Stuart Maconie: ‘The pandemic showed Britain the value of shared experience. The collective is making a comeback’

You love the NHS, right? Well there was a time when the railways and utilities were owned by all of us and when social housing was not stigmatised and student’s didn’t face a life of debt. The 1960s and 70s were no utopia, but maybe we have lost something incredibly valuable in our rush to put the individual over the collective.

How can you write an elegy to the past that informs a better future? This is the task author and broadcaster Stuart Maconie set himself when he wrote The Nanny State Made Me: In Search of A Better Britain, his paean to the post-war welfare state, the main thrust of which is to convince a new audience that we should be re-evaluating those decades. Community, statism, public ownership – society – call it what you will, Maconie’s thesis is that the past 40 years have been spent dismantling the state’s ability to manage society in the interests of the majority and portraying the years between 1945 and 1979 as the “bad old days” of strikes, inefficiency and decline. He says we have been sold a lie.

Maconie examines the positive aspects of this rich, complex era – from accountable public ownership, stigma-free social housing, student grants and, perhaps more than anything, an acceptance that there were some aspects of life that should be kept away from the excesses of carpet-bagging capitalism. There’s plenty of nostalgia in this book: Maconie is typically romantic about the importance of libraries, working-class culture and life on the dole. But more than anything, The Nanny State Made Me (now out in paperback) is about reclaiming the sense of belonging to a shared society – and the common purpose that could provide in the age of social media and the gig economy.

GQ How did you go about writing this without making it just a nostalgia trip?

SM I was aware of that and I tried to have to acknowledge it. I could see that I could be accused of sentimentalising the past and I was also very aware that I could seem the ultimate centrist dad. But good things are worth romanticising. I’m not saying the music of the past was any better or the food or the clothes or anything like that, but I am saying that the way we organised our water supply was better, as an example. For half a century we’ve been fed a false narrative that goes unchallenged – that we had to dismantle all that because it wasn’t working and we had to put our country in the hands of thrusting, virile entrepreneurs and private enterprise. And that’s almost been an article of faith by successive governments since. Critics often say, “You’re romanticising the past” but I think we are demonising the past and romanticising what we replaced it with. So we’re seeing the 1970s as all football violence and British Leyland being on strike forever. But you can read it another way: that after the Second World War we reached a political settlement that did pretty well. We ushered in the new Elizabethan era of the Beatles and brilliant telly and brilliant comedy, a lot of which I think was to do with the supportive state system in schools, health and housing. And we’re the only country in Europe to pretty much dismantle that and flog it off. And we’ve made ourselves kind of meaner, cheaper, sicker. I just wanted to say this narrative we’ve been fed since 1979 is not necessarily the truth.

I want to gently challenge this orthodoxy that the state is bad and business is always good. I am not anti-capitalist. I’m not anti private enterprise. But we’ve seen the downside of men in shiny suits running things during the pandemic.

We’ve made ourselves kind of meaner, cheaper, sicker. I just wanted to say this narrative we’ve been fed since 1979 is not necessarily the truth

It’s a difficult environment in which to make your case because you’re going up against those 1970s stock images of bins piled up in the street or the gravediggers on strike.

You get a lot of slightly smirking commentaries that go, “Everybody knows the 70s were terrible?” But were they? The case got a lot easier when, within two or three days of the book going on sale, the lockdown started. It closed the bookshops but was a great marketing strategy because when it comes to the crunch, who stepped up? Overnight, we found out that the business people were nowhere to be seen. They were leaving and begging for money and it was the binmen and nurses who became the heroes.

Just the ideas of state education or social housing are often portrayed as inherently negative now.

We’re pretty much alone in Europe on this attitude. Look at Norway, which I know quite well. It’s a centre-right country but the Norwegians I know think we are crazy getting into all this debt so you can buy houses that are assets for the future. “So why don’t you just rent nice houses?” They’ve got a proper social housing sector. But cuts to social housing here have made it seem remedial, like comprehensive education. It’s like that attitude of “Only losers take the bus.”

Apart from the NHS, every aspect of public ownership has been stigmatised. How do you turn that around in a world that is very different to 1979?

Well, we’re going to have more and more of those little pinch points. Look what happened to Uber [who’ve been ordered to pay minimum wage, holiday pay and pensions]. As for the internet, that is way too important to be left a Mark Zuckerberg. People say you can’t do anything about it, but you could have some form of state regulation of the internet – though not for the same reasons the Chinese do. A kind of digital sovereignty if you like. 

Cuts to social housing here have made it seem remedial, like comprehensive education. It’s like that attitude of ‘Only losers take the bus’

Going back to Norway, you recount a story of a friend who was amazed how blasé Brits were about tax evasion.

She said the idea of grown people around the dinner table in North London or wherever saying “I’ve got a marvellous accountant and he really reduced my tax bill” was shocking. She said that would be like in Norway boasting you’d done a runner from a restaurant. And she also said the idea of moving to a different postcode to get your children into a better school was insane to Norwegians. To them that would be like moving to get a different water supply. You should get a decent standard of education wherever you are.

What about the symbolic value of public ownership and a decent welfare system?

I think the idea of a shared endeavour is something we’ve lost and has become unfashionable. Even among the politics of the left in the past few years, we have seen a move to the idea that individual empowerment and individual emancipation is the most important thing in the world. That expressing yourself and being yourself is the greatest human goal. I’m sure it is great. But, to some extent, subsuming your own personal stuff is quite a good thing as well. 

The NHS is the last remnant of that idea, isn’t it?

I think it might be because when the welfare state was established, the NHS was its symbolic heart. And I think in many ways, that is in our deep national consciousness, all wrapped up with the victory over fascism, the end of the war and the new optimism. I think that is very much intertwined in our minds. It’s such a part of our identity and it impinges upon us all. We don’t all join the army and we may not all use libraries, but at some point, we will rub up against the National Health Service – often at times when we are fearful and vulnerable. 

There’s a lot of stuff about libraries in the book. What’s the potted version of why libraries are important in 2021?

A modern library isn’t just a place where you take books out – though that would still be a good thing. I’m celebrating the place where you can get advice, and where you can see a performance or be in a shared cultural space. Do we need places where you go and put six books under your chin? Maybe not. But do we need a place where you can go for information that you don’t have to pay for? I think that’s still really important. I’m extending the idea of the library to a shared space. 

How do you assess your argument against the negative aspects of the post-war consensus, especially in culture – for example, racism or sexism?

That’s an interesting point. I am really not celebrating the entirety of that culture. We are talking about the mores of the past. I don’t think the culture that made punk rock, for instance, was racist or sexist. But side by side with that were simple things we didn’t used to question as we do now, like the use of our language. I think we now realise that the simple, everyday language people used needed to be challenged. I would hope my book is different to a right-wing writer who wouldn’t argue that council housing or state education was better but that it was marvellous you could say anything you wanted about anyone. I’m saying the economic and social fabric was better back then and I’m sure right-wing writers would say the opposite. I don’t mind at all that we are moving towards a culture that challenges entitlement.

What about the link between the politics you write about and the culture that was created in those times?

I want to again make the point that I’m not anti-capitalist or anti private enterprise, but I don’t think you could have had The Beatles without council housing and state education. And I think the same applies to a lot of writers, playwrights and musicians. But I do think that, in both the production of an educated citizenry to appreciate it, and an educated citizenry to make it, it was really, really crucial. And this is one of my arguments against the culture we’re experiencing now. I’ve got nothing against the actors or musicians who’ve been drawn from privately-educated worlds of what you might call the upper-middle classes. I know a lot of these people and they’re nice people. The issue is that if you only have those people exclusively, you get one view of the world and it will be quite often, by definition, an accepting view of the world rather than a critical or dissenting view of the world. It will include one particular kind of art and art that always just makes you feel comfortable.

What about the role of benefits and grants?

It’s about removing the kind of fear from people’s lives. Of course, a lot of great art was made by working-class people in hardship. But if you exist in ‘the precariat’, as it’s called, if you’re completely at the whim of the gig economy, you won’t have the time or inclination to write or make music. What we had in those days was a culture that said you will be to a certain extent protected and provided for. You also need to see people who look and sound like you.

Before we rolled back the state completely, there was more of a feeling that we were not that different from each other. But I think as we’ve got rid of council housing and libraries, and as all kinds of things are fragmented, then I think our differences have made us feel ‘very’ different

How does the notion of class inform your book?

Before we rolled back the state completely, there was more of a feeling that we were not that different from each other. But I think as we’ve got rid of council housing and libraries, and as all kinds of things are fragmented, then I think our differences – especially economically – have made us feel very different. And that applies to the right and the left. Our loyalties have become both less tribal to class and more tribal in the sense of very small micro tribes, which can be just a handful of people like you who agree with you.

You point out polling that suggests there is a broad, probably under-reported, support for public ownership.  How does that butt against a media that doesn’t really want to follow that agenda?

The way our country is owned and run now is so opaque. I don’t think people realise this. I think that’s absolutely true. Imagine if you went up to someone in the street and said, “Who do you think should run the prisons? Do you think it should be the government or a company that makes bin bags?” I genuinely don’t think a lot people know who runs what. The irony is that our electricity supply is in state hands. It’s just the French state. We have this weird and arcane system where we’ve flogged off everything, but most people don’t realise that Seven and Trent Water aren’t the water board. You see with Matt Hancock giving his mates a test and trace contract, and people are beginning to go, hang on? Well, hello, this is how we’ve run the country for the past 40 years.

Would you concede that there must have been some appetite to get away from the world you are writing about in 1979?

I’m not ahistorical, I’m not saying the 1970s were a golden age. I am saying economically, socially, they’re really not as bad as you thought. I don’t think it was such a bad time to be a young working-class person, or indeed a middle-aged person. But I do take that point. And I am not saying that there was the golden age that we got rid of. We had an ideological revolution as ideological as the 1979 Iranian Revolution. It was absolutely driven by fundamentalist ideologues. With no great public appetite for it. I’m sure the average man and woman in the street would have said “I wish people weren’t on strike as much”, but I’m not sure if you’d said to them, “Do you want the trains to be privatised?” there was any great public appetite for that. It wasn’t all done for the good of the country. It was done, in many cases, for the good of a particular class and a small section of the country.

You always end up sounding like you’re pining for the days when everyone had to watch the Morecambe & Wise Show or whatever. But I do mean we have lost a sense of some shared life experiences, and the celebration of shared life experience.

In lockdown we’ve learned how much we really missed other people. Sartre said ‘Hell is other people’, but I think we see heaven can be other people, too. Lots of the great things we do, we do together

How might that message be communicated and nurtured among Millennials and Gen-Z? 

To an extent they’re already grasping it. The pandemic has shown we cannot just depend on the very thin network of commerce to get us through. There is a generation that’s grown up simply not knowing that once upon a time we had secure council housing. But how do we inform people? I don’t know, maybe you write books about it?

Is there is a conflict between the idea of the sanctity of individual identity and the idea of collective action and subsuming yourself into something greater?

We saw on Clapham Common that people getting out with other people is a good way of showing your anger and protesting. It’s much more effective than signing a petition. So I think it’s interesting. I think that kind of collective communality may be making a comeback.

In lockdown we’ve learned how much we really missed other people. Sartre said “Hell is other people”, but I think we see heaven can be other people, too. Lots of the great things we do, from collective action, or suffragettes, to being in a football crowd, lots of the best things we do, we do together. When we emerge from this, we will value the simple stuff like being able to give someone a hug or shake their hand. We might think how important that is to us and all that it implies, in its wider political resonances.

The Nanny State Made Me: In Search Of A Better Britain, Penguin, £9.99

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