Getting Thatcher’s children to love the state – or at least trust it!
Alaina said to me, “That’s the difference between you and me. You trust the bureaucracy and I don’t”. I thought nothing of it at the time but it struck a chord. Just why do I so often feel uncomfortable with some of the attitudes of my younger Labour colleagues? And do I really trust governmental bureaucracy? Do I really think that the ‘the man in Whitehall knows best’?
Well, in obvious ways, I do not. For a start I would never think that Whitehall knows better than the Town Hall, and, for a second reason, after many years of experience, whether of cock-ups or stitch-ups, I am not that gullible. But nonetheless there is a clear and distinct difference between my attitude and what I consider to be the cynicism and negativity, at least as regards civic institutions, that many of my younger Labour colleagues feel. Why is there such a difference?
In The Socialist Case in 1937 Douglas Jay, later the Battersea MP, who I got to know quite well in the 1970’s, wrote: ‘in the case of nutrition and health, just as in the case of education, the gentleman in Whitehall really does know better what is good for people than the people know themselves.’ For someone born four years later and who benefited from the most balanced, and rationed, diet ever fed to a generation of Brits, this did not, and does not, seem such a strange dictum.
Moreover, growing up being looked after by the NHS, educated by the 1944 Education Act-framed school system, graduating with the benefit of total state support (no fee charges then) and a local authority maintenance grant, I was, with the rest of my generation, a major beneficiary of the state.
It was a state fired in the cauldron of war, a state with the common purpose of defeating Germany and creating a better world. Fired by the collective will of a nation shaped by the greatest existential threat in its history, the public had a belief in a better future and in the state’s ability to be the agent of that better future.
“Homes fit for Heroes” may have been a First World War slogan, but it was equally strongly felt in 1945, by the heroes of WW2. The Beveridge Report, largely written by civil servants, under the chairmanship of William Beveridge, an academic and a civil servant, sold half a million copies in its first week of publication in 1942. It was a publishing sensation. And still to this day, an overwhelming majority of my generation believes that the Welfare State is the greatest achievement of twentieth-century Britain. Unsurprisingly, we tend to trust state mechanisms and state agents.
A later generation shaped, consciously or not, by the Thatcherite revolution mocked Douglas Jay for saying ‘the man in Whitehall knows best’, which was, as Jay often protested, a quote taken out of context. They also mocked the idea that the state could possibly be as effective as the market; they frequently mocked the idealism of their elders; indeed some clearly despise the objectives to which my generation aspired. One of the most astounding, to me, experiences is listening to the younger Tory councillors, apparently genuinely, asking why we should care about inequality, or even worse, ever-widening inequality. They clearly do not come from the same starting point as I do.
Gordon Gekko – Oliver Stone and Michael Douglas’s brilliant fictional creation for the 1987 film Wall Street – may have been a harder, sharper American version of the type but there is a British version too (and there was also Bernard Mandeville, an eighteenth-century Anglo-Dutch model of Gekko). Their attitudes have also, no doubt, been helped by many classic failures of the state from the 1940s East African groundnut scheme to the modern Mid-Staffs Hospital scandal.
Surely it is time to re-discover some of that war-time optimism and reforming zeal. How otherwise do we tackle the destructive tendencies of the unbridled market-place? How else can we fight off the privatised, divided society that Cameron and Osborne are so keen to promote? The Welfare State we have known in the past will not do for the future but it is only the state that can control and civilise the market and it must do that for the good and the welfare of all its citizens.
Tony Belton
Tony Belton 