I Love My Country

Someone made a reference the other day to the shortlived BBC quiz/entertainment show "I Love My Country", which was broadcast for a month in 2013.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Love_My_Country_(UK_TV_series) I remembered as a result that I'd written a review of the first episode, though never did anything with it. I don't know whether to feel broadly pleased that the show was a flop, or disturbed that it was made. I suppose short of disturbing, the show was an interesting response to the overt nationalist turn of the last 5 to 10 year, one that obviously attempted to respond to and be part of that turn, while at the same time articulating its nationalism in terms (multiculturalism and pop culture) that date to the last, rather softer, form of nationalism of 'Cool Britannia'. The contradiction might be what did for the show. 

Not Just the Title of the Show

Last Saturday BBC1 broadcast the first episode of “I Love My Country,” a Britain-themed quiz show hosted by Gabby Logan, with Frank Skinner and Mickey Flanagan.  Two teams, led by Skinner and Flanagan and cheered on by a studio audience inexplicably wearing novelty wigs, have to prove their patriotic credentials by answering stupid questions loosely related to a drunk BBC commissioner’s idea of Britain. The winning team is presented with the ‘I Love My Country’ souvenir plate. I’m not making this up.

Sophisticated it ain't. At one point contestants have to guess the weight of the Mayor of High Wycombe, in imperial measurements, naturally. (The Mayor appears in person for this purpose.) Sexist jokes are met with roars of laughter and applause. Flanagan wins a standing ovation from the audience for identifying that P _ T_ _ B _ _ _ _ _ _ was spelling out Peterborough. He then has to indicate its location by placing a Yorkshire pudding on a giant map of Britain. Afterwards Skinner has to find Lickey End (cor blimey.)

It's kind of inventive though, in its way. The musical interludes from Jamelia and the house band are particularly good. At one point they play three classic British tunes and the contestants have to guess the celebrity to which they refer. (For the record: The Who – My Generation, The Artic Monkeys – I Bet That You Look Good on the Dancefloor, and Motorhead – Ace of Spades. That was Bruce Forsyth. No, me neither.)

Mostly the show reads like another piece of Saturday night junk telly for all the family – complete with a sing along to The Beatles’ ‘All You Need is Love’ – and it largely conforms to the conventions of the genre. Skinner and Flanagan have some fake-spontaneous banter with the other guests, and Skinner makes several ‘jokes’ about the surname of Casualty actress Charlotte Salt. (They are, if anything, worse than you might be imagining.)

The BBC have quite self-consciously tried to present an inclusive notion of what Britain is, decorating the studio with banal symbols like Stonehenge (think This Is Spinal Tap), and celebrating Notting Hill Carnival as a British tradition. The overall tone though is represented more aptly by the opening credits, when a squealy electric guitar solo picks out the melody of 'God Save The Queen' before seguing in to generic rock while black cabs, sticks of rock, fish and chips, lions rampant and London buses float over a red, white and blue background. It's Our Britain, as the Sun would have it. [http://politicalscrapbook.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/the-sun-our-britain.jpg] When you think about the crappy symbolism of monarchical-nationalism suddenly the I Love My Country commemorative plate makes a lot of sense.

At one point Flanagan stands up straight and gives a mock salute when mentioning Kate Middleton, but that's the only, brief, hint of subversion, to which the producer's cut doesn't draw attention. Mostly though this is the BBC blowing with the wind, happily playing its role as regime broadcaster, following on from their recent reality show on scroungers, 'We All Pay Your Benefits', with Nick and Margaret.

Logan begins by announcing: “Welcome to ‘I Love My Country,’ not just the title of the show but a statement of fact. Tonight we’ll be putting our teams’ Britishness to the test.” She closes in a hail of rapturous applause from the studio audience, thanking all the participants as the theme music plays. “They all love their country,” she says, by way of praise, “and so do I.” 

Legally High

Mike Power

Drugs 2.0

Portobello, May 2013

I first heard about the website called the Silk Road through a friend of a friend, a maths undergraduate who liked to experiment with drugs. He described it as “an anonymous ebay,” and proof that the war on drugs was over, “and we won.” The Silk Road was hosted on the Tor network, a kind of alternative-internet popular with hackers, dissidents and criminals, which hides the IP address of users, and therefore their identities and locations. Drugs were bought and sold through the Silk Road using bitcoins, a kind of digital currency that is (to some, debated, extent) untraceable. This friend had bought everything from high quality MDMA to rare hallucinogens on the site, receiving it through the post in innocuous packages disguised as music CDs or greetings cards.

On the 1st October last year, FBI agents arrested a man called Ross William Ulbricht at a public library near his home in San Francisco, alleging that he was 'Dread Pirate Roberts', the owner and operator of the Silk Road. He has been charged with narcotics trafficking, money laundering, computer hacking, and conspiracy to murder at least six of his rivals and former collaborators. It seems that the Tor technology did its work well enough, but Ulbricht left signs outside of the anonymous net that were enough to identify him. When the Silk Road was first set up, in January 2011, Dread Pirate Roberts needed to publicise it, including on the ordinary, traceable web, where most people spend their browsing time. The FBI therefore looked for the first mentionss of the Silk Road, reasoning that whoever knew about the site in the earliest days was likely to be close to its founder.

A user calling themselves Altoid posting on an online forum for discussing magic mushrooms claimed to have 'come across' the Silk Road and recommended it to other forum users. In a post on another site, Altoid had included an email address, rossulbricht@gmail.com. The FBI put Ulbricht under surveillance and undercover agents began to communicate with him. When he was arrested and his laptop seized he was logged in to the Silk Road as Dread Pirate Roberts. According to a letter from the US Attorney on the 20th November 2013 opposing Ulbricht's application for bail, he was even stupid enough to keep a diary of his deeds on his laptop, including entries such as: “04/04/2013 received visual confirmation of blackmailers execution.”

The Silk Road has now been shut down, but the association between the internet and the market in mind-bending substances endures. Indeed, according to Mike Power it's an association that's almost as old as the internet itself, and which pre-dates the invention of anonymising tools like Tor. Power has written a history of drug culture – primarily British drug culture – for the new century, exploring life after the 1994 Criminal Justice act and the entry of MDMA (ecstasy) into the mainstream. He follows the lives of MDMA's many newer, younger descendants, and the future of the culture for which it is a sort of Ur-drug. At the centre of this work is an analysis of the seismic shifts of the last five years. Power identifies a confluence of factors recognisable throughout 21st century capitalism – principally the rise of China as a manufacturing centre and the development of the internet as a vast marketplace – that have transformed the world market in drugs, changing not only the way they’re sold, but the nature of the drugs themselves.

New synthetic substances such as mephedrone (called ‘meow meow’ by gullible British journalists who took a satirical internet post at face value) have rode waves of popularity and infamy before being made illegal, only for others such as methoxetamine to follow the same trajectory. New drugs like 6-APB, itself a variation on a substance called 6-APDB, are being invented all the time. Until 10 June 2013 6-APB was legal in Britain and easily bought online for a few pounds. It is now subject to a Temporary Class Drug Order making it illegal for 12 months while scientists and politicians consider further. After this time it will probably be permanently banned. Power cites a laboratory in Hong Kong that offers over 90 different substances for sale and delivery within days. This is an anarchic free market beyond any realistic prospect of government control or restriction, in which the inventiveness of chemists far outpaces the capacity of lawmakers and police forces to adapt.

The reference to Silicon Valley in the book title is, of course, deliberate. Power makes an explicit link between the free-thinking hedonism of switched-on drug users and the libertarian culture of California in the early years of the internet. He argues that what he calls ‘an online drugs culture’ is as old as the internet itself. What has happened in the last five years is not the penetration of the internet into a world of drug taking that was previously entirely offline, but the explosion into the mainstream of a subculture of online discussion, debate and information-sharing around drugs that has existed since the late 1980s. As Power puts it, ‘the history of the internet is bound up with the counter-culture, and the counter-culture finds some of its richest expression in the use of psychoactive chemicals.’ (This isn’t quite the whole story: it leaves out the US military’s role in the development of the internet; LSD and amphetamines have a similarly curious hybrid military-beatnik history.)

There might also be a social-psychological similarity between some ‘tech entrepreneurs’ as we are now bound to call them, and certain kinds of drug dealers. They are men halfway between capitalist and dropout. They despise the idea of conformity and of traditional ‘work’, but love making money. A friend of mine sold a few kilos of MDMA while he was at university, and ended up paying his final year fees and rent in cash. He’s full of business schemes. He once told me he’d like to be ‘a drug venture capitalist.’ He exploited his privileged access to financial capital – usually the lump sum of a new term’s student loan – to buy a starting float of drugs at wholesale prices to sell at a profit, but he also leveraged his social capital. He was selling, but also participating in, a social-cultural experience. He mostly sold to people he knew, and went to the same parties as they did. He was so immersed in his product that making money didn’t feel like work.

Power locates the origin of the online drugs culture in a discussion network called Usenet, which was enormously popular in the late 80s and 90s. Among Usenet’s thousands of discussion groups was one called ‘alt.drugs’. Here users discussed their personal experiences with drugs, and the relationship between drugs, law and morality. In the sub-group ‘alt.drugs.chemistry’ they also discussed the chemistry and manufacture of illegal drugs, principally MDMA and methamphetamine. By 1995 alt.drugs generated around 130 posts and had around 120,000 readers every day. At the height of the worldwide scare about ecstasy, 120,000 people a day were reading detailed messages about the manufacture and consumption of drugs. They were also able to exchange information and discuss issues of safety in the face of what amounted to a campaign of disinformation by governments and media. Power draws an analogy between the nature of online life and the experience of taking ecstasy. They both foster ego-dissolution and a desire to share one’s experiences with others. Ecstasy and the internet, Power says, belong together. (The dullness of drug users’ sharing – in the form of their idle chatter when high – may strengthen not weaken the analogy, given the nature of much social media content.) Such sites as Erowid, founded in 1995, and Bluelight (a better source than the NHS if you want to know which illegal drugs are safe with your prescribed anti-depressants) depend upon the social mode.

By the end of the 1990s, there were thousands of self-described ‘psychonauts’, posting chemical recipes, comparing notes on drugs’ effects, and sourcing small batches from laboratories mainly in Eastern Europe or China. Although this remained a minority sub-culture, not all of the substances used were illegal. Some acquired a degree of fame and popularity, particularly a group of hallucinogens known as the 2Cs. 2C-T-7 was sold online as ‘Blue Mystic Powder’, and in shops in the Netherlands and Japan. Around the same time, a Dutch drug dealer realised that the then UK law on magic mushrooms (it was illegal to prepare them for human consumption, but not to grow, pick or sell them fresh) left a loophole for the sale of punnets of fresh mushrooms to British customers. A craze for mushrooms lasted until the law was changed in August 2005, demonstrating that people – particularly the British, Europe’s leading drug takers – were ready to try something new, and buy it online.

By then the underground was ready to enter the mainstream; all that was required was a gap in the market and the right product to fill it. The gap came in 2007, at the beginning of a two year global MDMA drought. The easiest way to make MDMA is from Safrole, a natural oil distilled from the mreah prew phnom tree found in South-East Asian rainforests. Heightened security in European ports from 2006 onwards caused the price of safrole and other precursor chemicals to rise. Manufacturers attempted to maintain the wholesale price of their products by using cheaper substitutes such as piperazines, but users noted the inferior quality of the MDMA they were being sold; millions of them were now online and able to exchange information. UN anti-drug officers also targeted the supply of safrole at its source; on one occasion in late 2008, the Cambodian government destroyed a quantity of safrole which would have supplied the entire British market for five years. Rather than take weaker, dangerous or more expensive MDMA, users chose an alternative: mephedrone.

Power makes a plausible claim to have found the origin of mephedrone. It seems to have been discovered by a chemist in the UK calling him- or herself ‘Kinetic’. In 2003, Kinetic posted a message to a website called the Hive: ‘I’ve been bored over the last couple of days, and had a few fun reagents lying around, so I thought I’d try and make some 1-(4-methylphenyl)-2-methylaminopropanone hydrochloride, or 4-methylmethcathinone as I suppose it would be commonly called.’ Kinetic then ingested this substance and recorded the results. Later he posted: ‘I really just have to say a big ‘Fuck You’ to the UK government and their stupid drug laws, since I’m high as a kite and there’s nothing they can do.’

Mephedrone is a methcathinone, a variation of cathinone, a Class C drug in Britain. It is loosely related to chat, the natural stimulant popular among Yemenis and Somalis, recently made illegal in the UK. Mephedrone was synthesised in 1929 and written up in the journal of the Société Chimique de France, but before Kinetic no one had thought to use it as a drug, and it was legal in most countries.

It was developed commercially by an Israeli pharmaceutical company called BioRepublik, based in Tel Aviv. In 2003 Israelis had buzzed about hagigat, legal pills containing cathinone whose name came from the Hebrew word for chat. After cathinone was banned in Israel in 2004, BioRepublik chemists seem to have searched for a replacement, and found their way to mephedrone either by reading Kinetic’s post or following the same steps he took. By early 2007, BioRepublik was selling mephedrone in branded capsules called NeoDoves and SubCocas. They were especially popular in Australia, where illegal drugs have always been expensive due to difficulties of importation. They became even more popular as the MDMA drought worsened – compounded by a police seizure of a shipment of 15 million ecstasy pills ordered by an Australian member of the Calabrian mafia. Sweden was another early adopter of mephedrone, which Power attributes to its especially punitive laws on the possession of illegal drugs.

Mephedrone is not hallucinogenic. Although it’s chemically different from MDMA, it produces a similar sensation. Users feel energised, ready to dance, empathetic and open. If you were used to MDMA, you could take it as an approximate substitute, and if you were new to drugs you could take it knowing that you wouldn’t lose control. BioRepublik did not name the active ingredient of their pills, but some users opened up the capsules and tested the contents; the results were published on Bluelight. While it was still legal, there were minimal barriers to entering the market for mephedrone. Laboratories in China began producing and exporting in bulk to Europe. By the time it became illegal in Israel in 2008 its manufacture was almost entirely a Chinese affair. By early 2009, when Power wrote the first stories on mephedrone in the British press, a kilo could be bought in China for as little as £1000 and could be shipped to a British supplier in a few days. One Chinese manufacturer told Power he was sending 50 kilos a week to Britain by FedEx and DHL. His British customers sold the mephedrone on in small amounts through websites. At around £10 a gram in those days (compared to £40 a gram for adulterated MDMA), mephedrone was cheap to its users. Even so, importers were making a profit on each kilo of up to £9000: those 50 kilos per week were therefore worth around £400,000 weekly profit to the British middle men that bought them.

By the end of 2010 mephedrone was illegal in most of the world, including in China. But the trade in new synthetic drugs continued to grow and diversify, now often driven by the experiments of suppliers in their own laboratories. As long as production remained legal in the supplying country (or local officials could be bought off), export to Europe was relatively easy. Shipment of legal substances was straightforward, but even if the product was illegal in the target country it could be shipped under a false label bought with bribes to local customs officials, or routed via a contact in an EU country where it remained legal – routing via a ‘safe’ EU country means that a shipment is less likely to be inspected on arrival at its ultimate destination. In any case, the volume of freight from China and the Far East is too large for all illegal imports to be stopped.

The constantly updating supply of legal drugs can pose significant health risks, as Power outlines. The European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction reports that between 1997 and 2010 150 new drugs appeared on the European market. The figure was matched and possibly exceeded in the next three years. The new substances have no history of human use and are produced speculatively, in unregulated circumstances, for profit, and are legal only on the basis of the fiction that they are not sold for human consumption. Even if vendors have a good idea about the properties of what they are selling (not always an assumption one can make) they still can’t provide instructions about appropriate dosage. This has serious consequences: a gram of Ketamine can get two or three people high in a night; a gram of Methoxetamine, sold as a direct substitute, can get a hundred people high. It’s too easy to overdose, especially when a 2012 survey found that 15 per cent of respondents had taken an ‘unknown white powder.’ A third of these had taken it from a stranger. If possession of a ‘legal high’ is not illegal, and its sale is not illegal, what is illegal? Only the information needed to make it safer.

The Elephant in the Room

This review of Alex Niven's book about Oasis, Definitely Maybe (33 1/3), was originally published in the Oxonian Review. http://www.oxonianreview.org/wp/the-elephant-in-the-room/

The Elephant in the Room

Alex Niven
Definitely Maybe (33 1/3)

Alex Niven opens Definitely Maybe, his book about Oasis’ debut album and the culture that made it, by saying that the band was “mostly popularly loved, mostly critically scorned.” That’s a fair assessment (though a lot of non-critics hate them too), but it’s not the end of the story, as Niven makes clear. In the mid-1990s Oasis were massive. They were front page news, the most potent symbols of a popular mood that seemed to promise not just the rejection of Thatcherism but its electoral annihilation. You couldn’t get away from them, even if you wanted to. (I didn’t, at the time). Their significance must be greater than that opening aphorism would imply.

In his last book, Folk Opposition (Zero Books, 2011), Niven argued that the contemporary left has largely abandoned any effort to speak to, or for, a mass of people sharing a common culture. At the same time, while some parts of postwar popular culture were always created in a semi-commercial context (television, for instance), now even more popular practices like music and football have been transformed by the neo-liberal project. In response to this shift the left has not articulated any sort of resistance rooted in mass identity—the “folk opposition” for which Niven would wish—but has instead retreated into a kind of Fabianism, detached from, and rather scornful of, popular culture. If the left is to find any kind of mass appeal it needs to start by reclaiming populism from the far right.

Such a project would necessarily entail taking popular culture seriously; in his examination of Oasis, Niven shows how this might work. He sets out to find, in “the most apparently banal, ordinary, hackneyed phenomenon of the last 20 years”, some previously missed clues that might explain why “populism has disappeared from pop music” and why “we don’t seem to have made any real artistic or social progress since the 1990s.” In a sense then, though he never says so explicitly, this book can be thought of as a sequel to his last.

Niven sticks close to the songs, mostly discussing the tracks in the order in which they appear on the album. There are digressions though, especially to the B-sides, and the book is divided into four sections titled ‘Earth’, ‘Water’, ‘Fire’ and ‘Air’. Niven uses this loose structure to group his thoughts about the wider political and social context from which Oasis emerged. ‘Earth’ is a discussion of the bands’ roots, both geographical and musical; ‘Water’ refers to the context of the 1990s, when Oasis rode a wave of optimism to wealth and fame; ‘Fire’ examines the anger that infused their music, particularly in this first album; ‘Air’ is broadly about politics.

Given his determination to rescue the band from critical derision, Niven is often on the defensive. Some of this comes over too strongly, detracting from his broader claims about the group’s significance. In the course of a discussion of Oasis’ borrowings from other musicians Niven makes a comparison with early hip hop and the practice of sampling. It’s fair to say that “Oasis’ appropriation of the past was just as valid” as Public Enemy’s, but it’s a stretch to suppose that it was equally successful artistically. We can agree that Oasis were not straightforward plagiarists, without regarding as plausible the claim that their form of cut and paste was as interesting as Public Enemy’s, or its end product as novel.

Niven is on much firmer ground defending Oasis’ lyrics. For a start, he points out, most pop and rock lyrics are basic, internally inconsistent, and even nonsensical. Where popular music lyrics succeed they usually do so as fragments, arresting couplets that function as slogans or, in Niven’s phrase, “verbal graffiti”. Accompanied by the music, lines like “we see things they’ll never see” are more than capable of carrying the song along with them. The point isn’t that Noel Gallagher’s lyrics were as good as Morrissey’s, or even Jarvis Cocker’s, it’s that they weren’t unusually bad. (They’re arguably better, for instance, than those of Kurt Cobain, often regarded as a tortured genius.)

Although the “sampling” analogy is misguided, Niven is good when he examines the musical influences from which the group assembled their styles. While many are inclined to dismiss them as a facsimile of the Beatles, Niven convincingly shows how the band also drew from shoegaze, grunge, acid-house, and punk. Before they later became a derivative cliché of themselves, Niven argues, Oasis produced a music that was vital and contemporary, a clear product of the early 90s. (The only omission in Niven’s list of influences, I feel, is Irish traditional music: the Gallagher’s father, Tommy, was an occasional DJ in South Manchester’s Irish clubs, and Noel’s solos often use the pentatonic scale popular in folk*.)

For all the laddishness that Oasis projected, there’s a strong escapist tone to their music and lyrics. Escape is a recurring theme, and though it’s portrayed as impossible in ‘Cigarettes and Alcohol’ (which Niven compares to the exhortation in Trainspotting not to “choose life”), it is defiantly and definitively promised in ‘Live Forever’. In many ways Oasis inherited the vague unspecific euphoria of rave, filtered it through a football crowd, and produced a kind of “lad psychedelia”.

Ultimately though, Niven’s argument comes down to politics. Here, as he concedes, the elephant in the room is Tony Blair. Many versions of the story of the 1990s assume an obvious parallel between Blair and Oasis, with Britpop as the state-music of New Labour. Niven denies much of this, pointing out that the band was formed, Definitely Maybe written and recorded, and their first single released, before Blair even became leader of the Labour party. There’s certainly an argument for 1995 as a watershed for both Oasis and the Labour party. But even if Oasis’ euphoric  fellow-feeling had a political edge—Niven quotes Gallagher ascribing an explicitly anti-establishment meaning to ‘Up in the Sky’—it was sufficiently unspecific and stripped of content to render it useable to a charlatan fraud like Blair.

Niven wants us to see Oasis as representing not only a lost past, burned out and pensioned off by 1996, but also as the clue to a possible future, to be excavated from the ruins of that first burst of Mancunian-Irish energy. From the present vantage point such an excavation of the late 80s and early 90s is more urgent than ever. While New Labour might have seemed to promise a more optimistic, open, social-democratic Britain, that moment now appears as merely a brief slowdown in a three (going on four) decade-long project of neoliberalism, powered by the financial services industry and justified by an increasing hatred of the poorest and weakest. Niven sees it is vital that we examine the time between the second summer of love and the Criminal Justice Bill for clues as to what went wrong. Even if he is too kind about their music, Niven is right to identify Oasis as the most culturally central, and in that sense the most important, voice of the period.

* Incidentally, how many great ‘English’ musicians have in fact come from Irish roots? John Lydon, Morrissey, Johnny Marr, John Lennon, to name just a few.

Policing Passion

On Monday, Merseyside Police announced that they planned to go to court the following day, to force a change in the kick off time of Saturday's game between Everton and Liverpool at Goodison Park. In the case of high profile games such as this one, kick off times are sometimes changed, or supporter travel arrangements are restricted, at the behest of the police. Saturday's 5.30pm kick off time had been agreed by Liverpool Council's licensing committee.

The sole reason for the late kick off this Saturday – indeed, the reason for pretty much all weekend late kick offs – was the scheduling requirements of satellite TV channels. A 3pm kick off would clash with Athelico Madrid-Real Madrid, and a lunchtime kick off with Tottenham-Arsenal. The channels, the clubs, and the Premier League all have a significant financial interest in a 5.30 kick off.

When police attempt to disrupt football matches over safety they are rarely able to cite evidence for their concerns. When arrangements for a match between Huddersfield and Hull last season were questioned by fans, a senior West Yorkshire Police officer told a colleague to search “open source channels” - to trawl the internet in other words – in search of information that could retrospectively justify the decision police had already made. In a private email, a police solicitor admitted that the force appeared to have behaved “irrationally.” In the case of Saturday's match, Merseyside police publically admitted that they had no specific information indicating increased risk, other than the fact that a late kick off gives fans more time to drink.

In the end the hearing was a farce. The police solicitor immediately asked for an adjournment, returning to the court a short while later to announce that the force had come to an agreement with Everton: the club would take unspecified steps to improve security and “segregation”. The case was dropped.

The point of the challenge was not really to force a change in Saturday's kick off time, so much as to offer the police an opportunity to throw their weight around. At the moment, football clubs are only eligible to pay police costs incurred inside stadia and on immediately surrounding streets. The Association of Chief Police Officers has argued that effective policing has displaced football-related crime away from stadia, making clubs responsible for a much larger footprint. This is a classic bait and switch from the police – crime is down so you need to pay us more – which would conveniently offload part of the cost of policing many city centres onto football clubs every Saturday.

Football also offers police chiefs an easy way to complain about their budgets and staffing numbers in a context in which – even though crime rates around football have been falling for decades – scaremongering about fans is politically easy and rarely subject to serious scrutiny. The Merseyside Police statement confirms this reading: “Going forward cognisance needs to be taken in relation to the timings of these games and the extra burden on police resources and the public purse when forces are seeing unprecedented cuts to their budgets.”

Besides being an example of increasing police assertiveness, the abortive court case exposed the tension between the two dominant themes in the development of English football since the 1980s. On the one hand, the transformation of the game into a globally marketed product has required the erasure of its commercially unappealing (though exaggerated) connotations of violence. This has been effected by a regime of football policing which the police themselves boast is unlike anything seen elsewhere in Europe. As long as fans' culture can be domesticated and safely repackaged as “passion”, for sale around the world, the interests of security and branding are perfectly in line. Here though, the political and financial interests of the police were at odds with the brand's need for a night match, and a stadium full of loud (maybe even drunk?) fans, paying to leverage their own enthusiasm into profits for the Premier League and its sponsors – which include Carslberg.

Canal Boat Hitchiking

*My brother and I spent 5 days hitchiking on canal boats from Manchester to Lichfield in September 2012.*

Ordinarily as a hitchhiker one hopes for as much passing traffic as possible, so that the slim chances of getting a lift from any one of the staring faces that zoom by are compensated for by sheer numbers. When hitchhiking on canal boats there is very little traffic, but the odds of being taken onboard are extraordinarily good, it seems. In five days hitching from Manchester to Lichfield down the Macclesfield, Trent & Mersey, and Coventry canals , my brother and I asked for lifts from seven boats and only had two refusals.

Mostly we parked ourselves at the front of the boat, smoking his electric cigarette and chatting about the new turn his life was taking post university. I saw an otter slip into the water just ahead of us somewhere around Rugeley as we chugged along with a retired couple (a sewing machine mechanic and a hairdresser), and somewhere around Stone the last of the swallows swooped across our bows and thought about slinging their hooks before the weather turned. We soon learned to incorporate “we’ll stay out of your way at the front” into our pitch.

At Bosley locks on the Macclesfield canal, on the second day of our trip, we were picked up by Brian and Ann-Marie on the Alton, a 1936 coal barge built at the Harland and Woolf yard at Woolwich. At one time there were as many as 300 of these ‘Big Woolwich’ barges, but after the British Transport Commission discontinued canal freight in the early 1960s almost all of them were turned into houseboats or pleasure cruisers, or scrapped. Perhaps only ten remain in their original form, Brian reckons, with an engine room and a tiny one room living space at the stern, and the rest of the 70-odd feet of the boat filled up with 30 tons of cargo covered with tarpaulin.

Brian grew up on the Wirral and used to work as an automotive engineer, making car parts for Toyota, but he has been in love with canal boats since he took a holiday on his dad’s mate’s boat one summer when he was fifteen. He’s a stocky bloke with a big brown beard, wearing a heavy padded neon construction site jacket engrained with grime. Ann-Marie had a wooly hat half pulled down on top of blonde hair and a padded check shirt, and looked tired. We later learnt they had been up since 5.30 that morning.

The Alton is still a working boat. Brian and Ann-Marie run the Renaissance Canal Carrying Co. selling solid fuel, diesel, gas canisters and a few other bits and bobs along the canals of Cheshire and Staffordshire. Their regular round, a loop that starts and finishes near Macclesfield, takes about a fortnight, and they do it about once a month, with rest and restocking time at their houseboat. They sell to anyone who wants along the canal, including pubs, boatyards and so on, but most of their customers are people who live aboard. There are more customers in summer as there are more boats around, but fuel orders are larger in winter, so broadly speaking it seems to level out.

Brian’s full of knowledge about canals. When this or that one was built, how they came to be narrow unlike the canals and navigations in Europe, who’s the best boat builder in Staffordshire. He talked about the horse rope marks you find in bridges, or about the places on the Trent and Mersey around Stoke where they fitted cast iron covers at the stone corners, and that even these have been worn by ropes, or where they fitted wooden rollers, the iron brackets for which can sometimes still be seen. He talked about canal characters like Caggie Stevens of Birmingham, who used to collect factory rubbish on his barges, pulled by a horse right up to the 1990s. We tried to help out as we made our way down to Kidsgrove, lugging bags of coal or holding ropes to stay alongside a boat as Ann-Marie pumped it full of diesel. Sometimes we’d pass a holidaying narrowboat at a set of locks. “Is that a working boat?” they’d say, full of excitement and a hint of envy, “It’s good to see there are still working boats.”

That night our kid and I fetched up camping on waste ground between the West Coast Mainline and the Trent and Mersey canal, next to G.Park Blue Planet, a warehouse built on the site of a former colliery by Gazeley, an international developer of ‘sustainable distribution space.’ The centre has been empty since it was built with Regional Development Agency money in 2009. You can’t miss a five second view of it as you whoosh past on the West Coast Mainline just north of Stoke, a big green thing showing off a long row of empty lorry docking ports.

In the early evening a few dog walkers skirted the edges of the boggy ponds nearby and looked over at us curiously as we heated up water on a camping stove for cous cous and Tesco tinned curry sauce. Night fell and we went to bed, the lights of the empty warehouse shining mistily through the tent fabric and the trains rushing past every ten minutes. The next morning it was raining and the canal was still sleeping, so we walked through Burslem, the ‘Mother Town’ of the potteries with its old branch canal drained and filled in in the 60s, and skirted more of England’s underside, until we finally got a lift from another retiree in Stoke; a former IT manager at Rolls Royce.

In China Town

Since the summer, members of the London Chinatown Chinese Association say, the UK Border Agency has been targeting businesses in Chinatown, looking for people who may be living or working in Britain illegally. Most of the raids, according to the LCCA, have been speculative ‘fishing’ trips, based on no intelligence and designed to intimidate. Almost every business in Chinatown has been hit. At one restaurant the officers showed the manager their warrant only after the raid was finished – they were at the wrong address. 

On Tuesday afternoon, most businesses in Chinatown shut down in protest, their owners and employees marching through the streets of Soho. The demonstration was organised by the LCCA and Min Quan, a project of the anti-racist Monitoring Group. 

Read the rest here: 
http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2013/10/24/harry-stopes/in-china-town/

A Marikana Continua

There were no more than twenty of us outside South Africa House the other week. Londoners are used to small demonstrations outside foreign embassies, and passers-by didn’t pay much attention. We were there in support of the Abahlali baseMjondolo (Zulu for ‘shackdwellers’) movement. AbM was founded in Durban in 2005, after land at Kennedy Road, which the municipality had long promised would be used for housing for the poor, was sold to a developer. Echoing the language of Lefebvre, AbM call for the poor’s ‘right to the city’.   

The state’s response has been unyielding. In 2007 the Kwa-Zulu Natal provincial government passed the Elimination and Prevention of Re-emergence of Slums Act, which provided for forced evictions without a court order. AbM went to the Constitutional Court to have the law overturned. They won the case, but on 26 September 2009, shortly before the judgment was passed down, an AbM meeting in Kennedy Road was attacked by an armed gang, which AbM leaders say was connected to local ANC figures. Two people were killed. Thirteen AbM supporters were arrested, and no attackers.

read the rest here:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2013/10/18/harry-stopes/outside-south-africa-house/

Well played, Gents.

On 30^th March Huddersfield Town played Hull City at home. The fixture was originally scheduled to be played at 12.30, but Sky TV decided that they wanted to broadcast the match live, and have it kick off at 5.20 instead. Huddersfield wrote to West Yorkshire Police to request permission to make the change. It's a standing rule of thumb in football policing that the later a match kicks off the more 'risk' it poses, because supporters will have more time to get drunk beforehand. Seemingly on this basis, West Yorkshire Police would only permit a later kick off time under certain very strict conditions.

The most significant of these conditions was that all Hull fans buying a ticket for the match would at the same time be obliged to purchase official coach travel from Hull. All travel to the match for Hull fans would have to start and finish in Hull. A fan living in West Yorkshire, or London, or wherever, would be obliged to make his way to Hull first in order to go to Huddersfield. The reaction of fans was furious, with one fifteen year old Hull fan living in Manchester attempting to force a judicial review. As a compromise police eventually agreed that fans that didn't wish to travel from Hull could make their own way to a rendezvous at a motorway service station near the Huddersfield stadium and use police-escorted buses. Many Hull fans stayed away, while others protested outside the ground before the match.

RedsAway, a website about away matches for Manchester United fans, used the Freedom of Information Act to request copies of all police correspondence relating to the match. The emails reveal a police decision making process that was haphazard and rested on little evidential basis. West Yorkshire Police seemingly gave no consideration to the rights of thousands of fans to enjoy going to a football match in a manner of their own choosing, instead making their policing decisions solely on the basis of perceived (exaggerated) risk, and on the extra cost to the public purse of letting Hull fans travel the way they pleased.

In the face of criticism when the restrictions were originally announced, police tried to deflect the anger, saying that policing plans were the result of negotiation and agreement between all parties. But the emails reveal that the police went into meetings prepared to concede very little ground. As the clubs were under pressure from the Football League to ensure the game went ahead and was televised, they were in a weak negotiating position – something of which the police were aware. “The club were clearly under a lot of pressure from the FA [sic] to get the game on and I have made it clear there will be no further negotiation from ourselves,” Chief Superintendent Tim Kingsman wrote on 5^th February. In reply he received a laddish pat on the back from the Assistant Chief Constable: “Gents. Well played, keep me in the loop re: developments.”

Police were unprepared for the scale and volume of fans' anger. They have become so used to pushing people around that it never occurred to them that fans would object to having their movements determined and supervised for around seven hours in order that they could watch a game of football lasting ninety minutes – in a fixture which hadn't seen any trouble for over a decade. When Hull City objected, Kingsman said he was happy to attend a meeting to explain his rationale, but only in the context where it was understood that there was “no further room for compromise.”

Ahead of follow up meetings with the clubs, Superintendent Ged McManus asked a junior officer to trawl through police databases to find some intelligence with which to retrospectively justify the purported high risk of the fixture. Research was also done through 'open source' channels, i.e. the internet. A police officer, paid by taxpayers whose money the WYP were so anxious to protect, was paid to read internet forums, Twitter and Facebook, and to trawl through Youtube videos trying to find evidence of Hull fans behaving badly.

Pressure grew, particularly after a BBC interview following which the police's PR division whinged in an email that McManus had been “ambushed,” by being forced to answer tough questions. One fan emailed to ask, pertinently, “on what legal basis you can prevent me travelling lawfully in my legal vehicle to a place of my choosing?” Police were gradually realising what a stupid decision they had made. At least, some of them were: Deputy Chief Constable Jawaid Akhtar praised a Yorkshire Post editorial because it laid the blame on fans for bringing the restrictions on themselves.

A police solicitor had a clearer idea of the reality, a reality which might be further exposed once the Police and Crime Commissioner's investigation into the decision has run its course. “We have an area of weakness,” he or she wrote, “which is the Leeds v Derby game where we have agreed to kick off at 5.30pm on Bank Holiday Monday with no restrictions... Leeds have a far worse record for disorder than either Hull or Huddersfield and there is evidence of recent disorder between Leeds and Derby... There is a risk that a Court would find that we have acted irrationally.”

Conditions of Sale

For most clubs in the NPower Championship, the football division below the Premier League, the season is now over. Cardiff City will be promoted as champions, along with Hull City, who came second. The next four teams are competing for the third promotion place. Leicester City beat Watford 1-0 in their first leg last night; Crystal Palace are playing Brighton and Hove Albion this evening; after the second legs on Sunday and Monday the winners will meet at Wembley.
 
Palace and Brighton have a longstanding rivalry. Violence between fans isn’t unknown. It’s standard practice with such ‘high risk’ matches for the police to make special plans. Police numbers go up, and more or less onerous restrictions are placed on fans: only season ticket holders may be eligible for tickets to away matches; trains to and from the match may be alcohol-free; movement outside the ground after the game may be limited.
 
But the restrictions on Brighton fans going to Palace tonight are something new. 

Read the rest here:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2013/05/10/harry-stopes/conditions-of-sale/

Miembros no Numeros!

There are a few hundred outsourced workers at Senate House and other University of London buildings in Bloomsbury, including the intercollegiate student halls. Most of the caterers are employed by Aramark; the cleaners, security guards and maintenance by Balfour Beatty Workplace, the services arm of the construction giant. Most are immigrants; from Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe and, overwhelmingly in the case of the cleaners, Latin America.

Two years ago the cleaners were being paid £6.15 an hour, and only 18 outsourced workers were members of the trade union, Unison Senate House Branch. A group of activists, working with the branch education representative, began free English classes sponsored by the union, together with a recruitment drive. In July 2011 they started a campaign for the London Living Wage, and in September 2011 held an unofficial strike demanding overdue wages; Balfour Beatty paid out around £6000 within three days. Wages have gone up four times since October 2011; the cleaners are now paid £8.55 an hour.

Union recruitment soared: up to a third of Branch members, including some of its most active organisers, were outsourced workers – unprecendented for a group that is traditionally among the lowest paid, most vulnerable and most difficult to organise. Last September the cleaners launched a new campaign for 3 Cosas: sick pay, pensions and holidays on the same terms as directly employed university staff.

But the Union management and branch leadership have not been helpful, to put it mildly. The then branch chair tried unsuccessfully to block a committee vote to increase funding for the Living Wage campaign. The vice-chair, Simon Meredith, and secretary, Josephine Grahl, wouldn’t hold a vote on giving official support to the 3 Cosas campaign, and tried to co-opt the agenda with a campaign run by Unison management rather than by the cleaners. ‘All our resources were going into fighting our own Union, instead of the campaign,’ an activist told me.

Read the rest of the article here:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2013/04/09/harry-stopes/miembros-no-numeros/

What Community?

I was doing one of my irregular piss about trawls through my old word docs and found this, which I wrote in autumn 2011 about the riots of that summer. I published a version of it in Catch Magazine at the time, but this is the original.

Looting the Lexicon

I’m no Malcolm X, but I’m no Norman Tebbit either. ‘Malcman in the Middle,’ if you like. Being in the middle might be boring and not a sexy as stringing them all up, or garroting all the coppers, or taking everyone in London off to Butlins together and talking about our feelings, but I’m not inclined to apologise for that. I find it unlikely that a complex problem will have a simple solution. Simplicity, usually, is for simpletons.

But there’s a difference between simplicity and clarity. Too much of the language being used around the events of early August is vague, or meaningless, or is used as George Orwell once said, not to reveal meaning but to obscure it. In the two months since the riots and looting, things have got worse, with debate settling into familiar ruts and easy clichés, and most politicians and journalists claim to be able to end rioting simply by opening more youth centres or more jails, as if a profound sociological crisis could be solved by scrapping one trident missile and rewriting one line of a budget. If we are going to have a meaningful and productive discussion about what happened we need to start with first principles, and that starts with thinking about the words that we use.

I’ve been suspicious about the word ‘community’ for a long time, at least as it’s used in political discourse, where it has a long and sorry history. In the late 1990s for example, the Lord Rogers-endorsed political orthodoxy was that inner city areas like Gorton or Mile End suffered from a lack of communal feeling or ‘community spirit’ thanks to their unsympathetic architecture and urban landscape. The prescribed solution was to build anew, ensuring that the new Utopia that sprung up was designed in accordance with the wishes of the residents; ‘the local community.’ The writers of ‘Towards a Strong Urban Renaissance’, the 1999 report on the future of cities, never realised the circularity of stating on the one hand that dysfunctional design and degraded infrastructure made for a hollowed out, disparate population with no collective identity or solidarity, and on the other hand that the attendant social problems could be solved simply by talking to this population and listening to its (coherent? unanimous?) voice.

Anyway, fast forward to now and the word ‘community’ is being passed round like a bag of coke at a Bullingdon Club party. What is a community? Is it just a generic word for all the people who live in a geographical area? If it is it’s a rather useless concept, since if August showed us anything it’s that having a mix of people in an area doesn’t necessarily make it happy or socially cohesive. In fact, the evidence has been there for years, if you care to look. Middle class people who live in Brixton – like me, indeed – will say that they love the area for its diversity, its capacity to challenge one’s expectations, to expose one to funny food in the market. All this is true, up to a point, but what is also true is that any number of studies of Brixton - or London Fields, Dalston, Peckham, Kentish Town, Hammersmith, or anywhere else in London you care to mention – show that people here tend to associate with others who earn like them, learn like them, talk like them, think like them, dress like them, and usually look like them.

John Major once said that when faced with criminals society needed to “condemn a little more and understand a little less,” the only example I know of where a politician (openly) made it his policy to promote ignorance among the electorate. Reading my facebook during the riots I began to think that the internet was broken, and that the Daily Mail comments page was leaking into my newsfeed. People I used to know at school poured scorn on any attempt to understand or explain what was happening. ‘It’s criminality and greed’ they shrieked, la-la-laing with their fingers in their ears – an easy misunderstanding if you don’t know the difference between a cause and a motive. By all means declare that those people breaking windows and stealing trainers were motivated by nothing more than the desire to own and possess, and at the same time to disrupt and to destroy. Maybe that was all that was in their heads. But why, and how, do we come to a state of affairs, in this city – one of the richest and by its own proclamation, ‘greatest’ in the world – where a large number of young people are prepared to behave like this?

I began by listing a couple of people I am not. I could add semiotician to the list. I’m no Roland Barthes, for example, but in the last analysis I damn community for its lack of meaning. As Gramsci made clear, ideology is intimately linked with the concrete and material. To be ideological is not simply to be an idealist. Thus the hollowing out of our politics, the removal of ideology from our political parties, is paralleled by a turn to the abstract. For all their talk about ‘what works’, politicians now are less, not more engaged with reality.

‘Community’ is too vague to call up anything concrete. It is evocative rather than indicative. It calls to mind indisputed Good Things: friendly people, shops where they know your name, identifiably local places rather than characterless nonplaces, the personal rather than the anonymous, the specific rather than the general. A vision, of Police Community Support Officers biking through the morning mist to the Tesco megastore. It is apolitical. A solidarity without politics for a political culture without ideology. In short in this small angry island it is the only form of society we really deserve.

Among The Touts

The only football ticket I’ve ever bought from a tout was for the FA Cup semi-final between Manchester City and United at Wembley last year. It cost me more than a third of my monthly rent. After the tout had satisfied himself that I wasn’t a cop he told me that the ticket was ‘one and a half’ and that I could collect it from his pal. ‘My mate’s in the bookies, ’cause it’s bent round here with the Old Bill.’ In the bookmakers there were horses on the telly, beer in the air, and football on everyone’s lips. A thin man with an unlit cigarette in his mouth gave me a ticket in a Club Wembley branded envelope, and I handed over £150.

Buying multiple gig tickets on several credit cards and selling them for a profit is not only legal but smiled on: the Conservative MP Sajid Javid called such touts ‘entrepreneurs’. But touting football tickets is a criminal offence, punishable with a fine up to £5000 and a ban from all matches for up to ten years. Similar laws are in place for the Olympics, with a maximum fine of £20,000. The Met have been stepping up their arrests of football touts since the beginning of last year, on the reasonable assumption that they are likely to be involved in selling Olympic tickets too. ‘What we have uncovered shows that organised crime networks of the highest level which are known to us are involved in ticketing offences,’ according to the head of Operation Podium.

[Continued here: http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2012/07/05/harry-stopes/among-the-touts/ ]

Here Comes Dickens!

Recently I've been reading David Lodge's novel Therapy, in which the main character Tubby Passmore pursues various therapies for his painful knee and, later in the story, his broken heart. Tubby is a television writer, most famously for the Heartland Productions smash hit The People Next Door, a sitcom about two incompatible families that share the same party wall between their semi-detached houses. The show is a massive success, and Tubby has a large house in Rummidge, Lodgelandia, and a flat in non-fictionalised London.

The US version of the show is also succesful (which explains the house and flat), though as usual the Americans feel the need to change the name. The People Next Door becomesWho's Next Door? This suggests a more dynamic, exciting television concept. Not just a known, understood, fixed situation of some people next door, but a constant revisiting of the question – who are they, these people next door? Probably the writers would aim to hamfistedly restate the concept within the first couple of minutes of dialogue in every episode, for the benefit of American viewers chancing on the show for the first time, flicking through hundreds of American cable stations. There's also a hint of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?there, with class in Tubby's original being replaced by race, though Lodge has the conversation about whether the Davises should be replaced by a Latino family go unresolved.

Being clear is good when translating titles. Elizabeth Laird's novel Red Sky in the Morning, which my mother read to my sister and I when we were children, is about a girl called Anna whose younger brother Ben is born with hydrocephalus. At first Anna is ashamed of Ben and tries to hide his condition from her friends, but later she comes to accept him and his disability. When it was first published in America this book was called Loving Ben. A Ronseal title, as David Cameron would probably say. John McGahern's That They May Face the Rising Sun (which was set by a lake)? By The Lake, published by Knopf. Whimsy is out too. Angela Carter's The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman reappeared as the more prosaic The War of Dreams.

(As an aside, Tubby Passmore's oeuvre excepted, TV shows tend the cross the water unchanged. Well, the names stay the same – Life on Mars, Queer as Folk, Shameless, Cold Feet – they just replace the actors with sexier American versions and swap Manchester for New York.)

Americans seem to like names that suggest action, preferably in the present tense – continuous if possible. Helen Simpson's collection of stories Hey Yeah Right Get a Lifeappeared across the Atlantic with the self-helpy title Getting A Life. The Violent Effigy, John Carey's book on Dickens, went out in America as Here Comes Dickens, a name so bizzare that when I first heard it spoken aloud I assumed it was followed by an exclamation mark. Which really would be dynamic.

La Goutte D'Or - Ghana vs Uruguay

I don't remember where the restaurant was, except that it was somewhere around Chateau Rouge or Barbes. A little side street, anyway. I'd tried to remind myself by looking at a map just now and for a moment I thought it could be the Rue Eugene Sue - he wrote Les Mysteres de Paris, after all - but that's too far up towards Simplon. So call it La Goutte D'Or.

No one talked to me at first, though when he saw my uncertainty about eating with my hands the man next to me told the proprietress to bring me a spoon for my meat and rice. I relented in the end though and did as the others were doing. Food in the right hand, of course, beer in the left. There were surprised, warm glances when I cheered Ghana's goal as much as everyone else, and at half time my neighbour asked why I was supporting Ghana.

By the end of extra time and penalties I was still the only white man in there, though no longer the only non-Ivorian. Some arab teenagers had joined us and were more blasé about Suarez's handball, more inclined to blame Gyan for his miss. The biggest man, wearing a yellow red and green string vest, was in a rough mood after the game and it suddenly wasn't a happy place. But I remember him standing in the street at half time when Afrique was winning 1 -0, ignoring the cars, smoking hard from one hand, clutching a mobile, shouting down it "le monde a changé, le monde a changé, le monde a changé!."

a spectre, is haunting, a spectre's haunting

I wrote this for the LRB blog, where by now I have four pieces, but I wrote it up too slowly for it to actually go on the website. I found it again today and thought I should put it up here. It's about the last tuition fee march.

There was some confusion when we reached Fetter Lane. The agreed demonstration route had us turning off the Strand and following the Lane up towards Holborn Circus, but some of the crowd had evidently hoped to reach St Pauls by the most direct route, and for a while there was a stand-off. The police were mystified for once. “Keep moving along please, we’re not kettling you,” one of them shouted.

On Fetter Lane we stopped again, this time involuntarily. A boy probably not out of his teens wearing a hoody and tracksuit bottoms, who with a couple of friends had climbed onto some scaffolding to look, shouted of the hold up: “We shouldn’t just wait here, we should go forward! Forward!” There was a general ‘Yeh!’ but no movement, and everybody waited for everybody else. “Whose streets? Our streets!” we chanted, while we waited for the police to let us walk through them.

The day before the march the Metropolitan Police had announced that they were using special powers under Section 12 and 14 of the Public Order Act to impose extra conditions on the demonstration. Anyone who left the agreed route, went within a hundred yards of Bank, or who stayed at the march endpoint for more than two hours would be committing a criminal offence and could be arrested. Protest in this country is now bound by the assumption that the police have a total right to determine its timing, place and manner.

At Holborn Circus the atmosphere had been ramped up. There were hundreds of police, most of them now in riot gear, and the windows of all the buildings around were full of office workers filming and taking pictures with their mobile phones. A fat man at a window above the branch of Natwest at the corner of Charterhouse Street was making ‘wanker’ gestures at us.

We chanted the now-familiar “no ifs, no buts, no education cuts”, which some people updated to “still no ifs,” and the call and response of “I say ‘Tory’, you say ‘scum’” was given an airing. A man behind me tried to raise the tone with “a spectre, is haunting, a spectre’s haunting Europe” as we crossed Holborn Viaduct and passed near to St Pauls – which was also out of bounds.

No Ideology

Not every UCL student will be joining the protest march tomorrow. There has always been a part of the student body, necessarily quiet (because it has little to articulate), but large nonetheless, that professes no interest in politics of any sort, student or otherwise. To try to win the votes of this valuable demographic, candidates in UCL Union elections use a language of common sense, or promise that they will “represent all 22,000 students without fear or favour” [1], which is code for ‘I am not friends with Michael Chessum.’

During the latest Union elections, a couple of weeks ago, I saw a poster for one of the candidates for the position of Student Trustee. It consisted of a black rectangle, on which was written in white: “Vote ____ for student trustee. No Ideology – interested in you!”

According to Terry Eagleton, ideology could be one, or perhaps several, of the following things:

a) the process of production of meanings, signs and values in social life;

b) a body of ideas characteristic of a particular social group or class;

c) ideas which help to legitimate a dominant political power;

d) false ideas which help to legitimate a dominant political power;

e) systematically distorted communication;

f) that which offers a position for a subject;

g) forms of thought motivated by social interests;

h) identity thinking;

i) socially necessary illusion;

j) the conjuncture of discourse and power;

k) the medium in which conscious social actors make sense of their world;

l) action-oriented sets of belief;

m) the confusion of linguistic and phenomenal reality;

n) semiotic closure;

o) the indispensable medium in which individuals live out their relations to a social structure;

p) the process whereby social life is converted to a natural reality.

He wasn't elected.

---

[1] The candidate who made this promise is secretary of the UCL Union Conservative Society.

'Offcuts' - bits and pieces of a few ideas I was exploring over the summer

“These fragments I have shored against my ruins.”

Eliot, The Waste Land

“In every object there is inexhaustible meaning; the eye sees in it what the eye brings means of seeing.”

Thomas Carlyle

In Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia all the action happens in the same house, in the same room, with the same props. Except, it isn’t and they aren’t. Two hundred years separate the room in which Septimus teaches algebra to Thomasina from the room in which Hannah sketches out the proposal for her book on romanticism to Bernard. So, so, so close but impossibly far. I don’t understand how anyone can think about the past without being morbidly nostalgic.

The other week I was back at my parents’ house in Manchester for a few days, and I found myself going through the cupboards in my old bedroom. I’ve never been much of a hoarder, and over the years I’ve performed several ‘shitectomies’, as my dad calls a clearout, but there are still things there to find, mental inventories to draw up. I’ve lived in London for most of the last six years but never stayed in one place for more than nine months, and in all that time I’ve spread my stuff around, and never quite shifted it all out of home. I’ve spread my life around really in a way, subbing cash to my flatmate for Council Tax in Homerton, carrying a drivers licence that still puts me in a flat in Stroud Green, letting my bank statements arrive in Manchester. I’m starting a PhD in September and I’m planning to move to a much nicer flat in Brixton in July. I’m 25 and I need some permanency, and I need to take my things with me. I think my mum feels the same; family stuff has begun to drift into my room and jostle for space with my CDs and the t shirts I don’t wear anymore. Under my bed there are about four sleeping bags and a tent, next to my bookshelves is a collapseable cot that my parents keep for when my neice visits, in my wardrobe hangs my mum’s beekeeping outfit. My room is like a town by the sea slowly being covered by sand dunes.

I’d been spending a lot of time indoors lately and I needed some air to clear the dust out of my lungs. I walked down to Primark in Hackney to look for a pair of jogging bottoms. If I’m going to spend so much time around the flat I quite like the idea of having a pair of trousers that lets me get out of my pyjamas without really getting dressed. More than any other shop, Primark encapsulates cheap low quality disposable possessions. (There’s already a hole in the pocket of the joggers which I’ve had to shore up with masking tape, but on the plus side they only cost me a fiver.) Queueing for the tills you are led in a snaking line past a last selection of crap you look at out of boredom, and just might buy on impulse. On my right is a ‘wash mitt’, that looks like a small oven glove made out of a Winnie the Pooh towel. Behind me an American girl carrying two pillows and a duvet is talking to her friend. “I’ve bought so many pillows in my life. You know, every time you’re moving your things at college you throw stuff out. The bedding’s the first thing you get rid of.”

Sitting in Steve’s lounge, a rained off barbecue. Heavy rain and wind tugging at the gazebo in the back garden. It wants to get away. A small bureau in dark wood, from a workshop in Manchester where they take old furniture and get it restored by homeless people. They take an object and put extra symbolism and a story into it. There are trinkets on the shelves; two cigarette lighters, a tobacco tin, a cigarette case, hip flask, some kind of incense holder, pewter tea set with milk jug, a framed print of the Alfred Wallis painting the blue ship. Prints and photos on the walls. Flowers. A copy of ‘Lamb’s last essays’ on the bookshelf.

My sister Anna and her husband and daughter Nina will soon be moving to a new house in Manchester. She’s been in London for nearly ten years but she’s going back. Me, I just can’t leave yet. I’m taking over the lease on her flat in Brixton, and every time I visit at the moment I feel like I’m sizing it up, making my plans. I wonder if it annoys her. I’ll put my this there, I need to buy a that for the bedroom, I’ll probably get some of these.

Anna’s new house in Manchester isn’t ready to live in, and currently has builders hard at work on it. The other day, chipping old plaster off a wall one of them found an old page torn out of the Manchester Evening News from 1993 tucked into a cavity. There was a little piece on an event held by the Hallé orchestra, in which local schoolkids had visited for the day and had help composing their own piece of music. Pictured, and quoted, was my friend Ed’s mother Janet, the Hallé’s pianist. By coincidence, Ed came over for dinner the night Anna told me about this. I made bobotie, a South African dish my dad makes, and we watched the Apprentice, pissed ourselves laughing, and made stupid comments on the Guardian liveblog about the show. The candidates were making fools of themselves selling mostly shit British-designed products in Paris, so we opted for “un, deux, TWAT.”

I took Nina for a few hours this morning to get her out of her parents’ hair. We went up to the ‘play zone’ at the Brixton Rec. It’s much bigger than I expected, and loads more fun too. There were lots of plastic balls to flop around in, a kind of rope bridge, tunnels to crawl through, slopes to climb up, slides to woosh down. I wish we’d had one near me when I was a kid. “Look at me!” Nina shouts, “uncle Harry, look at me!”, and she jumps off a slide into a pool of balls. Eventually she hurt herself and insisted on going home, but she calmed down after a few minutes and we went for a drink at a café in Brixton Village instead. She sucked her ginger beer through a curly straw (“like a snake”) and offered me sugar for my coffee. We talked about their imminent move: “You can come and visit me if you like,” she said. And then, “Are you going to miss me?” she asked. I nodded, somehow I couldn’t speak.

I stayed at Anna’s for lunch. My brother in law had just heard that he’d passed his final exams. We cracked out the Cava and clinked glasses. “Here’s to Dr Cormack.”

I looked around and wondered what I’d leave behind in the walls when I finally make it out of here.

The Average British Family

The British press have a number of tried and tested stories they like to fall back on when there are column inches to fill. One popular genre is the reworked-press-release-plug-for-a-company-pseudo-scientific-study-reveals-shocka.

This week’s specimen was the news that a survey carried out by the home energy management service AlertMe (see what I did there?) had pinpointed the characteristics of the Average British Family. The ABF has 1.5 cars, has paid off 32% of the mortgage on their semi, watches nine hours of television a day, holidays twice a year, spends £12 a week on booze (is that all?), goes to bed before 11pm, and has two arguments a week.

You can see quite easily how they worked out the figures – they added up all the numbers and divided them by the appropriate amount to get the mean – but the statistics on the ABF’s average meal (it’s spag bol on Monday, for example) are a little more mystifying. The papers don’t specify, but presumably they’re talking about the mode rather than the mean here. Either that or there’s some special AlertMe mathematics that says that three chicken pies, two full englishes, seven cod and chips and a bangers and mash averages out to make a pasta bake, (Tuesday).

I heard about the ABF study from my friend N when I was round her parents’ house on Monday. I haven’t seen her since Christmas (she studies in New York now), but everything is as it always is at her parents’ house on one of the roads that slope down to the Mersey in south Manchester. It’s comfortable and chaotic in equal measure, the chaos coming partly because her parents run their businesses (a lingerie company and a scrap metal dealer) from an office in the front room, and partly because her dad is gradually filling it with paintings he buys online.

N has to get ready to go and model for a life drawing class in Littleborough and N’s mum is going to visit her Italian mother where she grew up in Rochdale. As N potters about the kitchen making a salad of tuna and chick peas they discuss the ABF study. “70% of people describe themselves as normal”, N tells her mum. “Would you describe us as normal mama?” “Definitely not,” she says. “We’re foreign.”

Why is life worth living?

“Well, alright, why is life worth living? That's a very good question. Well, there are certain things, I guess, that make it worthwhile.

Like what?

Ok... for me...

Ooh I would say Groucho Marx to name one thing.

And Willie Mays

And Louis Armstrong's recording of Potato Head Blues

Swedish movies, naturally.

Sentimental Education by Flaubert.

Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra.

Those incredible apples and pears by Cézanne.

The crabs at Sam Wo's...

Tracy's face."

That's from one of the last scenes in the Woody Allen film Manhattan. Isaac (well, Woody really, is there any distinction between the character and the writer?) is lying on his back on the sofa talking into a tape recorder.

I’ve decided, vaguely, to gradually write a blog entry about each of these things. It’ll take quite a long time (and a bit of research), but it could be fun.