As I had a go at Niven in a recent post I thought I would post the review of his book which I wrote for North East Labour History Journal. This organization is now dominated by academics but for most of my long time in it, it had a large membership of people actually drawn from the industrial working class and who had worked in the world it addressed. The editorial board rejected this review on the grounds that it was “uncomradely”. I never knew that reviews were not allowed to criticize. Anyhow here it is and I stand by every word,
Niven, a ‘ leading voice on Northern identity and culture’ (Blurb for a Royal Society Event in York 2022), has a presence in the London Media. The book was extensively reviewed, not least in the Financial Times. It mixes personal memoir, literary criticism, weak history and a weaker account of Northern culture. He addresses the whole of the North but with a focus on the NE which I will follow in this review. The historical errors are trivial but if we don’t know our past we are damned to repeat it. For example, the Tyne Wear Metro was not the product of Dan Smith, far too much influenced by road engineers, but of Tyne and Wear County Council in the 1970s. Dan was an atypical product of machine Labour politics in the 60s. Far more representative was the vile crook, back-handy Andy Cunningham. That matters because the alliance of the local Labour machine with a right wing national party, now far to the right of Wilson et al., is back– witness the attempt to bar Driscoll from standing for NE Mayor. The 1970s Met Council was a progressive force but Blair (who to be fair Niven detests) did nothing to revive that level of governance.
Niven focuses on high culture, especially on Bunting’s Briggflats. No mention of popular middle brow culture – When the Boat comes in, Whatever happened to the Likely Lads, plays from Live Theatre, especially Tom Hadaway – keep going – so a literary critique rather than cultural study. If Niven had paid some attention to say the Likely Lads trajectory he would have engaged with lived experience, in the NE from the affluent 60s – see Pearson’s Sex, Brown Ale and Rhythm and Blues -towards the present. He might have understood the importance of the Elm Lodge housing estates. Niven has claimed to have returned to his native city on his appointment at Newcastle University. He didn’t. He grew up in the South Tyne Valley, the child of two blow-in educational professionals (both of working class origins and his London Irish mother could have put him right on the nature of the outer South East population which he gets badly wrong). He blew out to the music scene and to a higher education in London and Oxford before he blew back. He has no lived experience of North Eastern industrial working class life and no family background in it. That shows in what he writes. Niven’s heart is in the right place but his head is away with the fairies and his representation of us to others is flat out wrong.
David Byrne
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