Narratives of Encroachment

Like most people, these days, my attention tends to wander…my eye will soon catch something else. It’s not often that an article is able to hold my attention but “Turning Inward; Brexit, Encroachment Narrative and the English as a “secret people” achieved that amazing feat…

I almost missed it since it had been lurking as one of hundreds of hyperlinks which I store in a file but rarely activate.

And my attention was held because the author – one Prof Patrick Wright - had cunningly embedded in the article a video of his presentation which made even more interesting points than the article itself. But the sound-level was so low that I had to strain my ears to identify the embellishments he was making to the text.

Truly the sort of cunning technique one would expect from a Professor of “Literature and Visual and Material Culture”!! He is also the author of On living in an old country – national past in contemporary Britain, published in 1985.

The basic argument of his paper is that English society has been portrayed over the ages by certain writers with particular themes and symbols eg rustic meadows, the sound of a cricket ball and warm beer. The gallery of writers includes William Cobbett, GK Chesterton, JB Priestley and George Orwell….each of whom, admittedly in very varying degrees, paints pictures of “sturdy yeomen” under threat…

 While the Brexit campaigns have rightly been condemned for its appeals to xenophobia, and for the lies, misrepresentations and sheer opportunism of its leaders, there is more to be said than that. To the considerable extent that this resurgence of English identity has been engineered by partisan politicians, campaigners and journalists, it has also been activated by the deployment of allegorical narratives that work by simplification and polarisation.

In these encroachment narratives, the traditional nation and its way of life is typically squared off against a vividly imagined and probably advancing threat — be it immigrants, bureaucrats, Europe, ‘experts’ etc. Where the reality addressed is likely to be complex and full of nuance, encroachment narratives of this kind press that reality into a brutally simplified and prejudged opposition between good and evil. They often defend a traditional idea of community against modern forms of society and political organisation. They tend to favour common sense and instinct over long words, abstract knowledge and expertise. They make a virtue, particularly in the English context, of insularity and shrinkage. They champion the small, the grounded and the localised, as opposed to the large and mobile sweep of internationalisation and cosmopolitanism. They are highly resistant to any possibility of compromise or synthesis between their opposed terms.

 ……….Encroachment narratives abound in the writings of William Cobbett (1763–1835), the campaigning journalist and furious defender of the beleaguered Georgian countryside, whom Raymond Williams would place among the founders of a characteristically English idea of culture, and whose name now appears as a proto-Brexiteer in blog posts. He conducted his ‘rural rides’ as the agrarian revolution proceeded in the 1820s, producing a fulminating account of England as he saw it at this moment of transition…..
As G.D.H. Cole would assert much later, Cobbett lived before it became apparent that the urbanisation and industrialisation, which Cobbett saw as entirely hellish, would eventually open new possibilities of working class politics. As it was, Cobbett raged against everything he could blame for the destruction of the traditional rural community: the Reformation, the national debt, tea drinking, decadent MPs sitting for rotten boroughs, the genteel fashion for mahogany furniture, sofas and picturesque views in which the countryside was dissociated from utility, the abolitionists (accused of being more ‘concerned’ about distant slaves than about native English labourers) and, as some of Cobbett’s admirers still struggle to accept, Jews. The list is long, varied and disconcerting, even after Cobbett has bundled up everything on it to produce the overwhelming biblical monster he named ‘the thing. 

Polarised allegories also feature strongly in the writings of G.K. Chesterton, who may well appeal to the Brexiteers not just as the author of ‘The Secret People,’ but as the man who turned being a ‘Little Englander’ into a positive virtue.

The presentation was made at a British Academy symposium and can be read with others on the British Academy website in the report European Union and Disunion – reflections on European Identity (2017) which I had downloaded some time ago without noticing the Wright contribution. But it encouraged me to activate google search and discover a Demos pamphlet from 1995 The Battle over Britain which clearly laid the basis for the subsequent Cool Britannia theme. A decade later, Gordon Brown tried in vain to get the notion of British identity taken seriously but was faced down by a wave of criticisms including the redoubtable Tom Nairn who called him The Bard of Britishness  

This is the latest of what has become quite a series of musings about what the 23 June 2016 Referendum might tell us about the sort of people the Brits are… When I then went on to ask whether novelists don’t perhaps have better insights than specialist academics, I had forgotten the debate of the mid 1990s and the later one sparked off by poor Gordon Brown. 
But it's ironic that what has tuned out so far to be the most insightful of the bunch, should have been penned by an academic - if of a rather unusual sort !

Resources for English identity

- England’s Discontents – political cultures and national identities; Mike Wayne (2018) - explores the various strands which have created the english weave over the centuries - looks very strong on theory

- The Lure of Greatness – England’s Brexit, America’s Trump; Anthony Barnett (2017) – probably the best analysis of the issue, written in Barnett’s special style which bursts with insights and references and therefore comes in at 370 pages. . Each of its 34 chapters has an almost self-explanatory title. It is one of these rare books that you realise half-way through that you need to go back and read more closely and make notes about….I received the book only in September and will devote a special post to it in the autumn

- The party politics of Englishness 2014 – a typical exploration by a political science academic of the question

- The debate on Englishness can no longer be avoided; 2012 short article

- British identity and political discourse – analysis of New Labour’s search for identity; a useful little piece from an outsider from 2010

- Priestley’s England – JB Priestley and English culture (2007) a biography of the man which looks at the society in which he became such a famous name.

- BBC Postscripts; a lovely tribute to the 1941 radio talks Priestley did in which you can hear excerpts

- Priestley’s Finest Hour; Commentary from one of the librarians of the University collection of Priestley’s works

- English Journey; JB Priestley (1936) Gives a sense of the sort of people he met as he travelled around by bus

- The secret people; GK Chesterton. The poem which was apparently used by a lot of Brexiteers

- Rural Rides; William Cobbitt (1830) an early example of a political travelogue by a great radical

Send in the Clowns

The new deadline of 31 October fixed by the EU at Wednesday night's Summit proves that the UK has indeed “lost control”..... 
John Harris, out on his illuminating Brexit travels again, visited the Prime Minister’s constituency of Maidenhead - and is left almost literally tearing his hair at one Conservative activist's refusal to moderate his charge that the Prime Minister was a "traitor"......

Recent posts have explored whether novelists or social historians have the better skill-set to make sense of what is going on these days in England’s green and pleasant land.

I had clearly forgotten about comedians – with the Little Britain characters (of a decade ago) being obvious contenders for the award of those who best exemplify the country….Except there is stiff competition from the Frankie Boyle New World Order insights – let alone the classic Basil Fawlty (of 40 years ago).

Fawlty Towers was, above all, an ensemble piece about isolation. It was a portrait of rage and frustration, an exploration of the impotence that results when the world as we wish it to be is so agonisingly at odds with the world as it is.

It was the Brexit mindset incubating in the shabby surroundings of a down-at-heel hotel that had seen far better days.What is Basil Fawlty, beyond the proprietor of this macabre hotel? Well, he is a snob, for starters: in the first ever episode, "A Touch of Class", he abruptly reverses his customary hostility on learning that a prospective guest is a lord, clearly hoping that a visiting toff will magically improve the hotel’s social standing (one of his first conversational gambits is to rave to Lord Melbury about the properties of fields of wheat, which may perhaps have stuck somewhere in Theresa May’s psyche). 

A man of somewhat mysterious origins, Basil Fawlty is acutely class conscious, at once mistrustful of the working classes and a Labour party that he sees as encouraging their propensity for industrial action, and anxious about his own lack of social status. Professionals – experts, one might say – frighten him; rules and regulations intimidate him; the need to ingratiate himself to foreigners infuriates him. 

The put-upon Spanish waiter, Manuel, is, for Basil, there to receive a last kick – usually up the backside – from imperial Britain. He is another outsider to be pushed, prodded, poked and communicated with through a loudhailer. But the British empire to which Basil wants to return is already a thing of the past; the world more complicated than his blinkered mind can admit. Watch Fawlty’s visceral horror as young people flaunt their sexuality, as the common people dare to holiday in sedate Torquay, and – in a moment that causes Fawlty to literally jump in disbelief – the NHS is staffed by doctors who are black.

Basil’s most celebrated meltdown comes, of course, when he is confronted with a touring group of well-to-do, articulate, friendly Germans. His psyche splits: he knows he must be welcoming, but cannot find the mental space or language that allows him to forget the second world war…….
 If only we had picked up that Basil – far from being a glimpse into the past – was a snapshot of the future, we might have been able to do something about it.

For the more cerebral amongst us, however, there is another, equally hallowed and longer running, series which captured the belief system at the heart of this blessed land – Yes Minister – which graced our television screens for most of the 1980s. There indelibly is Perfidious Albion in drag – the foibles of the political class exposed for all to see

What we didn’t know at the time was that the brilliant creator of the series – Anthony Jay – had based his script on the theories of the “public choice” economists who promulgated the view that all “public servants” were serving….their own interests…..

In  other words, the series was laying the ground for the neoliberal doctrine which has led to such cynicism about politics….(the last link is to a powerful short article supporting this thesis)

Despite this, I am a great admirer of Anthony Jay’s work which encompassed some great non-fictions books. “Management and Machiavelli” (1969) enthused me no end (I was battling a traditional bureaucracy at the time) - and he “almost single-handedly resurrected the academic study of that 15^th century genius. And Jay followed it up with an equally brilliant book – “Corporation Man” – based on his observations of the BBC…… His talents even extended to tossing off elegant guides to running an effective meetings! Indeed some of my more regular readers will know that I have been known to use his “Democracy, Bernard, it must be stopped” when discussing the workings of the political class. For my money, the article can’t be bettered…

I once found an edited transcript to the entire Yes Minister series which I left behind in Sofia but was delighted to find the entire work here for my permanent perusal!

Update

The role of the comic or jester in politics seems to be in the air these days since there were a couple of learned discussions of the issue this month – on both sides of the Atlantic. First, the NYR Daily gave us this nice walk down Memory Lane - What Koestler knew about jokes

William Davis is a very serious policy wonk whose The Funny Side of Politics also came to my attention only after this post. It surprised me in making no reference to Arthur Koestler who famously explored the dynamics of the joke in 1949 in the first part of Insight and Outlook – an inquiry into the common foundations of science, art and social ethics and updated his thoughts in The Act of Creation, (1964) devoting 100 pages to an exposition on The Jester. It mist have been the second book that I read in the 1960s and remember being bowled over by it.

His approach continues to attract attention as can be seen in this nice comparison with Bergson a few years back and this rather more ponderous  25 page analysis of his theory from the 1980s  

And, while we’re on the subject of politics as entertainment, let’s not forget Neil Postman’s brilliant Amusing Ourselves to Death; (1985) and Jerry Mander’s Four Arguments for the elimination of television;  (1978).

LRB also gave us a few years ago this great overview of the English satiric tradition - Sinking into the Sea - which took as its cue a little book entitled "The Wit and Wisdom of Boris Johnson" edited by Harry Mount

spring cleaning - with a difference

Spring cleaning is generally a chore but can, if serendipity is in the air, be a pleasure – particularly if the focus of removal is .......books. Space needs to be created in the cluttered shelves if new finds are to have a home…. 
Getting rid of books which had disappointed is the easy part – so no question about recent buys which had let me down – eg Snyder’s The Road to Unfreedom; Euan Davies’ “Post-Truth”; and Craig Oliver’s “Unleashing Demons” although I should probably take another look at Slavoj Zizek’s “The Courage of Hopelessness”, much as his style annoys me. (the last link by the way is to a real skewer of a review by novelist Will Self) which helps direct the book into the reject category…

I also have quite a few titles from the Lonely Planet and Footprint series – particularly France, Italy and Turkey…..but also an enticing couple on India and Andalucia

I thought it would be a simple matter to evict the titles which had been lurking unopened for several years but She Who Must Be Obeyed likes her stock of books about the operation of the EU which go back almost 25 years and includes, for example, Keith Middlemas’ Orchestrating Europe (1995) So reprieve is graciously granted these….

Howard Zinn’s  “A People’s History of the United States” causes a minor twinge as it goes – it is such a good read….Laurence Cosse’s “A Novel Bookstore” and “Eva Luna” are both great novels but don’t fall into the category of books which should be reread    particularly when I still haven’t done justice to the likes of Dostoyevski, Conrad or gone back to reread Aldous Huxley and HG Wells (eg his "The New Machiavelli")

But before I release Paul Mason’s Postcapitalism or John Carey’s The Unexpected Professor – an Oxford Life in Books, I would like a last few minutes with them – providing, that is, they are destined for a good home!! 
A couple of self-help books also could do with a quick skim before they join the haul of a dozen or so books which I will now offer up to friends…

But, as I’ve been carrying out this exercise, I’ve been very aware of how many of the 400 books in my virtual library are also still not properly read – and, more to the point, offer much more powerful reads than most of the titles in bookshops these day…..
So there’s another project for me – it is a matter of a few hours to transfer the url to my blog (uploading any which are no longer available to my website).

The pity, however, is that the world doesn’t know what an amazing resource/library my blog and website is…..Time perhaps for some marketing??

Books which can be immediately downloaded in full – just click on the title (UPDATED)
New Entries

Political Order and Political Decay; Francis Fukuyama (2014). The second volume (which can be downloaded in full!!) of Fukuyama’s magnum opus. Its introduction summarises the first volume – and the opening chapters set out his framework showing the link between economic, social and political development and how ideas about legitimacy have shaped our understanding of the three basic building blocks of “modern” government – “the state”, “rule of law” and “democratic accountability” (see the figure at p43)

This first chapter spells out how very different social conditions and traditions in the various continents have affected the shape and integrity of government systems (The sequencing of bureaucracy and challenge to political power is of particular interest)

Politics and Governance in the UK; Michael Moran (2005) is actually a textbook – aimed at undergraduates - from one of the best UK political scientists whose focus was much wider than most such academics. Somehow such people are clearer writers than those with narrow specialisms. 
Given the breadth of his reading and the originality of his thought, it's ideal reading (even at 500 pages) for a foreign audience 

Original Titles

Against Power Inequalities – reflections on the struggle for inclusive communities; Henry Tam (2010) One of these rare book aimed at activists but written by an academic… Positively inspiring

Capitalism and its Economics – a critical history; Douglas Dowd (2000). The Pluto Press is a rare British leftist publisher which ensures that its titles are clearly written – since it is aiming not at academics but the committed citizen.

The Economics of the 1% - how mainstream economics serves the rich, obscures reality and distorts policy, John Weeks (2014) One of the small bunch of economics titles I strongly recommend

The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People; Stephen Covey (1989) I have been recommending this book to change-agents since its publication (and often giving a version translated into a foreign language). It is, of course, the sort of self-help book despised by bien-pensants – but, as I say, it’s well worth study….

The Primacy of Politics – social democracy and the making of the 20^th Century;  Sheri Berman (2006)

I’m a despairing social democrat and find it ironic that one of the best treatments of the subject is by an American academic

A Brief History of NeoLiberalism; David Harvey (2005) One of these essential books….a good review is here http://rebels-library.org/files/d3Thompson-1.pdf

The Biographical Dictionary of Dissenting Economists; ed P Arestis (1992) Don’t be deceived by the humble title – this is fascinating stuff…History is, as someone once said, written by the victors. I had heard of few of the almost 100 individuals in this book (although I was taught by 2 – Meek and Nove) but it tells the story of those whose courage deserves to be remembered

How to change the World  - reflections on Marx and Marxism; Eric Hobsbawm (2011) Like most people, I tend to be put off by those who talk about Marx. This is my loss, I readily agree…and Hobsbawm is one of the few people who could persuade me to lift my self-imposed cynicism on the subject….

The Fifth Discipline- the art and practice of the learning organisation; Peter Senge (1990) A seminal book which started a long-lasting fascination with “organizational learning” (personal note - in the 80s I even wrote a master’s thesis on the subject!)
Building the Bridge as you walk on it – a guide for leading change; Robert Quinn (2004) With “Change the World”, one of my all-time favourites. Before attempting the entire book, you might find this summary useful; as well as this excerpt from the first chapter.

Decisions. Decisions…….

A daughter’s career dilemma raises the question of how well served we are by the literature on decision-making. With the usual serendipity, I had just bought from the second-hand English bookshop here "Decisive – how to make better decisions in Life and Work" (2013) whose focus is actually a bit more on the commercial world – although it does give examples of more solitary decision-making. It is actually one of no less than 89 books which one site offers on decision-making

And I had already noticed that the bookshelves are being increasingly swamped by books by psychologists divulging in numbing detail their various experiments and how they might help us improve our personal decision-making.

I blame populiser Malcolm Gladwell - for the success of his 2005 "Blink – the power of thinking without thinking" about which a contemporary reviewer wrote -

Malcolm Gladwell’s fevered new book, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking is evangelical in a got-religion kind of way, with Gladwell praising a stratagem he calls “thin-slicing” — using the smallest amount of information possible to make decisions. In fact he’s wandering through territory staked out by Herbert Simon fifty years ago when he wrote about “bounded rationality,” as well as by practitioners of a branch of psychology called “heuristics and biases,” and by evolutionary biologists and economists and neuroscientists and philosophers and those ancient taxonomists who classified cognition as either intuition or reason. It’s a long literature, and hey! who has time for it?

The result, ironically, of this embarrassment of riches is to make it increasingly difficult to find the book on the subject which might best fit a particular person at a particular point. Of course, you can find lots of reviews of such books – but they are of a single book and give no overall assessment of the field..  And those most capable of doing such comparative assessments would never attempt it...for fear of the damage it would do their professional or academic reputations….”did you hear that old so and so actually reviewed a clutch of self-help books??? What is the world coming to…??”

I can’t say I am all that decisive myself – things panned out well for me...so I tend to a more fatalistic philosophy….Que sera sera. But the reference to Herbert Simon in the review above reminds me that I do have form in this field of decision-making…..Back in the 1980s I took a part-time MSc in the country’s first degree course in Policy Analysis in which Simon and others such as Etzioni loomed large….I even, in 2002, wrote a Manual on the subject – for Slovak senior civil servants!

The New Labour government of 1997 made the subject a sexy one – although the manuals its policy unit spawned were still rationalistic…..it was not until the mid 2000s that I got a copy of what remains for me far and away the most satisfactory (less rationalistic) treatment - Policy Paradox -the art of political decision-making by Deborah Stone

A post last autumn noted the explosion of interest the last decade has seen in efforts to change people’s behavior – initially it seemed by governments although subsequent revelations demonstrated the extent to which big business had been successfully using algorithms to influence our social behavior…

My plea

So my plea to editors of book sections and of Literary journals is – please don’t look down on these popular books on decision-making….there are a lot of readers out there who would value some guidance to the literature!

Background Reading

Decisive - how to make better decisions in life and Work; C and D Heath (2013) 

https://fs.blog/2015/06/books-on-decision-making/

https://epdf.tips/queue/handbook-of-decision-making.html

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/01/21/the-art-of-decision-making

Blink – the power of thinking without thinking  - the full read

The Art of Decision Making; Helen Drummond (2001)

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1972/10/19/cooling-it/

https://readingraphics.com/book-summary-decisive/

The sculptures which heads the post were found in Cernavoda on the border between Romania and Bulgaria and date from 6,000 BC ie the oldest of their sort.... 

Memorable Texts

Rereading a book after a gap of 50 years can be a grave disappointment – that was certainly the case for me recently when I was able to download Stan Andreski’s Social Sciences as Sorcery which I had read in the 1970s. What I had remembered as a series of caustic witticisms turned out to be rather belaboured and cheap digs..  

Thanks to researchgate, I am currently rereading with a great deal of pleasure a book which made a huge impact on me in the early 60s - during my Politics and Economics course at the University of Glasgow. The Twenty Years’ Crisis is the first classic of what was to become the prestigious discipline of International Relations. 

It opens with the fascinating story of how any field of study generally starts with a utopian stage - which focuses on the ideal or how things should be, eg the study of gold for example started with alchemy. Only after major disappointments and no little strife do people move on to adopt a more scientific approach. Thus the high hopes with which the 20^th Century started were dashed by the horror of the First World War – paving the way for the efforts in the 20s and 30s to “end all war”. “The Twenty Years’ Crisis” was written not just to challenge such naivety – but to explain it. It was at the printers on the very day in 1939 that the Second World War was declared…

What was it about Carr’s writing – almost 60 years ago – that gave his words such impact then and now? At the time I know I was also reading Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932) which also left a lasting impact. It must have been the bluntness with which the doctrine of Realism was spelled out in the two books – against the chimera of utopianism which had been so well taken apart by Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies (1944) 

Another important – if less memorable - book in the course was “Ideology and Utopia” (1954) by Karl Mannheim, an early text on the sociology of knowledge…. 

The texts in the Economics part of the programme offered no such exciting reading - with one noticeable exception – Schumpeter’s powerful Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942)

All in all, it’s perhaps not surprising that I emerged from my studies as a reformist convinced of the benefits of Fabianism….Ironic that my LSE tutor on the political sociology MSc programme I briefly enrolled in should turn out to be Ralph Miliband of Parliamentary Socialism fame (1961) - but even more ironic that his two sons should in the 2000s rise to such heights in the party he despised.

And if you think these titles were dated even for the 1960s, that was all that universities could offer in those days – even if JK Galbraith used the term “The Affluent Society” for his famous 1958 book. SM Wolin’s Politics and Vision – continuity and innovation in western political thought was quite exceptional as a 1960 textbook which was given pride of place in our reading list…

What is History? is based on lectures Carr gave in 1960 and contains a sentence which has stayed with me for half a century….   

facts are like fish swimming about in a vast and sometimes inaccessible ocean; and what we catch will depend partly on chance, but mainly on what part of the ocean we choose to fish in and what tackle we chooses to use - these two factors being, of course, determined by the kind of fish we want to catch. By and large, we will get the kind of facts we want

I mused recently about what it was that accounted for the originality of good writing – suggesting that straddling of boundaries (whether national or intellectual) does help give an extra dimension to one’s understanding. Carr was a Brit through and through but straddled the worlds of the civil service (Foreign Office); journalism (Deputy Editor of The Times no less) and academia. It’s increasingly rare to find such career combinations these days – which is very much our loss!!

update; https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2019/05/eh-carr-what-is-history-truth-subjectivity-facts

The crayon drawing which adorns this text is by Grigor Naidenov - one of my favourite Bulgarian artists of the first half of the 20th century, well known for his aquarelle cafe scenes...

Rising – or falling – to the Occasion?

The question for today – April Fool’s Day - is how well served the Brits have been during this past 3 years of the Brexit saga by their “opinion-makers” – or “the chattering class” made up by their MPs, journalists and intellectuals?

Richard North – the author in 2015 of the 400 page bluebrint Flexcit - has been consistently disdainful of the ignorance shown by MPs of the technicalities of the various options, reminding us of the scale of the research facilities they have at their disposal if only they would use them properly. And, given the way North’s plan was ignored both before and after the referendum, he is clearly entitled to his disgruntlement. Here he takes apart those who contributed to the government’s third defeat on 29 March. And how he assessed the qualities of the various options MPs drafted in the first of the historic sessions of indicative votes they held on the 27th
By way of comparison, this is how one of the Guardian journalists set the scene. 

But it is contempt which is the dominant tone of most commentators eg of this diatribe last week against the political class; and this TLS comment on Parliamentarians – although “grammar of Brexit” is less caustic.

A great new blog

Context Matters is a fascinating blog I have just discovered – with intermittent posts written by ex-pat Jonathan Story - Emeritus Professor of International Political Economy at INSEAD at Fontainebleau – joining  it in 1974. He does great book reviews – often on recondite matters….see this recent one on a couple of academic books about German politics .

He is also one of the most articulate enthusiasts for Brexit – set out in one recent series

And last week’s post assessing the state of affairs was, as always, a great read.

Almost uniquely he gave us a summary of the key points of Theresa May’s deal with the EU

Titbit of the week

I have just come across a 1972 novel which anticipated Brexit! It’s the last novel written by the famous Daphne du Maurier – “Rule Britannia” It's a rather dystopian affair which actually involves a referendum (a device which had never been used at that time) a by the US!nd involves a takeover

Are Literary Magazines up to the Task?

Although I’m not a fan of newspapers, I did succumb recently to an offer from Le Monde – even if I miss the smell of the newsprint and its footnotes. But it is to journals I turn for serious reading - some two years ago I shared quite a long list of journals worth reading which is probably due an update. Here in Romania I often buy “Lettre Internationale”…..whose woodcuts are a great attraction. “Le Nouveau Magazine Litteraire” is also a regular purchase – sadly, German literary journals are not easily available so I have to make do with the German version of Lettre Internationale.

At the moment I actually have internet subscriptions to no fewer than 3 journals the New York Review of Books; the London Review of Books; and Political Quarterly

A venerable journal acquires a new editor

But the spark which ignites this particular post was my purchase recently of a couple of copies of the Times Literary Supplement (or TLS) – which have started to appear in Bucharest’s great little English bookshop “Carturesti and Friends”.

TLS is a venerable English institution – if not quite as old (est 1902) as its parent The Times which began in 1788 and was, until the late 1970s, very much the paper of the British elite whose seriousness was immediately evident by the closeness of the script and the lack of photographs. Indeed, until 1966 the front page was devoted to small advertisements of interest to the monied classes. All of this changed in 1981 when Rupert Murdoch acquired the newspaper after which its reputation may have declined but by 2005 its circulation had more than doubled (to 600k). Presently its circulation is only 300k

The Times Literary Supplement (TLS) I knew of old had repellent elitist tones but was then the only regular journal (weekly) devoted to books but, in the 1970s and 1980s, it was “New Society, “The Listener” and “Encounter” which attracted – and whose passing (some 30 years ago) I deeply regret. Each, in their distinctive ways, had a breadth and sensitivity which few other cultural mags seem capable of these days. I daresay that says more about me than the mags…..You can still taste the delights of “Encounter” in its archives which can be accessed here

But a strange happened in 1978 – a newspaper strike put The Times and TLS off the streets for almost a year. And into the empty space jumped a new title – initially as a pull out in the New York of Books. It was called the “London Review of Books” (or LRB) – a bi-monthly which now has a circulation of almost double that of TLS. The precise details of all this are set out in this nice little story in The Financial Times. What I had forgotten was that another title also jumped into the gap – and one which is also going strongly, the monthly Literary Review. But it is the LRB which has engaged my affections – confirmed whenever I buy the odd copy of TLS.

However the TLS acquired a new editor a couple of years ago – Stig Abell, a 39 year-old who had….wait for it….been the editor of the most offensive british tabloid newspaper – the Sun - for a couple of years…as well as a presenter on London Radio.

If the 2 copies I'v e read recently are typical, then he seems already to have made a difference to the staid journal I remember.....and I am tempted to write to him to make some points along the following lines.......   

I am an unashamed bibliophile – but of non-fiction - who has, however, become so concerned with the combination of scale and quality that I suggested recently (only half jokingly) that non-fiction books needed to be rationed. I now look very carefully at the introductions (and “Further Reading”) of books I pick up - to see what awareness the author (and indeed the publisher) reveals of the cynicism with which many of us readers approach this latest addition to our burden of reading. Ideally I would now like to see a typology – a short review of the relevant literature - to give me the confidence that the author is master of the field and has a mind open to the points at both ends of the relevant spectrum…..I certainly need to read a few pages of the text to give me a sense of the clarity and sensitivity of the writing 

And this is where we need the help of the literary journals…whose reviewers should be more obviously be asking these questions on our behalf – and exerting some pressure for answers on publishers and editors (with the exception of Simon Winder do editors exist these days?)

 But it is the European dimension which, not surprisingly, I find missing in the British journals….with the exception of the towering figure of Perry Anderson to whom I refer fairly regularly here.… Perry Anderson deserves much more credit for being one of the very few English-speaking writers whose articles (mainly in LRB) pay serious attention to contemporary debates on the European continent – whether France, Germany, Italy or even Turkey. They are collected in a version The New Old World which can be downloaded simply by clicking on the title. 

A UK outside the EU is in particular need of such writing – but has enough bilingual journalists (eg Olterman) and translators of the quality of Michael Hoffman – let alone polymaths such as Clive James of blessed “Cultural Amnesia - to make it possible. They just need a bit more encouragement from the editors of literary journals…

In the meantime I am just grateful to the EC for its continued support of the Eurozine venture which brings together the best of some 70 European cultural journals. And point to Courrier International as an example of a good selection into the French language of quality global journalism. Pity no one thought of making a bid some years ago for European funding for a journal giving us a sense of how different European countries were dealing with the big issues in their societies…..

Drama in the Commons

Brexit is apparently delayed - at least until April 12. And the headless chickens now have control of the farmyard ie MPs are now attempting to get their colleagues to support an alternative strategy from that of the government’s - which has twice in recent weeks been voted down by huge majorities. 

Even some of the hardline Brexiteers who have refused to support the government “deal” are beginning to understand that Brexit could be slipping away from them…..

There are no fewer than 16 different propositions on the official agenda for the House later today – only a few of which will by selected by the Speaker as likely to command wider support. One will be more of a procedural vote – to hold a second referendum. So I shall this afternoon be in thrall to parliamentary television. I watched the last few minutes of the interplay between witnesses and MPs on the Brexit Select Committee and it will be an hour or so before the exchanges start in the Chamber…..

One MP who will not be present is Chris Mullin - who retired in 2010 but whose wry memoirs are among the very few of that genre to attract readers. He occasionally contributes a diary entry to the London Review of Books and gave this insight last year into recent House of Commons’ operations - 

On this Wednesday afternoon, I was struck by the absence of recognisable faces. There were many staffers and officials, but scarcely any MPs. A sad truth dawned on me: for many of the present generation of MPs, the business of Parliament occupies only two days a week. Most out of town MPs travel down on a Monday morning and leave soon after Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday. Anyone who has seen the chamber on a Thursday, or indeed at any time other than Wednesday at midday, will know it is usually embarrassingly empty. The majority of debates and even important statements are thinly attended.
 Increasingly the business of Parliament has to be shoe-horned into the two days on which sufficient MPs can be guaranteed to be present.

It’s not that MPs are lazy; on the contrary, many work long hours. It’s just that holding the government to account appears no longer to be a priority for them. The trend has been noticeable for some years but seems to have accelerated. Part of the explanation is that Brexit has so overwhelmed the business of government and public discourse that there is little legislation of any significance and, as a result, nothing to vote on. Three-line whips on a Wednesday or a Thursday are now virtually unheard of. Sometimes weeks go by without a meaningful vote.
Many MPs have young families to whom they are anxious to return, and constituents and constituency parties expect a great deal more from their elected representative than they used to. Long gone are the days when an MP could get away with a quarterly visit to his constituency, where he would be greeted on arrival by the stationmaster in his top hat. Nowadays an MP is expected to live or, at least, have a base in their constituency and to be highly visible.The facilities available to MPs at the Commons have dramatically improved. The best a new MP could hope for forty years ago was a locker on the library corridor. Postage was strictly rationed and, until the 1960s, MPs were not allowed free phone calls outside London.

The secretarial allowance was introduced in 1969 and gradually morphed into the office costs allowance which, by the late 1980s, was enough to enable MPs to establish constituency offices. Over the years these and other allowances have steadily increased, with the result that the role of an MP has been transformed.
 The downside is that MPs are increasingly constituency-focused and some, especially those who represent poorer areas, have become glorified advice workers, embroiled in issues that in many cases are more properly the province of councillors and local authorities. Some MPs in marginal seats actively prefer to devote their time to acting as fairy godmothers to their constituents. I’m in favour of constituency-based MPs. That’s not the problem. I was one myself. I wonder, however, if the balance has tipped too far. Scrutiny of the executive is what Parliament is supposed to be about……….

John Bercow, Speaker of the Commons since 2009, has proved robust in promoting the rights of Parliament at the expense of the executive, grown overmighty in the last half-century. Up to March this year he had granted a staggering 439 urgent questions, each requiring an appearance, at short notice, by a minister at the dispatch box. This compares with the handful granted by his predecessors. No wonder he is cordially loathed by the government, or that he has earned the grudging respect of backbenchers. 

Another advance has been the rise of the select committees, which were established by the then Leader of the House, Norman St John Stevas, in the first year of Thatcher’s reign. Had she had any idea where the introduction of select committees would lead, she would have strangled them at birth.
They have the power to summon ministers and officials and to poke their noses into any aspect of policy that takes their fancy. This, combined with the televising of Parliament, has made them an important part of the political landscape.
 In recent years they have flexed their muscles in areas previously undreamed of. The only reason we have seen the bankers, or Rupert Murdoch or Philip Green having to account for their sins is that they have been summoned by select committees. These days there is even a committee to which the intelligence and security services are supposed to be accountable – an imperfect one (it reports to the prime minister rather than Parliament and its reports are censored) but light years ahead of where we were thirty years ago, when the public was not even permitted to know the names of the service heads, never mind what they got up to. Chairing a select committee is now remunerated, making it an alternative to a ministerial career. The chair of one of the main select committees has more influence than most junior or middling ministers. 

………………..many MPs can only be bothered to turn up for two days a week. A government that is allowed to function more or less unchallenged will become a law unto itself. And, after all, if MPs don’t take Parliament seriously, why should anyone else?

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/27/take-back-control-brexit-remain-mps-indicative-votes

Update

During this past 3 years it’s been remarkably difficult to find clear and well-written material which would help the concerned citizen understand what was going on….3 months ago I tried to explore the reasons for this shameful state of affairs.

The BBC link at the top of this post is an unusually clear guide to the 16 motions which were tabled by MPs. And the People’s Vote has just published an exceptionally clear Guide – Weighing Up alternative Brexits