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The Industrial Revolution and the Enclosure Acts - contemporary relevance
An article by Robin Carmody

The arch-conservative English nationalist Robert Henderson's material on this subject taken from his book 'What is Englishness?', coupled with his rather curious comments elsewhere which seemed to dismiss the Northern contribution to the Industrial Revolution, got me thinking (incidentally, I always thought a key part of that dramatic shift in society was the rapid development of Manchester from an insignificant backwater to a vast powerhouse of a city, plus the development of football clubs from the Northern towns as the dominant force in the game to such an extent that, after the university and public school sides had been pushed aside, there was no FA Cup final between two Southern teams until 1967).

Many of the certainties and much of the "fixed order" of society that someone like my mother would have had sensed growing up in the 1950s - the songs they sang at primary school, the detail of the textbooks, the tone of the schools radio programmes - was based around the aftereffects of the Industrial Revolution and the Enclosure Acts, which did admittedly predate mass industrialisation, but only came to their full fruition with the urbanisation of the working classes and changes in agricultural practice meaning that fewer people were needed to work the land anyway. Imagery of the landed gentry in their isolated splendour and the football crowds in their plain, decent, unified support resonated through British society. But, like so many other old certainties, this situation has faded away.

The thing is that for much of the last 50 years, accelerating in the early 1980s, the Industrial Revolution has been contracting. Quite obviously I'm not thinking of the most cliched sense in which one might use that phrase - that of William Morris' "News From Nowhere", J.B. Priestley's "A Summer Day's Dream", Peter Dickinson's Changes trilogy and even Sandy Denny's "The Sea", the sense of a return to the land and to a superstitious, neo-medieval society. The extent to which the Industrial Revolution changed the landscape and the appearance of this country is such that it can never be wholly undone. But the invention Robert Henderson cited as the epitome of the Industrial Revolution - steam power - has long since faded into history. In the late 50s and early to mid-60s it was removed from the railways at a breathtaking pace by a modernisation plan which may have revived the "workshop of the world" principle (the BREL works at Doncaster, where many of the first-generation diesel and electric locomotives were built, were firmly in the tradition of the original industrialists) but created a much cleaner society where fewer people were employed in the dirtier, more physically draining industrial jobs of which a classic example was the footplate of the steam locomotive. Concurrently, the Clean Air Acts dramatically changed the atmosphere of our cities, which became much less polluted than at any time since before heavy industry really took off.

While all this was going on, the first mass rehousing of the working class since the "flight from the land" was taking place - the demolition of the old back-to-back terraced houses in the industrial towns, and the moving of the population to tower blocks and new housing estates which had a much more standardised, suburbanised design aesthetic. The 1969 short film "This Town", a blood-rushingly striking picture of Halifax on the cusp, captures this process chillingly: people still work en masse in the factories, still walk as one through the streets and through the town's market, but suddenly it jump-cuts from the crowds to adverts in the town utilising glossy imagery in the vein of a 60s Bond movie, and then it shows the new flats with their vague promise of a new form of employment (of course it also gives the lie to the notion, beloved of some on the anti-Blair hard left, that the Wilson government was particularly concerned about the patterns of living that had grown up in the areas formed by the Industrial Revolution to which the Labour Party owed its very existence; if it was felt that such things had to be sacrificed to its beloved modernism, then sacrificed they were). The film ends with a frozen image of terraced housing clearly about to be pulled down forever; de-industrialisation was on the way, even if it wasn't foreseen at the time.

In the short term, it didn't necessarily matter, but before too long it was manifestly evident that people no longer felt the same sort of shared affinity within their work that they once had - the trade union militancy of the mid to late 70s was ultimately a sham led by increasingly egotistical figures in the Scargill vein - and the process made the full-scale grinding down of the Industrial Revolution legacy that little bit easier. Once the collectivism had died, and alienation amid rootless, lumbering architectural monsters had become virtually par for the course (the worst thing about the tower blocks was the institutionalisation of the elderly), destroying the institutions of these people's employment seemed almost like a natural thing to do.

What happened under the Thatcher era and subsequently needs no introduction, of course - I cannot be certain, but I'm guessing that the percentage of the population working in heavy industries is now the lowest it has been since we were still a predominately land-based society. Similar changes have, of course, happened within the rural population as agriculture has declined, especially over the last decade or so ... and that brings us back to the theme which makes this piece fit for crossposting to a rural political ng.

It has become a truism to the point of cliche to state that the mass closures of the mines, factories, railway works and the like are the undoing of much of the order of society set up by the Industrial Revolution, admittedly not restoring the previous situation but instead leaving us with an increasingly rootless population now employed, if at all, in a variety of technological and service industries, but the undoing of the Industrial Revolution nonetheless. If we accept that the dominance that the Countryside Alliance set developed in rural society was mainly brought about by the enclosures coupled with the urbanisation of the working classes - processes which removed the people who could have formed communal resistance to their position, and put them in places where the landed aristocracy would have been pretty much out of sight and out of mind - then aren't the dramatic changes in rural Britain over the last few decades, now coming to a head, the effective reversal of the enclosure acts?

The interest in the countryside among the hippie generation was a factor: this was a movement of the progressive liberal-left where "back to the land" did not carry the right-wing connotations it would have had after punk, and songs like Steeleye Span's "The Weaver and the Factory Maid" plugged into an unease at the aftereffects of industrialism fuelled by the 1973 oil crisis and the growth of environmentalism (the outstanding example of this is, of course, Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull, who now owns vast swathes of the west of Scotland whose owners 30 years ago would presumably have denounced him as a "filthy hippie", and whose actions in the 70s have proved to be far more influential on the recent Scottish hunting ban than those of Jim Callaghan).

The increasing influence of the urban nouveau riche in many old farming villages is another factor, and in this context the House of Lords Act 1999 (the legislation removing most hereditary peers), the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 (aka "the right to roam act"), the recent act outlawing hunting with dogs in Scotland, and the hunting bill soon to come before the Westminster parliament are all of a piece. The removal of hereditary peers finally enacted what would have happened some time in the 19th Century had the massive changes in society brought about by the Industrial Revolution erupted into genuine insurrection and the formal overthrow of the old order (this further underlines one of RH's lines; although a massive social transition, the Industrial Revolution was still in a sense "no revolution" because the flight from the land which made it possible actually strengthened the power of the landed aristocracy). The "right to roam act" gave the people a freedom that was slowly taken away from them during the enclosures, and foxhunting is ultimately a relatively new pastime passed off as something from time out of mind by the landowners once the old communal farmland was in their hands.

The same applies to the party political situation. In my essay "The lost lineage of rural liberalism" I cited the split between the Liberal and Labour parties and the Liberals' subsequent self-destruction as the starting point for an unfair polarisation which reflected the urbanisation of the proletariat and the ultimate weakness and marginality of that minority of the working class that had not been absorbed into mass industrialisation (without th Industrial Revolution, there could never have been a Labour Party in the sense understood by all its leaders until Blair came along; it might easily have developed differently, in the vein envisaged by early socialists like the "Merrie England" dreamer Robert Blatchford, but the whole history of British politics would inevitably have been very different). At its nadir in 1955 the Liberal Party held six seats, of which three were in rural Wales (never industrialised, but crucially never Tory in the way that most of rural England was) and two were, oddly, in the urban north of England. The sixth seat, the most northerly of all, was Orkney & Shetland. Even in 1966, their worst electoral showing between 1945 and 1997, the Tories still held overwhelming dominance over the shires mainly because the Liberals - the only party that could have challenged them in those areas that had not been heavily industrialised - remained largely a weak, denuded force.

But now we have a Labour Party thoroughly disassociated from its old heartlands, able to gain seats that were beyond it even in 1945 and 1966, because the association with the Industrial Revolution and its aftereffects - the party's source and its strength for so long - is now pretty much drained out. Moreover, the Liberal Party which challenged the Tories throughout the country until its collapse in the 1920s has, in its current incarnation, seriously eaten away at the Tories' position in the shires to an extent quite unprecedented in at least the last 60 years. Without a major party umbilically linked to the massed working classes, and with the Liberals a major challenger to the Tories rather than an inconsequential third party with zero political credibility, our political situation is oddly akin to a post industrial version of the pre-industrial one. It is obviously a totally different world in every possible way, but something of the pre-Labour narrative is still with us (Blair will be pleased with that - when NuLab were in opposition he frequently expressed his regret at the 1900 split, making no secret of his view that socialism was, for him, a blip on the flow of history, not a theory for all time), and the safe tribal narrative of the years between the completion of the Industrial Revolution and the mass erosion of its patterns of living in the 1980s has faded away.

Industrialism and the enclosures changed this country for all time, but the tribalism they engendered has already gone. With its dominant centre ground parties and its marginal socialist movements not represented in the cultural or demographic basis of any of the main parties (present-day trade unionists are in a position much closer to that of the Swing rioters of 1832 than to that of the 1970s unions), post-industrial Britain has a political narrative which oddly harks back to the time before the aftereffects of the Industrial Revolution had altered the political process, and knows little and cares less for or about the absolute certainties that still seemed so unimpeachable in the mid-20th Century. The Industrial Revolution *did* change everything, as did its aftereffects on the land the working classes had left behind, but when much of it had been dismantled, the new structure would have the power to surprise us with its echoes of the system we thought we'd left behind for good, and its utter removal from the system we thought would last forever when the earls and the miners alike still knew their place. That's the biggest change of all, really; *nobody* knows their place anymore.

Robin Carmody, Portland, Dorset

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