The post-war Labour government gets a generally good press nowadays. Evelyn Waugh, however, used to speak and write about “the Attlee Terror”, and not only on account of the demands of the Inland Revenue, something which, like most writers, most self-employed people indeed, he resented.
This was a time of food rationing, a time – remember – when you could not lawfully take more than a small sum of money out of the country. That restriction remained in place for years, long after the Conservatives were in office. A stamp in my first passport records that in 1957 I was taking £50 in, I assume, Sterling travellers’ cheques on what was my first visit to France. Simon Gray in “The Smoking Diaries” remembering Attlee’s England, “depleted by war” wrote that the travel allowance was “sixty pounds per annum per adult.”
It was also a time when young men were conscripted at the age of eighteen and compelled to serve two years in the Armed Forces. Some found this experience enjoyable and beneficial; for many it was a two-year lockdown on life.
In 1915, the introduction of conscription, a year into the terrible war, had met with strong opposition. It led to at least one cabinet minister’s resignation. In 1945, its continuation into a time of peace was accepted with scarcely a murmur.
We have enjoyed a lot of freedom since, but the outlook is gloomy. There are always good reasons for governments to restrict liberty and much of the time we acquiesce. The extraordinary impositions of the last 12 months have met with very little opposition and have for the most part been obeyed.
People have submitted to lockdown – that is to say, house arrest – because they have accepted, however grudgingly, that this is in both their own and the public interest. Acceptance has been made easier by technological advances which make communication, home-working and supply of goods possible and even no trouble at all – if, that is, you can make sense of instructions on websites.
These same advances mean, however, that governments and businesses know more about us as individuals than at any time in history. No totalitarian state – Fascist, Nazi or Communist – had access to anything like as much information about the private lives of citizens as a “caring” democracy has today.
Back in the days of “the Attlee terror” officials checking that regulations were not being disregarded were resented as “snoopers”. Orwell wrote somewhere that there was perhaps no one more disliked than a “Nosey Parker”. Now we perforce accept that Mr Parker will lawfully stick his nose in everywhere. In Edinburgh the absurd Scottish government is criminalising the expression of what it may deem to be “hate speech”, even if the supposedly offensive words were uttered only at your own breakfast table. How long before listening devices are installed alongside smoke alarms?
The pandemic has granted politicians the authority to make new regulations, or indeed new, supposedly temporary, laws, pretty well overnight, often, you think, because this is the latest jolly wheeze to have popped into their minds. One of the latest bright ideas to have come to them is to fine anyone £5000 if found in an airport intending to fly abroad without having gone through the required hoops.
During the War even the state restricted itself to posing the question “Is your journey really necessary”, and left you to decide for yourself. Now the decision is made for you. In Berlin they built a wall to keep citizens of the DDR confined. Now a ministerial whim suffices in our parliamentary democracy.
“My philosophy,” said the great Labour Foreign Secretary Ernie Bevin in answer to a journalist’s question, “is that you can go to Victoria Station and buy a ticket to wherever you damn well please”. Now you might still be able to buy the ticket; boarding the train would demand a good deal more.
Of course all these miracles of technology – apps and Zoom and whatever – have in many ways enriched our lives, given us new opportunities, even expanded our freedom. But equally, all this comes at a price. We suffer intrusion. We endure government by decree rather than law.
It will get worse. A return to “normality” won’t see us return to what was normal before the pandemic, let alone to what was the normal privacy and freedom enjoyed even thirty years ago. The genie is out of the bottle and won’t – can’t – be pushed back.
Long ago, in the fifties or sixties, there was an advertisement for a brand of cigarettes called Strand which aroused mockery. It showed a man in a raincoat smoking in a dark and slightly sinister alley. He looked to be up to no good, looked indeed like a rapist-in-waiting. The caption read “You’re never alone with a Strand”. The advertising campaign flopped and the brand soon disappeared.
Now, quite simply, you are never alone, or, at least, can never be sure of being alone. Big Brother or Big Sister is not only watching but taking notes. All for our own good and safety of course.