Empire with Danny Dorling
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- Опубликовано: 22 июл 2020
- This week Katherine and Paul welcome the incredible social geographer Danny Dorling. Join us as we don our breathing apparatus and dive deep, deep down into all sorts of topics including the British Empire, inequality, brexit and pandemics.
Danny’s huge brain is our guide in contemplating a more honest understanding of Britain's history and position in the world. He challenges us to confront why we, as a country, often think we’re somehow special and different to other countries.
When Danny spoke at Greenbelt last year, he spoke about Brexit. We managed to catch up with him in June to talk about all the latest B-word antics, as well as the odds on a second lockdown. Meanwhile Katherine and Paul tackle their own demons as they react to some less-than-positive feedback in which Greenbelt was compared, obviously, to the antichrist.
As always, you can find links, resources and episode timestamps (for all you skippers out there) below.
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ABOUT DANNYDanny Dorling is a professor at the University of Oxford and has lived all his life in England. To try to counter his myopic worldview, in 2006, Danny started working with a group of researchers on a project to remap the world (www.worldmapper.org). He has published with many colleagues more than a dozen books on issues related to social inequalities in Britain and several hundred journal papers.www.dannydorling.org/Twitter: @dannydorling Facebook: / dorlingdanny____
LINKS AND RESOURCES
‘What’s So Funny About Brexit?’ by Danny Dorling bit.ly/gbtv-brexit
Pussy Riot in residence www.greenbelt.org.uk/artists/...
‘SLOWDOWN’ by Danny Dorling www.dannydorling.org/books/SLO...
Rhodes Must Fall, the removal of a Cecil Rhodes statue in Oxford en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhodes_...
TAKE ACTION
Add education on diversity and racism to all school curriculums: petition.parliament.uk/petiti...
Making the UK education curriculum more inclusive of BAME history: petition.parliament.uk/petiti...
Teach Britain's colonial past as part of the UK's compulsory curriculum: petition.parliament.uk/petiti...
There are several ongoing petitions about race and equality more widely, which you can view here: petition.parliament.uk/petiti...
MORE FROM DANNY AT GREENBELT
‘What’s So Funny About Brexit?’Audio: bit.ly/gbtalk-brexit Video (with subtitles): bit.ly/gbtv-brexit
‘Peak Inequality and Food Bank Use’ bit.ly/gbtalk-foodbank ____
00:00 - Welcome to Somewhere To Believe In00:30 - Katherine and Paul catch up01:40 - Reactions to Somewhere To Believe In03:08 - Messages from listeners04:30 - Katherine and Paul’s favourite Greenbelt Festival moments07:25 - Introducing Danny Dorling and his work08:00 - Danny joins the conversation08:19 - Danny on lockdown09:20 - Danny on Greenbelt and Brexit11:46 - Danny on the British Empire and Brexit12:45 - Talk Snippet from #GB19 ‘What’s So Funny About Brexit?’23:21 - Danny on pandemics and kindness26:50 - Danny on a hopeful future29:00 - Danny on the second peak of covid-1932:38 - Danny on “Make Britain Great Again”34:50 - Danny on the fall of the British Empire36:20 - Danny on colonial monuments and statues37:13 - Danny on his new book ‘Slow Down’40:00 - Danny on spending and what really matters42:14 - Danny on inequality44:46 - Danny’s recommendations48:00 - Katherine and Paul reflect on the conversation with Danny53:18 - Coming up in next week’s episode53:58 - How to get in touch with us55:24 - Thank you’s____
A huge thanks to the Greenbelt Volunteer Talks Team for all their hard work on editing this episode. Our podcast music is ‘I Can Change’ by Lee Bains III & The Glory Fires.____
www.greenbelt.org.uk/#Somewhe... 
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I enjoyed the bulk of this podcast - although, I have to say, the musical interludes (if you could call that music), were way too loud, way too annoying and certainly way too unnecessary.
Now I've got that out the way, I have to say I agree with Danny's hypothesis that brexit is, at the end of the day, all to do with England's reaction to the loss of the British empire. I would urge anyone who enjoyed this video to also watch Fintan O'Toole - Ireland and the English Question.
Thank you for the recommendation, it was very good.
We are NOT closing down the car plant in Ellesmere Port....not yet anyway.
Good show guys! Your honest and open minds give hope for the future of GB!
It definitely sounds like a real podcast ;-) Enjoyed it, thanks.
Great podcast. I agree with others - the music is too loud. And you're really lovely, but cut the chatter a bit more and focus in (just my opinion). The lightness of approach that I think you want is coming through well.
Coming from Aus we live with the ripples of the British Empire every day and I'm surprised how many pple here don't make the that connection.
I love Danny Dorling, but I am surprised at his relaxed attitude to Covid back in July and his confident epidemiological assumptions. He's right about the clear choice between supporting life or the economy and that historically countries had to (or chose to) let a pandemic take it's natural course, and that that's been questioned this time around by many countries.
The UK is an island and could take control of the pandemic as Danny says. A wide opinion over here is that it has chosen the traditional path. Aus locked down hard and risked it's economy (we had a better start position to do this perhaps). Melbourne has been in lockdown for seven of eight months and after Victoria having covid figures that match the UK in August, we've almost eradicated community spread with now single figure deaths per day in October. I can't say yet if I think one approach is better than the other. And certainly what works for us (if it works) might not work for others. It's fascinating. I look forward to Danny's analysis in the years to come.
I wonder what other countries spending is like on the military...
It's interesting that Dorling has so much to say about cultural history concerning Europe, as a Geographer, and so little to say about the economic geography and history of the EU. As so often there is a curious kind of blind spot in which it is assumed that all the effects of the EU are benign, non-political, and at worst morally neutral, while everything which goes wrong is assumed to originate at national level, and is to be attributed to some imagined aspect of national character. A paradoxical inversion of the internationalism, and avoidance of nationalism, pretended to by advocates for EU membership. To be a force for good, as pro-EU people want to assert, the EU has to be a force. And it has force. We saw the force flexed against Syriza and the Greek people in 2014 and ever since. It has legislative power which according to the Treaty of Rome, the very first of the treaties constituting the EU, which cannot be negotiated or reformed in any way, no treaty can, takes precedence over the legislative authority of the UK Parliament. Parliamentary Sovereignty was the great revolutionary gain of the English Civil War, enabling eventual democratisation. It is no longer sovereign. As a legislature, the EU legislates not through the EU parliament, which is purely ceremonial, and can neither propose nor amend nor veto legislation, but through the European Commission, which is entirely unelected, and through the European Court of Justice, whose rulings automatically become law in all member states, again taking precedence over the laws passed by the British Parliament which is at least elected, and over the decisions of British courts. EU lawmaking is not restricted to unimportant things, or to the narrow issues of trade. In keeping with the neoliberal structural purpose of creating a free market immune to popular pressures, democracy and accountability, it's political remit keeps expanding, from removing tariffs and harmonising market regulations, to imposing privatisation under the rubrik of free movement of capital and freedom of establishment. Member states cannot have public services which are run as public sector monoplies, as the NHS was set up as, and how it can be run most efficiently with the best economies of scale and the least pricing of provision, because they have to be open to foreign companies to bid for contracts for service provision. That is required by freedom of establishment and enforced consistently by every ruling of the ECJ. Likewise with national level union agreements, labour rights, protections for communities, consumers and the environment hard won over decades and centuries of class struggles and political battles in each country. Inasmuch as they can be considered to restrain trade or profits, they are banned and subject to challenge in the ECJ, which has never yet failed to rule in favour of companies and against unions, communities and consumer and environmental protections. Organised labour and the left is in retreat throughout the EU, as the means once available to enact social democratic reforms, and to secure good jobs with good pay and conditions for non-graduates have been rendered impossible by the Single Market and the European Single Currency. When allegedly social democratic parties cannot realistically offer social democratic policies, and in fact enact neoliberal ones, they cease to be useful to working class voters, who such parties have increasingly alienated thereby, as shown by collapsing polling support in most EU countries, but most especially in Germany, France and Italy, and here prior to 2015 and again since Corbyn's ousting. There are tight restrictions on state investment to create jobs or to transform the economy to make it more competitive, whether thorugh expanding techinical and cientific education, or by expandng public transport or providing funds for long term research and developent of new green industries. Countries finding themselves in chronic balance of payments deficit, which is most of the EU vis a vis Germany, cannot use state investment to reduce their imports or increase their exports. Those in the Eurozone cannot devalue their currency to lower the price of their exports and increase the price of imports. They cannot set capital controls, at all, to slow outflows of money. And of course no-one can use tariffs to control the terms of trade, despite high tariffs being integral to the industrial development strategy of every country in the world to have become a developed country after England, including Germany, the USA and Japan. Free trade is the war cry of neoliberal extraction from the third world, and the defenders of perpetual crippling indebtedness to western banks. Free Market is the war cry of Thatcherism, as well as an idolatry in itself. And the effect of the EU as a free market on the economic geography of Europe couldn't be more stark. Europe has gone from being a continent where local industries made every kind of product in every country, to one dominated by international monopolies and an international division of labour in which there are regional winners and losers on a permanent basis. That is why in the 1980s, the obvious strategy for the British government was to embrace financialisation and establish the City of London as the most deregulated, most corrupt and criminal financial market in the world. Whereas Germany had a historical investment advantage in industrial production, involving heavy investment in engineering and sciences, a huge skills base, and economies of scale as well as specialisation in vehicle manufacturing, white goods and so on, we had a similar historical advantage in financial services and speculative, bricks-and-mortar banking. Consequently money flooded into London and failed to trickle out to the British regions. Public spending continues to be weighted toward London, because luxury customers, oligarchs from all over the world not just Russia, demand luxury services and housing close to their banking and gambling action. And the regions and Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have had their industrial jobs and communities destroyed, losing the good jobs and suffering population loss as people have been forced to migrate to London and the South East. The staunchest region for EU membership, including within the left. The immediate issue is deindustrialisation and regional neglect, or rather regional economic extraction, but the structural cause is the international division of labour fostered by the Single Market and other globalization. A yarn is spun about British national character being irretrievably reactionary and nationalistic by reason of the Empire which was mostly released by mid 1970s, around the time we joined the EEC, despite Britain's proud history of revolutionary resistance and socialist progress. A yarn rooted in revulsion at the nationalistic tone of the official Brexit campaign during the referendum, engineered by Farage and the Tories by excluding the two Lexit organisions from their events and messaging, and the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 News all determining to find every racist in Britain to put a microphone in front of to make it seem like Brexit was by and for racism, and likewise censoring the Lexit argument.
That's the deepest, longest comment I've ever seen on social media - I hope plenty of people read it! Perhaps publish it in a book?!
He doesn't assume that the EU is perfect.
Hmm, the problem with the Lexit argument is that you have been had. You have voted for maximum unfettered capitalism. The costs of Brexit are going to fall on the poorer parts of society. With increased costs of importing and exporting employers have only one big thing they can control to maintain price stability and that is labour costs. Labour laws will be gutted to reduce costs. When the Tory party talks about reducing red tape and deregulation. Which regulations do you think they are talking about?
Lexit? You’ve been had.
@@byrnemeister2008 That's the self-fulfilling prophesy of Labour backing Remain instead. That put the power in Tory hands, and guaranteed the Tory Brexit of hysteria in 2019. In very obvious fact, it was precisely remainers who were had by the corporate funders and Blairite leaders of the PV campaign, whose real objective was to get Labour to throw the 2019 election to force out Jeremy Corbyn, regardless of the fact that in doing so, the Tory Brexit would come to pass.
Will Johnson And yet the EU is currently resisting the UK gov who want to be able to put worker protections on the bonfire next year. The EU are doing that to protect EU workers at the cost of EU corporations and capital. So there actions are not supporting your argument.
Also I am sure your aware that worker protections in Germany and France are the strongest in the world. Germany still has very strong unions with a seat on the board. Nothing happens in a German company until it’s supported and agreed by the workers council. How does that fit with your approach?
You say you can’t change the commission but who tells them what to do? Oh yeah the leaders of the countries. Who pushed the expansion into Eastern Europe as a balance to more integration? The UK. Who pushed for the single market turning the EU from a political club to an economic powerhouse? The UK. We were very influential. History now.
There is plenty wrong with the EU but it is not going anywhere and it works much harder for its people than the UK does.
There is no such thing anymore as absolute sovereignty. Except in North Korea. All countries surrender sovereignty in order to work together in trade, treaties and big projects. So that whole argument is just crap when you dig into it.
One cursory look at the history of Britain tells me that the Roman empires’ influence in Britain ( except Scotland) and many invasions of very brutal Vikings and Anglo Saxons and many other young and aggressive Norsemen have this isles a kind of genetic strength , Darwin probably would’ve described it as natural selection at work and resulting in a general toughness in the genetic makeup of the Brits , and the invasion of Normans added the intellectual ingredient to the genetic makeup of Brits who enjoyed being in an island that gave them the ability to become better at seafaring than the other European tribes and nations , also the genetic memory of hundreds of years of fightings has made an impact on the psyche of the Brits though the real Britons can only be found in wells and yet the mixing with the invaders of many different warriors has been a factor in forming the psyche of white British people
In a way only the strongest and fittest young men can invade another tribe and that’s exactly what’s unique about Britian because that impact factor was always compounded because of multitude of fittest warriors boosting the genetic makeup of Britain
Which probably can explain why certain things happened in Britain and not in other parts of the world, it’s a fact that in nature only the selfish and fit creatures can survive and pass on their genes .
Is this for kids?