is north stockton a shithole?

nightfall diaries - the third in a series of reflective evening posts

'as interest rates rise, funding for a lot of marginally profitable companies is drying up... corporate “zombies” are wandering the markets, looking for the cheap credit they used to feast on.' - FT, unhedged podcast, 21st november 2023. there are great phrases in this podcast (such as 'cascading defaults' - not a good thing, no. hmm). 

'we have heard chancellor talk' - radio 4, world at one, 22nd november 2023. so they have reduced NI but overall taxes are still up (for the working people) due to fiscal drag. 4 million new people will be paying income tax because the lower limit to pay income tax has not been raised inline with inflation (or even wage rises). 

one welcome thing is that local housing allowance is up  (so people can get more help with their rent) - previously, the government had frozen the LHA rate since april 2020 squeezing people on benefits out of the private rented market and onto the street. now this will happen more slowly for a while, well actually no because more poor people will be paying more tax. 

on the other hand no-one can seemingly hear the home secretary talk (and certainly not when he calls north stockton a shithole). cleverly (is as cleverly does) for it is he, denies doing it and presumably would apologise if he had done (and so won't be apologising).  he doesn't seem to be on camera doing it and the sound quality on the scene is poor. EVP maybe. maybe this is the kind of thing the tories would say and thus we are imagining it. 

Q. did the home secretary really say that north stockton was a shithole? 

A. no that could never happen. even if he did. 

maybe we should go out and change the signage. 

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horsemouth needs to discuss high rise more - he thought of a parallel with michael hanneke's the seventh continent - bourge family order big blowout meal and then commit mass suicide  - just in the sheer disgusting excess of broken furniture and spoiled food. 

there is a kind of technological determinism at work, that if the high rise produced delinquency among the poor and working class families surely it should do the same for the middle classes, for the stockbrokers and for the dentists. seldom will you be introduced to more professionals - there is another joke in there about the social stratifications of the english class system being reflected onto the floors of the tower block.

'in a sense these people were the vanguard of a well-to-do and well-educated proletariat of the future, boxed up in their expensive apartments with their elegant furniture and intelligent sensibilities...' 

of course there arguments come back into being as the rich (or at least the well-to-do) start to live in high rises again.  

the film of high rise (novel 1975 film 2015) ends with a thatcher quote but this is itself a kind of homage to the end quote on malcolm bradbury's the history man (novel 1975 tv series 1981) this has our ostensible leftist lecturer howard kirk voting conservative in the next general election. horsemouth's parents howled with delight at this proof of his hypocrisy (and of the inevitable foundering of all leftist dreams on the rocks of economic reality and sociobiology).  

horsemouth always connected howard kirk with richard wilder, documentary film-maker and 'socal climber' of the post-apocalyptic high rise. there are comparisons to be made here with terry nation's survivors (tv series 1975) in which society collapses but everyone remains frightfully decent (except for the hoi-polloi). 

there are connections to be made to themroc (film 1973) also. 

ballard is interested in what lies beneath the decent lineaments of bourgeois existence and bourgeois consciousness but he doesn't think it is pretty and liberating (ok it might be liberating). in this he shares an interest in limit experiences. everything must be reduced to ruins to reveal the psychological states beneath.