Coming Up for Air: Unemployment and Uncertainty

Saturday 13 June 5-6pm, Trafalgar Studios

Andy Beckett | Lisa Harker | Paul Mason | Chaired by Jean Seaton

Does anyone who isn't dead from the neck up doubt that there's a bad time coming? We don't even know what it'll be, and yet we know it's coming.  Perhaps a war, perhaps a slump—no knowing, except that it'll be something bad. Wherever we're going, we're going downwards.  Into the grave, into the cesspool—no knowing.

Orwell’s underrated novel Coming Up for Air, published 70 years ago in 1939, was written at a time of great uncertainty: war was looming, industrialisation and capitalism was changing the face of the country, and Britain was still recovering from the Great Depression. With Britain today facing the effects of the global economic crisis, and with unemployment over 2 million and rising, we explore the effect of unemployment and how to tackle it, and the lessons of the past.

Andy Beckett is the author of the recently published When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies. He studied Modern History at Oxford University and Journalism at the University of California in Berkeley. Since 1993, he has written for the New York Times, the Economist, the Independent on Sunday and the London Review of Books. For the last twelve years, he has been a feature writer at the Guardian. He was nominated as Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year for his first book, Pinochet in Piccadilly: Britain and Chile’s Hidden History (2002).

Lisa Harker is the co-director of the Institute for Public Policy Research. She previously worked for the BBC as a Social Affairs Specialist, advising journalists across the Corporation, and as a producer on the Today programme. She was instrumental in transforming the Day Care Trust into the leading childcare organisation in the country, before being appointed as the Government’s child poverty tsar at the Department for Work and Pensions, where she wrote Delivering on Child Poverty: What would it take? She has also worked as an independent consultant for numerous government departments, jointly with Carey Oppenheim.

Paul Mason is the award-winning economics editor of BBC Newsnight, covering an agenda he describes as ‘profit, people and planet’. A former professional musician and university lecturer, he spent nine years covering business for specialist magazines and newspapers (including as deputy editor of Computer Weekly) before joining Newsnight in 2001. Author of the Idle Scrawl blog, which was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize 2009, he has also written two books: Live Working or Die Fighting: How the Working Class Went Global (2007) and Meltdown: The End of the Age of Greed (2009). 

Jean Seaton (Chair) is Director of the Orwell Prize and reports co-editor of Political Quarterly. She is Professor of Media History at the University of Westminster, and has written on the history and role of the media in politics, wars, revolutions, religion and childhood. Her books include Power Without Responsibility: the Press and Broadcasting in Britain (with James Curran), Carnage and the Media: the Making and Reporting of News about Violence, and What Can Be Done? Making the Media and Politics Better (with John Lloyd). She is working on the Official History of the BBC between 1974-1987.

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