Saturday 5 May 2012
Austerity
During the talk Rifkind made the point that, in both France
and the United Kingdom, there is no longer an ideological divide between the
major parties. As he sees it, since the collapse of communism, and disillusion
with socialism as an alternative, “we are all capitalists now”. While many
would dispute that, when you have two alternatives and one is demonstrably
unworkable, then you have no choice but to adopt the other. I’m not aware of anywhere
other than North Korea where a state controlled, centrally planned economy is
the order of the day, and if you don’t have that you must have some form of
market economy.
Poirier then made the point that the divide may well have
been replaced by those in favour of austerity measures, and those against.
Austerity is the new ideology. The alternative to this has to be a role for the
state, where it is not anti-business, but can reassert itself against the
markets and mitigate the worst effects of the harsh impact of market forces on
ordinary people. As Will Hutton said in his Guardian piece the other day, we
need a new kind of state, a smart state.
Sunday 9 October 2011
The Slap
The novel The Slap, by Christos Tsiolkas has been strongly recommended by reviewers, which phrases such as 'the must read novel of the summer. Well I've tried and just given up in despair after 200 pages. The basic premise of a split second act which polarises a community and tests friendships got my interest, but what a load of badly written tripe it turned out to be. I haven't found one character to be at all believable, and just haven't got the energy to go on. All the the characters are nasty caricatures, and seem to based on a strangely skewed view of the world. I remember a quote from John Irving which said all good novels need narrative momentum and an emotional engagement with the characters. The Slap has neither.
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