A NOBLE CALL – A NOBLE PLATFORM
Thank you for the honour of the penultimate Noble Call of the season. I’ve seen the Risen People three times now in the Abbey and on each occasion the cast have brought even more energy and panache to the performance. I don’t know what they are taking but it should be bottled and sold in the bar.
Abbey Cast of Risen People January 2014
I’m afraid I can’t dance, I can’t sing and I’m not a comedian, though some people might tell you otherwise, so you will have to put up with me saying what 1913 means to me for a few minutes.
What interests me most about the Lockout is its values. My parents were literally children of the Lockout. My mother was born in 1911 in North Cumberland Street and my father around the corner in Buckingham Street in 1912. My mother left school at eight after both her parents died in the Spanish ‘flu pandemic to help her sister, who was a dealer, sell fruit and vegetables from a handcart. My father was sent to industrial school for mitching and had any affinity with the new Irish Free State beaten out of him by the Christian Brothers. They were both among the hundreds of thousands working poor for whom the new dispensation was, if anything, worse than the old one.
I learnt about the Lockout and its values from them. But I grew up largely in post-War Britain. I still like to watch Second World War movies – I mean the old black and white ones made during the war. Whether the actors are speaking in the clipped public school accents of the officer class or comic cockney ones the dialogue is probably the most sophisticated and effective agitprop you are ever likely to hear – advocating the sort of social solidarity values Britain needed if it was to survive the years when Hitler dominated most of what is now the European Union.
I was one of the beneficiaries of those values reflected as they were in free education, free health care, slum clearance and full employment. In those days it required considerable ingenuity to avoid working for a living, as I discovered when I left school. These values came under attack almost as soon as the war ended. Ironically Britain was excluded from the US Marshall Plan to save Europe from communism. The new Labour government had to introduce severe austerity measures to repay all the money borrowed from Britain’s gallant ally in the West to fight the war and simultaneously had to fund a massive defence budget to confront its other former gallant ally in the East in case there was another one.
The Tories won the 1951 general election on an anti-austerity platform. Churchill dismissed the welfare state as ‘Queuetopia’. He said, ‘We are for the ladder. Let all try their best to climb it’. ‘They’, meaning Labour, were ‘for the queue. Let each wait in place until his turn comes’. The core values of the next 14 years of Tory rule were immortalised by Harold McMillan in his 1959 election slogan, ‘You’ve Never had it so good’. This was only surpassed by Maggie Thatcher in 1987 when she told Woman’s Own magazine there was ‘No such thing as society’.
A reaction against the regimentation of the war years and the hardships of the austerity years was inevitable. It just happened to be the wrong one. The triumph of possessive individualism slew many collectivist dragons along the way, of which the trade union movement was the greatest. Unions, which led the fight for social and economic justice across the industrialised world in the first half of the twentieth century, slowly sank into little more than alliances of sectional interest groups whose agendas were frequently hijacked by the most militant, sometimes the most selfish and often the most short sighted pressure groups among the membership. These sometimes mouthed the slogans of the left but they paved the way for Thatcherism.
Of course any movement is ultimately the sum of the people it represents and the new generation, my generation, the beneficiaries of the welfare state, were not interested in hackneyed ideas of social solidarity. We not only bought into the low tax, easy credit, value free consumer model but in the process pulled up the ladder behind us. Today we are discovering that the devil’s bargain not only locked out vulnerable low income groups but is now denying a future to many of our own children.
In Ireland the sequencing of events was somewhat different but the rhythm of change was the same. A few of us who thought we were engaged in a struggle to change society were actually trying to turn the clock back to the 1940s, to the high water mark of left social democracy and revolutionary communism.
Of course, we can’t turn the clock back but we can be driven backwards. I don’t believe we have much of a future if we don’t make our starting point the sort of social solidarity values that made post-war Europe a better place. Murphyism and its slimmed down neo-liberal model offer nothing except another terrifying turn on the roller coaster of boom and bust, yet there are no signs we will abandon it anytime soon. We continue to foot the bill for unsecured bank debts, we continue to allow free marketeers to dictate economic policy, we continue to march blindly towards a pensions time bomb and allow public services to be dismantled while we focus on irrelevancies like property tax. In fact the obsession with property not only shows we are still in bondage to Murphyism but exposes the poverty of our ambition as a people.
Is it being too ambitious to hope that we can at least guarantee our children, and grandchildren, the same basic rights and opportunities I grew up with in post war Britain almost 70 years ago? James Plunkett shared those social solidarity values; what I suppose we can christen the values of the welfare state. If we are to challenge the rule of Murphyism, we have to have the courage to demand the basic requirements of any civilised society – free health care, free education, free childcare, a secure roof over our heads, decent job opportunities and a pension we can live on in old age. We also have to be willing to pay the price to achieve them. This is hardly Larkin’s New Jerusalem but it would be better than life in the cellars of the New Babylon. William Martin Murphy’s heirs have nothing to fear from The Risen People if we remain poor in spirit.
Padraig Yeates, Abbey Theatre, January 31st, 2014