Postwar artists wouldn’t have had a chance without affordable housing or social security. When will politicians realise that?
When John Lydon sang in 1976 that anarchy was coming to the UK, he wasn’t far wrong. Genuine anarchism (a noble political tradition) certainly didn’t descend on Britain in the wake of punk rock and Margaret Thatcher’s general election victory three years later. But since 1979, the consensus that the British state should empower individuals through social security (such as the “council tenancy” Lydon sneered at in Anarchy in the UK) has been steadily unpicked by Thatcher and her successors – a triumph for laissez-faire anti-statism, if not quite anarchy itself.
The irony is that countercultural outbursts like punk were really enabled by the statist policies of postwar Britain. For all that countless artists, musicians and writers from the 50s to the 80s saw government as the enemy and thought they were mavericks railing against the system, the flourishing culture of the period was very much a product of the welfare state and its nurturing social infrastructures.
Alex Niven is a lecturer in English literature at Newcastle University and the author of The North Will Rise Again
