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Indlæser... A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s (udgave 2014)af Alwyn W. Turner (Forfatter)
Work InformationA Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s af Alwyn W. Turner
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When Margaret Thatcher was ousted from Downing Street in 1990, it appeared that Britain had reached a crossroads. After years of bitter social and economic conflict, many believed that the decade to come would be more 'caring'; others hoped that the radical policies of her revolution might even be overturned. However, the 'new' Britain to emerge under John Major and Tony Blair would be a contradiction: both economically unequal and culturally classless. Opening with a war in the Gulf and ending with the September 11 attacks, this book goes in search of the decade in which modern Britain came of age. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Indlæser... GenrerMelvil Decimal System (DDC)941.0859History and Geography Europe British Isles Historical periods of British Isles 1837- Period of Victoria and House of Windsor 1945-1999 1990-1995LC-klassificeringVurderingGennemsnit:
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My own feelings about the mindset of that environment are, as it happens, perfectly captured by an anecdote that Alwyn Turner borrows from David Baddiel.
In 1990 the comedian David Baddiel went to a screening of John McNaughton’s harrowing, low-budget film Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, which had been made in 1986 but but still hadn’t been passed for general release. During a panel discussion that followed the showing, an audience member began railing against the extreme violence in the movie, about which, she said, she had received no warning. At which point another member of the audience interrupted her: ‘For fuck’s sake, what did you expect?’ he called out. ‘It’s not called Henry the Elephant, is it?’ Baddiel was convulsed with fits of laughter, and later reflected: ‘I think it was at that point that the eighties fell away for me, or at least that seriousness fell away for me, seriousness as in that adolescent, or post-adolescent, concern about everything. I was never going to be intense again.’
The 90s were a time when no one really took anything seriously. This was its greatest strength – self-importance, national crises, personal anxiety and gender disagreements were all found to dissolve under the application of an intelligent irony – but also, perhaps, the decade's most unfortunate legacy: my generation had the sense that things were slowly but steadily getting better without our direct involvement, resulting in a political disengagement whose consequences are now becoming distressingly obvious.
The complacency came from an eerie sense of accord – or at least impasse – in both culture and politics. There was no equivalent, in Britain, of the culture wars that were so convulsing the US during the 90s. Both left and right broadly agreed on the inevitability of a certain social liberalisation – equal opportunities for women, access to birth control, the normalisation of homosexuality were all things that were not seriously opposed except by a few religious leaders whose irrelevance felt increasingly obvious. The political parties had come together in an indistinguishable middle-ground (commentators afterwards talked about ‘Blajorism’); unlike, say, France, where the Communist Party and the National Front still contributed hugely to public debate, there was very little support in the UK for parties on the political extremes.
This was, of course, in many ways a problem. Labour were voted in by a population desperate for an alternative to the sleaze-ridden Tory ‘nasty party’. What they got was a slick rebranding of the same basic economic, and even social, policies – what's more, in dumping John Major for Tony Blair they had swapped a working-class boy who'd left school at sixteen for a middle-class career politician educated at boarding school and Oxford.
Turner clearly sympathises with Major, presented here as basically a decent politician trying to lead a party of squabbling bastards. Blair, meanwhile, is seen as a ‘political salesman’, who ‘presented [the public] a mirror, rather than becoming an architect of change’.
At one point in the mid-nineties, it seemed that a new Tory MP was caught shagging his secretary or getting taken up the arse on Clapham Common every other week: seeing these cases summarised one after the other here gives them a decidedly comic effect, like flicking through a Viz strip. Some of the details seemed very British: after culture minister David Mellor was forced to resign, an actress having sold her story of their affair to the tabloids, European partners were completely bemused. ‘An affair with an actress?’ puzzled the former French culture minister, Jack Lang. ‘Why else does one become minister of culture?’
Alan Clark, meanwhile, went right through disgrace and out the other side into grudging respect, when it turned out that he had not only slept with the wife of a South African judge, but also both of her daughters. ‘I still think he's super,’ said his own wife. ‘I know he's an S-H-one-T, but that's it.…Quite frankly, if you bed people that I call “below-stairs class”, they go to the papers, don't they?’
When Labour finally got in, though, they weren't much better on the sleaze front. Most infamously, Peter Mandelson had to resign from the Cabinet in disgrace, only to be reappointed some months later to a different Cabinet position, from which he then had to resign in disgrace over a second, separate incident. (Somehow, the fuckers got away with appointing him to yet a third Cabinet post.) Labour's ties to big business always played a role; the party, Turner suggests, had ‘a dangerous attraction to affluence’.
I've already written too much elsewhere about the whole ‘new lad’ phenomenon; Turner, who is extremely good on the subject, pinpoints it as ‘a slightly muddled, slightly disappointing compromise, a way of helping to negotiate a transitional period’ as the British patriarchy resignedly surrendered its more obnoxious privileges. Martin Deeson, Loaded's first editor, described his readership as men who were ‘slagged off by feminists but egalitarian by inclination’ – the general attitude appeared to be that men welcomed the prospect of having more women as ministers, leaders and CEOs as long as some of them occasionally allowed themselves to be photographed in their knickers, in a spirit of communal relations.
I think it's not unfair to claim that people my age were more puzzled than outraged by the idea that men and women were anything other than equal – it seemed anachronistic, something for an older generation. It was naïve, but then we grew up in a state headed by a queen and overseen by a female PM; as Cool Britannia kicked in and the right-on politics of the 80s started feeling increasingly silly, the sense was that men and women liked each other, fancied each other, and considered ourselves to be fundamentally on the same side. And in typical 90s style, nothing was really serious anyway, everything mediated through a wicked sense of humour. Imagine our surprise as internet culture enveloped us in our early twenties, and we found the conversation dominated by people our age for whom basic truths were the loci of vicious disputes, characterised by entrenched political opposites and what looked like gender warfare. It was, and is, confusing, dispiriting and toxic.
Just as peak ’60s came in 1969, when the Sixties dream was already rotting, so too peak ’90s, which I'm calling 1997, was also the year when everything was falling apart. In August, Princess Diana went flying into a pillar under the Pont de l'Alma at 100 km/hr, and suddenly the country was caught up in a hysterical outpouring of mass emotion – tears in the streets, memorial fountains, acres of soft toys and flowers. The British public were full of unaccustomed feelings, and anyone getting in the way was going down.
A Sardinian tourist was…spotted taking a teddy-bear [from the displays of condolences] and was arrested after members of the public gave chase; he was given a seven-day sentence, later reduced to a £100 fine, and on his way out of court was punched in the face by a 43-year-old man who later explained: ‘I did it for Britain.’
Newspapers, in fact, were caught on the hoof somewhat, having made a fortune from promoting the idea that Diana was someone to be leered at or sneered at. In the US, the National Enquirer backpedalled with impressive alacrity:
We apologise for the Princess Diana page one headline DI GOES SEX MAD, which is still on the stands at some locations. It is currently being replaced with a special 72-page tribute issue: A FAREWELL TO THE PRINCESS WE ALL LOVED.
In describing all this, Turner is acute enough to take note of ‘the confusion of a generation that found its sense of irony had become out of date overnight’. Perhaps Tony Blair is emblematic of that shift, too – with his constant assurances that ‘I'm a pretty decent guy’, he was a black hole of irony, a walking grinning embodiment of shiny surface with no substance underneath. ‘It's the signals that matter, not the policy,’ he actually said. When he realised that this didn't impress anyone – as Turner puts it – ‘Blair's interest seemed to wander away from the home front and onto the world stage’. And with what consequences. The decade in that sense really ended when the towers came down in 2001, at which point the ironic detachment of the 90s ended, we all grew up, and Tony, squinting into the middle distance, glimpsed his chance to leave a lasting legacy. ( )