Tuesday, 24 January 2017

Leaving the Neighbourhoods blog

After something like thirteen years, I've decided to stop writing this blog. When The Divide was screened about a year ago, I started to wonder if neo-liberalism might just be on the way out. But then came Brexit and Trump, a double-whammy that has left me feeling more bruised than at first I would have expected. Maybe Mr Trump himself might bring about the end of neo-liberalism, by accidentally signing the wrong document or something, who knows...

But thanks to Typepad, the blog will stay here, for the time being, in this rather different livery, like a patient wearing a hospital gown. Will the patient recover and be discharged - to re-emerge elsewhere perhaps in bright light with fresh ideas - or is it a question of a quiet transfer to the hospice...? It's been fun anyway.

 

24 Jan 2017 14:35:04

2 Comments

Well I will be sad to see you go. You see you kept being optimistic when others were not, and pessimistic when we bloody well needed to know. And you got me thinking, the only thing that a university education gave me any semblance of a skill in.So thanks Kevin.
Martin

Posted by: Martin Dudley | Tuesday, 24 January 2017 at 16:34

Thanks Kevin, for all these years of enlightenment. I wish you luck in your next projects...

Posted by: Gillesenvrac | Sunday, 05 March 2017 at 20:52

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Get out of that without moving Thoughts on individual action and collective interests On no, what have we done? We were so angry, we just… We did what?? You mean, we fecked up the future of our country for our kids and their kids?? Just like that? How the heck did we do that? We didn’t realise, I mean… And messed things up for the rest of Europe too? Ooh. Ooh dear. Just wanted to have a go at those Westminster types, that’s all. There seems to be some substance in the analysis that concludes that many voters felt disenfranchised and chose ‘Leave’ to express their sense of disconnection from the establishment. (I don’t know if it is true, as suggested in various places, that these were predominantly older people in middle and low income areas. Do I hear the sound of Zimmer-frames, incontinence pads and false teeth being thrown out of prams?) They have at the same time, whoops, voted for a dire future for themselves. This is not just collective self-harm on a spectacular scale, it also perversely and unjustly condemns young people and subsequent generations. It’s ‘profoundly irresponsible’ as one young man said among several other insightful remarks on The World This Weekend today (from about 48 mins). The force of a protest vote can look rather unfortunate when the issue is your country’s future. It leaves a lot of residual anger towards the people who distorted the reality of issues for their own interest in power, essentially in pursuit of some laughably quaint notion of ‘sovereignty’; and for the leading politicians over a couple of decades who allowed this situation to arise. So we are left with the hard-to-deny accusation that we are a nation dominated by racists, who by definition are stupid (that seems to have been one of the most widely-used words in commentary since Friday morning). As for democracy, well it’s been pulled and pushed around a bit lately. The extraordinary scenes of the sit-in at the US Congress have provided a focal point for the tensions between individual interests (the right to carry a gun) and collective interests (er, what about random massacres?) giving rise to the apparent need to try and twist the rules for the latter views to be heard. Here in the UK there are also attempts to twist the rules – or rather, in this case, agree them post hoc. Many voices have lamented the poverty of the referendum process: what a way to demonstrate that turning from representative to plebiscite democracy maybe doesn’t work on such a scale or with such a historically resonating issue. Or was it such a big issue? I certainly thought so; but the turnout was only 72 per cent, so more than a quarter of Brits either couldn’t be bothered or didn’t think it affected them. Christ what a country. The principle that people vote in their own economic interest seems to have been trumped (I shudder to use that word) by fear of the Other. But the...

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