Let’s ditch the nostalgia that’s invaded our TV and seeped into our politics
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Version 0 of 1. “Life isn’t just about bunting,” observed Kim Shillinglaw, the controller of BBC2, this week. “We could do more to get closer to the national conversation.” What is it with bunting, anyway? And The Great British Bake Off, and “vintage”, and Victoria sponge, Kilner jars with home-pickled currants, gingham and Cath Kidston and tea roses on crockery, crochet and craft and posters saying “Keep Calm and Carry On”? What drives this nostalgia, which is so much more than a visual reference or even a set of new dietary rules? It is an announcement of identity – but what self does it declare? It seems to me that two ideologically disparate movements have smashed together – or, if you were to take a Marxist stance, that one has been appropriated by the other. The first is a reimagining of craft from a feminist perspective, and a repurposing of thrift as a feature of environmentalism. OK , that might need a couple of examples. 'What drives this nostalgia, which is so much more than a set of new dietary rules?' This is the American author of the Stitch ’n Bitch series of books, Debbie Stoller, describing in 2005 what the movement was about: “Why, dammit, doesn’t knitting receive as much respect as any other hobby? Why is it still looked down on? It seemed to me that the main difference between knitting and, say, fishing or woodworking or basketball was that knitting had traditionally been done by women. And that’s when it dawned on me: all those people who looked down on knitting – and housework, and housewives – were not being feminist at all. In fact, they were being antifeminist, since they seemed to think that only those things that men did, or had done, were worthwhile.” Eight years later, in the Shoreditch Sisters Women’s Institute sewing group, Caroline Brooks told me: “I’m anti-consumerist, not pro-thrift. I love clothes but I don’t want disposable clothes. It’s about the pride of making stuff, rather than having stuff.” From the opposite direction came the Keep Calm and Carry On nostalgia fest, where the wartime slogan suddenly started to appear on mugs and T-shirts and tea towels: the significance is not the slogan itself, but the tacit messages it invokes, none of which were intended by the people who first found it in 2000, Mary and Stuart Manley of Barter Books in Alnwick. “My wife didn’t want to commercialise it or spoil it,” Stuart remembers. “So I waited till she was on holiday and had some copies made.” (They didn’t sell many copies outside the region until the Guardian put it in a 10 Favourite Things list in 2005). Since then, of course, it’s gone global. There is a myth around the 1939 version, that the posters never actually went out, because they were being saved for after a German invasion. In fact, Stuart says, they weren’t distributed widely because the British public “blew a great big raspberry” at the entire campaign, finding it patronising and facile, qualities that we apparently no longer mind. Related: How the Tories dehumanise low-paid families – or should I say ‘benefit units’ | Zoe Williams Try to imagine, now, how the current government could have swung its agenda – the radical, hyper-modern destruction of state support structures – without the fictional stoic Britishness embodied in this meme. The word “austerity” conveys an atmosphere that is the exact opposite of the society it actually creates: blitz spirit, togetherness, community, waste-not-want-not (the results of the spending cuts have, contrawise, been mutual suspicion, alienation, and a huge amount of want). Without that surge in a mawkish conception of Britishness – where we triumph over everything with stiff upper lips, but only if we cleave to those ancient traits that made us great in the first place – it is impossible to imagine David Cameron being able to present spending cuts as a social boon, or, for that matter, Nigel Farage successfully billing drinking and smoking as the necessary and sufficient skills of the statesman. I put it to Mary Berry et al that the whole vintage package – which started as essentially a rediscovery of simple skills, tying generations together and serving as a visual cake-based bulwark against modern turbulence – has been used to sugar-coat a free-market nationalism that isn’t sweet at all. Shillinglaw is dead right that there is more to life than bunting. Burn the bunting. |