A unique experience of modernity, for which someone might invent a twee German word, is how an otherwise respectable intelleckchual figure can utterly destroy their posthumous reputation by posting. Two examples come to mind, one of them a family-chain theologian, the other an Olde Englische style poet; now, the aesthetic and political tastes of both these men suggests I would always disagree with them but had neither of them ever hit the ‘send tweet’ button or authored a piece in an online publication, I would feel compelled to afford them the nimbus of respect unique to those who ‘made it’ in print culture, I would write obituaries about them. As it stands, I can only regard them as lolcows.
I’ve always been grateful that Adam Curtis has never bothered posting because one can detect that his actual opinions are very silly. A bit of this came into the picture with CAN’T GET YOU OUT OF MY HEAD (2021) in which moralistic commentary about how the British people didn’t like immigrants because they were “guilty” about Empire intruded on otherwise prime Curtis.
Curtis followed up, (after, one suspects, getting a bit tired of people parodying his, really quite reasonable, voice-overs), with a narrator-less montage of late Soviet Russia called TraumaZone. This prompted another doozy, a drama set in a futuristic Britain where ethnic tensions rise between the Welsh and the English. It was patently obvious Curtis’s boomer brain had dimly perceived a connection between the USSR and the United Kingdom and, for lack of really examining his own society to see what this might be, decided to bluntly transplant the immediate conditions of the former to the latter. Yeah, right, there definitely aren’t other potential fault lines between ethnic groups in Britain: the Welsh will stir. I was quite worried when watching Shifty.
About fifteen minutes in I recognised a sensation I’d never yet experienced with Curtis. I was bored. By episode two, I began to work out why. The Curtis house style works well when it takes a small topic, like public choice theory and traces its influence; or when it aims to tell the immense psychohistory of a whole global epoch. Shifty is, in its own words, a work of political history of a specific country. The topic is both too small and too large for the usual mix of allusion and implication to do it justice. It can be beguiling to set, say, depeche mode to images of Afghan dancers or Chairman Mao; this appeal is entirely lost to an audience under 60 when you’re just showing us very long video footage of the era’s “iconic bands” themselves singing. Curtis doesn’t want to make a conventional documentary about Margaret Thatcher and Britain in the 80s; yet this is, ultimately, the story he has chosen to tell. There are no protagonists or forces introduced which seriously contest the political decisions. Some of the tangents, like Stephen Knight (who long-time readers will remember me recommending before), are bold and interesting but few of them are integrated into the main narrative. An exception to this is a thoroughly deserved outing of the vile Duke of Westminster dodging inheritance tax.
The protagonist is a woman who loomed excessively large in the minds of Curtis’s generation: Margaret Thatcher. Both Thatcher’s critics and admirers vastly overstate her importance as an individual. The 1980s were the peak of the ability of hidden powers behind the throne to produce tailor-made public faces for their agendas (“this is the girl”); individual politicians had lost their old physical powerbases and had yet to gain access to social media. The programme of Thatcherism was rolled out in every single European country (bar Germany), including Socialist ones like France and Sweden, regardless of who was in charge. It had been decided upon, about ten years earlier, with Nixon’s triple alliance of free-floating currency, Saudi oil production and opening up China. Thatcher was never a particularly ideological politician, vacillated on most issues (like monetarism, abandoned at the advice of Alfred Sherman) and shied away from seriously reforming the British state. Almost everyone forgets that ‘there is no such thing as society’ was followed up by ‘there are families’. Thatcher was the originator of postliberal politics in Britain, from whom the burgeoning Quangos got their foundation. Her greatest achievement, in retrospect, was stopping the flow of Commonwealth immigration and thus creating a relative racial detente in Britain from 1988-2001.
What are we to make of Thatcherism? Did it destroy Britain’s industrial base? Yes. Was not the democracy of trade unionism 1961-1984 equally to blame? Probably. The only countries which have maintained their Meadesian ‘white heat of technology’ moment are those in which grammar school technocrats run the economy with zero regard for ‘co-operatives’ or ‘unions’. Most ‘utopian’ political projects are 100% effective on their own terms but for missing a single detail. The detail missing in ‘Neoliberalism’ was scrapping planning regulations alongside capital controls. We don’t actually know how Britain’s state industries would’ve fared in private hands because they were forbidden, for the entirety of the Conservative ministry, from actually building anything. As a result, the capital flowing into Britain went mainly into assets like property causing a housing crisis which persists to this day, or speculation. Even if, as Alan Budd suggested in Curtis’s 1993 documentary Pandora’s Box, Monetarism was a scheme to increase the reserve army of labour; these labourers didn’t end up doing much work for lack of new factories for capital to build. The Left and the Right are both partially correct but for entirely the wrong reasons.
As a teenager, one of my neighbours was a retired brutalist architect who could boast of having designed the doorknobs in an unidentified Oxbridge college. During the summer of George Floyd, he would often solicit my reckoning on whether this ‘all of this going on [everything]’ was ‘basically, the legacy of Mrs. Thatcher’. As a human type, he was fascinating to me because it was people like him who made Socialism work, not just in Britain but everywhere else. Snobbish, interested in low culture but not pop culture, not quite Ezra Pound Bloomsbury levels of genuine patrician taste but certainly Louis MacNiece on the world service and Schnittke – beats Tom Skinner any day, at least. Japan, South Korea and Germany have retained their industrial bases because the ‘traditional elites’ in such places take a traditionally dim view of ‘cooperatives’ and ‘the trade union movement’. The British Left has failed because, since Tony Benn, it has tried to reconcile an inherently elitist project of economic planning and high technology with Rastah beats mon and Ken Loach aesthetics of running the country like a cooperative garden centre in Blackpool and so have ‘built nothing but Woke’.
St. Michael with the face of a civil servant.
People like this, who included a number of my mother’s older male friends, hated Margaret Thatcher because she destroyed a utopia for white upper-middle class men, whether in economic planning, the BBC or the Arts Council; in which any Tripos man could immediately be given vast sums of money extracted from the grunting, gurning taxpayer and funnel it into vanity projects. This hatred was 100% deserved and far more sympathetic than Billy Bragg wanging on about the miners. The gentile pleasures of Nicholas 30 ans will never, ever approach the life of demigods which must’ve been working at the BBC in 1971, forcing millions of housewives to watch A.J Ayer debate Quine instead of ‘Dr David Bull’s Social Housing Wipeout’, or a council architect evicting the inhabitants of some Celtic urban slum to make way for a tacky pastiche of Corbrusier. If the British Left wish to establish some preliminary intellectual avant-garde to counter the influence of the, rapidly ossifying, New Right: then exploring this model of modernity recommends itself to the future far more than mass immigration. Young white men do not want ‘models of masculinity’, they want to build giant cooling towers atop the ruins of poundbury and flood Fulham with Antonio Sant'Elia social housing for blonde people.
Strongly second the final paragraph.