This is England

I’ve just been watching a flim on TV, This is England.

It was made a couple of years ago, but was set in England in about 1982, during the Falklands War. It’s about a boy who is bullied at school and befriended by a gang of skinheads, and begins to hang out with them, and enjoys their friendship, but then an older former leader of the gang is released from prison, and a darker side emerges, as he is an English nationalist, and the gang splits as racism and xenophobia intrude.

I won’t say more about the plot in case anyone reading this hasn’t seen it, and don’t want to add plot spoilers.

But I was very conscious of it being an England I had missed entirely.

I visited England twice. Once in the mid-sixties, when I spent two and a half years there, mostly studying in Durham, but also driving buses in London, described, in part, in another blog post on Swinging London in retrospect. The second visit was about three years ago, much shorter, a three week holiday visiting old friends and relations.

After nearly 40 years there were many changes. One of the most noticable was that in the 1960s there had been an industrial working class. There were factory workers, coal miners and others. Forty years later most people seemed to be employed in service industries.

Nowadays the transition seems to be marked by the jokes on motoring programmes on TV — about the Japanese failure to make proper motorbikes that leaked oil, or proper cars that broke down.

But the film showed something I had missed, that marked the transition — the Thatcher years.

I’m sure that the film does not tell the full story of those years, and that there were lots of other things that happened. But during both my visits to Britain there was a Labour government, and it seemed a little bit more sunny and cheerful and optimistic.

I’d be interested in knowing if people who lived through the Thatcher years and saw the film think it is true to life.

Will the real socialists please stand up

During the recent US elections, there were all kinds of stories flying around the internet from Americans to the effect that Barack Obama was a “socialist”, which made it clear that a lot of people simply don’t have a clue about what “socialism” actually means.

Hat-tip to the Western Confucian for this piece from a real socialist explaining what it’s all about.

Where Are All The Socialists? Here, There and Everywhere | CommonDreams.org:

Socialism shares one thing in common with religion; there are many denominations and sects and they all claim to hold some higher truth. I don’t claim to hold a higher truth. I do have a perspective on socialism, and that is, of course, open to disagreement.

Not all socialists are Marxists or atheists. Norman Thomas, the leader of the party in the 1930s and ’40s, was an ordained Presbyterian minister.

Socialists do not believe nationalization of an industry, government buying stocks in banks or the subsides to auto makers makes the country socialist.

Will the real socialists please stand up

During the recent US elections, there were all kinds of stories flying around the internet from Americans to the effect that Barack Obama was a “socialist”, which made it clear that a lot of people simply don’t have a clue about what “socialism” actually means.

Hat-tip to the Western Confucian for this piece from a real socialist explaining what it’s all about.

Where Are All The Socialists? Here, There and Everywhere | CommonDreams.org:

Socialism shares one thing in common with religion; there are many denominations and sects and they all claim to hold some higher truth. I don’t claim to hold a higher truth. I do have a perspective on socialism, and that is, of course, open to disagreement.

Not all socialists are Marxists or atheists. Norman Thomas, the leader of the party in the 1930s and ’40s, was an ordained Presbyterian minister.

Socialists do not believe nationalization of an industry, government buying stocks in banks or the subsides to auto makers makes the country socialist.