I am Thatcher

 Margaret Thatcher, mealy-mouthed Mil, on a high, youth  No Responses »
Apr 152013
 
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The advice they always give is play the ball, not the man.  Or, in this case, the woman.  But, in this case, she herself almost gleefully became the ball itself.  She cared little for avoiding the rough and tumble of brutally facing down opponents.  This video, for example, lays it out all too clearly for those who would care to emulate her style.  Be warned if you don’t like her: her ability to perform in the House of Commons was up there with the best – perhaps the very best.


http://youtu.be/okHGCz6xxiw

This, meanwhile, shows what the other side thought of her.


http://youtu.be/txBZ8cH1eVc

Or, perhaps, nihilism was what we all finally came down to.


http://youtu.be/3TFx9u1t1LY

To be honest, I started out writing this post with the express intention of proving to you that we lived in a country where soft power – that very English sense of fair play – ruled our hearts.  But in the light of the three evermore savage videos above, I do wonder if that’s really the case.

Thatcherism in three acts perhaps, laid bare for all to see?  For in reality, Thatcherism’s abiding quality was not in its falsely-drummed-up expectations of a free market Nirvana it not only never delivered but, perhaps, never intended to deliver.  No.  With the evidence contained in these three short videos, we can see that what she provided us all with was a naked reflection of the cruelty that lies beneath our very English inability to give proper vent to our opinions.

We do not essentially believe in fair play.  We believe in dominating and ruling others.  Our history says this; our Union Flag demonstrates this; our instincts to kowtow to authority prove this.  Thatcherism as hard power in a country where soft power generally rules our hearts, we find ourselves suggesting?  In reality, soft power never ruled our hearts.

White hunter, black heart.  That’s what being an Englander actually means.  Even down to the racist subtext such a metaphor employs.

Thatcherism’s achievement wasn’t economic; wasn’t political; wasn’t even social.  It was personal – as personal as you could possibly get.  It made saying what you thought, simply because it was what you thought, right, clever, witty and – above all – possible.  As long as, of course, you knew how to top the opposition.

Thatcherism made point-scoring the point of political debate.  She didn’t invent it, but she did exemplify, enshrine and make sacred its value.  And ever since she’s died, we’ve allowed ourselves to be sucked up in her dynamics.  Her very personal “-ism” reaches massively beyond the grave, precisely because she herself played the man instead of the ball.

Which is what we’ve spent the last week doing.  Not because we’re all bad envious lefties but – rather – because, at a human level, we’re all far more like her than we’d ever care to admit.

No escape, folks.  Even as the atheist defines themselves in terms of what they are not, so we are condemned to understand ourselves in our rejection of what we despise.

Our own prejudices.

Our own desires.

Our own wish to overthrow.

It doesn’t ennoble us, this hatred; this inability to disentangle.  But it does make it easier for us to understand what the future mustn’t be.

I am Thatcher and because of this, I am the least well-placed generation to enable a recovery of our better selves.

This week I will be voting to nominate up to three candidates to go forward in the selection process my local Constituency Labour Party is holding to choose a future parliamentary candidate for Chester.  All the candidates I have spoken to or read about are all substantially younger than I am.  In times of severe crisis, in times of institutional fracture, this is as it must be.  The only solution to the vagaries, infighting, battles and despair of the aged – the kind of internecine conflict the above three videos make all too manifest – is a transcendental renovation from the direction of the young of all our ways of seeing and doing politics.

I am Thatcher but I do not fear the future because I know the young will one day be in charge.  And in that despair which comes of failure, that despair I mention above, there is always a sense of hope and excitement that things may one day change.

As someone wisely said, life would be unbearable if it weren’t so unpredictable.

And that, my dear friends, is the crossroads at which we stand right now.


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Hit and myth – the real story behind progress

 civilisation, class war, class warfare, old age, old and new, old boys' networks, poverty, poverty trap, power, Progress, unclassifiable, younger generation, youth  No Responses »
Dec 232012
 
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Two – related – questions which have been gnawing away at me today:

  1. the battle that drives a fault-line deep into our civilisation – between the young who are willing but don’t have the power and the old who refuse to renew themselves and yet hang on to the bitter end;
  2. the chimera that is this thing the old call progress – a concept which justifies those ways of doing stuff, concentrating wealth and creating a certain set of privileges in the supposed interests of a broader societal benefit;

*

As I get older, and yet continue to recall my youth with dear fondness, I become more and more convinced that young people in general judge far more accurately what’s important and relevant to our world as a global whole than do people my age.  It must have been quite different when we lived in a time where life expectancies rarely led us beyond the age of forty.  The memories and instincts would have been sharper; the regrets would have been fewer; the tendency to self-justify would have been far less incessant.

As a group, as a crowd, as a common intelligence … almost as an entity of shared common sense … well, that is how I see the young of today.  And not only of today but of ever and always.

So much time and energy is wasted in that eternal battle between those who manage the levers of power, and can thus assert their truths over the rest of society through simple megaphonics, and those who are still in touch with their childlike ways of seeing and doing.  The immediate urge to tell and bear witness to the truth is still present in so many young people – even as in people of my age it becomes dowdy, faded and somehow compromised by so many crossroads where recent wrong turnings only serve to compound the previous.

As we live beyond that moment of mid-life crisis, an unassailable reality of downhill dynamics which in other ages coincided with the burnished and contradicting bravery of the twenties, so we decide to hold onto the few privileges we have acquired in the hope that in some trivial way these will compensate our inability to win our arguments through truth.  Bound as we are to leave our childlike selves behind, we can only build our right to rule on the basis of indisputable precedent and historical baggage.  Starting from scratch, as the young are bound so to do, is a revolutionary act which elderly societies cannot permit.

And so we lose our early sense of absolute right and wrong – and replace it with quite another of imposed correctness and incorrectness.

Hit and myth – that is what people my age do to the young.  Firstly, we physically and mentally attack our subjects and charges; secondly, we propagate stories about how the world should be and why.  By doing the latter, we justify the former.  And by doing the former, we make the latter a self-perpetuating – and self-justifying – piece of cake.

Progress as defined by people my age these days is a lie.  There is too little about this concept of progress that benefits a wider society.

The concept of progress as defined by the compromises of our powerful elders is mainly designed to benefit their interests over the interests of the vast majority of us who survive in this latterday jungle of Darwinian behaviours.  And you know what’s so wearisome about modern life?  That this survival we are now getting accustomed to will take place over maybe seventy or eighty long years.

That’s what 21st century elders seem to be offering the societies they rule: misery, penury and the hollow comforts of painful perspective – that relative relief of the quite unjustly treated.

Not much, is it?

Not much at all.

Happy Christmas, if you believe.

And if you don’t, at least try to remember your youth.


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Fearful figures on the verge of an economic breakdown

 crisis, economics, in a hole, jobs, latterday capitalism, Spain, unemployment, youth  No Responses »
Jan 282012
 
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This is indeed a lost generation.  The country of my wife and children, Spain, as reported by the Telegraph yesterday, now has a youth unemployment rate of 51.4 percent.  Meanwhile, as painted by the English version of the Spanish El País newspaper, the wider picture is just as terrifying:

According to the National Statistics Institute’s (INE) latest quarterly Active Population Survey (EPA), the unemployment rate climbed from 21.5 percent in the third quarter to 22.85 percent in the period October-December. The ranks of the unemployed swelled by 348,700, while the number of people who lost their jobs during the whole of last year amounted to 577,000. The number of people out of work at the end of the year stood at a record 5.273 million.

The solution to this problem?  As follows:

The gloomy figures underscored the dire need for an overhaul of the labor market, a task the government wants to complete in the first quarter of this year.

But with an important proviso:

“This shows that the government has to carry out a labor reform that focuses on incentivizing hiring, rather than just on cutting firing costs,” Bloomberg quoted Estefania Ponte, chief economist at Cortal Consors, in Madrid as saying. [...]

And I thought capitalism had all the tools it needed to sort out – all on its lonesome – the pretty mess someone, or something, has got us into.

Oh!  It does …

In 2011 Spanish luxury goods sales were up by 25% despite the economic climate in the country.The luxury goods sector brought in 4,500 million euros up to the end of this year.

Truth of the matter is that capitalism by itself offers no convincing solutions for a broader society.  It can’t.  It’s been so vigorously – and for such a long time – a fundamental part of the problem.

And as any good experienced teacher would tell you, there is no one methodology in the world which can ever teach you everything you need to know or do.  We must apply the same principle to economic practice.

Instead of building these self-justifying barricades between different classes and ways of seeing.

*

I do wonder if the crisis isn’t rather more profound, mind.  What if the deficit isn’t really financial?  I mean obviously there’s a shortage of political will to spend our way out of encroaching crisis, as perhaps we have preferred to do so on previous occasions – but, in reality, perhaps the problem is actually that we simply no longer have enough jobs to go around.  No mystery here – nor a particularly perceptive remark.  But, nevertheless, maybe – in the circumstances – worth revisiting.  As the past century progressed, automation struck in more and more professions: we now learn by ourselves; medicate ourselves; bank by ourselves; book our holidays by ourselves; even get to the point where we contemplate the possibility of legally representing ourselves.  And maybe – just maybe – all the aforementioned just goes to show that the balance generated by our economic structures between jobs and consumers is suddenly and irrevocably tipping in favour of the latter.

That is to say, our latterday Western economies – as they are set up and structured these days (and for some reason my unpractised eye is totally unable to fathom) – require far more of us to play the role of passive consumers than that of productive workers.

Does it have to be that way?  I really don’t know.  Wasn’t there a time, for a while, in the last quarter of the last century, that a potentially halcyon period of generous leisure activity began to be promised to our future generations?  I can certainly remember the predictions made by the technologically minded stories and thinkers who dominated my scientifically influenced thought processes in my more tender years.

Of that – however – we hear little these days, it would seem.  Instead, the things they tend to say now remind us we must work for less; work more flexibly; work more insecurely; and, above all, expect no guarantees whatsoever.

Stability of personal income is no virtue or given of modern Western society.  As an American called Kirk (and spookily so) apparently said at Davos today:

US trade rep Kirk: “More and more Americans question value proposition of trade… think weve traded jobs for cheap t-shirts /iPads #Davos

And it’s not just the jobs – it’s the nature of those jobs.

For Christ’s sake capitalism – get your bloody act together before it’s too late!

You’d almost think your proponents thought there was no alternative.

But there always is – to everything.

So where have all your competitive instincts gone?  Is it in fact – and here perhaps we have a horrifying unspoken truth – that, after so much time spent managing and manipulating and operating in monopolistic markets, our capitalist captains have forgotten what real free markets feel and look like?  As well as the instincts which should correspond to such mindsets?

Fearful figures, indeed, then, on the verge of an economic breakdown.

All of us, that is.  Sooner or later.


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What a foolish excuse for a leader you are, Mr Cameron!

 #N30 strike, Camerong, David Cameron, on a high, trades unions, younger generation, youth  1 Response »
Nov 302011
 
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So from an opinion poll published a couple of days ago, we find that 61 percent of people in this country supported today’s strike:

An opinion poll commissioned by BBC News suggests 61% of people believe public sector workers are justified in going on strike over pension changes.

 What’s more:

The poll indicates greater sympathy for the industrial action among women – at 67% – compared with men, at 55%.

And:

Younger people, it also suggests, are considerably more supportive of the strikes than pensioners; almost four in five 18 to 24-year-olds back the action, a little under half of over-65s do.

So what next?

Well, all the above would suggest that the country is indeed disintegrating – but, in this case, along generational lines.  Whilst statistics from today would suggest that some of the different nations of the Union continue along their separate ways:

  • Department for Education figures suggest 62% of England’s 21,476 state schools were closed, with another 14% partly shut
  • In Scotland just 33 of the 2,700 state schools were open, according to local authority body Cosla. In Wales, more than 1,500 out of 1,776 schools shut. In Northern Ireland, about two-thirds of the 1,200 schools closed

And whilst Cameron chooses to posit the battle in terms of the language of power – for him the above data translates into a “a damp squib” – Brendan Barber comes across in quite a different way:

Barber, the country’s most senior trade unionist and the lead negotiator in the dispute with the government, does not really conform to what he called Gove’s “silly 70s cliches” about belligerent union leaders. “Now and again I can thump a tub,” he said with a smile, when asked about his tactics for the day, “but I don’t think it’s unhelpful if I come across as reasonable, because I think I am reasonable. And when reasonable people begin to feel so angry and disappointed about the problems they are dealing with, other people should respond to it.”

The people who are really living in the past are not the trades unions – forced as they have been to update and renew like no other British institution as a result of the continued and persistent imposition of new laws and regulatory frameworks over the last three terms of New Labour.  No.  Those who would have the future truly back in the past are those Tories looking to rerun Thatcher’s destruction of a very English socialism – only the socialism they are looking to destroy is actually rather beloved by most the people who inhabit these isles.

They talk about trades union leaders itching for a fight – when what they really neglect is the following reality: they’ve opened up so many fronts in the battle to remake the Britain they despise that trades union leaders are going to be the least of their worries.

Think about that new generation of voters waiting to be energised – four out of five young people who not only support the rainbow coalition of #occupy movements but also find themselves lending their considered approval of specific and well-organised actions such as today’s strike.

No.  This is not the winter of unruly and power-hungry discontent.

This is the autumn of quite reasonable and widespread despair.

There’s a big difference, Mr Cameron.  And it makes a big difference too.

“Damp squib” indeed … what a foolish excuse for a leader you are!


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Globalisation, the young and getting out of here

 globalisation, nation states, on a high, youth  No Responses »
Sep 062011
 
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There’s a fascinating graph on the subject of how the world’s youth see globalisation over at Government in the Lab this evening.  Alberto Cottica’s conclusion at the foot of the graph is spot-on – except, I feel, in his use of the adjective “unsettling”:

Yet there may be another, more unsettling explanation: that the young (especially the educated ones) are switching their allegiance away from their countries – less and less able to give them a meaningful life, less and less interested in doing so – and over to their peers. The globalized economy and society is where the opportunities are: where will the young stand if it comes into conflict with the old nation states?

And the reason I feel that Cottica is wrong to find it unsettling is because many of our problems lie precisely in those old nation states – the nearest I have to hand is the ex-Yugoslavia and how imposing overarching structures on clearly defined cultures was never going to help anyone long-term. Whilst the new nation states are made out of the technocratic bricks and mortar of the 21st century, it’s the old nation states with all their history of painful and inhuman oppression we should really be worrying ourselves about.

I once read a theory about how nation states arose – I don’t know if it’s true or not but it basically suggested that the size of most countries was never going to greater than seventy-two hours on horseback.  I would suggest that we can accept the principle today even if the reality then was otherwise, in the sense that a world where no country is further away than three days by plane is a world where at least for its youth – those of us who experience life anew, who fear little, who believe in instant friendship and travel the world in continuous wonderment – there are no real barriers, no real prejudices and no real impediments to find out about another.

The older we get, the more ingrained in our mental landscapes we become.

The youth have an edge on us oldies.  They don’t see what we claim to have experienced.  For them, experience is a revelation.  For us, it has already turned into an obstacle.

So if the youth – a much more powerful and savvy “customer” base now than they were decades ago – are beginning to trust each other much more than they might their elders and governors, I personally find this not in the least “unsettling” but, rather, far more, “exhilarating”, “exciting”, “revealing” and “liberating”.  For both the youth as groups of individuals as well as our wider societies.

And if countries like China – with all the problems they have – can create a youth capable of embracing the rest of the world, then perhaps we should choose to understand this better here in the United Kingdom. 

Browbeating our younger citizens into rank submission isn’t going to be the solution.

But I do wonder if anyone currently at the top properly understands the implications of these perceptions.  And if they do, whether they’re prepared to do anything serious about it.


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