The Bloody Crossroads

To say that the pace of modern life is unconducive to lyric poetry is not so much to flirt with cliché as to drop your keys down cliché’s blouse and insist upon retrieving them. It’s also undeniable. Assailed from all sides by all manner of trivia, we’ve lost the habit of sustained contemplation needed to engage with this most challenging […]

‘The trouble with you socialists is that you don’t know anything about economics.’ The businessman – a wealthy retailer – was talking to a miner in Western Australia. ‘What you don’t seem to understand’, he continued, ‘is that every time you get an increase in your wages, the cost of living rises with them.’ ‘So what are you saying?’ enquired […]

In a career spanning nearly half a century, the US journalist Barbara Ehrenreich has sought to expose economic inequality and to critique the utopian and delusional character of the arguments used to justify it. In Nickel and Dimed (2001) she revealed how the lives of unskilled workers give the lie to ‘trickledown’ economics, while in Bait and Switch (2005) she […]

Having arrived in Christchurch in the small hours of the morning, I have to wait till my alarm call comes through at 8am for my first proper view of it. It’s a disconcerting experience. It is now four years since the Canterbury earthquake caused widespread damage to ‘the Garden City’ and three and a half since a second earthquake, much […]