A few weeks ago we previewed Barbara Schultz’s memoir of her mother, who escaped from the GDR in 1953 at the height of the Soviet occupation. The very successful book launch took place at Crown House on 20 June.

There’s more to be said about it: It functions not only as a personal memoir, but also as an unusual window into the social history of East Germany. Memoirs and fiction, or autobiographical writing, about escape from Germany predominantly foreground the excruciating hardships of Jewish (and subsequently Polish) people managing to evade the Hitler authorities and escape death, leaving for Europe or the Americas. These extraordinary stories indicate resilience, courage, and ingenuity in the face of the alternative – extermination. From Anne Frank through Primo Levi to recent works by Michael Calvin and Naftali Schiff, they rightly document an appalling and unforgettable period of history.

Schultz’s book, however, highlights something perhaps less frequently acknowledged (at least by the Allied victors), the hardship and penury inherent in the lives of fairly ordinary residents of rural East Germany through two world wars, then afterwards in the restrictions set up by the Soviets in the name of Collectivism and enforced by the Stasi (Ministry of State Security). As in the Chinese equivalent, almost anyone in town or village communities could have been recruited or pressganged into secretly spying on their neighbours, resulting in an unimaginable lack of personal freedom.

PLANS FOR ESCAPE

These Machiavellian controls, and the ban on leaving the country, coupled with her (rather late) acknowledgement of the horrors of the Nazi administration and subsequent guilt at membership of the vile party that had once been thought to embody progress (Make Germany Great Again?), caused Schultz’s mother to organise an escape from her small village farming life. Her husband, captured as a POW by the British in 1945, had subsequently made his home here, in Basingstoke. So over two years, after being knocked unconscious and permanently wounded by the butt of a Russian soldier’s gun, her mother (Elzbeth) formed plans to leave the GDR, along with her three children, and join her husband. Her escape, her interrogation and knock-back, only to try again and succeed, are documented in the last few chapters.

An escape from a country where you are effectively a captive is necessarily laced with drama and trauma. But the prose description, in these latter chapters, is no more dramatic than at any other point. By the time Elzbeth actually managed her exit, the action was just one more in a long line of incidents in a life of endurance and rather gruelling subsistence.

PIGS AND POTATOES

There were undoubtedly people in the village who were worse off; her farmer husband Willi had been a paeon of individual enterprise from a young age. Elzbeth brought with her things from her own mother, from her old, relatively bourgeois, life in a small town. She describes good china, ‘good’ clothes, embroidered tablecloths, nice furniture. She has to adapt to pig farming, chicken cleaning, saving pig waste for manure, planting, sowing, reaping, and ensuring through the spring and summer that they will have enough supplies (particularly of potatoes) to last them through freezing winter months. Her children are all recruited to help as they reach ages four or five, and the elder sister Karin appears to have acted as a mother’s help in raising the two youngest, twins Barbie and Bernd. It’s interesting that though the book is written by Barbara, there’s some emphasis on Bernd, who is clearly marked out as his mother’s favourite. Whether this is true or mere authorial licence is impossible to know; it’s apparent from the narrative but documented, by his twin, seemingly without resentment.

Schultz writes predominantly from Elzbeth’s point of view, using source material from her mother’s journal. As her contribution to village life, Elzbeth had brought with her plays written by her father, and produced and staged them with the other occupants for a number of years. These are not further described in Schultz’s memoir but it does tell of the fact that she had friends and family in the village or nearby, to aid her eventual exit. Aside from personal courage and enterprise, the book documents courage, determination, hard winters, and (surprisingly, in the face of everything that needed to be done) an abiding love of the countryside.

This timely book is subtitled ‘How the British establishment made the Far Right respectable’. A great deal of contemporary discontent amongst the public emerges from the huge and growing wealth disparities we see all around us. Much of this is rooted in neoliberal capitalism; deindustrialisation and the emergence of ‘the City’ as a core economic growth area whilst the regions, peripheral to ‘the home counties’ were left to decline; the banking bailout in 2008, which instigated an ‘austerity’ regime designed to ‘balance the books’ by further fleecing the poor to pay for bailing out the rich; and the failures of Brexit.

Looking at this objectively, one might expect ‘the left’, which traditionally supports social and economic democracy, to benefit from discontent. Yet, we are on average very much seeing the opposite. Trilling’s book seeks to analyse why and how, instead, the ‘far right’ has benefitted and manipulated this discontent. Amongst numerous factors behind the rise of extremists on the right of the political spectrum, one stands out to Trilling, which is ‘failure’ of the centrist parties of ‘the establishment’ to pour oil on these choppy waters and cool things down. Some of this failure is down to decisions within our elites, and some is down to extraneous factors, such as, not to put too fine a point on it, foreign interference backing openly treasonous opportunist populists on the right.

The possibilities to control the narrative have been significantly influenced for the worse by online trollery via social media platforms, owned, and manipulated to varying degrees by their owners – who are, of course, billionaires, and foreign, thus not really having the nation’s interests at heart. This goes for the bulk of our news media too, such as the Mail and the Telegraph, who number amongst the most toxic of a bad bunch – but print media sales have been dropping for years, as online activity has grown.

EFFECTIVE ECONOMIC SOLUTIONS COME FROM LEFTWING ECONOMICS

The power of social media platforms grew over the last two decades, but really became the go-to echo chamber we see today through lockdown. During the covid years, millions of us were habituated to an online world that a significant proportion of us remained locked into after we were opened up again. This push to online supremacy was a boon to online markets such as Amazon, and has accelerated dissatisfaction with ‘the death of the high street’. It also was a boon to rich opinion manipulators, and once Elon Musk acquired ‘Twitter’ the potential to queer our politics went into hyperdrive. It is no exaggeration to put at least two-thirds of the misdirection of dissent away from the rich towards minorities, especially those who sought refuge here from resource wars carried out on the homeland by the West, down to platforms such as ‘X’ (and in the last weeks, the Facebook app too). This is a key aspect of why ‘the right’ have benefitted the most: deflecting public ire away from themselves had to be toward ‘the right’, as effective economic solutions for our situation all come from leftwing economics which are another threat to the overweening wealth of the super-rich.

So, much of what we need to control is to a degree out of our hands. Suggestions such as banning youngsters from social media ignore the fact that the majority of toxic right-wing support is from an entirely different demographic, ‘the over-50s’, a wide and slightly misleading category, similar to blaming ‘the red wall’, but nevertheless with more than a kernel of truth. It is doable, though, to block at least the casual onliners, as proven by the block on Russia Today. Yes, of course it can be bypassed, but if, for example, ‘X’ was blocked, most users would probably not bother to tinker with what for many appears to be highly technical IT issues (though in reality they are pretty simple). At the same time, there remains, on the left as well as on the right, distaste for censorship. But, in an increasingly ‘online world’, with the rise of AI, the move away from a cash economy, and increasing surveillance (including hacking, but also spying by the biggest app developers), makes it incredibly difficult to control the misinformation engine. The rise of algorithms, putatively designed to monetise platforms by leading users toward posts ‘For You’, has obviously been utilised by Musk to push a rightward narrative, one where to ‘save Britain’, this week, we must vote Restore; one where ‘Tommy Robinson’ is a ‘freedom fighter’ not a terrorist thug; one where the Tate Bros manosphere is not toxic extremism, but a redress of an overly feminist ‘communist’ leftwing phantom… 

A BETRAYAL OF DISILLUSIONED WORKING PEOPLE

Trilling looks in more depth at ways in which the establishment here has failed us, indeed all too often deliberately. It has been a consistent strategy politically to try to co-opt extreme outlier parties and lobbyists by pandering to some of their concerns: a classic example is Cameron’s ‘hostile environment’. Rather than attract ‘moderate’ far-right supporters to the Conservatives, it has led to them haemorrhaging leading politicians, as well as voters, to Reform. This has shoved the Overton window so far rightwards that ‘even’ the Labour Party have moved, in many regards, somewhat right of Thatcherism. A significant part of Trilling’s book is titled ‘Cowards’, and it really can’t be ignored that this, too, has been a very real part of the establishment’s problem containing the alt-right.

Trilling thinks ‘more democracy, not less’ is part of the answer to our problems. Personally, once again, I must say that we need ‘citizens’ for this to work, and one of the things biting the elites in the butt is their past reliance on ensuring our ‘education’ system fails to create citizens. Ironically, hoist by their own petard, but it is the ordinary disillusioned working people that they’ve betrayed who will ultimately suffer the worst consequences: the very people being conned by Reform and their ilk.

As Mary ‘Liz’ Truss brings over to us the very right wing American CPAC; as the likes of Tommy and Trump squeal about ‘free speech’ whilst shutting down left attempts to engage in dialogue since what they really mean is the freedom to spread hate; as Musk bankrolls far right ‘freedom’ marches and appears on giant screens in London to promote his racist agenda; as US evangelical nationalist Christians infiltrate the UK far right; and as Rubio invites 60 nations to a conference on ‘left wing extremism’, it is hard not to conclude that fascism, on an internationally organised scale, is reaching its next stage: the one where they in effect, or perhaps literally, organise a coup against forces that may oppose them. As a student of history, I’d love to be wrong, but all the signs are there.

Those paying attention to world affairs today know there is something of a ‘hope’ deficit. It is with this in mind that I have chosen to review Barney’s book looking at successful movements ‘driving social change around the world’ or as he calls them, ‘the disruptors’. Each of the groups covered have limited goals and limited success, but taken together give cause for at least some hope!

In his introduction, Barney touches on the double-edged sword of hope for change versus reality, so he is not a naive optimist, which makes his book all the more beneficial. His introduction talks about Just Stop Oil, and their relatively successful early ‘nonviolent direct action’ and much more successful ‘marketing’, but also the limits imposed by changing legislation aimed at smothering people-powered lobby groups. In this case, that was Suella Braverman’s amendments to the Public Order Act of 1986. And, since the book was written, we have seen ‘Labour’ extending the reach of legislation to stop any protests they don’t like, and even ensuring police action continues despite the courts overruling the government. This is, of course, an unacceptable attack on our civil liberties, and taken alongside other extensions of policing of protest from the Thatcher era, the Criminal Justice Act of the early 90s, and Blair’s reforms after the 2000 petrol strike, gives the framework for future governments to enforce a police state clampdown on us all.

Nevertheless, amongst the weeds and cobbles there is still hope for new shoots to sprout. The trick is ‘how to achieve social change’ despite the obstacles. Barney has, as he puts it, ‘met and quizzed activists, lawyers, political scientists, campaigners, graffiti artists, anthropologists, peace-builders, hacktivists, charity directors, authors, Olympians, refugees, researchers and every other kind of change agent you can think of. For this book.’

TEN PARTS BY THEME

He takes a global approach, from Greta Thunberg, through Black Lives Matter, to Greek refugee NGOs and reconciliation activists in the Sahal. The book is divided by theme into ten parts. The first addresses environmentalist groups, such as Extinction Rebellion and Freetown Christiania; the second, race-related activism and education. In part three, Barney looks at issues around abortion law in Turkey and in Ireland, and the social movements fighting for justice during Brazil’s ‘Zika crisis’. The fourth part is ‘Health and Healing – Creative Confrontation’, and touches on mental health politics, drug legalisation, and the ‘wall museum’ in Palestine – the latter is especially poignant given the genocidal war that has no doubt destroyed such initiatives since.

In the fifth section Barney looks at legal roots to change in Spain; Mary Hwyere’s ‘International Alert’ group, building peace by confronting trauma in the Sahal; and the Columbian peace accords. Parts six and seven cover the fightback against censorship and repression in Albania, Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and Turkey. Part eight takes on hacktivism in Iran and resistance to internet control in Ethiopia. This latter has global importance today. At the time of writing, Barney records that ‘whilst there have been policies restricting access to the internet across the world, they had arguably never been attempted on the scale seen in Ethiopia’ in 2016. Attempts to control access to Facebook, YouTube and ‘X’ have since become ubiquitous from China to here in the UK; banning VPNs to those without digital proof of identity; the ‘great firewall of China’ that former Hastings MP Amber Rudd advocated for copying in Britain, and that Starmer gives every sign of also wishing to perpetrate, all seek to censor and control dissent. As with the clampdown on protest in the streets, this adds to an arsenal of dubious control that is just begging for a paranoid extremist future government to misuse even more blatantly than today. Analysing successful methods of resisting this is imperative.

Part nine looks at refugees and asylum seekers, in the face of state attempts to effectively criminalise NGOs seeking to help them. Speaking of Greek attempts to shut down humanitarian support, Ellim Xenou of charity ‘Doctors of the World’ states that ‘the new asylum law and the defaming and blaming of NGOs…  they are all different pieces of the same puzzle that is to make refugees and migrants lives unbearable so as not to create a pull factor for more to come to Europe. [Yet] ethnocentric policies may add a challenge – a barrier – but you don’t put an end to the people’s hope for a future, for a better life, for peace this way.’ The last chapter in part nine addresses women’s rights in sports in Qatar.

The last part looks at the role of Human Rights Watch and Legal Agenda in Lebanon, and the relative success at the time Barney was writing of anti-corruption protests in Israel, which, like Just Stop Oil here, used non-violent direct action in the form of roadblocks. Sadly, the military events that have taken place since 2023 will have negated any successes. Then Barney looks at anti-Beijing activists in Hong Kong and Taiwan, with the activist collective Scholarism, and the ‘Umbrella Movement’.

Barney is not unrealistic about the limits of these activist and legalist movements, but sees them as demonstrating ‘the imagination, independent thought and optimism fundamental to all social change movements’, the importance of international links, and of solidarity and ‘shared leadership’. Activism for positive change is a ‘permanent revolution’, with a step forward here and a step back there, but the green shoots persist. To quote Galaxy Quest, “Never give up, never surrender!”

With her husband a prisoner of war, Elzbeth was left to raise her children alone. Hunger and oppression were daily realities. As restrictions tightened in East Germany, the possibility of a life in the West became an increasingly compelling dream. Faced with difficult choices and significant risks, she began planning a journey that would ultimately take her toward freedom and a new future in England.

Reimagined by Hoeger’s daughter from family memories and historical records, You Can Go Now… But Leave The Butter conjures up an intimate portrait of an ordinary woman confronting extraordinary circumstances. Deeply personal and historically illuminating, the memoir provides a vivid account of daily life before, during and after the Nazi era, while exploring themes of resilience, courage, love and survival.

THE AUTHOR

Barbara Schultz grew up in East Germany and escaped with her mother and twin brother to England when she was eleven. She moved to the United States at fifty; got a degree at fifty-seven; was ordained a year later as a deacon in the Methodist Church, specialising in spiritual formation. She started writing seriously when almost seventy. She now lives in Hastings.

You Can Go Now … But Leave The Butter launch is on Saturday, 20 June, from 1pm to 3pm, at Crown House, 57 Marina, St Leonards. It is published by ByTheBook Press at £10.99 bythebook.press

Get Ahead of Being Dead: Your Handy Planner for the End of Life is the second book by Evie King, local author, humanist, and former stand-up comedian. It’s an appropriate follow-up to her best-seller Ashes To Admin, and will be launched this Friday (19 June) at 1200 Postcards on Queens Road.

In this practical, funny and informative book, King walks you through everything you need to sort out the swathe of administration that surrounds a death, specifically your own. As well as recounting real-death stories, she takes you through a series of lessons and exercises covering death-preparatory activities.These include: advice on how to decide what you really want to happen at your funeral, how to express your wishes to avoid post-death pandemonium, and how to clear your clutter so that those you love don’t have to.·Get Ahead of Being Dead is a gift to your future (dead) self, and also to those close to you who remain. Evie King makes an excellent case for sorting your life out by sorting your death out first. In other words, by preparing for death, you also prepare to live.

Friday, 19th June. Venue: 1200 Postcards, 80 Queens Road, Hastings. Free entry. 6 pm start.

By Sarah Bearchell
Published by Icon Books, 2025, rrp £10.99
REVIEW BY TIM BARTON

This book is pretty good on the crises that are coming, yet a bit overly optimistic in some of its recommendations. Primarily, my issue with them is over the expectation that mechanisation is any kind of real or sustainable answer, and that gene hacking can save us. Both treat science as a magic trick that will save us come what may, not a process that may or may not help us ‘just in time’, and indeed may preclude a ‘fix’ that accidently scuppers us still more. A case in point here is ‘geo-engineering’, which, on a small scale can perhaps help but that is just tinkering around the edges: but on a large-scale is certifiably stupidly dangerous.

If you wonder why I am putting this review into my occasional series ‘Oil Be Damned’, this quote from Yasuhiro Niji, on the website Medium, is pertinent: “The food crisis will begin not as ‘there is no food’ but as ‘food cannot be delivered’.” This is already occurring and far faster than any conventional food crisis scenario assumes, accelerated by idiocies such as Trump’s attacks on Iran which is a major disruptor of international trade.

Yasuhiro Niji again: “When the Iran war broke out, the world’s attention focused on gasoline prices. But that is only the surface. Oil’s true value is neither electricity nor gasoline. It is the raw material for virtually every-thing we use. Plastics, synthetic fibres, synthetic rubber, paints, adhesives, pharmaceuticals, pesticides, chemical fertilizers — nearly all the materials that constitute modern civilisation are derived from naphtha, the foundational feedstock of petrochemistry. Food packaging, clothing fibres, building insulation, automobile parts, medical equipment – all are petrochemical products. There is a common argument: “When oil runs out, we’ll just generate electricity from renewables.” But solar panels themselves are made of plastics, silicon and synthetic resins. Wind turbine blades are made of glass fibre-reinforced plastic. The very equipment that produces renewable energy cannot be manufactured without oil.”

THE NEED FOR NAPHTHA

Of most direct relevance to Bearchell’s book, chemical fertilizers too are entirely dependent upon fossil fuels due to the need for naphtha in the processing. Productivity was massively increased when we first introduced artificial fertilizers, but the gains have dropped year upon year since the 1950s, till recently many areas hit the same productivity as pre-’green revolution’ agriculture, especially in the wheat belt. Take these fertilizers away, and crops will rely upon the extremely nutrient and microorganism depleted soil left over, and yields will drop still further. Add the effects of altering climate on our food supply biomes and you can see that we are in for a salutary and painful reminder of why our global human population exploded so excessively since the second world war, and how over-reliance on short-term agricultural methods will inevitably lead to a population crash. This again will be exacerbated by climate change.

The discovery and utilisation of oil fields in Pennsylvania in the 1850s saw the first step in allowing a larger human population. Discoveries such as penicillin did yet more, as did the invention of plastics, but it was the Haber-Bosch process for nitrogen fertilizers that really set us on a course for a population explosion. Take fossil fuels out of this equation, add rocketing average climate warming (and potential winter cooling for us), and you have a recipe for collapse. Recently a story ran in the papers claiming that the government had suppressed a DEFRA report on our ecologically challenging future, as it was so negative. I have yet to see the full report, but the headline findings were published last autumn as ‘Global biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and national security: A national security assessment’ – it makes a grim read.

REGENERATIVE FARMING

So, what future is there for agriculture that can mitigate these issues? If you take away Bearchell’s utopian musings on GM and automation, reading only her excellent chapters on climate, and on what she calls ‘the great balancing act’, leaves a grim picture.

In her final chapters she addresses ‘the big question – meat’, and here is a facet of the issue that we can address more effectually. It is in no way controversial, any longer, to admit to ourselves that livestock takes up huge acreage of land we need for far more fruitful plant crops (and, indeed, for biodiversity). If you look at Dr Mae-Wan Ho’s Dream Farm 2, still archived out there on the interweb, you’ll see a model sustainable farm. It includes necessary livestock, and does not require us to all go vegan, but limits livestock availability ‘on your plate’ to realistic and sustainable levels.

Also useful is her chapter on reducing waste. She references ‘regenerative farming’, but I would like to have seen a whole chapter on this, and less teleologically dubious technophilia. Massively decreasing land wasted on resource-intensive livestock, regenerative farming, rewilded countryside, and waste reduction cannot ‘solve’ our problems and are slow-burn methods, but they are necessary and can certainly reduce the impact of the coming crunch: although ‘mitigation’ inevitably still leaves a lot of people behind, it is in reality the least worst option. If we act, and preferably act, erm, a decade or four ago. Nevertheless, “We can’t be only fighting because there’s hope. If there’s only despair, the reasons to fight are even greater.” (Arundhati Roy).

Sheila Denning was a brilliant painter who lived during the twentieth century, from 1920 to 2015. This memoir recounts her life as seen from the perspective of her daughter Teresa Thornhill, and gives accordingly a unique view with points of illumination no one else could have offered. While there will inevitably remain parts of Sheila’s life to which Teresa had then and has now no access, this somehow adds to the appeal of the book – it is unashamedly subjective and personal, as proclaimed in its very title: Sheila: Portrait of an Unknown Artist (through the eyes of her daughter.) It is further enriched by excerpts from Sheila’s autobiographical notes, and from her letters and poems. These in turn give us, in Sheila’s own voice, repeated and eloquent glimpses of how it was for her in real time – the kind of direct testimony that is so compelling to read now. And at the core of the book, threaded throughout, is the collection of colour reproductions of many of Sheila’s paintings, in particular her wonderful portraits. Thornhill, herself a painter, delves into each of the paintings to provide background and to share a way of looking at them. These are undeniably exquisite works of art, so that we can see for ourselves what it was that Sheila had to offer, and through them, that passion that kept her painting in the face of all of the obstacles that Thornhill recounts.

DESTRUCTIVE CRITICISM DELIVERED BY MALE ARTISTS

Like so many women of her generation, and despite her extraordinary talent, Sheila was overlooked in her time. She was caught in the societal mesh that affected the lives of these pre-and post- second world war women – notwithstanding some incipient achievement of rights gained around the time they were born – as they struggled to achieve their rightful place in the world beyond the kitchen and the children of whose nurture they so often ended up as sole providers. Things are a little better now, at least for some women who have been able to push at the boundaries that confined those captive souls before us; and we, their children and grandchildren, can perhaps look back at their lives, and compare them with our own, and ask ourselves, ‘what if?’ – and wonder, ‘if only’.

Sheila studied at Camberwell School of Arts, but found little encouragement there. Although her talent was occasionally and perhaps grudgingly noted, overall the experience was profoundly damaging. As Thornhill notes: “Destructive criticism delivered by male artists in positions of authority was something experienced by many young female painters of Sheila’s generation.” Soon married to the author’s father, she found her life as a painter relegated to the background with his own artistic needs and career taking priority in their lives together. Eventually they separated, and her new situation as a single parent bringing up Thornhill and her sister was not a comfortable position either financially or socially in that period, during those decades immediately after the second world war. Through all this, she continued to paint.

HITHERTO HIDDEN FROM PUBLIC GAZE

A further strand woven throughout the book concerns Thornhill’s relationship with her father, and this adds yet another dimension from which we can understand Sheila’s own life. There are also vivid reminiscences of Sheila’s experiences during the second world war, which again bring to life the reality of living through a time when a beloved brother is killed, and other young men who might otherwise have become life partners also disappear.

Thornhill’s devotion to her mother permeates the book and gives it a singular authenticity, while her commitment to bringing Sheila’s work back into the light at last underpins it throughout. Furthermore, Thornhill’s specific perspective as Sheila’s daughter provides an intense immediacy which will surely resonate with many women who watched their own mothers try to cope with, and tackle, the constraints that prevailed in the post-war period in the 20th century and which so often suppressed or ignored their talents. For myself, Sheila’s story evoked memories of my own mother, also talented and curious and wanting to get right out into the world and in fact make it a better place – but who found herself in the kitchen with a steady stream of progeny for some decades ( I was the first of six, and it was my advent that put a definitive end to her medical training). In this way, the book is multi-layered: a view of an artist and her beautiful works of art hitherto hidden from public gaze: a compelling expression of love for the person who nurtured her daughter from her first moment on this earth and who never gave up on her children: and a story of a childhood and its complex family relationships, which again will resonate with so many of its readers.

This tender account thus touches its reader on many levels. As I put it down, I had two main reactions: on the one hand, the resonating memories of my own mother that were so powerfully evoked, and on the other, a strong desire to see Sheila’s paintings ‘in real’ – perhaps sometime, somewhere, there could be an exhibition of them to accompany this compelling book.

Sheila: Portrait of an Unknown Artist is available at Hastings Contemporary art gallery or through tinyurl.com/Buy-Sheila

By Laleh Khalili
Published by Profile, 2025, rrp £11.99
REVIEW BY TIM BARTON

Khalili’s new book is unexpectedly timely. Its subtitle is ‘how commodities and cronyism drive the global economy’. It is a short and accessible introduction to ‘the backbone of globalization’, which she sees as ‘low-cost labour and rapacious corporate control’.

Amongst the subjects here are shipping lanes and container ships, assaults on unionisation, assaults on national autonomy, and the major extractive mineral industries. She also covers the construction of China’s belt & roads ‘new silk route’. The ‘cronyism’ chapters take a well-aimed swipe at commodity traders and ‘super-yacht’ owning billionaires, private equity and ‘management consulting’, the offshoring of capital, and the ‘shell game’ of company registration and flags of convenience.

So, ‘extractive’ here is about asset-stripping through financialisation measures, deregulation, and privatisation. And ‘special economic zones’ and freeports are, of course, central to this for us in the UK. Since at least the 1980s ‘Reaganomics’ free market extremism through to Brexit and the current phases of what I call ‘Operation Asset-Strip UK’, our financial and material assets have been subject to a garage sale that will leave us floundering in a financial black hole. The recent Chinese sell-off of $688 billion of US Treasury debt will severely impact the US economy and naturally their pain will be offloaded to US vassal states, of which we are one.

NEW US IMPERIALISM

‘Extractive’ also includes minerals, rare earth metals, sand and oil. I wrote a recent review on the former issues, about the book The War Below. On the latter issues, not many people will be aware of the monstrous size of global sand movements, and the environmental catastrophes developed economies inflict on sand-rich river and beach communities (because of their demand for concrete).

Oil, other minerals, and shipping lanes, though, are the key items that make Khalili’s book even more relevant than when she wrote it. The hard question is ‘where to start’! 2026 is unfolding as an especially concerning inflection point, and we are already careering faster than ever down the wrong track.

At the heart of our current crisis is the new US imperialism. The Monroe Doctrine was first stated in 1823, and posited that anything that occurred in the domestic politics of central American states was the direct business of the USA. It was a formalised sign of things to come – for example, if you dared elect a left-wing government, the USA regarded it as just fine to back a coup and install a puppet-government, no matter how vicious. The two centuries since President Monroe’s imperialist policy has seen the doctrine extended, frankly, to the whole planet. January 2026 has seen it rebadged as the Donroe Doctrine, in response primarily to Trump’s invasion of Venezuela and his threats to annex Greenland. I wrote about the latter five years ago for HIP, in a review of a book on Arctic Security, at which time it was already eight years after Trump first voiced his imperialist policies for the Arctic.

CURSE OF ‘INTERESTING TIMES’

In both cases, oil and other minerals are a core concern, though for Greenland we can add a potential ice-free north-west passage and a climate change-induced freeing up of the Arctic Ocean for competitive resource extraction. This is code for a cold war with Russia and Europe over who can get in there first, with a real risk of hot war attached.

Meanwhile, Trump is also wanting to break BRICS and force Iran, one way or the other, to open up to US markets, and resource extraction. This has been a long game for the USA: having ousted a democratic government in 1953, and installed a murderous regime (remember, ‘he may be a bastard, but he’s OUR bastard’ is US policy), and then being embarrassed on the world stage by the ‘Iran hostage crisis’ as a different regime took over that was not going to play ball with the West, the USA has long planned revenge. Khalili writes here about ‘Operation Prosperity Guardian’, which has included shelling Yemen into the stone age and embargoing Iranian oil, which is the tip of an evil iceberg in undermining the Iranian nation. I don’t know how many fronts Trump wishes to open up at the same time, especially as the China-Taiwan crisis is also hotting up, never mind Ukraine.

None of it seems wise, and I believe the curse of living through ‘interesting times’ may be very much in play.

Extractive Capitalism is available from Bookbuster, 39 Queens Road, Hastings TN34 1RE

This book traces the endeavours of one German Jewish family to escape from Nazi persecution before and during the Second World War.

The inspiration for it came from a cache of anonymous but annotated negatives dumped in a street in Arlington, Massachusetts in 1980. Individuals and family groups were pictured across a range of European locations. The accompanying notes indicated that the majority of the photos had been taken between 1929 and 1935.

Sheri Blaney, a young Jewish American woman with an interest in photography, was offered them by a friend and, intrigued by their quality but without making a detailed inspection, squirrelled them away for future enquiry. It wasn’t until Covid lockdown 40 years later that she turned her attention back to them.

Ms Blaney noticed that one of the family pictures showed a Star of David on a drawing room wall. From clues in the annotations followed up by research into public documents, she was able to establish that the photographer was Marion Samter, an emigree to the USA from Germany in 1938. Mrs Samter was long deceased, but had a daughter living in Oregon, who was able to supply a detailed back story.

The result is this book, written by Hastings author Julian Beecroft from the photographic record, from manuscript notes compiled by Ms Blaney, and from his own meticulous documentary research.

The title is ironic, like so much of its melancholy narrative.

REFUGEE RIGHTS

The Nazi regime put obstacles in the way of emigration – initially financial rather than institutional. Up to August 1939 Jews could get out of Germany if they were willing to abandon their property and/or business assets. On the other hand, there was no international convention conferring any refugee rights. Other countries of Europe and the USA could pick and choose whom they would admit.

Since the Aliens Act of 1905, passed specifically to curb a previous wave of Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe, Britain had limited the arrival of foreigners to its shores; and under the Aliens Restriction Act of 1914, enacted on the first day of the First World War in August 1914, the Home Secretary was empowered to regulate their entry and subsequent residence. The increasing oppression of Jews in 1930s Germany did not persuade British governments of the time to relax immigration controls. On the contrary, with some exceptions such as the Kindertransport mission in 1938-39, they maintained a regime designed to limit the in-flow to very small numbers of applicants who could show they would not be a drain on the public purse.

Other European countries operated similar restrictions. Even the USA, traditionally the refuge of the Old World’s “huddled masses”, had imposed immigration quotas from the 1920s onwards. These quotas favoured entrants from northern Europe, but there could be no passage across the Atlantic without a prior visa issued from a US consulate, generally obtainable only under proof of a job offer or other evidence of both financial sustainability and political suitability.

Destitute Jews needed helping hands. This study shows how, within one family, some might be rescued, others not.

SOCIAL RESPECTABILITY

The family of Kurt Grelling, the central character, had enjoyed comfortable affluence over at least three generations. Louis and Isaak Simon, respectively his maternal grandfather and great-uncle, were cotton manufacturers, acknowledged before the First World War as ‘Kaiserjüden’ (Jewish associates  of Kaiser Wilhelm). His brother-in-law’s father had been a coal magnate in Silesia. The next generation embedded themselves in professional and scientific circles at the heart (they believed) of respectable German society.

Early chapters of The Right of Passage set out this background, and describe briefly the ways in which, from 1933 onwards, the Nazi regime picked on its Jewish population and stripped it of status, money and employment. Kurt is immediately forced to resign his teaching post in a Berlin Gymnasium, and from then on struggles to find alternative work. He maintains intellectual friendships with leading philosophers of the Vienna Circle of logical positivists, including Otto Neurath, and manages to relocate to Brussels, where a wealthy art dealer pays him a modest salary to undertake recondite investigations in maths and philosophy.

One after another of his extended family and associates take further flight – to England, Ireland, Switzerland or the USA, in most cases shorn of their wealth but able to start or renew professional careers. His academic friends have also been making their way across the Atlantic to fill philosophy posts in American universities.

LEFT BEHIND

Kurt gets stranded, having neither the money nor the social connections – nor, perhaps, the personal energy – to find his own lifeline out. His wife Greta is stuck in Berlin. She herself is not Jewish (and has brothers who are well-placed within the Nazi party), which seems a potential benefit for a while but ultimately isn’t. Their children are being educated in Switzerland, now in permanent separation.

From May 1940, when the Germans invade Belgium, Kurt finds himself interned as an ‘enemy alien’ and sent to a squalid internment camp in southern France. When France in turn is overrun, the new Vichy government continues to incarcerate those interns who are Jewish. They remain undesirable aliens as far as Laval and co are concerned, though those who can obtain entry visas to the USA (neutrals in the war until December 1941) are still allowed to depart.

The book’s narrative, supported by a full archive of contemporary correspondence, follows Kurt’s increasingly desperate efforts to become one of the escapees, preferably with his wife and children in tow. Meanwhile, it chronicles his continuing devotion to the abstract world of logical positivism despite such appalling personal circumstances.

A novelist might have been tempted to give Kurt a more endearing personality – more heroic, less socially awkward. But Beecroft has set himself the dual task of paying maximum tribute to his historic archive while keeping the attention of the general reader.

The story is told with unflinching honesty and painstaking objectivity. And it has resonance for our time, as millions of refugees worldwide look for their own right of passage.

St Leonards-dwelling filmmaker, author, artist and performer Duncan Reekie has recently compiled and published an impressive, 324pp full-colour history of the Exploding Cinema – a low-budget/no-budget film collective that emerged out of South London in the early 1990s and is still putting on shows, some locally. Boom! is a dazzling collage of archive photos, film programmes, rants, and pithy short articles written by Reekie and other members of the group, celebrating 35 years of radical cinema.

Formed as a reaction to sterile, state-funded ‘art house’ film spaces, the Exploding Cinema – along with similar film groups such as MyEyesMyEyes, Omsk, and the Halloween Society – enabled countless filmmakers to get their short-format films before audiences in a welcoming, inclusive environment. Their evolution ran in tandem with the changing face of the UK counterculture, which was in its second-wave ascendency at the end of the ’80s and flourished in those pre-internet ‘years of hope’ of the 1990s.

THE FREE PARTY SCENE

The past 30 years have seen a clampdown on autonomous zones of radical resistance and an increase in state powers enabled by new technologies. Back in the summer of 1993, the collective put on an all-night film ‘happening’ at the then-squatted Brixton Lido in Brockwell Park, South London, which attracted 2,000 people. This was a time before legislative powers such as the Criminal Justice Act of 1996 pulled the plug on the free party scene, and before property prices went sky-high. The book features numerous photos of long-defunct, much-missed venues, celebrating a time before community arts venues were seized, sold off, defunded or demolished.

The distinctive, incendiary graphic design elements of the group’s publicity materials have been central to the Exploding Cinema’s identity. Pages taken from their montage-style film programme booklets leap out in all their provocative glory as a dynamic, defiant history that’s part pop-art puzzle, part situationist manifesto. The group has never applied for or accepted state funding, and takes special pleasure in lampooning the elitist selection processes of bodies such as the Arts Council and the BFI. But at the (very big) heart of the group, there has always been a sense of fun along with its determination to screen open-access short film events.

REFRESHINGLY ‘UN-CURATED’ AND DEMOCRATIC

Boom! is a fascinating countercultural history, with a month-by-month chronology that shows how UK underground filmmakers brought colour and carnival to political protest events over the past 35 years, including the Poll Tax Riots and the Occupy movement. It is also a history of the broader UK underground film movement, which has largely been ignored in official histories of the ‘independent sector’ of British film. Staging online shows during the Covid-19 years, and harnessing every bit of digital technology available to them, the group has remained at the cutting edge of underground media while staying true to their original vaudeville spirit. Truly and proudly independent, the Exploding Cinema shows remain refreshingly ‘un-curated’ and democratic. The book is a valuable and colourful addition to anyone interested in, or pining for, the days of future utopias.

Boom! is available from explodingcinema.org/shop priced at £23 or other outlets: ISBN 978-1-0369-2476-8

The vagaries of the Art world are wondrous strange. The ‘Rokeby Venus’ by Velázquez– so named because it was first brought to England by a prosperous Yorkshireman to hang in his neo-Palladian pile, Rokeby Park – is probably better known for having been slashed by a Suffragette in 1914, than for being among the most sinuous and sensuous (not to say lecherous) paintings of a female form.

The Suffragette slasher was known as Mary Raleigh Richardson, who said later that she did it because of ‘the way men visitors gaped at it all day long’. The act remains one of the more radical by the women who, just over a century ago, fought (even died) for the right to be treated as thinking citizens, who could reasonably decide whom they wanted to represent them in government. It has become, like women chaining themselves to railings and throwing themselves under horses’ hooves, symbolic of the movement, of a truly radical change in the position of women in this country.

It is absorbing, therefore, that in a new biography of Mary Richardson, local author Helena Wojtczak reveals her not as a stalwart political campaigner and long-time party activist but rather as a wealthy dilletante who readily changed her name from Perkins (probably to avoid the stigma of a court conviction for theft, which is documented), and henceforth maintained an extremely casual relationship with the truth. ‘After being immersed in studying Mary for over two years’, writes Wojtczak, ‘I am persuaded that it was not solely a yearning to choose between [male] parliamentary candidates that drove her to commit acts of destruction.’

DEBUNKING THE MYTH

Meticulously researched, illustrated and annotated, it’s a splendid debunking job. The author’s stated opinion is that Richardson (who later joined Mosley’s fascist party), though the perpetrator of many acts of violent protest, was not quite the principled heroine she later claimed. Her often-quoted autobiography, Laugh a Defiance, was a tissue of lies: her original motivation was probably attention-seeking and a ‘craving for excitement.’

The act of destruction of a publicly-owned painting is made to seem, in retrospect, impulsive and a little disingenuous rather than a carefully-considered act of rebellion. Not one of Richardson’s anecdotes of the movement ‘dovetails with primary source accounts’ and most of them are ‘a mixture of truth, distortion, embellishment, uncorroborated assertion and chronological inaccuracy or impossibility.’ Indeed, Richardson’s stated reason for the act, the release of Sylvia Pankhurst from prison, had actually been achieved before she entered the art gallery.

So far, so fascinating. But this book does not seek to denigrate the ultimate achievements of the Suffragist movement: on the contrary. Wojtczak relies on various trusted sources to document the events surrounding the various arrests of Mary, of Sylvia Pankhurst, and several other militant women. It’s harrowing: women were beaten up in demonstrations, treated on (frequent) arrest as common criminals, brutally and painfully force-fed in prison. A radical subgroup, the Young Hot Bloods, nevertheless escalated the protest action to arson and other acts of extreme violence.

LEGACY OF THE SUFFRAGISTS

In spite of the severity of the movement, many of the newspaper comments were patronising and belittling in the extreme – H. G. Wells, for example, called their activities, including those of Richardson, ‘skylarking’. Women in this country who feel that ‘politics don’t concern them’ may wish to consider exactly what it took to enable them, as women, to make such a choice in the first place. It should also not need to be restated that what they call ‘politics’ is not something apart but is present in every aspect of our lives, down to the cost of a pint of milk or a loaf of bread.

Though matters have progressed, there is still a deeply ingrained cultural inequality between men and women. It’s present in our advertising and in the assumptions behind much of our language. It’s rampant on social media, encouraged by the popular press, ratified by the more regressive media outlets. But whatever their personal vagaries, Suffragists made a groundbreaking change in the position of women in this country.

Available from Bookbuster,
39 Queens Road, Hastings TN34 1RE and other local bookshops or direct from hastingspress.co.uk 

Fixing Hastings & Rye by HIP newswriter James Prentice is an ambitious overview and explanation of the area’s social and economic fabric. Informed by the author’s Fabian Society membership and underpinned by a PhD in social science research from the University of Sussex, it attempts to quantify the many issues, human and infrastructural, which beset Hastings and many other coastal towns.

Prentice has lived in the area for most of his life, lending a local perspective to the many maps, tables, graphs and source annotations which support his findings. Impressively and extensively analysing and ordering a plethora of official figures from the public domain, Prentice tackles the shrinking and poorly coordinated two-tier local government structures, neither effective nor efficient; housing; economic activity and the area’s parlous transport links, among much else.

Perhaps the most shocking – albeit unsurprising – revelations concern health, education, poverty and deprivation. Despite its ABC1 coastal strip population demographic of artists and musicians, the town has areas of intense inequality and deprivation. This is partly due to low-paid seasonal and part-time employment and a skew to low-paid hospitality and care work, but also rooted in the increasing unaffordability of food, fuel and above all, housing. I’d like to have seen mention of the long shadow cast by the cynical dumping of homeless families from London into peripheral housing estates in the 1960s and 70s. However, Prentice is astute in demonstrating how a dearth of social housing and the impact of incomers on the cost of both private rented and owner-occupied homes, along with the blight of Airbnbs, has affected the market.

Think it’s nice living by the seaside? Hastings is the 13th most deprived area in the country, 14,000 people (from a combined population of around 97,000) live in multiple deprivation and 26% of local children are from low-income households. According to research by Prentice, over the last decade, child poverty has increased by 45%, yet there is little central government impetus to devolve the necessary funds and resources to tackle their long-entrenched low quality of life.

Using detailed case studies and specific examples throughout, Prentice provides positive policy remedies (a mixture of pragmatic and pie-in-the-sky) at the end of every chapter, concluding with an ultimately bleak assessment of the state we’re in.

Non-fiction. 400 pages. Paperback. £10

Marilyn Garson’s book Jewish not Zionist was published in late 2024 in her home country of Aotearoa New Zealand. It has now been republished in a UK edition, by Circaidy Gregory Press, because of its acute relevance to everyone here too who is concerned with what it means when someone says they are Jewish, but not Zionist, at this time. Marilyn Garson looks not only at the crux of what it is to be Jewish, but also, of what it is to be human, and fellow-human. As quoted on the front cover of the UK edition, the book is indeed ‘essential reading for Jews and non-Jews alike’ in these days of the confusion so often expressed about the tangled and varying interrelationships between Jewish people, Judaism, Zionism and Israel.

Although Garson’s story takes place in Aotearoa New Zealand, she brings to it her lived experience across the world: her Zionist upbringing in Canada, her training in philosophy and other disciplines, her journey from and then back into Judaism, and her work over many years in the war grounds of Afghanistan, Cambodia and, for four years, Gaza.

When Garson returned to New Zealand in late 2015 from Gaza, having lived through Israel’s massive bombing campaign of 2014, she embarked upon her first book Still Lives: A memoir of Gaza which re-

counts her time there and the lives of the talented and vital young people with whom she worked to help develop the various enterprises to which they were dedicated. With this story, she wanted to puncture the dehumanisation of Palestinian people that she had encountered so repeatedly throughout her life, and to open up some new understandings both within her religious community and beyond it.

But she found herself the recipient of outrage from her own synagogue, and from further afield. She was accused of treachery simply for having lived and worked in Gaza, and her attempts to argue the equal humanity of the Palestinian people were buried in the sustained abuse that poured upon her, unceasingly, from the community to which she had thought she belonged.

IMMENSELY THOUGHT- PROVOKING

While Jewish not Zionist chronicles this traumatic experience, it is also the story of her survival of it, and the subsequent founding of the group Alternative Jewish Voices (NZ) (AJV) for those who take a critical view of Zionism, who see Palestinian people as having equal human rights, and who want to explore their own stance as Jews of the diaspora.

Her introductory explication of ‘Why I am an anti-Zionist’ reflects:

‘Anti-Zionist Jews walk a paradoxical path of loss, exclusion and discovery as we outgrow everything we have been told. We situate our Jewish selves in the actual world before our eyes. The motif of passage is familiar to us. We are inveterate wanderers, explorers, guests on the threshold hoping to be welcome.’

Part One describes her return to New Zealand from Gaza, the ostracism from her synagogue, the silencing of her voice in many other public spaces, and the profound trauma, both mental and physical, that she endured over a period of several years. Then comes the story of her emergence from this, and her co-founding of AJV, as described above, which now has a strong profile and representation across many institutions including at governmental level in the country.

Part Two starts with two major essays, respectively on human rights and on the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance Working Definition of Antisemitism (the IHRAWDA, usually abbreviated to the IHRA).

Both discussions are immensely thought-provoking. Her discussion of the IHRA constitutes a seminal analysis of this ‘definition’ of antisemitism, which was never intended to be the final word, has no legal status despite its adoption by so many official organisations, and was in fact renounced by its author more than seven years ago for being badly misused to stifle free speech.

PROFOUNDLY ENRICHING

Garson argues that:

‘The IHRA[WDA] is a definition, a project and a strategy of influence. […] It is the enforcement regime of the Zionist project of occupation and power.

The IHRA definition has hemmed in the space of speech and protest, rendered statements of Palestinian identity and rights suspect, foreclosed on millennia of Jewish pluralism, and elevated political difference to the absolute wrong of racism. […] Every message must now be filtered (or rammed) through a language that places Zionist-Jewish discomfort before Palestinian survival.’ 

A further invaluable aspect of the book is the interweaving throughout of posts from press articles and the AJV blog, each one a short but sharply illuminating reflection on its particular topic; collectively, these provide a riveting and enlightening counterpoint to the personal narrative. The book concludes with her ‘Afterword: the new Jewish International’, which discusses, in her words, the ‘growing presence of Jewishness beyond Zionism’.

A reader of this book has noted that: “For people like me, who are not Jewish, this book brings welcome assistance in the struggle to make sense of and to distinguish between Jewish race, religion and culture, and, when looking at ‘Judaism’ and ‘Zionism’, to distinguish the religious and the political. People like Marilyn Garson are ideally placed to help develop the growing movement for united anti-racism across the world.”

For those of Jewish heritage, like me and so many others all over the country, whether religious or secular, who can neither identify with nor support Israel’s actions – and who are often confronted by family and friends who take another view – the book is at once profoundly enriching in its huge sweep of experience and knowledge, and a source of solace and wisdom.

Buy from kaygreen.blog/2025/02/17 or email KayGreen lit@gmail.com Or ask in Bookbuster, 39 Queens Road, Hastings, or your local bookshop, for Jewish not Zionist

Part Two of Left Behind is titled ‘Spiralling Up’, and is a detailed look at how previously ‘left behind’ places have in fact triumphed and reversed the trends. This is the meat of the book, with chapters on ‘how places renew from the grass roots’, ‘inclusive prosperity’, ‘building the sinews of the State’, and ‘the morality of common purpose’. 

Collier accounts for England’s special status as a failing economic state by reference to other countries’ choices to devolve power, investment, and both public and private finance. Thus, regions in danger of being ‘left behind’ may in fact be able to build in more resilience. Much of the book details examples of different tactics, few of which our politicians seem interested in, but which set out possible roots away from neglect and poverty for areas ‘left behind’.

Possibly most resonant for us in England is a section on ‘crisis as opportunity’. The emergence of a possibly true Left political party in the last few weeks may be seen as a national opportunity to fight the entropy dragging this country down, that is, if they can find a way to see off the threat from the entropy accelerators of the nationalist right. Examples Collier uses include post-1945 West Germany, Bangladesh after 1970, and the Basque region of Spain. Renewal ‘from the grass roots’ is in the author’s view a foundational step toward reversing trends in ‘neglected places’.

The role of the Quakers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are briefly outlined, as they ‘believed in living simple but purposeful lives in which every member of their community had equal agency’, as opposed to an ossified and hierarchical approach taken by the established church and state. Other dissenters serve as examples as well – without Quakers, Baptists and Methodists we might have had no successfully emergent trade unions, credit unions, building societies, etc, and ultimately perhaps no Co-Operative Party or Parliamentary Labour Party. These religious dissenters catalysed and focussed working-class organisation.

WE NEED A ‘THICK’ STATE

Entropy is a term originating in thermodynamics. In essence, it is defined as a force that brings disorder to ordered systems. In thermodynamics this is a result of energy draining from a system, and changing to cooler forms. Used in sociological, political or economic systems theory, it is an ever-present drain on energy. Indeed, I see it as the true ‘invisible hand’ in the market. It does, sadly, the opposite of the invisible hand Adam Smith mooted in passing – it was never an important element in his economic ideas. As in chemical and physical systems, it takes a great deal more energy to push a system up a hill than it does to roll it back down again. For local economies that suffer from underinvestment this creates huge issues, and ultimately ‘neglected places’ will no longer be peripheral but everywhere, unless, despite ‘free market’ ideals, governments, councils, and community bodies curb the market, intervene in the markets, and inject a great deal of energy in renewal. 

For this to work for everyone, rather than the current dead-end of massively increasing the wealth of the few at the expense of the many, Collier suggests a number of requirements. As with the Quaker example, we need ‘inclusive prosperity. We need a state apparatus that is inclusive, unlike out current elitist, indeed predatory, state, and ‘thick’, which Collier differentiates from ‘big’. Big states tend towards over-bureaucratisation, and thin states allow too much power to unelected unaccountable non-state apparatus such as corporations and their think-tanks and lobby groups. Thus, Denmark is an example of a successful ‘thick’ state, that ‘uses its large revenues to be inclusive’.

Other topics covered are ‘liveable cities’ with controlled urbanisation; service industries that are people-focussed or even -owned, such as utilities, transport, schools and libraries; embedding ecologically sustainable building practices; effective taxation and regulation of the mega-rich, amongst whom Collier investigates fossil fuel companies, with a section on ‘how Norway beat Britain’. Regulation and taxation require controlling ‘slippery accounting’, off-shoring to tax havens etc. Resource development requires strict controls on how it impacts local communities as well as the environment.

BLUEPRINTS FOR POSITIVE CHANGE

Perhaps his most important chapter is ‘Building the Sinews of the State’. All the above is all very well to suggest, but nothing happens by magical thinking. One example would be the ‘capacity to tax’. Collier gives some insight into how a low-tax low-infrastructure state such as Uganda historically succeeded in increasing tax revenues. The current media propaganda against taxing the wealthiest more, with the new ‘project fear’ bogeyman of ‘capital flight’ indicates how much of an issue the capacity to tax can be

Collier is a ‘communitarian’, and like others of that ilk, such as Amitai Etzioni, has a grand catholic plan that describes the problems very well, but often seems errantly optimistic in its prescriptions. His views here are expressed in the chapter ‘The Morality of Common Purpose’. Contemporary ideology suggests morality is automatically served by the market and that supporting those ‘left behind’ is a wasted effort – see every Daily Mail headline on benefits (except pensions, I wonder why, eh?). This ideology must be named Enemy and expunged with extreme prejudice, yet is grows stronger by the day.

Nevertheless, whilst our era often suffers from a preponderance of ‘individualism’, some assumptions communitarians make tend to ride roughshod over individuals for the sake of community. It is a hard balance to maintain, and one might agree that we have shifted too far from community, but we must keep sharp or we stand to lose as much as we stand to gain. I would wish to see a lot more power imbued in the grass roots too, as a state is by definition hierarchical in ways that, again due to entropy as much as design or intent, are inimical to the fight to not be ‘left behind’. Overall, I think Left Behind’s blueprints for positive change are important, so long as approached and enacted critically.

Left Behind is available from Bookbuster, 39 Queens Road, Hastings TN34 1RE

Collier’s project here is to discuss what he calls ‘a new economics for neglected places’, which we can readily apply here. The book has a global perspective, covering for example parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America. But he reserves a special place in his analysis for England. Part One of the book, ‘Spiralling Down’, ‘is the story of damaging ideologies and the politics of greed’ and how they impede attempts to narrow the wealth-gap and keep the base of an economy fluid and viable through investment and welfare. Thus, England is seen through the lens of an extreme version of the ‘free market’ imposed on us from Thatcher’s 1980s onwards, one he sees as more extreme than any other country: despite the propaganda, ‘far from remedying the syndrome, market forces accentuate it’. He also accounts for England’s special status as a failing economic state by reference to other countries’ choices to devolve power, investment, and both public and private finance.

Collier has relatively little to say about ‘class politics’, but does point out the need for workers unions, willingness to compromise and cooperate between workers and bosses, and the need for resilient welfare support. The latter has been especially badly dismantled in the UK, especially since 2008, with little sign of the recent change in government addressing that, with the Labour government instead stating that it is only interested in ‘working people’. And so we fall yet further behind.

MANY IN HASTINGS DRIVEN INTO THE GROUND

Let’s get an elephant in the room out of the way. Collier has a warped perspective regarding ‘the South-East’, one typically found ‘up north’. We are, apparently, all terribly well-off down here. Only the post-industrial North, Wales, and Cornwall are badly ‘left behind’. This is disappointing in what is, in many ways, a compulsory read, dense with information. And ironic, too, because he in general acknowledges that many places outside the capitals or resource-rich regions of countries can easily be ‘left behind’ as the wealth-gap expands, as it is doing, and rapidly, in our country. It is a patchwork with mixed results, such that areas such as Hastings can experience a growth in ‘average earnings’, driven in part by equity-rich blow-ins, and at the same time evisceration of the base economy that mainly impoverishes locals and previous generations of, equity-poor, blow-ins – also driven in part by recent equity-rich blow-ins. This has the effect of masking a detrimental ratcheting down of our community. This is a phenomenon Collier would be sure to recognise exists in ‘the South-East’ too, if he didn’t show such a caricatured anti-Home Counties bias.

Perhaps this is a misperception explained by the relative recentness of this phenomenon, at least in its current form. After years of austerity driven by elite economists’ and politicians’ choices in how to address the 2008 banking crisis, plus the rise in popularity of AirBnBs, the economic pressure pushing many away from an overly expensive capital, the effects of Brexit on small businesses, and the iniquities of the Universal Credit system that replaced the fairer and stabilising Working Tax Credit system, many in Hastings have been driven into the ground, compounding the growth in the wealth-gap.

Nevertheless, these pressures that we suffer here are acknowledged in other areas of the UK, and in other countries. So, if we put aside his biases, this first part of Left Behind is as important and valid for us here as for his much-lauded post-industrial Yorkshiremen, which means we, as readers, can roll our eyes at him but still join the dots ourselves. A ‘society’s spirit’ can be ‘crushed by despair’, and Collier analyses ‘social psychology’ to explain ‘social fragmentation’ in neglected places.

Part Two of the book, ‘Spiralling Up’, however, is a detailed look at how previously ‘left behind’ places have in fact triumphed and reversed the trends. This is much more positive, and represents the meat of the book, taking up two-thirds of the narrative, with chapters on, for example, ‘how places renew from the grass roots’, ‘inclusive prosperity’, ‘building the sinews of the State’, and ‘the morality of common purpose’. And it is to this I will return next time…

Left Behind is available from Bookbuster, 39 Queens Road, Hastings TN34 1RE

Jemia De Blondeville has been around on the Hastings poetry scene for a good few years and our paths have crossed at several events. HIP has published some of her work on this page’s Poetry Corner. Now she has gifted us this delightful collection of lyrical feel-good poems in her new chapbook Where Fairies Once Dwelt.

Her poems here are divided into three sections: The Fairy Moon, Dark Butterflies and The Girl and the Dragon. The overall feel of this collection is an ethereal one, as might be expected from the title and section headings, with themes of nature, fantasy, surrealism and a little philosophy thrown in. Jemia uses repeat words in different poems – zephyrs, butterflies, flowers, velvet, fairies – linking us into the optimistic and childlike (but not childish) view of her creative world. She also explores different styles of poetry from regular verse through to haikus, an acrostic, a poetic prose piece and an ‘A-Z of British Birds’.

At £3 for a collection of 30 (10p per poem!) this wonderful chapbook, which includes photos and illustrations, is a great tonic to uplift our spirits during times when the world may seem overcomplicated and less than harmonious. More good news is that all proceeds go straight back into our community, namely to Arts in the Park and its wellbeing groups.

Where Fairies Once Dwelt is currently available from Bookbuster, 39 Queens Road TN34 1RE, 1,200 Postcards at 80 Queens Road, and soon other outlets around the town.

Guy Shrubsole is the author of the bestselling The Lost Rainforests of Britain. His latest book, out now in paperback, includes some of the remnants of our temperate rainforest, along with 92% of English land – land we have no right to roam upon. Indeed, much of the 8% left over upon which we may walk is privately owned. The recent farce over camping on Dartmoor highlights this for us, and Guy, who himself lives in Devon, covers the court case over access here. The book went to print before the victory was won against the landowners last month – judges unanimously dismissed an appeal by Alexander and Diana Darwall against a 2023 ruling upholding Dartmoor Commons Act.

Lewis Winks of protest group Right to Roam, in an article in the Exeter Observer, said “Dartmoor remains the only place in England and Wales where the public has a right to wild camp and can lawfully experience the magic of sleeping under the stars. And the fact that one wealthy landowner, Alexander Darwall, was able to temporarily remove a right that belonged to everyone, demonstrates how England’s system of access is utterly broken.” ‘He added: “The Labour Government must now pass a new Right to Roam Act to defend and extend the public’s rights to access nature in England. Ministers must urgently change the law not only to protect the right to wild camp on Dartmoor from future challenges, but to expand the public’s right of responsible access to the wider countryside.”

‘AN END TO FEUDALISM’

Shrubsole’s hardback edition The Lie of the Land was subtitled ‘Who really cares for the countryside’. The paperback is more combative, with the new subtitle ‘How a tiny group of landowners wrecked the countryside, and how the public can restore it’. The book takes a look at who owns the countryside, how many landowners propagandise about what a great job they do as stewards and suggest the ‘townies’ will just treat the countryside as a garbage dump. Shrubsole gives this elitist claim short shrift. He gives us many examples of how these self-professed ‘guardians of the land’ in fact cause great damage. This ranges from agricultural run-off, through destructive alteration of the course of rivers and degradation of wetland including SSSIs, to the effect rape of the land has in the name of grouse and pheasant hunting for toffs. The latter alone causes immense destruction of our native flora and fauna for a sport which accounts for per annum CO2 emissions of half a billion tons. At the same time, he acknowledges and praises those landowners that do in fact care for their land.

All this makes for a fascinating read, and I recommend it. And I could fill this review with the dastardly behaviour of our elites – but in fact, the best thing about the book is its sections dealing with the second half of its new subtitle, how we can address stewardship and ownership issues. As Shrubsole notes, currently ‘in a country where 1 per cent of the population owns half of all England, such decisions are made by a tiny elite’. One clear change required to begin to solve pressing issues around degradation of our natural environment, and urgently enhancing the sustainability of our native food supply, is a widening of involvement in decision-making. It is an uphill struggle, landowners are rich, influential, and often angry – in 1983 effigies of conservationists on the Somerset Levels were hung by the neck by farmers opposed to plans to rewet drained wetlands.

The focus on England is tempered by reference to the various successes in protecting land, beyond the right to roam, in Scotland. Shrubsole gives over a fair few pages to the public acquisition of vast swathes of the former Buccleuch Estate, and what the Scottish government fairly describe as ‘an end to feudalism’, focussing on community ownership as well as the right to access. Centuries after the eviction of Highlanders from the land they lived on and farmed by arrogant lairds who could be richer with sheep than tenants, the ancestors of the victims of the clearances in Sutherland now have the right to buy the land. A Heritage Trust now owns the Isle of Eigg… Needless to say, in England we remain quite definitely ‘feudal’, with a disproportionate amount of land still owned by earls, barons, and lords granted vast acreage after the Norman Conquest. Globally, more and more land is owned by venture  capitalists, and even Utah’s Mormon Church. And changes of governance under Thatcher ‘closed down debate about the public ownership of land for a generation’.

‘THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM’ LAND OWNERSHIP

So, read this excellent book all the way through! But, here I will round off this review with a quick potted rundown of Shrubsole’s main recommendations for action. He says that reform must be a democratic process, a million miles from where we are now. There must be stricter prioritisation, as much land is deemed ‘multi-use’ that in fact has quite narrow requirements if it is to be protected, such as our vanishing wetlands. One might mention the disconnect between those who think we can address the decimation of our forests through massive monoculture plantations, and those who see that different biomes should be seeded with appropriate native trees and flora in order to recover. And none of this means diddle-squat without addressing ‘the elephant in the room’, land ownership. To do this requires agriculture and forestry be bought into the planning system, as, unbelievably, they are not!

He finishes on a ten-point programme, beginning with protecting our greatest carbon sinks, moorland and the fens, and banning moorland burning and grouse-shooting. King Charles, our supposedly ‘green’ royal wouldn’t like that. Second, institute a community right to buy in England. Third, use public money to ‘buy land for nature’. Fourth, levy a carbon land tax on polluting landowners. Fifth, stop letting landowners unleash hundreds of thousands of imported pheasants on the land in shooting season (indeed, why not ban shooting?). Sixth, create a ‘right of responsible access’ giving the public rights to become whistleblowers when finding nefarious land practices on yer lordship’s manor. Seventh, let national parks serve the interests of nature, especially important now rare-metal rich uplands such as Dartmoor are now technically within the new ‘enterprise zones’. Eighth, ‘put in place a land use framework for England and open up data on land’. Ninth, ‘require landowners to give an account of their stewardship’, Shrubsole’s ‘Ecological Domesday Book’, and, tenth, not a policy suggestion, ‘but a plea to everyone reading this book’ – ‘Join campaigns to hold landowners to account and change the laws of the land’.

We cannot go back to ‘subsistence rights on the common land’, as once granted under the Carta de Foresta, not with a UK population of 70 million people, but we can and must be activists for change. Scotland is proving it works. Solidarity is the way.

The Lie of the Land is available at a specially reduced price from Bookbuster, 39 Queens Road
TN34 1RE

In 1948, when George Orwell published 1984, he imagined the Thought Police. That is, he imagined a form of surveillance where those whose personal thoughts displeased the Party were hounded out by the State and punished. To Orwell, to his readers then and now, the attempt to suppress everything that did not conform to Party lines, whether merely mentioned, or discussed in public or private places, was the most heinous aspect of despotic control. Big Brother was watching everyone, whether they liked it or not.

STATE CONTROL AND INDIVIDUAL OPINION

Tiffany Jenkins is a historian, writer, journalist, and broadcaster living in Hastings. Her powerful history, Strangers and Intimates, takes us back to the time before Henry VIII and his self-serving declaration of the separation of Church and State. The rule of God was paramount and a man’s individual ‘conscience’ immaterial, if it existed at all. The Monarch was God’s appointed and the Church and the State and the Law and the Individual were all one. There was not a word for ‘private’ until the beginning of the sixteenth century.

It’s a sobering thought: don’t we often concur that as individuals we have formed our own life-rules, our own convictions about what is right and what is wrong? But our right to our own opinions, and a private space where we can do and think what we like, was pretty well unknown, Jenkins points out, even until Victorian times. People “had interior lives. They did retreat for reflection. But against the structures of power, the demands of society and the community, there was no…aspect of life where others could not legitimately intrude.”

In her extensive examination of the distinction, in a final summary chapter, ‘Saving private life’, Tiffany Jenkins argues passionately for society to retain the distinction between the two spheres. “It is important to recognize and accept” states Jenkins, “that we naturally present ourselves differently in public and in private. Both modes of behaviour are authentic: neither is fake.”

The word ‘naturally’ here worries me slightly, since the bulk of the book refers not to nature but to public legislation. Jenkins certainly made me aware, through successive historical chapters, that actually our thoughts are not our own, that the way we imagine events, the rules we live by, our ‘internal’ consciences, are formed through hundreds of years of collective cultural conditioning. Our belief in our right to private lives and opinions has been ingrained, and enshrined in Law, so that, until recently, it was difficult to imagine a life where a citizen’s privacy was not inviolable. Events and technological developments over the last fifty years have, however, affected the boundaries.

THE DESTRUCTION OF OUR OWN INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS?

Jenkins argues, through examination of a succession of public events, that the private sphere is in danger of breaking down. Examining specific historical developments, she works through an early example of a Big-Brother type programme called An American Family, to the Clinton/Lewinsky exposé and its knock-on effects (one wonders whether in the Trump era this would be a cause for celebration rather than presidential resignation), to the very public row between Boris Johnson and Carrie Symonds, Prince Harry’s kiss-and-tell, and the general demand, in the name of transparency, for the publication of the private text messages of public figures.

Massive technological developments like the invention of photography, TV and, subsequently, the internet, have been instrumental in this change. There’s a whole telling section of the book beginning with the vision of Steve Jobs and the launch of the Apple Mac in 1984. “1984,” he announced, “won’t be like 1984.” Now, messaging services like WhatsApp have eroded our assumption of privacy in ways that even Orwell did not imagine. Even sex, a hitherto relatively private act, can now be viewed by millions on any social media, if people bother to look. For Orwell’s book, this would have been more satisfactory to the State than any private act of love between consenting adults. Have we used technology to engineer the destruction of our own individual rights? Time will tell. 

This new book by locally based author and poet Paul Green channels the spirit of J G Ballard. It features seven stories, and three essays. Paul is a few years older than myself, but we share considerable cultural influences. These might be described rather simplistically as encompassing elements of sixties counter-culture, eighties cyberpunk and nineties ‘Mondo2000’ alternative tech-oriented culture, all subsumed in the nineties, by, I believe, Forbidden Planet bookshop in, then, New Oxford Street, under the banner ‘Slipstream’. Authors in this category, which spans fiction, non-fiction, and pseudo-fiction, include: William Burroughs, Noam Chomsky, Brian Aldiss, Timothy Leary, Iain Banks, Bruce Sterling, William Gibson, William T Vollmann, Robert Anton Wilson, and even perhaps Erich von Daniken.

And, of course, Jim Ballard. Paul and I were both influenced by Ballard. This shows in much of Paul’s writing, but comes to the fore in this excellent new collection. One of the essays looks at some of the tropes that appear in Ballard’s work, through the lens of one of his early novels, The Wind From Nowhere. Paul thanks David Pringle, former editor of the great UK SF magazine Interzone, a worthy successor to New Worlds, for his feedback on the essay. In the early nineties I had read a piece on Pringle’s fascination with Ballard. Interzone ran a competition, which I entered, to ‘rewrite Alien as if novelised by Ballard instead of Alan Dean Foster’. I pitched my entry towards Pringle’s take on Ballard, coming, as I recall, second in the competition – my entry is buried in a box somewhere in the Interzone archives at Liverpool University. The winning entry was printed, it took a minor liberty, adding ‘…and directed by David Cronenberg’ and was very good.

PAUL COVERS THESE TOUCHSTONE TROPES WELL

Reading Paul’s stories reminded me of my own tribute to Ballardian obsessions. Few have captured his tone and ecology of ideas as well as Paul has. Some of the early stories of Eric Brown, in his The Time-lapsed Man come to mind.

Ballard was a bit of an existentialist. His leading, male, characters reflect this philosophy. His female characters are of his time; in my imagination they are often highly-strung and faded, clinging to an outmoded comfort-zone, looking perhaps a bit like Nanette Newman. They are usually living in suburbia, or post-apocalyptic hotels, amongst jaded middle-class professionals. There is often an eccentric public school antagonist. The time-space the main character occupies is as much the ‘inner space’ of the mind as it is the external environment, and the latter is often arguably an existential extrusion of that mind.

It is often assumed that Ballard’s childhood, interred by the Japanese in Shanghai during the war, followed by post-war London, and in later life suburbia in the form of Shepperton is the key to his mentality. No doubt there is more to it than that, but his memories of the camp and of the austerity of post-war England are I think central to the atmosphere of novels, such as The Drought, The Crystal World, and The Drowned World – perhaps, too, in some aspects of one of my favourite Ballard novels, Hello America. One way or another, deserts are the heart of his most elemental novels and stories. Paul covers these touchstone tropes well in his stories, and explicates them in his essay on ‘The Poetics of ‘Studio 5, The Stars’, which inhabits the ambience of the collection Vermilion Sands. One of my favourite shorts appears here, The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D.

A CLASSIC TAKE ON BALLARDIAN APOCALYPSE STORIES

Paul channels other threads in Ballard’s work, especially in his story Monaco, which has shades of Crash, The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race, though he doesn’t go so far out as the Ballard of The Atrocity Exhibition here.

I think my favourite stories here are The Final Analysis, The Seismic World, and Shadow People. The former inhabits an alternate reality where the UK has joined the war in Vietnam, and the Russians have also arrived there, Profumo is PM, and characters include Jim and his friend Christopher Evans, in Wimbledon instead of Shepperton, but in different roles to our world, and a very Jim-esque lead in David Carlson. Carlson works for a trade rag, ‘Plastic World’, whereas Ballard worked for the trade rag, ‘Chemistry and Industry’. Paul has placed a number of amusing parallels amongst his work here. Seismic World is a classic take on Ballardian apocalypse stories, especially, perhaps, The Wind from Nowhere. The latter story, Shadow People, I like because I find it redolent of classic paranoid kids’ TV such as Time-Slip, Quatermass, and Children of the Stones, as well as of Ballard himself. It may recycle 70s TV, but ‘hauntology’ and ‘psychogeography’ have rendered nostalgia for that era current once more.

Highly recommended.

Terminal Transmissions is available from Bookbuster, 39 Queens Road, Hastings TN34 1RE

In the 1880s, chief Concomly, of the Native American Chinook tribe, “tried [..] to develop a system of equitable and peaceful trade between tribes and white merchants. He was confounded by the necessity for profit that underlay the whites’ system of trade. And he could never fathom the reason for funnelling profits to distant owners, people who were not part of the economy”, said Barry Lopez in his monumental work, Horizon. Lopez later points out that “The hedge fund manager who amasses material wealth with no thought for the fate of the pensioner he cheats ruins lives. He is a kind of suicide bomber.”

In Vassal State, Hanton demonstrates the degree to which ‘America runs Britain’. Make no mistake, whilst two centuries past England was the world leader in exporting exceptionalist mayhem and terror for profit, America has fulfilled that role since at least 1945, and now they are coming for us, suicide-bombing our economy.

HANDS AROUND THE UK ECONOMY’S THROAT

Those who regularly read my reviews here will already know I’m a tad cynical and, as people so often do, mistake my realism for pessimism. However, this important book, which I picked up ‘knowing’ whereof it spoke, still managed to shock me. We all know American corporations carve up companies the world over, undertake large-scale mergers and acquisitions, asset-strip, and walk away with a country’s material and financial wealth in the name of ‘free’ markets, and happily back the IMF and World Bank in imposing neoliberal ‘structural adjustment’ conditions on bail-outs and loans, which further hollow-out developing and failing economies.

But few are fully aware of how deeply they have plunged their hands around the UK economy’s throat, how hard they are squeezing. I have known since school in the late ‘70s the USA to be the greatest threat to world peace. Now it’s getting real for us here too, ‘ally’ or not. In essence we are owned by the USA. UK assets held by American corporations exceed the total of US assets in the whole of the rest of Europe, and the majority of taxation on their profits is evaded by registering for tax in Ireland and Luxembourg, Switzerland and Holland. Estimates are that monies shipped abroad work out at over £2100 per annum for every British household. More than a quarter of the top 350 British listed companies are US-owned. US companies’ share of ‘our’ assets is equivalent to a stonking £53,000 per UK household, a significant proportion of it acquired from 2019 onwards. By some measures it is estimated that the US share of UK assets increased by one-third in 2023 alone. The 2008 crash, Brexit, and the pandemic have all fed this beast.

The US plans long-term, the UK investor culture has a ‘very short-term focus’: basically, shareholders want money now and damn the consequences. Yes, that’s right – much of this is self-inflicted. Countries such as France and Germany have rules restricting foreign ownership, but we are having a jumble-sale. US private equity control “Morrisons, Travelodge, the AA, Alton Towers, Gatwick Airport, Biffa, Center Parcs, and Burger King”. “Our high streets are hosting many American-owned chains, such as Pizza Hut, McDonald’s, KFC, Gail’s Bakery, Majestic Wine, Taco Bell, Nike, Gap, TK Maxx, Abercrombie & Fitch, Timberland, Foot Locker, Levi’s, Costco, Subway, Hotel Chocolat, Waterstones, Ralph Lauren and Sweaty Betty,” to name but a few. Under post-2008 ‘Universal Credit’ rules, self-employed small businesses are eviscerated, and with the last tranche transferred from WTC to UC last year, many more will disappear over the next year as we hit the wall created by cynical UC rules. Only the large chains will benefit, and the US will have an eye to taking over yet more of those.

A SLAVE NATION

The book also covers ‘big tech’, subscription services, the drive on the part of Visa, Mastercard, Worldpay, PayPal and others to push all financial transactions online where American firms take a cut of every pound we spend. Every credit card machine, every cash-machine, every Amazon, eBay or AirBnB sale gives a cut of UK financial assets to America. Usuriously out-of-control credit card rates, set by companies such as Visa, are dumping our nation into ever deeper debt like never before. As Hanton puts it, we are indeed a ‘vassal state’ of the USA. Further, a slave nation. Yet still we bang on about the ‘special relationship’. In reality, we are an annoying yappy terrier running round the Big Apple’s legs, and after getting the occasional kick enthusiastically coming back for more abuse.

The idea that Starmer, and his City handler Rachel Reeves, are anything but continuity neoliberal ‘safe hands’ is deranged. As Hanton puts it, “it is clear that the invitation to buy up Britain, first extended by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s and reiterated by every prime minster since, has been enthusiastically accepted by Americans”, who just loved Johnson, Sunak and Truss. The so-called (parliamentary) ‘Labour Party’ today certainly follows in their footsteps. As Cameron put it, we are ‘open for business’, and it’s a garage sale.

The much-sought unicorn, a ‘Brexit bonus’, doesn’t exist for the voters who erroneously thought they were ‘getting their country back’. Nope, only private equity, City traders, including Farage and his henchmen, the cynical rich, including Hannon and Banks and the others who paid for the Brexit they wanted, and foreign powers (principally the USA) are ‘getting our country’. Jeremy Hunt, recently knighted for his crimes against the British people, and his ‘Labour’ successor Wes Streeting, know that the NHS is ‘on the table’ in any ‘deal’ with America and both are in the pocket of US health insurance providers. Not to put too fine a point on it, these people have committed massive treason against this country and its people.

RESTRICTIONS ON PROTEST

Is there any hope? Hanton suggests a few options. Stop the sell-offs; actively support home-based innovations, especially in tech; invest in people, the opposite of government policy; increase our autonomy from these globalising tyrants; radically transform our tax regime; learn from European structures, attitudes and values – especially acting to reverse our demented ‘bonfire of the regulations’, our refusal to address monopolies, anti-competitive foreign corporate behaviours, and curbing the overweening dominance of US culture in the UK. These options may be too little. And impossible to impose without deposing our City, Establishment, and public-school elites with extreme prejudice – after-all they are the main indigenous engine of off-shoring and rule-breaking, it’s why they lied to us all and paid for the ‘Brexit’ they wanted: one in which we dodge Europe’s attempts to rein in all the ‘torrent-out’ asset-stripping, which can only impoverish the majority of us even further.

And they know we are coming for them, sooner or later, as witnessed by the entirely paranoid increasing restrictions on protest. If we are not vigilant, next it will be restrictions on unsanctioned assembly everywhere.

Vassal State is available from Bookbuster, 39 Queens Road, Hastings TN34 1RE.

The first image inside the new edition of Claude Cahun’s Disavowals, more literally retitled Cancelled Confessions, is a complex photomontage by Cahun’s partner, Marcel Moore. That name was the alias for illustrator, designer, and photographer Suzanne Malherbe. Cahun was born Lucy Schwob. Malherbe and Schwob met at their local art school in Nantes, and lived in Paris, associating both intimately and artistically, for the next forty years. 

THE CONSTRUCTION OF MYSTERY

The centre of this montage (cut out here) is obviously the eye – this vision is cupped by two graceful hands which end at the forearm with a pair of lips. In other parts of the image, another pair of hands cradles a globe, and a pair of cloaked fists grasp something that looks like a lens gazing into a confined world of classical sculpture. 

Cahun’s text is a long, fascinating, not always easy read. Presented more-or-less chronologically, the chapters of her ‘narrative’ are all preceded by similar photomontages. The beginning of each chapter appears to correspond roughly to its preceding image, but the text soon veers off in all directions, often following no discernible sequence and sometimes adopting a different form of address paragraph by paragraph. It is objective and subjective, metaphorical and literal, poetic and prosaic. “When the mechanism has been completely deconstructed, the mystery remains intact” writes Cahun.

This intentional creation of mystery, along with the prominence of hands and eyes in the images, broadly suggests a Surrealist intent. In addition, (after stars and hearts in other chapters) the sections of the last chapter are separated by small eyes. Think of Max Ernst’s unforgettable Eye of Silence, Man Ray’s Glass Tears, Magritte’s False Mirror. To the Surrealists, the Eye represented a gateway to the Subconscious, a tool for revealing hidden truths. André Breton’s Manifestoes of Surrealism (1924) refers 91 times, literally or metaphorically, to the eye.

In Breton’s Manifestoes there is also un chien  – the “Alsatian that has one blue eye and one yellow eye, the dog of the anaglyphs of my dreams.” One of the lasting projects by arch-Surrealist Salvador Dali was his input (with Louis Buñuel) to the film Un Chien Andalou, an acknowledged milestone containing a wealth of Surrealist references, including the famous sick-making razor eyeball-slitting scene. A clear gel emerges from that wound: death, hope, or liberation? In dreams these are often one and the same.

Like many of her literary Modernist contemporaries, Cahun pays homage to her Classical antecedents. For example, she devotes a whole chapter to herself as an ‘aurige’ (Latin Auriga, charioteer). Cahun’s wordplay, throughout the book, assumes readers’ ready familiarity with the classics. She references Christian texts and ceremonies, philosophers and historians ancient and modern, Greek, Roman, and Norse mythology. She refers, too, to works by more recent luminaries, and her contemporaries: Apollinaire, Oscar Wilde, Molière, the symbolism of Rimbaud, the Da-da and Surrealism of Breton.

ART AND QUEERNESS

Another feature of this unique text, especially relevant in recent times, is a connection between Art and Queerness. Bring to mind famous artistic couples (and triangles): Michaelangelo and Cavalieri, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, Vanessa Bell, Clive Bell, and Duncan Grant, Oscar Wilde and Bosie, Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, Tennessee Williams and Frank Merlo. Think also about the present-day activity that is (still) called cross-dressing. Marcel Duchamp, Grayson Perry, David Bowie, Beyoncé, Marilyn – all have created gender-defying alter-egos. Dali, too, was happy to wear a dress. Cahun and Moore were an unconventional couple; like a number of the aforementioned, they lived slightly outside regular society, but their kind of relationship was far from unknown among artistic radicals. So the fluid, unclassifiable writing of Cancelled Confessions is Modernist, Surrealist, of its time, but simultaneously infinitely contemporary. Its blend of reality and fantasy, the (Freudian) Conscious and the Subconscious, is unique, the intellectual reach, extraordinary. 

As a most courageous work even for its time, the book’s disjointed form seems very relevant to today’s copious fragmentary literary blogs, and also perhaps to the now heavily blurred association between the physical and the digital. It is a biography, though not at all as we might expect. Some sections could be called self-examination, but the text is so varied in form that the self being assessed becomes divided, fluid, and indistinguishable from its accumulated intellectual background. 

This is, therefore, a timely reissue. As a physical object it is supremely well-produced, tissue-bound, reverse-engineered to look very like it might have looked in the original edition by Editions du Carrefour (a copy of which, incidentally, recently sold at Christie’s for £3,500). It is perhaps important to notice, though, that while the original cover contained a few jolly neolithic nudes, the newer, more anodyne cover has cropped them out. Is nudity somehow less acceptable now? The eyes, though, are everywhere.

Available from thinmanpress.com

It is increasingly obvious that global capitalism, in its industrial mode, is creating an environmental crisis of epic proportions. It is also apparent that the post-Thatcherism and post-Reaganomics mode of capitalism, one which is focussed on ‘financialisation’, is increasing the wealth of a tiny minority at the expense of everybody else, as it is essentially fed on debt, not production. Decades ago, visionary thinkers, such as Ivan Illich and Murray Bookchin, saw the broad outlines of our current crises coming.

In Bookchin’s case he developed a political philosophy based on attempting to ‘square the circle’ between socialist, ‘anarchist’, and ecological ideas. Like Rachel Carson, he was early amongst radical thinkers in seeing the extent to which environmental degradation was a threat to life on our planet. Unlike Carson, his political experiences in the 1950s meant he saw solutions that were not merely ‘instrumental’ tinkering, but that would attack the capitalist and industrial productivist behemoth at its roots.

He named this ideology ‘social ecology’. Throughout his life, he amended the details as experience required. Much of his writing was focussed on critique of topical crises of the day, and on theoretical underpinnings to his ideas. But he  also, and necessarily, was involved in real-world practice, and concerned with how to create new forms of political consociation that were compatible with a sustainable and liveable future society. Because, as we surely must admit by now, our current way of life is driving us off a cliff.

YOUR BOWELS WILL LOOSEN

This book, subtitled ‘From Bookchin to Rojava and Beyond’, is a welcome analysis of how the ideas central to ‘social ecology’, and thus central to our survival, have been expressed in the real world. Theory is all very well, but practice is where hope is forged. I have written here before about the Kurdish experiment in ‘socially ecological’ living. As with other areas on the periphery of the Western global hegemony, such as Bolivia, space has been, at least temporarily, available to experiment with Bookchin’s ideas. Within ‘developed’ nations there are fewer spaces to act, but the Occupy movement is one area in which Bookchinite ideas were able, in a few locations such as Oakland and New York, to flourish.

Primary among these ideas, and dating from his later writings, is ‘libertarian municipalism’, expressed in the ‘real world’ through ‘people’s assemblies’. Here in Hastings we have had a few attempts at creating such bodies. The idea would be to get as many local people as were interested and free to pop along to meetings where ideas can be shared and a consensus reached on actions. Optimally, decisions made would be able to be enacted. Town councils on a libertarian model find it hard to get traction where ‘representative’ councils exist, and even more so where these are embedded in local, county, and national bureaucracies. But their necessity is more apparent every day.

As is the necessity that discussions include as a core focus our relationship with the land. How much of our food is locally produced? How much is farmed in an ecologically sustainable manner? How is it integrated with the natural world? How much of our energy provision is local, under our control, and genuinely sustainable in the long term? Think about such things for a minute and your bowels will loosen. By these measures, and many more, we are nowhere near any kind of self-sufficiency and have no resilience to global supply issues. So eco-communities, direct democracy, education that teaches us to think and analyse for ourselves and thus function as citizens, are a necessity if we are to address any kind of survivable future.

WHAT LITTLE AUTONOMY HASTINGS HAS

The role of popular assemblies is about to be challenged: they were never easy, but dissolving local authorities and pushing the locus of power up to the level of county-wide or even larger ‘unitary boroughs’ will take what little autonomy Hastings has away from us. As Julia Hilton discussed in issue 273 of this paper, there may still be wiggle-room, but frankly right now is a ‘counter-revolutionary’ moment without the preceding ‘revolution’.

Meanwhile, Finley has found numerous examples of people-power, of eco-communities, directly democratic fora, and federalist alternatives to ‘nationalism’–in the best cases, based around ‘biomes’ and balanced ‘ecological footprints’. She says ‘there is no single blueprint for a democratic and ecological way of life. Indeed, if the last decades of emancipatory social movements and democratic experimentation have revealed anything, it is that each community must reinvent real democracy for itself.’

Currently, the nationalist-populist far-right is on the ascendant all across ‘the West’, clearly including the UK. They offer ‘business as usual’ whilst promising a better life for those who will buy into their tacit promises to deal with structural problems that their leaders are getting rich from, in fact increasing. Any kind of solutions must come from elsewhere, though none can contain the enormity of what’s coming. Finley’s approach to the praxis of social ecology gives us a few clues. ‘Our task is not to rehabilitate the past but to move forward with lessons in hand’, lessons which clearly preclude the kind of ‘reforms’ promised by our parliamentary system, least of all ‘ReformUK’. 

A RESILIENCE AND LOVE OF FREEDOM

Some of Bookchin’s ideas were predicated on us acting in sensible ways in order to head off problems that today are like a tsunami we’d seen on the horizon and ignored but that ‘suddenly’ is upon us. Thus, he may seem optimistic where, when I first read his work, in the early 1980s, his ideas seemed realistic, as well as necessary. He did warn us, over and over. I argued as early as 1990 that the narrow window of opportunity was closing fast. Once slammed shut, only bad options would remain. Now, in 2025, it appears all too likely that we have passed significant ‘tipping points’, ones that lock in horrific changes in our biosphere, that will crash our civilisation, create wars, famines, and disease, and trash yet more of the natural world that we are entirely dependent upon, no matter how alienated from it we may be in our current siloed way of living.

Real positive change at the local and regional level is more urgent than ever, to at least mitigate the worst of what is coming. Of those who are acting for positive change in the face of a new great depression, or worse, she says ‘their perseverance speaks to a resilience and love of freedom embedded in nature itself’.

This book is subtitled The Memoir of a Child Protection Lawyer. The writer lives locally, having recently retired from practice as a barrister specialising in care proceedings. Without sensationalising, soft-pedalling or patronising, she paints at first hand a devastating picture of the legal process that ensues when local authorities intervene in situations of family trauma.

Lawyers, like doctors, are bound by strict rules of confidentiality that aren’t relaxed by time or distance. Ms Thornhill is barred not only from citing the true names of the adults and children involved but also from providing any physical descriptions, including of courtroom or council locations, that would allow readers to guess identities. She tells us at the outset, therefore, that the cases which she will recount in compelling detail are “fictitious creations… I’ve combined, for example, elements of the background of real family A with elements of the trauma suffered by the child or children of family B with a little of the courtroom experience of real client C”. Names, ethnicities, ages, genders of both children and adults have been altered accordingly.

That does create a problem for a literal-minded reader. Given the artificial construction of both the characters and their circumstances, how can we judge the verisimilitude of the events she narrates? Wouldn’t it be cleaner to embrace the fictional elements whole-heartedly and turn the reportage into an autobiographical novel?

POTENTIALLY HEARTBREAKING

On the other hand, Ms Thornhill’s experience as a jobbing barrister also limits the extent of her narrative. She is called in, often at no more than an evening’s notice, to present a case for a mother or father whose children are at risk of being put into care, whether for fostering or for outright adoption. She may have no previous knowledge of the client and will have no ongoing responsibility for what happens after the court has made its decision.

Subject to these limitations, however, Ms Thornhill describes both with admirable clarity and with human feeling the issues which the court has to deal with, and how the different actors – parents, guardians, social workers, lawyers, judges – present their points of view or react to others. The process of any court in action is intrinsically dramatic, and the subject matter – the future lives of traumatised and vulnerable children – is potentially heartbreaking. Ms Thornhill enhances the intimacy of her professional experience by counterpointing it with scenes from her own private life, having to balance her legal career against her own responsibility as single mother of a son who moves through adolescence to adulthood through the course of the book.

In the background, but having increasing impact as the years of economic austerity turn into the experience of Covid-19 lockdown and beyond, is the sense of mounting pressure on local authorities and their financially squeezed social services departments to cope with the ever-rising tide of family breakdown. In the book’s grimmest chapter, ‘Locum’, Ms Thornhill takes a temporary job as the senior in-house lawyer in a local authority child care team, required to progress multiple casework in a hot-desking open plan office under oppressive strip-lighting with a recently digitalised case management system that keeps going down. Most of the social workers around her are fellow locums. Reading her account, you have to wonder how children whose lives lack above all the ingredients of stability and reliability are going to be satisfactorily served by this chaotic environment. The potential for more child victims like Victoria Climbie or Baby P is palpable.

ENGROSSING, INSTRUCTIVE AND ENTERTAINING

There is a bigger question, though, which Ms Thornhill only faces up to in her epilogue: how could any child protection system, however well funded and professionally staffed, cope with the extent of family breakdown which is now occurring. She notes that the number of children in care in England increased by 30% between 2010 and 2023 (and at a still higher rate in Wales). She adds: “A lot of the children who come before the Family Court in public law cases are being raised by lone mothers, who could parent better if they weren’t constantly struggling to keep a roof over their children’s heads, food on their plates and money for heating in the pre-payment meter. Many of these women are struggling with their mental health and it’s not hard to see why.”

She suggests that better support for families living in poverty plus better children’s social care would end up not only reducing human misery but saving the higher social and economic costs incurred in dealing with the fall-out: prevention would be cheaper than the cure.

That may be so. What she doesn’t comment upon is the prevalence of lone mothering in the first place. A recent statistic: 50% of first-born children in this country are no longer living with their two original parents by the age of 14. That’s not to say that lone parents cannot bring up healthy, functioning and well-adjusted children. Not only was Ms Thornhill raising her own son in the absence of his father; her own parents too, she relates, had a “troubled” marriage which ended in a long-drawn-out divorce overshadowing her own childhood. But she perhaps feels that she’s not in a position to endorse the virtues of joint parenting in a single household. None of her sample cases exhibit such a set-up.

On the other hand, she rightly laments the absence of properly conducted research into outcomes of care decisions, including adoptions. However unpromising the prospects of a child being left within the household of a drug-addicted, abusive or otherwise feckless parent, what’s the evidence that being shuffled in and out of a local authority care system has better long-term consequences?

Ms Thornhill writes that at the start of her career as a barrister she felt “like an imposter in the legal world”, wondering whether she shouldn’t have pursued a career as a writer or activist instead. Fortunately, she seems to have kept these alternatives primed for eventual deployment. Her book is engrossing, both instructive and entertaining, and should appeal both to other professionals within the system and to the general reader.

As the war in Ukraine gets ‘interesting’, And with Trump making bizarre attempts to ‘buy’ Greenland, with threats and menaces, in another plug for rare earth minerals, this excellent new book is very timely.

The subtitle is ‘Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power Our Lives’. The author, who works for Reuters with a special interest in the ‘green transition’, has a wide-ranging and well-researched yet chatty and readable approach to a complex subject. He gives a lot of space to industry boosters, and also to Native Americans protecting sacred spaces, and environmentalists. He bookends his work with a story about an imperilled newly discovered buckwheat that thrives in the lithium-rich clays of Nevada’s ‘Rhyolite Ridge’.

The book gives a frankly concerning glimpse of the regulatory and financial fetters of developing new mines in the US, as well as to developments in Chile and Congo where human rights and pollution issues dominate. The global aspect of the supply and manufacturing chain is another absurd and decidedly un-Green aspect the current model of ‘sustainable’ ‘green’ ‘transition’. Scheyder gives us a glimpse of the issues here, but I suggest researching it in more depth. It is not a pretty tale, but it is necessary that we understand what we are up against.

THIS WARMING IS PUSHING TIPPING POINTS

His focus is on the US, which has vast mineral resources, possibly 25% of global lithium, and huge untapped copper reserves, though there are many other rare earth minerals needed in your SUV batteries. Getting these resources is harder than it sounds, though Trump’s ‘bonfire of regulations’ will help in this endeavour. Nevertheless, it is true that the infrastructure is nowhere near available, much of the processing etc being completed in China, amongst other places. The UK’s position is far worse. We’ve less access to minerals, and no infrastructure, even having closed our last steel mill. Try not to laugh / cry.

The role of Trump in signing off on a few projects on leaving office at the end of his first term, plus his interest in Greenland, may confuse some readers. Surely, he has been quite the climate change denialist? And very vocally anti-green transition policies? Well, that’s just his cake-hole yapping to get the incel voters out in his favour. Because, clearly, signing off on developing lithium mines for EV batteries, and angling for an in up in the Arctic Circle to fence off resources for the good ol’ boys down South, is a tacit acknowledgement that he knows full well those resources are becoming more accessible due to, you guessed, global warming, and that this warming is pushing tipping points thus making a ‘green transition’ imperative. One wonders what his voters might make of that if they could add two and two.

Though it is more complicated than that, of course. Gary McKinney, of the People of Red Mountain tribe, is adamant that ‘the green transition is just all about money’, said in the context of a battle to protect indigenous peoples and their sacred spaces. And, anyway, hugely expensive lithium mines will ‘by 2050’ be running down as lithium is readily recyclable (guess what: few countries are doing this efficiently yet, adding yet more carbon-miles to the process). Meanwhile, a company in Vancouver has started ‘vacuuming’, or more accurately, bulldozing, lithium nodules off the Pacific sea-bed, much to the ire of Greenpeace and other environmental groups, and the rather less ‘green’ whaling industry.

EASY. STOP INDUSTRIAL CAPITALISM

Here’s Brian Menell, of mining investment company Techmet: “We need government to say, ‘Sure, we love wildflowers […]’ But, at some point, we’ve got to say, ‘Mister wildflower group, you had your say, now go and shut up. We are going to develop this mine, even if we destroy the habitat of a wildflower, which everybody would regret. It’s better than destroying the world with climate change’.” One ‘Warren’ of North Carolina points out “we don’t need to destroy the United States to address climate change […], this mine would create an environmental issue in an attempt to address an environmental issue”.

Amplifying this issue, Marco Lambertini of the World Wildlife Fund points out that “it is the very gravity of our current circumstances that requires us to act with utmost care for our planet’s life-support system: nature.” An application of the ‘precautionary principle’ puts us in the uncomfortable position of desperately needing to curb fossil-fuel culture, but at the same time desperately needing to replace it with a genuinely ‘green’ and ‘sustainable’ alternative. The capitalist model that currently runs the world may accept a transition from one mega-energy culture to another, but they say ‘there is no alternative’ to some form of ‘business as usual’. Of course, that is not true, but the alternatives are not attractive to most of those living in ‘the West’, as they require swingeing changes. Here, to give a flavour of where we’re at, is Derrick Jensen & Aric McBay, who, in their book Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet, say:

“How do you stop or at least curb global warming? Easy. Stop pumping carbon dioxide, methane, and so on into the atmosphere. How do you do that? Easy. Stop burning oil, natural gas, coal, and so on. How do you do that? Easy. Stop industrial capitalism. When most people in this culture ask, ‘How can we stop global warming?’ that’s not really what they’re asking. They’re asking, ‘How can we stop global warming, without significantly changing this lifestyle that is causing global warming in the first place?’. The answer is you can’t.”

The War Below is available from Bookbuster, 39 Queens Road, Hastings TN34 1RE

Hastings, and indeed many places in England, is experiencing a significant rise in rental prices, ‘driven by demand’ as there is way too little property available to rent. Much property that could be made available to renters is in fact only available as holiday lets, a more lucrative option for landlords than rental. The excessive cost of mortgages is kettling many of us into long-term, often life-time rental, exacerbated by the banks, which, despite the fact that rent is usually cheaper than a mortgage on a similar or often even a bigger property, will not lend to low-income applicants.

I put ‘driven by demand’ in quotes as it needs unpacking. Despite special pleading by certain landlords and lettings agencies around costs to them, which of course are real and often not negligible, it is not ‘costs’ that result in rent increases; nor is it ‘demand’. It is linked more closely to ‘what the market will bear’. This is another way of saying that it is based on greed and usury. Of course it is ‘Not all landlords!’, but it is only ever landlords, to borrow from the #MeToo movement. My own landlord is not a greedhead, and as she lets to me without an agency involved, she is not constantly pressured to raise my rent to the ‘market value’. If she did, I’d have been homeless years ago.

A HOUSING CRISIS DRIVEN BY GREED AND USARY

But I know that I am very lucky in this. Almost everyone I know that rents has experienced year-on-year rent increases. £50 a month extra for a few years in a row, equating to £600 extra a year over a decade, for example, has literally doubled and more than doubled some of my friends’ rental costs. And these are not the worst cases by far. Add the hateful Section 21 eviction orders to, for example, push someone out only to put the flat straight back on the market at double the rent or as Airbnb (you know who you are), and we have a real housing crisis driven by greed and usury.

And this unveils a fundamental set of facts. OUR EARNINGS become THEIR INCOME. Of course, this is true of any transaction in a market economy. But rent is in almost every case, by a large margin, a person’s greatest expenditure, and one that too often needs to supplant appropriate heating and nutritional needs, especially as ‘the cost-of-living crisis’ increases (mostly more greed and usury – witness our water, electrics, supermarket bills increase mapped against insane profit increases for suppliers and their stockholders). And yet our ‘rights’ regarding this excessive expense are often rather less protected than consumer rights on, say, a new kettle. I am of the opinion that a roof over one’s head should be seen as a fundamental right, along with sufficient food and warmth, but our globalised market economy sees that as anathema, a threat to profits to be stamped out. In Trumpian terms, ‘communism’ (try not to laugh, or cry).

A FIGHTBACK TODAY IS A HARDER TASK

Now, obviously, as certain landlords may have pointed out in these pages, such costs add to a landlord’s costs too. This is, up to a point, a legitimate complaint. But only up to a point. As we all must be aware by now, surely, ‘trickledown’ is only ever a tiny drip from the billions hoarded by the super-rich, and in a failing economy like ours it becomes a torrent fountaining upwards with no trickledown at all. This sucks yet more energy from the economic base, deepening the crisis. Current government policy seems no better than the austerity-obsessed Tory government policies.

How do we deal with this? Since the removal of rent tribunals and rent controls in the 1980s things have generally become worse for those of us trapped in a rent economy. Before that we had a rich tapestry of community-based organisations, not only in housing, fighting for tenants’ rights and squatters rights, but across the whole of ‘working class’ society. A fightback today is a harder task, as rebuilding always takes far more energy than destruction.

But… Renters can Unite! Stringer’s book covers a global perspective on the fight for our rights, and the revival of the fight here too. His focus in the chapters on the UK are based around his experience with tenants unions such as ‘London Renters Union’, of which he is a member, and associated unions such as ACORN, who have a presence here in Hastings. Read this book from an in-depth analysis of how such unions work, and how they succeed. Many examples include a firm political stance, others are much less concerned with context, fighting instead each battle as it comes. There is a good argument for looking at wider issues and uniting across larger areas, for long-term success, but national policy is harder to influence than it is to appeal to your peers in your home town: thus, both approaches (and others) can work. However, which path you choose, ‘stronger together’ applies, and you ARE NOT ALONE!

If you are interested in joining ACORN, or just learning more about tenant unions, you can contact Hastings branch by emailing Naomi Gann at naomi.gann@acorntheunion.org.uk

Renters Unite! Is available from Bookbuster, 39 Queens Road, Hastings TN34 1RE

The foreword to this excellent book is by John McDonnell MP, who contextualises Hannah’s topic by noting that an historical perspective is necessary. To reclaim the future we must also reclaim the past, a past that includes workers solidarity, the founding of the NHS and of welfare provision. I must add, as Starmer and Reeves continue what is a right-wing agenda better fitted to the Tories than to Labour, that our project must urgently be, as well, to reclaim the present.

McDonnell says of our current predicament, ‘The advocates of capitalism extol the setting free of uncontrolled animal instincts, combining to create the hidden hand of the market as the optimum method of economic decision making. Whilst socialists, recognising the chaos and crises this leads to, have looked to reason and rationality to control and plan economic processes. The reality is that planning has been an inherent feature of capitalism but it has been used to plan for profit maximisation and not to satisfy need.’

AN ’ECOSOCIALIST’ ALTERNATIVE

Hannah says that economic systems come and go, and insists that ‘capitalism can and must be replaced’. The urgency of confronting capitalism today is both about creating a resilient social fabric that can weather at least some aspects of an inevitable global economic recession, one that locally will be a depression, and about changing our lifestyles to proof ourselves against the worst of the coming ecological chaos. Both these issues are absolutely beyond the scope of capitalism, a greed oriented ‘I’m alright, Jack’, ‘the devil take the hindmost’ ecologically terminally destructive ideology.

The author takes us on a journey through the extremist economic ideology we live under, and argues for an ‘ecosocialist’ alternative. He explains that this should create social justice and ecological stability, where the current global free-for-all can only create inequality and exploitation. The first chapter asks ‘how does capitalism work?’, and runs through a standard Marxian analysis of, for example, surplus value and commodity fetishism. He also shows how ‘scarcity’ is a requirement of the system. A local example might be the deliberate withholding of land acquired for housing from development in order to artificially push the price up of what little developers do deign to build. This kind of land-banking should be illegal, but is a core economic tool for construction companies’ profits, at our expense.

ECONOMIC IDEOLOGIES DESTROYING OUR PLANET

Ecologically, it is obvious that the collapse of ecosystems under industrial productivism is creating real scarcity, which makes addressing the rapacious nature of capitalism all the more urgent. A ‘fix’ based on the premise that scarcity is an illusion created by greedy economic models can’t work if the bedrock of our ability to survive is under threat. And today, that threat is dire. In this context, Hannah introduces Marx’s concept of ‘metabolic rift’ – both class relations and ‘metabolic rift originate from a unique, global process of violent separation of people from their means of subsistence, which also disrupts the biosphere.’ There is some detail on this here, and it has long been contended that Marx addressed ecological issues in the nineteenth century, long before the emergence of a ‘green movement’. This has some truth, but in the context of his extensive writings can be exaggerated: it is typical of the traditional left to do so, as there is a tendency to want to continue an essentially hierarchical ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ under the guise of ‘socialist democracy’. In reality many on the ‘green left’ have spent much of the last sixty years arguing that we urgently need to decouple left politics from ‘the state’ and pursue what Murray Bookchin termed ‘social ecology’. This includes localist decentralisation, and grassroots democracy, but also ‘internationalism’, a view we share with the traditional socialist movement, but one seemingly lost from mainstream Labour today.

Nonetheless, the traditional left has been right to interrogate the liberal idea that ‘democracy’ and ‘economics’ should remain distinct. A ‘soft’ version of this is seen in the pursuit of ‘economic democracy’ alongside ‘social democracy’, but in recent years this has not been remotely tough enough on the capitalist context in which it seeks a foothold. ‘Change from within’ can only come from below if it is to overthrow the economic ideologies destroying our planet, and only from the left if the resulting altered social relations are to be positive – at present the ‘right’ is stirring up those ‘below’ who need to act, directing them in ways that may ultimately help destroy current economic relations, but offering a bigoted exclusionary hell in its place. ‘Reform’ is needed, indeed revolutionary reform, but it is not ‘Reform UK’ that offer real alternatives that can help the people find a stable and peaceful new economic ecology, quite the reverse. Many of the arguments against a leftist planned economy are addressed in the second half of the book, including for example ‘human nature’, the role of automation, the arguments for and against a ‘universal basic income’, and green concepts such as ‘degrowth’.

Thus, books like this one become a necessary weapon to help resist the nationalist right-wing at the same time as seeking significant and real change. This is becoming urgent, and maintaining any optimism about the coming decades is not only hard, but possibly even stupid. Hannah acknowledges that ‘lack of empathy runs deep in the modern world, fostered by prejudice and hate to divide us from our common humanity. ‘ A realist position must see how it is not a polite argument that will help us now, but bloodied noses. After decades arguing for some of the radical changes Hannah suggests, it is disappointing, but ultimately inevitable, to see mitigation strategies as the only game in town.

Reclaiming the future is available from Bookbuster, 39 Queens Road TN34 1RE

I have just read and greatly enjoyed this excellent book Demon Copperhead by the American novelist Barbara Kingsolver (available from Hastings Library). It is a re-working of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, the story of a young boy’s life, but set in Lee County Virginia in the 1990s and 2000s. The book begins with the traumatic birth of Demon (real name Damon Fields) in a run-down trailer park to a teenage mother addicted to drugs and alcohol. His father has already died in an accident. So begins his odyssey through a life of poverty, struggle, and prejudice; and yet the quality of the writing is such that the story is often both tragic, poignant, funny, and enthralling all at once.

One of the mainstays of his life which helps the young Demon to survive is the long-suffering but warm and loving household of the Peggot family who run the trailer park and often provide a substitute home for the boy. When he is 10 years old Demon’s mother marries a violent bullying man who asserts his control over both mother and son and seeks to isolate him from the Peggot’s support. The battle of wills between the man and boy is excellently presented through Demon’s eyes and movingly portrays the precariousness of a young child’s existence in a hostile world.

His mother’s overdose propels Demon into the arms of the State and describes his encounters with social workers and others in authority from a child’s point of view: the jaded burnt-out professionals, the idealistic but naïve young social worker, afraid herself of the overbearing morose ‘foster carer’ that she leaves Demon with. He finds himself as slave labour on a backwoods farm, sustained by the camaraderie of three other boys placed (or imprisoned) there and his first taste of illicit drug use to dull the pain. His hopes of a return home are dashed when his mother, now pregnant, dies from another overdose.

ECHOES OF THE RAGGED TROUSERED PHILANTHROPISTS

Demon has many other adventures and encounters as he fights his way to adulthood. The story is also about the grim realities of rural, post-industrial America. The Appalachian Mountain region was once a great coal mining area which fuelled the factories of the north. The book describes how the mining companies suppressed the development of other industries to ensure a plentiful labour force with no competition, and then kept the schools poorly resourced to stifle ambition in the young people other than to work in a mine. Nevertheless, the people look back to this era as the ‘good times’ when they had work and money, although a voucher system meant they often had to spend their wages in the company shop – echoes of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists there.

The 1980s brought modernisation to the mining industry that meant they no longer needed legions of workers to toil underground, they blew the tops off the mountains and employed a few giant machines to scrape up the coal. Mass redundancies and unemployment meant depression and poverty and the area became the butt of jokes and scorn about ‘hillbillies’ and ‘rednecks’ as it remains today. In the wake of despair came the drugs epidemic, both illegal, and legal in the form of Oxycontin. The book examines these themes through the lives of the characters. Aunt June Peggot is a nurse who dates a sleazy Purdue drug salesman. Demon himself, his promising career as an Highschool American Football star cut short by a knee injury, is led into opiate addiction by an unscrupulous team doctor. Demon and his ethereal girlfriend Dori descend into the squalor and desperation of drug abuse, painting a moving picture of his attempts to get clean undermined by his desire to save her from pain and distress by scoring more drugs.

ITS MESSAGE IS ONE OF RESILIENCE SURVIVAL AND HOPE

This is a big novel with many other characters and events that explore the themes of social deprivation: the exploitation and manipulation of the poor, the prejudice and stereotyping that they have to suffer in both the media and society at large. Yet its message is one of resilience, survival, and hope. We meet Mr Ghali, for example, an Indian shop keeper who gets a thrill from handing his customers their take-aways. He was born into the Dalit (untouchable) caste in his home country and physical contact of this type was never allowed. There is Mr Armstrong, an inspirational Black teacher and his White wife, who have had to face down ignorance and discrimination in their working and personal lives. There is the tragic and moving story of Marisa Peggot who endures unbearable mental and physical torture by her partner as a young mother and ends up in prison for wounding him with a knife but is eventually released and reunited with her son: both damaged individuals groping towards a better life. Demon is able to use his skill at drawing cartoons to create a hillbilly superhero character in a local newspaper to counter the negative stereotypes of rural people as feckless, inbred wasters and to illustrate the real challenges that they face.

The book ends with Demon aged 18, and finally free of drugs, finding a tentative new love and making his third attempt to head east and see the ocean for the first time in his life.

I would strongly recommend this book as a brilliant and illuminating read. 

Over the last few decades, a growing ‘management culture’, hog-tied to neoliberalism and austerity programmes, has put education at all levels under assault. This is true from infant, junior, and secondary ‘academies’, through colleges of Further Education such as our local college (always at the bottom of the pile, it seems, especially adult provision), to universities. Much of this is money-driven, overseen by parachuted-in senior management whose job is less about education, students, pastoral support etc than about purse-strings.

A side effect of management culture under austerity has been staff cuts and pressure on faculties to appear to be competitive as compared to the so-called ‘top’ universities, such as Oxford and Cambridge, or the Russell Group universities. This attempt to create ‘one-size-fits-all’ identikit and modular provision, with as little costly face-to-face student contact as possible, argue the authors of this book, may aim at ‘shaping for excellence’, but in fact shapes for mediocrity. Faculties that offer unique and interesting takes on a subject are deemed problematic when trying to look like a Russell Group top uni, so the very things core to good academic study are militated against.

A BLUEPRINT FOR SAVING OUR EDUCATION SYSTEM

The authors here were from Leicester University, and are victims of redundancy rounds, after a long battle to keep a unique syllabus from being watered down. Interestingly, they are from the School of Business, which had an international reputation for academic excellence. It is apparent from their experience that they were a more objective school than I thought could exist under the umbrella of ‘business management’, which may well have been relevant to their being targeted. They were part of a very militant union and took the fight against redundancies as far as they could, and that sorry tale is well told too. In fact, it is compulsory reading for anyone in a union, or who thinks things are well in worker-manager relations.

Most faculties targeted tend to be those regarded by the anti-liberal-arts Tory attack as ‘useless’ subjects, as well as ‘experts’ in general it seems. The experience of the school of business at Leicester is central to the book, but other faculties, such as Mediaeval Studies were targeted, and in other universities it has usually been ‘the arts’ that were and are targeted. Another example, driven by the science sections at Lancaster University, was the corporate attack on post-graduate studies in environmental philosophy. Lancaster had huge money pumped in by companies such as DuPont, and Monsanto and there was massive pressure, ultimately successful, to shut down sociology and philosophy that questioned their practices, in for example genetically modified crops, or their corporate capitalist ethos in general.

Addressing these issues is a huge task, and needs to be enacted by powerful forces. Most of those in a position to act are in fact and of course the perpetrators. Politically, the henchmen for neoliberal corporatism have been in government since at least 1979. Melissa Benn, daughter of Tony Benn, wrote a book I reviewed here, Life Lessons, which gave a blueprint for saving our education system. It to some degree was taken up in Labour’s manifesto in the two elections during Corbyn’s tenure as leader. The much complained about change to make private schools pay VAT on certain services, as other industries must, by denying, in effect, charitable status to them is a light-touch attack on them, Benn, and I, would simply abolish them. But the narrative is controlled by the posh middle-classes who run the newspapers, TV and radio, and have time to bang on about it all on social media. Polls show there is considerable support for the government’s policy, but the war on social democracy rages on, as seen more successfully in the assault of the policies on inheritance tax.

SPECTATORS OF OUR OWN CULTURAL SUICIDE

In 2016 on Sky News, Michael Gove expressed a very negative view of ‘experts’, claiming to be talking for ‘the British people’, the interviewer, Faisal Islam neatly summing Gove up as an ‘Oxbridge Trump’. The philistinism of his government was remarkable, and drove much of the attack on the academe. One chapter is especially illuminating and topical in relation to the role played by social media during their anti-redundancy campaigns and strike action. It is clear that power can buy time, so a highly professional and unremitting assault on those fighting redundancies and glossy pro-uni PR campaign was difficult to counter by those strapped for time with teaching, inspections, marking etc to do. Misinformation and lies repeated over and over is a huge issue on social media, and the mainstream media today: both owned by a small clique of overweeningly powerful billionaires.

Adam Steiner, in his book Silhouettes and Shadows sums things up tidily, although talking of TV not social media and the tabloids – ‘it doesn’t teach you anything, it simply accumulates images and sound bites to become the junk food of the mind. In watching, we enter into a contract, the more we see the more readily we accept to be nullified and battered in the contemporary backwash of culture. Our refusal to turn away commits us to the routine of the everyday atrocity, spectators of our own cultural suicide’. So long as your ‘breakfast news’ consists of GB News, the Daily Mail, and Trump and Elon Musk’s toxic tweets, we remain doomed to, at best, ‘mediocrity’, if not something far darker. But definitely not ‘success’.

Shaping For Mediocrity is available from Bookbuster, 39 Queens Road TN34 1RE

Canongate have an imprint called The Canons, reprinting important titles. This book is a new edition of a 2019 bestseller, though given its release date it has no doubt had less exposure than it deserves. This edition includes a new foreword by the author, and is well-timed, coming as it does alongside the return of Trump, urgent but worrying snap elections in Germany, and the continuing annihilation of Gaza, and indeed all other border areas Israel wishes to add to its own lebensraum. 

The book’s subtitle is ‘the seven steps from democracy to fascism’, told in seven chapters, whose titles give the baldest outline of the process as Temelkuran sees it. She came to the work by virtue of seeing her own country slip into ‘fascism’, as Erdogan’s populist but totalitarian party rose to power in Turkey. But, her examples of this process she sees rising all across Europe and the Americas.

Step one is ‘create a movement’, something that identifies as not ‘political’ in the ‘established’ sense, that includes ‘the real people’ of country x, y or z, a new and exclusive ‘we’ that clearly rejects ‘intellectuals’, a term applied to anyone who knows anything factual about politics, history, economics, et cetera et cetera. Knowing stuff is bad, condescending and oppressive by definition, experts must be disbelieved on principle. This festering and unanswerable swamp mentality is clear to see in the UK and America, Holland and Germany, France and Italy, Hungary and… well, everywhere. It is hard to understand how it isn’t blindingly obvious how dangerous such an anti-cultural ‘culture’ is.

TOXIC NARCISSIST RINGMASTERS

Donald Trump explicitly says ‘I play to people’s fantasies’. Worse, he, and others of his ilk such as ex-banker Nigel Farage, or Elon Musk, create or amplify deliberately misdirecting narratives, the blame is always on some scapegoat ‘over there’, such as the EU or NATO, or a minority scapegoat ‘over here’, such anyone that isn’t ‘us’ in the populist imagination. Anyone outside this circle is ‘an enemy of the people’, which includes apparently me and thee, and Ece too. And this populist ‘we’ sees itself as an underdog, and cries out that others must be more ‘tolerant’ and ‘respectful’ of their ever-changing pseudo-beliefs, even whilst very clearly and in the most violent language denying the right of anyone outside their narrow-minded insular worldview to be tolerated or respected.

Instead, they label people who aren’t asleep ‘woke’ as a pejorative, or ‘cultural Marxists’, which most on the left used to see as a good thing, at least up to a point. And so, the debate polarises to extreme and unnuanced positions, where giving ground to more complex narratives is a concession that will be used against you. The ‘debate’ around trans identity, and around vaccines, to take two live examples is like this. If you concede any issues, but don’t embrace the new cultural fascism, you are shot by both sides. With toxic narcissist ringmasters steering the ‘we’ by the nose.

As Ece puts it, ‘first and foremost, such leaders need to infantilise the people’. This isn’t hard to do, because, at risk of being, yes, someone conceding a point, it is obvious that there is indeed something rotten at the heart of our establishment and our democracies are failing to represent many of us; and that our tabloid culture has for decades infantilised the general public with cartoon versions of reality, in order to control us, in case we may otherwise try to use democracy to get all uppity. The owners of the papers, and social media platforms, and the blog websites, and the airhead TV so-called ‘news’ channels are billionaires, the natural enemies of everyone less well-off. Isn’t it remarkable how it is also their class openly pulling the strings and standing for the populist ‘we’? Admittedly, dressing themselves as outside the elite, but whilst clearly being of it. It is almost as if there was (yet another) civil war amongst the factions that hold power. Hint: that is what it is, on one level at least, as ‘democracy’ has been subverted by the neoliberal agenda. And let us not forget that Trump defines ‘real power’ as the ability to induce fear. I’ve had managers like that, I bet you, gentle reader, have too.

A SNOWBALLING PLUMMET INTO A TOTALITARIAN CHAOS

Ece takes us through seven steps, and all resonate with contemporary events. The two that called out most strongly to me as especially topical are ‘Dismantle Judicial and Political Mechanisms’, and indeed a ‘bonfire of regulations’ is at the heart of the alt-right agenda here and across the pond, and in the Argentine, Hungary… And, ‘Remove the Shame: Immorality is ‘Hot’ in a Post-Truth World’, essentially the gospel according to Trump, Tate, Farage, Jordan Peterson, Javier Milei and company.

Robert Bolt played fast and loose with history in A Man for All Seasons, at least a bit, but this quote attributed to Thomas Moore in answer to William Roper rings truer than ever today – ‘What would you do? Cut a great road through the law[…]? […] “And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ‘round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!”’

So say we all. Buckle up, we’re in for a rocky ride. We are creeping ever faster toward a snowballing plummet into a totalitarian chaos. Even Macron, albeit for his own nefarious reasons, realises there is trouble ahead, recently saying ‘The world is made up of herbivores and carnivores. If we decide to remain herbivores, the carnivores will win’. Unfortunately, the libertarian socialists are still drowned out by the authoritarian left who promote pacifism in the face of the rising threat from the loony right populists. People say ‘You can’t call it fascist’, ‘it isn’t that bad’, ‘there aren’t any deathcamps!’, and procrastinate until… you wake up one morning and realise you can, it is, and there are, and wonder, ‘How did we get to this?’, just before you hear the jackboots in the hall, the banging on your door… as experienced by Ece in Turkey. She knows the signs.

In good news, Ece’s new book is Together: A Manifesto Against a Heartless World, wherein she apparently will offer some hope and a path out of the swamp of eternal despair. I will review it soon, and let’s hope my conclusion isn’t ‘She’s pissing in the wind’.

How To Lose a Country is available from Bookbuster, 39 Queens Road, Hastings TN34 1RE.

On December 7th this year, Bookbuster ran a stall at the Mint House in Pevensey. This was a great venue for an esoteric fayre, and this one, ‘Making Misrule’, is just their latest makers’ market. Alongside crafts, tarot stalls, and tattooists, there was folk-music and a mummers play: Hastings was well represented. In the evening, the fabulous Goblin Band had a sold-out concert, playing a variety of folk-music of the British Isles.

The contemporary folk-revival has not lost any momentum, and, amongst the best-selling books and zines, pride of place still goes to Hellebore and Weird Walk. The former just put out their second Yuletide special, already shifting fast. It follows hot on the heels of their twelfth issue, ‘story-telling’ themed, which landed just in time for Samhain.

The first piece in issue 12 covers 1980s ‘dark fantasy’, featuring Bowie as the Goblin King in Labyrinth, and other cult movies, including The Dark Crystal, and The Company of Wolves. Other pieces discuss Robin Hood, Tam Lin, and the Fairy Queen, plus features on storytellers Susanna Clark and Alan Garner.

A WARNING TO THE CURIOUS

The Hellebore Yule special, ‘a summoning of seasonal terrors’, has the wonderfully named Verity Holloway ‘summoning the spirit’ of the Black Prince of Cornwall. There are also articles by Keri O’Shea on the Woman in Black; John Callow on the black dog of Isle of Man’s Peel Castle; and editor Maria J Perez Cuervo spooking us out about Uncanny Children. Other essays here give us an eldritch peek at yuletide hauntings, ghosts sightings, spiritualism and other ‘metaphysical mysteries’. As ever, Hellebore is a quality zine, and has excellent artwork throughout.

Weird Walk’s latest offerings are a taster for Ben Edge’s super new book Folklore Rising, in the form of a highly illustrated zine entitled ‘Folklore Activist’, and pamphlet, ‘Cromlech’, about the kistvaen named ‘Devil’s Den’ in Wiltshire. This is one of the UK’s best dolmens. Its history is discussed, alongside copious and moody photographs. A must for the ‘modern antiquarian’ fans.

New zines are popping up all the time alongside these classic publications. Two of the more recent ones are Wort and Occulture. The latter is subtitled ‘a warning to the curious’, and they have issued their third and fourth zines this year, one a Special, the ‘cinema issue’, and also volume 2 of their ‘ordinary’ edition, this one themed ‘the devil’s party’. The zines all feature ace collage art, and in this latest offering talk about ‘mass possessions’, satanism, ‘the demonic feminine’, and pieces on the devil and demons. George Parr writes of the devil in the English landscape, calling him ‘Britain’s biggest loser’.

A BRIDGE BETWEEN THE PAST AND FUTURE

Meanwhile, Wort, ‘a journal of radical, rooted relational herbalism’, hits its second issue. This has poetry and fiction, but primary esoterically inclined non-fiction. Katie Hastings (not from Hastings!) and Sinead Fortune write on ‘saving seeds’. Katie tells about a Welsh seed-saving collective, Llafur Ni, who are reviving rare ‘black oats’; Sinead tells about the ‘seed sovereignty programme UK’. Then we get a feature on the ‘Palestinian Heirloom Seed Library’, based in the West Bank. Clearly, they are somewhat beleaguered by their neighbours who show no respect for the past and target artefacts that show a long history for Arab people there. Consequently the collective running the project seek to preserve seeds from the Makhrour Valley, an area that has signs of irrigation systems going back 4000 years. ‘Preserving and propagating seeds draws a bridge between the past and future.’ Other articles cover ‘planet medicine and the tarot’, ‘foraging as resistance; an artist’s use of woad, ‘Slavic oak’, Hasujiku Tanaka on the ginkgo tree, and more.

Hellebore’s blurb describes the zine as a ‘tribute to the supernatural richness of Britain’. This is, I think, true of most of this new generation of folkloric zines. They fit right in with the spectrum of contemporary culture from Mark Fisher’s Weird & the Eerie, through hauntology, psychogeography, and Julian Cope’s antiquarian writings, to more practical esoterica as represented by Wort, and the resurgence of interest in ‘folk horror’, especially in both cinema – nicely book-ended by the Wicker Man and Midsommer – and zine culture. Long may it last. Happy Yuletide, one and all!

All zines reviewed available from Bookbuster, 39 Queens Road, Hastings TN34 1RE

A novel featuring a protagonist born into British colonial landed society a decade before Victoria takes the throne, is far from my usual genre of choice. Discovering it is based on the extraordinary and societally impactful life of a real person, however, interested me more. Although I knew little of Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon – campaigner for women’s rights, professional artist, educational philanthropist and adventurous traveller – it did not take many pages for me to become fully invested in her compelling journey.

Mary Upton has published three previous novels, one of historical fiction and two of Sci Fi. In Bodichon she writes in first person narrative, allowing her to express some of the thoughts, feelings and emotions she imagines Barbara goes through in the course of her many achievements. This brings an extra layer of colour to the story and encourages readers to get behind the character in a way a traditional biography may not. The author has clearly researched her subject well and a helpful family tree at the book’s opening explains the complex relationships of the familial characters. I also like the short chapter lengths, which keeps the pace going whilst also offering the reader a chance to easily pause and reflect. Upton’s earlier career was in mental health and, following extensive world travel, she is now settled in St Leonards. 

HASTINGS, ROBERTSBRIDGE AND BEYOND

The Bodichon story is very much a local Hastings one too, with Barbara having been born in Whatlington, spending her formative years living in Pelham Crescent, and her later years at ‘Scalands’, a cottage on the edge of her father’s estate near Robertsbridge, which she extended into a night school to teach literacy to manual workers from Hastings and its surrounds. In between, there are long trips to East Coast America, French colonial Algiers, excursions in Europe and time spent in London. The movement between different locales captures the enthusiasm and energy of Bodichon’s life, although travel was slow then, which kept me rivetted.

Born into privileged Victorian society, Barbara’s family life was unconventional in many ways, not least because her eccentric father, a Whig politician, reformist and Unitarian, refused to marry, despite fathering a further four children with her mother before she died from consumption aged just thirty-two. A theme of non-conformity continues throughout the book, and indeed Barbara’s life, as she constantly challenges societal and church conventions, the class system, the arts and education establishments, and most passionately the denied rights of women.

Introducing her novel, Upton quotes directly from, Barbara Leigh Smith: ‘I am one of the cracked people of the world, and I like to herd with the cracked, such as queer Americans, Democrats, Socialists, artists, poor devils or angels; and am never happy in genteel English family life.’ Barbara certainly fulfilled this, mixing from a young age with politicians, the liberal intelligentsia, artists including Turner, Holman Hunt, Rossetti and Lizzie Siddal; and in adulthood the educator and feminist Emily Davies, as well as author George Eliot (Marian Evans).

With teenage years behind her, Barbara is inspired by older women to join anti-slavery and women’s rights campaigns, as well as developing an interest in education. Pulled between art and politics, she determines to study painting, shunning any suggestions that women cannot become professional artists. Accepted by Bedford College in Bloomsbury with support from its feminist founder, Barbara declares: ‘It makes me want to laugh and shout from the top of Fairlight. “We are here, we are not going to remain silent.”’ And Barbara Leigh Smith remains anything but silent, fielding opposition from society and certain wings of her family, along with devoting compassionate energy to friends, loved ones and others in need, to make significant impacts in the fields of art, education and feminist politics. 

Barbara’s marriage to Dr Eugène Bodichon reinforces the unconventional nature of her life’s trajectory. Her French husband of noble birth was a charismatic older man who, finding himself stifled by the conventions of his native country, chose to live in Algiers (where they first met) and developed a local medical practice. Often dressed in Arab clothes, he also practised naturism, herbalism and notably researched and popularised the medicinal benefits of eucalyptus. Unusually for the time, it was a marriage of equals, with both giving each other the space to achieve their own ambitions whilst remaining devoted to each other.

AN ILLUMINATING ACCOUNT OF AN EXCEPTIONAL WOMAN

All the while Barbara is campaigning for equality for women in education and work, writing pamphlets and papers, organising debate. Her paintings are beginning to sell, and she petitions the Royal Academy who continue to prohibit women from crossing its portals. She campaigns for women’s rights to own property and, along with Emily Davies, sets up Girton, the first women’s college in Cambridge, overcoming intense opposition from all quarters of the Victorian status quo. There was even tension between Barbara’s more rebellious approach and that of her more cautious suffragist ally, Davies, who believed only unmarried women and widows should gain the vote. An interesting fact I learnt from this book was that George Eliot donated the profits from Middlemarch to the construction of Girton

Mary Upton’s novel gives an illuminating account of an exceptional woman and her numerous successes as she battles adversity throughout her, albeit privileged, life, including serious illness during her later years. There are insights too into the trials and tribulations of Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon’s friends and family – her lifelong best friend Bessie, the young woman Hertha whom she mentors and treats as the child she never had, her husband, and her brother Ben, an Arctic explorer – making Bodichon a great all round read. As we move into winter and the festive season, a time of giving, what better than a book about someone who not only achieved success as a professional artist but also devoted her life to helping the less privileged in our society. I found it uplifting and am sure you will. 

Bodichon is available from Bookbuster, 39 Queens Road, Hastings TN34 1RE, as well as The Hastings Bookshop, The Bookkeeper and Hare & Hawthorn. Please support our local independent bookshops!

By Andreas Malm & Wim Carton
Published by Verso, 2024, rrp £25
REVIEW BY TIM BARTON

On Monday 11 November, COP29 Azerbaijan began, in an authoritarian oil-state that is effectively a branch of BP’s oil empire, with the Azerbaijani government hilariously claiming green credentials. Their website claims that ‘Azerbaijan is committed to developing its renewable energy potential, which is an important part of the country’s plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 40% by 2050. The country intends to increase renewable power capacity to 30% by 2030 and diversify its existing energy system to become a leader in green energy’. Meanwhile the minister nominated to preside over COP29 is an ex-executive of SOCAR, the state oil company. There is definitely an unhealthy stink emanating from the cheerful propaganda. Which makes it not dissimilar to the previous rounds of the UN’s ‘climate change’ conferences, the last also having been hosted by oil-states.

Which brings us to Andreas Malm’s new book, co-written with Wim Carton, both of whom are associate professors at Sweden’s Lund University. Malm wrote the best-selling How to Blow Up a Pipeline. His ire is quite rightly raised by the greenwashing industry, dominated by climate-change denialists and fossil-fuel corporations. In this latest book he shows in detail how these bad-faith actors have far from addressing, for example, CO2 emissions to try and lower them, in fact pressed the accelerator to the floor. 

‘Overshoot’ in this case refers to our CO2 targets in regard to a tipping point at which global average temperatures shoot past the ‘must not go higher than’ targets and start to snowball, or should we not say ‘fireball’? The latest reports indicate that we are already at the tipping point and that the current rate of emissions is looking likely to lock us in to an unavoidable whopping 3.2 degrees average global temperature rise. And to think we were worried about a 2.5 degree rise, which was deemed to be a point of no return. 

WHAT WENT WRONG?

Malm and Carton dig deep into the way in which the capitalist and state fossil-fuel industries have propagandised, spreading disinformation and lies across every media outlet they can buy off or manipulate. As the world, especially our youth, migrated online in even greater numbers over lockdown, a trend that has only very partially reversed, those enriching themselves by spreading doubt about climate change found it ever easy to succeed, and have doubled-down on their mission to avert shareholder losses regardless of the long-term effects. 

The US election result ensures yet more oil, coal, and gas extraction, and is unlikely to curb the rape of formerly pristine marine environments of the Pacific by an electric vehicle obsessed auto-industry, as they accelerate lithium extraction from the seabed. Meanwhile, here in the UK, Johnson, Truss, Sunak, and now Starmer, promote and open new ‘free trade’ economic low-tax zones, one of which includes Dartmoor national park. The restriction of a traditional right-to-roam, coupled with the presence of lithium and other metals in the granite uplands there, may fit into a jigsaw puzzle alongside low-regulation freeports – how can one not conclude that extraction is planned, albeit perhaps not immanently?

Malm & Carton concentrate on the fossil-fuel industry in Overshoot, but are not blind to the fact that this is just one aspect of the global failure to curb climate, and biodiversity, breakdown. They regard the world as having surrendered to this, and give a blow-by-blow account of the failures of the last three years. As Jello Biafra once put it, there is, in effect at least, an attitude under capitalist consumerism of ‘give me convenience or give me death’. No-one wants to give up their slice of pie to achieve necessary targets. But the super-rich could set an example, as none of them can eat their vast portion of pie in their lifetime, in fact they could feed whole countries with it. In a childish game of ‘no, you first’, closing the poverty gap and punishing overweening wealth may be the only way to avert the ‘no-win’ situation written into the rules of the game.

THERE IS NO PLANET B

The authors note that CO₂ emissions dropped during Covid. They, and many others, hoped that this would prompt the world leaders to see reduction as a doable mission. Yet, as they put it, ‘like an arsonist briefly interrupted by the sound of voices in the building, fossil capital resumed its work’. And, not only did CO2 emissions rebound, but in fact ‘went way beyond the levels preceding the pandemic’, in fact ‘emissions rose by 6%, or two gigatonnes, giving overall the highest per annum emissions increase in history. They go on to analyse ‘the rise of overshoot ideology’, and given a Marxian analysis of ‘asset stranding’ and the role of capital and ‘value’ in this overshoot. It is a sobering but necessary read. They plan to follow the book up soon with one on ‘climate politics when it’s too late’.

The gist is, of course, that it is already too late, we are pretty much in the early stages of overshoot. There are few, in any, realistic ways to avert the crisis. But mitigation is urgently required, meaning hard choices. The lack of will to make these choices on the left leaves the field open for capitalist industry, investors and the neo-right to define mitigation strategies. That, needless to say, will be a complete disaster for the ‘have-nots’, amongst whom there inevitably will be millions of Britons – we’ll all burn together, and there is no Planet B. Unless… what?

Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown is available from Bookbuster, 39 Queens Road, Hastings TN34 1RE
On World Climate Day, Sunday 8th December, the Electric Palace hosts DIVEST! The Climate Movement on Tour: Governmental response to climate change goes under the microscope in this powerful documentary, plus short films and post-film discussion from Divest East Sussex. Info & tickets: www.electricpalacecinema.com 

Xiaolu Guo, an award-winning writer and film-maker, spent the year 2022 living alone in a small one-bedroom flat on St Leonards sea-front. She had been residing in London with her partner Steve and their daughter Moon, but she wanted her own room ‘just to write and to think by myself”. London was too expensive for that: hence Hastings. This book is a diary of her thoughts and impressions through the year.

A month into Xiaolu’s stay, the Russians invade Ukraine. She decides that, in a period of contemporary war, she will focus on a war of nearly 1,000 years ago: the Norman invasion of England. It seems to her an apposite time, as well as place, to pick the bones – figuratively and almost literally – of the Battle of Hastings.

But her method is not that of a standard Western historian nor of a professional journalist. The clue is in the title: it’s her battle, not anyone else’s. She introduces herself as an immigrant (from China), an artist and a woman, and makes it clear that these are the credentials that she is here to apply.

PECULIARLY INTROSPECTIVE

She laboriously reads up the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles for the years in question; examines the statue of King Harold and Edith Swan-neck in West Marina Gardens; drops in on the Hastings Museum where a local enthusiast lists for her the human make-up of each army, their respective clothing, weaponry and accessories; and eventually she takes Steve and Moon to watch a modern re-enactment of the battle. But her research is, for most of the diary’s pages, peculiarly introspective, projecting her own thoughts and feelings onto her surroundings rather than offering objective descriptions, and rarely interesting herself in how the modern population of Hastings and St Leonards are living their lives around her. 

Xiaolu does hire a local builder Andy to replace the windows in her flat, and reports his diatribes about Poles and migrant refugees. She hangs about the Bluetits group of out-of-season swimmers on the beach below. And it’s gratifying to read in the closing acknowledgements that, during her research, she “loved reading the local paper, the Hastings Independent, a constant source of anecdotes and information”. But one can’t help wondering whether she might have sourced more from closer engagement with her neighbours. 

WILFULLY COUNTERFACTUAL

This is, though, to misunderstand the genre. Many Western travel writers have travelled to the locations of past civilisations – Egypt or Sumeria or Mexico, as the case may be – to spend time examining ancient stones, archaeological finds or abstruse artistic records. They hope to draw inspiration from the local scenery, which may or may not retain elements of the former age they are researching. Of the people who live there now, they often report little or nothing except in their passing roles as tour guides or hospitality providers. Xiaolu is in similar terrain even if coming from an opposite direction.

It renders hers a somewhat unreliable witness as far as contemporary Hastings is concerned. Her topography appears at times wilfully counterfactual: “Starting from the pier, I took a long walk towards the White Rock Theatre…” “The museum is a century-old red-brick building in the hilly part of town” (where exactly is the non-hilly part?). She refers to a local paper as the Hastings Daily.

DISTANCE BETWEEN THE HAPPENING AND REPORTING

Her political observations also seem under-informed and over-judgmental. She takes the side of the Saxon Haestingas as the oppressed victims of the invasion, but doesn’t consider whether their forefathers inflicted similar depredations on the Celts who inhabited the shores of Sussex before them. She tells the legend of Canute as if he was surprised by the refusal of the waves to obey his commands, whereas the story all English schoolchildren learn is that he was demonstrating to his courtiers the limits of kingly power. 

As to modern British politics she describes the news – including the war in Ukraine, the death of Queen Elizabeth II and the removal and accession of three successive prime ministers (Johnson, Truss, Sunak) – as “ever-maddening”, and complains that its reportage by modern chroniclers is undertaken “with eagerness, participation and a sense of confusion. There is no distance between the reporting and the happening”.

Xiaolu intends, on the contrary, to put plenty of distance between the happening and reporting, retaining through her diary pages her self-proclaimed alien status as cover for any lack of comprehension. 

IT FLOWS EASILY

My Battle of Hastings follows two previous memoirs of hers, Once Upon a Time in the East and Radical: A Life of My Own, both of which have received high praise in literary circles. So has this: the front cover of the book quotes Iain Sinclair, poet, essayist (and, as it happens, owner of a neighbouring flat in Marine Court): “Magnificent, brutal and poetic”. Lauren Elkin, Franco-American cultural critic, tells us on the back: “This is urgent, compelling, but also delightful writing, a book about war unlike any you’ll ever read”. 

So don’t let me put you off. It flows easily, though the £18.99 price tag for a rather skimpy 180-odd pages confirms that, while Hastings is the shoot location, it’s not the target audience. 

In the current divisive cultural climate, this book is a great curative to what the author describes as ‘21 myths’ about migration.

He tackles, first, the right-wing propaganda that migration is at an all-time high. Noting that current international migration figures as a percentage of the population are little different to those found 50 years ago, remaining relatively low and stable, he points out that most migrate short distances too. In our country a continual fire is kept burning by tabloids such as the Mail, and the Trollosphere, claiming numbers coming here to claim asylum are disproportionate and pushed here by the EU. It is useful to note that those coming from, say, Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan almost all stop in neighbouring states. 

As a percentage of world population, 0.3% are refugees, and 3.3% are ‘international migrants’. Now, the UK last year did have a large number of immigrants, but under 10% were asylum seeking, and a small percentage of those came ‘by boats in the Channel’. The bulk of our immigrants have been workers and students, the former primarily to take shortage area skilled work, and the latter paying high fees to our colleges and universities. It’s worth noting that international student applications are down considerably, which is an economic issue for higher education establishments.

‘ILLEGAL’ MIGRATION FIGURES A FIFTH OF WHAT THEY WERE

Those migrating to the UK for work are more visible than those we booted out over Brexit, by dint of being darker skinned, but there are arguably few more (possibly less, even, though growing) than have left – there is an employment crisis in a number of sectors, and ironically some of these sectors do not offer sufficient salary for our EU neighbours to be replaced, under current income restrictions, by migrants from further afield. Thus, as de Haas puts it, ‘most immigration stems from active labour recruitment’.

As to ‘illegal’ migration, the bulk of the numbers, by far, have been into Greece, followed by Italy and Malta, and these figures are a fifth of what they were 10 years ago (Spain is currently experiencing the largest numbers, but they are still relatively low). You don’t read that in the Mail, now do you? It doesn’t suit the narrative.

De Haas notes, too, that in fact there is ‘no evidence of a rise in ‘bogus’ asylum claims’, most asylum seekers are fleeing oppression and war, often from countries destabilised by US and UK foreign policy, both historically and today. Warfare is the primary driver of asylum-seeking migration. And overall, the world is more peaceful than in the past – the takeaway here is that the refugee ‘crisis’ is actually a ‘political crisis’.

DIVERSITY IS NO THREAT TO SOCIAL COHESION AND NATIONAL IDENTITY

‘The data clearly defies the widespread belief that the West is besieged by a rising tide of refugees’, and we know who spreads this toxic opinion. The fact that our asylum process in the UK is beyond capacity is, too, a politically created crisis, as the outgoing administration deliberately bottle-necked the bureaucracy, in part to keep the numbers granted legitimate asylum down so as not to annoy a far-right they increasingly relied upon to retain power. And he illustrates how ‘Brexit accelerated immigration’, in a chapter on how closing borders doesn’t work unless your goal is to create a public obsession with immigration!

As with so many issues, such as Cameron’s ‘Brexit’, an education system designed to discourage critical thinking, a culture designed to ‘divide and conquer’ thus not interested in teaching citizenship or ensuring social cohesion, this short-termist refusal to process asylum applications in a timely fashion has come back to bite our elites on the proverbial arse. The author notes that, globally, cultures have been becoming more homogeneous. I think it is clear that, in Europe and America, there is a backlash against diversity which, again, can only be a largely manufactured ‘crisis’, and those pouring petrol on the flames they also sparked in the first place are known to us. Overall, ‘diversity is no threat to social cohesion and national identity’.

This conclusion may surprise some readers, but the UK since the Tories took power has gone out of its way to stop education of those granted asylum for integration by cancelling English and Citizenship programmes once delivered by every FE college. These cuts cost jobs locally to many Hastings teachers, whilst also ensuring integration be made more difficult. Again, a politically motivated and created ‘crisis’.

ABSORB THE LESSONS OF THE REALITY OF MIGRATION

On the other hand, de Haas notes that despite war being a primary driver, migration is often about investing in a better future. As noted above, much of our inward migration is for work and is encouraged by our government. Important skilled jobs can be filled, that our own population is insufficient for, thus ‘migration is an investment in a better future’ for both migrant and Britain. Just ask the NHS, for example, where we’d be without it. Obviously, if our own education system was better at creating career aspiration amongst our children we may end up with more nurses, doctors, engineers, etc… but again, the Tories were the ones who cut processes such as Aim Higher, and careers advice in schools has always been appalling.

This book is an important tool in countering many more myths around migration. These include the beliefs that ‘immigrants steal jobs and drive down wages’, ‘undermine the welfare state’, ‘produce mass segregation’, ‘send crime rates soaring’, amongst other things that can be proven wrong by use of, erm, FACTS! Conversely, he shows how ‘we need migrants to fix the problems of ageing societies’ is a myth. And, as shown on our very own streets so recently, the book gives a factually rigorous proof that ‘public opinion has turned against immigration’ is also a myth. De Haas rounds his book off with a call to both left-wing and right-wing to absorb the lessons of the reality of migration and thus help make future decisions by politicians and opinion amongst the public more nuanced and helpful.

How Migration Really Works is available from Bookbuster, 39 Queens Road, Hastings TN34 1RE

Ex-Green MP Caroline Lucas sets out, in her new book, to suggest ‘how to reclaim our national story’. Reclaim it from what? Well, from ‘exceptionalism and imperial nostalgia’, which, however you cut it, has predictably led to the rise of dark forces claiming a rather toxic form of ‘patriotism’. She quotes Nigerian poet and novelist Ben Okri, who says that ‘nations and peoples are largely the stories that feed themselves. If they tell themselves stories that are lies, they will suffer the future consequences of those lies.’ Lucas sets herself the task of suggesting a new narrative, a ‘coherent story’ to help us ‘thrive and prosper’.

Her focus is on England, and she sees a real possibility of Wales and Scotland gaining independence in the future, though by no means inevitably. She voices some serious questions about what a break-up of the Union might mean for us, whilst still seeking to place us squarely in the context of a ‘united’ kingdom, because both contexts are possible and ‘Englishness’ needs a more open culture than the current narratives offer. At a minimum, she suggests we push for an English Parliament, and offer a federated Britain as a solution to the centrifugal tendencies that risk tearing GB apart.

HEALING THESE DIVISIONS

Years of populist genuflection under increasingly philistine government have resulted in what Henry Sussman pithily calls a ‘cultural demolition derby’. I have not seen our country so riven by division and misdirected ire since the late 1970s, the 80s miners’ strikes, and poll tax riots. The rise of a disinvesting neoliberal elite that sell our country’s assets down the river whilst gaslighting the public about how damaging actual solutions such as a wealth tax or a universal basic income may be, mean the ‘right-wing’ have no ‘solutions’ to offer that won’t make things worse. A dwindling number of ‘one-nation’ uniting conservatives has led to an elitist and sociopathic government somewhat to the right, on many issues, even of Margaret Thatcher, though a few voices still exist, once deemed enemies but now, without having softened, sounding comparatively like the ‘voice of reason’.

Which just goes to show how far to the right the ‘Overton window’ has shifted. This concept was designed to ‘define the spectrum of acceptability of governmental policies’, but in fact constrains the spectrum to a tightly controlled range that disables most of the policies we most require.

It is our job to break the Overton window’s frame, and get a more cohesive and inclusive narrative to the fore. ‘The stakes could not be higher: the Right have come to revel in chaos.’ At a minimum, Lucas says, ‘if we are ever to have a chance of healing these divisions, the progressives have got to work together’.

WE ARE NOT ‘ONE ENGLAND’

The book begins with an overview of the country’s history, under the rubric ‘stories of England’. Since the second world war, at least, we have, as our empire crumbled, embraced a myth of Gloriana, and of a halcyon vision of Britain that sees us all living in a Powell & Pressburger ministry of (dis)information that grants us a utopian past wherein all us ordinary folk lived out our days happily in nice cottages with roses round the doors. We hark back to a non-existent time when every Englishman’s home was his castle. This is what Jello Biafra of The Dead Kennedys called ‘nostalgia for an age that never existed’.

There are real divisions within our country, causing anger and alienation. At present, the Right are dominating the story fed to the people, but their ‘solutions’ require more social breakdown. It is, of course, not accidental that they pursue a more divided Britain. A united community, inevitably running along class lines to some extent, is a danger to those weaponising intra-class hate to preserve their wealth at the expense of the masses. Misdirection of our energies, and a narrative that tars empathy and compassion as a ‘politics of envy’ (though only when they operate to rein in the Right) only serves to worsen conditions for millions of us. A socially and economically democratic political culture is heralded loudly as ‘communist’ and/or ‘woke’. Yet that is the only path that can save us. We are not ‘one England’ and we do not own our own country – Lucas declares that ‘the most powerful way to rebalance the interests of private owners and the common good is by shifting the focus towards taxes on wealth’, something the current ‘Labour’ government are too scared by the tabloid media to contemplate.

‘OUR SHARED HUMANITY’

Naturally, as a Green socialist, Lucas also discusses ‘the climate and nature emergencies’, which cannot be addressed without ‘another England’. She compares a reparative project to the ‘post-war settlement’, saying that ‘we need an equivalent collective story that equips us to respond to the climate emergency’. Yet she understands that the horse must come before the cart, and fixing our broken country with a more inclusive narrative to create a stable platform from which to launch  a compassionate response to crises the world faces is a necessity. She book-ends her story with ‘Rule Britannia’ and ‘Jerusalem’. It is a Jerusalem for All that we need. A new ‘national story’, a peoples’ England, that challenges our elites without fear, and to positive ends, must emerge. The ‘right-wing’ offerings from the likes of ReformUK seek an exclusive and toxic anti-establishment story, only a leftist such story can offer actual solutions. The alternative is a narrative that scapegoats and ‘others’ powerless minorities, and we all know where that leads.

Lucas rounds off her concluding chapter with a discussion of John Donne’s 17th Meditation; you know, the one that begins ‘No man is an island, entire of itself; everyman is a piece of the continent, a part of the main’. His expression of ‘our shared humanity’ is as relevant today as the day that, 400 years ago, it was penned. It is this England, and that of the Chartists, the Suffragettes, the Diggers, and of the Charter of the Forest, that we must channel if we are to thrive.

Another England is available from Bookbuster, 39 Queens Road, Hastings TN34 1RE

Lovebroken is a memoir by Hastings writer and trauma specialist, Finley de Witt (“For anyone who’s ever struggled with their mental health…”)

It’s been a long time since I was so engrossed in a book that I sat down and read it cover to cover at one sitting. But that’s what happened when I picked up Finley de Witt’s pacey, funny, moving and (though much of it resonated) shocking memoir. Lovebroken takes us on an eventful journey from Finley’s traumatic childhood in West Yorkshire to finally finding truth and peace in ‘Tastings’ (a thinly disguised Hastings).

Finley was born in West Yorkshire to Peggy, a narcissist who had “an insatiable need to be always right”, was neglectful and downright cruel. The book captures in graphic detail the experience(s) of being a bright child in a stultifyingly dull and terrifying world. Chad (both parents are called by their first name) was a charming but mostly absent father and (as we later learn) an abuser. “In the womb I’d been relatively safe; out of it, I was at my parents’ mercy.” 

CONTROLLING LOVERS, RISKY SEX AND INEPT THERAPISTS

When Finley’s teacher tells them they’re bright enough to go to university, Peggy says they’re “not clever enough for that” and enrols Finley instead in secretarial college. That doesn’t last long. Through their own spirit of survival and rebelliousness, Finley is soon on their way to Oxford university, where they’re confronted with both beauty and snobbery, and where they meet upper-class Dan and Marianne – who become their first real lovers and long-term friends.  

Lovebroken goes on to take us on a hilarious roller-coaster ride from love and learning (despite all their mother’s put-downs, Finley graduates with a first) at Oxford to wild (and not always liberating) lesbian love and feminism in London. Each episode of Finley’s life – which includes a couple of breakdowns and psychotic episodes – is described in colourful detail, as are the people they meet. From the descriptions of their various homes to those of loyal friends, controlling lovers, risky sex and (mostly inept) therapists, what shines through, over and above the fear and despair, is Finley’s bravery and sheer determination. Their numerous attempts to get help expose the devastating effects of traditional, ill-informed approaches to mental health: “To realise that mental illness is a protector from unendurable pain, not a pathology, is too radical for most, too countercultural.” 

A QUIVER OF HAPPINESS

Only when Finley makes the move to Tastings with the love of their life, Dahl, and discovers the Internal Family Systems work of Richard Schwartz and a sensitive, trauma-trained therapist, are they able to confront a buried childhood atrocity that’s been haunting them all their life. “I’d lived with a kind of amnesia and coming round was appalling, agonising and potent. I’d never felt so gutted and I’d never felt so real.”  In facing up to the truth, Finley has a harrowing decision to make about their parents, who, in their eighties, at last begin to feel more benign.

I wouldn’t say that Lovebroken is a ‘cosy’ read. But it’s deeply moving, especially for someone who’s had some similar experiences. Its honesty, gutsy-ness and the sheer quality of the writing are a breath of fresh air. Against all the odds, Finley makes it through to “a quiver of happiness”. Along with them, we can only hope it lasts.

Finley will be signing copies at the Observer Building on Saturday 14 September as part of Hastings Book Festival. Lovebroken is also available at The Hastings Bookshop and Hare & Hawthorn. 

It is close to 30 years since Hutton’s most influential book, The State We’re In, first came out. In that book he argued that ‘altruism and the civilising values of an inclusive society have been sacrificed on the altar of self-interest, of choice, of opting out and of individualism’. Some reviews, such as David Aaronovitch, took issue with that as too simplistic, and as a sentence taken out of context it is. 

Nonetheless, it is difficult, all these years later, not to agree with Hutton, and in fact say the same thing even more loudly. In his new book, he gives the first few chapters over to an analysis of events that have led to the mess we are in today. As I have argued here in previous reviews, Liz Truss was not the aberration she is seen to be, but merely a less cautious and more stupid expression of the logic of post-1979 neoliberal Tory economic ideology. And that is pretty much Hutton’s position, too. It would be interesting to see what Aaronovitch thinks of that 29 years on – I suspect he may be less quick to dismiss the argument.

The book features a blurb from our new PM, no less, who said it is ‘brilliant’. As always with Kier Starmer, he less U-turns than spins like a gyroscope. I wonder what he would say today now his and Reeves’s announced economic policies seem so at odds with Hutton’s suggestions. The prescriptions for change start with addressing inequality and poverty, and require ‘British capitalism’ to change radically, indeed it must ‘work for the common good’, not just for shareholders. This is obvious good sense, as our recent experience with Southern Water’s underinvestment in infrastructure repair drives home.

WORKFORCES NEED TO BE ENFRANCHISED

Spending, here, unlike with Starmer and Reeves’ unfunny Tory-lite routine, must start now, on a large scale, to repair 15 years of damage, and to ‘drive productivity’ in both the public and private sectors. This emphasis on both public and private spheres, marrying ‘socialism’ to ‘progressive liberalism’ should sound familiar. We are, here, slap-dab in the middle of the 1990s’ ‘Third Way’, a ‘sensible compromise’ formulated by writers like Hutton and of course sociologist Anthony Giddens. This ‘renewal of social democracy’ failed then, in part because of Blair’s neoliberal bent as evidenced by the foolish over-use of the fiscal ‘private finance initiative’, and also his liking for the ‘communitarianism’ he took from Amitai Etzioni, which tended to push an unbalanced path to ‘rights and responsibilities’ that more than somewhat leaned on the latter at the expense of the former. So far, Reeves has talked up renewal of the PFI agenda, which as before will simply increase debt for yet another generation or two.

Nevertheless, for those of us who actually read Giddens books, ‘third way’ policies did have some rational basis. Blairism did not do any favours to the way posterity views the ‘third way’, but Hutton, to a degree, seeks to revive aspects of the concept. For many on the left, it is too compromising with the capitalist order, but pragmatically it is clearly far better than the neoliberal garage-sale the Tories have pursued. How to actualise such policies in the face of our nation’s greed-driven ideology is another issue, of course. 

As Hutton said on an LSE blog, ‘I thought when I finished writing the book that the ideas and policies might be too ambitious for Starmer’s Labour party. I want to lift the economy by decisively raising public investment, reshaping our savings and investment ecosystem so it dramatically raises its support for business and to reconfigure our capitalism around the delivery of great purposes rather than putting profit first. Our tech sector needs careful nourishing rather than to be sold off abroad. Workforces need to be enfranchised.’

MORE OF A REFORMING GOVERNMENT THAN MOST EXPECT

I for one think he was correct to suspect Starmer would find such a blueprint too radical, but at the same time it is of a piece with the caution exhibited in the PM’s recent statements. Hutton critiques the late 1920s Labour governments of Ramsay MacDonald, saying they ‘lacked the self-confidence and the will to make dysfunctional capitalism work better’: we can only hope Starmer is more forthright, as forthright in a good cause as he has been on, say, the bad causes of suppressing the Labour left and of punishing a human response to the destruction of Gaza. That would do it.

Hutton takes a positive, if out-of-touch, cultural stance. He wants to see a new public sphere of debate, noting, quite rightly, that ‘the common good, and the ability of individuals to live lives they value and find meaningful, are interdependent’. But, post-lockdown and against a global rise of the far-right, one that as Hutton notes, grows and grows ‘in the fertile soil of economic and social distress’, it is hard to see how to get there from here. At least, not without a far more iron-willed curbing of capitalist greed and of the mass media, alongside much more enabling welfare reforms such as a Universal Basic Income. Hutton’s prescriptions do not go far enough toward these ends, and Starmer’s certainly don’t seem to, in fact as Reeves’s cuts indicate, quite the reverse may be the case.

On the LSE blog, Hutton ended on a positive note: ‘If Starmer meant what he said [when describing the book], Labour may be more of a reforming government than most expect. Perhaps this time there will be no mistakes.’ It is too early to tell, of course, the signs are ambiguous. Personally, I think they auger badly, but let’s hope I am pleasantly surprised.

This Time No Mistakes: How to Remake Britain is available from Bookbuster, 39 Queens Road, Hastings TN34 1RE

The website for Left Foot Forward recently analysed data on far-right party funding, and reported that “climate disinformation database DeSmog” had found “that all of Reform Party’s funders in 2023 had oil and gas investments or ties to climate science denial, totalling £135,000”. They note that “the party holds a vocal anti-net zero stance, seemingly reflected in its funding […], [donors include] Panther Securities, […] First Corporate, who gave £100,000 in June 2023, a consultants firm owned by Terence Mordaunt, director of the UK’s leading climate science denial group, Global Warming Policy Foundation”.

Additionally, “Richard Tice, the current leader of Reform has previously denied there is a climate crisis, airing his anti-net zero views on GB News – who’s co-owner has invested billions in fossil fuels – where he is a regular presenter. In a scientifically debunked video, he called C02 ‘plant food’ in an attempt to challenge climate change facts”. They are far from alone, all major parties take bribes, sorry, ‘donations’ from fossil-fuel industry lobbyists.

This is not a new phenomenon, although the traction for such views has increased considerably during and since the lockdown year, as more people, trapped at home, absorbed huge amounts of dubious ‘news’ via the Trollosphere. Geoff Dembicki, a contributor to DeSmog, in his new book The Petroleum Papers traces the deep roots of what he describes as ‘the far-right conspiracy to cover-up climate change’.

GREENWASHING AND DENIALIST

The tragedy here is that the fossil-fuel extractive industries have been aware of their role in anthropogenic climate-change for many decades, but systematically not only suppressed internal reports, but frighteningly successfully propagandised against external agencies that have sought to blow the whistle on these issues. And now, decades later, and despite the environmental activists succeeding in pressuring industry to, in public, admit they are responsible, but whilst they less publicly fund a greenwashing and denialist propaganda machine to the tunes of millions of pounds, we have begun to reach limits many fear will lead to a synergy between various ecological drivers that will accelerate beyond any hope of successful human intervention.

The facts of ‘greenhouse gasses’ were first theorised and laboratory-tested in the nineteenth-century by scientists such as Fourier, Pouillet, Foote, Tyndall, and Arrhenius. The Royal Institution website notes that “Guy Callendar, […] showed in 1938 that human activity was responsible for increasing carbon dioxide levels, and hence of potential climate change”.

A RUNAWAY WARMING EVENT VERY SOON

Of course, CO2 is by no means the only greenhouse gas, a fact the disinformation crowd make much of, deliberately misrepresenting the situation. Methane is a major contributor, for example, which is one of a number of reasons many advocate a reduction in numbers of farm-bred cattle, who to put it bluntly fart too much. James Lovelock invented the electron capture detector and became the first to detect the presence of greenhouse gasses of the chlorofluorocarbon family in the atmosphere. Lovelock wrote many articles and books warning of the consequences of the ‘greenhouse effect’. The reality is that, whilst not the worst gas per volume in climate change, CO2 remains the most copious by a very large degree. As Lawrence Krauss noted in his book The Physics of Climate Change, over the last 150 years we have burnt through probably the majority of easily reached fossil fuels: oils, gasses and shales laid down over millions of years. He notes the difference between natural average annual CO2 emission and absorption, and contemporary emissions and absorption. And that our oceans are reaching their capacity to absorb heat & CO2, whilst our forests are fast disappearing, thus reducing the capacity of land-based mechanisms to absorb even ‘normal’ CO2 emissions. This augers a runaway warming event very soon.

Dembicki’s book traces the denial industry, it’s nefarious suppression of data, and it’s funding of those spreading disinformation. Unsurprisingly, giant corporations such as Shell, British Petroleum, Koch Industries, and Exxon have not only known of the problems their industrial pollution causes for many decades, but have and are actively suppressing, misrepresenting and frankly lying about it too. Their natural allies, of course, are in the agriculture industry, the construction industry, the transport industry, and the supermarkets. Productivist capitalism, and state-capitalist supposedly ‘left-wing’ nations, also seek to at best deliberately sideline attempts to curb emissions. Hence the rampant failures of our much-touted international conventions to agree limits. 

IT WILL BE BITTER

Given the impacts of reining in the fossil-fuel industry, reducing livestock, reducing the use of artificial fertilisers, limiting private transport, trying to source materials and products more locally instead of shipping them from the Far East, moving away from out-of-town megastores and shopping centres, et cetera, it is no surprise to find the right-wing neoliberal globalists in bed with far-right populists who will blow any old dog whistle they can in order to suppress the effort to save us from a runaway climate emergency. It is no accident the Trollosphere has radicalised so many people against ULEZ, the climate justice movement, and those seeking a more decentralised and localist economy. The latter are allied with the movement to found ‘fifteen-minute cities’, a particular focus for over-weaning and irrational hatred from the populist right-wingers. The paranoia they spread will likely be the final straw. 

It is ironic that Reform UK Party supporters are so cognitively dissonant, and unable to see through the dangerous spiv, Nigel Farage’s nonsense – on the one hand ‘we got our country back’, on the other he takes cash from those most inclined to push a globalist capitalist agenda and puts more fossil-fuel extraction right there in his Top 5 policies. 

“If oil executives had actually taken seriously the climate warnings given by their own scientists” from at least the 1980s onwards, “we wouldn’t be experiencing the climate crisis.” And we are experiencing it, in its early but accelerating stages, right now, not in some far-off future. But of course, Essex Man wants his car, just as much as the oil barons want to keep the black gold flowing until the bitter end – and it will be bitter.

The Petroleum papers is available from Bookbuster, 39 Queens Road, Hastings TN34 1RE

‘Americans are deeply sceptical of once well-regarded institutions such as universities, the media and the public health system, and do not trust the functioning of democratic politics. The economy is characterised by entrenched inequality, and intense polarisation between the parties makes it all but impossible to address long-term problems such as climate change,’ says Eric Foner in the London Review of Books (4 July 2024).

‘The BJP [in India] enabled the rise of this new oligarchy by instituting special economic zones, granting environmental clearances and providing cheap development loans, while overturning basic labour protections like the right to an eight-hour work day,’ says Aditya Bahl in the same issue.

And, same issue again, James Meek, writing on the housing crisis, says ‘just as Manchester’s industrial heyday made some people prosperous, even as it demeaned and exploited others, so the new manufacturing countries of Asia, Latin America and Africa have been doing it long enough to enrich a fairly broad section of society – to create people with money to spare and eventually, money to invest. What better way to invest it than by buying a flat in Manchester? Most of the new residential towers are developed on a build-to-rent basis, designed to be sold to people who’ll let them out rather than live in them, who may never see the property they own, or to people who don’t even know they own it, because it’s bought on their behalf by a pension fund. The internet is thick with agencies like the Emirates-based, British-run RPA Group, which markets UK properties to overseas customers […]’.

A MOVEMENT HELL-BENT ON ESCAPING THE CONSTRAINTS OF DEMOCRACY AND STATE REGULATIONS

What links these perceptions, all of which are applicable interchangeably across the nations of the deindustrialising North?

As I noted in my review on Monbiot’s latest tirade against neo-liberalism, the UK has been host to an increasingly toxic asset-stripping free-market playground. We are host to freeports, and encourage the use of tax havens and ‘secrecy regimes’. Our ex-MP Sally Ann Hart kicked off her re-election campaign with a vigorous promotion of ‘free-ports’. She must be aware that they are intended to attract companies into low-tax zones, often with extreme anti-union regulations, supposedly to encourage ‘inward investment’. This creates a steep economic cliff that leads to migration of firms from within the country into these zones, and a lower-pay lower-tax regime that sucks jobs away from the areas outside the ‘special economic zones’. Boris Johnson legislated for 8 of these in the UK, on his way out the door as PM, including one nowhere near a ‘port’, in Derbyshire. This is our ‘Brexit-bonus’; we played right into the hands of the ‘market radicals’ who ‘dream of a world without democracy’, as Quinn Slobodian’s sub-title to Crack-Up Capitalism has it.

The far-right economic hell ‘libertarian capitalist’ Mary ‘Liz’ Truss sought to unleash is not really the aberration the media painted it as. It is of a piece with Johnson’s policies, and with the policies of right-wing think-tanks that have had more influence on policy than any ordinary citizens groups, more perhaps even than industry lobbyists. Slobodian’s book shows the deep history of a movement hell-bent on escaping the constraints of democracy and state regulations. They are a global force for evil, and clearly the real winners here in the post-EU UK – after all, they and their allies bankrolled much of the Leave campaign. Farage wants to take a few industries into a kind of part publicly-owned framework, but with 50% to come from pension fund investment. Pension funds can invest, but just as Meek noted above regarding housing, they are in fact often foreign-owned profiteering ventures – one of the reasons even Thatcherites began to criticise their own 80s policy of encouraging us to opt out of SERPS: there’ll be too little in the funds to come close to the demand about to hit as Boomers reach retirement age. As a stock dealer, Farage knows this well, and would ensure his investments are nicely hedged in these pension funds.

IF YOU WANT TO UNDERSTAND THE CLIFF WE ARE DANGLING OFF

Margaret Thatcher famously ‘wrote to a friend that she thought Britain should turn away from Europe to become “a kind of free-trade and non-interventionist ‘Singapore’”.’ The ruling party of the last 14 years, and their deregulated City casino friends have pushed this agenda pretty hard. Slobodian analyses this ‘Singapore solution’, and looks, too, in depth at ‘models’ such as Dubai and Silicon Valley in order to warn us of our plight. 

We can vote out politicians, but many are puppets of corporate and foreign interests, increasingly so, and they seem increasingly oblivious of our becoming aware of it. The extremist ‘gonzo capitalists’ once regarded as weirdo outliers are now very much mainstream. Any vestige of actually functioning ‘democracy’ is anathema to them, and they are winning their war against it. Small-c ‘conservatives’ may be beginning to wake up, but rather too late, and, as with Cameron’s ‘Brexit’, they have in fact enabled it: our old guard ‘establishment’ in our unequal and barely democratic system never wanted a public that could be mistaken for functioning citizens, they may insist in large numbers on real change. As the pressure-cooker of disaffection ramps up, ‘populists’ start to win, not because they are ‘right’, they are rarely so, in fact are dangerous, but it is hardly surprising that in a dysfunctional society extremism inevitably rears its head.

The left have often used the phrase ‘socialism or barbarism’. The demolition of the left-populist wave under Corbyn has left the field open for the far worse, far more cynical, and conspiracy-prone alt-right. Witness well over 4 million votes for the ‘ReformUK Party’. This is happening all across Europe. And, to a large degree, the ‘market radicals’ and their billionaire profiteering sociopath friends – the ‘global freedom class’ – are the cause.

If you want to understand the cliff we are dangling off, and the cynical alt-right role in pushing us over it, this book is a compulsory read.

Crack-Up Capitalism is available from Bookbuster, 39 Queens Road, Hastings TN34 1RE

The first wave of ‘neoliberal’ ideology was influenced by a century-long tradition beginning with Charles Gide, and moving toward the present via Milton Freidman, Hayek and von Mises. The term was first coined in 1938, and has become synonymous with an anti-regulation, anti-tax, anti-welfare, anti-trade union extreme version of capital accumulation, based on an equally extreme ‘conception of liberty: an absence of coercion’. This is fundamentally an unfettered, ‘do as you like, I’m alright Jack, and bugger the consequences’ take on freedom. Under it, devil take the hindmost, red-in-tooth-and-claw definitions of human nature and morality are promoted, an exalted ‘freedom to’ that explicitly does battle with ‘freedom from’. For Hayek, this includes freedom from democracy, when democratic choices include rolling back capitalist fundamentalism.

Back in the Eighties the beginnings of this ideologically ‘American’ economic coup began to roll out across the British economy. Channelling Ayn Rand and Nietzsche as much as the ‘Austrian’ and ‘Chicago’ schools of economics, it came to us via Maggie (Thatcher), and her much vaunted valorisation of Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’. This toxic neoliberal agenda began to invade our hearts and minds, and manifested in small true-believer organisations such as the ridiculously influential lobby group The Adam Smith Institute. Similar ‘think tanks’, such as the Institute of Economic Affairs, are the subversive method by which neoliberal ideology has infected our institutions. Low on accountability, high on influence, and with their claws in deep with the elites that run our country, such organisations are often deeply undemocratic and ideologically out of tune with the electorate.

THAT ‘UNEARNED INCOME’ RENT

George Monbiot and Peter Hutchinson bring us a new analysis of neoliberalism, informing us in some detail, albeit in a short book, ‘how it came to control your life’. Their conceit is that, as per the title, neoliberalism is ‘invisible’ to us mere mortals. As someone who has consistently railed against the concept for over three decades, I dispute that ‘invisibility’, but agree that those promulgating its pernicious values go out of their way to hide its true nature from the public. In this regard, check their chapter ‘Invisible Doctrine – Invisible Backers’, and, later, their section on the ‘Pollution Paradox’.

As the authors note, the economic and political entrenchment of neoliberalism has manifestly done the opposite of what its advocates cynically propagandise. Far from leading to a ‘trickle-down’ that ‘lifts all boats’, neoliberalism has firmly entrenched a growing wealth-gap, whereby wealth ‘has increasingly become concentrated in the hands of those who already possess it.’ Another element is that ‘unearned income’, rent, as the authors explain, something also critiqued in recent reviews here.

THE ANTI-DEMOCRATIC HEART OF CONTEMPORARY CAPITALISM

Re-defining ‘capitalism’ as a vampiric beast ‘founded on colonial looting’, the authors show how neoliberalism is a rocket-powered extension of what went before. Naturally, profit is at the heart of capitalism, but profit based on ecological destruction, and off-loading of many of the costs (in terms of resource depletion, and of waste disposal, for example), as ‘externalities’ not included in corporate cost-benefit analyses. Society, us, and the poorest pay these costs instead: ‘…while neoliberal capitalism continues to loot the South to enrich the North, it also loots the future to enrich the present’. This ‘capitalism on steroids’ model of economics is all too swiftly destroying our very life-support systems, the global ecology itself.

The absolute arse-end of this pernicious economic and political ‘culture’ was exposed to all in the person of Mary ‘Liz’ Truss. The authors quite rightly describe her recent book Britannia Unchained as ‘a semi-literate polemic’, but it is no aberration except in its willingness to be seen in public, in fact I argue it is the Id of the Tory Party (and, at least from Blair onwards, the Labour Party too). In a chapter on the UK free-market playground they address something that has been at least a bit ‘invisible’, freeports. Both these, tax havens, ‘secrecy regimes’, and the anti-democratic heart of contemporary capitalism will be looked at in a future review (of the book Crack-up Capitalism). Monbiot and Hutchinson conclude that ‘we should see Truss’s government as an experiment: what happens when neoliberal ultras, backed and advised by dark-money think tanks, get everything they want? Answer: Economic life falls off a cliff.’

FIGHTING TALK

Margaret Thatcher famously said ‘there is no alternative’, claiming this dangerous ideology to be ‘the natural order’. But this book argues that this is a lie. ‘Catastrophe is not a matter of fate. It’s a matter of choice […] We need a new story.’ Indeed, ‘A New Story’ is the title of chapter 22. The following chapter is titled ‘The Politics of Belonging’, and the next ‘Private Sufficiency, Public Luxury’. Because Monbiot and Hutchinson are here to promote hope and a new narrative. Here, they discuss deliberative democracy, participatory culture, the commons, and the reality that the Hobbesian view of human nature we’ve been sold is a lie, that in fact humans ‘have a remarkable capacity for altruism.’ In promoting a new ‘politics of belonging’ they hope to offer an alternative to that ‘common response to political and societal dysfunction’, ‘fascism’, instead building bridges across and between communities. This is diametrically opposed to Thatcher’s self-serving ‘there’s no such thing as society’, instead seeking to re-weave the fabric of community.

‘We will fight those nefarious forces by building rich, engaging, collaborative, inclusive and generous communities. In doing so, we will restore harmony to the land.’ Now there’s fighting talk for you!

The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism is available from Bookbuster, 39 Queens Road, Hastings TN34 1RE