Nick Cohen: Writing from London

On the edge of Rugeley stands Amazon’s largest distribution centre in Britain. Life for the workers who trudge around the 800,000 sq ft warehouse is not as bad as it was for the men who once worked in the pits of the Staffordshire coalfield, but that is not saying much. They must carry satnavs, which direct their movements round the stacks and flash warnings from managers to stop dawdling or chatting with colleagues. Britain being the way it is, they have no job security.

Trade unionists call the Amazon shed a “slave camp”. But whatever arguments they have with Amazon’s management, one point should be beyond dispute – Rugeley is in Britain. British customers send Amazon their money. British workers package their goods and send them off in vans along roads built and maintained by the British taxpayer. If workers steal – and before they can go home or visit the canteen, they must walk through airport-style security scanners to prove they have not – Amazon will call on the taxpayer-funded police to arrest them and the taxpayer-funded criminal justice system to prosecute them. Admittedly, Amazon’s buyers who supply the stock are based in Slough rather than Rugeley. But the last time I looked Slough was in Britain too.

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Review of 5 Days in May by Andrew Adonis

Cool anger drives Andrew Adonis’s first-hand account of how Labour tried to stop the Liberal Democrats handing Britain over to a reactionary and incompetent Conservative administration. As a Blairite education and transport minister and a former member of the Social Democratic party, Adonis had spent his adult life believing a “progressive coalition” could unite the centre and left of British politics.

His five days in May 2010 negotiating on Labour’s behalf disabused him of that notion and much else besides.

“Clegg wouldn’t put the Tories in power, throwing over a British Liberal tradition going back a century and a half as a progressive anti-Tory party,” he thought as the electorate returned a hung parliament. When they heard that David Cameron was making Clegg a generous offer, Gordon Brown and much of the cabinet thought the “process would turn to our favour once the Tories and Lib Dems had rehearsed the extent of their differences”.

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When you see rottenness in a system you must ask: does it come from one bad apple or does the whole barrel stink?

The rank smell emanating from the coalition is impossible to miss. At first sniff, it appears to come from the blazered figure of Iain Duncan Smith. It has taken me some time to identify its source, because appearances deceive. From his clipped hair to his polished shoes, Duncan Smith seems to be a man who has retained the values of the officer corps of the Scots Guards he once served.

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We flatter ourselves when we boast of mastery of the ironic style. Unlike literal-minded Germans and Americans, we are not ashamed to live behind masks and speak in riddles. On the contrary, we delight in it and damn foreigners for their insistence on saying what they mean. They lack our sophistication. The delightfully quirky British sense of humour leaves them cold.

If we were harder on ourselves, we would notice that on the reverse side of the ironic coin are the smuttiness and evasiveness that always accompany self-censorship. We would wonder how we ended up in a country where fear of causing offence or crossing a powerful or litigious interest had become so ingrained the British could no longer speak plainly or read freely.

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If you want to combat poverty, empower women. There are few uncontested arguments in social policy, but this is one of them. Give women control of their fertility and overpopulation and undereducation will fall. Give women financial independence and they will have the means to free themselves and their children from dangerous men.

Everyone accepts the proposition that, in general, mothers are more likely than fathers to spend money on children. Even the British government accepts it after a fashion. But religious bigotry, rightwing prejudice and bureaucratic convenience have made the coalition determined to forget what it already knows.

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