Bits and pieces I've been reading

As I indicated a few posts back, I've started reading the Financial Times on a regular basis, as it has Serious News for Serious Times. I noticed a piece about Britain's coal industry (or what's left of it) on March 12th entitled 'Mining recovery needs longer-term aid' (p.4, bye-lined Ed Crooks) which quoted Nye Bevan's observation that Britain is an island 'made mainly from coal' (Bevan also said Britain was an island 'in a sea full of fish' or words to that effect. The running down of the British Isles' fishing industry is another national scandal). The article then said:

'Estimates from the now-defunct National Coal Board in the 1980s suggest the UK has now enough mineable reserves to meet demand at current levels for about 4,000 years.'

To waste this natural resource is criminal to me. I fully support investment in renewable energy, but to run down the coal industry when we are importing oil and gas (which are hardly environmentally friendly...and what happened to North Sea oil? On the same page of the FT: 'Almost 5,000 platform wells and subsea wells in the North Sea will have to be decommissioned, most of them over the next 15 years, UK Oil and Gas said.' What is going on?!) and are talking about expanding the most dangerous power source of all ie nuclear (think it's safe? Would you live next door to a nuclear power station if you had the choice?). When we have the likes of James Lovelock, George Monbiot, Mark Lynas and other self-righteous eco-doomsters saying we should go nuclear (state-subsidised capitalism par excellence) rather than invest in clean coal technology, I think sections of the environmental movement have gone off the rails entirely.

The FT's review of the coal industry comes on the 25th anniversary of the Miners' Strike. The fact that the miners were badly led by Arthur Scargill does not take away the fact the wrong side lost and the country is still living with the consequences. Simon Jenkins, writing in The Guardian, would disagree with this, but he is far from a Thatcher-worshipper:

Meanwhile history is silent on the downside of the Thatcher era. The command structure she created to crush her foes became unrestrained, over-centralised and inefficient. Her evisceration of local democracy bred a cynicism among Britons towards political participation that remains unique in Europe. It also led to her downfall through the poll tax.

Thatcher was one of the great "nationalisers" of all time, taking control of the public housing stock, the rating system, a previously devolved hospital service, the universities, the courts, crown prosecution and, during the miners' strike, the police. It was Thatcher who turned Whitehall from an elite administrative corps into a demoralised, politicised officialdom which, under Blair and Brown, became besotted with targets, initiatives and useless IT systems.

Thatcher removed former nationalised industries from the state. But ask any doctor, farmer, lecturer, engineer or victim of the health and safety executive if, as a result of Thatcher, they feel less or more liberated from state interference. You will get a sick laugh.

The portrayal of Thatcher as libertarian St Joan in the fight against big government is nonsense. When I once suggested to her that a policy she was proposing was hardly laissez-faire, she exploded: "Never accuse me of that ghastly French word. I believe government should be strong in what it does."



Next time some Thatcher-worshipper gives you the full 'Oh, she believed in freedom' spiel to you, quote this back at them. Personally I think Thatcher-worshippers are largely cut from the same intellectual cloth as Western Stalin-worshippers back in the 1930s! That is, secular worshippers of the idea of a Strong Leader who kicks people (not themselves of course!) around...



The LRB has a bookshop: 14 Bury Place, near the British Museum...

I've also bought the London Review of Books for the first time in ages. I gave up subscribing back in late 06, partly on budgetary grounds, partly because although it has some very good articles, I could sometimes go through an edition without finding anything of worth to read. However, the latest edition (12th March- Volume 31 Number 5) had a fair few articles I wanted to read at leisure at home, as opposed to snatching 20 minutes in the local bookshop.

Amongst the articles I found of interest was a review of Harriet Harvey Wood'sThe Battle of Hastings: The Fall of Anglo-Saxon England written by Tom Shippey, who I know as one of the leading scholars in the field of Tolkienology. He notes that Wood is very much of the view (which I share) that the Norman victory in 1066 was an absolute disaster for England, one which we as a country are still trying to recover from (the idea of a class system comprising 'us' and 'them', with 'them' very much in charge through a modified 'Norman Yoke'). Shippey notes that:

'she comes close to repeating the claim, made many years ago by R.W. Chambers, that in 1065 England looked as if it would skip the Middle Ages altogether and go straight into a Renaissance....While there was admittedly a class system based on weregilds, it was a relatively flat one, with only two main male classes....It was a fairly porous system: there were established procedures for churls to become thanes, with written laws and a system of open-access courts at every level from the hundred, the unit of local government, upwards. Women were also well protected by medieval standards, with legal rights to a share of the property on divorce, no bar to remarriage, and freedom to own and dispose of land, a situation...not reached again until the passing of the Married Women's Property Act of 1882. Sentiments in the gnomic poems, she says, 'were positively advanced even by 20th-century standards', and she quotes in support the poem Maxims I, with its advice (putting it in 20th-century terms) to encourage the self-esteem of the young. Rich, stable, liberal and progressive; why did they lose to a bunch of pirates?' ('Why did they lose?', p.25)

Shippey says 'Wood's view, in short, is that the results of Hastings was a mix of good luck for William with some forgivable bad judgement from Harold; but really, the Normans didn't deserve it.' (ibid, p.26) Shippey suggests there was more to it than that. However, he admits that 'even in the 11th century there was a strong reservoir of national feeling' in England, but it was squandered by the country's ruling and administrative elites, and so the 'Norman Yoke' was imposed, and everyone (not least women) knew their place.



Richard Cobden: outside Mornington Crescent tube station!

There is also a review in the LRB by Miles Taylor of The Letters of Richard Cobden, Vol. I, 1815-47 ('Dig, Hammer, Spin, Weave' pp.27-28). I've got quite a lot of time for Cobden and John Bright, who are often called the founders of the 'Manchester School' of economic thought. They were anti-imperialist and anti-war at a time when it was extremely unpopular; they had no time for the landed aristocracy (and, as genuine believers in free markets, I think they would have had little time for the rise of the corporation); no time for the Corn Laws (the Common Agricultural Policy of their day); and were supporters of cheap newspapers and the penny post (would they be supporters of a free internet today?). Taylor's review of the collection edited by Anthony Howe stresses how much Marx and Engels (in the 1840s the latter lived in the same city as Cobden, who was Stockport's MP; Manchester's Free Trade Hall is very much a monument to Cobden) saw Cobden as the leading voice of Britain's revolutionary bourgeoisie against the aristocratic ruling class. However, after the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1845, it was not to be...

Other articles in the LRB which I also found worth reading was an overview of Italian politics by Perry Anderson (who is always worth reading, not least because he writes so well); a review by Neal Ascherson of a new biography of Robbie Burns (The Bard by Robert Crawford), which explains his diverse political views on Burn's love of 'anybody who bravely rose against established power...It was the means-the act of rebellion-rather than the motley ends which made his heart thump.' ('How Does it Add Up?', ibid, p.3); a review by Hal Foster of Guy 'Society of the Spectacle' Debord's Correspondence: The Foundation of the Situationist International (June 1957-60); and an overview by Katie Thumpener of several books on cinema under the Nazis. In short, well worth splashing £3.20 for!

What England Means To Me

The Battle of Hastings, October 13th 1066: A bad day at the office for England.


It's up there in its full glory in cyberspace at What England Means To Me.

Here's what I said:

I think of myself as an old-style English Radical in my politics, somewhere on the Left. I see the English people, whatever their origins, as having struggled for centuries to reverse the effects of the “Norman Yoke”. When I was about eight, living in a Labour-voting (or, more accurately, Tory-hating) household in the West Midlands, I remember learning at school about the Roman and Viking invasions of England and how they left eventually. Then when learning about the Normans, the obvious question to me was “when did the Normans leave?” I never got a decent answer at the time. As I got older the obvious answer was “never”, but l knew from the callous destruction of much of the West Midlands’ industrial base under the Thatcher regime that we were a nation of lions led by donkeys. When I was 19 I came across the Levellers in the English Civil Wars and their idea of the “Norman Yoke” which deprived the “free-born” Anglo-Saxons of their liberties after 1066. Ever since, I have basically held onto the idea that England is still under the thrall of a much-modified “Norman Yoke”. The faces and names may change (and if your ancestors came over in 1066 I don’t hold you personally responsible for anything!) but “the Thing”, to quote William Cobbett, has persisted for centuries. Its “golden thread”, to coin a phrase, runs from the “Harrying of the North”, Magna Carta (a baron’s carve-up), the Glorious Revolution (a banker’s coup d’etat) all the way up to New Labour’s paeans to “New Britishness”.

Why does anyone on the Left have hang-ups about the idea of being English? It sure beats the idea of Britishness. For about two decades I’ve thought the whole concept of Britishness (for which my spellchecker suggests “Brutishness”) as an idea whose time has gone. The only question is how we give the United Kingdom a decent burial. However, too many on the Left hold onto the idea of Britishness, fearing Englishness. However, how on Earth can holding onto the ideology of a big business dominated imperial state, which is in its death throes, be progressive? There is simply no “Britishness”, new or otherwise, that political progressives can subscribe to and be true to their ideals. It is a concept too weighed down by the gap between its democratic, enlightened rhetoric and the sordid reality that the British state has presided over for centuries.

Instead the Left should embrace English Radicalism, which inspired thinkers and movements such as the Levellers, Tom Paine, William Cobbett, the Chartists, the mutualist and co-operative movements, William Morris, the pre-1914 syndicalists and Guild Socialists such as GDH Cole. It was driven underground politically by the triumph of “top-down” socialism, in both its Fabian and Leninist forms, after 1918. Now that global “top-down” models of organising society, whether by states or corporations, are under attack from decentralising, democratic tendencies, it is time for the English Left to embrace a national identity that accords with the spirit of the age.

It also means we need a national identity that draws upon one of the most abused phrases in modern politics: “Little Englander”. The original “Little Englanders” were patriotic radicals who were opposed to the Empire building that underlay Britain’s participation in the 1899-1902 Boer War. Our nation can only be at ease with itself when we abandon imperial adventures, whether our own or on behalf of the USA or EU, and realise that our real gifts to the world are our language, our culture and our sense of humour, none of which the Normans gave us! (“Taking the piss” is something that William the Conqueror, Oliver Cromwell, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair would never appreciate!). We should become a country where, to quote Orwell, we “hate to see England either humiliated or humiliating anyone else.”

Biographical note: I was born in Walsall in the Black Country two weeks before the end of 1969. My mother was also born in the Black Country. My father was born in County Sligo. He came over in 1948 at the age of six after his dad served in the British Army during WW2 (and was to again in Korea in the early 1950s). However, I think of myself as English rather than British, and have done for 30 odd years.

Little