Days of Lost Hope

In 1975, the BBC screened a television series called ‘Days of Hope’. This was directed by Ken Loach and portrayed the lives of a working-class family from 1916 to the General Strike in 1926. It showed how the revolutionary fervour of the time concluded when it was ‘betrayed’ by Labour leaders when they called off the General Strike. The programme thus followed a narrative common on the left, in which failure is explained by the cowardice or malevolence of the leadership. This explanation is selective because only some politicians are deemed to be traitorous. The greatest betrayals by left-wing leaders were in the communist states of Soviet Union, China and Cambodia which slaughtered millions of their own people.

There is a wider significance to Days of Hope, and that is that it marks the conversion of left-wing movements and specifically Marxism in Britain from hope to nostalgia. The predominant intellectuals on the left by this time were historians rather than economists. There was little attempt on the Left to understand how changes to the production and distribution of goods and services were radically changing society. Instead, the Left became committed to heroic retreats in a futile defence of declining industries. The extreme example is the miners’ strike of 1984-5. An heroic organisational effort supported coal miners opposing the closure of loss-making pits, and its defeat had catastrophic results for miners and their communities. But other European countries managed a similar decline in coal-mining as cheaper and less polluting forms of energy were introduced. The difference there was that governments did not regard miners as enemies to be crushed but as people to be helped. In one former mining town in Western Germany that I visited ten years ago, the Land and Federal governments had funded a new university and shopping centre, and invested in re-training former miners.  

My own days of hope were less radical than those experienced after the First World War. The election of a Labour government in 1997 brought in many reforms, economic growth and significant improvements in public services. I remember a sense of optimism, as well as a shared commitment to common European values of peace, welfare and respect for different cultures. All that is now in retreat. We have domination by staggeringly wealthy oligarchs, who have discovered that electoral success comes from spreading hate and fear without regard for the truth. They fund compliant political parties led by mediocre salesmen and journalists who dutifully minimise taxes on the rich and direct massive public funds in their own direction. The public purse has become a resource to be looted instead of the means for supporting a better quality of life for the population. This criminality is supported by spreading hatred and suspicion, which in turn legitimises violence against people of different ethnicity or appearance, all of whom are falsely designated as ‘immigrants’. 

We face a difficult few years ahead. It is up to us to do what we can to oppose the oligarchs and assert our common values.