Hegemony, censorship and satire

Before 1979, much of British comedy (sit-coms and stand-up comedy) was disconnected from reality and isolated from history; it treated every person who wasn’t white, straight, male or English as objects of ridicule. The Oxbridge comedy was little better; produced in ivory towers, all it could do was gaze longingly at its own navel. In the years preceding the Sixties, political satire was often limited to the print media and, in the mainstream, there was little of that. There was Punch and later Private Eye but the less we say about Punch, the better.

Punch’s “Rhodes Colossus”: satire or triumphalism?

In terms of television, That Was The Week That Was is often cited as the starting point of the British satire ‘boom’.  But it wasn’t a boom at all, merely a controlled explosion that was carried out in a car park at BBC Television Centre. It may have thumbed its nose at the political establishment but it was pretty tame stuff compared to the alternative comedy-cabaret of the 1980’s. To get around censorship laws, TW3 was ostensibly a “news and current affairs” programme. Entertainment was seen as a diversion and as such it was supposed to be free of political content.

TW3 did not address social concerns, its primary objective was to lampoon the political establishment. Ironically, the people who did the lampooning were members of the same social class they lampooned. In other words, they fed off each other. David Frost, the son of a Methodist clergyman,  used his suave image to launch a highly successful career as an interviewer and anchor. He didn’t do too badly either. TW3 attacked racism in the US cornpone states and South African apartheid but failed to tackle the endemic racism that existed in Britain. It was as if to say “We’re not racist because we’re British”. The class system was also lampooned, as this classic clip shows (up to 1.02),

Britain is a class-riven society and in spite of feeble attempts on the part of some political leaders to reconcile the classes; the upper classes – the dominant social and cultural classes – continue to have the whip hand. But if class is a massive fault line, then racism and sexism are the deep cracks that run from it. We are still a very long way away from a truly classless society and we certainly haven’t seen the end of racism and sexism as I pointed out in this blog.

Perhaps I’m being a little unfair to TW3. After all, it was a groundbreaking programme and it broke through the stuffy, oppressive paternalism of British political system – but only briefly. It also attracted audiences numbers of around 14 million at its peak. But, ultimately,  it failed to ignite a satire movement and the heavy hand of the dominant class was once again applied to the writing and performance of satire on television. Those who remember TW3 with a certain dewy-eyed fondness will forget that the programme was produced by members of the same class as the politicians that were mocked.

When it came to live satire, there was only the Establishment Club, its light burned brightly but briefly but, most tellingly, nothing followed it. We also need to remember that theatre scripts and even comedian’s jokes had to be sent to the Lord Chamberlain’s Office for inspection. The Establishment Club could circumvent this diktat by virtue of the fact that it was,  for all intents and purposes, a private members’ club.  It was the exception rather than the norm. This crushing weight of cultural hegemony had been around since the 18th century, when the paranoid political leaders of England responded to what they saw as the threat of  a Jacobite cultural insurgency in the theatres and inns of the country and replied by drafting legislation to outlaw the singing of Jacobite songs and the staging of pro-Jacobite plays.  Furthermore, the Prime Minister of the day, Robert Walpole was mercilessly lampooned by satirists like John Gay, who compared him to a leader of the criminal underclass in Beggar’s Opera.  Walpole, unable to take a joke, responded with the Theatre Licensing Act of 1737. The steps that Walpole’s government took to curb dissent in the theatre had a lasting effect on British culture. No talk of religion or politics was permitted in the inns. Indeed, some pubs still proudly display signs at the bar which read “No politics or religion”. But this isn’t to say that there was no satire at all: it continued to exist in print but it was never far from danger as the Oz Trial and countless other cases brought to trial under the absurd Obscene Publications Act (1957) tell us.

The Obscene Publications Act and the Theatre Licensing Act were only two of the weapons used by the state and it agents in the fight against ‘smut’ (a rather wide-ranging term that is/was often loosely applied). Libel laws have also been used to great effect.  Private Eye has felt the wrath of many a litigant and its coffers are deep – they have to be. Certain organizations and groups like The Freedom Association and individual Tories believe that any criticism of them or their ideas or their idols – whether they are expressed satirically or not – should be met with the threat of taking the offender to court. This makes a mockery the overused phrase of “free speech”, which is routinely trotted out by the likes of TFA and the cult-like Institute of Ideas like some kind of mantra. But it’s a myth and deep down all of us know it is.

After the theatres were freed from the dominance of the state in 1968, few attempts were made to put satire on the television or in any live context for that matter. It was only fringe theatre groups like CAST that made any real effort to tackle social issues, which they did through a blend of popular culture, slogans and biting satire. CAST had been around since 1965 and were improvisers by trade and while the rest of the political fringe theatre movement were obsessed with Piscator and Meyerhold and notions of ideological purity, CAST stood alone by making their work accessible to the masses.

Throughout the Seventies, few attempts, if any, were made to produce real hard biting satire for television. Instead, on the one hand, we were treated to a near endless parade of sexist and racist jokes told by fat Northern comedians who tried to cover up their bigotry by using the “It’s a joke” defence. On the other hand, we had the absurd whimsy of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, the memories of which appear to be entirely formed around a handful of decent sketches. Then there was Mike Yarwood, whose impressions of political figures and union leaders was tame, even toothless.

Here’s Yarwood doing an impression of Harold Wilson for the 1974 Election Special

But there was no satire of any note contained within Yarwood’s work. This was not real life and it was a couple of parsecs away from my own lived experience. At least we had Dave Allen and he was the only satirist on prime time television.

The appearance of what would later be coined “alternative comedy” was greeted with brickbats and insults from the comedy establishment. The bow-tied, besuited fatsos of The Comedians claimed that it “wasn’t funny” and  all that the young comedians could do to get laughs was to “use bad language”. Bernard Manning, the leader of this pack of old farts, was never averse to using salty language. In fact, in his own Embassy Club he frequently swore. In what the Daily Mail presented as  a self-penned obituary from beyond the grave, Manning said,

In their obsession with turning comedy into a branch of Left-wing politics, they forgot that the only point of jokes is to make people laugh.

Manning ignored one thing: alternative comedians made their audiences laugh and those audiences didn’t find Manning in the least bit amusing.

The 1970’s were characterized by social strife and yet none of the comedians of the period made any real references to it, unless it was to ridicule the leaders of the trade unions and striking workers. No effort was made to puncture the façade of harmony and unity, under which lay the ugly realities of urban decay, ethnic tensions and industrial collapse. This was an age when the police could do what they wanted.

This sketch from Not the Nine O’Clock News was the first attempt to satirize the police, who had used Sus laws to detain black people on the basis that the colour of their skin made them criminals-in-waiting.

The popular image of the police in the 1970’s was derived from the mythology of Dixon of Dock Green. Television’s treatment of the boys in blue was deferential to say the least.

Here’s Dixon of Dock Green, your friendly neighbourhood bobby who never put a foot wrong.

This image of the police was worlds away from the day-to-day reality for many people. The police routinely fitted people up, fabricated evidence and assaulted, even killed people who were in their custody. They still do it. Ask the families of Blair Peach, Ian Tomlinson and Smiley Culture what they think of the police and they’ll tell you that they get away with murder.

Not the Nine O’Clock News wasn’t alternative comedy but it was a sign that things were, at last, beginning to change. But, on television, this change moved at glacial speed. On the emerging alternative cabaret circuit, there was no aversion to talking about society and politics on stage. In fact, performers were expected to engage with the here and now.

Meanwhile certain Tory MPs had CAST and others in their sights. The MP for Glasgow Cathcart and Monday Clubber, the god-bothering Teddy Taylor, demanded to know why left-wing theatre companies, particularly CAST, were being given public money for ‘political causes‘. This point of view was supported by Norman Tebbitt, who had railed against the Arts Council since taking his seat in the Commons in 1970, calling it “biased” and “elitist”. The Conservative intention then as now was to impose a sort of monoculture on the country; a form of leitkultur as Shreiking Douglas Murray would say. The hegemony must be total.

While alternative acts were ridiculing the political classes on stage, Spitting Image took satire to new levels on the small screen. Its satirical writing was reinforced by its use of grotesque puppet likenesses of the famous people it sent up. Thatcher always appeared as a tyrannical cross-dresser, who bullied her cabinet. Norman Tebbit was depicted as a leather jacket-wearing bovver boy who would rough up anyone who stepped out of line. While Douglas Hurd’s hair resembled, rather memorably, a Mr Whippy ice cream cornet.

While I’m at it, this parody of Tomorrow Belongs to Me from the film Cabaret is particularly savage. This was the closing scene from the 1987 Spitting Image Election Special.

TW3 was denied an election special on the grounds that it would adversely influence voters. It is likely that the McMillan government put pressure on the BBC. Spitting Image got its election specials but they weren’t shown on the same night as the General Election, which meant that the government was still very much afraid of satire and how it might affect their poll numbers.

By 1990, Spitting Image had been effectively defanged and declawed. The reasons given for this change varied from Thatcher’s resignation to the oft-used ‘change in tastes’ mantra.  The image of a grey John Major, with a satellite dish on his head, eating peas seemed to sum up the satirical mood.  Spitting Image’s fire became focussed on the emerging culture of celebrity, it dragged on for a few more years but it was hopeless. In 1996, it was axed. The expense of producing such a show was highlighted as a causal factor in its demise. Latex puppets are rather costly to make so it seems.

There was a gap between 1996 and 1999, when Bremner, Bird and Fortune began its run of 85 shows on Channel Four. But this programme seemed to hark back to TW3 for its rather highbrow approach to the material (Bird and Fortune were involved in the Sixties satire ‘boom’). The satire also relied rather heavily on the viewers’ a priori of the intricacies of the British political system, and for those without a working knowledge of Hansard or a familiarity with politicians (who seem to have deliberately made themselves bland to thwart the satirist-impressionists), it was often little more than a collection of obscure political in-jokes. Bremner, Bird and Fortune left our screens in May 2010, which was, by coincidence, the month of the last General Election. Rory Bremner cited the blandness of the current crop of politicians that influenced their decision to pull the plug on the show but there were other reasons.

Here’s a clip from the programme,

Please try to ignore the foreign subtitles.

These days, political satire is in the shadows. I can count the numbers of satirists on the comedy circuit on one hand (well, maybe one and a bit). There is also an eerie absence of satire on television. It seems as though we have entered a new period of deference and this is what right-wing governments want. In Mussolini’s Italy, satirists were attacked on the streets, even killed (Mascha, 1998). We clearly haven’t reached that point yet.

Satire is counter-hegemonic; it works passively to draw people’s attention to social injustice and political hypocrisy and makes them laugh out loud at the same time. The fact that certain political parties are afraid of it shows a weakness of character on their part.

Britain is crying out for satire and now is the time for satirists to sharpen their wits and plunge their comedic knives into the hearts of the enemies!

References

Gramsci, A., (ed.) (1971) Selections From The Prison Notebooks, London: Lawrence & Wishart.

Itzin, C. (1986). Stages in the Revolution: Political Theatre in Britain Since 1968. London: Methuen

Mascha, E. (1998) “Political Satire and Hegemony: A Case for Passive Revolution During Mussolini’s Ascendance To Power, 1919 to 1925” in Humor, The Journal of The International Society For Humor Studies.

Can we have some of what the Egyptians and Tunisians are having, please?

We need some of this here

First Tunisia and now Egypt, the old corrupt and repressive regimes are under threat. Ben Ali of Tunisia went into exile last week and Hosni Mubarak is clinging on. But these protests tell us something: ordinary people have put up with neoliberalism, corruption and attacks on them for long enough. There is only so much people can take before they snap.

Yesterday,  David Cameron said

“I think what we need is reform in Egypt. We support reform and progress in the greater strengthening of their democracy and civil rights and the rule of law.

“Clearly there are grievances that people have and they need to be met and matched.

“I don’t think it’s in anyone’s interest that people are being killed on the streets of Egypt as we speak, and so I hope the violence will cease.

“But clearly, when you have people who have grievances and problems that want them responded to, it’s in all our interests that these countries have stronger rule of law, stronger rights, stronger democracy.”

Foreign Secretary, Fizzy Willy Hague chipped in with

“I think it is important to recognise that the people involved have legitimate grievances – economic grievances and political grievances – and it is very important for the authorities to respond positively to that, and to be able to hold out the hope and prospect of reform in the future.

“That is the answer to this situation, rather than repression. It does not help to suppress people’s right to freedom of expression.”

Cameron  also said to the delegates at the World Economic Forum in Davos that Europe had to

‘incentivise the same kind of risk-taking investment culture’

What Cameron can’t wrap his head around is the fact that British people have plenty of  grievances and problems  but his government ignore them and are intent on creating more problems by pursuing their ill-conceived and poorly-formulated social experiments.

Yesterday, one of Cameron’s model councils, Westminster, announced that it has plans to give social housing priority to those people who are employed.   Westminster was infamous in the early 1990’s for the Homes for Votes scandal. The then leader, Dame Shirley Porter, gerrymandered marginal wards to favour the ruling party (her party).

Under the council’s plans, working households will be defined as those where the main applicant or their partner are in work, have a permanent or temporary contract or are self-employed.

People who would be prioritised must have been working for a minimum of two years.

As if to emphasize their intellectually feeble and philosophically bankrupt policies, Hon Gid  and Cameron were spreading the Thatcherite message. Their message files in the face of recently published economic figures which say that Britain’s economy has shrunk while the US economy has grown. The US has spent money to achieve growth, while the British government makes deep cuts to public services and raises the rate of VAT, thus choking off consumer confidence. A PPE degree clearly doesn’t make for a wise politician.

While the likes of Cameron and Hague call for reform in Egypt, they trample over our democratic rights and pursue ideologically-driven policies that will make people poorer and destroy public services. Not only are these people intellectually feeble (it was the snow that caused our economy to shrink) and philosophically bankrupt (social housing is responsible for worklessness), their minds are firmly closed to today’s realities.

This is 2011, not 1981.

But the Great Lord of Darkness is still living in the past.

After nearly a quarter of a century of good industrial relations, the cloth-cap colonels of the TUC are talking about using the strike weapon to overrule a democratically elected Parliament. I can understand their anger and frustration.

I doubt he can understand the anger and frustration. His take on history is faulty too. What does he mean by “a quarter of a century of good industrial relations”? He’s not even honest enough to admit that it was his government passed a series of anti-trade union laws and spent a lot of its time smashing those unions while, ironically, supporting Solidarinosc in Poland.

I won’t bother to quote the rest of his blog. It’s really depressing.

There are demonstrations against the cuts to education in London and Manchester today and there are more planned for the future. There should be daily protests and if a few things are damaged in the process, then so be it. This government has shown that it isn’t interested in what ordinary people think and it is only through the tactics of shock that we can get them to change anything. Though, expecting this shower of shite to leave office and go into exile to Chile is clearly my fantasy and mine alone.

Postcards From the Barricades (Part 3): a look at what the Tory press is saying

Since the national student demo in London on Wednesday, the Tory press has waged a campaign of smears and disinformation.  The issue revolves around the use of the word “violence” and what it means. The BBC have led the way in insisting that there were “violent scenes” at Millbank Tower. Newsnight’s Jeremy Paxman and Radio 2’s Jeremy Vine have all tried to claim that the intention of the students was to act in a violent manner.  Paxman’s questioning of Claire Solomon, who seems to have been identified as a sort of ‘ringleader’, took the line of a CPS prosecutor and thus was the interrogatory voice of the state. The attitude of the BBC’s anchors and reporters has been consistent with that of a state broadcaster – yet the bods at the Telegraph still have the gall to claim that the BBC  is “biased” towards  Tories, Europhobes and other right wing lunatics (remember the run up to the Iraq invasion or the Battle of Orgreave Colliery?).

The entire Tory press without exception has made the claim that the protest was violent and was hijacked by ‘outsiders’. Writing in the Telegraph, The Great Lord of Darkness said,

No doubt our Chinese friends had a pretty good laugh at the TV news showing our happy students in democratic Britain express their delight at their lot by trashing buildings and assaulting the police,

Here is the lie that students “assaulted” the police.  I was there, I saw no student assault a policeman/woman. I would demand evidence from Tebbitt but I know that it will not be forthcoming. Here we also have a clue into their thinking: property is more important that people or their needs. The police’s primary role in our capitalist society is to protect property from the masses.

Benedict Brogan, blogging for the same paper repeated the line about “violence”,

Westminster and the police have been caught on the hop by the size and violence of the demonstration currently battering the glass walls of Millbank tower, or specifically 30 Millbank, the lowrise part of the complex where CCHQ is based.

He continues,

Objects are being thrown, and there appears to be a separate confrontation going on inside the lobby. Heads are being cracked, and some of the more excitable demonstrators seem eager to take on the cops. Perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised. Aaron Porter, the leader of the NUS, was on the telly last week using fairly extreme language to warn that students would hound MPs in their constituencies.

Hang on, no heads were cracked. Furthermore, Aaron Porter made some pusillanimous statement about “condemning the actions of a small minority”. I guess our Benny didn’t see that. The truth sort of gets in the way of a good horror story. Brogan uses the occasion of the demonstrations to make a cheap swipe at the opposition,

the NUS and Labour have formed such a tight alliance on the issue: this protest is in effect a Labour protest, and however the NUS and Labour try to disown the riot, it is their show – it wouldn’t have happened without them.

Let me get this straight, this was a “Labour protest”? I saw no one from the Labour Party (though it is possible that some students had voted Labour) on the march yet Brogan has made the suggestion Labour being behind the demonstration and, by extension, the ‘violence’. His last paragraph is very telling and reveals the lies that the right wing press resort to,

UPDATE @10.15pm: Labour chums have chided me for being unfair and tendentious when I suggest that the riot was the NUS and Labour’s show. Of course I don’t mean that they orchestrated it or even willed it. But Labour has lined itself against this reform, it supported the march, Harriet Harman made a big number out of taunting Nick Clegg about tuition fees at PMQs, and the NUS is a Labour subsidiary and forcing house for Labour politicians. So when what was supposed to be a Labour supported demo designed to put political pressure on the Coalition ends up with the mess at Millbank, I reckon it’s fair to say that this is an awkward moment for Labour.

Again, he has no evidence to claim that this was a “Labour supported demo”, so he lies.

This blogger calls herself “CyberBoris”...guess who she supports? She chides those horrid lefty students and suggests to them that they  should have adopted Gandhi’s tactics,

Twitter is awash with students foaming at the mouth, in their illogical and ill-judged attempts to insist that peaceful protest does not work.  “Can anyone” squeaked @noldorstu “name a peaceful protest that achieved something?”  “Yes!” I tweeted back enthusiastically.  “Mahatma Gandhi’s Salt March and his policy of peaceful protest that changed the history of India!”  I didn’t even go to uni, so possibly David Cameron might consider raising tuition fees to £18K.  These students are clearly ill informed and any investment in such a volatile risk is money down the pan!

Er, wait a minute, someone hasn’t actually read their history here and has plucked out a single event (probably from Dickie Attenborough’s film, Gandhi). Besides, peaceful protesters usually end up dead. She’s completely ignored the fact that Gandhi was assassinated (or that he was a raving anti-Semite). Here is my first comment,

Yes, the whole of India was transformed by partition and the violence that ensued in the aftermath. Nice bit of propaganda there. Of course, you wouldn’t find it ironic that ex-Bullingdon Club members condemn a group of students who smashed a couple of windows.

And hers,

The truth is not propoganda. It was the peaceful protest that made the difference, the violence was something else.

This argument about the Bullingdon Club is absolutely pathetic. There was no violence even remotely resembling the violence yesterday. They all just got pissed and chucked a few flower pots. You are utterly ridiculous to bring this up.

Even when they are confronted with the truth, they lie. The Bullingdon Club’s antics are legendary and have even been the subject of a Channel 4 film written by the Honourable Tobes. What I find so amusing about her reply is the way she says “The truth is not propoganda”.  She quite clearly understands neither. She refuses to acknowledge the antics of the Bullingdon Club nor does she want to do her own work.

Just not any good to produce unsubstantiated accusations against the Bullingdon Club. Where is your evidence that what they did was any more serious than a few smashed glasses, the odd window and some flower pots, caused by heavy drinking? “Accounts are legion?” That’s not evidence. Produce some evidence or withdraw your daft statement.

Pathetic. This is a classic example of Tory denial that goes well with their sense of entitlement.

Back to the Torygraph, Today’s edition says that a “Lawyer’s son was behind the student protests”. Fuck’s sake, what is it with these right wingers? The article says that,

History student Karl Sielman-Parry, who uses the alias “WorkersDreadnought”, said a “workers and students’ bloc” should band together rather than go along with the official National Union of Students’ march.

He distributed a leaflet stamped with the anarchist “A” symbol calling for “Direct Action!, Occupation!, Strike”.

I wonder where they get this information from? Well, it turns out that the Telegraph and the other Tory papers have been trawling Britain’s student population for snitches. This article tries to tell us that students aren’t in charge of their own thoughts and actions and have to rely on a group of outsiders to stir up trouble,

The Radical Workers’ and Students’ Bloc, identified by red and black flags flown from the roof of Millbank Tower, was organised by the Anarchist Federation, along with the London Solidarity Federation. The Leeds Class War group and the Whitechapel Anarchist Group also confirmed yesterday that they were involved in the trouble

The suggestion here is that students aren’t anarchists and anarchists aren’t students.

The right wing press have also tried to claim that lecturers from Goldmiths College condoned and supported violent behaviour. The Torygraph again,

But the lecturers from Goldsmiths made no reference to the injuries suffered by police and some students as they gave the protest a glowing report.

“Yesterday was a really good natured but equally angry demonstration against the damage that the coalition is doing to higher education,” their statement said.

“Yes, that got out of hand, but yes, it also got media attention across the world.”

With reportage like this,  you can understand why Andrew Gilligan writes for The Telegraph.

This Daily Mail article tells us that the student demonstrators were all privileged. They even have a ‘story’ from Tory Party chair, Saveeda Warsi who tells us,

What I find truly baffling is the number of Labour MPs who used Twitter to support those protesters committing criminal damage and endangering lives. Former Labour leadership candidate John McDonnell MP tweeted: ‘Just shows what can be done when people get angry. We must build on this.’ And Labour MP Alex Cunningham wrote: ‘Well done our students – thousands outside the office getting stuck into the Lib Dem/Tory government over tuition fees.’

Warsi repeats the lie that Labour were behind the occupation of Millbank Tower. Ah, nothing like a bit of black propaganda. She adds,

There is nothing fair about attacking innocent people or property. Political violence must never prevail over rational debate. So it’s high time we restored reason to the debate on student finance and fairness.

So it’s all about “property”? Who are these “innocent people” of whom she speaks? Her staff?

Over at The Spectator, Rod Liddle couldn’t resist making up a couple of porkies,

If you fancy a laugh, and have the time to spare, check out the websitefor REVOLUTION, aka Permanent Revolution, the Trot group some of whose members smashed up Conservative Central Office this week.

First, it’s anarchists who smashed the windows, now it’s a “Trot group”. Can’t these liars make up their minds? Evidently not.

Another national demonstration is being planned. I expect the police to be better prepared and I also expect more smears, lies and yellow journalism.

Prisoners to get the vote

I’ve just heard that prisoners are to get the vote. The European Human Rights Commission has declared Britain’s penal laws to be in violation of human rights.

The move comes after government lawyers advised that failure to comply with a 2004 ECHR ruling could cost the taxpayer hundreds of millions of pounds in litigation costs and compensation.

David Cameron was said to be “exasperated and furious” at having to accept that there was no way of keeping the UK’s 140-year-old blanket ban on sentenced prisoners voting.

One can only imagine how the bods at the Torygraph will react to this. I suspect The Great Lord of Darkness will be foaming at the mouth at the prospect. But then I also suspect that many of the newly enfranchised cons will end up voting for the Tories in large numbers. I am sure that Jonathan Aitken and Jeffrey Archer will do their best to use their prison connections to convince prisoners to vote for the party.

I’ve just had a look at the Telegraph blogs and so far, there is nothing about this story. But give it time. I’m sure Janet ‘the Tea Party is misunderstood’ Daley will have something to say on the matter –  if she’s not occupying herself with Tea Party celebrations that is.

The Spending Review: a glimpse of an alien world

I’ve just had a quick trawl of today’s blogs over at the Torygraph and the response to the spending review is, for the most part, unsurprising. The Great Lord of Darkness says,

I have taken a little time before commenting on yesterday’s statement by the Chancellor. It is all to easy to become fixated on one aspect or another of his plan to get us out of the ruinous situation created by Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and their friends.

“Their friends” happen to be the same people who are friends with the Tory party: the bankers and Ye Wizards of ye Cittie of London. But The Chingford Skinhead refuses to lie down.

Setting aside for a moment the question of fairness, what we can all see is that it has not been, for example, defence spending which has been responsible for the explosion of spending over the lifetime of the Labour Government.

Crumbs! It’s that word again!  Since when did Tebbit ever do ‘fair’? So tell us O Great Lord of Darkness what is responsible for the awful mess we’re in?

It has been welfare, the NHS and education. The first two are the real big spenders. The schools budget costs less than debt interest. Defence costs less than schools. For some good, and some less good, reasons the Government was committed to increase spending on the NHS. That made it inevitable that welfare spending would be squeezed, with its growth being curtailed.

Hey, I know, maybe we could get the military to run the schools or just privatize education like they’ve done in Chile. Oh hang on, they’re already doing that with ‘free schools’.

David Hughes, their chief leader writer had his sights on the RMT’s Bob Crow. In a blog titled “Comrade Crow orders his call to arms but who is listening’? He says,

The RMT boss was trying to whip up the brothers into a frenzy – or at least into a glimmer of interest – by extolling the example of their comrades in arms in France.

Scary huh? But it gets better,

There’s just one problem for Comrade Bob – he’s whistling in the wind. We don’t do mob activity, we do stoicism verging on apathy.

Is that so? What about The Poll Tax Riots? Maybe Britain has changed, Mr Hughes and you’re still living in 1957 when “we never had it so good”.

New boy, Daniel Knowles who has “just graduated in history and economics from Pembroke College, Oxford” (yeah, I’m really impressed) declares that “The Left got what it wanted – they just haven’t realised it yet”. He opens with a dig at the anti-cuts demo last night at Downing Street that attracted around 1,000 demonstrators,

It could almost have been a parody of current Leftist thinking. “Stuff your cuts, we will pay (much higher taxes for decades)” would be a coherent protest. “We won’t pay” makes no sense – government money is taxpayer’s money, so someone has to pay one way or another. The Government looks strong at the moment because of that Leftist confusion. It even has a name – “Deficit Denial”. But perhaps the Coalition should be worried. In the longer run, they may be losing the argument.

The “Deficit Denial” tag is supposed to be some kind of discourse killer by the way. It’s a little like labelling someone a Holocaust denier for donating money to a Palestinian relief fund. It’s easy. It’s lazy. He finishes with this,

This Government has ambitions in that direction – higher university tuition fees, the “free schools” plan and more freedom for local government are all very welcome innovations – but it could be doing an awful lot more, not least with the NHS. At the moment, the Left is disorientated; all they know is that they don’t want cuts. Given time, however, they will regain some composure. If, by then, all austerity has achieved is less effective public services, the Left will probably win the argument, and soon enough we will find ourselves back in ruinous debt.

So young and yet so predictable. You give those Reds what for, yah? Meanwhile Jeremy Warner puts the boot into the Institute for Fiscal Studies report that the spending review will hit the poor and vulnerable the hardest,

To be honest, I’m not sure where all this analysis takes us. One of the Government’s primary aims is to reduce welfare dependency. The benefit cuts are therefore not just about saving money. Now as the IFS argues, some of the reforms announced yesterday further complicate the benefits system, and may perversely further disincentivise work, but overall it must be the case that if you want to reduce the attractions of welfare as a lifestyle choice, you have to cut benefit.

There’s the old canard of “welfare as a lifestyle choice”. I wondered when someone would mention it. I can’t think of one single reason why anyone would willingly choose to live a life on benefits. There are those who are long-term unemployed but have they all necessarily made a “lifestyle choice” to spend their lives on the dole”?

Going for the royal angle, Andrew M Brown tells us  that,

it should not surprise us that the Queen has readily gone along with the plan. Only a week ago she indicated her wish to show restraint in this age of austerity by cancelling the Royal Household’s Christmas party.

Ah, good old Betty, I knew she’d come good! She remembers the Blitz!  He continues,

Partly, the Royal Family wants to show patriotic solidarity with a suffering nation. More than that, though, Queen Elizabeth belongs to a class and a generation to whom frugality comes, if not naturally, then quite easily – and without a squeak of complaint. She represents the old-fashioned upper class, the ones who remember the second world war.

Gawd bless ’em! We really are all in this together!  But you know what?  I’ve never come across a single royal who wasn’t patriotic, it sort of goes with the territory so to speak. But all that belt-tightening means it’s caviare on weekends only from now on.

My old prep school headmaster conformed to this model. He drove an old Peugeot 504 estate, the one that had three rows of seats, and was instinctively parsimonious

Oh, do shut up.

Finally, away from the cuts. Ed West, who can always be relied on for a laugh, bemoaned a blog by Laurie Penny in the New Statesman. In “The glee with which people talk about Thatcher’s death reminds me of the inherent nastiness of socialism” he says,

Even in wartime respect for the dead is considered one of the last vestiges of common humanity when all around decency collapses (near where my parents live in Kent there are the graves of three German airmen who were respectfully given a Christian burial in 1940 by the people they were trying to kill), and yet there are thousands who openly gloat about the failing health of an elderly woman.

She’s not just any elderly woman, Ed,

Mrs Thatcher is a Conservative, therefore she is evil.

Well, that’s a somewhat simplistic analysis but you Tories like things pretty simple, so I’ll just say this: she set in train the neoliberal course of this country that created a climate that fostered and nurtured a culture of greed which ultimately led to the financial crisis and the recession that followed. Sorry, that’s about as simple as I could get.

Which reminds me, when Thatcher finally pops her clogs, I’m going on a week long bender. I may even try and organize a street party somewhere.

UPDATE:

After cherry-picking the IFS’s finding before the election, Nick Clegg has today chosen to attack their report on the Spending Review and this time it’s personal,

Clegg said the work by the IFS took no proper account of public spending inputs, or the potential for some spending, such as the pupil premium, to improve social mobility.

I’d say that the coalition government has taken no proper account of the effect this review will have on the poor, the unemployed, children, the vulnerable and the low-waged.

Left? Right? Useful?

The words right and left have been used to define party political positions since the days of the French Revolution. Le droit (the right) was represented by the clergy, the aristocracy and the monarchists. Le gauche (the left) was represented by anyone else who wasn’t born into the purple. In recent years, the words right and left have been described variously as “unhelpful” or “useless”. While this may often be the case – particularly when describing positions within political parties – it is all that we have and regardless of its flaws, it works.

Within the last few days I have witnessed a blatant (and Orwellian) manipulation of language so that the extreme-right appears to be extreme-left.  At least this is the case in the mind of Daniel Hannan and his supporters who seem to feel that the BNP are “left-wing” because there is a trace element of socialist economics in their policies. I say ‘trace element’ because whatever socialism there is within their economic policies is reserved only for les certains, in other words – as Griffin would describe them – ‘indigenous’ British. The BNP is not socialist and they are certainly not an internationalist party.

I often find that it is those on the Right who will shout the loudest about the right/left cleavage. Today another Telegraph blogger has waded into the fray. Gerald Warner shouts,

We have to get rid of this nonsensical vocabulary. The correct terminology for those who futilely seek to improve the world through some innovatory creed such as socialism is “radical”, “liberal” or, preferably, “progressive”, since that places some onus on them to explain to what destination they imagine they are progressing. In the more extreme cases they may be described as “revolutionary”.

The shouts are at their loudest when parties like the BNP or their predecessor, the National Front are described as ‘extreme right’.  It seems as though the problem stems from the fact that parties like the BNP, NF and of course the Nazis lean towards authoritarianism. According to commentators like Hannan or Tebbitt, authoritarianism and tyranny are characteristic of left-leaning regimes and will cite Stalin-era Soviet Union or Maoist China as examples. Apparently this is what happens when left-wing parties take power…or so they continue to delude themselves into thinking.

But they seem ever-so-sensitive about their assignment on the Right. Left-wingers don’t get this worked up.  Ed West says,

This is because, as Daniel Hannan wrote last week, the BBC and the wider liberal media conflates “Right-wing” with evil, even when it’s absurdly inappropriate, anachronistic or nonsensical (such as with the Iranian hardliners).

“Evil”?  Someone needs to grow up. Surely the Iranian hardliners are right-wing? Why get so upset about it? But the BBC are described here as ‘liberal’ when they are, in fact, rather conservative (witness the BBC’s response to the DEC request to air an appeal for the people of Gaza earlier this year).  Hannan was so enraged that he even claimed that,

A true Rightist believes that, other things being equal, the individual should be as free as possible from state coercion: a position equally abhorrent to socialists of the National or Leninist varieties.

His argument comes unstuck when Pinochet, Franco, Stroeßner, the Greek Generals or Salazar are offered as examples of right-wing tyrannies which, incidentally, were all trading partners of the so-called liberal democracies from the 1950’s through to the 1980’s.  For instance, Pinochet had the support of the Thatcher government, ostensibly because of Chile’s succour during the Falklands War. But this support was also ideological: Chile under Pinochet was brutally fashioned into  a model of free-market economics. This ‘miracle’ impressed Thatcher and those on the right of her party, who were referred to as the ‘Dries’.  The left of her party or the ‘Wets’ (or One Nation  Tories), on the other hand, were known to be dismayed. Curiously, in the 50’s and 60’s, some One Nation Tories were denounced for their ‘socialism’.

Stalin: left or right?

As I mentioned above, the Right will often use Stalin as a tactic to undermine the arguments of the Left, pointing to both Stalin’s character and his authoritarian regime. But if we have a closer look at Soviet-era ‘communism’ we see two things: first, there is the regime’s glorification and worship of the military – something that is consistent with fascism. Second, Stalin’s policy of ‘Socialism in one country’ was in direct conflict with socialism’s internationalism; it was nationalist in scope. We could argue that the thesis of  ‘socialism in one country’  gave rise to the former.  Related to Stalin’s doctrine was the need to keep the revolution at ‘home’: this was manifested in the way in which the public was kept in line: through coercion and repression.

Apart from the nationalism and the glorification of the military, Stalin’s USSR had a centrally planned and managed economy; there were no private companies; all economic activity was state-controlled. This is not necessarily the same as a commonwealth, where all the citizens of a nation share in the wealth created through common ownership.

In the so-called ‘free’ world, the act of consumption was regarded as ‘freedom’. However when we unpack this thesis we find that one has to have the economic means – in other words, the money – in order to participate; in order to be ‘free’. This message of ‘freedom’ was sold to the east as an ideal and when the Eastern Bloc collapsed in the late 1980’s, there was a headlong rush for consumer goods. How quickly ideas of freedom evaporated when it was discovered that the West’s ‘freedoms’ rested entirely on the means to consume. As a consequence we now see former Soviet satellite states adopting authoritarian and reactionary regimes.

The end of ideology is a myth

In the early 1990’s we were told by a succession of Right-thinking academics and politicians that we had reached the ‘end of ideology’. Fukuyama described it as the ‘end of history’. But have we come to the end of ideology or is this what the certain politicians want us to think?

One of Thatcher’s objectives was to ‘destroy’ socialism in Britain. How she was going to achieve this was anyone’s guess since, as the character V says in the film V for Vendetta, “Ideas are bullet-proof”.  People who espouse certain ideas can be killed-  often by the state – but their ideas refuse to die. The de-Nazification of Germany in the aftermath of WWII did not lead to a purging of all Nazis from Germany nor did it wipe from the memory the Nazi ideology. Nazi parties, as well as fascists ones, continue to exist in spite of the misguided efforts to eradicate their ideas.

I find it odd that no one has ever declared Conservatism or Liberalism dead, but many on the Right will erroneously claim that socialism is dead because of the collapse of the USSR. Even the Left bought into this idea and so the race was on among social democratic parties to make themselves appear slightly more right-wing. This included the abandonment of long-standing policies and the full embrace of neo-liberal economic policies in order to appeal to ‘floating’ voters. This became known as the Third Way.

Left-wing and proud

I will not apologize for being a left-winger nor will I erroneously claim that Franco was actually a left-winger in order to pervert historical materialism for the sake of ideology. The legacy of the Thatcher years has been to demonize anything that is vaguely left-wing; even the Labour Party fell into this trap when Kinnock expelled the Militant from the party. Labour then went on to reject anything that appeared or sounded slightly socialist. Why? Because 18 years of Tory rule created a culture of intolerance (just look at how loudly they shout about ‘political correctness’). The Tory-supporting press were more than happy to oblige in the ritualistic slaughter of an ideological enemy and so lies were told about left-wing councils in order to make them left look foolish, trivial and silly.

The Left is weak in Britain and it has only itself to blame for this sorry state of affairs. While the Right continue to thrive…but for how much longer?

Tebbit demands justice!

In the immediate aftermath of the Saville Report the Daily Telegraph’s bloggers were mysteriously quiet. Clearly, they hadn’t had time to formulate their twists on the findings. The Chingford Skinhead is already demanding a public inquiry to the Brighton Bombing in 1984. Tebbit says “The victims of Brighton are no less important than those of Londonderry. They should not be treated as second-class victims”. The “victims” in this case were members of the Conservative Party including Tebbit whose wife was left disabled by the blast. But his sense of apparent fair play is undermined by his mean-spiritedness. What Tebbit fails, or does not want, to understand is the fact that there are no secrets vis a vis the Grand Hotel bombing; the Provisional IRA claimed responsibility. Whereas the State, on the other hand, actively sought to hide the truth behind the Bloody Sunday killings.

Not one to respect or acknowledge difference, Tebbit excelled himself in 1990 with his infamous suggestion that one’s citizenship or, rather, dedication to a notion of national pride could be determined by which cricket team one supported (presumably he also meant the Scots by this, because they patently do not support English cricket). Perhaps it is also no surprise that Tebbit was (and possibly still is) a member of the notorious [Conservative] Monday Club who once firmly supported the idea of voluntary repatriation of ethnic minorities – something that they had in common with the National Front and the British National Party. By the way, the Monday Club is working flat out to return to the Tory fold after having their links with them severed in 2001 by The Quiet Man. If their website is to be believed, they appear to have softened their earlier ideas on ethnic minorities but this doesn’t represent a philosophical sea change; they are still as anti-immigration and reactionary as they’ve ever been. They also have a Facebook group with only 7 members. No sign of Tebbit though.

Tebbit finishes his article by whining, “Some victims, the peace process seems to imply, have superior rights to others”. That isn’t the feeling that I get; this is long-overdue justice.

Meanwhile Douglas Murray is as paranoid as ever, muttering gloomily about “handing propaganda victories to people who hate us“. I thought that was just the ‘Islamists’ who did that sort of thing, Dougie? Say, didn’t you go to a prestigious private Catholic School in Ealing? He singles out Martin McGuinness for special attention – as have the usual Unionist voices, focussing on allegations that he was toting a sub-machine gun on the day. McGuiness, of course, denies this but this single-minded interest in what McGuniness was or was not doing is, in my view, an attempt to besmirch findings of the Saville Report. The qualified acceptance of the Saville Report that we see here from Murray and others is not surprising because for all their talk of greater freedom and social ‘cohesion’, they still have a fundamental issue with the exact nature of human rights.

Ah, balance…don’t you just love it?