Written by: Richard
- July 6, 2010
The BBC’s latest offering to the sitcom gods is Rev, the usual half hour, oh-they’re-in-a-pickle-now kinda thing, with the twist being that it’s not just about a vicar, but about an inner city vicar. It’s been hammered home by the BBC that this is a chance to move away from everyone’s favourite fat theological. Gone is the twee image of the countryside – instead, the writers are forcing themselves to deal with the issues.
The move away from Dibley and the countryside and into the city is taken to the ends of the East London – one of the most deprived areas in the country, lest we forget – and the first episode delved straight into the pressing matters of our time: vandalism, faith schools and small church congregations. (Okay, some of these are more pressing than others).
To sum up: the vicar, Adam, has just moved into his new parish, St Saviours on the Marshes. In the first week, the stained glass window is broken, and vandalism is suspected. In order to raise money to pay for the damages, the vicar is encouraged (by his church superior and his inner self) to accept money from the local MP in exchange for his kid to go to the church school, even though the kid’s family don’t really go to church. Eventually the vicar has a chat with god (overdubbed – no response from God booming through my speakers, I’m glad to say), has a bout of conscience, refuses the money, and settles for the broken window instead. The vandalism also turns out to be by one of the church regulars, an amicable drunk, and entirely by accident.
In the midst of this we have some casual racism (the only black character is a ‘cassock-chaser’ who orgasms during sermons, a clear dig at Pentecostalism), and the only asian character is a pervy chiropractor who inappropriately feels up the vicar’s wife.
Importantly, the countryside is also held up as a paradise in its absence – the vicar (originally from a small parish church in Suffolk) has a terrible time cycling in the godforsaken city, and is surrounded by ‘church whores’ who only pray in order to get their kids into the local church school. When the amicable drunk is having a crisis of faith, ranting about Richard Dawkins, the vicar takes the example of a snail shell as proof of God’s existence, something in nature (in the unchanging, green and pleasant sense) being beautiful, even though it doesn’t have to be.
But, despite the continuing distinction between countryside and city in that unhelpful, English way (and the casual racism), I think there’s definitely some redemption in the show. It displays religion as a working, functioning thing, albeit something which doesn’t necessarily do good things even when it’s functioning well.
If you’re an atheist like me (and I suspect that most readers of this blog are), then the scene of the vicar relishing the thought of setting prospective parents a Bible quiz in order to allow their kids into the Church school is scary and a bit sickening – but I think it’s also accurate, showing the close ties between money, property, class and religion which dominate the contemporary church. And it’s brave of the writers to broadcast this. (Interestingly, the mere presence of Olivia Colman from The Office and Peep Show, means that it all feels very ironic and sinister).
Religion is still big, and I think it would be a mistake to dismiss all progressive politics within it simply because the expression invokes God rather than ‘the people’ or some other transcendent being. Of course I’d rather that we got rid of transcendence altogether, but in the meanwhile I’m not going to pretend as if I/we have. Anarchists like David Graeber definitely rely on the imagination in the same way that Renaissance theologians use the soul, but this doesn’t mean there isn’t a hell of a lot of good politics and ideas going on in his writing. And the same goes for other radical transcendentalists like Christian anarchists and progressive Muslims.
I think our mistake too much of the time is to pretend as if the political ideology which causes the back-room deals of the MP trying to get his kid into a faith school is structurally different from the theological ideology which makes the vicar talk to God and expect a response.
Once you accept that we’re all living a lie of one kind or another, the point stops being about how good the lie is, but how progressive the results are. Mind you, I didn’t even get onto writing about the generalised sexism in the show…
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Written by: Reuben
- June 30, 2010
Just made it to Germany today for my first holiday in ages, and there are some things I like about it.
1) People smoke on overground stations. Back in England I have smoked on virtually every overground station in London (being careful not to stand near any non smokers) but everyone else keeps to the silly rules and refuses even to go to an empty part of the platform and light up.
2) due to lower taxes tobacco is half the price. I intend to bring back a decent amount for personal consumption and thus avoid a punitive and regressive sin tax.
3) the hotel in which I am staying (go ahead and sneer you ‘left’ puritans) has given us massive pillows. This is extremely considerate given that my girlfriend has a massive face.
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Written by: Reuben
- June 29, 2010
Today two red tops carried pictures of a couple of England players laughing, and expressed outrage that they could laugh at a moment such as this. Clearly if they had any respect for their fans and their country they would wait at least a week before cracking any jokes. Meanwhile one of the narratives to grip the country is that England failed to get very far because their players are too rich, spoiled and pampered. “Pampered Spoiled and Mutinous…” boomed one daily mail, “footballers now think they are bigger than their country”. According to the Express they are “pampered sloths”.
It all reminds me a bit of my dad – a good lefty who unfortunately buys into some of the abundance is bad for you crap – telling me that the reason Pele got so good was that he trained without football boots. If this were the case you would think some other coaches and youth development schemes might have caught onto it. And the idea that England failed because their stars have too much cash and bling is equally wrongheaded. At the very least, it is difficult to reconcile with the piss poor performance of teams from Africa,with the exception of Ghana. It is also worth noting, after Germany gave England a footballing lesson, that the wages in the Bundesliga, though not as high as the premiership are comparably astronomical. Compared with the £1.3bn wage bill of the premiership, the Bundesliga – which has slightly fewer clubs – spent £684m. Does anybody really believe that somebody on 30k a week leads a substantially different lifestyle from somebody on 50k?
The idea that England’s players failed because they are pampered is in fact a logical extension of the old myth – put about by clergymen, Neitzche and many other dickheads – that suffering is good for you and makes you stronger. And in a period of enforced austerity, this kind of rhetoric really does need to be opposed.
Because the thing about the “austerity ethic” is that it might start at the top, but it soon gets projected onto those least able to afford cuts in their living standards. The “new age of austerity” might start with David Cameron et al. rebuffing a ministerial pay rise, but it ends with civil servants on 21k facing a real terms pay cut of nearly 7.5 per cent. In much the same way, Willie Walsh made a great show of giving up a months pay before attacking the pay, conditions and jobs of those earning far, far less. The fact we have a Tory health minister who say that recessions can be good for you because people “eat less rich food” should alert us to how this “virtue in poverty” bollocks can be used to justify attacks on working people’s living standards.
Don’t get me wrong, I would love to see the wage packets of footballers being squeezed, but only so that their enormous earnings can be redistributed to ordinary people. And let us not think for a second that taking their money away will somehow improve their moral fiber, or indeed their ability to kick a ball.
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Written by: Reuben
- June 28, 2010
An interesting discussion has been taking place about the routes of New Labour’s illiberalism. In a piece limited by an evident lack of understanding about the history of the Labour movement or of British marxism, Francesca Klug argued that traditional Marxist influences in the party were to blame. (Francesca says that Marxists were uninterested “in the state as a potentially oppressive force” until Ralph Miliband in 1969. LOL.” Lenin’s tomb hit back with a well worth reading piece arguing that the strong state ironically is routed in Neo-Liberalism. Meanwhile Guy Aitchison at our kingdom has written a thoughtful piece once again emphasising the significance of Marxism in stimulating New Labour’s disregard for liberty.
Where Guy is correct is in identifying a tendency within old labour which emphasises ends over means and which justifies restrictions on liberty on the basis of social welfare. An ex -ide to Gordon Brown once said that the best way to convince him of anything was to put up an oOHP with a graph showing the worst off in society getting better off. There is most certainly a tendency with old labour which says that “real freedom is bread on the dinner table” – a tendency which at its worst treats the working class as though they want nothing more than to be fed and watered.
But the analyses of Guy Aitchison and Francesca Clug are undermined by their unnuanced perception of old Labour and the labour left. It is worth remembering sometimes that Bevan – the ex miner, the radical, and the father of the welfare state – was fiercely anti-communist. At its inception the labour party was characterised by a struggle between ideological socialists – many of them Marxists – and trade unionsts who were concerned, sometimes exclusively, with pay and conditions and living standards and who regarded the first group as dangerously ideological. It was a tension that continued right through the history of old Labour. And it is these bean counting social democrats – not the Marxian influence within the Labour party – whose tradition has shaped the authoritarianism New Labour. It is in this tradition that the Labour Party lined up behind the smoking ban, on the grounds that any level of intrusion and interference could be justified on the basis of improved life expectancy.
What New Labour also draws upon is a tradition of well meaning technocracy. 21st century policy wonkery is in many ways infused with the spirit of 1920s bloomsbury. It is infused with the spirit of those like the Webbs who seemed to believe that the masses could effectively be bypassed and that a few clever people – equipped with powerful state machinery – could put right societies moral and material failings. Equally their good friend Keynes – hero of the old Labour soft left and an anchor point of post war social democracy – was sometimes forthright on the need to insulate the management of the economy, and other aspects of policy, from democratic pressure.
Clugg and Aitchison, meanwhile, offer no explanation as to why those members of the Parliamentary Labour Party who appear closest to Marxists traditions and politics – such as Jeremy Corbyn and John Mcdonnell – have been amongst those most opposed to New Labour’s attacks on civil liberties. Klug argues that there was an “intellectual tradition which never really saw the problem with the state – provided it was in the right, or rather left, hands” – yet Marxists more than anyone have understood that gaining elected office does not in itself alter fundamental aspects of the state and the way it operates. As did my comrade Tony Benn who entitled one of his memoirs “Office Without Power”.
Drawing a straight line between a caricatured vision of Marxism, and the policies of a decidedly non-Marxist new labour government illminates little. But Klug nonetheless has done us a service by raising important questions about the relationship between socialism and liberty.
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Written by: Owen - June 27, 2010
Like most readers of this blog, the Budget made me pretty angry – the VAT increase and tighter controls on benefits combined with the cut in corporation tax make a complete mockery of the claims that this Budget was ‘progressive’ in any sense, and millions of the poorest and most vulnerable people in this country will be worse off because of it. But this has been said by any number of people with far more expertise than me in great detail already, so I don’t intend to go over the same ground. What I want to write about is the overwhelming desire I have, now that a supposedly centre-left party is colluding with Tories to bring in the most regressive economic measures in decades, to grab every soi-disant leftie I know who voted Lib Dem and shout ‘Is this what you wanted? Is it? Osborne’s going to be able to do everything Thatcher didn’t have the guts to do, and you helped it happen!’ in their smug self-deluding faces. But I want to write about it because I don’t think that reaction’s justified, no matter how strong its appeal might be. Yes, a blue-yellow coalition was always a possibility under a hung parliament, and one that those voting for the Lib Dems should have borne in mind. But that’s all it was; a possibility, not an inevitability. And in any case, it’s hard to judge people too harshly for turning away from Labour when you consider so much of the record of the Blair and Brown governments.
First, consider the actual election result. Thanks to the random vagaries of our electoral system, no one could have predicted the result we got. A hung parliament was always quite likely, of course, but the specific result of a hung parliament where Labour and the Lib Dems didn’t have a majority between them wasn’t something anyone predicted. And it’s because of this result that the Lib Dems didn’t really have many options open to them other than getting into bed with Cameron and friends; remember that Labour was pretty openly against Alex Salmond’s suggestion of a centre-left ‘rainbow coalition’ and that pretty much no party save the Tories really had the money to fight another election campaign (which would have been the likely result of a minority Conservative government). There weren’t many options open to the Liberal Democrats after the election, and none were appealing.
As for those who actually voted for the Lib Dems, it’s easy to criticise them in hindsight, now that we know what we do about how things turned out. But equally there were a hell of a lot of good reasons for people to turn away from Labour, and – given our first past the post system – not many credible alternatives in most parts of the country. The reforms to jobseekers’ and disability living allowance being introduced now are atrocious, but we shouldn’t forget that the benefits system was already pretty damn draconian – a point made by our own Dan during the election campaign and more recently by Laurie Penny at the New Statesman. Then there were the attacks on civil liberties (and for all the hateful shit the coalition’s doing, we can at least be thankful that ID cards and the vetting and barring scheme are on the way out), the privatisations, the corruption, the utter failure to do anything meaningful about climate change, the warmongering…it’s a familiar list, and one that could be made a lot longer. I voted Labour because my local MP was opposed to most of that, but if I lived in an area where that wasn’t the case I’d find putting a cross next to that red rose logo on the ballot paper a lot harder to stomach.
Laying the blame for the coalition’s failings at the feet of those who voted Lib Dem is easy and very tempting. It was, in retrospect, a serious error. But it was an understandable error, and what’s more, it’s an error that many Lib Dem voters are now recognising. The left cause won’t be helped by going on about it. Right now we need to do everything we can to minimise the damage the government’s going to do to the social fabric of the UK. Turning on each other over past differences really isn’t going to help.
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Written by: Reuben
- June 26, 2010
There was a lot that was horrible about the emergency budget. The pay of all public sector employees on 21k a year or more wasa frozen for two years. With prices expected to rise by over 7.3 per cent over the next biennium, this represents an enormous real terms pay cut – equivalent to taking £1500 off a worker earning 21k. Meanwhile, pensioners are, it seems, the new deserving poor. While the unemployed face cuts in housing benefit, Osbourne has declared his budget “fair” because pensioners – many of whom have millions of pounds worth of assets – will all get a boost. Don’t get me wrong, I do support decent state pensions. But what I absolutely oppose is this moral hierarchy of the less well off. In an economy in which jobseekers outnumber jobs by 5 to 1 – I object to the way in which benefit claimants are constantly portrayed as the authors of their own misfortune in contrast to those who merely suffer from old age.
This said, the reduction of tax credits to higher earners in the budget, and possible moves away from universal benefits are not necessarily a bad thing, despite the left’s longstanding attachment to universal benefits. Indeed the left has long been differentiated from liberals by its recognition -in other areas – that treating everybody equally does not promote equality in a society that is unequal to begin with.
The reality is that the labour movements attachment to universal benefits has more to do with specific features of 20th century history than anything else. Typically the birth of the modern welfare state is understood in terms of the pressure to build “a land fit for heroes” following the second world war. Yet what is often underestimated is the extent to which welfarist politics in post war Britain were shaped by the memory of the 1930s. It was the dark shadow of interwar Britain that animated those who sought to build a full employment economy in which the basic needs of all were met. And one of the most hated aspects of 1930s life had been the use of the means test. Destitute families had been denied help on the flimsiets pretexts. But equally awful had been the intrusion into private family life that the means test had represented. Means test inspectors were empowered to enter homes and to pry hmiliatingly in weekly budgets and family circumstances. As one sorce puts it, the means test became a “national folk myth”.
It is then no surprise that the post war welfare state was built on universalist principles, and that the attachment of the left and th labour movement to htose principles remained strong. Yet today a host of options exist for targetting benefits and social welfare without such intrusion. I really really really hate the man, but I must admit that Frank Field’s proposal to tax child benefit strikes me as a good idea. Such a move would attenuate the amount recieved by the better off without necessitating a whole new body of inspectors and eligibility tests. The challenge for the left is to ensure that those benefits targetted at the less well off are sufficient to make a real difference to their lives.
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Written by: Richard
- June 23, 2010
Some friends of mine have told me to watch the Channel 4 Dispatches show on the banks, aired last week, but still available online. It took me a while to get through – I kept falling asleep in the long segments of zooming in and out of buildings, the dark filter shots over the London skyline, and the print-style dots effect which seemed to be a necessity at least once every ten seconds. However, in-between all this there was content. For your sake, I’ve condensed it down. It can be covered in four main points. I’ll take the good one first, mainly to show that I’m not just a big moaner:
1. The financial sector only produces half the capital as good ol’ fashioned production
Despite the fact that the show pretty much polarised the economy into banks and factories, it did point out that the City’s constant claim that they make loads of money for everyone and provide huge amounts of jobs is basically a lie, and that it doesn’t deserve the special treatment the government gives them. Right, gloves off.
2. The people suffering in the recession are small business owners
Though there is a quick reference to shops closed because ‘the banks have disengaged’, the main sob story of the piece (which comes very near the end) is for the small business that can’t get a bank loan. The idea of ‘British businesses’ and entrepreneurs is championed throughout the second half of the show as the solution to our recession woes: investment in new ideas, creative profit and business innovation will save us all. The business owner in a hard-hit town in the Black Country is interviewed, and tells of how he has had to mortgage the family home in order to keep his business going. I couldn’t help but wonder if the factory workers had homes to mortgage.
3. Clandestine institutions have too much power
The culprits of the piece are the bankers of the City of London. There are lots of shots of the Corporation of London coat of arms, and plenty of the inside and outside of the Guildhall, showing it as some big splendid ancient hall. They failed to show that it’s actually a rather gloomy place, pretty empty, almost entirely reconstructed in the 19th century, and with some of the ugliest sculptures available in London. But never mind. The point was that the bankers all dine and wine together, pat each other on the back, and collude and lobby, and the 800 year history of the Corporation is mentioned, as if it has some longevity. The problem here is that it uses the pomp and ceremony of the Corporation not to mock the bankers but as proof that they have some kind of special powers beyond capital and privilege. This is all backed up the constant use of pseudo-voyeuristic close up shots from behind box files and beneath desks, as if these sneaky secretive bankers are alluding our attention with their clever hidden clubs and societies. And here is where the real mistake kicks in.
4. The banks fooled and control the government
The central premise which runs through the analysis (until, and only until, the very last sentence, strangely) is that politicians were fooled by the cleverness of the bankers, and that consequentially the bankers control the government, making it do their will. The state is basically admonished of responsibility for the crisis, and we the people are left out until right at the end, in a quick add-on of ‘will the government do what the people (i.e. the ex-Editor of the Observer) want?’
The reason I think all of this is important is that this isn’t unusual. It’s the liberal concept of finance: the bankers have the money, the ordinary people don’t have the money. The solution? Let’s go back to good old fashioned liberal capitalism, the way it used to be. Reform the banks so that small business and business ideas can thrive even better (as the Dispatches show seems to propose), let’s break up the nationalised banks and let lesser known banks have a go at it; you know, trustworthy people like Tesco, Virgin and Santander (that’s Abbey National to anyone not born yesterday).
And, I hate to say, it’s not just a liberal response – there’s a good deal of bad economics in there, showed up by the middle segment’s obsession with the Corporation of London. Clandestine societies that control the government? It’s really the same kind of nonsense as in Zeitgeist the Movie or any other self-respecting conspiracy theory.
These arguments are becoming standard both on the left and the right. The net effect of this is the liberals in power and much of the left out of power are ending up making demands for us all to go back 4 or 5 years, to a land where capitalism worked nicely; all we have to do is target this small group of rich miscreants, and all will magically be reversed. I hope that the readers of this blog know otherwise.
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Written by: Jacob - June 20, 2010
How many times in the last two weeks have we had some poxy journalist or other tell us that hard times are good for art? How many of them think that the endless queues at Job Centre Plus will be the inspiration for a New New Objectivity movement, or that the broad pretentiousness of the highly commercialised underground art movements of Shoreditch and Whitechapel will eventually gain some authenticity in finally being driven properly underground when there’s no more money to rent studio or gallery space?
In the first wave of cuts, last week, we saw the axing of the government funds towards the new BFI Film Centre planned to be built on the South Bank. No doubt in the budget tomorrow we are likely to see further cuts to our country’s artistic institutions. Furthermore, over the course of the last century more and more artists find that the only way they can exist is by taking a salary from universities, and ongoing cuts to the HE sector, particularly aimed at arts and humanities will inevitably have a turbulent effect on Britain’s artistic life.
The fact is that many of the critics who come out with this sort of shit have some awful Romantic notion of some wondering classless artist (both within and without capitalism.) You say art and they think of Chopin or Van Gogh. The reality of artistic production doesn’t come into it. Whilst there are undoubtedly many problems with state-funded art in this country (I mean which fuckwit thought that hundreds of colourful elephants sprinkled throughout London’s streets were either interesting or a good idea?), the state does fund all sorts of useful things that simply wouldn’t be able to exist otherwise: By this I mean large free public galleries, theatre, opera, concerts etc, which simply couldn’t exist without subsidy.
Yes, there are serious aesthetic problems with artistic production, yes, a whole lot of shit ha been produced in times of not a whole lot of aesthetic theorisation in the last 25 years, but it clearly is not a direct result of everyone being well sated and kind of happy that capitalism keeps them going, despite what Damian Hirst might have you believe. Perhaps the realisation of the fragility of capitalism may offer a crack through which some light of the necessity of new aesthetic theorisation may be allowed in, but the relationship of art and the economy is rather more complex than than saying that when capitalism does badly art does well.
Furthermore, if anything this recession will more than likely turn art in the other direction. In an already horribly dog-eat-dog world, a scarcity of liquidity can only spur on an aesthetic of populism. When every avant-garde concert has been ridden from the world to be replaced by some banal collection of popular classics ranging from the chorus of Beethoven 9 to Barber’s Adagio for Strings, when the only ballet that ever gets performed is the god damn Nutcracker, when everything is new has been murdered at the expense of what is familiar, and all the artistic spaces make wonderful fortunes as businesses, will we still be saying that hard times are good for the arts?
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Written by: Reuben
- June 19, 2010
For such a huge event, cant we get half time commentators who say something a bit more incisive than “England need more confidence and self-belief”. Some people who aren’t necessarily ex-footballers. And by that I mean no disrespect to ex-footballers, but surely there is some value in widening the pool.
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Written by: Dan - June 17, 2010
Generally speaking we try on this blog to avoid getting involved in more tedious debates on the left blogosphere, and generally speaking it’s a good policy. However, I wanted to comment on something that’s been bugging me for a while. It’s a common offence, particularly amongst the commenters on Socialist Unity, but is often replicated by people who should know better. You don’t have to read very far to find examples of it. It’s a patronising, dismissive and often downright nasty attitude towards students.
You’ll find it in reports of demonstrations, especially anti-fascist ones. Organisations are accused of “bussing in students”. Demonstrators are denounced as a “bunch of students” with no connection to working class life. This happens just as much on the left as the right, coming from a commentariat who seem to think that if you have a place in the Higher Education System your involvement in politics is somehow merely a hobby, or at least in some way not real.
The question that strikes me whenever this comes up is: “How do you know they are students?” Now, a student union banner, chanting about students, a concern for education cuts, all these are good evidence. But often, when you ask this question you get a different response: “You can just tell.” Often this is supplemented by some odd claims about clothes and accents, or haircuts. The absurdity of this struck me recently at the Right to Work Conference. I attended the session on Education cuts, because I actually am a student. But from where I was sitting I could see the session on organising temporary and part-time workers. The thing is, the young people I could see in that session looked a lot like the young people in my session. They were talking about organising in call centres and other vulnerable work places, not about organising on campuses. But they were wearing the same range of clothes, had the same range of accents and haircuts. Funny that, workers, looking like students.
Except, it’s not funny, it’s fucking obvious. Firstly, many of them were graduates. This shouldn’t shock anyone who’s familiar with the expansion of Higher Education over the past decades. Secondly, young people wear the same kinds of clothes as other young people. The minute you join the workforce you don’t start dressing differently in your spare time. You still hang around with the same friends, who may still be students. I’m writing this from Liverpool. I’m confident that if I were to be seen with my old schoolfriends in the pub we would all be labelled as students. Except I’m the only one who has spent more than a couple of months in Higher Education.
Often these comments are motivated by a genuine concern that a demonstration, event etc isn’t rooted in a local community or involving the people it claims to represent. There’s nothing wrong with students, of course, but there are some campaigns they shouldn’t dominate. But these sorts of comments often go beyond reasonable critique and betray a patronising and dismissive attitude to young people in general. It’s lazy, it’s stupid, and those who use it should grow up a bit.
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