Alternative reading
Surprising literary ventures
Gary Dexter
UNDERMINING THE CENTRAL LINE (1989) by Ruth Rendell and Colin Ward Ruth Rendell, it turns out, as well as being the queen of ‘adventure sex’, is a furious decentraliser. In this small book of 1989 she argues not only for devolution for Scotland and Wales but autonomy for the English regions and a ‘cantonisation’ of the UK along Swiss lines. Undermining the Central Line is nothing to do with the Tube system, therefore, but is a plea to ‘give government back to the people’, published in the year of the introduction of the Poll Tax and a few months before the fall of Margaret Thatcher in 1990. It paints the UK as ‘the most centralised state in Europe, with a few obvious exceptions such as Romania and Albania’ — an interesting conclusion by an author writing at the end of ten years of Thatcherite assaults on the socialist public sector — with a chokehold on local government, education and housing. Other offerings from the short-lived ‘Chatto Counterblasts’ series were Jonathan Raban on God, Man and Mrs Thatcher and Margaret Drabble on mortgage tax relief. Rendell’s partner in iconoclasm was Colin Ward, the author of Anarchy in Action (1973) and The Allotment (1988).
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