The death of Philippos Andreou Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg (as he was christened) has proved to be something less than significant. The state's reaction, embodied in the shallow excess of the BBC, has been predictably oleaginous, while the popular reaction has been an equally predictable mixture of the sentimental and the indifferent. Perhaps the most noteworthy response was the liberal press proving that if you can't say something nice you can always say something stupid. Despite eight days of official mourning, most of us are now more concerned with pints and haircuts. Part of the reason for the indifference was the man's age, which meant his death was long-expected. Even the most ardent royalists regard it as simply a dress rehearsal for the big one. The days of the freelance, peripatetic monarchy, of which Prince Philip's family were such notable examples, ended with the abolition of the Greek throne in 1973. That was the termination of an era of national and monarchical formation that stretched back to the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Since the Queen's Silver Jubilee in 1977, monarchy has been little more than a branch of the light entertainment industry.
This serves as a useful contrast to another death this week, that of Shirley Williams. As the daughter of a famour writer, Vera Brittain, and an academic, George Catlin, she was arguably bound for glory, but her long career in politics and higher education was also seen as a pyschological reckoning with her parents. For example, Williams' adult diffidence - her failure to challenge Roy Jenkins or David Owen for the leadership of the SDP - was traced back to her mother's preference for Shirley's older sibling, who supposedly resembled the brother whose wartime death was central to Vera's A Testament to Youth. More prosaically, Williams' notorious timekeeping and dishevelment were seen as reactions to her famous parent's punctuality and tidiness. This is typical of a strain of twentieth century British political biography in which the key to adult behaviour is thought to be found more in childhood than in mature experience let alone an exposure to political philosophy (see Tom Bower's book on Boris Johnson for a recent example, or recall the supposedly formative role of Alderman Roberts in Margaret Thatcher's Hayekian worldview).
A notable feature of Williams' career was her tendency to advance policies that not only caused friction with her ostensible allies but which often lacked internal coherence. For example, she pushed comprehensivisation as Education Secretary between 1976 and 1979 yet was one of the first to question the financial sustainability of the expansion of further education, which was an inevitable consequence of abandoning the old tripartite system, and even advocated tuition fee loans as a possible solution, which managed to alienate most of academia. This tendency was interpreted by sympathisers as "free-thinking" or a lack of "predictability", though much of it seemed easy enough to predict at the time, such as her religiously-informed opposition to abortion. She gained liberal kudos by pushing for the abolition of the death penalty in the 60s, but alienated the same constituency by later opposing easier divorce and gay adoption. She earned the grudging admiration of socialists for being an advocate of comprehensive schools, but alienated them by her enthusiasm for the Common Market in the run-up to the 1975 EEC referendum.
Rather than being "the patron saint of lost causes", as some have claimed, her progression from the Labour Party through the SDP to her willing support for the Liberal Democrat coalition with the Conservatives in the House of Lords was a trajectory of establishment success. But it also suggests someone with a fundamentally deracinated approach to politics. Her beliefs may have been sincerely and passionately held - she was no dilletante - but there was little that grounded her views beyond her Catholicism, and that was clearly of a different nature to the organic fealty found among the Irish-heritage MPs of the old Labour right. This lack of rootedness was not simply a product of her upper middle class upbringing and her parents' easy familiarity with the inner circles of Westminster, it also reflected her peripatetic life and engagement with academia. She was not merely a metropolitan liberal, she was an example of the cosmopolitan neoliberal of the late twentieth century, advocating market solutions and European integration from a berth in Harvard.
Though lamented as the great lost leader by many centrists, Williams was never a remotely credible candidate for the top job in either the Labour Party or the SDP. This wasn't due to her lack of ambition or the intractable misogyny of others. It was because, though popular, her deracination meant that she lacked any natural organisational base and her contradictory policies prevented her from developing one. Despite their caricatures as conceited solipsists, both Jenkins and Owen cultivated their own factions and placed themselves in clear political traditions, the Asquithian liberalism of the one and the Atlanticist social market liberalism of the other. Williams not only lacked a consistent enough worldview to convert admirers into supporters, she seemed in later life to have little respect for the traditions of the party that had given her a political career. The claim this week by former SDP luminaries that "Williams was Labour through and through" is meaningless if your definition of Labour includes supporting the 2010-15 coalition and voting through the 2012 NHS reforms.
Some on the left have insisted that Williams should be judged on the damage she caused Labour in the 1980s, rather than her occasional legislative triumphs and performance as a minister, but even this tends to over-emphasise her impact. While the SDP-Liberal Alliance clearly undermined Labour in the 1983 general election, it was the Falklands that rescued Thatcher from what looked like certain defeat (the Conservative vote still managed to decline slightly on 1979), and this despite the Labour leader, Michael Foot, being thunderingly pro-war (proving once again that there simply aren't enough flags you can wave). The postwar social democratic consensus was being dismantled from the early-70s, but Williams wasn't particularly prominent in the economic discussions. The pivotal moment was not the election of Margaret Thatcher (that was a consequence, not a cause) but Jim Callaghan's famous "I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists" speech to Labour's party conference in 1976. The rise of the Bennite left was a consequence of that steady dismantling, and the SDP split was in turn a consequence of that resistance.
1976 was the year of the Sex Pistols' Anarchy in the UK, which would be followed by God Save The Queen in 1977, neatly encapsulating the themes of social and political breakdown on the one hand and the detournement of monarchy as a commodity on the other. This is the point at which Shirley Williams and that other rootless cosmopolitan, Prince Philip, exhibit a strange parallel. Both were essentially redundant by the late 1970s. For all the novelty of the SDP, her politics were increasingly a nostalgia for the mixed economy and social progressivism of the 1960s. His attempts to humanise the monarchy, notably through the 1969 BBC film Royal Family (last broadcast in 1977), had come to naught. Yet the needs of political discourse and the management of the state required their continuing participation. Williams became a beacon of virtue in the campaign against the left, while "the firm" became ever more important as an icon of social order during the neoliberal revolution. Both would spend another forty years being excused their past and continuing misjudgements and "gaffes", and held up as objects of respect for their symbolic utility rather than their actual contribution. It was national service of a sort.
No comments:
Post a Comment