I Don't Love the 1980s: Second Bash

Back in October, last year, I finally got around to writing my views of the 1980s.  Given that it is a decade which is being referenced a lot at the moment, by politicians, the media/culture and the public, primarily because we are once again under a harsh Conservative regime (wrapped up to look like a coalition, but in fact no less sinister than if David Cameron had won a clear majority), unemployment and social division are rocketing once again.  I intended to write a critique of the decade which too often is remembered through the rose-tinted perspective of the 'Brat Pack' movies of the 1980s and the lie that it was a period of glamour and prosperity, whereas for most people it was one of the worst times of their lives.  My critique: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2010/10/i-dont-love-1980s.html ended up going down the Alan Davies route and in fact being very much about my personal experiences of the decade and far less a general historical survey of the times along the lines of what I did for the 1970s.  Thus, with the objective of reminding those people who lived through the 1980s actually how bad it was, cutting through the softening of memory and especially of nostalgia, and for those who were not alive or not conscious of the decade except as history, this posting is a more impersonal critique.

Bascially the 1980s were frightening.  When the population was not frightened about losing work and home, they were frightened about being wiped out in a nuclear war.  The period called the Second Cold War started in 1979 when the USSR invaded Afghanistan to support the left-wing government in power there against radical Islamists; they remained until 1989.  The Soviets were to prove the second of three superpowers (the British in 1837-42 and again 1878-1880; the Americans now) to get into serious military difficulties trying to control the country.  Their invasion coincided with a shift in the American political scene away from the detente phase of the mid-1970s to a much harder line under right-wing president Ronald Reagan (1980-8), not an intelligent man and one who had strange beliefs about how God would defend the righteous when a nuclear war came.  Consequently, certainly until Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the USSR in 1985, there was a real fear that we would see a nuclear war.  Reagan's bullish approach was seen in active support for the Contra rebels seeking to overthrow the elected left-wing government in Nicaragua and for the Afghan Mujahadeen fighting the Soviets.  Such support seemed to revive the 'proxy' wars facet of the Cold War of the early 1980s. 

The threat of nuclear war was brought home to the population of Britain and many other West European countries by the higher visibility of nuclear weapons in the country.  The advent of cruise missiles launched from lorries meant that ordinary people saw nuclear missiles coming through their village on manoeuvres in a way that they had not seen them in the past when they were generally concealed in underground silos and nuclear submarines.  Culture constantly reminded us of nuclear weapons and it spilt over into all aspects of popular culture with numerous books and even games about the Third World War; songs about nuclear war by mainstream bands (e.g. 'Two Tribes' by Frankie Goes to Hollywood (1984) and 'Russians' by Sting (1985)), not only protest singers; television dramas (notably 'The Day After' (1983) and 'Threads' (1984)) and documentaries about the effects of nuclear war (the concept of nuclear winter began to be explored at this time) and even comedians referenced nuclear war, not only the burgeoning 'alternative' comedians in the UK (such as in 'The Young Ones' series (1982-4), but even mainstream comedy like the short-lived series 'Comrade Dad' (1986). 

For many people there seemed to be a choice between instant vapourisation in a nuclear blast or lingering death from radiation sickness or starvation during the nuclear winter.  It is unsurprising that the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) revived so vigorously.  It had been formed in 1958 but had been pretty moribund, having only 4000 members in 1979.  The immediate threat of nuclear war meant membership rose to 100,000 by 1984 with many more sympathisers in the general population.  The advent of Mikhail Gorbachev was a real relief to much of the world.  Whilst most of us had never expected the USSR to start a nuclear war (in fact China was a greater danger but constantly overlooked in the West), this was confirmed by Gorbachev's steps in the late 1980s.  Fortunately Reagan saw which way things were going.  With the failure of his delusional plan for the 'Star Wars shield' against nuclear weapons he recognised, or his advisors did, that going along with Gorbachev could also spare the ailing US economy of the burden of the constant arms race.  It was made more palatable for the Americans by the declarations that they had 'won' the Cold War, though, as I have argued on this blog, that was probably a premature claim.

The other global threat to life in the 1980s was AIDS. HIV had been identified in 1959 but the perception of it as an epidemic really began to appear in 1980-1; AIDs was officially defined as a disease in the USA in 1982. While we were aware of the rising number of people with HIV and AIDS, it reached around 8 million globally with HIV by 1990 (it is now 33 million), in the UK, the real jolt came with the 'Don't Die of Ignorance' campaign started in January 1987. With intentionally very grim imagery, it instilled in people the fear that the world was at risk from this epidemic. It certainly seemed like something out of science fiction series of the 1970s such as the chilling BBC series 'Survivors' (1975-7) and movies like 'The Andromeda Strain' (1971; from 1969 novel). To a great degree it was to shake up the complacent attitude that the disease was something that only gay men or intravenous injecting drug addicts would get. Of course, Africa has seen the outcome that the whole world anticipated in the mid- to late 1980s, with over 22 million people in sub-Saharan Africa with HIV, 1.4 million deaths and over 14 million children left orphaned by AIDS. Around 1 billion people live in Africa, so we are talking about 5% of the population of that continent still suffering. Fortunately the development of medicines and a degree of alteration of behaviour, in particular the growth in the use of condoms, slowed down the growth of HIV/AIDS in other parts of the world, especially the wealthy countries. However, complacency is risky, as the rise in all STIs among over-50s has shown in the past two years in the UK. AIDS seemed, like nuclear war, to tell us that the warnings that authors had given us in the 1960s and 1970s could easily come true and the fear was palpable.


In terms of global politics, in the early 1980s most people assumed that the world would be divided into two or three superpower blocs for the foreseeable future.  Looking back now on the era there is naturally a sense that the dissolution of the Soviet bloc and of the USSR itself was inevitable.  However, the suppression of the Solidarity trade union movement in Poland in 1981 with the implementation of martial law made us far less optimistic in the 1980s.  Even when Gorbachev came to power there were often concerns in the late 1980s that he would be overthrown and a harder line regime re-introduced as happened after liberal Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was removed in 1964.  Like Khrushchev, Gorbachev did not always pursue liberal policies and the suppression of nationalist uprisings across the USSR in 1986 can be seen as a clear example of this.  Thus, millions of people in Europe continued to be under totalitarian Communist rule until the Soviet bloc began to break up properly in 1989 first with Hungary and notably with East Germany and Romania.  Even then the break-up of the USSR was not a foregone conclusion.  The former Communist states did get democracy and some have flourished.  Russia has found it harder and has suffered from gangsterism and a tendency towards authoritarianism.  Elsewhere in the former Soviet bloc, national tensions effectively put on hold in 1944 have revived, most shockingly in the brutality of the Yugoslav War 1991-5 (I know Yugoslavia was not entirely in the Soviet bloc but it had been a Communist state) but also in states like Hungary and Romania.

The rapid collapse of the Soviet bloc and then the USSR 1986/9-91 led many to feel that the right-wing assumption that a free economy must lead to democracy was disproved by the experience in China.  Following the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, Chinese leaders like those in the USSR came to realise that a highly centralised economy was no longer working and so more steps towards a more capitalist system was needed to secure even basic prosperity.  In China millions of people were allowed to relocate, primarily to coastal cities.  In the 1980s about 80 million people, equivalent to the population of Japan (which was the booming economy of the time, people forget it was seen then very much as China is now) relocated.  China moved very slowly towards capitalism, a process which was anticipated to move as fast as it had in the USSR, though thirty years on it is still incomplete and the Chinese state still controls vast sections of the economy.  Too many commentators cannot shake off the delusion that China will inevitably (and comparatively soon) come to a more democratic system.  They do not look at Taiwan which had capitalism for fifty years before it became democratic or how authoritarian in flavour the regimes of South Korea and Singapore are.  If they needed any more evidence they have to only look as we did at the suppression of the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989.  The sending in of tanks looked incredibly like the suppression of the Hungarian Uprising of 1956 and the Prague Spring of 1968-9, the crushing of attempts towards a more liberal political system in Communist states.  China has made no further steps towards political liberty, it remains a totalitarian state with an appalling human rights record as it did in the 1980s.

Another concern was what was happening in Iran.  This took time to really penetrate into our consciousness, but also signalled a big change in the risk to the world.  In 1979 the Ayatollah Khomeni became the head of a revolutionary regime which had expelled the corrupt Shah of Iran.  The shah's callous and greedy behaviour, based on the country's immense oil wealth, had made him naturally hated in Iran.  The failure of Arab nationalism to effectively remove western influence in the Middle East and limit/destroy Israel, led to Islamist thinkers (remember the population of Iran is mainly not Arabic, they speak Farsi) to adopt different approaches.  In common with a trend across the world (in terms of Christianity, notably in the USA) there was a shift to fundamentalism; a re-emphasis on literal interpretation of holy writing.  In Iran, Islamic fundamentalism was the foundation of the regime which persists to today.  Reagan's predecessor, Jimmy Carter had ordered an embarrassing failure of an attempt to rescue US hostages in Iran and I think this is why Reagan stayed away from the country.  US interest in the region dates back to the Eisenhower Doctrine of 1957 which outlined the USA's need to ensure stable friendly governments in the Persian Gulf region to secure oil supplies, a policy revived under the two Presidents Bush in the 1990s and 2000s.  Reagan's approach was to bolster secular Iraq ruled by Saddam Hussein, especially during the inconclusive Iran-Iraq War 1980-8; ironically Hussein was later removed by the Americans on the basis that he was backing Islamist terrorism, but in fact it was simply about the oil he controlled and that his usefulness to the USA was at an end. Fundamentalist Islam is an attitude that proved to provide the intellectual seeding ground for Islamist terrorism in the 1990s and 2000s.

One country which attracted much attention in the 1980s was South Africa.  The apartheid system was still in place.  Apartheid had been in place since 1948 and though there had been massacres in the 1960s and 1970s, notably the Soweto Uprising of 1976, in 1985-9 the situation came to a head with local rioting spreading.  In 1985, a State of Emergency was declared and spread to the whole country.  Battles between the black population and government forces and within the black population filled this period and it appeared as if South Africa was on the verge of civil war.  As it was fatalities were commonplace.  It was only with the resignation of President P.W. Botha and his replacement by F.W. de Klerk in 1990 that began the steps towards the dismantlement of the apartheid system, including the release in 1990 of Nelson Mandela.  For the bulk of the 1980s it appeared as if the killings in South Africa would not cease and a full-scale racial war would develop as it almost did at the start of the 1990s.

Many Americans seem to think that terrorism was not invented until September 2001.  However, the UK in the 1980s was suffering terrorist attacks by Irish Republican groups.  In the period 1981-3 there were bombs across London including in prominent sites like Regent's Park and Harrods store; another in Kent in 1989.  In 1984 they blew up the Grand Hotel in Brighton where the British government were staying killing and injuring members of the government and their families and almost assassinating the prime minister.  These were a continuation of bombings on the British mainland seen in the 1970s.  In Northern Ireland itself bombings and shootings continued almost without cease; notably the Enniskillen massacre in November 1989.  The British government responded with harsh policies such as 'shoot to kill' allowing special forces to assassinate terrorists both in the UK and outside its borders.  In the 1990s the incidents increased in regularity and severity.  This is why the British were pretty non-plussed about the 11th September 2001 attacks and their aftermath.  In the 1970s we had seen the Queen's cousin assassinated; an MP Airey Neave killed right in the Houses of Parliament car park and were to see another Northern Irish Secretary assassinated, mortar bombs fired at the home of the prime minister and countless soldiers and civilians killed.  The security checks you went through whenever visiting a public building reminded you of the risks you faced.

Another particular characteristic of the UK in the 1980s was rioting.  In 1981 there were riots in London, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Birmingham and Bristol.  During the Miners' Strike of 1984-5 there were regular battles between police and strikers that seemed to resemble something from the Middle Ages with police behind shields and riding down strikers from horseback.  In 1985 many of the areas which had experienced riots in 1981 saw them again, some again in 1987.  The introduction of the poll tax was to lead to the Poll Tax Riot of 1990 in central London.  The poll tax or Community Charge as it formally named (though even government documentation noted its more popular name) was introduced to Scotland in 1989 and the rest of the UK the following year.  It funded local authority spending.  Unlike previous local authority taxation or the current Council Tax, it was not based on the value of the property which you lived in.  All people living in a district had to pay the same amount no matter whether they own property and no matter what their income was (though the unemployed could get a discount).  Clearly it hit the poorest working people hardest.  It was incredibly inefficient as it was based on individuals, and on average a district would see 2-4000 people move address between each year's assessment and the bills being sent out.  In the town where my parents lived it meant doubling the number of staff working for the council simply to handle the tax so sapping the funds it brought in.  I lived in East Anglia at the time and received bills for eight different people who shared a surname with me; one friend of mine whose surname is the very common Smith never received a bill because they were all sent to someone else.  Another friend who was out of the country for three months (you were not liable for the tax if not in the UK), and had told the council returned home to find he was being summoned to court for not paying the tax, so costing the council additional money in the legal processes.  You can see why the tax was unfair and in fact useless.  The idea was that it would make payers put pressure on the local authorities to find the cheapest way to provide services so curtailing the activities of high-spending local authorities on behalf of the government which despised Labour-run councils.  However, no-one gave any thought to that just the inequity of the whole scheme and how it penalised them.  No wonder the riot was so virulent.  Again it was a factor which brought fear into your everyday life.  I worried I would be taken to court and be imprisoned (elderly people who refused to pay on principle were imprisoned, so I feared, that, as a young man, I would be one of the first to be locked up) because I had not paid the other seven bills sent to me but certainly lacked the money to do so.  The poll tax led to a great distrust of local authorities to the extent that even in the mid-1990s when I was living in East London it was reckoned there were 60,000 people living in the borough who were not registered for council tax.  Though the poll tax was short lived it has done immense damage to local authority funding. 

There was an assumption, which fortunately in the past five years seems to be finally being challenged, that private business will always run things far better than any public provision.  As we have seen with filthy hospitals, expensive fuel and water and appalling public transport, in fact, private business is good (most of the time) at making huge profits but in terms of service delivery is very poor.  In addition, British service providers are not even good at running businesses, which is why so few of the privatised services of the 1980s remain in the hands of British companies.

Another major trouble of the 1980s not only in the UK, but across capitalist countries, was unemployment.  UK unemployment was a little below 2 million, around 5% of the working population when Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979.  This contrasted to 1.2 million, around 3.5% in 1974.  The increase had been provoked by the oil price rise, the decline of heavy industry in the UK and difficulties around the strength of the pound and balance of payments which had led to the introduction of semi-monetarist policies in 1972 and again in 1976 on the urging of the International Monetary Fund (IMF).  The cutback in public services, the wrecking of the coal industry, the restriction on money flow and a strong pound limiting export markets meant that manufacturing, which had been overtaken by service industries in contributing to the economy in 1974, went into severe decline.  In 1983 unemployment exceeded 4 million, around 12% of the working population, but far higher in particularly depressed regions like Northern Ireland where it exceeded 20%.  Even in the 'boom' of 1989 it was still at 2.5 million before rising again to 3.5 million in 1992, 10% of a larger working population.  The UK was not alone, the USA had unemployment of 7.5% in 1980 and 10.8% by 1982.  These days the rate of 10.2% unemployed in the USA means 16 million people without work.  West Germany, like the USA and UK pursuing a monetarist policy saw its unemployment rise from below 4% in 1979 to over 9% in 1983 and remain that high for the rest of the 1980s.  Unemployment not only blighted individuals and their families, it blighted towns.  As now you could walk or drive through areas with all the shops and often many houses boarded up.  It was easy for areas to get into a spiral as with high unemployment people did not have money to spend in shops so these would also close putting more people out of work.  The fear of losing your job hit far wider than the 1 in 5 or 1 in 10 people who might be unemployed in your street.  In addition, as now, many of those in work were in part-time and low-paid jobs.  In particular local public sector work saw a decline in wages as councils were compelled to privatise them to the cheapest bidder.  Thus, even those in work were often worse off than they had been during higher inflation of the 1970s.  Those who did not get the training or the education or the promotion or who spent much of the 1980s unemployed are still being affected by these years now.

Despite that the bulk of the population, even those who were not affected directly by unemployment, reined in their expenditure for fear of losing their jobs, the very nasty aspect of the 1980s was the emphasis on greed.  I always refer back to a line from a song by the band 'the The' (1986; I think from the track 'The Mercy Beat'): 'everyone can be a millionaire so everyone's got to try'.  The sense, as now, that if you were not out being an entrepreneur and making a huge profit you were somehow a 'scrounger' and unpatriotic, despite the fact that through the 1980s recessions thousands of companies large and small were going out of business.  It was as if you did not put yourself up as a sacrifice to capitalism you had no right to respect.  Of course, the bulk of us will never make good entrepreneurs.  However, public service was now looked down upon and claiming benefits had you portrayed as a pariah and pushed around by an ever intrusive state. Trade unions which stood up for decent pay and conditions were portrayed as 'the enemy within' and were increasingly restricted by legislation and police activity.  Margaret Thatcher's emphasis that society did not exist exempted those doing reasonably well from caring at all about their neighbours or even members of their own families and instead the cry 'get a job' was shouted at them as if they were deliberately avoiding work.  This myth that anyone on benefits was claiming simply for an easy life, despite how low those benefits are, became fixed in British society and remains there today, when, in fact, the bulk of unemployed people are desperate to work which is why even the low paid and increasingly dangerous jobs were filled.  These attitudes, this smashing of concern for others infected the USA as well.  I am sure it appeared across Europe though perhaps not as virulently, though the steps against immigrants does suggest it took root.  This view that we can all be successful in private business and if we are not it is our fault, revives one strand of Victorian thinking without the balancing element of philanthropy which stemmed from seeing all great and lowly as part of the same society.  Attempts to re-establish that latter aspect by Cameron, are not succeeding and so we simply have the harsh Thatcherite line of 'I'm all right Jack, the rest go to Hell' is back as virulently as it was in the 1980s.

Though the 1980s can be seen as a period of important steps forward, in the dismantlement of apartheid and of Communist dictatorships, for the bulk of the decade the future seemed incredibly bleak and the present unsettled and violent.  Scars have been left on public attitudes which have damaged many societies, notably in the UK and USA up to the present day and make life far more unpleasant that it needs to be.  Hyper-individualism and being beholden to profit-making at any cost are harmful for the vast majority of people who are never going to come close to being millionaires.  Yet, since the 1980s these attitudes have been portayed as laudable and the 'common sense' basis for how things should run.  I am glad that the fear of nuclear was has subsided but the racism and the unemployment with all the bigotry it brings are with us now.  Remember when you sit down to watch 'Ferris Bueller's Day Off' (1986) or 'The Breakfast Club' (1985) let alone 'St. Elmo's Fire' (1985), that that was a fantasy of the 1980s, all big hair, pastel colours and big mobile phones; it came nowhere near the bitter reality that most people experienced.  Certainly there seems to be none of the fear that was so prevalent in the 1980s and is again, that you could be dropped by society and there would be no escape from that.  Watch instead 'Boys from the Blackstuff' (1982) or 'Edge of Darkness' (1985) or even 'Auf Wiedersehen, Pet' (1983-4) for a more realistic indication of the times.  If I had written this three years ago as I had intended, I would have said, I just hope we never go back to the days like that.  Unfortunately, now we seem to be back in the midst of them once more.

Twenty Twenty-Nine: Speculative Short Story

This story details what I could envisage the UK being like in twenty years' time if the BNP continues to build on its recent European election success and becomes the dominant political party in the UK. I have based the society of Britain in 2029 on the BNP's stated policy objectives and, also, from my experience in the Anti-Apartheid Movement, of what apartheid South Africa was like, especially in terms of the racial categorisation of people. The advent of DNA analysis makes that easier than the physical categorisation the South African regime used, but of course no system is infallible.

The assumption is that growing in success and with many people leaving UK for life abroad, ultimately the BNP is sufficiently strong to defend democracy, perhaps in response to a manufactured terrorist crisis and then the UK becomes a one-party state with candidates selected from a list. This is similar to many authoritarian regimes and naturally owes a lot of the Nazi regime. I think that it is useful to think through the implications of parties' policies and see where, if unchecked, they could lead this country in the next few decades.


Victoria Day was the Canadian replacement for Empire Day. These were on 24th May, Queen Victoria's birthday. In the UK, Empire Day was officially celebrated 1916-58 when it became British Commonwealth Day; in 1966 it became just Commowealth Day and moved to 10th June, Queen Elizabeth II's birthday. In 1977 it was moved to the second Monday in March and is now mainly observed simply through a radio message from the Queen. Given the BNP's obssession with supposedly glorious elements of Britain's past, I envisage they would revive such anachronisms; others are mentioned in the story.


Twenty Twenty-Nine


Despite the heat of the mid-May evening, Alfred Napier closed the window. The sound of the brass band rehearsing in the park ahead of the Victoria Day celebrations had been nagging him for the past couple of hours. Of course, as a councillor he once would have expected to have air conditioning in his office. Yet, like a lot of things in Britain today, the New Great Britain as the government vigorously branded it, his air conditioning no longer worked. With the country having been expelled from the European Union three years before and the borders to Britain tighter than the Iron Curtain had been in Alfred’s youth, there was a labour shortage. People preferred to get jobs working in the new Ministry of Information or as Special Constables, basically thugs with a warrant to boss people around, than to train for a skilled job like air conditioning repair. Part of the problem was the fad in architecture of the past five years. All government bodies had been moved out of modern buildings into anything Victorian that could be found; alternatively, buildings constructed along those lines, which meant huge lobbies that were difficult to heat and poky offices that were either too cold or as now, too hot.

There was a knock at the door and Alfred stepped away from the window, realising he had let his mind wander. He knew it was displacement activity. His wife, Mary, had had an appointment at the hospital this afternoon to see about treatment for their son, Harold’s glue ear. Alfred knew that it was a straight forward procedure, but the National Health Service had lost so many doctors in the sweep of 2026 that waiting lists now stretched for years, even for the family of a man as comparatively privileged as Alfred. He wondered if he should lay out more bribes to see if he could get Harold moved further up the list. With the debts that the doctors who had been rushed through medical school in the past decade in an attempt to fill the shortfall, incurred, they were more than willing to take payments. Of course, everyone knew this and Alfred recognised that he was in competition with people much richer than himself. He wondered if his predecessor in this role had adopted the right method. Richard Waugh had been unashamed when speaking with fellow councillors about how he used blackmail and simple rumour-mongering to exert pressure on those he wanted something from. Many men would do Waugh a favour rather than have a visit from the Borders Agency following an allegation that they did not have four generations of indigenous blood or that their daughter had been consorting with a mestee or even a quadroon.

“Come.” Alfred called and went and sat down in his seat.

It was Harley, Alfred’s tea boy; though ‘boy’ was more a technical term these days than designation of age; Harley was only three years Alfred’s junior. Alfred knew that Harley had been born Henry, but had been compelled to change his name back in 2024 to something that was seen as being more suited to a man whose father had been born on St. Lucia. Alfred had changed his name too when it became apparent that, despite the history of English Anthonys, it was being perceived too much as belonging to the ‘Mediterranean’ category, especially when shortened to Tony. Mary always said he would have been unlikely to have got on the Party list for the council selection, if he had kept his old name. Back in the early 2020s people had begun to get so jumpy about that kind of thing.

It was that purging of anything felt not to be sufficiently ‘indigenous’ that had started the EU towards expelling Britain. Of course, the National Party had been keen to leave the organisation right from the start; that had been the key thing that had attracted Alfred to them in the first place. However, previously their economists had shown how damaging it would be to suddenly been shut out from Britain’s prime market. The Commonwealth had its own trading partners and anyway, once the expulsions of ‘non-indigenous’ people back to many of these countries began, they had little interest in trading with Britain even with continued reference to the shared heritage.

“Are you staying late this evening, sir?” Harley said with his eyes dipped.

Alfred felt like shouting ‘look at me’, but knew that that would cause more trouble than the moment’s irritation he was facing. The mixed race people left in Britain had to face enough, Alfred felt, without this palaver of pretending as if they were slaves from a cotton plantation. Alfred dreaded the day when one of the more robust members of the council insisted that he be called ‘massa’.

“Yes, Harley, I want to finish this report. The committee meeting’s at eight tomorrow, isn’t it?”

“Erm, yes, erm, sir.”

Harley replied hesitantly and Alfred realised that that was because he was aware that he should display no knowledge of the affairs of the council. Alfred knew, however, that Harley had a degree in economics from back in the 2000s when mixed race people were still allowed to go to university, and in fact, when half of 18-year olds were expected to attend rather than now when it was something just for the rich and those of leading National Party members. Harley was never going to be able to do much more than make the tea. Once his grandparents died, Alfred was sure, Harley would flee across the Channel and be Henry once more. With the influx of skilled and educated mixed race people from Britain over the past decade, the economy of France; those of Spain, Belgium and the Netherlands too, were thriving.

“Would you like a cup of tea?”

Alfred hesitated. “Erm, yes, bring me one; make yourself one. Is Matilda still out there?”

Harley shook his head. “No, she went at … she went.” He cut his sentence short and Alfred realised he was reluctant to give away that Matilda had slunk off early again as he knew the trouble she could cause him if she found out.
“Okay.”

Matilda. Alfred laughed at the name. Almost all women born in the past twenty years were named after queens. The number of Victorias and Elizabeths was ridiculous. For a while Matilda had been argued over. The connection between that queen and France had counted against her, but ultimately, Alfred imagined, she had been accepted simply to increase the range of names female babies could be given, just a little. Matilda’s father was the city head of the National Party and so she was simply given a job, despite the fact that she had few skills and, having being spoilt for all her life, almost seemed to expect Alfred to do her bidding rather than the reverse. Alfred had to admit that her father, Edward Dickens, at least seemed to feel that his daughter should get out of the house and do ‘something’, unlike the bulk of the princesses of Party bosses who simply idled their time and their fathers’ money away. However, it meant that Alfred was saddled with an assistant who was useless and spent most of her time chatting with friends via the computer, when the power supply was on, or slipping off for various beauty treatments.

Of course, Alfred knew that there were many women who would do the job better, but these days after they passed their mid-twenties, companies were reluctant to employ women. The government’s emphasis on women being at home producing babies, or, if infertile, adopting a child from a single mother meant that any working women older were looked at with suspicion. Mary had been an IT consultant in her younger years but stood no chance of working in that field now. The best she could have hoped for was secretarial or care worker jobs and then there were hundreds of younger women filling those each day while they sought a husband. Heaven help them, though, if they got pregnant out of wedlock. These days abstinence was the only permitted form of contraception and unmarried mothers automatically lost their child at birth before serving three years imprisonment. The government felt the loss of morals had been partly what had previously weakened Britain and, so, for the past decade had felt compelled to legislate on these too.

Alfred gazed at his computer screen but he was utterly bored of this report. These days reports were demanded with such tight deadlines it was always difficult to meet them. This was the so-called ‘national’ style of running business. It was felt that catching staff out with sudden demands kept them dynamic and always ‘ready for action’ as the phrase went. However, Alfred was now not so sure. It seemed to just leave him feeling edgy and he knew that he did not produce the kind of analysis that was really needed. This report was on the challenges of attracting sufficient primary school teachers to the city. It had been a grave problem for over ten years. No-one wanted to come and work in a city when so many tiny village schools had appeared across the country. Teachers liked the small class sizes and the fact that in those places there was less direct monitoring by the Ministry of Education about what they taught day-to-day and whether the content was sufficiently patriotic. The strict limits on what books could be used in schools and the tight budgets local authorities worked under, made it difficult to run a school successfully to start with. In addition, Alfred imagined that the contemporary emphasis on rote learning, especially of dates and famous names, could not be that interesting to teach. Accessing forbidden websites, even inadvertently, might end a teacher’s career and so they kept to just the official government ones when seeking teaching resources.

Matilda had recited the names of the monarchs when she had been interviewed for the post of personal assistant as if it equipped her for any job. Of course, with the criteria that Alfred had to work with, in part, it did. That knowledge of British history and a clean nationality certificate, let alone a father in the Party, rather any ability to do the work, had been more than sufficient for her to get the place.

The computer warbled and brought Alfred back from his pondering. He clicked on the icon and brought his wife’s face on to the screen. He could see she was back home. Partly he hoped that meant the visit to the hospital had been a success, but his wife’s face seemed to tell a different story.

“My love. How’s Harold? Did you get to see Dr. Allison?”

Mary melted into tears and Alfred wished he could be there to hold her. He imagined that Allison had gone to deal with the child of a Party leader or someone who offered him more money or a parent who had simply threatened the doctor to get his attention.

“They refused us. They said Harold’s not indigenous. They took a swab from me too. They said we can’t go to that hospital. Apparently we can’t use a national one any more; we have to use community facilities from now on.”

Alfred’s head reeled. ‘Community’ was a euphemism for second class. The hospitals that the ‘non-indigenous’ were sent to, generally underfunded and filthy.

“That’s not right, we’ve got our nationality certificates. There must be some mistake. They must have mixed you up with someone else. Look, calm down, I’ll phone the hospital direct and get them to sort this out. We’ll have it sorted. Okay? It’s going to be alright. I’ll be home soon. Give Harold a treat, keep him happy. I know he feels uncomfortable, but it’ll soon be sorted.”

“Yes, okay.” Mary looked a little more cheerful. “Hurry home, Tony, erm, Alf. I love you.”

“I love you too.”

Alfred said, a little self-conscious that someone might overhear that he had had a personal call here at work. He guessed that the connection was tapped anyway, though where the funds to employ people to listen to every mundane conversation came from, he had no idea. Alfred would have been happier if his elder sons, William and George, had been at home, but term at their army academy did not end for another seven weeks. Alfred wished that he could just shove this report aside and go home to his wife. Not for the first time was he tempted to get Harley in to write something for him, but knew that would risk both their jobs and, if it came to light, would render the report meaningless: no-one in government was permitted to accept anything written by a mulatto.

Alfred heard footsteps outside the door but could tell from their weight and number that this was not Harley returning. There was a terse knock on the door, but the two men did not wait for a response before entering. Alfred guessed that only his position had warranted the knock; these men were more used to opening doors with their feet. He did not need to take in the details of the uniforms to know that they were from the Borders Agency. Of course that body’s role encompassed everything pertaining to racial legislation in Britain these days and these two particularly looked like men who were more used to chasing down quadroons trying to pass as white than checking passports. They were both over six feet tall, with shaven heads and large moustaches that, despite apparently being drawn from Victorian styles of the British Army, always made Alfred think of fat Germans running a beer hall.

“Mr. Napier?”

From the man’s pronunciation that he was one of those who had come to Britain from the southern USA once the implementation of the National Party’s agenda had got underway. In terms of ability and even numbers, they had done nothing to replace those people expelled from the country. Many had had their expectations dashed. In contrast to what they had expected, that they would be stringing up blacks from lamp-posts as their grandfathers had done, they had ended up hassling those who had a few genes that no longer fitted with the government’s demands. Much of their day was spent excluding such people from certain buses, parks, beaches, schools, hospitals and jobs, reserved for the ‘indigenous people’.

“Yes, I’m Councillor Napier.” Alfred felt he had to pull rank to show this pair he was better than them.

The two men took chairs unprompted. The other man had a leather case from which he pulled documentation. He spread it out across the table.

“This,” the second man spoke with a strong West Midlands accent, “is the report of your son’s latest DNA check.”

“And you are?”

Alfred’s question seemed to surprise the men. There was a quick glance between them and Alfred was pleased that he had drawn them up short.

“I am Sergeant Hopkins,” the American said, “and this is Corporal Neal, we are from the Borders Agency, Councillor.”

“Thank you.”

Alfred felt he had won a little victory. He wanted these men to be uncertain as to the extent to which their careers were in jeopardy if they mistreated him. He might not be all-powerful in this city, but he was not without influence. Major Kendal of the Borders Agency had dined at his house.
“Can I offer you some tea?”
“No thank you.” Hopkins replied and Alfred noted there was no ‘sir’.
It seemed apparent now that the mix-up at the hospital had had wider repercussions. This could be tiresome to resolve.

“Basically your son’s DNA check shows some non-indigenous characteristics that were followed up on.” Hopkins had taken over the narration.

“Are you sure there has been no mix-up? A mistake at the hospital.”

“Mr. Napier, they only call us in when they’re certain.”

Alfred realised that these men would go nowhere near the biological analysis, they just did the enforcement.

“This has been followed up on and it revealed something from your wife’s record. Did you ever meet her grandmother?”

“Once, she was at our wedding. She does not live around here.”

“No, she lives in France, doesn’t she?” Neal snapped as if that was a crime in itself.

Alfred felt guilty for an instant. He had asked Mary to pressure her parents to remain in Britain and they worried that it might come at the time when Alfred was being considered for the Party list, but until now, fortunately, it had not.
“Did you know that Mrs. Gould was half-Burmese?” Hopkins asked.
“Joyce?”

“Must have come here as a baby, say, in 1948, when the floodgates opened. You know, when we lost India, a lot of them came over here.”

Joyce Gould certainly had long straight hair, but she had freckled in the sunshine as Mary and her mother, Helen, did. Then Alfred found himself wondering a little at Hopkins’s claim to ‘we’ losing India.
“No, I didn’t know that.” He responded calmly.

“And the grandfather, Gould, he wasn’t born Gould, but Gold, you know, a Jewish name. Probably forced their way in here in the 1930s.” Neal said almost with an enthusiasm.

“There are people, not Jewish, called Gold.”

“Not in this country.” Neal sneered.

“Well, why was none of this detected? Mary and I have had our checks. You are saying that my wife has sixteenth Burmese and possibly an eighth Jewish blood, though probably none, so why is it only now that you know?”

Hopkins hesitated and Alfred was pleased that he had got him back on the defensive.

“The history of this country has been plagued by so many tides of different races sweeping into it; miscegenation, bastards, all that kind of thing makes it tough.” Hopkins drawled, what, to Alfred, sounded like a speech repeated by this man’s boss. “There are sometimes backlogs in processing the results and, you know, we are reaching new levels of sophistication in how we detect cross-breeds. Great Britain leads the world in this type of DNA analysis. It costs billions, sorry, milliards of pounds in research to get it right.” Hopkins said proudly.

“Yes, yes, I know that. Many milliards.” Alfred said, now with irritation as he knew how much his city could benefit from even one of those many billions.

Alfred allowed himself to laugh a little to see that even a Borders Agency man could slip up and forget the directions on the use of ‘proper’ English. He knew how challenging these changes were. Coming from the construction industry, Alfred remembered how he had had to adjust from millimetres to inches and the re-adoption of shillings and pennies alongside pounds had taken him months to master.
“You have been shown the evidence.” Hopkins seemed to be getting back to his script.

“So what happens now?” Alfred was a little uncertain. He remained convinced that this was a mistake, but pondered if a bribe was in order. He wondered how much cash he had in his drawer.

“Your wife has already been re-categorised. She has been given octoroon status, but she may be reduced to quadroon if we do find her grandfather had Jewish blood.”

For an instant Alfred envisaged one of Hopkins’s ancestors being as comfortable as him, with these terms like octoroon that the National Party had imported from the Americas of the past. They had come in when talking about ‘one-eighth non-indigenous persons’ had proven to be so cumbersome.

“So, the community hospital for her?”

“Yes, Mr. Napier and for your sons. Being mestees, William and George will be expelled from their academy this evening. You might like to make arrangements to collect them. They can join the waiting list for a community school in this city.” Hopkins outlined.

“Of course, your wife won’t be permitted to live in Wollaton district and will have to move closer to the city centre. I have no doubt your office has a list of the districts that the kind of people like Mary and her sons are permitted to live in.”

For a moment Alfred was going to protest or argue he would have to move with his wife and children, but realised that someone deemed to be ‘indigenous’ would not be allowed to live in districts allocated to octoroons. Even if he tried to live there he would be chased out, he was sure.

“This,” Hopkins said, lifting up a folded form, “is your application for divorce. It will be processed immediately and you will not be liable for charges of miscegenation, though obviously they will be held on record in case you happen to make a ‘mistake’ like this again.”

Alfred felt stunned. It seemed incredible that his marriage of over twenty years was being dissolved by documents being delivered by these two bully-boys.

“This is your resignation from the council.” Hopkins turned a printed letter towards Alfred. “In your case, we have included the phrase ‘to spend more time on my business interests’ as ‘spending more time with my family’ is inappropriate as you do not have one.”

Alfred’s head spiralled through all the options. He wondered whether he could bribe these men to lose all this stuff. Could he try to challenge this in the People’s Court? It seemed futile: he knew that even men simply suspected of miscegenation received rough treatment, let alone someone like himself who had lived with an octoroon woman for twenty years and fathered three children by her. Perhaps a prison sentence for that would be what he needed, to get him away from all that was happening. Realistically, though he knew he would still have to live the rest of his life and his options would be wider if he still had his business. Now his plans began developing. He knew people, he could start getting funds out of the country, say to France, and in a couple of years he would be able to fetch Mary and the boys and they could flee abroad. Better than that, if he invested in property in Spain he could channel funds there, yes that was what he would do, run down his business and build a new life there. Of course, Mary would have to tolerate months in the ghettos of the city centre, but she was strong, he knew.

“Your Party card.” Hopkins asked.

Alfred reached into his jacket and pulled out the worn leather wallet that had held his membership of the National Party. Of course, without it he would never have been able to work in any public sector job, let alone hold office even at local level. His membership dated back over a decade and he wondered whether, if he had been in the Party from when its rise had started, or had been more visible in its activities in the years since he had joined, he would have somehow have found a way now to stop what was happening. He guessed not.

“Well, that will be all gentlemen.” Alfred said as he briskly signed the various forms and shoved them back across the desk. He took the DNA record and dropped it into the bin for shredding that sat by his desk.

Neal took the documents and Alfred’s membership card and thrust them all into his leather case as if they were unimportant.. The councillor stood and began ushering them to the door. He was concerned that they would escort him from the building, but realised that they had no powers to arrest him unless they pressed the miscegenation charges and it seemed they would not. They would inform the town hall security staff, but Alfred guessed he had some minutes before they would arrive to eject him.

The two Borders Agency men were through the door now. Alfred was eager to return to his computer and wreak as much damage as he could before he went. Let the council disentangle the schools and hospital policies once he had done that.

“Sorry to rush you two, but I need to get down to working on my business interests as soon as possible.”

With that Alfred closed and locked the heavy door.

Removing One 'Wrong' Does Not Automatically Put A 'Right' in its Place

It is always interesting listening to apologists of something who know that general consensus about what they are saying will be hostile so they wrap up their statements in conciliatory phrases especially if they are eating in your house at the time, but then with rather veiled statements proceed to make outrageous statements. In the UK it is not the done thing to say to them 'your views are entirely offensive stop', society requires you smile and admit they have a point. I would support this view, because I heartily support the view that whilst I may disagree with someone they have the right to express any views they choose and if I tried to prevent them then I would be behaving as badly as the views they outline. As noted in a recent post, some will see that as a weakness of the liberal humanist approach, but in fact in line with a comment I saw in a newspaper recently referring to the BNP (British National Party the main UK fascist party) 'given them enough string [i.e. not even rope] and they will hang themselves' as typically bigots show themselves up as stupid and hateful far better themselves that we could ever hope to do.

Now, in this context, I had a white former South African woman in my house last week. She is 28 so was born in 1980 when apartheid was in place but still only a teenager when it finally ended in 1994. Like people interested in the country she has seen the difficulties with crime, violence, poverty and AIDS that have plagued it since and she now argues that many Blacks in South Africa would prefer a return to the apartheid system because it at least had stability. To some degree that is a rather rosy view of the 'stability' of South Africa especially in the 1970s and 1980s with its economy suffering spiralling inflation and heavily armed police riding around beating and shooting people and internicine murders between different Black factions. It is clear that many Whites who grew up during the period were oblivious to the severity of events going on. They say the British had exaggerated information, but it is clear that having a free press we did not have to have exaggerated reports to see how bad the situation was. South Africa had no television broadcasts before 1977 to help keep people in ignorance and even then news was heavily censored. The one incident that they are most suprised to hear about the attack of the extreme AWB against the ANC conference in 1990 which almost triggered a civil war.

Apartheid South Africa was a society divided on racial grounds denying people access to areas and facilities such as schools and hopsitals based on their racial categorisation, something that had only otherwise been seen in Nazi Germany, hardly a good role model. The woman knew I had been in the Anti-Apartheid Movement in the UK in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which for liberals in the UK was almost assumed and I recognise now I could have been much more active than I was. Anyway, she said to me, had I been to South Africa and I said no (partly because flights there are beyond my income) but I also said because I knew how violent and crime-ridden the country was. She ridiculed me saying well, surely those were the people in control that I had campaigned to liberate. Of course that is a foolish statement but you can see why Whites in South Africa see a direct connection between the end of apartheid and the rise on social problems. This, however, is a very simplistic view and is similar to the difficulties in both Iraq and Afghanistan. It is right to campaign against dictatorships but you cannot assume that simply removing them will create peace and democracy; that is actually the harder job than removing the dictatorship and yet it is the one people pay least attention to.

The Anti-Apartheid Movement campaigned not to create a South Africa which was crime-ridden and violent, it aimed for a state which did not have a divisive social and political structure and gave the majority a voice but in the context of freedom for all people no matter what their ethnic background. It also gave people the freedom to be criminals and to be violent in a way that they have that freedom (and use it) in the UK, USA, France and so on. There are some points to note. Democracy does not suddenly manufacture a feasible economy. As in the USSR before its collapse, a distorted economy of the kind which is prevalent in Africa and was also in the Communist state is going to leave certain people in poverty to an even greater extent than they are in the democracies, because the authoritarian state can restrict their movement to find work and to protest against conditions in a way democracies cannot do. So in Russia and South Africa you still have the weak economy from before but people can take action to improve their situation and the easiest way is always to commit a crime. In addition creating democracy does not overnight erase social inequalities and whilst Blacks and Coloureds are now in a position to become prosperous in South Africa, the richest people there are still White as they were in previous decades. This will also take time to change and the Mugabe model in Zimbabwe has proven itself to be the wrong way to go about it.

Democracy itself (let alone a fair society and despite many Americans' views the two are not necessarily linked) takes a long time to establish. In the UK it took centuries and as yet we are still not a truly democratic state as half of our parliament is unelected. In France it took centuries and a bloody revolution. In Germany it took two world wars and the Nazi regime before enduring democracy was established. The USA had a colonial war, a vast civil war, rioting and unrest to even establish its current form of democracy, again taking centuries. So why does anyone think that democracy can really truly be established in South Africa, Russia (which had never even tried democracy before the 1990s), Iraq, Afghanistan in the space of a few years and peacefully, when the bulk of the lauded democracies had to go through decades and decades of bloodshed to get to often quite imperfect democracy now.

It is a human tragedy that when dictatorships end it takes so long to establish some degree of stability, even to reduce the 'normality' of violence to an extent when it becomes exceptional rather than taken for granted. However, this is no excuse to say, well as democracy is so violent and unstable in the first few decades then we should not bother and stick with authoritarian regimes instead. This is like saying a woman should not let the baby out of her womb simply because it is going to be a painful process often needing lots of input from doctors and nurses. When things change you need to look forward. No-one fights to help criminals prosper, they fight for all the ordinary people, the bulk of South Africans and Iraqis who simply want to be able to go work in the morning, feed their families, come home, eat and go to sleep; to not be stopped and checked all the time, not to be arrested with no cause, to disappear, to be tortured or shot. In addition, they would like to be able to shape the government in the direction which fits with their values (though most people are quite happy if it just leaves them alone) and to be able to protest freely when things upset them. These are the people that anyone opposing a dictatorship is campaigning for. Yet, everyone, especially governments must remember, that taking away the dictatorship is not the end of the process rather it is just the brief introduction to a process that will stretch over the following decades.