Booklaunch Issue 16

Disability figures rise in Cambridge

A professor at Cambridge University tells Booklaunch that a fifth of his students are now registered as having a disability related to their mental health.

The claim is backed up by evidence. The number of students disclosing a disability rose nearly fourfold between 2008 and 2020, according to the university’s figures, with higher rates of increase in those reporting mental as opposed to physical health issues.

The Student Union at Cambridge has also found that conditions related to mental health rose from only 35 students in 2009 to 1,254 students eleven years later.

In a 2013 report by the Equality Challenge Unit (part of Advance HE, which helps higher-education bodies apply for equality and diversity awards), over 60 percent more students were found to be identifying as disabled at Cambridge than at other UK universities.

continued

The democracy debate: is there a new Cleisthenes in the house?

In Issue 15 of Booklaunch, we looked at the assault on democracy from countries little enamoured of the West, and featured Paul Cartledge’s new book on the evolution of democracy from its ancient origins. Prof. Cartledge now speculates on democracy’s future. If democracy endows us with freedoms that are harming us, can we say that it’s still working?

How in a democracy can people be got to do the things they don’t want to do but which, if they don’t do them, or do them right, will kill us all? That’s the question. Or, to be a little more specific: how does a democracy get its citizens to stop over-consuming, over-eating, over-burning fossil fuels, over-destroying habitats and over-polluting?

The short answer would be: abolish democracy. After all, as a former UK PM

continued on page 18, column 3

The crisis in our schools

The shocking news that Ruth Perry, the headteacher at a primary school in Reading, Berkshire, committed suicide in January 2023 after her school was downgraded from outstanding to inadequate by Ofsted has raised questions about the inspectorate’s procedures and judging system.

Critics have spoken of the need to reduce the pressure that the current inspection regime places on teachers, children and parents, with Paul Whiteman, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, describing it as “intolerable”.

In spite of this, the teaching profession seems to agree with the education watchdog’s chief inspector, Amanda Spielman, that inspections help parents understand how their children’s school is doing and helps schools understand what their strengths are and where they need to improve.

The fact is, however, that Ofsted does no more than reinforce the structures of an education system that is itself broken, from top to bottom. Education, even at primary

level, now fails to do the one thing that children need most.

Schooling prepares them, almost to the exclusion of all else, for a university education which is itself dangerously narrow, while doing almost nothing to ready them for the complex challenges of real life.

The extent to which children emerge into adulthood equipped with life skills is largely dependent on family and cultural background. Teachers who might otherwise be wholly committed to helping children gain broader competences cannot do as much as they’d like because of the limitations of the curriculum which Ofsted defends.

In his one public statement about educational reform in January, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who studied economics and business administration, talked about the need for mandatory teaching of mathematics up to the age of 18 to tackle innumeracy, but not about the need for educational changes that would tackle other types of unpreparedness.

A thousand and one one-liners

Since 2009, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe has been conferring a special annual award—the “Dave’s Funniest Joke of the Fringe” award—for the best gag used in a stand-up routine. Each year, a panel of ten comedy critics gets to work: its members view about 600 comedy shows in all, and compile a shortlist of candidate jokes—usually ten. That list is then submitted (with the comedian’s name suppressed, in each case) to 2,000 members of the public, who select their favourite and thereby jointly select the winner.

Typically, the jokes involve a play on words, and the winners are not always deserved. 2022’s winning joke, for instance, seemed rather too forced: “I tried to steal spaghetti from the shop, but the female

guard saw me and I couldn’t get pasta.”

As it happens, the creator of that joke, Masai Graham, won the 2016 prize as well, with a far finer joke: “My dad suggested I register for a donor card—he’s a man after my own heart.”

The winner who preceded him (in 2019, as Covid stymied the competition for two years) has also been a runner-up several times: Olaf Falafel, “Sweden’s 8th funniest” comedian. His winning joke was: “I keep randomly shouting out ‘Broccoli’ and ‘Cauliflower’—I think I might have florets,” a joke that prompted protests from the charity Tourettes Action, which called on the comedian to apologise.

Two of his shortlisted jokes, from previcontinued on column 4, page 11

For anyone outside the educational system, what seems obvious is that children need systematic help in anticipating and handling problems in their relations with each other and family members. They need to understand the impact of death and loss, how to deal with achievement and disappointment, and how to navigate the whirl of emotions that make adolescence a trial for so many.

They need to understand issues to do with health and the workings of the body and the mind. They also need to be taught about wider definitions of health: of the dangers to society and the environment but also to themselves of over-consumption, waste and pollution, as well as over-dependence on other people and electronic aids, how to recognise and discredit disinformation, and of the need to protect nature.

Such issues may be promoted as a general ethic in schools but occupy none of the teaching time taken up by subjects in which continued on page 3

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knowledge has been formulated into jargon that, even at university level, is very likely never to be needed after being tested for in school examinations.

Even at a practical level, children do not now enjoy the sort of competences that their grandparents took for granted: repairing a puncture on a bicycle, building a simple radio receiver, knitting, milking, manual skills, things one used to do for oneself. Today, life spent on a mobile phone means little more than being a passive receiver; by contrast with a century ago, there seems little that today’s children know how do for themselves. We have all been reduced— and AI threatens to reduce us further.

At the same time, the setting in which education is delivered has barely changed since schooling began. Teaching continues to be delivered in large classes, led by teachers, top-down, in spite of the availability of more sophisticated methods. I tell you what you need to know; you remember it.

Lockdown showed that lessons can be transmitted at long distance, into the home, via computer and smartphone. And every subject now taught in school is backed up not by books but by online “curriculum materials” that children are meant to access on their own.

Not a single local authority now says it

ment. Given the tools now available to us, we should be finding better ways of providing children with settings tailored to their needs.

The mantra of the incoming Labour government in 1997 was “education, education, education” and Professor Paul Cartledge, writing in these pages, repeats it in his prescription for the survival of democracy.

We cannot expect our political system to perform at a higher standard, he suggests, unless we are better educated about it—and about much else. That requires enormously more imagination than the educational establishment currently shows any sign of and much more than it seems to aspire to.

Instead, the establishment is highly conventional and institutionalised, entrenched in its own routines, and incapable of carrying out the self-scrutiny that education systems ought not just to teach and value but to practise. Without it, the main purpose of schools seems to be little more than that of keeping young people off the streets, lest they cause trouble, and keeping them off the job registers, lest they add to our unemployment figures and claim benefits.

The national curriculum was intended to raise educational levels in the worst performing schools but it has bulldozed more sensitive approaches to teaching and ignored the singular talents of exceptional

and individuality among their charges. Rote learning rarely inspires.

The educational establishment needs to look urgently at how to introduce rootand-branch reform, overhauling its own institutional practices in favour of varieties of approach that allow for variation in what schools offer and what teachers are valued for, that welcome a range of possible teaching environments, that allow for single or group learning, peer-to-peer learning, exams versus continuous assessment, and project work or other types of assignment, according to what a pupil feels comfortable with.

But schools must go much further and prepare their students for life. We need adults who know how to prepare decent meals rather than relying on unhealthy carb-heavy supermarket products, who can manage a bank account and understand varieties of financial risk, who recognise the differences in human motivation and the reasons why we disagree and see things differently, and who can think through problems and look ahead to the consequences of any action.

Where is all this being discussed? It’s not obviously a central concern at Westminster, nor of the teaching unions and academics, nor of Ofsted, otherwise we would have heard about it. And yet it’s fundamental not just to how we ensure the survival and prospects of society but to how we improve the life chances of the most vulnerable.

Trust the children

Who, then, should be asked to lead this essential restructuring? Children, of course, just as prisoners should be asked to lead our thinking on the rehabilitation and reform side of the justice system. Children should be asked not just because they are the end-users and beneficiaries of schooling but because they have the most to lose if the system fails them.

In an ideal world, as was said after the death of Ms Perry, Ofsted’s inspectors would spend a year at a school instead of just two days every four years, ensuring that they’d really got the measure of it. They cannot; but children can and do. They see everything. And unlike DfE civil servants, they live with the consequences.

Quiz Time with Maggie Bawden

has the resources to maintain its stock of school buildings and its cohorts of teachers. And yet there has been no serious investigation of what education would look like if digital learning equipment made school attendance optional or unnecessary.

Children themselves complain about the boredom of the school regime, of the cramped, repetitive nature of the curriculum, and of inflexibility in teaching styles and expectations.

For children who are academically gifted or naturally social, school may be what our parents told us it was—the best days of our lives. But for many more, and perhaps most, the school day is a challenge, during which they are repeatedly reminded of their incapacities or their unpopularity or their failings, or forced to compete with each other against their will.

It’s not surprising that many children regard school as a prison, and one in which they are made to confront a range of abusive behaviours, whether from bored or insecure teachers or from bored or transgressive peers. It’s at school that bullies learn their craft.

To expect every member of the school community to behave perfectly every day, in spite of the personal challenges they may be coping with in their outside lives, is to fantasise about the school environ-

teachers. It is the most conformist, unquestioning teaching employees today who are most likely to succeed; those natural educators with the greatest flair and charisma are the ones most likely to be squeezed out or to feel there is no place for them.

Conformist teachers in turn expect students to conform to the curriculum, learning in the same way and at the same pace, relying not only on memorisation rather than thought but on their ability to regurgitate information on demand, in examinations, whether or not what is coughed up is understood. It’s no wonder that many children feel unengaged, frustrated and discouraged. Teachers too.

Such teaching can be detrimental to the mental health of both. The pressure to perform well in tests and assignments—as with the pressure on schools to perform well in Ofsted inspections—can be overwhelming, especially for students who in any case struggle with anxiety or other mental health issues. Stress and anxiety in turn adversely affect academic performance and overall well-being. And, as we have seen so tragically, affect teachers anxious to have proved themselves and not let down the communities they serve.

Meanwhile, the exclusion of creativity and individuality among the teaching staff becomes a template that stifles creativity

Children know, really know, what their needs are, to an extent that adults find hard to credit. Older children also know their way round technology better than we do— find it more intuitive and obvious—and are less wedded to old habits.

Can we trust children to design their own education? We haven’t done in the past and look where it’s got us. Children are already making intuitive moves that no one has taught them. Long before undergraduates get to put off parenting to focus on their careers, their teenage siblings are talking of not wanting to bring children into a world that their parents have wrecked. Talk to them about how their schooling fails and how it could be improved and you’ll be surprised by what you learn—not just about the education system but about their own insight.

It’s radical to the point of naïvety, of course, to imagine that children have the maturity of mind to identify and work out all the problems but, guess what? Children know this as well. They’ll say when a problem is beyond them. We need to trust and listen, take them seriously and not condescend to them by imagining we know everything better.

Education is in crisis—unacknowledged by too many of us but fully recognised by those we’re failing—and it needs a partnership with the young to rebuild it. Fortunately there’s conceptual stuff that we older hands find hard to deal with that the young know instinctively. We need to press them into service.

First, a quiz question. But before that … … hang on, surely you can’t have something before the first item? Yes you can, and there’s even an adjective for it, zeroth, dating all the way back to 1896. It’s best known through the 1930s’ “zeroth law of thermodynamics”, which underlies the long-established first, second and third laws of thermodynamics. The New Oxford Dictionary of English (NODE) defines zeroth (adj. attrib.) as “immediately preceding what is regarded as first in a series”. True enough, neither NODE nor the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) recognises zeroth as an adverb, or upgrades the potential word zerothly to a formal entry, but let’s go for it.

After all, neither does NODE or OED sanction zeroth’s synonym noughth, even though every Oxford University student is very familiar with it: Oxford terms are eight weeks long, but for start of term, students typically return to their college during the week prior to first week, in what is known as noughth week. Cambridge uses a different naming system: week zero, week one, etc. That’s the story anyway.

Zerothly, then, I have been dividing the alphabet into two sets: letters typed with the left hand and letters typed with the right hand:

a b c d e f g

h i j k l m n o p …

Halfly (i.e. an item between Zerothly and Firstly) and apropos, here is an unofficial quiz question, with the answer provided immediately. Divide the following words into two groups of ten, and explain the basis of your division:

afterwards badger bastard creased database gazette homonym kimono knoll lollipop monopoly nylon opinion phylum steadfast trade uphill vertebrate wordcraft yolk

The answer is in the table below. The basis for the grouping is that (on a conventional qwerty keyboard) ten of the words are typed solely with the left hand, and ten are typed solely with the right hand.

Group A (typed with the left hand) afterwards badger bastard creased database gazette steadfast trade vertebrate wordcraft

Group B (typed with the right hand) homonym kimono knoll lollipop monopoly nylon opinion phylum uphill yolk

The obvious follow-up questions: What is the longest word that can be typed solely with the left hand? And with the right hand

This book explores the impact of dictatorial governments on everyday life, as well as analysing the relationship between the population and the regime in a number of key dictatorships in Europe. The chapters explore the extent to which populations living in these circumstances embraced, appropriated, accommodated or avoided the regime’s penetration into daily life. They shed light on nuances in these lived experiences of dictatorship and in the relationship between the population and the government in each case.

Although particular circumstances and national histories might have been distinctive in the different case studies we are treating, European intellectual, cultural and political traditions had a part to play in the development of conditions in each of these to provide fertile ground for dictatorships to arise when they did, and in some cases to remain in place for several decades.

The developments that shaped each of

DICTATORSHIP AND DAILY LIFE IN 20TH-CENTURY EUROPE

LISA PINE (ED)

Bloomsbury Academic

280 pages Softback

1 December 2022

9781350208988

RRP £24.99

Check our website for discount

EDITOR’S NOTE

A long-overdue and much-needed round-up. Leading scholars explore the impact on populations of antidemocratic regimes on working life, news and entertainment, the conduct of leisure time, the instinct for dissent and resistance, religious and cultural life, and reproduction, education and eating. The book focuses on examples of one-party states and leadership cults, and considers policies of coercion and indoctrination, press censorship and the threat and use of force by the regime’s agents.

READER’S COMMENT

Prof. Marius Turda, Oxford Brookes

University: An important book. Lisa Pine has assembled a fine team of historians to recreate the ebb and flow of daily life in such dictatorships as Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Soviet Union, Salazar’s Portugal andCeausescu’s Romania. The chapters included here demonstrate how ordinary people built love-hate relationships with authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, which kept them under strict surveillance and constantly deprived them of many personal and collective rights. Essential reading.

studies selected extend the scope of this book beyond the most obvious ‘totalitarian’ dictatorships in Fascist Italy, the USSR and Nazi Germany. We examine the Iberian Peninsula, looking at developments in the Franco regime in Spain, as well as the Salazar administration in Portugal, both of which similarly lasted many decades. Ceausescu’s regime in Romania, which lasted from 1965 to 1989 (and was a more extreme version of that of his predecessor, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej), also extended over several decades. Its significant and distinctive social policies towards the family are worthy of discussion in the context of a book that treats the history of everyday life. Beyond that, a coverage of the German Democratic Republic and one of the Baltic states ensures that whilst this book cannot embrace examples from the whole continent, it does represent a reasonably broad geographical range.

The book covers dictatorships from what are considered to be the extreme left and

personal choices in aspects of life such as reproduction, education and even food affected by these regimes? What was the impact of different political ideologies on people’s way of life – whether fascist, Nazi or communist?

In setting out the national histories of each of the different regimes and placing them together in one volume, this book allows readers not only to understand what daily life was like in individual dictatorships, but also to compare them with each other, either singly or severally, as well as allowing a comparison of those based upon left-wing or right-wing ideologies, either together or with each other. This approach helps readers to come to an understanding of the subject and to formulate their own assessments of the dictatorships we cover through comparison and contrast.

Some comparative books deal with the machinery of dictatorship or the dictators themselves and make comparisons about those but none does this in terms of every-

How do populations adapt to the repression imposed by authoritarian regimes?

these countries throughout the course of the 19th century and into the 20th century were very significant in determining the paths they took into dictatorship, as political, social and economic circumstances led to the rise of extreme ideologies and autocratic governments.

Specifically, modern European history from the Enlightenment onwards set the stage for their emergence and development in a variety of ways. Industrialisation and revolutions (thwarted or not), as well as the rise of new political parties and ideologies of nationalism and racism (and even the levelling aspect inherent in socialism), left their imprint.

The establishment of overseas empires (or the incapacity to do so) contributed to the dictatorial impetus. Most acutely, the First World War, its unresolved outcome and the post-war settlements provided fertile ground for extreme ideologies to rise and allowed opportunistic politicians to grab power. Unfavourable economic circumstances heightened the frustration and often desperation among their supporters, as did inequalities between social classes and uneven economic development.

For these reasons, this book is restricted to a discussion of the history of dictatorial regimes in Europe’s twentieth century, where the circumstances of the development of the dictatorships were different from those of other continents. Limiting the geographical extent to Europe gives coherence to the book, with each case study rooted in the shared history of Europe.

The original concept for this book came from my hearing about the experience of a first-year undergraduate history student at a British university, presented with the essay title, ‘Was Nazism more similar to Italian Fascism or Stalinism?’ The apparent lack of (up-to-date) secondary sources faced by students like this to tackle a question of that nature prompted me to consider producing a book to fill this gap.

But then it also appeared opportune to expand the remit of such a book beyond these three examples. And so, the case

right of the political spectrum, and one of the intriguing questions it addresses is whether or not, or how far, daily life in each of these states showed more than superficial commonalities. None of the authors subscribes anymore to the Cold War social-scientific paradigm of totalitarianism, but undoubtedly the European 20th-century zeitgeist or, more concretely, at least a shared stage of society’s technological development contributed to the prevalence of often similar conditions of everyday life.

As we examine the intersections between the structures of the dictatorships and the citizens who lived under their rule, we see how people attempted to preserve as much of a semblance of normality in their everyday existence as was possible within the context of living under despotic rule.

This book then, examines what happened to people’s lives in a political regime characterised by some or all of the following: a one-party state in which opposition or multiple parties were banned; a cult surrounding the leader; the censorship of the press and other publications; the widespread use of propaganda and political persuasion; and the simmering threat or the actual use of force by the regime and its agents.

The chapters investigate crucial questions in relation to life under dictatorships including: What was the impact of censorship on access to news or entertainment? How was leisure time conducted? What was the impact of the regime on working life? What was the potential and scope for dissent and resistance? How much did the regime coerce the population and how much did it attempt to gain popular support? What was the difference for party leaders, comrades and members in terms of the career possibilities and opportunities for social advancement these opened, compared to everyone else in society?

In particular, with the shutting down –to a large extent – of civil society and state intrusion into private life, what restrictions were placed on ordinary and day-to-day activities? What happened to religious life and to cultural life and the arts? How were

day life and the relationship between the regime and the people. The only truly comparable book, edited by Alf Lüdtke, deals with an eclectic selection of cases from across the globe, including two chapters on the Third Reich, one on Italian Fascism, one on Stalinism, two on Korea between 1937 and 1945, one on the German Democratic Republic (GDR), three further chapters on Korea, one on Senegal and one on Ghana.

The present volume deals with some different cases to his whilst focused solely on Europe. Lüdtke identifies both ‘collusion’ and its ‘crucial flipside: evasion’ as the key themes of his book. He notes a range of practices of collusion, as well as ‘moments and spaces that allowed evasion of the gazing eyes and listening ears of the authorities and their agents’. These are certainly important themes in the study of dictatorship and daily life. In this book too, we reflect upon the extent to which people made decisions about how to go about their everyday lives within the parameters of the very restricted lifestyles imposed upon them by the governments in question.

A noteworthy comparative study by Glennys Young deals with solely communist regimes. Young’s book extends beyond the USSR and Eastern Europe to examine the lives of people across the globe, in China, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Kyrgyzstan, Algeria, Peru, Cuba and elsewhere. It analyses the communist experience, in which people became enthusiasts, reshapers, resisters or victims of the communist ideological project. It is very broad in its coverage, but, as the title already indicates, looks only at communist regimes.

In contrast, the comparative volume edited by António Costa Pinto and Aristotle Kallis focuses mainly on the 1920s and 1930s and extreme right- wing examples, so here too the coverage is also not the same as in this book. In addition, it deals with the political or ruling mechanisms of the regimes and with fascist ideology, rather than the history of everyday life.

Beyond this, there are some older books that deal with compar- continued in the book

One way to engage with lost art: remake it yourself

REDISCOVERING BLACK PORTRAITURE PETER

BRATHWAITE

Getty Publications

168 pages Hardback

11 April 2023

9781606068168

RRP £35.00

Check our website for discount

AUTHOR’S NOTE

During the pandemic, my social media feed was awash with photos by people with time on their hands who had challenged themselves to re-create their favourite artworks using everyday items found at home. I had done so myself but for professional reasons. As a black British opera singer, I had wanted evidence not to have to “white up” for an opera production that required me to play the part of a French aristocrat. I had trawled the internet and found a portrait of a black man of high status portrayed in his own skin in eighteenth-century Paris. Armed with his likeness I ditched the white greasepaint and portrayed myself authentically for a change.

Since then, I have been searching for and recreating as many black figures from art as possible, using found objects and the camera of my iPhone 7. The results rescue them from oblivion, restore their dignity, and reveal the true diversity of European history and art.

READERS’ COMMENTS

Samira Ahmed, BBC broadcaster: This is a book that will enchant and intrigue and educate. I’m thrilled by the beauty and fun and history on every page.

REMAKES

All re-creations by Peter Brathwaite (with photographic partner Sam Baldock) © Peter Brathwaite.

ORIGINALS

Top row: Mansa Musa, ca. 1375, Abraham Cresques, 1325—1387. In Atlas of Maritime Charts (The Catalan Atlas). Illum. parchment glued to board. Paris, Bibliothèque nat. de France, Ms. Espagnol 30, fol. 3.

Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. Digital image from same source. Presented by Mr. C. E. Docker, 1956.

Bottom row, right: The Adoration of the Magi, ca. 1480 90, Georges Trubert French, active 1467 1499, died before 1508. In a book of hours. Tempera, gold leaf, gold and silver paint, and ink. Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum, Ms. 48, fol. 59 Digital image courtesy of Getty’s Open Content Program.

Baroness Floella Benjamin: Highly entertaining—a breathtaking visual explosion in which Brathwaite reimagines a wide variety of portraits of black people in a stunningly creative way. Not only an original visual treat but an important historical work.

Professor Dorothy Price: A truly compelling visual feast that reanimates the archives of black portraiture in the present.

Middle row, left: The Sibyl Agrippina, ca. 1630, attrib. to Jan van den Hoecke, 1611 1651. Oil on canvas. Düsseldorf, Germany, Kunstpalast, mkp.M 125 Commons.

Middle row, right: Don Miguel de Castro: Emissary of Kongo, ca. 1643, Jasper Becx, d. 1647. Oil on panel. Copenhagen, Statens Museum for Kunst, KMS7.

Bottom row, left: “Cotton,” ca. 1823, John Dempsey, 1802/3 1877. In A Folio of

British Street Portraits, 1824 44. Watercolour. Hobart,

EDITOR’S NOTE

Booklaunch is delighted to be sponsoring the first Architectural Book Awards, the finalists of which will be announced in the summer.

On the following pages we publish our shortlist, broken down into three categories — Monographs, Reference Books and History — each of which will have its own winner, from which the overall winner of winners, the Architectural Book of the Year, will be chosen.

Architecture is an odd subject which has always overlapped into other specialisms, and never more than now, as digitisation makes it possible to calculate factors that relied in the past on instinct and experience. Architectural writing, similarly, picks up on issues more easily recognised as engineering, aesthetics, urban studies, environmentalism and art history, to name but a few, while being encumbered by a jargon that evidently pleases its own practitioners but no one else.

In considering the books submitted for these awards, the judges were therefore at pains to single out books that were excellent by any standard and not just by the standards of their own discipline, and we are hugely gratified by the first batch of titles, from which the eventual award winners will be chosen.

All titles are now on sale and can be bought from the Booklaunch website (www.booklaunch.london), where prices always offer free UK postage and usually include the most generous discounts available.

Shortlisted: Monographs

GENTRIFICATION IS INEVITABLE AND OTHER LIES LESLIE KERN

Verso

256 pages Hardback

September 2022

9781839767548

RRP £14.95

Architectural Book Awards

Leslie Kern’s book is immediately identifiable as a political work, both from its provocative title—Gentrification is Inevitable “and Other Lies”—and from the labelling of her on the cover as “author of Feminist City”. That means its agenda is also identifable as a variation on the “property-is-theft” theme. That kind of flag-waving can be counterproductive: why read a book if you know in advance what it’s likely to be arguing?

In this case, though, Kern offers up a mix of issues that richly deserve consideration, warning us about the supposed attractions of gentrification, and against the metaphors of organic growth and change that lace the writings of Patrick Geddes, Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs.

Seen afresh, the language of urban development is uncomfortably close to that of eugenics when applied to ridding problem areas of undesirables (“weeds”—weak but cunning aliens, reproducing quickly and having no natural abode) and replacing them with a higher level of inhabitants (the cultivars that will put down roots, grow strong and make more inhabitable places).

Conventional planning relies on these survival-of-the-fittest principles and, as Kern says, “Darwin might be dismayed to find his careful observations … reduced to simplistic justifications for craven profiteering.”

The risk with biology-based metaphors, she adds, is that encouraging us to see a process as natural limits how we understand it and how free we feel to try and change it.

This is good because it invites us to consider land development in terms of occupation and displacement, and to look out for alternatives to the boosterism that sees speculative development as necessarily “the right ‘evolution’ for cities”.

ARTIFICIAL ISLANDS ADVENTURES IN THE DOMINIONS OWEN HATHERLEY

Watkins Media / Repeater

345 pages Softback

August 2022

9781914420863

RRP £12.99

IF WALLS COULD SPEAK MY LIFE IN ARCHITECTURE MOSHE SAFDIE

Grove Press UK

360 pages Hardback

6 October 2022

9781611856576

RRP £25.00

Kern’s observations about gentrification as a kind of colonisation are mirrored in Owen Hatherley’s Artificial Islands, a historical study of urban development in the British “Dominions”, except that Hatherley sees gentrification as not just testbeds for urban neoliberaism but “places where attempts at decolonisation have gone furthest”.

The artificial islands of his title are those one-time reconstructions of Britain in the outposts of Empire that became “Dominions” in the early 1900s and that Brexit campaigners heralded as more natural UK trading partners than Europe on grounds of long-standing kith-and-kinship.

What Hatherley wants to know is: how realistic is the idea (promoted by Dominic Cummings and others) that UK should attempt to reheat imperial unionism by entering a trading alliance with the “white” Dominions of Canada, Australia and New Zealand—the so-called CANZUK alliance?

The question affords him a much-needed opportunity to revisit British imperialism, discovering what few of us in the UK know enough about: especially the extent to which indigenous populations were decimated for the sake of land (and in the name of social Darwinism) and the enthusiasm of the working movement and trade unions in wishing to deter Chinese and Indian immigration, policies he follows other historians in calling Labourism rather than Socialism but which could equally well be called national socialism.

What does this have to do with architecture and town planning? Read the book.

If only the great architects of our times were also great writers. Gropius and Le Corbusier were role models in this regard, using language brilliantly, in parallel with their work. Moshe Safdie (1938), also a polemicist, tends to defend his ideas more quietly. In his new memoir, If Walls Could Speak, he sounds genial and older-statesmanlike—a far cry from the young firebrand whose student project, Habitat, at Expo 67 in Montréal, launched him with the same sort of bang with which Citizen Kane had launched the similarly precocious Orson Welles. Safdie’s new book is full of gentle reminiscence but also teaches us things. It introduces us to the communities that it takes to get a building built—not just those in the architectural office but owners, promoters, city councillors, mayors, engineers. It discusses the problems of running an architectural practice—how much to risk on a competition entry and how to distinguish between certainties and variables in any new scheme. And it recalls projects going wrong. It also documents the tensions in his life. He has oscillated between realising his patron’s ambitions and needing patrons to help him realise his own. He has also experienced the tensions of being a displaced Israeli, having visions for Israel’s future in the face if its myopeia and treacherous infighting while recognising the unmet needs of its Arab citizens and of Palestinian refugees

In one case, he says, and with the support of Israel’s then minister of transport, Shimon Peres, he tried to set up a factory to help build more housing in the West Bank, until stopped by the prime minister, Levi Eshkol, following failed peace talks with Israel’s neighbours.

“Such is the tragedy of the Arab-Israeli conflict,” he writes. “The antagonists insist on all or nothing, and ‘nothing’ is the inevitable result.”

LAND OF STONE A JOURNEY THROUGH MODERN ARCHITECTURE IN SCOTLAND ROGER EMMERSON

Luath Press

480 pages Softback

6 December 2022

9781804250167

RRP £25.00

One way of thinking about Roger Emmerson’s Land of Stone is that it is a religious book, the religion being Scottishness and the possible encapsulation of Scottishness in the architecture of modern Scotland.

Such a phenomenon is not something the author was always convinced of, as he confesses in his Introduction, and especially scorned when post-Modernism in the 1990s tried to recycle Scottish motifs for its own polemic purposes. Besides, he does not wish to renounce his upbringing as a child of the Modern Movement.

But now, Emmerson wants to show that Scottishness is indeed possible, and this book—20 years in the making—takes us on his intellectual journey. What follows is a yoking together of all the evidence he feels necessary to make the case, starting with an exploration of how other countries—notably Czechoslovakia and Finland—grappled with the same question a century or so ago.

Fortunately, Emmerson starts out by explaining how his heavy paperback works and what it contains—fortunately because, on first inspection, it is a blizzard of references, quotations, names and dates (sometimes unnecessarily so: Alvar Aalto’s dates are given twice, Hugh MacDiarmid’s three times), occasionally reading like a set of lecture notes.

In addition, its method of argument is not entirely scientific, constructing each new section on the assumption that the previous section has been answered persuasively.

But like any religious work, it is at heart a work of passion, and rigorous argument is inevitably moulded to its agenda, which is to validate what international architecture has long denied and to show that, rather than simply copying Caledonian tropes, there is a solid set of ideas and values that informs—or could inform—a common architecture no less than it informs Scottish politics, all the while resisting the dark side of political nationalism.

Shortlisted: Reference Books

QUEER SPACES

AN ATLAS OF LGBTQIA+ PLACES AND STORIES

ADAM NATHANIEL

FURMAN AND JOSHUA MARDELL (EDS)

RIBA Publishing

240 pages Hardback

1 May 2022

9781914124211

RRP £40.00

HOUSE LONDON ELLIE STATHAKI AND ANNA STATHAKI

Frances Lincoln Publishers

256 pages Hardback

6 September 2022

9780711267428

RRP £35.00

A HISTORY OF COUNCIL HOUSING IN 100 ESTATES

JOHN BOUGHTON

RIBA Publishing

272 pages Hardback

1 November 2022

9781914124631

RRP £40.00

The notion behind Furman and Mardell’s Queer Spaces is that to be “queer” means denying aspects of oneself in order to fit in, which is burdensome, and therefore valuing places where no such self-denial is necessary, and designing places that symbolise visually that the space itself is queer or queer-friendly, where one can relax.

In view of Roger Emmerson’s long struggle to establish that a building can be identifiable as “Scottish”, it’s intriguing that the authors of Queer Spaces seem not to have had similar reservations—or at least, there’s no obvious questioning in this book of what they take to be the case: not just that the nearly 100 buildings illustrated here are queer but that the idea of “queer” can be meaningfully applied to buildings.

Such an idea might strike us as odd and invite us to ask whether architecture has the capacity to be defined in this way and, if it does, what the determinants might be. Is architectural queerness something fundamental that we know from Architectural History (the manipulation of space and light and rhythm etc etc) or—more radically— more to do with the apparent superficies of who the designers or occupants are and how they dressed the place?

The latter, presumably, because many of the spaces shown here are adaptations of pre-existing buildings—and queer culture highly values the art of dressing.

So this is not a book of theory but a treasury of case studies allowing readers to compare and contrast, and establish for themselves what these global examples have in common that marks them out as queer and not not-queer.

If queerness is identifiable in a home, as the previous book asks us to consider, then it ought to be possible to flick through Ellie and Anna Stathaki’s House London and identify which of its 50 stylish London interiors was designed by queer designers or for queer residents. Maybe one can: the main staircase in Danielle Moudaber’s SW3 Victorian townhouse looks as if it’s made out of whipped cream. Is it gay? Maybe. It’s certainly fun (and many of Furman and Mardell’s examples are way harder than that).

More obvious, though, is the monied uniformity in the London-only homes featured in the Stathakis’s coffee-table book—and who doesn’t like ogling at the rich? We’re talking “Utilitarian with a Minimalist Twist”, “A Nod to Pop Culture”, “Domestic Grandeur meets Mediterranean Blue”, “Revisiting Rococo”—all different but somehow all the same.

This is intriguing because it cuts across the internationalism of many of the owners and designers—Shalini Misra, Sarah Akigbogun, Sunita Kumar Nair, Michel Da Costa Gonçalves and others—and their influences and materials.

The authors quote as sources Memphis, Scandinavia, Shanghai (the Waterhouse Hotel) and Peter Zumthor in Switzerland, with furniture by Restoration Hardware in California and Kai Kristiansen in Denmark, and Iroko wood from Nigeria, and a balance of classic signature pieces (Eames chairs, Saarinen table) and objects by younger firms.

The Stathikis suggest that behind London’s indistinguishable facades, wildly different experiences await us but what they have actually demonstrated is the common culture of the well-heeled. It’s worthy of note for the aspriational among us.

And so to public housing. It’s different. Chapter 6 of A History of Council Housing in 100 Estates shows just how. It quotes the sociologist Richard Hoggart saying of Hunslett Grange in Leeds, where he grew up, saying that it represented “some of the worst, most crass and inhumane public housing I have seen in any developed country”, and there are many who would say the same of a majority of the projects featured here.

The fascinating question is: what would it take for there to be a transformation in the perception of these estates? Such has been the horror of prefabricated concrete-panel high-rise that virtually any building before the First World War is now redeemed, however mean or unworthy it may have seemed previously. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century buildings that the planners tried to demolish have been fought for by action groups and then—to refer back to Leslie Kern’s book—stolen for the rich.

If that’s the pattern, then it would require an even more loathsome architecture to make the housing estates of the 1960s appealing—or the complete absence of any new construction. (Could that possibly happen?) And so it takes a historian—in this case Liverpool University’s John Boughton, to ask questions that illustrate virtues not obvious to the naked eye.

The question we might throw back at him is: have residents liked some of these buildings because what they’d had before was worse or did they learn to value buildings by living in them? If the latter is the case, then we have a lot to learn, as a corrective to the fragile economy that pampers our privileged expectations. Boughton’s conclusions and his withholding of judgement is therefore important. Circumstances were everything, he suggests; few buildings were born bad.

BRUTAL OUTER LONDON

THE FIRST PHOTOGRAPHIC EXPLORATION OF MODERNIST ARCHITECTURE IN LONDON’S OUTER BOROUGHS

SIMON PHIPPS

September Publishing

208 pages Hardback

27 October 2022

9781914613166

RRP £20.00

Photographer Simon Phipps goes further than John Boughton in his photographic report on Outer London’s postwar monuments, and does not withhold judgement on our most challenging buildings. “I don’t like every one of the buildings I have photographed for this book,” he admits, “but within all of them there is something admirable and particular about their aesthetics.”

With supreme panache, Phipps illustrates his conviction by reference to The Rubble Club, a whimsical grouping for architects who have seen their buildings demolished in their own lifetime and which claimed twice-RIBA-president Owen Luder as one of its most celebrated members.

“In the 60s my buildings were rewarded,” Luder reflected in a 2010 documentary; “in the 70s they were applauded; in the 80s they were questioned; in the 90s they were ridiculed; and when we got through to the 2000s, the ones I like most are the ones that are being demolished!”

Phipps also quotes figures from Estate Watch to show that more than 100 of London’s council estates are now threatened with demolition—“crushed between the insidious repetition of what [influential 1950s architectural critic] Ian Nairn termed ‘subtopia’ and its contemporary equivalent.”

Photographic archives can prove unreliable and Phipps quotes two photographers adept at teasing out fine images from unpromising subjects. Although he offers up images himself, the clear message of his book is that buildings must at the very least be walked around and explored—as he does—in order to understand them. Brutal Outer London is therefore not just a blackand-white photographic record of a genre of architecture and a plea for the survival of new ways of living, it is also a record of the powerful conviction of this particular photographer.

Shortlisted: History

THIS IS ARCHITECTURE WRITING ON BUILDINGS STEPHEN BAYLEY AND ROBERT BARGERY (EDS)

Unicorn

112 pages Hardback

25 October 2022

9781914414862

RRP £25.00

The Royal Fine Art Commission used to be a prominent national body, advising the government on whether new developments were in the public interest. It ran out of pep in the 1990s and was wound up in 1999, was then rolled into the newly established Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE), and was finally merged into the Design Council in 2011.

The RFAC is survived by the Royal Fine Art Commission Trust, a charity set up in 1987 to promote public appreciation of good design. In promoting its charitable objectives, it launched, in 2021, the Building Beauty Awards, giving the first of these to Lord Foster, Norman Foster, the most famous architect in the UK and its own president.

In like manner, it has now commissioned a book edited by its own chairman, Stephen Bayley, and its own executive director, Robert Bargery. Some guys get all the luck.

The point of their book is to show what good architectural talk looks like, because architects themselves are bad at it. To counter their technical sermonising to audiences of the converted, the editors have provided examples of writing by writers who have a detachment that those with skin in the game usually lack.

The result is a superb collection of over 90 historical snippets, which the editors commend as non-didactic but which they hope will stimulate the palate. Their choices are broadly insightful of changing values and approaches to architecture, and many were in fact meant to be didactic by their authors. Some were once uplifting (though less so now) but, paradoxically, many of the most engaging examples are in fact sceptical: de Maupassant on the Eiffel Tower; Tom Wolfe on the Seagram Building, W.G. Sebald on the Bilbiothèque Nationale; Reyner Banham on the History Faculty, Cambridge.

And although the editors invite readers to make their own connections between these chance quotations, the doubters make the more reverential look prim.

All is not sweetness and light in architectural commentary. Well worth dipping into, though.

GILDED CITY TOUR MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE LONDON DUNCAN

Unicorn

160 pages Hardback

1 July 2022

9781914414848

RRP £25.00

Duncan A. Smith is an urban geographer at UCL where he studies cities from a multi-disciplinary perspective. His Gilded City offers seven walking tours of the City of London and its surrounds, and one of the City of Westminster, taking in the oldest surviving relics from Roman London and stretching to the completion of St Paul’s Cathedral 1,700 years later.

The core of London’s importance, he points out, was its positioning as the gateway to Europe (not much hope of that any more) and the focus for international sea links beinging new ideas, new faiths and new peoples to our shores (ditto).

Westminster was always the preserve of crown and church, which tended to lock the population into a rigid hierarchy. The City of London, by contrast, offered social mobility that enabled individuals the “chance to break free of fixed social roles” by entry into an apprenticeship or a scholarship to a London school.

Given the destruction suffered by London’s fires, Victorian slum clearance, German bombing and post-war redevelopment, it is a marvel that anything still remains of its physical history, but Gilded City is an excellent introduction, with helpful maps and a wealth of colour photos.

In addition to encouraging us to experience London’s history for ourselves, Smith argues for the surviving buildings and their urban context to be preserved and enhanced. Of course. He adds that London has a long history as a dynamic and creative city, with a built environment that has played a part in this dynamism. The irony, however, is that dynamism and creativity are not consonant with preservation, both of which have to operate in islands of freedom far less constrained than the areas we conserve.

BUILT IN CHELSEA TWO MILLENNIA OF ARCHITECTURE AND TOWNSCAPE DAN

Unicorn

312 pages, Softback

21 February 2022

9781911604969

RRP £30.00

According to the architecture critic Ian Nairn, Chelsea during the Swinging 1960s was an undistinguished place to host a rebellion in clothes and music—“full of idiosyncratic life … yet without anything in the buildings to express it”.

Postwar London was down at heel and it was precisely Chelsea’s decay and neglect that made it affordable for young entrepreneurs like Mary Quant, who had opened her boutique in King’s Road as early as 1955.

Since Nairn’s time, research and scholarship and commitment to architectural history have enabled us to see Chelsea more enthusiastically—assisting its progress as an example of the gentrification highlighted in Leslie Kern’s book (see page 6)—and no one is better placed to illustrate this than Dan Cruickshank, a former news editor at the Architects’ Journal.

Built in Chelsea is Cruickshank’s masterful account of Chelsea’s rise as a rural up-Thames retreat for the wealthy from the dirt and intrigue of London. Here, says the antiquary John Aubrey, “Sir John Danvers, of Chelsey, … first taught us the way of Italian gardens” in the mid-16th-century, much of Chelsea’s land having been acquired from 1524 by Henry VIII’s Lord High Chancellor of England Thomas More, author of Utopia (1516) and an enthusiast of the Northern Renaissance.

Valuing Chelsea requires our knowing Chelsea intimately and Cruickshank does so, bringing to life both the architectural details and those responsible for them, such as the extraordinary Syrie, who divorced the pharma-tycoon Henry Wellcome to marry W. Somerset Maugham, father of her love child.

SW3 will be Cruickshank’s beneficiary, especially via the intercessions of the Chelsea Society, to which the book seems to be dedicated, even if not explicitly so.

MASTER OF THE HOUSE

THE THEATRES OF CAMERON MACKINTOSH

MICHAEL COVENEY/ DELFONT

MACKINTOSH

THEATRES

Unicorn

320 pages, Hardback

11 Oct 2022

9781914414831

RRP £40.00

In This is Architecture (see page 8), Stephen Bayley and Robert Bargery suggested that some of the brightest writing on architecture comes from architectural outsiders. A fine illustration of this idea is Master of the House, a study of eight London theatres owned by the impresario Cameron Mackintosh.

Mackintosh evidently contributed to the content (his company gets equal billing) but the credited author is Michael Coveney, in his time theatre critic for the Financial Times, the Observer and the Daily Mail and biographer of Ken Campbell (David Bowie’s inspiration), Maggie Smith, Mike Leigh and Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Master of the House is a homage to Mackintosh—although the title is also a tilt to the eight theatres’ original architects and patrons—and begins with a piece of unabashed veneration, stating that how Mackintosh, “the world’s leading producer, also became the West End’s most successful and committed theatre owner … is one of the greatest stories ever told in London theatreland.”

And why not? This is showbiz. And to its credit, this plush large-format volume lives up to its hype. There’s enough background on the buildings to satisfy the most discerning architect (especially for anyone wanting to know what went into modernising the various theatres’ lighting and ventilation systems) while introducing the full cast of characters who gave the buildings life— something that architectural writers are often too puritanical to address.

Coveney’s bibliography is just the right length and, significantly, he thanks for their help Nick Thompson and Clare Ferraby (who refurbished the Nottingham Theatre Royal), Julian Middleton, whose team restored Matcham’s Victoria Palace Theatre, theatre design consultants Richard Pilbrow and Iain Mackintosh, Rupert Rhyme, vice-president of the Frank Matcham Society, and an army of craftspeople and contractors, from marble floor installers to specialists in ornate plaster. We like books that get their hands dirty.

THE ARCHITECTURE DRAWING BOOK

RIBA COLLECTIONS

CHARLES HIND, FIONA ORSINI, SUSAN PUGH

RIBA Publishing

240 pages, Hardback

1 November 2022

9781859469491

RRP £45.00

CARLO SCARPA AND CASTELVECCHIO REVISITED

RICHARD MURPHY

Breakfast Mission

Publishing

384 pages, Softback

16 October 2017

9781527208902

RRP £79.65

ICONICON

A JOURNEY AROUND THE LANDMARK BUILDINGS OF CONTEMPORARY BRITAIN

JOHN GRINDROD

Faber & Faber

496 pages, Hardback

3 March 2022

9780571348138

RRP £20.00

The RIBA’s book about its own collection of drawings is overwhelming: is it just a random selection of some of the wonders the RIBA has collected in the last 200 years or is there—as you would expect of architects—a plan? Unsurprisingly there is, but it’s not easily guessed. The RIBA collects evidence of the whole process of building and the various sections of the book gather examples of each chronological stage—though not, sadly, in respect of any particular building, so we don’t see specific projects coming to fruition.

Jill Lever and Margaret Richardson had written a fuller introduction to drawings and their purposes in 1984 but, astonishingly, the present work—by the Collection’s three current curators—is the first attempt at a history of the Collection itself, and draws heavily on published and unpublished writings by earlier curators, of whom Lever and Richardson were two.

Astonishingly, also, the book is a highly disciplined work, limiting its commentaries on each illustration to a maximum of 200 words. That takes quite a deal of concision.

Form ought to follow function but whether the structure of the book is as revealing as it means to be is uncertain. It might be more a parading of trophies than an academic work, although its ambiguities are fully signposted. Section 5—“Study Sketches”—aims to show how third parties have drawn buildings designed by others (although who actually rendered many of the drawings shown here and credited to a major architect is not investigated) and how architects have drawn buildings (something no one does any more) in order to understand them better. As the authors say, it is hard to find a perfect title for this section, just as it was hard to generalise about working drawings in the previous one.

One is left wanting more—but that’s good, and this will be a valuable roadmap for future explorers.

This book, published in 2017, predates the start date for this year’s Architectural Book Awards but was accepted by the judges on the grounds that it is in fact part of a 30-year project. It concerns Castelvecchio, a 14thcentury castle built on the Adige river in Verona, which was damaged by Napoleon’s troops in the late 1790s and again by Hitler’s army as it retreated in 1945.

The point of interest in it, for Murphy, is the extensive restoration work done by Carlo Scarpa (1906–1978), a Venetian architect, not universally admired by British architects, who developed an approach that is now standard in building conservation of revealing the old and adding what was new and necessary, rather than trying to fake the building’s original appearance, an approach that is now standard in building conservation.

Murphy surveyed and drew the building in 1986, helped first by three Edinburgh University students and then by a whole army of them, intrigued by Scarpa’s treatment of the building on and off between 1957 and 1975. He published a first study in 1990; the present volume is a massively enlarged revision of that work, looking alternately at elements in Scarpa’s work (paving and fountains, the north façade, the east façade, the bridge across the moat) and then—like the RIBA curators in the previous book—at the way in which Scarpa used drawings (almost 900 of which have survived) to think about those elements.

Some readers might find that Murphy stands too close to what he’s viewing: that the intensity of his visual examination leaves no space to step back and engage in broader thinking. For that, a historian is necessary and here Murphy presses into service Ken Frampton, an adept at seeing the wood for the trees, though even Frampton’s one-page Foreword leaves one breathless.

That said, there’s no doubt that this is an exceptional piece of documentation and it is hard to see how it will ever be bettered. Richard MacCormac, Murphy’s lieber Meister from the 1980s, would have approved.

Booklaunch is based in London (our domain is booklaunch.london) and our perspective is inevitably skewed to the metropolis—not unreasonably; Londoners account for 13 percent of the UK’s population, making us a small country as much as a conurbation.

It is welcome, then, when a writer looks at what we’re already familiar with from a different perspective. John Grindrod starts his comprehensive survey of 20th-century British architecture from Glasgow, quoting two TV documentaries about the city that enable him to reflect on urban ideas that planners aspired to in the 1970s and then gave up aspiring to in the 1980s.

It’s a strong start and sets a tone of inquiry that he keeps up for all of this book’s near 500 pages: not that of the critic but the flâneur: a Tony Parsons, perhaps, or, classically, the now venerable Hunter Davies, who invented the genre of super-informed, super-informal writing for the then new medium of Sunday colour magazines and who remains the only authorised biographer of the Beatles. Grindrod talks the way insightful cool people talk when they’re outwitting laboured academics but he can do the architectural stuff too.

He has already written in Concretopia about his journey around postwar British reconstruction and in Outskirts about his exploration of suburban green belts. Now, in his cleverly titled book, Iconicon (a lexicon of icons), he trashes the architect’s cliché of what an icon means—monuments that represent “nothing more than themselves with a kind of dumb confidence”—and looks at what is really iconic, even if prosaic: estates of pseudo-Georgian houses, campuses of fibreglass shed and surface car parks, town-centre office blocks cum micro-flats”. That’s better: someone who actually looks and sees—and is surprised. It’s such a relief.

WHEN THIS IS OVER REFLECTIONS ON AN UNEQUAL PANDEMIC AMY CORTVRIEND, LUCY EASTHOPE, JENNY EDKINS, KANDIDA PURNELL (EDS)

Policy Press

208 pages

14 March 2023

9781447368069

RRP £14.99

Check our website for discount

On paper, there were few Covid-19 deaths. That’s not what our fridges said

For as long as I can remember, I’ve always wanted to work with the dead. I cannot explain what drew me to this line of work, and speaking to colleagues across this profession I can honestly say that very few of us can answer the question ‘why?’ A vocation, a calling— no one enters this line of work lightly. We are all individuals; there is no stereotypical mortuary professional (although with my all-black-everything attitude to clothing, multiple tattoos and piercings, I would say that I definitely look like what you would imagine a stereotypical mortuary dweller to look like).

As an ‘anatomical pathology technologist’ (APT), to give my full job title, I am responsible for the continued care of the deceased. I work in an NHS hospital but APTs also work in council/local authority-run public mortuaries. My job is to look after the adults and children who die in our hospital and local borough. We also provide post-mortem services for coroners from all over London, the southeast and as far afield as Hereford and Nottingham.

For APTs in general, our day-to-day job involves admitting and releasing deceased patients, assisting with post-mortem examinations and facilitating families visiting their loved ones, alongside the administration and maintenance of the mortuary environment.

EDITOR’S NOTE

There was no one that the Covid-19 pandemic did not touch. In this book, academics, activists and artists come together to consider the experience of marginalised and minority groups, and to measure how unjust and uneven was the pandemic’s impact on the most vulnerable. They note how it brought out the good in many and the worst in others, and how it raised questions about what is truly important in our lives.

READERS’ COMMENTS

Toni Haastrup, University of Stirling: A timely meditation on crisis, response, resilience and death. A must-read.

Andreas Papamichail, QMU

London: Hugely illuminating and harrowing, laying bare how loss, burden, sacrifice and grief were mediated by systemic inequalities and discrimination.

Yoav Galai, Royal Holloway, University of London: A powerful and moving cycle of reflective and analytical moments.

Katharine Millar, LSE: Empathetic and urgent ... an essential resource to challenge our ambivalent return to “normality” and the inequities and inequalities on which it is founded.

My job is gruelling and rewarding in equal measure, and for those of us who enter this career, it is usually a path we remain on for life. But I am not the sole authority on mortuary work, nor am I trained in emergency preparedness. However, I do believe I have something worthwhile to say on the lessons I have learned, and the lessons that we should take away from the pandemic as they relate to care of the deceased.

Business-as-usual to chaos

When news first started breaking about this new coronavirus with pandemic capabilities, I wasn’t worried. We are well versed in handling excess deaths—we do it every winter; but as the virus spread and death tolls were increasing across the world, we started to get concerned about our ability to cope with the projected death rates.

From mid- March, it was clear that this was on a scale we had never experienced before. We received out first COVID-19 patient in the mortuary on 14 March and less than three weeks later had reached capacity. Our day-to-day job became that of management of the deceased.

The increased death rate did not happen in a vacuum. Let’s say there is an expected death in a hospital, a death in which a medical certificate of cause of death (MCCD) can be issued without the need for a coroner or a post-mortem examination. The patient is brought down to the mortuary within four hours of death and placed in a fridge by two porters. They arrive maybe with some small items of personal property (jewellery, credit cards, religious tokens and so on).

The patient is then ‘checked in’ by a member of mortuary staff: three points of ID are put on two hospital wristbands, their

property is accounted for, they are weighed and measured (in case of a post-mortem examination) and we look for evidence of any implanted devices, such as a pacemaker. We change their sheet and clean them up if needed. We then transfer this information onto our bespoke mortuary database. This will be very important later.

Meanwhile, the patient’s hospital notes and any other property is taken to the bereavement centre by a nurse or ward clerk where the bereavement staff input the patient’s details onto the database. They document the property and start to phone the wards to see if there is a doctor available to write the MCCD. The doctor has to come to the bereavement centre to do this. The family of the deceased get in touch and will be called when the MCCD is ready to be collected; we have a time frame of 48 hours for doctors to complete this paperwork. The family also collect the property of the deceased from the bereavement centre or is disposed of by the hospital, should the family not want it.

This is a basic run-through of what happens, but read it again and take note of how many people are involved and how much of this happens face to face. This is pre-COVID-19 and, of course, there are far more complicated deaths than this standard example, with families experiencing difficult emotions, some not speaking English as a first language or having specific religions or cultural needs.

Now imagine that process happening when the country is in lockdown, when people are not supposed to leave their homes, when doctors and nurses are overwhelmed on the wards and when the mortuary is receiving more and more patients.

During winter, excess deaths bring an increased volume of work but people can still attend the hospital and collect paperwork and property and register deaths. With COVID-19 and the lockdown, things ground to a halt. Legally, there was no way of registering a death remotely. Between the next of kin testing positive for COVID-19, or having to isolate because of their contact with someone with COVID-19, and the hospital shutting down to visitors, we were all stuck, waiting. The only thing moving was the dead and they were all coming our way

‘Not my problem’ becomes your problem

How to deal with the property of the deceased soon became a major issue. This was something that I had never really given a second thought about, as it wasn’t anything I ever saw: it was the bereavement office that dealt with it. As it turns out, people bring a lot of property to hospital with them: clothes, books, electronics, personal hygiene products and so much more. This property all needs to be returned to the family. With the death of a patient, these items are no longer just comfort items that make a lengthy hospital stay more pleasant; they are now the last link between the living and the dead.

Concerns about how long COVID-19 remained on surfaces (at this early stage in

the pandemic, there were a lot of unknowns and uncertainties) meant there was an extra layer of complexity to contend with: how do we deal with property safely? A new process was created by those higher up the chain, involving ways of decontaminating, separating, documenting and tracking the property before it even reached us. I wish I could say it worked well. On paper it was easy, but practically … less so.

The most frequently recurring, contentious and infuriating aspect of the pandemic was the ‘property problem’, which really boiled down to communication problems among those who designed the new system, those whose job it was to use the new system and those whose job it was to implement and communicate these changes to all involved.

The mortuary was not responsible for any of these aspects, as this was about what happened to the property before it reached us. It just so happens that we were the ones who were at the end of the chain and spotted errors in the process, by when it was too late. The burden fell on us to fix the issues and we simply didn’t have the staff or capacity to deal with it alone.

Thankfully, redeployments were happening all over the NHS trust. With outpatient clinics and research departments on standstill, staff were available to work elsewhere. We were able to have a two-person team dedicated to dealing solely with property and it was a relief to have people who could focus their whole attention on this, coming up with systems and a database to document everything.

It was not an easy job, either practically and emotionally. These people were now responsible for contacting the families of the deceased and having conversations about what they wanted to do with the belongings their loved ones had left behind, packing it up and mailing it out. There was no training as such, and I cannot express enough how important this job was and how well they did it.

Trust your mortuary staff

National lockdown was announced on 23 March, quickly followed by the Coronavirus Act 2020’s receiving Royal Assent on 25 March. This was what we had been waiting for as this Act was effective at streamlining swift death certification and registration, but we were worried that it would not necessarily translate into the movement of deceased patients. Between the mortuary and bereavement staff, we predicted that families would be reluctant to book a funeral, given that restrictions meant that there could be no attendees. Seeing as the lockdown measures were going to be in place for three weeks, people would refrain from making arrangements until they could have the service they wanted. And if there is one thing the dead can do, it’s wait.

Three weeks is a bit long for a deceased person to stay in our care, but a couple of things were now becoming very evident. First, higher management had no idea how the mortuary worked on a day-to-day basis. Routine things such as the movement of the deceased, the hold-ups that can occur even

with the introduction of online death registration (you cannot force people to make funeral arrangements), the lack of space at funeral directors’ premises—all of these we had to explain, it felt, on a near daily basis. Second, this lockdown was going to last a lot longer than three weeks.

We made our concerns clear from the start about our capacity: we needed more, and quickly. I remember vividly an almost comical exchange between my boss and local health and emergency planning leads about the number of COVID-19 positive patients in the mortuary. When we said that we were getting full and needed extra space urgently, we were met with disbelief. How could we be running out of space? There weren’t that many deaths, surely?

We sat open-mouthed, looking into the fridge room at our rapidly declining spaces: how could they not believe us? The answer was paperwork. Every death due to COVID19 had to be reported to NHS England, and this was done by filling in a paper form that then made its way up the chain. With the overwhelming demand on ward staff, there were delays in the forms leaving the wards.

On paper, there were few COVID-19 deaths. Our fridges told a different story. When patients die in hospital carrying infections such as hepatitis, HIV, tuberculosis and now COVID-19, they are placed in a specific, separate fridge bank, as more personal protection equipment (PPE) precautions are needed when handling the deceased. The separate fridge banks serve as an easy visual cue more than anything else. Contrary to belief, there is very little danger posed from the deceased in terms of infection transmission.

With COVID-19 deaths on the increase, the deceased were now placed wherever there was space. We made a note on the fridge doors if the deceased had COVID19—another easy visual cue for us and the portering staff who are responsible for transferring the deceased from the wards to us. A quick glance at our fridges showed the majority of our residents had had COVID-19.

From here began an eventual daily situation report (sitrep) meeting—virtual, of course—regarding mortuary issues: namely, capacity. It turns out there is quite a bit to consider when procuring extra mortuary space. Issues like security, ease of

access and how public it would be all had to be weighed up.

During previous excess-death scenarios, we were fortunate enough not to have to use outside excess storage, as we could utilise the space at our (much smaller) satellite mortuary. Looking elsewhere meant there were cost and timing implications. Every mortuary in the country was looking at obtaining more space, and with few companies actually being able to provide such bespoke equipment, and with lead times increasing every day, a decision wasn’t made, and things were looking bleak.

London and national mortuary capacity databases were set up to enable the NHS and the government to monitor the situation. It was around this time that there were rumblings of large temporary mortuary facilities being put in place, quite separate from the Nightingale hospitals that were being built.

I received a phone call from someone in a council department who had been tasked with helping with the logistics of one such temporary mortuary facility that would be situated in Breakspear Crematorium, in the borough of Hillingdon. This was due to be operational only one week later and advice was wanted on how to keep track of the deceased moving in and out of the facility.

The specific question will be burned into my memory forever: ‘What system does the NHS use for keeping track of the deceased?’—as if such a system existed. I broke it to them: there wasn’t one. A brief silence was followed by a despondent, ‘Oh’.

I then explained how every mortuary uses a different system to track the deceased in its care, and that some may still use paper registers; that not everyone dies in a hospital, that our patients may arrive with us after dying at home. The, there’s the paperwork generated after you die in relation to burial and cremation, which is another matter altogether. This was clearly not the conversation the person on the end of the phone was hoping to have.

My boss had the pleasure of following up these conversations, and each email and phone call brought more bad news for the designers and disbelief from APTs that this was ever going to work.

Althugh our own temporary storage facilities were close to being built, the Breakspear facility would be operational

first and a system for how to organise the transfer of the deceased seemed to have been ironed out. This was not without fault, was very labour-intensive for APTs and brought with it a lot of frustration and upset, but we really had no alternative but to use the facility as we had nowhere else.

This use of emergency mortuaries is the most difficult aspect to reflect on. APTs have high standards and expectations when it comes to management of the deceased; it is what we do on a daily basis, and to have this taken out of our control was very difficult to accept. APTs and funeral directors alike had an opinion on how this could have been done better and our picking apart of every perceived fault became a bonding activity. Because the deceased were still our responsibility, we felt comfortable passing judgement on those who dared enter our realm uninvited and uninitiated. It was an easy target and somewhere very tangible to direct our frustrations, but later on I would come to realise just what limited expertise the people in charge of setting these up had at their disposal.

By the time the first peak of COVID-19 seemed to be settling and we were moving into summer, things that had been strange and unfamiliar soon became routine. Our own onsite excess storage was up and running with no need to use the temporary mortuaries any further. Reporting systems for mortuary capacities were streamlined and reduced in frequency as mortuaries became less pressured for space. Knowledge about COVID-19 in general had advanced, in part because of the information that post-mortem examinations had yielded.

This information aided medicine in real time as the effects that COVID-19 and the current treatments were having was understood more, and the benefits to the living cannot be overstated. We were able to help other departments that were eagerly waiting to reopen their clinics as we were able to test various fluids and areas to see if COVID-19 was present and transmissible—things like orthopaedic surgery and ophthalmology—and guide risk assessments and PPE. This was down to the generosity of the families who consented for post-mortem examinations on their loved ones, and I cannot thank them enough …

continued in the book

continued from page 3, column 4 dismiss various obscure, dubious, or hi-tech words (tesseradecades, sweaterdresses hypolimnion, phyllophyllin, etc).

Finally, to begin (huh?) with, a (new and official) quiz question:

Based on Wordle

Part 1 One of the commonest initial cue words chosen by Wordle players-—perhaps the commonest of all—is adieu, on the grounds that it tests for four of the five vowels (albeit a poor opening strategy) As far as I can tell, there are only three other Wordle cue words (i.e. common five-letter words) that contain four different vowels, and in each case it’s the same set of four vowels: a i o u. Can you identify the three words?

Part 2. Suppose, however, that you wanted to test for a single vowel (five options) or for two different vowels (ten combos: ae, ai, ao, au, ei, eo, eu, io, iu, ou). Usually it takes just a moment to find an appropriate cue word: a and o? … solar; e and u? … flute; etc.

But what about testing for three different vowels? Again, there are ten combos (aei, aeo, aeu, aio, aiu, aou, eio, eiu, eou, iou). Try to find a cue word for each combo. (Rules: in each case, the vowels can be in any sequence; you can’t repeat a vowel; and obviously the cue-word has to be five letters long.)

Prizes. EnvelopeBook prizes to those most favoured by the goddess Tyche, capricious dispenser of good fortune, and occupant of the penthouse flat above Booklaunch Towers. Answers to book@booklaunch.london

continued from page 1

ous Festivals, are: “I took out a loan to pay for an exorcism. If I don’t pay it back, I’m going to get repossessed.” And “I wasn’t particularly close to my dad before he died … which was lucky, because he trod on a landmine.”

The all-time top gun is probably the comedian Tim Vine: he too is a two-time winner, and a multiple runner-up. His winning gags, from 2014 and 2010, were: “I’ve decided to sell my Hoover … well, it was just collecting dust.” And “I’ve just been on a once-in-a-lifetime holiday. I’ll tell you what, never again.”

Of his runner-up jokes, the best was: “Last night me and my girlfriend watched three DVDs back to back. Luckily I was the one facing the telly.”

The very first winner, Dan Antolopolski, has a double distinction: being a runner-up in the same year that he won; and being the only winner, as far as I can tell, who has also had a joke that featured on the list of worst jokes of the year: His winning joke (from 2009) was: “Hedgehogs—why can’t they just share the hedge?” (For the record, his groaner, from the 2010 list, was: “How many Spaniards does it take to change a lightbulb? Juan.”)

Here now is a selection of the best jokes (including a further two of the winners) from all the shortlists since 2009, when the prize was launched:

“Someone stole my antidepressants. Whoever they are, I hope they’re happy.”

“A cowboy asked me if I could help him round up 18 cows. I said, ‘Yes, of course— that’s 20 cows’.”

“I’ve given up asking rhetorical questions. What’s the point?”

“As a kid I was made to walk the plank. We couldn’t afford a dog.”

“I was watching the London Marathon and saw one runner dressed as a chicken and another runner dressed as an egg. I thought: ‘This could be interesting’.”

“I’m sure wherever my dad is, he’s looking down on us. He’s not dead, just very condescending.”

SOUTH ASIA’S PATH TO RESILIENT GROWTH RANIL M SALGADO; RAHUL ANAND (EDS)

IMF

367 pages

23 December 2022

9798400228568

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from the IMF website

South Asia was doing a lot better until Covid-19 hit. How to get back on track?

South Asia is the youngest and most densely populated region in Asia. The median age of the population is less than 27 years. As a result, the working-age population in the region is projected to increase over the next 20 years. More than 150 million people are expected to enter the South Asia labour force by 2030. This puts an emphasis on labour market reforms that can support job creation.

However, while now is the time to reap the growth benefits from the sizable demographic dividend, the dividend is declining over time (India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka). India’s under-19 population ratio has already peaked because of declines in fertility rates. As a result, the labour force will now grow more slowly.

Similar patterns hold across South Asia. As a result, the benefits of the potential demographic dividend, including higher potential output, are also declining over time. This calls for some urgency in labour reforms.

EDITOR’S NOTE

Over the past two decades, extreme poverty has declined from 500 million to fewer than 250 million people in Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal and Sri Lanka — a remarkable success story for the region and the world. Per capita income during this time has doubled, helping to deliver improved health care, education and infrastructure, as well as better access to financial services, the Internet and mobile technology.

However, the Covid-19 pandemic and the economic repercussions of Russia’s war in Ukraine have slowed the fight and — together with the effects of climate change — have impeded growth and poverty reduction in the region.

South Asia’s Path to Resilient Growth tackles these factors by reviewing South Asia’s experience of the pandemic and of post-pandemic recovery as well as the risks and setbacks that have followed in their wake. Several chapters of the book then take a longer-term perspective and draw lessons from South Asia’s own development experience over the past decades to chart a path forward.

The key, overarching question is how South Asia can return to the growth rates of the past two decades, resume the momentum of poverty reduction and achieve resilient and climate-friendly growth without a renewed buildup of macro-economic vulnerabilities.

Moreover, a back-of-the-envelope estimate on the potential job losses caused by Covid-19 suggests that in the short term, the job-creation rate in the region could temporarily fall from 1.5 percent to between 0 and 0.5 percent. There is also a growing risk that some of these job losses may become permanent because of the scarring effects of the deep recession associated with the pandemic.

Labour market regulations

South Asia’s Labour market regulations and institutions generally do not apply to the large informal sector. For example, in India, up to 90 percent of workers have no written employment contract, especially in the informal sector and among agricultural workers. Informal sector workers in India rarely benefit from union representation, nor from labour laws, except for the minimum wage. They are also unlikely to receive long-term contracts as their formal sector counterparts do. Even if labour market regulations were applicable, as in Nepal, the degree of compliance in the informal sector is unclear.

Minimum wages are unlikely to be a constraint on hiring because they are low—in India lower than in other large emerging market economies, including Brazil and Indonesia. Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka have a minimum wages board that reviews the minimum wage periodically, including (in Bangladesh) for the garment sector. Pay commissions are also established every few years to review pay and conditions in the public sector, with civil service pay increases approved by the cabinet, sometimes on advice from ad hoc commissions. In India, minimum wages differ by state and are set by state governments.

However, legally enforceable minimum wages are still not universal, with coverage estimated at 66 percent of wage earners.

In the formal sector, collective bargaining rights are supported by the right to strike and also by restrictions on fixed-term employment contracts in some countries, such as India where they can only be used for employment of a temporary nature

(although this may be relaxed under the recently approved Industrial Relations Code). However, the extent of collective bargaining and union power is not clear in practice, with trade union membership relatively low as a share of total employment, reflecting that most employment is informal.

Relatively stringent employment protection legislation (EPL) increases the cost of hiring workers in the formal sector. Those in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka appear particularly stringent, with Sri Lanka having the most stringent requirements for dismissal of individual workers, which can only occur if an employee consents or the government approves. Where a group of employees is dismissed for economic reasons, approval must be sought from the government and a decision is required within two months. Severance payments are required for dismissals of those employed for more than five years, at the rate of 14 days of pay for each year of service.

In Bangladesh, the requirements for dismissal are less stringent but severance payments are more generous. The government and the relevant union must be notified but otherwise government approval is not required. Severance payments must be made at the rate of 30 days of pay for each year of service above one year, in cases of redundancy or individual dismissal without reason.

In India, labour laws differ across states, but in a workplace with more than 300 employees, government approval is generally required to dismiss an employee who has been employed for more than one year, while severance payments are similar to those in Sri Lanka.

In India and Bangladesh, there is a ‘last in, first out’ rule for groups of workers dismissed for economic reasons and those dismissed must be given priority in future hiring by the employer. Other countries in the region, including Bhutan, Nepal and Maldives, have no requirements for government notification or severance pay.

Across the region, dismissed employees can bring a legal challenge and seek reinstatement or compensation if their employer has not complied with employment protection laws.

Social protection for workers is limited for both the formal and informal sectors, with no universal unemployment insurance in South Asia and limited coverage of pension schemes, although India and Nepal have made recent reforms to expand coverage. There are also social assistance payments for some older people, such as in Maldives, sometimes subject to means testing, as in Bangladesh.

In India, more than 85 percent of workers have no pension scheme, and less than one quarter of people older than the retirement age receives any pension. A social assistance payment is available for older people in the general public below the poverty line, but it is relatively small (between $3 and $7 per month) for those older than 60 years of age, and only benefits approximately 16 million people.

Around 20 percent of Indians older than 80 years of age are still in employment,

according to census data, suggesting that social assistance payments are inadequate.

Before 2017, Nepal had an Employees’ Provident Fund, mostly for civil servants, providing old-age benefits financed mostly by employers. Other social assistance schemes were in place as a safety net, funded by a tax on payrolls. The most generous is the Senior Citizens Allowance, which currently pays 3,000 NPR per month ($25) to all adults older than 65 years (and those older than 60 years from disadvantaged groups/regions). The other four schemes are monthly allowances for some children younger than five years, single widows, disabled persons, and certain indigenous groups.

Other South Asian countries have civil service pensions, contributory savings schemes for the formal private sector and limited social assistance payments as a safety net. In Bhutan, the civil service pension is partially funded on a pay-as-you-go basis from employee contributions. In Bangladesh, all formal sector employees must contribute 7–8 percent of their base salary to a defined contribution provident fund after one year of service, with a matching contribution by their employer, so that accumulated amounts are payable as a lump sum on retirement. Sri Lanka’s Employees’ Provident Fund operates in a similar way. Maldives also has the contributory Maldives Retirement Pension Scheme, although its coverage is unclear.

Bangladesh established a social assistance program for elderly adults in 1998 as a safety net, for those with an annual income of less than $38, which provides a transfer of around $4 every three months. Sri Lanka has a similar social assistance scheme and Maldives provides an old-age basic pension and senior citizens allowance to those older than 65 years of age.

Labour market institutions are not sufficiently supportive of female labour force participation. There is no entitlement to part-time work in South Asian countries, which could be an important driver of higher female labour force participation. Some support to families is provided through childcare facilities. India has made a crèche facility compulsory for establishments with 50 or more employees. Sri Lanka issued guidelines establishing national standards for day care centers in 2017.

Across the region, there are maternity leave entitlements, of varying degrees of generosity. In Sri Lanka and Maldives, employers in the private sector are required to offer 84 and 60 days paid maternity leave, respectively. Nepalese law requires 60 days of paid maternity leave, some of which is paid for out of labour taxes, although the degree of compliance is unclear in practice.

In Bangladesh and Bhutan, civil servants are entitled to six months of paid maternity leave, whereas private sector employees in Bangladesh can access paid maternity leave on one occasion, for 16 weeks, and unpaid leave during subsequent pregnancies.

Empirical evidence

Loosening EPL would seem to lead to an increase in total employment over time, lower informality, and an

The goals of planning and politics rarely gel. That’s a challenge for town halls

More than forty years ago, Bernard Crick’s In Defence of Politics (1962) attempted to defend the art of politics from those who sought to denigrate it. Against the orthodoxies of the time—Fabian centralism and one-party Conservatism—he looked back to a much older tradition of political thinking, centred on active and participatory citizenship in a pluralistic political community. Councillors, at the local level, were very much a part of this political matrix.

Strong support for the positive role of councillors in spatial planning was given by Lord Nolan in his report on standards in public life (1997). Councillors were seen as exercising quite properly two roles in the planning system. They determine applications, arriving at a decision on granting or refusing permission by using planning criteria and by excluding non-planning considerations. They also act as representatives of public opinion in their communities.

There has always been some tension in this dual role, but it was minimised when public opinion was broadly in favour of, or at least neutral to, development. The tension has, however, become more acute as opposition to development projects from the public has grown. As politicians, local councillors must listen to and be responsive to the views of their constituents; as members of the planning committee, they must make a decision using only planning criteria. This may be a delicate balance to achieve.

Nolan noted that one approach to resolving this internal conflict might be to reduce the scope of councillor involvement in the planning process, but concluded that the result, however well intentioned, would create difficulties. One of these was the view that planning is a ‘quasi-judicial’ process. Nolan disagreed, and argued that if planning decisions by local authorities were to be regarded as quasi-legal, with councillors playing a similar role to that of inquiry inspectors or judges, there would be no point in involving councillors in such decisions; they might as well be taken by planning officers or inspectors. Another difficulty was the assumption that councillors cannot be trusted to arrive at a sound decision or, more insidiously, that they are more likely than officers to succumb to corruption or improper influence.

Nolan took a robust approach to these concerns. Planning, he said, was not an exact science; there will always be a balance between various criteria. There is therefore nothing intrinsically wrong if planning committees do not invariably follow the advice of officers. Planning officers exist to advise planning committees, which are entitled to reach their own decisions by attaching different weight to the various criteria that are relevant to an application. If a decision was thought to be perverse, a planning officer should so advise the committee, but still respect the decision. Providing elected members were fully and properly briefed, they were particularly well equipped to make planning decisions because of their representative role, not despite it. Finally, divorcing the political role of councillors

from their planning function was unlikely to succeed. It was also undemocratic and impractical to try to prevent councillors from discussing applications with whomever they wanted.

Planning decisions, Nolan concluded, are not legal judgements. They are administrative decisions, taken within a framework of law and practice, and his view has been upheld by the courts. The effect of this is not that planning decisions are free from legal constraints, but that the constraints are different. Decisions must still be free from bias caused by personal interest, but they need not be taken judicially or based solely on a rational and impartial assessment of evidence. On the contrary, councillors must bring to planning decisions a sense of the community’s needs and interests. That is why they are there.

The Nolan Committee therefore accepted and understood the duty of elected members to listen to their constituents, together with an expectation that most members would behave properly if they had the support of best-practice guidelines and training, and effective external scrutiny if misconduct was suspected. A Code of Best Practice in Planning Procedures was recommended and subsequently adopted by the Standards Board for England.

The Nolan Report stimulated a strong debate on the role of councillors following its publication, and in 2001 Matthew Taylor, then director of the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), and Paul Wheeler, head of member development at the Improvement and Development Agency (IDeA), published a pamphlet entitled ‘In Defence of Councillors’. The analysis contained in their essay is still relevant and is an important guide to understanding the political influence on councillors.

They asserted that successive governments have put considerable energy into minimising the capacity of councillors to make decisions or wield power. The government has on the one hand tied up local authorities in a web of central regulations, targets and inspections, while on the other hand it has removed local authority functions and set up new bodies to drive priorities, such as neighbourhood renewal and a variety of Action Zones. A ‘quango state’ has also emerged in which local decisions are made by executives and non-executives appointed by central government.

The managerialist critique of councillors tends to focus on two managerial attributes said to be lacking: namely, impartiality and expertise. It is argued that while the decisions made by councillors are clouded by political ambition, inflexible beliefs and internecine conflicts, conversely the judgements of managers are evidence-based, objective and disinterested. Councillors are seen as part-time amateurs, while managers are seen as full-time professionals.

There are two main expressions of the rise of managerialism. These are a consumerist approach to service delivery and the requirements of best-value targets, together with the greater use of external management consultants. There is clearly a case for managerialism, for councillors not

to be taking detailed operational decisions or using irrelevant or inappropriate political criteria to determine the allocation of local resources. However, much of the business of local government is about the political reconciliation of competing interests and, here, political parties have a vital function in organising choices in elections and in ensuring that political accountability relates to the pursuit of broad values.

Taylor and Wheeler (2001) explained that although the social and cultural base of the political parties had been eroded, the control of these parties over the formal representative democratic process had, if anything, increased. Parties control who can be elected, and have first call on the accountability of politicians. This accountability is both downwards to the activists who campaign for and reselect the candidate, and upwards to the party hierarchy, whose patronage will determine the career prospects of the councillor.

Particularly in councils run by their own party, councillors will be powerfully constrained by the patronage of the executive, and ‘it will continue to be in party group meetings rather than public scrutiny sessions that the executive will be called to account by the majority group.’

Delivery and implementation

The means by which development, particularly in the field of housing, can be most efficiently and equably delivered has been a major issue between the parties. The Labour Party ushered in the ‘new towns’ by means of development corporations while the Conservatives used similar agencies to deliver the urban regeneration of the inner cities in the 1980s. Opposition in the shires prevented the use of the concept outside the cities.

New Labour, impatient at the lack of delivery of new housing, brought forward new-town-style development corporations in the growth areas, bypassing local planning authorities. Local authorities have often been regarded as inadequate for this task, particularly in areas of substantial growth, but there are difficulties as to the form, composition and political accountability of new agencies tasked with regeneration.

Local autonomy and local government

The autonomy that can be delegated to local planning authorities and to elected members by central government in the making of planning policy and planning decisions is a major difference between the parties.

The Liberal Democrats have supported localism, and at varying times the Conservatives have championed local autonomy but Labour’s Tony Blair continued the micro-management of local government begun by Margaret Thatcher. In opposition, parties have championed local autonomy but centralisation remains a powerful force.

Throughout the political history of spatial planning, the Conservatives have resisted moves for regional government. There has been a long-standing fear that if regional democratic bodies were based on existing continued in the book

ENGLAND’S FUTURE THE IMPACT OF POLITICS ON SHAPING THE ENVIRONMENT NIGEL MOOR

The Book Guild

624 pages

3 October 2022

9781915352170

RRP £19.95

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EDITOR’S NOTE

It’s an oddity that while three nations of the United Kingdom now have their own legislative assemblies, the largest partner — England — does not. In the absence of a devolved legislature, Nigel Moor looks at how local politics in England has tackled the needs of voters in “left-behind towns” and how much the planning system is able to work with local politicians before being stifled by differences in ambition and approach.

Covering Brexit, the pandemic and the 2019 general election, his book includes case studies drawn from Greater London, Liverpool, Newcastle Upon Tyne and Plymouth and the smaller towns of Stamford, Grantham and Blyth Valley in Northumberland, one of the Red Wall constituencies that saw political allegiance flip.

Dr Moor was for nearly 20 years a planning correspondent for Building magazine and has written for a range of professional and industry journals. He has served as a councillor at town-, district- and county-council levels, as well mayor of an Oxfordshire market town.

READER’S COMMENT

Graham New (former member of the Law Society’s Planning Panel): A formidable work examining the changes wrought to the planning system by successive governments and the complexity and confusion arising from them. Nigel Moor brings his vast experience to bear in examining in detail those developments, accompanied by practical case studies.

THE DEATH OF THE LEFT

WHY WE MUST BEGIN FROM THE BEGINNING AGAIN

SIMON WINLOW AND STEVE HALL

Policy Press, 352 pages 15 November 2023

9781447354154

RRP £12.99

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READERS’ COMMENTS

Paul Embery, author of Despised: Why the Modern Left Loathes the Working Class: A well-argued and deeply persuasive analysis, illustrating how and why the British Left went so wrong.

Tara Brabazon, Flinders University: Probably the most important book to emerge in the humanities and social sciences in the last two decades.

Thomas Fazi, journalist and economist: “The most enlightening exploration yet of why the left died and whether it can be resuscitated.”

Philip Cunliffe, Institute of Risk and Disaster Reduction, UCL: Winlow and Hall tackle head-on the central political and social question of our time.

Deirdre O’Neill, film-maker: Combative, provocative and necessary, this book should be read by anyone interested in the plight of the working class.

Lisa Mckenzie, author of Getting By: Hard to put down. A long, difficult and sad tale that needs to be told.

Keith Hayward, University of Copenhagen: A much-needed wake-up call for the so-called progressives and latte liberals that patrol the borders of academe.

Ashley Frawley, Swansea University and author of Semiotics of Happiness: A hopeful and rousing call for humanity to retake the economic engine-room.

The return of populism after the 2008 global financial crisis was, given the left’s abandonment of interventionist economic policy, inevitable. However, the dominant narratives that accompanied the return of populism were remarkably one-sided and tended to ignore the long history of Western populist responses to technocratic arrogance and economic injustice.

The fundamental political struggle in the Ancient World was rooted in economics and property ownership. Put simply, state authorities functioned to prevent landholding creditors using private loans to become oligarchs. In return, small subsistence farmers struggled against state authorities who wanted to stabilise economies in order to retain satisfactory production levels and produce individuals loyal and healthy enough for military service.

Life was hard and neither side was motivated by pristine values but, on balance, the majority were significantly better off under

it had some political shape? In the USA during the nineteenth century, Bryan’s Populist Party was actually a labour party, lining up producers against emerging oligarchs, corporations, banks, trusts and other elite economic institutions involved with credit, foreclosure, asset-stripping and the extraction of surplus value at the point of production. Populists demanded that the government issue fiat currency, nationalise railways, seize land owned by speculators and asset-strippers, and relocate national banks into post offices.

In the 1930s, Roosevelt put similar ideas into practice in an effort to combat the Great Depression and offer the American people a New Deal. He abandoned the gold standard, strapped regulations around bankers and creditors, made speculation more difficult, supported unions, expanded public sector employment and established a welfare system. After yet another economic failure of the liberal elite and the implementation of policies that worked, Roosevelt

wealth and power, these doctrinaire economists, supported by the investment elite, were convinced that if the world’s nations could be persuaded to roll out the free market worldwide, this time it would work.

At first the Austrian thinkers saw a positive role for nation-states as subservient hands-on economic managers. However, in the 1930s, leading neoliberal intellectual Friedrich Hayek, reflecting on the difficulties experienced by the Habsburg and British Empires and observing the even greater difficulties encountered by the fledgling Soviet command economy, was persuaded of the impossibility of economic management on such a scale. Here we see the beginning of the risky move to trust the forces of the unregulated market to ‘correct’ problems and restore equilibria, even though life might be tough for those waiting for the correction to happen.

Hayek and his growing band of supporters had also witnessed the rise of the German and Italian national socialist and

Time for the Left to pick itself up, dust itself off and start all over again. Again

the authority of the state. Populism was simply popular support for tyrants—at that time, a word with positive, noble connotations because it denoted rulers who would overthrow oligarchs, redistribute land and legislate in the interests of the majority.

The ‘decadence’ that Gibbon placed centrally in the fall of Rome was the triumph of the landholding, moneylending families against the populist tyrants who, like Caesar and the Gracchi brothers, were often murdered by oligarchs. The decline in production and health—compounded by fraud, coercion, foreclosure and political assassinations—dispirited and impoverished the population. The barbarians had always been at the gates, but the internal deterioration of morality and political life in Rome was the main factor in its demise.

When Christian eschatology relocated the debt jubilee in the afterlife, Western history became a struggle to establish the rights of creditors to retain assets (paid to service debts) above the rights of debtors to have debts cleared and property restored. The debtor must always take the risk; the lender must always be paid.

After a very long wait, this was interrupted to some extent by the establishment of the limited company in the nineteenth century, but the creditor could still assetstrip while the bankrupt debtor would still lose all property associated with his or her business.

The great ideological reversal of reality was to portray the creditors as the noble elite, and the indebted, wage-dependent people as the dangerous mob. This narrative is central in a lot of liberal literature and retains a significant presence in both academic life and popular culture. The fear of crowds derives from an assumption that the mob is always replete with bigotry, in essence a nativist, exclusionary and hostile sub-democracy with no rational leadership, plan or moral purpose.

Populism has been framed as intrinsically bad, so we don’t see it as a legitimate political reaction to the failures of the liberal elite, but what was populism when

was roundly denounced as a populist.

What the liberal elite fear most is ambitious, feasible, effective and popular social democratic reform. But, given the scale of the present crisis and the problems that lie ahead, is even this ambitious enough? The current mainstream left across the West has quite systematically marginalised these discussions. In such a climate of repression and silence, less rational and organised forms of populism were inevitable.

Neoliberalism’s murky past

In its attempt to build on communal values and repurpose the sovereign nation-state to work on behalf of working people, what was the traditional left up against? The initial answer to that question is ‘neoliberalism’. It’s not a difficult concept—a political doctrine that prefers the minimally regulated global free-market to be the principal system of economic organisation. This system continues to govern the lives of a large proportion of the world’s population. It is against true democracy, against organised labour and against the state, unless the role of the state is restricted to protecting free markets.

What brought this thing upon us? Contrary to popular opinion, it wasn’t the work of Thatcher and Reagan in the 1980s, or even that of the neoliberal think-tanks that began to spring up and influence the mass media and politicians after the Second World War. It began life during the final years of the Habsburg Empire, which had been a free-trade playground for a powerful banking and investment elite, based mostly in the opulent streets of Vienna. Here the Austrian school of economics was founded which, in the 1920s, received funding from the Ford Foundation, a US think-tank always alert to possible ways of spreading free-market doctrine.

The Austrian economists hatched one of history’s most audacious economic plans. Even though the principal strain that eventually collapsed the Habsburg Empire was the mounting dissatisfaction felt by individual regions over an uneven distribution of

fascist states. Whilst taking little notice of the deep social problems that had set the context for the rise of these monstrosities, the fledgling neoliberals decided that they—along with Soviet Communism— were the inevitable political forms that a firm nexus between the working class and a powerful state would take.

But for Hayek and his followers, Roosevelt had implemented state-centred Keynesian economic management policies in the 1930s as a response to the Great Depression, first in 1933 and with renewed vigour during his second term after 1937. Criminal activity was significantly reduced and the high American homicide rate dropped by almost a half as a growing number of people found legitimate livelihoods, some directly provided by the government.

Whereas the monstrosities of Nazism, fascism and Stalinism were easy to discredit and demonise, the early and very popular successes of Keynesian economics and social democracy were not. Alerted by this political threat, the neoliberal vanguard met in Paris in 1938, at the Walter Lippmann Colloquium.

In the midst of complex discussions of burning issues such as freedom, individualism, free markets, finance and wealth creation, the principal enemy was identified as the organised working class and the democratic state together taking up the reins of Keynesian economic management. According to an economist who spoke up at the colloquium, the organised working class must be ‘eliminated’.

The principal ideological tactic was to persuade as many people as possible that social democracy was really a wolf in sheep’s clothing, the first step on ‘the road to serfdom’ and totalitarian brutality. It was an effective tactic, because individual freedom was Western liberalism’s foundational value, and the totalitarian states of the postwar era were indeed palpably monstrous. However, social democracy pressed on to become a reasonably popular orthodoxy. So neoliberals were forced to work hard in the back-

I am Spartacus: when the invisibility of individuality attacks the common good

Countries’ efforts to fight criminal activity—including money laundering and terrorist financing—are often obstructed because of the challenges of finding out who truly owns, controls and benefits from the legal entities used in the context of these illicit activities.

Most countries have systems for obtaining information on legal ownership (that is, the person or legal entity who is the legal titleholder) but the legal owner is not necessarily the person who ultimately owns and controls the entity—the beneficial owner. There is a need to go one step further to identify who the beneficial owner is. Many countries have inadequate systems or no system at all for holding information on these beneficial owners; nor will beneficial ownership information always be apparent on the face of documentation maintained by or on behalf of a legal person.

In March 2022, the Financial Action Task Force—an intergovernmental body that sets the international standards for anti-money laundering and combating the financing of terrorism—adopted changes to the standards concerning requirements for collecting and holding beneficial ownership information. The FATF’s work needs to be known better.

Key concepts of beneficial ownership

At a very basic level, beneficial ownership is determined by factors such as the number of shares that a natural person may hold in a legal person.

[Note: a legal person is an entity or body

(a) which has an existence that is separate and distinct from the persons (legal or natural) comprising that entity or body, (b) which can do the things a human person is usually able to do in law (i.e. enter into contracts, own assets, sue or be sued) and (c) which has legal rights and is subject to obligations.

Corporate bodies, corporations sole and Scottish partnerships are examples of legal persons.

By contrast, examples of beneficial owners—also known as natural persons— are sole proprietors, partnerships and unincorporated associations.]

Countries may choose to impose a qualifying ownership threshold (e.g., a maximum of 25 percent) that might help to identify beneficial ownership, though this is not always straightforward.

Control, however, can be determined by other factors (e.g., which natural person can make decisions in relation to a legal person). Competent authorities should understand that identifying who controls the legal person is not always the same as determining who owns the legal person, or who owns a certain threshold of shares in it.

A common misconception is that knowing the shareholders of a company is sufficient to determine who the beneficial owners are. However, shareholders can include other legal persons. In addition, even if the shareholder information refers to natural persons, it still does not always consider natural persons who may exercise control without necessarily being shareholders. It

also does not reflect those shareholders who may have control over the legal person because of the type of shares they hold, in contrast to ownership thresholds.

Some of the common practical challenges that may be encountered when trying to identify ownership and/or control of a legal person are set out below.

Complex ownership and control structures. Complex legal structures can be created for legitimate purposes but the more complex they are (e.g., multiple layers of ownership, spread across jurisdictions), the more difficult it is for competent authorities to identify who owns and/or controls the structure.

However, even the most complex structure exists for a reason, and that reason should be understood (e.g., by a bank taking on a legal person as a customer, or by a trust and company service provider forming the legal person). If there is no adequate explanation for the use of a complex legal structure, this could indicate that the company structure is deliberately complex to disguise the beneficial owner, or that it may have been created to facilitate or commit a crime—and the relevant authority should treat this as a red flag.

Ownership thresholds.

For practical purposes related to carrying out customer due diligence, countries often put thresholds in place for identifying beneficial owners regarding ownership levels (e.g., 10 percent or 25 percent shareholdings). Share ownership above these thresholds can sometimes indicate beneficial ownership but is not necessarily the only determining factor in ascertaining the beneficial owner.

Legal persons can be vastly different from one another, and applying one threshold does not adequately capture the different ownership structures of these different legal entities. If thresholds are imposed, they should be proportionate to the risk posed by the type of legal person. For example, a legal person that presents no particular risk factors might justify a maximum of 25 percent threshold (the FATF standards’ suggested maximum threshold), whereas higher-risk situations might warrant a lower threshold or even no threshold. Lower thresholds mean that more potential beneficial owners will be found and are particularly relevant in relation to fit and proper requirements for ownership of financial institutions.

Furthermore, any threshold—regardless of how low it has been set—can be circumvented through exercising control of the legal person. Countries should ensure that they adopt a comprehensive definition of beneficial ownership that includes both concepts of ownership and control.

At some point, the number of shareholders might also dilute ownership enough that identifying each separate beneficial owner would not be possible and would create too heavy an administrative burden.

The standards recognise that if ownership is so diversified that there are no natural persons (whether acting alone or together) exercising control of the legal person

through ownership, then control through ‘other means’ should be examined. (Other means might include holding a significant influence function or being closely related to a shareholder and/or being able to exert influence on them. This may be the case for certain publicly traded companies.)

Voting rights

Shareholder voting rights might be an indication of beneficial ownership because, in theory, the power to direct the affairs of the legal person should lie ultimately in the hands of the voting shareholders. However, not all legal persons issue shares with voting rights or with equal voting rights. For example, a company might allow shareholders one vote per share, thus giving those with higher equity in the company more votes. Other companies might allocate one vote per shareholder, thus giving minority shareholders or groups of minority shareholders a bigger say in the company’s affairs than their equity stake would otherwise suggest.

Golden shares

Golden shares traditionally give the holder a majority of the voting rights, which means that the holder can outvote all other shareholders, and this often results in giving their holders effective control over the company. Although many such shares were originally given to governments after privatisation of state-owned companies, their wider use could give a distorted view of control if the simple share value was viewed as the basis for ascertaining beneficial ownership information.

Nominee shareholders and directors

Legal persons that allow nominees to represent shareholders and directors can be misused by those trying to hide beneficial ownership information. Some nominee arrangements are legitimate and formal in nature (e.g., governed by a written contract and disclosed to the legal person), but others can involve less formal or more opaque arrangements, in which the nominee is used primarily to conceal the beneficial owner’s identity.

Undisclosed agent arrangements

Those seeking beneficial ownership information should be conscious of business and other relationships that may suggest that a director or shareholder is acting as an agent for another person. For example, a person may hold shares or a directorship in a company but also be an employee of another person or company. It may be that the director or shareholder is acting at the behest of the controller of the company in which he is employed. This could also be a type of nominee arrangement.

Family members and other strawmen

The use of strawmen in such arrangements can be particularly challenging and can be a nominee arrangement. In such cases, the ownership and formal control of a legal person will be with a person that is closely related to or associ- continued in the book

UNMASKING CONTROL

A GUIDE TO BENEFICIAL OWNERSHIP TRANSPARENCY FRANCISCA FERNANDO AND RICHARD BERKHOUT (EDS)

IMF

171 pages

7 October 2022

9798400208041

Download ebook free from the IMF website

EDITOR’S NOTE

Crime operates furtively so we rarely get an opportunity to take note of it, but it’s one of the world’s great growth industries. Occasionally, news of a data leak or a court appearance reminds us how powerful the big players are but, mostly, the criminal fraternities operate with impunity — and even with the complicity of those charged with suppressing them.

This new study by the IMF alerts us to the freedom that money launderers, terrorist financiers and international smugglers enjoy because of the law’s ignorance of who actually controls apparently legal entities. The big issue is that of beneficial ownership, and the fact that criminals are able to hide their identities and infiltrate the legal economy, making it impossible to trace their assets back to source and causing massive damage to the economies and trading operations of nation states and metropolitan regions.

This much-needed guide was written to help practitioners, policymakers and other researchers to understand the problems at a theoretical level and to take practical steps to set up more effective beneficial ownership frameworks that can reduce opportunities for corruption, support efforts against tax evasion, help tackle illicit financial flows, protect national security interests, and benefit procurement transparency.

EDITOR’S NOTE

On the 20th anniversary of the Second Gulf War, we ask three commentators to look back on the tragic error of WMD, the invasion and its aftermath

Won’t get fooled again?

Sam Quilleris wonders how we got it so wrong

The 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq has prompted a slew of articles and broadcast programmes looking back on the war and the country’s subsequent unravelling, to use the title of Emma Sky’s excellent book on the catastrophic aftermath.1

A tone of incredulity has flowed through many of these post-mortems that anybody at the time could have supported such an obviously disastrous policy.

The theme was exemplified recently in a piece by Ben Sixsmith (a child at the time of the invasion) in “How Were We So Wrong?” (The Critic, March 2023), which was evidently a rhetorical question, as the essay offers little by way of answer and is mainly a cry of bafflement.

For those of us who did support the invasion at the time, the tone of not merely disapproval but complete bewilderment from others is familiar.

After all, almost everyone thought it was crazy at the time: it gave rise to the largest protest march in British history. Most of the commentariat, with the exception of a few outliers, notably Christopher Hitchens and Nick Cohen, were vehemently opposed. MPs may have been whipped to vote for it—many reluctantly—but they were not in tune with the nation.

The WMD threat was always recognisable as obvious nonsense—a pretext to offer a tissue of legality in international law. Even if it were true Saddam Hussein had such weapons, it was likely other grim regimes did too. Only a handful of people whose job it was to be exercised by the legality of the invasion, such as government legal advisers and MPs, cared or persuaded themselves of it.

(Incidentally, the machinations about whether or not Saddam Hussein had WMD was a particular phenomenon of British politics and far less of an issue in the USA, where the need to assure the public of the legality of the war was less of a bar. Instead, in the USA, there were dubious commentators, especially “shock jocks”, who supported the invasion, suggesting to their audiences that Saddam Hussein had borne some responsibilty for the 9/11 attacks—a fabrication, designed to push the American public’s anger button and not something that got onto the radar in the UK.)

So why did we few support the invasion

and the notion of “liberal interventionism”?

We were haunted by the non-interventions in the early ’90s, especially in Rwanda and, for several years, in the former Yugoslavia, where, in both cases, dictators massacred their populations while UN peacekeepers stood by and did nothing.

And, of course, the non-interventions in Iraq itself, the genocide of the Kurds at Halabja in 1988 and, after the First Gulf War, Saddam’s massacring of those in the Iraqi population whom the Americans had encouraged to rise up against the dictator and then abandoned. We understood that being a bystander, doing nothing to help the oppressed, left blood on our hands too. As Elie Wiesel said, the opposite of good is not evil but indifference.

If that is what haunted us, what encouraged us to think it could succeed? Firstly, what appeared to be several successful Western military operations to prevent bloodshed at the end of the ’90s, in Sierra Leone, Kosovo, East Timor (all championed in the UK by Prime Minister Tony Blair—with whom I usually had no truck). All seemed like appallingly belated interventions, but at least the West was, at last, doing something, though far from enough, to protect people.

The eventual interventions in Yugoslavia in the ’90s and the tardy imposition of a no-fly zone in Iraq to prevent further massacres of the Kurds had also saved lives. Even today I think it would be hard to argue that those were not morally better than the counterfactual of having done nothing. The “responsibility to protect” doctrine became our rallying cry, which we then applied also to the invasion of Afghanistan, which had at least got rid of the gruesome Taliban and appeared then to be assisting in the sowing of the seeds of democracy.

When any effective action at the United Nations was blocked by totalitarian regimes, gunboat diplomacy seemed the only way to save lives around the world. I think it was Nick Cohen who wrote of the need for someone to act as the military arm of Amnesty International.

Secondly, we were inspired by the Iraqi exiles, especially the Kurdish political types, many in London, who supported the invasion. Many were brave fighters for

democracy who had suffered terrible tortures under Saddam and whose comrades had died, and their vision of the democratic future that would unfold if Saddam was removed was reassuring and we felt that the least we could do, when they had risked so much for the values we hold dear, was to offer them solidarity.

The Kurds also seemed, under the protection of the no-fly zone, to have created an autonomous embryonic democracy in the North. It looked like a model of how all of Iraq might be, once the heel of the dictator had been removed from the necks of the population.

I particularly remember reading, before the war, a widely circulated speech by the Kurdish leader Barham Salih pleading for solidarity, saying that even were it true that the West merely wanted to improve its access to oil, as the cynics on the Western Left pretended, why shouldn’t the invaders’ thirst for oil, which had always been their curse, for once be their blessing?

Then we looked, on the other side, at our opponents, most tub-thumpingly led in the UK by reprehensible enthusiasts for dictators like George Galloway, who had fawned over Saddam, and other Far Left admirers of totalitarianism.

Meanwhile, looking across the Atlantic, the argument seemed to be between, on the one hand, the bloodstained Kissinger realpolitik conservatives who had notoriously propped up murderous dictatorships throughout South America and the rest of the world, and, on the other hand, a new breed of neoconservatives who were talking about ethical foreign policy and supporting democracy. The moral difference between the two camps seemed, at the time, starkly in favour of the latter.

More widely though, the argument one heard from most opponents of the war— “what gives us the right to interfere in other countries?”—sounded to us like precious, holier-than-thou, isolationism, intended to make the speaker feel good while doing nothing to help the oppressed of the world.

Moreover, its pretension to moral purity encompassed no recognition that Britain and the West might share some responsibility for the mess that the world was in, and therefore have some restorative duty

to get involved. There also seemed a whiff of rascism: the underlying implication that democracy was natural and necessary for us but not for these faraway cultures of other races.

So what do I think now? Obviously it was a disaster; twenty years on one can no longer shy away from that, cling on to some illusion that enough will come out right in the end to in some way counterbalance the death and suffering. Would I support such an invasion today? No, having seen the horror it can unleash, of course not. Gung-ho idealism mixed with ignorance can be more deadly than anything else, I now see.

But was it inevitably a disaster? Could it have turned out otherwise? It was often said, as we tried to understand the wreckage, that we won the war and lost the peace—through unbelievable post-invasion mismanagement and lack of anticipation. The Iraqi politician Ali Allawi even took the phrase as the title of his book dissecting the aftermath.2

Indeed it was not only exiles and starryeyed Western fools who thought, in the immediate aftermath, a successful, democratic could be built. Hope existed and died slowly even among many Iraqis. The Iraqi “blogosphere” that sprung up after the invasion was a record of that. There were a couple of English language bloggers, including the pseudonymous Riverbend3 and Salam Pax4, who were cynical of the invasion from the outset (and whose books comprising extracts of their blogs were consequently published prominently in the West) but most were at first middle-class professionals discussing optimistically the future of Iraq for the first months and years. Eventually a large proportion of them fled the country and some were killed.

Furthermore, the way in which the disaster unfolded bore little resemblance to the loudest warnings emanating from opponents within the Western Left, who predicted that Saddam’s loyal people and the Arab world would rise up in his defence, that Baghdad would be a Stalingrad for the Americans, and that waves of terrorism would immediately be unleashed in Western cities. Few Leftist critics focused on insurgency prompted by administrative mismanagement after the successful taking of the country.]

Was Gulf War Two correct in principle,

Remembering Ahmad Shawkat Tragedy and the horror of anarchy

Michael Goldfarb David Wineberg

then, but wrong in execution? It is hard to maintain that today. All the most thoughtful and knowledgeable commentators, such as Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, in his new book A Stranger In Your City, 5 say that the disaster was inevitable and that there was no plausible alternative scenario where it all worked and I guess they are right.

And yet and yet … thoughts niggle. Would it have been wrong at the time to support the failed European revolutions for democracy of 1848? Or the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War? These are not analogous, in that neither was a foreign power trying to “export” democracy, but both illustrate the issue of hindsight: both, in failing, led to terrible, prolonged bloodshed, lives lost, families destroyed, in the end for nothing. Now those failures too seem inevitable but I know which side I would want to have been on.

By the same token, what if—perish the thought—Ukraine loses? And what if China supports Russia militarily, as a crucial power play against the liberal world? Will it have been wrong, in retrospect, for the West to have supported Ukraine and thereby multiplied the suffering?

And, if we accept that military interventions can sometimes save lives, as I think those in the late ’90s did, then was the failure principally a matter of scale? In a scenario perversely echoed by Putin’s genocidal invasions of former Soviet territories, was it that the others were smaller and winnable whereas in Iraq we bit off more than we could chew?

Hindsight can be very deceptive; unlike a fairground mirror which distorts a sane reality into a grotesque vision, it resolves a severely grotesque reality into an illusion of clarity. So when critics ask in disbelief how could we get it so wrong, the moral and political calculus was not perhaps as clear as it now seems. Nor, as it seems, to most people at the time.

Somewhere along the road from Lalish back to Erbil in northern Iraq/Kurdistan, my driver, Sami Abdulqadir, and my friend and translator, Ahmad Shawkat, began an extended conversation in Kurdish. This was unusual. Both were polite and understood that it was rude to speak in a language I could not understand.

We had gone to Lalish because there had been some half-hearted bombing by Saddam Hussein’s crumbling forces in the area an hour north of Erbil, not far from Iraqi Kurdistan’s border with Turkey and the great dam across the Tigris that rumours said Saddam had ordered to be blown up to flood Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city.

There wasn’t much bomb damage to see, so Ahmad insisted we go to the Yazidi temple there. The temple is at least 4,000 years old. Ahmad had spent much of our time together teaching me about the cultural richness of northern Iraq, where humanity first organised itself into what we call civilisation: first major cities, first empire and first religions, like Yazidism, an early montheistic faith, still practised today.

The temple complex was full of Yazidi refugees from the plains of Nineveh below the town. We were welcomed and given a tour of the place. The temple was dark and smelled of tallow and unshod feet.

It was a mind-bending few hours, which may explain why I did not interrupt Sami and Ahmad as they carried on their conversation. Finally, I asked, What’s Sami talking about?

He is worried about what will happen to him if America loses, Ahmad said. I shouldn’t have laughed but I think I did.

Is he kidding? No, he worries about what will happen to him and his family if Saddam is still in charge.

This was a not unreasonable fear given what happened in Kurdistan at the the end of the first Gulf War when the first President Bush left Saddam in charge and Saddam launched a campaign against the Kurds, driving them into the mountains.

Tell him not to worry.

Ahmad said something in Kurdish. I reached over to the front seat and put my hand on Sami’s shoulder. I’ll make sure you and your family are safe. It was a promise I knew I could make, because it was a promise I would never have to keep.

By the time we got back to Erbil, the streets were jammed in celebration. Saddam’s statue in Baghdad’s Firdos Square had been pulled down. The Americans had taken Baghdad.

A few days later the regime collapsed in Mosul, Ahmad’s home town, and we raced there and witnessed the violent anarchy that overtook the city. I recorded a gun battle outside the national bank. Ahmad nearly got lynched, arguing with people to stop looting.

The sense that the US could not be entirely trusted was a periodic topic in Sami’s Mitsubishi SUV. I had assured my friends that failure was not an option. Bush the son was determined to outdo his father. In a patriarchal society, this Oedipal theme was something they understood.

But I was wrong. Six months later Ahmad was murdered in Mosul. Twelve years later, Da’esh/ISIS commenced a campaign of genocide against the Yazidis. Once again the temple complex in Lalish filled with refugees.

Right up front, Kaplan admits shame for supporting the American invasion of Iraq. It has bothered him for two decades, and has resulted in this unusual book: a catharsis, a way for others to understand and avoid making his big mistake.

It focuses on tragedy, not the death of thousands, but the self-discovery of powerlessness, of fear in place of bold moves, of human failings clouding global accomplishments.

He finds this in all kinds of Shakespearean and Greek play characters. King Lear resists self-awareness. The Macbeths can’t figure out what happened. Hamlet is entirely an analysis of the impossible situation.

Kaplan has become conscious that societies need form and structure to flourish. To remove a government and replace it with nothing is his nightmare. Everything, including society itself, stops. Anarchy is entropy in action.

Leaders are there to prevent it: “It is the burden of leadership that provides tragedy, with many of its most searing and pivotal moments,” he says. This is the challenge leaders rise to, even if it ruins them, as so many did in Greek and Shakespearean plays.

One of the problems, according to Kaplan, is that current generations have no experience of war or tyranny or anarchy on their own territory. So they have no fear of it, and don’t care to be prepared to deal with it. In Kaplan’s terms they have not been trained to think tragically. This is also his personal issue, since he figured anything would be better than Saddam Hussein. Clearly not so.

Today’s pop culture is all about videogame superheroes, not the soul-searching decisions of men facing existential crises. So, few people are prepared to think in those terms. Nor do they see any reason to.

Kaplan says “There can be no worse burden on a leader’s peace of mind” than knowing he screwed up, costing the lives of millions, including many of his own countrymen—for nothing. History does not support this. Usually they don’t care. They just move on, and have no problem doing it again. In current culture, the high-minded concepts and tales of Shakespeare and the ancient Greeks are for entertainment purposes only. From where I sit anyway.

How doth Dahl offend?

Does Puffin’s now much-commented-on bowdlerisation of the children’s author Roald Dahl (1916–1990) warrant the outrage that broke out in February?

The latest edition of Dahl’s works carries a note, explaining that the publishers regularly review Dahl’s language to ensure that it can still be enjoyed, implying that were they not to do so, his books would be exposed as hurtful in a way they never were when we were less brittle.

Dahl was a nasty, patronising man, and in the days before cancel culture, his unguarded mockery was partly what people liked him for. Those who now object most to the censoring of him include those who think he was merely being forthright.

Those who have tried to adapt him to our more inclusive age are accused of misplaced sanctimony. A more extreme view is that Dahl should have been totally erased rather than merely emasculated, if we wished to say that his relish for divisiveness no longer has a place in our world.

In some ways it’s a pity that the argument about literary house-keeping should have focused on Dahl, because it has allowed the primary question—should writers’ work be updated?—to get tangled up with a separate question about Dahl himself and the question of whether he should ever have been published.

One wouldn’t pretty up Richard Wagner’s Judaism in Music or Adolph Hitler’s

Disability figures rise

In 2021, the total number of Cambridge students disclosing a disability rose 12 percent on the previous year, with a 20 percent increase in the number identifying as autistic or presenting with other mental health conditions. The most common diagnoses disclosed by applicants included social impairments associated with Asperger’s Syndrome, as well as learning difficulties and depression.

Lockdown arrangements during 2020–21 have been cited as a contributory factor adding to the anxiety felt by students, but the increase in disability reporting long predates the Covid-19 pandemic.

The university has offered no official explanation for this phenomenon, but it appears to be related to the destigmatising of mental health difficulties, alongside a demand among students for greater identity recognition and an increasing intolerance of inflexible teaching and living arrangements.

Registering as disabled at Cambridge allows for alternative arrangements to be made for interviews and examinations, extra time for the fulfilment of assignments and the provision of specialist equipment.

A leading UK professor of cognitive neuroscience who also wished not to be named speculated that the growing documentation of students diagnosed as neurodivergent may be nothing more than the application of a medical label to those who would previously have been regarded as “eccentric” or “a bit odd”.

Neurodivergence is now diagnosed to a far greater extent than in the past, he points out. Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) was only recognised as a valid condition from 2000, when the first National Institute of Clinical Excellence report on the condition was published. It is now considered far from unusual.

Mein Kampf because the thinking in both is so poisonous that it can’t be made palatable. What Puffin is saying is that because Dahl didn’t articulate his prejudices but merely used them as background, they deserve a new lease of life. And with a $686 million price tag on the Dahl estate, reportedly paid by Netflix in 2021, one can see why Puffin should have thought so.

Meanwhile, the answer to whether updating can ever be justified is of course Yes. One of the UK’s bestsellers, in the days when care for language was technical rather than emotional, was Fowler’s Modern English Usage. The book had originally been published by Oxford in 1926 and took the world by storm. “Why must you write intensive here,” Churchill wrote to his Director of Military Intelligence about plans to invade Normandy during the war. “Intense is the right word. You should read Fowler.” And “Fowler” meant Fowler.

But in 1965, Sir Ernest Gowers brought out an extensive revision of the book and everyone cheered again. As with the updating of the Pevsner County Guides, which originally appeared between 1951 and 1974 before being brought back to life by Yale University Press from 2003, few have suggested that updating in itself is illegitimate. And we all read Percy Shelley’s version of Frankenstein rather than Mary’s.

What is illegitimate is bad revision, and this attracted too little attention when the

fuss about Dahl took off. It’s all very well being sanctimonious, after all, but your replacements have to be an improvement. Time and time again, the changes offered by Puffin and the Roald Dahl Story Company, together with Inclusive Minds, “a collective for people who are passionate about inclusion and accessibility in children’s literature”, are horrifically worse.

The locus classicus of this is the attempt at poetry, where today’s editors reveal a blindness to basic scansion and poetic form that raises suspicions about other blindnesses. Here is a Dahl original, from James and the Giant Peach:

Aunt Spiker was thin as a wire, And dry as a bone, only drier. She was so long and thin

If you carried her in

You could use her for poking the fire!

‘I must do something quickly,’ she frowned.

‘I want FAT. I want pound upon pound!

I must eat lots and lots

Of marshmallows and chocs

Till I start bulging out all around.’

‘Ah, yes,’ she announced, ‘I have sworn That I’ll alter my figure by dawn!’

Cried the peach with a snigger, ‘I’LL alter your figure’— And ironed her out on the lawn!

The democracy debate

continued from page 1, below

once observed, democracy is only the least worst of governmental systems, apart from all the rest. Then replace it with a dictatorship, a tyranny, a police-state. Job done.

The longer answer is more tricky. Liberal democracies—the kind invented in the later seventeenth century in England and evolved and developed ever since in the Western world—make a fetish of freedom. Or, to put it the other way around, they systematically maximise the chances of the citizens collectively deciding, consciously or by dereliction, not to live in the most socially and politically and planetarily responsible ways possible or desirable.

That was simple enough: three perfect limericks in a row. But now comes Puffin’s all-knowing Committee of Public Safety with this alternative:

Aunt Spiker was much the same

And deserves half of the blame.

Ta-ra, Aunt Spiker!

(Though we never did like her)

It’s sad but true.

If only she knew,

How the absence of charm

Can do so much harm.

With thoughts so frightful

One can’t be delightful

And now worms will have Spiker for tea!

Apparently, it is OK to offend against literary precision if one’s motives are virtuous and the flawed result can be laughed off as humorous. Here (if it really needs spelling out), Inclusive Minds and their chums were completely defeated by the modest-enough challenge of respecting the rhythm of what went before. It’s clear that they tried—and failed, generously leaving the detritus of their failure for all to see.

Unable to construct even three five-line limericks to match the original, they struggled to compose four lines (three with a syllable short, then one with a syllable too many) before going careening off into chaos, with six additional lines arranged as rhymed couplets.

still fit for purpose? Or, to put it even more pragmatically, what else could save us if a reformed but still recognisable form of democracy still betrays us in the future by allowing us the right, in the name of freedom, to commit planetary suicide?

One matter that conspicuously determines this crisis is population. Birthrate is a deeply sensitive matter that we in the West tend to consider a totally private and individual affair, but it was not so considered in antiquity, nor today in an authoritarian society such as China. China has not borrowed its politics from the West; should we be borrowing our politics from China, which has mechanisms to enact root-and-branch reforms in a way that we do not?

In addition, without minimising the negative impact of neurological problems, he argues that neurodivergency is exactly the sort of identity one would expect of very high-performing students, who need—and need to enjoy—an obsessive focus on rigid and repetitive tasks such as the gathering, sorting and analysing of data, often at the expense of a developed social life.

At the same time, the data suggests that students no longer feel the need to hide their identities or pretend to conform to artificial ideals, as they may have done in the past, any more than do LGBTQ+ students.

In this sense, the increase in the presentation of students registered as being on the autism spectrum, for example, can be seen as a sign of the growing health of the student population rather than of its growing disability.

For further reading: Catherine Frazee, Dispatches from Disabled Country (UBC Press, 15 May 2023).

Just to give one recent example: when Boris Johnson was the UK’s prime minister, he appointed someone who became tagged in the red-top press as the ‘Food Czar’ (or ‘Tsar’). Ironic title, that, since the Russian term is a derivation of the ancient Roman-Latin Caesar, implying total, non-accountable, autocratic: precisely not the sort of power with which Henry Dimbleby was entrusted or endowed, which is precisely why he resigned his position in March of this year, in despair at the government’s failure or flat refusal to implement his and his committee’s carefully researched and advocated proposals (I was privileged to be one of their many consultants), the aim of which had been, above all, to diminish the UK’s current crisis of obesity.

Choice, in other words, is all very well. But choice can prove inimical to the furtherance of societal goods and the achievement of what a rational observer would call not just desirable but absolutely imperative goals, goals the non-achievement of which will, crudely, in the not-so-short run, kill us all, and not only the morbidly obese among us.

So, what political system do we turn to? We need to know. Is any version of Western-style liberal representative democracy

There are less extreme options. As an academic historian, I notice that some of my peers and colleagues have begun contemplating, even advocating, radical political innovations—stopping short only of outright political revolution. One such innovation would be the establishment of constitutional conventions of citizens, chosen by lot, on a representative basis, each tasked with addressing a fundamental current and future political concern, such as (over)population.

The findings and recommendations of such conventions would be debated in parliament and government and then put to the electorate in the form of referendums—couched, sensibly, in terms requiring a supermajority of voters. That’s one approach that steps back from tearing down our whole political apparatus.

My own view is that democracy has not come to the end of the road, nor can I bear to contemplate the imposition of illiberal values and Orwellian regimes. But I am of the view, an ancient Greek one, that democracy needs to work better than it is doing and that for a properly democratic culture to take hold requires education, education, education—in communal and above all civic but now also global values.

These six extra lines weren’t replacing anything, so there was no excuse for getting the rhythm wrong in them, yet their violations come thick and fast. “It’s sad but true” needs an extra syllable (how difficult would “It’s sad but it’s true” have been?), as does the next line, as do lines 8 and 9.

And when the last line is finally allowed to appear (stuffed with too many syllables, as if in triumph), it leaves us, bizarrely, with a poem of 11 lines—one more than two lim-

Another bookish quiz question

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ericks back-to-back—and what is either a delayed or premature denouement, in defiance of the expectation the editors themselves have set up. What a terrible example to pass to a child.

Here at Booklaunch, we think the neglect of poetic form counts decisively against the Puffin team, but evidently we’re in a minority. After all, rap—which permeates popular culture—bulldozes its way past every other poetic feature in its fetishising of rhyme, as does ChatGPT, which mirrors the best it can find on the web. In every other way, this unbelievably competent AI app can perform wonders, but when it comes to poetry, it is utterly defeated.

To demonstrate this, we asked ChatGPT to knock off a limerick on the subject of the Dahl controversy. What emerged—in one second flat—showed a perfect grasp of the topic but a very imperfect grasp of scansion. Here was one of its many flawed efforts:

In Dahl’s books, some words caused strife, (1 syll. too short)

Controversy over what’s fit for life,

(2 syll. too long)

But to rewrite his tales, Would surely curtail, (1 syll. too short)

The spirit of his creativity and knife.

(Don’t ask.)

We take from this two lessons: the first is that contemporary moral virtue is selective in what it will fight for. The second is that with every other human task now being bettered by computers, poetry offers the last redoubt in the fight against mankind’s total existential wipe-out.

Hoo-bloody-rah.

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In his new book of short stories, Lagos, Life and Sexual Distraction, he brings to our attention some of the everyday situations he has encountered as reporter, both in Nigeria’s commercial capital in the south of the country and in the troubled North, wracked by Boko Haram insurgency.

Writing about Nigeria’s underclass, he illustrates the tensions that exist between the generations, between the sexes and between Nigeria’s different social classes and ethnicities.

Now available exclusively from Envelope Books at £11.95.

Fatima Kara was brought up in what was then Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, the daughter of parents who had come to Africa from Gujarat in India.

In her vibrant new book, she tells the story of a family like her own, trying to establish itself in the face of white racism while struggling to reconcile the appeal of modernity with loyalty its own traditions.

The Train House on Lobengula Street focuses on the heroine’s wish to educate her daughters in the face of her husband’s fears that education will make them unmarriageable within the caste.

Shortlisted for the 2021 Laxford Literary Launch Debut Authors Prize and now available from EnvelopeBooks at £15.95.

Tunde Ososanya broadcasts in Pidgin English for the BBC’s West Africa bureau in Lagos, Nigeria.