Owen Jones

Free Speech And Why It Matters
by Andrew Doyle
Published 24 Feb 2021

The title is a reference to the Areopagiticus, a speech by the Greek orator Isocrates (436–338 BC), although this has caused some confusion given that Isocrates wanted to reinstate the court of the Areopagus as the censor of public indecency and immorality, which seems incongruous in relation to Milton’s stated objectives. p.4‘thinking in astronomy’: Ibid., p. 602. Left and Right p.6‘a term the far right wilfully abuse’: Owen Jones, ‘“Tommy Robinson” is no martyr to freedom of speech’, the Guardian (31 May 2018). p.6‘no reasoning without speech’: Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. AP Martinich (Peterborough, Canada: Broadway Press, 2002), p. 30. Originally published in 1651. Then and Now p.9‘speaking truth with candour’: The earliest recorded usage of the term parrhesia is by the tragedian Euripides in the Hippolytus of 428 BC.

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p.27Gillian Philip was dropped by her publisher: Jack Haugh, ‘Scots author Gillian Philip dumped for backing JK Rowling in transgender row’, the Herald (6 July 2020). p.27‘people seem to think freedom of speech means “saying things without being challenged”’: Owen Jones, Twitter (8 July 2020). p.27‘freedom of speech means freedom from objection’: Nesrine Malik, ‘The myth of the free speech crisis’, the Guardian (3 September 2019). p.28free speech ‘doesn’t mean the right to say what you want without rebuttal’: Reni Eddo-Lodge, Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race (London: Bloomsbury Circus, 2017), p. 134. p.28stories about people who have been hounded out of work: Examples of cancel culture could fill a whole other volume, but the following are a selection that have been widely reported in the media.

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More victim-blaming ensued when thirty-five writers signed a letter protesting against the decision on the grounds that the magazine had mocked a ‘section of the French population that is already marginalized, embattled and victimized’. See Alan Yuhas, ‘Two dozen writers join Charlie Hebdo PEN award protest’, the Guardian (29 April 2015). p.51Charlie Hebdo’s critics have a number of shared qualities: Robert McLiam Wilson, ‘The scurrilous lies written about Charlie Hebdo’, the Guardian (3 January 2016). p.53‘sticking a clown nose on Marx’: Charbonnier, op. cit., p. 17. p.53to excoriate these cartoonists for racism: Writing in the Guardian, Jonathan Freedland offered a similarly uncharitable interpretation of a cartoon in Charlie Hebdo of the drowned refugee child Aylan Kurdi which, he felt, implied that he ‘would have grown up to be a sexual abuser like those immigrants allegedly involved in the assaults in Cologne’.

This Land: The Struggle for the Left
by Owen Jones
Published 23 Sep 2020

Like many on the Labour right, they firmly believed Labour had lost the 2015 election because they were too left-wing; now, it appeared that they were doubling down on the reasons for their own failure. ‘How you can help Jeremy Corbyn – and destroy the Labour Party,’ sneered the Tory-supporting Telegraph newspaper, encouraging its readers to join the party to vote for Corbyn.15 The right-wing journalist Toby Young likewise backed Corbyn’s campaign, arguing that ‘With Corbyn at the helm, Labour’s loss will be so catastrophic – so decisively humiliating – that the Left of the party might finally be silenced for good … We might even see a bit less of Owen Jones on the telly.’16 But there were other, savvier right-wing voices.

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‘Almost to a man, woman and child the people wanted me to give them the route map back to supporting and believing in Labour,’ Watson later wrote about the event for Vice News, describing people’s yearning for the party to offer a more radical alternative to Tory austerity. ‘Yet I couldn’t traverse the chasmic gap between the words coming out of my mouth and the voices in my head. The audience cheered my nemesis, the left-wing polemicist Mr Owen Jones. They were polite to me, at least, but markedly unenthusiastic about what I had to say.’10 His long-standing disillusionment coming to the boil, a week later he resigned. ‘You’ve become a working-class hero,’ McCluskey told him. ‘But if you ever betray the left, they’ll never forgive you.’

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The Labour MP John Mann, firmly on the right of the party, demanded that the leadership contest itself be halted, alleging ‘Trotskyist infiltration’.8 A couple of weeks afterwards, Simon Danczuk – another Labour right-winger who would later be suspended from the party for allegedly sending graphic text messages to a seventeen-year-old job applicant – was asked whether attempts to remove the leader would begin on day one. ‘Yeah, if not before,’ was his brazen response. ‘As soon as the result comes out. Am I going to put up with some crazy left-wing policies that he is putting forward and traipse through the voting lobby to support him? It’s not going to happen, is it? So I would give him about twelve months if he does become leader.’9 Shortly after, Labour MPs briefed the Guardian that as soon as Corbyn assumed the leadership twelve MPs would instantly resign from the party – and that, in any case, a coup attempt would soon follow.10 Corbyn’s support among the 232 Labour MPs that then made up the parliamentary party was derisory.

The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It
by Owen Jones
Published 3 Sep 2014

EHRC, ‘Race Disproportionality in Stops and Searches under Section 60 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994’, http://www.equalityhumanrights.com/sites/default/files/documents/research/bp_5_final.pdf (Summer 2012). 18. EHRC, ‘Stop and Think Again: Towards Race Equality in Police PACE Stop and Search’ (June 2013). 19. http://www.lifeline.org.uk/articles/drug-war-milestone-uk-drug-searches-and-drug-offences-both-reach-record-levels. 20. Owen Jones, ‘London Riots – One Year On: Owen Jones Commences a Series of Special Reports’, The Independent, 23 July 2012. 21. ‘Key Macpherson Report Figure Says Met is Still Racist’, The Independent, 4 January 2012. 22. http://www.ipcc.gov.uk/news/Pages/pr_170713_mps_race_complaints.aspx?auto=True&l1link=pages%2Fnews.aspx&l1title=News%20and%20press&l2link=news%2FPages%2Fdefault.aspx&l2title=Press%20Releases. 23. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201213/cmselect/cmhaff/494/49411.htm. 24.

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‘G20 Assault: How Metropolitan Police Tried to Manage a Death’, The Guardian, 9 April 2009. 9. http://content.met.police.uk/News/Public-Statement-and-Deputy-Assistant-Commissioner-de-Brunners-apology-to-the-Tomlinson-family/1400019013635/1257246745756. 10. ‘Kettle Tactics Risk Hillsborough-Style Tragedy – Doctor’, The Guardian, 19 December 2010. 11. http://www.ohchr.org/en/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=12945&LangID=E. 12. ‘Trauma of Spy’s Girlfriend: “like being raped by the state” ’, The Guardian, 24 June 2013. 13. ‘Police “smear” Campaign Targeted Stephen Lawrence’s Friends and Family’, The Guardian, 24 June 2013. 14. Ministry of Justice, ‘Story of the Prison Population: 1993–2012 England and Wales’ (January 2013), p. 1. 15.

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The right’s relentless criticism of the BBC for ‘left-wing bias’ is a clever preventative measure: it allows them to police the output of the BBC. The Daily Mail is a particularly aggressive critic, having even accused the long-running TV series Sherlock of providing ‘more evidence’ for the BBC’s ‘left-wing bias’. In February 2014, Tory cabinet minister Chris Grayling suggested the BBC was dominated by a ‘left-leaning, metropolitan group of people who are disproportionately represented there’. This leaves the corporation in constant fear of providing evidence of left-wing bias. When the BBC does give a platform for more critical journalism, suggests the former BBC journalist, corporation managers feel ‘they have to atone for it’ with programming that does the reverse.

The New Snobbery
by David Skelton
Published 28 Jun 2021

Social class, taste and inequalities in the creative industries’, Arts and Humanities Research Council, 2018. 15 Matthew Moore, ‘Metropolitan mindset is alienating BBC viewers, says Tim Davie’, The Times, 17 September 2020. 16 Today, BBC Radio 4, 4 April 2017. 17 ‘The Oxbridge white bloke’s day is over at the BBC, says comedy controller’, The Independent, 19 June 2018. 18 Anita Singh, ‘BBC cancels The Mash Report, show criticised for “left-wing bias”’, Daily Telegraph, 12 March 2021. 19 Roger Mosey, ‘Bowing to Twitter culture is bad news for the BBC’, The Times, 19 July 2020. 20 Mark Townsend, ‘John Humphrys attacks BBC’s “liberal bias” days after retiring’, The Guardian, 21 September 2019. 21 Mosey, ‘Bowing to Twitter’. 22 Jim Waterson, ‘Jon Snow cleared by Ofcom over “white people” comment’, The Guardian, 5 August 2019. 23 ‘Waitrose is on the march against Brexit – but what of Lidl Britain’, The Guardian, 22 October 2018. 24 Rod Muir, ‘Jon Snow can’t remember if he chanted “f*ck the Tories” at Glastonbury’, Total Politics, 27 June 2017; ‘Channel 4 News boss says media have right to call politicians “liars”’, BBC News, 22 August 2019; Jamie Doward, ‘“Back off”, controversial professor urges critics of Channel 4’s Cathy Newman’, The Guardian, 21 January 2018. 25 Daily Telegraph, 14 June 2008. 26 ‘Panic!’

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On the left, Josh Marshall has argued that, for white working-class communities, the ‘stressor at work here is the perceived and real loss of the social and economic advantages of being white’.31 The almost explicit argument is that white working-class areas had it coming after years of so-called privilege and that priority for public policy should be elsewhere. The snobbery towards ‘chavs’, described so well by left-wing commentator Owen Jones, makes clear that this shaming culture hasn’t stopped at The Atlantic. The contempt expressed for many post-industrial communities in the aftermath of the Brexit vote was all too often wrapped in the concept that post-industrial areas had themselves to blame for economic and social decline.

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Why working-class people voted for Brexit’, LSE Blogs, 15 January 2018. 2 Michael Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good (London: Penguin, 2020). 3 ‘Executive pay in the FTSE 100, 2020 review’, CIPD, August 2020. 4 ‘Addressing employer underinvestment in training’, CIPD, July 2019. 5 ‘Margaret Thatcher interview for The Sun’, 28 February 1983. 6 Francis Wheen, ‘Satirical fiction is becoming Blair’s reality’, The Guardian, 14 February 2001; Patrick Wintour, ‘Gordon Brown: Middle class to be our election battle-ground’, The Guardian, 15 January 2010; Patrick Wintour, ‘David Cameron presents himself as leader of “aspiration nation”’, The Guardian, 10 October 2012; ‘A first glimpse of Theresa May’s meritocracy vision’, Financial Times, 9 September 2016. 7 Kwame Anthony Appiah, ‘The myth of meritocracy: who really gets what they deserve?’, The Guardian, 19 October 2018. 8 B. Lopes, C. Kamau and R. Jaspal, ‘The roles of socio-economic status, occupational health and job rank on the epidemiology of different psychiatric symptoms in sample UK workers’, Community Mental Health Journal, 6 March 2018. 9 James Bloodworth, The Myth of Meritocracy: Why Working-Class Kids Still Get Working-Class Jobs (London: Biteback, 2016). 10 Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit, p. 26. 11 F.

Hostile Environment: How Immigrants Became Scapegoats
by Maya Goodfellow
Published 5 Nov 2019

She has written for the New York Times, the Guardian, the New Statesman, Al Jazeera and the Independent. She received her PhD from SOAS, University of London. She is a trustee of the Runnymede Trust. Hostile Environment How Immigrants Became Scapegoats Maya Goodfellow First published by Verso Books 2019 © Maya Goodfellow 2019 All rights reserved The moral rights of the author have been asserted 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Verso UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201 versobooks.com Verso is the imprint of New Left Books ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-336-6 ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-338-0 (US EBK) ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-337-3 (UK EBK) British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Typeset in Sabon by Biblichor Ltd, Edinburgh Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY To Rambhaben Vallabhdas Tanna, Vallabhdas Gordhandas Tanna, Hedy Goodfellow and my parents Contents Introduction: An Honest Conversation 1.

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A triumph of non-fiction writing’ Nikesh Shukla, editor of The Good Immigrant ‘How immigrants became the scapegoats for injustices caused by the rich and powerful is one of the burning questions of modern politics. This masterful, wonderfully written, and vitally important book – written by one of the most powerful writers on race and migration today – more than does it justice. This book is essential to understanding the reactionary political upheavals which have swept the West’ Owen Jones, author of Chavs ‘This is an essential study into the toxic discussion around immigration in the UK. It is as brilliant as it is necessary’ Nish Kumar ‘A book to cut through the noise of toxic politics, the race to the bottom to demonise immigrants, and the ahistoric idea that a hostile environment is anything new.

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Carys Afoko, Framing the Economy: The Austerity Story, London: New Economics Foundation, 2013; Sally Gainsbury and Sarah Neville, ‘Austerity’s £18bn Impact on Local Services’, Financial Times, 19 July 2015. Between 2010 and 2015, a quarter of the Home Office budget was cut by around 24.9 per cent and there were £18 billion cuts to local authority budgets, amounting to authorities having to get rid of key services for 150,000 pensioners and cutting child protection spending by 8 per cent. 19. Owen Jones, Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class, London: Verso, 2011, p. 196; Citizens UK, The Public Subsidy to Low Wage Employers, London: Citizens UK, 2015. 20. Bridget Anderson, ‘Migration: Controlling the Unsettled Poor’, openDemocracy.net, 1 August 2011 last accessed 24 June 2019. 21. Robbie Shilliam, Race and the Undeserving Poor, Newcastle upon Tyne: Agenda Publishing, 2018, p. 9. 22.

Corbyn
by Richard Seymour

There had been, in the wake of the Conservative victory, an angry reaction by Labour supporters, and a large anti-austerity march through central London attended by Corbyn. The Labour establishment from which Burnham, Kendall and Cooper were drawn had responded to the defeat by blaming Miliband for being too left-wing. The ‘Blue Labour’ guru Jon Cruddas fed mangled and misleading research to the Guardian newspaper claiming to support this idea.3 Such claims were rejected by the British Election Study, which pointed out that the major factor dogging Labour was the 2008 economic crash, Labour’s version of the 1992 ERM crisis.4 But more importantly, they were rejected by a growing number of Labour supporters.

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How ‘Project Fear’ Failed 1Michael Crick, @michaelcrick, Twitter, 28 May 2015, twitter.com/michaellcrick/status/603845352727453696. 2‘Labour leadership latest odds: can Jeremy Corbyn really win?’, Week, 19 August 2015. 3Cruddas’s spin on the findings was reported by the Guardian’s resident Blairite, Patrick Wintour, with the following headline: ‘Anti-austerity unpopular with voters, finds inquiry into Labour’s election loss’. Guardian, 4 August 2015. In fact, the research did not ‘find’ any such thing. 4Ross Hawkins, ‘Ed Miliband did not lose election because he was too left wing – study’, BBC News, 17 September 2015. 5Steve Coogan, ‘Andy Burnham is Labour’s best hope’, Guardian, 14 August 2015. 6Interview with Marsha-Jane Thompson, 14 January 2016. 7Interview with Ben Sellers, 12 February 2016. 8Interview with Marsha-Jane Thompson, 14 January 2016. 9Chi Onwurah, ‘My nomination for leader of the Labour Party’, Chionwurahmp.com, 11 June 2015. 10Luke Akehurst, ‘Why Jeremy Corbyn should be on the leadership ballot’, LabourList, 9 June 2015. 11The speech can be viewed at: ‘Jeremy Corbyn – End Austerity Now – June 20 2015’, YouTube, 20 June 2015. 12Stephen Bush, ‘Why are we so certain that Jeremy Corbyn can’t win?’

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One result of this is that since 1989, a series of radical Left parties have emerged across Europe, to challenge the rightward shift of social democracy.38 Pinning their hopes on a ‘vacuum thesis’, according to which the evacuation of a traditional social-democratic political space should leave space for a new Left, parties including the Rifondazione Comunista in Italy, the Front de gauche in France, and Die Linke in Germany, were launched to occupy the vacant space. Emphasising a modern combination of left-wing themes, from class politics to ‘post-materialist’ and left-libertarian concerns, they have fused old elements with the new: the remnants of traditional Communist Parties fused with defecting left-wing components of social democracy, a range of revolutionary fragments and activists schooled in the social movements and public assemblies.

Social Class in the 21st Century
by Mike Savage
Published 5 Nov 2015

Our focus on economic, cultural and social capital offers our alternative to previous sociological analysis focusing on classes as groupings of occupations and which do not adequately illuminate the wider cultural and political significance of class. We can also restate the importance of class, given that critical commentators such as Owen Jones or Danny Dorling rarely use the concept of class directly,1 while economists, who in recent decades have done most to demonstrate the growth of inequality, tend not to use the concept of social class at all, which they see as too crude to capture contemporary economic divisions. Our perspective allows us to see how expanding economic inequalities are associated with class divisions more broadly.

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Deprivation is not simply lamentable: the portrait of social decline presented here suggests a degree of inherency – that is, the conditions which pertain to a place are not only the outcome of the UK’s industrial collapse and its concentrated effect on specific areas, but are also a result of integral weaknesses within communities like Easington and their seeming inability, or unwillingness, to adapt to the new economic world order. Places are moralized through the lens of the dominant London worldview. Recently, the journalist Owen Jones has highlighted this polarization in sensibilities in his influential book Chavs. In his view not only are the working class more generally becoming an object of scorn in the public imagination, but also by extension the places that they inhabit.4 Such classifications are accentuated in the surge in digital geodemographic information available on the activities, preferences and locations of millions of people in this country.

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The interviews were conducted in late spring 2014, transcribed and coded up for analysis (during which we systematically searched for key phrases and issues). Brief details of the interviewees are as follows: Notes INTRODUCTION: THE GREAT BRITISH CLASS SURVEY AND THE RETURN OF CLASS TODAY 1. Danny Dorling, Injustice (Bristol: 2010), and Owen Jones, The Establishment, and How They Get Away with It (London: 2014). 2. Mike Savage, Fiona Devine, Niall Cunningham, Mark Taylor, Yaojun Li, Johannes Hjellbrekke, Brigitte Le Roux, Sam Friedman and Andrew Miles, ‘A New Model of Social Class? Findings from the BBC’s Great British Class Survey Experiment’, Sociology, 47(2), 2013, 219–50. 3.

Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class
by Owen Jones
Published 14 Jul 2011

Jones's book is a cleareyed examination of the British class system, and it poses this brutal question: "How has hatred of working-class people become so socially acceptable?" His timely answers combine wit, left-wing politics and outrage. ' Dwight Garner, New York Times CHAVS: The Demonization of the Working Class: OWEN JONES VERSO london. New York This updated edition first published by Verso 2012 First published by Verso 20II Veno UK: 6 Meard Street, London WIFOEG US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201 www.versobooks.com Verso is the imprint of New Left Books British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for thisbook is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-iii-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Typeset inFournier by Mj Gavan, Truro, Cornwall Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CRO 4YY Created by Tshirtman Contents Preface to the New Edition Introduction 1.

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Chaves: The Demonization of the Working Class 'A trenchant exposure of our new class-hatred and what lies behind it' 'Alively,well-reasoned Sean and informative eounterblast' 'A work of passion, sympathy and moral grace' New York Times The working class has become Media and politicians alike dismiss and ignorant a vast, underprivileged an object of fear and ridicule. as feckless; crirninalized swathe of society whose members have become stereotyped by one hate-fined word: chavs. In this acclaimed investigation, Owen Jones explores how the working class has gone from 'salt of the earth' to 'scum of the earth', Chavs is a powerful, illuminating inequality and class hatred in modern and disturbing portrait of Britain. OwenJones84 ' www.owenjones.org 'Chavs is persuasively argued, and packed full of good reporting and useful information ...

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Sometimes the police officers were sympathetic, or even almost apologetic; at other times they were aggressive or threatening. Some officers acted as if'we're the biggest gang around here'-a sentiment that cropped up in interviews with convicted rioters. Indeed, interviews with rioters conducted by the Reading the Riots study-a collaboration between the LSE, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, and the Guardian-found that rioters identified anti-police sentiment as the biggest single cause of the unrest. 11 of course, many of the rioters got involved because they saw an opportunity to steal with impunity. For others, it was a vicarious thrill; a chance to show off in front of friends, and to be able to boast that they were a part of the action.

Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right
by Angela Nagle
Published 6 Jun 2017

In the UK, an almost identical phenomenon occurred when the British liberal media establishment, particularly The Guardian, joined forces with their more youthful online offspring in smearing Corbyn and his supporters as being motivated primarily by this nefarious tide of brocialism, despite his squeaky-clean track record on women’s issues in the UK. Where, then, was the real left’s alternative media during this period? On YouTube, The Young Turks emerged as one of the few genuinely popular talk-show platform video producers, with 3 million subscribers and typical video views of 100,000 to 200,000. British Laborite (who later went anti-Corbyn) Owen Jones started producing popular interview videos.

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So committed were they to ethics in games journalism that in this discussion they discuss Quinn’s vagina as ‘wide’, large enough to ‘fit 12 dicks at once’ and ‘a festering cheese-filled vagina’ that leaves ‘a trail of cunt slime’ wherever she goes and then speculated about its smell. Jenn Frank, an award-winning freelance games journalist, wrote an article entitled ‘How to attack a woman who works in video gaming’ for The Guardian that looked at on-going harassment. It outlined the ways in which trolls were harming women who work in the male-dominated field: … someone recently and bafflingly tried to hack into my email and phone contacts. This is all very frightening to write, and so I must disclose that I am biased, insofar as I am terrified.

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Unintentionally amusing and easily satirized as sites like Upworthy may have been, at its height in 2013 it was averaging about 75,000 Facebook likes per article, while its site traffic was coming in at around 87 million unique visitors per month. In 2015, the liberal listicle site Buzzfeed’s articles were getting more shares on social media than BBC and Fox News put together. All of these were liberal, millennial-oriented and openly propagandistic. While the alt-right regard these and the Guardian, BBC and CNN as the media of ‘the left’, espousing ‘Cultural Marxism’, it became obvious when the possibility of any kind of economically ‘left’ political force emerged that liberal media sources were often the most vicious and oppositional. Liberal feminist journalist Joan Walsh called Bernie Sanders’s supporters ‘Berniebot keyboard warriors’, while Salon was one of the main propagators of the Berniebro meme with headlines like, ‘Bernie Bros out of control: Explosion of misogynist rage…’ and, ‘Just like a Bernie Bro, Sanders bullies Clinton…’ Meanwhile Vice, a magazine that made its brand on the most degenerate combination of vacuous hipster aesthetics and pornified transgression, published things like ‘How to spot a brocialist’.

The Nanny State Made Me: A Story of Britain and How to Save It
by Stuart Maconie
Published 5 Mar 2020

In truth, the state is usually the source of innovation and creativity in business, science, tech and the economy. In her excoriating study, The Value of Everything, economist Mariana Mazzucato finds high drug prices particularly enraging and immoral since the majority of fundamental research in biochemistry, crucial to pharmaceutical innovation, is funded by the state. And Owen Jones, baby-faced standard bearer of the new left (who I often utterly disagree with), spent a few coldly analytical pages of his book The Establishment nailing this canard, summarising his arguments in a Guardian article. ‘It is yet another example of socialism for the rich, capitalism for everyone else. Britain’s private sector is utterly dependent on state largesse to make money.

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Copyright © Chuck Palahniuk, 1996 First published by Ebury Press in 2020 penguin.co.uk A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 9781473562103 Footnotes Introduction 1 Grayling really should be on the cover of this book, so emblematic is he of the privatisation disaster. As well as the above, most Graylingly of all, he lost us £50 million when he awarded Channel ferry contracts to a company with no ships. 2 In October 2019, Owen Jones advocated just this, a state-run fast-food outlet chain. This would seem to me a classic example of proposing a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist, at least so long as there is Gregg’s. Chapter 2 I am Born 1 Care Quality Commission, independent health regulator for England. 2 In fact, despite being told all my life that my middle name is John, there is no record of any middle name on my birth certificate.

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But in September 2019, the party said that a future Labour government would ‘integrate all private schools into the state sector’ as well scrapping all subsidies and tax privileges and even selling off all assets and land and redistributing the proceeds ‘democratically and fairly across all the country’s educational establishments’. About time too. This politician knows the score. ‘We have one of the most stratified and segregated education systems in the developed world, perpetuating inequality and holding our nation back … From the England cricket team to the comment pages of the Guardian, the BAFTAS to the BBC, the privately educated – and wealthy – dominate. Access to the best universities and the most powerful seats around boardroom tables, influence in our media and office in our politics are allocated disproportionately to the privately educated children of already wealthy parents.’

The Extreme Centre: A Warning
by Tariq Ali
Published 22 Jan 2015

Such attitudes were not only carried in the corporate press, owned by mighty barons such as Rupert Murdoch or the Barclay twins, or in the tabloids of certain former porn merchants and other worthies (and as for the wealthy Russian proprietors of the Independent, they were all for maintaining the Union). What would the Guardian do? A newspaper not owned by anyone except the Trust, it too was caught up in the tidal wave of Unionist reaction. Its editorials effectively defended the Union, and while it gave some space to opposition voices its own in-house columnists, with the exception of Monbiot, were all singing different lines from the Unionist hymn sheet. Seamus Milne attacked Alex Salmond as effectively a Tartan Tory, ignoring what Scottish Labour had done to that country and the reasons why so many Labour Party supporters were joining the SNP. Young Owen Jones wrote in a similar vein, but more open-mindedly than Milne.

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A reliable toady, Marmaduke Hussey, was catapulted onto the BBC board as chairman. His first task was to sack Director-General Alasdair Milne for ‘left-wing bias’. Thatcher was livid that the BBC had permitted her to be grilled on the Falklands war, live, by the articulate Mrs Gould from Bristol. Thatcher disliked the BBC’s coverage of the Falklands war and the miners’ strike and highlighted a number of other documentaries that were considered ‘too left-wing’. A faceless accountant, Michael Checkland, replaced Milne until the appointment of John Birt, a dalek-like figure without instincts or qualities, who transformed the BBC into the top-heavy managerial monster that it has become.

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He has written more than a dozen books on world history and politics – including the novels of the Islam Quintet, The Clash of Fundamentalisms and The Obama Syndrome – as well as scripts for the stage and screen. He is an Editor of New Left Review and lives in London. The Extreme Centre A Warning Tariq Ali First published by Verso 2015 © Tariq Ali 2015 ‘The Seven Ages of a Labour MP’ © Ian Birchall 2015 All rights reserved The moral rights of the authors have been asserted 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Verso UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201 www.versobooks.com Verso is the imprint of New Left Books ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-262-7 (PB) eISBN-13: 978-1-78478-263-4 (US) eISBN-13: 978-1-78478-268-9 (UK) British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ali, Tariq.

Posh Boys: How English Public Schools Ruin Britain
by Robert Verkaik
Published 14 Apr 2018

Having spruced up the CV, he picked up six more jobs in just a few weeks, including major conflicts of interest with his role as a member of parliament. There are rules that strictly regulate the movement of politicians from high office to big jobs outside government. But Osborne didn’t bother waiting for permission from either the Cabinet Office or the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (ACOBA).6 For Owen Jones, Osborne’s seamless switch from Westminster to Fleet Street reflected the gulf between the unconnected working class and the wealthy elite. Talented working-class aspiring journalists are discriminated against because they can’t live off the Bank of Mum and Dad. With few exceptions, only the well-to-do can afford to do the unpaid internships and expensive journalism masters’ degrees that increasingly must adorn the CVs of those with hopes of making it into journalism.

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I don’t think they are being set aside for us just because we have expensive educations, posh voices and a certain confidence. But it’s crazy to say that life is equal. I don’t think life can ever be equal.’26 While some of those who went to public school are prepared to confront the iniquity of the education system, many from the left are not. When Owen Jones and Zadie Smith were invited to discuss social mobility on BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week in 2014 they were conspicuously silent on the issue of private education. Instead it was left to the privately educated David Kynaston to make the case for reform. As we have learned, recent Labour politicians have also been equally mute on this subject: if the case for abolishing public schools were solely a hard-left enterprise as Barnaby Lenon suggests, wouldn’t you expect to hear more about it from Jeremy Corbyn?

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Robert Verkaik is an author and journalist specialising in extremism and education. He writes for the Guardian, Independent, the i, Observer, Sunday Telegraph and Sunday Times. In 2013 he was runner-up in the specialist journalist category at the National Press Awards and he has previously been longlisted for the Orwell Prize and the Paul Foot Award. Before becoming a freelance journalist, he was the security editor for the Mail on Sunday and the home affairs editor and law editor for the Independent, where he worked for twelve years. Since the 9/11 attacks, Verkaik has covered the ‘War on Terror’, visiting the US detention camp at Guantánamo Bay and interviewing victims of torture in Syria.

Small Men on the Wrong Side of History: The Decline, Fall and Unlikely Return of Conservatism
by Ed West
Published 19 Mar 2020

For fervent religious believers it’s often the case that their entire life is dominated by the faith, and they tend to develop quite a sectarian attitude to non-members. Jeremy Corbyn reportedly once said that he could not be friends with someone who isn’t Left-wing, which for a potential prime minister struck me a red, flashing, warning light; a similar opinion has been voiced by a couple of Corbynite MPs. There is certainly asymmetry of hatred. When the Tory party met in Manchester during the 2010s people entering the arena had to go through a baying mob shouting ‘Tory scum’, the protestors’ faces contorted with hatred. When Left-wing polemicist Owen Jones turned up at the Tory conference in 2018 people asked to have selfies taken with him. Unsurprising, then, that Tory MPs get the most abuse on Twitter, men especially, with Labour women getting the least, and a lot of the abuse Labour MPs get is from party supporters who think they’re insufficiently socialist.2 Some Leftists don’t hate us, obviously.

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In recent years the bishops had a particularly prickly relationship with the Tories, and it was said that on the night of Blair’s victory champagne corks could be heard at Ecclestone Square, the bureaucratic headquarters of the bishops in Victoria. If true, then it was soon to turn sour. Or flat, I suppose. The Herald had once been the more Left-wing of the Catholic papers but had since repositioned itself on the Right, a Telegraph to the rival Tablet, which as the paper of quite posh liberal Catholics was more like the Guardian. As Catholicism had declined, the Church had become less working class, and there were fewer dockers in the pews and more Brideshead Revisited types who liked wearing cravats and pretending they had been to Oxford.

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Outside of those clusters, the ‘Right’ have little in common except that they’re not on the approved Left. Lots of Catholics are very active in Left-wing causes, especially on the subjects of poverty, immigration and pacificism; you occasionally still get nuns trying to break into nuclear bases, for instance. Yet at the same time their views on things such as sex education and abortion evoke more hostility from their own side than any of their beliefs do on the Right. During my time at the Herald the government had the temerity to appoint a pro-life charity to a government health body, which the Guardian took as an outrageous attack on women and a return to the Victorian era.

Broke: How to Survive the Middle Class Crisis
by David Boyle
Published 15 Jan 2014

But renting is really no escape from high house prices, because they feed straight into high rents, and a third of all mortgages in 2006 were for buy-to-let homes. The cost of servicing a mortgage provides a kind of basic floor for rents too, which is why so many people in successful jobs remain trapped in flatshares, sharing the bathroom, well into their thirties and probably beyond. The newspaper columnist Owen Jones complained on Twitter about London rents (£1,000 a month for a two-bedroom house in inner London). Hundreds of people responded with their own horror stories — a 35 per cent rent hike imposed after Christmas, a couple who had to abandon their ‘tiny flat’ in Zone 3 after their monthly rent went up from £720 to £950.

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Gordon Brown’s response to the banking crisis of 2008 was first to prop up the banks and then to support people paying mortgages. The needs of the middle classes still come first, where they coincide with the interests of the financial world. This period has also coincided with an extraordinary and deeply unpleasant vilification of the working classes, tracked so compellingly by Owen Jones in his polemic Chavs, where mainstream culture and politics alike seem to have become suffused with an unpleasant contempt for anyone who wasn’t middle-class, as if the threat to middle-class values came from below and not from above. Websites like Chavscum were reported in the Daily Telegraph under the headline ‘In defence of snobbery’.[10] As Francis Fukuyama suggested (see previous chapter), the political risks from destroying the middle classes are terrifying.

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This ‘chavscum’ attitude has fed into the extremes of panic for many middle-class parents desperate to choose the right school for their children, and fearing that a feckless, alien culture would somehow steal their security and poison the minds of their families. This panic is at least partly a feature of middle-class imagination, and actually it always has been. One working-class MP told Owen Jones: I genuinely think that there are people out there in the middle classes, in the church and the judiciary and politics and the media, who actually fear, physically fear, the idea of this great, gold bling-dripping, lumpenproletariat, that might one day kick their front door in and eat their au pair.[11] This is true.

Uncomfortably Off: Why the Top 10% of Earners Should Care About Inequality
by Marcos González Hernando and Gerry Mitchell
Published 23 May 2023

effectively the power of the wealthy, at national and international levels. By “assuming away” critical concerns, theoretical results and problematic empirical analyses effectively reinforce power structures and imbalances.’18 One of the most successful things that the wealthy have done is, in the words of polemicist Owen Jones, to ‘persuade the middle class that they’re middle class too’.19 When politicians talk about middle England, they are not always talking about people on median incomes, but actually about affluent voters in ‘upper-class Britain’ – they are the ‘middle class’ in the British sense of the term, after all.

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As Peter Mandler has recently written: Middle-class and working-class kids today have the same educational experience, and yet the middle class still go into the top-paying jobs. One study showed that 30% of people from Class 1 backgrounds leaving school with no educational qualifications nevertheless end up in Class 1 jobs. It seems your class position is, mainly, inherited.7 Owen Jones wrote that aspiration, however commendable a goal it might be, has become a ‘dominant atomised, consuming, acquisitive sense of self ’ sold as a means to individual salvation, resulting in the communitarian dimension of our lives being stripped bare.8 This was evident among many of the members of the top 10% we spoke with.

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Berlin: Hot or Cool Institute. Alamillo-Martinez, L. (2014) Never good enough. Comparative Sociology, 13:1, 12–29. Allegretti, A. (2022a) Ministers warn of scammers posing as energy bill support scheme. The Guardian. 1 October. www. theguardian.com/money/2022/oct/01/energy-bill-supportscheme-scam-alert Allegretti, A. (2022b) Gordon Brown urges Liz Truss to ‘show up’ for workers struggling with bills. The Guardian, 7 September. www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/sep/07/gordon-brownurges-liz-truss-to-show-up-for-workers-struggling-with-bills Allen, P., Konzelmann, S.J. and Toporowski, J. (2021) The return of the state: Restructuring Britain for the common good.

The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class, 1910-2010
by Selina Todd
Published 9 Apr 2014

This change reflected a decline in immigration as a political concern and a news story, as New Labour turned the agenda towards debating unemployment and education in the run-up to the 1997 general election (both of which Basildon’s residents cited as key points of concern).48 But from the early 2000s, politicians once more sought to put race on to the political agenda as they tried to deflect attention from their role in sustaining economic inequality by suggesting that race, not class, was the biggest social division in twenty-first-century Britain. As Owen Jones put it in Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class, those in power ascribed the ‘problems of the “white working class” … to their whiteness, rather than their class’.49 At the same time, politicians and employers have willingly used migrant workers as cheap labour – sanctioned by the European Union and the IMF – and then blamed them for unemployment.

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As the sociologists Bev Skeggs and Valerie Walkerdine have revealed, these attitudes aren’t confined to north-east England: women from working-class backgrounds whom they interviewed in southern England similarly saw their appearance and personality as determining their lives, and any failure led to low self-esteem, anxiety and depression.57 Yet as my classmates prepared to turn forty, attitudes towards class and inequality did appear to be changing in Britain. The success of The Spirit Level provided a clue: this academic study of ‘why inequality is bad for all of us’, written by two social scientists, became a surprise bestseller when it was published in 2010.58 Owen Jones’s Chavs achieved similar success a year later. Increasing numbers of people described themselves as working class. A survey by the thinktank British Future indicated that more than 60 per cent of Britons identified themselves as being working class.59 It was no coincidence that this new interest in class coincided with the first major recession for twenty years.

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This committee of local ratepayers – usually including municipal councillors, a clergyman and an assortment of Liberal and Conservative voices – determined whether applicants deserved help, how much assistance to give them, and whether such help was offered in cash or in the form of food or clothing. In 1904 thirty-three-year-old Hannah Mitchell, a member of the Independent Labour Party (ILP), witnessed how callous the Guardians could be. Hannah, the daughter of an agricultural worker, had left home at fourteen to become a servant. She had hated this work, particularly after her employer’s son attempted to rape her. She managed to save up enough money to escape to lodgings in a Derbyshire village, where she found work as a shop assistant and involved herself in the trade union movement.

The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time
by Yascha Mounk
Published 26 Sep 2023

But over the past decade, the defense of free speech has, in the imagination of many leftists, taken on a right-wing hue. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, perhaps the most prominent young progressive in the United States, has repeatedly put free speech in scare quotes and insinuated that the First Amendment is “merely a service for the powerful.” Owen Jones, a columnist at The Guardian and one of the most influential leftist writers in the United Kingdom, claimed that “ ‘free speech’ warriors” care only about “the right to say bigoted and stigmatising things about minorities.” Ellen K. Pao, a former CEO of Reddit and a committed leftist, expressed the increasingly common dismissal of free speech even more succinctly.

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GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “Liberty is meaningless”: Douglass, “Plea for Free Speech in Boston (1860).” GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “merely a service”: Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC), Twitter, March 18, 2022, 5:50 p.m., twitter.com/aoc/status/1504938290386030598. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “the right to say bigoted”: Owen Jones (@OwenJones84), Twitter, Sept. 11, 2022, 1:11 p.m., twitter.com/OwenJones84/status/1569010714420838401. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “At the end of the day”: Ellen Pao (@ekp), Twitter, April 5, 2022, 7:31 p.m., twitter.com/ekp/status/1511486807451463680. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT in “Repressive Tolerance”: Herbert Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance,” in A Critique of Pure Tolerance, ed.

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See, for example, Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963); Robin Archer, Out of Apathy: Voices of the New Left Thirty Years On: Papers Based on a Conference Organized by the Oxford University Socialist Discussion Group (London: Verso, 1989); and Lynne Segal, Sheila Benson, and Dorothy Wedderburn, “Women in the New Left,” Verso website, Oct. 26, 2017, www.versobooks.com/blogs/3460-women-in-the-new-left. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT awareness and understanding: This sentiment is most obvious in the Black Power movement. As Stokely Carmichael and Charles V.

Inequality and the 1%
by Danny Dorling
Published 6 Oct 2014

Many books are now being written to explain that there are areas of our lives where crude markets are inefficient, and where competition causes harm. Michael Sandel’s What Money Can’t Buy is a good example. Other current titles, such as Chystia Freeland’s Plutocrats, explain what it is like to be superrich; or how it is to live life more precariously, as Guy Standing’s The Precariat makes clear; or what it feels like to be at the bottom, as Owen Jones describes in Chavs; or the top as Jones describes in The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It. In the US the growing precariat majority – those whose lives are economically precarious – has come to be called the ‘task rabbit economy’. Task rabbits are people who bid for very short-term jobs on the internet.

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household income 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 housing 4.1, 4.2 empty stock 4.1, 4.2 equity gains and losses 4.1, 4.2 investment 4.1, 4.2 luxury poverty 4.1, 4.2 prices 4.1, 6.1 private rented 4.1, 4.2, 4.3 social 4.1, 4.2 vulnerable families housing benefit Hull human genome project Hutton, Will 3.1, nts.1 Iceland 4.1, 5.1, 6.1, 6.2 immigration 5.1, 6.1 immiseration 3.1, 4.1 impoverishment 2.1, 6.1 incapacity benefit income inequality 1.1, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5, 3.6, 3.7, 3.8, 3.9, 3.10, 3.11, 4.1, 5.1, 5.2, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4, 6.5, 6.6, 6.7 incomes drive down equity gap 1.1, 3.1, 3.2 and happiness highest UK licensed occupations low and falling pay 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5, 3.6 perks servant class 3.1, 3.2 and tax 3.1, 3.2 women youth India 3.1, 3.2, 5.1, 5.2 inequality 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5, 1.6, 1.7, 3.1, 3.2 attitudes to 3.1, 3.2 causes of extreme price of 6.1 reducing 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 4.4, 5.1 rise of 4.1, 4.2, 5.1 inheritance 4.1, 4.2 inheritance tax 4.1, 4.2 ‘In Search of Homo Economicus’ Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) 1.1, 1.2, 4.1, 5.1, nts.1 Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) 2.1, 2.2 Institute of International Finance International Labour Organization International Monetary Fund 3.1, 5.1 internships, Westminster School auction IQ tests 2.1, 2.2 Ireland 3.1, 4.1, 6.1, 6.2 Italy 2.1, 6.1 Jack, I. 3.1, nts.1 James, Clive 3.1, 6.1, nts.1, nts.2 Japan 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 2.1, 2.2, 3.1, 4.1, 4.2, 5.1, 6.1, 6.2 Jeffery, C. job creation Johnson, Boris 2.1, 6.1, nts.1 Johnson, D. Johnson, Jo Johnston, Darren Johnston, L., et al. Johnston, P. Jones, C. Jones, Owen Jones, Paul Tudor Jones, R. Jones, S. 2.1, nts.1 Joseph, C. Joseph Rowntree Foundation 1.1, 4.1, nts.1 Kaffash, J. Kavousii, B. Kay, John 3.1, 5.1, nts.1, nts.2 Kazakhstan Kelly, G. Kennedy, M. Kensington 5.1, 5.2 Kershaw, A. Kinnock, Neil Klimke, B. Knight, Frank Kollewe, J. Korea 2.1, 2.2, 6.1 Krugman, P.

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Mazzocchetti, ‘Feelings of Injustice and Conspiracy Theory: Representations of Adolescents from an African Migrant Background (Morocco and Sub-Saharan Africa) in Disadvantaged Neighbourhoods of Brussels’, Brussels Studies, No. 63, (26 November 2012), at brusselsstudies.be. 25. M. Farauenfelder, ‘12 Million Americans Believe Lizard People Run the US’, Boing Boing Blog, 15 April 2013, at boingboing.net. 26. L. Mckenzie, ‘The Realities of Everyday Life for the Working-Class in Neo-Liberal Britain (Part 2)’, New Left Project, 31 August 2013, at newleftproject.org. 27. Alice, ‘Eton’s Scholarship Exam’, New Left Project, 23 May 2013, at newleftproject.org. 28. Ibid., comment by David, made on 24 May 2013, 09:17. 29. See, for example: http://auction.westminster.org.uk/lots/a-one-week-internship-at-portas (accessible as of April 2014). 30. J. S. Henry, ‘The Price of Offshore Revisited: New Estimates for ‘Missing’ Global Private Wealth, Income, Inequality, and Lost Taxes’, Tax Justice Network, July 2012, pp. 8, 36, at taxjustice.net. 31.

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
by Steven Pinker
Published 1 Jan 2002

Helena Cronin, Judith Rich Harris, Geoffrey Miller, Orlando Patterson, and Donald Symons offered deep and insightful analyses of every aspect, and I can only hope that the final version is worthy of their wisdom. I profited as well from invaluable comments by Ned Block, David Buss, Nazli Choucri, Leda Cosmides, Denis Dutton, Michael Gazzaniga, David Geary, George Graham, Paul Gross, Marc Hauser, Owen Jones, David Kemmerer, David Lykken, Gary Marcus, Roslyn Pinker, Robert Plomin, James Rachels, Thomas Sowell, John Tooby, Margo Wilson, and William Zimmerman. My thanks also go to the colleagues who reviewed chapters in their areas of expertise: Josh Cohen, Richard Dawkins, Ronald Green, Nancy Kanwisher, Lawrence Katz, Glenn Loury, Pauline Maier, Anita Patterson, Mriganka Sur, and Milton J.

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Does all this mean that social service agencies should monitor stepparents more closely than biological parents? Not so fast. The vast majority of both kinds of parents never commit abuse, so putting stepparents under a cloud of suspicion would be unfair to millions of innocent people. As the legal scholar Owen Jones points out, the evolutionary analysis of stepparenting—or of anything else—has no automatic policy implications. Rather, it delineates a tradeoff and forces us to choose an optimum along it. In this case, the tradeoff is between minimizing child abuse while stigmatizing stepparents, on one hand, and being maximally fair to stepparents while tolerating an increase in child abuse, on the other.15 If we did not know that people are predisposed to lose patience with stepchildren faster than with biological children, we would implicitly choose one end of this tradeoff—ignoring stepparenting as a risk factor altogether, and tolerating the extra cases of child abuse—without even realizing it.

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If so, the lawyer argued, “his actions may not have been a product of total free will.”2 When Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer argued that rape is a consequence of male reproductive strategies, another lawyer contemplated using their theory to defend rape suspects.3 (Insert your favorite lawyer joke here.) Biologically sophisticated legal scholars, such as Owen Jones, have argued that a “rape gene” defense would almost certainly fail, but the general threat remains that biological explanations will be used to exonerate wrongdoers.4 Is this the bright future promised by the sciences of human nature—it wasn’t me, it was my amygdala? Darwin made me do it? The genes ate my homework?

Getting By: Estates, Class and Culture in Austerity Britain
by Lisa McKenzie
Published 14 Jan 2015

Contents Acknowledgements About the author Foreword by Danny Dorling Introduction 1 St Ann’s, Nottingham: a working-class story 2 ‘Being St Ann’s’ 3 The missing men 4 ‘A little bit of sugar’ 5 ‘On road, don’t watch that’ 6 ‘The roof is on fire’: despair, fear and civil unrest Last words: the working class – a sorry state? Afterword by Owen Jones Bibliography Acknowledgements Low-income working class families have over the last two generations been increasingly positioned to rely on the state to ensure they have enough to survive. This is because of low wages, or no wages, the precarity of the financial markets and because of the inadequate and shameful state of social housing in the United Kingdom.

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The history of our country – the Tolpuddle Martyrs, the Chartists, the suffragettes, the labour movement, movements against sexism, racism and homophobia – tell us that change happens through people organising from below. One day, the ‘hardships caused by the consequences of structural inequality’, as the book puts it, will be abolished. But books that cast light on the difficult and all too ignored realities of modern Britain will surely play their part on bringing that day ever closer. Owen Jones London, November 2014 1 ‘Support for benefit cuts dependent on ignorance, TUC-commissioned poll finds’, TUC press release, 2 January 2013. Bibliography Back, L. (1996) New ethnicities and urban culture: Racisms and multi-culture in young lives, London: Routledge. Bart, L. (1962) ‘It’s a fine life’ [song from the musical ‘Oliver!’].

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Table of Contents Title Dedication Copyright Contents Acknowledgements About the author Foreword by Danny Dorling Introduction 1 St Ann’s, Nottingham: a working-class story 2 ‘Being St Ann’s’ 3 The missing men 4 ‘A little bit of sugar’ 5 ‘On road, don’t watch that’ 6 ‘The roof is on fire’: despair, fear and civil unrest Last words: the working class – a sorry state? Afterword by Owen Jones Bibliography

99%: Mass Impoverishment and How We Can End It
by Mark Thomas
Published 7 Aug 2019

Meanwhile the traceable cash flow from more traditional sources, such as Koch Industries and ExxonMobil, has disappeared.16 The example of the Climate Change Counter Movement does sound rather like conspiracy: a small number of powerful actors coordinating their activities and attempting to cover their tracks as they do so. Jane Mayer and Owen Jones in their books, Dark Money17 and The Establishment,18 chart in some detail how some of the wealthiest in society have used covert means to increase their influence over recent decades. Recent revelations about the role of companies such as Cambridge Analytica in the US presidential election campaign and in the UK’s Brexit vote make the risk to democracy even clearer.19 But in general, there is no need for conspiracy.

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Appendix I – What Current Policies Would Mean for 2050 (Supporting analysis for Chapter 1) Appendix II – Comparison of Golden Age and Market Capitalism (Supporting analysis for Chapter 2) Appendix III – Mass Impoverishment (Supporting analysis for Chapter 3) Appendix IV – The Impact of Poverty Appendix V – Automation (Supporting analysis for Chapter 5) Appendix VI – How Current Policy Sustains Mass Impoverishment (Supporting analysis for Chapter 7) Appendix VII – Myth Busting (Supporting analysis for Chapters 9 to 12) Appendix VIII – What Makes a Happy Society (Supporting analysis for Chapter 13) Appendix IX – Two Stories of Value Creation Appendix X – Bibliography (Full details and website links for data and citations) Endnotes How This Book Came About 1 McKinsey Global Institute, 2016 2 Tatlow, 2017 3 Wearden & Fletcher, 2017 4 Monaghan, 2017 5 Bulman, 2017 Chapter 0: Economics – The Five Things You Need to Know 1 Wren-Lewis, 2014 2 Ghizoni, 1971 3 McLeay, Radia, & Thomas, 2014 4 If you are curious, the paper by McLeay, Radia, & Thomas does an excellent job of explaining it 5 ONS, 2015 6 Credit Suisse, 2015 7 OECD, 2015 8 OECD, 2015 Part 1: The Burning Platform 1 Machiavelli, Niccolò, The Prince, 1532 2 Conner, 2012 Chapter 1: The Age of Anxiety 1 Benarde, 1973 2 Stanley, 2017 3 CNBC, 2014 4 Shelter, 2016 5 Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, 2017 6 Jivanda, 2014 7 Centre for Poverty Research, University of California, Davis, 2018 8 Centre for Poverty Research, University of California, Davis, 2018 9 US Census Bureau, 2018 10 Deaton, 2018 11 Again, Appendix I contains the basis for these estimates 12 US Census Bureau, 2018 13 O’Brien, 2014 Chapter 2: A Tale of Two Systems 1 Dickens, Charles, A Tale of Two Cities, London, 1859 2 Macrotrends, 2018 3 Spence, 2018 4 Lawson, 1992 5 Duncan, 2010 6 BBC, 2009 7 Pfanner, 2008 8 Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, 2011 9 Evans, 2018 10 Campbell, Denis, ‘Hidden toll of ambulance delays at A&E revealed’, The Guardian, 2 April 2018 11 Campbell, Denis , Marsh, Sarah and Helm, Toby, ‘NHS in crisis as cancer operations cancelled due to lack of beds’, The Guardian, 14 January 2017 12 Bureau of Economic Analysis, 2015 / St Louis Federal Reserve Bank, 2015 Chapter 3: Mass Impoverishment – Coming to a Street Near You 1 Córdoba & Verdier , 2007 2 Robbins, 1935 3 Mankiw, 2009 4 Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis, 2018 5 St Louis Federal Reserve, 2016 6 Anderson & Pizzigati, 2018 7 Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2015 8 Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2017 9 World Hunger, 2016 10 Sen, 2001 11 Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis, 2018 12 Statista, 2018 13 See the full analysis in Appendix III 14 May, We can make Britain a country that works for everyone, 2016 15 World Bank, 2018 16 OECD, 2018 17 Glasmeier, 2015 18 Centre for Research in Social Policy, 2015 19 Tiplady, 2017 20 Buffett, 2015 21 OECD, 2015 Chapter 4: An Alternative Morality 1 Wilde, Oscar, Lady Windemere’s Fan; London, 1893 2 Oxford Dictionaries, 2018 3 Soros, George, The Crisis of Global Capitalism: Open Society Endangered, New York, 1998 4 Melin, 2017 5 Ziprecruiter.com, 2018 6 Morningstar.com, 2018 7 Davidson, James Dale and Rees-Mogg, William, The Sovereign Individual (London, 1997), p. 131 8 Sohn, 2014 9 Romney, Full Transcript Mitt Romney, 2012 10 Davidson, James Dale and Rees-Mogg, William, The Sovereign Individual (London, 1997), p. 310 11 Davidson, James Dale and Rees-Mogg, William, The Sovereign Individual (London, 1997), p. 393 12 Thiel, 2009 13 Davidson, James Dale and Rees-Mogg, William, The Sovereign Individual (London, 1997), p. 140 14 Cowen, 2013 15 Mason, Rowena, ‘Benefit freeze to stay for working people costing typical family £300 a year’, The Guardian, 27 November 2017. 16 Tighe & Rovnick, 2018 17 Morley N., 2017 18 Greenfield & Marsh, 2018 19 Fleming, 2018 20 Wikipedia, 2018 Wikipedia, 2018 21 Mayer, 2016 22 Freedland, 2017 Chapter 5: The Fork in the Road 1 Carney, Mark, ‘Keeping the patient alive: Monetary policy in a time of great disruption’, World Economic Forum, 6 December 2016 2 Miller, 2014 3 US Census Bureau, 2015 4 Rigby, 2016 5 Royal Academy of Engineering, 2013 6 University of Manchester, 2016 7 Walsh, 2016 8 Kirkpatrick & Light, 2015 9 Driverless car market watch, 2016 10 Yadron, 2016 11 Bostrom, Superintelligence: paths, dangers, strategies, 2014 12 United Nations, 2016 13 ITER, 2016 14 Culham Centre for Fusion Energy, 2016 15 Noakes, 2016 16 Hudson, 2013 17 Murgia, 2016 18 Rajesh, 2015 19 Smart Cities Council, 2016 20 The Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 2016 21 Andersen, 2006 22 Allen R.

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In the UK, for example, benefits for working people have been ‘frozen’ since 201515 – that means that they have been falling in real terms, and they will continue to do so – and the government plans to roll-out Universal Credit, a so-called reform of the benefits system, despite the evidence that it causes enormous hardship to the most vulnerable and has forced many to turn to food banks to survive.16 The Conservative MP, Jacob Rees-Mogg commented that this growth in food banks was rather uplifting: [The State] provides a basic level of welfare, but on some occasions that will not work and to have charitable support given by people voluntarily to support their fellow citizens I think is rather uplifting and shows what a good, compassionate country we are.17 And there is a growing movement to criminalize homelessness: Despite updated Home Office guidance at the start of the year, which instructs councils not to target people for being homeless and sleeping rough, the Guardian has found over fifty local authorities with public space protection orders (PSPOs) in place. Homeless people are banned from town centres, routinely fined hundreds of pounds and sent to prison if caught repeatedly asking for money… Local authorities in England and Wales have issued hundreds of fixed-penalty notices and pursued criminal convictions for ‘begging’, ‘persistent and aggressive begging’ and ‘loitering’ since they were given strengthened powers to combat antisocial behaviour in 2014 by then home secretary, Theresa May.18 In the US, the unemployed already face strict constraints on the support they can receive, and President Donald Trump has declared his intention to let states tie eligibility for Medicaid to work: Benefits under welfare programmes – including temporary cash assistance to needy families and food stamps – can [already] be linked to work.

Protest and Power: The Battle for the Labour Party
by David Kogan
Published 17 Apr 2019

Shirley Williams accounted for this in 1981 after she had left the Labour party to create the SDP. The right of the NEC had been outgunned for the last three years because its power base had always rested on union representatives countering the New Left. . . . we were hampered by the fact that we still often had to spend hours on the phone rather than in meetings and very often we had to explain to people who themselves were to some extent bound by decisions made by their unions — not left-wing decisions, but decisions made in ignorance of what was the latest move. They were much slower in moving. On this particular day it was too late and the fight was going out of them.

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We watched them sell migrants down the river. This push from the left had only four full- and part-time staff and no real funding or structure. We organised the biggest event of the Remain campaign. A big conference with John McDonnell and all the rest of it. And we organised a speaker tour with the likes of Owen Jones, Caroline Lucas and Clive Lewis. Our two big core groups were Momentum, which affiliated to us in the course of the campaign, and we ended up being based in Momentum’s offices, and the Green party. When the referendum was lost and the result accepted by Jeremy Corbyn, attention moved away from Brexit to the chicken coup and second leadership election.

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The bigger surprise was Seumas Milne brought in as the executive director of communications. Seumas Milne of Winchester, Balliol and the Guardian, the son of a former director general of the BBC, was at first sight an unlikely ally, yet he perfectly demonstrated the concerns of Corbyn’s enemies. He had once been the business manager of Straight Left, the house magazine of the Communist Party of Great Britain – a pro-soviet magazine. He had not been a member of the Communist party but over thirty-five years his columns in the Guardian perfectly echoed Corbyn’s world view: anti-imperialist, anti-American, anti-capitalist and anti-Israeli.

England: Seven Myths That Changed a Country – and How to Set Them Straight
by Tom Baldwin and Marc Stears
Published 24 Apr 2024

In more recent years this connective tissue between politicians and communities has weakened, leaving an increasingly professionalised Establishment divorced from the everyday experiences of other people. Democracy, wrote Mair, ‘is being steadily stripped of its popular component’, as politicians develop their own specialised, technical language and reference points and networks from places like Oxford where those high college walls exclude everyone else.38 The Guardian columnist Owen Jones went to Oxford University himself before writing a book called The Establishment in which he worried people might think he was part of it. Jones cited the example of Danny Blanchflower, a dissident economist on the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee, who felt frozen out by the other members because he was the only one of them who didn’t go to Oxbridge.

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Id=65 32 Clive Aslet and Greg Hurst, ‘Eton’s £18m hall’, The Times, 9 June 2015. 33 Peter Hitchens, ‘The Oxbridge war on private schools doesn’t help the poor’, Mail on Sunday, 6 November 2022. 34 Sean Coughlan, ‘Thousand fewer UK students at Oxbridge’, BBC News, 26 February 2019. 35 Alastair McCall, ‘Top universities fall short’, Sunday Times, 17 September 2021; Hannah Richardson, ‘Oxbridge uncovered’, BBC News, 20 October 2017; The Sutton Trust, ‘Eight schools send as many pupils to Oxbridge as three-quarters of all schools’, Sutton Trust, 7 December 2018. 36 Adrian Wooldridge, The Aristocracy of Talent, London, Allen Lane, 2021, p. 312. 37 Simon Kuper, Chums, London, Profile, 2022, p. 3. 38 Peter Mair, Ruling the Void, London, Verso, 2013, p. 2. 39 Owen Jones, The Establishment, London, Penguin, 2014, pp. xvii, 15, 256. 40 Daily Mail, 4 November 2016; Daily Mail, 18 April 2017. 41 See Matthew Goodwin, The New Elite, London, Penguin, 2023; Paul Collier, The Future of Capitalism, London, Penguin, 2019, pp. 3−4; and Alistair Heath, ‘The blob is taking back control’, Daily Telegraph, 24 November 2021. 42 See https://policyexchange.org.uk/publication/academic-freedom-in-the-uk-2/ 43 Steve Hilton, ‘Steve Hilton: Yes there is a Deep State’, Fox News, 3 February 2018. 44 ‘Woke, Cancel Culture and White Privilege’, Ipsos Mori/King’s College, 12 May 2022. 45 Tim Shipman, ‘How the Tories weaponised woke’, Sunday Times, 13 June 2021; Rob Merrick, ‘Tory insiders’, Independent, 5 August 2020. 46 See: https://policyexchange.org.uk/publication/academic-freedom-in-the-uk/; https://www.civitas.org.uk/publications/academic-freedom-in-our-universities/ 47 Anna Fazackerley, ‘Gavin Williamson using “misleading” research’, Guardian, 27 February 2021. 48 Sally-Anne Huxtable, Corinne Fowler, Christo Kefalas and Emma Slocombe (eds), Interim Report on the Connections Between Colonialism and Properties now in the Care of the National Trust, Including Links with Historic Slavery, Swindon, National Trust, 2020. 49 The Common Sense Group, ‘Letters: Britain’s heroes’, Daily Telegraph, 9 November 2020. 50 Vanessa Thorpe and James Tapper, ‘National Trust sees off culture war rebellion in an AGM of discontent’, Observer, 30 October 2021; Jack Blackburn, ‘National Trust is building its reputation, poll shows’, The Times, 30 September 2023. 51 Jon Alexander and Ariane Conrad, Citizens, Kingston-upon-Thames, Canbury Press, 2022, pp. 180−6. 52 Robert Jenrick: ‘Keir Starmer’s Labour is complicit in the woke takeover of Britain’s institutions,’ Daily Telegraph, 26 January 2024. 53 James Delingpole, ‘BBC’s A Christmas Carol’, Spectator, 26 December 2019; Kevin Schofield, ‘BBC Director General Tim Davie to speak at private meeting of Tory MPs’, Huffington Post, 20 October 2023. 54 Peter Walker, ‘BBC Political Editor given bodyguard’, Guardian, 24 September 2017. 55 Sky News, ‘Lord Adonis: “BBC created Brexit and Farage” ’, YouTube, 8 April 2018. 56 Jim Waterson, ‘Emily Maitlis says “active Tory party agent” shaping BBC news output’, Guardian, 24 August 2022; Alex Farber, ‘BBC cuts make Have I Got News for You the last satire standing’, The Times, 31 March 2023; Jim Waterson, ‘BBC licence fee to be abolished in 2027 and funding frozen’, Guardian, 16 January 2022. 57 Gavin Cordon, ‘Boris Johnson: three decades of scandals, blunders and rows’, Evening Standard, 12 January 2022. 58 See https://www.carnegieuktrust.org.uk/blog-posts/loss-of-public-trust-in-government-is-the-biggest-threat-to-democracy-in-england/ 59 James Grant, ‘Letter Goes Viral’, Daily Mail, 13 January 2022; Max Hastings, ‘I Was Boris Johnson’s Boss’, Guardian, 24 June 2019. 60 Purnell, Just Boris, pp. 129–30. 61 Jin Pickard, ‘David Cameron and the Bullingdon Night of the Broken Window’, Financial Times, 4 April 2010. 62 See https://www.ox.ac.uk/about/facts-and-figures/student-numbers 63 Luke Harding, ‘Oxford University criticised for accepting oligarch’s £75m donation’, Guardian, 3 November 2015; Henry Foy and Max Seddon, ‘From Russian oil to rock’n’roll’, Financial Times, 6 June 2019; Figures for proportion of students from outside the UK and Europe are taken from https://www.bsg.ox.ac.uk/2020-21-annual-report 64 Andrew Jack, ‘Reuben brothers fund new Oxford college with £80m donation’, Financial Times, 11 June 2020. 65 Catherine Bennett, ‘Just what was it exactly that Oxford University saw in the billionaire boss of Ineos?’

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For them it ran from Magna Carta through the Peasants’ Revolt, the Levellers and the Diggers, the Chartists and the Suffragettes all the way to the foundation of the NHS. Billy Bragg, a socialist songwriter best remembered for the lines ‘I don’t want to change the world/I’m not looking for a new England’, has written about ‘the struggle for rights that has gone on in England since Magna Carta’. Even the long-time left-wing MP Tony Benn, who had previously dismissed what happened in Runnymede as merely a victory for ‘feudal barons’ against monarchical ‘dictatorship’,44 felt moved to invoke the Charter against efforts by Gordon Brown’s Labour government to extend the time terror suspects could be detained without trial from an already unprecedented 28 days to 42 in 2008.45 This was when the pendulum began to swing back the other way.

Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India
by Shashi Tharoor
Published 1 Feb 2018

In 1936, 62 per cent of the cloth sold in India: Gurcharan Das, India Unbound: From Independence to the Global Information Age, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001. at the end of British rule, modern industry employed only 2.5 million people: Ibid, p. 63. ‘the redemption of a nation… a kind of gift from heaven’: Owen Jones, ‘William Hague is wrong… we must own up to our brutal colonial past’, The Independent, 3 September 2012. ‘There are few kings in Europe’: Letter to the Duke of Choiseul, dt. London, 27 Feb. 1768. A.E./C.P., Angleterre, Vol. 477, 1768; quoted in Sudipta Das, ‘British Reactions to the French Bugbear in India, 1763–83’, European History Quarterly, 22 (1), 1992, pp. 39–65.

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‘[T]he British empire was essentially a Hitlerian project on a grand scale’: Richard Gott, ‘White wash’ (book review of Ornamentalism: How the British saw their Empire by David Cannadine), The Guardian, 5 May 2001. if looted Nazi-era art can be (and now is being) returned to their rightful owners: See the discussion in Erin Johnson, ‘If we return Nazi-looted art, the same goes for empire-looted,’ Aeon. www.aeon.co/ideas/if-we-r etur n-nazi-looted-art-the-same-goes-for-empir e-looted?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=oupphilosophy&utm_campaign=oupphilosophy. ‘if a strong man were to throw four stones’: ‘The Koh-i-noor diamond is in Britain illegally. But it should still stay there’, The Guardian, 16 February 2016. Part of the legacy of colonialism is the worldwide impact of the methods: For a searching political analysis of the Empire and its continuing implications, see two books by John Darwin, The Empire Project, London: Penguin, 2010; and Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain, London: Allen Lane, 2013.

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At the beginning of the eighteenth century, as the British economic historian Angus Maddison: Angus Maddison, The World Economy, Development Centre of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2006. ‘What honour is left to us?’: William Dalrymple, ‘The East India Company: The Original Corporate Raiders’, The Guardian, 4 March 2015. Bengal’s textiles were still being exported: Most of these details are from K. N. Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company: 1660–1760, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006 and Sushil Chaudhury, The Prelude to Empire: Plassey Revolution of 1757, New Delhi: Manohar Publishers, 2000.

The London Compendium
by Ed Glinert
Published 30 Jun 2004

A year later Aitken resigned from the Cabinet following allegations in the Guardian that while he was Minister for Defence Procurement he had concealed his links with a Lebanese arms dealer and that a hotel bill for his stay at the Paris Ritz in 1993 had been paid by a Saudi businessman, in breach of parliamentary guidelines. Distraught, Aitken vowed to sue the Guardian (and Granada TV) using ‘the simple sword of truth and the trusty shield of fair play to cut out the cancer of bent and twisted journalism’, and for a while it looked as if he would be exonerated. But the Guardian staged a clever coup to ensnare him. The paper’s editor, Peter Preston, sent the Ritz Hotel a fax on House of Commons notepaper, purportedly from Aitken, requesting information about the bill, and received the required information in response.

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In 1994 the art collector Nasser David Khalili bought No. 18 and the neighbouring No. 19 for £40 million and converted them into one mansion, at the cost of a further £40 million, using marble from the same Agra quarry that was used in building the Taj Mahal. Seven years later he put the combined block on sale for £65 million, at the time the highest price ever placed on a London property. • Lenin in Bloomsbury, p. 84. No. 24 A Moorish extravaganza built in 1845 by Owen Jones which is now the Saudi ambassador’s residence. east side: Notting Hill Gate to Palace Green No. 5 A Soviet Consulate in the 1960s, it was here on 23 December 1962, according to some theories, that Hugh Gaitskell, the Labour Party leader, was fatally poisoned as ‘punishment’ for hounding communists out of the Labour Party.

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According to Peter Wright, the secret agent who later wrote Spycatcher, the biscuits may have contained hydralazine, a drug that produces the symptoms of lupus disseminata erythematosis, a tropical disease rare in Britain – even rarer in someone who has not visited the tropics – and not usually seen in men over forty (Gaitskell was fifty-six), which induces heart and kidney failure and which had already been proposed as a method of assassination in a Soviet journal. ‘The Cage’, No. 8 Built by Owen Jones in the 1850s, and later owned by the art collector Lord Duveen of Millbank, who also had a suite at Claridge’s, No. 8 was used during the Second World War as the headquarters of the War Crimes Investigation Unit interrogation centre known as ‘The Cage’, where German prisoners of war who had been close to the upper echelons of the Nazi Party, or those who had specialist knowledge of the V1 and V2 rockets that were bombarding London, were questioned.

Brexit, No Exit: Why in the End Britain Won't Leave Europe
by Denis MacShane
Published 14 Jul 2017

Blair’s press operation in Downing Street always found reasons to run down any EU proposal and played up Blair wielding vetoes over directives. Yes, there was the occasional pro-EU piece in the Financial Times, while the Guardian handed over its comment pages to fluent writers like Sir Simon Jenkins, Owen Jones, Paul Mason or Giles Fraser to mock and denigrate Europe. Almost the entire economist establishment took against the euro and the Guardian’s economics editor, Larry Elliott, wrote a book denouncing Europe’s single currency in 2016. The UK and indeed the world’s liberal-left pontificators from Yanis Varoufakis to Joseph Stiglitz have spent more time trashing parts of the EU they don’t like than arguing in favour of European integration and the existence of the EU.

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Can the Conservative Party now close the chapter of appeasing anti-European prejudices in Tory Party history, 1997–2017. The narrow victory for Brexit in the 2016 plebiscite was won on the basis of the most monstrous lies ever told before a key national vote. These lies were never challenged by the BBC, once the guardian of balance and fairness and the champion of hard questioning of politicians telling clear falsehoods. All politicians make dubious promises or forecast a dreadful future if their side does not win. But the Brexit vote was won by telling the biggest lies, repeated incessantly and added to with fresh lies to make an Everest of untruth to persuade people to vote to isolate Britain from its partners and allies.

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I have never challenged the rights of those sceptical of or opposed to the cooperation implicit in EU membership and its common rule book to their view, but when it crosses a frontier into open contempt and dislike of fellow Europeans or when anti-Europeans have to enter a post-factual world which may do massive damage to the future prosperity and coherence of my country and my children then I believe it is necessary to enter the lists. As Timothy Garton Ash points out in the Guardian, it takes time for people to see through the rise of the politics of identity and emotion and in that period what is required is ‘courage, determination, consistency, the development of a new political language and new policy answers to real problems’. To solve Brexit, therefore, Europe has to change.

The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World
by Adrian Wooldridge
Published 2 Jun 2021

(London, Duckworth and Co., 1900), Vol. p. 59 4 Thomas Paine, Common Sense (first pub. 1776), p. 23 5 Thomas Paine, Rights of Man (first pub. 1791; ECCO-TCP: Eighteenth Century Collections Online, University of Oxford), p. 69 6 Paine, Common Sense, p. 23 7 Paine, Rights of Man, p. 71 8 Paine, Common Sense, p. 26 9 Paine, Rights of Man, p. 72 10 See Owen Jones, The Establishment: And How They Get Away with It (London, Allen Lane, 2014) for one attempt to do this 11 John Wade, The Extraordinary Black Book (1832 edn), pp. 212, 480 12 Quoted in Douglas W. Allen, The Institutional Revolution: Measurement and the Economic Emergence of the Modern World (Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 2012), p. 44 13 Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (London, Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 16, 117 14 Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 2 Vols.

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Rejecting all the most heartfelt assumptions of his time, he argued that differences between individuals trumped differences between the sexes: ‘a good many women are better than a good many men at a good many things’. Society would be damaging itself if it consigned all women, regardless of their abilities, to a subordinate role just because they bear children. His biggest worry about recruiting women to the guardian class was (to us) a somewhat eccentric one: since the guardians will be expected to exercise together, and since exercise is best taken naked, mixing the sexes might prove to be indecorous. For Plato, the essence of statecraft was making sure that people are given jobs that are suitable to their inner natures: a process that meant re-sorting the population in every generation and carefully adjusting expectations to abilities.

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The ascent of women thus helped to promote the two great backlashes against meritocracy that will dominate much of the rest of our story: worries that women were being held back by structural constraints on their opportunities helped to drive the politics of the left in the 1960s; and worries that high-income couples were drawing away from the rest of society helped to drive the populist revolt on the right against meritocracy in the 2010s. Part Five * * * THE CRISIS OF THE MERITOCRACY 14 Against Meritocracy: The Revolt on the Left We have seen that the meritocratic revolution was largely driven by the left: by left-wing political parties that wanted to open up opportunities to members of the working class; by left-wing intellectuals who wanted to introduce a scientific method for allocating social positions; and by feminists, who wanted to extend opportunities to girls as well as boys. Yet from the 1930s onwards the left gradually turned against its intellectual offspring.

Three Years in Hell: The Brexit Chronicles
by Fintan O'Toole
Published 5 Mar 2020

Their disastrous inability even to tolerate his own (elected) deputy leader Tom Watson is a result of Corbyn’s profound uneasiness with challenges from within. In 2015, when he agreed to stand as a token left-wing candidate for the Labour leadership, his pristine lack of ambition was part of the appeal: as he put it, ‘I am much too old for personal ambition.’ It is indeed crucial to understand that even the comrades in the hard-left Campaign Group who put him forward as a candidate to succeed Ed Miliband had absolutely no notion of Corbyn as a potential prime minister. Subsequent Corbyn boosters like the Guardian columnist Owen Jones did not want him to stand at the time and argued that a ‘soft left’ candidate should be supported instead.

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The main one is my home territory at the Irish Times, where I have enjoyed the unfailing support of Paul O’Neill, John McManus, Conor Goodman and many other great colleagues. It is one of the most civilised newspapers in the world and I never forget my good fortune at having landed there. I am also deeply grateful to Katherine Butler, Jonathan Shainin, Paul Laity and their colleagues at the Guardian and to Robert Yates at the Observer. I am greatly indebted, too, to Jana Prikryl, Matt Seaton and the editors of the New York Review of Books. I am very lucky, too, to have the support, encouragement and sound advice of my editor Neil Belton and all the staff at Head of Zeus and of my agent Natasha Fairweather.

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Boris Johnson resigns as foreign secretary and is replaced by Jeremy Hunt. 24 July 2018: UK government publishes white paper on future UK–EU relations. 23 August 2018: UK government publishes the first collection of technical notices providing guidance on how to prepare for a no-deal Brexit. 10 July 2018 On 7 July Theresa May holds a cabinet meeting at Chequers and pushes through an agreement that the UK will seek to remain closely aligned to the customs union and single market after Brexit. David Davis resigns as Brexit secretary, followed by Boris Johnson as foreign secretary. The best headline about British prime minister Theresa May’s short-lived triumph over the hard Brexiteers last Friday was undoubtedly the one on Pádraig Collins’s report in the Guardian: ‘Possum rescued after getting head stuck in Nutella jar’. Admittedly, Collins was actually reporting, not from Chequers, but from Brisbane, Australia. Yet the accompanying photograph was the perfect image of what May is trying to do. It showed the furry creature all curled up and immobilised with its head completely encased in a glass jar streaked with visible residues of sticky brown stuff.

Respectable: The Experience of Class
by Lynsey Hanley
Published 20 Apr 2016

In the process, the idea that working-class voters – like their middle-class counterparts – in fact made a conscious decision to vote Ukip, or embrace the English Defence League (EDL) and their like, risks getting lost. What’s obscured in such arguments, in other words, is the sense that working-class people have agency. For instance, in Chavs – an important book which rightly argued against the ‘demonization’ of working-class people – the political journalist Owen Jones wrote: The rise of the far right is a reaction to the marginalization of working-class people … Karl Marx once described religion as ‘the sigh of the oppressed creature’: something similar could be said about the rise of the far right today.8 You can detect in Marx’s quote, and Jones’s apparently approving use of it, a clear sense of the working-class person as noble wretch, driven to shameful acts because he knows no better.

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Much of life for many people, even in the heart of the first world, still consists of waiting in a bus shelter with your shopping for a bus that never comes.’6 To this day, this is a sentiment apparently often forgotten by editors of the overwhelmingly London-centric broadsheet newspapers, to which two examples from 2010 editions of the Guardian testify. First, on the sale of ‘Lola’s peanut butter cupcakes’: ‘We thought we were over cupcakes … how wrong we were. This is just too delish. And now on sale in Topshop for that perfect post-changing-room sugar slump.’7 Needless to say, the generic Topshop branch invoked in that description was the fashion chain’s flagship store in central London. Second, in a regular column about the life of a retired teacher in north London, the bohemian upper-middle-class suburb of Highgate was described as ‘ordinary’.8 This is nothing new, of course: the Guardian reporter Geoffrey Moorhouse, in his 1964 Penguin Special The Other England, illustrates much the same complaint with this quote from an unnamed periodical: I was eating a moussaka in Bolton the other day which (though nice) was made of potato, and it suddenly made me realise how little you can take aubergines for granted out of town.

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I know exactly what this feels like: it’s the wall in the head by another name. What that phrase means to me is the feeling of division, of torn allegiance, that we might experience between the ‘home’ we know and the possibility of a different kind of ‘home’. ‘I was driven by my childhood to get on,’ Richard Hoggart told the Guardian in a 2004 interview, but not in the sense of becoming a millionaire or anything like that. The ambition was to do something useful and interesting and somehow involving my writing. And I did have an impulse to criticise because there was a lot to criticise. I was brought up in a world where just about everyone assumed they would stay there all their lives and I resented that deeply.

Four Battlegrounds
by Paul Scharre
Published 18 Jan 2023

Bots can be used to create the illusion of public support for ideas by amassing fake followers or artificially inflating content. Bradshaw and Howard cited twenty-six authoritarian regimes, including Saudi Arabia, that have used bots as a tool of information control to drown out political dissent, suppress human rights, and discredit political opponents. Marc Owen Jones, a professor at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Doha, Qatar, suggested in 2017 that half of Twitter accounts in Saudi Arabia could be bots. Bots have also been used in foreign disinformation campaigns to disrupt democracies. China, India, Iran, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela have all conducted influence operations targeted at other nations, in which bots can play an enabling role.

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Howard, “The Global Disinformation Order: 2019 Global Inventory of Organised Social Media Manipulation” (working paper, Project on Computational Propaganda, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK, 2019), 1, 11–12, https://comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/93/2019/09/CyberTroop-Report19.pdf. 141in the United States: Bradshaw and Howard, “The Global Disinformation Order,” 10–12; Case Studies—Collated—NOV 2019.docx, 123–126. 142“the adoption of techniques to influence political opinion online”: Case Studies—Collated—NOV 2019.docx, 123. 142astroturfing, a manipulative social media practice: Case Studies—Collated—NOV 2019.docx, 123–126. 142twenty-six authoritarian regimes: Bradshaw and Howard, “The Global Disinformation Order,” i, 2, 5. 142half of Twitter accounts in Saudi Arabia: Marc Owen Jones, “Automated Sectarianism and Pro-Saudi Propaganda on Twitter,” Exposing the Invisible, January 18, 2017, https://exposingtheinvisible.org/en/articles/automated-sectarianism/. 142China, India, Iran: Bradshaw and Howard, “The Global Disinformation Order,” 2, 5. 142Twitter removed a pro-government bot network: Ben Collins and Shoshana Wodinsky, “Twitter Pulls Down Bot Network That Pushed Pro-Saudi Talking Points About Disappeared Journalist,” NBC News, October 18, 2018, https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/exclusive-twitter-pulls-down-bot-network-pushing-pro-saudi-talking-n921871. 142another 88,000 Saudi spam bots: Twitter Safety, “New Disclosures to Our Archive of State-Backed Information Operations,” Twitter Blog, December 20, 2019, https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2019/new-disclosures-to-our-archive-of-state-backed-information-operations.html. 142“spammy network” used by China’s Communist Party: Twitter Safety, “Information Operations Directed at Hong Kong,” Twitter Blog, August 19, 2019, https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2019/information_operations_directed_at_Hong_Kong.html. 142150,000 “amplifier accounts” used in CCP influence operations: Twitter Safety, “Disclosing Networks of State-Linked Information Operations We’ve Removed,” Twitter Blog, June 12, 2020, https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/information-operations-june-2020.html. 142prohibits spammy or manipulative behavior: Yoel Roth and Nick Pickles, “Bot or Not?

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The Complete Guide,” Hootsuite Blog, June 21, 2021, https://blog.hootsuite.com/how-the-youtube-algorithm-works/; Paige Cooper, “How the Facebook Algorithm Works in 2021 and How to Make It Work for You,” Hootsuite Blog, February 10, 2021, https://blog.hootsuite.com/facebook-algorithm/. 144more sophisticated algorithm: Eric Meyerson, “YouTube Now: Why We Focus on Watch Time,” YouTube Official Blog, August 10, 2012, https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/youtube-now-why-we-focus-on-watch-time. 144deep learning to improve their algorithms: Koumchatzky and Andryeyev, “Using Deep Learning at Scale in Twitter’s Timelines.” 1449.3 million problematic videos: “YouTube Community Guidelines Enforcement,” Google Transparency Report, June 2021, https://transparencyreport.google.com/youtube-policy/removals. 145algorithm for recommending videos to watch next: Paul Lewis, “‘Fiction Is Outperforming Reality’: How YouTube’s Algorithm Distorts Truth,” The Guardian, February 2, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/feb/02/how-youtubes-algorithm-distorts-truth; Zeynep Tufekci, “YouTube, the Great Radicalizer,” New York Times, March 10, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/opinion/sunday/youtube-politics-radical.html; Sam Levin, “Las Vegas Survivors Furious as YouTube Promotes Clips Calling Shooting a Hoax,” The Guardian, October 4, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/oct/04/las-vegas-shooting-youtube-hoax-conspiracy-theories; Clive Thompson, “YouTube’s Plot to Silence Conspiracy Theories,” Wired, September 18, 2020, https://www.wired.com/story/youtube-algorithm-silence-conspiracy-theories/. 145over 70 percent of viewing hours are driven by the algorithm: Joan E.

Snakes and Ladders: The Great British Social Mobility Myth
by Selina Todd
Published 11 Feb 2021

Dennis Marsden completed his National Service in 1957 ‘on a wave of interest in the sociology of working-class life which Richard Hoggart’s Uses of Literacy [his semi-autobiographical study of working-class life, published in 1957], the Bethnal Green surveys by the Institute of Community Studies, and New Left Review [a new left-wing periodical] helped to arouse and disseminate.’6 In the late 1950s Marsden and Jackson found work at the Institute of Community Studies led by Michael Young and Peter Willmott. In 1962 they jointly authored Education and the Working Class, a study of socially mobile grammar-school children.

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For these younger people, social mobility was not a solution to inequality. And in arguing their case, they drew on perspectives that had found wider popularity since the financial crash. Over the next decade, books like Kate Pickett’s and Richard Wilkinson’s The Spirit Level, Danny Dorling’s Inequality and the 1%, and Owen Jones’s Chavs: The demonization of the working class and The Establishment became surprise bestsellers. These researchers revealed a Britain divided between a small wealthy elite and everyone else. They also showed that the existence of a wealthy elite didn’t create greater opportunity, but instead caused the growing poverty and insecurity that everyone else experienced.

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While union density was very low compared with the 1970s – just 6 million workers, or 26 per cent of the workforce, belonged to a union in 2010 compared with more than 13 million, or 53 per cent, in 1979 – unions were appealing to workers in expanding sectors.98 They were also becoming more left wing. The early 2010s saw the election of several left-wing union leaders, including Len McCluskey, born in 1950, who failed his eleven-plus, became a dockworker, and in 2011 became leader of Unite – a successor of the TGWU and the second-largest trade union in Britain. Then, in 2015, the Labour Party held a leadership contest.

Not Working: Where Have All the Good Jobs Gone?
by David G. Blanchflower
Published 12 Apr 2021

Americans, he argues, “have reached a point where ignorance, especially of anything related to public policy, is an actual virtue” (2017, x). Trump, Nichols argues, sought power during the 2016 election “by mobilizing the angriest and most ignorant in the electorate” (2017, 215). Oh dear. These were battles against the establishment. As left-wing columnist and author Owen Jones noted, “The illusion of every era is that it is permanent. Opponents who seem laughably irrelevant and fragmented can enjoy sudden reversals of fortunes. The fashionable common sense of today can become the discredited nonsense of yesterday and with surprising speed” (2014, 314).

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For I believe that our destiny is in our own hands and that we can emerge from it if only we choose—or rather if those choose who are in authority in the world. (3–4) That quote sends shivers down my spine every time I read it. Ten years in we still haven’t emerged from the long, dragging conditions of semi-slump. I warned this was likely coming to advanced countries if policymakers didn’t act in a couple of articles I published in the Guardian. In a 2009 article I argued that if we are to avoid the long, dragging conditions of semi-slump, “public spending cuts make absolutely no sense. The government should be increasing spending now—and by a lot—not least because it can borrow at such a low long-run rate of interest. In such circumstances, infrastructure and education are smart investments for all our futures.

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The whole idea of an expansionary fiscal contraction was always fanciful in the extreme; now, it’s time for a change of course—given that austerity has failed. Growth is going to be low for many years, living standards are not going to rise, and the high levels of income inequality are all likely to contribute to increasing levels of social unrest. Much, indeed, will need to be changed.”3 The Guardian editorial board in September 2009 even got in on the act but nobody much was listening. It argued that “a year on from the collapse of US investment bank Lehman Brothers and the height of the banking crisis, it does look as if the economy has avoided a rerun of the Great Depression—but it does not follow that from here on the UK is in for either a constant or a strong recovery….

St Pancras Station
by Simon Bradley
Published 14 Apr 2007

[ 105 ] St Pancras.indb 105 13/9/07 12:12:12 surprising thing is not so much that Scott’s plan has its faults, but rather that there should be so few of them. What we cannot know is how it compared to the other competition entries, since all that survives of these is a single perspective of the scheme by the architect and design theorist Owen Jones, shown as if from the train-shed end. That the outcome may have been ‘steered’ from the start is suggested by the way Scott was invited to join the competition at a late stage and his subsequent victory, despite piling in much more than the competition instructions stipulated. Could it also be that the Midland’s directors considered his design the best response to the exacting challenges of Barlow’s outline plan?

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Midland Railway Glasgow express at St Pancras, [ 182 ] St Pancras.indb 182 13/9/07 12:12:20 photographed by H. L. Hopwood, 1901 28. Train-shed interior converted for Eurostar services, computer image, 2004 29. St Pancras Station, train-shed extension under construction, photograph by Dan Chung from the Guardian, 27 May 2005 30. St Pancras Station, drawing of new hotel extension 147 165 167 169 illustration credits 1, 10, Crown Copyright, National Monuments Record; 4, courtesy of Private Eye; 6, 11, courtesy of Gavin Stamp; 8, A. F. Kersting; 14, 22, Science and Society Picture Library; 15, courtesy of The Railway Magazine; 16a, Birmingham City Archives, John Whybrow Collection; 20, courtesy of Emap Communications Ltd; 21, Janet Hall/RIBA Library Photographs Collection; 24, Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museums Collections; 27, courtesy of LCGB, Ken Nunn Collection; 28, courtesy of London & Continental Railways; 29, Guardian; 30, courtesy of Richard Griffiths Architects [ 183 ] St Pancras.indb 183 13/9/07 12:12:20 ACK NOWLED GEM EN T S First thanks are due to my editors Mary Beard and Peter Carson for commissioning a book covering three longstanding enthusiasms – railways, the history of London, and the Gothic Revival – and also to Andrew Franklin at Profile Books for his support and enthusiasm.

Concretopia: A Journey Around the Rebuilding of Postwar Britain
by John Grindrod
Published 2 Nov 2013

Twelve-year-old Tia Sharp was first reported missing from her grandmother’s house in The Lindens, and a week later her body was found wrapped in a blanket in the attic. Images of the fruitless searches, the wasted vigils, the shrine to the young girl were shown for days on the news, alongside Olympic champions proudly displaying their hard-won medals a few miles away in Stratford. A case like that does a lot to change a town. Owen Jones, author of Chavs, wrote on Twitter that he felt it said as much about life in poor communities as Harold Shipman did about GPs. New Addington has the lowest voter turnout of anywhere in the south of England, what politics it does have shifting over the years from staunch Labour to a recent flirtation with the far right.

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Nixon, Croydon Advertiser, 10/3/35 2 Gavin Stamp, Britain’s Lost Cities, p3 3 Alice Coleman, Utopia on Trial, p176 i Oddly enough, many pop stars have lived, worked or studied in Croydon, from Art College punks to more recent BRIT School alumni such as Amy Winehouse and Adele, but it’s rarely mentioned alongside pop powerhouses like Sheffield, Liverpool or Manchester. No one wants to be associated with a Croydon sound. Even Bob Stanley, architecturally savvy member of Croydon pop champions Saint Etienne is faintly disparaging. ‘South London’s not really London, is it?’ he told the Guardian. ‘It’s just an endless suburb.’ Part 1 SO DIFFERENT, SO APPEALING 1. ‘A Holiday Camp All Year Round’ THE TEMPORARY BUILDING PROGRAMME AND PREFABS (1944–1951) I was excited about my grand odyssey around Britain, so it was almost disappointing when it turned out that my first journey would be a mere three-mile stroll from my flat in Forest Hill.

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‘It seemed like living in a spaceship,’ he said of the modern amenities like fridges and plumbed-in baths that few at the time had.10 One of the residents of Excalibur, Eddie O’Mahoney, had lived there from the time it was built and was still there when this book was being written. ‘I’d been demobbed from the army and my wife was living in some bomb-damaged property with the two children,’ he told the Guardian in 2012. ‘When the council offered it, I immediately said, “I don’t want a prefab – I want a house.” I’d had enough of living in tents and Nissen huts. They told me to go and look before I decided. We opened the door and my wife said, “What a lovely big hall! We can get the pram in here.” There was a toilet and a bathroom.

Failures of State: The Inside Story of Britain's Battle With Coronavirus
by Jonathan Calvert and George Arbuthnott
Published 18 Mar 2021

But there was growing unease at the time about why Britain seemed to be consistently slower to act in tackling the virus in comparison to the rest of Europe. The article struck a chord. That Sunday it became the most read online piece in The Sunday Times and The Times’s history. It was described by Andrew Marr on the BBC as ‘a devastating piece of journalism’; ITV’s Robert Peston said he was ‘literally gobsmacked’ by the article; the Guardian columnist Owen Jones said it was ‘one of the most important things you’ve read’; the broadcaster Piers Morgan called it straightforwardly ‘a scandal’; and the writer Caitlin Moran said it read like ‘the obituary of Boris Johnson’s government’. The Press Gazette said the article was ‘the first major national press investigation to cast serious doubt over the government’s handling of the pandemic’.

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By the time the coronavirus pandemic began, the stockpile was mostly housed in a 370,000-square-foot distribution centre in Merseyside that had been built specifically for the purpose. But supplies had been allowed to significantly dwindle over the intervening years. An analysis of official financial data by the Guardian found that the value of the stockpile reduced from £831m in 2013 to £506m by March 2019 – a drop of almost 40 per cent.4 Leaked lists of the stocks showed that by 30 January 2020 the stockpile held 10 per cent fewer respirators, 19 per cent fewer surgical masks and 28 per cent fewer needles and syringes than it had in 2009.5 The remaining stock had not been replenished and was in a worrying state of decay.

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That month, police were called to her flat in Camberwell, south-east London, after neighbours had heard screaming, shouting and banging inside. Symonds could allegedly be heard telling Johnson to ‘get off me’ and ‘get out of my flat’. In a recording of the altercation made by a neighbour, which was reported by the Guardian,8 Johnson refuses to leave the flat and tells Symonds to ‘get off my fucking laptop’, before a loud crashing noise rings out. Symonds tells Johnson he was ruining a sofa with red wine: ‘You just don’t care for anything because you’re spoilt. You have no care for money or anything.’ Both Johnson and Symonds refused to comment on the incident.

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists
by Robert Tressell
Published 31 Dec 1913

And by the end of the working day real tasks still have to have been performed, tasks that Tressell vividly and lucidly describes from washing down ceilings to the exact method of ‘lapping’ wallpaper to transferring decorative designs from scale drawings to site. What soon becomes apparent is that our own niftiness with a tin of supermarket emulsion bears little relation to the craft of the Edwardian decorator who made and mixed his own paints, who grained and marbled, and who actually realized, brush in hand, the designs of an Owen Jones or the complex geo- metrical formulations of the sign-writers’ manuals of the day. As to the eternal battle with Time ‘the enemy’, one stage adaptation com- municated this by having the actors furiously paint the entire set in the course of the first act; Tressell did it by seamlessly interweaving the bustle of the job with both the anxiety and the humour.

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Henry Mayhew writing on the London poor for the Morning Chronicle. Public Libraries Act; Factory Act. xliv Chronology Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace. More Britons now live in towns and cities than in the countryside. Crimean War begins. Dickens, Bleak House. Dickens, Hard Times. Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South. Crimean War ends. Owen Jones, The Grammar of Ornament. Indian Mutiny. Irish Republican Brotherhood (Fenians) founded. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species; Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities; Samuel Smiles, Self-Help. American Civil War begins. Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor. Lincoln issues Emancipation Proclamation.

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(c.1880s); Building World: An Illustrated Weekly Trade Journal for Architects [etc., including Decorators] (c.1904). Ball notes that Hastings Explanatory Notes Free Library held Audsley and Ashdown’s Practical Decorator and Ornamentist (1892), one of the great Victorian collections of ornamental design. The ‘other books of designs’ may imply Owen Jones’s Grammar of Ornament. 124 Cholery morbus: cholera morbus: acute gastroenteritis occurring in sum- mer and autumn and marked by severe cramps, diarrhoea, and vomiting. 128 a kind of jail: the workhouse 131 Free Library: the Public Libraries Act was passed in 1850 thanks, in particular, to the efforts of the Liberal MP William Ewart.

Mbs: The Rise to Power of Mohammed Bin Salman
by Ben Hubbard
Published 10 Mar 2020

suggest names for it: Saud al-Qahtani (@saud1978), “al-hashtaaq ar-rasmi # al-qaaima as-sawda” (Ar.), Twitter post, Aug. 17. 2017. https://twitter.com/​saudq1978/​status/​898265869368807424 “starting now”: Saudi al-Qahtani (@saud1978), “as-sa‘udia wa ashiqaauha” (Ar.), Twitter post, Aug. 17, 2017. https://twitter.com/​saudq1978/​status/​898259368696725504 would be punished or prosecuted: Saudi al-Qahtani (@saud1978), “wa‘ad: santajalla al-ghimma ‘an al-khaleej” (Ar.), Twitter post, Aug. 17, 2017. https://twitter.com/​saudq1978/​status/​898257245183463424 state could unmask them: Saudi al-Qahtani (@saud1978), “hal al-ism al-musa‘aar yaHmeek” (Ar.), Twitter post, Aug. 18, 2017. https://twitter.com/​saudq1978/​status/​898379274788491265 “the faithful crown prince”: Saudi al-Qahtani (@saud1978), “wa ta‘taqid ani aqdaH min rasi” (Ar.), Twitter post, Aug. 17, 2017. https://twitter.com/​saudq1978/​status/​898273541367451648 to guide their coverage: Author interviews, Saudi journalists, 2017–18, and American officials, May 2019. could shift the conversation: Author interview, Abrahams. that the government wanted delivered: “Saudis’ Image Makers: A Troll Army and a Twitter Insider,” NYT, Oct. 20, 2018. to take them offline: Author interview, Abrahams. “a wasteland”: Author interview, Marc Owen Jones, Oct. 2018. the arrest in a series of tweets: Turki al-Roqi (@turkialroqi) published an account of his ordeal at “al-maqaal al-akheer lil-SaHafi al-maTruud” (Ar.), Twitter article, Feb. 26, 2017. https://twitter.com/​turkialroqi/​status/​835869428675915776 details that could identify users: “Saudis’ Image Makers: A Troll Army and a Twitter Insider,” NYT, Oct. 20, 2018.

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The official Islam of the kingdom was not any Islam, but Wahhabism, the ultraconservative and intolerant interpretation that was woven into the kingdom’s history. It taught the faithful to be wary of non-Muslim “infidels,” saw murderers and drug dealers beheaded in public squares, and deprived women of basic rights. The kingdom was far stricter than most other Islamic societies, but its status as the guardian of Islam’s holiest sites, in Mecca and Medina, gave it unique clout among the world’s 1.8 billion Muslims. Saudi leaders knew their kingdom’s troubled reputation, so the conference had been carefully planned to challenge how attendees saw the country. Guests had dined on grilled lamb and chocolate truffles at private dinners hosted by princes and officials in opulent homes with swimming pools, art galleries, and hidden liquor cabinets.

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There was also the grimly personal nature of the murder, of a writer who had not called for violence or regime change. He had not even wanted to be called a dissident. The scandal rippled through the royal family, whose thousands of members knew the importance of Saudi Arabia’s relationship with the United States and its status as the guardian of the Islamic holy sites. Would the killing shake those pillars? What if the United States scaled back weapons sales? Would Muslims in, say, India or Indonesia still see Saudi Arabia as a champion of Islam after it had butchered a nonviolent writer? But there was little they could do, because the royal family no longer functioned as it once had.

The Lucky Years: How to Thrive in the Brave New World of Health
by David B. Agus
Published 29 Dec 2015

Put simply, increasing feebleness and infertility with age is not a law of nature, but we humans think of it that way. On one end of the spectrum, a species can live a long time but have increasing mortality, and on the other end, a species can live a short time yet have declining mortality. In the words of the study’s lead author, Owen Jones: “It makes no sense to consider aging to be based on how old a species can become. Instead, it is more interesting to define aging as being based on the shape of mortality trajectories: whether rates increase, decrease or remain constant with age.” He hopes his research spurs more study in this fascinating field to help us address aging in humans.

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So something else is going on to cause this phenomenon—and we finally gained some clues in 2015 when two different teams of scientists discovered that elephants’ cells have 20 copies (40 alleles) of the p53 gene, which is a now-famous gene associated with protecting us from cancer. We only have one copy (2 alleles).12 In fact, p53 has been referred to as the “guardian of the genome.”13 It’s what we call a tumor suppressor gene. It has three known functions: 1) it induces DNA repair mechanisms when it senses DNA alterations from the original genome; 2) it stops cells from dividing when it detects DNA alterations, thereby allowing for more efficient DNA repair; and 3) it pushes cells to self-destruct when there are too many DNA mutations to repair.

Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs
by Johann Hari
Published 20 Jan 2015

I also thank many other people who read this book and commented on it in ways that made it better, or helped me in some other way: Patrick Strudwick, Jessica Smerin, Josepha Jacobson, Adam Thirlwell, Russell Brand, Lizzie Davidson, Noam Chomsky, Sarah Punshon, Daniel Bye, Tom Angell, Evgeny Lebedev, Ammie al-Whatey, Rachel Seifert, Glenn Greenwald, Arianna Huffington, Eugene Jarecki, Sarah Morrison, Jeremy Heimans, Alnoor Lahda, Ali Weiner, Jack Bootle, Alex Romain, Ronan McCrea, Matthew Bloch, Greg Sanderson, Josh Cullimore, Anna Powell-Smith, David Pearson, Dorothy Byrne, Rupert Everett, Peter Marshall, Chris Wilkinson, Owen Jones, Damon Barrett, Matthew Todd, Stephen Fry, Matt Getz, Deborah Orr, Sally-Ann Larson, Zoe Ross, Joss Garman, Ben Stewart, Anna Moschovakis, Dennis Hardman, Simon Wills, my parents, Violet and Eduard Hari, my brother and sister, Steven and Elisa, and my sister-in-law, Nicola. Harm Reduction International covered the costs of my trip to the World Federation Against Drugs convention in Stockholm, Sweden, in return for a short report on what I saw: thank you, Mike Trace, for facilitating this.

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Archives and Libraries Harry Anslinger archives at Penn State University, Pennsylvania George White archives at Stanford University, California National Archives at San Francisco, California Wellcome Trust Library, London Federal Bureau of Narcotics archives, Virginia New York Public Library, New York Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. British Library, London Julia Blackburn Archives at Brotherton Library, University of Leeds Public records office, Phoenix, Arizona A Note on the Author Johann Hari is a British journalist who has written for the New York Times, Le Monde, the Los Angeles Times, the Independent, the Guardian, Slate, the New Republic, and the Nation. He has reported from many countries, from the Congo to Venezuela. He was twice named Newspaper Journalist of the Year by Amnesty International UK, awarded the Martha Gellhorn Prize for turning political writing into an art, and later named Journalist of the Year by Stonewall.

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The heroin use in the 1980s and 1990s was so widespread and so damaging that it spurred a backlash among young people who looked at their older siblings and resolved never to follow those particular track marks to disaster. So some of these changes would have happened even without the transformation in the drug laws—but not, he is confident, all of it. João Figueira describes himself as “very conservative.” At first, he says, when the laws were changed, “the left wing said ‘let’s do this’ and the right wing said ‘no, no, no’—and in fact on the results we have, there is no kind of ideological [debate anymore] because it has nothing to do with ideology. What happened here worked,” he explains. “What happened here was a good result and the statistics we have prove it.

Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown
by Philip Mirowski
Published 24 Jun 2013

No one should be definitively tagged with class membership, since every individual is supposedly poised on the brink of becoming someone else.49 The abolition of class has been a font of political dividend for the neoliberals, since it has frustrated all attempts to mobilize politics on a class basis. Indeed, one might argue that the defeat and decimation of unions has been intimately involved with the dissipation of class identities. As Owen Jones put it: “A blue-uniformed male factory worker with a union card in his pocket might have been an appropriate symbol for the working class of the 1950s. A low-paid, part-time, female shelf-stacker would certainly not be unrepresentative of the same class today.”50 The extinction of political entities like unions, ethnic clubs, and party affiliations leaves the vast bulk of the working population bereft of communal identities.

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Don’t Look Back There can be no joy in pointing out just how wrong people have been about the intellectual consequences of the crisis. I recall myself entertaining the notion back in 2008 that perhaps, finally, we just might dispense with some of the rubbish that had sullied a political economy orthodoxy over my lifetime. Apophenia cascades at epidemic proportions when the sky seems to be falling. In August 2007, the Guardian columnist George Monbiot wrote, “We are all neoliberals now.”6 Now, five years later, Monbiot’s claim must seem eerily prescient. Things were not always thus. In the midst of the downdraft of 2008–9, I remember people saying to me: Yes, it’s been awful, but maybe the trial by fire will cleanse as well as sear.

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Knowledge and ignorance are relative concepts” (my italics).149 Many professional economists, and perhaps even the reader, may have been predisposed to argue that agnotology is an inquiry bereft of subject matter—that is, there is no such thing as the conscious manufacture and promotion of ignorance. All that exists, they insist, are people of differing opinions, and some groups that may, from time to time, provide them with support for their own purposes. People just say what they believe: full stop, end of story. I have heard some economists opine that “agnotology” is just another left-wing curse word, roughly on a par with “neoliberalism,” particularly back in the era when it was fashionable to bemoan a Republican “war on science.”150 Others might not go that far, but instead regard the public face-off of eminent intellectual figures as a matter of “intellectual capture,” say, after the fashion of Simon Johnson.

The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History
by David Edgerton
Published 27 Jun 2018

Noel Thompson, ‘Socialist Political Economy in an Age of Affluence: The Reception of J. K. Galbraith by the British Social-Democratic Left in the 1950s and 1960s’, Twentieth Century British History 21 (2010), pp. 50–79. For the limits of the New Left response to revisionist accounts of capitalism see Madeleine Davis, ‘Arguing Affluence: New Left Contributions to the Socialist Debate 1957–63’, Twentieth Century British History 23 (2012), pp. 496–528. Kenny’s New Left political economy is an exception, First New Left, pp. 119–64. 7. Morris, The Life and Times of Thomas Balogh. 8. Jim Tomlinson, The Unequal Struggle: British Socialism and the Capitalist Enterprise (London, 1982), chapter 5. 9.

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Notably John Hoskyns, formerly of IBM, who had set up and sold his own IT services company, and Norman Strauss, formerly of Unilever. 23. M. J. Oliver, ‘Whatever Happened to Monetarism?: A Review of British Exchange Rate Policy in the 1980s’, Twentieth Century British History 8 (1997), pp. 49–73. 24. Andrew Pettigrew, The Awakening Giant: Continuity and Change in ICI (London, 1985), pp. 75–6. 25. Owen Jones, Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class (London, 2011). 26. It is a crucial insight due to R. E. Rowthorn and J. R. Wells, De-Industrialization and Foreign Trade (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 100–101. 27. It is a myth that the Conservative manifesto of 1979 did not mention privatization – it did, but not the big ones which happened after 1983.

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Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire, p. 178. 32. Ibid., pp. 207, 213. 33. Nairn, ‘The Nature of the Labour Party, Part II’, p. 51. 34. Tom Nairn, ‘The British Political Elite’, New Left Review 23 (1964). 35. Nairn, ‘The Nature of the Labour Party, Part II’, p. 60. 36. Perry Anderson, ‘Components of the National Culture’, New Left Review 50 (July–August 1968), p. 11. 37. Perry Anderson, ‘The Origins of the Present Crisis’, New Left Review 23 (January–February 1964). 38. Christopher Harvie, A Floating Commonwealth: Politics, Culture, and Technology on Britain’s Atlantic Coast, 1860–1930 (Oxford, 2008) is a rich instance. 39.

Bernie Madoff, the Wizard of Lies: Inside the Infamous $65 Billion Swindle
by Diana B. Henriques
Published 1 Aug 2011

District Court, Southern District of Florida. 206 always managed to persuade themselves that Madoff was still safe: See Jonathan Clark, “Madoff Securities,” Optimal Investment Securities, an internal report dated July 2006, and a memo “To: Manuel Echeverria, From: Karine Courvoisier, Re: Meetings with Bernard Madoff and lawyers in New York—September 18–19, 2002,” p. 4, both filed as exhibits in Santander Litigation. 206 the mood becomes tense, maybe even threatening: Terrence Owen Jones, a former Optimal executive, told plaintiffs’ lawyers in the Santander Litigation (at p. 116) that the reason for the meeting was that Optimal was withdrawing $400 million from Madoff, but he did not indicate when Madoff was told about the planned redemption. According to the bank, the redemption request was not made until Echenique Gordillo returned to Madrid, although El Confidencial, a Spanish publication, reported that Echenique Gordillo delivered the news, prompting Madoff’s angry response.

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As a public document, the list was available to anyone who wanted a copy, and it was soon posted online. The “Madoff names” became an instant sensation, a road map to the stars and titans who had been swindled and also a roster of the ordinary people who had—or might possibly once have had—a Madoff account. In France, it was dubbed la liste de pigeons. In England, the Guardian featured it prominently. The Wall Street Journal built a map that showed the geographic concentrations of victims. The New York Times created an online database that could be searched by name, town, state, and postal code; it immediately attracted a nearly staggering number of visitors. Virtually every regional publication in the US had a feature story on the local “names” that had shown up on “the list”.

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
by Robert M. Sapolsky
Published 1 May 2017

They are: Ara Norenzayan, University of British Columbia, Canada Carsten de Dreu, Leiden University/University of Amsterdam, Netherlands Daniel Weinberger, Johns Hopkins University David Barash, University of Washington David Moore, Pitzer College and Claremont Graduate University Douglas Fry, University of Alabama at Birmingham Gerd Kempermann, Dresden University of Technology, Germany James Gross, Stanford University James Rilling, Emory University Jeanne Tsai, Stanford University John Crabbe, Oregon Health and Science University John Jost, New York University John Wingfield, University of California at Davis Joshua Greene, Harvard University Kenneth Kendler, Virginia Commonwealth University Lawrence Steinberg, Temple University Owen Jones, Vanderbilt University Paul Whalen, Dartmouth College Randy Nelson, Ohio State University Robert Seyfarth, University of Pennsylvania Sarah Hrdy, University of California at Davis Stephen Manuck, University of Pittsburgh Steven Cole, University of California at Los Angeles Susan Fiske, Princeton University I have also had the fortune to interact with the spectacular students at Stanford University, and a number of them have directly contributed to this book.

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v=Ncwee9IAu8I. South Africa’s national anthem is now a hybrid of the two songs, with some Zulu, Sesotho, and English thrown in for good measure. While its existence is intensely moving, it must be hell on wheels to sing right, modulating all over the place. * I’m hugely grateful to Josh Greene and Owen Jones for closely vetting this chapter. * Namely keeping dangerous people far away from everyone else—just to get this one out of the way early in the chapter. * And one thing that I’m not going anywhere near is this New Age–y notion: “Of course we have free will. You can’t say that our behaviors are determined by a mechanistic universe, because the universe is indeterminate, because of quantum mechanics.”

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Libertarians are a mixture of social liberalism and economic conservatism; conversely, black Baptist churches are traditionally economically liberal but socially conservative (for example, rejecting both gay rights and the idea that gay rights are a form of civil rights). Moreover, neither extreme of political ideology is monolithic (and ignoring that, I’ll be simplifying throughout by using “liberal” and “left-wing” interchangeably, as well as “conservative” and “right-wing”). Nonetheless, the building blocks of political orientation tend to be stable and internally consistent. It’s usually possible to dress like a Republican or lick ice cream like a Democrat. Implicit Factors Underlying Political Orientation If political ideology is but one manifestation of larger internal forces pertinent to everything from cleaning supplies in the bedroom to ice cream consumption, are there psychological, affective, cognitive, and visceral ways in which leftists and rightists tend to differ?

The Rough Guide to England
by Rough Guides
Published 29 Mar 2018

Churchill biographies abound (and the man himself, of course, wrote up – and magnified – his own life), but politician and statesman Jenkins adds an extra level of understanding. Jenkins (1920–2003) specialized in political biographies of men of power, so you can also read his take on the likes of Gladstone, Asquith and Roosevelt. Owen Jones Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class. A trumpet blast from the political left – and a yell of moral/political outrage at the way the media treat the working class. The youthful Jones is articulate, fiery and witty – and followed up Chavs with the equally trenchant, howl-inducing The Establishment: And how they get away with it.

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Stonehenge Near Amesbury, SP4 7DE, 9 miles north of Salisbury • Daily: mid-March to May & Sept to mid-Oct 9.30am–7pm; June–Aug 9am–8pm; mid-Oct to mid-March 9.30am–5pm; last entry 2hr before closing; advance booking of timed tickets essential • £16.50; EH • 0870 333 1181, www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/stonehenge • Shuttle buses to the site (every 10min; 10min) leave from the visitor centre No ancient structure in England arouses more controversy than Stonehenge, a mysterious ring of monoliths. While archeologists argue over whether it was a place of ritual sacrifice and sun-worship, an astronomical calculator or a royal palace, the guardians of the site have struggled for years to accommodate its enormous visitor numbers, particularly during the summer solstice, when crowds of 35,000 or more gather to watch the sunrise. Access to the stones themselves is via a shuttle-bus service from a sleek visitor centre that opened in 2013, after years of debate and planning.

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There are common architectural features among the colleges, with the students’ rooms and most of the communal areas – chapels, halls (dining rooms) and libraries – arranged around quadrangles (quads). Each, however, has its own character and often a label, whether it’s the richest (St John’s), most left-wing (Wadham) or most public-school-dominated (Christ Church). Collegiate rivalries are long established, usually revolving around sports, and tension between the city and the university – “Town” and “Gown” – has existed as long as the university itself. Exploring THE COLLEGES All the more popular colleges have restricted opening hours – and may close totally during academic functions.