Have they been putting something in the drinking water while I’ve been away? I had always thought that the British prided themselves on their common sense, on good old-fashioned down-to-earth realism. But the election of 1983 is beginning to look more and more like a dark fantasy, a fiction so outrageously improbable that any novelist would be ridiculed if he dreamed it up.
Consider this fiction. A Tory Prime Minister, Maggie May, gets elected on the basis of her promises to cut direct taxation and to get the country back to work (‘Labour isn’t working’). During the next four years she increases direct taxation and contrives to add almost two million people to the dole queues. And she throws in all sorts of extra goodies: a fifth of the country’s manufacturing industry lies in ruins, and (although she claims repeatedly to have vanquished the monster Inflation) she presides over the largest increase in prices of any British Prime Minister. The country’s housing programme grinds to a halt; schools and hospitals are closed; the Nationality Act robs Britons of their 900-year-old right to citizenship by virtue of birth; and the great windfall of North Sea oil money is squandered on financing unemployment. Money is poured into the police force, and as a result notifiable crimes rise by twenty-eight per cent.
She constantly tells the nation that cash limits are tight, but finds untold billions to spend on a crazy war whose legacy includes the export of drinking water to the South Atlantic at a cost to the British taxpayer of five pence a pint; and, speaking of peace, she earmarks further untold billions for the purchase of the latest weapons of death, although common sense, not to mention history, clearly indicates that the more such weapons exist, the more likely they are to be used.
So far, the story of Prime Minister May is almost credible. The fictional character does come across as unusually cruel, incompetent, unscrupulous and violent, but there have just occasionally been Tory politicians of whom such a description would not be wholly inaccurate. No, the story only falls apart when it gets to the end: Maggie May decides to go to the country, and instead of being hounded into the outer darkness, or at least Tasmania, like her namesake, it seems that she is to receive a vote of confidence; that five more years of cruelty, incompetence, etc., is what the electorate wants.
The hapless novelist submits his story, and is immediately submerged in a flood of rejection slips. Desperately, he tries to make his narrative more convincing. Maggie May’s political opponents are presented as hopelessly divided. The presence of alleged ‘full-time socialists’ amongst her foes alarms the people. The leader of the Labour Party wears a crumpled donkey-jacket at the Cenotaph and keeps falling over his dog. But still (the rejection slips point out) the fact remains that for Mrs May to hold anything like the lead that the polls say she holds, the unemployed—or some of them, anyway—must be planning to vote for her; and so must some of the homeless, some of the businessmen whose businesses she has destroyed, some of the women who will be worse off when (for instance) her proposal to means-test child benefits becomes law, and many of the trade unionists whose rights she proposes so severely to erode.
At this point, our imaginary novelist (compromising the integrity of his vision for the sake of publication) would, in all probability, agree to rewrite his ending. The trumpets sound, the sleeping citizenry awakes, le jour de gloire arrives, and Maggie May gets, in 1983, the same sort of bum’s rush given to her hero Winston Churchill in 1945.
Is it not passing strange that this, the plausible and happy ending, is the one that looks, in the cold light of real-life Britain, like the one in which it’s almost impossible to believe?
I find myself entertaining Spenglerian thoughts about how there can be times when all that is worst in a people rises to the surface and expresses itself, in its government. There are, of course, many Britains, and many of them—the sceptical, questioning, radical, reformist, libertarian, nonconformist Britains—I have always admired greatly. But these Britains are presently in retreat, even in disarray; while nanny-Britain, straight-laced Victoria-reborn Britain, class-ridden know-your-place Britain, thin-lipped, jingoist Britain, is in charge. Dark goddesses rule; brightness falls from the air, ‘The Ancient Britons,’ says the best of history books, 1066 and All That, ‘painted themselves true blue, or woad, and fought heroically under their dashing queen, Woadicea.’ The Britons are even more Ancient now, but they have been fighting once again, and that blue dye takes a long time to wear off. Woadicea rides again.
What an achievement is hers! She has persuaded the nation that everything that goes wrong, from unemployment to the crime rate, is an Act of God or someone else’s fault, that the forces of organized labour are actually the enemies of organized labour; that we can only defend ourselves by giving the United States the power of life and death over us; that to be an ‘activist’ is somehow far worse than being an inactivist, and that the left must once more be thought of in Latin, as sinister. She propounds what is in fact an ideology of impotence masquerading as resolution, a con-trick, and it looks as though it’s going to work: Maggie’s sting.
And it was as recently as 1945 that the British people, politicized by their wartime experiences, threw off the yoke of the true-blue ruling class … How quickly the wheel has turned, how quickly faith has been lost in the party they forged as their weapon, how depressingly willing the nation seems to be to start touching forelocks once again. The worst thing about this election is that nobody seems really angry about what has happened, is happening, and is sure to go on happening if Mrs Thatcher is standing on the steps of No. 10 on the morning of 10 June. (What will she quote from this time? St Francis of Assisi again? St Joan? The Hitler Diaries?)
I believe the absence of widespread anger matters enormously, for this reason: that democracy can only thrive in a turbulent climate. Where there is acquiescence, cynicism, passivity, resignation, ‘inactivism’, the road is clear for those who would rob us of our rights.
So, finally, and in spite of all the predictions and probabilities, I refuse to accept that the cause is lost. Despair brings comfort to one’s enemies. And elections are not, at bottom, about reasoned arguments; they are about passions. It is just conceivable that even now, in this eleventh hour, a rage can be kindled in the people, rage against the dying of the light that Thatcherism represents. The electorate, we are told, has never been so volatile; so maybe the miracle can still be worked. Maybe, on the day, real life will turn out to obey the same laws of probability as fiction, and sanity will return.
If not, we can look forward to five more years of going to the dogs. Guardian readers will no doubt remember these unappealing canines; a few years ago, they used to be known as the running dogs of capitalism.
1983
CHARTER 88
It used to be believed that philosophies of social justice, arguments over the definition of the good, indeed all discussion of the shape of the society in which we wished to live, were anterior to politics, that, in fact, politics was a secondary and subservient branch of ethics. You could argue that this was as true for Karl Marx as it had been for Aristotle. It is apparently true no more. ‘Nothing in Britain is these days permitted to be apolitical,’ Hugo Young tells us in a Guardian article accusing the Charter 88 campaign of being the SDP in disguise, an appeal to the ‘apolitical classes’. The only ‘real’ target of such campaigns, he says, is ‘to convert the Labour Party to this kind of thinking.’ So new ideas must now go cap in hand to political overlords (and ‘politics’ is equated with ‘party politics’). These are narrow days.
In the mind of one of these overlords, Mr Roy Hattersley, an even more remarkable fusion of the ethical and political has occurred, one which enables him to define ‘positive freedom’ as ‘government action’—this in an article whose immediately preceding paragraph refers, without any seeming awareness of the contradiction involved, to the denial, ‘by government action’, of the rights of ethnic minorities and women.
‘True liberty requires action from the government,’ says Mr Hattersley in authenti
cally Orwellian tones, ignoring the entire history of freedom movements the world over, to say nothing of the distinguished record of extra-governmental citizens’ movements in the increase of liberty—a record which suggests that, in the matter of freedom, governments do not act until they are pushed.
It will clearly take quite a push to move Mr Hattersley, for whom democracy means the ‘absolute sovereignty’ of Parliament. Quoting a Mori report of what proportional representation would have meant in the 1987 election (the Tories would have won 279 seats, not 375; Labour 202, not 229; the Alliance 149 instead of just 22), he insists that because this would have created a hung parliament, resulting in the ‘destruction of the major parties’, it must never be allowed to happen. Thus we see that the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party believes not only in the absolute sovereignty of Parliament, but of the major parties; further proof, if further proof were needed, that the true conservatives in Britain are now in the Labour Party, while there are plenty of radicals in blue.
Charter 88 is an attempt to renew the debate about the kind of country we want to live in, precisely because our ‘absolute sovereigns’ seem no longer capable of giving expression to such concerns; precisely because it is becoming difficult to believe in the inviolability of our rights, or even in their existence, until we see them enshrined in a written constitution. As Ian McEwan puts it, if we in Britain are the proud possessors of fundamental freedoms denied to so many other peoples, what could be the objection to writing them down?
I would certainly not describe the Charter 88 campaign as ‘apolitical’, because it must clearly seek eventually to enter the political, even the party-political field; but as pre-political, as one of those initiatives which, like the civil rights movement, the anti-Vietnam movement, the women’s movement, the nuclear disarmament movement, the greens, seeks initially to work as a movement of citizens, not leaders, and requires politicians to listen, for a change, to other voices than their own.
What differentiates Charter 88 from the movements I’ve just listed is that it is not a single-issue campaign, but an attempt at a radical critique of the way we are presently governed; and that, for its aims ever to be achieved, it would need support from all parts of the political spectrum. A lasting constitution must be above the sectarianism of party politics.
Roy Hattersley is contemptuous of written constitutions. Even the European Convention on Human Rights is dismissed as a means of protecting the public schools. Anyway, he tells us, the thing can’t be done. ‘What Parliament has given away, Parliament can take back.’ Absolute sovereigns lack, it seems, absolute power only over themselves. All this is hogwash. Yes, Charter 88 proposes something very like a constitutional revolution, but constitutional revolutions have happened before. Yes, it would require, for example, Parliament voting for its own, momentary abolition, so that—perhaps at a constitutional convention—the law could finally be placed above our rulers’ heads. Yes, we’re talking about changing the legal form of the nation. Nations can do such things if they deem them necessary. Mr Hattersley’s hatred of change condemns him, I fear, to the fate of the dinosaurs.
The simple truth is that just about every other democratic society possesses, and cherishes, a written constitution; that the British insisted that all their former colonies should, at the moment of independence, acquire such a document; and that increasing numbers of British citizens no longer have faith in the untrammelled powers of this, or any other over-mighty, British government.
‘The very idea of human rights—particularly universal ones—is a comparatively novel, recent development,’ Steve Platts writes in the New Statesman & Society. It is valuable to be reminded by him ‘just how revolutionary a development’ the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, just forty years ago, really was. Even the most cursory study of the history of the twentieth century indicates that it’s really very hard indeed to pin down what may or may not be a ‘human’ or a ‘civil’ right, and that it’s correspondingly easy for governments to act as if such rights did not, or need not, exist. But we all know what we mean by a ‘constitutional right’. The Fifth Amendment of the US constitution makes it impossible for an American Thatcher to remove a defendant’s right to silence in a court of law. The Charter 88 signatories believe that it’s high time we had such rights; and it may just be possible to achieve a national—and, at first, extra-parliamentary—consensus that agrees.
1988
ON PALESTINIAN IDENTITY: A CONVERSATION WITH EDWARD SAID
SALMAN RUSHDIE: For those of us who see the struggle between Eastern and Western descriptions of the world as both an internal and an external struggle, Edward Said has for many years been an especially important voice. Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia and author of literary criticism on, among others, Joseph Conrad, Edward has always had the distinguishing feature that he reads the world as closely as he reads books. We need only think of the major trilogy which precedes his new book, After the Last Sky. In the first volume, Orientalism, he analysed ‘the affiliation of knowledge with power’, discussing how the scholars of the period of Empire helped to create an image of the East which provided the justification for the supremacist ideology of imperialism. This was followed by The Question of Palestine, which described the struggle between a world primarily shaped by Western ideas—that of Zionism and later of Israel—and the largely ‘oriental’ realities of Arab Palestine. Then came Covering Islam, subtitled ‘How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World’, in which the West’s invention of the East is, so to speak, brought up to date through a discussion of responses to the Islamic revival.
After the Last Sky is a collaborative venture with Jean Mohr—a photographer who may be known to you from John Berger’s study of immigrant labour in Europe, A Seventh Man. Its title is taken from a poem, ‘The Earth is Closing on Us’, by the national poet of Palestine, Mahmoud Darwish:
The earth is closing on us, pushing us through the last passage, and we tear off our limbs to pass through.
The earth is squeezing us. I wish we were its wheat so we could die and live again. I wish the earth was our mother
So she’d be kind to us. I wish we were pictures on the rocks for our dreams to carry
As mirrors. We saw the faces of those to be killed by the last of us in the last defence of the soul.
We cried over their children’s feast. We saw the faces of those who will throw our children
Out of the window of this last space. Our star will hang up mirrors.
Where should we go after the last frontiers? Where should the birds fly after the last sky?
Where should the plants sleep after the last breath of air? We will write our names with scarlet steam,
We will cut off the hand of the song to be finished by our flesh.
We will die here, here in the last passage. Here and here our blood will plant its olive tree.*
After the last sky there is no sky. After the last border there is no land. The first part of Said’s book is called ‘States’. It is a passionate and moving meditation on displacement, on landlessness, on exile and identity. He asks, for example, in what sense Palestinians can be said to exist. He says: ‘Do we exist? What proof do we have? The further we get from the Palestine of our past, the more precarious our status, the more disrupted our being, the more intermittent our presence. When did we become a people? When did we stop being one? Or are we in the process of becoming one? What do those big questions have to do with our intimate relationships with each other and with others? We frequently end our letters with the motto “Palestinian love” or “Palestinian kisses”. Are there really such things as Palestinian intimacy and embraces, or are they simply intimacy and embraces—experiences common to everyone, neither politically significant nor particular to a nation or a people?’
Said comes, as he puts it, from a ‘minority inside a minority’—a position with which I feel some sympathy, having also come from a minority group
within a minority group. It is a kind of Chinese box that he describes: ‘My family and I were members of a tiny Protestant group within a much larger Greek Orthodox Christian minority, within the larger Sunni Muslim majority.’ He then goes on to discuss the condition of Palestinians through the mediation of a number of recent literary works. One of these, incorrectly called an Arab Tristram Shandy in the blurb, is a wonderful comic novel about the secret life of somebody called Said, The Ill-Fated Pessoptimist. A pessoptimist, as you can see, is a person with a problem about how he sees the world. Said claims all manner of things, including, in chapter one, to have met creatures from outer space: ‘In the so-called age of ignorance before Islam, our ancestors used to form their gods from dates and eat them when in need. Who is more ignorant then, dear sir, I or those who ate their gods? You might say it is better for people to eat their gods than for the gods to eat them. I would respond, yes, but their gods were made of dates.’
A crucial idea in After the Last Sky concerns the meaning of the Palestinian experience for the form of works of art made by Palestinians. In Edward’s view, the broken or discontinuous nature of Palestinian experience entails that classic rules about form or structure cannot be true to that experience; rather, it is necessary to work through a kind of chaos or unstable form that will accurately express its essential instability. Edward then proceeds to introduce the theme—which is developed later in the book—that the history of Palestine has turned the insider (the Palestinian Arab) into the outsider. This point is illustrated by a photograph of Nazareth taken from a position in what is called Upper Nazareth—an area which did not exist in the time of Arab Palestine. Thus Arab Palestine is seen from the point of view of a new, invented Palestine, and the inside experience of the old Palestine has become the external experience in the photograph. And yet the Palestinians have remained.