When Did our Era of National Demoralisation Begin?

Great Uncle Allen used to take my sister mousing in our local church. After checking and rebaiting the traps they would sit in the church porch, beneath the Saxon carved beasthead and eat Cadbury’s Creme Eggs; he kept one in each pocket of his threadbare tweed jacket. I happened upon this spot recently. Where once the porch walls were adorned only with whorls of mustard yellow lichen, there is now affixed a plasticated red, white and black NO SMOKING sign. It made me sad beyond measure. I was reminded there was a time before July 2007 when public indoor spaces were not besmirched with NO SMOKING signs, and that there are people alive today who have never lived in this world. Sure, everyone is grateful for smoke free pubs, but could this have been achieved without millions of bossy stickers? Were these signs ever necessary? Are they necessary now? Dare we dream we might ever get rid of them and the NO VAPING / DO NOT ASSAULT OUR STAFF / SMILE YOU ARE ON CCTV signs that make for the authoritarian graffiti of our times?

Just as Luther’s hammering of the 95 Theses to the church door marked a new epoch, perhaps our Era of National Demoralisation began in July 2007 when all of these NO SMOKING signs, millions of them, appeared everywhere. But as these things go, once I began trying to pin down a specific date when the National Demoralisation truly set in, I found other possible markers:

1994 when the police stopped looking smart. Previously dressed in dark blue tunics with polished silver buttons, police officers’ uniforms changed to include capacious fluorescent yellow reflective jackets. I am unconvinced that the change is not the direct cause of increased crime.
October 16th 2000 when the BBC Nine O’clock News moved to 10 o’clock and the nation became unnecessarily tired and grumpy, in preparation perhaps for today’s rolling news and our concurrent fever pitch of exhausted fury.
2019-2020 introduction of VAR. The menfolk tell me it marked the moment that humans irrevocably had to defer to the computer. There’s no point worrying about AI, the paradigm shift has already happened.
2013 launch of 111. Seemingly another layer of bureaucracy to keep people away from healthcare, rather like a GP’s receptionist on a national scale telling distressed patients: “No we can’t help now, but a doctor will (may) call you in 17 hours.” There was a time within living memory (mine) when a doctor would come to your house – with antibiotics – to see a small girl with earache (me) very late on a stormy Saturday night.
2010s+ all manner of self-service checkouts / check-in machines now fully fitted out with CCTV to remind us we are nothing more than potential criminals. It hasn’t always been like this, my friend’s mum used to work in M&S in the 1980s and M&S would pay for the staff to have their hair and nails done ‘to make the customer feel special’. Imagine such a wonderful thing happening today.
Introduction of ‘Passing the Peace’ in CofE churches. I remember the moment vividly in the early 1990s when a new vicar insisted that the small village congregation would ‘pass the peace’. The men cleared their throats and gruffly nodded to each other, the ladies attempted small waves across the pews. The Church of England and the country has never fully recovered.

However, we must not despair but instead remember the M4 bus lane: a stretch of prime motorway that lay empty save the occasional National Express coach (a grim foreshadowing of LTNs and ULEZ). Installed by John Prescott in 1999, it became a hated symbol of New Labour: an unnecessary expensive ideological failure. And yet the M4 bus lane is no longer. The motorway reverted to three full traffic lanes in 2010 – one of the only Labour foul-ups the Tories bothered to reverse. Let us remember this small triumph; things don’t have to be this way.

Joanna Gray is a writer and confidence mentor.