There's an old saying among stockbrokers that the market is driven by two raw emotions - fear and greed. When greed prevails the market goes up; when fear takes hold the market tumbles. It's much harder to apply the samesimplerulestoasociety- especially one as complex and multi-faceted as modern Britain, but to an extent it's what Mark Garnett has done in his latest work of history.
To the emotions of fear and greed he's added another six: anger, charity, faith, hope, lust and apathy. As a way of telling the story of the last 30 years it's not a bad device. For, as he reminds us, it was a pretty turbulent period.We'veseen the collapse of old-style socialism, the triumph of Thatcherism (and New Labour), no fewer than four serious wars, the shrinking of British manufacturing, the creation of parliaments in Scotland and Wales and the advent of Islamic terrorism.
Garnett'sployofanalysingthe decadesandmovinghisnarrative alongoneightpowerfulemotions works well enough. Take, for example, the chapter entitled "fear". In it, he analyses the fear of many of us of Soviet communism, nuclear war, IRA bombings, violent football fans and serial murderers such as Peter Sutcliffe, Dennis Nilsen, and Harold Shipman. Other panics of the period include Aids, and the notorious "mad cow disease".
Change itself was another source of fear. According to the opinion polls, the older you were the less likely you were to be impressed by what was going on around you. Garnett points out that: "The feeling of alienation affected even well educated people like Tony Blair's ally the New Labour MP Giles Radice (born 1936). On 1 January 2000 he noted in his diary that due to the pace of change, it was the present, not the past, which is becoming another country'."
Garnettkicksoffthechapter Greed by citing the whopping wages and lavish lifestyles of a variety of entertainers,sportsmenand,of course, the red braces of the City of London. The chapter Lust is a lively account of the way Britain grappled with fast-changing sexual mores. I liked Garnett's assessment of the redoubtable Mary Whitehouse as a figure of fun who was as often right as she was wrong.
And so on Garnett goes, through charity, faith, hope, and apathy coming to a halt in the year 2007 and all its attendantworries.Herubbishes Blair's claim that modern Britain "is at home in its own skin". In Garnett's view the Britain that Blair left behind is "full of troubled people who had turned inwards to brood over real problems or imagined inadequacies". This dismal process, he writes, "helps to explain the new prevalence of apathy". That apathy, he hints, might well prove disastrous to a democracy that's not yet 80 years old.
I'm not persuaded that this is an important book. There's not enough original material for that. Butit is certainly useful, clips along at a decent pace and is never less than readable.
I suppose there's an irritating Anglocentric cast to Garnett's book but it's one he acknowledges. The study, he tells us, "is about general UK trends, and these are most likely to be identified in English developments. There is certainly no attempt to claim that the English have been any happier than their near neighbours since 1975."
Ifanything,they'vedonemore whingeingthantheJocks.Butit might be that they've had more to whinge about.
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