What we have lost

On Saturday I spent the morning helping out with canvassing for the town council elections (not seeking votes for me this time – I was in another ward seeking votes for another couple of candidate of my party).

Instead of going straight home (after the morning canvass) I visited first the town museum and then the town library. I have visited both places many times over the years, but I still sometimes go (perhaps my senile brain means that each time I visit I find things that have long been there, but which I do not have a clear memory of).

In the museum, amongst other things, I looked at a stuffed red fox and was impressed by the size of the beast. In life it would have clear threat to the nice cats I had met in the morning – how can anyone oppose fox hunting? I know I was supposed to be talking to voters in the morning, rather than to talking to cats, but….. Also I know that cats are very cruel to birds and other such – but I do not much care (I like cats).

In the town library I looked through the main encyclopaedia (the one that is not going to publish any more editions in paper form). The section on Sweden told me that compulsory education was imposed there in the 1844 a few years before the guilds were abolished and the trade monopoly taken away from the special towns that had long held the monopoly. The encyclopaedia article also told me that in the mid 19th century it was decided that the Swedish state was to control all main line railways. Over the centuries it did seem that the state owned vast areas of the country and could steal private land at will – and there were all these detailed facts and figures on everything (in this country the first census we had in recent centuries was in 1801 and the Birth Marriages and Deaths registration act came in 1836 – other than that there was nothing much).

I thought about how this compared to what I had seen in my local town museum. In Kettering there was no town council till the the late 19th century. There was a church Vestry, but the local people had rejected a town council. In 1872 a local government board was imposed and in the 1890’s a Kettering Borough Council was created. Within a year or so the new K.B.C. was out doing wicked things (such as taking over the town water and gas supply). If one has a group of elected people and a staff to serve them one is going to get stuff like this. Few people who go to the trouble of getting elected (or working for the government at local or national level) are going to content themselves with talking to cats.

Education? Well Kettering did not have a Board of Education till the Act of 1891 made it compulsory (but what about the Act of 1870? Well that allowed places to set up education boards – Kettering, like many places in England, did not want one). Boards of Education did not last long in England – the Act of 1902 handed over their powers to the general County Councils.

Guilds? Kettering was too small a place to have guilds in the middle ages, and guilds did not have legal protection in England. Certainly in London guilds continued – but they became (and remain) largely social clubs and charitable institutions. Even in London it was not the case that you had to belong to a certain guild to follow a certain trade.

In most of Europe local trade monopolies were backed by the force of law. In Kettering (like most of England) there was no one to enforce such laws – there were unpaid Justices of the Peace (but these local landowners had better things to do – they were not elected and did not get paid).

Railways. There were indeed railways in 19th century Kettering – but like the rest of England (indeed the rest of Britain) the government did not put them there. People could travel to towns like Northampton in the west and Peterborough in the east – as well as Leicester and points north and London and points south.

These days people in Kettering can still travel north and south (when the trains are running), but non car people (many people can not afford cars and many people can not drive – I fit into both groups) can not really travel east and west. I suppose we could walk (as folk could in the middle ages), but I this does not seem like progress to me.

The great differences that once existed between nations like Sweden (which was not particularly bad by European standards) and England-Britain exist no longer.

True a few years ago I was still amused by a French security guard asking me who he had to get permission from to set up security company “British people do not need permission from anyone to do that sort of thing” I told him – but that has changed, there are more regulations (in all walks of life) all the time. There was a time (the 1980’s) when there was an effort to get rid of some regulations as new ones were imposed – but that does not happen anymore. This nation is no longer anything special, somehow we lost our way.