Start Again: How We Can Fix Our Broken Politics. Philip Collins
and the results, measured in material progress, have ceased to flow. It is time to start again.
Three Life Stories
But in order to start again we need to understand what we have lost. To understand that we need to know how we gained it in the first place. The story of the promise of politics can be told through three family tales which start and end where Peel stands, in Bury.
In 1788, in Chamber Hall in Bury, a boy was born into the calico-printing fortune of the local mill-owner. Throughout the odyssey of this young man’s life, via Bury Grammar School, Harrow, Oxford University, the House of Commons and 10 Downing Street, he retained a distinct regional accent and was regularly disparaged for cutting his jelly with a knife. He will forever be known, and to my mind admired, for breaking the mould of British politics. Today, as well as standing guard in bronze over his home town, Sir Robert Peel lends his name to the by-pass, the health centre, a public house and the 128-foot tower which was inaugurated the day after Peel’s statue and which overlooks the town from Holcombe Hill.
Peel had great intellectual gifts and an ardent work ethic but he was lucky enough to be born into a fortune. In time, life chances became more meritocratic. By no means fully and by no means everywhere, but often enough for it to seem that effort plus ability, the meritocratic formula, could secure the good life. The second Bury story begins on the threshold of one world war and spans another. This is the tale of a man born in 1910, within sight of Walshaw Hall, the seat of the weaving entrepreneur James Kenyon, Conservative MP for Bury. This child stayed in his town through school, work and retirement. Though evidently bright enough for higher education, he left school at fifteen, to work in the textile industry whose presence in the town owed so much to Robert Peel’s father. This man worked fifty years for James Kenyon, rising from office boy to foreman. On the day he retired he had his picture in the Bury Times clutching a gold clock and shaking hands with the boss.
The name of this man was Thomas Taylor and he was my grandfather. Adamantine, conservative and thirsty for the knowledge he memorised from the encyclopaedia, he became a church warden and a school governor. Tom Taylor was a man of granite decency and he was a meritocrat. He worked inordinately hard, entering every penny he earned and spent in double ledgers in his book of accounts. My grandfather took great pride in the work that was his source of welfare, both material and spiritual. I have, fading on my desk before me as I write these words, a photograph, of me as a boy with the man who launched my family’s journey towards the place from which I am now writing these reflections.
My grandfather’s story is the platform on which the protagonist of the third tale stands. It is the beginning of my story. The security my grandfather built, in the last era in which manufacturing industry was a sure road to prosperity, he passed on to his daughter. The legacy included a devotion to the Church of England, a respect for education and a moral code for life. It also included a life-long and ardent allegiance to the Conservative party, membership of which my grandfather saw as both a signal that he had ascended the social scale and a guarantee that greater progress was possible. He regarded the Labour party’s stress on equality as proclaiming its intention to hold him back.
The year after I was born, James Kenyon & Son was taken over by the Albany Felt Company of Albany, New York. It was a sign that power had passed from our town. As a boy I played in the derelict, dangerous Peel Mill, searching for the resident tramp of our fevered imaginations. It was a palatial structure that retained its grandeur even though the clatter of looms had long gone. There is nothing there now. The dog-walkers and runners on the banks of the River Irwell would never guess, if they did not know, that a castle of the first Industrial Revolution once stood here.
My mother was never destined for Peel Mill. She spent her working life fulfilling the only ambition she ever had which was to be a primary school teacher. She taught me too and that was the start of the journey through the town’s grammar school and on to higher education that made it possible for me to leave Bury for the rest of the world. I grew up in a household that had its dinner at what I would now call lunchtime and in which tea was a meal as well as a drink. Nobody went out for dinner and, if they had, it would have happened in the middle of the day. In the vanishingly unlikely event that we had been invited out for supper, my parents would have expected a cup of cocoa and a biscuit. From there I went on a journey through the English class system, through the doors of the great British institutions, always nervous but never less than excited: Cambridge University, the House of Commons, the BBC, the City of London, 10 Downing Street, The Times.
Next to the picture of my grandfather I have on my desk a photograph of my mother, with my two boys, aged four and two at the time, in the Downing Street rose garden in 2006. My mother liked to embarrass me with the story that, the night before I was born, she dreamt of Harold Wilson, whom she could not abide. It was my fitting revenge that the daughter of Thomas Taylor, herself a life-long Conservative, should find herself at the summer party thrown by Tony Blair, a Labour Prime Minister. Mr Blair always asked what my mum thought of policies. That was because she was from Bury, a town that always picked the winner in a general election. It was a moment of great pride, even if she did regard my unaccountable decision to swap sides as enough to make Peel step down from his pedestal. There was never a day, when I knocked on the famous black door to enter Downing Street, that I did not reflect on the privilege. I feel the same when I open a copy of The Times and find my script offered to the nation under a flattering picture taken some time ago. I like to think my grandfather might have been proud of that, even if he would have been dubious about my political affiliation.
This is my story and many others could once tell a similar story of their own. It is, though, today a rarer story than it was, and that is evidence of the broken promise of British politics. It was once assumed that every succeeding generation would do materially better than the one that went before. Parents would hand on to children a world enhanced and improved. Sir Robert Peel’s two political virtues offered power and progress to the people. My grandfather found secure employment in manufacturing which, through dedicated husbandry, he turned into opportunities that my mother took and passed on to me. This was, though the connection was never conscious, the contract between the political class and the electorate it served.
The Story of Modernisation
This book tells how that contract can be reinstated. The story of politics is the story of constant modernisation. A political movement courts success only when it looks like the future arriving. Clement Attlee promised that the sacrifice of war would be repaid by the benefits of welfare. Harold Wilson pledged to make Britain comfortable in the white heat of the technological revolution. Tony Blair spoke the language of globalisation and the coming information age. All three, in their own ways, said that their politics would shape and domesticate the future. Today, in an economy in which too many people miss out, in which unmerited rewards flow freely and in which work seems to be threatened by the next wave of industrial revolution there is an urgent need for a political movement that sounds like the cavalry of the future taking the field.
I begin with a definition of what has gone awry but the main focus of the book has to be time future rather than time past. No new dispensation is possible, however, without a clear understanding of time present and, in ‘The Broken Promise’, the first chapter, I chart the terrain. Politics over the last decade has been operating under new terms and conditions. When the next generation cannot reasonably expect any improvement on the living standards of their parents, then the implicit political bargain has broken down. This is the troubling context in which Britain faces, I go on to suggest, ten pressing questions to which the current set of politicians has no answers. First, there are the economic questions of how Britain makes a living in the world, how we tackle inequalities of income and wealth, the most conspicuous of which has become the allocation of housing, and how we reassure the workforce that technology is not a mortal threat. Then there are the political questions of how we restore faith in public deliberation, the location of power and how we improve life chances by devising public services that both enhance the citizen body and respect justice between the generations. Last come the vital cultural questions of providing a home for all, ensuring that Britain remains a tolerant and open society and defining Britain’s place in the world.