From Greenland’s icy mountains, from India’s coral strand, as the old hymn has it, we seem to inhabit a world that is more seriously troubled in more places than many can ever remember. In the UK, national morale feels all but shot. Politics commands little faith. Ditto the media. The idea that, as a country, we still have enough in common to carry us through – the idea embedded in Britain’s once potent Churchillian myth – feels increasingly threadbare.
Welcome, in short, to the Britain of the mid-1980s. That Britain often felt like a broken nation in a broken world, very much as Britain often does in the mid-2020s. The breakages were of course very different. And on one important level, misery is the river of the world. But, for those who can still recall them, the 1980s moods of crisis and uncertainty have things in common with those of today.
But – and here’s the point that needs to be grasped – those moods did not endure. Not everything was broken. With effort and tough judgment, we managed to get out of that place; imperfectly, because life is always imperfect; sometimes at a cost, though sometimes with reward; but nevertheless in real and significant ways. So the question is whether we can do something of the same kind now. I know we must. I also think we can.
The world of the generation before last can slip into a collective memory hole. For me, growing up in the 1960s, that era was the 1920s. My mother recalled her Edinburgher father telling her with great solemnity: “The prime minister’s name is Mr Andrew Bonar Law.” I was a boyhood know-all, but it was a name I had never heard. I knew nothing about the 1920s until, as an adult, I started reading about them and grasping their importance.
Here in the 2020s, it feels as if the 1980s may be slipping into a similar memory hole. The Britain of the 1980s, which was the Britain in which I first started working for the Guardian, was a country whose inherited assumptions were disintegrating. It had lost an empire, but too often still thought in imperial terms; was in the midst of a necessary but sapping cold war against the Soviet Union in a wholly divided Europe; and it was a country dependent for its security on a maverick US president. They were frightening times. Yet how benign Ronald Reagan now seems.
It was a Britain, too, of the revolt against consensus, of rising unemployment, double-digit inflation, the collapse of great industries, overmighty trade unions and press barons, and the politicisation of what was then called law and order. Northern Ireland was in permanent unrest, and the IRA almost blew up the prime minister. Terrorism cast a real not a confected shadow.
The point of saying this is not to play one era off against another. Nor is it to extol the answers of the 1980s, a low dishonest decade that would leave legacies of bitterness and dereliction alongside imperfect forms of renewal. But it is to say that we have been here before. What is more, we found a way out, a path forward.
We must not turn the clock back, even if that were possible – although some still seem to believe it is. There is no golden age to reclaim, just as there is very little point in attempting to expunge history. There is no magic bullet policy answer either. Nor do I have time for heroes – well, Garibaldi maybe. Put not your trust in princes, as my matchless mentor, Hugo Young, said in our last meeting. Nevertheless, there are lessons to be learned and reapplied from those now distant years.
One of the most important is that it is better to cooperate on things on which you can agree than to focus on the things that divide you. Historically, this is a huge lesson. What might have happened in Germany if the 1930s communist movement had tried to work with the social democrats and liberals against the fascists? Instead they perished in the same camps.
A similar lesson applies to less apocalyptic times. Crucially, it applied and was slowly relearned in Britain after the divisions of the 1980s. At the start of that decade, the labour and socialist traditions and the liberal and social democratic traditions had split into separate parties. The result was a divided electorate and a succession of large Conservative majorities.
But it was also a catalyst. The only solution was some form of reconciliation between the two traditions and with electoral reality. Neil Kinnock began that from the Labour side, moderating its offer to make it palatable to more moderate voters. The process then evolved into Tony Blair’s New Labour, with its tacit alliance with Paddy Ashdown’s Liberal Democrats.
You can say it was far from perfect, and that would be true. New Labour was always too soft on market regulation and too self-interested about constitutional reform. You can say that, like most things in politics, it ended badly. You can criticise Blair all you want, and I would agree with some of it, including Iraq, but also the foxhunting ban. But he found a path that mattered.
New Labour won three elections in a row because it was willing to learn, change and cooperate, though in all cases not enough. It is an open question as to whether Labour and the other parties are willing to do something similar, and perhaps more radical – working not just with the Lib Dems but with the Tories on a programme of political reforms perhaps – in today’s very different circumstances. But change is the bottom line.
Politicians have no alternative but to try. At the former police chief Ian Blair’s funeral last year, there was a reading from a Theodore Roosevelt speech of 1910. “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better,” Roosevelt said. “The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds.”
The arena matters more than the grandstand. We should rally behind politics, not turn away from it. I hope that necessity will once again drive politics on the kind of process that emerged after the 1980s. Although this is my last regular weekly column for the Guardian after 41 years on the staff and after more than 30 years of writing these columns, I also hope from time to time I shall be able to return here, perhaps even to cheer that desperately needed process on.
