Deutsch
English
FrançaisSub menu: Home
Home / Index of Authors
Wheatcroft, Geoffrey
Subscribe to receive the texts of "Wheatcroft, Geoffrey" as RSS feeds
2 articles of this author have been cited in the European Press Review so far.
Geoffrey Wheatcroft on a public spirit beyond Left and Right
The Swiss fire brigade and the British coast guard are good examples of self-help initiatives that go beyond Left and Right, writes Geoffrey Wheatcroft in The Guardian: "A Cornish lifeboat crew and an Oberland fire brigade refute dogmatic individualism and 'vulgar-Thatcherism': there is such a thing as society. The real distinction isn't between individual and collective, but between the voluntary and the coercive. And yet for that reason those amateur platoons are a rebuke also to the Left - or at least to state socialism. In either its Leninist or Fabian forms, socialism assumed unconsciously that people could not or would not deal with their lives by their own initiative and through co-operation unenforced and unregulated by the state. Even the moderate socialism of our own Labour party was all too clearly based on the belief that the lower classes were too backward, feckless and idle to look after themselves and had to be taken care of, whether they liked it or not. In that respect, the modern welfare state took over from older repressive institutions, and in the process helped eviscerate the finest thing Britain has produced: the voluntary institutions of the self-helping working class."
» full article (external link, English)
More from the press review on the subject » United Kingdom
The British love of alcohol
The author Geoffrey Wheatcroft complains in the Financial Times about the British attitude to alcohol. All over the country he describes as "quite a sight; drunken 18-year-olds shrieking and vomiting as they stagger out of pubs and clubs.... But it was ever thus. We 'decorous' English have in reality always been a most dissipated and licentious people. Our literature celebrates drinking – see Shakespeare's Falstaff – and public drunkenness was a political topic long ago. ... In the late 19th century, moralists pronounced that 'drink is the curse of the working classes', (which Oscar Wilde nicely and very truly inverted as 'Work is the curse of the drinking classes'). ... It is ironical that Labour, which succeeded the Liberals as the party of the left and even the party of Protestant puritanism, has now become the party of "the Trade,” pushing through deregulation of drinking that the Tories would have shrunk from. ...In Gladstone's time, Dr Magee, the Bishop of Peterborough, expressed the fine Tory sentiment that he would rather see England free than England sober. If he could now take a look at, say, Peterborough on a Saturday night, he might think again."
» full article (external link, English)
More from the press review on the subject » Public Culture, » United Kingdom
© 2005-2012