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9 opere 242 membri 3 recensioni

Sull'Autore

David Goodhart is the author of the bestselling The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics, Goodhart leads the demography unit for the Policy Exchange think tank. His book The British Dream: Successes and Failures of Post-War Immigration was runner-up for the Orwell Prize.

Opere di David Goodhart

Etichette

Informazioni generali

Data di nascita
1956-09-12
Sesso
male
Nazionalità
UK
Luogo di nascita
London, England, UK
Luogo di morte
London, England, UK
Istruzione
Eton College
York University
Attività lavorative
journalist
Relazioni
Kellaway, Lucy (former wife)
Organizzazioni
Prospect (founder)
Agente
Susanna Lea

Utenti

Recensioni

This book presents the best explanation I've come across for the 2016 Brexit vote result. Thoughtful analysis of many strands of British society and politics. Highly recommended.
 
Segnalato
JamieStarr | 2 altre recensioni | Jul 15, 2023 |
"Man is a political animal," said Aristotle, by which he meant that humans like to live in communities. It's the kind of communities that people like to live in that has come under scrutiny in the wake of Brexit. Do they want to stay together in kin groups? Or do they prefer to cluster with others, wherever they may come from, who share their outlook. Since the 2016 referendum the country has divided into sharply divided camps.

David Goodhart sees British society – perhaps one should say English society as he does little more than pay lip service to Scotland – as split between Somewheres – those people in rural areas and smaller provincial and post-industrial towns whose loyalty is to a geographical location and kinship links, and Anywheres – those whose horizons have been expanded by education, travel and global communications. It's the Anywheres, according to Goodhart, that form the elite, run the government whichever party is in power, control the media, set the agenda, and embrace a broader world where borders count for little more than a hindrance to global understanding and cooperation. The Somewheres are the "left behind", those who have stood quietly by as the world changed around them and the old certainties were knocked from under their feet and have now risen up to say enough is enought.

Goodhart seems to approve of the Somewheres. He sees them as standard-bearers for that bygone golden age (which may never have happened) when everybody looked out for everybody else, who were probably relatives anyway, where you learned to read and write and add up and then went into the local factory or down the local pit where you stayed, working your way up the ladder until (if you were lucky) you got your gold watch and a long-service certificate to put on the wall, and you only ventured to the the next town to find a nice girl to marry (you couldn't run the risk of incest after all. There's more than a whiff of the Noble Savage about his account; the author himself is not from such a background, he's the Eton-educated some of Philip Goodhart, the American-educated long-time Conservative MP for Beckenham and a thoroughly Establishment figure; a classic Anywhere in his own terms. Nevertheless he makes it clear in many subtle and not-so-subtle ways that he sees the Anywheres as shallow and self-centred.

I do recognise the Somewheres he describes. It may be that my father was an Anywhere before his time; a bright working-class man who couldn't wait to get away from his stifling family, of which he was the black sheep, and his isolated, inward-looking shipyard town – one of the most heavily Brexit-voting in the country as it happens. His family never forgave him for surviving the war in a reserved occupation while his elder brother got himself killed in Burma. Maybe I was born to be an Anywhere; my grandparents were always elderly people who lived a long way away. My Nanna, my mother's mother, used the occasional visits to repeat the curtain-twitching gossip of the street, not least the dubious doings of Mrs Kennedy and Mrs Dunphy who would always be outsiders in that milieu. Nanna didn't like Catholics, or Irish people, or "darkies" – if my sister and I weren't well-behaved our Mam would run of with a Black Man! Somewheres are Ena Sharples tearing Elsie Tanner off a strip for being no better that she ought to be; they are the community enforcers who ensure that those who step beyond the narrow boundaries of decent social behaviour; they are the ones who accuse those who are bookish (as I was) of being hoity-toity and above themselves. Above all they are people who need an "other" to hate. Goodhart picks up on this – after all, what's the point of circling the wagons if there's nobody to circle them against. There are a diminishing number who have clear memories of the war but Somewheres were brought up on that story: myth and reality alike. Britain stood alone against the Hun when all others had caved in, and Britain prevailed. So why have their leaders being cosying up to the German enemy for the last 45 years? It's no accident that in the digital forums where the more extreme Somewheres hang out, the EU is referred to as the "Fourth Reich".

It's not that Goodhart doesn't have a point. He does; the analysis of the Somewhere/Anywhere spilt is fair enough. It exists and its right at the core of our country's problems right now, and Goodhart describes it effectively. The weakness of the book is where he takes it, Firmly adopting a somewhere stance and drawing largely on the reports of right-wing commentators without making much effort to find a balancing view, he blames the ills of society on everything that he sees as going wrong since the 1960s – divorce and abortion reform and the Pill encouraging sexual freedom and taking women out of the home into the workplace, for example. Opening up higher education so encouraging young people to move away from their roots. Above all, letting the dreaded "other" into the country and not showing clear favouritism towards the white folks in jobs, services and the allocation of housing. He never says as much but the pull-up-the-drawbridge, isolationist mentality is between the lines of every page, and it looks like political expediency rather than serious analysis.
… (altro)
 
Segnalato
enitharmon | 2 altre recensioni | Jan 14, 2019 |
https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3000083.html

I had an unnerving experience one evening in February. I was chatting with a friend (from Montenegro) about politics, and she asked me if I had read this book. I was about to say that I hadn't, when my phone buzzed with a WhatsApp message from another friend (from Hong Kong) asking me exactly the same question. Clearly it was fate.

Well, it's a rather annoying book, frankly. Part of this is Goodhart’s tendency to unnecessarily resort to ad hominem remarks. In the first chapter he reports on a conversation with Gus O’Donnell, then the UK’s most senior civil servant, and Mark Thompson, then the Director-General of the BBC, in which both expressed the view that global welfare matters more than national welfare. Goodhart obviously disagrees, which is fair enough, but then he says that both men’s views “may reflect their moderately devout Catholic upbringings”. Yep, Catholics, the enemy within. In a more recent review he said that for another writer, understanding the concerns of populists “may be hard for the grandson of a Holocaust survivor raised in Germany surrounded by the ghosts of the past”; and subsequently showed no comprehension at all for how offensive this was. Well, I guess that’s all you can expect from an Old Etonian who is the son of a Conservative MP.

Goodhart divides the world (well, really, white English people, because nobody else much matters) into Anywheres and Somewheres. The Brexit vote is the clear cleavage between them. Anywheres are smug intellectual cosmopolitan elites like me; Somewheres are salt of the earth types, loyal to their particular locality, who have been left behind by globalisation. The fact that along with most of my cosmopolitan friends and colleagues, I remain strongly loyal to my origins in various ways, is not relevant; the fact that Scotland and the Republic of Ireland, not notably places where local sentiment is weak, are strongly pro-EU is also ignored. But I do have to admit that the most telling piece of evidence from the Brexit referendum, one which I have cited myself in several lectures and presentations, gives some support for Goodhart: this is Lord Ashcroft's June 2016 poll of how those who feel strongly one way or the other on certain grand global issues had split between Leave and Remain, showing strong correlations with views on the Green movement, feminism, social liberalism, multiculturalism and most of all immigration.

I'm clearly on the Anywhere side of Goodhart's divide (or would be if I were English; since I'm not, I don't count), and it's difficult to read a book that fundamentally accuses me and my friends of being not just wrong on the arguments, but on the ethics of how society should be run. For me, opposition to immigration, multiculturalism, and feminism go beyond mere political disagreement and cross a moral line, one where I'm not terribly interested in understanding the position of the other side. However, I did my best to put those feeling on hold and to assess Goodhart's book as a whole.

There is one section that he gets completely and woefully wrong. This is his analysis of the EU itself, just before the middle of the book, which completely swallows and regurgitates British Eurosceptic propaganda: in short, the euro is a failure which is tearing the EU apart. In the rest of the EU, the fact that the euro survived the 2008 crisis, with more countries queuing to join, is seen as proof of concept; and it is generally recognised that the crises in Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Spain and Cyprus all had rather different and largely indigenous causes and indeed largely different solutions, whereas British mythology has it that the euro and its fictionally one-size-fits-all policies were responsible in each case. I don't think the poor quality of British reporting on this was the crucial factor in the referendum outcome, but it can't have helped.

One the other hand, I have to admit that there was one section that completely convinced me. This was on the awful conequences of the decision two decades ago to reform vocational education by taking it out of the hands of local authorities (1988) and converting all colleges to universities (1992). By removing the vocational educational track, the UK has made it much more difficult for those who aren't up to university level to get meaningful qualifications which will help them in their careers. I was in student politics at the time that this reform was instituted, and remember wondering how we could measure success. The German apprenticeship system is often invoked as an international comparison (though not by Goodhart, who isn't terribly interested in learning from other countries here); in Belgium we also still have polytechnics and vocational colleges, without the temptation to merge them all into sprawling institutions with university status. It is, alas, telling that although Goodhart happily criticises the 1997-2010 Labour governments on numerous occasions, he does not blame the Conservatives for this particular policy screw-up.

Goodhart claims that his motivation for writing the book is to get the Anywheres in leadership (implicitly in the Conservative Party) to wake up, smell the coffee, and strike a new settlement with the Somewheres for the sake of national stability. I think he's wrong; the most important point I get from the book is that the UK has failed on social mobility as well as on social equality, and that those two failures drive the rise of Goodhart’s Somewhere mentality; so perhaps the Anywheres in leadership might do well to shape policies that increase social mobility and decrease social inequality, and see if that increases affection for the state and decreases the resort to populism caused by other political avenues failing to deliver? Of course, that was more or less what Theresa May said she would do when she took office. Well, that doesn't seem to have worked out so far...

Anyway, I’m grateful to my friends for alerting me to this; I did learn some things from it (mainly that it’s not good for my blood pressure to read too much Conservative political analysis).
… (altro)
 
Segnalato
nwhyte | 2 altre recensioni | May 21, 2018 |

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Opere
9
Utenti
242
Popolarità
#93,893
Voto
½ 3.4
Recensioni
3
ISBN
25
Lingue
2

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