The Britain that the 25-year-old Elizabeth inherited when her father, George VI, died on Feb. 6, 1952, was astonishingly different from the Britain that is celebrating her platinum jubilee — not so much “a foreign country,” in L.P. Hartley’s wistful phrase, but “a far-off continent” (and one that was habitually referred to as “England,” as if the regional appendages didn’t matter). The country was dominated by a tiny “establishment” — a collection of intermarried families who dominated the Conservative Party (which held power without interruption from 1951 to 1964), Oxbridge, the public schools, the Church, the upper professions and the armed services. Though the Queen was at the heart of the establishment, she was also a rare female in a resolutely homosocial world.
Britain still thought of itself as an Empire, though, in fact, George VI was the last British king to have the formal title of “emperor.” His daughter’s coronation oath was deliberately vague about what countries she ruled over, pronouncing her “Queen of this realm and of all her other realms and territories,” a vagueness that led the young Tory MP, Enoch Powell, to deliver an agonized speech in the House of Commons. It also continued to think of itself as a Great Power. The Coronation Naval Review at Spithead, in June 1953, featured more than 300 ships, including representatives from the US, the USSR and France, headed by the battleship HMS Vanguard. Not to be outdone, the Royal Air Force later responded with an overhead display of 600 planes, including prototypes of three V-Bombers.
Yet this establishment-dominated and imperial-minded country was also, at root, a white working-class one. Some 80% of the population worked in manual occupations — coalmining and steelmaking were still big industries — with distinctive clothes (cloth caps for men) and branded on their tongues with distinct local accents. George Orwell’s famous description of his countrymen as “gentle”— by which he meant socially conservative and instinctively law-abiding — continued to apply. In 1955, the anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer reported that the English were “gentle, courteous and orderly… you hardly ever see a fight in a bar (a not uncommon spectacle in the rest of Europe or the USA)… football crowds are as orderly as a church meeting.”
This public respectability was reinforced by the power of the establishment, usually by tacit agreement but sometimes by legal force. The BBC did not broadcast anything “derogatory to political institutions,” making a particular point of banning impersonations of leading public figures. Magistrates ordered the destruction of more than 1,500 “obscene” works of fiction, including Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857). During the “Lady Chatterley Trial,” when Penguin Books was prosecuted for publishing D.H. Lawrence’s rather dire bodice-ripper, the prosecuting council asked the jury whether it was a book “you would… wish your wife or your servants to read.”
The country that the Queen inherited was too much of a balancing act to remain as it was: elitist but proletarian, gentle but arrogant, great but also fading. But it was transformed not just by the logic of these contradictions but also by four powerful forces.
The first was the rise of the meritocracy, the title of a book published by Michael Young in 1958. The “rise” had been going on since the introduction of open competition into the civil service and Oxbridge colleges in the middle of the 19th century, as Young’s account made clear. But hitherto the “rise” had meant recruiting a few exceptional children into the establishment. What Young’s book heralded was the meritocracy’s capture of the establishment. The Conservative Party was led by two grammar school products in a row: Edward Heath and Margaret Thatcher. Establishment types such as Harold Macmillan and Quintin Hogg were mocked into irrelevance by a new generation of satirists such as Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. Women flooded into the elite professions and, rather more slowly, into the upper ranks of business. Being “self-made” was transformed from a mark of opprobrium to the highest compliment. Thatcher’s government added entrepreneurs to grammar school-educated civil servants and academics as solvents of the old society of rank and degree.
The second factor was the rise of the permissive society, a phrase coined by the flamboyant and gay Tory MP, Norman St John Stevas. The government began to get out of the business of micro-managing morality even before it got out of the business of micromanaging the economy, led by a Labour home secretary, Roy Jenkins, but also cheered by liberal Conservatives. “Sexual intercourse began in 1963,” in Philip Larkin’s famous phrase, two years after the “the pill” was introduced. Homosexuality was decriminalized in 1967. The BBC embraced not just satire but a more aggressive interviewing style, eventually treating politicians not so much as grandees but as criminals in the dock. Children whose births were registered by only one parent rose from 4% in the 1960s to 24% in the 1990s.
The third is harder to name: Call it “deindustrialization” if you’re on the left, “the rise of the entrepreneurial society” if you’re on the right, “the creation of a post-industrial society” if you’re a technocratic. Britain has arguably seen the biggest economic transformation of any country in Western Europe during the Queen’s reign. Gone are the big industrial blocks along with the trade unions that represented, or, as the 1970s wore on, misrepresented them. In their place is a service economy that boasts some of the world’s best-paid knowledge workers at the top but also an army of just-in-time casual workers. This economic revolution put an end to the bitter industrial strife of the late 1970s. But it also provided the material for new strife — the alienation of the former industrial north manifested in Brexit and a Scottish independence movement that could yet succeed in dividing the Queen’s realm.
Britain’s agonies over which economic model to adopt are only matched by its agonies over relations with the rest of the world. The country has been thoroughly transformed by globalization. In the 80s, the City of London regained its Victorian status as a global hub of finance, though this time it had to share its position with New York. The number of foreign-born workers doubled between 1997 and 2007 to 3.8 million, the biggest influx of immigrants in British history. For all their disagreements Tony Blair and Boris Johnson both championed “global Britain.”
But what kind of globalization did people actually want?
Some thought that the only way that Britain could continue to punch above its weight was to join the what was then called the European Economic Community, or, having joined, play a bigger role in the European Union. “Europe is today the only route through which Britain can… maintain its historical role as a global player,” Blair pronounced. Others said it needed to revive the old Commonwealth in the guise of a new Anglosphere. Still others declared it should retreat from formal ties and play the role of a buccaneering power in a world of giant global blocks, tied to nobody but free to act anywhere.
The result was a mess of a policy: First joining the EEC on the (deliberately) mistaken grounds that it was nothing more than a common market and then, after the most divisive debate of the Queen’s reign, leaving without taking the trouble to work out the details of our relationship with the EU, let alone the rest of the world. It is sufficient comment on Johnson’s prime ministership that he has decided to mark the Queen’s 70 years on the throne with the re-introduction of imperial measures.
Such wrenching change might have torn apart other countries: it’s impossible to look at Donald Trump’s reaction to the storming of the Capitol or the wider Republican Party’s response to the loss of the 2020 presidential election without worrying about the future of the Republic. It certainly caused agonies in Britain, particularly during the miner’s strike of the 1980s but also during the Brexit debates more recently. But Britain has, nevertheless, survived wrenching change without losing either its balance or its distinctive character.
There are lots of reasons for this. The transformation of the establishment into a meritocracy has prevented the formation of an alienated intelligentsia. The great political parties have shown a genius for reform. The Tories have absorbed immigrants (two of the three great offices of state, the Treasury and the Home Office, are held by ethnic minorities). The Labour Party has adapted to a new economy — despite a disastrous relapse under Jeremy Corbyn. Oxbridge dons continue to dine by candlelight even while illuminating exciting new areas of knowledge. Barristers still wear horse-hair wigs even as they debate complicated pieces of corporate regulation.
The Queen must claim a good deal of the credit — not only by providing a point of continuity in a world that often seems to be spinning out of control but also by showing that ancient institutions can subtly adapt to change without losing any of their essential magic.
More From Writers at Bloomberg Opinion:
• Britain Is Taking School Snobbery to New Heights: Therese Raphael
• Jubilee Parties Won’t Rescue the UK Consumer Economy: Andrea Felsted
• Britain Begins to Think the Unthinkable: Life After the Queen: Martin Ivens
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Adrian Wooldridge is the global business columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former writer at the Economist, he is author, most recently, of “The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World.”
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