Recent content by Finnegan

Very highly, classic Speyside. Always solid and often spectacular- one of the all time greats. All the years it was under the radar it was a hugely affordable alternative to Macallan. Prices have crept up over the last few years but it’s still comparatively affordable and every bit as good as...

Bagged myself the Signatory Miltonduff 12 YO and the new Glen Scotia 2024 festival bottling while I was at it. The last two festival bottlings have been pretty wonderful.

Good article examining and demonstrating how compromising with Parliamentary reformism leads to the sort of intolerable tensions that are tearing apart the Scottish Greens. “Members were continually told that “it’s better to be in the room, than out. But we were never really in the room, at...

One of the most important factors in determining life expectancy is the prevalence of peri-natal death and infant mortality. Prior to advancement in midwifery and the development of antibiotics, this was astonishingly high. When the average age of death of a population with high infant mortality...

I think I’ve said all I have to say and we’re beginning to round in circles. I didn’t really expect a meeting of minds so I’ll continue to draw my knowledge of the Industrial Revolution and its effects from my previously cited sources. Ah’ll see thee.

Agreed, this is largely good news for a certain class of baby boomers like ourselves, but not so good for much of the global south who are on the sharp end of both empire and climate breakdown. We get terribly upset at a few thousand Afghanis, Vietnamese and Iraqis coming over the channel in...

Nobody is saying it was so I’m not sure what point you’re responding to. The point I’m making is that the benefits of the Industrial Revolution were concentrated In the hands of a tiny minority as opposed to the mass of people who actually made it happen. That wealth inequality existed prior to...

Under what pseudonym d’you reckon? I’m_Just_ looking_For_A_New_England?

Nobody lived in a hut. We are talking about about 18th and 19th century rural Britain, not sub Saharan Africa. Indeed there were some philanthropists, Robert Owen and his New Lanark project was probably the most widely known, but they were the exception rather than the rule. Peasants toiled...

You are extrapolating your own experience as the experience of millions of others- a fallacy. It is widely acknowledged that mental health is an essential component of the overall health of a society. What qualifies you to determine that loneliness is a condition unworthy of funded assistance...

I’m surprised that Billy would succumb to that sort of pessimism. Quite extraordinary against a recent backdrop of a wave of British working class, trade-union militancy not seen since the 70’s, not to mention the millions who were drawn to Corbynism.

Yeah, I admit I haven’t kept up with Billy since the 90’s, but that sounds like he’s joining in with the “class politics is so 20th century” argument.

You’re the only one talking about bucolic bliss and rural shackles. I stressed that I did not romanticise an agrarian existence. The industrial revolution helped Britain to become a great power? Who benefited from this imperial power? Did imperial conquest shorten the working week or improve the...

“Very much a 20th-century politician”?

That’s true, it did not. But if we take an overly schematic view of history, the Industrial Revolution was a necessary phase of the transition from feudalism to capitalism in what Eric Hobsbawm termed the ‘dual revolution: the French Revolution being the political, and the Industrial Revolution...