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Charles Chevalier's avatar

Excellent article, I have to say the academic lit certainly indicates your proposition holds significant weight. I think on the whole the political elite are incompetent and do not posses the knowledge or the impetus to examine the evidence, and as you say the discourse is stifled by the Jeremiad authors of the Anywhere's.

I think the UK has been subjected to a 3 phase destabilisation of society starting post war although the deindustrialisation process at this juncture was of little note by the 3rd phase of deindutrialisation and the rejection of the moral economy approach, it was obvious at this point capital had been maneuvering for 3 decades to create a hegemony. The Chicago school of economics were shilling for position and the Jeremiad men of letters were scribing letters of doom in the press and academia. Reagan and Thatcher were elected.

In the UK starting in 79 the stepping stones plan was implemented by Thatcher, this plan was preconceived before election by high profile Industrialists, financiers and patrons of the NRC. Sir John Hoskyn's the industrialist appears to have been the steering hand of the plan. The unions were to be emasculated leaving the workers with no recourse over pay and conditions and social solidarity and community cohesion were via Neo-liberalism to be fractured by a pure form of individualism that encourages an incontinence of self control to self service.

Alongside neo-liberalism New Public Management systems of governance were implemented to embed neoliberalism in all institutions including the welfare state, targets, performance indicators and league tables were implemented alongside privatisation deregulation and attacking the unions through legislation.

A comprehensive top down ideological revolution was inaugurated that was to over the last 4 decades by the plurality of politics in the UK reduce society to a business model that was clearly dominated by political economy discourses, culturalism and structuralism were sidelined. Blair and his executive were in fact Thatcherites with a Labour face, the so called 3rd way was in effect a pig midden of undecipherable political misdirection to hide that fact.

The effects of two ideologies working in conjunction, a) Managerialism and b) Neoliberalism were used to implement an inverted form of neo-colonialism of society by capital. Capital and capitalism in all previous crises have devised constructs that create monopoly and oppression of the workers.

I don't have a problem with capitalism.

However it cant be unbridled as we well know at present it is untethered and dominating by political economy with no regard for society and culture in general.

At the time the middle classes were unaware of the long game and were complacent in their own egoism while society and community were in a perpetual state of anomie.

Without diving deeper into the vagueness of the neo-liberal assault and rushing forward to present date the middle classes are waking up. Realising the end game is to drive their position in society via mass migration downward with no view to upward mobility and slowly are backing unions again although they are in a weakened state there is potential for a revival.

If and only if public opinion can force a stifling of IGOs de-facto power and any adoption of external supranational (EU) IMF and WB both latter USA neo-colonialist constructs from dictating immigration policy.

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George Carty's avatar

One of the reasons why modern China was able to keep its "Zero Covid" policy going for so long is because the vast majority of urban Chinese live in walled compounds (xiaoqu) that are easy to seal off from the outside world, and apparently this has been a feature of Chinese urbanism going back at least as far as the Tang Dynasty.

I wonder if the historic Chinese problem with incel bandits that you referred to was one of the reasons why Chinese cities came to be laid out that way?

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