Section:GDN 1J PaGe:1 Edition Date:190906 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 5/9/2019 19:13 cYanmaGentaYellowblac
N
ot long after the referendum in
2016, a neighbour of ours suddenly
erected a big wooden fence around
her front garden. Well, it seemed
sudden. Our postman jokingly called
it “the Brexit wall ”, and although the
two events may have been entirely
unconnected, the fence took on a
symbolism it was probably never intended to have.
Whether it was there for reasons of privacy, security,
or simply to have something for the ivy to grow on, we’ll
never know. I don’t like to ask. But the fence reinforced
my belief that community life has never been, and never
will be, as straightforward as some dew y-eyed nostalgics
would like to present it. That thought recurred this
week, as the country staggers towards a general election.
Whenever it does fi nally take place, both the Tories and
Labour will make a pitch – in the Midlands and the north
of England particularly – on the presumption that the
leave vote represented a desire to take things back to
how they supposedly once were.
The fence incident, and the sense of privacy and
desire for individual space it seemed to suggest, reminds
me of many of the interviewees featured in the historian
Jon Lawrence’s new book , Me, Me, Me? The Searchfor Community in Postwar England. In it, Lawrence
rescues dozens of voices from dusty transcripts buried
in university libraries to build a picture of how British
people have felt about their lives and the places they live
in over many decades.
These are not vox pops. In successive studies people
were interviewed at length, over many months, at work
and at home, and encouraged to put across their side of
the extraordinarily complex story of post war society.
What they reveal, unsurprisingly, is that people hate
being told what to do: whether by family members,
neighbours, bosses, colleagues or politicians.
But at the same time they do want to feel supported.
When government fails and basic needs go unmet,
people turn in on themselves and try to look after
their own as best they can. The idea that community
is bolstered by character-building hardship is a myth.
An unemployed Sheppey couple interviewed by the
sociologist Ray Pahl in 1982 told him that when it was
a struggle to maintain family life, it made you “sort of
more narrow”. In Lawrence’s words , “the outside world
ceased to matter when they were struggling to survive”.
Lawrence reminds us of what we should
never forget: that to experience class at the
“wrong ” end of the scale – the economicallyJohnson acts like a winner. Reality may have other ideas Martin Kettle, page 3
The New York high life has given me a new fear – of lifts Emma Brockes, page 4
The death that revealed the CIA’s darkest secrets The long read, page 9
The Guardian
ILLUSTRATION:
NATE KITCH
PHOTOGRAPH:
CHRISTOPHER
THOMOND/GUARDIANFriday 6 September 2019
Ly nsey
Hanley
Wo rk i n g- c l a s s
voters w ill want
no part in a fake
‘culture war’
Lynsey Hanley
is the author of
Respectable:
Crossing the
Class DivideOpinion
and ideasG2
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