A review of Kate Fox's 'Watching the English' and some additional thoughts on Englishness

Maybe it’s the world cup, maybe it’s Brexit, but I’ve been thinking a lot about Englishness recently. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about how those of us on the political left might reclaim Englishness from the right. At this point you might be wondering what good a sense of national identity is to a liberal, internationalist remoaner. In ignoring the problem of Englishness for so long, we have excluded those for whom a sense of Englishness is important while also allowing the right to entirely control the narrative of what Englishness means. And while an excess of patriotic pride can lead to a whole host of problems, there is nothing inherently wrong with feeling a sense of belonging to a place, a people or a history, so long as we do not start to believe that this makes us better than those who do not share these things. I picked up Kate Fox’s Watching the English partly because there were no relevant George Orwell books in the library at work, but it turned out to be a great place to begin my investigation. Fox is a social anthropologist, and in this book she sets out to uncover the hidden rules which define English culture. This analytical attempt to define Englishness as it is, rather than as any nostalgic or political viewpoint would like it to be, is a necessary starting point in imagining what a progressive, forward looking Englishness could become.

Fox is an entertaining guide, pitching her writing towards what she claims ‘used to be called the educated layman’. Her writing is peppered with personal anecdotes, amusing observations and an undercurrent of the sort of humour which she sees as our ‘default mode’. There is a touch of Douglas Adams’ biscuit story to her account of pushing into queues or bumping into strangers for research purposes. Balancing her light-hearted prose, Fox structures the book like a serious academic investigation, defining key anthropological ideas in her introduction before systematically applying the ‘participant-observer’ methodology to different aspects of English society and identifying patterns and themes along the way.

As might be expected of the co-director of the Social Issues Research Centre, this investigation, however lightly written, is underpinned by thorough research, and the depth of Fox’s knowledge is evident throughout, although she rarely includes statistics (which would seem dry and out-of-place in a work of pop-anthropology). However, while Fox makes occasional references to ‘cross-cultural studies’, and is keen to point out that some of the traits she identifies are not uniquely English, I did feel in places that the book lacked enough specific references to other cultures to truly clarify what makes English culture different. A dog is not just defined by the fact that is a four-legged domestic animal, but also by the ways in which it differs from a cat or a horse, and in the same way it would have been nice to have some examples of how English attitudes differ from the attitudes of the Germans, the Vietnamese or our neighbours the Scots, the Welsh, the Irish. We are told in the introduction that, although a certain amount of overlap is to be expected, Fox is interested in Englishness rather than Britishness, but she never follows this up by suggesting how these cultures differ.

I particularly wonder about the pervasiveness of Fox’s core features of Englishness – what she calls our ‘social dis-ease’ – in other parts of our islands. For Fox, this social dis-ease is central to English identity, and she sees it as the key to two seemingly irreconcilable sides to our culture: our reputation for polite reserve and our notoriety as violent, drunken yobs. While I don’t see myself in the latter stereotype, I definitely felt a pang of recognition in many of the more ‘awkward’ behaviours – the potential for embarrassment, the negative politeness, the desire not to make a scene, the awkwardness of greetings and farewells. Turns out I’m not socially-awkward, just English. I do wonder whether this feeling might be more universal than Fox suggests though, in the same way that everyone on the internet self-identified as introverts a few years ago. Perhaps everyone has this sense of ‘social dis-ease’ and some cultures and individuals are just better at hiding it than others.

As you might expect from a book on English culture, social class features heavily. Fox chooses to include sections on class in every chapter, rather than devote a chapter to class in its own right, as she theorises that class norms and an awareness of social class pervades all aspects of our society. Fox is clear that she is making descriptive, analytical judgements on the distinctions between classes rather than prescriptive value judgements, but in parts of the book where she is not addressing social class directly some of her assumptions seem to be unconsciously based on middle class attitudes and norms. She also identifies the usage of ‘dinner’ or ‘tea’ to describe the evening meal as a class indicator, while I had always understand it to be a north/south geographic divide (and my tendency to switch between them as a midlands quirk). I was willing to defer to her expert opinion on the matter (and reassess my uncertainty as a symptom of my mixed class-background), but a recent YouGov survey seems to support my initial instinct. Perhaps English class consciousness is so deeply rooted that even when she is attempting to play the part of the detached observer, Fox cannot quite escape her own biases. I must also confess to these biases: while reading, I found myself unable to avoid measuring her descriptors against my own behaviour and being secretly pleased that I am more likely to say ‘sorry’ than ‘pardon’ if I mishear somebody, unwittingly providing evidence for Fox’s portrayal of the lower, less established middle class[1] unease with their status – their tendency to want to look ‘higher’ than they are. According to Fox, this tendency is more-or-less absent from the working classes and the upper-middle to upper classes, and most prominent among the lower-middles and (to a lesser extent) the middle-middles, who are both keen to distance themselves definitively from the class below. When introducing us to the idea that hidden ideological systems govern our thoughts, one of the lecturers on my degree course emphasised that, once we step outside of these ideologies and recognise them as constructs, we can never truly step back in. Apparently English class consciousness is so strong that attempting to dissect it only serves to make it stronger.

Focussing on a universal grammar of English culture, Fox does not really address English politics, and while it was interesting to see her lay out a grammar of Englishness, the book has little to say on how Englishness can be reclaimed from the nationalists. In fact, English nationalism is not mentioned at all and while Fox is happy to address a number of anti-social behaviours, the only reference to racism is in the context of how, in the ‘orderly disorder’ of Fresher’s Week or New Year’s Eve, ‘telling bawdy jokes is fine, but racist ones are inappropriate.’ It is tempting to imagine that overt racism and nationalism have become more prevalent since the book was published in 2004, but where I grew up not only were openly racist jokes fairly common, but so were far-right political candidates and pro-Combat 18 graffiti. Perhaps a playful examination of a culture is not the right place to examine truly serious socio-political issues. Neither does Fox really address the plague of nostalgia. While she identifies that, from washing machines to restaurants to politicians, we generally don’t expect things to be very good or work particularly well, she does not comment on the related fact that many of us believe things were better in the past. Depending on your political bent, that past might be the height of British Imperialism, or it might be the post-war Labour Government with its radical social policies. It might be the Thatcher years or the cultural explosion of the Beatles and the Stones. For many of us, perhaps perversely, Britain’s golden age comes in WW2, with all of us coming together through food shortages and bombs to show the Nazis what for. One thing is certain, the country is going to the dogs. The politics/music/people of tomorrow are bound to be worse than those of the past. I used to think this was a universal trait, rather than a particularly English one, but recent research shows that our island neighbours do not share this view. In Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, more people believed that their country’s best years were ahead of them.

One useful concept Fox does have, however comes right at the beginning of the book when she is defining her terms. Englishness, as described here is a cultural category rather than an ethnic one. To some extent this argument seems facile – ethnicity itself is a culturally constructed concept rather than one that has a real basis in science. But the way we talk about culture and the way we talk about ethnicity differs significantly. Culture is system of behaviours and attitudes – something we acquire, while ethnicity is bestowed upon us by accident of birth or perception. By thinking of Englishness not as an ethnic categorisation but as a set of cultural norms one can acquire or adopt, we can neutralise nativist attempts to define English identity as one that can only come from some sort of imagined pure bloodline, but this view risks encouraging those arbiters of Englishness to judge immigrants (and by extension, those who have been here for their whole lives, but who ‘look foreign’) by the degree to which the adhere to a particular pattern of English behaviour. This is all part of the knotty problem that humans naturally look for a sense of group identity, but that all group identities (national, sub-cultural, religious, sports team-related) are, by their very nature, exclusionary and divisive.

I have a few things to add here, but none of them really go very far in solving this problem. Firstly, in any culture, no individual will perfectly embody all of the attitudes, values and behaviours associated with it. Whether your ancestors arrived with Hengest and Horsa, on the Windrush, or last Thursday on a flight from Krakow, there will be elements of English culture that you display, and elements you that you do not. Throughout her book, Fox refers to the underlying rules of English as a ‘grammar’, and I think this is a useful comparison. Linguists describe the rules of a language as it is used by its speakers, they do not prescribe how it should be used – if the language changes, the linguists will record this change and look for causes, but they will not tell the people who are using the new rules that they are ‘doing it wrong’. This brings me rather nicely to my second point. All cultures change over time. As people come from different places, bringing their own cultures with them, it will inevitably have an impact on the culture that is already there. But becoming the sort of country that tightly controls our borders, that tries to police a prescribed view of Englishness, would also have an impact, and, I believe, would tend to exaggerate some of our less desirable qualities. Finally, we should not confuse culture with citizenship, and we should not confuse citizenship with a right to reside in a country. As new people arrive, they will naturally adapt to their new cultural environment (and remember, it is perfectly possible to belong to more than one culture), just as their new environment will be changed in some way by their presence. A progressive version of Englishness would welcome these people into our land and into our culture as part of a new chapter in what it means to be English.

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[1] Although my own class background is probably more complicated than that – I could write a whole blog post trying to work it out. For now I’ll just say that I’m describing myself as ‘lower-middle’, not because I think that is better than being ‘working’ but because, despite having always lived in working-class areas, to describe myself as ‘working-class’ would be to claim a cultural identity that I don’t really have.

On the European Referendum.

Before I start, I should warn you that this is a very long post, and a break from my usual, word-centric concerns. It is however an issue which I feel is very important. For the 'TL;DR' crowd, and for ease of navigation, I will include a bullet-point summary at the end, but the piece is intended to be a coherent argument, so I would recommend making a cup of tea and sitting down to read the whole thing.

Introduction

In under two weeks, we will be asked to make a decision as to whether Britain should remain a member of the European Union. This is probably the biggest political decision that our generation is likely to face, and many of us (myself included) feel like we are being forced to make this choice without being given adequate information. Under these conditions, many of us will go to the polling stations armed with little more than gut-feeling. In a way, this is how we always vote – choosing a political party is often an emotional decision which has more in common with choosing a football team than it does with balancing rational arguments – but this time the dividing line is less clear, with most of the media attention focused at the civil war within the Conservative Party. I believe that we should remain in the EU, but this is largely based on instinct. Over the course of this post, I intend to turn this instinct into a rational argument. This will not be a neutral post, but I will explore both sides, I am going to reference where my information has come from so that it can be verified, and I will try to avoid sensationalism.

What advantages does the EU bring?

One of the big problems of this referendum is that the British public does not really have a clear picture of what the EU is for. It is best known for allowing free movement of people within its borders, and for allegedly being very picky about the size and shape of our fruit and veg. One of the problems the remain camp seem to be facing is that many of its arguments for staying are based around abstract economic concepts, which do not engage the public as easily the leave campaign’s appeals to fear and patriotism. But, dry though the details may be, the fact remains that currently we export more goods and services to EU countries than we do to anywhere else in the world (44% of our trade goes there – worth around £226 billion – with the next biggest buyer of British goods and services being the USA at 17%)(source here). While leaving the European Union would not necessarily exclude us from trading with member countries there is no way of telling how long it would take to negotiate a new trade deal, and countries which have trade deals with the EU but are not members (like Norway or Switzerland) are required to follow EU regulations in the production of these goods and services, but have no say in what those regulations are (source here).

The big economic stuff is difficult to sell though, particularly as we don’t know what would happen if we were to leave. Perhaps we should look at how the EU affects our day to day lives in terms of employment law. It should be noted that, while UK legislation exceeds the minimum requirement for things like paid holiday and paid maternity leave, the European Union was instrumental in implementing these rights in the first place, and guarantees that it cannot be reduced below a certain level. It should also be noted that in some cases, while the UK currently exceed minimum expectations, British MEPs tried to block the initial inclusion of these rights into European law (a full analysis by an employment law specialist can be found here – you’ll have to scroll down below the initial graphic that he is responding to). Keep in mind too that the Conservative party has a track record of trying to opt out of things like the Work Time Directive, which determines how many hours per week employers can legally make their employees work (according to this Independent article).

The European Union has also played an important role in developing and enforcing laws relating to the environment, with legislation governing things like quality of air and water, carbon emissions levels and use of pesticides. Again, these laws would not necessarily be repealed if we voted to leave the EU, but it should be remembered that the UK government has tried to block some of this environmental legislation from being passed in Europe (more detail can be found in this Friend of the Earth Report). There is more to be said for staying in the European Union, but as we are talking about maintaining the status quo, it might be best considered by comparing it with some of the key arguments of leave campaign.

Why some people want to leave, and why I think we shouldn’t.

Cost

One of the most commonly cited reasons for leaving the EU is the cost of membership. It is true that the UK contributed £13 billion to the EU budget last year, once you remove the £5 billion instant rebate (actually more of a discount, as it never leaves the country), but it is also true that £4 billion of the EU budget was returned to Britain through investment in agriculture or in poorer regions of the country (see here). Yes, theoretically if we were to leave the European Union, this money could be invested directly into redeveloping poorer regions of the country, but we have to ask, do we trust the current government (or worse, Johnson and co.) to do this? Just look at what happened to Osborne’s Northern Powerhouse.

There are two other factors which need to be considered when discussing the financial cost of the EU. Firstly, that £13 billion sounds like a big number, but it amounts to only 1% of total UK spending (According to this YouGov breakdown of how tax is spent). Secondly, we should consider this figure in relation to the benefits that EU membership has for the British economy as a whole. This is a difficult figure to estimate, but according to this New Statesman article, the Confederation of British Industry puts the number somewhere between £62 and £78 billion, a fair return on our investment, given that it also helps to fund the benefits already mentioned.

Immigration

Perhaps more widely discussed by the Out Camp is the issue of immigration. This is an emotive issue which is hard for people to discuss rationally and, while the idea of controlled immigration is not intrinsically racist, it is an argument which attracts racists like flies to a turd. Arguments about immigration from the EU tend to centre around two contradictory strands: that migrants from within the EU are taking too many jobs which could be done by British people, and that migrants from within the EU are unfairly draining the British welfare system.

The second of these claims is easier to unpick. Research shows that people who came to Britain within the EU since 2000 have tended to contribute more in tax than they take in benefits. This picture is somewhat complicated when we consider people who arrived in the UK before the year 2000, as these migrants tend to be older and, like many older people, require additional help to come with the effects of age (source). People in this category have been in the UK for at least fifteen years – surely long enough to justify equal treatment with those who happen to have been born here.

Related to worries about the increased pressure on our benefits system is the concern that ‘health tourism’ is placing unfair strain on the NHS. The figures involved in this are complex, and take into account a number of different groups, including regular visitors to the UK from the EU (people who are resident here for part of the year, like students) and British citizens who live abroad. Remember too that while Britain is a member of the EU, you or I would receive free or reduced price healthcare if we were regular visitors or ‘non-permanent residents’ in other EU countries. If you are really interested in the figures, you can look here. All I’m going to say is that most of these numbers seem to represent visitors to the country who happen to need the hospital when they are here. For the few that do come here specifically for medical purposes, the NHS is not a charity and it should not be treated as such, but if somebodies medical problems are serious enough, and the cost of treating them is prohibitive enough that somebody thought they’d be better off travelling to an entirely different country for treatment, I’m not that interested in hounding them too much over it. In any case, most EU countries have pretty good medical care, so these people are likely to be coming from outside the EU. While Brexit might give us slightly more control over our borders, we will presumably still be open to tourists – unless we’re going to give each one a medical screening, I’m not too sure how leaving the EU would prevent this from happening. And one last word on this subject – hospitals have the option to charge non UK patients for services (outside of accident and emergency) but the costs of recovering this debt is not too far off the amount itself (source).

That other aspect of the migrant debate – that EU migrants are flooding the job market – is perhaps even more emotive. Understandably, people who have been out of work for a long time are not necessarily going to want to listen when people with apparently better job prospects (journalists, politician, English teachers with blogs, for example) tell them that they are losing out on jobs because they aren’t trying hard enough now (the ‘they do the jobs we don’t want to’ argument) or they didn’t work try hard enough at school (the ‘they are better qualified’ argument). I’m not suggesting that completely unrestricted immigration is the best of ideas, but this seems to be how most people think EU migration works. Before we can think about changing Europe, we must first decide to stay, so I’m going to start by looking at the migration situation logically, and then consider some of the facts and figures.

If unemployed British people cannot find work because there is not enough work to go around, leaving the EU may reduce some of the competition for jobs, but it could also plunge the economy into uncharted territory – evidence suggests that over 3 million jobs are linked to trade with EU countries. Jeopardising trade with Europe could put these jobs at risk, leading to an even more competitive job market. In this case staying is our best option.

If there are jobs available and they are being given to people who were raised and educated in the rest of the EU in preference to people who were raised and educated in the UK, we must ask ourselves why. If the answer to that question is that the people from outside of the UK are better qualified, this highlights a problem within our own institutions, and leaving the EU will not change this. Depending on how we leave, we may be able to reduce access to the UK and therefore limit competition but if we do, we may find ourselves with a shortage of skilled workers. In this scenario, our best option would not be to leave the EU, but to better prepare our workforce for the 21^st Century economy. If, on the other hand, the reason is that immigrants are taking jobs that British workers are unwilling to do, I suspect the reason lies not in laziness, but in a benefits system which does not make it easy for people to take part time, low paid or precarious jobs, as they may end up worse off than before. Reforming benefits is important, but discussion of it is beyond the scope of this post, and I will not attempt to do it here. I will say that leaving the EU would not make these jobs more attractive, or solve the problems which make British workers reluctant to take them in the first place.

If neither of the above scenarios are true – if there are jobs available, and employers are not choosing people from outside of the UK in preference to people from inside the UK – then we are left with a simpler picture. Finding work is difficult, and has been since the economic crash. Having a larger potential workforce (anyone in the EU who wants to work in Britain, for example) does make this more difficult, but when the economic benefits of being a member of the European Union help to create jobs, and when the European union helps to fund development of poorer areas, leaving is not the best solution. The best solution is to find ways to create more jobs, and to acknowledge that, as finding work in the current economic climate is difficult, we should find ways to better support those who are looking for work, both financially and practically, rather than vilifying them in the tabloid press and creating an increasingly punitive culture within the welfare state.

I suspect that there may be some element of truth in all of the scenarios described above, and again, while I broadly agree with the principle of free movement, I am not saying that we should not perhaps revisit some of the conditions of this principle. Staying in the EU gives us the best position to negotiate this, particularly when we consider the fact that, if we were to leave, but wanted to remain part of the European Free Trade Agreement (the least risky option, economically), then we would likely have to accept the free movement of people between the UK and the rest of Europe as part of the deal, as it is in Norway, Iceland and Switzerland. A fairly detailed account of the issues which would face Britain if it wanted to leave the EU and become part of the EFTA can be found here. So far, I have simplified the situation around immigration in the same way that many in the leave campaign do – by conflating all immigration into the UK. In fact, immigration from outside of the EU has traditionally been significantly higher, and is currently about equal. Even if we were to leave the EU, we would still potentially have large numbers of people coming to live and work in the UK (source).

Then there are the benefits of migration. Apart from the previously mentioned fact that migrants have made a net contribution to the UK, the immigration of young, working-age people is a way of spreading the tax burden created by an aging population (as shown in this 2013 study). It also helps us to cope with shortages of suitable workers in specific sectors, for example, recent research suggests that 26% of NHS doctors were trained outside of the UK (source), and 10% were from other places in the EU (source). I haven’t been able to find any statistics, but I very much doubt that there are large numbers of British-born doctors waiting in dole queues because of this. Sticking with the NHS, recent cuts in the number of training places available for nurses (source) mean that we are likely to become even more reliant on migrants to fill these vital roles in our communities.

And migrants don’t just work and pay taxes. They buy things in our shops, they start business, and have families. The ratio might not be a simple one to one, but larger populations also create jobs, as there is greater demand for goods and services. Public institutions like schools and hospitals might be put under increased pressure in the short term, but over time, the increased tax revenue will allow for more investment in these services, balancing out and creating more jobs in the process. Perhaps more important is the cultural impact. Since at least the end of World War Two[1], British culture has been enhanced and expanded through interaction with other cultures. We are lucky to have access to such a wide range of cultural experiences. Some people worry that this is undermining traditional British culture, but I can still get cream tea, watch a football match, drink a pint of Banks’ Mild brewed just over ten miles away from my house, or go watch a Shakespeare play. I can even, if I am so inclined, go Morris dancing. But thanks to sixty odd years of multi-cultural Britain, I can get jerk chicken, rice and peas delivered to my house, watch a Bollywood film at Star City or go to a pub where the Polish chefs serve szwajacar and suflak alongside British pub classics[2]. Again, I know that two out of three of these examples have nothing to do with the EU, but the principle that the mixing of cultures can enrich our experience remains.

Sovereignty

Vote Leave campaigners also love to talk about sovereignty, the power the country has to make its own laws. It is true that as part of the EU, we allow some decisions about the laws affecting us to be made elsewhere, but this is also true of other international institutions, like NATO. If we are concerned about our ability to make the decisions which are best for the country, then we should consider that, if the benefits outweigh the disadvantages, it may be best to transfer some of our sovereignty elsewhere (source). Even with this transfer of sovereignty, Britain maintains some element of control through the European Parliament (where we can send MEPs elected within by our European constituencies) and through the Council of the European Union (where ministers from national governments meet to discuss specific policy areas). As a nation, we abdicate some of our sovereignty to the European Union in the same way that as individuals, we agree to live by certain laws in exchange for the protection that the law offers. Ultimately, while we have allowed the European Union to make some decisions for us, the very fact that we are able to hold a referendum shows that we still retain the option to take this transferred sovereignty back – the question is whether it would be advantageous to do so. I believe that the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that we are better off staying in the EU, and that the leave camp’s arguments about sovereignty have more to do with populist notions of national prestige than they do with any real world benefits.

Human Rights

Related to issues of sovereignty is the issue of the European Convention on Human Rights, which the Human Rights Act enshrined in British law in 1998. The current government has said that it wants to replace this with a British Bill of Rights, and some people who want to leave the EU use the Human Rights Act as another example of the loss of British Sovereignty. If this is something which concerns you, I suggest that you look at the list of rights protected by this act, here, and then ask yourself ‘are there any rights here which I do not want?’ Part of the problem here is that some elements of the media have caused us to erroneously think of human rights as something which prevents us from punishing criminals, or requires us to give porn to murderers or KFC to thieves, rather than as a universal standard for how all human beings should be treated. For more information, including a debunking of the ridiculous cases above, look here. If the British public were to leave the European Union because they no longer wished to be bound by the ECHR, it might be the first time in history that people have chosen to be given less legal rights. It would also be futile, as the ECHR is a treaty which is separate from our membership of the European Union, and is instead related to our membership of the Council of Europe – an international body which contains several non-EU states, and which the British government has no plans to pull out of (source).

Security

Some people worry that overly lenient application of human right’s law, combined with the European Union’s open borders policy, has created a threat to British security, particularly in our current age of international terrorism. There are several things to consider here. Firstly, we are not part of the Schengen Area, meaning that we retain the right to carry out passport checks at our borders, so we could still prevent known security threats from entering Britain. Secondly, the perpetrators of the terrorist attacks in France and Belgium last year were French and Belgian citizens, so even if we were to close our borders completely (which not even the most extreme in the Vote Leave camp are planning on doing) we would still have some risk of home grown terrorism, while our current status allows us to make use of various resources, such as the European Criminal Records System. Leaving would not automatically deny us access to these things, but neither would it guarantee that we can continue to use them (source).

Conclusions

The European Union is not perfect. No large organisation is, but I believe that the benefits of membership far outweigh the risks of leaving. In this post, I have given a large number of reasons, often centred around complicated issues, but in the end, the main issue is whether you believe that our best option in a changing world is to co-operate with our neighbours or to go it alone. From our position in the EU, we can help shape a better future, both for the UK and for people across the continent.

Summary

• I believe that Britain should remain part of the European Union.
• Membership of the EU comes with a number of economic advantages which we may lose if we leave.
• The EU has helped to protect the environment, and workers rights.
• We are required to contribute towards the EU budget, but this allows us access to numerous benefits, and costs only a small part of our national budget.
• Immigration has brought benefits to our economy, society and culture.
• We have given the EU some control over our legislation, but this is a normal part of international co-operation.
• The Human Right Act is not directly tied to the EU, and why would we want to give it up?
• Being part of the EU allows for easy co-operation between different countries' security forces.

Further Reading

While writing this post, I have found the following websites to be balanced and informative:

Full Fact - The independent fact checking charity

The UK in a Changing Europe

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[1] Yes, I know I’m talking about non-EU migration here, but the principle still applies, so bear with me.

[2] The Stile in Wolverhampton, just round the corner from where I used to live.

NaPoWriMo 16

This one may be a day late, but since the aim is to produce 30 poems in 30 days, I still have time to catch up. For those of you wondering why only a few poems have made it onto here, it's because I'm selfishly hoarding the rest, revealing only short samples on Facebook and Twitter.

Here's today's effort:

Damnito Memoriae

 They put their chisels to her name,
and in a chattering of bronze
on bronze, she turned to crumbs of stone.

The Nile yawned and stretched, spine-like,
as the nation woke from a dream
remembered in uneasy frescoes,

as a sentence with the nouns torn out.

Some things to worry about....

So, the new government has announced cuts in many areas. It's a recession; cuts are a necessary unpleasantness, and unsurprisingly nobody wants to be on the receiving end. The Socialist Worker Party has been putting up posters imploring people to protest against the cuts, but what's the alternative? Spending at the same rate in spite of our huge national debt?

So what am I worried about? At the moment, two things. The cuts to arts organizations, and the possibility of unlimited tuition fees at universities. If these changes come into place it will be too late to affect my degree, and despite the possibility that I might choose to return to university for a Masters, it's not for myself that I worry.

I have an uneasy feeling that, in a higher education culture which increasingly values business skills and employability over more traditional academic traits, it is the Arts and Humanities over which the sword of Damocles hangs poised, particularly the more purely academic subjects. Why study Literature when Media offers more employability options?

And combined with the cuts to funding for the arts, it offers the possibility of a particularly bleak future. A future where higher education costs at least twenty-one thousand pounds, and the more prestigious institutions cost much more. Where the already rich can afford the education it takes to make their way into politics and big business. In this distopia, no arts would ever be banned. They would merely die out with a whimper, financially unviable.

Obviously I don't believe things would really get this bad, but the arts which require a lot of funding, such as film, music, and most of the visual arts, could suffer badly. Obviously pop music (which I use in the broadest possible sense, to mean anything other than Classical and perhaps the more high-brow forms of jazz) will survive and probably even thrive. It is at once a multi million pound industry and a modern day equivelant to folk music, the music of the people. As ever, some of it will be very good, and some of it will be very bad. Street art could also do very well, and the often anti-authoritarian dialogue it presents will be particularly suited to the tough times ahead.

Where does literature fit into this? On the one hand the materials are relatively cheap, as are the books which must fuel the engine of any writer, and while publishing can still be relatively expensive, the advent of home printers and the internet make it easier than ever for your work to reach a wider audience. However, there is not much money in poetry, the short story or even the more literary novel, the changes in university funding mean that it will become increasingly difficult for people to study literature. The accessibility of electronic self publishing is also has its less attractive points. The internet is a big place, with no quality control, and obscurity is the curse of the blogger.

The arts have some difficult times ahead, and I think what literature needs is to learn from the unsigned band and the street artist. We need to develop a DIY culture which encourages good quality work, links to the great conversation of long dead poets, dramatist, authors, journalists and philosophers, but is also ready to experiment and carry that conversation forward into new directions. Of course, how we achieve this is another question...

Actually, lets make THIS happen.

I've stayed largely quiet during the run up to the election. This is not due to any desire to stay out of the politics, although I am aware that other people are doing a better job of writing about it then I would have done. It's simply because I've been too busy with assignments and what-not to find the time. I have something none election-related which I've wanted to blog about for a week or so now, but that will have to wait. For today, I just wanted to pop on that I've been following the election via The Guardian, and they've managed to get me quite excited about the possibilities of a hung Parliament and the electoral reform which could follow. And the possibility of a liberal leaning government for the first time in my lifetime (New Labour clearly don't count).

Now though, on Election Eve, I can't escape nagging worries that the Conservatives will sneak a majority, or that Labour will somehow hold on to power. If that happens all this excitement will be for nothing, and the disappointment could even harm the Liberal cause (and that of all the smaller parties who struggle to get a look in under the current system) next time round, reinforcing the 'wasted vote' myth. So now I'm here, flying a garish orange flag and urging all of you to:

Vote Lib Dem

Especially if you live in Warwick or Lemington Spa (not that I have any vested interest).