James Butler is a contributing editor at the LRB. He co-founded Novara Media in 2011 and hosted its weekly radio show for several years.
After the grovelling, thousands of troops processed in armed celebration. Somewhere beyond the cordon, the Metropolitan Police arrested a few republicans for precrime. Commentators purred that this, after all, is what Britain does best.
Translating ethical urgency into a politics of care would not lack for pathologies: it would be potentially suffocating, conformist, a licence for moral scolds wielding duty as a cudgel and inclined to conceal abuse. But the urgency remains. All of us depend, in early age and often at the end of life, on the care of others. We are shaped by individual, consequential but highly contingent acts of care, or their absence. To think about care is to shuttle back and forth between social totality and the irreducible complexity of individual needs, from feeding or washing to dignity or meaningful attention. Because it concerns the state, care must be thought of in the aggregate – unit costs, labour time, population trends – but many carers worry that such categories miss everything significant about their work. It doesn’t help that so many definitions of care are vague or tautologous, constituting the entire range of social activities that allow human beings to exist in the world.
The spectacle of fringe libertarianism crashing and burning on contact with the real world would be funny if we didn’t have to live through the consequences. It isn’t clear what Conservatives think conservatism is any longer: what aspect of actually existing British society (rather than ersatz Victorian fantasy) they seek to conserve, or even what they think the roots of the country’s problems in fact are. The easy, nonsense answers – Remainer fifth columnists, decadent critical race theorists and debauched metropolitans – have their idiot adherents still, some of them sincere and dangerous rather than merely cynical. But they are fictions that won’t stand up to the very real problems of the winter now bearing down on us.
Despite lasting almost two months, the process of selecting Britain’s new prime minister has revealed little about what Liz Truss intends to do. Her short victory speech contained pro forma praise for her predecessor and ritual execration of the defeated socialist threat. Her Downing Street speech turned on the Cameron-era cliché about an ‘aspiration nation’. She...
Boris Johnson does not like resigning. Shamelessness has been his trademark, and it has allowed him to brazen out scandals that would have brought down other politicians (and better men). Before his speech outside Number Ten on 7 July, his sole political resignation had been from Theresa May’s cabinet in 2018, the opening gambit in his successful campaign to take her job. In 2004,...
In the run up to the local elections, and following his recent piece on the care crisis, James Butler joins Tom to discuss some of the other problems facing the UK, and what the two major parties are promising...
James Butler and Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite talk to Tom about Britain's new monarch and Prime Minister.
James Butler joins Tom to consider the fall of Boris Johnson, the candidates hoping to replace him, and what the next few years of British politics might look like.
Geoff Mann talks to James Butler about the economic models developed by William Nordhaus and others, widely used by governments around the world as a tool to tackle climate change.
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