Monthly Archives: August 2011

Books Politics

Owen Jones’s Chavs, a true must-read

August 7, 2011 – 5:33 pm

A shorter version was published on Blogcritics.

You couldn’t open a British newspaper last month without seeing a columnist referring to Owen Jones’s Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class. Influential it certainly has been, and now that I’ve laid my hands on a copy, it isn’t hard to see why.

First, it serves as a solid primer of the economic dispossession of the past 30 years that has seen working class communities, particularly in traditional manufacturing areas robbed of most of the things that make life living – robbed of decently paid, steady jobs, robbed of the chance to see their children and grandchildren living near them through a lack of housing, and robbed most particularly of hope – of their long-maintained communal aspiration to see the lives of everyone in the community improve together. There’s one figure here that really should be trumpeted from the rooftops: “Nearly two-thirds of the nation’s wealth went on wages back in 1973. Today’s it’s only a little over half.” (p. 157)

And the fact from one survey found that four out of ten middle-income workers felt their occupation had a lower status than their father’s, while only 29 per cent felt it was higher. “Lower middle class” workers, clerical and administrative workers and supervisors, now have lower incomes, and lower status, than the skilled working class of one generation before. (p. 159) Yet, Jones quotes the New Economics Foundation study that found the real value of many lowly-paid occupations is high, while many high-paid cost us a great deal.

This is Jones’s summary of the Thatcher government: “For the first time in generations, it was a blatant government aim to shovel as much money in the direction of the rich as possible.In the first Budget, top bracket taxes of 83 per cent on earned income and 98 per cent on unearned income were slashed to 60 per cent, and corporation tax went from 52 to 35 pre cent. In 1988 the then-chancellor Nigel Lawson went even further: the top rate of tax was reduced to 40 per cent. … the reality of this part of Thatcher’s class war is that it shifted tax burden from the rich to everyone else.” And while in 1979 the average rate of tex was 31.1 per cent, by 1996 that had risen to 37.7 per cent – while the rich kept so much more. (p. 63)

And this book is also good on both the economic and human sides of the huge shift in the British economy from manufacturing to service industries, particularly retailing, which is now the second-biggest employer in the country, with nearly three million people, more than one in 10 workers, nearly two-thirds of them women, employed in shops, a threefold increase since 1980, and half earn less than £7 an hour, while since 2007 25% have seen their pay slashed, a third had their hours cut and a fifth lost benefits.

Yet, as Jones points out, the “Chavtown” website (no, I’ not going to link to it) defines working in a shop as one sign of “chavdom”, even though working in shops was not so long ago considered quite a genteel, middle-class occupation. He follows the life and story of Mary Cunnningham, the now 55-year-old daughter of a miner, who has spent her career in supermarkets. She says: “When I started, you could have a little bit of time with a customer, and get to know your customer, you had your regulars that came to you because you had that little bit of rapport with them. Now it’s get on with the job, you have to have targets… you’re supposed to get through so many customers per hour.” And Mary notes how workers are vulnerable to bullying from managers, and customers. (p. 143)

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Books Environmental politics Politics

Touching on conservatives and greens

August 6, 2011 – 12:04 pm

Made a quick whip through Kieron O’Hara’s Conservatism, a chance encounter at the London Library that left me intrigued by its “green” chapter.

It is very explicitly a book about “small c” conservatism – excluding and rejecting all traces of neoliberal economic theory, so a long way from a lot of what we encounter in practical politics.

There’s a couple of things O’Hara identifies as key to this conservatism – one is that knowledge and data, particularly that on which governments make decisions, are limited and uncertain. “Massive government spending based on little or no idea of whether it would do any good: a scandal? [referring to recent stiumulus spending] Possibly, but goverments rarely understand the effects of their actions.This is a dramatic example, but a common type of deficit in knowledge.” (p. 24)

The second is what he calls the change principle “because the current state of society is typically undervalued, and because the effects of innovations cannot be known fully in advance, then social change (a) must always risk destroying beneficial institutions and norms and, (b) cannot be guaranteed to achieve the aims for which it was implemented. It therefore follows that societies should be risk-averse with respect to social change and the burden of proof placed on the innovator, not his or her opponents. It also follows that change, when it does come, should ideally be (a) experimental (b) reversible where possible and (c) rigorously evaluated before the next incremental step.” (p. 88)

Do how does this play out in the environment? Proving that conservatives can have a sense of humour, O’Hara first offers this: “Temperamentally, environmentalists and conservatives are miles apart; while the Tory sups champagne at White’s the green annoys nothing so much as creating a new type of compost. They move in different circles and have different enemies (often each other). Yet I shall argue… that, both philosophicaly and programtically, conservatism is the best-placed ideology for defending our environment.” (p. 273)
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Books Feminism

The must-read feminist book of the summer – it lives up to the hype

August 1, 2011 – 10:27 pm

A shorter version was published on Blogcritics

If you move in feminist circles, there’s really no choice this summer – you have to read Caitlin Moran’s How To Be A Woman: otherwise, you won’t be able to keep up with the conversations. And it’s not hard to see why it has made a splash – it covers all of the usual issues: body image, harassment, and the general difficulties of being a female teenager in an in-your-face, often laugh-out-loud funny, manner – how an all-women friendship group is likely to talk down the pub just before closing time.

And broadly I’d agree with the hype – if you’ve got a 15-year-old daughter, or know one, I’d want to make sure she read it. Given the nature of 15-year-olds, you probably can’t just give it to her – hide it on the back row of the top shelf of books beside The Joy of Sex; she’s sure to find it. Although if she’s already read Puberty Blues she’s going to recognise the genre.

There were bits of the book that really left me thinking yes, you’ve nailed it – really exposed something not much recognised. Particularly on eating disorders. “Overeating, or comfort eating, is the cheap, meek option for self-satisfaction, and self-obliteration. You get all the temporary release of drinking, fucking or taking drugs, but without – and I think this is the important bit – ever being left in a state where you can’t remain responsible and cogent. In a nutshell, then, by choosing food as your drug – sugar highs, or the deep, soporific calm of carbs, the Valium of the working classes – you can still make the packed lunches, do the school run, look after the baby, pop in on your mum and then stay up all night with an ill five-year-old – something that isn’t an option if you’re caning off a gigantic bag of skunk , or regularly climbing into the cupboard under the stairs and knocking back quarts of Scotch. Over-eating is the addiction of choice of carers, and that’s why it’s come to be regarded as the lowest-ranking of all the addictions.” (p. 117)

She’s also very solid and sensible on plastic surgery – even “good” plastic surgery, that makes the operee look just amazingly well-preserved for their age (“women living in fear of aging, and pulling painful and expensive tricks to hide it from the wold”) is still not defensible (p. 294); and abortion and the need for honestness and openness (she’s had an abortion, and a miscarriage, and says there’s a similarity in both – her body or her mind “had decided this baby was not to be” – p. 277) and the fact that women still find it hard to say they don’t want to have children (because of social reactions), even though many don’t want to, and those who have had will, when honest, admit that they regret it. And on the ludicrousness of the continuing existence of high heels.
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Books Feminism Women's history

Millicent Fawcett’s campaigning – not much has changed in far too many ways!

August 1, 2011 – 8:38 pm

Reading The Women’s Victory – and After: Personal Reminiscences, 1911-1918 by Millicent Garrett Fawcett (1920), it’s hard not to think that little has changed in the campaigning world. Fawcett was president of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, and this little memoir is a pretty well blow-by-blow account of the final push from the non-militant wing of the suffragist movement. (They were, you might say, today’s Friends of the Earth and the suffragettes, with their militant tactics, the Sea Shepherd of the time.)

The parliamentary tactics, the lobbying, the enlisting of parliamentary supporters to convert waverers, the plotting to find ways to disarm the enemies of your cause, and the betrayals coming from those who’d promised support but found excuses to back down might come straight from an account of any similar efforts today.

As today, that often involved meetings with people with whom you had little sympathy – and they the same for you. Fawcett is delightful on the subject of her first meeting with the Chancellor Asquith. “We had with us Miss Emily Davies, the founder of Girton college; Lady Strachey, wife of the well-known Indian administrator; Miss Frances Sterling; Miss I.O. Ford, and other well-known suffrage leaders from our various societies. While we were still in the waiting-room, I was sent for by myself for a preliminary interview with Mr Asquith’s private secretary. If found him a rather agitated-looking young man, who said: ‘I want you, Mrs Fawcett, to give me your personal word of honour that no member of your deputation will employ physical violence.’ ‘Indeed,’ I replied, ‘you astonish me. I had no idea you were so frightened.’ He instantly repudiated being frightened… As we entered the room, where Mr Asquith was sitting with his back to the light on our right, I observed in the opposite corner on our extreme left a lady I did not know. So I said to the secretary in a clear voice, ‘I give no guarantee for that lady’ I do now know her.’ ‘Oh that,’ he rejoined, and again showed some agitation – that lady is Miss Asquith.’” (p. 17)

There’s also some of the same dilemmas as for today about how far a “non-party” campaigning group should do in backing parties that support it and working against those with which it disagrees. There’s some clear defensiveness in Fawcett’s tone as she describes the decision from 1912, after the Liberals had gone back on plans to include women’s votes in the Government Reform Bill in 1911. “It is interesting now to look back at the NUWSS report in the year 1912, and see the care with which we defined our position. No Government candidate was to be supported, because the Government, under Mr Asquith, had shown the most determined opposition to our enfranchisement. When a Conservative candidate was supported, it was because we deemed this the best way of securing the defeat of a Government candidate; when the Labour candidate was supported, it was made clear that this was done because the Labour Party was the only party which had made women’s suffrage part of its programme, and had, moreover, rendered us the signal service of calling upon its parliamentary representatives to oppose any Franchise Bill which did not include women.” (p. 34)
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