dubdobdee:

Creativity, ideas and imagination are literally exiled from any culture that’s divorced itself from actual physical craft in some form (“workers by hand or by brain” as the lovely lost clause four put it, ruskino-marxism at its most poetic): I don’t mean everyone has to make pots or knit hats themselves, or bake their own pies; I do mean that tactile, sensuous form of some kind has to be in relatively small degree of separation

tomewing:

But it was with Tony Blair that the argument for moving from industry to services shifted from one of dire necessity to being an altogether more optimistic vision about Britain’s place in the world. The architects of New Labour were convinced that the future lay in what they called the “knowledge economy”. Mandelson declared Silicon Valley his “inspiration”; Brown swore he would make Britain e-commerce capital of the world within three years.

Again, the theme was simple: most of what could be manufactured could be done so more cheaply elsewhere. The future lay in coming up with the ideas, the software, and most of all, the brands. Once the British had sold cars and ships to the rest of the world; now they could flog culture and tourism and Lara Croft.

The odd thing is that all this techno-utopianism came from men who would struggle to order a book off Amazon. Alistair Campbell tells a story about how Blair got his first-ever mobile phone after stepping down as prime minister in 2007. His first text to Campbell read: “This is amazing, you can send words on a phone.”

hahahahaha oh christ.

(This whole piece is great: if you are not British and want to know abt why Britain is fucked you should read it.)

Not particularly on topic: Read a book (totally forget whose) that starts by specifically linking the decline of shipbuilding in northeast England to the rise of shipbuilding etc. in South Korea. Or vice versa. Perhaps the decline in the quality of British chartpop has a similar connection. But surely those under-employed Britons on Tyne and elsewhere could occupy themselves by writing about K-pop, thus leading to a resurgence in the knowledge industries. But sadly, this seems not to be happening.