A New Kind of Bleak. Owen Hatherley
finance and services over industry and technology. Yet here is an apparent change of heart. What does it mean, this stated divide between producer and predator, industrialist and speculator, this seeming desire to turn the long-defunct workshop of the world back into a workshop of some sort? Is it plausible?
Answers might lie in a book published thirty years ago, which was once a fixture of British political debate – the historian Martin J. Wiener’s 1981 polemic English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit. This book was on Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher’s notorious ‘reading list’ to the Tory Cabinet of the early ’80s, and ministers were each handed a copy. Most of that list consisted of the classics of neoliberalism – defences of raw, naked capitalism from the likes of Friedrich von Hayek or Milton Friedman, the books which are often associated with an economic policy that decimated British industry. Wiener’s book was different. Not an economic tract as such, it was more of a cultural history, and its manifest influences were largely from the left. A short analysis of English political and literary culture, the centrality it gave to literature evoked Raymond Williams; its insistence on the sheer scale of English industrial primacy showed a close reading of Eric Hobsbawm; and by ascribing industrial decline to England’s lack of a full bourgeois revolution, it had much in common with Tom Nairn and Perry Anderson’s famous 1960s ‘thesis’ on English backwardness. In fact, Wiener seldom cited right-wing sources at all. He invited us to imagine a Tory–Whig coalition that didn’t feel the need to ‘reterritorialize’.
Wiener claimed that British industrial capitalism reached its zenith in 1851, the year of the Crystal Palace, whose protomodernist architecture was filled with displays exhibiting British industrial prowess. After that, it came under attack from both left and right – in fact, Wiener argues that the left and right positions were essentially indistinguishable. Whether ostensibly conservative, like the Gothic architect Augustus Welsby Pugin, or Marxist, like William Morris, opinion formers in the second half of the nineteenth century agreed that industry had deformed the United Kingdom, that its cities and its architecture were ghastly, that its factories were infernal, and that industrialism should be replaced with a return to older, preferably medieval certainties. Wiener claims the foundation of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings as one of this movement’s successes – an unprecedented group of people who, in his account, honestly believed that their own era had no valuable architectural or aesthetic contribution to make.
This horrified reaction to industry, and most of all to the industrial city, affected middle-class taste (and Wiener has it that working-class taste invariably followed suit). The ideal was now the country cottage, and if it couldn’t be in the country itself, then the rural could be simulated on the city’s outskirts, as in the garden suburbs of Bedford Park or Hampstead, followed by the ‘bypass Tudor’ of the early twentieth century. The real England, insisted commentators of left, right and centre, was in the countryside – despite the fact that since the middle of the nineteenth century, for the first time anywhere, a majority lived in cities. One of Wiener’s sharpest anecdotes concerns a book of poetry about ‘England’ distributed to soldiers during the First World War. Not one poem even mentioned the industrial cities where those who fought had overwhelmingly come from. By the 1920s, competing political leaders posed as country gents, whether the Tory Stanley Baldwin, marketed rather incredibly as a well-to-do farmer, or Labour’s Ramsay MacDonald, who presented himself as a simple man of the dales.
This sounds far from a Tory argument. Britain’s industrial and urban reality was ignored or lambasted in favour of an imaginary, depopulated countryside, and its industrial might and technological innovation suffered accordingly – what could the Conservative Party possibly find to its taste in this? That becomes clear in the third of Wiener’s points. British capitalism, he argues, had become fatally ashamed of capitalism itself. It was embarrassed by the muck, mess and noise of industry, shrank from the great northern cities where that was largely based, and cringed at being seen to be ‘money-grubbing’. Wiener, like many a left-winger, argued that this came from the English middle class’s love affair with its betters, the usually fulfilled desire of every factory owner to become a country gent, a rentier rather than producer. But he also suggested it came from a misplaced philanthropy, and a pussyfooting discomfort with making a profit from making stuff. In the form of the City of London’s finance capitalism, it had even found a way to make money out of money itself.
Now the book starts to sound like the Tory–Whig consensus we know today. British capitalism, it argues, needs to rediscover the free market, the profit motive and the ‘gospel of getting-on’ that it had once disdained. Wiener’s adversaries here are the same as Thatcherism’s punchbags – the BBC, for instance, an institution of paternalist arrogance which haughtily refused to give the public the money-generating entertainment it really wanted; or the Universities, devoted to the lefty talking shop of the ‘social sciences’ rather than robustly useful applied science. Enter current universities minister David Willetts, and his war against academia. English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit divided the Tory Party between those who welcomed this new, swaggering capitalism – the heir to nineteenth-century Manchester Liberalism – and the true conservatives who were horrified by this scorn for the countryside, old England, conservation and preservation. The former faction won, but in its rhetoric the contemporary Tory Party still tries to balance these two impulses, rather ineptly – Grant Shapps praises garden cities and Philip Hammond raises the speed limit, Cameron advocates concreting over the green belt and Gove slates modernist architecture.
Yet if the book fell into obscurity, it’s because Wiener’s central thesis was so resoundingly disproved. He predicted that in bringing back ‘market discipline’, Thatcher would rejuvenate British industry and the ‘northern’ values it inculcated; instead, the industrial centres of Tyneside, Clydeside and Teesside, South Wales and South Yorkshire, Greater Manchester and the West Riding all faced cataclysm, on such a scale that most have still not recovered. Wiener might have praised cities and industry, but the former usually voted Labour, and the latter implied strong trade unions. Neither point was to endear them to the new, swaggering capitalism. The cities were even further emasculated, their organs of local government defeated and destroyed, their economic bases of coal, steel, shipbuilding and textiles downsized or simply wiped off the map. How did this happen? Perhaps because of that politer, more reliable way of making money – the City. Wiener scornfully quotes one Rolls-Royce executive in the 1970s who tells him that he is in the motor industry for pleasure, not for profit; if he just wanted to make money, he says, he’d be in the City. And from Spinningfields in Manchester to Canary Wharf in London, former industrial sites now house the trading floors of banks that had to be bailed out like the lame-duck industries of the ’70s. And where industry really did transform rather than disappear, it took new, discreet forms – the exurban business park, the BAE Systems airfield, the container port, all safely nestled far from public view, enabling the fantasy of old England to continue unimpeded.
Wiener’s heirs are those, sometimes to be found on the left, who try to separate out finance and industrial capitalism, as if they could be prised apart. Britain is more obsessed than ever with an imaginary rural Arcadia which bears less and less resemblance to the places where we actually live, yet the profit motive has been strengthened in the process, not limited. It seems amazing at this distance to imagine anyone could have thought otherwise – a counterfactual Thatcherism which revived industrial, urban Britain. The Garden Festivals that Michael Heseltine bestowed upon Liverpool or Ebbw Vale, with their enormous exhibition hangars, were presumably the new Crystal Palaces. But what is especially bizarre about the current orthodoxy – from which none of the main parties are exempt – is that Wiener’s attack on all but ‘useful’ moneymaking activities is continued, without the concrete industrial products or technological advances that there was once to show for it. There is a counter-theory, which has it that neither speculators nor small businesses are the real ‘wealth creators’, but rather the masses who have nothing to sell but their labour. Their voice wasn’t heard in Wiener’s book, and it is scarcely heard in the current political debate.
Society against the Big Society
There is an awful impasse in contemporary Britain, a failure of imagination or intellect, producing a manic-depressive society locked into what Ivor Southwood calls ‘Non-Stop Inertia’, while the