3
It seems to me that we who reported from the heart of a mutating working class, were also undertaking a kind of low-level social snooping on behalf of the superintendents of these changes. Were we not signalling to those who governed us what they might expect from people suffering these radical discontinuities, forewarning them of places from which disaffection or unrest might come? Certainly, much of what I wrote focussed on the sensibility of people passing through this coercive social churning – the emptying of the industrial suburbs, the construction of new towns, loss of faith in the labour movement, the altered meaning of poverty, the relaxation of industrial discipline, and of course, the recreation in Asia and elsewhere of the landscapes of industrialism which were crashing into extinction at home.
I don't want to exaggerate. Perhaps this is simply another expression of the distrust and churlishness I had inherited, my unchosen kinship with doubting shoemakers. I was certainly never prominent enough to have been taken very seriously, and what I wrote was derided by an omniscient Left with which I had imagined myself in sympathy.
I traced the direction of gay liberation, which proved to be similar to that of the emancipation of the working class: the consumer society had ample space to accommodate those earlier regarded as moral outlaws, just as a class which once appeared doomed to eternal antagonism to capitalism was eventually won over by the sweets proffered by its estranged progenitor.
How different it all looks now! The transition was successfully negotiated. Society was not torn asunder. Continuity was assured, and the advantages of privilege remained intact. Poverty was replaced by a fretful inequality, infinitely more manageable than the sullen collectivism of a mass of poor people. I have the uncomfortable feeling that I was not merely present at the unmaking of the working class, but an active participant in its demolition; since our rulers (whatever their politics) were, no doubt, confirmed in the wisdom of their ways by the news they received from unwitting tellers of tales, as the profound re-structuring took its course, not only in the economy and society, but equally in the psyche and mentality of the people.
The spectral work I performed, obsessed as it was with demolition and absence, was part of a more general troubled preoccupation with what happened to the people of Britain. It was not the loss of empire which inflicted the most enduring wound, but the swift undoing of the sense of purpose inscribed in the landscapes of the industrial towns and cities – factories now transformed into chic apartments, hotels, shopping malls or units for post-industrial activities, such as the manufacture of burglar alarms, the dispatch of sales catalogues, the storing of ink-cartridges or ready-made meals for the elderly at home. Perhaps, after all, my shadow-labour in the graveyard of industrial manufacture has been less marginal than I have sometimes imagined.