Thursday 26 April 2012

Nick Cohen

In the new edition of Standpoint magazine, Nick Cohen spends most of what is ostensibly a television column writing about Things Can Only Get Bitter. And, happily for me, he's very flattering: 'the most interesting essay on British culture I have read since George Walden's New Elites.'

He also, I'm glad to see, credits Dan Atkinson's blog entry that originally inspired the piece.

There's the bit where Cohen says my 'grasp of politics is feeble', of course, but obviously I think he's wrong. It's not really true that I'm 'interested solely in the left' - hell, I've just spent the last two months writing about the John Major government for my forthcoming book on the 1990s. But this essay is about the left-inclined section of a particular generation, and is therefore necessarily partial.

He is right, however, that my interests are parochial. Britain fascinates me, and British culture is what I write about. I don't really feel qualified to comment on international subjects.

This is the bit I really like: 'Yet for all his parochialism, his description of how we moved from the harsh and confrontational world of Thatcher to the soft and mendacious world of Blair remains superb.'

As someone who's enjoyed Cohen's own books, I'm rather pleased with that.

2 comments:

Tyrone Jenkins said...

Sorry to bombard you with yet another post(ing), but have you been watching D.Sandbrooks series THE 70s? As a post-war British social history junkie (or something!) I'm wallowing in this series and the recent spate of books! D.Sandbrooks premise that individualist aspiration created Thatcher rather being an outcome of her ideology/policies is interesting though not quite as groundbreaking as the progammes publicity suggests. The argument about the 60s not really happening for the majority of us until about 1972/3 seems to be growing in credence. Notwithstanding these caveats this is an excellent series and Sandbrook is a great presenter. His suggestion that modern Britain is largely a product of that decade is sound, though as a social democratic leftie I think the neo-liberal agenda presents a few problems. Perhaps you could pitch a series about the 80s to the BBC?
One last thing: do you recal a 1982 Channel Four series called THE SIXTIES, narrated by James Bolam? It was one of the earliest retrospectives of the decade and was thematic rather than chronological. Its impossible to get hold of a copy and there's nothing on youtube etc. A young Francis Wheen wrote the accompanying book.

Alwyn W. Turner said...

Thanks for your comments, Tyrone. I saw the first episode of The 70s - need to catch up with part two before it runs out of time. Good stuff, I thought. It skips across the surface, of course, but this is modern television, not the best medium for in-depth analysis. I find Sandbrook a really engaging TV presence, though, which is good, because I do like his books where there's so much more room to explore his thesis.

The appeal of Thatcher, I thought, was that - despite the self-image of being a conviction politician - she was actually something of a blank canvas onto which very different groups of people painted their own pictures.

There was very little common ground between, say, Rupert Murdoch, Mary Whitehouse and Paul Weller, except that they all voiced support for Thatcher. (Weller only briefly, I know, but he did represent in that moment a section of her constituency.) It was an unstable coalition from the outset and destined to fall apart. A stronger Labour Party could have torn that alliance to pieces in the early-1980s: its success was by no means as assured as some portray it in retrospect.