The birth of modern Britain

‘Does history repeat itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce?’ asked Julian Barnes in A History of the World in 10½ Chapters. ‘No, that’s too grand, too considered a process. History just burps, and we taste again that raw-onion sandwich it swallowed centuries ago.’ Reading David Kynaston’s densely detailed new book — in a ‘projected sequence of books about Britain between 1945 and 1979’ with the slightly magniloquent general title of Tales of a New Jerusalem — there isn’t half a whiff of onions.

We have an Old Etonian prime minister with a chancellor ideologically hellbent on belt-tightening; we have a poisonous and sometimes violent debate about immigration; we have fears about the consequences for the national moral character if homosexuals are accorded equal rights; we have a national epidemic of hand-wringing about selective education; we have a political class dismayed that young people don’t seem to give a toss about politics (‘Western Germany, steel nationalisation, the constitutional future of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, the Singapore Elections’, reported an unbelieving advisory committee, ‘nearly all of them seem incapable of the slightest interest in, let alone enthusiasm for, any of these topics’).

We also have mail-order shopping starting to eat into high-street sales; and we have a new entertainment medium that appears to spell doom for established formats (variety theatres closing down; cinema attendances in the doldrums; fears for electoral turnout: ‘What will the one-eyed monster devour next?’). Plus, these at least appearing to be immutable laws of nature, we have Bruce Forsyth on the telly of an evening and the bien-pensants of Hampstead getting their balls in an uproar about a burger joint opening.

The short period to which Kynaston addresses himself here, however, is more than just a foreshadowing. It is where the social order we recognise now — the consumer society, if you like — begins to get going.