Tag: UK
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a summer job bagging cadavers
It’s hard not to feel an opportunity was missed by not making Frankie Boyle the new leader of the Labour party instead of the equivocal sub-Blair suit who just got the gig. … you have to wonder if the virus is so very different from extractive capitalism. It commandeers the manufacturing elements of its hosts,…
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geography of fear / fear of geography
Back when I used to live in Velcro City’s original namesake, I remember being told many times over, by many different sources, that difficult cases of social exclusion or dysfunction were often tagged by overburdened social workers in the area with the acronym NFP—“normal for Portsmouth”. Quite how normal (or not) those cases actually were—and…
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scumbags and maggots
Huw Lemmey on the establishment of “Fairytale of New York” as a trench-front in the UK culture wars: Sometimes I wonder if not engaging is the answer, but I’m rapidly coming to the opinion that these disputes could be about anything, and will be about anything. The point is not necessarily about the etymology of…
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Burning the village green in order to save it
Duncan Thomas at Verso: … the geographical unevenness of neoliberal development, in concentrating wealth in the Southern regions of England, has also seen the Conservative Party retreat to its historic heartlands. Exiled from power during the Blair years, the party clung desperately to its decimated membership and receding support. In doing so, it fostered a…
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Qui autem temperet moderatores?
… [UK] consumers have overpaid for the natural monopolies and other networks underpinning many of these markets for at least the past 15 years. Because of patchy reporting from regulators, it’s impossible to document the full extent of these overpayments. However, this research finds that regulators have systematically set prices too high, leading to consumers…