COMMENTARY Farewell to Pudding Island Discarding romanitas in Blair's Britain, and Thatcher's By Ferdinand Mount, TLS It was in 1956, just after Look Back in Anger opened, that the film director Lindsay Anderson said to the poet Christopher Logue in a Soho pub, "I don't think there's much hope for the English, do you?" Anderson was by no means the first artist or writer to express a gloomy or dismissive view of his fellow countrymen. Lawrence Durell, trawling about the Mediterranean at the time, was already referring to Britain as "Pudding Island". The novelist Sarah Gainham, roaming through Central Europe, used to talk simply of "the Island", making the insularity of her homeland sound not only stuffy but bleak in a Kafka sort of way. And a generation earlier, D. H. Lawrence described how "the first halfhour in London, after some years abroad, is really a plunge of misery. The strange, the grey and uncanny, almost deathly sense of dullness is overwhelming." However hard he tried, he could never find the city as thrilling as Paris or Rome or New York. Life in London remained "a sort of death; and hope and life only return when I get my seat in the boat-train and hear all the Good-byes!" So it is not exactly unprecedented that we should find The Times last month identifying a new generation of writers who have found Britain a stodgy place and have lit out for New York. For Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie and Ian McEwan – the three most eminent novelists of their crop – Manhattan is now the place to be, the place "where the history of the next century is already being written". By comparison, Amis told the Los Angeles Times, last summer, "the trouble with England is that it leads the world in nothing but decline. That's not a bad thing. We're heading towards becoming a little efficiency state, like Switzerland. But the country is not exciting in the way a novelist wants it to be. America, for all ist faults, is still exciting. It's blandness I fear… I don't see any reason to stay in England. It's just a little more exciting here. It feels more central. England is a backwater, let's be frank." Christopher Hitchens, already long resident in the United States, describes America as "the great subject, the great canvas". According to McEwan, when he started writing, "we British were in the shadow of the American novelists of the time; William Burroughs, Philip Roth, they were so bold, so funny, so uninhibited, they seemed so free. They really lunged at life." To go to America now is to do the opposite of Parsnip and Pimpernel in Put Out More Flags. It is to take on the great challenge, to open yourself to the future and to leave behind a smug, sclerotic, closed-in country gently sliding towards oblivion on a muggy tide of warm beer. Well, we are all entitled to live wherever we fancy, and our reasons for residing here and not there may be complicated and intimate. In Salman Rushdie's case, after all he has been through, you would not blame him for wishing to live on Mars. Yet when people start comparing the merits of one country with those of another for any purpose – as a place to write novels in, say – it is legitimate to examine the reasons advanced. And in this case, I cannot help feeling that this is a rather surprising moment for a British novelist in search of excitement to start stepping westward. America is a wonderful country, but part of the reason it is so especially wonderful now is that it is so quiet, so orderly, so polite. The constitutional arrangements haven't changed since the 1790s, the newspaper look like they did in the 1930s, and the economy purrs on regardless. The endless courtesy and restraint of American manners, the calm and civility of American suburbia, continue to arouse the contempt of intellectuals (see the film American beauty, passim), but they have awakened only gratitude from successive waves of immigrants in search freedom from being bullied and bossed about. That great, sleepy republic is still capable of stretching out a lazy paw and taking a swipe at the Zeitgeist. Yet a nation which is preparing, with the utmost negligence, to choose between Georg W. Bush and Al Gore as its next President cannot be said to be in much of a ferment. I wonder, too, how far a novelist from Europe can gain access to the peculiar regions of inner desolation which the modern American novel prides itself on charting. I admire the work of both Richard Ford and Ian McEwan, but it is hard to see that a year or two in the Hamptons would do much to turn the latter into a British version of the former – or that it would be a good idea if it did. By contrast, Britain at the turn of the century could be described as an almost insanely openminded, casually reckless place. I say Britain, meaning to include the whole Kingdom, but most of what I shall say applies with particular force to England, and to London and South-East England in particular. This coming week marks the third anniversary of Tony Blair's arrival in Downing Street and the twenty-first anniversary of Margaret Thatcher's. We have thus had two decades of a politics which has unashamedly claimed to be New – New Right, New Times (the Marxist's formulation), New Labour. For the sake of argument, let us take the politicians at their word and accept that we have enjoyed or endured a generation of government which may have taken different forms at different times, but which has undeniably exhibited a certain ongoing novel character. The continuities between Thatcher and Blair are by now well thumbed. And there are beginning to emerge quite a few continuities between Blair and any future Hague–Portillo government. Often, it is true, the governments of the 1980s and 90s were not really taking the lead, but simply responding to fresh circumstances and altered popular moods. The establishment of a Scottish Parliament, for example, was not a cause dear to the heart of either main UK party (Old Labour was a fiercely opposed to the idea as Mrs Thatcher). It was made inevitable by the settled fervour of Scottish opinion. But I am not concerned here to allocate responsibility. All I want to do is to build up a mosaic of how different we are today from how we used to be a generation ago. It will be a rough and glittery picture, like most mosaics, but not, I think, unfair: There are estimated to be a quarter of a million French citizens now living in Britain – including, notoriously the French actress who posed for the Millennium busts of Marianne – attracted by low taxes and the vivacity of London life. Parts of South Kensington, Pimlico and even Holloway make you blink and think you are in the Parc Monceau. Outside London, especially in Kent, French businesses are setting up shop on a scale not seen since 70,000 Huguenot weavers fled to England from the persecution of Louis Quatorze. Yet it is not so long ago that England was just about the last place on earth a Frenchman would think of settling him. In a recent European Champions League match at Stamford Bridge, Chelsea Fottball Club was cheered on by an enthusiastic crowd of 34,000. The Chelsea team contained not a single british player. It included a Uruguayan, three Frenchmen, a Romanian, two Italians, a Dutchman, a Norwegian, a Nigerian and a Spaniard. When I started watching professional football in the 60s, the only foreign player you were likely to see in a London team was a Scot. Black players, when they eventually emerged, were routinely booed and their moral fibre questioned. Now black English players like Sol Campbell and Andy Cole are local and national heroes. Blair's Cabinet includes three "out" or "outed" homosexuals. On the Conservative side, Michael Portillo's return to front–line politics was not visibly impaired by his revealing a homosexual period in his youth (he is now Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer). Several of the Conservative candidates for Mayor of London wer also declared homosexuals, and those who weren't hastened to declare their eager support for gay rights. Late at night on Channels Four and Five, male and female genitals are regularly displayed and topics such as masturbation discussed in a breezy spirit, with naming of parts. Britain's current rate of abortion, divorce and illegitimacy – taken in combination – must be the highest in the industrial world. The Conservative government was perfectly willing to see the last British mass car manufacturer pass into foreign hands, those of the German firm BMW. More recently, the Labour government has done little or nothing to prevent BMW washing ist hands of Rover, thus probably precipitating the closure of the Longbridge plant and thousands of job losses throughout the Midlands. Over the past twenty years, the once legendary "triple alliance" of the coal, steel and rail unions watched helpless as hundreds of thousands of jobs were lost in those industries and what remained of them sold off into private hands. The other public utilities – electricity, water, telecommunications – have not only been privatized but in many cases sold to foreign companies, the French once again well to the fore. Britain is now just about the most favoured country in the industrial world for foreign investment. Foreign capital and foreign control are as welcome here as they are dreaded – and resisted – in most Continental countries. Even the famously open US takes much less kindly to a foreign takeover of one of its industrial giants. From being one of the most centralized nations in the post–war period, Britain is halfway through a programme of radical decentralization. Privatization has offered an opportunity to break up the great nationalized monopolies. In politics, the UK once again has a couple of subordinate Parliaments, in Scotland and Wales with another one temporarily aborted in Northern Ireland (though it may be a long time before the IRA surrenders an ounce of Semtex). Elected Mayors are in prospect in London and other major British cities. Local government, although still in the nervous clutches of Whitehall, is beginning to feel the grip loosening, as sheer shortage of cash for public services compels the government to allow local authorities to raise their council taxes. – will be continued –
