Latest news with #ChristopherClark
The Guardian
13-06-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Thatcher, Farage and toe-sucking: Adam Curtis on how Britain came to the brink of civil war
The mood is very fragile. There is a feeling of global disorder and growing chaos. The threat of war edges ever closer. Some people are even predicting revolution in the UK. Two weeks ago, Dominic Cummings gave an interview to Sky News prophesying violent uprising, then wrote on his blog that there is 'Whitehall terror of widespread white-English mobs turning political … Parts of the system increasingly fear this could spin out of control into their worst nightmare.' I think something much deeper is going on beneath the surface of Britain today. Two years ago, a historian called Christopher Clark wrote a book that makes you look at your own time in a completely different way. Called Revolutionary Spring, it tells the story of the unrest that swept Europe in 1848. In a few weeks, uprisings spread like ferocious brushfire – from Paris to Berlin to Vienna, Prague and Milan. Thousands of demonstrators stormed national assemblies and kings fled their countries, caught up in a wave of violent upheaval never seen before. Clark's book inspired me to make Shifty, my new series of films, because the world he describes feels so similar to today. One in which 'the political horizon was dark. Neither nations nor governments knew where they were going. 'Everyone had surrendered to doubt and anxiety. All forms of belief were enfeebled, all forms of authority shaken, social bonds had reached breaking point. The political horizon was dark. Neither nations nor governments knew where they were going. There was a sense of being 'on the eve of bloody wars and internal strife'.' All the revolutions failed in their original aim. But out of them came the bourgeois class that was going to run society in the future. Fascinatingly, Clark showed how from that came all the ways of ordering the world that we today accept as eternal – not just the political structures of left and right but fundamental ideas of our time, like social class. But he is clear that they may be temporary. 'They belonged to the world that had not yet encountered the great disciplining identities of modern politics. We belong to one in which those identities are swiftly dissolving.' I wanted to make a series set in Britain over the past 45 years that shows how all our political certainties dissolved. It is built of hundreds of moments that try to evoke what it has felt like to live through this age. The mood is that strange twilight zone between history and memory; fragments that have not yet been fixed into a formal version of the past. From intersex dogs and fat-shaming ventriloquists to avant-garde hair. Leeks by moonlight. Ken Dodd's suitcase. Nuns playing ping pong. Margaret Thatcher's handbag. A scanner from Maplin. Netto. And dark moments – racist attacks, suspicion of others and modern paranoia about conspiracies in Britain's past. Above all, I wanted to trace the rise of the thing that has destroyed the confidence of our age: distrust – not just of those in power, and of 'truth', but of everything and everyone around us and, ultimately, of ourselves. It didn't start like that. Thatcher believed that if you liberated people from state control they would become better and more confident. But to do this, she turned to radical rightwing economic thinkers – some of whom were very odd. About 15 years ago, I went to see a US economist called James Buchanan. I had to drive for hours deep into the mountains of Virginia to his farm. He told me that you couldn't trust anyone in any position of power. Everyone, he insisted, is driven by self-interest. We sat in a darkened room, with a thunderstorm raging outside, as he told me firmly that human beings didn't just follow their own self-interest when they were buying and selling stuff; they were driven by it all the time. So when people in power talked of being motivated by 'public duty', they were lying. He called this 'public choice theory', and it had an enormous effect on the advisers around Thatcher. It explained to them why all the bureaucrats that ran Britain were so useless. The economists invented a system called New Public Management (NPM) to control them. NPM said it was dangerous to leave people to motivate themselves through fuzzy notions such as 'doing good'. Instead, you created systems that monitored everyone through targets and incentives. Constantly watching and rewarding or punishing. It was the birth of modern HR. Anyone who has ever dealt with HR and their monitoring systems knows instinctively that they don't trust you. There is a very good moment that was captured on a documentary about London Zoo in 1993 made by Molly Dineen. The zoo had brought in a new HR expert who explains to the mild-mannered zookeepers how incentives and targets work. 'Once you do that,' he says, 'you've got them in the Grinder.' That's Buchanan's theories at work. And it was a terrible virus that was going to spread. But the roots of distrust didn't just come from the right. The patrician liberals in Britain were completely shocked that large sections of the working class voted for Thatcher. They had always drawn their influence and prestige from the idea that they cared for the 'little people' and the 'less well-off'. Now they turned on them in fury. I found a clip of the novelist Martin Amis promoting his book Money. Dripping with disdain, he says the working class have been seduced by the vulgar allure of money. They are, he said, stupid. It was at that moment the influence of liberal intellectuals began to slip. Power was shifting. There was one institution Thatcher still trusted, though: the security services. Even that crumbled with the case of Geoffrey Prime who worked at GCHQ. It started when Prime's wife came home to find him being questioned about the assault of a local girl. After the police left, he told her that he was the man they were looking for. She asked him if there was anything else she should know. He said yes: he'd also been spying for the Russians for the past 17 years. Thatcher was stunned. MI5 had vetted Prime five times and hadn't noticed anything. Even the Russians knew he was a paedophile. It became clear MI5 was hopeless. And when it failed to prevent the siege of the Libyan embassy in 1984, she ordered the home secretary, Leon Brittan, to reform it. MI5 fought back – spreading rumours through journalists that Brittan was a predatory paedophile, part of a secret ring of paedophile MPs in Westminster. Thirty years later, those rumours would burst to the surface as part of Operation Midland. None of it was true. By the end of the 80s the belief that you couldn't trust anyone in public life, which Buchanan started, finally came round to the politicians themselves. It was basic logic. If you believed public duty was a fiction, and all public servants were lying when they spoke of public duty, weren't the politicians also public servants? Which meant they must also be lying when they proclaimed they were working for the public good. One of the key figures in this process was the infamous publicist Max Clifford. He had picked up on the groundswell of distrust and found a way to monetise it. Clifford specialised in putting two or three of his clients together and cooking up stories from which they all benefited. He started in the late 80s with a famous radical leftwinger called Derek Hatton. He took him to a nightclub – which Clifford also represented. He photographed Hatton next to an heiress of the Baring bank family – whom he also represented – and cooked up a passionate romance between them. Then he turned to the Tories. When a government minister called David Mellor was revealed to be having an affair, his mistress – Antonia de Sancha – came to Clifford. He took her to meet the press in restaurants he represented, then told them stories about Mellor making love in a Chelsea shirt while toe-sucking and spanking. All invented. Sign up to What's On Get the best TV reviews, news and features in your inbox every Monday after newsletter promotion Clifford had opened the floodgates. In the early 90s, MP after MP was revealed to be a sleazy hypocrite who seemed far more concerned with his own weird sex life than governing the country and serving the people. The one I love is the story of David Ashby MP. He sued the Sunday Times in 1995 when they accused him of being a homosexual. He admitted he had shared a bed with another man, but said it was purely to save money on holiday. He admitted that his wife did call him 'Queenie' and 'Poofter', but said that was only because she was lonely in the marriage. He had bought her a dog to make her feel better. But it didn't work. Ashby told the court she threw plates and kitchen knives at him. She threatened to 'kick him in the bollocks to stop him having sex with anyone', and broke his glasses. Ashby lost the case, which put paid to his career. Soon, he was deselected by his local Tories as their parliamentary candidate. He later said of his ex-colleagues, on live radio: 'They're a bunch of shits, aren't they, and we know they are.' The early 90s saw an extraordinary collapse in trust in politicians. Created not just by Clifford, but also by Mohamed Al-Fayed, who said that he regularly paid MPs with cash in brown paper envelopes to ask questions for him in the Commons. It seemed to prove everything Buchanan had been saying: you couldn't trust anyone in public service. After I interviewed Buchanan in the Virginia mountains, I asked him about his life. He told me about how when he was training as an officer in the US Navy, he was constantly patronised by pompous officers from posh Ivy League universities. He was still angry about it – he knew they were all phoneys, he said, you could feel it. As I drove back I wondered if that was his real motivation. Dressed up in academic language, but beneath it was simply revenge. He was going to destroy that smug patrician class. And he succeeded. Big time. By the second half of the 90s, even the politicians came to believe they were bad. And they did the most extraordinary thing: they gave away power. They did it partly because they knew they couldn't fight against the rising tide of public doubt. But they were also persuaded by another force they felt they could no longer fight against: the markets. The first to go was Bill Clinton. His secretary of the treasury, Robert Rubin, persuaded him to pull back from public spending. Instead, he should cut the deficit and allow the markets to create a financial boom. Clinton agreed – and the US boomed throughout the 90s. But it also led directly to the global crash of 2008. ƒ And behind the markets was a whole academic industry that had taken Buchanan's ideas and run with them. They wrote articles that bluntly said the role of politicians in society should be marginalised because so much of what they did was 'sub-optimal'. Journalists picked up these ideas and put them in simpler terms. Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International wrote: 'What we need in politics today is not more democracy – but less'. In the face of this undermining of politics, New Labour also gave in. The day after their victory in 1997, the new chancellor, Gordon Brown, dramatically announced that he was giving power over the setting of interest rates to the Bank of England. It was an extraordinary move. Labour MPs were aghast. One, Bryan Gould, exclaimed: 'What then is the role of the chancellor? Or more simply, what is the role of democracy?' Brown later admitted the truth: that it was because politicians were now seen as dangerous. We did it, he said, 'not for any fundamental economic reasons', but because we weren't trusted. Born out of a weird self-hate, that single act was largely responsible for the present powerlessness of politicians. It was also helped on by a new phenomenon – because liberal culture too caught the disease. The Thick of It was a comedy series based around a government minister and their advisers. They live in a constant state of self-interested hysteria. Reacting to events and having no control over the real world outside. It was seen as liberal satire – but it can also be seen as a very powerful expression of Buchanan's idea that all politicians are completely venal, driven only by dark emotions. But that wasn't the end of it. Because a new kind of politician rose up, bred in the swamp of distrust. They saw that playing bad in an over-the-top way would give you a great deal of power. Because in a world of disenchantment, where no one believed that politicians could be good, being bad meant you must be authentic. I give you Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage and Donald Trump: pantomime villains who are locked together with us in a feedback loop of shock-outrage-badness repeating endlessly. Outside this theatre, really bad people do really bad things – but we are distracted by the pantomime. Meanwhile, the classes that once made up society fractured. The liberals turned on those who voted for Brexit, using with one voice the word Amis had spat out 30 years before: 'stupid'. It may be that Britain – and much of Europe – is in a similar moment to that described by Clark just before 1848: on the edge of a new kind of society we don't yet have the language to describe. It feels frightening because without that language it is impossible to have coherent dreams of the future. To build a better world, you need an idea of what should change and how. And one of the things preventing that may be our obsession with constantly replaying the past. In the present age, the fog of experience has been thickened by the mass of recorded data that allows the recent past to be endlessly replayed, refusing to fade away. A constant loop of nostalgia – music, images, films and dreams from the past. It is another block to the future. And it is also the way this series is made. My bad. Shifty in on BBC iPlayer from Saturday 14 June.
CBS News
10-06-2025
- Politics
- CBS News
Harvey, Illinois Ald. Colby Chapman returns to City Hall after latest arrest
Just days after an alderman in the south Chicago suburb of Harvey was arrested and charged with a felony, she was back at a Harvey City Council meeting. Ald. Colby Chapman (2nd) chalks the charges up to political retaliation by the mayor. Harvey Mayor Christopher Clark says no such thing is happening. The allegations stem from an April city council meeting where Chapman was removed from the meeting and charged with misdemeanors that were later dropped — but now she is faced with a felony from that same encounter. On Monday night, Chapman was back at Harvey City Hall. "Our city needs men who lead with integrity, love and courage," Chapman said at a City Council meeting. Late last week, Chapman turned herself in to Harvey police on a felony charge. In April, Mayor Clark said Chapman was disruptive at least three times, and asked the Harvey City Council to censure and remove her. Chapman was charged with misdemeanors for this encounter with officers. The charges were dropped last week by the Cook County State's Attorney's office. But a day later, the State's Attorney's office approved a new felony charge against Chapman of aggravated battery to a police officer for the same April incident. "This is my fourth time arrested, third time jailed," Chapman said. Chapman has been arrested before for incidents at City Hall. The charges have all later been dismissed. Chapman is a frequent critic of the mayor, and said she believes the mayor has unfairly targeted her. Mayor Clark denies any allegations of political retribution. "When the State's Attorney's office has an opportunity to make full review of the entirety of what happened on Monday, April the 28th, I think that they'll make a good decision, favorable," Chapman said. Back inside Harvey City Hall, some residents came to the defense of Chapman. "I'm sick and tired of you arresting Colby Chapman," said Harvey resident Mazurk Irvin. Meanwhile, some fellow aldermen accused chapman of grandstanding. "This is not a way to run a city," Irvin said. Mayor Clark said the video of the April City Council incident speaks for itself, and shows Ald. Chapman striking a police officer. The mayor added that the charges should send a clear message that no one is above the law. "For the next six months to the end of 2025, I'm hopeful that there will be no more arrests; that nobody will be silenced because they talked," said Chapman. The day Ald. Chapman turned herself in last week, she announced her candidacy for mayor. Chapman has also filed a civil lawsuit against the mayor.
CBS News
06-06-2025
- Politics
- CBS News
Harvey, Illinois, Ald. Colby Chapman arrested again a day after charges are dropped
Political drama erupted in the south suburbs Thursday, as an alderwoman in Harvey was arrested. The latest arrest of Ald. Colby Chapman (2nd) comes just a day after the Cook County State's Attorney's office dropped charges stemming from a previous arrest at a Harvey City Council meeting. Chapman claimed this was all political retaliation from Harvey Mayor Christopher Clark, of whom Chapman is a vocal critic. Chapman has been arrested before at the mayor's direction, and each time, the charges have been dropped by the state's attorney. Chapman's attorney said he expects the charges will not be pursued this time either. Chapman showed up to the special Harvey City Council meeting Thursday expecting to get arrested. She held her mom's hand as she approached the doors to Harvey City Hall. "When I walk inside of City Hall, am likely going to be arrested on something I have no understanding on," she said. Chapman has been critical of Mayor Clark. In April, the mayor accused Chapman of being disruptive and ordered Chapman out of a city meeting. Officers led her out as she attempted to hold onto the door. The alderman was charged with disorderly conduct and resisting a police officer — both misdemeanors. On Wednesday, the Cook County State's Attorney dropped those charges. "What is going on in the City of Harvey?" Chapman said Thursday. "This is a catastrophe." Chapman said Harvey police officers came to her home Thursday on what she believed was a warrant for her arrest. This time, she was arrested on felony charges of aggravated battery to a police officer stemming from the same April City Council meeting. "One day later, here we are. The City of Harvey is back to its usual form arresting my client," said Chapman's attorney, Daniel Olswang. "It is a blatant and deeply troubling act of political retaliation. Last month, Mayor Clark commented on the April incident. "This is the weekly grandstanding we normally get from this council member," Clark said. On Thursday night, Chapman tried turning herself in at City Hall — but the handful of officers standing by would not put her in cuffs. "Why not arrest me in front of everyone?" she told an officer. "You said I did something. You said I committed a felony." Over at the Harvey police station, CBS News Chicago's cameras and Chapman's supporters were not allowed inside as she walked in. But Olswang was there, and said Chapman was read her rights and booked on one felony charge. "I've seen the video. There's no basis for the charges," said Olswang. "This is the fourth time they've arrested her." Mayor Clark said the Cook County State's Attorney's office approved the charges. He said the video of what happened at the April meeting speaks for itself, and added that it is not acceptable for anyone to put their hands on a police officer. He also denies allegations of political retaliation. Chapman will be in court Friday morning.
CBS News
04-06-2025
- General
- CBS News
Charges dropped against Harvey, Illinois, Ald. Colby Chapman after removal from City Council meeting
Cook County prosecutors on Wednesday dropped charges against Harvey Ald. Colby Chapman, who was arrested and removed from a City Council meeting in April. Chapman had been charged with disorderly conduct and resisting a police officer after she was arrested at the April 28 Harvey City Council meeting. At her first court appearance on Wednesday, prosecutors dropped the charges. Mayor Christopher Clark accused Chapman of being repeatedly disruptive at that meeting, and kept asking about an issue that had already been addressed, leading him to ask the council members to vote on censure Chapman and remove her from the meeting. Chapman said the city had sold a senior's home for $2,000, and she wanted to know why. Video shot by a frequent critic of the mayor, and shared on Chapman's aldermanic Facebook page, shows Chapman refusing to be removed. An officer then came to gather her belongings, prompting Chapman to say: "Don't touch my stuff!" Then Chapman pushed the officer, and was led out by police. She tried to stay in the meeting by holding onto the door. Harvey Chief of Police Cameron Biddings said she was later placed in handcuffs off camera. Clark has accused Chapman of repeatedly grandstanding at council meetings, and said she was censured and asked to leave council meetings twice before. Chapman's mother also was arrested at the meeting, and charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. Charges against her also were dropped on Wednesday. The video above is from an earlier report.
The Independent
30-05-2025
- Business
- The Independent
Chicago risks severe cuts to transit. Its poorest suburbs could be hit even harder
Winfred Wilson was struggling to make ends meet on less than $700 a month, so he moved in with his daughter, gave up his car and started relying exclusively on public transit to take him wherever he needed to go across Chicago 's southern suburbs. As he waited for a bus connection in his hometown of Harvey on a recent trip to the grocery store, Wilson waved at familiar travelers who regularly pass through the key transportation hub serving one of the region's poorest areas. Many, he said, encounter little resistance from drivers when they board without paying. ' People in affluent neighborhoods, they have cars and personal transportation, but they don't want to get caught up in the rush hour,' so they use transit, Wilson said. 'We couldn't live without it.' Public transit agencies across the U.S. have been grappling with a fiscal cliff spurred by declining ridership and the impending sunset of federal COVID-19 relief funding. The Chicago area faces particularly bleak service cuts that officials warn could be set in motion as early as Saturday if Illinois legislators adjourn without plugging a $770 million hole in the transportation budget. The big city's commuters would be hit hard, with the Chicago Transit Authority poised to shut down four of eight elevated train lines and 74 of 127 bus routes under the worst-case scenario. But perhaps no place illustrates the range of potential outcomes more vividly than Harvey, whose mayor, Christopher Clark — a lifelong resident — says was once 'the metropolis of the Southland' before plants and factories closed and disinvestment took hold. Suburb at a crossroads Already the busiest station for PACE, the region's suburban bus system that also serves paratransit customers, Harvey recently won state and federal grant money for a state-of-the-art facility that would put the buses under the same roof as the Metra commuter rail stop a block away. Plans eventually call for a high-speed bus line connecting the Harvey station to the Red Line L train that cuts through the downtown Chicago Loop. Such an upgrade could be an economic boon for Harvey, where now-vacant businesses are found on almost every downtown block and where more than 1 in 4 residents live below the poverty line. But even if the new station is built, ending or severely cutting the buses and trains that pass through could send the city reeling in the opposite direction. 'It would be chaos for us in the suburbs,' said Cheyane Felton, after finishing her shift at a coffee stand in the basement of Harvey's City Hall. 'It would cut us off.' Without additional state funding, PACE could be forced to halt buses in Harvey and elsewhere on weekends and after 8 p.m. on weekdays, executive director Melinda Metzger said. 'The downside for this is disastrous,' she said in an interview at the Harvey stop. 'You would be cutting back your service by at least 40%, not giving people viable rides. They might get to work, but they might have a late-night shift and can't get home, so ridership also would plummet to match the service cuts.' Transit's nationwide funding crunch Major public transportation agencies across the country have had varying degrees of success lobbying their legislatures for more support with the federal emergency funding set to expire at the end of the year. Perhaps no place mirrors Chicago's current situation more than Philadelphia, which faces a $213 million transportation budget deficit next year, even after Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro authorized redirecting some of the state's highway money to mass transit. Absent more funding, riders could see a 20% spike in fares, a 9 p.m. curfew, and the elimination of 50 bus routes and five of eight regional rail lines, the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority has said. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signed a bailout package in 2023 to help fund New York City's subway and buses. She also opened a major new source of transit revenue by implementing congestion pricing for drivers in Manhattan, but it remains to be seen whether the new tolls will survive threats from President Donald Trump's administration to shut them down. Boston, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and numerous other transit-dependent cities have also been scrambling to avert major cuts. A moving deadline? 'No funding without reform' has been a common mantra among Illinois legislators working to hash out a solution for Chicago's transit crisis before leaving Springfield on Saturday at the end of their regular session. Technically, the money doesn't run out until the end of the year, and there will likely be a veto session that could provide another shot at an 11th-hour rescue. But transportation officials say they'll have to start laying out the specific cuts next week if the funding doesn't come through by then. 'It's not a light switch we can just turn on or off," said Leanne Redden, executive director of the Regional Transportation Authority, which oversees planning and funding for the area's transit agencies. "Even if we find funding at a future point, it's a slow process to kind of unwind the unwinding.' So far, there have been no major breakthroughs on funding, although a compromise surfaced this week to create a new umbrella organization that, among other things, would ensure the various agencies work in unison rather than as competitors for the same customers. 'They should just be able to get on and go where they want to go, and that has not been happening with the governance that we've had up to now,' Gov. J.B. Pritzker said. Chicago's transit agencies argue they're more efficient than their peers in other states and get by with a smaller portion of state funding. Clark, the Harvey mayor, said he still envisions his community benefitting from the economic promise of a new transit facility rather than enduring disappointment once again. 'I guess some people want me to paint a picture that it's a nuclear Armageddon or something like that,' he said. 'I can't paint that picture because I have to remain ever hopeful that we will get what we need to get in due time. Government is a long game.'
