No Logo

"This is another modern classic worth revisiting. It charts how brands have become tangled up with identity – how they stopped being markers of quality and became symbols of identity and markers of status. Logos have moved from the inside label to being splashed all over products. Having a coffee in Starbucks is an experience not a product. What you wear helps signal your worth. For certain groups of people these are real questions about how you get your worth in society if you don’t have a job, don’t own a home and feel like you’re in a depressed environment. This is some of the context of the scenes from the riots of people looting Footlocker, trying on shoes while they were waiting to use the de-tagger. For most people across the world, those images were deeply challenging. No Logo is definitely an informative book in relation to our times. I think that they are related. If you are young, the prospects of work are grim, the prospects of owning your home are beyond you, and you are expected to pay the baby boomer generation’s pensions for them. We live in times where the inequalities in our society – because of problems in our economic liberal model – are sharp, and so young people feel they are exercising their rights justly by pitching a tent and protesting. This is directly relevant to where we are in Britain, and I think we will probably see more unrest in different ways. Obviously I don’t want to see more riots, but I’m saddened that I predicted the riots, in parliament, on several occasions before they happened. I didn’t know they would happen this summer, and of course I didn’t hope they would happen in my constituency. But we are living through very turbulent times, and the books that I’ve recommended here chart aspects of that story. My own book, I hope, also fits into that canon. We’ve got to give people a stake on the board of companies, to reduce the inequality between wages. We should not be selling off £9bn of private land, we should be creating community trusts for land so that people can actually get on the ladder. We should definitely, it seems to me, ban advertising targeted at children. We should be concerned about the Internet and advertising, and the details that modern companies seem to have on all of us. We should be very concerned about a workless society, and ensure that the young generation is occupied in work. And we need to ensure that the breakdown in masculinity in some communities is being moderated by mentors in society. They’re not going to get work in the private sector, but I think it was a mistake to scrap the Future Jobs Fund . The scarring effect of generations of young people doing nothing active with their time is disastrous. So I do think that the state has to step in to keep young people accustomed to the business of getting up and doing something, then going home at the end of the day. Better that, it seems to me, than queues on the dole. I didn’t want to write a partisan book, as far as I could. David Cameron has talked about a moral capitalism, but I don’t see him giving people a stake on our boards and I don’t see him dealing with the housing crisis. His answer to all this is the big society. But the big society is not enough. It doesn’t challenge the banks – and these are banks who still expect families who had their houses burnt out in Tottenham to pay interest on homes that no longer exist! The problem with the big society is it’s not very big. The big society is confined largely to the public sector. It doesn’t really want to see the rest of our environment. So I am doubtful. I can see why the Lib Dems [Liberal Democrats] and the Conservatives have come together at this time, but I think that their combined liberalism is precisely not the answer that we need."