Andy Beckett's Blog, page 22
August 3, 2017
How Britain fell out of love with the free market
Under Thatcher and Blair, it looked unassailable. But now both Britain’s main parties are turning away from unfettered capitalism. By Andy Beckett
Twelve years ago, shortly after winning his third consecutive general election, Tony Blair gave the Labour party a brief lecture on economics. “There is no mystery about what works,” he said, crisply, speaking from a podium printed with the slogan “Securing Britain’s Future” at the party conference in Brighton. “An open, liberal economy prepared constantly to change to remain competitive.”
Blair rounded on critics of modern capitalism: “I hear people say we have to stop and debate globalisation. You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer. They’re not debating it in China and India.” He went on: “The temptation is … to think we protect a workforce by regulation, a company by government subsidy, an industry by tariffs. It doesn’t work today.” Britain should not “cling on to the European social model of the past”.
Related: The day the credit crunch began, 10 years on: 'the world changed'
Related: Globalisation: the rise and fall of an idea that swept the world
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June 29, 2017
Theresa May's deal with the DUP – Politics Weekly podcast
Anushka Asthana is joined by Ellie Mae O’Hagan, Sean Worth and Andy Beckett to discuss Theresa May’s post-election deal with the Democratic Unionist party in Northern Ireland to ensure a majority in the Commons
Theresa May’s deal with the DUP has bought her some time and a working majority in the Commons – but could it end up costing the Conservatives a lot more?
Joining Anushka Asthana this week are commentator Ellie Mae O’Hagan, political writer Andy Beckett and former Conservative policy adviser Sean Worth of the Westminster Policy Institute.
Continue reading...June 26, 2017
How the Tory election machine fell apart
The conventional wisdom is that the Conservatives are good at elections. Last month they failed spectacularly. But do recriminations about negative tactics mask deeper problems for a party that hasn’t won convincingly since the Thatcher era?
In September 2015, a few months after the Conservatives had won that year’s general election, more comfortably than even their most optimistic supporters had hoped, a veteran Tory politician and journalist was waiting to appear on a BBC radio show. Still smiling about the election, he was in expansive mood. The party’s targeting of voters had become so precise, he told me, thanks to the latest marketing software, that it would take Labour many years to catch up.
During this year’s general election, as in 2015, Tory activists across Britain were supplied with computer-generated lists of amenable voters by Conservative campaign headquarters in London. But this time, many canvassers got a shock when they knocked on doors. “The data was only 65% accurate,” says a local Tory organiser who has worked in the party’s heartlands in southern England for decades. “In the marginals, it was less than 50%.” In some cases, canvassers were accidentally sent to the addresses of activists for rival parties. The organiser says: “I despair of our national campaign.”
Continue reading...June 23, 2017
The Secret Life by Andrew O’Hagan review – Assange and other internet outlaws
Three long pieces, the product of inside-track reporting by one of literary journalism’s charmers, are full of wit and confidence
How do you write a compelling book about the internet? Decades after computers started reordering our lives, it’s a question nonfiction writers are still struggling with. The speed with which the digital world changes; the difficulty of dramatising people peering at screens and typing; the less than vibrant emotional lives of key online protagonists – all these can make internet books seem rather grey and out of date compared with the technicolour, distracting swirl of the internet itself.
Andrew O’Hagan’s solution is to write about three “outlaws” from “the wild west of the internet”: Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks (right); Craig Wright, who claims to be the inventor of the online currency bitcoin; and Ronald Pinn, an almost completely forgotten Londoner who died in 1984, whose identity O’Hagan borrows to create a fictitious digital persona. “My three case studies are individual, and in many ways they are typical of nothing but themselves,” O’Hagan writes with studied modesty in his foreword. But then he can’t resist adding more ambitiously: “They might each tell a story about the times we are living in.”
All three stories end with dramatic, finely drawn paragraphs – the literary journalist emerging, skills intact
Continue reading...June 5, 2017
Accelerationism: how a fringe philosophy predicted the future we live in – podcast
The world is changing at dizzying speed – but for some thinkers, not fast enough. Is accelerationism a dangerous idea, or does it speak to our troubled times?
Subscribe via Audioboom, iTunes, Soundcloud, Mixcloud, Acast & Sticher and join the discussion on Facebook and Twitter
Continue reading...May 23, 2017
The Fall of the House of Fifa by David Conn review – a long tale of corruption and seediness
From 1996 to 2013, one of the members of the executive committee of Fifa, the body that runs world football, was an American businessman and former manufacturer of smiley-face badges called Chuck Blazer. For most of that time, Blazer was also general secretary of the Confederation of North, Central America and Caribbean Association Football (Concacaf), one of the half dozen international federations that Fifa helps fund. At Blazer’s instigation, Concacaf rented offices and apartments in Trump Tower in Manhattan. One of the apartments was for the sole use of Blazer’s cats. They “peed all over the floor”, Guardian journalist David Conn records, “and made the place stink”.
When it comes to the moral shortcomings of modern football, writers are not exactly short of metaphors. The challenge is more the opposite: how to make people who love the game despite everything want to read another catalogue of its off-pitch horrors. Since 2010, Conn writes, “seven members of that 22-man Fifa executive committee have been charged or accused by the US authorities of criminal wrongdoing; another, Franz Beckenbauer, is under criminal investigation in Switzerland and Germany over … Germany’s 2006 World Cup bid [he maintains his innocence]. Six more members, including [Sepp] Blatter and [Michel] Platini, have been sanctioned by Fifa’s own ethics committee.” For many years now, Fifa has been associated with corruption, bribery, cronyism and seedily close relationships with corporations, dictatorships and repressive governments – and all the while football has carried on expanding regardless, becoming not just the world’s favourite sport but arguably its dominant mass culture. What difference will another anti-Fifa book make?
Related: Fifa opens corruption case against Sepp Blatter and Jérôme Valcke
Conn wants 'to be fair to Blatter', but underlines 'the rottenness did set in from the top'
Continue reading...May 10, 2017
Accelerationism: how a fringe philosophy predicted the future we live in
The world is changing at dizzying speed – but for some thinkers, not fast enough. Is accelerationism a dangerous idea or does it speak to our troubled times?
Half a century ago, in the great hippie year of 1967, an acclaimed young American science fiction writer, Roger Zelazny, published his third novel. In many ways, Lord of Light was of its time, shaggy with imported Hindu mythology and cosmic dialogue. Yet there were also glints of something more forward-looking and political. One plot strand concerned a group of revolutionaries who wanted to take their society “to a higher level” by suddenly transforming its attitude to technology. Zelazny called them the Accelerationists.
He and the book are largely forgotten now. But as the more enduring sci-fi novelist JG Ballard said in 1971, “what the writers of modern science fiction invent today, you and I will do tomorrow”. Over the past five decades, and especially over the past few years, much of the world has got faster. Working patterns, political cycles, everyday technologies, communication habits and devices, the redevelopment of cities, the acquisition and disposal of possessions – all of these have accelerated. Meanwhile, over the same half century, almost entirely unnoticed by the media or mainstream academia, accelerationism has gradually solidified from a fictional device into an actual intellectual movement: a new way of thinking about the contemporary world and its potential.
The manic presidency of Donald Trump has been seen as the first mainstream manifestation of an accelerationist politics
The CCRU was image-conscious from the start. Its name was deliberately hard-edged, with a hint of the military
Related: Mark Fisher’s K-punk blogs were required reading for a generation | Simon Reynolds
Continue reading...March 6, 2017
PPE: the Oxford degree that runs Britain – podcast
Oxford University graduates in philosophy, politics and economics make up an astonishing proportion of Britain’s elite. But has it produced an out-of-touch ruling class?
Subscribe via Audioboom, iTunes, Soundcloud, Mixcloud, Acast & Sticher and join the discussion on Facebook and Twitter
Continue reading...February 22, 2017
PPE: the Oxford degree that runs Britain
Oxford University graduates in philosophy, politics and economics make up an astonishing proportion of Britain’s elite. But has it produced an out-of-touch ruling class?
Monday, 13 April 2015 was a typical day in modern British politics. An Oxford University graduate in philosophy, politics and economics (PPE), Ed Miliband, launched the Labour party’s general election manifesto. It was examined by the BBC’s political editor, Oxford PPE graduate Nick Robinson, by the BBC’s economics editor, Oxford PPE graduate Robert Peston, and by the director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, Oxford PPE graduate Paul Johnson. It was criticised by the prime minister, Oxford PPE graduate David Cameron. It was defended by the Labour shadow chancellor, Oxford PPE graduate Ed Balls.
Elsewhere in the country, with the election three weeks away, the Liberal Democrat chief secretary to the Treasury, Oxford PPE graduate Danny Alexander, was preparing to visit Kingston and Surbiton, a vulnerable London seat held by a fellow Lib Dem minister, Oxford PPE graduate Ed Davey. In Kent, one of Ukip’s two MPs, Oxford PPE graduate Mark Reckless, was campaigning in his constituency, Rochester and Strood. Comments on the day’s developments were being posted online by Michael Crick, Oxford PPE graduate and political correspondent of Channel 4 News.
The rise and possible fall of Oxford PPE is part of a bigger story: the 100-year trajectory of a political establishment
It gives you fluency. Just like politicians, journalists often have to be performance artists
Continue reading...January 9, 2017
British unions must defend their right to strike – and become better at it | Andy Beckett
Rightwingers exaggerate union power with a view to curbing it further. The modern, insecure workforce cannot afford to let that happen
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Four decades after the winter of discontent, after Margaret Thatcher’s government and its successors gave Britain some of the most draconian anti-union laws in the world, and long after unions were further weakened by self-employment, individualism and political apathy, it is still surprisingly easy to find yourself on the receiving end of industrial action.
Related: I’m a cleaner on GWR trains. We’re striking because we’re treated unfairly | Anonymous
Related: Don’t complain about the strikers – they’re only doing what we all should in 2017 | Paul Mason
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