through europe

When the Justice Secretary Chris Grayling recently announced his intention to reform the British  prison system, I couldn’t have agreed more. British prisons are badly in need of reform. Since their ‘privatisation’ – that is, the wholesale of buildings and inmates to G4S, – prisons on the island have become even more overcrowded, insulting of the dignity of the inmates, and completely oblivious of any rehabilitating function that they might be supposed to have. Much like in Britain’s motherland, the US, the prison system seems to have reverted to the gruesome pantomime of a Medieval vision of hell on earth. While the British government keeps waving the supposed superiority of Western culture uber alles, its prison system has completely lost touch with those Enlightenment ideas of human dignity, that have contributed so much to the most decent aspects of our Western civilisation.

 

One would have expected Grayling to meditate cautiously on his role, possibly to read a book or two by people like Beccaria or Voltaire – Foucault might be too much for a Tory MP, – and finally to burst out in a beautiful announcement on the priority of human dignity over everything, even over the stiff rigour of the law. One would have expected Grayling to comment on the despicable regression of British prisons towards a Victorian model of workhouses, or on the highly dangerous passage of the most controversial of all State powers – the power to kidnap and enslave civilians, legally defined as ‘imprisonment’ – from the hands of the State to those of a private commercial company. In short, one would have expected Grayling to follow the claim of the Latin poet Terence that ‘I am a human being, I consider nothing that is human alien to me’ – and to act consequently.

 

If 'the world is our oyster' why are they so expensive? Shakespeare's formulation, that a poor man denied money may open the world like an oyster instead, takes on a very different meaning when the cheap food of the poor becomes the delicacy of the rich. Perhaps the shifting fortunes of the oyster are simply the most obvious example of a culinary and cultural refinement which has seen the pots of the many emptied on to the plates of the few. The crumbs from the master's table, 'authentic' and 'honest', have been plucked from the mouths of the poor who have been sold instead a pale imitation of the original loaf.

 

Oysters comfortably adorn the plates of the highest haute cusine and the stalls of the saltiest salt-of-the earth artisans, yet it is no secret that they were also once plentiful fare for the English poor. Originally popular with England's Roman invaders who set slaves to work collecting the delicacy from the shores of the English Channel, these native delicacies were transported as far as the empire's capital. After the Romans left oysters fell out of favour but were popular again as early as the 8th Century and by the 1400's were consumed in great numbers by both the rich and poor. For the less well-off they would appear on 'fish days', during which no meat was eaten and which fell as often as Wednesday, Friday and Saturday in order to bolster both the fishing industry and the number of seafaring men available to the royal navy.

 

The need to eat is a great leveller, an inescapable biological necessity, but what is the difference between the food of the rich and that of the poor - Is it just a question of taste? John Burnett in 'Plenty & Want' describes the rich of the 19th century as those who enjoyed “some margin of income over necessary expenditure and were able to make some choice in their selection of food”. This being the case the poor therefore ate a food which was a product of circumstance: Cheap, often monotonous and nutritionally inadequate. Yet out of this necessity came a resourceful invention, a creative use of the ingredients at hand and an open minded adoption of the products of foreign trade and technological innovation supposedly absent from traditional English cookery. The recipes left to us show a cooking which fulfils the apparently contemporary fashion for local produce, economy and creative presentation, not as a fad but as perhaps the richest heritage of working class culture. However, the development of this culture was broken somewhere along the line only to be 'rediscovered' recently by chefs and television personalities catering to the middle and upper classes. How did the working class loose their culinary culture only to have it dangled in front of them, out of reach, by supermarkets who can 'taste the difference' and celebrity chefs who berate them as they eat their TV dinners?

 

The potential list of objectionable adjectives that have been extended to the medley of policies collectively understood as ‘workfare’ is, much like any credibility once invested in the present coalition government, indubitably nearing the point of expiry. Indeed workfare, and its present puppeteer the Home Secretary Iain Duncan Smith, are now not not only regarded as mad, bad and malicious but alsothoroughly inept. Surely even ‘IDS’ thought the numbers, the returns on government ‘investment’ in awarding these deals to A4E and others would not be so precociously dreadful as to place the programs beyond the parameters of any credible defence?

 

The contribution of groups such asBoycott Workfare,DPAC and Solfed, among others, in discrediting workfare programmes is impressive. At the same time such a contribution has undoubtedly been embedded within a defensive approach that has come to characterize anti-austerity struggles throughout the OECD. At times, as with workfare, such a response can be impressive. The student movement of 2010 was similarly a defensive struggle but was nonetheless possessed of admirable flexibility, scale and intensity. The same is true, indeed to a greater extent, with the ultimately victorious Quebecois student movement of the last two years, impressively coordinated byClasse. Conversely the UK ‘pensions fightback’ by public sector unions in 2011, again essentially defensive, shared few if any of these qualities. This is for a variety of reasons and has nothing to do with the intelligence or integrity of those involved, nor the quantity or quality of legitimate grievances they possessed. Indeed for all its scale, tenacity and openness the UK student movement of 2010 likewise failed to achieve its objectives or indeed really catalyse a larger movement beyond itself - although in retrospect it undoubtedly undermined any credible argument the coalition could communicate about its ambition to ‘share’ the burden of austerity.