Beatrix Campbell is the author of a book about poverty and politics in the Eighties, published in 1984: Wigan Pier Revisited.
It is in poor old times like these that wordsmiths turn their minds to the collective state of the nation. We are driven to ask ourselves who we are, and who is ‘them’, and who is ‘us’. Who is Britain? Are you? Am I? While the Right proclaims a new nationalist project – to make Britain great once again – and in so doing invokes a notion of ‘we’ who share the same stake in some imagined national redemption, the Right’s critics are driven to the backyard of the nation where we will find, not the national ‘we’, but a miscellany of difference, where speech, circumstance, colour, sex and class suggest the experiences of exclusion, of otherness.’
Among the people who almost certainly took comfort from the tone of the national discussion of events in Cleveland in the summer of 1987 were three middle-aged men from a housing estate in...
Twenty-odd years ago I was lucky enough to hear the great Jeannie Robertson, then at the height of her powers as a singer in Scots of anything from ‘classic’ ballads to sheer bawdy....
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