Three apparently unrelated documents in my possession recently caused me to pause for thought on the full circle of history in Britain and, to an extent, Ireland. Two are letters on headed Commons notepaper, from Labour Prime Ministers, past and present. The other is a recent newspaper report on the redesign of Ballymun. This is a bold plan which will involve £180 million, including special designation status for tax purposes for eight years. Ballymun currently consists of 2,800 apartments, including the 17 notorious 15-storey towers and the first demolition is scheduled for January 1, 2000.
The tower-block apartment was undoubtedly the great misinvention of post-war suburbia. The clearing out of the old slum tenements created Ballymuns all over these islands. By the early 1970s, the great industrial cities of Britain, London, Liverpool, Sheffield, Manchester and others each had its share of scabrous browngrey monoliths.
Of course we were lucky in this country, never having experienced anything on the scale of Britain. Those jerry-built tower blocks, like human termite colonies, were no place to nurture a sense of community so no one will mourn their demolition.
Forgotten old man
The letter received from Harold Wilson dates from mid-1993, two years before his death. By that time, he was a forgotten old man with his once freakish memory ruined by Alzheimer's Disease and his reputation dimmed by "New" Labour's rapid flight from the old Keynesian tax `n' spend social democracy he championed. I had asked him to comment on Ben Pimlott's biography of him, just published.
His reply was a curt note saying he had not and was not now concerning himself with political matters due to ill-health. The reply from Tony Blair, Shadow Spokesman for Home Affairs, dated roughly the same time, was a courteous reply to a letter I'd written on the privatisation of the criminal-justice system. Here was the up-and-coming man. When, not long afterwards, he became leader of Her Majesty's Opposition, on the sudden death of John Smith, the Wilson-Blair comparison inevitably entered political discourse, and continued when Lord Wilson died a few months later.
A stale Tory administration was battered by sex scandals and divided over Europe. Labour, encouraged by a youthful Democrat President in the States, was envigorated when the death of its leader put a young and charismatic populist at the helm. Were not the similarities between mid-1960s and mid-1990s Britain spooky?
When looking at tower complexes in Ballymun or anywhere else in these islands, one needs to remember that a generation separates the two great Labour PMs. If we can view the three agonised years of Jim Callaghan's regime as a sort of appendix, Old Labour really ended on that April afternoon in 1976 when Wilson announced he was stepping down.
Two decades ago, Britain entered that odd never-never land demarking the retreat of the humanistic ethos of Old Labour and the victory of the cynical Conservatism represented by Margaret Thatcher. This was the Britain of the National Front, wildcat strikes and punk rock. Tony Blair is, in a sense, still living with the legacy of that malaise; tower-block housing complexes, either in Ireland or Britain, are the bleak gravemarkers of Sixties optimism. In this country, Neil Blaney's ugly foray into urban engineering, East-bloc style, which even John Charles McQuaid warned was a disaster waiting to happen, gave us just a few high-rise gulags. But in Britain, they seem to represent something more.
Steely confidence
Certainly, almost every Briton I've spoken to who was around at the time has said that it's difficult now to appreciate the sense of tingling optimism that pervaded during that smogbound winter of 1964, when Wilson marched from Transport House to No. 10 Downing Street. It wasn't just Beatlemania or the impact of the first 16-21 generation with no memory of rationing, the Blitz or National Service. A steely confidence abounded that a newer more egalitarian world was imminent, a vibe picked up by Wilson when he spoke of the "white heat of technological revolution" as a catalyst for national rejuvenation.
Alas by the later 1960s, the docks in Liverpool were falling silent as never before, the Newcastle shipyards were witnessing their twilight years, the once mighty motorcycle industry in Birmingham was losing orders to the Japanese. Even supposed innovations like the Anglo-French Concorde project merely served as bitter and eloquent symbols of an industry shackled by inept class-ridden management and a weak, fragmented workforce.
The failure of Sixties Labour to affect real change was the betrayal of a people who had suffered a Depression and borne a war, not just against Hitler, but their own class-ridden past. The punishment was nearly two decades in Opposition while the political topography became demonstrably more rightist.
Upgrading poverty
If Blair, in the coming years, exults in `feelgood' rhetoric, then fails to deliver anything concrete, his political fate will come to resemble Wilson's. Then as now, Labour managed to dent the confident hegemony of the Tories by appealing to mainstream Britain. But its true failure came at a time when everything north of Watford was said to be changing. That this change mostly involved upgrading poverty in the name of political expediency, not to mention the profiteering of the building contractor and land developer, was seldom a matter for discussion, much less debate, in the later 1960s.
The political and social disaffection, embodied by those towers, a feature of so many Western cities, was begotten by the failure of the great reformist governments of the 1960s. Essentially, the sell-out implicit in the post-war "consensus" hamstrung Labour for a generation, consigning it to ideological faction-fighting and demoralisation.
Soon the blast-charges will be put to the towers; in time, in Dublin at least, they will be a memory. Everywhere now, the lesson has been learnt that this kind of habitation was a disaster, never the spotless post-industrial Utopia with its shiny, happy people imagined on glossy brochures of long ago.
But in Britain, where the damage was more widespread, will the Labour administration learn the historic lesson of the tower-block city? Will it remember that another betrayal of a generation's hopes will be a calamity far worse than any fiscal foul-up or foreign policy bungle? And will it leave in its wake a society healthier than before or yet more cynicism? These questions still await answers.