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Resistance is not enough – Britain needs a whole new political vision | |
(about 17 hours later) | |
“If you’re always in a mode of resistance, you’re never going to budge. You’re not moving as a person. Resistance is a deep form of defensiveness, a profound form of conservatism.” Last week, at an academic conference in Sheffield, Professor Keith Jacobs, a University of Tasmania sociologist, divided his peers with these comments. Actually, that’s a bit misleading. Sociologists divide on every sentence, in every paper; it’s like watching a uterus build twins. William Davies, author of the wonderful book The Happiness Industry, said: “I can hear nothing here that Peter Mandelson wouldn’t agree with.” Meaning, isn’t this just most post-ideological, third-way capitulation? I thought this quite a good test for all arguments: What Would Peter Mandelson Think? (*thinks the opposite*). | “If you’re always in a mode of resistance, you’re never going to budge. You’re not moving as a person. Resistance is a deep form of defensiveness, a profound form of conservatism.” Last week, at an academic conference in Sheffield, Professor Keith Jacobs, a University of Tasmania sociologist, divided his peers with these comments. Actually, that’s a bit misleading. Sociologists divide on every sentence, in every paper; it’s like watching a uterus build twins. William Davies, author of the wonderful book The Happiness Industry, said: “I can hear nothing here that Peter Mandelson wouldn’t agree with.” Meaning, isn’t this just most post-ideological, third-way capitulation? I thought this quite a good test for all arguments: What Would Peter Mandelson Think? (*thinks the opposite*). |
As the political narrative hurtles down an ever more vindictive, regressive, dishonest path, what stance do you take, if not one of resistance? We have a government that intends, from April 2017, to ask women to prove they’ve been raped if they want to avoid losing tax credits for a third child, and so be exempt from the two-child restriction; a government that has scrapped plans for new housing to be carbon neutral, and with that all our (already pretty modest) ambitions to meet the future with at least some fossil fuels left in the ground; a government that, faced with the perplexities of modernity, decides the best thing to do is to re-legalise fox hunting. How does one respond to all this, in an agile way that allows one’s own argument to progress? Is there any point, practically or philosophically, in resisting? Is there some other, more fruitful thing we could be doing? | As the political narrative hurtles down an ever more vindictive, regressive, dishonest path, what stance do you take, if not one of resistance? We have a government that intends, from April 2017, to ask women to prove they’ve been raped if they want to avoid losing tax credits for a third child, and so be exempt from the two-child restriction; a government that has scrapped plans for new housing to be carbon neutral, and with that all our (already pretty modest) ambitions to meet the future with at least some fossil fuels left in the ground; a government that, faced with the perplexities of modernity, decides the best thing to do is to re-legalise fox hunting. How does one respond to all this, in an agile way that allows one’s own argument to progress? Is there any point, practically or philosophically, in resisting? Is there some other, more fruitful thing we could be doing? |
Related: MP challenges child tax credit plan that could require women to prove rape | Related: MP challenges child tax credit plan that could require women to prove rape |
On the case of the third child begat by rape: only 18% of reported rapes actually end in a charge or caution, and so offer the sort of proof the Department for Work and Pensions might need to authorise the third-child tax credit. We have no available data, of course, on the number of children, surplus to the statutory pair, born as the result of sexual violence, so it’s hard to say how many households 18% would represent. The full nastiness of this policy is laid bare in the caveat: in attempting to distinguish between mothers of three children who were “blameless” in that third conception, and mothers who were guilty, they had to make this bizarre, brutal exemption. This is because the distinction is, in itself, bizarre and brutal. | On the case of the third child begat by rape: only 18% of reported rapes actually end in a charge or caution, and so offer the sort of proof the Department for Work and Pensions might need to authorise the third-child tax credit. We have no available data, of course, on the number of children, surplus to the statutory pair, born as the result of sexual violence, so it’s hard to say how many households 18% would represent. The full nastiness of this policy is laid bare in the caveat: in attempting to distinguish between mothers of three children who were “blameless” in that third conception, and mothers who were guilty, they had to make this bizarre, brutal exemption. This is because the distinction is, in itself, bizarre and brutal. |
On the matter of zero-carbon housing, 38% of our total greenhouse gas emissions are leaked from buildings. Overhauling our housing stock is, by a mile, the easiest fix we have to meet emissions targets, easier than green energy and electric cars and solar storage, easier than everything else put together. The idea of a government not just retreating from the need to retrofit existing stock, but creating new housing that wastes yet more energy: it’s too depressing to contemplate. Against this backdrop of lofty carelessness for people and for the environment, I almost think bringing back fox-hunting is a good thing, since it will keep at least part of this poisonous, antisocial class occupied elsewhere for at least part of the time. | On the matter of zero-carbon housing, 38% of our total greenhouse gas emissions are leaked from buildings. Overhauling our housing stock is, by a mile, the easiest fix we have to meet emissions targets, easier than green energy and electric cars and solar storage, easier than everything else put together. The idea of a government not just retreating from the need to retrofit existing stock, but creating new housing that wastes yet more energy: it’s too depressing to contemplate. Against this backdrop of lofty carelessness for people and for the environment, I almost think bringing back fox-hunting is a good thing, since it will keep at least part of this poisonous, antisocial class occupied elsewhere for at least part of the time. |
Everything I’ve just written is classic resistance: facts, figures, outrage, the heuristic projection on to other people of all the things I don’t like about a political ideology. But there is a habit on the progressive side, in resistance mode, to make a self-righteous point about the number crunching - “I understand the difference between housing benefit and local housing allowance, I know what an in-work family tax credit is, and anybody who doesn’t has no business in the debate” - so that it goes beyond whiny and wonky, into the territory of active alienation. | Everything I’ve just written is classic resistance: facts, figures, outrage, the heuristic projection on to other people of all the things I don’t like about a political ideology. But there is a habit on the progressive side, in resistance mode, to make a self-righteous point about the number crunching - “I understand the difference between housing benefit and local housing allowance, I know what an in-work family tax credit is, and anybody who doesn’t has no business in the debate” - so that it goes beyond whiny and wonky, into the territory of active alienation. |
I almost think bringing back fox-hunting is a good thing, as it will keep this poisonous, antisocial class occupied | I almost think bringing back fox-hunting is a good thing, as it will keep this poisonous, antisocial class occupied |
Who wants to even enter a debate above which hovers the possibility that they’ll be made to look stupid? This narrows the field of participation, which is one practical problem, the other being that this is a majority government we’re living under. Its aim, which roared out of George Osborne’s budget, is to be as true to its Conservative nature as it can. Complaining about this is beyond pointless: if anything, it empowers the Conservatives to be resisted in this way. | Who wants to even enter a debate above which hovers the possibility that they’ll be made to look stupid? This narrows the field of participation, which is one practical problem, the other being that this is a majority government we’re living under. Its aim, which roared out of George Osborne’s budget, is to be as true to its Conservative nature as it can. Complaining about this is beyond pointless: if anything, it empowers the Conservatives to be resisted in this way. |
To attack first entails retaking the language, so that we aren’t constantly battling on the territory of “common sense” that has already been demarcated and controlled by someone else. Professor Danny Dorling, at the British Library’s weekend conference on London, had this suggestion, in the wake of Osborne’s appropriation of the phrase “living wage”. Rather than rename the original concept “actual living wage” or “real living wage”, we should instead refer to Osborne’s national living wage as a “servant wage … as anyone who, in order to live where they work, can’t afford to have a family of their own, so exists to serve others”. | To attack first entails retaking the language, so that we aren’t constantly battling on the territory of “common sense” that has already been demarcated and controlled by someone else. Professor Danny Dorling, at the British Library’s weekend conference on London, had this suggestion, in the wake of Osborne’s appropriation of the phrase “living wage”. Rather than rename the original concept “actual living wage” or “real living wage”, we should instead refer to Osborne’s national living wage as a “servant wage … as anyone who, in order to live where they work, can’t afford to have a family of their own, so exists to serve others”. |
More broadly, we need to use each event as a starting point for a different conversation: I don’t just not want mothers-of-three to be cast into penury for political reasons; I want to completely remake the state’s relationship with the family, to one of support and – yes, sod it – rejoicing, that someone would undertake the profoundly social act of raising children. Don’t ask: “Why did they have them if they couldn’t afford them?” Ask: “Why can’t they afford them, and what do they need?” | More broadly, we need to use each event as a starting point for a different conversation: I don’t just not want mothers-of-three to be cast into penury for political reasons; I want to completely remake the state’s relationship with the family, to one of support and – yes, sod it – rejoicing, that someone would undertake the profoundly social act of raising children. Don’t ask: “Why did they have them if they couldn’t afford them?” Ask: “Why can’t they afford them, and what do they need?” |
I don’t just want not to create more shoddy, cheaply built, wasteful housing: I want all housing to be carbon neutral and – yes, sod it – food neutral. I want us to reframe housing as infrastructure so that we invest in and view it as we would a road, or a railway. | I don’t just want not to create more shoddy, cheaply built, wasteful housing: I want all housing to be carbon neutral and – yes, sod it – food neutral. I want us to reframe housing as infrastructure so that we invest in and view it as we would a road, or a railway. |
There is nothing in the immediate term that we can do, but nothing here that we can’t use: the very baseness of this government’s agenda is the rock bottom from which we can finally ask fundamental questions about how we want society to look. Resistance is not futile: but it’s just the beginning. | There is nothing in the immediate term that we can do, but nothing here that we can’t use: the very baseness of this government’s agenda is the rock bottom from which we can finally ask fundamental questions about how we want society to look. Resistance is not futile: but it’s just the beginning. |
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