By James Meek, Verso Books, 2014, pp229, £12.99
Book Review by Andrew Noble
Within living memory we British thought it possible that our seemingly mature democracy entailed of its nature open mindedness. That is ideas, especially our crucial economic ones, were inherently pragmatic in that they were open to constant scrutiny as to what they were practically achieving. We prided ourselves as an anti-ideological people of robust common sense; ours was a relatively happy land where compromise and conciliation were always finally available. For us, Marxism, especially the Stalinist version, rightly represented the catastrophic destructive consequences of an allegedly progressive but absolutist ideology running unchecked.
James Meek, like so many of our most important Scottish writers, is a man of global passage and curiosity. He is, in turn, investigative journalist, political thinker and, most importantly, an extremely fine novelist. His extraordinary novel, The People’s Act of Love, is a historical work set in Russia just prior to the Bolshevik revolution which remarkably foresees the world of terrorist violence in which we all increasingly exist.
Meek has also had contemporary actual experience of Russia and the Ukraine during the bizarre breakup of the Soviet Union and the appearance of oligarchic hyper capitalism whereby Marxist promise of economic equality has been totally inverted. A kind of sub Darwinist world has been created, with the inevitable economic result which it is that the tiny minority of the rich (1%) get richer and the poor get grotesquely poorer.
The present book reveals that, albeit in less extreme form, Meek perceived that returning to Britain we, post-Thatcher, were in thrall to a similar process. He reveals Thatcher as the matriarch of this movement with Blair as her son and heir. Blair, of course, is worshipped by the present government as they attempt to consummate his legacy. Thatcher was, in fact, a kind of malignant hybrid composed of America neo-conservative elements and her implicit belief that she was our saviour from imminent Communism. As she wrote of the miners’ strike: ‘what the strike’s defeat established was that Britain could not be made ungovernable by the Fascist left’.
A Marxist Britain is, of course, a past and present fantasy. What Thatcher did was create a left wing monster of all pervasive evil which would justify an extremist destruction of it. As Meek points out, she was never a creature of intellectual or cultural breadth, and had a political mind-set derived from her grocer father and a cursory reading of Friedrich Hayek. Meek describes Hayek thus:
‘The Road to Serfdom claims that socialism inevitably leads to communism and that communism and Nazi-style fascism are one and the same. The tie that links Stalin’s USSR and Hitler’s Germany, in Hayek’s view is the centrally planned economy – as he portrays it, the attempt by a single central bureaucracy to direct all human life, to determine all human needs in advance and organise provision, limiting each to their rationed dole and their allotted task.’
Her answer to this was, behind a mask of reforming the nationalised industries, to smash them up and replace them with frequently foreign fiscal and technological energies. What Meek displays, with a novelist’s eye for telling detail and empathy for much human suffering, is that this policy has been in every respect catastrophic. Like Blair, she believed that privatisation was implicitly modernisation. In his six chapters of acute analysis Meek reveals how the post office, the railways, the water boards, the power generators, the NHS and the privatisation of property have delivered us a series of reckless disasters whereby our technological prowess has suffered and that much of the wealth is outwith British hands.
It is perhaps a desperate sign of the times that it takes a great journalist/ novelist to write such a book. Not only politics but economics has washed its hands of everyday reality. If this process is allowed to complete its programme one cannot but think that Britain faces a fate similar to Chile’s, with a tiny minority of hyper-rich, a neutered middle-class and a massive impoverished majority. Pinochet, after all, was not a court favourite for nothing.