Ruairidh MacVeigh
Published 23 Nov 2024Hello all! 😀
In something a little different from cars, trains and planes, we take a look at what has often been considered the Concorde moment for cross-channel ferry operations, the introduction of routine hovercraft services between Britain and France by the Hoverlloyd and Seaspeed companies, and later the Hoverspeed firm following their merger.
Hoverspeed was a truly exceptional mixture of speed and technological prowess, skirting across the surface of the English Channel and reducing journey times to but a fraction of what they were aboard regular ferry boats, but due to increasing costs, a fragile business case, and the arrival of the Channel Tunnel, Hoverspeed, much like Concorde, is now but a fading memory of a bygone era for international travel.
Chapters:
0:00 – Preamble
0:44 – Rise of the Hovercraft
3:04 – Tapping an Untapped Market
7:15 – Into Service
10:33 – Heyday of the Hovercraft
13:05 – Fragile Foundations
17:21 – Coming to the End
21:55 – Conclusion
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March 24, 2025
The Concorde of the English Channel – Hoverspeed
QotD: Communism and western intellectuals
It is a curious fact that Communist dictatorships were at their most popular among Western intellectuals while they still had the courage of their brutality. Once they settled down to gray, everyday oppression and relatively minor acts of violent repression (judged, of course, by their own former high, or low, standards in this respect), they ceased to attract the extravagant praises of those intellectuals who, in their own countries, regarded as intolerable even the slightest derogation from their absolute freedom of expression. It is as if not dreams but totalitarian famines and massacres acted as the Freudian wish fulfillment of these Western intellectuals. They spoke of illimitable freedom, but desired unlimited power.
Mao Zedong was the blank page or screen upon which they could project the fantasies that they thought beautiful. China was a long way off, its hundreds of millions of peasants inscrutable but known to be impoverished and oppressed by history; its culture was impenetrable to Westerners without many years of dedicated and mind-consuming study; Western sinologists, almost to a man, upheld the Maoist version of the world, some of them for fear of losing their access to China if they did not, and thereby created the impression that Maoism was intellectually and morally respectable; and so perfect conditions were laid for the most willing and total suspension of disbelief. Mao’s Thoughts — that is to say, clichés, platitudes, and lies — were treated by intelligent and educated people as if they were more profound, and contained more mental and spiritual sustenance, than Pascal’s. As so often before, mere reality as experienced by scores of millions of people was of little interest to intellectuals by comparison with the schemata in their minds and their own self-conception. “Let the heavens fall so long as I feel good about myself” was their motto. One didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Rare and Common Sense”, First Things, 2017-11.
March 23, 2025
Tariffs versus income taxes – pick your poison
Walter Block on the pros and cons (from the government’s point of view) of income taxes and tariffs:
Every fiber of my economic being cries out against tariffs. If they are so good, why doesn’t each state in the US have one against the products of all of the other 49? That is, Ohio could “protect” its industries against the incursions from Arizona. This is obviously silly. One of the important reasons America is so prosperous is that we have a gigantic, internal, free trade area.
Donald Trump supports them on the ground that the McKinley administration was prosperous, and relied upon tariffs. But this is to commit the post hoc ergo propter hoc logical fallacy: that since A precedes B, A must be the cause of B. No, America did indeed become rich during this epoch, but that was in spite of tariffs, not due to their benign influence. If you are looking for a historical episode to shed light on this matter, the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930 will do far better: it greatly worsened an already bad recession, plunging our economy into a deep depression.
Our President also claims that the US is victimized by a negative balance of trade: we buy more from Canada and other countries than they purchase from us. However, I have a horrid balance of trade with McDonald’s and Wal-Mart. I acquire several hundreds of dollars’ worth of their products every year, and neither has yet seen fit to reciprocate with any of my economic services (hint, hint!). On the other hand, I have a very strong positive balance of trade with my employer, Loyola University New Orleans. They pay me a decent salary; apart from a few lunches in their cafeteria, my expenditures to them fill their coffers to a zero degree. Should anyone worry about this sort of thing? Of course not. Ditto for international trade. If Country A buys more from B than it sells to it, money will flow from the former to the latter, reducing prices in the former and raising them in the latter, until matters balance out.
Everyone realizes the foolishness of tariffs when it comes to absolute advantage. No Canadian objects to the importation of bananas from Costa Rica. Producing this tropical product in the frozen North would be financially prohibitive (gigantic hothouses). Ditto for maple syrup in the country to the south. The only way they could produce this item would be to place maple trees in gigantic refrigerators. Ludicrous and prohibitively expensive.
But when it comes to comparative advantage, all too many people are out to lunch insofar as the teachings of Economics 101 are concerned. They fear that other countries might be more efficient than we are; with free trade, they would produce everything, we, nothing, and we would all starve to death from massive unemployment.
Rigged Votes and Terror: Stalin’s Takeover Tactics! – W2W 014 – 1947 Q2
TimeGhost History
Published 21 Mar 2025By 1947, Stalin’s Soviet Union has begun to firmly grip Eastern Europe, reshaping nations through rigged elections, terror tactics, and propaganda. From Poland to Bulgaria, countries are forced into Moscow’s orbit, crushing opposition and extinguishing democratic freedoms. As Truman declares a doctrine to contain communism, the stage is set for decades of Cold War confrontation.
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How To Invade France
HardThrasher
Published 2 Feb 2023For more than 1,000 years British people have studied how to invade France, here then are the fruits of that wisdom.
1. Be German
2. Head for Sedan
QotD: Herbert Hoover as president
First, he has no doubt that the economy is going to crash. It’s been too good for too long. He frantically tries to cool down the market, begs moneylenders to stop lending and bankers to stop banking. It doesn’t work, and the Federal Reserve is less concerned than he is. So he sits back and waits glumly for the other shoe to drop.
Second, he hates politics. Somehow he had thought that if he was the President, he would be above politics and everyone would have to listen to him. The exact opposite proves true. His special session of Congress comes up with the worst, most politically venal tariff bill imaginable. Each representative declares there should be low tariffs on everything except the products produced in his own district, then compromises by agreeing to high tariffs on everything with good lobbyists. The Senate declares that the House of Representatives is corrupt nincompoops and sends the bill back in disgust. Hoover has no idea how to solve this problem except to ask the House to do some kind of rational economically-correct calculation about optimal tariffs, which the House finds hilarious. “Opposed to the House bill and divided against itself, the Senate ran out the remaining seven weeks [of the special session] in a debauch of taunts, accusations, recriminations, and procedural argument.” The public blames Hoover, pretty fairly – a more experienced president would have known how to shepherd his party to a palatable compromise.
Also, there are crime waves, prison riots, bootlegging, and a heat wave during which Washington DC is basically uninhabitable. Also, at one point the White House is literally on fire.
… and then the market finally crashes. Hoover is among the first to call it a Depression instead of a Panic – he thinks the new term might make people panic less. But in fact, people aren’t panicking. They assume Hoover has everything in hand.
At first he does. He gathers the heads of Ford, Du Pont, Standard Oil, General Electric, General Motors, and Sears Roebuck and pressures them to say publicly they won’t fire people. He gathers the AFL and all the union heads and pressures them to say publicly they won’t strike. He enacts sweeping tax cuts, and the Fed enacts sweeping rate cuts. Everyone is bedazzled […] Six months later, employment is back to its usual levels, the stock market is approaching its 1929 level, and Democrats are fuming because they expect Hoover’s popularity to make him unbeatable in the midterms. I got confused at this point in the book – did I accidentally get a biography from an alternate timeline with a shorter, milder Great Depression? No – this would be the pattern throughout the administration. Hoover would take some brilliant and decisive action. Economists would praise him. The economy would start to look better. Everyone would declare the problem solved – especially Hoover, sensitive both to his own reputation and to the importance of keeping economic optimism high. Then the recovery would stall, or reverse, or something else would go wrong.
People are still debating what made the Great Depression so long and hard. Whyte’s theory, insofar as he has one at all, is “one thing after another”. Every time the economy started to go up (thanks to Hoover), there was another shock. Most of them involved Europe – Germany threatening to default on its debts, Britain going off the gold standard. A few involved the US – the Federal Reserve made some really bad calls. The one thing Whyte is really sure about is that his idol Herbert Hoover was totally blameless.
He argues that Hoover’s bank relief plan could have stopped the Depression in its tracks – but that Congressional Democrats intent on sabotaging Hoover forced the plan to publicize the names of the banks applying. The Democrats hoped to catch Hoover propping up his plutocrat friends – but the change actually had the effect of making banks scared to apply for funding and panicking the customers of banks that were known to have applied. He argues that the “Hoover Holiday” – a plan to grant debt relief to Germany, taking some pressure off the clusterf**k that was Europe – was a masterstroke, but that France sabotaged it in the interests of bleeding a few more pennies from its arch-rival. International trade might have sparked a recovery – except that Congress finally passed the Hawley-Smoot Tariff, the end result of the corruption-plagued tariff negotiations, just in time to choke it off.
Whyte saves his barbs for the real villain: FDR. If the book is to be believed, Hoover actually had things pretty much under control by 1932. Employment was rising, the stock market was heading back up. FDR and his fellow Democrats worked to tear everything back down so he could win the election and take complete credit for the recovery. The wrecking campaign entered high gear after FDR won in 1932; he was terrified that the economy might get better before he took office, and used his President-Elect status to hint that he was going to do all sorts of awful things. The economy got skittish again and obediently declined, allowing him to get inaugurated at the precise lowest point and gain the credit for recovery he so ardently desired.
Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Hoover”, Slate Star Codex, 2020-03-17.
March 22, 2025
“Humiliate yourself before us,” I was being told, “And we still won’t hire you, lol”
The accelerating downfall of the academic-political complex is the subject of John Carter’s most recent post at Postcards from Barsoom:
University College, University of Toronto, 31 July, 2008.
Photo by “SurlyDuff” via Wikimedia Commons.
Look. In any given case, for any given scientist working inside the university system, there are exactly two possibilities.
One: they embraced all of this with cheerful, delirious, evangelical enthusiasm. Religious devotees of the unholy cause of converting every institution to the One False Faith of Decay, Envy, and Incompetence, they have spent the last decade or more enforcing campus speech codes, demanding inclusive changes to hiring policies, watering down curricular requirements to improve retention of underrepresented (because underperforming) equity-seeking demographics, forcing their research collaborations to adopt codes of conduct, and mobbing any of their colleagues who voiced the mildest protest against any of this intellectual and organizational vandalism.
Two: they had reservations, but went along with it all anyhow because what were they to do? They needed jobs; they needed funding; and anyhow they didn’t go into STEM to fight culture wars. As the article says, “They’d prefer to just get back to the science,” and the easiest way to get back to the science was to just go along with whatever the crazies were demanding. Even if the crazies were demanding that they abandon any pretense of doing actual science.
The first group are enemies.
The second are cowards.
Both deserve everything they get.
And I am going to enjoy every moment of them getting it.
Look, I am going to vent here a bit, okay? Because the mewling in this article succeeded in getting under my skin.
Not long ago I was considered a promising early career scientist, with an excellent publication record for my field, a decent enough teaching record, and all the rest of it. After several years as a semi-nomadic postdoc – which had followed several years as a semi-nomadic graduate student – it was time to start looking for faculty positions. My bad luck: Fentanyl Floyd couldn’t breathe, and the networked hive consciousness of eggless harpies infesting the institutions was driven into paroxysms of preening performative para-empathy.
What this meant was two things. First, more or less every single university started demanding ‘diversity statements’ be included in faculty application packages, alongside the standard research statements, teaching statements, curriculum vitae, and publication list. The purpose of the diversity statement was to enable the zampolit in HR and the faculty hiring committee to evaluate the candidate’s level of understanding of critical race theory, gender theory, intersectionality, and all the rest of the cultural Marxist anti-knowledge; to identify candidates who had already made contributions to advancing diversity; and to identify candidates who had well-thought-out ten-point plans to help advance the department’s new core principle and overriding purpose, that being: diversity.
The second thing it meant was that hiring policies now implicitly – in the United States – and explictly (in Canada) mandated diversity as an overriding concern in hiring. As everyone knows, this means that if you’re a heterosexual cisgendered fucking white male, you are not getting hired.
In other words, I was now expected to write paeans praising the very ideology that had erected itself as an essentially impermeable barrier to my own employment, pledging to uphold this ideology myself and enforce it against others who look like me. “Humiliate yourself before us,” I was being told, “And we still won’t hire you, lol.”
Having some modicum of self-respect, I refused to go along with this. This meant that I simply could not apply for something like 90% of the available positions. And when I did apply to positions that didn’t require a diversity statement, and successfully got an interview, guess what? One of the first questions out of the mouth of one of hiring committee members would be “what will you do for diversity”, or “I see you didn’t mention diversity in your teaching statement …” See, even if it isn’t mandated by the administration, that doesn’t stop the imposter-syndrome-having activist ladyprofs from insinuating the diversity test on their own initiative. I once had a dean, a middle-aged Hispanic woman, tell me “women in science are very important to me” right at the beginning of the interview; I very nearly got that job, because everyone on the committee wanted me, but later – after they inexplicably ghosted – found out that she’d nixed it. They just didn’t hire anyone.
Right around the same time, of course, we were in the thick of the COVID-19 scamdemic. You remember, the one that was just the flu, bro, until it became the new Black Death that definitely did not come from a laboratory shut up you conspiracy theorist; which couldn’t be stopped by masks so don’t be silly until suddenly masks were the only thing that could save you; which led to us all being locked in our houses for a year because some idiot wrote a Medium article called “the dance of the hammer with your soft skull” or whatever which then went viral inside the hysterosphere; which motivated the accelerated development of a novel mRNA treatment that no one was going to get because you couldn’t trust the Evil Orange Man’s bad sloppy science until suddenly it was safe and effective and then overnight absolutely mandatory and anyone who refused to take it should be sent to a camp.
Yeah, remember that?
I guarantee you that every single credentialed scientist in that article was on board for all of it.
How do I know this?
Because they all were.
How One Movie Drove Hitler’s Men Crazy – Rise of Hitler 12, December 1930
World War Two
Published 20 Mar 2025December 1930 plunges Germany deeper into chaos. Nazis and Communists join forces against Chancellor Brüning’s emergency decrees, while a shocking court decision boosts Hitler’s power. Violent riots erupt over the film All Quiet on the Western Front, and police uncover a terrifying communist bomb plot aimed at sparking civil war. With extremism rising, is Weimar democracy heading for disaster?
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Fundraising is much tougher for Democrats right now … and they’re not coping well
It’s not just Canadian politicians getting driven completely insane by the Bad Orange Man’s antics — he’s even doing it to his domestic opponents in the Democratic party as well:
“REMINDER: It Is Offensive And Possibly Illegal To Photoshop Anything On These Democrats’ Signs That Would Make Them Look Foolish.
The Babylon Bee.
Kansas City Star:
Democrats Suffer Blow Ahead of Senate Elections
It’s a goddamn slide show, but as it might be amusing I shall wade in. The things I do for you people …
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen’s retirement is expected to significantly impact the Democratic Party’s prospects for the upcoming Senate elections, amplifying pressure on Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY). The party’s challenges ahead have heightened with the departures of Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI) and Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN). Democrats must regain four seats to reclaim the majority.
It sure looks like the Donks are planning to get clobbered in 2026. Or, more likely, they anticipate a series of bruising primary fights as the old grift-and-grin Democrats are challenged by True Believers, because as HGG has taught us — credit where it’s due — SJWs always double down. Batshit insanity is the hill they’ve chosen to die on — Trump keeps handing them 80/20 issues, and they keep jumping on the 20 with both feet.
CNN’s Chris Cillizza recently noted the Party’s challenges in the upcoming Senate elections. With the need for a net gain of four seats, Cillizza expressed concern over potential financial limitations that may hinder effective campaigning.
Yes. “Financial limitations”. Democrat donors are stupid — if they weren’t, they wouldn’t be Democrats — but even they can see that 80 is way, way bigger than 20.
Oh, and also: It doesn’t help that you’re openly, gleefully endorsing no-shit terrorism against Tesla dealerships — and drivers! — calling for Musk’s assassination, and so on. It’s a bad look in general, and a bad look in particular, because now the guys with the big checkbooks are wondering if that kind of thing won’t happen to them if they get crosswise with the most lunatic members of the lunatic fringe (hint: It will. As the scorpion said to the frog: can’t be ‘elped, mate, it’s me nature).
Cillizza said, “The money that gets spent there playing defense, just to hold Democratic seats, means money that doesn’t get spent playing offense in, let’s say, a state like Ohio, where Democrats are trying to recruit Sherrod Brown, the former senator, to take on John Huston, the appointed Republican senator.”
Yes, a dwindling asset pool forces those kinds of choices. It also doesn’t help that you keep going back to the well like that. One assumes there’s a reason Sherrod Brown is a former senator. Do you have no one else?
Haha, just kidding, obviously you don’t have anyone else. That’s one of the biggest problems with gerontocracy — the Groovy Fossils are going to have to be carried out at room temperature, so anyone with anything on the ball has been giving Government a pass since the 1980s. Trump went around the Official GOP for lots of reasons, but not the least of them was: he had to. They have the same gerontocracy problem as the other side of the Uniparty. It’s turtles all the way down.
Cillizza concluded, “I just do not see it. I don’t see the money there. I don’t see the energy there. I don’t see the candidates there to expand the playing field”.
It won’t be for lack of trying, though. You’ve still got The Media in your pocket, and they can still do some damage. You’ll never get to the 80 side of those 80/20 issues, but you might get it to 50/50 — as has been done with abortion, gay “marriage”, and so on. On the other hand, those took 40, 50 years, and The Media hadn’t totally pissed away all its credibility back then. It’s a real corner you’ve backed yourselves into,
guysgalspersyns.It also doesn’t help that you’re stupid:
Democrats have identified potential pickup opportunities in Maine and North Carolina, targeting Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC).
Holy breakdancing Buddha, why would you target them? Thom Tillis is the very definition of “RINO”; Collins is a Leftist, full stop. The next time they vote against the Democrats on any issue of substance will be the first time they’ve ever done it. It’s as predictable as sunrise, so much so that it’s a joke to anyone right of Mao — the GOP officially has X number of seats, minus Collins and Murkowski.
Vulnerabilities among current incumbents, especially Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA), have added to the party’s challenges.
Oh, don’t worry about it — the GOP will find some way to throw it. Georgia, Georgia … hey, what’s Herschel Walker up to these days? Think he’s up for another run? Why not parachute in Alan Keyes or Ben Carson? They’re still alive, right? What about “Nikki” “Haley”? She’s gotta keep her arm loose for the 2028 primaries …
Some Democrats have remained optimistic despite the hurdles. Discussions have included potential candidates such as Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI) and State Sen. Mallory McMorrow (D-MI) for key races. New Hampshire Democrats have prepared for competitive primaries, with Rep. Chris Pappas (D-NH) considering a bid for Shaheen’s seat.
As we know, when it comes to crime 13 does 50. When it comes to Leftism, though, it’s more like 20 does 100, and there’s no better illustration than New Hampshire. It should be the reddest state in the union, and people who live there tell me it really is… except for their Congresscritters, because the good people of New Hampshire didn’t shoot every Masshole they could catch. The fine folks in Oregon, Colorado, and (soon enough) Texas know what I mean — y’all didn’t introduce migrating Californians to wood chippers when you had the chance.
Allen & Wheelock Lipfire Navy Revolver
Forgotten Weapons
Published 12 Apr 2015Not all companies responded in the same way to the development of cartridge revolvers and the Rollin White patent. Allen & Wheelock, for example, decided to simply ignore the patent and make revolvers for their proprietary lipfire cartridges (fairly similar to rimfire) while relying on their lawyers to delay the anticipated patent infringement suit for as long as possible. Ultimately it took 4 years for Rollin White and S&W to gain a legal injunction against them, and when that did happen they were ready and converted their production to percussion revolvers of the same basic type. This particular piece is a .36 caliber (“Navy”) version for the lipfire round, which have been since converted to use either lipfire or more common rimfire ammunition.
QotD: The Dunbar Number in the ivory tower
Leave your logical brain aside for a second — I’ll pause, to let you pound as many shots as necessary — and think like a chick. Declining enrollment numbers are just a line on a graph. Indeed, the students themselves are mostly an abstraction — professors hate teaching and avoid it whenever possible, which, thanks to grad students, research sabbaticals, and the like, is fairly often. But that radical-even-by-academic-standards lesbian? She’s right there. All the time.
If you’ve never been inside the ivory gulag, it’s hard to convey just how tiny and all-encompassing that world is, but I’ll try. Imagine you’re just out of school and living with two roomies (for the one or two young folks who might still remain among the readership: It was once considered a good thing to move away from home, so much so that even if they had the opportunity to live in Mom’s basement after graduation — even if it would make great financial sense to do so — young folks would endure quite a bit of deprivation in order to make their own way in the world. This often necessitated living in crappy apartments in a dodgy part of town with one or more roommates, for several years). Your roomies do what young guys do — sometimes their girlfriends move in; sometimes they move out; sometimes their friends crash on the couch — but here’s the kicker: Everyone involved does the same job at the same company, such that you’re effectively always at work. Anything you do at “home” gets brought into the office, because everyone you live with — and everyone you could potentially ever live with — is there.
Imagine living life like that. That’s the ivory tower.
Severian, “The Dunbar Problem”, Founding Questions, 2021-10-06.
March 21, 2025
The Shocking Dress That Sparked Global Outrage! – W2W 13 – 1947 Q3
TimeGhost History
Published 19 Mar 2025In 1947, Christian Dior stunned the world by introducing his controversial “New Look”. With luxurious dresses and ultra-feminine silhouettes, Dior’s designs ignited fierce debates about gender roles, societal values, and post-war extravagance. While some saw his collection as a welcome return to elegance, others viewed it as an insult during times of austerity. Was Dior celebrating beauty or setting women’s progress back decades?
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Apparently the US Constitution elevates the judiciary over the other branches of government
Chris Bray on recent innovative judicial activism to constrain the evil machinations of the Bad Orange Man:
It won’t be news to anyone that the federal judiciary has decided Donald Trump has no authority as President of the United States but to serve and protect the status quo, absolutely without deviation. Change is unconstitutional. Policy is unconstitutional. But even by that standard, today has been very special.
Without digging into all the details about everything, skim your way through a single judicial decision to begin to see what’s happening: the decision from District Court Judge Ana Reyes, ordering the Department of Defense to allow the continued service of transgender military personnel. You can click here to read it, or open the PDF file below.
This is not a judicial decision. I mean, it is a judicial decision, but it doesn’t represent judicial culture or a judicial outlook. At all. It’s a bitchy schoolgirl essay about being fair and not being mean, with healthy doses of platitudinous foot stompery. Screenshot, bottom of page one and top of page two:
“Today, however, our military is stronger and our Nation is safer for the millions of such blanks (and all other persons) who serve.” Because she says so, is why. The old bigoted American military was very weak. I don’t remember: Did the old dumb bigots ever even win any wars or anything?
[…]
Our military is much stronger now than it was when gay and transgender service wasn’t warmly encouraged, the end. (Stomps foot.) It’s a TikTok video formatted to look like a, you know, a judge thing. You can even agree with the judge and see that she hasn’t made an argument. “Today, however, our military is stronger.” Like when we beat the Taliban, or all the other wars we’ve won lately. This is the declarative reality in which a thing becomes true because you type it.
Now, watch this. Watch Judge Ana Reyes roll right over herself without noticing that she’s doing it. You don’t have to read past page two to see this.
On page one, she characterizes the reasoning — the premise the administration advanced to forbid military service by transgender personnel: “Service by transgender persons is ‘inconsistent’ with this mission because they lack the ‘requisite warrior ethos’ to achieve ‘military excellence’.” That’s it, those mean monsters! That’s their whole reason! They said trans people can’t serve because of, I don’t know, some stupid ethos thing. What does that even mean?
Star Trek: Jobs, Money, and Replicators
Feral Historian
Published 14 Jun 2024So the Federation doesn’t use money and magic walls give you anything you ask for. What kind of economy are we really looking at here, and is some approximation of this possible without first having those replicators?
First we have to talk about what money is, what a job is (vs just being employed) and a little historical detour into modern efforts at Universal Basic Income. All of which lead to a very hypothetical look at how we might be able to build a rough approximation of a Star Trek economy in the near-term future.
This is all analysis and thought-experiment. I’m not necessarily endorsing any of these ideas, just bouncing things around for consideration.
00:00 Intro
01:00 Qualitatively Distinct Model
02:27 The Triple Revolution
05:00 Jobs ≠Employment
06:32 Universal Basic Income
11:35 Federation Credit
13:45 Impacts of Currency
15:16 Can We Really Do This?
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QotD: Gordon Brown and the “Gillian Duffy affair”
The linguistic chasm between Duffy and Brown spoke volumes about Labour’s turn away from its traditional working-class base. Yes, there was the word “bigot”, but, strikingly, that wasn’t the word that most offended Mrs Duffy. No, she was most horrified by Brown’s description of her as “that woman”. “The thing that upset me was the way he said ‘that woman'”, she said. “I come from the north and when you say ‘that woman’, it’s really not very nice. Why couldn’t he have just said ‘that lady’?”
One reason Brown probably didn’t say “lady” is because in the starched, aloof, technocratic world New Labour inhabited, and helped to create, the word “lady” had all but been banned as archaic and offensive in the early 2000s. Since the millennium, various public-sector bodies had made moves to prevent people from saying lady to refer to a woman. One college advised against using the word lady, as it is “no longer appropriate in the new century”. An NHS Trust instructed its workers that “lady” is “not universally accepted” and should thus be avoided. In saying “that woman”, Brown was unquestionably being dismissive — “that piece of trash” is what he really meant — but he was also speaking in the clipped, watchful, PC tones of an elite that might have only been 170 miles from Rochdale (take note, Guardian) but which was in another world entirely in terms of values, outlook, culture and language.
“I’m not ‘that woman'”, said Duffy, and in many ways this became the rebellious cry of the People’s Decade. She was pushing back against the elite’s denigration of her. Against its denigration of her identity (as a lady), of her right to express herself publicly (“it’s just ridiculous”, as Brown said of that very public encounter), and most importantly of her concerns, in particular on the issue of immigration and its relationship to the welfare state.
The Brown-Duffy stand-off at the start of the People’s Decade exposed the colossal clash of values that existed between the new political oligarchy represented by Brown, Blair and other New Labour / New Conservative machine politicians and the working-class heartlands of the country. To Duffy and millions of other people, the relationship between welfare and nationhood was of critical importance. That is fundamentally what she collared Brown about. There are “too many people now who are not vulnerable but they can claim [welfare]”, she said, before asking about immigration. Her suggestion, her focus on the issue of health, education and welfare and the question of who has access to these things and why, was a statement about citizenship, and about the role of welfare as a benefit of citizenship. But to Brown, as to virtually the entire political class, it was just bigotry. Concern about community, nationhood and the impact of immigration is just xenophobic Little Englandism in the minds of the new elites. This was the key achievement of 13 years of New Labour’s censorious, technocratic and highly middle-class rule — the reduction of fealty to the nation to a species of bigotry.
Brendan O’Neill, “The People’s Decade”, Spiked, 2019-12-27.
