Articles with the Tag the coming recession

BBC2’s White season: the trailer

Auntie Beeb, Racism
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Below’s the trailer I described earlier. Now am I right or wrong to see this as something that could’ve ended with the words “I’m Nick Griffin and I approve this message” as new to me blog The Soul of Man under Capitalism puts it.

Chris Bertram over at Crooked Timber meanwhile looks at the Decentist response to this series:

Given their leftist background, most “decents” have promoted either a class-based solidarity or an abstract universalism of citizenship in opposition to multiculturalism (which their blogs incessantly attack). But these pieces suggest something new. One possibility is that they are being drawn to the promotion of “my culture too!”, a resentment-driven demand for recognition within a multicultural system; another is that they are pushing the ethnos in the demos. Maybe they haven’t worked it out themselves yet. Either way, it gives me the creeps.

BNP or BBC?

Auntie Beeb, Life under Capitalism, Racism
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Imagine the following trailer: the face of a white, bald man somewhere in his forties is shown in close up while Billy Bragg’s interpretation of Jerusalem plays. A hand moves in view and starts writing on the man’s skin in black paint, in a clearly non-western looking script. A second hand follows and writes in another script. More hands follows, until the man’s whole face is covered in black paint. He then closes his eyes and the text appears below: “is Britain’s white working class becoming invisible?” All hands shown look Black or Asian.

sounds like a BNP ad? You would think so, but if you’ve been watching the BBC this weekend you must’ve seen it come past, as a trailer for their coming season of programmes devoted to “the white working class”. According to the press release the BBC have put out about this, these programmes are meant to examine “why some sections of this community feel increasingly marginalised yoday” and why it is that “some white working class people to say they feel under siege and as if their very sense of self is being brought into question“.

Because until now the working class has largely featured on BBC2 as gormless chavs who need to be taught how to feed their children properly, it’s not hard to feel skeptical about the intentions behind this. The BBC has rarely cared about the working classes, white or otherwise, staunch bastion of middle class priviledge that it is. Why suddenly discover them now and sell this with images and a narrative that play straight into BNP scaremongering? A white man’s face that disappears under a layer of black paint; how obvious can you get?

This season could’ve been worthwhile if the BBC had made it working class season rather than white season because the issues it presents are issues that concern the whole working class, not just the white part of it. Britain in the last thirty years has been forcibly shifted from a manufacturing to a services orientated economy and that’s the reason the “white working class” feels “increasingly marginalised today”, because the jobs their fathers and grandfathers had for life have disappeared. It’s the economy, stupid.

Of course the programmes themselves may very well be much better than the trailer makes them out to be; the BBC has a long tradition of making shit trailers for good shows. These programmes might just examine the economic background to the plight of the English working class, -white, black, Asian and other–. For the moment however whatever the BBC thinks it’s doing, it’s mostly providing ammunition to the BNP and other bigots, as a Google search on “BBC white working class” makes clear. The first hit is to the St*rmfr*nt hate site.

The last word is for Theloonyfromcatford commenting on a similar article in the Guardian lamenting the loss of “white working class identity”:

I’m a white,working class man.

The idea that I’ve become invisible, maligned and need a hug/season of programmes from ex public schoolboys in order to feel better about myself is absurd.

Yes, the man who owns the local shop has brown skin. Yes,my work colleagues include Polish girls and black blokes.

So what?

National Rock

economic crisis, libertarianism
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So Northern Rock is to be nationalised, but as the Darling treasurer hurriedly explained, only as a temporary measure and only as a last resort; wouldn’t want to do anything that frightened business, now would we? The Tories immediately started howling about how this was all an embarassement and a prelude to a new winter of discontent, with the mass strikes and the power cuts and the dead piling up in the streets and all that, while Northern Rock shareholders immediately started making noises about sueing because of course no matter what happens they deserve their pound of flesh. For the rest of the financial sector, however much they may not like the dreaded n-word, they seem happy to let it happen and have the tax payer take responsibility for their failings.

For all the angst surrounding it, this nationalisation really is only business as usual, as over eleven years of New Labour it has always been willing to guarantee private profits with public money, although it’s usually done through less visible methods like private finance initiatives. Nationalisation happened only because Darling was unable to get rid of Norther Rock any other way, had spent too much money propping it up already to sweep the losses under the carpet and the crisis was too high profile to resolve through the usual sleight of hand. Not just the opposition and the voters were watching, so was the EU competition commissioner. Any hint of preferential treatment and the EU would’ve pounced. Since nobody was stupid enough to buy an almost bankrupt company with a multiple billion pound debt, nationalisation was the only option remaining.

But while nationalisation should not be seen as some huge blow for socialism, the mere fact that the government actually wants to go through with it is a significant break with the past. until now the profit principle, privetisation and marketisation as the solutions to all ills had been sacrosanct. To abandon them in the case of Northern Rocks means things are changing. It fits in a larger pan-European trend of abandonment of free market principles, as even the Dutch government has now admitted privetisation of public services has largely failed to bring the benefits that they promised it would. Plans to sell off Schiphol have been halted and the threatened liberalisation of public transport in the four biggest cities has fallen through. The finance minister has even gone so far as to say that privetisation of remaining state run companies would be stopped entirely, unless there were compelling reasons otherwise.

This u-turn is not to be explained by a change in ideology on the part of the British or Dutch governments, but simply because both can see the threatening recession looming at the horizon and both know that this recession is likely to be severe. Contrary to free market ideology, business has always relied on the government to shelter them through these storms.