The Grand Experiment Great Thinkers: In Their Own Words

There is an image of intellectuals

as being cut off from the real world. Abstract thinkers,

living a cosy existence in their ivory towers.

But with the advent of broadcasting,

scholars became national celebrities.

They became experts at using radio and television

to preach their radical views about transforming Britain.

Love is wise. Hatred is foolish.

I don't believe there's a feminist alive

who wants to abolish femaleness.

In this film, we'll hear from political and economic thinkers

who were united by one idea -

that for the first time in history, they'd found

the key to running a good society.

All citizens in Britain are, in effect,

covered for all risks from the cradle to the grave.

Their conflicting, sometimes dangerous, ideas

-defined Britain in the 20th century.

-..at the time!

We believe in the abolition of money.

We believe in the appropriation of all private property.

Should we allow governments to secure a better society...

..or place our trust in the individual?

Prosperity has never been created by governments.

And the battle was so bitter, we can still feel its scars today.

How do you run a free society?

You haven't been able to.

Hidden away in the Bloomsbury area of London

is a statue to one of the greatest minds of the 20th century.

He's slightly forgotten these days,

but he was a truly revolutionary figure who burst out of the academy

to try to transform British society.

His name was Bertrand Russell.

Russell was a pampered child of the Victorian era,

born to a wealthy, aristocratic family in 1872.

The young Russell fell in love with philosophy and mathematics,

as he explained when looking back on his life on the BBC's Face to Face.

Now, what was it that provided you with the incentive

-to become a mathematician?

-My first lesson in mathematics

came from my brother, who started me on Euclid,

and I thought it was the loveliest stuff I'd ever seen.

I didn't know there was anything so nice in the world.

At the start of the 20th century, Russell was a fellow of

Cambridge University, where he lost himself in the complex,

abstract world of mathematics and logic.

He might have expected to end his days in relative obscurity as an academic.

But in 1914, Russell's world changed forever.

What episode in your life led you to turn again from philosophy

to some extent into social work and politics?

Oh, the first war.

The first war made me think it just won't do to live in an ivory tower.

This world is too bad, we must notice it.

I went all over the place making speeches.

I did everything I could to help the conscientious objectors.

I wrote about it everywhere I could.

No, I did everything I could think of to do.

Russell was kicked out of Cambridge and even jailed for his activism.

But he'd discovered a new vocation.

We all deplore the rapidly-growing feeling in America

in favour of a nuclear war in the very near future.

He became a familiar face on British television,

using the medium to campaign for peace.

Of course, Russell was a philosopher and an intellectual,

and one of the great public intellectuals of his time,

so what he said mattered.

He was one of those people who grew more and more radical

as he became older. Normally, it's the opposite.

His success as a public intellectual

was due obviously to his intelligence

on the one hand, but also to his mastery of English.

He was somebody who never wrote an ugly sentence

or spoke an ugly sentence.

He was somebody for whom the English language was a plastic material

that could be put to his own uses whenever he needed it.

The worst possibility is human life may be extinguished,

and it is a very real possibility. Very real.

And that is the worst.

But assuming that doesn't happen,

I can't bear the thought of many hundreds of millions of people

dying in agony, only and solely because the rulers of the world

are stupid and wicked,

and I can't bear it.

Russell encouraged intellectuals

to move from the world of abstract thought into direct action.

One person to follow Russell's lead was his friend,

the economist John Maynard Keynes.

The young Keynes rebelled against conventional society.

He was happily and openly homosexual,

with daring ideas about shaking up the staid British establishment.

Keynes was part of the Bloomsbury Group, a circle of avant-garde intellectuals

that included Russell and the novelist Virginia Woolf.

But even amongst this high company, his genius stood out.

Maynard Keynes had the most extraordinary good mind,

frightfully quick, terrifically quick and incisive.

And also, an imaginative way of looking at economics,

which seems to be almost impossible.

But he did.

Well, Keynes has fair claim to have changed the world.

He changed the world obviously,

he changed the economic world fundamentally, because Keynesianism

is a fundamental challenge to pretty much all that had gone before.

But I think the historic significance of Keynes

is about more than economic theory.

Like Russell, Keynes was deeply affected by the First World War,

as he witnessed the tragic fate of the men who'd returned from the trenches.

The government had promised "a land fit for heroes,"

but in the '20s and '30s, Keynes could only see poverty

and, above all, unemployment.

Unemployment represented waste and insecurity,

a terrific amount of insecurity.

People were much closer to the margins of life

and there was much less social security, so if you lost your job,

your household was driven into poverty very, very quickly.

To Keynes, that was not only a great moral crime, but it was unnecessary.

In 1936, Keynes published his General Theory,

which overturned all previous economic thinking.

It argued that governments should spend more, not less,

during hard times to stimulate the economy.

It was a ray of hope for people at the time.

It imparted a sense of urgency,

and it was very exciting for young economists,

because it showed why the classical economics was wrong.

Keynes saw his instincts about the economy proved right

during the Second World War.

He called the conflict "The Grand Experiment."

If the State could spend on armaments in wartime,

why couldn't it spend money to keep people out of poverty in peacetime?

It cost us that much to make war for two weeks...

There is little moving footage of John Maynard Keynes,

seen here on the left of the screen.

But in 1945, Keynes made a landmark radio broadcast,

explaining his radical solution to unemployment.

'It is not an exaggeration to say

'that the end of abnormal unemployment is in sight.

'And it isn't only the unemployed who will feel the difference.

'A great number besides will be taking home better money each week.

'And with the demand for efficient labour outrunning the supply,

'how much more comfortable and secure everyone will feel in his job.

'The Grand Experiment is begun.

'If it works,

'if expenditure on armaments really does cure unemployment, I predict

'we shall never go back all the way to the old state of affairs.

'Good may come out of evil.

'We may learn a trick or two which will come in useful

'when the day of peace comes.'

CHEERING

And when "the day of peace" came,

Keynes' economic policies were finally put into action.

The Labour Party took power with

a truly revolutionary manifesto.

Clement Attlee's government set about

creating a fresh vision for Britain.

'Let's go forward into this fight in the spirit of William Blake.'

I will not cease from mental fight, nor shall the sword sleep in my hand.

'Till we have built Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land.

APPLAUSE

But Keynes' theories formed only one half of this new Jerusalem.

Just as important were the social ideas of another

much more strait-laced economist.

A former head of the London School of Economics,

Sir William Beveridge was serious, abstemious,

famous for taking a punishing cold bath every morning.

He produced a government report infused with Victorian morality,

proposing a social security scheme to combat

"want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness."

The plan was controversial,

so the timid Beveridge had to sell it to the nation.

'Sir William summarises the points of his plan.'

The report proposes, first,

an all-in scheme of social insurance,

providing for all citizens and their families

all the cash benefits needed for security.

I hope that when you've been able to study the report in detail,

you'll like it, that it will get adopted, and that so we shall take

the first step to security with freedom and responsibility.

That is what we all desire.

'Thank you, Sir William.'

What Beveridge offered was a better life.

Keynes offered security of employment,

Beveridge offered security

for all those periods when people weren't in employment.

So it was a cradle-to-grave system of security.

It's time for the Longines Chronoscope,

a presentation of the Longines watch company.

The report flung this shy academic into the limelight.

He even spread the gospel of his revolution

to the capitalist heartland of America.

In this 1952 interview, in front of some shameless product placement,

Beveridge discussed his plan.

All citizens in Britain are in effect covered

for all risks from the cradle to the grave.

I think my wife puts it, "from the womb to the tomb."

But what's most interesting is that Beveridge himself

didn't like the phrase that's become most associated with him.

You have been talking about

-what we might call in this country a welfare state...

-I never use

the term "welfare state". I believe in welfare,

but I believe people ought to get their welfare

by co-operation between the state and themselves,

and not from the state alone. What we give to people

when they're unemployed, or sick, or retired

is a bare minimum, just enough to keep body and soul together,

but not enough for anybody really to be content with.

What's to prevent a man from merely staying

on the social unemployment insurance system for ever?

Nobody really would be content to do so. We always want... He wants

more than the bare minimum. Practically all people do.

Thank you very much, Lord Beveridge.

It all seemed so hopeful.

The new Jerusalem had finally come.

The ideas of Keynes and Beveridge triumphed after the war.

Britain had close to full employment.

A national health service.

Free schooling for all.

The old were given guaranteed pensions.

And Victorian slums were cleared for new housing.

The welfare state was supported by both Labour and the Conservatives,

a time of national consensus after decades of chaos.

-DAVID MILIBAND:

-What happened with Keynesianism is it was married with...

centre-left politics,

with a sense of commitment to the welfare state, to building

the land fit for heroes that wasn't built after the First World War.

And the Keynesian welfare state that dominated western European politics

in the 25 years after the Second World War was a seismic change

because it regulated the market, but it also built a fair society.

And that's what it made it a remarkable political vehicle,

not just an economic theory.

But there were rumblings of discontent

even in the midst of Utopia.

This "new Jerusalem" could only be achieved

through a colossal expanse of the state.

Bureaucracy and the public sector

hugely increased in the post-war period.

Critics feared Britain was becoming a nanny state.

One thinker, disquieted by the spectre of government interference,

was Russian emigre and Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin.

Why are these highly controversial?

In the early '60s, Berlin appeared on a discussion programme,

expressing his hatred of being told what to do.

How does it stand up intellectually?

I object to being treated like a child.

I object to not being reasoned with. I object to paternalism.

Ultimately, I think what I object to

is being treated like a schoolboy, being told for my own good,

being driven in a perfectly beneficent direction

by perfectly disinterested, pure-hearted...

governments or manufacturers, doesn't matter which.

Even if you assume they are pure-hearted men.

This is exactly what the British Empire felt towards

coloured people in Africa.

It's exactly what schoolmasters feel towards children,

and it always leads to bad consequences in the end.

'Paternalism was very alien to Isaiah Berlin.'

He wanted people to be free to live their lives,

according to their own values and goals, even if that meant

they ruined their lives or went to disaster or tragedy.

Berlin became an advocate of liberalism against political dogma,

a belief that stemmed from his childhood, when he'd witnessed

the brutal convulsions of the Russian Revolution first-hand.

CHANTING

There was a man in the middle of a kind of lynching,

very, very white, being dragged off by the crowds.

He was one of these people apparently caught in some rooftop,

and was being dragged off to an obviously not very nice fate.

And this was so awful that it made a permanent impression on me,

and I've never recovered from it quite.

It's given me a personal distaste for violence...

which nothing will overcome.

CHANTING

What Isaiah Berlin believed

above all is that no individual

or government should ever be confident that it knows the truth,

and therefore all attempts to impose a magic solution on problems,

be they Communism or certain kinds of right-wing economic doctrinaire behaviour,

all these things we should be suspicious of,

because no-one knows the whole truth,

and scepticism is the only wise position to adopt.

If you believe there is a single answer to a single question,

THE true answer, all the other answers being false,

and all these answers can be put together

and harmonise with each other and create the perfect universe,

then there is a temptation, if you think you have it, to do awful things.

This is a moment when the old order is crumbling, and people like Berlin,

with his philosophy of liberalism, is really advancing

what we now think of as the modern way of looking at things,

which is, leave people free to do as they please,

so long as they don't harm anyone else.

Berlin thought repressing individualism would only lead to anarchy...

..and his worst nightmares seemed to come true

in the angry decade of the 1960s.

I'm telling you! Now, don't make me provoke you...

Students became a force for protest.

And like Russell before them, they fought for change

not only on the streets, but also on television.

What would you do without any students?

The machine would not run, would it?

-Wouldn't run?

-No, wouldn't run.

I don't agree with them at all.

If they're so fed up with being students,

they can get a job anywhere.

CHANTING

'In the Sixties, that was the mood.

'It was a mood created by full employment, by being very fed up

'with the boring - in this country - stale...'

tired, fuddy-duddy '50s.

A house which is divided against itself cannot stand!

What we've been talking about here today

is the problem of racialism...

This was a country where deference

played a very important part, and the young generation

wanted to break with that deferential attitude to authority,

which was incredibly strong in Britain.

The fundamental idea behind all the thinkers that then...

leapt into prominence was that the world is organised hierarchically.

That there are powers that dominate.

These powers are not necessarily explicit, some of them are secret.

We have to dig them out and repudiate them

and claim our liberation from them.

There is this bourgeois normality out there which is not

the consensual, good-natured thing that it pretends,

it really is a system of domination,

and we must side with the victims and liberate them.

And I think that was the sort of general view that suddenly

became popular among the highly pampered youth of the baby-boom era.

Do you think that the middle class and the capitalists

will give up easily, or fight to the end?

They will fight tooth and nail.

Until you can push off your oppressor, he will never give in,

and that had to be through violence.

Young activists turned to One Dimensional Man,

by the German philosopher Herbert Marcuse.

It argued that consumerist society, for all its talk of freedom,

actually stifled democracy and liberty.

As a refugee from the Nazis, Marcuse had seen fascism first-hand,

when he developed a radical Marxist view

of the repressiveness of the state.

Marcuse was interviewed by the philosopher Brian Magee

in the late 1970s, just a year before his death.

Professor Marcuse, why should it have been to your writings

that the revolutionary student movements

of the 1960s and early '70s turned?

The student generation that became active in these years did not need

a father figure, or a grandfather figure, in order to

lead them to protest against a society

which revealed daily its inequality,

injustice, cruelty and its general destructiveness.

I would like to mention racism, sexism,

the general insecurity,

the pollution of the environment, the degradation of education,

the degradation of work, and so on, and so on.

In other words, what exploded in the '60s and early '70s

was a blatant contrast between the tremendous available social wealths

and its miserable, destructive and wasteful use.

Ho, ho! Ho, ho!

-Ho Chi Minh.

-Ho, ho!

One of the disciples of Marcuse was a media-savvy Marxist

called Tariq Ali.

He propagated revolutionary ideas to students through his newspaper,

The Black Dwarf.

We believe that Parliament is completely immaterial

and is hypocritical, because it leads the people to believe that

here is something which can help you when it's completely ineffective.

Black Dwarf.

In the late Sixties, Ali even smuggled a taste of rebellion

into people's homes, when he and a group of

student radicals were given a platform

during a live broadcast...

..presented by an establishment figure,

Robert McKenzie.

'It was the BBC's idea - it wasn't our idea.

'We would never have dreamt of it.'

Obviously, they hoped we'd make fools of ourselves, but they did it.

Most of us are in fact libertarian Marxists. We believe in all power to the Soviets,

we believe that that slogan is not dated at all,

that it has not been properly applied.

We believe in the abolition of money,

we believe in the appropriation of all private property,

and we believe in a large mass of people and their respective jobs they do.

-This is a very big programme indeed!

-Well, these are the bare essentials.

But the students derailed the live broadcast

by bursting into the socialist anthem, The Internationale...

# Internationale... #

..forcing the producers hastily to put the final credits up.

# ..Internationale... #

SINGING CONTINUES

Well, the next scene after the cameras switched off,

everyone burst out laughing. Us that we'd done it,

the camera crews amazed and very friendly and supportive

and shaking hands, and Bob McKenzie saying, "You got away with it!"

But it wasn't just university students who protested

against the status quo.

Their teachers also attacked the outmoded and old-fashioned institutions of state.

Ralph Miliband was a Belgian academic who, like Marcuse,

had fled the Nazis.

Today, he's famous as the father of Ed and David Miliband.

But in the '60s, he was well known as a Marxist thinker,

lambasting the monarchy during this televised debate.

Dr Miliband,

do you agree that monarchy remains a valuable institution?

If you think a nation should sleepwalk through history,

into the future, if you think that deference

is an important part of government,

if you think social hierarchies ought to be preserved...

in that case you're bound to think that monarchy

is a valuable institution. If you think, on the other hand,

that democratic government entails

a high degree of political rationality,

then I think you would think not.

Ralph Miliband wrote a series of books heavily critical

of what he saw as the bullying imperialism of the British state.

I think that my dad caught the mood for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, I think he was a very good teacher, both in person and writing,

maybe because English wasn't his first language.

Secondly, it was a time of great struggle

and it's not just the man, it's the moment.

And so I think his writing was on the issues of the time,

because it was a time of great optimism in some ways, but also great fear.

One cause that really energised Miliband and the left in the 1960s

was the Vietnam War.

Miliband was horrified that Harold Wilson's Labour Party

seemed to be colluding with the Americans during the conflict.

There is a civil war, with, on one side,

nationalist, socialist, communist, neutralist forces

grouped in the National Liberation Front.

And on the other side there are the military men, the politicians,

the landowners, the racketeers

and all the forces of property and privilege.

He thought it was misbegotten, unjust,

and potentially disastrous for the world.

And the justification for American intervention was very weak

and, further, that it was likely to end in disaster.

If Mr Wilson genuinely wants peace,

the first thing he must do is to condemn American bombing.

The '60s generation fought to change not just politics

but also social attitudes.

And one movement, feminism,

was to transform the status of women in Britain.

When I was 17, 18, 19, all I thought about was marriage and children.

I thought it was going to be the most fantastic thing in the world.

But I suddenly realised that, what was it that I was dreaming about?

Because it hasn't come true. I've got married, I've got kids,

but the dream life isn't there.

Oh, you cow!

In 1971, the American feminist Selma James made a film for the BBC

which allowed ordinary British women to talk about their lives.

'Like millions of women everywhere, I'm a typist.

'I'm a housewife, a mother and I've been a factory worker.'

I am one of those people who have always listened to women,

assuming that what they are is not necessarily what they can be.

In a house you can't expect the man to do the washing.

You can't expect him to make beds or anything like that, can you?

I didn't want to live like Mum and Dad lived,

Mum doing everything, Dad doing nothing.

It was my view that if you wanted to find out what was going on,

you had to ask people, cos they could tell you.

And, in fact, looking at the film today,

I find that it is a very good spectrum of views.

We work an eight-hour day here.

I'm going home now to do some shopping.

I don't have a lunch.

I have a cup of tea, if I'm lucky.

I come back to work, I do my work, then I go home and do my housework,

get the tea prepared...

Working women have two jobs -

the one they get paid for and the one they don't,

the running of the home.

I really felt, and still feel,

that the fact that women take care of children, almost exclusively,

is a punishment for us rather than the enjoyment it should be.

And it's certainly a punishment for men.

Men are deprived of a great deal in this society

because women are given these jobs of caring.

How much time do you spend with your children?

Well, very little, actually,

just probably one day per week, which is Sunday.

We feel very much that men should take a full role

in bringing up the children and running the household.

-What do you feel?

-I don't agree with that.

Tell us why. SHE LAUGHS

Tell us why.

Men just can't do it.

Why?

He hasn't got the patience and the understanding.

Feminism transformed attitudes to issues like equal pay

and sex discrimination.

Not that the BBC always kept pace with this huge social change.

This is International Woman's Day today

and you send a male to interview me and a male cameraman.

Where are your women cameramen, BBC?

But feminism produced a thinker who shone on screen

and had no fear of expressing her provocative views.

Germaine Greer, the radical feminist and author of the bestselling book

The Female Eunuch, is in Newsday's studio tonight.

But first, this evening's news summary.

HE COUGHS

Greer was an unknown Australian academic,

but she was to become internationally famous with the incendiary Female Eunuch,

which argued that society made women into weak, subservient creatures.

I don't believe there's a feminist alive who wants to abolish femaleness.

My whole argument has been since the very beginning,

that we don't know what it is - you have given us a disgusting idea of it.

A mimsy, useless, pathetic idea of it, which makes even bad mothers.

Women were already sniffing the air,

looking out the window thinking,

"I'm not standing by this bloody sink a moment longer.

"I'm going to go for a walk without my hat."

That's what happened.

The women made the book, the book didn't make the women.

Such was the book's popularity,

the BBC even commissioned Greer to narrate a film about her ideas.

'As long as the energies of women are not properly exercised,

'their natures are degraded into feebleness and irritability.

'The greatest service a woman can render her community is to be happy.

'More and more women are finding the courage to follow their own objective

'and realise their own potential.'

But while she was the most famous exponent of feminism,

Germaine Greer had misgivings about the collective nature

of the women's liberation movement.

What's the biggest lesson you've learned in the women's movement?

The biggest lesson I've learned?

You must understand I haven't been

a part of an organised women's movement.

This is not really because I object to it,

but because, for various reasons, it hasn't been possible for me.

So really I'm still where I always was, hanging about on the edges.

Is the lesson that a lot of women don't want the sort of liberation you want?

Has that surprised you?

Well, the thing is this...

I don't consider my time would be well spent

marching about the place, sowing despair and disillusion.

There's quite enough despair and disillusion there already.

I watched Germaine Greer on the television, she was often there.

And I'm really amazed at how many perceptions there are,

what clarity she had, and how articulate

and precise she is about many things,

but she has absolutely no sense of the society as a hierarchy,

and she has no sense of the movement.

And that's unfortunate because it means she doesn't see a way out.

Feminism was, from the beginning, very doctrinaire and very prescriptive.

You had to be the right kind of feminist -

it's a bit like having the right kind of orgasm.

There were some people who would tell you

if you didn't decide that in future you were going to have

sexual relations with women, then you weren't a real feminist at all.

But from the mid-1970s,

the idealism and optimism that had characterised the post-war period was crumbling.

The "new Jerusalem" was falling apart.

It was all because Britain had once again hit economic hard times.

BBC cameras captured food shortages...

..strikes...

If you go in, you're scabbing on us. A scab's a scab, as far as we're concerned.

..electricity cuts.

We're virtually out of business while the power's off.

We've no light to work with. It affects us pretty drastically.

And inflation rocketed.

I think there was a change in the intellectual climate

because of the crisis that the socialist model

under both parties had got into difficulties.

We visibly weren't succeeding economically as a nation

and it was causing enormous stress for individual families.

People were losing jobs, they weren't on decent incomes, it wasn't very pleasant.

There was a, sort of, kind of sense that Western civilisation was breaking down.

Specifically, Britain seemed to be a country in great decline.

Everyone started noticing that Britain had become

the sick man of Europe

and people thought that must...

be something to do with the way it runs its economics and politics.

In this time of crisis, one thinker had a startling message...

British economic policy since the Second World War

was completely wrong.

The Austrian-born academic Friedrich Hayek

had been ignored - even vilified -

for most of his career because of his heretical belief

that the free market should be left to its own devices.

I have, incidentally, often regretted

that there haven't been more bankruptcies in the past,

as the British economy would be in a better position now

if more firms had been eliminated, not been artificially kept alive.

But in the '70s, Hayek broke out of his ivory tower.

His anti-government polemic, The Road To Serfdom,

first published in 1944, even became a surprise bestseller.

Prosperity has never been created by governments.

The most government can do is not disturb the prospects

by interfering sillily in things they do not understand.

I think the big idea from Hayek was this idea

that a well-intentioned state doing more and more can end up

suppressing freedoms,

achieving the opposite of what it sets out to achieve,

destroying wealth, prosperity, jobs, happiness -

all those things that politicians ought to be in favour of.

He's got an arresting thesis.

His thesis is that a market outcome is, by definition, just

because it's been freely entered into.

Now, that is a very pure description of what it means to be on the right of politics,

because it says that market exchange,

because it's "free", is necessarily fair.

So far as our commercial activities

and economic activities are concerned,

we will benefit our fellow man most

if we are guided solely by this striving for gain.

Isn't it a philosophy based essentially on selfishness?

That is to say, the only spur, it seems, is gain.

-What about altruism? Where does that come in?

-It doesn't come in.

Hayek's high-minded philosophy was given concrete form

by a plain-talking economist from Chicago,

who was a broadcasting natural...

Milton Friedman.

Professor Friedman, you've just written in an article

and I quote you, "The odds are at least 50-50

"that within the next five years British freedom and democracy will have been destroyed."

How do you reach that, to British ears,

terrifying and apocalyptic conclusion?

It's a terrifying conclusion to myself and to American ears.

I certainly hope you don't continue down that road,

but a candid man must find it hard to see how you're going to get off it.

Friedman had come up with a theory of how to solve Britain's economic woes,

monetarism.

Friedman said Keynes was wrong -

governments should spend less and print less money in difficult times.

Taking money out of circulation to combat rising prices.

Turning off the tap,

reducing the flow of money and spending power in the economy,

now has the highest priority.

The economic theory behind this trend has come to be known as monetarism.

There's only one way to cure inflation, there aren't any two ways.

The only way to cure inflation is to slow down the rate

at which the quantity of money is increasing.

Friedman had a very powerful argument.

I think there were bits of it that are wrong,

and which didn't survive but, at that moment,

people said, "Well, he's given us a way of governing again."

Friedman made his theories sound like common sense,

but they were highly controversial.

Critics said reducing spending

would throw millions of people out of work.

Unfortunately, when you have followed policies as misguided

as British policies have been these many years,

there is no way out that is going to be easy and costless.

Are you saying that means we have to accept

a higher level of unemployment, whatever happens?

I am afraid that is likely to be the case.

In terms of emotion, I think the Keynesians of that day -

and this was right at the end of the Keynesian era,

when they were really on the defensive -

thought Milton Friedman was the embodiment of evil.

That he wanted to put the clock back to the 1930s.

I have argued for a long while that monetarism,

a set of ideas that come from Professor Milton Friedman in modern times,

I have argued this is not an issue between left and right,

Conservatives and Labour, Liberals and Conservatives.

The issue is whether it works or not,

and I've long argued that it doesn't work.

This fight between Friedman and the Keynesians

reached its climax on television.

In 1976, the BBC travelled to Chicago to film a Labour minister

confronting Friedman on a hot-tempered episode of Panorama.

We took a distinguished British economist,

very much committed to recent British policies, Lord Balogh,

to challenge Milton Friedman on his home ground.

Professor Friedman, you've made some very dire predictions about Britain.

Can you explain what ought to be happening in Britain that isn't happening?

There is nothing, in my opinion, wrong with Britain

that could not be set right by a change in the direction of policies

away from a policy which leads to putting civil servants in charge of everything

to a policy which gives to the ordinary man control over his own life.

His policies have never succeeded,

wherever it was tried, either in America or in England.

A political economist - and he is,

after all, a very political economist -

must take into account the probable consequences,

politically and socially, of his advice,

and this he's quite incapable of doing.

What do you believe those to be?

Total collapse of the consensus which we had,

probably a strike, and the decline of the country,

with absolutely incalculable consequences for the country.

-What do you say to that?

-I say that continued increase

in government spending

has produced exactly the results he said the opposite would produce.

You've had increased growth in government spending,

you've had increased militancy in the unions,

and you've had increased unemployment. So apparently...

Here again Professor Friedman is entirely wrong.

I don't mean to be invidious on that, I'm just saying...

Here are the weasel words, you see. Out come the weasel words.

Can I put to you a quote from a London newspaper, The Guardian,

which said you are "a cantankerous old bigot,

"peddling your patent wonder cure and telling the world

"that those who decline to take your wonder cure will die a very nasty death."

But Friedman's "wonder cure"

was to be taken up by an eager patient,

who was to use the BBC to make monetarism palatable to a British audience...

An Oxford don and Conservative intellectual, Keith Joseph.

I thought I was a Conservative, I thought I was a Conservative.

But all the time I was in favour of shortcuts to utopia,

I was in favour of the government doing things

because I was so impatient for good things to be done.

And I didn't realise that the government generally makes a mess.

You see, the more ministers try to do, the less well they do it.

It was Karl Marx who has done more to alter the world, I say for ill...

Joseph was committed to spreading a new right-wing gospel

of personal responsibility over state intervention...

And how did he have the time to write his work?!

..even preaching his message to roomfuls of bemused-looking students.

This country is conservative with a small C,

that's to say, it doesn't believe in collective solutions,

it cherishes freedom,

and yet we have allowed this rubber stamp of collectivism

that has been propagated by socialist intellectuals

to dominate our lives. And the result is, as I've said before,

we're now more socialist than any other developed country.

There's still a little bit sticking up there.

You can see it in the reflection.

Joseph was the key advisor to the party's first female leader,

Margaret Thatcher, who made speeches that tore apart

the old "consensus" politics of the post-war period.

We'll bring in a society which lives within its means,

where public expenditure is cut, and where waste of taxpayers' money

is ruthlessly expunged.

APPLAUSE

Yes, we'll bring in a Conservative society.

And when Thatcher won the 1979 election,

the ideas of Hayek and Friedman

were now at the heart of British government.

FREIDMAN: The Thatcher government is a kind of an experiment,

in whether it will be possible in a democratic society

that has gone as far as Britain has gone, to change course

in an orderly, effective way, to set Britain on a new road.

If the Thatcher government succeeds, it will be an example

that will not be lost on the United States or the rest of the world.

Under the Conservatives, the government tried to curb spending.

It privatised many of the industries that it owned

to encourage free enterprise.

The stock market was deregulated,

generating billions of pounds of revenue.

But as the Keynesians predicted,

strikes became increasingly embittered

and joblessness soared to rates not seen since the 1930s.

REPORTER: Unemployment in Britain is now two and a half million and rising.

Monetarists always said that unemployment

was the unavoidable price for cutting inflation,

but no-one expected Britain's recession to be so severe,

or so long-lived.

By the end of the '80s,

free market values seemed to have triumphed,

both in west and eastern Europe.

They've opened the floodgates, and here at Checkpoint Charlie,

and other gaping holes in the wall, a great human tide is flowing out.

They're pouring through here by car and on foot,

to spend an hour, a day, as long as they please, in the west.

In 1989, the communist system collapsed across eastern Europe.

Capitalism appeared to have won.

CHEERING

And one philosopher preached

that the ideological battles of the modern age were now over.

A provocative New York academic, Francis Fukuyama,

became a celebrity with the last "big idea" of the century.

Liberal, capitalist democracy,

championed by Thatcher in Britain and Reagan in America,

was so suited to human needs, we'd reached the end of history.

In 1989, an unknown researcher at an American think-tank

wrote an article for an obscure foreign policy journal.

But this article was called The End of History.

In it, Francis Fukuyama argued that the collapse of communism

and the end of the Cold War had left capitalism

and liberal democracy without any challengers.

What you've seen happening in the century

when we began it, there were many competitors to liberal democracy,

leftover hereditary monarchies, fascist dictatorships,

communist totalitarianism

and virtually all of them have now disappeared by the end of the 20th century.

What people wanted to hear was that the West had won,

what we described as our values had now spread,

not only throughout the former Soviet Union and in Russia,

which they didn't, certainly not in Russia, not for long,

but also in China and throughout the entire world.

It seems to me that liberal democracy is the best arrangement of politics

by which people can be recognised on a universal and rational basis.

That ultimately accounts for the fact that communism collapsed,

because it did not recognise the everyday person's dignity.

-OK. Those... Every single word raises controversial issues.

-Sure.

That vision of democratic capitalism spreading everywhere,

carried with it the promise of...

..permanent peace,

steady economic growth, the disappearance of war,

and the gradual vanishing of intractably human conflicts.

They were all illusions but they're the sort of illusions that are perennially attractive.

Despite Fukuyama's predictions,

it seems hard to believe that we now live at "the end of history".

Cultural and ideological clashes haven't disappeared

and the financial world is no more predictable than it's ever been.

Thinkers used broadcasting to try to change the world.

But it seems unlikely that the battle of ideas,

the "grand experiments", are likely to end any time soon.

Make the connections between Great Thinkers

and discover some surprising new ones

with the Open University.

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