A few years ago I read The Radetsky March by Joseph Roth.
It’s about how, at the twilight of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the myths that had sustained the society started to unravel.
Last Saturday I spent five hours watching the latest Adam Curtis documentary on the BBC. It’s about the history of Britain from the beginning of Mrs Thatcher’s regime to the arrival of Tony Blair. Having watched almost all the Adam Curtis documentaries over the years, I saw this as his Greatest Hits Compilation – the same themes all remixed for his last hurrah.
I remember as a young Tory boy in the 1980s thinking that privatisation was a great thing. But Curtis points out that the first people to introduce privatisation were the Nazis, to ingratiate themselves with corporate interests. My jaw dropped at that. He then told the story of how the people of Camelford were poisoned by a private water company, and all the authorities denied it because they didn’t want to halt the process they had started.
Curtis has always been brave when it comes to demythologising Britain’s glorious past. He did a fantastic documentary interviewing the American veteran Paul Fussell on the horror of combat in the First and Second World War.
This time he topped that with a story of a British fighter plane discovered buried in the ground in the 1980s. The body was still in the cockpit. They assumed they’d dug up a hero. In fact they discovered the chap had been a cowardly aristocrat shirking his duties. Then a veteran fighter pilot explained what a dirty business air combat was, not heroic at all. My jaw dropped at that, too.
Attention was turned to the monetary policies of the Tories, which worked on a philosophy that assumed that everyone is selfish and the only way to get people to behave well is to offer them financial incentives. The industrial North was seen as unproductive, and if they de-industrialised, they thought, new businesses would emerge to replace them. When the private companies decided that it was cheaper to buy coal abroad, they no longer bought coal from the British pits. That finished off our coal mining industry.
As a wise commentator points out, they had good intentions, but the people who were executing these plans were aware that high unemployment would mean cheap labour which they could exploit for profit. It didn’t mean better lives and jobs for the people left behind.
In the late 1990s, I remember the arrival of Tony Blair. I was living in Bayswater reading the trilogy of novels by J G Farrell at the time, Troubles, The Siege of Krishnapur and The Singapore Grip. Curtis mentions them as stories which described the decline of the British Empire, focusing on the shame – like the loss of Singapore – rather than the glory.
At the time, with the death of Diana, I felt, like Adam Curtis, that an old idea of England was dying. Soon after that global capital came roaring into Paddington, building the glass-and-steel corporate constructions that are now a feature of every city in the UK.
Property prices have rocketed ever since, to a point where it’s now unimaginable that the wealth generated by ‘regeneration’ for the property-owning classes could dry up, thus breaking the seductive tyranny of endless ‘economic growth’.
Curtis showed how money from the Brink’s Matt bank robbery ended up in the coffers of Cheltenham Ladies College to make the point.
Adam Curtis always complains that we seem to have no alternative vision for society, but over the years he’s done a great job of dispelling the illusions and calling for alternatives.
Humans societies are built on ideas and myths, and these are perishable.
We’ve reached another turning point. It’s going to be curious to see how global capitalism functions when you’re in a multipolar world with war breaking out on every continent. The new Labour government has a huge majority, but they can’t change anything. The state has a huge payroll and is effectively bankrupt. The death of Queen Elizabeth II will one day be seen as the end of an era, heralding the break up of a way of living that lasted 70 years.
Curtis at least reminds us in these documentaries not to be too nostalgic for the past.
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