Latest news with #Thatcher
New Statesman
8 hours ago
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
What does Adam Curtis know?
Photo byOn or about May 1979, the British character changed. That, in a sentence, is the argument of Adam Curtis's new documentary series Shifty. The election of Margaret Thatcher was the beginning of a revolution she helped accelerate but could never control, one involving economics, physics and ideology. Our nation – fretful, immiserated, lonely – was created in the two decades that followed. The adjectives most often used to describe Curtis's recent work tend to be related to drugs: hallucinatory, trance-like, psychedelic. They are apt. Though his earlier films featured interviews and televisual strictures, now he works through a combination of montage and caption, ditching even the nasal narration that once characterised his work. Some storylines he pursues for a full episode, others receive a mere 30 seconds of fame. The effect is disorientating, a constant swaying between plot and subplot. But sudden contrast is Curtis's fetish: gentlemen in cricket whites beneath skeletal electric pylons; shots of glass-and-steel towers immediately followed by a horse dying in a field. However, despite this reputation for experimentation, you get the sense that the scenes he is most drawn to are sober, humdrum, everyday. So, while you have Thatcher scuttling about laying tables for state banquets and trying to force monetarism to work, you also get nightclubs, barbers and police interviews – all the inventory of history from below. Sometimes you wonder where such moving footage comes from: who was letting documentarians into their house parties in 1981? But no matter. Such is the capaciousness of the BBC's archive that serves as Curtis's quarry, he doesn't have to show or tell you. You simply see. When he's doing history from above, though, Curtis is, by his own standards, dealing with a conventional arc. We move in a familiar sequence from Thatcher to Big Bang, from deindustrialisation to MDMA, from mass politics to mass atomisation. Perhaps it is a sign of the shifting historiography of the recent past that this feels more like restatement than reinterpretation. Thatcher is no longer seen as Britain's saviour on the right or left. We all know the bankers are crooked and the politicians are powerless. And did anyone else hear that Max Clifford was a wrong 'un? However, these familiarities are diversified by much more Curtis-like swerves into the strange and the eccentric. Like the story of Stephen Knight, a local reporter who became a national figure for claiming in his book Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution that the Victorian murders were linked to both the Freemasonry movement and the British royal family. Knight went on to write another conspiratorial book about the Freemasons before his early death from a brain tumour. Though Knight is scarcely remembered today, for Curtis he is illustrative of a paranoid society growing fearful and sceptical of its elites. The title of this series ('shifty') is a description of what happens 'in societies when the foundations of power begin to move'. It's something we all feel – almost to the point that you wonder if it is truly confined to the last two decades of the 20th century in Britain. The Sixties and Seventies – with their own depressive introspection, aristocratic crack-up, and stewing industrial conflict – could surely have served as part of the same canvas. At times Curtis overstretches himself, conflating the late-20th century with modernity in the broadest terms. Aside from Mrs Thatcher, Curtis's main protagonist is probably Stephen Hawking, whose hyper-rational analysis of the cosmos Curtis places in parallel with the penetration of market forces into the soul of Britain. It is difficult to see these phenomena as coterminous. At other moments, his captions are slightly strident, almost drunkenly so: 'The concept of privatisation had been invented by the Nazis.' 'Do you really believe that, sir, or are you just trying to make us think?' So Dakin asks his teacher Irwin in Alan Bennett's The History Boys as he hears the mythos of the First World War being swept away. I would ask Curtis the same question. But in Bennett's play, the boys learn that sincerity and iconoclasm are both necessary instincts. As a rare historian who is willing to prioritise sweep, argument and craft over the accumulation of credible detail, we are fortunate to have Adam Curtis. Shifty BBC iPlayer [See also: Amol Rajan's Ganges vanity project] Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Related
Edmonton Journal
a day ago
- Sport
- Edmonton Journal
NHL ROUNDUP: Canucks extend Thatcher Demko and Connor Garland to multi-year deals
Article content Demko, 29, is coming off an injury-plagued 2024-25 campaign where he posted a 10-8-3 record with a .889 save percentage, a 2.90 goals-against average and one shutout. The San Diego native was named a finalist for last year's Vezina Trophy, awarded annually to the NHL's top goaltender, after going 35-14-2 with a .918 save percentage and a 2.45 GAA during the 2023-24 campaign. The performance helped Vancouver clinch first place in the Pacific Division and earn a spot in the playoffs. Demko suffered an injury to the popliteus muscle in his left knee during Game 1 of the team's first-round series against the Nashville Predators. He did not play again until Dec. 10. 'Thatcher is one of the top goalies in the National Hockey League and a key leader in our locker room,' Canucks general manager Patrik Allvin said in a statement. 'Demmer is one of the hardest-working players on our team and gives our group great confidence when he takes the net. A complete package of size, strength, rebound control, and athletic ability, our players know that they have an opportunity to win each and every game he plays.' Garland put up 50 points (19 goals, 31 assists) for the Canucks this past season and won gold with the U.S. at the men's world hockey championship in May. ♦ The Calgary Flames have extended defenceman Joel Hanley's contract by two years. The deal announced Tuesday by the Flames carries an average annual value of $1.75 million. The 34-year-old from Keswick, Ont., played a career-high 53 games for Calgary last season. He contributed two goals and seven assists and was a career-best plus-12 while averaging 18 and a half minutes of ice time per game.
The National
4 days ago
- Politics
- The National
Anas Sarwar and Keir Starmer have taken another hit to any credibility
For the recently wedded, the first anniversary is known as the paper one. So-called, apparently, because the relationship of the couple is still fragile and delicate territory and is also a blank page representing how they are just beginning their life story together. Or maybe underscoring the need for a government to remember the all-important relationship with its own troops. However, you dress it up, the very late-night concessions wrung out of a beleaguered Work and Pensions Secretary last Thursday night count as the third government U-turn in the last month. Thatcher once famously told her conference: 'You turn if you want to, the Lady's not for turning.' As they say; compare and contrast. READ MORE: 'Completely unprecedented': BBC cuts live feed for Kneecap Glastonbury performance In the past 48 hours, the narrative has been swiftly rewritten as the bill being strengthened, and the Government only changing its mind having listened – however belatedly – to its own backbenchers. The latter, of course, had already been listening to some very alarmed disabled voters and unpaid carers, liable to lose some £4k of urgently needed funds. Turns out that what the PM dismissed as 'noises off' when he was at the G7 was more of a howl of anguish from a wheen of Labour MPs who had listened to their constituents more assiduously than their own cabinet had listened to them. What can't be mended by this late-night about-turn is the anguish of many PIP recipients who have been through the mental wringer as minister after minister intoned that the bill would not be amended. There's a very instructive passage in the book Get In, which recounts how Starmer was selected as Labour's likely leader and, if all went to plan, the PM in waiting: '[Morgan] McSweeney and his acolytes saw themselves as insurgents … as long as Starmer's private office was functional, they could control the party's politics themselves, without interference from small-minded Westminster villagers.' The book also details Starmer's contempt for, and refusal to play by, the normal political rules. Which may just explain why Labour's high command, and its leader, remained tone-deaf to the scale of the rebellion until five minutes to midnight. It also explains why Starmer first appointed Sue Gray as his chief of staff, believing that she could plug the gaps in the rest of the staff's political nous. Then she too was defenestrated. McSweeney took the post instead which is a high-profile insider's role when the going is good, less so when the solid matter hits the fan. As he found out when he and Sir Keir tried to stem the rising tide of rebellion. Even deploying high-profile colleagues to ring around the erstwhile faithful failed to persuade them to take their names off the so-called wrecking amendment. They longed for more of what Bush Senior once called 'the vision thing' and less growth through guns. (Image: Rafik Wahba on Unsplash) There's always spare cash for shiny new weaponry, many thought, but less for the poor, vulnerable or disabled. This was not why people had voted for Labour. (Not at all incidentally, the 12 new F-35A planes – which can carry tactical nuclear weapons – will come in at £80 million each, or just under £1 billion all told. Other defence contracts will be just shy of £60bn in the next calendar year.) Not really the sort of price tag which usually attracts 'noises off'. The other thing to note about the purchase of the planes is that they're entirely contingent on the USA giving the go-ahead for their use – a bit like Trident which some people persist in calling our 'independent' nuclear deterrent. The other day I heard Pat McFadden, the Scot who has sat for a Wolverhampton seat for the past 20 years, talk of America being a 'reliable ally'. Really? Would that be the country with a president as predictable as a Scottish weather vane? The chap with the shortest attention span of any adult political leader? Allegedly the G7 timetable was hugely truncated to stop the Trump person getting too bored and maybe even again leaving early! It was once observed of Scottish golfing great Sandy Lyle that the longest thing he had ever read was a left-to-right putt. Bit like the perennially (and expensively) golfing bod in the White House. Maybe flying back early from the Canadian summit gave him time for a quick nine holes before popping into his security meeting. Typically, he then claimed credit for solving all conflicts everywhere, his Iranian adventure certainly ensuring that attention was diverted from the carnage in Gaza. Despite the ill-named Humanitarian Foundation he set up with his pal 'Bibi' having led to the murder of countless civilians whose 'crime' was being so desperate for food that they approached the aid stations, where many were gunned down. Trump's reaction to all of this was to toss the Foundation another $30m, although the operation had been roundly condemned by everyone who actually understood, after many years of experience, how to distribute aid without casualties. Inevitably, the fallout from the latest UK Government's capitulation has had an impact on the politics in our own backyard. Although there were the signatures of no fewer than 12 Scottish Labour MPs on the amendment, Anas Sarwar chose to back his ultimate boss. No change there, then. Wonder how he felt on Friday morning when the commitment to reform welfare and the pre-existing bill met the Head Office's shredding machine. If you want people to stop referring to Scottish Labour as a branch office, then it's essential to stop behaving like a branch manager. Sarwar may have to eat some humble pie this coming week, but his are flesh wounds compared to the ugly gash in the PM's credibility. Sir Keir was much given to mocking what he called the 'sticking plaster' policies of the government he so handsomely defeated a torrid 12 months ago. It will take more than a temporary plaster to heal this particular wound, I'm guessing. And what of his Chancellor? Her legendary fiscal rules are apparently self-imposed; a naked bid to convince the marketplace that she was a serious chancellor with a serious agenda and would not cave in to external pressure. That too will lack credibility when she checks her spreadsheets and finds an ever-larger, blacker hole than the one she inherited. She and Keir will doubtless argue that the humongous hike in defence expenditure was an essential response to the dangerous times in which we all now live. If that response includes tax rises and these are not aimed at those with obscenely broad shoulders, she may find herself pointed at the shredder too. There is a well-trained army of lawyers and accountants whose day job is to allow the very wealthy to stay that way by stashing their cash in a variety of offshore hidey-holes. Every government promises to clamp down on this mammoth tax fraud and no government, to my knowledge, has made the smallest dent in it. When Denis Healey was chancellor, he got pelters for suggesting he would 'squeeze property speculators until the pips squeak'. Mind you, the same gent once observed: 'Being chancellor is not a woman's job. There's a difference between the sexes, and people who don't know that don't know what people are like with their clothes off.' I'm sure he didn't repeat that in the hearing of the redoubtable Edna Healey, his missus. Then again, having a woman ruling the roost at number 11 probably depends on the woman.
Metro
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Metro
Why ‘big hairy' Welsh miners led London Pride in1985
When Mike Jackson and 26 of his gay friends from London walked into a remote Welsh miner's club, they were met with stoney cold silence. 'The whole crowd stopped talking – then one person started clapping. Within seconds, 300 people stood up and applauded us,' Mike tells Metro, as he recalls that unforgettable day in October 1984. It was a moment that marked the beginning of an unlikely friendship between two oppressed groups – striking miners and the LGBT community – that not only inspired a star-studded comedy movie 30 years later, but also spurred a transformation of gay rights in the UK. It even led to a historical spectacle that captured their unique bond, as dozens of 'big hairy miners' led the London Pride parade, 40 years ago this summer. Back in 1984, as the LGBTQ+ community were getting ready for their annual pride march, miners across the country had been on strike for over three months. They were protesting plans by Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government to close 20 collieries, which threatened to cut 20,000 jobs from many towns who relied on the coal pits for employment. Despite being hundreds of miles away from the nearest coal mines, Mike and his friend Mark Ashton decided they had to do something to stop this happening. 'It was in my blood to support the miners. It was the most obvious thing to do,' Mike, 71, explains. 'We were having a bad time, too. Gay men faced completely undiluted bigotry shown by everybody – the courts, the police, the government, schools, colleges, you name it. With thousands of members from all over the world, our vibrant LGBTQ+ WhatsApp channel is a hub for all the latest news and important issues that face the LGBTQ+ community. Simply click on this link, select 'Join Chat' and you're in! Don't forget to turn on notifications! 'We were sick of Thatcher and were desperate to get rid of her. The miners had shown us a way. They could have hated our guts and we still would have supported them because we knew that if Thatcher won, Britain would go down the pan as far as working class people are concerned.' Mike and Mark decided to rattle some donation buckets with friends during the Pride march that year and managed to raise hundreds of pounds for the miners. Spurred on by their efforts they created a group to help raise more money called Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM). Numbers grew rapidly, with as many as 50 regular attendees helping them to fundraise for the striking miners. Within a few weeks LGSM were regularly collecting outside every main gay or lesbian venue in London, including the 'Gay's the Word' bookshop. In total the group raised a staggering £22,500 (£73,500 in today's money) in their year long campaign, but hit a stumbling block early on – who should they donate it to? The Thatcher government had sequestered National Union of Mineworkers (NUM)'s funds, meaning it was pointless for supporters of the strike to send donations to them. So, in the end, LGSM decided to twin with the Neath, Dulais, and Swansea Valleys Miners Support Group deep in South Wales. Keen to meet the miners they were working so hard to help, in October 1984, Mark, Mike and 25 members of their crew rocked up at Onllwyn Miners' Welfare Hall in the Dulais. They had no idea how a town of gruff miners would react to a group of LGBTQ+ people from London. 'We were young and we were quite conspicuous because we were LGBT,' remembers Mike. 'When we walked in, the whole crowd of people stopped talking for a moment. We knew that was a response to us – we just didn't know what it meant.' That was, until the miners broke into rowdy applause for their newfound friends. 'Who would have expected, miners who have very tough, hard jobs, would give us that kind of reception? 'We all then got drunk and exchanged stories. By the end of that weekend, we'd cemented friendships that were to last to this day. We never expected that kind of welcome.' Why were LGSM met with such tolerance? Mike thinks the miner's wives might have had something to do with it. While their husbands were off at protests, they were busy fundraising and liaising with their support groups – so they saw first hand how important LGSM's work was for their community. 'I think in the weeks leading up to our visit, the women had talked to the men and made them think in an adult way about gay people,' Mike explains. 'So by the time we got there, the miners were thinking, 'This is brave of these queer boys coming in here. Very brave of them'.' The miners even returned the favour and travelled to London, where Mike and his friends took them to bars in Soho. Their unlikely friendship turned out not just to be crucial support for the striking workers, but also sparked an outpouring of support for LGBTQ+ people after the Neath, Dulais, and Swansea miners began wearing LGSM's badges in solidarity. They even stuck the group's logo on their van as they travelled up and down the country to join strikes at other pits. 'There was these big hairy miners on picket lines, facing up to the police and getting the s**t kicked out of them by the police – and they're wearing gay badges,' remembers Mike. 'And the really crucial way for miners to know what was happening nationally was literally speaking to each other on these picket lines. So our Welsh guys would go around saying, 'Oh, we've got the gays supporting us. Marvellous people. They've been so good to us'. 'They realised what we needed in terms of support was people to identify with us, to be our allies.' Ten other LGSM groups sprung up across the country during the year long strike and began fundraising for other towns battling to keep their coal pits open. However, as the New Year approached, the number of people crossing the picket line had increased as many miners faced serious financial hardship, while arrests, clashes with police and divisions within the movement demoralised those striking. By March 1985, thousands of miners marched back to work, which marked the end of a year of industrial action – and weakened the power of trade unions under Thatcher's government. Defeated and demoralised, a group of 70 miners travelled down from Dulais in June 1985 to London Pride in the very van they had brought from LGSM's donations, to say thank you for all the support they had received from the LGBTQ+ community. Their arrival was met with awe from the crowd – just as Mike and his friends had, when they turned up in Wales. Remembering the scene as they unfolded their trade union and LGSM bannersat the march's starting point in Hyde Park, he says: 'The crowd arrived and they saw this huge banner. They gathered around it and wouldn't move. 'So the organisers came round and said: 'Look, you're going to have to lead the march because the crowd around you is so big'.' The miner's support did not end there. The NUM had once been dismissive of gay rights campaigning, but that changed at the Labour Party conference in Bournemouth in 1985, when miners voted as a block to support a resolution committing the party to gay rights. The same happened at the Trade Union Conference that year. 'The whole of the entire trade union movement followed the miners' example and supported lesbian and gay rights in homage to the recently defeated miners,' Mike recalls. Mining groups soon became some of the most vocal supports of LGBT rights and began leading fundraising efforts for HIV/Aids charities. For author and playwright Clayton Littlewood, who was a gay man in London during the strike, the legacy of LGSM 'has been incredible'. He tells Metro: 'Back then, I thought, 'Why are we collecting for striking miners?' Now it all makes sense. 'That unity between two attack groups, it almost put the sexuality aside and was like, 'You're oppressed, we're oppressed. How can we join forces?' It helped the miners, it helped gay need that kind of solidarity again.' Clayton now helps the dating app Grindr with a social media project called 'Daddy Lessons', dedicated to commemorating key moments in gay history and features the history of LGSM, hoping to educate more young people about its importance. 'If people can see that kind of history and see what happened then and how successful it was, they may think of trying to join forces with other groups because we need support at the moment,' he explains. However, the history of LGSM was 'almost invisible', until screenplay writer Stephen Beresford decided to make a movie out of it in 2014, adds Mike. Called Pride, the film had a star-studded cast including Bill Nighy, Imelda Staunton and Dominic West, and was met with critical acclaim across the globe. Mike, who was played by Joe Gilgun, was even invited to speak to miners in Belgium after the film aired. Despite the miners' defeat, Mike says he is proud of his role in the fight and the legacy it has left. More Trending 'Thatcher won – history is always the history of the victors and not the losers. But we put up a fight and that itself is something to be proud of,' he insists. 'There are mining communities across the world that have been influenced by the striking British miners from the '80s. 'Even in countries which are are viciously homophobic, I wouldn't mind betting that in those communities, there isn't as much homophobia as there is in their communities at large.' Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@ For more stories like this, check our news page. MORE: I never expected my one-night stand to pursue me after our casual fling MORE: 54 years of groundbreaking LGBT TV that shaped what we watch today MORE: Patient who threw bricks at paramedics and smashed ambulance avoids jail
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Welfare bill: A humiliating blow for Starmer, and the fallout will be felt way beyond this week
First there was stonewalling, then the private complaints from MPs before a very public outburst that saw an eye-watering 127 MPs tell their prime minister they were going to defy him on a welfare vote. Now, the inevitable climbdown has arrived, with Downing Street to rebels last night on their planned cuts to disability benefits. A government with a massive 165-strong working majority, had an awakening on Thursday to the importance of parliament as it embarked on a humiliating climbdown after the private warnings of MPs to Downing Street fell on deaf ears. It's worth taking a beat to reflect on the enormity of this moment. Less than a year ago, was walking into No. 10 having won a landslide, with a Labour majority not seen since the Blair era. That he has been forced to retreat by angry foot soldiers so early in this premiership, despite having such a big majority, is simply unprecedented. No government has lost a vote at second reading - this basically the general principles of a bill - since 1986 (Thatcher's shops bill) and that was the only occasion a government with a working majority lost a bill at the second reading in the entire 20th century. It is obviously a humiliating blow to the authority of the prime minister from a parliamentary party that has felt ignored by Downing Street. And while No. 10 has finally moved - and quickly - to try to shut down the rebellion, the fallout is going to be felt long beyond this week. Before we get into the problems for Starmer, I would like to acknowledge the predicament he's in. Over the past 10 days, I have followed him to the G7 in Canada, where the Iran-Israel crisis, US-UK trade deal and Ukraine war were on the agenda, to Chequers at the weekend as he and all the risk it carried, and to the NATO summit this week in the Netherlands. He could be forgiven for being furious with his operation for failing to contain the crisis when all his attention was on grave international matters. He landed back in Westminster from the NATO summit on Wednesday night into a domestic battle that he really didn't need but moved quickly to contain, signing off a plan that had been worked up this week in Downing Street to try to see of this rebellion. What will the changes be? At the time of writing this, the government is yet to officially announce the climbdown, but I expect it to be significant. I understand the government is offering to keep personal independence payments, the benefits given to those who are disabled, unchanged for existing claimants, rowing back on an initial plan to take it away from hundreds of thousands of people by tightening the criteria for claiming. I also understand the government will drop the cuts to the health element of universal credit for existing claimants, in changes that will cost an estimated £1.5bn - nearly a third of the savings the government has previously earmarked from these changes. One senior parliamentary source told me on Thursday night they thought it was a "good package" with "generous concessions", but said it was up to individual MPs to decide whether to withdraw their names from the amendment that would have torpedoed the welfare bill. In the coming days, No. 10 will have to make the case to backbenchers and whittle down the rebellion in order to get the welfare bill passed on Tuesday. But it's clear that No. 10 has given MPs a ladder to climb down. But the bigger question is where does it leave the government and its party. There is quiet fury from many MPs I have spoken to, angry at the No. 10 operation and critical of what they see as a "boy's club". There has been criticism levelled at the PM's chief of staff Morgan McSweeney, with MPs in seats facing challenge from the left rather than the right frustrated that the whole No. 10 strategy seems to be seeing off Reform, rather than look to the broader Labour base and threats from the Lib Dems or the Greens. There is also much ire reserved for Rachel Reeves - interestingly Liz Kendall is escaping the criticism despite being the architect of the reforms - with MPs, already angry over winter fuel debacle, now in open revolt over the chancellor's decision to force through these cuts ahead of the Spring Statement in March in order to help fill her fiscal black hole. MPs felt talked down to One Labour figure told me on Thursday the growing drumbeat in the party is that Reeves must go. Another MP told me colleagues hated the cabinet ring around to try to persuade them to back down over welfare, saying more MPs ended up adding their names to the list because they felt talked down to. Read more: All of this needs work if the PM has any hope of rebuilding trust between his party and his operation. There is also the problem of what flows from the concessions. The chancellor will have to fund these concessions, and that could mean hard choices elsewhere. Will this mean that the government ends up doing less on reforming the two-child cap, or will it have to find welfare cuts elsewhere? That flows into the third problem. In seeing off this rebellion No. 10 has contained MPs rather than converting them. What the parliamentary party has seen is a government that, when pressed, be it on winter fuel or benefit cuts, will fold. That will only serve to embolden MPs to fight again. In the immediate term, the government will hope it has seen off a potentially catastrophic defeat. But seeing off the growing malaise around the Starmer administration just got a bit harder after this.
