Category: half baked theories

Rather than a brand new post here this week, I’ve written this for the MBS Birmingham blog on Cameron’s approach to so-called “sink estates”, or as Michael Heseltine believes, everyone knows that they’re “slums”. As you can imagine, that got my back up a bit.

Language, as Chomsky, Foucault, Lefebvre or any number of other critical theorists will tell you, is crucial. It sets the tone and the scope of debate, it stigmatizes and divides, it creates problems and solves different ones. For Lefebvre, it’s an integral part of the production of social space – describing a housing estate as a slum automatically sets a tone and starts a debate, whether there’s any basis for this or not. It’s even more specific this week: Cameron is targeting language itself as a cause of extremism, of segregation, of division and modern cultural problems. Statistics fly around about the number of women, in particular, amongst Muslims, in particular, who are not learning the Queen’s Own English. Like slums, these are myths – not to say there aren’t truths hidden in there but they are obfuscated by larger, disingenuous distractions. The effect of these is to redirect public opinion away from the wider benefits to society that learning a language can bring (which the last government’s free ESOL classes sought to help) and towards the stigmatisation of small sections of society which can be blamed (women; Muslims; foreigners). It’s all highly distasteful, and a major problem of modern political debate.