“The Age of Austerity”

Is Malcolm unique in being offended by this current cliché?

It was the title of a collection of fine little essays on Britain in the 1940s, published in 1963 or so, by Michael Sissons and Philip French. Malcolm enjoyed it at its original publication, and still has a disintegrating paperback copy, nearing half-a-century old. He was almost shocked to discover the reading list for his youngest daughter’s undergraduate course, well into the twenty-first century, included it as a prescribed text. And even more so, when he found she had bought a second copy. She recommends especially the essay on Bevan and the start of the NHS.

The original sense of “austerity” was moral severity. We find Wyclif employing it around 1380:

Seculer prinsis shulden teche to drede god by austernete and worldly drede.

Shakespeare has it, to imply sexual abstinence, in the opening scene of Midsummer Night’s Dream:

Upon that day either prepare to die
For disobedience to your father’s will,
Or else to wed Demetrius, as he would;
Or on Diana’s altar to protest
For aye austerity and single life.

During the eighteenth century, and particularly with the Romantics, the term comes to imply something external and more concrete. Doctor Johnson, around 1750, applies it, not far from the earlier sense, to student life:

… I continued to dissipate the gloom of collegiate austerity, to waste my own life in idleness, and lure others from their studies, till the happy hour arrived when I was sent to London. I soon discovered the town to be the proper element of youth and gaiety, and was quickly distinguished as a wit by the ladies, a species of beings only heard of at the university.

However, for Byron, in Act III of Manfred, it involves Roman ruins picturesque in the moonlight:

… thou didst shine, thou rolling moon, upon
All this, and cast a wide and tender light,
Which soften’d down the hoar austerity
Of rugged desolation, and fill’d up,
As ’twere, anew, the gaps of centuries

During the Second World War it acquired its current meaning, the cult of “doing without”, of stripped-down, basic “make do and mend”. In this sense, it seems to stem from Hugh Dalton. Again, there was a shift in tone from the war years to the post-war period. This was particularly felt when rationing had to be tightened in the immediate aftermath:

Of greater significance was the introduction of bread rationing in July 1946, which initiated the first concerted campaign against the Labour government on a major policy issue. This policy, which had been avoided during the war, represented the height of post-war austerity and involved a severe blow to morale.

Now all-comers are piling in to suggest that adjustment of Government programmes amounts to “austerity”.

No matter that consumption and confidence among consumers is being actively talked up.

No matter that estate agents and car salesmen are the vanguard of this new “austerity”.

First as tragedy, then as farce

Marx? Hegel? Whoever …

Steve Bell skewers politicos for a living. Deliciously so, as with today’s evisceration of Osborne and the great revisiting of The Age of Austerity:

After the snort of amusement, Malcolm recalled that we had been here before:

All the way from 1931, by Frank Horrabin.

Respec’ to both.

Grieve us harm

Here we go again:

The Tories say they will end what they call the “automatic privacy” of criminals, by giving police powers to reveal their identities to the public…

Shadow Justice Secretary Dominic Grieve, who will outline the plans at the Conservative Party conference later, said the rights of criminals were being “put before” those of communities.

In other words, a further bit of irrelevant populism, for:

Justice Secretary Jack Straw called the Tory plan a “deeply confused populist announcement”, which ignored the fact that police already had such powers.

It’ll please the door-stopping red-top tabloids. It’ll please the blue-rinse brigade of the Tory Conference:

I am a Tory lady, sir, of gentle disposition;
I go to church on Sunday, sir, and feel it is my mission
To educate the masses in the art of gentle living,
By teaching them to follow the example I am giving.
I donate to worthy charities, and treat my neighbours kindly;
I never use a vulgar word, and always speak refinedly;
But the mob, sir, who rob, sir,
The hooligans and teddy-boys,
The flick-knives-at-the-ready boys,
The one who never do a decent job, sir …

H – A – N – G – O …

Hang ‘em and flog ‘em and strap ‘em and thrash ‘em
Until their bottoms hum, sir, …
For justice must be done, sir!

As so often, the great Leon Rosselson nailed it.

Malcolm recalls that, on the EP from which he learned that, it was prefaced by an anecdote of the lady at Tory Conference demanding that murderers and rapists be birched before they were hanged:

To teach them not to do it again.

Dominic Grieve was such a success as shadow Home Secretary that he had to be demoted six months later. He is a legal specialist in … health and safety. If Nicole Kidman was “pure theatrical viagra” [© Charles Spencer for the Daily Telegraph], then Grieve is parliamentary cold porridge. Trapped in the Victorian brickwork of what used to be a trainshed, the delicates at the Tory Conference, regaled by a third-rate lookalike Lurch, might feel they are truly doing “time”, going “stir crazy”.

What is far more serious is the failure to address the real issue of privacy laws. The current issue of Private Eye used it as the first, leading item — unusually giving it the whole page treatment:

LAST month a certain institution obtained a high court injunction to prevent a certain newspaper from publishing a certain document. More than that we cannot say; to do so is fraught with danger.

The battle between press freedom and prior restraint dates back at least to the era of John Wilkes. “Wilkes and Liberty!” was the chant of his followers in the 18th century, and a few years ago it seemed that Liberty was finally winning. If a company or individual tried to injunct a newspaper in advance but the newspaper said that it would justify the story in any subsequent libel action, the tendency of judges was to say “publish and be sued”. For a while, pre-emptive high court orders seemed to be going the way of Spangles and the Bay City Rollers.

Not now. Thanks to some aggressive solicitors and timorous judges, prior restraint is now a flourishing industry. If lawyers get a whiff that one of their clients is about to be embarrassed, late in the evening they contact a duty judge – often one who has no experience of libel or media law. And the judge, reached down a phone line while eating his dinner and half-watching Coronation Street, errs on the side of caution. The newspaper may not even be aware of this “hearing without notice”, still less have a chance to argue its case.

But that isn’t all. The new breed of superinjunction is far more oppressive than the traditional court order under which a newspaper or TV channel is (perhaps temporarily) prevented from publishing a particular allegation. It usually includes an order that “the publication of all information relating to these proceedings or of information describing them or the intended claim is expressly prohibited.” (Our italics.) In other words, nobody can report that the order has been granted, or who applied for it. Even the identities of the judge and the newspaper remain secret, and anyone who even hints at them “may be held to be contempt of court and may be imprisoned, fined or have their assets seized”.

So it was last year when Andrew Marr won an injunction to stop the media revealing “private information” about him – and to stop them revealing that he’d stopped them. Marr himself was on record arguing against a judge-made privacy law and calling for a public debate on the subject. Any such debate should include some reference to the effect of super-injunctions; yet Marr’s, like many others these days, was so draconian that one couldn’t mention its existence. Nor were we allowed to know on what grounds it had been given. After a long struggle by Lord Gnome’s lawyers, the order was varied so that we could at least say that he’d obtained it, while not repeating the story he wished to suppress.

Something similar happened last year when another TV presenter won a gagging order stopping publication of the fact that a death threat had been received by the broadcaster for whom he works. Even the facts in the previous sentence could not have been reported under the original terms of the order. It was only after more pushing and shoving by Lord Gnome’s lawyers that this concession was achieved.

The Guardian‘s legal correspondent noted last week that “it is impossible to say just how many of these cases there are”, since no one can report or discuss them – though the Eye learns that one MP hopes to break the conspiracy of silence, under parliamentary privilege, when the Commons reassembles later this month. But it’s clear that they are breeding and sprouting like giant hogweed: “The Guardian, for instance, has been served with at least 12 notices of injunctions that could not be reported so far this year, compared with six in the whole of 2006 and five in 2005.”

To which some readers might say: so what? Are our lives impoverished by not being allowed to know that a broadcaster has had a death threat, or wishes to keep his private life private? But of course it isn’t only bashful celebs who benefit from this clampdown on free expression. Other public figures and corporations have been quick to exploit the opportunity to tick the box marked “no publicity” and thwart media scrutiny of their conduct.

Eye readers will need no reminding of the super-injunction obtained by Messrs Carter-Fuck, on behalf of former Law Society president Michael Napier, to stop us reporting that he’d been officially censured for breaching conflict of interest rules. “Freedom to report the truth is a precious thing both for the liberty of the individual and for the sake of wider society,” the court of appeal said when it found in our favour after a five-month legal tussle. These noble sentiments clearly failed to impress some high court judges who have carried on injuncting like billy-o.

In one recent application for a super-injunction, the QC for the claimants explained to the judge why a newspaper must not only be stopped from publishing its story but also banned from alluding to the gagging order: if it was allowed to report the injunction, it would probably run a piece accusing his clients of trying to muzzle the press.

Which, of course, is precisely what they were doing. The super-injunction was duly granted.

Now there’s an issue for Grieve.

It won’t sell as easily as grossly misrepresenting the position of convicted prisoners.

And there’s just a possibility that a Tory Conference might be accommodating rich-and-privileged (and their hired legal guns) currently benefiting from those super-injunctions.