Written by D A MI AE, CNN
There is hope that things can change
These are the words of Thomas Frank, one of Britain’s leading political analysts, in conversation with CNN’s Shirley Yamada in Beijing, following Frank’s presentation of a new video series for the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center.
“Brentford has decided on his own to be great,” Frank says, explaining how far west Brentford, a village close to London’s River Thames and home to about 11,000 people, has pushed the UK into the unknown, because of its liberal political vision and right-of-center notion of what makes a country great.
“Brentford has decided to be brave and non-complex on where it is going and he is actually making Britain great too.”
“We as a nation, in moments like this, we look back, at times like these, and we think ‘Why don’t we have a water park?’ And why aren’t we importing film crews?”
“The trouble is that the remote landscape people want to live in and the shallow water they can swim in, it has turned into this love potion — for drinking water. And we are saturated with knowledge that makes us endlessly varied and complicated.”
“We are arguing, in many ways, about the kind of places where we want to live … We are being forced into making choices, and they are deeper than the simple choices people have had in the past — and they are individual choices.”
“Some of this is ignorance — some of it is ambition,” Frank remarks. “Some of it is bad taste, but it is also quite easy. It’s hard to accept what you see, but you don’t have to.”