Jew World Order

Crowning glory … the Queen and Prince Philip after her coronation. Photo: PA Wire

Britain has become a kinder, gentler place in Elizabeth’s reign, writes Simon Jenkins.

My memory of the Queen’s coronation in June 1953 is still vivid. In February the previous year, we had been summoned to a school assembly to be told of the death of King George VI. Elizabeth, then 25, acceded to the throne immediately, the event commemorated by this year’s Diamond Jubilee. I watched the later coronation on a neighbour’s new television. It seemed a distant tribal ritual in which overdressed priests fussed around the sacrifice of a 27-year-old maiden in a strange hat.

My overwhelming recollection of the 1950s is of continuity and security. Great Britain was a world power that had just triumphed in an epic war against the evil Germans. Churchill’s Tories were back in power. All was in its rightful place.

To look back on those days in 2012 is not easy. The difficulties of the present can make any past seem a golden age. Yet some things about this epoch are irrefutable. Britain’s gross domestic product (adjusted for inflation) is roughly four times what it was in 1952. Its health and education are better. Britain isn’t just more prosperous, it is more tolerant, caring, creative and outward-looking and almost certainly more fun.

Britain in the 1950s was deeply conservative. The expansion of secondary education after 1944 had little impact on the class system. Slums were everywhere. Abortion was illegal, divorce difficult. Most believed in capital punishment and in the criminality of homosexuals.

The war against Hitler infected everyone and everything. The nation was left impoverished, cities derelict. Though fewer lives were lost than in World War I, millions had been disrupted and families dislocated.

In the 1950s, complacency was soon to collide with postwar reality. This came first in foreign affairs with the Suez crisis of 1956, when America refused to stem a run on the pound, putting a humiliating end to Britain’s imperial reach in the Arab world.

Reality dawned more insidiously as the reinvigorated economies of Europe began to compete with Britain’s traditional industries of coal, steel and shipbuilding. Although world trade continued to favour Britain, the state of the economy moved to centre stage. The most visible sign of change emerged in London’s cultural life. Anti-establishment sentiment stirred in the theatre and literature, then to fashion and music. Miniskirts paraded in Carnaby Street. The Beatles and Rolling Stones swept the charts. In 1966, Time magazine hailed the maturity of ”Swinging London”.

Yet conservatism was deep enough to survive the Beatles. A devaluing currency could stave off commercial decline for a while, but in the early 1970s Britain saw its first recession since the 40s. The economy was hit by the ”British disease” – industrial strife, government inertia and trading failure.

While recent historians have restored some dignity to the 1970s, the period of the ”three-day week” spawned an overwhelming defeatism. Two elections in 1974 were conducted on the slogan ”Who governs Britain?” Inflation … the next year hit 25 per cent. Britain was the sick man of Europe, crawling into the new Common Market on the pleadings of its leaders.

The means by which the country hauled itself back to recovery in the 1980s have been controversial ever since. The Thatcher years (1979-90) were dramatic and divisive. They began with an engineered recession, with mass bankruptcies and inflation driven down to 5 per cent by 1983. But the defeat of Argentina’s invasion of the Falklands the previous year and the crushing of left-wing militancy in the unions brought a new direction to government. Thatcherism and privatisation supplanted welfarism as the dominant ethos of the day.

By 1995, virtually the entire utilities and trading sector nationalised in the 1940s had returned to private hands. The structure of the private sector changed radically. Britain’s balance of traded goods lurched into the red from 1983 and never recovered, the gap being covered largely by financial services.

Margaret Thatcher never enjoyed strong popular support, but she reflected a steeliness long been absent from politics. Britain undeniably changed in the period. Apart from a blip in 1991, the economy grew each year from 1982 to 2008.

Thatcher’s ”supply-side” reforms – weakening labour and bringing competition to bear on the public and private sectors – weren’t reversed by her successors, John Major, also a Conservative, or Labour’s Tony Blair.

But some aspects of government did not change under Thatcher who had been fearful of reforming the public sector, backing away from privatising railways or the health service. After taking office in 1997, Blair fared no better in this respect. The government share of the nation’s output hovered around 40 per cent in the 1990s and soared under Labour, achieving a peacetime high of 48 per cent in 2009.

This spending came to rely on government debt. In the private sector, a political obsession with private housing left homeowners over-borrowed. The result was a similar crisis in 2008 to one 30 years earlier.

The advent of the internet in the 1990s and the computerisation of swathes of the economy liberated millions from the drudgery of the factory and typing pool. For all its suddenness, the second recessionary dip in 2012 meant prosperity regressed only as far as 2005. But the good times had lasted so long that bad times proved hard to stomach.

To older people, the most remarkable cultural shift in the past 60 years has been a declining obsession with class. As Lawrence James says in his 2006 book, The Middle Class: a History, by the turn of the 21st century, a posh accent had lost its cachet and social surveys showed two-thirds of Britons saw themselves as ”middle class”. Attitudes towards sexual behaviour and the importance of marriage transcend class boundaries. Divorces have risen fourfold since 1950, while the proportion of babies born out of wedlock has risen from 3.5 to 40 per cent.

Unlike most European nations, Britain has continued the steady centralisation of state power begun during the world wars. Local participation in politics has declined.

The one major reaction against centralism has come from the erosion of the UK itself. Most of Ireland went between the wars, and Northern Ireland was to remain at a horrific price. But in 2000 Scotland and Wales won a measure of autonomy that, in Scotland’s case, may yet progress to substantive independence.

Prospect Magazine

Simon Jenkins is the author of A Short History of England.