Talking to their pockets

A run of media appearances…

On BBC Radio 4’s Free Thinking programme, discussing humility, Spinoza, the worm in the blood, George Eliot and the wrong pronunciation of Happisburgh. I may have been a little unduly sharp to Robert Buckland in my account of Liz Truss and her lack of humility – Buckland spoke with real candour, dignity and – the term we arrived at – service.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002t2ll

A couple of Open University films. The first – ‘Think before you share’ – on misinformation and intellectual self-defence. Here I offer useful guidance on the abolition of the weekend.

And the second, on my community research around the country.

And a Spotify podcast recording for an MK Lit Fest event with Kit de Waal:

March has been a month of drilling, in the farmers’ sense. After being trapped for many months by a lazy argument, I think I found a way to discuss the conditions for authentic teaching in the wake of generative AI, one that takes seriously obsolescence and enfeeblement through an argument for purpose and presence, resting in part on Alasdair MacIntyre.

In the next couple of weeks, the Growth and Reform Network (a UK-wide thinktank) will release my report Inclusive Growth at 10: Lessons from Barking and Dagenham. It has been a time-consuming and fascinating piece of work, and my first to properly use quant data on inequalities alongside the usual melange of interviews I’ve worked on. The philosophical framing is not Spinoza, but Epictetus: what is and what is not in the power of local authorities. The picture is damning, but not for want of trying from many deeply committed, humble and genuinely admirable council officers and councillors. To me, the key figure is the ghost of George Brooker, the former council leader who fundamentally opposed the model of private developer-led blocks of flats that was imposed across Barking and, well, many other parts of the country. I hope I can set out what I mean soon.

By the next post I hope to share another long-term piece of work finished this week, examining academic freedom in the wake of the Phoenix Tribunal.

And a cross-nations write-up on unpaid care.

I don’t know why I’m listing work I haven’t even published – there’s a lesson for humility there…

Last one: I’m writing on a Saturday evening, train back from a fantastic event in Cardiff organised by my OU colleague Claire Malcolm, “Caring for Carers Cymru”. I gave a talk celebrating care, in an uplifting but honest and genuine way. I’d left my notebook at home, so I wrote my notes on the back of a spreadsheet printout, detailing the redundancy payouts for a dear carers organisation I have worked with for around four years, and which this week we initiated the winding-up off. It is one of many carers organisations around the country being wound up due to funding cuts, principally from local authorities shifting to outside providers who underbid for tendered contracts with no connection to the areas concerned.

I am 38, soon to be 39. Over my still relatively short working life (or so I delude myself in thinking), I have seen the progressive and unrelenting defunding and hollowing out of youth work, community work, organisations which build and support capacity within community and voluntary organisations, and organisations which support carers. At talks recently at Goldsmiths and Sussex, I’ve been zoning back on the concept of class and obsolescence: the notion that substantial parts of what was the working class are becoming obsolete to the global capitalist economy, not needed, not wanted, perhaps except, in the sense Marx took from ancient Rome, of proletarians who produce children for a future service class.

But when I was up in Gateshead this week, you know what carers I met and people I value talked about? Union; unions; unionism. A politics of solidarity and camaraderie, that steps out amid what is damaged, if not broken. Take a look, one last time, at the union banner we designed with carers, then produced in best by Emma Shankland of Durham Bannermakers, that no arts or local grant-giver would then fund to make, and then the carers organisation behind it folded… There are two different interpretations, two truths, that open up to you here.