Andy Beckett's Blog, page 21
July 24, 2018
It feels like 1976. And that long, hot summer didn’t end well | Andy Beckett
The sense of ease in Britain over those months was not a total delusion. Yet the year brought huge political upheaval
Just like this year’s, the heatwave in 1976 arrived as Britain seemed to be approaching an economic and political abyss. During the spring and early summer, as the sun began to hammer down and the usual rain failed to fall, and the reservoirs began to shrink, the pound was lurching downwards on the markets. For almost three years, under Tory and Labour governments, the economy had been shrivelling alarmingly. Just as since the Brexit vote, a conviction had been building like a thundercloud among financial traders and business leaders, economists and commentators, in Britain and beyond, that the country was about to slip to a lower, less elite level, and stay there. “Goodbye, Great Britain,” said a much-read editorial in the Wall Street Journal in 1975, “it was nice knowing you.”
If you remember the British summer of 1976 we'd like to hear from you. What do you remember? How does it compare to this year?
Related: Why is Europe going through a heatwave?
In late August the heatwave finally disintegrated in a mess of thunderstorms. A soaking, grey autumn followed
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July 18, 2018
How to Spend It: the shopping list for the 1%
In an age of astonishing wealth, nothing reveals the lives of the ultra-rich like the FT’s unashamedly ostentatious luxury magazine.
By Andy Beckett
On 7 October 1967, the Financial Times, then the most buttoned-up newspaper in Britain and quite possibly the world, discreetly added a regular new page to its Saturday edition. Buried deep inside the paper, behind the usual thicket of articles about share prices and companies and pensions, the page was introduced to readers a little euphemistically, as “a guide to good living”. In small letters across the top of the page, the FT spelled out what “good living” meant. The page was called How to Spend It.
In the still slightly austere postwar Britain of 1967, where the great majority of the FT’s prosperous readership of 150,000 lived, spending opportunities were limited. The new, monochrome page had an article about installing home central heating, then a relative luxury; about a new electric coffee maker; and about how to select and cook a pheasant: “Choose carefully. Hens are always best.” The most expansive piece was on an old-fashioned Scottish hotel owned by state-run British Rail. “The visitor is received with all the ceremony of an arrival at a country house,” wrote the reviewer. “You go into the immense hall and no one takes any notice.”
Continue reading...March 28, 2018
Yes to Europe! by Robert Saunders review – the 1975 referendum, when the remainers won
A myth-demolishing study of the vote in which Tony Benn voted to leave and the Tory tabloids hailed a result ‘more unanimous than any decision in peacetime history’
In 1975, supposedly one of the worst years of supposedly the worst decade in recent British history, voters chose to remain in the European Economic Community, now the European Union, by 67.2% to 32.8%. Britain was more insular, more racist, less cosmopolitan, and less confident than it was when the next referendum on Europe was held, 41 years later. But even in Essex and Lincolnshire, the Brexit heartlands of the future, support for Europe was overwhelming. Neil Kinnock, who like many on the left campaigned for leave in 1975, told the Western Mail: “Only an idiot would ignore or resent a majority like this. We’re in for ever.”
Britons preoccupied with the EU, whether for or against, often prefer to invoke history in the abstract rather than actual historical facts, and making sense of the apparent mysteries and contradictions of the 1975 referendum is a task few authors have attempted. Before this thick book, the standard texts were volumes published in the 70s. Robert Saunders’ aim is to look at the contest afresh, in the light of the 2016 referendum, and to use the 1975 campaign “as a window into the political and social history of the 1970s”.
The EEC was also seen as strongly pro-capitalist: significantly, Britons called it the Common Market
Related: Reclaiming Euroscepticism
Continue reading...March 7, 2018
A Party with Socialists in It review – Labour’s left from the 19th century to Corbyn
In writing about a party as muddled together and misrepresented as Labour, clarity is a powerful weapon. Authors who accurately describe the party’s competing factions and traditions, and the ever shifting balance between them, are relatively rare. They are also a threat to Labour’s many enemies, who have often relied on portraying the party, and the left of it in particular, as a vast but hazy conspiracy.
This pithy book, “intended mainly for those who have been drawn into politics” since Jeremy Corbyn stood for leader, aims to “introduce the major historical struggles” of the Labour left and “explain what was at stake”. Simon Hannah is a young leftwing Labour activist, and there is an avuncular foreword from the shadow chancellor, John McDonnell. Yet Hannah’s approach to the Labour left, from its quarrelsome 19th-century origins to its present golden age, is unsparing rather than triumphalist or romantic.
Continue reading...February 5, 2018
Post-work: the radical idea of a world without jobs – podcast
Work has ruled our lives for centuries, and it does so today more than ever. But a new generation of thinkers insists there is an alternative
Subscribe via Audioboom, iTunes, Soundcloud, Mixcloud, Acast & Sticher and join the discussion on Facebook and Twitter
Continue reading...January 18, 2018
Post-work: the radical idea of a world without jobs
Work has ruled our lives for centuries, and it does so today more than ever. But a new generation of thinkers insists there is an alternative. By Andy Beckett
Work is the master of the modern world. For most people, it is impossible to imagine society without it. It dominates and pervades everyday life – especially in Britain and the US – more completely than at any time in recent history. An obsession with employability runs through education. Even severely disabled welfare claimants are required to be work-seekers. Corporate superstars show off their epic work schedules. “Hard-working families” are idealised by politicians. Friends pitch each other business ideas. Tech companies persuade their employees that round-the-clock work is play. Gig economy companies claim that round-the-clock work is freedom. Workers commute further, strike less, retire later. Digital technology lets work invade leisure.
In all these mutually reinforcing ways, work increasingly forms our routines and psyches, and squeezes out other influences. As Joanna Biggs put it in her quietly disturbing 2015 book All Day Long: A Portrait of Britain at Work, “Work is … how we give our lives meaning when religion, party politics and community fall away.”
Related: Do you work more than 39 hours a week? Your job could be killing you
Related: What happens when the jobs dry up in the new world? The left must have an answer | John Harris
Continue reading...December 12, 2017
Corbyn by Richard Seymour review – the strange rebirth of radical politics
Seymour investigates how the Labour leader proved doubters wrong – and a collection of essays, The Corbyn Effect, asks what might his government look like?
In these febrile times, writing books about current British politics – and even reviewing them – is a risky business. Richard Seymour’s highly opinionated study of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour leadership, and the circumstances that gave rise to it, was first published in April 2016. Labour were in the low 30s in the polls, a middling-to-mediocre position, and Corbyn’s tenure seemed a bold experiment that was not that likely to succeed. Seymour gave his book, “written in sympathy with Corbyn”, an upbeat subtitle, but his predictions were largely pessimistic. A prolific polemicist in the small but prickly space to the left of the Labour left, and pointedly not a party member, Seymour argued that Corbyn’s leadership would be both too radical for the establishment to tolerate, and not radical enough to truly transform the party or the country. “In all likelihood, Corbynism is a temporary phenomenon,” he concluded. “There will be backlashes and disappointments, electoral setbacks and, in the event of government, continual, energy-sapping crises ... Corbynism will struggle to outrun the limits of Labourism.”
Related: The inside story of Labour’s election shock
Towns would be financed to become communities again, instead of the deserted edge-places that neoliberalism created. Major infrastructure projects, delayed or cancelled by the cash-strapped Tories, could be implemented immediately – bringing jobs, training, green energy and hi-tech industries to all parts of the UK.
This sense that Corbyn has many obstacles to overcome, whatever the next election’s outcome, preoccupies these essayists
Continue reading...November 17, 2017
The wilderness years: how Labour’s left survived to conquer – podcast
Corbyn, Abbott and McDonnell were long dismissed as irrelevant radicals. But their formative years on the margins were more important than anyone realised. By Andy Beckett
Subscribe via Audioboom, iTunes, Soundcloud, Mixcloud, Acast & Sticher and join the discussion on Facebook and Twitter
Continue reading...November 2, 2017
The wilderness years: how Labour’s left survived to conquer
Corbyn, Abbott and McDonnell were long dismissed as irrelevant radicals. But their formative years on the margins were more important than anyone realised. By Andy Beckett
On 25 March 2015, six months before becoming Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn spoke in Westminster about “human rights and security in the Democratic Republic of Congo”. A long, U-shaped arrangement of chairs had been set up in the grand Commons committee room. “I am pleased that we are having this half-hour debate,” he began, in the flat, almost anti-rhetorical voice that had become a parliamentary fixture since his election 32 years earlier. Unshowily, he revealed that he had visited Congo twice, that he had “a considerable number” of Congolese immigrants in his constituency, and that he had a grasp of the country’s colonial and post-colonial history. “Sadly,” he said, “the horrors of Congo are not new.”
There was a sense, rare in Westminster, of politics being about life-or-death questions that extended across continents and centuries. But Corbyn’s entire audience consisted of a Conservative junior minister, a Democratic Unionist party MP, and four other people, two of whom chatted while he was speaking. Corbyn carried on, seemingly quite unfazed; in early 2015, as for much of his political life, promoting apparently lost causes before tiny audiences was what he did.
Related: Marxism Today: the forgotten visionaries whose ideas could save Labour | John Harris
Related: A shock to the system: how Corbyn changed the rules | Gary Younge
Continue reading...November 1, 2017
The Story of the Face by Paul Gorman review – the style magazine and British pop culture
On 1 May 1980 a new magazine with a murky cover but a blaring red-blue logo appeared on London’s most up-to-date newsstand, in Great Marlborough Street, Soho. Contrary to the magazine conventions of the time, the Face had a title which did not tell you what it covered, almost no adverts, and was launched during a deep recession. Once distributed beyond Soho, the first issue sold 56,000 copies.
The early 80s were a feverish time in Britain for new things, from youth cultures to design companies to political ideologies, and the Face – which tried to feature all of them in a fresh way, both glossy and gritty, while operating on a shoestring – remains one of the era’s most mythologised products. It never sold more than 130,000 copies, modest for a magazine distributed internationally, and it was published for 24 years – a good but not outstanding run. Yet it was consumed and is remembered with intensity. I was a Face reader from the mid-80s until near the end, and the feel of its best issues – forbiddingly stylish, but full of exciting information; insidery, but open to the world – was already loitering in my memory before I opened this elaborate history.
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