New Model Island by Alex Niven

Author:Alex Niven
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781912248636
Publisher: Watkins Media
Published: 2019-03-17T16:00:00+00:00

This memory from my teenage years means what it means — that is, it doesn’t necessarily imply anything beyond its own narrative and emotional contours. But a brief gloss will draw out a key underlying context, which this anecdote embodies in mild, bathetic ways, but which is regularly felt in much more serious settings.

The sense of being part of a scattered, dislocated fringe is, of course, a very long-running one in the culture of the islands. Indeed, it was infinitely more pronounced in the pre-eighteenth-century days when England really was England, before the modernising surge of the industrial revolution created multiple competing urban centres that went some way towards disrupting the London-centric dynamic of the evolving Anglo-British Imperium. However, as in so many other instances, the marginality of our peripheral towns and cities has been immensely exacerbated by the combined and uneven development of Britain by successive neoliberal governments since the Thatcherite 1980s. Like other committed forms of neoliberal capitalism, our post-Thatcher political consensus has, as part of its ideological hardwiring, a casual conviction that some areas should be built up at the deliberate expense of others. About this it has always been fairly open and consistent. But there is also a sense in which the backslide in recent decades towards a centralised state with a south-eastern powerbase shows Thatcherism running against itself in splendid self-contradiction.

Defenders of Thatcher are sometimes keen to point out that one of her most famous axioms, “there is no such thing as society”, is often taken out of context. The full quotation, from a 1987 interview with the lifestyle magazine Women’s Own, runs slightly differently, as follows: “And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.” This, supporters argue, is a rather different proposition to the popular stereotype that Thatcherism was in favour of unchecked, Randian individualism. Giving full weight to the second part of the quotation, we might see Thatcherism as concerned with reinstating a rather traditional, even paternal (or maternal) form of conservatism. In the face of the dehumanising, socialistic statism of the post-war era, so the argument goes, Thatcher attempted to stress the importance of the traditional nuclear family and its essential role in nurturing individuals, rather than individualism per se.

Whether or not this argument for Thatcherism with a human face is valid (it isn’t), it is ironic that the neoliberal consensus ushered in by the Thatcher government after 1979 has resulted in the widespread separation and dispersal of families and friends across the islands. Because London and the Home Counties have been hugely and disproportionately privileged by neoliberalism, resulting in large-scale unemployment, precarity and civic decay almost elsewhere else, it has become increasingly difficult for people to lead stable family lives in so-called provincial towns and cities. After leaving school or graduating from university, Thatcher’s Children and Grandchildren are often forced to seek gainful employment hundreds of miles from their families, typically in London, where the vast majority of the

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