Asking Questions. Seeking Answers.
Owen Hopkins’s book Lost Futures surveys the rise, fall and rise again of the reputation of British post-war architectural modernism, including iconic Scottish projects such as Glasgow’s Red Roads Flat and Hutchenstown C, the Cockenzie Power Station and St Peter’s Seminary.
“If 2016 was the year in which millennials realised that they had to confront the true reality of their meagre inheritance, 2017 must be a year in which resistance to authoritarian nationalism takes definite form. The awful questions that the past twelve months have posed can only be answered if we first understand this moment as a generational coming of age.”
Communitarianism doesn’t have to be regressive: the pre-war origins of social democracy hold lessons for today’s left.
“Rich navigates this exceptionally fraught and emotionally charged terrain with great sensitivity. But on occasion his focus on making plain the nature of leftist anti-Semitism leads him to understate or omit some important elements of the Israeli-Palestine conflict that motivate Israel’s critics.”
“It won’t work. May’s project will flounder. It cannot deliver the communitarian goals it strives for, and will damage Britain’s competitive position.” But: “In Scotland, things will keep going catastrophically nowhere.”
Though there is fierce disagreement about the extent of any Marxist revolutionary incursion into Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour there is less dispute – for both his supporters and opponents – that it is bad news. For most, it seems, Trotskyists are simply beyond the pale, distinguished by an unmistakeable whiff of sulphur. But why, exactly?
Nicola Sturgeon is about to launch the SNP’s much-delayed “summer” initiative to win over No voters to support independence and, maybe, #indyref2. But two books by two prominent Scottish professors, reviewed here, suggest she has a very steep hill to climb.
Six weeks to the Brexit poll and another test of constitutional and identity political feeling. Facts and logic may play a role but our sense of who we are will be decisive. And what we fear about the wider world.
In the second of an occasional series looking at the lively contemporary ‘postcapitalism’ debate about possibilities for a viable alternative to the current economic order, Justin Reynolds reviews a book charting the continued influence of a bold, brief-lived experiment that took place 145 years in the heart of a major European city.
On the centenary of the Easter Rising in Ireland politicians need to use its political imagery at their peril. Its lessons for nationalism as for fein ism are not unambiguous.