1: Houses have got stupid expensive. You may have noticed Here’s a great chart from James Plunkett of the Resolution Foundation, making the point that it will take you your life to save for a deposit. Note that the curve takes off like a homesick angel in the mid-90s, when prices start back up again,…
Read More 12 links on Bob Crow, and how to get the lookI did some Ralph Miliband blogging a couple of weeks ago. Here’s some more, from my back-cover notes. The chapter on “The Politics of Survival” is quite possibly more use as a playbook for the opposition than anything else and I even suspect that US and French rightwingers might have done so. Delay everything, get…
Read More A bit more Ralph Miliband bloggingI’ve recently started reading Ralph Miliband’s Socialism in a Sceptical Age. Partly because someone on twitter wants to quote Ralph every time Ed says something, here are a couple of points so far. RM felt that the power of Big Media was akin to the power to raise a private army, and he says this…
Read More A little Ralph Miliband bloggingThe Ed has got everyone’s attention by promising to freeze consumer energy prices. It’s one of those moments, as with hackgate and Syria, when he succeeds in making the prime minister look irrelevant and bypassed. Having whined a bit, at least some of the energy companies moved to accept the policy voluntarily. The most interesting…
Read More Rolling back the frontiers of privatisationSo I pushed the simple plan on various people. Here’s a scorecard. LabourList: Henry Root-esque NO REPLY. Liberal Conspiracy: Initially, NO REPLY. Badgered, Sunny Hundal said it was in his queue to read but it was so long. Politics is hard, let’s go shopping. Dave Hill at the Guardian London blog: Hasn’t read it. Will…
Read More Simple Plan: response from the cutting edge of the online Left!Birdy! For it is he, back out of the woodwork to tell us that there might be a surge in homelessness, up or rather down to the depths of the 80s. Well, that’s grim, and only surprising in that the Tories took just two-and-a-half years to get back to mass homelessness. Unlike Birdy I promise…
Read More TYR Rewind: slip inside this house and fuel the fireDavid Harvey’s Brief History of Neoliberalism is a pretty decent survey, if you’re a slightly naive People and Planet-ish student just dipping a toe into the idea that perhaps, maybe, something is wrong with society. But then, I suspect that this was precisely the audience he had in mind. That sounds sarcastic, because it is.…
Read More read this book, if you’ve not read better booksSo, why did we get here? Back in the mists of time, in the US Bell System, there used to be something called a Business Office, by contrast to a Central Office (i.e. what we call a BT Local Exchange in the UK), whose features and functions were set down in numerous Bell System Practice…
Read More The politics of call centres, part two: sources of failureWhat is it that makes call centres so uniquely awful as social institutions? This is something I’ve often touched on at Telco 2.0, and also something that’s been unusually salient in my life recently – I moved house, and therefore had to interact with getting on for a dozen of the things, several repeatedly. (Vodafone…
Read More The politics of call centres, part oneQuiggin is discussing why some things are neo- and others are post-. How do we deal with the current revival of high modernism (see Owen Hatherley’s blog and indeed his career, the proliferating Mid-Century Modern groups on Flickr, the wave of preservation campaigns for mid-20th century landmarks)? It’s obviously silly to call it post-modernism and…
Read More post-IKEA and indeed post-furniture