Good column in The Irish Times today. What stuck out most to me is below.
"Whoever wins the next election faces a daunting task to jolt Britain out of its post-Brexit stasis. Its economic growth is anaemic while its national debt tops levels not seen in 60 years. Living standards are in the middle of their biggest two-year fall since the 1950s due to inflation. Infrastructure is creaking, industrial relations are sour and national morale is low after years of political psychodrama.
...
Bale says the nation’s postwar political cadence has always moved to the same beat, and it goes like this. The Conservatives get into power and do not spend enough on public services, which eventually crumble. Voters decide they want better services, and do not care so much that it will cost extra taxes. Labour gets in, diverts resources towards public services and uses taxes to pay for it. Then people get fed up paying the taxes, and turn to the Conservatives again to change the dial.
“And so on, and so on. In Britain we swing back and forth, again and again. In a way, we’re still broadly in that pattern now. The underlying dynamics remain the same,” he says.
...
Tomiwa Owolade recently wrote a book, This is Not America, in which he argued that US-style racial identity politics have been inappropriately imported into Britain via social media. A British man born in Nigeria who immigrated when he was a child, Owolade says his personal experience tells him “the vicious day-to-day racism” of the 60s and 70s is over in Britain.
“That is not to say that racism has completely disappeared,” he told The Irish Times. “But with racial violence, the US and UK are completely different countries. The US is a far more violent country anyway and because of its history of race and slavery, violence there tends to manifest itself in a racial way. But it is not the same here in Britain.”
Owolade says the problem is not how to integrate Black people into Britain, but to recognise that they are integrated already, in many avenues such as sport and politics: “The future is about trying to accommodate this fact. If a Black British person went to Africa, the most striking thing about them there would be that they are British, not that they are Black.”
Britain’s racial sin, insofar as he sees one, is to “homogenise” the experiences of people of different races. Owolade says white British people tend to, say, view Black Caribbean people and Black Africans as facing the same issues.
“But they do not. Black Caribbean boys, for example, are more than twice as likely to be excluded from school. Understanding these kinds of differences are crucial for fixing problems.”
No comments:
Post a Comment