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beyond the familiar Wigan Pier territory of unemployment and social conditions in the depressed areas, to bring in issues of democracy, culture, national identity and the distribution of power and status in British society. During the war, much to the irritation of Churchill and his colleagues, he was the most widely heard spokesman for radical postwar reconstruction, appealing to the oft-expressed desire for ‘no return to the thirties’. Even during the ‘phoney war’, he was already asking why we could not ‘learn to plan and spend in peacetime as we do in wartime’, to
mainly from small local societies. Dundee, unusually, had an Oddfellows Democratic Society which appointed missionaries ‘delivering Chartist lectures’ across Fife. Direct Chartist involvement in providing sick, death and unemployment benefits was slight, reflecting how extensive and sophisticated friendly societies had become by the late 1830s. But a few Chartist localities did provide benefits of this nature. Hyde’s Chartist Institute, for example, operated a ‘Board of Health’ through which members, for a weekly subscription of a halfpenny, could access medical
and the more general economic depression of the 1930s saw periods of large-scale unemployment among mineworkers.14 This malaise was strongly reflected in Orwell’s treatment of the town in The Road to Wigan Pier, published in 1937. Unarguably, the horrors of enervating economic and social deprivation were there for all to see. Nonetheless, Orwell pointed to images of an embryonic teenage culture where ‘the youth who leaves school at fourteen … can buy himself a suit which … at a little distance, looks as though it had been tailored in Savile Row. The girl can look
-producing small business and I like the feeling of control over my time.” As mentioned earlier, due to the visitors from Greece, Gevgelija has become one of the most prosperous towns in RN Macedonia, with the lowest unemployment rate. The financial prosperity brought by the casinos in this town appeared to be tempered by a compromise with the Greek visitors regarding the name Macedonia: nowhere in the restaurant or café menus would you find the traditional Macedonian salad or any Macedonian specialties. These are named as local specialties, but without
, to downgrade the role of unions in managing the industry; and jobs were lost in coal mining just as unemployment was rising steeply across the economy. This approach angered many miners and their supporters, but it was consistent with the ascendant ideological concepts of political economy in the 1980s: the privileging of market competition, diminished public enterprise, and trade union ‘reforms’ to strengthen managerial agency.7 In ‘management style’ terms this encouraged the adoption by managers of what Alan Fox called unitary practices as well as attitudes,8
reduced as a proportion of in-migration, by non- Irish migrants; by 2004 Irish returners constituted less than 25 per cent of total immigrants. Managing Migration claimed that on-going immigration was likely to make Irish society more resilient and adaptive: With Irish growth rates and employment projected in the near future to follow the impressive trend set during the last decade, migration will certainly remain a key feature allowing the labour market to react to changes in demand and further boosting Irish competitiveness. As such, Irish unemployment is expected
government, the key site where decisions about unemployment, housing and the poor law were made. Poplarism existed at the militant end of a broader municipal socialist strategy enacted at the local level. What was Poplarism? Indelibly associated with the poor London district which bore its name, Poplarism generally denoted an attempt by municipal authorities to provide ‘excessive
-determination. With the shift to the neoliberal order of the early 1980s, the generation of British intellectuals to which Williams belonged could hardly hope to represent the cutting edge of the political zeitgeist. The defence of working-class everyday culture could be easily dismissed, in a context of mass unemployment, as an embarrassing anachronism. Opening the gatefold sleeve of The Smiths’ album Hatful of Hollow at the age of fifteen, I felt a natural affinity with the sentiment of Morrissey’s words in ‘Still Ill’: ‘And if you must go to work tomorrow, well if I were you I
Amateur cinema established itself within middle-class circles during the 1930s, when Britain’s unemployment reached almost three million. 1 What prompted the making and showing of numerous films about working people during years of mass unemployment, particularly in the industrial regions of the North West? Government initiatives, public debate, media reports and the observable reality of people – specifically the
. Official discourse: migration as an existential threat Official discourse on migration in contemporary Russia presents itself in a highly securitised manner. A major focus of this discourse has been the portrayal of illegal migrant labour as an existential threat to the national economy.1 More specifically, according to this discourse three specific aspects of illegal migrant labour are posing a threat to Russia’s economy. These factors are tax evasion, capital flight from Russia, and an increase in official unemployment figures. In 2001, Viktor Ivanov – then deputy