All Consuming: How Shopping Got Us Into This Mess and How We Can Find Our Way Out
by Neal Lawson
Penguin, £10.99
Andrew Marr begins his History of Modern Britain in May 1940, shortly after Winston Churchill became Prime Minister. One of the first decisions his Cabinet had to make was whether or not to try and negotiate a deal with Adolf Hitler. Thankfully, their decision was “no deal”.
Over the following 600 pages Marr describes all the major events that have taken place since the end of the Second World War, in particular the Labour government of Clement Attlee and how it brought under state control the essential public services in order, as Marr writes, that the same unity that was applied to winning the war was used to organise and establish a post-war socialist future. A new scientifically planned future was promised by both Harold Wilson and Edward Heath. They failed.
They were followed by Margaret Thatcher’s revolution that swept away many of the state controls that had been put in place after the war – and allowed the consumer society to advance unfettered. Thatcher’s aim was, she said, to return to the Victorian values of frugality, saving and good housekeeping. Instead what happened was that millions went on a spending spree orgy with a fistful of credit cards. In conclusion, Marr writes that his book has told the story of the defeat of politics by shopping.
What Neal Lawson in his new book All Consuming sets out to show is that the state we’re in now is the result of shopping – and that it need not be the case again in the future if we accept that the crash of 2008 was no accident.
He wants us to slow down, wise up and start living in a more meaningful way. He is in no doubt that it was our obsession with shopping that was both the creator and the victim of the biggest global recession for 80 years. The free rein of the free – Thatcher deregulated – market over the past 30 years has, in his words, turned a consumer society into a turbo-charged consumer society. And now the turbo-charged consumer society is over Lawson argues that there can be no turning back.
He gives three main reasons why we should seize the present situation to create a society that bridges the gap between individual aspiration and the common interest.
First, the decades of binge consumerism haven’t made us any happier. Second, consuming more only gives us the illusion of control of our lives and leaves us less time to get involved in making decisions that really govern our lives. Third, our way of life has put us on a collision course for an even bigger crash with the planet.
Before providing an alternative to the turbo-charged consumer society Lawson explains the how and the why of what has changed over the past 30 years. The answer, he believes, lies not only in a set of political and economic ideas that took hold of the Western world but also by the way people were influenced to buy not because of any physical need but for an emotional one. The Guardian’s money section recently ran an article about women’s shopping habits during the recession and reported that some see shopping as part of their “survival mode” in order to be seen to be acting normally. Lawson argues that such behaviour is abnormal.
He wants people to grab the opportunity that exists following the global credit crunch to create a post-consumer society. The trick, he writes, is to pull all the various strands together into a coherent plan for change. It won’t be easy because “Shopping is still the way in which we define ourselves as being normal members of society.”
But for Lawson the credit crunch heralded the beginning of the end of the 30 years’ supremacy of the free market. “Every 30 years or so, our society goes through a profound transformation of its cultural, social, economic and political make-up. In the 1940s, after the Second World War, a new collective spirit ushered in an era of social welfare. It was epitomised by the NHS. This lasted until the mid to late 1970s when this consensus finally broke down and was replaced by the free-market fundamentalism of Thatcher.” Now, he says, the free market and the consumer society have become the problem, not the solution.
For people who have failed to see the error of their ways, Lawson believes what Edmund Burke had to say back in 1757 should do the trick: “The great error of our nature is not to know where to stop, not to be satisfied with any reasonable acquirement but to lose all we have gained by an insatiable pursuit of more.”
Terry McGrenera
