DOCSLIB.ORG

The Ethics of Space: Homelessness and Squatting in Urban England

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
The Ethics of Space: Homelessness and Squatting in Urban England THE EtHICS OF SPACE THE EtHICS OF SPACE HOMELESSNESS AND SQUATTING IN URBAN ENGLAND Steph Grohmann Hau Books Chicago © 2020 Hau Books The Ethics of Space: Homelessness and Squatting in Urban England by Steph Grohmann is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode Cover design: Daniele Meucci Layout design: Deepak Sharma, Prepress Plus Typesetting: Prepress Plus (www.prepressplus.in) ISBN: 978-1-912808-28-1 [paperback] ISBN: 978-1-912808-38-0 [PDF] LCCN: 2019956078 Hau Books Chicago Distribution Center 11030 S. Langley Chicago, IL 60628 www.haubooks.org Hau Books publications are printed, marketed, and distributed by The University of Chicago Press. www.press.uchicago.edu Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper. For all who are out of place Table of Contents Acknowledgements ix Preface xi Introduction 1 Chapter One: Of life and fieldwork 47 The“field” as morally neutral zone 55 Chapter Two: Shelter 67 An attack on one is an attack on all 75 Chapter Three: Hope 90 Becoming at home 100 Chapter Four: Codes of honor and protection 111 Of apes and anarchists 118 Chapter Five: Total places 133 The Big Society strikes back 141 Chapter Six: The enemy within 153 The eturnr of the savage noble 164 viii THE EtHICS OF SPACE Chapter Seven: Fragments 177 Death and sanctions 187 Chapter Eight: Circle the wagons 204 Extinction 213 Epilogue 231 Index 239 Reference List 249 Ethnographic Vignettes: Trolley Problem 45 Refugee 66 Spell 89 Through the Looking Glass 131 Clash 175 Dispatch 202 Acknowledgements This book has been a long time in the making, and it would be impossible to list here all who have contributed to making it possible. Special thanks goes to: Nicholas De Genova, Brian Alleyne, Victoria Goddard, Frances Pine, Sophie Day, Pauline von Hellermann, Stephen Nugent, Magda Buchczyk, Katie Aston, Aimee Joyce, Zahira Araguete-Toribio, Alexandra Urdea, William Tantam, Krzysztof Bierski, Elizabeth Saleh, Maka Suarez, Cy Elliott Smith, Alena Hale, Claude Jousselin, Souad Usayran, and all staff and students at Goldsmiths who have shaped my thinking; Pieter Francois, Harvey Whitehouse, the Seshat and Aligned teams, Carlos Moreno-Leguizamon, David Smith, Roy Bhaskar, Tim Rutzou, Michiel van Ingen, Phil Gorski, Laura Brace, Fiona Cuthill, Charlotte Clarke, the Right to Home network, Hylton White, Vita Peacock, Enrique Martino, Faun Rice, Giovanni da Col, Michelle Beckett; my family, especially my parents Fritz and Brigitte, Lukas and Amelie, Nonna, who would have loved to see this book in print, Nunu Kaller, Dieter Ratz, John West; the two anonymous reviewers who have invested great time and care into helping me improve the manuscript; and of course all squatters and allies without whom this book would have never been written. Preface to The Ethics of Space: Homelessness and Squatting in Urban England by Steph Grohmann Nicholas De Genova The ethics of space: Homelessness and squatting in urban England is a rare and ex- traordinary work that deftly integrates fine-grained and sensitive ethnogra- phy with a bold philosophical imagination. With this remarkable book, Steph Grohmann not only exhibits her remarkable capabilities as an ethnographic researcher with a tenacious critical intellect—attuned to the complexities of contemporary hierarchies of wealth, power, and prestige—but also delights the reader with her exceptional talents as a writer. Based on fieldwork with squatters and other homeless people, primarily in Bristol, during which Grohmann was herself living as a squatter, the book examines how people who are not securely housed, and are therefore “home”-less, are also socially and politically produced as being always “out of place.” In this book, Grohmann transports the reader into a vivid and deeply mov- ing exploration of her firsthand experience of homelessness and squatting in urban England. Her purpose is not to reduce those experiences and struggles into a voyeuristic pornography of misery and marginalization, nor to orientalize or romanticize homeless people as the contemporary urban equivalent of wild “savages” with their own exotic culture. Rather, Grohmann aims to elaborate a xii THE EtHICS OF SPACE critical lens through which to ask fundamental questions about the larger con- figuration of social inequality and class hierarchy in neoliberal, neo-Victorian Britain. Grohmann’s incisive social critique does not remain confined to the sociological or anthropological “peculiarities of the English” (in the felicitous phrase of Perry Anderson), but instead mobilizes the ethnographic insights of her research as a platform for exploring the social dynamics of empathy, recog- nition, and ethics. In this context of social marginalization and precarious housing, Grohmann discerns how squatters’ practices of appropriating space produce their own sens- es of “home” and “safe space,” and thereby collaborate in constructing moral subjectivities. The book demonstrates that squatting is not reducible to mate- rial deprivation or political disobedience but must also be understood as an ethical practice intended to counteract the traumatic loss of full moral status, or “social death,” which is so pronouncedly evident in the condition of homeless- ness. For homeless people, Grohmann shows, experiences of spatial and social displacement enact specific territorial forms of unequal power and prestige. Consequently, conflicts over legitimate access to, and control of, the physical environment become decisive sites in which to understand and transform the cognitive construction and social production of embodied moral subjectivities in space. By purposefully and defiantly asserting their right to occupy vacant houses and other buildings, the squatters whom we meet in this book not only challenge the sanctity of private property or neoliberal housing policy but also remake themselves and one another as “spatial selves,” as embodied ethical subjects. In other words, what is at stake in their struggles to create practical solutions to the permanent “crisis” of affordable housing and the consequent scourge of home- lessness is a more elemental question of ethics, as they also seek to redress the moral dilemma of how we live and relate to one another within the dominant regime of private property and social life under capitalism. Through their strug- gles for housing, squatters initiate a more fundamental struggle to inhabit and take hold of social space, and thus to make modest but no less daring efforts to remake the world through very localized but determined measures to change their immediate, everyday lived realities. In doing so, they challenge the larger social and political order of neoliberal capitalism, and in working to transform life, they also transform themselves and their relations with the wider society, and engage in new and creative experiments with how we might begin to reor- ganize all of our collective social life. Introduction One cold day in the winter of 1921, Harry Cowley, a chimney sweep from Brighton, decided that enough was enough. A drummer boy in the Royal Navy in his youth, Cowley had been injured at the age of seventeen, and after his recovery, had been redeployed to bury the dead soldiers of World War I. On his return to Brighton, he had found the survivors and their families living in abject poverty in overcrowded slum accommodation or in tents on the local racecourse. Cowley’s patience with this state of affairs ran out the day he found the family of an ex-serviceman camped out in the tent city overlooking town: “I thought; this won’t be allowed to go on, I asked the man ‘are you prepared to go in a house if me and my men find you one’ he said ‘yes’ So we got together our boys and at 3 in the morning under cover of dark we forced our way into an empty house in Cheltenham Place and moved the family in.”1 Cowley proceeded to form a group of local men who began to routinely break into empty properties and move in homeless locals. The group not only lent practical support to the squatter families but also acted as vigilantes to protect the new residents from eviction and violence by landlords or the police. Their actions continued until after World War II, when a new wave of impov- erished and traumatized ex-soldiers returned from the front, to find what in today’s terms could be referred to as a housing bubble. In Cowley’s words: 1. https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/stories/17/a4212217.shtml. 2 THE EtHICS OF SPACE Well when this last War ended Brighton was loaded with empty houses, yer see. There was a lot of people buying empty houses cheap and selling them or renting at exorbitant prices, people couldn’t afford them., One day I went to do some work in an old ladies home, she saved £400 in her life, her and her husband was old people. I valued the house at £600 and they was being asked £1,600. I thought this don’t come right, your £400 gone up in the air and you’ll never live long enough to buy the place and be secure.2 Cowley’s keen sense of justice made him not only a squatting activist but also a staunch antifascist: “When I read about the brutality to the Jews, any- thing like that, I could cry and have cried. And I felt it was my duty to fight against it.” Fueled by this sense of moral commitment, Cowley and his group fought the rising Far Right in the shape of Oswald Mosley’s “British Union of Fascists”—often physically. Cowley recounts being assaulted and hospital- ized, having his property attacked, and having himself incited violence to shut down local fascist rallies. Asked to justify their actions after one such bloody battle, he replied on behalf of his men: “No mine wasn’t rough boys; they were conscientious.”3 Some ninety years later, Mike Weatherley, Conservative MP for Hove—a place so close to Brighton that nowadays they are considered the same town, Brighton and Hove—launched an entirely different campaign.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • The Criminalisation of Squatting Discourses, Moral Panics and Resistances in the Netherlands and England and Wales
    6258 MORAL RHETORIC-A_234x156 mm 30/06/2014 13:17 Page 109 Chapter 5 The criminalisation of squatting Discourses, moral panics and resistances in the Netherlands and England and Wales Deanna Dadusc and ETC Dee What is philosophy if not a way of reflecting, not so much on what is true and what is false, as on our relationship to truth? . The movement by which, not without effort and uncertainty, dreams and illusions, one detaches oneself from what is accepted as true and seeks other rules – that is philosophy. The displacement and transformation of frameworks of thinking . to become other than what one is – that too, is philosophy.1 In both England and Wales and the Netherlands, squatting has recently been legislated against.2 In most European countries squatting is illegal and considered either a crime against public order or a violation of private property rights. In England and Wales, the act of squatting in residential buildings was criminalised on 1 September 2012 and is punishable by a sentence of up PROOFS3 to 51 weeks in prison and/or a fine of up to £5,000. In the Netherlands, the act of squatting was made illegal by a new criminal law of 1 October 2010, punishable by up to two years in prison (or a fine).4 These countries have had a history of civil regulation in regard to squatting, yet the use of criminal law is recent. In the Netherlands, the first formulation of the new law was vague and is being modified by means of legal battles between the state and squatters.
    [Show full text]
  • The Communist Manifesto (Get Political)
    The Communist Manifesto Marx & Engels 00 pre i 2/7/08 19:38:10 <:IEA>I>86A www.plutobooks.com Revolution, Black Skin, Democracy, White Masks Socialism Frantz Fanon Selected Writings Forewords by V.I. Lenin Homi K. Edited by Bhabha and Paul Le Blanc Ziauddin Sardar 9780745328485 9780745327600 Jewish History, The Jewish Religion Communist The Weight Manifesto of Three Karl Marx and Thousand Years Friedrich Engels Israel Shahak Introduction by Forewords by David Harvey Pappe / Mezvinsky/ 9780745328461 Said / Vidal 9780745328409 Theatre of Catching the Oppressed History on Augusto Boal the Wing 9780745328386 Race, Culture and Globalisation A. Sivanandan Foreword by Colin Prescod 9780745328348 Marx & Engels 00 pre ii 2/7/08 19:38:10 theth communist manifesto KARL MARX and FRIEDRICH ENGELS With an introduction by David Harvey PLUTO PRESS www.plutobooks.com Marx & Engels 00 pre iii 2/7/08 19:38:10 The Manifesto of the Communist Party was fi rst published in February 1848. English translation by Samuel Moore in cooperation with Friedrich Engels, 1888. This edition fi rst published 2008 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA www.plutobooks.com The full text of the manifesto, along with the endnotes and prefaces to various language editions, has been taken from the Marx/Engels Internet Archive (marxists.org) Transcription/Markup: Zodiac and Brian Basgen, 1991, 2000, 2002 Proofread: Checked and corrected against the English Edition of 1888, by Andy Blunden, 2004. The manifesto and the appendix as published here is public domain. Introduction copyright © David Harvey 2008 The right of David Harvey as author of the Introduction has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
    [Show full text]
  • Refugees As Surplus Population: Race, Migration and Capitalist Value Regimes
    New Political Economy ISSN: 1356-3467 (Print) 1469-9923 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cnpe20 Refugees as Surplus Population: Race, Migration and Capitalist Value Regimes Prem Kumar Rajaram To cite this article: Prem Kumar Rajaram (2018) Refugees as Surplus Population: Race, Migration and Capitalist Value Regimes, New Political Economy, 23:5, 627-639, DOI: 10.1080/13563467.2017.1417372 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13563467.2017.1417372 Published online: 05 Jan 2018. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 610 View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=cnpe20 NEW POLITICAL ECONOMY 2018, VOL. 23, NO. 5, 627–639 https://doi.org/10.1080/13563467.2017.1417372 Refugees as Surplus Population: Race, Migration and Capitalist Value Regimes Prem Kumar Rajaram Department of Sociology & Social Anthropology, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY Refugees and migrants are often studied as though they have no Received 21 November 2017 relation to the racial and class structures of the societies in which they Accepted 5 December 2017 reside. They are strangers to be governed by ‘integration’ policy and KEYWORDS border management. Refugees and migrants are, however, subjects of Refugees; surplus contemporary capitalism struggling to render themselves valuable populations; colonialism; capitalist modes of production. I study the government of refugees and Marx; Foucault migrants in order to examine capitalist value regimes. Societal values and hierarchies reflected in capitalist modes of production impact on struggles of racialised subaltern groups to translate body power into valued labour.
    [Show full text]
  • Black Anarchism, Pedro Riberio
    TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Introduction.....................................................................................................................2 2. The Principles of Anarchism, Lucy Parsons....................................................................3 3. Anarchism and the Black Revolution, Lorenzo Komboa’Ervin......................................10 4. Beyond Nationalism, But not Without it, Ashanti Alston...............................................72 5. Anarchy Can’t Fight Alone, Kuwasi Balagoon...............................................................76 6. Anarchism’s Future in Africa, Sam Mbah......................................................................80 7. Domingo Passos: The Brazilian Bakunin.......................................................................86 8. Where Do We Go From Here, Michael Kimble..............................................................89 9. Senzala or Quilombo: Reflections on APOC and the fate of Black Anarchism, Pedro Riberio...........................................................................................................................91 10. Interview: Afro-Colombian Anarchist David López Rodríguez, Lisa Manzanilla & Bran- don King........................................................................................................................96 11. 1996: Ballot or the Bullet: The Strengths and Weaknesses of the Electoral Process in the U.S. and its relation to Black political power today, Greg Jackson......................100 12. The Incomprehensible
    [Show full text]
  • The Economic Evaluation Alternatives to Digital
    THE ECONOMIC EVALUATION of ALTERNATIVES TO DIGITAL COPYRIGHT Peter Eckersley Department of Computer Science & Software Engineering and Intellectual Property Research Institute of Australia, The University of Melbourne SERCIAC 2003 (Preliminary Version) 1 ABSTRACT A certain air of controversy has arisen around copyright law, as a result of its interactions with digital technology. The body of literature claiming that existing copyright laws are economically sub-optimal is growing rapidly. Some authors are even claiming that it would be better to have no copyright system at all, while others argue that alternatives, such as various forms of public funding, would be preferable to exclusive rights in literary and artistic works. This paper explores the economic differences between a system of consumer-regulating copyright based on “digital rights management”, and alternatives based on public funding. I argue that the distinctions are sufficiently intricate that they elude any simple modelling technique. Instead, this paper attempts a semi-analytic comparison which weighs a set of different factors which may favour either copyright or the alternatives. When these are summed, it is concluded that well-designed systems of public funding are almost certain to produce better social welfare outcomes than DRM-based copyright. 2 1 Introduction The infrastructure for purely digital information economies is only beginning to crystallise1. As this occurs, it has become apparent that some of the central assumptions which have defined information industries in the past are in danger of unravelling. Perhaps the most prominent assumption of this kind is that states of artificial scarcity will be maintained by the exclusive rights of copyright law (in combination with “digital rights management”).
    [Show full text]
  • Unfree Labor, Capitalism and Contemporary Forms of Slavery
    Unfree Labor, Capitalism and Contemporary Forms of Slavery Siobhán McGrath Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science, New School University Economic Development & Global Governance and Independent Study: William Milberg Spring 2005 1. Introduction It is widely accepted that capitalism is characterized by “free” wage labor. But what is “free wage labor”? According to Marx a “free” laborer is “free in the double sense, that as a free man he can dispose of his labour power as his own commodity, and that on the other hand he has no other commodity for sale” – thus obliging the laborer to sell this labor power to an employer, who possesses the means of production. Yet, instances of “unfree labor” – where the worker cannot even “dispose of his labor power as his own commodity1” – abound under capitalism. The question posed by this paper is why. What factors can account for the existence of unfree labor? What role does it play in an economy? Why does it exist in certain forms? In terms of the broadest answers to the question of why unfree labor exists under capitalism, there appear to be various potential hypotheses. ¾ Unfree labor may be theorized as a “pre-capitalist” form of labor that has lingered on, a “vestige” of a formerly dominant mode of production. Similarly, it may be viewed as a “non-capitalist” form of labor that can come into existence under capitalism, but can never become the central form of labor. ¾ An alternate explanation of the relationship between unfree labor and capitalism is that it is part of a process of primary accumulation.
    [Show full text]
  • Hangleton and Knoll Community Action Reports
    THE SCROLL AL LOC NEW SPA February - PER March Issue No. 17 2013 DELIVERED FREE IN KNOLL AREA* Hangleton and Knoll Community Action Reports At the Community Action meeting held on Our Youth Team have organised a 12 th of December 2012 , our local Police Officers Drop-in at Knoll Park. Congratulations spoke about the burglaries in the area. were given to Helen Bartlett a youth worker They are patrolling the area, and helping who has been awarded a MA with Distinction . residents with Home Security , which is the She based her dissertation on Knoll Park and theme for the Community Action Meeting she wants to thank everyone who helped her. scheduled for Wednesday 23 rd January 2013 (at the time you read this it will already have Pat Weller, Sophie Murphy, Joanna been held at St Richard’s). You will find out Martindale and Claire Sillence met the more in the next edition of The Scroll. Prime Minister at 10 Downing Street on the The Police officers will be patrolling 28 th of November, 2012 to receive a Big Knoll Park and our Youth Team will be Society Award on behalf of the Hangleton out and about talking to young people . and Knoll Project. More information can be Some arrests have been made, and the Police found on page 4 or at www.hkproject.org.uk . would like to hear from anyone who witnesses anything suspicious at Knoll Park or anywhere To report any and all housing incidents , else in the area. please fill out the Community Action We are planning a Community Safety report form available either at St Richard’s Event at Hangleton Community Centre on Community Centre or also on the CA website the 27 th of February , 2013 from 1pm-3pm (see the advert on page 3) or contact St Richard’s (see also HKP column on page 2).
    [Show full text]
  • Deserving, Gifting, and Needs
    Deserving, Gifting, and Needs MIKI KASHTAN L’auteur s’interroge sur les « besoins » et les « mérites « dans able to set aside the time to nurture their friendship with le contexte du don. Son but est de poser toute la notion du him, and they would need to see him less. The shift from mérite et de proposer un cadre bas é sur le bon vouloir afin exchange back to relationship, now expanded to include d’assurer le transit des ressources mondiales. Elle suggère everyone’s needs, allowed those friendships to continue des exemples ordinaires d’économie historique avant d’as- uninterrupted, involving the entire family, some of them surer que c’est le glissement vers l’agriculture qui a motivé lasting through and beyond his childhood. l’accumulation et la possession des ressources plutôt que We all know what he knew then: there is nothing sweeter sur leur circulation. Ce geste vers une nouvelle structure than giving and receiving within the context of human économique a développé des récits à propos de qui méritait relationships based on a flow of generosity and care. We et qui ne méritait pas selon la loi divine ou la moralité pour all were once babies, and almost all of us were given to justifier les inégalités inhérentes; une discussion autour du simply because we had a need, as Genevieve Vaughan has don comme économie alternative qui n’est pas attachée la been calling to our attention for so many years. valeur mais plutôt aux besoins et aux soins. Elle termine At the same time, even those of us who have not been sur une image d’un monde futur qui serait basé sur le soin mothers and caregivers for the young, have no doubt had et la collaboration plutôt que sur la raison.
    [Show full text]
  • Markets Not Capitalism Explores the Gap Between Radically Freed Markets and the Capitalist-Controlled Markets That Prevail Today
    individualist anarchism against bosses, inequality, corporate power, and structural poverty Edited by Gary Chartier & Charles W. Johnson Individualist anarchists believe in mutual exchange, not economic privilege. They believe in freed markets, not capitalism. They defend a distinctive response to the challenges of ending global capitalism and achieving social justice: eliminate the political privileges that prop up capitalists. Massive concentrations of wealth, rigid economic hierarchies, and unsustainable modes of production are not the results of the market form, but of markets deformed and rigged by a network of state-secured controls and privileges to the business class. Markets Not Capitalism explores the gap between radically freed markets and the capitalist-controlled markets that prevail today. It explains how liberating market exchange from state capitalist privilege can abolish structural poverty, help working people take control over the conditions of their labor, and redistribute wealth and social power. Featuring discussions of socialism, capitalism, markets, ownership, labor struggle, grassroots privatization, intellectual property, health care, racism, sexism, and environmental issues, this unique collection brings together classic essays by Cleyre, and such contemporary innovators as Kevin Carson and Roderick Long. It introduces an eye-opening approach to radical social thought, rooted equally in libertarian socialism and market anarchism. “We on the left need a good shake to get us thinking, and these arguments for market anarchism do the job in lively and thoughtful fashion.” – Alexander Cockburn, editor and publisher, Counterpunch “Anarchy is not chaos; nor is it violence. This rich and provocative gathering of essays by anarchists past and present imagines society unburdened by state, markets un-warped by capitalism.
    [Show full text]
  • Squatting – the Real Story
    Squatters are usually portrayed as worthless scroungers hell-bent on disrupting society. Here at last is the inside story of the 250,000 people from all walks of life who have squatted in Britain over the past 12 years. The country is riddled with empty houses and there are thousands of homeless people. When squatters logically put the two together the result can be electrifying, amazing and occasionally disastrous. SQUATTING the real story is a unique and diverse account the real story of squatting. Written and produced by squatters, it covers all aspects of the subject: • The history of squatting • Famous squats • The politics of squatting • Squatting as a cultural challenge • The facts behind the myths • Squatting around the world and much, much more. Contains over 500 photographs plus illustrations, cartoons, poems, songs and 4 pages of posters and murals in colour. Squatting: a revolutionary force or just a bunch of hooligans doing their own thing? Read this book for the real story. Paperback £4.90 ISBN 0 9507259 1 9 Hardback £11.50 ISBN 0 9507259 0 0 i Electronic version (not revised or updated) of original 1980 edition in portable document format (pdf), 2005 Produced and distributed by Nick Wates Associates Community planning specialists 7 Tackleway Hastings TN34 3DE United Kingdom Tel: +44 (0)1424 447888 Fax: +44 (0)1424 441514 Email: [email protected] Web: www.nickwates.co.uk Digital layout by Mae Wates and Graphic Ideas the real story First published in December 1980 written by Nick Anning by Bay Leaf Books, PO Box 107, London E14 7HW Celia Brown Set in Century by Pat Sampson Piers Corbyn Andrew Friend Cover photo by Union Place Collective Mark Gimson Printed by Blackrose Press, 30 Clerkenwell Close, London EC1R 0AT (tel: 01 251 3043) Andrew Ingham Pat Moan Cover & colour printing by Morning Litho Printers Ltd.
    [Show full text]
  • Socialism – an Introduction
    Socialism – An Introduction. Socialism can be defined as a social order that raises the living standards of the majority by a fair and equal redistribution of wealth and work, that looks after those most in need, doesn't consign them to the scrap heap of poverty and despair. Based on compassion for all humanity, and the belief that a small minority should not hold the majority of wealth, socialism is not about one rule for all, a colourless world, but about allowing each individual the access to develop their own unique skills and character, thus benefiting the community as a whole. Socialism does not discriminate on ground of creed, colour or sex, but embraces all peoples lives, a fervently believes in the good within us all and utilising these qualities for the benefit of everyone, not the selfish few. Often attacked as idealistic, socialism is an easily attainable state, a true and powerful way of abolishing all inequality and prejudice. Some socialist demands for the late 20th Century Britain. 1. Socialist measures in the interests of working people! Labour must break with big business and Tory economic policies. 2. Full employment! 3. No redundancies. 4. The right to a job or decent benefits. For a 32 hour week without loss of pay. 5. No compulsory overtime. 6. For voluntary retirement at 55 with a decent full pension for all. 7. A national minimum wage of at least two-thirds of the average wage. £4.61 an hour as a step toward this goal, with no exemptions. 8. The repeal of all Tory anti-union laws.
    [Show full text]
  • The “Ill Kill'd” Deer: Poaching and Social Order in the Merry Wives of Windsor
    The “ill kill’d” Deer: Poaching and Social Order in The Merry Wives of Windsor Jeffrey Theis Nicholas Rowe once asserted that the young Shakespeare was caught stealing a deer from Sir Thomas Lucy’s park at Charlecote. The anecdote’s truth-value is clearly false, yet the narrative’s plausibility resonates from the local social customs in Shakespeare’s Warwickshire region. As the social historian Roger Manning convincingly argues, hunting and its ille- gitimate kin poaching thoroughly pervaded all social strata of early modern English culture. Close proximity to the Forest of Arden and nu- merous aristocratic deer parks and rabbit warrens would have steeped Shakespeare’s early life in the practices of hunting and poaching whether he engaged in them or only heard stories about them.1 While some Shakespeare criticism attends directly or indirectly to the importance of hunting in the comedies, remarkably, there has been no sustained analysis of poaching’s importance in these plays.2 In part, the reason for the oversight might be lexicographical. The word “poaching” never occurs in any of Shakespeare’s works, and the first instance in which poaching means “to take game or fish illegally” is in 1611—a decade after Shakespeare composed his comedies.3 Yet while the word was not coined for another few years, Roger Manning proves that illegal deer killing was a socially and politically explosive issue well before 1611. Thus, the “ill kill’d deer” Justice Shallow refers to in Act One of The Merry Wives of Windsor situates the play within a socially resonant discourse where illegal deer killing brings to light cultural assumptions imbedded within the legal hunt.
    [Show full text]