LORENZ Hart, who knew a thing or two about being miserable, wrote a lyric that strikes a chord today: "Very glad to be unhappy…" Seventy years later, it could be the theme song for our times – as Scots MP Tom Harris has sadly found out.
Harris has been pilloried for making a light-hearted comment about a nation that is happiest when it is moaning: "Why is everyone so bloody miserable?" He was only trying to be a little ray of sunshine in a gloomy world, but he should have known bett
er.
How dare he question our national pastime of girning, griping and whingeing? Doesn't he know we're all Woody Allens ("Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable")? In the middle of an economic downturn, when prices are rocketing, his timing has been questioned. In fact, it is exactly the right time to remind ourselves that most of us are still all right, Jack. If you think these are hard times, you ain't seen nuthin'.
Instead of the misrepresentations of the misery-mongers, it is worth reading what Harris actually said on his blog: "Despite the recent credit squeeze, our citizens have never been so wealthy. High-def TVs fly off the shelves at Tesco quicker than they can be imported. Whatever the latest technological innovation, most people can treat themselves to it. Eating out – a rare treat when I was a child in the '70s – is as commonplace as going shopping. And when we do go shopping, whether for groceries or for clothes, we spend money in quantities that would have made our parents gasp." Check, check and check again.
The Glasgow South MP is no mere political Pollyanna and is not to be compared to 'Sunny' Jim Callaghan, the Labour Prime Minister who returned from the West Indies in the middle of the 'Winter of Discontent' and did not actually say, but implied: "Crisis, what crisis?" Harris's mistake is to be a serious politician making a serious point and expecting a serious debate, when he should have known that is the last thing he would get from a knee-jerk opposition and the right-wing press.
He was naive to hope he could spark a thoughtful dialogue about what he believes to be a deep social, spiritual and cultural malaise. The reaction was all too predictable; whether or not it is good for a country undergoing troubled times, some see it as their job to foster discontent and promote pessimism.
Their lament that "it's back to the Seventies" plays on the fears and uncertainties of those who do not want to do without the luxuries and self-pampering pleasures to which they have become accustomed (under, be it noted, a Labour Government). "Shall we fill up the BMW or the Ford Focus, dear?" "Better use the smaller car – damn that Gordon Brown!"
It also resonates with lower income groups who have become accustomed to the splurge in the shopping malls and the Saturday night on the booze and do not see why they should have to do without the latest electronic toy or have one drink less.
Anyone who lived and worked through the 1970s knows we are nowhere near those straitened times. Then, even a pay explosion could not keep pace with the spiralling cost of living. In 1973, oil prices tripled (to $35 a barrel compared with $140 last week) and that was enough to send the world into an economic tailspin and Britain into a three-day working week.
Last week, we went to panic stations because inflation reached 3.3% and the governor of the Bank of England warned it might go to 4% before dropping back to the Government's 2% target. In 1978-9 inflation was running at 10%, and during that decade it went as high as 26%.
The pay limit was meant to be 5% but strong unions banged in double-digit claims and defied the Government. In a striking parallel with today, a chain reaction was triggered when oil tanker drivers and public sector workers piled in, leaving rubbish in the streets and bodies unburied in mortuaries.
Are we anywhere near that scenario? Certainly, we are hearing the sound of big beasts stirring from their long slumber. Railmen's union leader Bob Crow says they will pay no attention to a wage freeze and Unison general secretary Dave Prentis said his union would oppose attempts to impose an "unfair, immoral" pay policy of 2% for the next three years on public sector workers.
The difference is that the union strength is now confined to the public sector and is virtually non-existent in the private; meanwhile, our consumerist, credit-crazy society is so deeply in hock that those with jobs are terrified of losing them and will swallow whatever the bosses hand out. The unions would also have to ask themselves whether they want to bring about the downfall of a Labour Government, even a New Labour Government, that needs an economic resurgence in the next two years to have a chance of survival.
What the Government – and we all – need to realise is that it is no longer a pop-song slogan: Things really are better. We could learn from the success in America of Barack Obama's politics of hope, which led one commentator to declare: "The cockeyed optimists are back among us."
Harris is right when he says that even in the Struggling Seventies, people managed to find contentment. In the Nervous Noughties, we are better off and better looked after, yet more discontented. The more we have, the more we fear we have to lose. When we've never had it so good, we refuse to be satisfied and the next question is: "Why can't they be better?"
Instead, we should remember the last lines of Hart's lyric: "I'm so unhappy but, oh, so glad."
The full article contains 993 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
