Searching for the Promised Land by Magnus Granath

Book details

Title: Searching for the Promised Land
Genre: Political History
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 978-1904976-00-4
Price: £10.99

Synopsis

The Promised Land is not just a story about a town in South Essex, it could be a story about any town or city in the UK. But it is also a state of mind; a sense of knowing where we have come from, where we are going to, and the journey we have undertaken.

The journey outlined in this book is both eccentric and haphazard. It negotiates the obstacles of nineteenth century pornography, UFO sightings, defining socialism, and being part of the Basildon New Town experiment. It examines the reasons why governments always let us down, and studies the London working class diaspora and the death of the autodidactic tradition. It exposes the secret admirers of Enoch Powell and offers cycling as an anarchist statement compared to boxing as a morally improving activity.

It is interlaced with a whimsical regard for poetry, a wealth of good stories told in the author's quirky manner and overall it shows a reckless disregard for both propriety and good sense.

Extract

Promised Land In 1776, Thomas Jefferson, the author of the American Declaration of Independence, told us that all of mankind have an inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness. Jefferson, in turn, was building upon the ideas of Englishman, John Locke, who, a hundred years previously, had first argued the existence of a natural law that gave inalienable rights to men, amongst which were life and liberty.

Uncomfortably, Jefferson owned somewhere in the region of two hundred black slaves upon whose labours he depended for his gentlemanly existence. Although he was aware of the contradictions of his position, it did not prevent him buying and selling slaves for profit on his Monticello estate.

James Hubbard, one of Jefferson’s more awkward slaves, discovered that the pursuit of happiness was little more than a distant fantasy. When he was captured after running away, Jefferson had him ‘severely flogged’ and then sold him.

Jefferson also fathered at least one child by another slave, Sally Heming, a fact that should cause us to sit up and take notice of the contrast between ‘what great men say’ and ‘what great men do’. Such facts illustrate not only the complexity of human character but also demonstrate there is no straight line between the outpourings of a great and original mind and the way society develops.

On the whole, it is probably most useful to look upon Jefferson as a shameless, opportunistic scoundrel rather than an elevated liberal intellectual.

Despite this minor, but rather awkward, diversion it is undeniable that Jefferson was chief among those who, in the second half of the eighteenth century, watered the tree of liberty and infected Western Europe and the Americas with the idea that we all have an inalienable right to fulfilment in our lives.

Although Jefferson may have put this great and overwhelming objective into words, there has existed, in every generation and in every society through the whole of human history, a group of people who are not content with the status quo. But they never had the verbal dexterity of the third American president.

In an authoritarian or totalitarian state they learn to internalise their discontent and somehow live a different life through the richness of their imagination. In an open liberal democracy where people can, by and large, do what they want if they observe the law, then they are free to try to build another life for themselves outside the mainstream orthodoxy.

Britain, with its liberal tradition of relative openness, tolerance and pluralism, provides a rich list of those who have attempted, through their own efforts, free from the influence of the state, to create a better world for themselves. The two key impulses for this movement were the religious and political upheavals and persecutions of the 16th and 17th centuries, and the industrialisation and urbanisation of the 19th century.

The religious motive led to the formation of such groups as the Scrooby Separatists - extreme Puritans from remote Lincolnshire who, in the early 17th Century, set sail for a new life in Holland. The same impulse led to the formation of separatist communities such as the Amish and the Hutterites in the rural parts of North America.

The political imperative of the English Civil War led to the formation of the Diggers with their espousal of a primitive agrarian communism.

Industrialisation and the increasingly impersonal nature of society accelerated the desire to find alternative ways of living. At New Lanark, Robert Owen tried to demonstrate that industrialisation and the factory system did not always need to be a brutish and dehumanising process.

The Agapemonites, the free love cult of the second half of the nineteenth century based in Clapton, on the cusp of East and North London, and then in the village of Spaxton, Somerset, were a reaction to the increasing rigidity of the nuclear family. The ‘back to the land’ aspirations of the Chartists in the mid-nineteenth century, the William Morris-inspired arts and crafts colonies of the late-nineteenth century, and the Garden City Movement, as exemplified by Letchworth at the beginning of the twentieth century, were all manifestations of that pure desire to find a better way of life.

Significantly, in varying degrees, they all signalled a belief that government had little role in the process beyond allowing people to shape their own lives. All are a testament to the endless struggle of the human spirit.

Beneath the authoritarianism that even the most benign of governments exhibit, there lies a hidden world of individuals and groups who refuse to accept the conventional mores of society and are determined to live life on their own terms.

The Pioneers sprung out of this tradition. They were a group of mainly working class men and women who moved to Basildon New Town between 1949 (when the town was founded) and 1957. They were not a formal political party, more a loose grouping of ethical socialists who, in the light of austerity and post war housing shortages, made the collective decision to move to the new Essex town, thirty miles east of London.

They were socialists in an old-fashioned mutualist sense although in some ways it would be easier to leave the S word out. It reflected the immediate post-war optimism, the spirit of the age rather than a statement of practical intent. It is important not to confuse socialism with an active collectivist state. One of the tragedies of the past hundred years is that socialism has become equated with an overarching, regimented and intrusive government. But the Pioneers lay outside of that tradition. Most of them would view a Labour government as simply another variety of state collectivism little different from the Conservative government it probably succeeded.

A small advertisement in a 1948 edition of Tribune was enough to bring the original Pioneers together. They came from disparate backgrounds but they were united by a belief that, through their own efforts and by applying the principles of mutual aid, they could make a better life for themselves. In Basildon, they reasoned, there would be houses and jobs and, above all, the chance to form a community of their own.

They were not overtly political although most, if not all of them, would have accepted the label ‘socialist’ in its broadest sense as a reasonable description of their outlook. Most of them came from backgrounds of the Communist Party, the Labour Party and the Independent Labour Party which, up to the 1930s, remained a significant political force. A few of them had been in the Socialist League, some had been part of the Social Credit Movement and at least one of them had been with Wal Hannington’s Unemployed Workers Movement.

One of the couples remembered the ruthless application of the means tests in the 1930s, which had driven their mother to subsist in a dirty lodging house torn from the family home. Another had fought as a young man in the Spanish Civil War and retained vivid memories. All had powerful residual memories of the poverty and hardship of the 1930s and the inability and unwillingness of governments, both Labour and Conservative, to address the needs of ordinary people.

The Pioneers settled in the older eastern side of Basildon town on the Fryerns Estate, most arriving in the two years following 1949. They comprised no more than fifty families, all living within a three quarter mile radius of each other in the respectable solid red brick houses that were constructed in the early 1950s. They held normal jobs and pursued reasonably normal lives within the confines of their beliefs. They were not exclusive and neither were they highly political in a conventional sense. But they were bound together by memories of the 1930s privations and then the war years. They believed the election of a Labour Government in 1945 would bring about the building of a New Jerusalem. In a very real and practical way, Basildon was to be their New Jerusalem.

In most ways the Pioneers were normal members of the industrial working class. They had jobs, they took a week’s holiday every year at Clacton, or a similar resort, they lived in nuclear families in their council houses, they watched Sunday Night at the London Palladium, they did the football pools, they had toast and dripping for Sunday afternoon tea and they subscribed to a Co-op funeral plan.

They did not live together communally, they did not wear dark blue Mao suits, they had no leader and they did not have any overwhelming ideological commitment. They did, however, nurture a sense of working class destiny and solidarity that told them living in close proximity, supporting each other and exercising a healthy degree of contempt for all the manifestations of state authority, could improve the circumstances of their lives.

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Searching for the Promised Land by Magnus Granath

Book details

Synopsis

Extract

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