a colour change

I'm informed by one of my Polish colleagues that the previous colour scheme of this blog was too close to the nationalist insignia of Poland - so she couldn't read it without feeling uncomfortable. It went red around 18 months ago, mainly because I was seeing so much red through my anger about the economic situation - so it was supposed to be a vaguely socialist kind of thing. However I've changed it now. It doesn't mean I'm any more optimistic or less angry about inequality - in fact, I'm not, although I do think that the recession could have been much much worse than it has - the UK economy has been kept afloat by public spending -  although that's no consolation for all the people put out of work or out of their homes by the fallout from market excess. 


Anyway, we're back to blue. But that in no way should be taken as any kind of prefiguration of a potential Tory government. Here's Cameron making a bit of a fool of himself in front of some wise and sceptical students at Lewisham College, trying to "do an Obama"; but failing to connect with his audience and instead dribbling cliches in what, to my ears, comes across as patronising tones:



And a reminder, below,  of what Tory economic policy looks like in action: a weirdly schizoid combination: encouragement of laissez-faire market economics and then panic authoritarian intervention, with devastating consequences. Just listen to the smug tones of Michael Howard towards the end of the first report, and bear in mind that Cameron served a political apprenticeship of sorts as a 'special advisor' to chancellor Norman Lamont throughout the sterling crisis of '92. (OK, I'm not suggesting that the neoliberals have really been out of power for the last 13 years either, but the Tory proposal - do nothing except viciously cut public spending - would be a total disaster). And the trauma from the disastrous experiment of the ERM mixed with global free market currency runs deep in Tory DNA and probably accounts for a good chunk of the hostility to the  European project, along with a dose of old-fashioned jingoism. It's back to that strange, multi-headed Hydra of authoritarianism/moral conservatism/nationalism and libertarian free market thinking that fractures right-wing parties everywhere. But as I've written before, I think Dave, in common with lots of boys shaped by boarding school,  has a secret fetish for austerity and authority. 

The Health of a City

This is a great documentary from 1965, commissioned to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the founding of the post of public health officer for Glasgow. It gives some context to the innovations in public healthcare pioneered in this city from the mid-19th century onwards. It's a nicely shot and edited piece of work which conjures up some of the extraordinary richness of Glasgow's culture and the resilience of its people. It also demonstrates the absolute necessity of continual innovation and improvement in public services if we are to solve the challenges of the 21st century...as well as the pride in the creation of a National Health Service. I wonder what sort of a documentary could be commissioned now, 52 years on? In some ways this film feels that it could have been made much more recently than 1965. What is so smart about it is that it makes the policy and planning links between culture, economics, health and social policy, and community, down to details of food safety and the social conditions in which people are living...and shows the aspirations which underpinned the foundation of the Welfare State, and how they were taken up by the Corporation of Glasgow. A great piece of social documentary, but you can see all too clearly how the welfare state was transformed into the nanny state in the popular imagination of the 1970s and 1980s, as it ran into a tidal wave of consumer capitalism and individualism...you can also see how the socialist utopias of the 20th century contained within themselves the seeds of their own destruction...