Where have all the good women gone? Men fight back with a vengeance against the women who SLAMMED chaps today as boring, grumpy slobs

Five single men share why they've struggled to find women worth dating
They ask if it is possible to find considerate women who don't want to rush things
One psychotherapist blames online dating and pornography for complications





He is what you might call, with some understatement, a catch. Chris Gray, 57, is tall and attractive with dark hair and blue eyes.


By his own admission, he is ‘very well‑off’, owns several properties, including a £1.3 million terraced house in affluent Chiswick, West London, and is financially set for life, thanks to a series of successful investments.


A widower, Chris is educated and well‑travelled — in part thanks to his previous career as a BBC cameraman of 30 years’ standing.


The cherry on the cake? For hobbies, he flies small aircraft and enjoys dining in Michelin-starred restaurants.


Five single men shared why they've struggled to find women worth dating. Chris Gray, 57, (pictured) says 'I’m all for female equality, so why do 99 per cent of women expect me to always foot the bill'


So why, you might wonder, has Chris joined the growing band of British men, old and young, who have sworn off women for ever?


It’s simple, he says. There simply aren’t any good women out there.


‘I have given up. I have many female friends, but I can’t be bothered to deal with all the hang-ups and complications other women have,’ he says.


‘Often, at my stage in life, many of them are divorced and seem full of bitterness and anger.’


That’s certainly not the only complaint single men such as Chris direct at potential female partners they meet.


Indeed, after the Mail recently recounted the stories of attractive single women who appeared to have everything, yet said they still couldn’t find a decent man, there was a significant backlash from male readers.


Men told us in their droves that it wasn’t they who were to blame — but women.


They insisted romances failed today, not because of male laziness and a lack of attention to their physical appearance as claimed, but because women are picky and demanding divas, who either treat dates like job interviews or are all too keen to leap into bed.


Above all else, though, men said women are increasingly status and money-obsessed. While they might be full of the entitlements of feminism and happy to preach the necessity of equality, men said the opposite sex were simultaneously all too keen to enjoy a comfortable lifestyle almost entirely paid for by their male partners.


One MailOnline reader put it succinctly in response to the article’s question asking why women were finding it so difficult to find a man with whom to settle down: ‘It’s because every man they meet has already been taken for a ride and had his pockets emptied.’


So should the old adage ‘Where have all the good men gone?’ really be more applicable to women instead?


Chris is adamant this is the case —and believes single, middle-aged women in particular should look closer to home when casting blame.


You might want to dismiss Chris as just another misogynist. Far from it.




Alex Cavadas, 41, (pictured) a divorced part-time actor, says he’ has given up on love after a series of emotionally crushing dates with women seemingly after just money


A devoted husband of 21 years to his late wife Rosie, who also worked in television until her sudden death from an undiagnosed heart condition in 2008, the urbane Chris is as removed from a stereotypical knuckle-dragging woman-hater as you could hope to meet.


Yet even he was astonished by how brutally mercenary some of the middle-aged single women he met were.


‘I was brought up by just my mother and absolutely support female empowerment. But the vast majority of women I met expected the man to pay for everything,’ he says. ‘I’m all for female equality, so why did 99 per cent of women expect me to always foot the bill?’


Chris’s dating experience was particularly bruising as he spent years grieving, before loneliness led him to online dating and to pay a substantial sum to an introduction agency to find someone with whom to share his life.


But as well as being relentlessly focused on money, he found some of the women he met — and he went on scores of dates — were surprisingly envious.


‘A few years after Rosie died, I felt capable of trying to meet someone, so I joined the brutal triage of online dating. It was such a disappointment. I found women can be so jealous. They very quickly started to make demands. They were jealous of my female friends. Believe it or not, some didn’t like that I had photos of my wife still on the wall.’


In addition, many were hell-bent on commitment, treating casual lunch dates more like job interviews for a prospective husband.


There was a gradual realisation that you are complete just as you are. Men can have an entirely content life on their own


Chris Gray


‘The introductory agency set me up on a date with an attractive lady in her 50s who had a very powerful job. She texted me, saying she was on her way and to ask for my address so she could park on my street.


‘Minutes later there was a knock on the door. She barged in and started looking around: checking me out, checking out my house. She was a complete stranger to me. It was very odd.’


He says after lunch — which, of course, he paid for — things went even more rapidly downhill.


‘She said: “So, Chris, what about us? Where are we?”


‘I said: “We’re on a first date, I don’t know.”


‘Women like this are trying to run before they can walk. Maybe, faced with mortality as we all are in our 50s, she was so desperate for a relationship she tried to rush things.’


Chris found he differed from many women he met because, unscarred by the trauma of a divorce, he had none of the resentment that seemed to haunt others. Indeed, he was driven by the loving memories of how wonderful life can be when you have a partner with whom to share it.


‘I loved — love — my wife. I always will. My marriage was very happy. Maybe I was trying to recreate that, but it certainly didn’t work.’


After around five years of dating, in 2015 Chris decided enough was enough.


‘There was a gradual realisation that you are complete just as you are. Men can have an entirely content life on their own.’



Ross Foad, 29, (pictured) has been single now for more than two years and says: ‘This is what I want for the rest of my life'


So what’s causing this schism between the sexes at the very point in their lives when you might imagine they would be more likely than ever to settle down?


Psychotherapist Teresa Wilson, who runs a practice in South-West London, believes men and women are coming to the dating game in middle age with entirely different perspectives.


While women — now so independent in outlook and behaviour — are much less worried than male counterparts about finding a new long-term partner, men are more likely to have come from a relationship they’d rather have kept.


‘Women don’t feel quite so trapped in bad relationships. They’ve found a certain liberation over the last 20 years,’ she says.


‘Men, however, like the stability of a home life provided for them, their creature comforts, and often don’t know how they’re going to manage except by going into another relationship.


‘Women, meanwhile, are not as fearful [of being alone]. They tell me: “I might find another relationship, but even if I do not, I can cope.” ’


Meanwhile, Selena Dogg-ett-Jones, a psychosexual and couples’ therapist, sees men as less able to cope with an entirely new dating landscape which has made singletons much pickier about prospective partners.


‘If you’re newly divorced, the dating game has changed dramatically; it’s all online now,’ she says.


‘People who had finished a long-term relationship or were widowed used to be introduced to someone new at a dinner party.


‘But today people will say precisely what they want online. For example, “I only want to meet someone between 40 and 50”, meaning someone aged 51 will not be considered because they’re not in the right category. If they met someone for real, they’d maybe not find out their age until they’d been on a couple of dates, by which time they’d probably like them and the age wouldn’t matter.


‘But instead, all they’re looking at is a photograph and they’ll swipe or click “yes” or “no”. It’s very difficult.’


Alex Cavadas, 41, a divorced part-time actor, says he’s a victim of this pickiness — and has given up on love after a series of emotionally crushing dates with women seemingly set on just one thing: money. ‘Some of the women I’ve dated were too pushy,’ he says. ‘One woman talked to me on the first date about having children and getting married.


‘She asked me how much I make, which is about £400 a week. She told me that wasn’t enough, saying: “I have certain standards.”


‘Yes, I’m a struggling actor. But she wasn’t well off, either. She was an au pair. She was just looking for a wealthy husband.


‘She told me she thought I was handsome and kind, but not successful or rich enough.’


For Alex, who lives in Mitcham, South London, it has been heartbreaking to find his hopes for love so quashed, especially because he says he was very happily married until recently.


‘I met my wife at a concert in 2004 and we married a few years later. I was smitten instantly,’ he recalls.





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'The dominant discourse in the Western world is that men are up for sex 24/7. But many men are not' says Alex (file image)


‘Things were great at first, but when our daughter was born in 2014, it felt to me like my wife didn’t want me any more. We divorced in 2015.


‘I’ve been on dates since then, but soon think to myself: “What’s the point?”


‘Since my marriage, I have been celibate because I can’t find a nice woman.’


Psychotherapist Selena says another reason for men, old and young, being disappointed by modern dating is that today’s sexual relationships have been complicated by online dating and pornography.


‘There’s an awful lot of instant sex expected with some of the apps, like Tinder. It’s meet-for-sex and sometimes it will develop into a relationship.


‘The dominant discourse in the Western world is that men are up for sex 24/7. But many men are not. They want to get to know the woman. They tell me they find it very difficult because they feel rushed; and women are rushing them because they think that’s what is expected. Some men can cope with one-night stands, but most do not feel comfortable with them.’


This is the case with Jamie Clows. He may only be 27, but he’s already decided to give up on women entirely, disillusioned after a number of painful relationships and subsequent attempts at dating women who, after drinking too much, have proved themselves rather too keen to jump into bed.


Jamie, a small business owner from Chesterfield, Derbyshire, who has a young daughter from a previous relationship, says he is ‘a lot happier being single’.


‘It all ends the same way,’ he says resignedly. ‘I don’t want to go on dates. It depresses me.



Jamie has found himself agreeing with a growing army of single men who make up the online community called MGTOW — Men Going Their Own Way (file image)


‘Some women have become violent, in jealous rages for no reason, because they’ve been drinking too much.


‘I’d rather go for a walk than to the pub. But I’ve found it hard to meet anyone the same as me.


‘Some women have asked me to sleep with them on the first night. They get drunk and wear very revealing clothes, too. I think women who do this don’t respect themselves, and I can’t respect them, either.’


Jamie has found himself agreeing with a growing army of single men who make up the online community called MGTOW — Men Going Their Own Way — which has tens of thousands of followers. On this website, disillusioned males come to share relationship problems, their struggles for equal access to children and describe being freer, happier and wealthier for shunning relationships.


The philosophy of MGTOW, which began in America in the Seventies, is described as a ‘statement of self-ownership, where the modern man preserves and protects his own sovereignty above all else’.


On its website, it lists great men throughout history — among them Beethoven and Sir Isaac Newton — who were all single and, as a consequence, says MGTOW, led fulfilled lives packed with accomplishments.


It’s a group Jamie admits he never imagined he would find kinship with: ‘When I was younger, I always dreamed I would get married. No more.’



Trelawney Kerrigan, a consultant for the Dating Agency Association, says: 'After a couple of knock-backs, [men] will shrivel up. They are easily disillusioned; women are better at brushing themselves off' (file image)


Ross Foad, 29, is another who subscribes to this philosophy. A talented actor, comedian and writer, he is charismatic, confident, fit and attractive.


But he says he has no interest in ever finding anyone with whom to spend his life.


For Ross, from Kingston-upon-Thames, south-west London, says: ‘I don’t hate women — I have many female friends. I just can’t give them what they want, which is commitment, attention and time. I want to concentrate on my career. I like to write, create films and be active.’


Ross has been single now for more than two years and says: ‘This is what I want for the rest of my life.’


Another factor, experts say, is that men are actually more sensitive than women, and struggle to deal with romantic knock-backs.


Trelawney Kerrigan, a consultant for the Dating Agency Association, says: ‘Women will take a more positive approach while men, after a couple of knock-backs, will shrivel up. They are easily disillusioned; women are better at brushing themselves off.


‘It’s a confidence thing with men. You often hear men saying there are not enough genuine people out there and nobody’s taking it seriously.’


Danny Webster, a 33-year-old radio presenter from Birmingham, who has been single for more than three years following the break-up of a long-term relationship, admits he’s given up on women because of painful rejections.


‘I think women don’t want nice men like me. They want bad boys,’ he says. ‘I’ve found the knock-backs hard to deal with and decided a few years ago I’m better off alone. I’m meeting more people of this mindset. Increasing numbers of men are choosing to be independent.’


However, Danny does admit he finds the fact he will not have children difficult to bear.


‘It’s one part of my life I yearn for, because when I see all my other friends with kids, I feel I should have them, too.


‘But there is no one holding me back. I can come and go as I please. A lot of men would give their right arm to have that freedom.’

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Guts and Grease: The Diet of Native Americans

JANUARY 1, 2000 BY SALLY FALLON AND MARY G. ENIG, PHD

18 COMMENTS

The hunter-gatherer’s dinner is front page news these days. Drawing from the writings of Dr. Boyd Eaton and Professor Loren Cordain, experts in the so-called Paleolithic diet, columnists and reporters are spreading the word about the health benefits of a diet rich in protein and high in fiber from a variety of plant foods 1,2. It’s actually amusing to see what the modern food pundits come up with as examples of the “Paleolithic Prescription.” Jean Carper offers a Stone Age Salad of mixed greens, garbanzo beans, skinless chicken breast, walnuts and fresh herbs, mixed with a dressing made of orange juice, balsamic vinegar and canola oil.3 Elizabeth Somer suggests whole wheat waffles with fat-free cream cheese, coleslaw with nonfat dressing, grilled halibut with spinach, grilled tofu and vegetables over rice, nonfat milk, canned apricots and mineral water, along with prawns and clams. Her Stone Age food pyramid includes plenty of plant foods, extra lean meat and fish, nonfat milk products, and honey and eggs in small amounts.4

Above all, the food writers tell us, avoid fats, especially saturated fats. The hunter-gatherer’s diet was highly politically correct, they say, rich in polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fatty acids but relatively low in overall fat and very low in that dietary villain-saturated fat. This is the one dietary factor that health officials tell us is responsible for all the health problems that plague us-everything from cancer and heart disease to obesity and MS.

Remarkable Health

That the hunter-gatherer was healthy there is no doubt. Weston Price noted an almost complete absence of tooth decay and dental deformities among native Americans who lived as their ancestors did.5 They had broad faces, straight teeth and fine physiques. This was true of the nomadic tribes living in the far northern territories of British Columbia and the Yukon, as well as the wary inhabitants of the Florida Everglades, who were finally coaxed into allowing him to take photographs. Skeletal remains of the Indians of Vancouver that Price studied were similar, showing a virtual absence of tooth decay, arthritis and any other kind of bone deformity. TB was nonexistent among Indians who ate as their ancestors had done, and the women gave birth with ease.

Price interviewed the beloved Dr. Romig in Alaska who stated “that in his thirty-six years of contact with these people he had never seen a case of malignant disease among the truly primitive Eskimos and Indians, although it frequently occurs when they become modernized. He found, similarly, that the acute surgical problems requiring operation on internal organs, such as the gall bladder, kidney, stomach and appendix, do not tend to occur among the primitives but are very common problems among the modernized Eskimos and Indians. Growing out of his experience in which he had seen large numbers of the modernized Eskimos and Indians attacked with tuberculosis, which tended to be progressive and ultimately fatal as long as the patients stayed under modernized living conditions, he now sends them back when possible to primitive conditions and to a primitive diet, under which the death rate is very much lower than under modernized conditions. Indeed, he reported that a great majority of the afflicted recover under the primitive type of living and nutrition.”6

The early explorers consistently described the native Americans as tall and well formed. Of the Indians of Texas, the explorer Cabeza de Vaca wrote, “The men could run after a deer for an entire day without resting and without apparent fatigue. . . one man near seven feet in stature. . . runs down a buffalo on foot and slays it with his knife or lance, as he runs by its side.”7 The Indians were difficult to kill. De Vaca reports on an Indian “traversed by an arrow. . . he does not die but recovers from his wound.” The Karakawas, a tribe that lived near the Gulf Coast, were tall, well-built and muscular. “The men went stark naked, the lower lip and nipple pierced, covered in alligator grease [to ward off mosquitoes], happy and generous, with amazing physical prowess. . . they go naked in the most burning sun, in winter they go out in early dawn to take a bath, breaking the ice with their body.”

Greasy and Good

What kind of foods produced such fine physical specimens? The diets of the American Indians varied with the locality and climate but all were based on animal foods of every type and description, not only large game like deer, buffalo, wild sheep and goat, antelope, moose, elk, caribou, bear and peccary, but also small animals such as beaver, rabbit, squirrel, skunk, muskrat and raccoon; reptiles including snakes, lizards, turtles, and alligators; fish and shellfish; wild birds including ducks and geese; sea mammals (for Indians living in coastal areas); insects including locust, spiders and lice; and dogs. (Wolves and coyotes were avoided because of religious taboos)8.

According to Dr. Eaton, these foods supplied plenty of protein but only small amounts of total fat; and this fat was high in polyunsaturated fatty acids and low in saturated fats. The fat of wild game, according to Eaton, is about 38 percent saturated, 32 percent monounsaturated and 30 percent polyunsaturated.9 This prescription may be just fine for those who want to promote vegetable oils, but it does not jibe with fat content of wild animals in the real world. The table below lists fat content in various tissues of a number of wild animals found in the diets of American Indians. Note that only squirrel fat contains levels of polyunsaturated fatty acids that Eaton claims are typical for wild game. In a continent noted for the richness and variety of its animal life, it is unlikely that squirrels would have supplied more than a tiny fraction of total calories. Seal fat, consumed by coastal Indians, ranges from 14 to 24 percent polyunsaturated. The fat of all the other animals that the Indians hunted and ate contained less than 10 percent polyunsaturated fatty acids, some less than 2 percent. Most prized was the internal kidney fat of ruminant animals, which can be as high as 65 percent saturated.

Sources of Fat for the American Indian10

	Saturated	Monounsaturated	Polyunsaturated
Antelope, kidney fat	65.04	21.25	3.91
Bison, kidney fat	34.48	52.36	4.83
Caribou, bone marrow	22.27	56.87	3.99
Deer, kidney fat	48.24	38.52	6.21
Dog, meat, muscle	28.36	47.76	8.95
Dog, kidney	25.54	41.85	7.69
Elk, kidney	61.58	30.10	1.62
Goat, kidney	65.57	28.14	0.00
Moose, kidney	47.26	44.75	2.11
Peccary, fatty tissues	38.47	46.52	9.7
Reindeer, caribou, fatty tissues	50.75	38.94	1.25
Seal (Harbor), blubber	11.91	61.41	13.85
Seal (Harbor), depot fat	14.51	54.23	16.84
Seal (harp), blubber	19.16	42.22	15.04
Seal (harp), meat	10.69	54.21	23.51
Sheep (mountain), kidney fat	47.96	41.37	2.87
Sheep (white faced), kidney fat	51.58	39.90	1.16
Sheep, intestine, roasted	47.01	40.30	7.46
Snake, meat	26.36	44.54	0.09
Squirrel (brown), adipose	17.44	47.55	28.6
Squirrel (white), adipose	12.27	51.48	32.3
Game fat, according to Eaton	38	32	30

Politically correct paleo-dieters also ignore the fact that the Indians hunted animals selectively. The explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson, who spend many years with the Indians, noted that they preferred “the flesh of older animals to that of calves, yearlings and two-year olds. . . It is approximately so with those northern forest Indians with whom I have hunted, and probably with all caribou-eaters.” The Indians preferred the older animals because they had built up a thick slab of fat along the back. In an animal of 1000 pounds, this slab could weigh 40 to 50 pounds. Another 20-30 pounds of highly saturated fat could be removed from the cavity. This fat was saved, sometimes by rendering, stored in the bladder or large intestine, and consumed with dried or smoked lean meat. Used in this way, fat contributed almost 80 percent of total calories in the diets of the northern Indians.11

Beaver was highly prized, especially the tail because it was rich in fat. But small animals like rabbit and squirrel were eaten only when nothing else was available because, according to Stefansson, they were so low in fat. In fact, small animals called for special preparation. The meat was removed from the bones, roasted and pounded. The bones were dried and ground into a powder. Then the bones were mixed with the meat and any available grease, a procedure that would greatly lower the percentage of polyunsaturated fatty acids, while raising the total content of saturated fat.12When a scarcity of game forced the Indians to consume only small animals like rabbits, they suffered from “rabbit starvation.”

“The groups that depend on the blubber animals are the most fortunate, in the hunting way of life, for they never suffer from fat-hunger. This trouble is worst, so far as North America is concerned, among those forest Indians who depend at times on rabbits, the leanest animal in the North, and who develop the extreme fat-hunger known as rabbit-starvation. Rabbit eaters, if they have no fat from another source-beaver, moose, fish-will develop diarrhoea in about a week, with headache, lassitude and vague discomfort. If there are enough rabbits, the people eat till their stomachs are distended; but no matter how much they eat they feel unsatisfied. Some think a man will die sooner if he eats continually of fat-free meat than if he eats nothing, but this is a belief on which sufficient evidence for a decision has not been gathered in the North. Deaths from rabbit-starvation, or from the eating of other skinny meat, are rare; for everyone understands the principle, and any possible preventive steps are naturally taken.”13

The Whole Animal

Ruminant animals, such as moose, elk, caribou, deer, antelope and, of course, buffalo were the mainstay of the Amerindian diet, just as beef is the mainstay of the modern American diet. The difference is that the whole animal was eaten, not just the muscle meats.

Beverly Hungry Wolf describes the preparation and consumption of a cow in The Ways of My Grandmothers, noting that her grandmother prepared the cow “as she had learned to prepare buffalo when she was young.” The large pieces of fat from the back and cavity were removed and rendered. The lean meat was cut into strips and dried or roasted, pounded up with berries and mixed with fat to make pemmican. Most of the ribs were smoked and stored for later use14.

All the excess fat inside the body was hung up so the moisture would dry out of it, recalls Beverly Hungry Wolf. It was later served with dried meat. Some fats in the animal were rendered into “lard” instead of dried.

All the insides, such as heart, kidneys and liver, were prepared and eaten, roasted or baked or laid out in the sun to dry. The lungs were not cooked, just sliced and hung up to dry. Intestines were also dried. Sapotsis or Crow gut is a Blackfoot delicacy made from the main intestine which is stuffed with meat and roasted over coals. Tripe was prepared and eaten raw or boiled or roasted. The brains were eaten raw. If the animal was a female, they would prepare the teats or udders by boiling or barbecuing-these were never eaten raw. If the animal carried an unborn young, this was fed to the older people because it was so tender. The guts of the unborn would be taken out and braided, then boiled too. The tongue was always boiled if it wasn’t dried. “Even old animals have tender tongues,” she recalls.

The hooves were boiled down until all the gristle in them was soft. The blood was also saved, often mixed with flour or used to make sausages in the guts.

The second stomach was washed well and eaten raw, but certain parts were usually boiled or roasted and the rest dried. “Another delicacy is at the very end of the intestines—the last part of the colon. You wash this real good and tie one end shut. Then you stuff the piece with dried berries and a little water and you tie the other end shut. You boil this all day, until it is really tender and you have a Blackfoot Pudding.”

According to John (Fire) Lame Deer, the eating of guts had evolved into a contest. “In the old days we used to eat the guts of the buffalo, making a contest of it, two fellows getting hold of a long piece of intestines from opposite ends, starting chewing toward the middle, seeing who can get there first; that’s eating. Those buffalo guts, full of half-fermented, half-digested grass and herbs, you didn’t need any pills and vitamins when you swallowed those.”15

The marrow was full of fat and was usually eaten raw. The Indians knew how to strike the femur bone so that it would split open and reveal the delicate interior flesh. Eaton and others report that the marrow is rich in polyunsaturated fatty acids but Stefansson describes two types of marrow, one type from the lower leg which is soft “more like a particularly delicious cream in flavor” and another from the humerus and femur that is “hard and tallowy at room temperatures.”16 According to Beverly Hungry Wolf, the grease inside the bones “was scooped out and saved or the bones boiled and the fat skimmed off and saved. It turned into something like hard lard.” More saturated fat the professors have overlooked!

Samuel Hearne, an explorer writing in 1768, describes the preparation of caribou: “Of all the dishes cooked by the Indians, a beeatee, as it is called in their language, is certainly the most delicious that can be prepared from caribou only, without any other ingredient. It is a kind of haggis, made with the blood, a good quantity of fat shred small, some of the tenderest of the flesh, together with the heart and lungs cut, or more commonly torn into small shivers; all of which is put into the stomach and toasted by being suspended before the fire on a string. . . . it is certainly a most delicious morsel, even without pepper, salt or any other seasoning.”17

Sometimes the Indians selected only the fatty parts of the animal, throwing the rest away. “On the twenty-second of July,” writes Samuel Hearne, “we met several strangers, whom we joined in pursuit of the caribou, which were at this time so plentiful that we got everyday a sufficient number for our support, and indeed too frequently killed several merely for the tongues, marrow and fat.”

Certain parts of the animal were considered appropriate for men or women. The male organs were for the men, as well as the ribs towards the front, which were called “the shoulder ribs, or the boss ribs. They are considered a man’s special meal.” For women, a part of the “intestine that is quite large and full of manure
. . . the thicker part has a kind of hard lining on the inside. My grandmother said that this part is good for a pregnant mother to eat; she said it will make the baby have a nice round head. Pregnant mothers were not allowed to eat any other parts of the intestine because their faces would become discolored.”18

Sacred Foods

All of the foods considered important for reproduction and all of the foods considered sacred were animal foods, rich in fat. According to Beverly Hungry Wolf, pemmican made with berries “was used by the Horns Society for their sacred meal of communion.” Boiled tongue was an ancient delicacy, served as the food of communion at the Sun Dance. A blood soup, made from a mixture of blood and corn flour cooked in broth, was used as a sacred meal during the nighttime Holy Smoke ceremonies.19

Bear was another sacred food-altars of bear bones have been found at many Paleolithic sites. Cabeza de Vaca reports that the Indians of Texas kept the skin of the bear and ate the fat, but threw the rest away. Other groups ate the entire animal, including the head, but recognized the fat as the most valuable part. According to colonist William Byrd II, writing in 1728, “The flesh of bear hath a good relish, very savory and inclining nearest to that of Pork. The Fat of this Creature is least apt to rise in the Stomach of any other. The Men for the most part chose it rather than Venison.” Bear grease was thought to give them resistance by making them physically strong. “We eat it sometimes now and everybody feels better.”20

Bear was also considered an important food for reproduction. When Byrd asked an Indian why their squaws were always able to bare children, the Indian replied that “if any Indian woman did not prove with child at a decent time after Marriage, the Husband, to save his Reputation with the women, forthwith entered into a Bear-dyet for Six Weeks, which in that time makes him so vigorous that he grows exceedingly impertinent to his poor wife and ’tis great odds but he makes her a Mother in Nine Months.”

Fat-Soluble Nutrients

Indians living in coastal areas consumed large amounts of fish, including the heads and roe. Price reported that in the area of Vancouver, the candle fish was collected in large quantities, the oil removed and used as a dressing for many seafoods. Shell fish were eaten in large amounts when available.

Animal fats, organ meats and fatty fish all supply fat-soluble vitamins A and D, which Weston Price recognized as the basis of healthy primitive diets. These nutrients are catalysts to the assimilation of protein and minerals. Without them minerals go to waste and the body cannot be built tall and strong. When tribes have access to an abundance of fat soluble vitamins, the offspring will grow up with “nice round heads,” broad faces and straight teeth.

Certain fatty glands of game animals also provided vitamin C during the long winter season in the North. The Indians of Canada revealed to Dr. Price that the adrenal glands in the moose prevented scurvy. When an animal was killed, the adrenal gland and its fat were cut up and shared with all members of the tribe. The walls of the second stomach were also eaten to prevent “the white man’s disease.”

Plant Foods

A variety of plant foods were used throughout the North American continents, notably corn (in the temperate regions) and wild rice (in the Great Lakes region). Dry corn was first soaked in lime water (water in which calcium carbonate or calcium oxide is dissolved), a process called nixtamalizacionthat softens the corn for use and releases vitamin B3, which otherwise remains bound in the grain. The resulting dough, called nixtamal or masa, can be prepared in a variety of ways to make porridges and breads. Often these preparations were then fried in bear grease or other fat. Many groups grew beans and enjoyed them as “succotash,” a dish comprised of beans, corn, dog meat and bear fat. As an adjunct to the diet, corn provided variety and important calories. But when the proportion of corn in the diet became too high, as happened in the American Southwest, the health of the people suffered. Skeletal remains of groups subsisting largely on corn reveal widespread tooth decay and bone problems.21

Tubers like the Jerusalem artichoke (the root of a type of sunflower) were cooked slowly for a long time in underground pits until the hard indigestible root was transformed into a highly digestible gelatinous mass. Wild onions were used to flavor meat dishes and, in fact, were an important item of commerce. Nuts like acorns were made into gruel or little cakes after careful preparation to remove tannins. In the Southeast, pecans contributed important fat calories. In the southern areas, cactus was consumed; in northern areas wild potatoes.

Staples like corn and beans were stored in underground pits, ingeniously covered with logs and leaves to prevent wild animals from finding or looting the stores. Birch bark was used to make trays, buckets and containers, including kettles. Water was boiled by putting hot rocks into the containers. Southern Indians used clay pots for the same purpose.

In general, fruits were dried and used to season fat, fish and meat-dried blueberries were used to flavor moose fat, for example. Beverly Hungry Wolf recalls that her grandmother mixed wild mint with fat and dried meat, which was then stored in rawhide containers. The mint would keep the bugs out and also prevent the fat from spoiling.

The Indians enjoyed sweet-tasting foods. Maple sugar or pine sugar was used to sweeten meats and fats. In the Southwest, the Indians chewed the sweet heart of the agave plant. In fact, the Spanish noted that where agave grew, the Indians had bad teeth.22

Fermented Foods

Use of sour-tasting fermented foods was widespread. The Cherokee “bread” consisted of nixtamalwrapped in corn leaves and allowed to ferment for two weeks.23 Manzanita berries and other plant foods were also fermented.

The Indians also enjoyed fermented, gamey animal foods. The Coahuiltecans, living in the inland brush country of south Texas set fish aside for eight days “until larvae and other insects had developed in the rotting flesh.24 They were then consumed as an epicure’s delight, along with the rotten fish.” Samuel Hearne describes a fermented dish consumed by the Chippewaya and Cree: “The most remarkable dish among them. . . is blood mixed with the half-digested food which is found in the caribou’s stomach, and boiled up with a sufficient quantity of water to make it of the consistence of pease-pottage. Some fat and scraps of tender flesh are also shred small and boiled with it. To render this dish more palatable, they have a method of mixing the blood with the contents of the stomach in the paunch itself, and hanging it up in the heat and smoke of the fire for several days; which puts the whole mass into a state of fermentation, which gives it such an agreeable acid taste, that were it not for prejudice, it might be eaten by those who have the nicest palates.”25

A number of reports indicate that broth and herbed beverages were preferred to water. The Chippewa boiled water and added leaves or twigs before drinking it.26 Sassafras was a favorite ingredient in teas and medicinal drinks.27 Broth was flavored and thickened with corn silk and dried pumpkin blossom. California Indians added lemonade berries to water to make a pleasantly sour drink.28 Another sour drink was produced from fermented corn porridge.29 In the Southwest, a drink called chichi is made with little balls of corn dough which the women impregnate with saliva by chewing. They are added to water to produce a delicious, sour, fizzy fermented drink.30

Guts and Grease in a Glass

Modern food writers who assure us we can enjoy the superb health of the American Indian by eating low fat foods and canned fruits have done the public a great disservice. The basis of the Indian diet was guts and grease, not waffles and skimmed milk. When the Indians abandoned these traditional foods and began consuming processed store-bought foods, their health deteriorated rapidly. Weston Price vividly described the suffering from tooth decay, tuberculosis, arthritis and other problems that plagued the modernized Indian groups he visited throughout America and Canada.

Modern man has lost his taste for the kinds of foods the Indians ate—how many American children will eat raw liver, dried lung or sour porridge? How then can we return to the kind of good health the Indians enjoyed?

Price found only one group of modernized Indians that did not suffer from caries. These were students at the Mohawk Institute near the city of Brantford. “The Institute maintained a fine dairy herd and provided fresh vegetables, whole wheat bread and limited the sugar and white flour.”31So the formula for good health in the modern age begins with the products of “a fine dairy herd”—whole, raw, unprocessed milk from cows that eat green grass, a highly nutritious substitute for guts and grease and one that every child can enjoy, even native American children who are supposedly lactose intolerant. Add some good fats (butter, tallow and lard), aim for liver or other organ meats once a week (but don’t fret if you can’t achieve this with your own children), make cod liver oil part of the daily routine, eat plenty of meat and seafood, and augment the diet with a variety of plant foods properly prepared, including a few that are fermented. Keep sugar and white flour to a minimum. It’s a simple formula that can turn a nation of hungry little wolves into happy campers.

Meanwhile, be skeptical of government guidelines. The Indians learned not to trust our government and neither should you.

The authors are grateful to Don Coté for his help with this article.

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Sidebar

Native Americans and Diabetes

American Indians know all too well the havoc that Type II Diabetes can wreak on the human body. What they may not know is that Uncle Sam is to blame.

Thousands of American Indians depend on the Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations (FDPIR). What do participants receive? It should come as no surprise that the commodities are loaded with carbohydrates with very little protein on the menu and even less fat. And the fats Indians do receive are loaded with trans fats. These foods are cheap and the multinational giants that produce them are equipped with lawyers and lobbyists to ensure that their products are the ones our government buys. The federal government feeds 53 million people per day. Is it any wonder they’re out to cut costs, whatever the consequences to our health?

Even in light of the latest research on the ill effect of excess carbohydrates on the human body, federal agencies have no choice. The National Nutrition Monitoring and Related Research Act of 1990, also known as Public Law 101-445, states that all federal agencies shall promote the current US Dietary Recommendations in carrying out any federal food, nutrition or health program. The USDA Food Pyramid is more than a recommendation; it’s a federal prescription written in stone. And it’s speeding the death of most if not all Americans.

The Indians are hit harder and faster than the rest of us because they are only two generations away from the “old way” of life, based on game animals and fish. Uncle Sam will never admit that the Indians were tall, lean and healthy just two generations ago. If ever someone wanted proof that humans weren’t designed to eat a grain-based diet, look at the American Indian population-almost all of them are battling overweight, diabetes, and heart disease. Addictions are common. Yet many Indians have vivid memories of life before federal handouts, a time when diabetes and other diseases of civilization were unheard of among the Indians.

The US government has failed miserably when it comes to treating its native peoples. But without a change in US law, Indians will continue to receive a recipe for death. One possible remedy is the Tribal Self-Governance Project, created by Congress in 1988, which allows tribal governments more flexibility in the decision-making and administration of their contracted programs. Indians must take a stand and demand that government subsidies reflect their native diet. Better yet, Indians who can should refuse their “gift” from the government and return to hunting and fishing-the only way to reclaim their health.

Michael Eades, MD
Drs. Michael and Mary Dan Eades are the authors of Protein Power Lifeplan (Warner, 2000)

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References

1. S. Boyd Eaton, MD with Marjorie Shostak and Melvin Konner, MD, PhD, The Paleolithic Prescription: A Program of Diet & Exercise and a Design for Living, Harper & Row
2. Loren Cordain, PhD and Boyd Eaton, “Evolutionary aspects of diet: Old genes, new fuels. Nutritional changes since agriculture,” World Review of Nutrition and Dietetics 1997:81
3. Jean Carper, USA Weekend
4. Elizabeth Somer, MA, RD, “Stone Age Diet,” SHAPE, October 1998
5. Weston A. Price, DDS, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation, (619) 574-7763, pages 73-102
6. Ibid., p 91
7. The explorer Cabeza de Vaca is quoted in WW Newcomb, The Indians of Texas, 1961, University of Texas.
8. Ibid.
9. Eaton, op cit, p 80
10. USDA data, prepared by John L. Weihrauch with technical assistance of Julianne Borton and Theresa Sampagna
11. Vilhjalmur Stefansson, The Fat of the Land, MacMillan Company, 1956
12. Frances Densmore, “Chippewa Customs,” Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 86, page 43
13. Stefansson, op cit
14. Beverly Hungry Wolf, The Ways of My Grandmother, pages 183-189
15. John (fire) Lame Deer and Richard Erdoes, Lame Deer Seeker of Visions, Simon and Schuster, 1972, page 122
16. Stefansson, op cit, page 27
17. The Journals of Samuel Hearne, 1768.
18. Hungry Wolf, op cit
19. Hungry Wolf, op cit
20. Inez Hilger, “Chippewa Child Life,” Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 146, page 96
21. William Campbell Douglass, MD, The Milk Book, Second Opinion Publishing 1994, page 215
22. Personal communication, Florence Shipek, expert on the Californian coastal Indians.
23. Mary Ulmer and Samuel E. Beck, Cherokee Cooklore, Museum of the Cherokee Indian, 1951
24. Cabeza de Vaca, op cit
25. Samuel Hearne, op cit
26. Frances Densmore, op cit, page 39
27. “Wildman” Steve Brill with Evelyn Dean, Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medicinal Plants, Hearst Books, New York, 1994, page 220
28. Personal communication, Florence Shipek, op cit
29. Mary Ulmer, op cit
30. Keith Steinkraus, ed, Handbook of Indigenous Fermented Foods, Marcel Dekker, New York, 1983
31. Weston Price, op cit, page 31

This article appeared in Wise Traditions in Food, Farming and the Healing Arts, the quarterly magazine of the Weston A. Price Foundation, Spring 2001.

La Cultura del Victimismo

...In its light, human history, for the first time, becomes intelligible, and human behaviour understandable as never before. This radical transformation in human understanding - which has come to a peak in the mid 1990's - I shall call "the new evolutionary enlightenment" . I confidently predict that, because it is based on fully tested scientific knowledge, it will far outshine the enlightenment of the 18th century. -Derek Freeman-


sábado, octubre 03, 2015



Jonathan Haidt comenta en profundidad, e incluso subraya, en su web un artículo que le ha encantado sobre el origen de las Microagresiones escrito por Bradley Campbell y Jason Manning. El artículo sitúa la aparición de este fenómeno, que ha estallado en las universidades americanas en los últimos años, en una evolución moral que nos ha llevado desde la cultura de la dignidad, en la que vivíamos hasta ahora, a una cultura del victimismo, y lo contrastan también con la cultura previa del honor. Merece la pena resumir el análisis sociológico que hacen estos autores.


Derald Wing Sue define microagresiones como: “las breves y cotidianas indignidades verbales, conductuales y ambientales, intencionadas o no intencionadas, que comunican una actitud hostil, negativa o derogatoria en temas raciales, de género u orientación sexual, e insultos leves religiosos contra individuos o grupos”. Sue pone como ejemplo de microagresión que alguien le pregunte de donde es y no se quede satisfecho con la respuesta “- de Portland”. Otros ejemplos son decir a un norteamericano asiático que habla muy bien inglés, agarrar el bolso cuando un afroamericano entra en el ascensor, o mirar las muestras de afecto de gays y lesbianas en público. El término apareció en los años 70 del siglo pasado pero es ahora cuando se ha puesto de moda con varias webs dedicadas a denunciar el problema, donde la gente puede remitir sus ofensas.


Las microagresiones tienen algunas características como son la dependencia de terceras partes. Alguien que se siente ofendido puede reaccionar de diversas maneras: agresivamente, cortando la relación con el ofensor sin confrontación, hablándolo con el ofensor, etc. Sin embargo, la característica principal de las webs de microagresiones es que airean los agravios y animan a difundirlas a todo el mundo, a personas que nada tienen que ver con el asunto. Podemos decir que se trata de un cotilleo masivo. Las personas siempre han cotilleado (cotilleo: charla evaluativa acerca de alguien que no está presente) sus problemas a amigos, familiares y conocidos, pero no de forma indiscriminada. Los niños presentan sus quejas a los adultos y los adultos a los tribunales del sistema legal. Explicar las microagresiones, por tanto requiere explicar las condiciones que llevan a las personas a trasladar sus problemas a terceras partes.


Estas webs se dedican a buscar y mantener apoyos para lanzar cruzadas morales contra injusticias que presentan como muy graves y sistemáticas exagerando, o falsificando incluso, muchas veces las ofensas. Se produce también una “sobredependencia legal “, una atrofia de la capacidad para manejar pequeños problemas interpersonales. En el fondo se trata de conseguir el suficiente apoyo para obligar a las autoridades a que actúen. Lo curioso, también, es que estas quejas florecen entre las poblaciones más educadas y pudientes de las universidades americanas y no entre los más pobres. Parece que cuanto más igualitaria es una sociedad nos sentimos agraviados por cosas cada vez más pequeñas.


En definitiva, el marco en el que aparecen las microagresiones es el de una sociedad diversa culturalmente, igualitaria, en la que hay unas terceras partes poderosas (autoridades legales , académicas, administradores…). Pero un ingrediente necesario son las redes sociales (Internet, Facebook, Twitter…) ya que sin ellas no sería posible difundir las ofensas de la forma masiva que se requiere. Pero ¿cómo explicamos este fenómeno?


Campbell y Manning hablan de que se ha producido una evolución en la cultura moral de Occidente. En los siglos XVIII y XIX la mayoría de las sociedades de Occidente pasaron de la cultura del honor a la cultura de la dignidad. En las culturas del honor es la reputación lo que hace que alguien sea honorable o no y uno debe responder agresivamente a insultos, a agresiones y desafíos o perder el honor. No luchar se considera una debilidad moral. La gente honorable es muy sensible a los insultos y responde inmediatamente. Las culturas del honor aparecen en lugares donde no existe una autoridad legal fuerte y uno mismo tiene que sacarse las castañas del fuego.


Pero al pasar a la cultura de la dignidad se considera que en vez de honor las personas tienen dignidad y que es inherente a la persona, por lo que no puede ser alienada por otros, ni tiene que ser demostrada. La dignidad existe independientemente de lo que otros piensen por lo que la reputación social es menos importante. Los insultos pueden ser importantes pero ya no destruyen el honor y la reputación de una persona como ocurría anteriormente. Incluso está bien visto tener la piel dura y pasar de esas provocaciones. Esta cultura aparece cuando hay una autoridad fuerte y un sistema legal que funciona. Las ofensas graves (robo, asalto, ruptura de contrato, etc.) se llevan a los tribunales y las ofensas menores se arreglan personalmente , hablando y discutiendo el problema, o se pasa de ellas.


Pero ahora, según Campbell y Manning, se está produciendo la transición desde una cultura de la dignidad a una cultura del victimismo que tiene características que no encajan ni con la cultura del honor ni con la de la dignidad. La gente ahora es muy sensible al insulto, como en las culturas del honor, pero no responde personalmente sino que busca la ayuda de terceras partes. Esto sería anatema en una cultura del honor. Por otro lado, las personas integradas en una cultura de la dignidad entienden lo de recurrir a terceras partes pero no para ofensas menores. Así que es como un remix de ambas culturas. El victimismo es una forma de atraer simpatías y ser víctima confiere estatus moral (a la vez que se rebaja el estatus moral del ofensor) de manera que se produce así una espiral de competencia a ver quién es más víctima.


Resumiendo, estamos viviendo ahora un choque entre la dignidad y el victimismo de la misma manera que antes lo hubo entre honor y dignidad. En las sociedades actuales, atomizadas e igualitarias, pequeñas ofensas generan gran angustia y se recurra a terceras partes. Si añadimos a la mezcla las nuevas tecnologías de la comunicación el resultado es la emergencia de una cultura del victimismo que probablemente se irá extendiendo.


@pitiklinov


Referencia:


Jonathan Haidt. Where microaggressions really come from: a sociological account.

How Britain fell out of love with the free market

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welve years ago, shortly after winning his third consecutive general election, Tony Blair gave the Labour party a brief lecture on economics. “There is no mystery about what works,” he said, crisply, speaking from a podium printed with the slogan “Securing Britain’s Future” at the party conference in Brighton. “An open, liberal economy prepared constantly to change to remain competitive.”

Blair rounded on critics of modern capitalism: “I hear people say we have to stop and debate globalisation. You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer. They’re not debating it in China and India.” He went on: “The temptation is … to think we protect a workforce by regulation, a company by government subsidy, an industry by tariffs. It doesn’t work today.” Britain should not “cling on to the European social model of the past”.

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Most of his conference speech was vigorously applauded. But the passage on economics was received with solemn looks and silence. There was no heckling, as there had been when previous Labour leaders and chancellors delivered what they saw as home truths about the economy. Instead, there was a sense of resignation in the hall: an acceptance by a party of the left that the right had won the economic argument.

In the early years of the 21st century, the inevitability of an ever more competitive, deregulated, internationally orientated market economy, to which both government and society were subordinate – a doctrine often called neoliberalism – was accepted right across the mainstream of British politics: from the Thatcherites who still dominated the Conservative party; to the increasingly pro-business Liberal Democrats, who would soon form a coalition government with the Tories; to the Scottish National party, whose then leader Alex Salmond praised Ireland and Iceland for their low corporate taxes; to the Blair cabinet itself, where, I was told by a senior Labour figure in 2001, “You won’t find a single member with anything critical to say about capitalism.” It was assumed by the main parties that most voters felt the same way.

Margaret Thatcher’s government had overcome fierce opposition to install a free-market economy in Britain. But under Blair, seemingly more consensual and less dogmatic, the extending of markets into ever more areas of everyday life was presented as unavoidable, or simply practical: “what works”. The British housing market was thriving, with home ownership reaching an all-time high in 2003. There had not been a recession since 1991, a blissfully long time for the previously fitful British economy. Compared to the sometimes tatty, depopulating country of the 70s and 80s, much of Britain in the early 2000s looked successful – a society of regenerating city centres and steadily rising wages.

The free-market ascendancy was acknowledged even by some of its strongest critics. In 2000, the Marxist historian Perry Anderson declared: “The only starting-point for a realistic left today is a lucid registration of historical defeat … Neo-liberalism as a set of principles rules undivided across the globe: the most successful ideology in world history.” In 2007, Naomi Klein wrote in her book The Shock Doctrine that capitalism was “conquering its final frontiers”.

In 2017, that aura of invulnerability has evaporated. Disenchantment with the economic status quo has been potently expressed in elections across the world, from France to the US. But in no democracy has the political shift against the free market been as stark as in Britain.

Since Thatcher’s election in 1979, Conservative and Labour governments have privatised and deregulated, reduced taxes for business and indulged its excesses, opened up the economy to foreign capital and commercialised the national psyche, until Britain became one of the world’s most thoroughly neoliberal societies. And yet, at last year’s EU referendum, the votes of those “left behind” by all this played an unexpectedly pivotal role. Then, at this year’s general election, both the Conservatives and Labour campaigned – or appeared to campaign – against the economic system that they themselves had created.

The Conservative manifesto attacked “aggressive asset-stripping” of British companies by foreign buyers; “perverse pricing” by privatised rail companies; “exploitative” markets in energy, property, insurance and telecommunications; and “the remuneration of some corporate leaders … [which] has risen far faster than some corporate performance”.

 Theresa May launching the 2017 Conservative election manifesto. Photograph: Danny Lawson/PA

“We reject the cult of selfish individualism,” the manifesto declared, in language seemingly calculated to insult Thatcherites. “We do not believe in untrammelled free markets.” Instead, the Conservatives now believed that “regulation [was] necessary for the proper ordering of any economy”. They would “enhance workers’ rights and protections”, and create an “economy that works for everyone”. The obvious implication was that the free market had created the opposite.

The Labour manifesto opened with almost exactly the same words: “Creating an economy that works for all”. Like the Tories, Labour attacked executive pay and promised to strengthen workers’ rights. Like the Tories, they offered an “industrial strategy” through which government – long depicted by free-marketeers as largely irrelevant or actively harmful – would help modernise the economy. And like the Tories, Labour said companies should no longer be run primarily for their shareholders, as free-market doctrine has insisted since the early 80s, but also for the benefit of their employees, customers and the public as a whole.

While the Conservatives offered mostly rhetoric, Labour offered policies – nationalisation, restored trade union rights, restrictions on the City of London – which would undo much of British neoliberalism. It is these policies that, on 8 June, helped Labour achieve its largest vote since Blair’s landslide in 1997, and now leaves the party possibly on the verge of power. John McDonnell, who lists one of his recreational activities in Who’s Who as “generally fermenting the overthrow of capitalism”, could soon be chancellor.

Amid all the current political turmoil in Britain and the wider world, the shift against free markets has yet to register fully with much of the media or many voters. But the most ardent neoliberals have noticed. “Free marketeers have been gobsmacked,” says Mark Littlewood, director of the Institute of Economic Affairs, which has supplied British politicians with pro-capitalist arguments for 62 years. “Things we thought of as like the laws of gravity are now up for grabs.”

The end of the free-market monopoly in British politics is part of an even bigger change. After almost a quarter of a century when it was widely agreed that the fundamentals of the economy were too important to be meddled with by politicians, or be subject to democratic scrutiny, the contest to shape that economy has restarted.

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ne clue as to why Britain fell out of love with the free market is in the tone now adopted by its defenders. Gone is the capitalist triumphalism of the Thatcher and Blair eras. Instead, there are apologies. “Markets can be brutal,” concedes the Conservative MP James Cleverly, leader of the Free Enterprise Group, a Commons pressure group with three dozen members (all Tories) that was founded in 2010. “The benefits of free markets have not spread themselves between the generations as equally as many of us would like,” he says. “Part of the reason Corbyn got so much support in the election, for policies which I regard as economically illiterate, is that many people don’t value the impact my kind of economic values have had on their lives. The big wins we had with market reforms in Britain were back in the 80s.”

These days, many free marketeers are highly critical of how British capitalism operates. “The City is incorrectly incentivised,” says the Tory peer Nigel Vinson, who has been a leading player in Britain’s free-market thinktanks since the formative days of Thatcherism in the mid-70s. “We have sold far too many companies to foreign owners. A lot of corporate takeovers are personal megalomania, not corporate efficiency. There are abuses of market power, such as [the zero-hours employer] Sports Direct. Meanwhile you see [the advertising executive] Martin Sorrell taking home £70m in 2015. That sets a rotten example.”

Littlewood lists other dysfunctions: “Wage stagnation, poor GDP growth, crony capitalism in the contracting-out of public services, endless gaming of the system by corporations, a general ennui about the prevailing economic system … ” Finally, he cites the event that did more than any other to discredit free-market capitalism in Britain: “the 2008 crash”, the banking crisis caused by the deregulation and hubris of the financial markets.

The day the credit crunch began, 10 years on: 'the world changed'

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That crisis and what followed – recession, prolonged weak growth, ballooning public and private debt, and seemingly endless austerity – has already destroyed or severely damaged the governments of Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Theresa May. It has necessitated contortions that suggest an economic system on life support: bank bailouts, unprecedentedly low interest rates, and quantitative easing – ie the Bank of England simply printing money and pumping it into the economy.

“The architecture of neoliberalism has had huge holes blown in it,” says Will Davies, reader in political economy at Goldsmiths, University of London. He argues that free-market capitalism has suffered a two-stage collapse: “First, in 2008, it was revealed as financially unviable. Then, in 2016 and 2017, it went into political crisis.” One symptom of the latter, he says, has been a rupture between big business and the main British political parties.

But this is not the first time that the economic failings and social costs of neoliberalism have led people to forecast its demise. Repeatedly in the past three decades, critiques and alternatives have been conceived and promoted, refined and combined by innovative thinkers and politicians of both main parties – and then frustrated and largely forgotten, until the re-emergence of many of their themes and advocates under May and Corbyn.

In the meantime, the free market has survived, and worked its way into more aspects of Britons’ daily lives, becoming in many ways progressively more efficient and thorough in its commodification of our activities, our homes, our minds. In fact, it might be this inhuman efficiency, and its social consequences, that has provoked the current political revolt against modern capitalism.

Is this revolt just another episode in a long resistance to neoliberalism, or is it a breakthrough? And if so, do Labour or the Conservatives have another viable economic model, which might make capitalism less dominant in our lives?

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T

he first chance to change the economic order that Thatcher and John Major’s governments had imposed on Britain came 22 years ago. In January 1995, a few months after Blair was overwhelmingly elected Labour leader, the then Guardian economics editor Will Huttonpublished a panoramic book about the British economy, The State We’re In. Hutton had spent years exploring the economic ideas and social consequences of Thatcherism, and had decided that both were disastrous. He was a follower of John Maynard Keynes, the early-20th-century economist whose vision of a milder, state-regulated capitalism had shaped the postwar Britain that Thatcherism largely erased. Hutton was also close to the Labour party: two rising young Blairites, Yvette Cooper and David Miliband, gave him comments on the book’s manuscript.

The State We’re In depicted British economic life after a decade-and-a-half of Conservative free-market reforms as “meaner, harder, and more corrupting”. It also saw the economy as a failure in business terms: short-termist, low in productivity, over-reliant on the City of London and old technology, prone to boom and bust. Britain was falling behind other capitalist countries. “The individualist, laissez-faire values which imbue the economic and political elite,” wrote Hutton, “have been found wanting.” His solution was to import the best practices of other economies, particularly Germany, which he admired for its more patient, more socially inclusive economic approach. He called his vision “stakeholder” capitalism.

The book had a cautious initial print run of 3,500. But its timing was good: Britain was emerging sluggishly from a long recession, and was tired of Tory government. The State We’re In sold 250,000 copies, making it one of the bestselling economics books in Britain since the second world war. Among its readers were much of the New Labour government-in-waiting: Gordon Brown, Ed Balls, John Prescott, Robin Cook and Tony Blair himself.

“Tony was not a man of settled opinions, nor someone who knew a lot about economics,” says Hutton, “but David Miliband persuaded him to read it. This may be apocryphal, but apparently there is a picture of Blair reading it on holiday.” During 1995 and 1996, Blair’s speeches began to refer to the limitations of the free market, and to the desirability of a “stakeholder” economy, “run for the many, not for the few” – an almost exact prefiguring of the title of the 2017 Labour manifesto.

But then these themes were abruptly dropped. According to Hutton, as the 1997 election neared, Blair was told by his more nervous advisors that any talk of reforming British capitalism would be presented by the Conservatives as a return to the economic interventionism of the troubled Labour governments of the 70s. For decades, they had been crudely but effectively caricatured by the Tories, and much of the media, as bullyingly leftwing and disastrous. Meanwhile Brown, who as shadow chancellor had spent years trying to win over the City, decided Hutton’s book was too hostile to bankers; and Prescott, a Labour traditionalist, decided it was not anti-capitalist enough. “I was frozen out,” Hutton says.

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 Gordon Brown as chancellor in 1997. Photograph: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

In the late-90s, the economy started growing more consistently, as part of a technology-driven boom across the western world, and Hutton’s view of Britain began to seem too pessimistic. On winning power in 1997, Labour left most of the structure and practices of Thatcherite capitalism in place, and rather than question its rationale, they used swelling tax revenues to soften its social effects, for example through tax credits to subsidise low wages.

Outside Britain, the free market had more doubters. In 1997, the World Bank, previously an uncritical advocate of its state-shrinking orthodoxies, published a report conceding that “an effective state is the cornerstone of successful economies”. In South America, the failures of market-driven economic policies began to move electorates dramatically leftward. And in 1999, an even wider mass movement formed around the world against the environmental and social damage done by globalisation, as the spread of free-market capitalism was euphemistically called by its advocates. Enormous protests took place, from Genoa to Seattle. Smaller, but still vibrant, anti-capitalist demonstrations began to occur regularly in London.

But still most British politicians did not take them very seriously, regarding the movement as backward-looking and naively utopian. In a brief book published in 2001, the Financial Times journalist John Lloyd, a former communist who had become a New Labour associate, described the activists’ annual summit at Porto Alegre in Brazil as “a ragbag of declamation, hot air and vapidity”. The contempt was mutual: most of the protestors showed no interest in forming alliances with centre-left politicians in order to slightly civilise capitalism. “It’s not our job to suggest alternatives!” one prominent activist told me in 2000.

By the mid-00s, the protests were tailing off. Rather than listen to the anti-capitalists, the Blair government and its centre-left counterparts regulated their sometimes violent demonstrations with ever more riot police – while regulating the more powerful anarchic forces of finance capitalism less and less. The British public, meanwhile, seemed to have largely accepted the reign of the free market: during the mid-00s, the annual British Social Attitudes survey found that dissatisfaction with its impact on society and the workplace, while still substantial, had dipped to the lowest levels ever recorded.

With the economy still growing, year after year, the mass benefits of unfettered capitalism – ever wider property ownership, low inflation, cheaper consumer goods, and “no more boom and bust”, as Brown put it – appeared secure. “For most people under 20,” wrote the cultural critic Mark Fisher in his 2009 book Capitalist Realism, “the lack of alternatives to capitalism is no longer even an issue. Capitalism seamlessly occupies the horizons of the thinkable.”

And yet, even during these boom years there were signs that the free-market economy might be brittle. In 2001, the rail infrastructure company Railtrack – which had been one of the Conservatives’ most high-profile privatisations seven years earlier – went into administration after the Hatfield train crash and a botched modernisation of the west coast mainline. In 2002 the company was effectively nationalised by the Blair government – a policy approach supposedly discredited and abandoned in the 70s – and became Network Rail.

Meanwhile, the short-term British business culture identified by Will Hutton persisted. Investment by companies fell almost continuously between the late-90s and the late-00s. With trade unions weak, many employers became meaner. “Around 2003, wages for most Britons started to flatline,” says Will Davies. This was usually a sign of a recession rather than a boom, and had not happened since the early 80s. In order to keep shopping, people borrowed: outstanding private debt, already high by international standards in 2003, at about twice the national GDP, began rising, faster and faster, towards a peak of more than two-and-a-half times GDP in 2008.

“Much of the apparently benign [economic] growth … did not in fact represent a sustainable expansion,” wrote the economists Michael Jacobs and Mariana Mazzucato in their introduction to the 2016 book Rethinking Capitalism. “Rather, it reflected an unprecedented increase in household and corporate debt … lax lending practices … [and] an asset price bubble, which would inevitably burst.” Large elements of the neoliberal British economy were going to prove unsustainable.

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n Dagenham, on the eastern edge of London, the local Labour MP Jon Cruddas noticed pressures building. The area has some of the cheapest housing in London – worn but sought-after 1930s semis – but “around 2002, 2003”, Cruddas says, “the economic status quo stopped working: wages, property prices, competition for public services … People were not living the lives they had been promised by the politicians.” In 2007, he stood for the Labour deputy leadership.

Cruddas was (and is) on the left of the party, but had a reputation for free thinking and building unexpected alliances. After working in Downing Street in the 90s, and helping introduce the minimum wage – one of Blair and Brown’s few alterations to the economic status quo – Cruddas had become frustrated by their refusal to confront corporate power. He based his deputy leadership bid around attacks on “free-market dogma”, and warnings about “the material insecurities” and proliferation of low-skilled jobs in his and other working-class constituencies. Once famous for highly unionised car manufacturing, Dagenham was becoming a patchwork of derelict former factory sites and casualised, low-paid work in retail. Standing against five other less radical, better-known candidates, Cruddas won the election’s first round. But subsequent rounds of voting narrowly eliminated him from the contest.

Regardless, the tempo of the revolt against free-market Britain picked up. The following year, the activist and thinker Maurice Glasman, whom Cruddas knew well, began to conceive of a movement he called Blue Labour. Glasman had worked for years with people who felt bullied by the modern economy, through the community organisation London Citizens. “I was just channelling what I was hearing,” he says. “People would say to me, ‘I’ve got to work two jobs to survive,’ or ‘I’ve had to move to London to find a job, but my mum is in Derby and she’s dying.’”

A social conservative, Glasman saw capitalism as “a criminal, dominating thing” that fractured families and communities. Glasman is an intense, compelling talker, and as with Will Hutton a decade earlier, his ideas intrigued senior New Labour figures, many of whom were becoming more interested in the importance of community themselves. But when he properly laid out his critique of capitalism, he remembers, “their faces would go a bit blank. Then they would say: ‘You don’t understand. It’s the goose that lays the golden egg.’”

Along with close allies such as Ed Balls, Brown saw the deregulated City of London as a source of tax revenue to fund more generous state spending. During his premiership from 2007 to 2010, despite the City’s major part in causing the 2008 financial crisis, Labour could never quite bring itself to turn against the free-market capitalism it had inherited and furthered.

Instead, improbably, the denunciation came from the right. Phillip Blond was a conservative philosopher and theologian with a declamatory, slightly old-fashioned persona and prose style who had lectured for years at a small Church of England higher-education college based in Cumbria and Lancashire. In 2008, he began publishing newspaper articles attacking the Thatcherites and New Labour as co-conspirators. “The lesson of the last 30 years,” he told Guardian readers in May of that year, “is that neither the state nor the market is able to alleviate poverty or deliver opportunity for all.” Cleverly branded as Red Toryism, Blond’s ideas caught the attention of David Cameron. He was then still a relatively new Tory leader, and was energetically and shamelessly looking to differentiate his approach from Thatcherism.

In January 2009, Blond wrote much of a speech that Cameron delivered to the annual summit of the global business elite at Davos. “This is what too many people see when they look at capitalism today,” declared the Tory leader, who had until recently been an enthusiastic free-marketeer himself. “Markets without morality … wealth without fairness … recklessness and greed … lives [that] feel like little more than flotsam in some vast international sea of business.”

 David Cameron at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2009. Photograph: Pierre Verdy/AFP/Getty

Cameron’s solution was almost laughably vague and ambitious: the creation, by unspecified means, of a new “capitalism with a conscience”. But he and Blond caught a mood. Thanks to the financial crisis, during 2008 and 2009 Britain suffered its worst recession since the calamitous first years of Thatcher’s market experiment in the early 80s.

In 2010, as Brown’s government ended and Cameron’s began, Westminster was suddenly crowded with competing critiques of the free market. As well as Red Toryism and Blue Labour, there was “fake capitalism”, an idea promoted by the Conservative MP Jesse Norman. It said that, in Britain, corporations lived too easily off earnings from privatised state functions. There was also a run of acclaimed books about the costs and flaws of neoliberalism: The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better, by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett in 2009, 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang in 2010, and The New Few: Or a Very British Oligarchy, published in 2012 by Ferdinand Mount, who in the 80s had been one of Thatcher’s senior advisors. And over the winter of 2011-12, there was Occupy London, a raucous anti-capitalist encampment outside St Paul’s Cathedral. During its first weeks, Occupy London received strikingly plentiful and respectful media coverage.

The culmination of all these revolts, some hoped, would be the party leadership of the one senior New Labour figure who had never been fully converted to the free market, Ed Miliband. “When Ed and I worked for Gordon at the Treasury,” says the Labour peer Stewart Wood, who became a Miliband advisor, “we used to sneak off for a drink at the end of the day, and say to each other, ‘Why isn’t the government doing anything to challenge the market?’”

Miliband unexpectedly won the Labour leadership in 2010, after campaigning against “brutish US-style capitalism” and for a more controlled, egalitarian British economy. As leader, he consulted Hutton and Glasman, whom he made a Labour peer. He appointed Cruddas to lead a review of all Labour’s policies. And he made high-profile speeches attacking corporate “asset-strippers” and “predators”, the treatment of customers by the privatised utilities, and the worsening living standards of “the squeezed middle”. He condemned neoliberalism in more concrete terms than Cameron’s generalities at Davos.

Cruddas was energised: “We were beginning to change lanes as a party.” Even some of the small residue of older Labour MP’s who had never accepted any aspect of Blairism were intrigued. John McDonnell told me: “In some of his criticisms of the market, Ed Miliband was ahead of his time.”

But Miliband’s judicious, qualified critique of capitalism had to compete for political space with other, more primal forces unleashed or strengthened by the financial crisis: resentment of immigrants and the European Union; resentment of MPs after the expenses scandal, and of elites in general; and above all, Cameron’s appealingly simplistic austerity policies.

Even though the cuts in state spending made the daily experience of neoliberalism worse for many Britons – by weakening the initiatives introduced by New Labour to soften it – the rhetoric used to justify austerity helped make the general discourse about the economy more cautious, not more adventurous. Rather than talking about the bankers, and how to reduce their power, people increasingly talked about scroungers. The economic views of many voters initially moved rightwards, not leftwards.

With his modest communication skills, Miliband faced a huge task in advocating a different kind of economy. The few reforms he proposed were either too abstract and technical-sounding (“predistribution”, or creating a capitalism that requires less redistribution of income by government), or too short-term (a temporary price cap on energy bills) to form a coherent picture.

Like Blue Labour and the Red Tories, he wanted to remove the worst excesses of the free market while leaving the rest of it intact. The ambivalence of the Labour mainstream towards capitalism, an ambivalence as old as the party itself, “played out inside him,” says Cruddas. Last month, Miliband told the Guardian with a characteristically opaque mix of self-confidence and self-criticism: “I think what Jeremy [Corbyn’s success] teaches me is that when I had instincts that we needed to break with the past, and we needed more radicalism, I was right.”

In 2015, whatever Miliband’s true intentions, the many remaining neoliberals in the Labour hierarchy, such as then shadow chancellor Ed Balls, had other economic priorities. So, increasingly, did Glasman, who became controversially preoccupied by the idea that a reformed British capitalism would involve drastically less immigration. At that year’s general election, after an internal struggle that Cruddas and Miliband lost, Labour presented a manifesto that emphasised cutting the national deficit in language little different from that used by the Tories. The manifesto only criticised the deregulated capitalism that had effectively created that deficit in the first place in coded terms: “We will build an economy that works for working people,” it promised blandly. Even though more and more politicians and commentators agreed that free-market Britain was working less and less well, the anti-capitalist moment seemed to have gone.

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ut even rigid, insular Westminster politics has to bend to economic realities in the end. In 2017, after two more years of thin growth and austerity, with British wages in their longest slump since the Napoleonic wars, and home ownership at a 30-year low, neoliberalism is no longer producing enough winners to be an utterly dominant set of political ideas. An opportunity has been created – bigger than any before – for the anti-capitalist counter-revolution that has been stopping and starting since the mid-90s.

Phillip Blond senses it. “I go into No 10 [Downing Street] a lot,” he says. “They really do get it about the failures of the market.” Glasman has been to No 10 in recent months too. “There is a stirring among genuine Conservatives,” he says. “A realisation that capitalism is against place and home.”

Cruddas quite liked the 2017 Conservative manifesto: “Some of it was very well written. I thought: ‘Spot on. Confront the market. Make government more interventionist.’ It was an attempt to acknowledge that the world is now challenging the old Thatcher certainties.” But he liked the Labour manifesto a lot more. “It has set up the possibility of … a different kind of economy. There are more continuities between the manifesto and Ed’s than people assume, but under Ed we had to smuggle our anti-free-market stuff in. It wasn’t spoken to properly. Corbyn and McDonnell are more explicit. Some of the people and energy from the anti-globalisation movement of the 2000s have fed into [the pro-Corbyn movement] Momentum. And some of the concerns of those activists are being reconciled with the economic concerns of people here, in Dagenham. Everything’s in play. It’s fantastic.”

In early July, not long after Labour’s far better than expected election performance, I went to a party rally in Parliament Square. During the 90s and 00s, I had been there repeatedly for slightly sparse anti-capitalist demonstrations, which felt, at best, defiant. But now the atmosphere was expectant. “We are winning, and the battle is now on our terms,” said one of the warm-up speakers, to a mass of young and much older faces – the potent Corbyn electoral coalition made flesh. McDonnell made a short, fierce speech attacking “the bankers and profiteers” and “neoliberal trickle-down economics”. He ended with a promise: “Another world is in sight!”

 Labour shadow chancellor John McDonnell. Photograph: Jack Taylor/Getty Images

Afterwards, I asked him why it had taken so long. The financial crisis began exactly 10 years ago this month. “When a crash occurs, people are in survival mode,” he said. “It’s when growth returns that people get angry.” What did he think of the Conservatives’ apparent break with the free market? “The Tories are opportunists.” Then he talked fluently for several minutes about Labour’s plans to “learn from Germany” about how to create a more high-tech, more long-term economy. It sounded like a passage from The State We’re In. With his neat silver hair, and wearing a striped shirt with a bright summer jumper slung over his shoulders, McDonnell even looked like an off-duty German industrialist.

But wasn’t he meant to be interested in replacing capitalism rather than reforming it? He gave a big, knowing smile. “It’s a staged transformation of our economic system.” Then he continued less gnomically: “Public ownership. A fairer distribution of wealth than in Germany. A society that is radically more equal … ”

Even economic thinkers close to McDonnell wonder if a Corbyn government could effect such a transformation. Paul Mason, author of Postcapitalism, says: “They have a big task with a small team. We face problems – climate change, information technology destroying jobs, a market economy that in many sectors is not capable any more of generating value – that were not faced by Keynes,” the last economist to shift British capitalism to the left, more than 70 years ago.

Mazzucato is probably McDonnell’s favourite contemporary economist. In her much-cited 2013 book The Entrepreneurial State, she argued convincingly – as the Labour manifesto did – that through state-funded research and other investment, government acts as an essential accelerator of capitalism rather than a drag on it, as free-marketeers usually claim. Last year, she gave the first lecture in an ongoing series of Labour events intended by McDonnell to set out a “New Economics”. According to the website LabourList, “McDonnell sat [in] rapt attention throughout.”

In a hot meeting room at University College London, where she is director of a new institute for innovation, the Italian-American Mazzucato told me that the 2017 Labour manifesto was “a turning point” in British economic policy, “full of good stuff, a new energy”. She advises McDonnell. Yet she also advises the Conservative business secretary, Greg Clark, and the SNP. She thinks Labour could do better: “I say to them, ‘You sound defensive. You sound like you know what’s wrong with the economy, rather than what could happen.’” She says Labour needs to explain its economic policies more compellingly: “When you do bold things, if you don’t have the language to describe them, you’re going to be in trouble.”

The Conservative reformers of British capitalism have the opposite problem. So far, their rhetoric dwarfs their solutions. “Their promises to put workers on company boards, to stop high executive pay, haven’t really gone anywhere,” says Tim Bale, a leading historian of the party. Many observers, on both the left and the right, interpreted the 2017 Tory manifesto’s anti-market talk as solely a ploy to attract Labour voters – a ploy that failed so badly that it led to the resignation of one of its devisers, Theresa May’s joint chief of staff Nick Timothy.

Blond insists that many senior Tories besides Timothy oppose neoliberalism. Before Thatcher, there was a recurring Conservative impulse to soften capitalism during hard times – from the future prime minister Harold Macmillan’s influential 1938 book The Middle Way to Edward Heath’s centrist government in the 70s. But that impulse has weakened. “Most Tory MPs are Thatcher’s children,” says Bale. “Most Tory thinktanks are still in a free-market phase.” So is the Tory press: “I could more easily imagine an asteroid hitting the earth,” says Mason, “than the Sun and the Mail coming out for state intervention.”

Many Tory activists and voters have also become free-market diehards. During the election, when the usually revered editor of the website ConservativeHome, Paul Goodman, told readers “to get over Thatcher” and embrace the Tory manifesto, because “the world has moved on”, the response was prickly. One post accused May of being “a Labour sympathiser”. Another pointed out that Heath’s policies failed.

Moreover, the current government might respond to Brexit – an even bigger economic shock than Heath suffered in the turbulent 70s – by becoming more neoliberal, not less, having freed British business from the EU’s limited restrictions on capitalism. Tory economic policy has swerved suddenly rightwards before. Faced with the aftermath of the financial crisis, Cameron and his chancellor, George Osborne, quickly dropped Red Toryism and instead told Britons to toughen up for “the global race” – their phrase for an ever-more competitive capitalism. Osborne had never lost his faith in the free market. “Cameron turned out to be just a standard Thatcherite,” Blond now says.

As Cameron, the son of a wealthy stockbroker, knew well, Britain is still home to plenty of neoliberalism’s beneficiaries: hedge funders, homeowners with the right kind of property, disproportionately rewarded “top talent” from footballers to management consultants, and companies built on cheap labour and loose regulation. They will not give up their supremacy easily, and after Brexit, a Tory government – or a Labour one – might be desperate for economic growth from any source.

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s an idea, the free market retains a simple power. “Neoliberalism was sold as capitalism perfected,” says Mason. That has made its diminishing returns politically explosive, but it has also made a reformed capitalism hard to sell. “The idea that markets work well in very limited circumstances, that economic life is about compromise, imperfectability – that’s not an argument you can present easily in a tabloid or a political advertisement,” says Abby Innes, assistant professor of political sociology at the London School of Economics.

Critics of neoliberal Britain have long dressed their texts and speeches with rosy images of other countries’ kinder economies. “Following the successful example of Germany and the Nordic countries,” says the 2017 Labour manifesto, “we will establish a National Investment Bank … that unlike giant City of London firms, will be dedicated to supporting inclusive growth.” In today’s spivvy Britain, how grown-up and enlightened that sounds. But on reflection, the idea that Britain should become more like Germany – its profoundly different capitalism the product of a different geography, culture and history – feels both very ambitious and yet also underwhelming. Can’t we come up with our own economic vision?

Globalisation: the rise and fall of an idea that swept the world

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Somehow, it would have to reconcile the intensely competitive, commercialised daily existence of many Britons with the fact that the economic system that created that individualistic world no longer works very well. But perhaps the children of Thatcher’s children have an answer. Many of them are already living with this tension: working ambitiously but often for nothing; sharing living space and possessions as well as racing to buy them; jostling with each other for the smallest economic opportunities, but also marching together for Corbyn.

The emerging outline of a new economic order is often present, not much noticed, amid the final stirrings of the old. In the 70s, the City traders and sharkish entrepreneurs of the Thatcher era to come were often already at work, even as trade unions and Keynesians still held court in Downing Street.

If Brexit proves a disaster, or another crisis soon hits our largely unreformed financial system, as an increasing number of commentators predict, the political space for alternatives to neoliberalism may open further. But Glasman predicts that working out exactly what comes after modern British capitalism will be “the job of the rest of our lives”. He is 56 years old.

Main illustration by Jasper Rietman

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