The New Estate in Great Britain

BY CHARLES CURRAN NEW class has come into existence in Great Britain.

It has been created by the two great pressures that have transformed our national life since the decision to abandon Free Trade in 1931—the industrial revolution that has moved several millions of people to new jobs and new homes, and the political revolution that has given the wage- earner full employment in a Welfarg State. A vast resettlement. of wealth and of human beings, has taken place in this country. It is the most far-reaching change since the coming of indus- trialism. Its consequences can be seen in every corner of our social fabric; they are altering our politics, our newspapers, our habits of living, our entire national character.

One of its consequences is the creation of a new class com- posed of the manual workers who are the principal beneficiaries of the resettlement. They have been lifted out of poverty and also out of their old surroundings. Now they form the bulk of the inhabitants on the municipal housing estates that encircle London and every other urban centre. They are the New Estate of the realm. '

They began to emerge in the decade before the war. Those were the years of the great migrAion from the coal, cotton and shipbuilding areas where lost markets had produced mass unemployment. The 1932 tariff revitalised steel and engineering; the electric grid, completed in 1933, provided abundant power; cheap money made capital easy to raise. Between them these things altered the map of industrial England. They marked it with, for example, the new steelworks at Corby, in the heart of rural Northamptonshire; the expansion of chemicals in south Lancashire, of motor-cars in Oxford, Dagenham and the Midlands; the forest of new factories in the Bristol-Gloucester area; and, most conspicuous of all, the great growth of light industries in the South that turned Greater London. Middle- sex, Essex and most of Berkshire into manufacturing zones.

The mass deployment of workers caused by these changes was made possible by a boom in house-building. During the six years 1933-39 more than two million new houses went up. Nearly half a million of them were built, owned and let by local authorities with the aid of Government subsidies. The Council house became an important part of the national land- scape.

Building policy since 1945 has spread the New Estate far beyond its pre-war frontiers. In the past ten years a further two million houses have been completed—and 1,600,000 of them are council-owned.

Now that the resettlement is almost. complete, the pattern of the New Estate has become clear. Here you can study a working model of the promised land that the reformers have been demanding ever since the attack began on the evils of Victorian industrialism. This is what life is like when all the dragons that menace the manual worker have been slain; when poverty, unemployment and insecurity are wiped out; when houses. jobs, schools and social services are available to everybody; when all the perorations have been fulfilled. What sort of life is it?

LIFE BY PROXY Any attempt at a fair assessment must start from two facts, both incontrovertible. Firstly, the New Estate is a way of life that its inhabitants find completely satisfactory; secondly, they have many good reasons for doing so. The critics who deride it as a Subtopian desert, a spiritual and cultural void, must remember what went before it. Contrast it with the mass unemployment of Tonypandy or Oldham in the 1930s; or with the Middlesbrough that Lady Bell described in 1911; still more, with William Booth's picture of working-class London in 1890 or the Manchester that Engels saw in 1844—and it is a near-paradise. It does represent by far the highest level that the common man has ever reached in this country. What- ever its shortcomings, no serious observer will dispute that it has lifted a heavy load from our social conscience.

One word sums up the New Estate : the word 'security.' It is security in working-class terms, maintained and enforced by working-class methods. The traditional values of the, middle and professional classes form no part of it; among wage-earners these values are meaningless.

To the middle-class citizen, economic security is a goal to be reached primarily by personal effort. It is a matter of thrift, self-help, self-improvement, competitive striving. But the manual worker sees it differently. To him, any betterment in' his conditions of life is essentially a collective process—something to be achieved not by himself as an individual but in company with his fellows. He will organise for it, vote for it, strike for it, always with thetn. It is 'Us' not 'I.' Eugene Debs, the American Socialist leader, put this attitude into one sentence when he said, '1 don't want to rise from the ranks; 1 want to rise with them' The New Estate embodies the ideal of organised manual labour—a non-competitive community whose members are cared for collectively, where full employment ensures a rough equality of effort, status and incomes, where the individual citizen need not strive to rise or fear to fall. It is a harbour where economic gales do not blow. And its attractions are very real.

For in thei world of the New Estate there is no cqmpulsion on any household to make its own provisions for childbirth, or sickness, or education, or insurance, or unemployment, or retirement—since the State takes care of them all. The traditional responsibilities of ,the husband and father are either drastically reduced or removed altogether. It is a world in which wages can be treated as not much more than pocket- money—a cash surplus to be spent largely on pleasures, instead of being concentrated on necessities.

Nothing reveals this pocket-money basis more clearly than the rent structure of the New Estates This structure, founded on subsidies paid from public funds, replaces the obligation on a citizen to provide a home for himself and his family out of his own resources. An example will illustrate how it works.

In the city of Norwich there are 8,000 council houses which are let at 7s. a week, less than the price of two packets of cigarettes. This almost nominal rent is made possible because there is a combined rates-and-taxes subsidy on each house that totals 15s. a week. So prosperous are some of these tenants that it is worth while for the Council to provide lock-up garages for their motor-cars. (A garage costs 7s. 6d. a week. 6d. more than a house; for there is no subsidy, as yet, on garages.) A similar shift in expenditure away from necessities to luxuries can be traced, of course, in many other directions—in the diversion of money to tobacco,, alcohol, gambling, amuse- ments and so on. It is broadly true that the New Estate gets its television sets out of the rent subsidy, since the hire-purchase cost of a set ranges from about 25s. a week upwards. This, to a middle-class onlooker, is life by proxy. It reduces personal responsibility to a minimum. It allows the freedom of an adult to be combined with the carefree security of a child. All these things can be said. And yet—whatever the middle- class critic may think—it is highly popular with its inhabitants, who form a considerable proportion of the British electorate. So firmly established is it that nothing short of war or economic collapse is likely to overturn it. What sort of citizen does it produce?

PRIVATE WORLD Go into a New Estate household in any part of the country and you are likely to find a pattern of living that is almost the same everywhere, with few regional variations. It is a place of mass-production comfort, made easy by hire-purchase. The living room will probably contain a cage with a canary or a budgerigar; there will be a sideboard carrying family photo- graphs; sometimes the piece of furniture that is sold as a Holly- wood cocktail cabinet. Ideas of furnishings are derived from the cinema and the women's magazines.

The focal points of the living-room will be, usually, a tiled fireplace and a wireless set—objects that have become, to the New Estate, what the'piano used to be in working-class house- holds; they are the symbols of conspicuous expenditure. Books are rare, bookshelves rarer still. For the New Estate the word `book' means a periodical such as Reveille or Woman's Own; something with stiff covers is called 'a library book.'

From September to May one or more members of the house- hold will devote an evening every. week, to filling in football coupons with forecasts of match results. The private daydream of winning a large sum of money in this way is all but universal. You can start a conversation on any doorstep by asking 'What would you do if you won the pools?' It is a question that almost every adult has pondered in detail.

But even more than the football coupon, it is the reading- matter of the New Estate that gives the key to its state of mind. It buys newpapers and weekly periodical's in large numbers; and nearly all of them (the main exception is the News of the World) display one characteristic in common. They exploit the tabloid method of presentation that has become more and more Popular with the British public since the war—and nowhere more than on the New Estate. This tabloid revolution (it is no less) in popular journalism may be summed up as burying Lord Northcliffe.

When Northcliffe set out seventy years ago to capture the mass public created by the 1870 Education Act and its succes- sors, his main weapon was News. He evolved a fresh formula for it, one that side-tracked the solid Victorian dailies; he made it pre-digested, crudely simple, easy to read, heavily spiced with personalia—but News all the same. The formula, as developed by Northcliffe and his imitators, has been highly successful and it is not yet worn out. But a rival formula has now arrived. Instead of News the tabloids offer escape from the news.

It can now be seen that when the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 the fall-out started something like a genetic mutation in the minds of large sections of the British people. They. received an apocalyptic shock. Fear, helpless and be- wildering, struck deep into them. Year by year since then, atomic and nuclear developments have driven it deeper still.

Nowhere was the shock more severe than among the manual workers of the New Estate; for it coincided with the achieve- ment of all the security for which they had been struggling over three generations. No sooner had the goal been reached than the foundations began to rock. Escape from fear became a clamorous psychological necessity. The tabloid is an exact response to that demand. (Necessarily it is a highly profitable response; the New Estate is a big public, avid for consumer goods, able to afford them in quantities, and therefore valuable to advertisers.) The skilled technicians of the tabloid press are giving the New Estate something that it wants urgently and desperately; a refuge from nuclear nightmares and threatening chaos and a world of baffling problems for which nobody can provide slogan solutions. The tabloids are not pornographic, as some inexact critics suppose. They offer a simple, cheerful, manage- able universe, a warm, cosy place of sex, excitement, triviality and fantasy. They supply the New Estate with an art-form of its own in the comic strip—a psychologically accurate device for providing selected strata of readers with wish-fulfilment picture patterns in which they can see themselves as potent young men or sexually irresistible young women.

The psychological hunger of the New Estate is exhibited also in its preoccupation with the shadow personalities of radio, television, the cinema and the gramophone record—and in the large amount of space which the tabloids devote to them. Some of these personalities have now acquired a three- dimensional existence in the minds of their devotees. (Last month, for example, large numbers of people sent postal orders to Mr. Dan Archer, an imaginary character in a BBC serial story about a farm; asking- him to supply them with Christmas poultry.) These figures, some of them real, some mythical, are the gods and goddesses of the New Estate. They inhabit the day-dream heaven of wealth, luxury and sexual attraction to which the football pool coupon will one day provide a ticket of admission.

An interior life of this kind, and on this scale, is something that has not previously existed in England. It contrasts sharply with the expectations that buoyed up the social reformers— that once the manual worker was freed from the clutches of poverty and insecurity he would begin to participate in our cultural heritage. Nothing of the kind has happened. So far, at any rate, there is nothing to justify the hopes nursed by such bodies as the Workers' Educational Association; all its lectures put together would finish nowhere in competition with Miss Diana Dors. In fact, there was far more mental ferment among manual workers in the Rhondda Valley of 1910 or in the Glasgow of 1915 than there is now throughout the New Estate.

AND NOW What (if anything) shall we do about it? Must we accept this gilt-edged version of Disraeli's other England, this passive. docile mass of suggestible citizens eager to contract out of responsibility into fantasy? Must we perhaps see the New Estate spread gradually until it covers most of the land?

Without attempting any final answers, I will offer some tentative comments.

Basically, the New Estate is a post-dated cheque signed a hundred years ago and presented for payment now. It exists because nineteenth-century England acquiesced, though with many misgivings, in a working-class that never lost sight of destitution. No doubt that was largely unavoidable. It was the equivalent of a Five-Year Plan, the comptilsory curtailment of consumption so that capital might be accumulated. No doubt also it was accompanied both by a great many opportunities for individual advancement and by a continuous rise in the national standards of life. The existence of the New Estate is itself a vindication of those decades of forced abstinence. The rewards have been distributed at last.

All this must be said. But one result is that the manual worker flees front insecurity, material and psychological, with the violence of a stampede. This is seen, not in the New Estate only, but throughout British industry--=where a job has become something like a piece of land to a peasant, a property- right to be guarded against all comers. The Welfare State is in danger of becoming the Stationary State.

Yet what else should we expect? Given his industrial back- ground, why should the manual worker feel any differently?

Self-confidence is bred only from security. So are assertive- ness, willingness to change and experiment, readiness to accept responsibility. But the breeding is a slow process. It will prob- ably take some decades of full employment to lay the ghosts that have haunted the manual worker ever since the industrial revolution. But there are various ways in which the exorcism can be speeded up. First I would put the expansion of the property-owning impulse—by enlarging the idea of material possessions, by encouraging investment, most of all by pro- moting house purchase. The dismantling of the rent-subsidy structure can be carried out only if it is linked with proposals for selling the houses to the occupants. Unless he is in actual poverty, the State-aided tenant is a social offence. Reality will break into the New Estate as soon as the cost of the home becomes the first charge on the family income.

But nobody who upholds the beliefs and the values of traditional England can leave the matter there. Somehow or other, those beliefs and values must be brought to the New Estate—as Wesley brought Evangelical Christianity to the proletariat of the industrial revolution, and as Arnold created a framework to mould the sons of ascendant Victorian indus- trialists. Conceivably an Education Minister of- genius might do it; or someone uniting a social conscience with the talents of a Northcliffe to exploit the possibilities of television. It is a task that should (and, I believe will) absorb the imagination of the new Toryism.