Even republicans must see that
jubilees, occurring sufficiently rarely (Diamond ones only twice in our
history) to stick in the mind, provide a valuable moment. In our
village, the Jubilee has prompted us to remember that our church is — or
anyway might be — 650 years old, and to link this with the great day.
We shall have a medieval banquet in the nave that night, and I hope to
convince our American guest that the present Queen was on the throne
when the church was built. Ken, who formerly kept the village shop, has
also embarked on a project of interviewing present residents who were
living in the village 60 years ago. (Our oldest resident is Jacqueline,
Lady Killearn, who is 102, but she blew in late — c. 1960 — and so does
not feature.) I have listened to the first cut. The most striking thing
is how many businesses there were. In a village of 300 houses, there was
a pub, a post office, a butcher, a slaughterhouse, a timber yard, a
fencing firm, two builders, a garage, a sweetshop, a ‘snob’ (which is
the old word for a cobbler), a shed that sold newspapers, a creamery, a
club, a grocer, and a temperance hotel. Strange how prosperity has
erased small enterprise.
Prosperity? Really? Defined how, exactly? And even if defined in purely monetary and material terms, really? Far from our having grown richer since 1979, we have in fact grown vastly poorer: only a generation ago, a single manual wage provided the wage-earner, his wife and their several children with a quality of life unimaginable even on two professional salaries today. This impoverishment has been so rapid and so extreme that most people, including almost all politicians and commentators, simply refuse to acknowledge that it has happened. But it has indeed happened. And it is still going on. It was still going on before 2008.
That 1979 is the key year makes it all the more poignant that, while all of the features listed conjure up vanished worlds, even the pub and the post office these days, none does so more than the last, the temperance hotel. The daughter of a shopkeeping alderman and lay preacher destroyed much or most of small and family business and of local government. She carried on where Ted Heath, who had abolished both Resale Price Maintenance and the ancient counties (the latter while she was an unprotesting Cabinet Minister), had left off. As as surely as she did with her Single European Act, with her Anglo-Irish Agreement and with her GCSEs, that last a continuation of her own record of wanton vandalism as Heath's Education Secretary.
But a few, a tiny and precious few aspects of small and family business, of the municipal order, of British national sovereignty, of the Union across the Irish Sea, and even of academic examinations and the teaching needed in order to pass them, did and do survive. Whereas nothing remains of the country within a country that was the England of millions upon millions of Methodists and Baptists, Congregationalists and Presbyterians, Unitarians and Quakers, such as accounted for half of all churchgoers when the figures were first collected in the 1850s. It massively predominated in many parts of the land for anything up to a century thereafter. It dominated the mighty Victorian and Edwardian Liberal Party, the collapse of which left Alderman Roberts as an Independent; he was never a Conservative to his dying day. It largely founded the Labour Party and the institutions of its wider subculture, especially the co-operatives. And it provided the secure, often very well-heeled customer base for a temperance hotel.
So little did Alderman Roberts's daughter care for it that she tried to turn Sunday into just another shopping day. Her successors are now trying to do exactly the same thing, a further generation downwards into the mire.
Prosperity? Really? Defined how, exactly? And even if defined in purely monetary and material terms, really? Far from our having grown richer since 1979, we have in fact grown vastly poorer: only a generation ago, a single manual wage provided the wage-earner, his wife and their several children with a quality of life unimaginable even on two professional salaries today. This impoverishment has been so rapid and so extreme that most people, including almost all politicians and commentators, simply refuse to acknowledge that it has happened. But it has indeed happened. And it is still going on. It was still going on before 2008.
That 1979 is the key year makes it all the more poignant that, while all of the features listed conjure up vanished worlds, even the pub and the post office these days, none does so more than the last, the temperance hotel. The daughter of a shopkeeping alderman and lay preacher destroyed much or most of small and family business and of local government. She carried on where Ted Heath, who had abolished both Resale Price Maintenance and the ancient counties (the latter while she was an unprotesting Cabinet Minister), had left off. As as surely as she did with her Single European Act, with her Anglo-Irish Agreement and with her GCSEs, that last a continuation of her own record of wanton vandalism as Heath's Education Secretary.
But a few, a tiny and precious few aspects of small and family business, of the municipal order, of British national sovereignty, of the Union across the Irish Sea, and even of academic examinations and the teaching needed in order to pass them, did and do survive. Whereas nothing remains of the country within a country that was the England of millions upon millions of Methodists and Baptists, Congregationalists and Presbyterians, Unitarians and Quakers, such as accounted for half of all churchgoers when the figures were first collected in the 1850s. It massively predominated in many parts of the land for anything up to a century thereafter. It dominated the mighty Victorian and Edwardian Liberal Party, the collapse of which left Alderman Roberts as an Independent; he was never a Conservative to his dying day. It largely founded the Labour Party and the institutions of its wider subculture, especially the co-operatives. And it provided the secure, often very well-heeled customer base for a temperance hotel.
So little did Alderman Roberts's daughter care for it that she tried to turn Sunday into just another shopping day. Her successors are now trying to do exactly the same thing, a further generation downwards into the mire.
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