Britain Explained (By Americans)

This is quite an interesting video attempting to explain to Americans the relationship between England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, and what makes up "The United Kingdom". It starts off simply enough but begins to get quite complicated once you start adding Jersey, Guernsey, the Falkland Islands and Gibraltar! If you would like a further venn diagram (!) to explain this click here.

Walter Bagehot is Smiling

Well the Royals are going to have wedding. And the young prince has bestowed his late mum's engagement ring on the princess-to-be. (The baubles are reported to have been worth thirty thousand pounds in 1981, so with inflation ... not a bad pay day for the young lady!) No sooner had the excitement begun to gather than the London correspondent for The Nation had the temerity to point out that the nuptials would nicely distract everyone from the Tory budget cuts and from the deal to buy off torture victims. You can find her comments here. I suppose I am not quite cynical enough to buy this line of thinking. But then again, Walter Bagehot pretty much assigned this role to the Royals way back when (see The English Constitution - 1867). While the Cabinet is, on his view, the "efficient secret" of British politics allowing the government to exercise power, the Royals are the "dignified" or symbolic dimension of that politics, being mostly useful for distracting the attention of the common man from the machinations of real politics. So, on second thought, maybe I am cynical enough . . .

Surprise! Britain Subject to Laws of Gravitation: S@#* Still Rolls Down Hill Onto the Poor in Budget Cuts

"The tax and benefit changes are regressive rather than progressive across most of the income distribution. And when we add in the new measures announced yesterday this is, unsurprisingly, reinforced.

Our analysis continues to show that, with the notable exception of the richest 2%, the tax and benefit components of the fiscal consolidation are, overall, being implemented in a regressive way." ~ Carl Emerson, Institute for Fiscal Studies

Margaret Thatcher, 1975. Phototograph © Srdja Djukanovic.

When Margaret Thatcher proposed budget cuts of about 4% in the 1980s her Conservative policy was depicted as draconian and regressive. And rightly so. Now the Conservative/Lib-Dem coalition has upped the ante, proposing cuts significantly deeper than those Thatcher peddled. And, of course, in presenting their policy the coalition insisted that their proposal would be even-handed. Ooopps! Turns out that that is not true. It only took a day for the independent analysts to say so. And, of course, once the spending cuts exacerbate the ongoing recessionary economic trends, things will only get worse. Cameron/Clegg are not just Thatcher in drag, they have taken the hormone treatment too.
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P.S.: It is already tomorrow (Friday) on the east coast - I am still in Oregon, preparing to give some comments at a conference in Portland. But here is a link to Paul Krugman's column in The Times in which he alternately bemoans and mocks the Conservative/Lib-Dem budget blunder.

Tories Open the Door to Economic Democracy in Britain!

. . . at least that is the conclusion Hilary Wainright draws in this essay from The Guardian yesterday. She suggests that since the Conservative Party Manifesto invites citizens to join with the government to monitor and hold to account various political agencies, it must, by extension extend an analogous invitation with respect to corporations and markets. The latter, she reasons, have just as much, perhaps more, impact on the lives and well-being of individuals and communities across Britain than do governmental agencies. And so, just as we need to identify ways of holding concentrated political power accountable, so too do we need to identify ways to hold concentrated economic power accountable. Sounds right to me.

The British Election Campaign

Ah, British politics! There is an election campaign under way. A couple of months back I posted here on some of the early campaign graphics. But now the visuals are heating up a bit. This is a photo of an anonymously created London billboard 'taking the piss' out of the Tory candidate David Cameron. Deserved so, in my estimation. Earlier in the month The Guardian ran an April fool's spoof, claiming that Labour was mounting a campaign seeking to capitalize on the now notorious bad temper of the current Prime Minister Gordon Brown. My sweetheart Susan thinks 'Gordo' is pretty terrific, despite all the bad press. I agree that he is a big improvement on Blair who in Manchester parlance was 'all fur coat and no knickers!' So 'Gordo' is our household candidate. Here is one of the fake posters that The Guardian folk produced.

And, indeed, here is our Gordo out on the hustings, apparently scaring the tar-nation out of a young child. Perhaps Labour might've embraced the spoof? Perhaps the parents here are wondering how they will deal with junior's recurrent nightmares?

Gordon Brown and his wife Sarah in a coffee shop in Kirkcaldy.
Photograph © Dan Kitwood/Getty Images.

Now to the main point. In The Guardian today is this story reporting that the House of Commons has appointed photographer Simon Roberts as the "official election artist." The report notes an extremely interesting twist:

". . . Roberts . . . will, he says, be concentrating on the 'relationship between the politicians canvassing and the voting public with images from battle-buses and village greens to polling stations and shopping centres.' His images will be exhibited in the House of Commons this summer. Alongside them will be a gallery of photographs taken by members of the public.

. . . Roberts has therefore invited people to participate in what he calls the Election Project by sending their own mobile-phone or digital-camera images to a dedicated website. The aim, he says, is to 'create an alternative photographic vision alongside my own' – one that will 'add a collaborative and democratic dimension to the overall work.'"

I think this is a pretty remarkable, self-effacing initiative. Roberts has added a link to the Election Project to his web page. It will be worth following.

British Authorities Continue to Harass Photographers (even more)

The folks at The Guardian have published two video interviews with amateur photographers who have been harassed by police for taking pictures on the streets.* In both instances the photographers video-taped their initial interactions with the authorities and The Guardian includes that footage.

This is a depressing pattern - in both the UK and the US - about which I have posted numerous times. Not only is the British law overly broad and poorly specified, but it seems pretty clear that the 'cop on the beat' is in most cases clueless about what the law does and does not allow. As a result, citizens are being questioned, detained and arrested for no reason whatsoever. In terms of their absurdity the interactions between the photographers and the police remind me of nothing so much as old Monty-Python sketches. Unfortunately the absurdity wears thin in the face of the more or less systematic violation of civil rights.

You can find the video interviews, the first with Simona Bonomo here and the second with Bob Patefield here. I admire their fortitude in the face of the police. But I also wonder whether in the U.S. their refusals might not have encountered what one might call a more vigorous response on the part of police.
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* Thanks Chris!