A Free Left Blog

The subject of depression has got a fair amount attention in the media in recent times, something much to be welcomed. High-profile figures like former spin doctor Alastair Campbell, ex-footballer-turned-pundit Stan Collymore and the writer Marian Keyes have made their sufferings public and given a lot of encouragement to others who have gone through similar experiences. I’ve been a sufferer myself in the past and certainly welcome these interventions, especially for the way these people have candidly revealed weaknesses in themselves, thereby making it easier for others to do the same. Campbell wrote a little book called ‘The Happy Depressive’, exploring his own experiences and depression as a public policy issue. I won’t go into that book in detail here because I want to take a brief look at depression from a different angle, but one quotation wouldn’t go amiss: “In the US, trust in other people being ‘nice’ has fallen from 60 per cent to 30 per cent in fifty years...

This article was originally published on Shifting Grounds on 19th February 2013. Since then I have been interested to see in Sir George Cox's review of short-termism in business, commissioned by the Labour Party, the proposal that infrastructure be removed from democratic political control (see page 11). That is precisely the sort of thing I mean by "A Stealthy Form of Authoritarianism":  perhaps not so stealthy though... “I think we really are the victims of a discursive shift, since the late 1970′s, toward economics”, the late historian Tony Judt said in a recent book. “Intellectuals don’t ask if something is right or wrong, but whether a policy is efficient or inefficient. They don’t ask if a measure is good or bad, but whether or not it improves productivity…Until you’ve generated resources, goes the refrain, there’s no point in having a conversation about distributing them. This, it seems to me, comes close to a sort of soft blackmail.” Judt talked ...