Spirit of 45

4 March, 2013 (13:59) | All articles | By: Stuart Fraser

It’s not like me, I know, but I had a rant the other day. In the Post Office this time. Over the charges for passports. Again.

I told the lady behind the counter, and the seething masses in the queue behind me, that near my desk hangs a picture of the Second World War aircraft carrier HMS Illustrious. My grandfather, Arthur Brewer, served on it; my grandmother bought it when he went away, for the cost of her week’s servant’s wages, so she had something to remind her of her husband while she sat lonely at home, year after year, nursing my infant mother.

Gramps met his daughter for the first time when she was about four. I keep the photo because it mattered and matters to Nan and Mum and me, and because it reminds me of what an earlier generation did and went through to buy what we have.

Or what we had.

I told the folks in the Post Office that I thought old Gramps would be spinning in his grave if he thought he’d fought for the right for his grandson to hand over £70 to bear his free country’s passport. As I left, a little old lady in the queue said: “I quite agree, dear.”

That’s the least of it, of course. Here are two much more important perspectives on the same subject.

Ken Loach has made a documentary called The Spirit of 45. It attempts to capture and explain my grandparents’ Britain, the Britain that rejected its heroic war leader, Winston Churchill, and voted for a socialist Jerusalem in 1945. Please read this piece by Yvonne Roberts in The Observer this week: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2013/mar/02/spirit-45-ken-loach-nhs-history It explains the film and the idea better than I.

Loach made the film, he said, because: “I felt it was important to record the memories of those almost written out of history who upheld the spirit of ’45. Today, the market penetrates everywhere. It’s time to put back on the agenda the importance of public ownership and public good, the value of working together collaboratively, not in competition.”

I found the passages in which people talk about homes and health care especially resonant, for it’s what all my grandparents told me. They all, all four of them, valued beyond jewels the move from unheated, insanitary, damp slums to council homes with heat and bathrooms, and valued beyond any luxury the idea that if they or their children were ill they would be looked after. But priceless beyond even that was the idea that they had created a world in which their children would have “the chances we never got”. They had improved the world in which they lived, and they were so very proud of that. Rightly.

And now. And now…

What also hits home from Roberts’ article is the sheer weight of the lies used to frogmarch this poor, betrayed country into the welcoming arms of the bankers and billionaires, the credit-mongers and snake-oil salesmen of the free market, away from the spirit of 45 that said we were truly all in it together. Just for one example, take the myth that socialist lefties are irresponsible public sector spendthrifts. Up to 2008, no government had ever spent more on the public sector than that of…. Margaret Thatcher. And there certainly hasn’t been a socialist government since 2008. It’s like the myth that the global economic meltdown wasn’t the fault of the right’s friends, the bankers and businessmen and gamblers, but of Gordon Brown.

Loach’s film looks at how we prioritised the common good over the private good. We worked together. The message seems to be: we didn’t fight and make sacrifices for the world we have now.

For our second perspective, that was the central message of a great Frenchman who died last week, Stephane Hessell. Hessell, a veteran of the French Resistance, who survived Gestapo torture and the concentration camps, wrote, in late old age, a pamphlet called Time For Outrage.

In it, he declared that people – his people – didn’t fight for freedom in order to then hand over wealth and privilege to a tiny few and perpetuate want and need among the poor and old, the sick and downtrodden. He didn’t fight for a world in which children labour long hours for pence to create the baubles of the rich, nor for a world in which, once again, old people can’t afford heat.

His argument was that people need to become outraged again, just as people were outraged by the evil his generation fought. People need to combat greed and selfishness, destruction and irresponsibility, the yawning chasm between rich and poor, have and have-not, with peaceful protest.

The words of this old man struck a chord around the world: the pamphlet sold 4.5 million copies and was one of the inspirations for movements such as Occupy in Wall Street and in front of St Paul’s.

Hessell was by no means perfect, of course, and could be unwontedly abusive in his criticism of the Israeli occupation of Palestine, but after his death, French President Francois Hollande put it rather beautifully: “Hessell’s capacity for indignation knew no bounds other than those of his own life. As that comes to an end, he leaves us a lesson: to refuse to accept any injustice.” A good tenet by which to live.

It all fits into my lesser perspective, all interweaves. During the war that Gramps and Hessell fought, one building stood while the rest of the city centre of Plymouth burned in the blitz: the building in George Street where the Western Morning News and the Plymouth Evening Herald were printed. You can see it still today, housing Waterstone’s, set at an odd angle to what, after rebuilding, became New George Street. The angle is there because, when the city was put back together by the spirit of 45, local people wanted to keep this symbol of the city’s proud defiance of evil. They cared about it.

I used to work there and was proud to do so. You could feel the history in the nicotine stains, the polished wooden stairs, the vibrations in the soles of your feet when the presses ran, the sweet stench of ink. My dad, who survived the Plymouth Blitz, was incredibly proud that I worked there. His generation, as described by people like Ken Loach and Stephane Hessell, knew about values and symbols.

The newspaper corporation that came to own the building, a wing of Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail and General Trust, didn’t care a stuff for any of that, of course. You couldn’t put values and symbols and history in the profit and loss account. In the 1990s they sold the newspapers’ and the city’s heritage and moved to a modern glass-sided ship-shaped building on an outlying industrial estate. The following two decades became decades of decline and cuts and I have always felt the abandonment of the papers’ place in the city centre was very much a factor in this decline. I worked in the ship too, but the magic had gone and I was very glad to leave. The symbolism was profound on every level: the glass sides cost millions and impressed the shareholders and won architectural awards, but the people who actually worked inside couldn’t really see their screens when the sun shone. They had to install giant roller blinds.

In December, DMGT sold its regional newspapers to a new group, Local World, and now that glass ship, which always looked more like a big white elephant to me, is up for sale. It’s too big for the few remaining staff of the papers now the presses have been sold and the jobs have gone, and they’re moving back to the city. I hope it goes well for them.

On a local scale, the story is another useful symbol for the way the abandonment of the spirit of 45 led to decline and disaster.

At this point in any discussion of the history of the left in Britain, and especially when it relates to newspapers, somebody’s obliged by law to point out the alarming excesses of the print unions in the 1970s. There is also a legal requirement to use the phrases ‘dead left unburied’ and ‘rubbish piled in the streets’.

All I’ll say is this: there were indeed alarming excesses, counted in their dozens, unless you read Murdoch’s press, and he certainly had no vested interest in promulgating myth, did he? Excess and abuse existed – but people had jobs, people read newspapers, people took part in the lives of their communities, people lived together.

Did alarming excess and corruption end when Thatcher and Murdoch crushed the unions? Ask Murdoch. Or a banker. Or a police officer. Or a phone-tapper. A printer never made the call that sank a ship and killed 600 men; a printer never ignored the wish of the people and condemned thousands of civilians to death; a printer never gambled with people’s mortgages. Would you sooner pay unearned wages in dozens of pounds to a few dozen Mickey Mouses ripping off Rupert Murdoch – or would you sooner abandon that world and pay a few million pounds to a few thousand bankers ripping off entire societies? Would you sooner see piles of rubbish in the streets because unions want more money for working men and women, or see piles of money in the bank accounts of the shareholders of privatised utilities that push the price of your services like transport and energy beyond the pockets of the poor and the not-so-poor?

Where does it leave us, all this? Same as ever: arguing for right against wrong, good against bad, for the common good to matter more than the private wealth of a few, for essential services to be more important than the money they make for shareholders. All I can do is write and argue the case, just as I have always done, and if only for the sake of my old long-dead Gramps, whose picture I’m looking at now, just as I’ll always do.

 

Write a comment

You need to login to post comments!