Thinking a little about the 80’s. I was not really at all political with a big P then. I guess that I thought the Tories were so dreadful and stupid that they would not last long in power. That did not prove to be the case. It was just about possible to survive without working as the dole was a little more proportionate and rent was low. It was not so easy to get into debt as it was not so easy to borrow money.
The so-called boom did not get going until the late 80’s, that idea that the whole decade was one of excess and easy money is just another gross simplification, some places never ‘ boomed ‘ at all, both inside and outside London. The ‘ deprived ‘ parts of London remained so, and in places where the main industries were wound up it was depression time. And it did not last long, five years approximately and as usual only a small minority did very well, not the majority. Taxes for the higher earners were reduced which further skewed the wealth creation to the top end. Society was famously derided as a fiction, there were to be individuals and private companies rather than a common good and public institutions to facilitate that aim. The results of the dismantling and undermining of the social fabric began in earnest during that decade and the weakness and factionalism of the left let it go on for eighteen years. I contend that many of the ideas introduced into ‘ serious ‘ political debate during that horrible period still remain fundamentally unchallenged : that the country must be run like a corner shop as if it is just another business, that its citizens are ‘ customers ’ and ‘ consumers ’ not individuals and that society is simply a result of commodity relations and is not shaped by other values that can be encouraged or made more difficult to maintain by the actions of a Government.
Charter 88 was published in 1988 signed by a self-selected group of the more fair minded great and good. I retrieved my copy the other day and was immediately struck by the fact that of its ten point list only one has come into being, and that was about five years ago, the Freedom of Information Act. All the others including a written Constitution , which would have helped in the recent farrago around the legitimacy or otherwise of Gordon Brown remaining Prime Minister after defeat in the election, where conflicting interpretations of the situation added to the confusion with newspapers able to make all sorts of unsubstantiated claims while constitutional ‘ experts ’ had to be called in to explain the absurd complexities due to their being nothing but precedent to go on. God save us from experts. The new government is following in the trying and deferential manner so prevalent in this country of rather than acting on principle or, God forbid, ideology , which no one admits to having anymore, gets together a bunch of unelected ‘ experts ’ to ‘ look at ’ every vaguely contentious issue. You can look at something infinitely, eventually you have to decide what it is and if you want it anymore, is it doing any good , make a value judgement. Act.
I submit that it was because the last Labour government jettisoned just about all its original motivating ideals that so it was seen to be doing something it enacted numerous proscriptive measures which were presumably designed to show that it was doing the work of government. The trouble was these were precisely the opposite of positive enabling legislation, they were authoritarian and born of strange convoluted thinking that imagines that you can control behaviour by legislation, without ever tackling the major issues of policy such as the degree to which markets are given free reign and how a more inclusive and fairer society facilitated.
To recap, the nine points that were in Charter 88 and remain un-enacted :
A Bill of Rights : civil liberties such as the right to peaceful assembly, to freedom of association, to freedom from discrimination, to freedom from detention without trial, to trial by jury, to privacy and to freedom of expression.
Subject executive powers and prerogatives, by whomsoever exercised, to the rule of law.
Create a fair electoral system of proportional representation.
Reform the upper house to establish a democratic, non-hereditary second chamber.
Place the executive under the power of a democratically renewed parliament and all agencies of the state under the rule of law.
Ensure the independence of a reformed judiciary.
Provide legal remedies for all abuses of power by the state and the officials of central and local government.
Guarantee an equitable distribution of power between local, regional and national government.
Draw up a written constitution, anchored in the idea of universal citizenship, that incorporates these reforms.
Oddly, looking at Unlock Democracy, which is what Charter 88 has morphed into, they seem to have moved to the more esoteric and confusing STV and Alternative Vote ideas rather than sticking to the clear aim of proportional representation. I suggest that this needs to be extended to Local Government also, which is wildly unrepresentative and not at all transparent. Local Councillors are highly influential and yet manage to be strangely obscure creatures that are elected in bunches of three, for some reason, and whose ward boundaries and even names seem to change with alarming frequency.
I would add another to the list. This would be a right to a basic income for every citizen. At present I contend that this country is in breach of articles signed up to in the European Convention which are designed to ensure that citizens have the means to live in dignity. Our means tested allowances are amongst the lowest in Europe and bear no relation to an average or median income. The numbers of people being left to try and exist on this inadequate ‘ safety net ’ are in the millions. Administering this complex and non-productive system of benefits is costly and outmoded. A simple and straightforward entitlement would sweep away all that paraphernalia and take millions out of effective poverty, enabling much greater chance for social inclusion and the renewal of civil society.
Remarkably , given that it now appears to have been accepted by the political classes that the link between earnings and the basic state pension must be restored, another anti-social and unfair measure introduced in the 80’s by the Conservatives and shamefully not reinstated by the Labour administration, no one seems to see that there is the same disparity between the current JSA or Income Support levels and anything approaching an average wage. How is it that even at current levels before the pension is changed to link to average earnings an unwaged single man is expected to survive on £65 a week until 64 then this suddenly changes to £97 a week at 65 ? What arcane calculations have established these figures ?
So, back to the 80’s. I have to question why the BBC is in the process of showing a number of programmes purporting to be about that decade. The Martin Amis book ‘Money’ was published in the early part and, like most of his writing, while well crafted and funny, is a poor record as a social document. I will leave aside his low life obsession, which is very much a product of and an indictment of the continuous chasm between those of different classes and backgrounds in England and their complete failure to understand each other, and is actually quite prejudiced, producing caricatures rather than anything enlightening. For example, the main character in this book, John Self. As far as I am aware most of the people who go into advertising and PR are not working class blokes that ‘got lucky’ but rather well connected and well educated middle classes that have creative tendencies but would rather not risk being an out and out artist, and found the City or Law too boring a prospect. I suggest that far from being a critique of the 80’s the book, perhaps despite itself, contributed to a shift from the City and its besuited money making men being seen by those with the entrée to this area as dull and unexciting to it being ’sexy’ ( I hate that term, but am afraid it has to be used here ) and exciting, the conspicuous consumption and greed as a high.
With the pop themed programmes, the Boy George one I watched, they work within their own very limited form, but as an insight into the period they are super-lightweight. Quite why the writer of the Boy George tale was chosen given that he was too young to have been contemporary with that time I do not understand. This absurd idea that wearing some make-up and funny clothes was in some way revolutionary and made the slightest difference to anything other than contributing to making that one individual a famous pop singer, is a very tired cliché and is simply not the case. I was around at the time and can assure that in general people did not take a blind bit of notice, and the handful of people who did dress somewhat differently only went out at night to a very limited number of places where they were amongst their own little clan.
‘Ashes to Ashes’ does not purport to be a serious effort, (does it ?) this type of mixed up period drama that veers between harsh realism, whenever there is a bit of violence, and a fantasy view of a place and time based almost entirely on pop music and fashion references, strikes as most odd. No female Police Officers in the 1980’s dressed like a backing singer for Wham! It is always wrong, it may be amusing, but it is part of a broader failure to deal with actuality in 99 % of the BBC TV output.
Is it significant ? Well, it is very strange how I now see periods of time that I lived through and aspects that I was quite closely involved with being presented in these skewed forms and such a filleted unrepresentative manner. It naturally makes one think about all the received mediated accounts of earlier periods that one did not live through, or were too young to be fully conscious of , and how accurate these rewritten histories might be.
Perhaps it takes many years before a clearer view can be seen of any period, and of course there is the important matter of when certain facts emerge, but it worries me that events and the context of which I can remember clearly are being misrepresented in such an organised way, being turned into fictions and
Irrelevances, somehow the big media organisations never get it remotely right.
