{"title":"15-minute cities and the denial(s) of auto-freedom","authors":"Ian Loader","doi":"10.1111/newe.12330","DOIUrl":"10.1111/newe.12330","url":null,"abstract":"<p>For over 60 years, the way we think about, plan and experience cities has been organised around the private car. The result has been the production, among many people, of what in his recent book <i>Affluence and Freedom</i> Pierre Charbonnier calls “a sense of self” with “psychosocial attachments to automobile autonomy”, which has come to be seen as synomymous with personal liberty.1</p><p>Today, there is mounting evidence and recognition of the costs of that liberty – for the safety of other road users, the vibrancy and cohesion of urban communities, and the future of our climate-changed planet. The mood appears to be shifting, and with it the policy agenda. The devolved governments in Scotland2 and Wales3 have committed to introducing a default 20mph speed limit in towns and cities. Many English councils are following suit. Local authorities across England are experimenting with congestion-charging, low-emission zones and low traffic neighbourhoods. In many cities, land once allocated to car use is being re-purposed as cycling infrastructure.</p><p>‘15-minute cities’ is the idea that day-to-day amenities should be available within a short radius of people's homes, meaning basic essentials can be accessed on foot or by bike without reliance on the car. It involves creating neighbourhoods where cars drive around rather than across cities, making them places of dwelling rather than ‘rat runs’ for through traffic. It means neighbourhoods in which cars are guests not colonisers. It is this idea that has turned Ghent in Belgium and Groningen in the Netherlands into cities whose neighbourhoods have been reclaimed from car dominance and where walking and cycling has replaced once hegemonic automobility. Mayor Anne Hidalgo is currently pioneering a cognate series of measures (such as replacing on-street parking with cycling insfrastructure, creating neighbourhood parks and new local services, and expanding active use of ground-level buildings) which aim to transform Paris into a ‘city of proximities’.4</p><p>The 15-minute city idea underpins Oxford's current – and controversial – plans to cut traffic congestion. In addition to implementing several Low Traffic Neighbourhoods, Oxfordshire City Council plans from 2024 to trial six traffic filters which aim to reduce traffic in Oxford by 20 per cent. According to Andrew Gant, the cabinet member for Highways Management: “our roads are gridlocked with traffic, and this traffic is damaging our economy and our environment. Oxford needs a more sustainable, reliable and inclusive transport system for everyone”. Traffic filters, he says, are designed “to deliver a safer, cleaner and more prosperous place to live, work and visit”.5</p><p>Let's not dwell here on the ‘global conspiracy’ animus that fuels these protests. Instead, I want to focus on the objection that 15-minute cities are an assault on personal freedom because they ‘trap’ or ‘silo’ residents in discrete neighbourhoods; restrict people's ability to d","PeriodicalId":37420,"journal":{"name":"IPPR Progressive Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/newe.12330","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44921879","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Frames of war and welfare","authors":"Ben Whitham, Nadya Ali","doi":"10.1111/newe.12331","DOIUrl":"10.1111/newe.12331","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The political-economic terrain of the UK has been beset by a series of overlapping crises in recent years – from the global financial crisis (GFC) of 2007/08 (and the longer-term crises of public services induced by the decade-plus of austerity that followed), to the global public health crisis of the pandemic and its socio-economic impact. Today, stagnant wages and rocketing inflation have led to talk of a major ‘cost of living crisis’, with energy bills and basic commodities becoming increasingly unaffordable to many.</p><p>This article explores some of the frames that have shaped recent political-economic crises and crisis-responses in the UK. We argue that successive waves of crisis and austerity in the UK have been framed as universal or equalising moments, even as their impacts have been unevenly distributed. Pervasive racialised inequalities that are normalised, unseen, or ignored in ‘normal’, non-crisis contexts are exacerbated by both crises and crisis-responses. Austerity Islamophobia - the racialised framing of Muslims in the context of political-economic crises – provides the focal case study for our argument.</p><p>The UK government's economic response to the arrival of the global Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 included an unprecedented national furlough programme: the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme. From March 2020 to September 2021, the scheme constituted a massive programme of public spending, with employers given up to 80 per cent of staff salaries and employment costs to retain staff while they were ‘locked down’ at home and unable to work. That one of the most radical Conservative governments in recent history, led by the supposedly self-help Churchillian icon Boris Johnson, could find itself effectively nationalising all industry – albeit temporarily – might have offered a glimmer of hope for political and economic progressives for a radical reappraisal of the economic status quo.</p><p>Yet from the outset of the pandemic, the spectre of austerity lingered in the air. The invocation of discursive frames from the 2010–2020 austerity era was an early warning sign. In 2020, claims that ‘we're all in this together’ and that we should ‘keep calm and carry on’ – frames central to the cultural politics of austerity after the GFC – were revived with gusto, from corporate advertising to political speeches.2 But the trouble with these framings in terms of who a crisis affects, and how we should respond to it, is that we have never all been ‘in it together’. The systemic classist, racist, sexist, and ableist inequalities that pervade UK society in ‘pre-crisis’ times position some people to be more adversely impacted than others when a crisis arrives.</p><p>However, as Lucinda Platt has shown, racial disparities in Covid-19 deaths were not about the supposed (mis)behaviours of racially minoritised groups.11 They were about the complex interaction of social, political, and economic inequalities faced by Black and Asian groups. These inequa","PeriodicalId":37420,"journal":{"name":"IPPR Progressive Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/newe.12331","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47329187","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Anthropocene as framed by the far right","authors":"Dan Bailey, Joe Turner","doi":"10.1111/newe.12329","DOIUrl":"10.1111/newe.12329","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The ecological crisis is subject to a series of political discourses which each imperfectly capture the complex myriad of social, economic, and technological dynamics that are degrading planetary ecosystems. These discourses shape the public understanding of the environmental crisis and the appropriate strategies for its resolution, with each discourse purveyed by distinctive but evolving political factions and social forces.3<sup>,</sup>4</p><p>The far right discourse on the ecological crisis has historically been to deny its existence.5<sup>,</sup>6 This denial has taken many forms, but most commonly the science of ecological degradation has been disavowed and this has been matched by the refusal to accept any national responsibility for addressing the unfolding global ecological catastrophe. Customarily, the scientific evidence has been pronounced as a conspiracy designed to benefit ‘globalist elites’ or a plot to undermine national sovereignty through the ratification of multilateral agreements. This has served to bolster resistance to effective environmental policies.</p><p>However, this environmental discourse is no longer as central to the far right movement as it was in the 2000s and 2010s. Increasingly, climate science is tacitly accepted, but the finger of blame is being disingenuously pointed towards the far right's traditional enemies.</p><p>As environmental issues have risen up the political agenda (becoming salient to younger voters in particular), far right parties have seemingly shifted away from denialism of the science. This shift has not led to a recognition of the need for a just economic transformation or, indeed, any political action commensurate to the scale and character of the environmental crisis. Instead, the increasing (albeit belated) recognition of environmental issues (primarily those which exist within national borders) has been fused with an anti-immigration agenda to create a new invidious framing of environmental politics. The emerging discourse, which we have conceptualised as ‘ecobordering’ elsewhere,7 is characterised by climate nationalism and seeks to depict immigration (of which migration from the Global South is made hyper-visible) as a threat to local and national environments.</p><p>This discourse takes two primary forms. First, it aims to politicise the environmental impacts of ‘mass immigration’ from the Global South, while depoliticising the impacts of ‘natives’. This includes linking ‘mass immigration’ with rising demand for natural resources and local environmental problems such as the pollution resulting from greater traffic and consumption. Immigration, it is suggested, is to blame for such problems, which were not issues of concern for local areas prior to multiculturalism.</p><p>The lack of belonging is key to understanding this portrayal; as Le Pen explicitly put it: “environmentalism [is] the natural child of patriotism, because it's the natural child of rootedness… if you're a nomad, you'","PeriodicalId":37420,"journal":{"name":"IPPR Progressive Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/newe.12329","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49299139","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Economic justice in the UK","authors":"Frances O'Grady","doi":"10.1111/newe.12321","DOIUrl":"10.1111/newe.12321","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":37420,"journal":{"name":"IPPR Progressive Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43700044","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Racial justice in the UK","authors":"Dr Halima Begum","doi":"10.1111/newe.12323","DOIUrl":"10.1111/newe.12323","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":37420,"journal":{"name":"IPPR Progressive Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43879973","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The task ahead for Labour if it came to power","authors":"Gerry Holtham","doi":"10.1111/newe.12324","DOIUrl":"10.1111/newe.12324","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Any Labour government coming to power in the next few years will face a severe test. We do not know where the economy will be. What we do know is the economy has deep-seated long-term problems. These will need to be addressed while social aspirations will be harder to achieve. Neglect of our ecology will be taking an increasing toll. Moreover, the state of public services will be appalling.</p><p>Previous Labour governments have come to power in difficult circumstances. Are there lessons to be learned? The Attlee government inherited a country exhausted by war and very deeply in debt. The Wilson government inherited a bursting bubble with incipient inflation and a chronic balance of payments crisis. Only the Blair government inherited a relatively tranquil economic situation and was more easily able to tackle underspending on public services. Not coincidentally, the Blair government was the most electorally successful. Clement Attlee survived a single term and one year before losing office. Harold Wilson won two elections and survived six years before losing. He returned for another four years of effectively minority government in the turbulent 1970s. Tony Blair won three elections and he and Gordon Brown between them had 13 years in office.</p><p>Yet there is no correlation between time in office and the scale of the legacy that each government was able to leave. The Attlee government implemented the Beveridge plan for the welfare state,3 founded the National Health Service and nationalised the main utilities, while maintaining defence expenditures at over double current levels in relation to Gross Domestic Product (GDP).4 The Wilson government's effort to cure the UK's economic problems with indicative planning <i>à la française</i> was a failure but the government reformed laws on divorce and abortion, legalised homosexuality and abolished capital punishment. Attempts to reform trade union law also foundered but the government founded ACAS to mediate industrial disputes and passed laws against racial discrimination and legislation to promote health and safety at work. It also founded The Open University – Wilson's favourite accomplishment.</p><p>What explains this relative failure to leave a mark? It is partly to do with the zeitgeist, which is not under party-political control. The Attlee government rode a wave of belief in the power of government to improve people's lives. After all, complete mobilisation and planning had won a world war. Socialism was fashionable and the military and industrial successes of the Soviet Union, though not its political repression, were admired. Though the electorate tired of post-war hardships, the Conservatives bowed to the temper of the times and maintained Labour's innovations, reversing only the nationalisation of the steel industry.</p><p>Blair, by contrast, came to power when the neoliberal ideological wave was at the flood. Academic macroeconomics, often swept by fashion, had taken a reactionary turn","PeriodicalId":37420,"journal":{"name":"IPPR Progressive Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/newe.12324","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43490214","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Social movements and digital media in the UK","authors":"Anastasia Kavada","doi":"10.1111/newe.12318","DOIUrl":"10.1111/newe.12318","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The past 30 years have seen sweeping change in how social movements organise, mobilise and appeal to the public, largely as a result of digital media. This article takes stock of these changes by focussing on transnational movements with a strong presence in the UK, movements that were emblematic of broadly two key phases in the relationship between digital media and social movements: the periods before and after the emergence of social media.</p><p>The pre-social media period began roughly in the mid-1990s and ended with the 2011 wave of mobilisations. It was a phase dominated by websites and email lists, and included significant experimentation as this was when social movements started to explore the uses of digital media for activism.</p><p>GJM activists used websites and email lists intensively to disseminate alternative information to the public and to promote the activities of the movement. The web was important for establishing alternative news websites and for facilitating the production of news from below, by amateur citizen journalists with limited resources and training. Indymedia played a crucial role in this respect. The first Indymedia site was founded during the ‘battle of Seattle’ when GJM activists realised that mainstream news outlets were either marginalising or misrepresenting the protest. UK Indymedia, which also began in 1999, trained a new generation of activists in alternative news production. Indymedia was indispensable for promoting a culture of ‘open publishing’, allowing activists with no journalistic experience to easily publish their own reports from the streets and in an unfiltered manner, a feature that seems a given now, but was almost unheard of at the time. Indymedia also reported on the anti-war mobilisations in the beginning of the 2000s, when people opposed to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq took to the streets. The demonstration against the war in Iraq in February 2003 still remains the largest that the UK has ever seen.</p><p>Websites and email lists also transformed the organisational dynamics of social movements. Communication that was much more expensive in the past, and thus required infrastructures offered by well-resourced organisations – from printers to photocopiers to telephone lines –, could now be undertaken by smaller groups or even by interested individuals. This provided grassroots groups and activists with greater organisational autonomy in coordinating large protest events. It also lowered the costs of negotiation in the formation of coalitions, making it easier to bring different groups together in organising events under informal umbrella platforms. Activists could simply launch a common webpage for the event, with links to the websites of separate organisations, without entering into in-depth discussions. Therefore, the use of websites and email lists allowed the GJM and other social movements during this period to operate as ‘networks of networks’, eschewing hierarchical organising i","PeriodicalId":37420,"journal":{"name":"IPPR Progressive Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/newe.12318","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43142070","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Reflections on the criminalisation of sex between men in England and Wales","authors":"Justin Bengry","doi":"10.1111/newe.12325","DOIUrl":"10.1111/newe.12325","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The past 30 years have seen substantial change and improvement in both the law on and the state's treatment of men who have sex with men in England and Wales. Men were still imprisoned for consensual, adult homosexual offences into the 1990s – David Bonney, for example, was incarcerated in a military prison for four months in 1993 for homosexual conduct while serving in the Royal Air Force (RAF).1</p><p>Sex between men was first criminalised in England in 1533 (and extended to Wales in 1542):2 The Buggery Act, passed during the reign of Henry VIII, made “the detestable and abominable vice of buggery committed with mankind or beast” a capital offence, and while the meaning of buggery has its own history, in practice it was used to punish anal sex between men. Buggery remained punishable by death until 1861, although the last executions were in 1835.</p><p>Even as the threat of execution loomed over queer men for more than 300 years, an even more pernicious law from 1885 affected many more men: the infamous ‘Labouchere amendment’. Added to the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, this created the new crime of ‘gross indecency’, criminalising all sexual acts between men short of buggery while leaving the precise definition of this term undefined.</p><p>Later legislation began the process of redressing this injustice, with the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012 creating the possibility that men convicted of abolished crimes – primarily consensual buggery and gross indecency – could have them disregarded, effectively erased, by application to the Home Office.</p><p>Momentum for further change increased with the 2009 state apology and subsequent royal pardon in 2013 of mathematician and Enigma code breaker Alan Turing.3 Turing had been convicted in 1952 for gross indecency with another man, after which he was subjected to hormone treatments to reduce his libido, and later died in 1954 in what the coroner determined to be a suicide. Why, many asked, should one need to be a war hero or subject of a Hollywood blockbuster to be eligible for a pardon for consenting same-sex acts that were no longer criminal offences? A major petition called on the state to pardon the further 49,000 men convicted under ‘anti-gay’ laws.</p><p>The 2017 amendment to the Policing and Crime Act 2009 did finally extend a new statutory pardon to many more men than Turing, but it continued to be overwhelmingly exclusionary, restricted to those who had first received a disregard – itself still a flawed form of restitution due to its limited scope. Indeed, the 2017 pardon has been criticised on several fronts. For the living, it required first securing a disregard, after which a pardon was automatic if also entirely symbolic. For the dead, a pardon was automatic without application. The state simply deemed an unknown number of deceased men who had been found guilty of an unknown number of crimes across the previous five centuries, which would go unresearched and unconfirmed, to be pardone","PeriodicalId":37420,"journal":{"name":"IPPR Progressive Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/newe.12325","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45425524","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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