A Short History of England, 2020-2089: The Memoirs of Jeremy Lewin

By David Tirr

A short history of England, 2020-2089 is the autobiography of one of the movers and shakers in mid and late 21st century England, Sir Jeremy Lewin. Lewin describes a century in which the country passes through rapid economic collapse, political isolation and moral degradation to find a new way forward. Following the failure of long-standing national institutions the country is in search of new political and moral beliefs. These, combined with daring technological innovation, transform a post-industrial, post-imperial England very similar to the Britain we know today into a very different country..

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris UK
• Release date: Oct 24, 2014
• ISBN: 9781499090383

David Tirr

David Tirr was born in Yorkshire, England, and was educated there and at Oxford University. He has spent most of his active life as a civil servant, first in London and then in Brussels, always specializing in foreign relations. He has worked for the British Government, the European Commission and the European External Service. He still lives in Brussels but frequently travels to the UK and a number of other European countries. A historian by training, David Tirr has always questioned why people believe what they believe. For him, religion and mythology – ancient and modern – have always driven the course of events and redefined the identity of peoples; so faith, the stories around which faith is built, and the political consequences have always shaped history – be it truth or fiction.

Book preview

Week 1: Monday

This is going to take several weeks, and the spring of my 89th year is a good time to begin.

I was born on the eve of the 21st century, in December 1999, and until a few months ago I was targeting November 2089 for my exit.

There is a certain symmetry about that month. My great-grandfather died in November 1989, and the Berlin Wall fell almost as he breathed his last, or so I am told. He was born under Queen Victoria, fought in two world wars, saw fascism and communism and the atomic age, and just made it to the end of the Cold War. He, like me, would have had plenty to tell, but he never drove events himself, nor did he ever think - as far as I know – of writing an autobiography. He was in the textiles business, and had little enough time. I missed knowing him by only ten years. Odd to think that I was that close to someone who might have seen, or even met, Gladstone or Kipling or Conan Doyle.

But I have a feeling that I may not last quite that long. Admittedly there are compensations in going when it’s warm and light. I’ve always thought November, the fag end of Autumn, the most miserable of months. In the end targets, and symmetry, aren’t that important.

I won’t tell everything – some things are better passed over in silence – but I’m confident I still have enough juice to get most of my life into print. This machine converts speech directly into writing projected onto the wall, one of our best little gimmicks. Mene, mene… nothing, just a biblical reference. You can look it up in the book of Danny… I mean, Daniel. I want to set out my life and my times in my own way, but it’s a warning, too. All life stories are, I suppose.

I want this to be the record of me kept at the Hall, as well as a gift to my daughter and my grandchildren. But of course I also want people to read my testimony, which is also the story of my country’s collapse and renewal. This isn’t really about me; I’m only a leaf on the tree.

So let me tell you about England’s fall and transformation. This 21st century has given my country its most hopeless and its most hopeful moments. It is a story worth telling from the inside, and I am modestly pleased that I have played a part in it.

Week 1: Tuesday

Until recently I still did a lot of public speaking. But you know that. Somewhat to my surprise, I find that I have never been so celebrated as now. I still do Teleworldweb once a month. I try to keep up with events through home cinema (I can’t use the e-watch these days – too small) and I do still go to the Hall for the local Comity meetings: I use the reading room most days.

I was born, then, in Yorkshire, in a post-industrial town not far from here which has since been greened, that is, esthetically deconstructed. I was a mistake and my parents were still teenagers. They split up shortly after my birth and I lived with my paternal grandparents, Jonathan and Emer Lewin. My mother shacked up with someone, as they used to say, and went off to Australia. I have never been there, and I feel nothing whatever for her. My father, Feargal Lewin, moved to Los Angeles where he too found a new partner; I suppose she was not interested in meeting her impoverished English in-laws, or else was afraid we might reject her, which would have been simply silly because you could not have found a more open-minded couple than Jon and Emer. Anyway, I never met her. I did not miss my parents because I had loving kindness from my grandparents, and I loved them back and still do, even though they passed away a lifetime ago. Even so, it was a special day if Feargal was in town and came in our little Peugeot to pick me up at the school gates.

Even in those days, Judeo-Irish couples were unusual. Jonathan Joseph Lewin was descended from Jewish refugees who had come originally from Ukraine and Emer O’Day from a family who had come from County Wicklow. They met at university in 1974.

Why did you choose an Irish wife, Jon? I enquired.

It was God’s will, Jerry. He saw to it that I lusted after a blonde Catholic with big tits. This led to a series of expletives from Emer, who then lapsed into parody Irish.

Ach, get away wit’ yer, ye old fewel. My kinfolk, the People of the Sidhe, will be comin’ fer ye.

And the Lord said to Moses, get thee a wife from among the tents of the Midianites.

Is that written in the bible? I asked. Well, if it isn’t, it bloody well ought to be.

Sacred Lamb of God, protect us! squeaked Emer.

There you are, Jon concluded. That’s the Irish for you. One moment it’s the fairies, the next it’s Jesus. They can’t tell one religion from another. And then they had a mock fist-fight and started grappling on our red sofa – they weren’t that old, after all – while I ended up fleeing to my room from sheer embarrassment.

I was bullied at school, and one of the reasons was my clothing. My trousers were too short and I wore a cardigan with difficult silvery buttons which only excited derision. Emer told Jon to see the parents of my tormentors. But Jon wasn’t keen. There was indeed a danger of being beaten up himself. Jon wasn’t combattive. Confrontation is never the best way, he explained. I’ll write them a letter.

And so he did, stating in a dignified way that the persecution was making the boy’s life miserable and that if it did not stop forthwith, he would have to resort to further measures.

What would those be? demanded Emer.

Fuck knows, he replied, in the style of the 2000s. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. We didn’t need to cross it. The persecution ceased. I was still afraid of school, but Jon took a philosophical view. Sink or swim, Jerry, he would say. Sink or swim.

In those days I had a little old cellphone: its only purpose was to call home when I came out of school, in the hope that someone would come to pick me up and save me the trouble of confronting the bullies as we poured out onto the street.

Gypton Park Road was one of a series of almost identical streets with red brick and white painted semi-detached houses, German cars on the forecourts and wheelie bins, tiny little gardens in front and bigger ones behind, and ornate front doors on otherwise plain exteriors. No 49 wasn’t much different, except that we didn’t have a German car, it was a little blue 1998 Peugeot and for a while, Emer also had her red Micra. At Christmas everyone had trees. We had one too, and Jon told Feargal that he expected him to come home at least for Christmas or Hanukah. They didn’t believe in either, but they understood the importance of ritual. Jon would light candles at Hanukah, although he had never prayed in his adult life, and in the autumn he would joke about converting the garage into a tabernacle. Easter was the best, it became a really funny occasion completely exclusive to ourselves, with chocolate eggs, bits and bobs from the Jewish Passover tradition like bitter herbs and salted eggs, and some heathen make-believe in honour of the Goddess Eostre. They would invite the friends and neighbours and get tipsy. Raucous shrieks would be heard, but they never resorted to the Demon Weed, at least not in my presence.

Although it’s all gone now, I still have the red sofa and even the Easter videos which I had converted for smartnet. And sometimes, when I squeeze my eyes really tight, I can see the shape of our bow window frame with the sun shining through it.

School was, as it always is, a profoundly disturbing experience. Never, not even when were negotiating the Cradock project or the UBI, have I felt so strongly that I was fighting for survival. The classroom was the front line. And it was made much worse by the onset of puberty. Like the onset of the Sabbath, the dark hours come first. The last thing on one’s mind was learning anything. Everyone was desperate to belong, and I ran with the kids from the Gypton Park estate and the neighbouring streets, the Raleighs and the Summermounts. As quite a few of us were Irish, but there weren’t very many Jews, I decided to be Irish, too.

You’re not Irish, I was told. You’re a Jew.

I’m not a Jew, I insisted. You’re only Jewish if your mother is. Anyway, what’s wrong with being an Irish Jew?

Of course what was wrong with it was that I never went to church. Frances Connall, or Frankie as we called her then, and her friend and neighbour Ruth Reilly were both from Gypton Park Lane, and knew my grandparents. They took my part, especially after they had seen me defending my little cousin, Josie O’Day, against some older children who had chosen to torment her.

There’s nothing wrong with being an Irish Jew, Jerry, Frankie assured me. Anyway, what do any of us know about Ireland? I’ve only been there twice. I don’t speak Irish and I don’t speak English with an Irish accent. We’re English, really.

It was true. I knew nothing about Ireland except for Emer’s bedside stories about Cuchulain, Queen Maeve and the Morrigan. So as we grew older we chose other means to establish our identity. At one point it became the fashion to use one or another 20th century pop group as a totem. The Beatles and Stones were the most popular, but there was also a Kinks gang. Just to be different, we briefly supported the Animals, until the day that Frankie, whose brilliant mind had rapidly tired of these primitive bonding mechanisms, announced that she preferred Mozart.

I should say a word about these two ladies, since they played such a huge part in my life and in all our lives. Even at the age of ten, Frances was a forbidding character. Both her parents were teachers. Tall, thin and beaky, with short, curly brown hair and gold rimmed glasses, her manner was so austere that I never, in all the decades I’ve known her, saw anyone disparage or cheat her, or even dare to engage her in argument. Later she got a first class degree from Cambridge in politics and law. As for Ruth – with her cloud of flaming red hair, brilliant blue-green eyes and pure white complexion, she was an object of desire for half the school, not excluding the teachers. Somewhat to my bemusement I found myself envied just because I was so often in her company. True, the three of us did stick together. We did so for the next 75 years, on and off.

But I got nothing out of it when I passed twelve and found that my body had been invaded by an army of rampaging hormones. I pressed my suit with all the females of my acquaintance, only to be laughed off by one and all.

I like you, Jerry, Ruth would say. But you’re a bit too pimply. Anyway I don’t really fancy getting knocked up by Jerry Lewin at the age of twelve. I see my future rather differently. I would have tried it on with Frances too, but it was pretty clear that any form of erotica was off as far as she was concerned.

Frustrated I may have been, but at least I didn’t have to go through what some of my fellow students had to endure. The pursuit of learning had little to do with the real world of imperative physical and sexual domination by some and submission by others. The classroom itself was part of the jungle. There were some shocking episodes. I knew a blond boy called Kes who was induced by some older boys to go with them to a wooded area at the end of the rugby pitch. Judging by what he told us afterwards, he was very lucky indeed to get away from them. Others, both male and female, were not so fortunate. It was an epidemic at the time. Drugs were another thing. We didn’t mind weed but were smart enough to avoid the hard stuff.

For me, relief only came after four or more years of extreme frustration. An Asian family had moved into Gypton Park Crescent and the daughter, Selma, and I were both in the sixth form. We hit it off right away. Although her family were not as prudish and clannish as some, she probably wanted to assert herself, while I was happy to be seen with an Asian girl - it was well known that they were the hardest to get off with – and besides, Selma Rayman, as she spelt it then, had a natural elegance. She wasn’t really my type, to be honest, but she was clearly attracted and I gave her no peace until, one Saturday night, she conceded on this very red sofa. We had an intensely physical relationship for the next six years. I was fond of her, but I could not compare it to the overwhelming experience of deep adoration that some of my friends had enjoyed. Of course she understood and resented that.

For you, Jeremy, I’m just a walking private part, she complained, as we lay together. I tried to convince her that this was not so, showering her with affectionate caresses, but I rather spoiled the effect by ending the episode on top again.

Selma was not the only Asian in our circle. The loudest, brashest and most self-confident of all of us was Wally Khan. He had been allowed to grow a beard at school simply by claiming that it was a religious duty. The beard was, of course, not normally allowed under school regulations, but none of the teachers dared to cause offence. Actually Wally had no interest whatever in Islam, and the religious justification was, as he himself put it, complete bollocks. He needed the beard to impress, and in particular to impress girls, which he certainly did. He set himself the goal of seducing Frankie, not because he found her attractive but because she was a challenge. He proclaimed that he had had her, which I have reason to doubt. She never said anything then, and she never had a long-standing partner, but they remained on friendly terms. Wally amazed us all with his entrepreneurial spirit; he was a millionaire by the age of 28. While he remained among us he never had much time for RM, or for Danny Mac. Why should he? He was too busy making money. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

By the age of 16, we were no longer meeting in each other’s houses. The local pub, the Turk’s Head, was mank. It was patronized by the wrong people. We agreed that we wanted something a little more exotic, somewhere we could be sure not to meet our fellow-pupils. Ruth had heard about a ‘Mediterranean joint’ in town, so we all took the bus and tried it out. La Tortue was a hit with us right away, with its blue and terracotta walls, its alcoves with round tables and ornate iron-work and its continental snacks. There were pictures of Provence, French and Italian background music – not too noisy – and a good selection of drinks. It was not the cheapest, but the people were friendly and when we started showing up regularly they kept our alcove free for us, so we could actually have a decent conversation there.

A couple of people from other schools joined in. The core group of our little community was Selma, Frances, Ruth, Wally and myself from Gypton Park; Roddy Millbank from Hett’s Wood, whose hair was unfashionably long and greasy, as a sign of mourning, he said, for the 1970s; and Jackie Q, from Marchhill, who rejected surnames and became known as Quackie. He was the last of us to get a smartphone, but once he had it, it became impossible to talk to the man. He became a denizen of the cyberworld. But this was OK with me because I needed his expertise. I have always hated IT, but the geeks were the new shamans and you needed one to guide you through the many levels of virtual existence; you sure wouldn’t get any sort of assistance from either the makers or the retailers of these devils’ devices. It was something you didn’t really learn. You absorbed it – if you could.

Childhood is the shortest part of one’s life, but by far the most intense. The good part of it ended when Jon lost his job. He had managed a small branch of one of the big banks, and after the crisis of 2008-12 they began ‘down-sizing’. Later, all the provincial branches were closed and everything was done on line. He did try to find another job, but who would pay someone his age a decent salary? So we lived off his pension and Emer’s salary as a primary school teacher. She had hoped to retire at 60, but by then someone had discovered that women actually live longer than men, so the retirement age went up to 65, then to 67 and finally to 69 – which was when they found that she’d have to go anyway, because the Council could no longer afford her. When it came, the older teachers went first. But this was still some years ahead.

When the English voted to leave the EU, the Government began to cut pensions and salaries, as unemployment soared and tax receipts fell. We began to worry about money. We had been a two car, two TV, three smartphone family; in 2020 we sold both cars and bought a second hand Ford Fiesta instead. The family holidays were another casualty. Suffice it to say that we now knew fear: the fear of not making ends meet, of perhaps being obliged to leave our home, of giving up the things that had made life worth living. We never actually had to leave, but the worry ate away at Jon’s mind, and eventually he tipped over into dementia.

Week 1: Wednesday

By this time people had got used to the fact – even if they were socialists – that there was no alternative to rolling back the state. Every state institution behaved like a large business, outsourcing tasks to private companies who were able to do the work cheaper. The fact that these companies were responsible not to the public, not to the local community, not to the government in London but only to their owners and shareholders, did not give rise to much public concern at the time – partly because enterprises in public hands had been among the finest examples of inefficiency and waste that the country could offer, but also because there seemed to be no other way at a time when falling revenues were forcing governments into round after round of spending cuts.

Unfortunately, policy-makers were inclined, for ideological reasons, to confuse what was really a question of lousy management with the entirely different question of private or public ownership.

Strangely, it did not occur to most people that a private company will not have a concept of public duty or care. It is a mercenary, in the business not for a cause but quite simply to make money. It will cut back on services to offset falling revenues – or any other threat to profits. In many cases it can interpret a contract with a public body as it wishes, or even walk away from it if the work is no longer profitable. And then what do the public do? Almost all service providers in those days ran nation-wide operations. They had nothing to do with the communities they served, and no interest in them. A large number were foreign-owned. They kept costs to a minimum by forcing the public to use the internet when interfacing with them, even though a very large number of users were not really computer-literate, especially the old. They would call you to sell you products but were otherwise unreachable. Complaints were impossible; they were contactable only on-line (but in a majority of cases the websites were faulty) or after a very long wait, through a central call centre which, if it wasn’t physically in India, might just as well have been.

In short, these service providers had no human face. And they took care to ensure their facelessness, ruthlessly cutting back on local offices and branches – anything rather than deal directly with customers.

Moreover, if a government, local or national, does not itself pay the service-provider, all it can offer as an incentive to take the contract is the right to a local or national monopoly, or semi-monopoly – the right to milk the public cash cow. I have heard them compared to tax farmers in the 18th century. Inevitably, there was cherry-picking and inevitably, that brought corruption. Profitable public services are a licence to print money and many firms paid dearly for the privilege of being selected. But is such a system in the public interest?

There was of course an alternative – to raise taxes. But while all governments did this surreptitiously, the idea that people might use their taxes to pay for public services was considered unacceptable. The main reason was that governing political parties did not want to be blamed for unpopular price rises; and the private service-providers were continually putting up the prices, largely because there was no real competition. But it was also the common view that raising taxes was an economic disincentive. It was also, of course, a disincentive to vote for a party of taxation.

As times got harder, governments which had already largely detached themselves from service provision began to privatize areas which had been untouched in the first two decades of the century. First, motorways and major trunk roads were sold off and you had to use telepass or phone a call centre somewhere in the universe with your credit card, if you wanted to pay toll. If you didn’t, once on the motorway you would be flashed and presented with a hefty fine. There were no toll booths, just warning signs and camera after camera. Then, schools were progressively turned into cost centres with the public ‘exercising its right to choose’ (which meant choosing what it could afford, even at some distance from the home).

The privatization of the health service was completed in the ’20s. Surgeries, clinics and hospitals were progressively removed from public ownership, while care homes were exclusively in private hands. Those that did not pay were simply closed, irrespective of demand. In 2020, national insurance was replaced by continental-style mutuals. (This could have worked well, as it did in Europe, had it not been for the complete mess that was made of the transition).

At the local level, refuse collection was an early one, to be followed by Council Tax collection which was done by private companies on behalf of consortia of local authorities. Finally, almost all policing, with the exception of the CID and the Special Branch, was delegated to security companies on contract. The powers that be gave up on the concept of community policing, which had been popular twenty years before. Yet the more visible these private companies became, on the streets, the more corruption there was. It could be plotted on a graph.

The worst of the innovations was pension reform. Retirees were encouraged to invest their pensions, which increasingly took the form of a lump sum. This created more injustice than almost anything else, since it was an era when the public were literally bombarded with literature, on and off the web, urging them to invest in one or another enterprise or venture. It was like buying books: you needed only to invest £10 in a share here, and another £10 there, and so on, to have a varied portfolio which would – allegedly - keep the cash rolling in during the long years of retirement. After all there was a standard legal form which could be e-signed and everyone advertising on the net was by law obliged to publish their accounts. Such an investment could be made, literally, in seconds on your smartphone. There were plenty of apps to choose from. The only problem was that at least half of these investments brought in almost nothing, while of the rest a good percentage were simply swindles. And before you knew it, your