. Garnett is clever on pointing out that increased sexual freedom led not – as its exponents had hoped – to a more civilised society, but to one where ministerial fortunes could depend on the whims of newspaper proprietors (in 1992 Tory politition David Mellor had sabre-rattled against the media: shortly afterwards, newspaper exposure of a sex scandal led to his resignation). Garnett notes astutely that the magazines Cosmopolitan and Loaded – despite their respective feminist and new-lad stances – had a ‘strangely symbiotic relationship, guaranteed to maximise sales’ : both were devoted to propigating sexual pleasure. Given the old dictum that a stiff prick hath no conscience it was, perhaps, inevitable that devotees of a semi-mystical approach to sexual freedom would lose out: Soho would end up as the Lourdes of Britain’s sexual revolotion.

But sex wasn’t the only big provider of a cash nexus. Garnett reminds us that the proliferation of neuroses have been useful for the media, leading to television programmes like What not to Wear which could assure the insecure that there were people ‘more frumpish than themselves’. Shock-horror work from modern artists helped to generate tabloid sales: the object of the Turner prize, instituted in 1984, was ‘winning attention from the mass media’.

Garnett’s examination of political decline also shows a mixed picture. In 1975, public respect for politicians was not high. When the BBC broadcast Parliament on radio as a one-off experiment, listeners were outraged by the noisy conduct of the commons. With memories of the Second World War and its preceding Depression still fresh in their minds, most politicians were concerned with avoiding any return to mass-scale poverty rather than appealing to the media and continuous electioneering. But the 1970s generation of politicians were despised by the electorate as they seemed complacent, with little regard for individual aspirations. Only during the 1975 referendum campaign on EEC membership did politicians arouse any real interest, possibly because they campaigned on a non-partisan basis rather than along what were regarded as yah-sucks-boo party lines.

A succession of riots broke out in 1981. Initially they had race as their common flashpoint, but greed - or feelings of boredom which had accumulated for several years - were also causes (riots broke out in Cirencester, not a town noted for its racism, radicalism, or poverty). Racial tensions were certainly involved. But the riots might have been avoided – or toned down – had politicians overcome their understandable reluctance to grasp the nettle of explaining that the old industries were no longer viable and that their workers had to learn new skills. Voting, too declined. But did activism? Garnett shows that, while decline has taken place within public political participation, activism itself isn’t dead.

The establishment in 1975 by the Mcwhirter brothers of the National Association for Freedom to combat what was seen as general British decline was, perhaps, the beginning of modern non-party pressure groups. It could be said to be argued that, once the establishment of democracy was no longer seen as an ongoing crusade but an established part of the political scene, and poverty and war no longer presented the treats they had once done before the end of the Second World War, people’s enthusiasm for participation in mass politics started to wane. They were only prepared to campaign over issues which upset them, like the 2003 Gulf War: only when things were bad would people act against an incumbent political party (Garnett rightly says that a Conservative victory was inevitable in 1979; he might also have made the point about New Labour’s victory in 1997).

Does Garnett establish a firm case for saying that things have got worse since the 1970s? He does – just about – but he might have achieved more if he’d not tried to cram so much material into one volume, so forcing a scatter-gun approach to the way it’s given and used. (He also seems unwilling to really let himself go when it comes to dishing out criticism: it’s as if the subject-matter of his book fills him with too much disgust to tackle the job with the joyous surgical precision it needs). With quotations from two very different sources – Sir Winston Churchill’s former private secretary Lord Colville and socialist historian EP Thompson – Garnett shows that the British have adopted an attitude of ‘contemptuous subservience’ to their rulers over the past three decades.

Garnett rightly highlights the sense of powerlessness that grips people today due to the fact that – despite some eye-catching policies – neither party offers any real choice to the voters: traditional Conservative and Labour supporters have been, to a certain extent, disenfranchised. He points out that charities’ ‘new dependency on government largess meant that fund-raising skills owed more to the ability to bend ministerial ears than the rattling of collecting tins’. This development – which started under Conservative rule but continues today – is shown by Garnett as an example of sleek Thatcherite efficiency (and, arguably, some charities needed a dose of this). But it can be seen as symbolising the infantilising, box-ticking, over-regulation of society which has led to a disdain for politicians.

Garnett has provided a provocative portmanteau of the politics, attitudes and culture of the time he’s set out to examine. His book is not the last word on the subject, but its essential reading for anyone who wishes too look at a thirty year period when Britain went through a period of transformation which we take for granted today, but which would have seemed almost unimaginable to the majority of its inhabitants in 1975.