Author Archives: Ben Wood

In 1912 Britain was a surprisingly shabby place. Despite the country’s immense foreign possessions and vast export trade, the UK was suffering the enfeebling effects of a drastic readjustment of global trade. In the decades to come, these economic tides would cause the British Empire to recede into the history books. But for the Edwardians, these future chimes of doom were felt first as industrial sluggishness and mass hardship. The grand Imperial centre was witnessing an explosion of poverty, malnutrition, and ill-health, decaying infrastructure and insecure work.

E.M. Forster memorably dramatized this national condition in his 1913 novel Maurice through the metaphor of the tumbled down country house of Penge. This once-grand seat of the genteel Durham family is now beset by staff-shortages, leaky roofs and pathologically complacent owners. And to compound the estate’s troubles, the working-classes over whom the Durham’s bestow their parasitic patronage no-longer see the point of their old masters. The aristocrats grumble that the scullery maids have become unreliable while the game-keepers have gone socialist. As Forster puts it wryly: ‘ people had the air of settling something; they either just had arranged or soon would arrange England. Yet, the gate posts, the roads…were in bad repair, and the timber wasn’t kept properly, the windows stuck, the boards creaked.’ Plutocratic pretentions were finally hitting the cold and unforgiving buffers of economic reality. It is impossible to read Forster’s description of this sad and decaying estate without seeing something of ourselves.

Since the 2008 Financial Crisis the UK economy has stuttered along, struggling with low productivity, stagnant wages and a rising tide of social need. But if we find ourselves resolutely within the walls of Forster’s dilapidated Penge, the avoidable shabbiness of the Edwardians points us towards something like a remedy. Forster knew (and in time would become part of) a new circle of intellectuals, often dubbed ‘the New Liberals’. In the face of an ‘individualism which ignores the social factor in wealth’, that depletes ‘the national resources’ and deprives ‘the community of its just share in the fruits of industry’ (L.T. Hobhouse), New Liberals sought to establish a new set of political principles:

• Wealth is produced by a dynamic partnership between personal initiative and social organisation
• Society possesses common goods which must be met collectively
• Government (on behalf of society) has a right to demand a reasonable portion of private wealth in recognition of the social dimension of all personal initiative

As Hobhouse summarised this posture: ‘The prosperous businessman who thinks that he has made his fortune entirely by self-help does not pause to consider what single step he could have taken on the road to his success but for the ordered tranquillity which has made commercial development possible, the security by road, and rail, and sea, the masses of skilled labour, and the sum of intelligence which civilization has placed at his disposal …If he dug to the foundations of his fortune he would recognize that, as it is society that maintains and guarantees his possessions, so also it is society which is an indispensable partner in its original creation’.

And yet an atmosphere of structural individualism pervades our lives. Common needs are repeatedly neglected and common sources of prosperity are frittered away. The country is ailing, with an extractive economy, characterised by high rents, low savings and even lower investment. The jaded house-maids and socialist gamekeepers have morphed into precarious renters who yearn for a humane collectivism to rescue them from what Forster called the rootless ‘civilisation of luggage’.  This was once the grand mission of our public services, but they are looking increasingly threadbare and dysfunctional, with their maintenance falling on shoulders that simply cannot bare them.