Has anyone (other than NHH who recommended it to me) read this book by Andy Beckett about the alleged decade of gloom? A good read thus far, and certainly of interest to those who commented relatively favourably on the period in that thread we had about the subject a few years ago. Tubby Isaacs for one would dig, I think.

Sounds like it would be good. I'm particularly interested in the (relative) radicalisation of Labour in 1973 or so. Very under discussed subject.

This comes out in paperback on Feb 4. I've just pre-ordered a copy for £4.99.

Meanwhile, I have used the awesome power of kindle to download it automatically! Bwahahahahaha!

Look forward to reading it.

(edit: this kindle thing could end up costing me a lot of money. It makes impulse buying terrifyingly simple).

You got one for krismas?

Indeed-y do. Courtesy of the GLW. Who has since spent much of the last week looking over my shoulder while I'm using it and yelling "stop buying things!"

So tell me all about it, now.

My lovely wife is ecstatic about hers. I want to use my genius level IT skills to figure out if there's any way of downloading from it but she won't let me near the thing. If there were I'd buy myself one in a second. Have you checked out the small print AG? Someone told me that you weren't actually buying books, you were leasing them to read but that's not the way the agreement reads to me. However lawyer-speak makes my eyes glaze over so I could be wrong.

I'm patiently waiting for Amazon to deal me the Francis Wheen book on the same subject.

What do you want to know, TT?

The downloading of content is frighteningly, frighteningly easy. Out-of-copy-right books (e.g. long dead people...Dostoyeksy, etc) are about a quid each. in-print fiction and non-fiction is probably about 40% off. Some trade books are 60 or 70% off.

Reading takes a bit of getting used to. The screen is very easy to read, but what's odd is that a screen only holds between a third and a half of the text of a paper page. There's no scrolling like you're reading on a computer - it's strict pagination, with page forward and page back buttons for navigation. Once you get used to it, I think it works pretty well. I think one improvement would be backlighting so you could read when it's dark, but that would probably just be one more part that could fail.

For more complicated stuff you have to use the "mouse" (a button that moves in four directions and can be pushed in like a left-click on a regular mouse. Searching means using the keypad, which is flat-out terrible.

Re: content. AdC, my understanding is that you own, not rent. But I'm not really one for the small print. And you certainly can download content to more than one device but I think it has to be registered in the same name for that to work.

All that, certainly.

The best thing for me, though, would be being able to rent books.

And to read in the dark.

I'll have to have a go on someone's, sometime.

Rent books? Maybe someone will think of that one day, make rental free, and call it a library.

Do you ever come into the City? Anyone can join their libraries and they are excellent, will order new books very quickly for a pound.

Yeah, I meant that libraries should get into this Kindle lark, yeah.

I'm planning a trip to the newly reopened John Harvard down the road from work, soon.

Ah right.

Sarcasm's cheap but it's made me remember how great libraries are.

Actually, I'm really starting to dig this. That is, both the book and the kindle.

My quick reaction to the book is that it's pretty good. Though some of the stuff in the intro of the "but look at how low unemployment was - why did everyone think we were in trouble?" variety strikes me as either irritatingly naive or economically illiterate.
People at the top of a slide don't notice their height, they look at which direction they're heading in. (But perhaps I'm reacting too quickly...still only on chapter 5)

Anyways, the kindle - now that I've got used to the fact that a "page" only holds 150-160 words and not the 450-500 of most print books, I'm finding I can actually read much more quickly. My eyes don't wander on a page, and I'm finding that I can comprehend an entire kindle page in two "chunks" (or sometimes even just one), which I find allows me to speed through text without losing comprehension. I think the large font, which is very easy on the eye, has a lot to do with it, too. It would be irritating as shit on a printed page, but it really works on the kindle.

Though some of the stuff in the intro of the "but look at how low unemployment was - why did everyone think we were in trouble?" variety strikes me as either irritatingly naive or economically illiterate.

Well the point he was making was a reference to something Blair said, at neoliberalism's height, in 2005, about how low unemployment at that point was. How many people said we were headed for a fall at that point, even though we were? No one with any power or influence, that's for sure. I don't remember many people calling The Economist or the Wall Street Journal "economically illiterate" in 2005.

I think you have to understand the context here AG - over here, we are absolutely inundated with subtle and not so subtle propaganda about how uniformly dreadful or grey the Seventies were, and how everything that followed under Thatcher/Major/Blair was "necessary". This helps to poison the already piss-poor standard of political debate in Britain because even now any talk about serious wealth redistribution, or fairer taxation, or greater employment rights, is so often mindlessly drowned out with this mantra of "that'll be like going back to the Seventies, the Worst Decade Ever". Beckett's not a revolutionary, but I'm finding his book an informative and sober corrective to a damaging establishment consensus that has sprung up around a very interesting period in our history.

Like Nishlord I am waiting for Wheen's book on the era to come out so I've avoided Beckett's so far for fear of crossover.

What is going on with it, anyone know?

E10 - like I said, I should probably suspend judgement until after I've read the book. But it does seem to me that there was a big difference between 1972 (say, just before the Miners strike) and 2005. The latter was a general financial crash - if Britain was going down, so was everyone else, everyone was in the same boat. In 1972, it wasn't like that - what was so very visible was Britain's *relative* decline. Germany and France and Holland and whoever else you want to name were very obviously heading in the other direction. The problems weren't of a general financial crisis nature - they were very specifically British problems, related to British policy decisions (and the very heavy legacy of the Industrial Revolution and the Empire)

To some extent, this probably was an issue of militant labour, but also quite clearly (as I think the Heath chapters point out) it was that management practices were brutally outdated and the managerial class as a whole was blinkered and insular. Sometimes that managerial class was in the private sector - other times it was in the public sector. The "white heat of technology" hadn't even really singed the economy - plant and equipment were old, outdated and not especially productive.

My memories of my first trip to the UK (in '78) are, to a large extent, about how *shabby* it was. This was not without its charms, of course (even then, I understood that the Beano was seriously old-school and liked it partly for that reason), but I never thought "wow, this is a country that's really on the up". The decay was palpable.

(Also, punks scared the shit out of me. But that's a different issue altogether).

You might be right AG, but that's why one of the interesting developments in the 70s was workplace democracy. People got the notion that the managerial class was failing them, but didn't then see why the managerial class's solution - sack the workforce and give the managerial class another crack - was either sensible or equitable. The idea of interrogating how companies made decisoin and how companies were owned grew, spawing the boom in worker co-ops which the government encouraged especially when Benn was SoS at Trade and Industry.

Back in November, the woman two desks over from me told me that her husband bought her one of these. I said "A what?" and she told me again. "Come see it." So I walked over to her desk fully expecting to be shown Barbie's boyfriend. I thought she'd said "A Ken doll." Twice.