‘Remember snoek?’ asked my husband, as if I were old enough to be his mother. In 1947, ten million tins of this distinctive-tasting fish, Thyrsites atun, were imported from South Africa to take the place of sardines. The Conservatives complained in Parliament that the Labour administration’s austerity diet was damaging the health of British people. It was more likely that people simply felt put upon, developing a dislike of the very name snoek, which had been favoured officially as preferable to the alternative snake mackerel.
We tend to identify austerity with Attlee (1945-51), though the word as a political ideal had been introduced under the coalition during the second world war. Austerity had a counterpart in utility, the designation for clothes and furniture made in accordance with official allowances of materials. ‘Frankly, Meadows, can you see me in a utility suit?’ ran the caption to an Osbert Lancaster cartoon in 1942.
We were brought back to the consideration of state-sponsored austerity last week by the Office for Budget Responsibility’s complaint about being dragged into David Cameron’s justification of public-spending cuts. But it seems to me very different in the streets of Britain today from the state of things in the 1940s. If we are invited to think we are experiencing austerity, despite the heaps of cheap clothes in Primark or of expensive food in Waitrose, then it is Mr Cameron’s doing.
In April 2009, not so long ago, at the Conservative spring conference (that needless enterprise) he promised an ‘age of austerity’. In the same speech he promised a ‘People’s Right To Know’, a plan under which ‘Every item of government spending over £25,000, nationally and locally, will have to be published online.’ No doubt it is, somewhere, though it is no more use to me than the cones hotline.
Austerity was a good honest label to popularise in the 1940s. In ancient Greek austeros meant the quality of making the tongue dry and rough. As a metaphor, austerity was used in the English of the Middle Ages to signify the sternness of justice, as at the Last Judgment. Mr Cameron’s tongue may been forked rather than rough, but he has not yet come to judgment.
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