Men from the Ministry by Simon Thurley

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This is a book about the evolution of the “heritage” sector within the UK, and in particular the way the State moved from being the awkward custodian of a few royal relics to the principal actor in protecting the build environment (and ends at the point when the State tried to outsource this function).

However I got hooked in by the way this is a case study on the development of the “State” - how we got from the amateur public servant to the professional civil servant. How we moved from absolutely minimal state intervention to the current “Big State” - which despite forty years of governments calling for the rolling back of the State seems to have continued to grow – Departments were once small enough to yield (for good or ill) to the influence of their leaders individual preferences, priorities, and personality, but no more.

Maybe I am a geek about the machinery of government, but I really enjoyed this book... 

But I should note that it was never just the "men" from the Ministry, the book highlights the key role of a number of women so the title is unfortunate!

Building a new Catalonia Edited by Ignasi Bernat and David Whyte

This is a large collection of short reflections on the situation in Catalonia since the October 2017 referendum – and that continues to be played out, most recently with the jailing of the political leaders of Catalonia.

This collection suggests that there has been a comprehensive exercise in collective forgetting, and in so doing it shines a light on the way that the transition from Franco to democracy was not a complete process. This week the remains of Franco have been moved from the national tomb, as step in the right direction, but how far is there left to travel...

That Spain and Catalonia are in a troubled place has gone unnoticed in UK because we have been distracted by our relationship with the EU?

However as you progress through the collection the more specifically left-wing the solutions, and the sense of a partisan analysis perhaps undermines the earlier insights...

Conformity by Cass R. Sunstein

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I did probably buy this book for the cover…

The point that we like to be part of the group, and we have a significant tendency to put aside the evidence in front of our eyes in case we look stupid, seems fairly self-evident.

There is a lot that is rooted in the US system, especially their judges, which is difficult to read across to the UK.

Anyway it is a small book, it didn’t take long to read...

BRIT(ish) by Afua Hirsch

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Afua’s family heritage is a mix of Ghanaian, Yorkshire, and Germany Jewish – making her well placed to explore “Race, Identity, and Belonging” (the book’s sub-title).

Part of this is the “belonging” - finding herself perhaps too black too be British, yet in Ghana too British to be Ghanaian.

Within this is a reflection on her mispronouncing her own name, which resonated as I mispronounce my name – resulting in a moment of acute cultural humiliation when I overheard someone at our University Welsh Society correcting my friend’s pronunciation because she said my name just like I do…

I was also caused to reflect on this after a recent Church training event where I meet a 20 to 30 new people who without fail upon hearing I had a non-English name asked me where I was “from”. A couple of people followed this up with the top ten facts they knew about my presumed country of origin, and one clearly couldn’t process the answer “I’m from North London” as their conversation kept coming back round to which bit of Wales I was actually from.

Sat here with a massive amount of middle-class white privilege I am not suggesting equivalence in experience but it brought home for me the power on unconscious bias and the subtle power of assumptions that “other” people.

Ending the book in response to those that say they ignore race she writes “Blindness, it seems fairly obvious to point out, is not a good strategy for seeing what is there. Race is there, as lived experience, as the basis for the most dramatic economic and human shifts in history. Colour is there, and while people work on their myopia to avoid confronting awkward truths, others are finding their identities shaped by it. Identities are not becoming less important in our globalised world, they are becoming more important than ever. And Britishness is an identity that is excluding a growing number of people who, like me, should be among its core constituents.”

To be colour blind it to perpetuate white privilege...