What British politicians won't admit – we need to transform the welfare state. I found an anecdote towards the end of The Road to 1945, the late historian Paul Addison’s history of how the second world war changed Britain.
It centres on Winston Churchill, Ernest Bevin – then minister of labour in the wartime coalition government – and thousands of soldiers setting off to mainland Europe. In June 1944, two days before the D-day landings, Churchill and Bevin went to Portsmouth to say farewell to the troops. “They were going off to face this terrific battle,” Bevin recounted, “with great hearts and great courage. The one question they put to me when I went through their ranks was: ‘Ernie, when we have done this job for you are we going back on the dole?’
Beverley Bryan: the British Black Panther who inspired a generation of women. In the mid-60s, Beverley Bryan was a prefect at Lavender Hill secondary modern in south London.
One of her responsibilities was to stand at the school gates and scribble down the name of any student who was late. One such girl was Olive Morris, who would become one of the country’s leading anti-racism activists. Bryan, meanwhile, would follow in the younger girl’s footsteps, becoming a British Black Panther, a founder member of the Brixton Black Women’s Group and, in 1985, the co-author of the seminal book The Heart of the Race: Black Women’s Lives in Britain – which helped educate generations of women about the struggles and triumphs of Black women in Britain.
“She was always very fierce,” Bryan says, over a video call from her home in Jamaica, of her friend Morris, who died in 1979. “She was always a strong person, a strong personality.” After finishing school, Bryan went to teacher training college in Keele, Staffordshire. Yet Bryan always knew what she wanted to do – teach. Forty years on from the New Cross fire, what has changed for black Britons?
Although it happened before I was born, the New Cross fire in 1981 and the National Black People’s Day of Action that followed are landmarks in my identity; growing up in a Caribbean family in the 1980s, they are part of our collective memory.
New Cross is fundamental because it contains all the features of racism that black people in Britain have long suffered: the racial violence, police abuse, neglect by the state; in turn, it tells us of the community’s resistance. Forty years on, recalling the events seems vital, especially in this moment of renewed optimism after the Black Lives Matter protests, because the legacies of New Cross still resonate. On 18 January 1981, a fire tore through 439 New Cross Road in south-east London, where Yvonne Ruddock was celebrating her 16th birthday with about 60 guests. This Brexit disaster has been brewing in the Conservative party for 30 years.
What a strange, head-spinning moment this is.
The news is awash with reports of queues at the ports, the stockpiling of food and medicines and a government committee charged with “exit operations”, but the plain political fact that sits under everything is in a surreal league of its own. Amid an unprecedented pandemic that blurs into an equally unprecedented economic and social crisis, Britain has a government more than prepared to take the deranged option of inflicting even more disaster on its own country.
Everything remains uncertain; both sides say the chances of a trade deal remain slim. Wartime Christmases can teach us how to 'muddle through' in the time of Covid. Being as I am a child of divorce, I watched all the media discussion of Christmas and what was to be done about it with detached bemusement.
I have come to view Christmas as something of a movable feast, which at times had been downright unconventional. I realised that it mattered hugely to other people, of course, but I’d be fine, I thought – relieved, even, not to be on a crammed train, the windows misting up with everyone’s virus-y breath. 'Mini Brexit': Margaret Thatcher's statue divides her hometown. For a small town in Lincolnshire, which Margaret Thatcher once called home, it’s been an issue as divisive as Brexit: Should Grantham erect a statue commemorating the UK’s first female prime minister?
'Racism's still around': Notting Hill 50 years on from Mangrove. In the last scene of Mangrove, the first instalment of Steve McQueens critically acclaimed series Small Axe, the focal character Frank Crichlow is smoking outside his restaurant.
It’s a cold night and Crichlow, played by Shaun Parkes, looks weighed down by the landmark trial he and eight others had just won. His friend Dalston “Dol” Isaacs tells him: “We might have won the battle Frank, but we’ll see about the war.” Isaacs complains he can’t cope with another winter in the UK and wants to go home, to which Crichlow replies: “This we home, Dol. The Mangrove.” Though Isaacs, who is played by Gary Beadle, was speaking of the cold, the scene points to something much deeper – and raises questions about how much has actually changed since then. The hostile environment that London’s black community faced in the 70s and 80s, from racist policing to institutions indifferent to discrimination, made Isaacs and his community question whether they would ever feel at home in Britain.
Invoking a fantasy Winston Churchill won’t help as Brexit becomes grim reality. Winston Churchill should be held to account when Britain throws itself out of the EU.
Who is to blame for breaking up and impoverishing the United Kingdom? Churchill, by his followers’ own admission. The National Trust is under attack because it cares about history, not fantasy. The National Trust is in trouble.
Earlier this week, 26 MPs and two peers from the recently formed “Common Sense Group” wrote to the Daily Telegraph recommending that the heritage organisation’s funding applications to public bodies be reviewed in light of its having “tarnished one of Britain’s greatest sons [Winston Churchill] by linking his family home, Chartwell, with slavery and colonialism”. 'My grandfather's hidden wartime photo album' Blitzed cities still deprived 75 years after war. Margaret Busby: how Britain's first black female publisher revolutionised literature – and never gave up. There is a revealing story Margaret Busby tells, about the first novel she published.
A family friend had bumped into a former US serviceman called Sam Greenlee. The Tories have treated Manchester as callously as they did the miners. When a Conservative administration is at war with its own citizens its strategy is always the same: crush and make an example of them so that no one else will dare contemplate the same course of action. “When they beat the miners, they could beat anyone,” said one former West Lothian miner about the miners’ strike of 1984-5. The miners were the praetorian guard of the labour movement that once brought down Ted Heath’s Conservative government. Once they were routed, other workers were sent a crude but effective message: pick a fight with us and we will crush you.
Economically depressed ex-mining villages are testament to that threat being followed through. Historic England takes London 'birthplace of feminism' off at-risk list. A once damp and leaky meeting house known as the “birthplace of feminism” is one of 181 historic sites facing a brighter future after being taken off England’s 2020 Heritage at Risk Register. The story of the Mangrove Nine. The Mangrove restaurant in Notting Hill, London opened in 1968 and quickly became a key meeting place for London’s black community, hosting everyone from intellectuals and activists such as Darcus Howe and Altheia Jones-LeCointe to Bob Marley. But its popularity made it a target for west London’s police, who constantly raided the Mangrove, ostensibly to seize drugs that were never found. Jebb Johnson, who used to spend time in the Mangrove during that period, tells Anushka Asthana about how disturbing the raids were for everyone.
In 1970, Frank Crichlow, the owner, planned a protest outside west London police stations, but things descended into chaos on the residential Portnall Road, which the police claimed was entirely the fault of the protesters. UK cinema admissions on course to be lowest since records began. UK cinema admissions are set to hit their lowest level since records began almost a century ago, with the impact of the coronavirus pandemic wiping almost £1bn from box office sales. When the final ticket stubs are counted at the end of the year, it is expected that British cinemagoers will have attended between 40m and 44m times this year, the fewest since records began in 1928.
It is well below the previous nadir of 53.8m set in 1984, when hits included Beverly Hills Cop, Ghostbusters and The Karate Kid. Attendance this year will be about 75% down on the 176m admissions in 2019, one of the best years in decades. The knock-on effect of record low attendance means box office sales are forecast to be the worst in almost three decades.
The UK box office is estimated to be set to fall by a staggering 73% this year to £334m, the lowest total since 1992. Surge in number of UK children applying for free school meals. There has been a surge in the number of UK children registering for free school meals, with an estimated 1 million pupils recently signing up for the first time, according to food poverty campaigners. Analysis by the Food Foundation thinktank, released as part of footballer Marcus Rashford’s campaign to end child food poverty, estimates that as many as 900,000 more children have sought free school meals, on top of the 1.4 million who were already claiming, as the Covid-19 crisis plays havoc with family incomes. Campaigners urged ministers to prevent a growing food insecurity crisis for millions of children by widening eligibility for free lunches to all children up to the age of 16 whose families were claiming universal credit or other benefits.
Analysis by LGA Labour reveals that more than 450,000 pupils face spending half-term under increased lockdown restrictions but without free school meals. The return of Spitting Image shows how toothless British satire has become. Britain and Europe. Britain in the Twentieth Century. From the Blitz to Brexit: how society changed after the second world war. In 1942, aged 18, my mother was running for her life with her father, mother and siblings, heading for an air-raid shelter as bombs pulverised Portsmouth, turning the city into “a tomb of darkness” as one diarist recorded.
During the war the family were to lose their home twice as the city and its docks became a prime target. My mother was wearing a new coat so when her father ordered everyone to hit the ground, she refused. A bomb splinter gouged one side of her back. A female ambulance driver risked her life to drive my mother to hospital through the raid. I was born in 1948. Doris Lessing arrived in London from South Africa in the year I was born.
Baby boomers, like me, were born out of – or because of – that weariness. Time is running out to reconsider how war shaped not only the lives of our parents but our lives too. When council estates were a dream.