Hatherley - The ministry of nostalgia : consuming austerity

THE MINISTRY OF NOSTALGIA: We will remind people of how good things used to be. Since no one can now remember a time when things were good, we all need help to dream of a wonderful bygone age when everyone was paid in golden sovereigns, no one was ill or died, the weather was perfect, and you could get 200 pints of bitter for a quid.

Monster Raving Loony Party Manifesto, 1997

In the British General Election of May 2015, 37 percent of registered voters who bothered to turn out voted for austerity. Given that the ConservativeLiberal Democrat government had, for the previous five years, been quite dramatic in the sweep and scale of its policies, perhaps even the most radical government since Thatcher, theres no question of what was being voted for. In education, tuition fees were put up by 300 percent, arts funding was cut by 100 percent; elitist free schools and privately run Academies were expanded; the Education Maintenance Allowance that kept many working-class children in further education was abolished. In housing, a bedroom tax was introduced that was expressly designed to force poor people out of homes deemed too large for them, lifelong tenure in social housing was abolished and in Help to Buy, handouts were offered to mount the property ladder instead. In the National Health Service, a Health and Social Care Bill was introduced that opened up most of the NHS to private companies; benefit cuts and punitive benefit sanctions led to millions using food banks; what new jobs emerged were usually on zero hours contracts, the sort of working conditions last seen on nineteenth-century dockland. The privatisation of the railways was reinforced, with the East Coast Line sold to Virgin, and the banks nationalised at the height of the financial crisis were allowed to continue much as before, albeit lending somewhat less. All of this, however, made little dent in the allegedly terrifying national deficit. That 37 percent was a straightforward endorsement for the governments continued attack on the poor.

Although the vote of May 2015 was not some Thatcherera swell of Tory support, something in this austerity agenda nonetheless struck a chord with people. At the same time Labour, under the hapless leadership of Edward Miliband, offered no serious opposition to austerity as either concept or policy, preferring instead the comically innocuous criticism that the carve-up of the welfare states few remnants went too far, too fast.

The rhetoric of the opposition to austerity, such as it was, was communitarian and traditional. The irony, however, was palpable. What cultures of opposition did emerge during this time particularly after a brief flurry of protest in 2011 collapsed in repression and defeat were deeply indebted to a nostalgic rhetoric of a former period of austerity, just as they attempted to formulate a feasible resistance to its contemporary incarnation.

This failure to articulate the differences between the past and the present condition was only too clear. In March 2013, the filmmaker Ken Loach released a documentary about the last era of austerity, The Spirit of 45. At the same time, Loach was involved in the foundation of a new left-wing political party, Left Unity, seemingly set on the rock of that spirit. But what do these two moments in history actually have in common?

The period of post-war austerity entailed, as well as rationing and a certain cultural puritanism, the construction of a welfare state, the creation of generous state benefits and the building of a comprehensive system of health care and education, alongside collective bargaining with strong trade unions, the guarantee of full employment, and a massive public housing programme. Meanwhile the austerity of the Coalition government entailed destroying all of these and replacing them with little but scorched earth. Here, the future, if it was thought about at all, was primed to resemble an enterprise zone full of call centres on the edge of a business park on the M4. So how has it been possible to invoke the 1940s in defence of the 2010s?

Austerity Britain, the period roughly from the 1940s until around 1955, when rationing was finally lifted by a Conservative government, is the direct opposite of Austerity Britain Mark Two, the period from 2009/10 until the present when a financial crisis caused by property speculation and derivatives culminated in massive state bailouts of the largest banks, followed by an assault on what remained of the public sphere after thirty years of neoliberalism. But this most recent austerity has nonetheless been overlaid with the imagery of that earlier era. At times this has been so pervasive that it felt as if parts of the country began to resemble a strange, dreamlike reconstruction of the 1940s and 1950s, reassembled in the wrong order.

A couple of weeks after the election, I chanced upon a market being held on a bank holiday weekend, in Greenwich, South-East London. In front of the Cutty Sark, a late-nineteenth-century tea clipper whose dry dock had recently been encased in faceted glass and the ship hoisted into the air in renovation so poorly considered that it won the 2012 Carbuncle Cup for the Ugliest Building in the UK, were a variety of stalls selling things. Here one could rummage through wartime memorabilia old tins, plates, tat of various sorts. Another stall was selling records but stocked nothing beyond about 1965. The fashion on display: for men, moustaches and beards, sensible utility wear; for women, the semi-ironic sexualised style usually called burlesque. And looming over everything, the ubiquitous poster demanding that you

KEEP CALM
AND
CARRY ON

Tesco, Woolwich, May 2015

The effect was as if pop music and the social revolutions of the 1960s the struggles for sexual equality, and particularly, racial equality had never happened. Instead, everyone had decided to live in their own customised preliberation era.

I have seen this market, and places like it, proliferate since around 2008, but encountering it so soon after the electoral victory of austerity made it especially uncomfortable. Not because I suspected these people had actually gone out and voted for five more years of suffering in fact, given that the Labour vote went up significantly in London, they were less likely to have done so than anyone else. What was depressing was more the dominance of a certain structure of feeling (to use Raymond Williamss phrase), where austeritys look, its historical syncretism, its rejection of the real human advances of the post-war era had seeped into the consciousness of people who would, when pressed, probably be in opposition to it, even as they performed its aesthetics.