Andy Beckett's Blog, page 26
May 3, 2015
Slick and slapdash, U-turning and dogmatic - the legacy of the coalition
In August 2010, the usually deadpan, slightly-bored-of-Britain magazine the Economist published a rare excited-about-Britain article. David Cameron’s hastily thrown-together coalition had been in power for only 100 days, but the weekly already liked what it saw. “Most government departments will shrink by a quarter,” it reported. “Britain has embarked on a great gamble. Sooner or later, many other rich-world countries will have to take it too ... For the first time since Margaret Thatcher handbagged the world in 1979, Britain looks like the west’s test tube.”
Five years on, the results of that experiment are all around us. From free schools left to invent themselves in barely converted buildings, to the micromanagement of poor homes via the bedroom tax; from the brave challenge to Tory traditionalism of same-sex marriage, to the tabloid-pandering of the welfare cap; from a sudden and vast reorganisation of the NHS to almost a million public sector job cuts; from promises kept on austerity-busting benefit increases for pensioners, to promises broken over tripled tuition fees for students; from the lavish Help to Buy scheme for homeowners to a reduction of a fifth in the disability living allowance; from record levels of employment to the proliferation of zero-hours contracts; from the sell-off of the Royal Mail to the closure of the Forensic Science Service; from the 2012 cut in the top rate of tax for the richest quarter of a million earners, to the half a million Britons, at least, who used food banks in the financial year 2014-15 – in these and a blur of other ways, the coalition has reshaped Britain, patchily but profoundly.
There was a clear sense at first that this government might not last
There was huge apprehension in government about the cuts programme and what it might provoke
There is a dawning realisation that the British may not be as competent constitutionally as people thought
This has been a strange government: both slick and slapdash, U-turning and dogmatic, laidback and relentlessly partisan
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April 7, 2015
Who Governs Britain? review – timely but brusque examination of UK politics
Anthony King’s state-of-the-nation book attempts to explain the fickle and disillusioned nature of British politics
Sometimes a book can sound too timely. Who exactly is running the country is a question we may soon weary of asking. This shortish paperback seems recently written – the preface is dated January 2015 – and its author, Anthony King, has been sagely assessing British politics from the University of Essex for half a century. But no current book is likely to dovetail neatly with whatever bodged-together Downing Street arrangements the election on 7 May brings. “Britain’s political landscape is changing – very rapidly,” writes King, “and this particular book … may fail to detect the most recent seismic shifts.”
Yet, in fact, this is not a study of potential coalitions, or the main parties’ seemingly narrowing electoral chances, or the rise of Ukip, who do not appear until five chapters in, and then only fleetingly – a welcome change after their red-carpet treatment by so many observers. Instead, King is interested in what lies beneath all this Westminster brittleness and messy possibility: in how the fundamental distribution of power in Britain has shifted.
Continue reading...March 27, 2015
All Day Long: A Portrait of Britain at Work by Joanna Biggs – review
How have our working lives changed – and do our jobs define us more than ever? This is a beautifully observed set of case studies
Rochelle Monte is almost 40 and earns less than £200 a week. She is a care worker in Newcastle, visiting the homes of the frail elderly. Her lunch hour “might be a service station sandwich and a packet of crisps while she’s driving”, records Joanna Biggs with typical attentiveness. Monte, who has three children, “works 12 days and then has two days off”. But behind that solid, unforgiving routine is flux. Monte’s contract with her employer Allied Healthcare, which is owned by a private equity firm, states in crushing modern corporatese: “The company will offer you work when it is available … Your employment with us is conditional on your agreement to work flexible hours or no hours, if the work is not available … The company has no duty to provide you with any work at such times.”
In a Britain of zero-hours contracts and suspiciously high employment figures, of both shrivelling and bloating wages, of too much work and too little, of vibrant local enterprise and sagging national productivity, of energising immigrants and ominous foreign competition, it feels like a good time to publish a book about work. In a steadily fragmenting society, argues Biggs, “Work is now one of the ways we understand ourselves, how we give our lives meaning when religion, party politics and community fall away.”
Continue reading...March 16, 2015
Lynton Crosby: can the ‘Lizard of Oz’ win the election for the Tories?
The blunt-speaking political strategist helped Australia’s Liberal party to four victories in a row. Will his hard-right message reach the voters that Old Etonians cannot?
Up a side street in Mayfair in central London, about a mile from Conservative campaign headquarters, there is a handsome brick and stone block discreetly crammed with company offices. There is no sign outside, but men in smart coats come and go. Big cars wait with their engines running. In the lobby, small black letters on cheap glass list two dozen obscure financial and property companies, and another occupant: CTF Partners.
The F stands for Fullbrook, after Mark Fullbrook, a former Conservative campaign specialist of long experience. The T stands for Textor, after Mark Textor, an Australian pollster who since the 80s has done pioneering work for rightwing parties around the world. And the C stands for Crosby, after another Australian, Lynton Crosby.
Related: Tory strategists enforce rigid discipline as election approaches
Related: Farage is luring the Tories into long-term decline | Rafael Behr
Continue reading...January 20, 2015
Mad Men & Bad Men: What Happened When British Politics Met Advertising by Sam Delaney – review
How important are ads in winning elections? And what have been the best slogans? This is an entertaining account, rich in anecdotes
Three months before the 1992 election, with Labour and the Conservatives – as now – sweatily close in the opinion polls and a grappling pre-campaign under way, one of the admen Labour were using phoned his Tory counterpart. “Congratulations!” said the Labour adman. “What for?” said the Tory adman. “You’ve won the election,” said the Labour adman. “You’ve hit us on tax and we haven’t responded properly … I’d like to take you for a very expensive meal to congratulate you.” Soon afterwards, the two men – the protagonists in this swaggering book almost always are – had dinner in Soho. Soon after that, the Conservatives defied widespread forecasts of a Labour victory or hung parliament by winning outright, with the largest vote ever secured at a British general election.
Mad Men and Bad Men is a history heavily dependent on good anecdotes. It divides the half century since admen first took on the challenging job of selling British politicians and parties – and the easier one of rubbishing rival political products – into bite-sized chapters, like a tasting menu, which the general reader can quickly work through without spoiling their appetite. Famous admen such as Tim Bell and Charles and Maurice Saatchi strut and slither through the narrative, sometimes even more cunning and shamelessly pragmatic than the politicians. A few years before the Saatchis helped Margaret Thatcher into power with their celebrated late-70s poster assault about joblessness under the Callaghan government, “Labour Isn’t Working”, Delaney notes tellingly that their ultra-ambitious agency produced some posters for Labour. The theme of this long-forgotten campaign? The difficulty of reducing unemployment.
Continue reading...May 10, 2014
The north-east of England: Britain's Detroit?
Until seven years ago, there was a secret room at Darlington station. Just off one of the platforms, between the standard-class waiting room and a cleaners' storeroom, and set back behind three successive doors, it was small and plain: a desk, a grimy extractor fan and two windows made opaque to passing travellers by reflective material.
Tony Blair used this room when he was prime minister. His constituency, Sedgefield in County Durham, was a short drive away. When he needed to get to London, 260 miles south, he and his entourage would often catch the fast Darlington train, which can take less than two and a half hours. More usefully still, many other key New Labour figures took the same line, among them Peter Mandelson, Alan Milburn and David Miliband. Altogether, the north-east of England, which contains about a 25th of the UK population, was represented by "a third of Blair's first cabinet", noted the veteran anatomist of British power networks, Anthony Sampson, in 2004. (Sampson was himself born in County Durham.) Rarely before had our remotest and often poorest region been such a hub of political influence.
Continue reading...March 26, 2014
1983: Blair's year as much as Thatcher's
If you're a Tory, 1983 seems a golden year. It was when Thatcherism stopped being an experiment, with lots of baffling results and exploding test tubes, and instead became the whole laboratory, in which most modern British political ideas were tested.
Government papers from 1983 released on Wednesday by the National Archives are full of Conservative confidence and triumphs. There is a document breathlessly granting "Freedom of the Falkland Islands" to the prime minister, who made her post-victory visit there in January, for her "courageous, steadfast and unyielding leadership". There is anticipation of a showdown with the miners, with Thatcher's press secretary, Bernard Ingham, shrewdly judging that Arthur Scargill's long-feared union was "not irresistible". In the background there is the economy, growing healthily for four quarters for the first time since Thatcher took office in 1979. And, dominating the political foreground, there is the general election result in June: a massively increased Tory majority of 144.
The View from the Train: Cities and Other Landscapes by Patrick Keiller review
Early on in this enigmatic, intermittently brilliant collection of essays about the built landscape of Britain and how it has changed in the last 30 years, there is a quote from Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray: "The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible."
The sentence is as close as Patrick Keiller comes to a manifesto. It also appears in one of the films that made his longstanding cult reputation, Robinson in Space, a 1997 travelogue that turned wide, static shots of car factories, supermarkets and container ports, often seen from a distance or through fences, into a menacingly beautiful portrait of a Britain that is both bleaker and more powerful than we usually think. In another essay here, Keiller tries to explain the power of his footage. "The slightest sense of hyper-reality in the pictures seemed to be enough to unmask their subjects," he writes, "especially if one stared at them a bit."
Scotland's dirty secret: it has Thatcherites too
Scotland has a dirty secret. Many Scots liked Thatcherism. But these people have been written out of history: to listen to the independence debate, or to how Scotland has talked about itself since the early 80s, you might imagine that her governments with their southern English, sharp-edged, supposedly fundamentally foreign ways were foisted on Scotland entirely through English votes.
Like so many of the black and white things still said about Thatcherism, it is a convenient myth. In fact, Scottish support was crucial to her coming to power. At the 1979 election, the Conservatives won over 31% of the Scottish vote, an increase of almost a third on the previous election when they had been led by the much less carnivorous Edward Heath. In 1979, the Tories also won 22 Scottish seats; had these gone to other parties, Thatcher's 44-strong majority would have disappeared entirely.
March 10, 2014
Scotland's dirty secret: it has Thatcherites too | Andy Beckett
Tartan Toryism helped Thatcher win. After the referendum, we'll know how deep it really runs
Scotland has a dirty secret. Many Scots liked Thatcherism. But these people have been written out of history: to listen to the independence debate, or to how Scotland has talked about itself since the early 80s, you might imagine that her governments – with their southern English, sharp-edged, supposedly fundamentally foreign ways – were foisted on Scotland entirely through English votes.
Like so many of the black and white things still said about Thatcherism, it is a convenient myth. In fact, Scottish support was crucial to her coming to power. At the 1979 election, the Conservatives won over 31% of the Scottish vote, an increase of almost a third on the previous election – when they had been led by the much less carnivorous Edward Heath. In 1979, the Tories also won 22 Scottish seats; had these gone to other parties, Thatcher's 44-strong majority would have disappeared entirely.
Four years of abrasive Tory government followed: the decimation of manufacturing, the harsh dogma of monetarism, the beginning of modern British military adventuring with the Falklands war. Did Scots reject it all in disgust? Not exactly: Tory support in Scotland at the 1983 election dropped by just 3% (it fell in England too). At the 1987 election, the Scottish Tory vote slipped another 4%. But then, at the 1992 election – the Conservative victory that ensured many of the Thatcherite changes to Britain would not be reversed – Tartan Toryism revived again, increasing its vote share to 26%: still higher than Heath had managed in 1974.
In 1992, even after 13 years of Tory rule, after the early imposition of the poll tax on Scotland, and countless tin-eared Thatcher trips north of the border, a large minority of Scots approved of what the Tories had done to their country. In a close election, that approval was quietly pivotal for Thatcher's deceptively rightwing successor John Major.
The Tory vote in Scotland did not finally collapse until the 1997 election, when it fell by a third, never to recover. Why did this rejection of Thatcherism – if that's what it was, rather than enthusiasm for the Thatcher-revering Tony Blair – take so long to happen? Speaking to the Tory blogger Iain Dale in 2008 about his country's feelings towards the Thatcher government, SNP leader Alex Salmond said: "We didn't mind the economic side so much." He went on to add: "We didn't like the social [policy] side at all," and to furiously deny that he had given Thatcherism any kind of endorsement. But the first minister also gave an economic prescription for Scotland that might have come from an 80s Tory: "We need a competitive edge, a competitive advantage – get on with it, get things done, speed up decision making, reduce bureaucracy."
The SNP's Thatcherite side lives on in its promises to cut corporation tax and air passenger duty in order, it is claimed, to create a more dynamic country. And Thatcherism lives on in Scotland's economy and society. David Torrance, author of 'We In Scotland': Thatcherism in a Cold Climate, wrote in the Scotsman last year that under her, "North Sea oil boomed in Aberdeen, financial services swelled in Edinburgh … Overall employment levels remained relatively stable, while the labour market diversified, to the benefit of part-time, self-employed and female workers." Three decades later, the richest parts of modern Scotland – the electric-gated oil suburbs of Aberdeenshire; the central Edinburgh streets full of bankers' BMWs – look tellingly like Thatcherism's former heartlands in London and the home counties. Just because people don't – mostly – vote Tory any more, doesn't mean they haven't absorbed some of modern Toryism's free-market assumptions.
In Scotland, as elsewhere in Britain, it is true, her revolution left at least as many losers as winners. But Scotland's final reckoning with Thatcherism has yet to happen. That may not come at the referendum but afterwards, with an SNP administration, whether independent or devolved, having to choose between its contradictory commitments both to low taxes and semi-Scandinavian state spending. That's when we'll find out how many closet Scottish admirers Thatcher still has.
Scottish politicsMargaret ThatcherScottish National party (SNP)ScotlandScottish independenceEconomic policyEconomicsAlex SalmondAndy Becketttheguardian.com © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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