Austerity and the End of Multiculturalism in Britain

Toby Helm, Matthew Taylor and Rowena Davis report in the Guardian that

David Cameron was accused of playing into the hands of rightwing extremists today as he delivered a controversial speech on the failings of multiculturalism within hours of one of the biggest anti-Islam rallies ever staged in Britain.

A coordinated attack or just a slip up? Salma Yaqoob seems to think the latter. She writes also in the Guardian

I like to think Cameron was genuine in his words when he visited my ward. And that somehow his mind was hijacked by the right wing of his party. I hope for all our sakes he wins it back. Because while areas like Sparkbrook are not perfect, they are succeeding...

 Cameron once had a vision. It was a positive and genuinely uniting and inclusive one that gained him admirers across the political spectrum. He should return to it.

 The "Big Society" the name coined by PM Cameron to couch his vision for Britain to counter the idea of "Big Government" attached to Labor which has resulted in huge fiscal deficits was coincidentally his way of re-branding the Conservative Party in Britain and make them electable. Margaret Thatcher had previously declared, "there is no such thing as society." This was a complete reversal of that way of thinking. Just as Tony Blair had reinvented the Labor brand, so was Cameron.

It now appears that the "Big Society" that the PM had in mind is not so big after all having some strict preconditions for entry. As Yaqoob notes, this is a total reversal of the "face" he put on when he was aspiring to become Britain's next PM. Does the PM's statement unmask the fact that the new Tory brand is just a repackaging of the mean old Thatcherite ideology?

While all this was taking place, a fourth quarter contraction in GDP was hitting the headlines. Dean Baker commenting on the Great British Austerity Experiment notes that

(t)he fourth-quarter GDP report showing that the economy went into reverse and shrank at a 2.0% annual rate is exactly the sort of warning that many of us here were expecting. Weather-related factors may have slowed growth some, but you would have to do some serious violence to the data to paint a positive picture. Of course, the austerity in the UK is just beginning. There will likely be much worse pain to come, with a real possibility that the country will experience a double-dip recession, or at least a prolonged period of stagnation.

 With the pain of economic stagnation possibly setting in, is this the end of multiculturalism in Britain?

Is Food the New Sex?

This is the question raised by Mary Eberstadt, a fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, in a Policy Review essay of the same title, which I came across courtesy of the op-ed piece by George Will of the Washington Post.

Remember how fifty years ago, our mothers (or grandmothers, depending on how old you are) would stock their kitchens with things that nutritionists today would not find advisable - things like red meat, dairy products, refined sugars, and so forth? Everything came from the freezer or in jars. The only thing served 'fresh,' would be a potato. What they served was based on what they felt was good to eat, not what everyone else felt we ought to eat.

Nowadays it is considered proper to avoid eating red meat, endangered fish, to stick to 'organic' meat and produce, fresh fruits and vegetables, and avoid sugar in beverages. Abiding by these choices acquires the same moral imperative that was ascribed to sexual abstinence a generation ago.

“The moral poles of sex and food have been reversed," writes Mary. There are as many variants of vegetarianism, “schismatic differences” over what to (not) eat similar to denominational fractiousness over articles of faith, "a level of metaphysical attentiveness” that was once invested in sex. The oral and the sexual drives have always been interchangeable in our myths and in our daily expressions. Remember Eve in the Garden of Eden who offered Adam a taste of her “fruit”?

But the question that Eberstadt poses is that now that it has become possible given the affluence that modern societies possess to indulge in these impulses, why is it that we have become more selective in the food we eat and practically indiscriminate in terms of the sexual intercourse we partake in? Or as George put it, we are “prudes at dinner, gluttons in bed.”

By coincidence, this week, McDonald’s in South Australia was assailed for lifting its prices in stores that catered to less affluent communities (in economic terms, it is an admission that cheeseburgers are “inferior goods” because the demand for them is inversely proportional to household income).

While it could be considered a case for consumer protection against predatory pricing engaged in by a multinational company, comments posted in the local Advertiser newspaper online suggest that there is an equally valid case to be made regarding whether we should be encouraging people to eat at McDonald’s to begin with. Perhaps this “demand-based pricing” as McDonald’s called it, is a mechanism for constricting such demand, with the unintended consequence of reducing the social costs associated with obesity(?).

Leisure, the New Work

The contrast between social mores associated with eating and sexual conduct then and now provides a good template for understanding the transformation of similar beliefs around thriftiness and work.

The stigma once associated with financial profligacy that previous generations suffered seems to have given way to a belief that spending is now virtuous. Where once, it was our moral imperative to work hard, be frugal and stay out of debt, today we are told that it is to borrow, spend and even gamble our way to prosperity.

Where once hard work was imbued with a sense of piety, today it might be spending time at the beach, creating stimulus through holiday economics. The social ills associated with workaholism (?) after all are now laying the basis for our license to “chill” as a society.