Shopping Basket

Behind-The-Books Blog

My Scary Book Recommendation

Friday, October 29th, 2010

Halloween is nigh, and I brace myself for the barbarians at the gate: sugar-crazed kids citing defunct medieval superstition as evidence of their right to free confectionary from total strangers. And this year bodes to be scarier than ever, as what child will not pass up the opportunity to don a contemporary monster-mask… The George Osborne Goblin?  Or the Cleggcameron cloak – sinister power suited in the guise of a snotty school nerd (one face fits all)? And the blue-blooded children of Conservatism (they who argue the new monsters are simply tidying up the mess left by the last messy monster) will no doubt be dusting off the old ‘Grotesque Gordon’ mask – remarkably life-like on account of being moulded out of melting wax and especially appalling when leering up at you from the body of a small child.

My cheap attacks aside, these are scary times indeed. The measures Mr Osborne announced last week to save the budget by risking the economy will affect us for decades to come. Which is ironic, as they are also decisions uncomfortably familiar to views expressed many decades ago, as I have been reminded by reading Juliet Gardiner’s The Thirties: An Intimate History. It is a rather excellent book, highly detailed and very readable, but also, due to eerie parallels, a little bit scary.

The first part deals with the consequences of and responses to the depression and mass unemployment that followed the Crash of 1929. It is a familiar story. A huge budget deficit, rising unemployment, the banks on one side, the public on the other, and the politicians desperately trying to grasp a full understanding in the middle. To increase or reduce public spending? Claw back the deficit or increase it to keep the economy moving?

In 1931, as today, it was decided to balance the budget by cutting back on public spending and reducing, among other things, the already pitiful unemployment benefit. The bankers had won. Rationalise industry [today: public services] and not credit had been the view of the Governor of the Bank of England, Montagu Norman, even whilst acknowledging that with such ‘rationalisation’, “unemployment would be ‘apt to increase’.” It did; and it is set to now, by half a million people.

‘It certainly is a tragically comic situation that the financiers who have landed the British people in this gigantic muddle should decide who should bear the burden,’ wrote Beatrice Webb in 1931. It is even more tragic that 80 years on the banks still have the last laugh, and that the remarkable resignation of certain members of the political and financial landscape to the fact that the poor will just have to lump it as the storm others created is weathered, is not a thing of the past.

For not even single policies and actions, but the whole ideology of today’s Treasury (if ideology is not too grandiose a term) seems to leap from 1931 – ‘It is not part of my job as Chancellor of the Exchequer,’ claimed the then Labour Chancellor Philip Snowden, ‘to put before the House of Commons proposals for the expenditure of public money. The function of the Chancellor […] is to resist all demands for expenditure made by his colleagues and, when he can no longer resist, to limit the concession to the barest point of acceptance.’ Ah, Labour before the burden of Welfare. Are these words now printed on every Treasury memo?

To finish the tale that is being repeated; the Labour government that was in power when the crisis erupted in 1929 was after two years replaced by a coalition between the Conservatives and Liberals. I rather think this spooky repetition lark has gone far enough. I am not an economist; nor do I claim to be massively well versed in politics. I am though, I flatter myself, well versed in history; in the danger of not heeding history; and, I know a scary book when I read one. At the time of writing I have long passed the 100 page hurdle in Gardiner’s epic history of the 1930s, yet I am still hovering around 1930/31. Now call me a pessimist, but I have an inclination that things are going to get worse before they get better.

And so, if you want to scare the bejeezus out of your children this week at bedtime, then please put aside Roald Dahl’s The Witches (hitherto the scariest thing I’ve ever read), and pick up The Thirties: An Intimate History. For it’s Halloween, and the Ghost of old Snowden is afoot.

Georgina Phipps, Editorial Administrator

Katrine Says:


Interesting insight George!

Posted on October 29th, 2010 at 2:51 pm

Leave a Comment

  • Currently we are...

  • …Liking

    Lesley: This charming blog by a Penguin book collector, A Prenguin a Week.

  • …Reading

    Going Too Far, by Catherine Alliott. Susie: I rarely read 'girly' books but came across Alliott a few years ago. I've read 3 of her books thus far, and was delighted to spot this one for 30p in a charity shop. I've not opened it as yet but am hoping for another witty, grown-up, middle-class romcom, with lots of 4x4s and country houses!

  • …Tweeting