All in it Together by Alwyn Turner
This is just the sort of book I love – a fluently written account of the political and cultural landscape of the UK in the first two decades of this new century. With life moving so quickly, or at least seeming so, as new technology presents an unending stream of sensational new items for our attention, it is good to have Turner’s reminder of the key news stories, political events and cultural highlights and lowlights of the near past. For all his tone of detached and slightly disdaining amusement, this is, though, a carefully selected set of events which makes a point about where all this new millennium hurly burly was heading. And no spoiler here because I am sure you are ahead of me…yes, it’s 2016, Brexit and the inevitable end of this madness, a dangerous buffoon in charge of the country.
Except, I don’t accept that the self-inflicted wounds of the Labour Party after the disappointments of Blair and Brown seem to be inevitable. Where Turner does have a point, which is backed up by a whole tranche of political bombshells and celebrity madness, is the loss of faith by a large section of the country in the experts. He doesn’t mean this in the dishonest, calculating Gove way but as a gradual breakdown of trust. It is still fascinating, for example, to be reminded of how the financial crash unfolded; but it is more painful to be reminded that those who were most to blame – those oh so clever bankers who were operating at a too rarified level to be accountable – escaped the consequences that the rest of us faced.
So, there you have it: this book is a great reminder of the recent bizarre times we have lived through in this country as well as a persuasive case for how we got here. Talking of which, I had forgotten the dire warning of tens, nay, hundreds of thousands of fatalities by our country’s health experts when SARs, bird flu and other health issues arose in the noughties. What this means, well as ever in this book, Turner leaves us to decide but it may be that some of the public and politicians perhaps see covid as another case of the science boffins crying wolf. After all, it was mainly the same group of experts who were responsible for public health at the start of the millennium and who made doom laden projections then and who are now advising the government’s response to the pandemic.
Politically, this book also reminded me about how irrelevant the Tories were when New Labour were in their pomp; and, conversely, how little I remembered about Ed Miliband’s time in charge of Labour when Cameron seemed quite statesman-like alongside Nick Clegg and operating a coalition that nobody anticipated would last five years. And a sense of inevitability about Brexit was definitely not apparent when Robert Kilroy-Silk became UKiP’s most famous politician, with Farage stepping back for a while frustrated with those labelled “fruitcakes” by Cameron who complacently saw no threat from them in 2010.
Turner is good on the cultural stories that are fascinating in their own right yet also stand as touchstones for the evolving state of the nation. This was highlighted in a fascinating comparison of the two hugely popular comedians, Roy Chubby Brown and Jimmy Carr, at opposite ends of the cultural divide. One resolutely working class and popular in the red wall constituencies, shunned by television and often banned by local authorities from their venues. The other expensively educated, beloved by and ubiquitous on all the coolest, most right on television shows and able to bounce back without much trouble from his involvement with tax avoidance schemes. Both purveyed comedy that pushed the envelope but Carr could play the game and knew that an ironic look allowed him to get away with a multitude of things. Brown’s audience, who loved him, saw this as another case of the metropolitan elites ruling their pleasures as out of order.
As I said at the start, this is the type of near history that works for me because the bonkers celebrity stories seem as telling as the political theatre that Westminster has become. Of course, you may argue these events are too close to call history and perhaps that is right – Turner’s book can seem like journalism anthologising about what just happened in the country. There is, though, some underlying principle to the way he structures these once important and now barely remembered events. He also provides enough background detail about stories that I was unaware of when they came around the first time.
As I read this book, I was reminded of how I felt at the start of the new millennium. First of all, I was thankful that the Millenium Bug hadn’t caused Armageddon and then I was able to chuckle at the images of the Blairs welcoming in the new year in with an uncomfortable-looking monarch at the Millenium Dome. If I had then turned to 2020 and tried to imagine where the country would be … well you couldn’t make it up. That’s the beauty of a book like this: it gives you some of the continuities but reminds you how quickly life changes.