Britain as Social Democracy
Fyvel, T.R.
Changing Britain-4 Britain ciS Social Democracy By T R. Fyvel London Along with the shifts in the structure of the British upper class and upper middle class, the majority of the British...
...Some four out of five films shown are American — Brando...
...They want a better British national theater, cinema and culture and therefore a new society...
...The leading chain stores, which do an enormous volume of business, are as smoothly efficient as their American counterparts, and their customs and goods—especially in women's and men's fashions—are emphatically "classless...
...For instance, there are the Teddy Boys, who form an interesting case of a minor cultural secession...
...Another phenomenon Americans can now also encounter in England are some of their most familiar television serials...
...J. B. Priestley, in the New Statesman, has continued the fight against what he terms "Admass...
...away from the slums, from those endless, grey, drab working-class districts in London and elsewhere, and out into suburbia and a life based on a semi-detached small house with garden, usually with television and washing machine within and increasingly often a small car at the gate...
...nor are its gadgets different...
...Starting with a broadside in the Architectural Review in which he coined the term "Subtopia," Ian Nairn, one of the young editors of that review, launched a campaign against the planless spoliation of the English countryside which has been steadily maintained...
...Broadly, Britain has been moving from the historic society of cultural contrasts between middle-class and working-class life toward a new society with only a single culture and fairly fluid income brackets...
...In terms of buying newspapers, for instance, the British easily lead the world with 660 newspapers bought each day per 1,000 inhabitants...
...Another advance is reflected by a new look in the British landscape...
...But, whatever the definition of their views, they have already put them forward with enough vigor to create a public stir...
...Tin Pan Alley has spilled over heavily into England, and the leading English singers have to adopt a lesser or greater measure of American accent...
...In all this expanded popular culture...
...Indeed, there are signs that the present British Welfare and Advertisers' State has produced its special problems...
...That is...
...has a circulation of 4.-million: Lord Beaverbrook's Daily Express has 4 million...
...It is applied to a radical group which includes John Osborne, whose Look Back in Anger is now running on Broadway...
...As such it is picturesque...
...The London Daily Mirror, at once tabloid and intellectually radical, with Richard Crossman as political commentator...
...American influences are strong...
...Nonetheless, there are fears that this flood of commercialized culture is not only eroding popular taste but may kill everything that is better...
...Mansfield are household names...
...Then there is music: On the popular art level London has become the jazz center of Europe: it has its youthful bands which specialize in all the various classical jazz strains, and visiting virtuosos like Loui-Armstrong are the idols of the young...
...The BBC's leading political program, Panorama, has attracted a regular audience of several millions, while another BBC program has turned Sir Mortimer Wheeler, a redoubtable archaeologist, into one of the country's best-known television personalities...
...Monroe...
...Presley...
...Meanwhile, extremely well-produced weeklies like Woman and Woman's Own, with circulations respectively of 3.2 and 2.5 million, are now among the top-earning journals...
...The term was coined, somewhat irrelevantly, in connection with Kingsley Amis's novel Lucky Jim...
...Kenneth Tynan, an intellectual and dashing writer on the theater...
...but at the point where the Teddy Boy style has coincided with gang life and delinquency, a new problem has arisen...
...Traveling through Britain today, one sees continuous, sprawling colonies of well-built, well-planned and monotonously mass-produced small houses...
...At any rate, a sharp reaction against this laissez-faire in mass culture has recently made itself felt...
...With their surroundings of poster-lined roads, factories, cinemas and filling stations, these Estates form a large part of the new landscape decried as "Subtopia...
...The violent Industrial Revolution had turned the English towns into dark, smoke-stained and noisy conurbations...
...While the popular newspapers have lowered their sights, public libraries report a steady shift from light toward serious reading...
...Malcolm Mug-geridge warned the other day against the worst of possibilities, that "a few huge newspapers and trusts, utterly dependent on advertisers, will increasingly dominate the scene, prepared to engage in any sensational stunt and utterly indifferent to standards...
...Changing Britain-4 Britain ciS Social Democracy By T R. Fyvel London Along with the shifts in the structure of the British upper class and upper middle class, the majority of the British nation—the industrial workers—has undergone a striking transformation in the last twenty years...
...They are proclaimed Socialists, but have little concern with the Labor movement...
...The Teddy Boys are groups of youths, mostly young artisans and workers who sport Edwardian draped jackets (hence their name), stovepipe trousers and elaborate hair-styles and devote much care and expense to their somewhat outre costume...
...Among Sunday-papers, the News of the World sells close to 7 million copies a day...
...On the face of it, one can say that in England of 1957 something of a high-pressure Advertisers' Society has grown up alongside the British Welfare State...
...For most British workers, the postwar trend has been upward...
...Here we have a social change which is decisive...
...The vogue of Tin Pan Alley hides an unprecedented boom in the sale of classical records...
...These are the so-called "Council Estates," put up by local authorities with subsidies from local and state taxation and designed mainly for working-class families...
...In a sense, they are the spokesmen of a new age...
...It has been said with some justice that even high-pressure advertising, combined with women's magazines and television, is helping young working-class women to move out of their former narrow way of life...
...This same message also seems to emerge from the writings of the literary set called the Angry Young Men...
...Now the British workers are swiftly moving beyond these older suburbs into ever-spreading outer rings of Council Estates...
...At least on cultural and educational questions, one can say that the era of neo-Tory quietism is over...
...Every second household has television, almost one in five a car or motorcycle...
...The spread of popular culture does have its stimulating sides...
...the illustrated Sunday Pictorial over -million...
...On the majority level of commercial crooning and hand-music...
...Television has stirred up widespread new interest in archaeology, galleries and museums, politics and social questions...
...The Council House may be small, but it is a planned modern house, no different in kind from larger middle-class houses...
...class" is going out and "income bracket" is taking its place...
...One can see this change reflected in the sale of consumer goods...
...But the most profound effect of the social leveling has shown itself in mass entertainment and communications...
...The period of the aftermath of war, in which discussion was mainly political and focused on Labor's Welfare State, is over...
...The middle classes were the first to more out again into those pleasant garden suburbs which used to mark the limits of England's towns...
...That is...
...And these proportions must increase...
...The subsidized National Health Service and the much-expanded State Education system are well known...
...The conclusion drawn is that materialism, even welfare materialism, is not enough...
...The writings of these allegedly angry young men show an engaging confusion...
...The power of the scientists and the streamlined shapes of the new nuclear-power stations, the expansion of mass entertainment and the reaction to it, the immigration from the Commonwealth which is forging new links, the revived esthetic socialism of the young intellectuals —these are some of the starting points of what is clearly a new and changed era in British life...
...First of all sartorially...
...In the last few years, television has also expanded enormously—there are three times more sets in Britain than in all Continental Europe—with commercial television expanding alongside the BBC and drawing an advertising revenue of $150 million a year, and with television stars reflecting an unprecedented cult of the personality...
...In The Uses of Literacy, a study of current mass entertainment which has quickly become a sociological landmark, Richard Hoggart, a young university lecturer, inveighed passionately against the "candyfloss culture" now offered to the British working class...
...Education problems, too, have once again become news and a subject for intense discussion...
...The phenomenon is interesting, for it represents the first instance in years of English working-class youths no longer imitating their social betters but seeking their own sartorial self-expression...
...and Lindsay Anderson, whose documentary film on Covent Garden won this year's top prize at Venice...
...These popular papers are becoming more and more like daily magazines, featuring celebrity stories, gossip columns and especially women's fashion and household pages...
...The public has been shocked by the anti-social and destructive attitudes displayed by some of the Teddy Boy gangs...
...Suez, if nothing else, ended it for Britain, as the sputniks may do for the United States...
...Still, this remains a minority interest...
...To some extent these figures are boosted because the papers are bought for their betting pages—for news about the football pools, in which 30-40 per cent of all households take part, and about horse-and dog-racing...
...they are at once Little Englanders and internationalists, against capitalist culture and attracted by America...
...Over two million Council Houses have been built since the war alone, and roughly one working-class household in four today lives on such an Estate...
Vol. 40 • November 1957 • No. 47
