Artists more than most have reason to look to Roosevelt’s New Deal as a template for survival and revival. Annabel Turpin and Gavin Barlow explain why.
Are we all Rooseveltians now? Certainly it seems the cabinet are. On Saturday, in a speech at the Ditchley Institute, Michael Gove praised the president who led the US through the Great Depression and the Second World War.
Franklin D Roosevelt said Gove, managed to “save capitalism, restore faith in democracy, indeed extend its dominion, renovate the reputation of Government, set his country on a course of increasing prosperity and equality of opportunity for decades.” The former president, he followed, “enabled America to emerge from a decade of peril with the system, and society, that the free citizens of the rest of the world most envied.”
By Monday, Boris Johnson was telling the newly-launched Times Radio that now is the time for a “Rooseveltian approach to the economy.”
His plan is certainly ambitious—in keeping with Conservative election pledges of 2019 and its “levelling up” agenda—and now given huge urgency by the fallout from Covid-19. The economic prognosis is grim: in the US, the nation hit hardest by the virus, some are forecasting 25 per cent unemployment next year. Here in the UK, the Bank of England has warned of a doubling in unemployment and a 14 per cent decline for the economy.
Are we all Rooseveltians now? Certainly it seems the cabinet are. On Saturday, in a speech at the Ditchley Institute, Michael Gove praised the president who led the US through the Great Depression and the Second World War.
Franklin D Roosevelt said Gove, managed to “save capitalism, restore faith in democracy, indeed extend its dominion, renovate the reputation of Government, set his country on a course of increasing prosperity and equality of opportunity for decades.” The former president, he followed, “enabled America to emerge from a decade of peril with the system, and society, that the free citizens of the rest of the world most envied.”
By Monday, Boris Johnson was telling the newly-launched Times Radio that now is the time for a “Rooseveltian approach to the economy.”
His plan is certainly ambitious—in keeping with Conservative election pledges of 2019 and its “levelling up” agenda—and now given huge urgency by the fallout from Covid-19. The economic prognosis is grim: in the US, the nation hit hardest by the virus, some are forecasting 25 per cent unemployment next year. Here in the UK, the Bank of England has warned of a doubling in unemployment and a 14 per cent decline for the economy.
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