Banal dystopia: then and now
REVIEW: 1990
Britain today feels like a country ripe for satire. The saccharine vindictiveness of its nomenklatura, the absurdity and vacuity of its propaganda and the obtuseness of those who insist that things are still, nevertheless, mostly fine ought by right be the basis for a golden age of Aesopian novels.
It is unfortunate, then, that the genre seems to be at its nadir, primarily a result of the domination of those precise traits among our cultural gatekeepers, and the sense of insecurity which precludes self-criticism. This is especially the case since any attempt to critique the state of the nation in more earnest terms would be exceptionally unlikely to see the light of day. It’s not that writers (yet) would fear being dragged off to a re-education facility, but that such works would inevitably be dismissed as worthy, naff, provincial, or over-wrought by Britain’s myopic production industry, if it were not rejected out of hand for more explicitly political reasons. Any critique from the outside — especially America — would easily be dismissed, either as pandering or motivated hyperbole.
Fortunately for us, the job has already been partially done, albeit forty seven years ago. If it doesn’t quite depict Britain in 2025, it could quite plausibly show where we might be by the early 2030s on our current trajectory, give or take the odd Austin Princess.
As John Hoskyns was working on his Spaghetti Diagram and Keith Joseph was inducing Margaret Thatcher to read The Road to Serfdom, a man who had established himself as a jobbing screenwriter specialising in the depiction of professional niches, was writing a dystopian television series inspired by the society Britain was becoming. Remarkably, Wilfred Greatorex was eventually able to get his creation through the labyrinthine world of 1970s television commissioning.
The result was 1990; a two-series run of eight episodes each, released in 1977 to 78, depicting an imagined Britain twelve years hence. It is a country in which Thatcherism never happened, and in which slow economic collapse has seen something resembling the Labour governments of the 1970s drift into a relatively soft but utterly malign form of authoritarianism. The writer made some leaps of imagination about the kind of technology that would be at the disposal of a dystopian regime in 1990, as well as the attendant fashion choices.
The end product was a sort of Nineteen Eighty Four meets Blake’s 7. The screenplay was brought to life by Edward Woodward in the starring role, and a supporting cast who would go on to make their names in everything from Coronation Street to Father Ted. I was first persuaded to watch it by a bespectacled Ayn Rand enthusiast I met at a libertarian meeting at the Rose & Crown, around the time that Norman Tebbit’s Telegraph Blog first broke me away from my youthful Blairism. I think I may subsequently have seen it referenced on the old Samizdata website, but that is about the extent of 1990’s cultural footprint. Like Avatar but without the hype, and with John Savident as Home Secretary.
Having forgotten about it for a few years, I found myself suddenly plunged back into the second episode of the first series when I read the words ‘exit tax’ amidst reporting of the Chancellor’s desperate attempts to plug the hole in the Treasury coffers. The episode depicts a doctor, state-employed as almost everyone in the Britain of 1990 is, appearing before a tribunal seeking an exit visa, so that he can move to Arizona for the sake of his asthmatic daughter’s health.
The script and acting, particularly the performance of the actress playing the female chair of the tribunal panel, perfectly captures the vindictive sanctimony of those who regard themselves as having the duty of policing the lives of others for ‘the greater good’. Despite the various ways that writers were off about the nature of the tyranny of the well-intentioned in the future, this character is instantly recognisable to us from today’s Britain. And obviously, the concept of requiring doctors to pay off the costs of their training before they’re allowed to emigrate is very current.
As it turns out, 1990 was more in tune with the countercultural zeitgeist of its time perhaps than Greatorex was aware, anticipating the Thatcherite revolution that would delay if not forestall the dystopia that he saw emerging in 1977. The context of the Cold War focussed minds in a way that the far more nebulous array of economic and political factors in today’s world does not. Looking back, we can see that Britain’s overmighty trade unions had already overplayed their hands by the late 1970s, and that they had already written themselves into a showdown they were destined to lose. The experience of living through the early and mid 1970s in Britain, coupled with ongoing existence of the USSR, the Gang of Four stage of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the medieval horror of Pol Pot’s Cambodia, forced a generation of free-minded thinkers to contend with the reality of absolutist political coercion.
Many of us on the Right who were born after Margaret Thatcher had finished off Arthur Scargill and closed a long chapter of post-war British history have a tendency to be dismissive of the generation who came before us. Stuck in the heady aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and still convinced that the source of all the world’s ills was the amount of political compulsion flailing about in it, they are blind to the calamities they have presided over during the decades since.
Taken in by the confidence trick of the post-communist Left, they allowed themselves to be trapped into accepting freedom only on the handful of issues where it was acceptable to ‘progressives’, which they chalked up as wins. Free trade while our own most essential industries had both hands tied behind their backs; a hyper-individualistic approach to questions of personal morality that were intended to dissolve basic societal assumptions, and mass immigration that was ultimately intended to disarm conservatives and classical liberals permanently as a political force.
They assumed that systems that had been adapted around the English people could be universally applied to the whole of mankind, and failed to take account of the back door that Ricardian ideas of comparative advantage leave open to foes who are willing to bear short term costs in order to inflict long term harm. As a result, libertarianism and classical liberalism have now become almost dirty words to a generation who are more interested in the defence of nation and culture, and who regard the effective marshalling of state power as an essential element of the coming restoration.
But while we may be right in judging these failures harshly, we would do well to understand why they were made, and to appreciate that we will be just as liable to be so absorbed in the battles of our own heroic period that we miss the monsters looming further ahead. If you want to understand why and how a generation of conservatives finally rose to the challenge of socialism and made the case for individual liberty, free markets and property rights, there are works of history and philosophy you can read. But to understand the hopeless exasperation of the time, you could do a lot worse than to watch 1990.
The notion, epitomised by the circumstances of the doctor before the tribunal, that individuals can be thought of as cattle who were attempting to wander from the range, is one that we ought to be alive and resistant to. Given recent figures that have emerged about the scale of emigration from Britain, much of it by some of the most productive younger workers with many of their prime tax-paying years just ahead of them, it feels entirely plausible that Labour and the Treasury may start to take a much tougher line on emigration. In a country where the word ‘migration’ has effectively become a synonym for ‘immigration’, a show that depicts white, middle class British people sneaking out from Harwich hidden aboard freezing transport ships is a useful reminder that the opposite phenomenon could also be a relevant political question. This was a far less jarring message at the time it was filmed, of course, due to familiarity with people being smuggled out of Eastern Bloc countries.
In the second series, things get grittier still, as the protagonist - a journalist by the name of Jim Kyle, played by Woodward - finds himself on the wrong side of the stasi-like Public Control Department, who had hitherto tried and failed to manipulate him to their own ends in earlier episodes. Deprived of his citizenship card, which is required in order to travel, buy anything, gain employment or access accommodation, Kyle lives as a tramp alongside other non-people.
Again, ahead of its time in anticipating de-banking as a potent political weapon in the hands of a tyrannical system that nevertheless shies away from outright demonstrations of physical brutality. A sort of internal exile characterised by isolation, and the withdrawal of recognition in a highly formalised system in which social and corporate entities are forced to consider the reputations of those to whom they provide services was echoed in more recent times by ‘cancellation’ via social media. Although depicting its dystopia along such abashedly socialist lines as it does, 1990 does not consider the ways in which the nominally private sector could be drawn into such oppression.
The Hukou system of social classification was already in operation in China when Greatorex was writing, although it had gone into a degree of abeyance during the Cultural Revolution as the state’s administrative capacity atrophied. The modern Social Credit System in China is a more modern invention. 1990 was not the first depiction of a social credit type system in literature or television; The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster, and The Perfect Day by Ira Levin both envisage variations on the theme, although it is possibly Patrick McGoohan’s 1967 TV series The Prisoner which provided the more proximate inspiration for 1990’s Life Score system. However it must rank as one of the most plausible and well thought out depictions of how such a system might work under a thoroughly believable type of regime until the Chinese actually tried it for real.
What marks 1990 from much dystopian fiction on screen, with the possible exception of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, is that the state is clearly sclerotic, weak and generally unthreatening, other than to the individual citizen with no means of getting out. The regime was born out of a national bankruptcy, and its military capabilities have been whittled down to a handful of aircraft, which are mainly used for spying on and intimidating members of the public. Oceania it is not, let alone the Terran Federation. But it is in its grasping desperation that we see the soul-crushing state at its most malevolent. Another aspect which contemporary viewers will find familiar about Greatorex’s dystopia is that its decaying prison estate is so full that the Home Office are forced to consider dramatic measures to cut the sentences of prisoners - although they use ‘misery pills’ and electro-convulsive therapy rather than simply letting them out.
In the second series, Savident’s Dan Mellor is replaced as Home Secretary by Kate Smith - who turns out to be a critical character in the conclusion of the plot - played by the actress Yvonne Mitchell. It was to be the final performance of Mitchell’s long career, which included her portrayal of Julia in the BBC’s first adaptation of Orwell’s 1984, in 1954. Intriguingly, Mitchell was the cousin of Keith Joseph, the Tory MP and Thatcher mentor who played a crucial role in ensuring that 1990 in Britain looked as it did, and not as Greatorex imagined it.
And along with an overdue reappraisal of boomer-con libertarianism, 1990 invites a blackpilled generation to consider counter-factuals, and imagine how things might have been. Perhaps Britain, or the West in general, might not have declined to quite the levels of autocracy and poverty depicted in the series, or least not quite as quickly, without the Thatcher and Reagan revolutions; but the world of our childhoods would have been greyer, and poorer, and our horizons narrower than they were. Regardless of what has happened since, we can look back on the Britain of the 1990s as an example of a happy, prosperous liberal democracy worth living in, in a way that we could not if the existential crises of the 1970s hadn’t been overcome by principled, uncompromising leadership.
For all that China appears at least outwardly to be a functioning state that gets things done, improving the material circumstances of its basically homogenous and nationally self-confident population, it isn’t the kind of country we would aspire for our own to become. Although at the moment, it looks an increasingly appealing alternative to the updated version of Greatorex’s 1990 Britain we seem to be becoming. The lessons from the 1980s we ought to remember are not about economics or monetary policy - although we really could do with a few of those too - but about our national capacity for course correction under the right leadership and with the right attitude. Times may be bleak, but we have been here before and come through it.
This article was written by Chris Bayliss, a Pimlico Journal contributor. You can find his more of his work in The Critic. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.
If you enjoyed this article, please consider subscribing. If you are already subscribed, why not upgrade to a paid subscription?