Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the idea and experience of Christian pilgrimage in Europe from the 12th to the 15th centuries, which figured so strongly in the imagination of the age. For those able and willing to travel, there were countless destinations from Jerusalem, Rome and Santiago de Compostela to the smaller local shrines associated with miracles and relics of the saints. Meanwhile, for those unable or not allowed to travel there were journeys of the mind, inspired by guidebooks that would tell the faithful how many steps they could take around their homes to replicate the walk to the main destinations in Rome and the Holy Land, passing paintings of the places on their route.
Showing posts with label England. Show all posts
Showing posts with label England. Show all posts
25 February 2021
14 December 2020
TechCrunch: How four European cities are embracing micromobility to drive out cars
Every year, around 2,500 people die prematurely because of air pollution in Paris. Like most European cities, the number one cause of pollution is motorized traffic. [...]
There are two reasons why Paris is an interesting city for mobility experiments. First, the Paris area is the 29th metropolitan area in the world by population density. Georges-Eugène Haussmann initiated some radical urbanization changes in the second half of the 19th century leading to the city’s modern layout — mostly seven-story buildings circled by the ring road. [...]
And this is all due to political will. Vélib’ is a subsidized service. But it’s hard to understand the financial impact of Vélib’ as there are fewer cars on the road, which means that it’s less expensive to maintain roads. Additionally, the impact on pollution and physical activity means that people tend to be healthier, which reduces the pressure on the public health system. [...]
Second, the City of Paris wants to reclaim space. Cars in Paris remain parked 95% of the time. That’s why Paris is going to remove 50% of parking spots. Instead, the city of Paris wants to turn some streets into gardens. There are bigger plans for new parks as well in front of the city hall and between the Eiffel Tower and Trocadéro. [...]
The coronavirus pandemic has acted as a small-scale opportunity for accelerating pedestrian-focused urban remodeling — enabling city authorities to expand Barcelona’s network of bike lanes during the relative quiet of lockdowns, and install some emergency pedestrian zones to expand outdoor space as an anti-COVID-19 measure.
20 September 2020
The Guardian: Tudormania: Why can’t we get over it?
Right now, the Tudors hold the nation in an especially fearsome grip. In the British history section of my local Waterstones, in a not terribly royalist part of London, I measured four shelves of Tudoralia, covering the period from Henry VII’s snatching of the crown on Bosworth field in 1485 to the death of Elizabeth I in 1603. (The next most popular period was the 19th century, with two-and-a-half shelves.) The Tudor titles were mostly variations on a very limited set of themes: The Six Wives of Henry VIII; Henry VIII: King and Court; Elizabeth the Queen; The Elizabethans; Young Henry: the Rise of Henry VIII; Six Wives: the Queens of Henry VIII; Elizabeth’s Women. [...]
The Tudors are the first people in British history into whose eyes we feel we can gaze. We slip into their world – or what we imagine to be their world – with ease. They were the first people to have lived in recognisable houses, rather than in the draughty great halls and militaristic castles of their medieval forebears. There is something comfortingly domestic and ineffably English about these dwellings, which is surely why mock-Tudor has been, since the late 19th century, such a persistently revived vernacular architecture. Some of the inhabitants of these houses had even been women, whose characters were a little more than cyphers (such as the redoubtable matriarch Bess of Hardwick who, with her four husbands, rivalled Henry VIII in marital energy if not murderous tendency). Hans Holbein’s portraits of Henry’s court carry an air of realism verging on the photographic; even those stiff, flat-as-a-pancake Elizabethan portraits of country squires and their be-ruffed wives have something bewitching about them. Unlike their forebears, they spoke what we can recognise as our language, the language crystallised by England’s most towering and inescapable literary figure. [...]
The different ways in which the Tudor period was used by past generations can throw light on the way we see them now. Take the narrative of Hampton Court, which was opened to the public by Queen Victoria. The 19th-century tourist clutching the standard guidebook, published in 1841, would have received a completely different view of the palace from that conveyed today. The palace had “a striking lesson” to teach “on the mutability of human greatness”. Its hero, however, was not Henry VIII or Anne Boleyn, but Cardinal Wolsey. Henry gets short shrift – a single brief chapter, as opposed to Wolsey’s six. The Victorian story was much more invested in the lad who pulled himself up by his bootstraps, attained the chancellorship of England – and “fell a sacrifice to his own ambition”. The message was that worldly desires should be tempered by “humility and piety” – a lesson quite absent from our present dealings with the 16th century, whose protagonists provide spectacle rather than moral instruction. [...]
This secularisation, as well as perhaps a discomfort with the idea of revolution, explains how relatively little thought we give, as a culture, to the following century – the century of the English civil war. Martin Davidson told me that for him and his colleagues at the BBC, historical periods have certain textures; they serve as “story engines” for different kinds of narratives. “This place, this time that we call Tudorland, Tudorville has irresistible ingredients,” he said. “It is sex becomes death, via intrigue … I wish we could do more on the civil war, to be honest. But it’s difficult to find attractive characters, and it doesn’t help that they have zero sex lives,” he said. And, besides, the 17th century is too complex. “In a 60-minute programme, you spend 57 minutes explaining the rump parliament, ship money, the Irish issue.” Had we more confidence in the Westminster parliament now, perhaps, like the Whig historians of the 19th century, we would have more fondness for its 17th-century champions.
2 September 2020
New Scientist: Covid-19 is becoming less deadly in Europe but we don't know why
In England, the proportion of people infected by the coronavirus who later died was certainly lower in early August than it was in late June. Over the period, this infection fatality rate (IFR) dropped by between 55 and 80 per cent, depending on which data set was used, found Jason Oke at the University of Oxford and his colleagues. [...]
Nonetheless, why this is happening isn’t so clear. According to data for England, a larger proportion of younger people are being infected than was happening around the first peak of cases in April, with cases rates for 10-16 August the highest among 15-44 year olds. [...]
The jury is out on whether one variant of the coronavirus, known as D614G, explains why covid-19 is becoming less deadly. Paul Tambyah at the National University of Singapore told Reuters that the rise of the D614G mutation had coincided with drops in death rates in some countries, suggesting that it might be “more infectious but less deadly”.
10 August 2020
Cautionary Tales: The Village of Heroes
Not far from where I grew up, there’s a village called Eyam with a story to tell – a story of a plague, and of tragedy, and of heroism.
That old tale sits easily with stories of our modern response to the pandemic: too many people seem unwilling to suffer the slightest inconvenience to help others.
Has human nature really changed so much? Or might it be that the old story, and the new ones, are leading us astray?
8 July 2020
BBC4 Analysis: Thinking for the Long Term
"The origin of civil government," wrote the Scottish philosopher David Hume in 1739, is that "men are not able radically to cure, either in themselves or others, that narrowness of soul, which makes them prefer the present to the remote."
Today, Hume's view that governments can help societies abandon rampant short-termism and adopt a more long term approach, feels little more than wishful thinking. The "now" commands more and more of our attention - quick fixes are the order of the day. But could that be about to change?
Margaret Heffernan asks whether the current pandemic might be the moment we are forced to rediscover our ability to think long term. Could our ability to emerge well from the current health crisis be dependent, in fact, on our ability to improve our long-term thinking?
Among those taking part: Paul Polman (Co-founder of Imagine and former CEO of Unilever), General Sir Nick Carter (Chief of the Defence Staff), Justine Greening (former Conservative minister and founder of the Social Mobility Pledge), Lord Gus O'Donnell (former head of the Civil Service), Chris Llewellyn Smith (former Director General of CERN), and Sophie Howe (Future Generations Commissioner for Wales).
20 June 2020
Phenomenal World: Trade Wars Are Class Wars
Michael Pettis: Our argument is fairly straightforward: trade cost and trade conflict in the modern era don’t reflect differences in the cost of production; what they reflect is a difference in savings imbalances, primarily driven by the distortions in the distribution of income. We argue that the reason we have trade wars is because we have persistent imbalances, and the reason we have persistent trade imbalances is because around the world, income is distributed in such a way that workers and middle class households cannot consume enough of what they produce. [...]
That's an important difference. Hobson’s interpretation was that there are middle courses between overthrowing the entire system and tolerating exploitative international relationships, and we agree. We don’t argue that we’re in an inevitable crisis of capitalism, but rather that the problems we face can be solved using the kinds of redistributional tools that policymakers have used in the past. [...]
mp: That's why it's interesting to go back to Hobson. He argued that the reason England and other European countries exported capital abroad was not military adventurism, but income inequality. You had incredibly high savings because much of the income was concentrated among the wealthy, and so England had to export those excess savings and the accompanying excess production. Imperialism enabled it to lock in markets for both of those exports. Hobson’s prescription was that increasing the wages of English workers such that they’re able to consume what they produce would make imperialism unnecessary—and this is where I see the connection to today. [...]
mk: Right. The Hartz reforms were named after Peter Hartz, who was also the head of HR at Volkswagen. During this period, there was a belief shared on both sides that the only way to preserve employment and induce growth was through a combination of wage and hour cuts. Much of this was rooted in the way German unification occurred. The belief was that there would be this incredible growth story when you brought West German technology, management, capitalism, and democracy to a new population with a shared language and history. But for a variety of reasons it didn't work out that way. The German government lost a lot of money underwriting this whole process and that soured a lot of people on the possibilities for fiscal policy to generate growth.
13 June 2020
The Guardian: Labour councils launch slavery statue review as another is removed
All statues in Labour councils across England and Wales, and across London, will be examined for links to slavery and plantation owners, their leaders have said, as an east London authority took one down off its plinth on Tuesday evening. [...]
Earlier, the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, said the capital’s landmarks – including street names, the names of public buildings and plaques – would be reviewed by a commission to ensure they reflect the capital’s diversity, with a view to removing those with links to slavery after Black Lives Matter protesters tore down a statue of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol.
In Manchester, the council announced a city-wide review of all the statues in Manchester “to understand their history and context”. Councillor Luthfur Rahman said members of the public would also be asked for suggestions on “missing” statues. [...]
Pressed on Sky News about where to draw the line, given Winston Churchill held some racist views, Khan said the cases of Churchill, Gandhi and Malcolm X showed that many great historical figures were not perfect and history should be taught “warts and all”. But there were clear-cut figures such as those actively involved in the slave trade and ownership who should not be celebrated, the mayor said. [...]
Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, has said it was “completely wrong” for protesters to pull down the statue of Colston and dump it in the harbour in Bristol – putting him at odds with some MPs on the left of his party – while emphasising the monument should never have been there in the first place.
3 April 2020
The Guardian: 'Thank you Greta': natural solutions to UK flooding climb the agenda
The UK’s flooding this year is a story of desperation – but also hope, says John Hughes, development manager at Shropshire Wildlife Trust, who works in the valley. Following widespread acceptance of the climate and ecological emergency, Hughes believes people are increasingly looking to nature for solutions. [...]
“I say thanks very much Extinction Rebellion and Greta [Thunberg] – you’ve done a great job. It’s the job we’ve been trying to do for 50 years. We need to take a holistic view – land can do many, many things.”
In the past, flood plains acted like sponges that soaked up water and stopped it flowing headlong into settlements downstream. Wetter habitats provided useful materials such as willow and reeds for baskets and thatched roofs. However, natural wet woodland, neutral grassland, fens and marshes were ironed out of the postwar landscape and now cover just 11% of English and Welsh flood plains. Intensive agriculture covers 70%. [...]
The problem is that reducing food production is currently counterintuitive to most farmers’ business plan, says Dr Marc Stutter, a soil and water scientist at the James Hutton Institute. “The biggest thing we’re fighting against is that the farmers and their fathers and grandfathers have been very proud of the way they’ve brought the land into condition for crops and quite rightfully so. Their parents have spent a lot of effort draining the land and now there’s someone telling them they want pockets of it to be wet up again.
29 March 2020
BBC4 Thinking Allowed: Serial killers (21 Oct 2019)
Serial killers: Laurie talks to Ian Cummins, Senior Lecturer in Social Work at the University of Salford, about the media and cultural responses to the child murders committed by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley two decades earlier. The Moors Murders were to provide an unfortunate template for future media reporting on serial killing, including the crimes committed by Peter Sutcliffe - the Yorkshire Ripper - as described in a new study by Louise Wattis, Senior Lecturer in Criminology and Sociology at Teesside University. Sutcliffe murdered 13 women in the North of England between 1975 and 1980. Dr Wattis discusses the way in which these crimes shed light on how we think about fear of crime, gender and serial murder and the representation of victims and sex workers.
15 February 2020
The Log Books: "Crashpad needed"
Runaways and rough sleepers, communes and flatshares, crashpads and catastrophes... Stories about home feature heavily in Switchboard’s log books. Tash and Adam listen to LGBT+ people who searched for somewhere to live in the 1970s, and hear about the persistent problem of homelessness in 2019.
The Guardian: ‘Escaping the madness’: steep rise in Londoners moving to northern England
Sheffield, Leeds and Newcastle upon Tyne are experiencing the fastest rises among northern cities in the number of escapees arriving from the capital, according to separate data from the Office for National Statistics, which indicates a possible shift east of the London escape route from the well-worn path to Manchester. Sheffield had a 12% rise in Londoners moving to buy or rent in 2018, followed by Newcastle and Leeds, which both recorded 5% increases.
Dramatically cheaper housing – the ratio between house prices and income is 5.8 in Sheffield and Newcastle but 12.9 in London – is a key factor. But the lure of a slower, less work-focused and healthier lifestyle is also driving decisions to “escape the London madness”, as one leaver put it. [...]
In 2018 London lost population through internal migration, with 340,498 residents leaving for other parts of the UK, while 237,270 people arrived from elsewhere in the UK, ONS figures showed. Most go to to just outside the capital, but the biggest savings on housing costs are in the north. The average house price last year was £475,000 in London, £132,000 in Liverpool, £155,000 in Newcastle and £164,000 in Sheffield. [...]
Municipal leaders are trying to capitalise on the trend. Sheffield city council has been using the term “north shoring” to try to attract more employers to move out of London, promising considerably cheaper office rents, and the prospect of 20,000 graduates each year from its two universities. Leeds has attracted Channel 4’s new base, where 250 people have started work, and a new hub for HM Revenue and Customs is due to open later this year with 6,000 employees.
24 January 2020
UnHerd: Rural Cornwall is right to be anxious
Transport is both expensive and irregular. When I lived in Carnyorth — you will not have heard of it — there was a bus every two hours on Sunday to Penzance for £5 return. Here, if you want to go anywhere, you must have a car. Even the committed activists of Extinction Rebellion have cars, or they could not call themselves activists, because they would be marooned at home. It’s an hour by car to Newquay, where Flybe flies, or three hours by public transport. The train from Penzance to Paddington is regular, but it takes five hours and 20 minutes to reach London. [...]
It is worse for the Isles of Scilly, which can be cut off for weeks. Fog and wind stop the helicopters and the freight ship the Gry Maritha getting through. This constituency — St Ives — declared last in the general election of 2019, due to the weather and, later on the mainland, because the counting hall had to be cleared for badminton. The Isles of Scilly are feared by mariners. Four naval warships foundered in October 1707 on the Western Rocks, the Crim Rocks and Bishop’s Rock, killing almost 2000 sailors. [...]
If we are to grow our economy after Brexit, we need a motorway, cheaper and more regular public transport, and we need some variant of the horribly named Flybe which the Government has saved, at least for now. Let people who are less close to poverty share the burden of reducing carbon emissions. It is easy to mock rural anxiety from London; but you know where such laughter has led before.
19 December 2019
New Left Review: Zion Lights, Hot Earth Rebels
Yes. Its precursor was a group called Rising Up, started eighteen months before by some long-standing direct-action campaigners. There was Gail Bradbrook, who’d been involved in environmental campaigns since she was a teenager and had led anti-fracking protests around Stroud in Gloucestershire. There was Simon Bramwell, a builder and bush-craft teacher, who founded the Stroud-based Compassionate Revolution group in 2015 with Gail and George Barda, an Occupy and Greenpeace activist. Roger Hallam was studying civil disobedience at King’s College, London; originally he’d been an organic farmer in Wales, but he could see the impact of climate change on his crops and began reading up about it. Clare Farrell was a fashion designer, she does a lot of xr’s art work—the block printing, for example. Robin Boardman was a student from Bristol, a bit younger than the rest. [...]
The starting point was the need to find a more effective form of protest than what we’d all been doing to date. Pretty much none of this came out of our own innovative thinking. It was about looking at the research, adding up the facts. Conventional A-to-B marches don’t work: millions of us demonstrated against the Iraq War and it didn’t make any difference. A key piece of research was Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan’s Why Civil Resistance Works. They take data from hundreds of 20th-century social movements and analyse what they did right and what they did wrong. The most successful ones, those that had their demands met, used forms of decentralized, non-violent civil disobedience—large-scale direct action. The tipping-point, Chenoweth and Stephan found, was to get 3.5 per cent of the population involved. That’s not a huge number—it’s about two million in the uk. But it’s not just about getting them to demonstrate, because unfortunately that doesn’t make any difference. It’s about getting them involved at a higher level. If two million people bring the capital city to a stand-still, what can the government do? They can’t arrest that many people. We saw that in the April and October Rebellions this year: even when the number of people arrested was in the thousands, the police and the judicial system were overwhelmed. [...]
Number one is for the government to tell the truth about the climate and ecological emergency; we need the state to mobilize all-out, like in war-time, to halt the crisis. The second demand is to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions to net zero by 2025 and to halt bio-diversity loss—the 2019 ibpes Report on bio-diversity says that one in seven species is now at risk of extinction. Third, a Citizens’ Assembly on climate and ecological justice, to decide which policies to push forward. This would be a jury-like structure, chosen by lot to get a cross-section of society. Parliament will remain, but it will play an advisory role to the Citizens’ Assembly.
16 December 2019
The Guardian: Tactical voting was set to be Remainers’ saviour, so what went wrong?
Why so few successes? It was not the fault of Deltapoll’s data. Almost everywhere, they identified the correct challenger. Most dramatically, they showed rightly that the Liberal Democrats were snapping at Dominic Raab’s heels, despite the foreign secretary’s apparently impregnable 23,000 majority. [...]
Deltapoll’s data showed what tactical voting was up against. Lib Dem supporters were reluctant to help Corbyn become prime minister. Likewise, Tory Remainers feared voting for a badly led Lib Dem party that might support Corbyn. These Tories preferred a Brexit Britain governed by Johnson to a stop-Brexit government led by Corbyn.
The big lesson is that tactical voting needs not just a common enemy, but a broadly common vision, shared by the Labour and Lib Dem leaders. This was the case with Tony Blair and Paddy Ashdown in 1997; it was not with Corbyn and Swinson last week.
8 December 2019
The Guardian: 'I haven’t seen a healthy version of marriage': children of divorce on the lasting impact
The legislation transformed society, changed attitudes, emancipated women, and arguably saved many children from the emotional damage of being raised in miserable homes. According to the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics, an estimated 42% of all marriages in England and Wales currently end in divorce; and in 2017, 62% of divorces of opposite sex couples were on the petition of the wife.
Divorce is now so common that its impact on children and their emotional wellbeing can sometimes be downplayed. Yet almost every child of divorce I have spoken to acknowledges that it has shaped the way they see the world. It feels almost childish to speak of the emotional legacy of my own parents’ divorce, how it left its mark on me in a hundred perceptible and imperceptible ways; after all, it was so many years ago. Yet however well you do it, divorce determines who we become as adults. [...]
As we near the end of the 2010s, there has been significant progress in attitudes towards divorce. Gay marriage has been legalised, and blended, non-traditional families are increasingly the norm. Even Prince Harry married a divorcee. In April, the government announced fresh plans to introduce no-fault divorce – though it is hard to know if and when this will happen. The reforms will include a minimum timeframe of six months from petition stage to a marriage being ended, designed to allow couples to reflect on their decision. They will also prevent people from refusing a divorce if their spouse wants one.
1 September 2019
UnHerd: Was it The Sun wot won Brexit?
The trouble is that it’s very hard to study. If you see that readers of Right-wing papers are more likely to vote for Right-wing parties, you can’t conclude that the one causes the other; it could just be that people who vote for Right-wing parties enjoy reading that they’re right to do so.
That’s why there’s been some excitement about a new report, not yet published or peer-reviewed but available in preprint form. Its authors saw the opportunity for a natural experiment: the impact of Merseyside’s post-Hillsborough boycott of The Sun on Eurosceptic attitudes in the region. [...]
I am pretty sceptical. For one thing, when you look in the paper at the graph of attitudes towards Europe on Merseyside, Euroscepticism was declining pre-1989, and it continued to decline post-1989. There doesn’t seem to be a noticeable change at or shortly after 1989 itself; it levels off in the 1990s. The “control” group – a “synthetic Merseyside”, or conglomeration of other English areas weighted for similarity to the Liverpool area – also declines in Euroscepticism, just rather more slowly, and then increases for a bit in the early 1990s. Eyeballing it, at least, it doesn’t scream “Hillsborough did this” to me; it looks like some longer-term trend. [...]
In general, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Labour was the more Eurosceptic of the two main parties. And, in Liverpool in particular, the Labour council was heavily influenced by Derek Hatton of the Militant Tendency, who voted No in 1975. It was only in 1983 that Neil Kinnock made Labour explicitly pro-Europe, but Militant and Bennite Labourites still fought back (Denis Healey and others formed the Labour Against The Euro group as late as 2002, although that was specifically against joining the single currency). Meanwhile, Tory Eurosceptics became ever more vocal over the same period.
20 August 2019
UnHerd: Will Boris lose his seat?
The constituency of Uxbridge and South Ruislip, created in 2010 out of the old Uxbridge seat, was once deemed safe, if not rock-solid, Conservative territory. Between its two incarnations, it has returned a Tory at every general election since 1970. But things are suddenly less comfortable for the Tories here. In 2017, the seat saw a 13.6% swing to Labour and Johnson’s majority halved to just over 5,000 – the smallest for any prime minister since 1924. Labour needs only a 5.4% swing to win next time out, and is going all out to achieve it. [...]
The number of benefits claimants is significantly lower than the average across the UK, and the high street seems, unlike many across Britain today, to bustle with activity and trade. Resistance to HS2 and a third runway at Heathrow – both of which will impact on the constituency fundamentally – is widespread, with many residents mildly irritated that their MP’s own opposition has been less than unequivocal. In fact, chatting to people here, it is obvious that the new prime minister cuts as divisive a figure locally as he does across the country. [...]
The Tories are determined to ensure that Johnson does not become their first party leader since Arthur Balfour in 1906 to lose his seat. They will no doubt throw everything into protecting their star player. For its part, Labour has been co-ordinating a series of “Unseat Boris Johnson” days, and the grassroots organisation Momentum has promised to flood the place with activists.
2 August 2019
UnHerd: Rochester Cathedral is full of balls
Setting up a crazy golf course in the nave of Rochester cathedral is all about inclusive access and generosity of welcome. And those who decry the idea are elitist snobs whose treasured sense of musty ecclesiastical silence certainly hasn’t proved to be box-office for ordinary people. After all, weren’t cathedrals originally also meeting places of market-place chaos and light-hearted ribaldry. A Christianity that takes seriously the incarnation has no need of protecting the sacred from the profane. Cathedrals should stop taking themselves so seriously. Throw open the doors. Give people a little of what they want. [...]
But we have developed this extraordinary sense that boredom is some sort of moral failing. The philosopher Lars Svendsen – author of a Philosophy of Boredom – makes the interesting argument that the idea of boredom being a moral failing is something that comes about with modernity. That in having replaced a belief in God with a belief in the self as the ultimate source of meaning, modern boredom is a bit like a loss of faith in the self’s ability to generate its own meaning. It is almost as if bored people have let themselves down. This is modernity’s equivalent to loss of faith. [...]
Crazy golf in the nave is not, strictly speaking, a desecration of the holy. The holy has no need of our protection; still less the protection of pompous priests and bossy vergers. But a space for silence and the possibility of prayer does need careful ring-fencing. Where else in our noisy culture is one able deliberately to sit quietly and contemplate the meaning of our existence?
22 July 2019
The Guardian: The invention of Essex: how a county became a caricature
More than just brashly consumerist, Essex was also painted as a hotbed of bigotry, the place where white people moved to escape parts of London that were no longer white enough for them. In 1994, Lord Inglewood, a pro-European Conservative MEP, told a newspaper that the “Essex view of conservatism” was threatening the “more generous, less xenophobic historic tradition”. (Inglewood also blamed the influence of Essex for increasing “public bad manners, aggressiveness and yobbishness” in the party.) Essex came to represent “white flight” in the UK, and there is much evidence of xenophobia and racism in Essex: the county was a hotbed of BNP membership during the first decade of the 21st century. [...]
Today, Basildon is a poster child of inequality. It contains a quarter of the most deprived areas of Essex, despite housing an eighth of its total population, and is the sixth most unequal town in the country. Pitched against such evidence, the myth of Essex as the great Thatcherite success story says more about the will of the Conservative commentariat than anything else. In the mid-1980s, my parents bought the Southend council house my sister and I grew up in, but we didn’t feel like triumphant beneficiaries of some economic miracle. A microclimate of inequality existed on our street, separating homeowners from council tenants. I remember my mum and dad refusing to sign one London-born homeowner’s petition to have his sister, a renter, evicted for being the mother of a “problem family”. No one seemed any richer, just further apart. [...]
The persistent rhetorical power of this invented Essex – as a land of a million Marks Francois, ready to die for No Deal – requires that we continue to overlook the reality of the actual place. “There is still a conversation, even today, black folk in London saying to me, seriously: ‘What are you doing in Essex?’” says Southend-based artist Elsa James, whose work addresses stereotypes of people of African-Caribbean heritage and those of Essex women. Parts of Essex, James says, are more diverse than is widely acknowledged: there were 50 mother tongues among the students at the Southend primary school her youngest daughter attended. [...]
This, finally, is the magic power of “Essex”. For it allows Jenkin – the Cambridge-educated son of a lord – to confidently proclaim that he knows the desires of the “common man”, merely by the mention of this most misunderstood of counties. If Essex did not exist, they would need to invent it.
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