Happy Friday! This week is my busy work week which combined with a Tube Strike was challenging. However, I rose to the challenge but will need a lie in this weekend as it didn’t happen last weekend, ’cause of the nephew!
This weeks links….
What the Tube Strike was really about. To be absolutely clear, I was really annoyed about the strike but I’m not annoyed with the people on strike, I’m annoyed with TfL, who don’t negotiate or consult and then wonder why their employees go on strike, which they are entitled to do. I don’t blame the unions for working to get the best deal for their members, that’s what they’re supposed to do.
Louise O’Neill on being a feminist. She was 15 in 2000 and I was 25 but in 1990 when I was 15, I did call myself a feminist and I didn’t feel or do those things but I guess some girls did…
The changes to social housing policy are not about fairness.
…the underpinning principle is that the state has no business being a provider of ordinary, decent housing to ordinary, decent people. It should instead be thought of as the houser of last resort.
Thomas Piketty on Greek and German debt..
Germany is really the single best example of a country that, throughout its history, has never repaid its external debt. Neither after the First nor the Second World War. However, it has frequently made other nations pay up, such as after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, when it demanded massive reparations from France and indeed received them. The French state suffered for decades under this debt. The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.
It’s not just London that has a housing crisis. but this sums up the problem here too
This is what happens when housing is seen as a vehicle of wealth creation rather than primarily as somewhere to live. People’s actual living conditions are abstracted away, replaced by sets of economic indicators that are largely of relevance to those who are already on the property ladder.
What Labour should be doing. No, no, no. The problem is that you can work hard and not get anywhere. The problem is the increasing gap between the wealthy and everyone else who are working harder to stand still. The problem is fairness and opportunity, I could (and God willing will)work hard until I retire, aged 67, but as it stands I won’t ever be able to buy a house in the city I was born and where my family and friends are. The problem is that MP’s get £125 a week as a food allowance which is more than I spend on food in a month. The problem is inequality, stupid….
The stupidity of the wellness aesthetic.
It’s not really about health – health does not have to be beautiful, thin and tidy in designer crop tops, but wellness does. It’s an aesthetic of wealth, a sort of gentle, palatable capitalism. There’s a dizziness to its beauty: it is light, weightless, transcendent. It probably feels this way thanks to the restricted calories as much as the calm from appropriated Eastern meditation.
James Naughtie is leaving the Today Programme. I’m sad, and the idea of Nick Robinson taking over is scary, I know it’s really shallow but his voice is not up to it and it would put me off my morning coffee. Couldn’t we have another woman?
New York from above. These pictures are stunning.
I feel like a wally for believing in Osborne’s Northern Powerhouse. Like Satan, George Osborne is the Prince of Lies….
Yes, Osborne was cutting billions from the budgets of northern councils while promising a “revolution in the way we govern England” by devolving power to these increasingly penniless town halls. But why is he still wanging on about it with five years until the next election if he doesn’t mean it?
