21 results
Foreword
- Deborah Jump, Manchester Metropolitan University
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- Book:
- The Criminology of Boxing, Violence and Desistance
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 10 March 2021
- Print publication:
- 01 April 2020, pp viii-x
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Summary
There is nothing like hearing the words, ‘protect yourself at all times’ in a ring, knowing you are about to fight. Even writing them they still cause my adrenaline to surge a bit even now, well away from any real fight, sat at a PC. They cause a special, rare sort of excitement that is hard to recapture. Occasionally as an academic a book comes along that has the same sort of effect, not so much adrenaline as respect and admiration. The sort you feel when someone in a boxing ring has hit you with a great hook or cross and you do that little grimace of respectful acknowledgement while slightly resenting their luck, fortune and skill. This book evoked all those feelings.
As an ethnographer, and a long-term fan and practitioner of boxing, the so-termed ‘Sweet Science’ (as well as the social form that we researchers practice), it was an absolute honour and a rare pleasure to be asked to write a Foreword for Deb Jump's phenomenal book, The Criminology of Boxing, Violence and Desistance. It is a fantastic and engaging work, and proves its author a rare talent, the once-in-alifetime prospect every coach seeks, but few find.
I grew up in boxing gyms full of men like those in the pages of this book, and these spaces proved a good place to make connections and meet people, a skill that has served me well for years subsequently as an academic ethnographer and criminologist. In ethnographic and qualitative research ventures, boxing has given me commonality with an array of people. In New Zealand I have talked Joseph Parker vs. Anthony Joshua with a full-patched member of the Notorious Mongrel Mob, Horn vs. Pacquiao with Australian gangsters, and used boxing to build a rapport with all sorts of staff and subjects in policing, prison and crime contexts worldwide. Boxing and the unlicensed (including the now burgeoning white collar fight scene) gave me the chance to introduce colleagues to the crime world often written about in crime fiction. I have also fought myself, and boxing, fast feet and big hands for a big guy got me out of countless scrapes. Still now I regularly spar (my real fighting days behind me) and know the appeal of boxing and combat sports to its fans and practitioners alike. It is more than just the violence. Yet, at its core, boxing is about one person hurting another. Only some of those lured to the sport know the practicality, that pain and adversity, intelligence and strategy, are all as much a part of triumphing.
400 TW operation of Orion at ultra-high contrast
- Part of
- Stefan Parker, Colin Danson, David Egan, Stephen Elsmere, Mark Girling, Ewan Harvey, David Hillier, Dianne Hussey, Stephen Masoero, James McLoughlin, Rory Penman, Paul Treadwell, David Winter, Nicholas Hopps
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- Journal:
- High Power Laser Science and Engineering / Volume 6 / 2018
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 15 August 2018, e47
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The Orion facility at the Atomic Weapons Establishment in the United Kingdom has the capability to operate one of its two 500 J, 500 fs short-pulse petawatt beams at the second harmonic, the principal reason being to increase the temporal contrast of the pulse on target. This is achieved post-compression, using 3 mm thick type-1 potassium dihydrogen phosphate crystals. Since the beam diameter of the compressed pulse is ${\sim}600$ mm, it is impractical to achieve this over the full aperture due to the unavailability of the large aperture crystals. Frequency doubling was originally achieved on Orion using a circular sub-aperture of 300 mm diameter. The reduction in aperture limited the output energy to 100 J. The second-harmonic capability has been upgraded by taking two square 300 mm $\times$ 300 mm sub-apertures from the beam and combining them at focus using a single paraboloidal mirror, thus creating a 200 J, 500 fs, i.e., 400 TW facility at the second harmonic.
six - The scapegoat
- Simon Winlow, Teesside University, Steve Hall, Teesside University, James Treadwell, Birmingham City University
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- Book:
- The Rise of the Right
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 21 April 2023
- Print publication:
- 18 January 2017, pp 153-170
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Summary
It is only recently, with the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party, that we have seen the regulation of the market returning to a position of prominence in mainstream leftist economic policy in Britain. We will see, in the years to come, whether this actually comes to anything in the face of a ferocious and long-running attack by the entrenched liberal elites who wield such power in the Labour Party and the mainstream media. The Blairites still might engineer a comeback. The scale of capitalism’s victory is particularly striking when we remember key Blairite figures utilising right-wing rhetoric about the fundamental benefits of free market capitalism. Here is Peter Mandelson, at the time Secretary of State for Trade and Industry in Blair’s first Labour government, on the approach to aphoristic eloquence: ‘We want a society that celebrates and values its business heroes as much as its pop stars and footballers. So we must remove the barriers to enterprise in this country, reward risk-taking, and encourage innovation and creativity.’
Britain’s hollowed-out electoral democracy is, quite simply, not providing ordinary men and women with an appealing vision of a better future. Only a tiny number of mainstream politicians actively endorse genuine change. The majority hope only to manage the market economy a little better, and perhaps iron out a few bureaucratic impediments here and there. The dominance of neoliberalism across a truncated political spectrum means that, when it comes to personal failure, frustration and anxiety, accounts of inadequate talent and poor decision-making tend to predominate. People believe in personal agency, hard work and meritocracy. Forty years of neoliberalism have seen to that.
If you are talented and work hard, you will rise. Alternatively, if you happen to find yourself unemployed, flat broke and alone, you have no one to blame but yourself. You have failed to take advantage of the opportunities that were provided for you. You have shown inadequate talent and fortitude. You deserve nothing better. You do not even deserve sympathy, because your personal failures mean that those who work harder have unfairly become responsible for your upkeep.
But neoliberalism’s ideological centre cannot hold forever. The cynicism and pessimism that abounds in our political culture certainly does not rule out a return to politics at some point in the future.
Index
- Simon Winlow, Teesside University, Steve Hall, Teesside University, James Treadwell, Birmingham City University
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- Book:
- The Rise of the Right
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- Bristol University Press
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- 21 April 2023
- Print publication:
- 18 January 2017, pp 215-219
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three - The fickle parent
- Simon Winlow, Teesside University, Steve Hall, Teesside University, James Treadwell, Birmingham City University
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- Book:
- The Rise of the Right
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- Bristol University Press
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- 21 April 2023
- Print publication:
- 18 January 2017, pp 45-74
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Summary
While traditional nationalism transcends class, the vast majority of our EDL contacts are from the old Labour heartlands, the former industrial working-class regions once feared by the establishment as seedbeds of socialism. Although most have been disengaged from the political system for a very long time, a significant number acknowledged a familial connection to the Labour Party or the trade union movement. Their parents or grandparents tended to be Labour voters, and some of our key contacts talked in detail about the involvement of their fathers in once powerful trade unions that won significant concessions from industry bosses and advanced the lifestyles of working men and women substantially during the middle third of the 20th century. It would be wrong to assume that most of these men were once working-class Tories.
From where we sit as academics, on our comfortable ledge as surplus wage workers in the educational bureaucracy, reasonably well paid to do little more than reproduce a humanitarian worldview by levering its carefully selected cultural issues and approved post-political solutions to the top of the agenda, ‘the left’ might appear to be alive and in rude health. Enriched and enlivened by its new focus on cultural diversity rather than the dour and intractable neoliberal economy, to some it might even appear stronger than ever, about to regroup itself into a truly potent force and once more become the agent of history. However, for many of the old working class, especially those who occupy the old Labour heartlands, ‘the left’ today is totally irrelevant. It can no longer effect real change, and it can no longer be considered a substantive force in the world. It appears only as an optical illusion visible from all angles but their own, like an image on an old lenticular novelty card.
Before the left disappeared from the residual group’s perspective, it would seem that, generally speaking, at a fundamental level the English middle class and working class understood it as two very different things. A minority of the waged workers who identified with the old working class and belonged to its various communities for generations were socialists or communists, but the majority belonged to two main groups.
References
- Simon Winlow, Teesside University, Steve Hall, Teesside University, James Treadwell, Birmingham City University
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- Book:
- The Rise of the Right
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- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 21 April 2023
- Print publication:
- 18 January 2017, pp 209-214
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The Rise of the Right
- English Nationalism and the Transformation of Working-Class Politics
- Simon Winlow, Steve Hall, James Treadwell
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- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 21 April 2023
- Print publication:
- 18 January 2017
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This book is the first to offer an uncompromising look at the English Defence League (EDL), aiming to alter thinking about working-class politics and the rise of right-wing nationalism in de-industrialised English towns and cities.
Frontmatter
- Simon Winlow, Teesside University, Steve Hall, Teesside University, James Treadwell, Birmingham City University
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- Book:
- The Rise of the Right
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 21 April 2023
- Print publication:
- 18 January 2017, pp i-ii
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five - The hated 'centre'
- Simon Winlow, Teesside University, Steve Hall, Teesside University, James Treadwell, Birmingham City University
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- Book:
- The Rise of the Right
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- Bristol University Press
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- 21 April 2023
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- 18 January 2017, pp 109-152
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Summary
All of our contacts expressed hatred for Muslim immigrants and radical Islamic terror groups. However, their deepest hatred was reserved for mainstream politicians. All mainstream politicians had abjectly and spectacularly failed. In fact, many of our contacts claimed that mainstream politicians had actively facilitated the degeneration of a once-great nation. They had capitulated to the EU and allowed immigrants to disturb what our respondents believed had been England’s settled economy, national culture and regional variants. Politicians had made the British social security system a soft touch, and so prospective immigrants from all over the world were fighting hard to get into the country so that they could enrich themselves at the expense of white taxpayers. Politicians had enforced an illogical and unfair multiculturalism that subtly established a new range of injustices and antagonisms, and they displayed scant regard for the nation’s history and culture. Chief among these new injustices was an institutionally and culturally legitimised prejudice against the heterosexual white working class.
The heterosexual white working class, our respondents believed, had been unfairly ascribed a broad range of regressive and illiberal characteristics, and they were now the only remaining cultural group without vocal political representation. Our respondents felt short-changed and used. They had been catapulted from the centre of English society and culture to the margins. England had been turned inside out, and politicians had actively assisted minority groups in this endeavour. Our contacts believed that politicians had been seduced by the image of ‘the exotic’. They had grown to loath ordinary white working-class people. They wanted to appear cutting-edge, forward-looking, open, cosmopolitan and progressive. They wanted to embrace ‘diversity’ and cultural novelty, and the white working class was an uncomfortable reminder of times past. Ultimately, the career politicians of the centre-left and centre-right, keen to secure the liberal middle-class vote, wanted to forget the world the white working class represented. It’s the future that counts, and the old proletariat didn’t appear to figure prominently in the political class’s visions of a go-getting, efficient, high-tech, business-friendly, cosmopolitan 21st-century Britain. Politicians wanted to forget the class system and industrial work cultures and reaffirm their commitment to a new global society built on openness, meritocracy, diversity and tolerance.
Our contacts believed that public policy now favoured minority sexualities, religions, ethnicities and lifestyles. They talked of occupational quota systems, and the drive to ‘diversify’ workforces.
Contents
- Simon Winlow, Teesside University, Steve Hall, Teesside University, James Treadwell, Birmingham City University
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- Book:
- The Rise of the Right
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 21 April 2023
- Print publication:
- 18 January 2017, pp iii-iv
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Postscript: Brexit
- Simon Winlow, Teesside University, Steve Hall, Teesside University, James Treadwell, Birmingham City University
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- Book:
- The Rise of the Right
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- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 21 April 2023
- Print publication:
- 18 January 2017, pp 197-208
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Summary
We wrote the majority of this book in 2015. Our project was at an end by the time the nation went to the polls in June 2016 to vote on Britain’s continued membership of the European Union. Roughly 52% of those who voted wanted to bring Britain’s membership to an end. More than 33.5 million people voted in the referendum, and almost 17.5 million people voted to leave. Most columnists, commentators, pundits and broadcasters – and the enlightened liberals who dominate our academic institutions – were shocked by the result. They just could not understand how and why so many voters had been persuaded by the fearmongering of the Leave campaign. How could voters place their trust in Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove? These men represented the elite, and they were committed to ensuring the continued dominance of capital over human life. Couldn’t people see this? How could so many voters fall for the absurd claims the elite made about the economic benefits of leaving? Didn’t these voters find the Leave campaign’s blatant demonisation of immigrants distasteful? Didn’t they know that the EU generally benefits Britain’s economy, and that a vote to leave the EU was a vote for economic uncertainty and a reduction in living standards for the majority?
The economy did indeed enter a period of crisis immediately after the result was announced. As we write these words the road ahead remains uncertain. The great fear of ongoing economic turmoil – a fear lodged permanently in the British psyche after almost 40 years of neoliberalism – now frames the pious soul-saving of those whose job it is to promote a progressive liberal worldview that seeks, but hopelessly fails, to mitigate the social, economic, cultural and personal disasters free market capitalism has wreaked on the western world.
It quickly became clear that many of those who occupy the nation’s dead and decaying deindustrialised zones had voted to leave. This prompted the beautiful souls of the metropole to begin their own process of demonisation. The atavistic white working class were too stupid to recognise their own economic best interests, and they seemed to be dedicated to the task of tearing down all the towering achievements of multiculturalism.
four - Redundant
- Simon Winlow, Teesside University, Steve Hall, Teesside University, James Treadwell, Birmingham City University
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- Book:
- The Rise of the Right
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 21 April 2023
- Print publication:
- 18 January 2017, pp 75-108
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Summary
Enraged by what they perceived as the disappearance of their fickle parent, our contacts had wandered in from various points in the political wilderness to the only loose organisation that promised to represent their interests. Some made their way to the EDL from the field of organised football violence (see Garland and Treadwell, 2010; Treadwell and Garland, 2011). Very few had been active in other right-wing campaign groups (see Copsey, 2010; Busher, 2015). For the vast majority, this was their first foray on to the field of politics. Before getting involved with the EDL, or vocally supporting its politics from a distance, these men had been totally disengaged from our electoral system. They were disinterested in local politics, and generally unconcerned about the broader geopolitical issues of the day. They were bored to tears by the dour uniformity of our liberal democratic system, and had been for many years. They found absolutely nothing of value in it. All they had experienced on its watch was a descent into the insecure margins and the subsequent deterioration of their collective life.
Despite their prolonged dissatisfaction with the political field, they could not summon up the interest or energy needed to oppose it. They cynically dismissed politics as a sham, a racket, a stitch-up. The political culture they saw enacted on their TV news broadcasts appeared a world away from their reality. Those who occupied the incestuous Westminster bubble seemed quite alien to them. Many of those we spoke to were aware of the ability of the Westminster political elite to shape and reshape their environment, job opportunities and lifestyles, but nothing ever seemed to happen. Nothing good at any rate. In their view, things were becoming incrementally tougher for people like them. No matter which party was in power, they felt unrepresented, forgotten and ignored. Soft metropolitan liberals had taken control of politics, and they were busy feathering their own nests at the expense of everyone else. They saw in politics no principled debates, no vision of a secure economic future, no drive to improve the prospects of ordinary men and women, and no obvious commitment to addressing the genuine problems and frustrations they faced. Things were getting worse for people like them. They were sure of it. And from their position, other social groups seemed to be faring much better.
two - Dead politics
- Simon Winlow, Teesside University, Steve Hall, Teesside University, James Treadwell, Birmingham City University
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- Book:
- The Rise of the Right
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 21 April 2023
- Print publication:
- 18 January 2017, pp 17-44
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It’s the second week of May in 2015. The TV flashes and murmurs in the background as we write. The weird condensed melodrama of 24-hour news broadcasting is experiencing one of its gala events. Seeking but rarely finding an original and illuminating perspective, the usual pundits, publicists, bloggers and controversialists are queuing up to give the British people their hastily assembled take on the spectacular 2015 general election results. Contrary to the most informed predictions, the Conservatives have secured a small majority in the House of Commons.
In 2010 they had regained power after 13 painful years of opposition, but only with the support of the Liberal Democrats, which enabled the Conservatives to form the first coalition government in Britain since the end of the Second World War. It was not a resounding success for the Conservatives by any means, especially given that the outgoing Labour government had presided over the worst economic crisis in living memory. No matter. They were back and keen to get started.
Everyone agreed that the problems the Conservatives faced were significant. Since the crash of 2008, tax revenues had fallen precipitously, yet barely comprehensible amounts of money had been used to bail out ‘too big to fail’ banks. As the global financial system stalled, these banks found themselves on the verge of collapse and in desperate need of assistance from the state. By 2010 ‘tiny green shoots’ of economic recovery had just begun to appear on the barren post-crash landscape, but the incoming coalition government continued to run a huge deficit. Indeed, this deficit seemed set to cast the British economy in shadow for the entirety of the coalition’s term in office. As the outgoing Treasury Secretary Liam Byrne observed in a note left for his successor, there was, apparently, ‘no money left’ (Owen, 2010).
Members of the Conservative Party held the vast majority of the coalition’s major cabinet posts. What first appeared to be a fragile coalition – composed of two political parties that possessed, on the surface of things, very different views on economic management, welfare and social justice – turned out to be remarkably strong. It was fully capable of coping with the choppy waters of parliamentary life to forge ahead with a radically cautious political programme couched in the language of apolitical pragmatism and ever-so-careful economic management.
one - Introduction
- Simon Winlow, Teesside University, Steve Hall, Teesside University, James Treadwell, Birmingham City University
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- Book:
- The Rise of the Right
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 21 April 2023
- Print publication:
- 18 January 2017, pp 1-16
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Summary
Je ne sais quoi…
This book is based on the conviction that an honest, detailed and contextualised analysis of the rise of English nationalism among the working class can shed light on the unpredictable and volatile times in which we live. Lately we have witnessed some of the most profound shifts in the history of political economy. Neoliberalism’s global economic logic has established itself as the dominant organising principle in our lives. All known alternative modes of socioeconomic organisation have disintegrated and virtually disappeared from everyday practice and the popular imagination. In such a political hiatus neoliberalism has pressed on unhindered with the deindustrialisation of many areas of Europe and North America and the rapid industrialisation of China and other parts of the developing world. In many regions of the deindustrialised west we have seen the gap between rich and poor grow to historic proportions in a realigned social structure that can now be legitimately described as a plutocracy (Winlow and Hall, 2013; Dorling, 2014; Therborn, 2014). We have also seen global warming, drought, mass migration and the depletion of many of the natural resources that are vital to the uninterrupted economic growth on which the functioning of the capitalist system and the livelihoods of its subjects depend (Klare, 2008; Heinberg, 2011; Hiscock, 2012).
Our political culture has grown sterile. It no longer appears to be capable of engaging the people in an informed and forthright discussion about root-and-branch changes to the way we live together. The vast majority of our politicians display a dispiriting lack of will to challenge and overcome the historic problems we face. Most have accepted the transformation of the old modernist social order, with its unequal yet stable and comprehensible structure of entitlements and obligations, into a world of hollow freedoms, insecurity and panoramic dissatisfaction. The new political consensus has been forged in a silent pact between the liberal left and the neoliberal right, a dual power bloc that looks down on the corpses of socialism and one-nation conservatism (Rancière, 2010a, 2010b). This tacit agreement, built on an unwavering commitment to the free market, has opened a gap between institutionalised politics and the cultural life of the people.
seven - Mourning and melancholia
- Simon Winlow, Teesside University, Steve Hall, Teesside University, James Treadwell, Birmingham City University
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- Book:
- The Rise of the Right
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 21 April 2023
- Print publication:
- 18 January 2017, pp 171-186
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Summary
Interviewer: ‘So, if you had a time machine you’d go back to the seventies or the eighties, when you were a lad, eh?’
Tony: ‘Look, all I’m saying is that things were better then. Yes, definitely, things were better. For people like me it was better. We had a right laugh at school, and, well, everything just seemed to work. There was jobs then. Everyone worked. People stuck together. And I think the truth of it is that most of the people were just happier, just, I don’t know what you’d call it. It just worked, that’s all… You’re going to say it wasn’t that great back then. Fair enough. Maybe it wasn’t. But I just didn’t see the bad things when I was young, and I don’t think other people did either. It was, the mood of the place, it was just different. Now, everyone knows how bad things have gotten. Everyone is just, well, it’s just not the same. You don’t see the good things, and I used to take all that for granted... I think jobs, real jobs, is important. I think when work started to go the pride started to go. I don’t know. But that’s what a lot of the lads want, not really for them but for their kids. People know that things are getting worse. Everything is fucked. They want that kind of life they had when they were kids. A sense of community, isn’t it? Pride in your neighbourhood. People looking out for each other and having a laugh. That’s what I’m talking about.’
Interviewer: ‘So why the EDL then? Why Muslims?’
Tony: ‘Well, it’s jobs isn’t it? Jobs and a lot of other things. We lost jobs with immigration. It’s obvious. And then it’s people moving in, people moving out. People who couldn’t give a shit about the place, couldn’t care about the people, the history. It’s more and more shit everywhere, everything getting worse, getting harder. It’s just, we’ve been forgotten. We’ve been fucked over and no one cares. That’s it, as far as I can see. Who cares now? We used to have respect and now we’re all over the place... To be honest, the EDL is all done, mate. It’s finished now. At least around here it is. The police, court appearances, no one can be arsed. Nothing happened really.
eight - Conclusion: Begin from the beginning
- Simon Winlow, Teesside University, Steve Hall, Teesside University, James Treadwell, Birmingham City University
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- Book:
- The Rise of the Right
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 21 April 2023
- Print publication:
- 18 January 2017, pp 187-196
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Summary
In this book we have spent some considerable time addressing the transformation of the mainstream political left. For us it is clear that the rise of the right in the 21st century is inextricably connected to the decline of the left as a serious political force.
Since the 1970s the left has stumbled from defeat to defeat to defeat. Today’s relentless conservative and liberal media attacks on Jeremy Corbyn’s new opposition, salvo after salvo fired out of every position across the spectrum, from The Sun to The Guardian, threaten the left’s fragile revival among the young. Today, more young people feel empathy with those suffering on the margins because, in neoliberalism’s insecure economy, they can sense that there is a genuine chance they might join them there. The economic insecurity long experienced by the old industrial proletariat is spreading throughout the social body. Many young people will start their careers in insecure and poorly paid service sector jobs. Even for graduates this is true. And with the passage of time, fewer young people are progressing into more secure and better paid work. The labour markets they hoped to enter have been exposed to job insecurity. There is little left that can be relied on. Perennial insecurity is now perfectly normal. Unless the left can engage the people in a meaningful discussion about how these stark problems can be addressed, and how the economy might be reorganised with a view to making it work for the majority of citizens, it is staring yet another defeat in the face. A yet more destructive era of neoliberal pragmatism will begin. Asset stripping will continue and hard-won entitlements will be withdrawn. All of modernity’s partial achievements will begin to break apart and crumble into the dust of history. Anger will continue to grow, and things will become tougher and tougher for ordinary men and women across the country.
The neoliberal right has achieved total ideological domination of the field of political economy, and the power and influence of reactionary right-wing populism is growing day by the day.
nine - Controlling the new far right on the streets: policing the English Defence League in policy and praxis
- Edited by Neil Chakraborti, University of Leicester, Jon Garland, University of Surrey
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- Book:
- Responding to Hate Crime
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- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 04 March 2022
- Print publication:
- 21 May 2014, pp 127-140
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Introduction
In the UK since 2009 the face of the far right has become synonymous with that of the English Defence League (EDL), a street-based protest movement that have been regularly embroiled in disorderly protests in English cities and whose rapid growth is largely unprecedented in recent times (Garland and Treadwell, 2010; see also Allen, 2011). While academic accounts have now started to recognise the potential threat to public order that are the hallmarks of this new social movement there has yet been little discussion from criminology or the policing literature that sets out the broader challenge to policing that this group presents. Initially dismissed in the mainstream media or condemned as simply a ‘racist’ far-right organisation, there has been little empirical engagement with those in the organisation (Copsey, 2010; Garland and Treadwell, 2010; 2012; Treadwell and Garland 2011). Instead, the academic literature on the EDL is has been predominantly based on secondary and survey material (Githens-Mazer and Lambert, 2010; Allen, 2011; Bartlett and Littler, 2011). Yet in the wake of the 2011 Norway terrorist attacks that claimed a total of 77 lives, the recognition of the threat that the new counter-jihad movement presents (of which the EDL is a beacon organisation), is steadily growing (Hope Not Hate, 2012).
Elsewhere, the author has been involved in mapping out the contours of the EDL, using as method both covert and overt participant observation of the group as well as interviewing those inside it, facilitating better understanding of the attitudes and values of its supporters (see Garland and Treadwell, 2010, 2012; Treadwell and Garland, 2011). This research has typically entailed periods of involvement as a participant at EDL demonstrations that were subject to a heavy police presence and surveillance, while on other occasions a form of more distanced observation of the policing of the EDL was utilised. This has involved observations of, and interviews with, police officers, active members of the EDL and also extensive research fieldwork (see Treadwell and Garland, 2011; Garland and Treadwell, 2012). On occasion, as a covert EDL member, it has involved having to evade swinging police batons, and being section 60 detained, threatened with arrest, contained and held for long periods on cold car parks and train stations, and witnessing this happen to others.
10 - The urge to communicate: the prose writings as theory and practice
- from PART III - Ideas and ideology in the Gesamtkunstwerk
- Edited by Thomas S. Grey, Stanford University, California
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- Book:
- The Cambridge Companion to Wagner
- Published online:
- 28 September 2011
- Print publication:
- 11 September 2008, pp 177-191
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Summary
Wagner had just turned twenty-one when his first published essay appeared, and he was busy with his last on the day he died. Writing for publication was a perpetual accompaniment to his working life. One has only to browse through a catalogue of his titles, and the image of an artist brooding with immense concentration over vast and intricate music dramas, each of them years in the making, gives way to a very different picture: a Wagner who dashed off anything from anecdotal squibs to solemn tracts whenever the impulse struck. This body of work is substantial enough that it cannot be left out of any account of the composer; and, since most of it bears on questions of operatic theory and practice, and much of it refers directly to Wagner's own operas, it virtually demands that we refer to it whenever we are thinking about the more familiar productions of Wagner's genius. Since an essay of this length cannot hope to introduce the themes and propositions of even a few of the major writings, my purpose instead will be to consider the question of their relation to the operas. What can we do with them? How should we read Wagner's published prose to help understand him as a composer and dramatist?
Much of his published writing sets out to answer this very question. In the characteristically melodramatic words of A Communication to My Friends, a semi-autobiographical essay of 1851, “I was burning to write Something that should take the message of my tortured brain, and speak it in a fashion to be understood by present life” (PW I:378; GS IV:331; the remark mediates, in this context, an apologetic reference to the “tortured” style of his recent theoretical essays and an exposition of the unrealized dramatic project Jesus of Nazareth).
Reading and staging again
- James Treadwell
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- Journal:
- Cambridge Opera Journal / Volume 10 / Issue 2 / July 1998
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 27 August 2008, pp. 205-220
- Print publication:
- July 1998
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In a recent issue of this journal, David J. Levin proposed an approach to evaluating the work of directors and producers of opera. The idea that one might be able to theorise the difference between good and bad stagings is appealing, not least because many of us would like to feel able to raise the standard of debate on this subject. Most public discussions of opera productions (or at least of those productions that generate public discussion) can be predicted in advance, more or less verbatim; the persistence of the arguments used on all sides is in itself enough to suggest that little progress is being made. On the other hand, it is not easy to see how academic debate contributes. Theatre is where operas enter public discourse. Performance might seem like a decisive act of interpretation – choices have to be made about how to present the given work – but, paradoxically, it also marks the point at which opera escapes the attentions of the academy in favour of a constituency which is (presumably) less grounded in theory and less committed to consciously interpretative acts. With understandable reservations, Levin suggests the use of commercially available videos to analyse details of a staging, but details of this sort are not likely to contribute significantly to a theatre audience's experience of how a production works and what it has to say. Videotape permits us the mastery of freeze-frame enquiry, and at the same time confines us within the flattened perspective chosen at each moment by the camera's eye. Both its advantages and its drawbacks are incommensurate with theatre, where (especially in opera, with its simultaneous but distinct modes) the stream of information is diverse and continuous, and our eye moves in relative freedom, never capturing the totality of the stage. One might draw an analogous distinction between academic criticism, which works by isolating certain elements of the ‘text’ or its contexts and subjecting them to intense scrutiny, and the more holistic act of sitting in the opera-house watching a ‘work’ unfold. The pause button creates a sequence of discrete images submitted to the critic's intellectual play. In the theatre, a staging is more likely to achieve its effects through what we might call its ‘feel’, its general character and stance. When Peter Sellars set Così fan tutte in a diner, the air of incongruous modernity – conveyed through costume, set, the characters' ways of behaving–must have determined the audience's sense of his interpretation far more powerfully than (for example) the fact that he had Ferrando and Gugliemo sing ‘Secondate, aurette amiche’ in their own characters rather than their assumed ones.
Absolute prose? - Thomas S. Grey. Wagner's Musical Prose. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. xix+397 pp.
- James Treadwell
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- Journal:
- Cambridge Opera Journal / Volume 9 / Issue 1 / March 1997
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 27 August 2008, pp. 89-96
- Print publication:
- March 1997
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