Andy Beckett's Blog, page 28

The Guardian Audio Edition: 26 February 2013

Audio versions of a selection of articles from the Guardian newspaper and website

Reading on mobile? Click here to listen

In this week's edition:

• Pope accepts resignation of UK's most senior Roman Catholic cleric, Cardinal Keith O'Brien, who has been accused of 'inappropriate acts' Read the article here.
by Severin Carrell and Sam Jones

• Oscar Pistorius's uncle says athlete wants to talk to Reeva Steenkamp's relatives – as her father warns of consequences if star's story proves false. Read the article here.
by David Smith in Johannesburg

• Few prime ministers have been as tireless in promoting Britain's arms industry as David Cameron. He calls it a key part of the UK's economy, but do the figures really add up? Read the article here.
by Andy Beckett

• Size zero no longer stars at London fashion week, yet the carnival of spending still makes me queasy. Read the article here.
by Zoe Williams

• The Oscar's 2013: Lincoln and Django Unchained won welcome recognition in a ceremony that lifted no one film too high above the others. Read the article here.
by Peter Bradshaw

In this week's audiobook review we look back at the Canadian novelist Robertson Davies and examine David Mitchell's breakthrough novel Cloud Atlas.

• The Guardian Audio Edition is supported by Audible.co.uk. To listen to the audiobooks reviewed in this week's edition go to audible.co.uk/guardianaudio.

AudiobooksSeverin CarrellSam JonesDavid SmithAndy BeckettZoe WilliamsPeter Bradshaw
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Murdoch's Politics: How One Man's Thirst for Wealth and Power Shapes Our World by David McKnight – review

This is a brave and pacy portrait of Rupert Murdoch's fickle relationships with world leaders

How politically important is Rupert Murdoch? After more than half a century of his manoeuvrings, carefully and tellingly itemised in this book, it may seem naive even to ask the question. Only last month, to the alarm and perhaps hidden satisfaction of Murdoch-watchers, the supposedly infinitely manipulative magnate held dinners on successive nights at his London home in Mayfair, attended by Boris Johnson, George Osborne, William Hague and Michael Gove – the full set of pretenders, declared and otherwise, to David Cameron's unstable Tory throne.

Yet recent events have undermined the conventional wisdom that Murdoch is omnipotent. Last year there was his cheerleading for Mitt Romney – "looking better and better while Obama seems devoid of anything new", Murdoch tweeted 11 days before Obama comfortably won re-election. In 2011 there was Murdoch's unprecedented televised calling to account over the phone-hacking scandal by a committee of mere MPs. This autumn, there are the scheduled phone-hacking trials – probably the first of many – of Murdoch's once-vital British lieutenants and political liaisons, Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson. And then there is the ongoing, less sensational but more significant, unravelling of faith in the free market – a faith fiercely held by Murdoch and relentlessly spread from his media citadels for 40 years – since the financial crisis began in 2007.

Murdoch turns 82 next month. His mother, Elisabeth, died last December at the age of 103. "So far there is no sign of Rupert Murdoch genuinely stepping aside" from his intertwined political and business activities, McKnight writes. But this book, despite its subtitle, is more about Murdoch's past than his present. It wants to be a polemic but sometimes reads more like an obituary.

The main arc of the story begins in Australia in the 1950s. McKnight has already sketched Murdoch's early biography: a wealthy, influential father with anglophile tastes; an ambitious, frustrated stint at Oxford university, where Murdoch "stood for the secretaryship of the Oxford Labour Club but was ruled ineligible because he openly campaigned for votes". But the book is less interested in his life story and business ascent than most Murdoch volumes, and clearer and more pacy as a result. Its subject is political leverage: how Murdoch got it, exercised it, got more of it.

McKnight, who is a professor of journalism at the University of New South Wales, and was a leftwing newspaper and TV reporter for decades before that, shows that Murdoch was surprisingly clumsy and erratic in his early politicking. In Australia and then in Britain, he hastily fell for and then rejected party leaders, changed his mind on policy questions, and swung from left to right and back again, or sometimes even in both directions at once. During the 1972 British miners' strike, Murdoch's Sun, as he later put it, "pushed public opinion very hard behind the miners"; almost simultaneously, in Australia, he was allegedly complaining to one of his editors about "long haired stuff in the paper … bleeding heart stuff … Aboriginal stuff … Aboriginals don't read our papers."

The usual interpretation of Murdoch's fickleness is as a skilful hedging of bets. During the 1980 US presidential election, Murdoch's New York Post, one of his loudest political megaphones, endorsed Jimmy Carter as the Democratic candidate in the New York primary, days after the two men had had lunch. "When asked by a friend how the Carter lunch had gone," McKnight writes, "Murdoch is said to have replied: 'Very good, but he is going to get a hell of a shock when I support Reagan [for president].'"

Murdoch has a weakness for self-styled national saviours, whether of the right like Reagan or the left like Gough Whitlam, Australia's iconoclastic Labour prime minister in the mid 70s. In 1967, Murdoch hired Whitlam's private secretary, John Menadue. In 1999, long after leaving the tycoon's service, Menadue wrote of Murdoch: "He was, and still is, a frustrated politician." On Australia Day in 1972, Murdoch made a speech identifying "the rebirth of a vigorous Australian nationalism, something that has lain dormant for most of this century – to the heavy detriment of Australia's progress and enlightenment." The social generalisations certainly suggest a would-be politician; the ponderous, slightly old-fashioned language possibly suggests why he never became one. The impatience and contempt with which Murdoch sometimes treats politicians may be rooted in frustration. He has never done a Berlusconi.

McKnight extracts most of his Murdoch quotes and facts from easily available sources: other Murdoch books, pieces in Murdoch newspapers, memoirs by former Murdoch underlings. Yet the portrait he builds feels fresh and strong, free of the usual biographers' ruminations on the Murdoch mystique and their love/hate feelings towards him. Sometimes the book is a little stark and skeletal as a result, a 260-page charge sheet, calmly but relentlessly laid out. Only occasionally does McKnight allow himself some descriptive colour, such as a Bond villain image of Murdoch in 2003 watching the invasion of Iraq, for which his papers had lobbied for almost a decade, "on the panel of seven television screens mounted in the wall of his Los Angeles office".

Murdoch moved decisively rightwards from the mid 70s, as the free-market revolution began to achieve critical mass across the west. He turned against Whitlam and Carter, and Labour and the unions in Britain. Significantly for British readers, and perhaps deflatingly for some British rightwingers, McKnight shows that radical American Republicanism had more influence on Murdoch than radical British Conservatism. From Richard Nixon's angry, embattled presidency, he took the notion that a "liberal elite" – rather than a rightwing business elite made up of people like Murdoch – dominated western democracies. From Reagan's much more successful political formula, Murdoch borrowed shrill anti-communism, a sometimes glib optimism about capitalism and a belief in America's right to world supremacy. In 1985 he became an American citizen.

His admiration for Margaret Thatcher was less total. According to McKnight, "Thatcher and Murdoch had a deep mutual regard, more sincere on her part than his." When she deviated from what he saw as the true path of modern conservatism, he could quickly turn critical or disloyal – despite her crucial support for his commercial expansions, such as his controversial takeover of the Times in 1981. In 1983, her lack of enthusiasm for the American invasion of the Caribbean island of Grenada, a tiny Commonwealth territory claimed by the Reagan administration to be a major, Soviet-aligned security threat, caused Murdoch to fume that she had "run out of puff", "gone out of her mind", and was not "listening to her friends". Even after Thatcher crushingly won her third general election in 1987, Murdoch flirted with other rightwingers: he gave what McKnight describes as "secret financial support" to David Hart, the late, well-connected British political adventurer, who used a column in the Times from 1983 to 1989 to call for such neoliberal dreams as the privatisation of all state education.

The book lays out well how Murdoch transmits his political desires, both within his conglomerate, News Corporation, and far beyond. The eerily consistent ideology of his newspapers and TV commentators is maintained in a lovely, menacing phrase quoted here from a former Murdoch editor, Eric Beecher, "by phone and by clone". Executives are chosen for their ability and willingness to anticipate Murdoch's thinking. On the rare occasions that more direct guidance is needed, "I give instructions to my editors all around the world," as Murdoch put it in 1982.

Meanwhile, a slightly more subtle political pressure is exerted on the outside world through cooperation between Murdoch media and rightwing think tanks, and through support for chosen candidates, which sometimes goes well beyond the journalistic. In 1980, McKnight writes, Murdoch backed Reagan's presidential bid by "meeting his aides to discuss maximising the Republican vote in traditionally Democratic New York. An important part of this was Murdoch's alliance with New York Democrat mayor Ed Koch … "

Frustratingly but probably wisely, McKnight offers no firm conclusion about the precise electoral impact of the Murdoch machine, such as the Sun's notorious assault on Neil Kinnock and Labour in 1992. But he points out that the machine's mere existence can drag policy debates to the right: even anti-Murdoch voters and politicians, and non-Murdoch journalists, are forced to take his positions and mindset into account.

Yet when his thinking grows too extreme or eccentric – the curse of many a little-challenged media magnate – his influence diminishes. In the late 80s Murdoch's dogmatic anti-communism made him totally misjudge the reformist Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev: "a worthy heir to Stalin", with "nothing new going on" in his policies, concluded a New York Post editorial in 1987. Reagan negotiated with Gorbachev regardless. For a time, post-cold war American politics seemed to baffle Murdoch, too. In the 1988 presidential election, he vainly favoured the erratic TV evangelist Pat Robertson as the Republican candidate. In the 1992 contest, he abandoned the Republicans for the independent Ross Perot, who came third. Even in Britain, in the 90s there were hints that the Murdoch era might be drawing to a close. Thatcher's successor, John Major, was increasingly appalled by Murdoch's commercial and political power and wanted to diminish it: "If I had a majority of 150," he said privately in 1995, "I would crush Rupert Murdoch and make sure he had no newspapers at all."

But Murdoch's vulnerable phase did not last long. In 1996 he launched Fox News, with its fiery round-the-clock readings of the conservative gospel, and his influence on American politics was reborn. In 1997 Tony Blair was elected, his government considerably less hostile to Murdoch than Major's, and Murdoch lent it strong, if conditional, support. In 2010, shortly after Murdoch had switched his allegiance back to the Tories, Blair became godfather to one of Murdoch's children.

For all the outward, often blatant signs of Murdoch's influence, there remains an opaqueness to his political role. Partly this is a sign of his status, and of the congruence between his thinking and that of so many western politicians during the long free market ascendancy from the 70s to the 00s. McKnight quotes the former Australian prime minister Paul Keating: "You can do deals with [Murdoch] without ever saying a deal is done."

But there is a deeper mystery about him. What sort of political animal is Murdoch really? A crafty player of the game for its own sake; a self-interested businessman simply seeking more corporate freedom; a restless seeker after heroes and ideological certainties; a chippy anglophobe; a rebel against an establishment father; or just a powerful, opinionated man surrounded by unquestioning courtiers, a little like Prince Charles? Murdoch is probably a bit of all these, and McKnight doesn't ever quite establish the respective proportions. But as an anatomy and record of the reign of Murdoch this book is brave and valuable. And one day, when Murdoch is gone, it will help explain why so many obeyed him.

PoliticsRupert MurdochMargaret ThatcherTony BlairAndy Beckett
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Murdoch's Politics: How One Man's Thirst for Wealth and Power Shapes Our World by David McKnight – review

This is a brave and pacy portrait of Rupert Murdoch's fickle relationships with world leaders

How politically important is Rupert Murdoch? After more than half a century of his manoeuvrings, carefully and tellingly itemised in this book, it may seem naive even to ask the question. Only last month, to the alarm and perhaps hidden satisfaction of Murdoch-watchers, the supposedly infinitely manipulative magnate held dinners on successive nights at his London home in Mayfair, attended by Boris Johnson, George Osborne, William Hague and Michael Gove – the full set of pretenders, declared and otherwise, to David Cameron's unstable Tory throne.

Yet recent events have undermined the conventional wisdom that Murdoch is omnipotent. Last year there was his cheerleading for Mitt Romney – "looking better and better while Obama seems devoid of anything new", Murdoch tweeted 11 days before Obama comfortably won re-election. In 2011 there was Murdoch's unprecedented televised calling to account over the phone-hacking scandal by a committee of mere MPs. This autumn, there are the scheduled phone-hacking trials – probably the first of many – of Murdoch's once-vital British lieutenants and political liaisons, Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson. And then there is the ongoing, less sensational but more significant, unravelling of faith in the free market – a faith fiercely held by Murdoch and relentlessly spread from his media citadels for 40 years – since the financial crisis began in 2007.

Murdoch turns 82 next month. His mother, Elisabeth, died last December at the age of 103. "So far there is no sign of Rupert Murdoch genuinely stepping aside" from his intertwined political and business activities, McKnight writes. But this book, despite its subtitle, is more about Murdoch's past than his present. It wants to be a polemic but sometimes reads more like an obituary.

The main arc of the story begins in Australia in the 1950s. McKnight has already sketched Murdoch's early biography: a wealthy, influential father with anglophile tastes; an ambitious, frustrated stint at Oxford university, where Murdoch "stood for the secretaryship of the Oxford Labour Club but was ruled ineligible because he openly campaigned for votes". But the book is less interested in his life story and business ascent than most Murdoch volumes, and clearer and more pacy as a result. Its subject is political leverage: how Murdoch got it, exercised it, got more of it.

McKnight, who is a professor of journalism at the University of New South Wales, and was a leftwing newspaper and TV reporter for decades before that, shows that Murdoch was surprisingly clumsy and erratic in his early politicking. In Australia and then in Britain, he hastily fell for and then rejected party leaders, changed his mind on policy questions, and swung from left to right and back again, or sometimes even in both directions at once. During the 1972 British miners' strike, Murdoch's Sun, as he later put it, "pushed public opinion very hard behind the miners"; almost simultaneously, in Australia, he was allegedly complaining to one of his editors about "long haired stuff in the paper … bleeding heart stuff … Aboriginal stuff … Aboriginals don't read our papers."

The usual interpretation of Murdoch's fickleness is as a skilful hedging of bets. During the 1980 US presidential election, Murdoch's New York Post, one of his loudest political megaphones, endorsed Jimmy Carter as the Democratic candidate in the New York primary, days after the two men had had lunch. "When asked by a friend how the Carter lunch had gone," McKnight writes, "Murdoch is said to have replied: 'Very good, but he is going to get a hell of a shock when I support Reagan [for president].'"

Murdoch has a weakness for self-styled national saviours, whether of the right like Reagan or the left like Gough Whitlam, Australia's iconoclastic Labour prime minister in the mid 70s. In 1967, Murdoch hired Whitlam's private secretary, John Menadue. In 1999, long after leaving the tycoon's service, Menadue wrote of Murdoch: "He was, and still is, a frustrated politician." On Australia Day in 1972, Murdoch made a speech identifying "the rebirth of a vigorous Australian nationalism, something that has lain dormant for most of this century – to the heavy detriment of Australia's progress and enlightenment." The social generalisations certainly suggest a would-be politician; the ponderous, slightly old-fashioned language possibly suggests why he never became one. The impatience and contempt with which Murdoch sometimes treats politicians may be rooted in frustration. He has never done a Berlusconi.

McKnight extracts most of his Murdoch quotes and facts from easily available sources: other Murdoch books, pieces in Murdoch newspapers, memoirs by former Murdoch underlings. Yet the portrait he builds feels fresh and strong, free of the usual biographers' ruminations on the Murdoch mystique and their love/hate feelings towards him. Sometimes the book is a little stark and skeletal as a result, a 260-page charge sheet, calmly but relentlessly laid out. Only occasionally does McKnight allow himself some descriptive colour, such as a Bond villain image of Murdoch in 2003 watching the invasion of Iraq, for which his papers had lobbied for almost a decade, "on the panel of seven television screens mounted in the wall of his Los Angeles office".

Murdoch moved decisively rightwards from the mid 70s, as the free-market revolution began to achieve critical mass across the west. He turned against Whitlam and Carter, and Labour and the unions in Britain. Significantly for British readers, and perhaps deflatingly for some British rightwingers, McKnight shows that radical American Republicanism had more influence on Murdoch than radical British Conservatism. From Richard Nixon's angry, embattled presidency, he took the notion that a "liberal elite" – rather than a rightwing business elite made up of people like Murdoch – dominated western democracies. From Reagan's much more successful political formula, Murdoch borrowed shrill anti-communism, a sometimes glib optimism about capitalism and a belief in America's right to world supremacy. In 1985 he became an American citizen.

His admiration for Margaret Thatcher was less total. According to McKnight, "Thatcher and Murdoch had a deep mutual regard, more sincere on her part than his." When she deviated from what he saw as the true path of modern conservatism, he could quickly turn critical or disloyal – despite her crucial support for his commercial expansions, such as his controversial takeover of the Times in 1981. In 1983, her lack of enthusiasm for the American invasion of the Caribbean island of Grenada, a tiny Commonwealth territory claimed by the Reagan administration to be a major, Soviet-aligned security threat, caused Murdoch to fume that she had "run out of puff", "gone out of her mind", and was not "listening to her friends". Even after Thatcher crushingly won her third general election in 1987, Murdoch flirted with other rightwingers: he gave what McKnight describes as "secret financial support" to David Hart, the late, well-connected British political adventurer, who used a column in the Times from 1983 to 1989 to call for such neoliberal dreams as the privatisation of all state education.

The book lays out well how Murdoch transmits his political desires, both within his conglomerate, News Corporation, and far beyond. The eerily consistent ideology of his newspapers and TV commentators is maintained in a lovely, menacing phrase quoted here from a former Murdoch editor, Eric Beecher, "by phone and by clone". Executives are chosen for their ability and willingness to anticipate Murdoch's thinking. On the rare occasions that more direct guidance is needed, "I give instructions to my editors all around the world," as Murdoch put it in 1982.

Meanwhile, a slightly more subtle political pressure is exerted on the outside world through cooperation between Murdoch media and rightwing think tanks, and through support for chosen candidates, which sometimes goes well beyond the journalistic. In 1980, McKnight writes, Murdoch backed Reagan's presidential bid by "meeting his aides to discuss maximising the Republican vote in traditionally Democratic New York. An important part of this was Murdoch's alliance with New York Democrat mayor Ed Koch … "

Frustratingly but probably wisely, McKnight offers no firm conclusion about the precise electoral impact of the Murdoch machine, such as the Sun's notorious assault on Neil Kinnock and Labour in 1992. But he points out that the machine's mere existence can drag policy debates to the right: even anti-Murdoch voters and politicians, and non-Murdoch journalists, are forced to take his positions and mindset into account.

Yet when his thinking grows too extreme or eccentric – the curse of many a little-challenged media magnate – his influence diminishes. In the late 80s Murdoch's dogmatic anti-communism made him totally misjudge the reformist Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev: "a worthy heir to Stalin", with "nothing new going on" in his policies, concluded a New York Post editorial in 1987. Reagan negotiated with Gorbachev regardless. For a time, post-cold war American politics seemed to baffle Murdoch, too. In the 1988 presidential election, he vainly favoured the erratic TV evangelist Pat Robertson as the Republican candidate. In the 1992 contest, he abandoned the Republicans for the independent Ross Perot, who came third. Even in Britain, in the 90s there were hints that the Murdoch era might be drawing to a close. Thatcher's successor, John Major, was increasingly appalled by Murdoch's commercial and political power and wanted to diminish it: "If I had a majority of 150," he said privately in 1995, "I would crush Rupert Murdoch and make sure he had no newspapers at all."

But Murdoch's vulnerable phase did not last long. In 1996 he launched Fox News, with its fiery round-the-clock readings of the conservative gospel, and his influence on American politics was reborn. In 1997 Tony Blair was elected, his government considerably less hostile to Murdoch than Major's, and Murdoch lent it strong, if conditional, support. In 2010, shortly after Murdoch had switched his allegiance back to the Tories, Blair became godfather to one of Murdoch's children.

For all the outward, often blatant signs of Murdoch's influence, there remains an opaqueness to his political role. Partly this is a sign of his status, and of the congruence between his thinking and that of so many western politicians during the long free market ascendancy from the 70s to the 00s. McKnight quotes the former Australian prime minister Paul Keating: "You can do deals with [Murdoch] without ever saying a deal is done."

But there is a deeper mystery about him. What sort of political animal is Murdoch really? A crafty player of the game for its own sake; a self-interested businessman simply seeking more corporate freedom; a restless seeker after heroes and ideological certainties; a chippy anglophobe; a rebel against an establishment father; or just a powerful, opinionated man surrounded by unquestioning courtiers, a little like Prince Charles? Murdoch is probably a bit of all these, and McKnight doesn't ever quite establish the respective proportions. But as an anatomy and record of the reign of Murdoch this book is brave and valuable. And one day, when Murdoch is gone, it will help explain why so many obeyed him.

PoliticsRupert MurdochMargaret ThatcherTony BlairAndy Beckett
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Is Britain's arms trade making a killing?

Few prime ministers have been as tireless in promoting Britain's arms industry as David Cameron. He calls it a key part of the UK's economy, but do the figures really add up?

In the town centre of Barrow-in-Furness in Cumbria, between McDonald's and Carphone Warehouse, there is an unusual statue. Four firm-jawed figures in factory clothes stand back-to-back. One wears a flat cap, one wields a sledgehammer, one has a welder's visor. All of them are in purposeful poses, idealised workers cast in bronze. Around the statue base run the words "labour", "courage" and "progress". Its structure feels like something from the Soviet Union in the 30s.

But the statue is British and only eight years old. Its subject and design, slightly startling in a country that stopped celebrating most factory workers decades ago, is explained by a small plaque. Part of the statue was "donated by BAE Systems Submarines".

Barrow is a defence industry town. It builds Britain's nuclear submarines. And in defence the way of doing things – culturally, economically, politically – is different from other British industries. In defence, manufacturing jobs still have prestige, long-term prospects and political leverage. Unions are strong, but work closely with management. Apprenticeships are sought-after and numerous. Political support for the business comes from across the ideological spectrum: when the European Fighter Aircraft collaboration between Britain, Germany, Spain and Italy, now known as the Typhoon, was threatened with cancellation in the 90s, even the Socialist Workers party protested ("No Closures. No job losses. Stuff the Tories.") This week, David Cameron's much-hyped trade visit to India is promoting the Typhoon as one of its key objectives.

Robin Cook, the late Labour minister, a rare defence industry critic in Westminster, wrote in his 2004 diaries that the then chairman of BAE, Dick Evans, seemed to have "the key to the garden door of No 10". Roger Johnston, a defence analyst at Edison Investment Research, says: "As an industry, it is reasonably unique in how it's viewed within government."

In this business, in defiance of the past three decades' free-market orthodoxies, the state is pivotal. Accompanying Cameron in India are representatives of a dozen British or partly British-based companies – the industry is clever at blurring such definitions – with defence interests: Rolls-Royce, Serco, BAE, EADS, Thales, Atkins, Cobham, JCB, Strongfield Technologies, MBDA, Ultra Electronics.

The British state is also the industry's biggest customer, with our armed forces accounting for four-fifths of its annual sales; the provider of an "export support team", including "serving British army personnel"; the provider of export insurance, for a fee, in case foreign customers fail to pay for products. Above all, the state is the provider of the wars that act as the industry's best showcase.

"The Typhoon fighter jet performed outstandingly in Libya," said Cameron in December, before an official visit to the Middle East. "So it's no surprise that Oman want to add this aircraft to their fleet." On landing in the wealthy Gulf state, he strode quickly from his prime ministerial plane, in front of the TV cameras, to where a pair of dart-like Typhoons had been specially parked in the perfect, sales-catalogue sunshine, barely a hundred yards away. He climbed a set of steps to the open cockpit of one of the fighters, and held a stagey conversation with its pilot. That day, it was confirmed that Oman had bought a dozen of the aircraft.

"Boosting exports is vital for economic growth, and that's why I'm doing all I can to promote British business … so [it] can thrive in the global race," said Cameron on the eve of his Oman trip. "Every country in the world has a right to self-defence, and I'm determined to put Britain's first-class defence industry at the forefront of this market, supporting 300,000 jobs across the country."

Despite leading an overcommitted, often embattled government, he has frequently found time for foreign visits with a defence exports element. He has been to India before, in July 2010; Egypt and Kuwait in February 2011; Saudi Arabia in January 2012; Indonesia, Japan, Burma, Malaysia and Singapore in April 2012; Brazil in September 2012; and Saudi Arabia, Dubai and Abu Dhabi in November 2012. Throughout, his salesmanship and justifying rhetoric have been strikingly unashamed.

"The PM has done a fantastic job," says Howard Wheeldon, director of policy for ADS, a defence trade body. "He has picked up the value of defence to the national economy. Other PMs haven't, necessarily. Mrs T was very supportive of defence exports … Brown wasn't, but Blair was …"

Kaye Stearman, of the British activist group Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) says: "We're quite gobsmacked. For decades, governments have promoted arms sales, but there was always some degree of embarrassment … The coalition are much more blatant – quite shameless."

Last March Peter Luff, the minister for defence equipment – the position itself is telling – said in a speech in London: "The individual UK armed forces are in themselves a brand … If they are using a particular piece of kit, then that's the kind of endorsement a lot of companies are very keen indeed to have." In 2011, the then defence secretary Liam Fox said in a speech at Defence and Security Equipment International, a huge biennial trade fair held at the ExCel Centre in east London: "Defence and security exports play a key role in promoting our foreign policy objectives: building relationships … and spreading values."

This April, a Royal Navy frigate is scheduled to arrive in Tripoli in Libya, reportedly with British companies exhibiting on board for a Whitehall-backed "defence and security industry day". Even government policy on the London Olympics has produced a pay-off for the defence business. The brand of missiles controversially deployed around the Olympic site, Starstreak, made by Thales in Belfast, was sold to Thailand four months later. John Warehand of Thales says the London deployment was a factor in the sale, and is still contributing to "interest" in the missiles "from countries in the Middle East and Asia".

With the government desperate for economic growth, and seemingly just as quick as its recent predecessors to involve Britain in overseas conflicts, the defence industry's position is in some ways stronger than ever. Last month, Cameron suggested that if he was re-elected in 2015 British military spending would be exempt from the seemingly endless austerity planned for every other branch of government.

But how important is the defence industry to Britain really? The assertion that it supports "300,000 jobs", repeated like a mantra in recent years by Cameron, trade unions with defence members and the industry itself, is less conclusive than it appears. It is 1% of the UK workforce. According to the government-run UK Trade & Investment (UKTI), almost twice as many Britons work in food and drink manufacturing. And according to Ian Prichard of CAAT, the 300,000 figure is an exaggeration: "It includes all the ancillary services connected with defence, such as the people looking after the [ministry of] defence estates. The actual defence industry workforce is, maximum, 215,000, and could well be 30,000 or 40,000 less." In 2003, Tony Blair told a prime ministerial press conference: "There are roughly 100,000 jobs in this country that depend on defence or associated industries."

The figure of 300,000, says CAAT, is also based on six-year-old government statistics. Conveniently for the industry, an official tally is no longer kept, for the defence workforce has been shrinking for decades: from 750,000 in 1980 in the nervous final phase of the cold war, according to the Defence Manufacturers Association, to 475,000 in 1989 as the Berlin Wall came down, to 350,000 in 1997 when Blair came to power. Despite Cameron's efforts, Johnston says the workforce will "probably continue to trend down".

The industry remains important by global standards. After the US, the world's biggest defence exporter in 2011, with a 35% market share, Britain came second, with a 15% share, narrowly ahead of Russia and France, according to UKTI. There are only a few other businesses – such as pharmaceuticals and pop music – where Britain is still so internationally prominent. Yet like other defence statistics, this ranking should be treated with caution. The value of military exports, with their complex, often politicised, sometimes deliberately slow and secretive payment and delivery schedules, is notoriously difficult to measure. "Our own government's figures are not very transparent in terms of what they're counting," says Professor Malcolm Chalmers of the defence thinktank the Royal United Services Institute. "They show a much higher level of export sales than other sources do. The American Congressional estimates of our defence exports are much less."

But a few things about the industry can be said with certainty. Air warfare has for at least a decade been by far its most important overseas market. And the keenest foreign buyers of British military products have for at least as long been Middle Eastern countries, particularly Saudi Arabia, and the US.

Our defence business used to be broader-based. Barrow is a remote peninsula town that was created in a few decades by Victorian industrialists. Starting in the 1880s, naval shipyards and arms factories were established on its flat, watery western extremities. As well as pioneering military submarines, they produced guns and torpedos, warships and airships, depth charges and aircraft carriers. Barrow products were sold to Turkey, Chile, Israel, Iran, Portugal and Japan, and to Britain's own expanding armed forces. During the first world war, the dockyard workforce hit a peak of 30,000, and whole Barrow suburbs were built to house it.

"When I started in the yard in 1960, everything was done there," says Terry Waiting, a former leader of Barrow council who still works in the town for BAE – Barrow's politics and dominant industry have long been intimately intertwined. "We had our own foundries and engineering department." At lunchtime, bicycling workers would pour out of the yard and into Barrow's many pubs: "You used to have three pints, pie and peas, and go straight back to work."

In the 60s, the British defence industry was still benefitting from the fact that two potential rivals, Germany and Japan, were, as the second world war's defeated aggressors, unable to act as major military exporters. Meanwhile, the cold war was underway, Britain still had close ties to its former empire and the booming global oil trade was making many Middle Eastern countries rich but militarily anxious.

Overseas markets for our defence products were plentiful. In 1966, with the British economy struggling, Harold Wilson's Labour government set up the Defence Export Services Organisation (Deso). Part of the Ministry of Defence, but employing arms company executives as well as civil servants, Deso quickly learned to chase export orders without too many scruples. "Bribery has always played a role in the sale of weapons," Denis Healey, Wilson's defence secretary when Deso was established, told this newspaper in 2007. "In the Middle East, people couldn't buy weapons unless you bribed them to do so, and that was particularly true in Saudi Arabia."

During the 70s and 80s, British companies, first as nationalised then as privatised concerns, sometimes sold weapons to both sides in potential conflicts. A decade before the Falklands war, despite deteriorating Anglo-Argentinian relations, Barrow built identical destroyers for the two countries. But defence employees in the town, like defence employees generally, have always been good at justifying what they do, both to themselves and others. "I was in CND throughout the 60s and 70s," says Waiting. "I've still got a lot of time for the ideals of CND. In an ideal world, perhaps we might make big, beautiful liners in Barrow like we also did when I started. But nowadays, really, what else can you do in Barrow apart from build submarines? And they're good jobs."

Azza Samms is the union convenor for the submarine plant's manual workers. He started in the Barrow shipyard in 1975, following after his father and grandfather, a common local pattern. He says: "Everybody in Britain wants to be safe in their bed at night, but they don't want to build the submarines. And we build the submarines, not the [nuclear] missiles."

The plant looms over the town, a single vast building, corrugated and pale, like a cross between a grain silo and a medieval cathedral. Two thousand people work inside the near-windowless, 10-storey walls of Devonshire Dock Hall; and more than 3,000 more in satellite submarine-building facilities across western Barrow. As the defence industry always does, the submarine yard alternates between publicity-seeking – crowds of locals are invited for submarine launches – and high security – "We have Americans working here on the missile sections, but they have to be accompanied at all times," says Samms.

Margaret Thatcher opened the hall in 1986. Samms, a Labour supporter, stayed away from the ceremony. In the 80s, his party had turned critical of the defence business: "We are alarmed by the growth of the arms trade," said its 1983 general election manifesto. "Labour will limit Britain's arms sales abroad." Under the leadership of Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock, the party planned to reduce British manufacturing's dependency on defence by converting the factories involved to civilian use. At the 1983 election, the Labour candidate in Barrow, a safe seat, was Albert Booth, new to the area and an advocate of unilateral nuclear disarmament. He led a CND march through the town.

The Conservatives took Barrow. Labour did not win it back until 1992. Two years later, Blair became party leader and Labour began to shed its qualms about the defence business. By 1996, the party's policy handbook stated that the industry was "of vital importance to the nation's economic performance". Labour figures who still worried about the ethics of the arms trade, such as Cook, won a concession from their party that British defence products would not be granted the necessary government export licences if, as Cook declared on becoming foreign secretary in 1997, "there is a clearly identifiable risk that the proposed export might be used for internal repression". But this assurance was quickly undermined by the Blair government's decision to sell military jets, water cannon and armoured cars to authoritarian Indonesia.

As prime minister, like Cameron, Blair travelled widely to lobby for defence sales, to India, Saudi Arabia and the Czech Republic. In 2006, he pressured the Serious Fraud Office into dropping an investigation into alleged bribes paid by BAE to secure Saudi orders.

Yet Blair's arms industry advocacy was less public, and perhaps a little less desperate-seeming, than Cameron's. The wider British economy was booming, and in the treasury under the chancellor Gordon Brown there were many who felt that the defence industry was unnecessarily feather-bedded. "Officials said to me: 'There isn't a good case for subsidising the arms industry,'" says Stephen Timms, then a treasury minister. Anti-arms trade campaigners such as CAAT – "thoughtful, sensible" people, says Timms – told him the same thing. In 2007, the ethical and free-market arguments against the defence industry came together, and its unique Whitehall helper, Deso, was shut down.

The industry vented its fury via its many friends in the rightwing press. But the closure of Deso was arguably a last victory for the industry's opponents. A year later, the organisation was revived as the Defence & Security Organisation (DSO), a remarkably similar body, no longer based inside the Ministry of Defence but still part of government. Timms says a little world-wearily: "I don't think there's a possibility of this Deso sort of activity wholly disappearing." Even Ian Prichard of CAAT admits that currently, "It's hard to see a mechanism" for reducing the industry's power behind the scenes.

The real threats to the business may be less ideological. Britain remains the fourth-biggest military spender in the world, but the very scale of that spending – currently £34bn a year – makes it a tempting target for Whitehall economisers. Since the coalition's austerity programme began in 2010, "defence cuts really have bitten hard," says Wheeldon. Thousands of defence workers have been laid off. Tellingly, Cameron's commitment last month that the cuts would cease in 2015 was quickly softened into something more ambiguous by other government figures.

And if Britain is becoming a less certain market for the industry, then so are some of its foreign ones. Defence budgets are under pressure across the west. Cameron's arms-related trips to Asia, South America and the Middle East are partly a tacit acknowledgement that the industry will increasingly have to look to non-western markets – which are already busy with defence companies from other traditionally strong military exporters such as France and the US, trying to escape their own domestic difficulties. Cameron's hopes of selling the Typhoon to India depend on the collapse of an Indian order for the French Rafale fighter aircraft. Yesterday, he also had to defend an Anglo-Italian helicopter maker, AgustaWestland, against allegations that its Italian parent company, Finmeccanica, had used bribery to win a recent Indian order for the British-made helicopters.

"Exporting is not an easy game – never was," says Wheeldon. Nowadays, says Chalmers, "there is a market saturation issue." Meanwhile, for reasons of strategy, national pride and economic development, more countries are aiming to be, like Britain, as self-sufficient in defence manufacturing as possible. Foreigners bearing defence goods are received with less gratitude and credulity than they once were.

The defence business can be adaptable. It survived the end of two world wars and the cold war. British firms are now diversifying into highly profitable service contracts – offering export customers training in how to use British products, and British staff to maintain them; and "security" – alarm systems, surveillance systems, forensic equipment and anti-hacker protection. "There's more being spent on intelligence, reconnaissance and electronic gizmos," says Chalmers, "and less on big platforms" – the industry euphemism for machines that kill people.

In Barrow, they no longer build aircraft carriers, or destroyers, or surface warships. The manufacture of guns and munitions is almost gone too. The local ironworks closed in the 60s, the steelworks in the 80s.

What remains is the submarines, and the alternating local pride, confidence and anxiety around them. Currently, Barrow is making the Astute class of conventionally-armed nuclear submarines. The work will last until the "early 2020s", says BAE. If the next government approves a new generation of submarines to carry nuclear missiles – in a typical instance of how defence policy often outflanks democracy, the decision has been postponed until after the general election – then the beehive of Devonshire Dock Hall will be busy with that "from 2016 to the 2040s", says Samms. Few 21st-century British employees have that sort of security.

And yet, people in Barrow worry. "This town would die without the shipyard," he says. Unlike in the past, it now does almost no export work. Even with the yard, Barrow is the 32nd most deprived borough in the country. Hard to get to, its once-handsome streets now a little empty and tatty, for all its military history and gothic atmosphere it is unlikely ever to draw tourists like the Lake District a dozen miles north. And the north-west of England is ominously full of towns from which economic life has moved on.

The current Barrow MP is John Woodcock, a well-connected young Labour figure and defence hawk. He has a not-impregnable majority of 5,208. He says of the local submarine business – but he could equally be talking about the defence industry as a whole – "This is a sort of shark. It's got to keep going forward." Perhaps not a metaphor for pacifists to dwell on.

Arms tradeDavid CameronIndiaMinistry of DefenceManufacturing sectorWeapons technologyAndy Beckett
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A user's guide to art-speak

Why do so many galleries use such pompous, overblown prose to describe their exhibits? Well, there's now a name for it: International Art English. And you have to speak it to get on. Andy Beckett enters the world of waffle

• Have you been affected by IAE? Tell us your favourite examples in the comments below

The Simon Lee Gallery in Mayfair is currently showing work by the veteran American artist Sherrie Levine. A dozen small pink skulls in glass cases face the door. A dozen small bronze mirrors, blandly framed but precisely arranged, wink from the walls. In the deep, quiet space of the London gallery, shut away from Mayfair's millionaire traffic jams, all is minimal, tasteful and oddly calming.

Until you read the exhibition hand-out. "The artist brings the viewer face to face with their own preconceived hierarchy of cultural values and assumptions of artistic worth," it says. "Each mirror imaginatively propels its viewer forward into the seemingly infinite progression of possible reproductions that the artist's practice engenders, whilst simultaneously pulling them backwards in a quest for the 'original' source or referent that underlines Levine's oeuvre."

If you've been to see contemporary art in the last three decades, you will probably be familiar with the feelings of bafflement, exhaustion or irritation that such gallery prose provokes. You may well have got used to ignoring it. As Polly Staple, art writer and director of the Chisenhale Gallery in London, puts it: "There are so many people who come to our shows who don't even look at the programme sheet. They don't want to look at any writing about art."

With its pompous paradoxes and its plagues of adverbs, its endless sentences and its strained rebellious poses, much of this promotional writing serves mainly, it seems, as ammunition for those who still insist contemporary art is a fraud. Surely no one sensible takes this jargon seriously?

David Levine and Alix Rule do. "Art English is something that everyone in the art world bitches about all the time," says Levine, a 42-year-old American artist based in New York and Berlin. "But we all use it." Three years ago, Levine and his friend Rule, a 29-year-old critic and sociology PhD student at Columbia university in New York, decided to try to anatomise it. "We wanted to map it out," says Levine, "to describe its contours, rather than just complain about it."

They christened it International Art English, or IAE, and concluded that its purest form was the gallery press release, which – in today's increasingly globalised, internet-widened art world – has a greater audience than ever. "We spent hours just printing them out and reading them to each other," says Levine. "We'd find some super-outrageous sentence and crack up about it. Then we'd try to understand the reality conveyed by that sentence."

Next, they collated thousands of exhibition announcements published since 1999 by e-flux, a powerful New York-based subscriber network for art-world professionals. Then they used some language-analysing software called Sketch Engine, developed by a company in Brighton, to discover what, if anything, lay behind IAE's great clouds of verbiage.

Their findings were published last year as an essay in the voguish American art journal Triple Canopy; it has since become one of the most widely and excitedly circulated pieces of online cultural criticism. It is easy to see why. Levine and Rule write about IAE in a droll, largely jargon-free style. They call it "a unique language" that has "everything to do with English, but is emphatically not English. [It] is oddly pornographic: we know it when we see it."

IAE always uses "more rather than fewer words". Sometimes it uses them with absurd looseness: "Ordinary words take on non-specific alien functions. 'Reality,' writes artist Tania Bruguera, 'functions as my field of action.'" And sometimes it deploys words with faddish precision: "Usage of the word speculative spiked unaccountably in 2009; 2011 saw a sudden rage for rupture; transversal now seems poised to have its best year ever."

Through Sketch Engine, Rule and Levine found that "the real" – used as a portentous, would-be philosophical abstract noun – occurred "179 times more often" in IAE than in standard English. In fact, in its declarative, multi-clause sentences, and in its odd combination of stiffness and swagger, they argued that IAE "sounds like inexpertly translated French". This was no coincidence, they claimed, having traced the origins of IAE back to French post-structuralism and the introduction of its slippery ideas and prose style into American art writing via October, the New York critical journal founded in 1976. Since then, IAE had spread across the world so thoroughly that there was even, wrote Rule and Levine, an "IAE of the French press release ... written, we can only imagine, by French interns imitating American interns imitating American academics imitating French academics".

The mention of interns is significant. Rule, who writes about politics for leftwing journals as well as art for more mainstream ones, believes IAE is partly about power. "IAE serves interests," she says. However laughable the language may seem to outsiders, to art-world people, speaking or writing in IAE can be a potent signal of insider status. As some of the lowest but also the hungriest in the art food chain, interns have much to gain from acquiring fluency in it. Levine says the same goes for many institutions: "You can't speak in simple sentences as a museum and be taken seriously. You can't say, 'This artist produces funny work.' In our postmodern world, simple is just bad. You've got to say, 'This artist is funny and ...'"

He doesn't, however, think this complexity is a wholly bad thing. "If you read catalogue essays from the 50s and 60s, and I have some, there are these sweeping claims about what artists do – and what they do to you." A 1961 catalogue essay for a Rothko exhibition in New York declared that the famously doomy painter was "celebrating the death of civilisation ... The door to the tomb opens for the artist in search of his muse." Levine says: "That style of art writing has been overturned, and rightly so. It was politically chauvinistic, authoritarian. IAE is about trying to create a more sensitive language, acknowledging the realities of how things [made by artists] work."

Contradictions, ambiguities, unstable and multiple meanings: art writing needs to find a way of dealing with these things, Levine argues, just as other English-language critical discourses learned to, under the same French influences.

Rule is a little less forgiving towards IAE. "This language has enforced a hermeticism of contemporary art," she says, slipping (as Levine also frequently does) into a spoken version of the jargon even as she criticises it, "that is not particularly healthy. IAE has made art harder for non-professionals." In fact, even art professionals can feel oppressed by it. The artists who've responded most positively to the essay, says Rule, "are the ones who have been through master of fine arts programmes" where IAE is pervasive.

How has the broader art world reacted? "I've been a little baffled by the volume of positive response," says Rule, "and the almost complete absence of critical response." Levine adds: "There have not been any complaints that we know of. Obviously, we may be blacklisted and not know it."

The essay's tone – knowing, insiderish, never polemical, and constantly shifting between mockery and studied neutrality – probably accounts for some of its warm reception. "We didn't want to be nasty," says Rule. In 2011, she and Levine presented an early draft of their critique as a lecture at an Italian art fair. Levine hints that some of the audience were less than delighted. "If you're an art practitioner and you experience our analysis live, you feel a bit called out."

The two are keen to admit they are both guilty of IAE use. Indeed, Levine relishes the fact: "Complicity is what makes things interesting. Just this morning, I was writing a little essay for a newspaper and I caught myself using the word 'articulation'". Rule adds: "In one draft of our IAE piece, I had quoted my own use of IAE. It becomes extremely hard not to speak in the language in which you are being spoken to."

Sometimes this language is just pure front; sometimes it's a way of hedging your bets in the labyrinth of art-world politics. "Institutions try to guess what they're meant to sound like," says Levine, much of whose own art is interested in the rituals and role-playing of the art world.

The flood of new money into art in recent years may have helped swell the IAE bubble. "The more overheated the market gets, the more overheated the language gets," says Levine. IAE often "insists on art's subversive potential". Popular terms include: radically, interrogates, subverts, void, tension. Much contemporary art does have a disquieting quality, but there can be something faintly absurd about artists in Mayfair galleries playing up their iconoclasm for super-rich collectors. The showy vagueness of IAE can also be commercially pragmatic: "The more you can muddy the waters around the meaning of a work," says Levine, "the more you can keep the value high."

Of course, ever since art ceased to be mainly decorative – Levine dates this change to the mid-19th century – works have often been shown or sold with a garnish of rhetoric. Where IAE may be different is in its ubiquity, thanks to the internet, and thanks to the heavily theoretical and text-influenced nature of much current art-making and education. Rule and Levine are cautious about IAE's precise effect on artists; they haven't researched it. But Rule does say: "It would be naive to say artists are not influenced."

Will the hegemony of IAE, to use a very IAE term, ever end? Rule and Levine think it soon might. Now that competence in IAE is almost a given for art professionals, its allure as an exclusive private language is fading. When IAE goes out of fashion, they write, "We probably shouldn't expect that the globalised art world's language will become ... inclusive. More likely, the elite of that world will opt for something like conventional highbrow English."

One day, we may even look back on IAE with nostalgia – on its extravagant syntax as a last product, perhaps, of the boom years. Or as a sign of something more basic. "Sometimes," says Rule, "I read these IAE press releases and find them completely joyless, but sometimes I feel this exuberance coming through. For people who hold assistantships in galleries, writing press releases is kind of fun. Certainly more fun than billing!"

ArtAndy Beckett
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

A user's guide to art-speak

Why do so many galleries use such pompous, overblown prose to describe their exhibits? Well, there's now a name for it: International Art English. And you have to speak it to get on. Andy Beckett enters the world of waffle

• Have you been affected by IAE? Tell us your favourite examples in the comments below

The Simon Lee Gallery in Mayfair is currently showing work by the veteran American artist Sherrie Levine. A dozen small pink skulls in glass cases face the door. A dozen small bronze mirrors, blandly framed but precisely arranged, wink from the walls. In the deep, quiet space of the London gallery, shut away from Mayfair's millionaire traffic jams, all is minimal, tasteful and oddly calming.

Until you read the exhibition hand-out. "The artist brings the viewer face to face with their own preconceived hierarchy of cultural values and assumptions of artistic worth," it says. "Each mirror imaginatively propels its viewer forward into the seemingly infinite progression of possible reproductions that the artist's practice engenders, whilst simultaneously pulling them backwards in a quest for the 'original' source or referent that underlines Levine's oeuvre."

If you've been to see contemporary art in the last three decades, you will probably be familiar with the feelings of bafflement, exhaustion or irritation that such gallery prose provokes. You may well have got used to ignoring it. As Polly Staple, art writer and director of the Chisenhale Gallery in London, puts it: "There are so many people who come to our shows who don't even look at the programme sheet. They don't want to look at any writing about art."

With its pompous paradoxes and its plagues of adverbs, its endless sentences and its strained rebellious poses, much of this promotional writing serves mainly, it seems, as ammunition for those who still insist contemporary art is a fraud. Surely no one sensible takes this jargon seriously?

David Levine and Alix Rule do. "Art English is something that everyone in the art world bitches about all the time," says Levine, a 42-year-old American artist based in New York and Berlin. "But we all use it." Three years ago, Levine and his friend Rule, a 29-year-old critic and sociology PhD student at Columbia university in New York, decided to try to anatomise it. "We wanted to map it out," says Levine, "to describe its contours, rather than just complain about it."

They christened it International Art English, or IAE, and concluded that its purest form was the gallery press release, which – in today's increasingly globalised, internet-widened art world – has a greater audience than ever. "We spent hours just printing them out and reading them to each other," says Levine. "We'd find some super-outrageous sentence and crack up about it. Then we'd try to understand the reality conveyed by that sentence."

Next, they collated thousands of exhibition announcements published since 1999 by e-flux, a powerful New York-based subscriber network for art-world professionals. Then they used some language-analysing software called Sketch Engine, developed by a company in Brighton, to discover what, if anything, lay behind IAE's great clouds of verbiage.

Their findings were published last year as an essay in the voguish American art journal Triple Canopy; it has since become one of the most widely and excitedly circulated pieces of online cultural criticism. It is easy to see why. Levine and Rule write about IAE in a droll, largely jargon-free style. They call it "a unique language" that has "everything to do with English, but is emphatically not English. [It] is oddly pornographic: we know it when we see it."

IAE always uses "more rather than fewer words". Sometimes it uses them with absurd looseness: "Ordinary words take on non-specific alien functions. 'Reality,' writes artist Tania Bruguera, 'functions as my field of action.'" And sometimes it deploys words with faddish precision: "Usage of the word speculative spiked unaccountably in 2009; 2011 saw a sudden rage for rupture; transversal now seems poised to have its best year ever."

Through Sketch Engine, Rule and Levine found that "the real" – used as a portentous, would-be philosophical abstract noun – occurred "179 times more often" in IAE than in standard English. In fact, in its declarative, multi-clause sentences, and in its odd combination of stiffness and swagger, they argued that IAE "sounds like inexpertly translated French". This was no coincidence, they claimed, having traced the origins of IAE back to French post-structuralism and the introduction of its slippery ideas and prose style into American art writing via October, the New York critical journal founded in 1976. Since then, IAE had spread across the world so thoroughly that there was even, wrote Rule and Levine, an "IAE of the French press release ... written, we can only imagine, by French interns imitating American interns imitating American academics imitating French academics".

The mention of interns is significant. Rule, who writes about politics for leftwing journals as well as art for more mainstream ones, believes IAE is partly about power. "IAE serves interests," she says. However laughable the language may seem to outsiders, to art-world people, speaking or writing in IAE can be a potent signal of insider status. As some of the lowest but also the hungriest in the art food chain, interns have much to gain from acquiring fluency in it. Levine says the same goes for many institutions: "You can't speak in simple sentences as a museum and be taken seriously. You can't say, 'This artist produces funny work.' In our postmodern world, simple is just bad. You've got to say, 'This artist is funny and ...'"

He doesn't, however, think this complexity is a wholly bad thing. "If you read catalogue essays from the 50s and 60s, and I have some, there are these sweeping claims about what artists do – and what they do to you." A 1961 catalogue essay for a Rothko exhibition in New York declared that the famously doomy painter was "celebrating the death of civilisation ... The door to the tomb opens for the artist in search of his muse." Levine says: "That style of art writing has been overturned, and rightly so. It was politically chauvinistic, authoritarian. IAE is about trying to create a more sensitive language, acknowledging the realities of how things [made by artists] work."

Contradictions, ambiguities, unstable and multiple meanings: art writing needs to find a way of dealing with these things, Levine argues, just as other English-language critical discourses learned to, under the same French influences.

Rule is a little less forgiving towards IAE. "This language has enforced a hermeticism of contemporary art," she says, slipping (as Levine also frequently does) into a spoken version of the jargon even as she criticises it, "that is not particularly healthy. IAE has made art harder for non-professionals." In fact, even art professionals can feel oppressed by it. The artists who've responded most positively to the essay, says Rule, "are the ones who have been through master of fine arts programmes" where IAE is pervasive.

How has the broader art world reacted? "I've been a little baffled by the volume of positive response," says Rule, "and the almost complete absence of critical response." Levine adds: "There have not been any complaints that we know of. Obviously, we may be blacklisted and not know it."

The essay's tone – knowing, insiderish, never polemical, and constantly shifting between mockery and studied neutrality – probably accounts for some of its warm reception. "We didn't want to be nasty," says Rule. In 2011, she and Levine presented an early draft of their critique as a lecture at an Italian art fair. Levine hints that some of the audience were less than delighted. "If you're an art practitioner and you experience our analysis live, you feel a bit called out."

The two are keen to admit they are both guilty of IAE use. Indeed, Levine relishes the fact: "Complicity is what makes things interesting. Just this morning, I was writing a little essay for a newspaper and I caught myself using the word 'articulation'". Rule adds: "In one draft of our IAE piece, I had quoted my own use of IAE. It becomes extremely hard not to speak in the language in which you are being spoken to."

Sometimes this language is just pure front; sometimes it's a way of hedging your bets in the labyrinth of art-world politics. "Institutions try to guess what they're meant to sound like," says Levine, much of whose own art is interested in the rituals and role-playing of the art world.

The flood of new money into art in recent years may have helped swell the IAE bubble. "The more overheated the market gets, the more overheated the language gets," says Levine. IAE often "insists on art's subversive potential". Popular terms include: radically, interrogates, subverts, void, tension. Much contemporary art does have a disquieting quality, but there can be something faintly absurd about artists in Mayfair galleries playing up their iconoclasm for super-rich collectors. The showy vagueness of IAE can also be commercially pragmatic: "The more you can muddy the waters around the meaning of a work," says Levine, "the more you can keep the value high."

Of course, ever since art ceased to be mainly decorative – Levine dates this change to the mid-19th century – works have often been shown or sold with a garnish of rhetoric. Where IAE may be different is in its ubiquity, thanks to the internet, and thanks to the heavily theoretical and text-influenced nature of much current art-making and education. Rule and Levine are cautious about IAE's precise effect on artists; they haven't researched it. But Rule does say: "It would be naive to say artists are not influenced."

Will the hegemony of IAE, to use a very IAE term, ever end? Rule and Levine think it soon might. Now that competence in IAE is almost a given for art professionals, its allure as an exclusive private language is fading. When IAE goes out of fashion, they write, "We probably shouldn't expect that the globalised art world's language will become ... inclusive. More likely, the elite of that world will opt for something like conventional highbrow English."

One day, we may even look back on IAE with nostalgia – on its extravagant syntax as a last product, perhaps, of the boom years. Or as a sign of something more basic. "Sometimes," says Rule, "I read these IAE press releases and find them completely joyless, but sometimes I feel this exuberance coming through. For people who hold assistantships in galleries, writing press releases is kind of fun. Certainly more fun than billing!"

ArtAndy Beckett
theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Bang! A History of Britain in the 1980s by Graham Stewart – review

A study of Thatcher's era that leaves vital questions unanswered

Britain changed more in the 1980s than in almost any recent decade. The rise of the City and the fall of the unions, the wider retreat of the left and the return of military confidence, the energy of a renewed entrepreneurialism and the entropy of a new, entrenched unemployment – more than twice as high even in the mid-80s boom as when Margaret Thatcher took office in 1979 – all make the decade feel like the hinge of our modern history. Graham Stewart argues this emphatically in his conclusion. He compares his chosen period with that traditional whipping boy of 80s chroniclers, the 1970s, "a decade of strife", which "unfolded without actually settling any of [Britain's] persistent problems". "By contrast," he continues, "a Briton gifted with the ability to switch seamlessly from the news of 1979 to that of 1990 would have been astonished to find that … many of the daily staples of the 70s were either no longer major concerns by 1990 or … were analysed and debated through the prism of almost completely different assumptions."

But just because an era is important doesn't mean it is easy to bring to life. The 80s, especially the glossier, more expansive middle and later years, are both relatively recent and pretty familiar to anyone who knows a bit of history: the property bubbles, the beleaguered 1984-5 miners' strike, the 1986 deregulatory Big Bang in the City, the ecstatic 1988 birth of modern British dance and drug culture. And then there is Thatcher herself: so myth-encrusted, so stylised and armoured in her personal presentation from the mid-80s onwards, so much written about, that the historian's gaze often just bounces straight off.

Stewart, who has written previous books about Winston Churchill and has Tory sympathies, makes Thatcher the absolutely central figure of this volume. "No decade had seen Britain served continuously by the same prime minister since William Pitt the Younger in the 1790s," he points out, a little tweedily but tellingly. By the time her crucial ally-turned-enemy Geoffrey Howe resigned from her cabinet in 1990, she was its only surviving original member, "the prime minister who had sacked more ministers than any other in British history". Stewart authoritatively describes the workings of Westminster and how she subverted them, for example in cabinet where her "schoolgirl-swot approach to argument, trumping [ministers'] generalities with a seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of highly technical details … [meant] she was able to imply that she was more on top of their departments than they were".

The first half of the book is dominated by high politics and chewy as a result. Successive sections on "The Joy of Monetarism" and "The Pain of Monetarism" explain with rare clarity the Thatcher government's highly experimental early-80s economic policy, with its ever-shifting blueprint and frequent lab explosions, but non‑specialist readers may find themselves having to concentrate very hard. Whether writing about politics or pop music, Stewart builds up thick, thematic chapters using long, sometimes almost page-long paragraphs, perpetually explaining, summing-up and stitching together anecdotes from the life stories and memoirs of key 80s players. He knows how to usefully fillet a biography: to reveal, for example, that Sir Anthony Meyer, who helped precipitate Thatcher's downfall by standing against her as a "stalking horse" party leadership candidate in 1989, had been "one of only two Tory MPs actively to oppose the Falklands War" seven years before.

Yet the thematic structure of the book means that some of the drama of Thatcher's 80s arc is lost. After efficiently but a little routinely tracing her government's early struggles, and its rescue by a combination of the Falklands, a belatedly recovering economy and the errors of the opposition parties, there is a 100‑page detour into 80s culture. At‑times, it feels slightly dutiful, a frequent drawback of would-be encyclopedic decade histories such as this, with a few hundred pithy but unrevelatory words per subject, and boisterous movements such as alternative comedy stiffly referred to in quotation marks.

Stewart has more fun with the anti‑Thatcher tantrums of the arts establishment, like many grandees full of disbelief and fury at her success deep into the decade. In 1986 Harold Pinter co-founded a group for dissident leftish writers, announcing to the press: "We're going to meet again and again until they break all the windows and drag us out." In 1987 voters gave her a third term with a massive Commons majority.

"This book," writes Stewart, "has a unifying theme: the [feelings of] attraction or repulsion … [generated by] Thatcher." That many people – perhaps most people – might have been both attracted and repelled by her and the changes she led goes almost unexplored. Is Martin Amis's gaudy 1984 novel Money, as Stewart interprets it, simply about "the corrupting influence of … the world the Tories were supposedly encouraging" – or are its brash sentences also suggesting that Thatcher's Britain was rather more exciting than what had gone before?

An ambivalence does freshen some of Stewart's judgments towards the end of the book. The Tory "right to buy" policy for council tenants, lauded since by right and left alike as empowering and politically shrewd, also had a "byproduct … to reduce the available housing stock for those on low pay". The malign consequences of this, such as the current financial and social dilemmas around housing benefit, are only beginning to be felt. Stewart also correctly emphasises the slowness of Britain's 1980s economic "miracle": consistently strong growth only arrived six years into the Thatcher government.

Yet he is not prepared to make the bolder reassessment of her revolution that the financial crisis, the bank bail‑outs, and all the other recent blows to 80s certainties seem to call for. Much of this book reads like it could have been written in 2007. The secondary sources on which it relies are often from the 80s and the years immediately afterwards, when the effectiveness of the Thatcherite national rescue act went largely unquestioned. Stewart suggests that his lack of interviews with 80s protagonists is because of "the possibly unreliable memories of those who shaped the period". Yes, old warriors often spin and forget; but they can also interestingly reflect and think afresh.

He also makes little use of official documents. To his credit, his account seems reasonably consistent with what they are beginning to reveal, for example that Thatcher may have been more prepared to negotiate with Argentina during the Falklands War than was publicly thought at the time. "Her outward display of Churchillian resolve was not the whole story," Stewart writes shrewdly.

In the end, his book feels like a long, well-informed briefing about the 80s – he calls it a "tour d'horizon", a revealingly boardroom term – rather than a vivid evocation of a world. The British 80s were so eventful and important that Stewart's readers will rarely be bored. But they will finish this volume with much the same decade in their heads as they had when they started. The best history books do more than that.

Politics pastMargaret ThatcherAndy Beckett
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Could Ed Miliband be Labour's Margaret Thatcher?

Ed Miliband has long been fascinated by the conviction and charisma of the Iron Lady – and there are intriguing similarities in their records in opposition and radical spirit

Twenty-three years ago, on the morning that a cornered Margaret Thatcher announced she was standing down as prime minister, Ed Miliband was a student at Oxford. "Ted", as he was known then by his university friends, was a slightly fogeyish, contained young man, remembered for his awkward jumpers and kind but serious manner. Yet that morning, "He was ecstatic," a friend told his biographers Mehdi Hasan and James Macintyre. "We didn't leave the college TV room for 24 hours. It was the biggest event of our lives."

Since then Miliband has risen, sometimes smoothly and sometimes not, from student politician to New Labour backroom player, MP to respected minister, dark horse party leadership contender to shock winner, written-off opposition leader to increasingly possible prime minister. In many ways, Britain has changed profoundly since that morning in 1990. Thatcher herself, once a ubiquitous public figure, is now a frail 87-year-old, rarely seen or photographed.

But for Miliband, a fascination with her remains. "She was a conviction politician, and I think conviction really matters," he told a Radio 4 documentary about his political thinking last November. "In the 1970s [when she became Tory leader], it was a similar moment [to now] … the old order was crumbling, and it wasn't 100% clear what was going to replace it."

Members of Miliband's unusually small inner circle are also open about their preoccupation with – and even sometimes admiration for – what Thatcher subsequently achieved in her 15 years as opposition leader and prime minister. "Her pragmatic brilliance built a coalition that contested the centre ground and bolted in parts of the working class," wrote the MP Jon Cruddas, Miliband's chief policy strategist, usually considered on the thoughtful left of the party, in the Guardian last September.

Last March, Marc Stears, a close friend and political collaborator of Miliband's since university, wrote on the new leftwing blog Shifting Grounds that Thatcher, like Tony Blair and Clement Attlee, "made Britain think again about what was possible in politics". She "drew on arguments from outside the mainstream and transformed them into a new politics … Unlikely alliances emerge when people are encouraged to see the world anew." In 2011, another important Miliband loyalist and thinker, the Labour peer Stewart Wood, wrote in the Fabian Review: "Neoliberalism began in the late 1970s with Margaret Thatcher … Its political success – both for parties of the right and shaping perceptions of political space … has been extraordinary. As a governing project, it held out the promises of an end to social division, national renewal and prosperity for all."

Many Labour supporters, and other critics and victims of Britain's most controversial modern premier, may wonder what on earth is going on – or get a sinking feeling that we have been here before. Blair, infamously, invited Thatcher to No 10 within three weeks of being elected prime minister. "God, she is so strong," Blair is recorded as saying afterwards in Alastair Campbell's diaries. Gordon Brown met her there, too, three months into his premiership. He described her, just like Miliband, as a "conviction politician". David Cameron also had Thatcher to Downing Street, in the first month of the coalition government. "It's good to have her back," he said, as if she had ever really been away.

In old countries such as Britain, truly charismatic and "transformative" – to use a current Labour buzzword – national leaders are rare, and cast long shadows. For less commanding politicians to associate themselves with one can be a crude piece of political positioning, often only fleetingly effective, and sometimes counterproductive. In November, the former Thatcher cabinet member and current Tory MP Sir Malcolm Rifkind derided Labour's efforts to draw parallels between her and Miliband: "He has as much claim to the mantle of Margaret Thatcher as Silvio Berlusconi had to that of Julius Caesar." The still-Thatcherite Tory press has been equally dismissive.

But Miliband has a history of being underestimated – just as she was when opposition leader, and during her early years as prime minister. Like her, he was unexpectedly elected party leader. Like her, his public manner was then quickly judged unpalatable, his voice too nasal as hers was too shrill. Like her, he can seem too much of a party stereotype for broad appeal: the bourgeois north London leftie to her prim shire Tory. Like she did, he faces a smooth premier – "Sunny Jim" Callaghan for her, David Cameron for him – considered by journalists and voters to be more "prime ministerial", but also made vulnerable by internal splits and the lack of a Commons majority. As she did, Miliband has led his party to a substantial but not always solid poll lead. Two and a quarter years into his tenure, it is identical to her party's at the same stage: hovering around 10%.

Like her in the 70s, Miliband has nevertheless often seemed beleaguered. Thatcher's biographer John Campbell records: "She was even more on trial than most new leaders, facing a mixture of scepticism, curiosity and … condescension … She had seized the leadership as a result of a backbench revolt against the party establishment, opposed by practically the whole of her predecessor's shadow cabinet. Even those who had campaigned for her were not sure what they had persuaded the party to elect, and the party in the country did not know her at all." By the 1979 general election, she still trailed Callaghan as "best prime minister" by a huge 19% in Mori's regular poll, and the gap was widening. Miliband trails Cameron by 8% in similar recent polls by YouGov, and the margin is slowly narrowing.

Thatcher won power regardless. A close Miliband ally points out that she was the last British opposition leader to manage the difficult political trick of the "one-term return": getting your party, recently rejected by voters, back into office at the first opportunity. "Hers is an interesting model to look at, for how you win," he continues. "She recognised she had to differentiate herself not just from Callaghan and Labour but also from her own party under Edward Heath," the ultimately disastrous Tory prime minister between 1970 and 1974. "You don't get back into power by telling the electorate they were wrong last time. You have to be a change candidate."

Three days after becoming party leader in 2010, Miliband broke with New Labour as publicly as possible by condemning the 2003 Iraq war in a speech to the Labour conference. He has ostentatiously challenged orthodoxies, both New Labour and Tory, at regular intervals since: attacking Rupert Murdoch's newspapers, the "predatory" aspects of capitalism, the coalition's benefit cuts, successive governments' neglect of "the squeezed middle", and the state subsidy of low wages as a route to national economic competitiveness – a central policy of the Blair and Brown administrations in which he served.

Many of these political gambles have been surprisingly effective, shaping public debate and discomfiting the government; together, they have gradually given Miliband's stop-start leadership some momentum. This time last year, he had no poll lead, and speculation was widespread that his days as leader were numbered; but since last spring, Labour's ratings have been consistently better. Political commentators have started to tentatively test out the phrase "Miliband government".

"We've found being courageous works for us," says Wood. "We err on the side of boldness much more nowadays." Yet this approach is more than pragmatism. It also reflects something deeper. Miliband, like Thatcher before him, wants to overturn not just many of the policies of his immediate predecessors, but also a whole system of assumptions that has been entrenched for decades.

For her, the enemy was the "postwar consensus", the formica-and-pipe-smoke world of strong unions, nationalised industries, sometimes fussily regulated businesses and broad agreement between the main parties, which had held Britain together with increasing strain since the 40s. For him, the enemy is what she helped erect in its place: a market-dominated, less equal, more mercurial and abrasive Britain, which has begun to seem unsustainable in turn since the financial crisis started in 2008. In his Fabian Review essay, Wood called Thatcherism "the god that failed". In a 2011 paper for the Institute for Public Policy Research, Stears said it had had "horrific consequences", "deepening divisions" and created "a transactional mindset encouraging us to look on our fellow citizens more as objects than people". In a New Statesman interview with Hasan the same year, an "animated" Miliband blamed Thatcherism for "employers who don't take responsibility … the triumph of finance over industry … an ethic of take-what-you-can … the short term, the fast buck." He concluded: "All that has got to change."

"This has been lurking for a long time in Ed's head," says someone who knows him well. "He wants to break the consensus. What really attracts Ed to Thatcherism is its insurgency. A group of people seized the levers of the state, and effected a change in public consciousness." In short, Miliband wants to be both "the Labour Thatcher", as his adviser Neal Lawson of the leftwing pressure group Compass puts it, in the scale of his ambitions and the daring of his political methods, and the anti-Thatcher, in his actual policies and overall social philosophy, changing the Britain she largely created in a way that Blair and Brown never dared.

It is just the sort of complicated notion Miliband relishes. The son of the late Marxist thinker Ralph Miliband, he is a busy consumer of political books and ideas, and unapologetically intellectual – a quality that for decades many Westminster participants and observers have considered redundant, or even dangerous. His aides and allies, too, can be discursive and professorial – Wood and Stears teach at Oxford – in a way that still comes as a shock after the terse, rather macho press briefings of New Labour.

But does Miliband actually have any chance of beating Thatcherism at its own game? In so many ways, he is a completely different character: mild-mannered where she was regal, empathetic where she was confrontational, often frustratingly low-key in public where she was always compelling. Yet, Lawson says: "He's the best Labour leader to do this. No one should underestimate his steel. He's always thought, or wanted to think, that Thatcherism would eventually lose its hold. But his personality is open, respectful … He's psychologically ready to make the broad alliances Labour needs."

The philosopher John Gray, once a Thatcherite himself, says: "The Thatcher settlement has come unstuck, and it's not coming back. But market thinking in the political classes is still hegemonic. Among the public, there is anger about the banks. People are somewhat concerned about inequality, corporate tax avoidance. Does that add up to a sufficiently deep reservoir of contempt for Thatcherism for Miliband to exploit? There definitely isn't anything comparable to the mood for change the New Right exploited in the 70s."

Then, Thatcher rode a deep swell of ideas that had been building in boardrooms and thinktanks, newspapers and universities, pressure groups and political parties, for at least 30 years. Miliband, his allies admit, has a lonelier task. "One of our frustrations," says one, "has been that so much of the heavy lifting has had to be done by Ed himself."

Ferdinand Mount was one of the heads of the Downing Street policy unit under Thatcher, but has been increasingly preoccupied as an author since by the social downsides of her rule. He says Miliband's "talk" is "interesting": he cites his advocacy of "predistribution", the idea that better wages rather than tax credits should sustain working-class incomes in an era of state austerity. "But quite what government does about this is the problem," Mount continues. "Tone isn't enough if you're going to change anything. You have to arrive in power with some definite policy lines."

Miliband's allies insist he has plenty – for example, much more genuine banking reform and a tax system tougher on the wealthy and profit-hiding companies. But it is striking that, among all the well-informed references they make to Thatcher in the 70s, to her bristling speeches and vaguer policy documents then, the artefact they cite most reverently and often is her famously light-on-detail 1979 general election manifesto.

"For me," begins the brief foreword, signed by her, "the heart of politics is not political theory, it is people and how they want to live their lives … This manifesto contains no magic formula or lavish promises. But it sets out a broad framework … based not on dogma, but on reason, on common sense …" The manifesto proper continues: "Many things will have to wait until the economy has been revived … [But] we may be able to do more in the next five years than we indicate here."

In its skilful intertwining of the feelgood and plain-spoken, of populist generalisations and tantalising hints of radicalism, in its ambitious but shrewd attempt to turn ideology into "common sense", the manifesto reads rather like one of Miliband's better speeches. But what the slim pamphlet's admirers in his circle mention less often is the profound difficulties Thatcher got into in the years immediately after its publication. Between 1979 and 1982, Thatcherism, for all its energy and originality, frequently seemed a doomed experiment, and might have remained so without the semi-fortuitous foundation of the SDP and the war in the Falklands. The rareness of radical governments in Britain can make voters highly intolerant of them.

A Miliband ally fears that getting elected will be the easy part for Ed, too. "In power, think of the forces that may be against us: civil servants, the Bank of England, the press, who hate Ed over [his support for Lord] Leveson. A resurgent Tory party under Gove or Boris." Yet some of these traditional foes of leftwing Labour politicians are weaker than they were: the Tory press has lost readers, the Tory party has not won a general election for 20 years. And powerful but declining enemies can be the best sort for a prime minister to have, as Thatcher found when she took on Arthur Scargill. Some Miliband-watchers believe he needs not fewer enemies but more, to give his still-fuzzy public persona sharper definition.

Despite the financial crisis and all its political and economic fallout, despite Miliband's efforts, many British voters remain unengaged, with recent election turnouts often even worse than during the sleepy boom years. In the 70s and 80s, Britain was far more politicised; it was much easier for Thatcher to recruit the millions of true believers that an iconoclastic leader needs.

Gray lists other obstacles: globalisation has gone much further, limiting what any prime minister can achieve; Britain's problems have grown more entrenched, and less responsive to bold, easy-to-explain solutions; and the world economy is more thoroughly troubled than it was in the Thatcher era. And yet, he can't completely suppress an excitement that British politics may just be starting to get interesting again. "The Miliband project is something fresh," he says. "And there is a strong need for something fresh." We've been waiting for it, in many ways, since that morning in 1990.

Ed MilibandMargaret ThatcherLabour party leadershipLabourConservativesLiberal-Conservative coalitionAndy Beckett
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The Last Days of Detroit by Mark Binelli – review

An anatomy of a 20th-century boom town now so ailing that 'all of Paris could fit' into its empty spaces

In 1920, Detroit was the fourth biggest city in America. Its population had doubled in a decade. Migrants, many of them African-Americans from the rural South, were drawn by its pioneering car factories with their unprecedentedly high wages. The manic, mechanised, overcrowded metropolis of General Motors and Ford also drew journalists and writers. In 1934, Anne O'Hare McCormick of the New York Times wrote about Detroit's "democratized luxuries, with gas stations on every corner, chain stores, moving-picture palaces … as truly a world capital as any city on earth … Paris dictates a season's silhouette, but Detroit manufactures a pattern of life."

The city is still doing that, yet nowadays the pattern is different. Detroit has so much vacant land, writes Mark Binelli, "all of Paris could fit" into its empty spaces. Modern Detroit is world-famous not for its mania but for its entropy: derelict skyscrapers, collapsing houses, abandoned husks of businesses and civic amenities, all of them slowly sinking into what he calls "urban prairie", a post-human landscape of returning wild plants and animals. As decay often is, this Detroit is intensely photogenic – beautiful, apocalyptic Detroit "ruin porn", a phrase used by local critics of the phenomenon, Binelli included, has become an internet craze, a colour magazine staple, a coffee-table book mini-genre.

On these urban ghost-hunting expeditions, it is sometimes barely mentioned that the city's decline since the mid-20th century has also been a social disaster, slow-motion but seemingly inexorable. And sometimes not so slow-motion: since 2000, a quarter of its populace has departed, mostly to less blighted nearby settlements. For those who remain, life in Detroit can be dire. In 2008, writes Binelli, the city had "the highest murder rate in the country" and "90,000 fires", many of them arson. Detroit was "the most [racially] segregated major metropolitan area in the country … The school system remained the worst … The most recent mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, had just begun serving a three-month jail sentence … following a sex and corruption scandal." As 2008's global economic slump has lingered, Detroit has suffered further. Unemployment in the city may be close to 50%. Already-low property values have plummeted. Public spending cuts, driven by the dwindling population and shrinking inhabited area in a downward spiral – vicious, but bureaucratically logical – have left Detroit with services so threadbare that long stretches of street lights have been turned off.

For a currently declinist, anxious America, and pessimists across the western world, Detroit stands as a cautionary tale, its rise and fall an ideal subject for any nonfiction writer with some historical skills, a bit of courage and street wisdom, and a few gothic adjectives at their disposal. For the first few chapters here, it seems almost too ideal. Unlike many of Detroit's recent explorers, Binelli has local roots. He writes for Rolling Stone magazine, and uses a busy, knowing prose. Initially, this volume reads less like a book than a good book proposal, authoritative but self-conscious, switching restlessly between past and present, scene-setting and summary, energetic promotion of the topic at hand and world-weary commentary on rival Detroit portraits.

Binelli then traces the city's ascent, from its foundation in 1701 as a French fur-trading post, well situated between two of the Great Lakes, to the self-mythologising "Motor City" of Detroit's brief heyday. Again, the tone is too quick and breezy: "… After an eventual negotiated peace with [chief] Pontiac, nothing much interesting happened in Detroit for the next thirty or so years …" In modern nonfiction, the slick, conversational, summarising style of Malcolm Gladwell's influential bestsellers has a lot to answer for.

The book handles Detroit's decline better. In 1967, after a final, unsustainable manufacturing boom based on war production, the city suffered riots, "at that point, the worst in US history". Forty-three people died, nearly 3,000 buildings burned, and soldiers with tanks were sent out on to the streets, where gun battles took place that seemed a terrifying echo of what was happening in Vietnam. For some of Detroit's critics, many of them relatively prosperous white people who have left since, 1967 is the city's point of no return, the moment when black Detroit unthinkingly trashed its own backyard. But Binelli tells a more nuanced and persuasive story. Both white flight to suburbs beyond the city limits and the decay of the local car industry, he writes, had begun a decade or more before the riots. Despite – or perhaps because of – a reforming 60s mayor, the white, liberal Jerry Cavanagh, compellingly portrayed here as one of a succession of charismatic but seemingly doomed civic leaders, African-American grievances had reached boiling point. To this day, when many older black Detroiters talk about 1967, writes Binelli, "The word uprising replaces riot."

The city is now 85 per cent African-American, "run entirely by a black political elite". Binelli is a 42-year-old Italian-American with left-liberal leanings, and is firm but fair in documenting this elite's shortcomings and extreme administrative challenges. Yet he is more interested in portraiture than polemic, and the book's second half settles down into a series of delicately-drawn studies of life among the ruins. Defiant, isolated homeowners sit on their porches, surrounded by grassy emptiness, as if Detroit is turning into the rural South many of its original inhabitants came from. A bare-bones fire service is doggedly maintained in Highland Park, "the Detroit of Detroit", a separate, even frailer settlement surrounded by the city. Firemen work from tents and a trailer, set up inside a warehouse in an overgrown industrial park, "the former site of Chrysler's world headquarters".

Binelli is a diligent meeter and listener. One neighbour in the raw inner-city street he moves into for research (nowadays he usually lives in New York) turns out to be Derrick May, the legendary co-inventor of Detroit techno music. In the late 80s May's speeding but skeletal sound – perfect, Binelli points out, for a night drive through a half-abandoned city – briefly made him a star in Europe. But Detroit techno has long since become just another dance music genre. Invited over by May to watch one of the city's huge, unobstructed sunsets, Binelli finds not an Ibiza-style Bacchanalia but May and friends sitting on folding chairs on the pavement, drinking from plastic cups. "Only in Detroit … could twilight at the edge of an eight-lane boulevard strike anyone as a relaxing proposition." The rush-hour road is virtually unused: "Occasionally, a single car would seem to float past."

Of course, in cities one person's entropy is often another's opportunity. In recent years, Detroit's great, grey semi-vacuum has begun to suck in artists, activists, foodies, urban farmers, film-makers, even a few corporations, all of them attracted by its cheap space and gritty aura. Binelli, aware of the possibilities of revival they bring, and his own hipster tendencies, tries hard not to sneer. But an encounter with a longstanding black resident reveals underlying tensions. Detroit's famous ruins, she tells him, have left "scars" on locals: they are a daily reminder of the city's failures. Meanwhile some of the gentrifiers act, she says, "like they're out on the frontier and they can do anything … [But] Detroit isn't some kind of abstract art project." Binelli's achievement is to make that vividly apparent.

• Andy Beckett's When the Lights Went Out is published by Faber.

HistorySocietyDetroitUnited StatesMichiganAndy Beckett
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The Last Days of Detroit by Mark Binelli – review

An anatomy of a 20th-century boom town now so ailing that 'all of Paris could fit' into its empty spaces

In 1920, Detroit was the fourth biggest city in America. Its population had doubled in a decade. Migrants, many of them African-Americans from the rural South, were drawn by its pioneering car factories with their unprecedentedly high wages. The manic, mechanised, overcrowded metropolis of General Motors and Ford also drew journalists and writers. In 1934, Anne O'Hare McCormick of the New York Times wrote about Detroit's "democratized luxuries, with gas stations on every corner, chain stores, moving-picture palaces … as truly a world capital as any city on earth … Paris dictates a season's silhouette, but Detroit manufactures a pattern of life."

The city is still doing that, yet nowadays the pattern is different. Detroit has so much vacant land, writes Mark Binelli, "all of Paris could fit" into its empty spaces. Modern Detroit is world-famous not for its mania but for its entropy: derelict skyscrapers, collapsing houses, abandoned husks of businesses and civic amenities, all of them slowly sinking into what he calls "urban prairie", a post-human landscape of returning wild plants and animals. As decay often is, this Detroit is intensely photogenic – beautiful, apocalyptic Detroit "ruin porn", a phrase used by local critics of the phenomenon, Binelli included, has become an internet craze, a colour magazine staple, a coffee-table book mini-genre.

On these urban ghost-hunting expeditions, it is sometimes barely mentioned that the city's decline since the mid-20th century has also been a social disaster, slow-motion but seemingly inexorable. And sometimes not so slow-motion: since 2000, a quarter of its populace has departed, mostly to less blighted nearby settlements. For those who remain, life in Detroit can be dire. In 2008, writes Binelli, the city had "the highest murder rate in the country" and "90,000 fires", many of them arson. Detroit was "the most [racially] segregated major metropolitan area in the country … The school system remained the worst … The most recent mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, had just begun serving a three-month jail sentence … following a sex and corruption scandal." As 2008's global economic slump has lingered, Detroit has suffered further. Unemployment in the city may be close to 50%. Already-low property values have plummeted. Public spending cuts, driven by the dwindling population and shrinking inhabited area in a downward spiral – vicious, but bureaucratically logical – have left Detroit with services so threadbare that long stretches of street lights have been turned off.

For a currently declinist, anxious America, and pessimists across the western world, Detroit stands as a cautionary tale, its rise and fall an ideal subject for any nonfiction writer with some historical skills, a bit of courage and street wisdom, and a few gothic adjectives at their disposal. For the first few chapters here, it seems almost too ideal. Unlike many of Detroit's recent explorers, Binelli has local roots. He writes for Rolling Stone magazine, and uses a busy, knowing prose. Initially, this volume reads less like a book than a good book proposal, authoritative but self-conscious, switching restlessly between past and present, scene-setting and summary, energetic promotion of the topic at hand and world-weary commentary on rival Detroit portraits.

Binelli then traces the city's ascent, from its foundation in 1701 as a French fur-trading post, well situated between two of the Great Lakes, to the self-mythologising "Motor City" of Detroit's brief heyday. Again, the tone is too quick and breezy: "… After an eventual negotiated peace with [chief] Pontiac, nothing much interesting happened in Detroit for the next thirty or so years …" In modern nonfiction, the slick, conversational, summarising style of Malcolm Gladwell's influential bestsellers has a lot to answer for.

The book handles Detroit's decline better. In 1967, after a final, unsustainable manufacturing boom based on war production, the city suffered riots, "at that point, the worst in US history". Forty-three people died, nearly 3,000 buildings burned, and soldiers with tanks were sent out on to the streets, where gun battles took place that seemed a terrifying echo of what was happening in Vietnam. For some of Detroit's critics, many of them relatively prosperous white people who have left since, 1967 is the city's point of no return, the moment when black Detroit unthinkingly trashed its own backyard. But Binelli tells a more nuanced and persuasive story. Both white flight to suburbs beyond the city limits and the decay of the local car industry, he writes, had begun a decade or more before the riots. Despite – or perhaps because of – a reforming 60s mayor, the white, liberal Jerry Cavanagh, compellingly portrayed here as one of a succession of charismatic but seemingly doomed civic leaders, African-American grievances had reached boiling point. To this day, when many older black Detroiters talk about 1967, writes Binelli, "The word uprising replaces riot."

The city is now 85 per cent African-American, "run entirely by a black political elite". Binelli is a 42-year-old Italian-American with left-liberal leanings, and is firm but fair in documenting this elite's shortcomings and extreme administrative challenges. Yet he is more interested in portraiture than polemic, and the book's second half settles down into a series of delicately-drawn studies of life among the ruins. Defiant, isolated homeowners sit on their porches, surrounded by grassy emptiness, as if Detroit is turning into the rural South many of its original inhabitants came from. A bare-bones fire service is doggedly maintained in Highland Park, "the Detroit of Detroit", a separate, even frailer settlement surrounded by the city. Firemen work from tents and a trailer, set up inside a warehouse in an overgrown industrial park, "the former site of Chrysler's world headquarters".

Binelli is a diligent meeter and listener. One neighbour in the raw inner-city street he moves into for research (nowadays he usually lives in New York) turns out to be Derrick May, the legendary co-inventor of Detroit techno music. In the late 80s May's speeding but skeletal sound – perfect, Binelli points out, for a night drive through a half-abandoned city – briefly made him a star in Europe. But Detroit techno has long since become just another dance music genre. Invited over by May to watch one of the city's huge, unobstructed sunsets, Binelli finds not an Ibiza-style Bacchanalia but May and friends sitting on folding chairs on the pavement, drinking from plastic cups. "Only in Detroit … could twilight at the edge of an eight-lane boulevard strike anyone as a relaxing proposition." The rush-hour road is virtually unused: "Occasionally, a single car would seem to float past."

Of course, in cities one person's entropy is often another's opportunity. In recent years, Detroit's great, grey semi-vacuum has begun to suck in artists, activists, foodies, urban farmers, film-makers, even a few corporations, all of them attracted by its cheap space and gritty aura. Binelli, aware of the possibilities of revival they bring, and his own hipster tendencies, tries hard not to sneer. But an encounter with a longstanding black resident reveals underlying tensions. Detroit's famous ruins, she tells him, have left "scars" on locals: they are a daily reminder of the city's failures. Meanwhile some of the gentrifiers act, she says, "like they're out on the frontier and they can do anything … [But] Detroit isn't some kind of abstract art project." Binelli's achievement is to make that vividly apparent.

• Andy Beckett's When the Lights Went Out is published by Faber.

HistorySocietyDetroitUnited StatesMichiganAndy Beckett
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