Joyce McMillan: New slump but song remains same

Society has lost its way, people feel betrayed but we can’t rely on war to heal us this time around

THE CELTIC Connection Festival is probably the best idea ever conceived for brightening the dark nights of a Glasgow January; and last weekend, I found myself sitting among a hugely appreciative audience at the Tron, watching the Melting Pot Theatre Company of New York play out their powerful musical show, Woody Sez, about the life of the legendary musician and songwriter Woody Guthrie. It was just a century ago this year that Woodrow Wilson Guthrie was born, into a small-town Oklahoma family; and by the time he turned 30, he had built a remarkable career, shaped – like the lives of so many in his generation – by the experience of the Great Depression that began with the Wall Street Crash of 1929.

With America’s small farming communities devastated by dust and depression, the teenage Woody took to the roads and railways, jumping freight trains, walking the highways, hitching rides in the battered trucks of displaced families heading west.

What he saw there made a socialist of him, a belief born out of his rage at the betrayal of hard-working people by the system which was supposed to reward their efforts. And out of his anger, and the hillbilly musical tradition he had inherited from his mother, Woody forged a few dozen iconic songs, including the great anthem of the American left, This Land Is Your Land.

Things are very different now, of course. After half a century of postwar affluence, most of those who become unemployed today have a cushion of goods and property on which they can rely, at least for a time, while here in the UK, we have welfare benefits that help, however modestly, to keep hunger at bay.

Yet one thing about Woody’s great Depression songs seems instantly recognisable, to anyone observing our current sconomic crisis; and that is the acute sense of betrayal, the feeling that in being invited to work hard and play by the rules, the ordinary lower-middle-class workers of the west have been taken for a ride, and are now being denied the future they were promised, not only for themselves but – most painfully – for their chldren. This week, the media in Britain have been full of the row over the removal of Fred Goodwin’s knighthood, and the decision by the new Royal Bank of Scotland boss Stephen Hester to turn down his £900,000 or so annual bonus.

The truth is, though, that although the extravagant high-pay culture in the British financial sector is one symptom of an economy and society that has lost its way, it is not the most important factor in play. What really matters is the long, slow breaking, since the 1970s, of the deal that makes free enterprise compatible with democracy. The deal which says that while the rich will be free to get richer, middling people who work hard will also see things improving from decade to decade, and will be able to offer their children lives that are richer and more free than their own.

The reasons why this deal has been broken are complex, and range from genuine downward pressure on western incomes as we lose out to more competitive nations, to the adoption by western elites of an ideology which reassured them that massive inequalities would always be made tolerable, by the huge economic growth they would help to deliver.

Now, though, that 30-year bubble of free-market faith has burst. Millions of families across Britain and the United States are left scrabbling around in the debris of a jobs market increasingly characterised by chronic insecurity, low pay, and government subsidy for bad employment practices (46 million Americans are now officially defined as living in poverty).

Across the west, consumption grinds to a halt, while High Streets and malls fill with “To Let” signs; and the elites who thought it was clever to smash trade unions, destroy job security, and spend three decades bearing down on the real wages of ordinary workers, now find to their shock that those workers are the nation, and that without their prosperity and confidence, the nation is bust.

So far, so obvious; and thanks to the dogged rejection of extreme market solutions by some European governments – notably the Nordic countries, with their flat income distribution and superb public services, and the Germans, with their rigorous insistence on education and banking systems that support industry – we do have some models to follow, in preparing for a more balanced future.

The difficulty is, though, that our leaders show no real sign of being ready to abandon the ideological mindset that underpinned the current failure; and history suggests, frighteningly enough, that common decency and common sense are never enough to shift that entrenched right-wing belief-system, once it takes hold of an entire ruling class. At the end of the 1930s, what finally shifted their position was war. In the cause of licking Hitler, the destructive mantras of individualism and anti-statism were dropped, wealth was redistributed, excess consumption was curbed, and the state began to invest in its people again, even if only as potential warriors. And in 1945, the nation that emerged from the conflict was radically changed, far more equal, and determined that such disfiguring differences of wealth, health and opportunity should never again blight our national life.

So the question is whether we have learned anything from the last great cycle of Depression, and from the men and women like Woody Guthrie whose life’s work reflected that trauma. To be born into a lower-middle-class British household in the aftermath of the Second World War was indeed to be born into an aristocracy of sorts; not of wealth, but of opportunity, of care, of a society open to talent. That society was created, though, only out of the shock of a conflict that killed tens of millions; the old world of the 1930s died in an agony of mass slaughter.

And it will be to our eternal shame – here in Scotland, in the UK, and across Europe – if, this time around, we cannot find a way of building a 21st century society that restores the social contract between people and power; without waiting for such horror, to bring us to our senses again.