Paul Johnson Challenging Inequalities

 

This is not a long book,190 pages plus the usual footnote proof of due diligence, but it’s very repetitive and could be summarised in 60 or 70 pages. Even then I ask myself, how many Members of the UKs House of Commons could tear themselves away from their smartphones for long enough to read it and, then, how many could understand it? For all their university degrees, real and invented, I’m not convinced that they are, on average, very well informed. You can catch some of them by simply getting them to confuse the government’s annual budget deficit with the National Debt. Or by getting them to confuse total product with productivity. My own protection against  such mistakes is a sixty year old second-rate degree course, Oxford PPE. Education is  supposed to have improved  since then.

 In many ways the book is an uncontroversial presentation of how large and socially damaging economic, educational, health and political inequalities are created – deliberately (as by Mrs Thatcher) or unintentionally (as by everyone else) – and how they are interconnected. Many and probably most of the arguments are not new but there are new emphases. Most important, I thought, is their criticism of redistributive policies which take the form of cash handouts which are easy for computers to distribute but which may bring few of the hoped for benefits. Give poor parents cash according to the number of children they have and it’s far from certain (I suspect, unlikely) that the money will benefit the children. Give pensioners a Winter Fuel allowance paid in cash just before Christmas, no strings attached, and you can be certain it won’t be spent on fuel or home insulation. It buys Christmas presents and booze. In contrast, this book emphasises the merits of what it calls pre-distribution. Instead of cash to parents according to the number of children they have you invest seriously in local Head Start / Sure Start community centres which offer child care, advice, social facilities, talks, quite possibly vaccination and other health services, and nearly all free at point of use in communities where pre-school child deprivation is high. There is a side bonus that you bring people together which for stay at home mothers may be an important aspect of such provision and improve mental health. Likewise, to help keep pensioners warm, a pre-distributive appoach would offer financial help for double glazing, insulation, economical central heating except to those who have above (something like) median incomes and should be spending money on keeping themselves warm anyway. Gordon  Brown’s invention of the vote-winning Winter Fuel Allowance must be the standout example of the triumph of short-term political calculation over joined-up thinking about aims and consequences. We are living with the consequences of decades of such policies,  notably Mrs Thatcher's bonfire sale of council housing and the subsequent and linked failure to build enough new affordable homes where they are needed..

It’s not just Chancellors who settle for the easy way out of cash handouts; the Treasury is entirely complicit. It allows everyone to avoid joined-up-thinking. In many ways the arguments of this book are painfully obvious; what is not discussed is the inability or unwillingness of MPs and government ministers - regardless of party -  to formulate and implement joined-up policies which have due regard to knock on consequences down the road. Everything connects, a realisation never present in the Chancellor’s Budgets: this goes UP that goes DOWN is about the sum total of it.

The voters are now a problem because they have become habituated to think in terms of what THEY will give US and MPs elected by constituencies present themselves as pork barrel politicians who will bring home the pork to their constituency and damn the rest.

I’m not optimistic about the future of the UK, mainly because of the failure of the political class to reform their own political institutions - the House of Commons debating chamber is a place where Whitehall  farces are played weekly and very little serious work is done; the House of Lords is rotten with corruption. My advice to a young person would be, Get on your bike and leave. But they don’t need my advice; instead of voting they are already leaving or planning to do so. 

 

A.G. Hopkins, The Land Where Nothing Works

 

I wanted this to be a good book and admired the author’s conscientious work in putting together an economic and political history of Britain from 1945. But I was disappointed by a timidity about confronting what might be called the present state of the Disunited Kingdom and what if anything can be done about it. I leave Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales to their own devices  since a majority of  voters there have detached themselves at least emotionally from the Kingdom. So I am writing about England. 

There are people who think that the Kingdom is a democracy but I’m not one of them. It’s true that it is a country which offers some opportunities for democracy but they are not now taken up; many people don’t vote in national elections (turnout in 2024: 60%) and most people don’t vote in local elections where 40% is reckoned a good turnout. More importantly, the predominance of entirely understandable Us and Them thinking means that when they vote most voters are probably not thinking as citizens of a republic who are supposed to ask themselves the question, What’s best for my country / community? They are quite often and maybe mostly thinking, What’s in it for me? Opportunistic political parties are only too ready to supply answers to that question: Triple Lock, Winter Fuel, Bus Passes. Old people vote. The Greens will hope to get young people to vote by offering alternative freebies. That isn't what democracy is supposed to be about. The original  theorists of democracy linked it to taking an informed view and a long view.

Those who do vote are at the mercy of a flawed electoral system. In 1951, the then Labour government called a fresh General Election just twenty months after the previous one, aiming to increase its small House of Commons majority. On an 83% turnout it took 49% of the vote, one percent more than the Conservatives and in numerical terms gained 230 000 more votes than the Conservatives. Labour lost.  The Conservatives took power with 321 seats in the Commons against 295 for Labour. No one rioted. No one rioted when Labour took power in 2024 with a huge majority of seats on a 33.7% vote share though that figure  is complemented by riots which did occur linked to recent immigration, some irregular but mostly as more or less indentured labour under schemes  designed by  Conservative Home Secretaries, Priti Patel and Suella Braverman, to replace free movement workers from the EU who were obliged to leave after the Brexit vote..

Then there is the unelected buy-your-seat House of Lords though with sixteen seats still reserved for representatives of the failed state church; the monarchy or rather the dysfunctional but very wealthy Royal Family which hands out the feudal titles which Establishment politicians love (Sir Jacob …, Sir Kier…, Sir Sadiq); and the National Debt which is the killer. (By the way, there are countries which don't award the Titles which help sustain Them and Us, our near neighbour Ireland a good example).

Hopkins could have made more of the problem of the National Debt. British governments are vulnerable to the bond markets because they are so indebted. They are like home owners with very large mortgages and vulnerable to increases in the interest rates attached to their loans, increases which may force them to reduce other expenditures or even to sell up. How big is the National Debt? This is the current AI answer which I have double checked manually though without recourse to Zack Polanski’s answer:

The UK's public sector net debt is currently [April 2026] approximately £2.91 trillion, which is equivalent to about 93.8% of the country's annual Gross Domestic Product (GDP). This amounts to roughly £102,000 of debt for every household in the UK.

There are also, as I understand it, off balance sheet liabilities but I’ll settle for the £2.91 trillion and ask you the question, Would you lend money to the British government? And what rate of interest would you require to compensate both for price inflation and the risk of default?  The AI answer is this: interest rate 4.81% which entails that the cost of servicing existing debt absorbs roughly 8.3% of annual government spending.

So if interest rates go up then something has to give elsewhere or taxes have to increase. It’s really quite simple. So how do you feel about paying off the National Debt? Imagine yourself a householder with £100 000 of debt on top of your mortgage? What are you up for? £10 000 a year? £1 000 a year?

There is a very important feature of the debt which needs to be foregrounded. It does not arise from productive investments (things like roads, railways, cheap energy projects) which in the long term will boost Gross Domestic Product and in that way automatically generate additional tax revenues which can go towards paying off the original debt. Nope. It arises from spending on non-investment items such as the 2008 financial crisis; Brexit; military adventures; COVID – the last named an absolute bonanza for criminals who made a killing out of providing protective equipment often sub-standard and unusable. (The obvious analogy is with what used to be called “War profiteering” – supplying the troops with tins of inferior corned beef and such like). On top of those identifiable sources there has to be added general government fecklessness. Parliament has  a Public Accounts Committee which routinely reports on how money has been completely wasted though it does not get down to the small detail of things like the State Opening of Parliament and the endless and very costly public enquiries from which Lessons Will Be Learnt but aren’t. Horizon scandal? Still not settled. Grenfell fire? Still no prosecutions, nine years on. The Law, like Parliament itself, moves at a glacial pace. MPs spend their time marching through two-hundred year old Lobbies unlike members of other parliaments who sit in semi-circular chambers and push buttons on desk consoles. 

The present scenario looks like this: Growth in GDP has stalled as has the at least as important growth in productivity (output per head), employment has stalled, stay-at-home-and-play-with-your-phone-benefits can be had for the asking, new housing continues not to be built, infrastructure repair and replacement schedules have simply been abandoned (roads and pavements the obvious example; Hopkins uses them the beginning of his book). Add a government with a large disunited majority and a stiff and visionless leader whose natural habitat is the details of the Law and it seems to me that we are in deep trouble. And if the Midlands and North and the unfathomable depths of East Anglia get their way and give us Mr Farage on top of the Brexit they have already secured for themselves then the only way out for young people will be through the door of emigration.

Imaobong Umoren A New History of Britain and the Caribbean

 

 

Readers, like me, of popular and semi-popular history currently have a choice of two main genres both to be found on Waterstone tables. One genre creates a gripping narrative set in a slice of history narrowly circumscribed as to time and place and with a cast of characters some of whom remain throughout and offer what we call human interest. Of those I have read recently I single out Patrick Bishop’s Paris The Shame and the Glory , which covers the period 1940 – 44, and Adam Lebor’s The Last Days of Budapest set at the end of World War Two. Both are highly readable and, as far as I can tell, very well researched.

The second genre offers grand narratives spanning long periods of time across wide geographical areas. Such are Zeinab Badawi’s An African History of Africa, previously reviewed here, and the book now under review. A common peril  of the latter genre is that what is offered is  a set of thumbnail sketches which don’t provide narrative drive but become illustrations of some grand theory which is deployed to hold the whole thing together and which may or may not succeed in its aim.

As an A level History student over sixty years ago I was told to read Herbert Butterfield’s The Whig Interpretation of History (1931) partly with the intention that it would teach me to eschew all grand narratives to which theories like Marxism might tempt me; a couple of decades later it was Jean Francois Lyotard’s turn in The Postmodern Condition (1979) to warn me off. Plumb had good conservative credentials and Lyotard good leftist ones.

Imaobong Umoren’s book is more nuanced than its packaging but she does try to nail down all her material as illustrative of a grand theory that all of the history which has linked the Caribbean to Britain has been shaped, and is still shaped, by the commitment of the colonial power and local elites, white or sometimes non-white, to maintaining what she calls a racial-caste hierarchy. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Nothing really changes is not a terribly convincing grand narrative, especially if the goal posts – what it actually means - keep being moved. I can imagine that a dedicated Marxist analysis which kept a narrow focus on capital and labour relations might stand up rather better, able to show that through time there is more than one way of creating continuous extractive relationships. But then the Marxist analysis would miss the cultural things on which Umoren has very relevant things to report – I found what she has to tell us about the Caribbean and the First World War, for example, very interesting.

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Until the arrival of the telegraph and the typewriter in the second half of the nineteenth century, contact between the imperial centre and the Caribbean colonial periphery and vice versa was only possible by personal visits or hand-written letters sent by sea and arriving after excruciating delays: the young missionary John Smith, sentenced to death for his alleged part in a slave rebellion (Umoren, pp 134-6), died in an unhealthy Demerara prison in 1824 just before the reprieve from London reached the colony. A small detail which Umoren doesn’t use: the authorities obliged his widow to bury his body at night in an unmarked grave for fear of renewed unrest.  That is why Guyana now has a John Smith Memorial Church rather than a tended grave.

Of the letters sent, very many thousands probably survive and probably most of them not in archives. They were written from Britain by absentee owners, family relatives, bankers sending balance sheets, lawyers, import and export houses reporting arrivals and departures of goods by sea, and by missionary societies. In the other direction, there are letters from resident estate owners and the agents of absentee owners, from family members, from attorneys, from merchant houses, and from missionaries. There are letters from non-white writers, but they are rare. For a historian, these letters count as primary sources.

Over the past couple of years I have been collecting and transcribing unarchived letters on a small scale and am often surprised by things I read and things I discover when I research background on the internet. I also get to understand things which at first are puzzling. For example, if you use UCLs indispensable on-line slavery compensation database you will notice a significant amount of compensation going to trustees rather than simple owners. One reason for this is high mortality rates among those who went out from Britain to the Caribbean. Jane Austen’s father the Reverend George Austen was sought out as a trustee by a man who had been his student at Cambridge and who was going out to  Antigua to the Nibbs family plantation. Having a trustee meant that you had in place someone to manage your post-mortem affairs if you succumbed to disease before you had made your fortune and retired but might, for example, have children below the age of majority.  The Nibbs family is researchable and even before the abolition of slavery their business in Antigua appears to have failed with the Nibbs estate passing to the historically significant Martin family: it was an ameliorist Martin who in the late 18th century published a manual arguing for allocating provision grounds (allotments) to slaves  There is evidence of Nibbs family members still in Antigua in the late Victorian period; one was an auctioneer. They probably thought of Antigua as their home.

My feeling is that a better overall understanding of British-Caribbean relations might be got by taking slices of the entire story: Antigua is a small island which was colonised early and declined economically relatively early. But there is a big tale to be told about it which continues into the 20^th century with plenty of local nuances: the Chairman of the Oxford Committee for Racial Integration in the 1960s was the philosopher Professor Michael Dummett of slave-trade beneficiary All Souls; the vice-chairman was Rolston Williams who worked on the shop floor in the Morris car factory out at Cowley and was a Windrush arrival from Antigua where ( if my recollection is correct) he had been a journalist.

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Umoren doesn’t really evaluate the significance and legacy of the Christianisation of African slaves in the Caribbean and when she moves to the twentieth century she has nothing to say about the role of the many churches catering to both local and diaspora black communities. Any motorist driving through Brixton on a Sunday could not have failed to notice the throngs of black women in their Sunday best heading to church. In contrast, Umoren does give lots of space to thumbnails of the numerous and often ephemeral small groups which proliferated in the 1960s to 1980s with cumbersome names and unmemorable acronyms and which spent a lot of time falling out with each other. But they are easily accessible to historians through archival holdings; the Bodleian Library, for example, has recently created an online index for twenty boxes of stuff I donated to them and which included quite a lot of Black Power and general anti-racist material.

  https://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/bodreader/documents/media/pateman_collection.pdf

But I  kept some photographs for myself, as souvenirs:

The Provost of  University College London, Lord Annan, agreed to suspend normal teaching activities on 17 February 1969 in order to enable a day of seminars and meetings in protest against Enoch Powell's visit to the college's student Conservative club. The Socialist Society held a platform meeting; in the foreground, Althea Jones (later Altheia Jones-Lecointe) and on the platform, left to right, Obi Egbuna, Robin Blackburn, Trevor Pateman chairing the meeting (obscured by Althea's shoulder), Michael Dummett standing and speaking. The embarassing fact is that the person in the foreground was not on the platform. Unknown photographer.

Umoren passes lightly (p 338) over complaints of sexism in the various political groupings. An obvious starting point is the notorious remark of Stokely Carmichael "The only position for women [in the movement] is prone” which dates from 1964. The internet has all that you need to know, but I can’t get a single result for the answering call, “Stoke me, Stokely”. Whether I heard it used or just heard it as an answering joke, I can't recall but suspect it was a line in the 1967 musical Hair which came to London in 1968 and opened immediately after the abolition of government stage censorhip.

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