Soon a For Sale board will appear outside the 1930’s house
where I grew up in Coventry. It’s difficult to know how to value a home. To my
father, who died last year, the house was his legacy to my sister and I. Sitting
in the back room after tea once a week, we would watch as he opened a little
red tin and divided his weekly pay-packet from the tractor factory where he
worked in to different compartments: building society, bills, food, clothes,
holiday. Occasionally, when he was on
strike, the little tin lay empty but it triumphed in the end: he clocked in and
out of the factory and the bills were paid. The house is now ours. Almost.
Leave its bay-window behind, walk for fifteen minutes
and you confront the architectural scars of the City Centre - what remains of a
great medieval metropolis shattered when two-thirds of its buildings
disappeared in the blitz, stitched bluntly back together with 1950’s modernist
bravado. It’s difficult to know how to value a city. This blend of old and new
was once thrilling to those who flooded in to work in the booming factories. After the horrors of two world wars, it
represented a dignified post-war settlement. “The principle of Liberalism is
trust in the people, qualified by prudence, “, the great Liberal Prime-Minister
Gladstone offered in 1885. In Coventry, the decent liberal values of hard-work
and egalitarianism finally rose, phoenix-like, from the indecent ashes of war. Almost.
While my Dad was counting his pennies, I’d either be
doing my homework or day-dreaming. It’s difficult to know how to value a
culture. I read the Daily Mirror. I read the New Statesman. I read poetry. I
knew from family history the tyranny of the English oppression of the Irish,
the English oppression of its own working-class. “Get yourself an education, then
you can go and clean toilets”, was the puzzling mantra from my Irish maternal
line. My Mum was, indeed, a cleaner. Her money added a few nicer touches to the
house. My Dad was wary about all this aspiration. Working wasn’t about gaining
materially, it was about buying a life safe from both the authorities and the
vagaries of market forces. He sensed it could all disappear so easily. Yet I believed in an inevitable political and
social progress. We had peace and
democracy. My sister and I would be the first in our family to study at
university. Children, fulfilling work, sexual freedom, economic independence. I
had it all, as would my daughters. Almost.
As the For Sale board goes up, I have to wonder. What
do we own in the end, those of us whose parents were allowed the promise of a
better life while it was convenient to offer it to them? Those whose
grandparents were shovelled in to a mass grave when Coventry was bombed? This
city is worth little now that its industry has gone and the semi-detached
houses even less. My progress allowed me
a place as a senior editor at The Sunday Times for many years but now I am
redundant, I know how fragile that was. I was not entitled.
For Sale boards dot our collective consciousness: we,
who thought we owned the benefits of houses, hospitals, schools and
universities, are invited to sell up before things get even worse but someone
else is benefitting from what we are giving away. My place in the world appeared to come from
the top-down: governments embracing liberal values ensured the likes of us were
given the security of the welfare state, pensions and work. In fact, it came
from the bottom-up: men and women fighting for generations for the right to a
decent wage and the vote.
Liberalism has to be more than a luxury bestowed with
largesse. It is freedom from debt and bondage. It is guaranteed by the people,
not the market or the state. In our little semi, it tasted sweet. Now my children
must buy debt simply to be educated. Is some kind of bondage to a floundering
economic next? Their legacy, should they choose it, is the knowledge that
neither austerity nor progress are inevitable and that everything must be
fought for. As early as 1839, the workers
who published The Chartist Circular in Glasgow stated this: “For a nation to love liberty, it is
sufficient that she knows it; and to be free, it is sufficient that she wills
it. “
Let’s pause for a moment and relish those thoughts,
before we sell anything else.
Cathy Galvin's Twitter
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