ROGER BOYD—Up until the age of eighteen I believed the bourgeois propaganda that wealth was earned through fair competition and that if you only worked hard enough you could get to the top based upon merit without having to give up your ethical base. Then, I took a night class in sociology and understood that this was one of many possible stories of how society operated, one that served the rich and obfuscated the nature of their power and how society worked.
I was in Middlesbrough, an industrial town in the North East of England. As the mixture of an insanely overvalued exchange rate (due to the gushing flows of North Sea oil revenues and absurdly high interest rates), pit closures, union busting and government spending cuts gutted much of the North. In Middlesbrough people joked that the song “Ghost Town” was about Middlesbrough.

