The times, they are a-changing…

By Peter Barnard

In 1954, Lonnie Donegan sang “Diggin’ my Potatoes” at the National Jazz Festival at the Royal Festival Hall. Take a listen – it’s brilliant!

The song was subsequently recorded and released (Decca? 1956?) and immediately banned by the BBC because the lyrics were a bit too strong for that time – “Diggin’ my potatoes” was an obvious euphemism for adulterous activity, and that would never do in the eyes of the establishment in the “late Victorian age” that was 1950s Britain.

The times, they changed. The BBC now broadcasts the “f-word” almost every night, and also broadcasts simulated (perhaps real?) acts of heterosexual congress from time to time.

Well, you ask – what relevance has this to LabourList?

Well, times and “accepted” modes of conduct change. The rate of change may appear to be glacial, but change eventually occurs, for sure. Maybe I’m being facile, but the seventeenth century was all Nell Gwyn, Cavaliers and “enjoy yourself” (until Oliver C. came along), the nineteenth century was “Victorian respectability” and the late twentieth century was back to “enjoy yourself and let it all hang out.”

At another level, the authority of religion was eroded by the scientists – beginning with Copernicus – and secularism gained the upper hand. The tragedy of this development, as I see it, is that the only religion that I know a little bit about – the teachings of Jesus – holds eternal values. As I understand things, all religions, worldwide, hold similar “eternal values.”

It appears to me that the times are now ready for changing regarding the “conventional wisdom” of our present “Anglo-Saxon” political economy. Put bluntly, it isn’t working on either side of the Atlantic.

We really do need to examine “eternal values” and ask ourselves: how do we proceed to those “eternal values?”

Having said this, I am not religious. Neither was Clem Attlee. Kenneth Harris, in his biography of Clem, records the following conversation:

Harris: Do you mean you have no feeling about Christianity, or that you have no feeling about God, Christ, and life after death?

Attlee: Believe in the ethics of Christianity. Can’t believe in the mumbo-jumbo.

Back to Lonnie D. He was of the generation that upset the “late Victorian Age” of the 1950s. There were others – John Osborne in “Look Back in Anger“, Alan Sillitoe in “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning“, Richard Hoggart in “The Uses of Literacy” – much of which that we take for granted these days is due to these people, and many more. These artists captured the mood of our nation, and fifty and more years later, they are deserving of our salute.

There have been, perhaps, four great nation-changing and “mood-capturing” events in our history: the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, the Great Reform Act of 1832, the National Insurance Act of 1911 and the Labour government of 1945 that established our modern welfare state.

The mood of the nation – the times, they are a-Changing’ – is ready for capture once again. We need another moment like 1688, 1832, 1911 or 1945.

The question is: who is going to be the agent of that change? History tells us it won’t be the Conservatives. Can today’s Labour reveal a mindset – and a manifesto – capable of leading the nation towards the big, necessary and required change?