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Anatomy of decline: The political journalism of Peter Jenkins
Book by Brivati, Brian, Cockett, Richard, Toynbee, Polly
247 pages, Hardcover
Published January 1, 1995
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January 20, 2018
A quarter of a century after his untimely demise, the work of Peter Jenkins is of great interest to me. He was probably the pioneering modern British political columnist, in that he was the first to jettison the traditional parliamentary diarist approach and give us a mix of reportage, analysis and opinion. Jenkins' prose was always straightforward, the analysis reasonably balanced - his Social Democrat leanings in the 1970s-1980s probably helped in his critique of the wilder extremes of Thatcherism and Scargillism - and the polemic liberal and measured. Oh for his like, today, submerged as we are by the cult of the columnist, of whom Gove and Johnson, are for me the nadir, and thoroughly dishonest.
This book is a chronology, from the mid-60s difficulties of the Wilson government, the growing problems with the Unions and the breaking down of the post-war consensus, to the 1992 election - and the looming EU dislocation of the Maastricht treaty and the seemingly innocuous widening of the Union, with Austria, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Switzerland candidate countries to join. Where did the years go?
For all that, and the high quality of Jenkins' writing, his anchor points of the tensions between haves and have nots, social progress and capitalism, prosperity and distribution of wealth, seem thrown up in the air and sidelined here in 2018, with populism and its darker motivations stalking the Earth. So, for now his social democracy seems almost like a quaint, historical artefact. Most poignant of all, in these days of semi-literate web journalism, and the dubious, alternative facts of the world of Google, Facebook and Twitter, I note my copy of this book is a library discard from one of our colleges of journalism....
This book is a chronology, from the mid-60s difficulties of the Wilson government, the growing problems with the Unions and the breaking down of the post-war consensus, to the 1992 election - and the looming EU dislocation of the Maastricht treaty and the seemingly innocuous widening of the Union, with Austria, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Switzerland candidate countries to join. Where did the years go?
For all that, and the high quality of Jenkins' writing, his anchor points of the tensions between haves and have nots, social progress and capitalism, prosperity and distribution of wealth, seem thrown up in the air and sidelined here in 2018, with populism and its darker motivations stalking the Earth. So, for now his social democracy seems almost like a quaint, historical artefact. Most poignant of all, in these days of semi-literate web journalism, and the dubious, alternative facts of the world of Google, Facebook and Twitter, I note my copy of this book is a library discard from one of our colleges of journalism....
Displaying 1 of 1 review