If you happen to have children of an age to willingly study geography, you’ll know that it’s the topic with all the best field trips. They’re constantly going somewhere. That place is rarely cool to begin with, and they zone in on the least cool thing about it, so if they go to the seaside, they’re there to measure groynes rather than taste-test ice-creams; and if they go to a shopping centre, it’s to ask local residents what they think of urban regeneration, not to look round the shops. But they seem really into it, so who am I to cavil?
Therefore, while only somewhat listening to a conversation about an A-level module on globalisation – which is split into categories, one of which is shipping containers, like a parody of school being boring, and another is neoliberalism – I got it into my head that my daughter had to go on a field trip to see some neoliberalism in action.
I swear, we spent the whole 00s arguing about whether each other knew what the word meant – we as a society, I mean, not me and my daughter – and now it’s in an A-level. Where would you go, though? The world is so vast, and all of it so neoliberal. I’d start in a free economic zone in Djibouti – the logical endpoint of liberalisation, where money moves so freely the law must be suspended, and with it, all those annoying workers’ rights it enshrines. Probably the US is where you could best observe what happens when unconstrained markets have driven the price of labour down so inexorably that nobody can afford anything except pure political fury.
What the hell am I even thinking? We live in Vauxhall, south London, and could just walk 500 yards to see blinking skyscrapers with swimming pools in the clouds and pseudo-classical wordplay names, and no actual people anywhere – concrete temples to a system in which the price tag on square footage has come completely unstuck from humans who need to live somewhere, facilitated by a political butler class that won over the electorate by lying straight to its face, then subordinated it to the interests of capital. It wouldn’t be a very fun field trip, but it would be exceedingly cheap.
I had the wrong end of the stick, of course. There are two different modules, it turns out: human geography and physical geography. They’re actually going to Dorset, to look at the coastline.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
