Backwards and Forwards

In 1991/2 I lived in Leicester while doing my Museum Studies degree. God, Leicester was a dump. It was a post-industrial zombie city scattered with bits of Victorian civic largesse. I didn’t realise how much of a dump it was because a) I was naïve and b) the whole of Britain was pretty dumpish a generation ago.

In October I went back to visit the King and meet a friend I’d not seen in 20 years. The city has altered so much I couldn’t even recognise the street pattern. It’s full of neat squares, big plate-glass stores, and cafes spilling onto the street. It feels happy and vibrant. Even the Narborough Road looks smart. Leicester is ethnically diverse and culturally and economically active. This means it is part of the ‘spiritual London’, and accordingly voted to Remain. Of course some things have been lost in the change, but they have been replaced by much that is positive.

A century and a bit ago ordinary people knew where they stood. Large parts of Britain derived their identity from heavy industry – not just their economic identity, but their cultural and psychological identity as well. Even though that sort of activity mainly employed men, women were involved in it, and had a sense of self invested in it. This life was often extremely disagreeable, but pride and self-respect could be derived from surviving its very hardness. In agricultural districts the cultural experience was slightly different – less monochrome and with the realities of class division blunted and obscured by the longer history and tradition of that way of life. The basic economic facts were similar, though, self-respect being derived from work and the communal experience built around it.

Just to remind myself that this is a blog written by a clergyman, the Church also had varying roles in these different but parallel cultures. In rural or small-town communities the parish church mediated the relationships around it, provided a focus for communal self-expression which could, in theory, be accessed by different classes and social groups, and sometimes was. In newer, urban settings, its presence was more missionary and ideological, more concentrated on generating specifically Christian identities rather than communal ones, however much the Church may have wanted to create organic parishes along the old lines.

All that is gone. The kind of industry that generated communal identity and individual self-respect is never coming back, and the rural communities rooted in the experience of producing food are irrevocably disrupted. Nostalgia for that lost world is psychologically and politically harmful, as is the failure to deal with the grief arising from its dissolution, a grief which in England and Wales has gone largely unacknowledged and unprocessed (the Scots seem to have done rather better at redefining themselves). Grief left unprocessed expresses itself in pathological forms, as I think we saw last week.

The result of the referendum is at least partly a revolt against modernity, against the self-assurance of the Spiritual London that’s done moderately well out of the new arrangements of the world, out of globalisation and its attendant phenomena. The problem is that there is no other option that stands a chance of generating a better life for anyone.

What is our economic life for? Classic liberal political economy describes it in terms of providing the means for people to express their choices; more brutally put, making money. A socialist might contend that people ‘choose’ more or less the same sorts of goods – work, health, security, rest, interaction with other human beings, a roof over one’s head. It’s not rocket science. The test of an economy is how well it provides people with those things. As to what type of economy, I rather made my peace with capitalism as a result of coming to see it less as a means of providing material prosperity as such than of generating solutions to problems, and here you can again, boring though it may be, detect the influence of Tim Harford on my thinking.

In Leicester and places like it you have an active, thriving commercial and cultural life which provides human beings with opportunities to get together, discover more about each other, and do creative things, things from which they derive their sense of self as much as from work alone. Bringing diverse people together within a capitalist economy makes it more likely that they will find solutions to the common problems they face. Even in an economy which is as desperately skewed towards financial services as the British economy is, that activity, no matter what you might think of it, helps to generate the stuff that really does make a difference to people’s lives, which is why the half-a-million-plus souls who work in the City and Canary Wharf (half a million plus! I had no idea it was that many until two days ago) are actually quite important to us all.

A commercial life that facilitates human creativity and interaction, and a capitalism that generates ways of solving human problems, is the only game in town. It's the only viable and humane future. It develops a more complicated sort of human selfhood than did the old world, but it’s just as capable of producing humane, loving individuals. We need a political life that works to make this more likely and spreads its benefits to those who have been left out of them, and a national narrative that describes what’s happening in a way people can grasp.