'The light's on at Signpost......!'

I should first explain the rather curious title.

On the Manx motor-bike racing course, the last check-point before the finish is called ‘Signpost’. When a rider passes it, a light comes on to tell him he has nearly completed his race. So when a Manxman says ‘the light’s on at Signpost, he means that you are getting to the end of your journey through this vale of tears. And that is when we tend to look back rather than forwards.

(It is also the title of a book by our late resident famous author, George MacDonald Frazier, best known for his ‘Flashman’ series. In fact, most of his career was as a script-writer on Hollywood blockbusters. The book is autobiographical and is interspersed with his political views, which are a shade to the right of Heligoland. He also wrote the finest book from the perspective of the ordinary Private in the Burma Campaign called ‘Quartered safely out here’, a quote from Kipling and still in print).

One of the comments on ’75 not out’ suggested that we have seen moral, social and political deterioration in our lifetime, and that things were better in the 30’s and 40’s. Let’s have a look at these.

‘Moral’ deterioration is certainly apparent in a perceived widespread lack of a sense of right and wrong, manifested by the looting in London last year in which educated middle-class young people gleefully participated (they’re not laughing now). However,WW2 and military service afterwards created a culture of fiddling, skiving and beating the system. It was perfectly OK to ’liberate’ all sorts of public property. A friend in the army was part of a ‘milk scam’; the dairy would only deliver half the ordered quantity, double-invoice, and split the difference  with the cook-house staff at the end of the week. He later became a parson.

Likewise previously accepted sexual mores. And a good thing, too, say I. The concept of sexual morals was foisted on us by the Church. It must have caused untold misery over the centuries, and liberation came with the invention of ‘the pill’, one of the greatest breakthroughs of all time, and the main cause of the long-overdue liberation of women. The religious concept was based not on ‘morals’ but on inheritance. In the days before birth control it was important that estates were inherited by biological heirs.

Until the pill, it is likely that many (most?) working class marriages were of the shotgun variety which ended in tears at a time when divorce was almost impossible for any but the well-heeled, and largely unknown. In my village we had a divorced couple of retired colonials. They were a source of great interest; no-one had ever seen a divorced couple before.

Adolescent youngsters are sexual time-bombs, because that is what nature intended. If they can now indulge in a little horizontal jogging that’s fine with me as long as they recognise that the health consequences can be dire if they overdo it. Our pre-marital years were spent in an a torment of frustration. Kids today have never had it so good – or so often. I suspect that those who rant about teen-age promiscuity are secretly envious that they themselves never had the chance to go at it like a frog up a pump.

Social values? I generally write out of experience or study, so I can’t speak with much authority about the 1930’s, which are as remote from us today as the 1850’s were then. However, I can refer back to the early life of my father.

He was born in 1907, left school at 13, became an apprentice iron-moulder at Vickers Armstrong’s in the Scotswood Road, Newcastle (where the bus-wheel flew off in ‘Blaydon Races’), and lost his job in the Great Depression. He walked to London to find work as a building-site labourer, a big come-down for a skilled craftsman. It was harsh manual labour and my mother used to recount how she had to wash him because his hands were ragged from rough work.

It was a hard life.

In ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’, George Orwell recounts how he saw grinding poverty in the industrial north, sparse food, stinking dirty houses, high rents for damp-infested rooms 70 yards from the nearest privy shared by the whole row, and back-breaking shifts in damp and dangerous coal-mines. And no 5-day week or paid holidays, medical benefits or company pensions for the workers.

Until the Swinging Sixties heralded a social revolution, Britain was riven with class-distinction, a social apartheid. I well recall the appalling snobbery that I faced as a working-class officer in the Army. To be fair social mobility was pretty easy for grammar school oiks; I became what the pollsters would call middle class by the time I was 20. We were also almost unbelievably deferential compared with today. Peter Cook did a good hatchet-job on this when he gave his wonderfully cruel parody of Harold Macmillan with Harold in the audience, and political satire became very big in the 60’s to 80’s. It has now disappeared; modern politics is beyond satire.

There was censorship of books which was effectively destroyed by the failure of the prosecution in the ’Lady Chatterley’ trial (when Counsel for the Crown achieved overnight fame by asking the jury whether this was the sort of book to be read ‘by your wife and servants’). The acid test under the1959 Obscene Publications Act was whether the publication was of literary merit. I doubt whether many would pass that test today, but who cares?

There was theatre censorship that had gone on for 231 years until it was abandoned as late as 1968. This is what the DT had to say:

The Lord Chamberlain’s office had long been a channel for fathoms-deep reserves of reactionary philistinism. No other outlook could have banned the phrase “up periscopes” from being used on stage because, in the view of the Lord Chamberlain’s comptrollers, more impressionable minds than theirs might be incited to “commit buggery”.

So society was not quite as free as some might fondly imagine. In the present century we have sacrificed freedoms that in the past people had fought and died for under the pretext of ‘ant-terrorism’. As Ben Franklin said ‘Those who would give up liberty for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety’, but rather curiously this refuses to become a political issue. Of course, there are plenty of fools around  who say ‘if you have done nothing wrong you have nothing to fear’ and yet that is precisely when you do have something to fear.

Political standards?

Between 1930 and the 1980’s politics was very polarized and class-based. That was the problem then. Today it is homogenised. That is the problem now.

The 30’s was a time of political pygmies in the West. Ramsey Macdonald; Stanley Baldwin; Neville Chamberlain?

And then there was Adolf. In a new book, AN Wilson takes the view that Hitler’s creed has been inherited by the liberal intelligentsia, as epitomised by Blair who believed that he was entitled to impose his own values on other countries by force, and that the Olympics and other extravaganzas are subconscious re-enactments of Nuremburg Rallies (the Olympic torch was invented for the Nazi Olympics in 1936 and designed and made by the arms manufacturer, Krupp).

By contrast the 1940’s produced political giants; Winston above all but also Nye Bevan, Ernie Bevin, Herbert Morrison, Attlee, Supermac, and many others. This was before politics ceased to be a calling and became a career. Then reversion with Wilson (clever but slippery), and the worst of all time, Heath, whose traitorous lies led us into the present mess in Europe.

‘Cometh the hour, cometh the man’, though; or in this case the woman, and along came Maggie to save the ship of state just as it was sinking. (I will always have a soft spot for Maggie because of two wonderful gaffes. Referring to Willie Whitelaw, the Deputy PM, she memorably observed that ‘every Prime Minister should have a Willie!’.  And sitting on a huge artillery piece during an Army visit, when the Sergeant Major handed her the firing lanyard she said ‘If I pull this will it jerk me off?’).

Major was a decent enough fellow, and all the ‘sleaze’ of his final administration – the toe-sucking, the cash-for-questions -  would not raise a single eyebrow in comparison with the institutional corruption of the expenses scandal and Murdoch. If the electorate had known that John Major was hung like a grandfather clock and was discussing Uganda with Edwina Currie, Blair wouldn’t have stood a chance.

Unremarked upon is the dearth of great Parliamentarians, MPs who were devoted to the Commons and were superb orators and debaters. I am thinking of Enoch Powell, Michael Foot, Tony Benn, who were friends despite their political differences, and, back in the 30’s and40’s, MP’s like Lloyd George (who also had a sex-life far more lurid than today’s political Lotharios. But people were more discreet then; as Mrs. Patrick Campbell said ‘It doesn’t matter what you do as long as you don’t do it in  the street and frighten the horses!’).

So where does this all leave us? A re-run of the 30’s, perhaps,  with economic depression, increasing and widening poverty, civil unrest in a number of countries, Greek unemployment at 25%, Spanish youth unemployment the same, reversion to the protectionism that was so disastrous back then, loss of faith in democracy, the rise of Fascism?

Déjà vu all over again?

When TV news can report the deaths of 2 more British soldiers in Helmand as last item after the weather forecast and just before the sports report, I can only surmise that we have entered the Age of Indifference.