Variant, issue 29, Summer 2007

Contents
Who Are You to tell me to Question Authority?
Radical education in a ‘proto-fascist’ era
Benjamin Franks

Closed Circuit Tunnel Vision
Tom Jennings

Comic & Zine Reviews
Mark Pawson

‘Reframing the Poverty Debate’ the New Labour Way
Gerry Mooney

The Agreed Truth & The Real Truth: The New Northern Ireland
Liam O’Ruairc

Multiple Agendas, Impossible Dialogues: Where Irish Studies and History of Art Meet
Lucy Cotter

Loving Art
Tim Stott

Art School and the Old Grey Cardigan Test
Mick Wilson

The Critique of Everyday Life and Cultural Democracy
Alex Law

Killing Culture (Softly)
Stephen Dawber

O Rose, thou art sick!
Outsourcing Glasgow’s Cultural & Leisure Services

Adult Educators, Adult Education and Progressive Social Movements
Gordon Asher interviews Stephen Brookfield

Front cover:
Jonathan Owen and Neil Grassie
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Who Are You to tell me to Question Authority?
Radical education in a ‘proto-fascist’ era
Benjamin Franks

Against the New Authoritarianism: Politics after Abu Ghraib
Henry Giroux
Arbeiter Ring Publishing
Winnipeg, Canada
2005, pp. 198
ISBN: 1894037235

Henry Giroux is a highly prolific radical educationalist who has authored over 40 books. Many of his works apply the analytical insights of Critical Theory (a synonym for the Frankfurt School of unorthodox Marxists such as Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse) to highlight the impact of the cultural industries on children’s learning. In Against the New Authoritarianism, Giroux returns to one of the central concerns of the Frankfurt School: the rise of fascism within liberal democratic societies.
The book has two main hypotheses, which are interrelated. The first is that under the Presidency of George W. Bush, the United States is approaching a proto-fascist state; the second that a critical education is a vital strategy for resisting such developments. The first thesis is by far the most controversial, for the classification of states into particular categories has had far-reaching policy implications. The academic Jeanne Kirkpatrick, a policy advisor to Ronald Reagan, divided non-democracies into two types, those acceptable ‘authoritarian’ states who the US should support and unacceptable ‘evil’ / ‘totalitarian’ states who must be actively undermined.¹ Underneath the rhetoric, the only difference between the two was that ‘totalitarian’ states had an official policy of ‘communism’ or ‘socialism’ and a more redistributive economy, whilst the merely ‘authoritarian’, whilst having no better human rights records (and in many cases worse), were favourably disposed towards US investment. However, this division between acceptable ‘authoritarian’ and unacceptable ‘totalitarian’ regimes not only sought to justify the military and diplomatic manoeuvres of the US in the 1980s, but also helped to shape them. A similar if more simplistic division shapes Bush’s foreign policy, with similarly calamitous consequences.
So when Giroux uses the terms ‘proto-fascist’ and ‘fascism’, he is not merely employing them in the lazy rhetorical way to stand for something merely ‘objectionable’. Giroux is well aware of the political ramifications of these descriptors for the current US regime, and defends their application against likely critics from the right and soft-left. In order to pre-empt these replies, Giroux clarifies that in using the term he is not suggesting that the United States is literally akin to previous historical examples of fascist regimes. The new authoritarianism is not arriving in swastika emblazoned brown shirts; instead, it uses the discourse of democracy, even when it undermines it. Thus in the acknowledged footsteps of novelist-activist Arundhati Roy, political theorist Sheldon Wolin and American former Middle Eastern journalist Chris Hedges, Giroux sees the new fascism as embodied within democratic institutions, rather than burning them down. So too the new fascist state has a different relationship to the economy: instead of the state incorporating private business (Mussolini), or subordinating industries to the will of the party-state (Hitler), private institutions have taken over the democratic apparatus of government (pp. 17-21).
The economic developments within the United States since the initial rise of fascism in the early twentieth century, and its now unique position in late-modernity as an unchallenged military power, means that the old checklist characteristics of fascism, such as that employed by Zbiginiew Brzezinski (former policy hawk to the Carter administration) no longer apply. Originally, the characteristics of fascism included an official ideology; a single mass party – typically led by a single person; a system of terror, organised through a political party; monopoly control of communications; sole control of weapons and central control of the economy. These seem absent, or at least underdeveloped, in the US. Giroux acknowledges this, and persuasively argues that instead proto-fascism is formed by a different set of conditions, but shares at least one core element of traditional fascism – a concentration in the hands of the dominant class and away from the broad mass of people (pp. 34-37).
Giroux draws out eight central elements of the new authoritarianism: first, reactionary modernism, in which an alliance of free-marketeers, extremist evangelical Christians and neo-conservatives build a sustained social order based upon, and perpetuating, class, gender and ethnic hierarchies (pp. 37-38). The second feature is the corporatization of civil society, in which the democratic social spaces where people create their own social relationships are instead placed into service for the business sector and the administrative arm of the state. Without these spaces, “it becomes more difficult for individuals to imagine themselves as political agents or to understand the necessity for developing a discourse capable of defending civic institutions” (p. 39). As a result of this enclosure of communal fora, there are fewer avenues for constructing alternative values and social practices to those laid down by the dominant class (pp. 37-40).
The third feature of proto-fascism is the developing discourse of patriotism and nationalism and the culture of fear that supports it. A continual battery of jingoism on the news media, which includes the fluttering flags of the media idents, the label badges of the TV newsreaders, and the marginalisation or silencing of governmental critics as ‘unpatriotic’, are indicative of the strong current of nationalism used to bolster domestic and foreign policy (pp. 40-42). This incessant promotion of a militarised, chauvinistic discourse goes alongside a fourth characteristic: that of control of mass media through a combination of oligarchical corporate ownership and significant state regulation. Giroux accuses G. W. Bush’s executive of going further than any previous government in intertwining his administration with the mass media and manipulating the Fourth Estate.² The current leadership have altered legislation to create unchallengeable media conglomerates whose interests and values are inevitably those of economic liberalism, paying journalists to appear objective whilst promoting government policy; hiring actors to pretend to be news reporters to ask prepared questions of officials and creating fake news programs that carry government propaganda and distributing them to unwitting local television channels as video news (pp. 43-46). This deterioration in journalism has an impact on the fifth element – the rise of an Orwellian version of Newspeak.
Critical discourse is altered such that policy impacts are disguised, their intentions concealed and rigorous evaluation discouraged. Amongst the examples Giroux identifies are the deliberate misuse of terms such as ‘reform’ and ‘compassionate’, the packaging of policies which allow industries to freely pollute as ‘Clear Skies’ legislation, calling estate tax on multimillionaires ‘death taxes’ and describing supporters of redistributive taxation as akin to the ‘Nazis’. Other Orwellian techniques include the fabrication of the historical record: for example denying that assertions made prior to, and in support of, the Iraq War were ever stated (pp. 47-51). In such circumstances the ability to hold the actions of the powerful to account, or even conceive of a contrary position, becomes restricted.
The sixth element of US proto-fascism is the collapse of the separation of church and state. Rather than the tenets of democracy justifying governmental decisions, appeals are made to unknowable deities and their institutional supporters. The growing use of faith-based institutions in state provision further lessens critical thinking and democratic discourse (pp. 53-61). The lessening of democratic guarantees in order to pursue millennial goals is also responsible for the overt governmental approval of torture in the war against terrorism (p. 117).
The final two features are the ones Giroux spends greater time on discussing – Militarization at home and abroad and the replacement of democratic institutions by neo-liberal ones. Militarization begins to shape every area of public life, and acts as cause and justification for the maintenance of entrenched hierarchies, the intensification of labour, a cultural politics based on machismo and the entry of military structures into civil society. The extent and influence of the armed forces in the United States is exemplified in George Monbiot’s quoted findings: “[the US is] now spending as much on war as it is on education, public health, housing, employment, pensions, food aid and welfare put together” (p. 65). It is no wonder, with such enormous sums of money available, that universities prioritise research for defence departments over social research and productive learning for students (p. 68). Nor should it be thought that the US is unique in this regard: Glasgow University for instance, like many other HE institutions, has spent more in recent years on promoting its Aerospace, Defence and Security Markets programmes (thanks to investment by Scottish Enterprise) than it allocated to specialist student recruitment for (its now threatened) Liberal Arts Campus in Dumfries.³
This intercession of militarized practices into other aspects of state and society, along with the closure of critical thinking and the concentration on patriotic discourse, is viewed almost entirely positively by broad sections of US society, in which the armed services can be seen to do no wrong (p. 66). Whilst John Kerry and John McCain’s candidatures for Office were not explicitly mentioned, would be indicative of the movement of a militarized ideology gaining precedence. Much of Kerry’s original electoral appeal was, supposedly, his war record, a record that the Republican campaign felt would resonate with the electorate unless it was systematically traduced, whilst absurdly promoting Bush, as a war hero. Thus, being a loyal member of the military engaged in a disastrous, destructive imperial adventure is presented by the US’s two main parties as a positive electoral asset.
Militarization with its corresponding social practices based on hierarchy, unquestioning obedience, uniformity and security inform the social practices in other state institutions. The limited constitutional rights guaranteed in a classical liberal democracy are overturned in favour of detention without trial, military courts and suspension of civil liberties. Cultural activities, such as fashion, video-games and children’s toys are embedded with militaristic values, and used from an early age to enamour youth to joining the armed forces (pp. 76-80). Greater stress on security, and fear of any abhorrent behaviour, has led to harsh punishments even for minor infractions. Schools, in particular, now prepare pupils for the proto-fascist future with draconian policing and ever greater surveillance, such as the “early morning drug-sweep at Stratford High School [in which] when the police arrived, they drew guns on students, handcuffed them and made them face the wall. No drugs were found in the raid” (p. 69).
The final feature of Giroux’s eight point characterisation of US proto-fascism is the replacement of democratic practices with neo-liberal economic structures. Welfare state provision is dismantled in favour of support for large corporations, and spaces in civil society not primarily based on extraction of surplus value are encroached upon by corporations. The end result is that “Neo-liberalism empties the public treasury, privatizes formerly public services, limits the vocabulary and imagery available to recognize anti-democratic forms of power, and reinforces narrow models of individual agency” (p. 91). Capitalism encloses the economic commons, whilst restricting individual imagination to desires based on commodity consumption.
Whilst the descriptions of the closure of critical space in the US in the years immediately after the Iraqi invasion are convincingly distressing, there are a number of areas where Giroux’s analysis is questionable. Some are easily dealt with – such as the criticism that there is little explanatory grounding as to why these eight characteristics rather than those of Brzezinski, or indeed the ten selected by Naomi Wolf,⁴ are the pertinent measures of proto-fascism. Are these features not just an arbitrary selection of traditional gripes about a successful conservative, democratic society? A reply might be that the features Giroux highlights individually not only represent the concentration of power such that creative non-hierarchical social relations are harder to achieve and imagine, but collectively they represent a set of almost impenetrable apparatuses of domination. The horrific amalgamation of these elements seems to be collectively embraced in Iraq, and in particular the torture of detainees at Abu Ghraib, which are now immortalised in the “now-infamous photos” (p. 111).
The construction of the images reflects the compositors’ values – a glorified militarised western supremacism, humiliating in the name of security the non-Christian enemy. Acts are carried out in some instances, not by military personnel, but their neo-liberal surrogates, private contractors (or mercenaries) who therefore evade even the few military legal structures on the treatment of prisoners (pp.117-21). The mainstream US media’s initial Orwellian response was to ignore or excuse the torture of suspects (p. 123). The pictures were framed like pornography – that individualised, commodified version of sex – and as such the images from Abu Ghraib provide Giroux with a significant set of proto-fascist texts for discussing the wider social processes that produced them.
Another likely avenue of criticism is that Giroux identifies neo-liberalism as not only being compatible with fascism, but a necessary feature of the new authoritarianism. This is highly controversial, as the orthodoxy of conservative and liberal opinion, propagated by influential theorists like Kirkpatrick, Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, Karl Popper and Roger Scruton, is that the determining feature of totalitarianism was state intervention in the economy.⁵ These opinion-formers regarded the institution of private property as a bulwark against the excessive concentration of powers in the state. Economic liberalism is represented as the true freedom and thus presented as the polar opposite of authoritarianism. Yet economic liberalism provides no such defence against state power. It is predicated on enforceable contracts, which require state functions – and rather than distributing power, neo-liberalism moves towards monopolisation of the economy.⁶ Further, the values of the market economy, as Giroux points out, become increasingly dominant, thereby excluding all other principles based on different, more humane, models of productive, dignified social relationships.
Potentially stronger criticisms of Giroux’s text lie precisely in his underlying hypothesis concerning the totalising power of neo-conservatism. Giroux shares with the members of the Frankfurt School, who he approvingly cites, a pessimistic and almost wholly determined account of future social developments, in which the prognosis for alternatives to dominant powers looks bleak. Giroux, like Adorno and Marcuse, fears that we are approaching a one-dimensional future composed of intellectually stunted individuals, who are manipulated by the cultural industries, endorse militarised social hierarchies and engage in relationships conceived of only in terms of market-values. This grim dystopia is subject to continual monitoring by an evermore technologically-equipped police and legitimised by an increasingly subservient, partisan and trivial media. However, whilst Giroux’s account of growing authoritarianism is convincingly expressed, it is potentially disempowering, as it would suggest little space for opposition.
It is not simply wishful thinking to suggest that the existing power structures are neither as complete nor as impervious as Giroux’s account would suggest. Whilst the old media of radio, film and television are increasingly dominated by a few giant corporations (p.46), new technologies have opened access to dissident voices and created new forms of communication and organisation. Whilst the military are extending their reach into greater areas of social and political life, and intervening in greater force throughout the globe, resistance to military discipline is also arising, with fewer willing to join the army in both the US and UK.⁷ Bush’s long term military objectives look increasingly unfeasible as Peter Schoomaker, the former US Chief of Staff, told Congress on December 15, 2006 that even the existing deployment policy is looking increasingly ‘untenable’.⁸ The ‘overstretch’ of military resources is matched by an economy incapable of fulfilling its primary neo-conservative goals of low taxation, sound national finances and extensive military interventions. Whilst this is not to suggest that the US is on the point of financial implosion, the transition to a fully proto-fascist state is unlikely to be seamless or certain.
Giroux’s preferred form of resistance is radical education. The photographs from Abu Ghraib were iconic not just in their encapsulation of proto-fascism, but in their public pedagogic role. Their prominence highlighted the many different sites of interpretation, as Giroux rightly stresses, there is no single way to interpret a photograph, however potent the depiction. The ability to interpret an image requires an ongoing process by a critical citizenry capable of identifying the methods by which a picture’s meanings are constructed (p. 135). Giroux’s critical pedagogy overtly borrows from Adorno’s essay ‘Education After Auschwitz’, and proposes “modes of education that produce critical, engaging and free minds” (p. 141). But herein lies one of the flaws with the text: Giroux never spells out what sorts of existing institutions and social practices are practical models of this critical pedagogy. Thus, he does not indicate what methods he finds appropriate in resisting the proto-fascist onslaught nor how merely interpreting images critically would fundamentally contest hierarchical power-relationships.
Questions arise as to the adequacy of his response to the totalising threat he identifies in the main section of the book. Clearly existing academic institutions in the US are barely adequate given the campaigns against dissident academics led by David Horowitz (p.143). Giroux recounts in the final chapter, an interview conducted by Sina Rahmani, his own flight from the prestigious Penn State University to McMaster University in Canada because of managerial harassment following his public criticisms of Penn’s involvement in military research (p. 186). But whilst Giroux recognises that education is far wider than what takes place in institutions of learning there is no account of what practical forms these take. Nor does Giroux give an account of why a critical pedagogy would take priority over informed aesthetic or ethical practices. Such a concentration on education would appear to prioritise those who already have (by virtue of luck or social circumstance) an already existing expertise in critical thinking, risking an oppressive power-relationship in which the expert drills the student into rigorous assessment. This lapse into the role of the strident instructor demanding the correct form of radical response, occasionally appears in Giroux’s text: “within the boundaries of critical education, students have to learn the skills and knowledge to narrate their own stories [and] resist the fragmentation and seductions of market ideologies” (p. 155). Woe betide the student who prefers to narrate the story of the person sitting next to them, or fails to measure up to the ‘educators’ standard of critical evaluation.
These are, however, minor problems. Against the New Authoritarianism is a highly readable, passionate and well-researched polemic against the nexus of hierarchical institutions that have formed in the United States. It addresses the multifaceted interactions between military, media, government and education that constitute much of modern North America and bravely identifies the threat of authoritarianism.

Notes
1 Kirkpatrick, J. (1979), ‘Dictatorships and Double Standards’, Commentary, November 1979, available on line at <http://www.commentarymagazine.com/cm/main/viewArticle.aip?id=6189> last accessed 26 April 2007.
2 The term Fourth Estate refers to the press, both in its explicit capacity of advocacy and in its implicit ability to frame political issues.
3 With admirable openness Glasgow University’s ‘ADS Programme: Your Key to the Aerospace, Defence and Security Markets...’ is available online at <http://www.gla.ac.uk/ads/>, last accessed 25 April 2007. Information on the Save Glasgow University at Crichton campaign is available at <http://www.geocities.com/glasgow_at_crichton/>, last accessed 25 April, 2007.
4 N. Wolf, ‘Fascist Steps’, The Guardian, G2, April 24, 2007, pp. 4-11
5 K. Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (Routledge: 2002); R. Scruton , Thinkers of the New Left (Claridge: 1998); L. von Mises, Human Action (W. Hodge: 1949); F. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Routledge: 2002).
6 For instance one company, Tesco’s, provides 31% of all groceries bought in the UK, collectively the main supermarket chains account for nearly 80% of Britain’s total grocery spend. ‘Tesco set to unveil £2.5bn profit’, Sunday, 15 April 2007, <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6557187.stm>, last accessed 24 April 2007; J. Blythman, Shopped: The shocking power of British supermarkets (Harper Perennial: 2005): p. 16; pp. 303-04; see too Corporate Watch, What’s Wrong With Supermarkets, fifth edition (Corporate Watch: 2006).
7 C. Myrie ‘US recruitment hit by Iraq effect’, BBC Online, Wednesday, 27 July 2005 <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4722445.stm>, last accessed 25 April 2007; ‘Recruitment age for Army raised’, BBC Online, Saturday, 6 January 2007, <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6236345.stm>, last accessed 25 April 2007 and ‘Military “faces retention crisis”’, BBC Online, <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6233989.stm>, last accessed 25 April, 2007.
8 D. Lyon ‘How the US plans to “retake” Baghdad’, BBC Online, Thursday, 8 March 2007, <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/6370109.stm>, last accessed 25 April 2007.

Benjamin Franks
University of Glasgow Crichton Campus
Dumfries DG1 4ZL
b.franks@crichton.gla.ac.uk

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Closed Circuit Tunnel Vision
Tom Jennings

Red Road, 2006, United Kingdom / Denmark, 113 mins
Director, Andrea Arnold; Producer, Carrie Comerford

Concern over the use of information gathered by governments about their citizens has a long history, and the increasing sophistication of surveillance that matches the complexity of state and private institutions has been fertile ground for a variety of artistic, philosophical and political projects. The most prominent theme is the state’s proclivity for interfering in everyday life, purportedly in the public interest of social cohesion and stability but in practice for the benefit of those with power seeking more of the same. The cinema of paranoia grossly oversimplifies such scenarios, including Fritz Lang’s Dr Mabuse films of the 1920s, Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), 1984 (dir. Michael Anderson, 1956), Winter Kills (William Richert, 1979), a 1984 remake (Michael Radford, 1984), Enemy of the State (Tony Scott, 1998), and now the tired bourgeois triumphalism of The Lives of Others (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2006). Recent experimental films such as Unrequited Love (Chris Petit, 2005) and Hidden (Michael Haneke, 2005) develop the phenomenology of persecution to some extent, but a naïve belief that in the virtual omnipotence achieved by cumulative observation is still the rule – so that individual resistance to oppression means seeking out loopholes, weak points and blind spots in the blanket coverage of objective data.
Given that independent and arthouse cinema-makers claim to be deconstructing the voyeuristic fantasies masquerading as reality in mainstream cinema, it may seem surprising that the effectiveness of surveillance technology itself in delivering truth is rarely interrogated. An exception here is Coppola’s The Conversation (1974) that notably achieved this, despite restricting itself to the conspiratorial recording of voices and professional, expert and elite agendas. However, fictional treatments have failed to imagine the wider social and cultural significance of developments that may well lead to the current proliferation of high-resolution cameras that loom over urban areas across the UK becoming progressively integrated with ID card systems and comprehensive national databases (which will be hawked around for corporate scrutiny and input). Worse, despite the saturation coverage already offered by one-fifth of the world’s CCTV units trained on us in the UK, some local councils already fit ex-military employees with headset versions to roam dodgy areas – yet the local opposition to this creeping authoritarianism goes little further than queasily rehearsing outdated Orwellian pieties or lofty liberal abstractions concerning privacy.¹
In this context, perhaps Andrea Arnold’s Red Road, a Glasgow-set suspense thriller, was awarded the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival last year partly in recognition of its nerve in attempting to transcend cliché and liberal platitudes. It can’t have hurt that it is also an immensely impressive, ambitious, intelligent and idiosyncratic film, with a complex structure, taut pace, powerful script, convincing characterisations, evocative design, vivid photography, astute direction, and compelling performances. Red Road originates in Lars von Trier’s post-Dogme Advance Party project, which involved Lone Scherfig and Anders Thomas Jensen (undeterred by the failure of a similar concept in Lucas Belvaux’s Trilogy) outlining a set of characters to be played by the same actors in three low-budget DV features in different genres by novice writer-directors. Red Road depicts Jackie (Kate Dickie), a widow in her thirties working as a low-paid CCTV operative alerting emergency services to incidents in the north of the city. Shunning family and friends since her bereavement, her drab, hermit’s life seems to provide no pleasure beyond an occasional flickering smile when the quirks of ordinary folk on-screen interrupt her scanning for stabbings and muggings.
Her robotic routine is disrupted when she spots the man responsible for the deaths of her husband and young child. Clyde (Tony Curran) has been paroled early for good behaviour, and Jackie’s subsequent grim, single-minded, remote pursuit soon turns to stalking. He shares a high-rise flat on the run-down Red Road with disturbed youngsters Stevie (Martin Compston) and April (Natalie Press), with whom Jackie cultivates relationships after blagging her way into a party there. After several meetings she has sex with Clyde, whereupon her plan is revealed as she leaves, rips her face and clothes and accuses him of rape. However, Stevie tracks her home and confronts her but then accepts her explanation. Also now aware of Clyde’s efforts to connect with his own teenage daughter, Jackie’s demonising hatred dissolves along with her own character armour, and she drops the charges. Together they visit the accident site where his regret, combined with a determined positivity – despite worse prospects than her – leads her to reconcile with the in-laws, scatter the loved-ones’ ashes and at last contemplate a future.

In Full View
Arnold has consistently emphasised her intention to question the ramifications of surveillance in Britain (having wanted to make a documentary on the subject before being offered Red Road). She explains the apparent acceptance of the state’s intrusiveness in terms of “our national psyche” – a reference point which, beyond hysterical hyperbole, has been absent from debate on the subject on current affairs programmes.² Similarly, the critical reception of the film tended to emphasise Jackie’s personal psychological and social trajectory and her individual pathology – with the paranoid snooping seen only as convenient metaphor and instrument for its expression. But interpreting this film as a tale of the neurotic armed with the power of a million eyes is to miss the point of this story’s deconstruction of the unglamorous, supposedly benign perspective of those trying to pre-empt street violence. Juggling conventions from several film genres, the theme here is the inherent unreliability of suspicious monitoring as a mode of understanding that can lead to action and power.
The Advance Party character sketch limited itself to describing Jackie as “cool and aloof because of a terrible loss she has suffered … The world has been insanely unfair to her”. However, while the camera shadows her claustrophobically when not taking her point of view, information about her subjectivity, motives and backstory is scrupulously withheld (reminiscent of the contemporary cinematic naturalism, for example, of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne). Forcing viewers to guess who she is and what she’s up to mimics the process of interpreting CCTV images, using only sequences of trivial, isolated or arbitrary visual clues. Prior experience in similar contexts naturally inflects and colours any conclusions drawn, and expectations and predictions will further depend on resonances with our personal preconceptions, prejudices and predilections. Deep-seated anxiety or biographical trauma predispose us to associate victims with our own pain and suspects with fear or anger – but when feedback from direct interaction is not available, reality cannot be tested against the attributes unconsciously projected on to others, because they derive from one’s own preoccupations.
So, this damaged protagonist is far from proactively powerful at the hub of the panopticon. She is functionally impotent – moved only by an occasional remote compassion (for example, for a bloke with a sick bulldog or a dancing office-cleaner), prompting isolated expressions of human warmth which establish our sympathy for her numbly repetitive existence. A similarly mundane event triggers the unfolding drama. Noticing the possibly sinister pursuit of a girl on to waste ground, Jackie’s anxieties turn to mild arousal once consensual sex ensues, quickly followed by shock at recognising Clyde. Then, galvanised by imagining that her privileged gaze promises mastery over him, exposing herself to danger in his real world eventually proves to be a hollow victory. Revenge is redundant once its quarry is humanised by the yearning for intimacy they share and now that her anguish need no longer be suppressed. By implication, the detached overview of everyday life actually prevents development, and offers protection only by sustaining a safe, habitual alienation.
However, while the surface content of the narrative surely echoes the process of dealing with loss – from grief, fixation, anger, and melancholy to re-engagement with the world – there is no straightforward submission to a simplistic counselling formulae: this mourner’s pain is certainly not “managed”. Instead, she compulsively dismantles her own depressive defenses, casting off vulnerability for and overconfident recklessness and moving from self-hatred to the brink of self-destruction. In the process, hitherto dormant energies of aggression and libido are mobilised which couple capriciously to propel Jackie towards a variety of climaxes. The denouement, nevertheless, may seem a little anti-climactic, and too comfortingly tidy (perhaps relating to the need to leave the characters intact for the next two Advance Party efforts). Even then, that Jackie’s manic brazenness culminates in an uplifting, redemptive ending is as counter intuitive for her as it is for us. The narrative seams mined on the way seduced us into expecting the worst (as in the CCTV orientation), so that evidence of caring, empathy, or collective goodwill is easily discounted or uneasily misinterpreted in the inexorable gravity of violent or tragic destiny.
Precedents here for Red Road are furnished by cinema subgenres, such as rape revenge thrillers and recent, more sophisticated explorations of women’s autonomy and sexual agency, like Carinne Adler’s Under The Skin (1997), Jane Campion’s In The Cut (2003) and Catherine Breillat’s post-feminist brutalism from Romance (1999) to The Anatomy of Hell (2003). But while Red Road’s tantalising plot flirts with exploitation, and stylistic flourishes both encourage and thwart cod-psychoanalysis, a thoroughgoing ambiguity built into imagery and character undermines the temptation towards universalising mythology in favour of social-realist specificity. So Jackie’s reluctant contact with family establishes her traditional working-class background – her pursuit of Clyde into a seedy world was not slumming it: she is neither excited nor disgusted, nor daunted by a bit of rough (linguistically or sexually). The affair conducted fortnightly in the vehicle of a married van driver reinforces her lack of prudishness, and counterpoints her repulsion from and attraction to Clyde. His feral, expressive, uninhibited sexuality embodies an honest, generous curiosity that belies the squalor of his situation, and which, on intimate knowledge, helps bring about a re-orientation toward her misery as those in his milieu also strive to kick-start stalled lives in a collaborative, open-hearted, and raw sociability.

Behind the Scenes
Jackie’s journey, moreover, implicates far wider regimes of truth than local authority crime prevention schemes. It yields a convenient scapegoat in alignment with government policy and dominant popular media rhetoric that exaggerates under-class dysfunction as a cause rather than a symptom of society’s ills. In this case his name is Clyde, living on Red Road, Glasgow – home to a proud libertarian-socialist heritage of a militant Red Clydeside that challenged historic political and social divisions whose descendent faultlines CCTV systems help paper over and mystify. When the politics of narcissism, envy and resentment poison the traditions of mutual aid already shattered by deindustrialisation, the human fallout breaks into discrete strata of hopelessness frozen in antagonism, ordered by hierarchies of precariousness, abjection, and, most of all, aspiration. Then, refracted by the cold gaze of neoliberal information management structures into a visibly classifiable lifestyle, those able to maintain a veneer of respectability institutionalise their marginal distinction by servicing and policing the rest.
But Jackie’s solitary emotional confinement leaves no space for affection, as she observes Clyde trying to go straight as a 24-hour locksmith, his wounded, caring, rogue spirit provides the key to her prisoner’s dilemma, softening the tough exterior of her obsession. Their fluid negotiation of the normally gendered ascriptions of initiative, desire and sensibility then facilitates a reciprocal altruism which supersedes hypocritical truisms of moral conformity. The site of this revelation gains additional poignancy from the knowledge that Red Road’s actual eight tower-blocks now house asylum-seekers and refugees as well as ex-convicts and Red Road accordingly hints at renewed cycles of solidarity that are required for struggle in the global village taking shape outside of official structures, which are maintained by power-holders too busy dispassionately parading a matrix of superficial details across soulless monitor screens to take part. Their statistical correlations of our everyday lives give an aura of authenticity to the pseudo-scientific justifications of our elected rulers, whose policies allow those lives to be shrouded in persistent acts of surveillance, simulating the self-aggrandising need of those in power to tame and regiment human entropy.

Notes
1. The shortcomings of which are spelled out in the excellent Defending Anonymity, published by the Anarchist Federation (available at www.afed.org.uk). Meanwhile two national groups are gearing up for a concerted campaign against ID cards: the ‘No 2 ID’ coalition focusses on the usual respectably pointless lobbying – but is gathering very useful information, including from countries where similar schemes have been roundly defeated (see www.no2id.net); whereas the more truculent and pragmatic ‘Defy ID’ network (www.defy-id.org.uk) anticipates the need for action on an anti-Poll Tax scale.
2. An exception being Observer columnist Henry Porter, whose Suspect Nation (Channel 4, November 2006) comprehensively rubbishes the supposed necessity, desirability, workability, trustability and affordability of the government’s present plans as regularly peddled in transparent and fallacious spin. For valuable observations on the broader cultural context, see also James Horrox, ‘When the Clocks Strike 13’, and ‘Surveillance as a Way of Life’, in Freedom magazine, 16th December 2006 and 16th January 2007 respectively.

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Comic & Zine Reviews
Mark Pawson

Hitsville UK: Punk in the Faraway Towns is an examination of the UK’s p unk music boom from 1976 to 1984 which avoids the usual clichés and stereotypes. Instead of concentrating on the Sex Pistols, The Clash and The Damned triumvirate as recent publications have tended to do, old punk, lecturer and graphic designer Russell Bestley aims to focus attention on the groundswell of punk bands, including all the uncelebrated provincial punks and none-hit wonders. This booklet and three-poster package examines punk via 7 inch picture sleeves. At the time most chart singles came in plain sleeves with record company logos. Picture sleeves were initially a sales gimmick, but punk bands quickly seized the opportunity to create bold, colourful, eye-catching sleeve designs giving a flavour of the exuberant music inside and picture sleeves quickly became de rigueur.
One side of the posters has a gallery of singles’ sleeves; put these up at home and you’ll instantly recreate the atmosphere of a late-’70s/early-’80s independent record shop. You’ll be transported back to Saturdays spent gazing up at walls festooned with record sleeves knowing you wanted all of them but had enough pocket money for just one single and the bus fare home. The reverse side of these posters joins up to make an enormous punkiodic table: a graph with tiny pictures of hundreds of single sleeves mapped out by release date and geographic location. Most 40-/50-somethings will find this completely absorbing, poring over the posters for hours mentally ticking off all the bands you saw and records you bought. The wealth of information on the posters (the result of many hours of research and scouring eBay) is accompanied by a booklet which covers all possible categories of UK punk, with succinct articles on each: Proto Punk, Pub Rock, New Wave, Novelty Rock, DIY, Post Punk, the Avant Garde, Oi, Street Punk, Real Punk, New Punk, Hardcore and Anarcho Punk – labels which might seem blurred and irrelevant now, but which were fiercely argued and fought over at the time.
This is an excellent package of nostalgia-inducing historical research, all for the doing-it-for-the-kids price of £3.50 – echoing the “pay no more than 99p” slogan that certain punk bands always printed on their records.
Hitsville UK: Punk in the Faraway Towns accompanied an exhibition in May at Millais Gallery, Southampton, but Russell Bestley is looking for other venues for the exhibition to tour to, particularly in faraway towns.

Duke is a glossy, full-color, lifestyle magazine – if your chosen lifestyle is that of an ’80s obsessed Australian charity shop addict! Put together by the hyperenergetic duo of Raquel Welch and Emily Hunt (yes, really), it’s a 64 page glimpse into their world of glamour on a budget, outrageous dressing up, dance-offs, crazy theme parties and extreme devotion to duty in the cause of scouring Sydney’s charity shops. There’s interviews with extreme hoarders; chats with grannies in the street; a scary article on stoner style; Raquel & Emily’s A-Z of collecting, a four page guide to their museum-like apartment which I can personally very strongly identify with; a “We live here so you don’t have to” guide to every shop and restaurant in their local scuzzy neighbourhood of Parramatta Road; and a feature on Lady Di’s hats, frilly frocks and pregnancy dresses! Plus plenty of contributions by their artist and illustrator friends, and an all too familiar guide to “Things that ruin our lives in opshops” (trans. ‘charity shops’): the endless who-would-ever-even-have-wanted-that-when-it-was-new items that pointlessly clutter up charity shops creating obstacles and making the hardcore thrifter’s mission to find the good stuff harder. After reading Duke I was exhausted and needed a little rest. There have been charity/thrift shopping zines before, but with Thrift Score and Cheap Date both now defunct, Raquel & Emily have inherited the ill-fitting, slightly scratched charity shopping zine queen crown.

There’s a new wave of magazines for kids around. I picked up bright, eye-catching copies of Anorak and Okido recently. They’re both crammed full of things to make, do, draw, colour, eat and read/get your parents to read to you. These two independently produced mags are refreshingly free of any TV series spin offs or licensed characters. Okido is completely advert free. Anorak which is the same price with twice as many pages has lot of ads, but they’re aimed at parents rather than kids themselves and there’s several competitions with good prizes, so that kind of balances things out. Neither is overtly educational, worthy or preachy, and they don’t even say “After you’ve finished enjoying this magazine please recycle it”. Perhaps kids just recycle things automatically these days? I prefer the clearer layout of Okido, which is aimed at ages 2-7. Anorak is aimed at older children, more like 6-11, and at times gets a bit too illustratory (artists not software) for my liking (sorry Rob). Beware: there’s a photo-strip story in Anorak about a stuffed toy bear pissing himself with excitement!

Martha Cooper is best known for her photographs capturing the very early days of the New York Hip Hop and Graffiti scene. As a staff photographer for a New York newspaper in the late ’70s she spent all day criss-crossing Manhattan to cover news stories. In quiet moments whilst waiting for assignments to come through she headed down to photograph everyday life in the squalid Lower East Side. Street Play is a collection of her previously unpublished photos of kids playing in the streets of New York – tiny, scruffy, kids making the dirty sidewalks, debris-strewn empty lots and abandoned buildings their playground: building dens, racing go-carts, cobbling together customised bikes from scavenged parts, and improvising fairground rides. It’s a fascinating and fun document of a New York that no longer exists, and two seemingly opposite, incompatible elements of big city and small kids interacting free of any adult supervision. Sesame Street it is not! A few of my favourite photos: a small boy and girl concentrating intently on the task of catching flies in pop bottles, making their own mini zoo of imprisoned insects; a group of young entrepreneurs setting up their own ‘bar’ on the pavement using empty beer bottles and playing at being drunk; a gang of pre-teen Latino lads defiantly posing, displaying their rifles made out of broken pieces of wood and bits of string. Meeting these street kids was Martha Cooper’s introduction to the emerging Hip Hop/Graffiti culture, and her work documenting that world are acknowledged classics, but for me Street Play is a much more interesting and enjoyable book. File next to Nils Norman’s An architecture of Play: A Survey of London’s Adventure Playgrounds.
Tour De Fence is a different approach to using the city as your playground. Heath Bunting and Kayle Brandon took a map of their home town, Bristol, and drew a large circle on it. Then, having remapped the city to suit themselves, set out to walk through Bristol following the circle as precisely as possible, going over underpasses, scaling walls and walking along fences where necessary. Tour De Fence is a book and set of too-nice-to-tear-out postcards documenting this action which successfully blends urban exploration and civil disobedience. The kids in Street Play don’t need any encouragement to make up their own games, but as adults we forget how to play purely for its own sake. Tour De Fence encourages us to start playing again by turning the city into a free playground and playing with no particular goal or aim in sight. Simultaneously, it engages with pertinent issues of increasing surveillance and control of public space, and the policing and control of state borders. I’m reviewing a printed publication here but should mention that Heath Bunting’s projects exist both online and on the streets of the real world; both spheres feeding into and informing each other.

I picked Tour De Fence up at Here in Bristol. Here is a small, collectively run shop with a gallery downstairs. They sell a great selection of carefully chosen, independently produced magazines, zines, comics, books, cards and badges from the UK and US, together with gig tickets, prints by Bristol artists, and handicrafts from local Craft Rebels. They’ve even managed to squeeze in a sofa to encourage comfy browsing and are just round the corner from the Cube Cinema Microplex, forming their very own cultural hub.

Foie Gras by Edie Fake is a psycho-sexual, pumpkin-carving, gender-reassigning, (s)witch-hitting, castration-fantasizing, fox-fucking, fairytale-cookbook, complete with an invitingly tactile screen printed cover which is perforated front and back with inviting openings.

An envelope crammed full of nearly-impossible-to-describe comic booklets is a reviewers nightmare – thanks go to Malcolm Duff for making this bad dream come true. I Can’t Draw is a graphic meditation in which the artist repeatedly re-draws a set of goal posts in his notebook. Each successive drawing improves incrementally in quality and detail. Throughout this task he’s repeatedly interrupted by a teacher towering over him, chiding “You’re holding your pencil the wrong way” and offering helpful sounding but useless advice, such as how to hold a tennis racquet correctly. The artist gradually emerges from under his protective mane of shaggy hair and using the pencil as his weapon nullifies this overbearing authority figure by redrawing and reducing him to a simple diagram.

I discovered Your Mum buried in a slush pile of gig and club flyers in a branch of FOPP! It’s a pocket-sized freebie crammed full of unfeasibly stupid stories: Noel Edmonds to buy Buck House; Winners Thinners (‘Michael’ and ‘paint’); and updated personalised number plates (SUV TW8T, BL1NG SP4Z, F4T 2 J4G5). It’s a pisstake of all those supermarket sleaze sheets and mid-market celeb-filled tabloids which everyone reads but nobody admits to buying; fertile sources for satire which have been well explored by Viz, Bugs’n’Drugs and Hate. Yes, it’s still very silly. Yes, it’s still very funny. Your Mum thoughtfully includes the list of your rights when arrested – maximum stupidness with helpful legal advice! I assumed Your Mum was just another one of those pseudozines that’s really trying to sell alcohol/sweeties/clothes/entertainment industry product to 18-25 yr-olds, but, unless I’ve been completely fooled, there’s no product placement, not even a subtly placed website address. Maybe all those recent ‘viral’ marketing campaigns have infected each other with a deadly advert-flu and wiped themselves out?

Dishwasher Pete’s classic Dishwasher zine combined his tales of dishwashing wanderlust and menial job madness together with articles on labour history and reviews of dishwashing in books and movies. It’s long been out of print and unavailable, so I was excited to find out yesterday that his book Dishwasher: One Man’s Quest to Wash Dishes in All Fifty States has just come out. I haven’t seen a copy yet, but I’m sure it’s good and will be indispensable. Published by Harper, it should be quite easy to get hold of. File next to other classic zine compilations: the Temp Slave Book, Thrift Score book and Beer Frame book.

Notes
Hitsville UK: Punk in the Faraway Towns – £3.50+postage; russwyd@hotmail.com
Duke – www.huntandwelch.com
Anorak – £3.50; www.anorak-magazine.com
Okido – £3.50;
www.okido.uk www.myspace.com/okido
Street Play – £19.99; www.fromheretofame.com
Tour de Fence – £5.00; www.irational.org/fence
Here – 108 Stokes Croft, Bristol, BS1 3RU;
0117 942 2222
Foie Gras – $2 + postage; ediefake@hotmail.com
I Can’t Draw, and many other titles – malcyduff@hotmail.com
Your Mum – ???
Dishwasher: One Man’s Quest to Wash Dishes
in All Fifty States – Pete Jordan, Harper Perennial

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‘Reframing the Poverty Debate’ the New Labour Way
Gerry Mooney

New Labour and the Politics of Aspiration
Speaking at a one-day conference of the Social Market Foundation in London on April 30, 2007, Jim Murphy, New Labour MP for East Renfrewshire and Minister of State in the Department for Work and Pensions talked of the need to ‘reframe the poverty debate’.¹ In this speech and in a related pamphlet and newspaper article² Murphy strives to forge a distinction between what he terms ‘conservation’ on the one hand and ‘aspiration’ on the other. Aspiration, he claims, is the key to forging a new era of social progress and political change. Further public services ‘reform’, the promotion of ‘choice’ and developing ‘personalised’ services are all pinpointed as key elements in this process. For Murphy this politics of aspiration is key to developing New Labour’s approach to poverty which, to use his terms, must replace ‘the politics of charity’ which he sees as dominating the discussion of poverty in the UK today.
We will return to Murphy’s arguments a little later but it is highlighted here to draw attention to some of the ways in which the question of poverty is being reconstructed by New Labour and an assortment of journalists, academics and social and political commentators today. Without wishing to give this reconstruction a sense of coherence and organisation that it hardly merits, nonetheless it is increasingly evident that poverty is back on the agenda, but back on it in particular and very worrying ways. Of course at one level poverty has, with the exception of the period of Tory government during the 1980s and 1990s, rarely been removed from the political agenda – even if this is overtaken under New Labour with an emphasis on ‘social exclusion’. In addition, arguably there is little that is new in this the latest ‘rediscovery’ of, and rethinking around, poverty. ‘Poverty’ is one of those issues that is always present, even if it often takes the form of an ‘absent presence’, that is an existing reality but one that does not always merit the attention it deserves. Despite repeated efforts by some anti-poverty campaigners, activists and academics,³ the question of poverty did not feature prominently in the recent Scottish Elections for example, largely sidelined along with many other important social and economic issues by the overwhelming and at times stifling debate on the question of ‘the constitution’.
Poverty has long been an ‘essentially contested’ notion provoking numerous debates, arguments, controversies over definition, measurement and meaning as well as around the policy responses to it. Running through all of these debates one maxim tends to stand out: how poverty is defined, understood and talked about says much about the shape and nature of any policy and political response to it. And there is mounting evidence, both at UK and at Scottish levels that there is a coming together of some very regressive ideas and arguments which are helping to ‘reframe’ the poverty debate today in ways that should concern all of us who are interested in pursuing a more socially just agenda in contemporary Scotland. By this I mean not the New Labour neo-liberal vision of social justice premised on a celebration of the market but an entirely different conception and understanding of social justice that argues for social and economic equality through an attack on wealth and vested interests.

‘The Poor’ as a ‘Problem Population’
The assumption that many readers of Variant will surely share – that discussions of poverty and inequality should start from questions of social justice, of fairness and of compassion – is often far removed from the tone and approach that some academics, social commentators and politicians (and not always right-wing politicians at that) bring to the debate. Alongside campaigning groups from the poor, activists, trade unionists, academics and socialists have long had to battle the idea that the poor are a ‘problem’ population, a population that is in some way out of step with the ‘mainstream’ of UK society. Such sentiments have long featured in accounts and explanations of poverty and, arguably, since the 1980s in particular, there has been something of a shift in political attitudes to poverty, both across different countries and at a global level, which regards poor people in some way as deficient, as contributing to their own precarious situation. While the nature, extent and intensity of such views vary between place and over time, we do not have to look far to find claims that ‘the poor’ represent a ‘danger’ not only to themselves, but also to ‘wider’ society. In each period over the past century and a half, when poverty and inequality has increased, as since the late 1970s and early 1980s not only is poverty rediscovered, but this is accompanied by attempts to construct ‘the problem’ not as one of poverty but of poor people, their behaviours, lifestyles, cultures and inadequacies of a multitude of differing kinds. How the question of poverty is understood and how poor people are talked of and labelled says everything about the policies that will be developed in response. Seeing the poor and disadvantaged as ‘at risk’ or as ‘vulnerable’, requiring (more) state support stands in sharp contrast to viewing the poor as some kind of ‘problem’ group or ‘underclass’ that necessitates strict management.
It is important to be aware that the history of the study of poverty is characterised by the use of a language that has tended to describe ‘the poor’ often in the most condemning and derogatory of ways. From a concern with the ‘dangerous’ and ‘disreputable’ poor in the nineteenth century through to ‘problem families’, ‘dysfunctional families/communities’ and the ‘underclass’ and ‘socially excluded’ of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, poor people have all too frequently been talked about (and rarely talked with) in the most derogatory of ways.⁴ Labels such as ‘underclass’, ‘hard to reach’, ‘welfare dependent’ as well as some uses of the notion of ‘the socially excluded’ are stigmatising and mobilise normative ways of thinking of poverty and inequality that constructs ‘the poor’ and disadvantaged almost as a distinctive group of people living ‘on’ or ‘beyond’ the ‘margins’ of society. In the process this language works to distance ‘them’ from ‘us’, the ‘mainstream’ of society, ‘normal’, ‘hard working’, ‘responsible’ citizens.⁵ Such language has become a stock in trade for many New Labour and Conservative politicians today – and not a few academics and journalists also!

The Re-emergence of ‘Culture’-Centred Explanations of Poverty
There are a number of different ways of thinking of poverty that rely on what we could generally term a culture-centred perspective, that is an account that starts from and revolves around the individual and or which focus on the production and reproduction of particular cultural and behavioural norms and ways of living that work in some way to keep poor people in poverty. Among the most well known of such ways of thinking are explanations which focus on ‘cultures of poverty’ or ‘cycles of deprivation’.⁶ Culture, in this context, is being used to refer to a system of values, norms and attitudes that are regarded as normal for a particular group. The culture of poverty thesis claims that a set of values are being passed through families and across generations that prevent poor people and poor families ‘escaping’ from poverty. This approach became influential among both politicians and policy-makers in the United States during the 1960s and early 1970s as a means of explaining the persistence of poverty among black Americans. But it is a discourse that has travelled far and wide, albeit with some modification. It was popularised in the UK as a ‘cycle of deprivation’ in the 1970s by the Conservative politician, Keith Joseph, who argued that the persistence of poverty in the context of general economic growth, as in the 1950s and 1960s, was the consequence of the ‘dysfunctionality’ of the poor family. In an argument that was to foreground much of the Conservative thinking that was to emerge later in the 1970s and 1980s such poverty, Joseph claimed, would not be addressed through increased benefits, but by a transformation in the values and behaviour of the poor. Such thinking has also been developed and further popularised by the American social commentator, Charles Murray, in his account of ‘welfare dependency’ and a developing ‘underclass’ in the United States and in the UK during the 1980s and 1990s. While the idea of an underclass has been around for some considerable time in the UK, having being used in the mid-1960s and early 1970s to refer to poverty among ethnic minority groups in some of Britain’s urban areas, it re-emerged in a new and more potent form in the 1990s thanks largely – though not exclusively – to the work of Murray. When visiting Britain in 1999 as a guest of The Sunday Times to investigate if an underclass existed in this country, Murray left readers in no doubt of the ‘problems’ that the underclass posed for UK society:
“I arrived in Britain earlier this year …a visitor from a plague area, come to see whether the disease is spreading and (my) conclusions were as dramatic as they were predictable: Britain has a growing population of working-aged, healthy people who live in a different world from other Britons, who are raising their children to live in it, and whose values are now contaminating the life of entire neighbourhoods.”⁷
While widely criticised during the 1990s and to some extent overtaken by the idea of social exclusion, the ideology of an underclass has not disappeared without a fight and indeed has re-emerged of late in different contexts. Following the impact of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans in late August 2005, for instance, Murray once more takes the opportunity to highlight what he sees as the most pressing ‘social problem’ in the contemporary United States, the ‘underclass’:
“Watching the courage of ordinary low-income people as they deal with the aftermath of Katrina and Rita, it is hard to decide which politicians are more contemptible – Democrats who are rediscovering poverty and blaming it on George W. Bush, or Republicans who are rediscovering poverty and claiming that the government can fix it. Both sides are unwilling to face reality: We haven’t rediscovered poverty, we have rediscovered the underclass; the underclass has been growing during all the years that people were ignoring it, including the Clinton years; and the programs politicians tout as solutions are a mismatch for the people who constitute the problem. ... Other images show us the face of the hard problem: those of the looters and thugs, and those of inert women doing nothing to help themselves or their children. They are the underclass.”⁸
In this one quote many of the recurring features of underclass explanations are laid bare: a distinction is drawn, in a language not too dissimilar from Blair and New Labour, between the ‘hard working’ and the ‘inert’; crime and disorder are flagged as particular concerns; inadequate parenting (on the part of mothers if not fathers) is given attention and implicit here, if not in other responses to Katrina that mobilised underclass ways of thinking,⁹ state policies (and in particular welfare policies) are viewed as an important part of ‘the problem’ in that they contribute to the ‘growth of the underclass’.

Reframing Poverty in Scotland Today
While explicit references to the existence of an underclass rarely feature in discussions of poverty in Scotland today, we should not be mistaken in believing as a result that the influence of such thinking has completely waned. Indeed, as highlighted at the outset of this article, we can only too quickly locate ‘underclass’ and other cultural-based ways of thinking. To illustrate this let us first of all return to Mr Murphy and to his politics of aspiration and his view that we need to ‘reframe the poverty debate’:
“If we are to continue to make real progress we need to reframe the debate on poverty. We should also reflect on whether government should approach poverty differently. In the past we sometimes spoke of the politics of aspiration as though it was distinct from the politics of poverty, but the politics of aspiration and the politics of poverty are two sides of the same coin. ….There has been real and significant progress in tackling poverty in our society. …. Despite this improvement, entrenched pockets of deprivation still undermine the progress we have made. We have not yet managed to crack the cycle of intergenerational poverty. Inequalities in aspiration of parents drive inequalities in attainment for their children at schools. The aspirations of poorer children differ from those who are better off – from the presents children ask for on their birthday, to the careers they want when they grow up. If a boy’s parent is convicted of a criminal offence, he is twice as likely to be convicted himself. Relative generational mobility has fallen over time….. Today we are paying the price for the policy failures of previous decades. The cycle of mobility, even as its peak, has been painfully slow.” (emphasis added)¹⁰
Elsewhere he argues that the task for New Labour is to anticipate
“…the almost limitless aspirations of the many and lifting the near-fatalistic intergenerational poverty of aspiration of the few. We should also have a renewed confidence in eradicating poverty by transforming and reframing the consent to go further. And we must not falter at the thought of further transformation of public services.” (emphasis added)¹¹
I hope that readers will forgive the inclusion of a lengthy extract from Murphy here¹² but these do show in stark terms some of the important ways in which poverty is now being approached by the emerging post-Blair new New Labour leadership. Murphy proceeds here to talk of the need to develop a ‘modern form of social solidarity’ ‘based upon a renewed sense of progressive self-interest’.¹³ There are some significant pointers here to the likely future direction of New Labour policy-making in relation to poverty. ‘Traditional’ (for which read Old Labour/post-War social democratic) approaches to social solidarity are immediately ruled out in favour of a ‘modern’ approach that focuses on ‘aspirations’ and attitudes. In turn any sense of redistribution as a means of addressing poverty and inequality is also ruled out. The idea that we can have something called ‘progressive self-interest’ (or even ‘growth with fairness’) must surely compete with ‘competition and cohesion’ for the top slot in New Labour’s ever lengthening list of contradictory ‘buzz-phrases’. But this must send a shudder through those who are campaigning to have poverty, understood in relation to wealth and inequality, at the centre of social policy making.
Murphy’s arguments might be dismissed as mere pamphleteering, as blue (as opposed to red!) -skies thinking, ideas that will not be reflected in policy outcomes. But there are two responses to this which means that we should take his ideas seriously. The first is that New Labour is already processing apace with ‘personalisation’ agendas which are increasingly informing social and public services delivery across the UK now.¹⁴ In other words further ‘reforms’ of public services and the even-greater emphasis on the consumer (‘progressive self-interest’!) and on choice is happening now! The second reason for being cautious in simply dismissing such thinking is that it shares in important respects what I would call here ‘ways of thinking’ about poverty, disadvantage and inequality which are emerging in other social commentary in Scotland today; ways of thinking that echo in some respects the cultures of poverty theories of the 1970s and other ‘culture-centred’ explanations. These overlap to some extent with the growth in socio-psychological explanations of ‘well-being’.
Regular readers of Variant will have come across critical examinations of the growth in the ‘happiness’ industry and emerging ‘therapy’ culture in Scotland in previous articles by Alex Law and Colin Clark in 2005 and 2006.¹⁵ Among other developments Clark notes in particular the growing influence, at least on the ex-First Minister Jack McConnell and the previous Scottish Executive, of ideas generated from the Scottish Centre for Confidence and Well-Being which would have us believe that it is a ‘crisis of confidence’ (reflected in the prevalence of a ‘dependency culture’ across parts of Scottish society) which is holding ordinary Scots ‘back’ from achieving their potential and therefore from prospering like the ‘rest of us’!¹⁶ In such thinking any idea that inequalities of wealth, income, power and life chances play a role in shaping people’s lives is immediately kicked into touch. As Law has powerfully argued, this reflects the neo-liberal agenda which is being rolled out in the devolved Scotland.
It would be mistaken to think that there is no awareness at all on the part of New Labour and among politicians of the other main political parties in Scotland that structural factors contribute to the production and reproduction of poverty. However, in some respects these are acknowledged but then immediately dismissed or at best ‘sidelined’ as factors ‘beyond’ the control of politicians and of the government (both in Scotland and at UK level), such as long-term social, economic and demographic change or, more often, ‘globalisation’. A focus on individual deficiencies, family ‘dysfunctioning’ and assorted behavioural traits of one kind or another immediately becomes central. Adopting a structural approach of the kind that locates poverty in the context of class inequalities, exploitation and oppression does not even begin to feature in many of the dominant understandings of poverty.
Some examples of the way in which structural factors are recognised but simultaneously relegated have emerged in recent months each privileging ‘non-material’ factors! Reflecting on a Report from the Office of National Statistics that showed Glasgow men to be twice as likely to die from the effects of alcohol compared with anyone else, broadcaster and journalist Lesley Riddoch in a commentary in The Scotsman in February 2007 speaks of the “problems of working-class Glasgow” and of a culture of excess enjoyed by “a demoralised underclass.”¹⁷ Again in February at conference on ‘Transcending Poverties’ in Glasgow, organised by the Royal Society of Edinburgh (and supported by the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland), previewed in a special edition of The Herald’s Society supplement which was entirely devoted to the theme of poverty, there is repeated references to the need for the poor to take ‘responsibility’ for their own well-being, to spend their money on things other than cigarettes and alcohol. Prominent Scottish historian Tom Devine captured the thrust of this conference arguing that,
“This conference is important because it moves outside the orthodoxy of improving aspects such as employment, area regeneration or health campaigns and tries to look at the extent to which there must be cultural and indeed even spiritual underpinnings for this malaise.”¹⁸
He continues:
“We can examine why the majority with means are unwilling to be taxed. If you are dealing with a straightforward transfer of surplus from the better-off to the less well-off there is always the possibility of dependency. Redistribution of wealth in itself might not be the cure and simply perpetuate the malaise. I don’t think the old methods of taxing the rich to help the poor will really work.”¹⁹
In a related article on February 23, Herald journalist Alf Young, alongside castigating what he termed the ‘poverty industry’, chimed with Devine’s arguments by claiming that:
“Redistributist fiscal policies have their part to play. But we also need to rebuild the non-material pathways that were open to people like me nearly half a century ago. Otherwise the poor will always be with us.”²⁰

Another Kind of Reframing is Possible – and Urgently Needed!
It is deeply worrying that after decades of important research and much debate around the underlying causes of poverty that anti-poverty campaigners across the UK today find themselves once more facing deeply regressive ideas and thinking, some example of which have been highlighted above. Claims of a ‘malaise’ (and why is it that the poor are regarded as a malaise – are the rich not a ‘malaise’?) – or of suggestions that ‘the poor will always be with us’ echo 19th century commentary on poverty; ideas of ‘dependency’ (again of the poor not of the wealthy) as well as reflecting cultural and underclass thinking. However, this shift to a more explicit individual and cultural focus fits well with the renewed claims of New Labour Ministers that “only work ends poverty” and that “benefits do not lift people out of poverty in this country, and it has never been the case that they do.”²¹ And such thinking also finds a ready home in the celebration of the market that lies at the centre of the entire New Labour project. Jack McConnell, in his final weeks as First Minster spoke of his “top 10 challenges” to “accelerate progress to end poverty.” There will be no prizes for guessing what was number one on the list – “we must continue with a stable environment for business to prosper…We need a stable, growing economy, with minimum risk, for business to flourish”!²²
The challenges facing poverty campaigners are arriving from different directions as we have seen and these are coming together in a queasy mix of neo-liberal, individual, cultural centred and pseudo-psychological ramblings. Against this we do need to reframe the poverty debate, yes once again, by emphasising the structural factors that generate poverty and disadvantage; by highlighting at each and every opportunity the class inequalities and unequal and exploitative social relations which so permeate Scottish and UK society today. This also involves ‘moving upstream’ in both our focus and analysis to concentrate more on the reproduction of wealth and power among a privileged minority of the rich. It is shameful that in a period when the gulf between rich and poor is reaching levels unsurpassed for well over a century that so little attention is devoted to the activities of the rich. This means, above all, analysing the class dynamics of society today,23 challenging the uncritical celebrations of market-based economic and social policies and fighting for a more socially just Scotland.

Gerry Mooney is Senior Lecturer in Social Policy and Staff Tutor, Faculty of Social Sciences, The Open University in Scotland. He is co-editor with Gill Scott of Exploring Social Policy in the ‘New’ Scotland (Policy Press, 2005), co-editor with John McKendrick, John Dickie and Peter Kelly of Poverty in Scotland 2007, London Child Poverty Action Group 2007 (available from www.cpag.org.uk/publications) and with Alex Law of New Labour/Hard Labour? Restructuring and Resistance Inside the Welfare Industry (Policy Press, forthcoming October 2007).

Notes
1 For speech access www.jimmurphy.labour.co.uk
2 ‘Jim Murphy, ‘Progressive Self-Interest – the Politics of Poverty and Aspiration’, in Social Market Foundation, The Politics of Aspiration, London, SMF, 2007 available at www.smf.co.uk see also James Purnell and Jim Murphy, ‘The battle lines are aspiration versus conservation’, The Times, March 26, 2007.
3 See for example John McKendrick, Gerry Mooney, John Dickie and Peter Kelly (eds) Poverty in Scotland 2007, London: Child Poverty Action Group.
4 For a general discussion of these issues see Dee Cook, Criminal and Social Justice, London, Sage, 2006.
5 See Jock Young, The Vertigo of Late Modernity, Sage, 2007.
6 See Ruth Lister, Poverty, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2004 and John Welshman, ‘The Cycle of Deprivation and the Concept of the Underclass’, Benefits, 3, 1, October, 2002, 199-205.
7 Charles Murray, The Emerging British Underclass, London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1990, p.4
8 Charles Murray, ‘The Hallmark of the Underclass’, The Wall Street Journal, October 2, 2005, www.opinionjournal.com (accessed January 16, 2007).
9 For a comprehensive and well argued discussion of neo-liberal responses to Hurricane Katrina see Jamie Peck, ‘Neoliberal Hurricane: Who Framed New Orleans?’ in Panitch, L. and Leys, C. (eds) Coming to Terms with Nature: Socialist Register 2007, London: Merlin Press: 102-129.
10 ‘Jim Murphy, ‘Progressive Self-Interest – the Politics of Poverty and Aspiration’, in Social Market Foundation, The Politics of Aspiration, London, SMF, 2007, p.14-15.
11 Ibid. p.19
12 An extract which contains some very contentious claims regarding New Labour’s success in tackling poverty and addressing inequality. See McKendrick, Mooney, Dickie and Kelly, 2007 op cit, for a more ‘measured’ assessment.
13 Ibid. p15.
14 For a critique of such agendas see Iain Ferguson, ‘Increasing User Choice or Privatizing Risk? The Antinomies of Personalization’, British Journal of Social Work, 2007.
15 Alex Law, ‘The Conformist Imagination: Think-Tankery versus Utopian Scotland’, Variant, 23, Summer, 2005 and Colin Clark, ‘From Self to Structure: challenging the ‘happiness industry’, Variant, 27, Winter, 2006.
16 Carol Craig, The Scot’s Crisis of Confidence, Edinburgh, Big Thinking, 2003.
17 Lesley Riddoch, ‘A City Revelling in Denial and Altered Reality’, The Scotsman, February 26, 2007.
18 Tom Devine, ‘Glasgow could be a laboratory to test how we tackle the ills of modern society’, The Herald Society, January 30, 2007, p.10.
19 Ibid.
20 Alf Young, ‘A paucity of ideas for how to tackle poverty’, The Herald, February 23, 2007. See also response by Peter Kelly of The Poverty Alliance, ‘Low pay and predatory lenders are the power behind the real poverty industry’, The Herald Society, March 6, 2007. Both can be accessed at: http://www.povertyalliance.org/html/publications/pressReleases/press.asp
21 Jim Murphy, speaking at a DWP organised international conference on welfare reform, London, March 26, 2007. See Nicholas Timmins and Andrew Taylor, ‘Only work ends poverty, says minister’, Financial Times, March 26, 2007.
22 Jack McConnell, Speech on Poverty in Scotland at the Launch of Poverty in Scotland 2007, Glasgow, March 2, 2007.
23 See for example Alex Law and Gerry Mooney, “We’ve Never Had it So Good’: The ‘Problem’ of the Working Class in the Devolved Scotland’, Critical Social Policy, 26, 3, 2006, pp.523-542.

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_________________________________________________
The Agreed Truth & The Real Truth:
The New Northern Ireland
Liam O’Ruairc

The ‘historic’ restoration of devolution in Northern Ireland, on 8 May 2007, has been hailed by the media as marking the symbolic end of the conflict there.¹ Like most aspects of the peace process, the opening of the Assembly was “carefully stage managed to present a positive and progressive image.”² This is in line with news reports about the North being dominated by the ‘success story’ of the ‘New Northern Ireland’. “There is an optimism and realism in Northern Ireland today that is dissolving ancient prejudices and boosting business confidence, the essential underpinning for growth and prosperity. Belfast and Londonderry have been transformed by peace: business parks are springing up in place of derelict shipyards, while restaurants and cafés cater to a more relaxed public culture, and the walls of Derry are attracting tourists who no longer have need to be nervous.”³ Northern Ireland has been tipped by Lonely Planet as one of the must-see countries to visit in 2007. “There is no better time to see Northern Ireland than now. Freed from the spectre of the gun by cease-fires and political agreement; it’s abuzz with life: the cities are pulsating, the economy is thriving and the people...are in good spirits.” Belfast is also mentioned in another part of the book as one of the top ten “Cities on the Rise.”⁴ “Many UK cities have been regenerated in recent years but it is doubtful whether any have been transformed as dramatically as Belfast. Its image in the 1970s was of a city dominated by the threat of terrorism; its streets at best bleak and grey, and at worst reduced to rubble after another bomb attack. Today, however, Belfast is emerging as a shiny new metropolis of head-turning galleries, museums, restaurants, luxury hotels – and exciting new property developments.”⁵ The Belfast skyline is now dominated by schemes such as Lanyon Place, with its £20m Hilton Hotel; £35m BT Tower and £30m Fujitsu building; and the Odyssey Complex, a £91m entertainment, leisure and education centre; alongside such massive regeneration projects as Europe’s largest commercial and residential waterfront development, the Titanic Quarter. The ‘Troubles’, as they were known, seem to be over. The IRA has destroyed all its arms. The UVF has stated its intention to go out of business. With a few exceptions, so-called ‘paramilitary prisoners’ have all been released on licence between 1998 and 2000, and HMP Maze is being demolished. The security landscape in Belfast, Derry and South Armagh has changed. By 1 August 2007, British troops will be reduced to 5,000 and the number of sites where they are stationed will be reduced from 64 to 14, while most watchtowers will be demolished, bringing the 35-year-old Operation Banner – the longest in British Army history – to an end. “The moves are part of the government’s security normalisation plans.”⁶ But is Northern Ireland really “reaping the dividend of peace, stability and, it is to be hoped, impending prosperity” as the media is assuring us?⁷ And if so is it going to last?

Economic Performance
Impending prosperity is unlikely as the state of the economy is poor and unsustainable on all indicators. Northern Ireland has the lowest household incomes in the UK, with GDP per head of population almost 20% below the UK average. As to economic performance, the province scores 80 in terms of productivity for a UK national average of 100.⁸ The province is on life support from the British government: in a recent editorial, The Economist characterised the North as a “subsidy junkie” that receives every year from Westminster £5bn more than is raised locally in taxation.⁹ Compared to the 720,000 at work, there are 530,000 ‘economically inactive’ in the workforce (the term ‘economically inactive’ covers anyone neither employed nor receiving unemployment-related benefits, including the long-term sick and disabled, students, carers and the retired. In Northern Ireland, only 8% of the economically inactive claim to want work). The proportion of people of working age who are economically inactive is 26.9% – the highest percentage of the 12 UK regions, and well above the UK average of 21.2%, which makes a mockery of the ‘historically low’ unemployment figure of 4%.¹⁰ About 36% of the workforce are employed in the public sector and the state is responsible for 68% of economic output – figures double that south of the border and substantially higher than the rest of the UK.¹¹ No wonder that we find Lord Trevor Smith of Clinton remarking that the North has “an economy more collectivized than Stalin’s Russia, more corporatist than Mussolini’s, and more quangoized than Wilson and Health’s United Kingdom governments.”¹² The performance of private enterprise is dismal. More than 95% of the North’s private sector is made of small businesses. 90% of companies employ fewer than ten people and only 0.5% have a workforce of more than 200. There are fewer than ten PLCs; the largest is the privatised electricity board. Entrepreneurial spirit is low. Between 1996 and 2004, the number of VAT-registered companies in the six counties rose by 10% while the south swelled by 76%.¹³ The North has the second-lowest level of business start ups in the UK. Inward investment is negligible. A third of Fortune 500 companies have a base in the south, but none have one in the North, and less than 800 of the 90,000 companies conducting business in the six counties are foreign owned.¹⁴ The North’s infrastructure is woeful. The two main cities are not even connected by a motorway and experts calculate that the province has a £14 billion infrastructure deficit.¹⁵ With few quality jobs being created, the province still suffers from a brain drain. Nigel Smyth of the CBI in the North says that despite having some of the best A-level results in the UK, the province loses a third of its students every year to universities elsewhere with only a quarter of those returning. “We have not been able to create enough high quality jobs,” he says. Graham Gudgin, who has acted as economic advisor to the Northern Ireland Assembly and to David Trimble, has pointed out that job creation in the North has predominantly been in the public sector and in low skilled private sectors such as retail, call centres and tourism.¹⁶ On top of that, private sector wages are around 80% of the UK average, substantially lower than down south, and have been slipping further behind.¹⁷ For all those reasons, we find Conservative writer Alan Ruddock concluding in a Management Today article that almost ten years after the Belfast Agreement, “the much-longed-for dividends of peace remain an elusive dream for the province.”¹⁸ As a recent Belfast Telegraph editorial puts it: “Peter Hain long ago observed that the Northern Ireland economy is unsustainable as presently constituted. We lag behind Britain in terms of economic activity, productivity and wealth. With public sector cutbacks taking effect, it has been estimated that a total of 140,000 new jobs will be needed in the next 10 years. Constrained as it is, the private sector is unable to provide the sort of economic boost which is required.”¹⁹ And with government plans to slow down public spending over the coming years, economists have warned that Northern Ireland’s financial future could be even bleaker.²⁰

Property & Housing
Despite these structural problems, there are claims that Northern Ireland’s business growth is booming and employment is rising at a record rate, according to research from the Ulster Bank. The bank found that business activity has gone up for 46 months in a row.²¹ The reason for this apparent growth is construction and the housing market. The construction industry is now the driving force of the Northern Ireland economy, according to a report from the Ulster Bank.²² Figures from the Nationwide Building Society show that average house prices rose by 58% in the last year, the fastest rate of growth seen in any region of the UK since the Nationwide started compiling figures in 1973. The average price of a house in the North is now £203,815, which compares with a UK average of £175,554. The North, which used to be one of the cheapest places to buy property is now the third most expensive region in the UK behind London and the south-east of England. Fionnuala Earley, Nationwide’s chief economist said: “House prices have increased by 281% since the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, compared to the UK average of 179%.”²³ This is especially true of areas once synonymous with the conflict, which are now becoming property hotspots. For example, a property on Alliance Avenue in north Belfast – a street on which 14 people were murdered between 1971 and 1998 – went on the market for £285,000 in early March and sold for over £800,000. “Malone Road prices on a notorious North Belfast interface are a sure sign that the Troubles are over and peace is taking hold.”²⁴ Spurred by property investment returns, the number of landlords in Northern Ireland has jumped as banks have offered rental property investment loans, or ‘buy to let’ mortgages. 48% of private landlords in Northern Ireland acquired their properties in the past five years, according to a 2005 Housing Executive study, and the number of homes they own has more than doubled since 1991.²⁵ A study by the University of Ulster revealed that the buy-to-let sector has grown by 120% over the past 15 years.²⁶ With the rise in house prices, homeowners have built up over £58bn in equities in their properties over the last ten years. The average homeowner has made £134 000 and many people have become millionaires.²⁷ This accounts for the growing numbers of new bars, cafes, restaurants, shops and car dealerships. But the property boom is unsustainable and leads young people and first-time buyers into debt and danger. According to Sir John Semple, who was appointed by the Government to look into the housing crisis: “The very sharp rise in house prices in Northern Ireland has created a new situation here. The market here has changed from a relatively stable one to one where house prices in some areas are ahead of the UK – in a province where earnings are 20% lower.” He said the latest Council of Mortgage Lenders’ figures show the number of first-time buyers has halved from 60% to 30%. First-time buyers are being outbid by investors – 70% of new homes are now bought by investors.²⁸ Rising interest rates and spiralling house prices have already left thousands of homeowners struggling to make repayments with the number of home repossessions hitting record highs last year. Almost 3,000 people were served with writs for unpaid mortgages in 2006. Since 2003 the number of homeowners forcibly evicted from their property has more than doubled. Meanwhile nearly 10,000 of the 127,000 housing debt problems brought to Citizens Advice Bureaus last year concerned threatened repossession, while 2,000 related to actual repossession.²⁹ The negative effects of the housing boom reinforce research that proves that Northern Ireland “is one of the most unequal societies in the developed world.”³⁰ If people further up the social ladder have done well out of the peace, the gap between rich and poor is even larger than in the rest of Britain.³¹ The poorest members of society in Northern Ireland, both Catholics and Protestants, are worse off now than ten years ago.³²

Parity of Esteem & Identity Politics
One of the most visible signs of the ‘new Northern Ireland’ has been the radical change that has taken place within areas which suffered most from the conflict; Republican areas in particular. David McKittrick describes this transformation: “These days, the Jeeps on the Falls Road no longer contain helmeted British troops swivelling their rifles in the direction of potential IRA sniper hides: instead, as in any other major city, the 4x4s are driven by mothers ferrying children to school. Where once military surveillance installations were perched on top of flats, now modern apartment blocks with hefty price tags are going up everywhere. The massive army barracks, for decades a target of bombs and bullets, are gone. No longer do youngsters indulge in that west-Belfast sport of hijacking buses and setting them ablaze. An hour on the Falls, once one of Europe’s most notorious districts, is enough to confirm it: the Troubles are over. Welcome to the new Belfast, and a transformed Northern Ireland. The middle classes are richer than ever. And this time, the Catholic community is benefiting strongly.”³³ The last sentence is particularly significant. To a large extent, British counter-insurgency strategy, by creating a new Catholic middle class dependent upon public sector jobs and state subsidies for the ‘community sector’, has ‘killed Republicanism with kindness’.³⁴ Rising house prices have also significantly contributed to the creation of a whole class of conservative property owners and small shopkeepers. There is currently an average of eight people bidding on each available property in Nationalist West Belfast. Houses that sold for £40,000 fifteen years ago are now going for over £200,000.³⁵ The Andersonstown News, a large-circulation community newspaper in the Sinn Féin heartland of west Belfast, originally the official voice of the Andersonstown Central Civil Resistance Committee, now celebrates the local entrepreneurial spirit and has an extensive property supplement. Such a shift reflects the transformation of material conditions in the Nationalist community. Relying on a revisionist account of the history of the last 30 years, where the IRA campaign becomes one for civil rights and equality rather than for traditional Republican objectives, apologists for the Provisional strategy, such as Laurence McKeown and Jim Gibney, argue that the peace process has made life better for Nationalists in the North, and that the struggle was successful to the extent that never again will Nationalists be second-class citizens, young people in particular.³⁶ It is significant that at a public meeting in January 2007, “the Sinn Féin president relied heavily on the post-ceasefire, feel-good factor for Nationalists. Things had changed, he said: it was wonderful to see young folk ‘wearing their county ganzies, speaking an Gaelige’. Just because the previous generations had it rough, didn’t mean their children and grandchildren had to.”³⁷ It is undeniable that the educational, economic and cultural indices for the newly emergent Catholic population are rising. For example, in the early 1970s, 70% of QUB students were Protestants, whereas today some 60% of Queen’s University undergraduates and 55% of University of Ulster undergraduates are Catholics.³⁸ The 1998 Belfast Agreement copperfastened partition, yet it also involved the advancing of Nationalist communal interest within the North itself. As Suzanne Breen points out: “There has been undeniable advancement in many areas for Catholics in the North, but within existing constitutional arrangements.”³⁹ The Nationalist community may be dynamic, however “it should be noted that the celebration of a community spirit is not discouraged by the British government. It is part of the process of transforming political aspirations into cultural ones.”⁴⁰ It is in the shift towards identity politics that a collapse of political consciousness is most evident. Politics are now about the recognition of the Nationalist ‘identity’ and ensuring its ‘parity of esteem’ within the North.⁴¹ With the principle of consent accepted and Republicanism defeated, Nationalists have concentrated their attention on culture, marches, flags and symbols. For example, Sinn Féin calls for equality at Stormont, no longer for its abolition: statues of Irish Republican icons should be placed at Stormont to make it more welcoming for Nationalists, the party has stated. Assemblyman Paul Butler said there needed to be Irish cultural symbols at the devolved parliament to help make the building more attractive to all sides of the community: “It is Sinn Féin’s view that where British cultural symbols are involved in public life, equivalent symbols should be given equal prominence. The display of the Union flag at Stormont and other emblems wholly associated with Unionism do not promote mutual respect for both traditions,” Mr Butler added.⁴² “It’s because some Nationalists are uneasy at their own acceptance of Northern Ireland that they feel they have to make a show of rhetorical opposition to it. It is because, in practical terms, they have endorsed the legitimacy of the Northern Ireland State that they denounce symbolic representations of it all the more loudly. The campaign to obliterate Northern Ireland having halted, they turn to battle on who’ll rule the roost within it.”⁴³ This does not fit well with Republicanism, but chimes with the Provisionals’ Defenderist roots. Loyalism has also found new legitimacy thanks to the shift towards identity politics.⁴⁴ It is now a legitimate identity which needs ‘parity of esteem’ rather than a form of political supremacism that needs to be fought. Orange marches can now be rebranded as an aesthetics of percussion rather than sectarian intimidation. The twelfth of July is allegedly the largest carnival in Europe. Rebranded in the language of cultural studies, Loyalism has even proved to be very popular with ex-leftwing publishers in Britain like Pluto Press. Paradoxically, those who have been politically defeated think that they are winning, while those who have won are convinced that they are losing everything. Republicanism has been defeated but Nationalists are growing in confidence. The Belfast and St. Andrews Agreements have strengthened the Union, but levels of unemployment and social deprivation in Unionist working class areas are higher than any time since the Second World War, and figures for working-class Protestant involvement in third level education suggest that they are now lower than they have ever been.⁴⁵ Many feel treated worse now than the Catholic working-class, and if looking for somebody to hit out at, the only people below them are ethnic minorities. It is estimated that Loyalist death squads are behind 90% of hate crime.⁴⁶

Process of Peace & Partition
But is the current political set up likely to bring peace and stability? Central to the peace process is the idea that the conflict is one ‘internal’ to Northern Ireland the state should recognise and respect the ‘identities’ of the ‘two traditions’, and ensure parity of esteem between them; politics should be a sectarian balancing act to ensure that they are given equal worth. Sectarianism is supposed to be solved by a system that institutionalises it.⁴⁷ Therefore it is not surprising that research has shown that the North is more segregated, polarised and sectarian since the start of the ‘peace process’. A report issued in 2002 by the Royal Geographical Society found that sectarian divisions have worsened since the peace process began in Northern Ireland.⁴⁸ Prompted in part by the Northern Ireland Office’s denials that sectarianism was on the increase, Dr Peter Shirlow of the University of Ulster interviewed 4,800 people in 12 Belfast estates, six Catholic and six Protestant. The results are damning. Believing the hype about the peace process many, mostly Catholics, moved house to areas not dominated by their own religious denomination. The Housing Executive report that 3,000 moved between 1994 and 1996 but sectarian intimidation forced a reverse movement of 6,000 in the following five years. Two-thirds of the population now live in areas which are either 90% Catholic or 90% Protestant. In predominantly Protestant areas companies have a Catholic workforce of only 5% while in Catholic areas only 8% of the workforce is Protestant. Only one in five people would take a job on the other side of the peace line. 62% in areas separated by a peace line think community relations have got worse. 68% of young people between the ages of 18 and 25 claim never to have had a meaningful conversation with someone from the other religious denomination, and 62% say they have been the victim of physical or verbal sectarian abuse since the 1994 IRA ceasefire. Of those surveyed, 88% said they would not enter an area dominated by the other denomination, even by car, and 58% would not use shopping or leisure facilities in areas controlled by the other religion, even if they were better. “Such attitudes are not a relic of the 20th century that will die as memories of the civil war fade, but a dynamic force,” argues Nick Cohen. “A bus ride through Belfast should convince doubters that the Good Friday Agreement created partition and called it peace.”⁴⁹ Another official report based on statistics from the PSNI, Housing Executive and other research shows that levels of low-level sectarian violence are higher than before the ceasefires.⁵⁰ An average of 1,378 people a year seek rehousing because of sectarian intimidation. About 500 people a year formally complain of religious discrimination at work. 19% of Catholic and 10% of Protestant workers say they experience sectarian graffiti, jokes, songs, ostracisation or threatened or actual violence. Up to 60% of complaints are not formally reported. There are 37 peace walls across the North; none have been removed since the ceasefires, while 18 new ones have actually been built. 42% of Protestants and 33% of Catholics prefer to live in unmixed religious areas, while 48% of young Catholics and 42% of Protestants want separate schools. The financial costs of segregation are high: public spending alone is £1.5bn more per year in the Province than in Wales because of the additional problems caused by sectarian conflict, such as duplication of services.⁵¹ If sectarian attacks continue, many fear the Troubles may reignite. Peter Shirlow has predicted as much. “I don’t think we have the circumstances to take us back to conflict yet,” he says, “but in 20 to 30 years’ time, with constitutional uncertainty, the same pattern could emerge.”⁵² This is why we find The Independent recently concluding that despite all the hype about the ‘historical’ deal between Adams and Paisley, there is ‘a structural problem’ with the peace process: “While our politicians have been patiently mending Northern Ireland’s ceiling, the foundations have been cracking even further. The classic liberal assumptions – that the sectarian divide would slowly close up with rising prosperity and on-going peace have turned out to be false. Things are getting worse.”⁵³

Journalists Against Journalism
If things are getting worse, why does the media keep hammering the message of ‘Northern Ireland reaping the dividend of peace, stability and, it is to be hoped, impending prosperity’? A major reason for this according to Bernadette McAliskey (née Devlin) is that with the complicity of the media and through spin and choreography, peace has been bought by “perjury, fraud, corruption, cheating and lying.”⁵⁴ The 1998 Belfast Agreement was a prime example of what Chomsky would call the ‘manufacturing of consent’: promoting the idea that a ‘No’ vote was a vote for violence, while a ‘Yes’ was a vote for peace, while manipulating opinion polls and relegating dissenting voices to the margins; many of whom agreed with the peace but not with the process. Information Strategy, a British government document written by Tom Kelly, formerly of the BBC and Director of Communications at the Northern Ireland Office at the time of the Agreement, outlines the government’s strategy for getting the right result through a campaign of blatant media manipulation designed to flood Northern Ireland with positive stories about the peace deal.⁵⁵ The ‘Yes’ Campaign also called in the assistance of top advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi, who designed their billboard campaign free of charge. Government spin has been reinforced by the reluctance of the media to ask critical questions. The media has been accused by award-winning journalist Ed Moloney of covering up the truth to protect the peace process and being reluctant to report events unhelpful to the peace process.⁵⁶ Reporters and editors sympathetic to New Sinn Féin strategy branded journalists who asked awkward questions (such as Ed Moloney or Suzanne Breen) ‘JAPPS – Journalists Against the Peace Process’. It would be more accurate to say that the peace process has in fact produced Journalists Against Journalism. More generally, former hunger striker Brendan Hughes is on solid ground when lamenting the fact that “the process has created a class of professional liars.”⁵⁷ At a recent conference, both McAliskey and award-winning playwright Gary Mitchell (who was forced to leave Belfast with his extended family due to Loyalist hostility at his plays) expressed strong criticism of the media’s coverage of the peace process. In Mitchell’s view there is a ‘real truth’ and an ‘agreed truth’, and when the “agreed truth becomes accepted, the real truth becomes a lie.” The media is reporting the agreed truth and the real truth “doesn’t get a look in” he argued.⁵⁸ The agreed truth of the ‘New Northern Ireland’ has been actively promoted by the Blair administration in order that he might go down in history as the one who brought peace to Ireland rather than war to Iraq. The real truth, however, is that Blair is no Gladstone. “Some would suggest a more appropriate comparison would be with Lloyd George, who brokered the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 by telling lies to both sides and who left office in a scandal about the sale of peerages.”⁵⁹ And whether Blair has succeeded in bringing peace is open to question. Recent political agreements were in essence “a triumph of top-down politics, not bottom-up social change.” The majority of the population “certainly wanted peace, but they do not appear to have sought reconciliation.”⁶⁰ With people today being divided as ever, the evident conclusion is that Northern Ireland remains a fundamentally dysfunctional entity.

Notes
1 Gerry Moriarty and Deaglán de Bréadún, ‘Stormont ceremony marks end of Northern conflict’, Irish Times, 8 May 2007
2 Colm Heatley, ‘United Fronts as parties vie for success’, Sunday Business Post, 6 May 2007
3 Editorial, ‘Ulster moves forward’, The Times, 5 October 2006. See also Editorial, ‘A sign of rising confidence’, The Independent, 3 February 2007
4 Lonely Planet Blue List: The Best in Travel 2007, pp.150-151
5 Ben West, ‘Belfast’s ship comes in’, The Observer, 8 October 2006
6 ‘Troop withdrawal plan published’, BBC 28 March 2006, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/4853472.stm
Normalisation has been a British state strategy since the mid-1970s. Today is less a post-conflict situation than a successful normalisation. From a Republican perspective, this is hardly a gain. As an IRA leader concluded as early as 1975: “Suppose we get the release of all detainees, an amnesty and withdrawal of troops to barracks, we are still back where we started in 1969.” Paul Bew and Henry Patterson, The British State and the Ulster Crisis, London: Verso, 1985, p.84
7 Editorial, ‘A province on the move’, Belfast Telegraph, 20 April 2007
8 Oliver Morgan, ‘From bombs and bullets to boom towns’, The Observer, 1 April 2007
9 Leader, ‘Northern Ireland’s Peace Settlement’, The Economist, 29 March 2007
10 Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment for Northern Ireland, ‘Monthly Labour Market Report, April 2007’, http://www.detini.gov.uk/cgi-bin/downdoc?id=2885; John Murray Brown, ‘Finance issues will face N Ireland’, Financial Times, 26 March 2007; Editorial, ‘Northern Ireland now needs to promote the private sector’, Financial Times, 9 May 2007
11 Colm Heatley, ‘Bread and butter on the North’s doorsteps’, Sunday Business Post, 4 March 2007
12 Lord Trevor Smith of Clifton, Hansard, 20 July 2004 c.152. Quoted in Jonathan Tonge, Northern Ireland, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006 p.213.
13 Laura Noonan, ‘Creating a strong economy is goal for our future leaders’, Belfast Telegraph, 30 March 2007
14 Colm Heatley, op.cit.
15 John Murray Brown, op.cit.
16 Oliver Morgan op.cit.
17 Laura Noonan, op.cit.
18 Alan Ruddock, ‘Northern Ireland - Where is the bright new future?’, Management Today, 23 March 2006, http://www.managementtoday.co.uk/article/542849/
19 Editorial, ‘Business tax cut is the key to prosperity’, Belfast Telegraph, 12 March 2007
20 ‘Financial Future “could be bleak”’, BBC 20 March 2007, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/6469011.stm
21 http://www.ulsterbank.com/content/group/economy/ni_indicators/downloads/PMI/NI_UB_PMI_JAN_07.pdf
22 ‘Construction “driving NI economy”’ , BBC 16 April 2007, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/6557975.stm
23 James Stinson, ‘Average price now above £200,000’, The Irish News, 5 April 2007
24 Bimpe Fatogun, ‘Once bloody street now at centre of a property boom’, The Irish News, 29 March 2007
25 Simon Packard, ‘Northern Ireland Housing Market Booms as Era of Violence Ends’, http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601102&sid=aUGS2r6YqqgQ&refer=uk
26 University of Ulster News Release, ‘Rental Sector Booms, But Vacancies Grow’, 13th February 2007, http://news.ulster.ac.uk/releases/2007/2992.html
27 Yvette Shapiro, ‘NI homeowners “paper millionaires”’, BBC 13 February 2007, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/6357637.stm
28 Helen Carson, ‘Overhaul is only way to solve Ulster House crisis’, Belfast Telegraph, 2 February 2007
29 Bimpe Fatogun, ‘Price-boom hike fear over launch of 40-year mortgage’, The Irish News, 28 March 2007
30 ‘Third of children “live in poverty”’, BBC 13 October 2003, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/3185348.stm; ‘Report highlights NI poverty rate’, BBC 4 May 2006,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/4972346.stm
31 Mary O Hara, ‘False Dawn’, The Guardian, 24 November 2004
32 ‘Poor “worse off now than in 1996”’, BBC 14 September 2006, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/5347392.stm
33 David McKittrick, ‘From the gun to the school run – the new Belfast’, Independent on Sunday, 4 March 2007
34 Kevin Bean, The New Politics of Sinn Fein 1985-2007, Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2007. This is an allusion to the British state’s strategy to kill home rule with kindness by means of agrarian reforms at the turn of the century.
35 Roisin McManus, ‘West house prices soar’, The Andersonstown News, 08 February 2007
36 Jim Gibney, ‘Spirit of ’69 still hindered by obstacles’, The Irish News, 21 July 2005
37 Suzanne Breen, ‘Militant republicans shout surrender but unionists should say “well done Gerry”’, Sunday Tribune, 28 January 2007
38 Tom McGurk, ‘Power-sharing in North must not be stopped by minority’, The Sunday Business Post, 25 February 2007
39 Suzanne Breen, ‘“I’ll jail McGuiness any day soon”, jokes Paisley’, Sunday Tribune, 6 May 2007
40 Mark Ryan, War and Peace in Ireland, London: Pluto Press, 1994, p.135
41 Bean passim. See also: Mark McGovern, ‘Irish republicans and the potential pitfalls of pluralism’, Capital and Class, 17(2), 133-162 and ‘The old days are over: Irish republicanism, the peace process and the concept of equality’, Terrorism and Political Violence, 16(3) pp.622-645.
42 ‘SF calls for equality at Stormont’, UTV 10 May 2007, http://www.u.tv/newsroom/indepth.asp?pt=n&id=82142
43 Eamonn McCann, ‘Rooting for England’, Sunday Journal, 11 September 2005
44 Cllr Mark Langhammer, ‘State Funded Sectarianism and Pandering to Paramilitarism’ http://www.qub.ac.uk/csec/docs/Langhammer%20paper.pdf
45 Note that despite all the reforms, Catholics still experience substantially higher unemployment and poverty rates than Protestants. While Catholics make up 48.1% of the total population of working age, they make up 55.7% of economically inactive population of working age. Equally, while Protestants make up 51.9% of the total working age population, they make up only 44.3% of those economically inactive population of working age. Based on NIHE figures, Catholics are spending on average almost one and a half times as long on the housing waiting list as Protestants. While the absolute numbers of those on the waiting list has increased for both communities, the increase for the Catholic community has been almost double that for the Protestant community. See: CAJ report ‘Equality in Northern Ireland: The Rhetoric and the Reality’ (September 2006). The ‘Indicators of Social Need for Northern Ireland’ published by the Office of the First Minister and Deputy First Minister (http://www.research.ofmdfmni.gov.uk/publications.htm) show as well that Catholics are still suffering considerable economic disadvantage. See also: Jim Smyth, ‘Towards Equality of Misery?’, Fortnight, November 2006
46 Henry McDonald, ‘Loyalists linked to 90% of race crime’, The Observer, 22 October 2006
47 Peter Shirlow and Brendan Murtagh, ‘Entrenching Sectarian Goals’, Fortnight, September 2006. The idea that the conflict in Ireland is between ‘two traditions’ and ‘ethno-national’ in nature, rather than about the British state’s denial of the right of the people of Ireland to self determination as a unit is currently the dominant paradigm in academia.
48 Paul Brown, ‘Peace but no love as Northern Ireland divide grows ever’, The Guardian, 4 January 2002. See also: Peter Shirlow and Brendan Murtagh, Belfast: Segregation, Violence and the City, London: Pluto Press, 2006 and Sam Lister, ‘Divided by 57 peace lines: shocking extent of apartheid in Ulster’, Belfast Telegraph, 26 April 2007
49 Nick Cohen, ‘Stop this drift into educational apartheid’, The Observer, 13 May 2007
50 Neil Jarman, ‘No longer a problem? Sectarian Violence in Northern Ireland’, Office of the First Minister and Deputy First Minister, August 2005.
http://www.community-relations.org.uk/document_uploads/OFMDFM_-_Sectarian_Violence.pdf
51 Ben Lowry, ‘Sectarian divisions are “costing Ulster billions”’, Belfast Telegraph, 4 May 2007
52 Olga Craig, ‘Are the Troubles really over for Northern Ireland?’, Sunday Telegraph, 8 October 2006
53 Johann Hari, ‘Blair may have finally seduced Paisley - but that still leaves an Ulster as divided as eve’, The Independent, 26 March 2007
54 Lorna Siggins, ‘Peace in NI bought by “fraud and lying”, says McAliskey’, Irish Times, 30 April 2007
55 Full text of the document: http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/events/peace/docs/nio26398.htm
56 Ed Moloney, The Peace Process and Journalism, in Britain & Ireland: Lives Entwined II, London: The British Council, 2006. Jim Gibney criticises the media for asking “questions which are negative, which instil pessimism and could undermine the public’s hopeful mood” such as whether Republicanism has been defeated. (Jim Gibney, ‘BBC journalists have responsibility to the public’, Irish News, 3 May 2007
57 Interview with Brendan Hughes, Fourthwrite, Issue 1, Spring 2000
58 Lorna Siggins, op.cit.
59 Stephen Collins, ‘Prospect of deal in North dominates US celebrations’, The Irish Times, 17 March 2007
60 Adrian Hamilton, ‘We can learn from Stormont. So why don’t we?’, The Independent, 10 May 2007

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Multiple Agendas, Impossible Dialogues:
Where Irish Studies and History of Art Meet
Lucy Cotter

In an article entitled ‘Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities,’ Stuart Hall describes how we think of democracy as “a nice polite consensual discussion” whereas when it really takes place, it sounds more like an unending row. He writes: “That row, that sound of people actually negotiating their differences in the open, behind the collective program, is the sound I am waiting for.” The purpose of that row is the possibility of one group taking on the agenda of the other. “It has to transform itself in the course of coming into alliance... It doesn’t mistake itself that it becomes it but it has to take it on board.”¹ Art History and Irish Studies do not share a collective programme but given the overlap of their discourses, it was with this kind of face-to-face negotiation of agendas in mind that I convened a conference session reflecting on the potential for interdisciplinary dialogue. ‘Irish Studies and History of Art: Impossible Dialogues?’ was one of twenty-two strands in the Association of Art Historians 2007 conference, which was hosted by the University of Ulster in Belfast this April.² The one-day session consisted of nine formal papers, a panel discussion reflecting on the papers and an open floor discussion, which I will look at here in brief. I apologise in advance for not being able to do justice to the full contents of the papers or to the complexity and diversity of the discussions that arose.
Firstly, I would like to quickly put the overall dialogue in context. Over the past ten years some individual art historians of Irish art have considered Irish art’s relationship to broader cultural discourses – Fintan Cullen being an obvious example – while a small number of Irish Studies academics (such as Colin Graham, David Lloyd and Luke Gibbons) have dealt specifically with Irish art. These writings have often been criticised for using art as an illustration of theory and not in terms of its particularity as a medium and discourse. Unlike many in the Irish art world, I see this as grounds for more interdisciplinary dialogue. This dialogue might in turn offer Art History resources and methodologies for further negotiating Irish art’s relationship to wider cultural discourses. The main point of tension in such an interdisciplinary dialogue is the function and status of the national – which is central to Irish Studies and often seen as reductive in Art History.
These tensions were borne out most strongly in a paper by Gavin Murphy. Entitled ‘Unsanctioned Transgressions: The Limits of Irishness in the Works of Willie Doherty and Gerard Byrne,’ the paper asked what the role of the national might be in the context of two artists working in a global arena, as much informed by private and corporate concerns as by Irish culture. This question was examined in relation to the three intertwining contexts in which the artists worked – the Venice Biennale, the context of local representation and the blurr