Thanet is obviously a place with its own needs and interests, distinct from most of Kent, though somewhat similar to Medway. It needs to be a unitary authority now, and one that trials new forms of democratic engagement. (Local government dysfunction helps the far right here.)
Thanet also needs to rethink its relationship with its rural/agricultural hinterland. At the moment much of it is an intensively farmed wasteland with a ruinous out-of-town shopping centre in the middle. It needs to be joined up to the towns, and to the visitor offer.
A landscape that could host thousands of camping holiday-makers every summer and sell them heirloom fruit and vegetables, bespoke ales and speciality honey is an inaccessible cauliflower factory that is gradually being turned into car-dependent executive estates.
Campsites, barbecue spots, nature reserves and environmentally friendly food production linked to the coast by a network of cycle lines could offer visitors a glimpse of a better way of life and form the basis for a tourist economy that delivers high wages.
This is the sort of thing that preoccupies me on my daily lockdown walks ... How people can start to imagine a future for the places where they live, and take the power needed to make it a reality.
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Politicians can say anything to a nodding journalist, no matter how insultingly stupid and misleading, as long as they use a mind-numbingly banal analogy from daily life to do it. Nation's credit card? Sure. Under the bonnet? Yeah, sounds about right.
A great deal of media culture consists of projecting their own inability to grasp basic concepts onto their audiences: rather than explain how parties interact with the state, which would require thought, they happily go along with framing that is simple, familiar and wrong.
Haha, the public don't care about x! (when x is something that's extremely important, that can only shore up oligarchic power in a formally democratic system when people have no idea what x is, and only have brain dead analogies to go on when they turn to the media to find out.)
Labour's plans to use public-private partnerships for new infrastructure will create endless chokepoints for rent extraction for large investment funds, raising the cost of living for the rest of us, for no other reason than a reflexive desire to serve the rich. As in health ...
... if the workers and the materials exist, we can afford to do it: the means create the money and there is not reason to cede ownership of vital infrastructure. It's a political choice that the Greens, the Social Campaign Group and the rest of the left should loudly reject.
And anyone with an ounce of integrity who has railed against Conservative malfeasance and corruption should do the same. The question 'who owns Britain?' ought to be central to our politics for the next five years.
Just thinking about servility in capitalism when I saw this. If you "dig under the surface" of "centrist dad" as a term of abuse, I'd say it's about having one's opinions shaped - unknowingly - so they're consistent with a relatively privileged place in the social order.
A "centrist dad" is a product of domination, inasmuch as he doesn't know why he believes what he believes. There are plenty of liberal capitalists (some with children!) who understand what they are, how it relates to their beliefs. But the centrist dad is made as if from outside.
If we fear the patriarch because he is a clear-eyed tyrant, we're tempted to despise the centrist dad because he doesn't know what he is, while managing to be incredibly smug about everything.
A month ago I was wondering out loud why the British establishment converged on austerity after 2008 and whether it was part of a coherent class project to protect capital from a population that might have drawn dangerous conclusions from the collapse of economic orthodoxy.
While warbling about the role of the Treasury I was gently prompted by @aerondavis to read his book on the Treasury, and I did. It's well worth a look. I don't think we can yet say for sure whether the Treasury in the 2010s was as clear-eyed as it was in the 1920s.
(For one thing we won't have access to the files for 30 years, assuming nothing untoward happens. The kinds of eye-watering memoranda that Clara Mattei unearthed will be under wraps for a while yet.)
We are drifting into another round of PFI boondoggles, in which energy and other essentials will generate rents for the world's laziest plutocrats. A movement for constitutional reform worth a damn would declare this illegitimate and campaign to stop it.
We *know* we need to invest heavily in renewable energy, in food security, and in all kinds of public infrastructure. There is no reason to rely on private rent seekers to finance it. To repeat, we should make it clear from the outset that any revival of PFI will be reversed.
Labour can give as much free money as it wants to its favoured partners in the private sector. But we must organise to expropriate them all at the earliest opportunity. Otherwise the shiny new economy will be a re-run of the old, and we'll all be working for the same reptiles.
Interesting thread on the composition of panels on Question Time. Two points to note: 1. Lucas appeared more often than Farage because the study begins in 2014. An analysis of 2010-15 had a different result. theguardian.com/news/datablog/…
2. There's a startling absence of trade unionists among regular non-politicians, and an overwhelming preponderance of (right-wing) comment journalists. This results from the labour movement giving up its communicative assets after 1945, putting its trust impartial liberal media.
3. Because the labour movement doesn't have its own media it hasn't trained up nimble and appealing commentator/analysts of its own. This speaks to a profound degeneration of its capacity to protect its members' interests, let alone sponsor a broader social democracy.