Read Part I of Jeremy’s piece (‘Falling Standards’) here.
Fetishising the amateur
Welcome to the Age of the Amateur. Qualified experts, specialists, practitioners operating within established, well-regulated trades; these professionals have had their day. True integrity and nous belong to the volunteer, the have-a-go hero.
Has Britain reached a state of permacrisis? The past five years have seen a nigh-on seamless succession of scandals and mishaps that have rocked public faith in the nation’s institutions.
In 1884 the prolific American inventor Thomas Edison built the world’s first industrial research laboratory at Menlo Park in New Jersey. The centre applied Fordist mass production techniques to the task of innovation, and was soon generating a rapid conveyer belt of new ideas for trial and testing.
Read the first part of Jeremy’s argument here.
One rainy winter’s afternoon a few years ago, I found myself in a large 19th century townhouse in the chic 17th arrondissement of Paris, interviewing a Gaullist city councillor about the upcoming European elections.
‘Vous verrez, Antoine; dans quelques années ils feront comme si je n’avais jamais existé…’ (‘You’ll see, Antoine; in a few years they’ll act as if I never existed…’) remarks the dying President Mitterrand to his idealistic young biographer in the Robert Guédiguian film Le Promeneur du Champs de Mars.
Only a New Yorker can ‘bustle’ whilst waiting, stationary, at the traffic lights… It’s a drizzly April dawn in New York City, but the city’s famed frenetic energy is already on display.
When David Cameron flew out to Asia last week, he did so on a Boeing 474 owned by Sonangol, the Angolan state oil company.
Things used to be so simple. It was the 1990s: the Cold War was over, capitalism had won; its victory synonymous with the onward march of globalisation. The end of history was declared. The Bretton Woods institutions – the IMF, the World Bank – had emerged as the champions of the monetarist consensus.
‘Radical Britain’ they called it. Three months into the 2010-15 parliament, The Economist displayed on its cover the image of David Cameron in profile; a punk-rock, Union Jack-coloured Mohawk sprouting from his neatly-combed brow. The background: Sex Pistols yellow.
Few elements of Britain’s tax code could reasonably be described as ‘totemic’. But the debate over the 50p top rate of income tax has, for better or worse, become much more than a question of costs and benefits. It has become an emblem.
For many in Labour, it is a crucial instrument of tax justice for the 99% of the population who earn under £150,000.