United Kingdom? (Routledge Revivals)

Class, Race and Gender since the War

E. Cashmore

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780415661843
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135097523
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

First published in 1989, United Kingdom? examines the three main divisions in British society in the post-war period: class, race and gender. During the 1980s there was an increasing concern about deep, and often bitter, divisions in British society. Events such as the miners' strike of 1984-5, the riots in Handsworth, Tottenham and Brixton, and the women's peace camp at Greenham Common all demonstrated the opposing views and cultures of the British public. However, the UK at the time was also able to show remarkable and continuing stability in other areas.

This book considers to what extent the United Kingdom really was a kingdom united from the post-war period to the late 1980s. It focuses on issues of cohesion and conflict and debates the security of essential social stability.

Chapter 1

Introduction: Forces of conflict

A cake to fight over

Is the United Kingdom a kingdom united? It is often difficult to decide when images of flaming buildings, violent street assemblies and baton-wielding police officers fiercely clashing with all manner of antagonists come stampeding across our television screens. Far from being united, the images depict modern Britain as a deeply divided society split by conflict and challenge. The main divisions have been evident in a number of events, although one stands out memorably: the Grunwick dispute of 1976, when the misfortunes of a group of workers, mostly Asian women, came into prominence. This was an isolated conflict, but one reflecting broader themes. Exploited by a recalcitrant small-scale employer who refused to recognize their claims to unionize, the Grunwick strikers stood defiantly outside the company’s factory gates for over eighteen months. At times, they withstood a battering from the police and eventually they were snubbed by the unions. The chief players in the drama were working class, female and Asian – yet it was never clear in what order of allegiance. They defended their rights robustly as workers, but also as members of groups the white working class had ridiculed and despised: women and ethnic minorities. Grunwick (which is covered in more detail in Chapter 7) was a product of the most divisive forces in postwar society. Together with events either side of 1976, it formed a backdrop against which the unity often attributed to the UK has looked embarrassingly misplaced.

The UK has an electoral system that produces governments representing only a minority of the electorate. It has a political party said to be a vehicle for working-class interests, yet consistently failing to command support from that class. It has, at a conservative estimate, three million people without work or engaged in some ersatz employment, like training schemes. It has large sections of its ethnic minority population feeling so thoroughly disengaged from ‘mainstream’ society that they are prepared to take to the streets violently in efforts to make their grievances known. It has women insisting that the anti-discriminatory legislation of the mid-1970s has not helped them achieve parity in any measurable sense. It has had over two decades of constant internecine violence in Northern Ireland. Unless these are to be dismissed as imaginary conflicts, Britain surely cannot, in any meaningful way, be described as a unified nation.

Or can it? When all is said and done, the UK has proved to be a remarkably stable society compared to many other European and Western nations. It has experienced disruptions, some of great severity, yet its balance of power has remained basically unmoved, its political and economic structure has been maintained intact, its central social institutions have remained as solid as monuments, and, perhaps most crucially, its basic inequalities have not only endured but been renewed. Inequality has, especially since 1980, been validated as something necessary to a society’s health and growth.

This condition is not the product of apathy. Over the past forty or more years, the UK has become highly politicized, although in a way few people expected. There has probably been more involvement in the general political process since the war than at any time in the last two hundred years-involvement not on one dominant issue, such as national class conflict, but on many different community issues at all levels of society. This might have led to unity, in the sense of bringing together various groups, strengthening their political ties and cementing their allegiance to a common sovereignty, its rules, laws and values. Or it could have worked itself out in the form of separatist tendencies. In the UK it has been both: cohesion and cleavage. This combination of cohesion and cleavage has made a society powerfully united, yet split by the demands of conflicting interest groups. People clash and oppose each other in their attempts to grab their share of whatever resources are available – ‘the cake’. This is but one level of conflict. ‘At another level’, writes Peter Worsley, ‘they recognize a common interest: in keeping the system going so that there will be some cake to fight over’ (1970, p. 321).

Cleavages in Britain or, for that matter, any society derive from one source: inequality. Where there are grossly uneven distributions of power and discrepancies in access to resources, like money and housing, there are bound to be lines of social cleavage. Society divides into identifiable groups, some of which have an interest in lessening inequalities, others whose apparent interests are not served if the inequalities are reduced. Given the depth of the ravines within modern society and the trends that militate against their closing up, one might wonder why the conflicts they have triggered have not torn British society apart. One might also wonder if they will tear it apart in the future. The answer to the second question is implicit in the answer to the first: simply stated, the nature of British society is such that the conflicts have been allowed to surface. If they continue to surface and are not denied, suppressed, or diverted into other channels, then they will not be destructive of unity or lead to a disintegration of the overall structure of UK society. When conflict, in the form of protest, opposition, or open challenge, is bottled up, then positions harden and the groups pressing for change can lose faith in the ability of the system to absorb their claims.

Historically, this occurs when a social system is rigidly totalitarian and intolerant of protests; it clamps down on them, creating widespread discontent and a potential for further conflict of a more serious kind. South Africa presents a modern example of a society whose institutional arrangements – its economy, polity and culture – are inadequate to meet the demands of the country’s black majority. Instead of conflict being accommodated, it is obliterated. It is not blotted out in reality, because it returns, each time with a greater ferocity and more and more blacks see it as their only recourse.

Despite the political forecasts of some who see the UK as in the throes of transformation into an authoritarian state, British society has been relatively flexible, sponge-like in its capacity to soak up challenges and wring them out, sometimes in a fundamentally changed way. There is usually a modification in the immediate conditions which bring about the conflict. This is how conservatism succeeds: adjusting strategies and ideologies according to changing circumstances, at the same time preserving power balances and primary inequalities. The disruptions are usually subdued and the tensions eased; but while the inequalities remain, so does the potential for future outbreaks. One of the aims of this book is to identify the circumstances in which conflicts erupt and to analyse why there are not more of them in Britain.

I have approached this book by way of three main divisions in British society, all sources of profound inequalities. The inequalities are structured; they have occurred with such regularity over time that they cannot be dismissed as accidental or random. They are repetitive, patterned inequalities that have been fully incorporated into the British social structure. Class, race and sex inequalities have been the three major sources of social conflict since the war. I stress ‘social’ conflict because, for purposes of this book, I do not deal with the conflict in Northern Ireland, which cannot, I feel, be analysed within the terms of reference of class, race and gender. There are, of course, elements common to all three kinds of inequality. (The Northern Ireland situation strikes me as a very special type of political conflict deserving its own form of analysis. Rather than attempt to integrate it into an already congested framework, I have chosen to keep the focus of this book on the three social divisions, recognizing that the conflicts emerging from these are as relevant to Ulster as they are to the mainland; they are overlooked conventionally because the intensity of the political struggle often appears to subsume all else.)

The book is organized in three parts, each corresponding to one of the divisions, but it will be seen that there are correspondences and links between them. For example, a comparison of class and racial inequalities would reveal overlaps. Ethnic minorities in Britain are predominantly working class and are in similar circumstances to their white counterparts. On occasion, they have shown that they also see their problems similarly. Trevor Carter, himself black, believes the 1984–5 miners’ strike ‘awakened a level of solidarity’ amongst both miners and blacks. But where conflicts run deep, groups experiencing inequality have tended to define their problems and adversaries in different idioms; and groups that are, in an objective sense, in much the same social position tend to see their interests blighted by each other. Working-class women might see their true enemies as working-class men who insist their domestic roles stay unchanged, rather than the more abstract and intangible systems of patriarchy or capitalism. Unemployed blacks living in deprived inner cities may cite racism in their slogans, but they also blame members of the white working class for their predicament.

Conflict within unity

‘Conflict’ is an over-used term and one which needs sharper definition if it is to be useful. One way to approach it is by stating what conflict is not. For example, I want to distinguish’ conflict’ from ‘competition’, in which two or more parties seek control over or access to a finite amount of the some resource and agree beforehand to abide by clearly stated principles, rules and standards; there will always be obvious winner. Struggle is an underlying condition of conflict, although not of competition. It has Darwinian connotations of a physical struggle for survival and Marxian ones of class struggle. In both cases, groups clash because their fundamental physical or material existence depends on it. Marx saw his life’s work as on the same scale as Darwin’s, arguing that, as all living species struggle in their relationship to their environment, humans struggle over the means of production. There is a fundamental opposition between the interests of workers and those on whom they depend for their wages. Struggle may and sometimes does bubble up into open conflict.

A useful working definition of conflict is found in the work of Lewis Coser, who in 1956 defined it as ‘a struggle over values and claims to scarce status, power and resources in which the aims of the opponents are to neutralize, injure or eliminate their rivals’. Conflict, in this sense, is a type of struggle brought into the open. Its pivot may be values, perhaps of the more basic kind on which whole societies stand; or it may be resources or, more specifically, access to them. In Britain the conflict has not been over values (nor over the moral, legal and institutional system of which they are part) but over the distribution of resources. We might say that if conflicts over resources were continually blocked or frustrated, people would eventually question the values underlying the distributive process. Afghanistan, Nicaragua, the Philippines and South Africa present a few of the many cases where conflict has built up not so much over specific issues or resources, but over fundamental principles of a moral nature.

There is sense and perception in Coser’s work on the consequences of conflict, and, although written in the 1950s, The Functions of Social Conflict remains an authoritative source of insights. I will use Coser’s formula for analysing conflict to tackle the question: is the UK a united kingdom? The title of Coser’s book conveys his focus; while he does not deny that, under some conditions, conflict can be destructive of unity and lead to the collapse of complete societies, it can also serve to pull societies together, morally bind their members, unify their purposes and stimulate the creation of reforms in policy. Not everybody benefits from conflict, of course, and we have to ask a further question: functional for whom? The mutual repulsion of jati in the Hindu social hierarchy might be very functional for the caste system as a whole, but is not especially functional for the untouchables. The open struggle precipitated by the revolutionary Bolsheviks in early nineteenth-century Russia was hardly functional from the viewpoint of the autocratic Tzarist regime. But, Coser uses the term ‘function’ in a rather different sense to diagnose the consequences of conflict for entire societies. He provides possible answers to the question of why societies remain stable and continuous despite the volatility that usually grows out of inequality. The UK is a society sharply divided amongst classes, ethnic groups and the sexes. Yet its social and political system has looked solid and consistent. This raises questions.

In each of the book’s parts, I will answer three cardinal questions. (1) What have been the chief developments or changes in the areas of class, race and gender? (2) How have these changes affected existing patterns of inequality? (3) Why do those inequalities persist, often in the face of forceful attempts to eliminate them? Each part describes the main changes in the postwar period, highlighting certain signpost events that seem to show the direction of and impulse behind social change. Following this, there is, in each part, a more analytical appraisal of the extent of inequality in the three spheres, breaking down (whenever possible in measurable terms) the depth and breadth of the three divisions. For these chapters I have drawn together empirical studies to show how patterns of inequality do change, although never dramatically.

This leads logically to the third and, arguably, most important question: why? I suggest reasons why inequality has remained such a permanent feature of British society and how it continues amidst the often rampant conflict it generates. Here the focus is on (to use Arthur Marwick’s expression) the ‘mechanics of non-change’ – the apparatus, its motions and its tendencies that keep the UK divided. One component of the apparatus is education, and I devote a good deal of my account to the sometimes opaque but always crucial role education plays in the transmission of inequality over time.

A central argument of the book is that the same apparatus that produces inequality and promotes conflict simultaneously maintains unity, a broad-based agreement on the Tightness or legitimacy of Britain’s fundamental social, political and economic institutions and the values on which they rest. Unity and division are more than just cohabitees; they are symbionts, interwoven, each owing its existence to the other. This is a view of unity as having its source in conflict, and vice versa: not unity versus conflict, but unity as the result of an ability to express interests and fight in their defence. Yet the fighting, however dogged and factious, has been moulded, shaped by the institutions in which it takes place (the economic and political spheres, the legal framework and the class structure). It may seem odd logic at this stage, but I will show how conflict has actually strengthened unity by reaffirming faith in the ‘openness’ of this system, a system that is responsive enough to allow grievances to be vented, often quite violently without punishment or suppression (although there have been exceptions, as we will see).

In no way will this be a conservative evaluation of British society. It is an evaluation of a society that is conservative. Self-preservation being one of the objectives of society, the UK has developed permanent but flexible arrangements for dealing with conflicts that do not challenge the basic values, rules or ‘logic’ of society. The result is an accommodating status quo that has a chameleon-like quality, adapting and repairing to suit changing times. I write this not in admiration but simply in recognition of the way conflict has been treated and inequalities have been maintained. To follow on from these propositions, the argument has to be that only a severe and prolonged conflict that strikes at the values and logic of capitalist society can hope to hasten the disintegration of the structure of inequality in modern Britain. The conflict witnessed since the war has been disruptive but not corrosive; the framework from which the conflicts have emerged has remained unchallenged.

This book should not be approached as an orthodox work of social history that charts developments and summarizes their impact. I have gathered the raw material from which historians might work, taken a hammer to it and smashed it to pieces. In putting the pieces back together, I have produced an arrangement that is, I hope, both original and provocative. Interpretations of past events may be thought of as neither true nor false; they are best judged in terms of their ability to illuminate previously obscured areas, to spark new debates or nourish existing ones and to guide future exercises with concepts and observations.

Influences

The influence of many books is evident in the text, but three works in particular have to be singled out for special acknowledgement. The idea behind United Kingdom? originated after reading historian Richard Polenberg’s One Nation Divisible, a portrait of the United States split by what the author calls the ‘fault lines of class, race and ethnic identity’. Developments in those areas have been of central importance in the lives of American people, Polenberg argues. While I have approached my book in a totally different way, I begin from a similar conviction: that class, race and (in this case) gender are of central importance to British people.

I have already mentioned the theoretical input of Coser’s work, in which he concludes that ‘conflict tends to be dysfunctional for a social structure in which there is no or insufficient toleration and institutionalization of conflict’. Coser argues that the main ‘threat’ to a society’s stability ‘is not conflict as such, but the rigidity itself which permits hostilities to accumulate and to be channelled along one major line of cleavage’.

Britain has clearly not experienced such rigidity, and it is for this reason that Alan Fox, in his History and Heritage, is able to argue convincingly that ‘Its political and social system has been uninterruptedly in the making for three centuries, and the probability is that while minorities on both sides may be prepared in the last resort to test class relations to destruction, majorities will not.’ Fox reaches this verdict after tracing the social origins of the British industrial relations system; and, while my purposes are quite different to his, Fox’s argument has guided much of my own analysis. Whether this argument is credible when set against class, race and gender conflicts is something the reader will have to decide after reading the following chapters.

Part 1

Class

Chapter 2

Reform and reaction

Building the new society

‘He’s been the greatest union leader this century,’ claimed Steve McGhee as he cast his vote in favour of Arthur Scargill, who in 1988 sought re-election as the National Union of Mineworkers’ president. McGhee, a Yorkshire miner, had stuck resolutely to his picket line for the entire duration of the epic 1984–5 strike. Yet there was caution in his prognosis: ‘Whoever wins the election, nothing will alter.’ McGhee’s approach was firmly in line with the working class generally: a robust and unswerving fidelity to causes, a willingness to remain solid with colleagues even when the direction of events is unpromising, but a moderating realism about future possibilities. Essentially, these three features have shaped the development of the working class since the Second World War. Working-class people have struggled to improve their material conditions; they have shown impressive solidarity in the defence of what they take to be their interests; but, when it comes to envisioning changes of scale and substance, they have fought shy.

Over the next three chapters I intend to look carefully not only at the character of the British working class but also at the struct...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1. Introduction: Forces of conflict
• Part 1: Class
• Part 2: Race
• Part 3: Gender
• References and Bibliography
• Index