I was delighted to be asked to participate in a project in which I was asked to answer this question.
You can find the video here.
Lots of great women have taken part and it’s regarded as a chain, so the next participant is Kat Molesworth at Housewife Confidential.
All women are invited to participate – you can contribute your own video… It’s an interesting question to contemplate.
And if you’d like to know more about the Green Party part of my life you can find snippets on my leader’s blog.
Ulrich Beck in German Europe, quoting himself: “The model of Western modernity … is antiquated and must be renegotiated and redesigned… [What is needed is] not just rule-enforcing but rule-altering politics… not just power politics but political design, the art of politics … More and more often we find ourselves in situations which the prevailing institutions and concepts of politics can neither grasp nor adequately respond to.” (p. 16)
“On the surface the European crisis revolves around debts, budget deficits and problems of finance. But the deeper, more authentic question is how much solidarity can and should be achieved in Europe. … The arrogance displayed by northern Europeans in their dealings with the allegedly lazy, undisciplined southerns reveals an altogether brutal cultural ignorance and an obliviousness to history.” (p. 20)
“If we look at the decisive events and trends of recent decades – I have in mind here the Chernobyl disaster, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 on the World Trade Center, climate change, the credit crunch and the crisis of the euro – we find they have two features in common. First, before they actually happened they were inconceivable, and, second, they are global both in themselves and in their consequences.” (p. 23)
Recently out, and as readable as his earlier Austerity Britain is David Kynaston’s Modernity Britain: 1957-59.
A few highlights…
“In theory, there was ‘parity of esteem’ between the roughly 1,200 grammar schools and 3,800 secondary moderns. In practice, not only did most people view the secondary moderns as vastly inferior, but there was a shocking relative shortfall in their resourcing. ‘It is likely’ noted John Vaizey in his 1958 treatise The Costs of Education, ‘that the average Grammar school child receives 170 per cent more per year, in terms of resources, than the average Modern school child. …The gulf in expectations was even greater. Surveying in 1961 that year’s school-leavers from a semi-skilled and unskilled background at five Leicestershire schools (two grammars and three secondary moderns), William Liversidge found that 93 per cent of the grammar boys anticipated moving into a higher class of employment than their parents – whereas only 18 per cent of the secondary modern boys did. ‘The general conclusion … is one of a startlingly accurate appraisal of life chances by the children … a shrewd appreciation of the social and economic implication of their placing within the educational system.’ … Social class … did much to determine outcomes within grammars. In 1954 an official report on Early Leaving found that whereas children from the semi-skilled and unskilled working class represented over 20 per cent of grammar school intakes, but the sixth form that proportion was down to barely 7 per cent.” (pp. 218-219)
“On the morning of 5 December, two days after the pit-closures announcement, Macmillan inaugurated the 8.5-mile Preston Bypass, Britain’s first stretch of motorway, and, subsequently, part of the M6. ‘In the years to come,’ the PM declared, ‘the county and the country alike may look at the Preston Bypass – a fine thing in itself but a finer thing as a symbol – as a token of what is to follow’: pressing a button, he cut the traditional tape by remote control … he was driven along in a Rolls-Royce Landau.” (p. 259)
“Shortly after Christmas the government announced the full convertability of sterling held by non-residents … Although the announcement itself provoked no great controversy, Anthony Crosland would state the potential downside forcibly in a Third Programme talk in early February. Claiming (probably correctly) that the ‘strongest pressure’ behind the decision had come from the Bank of England and the City, wanting convertability ‘in order to enhance the position of London as a world banker and financial centre,’ he called it a ‘disastrous approach’ – given not only that ‘the financial earnings of the City from overseas business are trivial in relation to our balance of payments’ but that ‘every step in the direction [i.e. of financial liberalisation, ultimately leading to the end of exchange controls] increases our vulnerability to speculation’. And: ‘The really serious thing about all this is that our domestic policies are increasingly dictated by the holders of sterling – by bankers in Zurich and London, by speculators all over the world, and by traders using sterling as an international trading currency. These people are not, unfortunately, as the City likes to think they are, highly rational and sophisticated judges of the true state of the British economy. On the contrary, they are often naive, volatile and ill-informed…Yet the fear of what they may do to sterling increasingly influences our Bank rate policy, our rate of economic expansion, our wages policy, and … even what taxation policy we are allowed to pursue.” (pp. 262-3)
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First published on Blogcritics
I was 13 years old in 1979, and from a family that only bought the newspaper on Saturday, so my father could read the car classifieds. So I wasn’t exactly immersed in or aware of political events, but I do have some vague memories that have stuck. Those are the television footage of the Ayatollah Khomeini arriving back in Tehran to unimaginably large and excited crowds, and the election of Margaret Thatcher, which as a budding feminist struck me chiefly from the gender angle.
It was thus fascinating to read Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century, a text that looks at the events of that year, what led up to them and what came immediately after, through the view of key states. And this is an unusually globally focused book for its kind: the key states are not just the UK, but China (this is the year Deng Xiaoping came to power), Iran, Afghanistan, and the Vatican (with the election of the Polish John Paul II).
The author, Christian Caryl, comes very clearly from a political perspective not mine – he’s worked for Foreign Policy – and it’s telling that in the final chapter, when he brings concluding comments up to in some cases 2012, there’s no focus on the global financial crash and what it might mean. His theses – that there has been a coalescence of revolutionary leftist theory with traditional Muslim teaching, producing something entirely new, and that the late Seventies saw the end of a general acceptance of a social democratic welfare state as the Western standard, are not original.
What he’s really good at is researching and telling the story of great events, from a truly localised perspective in these very different states, which is no mean feat, and doing so in a way that is both gripping and memorable. He really has a fine line in anecdote, whether it is the fact that it was an Air France steward who assisted Ayatollah Khomeini down the steps in Tehran because the competing individuals on the plane with him couldn’t decide who’d get the honour and the potentially resulting influence, or the fact that the plane had been stuffed with Western journalists in a bid to ensure the Shah’s regime didn’t shoot it down, as it had threatened to do.
The machinations of the Afghan communist party, and the coup that saw it take power, which Moscow learned about from Reuters, and the account of the dangerously see-sawing career of Deng (who I learnt loved croissants from an early stint in France!) bear the hallmarks of an experienced foreign correspondent and a power of research.
Other reviews have questioned how these events all fit together – Iran and Afghanistan are easy, as are London and Beijing, but the complete package is less obvious.
Nonetheless, it is clear that this was a year of rapid change, in which old, seemingly solid, certainties dissolved with the swoosh of a limescale being swept away by lemon juice. That makes it a timely read, when so many of the certainties established in the era of Thatcher, Reagan and even Deng, the ruling neoliberal “consensus” that replaced unchallenged theories of social democracy, are clearly on the way out. I’m not sure there’s many lessons here about what comes next for us — the gap of more than three decades is too great — but that change tends to happen in big leaps, rather than gradual evolution, is one lesson to be taken here.
Other views: Observer, New York Times, The Economist.
From Philip Mirowski’s Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown
p54-5 “The thorny issue of just what sort of ontonological entity the neoliberal market is, or should be … The ‘radical subjectivist’ wind of the Austrian School of economics attempted to ground the market in a dynamic process of discovery by entrepreneurs of what consumers did not yet even know what they wanted, due to the fact that the future is radically unknowable. Perhaps the dominant version … emanated from Hayek himself, wherein the ‘market’ is posited to be an information processor more powerful than any human brain, but essentially patterned upon brain/computation metaphors…. Another partially rival approach to defining the market emanated from German ordoliberalism, which argues that competition in a well-functioning market needs to be directly organized by the state, by embedding it in various other social institutions.” Both sides “seem overly preoccupied with what it purportedly does, while remaining cavalier about what it actually is. For the neoliberals, this allows the avoidance of a possible deep contradiction between their constructivist tendencies and their uninflected appeal to a monolithic market that has existed throughout all history and indifferently across the globe; for how can something be ‘made’ when it is eternal and unchanging? This is solved by increasingly erasing any distinctions among the state, society and the market, and simultaneously insisting their political project is aimed at reformation of society by subordinating it to the market.”
p. 65-6 The neoliberal program ends up vastly expanding incarceration and the carceral sphere in the name of getting government off our backs. Members of the Mont Pelerin Society were fond of Benjamin Constant’s adage: ‘The government, beyond its proper sphere ought not to have any power; within its sphere, it cannot have enough of it.’ …. This is central to understanding the fact that neoliberal policies lead to unchecked expansion of the penal sphere, as has happened in the United States. … a definition of crime as inefficient attempts to circumvent the market. The implication is that intensified state power in the police sphere (and a huge expansion of prisoners incarcerated) is fully complementary with the neoliberal concept of freedom. …. there is also a natural stratification in what classes of law are applicable to different scofflaws: ‘the criminal law is designed primarily for the nonaffluent; the affluent are kept in line, for the most part, by tort law.”
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First published on Blogcritics
As a resident of the central London district of Somers Town, which I often describe as the “last poor area community left in central London”, when I heard that there was a new novel, The Streets, by Anthony Quinn, set in the Victorian district, based on voluminous research, well I couldn’t resist.
Of course when I say “poor” today, I mean an area that’s been resistant to the gentrification of Bloomsbury to the south and Camden Town to the north, largely as a result of the fact that it’s nearly all council flats, built from the Twenties and Thirties onwards, replacing many of the dwellings in which the characters of Quinn’s novel reside. Extreme poverty of the Victorian kind is not the common way of things today, for all that there’s increasing desperation and struggle.
That Victorian reality is something that Quinn brings vividly to life, in a manner that suggests extensive research. One minor story in the tale is of a desperate widowed mother, clinging to a home that’s been condemned for demolition. Her fate is likely to stick with you, and has the ring of truth that suggests extensive browsing through historic newspapers.
That’s really the strength of this novel. Quinn has taken a fictional character, a young man from the provinces trying to make his way in big London town, of comfortable but fairly modest background, and by giving him a rich godfather, and a job as a poverty researcher, allowed him to roam widely, sometimes into the wealthy west, but mostly around the poor of Somers Town, who at first seem to him like another race altogether.
The story of his researches, based on a composite of Henry Mayhew and Charles Booth, both familiar to anyone with a passing acquaintance with Victorian London, provides a comfortable frame for the novel.
So top marks for the textures, the tastes, the stories of Somers Town life, and for interesting, involving characters. I’ll admit I particularly took to Roma, the sister of the coster, Jo, who provides David Wildeblood’s route into the community, a fine singer with a sad but unsurprisingly Victorian back story that gradually unfolds.
The plot, where it departs from history, however, is a bit on the clunky side. Everything is neat, fits into the accepted romance frame, and left this reader a little cold. Tragedy tick, romance tick, I just felt I could see the author tugging at the strings.
Nevertheless, I very much enjoyed reading the novel, and you don’t have to live in Somers Town to appreciate the setting and detail. If you’ve any interest in Victorian London, you’ll enjoy The Streets.
Other views: Telegraph, Observer, Independent.
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