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Archive for September, 2018

Spice: a lethal epidemic fuelled by austerity | John Harris

Sunday, September 30th, 2018

The prevalence of this debilitating drug shows that society has reached a precipitous moment of decay

At first I thought he might be dead. The man was no older than 40, and dressed in a huge beige parka: he had stumbled on to an almost empty town square, wobbled on his feet and then collapsed. For a while, he lay completely motionless, his arms outstretched and his knees folded into his chest. People walked by, showing barely a flicker of interest. He then swayed to his feet, before crashing back down again. This time he hit his head on the concrete, and the hideous crack it made was enough to bring people to his aid, before he seemed to assure them that he would be all right, and uncertainly shuffled away again.

I was in the Yorkshire town of Doncaster – though it could have been any number of places where the street drug known as spice has entered the lives of people living on society’s edges, sowing anxiety and fear. Over the summer, stories of the drug and its users seemed to reach a critical point – in Cardiff, Leeds, Sheffield, Wrexham, Hull, Lincoln and Mansfield. At the end of August, a group of Conservative police and crime commissioners said that spice represented the “most severe public health issue we have faced in decades”, and demanded that, three years after it was made illegal, it be moved from class B to class A status, the same as heroin and cocaine. Three weeks ago, the Daily Mirror splashed that Britain “is in the grip of a spice epidemic”.

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Brexit breakdown part 4: two years on, why is Britain so bleak?

Wednesday, September 26th, 2018

In the concluding part of their journey into the heart of 2018’s weirdness, John Harris and John Domokos go to a Leave Means Leave rally and ask an obvious question: how did this side win? For the answer, they go to Labour conference, and then to a massive distribution centre at the cutting-edge of the new economy

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Can Labour forge a new, 21st-century socialism? | John Harris

Tuesday, September 25th, 2018

The scepticism about Corbynism isn’t because it is too radical, but because in an era of disruption, it is not radical enough

In among all the noise about Brexit and Donald Trump, there’s a remarkable sound: a great deal of the free-market, laissez-faire ideas that have dominated the last four decades being criticised and contested, perhaps as never before. In the US, the fallout from the election of 2016 has fed into the first stirrings of a new, confidently radical Democratic politics; in Britain, the Labour party might still be locked into endless travails and internal tensions, but it has definitely pulled politics leftwards. On a bad day, the political darkness can still feel overwhelming, but even in the most unlikely places, there are sometimes tantalising signs of light.

A panicked Tory prime minister is now rhapsodising about public housing. The Economist last week published an essay about the revival of liberalism built around such ideas as land taxation and a guaranteed income. For sure, continuing austerity and the polarised state of politics may bring to mind the hoary old quote from the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” History doesn’t glide; it wildly lurches. But the idea that neoliberalism is on the back foot is surely beyond doubt.

So far, the Labour party has had depressingly little to say about the decayed British state

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Britain’s insecure towns aren’t ‘left behind’. They hold the key to our future | John Harris

Monday, September 17th, 2018

The desire for community and stability should not be dismissed as nostalgia. It’s our politicians who need to get with the times

It can be found in the opening pages of a book published in 2014: one of the most influential ideas in modern British politics, given its first airing in the days when Ukip was on a roll, and the forces that would propel Britain towards Brexit were decisively coming into view. “Over recent decades,” goes the text, “deep social and economic changes have hit particular groups within British society particularly hard: older, less skilled and less educated working-class voters. These are the groups we describe as the ‘left behind’ in modern Britain, who could once rely on the strength of their numbers to ensure a voice in each of the mainstream parties.”

Revolt on the Right: Explaining Support for the Radical Right in Britain was written by the academics Matthew Goodwin and Robert Ford; its thesis was that the two main parties had ignored these people for decades, and their resulting resentment was now exploding into the open. In this sense, the term “left behind” was initially focused on neglect by politics and politicians – but it also implicitly referred to matters of culture and economics, and as the national media became newly interested in people and places way beyond the M25, the concept was quickly stretched.

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Brexit breakdown part 1: Why are the Tories winning Walsall?

Monday, September 17th, 2018

With Brexit fast approaching, John Harris and John Domokos have spent four months sampling the mood of the country. In episode one of this new series, they spend time in the Midlands town of Walsall, where despite cuts and Tory chaos, Labour isn’t breaking through

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