Monthly Archives: October 2009

Blogging/IT

Britblog Roundup No 245

October 26, 2009 – 1:40 am

Welcome to the perspicuous, the weird and the wonderful – a roundup of the British blogosphere, as nominated by you, its participants, this week.

Starting off, well there’s really only one subject that I could focus on – that well-watched, much-debated Question Time.

Clive Davis’ Confab (a new-this-month-blog) offers an overview from the “too much BNP” side of the debate. Constant Furious is, well, furious about the BBC’s approach, while feminazery considers Griffin was comprehensively hoisted on his own dogmatic nonsense. Writing in advance, that was what Juliet confidently predicted. The more light shone on the BNP the better, she suggests. But Jonathan on Liberal England thinks Griffin should have been given more rope.

Taking a broader view, James on Two Doctors remembers “the time I debated Nick Griffin, with some interesting thoughts on what makes the far right grow, while the issue of how to beat them has been pre-occupying Peter Cranie in the North West.

Cranmer takes an alternative approach, suggesting the programme provided the BBC with a clear way forward for saving money on Jonathan Ross (and also cutting their number of complaints.

You might need some light relief after that: I’d suggest visiting the bank with Mutley the Dog (he’s enjoying his huge share of the banking bailout in the form of chocolate peanuts); The Magistrate addressing the important issue of how to stay awake in court (as a former court journo I can sympathise with that one, the Diamond Geezer’s cunning plan to save Royal Mail; and, Jim on The Daily (Maybe) finds some generous rich Germans.

On the other big stories of the week, Bearwatch has what I’m judging to be a clever take on the GDP figures, Charles Crawford reflects on the Pope’s power grab, and Adopted Domain is considering how to vote in Edinburgh East.

Taking a broader view, Penny Red looks at the place of the blogosphere in British political life.

In other nominations, on The Final Redoubt there’s a view that the Copenhagen Summit will usher in ; on They’re Joking, Aren’t They, a consideration of the author Maurice Sendak; on Pro Liberi a consideration of brain programming by laser; and the Pirate Party blog tells of a woman who was almost made to pay for singing – and not by her neighbours.

Getting out into the “real world” of non-political (at least in the obvious sense) life, Jess McCabe on The F Word wonders what the woman in the woman in the bra has to do with consumer rights, Cruella considers the problem with miracles (why do they never involve the regrowing of a severe leg?), and to make you feel all warm and fuzzy (particularly if you’re tucked up warm at home and not in the Cotwalds rain) see what Stroud was doing for 350 day.

And staying with the birds and the bees to finish – even pigeons have bad dating days…

You can find out more about the roundup, and who’ll be hosting next, at Britblog central. You might find in this post some links to views you wouldn’t usually find on this blog – the rule of the Britblog is that all nominations are included, except for some clear exceptions. It does give a rather different view of the blogosphere, wherever you start from.

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Books History Women's history

Austerity Britain – then and now

October 18, 2009 – 11:48 am

The title is Austerity Britain: 1945-1951. The cover image is of a grey and dreary Newcastle on Tyne from 1950, and it weighs in at a wrist-wearying 692 pages. You wouldn’t pick David Kynaston’s combined social and political history as a non-fiction bestseller, which it was.

But you don’t have to get far into its pages to find its combination of anecdotal accounts (drawing heavily on the Mass Observation Survey) and descriptions of a society trying to rebuild itself from the ground up, compelling. In fact I found it so compelling I devoted two days of a recent holiday to little else, skipping easily through its pages.

The interest is multiplied by the fact that many of the debates that fill its pages — about the form of the foundational NHS, about the nature of a more equitable schooling system, about housing shortages and the problems of building new communities, about Britain’s economic place in the world — are being revisited today – or perhaps were never adequately solved.

Some of the stories about the NHS should be force-fed to everyone who’s now trying to dismember the fabulous free-at-the-point service provision. Kynaston reports the words of Dr Alistair Clark, an “ordinary GP: “For the first six months I had as many as 20 or 30 ladies come to me who had the most unbelievable gynaecological conditions… at least 10 who had complete prolapse of their womd, and they had to hold it up with a towel as if they had a large nappy on.”

The biggest early pressures were on “drugs, spectacles and false teeth” – the first and last of these reflecting modern-day debates about drug costs and dental provision today.

The housing debate started from a very different place from today’s – in a Sunday Pictorial account of “100 Families” in July 1946, only 14 owned or were buying their own homes, but one big debate was about mixing the classes. Bevan placed much hope in this: You have colonies of low-income people, living in houses provided by the local authorities, and you have the higher income groups living in their own colonies. …It is a monstrous infliction on the essential psychological and biological one-ness of the community.”

Kynaston reports that in 1946 a patchy start to housing construction, handicapped in part by a desire to build quality rather than quantity, and marked by a significant squatter’s movement, but by September 1948 750,000 new homes had been provided. But several million more were needed, without even counting the renewed impetus in the slum clearance movement.
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Miscellaneous

The bounty of nature

October 11, 2009 – 11:46 pm

Have been having a big autumn garden tidy up and replanting, on my balcony and in the communal pots in our informal community vegetable garden.

Found that a poor, struggling aubergine plant that barely reached 20cm in height had somehow produced a single offspring almost as large as itself (and found cherry tomatoes had insinuated themselves in every crevice and corner).

aubergine and tomato

What I’ve replaced them with is the “mini veggie garden” from this seller, which arrived very greenly wrapped in hay (now forming a “fleece” around the seedlings.

It is quite a selection: broad beans, spinach, red dandelion, a range of winter lettuce, rainbow chard and more … we should be a well-nourished council estate, at least on the nourishment found in leafy greens, if they all flourish!

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Books Politics Women's history

Radicals past and present

October 7, 2009 – 10:08 pm

If you look at the subtitle of Edward Vallance’s A Radical History of Britain, it’s clear where he’s coming from. He’s, in his own term, a radical, and sympathises greatly with those before him who he regards as falling into the same camp. The good news is, this has not destroyed his critical faculties. He’s wary of painting the present too closely on the past, of regarding former radicals as “just like us”, and keen to point out that many fond legends of the left, and the right, such as the exact place of the Magna Carta in “British freedom” (largely constructed in the 14th century, when Parliament passed six acts that reinterpretted chapter 29 far beyond its original intent and since, making, for example “lawful judgement of peer” mean trial by jury).

Vallance clearly explains his aims in the introduction for the book: “First, it aims to evaluate radicalism in its specific historical contexts, uncovering in many places the formerly secret history of both its successes and its failures. Second, it evaluates the enduring power of the idea of a ‘radical tradition’, by examining how each age has reinvented it to suits its own ends.”

Some of the names and events here will be familiar, at least in outline, to anyone with a smattering of school history: the peasants; revolt, the Levellers, Thomas Paine, the Tolpuddle Martyrs and the suffragettes. Yet most will have little more than a sketch of these events – and often an inaccurate one.

So Vallance concludes that the Peasants’ Revolt had a different impact that suggested by the “bitter invective of the boy-king Richartd, often invoked to show the futility of popular insurrection”. In fact, wages rose after the revolt, many serfs were released from villeinage, rations improved,with labourers’ rations at harvest often including up to a pound of meat a day, and life expectancy rose to about 35 (higher than industrial workers in the mid-19th century). And for the first time, Vallance said, there was an awareness in the elite that the Commons had a place in public life, as the anonymous poem ‘God Save the King and the King’s Crown’ said: “The leste lygge-man with body and rent/He is a parcel of the Crown.”

But the core of this book, as any book about English radicals, is around the Revolution. and the core of that is the Levellers, subject of much historical revisionism, antirevisionism, anti-anti-revisionism, etc… This is Vallance’s conclusion: “…the key Leveller writers, Lilburne, Richard Overton, William Walwyn and John Wildman, were at the centre of the political turmoil of the civil war and the revolution. Far from being marginal figure, individuals like Wildman were, in fact, well connected to radical MPs within the Commons such as Henry Marten and Thomas Rainborowe. By cautioning against seeing their politics as reflecting a simple dichotomy between radicals and conservatives, recent work has also directed our attention to those moments when the army grandees themselves seriously considered radical solutions, suc as the Levellers’ various Agreements of he People, for settling the nation.” I
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Books Politics

The return of Keynes

October 3, 2009 – 10:36 pm

It’s an academic tradition so often observed that it’s practically a rule: if you’ve been a star in your field, a creator of new paradigms, new fields, new genres, soon after your death (or possibly before) your reputation will fall into a precipitous decline. The nature of the Western academic method, that new intellectual stars arise by entirely revising, if not reversing, the direction of their teachers, guarantees it.

Yet few can have suffered quite such a precipitous fall from grace as Keynes, the man who after the Second World War most of the governments of the world with their economic prescriptions (maintain full employment and growth on a steady keel), and the medicine to do so (government intervention to stabilise markets).

So it was that in 1971, America’s President Nixon famously said: “We are all Keynesians now.” Yet, less than a decade later, Keynes was deposed by a coterie of neo-liberal economists, who restored a much older doctrine, that markets were naturally self-correcting and only the intervention of governments made them behave badly.

It was a doctrine that was to have two decades or more basking in the sunshine of political, regulatory and (to some degree at least) public approval – until the crash that has felled economies around the globe struck. Now, suddenly, Keynes, or perhaps it had be better said neo-Keynesianism, is back in fashion.

The speed of that reversal is illustrated by the frank declaration of Robert Skideslsky, author of Keynes: The Return of the Master, who explains that he sat down to write the book on January 1 this year, at the suggestion of his agent and finished it on July 15. It hit the shops on September 3, the publisher no doubt desperate to pre-empt what will surely be a flood of books on the now back in fashion economist.
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Books Theatre