Mostly reading books around the issue of national decline, cultural rot, loss of traditions and the British Old New Left, while unpicking Whig history.
THE MAKING OF THE ENGLISH WORKING CLASS
Along with Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy, this book represents a view of the working class and "progress" being about their struggles that died as the 50s turned into the 60s. From the perspective of today, both books are prescient of a type of rooted, conservation, reactionary cultural analysis. In it's day, this book was hugely influential.
I read this a few years ago when my thought was less developed, but it has floated around in the back of my mind. Time to return to it, I think...🧵
@ForeverCDL@bezos_killer@UnrealBarnet@ScipioAlpha Well, bad people for what? Both Labour and the Conservatives were getting reverse ferreted by Liberals while the old paternalistic Tories that Salisbury represented had been in long term decline since long before Churchill was in politics.
Churchill had had two strokes and a year, maybe a year and a half to recognize the problem and act after immigration started to surge, while surrounded by people (other than Salisbury) who thought his concerns were silly and wanted to stall the issue out. All things considered, I find it hard to blame him... and handing over to Eden earlier would hardly have helped.
A 13 year old Jamaican teenybopper gets in trouble for stealing a bicycle, and then steals another bicycle while on probation for stealing the first bicycle.
Yes, rather like how in the Rising Damp, a sitcom from the 70 partly about race relations in a multioccupancy house, in an era where riots had been caused by the antics of the West Indian underclass in multioccupancy housing... the black character is urbane, educated and charming and surrounded by the white underclass that he gracefully rises above.
@GreeneMan6 On the WQ, I thought this was rather interesting. It's a Jamaican academic, who studied the West Indian community of Bristol some time around 1970. The West Indians were perplexed by the behaviour of white women.
https://t.co/wVeeQlpzty
There was a common place observation amongst the West Indian pimps of Windrush Bristol that it would have been virtually impossible for black men to survive in England without the sympathy and inexplicable generocity of English women.