The century's greatest failures

Published 20 December 1999

New Statesman Millennium - Enough of those "best of the millennium" and "best of the century" lists. We asked people to nominate the biggest flops of the past hundred years

Jon Snow
A Martian landing on Earth would surely conclude that the greatest failure of the 20th century is our inability to feed ourselves. But very soon the Martian would discover that after 2,000 years and more of civilisation, man is still killing man - a dozen major conflicts at any one time. Retreating from the Martian's perspective to British domestic failure, the devastating absence of equality of opportunity in education and the reality that this most basic human right is affected by an ability to pay. Further, that the state goes out of its way to encourage this distortion by providing huge tax breaks to private education while failing to fund adequately the system available to 90 per cent of the population.

A close runner-up in the greatest failure stakes is the class system, which in part flourishes upon state-subsidised private education and in part endures from previous centuries of feudalism and non- meritocratic ennoblement. If we must personalise 20th-century failure, Anthony Eden wins for Suez - the embodiment of class crassness at home and imperial recklessness abroad.

Fay Weldon
Goldeneye Ointment - romantically named, it came in a tiny metal tube sold over the chemist's counter: a yellow, sticky substance used to treat conjunctivitis, sties and all eye ailments. It added a jaundiced unsightliness to the already inflamed eye, matting eyelashes and gluing lids while time did its normal reparative work. Condemned in later decades of the century as a mere attracter of dust, it was replaced by Chloromycetin on prescription which, as everyone knows, never works either - try bathing the eye with a pinch of salt dissolved in an eggcup of lukewarm water.

Bruce Kent
The unrealised hope of Tsar Nicholas II, expressed in the Hague Peace Conference, that international disputes could be settled by "peaceful adjustment".

Those hopes came to an end as the second Hague conference fizzled out in 1907. Not that there were no positive results. The International Court of Justice, now an organ of the United Nations, owes its origin to the Tsar's initiative of a hundred years ago. Nevertheless, a century that has seen over 100 million deaths in war, the deployment and use of weapons that are not only immediately indiscriminate but indiscriminate across generations, and in which military expenditure still runs at about £700 billion a year, is not quite what the Tsar had in mind for this century. In 1899 our belligerent Admiral Fisher even managed to vote against the banning of the dumdum bullet. A hundred years of not much progress. Fisher would be pleased, but not the Tsar.

Francine Stock
The enthusiasm for the internal combustion engine eclipsed prewar research into electric vehicles. With a little more effort - and fewer vested interests - we could have avoided a noisy, polluting, cumbersome transport white elephant.

We've failed to find a balance between work and leisure. Decades of pursuit of a leisure society have obscured the fact that what we really need is probably freedom from drudgery, not freedom from work. Those who are in work find themselves competing to achieve at home, too, in DIY, or gardening, or home computing. Those who are not employed feel doubly excluded.

Victoria Glendinning
There's nothing the 20th century needed more than an association of states for international peace, security and co-operation. That's what the United Nations was established for after the second world war. It hasn't really worked. The General Assembly and the Security Council are less successful than subsidiary agencies such as the World Health Organisation; the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank call the shots even in politics of conflict resolution. Nato does more "peacekeeping" than the UN, which is underfunded. Russia cannot pay its dues, the US will not. The US regularly blocks General Assembly resolutions on aggression, human rights and disarmament, and frequently exercises its veto on the Security Council. Individual states use the UN to further their national interests. The core functions of the UN must be reconstituted, though it will be hard to find a structure that the US will neither dominate nor undermine. There are good people among the 50,000-odd employed by the UN, but as a whole, it is, to quote Shakespeare, an expense of spirit in a waste of shame.

Jim Crace
1. The Christian churches, for failing to withstand the grander narratives of science.

2. The planet's ecosystem, for failing to withstand the meaner narratives of science.

3. American foreign policy, for entrenching dictatorships and undermining democracies, when the intention (mostly) was to achieve the opposite.

4. Communist Russia, for governing its citizens almost as badly as post-communist Russia.

5. All but one of the Labour Party leaders since Attlee, for trying to please and placate the wrong class.

6. Architects.

John Humphrys
The countryside. It's not that it has failed us; we have failed it. Compare rural Britain a century ago with today: small fields almost everywhere surrounded by hedges bursting with life; butterflies and birds, bees and wild-flower meadows, copses and woods and downland that had never seen a plough. Today, it's almost all gone: sacrificed to the god of mass production in the interest of food that seems cheap only if you discount all the other costs. The villages and small market towns have been devastated, the local schools, shops and pubs closed down, the houses bought by City types with fat Christmas bonuses. When John Prescott allegedly said of the green belt that it was one of Labour's great achievements "and we are going to build on it", he spoke truer than he knew.

Oliver James
Mrs Thatcher's trickle-down effect that was supposed to rob the rich for the poor. This did not happen. All that happened was the rich became richer and the poor became more numerous.

Philip Kerr
Hitler, because he so nearly succeeded in dominating the world and eliminating an entire race. We can count ourselves very fortunate that he failed! The measure of his failure is the enormity and evil of the task he set himself in wiping out a race completely.

Ben Pimlott
The 20th century's political Eddie the Eagle is surely Margaret Thatcher. Who else has so instinctively got everything so wrong? After gaining notoriety as education minister in the 1970s by abolishing children's milk and grammar schools, she became the most hubristically careless prime minister of recent times. First she destroyed British manufacturing by imposing an unworkable monetary policy. Then she stumbled into an avoidable South Atlantic war that has had us pathetically paying off debts of gratitude to the United States ever since. She also, for good measure, brought about the decimation of local government that has given rise to the current London mayoral mess, and sacked every minister of talent from her cabinet. Ousted by exasperated colleagues, she has used her baleful influence to attack policies she herself backed and to undermine her own party. If British Conservatism today lacks unity, confidence, mass support, social basis, viable philosophy and feeling of self-worth, nobody else is more to blame. What a failure. What a calamity.

Carla Powell
Hsing-Hsing the panda, who recently passed away in Washington Zoo, leaving behind Earth's pandemonium for the great bamboo shoots in the sky. With the world looking on, Hsing-Hsing was given a free shot at mating with the delectable Chia-Chia in London Zoo. Public expectation dwarfed even that surrounding Cherie Blair's new baby. But Hsing-Hsing simply failed to co-operate. Whether he just had a headache or was refusing to pander to the world's media, we shall never know. But he joined the list of males who have fallen short this century. Hitler failed to get to Moscow. Saddam Hussein failed to get to Kuwait. John Major failed to get re-elected. Hsing-Hsing just failed to get it up and in full public view. For my money, there cannot be a greater failure than that.

Nick Clarke
It was a shame about the League of Nations, 1960s tower blocks and - a bitter disappointment this - the so-called "self-cleaning oven". Most of all I would like to indict those unnamed civil servants in the War Office who decreed, throughout the early years of the century, that no work should be done on developing a channel tunnel. They stood by the findings of an inquiry in 1881 that warned that thousands of Continental soldiers could launch an invasion, arriving by train "dressed as ordinary passengers". This failure of the imagination delayed for many decades the sort of day-to-day contact with Europe that might have prevented wars, saved John Major's bacon - and hastened the possibility of getting a decent cup of coffee in an English restaurant.

Ziauddin Sardar
Judged by his own standards, Gandhi has been a colossal failure. He is normally credited with shepherding India to independence - yet given that they were fighting the British the moment they set foot on the subcontinent, the Indians would have gained their independence with or without Gandhi. Gandhi set himself three main goals. As the chief theorist and practitioner of non-violence, he wanted a non-violent India. Yet not only did he himself meet a violent death, today we have a nuclear India armed to the teeth. He had a pluralistic vision of a nation where Hindu-Muslim relations were based on mutual respect and affection. Yet he unwittingly contributed to the division of India into two perpetually warring states. The archetypal "man with a goat" wanted Indians to develop frugal lifestyles based on self-sacrifice, with an accent on equality. Instead we have an India of extremes of poverty and wealth where greed and corruption is the norm. The great ascetic must be turning like his trademark spinning-wheel in his grave.

Lauren Booth
The British monarchy and their mates. Once they ran the Empire. Now, they run tourist shops and posh B&Bs. But history will surely see the end of the House of Lords as natural selection at its best. They just couldn't keep up with the rest of us. As out of place in the computer age as a sherry-drinking nun in an Irvine Welsh novel, their only hope for survival lies in the hands of the younger generation. And what youngsters they have spawned, numerous junkies and spendthrifts, all in need of either a fix, a therapist, or both.

Yes, the aristocracy ends the century looking as majestic and dignified as the stain on Monica's dress. Close the door on your way out, chaps.

Linda Grant
The Third Reich promised to last for a thousand years and only managed a paltry 12. It sought world domination and succeeded in invading and occupying only a few European countries for a short time. It promised the Final Solution to the Jewish problem in the form of eliminating all the Jews. I met a woman in New York in the early nineties who collected old typewriters. She'd bought one manufactured in Germany in 1942. She wondered what should be the first words she should type on it. I suggested: "We are still here." Fascism was beaten and driven to the margins, where we must make sure it stays, along with eugenics and all other race theories that once promised the gullible a brave new world.

Edited by Shifar Rahman

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