TEMA 58 : EVOLUCIÓN POLÍTICA, SOCIAL Y ECONÓMICA

DEL REINO UNIDO E IRLANDA DESDE 1945. SU PRESENCIA EN

LA COMUNIDAD EUROPEA. PANORAMA LITERARIO DE ESTE
PERIODO EN ESTOS PAÍSES.

1. INTRODUCTON.

Early in the 20th century Britain was overtaken economically by the United
States and Germany. After two wars and the rapid loss of its empire, Britain found it
increasingly difficult to maintain its position even in Europe. Britain struggled to find a
balance between government intervention in the economy and an almost completely
free-market economy such as existed in the USA. Neither system seemed to fit Britain’s
needs.
By the mid 1970s both Labour and Conservative economists were beginning to
recognise the need to move away from the Keynesian economics. But it was the
Conservatives who decided to break with the old economic formula completely.
They were determined to lower taxes as an incentive to increase productivity,
determined to limit government spending levels, etc.

2. SOCIAL TRENDS IN THE 1970s.

The long-term social trends began with demography. The total population of
England rose slowly between 1970 and 1980. But there were important changes in its
structure as the expectation of life was lengthened. The proportion of those aged sixty-
five increased while the birth rate decreased in the late 1970s. The social consequences
of these demographic changes were related primarily to forward projections, for
example in education and pensions.

Educational change has been the second major social trend of the last three
decades. The first comprehensive schools opened soon after Butler’s Education Act of
1944, but their most rapid growth followed the Labour Party’s commitment to
comprehensive education following the 1964 general election. Numbers in higher
education doubled during the 1960s and continued in the 1970s, including both male
and female students. The most important new educational institution of the 1970s, the
Open University, catered not only for schools leavers but for adults.

It was widely recognized that the changing structure of the labour force
constituted a third major social trend. There was an increase of over two million
workers from 1960 to 1980 because of the rise in the number of employed married
women. The range of jobs available was wider. Higher education offered essential job
qualifications. However, there was a continuing decline in the number of those
employed in industry. In the 1970s unemployment became a major problem and in the
early 1980s it reached new proportions, with many old industries going through crisis.
All these economic trends were closely related to the development of
technology. WWII had left Britain with an advanced-military based production system
centred on aviation, electronics and nuclear power, but it proved difficult to fully exploit
commercially these technologies. There was an undercurrent of fear and suspicion. By
the late 1970s and early 1980s, there was a gloomy apprehension that unemployment in
England was not only cyclical but structural and that enhanced scientific and technical
development would actually increase it. Even medical science and technology met
criticism. Their effects on ways of life and deaths were controversial. Technology is one
of the several changes which have forced the trade union movement to concern itself
with a wider range of issues.

The last long-term phenomenon was the continuing power of “class”, as it

continued to influence the whole pattern of society. The real break in the class system
had come during the middle years of the 1950s when, with increased prosperity,
educational opportunity and social and physical mobility, society seemed to be more
fluid and less willing to accept old ways. This was a time when the so-called “angry
young men” challenged the “Establishment”. Commercial broadcasting began and the
number of television licenses doubled. The consumer boom undermined surviving
Puritan values in most sections of society as spending became the order of the day.
Houses became warmer as a result of the development of central heating. Food habits
began to change with the revolutionary development of refrigeration, the increasing
appeal of foreign cuisines, etc. Colour supplements of Sunday newspapers were as
decisive as television in pushing forward changes in values.

Through the 1960s government initiated a number of measures which marked a

significant change in attitudes to morality. These legislative measures include, among
others, the Suicide Act, the Abortion Act, the National Health Service, the Divorce
Reform Act and the abolition of death penalty. There was an expansion of the credit
system and property boom between 1970 and 1973. But this was followed by a period
of further industrial unrest which contributed to the collapse of James Callaghan’s
Labour Government and the return of the Conservatives with Margaret Thatcher as
prime minister in 1979.

3. THE DECADE OF THE 1980S.

During the 1980s the Conservatives put their new ideas into practice. Income
tax was reduced but the most notable success of “Thatcherism” was the privatisation
of previously wholly or partly government-owned enterprises. The government believed
that privatisation would increase efficiency, reduce government borrowing, increase
economic freedom and encourage wide share ownership.
Despite such changes, however, by 1990 Britain’s economic problems seemed
as difficult as ever. The government found that reducing public expenditure was far
harder than expected. In spite of reducing the power of the trade unions, wage demands
rose faster than prices, indicating that a free labour market did not necessarily solve the
wages problems. By 1990 the manufacturing industry had barely recovered form the
major shrinkage in the early 1980s.
There were fears that Britain’s industrial sector was becoming an assembly
economy, serving foreign-owned enterprises. Certainly, the level of commercial
interpenetration by multinational companies greatly increased during the 1980s.
 Government policy and the state of the world economy plunged Britain into the
worst recession since the end of the WWII. Britain imported more manufacture goods
than it exported. Unemployment doubled from 1979 to 1983.
The 1980s the Conservatives believed that only painful restructuring would
lead to greater efficiency. In certain areas efficiency was much improved like in steel
production. The only real bonus Britain enjoyed was the oil resources discovered
mainly in the North Sea, whereby Britain became the world’s sixth largest producer. It
was oil revenue which softened the impact of the 1979-85 recession.
There were other areas for optimism during the 1980s. Small business began to
increase rapidly. Such small were important not only because large businesses grow
from small ones, but also because over half of the new jobs in Britain were created.

4. INMIGRATION.

It was in 1950s that the first immigrants into England became “visible” to
ethnic minorities. Travel agencies, backed by advertising, actively developed the traffic,
particularly from the West Indies. The new immigrants took up many occupations and
industries, though men concentrated on railways and women on hospitals.
They had to face persistent discrimination. In the late 1950s, when an estimated
210,000 people from “coloured minorities” were living in Britain, there were serious
disturbances in a number of cities, started by “nigger hunting” youths. It was within this
context of prejudice and conflict that the issues of racial discrimination, immigration
control and police conduct began to be debated for the first time. As numbers increased
so did tensions, particularly at the end of the 1960s and beginning of 1970s.
Immigration controls were introduced through Acts of Parliament to regulate
the migrant flow. The most restrictive Immigration Act was in 1982, the British
Nationality Act, which replaced a single, unified citizenship of the United Kingdom and
Colonies by three separate citizenships. By then, the flow of new immigrants had
returned to a trickle, though there were big Asian concentrations in Leicester,
Wolverhampton and Bradford, with large West Indian communities in London and the
Midlands.

5. THE FUTURE OF THE COUNTRYSIDE.

The growing threat to the countryside has been felt to come from farmers,
whose incomes in 1982 rose more than those of any other social group. Modes of
farming – and with them the appearance of the farm landscape and buildings – have
changed more during the last quarter of a century than they did in the 18th century,
disturbing the traditional variety of landscape, wild life and buildings. The spread of
battery farming, cereal growing controlled by chemical fertilizers and a grass
monoculture supporting intensive stock-rearing was becoming a reality.
This was a new agricultural revolution, significantly speeded up by the actions
of the State. By 1973, when Britain entered the Common Market, it had been extended
by capital grants, tax concessions and price supports which served as a generous
subsidy. The National Farmers Union has been at pains to challenge the view that they
are destroying the countryside. Finally the Wildlife and Countryside Act was passed in
1982.
6. BRITAIN’S FOREIGN POLICY DILEMAS.

Until 1950s Britain’s view of the world was dominated by its overseas
territorial possessions and trade. Britain was reluctantly involved in continental
Europe, usually only when its own security was directly threatened. Since the
disappearance of its empire and the comparative decline of its power, Britain has
adjusted its world view with difficulty. As a result Britain’s foreign policy tended to lag
behind the reality of its world position and to conflict with its true economic interests.
The legacy of empire has distracted Britain from concentrating on its economic
and political future. During the 1970s Britain was dogged by a sense of economic and
political weakness, and by the apparent inevitability of post-imperial decline.
During the 1980s Margaret Thatcher resolved to reverse the process. Britain’s
military strength has been achieved at the expense of the civil economy. At the end of
the 1980s, Britain was still uncertain where its primary interests lay, whether it was with
the United States, its most important military ally, or with the European Community,
its most important economic arena.

6.1. SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP WITH THE UNITED STATES.

This relationship is based upon a shared language and an Anglo-Saxon culture

and upon a strong alliance forged by Churchill and Roosevelt during the war. However,
the United States has seldom valued this special relationship as highly as Britain has
done. For Britain the relationship was vital to its own world standing. For the United
States it was useful for strengthening the European commitment to NATO. This
special relationship will only last if both countries have something to gain from it.

6.2. BRITAIN IN EUROPE.

Britain joined the European Community in 1973, but it remained diffident,

with several MPs of both main parties believing membership to be a mistake. By 1990
there was no longer any question of Britain giving up membership. But it continued to
show it was less enthusiastic than other major members about accepting the
implications of membership - a single monetary system and reduced individual
sovereignty. The European Monetary System (EMS) was created in 1979, but Britain
joined it only in 1990.
Despite earlier British resentment, Britain’s economy nowadays is closely
interrelated with the other members of the Community. Most large companies now
operate across frontiers, making the idea of national economic sovereignty meaningless.
After Margaret Thatcher departure in 1990 the issue of national sovereignty remained
an important one. At the Maastricht summit in 1991 John Major agreed to the new EC
treaty, but insisted on Parliament’s right to “opt out” of the proposed single European
currency at a later date. For a long time there has been a strong middle-class support for
membership of the EC, also based upon interest in European culture.

6.3. THE COMMONWEALTH.

 The Commonwealth of countries previously governed by Britain provides an
informal forum for international issues to be discussed. By 1990 there were 50
member countries of the Commonwealth. The Queen is titular head of the
Commonwealth, actual head of the 18 countries and an ardent supporter of the
Commonwealth idea.
However, the growth of the Commonwealth is not necessarily a sign of its
success. The larger the Commonwealth becomes, the less effective it is as a place for the
uninhibited exchange of views. The heads of government of all Commonwealths
countries meet every 2 years and sometimes issue a Declaration of intent, enshrining
agreed ideals of principles.
Today there is no longer the strong sense of Commonwealth purpose that
there was thirty years ago. For Britain this is partly because the Commonwealth is now
much less important economically than the European Community. The dramatic
reduction of Britain’s overseas aid during the 1980s and the raising of education fees for
overseas students in Britain have both weakened Britain’s Commonwealth ties.

7. RELATIONSHIP WITH IRELAND.

In the 16th and 17th centuries England brought the whole of Ireland under
systematic rule. While England became Protestant at that time, Ireland did not. In
order to strengthen its political and economic hold on Ireland, the government in
London encouraged thousands of Protestants, both English and Scottish, to settle in the
more fertile parts of Ireland. In the north-eastern part, Ulster, the Protestants soon
outnumbered the Catholics. The traditional hostility between Ulster and the rest of
Ireland was thus increased by means of the racial and religious differences that continue
nowadays.
Inspired by the French Revolution in 1789, the Irish began their struggle to be
free from England. The majority of Protestants, particularly in Ulster, felt threatened
by the Irish Catholic majority and formed the Orange Order, a solidarity association of
“lodges” or branches.
When the Irish finally persuaded England in 1920 that it could no longer go on
governing Ireland, the Protestants of Ulster warned that they would fight rather than be
part of a Catholic-dominated state. Rather than take the risk, London persuaded the Irish
nationalists to accept independence for all Ireland except the six counties that made up
Ulster.
In 1921 London decided to allow the Northern Irish to govern themselves. It
was hoped that if they were not governed by the English, the Protestants and the
Catholics would find a way of living happily with each other. This was not to be. Every
election for the Northern Irish government of Stormont, from 1921 onwards, was about
Ulster’s future – whether it should remain part of the United Kingdom, the Protestant
position, or become part of the Irish Republic, as many Catholics wanted. The
consequence was that the Protestants, as the majority, kept Catholics completely out
of government the whole time. Ulster Loyalists were determined to keep the province
under British rule, fearing that any Catholic participation in government might lead to
what they feared most, incorporation into the Irish Republic.

In autumn 1968 the Catholics supported by many Protestants, demonstrated in

the streets, demanding fair participation in political and economic life. Ulster
Loyalists confronted them and the Ulster police force, which was almost entirely
Protestant, was unable to keep order. The violence soon resulted in deaths.
In 1972 the Stormont government was suspended and the province brought
under direct rule from Whitehall. During the next few years the number of deaths
increased rapidly. The measures brought in to satisfy Catholic civil rights claims were
too few and too late. The violence on the streets allowed the extremists on both sides to
establish a strong hold on their respective communities. Paramilitary forces, on the
Nationalist side the Irish Republican Army (the IRA) and its offshoots, and on the
Loyalist side the Ulster Defence Association and Ulster Volunteer Force, used violence
and terrorism to advance their aims. It slowly became clear that no solution was in sight.
On the Loyalist side it was sought to keep Ulster within the United Kingdom. Most
Catholics have supported the Social and Democratic Labour Party, which wants Ulster
eventually to become part of the Irish Republic by democratic and lawful means.
Fear of growing support for Sinn Fein, the political wing of the IRA, persuaded
the British government to negotiate an Anglo-Irish Agreement with Dublin in 1985. It
allowed Dublin a consultative role in the government of Ulster and also recognised that
to some extent Dublin represented the Catholics of Ulster. It also implied that London
was determined to keep Ulster in the United Kingdom if a majority of its people wished
to become part of a united Ireland. This weakened IRA / Sinn Fein position but it was
also intended to weaken the position of the Protestant Unionists. By 1990 there were
modest signs that the Unionists might moderate their position slightly and they seemed
more ready to consider power sharing with the Catholics.

8. PRESENT NOVEL IN ENGLAND: THE SECOND MID 20TH CENTURY.

Britain experienced in the post-war years considerable alterations both in

international role and in a domestic organization. New attitudes and values resulted
from the effects of the war, the creation of the Welfare State, etc. These factors helped to
lower traditional barriers between classes, creating some sense of possible social
mobility. Changes of this sort encouraged many authors in the fifties towards renewed
interest in class, conduct and manners.

8.1. THE GENERATION OF THE ANGRY YOUNG MEN.

His feelings of frustration and disappointment summed up a general mood at

the time, and led to the habitual designation of Osborne and several other contemporary
novelists and playwrights as “angry young men”.
Aspects of this new state of mind are reflected in Scenes from Provincial Life
(1959), by William Cooper. It is more significant for its anticipation of later trends. A
madly mocking comedy and a colloquial sceptical tone help other writers of the period
to establish dissentient angles of vision in contemporary society.
Kingsley Amis’ first novel, Lucky Jim (1954) was one of the most popular
works of the decade. Its hero, Jim Dixon was a symbol, the hero of a generation. He
embodies several attitudes typical of the “new state of mind” of the fifties, such as
irreverence, impatience with tradition, vulgarity and resentment against the cultivated.
The happy ending and the innocuous quality of his actions throughout make this novel
seem much more simply a comedy than a social criticism of an angry young man it
was often considered at the time. His luck at the end of the novel also exemplifies a
tendency towards reconciliation with society, rather than any real desire to reform it.
Alan Sillitoe presents the provincial working class ways which show his
admiration for D. H. Lawrence. Like him, Sillitoe extensively transcribes the thoughts
of his characters. He is also one of the fifties more genuinely angry young men, a self-
conscious rebel, fighting against law and order all his life. This sort of struggle
continues and is clarified as part of class-conflict in his novella, The Loneliness of the
Long Distance Runner (1959). Its narrator finds in running and in refusing to win races
some freedom from the expectations of materialist society.

8.2. OLD CONFLICTS AND NEW SYNTHESIS IN THE LAST DECADES.

Among the outstanding writers of recent decades we can distinguish Iris

Murdoch, William Golding and Anthony Burgess. Each lived through the war which
stimulated novelists to examine the nature and relation of good and evil, innocence
and experience, God and Devil. These 3 writers depart to some extent from the
socially-concerned “neorealism” predominant when their work began to appear in the
fifties.
Depressing truths about man and his nature are presented throughout William
Golding’s work. They are already apparent in his first novel, still his most popular,
Lord of the Flies (1954). It demonstrates what the novel defines as the end of
innocence, the darkness of man’s heart. He develops this theme in loose analogy with
the Bible story of original sin in the Garden of Eden. He has a linguistic facility and
shows in his novels something of the origin of evil within the species, its inherent
presence within “civilised” man, and its inevitable connection with individual will.
Iris Murdoch is funnier and more profound. She was for many years a
university teacher of philosophy and her novels, like Sartre’s, strongly exhibit the shape
and influence of philosophical interests. Her approval of the idea that morality is a
“matter of attention” is developed throughout her fiction. Many of Murdoch’s characters
go through an enlightening process of the renunciation of “hallucination”. And like
Shakespeare, she uses the trickery and magic illusion of her hero partly as means of
artistic self-examination; of investigating the relation between literature and life, form
and disorder, as we can see in her novel The Sea, the Sea (1978).
In Earthly Powers (1980) from Anthony Burgess, he raises self-conscious
questions about the capacity of literature to cope with human reality. He also considers
that novels should be about the whole of society. Like the previous authors his fiction is
partly limited by the subordination of characters and their stories to schematic
development of moral issues. This novel is a recent vision of good and evil coupling to
make the world.

9. BRITISH POETRY TODAY.

Today we have a new poetry which has altered the sense of priorities. There is a
modification of an accepted order “by the introduction of the new work of art”, which
Elliot speaks of in Tradition and the Individual Talent. The silent celerity of time is
useful for a true perspective on the present movement.
In 1955 there is the publication of a number of manifestoes from the group
called The Movement, in D. J. Enright’s Poets of the 1950s. Philip Larkin has been
considered as the most significant poet of the Movement. He writes poem after poem
where one waits for the dying fall. We are impelled to experience a “sense of falling”.
With his knowing humility and his naughty jokes, we are seldom far from the sense of a
formula. His narrowness suits the English perfectly. The stepped-down version of
human possibilities, the joke that hesitates just on this side of nihilism, are national
vices.
Ted Hughes is another great poet of our present time. Hughes is a poet who
circles the idea of death in poem after poem. He emerged with The Hawk in the Rain
(1957). Two experiences seem to have dominated him firstly, the myths of WWI and
that sense of dislocation it brought to “the mind of Europe”, secondly an awareness of
nature, of that other England which the London-bound writer has forgotten about.
Lupercal (1960) extends these two worlds of violence to that of animals. He, too,
portrays animal life and writes with great intimacy about the details of nature. Through
his poems we can see that the version of man thrown back on unthinking reflexes
fascinates him.

10. RECENT BRITISH DRAMA.

10.1. THE AWAKENING OF BRITISH THEATRE.

With the advent successively of the cinema, radio and television, the live theatre
in Britain lost its place as a principal provider of mass entertainment. But as theatre in
general contracted, it redefined its role in the community, being seen increasingly as a
serious intellectual, artistic and educational resource.
The establishment of the National Theatre on the South Bank in London
formally acknowledged the place of drama in the national heritage. The typical
contemporary theatre is smaller, more intimate place than its predecessors; the division
between the actors and the audiences is less clearly marked, and the opportunities for
something unexpected or experimental to take place there have correspondingly
increased. Such developments seem to have created not only new dramatists, but also a
new kind of audience, ready to watch something that will offer them a challenge, make
the think towards constructive ends.

10.2. A NEW ERA FOR THE BRITISH DRAMA: BECKETT AND OSBORNE.

A new era for the British drama was ushered by two productions, both ground-
breaking in their different ways. The first performance in Britain of Beckett’s Waiting
for Godot was given in 1955 at the Arts Theatre in London. John Osborne’s Look
Back in Anger was first staged at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 1956. The only
thing these plays have in common is their capacity to disconcert their original
audiences.
Waiting for Godot struck at the audience’s most basic expectations of what a
play should be: the characters and setting bear only the remotest resemblance to the
everyday reality; very little happens; and the dialogue is generally inconsequential and
sometimes totally incoherent.
Look Back in Anger, by contrast, is quite a conventional play but what made it
disconcertingly different was its choice of a most unlikely hero: Jimmy Porter was a
virtual dropout, the product of a provincial university, with a lower-middle-class
background.

10.3. FOLLOWERS OF BECKET AND OSBORNE: TWO DISTINCT

TRADITIONS IN BRITISH DRAMA TODAY.

These two plays started two distinct traditions in contemporary British drama
and a significant proportion of the most memorable plays written since seem to line up
behind one or other of them.

The plays of Wesker or Bond, for example, follow Look Back in Anger in being
primarily concerned with the social and political state of post-war Britain. There is a
persistent strain of disillusionment centred on the apparent belief that Britain is
morally and politically in decline – though the view of that decline varies greatly,
depending on the politics of the author. A good deal of social experience was expressed
through these plays, but not much of it was that of the actual working class.
Behind these valuable plays came a wave of conscious and fashionable “low-
life” drama, in which crooks and prostitutes were the natural characters. What was first
noticed was the new edge: the bitter, almost inarticulate rage at the general condition.
This new work has used naturalism, consciously or unconsciously, mainly as a mean of
expressing this state of mind. We have not had documentaries of youth and poverty, but
a number of personal cries in the dark: a lyrical and romantic drama turned bitter and
almost hopeless; a set of blues rhythms rather than a set of social problem plays.

There is another kind of play which has more in common with Waiting for
Godot. The works of Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard are the most striking examples.
They do not confront the world and its issues so directly as the other type but in an
oblique sort of way. They express disillusionment with the post-war world, but they
wrap it in a purely dramatic metaphor. These plays show the failure to communicate
with other persons, the anxious and at times hysterical struggle to establish personal
identity in a world where betrayal is general.
This structure of feeling belongs as much to the “social” as to the
“psychological” dramatics, and determines the forms of the new naturalism, the
insignificant silences in which meaning is groped for, the dramatization of inaction, of
the later expressionist and anti-theatre productions.

10.4. THE IMPORTANCE OF THE DIRECTOR AND PRODUCER IN THE

PRESENT DRAMA. FINAL CONCLUSIONS.

The concept of the author creating an action which others perform, has been
increasingly challenged by the emphasis on a producer’s theatre, in which the written
structure of the play has been the basis. Here comes what is called “group theatre”, in
which the actors as group are the only creators, discovering in movement and
relationship, sometimes improvised, sometimes rehearsed new theatrical or dramatic
patterns. This has been part of a general cultural emphasis on creative performers.
Words are often less important in this kind of theatre than the elements of movement
and design. Among many authors we can distinguish John Arden, who in his later work
has been consciously moving in this direction. Meanwhile the range of drama has come
to be permanently altered by the extension from the theatre to cinema and television.
In the theatre, because of these developments, there has been some narrowing of
scope. There has been persistent experiment in that variant of naturalism in which a
stylized flatness of speech is combined with the creation of a bizarre or terrifying
situation. The coexistence of a seemingly arbitrary and permanent violence with a sense
of deprivation and limited human resources has become almost orthodox. The tone of
this work is lively, often openly comic. This fusion of comedy and violence has
become so general that it can properly be called the dominant theatrical experience of
the last decades.