44 Letters from the Liquid Modern World

"Bauman churns out more than a book a year at the moment, and he’s very emeritus, he’s been retired for some time. I’m a fan of his books in general, though sometimes he does go on a bit. This one is nice. It’s 44 letters about a wide range of issues, so you can pick and choose. The reason I picked it is that he makes a comment early on about the nature of the current crash and economic recession in Britain. He says how different it is in the North of England compared with London. In effect, London has been bailed out now: the crash came and the crash went. But it’s still being felt deeply in the North. There’s a sense of bitterness in that the origins of the crash had nothing to do with the North of England, but the North of England is being left with more and more of the repercussions. It’s interesting to read a description written by a man whose origins were partly Polish – he was a refugee from Germany – for Italians, talking about the place you happen to be living in. Also, he’s talking from the point of view of someone who is now very old. It’s reading about your life as if someone is talking about it incidentally, and it feels slightly uncomfortable. When Frankie Boyle was writing about Glasgow I got exactly the same uncomfortable feeling, of having the present being described very analytically. It’s not always a very happy picture that is being painted. Well, I’m in Sheffield now. Sheffield has probably been the most cut city in Britain for various reasons. There’s quite a competition between various cities at the moment, to claim that they’ve had the most cuts. All the cuts kicked in in April, that’s when the money stopped. People have been sacked, we’ve lost lots of people working in local authorities. The book is about many other things – this is just one letter of the 44 – but it’s the way he describes our modern times, it’s almost like somebody from another planet is describing life on earth. He’s detached enough so that he describes it as it is, and you read it and you go, “Yes, it is pretty awful.” But again, not much of an agenda. He’s not writing it specifically for people in Britain, he’s writing about the general situation we find ourselves in. But he’s been emeritus professor at Leeds for ages, so he’s not ignorant of the situation. I think he still lives near Leeds or in Leeds. A bit angry, a bit miserable, but also a sense of denial among a lot of people. People think that if they haven’t been cut, they’ll be OK, but there are four more years of cuts to come. The chancellor of the exchequer, George Osborne, plans that the United Kingdom will soon spend less through its government as a percentage of GDP than anywhere else in Western Europe, and less than the US plans to spend by 2015. George Osborne can only do this with the support of the prime minister, David Cameron, and the deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg . There’s a huge hatred here for Nick Clegg, which is largely, but not entirely, his fault. He is the local MP for the bit of Sheffield I’m in. We did have 12 sets of cuts, including £112m in cuts announced in one week, last summer. That may have been because he was deputy prime minister, to show he was loyal to the government. The saddest thing is watching young people not getting jobs, including our graduates and our postgraduate students. It appears as if almost no one is being hired under the age of 35. That’s by far the biggest cut, the lack of hirings. The other thing is the way we now accept things that we wouldn’t have accepted a year ago, like university fees of £9,000. And that’s just your fees! The Daily Mail worked out that along with the other debts that students have, to buy food and so on, you’re looking at a £70,000 debt for students. You couldn’t have imposed this on the population a year ago. Bauman has been writing about dystopias for years. His books are about how bad things are, and in a sense reality has caught up with him. It may have been this bad, but it didn’t feel this bad in Britain, particularly in the boom years. Whereas now it actually is as bad economically, and it’s beginning to feel as bad psychologically. Reality is moving towards what Bauman has been writing about for some time. No, just one of the letters is. He generally talks about advanced capitalism and what’s wrong with it, how it can’t carry on like it is etc. But in an interesting way, it’s more nuanced than is the work of some younger writers. It means you can’t get hold of it, it’s very hard to understand what’s happening, it’s moving around. I think he means almost like mercury, a liquid metal. It’s very hard to get a sense of reality at the moment: you think things are a certain way, and then suddenly the banks have crashed and the money has run out. It’s about insecurity."