WE’VE NEVER HAD IT SO GOOD!
How will we remember the 2010s? A divisive decade scarred by belt-tightening, terrorism and THAT referendum? In a provocative analysis a leading historian dismisses the doomsters and declares...
ALL decades, in the long run, end up being reduced to a series of clichés. When we look back at the 1930s, we remember the dole queues and the dictators.
When we think of the 1960s, we see James Bond and the Beatles, the Mini and the mini-skirt. The 1970s will forever be the decade of the three-day week and the Winter of Discontent. The 1980s was the decade of Margaret Thatcher, the Falklands War, the miners’ strike and the video recorder.
The 1990s saw the arrival of the internet and the rise of Cool Britannia; the 2000s will be remembered for 9/11, Iraq and the shock of the financial crisis.
So how, then, will we remember the 2010s? A decade of austerity, defined by closing libraries and deserted high streets? A decade of great patriotic spectacles, from the wedding of William and Kate and Harry and Meghan, to the London Olympics?
Or the decade of social media, characterised by vicious online rows about ever more esoteric subjects? It was a decade that saw millions in thrall not just to Facebook, Twitter and Apple, but also to Game of Thrones, the Great British Bake-Off, Blue Planet and Love Island. Against all expectations a Scot won Wimbledon – not once but twice.
In British politics, five names stand out. Only one of them, though, might have been predicted at the start of the 2010s: David Cameron, whose decision to hold the EU referendum destroyed his own political career but changed the fate of Britain forever.
The other four were all mavericks, tilting against the Westminster establishment. There was Alex Salmond whose bid to take Scotland out of the UK gathered momentum at a formidable rate in the early part of the decade. Had he succeeded – and he came uncomfortably close – how vastly different the story of the 2010s might have looked.
Then there was Nigel Farage, whose long campaign to take Britain out of Europe ended in unexpected triumph.
Another was Jeremy Corbyn, whose shameless stint as leader of the Labour Party ended with the party’s greatest – and most richly deserved – electoral humiliation since 1935.
The final name, of course, belongs to Boris Johnson. He began the decade as an amiable, apparently buffoonish Mayor of London, having joked that he had more chance of being reincarnated as an olive than of becoming PM.
BUT he ended it not just as the man who had led the Leave campaign to victory, but as a dominant Prime Minister with the biggest Tory majority since Mrs Thatcher in her all-conquering pomp.
Indeed, if you ever wanted proof of the sheer unpredictability of history, you could find no better subject than the 2010s. Who could have foreseen that, having voted to leave the EU in 2016, Britain would spend the next three years in fruitless limbo before Boris, of all people, broke the stalemate?
And who could have foreseen that after an excruciatingly tight race for the White House, Donald Trump, of all people, would squeak home ahead of Hillary Clinton, having bludgeoned his way into America’s affections with his talk of trade barriers, immigration curbs and a giant wall along the Mexico border?
To high-minded metropolitan liberals, the words ‘Brexit’ and ‘Trump’ became intolerably maddening. In some ways they were simply aspects of the same story: a populist revolt of working-class voters across the Western world against the assumptions of liberal globalisation.
This was, of course, a story with a darker side. With the EU’s obsession with open borders handing ammunition to the far Right, some member states turned to authoritarian strongmen who recalled the grim days of the 1930s, such as Hungary’s Viktor Orban and Italy’s Matteo Salvini.
Even Germany, where the memory of Nazism has long acted as the ultimate cautionary tale, handed the far-Right AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) 13 per cent of the vote and a staggering 94 seats in the Bundestag in federal elections in late 2017.
That same year, some 11million Frenchmen and women voted for the far-Right Marine Le Pen to become President. But whether this was merely a belated reaction to economic stagnation and mass immigration, or a chilling harbinger of the politics of the 2020s, only time will tell. Indeed, almost wherever you looked in the past decade, grim headlines stood out, from Vladimir Putin’s brutal occupation of Crimea to the bloodbath in Syria, which has claimed some 500,000 lives and sent an estimated five million refugees streaming over the borders.
For Britain, one consolation was that this was not a decade of large-scale warfare. The last British troops withdrew from Afghanistan in October 2014 after 12 years.
For a while, the war left a deep scar on the national imagination, epitomised by the mourning crowds that greeted the bodies of the fallen in Wootton Bassett. But public awareness of the costs of war has once again begun to fade. Elsewhere, though, bloodshed went on. No story was more chilling than the rise of socalled Islamic State (IS) in the rubble of Syria and Iraq.
At once medieval and modern, IS posted online videos of its atrocities, from prisoners publicly beheaded to the crucifixion of civilians who resisted its reign of terror.
By the end of this year its ‘world caliphate’ was in ruins. But its dreadful shadow remained – not least in the fear that Western Islamists might have been radicalised by its example. As a result, more than ever the spectre of terror
ism haunted the Western imagination. In France, Islamic extremists killed 130 people in Paris in 2015 and another 86 in a truck attack in Nice a year later, while Britain still bears the scars from atrocities such as the Westminster and London Bridge attacks and, above all, the bombing of the Manchester Arena during an Ariana Grande concert. All these occurred in 2017.
Little wonder, then, that so many of us believe the world has become a more frightening place. After all, you need only venture online, to the snake-pits of Twitter and Facebook, to see how public debate has been hijacked by extremists, fanatics and keyboard warriors.
Nowhere was the vitriol more vicious, perhaps, than in the runup to and aftermath of the 2014 Scottish independence referendum. Described by then SNP chief Mr Salmond as a ‘joyous empowering campaign; a lesson, a model in the exercise of true democracy’, it is remembered very differently by many north of the Border.
Dissenters from the Nationalist gospel were ‘traitors’ to their land and, in the eyes of the infamous cybernats, moral cowards deserving of derision. Families were divided, friendships lost and, in the seething anger, we saw a blueprint for the UK-wide wrath engendered by the 2016 EU referendum.
The gnashing of teeth over both issues continues to this day, of course. Indeed it is unlikely people have ever before spent so much time screaming at one another than in the past decade. If it was not Brexit or Scexit, it was the culture of internet bile consuming the Labour Party, a once-great institution now fatally poisoned by paranoid Marxism, racism and unashamed anti-Semitism.
Is this, then, the story of the 2010s? Anger, rancour, violence and hatred? Online outrage, gunmen in the capitals of Europe and dying children in the streets of Syria? A world on fire, both metaphorically and literally?
Well, it’s part of it. But there is another side of the picture.
Horrifying and tragic as many of these events were, there is surely a case that the biggest story of the 2010s was much more optimistic. And setting aside the political headlines, I would suggest that the past ten years have been the best decade in human history. That probably sounds alarmingly counter-intuitive. So to start with, just think about all the apocalyptic predictions that never came true.
The Left told us austerity would provoke a massive reaction, with an uprising in the streets and a mass revolt of the young. And yes, there were riots in London in 2011 – but we know now that they were a disgraceful aberration, not the beginning of a trend.
IT turned out that Britain was strong, sensible and stable enough to swallow the Coalition’s budget cuts without descending into anarchy. So were European countries such as Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain, all of which endured years of deep spending cuts and youth unemployment without plunging into the widely predicted riots and revolution.
Contrary to the overheated forecasts of hysterical liberals, who cast Trump as Hitler reborn, his presidency has not seen America descend into fascism. And although
Putin made himself no friends in Salisbury after his agents’ attack on the Skripals, he is not Stalin.
Even his occupation of Crimea was a reflection of weakness, not a sign of strength, after the Ukrainian people had toppled his puppet government.
It is risky, of course, to be too optimistic, because history always has another twist in store. Even so, the world in the 2010s was a calmer, more stable place than the headlines sometimes suggested – which in turn reflects a deeper story.
For most human beings, and not just in the West, life is simply better than ever. A century ago, 90 per cent of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty.
Yet as the Swedish economist Johan Norberg recently reported, the World Bank’s figures show that the proportion living in extreme poverty today has fallen to less than 9 per cent, having dropped by half in only ten years.
So the next time some unreconstructed Corbyn-fancier rants at you about the wickedness of international capitalism, it’s worth reminding them that international capitalism is doing a pretty good job, lifting more people out of hunger and deprivation than ever before in human history.
The story of mankind in the 2010s, agrees the United Nations Development Report, is one of an ‘unprecedented number of people in the world escaping poverty, hunger and disease’. In almost every country on earth, child mortality is down and life expectancy up. To put it simply, most people are richer, better-fed, more comfortable and healthier than ever before.
Progress creates its own problems, of course. In the West, the surging costs of healthcare and pensions present a colossal challenge, which helps to explain why European countries have imported millions of immigrants to do the work and pay the bills. And as we all know, progress comes at a punishing environmental cost. Yet here, too, Greta Thunberg’s apocalyptic predictions of a climate emergency tell only one side of the story. In the West, most of us live more self-consciously sustainable lives than ever before. Our homes are more likely to be solar-heated, our cars more likely to be electric. We are a long way from being carbonneutral. But we are closer than we were. And the good news doesn’t end there. Contrary to what you might think, all the statistical evidence shows that life is less violent than it has ever been. Even wars like the slaughter in Syria are becoming the exception, not the rule.
Partly this reflects the striking tolerance and gentleness – and yes, you read those words correctly – of life in the 21st century.
Again, this runs counter to the overheated gibberish peddled by many Left-wing commentators, especially the fanatics who regard Brexiteers as ‘worse than Nazis’, to quote the ludicrous Labour MP David Lammy. But once again the data tells the story. By every statistical measure, most people in Britain are more tolerant, less sexist and less racist than ever before.
We are more likely to have black neighbours, friends, relatives and partners. Most of us have become comfortable with gay marriage, regard overt racism as utterly unacceptable and treat foreigners with kindness and respect.
To put it another way, Brexit Britain is a kinder, gentler place than ever before.
Only one group, in fact, betrays signs of the vicious, narrow-minded intolerance we associate with the bad old days. But after their humiliation on December 12, we don’t need to worry about Jeremy Corbyn’s fan club for a while.
In many ways, then, this month’s General Election was a remarkably appropriate conclusion to a decade that turned out a lot better than many predicted. After all the social media hysteria, all the screaming and sobbing, all the strident anti-Semitism and unreconstructed class warfare, Labour’s mission to turn Britain into Venezuela exploded on the launch pad.
Of course there are some daunting challenges ahead. But as we enter the 2020s, we do so as a richer, safer, greener and healthier country than ever before.
It’s not in our nature to pat ourselves on the back. Indeed, I often think that we British love nothing better than flagellating ourselves about our national failings.
But as the bells ring in the new decade, we ought, for once, to raise a glass to ourselves. We didn’t do so badly, after all.