Books: Have we become more civilised since the Second World War?

Robinson, £18.99

Review by Susan Flockhart

Perhaps the most disturbing psychology experiment ever conducted took place during the 1960s. Prompted by a Nazi war criminal’s claim to have been merely “following orders”, Stanley Milgram’s now infamous research into obedience saw volunteers agreeing to administer potentially fatal electric shocks to fellow human beings. Less controversial was the American psychologist’s research into attitudes towards queue-jumping. It asked graduate students to approach people standing in-line and politely insert themselves between the third and fourth person from the front.

Predictably, their interjections provoked hostility, even if mostly in the form of grumbles and dirty looks. But perhaps the most remarkable impact was on the students themselves, who found the experience profoundly uncomfortable and reported spending ages pacing around near their target queues before summoning the courage to push in. Some even felt physically sick.

Orderly Britain asks whether we’ve become more civilised since the Second World War by considering how we’ve governed ourselves on such matters as smoking, drinking, parking and dog-fouling – not forgetting our supposed national affection for forming orderly lines.

Of course, there is nothing peculiarly British about queuing; otherwise, Milgram’s Yale University experiment would have been pointless. But wartime rationing made it a ubiquitous feature of daily life here and then as now, failure to behave by the unwritten rules was considered “selfish, arrogant, rude and an affront to order” – a sentiment summed up by a 1948 quote from a Mass Observation diarist bemoaning the vagaries of their local tripe shop queue, where housewives dodged in and out to “run over t’fish shop” so that the line in front never seemed to get any shorter.

Yet, say authors Tim Newburn and Andrew Ward, we’ll put up with such frustrations “so long as we can see some sort of order and predictability to the queue – some sense that things are fair”. The alternative, after all, is invoked by Thomas Hobbes’s famous observation that without government, life for most people would be “nasty, brutish and short”.

The nasty business of dog fouling is a case in point. As Orderly Britain reminds us, there was a time when simply coaxing your pooch towards the kerbside to do its business was considered the height of responsible pet ownership and within living memory, parks and pavements resembled canine latrines. Yet over the space of half-a-century, a “quiet social revolution” has taken place so that today, poop is routinely picked up – even if the results are too often carelessly discarded, as the Daily Record noted last year above a photograph of a popular Ayrshire dog-walking area that had been nicknamed “the hanging gardens of jobbylon” (for obvious reasons).

The game-changer emerged during the 1970s in the form of scientific evidence linking dog muck to serious childhood disease. Even then, early attempts at regulation faced fierce resistance, with maverick dog-owners going to jail rather than abide by Burnley Borough Council’s ban on pets in public parks. But gradually, thanks to a combination of legislation, propaganda and public shaming tactics such as “shop-a-dropper” hotlines, a seismic shift in mindsets took place and as Orderly Britain makes clear, it’s not regulations themselves that govern behaviour, but the public attitudes that accompany them.

Cleaning up after your pet is now “an important mark of our civility”, say the authors, pointing out that at one time, people routinely urinated in corridors and stairwells. (In an interesting chapter on lavatories, they quote a BBC reporter’s observation that “by 1970 man had landed on the moon, yet one in four Scots still had to share an outside toilet”.)

Meanwhile, within the space of a shortish lifetime, smoking has gone from glamorous pursuit to shameful habit and although alcohol licensing laws have actually relaxed since the war, both drink-driving and work-time tippling are now taboo. (As an interesting aside, we learn that police services were initially unenthusiastic about breathalyser tests, which brought them into conflict with the middle classes, “a section of the population … with whom they had enjoyed a more straightforwardly positive relationship”. Similarly, parking controls created tensions with people who weren’t “the usual suspects”. The introduction of traffic wardens solved that problem.)

Tim Newburn is a professor of criminology and social policy; Andrew Ward, who died earlier this year, was a former statistician and their book concludes that over the past 70 years, British society has indeed become more ordered in that we’re “subject to greater regulation and oversight, to new styles of surveillance and management, and to forms of ordering that are more extensive, and often more intensive”.

Whether that’s a bad thing, they don’t say – though they raise some red flags where the commercialisation of queuing is concerned. Increasingly slick methods are being devised to distract us from the fact our time is being wasted. Think supermarket self-check-outs and all those irritating recorded tele-messages. Meanwhile, “queue flow” is routinely being turned into “cash flow” via the growing phenomenon of “priority booking”, which sees everything from speedy aeroplane boarding to fast-track hip operations being offered for a price.

If proof were needed that Britons have become increasingly compliant, our response to the unprecedented regulation that accompanied Covid-19, provides it in spades. “As the pandemic reaffirms,” say the authors, “our post-war world is one in which rules, instructions, guidelines, directions, regulations and commands have proliferated.”

Readers are left to draw their own conclusions as to the merits of that. And who could dispute the benefits of cleaner pavements, safer roads and disease-free lungs? All the same, a degree of healthy scepticism never goes amiss, especially now that emergency Covid-19 powers, such as the ability to impose lockdowns, are set to become permanent in Scotland.

Highly entertaining and extremely thought-provoking, Orderly Britain focuses largely on successful public policy changes but we shouldn’t forget that governments don’t always get things right. And perhaps, particularly when policy is being made on the hoof, we should be careful what we acquiesce to.