* The global epidemic of tobacco use among women and girls, from the Canadian Women’s Health Network. (Lots of other good stuff on that site.)
* A review of the fascinating-sounding Uncommon Ground: White Women in Aboriginal history.
* The latest ILO publication on “Equality at work: Tackling the challenge”.
* A belated pointer to the weekend’s Britblog Roundup No 117.
Work on Wifi in a “Digibar”, playing house music upstairs, where you are, while a heavy rock band plays downstairs, the vibrations, as well as the noise, coming up through the floor.
You’ll forgive me any spelling mistakes, I hope…
I’m just wondering if the signal stretches across the road to the Tandoori place. I have the feeling the barman would like to get rid of me – I’m not exactly giving his bar the image he’d hope through the entirely glass front; I’m about 20 years too old, and not dressed in the T-shirt of my favourite, cutting-edge band.
…reading, by the open fire, the Illustrated London News of August 5, 1893, sitting on its original shelf in its original (rather battered) binding…
It celebrated the Tercentenary of Izaak Walton, (p. 157), of interest to me because I’m interested in S.P. who dedicated “The Love of Amos and Laura” to him. In 1624 we learn he was dwelling on Fleet Street, two doors west of the end of Chancery Lane.
You can’t describe the ILN as high-brow, but it does range widely. This issue also has a piece on the marvels of “Ongcar the Great” (Angkhor Wat), whose age at this time, at least to this writer,seems to have been a mystery.
The illustrated bit is always a delight – there’s a lovely etching on the cover of the House of Commons punch-up, over Home Rule, “the most scandalous episode which has been witnessed in the House for many generations”(doubt that somehow), provoked by the use of “biblical but unparliamentary term” Judas”, and a nice portrait of “Elizabeth Hanbury, a Quaker centenarian by Percy Bigland”.
The adverts too are fun – we’re well into the age of celebrity endorsement, so Lillie Langtry is advertising Pears’ soap – “for years I have used your soap, and no other”, and Titan soap, illustrated with a before and after of black and white poodle, with its virtues attested in a quote from “The Lady” magazine “dirt flies before it…clothes wash themselves.” [No advertising standards authority then.] And leading the obits is a short account of “Mrs John Pearless, who under her maiden name Anne Pratt wrote many books dealing with botany.” She died on July 27, aged 87.
Recent reading has included Crisis and Consensus in British Politics: From Bagehot to Blair, by Michael Williams, published in 2000, so an interesting view from the start of the Blair premiership now that we’re at its end. The book’s basic thesis is that there has been a dialectic in British politics between crisis and consensus, particularly over the issue of Britain’s relative international economic decline, which Williams says first became an issue in Edwardian times, when it was also facing international risks from the military power of the US and Germany, yet this also coincided with the transition to democracy, the management of which preoccupied the ruling class. It chose to do this by consensus, to defeat the more immediate threat from Germany.
That consensus was broken up by the depression, but after the second great war a new one was forged, “commonly conceived to consist of a bipartisan agreement on the boundaries between the public and private sector, a commitment to full employment maintained through Keynesian techniques of macro-economic management, the conciliation of the trade union movement, and universal welfare services. This came under increasing strain – chiefly economic, in the sixties and seventies, and the period from the Thatcher victory in 1979 to the fall of Thatcher was one of conflict, which was then replaced by a new consensus – perhaps you might call it “Blaijorism”.
Economically over the same period, “the First World War destroyed the liberal world economy which had been dominated by the City of London, a domination expressed through the Gold Standard which was suspended on the outbreak of war. British macro-economic policy since the 1920s can be seen as a series of attempts to restore the rentier capitalist paradise which had been lost in 1914. The attempt to restore pre-war ‘normalcy’ by returning to the Gold Standard in 1925 broke down in 1931 in the first of the great sterling devaluation crises that have punctuated British history since then.”
At the start of the Blair years, Williams saw developing “common acceptance of a managerial ideal and an emerging managerial society in which wealth and power are based upon the possession of marketable skills. Thus we are seeing the emergence of a new kind of state … with its stress on work, education, partnership and pragmatism”.
And the idea is that private sector management approaches are beneficial for the public sector – so all of the targets, efficiency drives etc. But while what has been called “the Super Class”, the very highly paid private sector professionals have done very nicely, Williams says (and as a Whitehall man he no doubt closely noted this himself). And, hardly news now, but perhaps not so obvious when he was writing, he comments on Blair matching “Lloyd George in his adminration for business leaders whom he has appinted in large numbers to his Goverment and to over 300 task forces”.
He notes, presciently it would seem creates “problems for Labour in government so long as it remains ‘the party of public professionals’… The Blair Government faces a problem in reconciling its commitments to tight controls on public spending and a continuing drive for efficiency in public servies with the expectations of the public-sector middle class from which it draws its main support.”
The ultimate logic was to achieve “a bureaucratic monoculture spanning the public and private domains” – “success” being defined as meeting the demands of the market, public or private. Williams says that Blair had in 199 an “essentially optimistic vision of the emerging society in which an aspirational middle class of ‘knowledge workers’ comprises an increasing majority of the population with a diminishing minority of the ‘socially excluded’.” But Williams adds, “it is equally possible to imaine a future in which the Super Class constitutes a beleaguered minority among an increasingly resentful majority… today’s political consensus may contain the seeds of a future crisis of managerial society.” (p. 211)
Mmm – think he might have had something there….
“Akismet has caught 204,008 spam for you since you first installed it.”
It is a little over a year (April 27, 2006) since I moved to WordPress and installed Akismet. That was the figure a minute or so ago. It will have gone up since…
There’s often a lot of assumptions about why women have abortions: if you read these stories it is clear how complicated women’s lives can become. Should women like these be forced into facing the further impediment of having to break the law to get an abortion?
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