Homo Ludens

ETTA JAMES RIP

2012-01-20T18:48:00.002Z

LACAN IN THE CONSULTING ROOM

2012-01-19T23:18:00.002Z

The theories of Jacques Lacan are well-known, if not always well-understood. But the application of that theory into psychoanalytic practice (as opposed to, say, film or political analysis) is discussed far less. The first chapter of Bruce Fink’s book Lacan to the letter, a methodical untangling of the Ecrits, focuses on Lacanian technique as practiced in the consulting room.

The starting point for Lacan is that the ego of the neurotic person is not too weak, but too strong. It represses anything – a prejudice, say, or a fantasy – which does not fit with how he likes to see himself. The ego refuses to allow such ideas in, and rather than dealing with them, it pushes them down, rejecting their integration. But however hard the ego tries to repress them, they still exist, poking through as painful and confusing symptoms. The goal of analysis, for Lacan, is therefore to loosen or unfix the ego and to help the person to come to terms with these difficult concepts.

This goes against the grain of the prevailing ego psychology which dominated psychoanalysis when Lacan was writing and practising. Ego psychology takes its lead from Freud’s second topography of the psyche – the topography of ego, superego and id. It tries to get the patient to model his ego on the analyst’s (on the basis that the analyst’s ego is healthy – a kind of role-model for the distressed). The strengthened ego may then more successfully crush the crude drives of the id.

For Lacan, this is both impossible and undesirable. Impossible, because it depends on the analyst having a ego which the patient will choose as a prototype; undesirable because it alienates the patient from prejudices and fantasies which he has every right to face up to.

Using the analogy of a game of bridge, Lacan suggests that there are four ‘players’ in therapy. The analyst appears both as ego (the personality and image which, for all her training, the analyst inevitably wants the world to see) and as Other (the holder of truth or authority). The patient also appears as ego, but his unconscious must also plays its hand. In other words, the patient arrives with two voices – that of his conscious ego, and of his unconscious. He meets the analyst as a person, but more significantly as a figure which can help him – an authority figure, a holder (in some sense) of truth or of language itself. It is rather like going to see one’s GP – we recognise her as a person (with feelings, tastes, preferences etc), but we go to see her because she is a GP and she can diagnose and cure our particular problem.

Lacan drew this fourfold relationship as a diagram:

From top-left, S is the patient as a subject of their unconscious; other (autre with a lower-case a) is the patient’s ego; Other (Autre with a capital A) is the analyst as holder of authority; and ego (also an autre with a small a) is the ego or projection of the personality of the analyst. This diagram helps to see the two possible partnerships between analyst and patient – the ‘imaginary’ realm of the ego psychologists, and the ‘symbolic’ realm of Lacan.

When the analyst interprets, he is heard by the patient as doing so not from the position of flesh-and-blood person, but “as the person he is imputed to be by the analysand in his transferential relation to him” (Fink 2004: 6). The analyst cannot therefore think that she can step out of the relationship and interpret the transference as if she were not a part of it. If she does, the patient may see (and criticise) himself from the point of view of the observing analyst. He will step into the analyst’s shoes, which may help him to understand himself better, but will only prolong his alienation from himself.

This – the analysis of the transference by two egos – is the ‘imaginary’ transference of the ego psychologists. It is arbitrary – because it depends on the foibles and tendencies of the analyst – and it only operates on the surface. It may also have unintended consequences: “the analyst who believes she is adopting the most dispassionate tone of voice in speaking to the analysand is taxed with being hypercritical, like the analysand’s father it may turn out, and thus another dimension of the transference, the symbolic dimension, persists despite every attempt to eliminate it” (Fink 2004: 7). Despite the best efforts of the two egos, the patient’s unconscious remains alive and kicking.

‘Symbolic’ transference does something different. Here, “the analyst strives ... to analyse on the basis of ... the Other” (Fink 2004: 7). Not on the basis of what the analyst thinks, the values and beliefs she holds, her blindspots and biases, but solely on what she hears.

What does it mean to take the place of the Other? For starters, it does not mean taking the position of ‘I’ – for example, the common technique of immediacy, in which the therapist might suggest, “I feel like you are angry with me” – since this is one ego talking to another. Such a comment may feel accusatory and the patient may strengthen his ego in defence. Any attempt to speak to the healthy part of the patient’s ego (in Lacan’s words, “the part that thinks like us”) is narcissistic (after all, if I am an analyst, what’s so special about my ego?). Instead of a partnership between the analyst-as-Other and the patient-as-unconscious-subject which seeks to interpret, the analyst ‘confronts the analysand with the reality he supposedly refuses to see’.

So – again – what does it mean to situate oneself as the Other? Very briefly, the Other (with a capital O) is a radical form of otherness which we absorb and learn from childhood onwards. If you think of language, rules, codes of conduct, family histories etc, you get the rough idea. It is through the Other that we understand our place in a society. In childhood, we interpret conversations between our parents and try to understand how we fit into the world they describe. If they talk about the books they love or the God they worship, we will understand that we live in a bookish or a religious family, and must therefore decide whether or not to read or worship. If one of our parents cheats on the other, we try to decipher how we fit into that adultery – do we identify with the wronged parent, or the adulterous parent, or both? Whatever we choose, we take our subjective form from what we hear and try to understand.

The Other relates to something symbolic which is publicly known – a cultural frame of reference, a set of laws or codes, the things we are told by our parents. It is out there – both in the sense that it is publicly available to us, and also something separate from us. In Seminar I, Lacan describes the treatment of a North African patient with symptoms relating to his hands. His previous analyst had fallen back on psychoanalytic tropes such as shame about masturbation, and the analysis was not successful. This analyst had ignored the Koranic laws which unconsciously were so integral to the patient (his father had been accused of theft, which the Koran says must be punished by the cutting off of one of the thief’s hands).

By occupying the place of the Other, the analyst must try as far as possible to set his ego aside: “the analyst is able to hear a slip precisely because he has managed to put himself aside, so to speak, precisely because he has managed to take the analysand’s speech not as a personal attack but rather as directed elsewhere, directed at something or someone else.”

Interpreting the transference as a personal attack, and basing one’s interpretation on how the analyst believes the patient feels about her (even if her thesis is correct) is, for Lacan, an abuse of power. Why ‘even if her thesis is correct’? Because this still entails interpreting the transference solely on the imaginary axis, on the basis of ego vs ego.

Fink illustrates his point by citing a number of case studies. Freud’s famous case study of the Rat Man is a lesson in interpreting on the symbolic level. Aware that the unconscious speaks in signifiers (not signifieds), Freud observes the complex grammar with which the Rat Man speaks and, through a forensic scrutiny of the Rat Man’s words and their link to his very painful symptoms, speaks to the Rat Man’s unconscious. But Lacan (a Freudian purist) is far more critical of Freud’s treatment of an attractive young woman who dreams of a sexual relationship with another woman in order to escape from her marriage (and her father). Here, Freud interprets the transference only on the imaginary level, suggesting that “beside the intention to mislead me, [her] dreams partly expressed the wish to win my favour.” Whether or not Freud is right here is immaterial – he is clearly analysing from the position of his own ego, and therefore missing the bigger picture. (Lacan suggests that Freud generally finds it difficult to move beyond the ego level when analysing attractive young women...)

I won’t go into the other case studies. But by way of conclusion, Fink’s final section – entitled “why we should not encourage our analysands to identify with us” – is worth exploring a little further. For Lacan, there is a fundamental question that we all have to grapple with: why can my desire to be something never quite be satisfied? Why can desire itself never be fulfilled? We all yearn to be something – to be richer, more respected, better loved, more worldly etc. Yet, however much we succeed in becoming these things, we never quite achieve our objective in a way that sufficiently satisfies us. Our endless efforts to be something better hide the fact that what troubles us is a fundamental and unfulfillable want-to-be – and it is this that we must face up to. Identifying with somebody else, trying to be what they are, is an easy way out – and even when we occupy the place of our object of desire, our want-to-be stubbornly remains. As Fink concludes, “it is a misfortune to identify with someone, for it keeps me from grappling with and going beyond my lack of being. It leaves me with the same inadequacies or failings as my analyst. Now that is unfortunate!”

REVIEW OF 2011

2011-12-23T07:38:00.002Z

Strictly speaking, not a review at all. Just a precis of my top records of the year, and a playlist of songs mostly from this year, compiled by my wife, friend Alex and myself, and played over pizza and wine on Wednesday night.

Top 15 albums of 2011 first:

1/ Kurt Vile, Smoke rings for my halo
2/ James Blake
3/ Rustie, Glass swords
4/ Burial, Street halo (ep)
5/ Tim Hecker, Ravdeath 1972
6/ Oneohtrix Point Never, Replica
7/ Toro y moi, Underneath the pine
8/ Wiley, 100% publishing
9/ Metronomy, The English riviera
10/ Radiohead, The king of limbs
11/ Ford & Lopatin, Channel pressure
12/ Kate Bush, 50 words for snow
13/ Gang gang Dance, Eye contact
14/ kode9 & Spaceape, Black sun
15/ Paul Simon, So beautiful or so what

Honorable mention: the CD which came free with the festive edition of Homeless Diamonds (St Mungo's magazine of poetry and paintings, itself free).

I suspect some of the ordering from 10 onwards could do with some tinkering; Gang Gang Dance may be in there purely on the strength of "Glass jar".

No place for Battles or James Ferraro - haven't really heard the former, and came to the latter too late in the year. Reissues of the year: Beach Boys' Smile and Harald Grosskopf's Synthesist. Disappointments: Kate Bush, Panda Bear, Gang of Four (the worst album I heard all year).

That'll do!

Now for our 2011 playlist (not sure how Glen Campbell slipped in there ... guess just because I love that song):

merry Christmas!

"THE PUBLIC SERVICE PENSION PINCH"

2011-11-30T08:44:00.002Z

Click to expand - or click here to see a larger version.

ALL OUT

2011-11-28T21:58:00.002Z

Still too busy to blog, but not too busy to big up the industrial action on Wednesday. It's clearly going to be a huge walk-out (plenty of my friends and colleagues who do not take the decision to strike lightly, and may not have done so before, are brassed off enough to withdraw their labour this week), and the huger the better - as Seamus Milne points out, fine words alone will not make the government budge. Only action on a nationwide, millions-strong scale will make a difference.

And far from weakening the economy, defending pensions will help workers in the public and private sectors by maintaining demand. It's the economy, stupid (though I did thank Francis Maude last week for accidentally highlighting the massive economic contribution the public sector makes).

So...

Got it?

COULD YOU STOP YOURSELF FROM FALLING?

2011-10-16T20:56:00.002Z

Great single from 1981 here:

It's from the Beat's second album, Wha'ppen, in which they tone down the 2-tone and build up a fuller, more "world" sort of sound (a la Black Uhuru). Given the choice of obvious singles, "Drowning" is a lyrically and musically doomy song to play on Top of the Pops. But it did pretty well - not quite "Hands off she's mine," but it rung enough bells with recession-stricken England to get to number 22 in 1981.

This (inexplicably not released as a single) is even better - its anger packing even more of a punch because of its swagger and Saxa's dreamy, er, sax (NB: Lionle Martin was in his 50s when he played with these upstarts!)...

TAHRIR SQUARE, LONDON, EC4M

2011-10-16T20:52:00.002Z

William Hague’s response to the demonstration outside St Paul’s amused me this morning. He said, “I'm afraid these protests on the streets are not going to solve the problem," before claiming that the government’s austerity drive to reduce the deficit was the only answer. It’s the “I’m afraid” that makes me smile – it suggests that Hague has been wrestling with a painful dilemma, fully aware that the protestors make up the moral majority, but sadly accepting that their tactics will bear no fruit.

Something tells me that Hague does not lose too much sleep worrying about how a lack of jobs will blight a whole generation’s futures – but perhaps I am being uncharitable.

I have been out of London this weekend, so haven’t been to the demo at St Paul’s. I’ll try and go down there tomorrow. But seeing the pictures in London, Hong Kong, Sydney, San Francisco, Mexico City (see the picture above) etc does raise a possibility. I have seen people in one country demonstrating in solidarity with another, and have been involved in such protests. But I’m not sure I have seen people demonstrating, in country after country, for the same cause – perhaps because there is no issue which unites all the world’s citizens quite as acutely as this one.

Lenin has written an interesting piece about the strategy behind these protests. None of the many thousands of people who are occupying squares across the world have a definitive response to this crisis. In his blog post on the BBC website, Paul Mason says “if you ask 50 people why they're here and what they want you will get 50 answers.” As he also says, there are huge numbers of people who are not at the demos, who are at home worrying about how they will get through next week, or how their children will get to university or find a job.

The question, as always, is to connect those who have a clear idea of the problem with those who do not have the resources to challenge the system. My sense, borne out by some of the campaigns I have seen which have successfully resisted the cuts by local Councils in the last few months, is that if leaders emerge who can truly represent the majority, and who can transmit the arguments of this majority to a wider audience, there are great successes to be had.

Of course, a campaign against a local Council is very different to a global struggle against corporate finance or capitalism or neoliberalism or whatever. But if you allow a group to assemble and air its views – its similarities and its differences – a sense of collective leadership may emerge. It might be embodied in a single person, or it may take in the whole group, but if successful it will develop a momentum. And that leadership may arise from the unlikeliest of places, so we shouldn’t be precious about this.

What would kill the movement off, in my view, is if a particular group attempts to commandeer or corral the wider group. Even if you agree with the stance of a vanguard group (if we might call it that), its takeover is likely to marginalise those who don’t – this, surely, is a lesson that the Left must take, for to kill off a burgeoning movement now would be fatal.

NOT FIDDY

2011-10-09T19:56:00.002Z

Misread this at first:

"Using mass-culture flotsam such as ancient Califone turntables hijacked from local high schools, and 50 cent records that hew literally and figuratively cut up and rearranged, Marclay represented the self-consciously conceptual flipside of hip-hop's 'necessity is the mother of invention' readymades."

From the Wire Primer's section on Christian Marclay. A fair description of his schtick, maybe, but given that we're talking about the 80s here, surely he was really using 50........oh I seeeeeeee!

Here's a great cut from his compilation album Records. As I walked down Brixton high street yesterday afternoon, a young man castigated me/us/himself? for masturbating in our own houses, and promised that God would save us from our shame. This is dedicated to him.

(5,3,1,4)

2011-10-09T19:35:00.002Z

I am probably more proud than I should be to say: for the first time in my life, I have finished the Guardian Cryptic Crossword! And it's the prize crossword too!

It has passed largely without fanfare, but for a long time, somewhere in the back of mind has been the wish to complete a cryptic crossword. It's just one of those things I've long had an ambition to be able to do - mostly, I guess, because I'm crap at chess and know I always be, so cryptics seem like a good second prize.

Here's the crossword for those who'd like to share in my conceit. Once I'd got 12a, several others followed. 2d and 7d I had to look up as I'd never heard of the answers. 21d was the last man standing, but eventually worked it out. And the sharpest, funniest most concise clue is this:

5a. Couple with little on credit (4,3,3)

APPROACHES

2011-09-19T19:54:00.004Z

Rather busy at the moment - I am doing a counselling course at Lambeth College. I passed the first module earlier in the year, but things are hotting up now, with lessons twice a week and homework in between. I thought I knew a thing or two about this before I started, what with commissioning psychotherapy services as part of my job, and having read a fair bit of Freud, Lacan and others. But going back to basics - what does it mean to be with somebody as they describe their issues? how does one set boundaries so that the other person knows what they can and cannot expect of you? how can one help a person to feel safe and thereby help them to speak their mind? - has shown that what I thought I knew is all well and good from a theoretical standpoint, but is insubstantial if you cannot use it in a particular room with a particular person with a particular set of issues.

I am enjoying it very much, not least because my fellow students are warm, interesting, challenging people, very different from me and from each other. If you have a passing interest in this sort of thing, you may not have seen the film Gloria, made in 1965, in which a patient called Gloria undergoes therapy with three major psychotherapists from three very different background: Carl Roger, Fritz Perls and Albert Ellis. If you haven't seen it, you should. The first part is here - you can find the rest on Youtube.

A couple of other things. First, my wife and I celebrated our first wedding anniversary this weekend, which we celebrated by going on the flight simulator at the Science Museum. She bought me a book from the wonderful, East Anglia based Full Circle publishers: a book of short stories by Rose Tremain. This is the front cover which, as with all FC books, is gorgeous:

Second - and vaguely linked to the other reason I am busy, which is that my public sector employers keep finding me things to do (the cheek of it) - here is a wonderful post on "Camden council brutalism". If I worked for Microsoft, I suppose you'd call it brand loyalty or commodity fetishism; but as I work for the people of Camden, I am happy to call it pride. It's rather precious, I know, but there is something very gratifying about working in such a wonderful borough, whatever one's misgivings about its various decisions, both past and present. Only recently, I went to Gospel Oak, an area of Camden which has a certain "reputation", to talk to a local GP about dementia care. It was a sunny day (unlike the day EuV had to endure), but I don't think it was just the weather that made Lismore Circus feel so welcoming - more the sense of a shared purpose, of public services and community bodies working together for the good of the estate and the neighbourhood. There is a fuller post waiting to be written about Gospel Oak, and maybe in the new year, when I'm finished writing coursework about empathy and congruence, I will write it.

SAY WHAT YOU MEAN

2011-09-10T16:38:00.002Z

In our early courting days, my wife went to a book-signing event with Alasdair Gray and got him to sign my copy of Lanark. Since we moved in together, the Lanarks seem to have multiplied, since we now have three. She also gave him a copy of my own novel, which he said he would read (the thought that there is an outside chance that he may indeed have read it, or at least a few lines of it, on the train back to Scotland is rather lovely). He probably thought me rather gauche for trying to implicate my girlfriend in such a desperate act of fandom, and he told her, "He should ask you to marry him for doing this." Which I did!

This video, which shows him designing a mural for an underground station, is wonderful. He describes himself as an old-fashioned post-impressionist, very interested in directness and "hard edges" when he paints and writes. In this, and in his very practical acceptance that he needs both to write and paint to make a living, he reminds me of another favourite artist / graphic designer of mind, David Gentleman. I like his own description of how he makes his characters speak: "In my writing, most of the characters, in their speech, say exactly what they mean, to an extent that he thought was a bit unusual, since most people talk in order to hide what they mean."

LEAP OF FAITH

2011-09-09T21:55:00.000Z

Larval Subjects on "writing and the anxiety of meaning":

Kierkegaard and Sartre were right: unless you take a “leap of faith” or simply choose despite the absolute contingency of your decision, you will never manage to write or produce work, whether you’re a philosopher, a social scientist, a scientist, an artist, a poet, and novelist, etc. Until you can accept the contingency of your decision and follow, as Badiou might say, the logic of its unjustifiable deductive fidelity, until you overcome your belief that there is an Other that “knows” and not just others that are navigating their way through the contingency of existence, you will never write. All you can do is throw your dice, maintain deductive fidelity to your decision, value your encounters, and hope for the best. You will never please everyone because, as Luhmann observes, every decision is contingent and could have been otherwise. Some will hate it, others will be mystified, others will love it, some will be indifferent. You will never know why they respond in these various ways, nor will you ever be able to make a move that pleases and appeals to everyone. The most paralyzing thing is always the belief that we know what others desire and our belief that there is someone out there that knows. All you can do is make your cut, make your distinction, and choose. We are always looking for masters, leaders, sovereigns, and priests that we believe “know” so as to extinguish the anxiety of the contingency of our choices. What we don’t recognize is that our very act of choosing these phallic priests and kings is our choice and that, as Sartre recognized in “Existentialism is a Humanism”, a way of transferring our decision to someone else even though that choice of someone whose voice can “speak truth for us” is still a voice that we chose. The tragedy is that our very desire for a father is also the source of the extinction of our ability to speak and act. We believe they’ve already done so in our stead. You must kill your mother and father to act and write.

ENTITIES, EVENTS, TRAJECTORIES

2011-09-04T22:04:00.002Z

I am currently immersed in this:

Nothing to say about it at the moment - or rather, far too much to say, which means I need to read it again and try to crystallise what are currently rather confused thoughts.

Aristotle seems to be the main point of reference, since he tried to move away from Plato's theory of forms in order to pin down what was essential about a given object (as opposed to that object's temporary, non-essential characteristics), and tried to identify what form that essence took.

Here is a very interesting discussion between Bryan Magee and Martha Nussbaum on Aristotle, in which it becomes clear that the questions Aristotle asked about identity and change have never been satisfactorily answered. Graham Harman's book about Bruno Latour tries to reframe these questions, and does so extremely excitingly, but the big paradox about frozen events vs unfreezable trajectories still remains.

WATER WORKS

2011-09-04T21:46:00.005Z

If you ever need to be reminded what an exciting thing everyday life is, take a trip to suburbia. It never fails to stop you in your tracks and make you go, "huh"? Especially if you take a trip to a suburb near to, but not quite, where you live. Yesterday I took an afternoon stroll around Streatham and Tooting. Walking by the railway line on Conyers Road, I saw this:

Credit to this chap, who I think took this photo.

Here is another picture, taken in 1895:

It was built in 1888, and houses monitoring equipment for Thames Water. It is grade 2 listed, and quite right too. Who in South London knew that there was a mini Brighton Pavilion on their doorstep, and that it was built for the prosaic function of pumping water?

A HISTORY OF THE WORKING CLASS MOVEMENT IN IPSWICH - II

2011-08-23T21:58:00.004Z

This is the second part of my attempt to summarise a book that my great-grandfather Robert Ratcliffe wrote called A history of the working class movement in Ipswich. The first part covered the nineteenth century, up until the mid-1880s, when the first Trades Council was formed in Ipswich. This post goes into more detail about the successes and failures of the Trades Council and takes us into the early years of the last century.

What is most striking is how many failures the organised working class had to endure during the last quarter of that century. The formation of the Trades Council was a great success, as it brought together disparate groups of agricultural and urban workers. But the Trades Council was only a means to an end, and for decades it seemed to achieve little in getting working people represented on public bodies. If there is a political point here, it’s that the political relations and institutions which were taken for granted in the twentieth century were by no means inevitable a few decades earlier. Indeed, the men of the left who lived in Ipswich in the 1880s and 1890s must have wondered if their labours would ever bear fruit; and reading Bob Ratcliffe’s book now, we might almost wonder the same thing.

*

30/8/84. Meeting at the Saracen’s Head pub to form the Trades Council (TC).

1885.

First meeting of the Trades Council – first time unskilled workers had organised en masse. Dockers’ Union members could only join if accepted by other members. David Ault, president, was assaulted by stevedores [who loaded and unloaded the ships] at one meeting. They claimed he wanted to do away with them; he said the Union was interested in preventing sub-contracting.

The Ipswich Dockers’ Union was the first to have its own banner.

David Ault died aged 32. Hundreds attended his funeral on a wet day, and the banner was carried at the head of the funeral procession. Described as “nothing but a Docker, a man of good spirit, honest in all his dealings and thorough in all his ways, who possessed a power to raise the class he was so proud to lead and had faith in the people among whom he laboured.” He lived at 362 Spring Road.

Also in 1885, Mr Castledene fought St Clement’s ward (a slum district) for the TC. Fought on a ticket of improving conditions for workers who were paying high rates. Came last.

15/12/1885. Formation of Ipswich Debating Society, inspired by a letter in the local press. 1886 – became the Ipswich Parliament and met regularly but soon dissolved.

1886.

Ipswich Election Petition. Local MP Jesse Collins (a Liberal) had fought for land reform and free secular elementary education for all, and was unpopular with religious groups who lodged a petition. Later MP in Birmingham, but split from the Liberals over Home Rule.

26/8/1886. “[There] opened up in Ipswich a Labour Bureau, the first of its kind in the country. During the first seven months, employment was found for 235 out of a total of more than 500 applicants for jobs.” The bureau sometimes supported strike breaking, sending men to corners of England to fill in – seen as a divisive body.

1887.

“Mrs Annie Besant, the noted Socialist agitator, addressed a large public meeting in the Cooperative Hall on Wednesday 10 March 1887. She dealt at some length on the aims and objects of Socialism, and on the evil effects of private ownership of land. Mr Manning Prentice of Stowmarket presided; Mr George Hines and Mr H. Bailey moved and seconded a vote of thanks.”

1889.

London dock strike – a milestone in the creation of unions for unskilled workers, including Bargemen’s and Dockers’ Unions. In Ipswich, many of these became affiliated to the TC. Many were Radicals and used the TC for party-political ends.

Effects of ’89 Dock Strike in Ipswich. Dispute between the Gas Company and the workers: “the rate was 5½ d per ton ... a week later the men came out on strike for an advance of ¼d per ton ... the manager listened to the men’s statements and decided to meet the men halfway ... by offering them one eighth of a penny increase.” The men refused and fought scab labour. 20 December – meeting of the Dock Labourers Union in Princes St, addressed by Mr Tom Mann (“now famous for his work in connection with the London Dock Strike”) and “he appealed to the men not to be content until they had the ‘tanner’ [a rate of sixpence an hour] as they had in London.”

1890.

Formation of Eastern Counties Labour Federation (ECLF). Manifesto: eight-hour day; demolition of all insanitary dwellings; submission of all labour disputes to arbitration; prevention of overseas wars; support other Trades Unions. 7,000 men joined in the first year. Within 18 months it had 200 branches, 10,000 members, £487 income and £329 expenditure. Demonstrated to Suffolk workers that they were underpaid and enjoyed poor conditions compared to workers in other counties. In October 1890, the ECLF successfully represented a member in Otley who had been underpaid by a farmer. Several other successful cases in this vein. Fractious relationship with other Unions. Despite having at one point more than 20,000 members, it folded in 1895.

“At this period there were no such things as Labour Exchanges. The unemployed had to seek work as best they could and there was no income for those who were out of work.”

Also at this time, employers often formed scab unions and would share alternate labour when there was a dispute.

TC contested Bridge ward in 1890. Mr Medcalf came last in a poorly organised campaign. “Those who took part in the selection of the candidate and worked during the contest informed me that, as their meeting-place was on licensed premises, it was considered unlawful to publicly nominate a candidate within the building, so after the candidate had been selected they came outside into the street and publicly nominated him there under the street lamp.” The Labour and Wages paper said of the result: “He had not been ‘fiddled by the Tories’ nor ‘dished by the Whigs’; he had simply been neglected by his own class. The working man will do better next time. Their neglect is not due to badness of heart but from want of thought, and they will do better as they grow wiser. He recommends more work and less brawling next time.” Medcalf died of syncope while working shortly afterwards.

1891.

An independent Labour candidate, Mr Joseph Robinson, stood in St Margaret’s ward, came second and was thereby elected as the first working man on the Town Council. Proposal to form a party independent of Liberals and Tories, but nothing came of it for some time.

1892.

24/9/1892. Mass Trade Union demo “in a meadow below Oak Hill and Stoke Rectory grounds”. The demo met at St Margaret’s Green and marched with banners, including one from Stratford indicating “that the Great Eastern men asked to be paid for Sunday duty”. Another, from the Battersea Branch of the Navvy Bricklayers Labourers Union, “represented a Nemesis over taking sundry evils.”

At another meeting in 1892 a fight broke out between Mr Fred Woodyard, Treasurer of the Ipswich Dockers Union, and Mr Ike Ward, organising secretary of the General Railway Workers Union. “Mr Ward was described as a two months bird of paradise” whilst Mr Woodyard was defined as “a man who had set himself up as a divinity when in fact he was nothing but a false God – a brazen-faced Nebuchadnezzar who must be beaten down from the sight of all men.” A report from the TUC – the main item on the agenda – was never discussed.

1893.

The great national coal dispute. Keir Hardie, following the Trades Union Congress in Bradford, got together with others and formed the Independent Labour Party. Ipswich branch met at Neptune Inn, Fore St; set up a tailor’s shop also selling socialist literature and Co-op Wholesale Society products in Falcon St. This ran into financial difficulties and closed, and the Ipswich ILP branch folded. But before this in 1894, the ILP defended Joe Robinson’s Council seat in St Margaret’s. St Clement’s ward was also contested. Both lost badly.

Nevertheless, successes for the Postmen’s Federation; the boot and show dispute; the formation of the Ipswich branch of the Operative Plasterers Union; also branches in Ipswich, Felixstowe, Colchester and Thetford of the Operative Stonemasons Union.

1894.

Purchase by the public of Christchurch Park, supported by Cllr Robinson and other members of the TC.

1896.

An appeal was sent to working men which read: “Ipswich, with its 60,000 inhabitants, is a long way behind ... as, with the exception of the School Board, the working men are not directly represented on any public body.” Trades Council Committee proposed a subscription of 1d per month to fund a well-organised campaign. But lack of forthcoming funds and interest meant they had to forgo contesting Bridge Ward in 1897.

1897.

Two significant disputes around foreign labour substitution. First, the Captain of a boat carrying beans from Cyprus refused to pay his crew, then refused to employ local labour to empty the boat, bribing the crew to do it in order to get their wages; they refused and unsuccessfully tried to issue a court summons against the Captain. Meanwhile, the Labour Bureau (see above) provided scab labour to unload the boat, and therefore the crew were out-of-pocket. Second, Messrs Brown and Hooper had employed English silk-weavers from Spitalfields and, having gained much knowledge, dismissed them and employed much cheaper German labour.

1898.

Labour contest St Clement’s ward, with Page again as the candidate. Came last.

1899.

Ward tries again, under a Lib-Lab banner. This was ridiculed by the Tories, who dismissed them as Home Rulers and claimed that the Liberals had always been in the working man’s pocket. But Grimwade the Liberal won St Clement’s ward and Page came second. Despite this, the two parties would not cooperate in Town Council elections again, preferring not to be compromised.

Conclusion: “There is great satisfaction in observing that at the end of the nineteenth century, the Trades Council was firmly established and a beginning had been made in political activities ... perhaps one of the most important developments arising out of the individual and political struggles in our democracy during those years was the establishment of the Labour movement. In the year 1900 this movement was still very much in its infancy, but it opened up new and hopeful vistas for the future of the working classes in this country.”

*

We now move to the second book of Ratcliffe’s opus, which coincides with the first days of a new century.

1900/01. New Unions formed, and some disbanded. Trades Council petitioned Parliament to support MPs Norton and Hardie to establish a 48-hour working week and 24 shillings per week minimum wage. Following the Education Act of 1902, schools came under the Local Authority. Mr Whiting became a Trades Council rep on the Education Committee.

1901.

Postmen’s Dispute. Wages had stagnated amidst rising costs of living (especially rent), but a request to the Postmaster General for an increase had been turned down. The Trades Council appealed to local MPs to take up their case in Parliament, but the decision stood.

1902.

Council Elections. In St Clement’s, Page came last, losing by five votes.

1903.

Electric trams replaced horse-drawn trams. Houses were demolished to make way for new lines and 23 new houses were built in Devonshire Road as replacements. Meanwhile, workers protested against terrible working conditions on the trams at the Cornhill in November 1904. At the same time, a depression in the building trade. The Trades Council requested that the Council get local labour to build the Devonshire Road houses, rather than sub-contracting. The Council refused.

1904.

Electoral successes. Mixed fortunes in following years.

1906.

Ipswich branch of ASLEF formed. Met initially in the old museum rooms; then the Station St Institute, then the EUR hotel, then from 1927 the Loco Club in Rectory Road.

Also in 1906, following national Liberal landslide in 1905, Ipswich branch of the ILP reformed. First meeting place was 22 Norwich Road. “Their agitation took the form of a religious and spiritual nature, and no ILP meeting was complete without the singing of Labour songs.” Also Socialist Sunday schools; open air meetings; “they did much to arouse people’s emotions as well as to draw attention to economics ... Jack London’s books were also in great demand.”

Excerpts from the first annual report of the Ipswich ILP read as follows:

- “having among us a number of the Old Brigade, we are not the result of a new birth, but a resurrection”

- “we shall remember the addresses given by our Chairman and Vice-Chairman, also the evening when we all joined in a general confession of our faith; we each managed to add a few words in reply to the question “why we were Socialist,” and a pleasant evening was spent”

- “we also had an opportunity of witnessing a battle royal between a member of the old school of politics and the new”

- “If one characteristic has shown more than another, it is that the Labour Movement, as we accept it, lives by fighting.”

1906 elections – independent Radical Mr Boast was returned to St Clement’s; ILP candidate came last in Bridge and Westgate wards.

But the movement gained members and the ILP took a room in St Stephen’s Lane rent-free in return for putting it in order. Children were christened there at the “Labour Church”.

Bob Ratcliffe reproduces the 1909 Annual Report in full, but no sooner had I begun copying it out, than the librarians of the Ipswich Records Office announced that it was about to close. That will have to wait for next time.

BOTTLES, BENCHES AND BONES

2011-08-16T19:33:00.011Z

It occurred to me while reading The Luminous Coast that my ramblings about / over the East coast of England are in danger of becoming parochial. I have written at length (see here, here, here, here, ad infinitum) about a stretch of coast measuring about 25 miles from north to south (that between Dunwich and Felixstowe), but as much as my Suffolk pride may not stand the fact that there is more to the coast than Shingle Street and Orford, it is nevertheless true. There is Norfolk, and North Suffolk and the Shotley Peninsula, and Essex.

So on Friday, I took the day off work and decided to walk along the coast at Tilbury – a little out of my comfort zone since it is neither (a) mid Suffolk nor (b) the inner-London Thames. I began my walk at East Tilbury, or rather the northern section of East Tilbury which is served by the Fenchurch St to Southend railway.

East Tilbury used to be a small village, dotted with weather-boarded cottages and a traditional village pub, perched on the river where Coalhouse Fort stands. But in 1933, it grew northwards when the Bata shoe empire arrived from Czechoslovakia and chose the South Essex as its British base.

Tomas Bata had started the company in Zlin in 1894. Inspired by the Victorian industrialists, his business plan was to set up factory communities overseas (Vikram Seth lived in a Bata community in India and described it in A suitable boy). In effect, these were garden cities, but they differed from Letchworth and Bourneville in one important respect: Bata was a devout advocate of Modernism.

When he died in an airplane crash in 1932, his half-brother Jan-Antonin took up the reins and built one of these garden cities in East Tilbury. At the centre of the new settlement, a functionalist factory, hotel and administrative building were erected, along with flat-roofed houses for the workers, plotted along a grid pattern which adhered strictly to Ebenezer Howard’s formula.

The Bataville in East Tilbury appears, from reports we read, to have been a uniquely corporate benign dictatorship. Loyalty to the company was paramount, and the Bata empire’s techniques were positively Fordist. But John Tusa, whose father was the general manager of the East Tilbury factory, describes it rather wistfully, even if much of its mystique was a bit eerie:

Looked at from today’s harsh, market-driven methods, the Bata enterprise was incredibly paternalistic. Nobody acts like that nowadays, building model estates, looking after workers for a lifetime of service. The Bata estate contained a Bata school, Bata technical college, Bata hotel and restaurant, Bata cinema, Bata swimming pool, tennis court, Bata farm, butcher, grocer, Bata shoe shop, doctor and a Bata garage [...] Everybody regarded both the objective setting, the performance measurement, the league tables and the bonuses as part of the Bata system. It was tough; it was paternalistic. And it certainly assumed that a good deal of private life was enmeshed into company life.

Across the world, at one time or another, Bata produced shoes for Nazi soldiers, Soviet bloc citizens and Western consumers. Today, its obsessive approach to targets as ends in themselves seems rather modern; Bataville in East Tilbury, meanwhile, feels rather tired. The cinema is now a Co-op; the Bauhaus houses are mostly pebble-dashed and stand apologetically next to their more traditionally English neighbours; the factory is completely deserted (though much of the land still belongs to Bata).

I walk down through old East Tilbury (past cottages with cheesily evocative names like Shangri-la, Mariner’s Cottage and Alpha, and one which has been christened “Council House”) to Coalhouse Fort, built in the 1860s as a defence against the French. It was never used for this purpose, of course, but in the Second World War it contained equipment which tested whether the magnetic field of British steel hulled ships were effectively neutralised to deter attacks from magnetic mines. In the 60s, it was leased to Bata for storage.

I sat by the moat among families of picnickers and ate my sandwiches, then walked towards the old radar tower by the river, which is still marked on maps as a water tower, a hangover from the extreme secrecy that surrounded radar during the war. As I approached the water, I saw something extraordinary: a bench, commemorating the life of Harry, “a very special boy – 28.02.1997 – 29.08.2003”. There is nothing to explain who Harry was, where he came from, or what his connection was to this barren stretch of shoreline. Teddies and stones and pot-plants surround this shrine, and a framed card to “a little angel.” It is incredibly poignant, not least because it appears to be tended by complete strangers, people like me who pass this spot and add something. “It is an ancient desire,” writes Jules Pretty, “this wish to leave something of ourselves on the land to mark someone’s passing. But something has changed. Once the berth in the graveyard was booked. Now there is no such certainty. This disconnection from future place is something of a novelty.”

I turn westwards towards the huge power station at Tilbury. I think this is the closest I have been to the Thames without being on a boat. I can almost feel the water lapping at my feet, and when I reach the site of the old rubbish tip, I can hear pieces of old pottery tinkle under the tide. In the nineteenth century, when the old cemeteries of the City were excavated, human remains were dumped here, and it is not unusual to find a hip joint or a fibula on the beach. (Rather wonderfully, this Flickr user found the remains of an old Nestle advert – full version here – but I could only see some nice old bits of plate and what looked like Jagermeister bottles.)

Seasoned walkers of coastal paths, especially those with an industrial past or present, get nervous when they are among scenery which is stirring or cute, because it usually signifies that menace is just around the corner. The path from the ceramic beach-cum-boneyard became vague the nearer I got the power station, and I soon found myself hemmed in between a high concrete seawall and an evil-looking structure like two cranes balanced on a ship’s hull.

The wall zigzagged, so that I had the bewildered sensation of not quite knowing which direction I was walking in, and that somebody was lurking behind every corner, ready to attack. But while my pace increased, I couldn’t help but stop every few minutes to look at the graffiti. Most of it looked at least twenty years old, and had been painted on rather than sprayed. Its themes seemed to be Mods (pro), the Miners Strike (anti), the Tories (also anti) and this logo (a Pink Floyd reference?):

Exhausted by the Thames at Tilbury, I turned inland, walking along the busy Fort Road, ducking into hedges to avoid lorries bound for Tilbury Docks. Eventually, having found a side-road, I walked up the quiet side-road to West Tilbury and across the fields back to East Tilbury station. With your back to the twin chimneys of Tilbury power station, the scene is almost bucolic (though not quite – for all the chirruping birds and country pubs, one cannot avoid noticing the groups of migrant workers picking potatoes and sugar-beet from the fields). But what does the future hold for this community, whose roots lie so far back in English history?

Thurrock is a key part of the Thames Gateway plan. East Thurrock (the area around Shell Haven) has been bought by Dubai Ports and will become one of the UK’s major container ports. Meanwhile, the Thurrock Thames Gateway Development Corporation aims to build 18,500 homes in the borough, and it is believed that 26,000 jobs will be created. In a part of the world this seeped in history and so removed in the public imagination from London, it is easy to slip into melancholy and fear that the essence of the area will be swept away by mass construction. But, as with so many settlements next to a river or sea, Tilbury seems not to have an essence as such, and certainly no eternal kernel. How its inhabitants will adapt to the development (and vice versa) is anybody’s guess, but it is certain that in ten years time it will look very different. And yet, just as water continually flows from the source out to sea but the Thames remains the Thames, so Tilbury will remain Tilbury. It will still wave across the river to Gravesend. It will still, I suspect, be a strange place, its beaches scattered with bottles and benches and bones, and no amount of new housing or container shipments will alter that.

THE CAFE

2011-08-14T22:01:00.000Z

ROUGHS AND 'ARRYS

2011-08-13T15:52:00.005Z

One newspaper report in respect of the riots which has gone largely unnoticed is this one from the Times:

"the whole of South London was panic-stricken by the report that a large body of unemployed rioters were on their way to the Borough and Newington Causeway from New Cross and Deptford, smashing shops on their way. Shops were boarded up and extra police sent down the Old Kent Road."

In fact, the article is from 1886. That riot has parallels with last week's. Against a backdrop of global recession and rising unemployment, the anger and hopelessness that had been bubbling up for years erupted. In 1886, "masses of the poor devils of the East End who vegetate in the borderland between working class and Lumpenproletariat" (in Engels' words) met the leaders of the revolutionary Social Democratic Federation who high-handedly tried to channel their energies into something political. But the "roughs and 'Arrys" were having none of it: "on the road [from Trafalgar Square to Pall Mall] the roughs took matters into their own hands, smashed club windows and shop fronts, plundered first wine stores and bakers' shops, and then some jewellers' shops also, so that in Hyde Park our revolutionary swells had to preach "le calme et la modération"!

Engels was scathing of the revolutionaries - "literary and political adventurers" he called them - but he was one of the many writers at that time who saw that indistinct violence was an inevitable consequence of the dreadful living conditions in East London. "The distress," he wrote in a letter to August Bebel in February 1886, "especially in the East End of the city, is appalling. The exceptionally hard winter, since January, added to the boundless indifference of the possessing classes, produced a considerable movement among the unemployed masses."

This concern was shared by many bourgeois commentators and politicians. Around this time, Lord Salisbury set up a Royal Commission to investigate the issue of housing for the working classes. The Commission itself was an extraordinarily motley crew made up of Tory and Liberal politicians, the Archbishop of Westminster and Bishop of Bedford, a Trade Union leader and the Prince of Wales (subsequently Edward VII). One of the Liberal politicians was Jesse Collings, who has a connection with Ipswich politics (on which, more soon).

Out of the Royal Commission came the Housing of the Working Classes Act of 1885, which gave landlords a statutory responsibility to ensure sanitary housing, and gave Local Authorities the power to demolish unhealthy slums. One of the first Local Authorities to assert this power was the London County Council. The Friars Mount slum in Bethnal Green had become notorious when Arthur Morrison used it as a barely fictionalised backdrop to A child of Jago. The LCC began demolition of the slum in 1893, and by 1900 they had completed the building of the world's first ever social housing programme: the Boundary Estate round Arnold Circus. The rubble from the slums was famously used to build the bandstand in the middle of the estate.

Yet equally famously, of the 5,000 new flats, only 11 were occupied by evicted slum dwellers. The rest were moved on to other slums in Dalston and Hackney. It took a World War nearly twenty years later for slum-clearance and the construction of good Council housing nationwide to become a statutory duty for Local Authorities.

It is difficult to predict such a progressive outcome to rise from the ashes of last week's riots. One cannot see David Cameron asking one of his cabinet ministers to chair a Royal Commission; one cannot see it comprising backbench MPs, Rowan Williams, Dave Prentice or Prince Charles; and one cannot see it seriously trying to find anything out about the working class experience. The government sees little to be gained from launching an enquiry. It would rather turn a blind eye to the causes, although its blundering attempts to appear tough have made it look ridiculous and has earned opprobrium from the police.

Whereas Salisbury and his colleagues knew that reform was necessary to revive British trade, politicians today can see no way out of the neoliberal hole. They see Britain's position in the world and its social fabric going to hell in a handbasket, but they can do nothing about it, only trot out the same tired cliches about personal responsibility, call in the LAPD and pitch up in Clapham waving a broom. But as this excellent piece at the University for Strategic Optimism points out,

"Art and brooms isn’t going to fix this particular problem however, only the radical redistribution of wealth and a society not defined around the individual accumulation of property is going to do that. It’s not 1940, the destruction of the urban fabric is not wrought by foreign bombs, but by kids from the broom-brigade’s own neighbourhoods. They can pretend to pick up a few bits of litter for the cameras, but that is a fact that can not be wiped away so easily."

INEQUALITY AND STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE

2011-08-08T20:37:00.004Z

It is the easiest thing in the world to say that the rioting and looting which is spreading across London and beyond is mindless, or to blame certain demographic groups (poor, black young men). But as these two pieces argue, what we are seeing are not mindless acts. They have a cause, and while they do not have an explicitly political object, there is a political edge to them.

Coincidentally, on the tube into work this morning (from Stockwell rather than Brixton), I was reading the chapter on violence from Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s The spirit level, which highlights the unmistakable link between inequality and a range of social ills. Of all the behaviours which Wilkinson and Pickett link to inequality, violence is the clearest. If you plot a number of developed countries on a graph with income inequality on the x axis and homicides or assaults or other violent acts on the y acts, there is a crystal-clear correlation.

They quote the psychiatrist James Gilligan, who has researched and written widely on the causes of violence:

In his books Violence and Preventing Violence, he argues that acts of violence are ‘attempts to ward off or eliminate the feeling of shame and humiliation – a feeling that is painful, and can even be intolerable and overwhelming – and replace it with its opposite, the feeling of pride'.

They also quote evolutionary psychologists, who have demonstrated through statistical analysis that “young men have strong incentives to achieve and maintain as high a social status as they can,” to show why such acts are overwhelmingly committed by men. But the point here is that our preconditioned impulse to achieve a higher status is amplified in more unequal societies. A review of 33 analyses of inequality and violent crime carried out in 1993 found that all but one showed a positive correlation.

Wilkinson and Pickett also point to a study carried out in Chicago in the 1940s which disproves the idea that violence is committed more by certain ethnic groups:

In Chicago, neighbourhoods are often identified with a particular ethnic group. So a neighbourhood which might once have been an enclave of Irish immigrants and their descendants later become a Polish community, and later still a Latino neighbourhood. What the Chicago school sociologists drew attention to was the persistent effect of deprivation and poverty in poor neighbourhoods – on whoever lived there.

They conclude that “shame and humiliation become more sensitive issues in more hierarchical societies: status becomes more important, status competition increases and more people are deprived of access to markers of status and social success.”

This is precisely what we see happening today. The UK is becoming an increasingly unequal place, and for many people the idea of social mobility is a joke. In areas of poverty – which all of the blighted areas so far are – people are trapped, economically and geographically. This is not to justify acts of violence, but merely to explain them (a distinction which is lost on many of the lecturing statements we see from officials).

As Professor John Pitts from the Vauxhall Centre for the Study of Crime has said today, “many of the people involved are likely to have been from low-income, high-unemployment estates, and many, if not most, do not have much of a legitimate future. Those things that normally constrain people are not there. Much of this was opportunism but in the middle of it there is a social question to be asked about young people with nothing to lose.” Until this is recognised and acted upon by politicians, their self-important dressings-down will mean nothing.

ACTS OF DEFLECTION

2011-08-02T21:30:00.003Z

The flood of 1953 cannot be, and was not, blamed on anybody. It was the result of natural forces, and in its immediate aftermath, the public and government rallied round to prevent further floods, fixing sea walls and flood defences by lugging huge quantities of sand to patch things up.

By contrast, when Tewkesbury and other areas of the Midlands and Western England were hit by floods in 2007, there were clearly people and policies to blame – water companies for not bothering to think about a back-up plan for its main Gloucestershire waterworks (which were on a flood plain), and the wholesale privatisation of utilities. And, again by contrast to 1953, the public was impotent to respond.

We see this in all walks of life. When a private company screws something up, the government is blamed for surrendering its powers over to the private sector. We saw it in the recent care home scandals – CQC was blamed for not regulating Winterbourne View vigorously enough, and the government was blamed for allowing Southern Care to operate on such flimsy financial foundations.

As Mark Fisher says in his book Capitalist Realism, “it has to be recognised that focus on government, like the focus on immoral individuals, is an act of deflection.” As a body politic, we seem to need a big state to blame when things go wrong, but we refuse to face up to the realities of the market system. Indeed, however much things go wrong, our faith in the efficiencies of the market seems to hold up pretty well. This is a contradiction we find it difficult to resolve, perhaps because “at the level of the political unconscious, it is impossible to accept that there are no overall controllers.” The essential of government today is to fill the symbolic hole created by the submission of public services to the market.

Fisher’s chapter on this phenomenon – entitled ‘There’s no central exchange’ – is perhaps the best summation of life in late capitalist society that I have read. He draws on Kafka, who he says “is poorly understood as exclusively a writer on totalitarianism; a decentralised, market Stalinist bureaucracy is far more Kafkaesque than one in which there is central authority.”

He compares K’s encounter with the telephone exchange in The Castle to our own experience of call centres: “the boredom and frustration punctuated by cheerily piped PR ... the building rage that must remain impotent because it can have no legitimate object, since – as is very quickly clear to the caller – there is no-one who knows, and no-one who could do anything if they could.”

We search and search for an explanation, for somebody who can solve our problem (and when, on the odd occasion, we get through to somebody who can actually help us, we raise them to the level of a saint). But this is almost always a wild goose chase – nobody can help us, because our problems are irrelevant to the corporations who provide us with a service. “The supreme genius of Kafka,” writes Fisher, “was to have explored the negative atheology proper to Capital: the centre is missing, but we cannot stop searching for it or positing it. It is not that there is nothing there – it is that what is there is not capable of exercising responsibility.”

Neoliberal theory would say: ok, if you’re unsatisfied with the service you’re getting, why not change provider? You’re probably not the only one, and if enough people reject an efficient company, that company will go under, to be replaced by a more capable outfit. We do not quite see it like this, because despite all the propaganda that is thrown at us, we still like to see ourselves as citizens rather than consumers. To which neoliberal theory would also say: well, that’s your fault for not taking responsibility.

“Taking responsibility” is today’s buzzphrase. We must look within ourselves and play our own individual part in making the world a better place. When things go wrong, it is always because individuals have failed to do this. This applies to us as consumer-citizens, and equally to bureaucrats and corporate players. “For this reason,” says Fisher, it is a mistake to rush to impose the individual ethical responsibility that the corporate structure deflects. This is the temptation of the ethical which, as Zizek has argued, the capitalist system is using in order to protect itself in the wake of the credit crisis – the blame will be put on supposedly pathological individuals, those ‘abusing the system’, rather than on the system itself.” To an extent, we have seen this happening in the News Corporation crisis, although there one really does get the sense of a “shadowy, centreless impersonality proper to corporate conspiracy.”

The notion of individual responsibility is also one that beleaguers well-meaning public servants who believe that they are immune to external influences and can, by sheer force of ethics, make a difference. “It is here that structure is palpable – you can practically see it taking people over, hear its deadened / deadening judgments speaking through them.” I agree – and I speak as a middle-ranking, well-meaning, public-sector bureaucrat.

THE GREAT TIDE

2011-07-31T22:05:00.007Z

I’ve written a lot on this blog about the alleged invasions of the Suffolk coast – by the Germans at Shingle Street, the Russians at Orford, extraterrestrials at Rendlesham – and about the erosions which really are driving the coastline landwards at Dunwich. Its position – an isolated county at the easternmost tip of England – means it is vulnerable to hostile forces, be they elemental or military, and myths and forebodings abound.

In his recent and excellent book The luminous coast, Jules Pretty writes:

“This east coast has always been in the front line of national defence. During the ice ages, it was linked to Continental Europe by land bridge, and this was how the first modern humans came across as they pressed north, eventually to displace the long-resident Neanderthals. Much later came Romans, Angles, Saxons, Danes-Vikings, and finally the Norman armies. After 1066, though, no further invasion efforts were to succeed.”

No military invasions, that is. But the biggest invasion of the last century – which, inexplicably, I’ve never mentioned here – was the North Sea Flood of 1953, which killed 44 people in Suffolk, more in Essex, and thousands in the Netherlands. It was caused by the concurrence of three factors: very low pressure over the north Atlantic, gale force winds over the North Sea and an unusually high tide. One or two of these would not have been abnormal, but the three together were fatal.

A surge of water was pushed southwards from a low pressure zone over Scotland, and by midnight on 31 January / 1 February, an extra 15 billion cubic feet of water was rushing down the eastern coast. “The tide came as a giant standing wave, hundreds of miles long, arriving at King’s Lynn five hours before Harwich, and seven hours before Tilbury on the Thames.” It hit Lincolnshire in late Saturday afternoon; by half-past seven, the water had hit an estate in Hunstanton and swept 65 people under. But due to the gale-force wind, most of the phone lines from King’s Lynn to the Thames Estuary were down and there was no way of warning coastal residents, who were blissfully unaware of the incoming swell of water. “Today,” as Pretty notes, “this is inconceivable.”

Southwold was hit shortly afterwards, the water leaking through to its marshy backyard, effectively turning the town into an island, un upturned boat on which residents perched and hung on for dear life. The sea breaks down doors, rushes through halls and dining-rooms, its level rising and rising, forcing people upstairs. A couple, Rene and Don, rescue their disabled neighbours, the McCarthys, and spend the night in darkness. “At one point they look out of the windows and see the wooden tea room from Walberswick sailing regally upstream, lace curtains silver bright in the moonlight, heading for doom against the waiting bridge.”

Weeks afterwards, when the marshes are finally drained, hundreds of thousands of eels are left wriggling on the wet mud. Five people die at Southwold that night.

Felixstowe was the worst hit town in Suffolk. 39 people died, including 13 children. They lived in the West End of Felixstowe in prefabs which buckled under the force of the water. The eyewitness accounts of that night are terrible. Doris Watkins, who was eight months pregnant, describes how she, her husband and their two children managed to climb to the roof. When they were eventually rescued, she and Bill were taken to hospital, but her two young children were taken to a nearby house where her daughter died.

“Yes, I feel bitter about this. The children should have been taken to the hospital like me. But this had never happened before, the poor people thought they were doing right.”

28 of the 39 casualties in Felixstowe that night were killed as the roofs they clung to were swept out to sea.

Canvey Island was worst hit of all the settlements along the east coast. Jules Pretty describes how husbands helplessly watched their wives drown; how a mother stands knee-deep in water, holding two baby sons who drown in her arms; how a boy stands in five feet of water holding his younger brother until his legs go numb and he has to let him go. “No accounts do justice to the lonely despair, the shouting and urging, and the clawing sense of failure as those smallest children died. All survivors will remember this night for the rest of their lives.”

RETURN OF THE REPRESSED

2011-07-30T21:31:00.003Z

Time to Change, a campaign which aims to raise public awareness about mental health problems, has had much success in changing attitudes. But the events in Norway show why the campaign can only go so far in combating stigma about mental illness.

We do not equate mental illness with violence because we inherently fear mental illness (though clearly we do), but because we fear violence and therefore have to dissociate ourselves from it, to turn the perpetrator into an other by calling him a madman, insane, schizophrenic, paranoid etc. If he is not caught, we become scared that this madman is out there trying to kill us; if and when he is caught, we feel immense relief and eventually forget about him.

This is somewhat ironic for, as Darian Leader writes in today’s Guardian, our attitude is one of classic paranoia:

“Paranoia has three classical components. The paranoiac has located a fault or malignancy in the world, he has named it, and has a message to deliver about it. For Breivik, the conviction is that Europe is rotten, that the name of this rottenness is Islam and that it is his mission to expose and excise it.”

As we know, paranoia doesn’t only happen when that conviction is wrong. We can be paranoid about something that we correctly believe is happening. And therefore, paranoia – and its consequences – have nothing to do with knowing the difference between right and wrong, “since the central feature of paranoia is precisely that the person does know the difference.”

This is what disturbs us most – that the Norwegian attacks have nothing to do with morality – and that is why we must assign Breivik to an alterior space in which right and wrong do not exist. We must banish him to madness.

What is most interesting about this is is that these arguments only arose when we discovered the killer’s identity – i.e. when we discovered he was Norwegian, white, an apparently average Joe. In terror attacks committed by Muslims, I have never heard anybody diagnose the responsible person(s) as mad, schizophrenic, mentally ill etc. It is enough that they are Muslim. That is why they have committed such an evil, not because they are mad. We cannot say this of Breivik because he is one of us, and we (we Western citizens) secretly harbour many of the paranoias and desires that drove him to kill. So we call him mad.

BLOOD, FAITH (AND OIL)

2011-07-21T21:53:00.002Z

I read an article on holiday by Perry Anderson on the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory, and the conflict that has arisen from it. Written almost ten years ago, it is (as Anderson’s condensations so often are) the best summary of the situation I have read. In it he makes the following points:

1. This is a conflict between two distinct nationalisms. The Palestinian identity was largely forged after the Nakba of 1948. The Zionist cause is older, and its strength lies in its call to tradition, history and theology; its link to a “sacred homeland”; and its influence in Western Europe in the late 19th century.

2. The 1917 Balfour Declaration, which promised Jews a homeland in Palestine, was an imperialist ploy. Britain had secured control of Palestine at Versailles, and it brokered the removal of Arabs from the land by force, and by encouraging the ideological community of the kibbutz. Between the wars, an apartheid was created in which Zionist colonisation of the land was backed by British force. Between 1936 and 1939, the first intifada was crushed by Major-General Orde Wingate’s troops.

3. But there was a certain friction between the British and the settlers. In the mid 1930s, Britain tried to curb Jewish migration. Into the 1940s, the extreme Zionist Irgun paramilitary group tried to defeat Britain and take full control of Palestine. The USSR were impressed by the Irgun’s anti-imperialism and initially supported them.

4. In 1947, Britain handed over its mandate to the UN, which in practice meant the US. Palestine became officially split between Arabs and Jews (though at that stage, Jews represented 35% of the population and gained 55% of the land). A Palestinian uprising was crushed, and Israel was created; Arab national armies invaded Israel, but were crushed; a deal was struck with Jordan, a client state of Britain, by which Israel were awarded a much enlarged state and Jordan took the West Bank.

5. 700,000 Arabs, around 50%, were forced from Palestine during the late 1940s, and a huge proportion of Arab land was seized. “In early 1947, Jews owned 7% of the land of Palestine. By the end of 1950, they had appropriated 92% of land within the new state.” A handful of Arabs remained as refugees. While it is generally accepted that the Holocaust provided the moral justification for the creation of Israel (and, therefore, the Nakba), there was little or no link at the time; this reasoning has been applied retroactively.

6. Israeli citizenship became based on “blood and faith – confessional and biological criteria combining to define actual or potential citizens in full right as those individuals either born of a Jewish mother, or of attested Mosaic persuasion, regardless of physical location.” Palestinian refugees were denied the right of return; more generally, Arabs were denied ownership rights, entry into armed services, political organisation etc. Israel was generally more supportive of international Jews than Arab states were of Palestinian refugees. Israel received huge financial support from the diaspora, German reparations and – especially military support – the US.

7. The 1950s saw the emergence of new Arab nationalisms in Egypt, Syria and Iraq. Israel attempted to fight this threat by colluding with France and Britain. In 1956, the three states invaded Egypt on the pretext of Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal. The US, fearful that Egypt might ally with the USSR, halted the conflict. But in 1967, the US supported the Israeli pre-emptive assault on Egypt. Israel made huge territorial gains (Sinai, Golan Heights, West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem) and 1.5m Palestinians were brought under Israeli military occupation. In 1973, Israel launched a further defensive attack on Egypt, and by 1979, Egypt gave in and allied itself with the US in return for Sinai. In 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon, gaining a buffer zone for its northern borders. Such victories meant Israel now had to manage large numbers of Palestinian refugees within its borders; meanwhile, Jewish settlements began incrementally to colonise the occupied territories.

8. In 1987, the first modern intifada spontaneously rose up. It never really threatened Israel, but it was only really dampened by the US invasion of Iraq. The 1993 and 1995 Oslo Accords led to limited IDF withdrawal in exchange for a cessation of Palestinian attacks on the Israeli occupation.

9. The Accords were universally lauded, but they did not alter the fact that here was an occupation based on brutality. The IDF remains in charge of most of the West Bank; many roads can only be accessed by Israelis; Jewish settlements increase weekly; and the income of Palestinians has plummeted. Not surprisingly, Palestinian attacks increased during the 1990s. Israel tried to do a deal with Arafat whereby they annexed all settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Since this would have netailed Palestinians abandoning all hope of a return to 1967 borders, Arafat refused and a second intifada was unleashed.

10. Edward Said, “the most courageous and lucid critic of the Oslo Accords,” believed that the moral dimension was the Palestinian cause’s only real strength, and that the world should react as it had done earlier to apartheid-era South Africa. The problem with this is that the Afrikaner regime enjoyed virtually nil international support, especially in the US, whereas US sympathies tend to be with Israel rather than the Palestinians.

11. In the US, criticising Israel is risky. “For many years American Zionism has had little difficulty stifling any serious dissent, automatically typecast as ‘self-hating’ if Jewish or ‘anti-Semitic if Gentile.” Indeed, anti-Zionist criticism is heard more in Israel than in the US.

12. Israel has taken a neoliberal turn since the 1990s. This has further disenfranchised Palestinians who are not allowed to purchase land. “The country has becomes one of the two most unequal societies in the advanced capitalist world.”

13. Labour and Likud share similar socio-economic policies, but very different electoral bases. Their distinctions tend to be tactical, rather than substantial. Labour is more pragmatic, Likud more dogmatic. “Neither side has any intention of contemplating real national sovereignty for the Palestinians.”

14. “Post-Zionists” have seriously considered only two alternatives to a Zionist state. 1) a ‘bi-national’ state (unlikely, given the “antagonistic ethnic nationalisms”). 2) partition, under pretty terrible terms for the Palestinians (they would get 15% of Israel; territory would be divided into two chunks, with no harbour; no defence force would be allowed; no reparations would be paid). (An alternative model by the Frenchman Guy Mandrou was, at least, geographically contiguous and had equivalent security forces to Israel.)

15. Morally and realistically, a Palestinian state would need to contain equal resources (as Israeli and Palestinian populations are similar and a port, namely Haifa. It would need to abandon Gaza but cover the West Bank and Eats Jerusalem and the coast from Lebanon to Haifa, and should be the recipient of reparations.

Given this pessimistic outlook, Anderson then asks whether there are any chinks in the Israeli carapace. He finds one: its reliance on the US (and others). “But how would America ever contemplate such a betrayal? The answer lies, as it has done ever since the fifties, in the Arab world.

And here is where it gets exciting. He says the only real possibility of changes lies with “Egypt with its population, and Saudi Arabia with its petroleum”. If either of these powers – Mubarak or the House of Saud – were ever overthrown, “the fate of Palestinians would instantly alter.”

Anderson is, again, pessimistic. “The dismal political history of the Arab world over the last half-century gives little reason for thinking this is likely in the short-run.” But we know differently. However much we are becoming accustomed to unforeseeable events in the news (cf. News International), we should not forget what an extraordinary achievement the Egyptian Revolution is.

MUD BATHS

2011-07-19T20:07:00.011Z

In the last couple of weeks, I have been stuck in 1912 – or, less specifically, in the years leading up to the First World War, the period in which the twentieth century truly began.

A hundred or so years ago, Bethnal Green was one of London’s poorest districts. It had been the victim of a downturn in trade – particularly silk-weaving, which had been prevalent up until the beginning of the 19th century – and being carved up by the destructive force of the railways. Where once there had stood country cottages and market gardens, now there were overcrowded slums and violent crime (Jack the Ripper operated from around here in 1888), and both Engels and Mayhew wrote about the desperate poverty there (the latter describing “pigs and cows in back yards, noxious trades like boiling tripe, melting tallow, or preparing cat's meat, and slaughter houses, dustheaps, and lakes of putrefying night soil”). Such was the moral outcry that Bethnal Green became the test site for the world’s first Council housing, the Boundary Road estate, though only a tiny handful of the evicted slum-dwellers got the chance to move there.

This is the background for Alexander Baron’s novel King Dido, published in 1969 and entirely out of kilter with the contemporary literary fashions. Baron’s traditional, kitchen-sink style belies his disgust at the conditions in which people had to live. The main character, Dido Peach, is the son of a violent, bullying father and a devout mother who has given up on real life and retreated to a world of fantasies. The family earns a meagre by boiling rags and selling them on, until Dido takes on the Murchisons, a family from Brick Lane who have colonised the neighbourhood by terrorising and extorting money from the local shopkeepers. Dido takes on the mantle of protector, taking protection money and fending off the Murchisons’ retaliations. He marries, has a child (conceived during a rape) and, via a tissue of lies and self-deception, achieves the respectability he craves, until the Police intervene and reduce him, once again, to poverty and humiliation.

Baron never portrays Peach as a hero and yet, despite his crimes, we come to occupy his shoes and see how the desolate hand he has been dealt might make him act as he does. He and his wife, in their different ways, look down on the people around them, and yet however much they aspire to something better, something which they feel they deserve, neither quite manages it and Dido is left to die in the only place he knows.

All this is grim enough, but it is the final chapter in which Baron reveals his revulsion. It is a short, curt, angry chapter, in which he lists the fates of the main characters, including Dido’s teenage brothers:

Chas went to France with the Expeditionary Force and was blown to pieces within a month. Shonny joined up under age and before he was eighteen he was killed at Ypres, his apple cheeks worm-eaten.

Mrs Peach was said by the women in the shops to be mental, with her wandering eyes and puzzled, private mutterings; and Ada took her away. Ada never wished to see or hear of her brother again and Mrs Peach never again saw her son.

One suspects that many members of the bourgeois classes felt about the First World War as Inspector Merry does: that it wiped out the proletariat in numbers that sheer poverty could only dream of. “He crossed the road and surveyed the street as he strolled. It was quieter these days. The war, of course, had taken the men away. In fact the war in his view had done a bit of good down here. The roughs had turned out to be a patriotic lot, all rushing to join up at the start of it; and by now most of them were heaps of rags on the plains of France.”

Peter Watts at the Great Wen does an excellent job of excavating the streets where King Dido is set here and here.

Percy Wyndham Lewis and the Vorticists were at least as furious at the barbarism of capitalism, colonialism and war in the 1910s. Owen Hatherley has written about the Vorticists on his blog, and more fully in his Militant Modernism book. And my wife has dredged her limitless expertise on all things cinematic and graphic novel to reveal, rather wonderfully, that the Vorticists were more influential than you think.

Meanwhile, here are my favourite pieces from the current Tate exhibition:

David Bomberg, Vision of Ezekiel

Jacob Epstein, Female figure

Jacob Epstein, Female figure

Percy Wyndham Lewis, The crowd

Edward Wadsworth, Newcastle (in lieu of Cleckheaton)

Henri Gaudier Brzeska, Ornement torpille

Henri Gaudier Brzeska, Fish

Dorothy Shakespear, Composition in blue and black

Dorothy Shakespear, Untitled

CAPRIS LAUDATA BRATTIA

2011-07-17T13:29:00.004Z

The first time I ever travelled abroad was in 1990, when I was nine. We flew to Split, then still part of the SFRY, and then caught a ferry to the island of Brac. My main memory of that evening journey was seeing framed photos of Tito (who had, by then, been dead for 10 years) all over the walls of the boat.

Any political ferment was lost on me, but I guess it must have been a fascinating time to travel in Yugoslavia, particularly as by then the tendency towards nationalism, antipathy towards Serbian dominance and market economics would have been in full swing.

I, meanwhile, was much more interested in snorkelling and trying squid for the first time.

We returned to Brac for our honeymoon last year, and again at the beginning of this month. It has more or less recovered the tourist revenues it lost during the Yugoslav Wars, and the pictures on the ferry are now of the Pope. In my opinion, it is as close to paradise as any place I know - a mixture of mountainous coastal scenery, clear blue sea, Butlins holiday camp and old-school Ostalgia. I'm not ashamed to admit that it brings out in me a retrograde nostalgia for something which has never existed - a kind of innocent utopia, played out to a soundtrack of 80s power ballads and Balkan folk dances.

Here is a picture of Bol harbour taken, I would guess, in the 1930s.

On the surface, little has changed in the intervening years.

Yet, Brac is now in Croatia. When I first went, it was part of Socialist Yugoslavia. When the first photo was taken, it was part of post-Versailles Yugoslavia. In between, it was occupied by fascist Italy and then Nazi Germany. Before that, it was in the hands of Montenegro, France, Hungary, the Ottoman and Austrian Empires, the Republic of Venice, the Roman Empire and the Illyrian kingdoms. Beneath its placid exterior, it is a place of seemingly constant flux.

SUB-HUMAN SCUM

2011-07-12T21:27:00.002Z

Something sickly and sentimental in the human character usually takes pity on somebody who is ganged up on, however deplorable they might be, which just goes to show what a scumbag ex Screws hack Paul McMullan really is. This clip of Steve Coogan and Greg Dyke on Newsnight has gone so viral, you've probably seen it already. But having been on holiday last week, I've only just caught up with up it - and it really does bear repeated watching.

Enjoy (especially 6'10" onwards):

More on how the News Corp has implicated the entire ruling class here.

DEAD THEORY

2011-06-26T21:00:00.003Z

The East Asian crisis of the late 90s raises an interesting question. Why did the West insist that Asian economies adopt neoliberal policies? There was no evidence that this would create growth for the region. Indeed, those whose markets were the least free withstood the crash better than their more “liberated” neighbours. It appeared that neoliberalism was being foisted upon developing countries to enrich Western investors.

This raises a further question. Is neoliberalism applied for dogmatic or pragmatic reasons? Do its advocates believe it to be the lubricant which makes capitalism work for everyone, or is it an expedient for reorganising society along class lines? We should be very clear whether neoliberalism is a well-intentioned theory that has gone disastrously wrong, or whether from the start it intended to concentrate wealth and power among the elite. This is the question which David Harvey addresses in Chapter 3 of his Brief history of neoliberalism.

We know the basic tenets of neoliberalism: property rights are fundamental, and eliminating the barriers to buying and selling will create a productive society in which everyone can benefit from economic growth. State capital must, as far as possible, be freed into private hands. Individuals and corporations must be free to compete against each other within legally defined parameters. In becoming more competitive, individuals will become more efficient. Just as the state should not interfere with activities in the marketplace, neither should it interfere in other spheres of human life. Humans should take responsibility for their actions, which in turn determine whether or not they succeed. If you fail, that is unfortunate, but you cannot claim you had no opportunity to succeed. Within this theory, the place of democracy is ambiguous, since collective government may compromise individual rights. In general, neoliberal theory prefers executive power to outright democracy but, as we shall see, this is problematic.

So proceeds the theory of neoliberalism. Yet, as soon as we begin to unpick that theory, we find instances where neoliberals do things in practice which are the precise opposite to what they believe in theory. Harvey lists these “tensions and contradictions,” some economic, some political.

MONOPOLIES / MARKET WASTE / INNOVATION FETISHISM

The first arises from the problem of monopolies. As Lenin and others have noticed, competition logically leads to monopolies, as competitive individuals drive out less competitive ones. A situation where, as Harvey says, “the world of soft drinks competition is reduced to Coca Cola versus Pepsi, the energy industry is reduced to five huge transnational corporations, and a few media magnates control most of the flow of the news, much of which then becomes pure propaganda,” sits easily with neoliberal theory, since competition and efficiency are maintained. But what about situations where competition is inefficient? It makes no sense, for example, for multiple businesses to build railway lines from London to Ipswich (though, since the privatisation of the railways, we now have a messy and sometimes fatal proliferation of transport providers which operate on the same line).

Or, to take another example, what about the rising costs we now see as a result of the gradual privatisation of the public sector? Commissioners now manage contracts with a huge range of public and private health providers, which has increased bureaucracy (by the need to set up multiple contracts, arrange the payments of millions of invoices etc). Neoliberals claim that the alternative – a single provider of health services working outside of the market – would be even less efficient, since it would stifle innovation. While this latter point may be true, it is undeniable that unit costs of healthcare in the UK have risen as the NHS has been pushed further into the marketplace.

That issue of innovation is problematic, and has become something of a fetish. Technology often develops outside the marketplace so that, for example, medicines are invented for illnesses which do not exist and which have to be invented. Or, to take a more straightforward example, labour-saving technologies may be developed which lead to mass unemployment. This would not in itself be a problem for neoliberal theorists, but there is, as Harvey says, “an inner connection between technological dynamism, instability, dissolution of social solidarities, environmental degradation, deindustrialisation, rapid shifts in time-space relations, speculative bubbles, and the general tendency towards crisis formation within capitalism.”

These are economic contradictions.

WHAT WE CAN AND CANNOT DO

But the central contradiction is political. “While individuals are supposedly free to choose,” writes Harvey, “they are not supposed to choose to construct strong collective institutions ... they most certainly should not choose to associate to create political parties with the aim of forcing the state to intervene in or eliminate the market.” One of the propaganda coups of neoliberalism (and the failures of Trade Unions) has been to convince workers that, by dissolving their collective power, they will each be freer. However spurious the claim, workers have been bullied when they have come together.

And yet, coming together is precisely what the elite have done, via institutional and financial means. The IMF found its feet when Mexico ran into severe debt in the early 1980s, and since Mexico owed lots of money to US banks, Treasury Secretary James Baker used the collective institution of the IMF to impose structural adjustment to protect Wall Street from default. The same thing is happening now in Greece, Ireland and – potentially – the other PIIGS, and it is the citizens of those countries who will pay.

This is not to mention the power of corporate lobbyists. Are they in nature any different from Trade Unions? No – except that they are allowed to pool their resources to bid for assistance or benefits, whereas the rest of are not. We see the effects of special interest groups nowhere more clearly than in the NHS. The links between Arthur Anderson and the Labour government are well-documented – the former convinced the latter to proceed with this policy whereby “the state assumes much of the risk while the private sector takes most of the profits.” Indeed, people like Patricia Hewitt were actors on both sides of the revolving door.

ARE WE ALL BOUND BY NEOLIBERALISM?

We have a paradox. We are all constrained by the requirements of neoliberal ideology. We must be actors in the marketplace; we must take responsibility for what we do there; we must make the most of our opportunities. But some are more duty-bound than others. Indeed, it seems the neoliberals are the only ones who can rip up the rulebook when it suits them. Harvey cites George W Bush, who “advocates free markets and free trade but imposed steel tariffs in order to bolster his electoral chances.” And that “credits are arbitrarily extended from one state to another in order to gain political access and influence in geopolitically sensitive regions (such as the Middle East).”

More blatantly, advanced economies protect their institutions, refusing to let the market determine success or failure. As we have seen, the role of the IMF and World Bank – said to be guarantors of free markets – is really “to protect the world’s main financial institutions from the threat of default ... Reckless investments should be punished by losses to the lender, but the state makes lenders largely immune to losses.” We have seen this again and again, in the savings and loans crisis of the 80s, the hedge fund crisis of the 90s, and the banking crisis of the 00s. Citizens are forced to bail out the very institutions over which they are denied any control. This must be the most prescient of neoliberalism’s contradictions. On the one hand, the economy must be run by financial elites; on the other, if the elites mess up, we must bear the cost. Or to put it another way, we must take responsibility for being healthy and successful, but out of control men in suits who gamble with our money need take no such responsibility – for we will always rescue them.

A WEAPON OF CLASS WAR

Whether or not actors must abide by neoliberalism depends on who will profit by their actions. Even if the concentration of wealth into the hands of the few was not the objective of neoliberalism, it is undeniable that this has been the result. And Harvey argues that this was the objective all along. During the so-called golden age of capitalism, income equalised a little, so that the top 1%’s share halved between the 1930s and 1960s. But when growth collapsed, so did the value of assets. In 1965, the top 1% owned more than 35% of assets. By the mid 1970s, this had dropped to 20%.

Neoliberalism reversed this trend sharply. Harvey cites the French economists Gerard Dumenil and Dominique Levy who have demonstrated that “neoliberalisation was from the very beginning a project to achieve the restoration of class power.” The figures are well-known, but no less shocking for that: “the top 0.1% of income earners in the US increased their share of the national income from 2% in 1978 to over 6% by 1999, while the ratio of the median compensation of workers to the salaries of CEOs increased from just over 30 to 1 in 1970 to nearly 500 to 1 by 2000.”

It is hard not to see neoliberalism as a deliberate, pragmatic policy to increase the wealth of the wealthy. Indeed, if its purpose was to iron out the kinks of capitalism, to promote competitive efficiency or revitalise global capital accumulation, it has resolutely failed. Neoliberal theory is, for the most part, a glossy justification for anything which bolsters the power and wealth of the elite. Far from being a dry economic doctrine of applied mathematics, it is in fact that most old-fashioned of things: class struggle.

I AM THE WRATH OF GOD

2011-06-26T19:22:00.001Z

THE CRATER IN FITZROVIA

2011-06-25T17:20:00.004Z

18 months ago, I wrote about two developments in London which appeared to have been nipped in the bud by the financial crisis. The first was Noho Square in Fitzrovia, the second the King’s Cross development. Looking back, my analysis was pretty wide of the mark. The King’s Cross site – now a warren of cranes and luminous yellow jackets – was always too big to fail. And my hopes for what might replace the upper class playground of Noho (“what becomes of these sites depends largely on people providing better alternatives”) were hopelessly naive.

For a while, there was a plan by locals to build a huge allotment on the site, but this never materialised. Next week, as reported by Tom Foot in the CNJ, a consortium of Kaupthing (the Icelandic bank which was nationalised in 2009, and which is the majority landowner), Aviva Investments and Exemplar (an asset management company) will unveil a new masterplan for the site. Those of us who thought that the first plan couldn’t get much worse may be in for a shock. The new proposals – a mixed-use site of retail, health and education facilities and residential – contain even less affordable housing than the original.

There is an interesting quote in Foot’s report which may explain why these proposals are being presented to the public now. A representative of Charlotte Street Association says:

“[The consortium] are in quite a hurry ... one of the problems is that government policy has changed and they no longer give housing grants. It means the gap that has to be funded by the developer is bigger ... But the economics have changed dramatically in their favour. They are paying £50 million less for the site. The property market has gone up significantly and construction costs are lower. There’s a lot of fat in that scheme.”

Hence the CNJ’s f’nar-f’nar headline: “Will hole make someone a mint?”

As an aside, there is a wonderful aerial photo of the site, with the listed chapel standing alone in the middle of the rubble.

It is reminiscent of the no-go areas on the East-West border in 1980s Berlin. Old buildings like this seem quite heroic in their cockroach-like resistance to market forces, and the fact they are often dwarfed by bigger, more grandiose buildings only adds to their quiet resilience. Walking through Victoria today, I was struck by a view of a typical old Westminster pub set against the towering black glass of office buildings.

It's a strange kink in the fabric of neoliberal economies: that, however economically unviable they may be, and however much it might be pragmatic to tear them down, these sort of buildings are not subject to the usual planning rules. Their continued existence is a small sign, perhaps, that deep down we know that speculative ventures are petty, dissolute and doomed to impermanence.

CHAVS

2011-06-01T20:24:00.002Z

Read this. Richard Seymour writes terrifically on how the "chav" fits into our "common sense" worldview that, when all is said and done, hard work pays and that we slot into the natural order of things according to our diligence and aptitude.

The 'Chavs' phenomenon condenses many of the themes of this savage creed. It charges poor people with getting ideas above their station, with being feckless and irresponsible with money, tasteless, stupid, drunk, thuggish, and barbaric. In the guise of lewd satire, celeb-bashing and tart social commentary, it gives us a hit of class hatred. It references, and caricatures, the outward signs of social problems such as poverty, alcoholism, bad education and so on, but does so in the manner of a taxonomising anthropologist or zoologist, naturalising these very signs as qualities of a particular social sub-species: here a 'pramface', there a 'Croydon facelift', and mark the Burberry and inauthentic branded wear. The 'chav' is a folk devil, the quasi-satirical subject of the last decade's repeated moral panics about the 'underclass': nightmare neighbours, feral youths, ASBO kids, and so on. It is the byproduct of a neoliberalised social democracy which, in its acceptance of 'free markets', low taxes, and the language of meritocracy, was unable to directly challenge the growing inequality that, as a consequence of the unimpeded operations of the market, reached new peaks under New Labour. And it was under New Labour, rather than under Thatcher or Major, that the meritocratic 'common sense' was effectively popularised. It was New Labour that shifted the ideological terrain to the right, arguing for right-wing ideas and communicating them far more effectively to popular audiences than the Tories ever could.

I post this partly in dedication to Simon Cowell who, on an episode of a talent show tonight, said to a group of young dancers called Abyss: "You know what I love about you guys? There's so much whinging in the world at the moment - but you guys are prepared to work hard to get to where you want to be" - or words to that effect. Cowell is rather like Cameron - put him in the right situation and he shows his true colours. (I've seen him before say to groups of young black men, it's so great that you are setting such a great example to your peers. What a fucker.)

CASTLEBECK SCANDAL

2011-06-01T19:49:00.002Z

Since the CQC has been so terribly emasculated, it was down to the BBC to uncover the truly shocking abuse that residents of the Winterbourne View private hospital in Bristol, owned by the Castlebeck group, suffered on a systematic basis. This expose alone is sufficient reason why we should all pay our licence fee.

Joe Casey, the undercover reporter for Panorama, writes how he felt covering the scandal here. From a personal point of view, the bit where he describes the dilemma of watching a person with learning disabilities being beaten and taunted, unable to intervene lest he blew his cover, is very troubling.

But from a political point of view, the questions he concludes with are ones that the we all need to ask:

The way we treat people like Simone and Simon is a measure of our common humanity. By that measure we have failed.

So where can the debate go now?

Do we need to pay higher wages to the people we hire to care for the vulnerable? Should support workers, like nurses, be listed on a national register? Should there be profit to be made in caring for these people? Should this be an industry or a public service?

THE HITCHCOCK OF LATE CAPITALISM

2011-05-30T15:43:00.002Z

Doesn’t every Adam Curtis documentary disprove the claim that postmodernism / late capitalism cannot be represented visually? It has often been assumed, since manufacturing industry is generally no longer very visible in the West, that the economy is now so ephemeral as to be impossible to portray artistically. It is easy (given the requisite talent) to make an ironworks or a steam train appear sublime; it’s not so easy to do the same with collaterised debt obligations or capital flows.

In fact, Curtis solves this problem via that old modernist technique: montage. Splicing together footage of deserted stock exchange floors or long, lingering shots of Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton’s courtship with images from nature, he evokes the permanently weird, alienating effects of living in the 21st century. He takes our everyday reality, skews it a little, juxtaposes its contradictions and absurdities and plays us back to us, so that we see it for what it is: not quite right.

One of the reasons we generally feel unsettled is that we often cannot see the connections between events that we know, deep down, must be linked. The way that capitalism shifts money from place to place, account to account, in order to make it work for the investor often is tortuously complicated. We know from Enron, and more recently from sub-prime mortgage lending, that books are often cooked to hide fraud or unsustainable risk. But despite the abundance of sophisticated financial tools, the way capitalism works is really very simple.

Whenever the capitalist system comes across something which acts as a block to maximising profit, it must get rid of it. In the early 1970s, capitalism came up against two blockages, one big and one less big. The big blockage was hyperinflation in the prices of primary products (especially oil from the Middle East); the smaller one was the strength of organised labour, which had negotiated a compromise with capital for better wages and conditions. As we know from British politics in the early 1970s, the public debate centred around unions: it was their belligerence that was impeding Britain’s productivity.

But in fact, the reasons for the slowdown in global profits had little or nothing to do with unions. They could be found in the Middle East, where oil exporters improved their hand in the Arab-Israeli conflict by restricting supply and raising prices, and Vietnam, where the US had massively over-stretched itself and had run up a huge trade deficit. Unable to balance its budget, the US allowed the value of the dollar to be unfixed from gold, and the value of all currencies thus became determined by the market. In this period (early to mid seventies), all the major currencies of the world experienced galloping inflation – i.e. they lost value fast. This inflation (which in several Western countries, including Britain, was accompanied by stagnating growth) was blamed on workers’ pay rises, whereas in fact it was due to the opening currency values up to the money markets.

After the Bretton Woods agreement collapsed, the rules of balanced budgets no longer applied. During the 80s and 90s, the US could run up deficits as recklessly as it liked, which indeed it did. Having spotted openings in South East Asia, capital flowed at breakneck speed to develop markets where the cost of production would be cheaper than in the West. By the mid to late 90s, it became clear that too much capital was being invested into the Thai economy, and that its emerging export and weak domestic consumer markets couldn’t respond quickly enough. Investors panicked and withdrew their money. In a classic cycle of debt deflation, prices collapsed, firms went bankrupt, profit margins shrunk, unemployment soared and confidence in the South East Asian economy evaporated. The collapse of the baht spread to other Asian economies, which in turn decreased demand in those economies for primary products from Japan, which had struggled with its own overinvestment crisis for a decade already.

This is where Curtis picks up the story. The IMF offered to bail out the Asian economies, on the condition that they turned themselves into neoliberal economies – i.e. reduce state spending (on infrastructure, welfare etc) and open themselves up entirely to the free market. In other words, they must adopt the very model which had swallowed them up and spat them out. This worked in Thailand, but in Indonesia the dictator-President General Suharto refused to accede to the IMF’s demands. In order to generate a return on investment, US capital depended on temperate economic conditions in Indonesia, and Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin decided there was no alternative but to force Suharto from power.

Curtis intersperses a self-justifying interview with Rubin – who sat on the Boards of Goldman Sachs and Citigroup immediately before and after he became responsible for the US’s financial and monetary policies – with reports of the collapse of Indonesian political and economic life. Rubin repeatedly defends his actions by claiming to act in the interests of the “global economy” – but by global economy, he means the holders of capital, those few, wealthy people who hoped to get wealthier by restructuring Third World economies into profit machines.

Suharto gave in and the IMF agreed to the bail-out loans. But almost instantly, the Indonesian currency collapsed, losing 80% of its value. The same happened in Thailand and South Korea. Why did this happen? Why did huge injections of capital fail to stabilise these tottering economies? Because, as Curtis explains, the money that was paid into Indonesian and Thai and South Korean banks was immediately used to pay back the loans of Western lenders. The loans were never intended to help the countries, only to compensate the American financiers who had over-invested their capital into countries without the stability to withstand such rapid injections. The result was that these countries never saw the IMF loans, their economies collapsed, and their taxpayers were still faced with massive debts to pay back.

This is what I mean by the simplicity of capitalism. The need for capital to remain profitable trumps everything else. In the mid-90s, US capital came across the biggest blockage of all – it was locked into economies which were too fragile to generate a return. Whatever the human cost, however immoral the notion of the richest people in the world being bailed out by the poorest, this capital had to be set free. Curtis clarifies this situation beautifully (and by putting aerial images of Citigroup office-blocks side by side with street protests in Jakarta, ironically too) by finding a way into the story.

From the way that Curtis tells the story of globalisation (or, in The power of nightmares, of neoconservatism and Islamic fundamentalism), it is clear that he doesn’t believe neoliberalism was caused by the novels of Ayn Rand. This is a MacGuffin (in Lacanian terms we might call it the objet petit a): an otherwise unimportant device which nevertheless brings together a cast of characters and allows the viewer to find a way into the story. It may be true that dot com capitalists loved the books of Ayn Rand, or that Alan Greenspan was a friend of hers, but Curtis is careful not to blow her role out of proportion. But without drawing the story back to her, how else would you begin? 1997 has its causes in 1971; but 1971 has its roots in 1944 (the Bretton Woods conference), which in turn responded to the crisis of 1929 and even the October Revolution in 1917. A strict documentary might have begun in any of these places, but Curtis’s films are thrillers as well as documentaries. They rely on strange parallels and moments of tension.

Roll on episode 2.

THREE STATIONS

2011-05-30T11:39:00.005Z

HELSINKI (from Tom Gardner's Flickr account)

LEIPZIG

STUTTGART

500-UP

2011-05-17T20:30:00.003Z

Before I started this blog, I wrote a couple of fragments for my good friend Snowball's blog - slight, ill-informed snippets on Latin American history. I was travelling in Argentina and Paraguay at the time, and I felt rather mixed-up inside. On the face of it, I was unhappy because someone I'd met in Buenos Aires had ditched me, but actually I was embarking on a painful-but-fruitful year of re-discovery. Step 1 on the road to recovery was immersing myself in Kate Bush's Aerial as I travelled.

A few months later, in early 2006, I started this blog (not that you'd wish to, but some of the baffling / baffled reactions to this painful-but-fruitful year make up its first dozen or so posts). Five years later, I have reached a milestone. For this, dear reader, is my 500th post. And waddya know, Kate Bush has got another record out!

I have only listened to it once. I'm not a big fan of either The sensual world or Red Shoes - the former suffers from horrible production, the latter from a paucity of decent songs. Consequently, the beefed-up re-makes of SW's (and she does pick that album's highlights) glitter, where as with RS, well, you know that expression about polishing a turd.

The most radical re-make is of "This woman's work" - RBG found the word for it last night: amniotic. It evades the melody of the original, and Bush's voice is very different (blurred and deeper), but it does make a mockery of the criticism, "what's the point?". Even so, you can't help but compare the two. I have, and I'm not sure of my conclusion yet.

Here are both versions:

BIG SOCIETY

2011-05-10T20:32:00.002Z

"A 'sincere' believer in the official Socialist ideology was potentially much more dangerous than the cynic: he was already one step from dissidence. There was the fundamental paradox of ex-Yugoslav self-management Socialism: the official ideology exhorted people all the time to participate actively in the process of self-management, to master the conditions of their life outside the 'alienated' Party and state structures; the official media deplored people's indifference, escape into privacy, and so on - however, it was precisely such an event, a truly self-managed articulation and organisation of people's interests, which the regime feared most. A whole series of markers delivered, between the lines, the injunction that such official exhortation was not be taken too literally, that a cynical attitude towards the official ideology was what the regime really wanted - the greatest catastrophe for the regime would have been for its own ideology to be taken seriously, and realised by its subjects."

Slavoj Zizek, Did somebody say totalitarianism?, 2001

A HISTORY OF THE WORKING CLASS MOVEMENT IN IPSWICH - I

2011-05-02T22:02:00.002Z

Last Monday, I spent the day at Ipswich Records Office reading a book by my great-grandfather, Robert Ratcliffe. Entitled A history of the working class movement in Ipswich, it is the foremost book on the subject, although it has never been published. As I have mentioned previously, Bob was on the railways all his working life, was a leading trade unionist, and was elected on a number of occasions as Labour Councillor for several wards in Ipswich. He joined the Ipswich branch of the Independent Labour Party in 1912; the Ipswich Labour Party in 1930; was elected to Council in 1932; was twice elected Chair of the Welfare Committee; was Mayor of Ipswich in 1957-58; and retired from the Council in 1964.

He wrote the book, which is in four volumes, through the 1940s, 50s and 60s. Each volume covers the following dates: to the end of the nineteenth century (I), 1900-1918 (II), 1918-1926 (III); 1926-1935 (IV). What follows are the notes that I took, almost entirely limited to Volume I. They are rough notes, and of course lack the narrative flow of Bob’s book. They are for my own benefit as much as anything, so I hope you’ll forgive me the indulgence of posting them here.

*

Combination Laws 1799-1825 – outlawed assemblies of workers, caused depression in wages. “Midnight meetings in open fields” etc. Meeting in The Sailors pub, 1824: “sailors in Ipswich came together to demand an increase in wages; the bailiff banned their mode of assembly but said he would present their petition to the shipowners and merchants.” The dispute was thus settled.

1825 – Combination Laws repealed.

17 December 1812. Meeting in Town Hall to discuss the plight of the poor. Town clerk recommended a town fund, rather than leaving it to individual parishes. A fund was raised, but poverty increased. Rise of the Luddites – 1815 destruction of threshing machines at Gosbeck. 1816 protest at Norton against low wages. Other Luddish incidents at Bury, Diss, Laxfield, Stowmarket.

22 June 1819. Robert Owen addressed a gathering at the Freemasons Hall in Ipswich.

1807. Creation of voluntary schemes to support elderly, and then younger, women, including mothers. Long waiting lists.

1824. First Unions in Ipswich. Shipwrights Provident Union Society & Benevolent Sawyers Society. On their second anniversary, members assembled as follows on the Cornhill:

• One of the Trade on horseback with a model of an axe handsomely gilded.
• Two Union Jacks and a band.
• A purple banner.
• The Shipwrights’ arms motto “union of sentiment is the strength of society” with the inscription “Shipwrights Provident Union Society 1824”.

"A grand procession".

1830. Cobbett visited East Anglia; addressed meetings in Ipswich on “the evils of national debt and church property, and complained bitterly against the government who had spent over £2m to disband the Hanoverian officers.”

6 December 1830. Meeting arranged on Rushmere Heath to protest against church tithes. Concerned magistrates advised labourers against attending: “desperate and depraved characters make it their business to invite men to assemble for illegal purposes who, in the end, leave them to ruin.” But the meeting proceeded in an orderly manner.

9 December 1835. Meeting of working class in Ipswich Arms in support of the Six Men of Dorset.

“In spite of the law against conspiracy, men united for defensive purposes; local unions, craft and sectional, came into being, and were as common as blackberries, some lasting about as long.”

1837 General Election – Ipswich results:

• Gibson (Tory) – 601
• Tufnell (Reformist) – 595
• Watson (Reformist) – 593
• Kelly (Tory) – 593

Tufnell unseated for corruption in ’38 and replaced by Kelly! Eventually both Tories were also unseated for corruption.

Late 1837. Definite formation of Ipswich Working Men’s Association. “The Association adopted the Charter which advocated all voting by ballot, short parliaments, and universal suffrage.” Rural people also involved. August 1838 – big meeting in the Town Hall.

15 September 1838. Report in the Times of a meeting in Colchester. “These vagabond orators do not like work but that of agitation ... the wildest nonsense was uttered ... among the things it was suggested that the working classes might obtain all they demanded by simultaneously ceasing to work ... what must be the consequence? ... a famine, or rivers of blood ... The rich and the poor are mutually dependent on each other ... in a free country like this, there are perpetual changes of condition; the sun of today, which shines on the poor man, may tomorrow rise to gladden him as one of the rich.”

Working Men’s Association superseded by Ipswich Chartists. Did not contest elections in 1841 or 1842 (which was caused by the unseating of two Liberal MPs for bribery). Further by-election in 1842 (more bribery) saw Harry Vincent (Chartist) coming close 4th with 472 votes. Vincent was well-known and had an election song:

The time has arrived when freedom’s voice shall ring
To fling from our services the foes of the King.
The choice of the people, tis plainly clear
Is Vincent the brave, with a conscience so fair.
...Then hurrah one and all, rush away to the poll
And return the man who’s not tempted by gold.

During the following years, Vincent addressed packing meetings on Cornhill / Theatre. 1847 election: Vincent again 4th, but with 546 votes.

Chartist meetings widely attended until April 1848. Little political activity for a while thereafter. Also meetings opposing slavery.

15 June 1846. “Eastern Union Railway, the first railway to reach Ipswich, was opened to the public ... the station was situated where the present loco department now is in Croft St.” Tunnel dug through Stoke Hill – poor working conditions. 6 April 1846 – poor weather meant men assembled on Cornhill. Protested against low wages etc. Fear of violence meant shops were closed, police called.

1846. Successful strike action at foundry. Unsuccessful strike a year later. 1852 – strikes at Ransomes and May.

Post-1825. Formation of trade unions, especially 50s and 60s. Various petitions for increases in wages: agricultural workers, coal porters (’53), shipwrights (’55). 100 seamen met at the Steam Packet Inn on Duke St in 1853 to establish a society, which quickly grew and gained negotiating power. 1860 Building Dispute over the length of the working day. Also, 1860 – Mayor’s fund to alleviate poverty and unemployment by getting them back to work (“the general conditions of the workers were very low and poverty was very acute ... the Mayor’s appeal eased the position bu little, for it did not deal with the causes of the trouble”).

1862. Establishment of a Working Man’s College “in a room at the Town Hall ... Dr Christian, who was a lecturer on science, became the principle, and with the help of Dr GS Elliston, the Medical Officer of Health, and a few others, the college soon caught on and became a going concern. Lecturers were arranged and scholarships for students offered. All this for ½ d per week ... later on moved to premises in Tower St.” “By 1865, the College had 1000 books and this number was added to by Mr Read who presented 100 more ... the College lasted for several years ... later on, it lacked new entrants and in the end disbanded.”

1865. St Helen’s & St Clement’s Working Men’s Clubs.

Further strikes: builders (’65), painters (’66), shipwrights (’73) etc. Not very successful on the whole.

1872. The Nine Hour Movement – appeal from carpenters, bricklayers, labourers to the Master Builders for a half-day on Saturday . The Master Builders refused, the men came out on strike on 4 May – over 100 in all. The Master Builders offered a ½ d per hour advance, but no change in hours (financially this represented a better deal than the half-day). Master Builders threatened a lockout in case of the men not returning to work. But the pickets went on. Strike committee met daily at 33 St Matthews St. Eventually settled by arbitration, where the men got the half-day and were awarded extra rates for overtime. Significant, as this was an assembly of different types of trades.

April 1874. The Great Agricultural lock-out. Agricultural Labourers Union asked for increase from 13 to 14 shillings per hour for a 54-hour week. Farmers responded with a lock-out. Spread across Eastern and Midlands counties. 500 men on the Ipswich strike funds; open-air meeting on 2 May. Collection boxes handed round on the Old Cattle Market. Farmers set up their own Farmers Defence Association and a scab organisation. “The struggle ended in July after the union had spent £21,365 in strike pay. Several farmers refused to take men back, others were dismissed. Grass replaced grain over hundreds of thousands of acres, and the demand for agricultural labour fell off. So bad were the conditions that many emigrated to the Colonies. It is recorded that in one week seventy persons left Suffolk for Canada. It was often the painful duty of Mr Arch [secretary of Agricultural Labourers Union] to advise the men to accept lower wages. This lockout almost broke up the nation.”

1875. Formation of Ipswich Representation League. Contested by-election following death of Tory MP Cobbold. Their candidate: William Newton from Stepney. Election attracted national interest as it was one of the first to follow the Secret Ballot Act of 1872. Election on 1 January 1876: Con 2213, Lab 1607.

(“Tailoring, one of the oldest known trades, was first introduced by Adam and Eve, although we do not know what kind of needles they used, whether they were “between” or “shapes”!”)

1876 Dock Dispute. “No organisation existed to assist the dock-workers; they had to strike the best bargain they could on the spot.”

1884. The first Trades Council for Ipswich. W.E. Wingate [another of my great-grandfathers was 23rd President; R. Ratcliffe the 21st. [The last chapter of Volume I is dedicated to its first 25 years]

*

More to follow...

CONCEALMENT

2011-05-02T16:51:00.008Z

Paul Graham’s photographs, particularly his pictures of Britain in the 1980s, are empty of what we would usually call events. Like Patrick Keiller’s lingering shots, they present landscapes and people in an unpolished, unspectacular light.

The photographs which make up A1 – the great north road are in deep contrast to “on the road” sequences like Robert Frank’s The Americans. Frank’s photos appear to show momentary bursts of activity or revelation, as though he had sat through hours of nothingness in order to capture his own brilliant moment. They create an alternative reality which may have little to do with the scenes which they purport to convey. We think of them now as showing the myth of Americana, but we forget that they played an important role in creating that myth.

Graham’s photos, on the other hand, show those hours of nothingness. Indeed, they show more than hours; what we see is not just the Britain of 1981, but the history which has made the Britain of 1981. It acknowledges that Britain is inseparable from its history, but it also shows it at (what we now know is) a pivotal moment in time.

The series follows the route of the A1 northwards, from the City of London up to Edinburgh. So we inevitably begin outside the solid stone walls of the bank, with two young upstarts smiling over a piece of paper and an unseeing woman passing them, a little out-of-focus.

We barely recognise them as humans, but then nor do they recognise us. They are inextricably linked with what they do, with a system of money-making which keeps us at arm’s length. Coming first in the series, we might expect this photo to set the scene, but in fact it is quite out of kilter with the rest of the series. It is more like one of Frank’s photos, in that it captures a moment which then becomes an emblem of what we associate with the City (the point of which, lest we forget, is its resistance to being seized in an image).

A half-hour drive up the A1, and we see another woman. She stands waiting for a bus at Mill Hill in north-west London. The wind reddens her face and blows back her jacket, and her hands, plunged into pockets, clutch her hips. She looks straight at us, and however we interpret her expression, she sees us.

There is no romanticism or mythology here. The photograph speaks for itself and without making any assumptions of the subject, it suggests a way of life. The photograph of the bankers is dated, but this one is not. The graffiti (KGB / PUNKS) may have changed, perhaps the flyovers have collapsed, but the subject matter and the composition still speak to us.

As we drive further north, we see the people who maintain the circulation of goods around the United Kingdom: the truck-drivers, and the service station attendants who keep them fed on bacon sandwiches, ketchup, strong cups of tea. In the corner of a motel room sits a bright red bible on a white bedside cabinet. In another extraordinary picture, a sign saying “hotel” stands in the middle of a burning field. Was there a hotel here once? Are those Gideon bibles going up in flames?

Graham’s other projects during the 1980s speak of more explicit themes: recession and the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Although these photos share the documentary effect of the A1 photos, what is interesting about them is that they could never have appeared alongside newspaper reports of the day.

The pictures in Beyond caring of DHSS offices show people staring defeat in the face, or people who long ago accepted that society had defeated them. Taken from floor-level, you can almost step into the realities which these photos depict. You can smell the stale cigarette butts that litter the floor; you can read the cheerily helpful notices on the wall that give the lie to the hopelessness of unemployment. Children and pushchairs are present in virtually every scene. Those children are in their late twenties now. The younger men and women are approaching retirement. The older ones are probably dead. The social security offices have since been closed down, or spruced up and sub-contracted to the private sector. But despite these cosmetic improvements, the mood within will not have changed. But no newspaper photographer would dare (or be allowed) to step inside, and so the subjects of these photos are reduced to statistics.

Troubled land is the last series in Graham’s 1980s trilogy, and the most strikingly different. There are no people in the foregrounds of these photos, nobody looking back at you. With their huge blue skies and terraced houses, they are disarmingly passive, normal and disquieting at the same time. Unlike most war photography, an image like “Roundabout, Andersontown, Belfast, 1984” (above) does not record a sudden moment of agony. Whereas many war photographs only show what is happening “right now” (and can therefore make it difficult to work out what happened a moment ago, or a year ago, or what will happen as a result of this event), “Roundabout” is more like a moving picture. Wondering what could be “wrong” about an apparently normal scene, our eyes wander through the image and gradually pick up clues: the “P.I.R.A.” graffiti on the railing, the rubble on the roundabout, the street-lamps craning like birds without their bulbs and with election posters stuck to their necks. Then we see a soldier on the left-hand side running to catch up his colleague who is further down the road. A man walks by with a dog, pretending not to notice what is going on around him.

In an essay on war photography, John Berger writes: “The image seized by the camera is doubly violent and both violences reinforce the same contrast: the contrast between the photographed moment and all others.” Paul Graham’s photographs of conflict, whether geographical, economic, political, etc, blur this contrast. They bring us closer to those who were there in that situation. By not capturing what we would usually think of as the moment of violence, they stretch time and make the image linger in our minds. Keeping one’s distance from the horrors that we see thus becomes impossible.

Paul Graham: Photographs 1981-2006 is at Whitechapel Gallery until 19 June 2011. Admission is free.

BALL THE WALL

2011-04-19T19:57:00.003Z

He was brash, fast, bombastic, a sort of prototype Mohammed Ali ('I'm just the same as ever - loud, electrifying, and full of personal magnetism'), and right through the middle fifties he was second only to Elvis. Most of his records sold a million each: 'Long tall sally,' 'Lucille,' 'The girl can't help it,' 'Keep a knocking,' 'Baby face'. They all sounded roughly the same: tuneless, lyricless, pre-neanderthal. There was a tenor sax solo in the middle somewhere and a constant smashed-up piano and Little Richard himself screaming his head off. Individually, the records didn't mean much. They were small episodes in one unending scream and only made sense when you put them all together.

'I used to lose half my audience right at the start, when I came up screaming out of my coffin,' he said. 'They used to run screaming down the aisles and half kill themselves scrambling out of the exits. I couldn't stop them. In the end I had to hire some boys to sit up in the gallery with a supply of shrivelled-up elastic bands, and when the audience started running, my boys would drop the elastic bands onto their heads and whisper 'Worms'.

Long-time Rock fans have always been bitterly divided about him. He wasn't a hard core rocker, being too gentle and melodic, and this eccentricity can be construed either as back-sliding or as progression. Even ten years after his death, it isn't an academic question; I have seen Rock preservation meetings reduced to brawling knuckle-dusted anarchy about it. On the wall of a pub lavatory in Gateshead, there is a scrawled legend: 'Buddy Holly lives and rocks in Tijuana, Mexico'.

Eddie Cochran was pure Rock. Other people were other kinds of Rock, country or highschool, hard, soft, good or bad or indifferent. Eddie Cochran was just Rock. Nothing else. That's it and that's all.

NHS PLC

2011-04-17T14:29:00.004Z

A wag has imagined how Andrew Lansley's NHS bill might be presented if it was a proposal for research:

As there is no overwhelming evidence in support of the proposed changes to the NHS as detailed in the governments' recent white paper, ethically the proposed changes can only take place in the form of a trial. I ask you to consider favourably the following study proposal which I submit without permission on behalf of the UK government.

Title: Reorganisation of the NHS in England

Background: The National Health Service in is its 63rd year. It is suffering the same demographic and technological challenges as all high income countries, specifically ageing of the population and increasingly expensive new technologies. These are major problems that we seek to address.

We also have concerns about outcomes in the NHS when compared with other countries. France spends more on healthcare than the UK, has fewer deaths from heart attacks than the UK, and will shortly be overtaken by the UK in this mortality measure. We determine from this observation that the UK healthcare system is not delivering as much as it should and must change, but not to be like France in funding or structure, and hopefully not in the trend in heart attack deaths. We do not consider this to be an ecological fallacy, and we do not consider any other differences between the populations of France and England.

Study design: Immediate full scale roll out without control or comparison group.

What this study adds to the current evidence: We offer no global, systematic appraisal of current evidence, and take no account of quality of evidence. As lawmakers evidence in the legal sense is our primary concern: oral and written statements from individuals and organisations, and we do not distinguish this from higher quality evidence. We are confident that this study will accrue a substantial body of similar (grade 5) non-evidence with which to inform future reorganisations.

Study population: The entire population of England, of all ages, is served by the NHS, with the exception of the most wealthy, who will be exempt.

Interventions: 1. A market based healthcare system; open to all willing providers. 2. GP based commissioning and the closure of primary care trusts. 3. Transfer of public health to local authorities. 4. Providers that cannot generate enough profit will close, whereas those making the largest profits will succeed, irrespective of the clinical performance. Taxpayer funding will continue, allowing successful firms to become a conduit of money from the many to the few.

Comparison group: None

Outcomes: No a priory health outcomes are specified, although multiple testing, case studies and post hoc analyses are planned by all political parties for election purposes and generation of low grade evidence.

Ethical considerations: No ethical approval has been sought. We acknowledge the risk associated with changing the health service, and are aware that small changes in important health outcomes can cause or prevent thousands of deaths. As we are certain that our approach is correct, we have no stopping criteria.

Consent: Population level consent sought and an election almost won on the basis of: "No top down reorganisation of the NHS". No consent sought on the specific interventions.

Costing: Estimated £1Bn to £3Bn, with potential future savings. Taxpayers are the sole funders.

Potential conflicts of interest: None declared although newspapers report the secretary of state for health has received £21,000 from the chairman of Care UK to fund his personal office.

Thank you for consideration of our proposal.

josephlee@doctors.org.uk

Dr Lee's tongue-in-cheek summary of Lansley's Health & Social Care Bill is right on the money. For all the Department of Health's talk of evidence-based medicine, no evidence has been offered to back up what is effectively the privatisation of the NHS. A few random, decontextualised and sometimes woefully out-of-date statistics about the UK's mortality rates in some areas than other Western societies have been cynically forwarded to justify full marketisation of the health service.

The NHS, we are told, simply cannot stay the way it is. Reform is essential, and this much at least is true. To meet rising demand, arising from the ageing population and higher expectations from patients, the NHS must adapt and grow. But if the DH chose to look at the evidence (in other words, if it chose not to be so blindly ideological), it would discover that opening the NHS up to the market increases the risks of poorer patient outcomes and higher costs.

A report from the grand dame of health economics, Allyson Pollock, and David Price dissects the legislation with clinical precision. It spells out the following headlines:

- while the public will continue to fund the NHS through taxation, there will be no accountability for how this money is spent. Health services will be commissioned by general practitioners, often via private companies, and provided by independent Foundation Trusts. The direct line of accountability to the secretary of state (and hence to us, the people who pay for and own the health service) will be cut.

- GP consortia, which will commission for their local areas, have the power to decide which health services they wish to purchase, and for whom. The duty to provide comprehensive healthcare will no longer apply.

- This creates a risk that some people - especially "expensive patients" with chronically poor health, or those who cannot pay - may not be covered by the health service. A "safety net" in the legislation states that these people will fall under the "provider of last resort," i.e. the Local Authority. Local Authorities, unlike the NHS, charge for services on the basis of means-testing.

- The power to charge for some health services (e.g. prescriptions) currently lies with the secretary of state. Under the proposals, this power will pass to consortia. Consortia has been given a general power (under section 7, part 2h) to charge for services, and the limits placed on hospitals on the proportion of private patients they can take on will be removed.

- Funding will be allocated to individual consortia on the basis of aggregated patient lists. Given that practices will be able to compete for patients, it follows that some consortia will be left with a less attractive and efficient group of patients. In mitigation, consortia can pool a portion of their budgets in order to share risk; however, the costs of administering such an arrangement is high, and not guaranteed to solve the problem.

- The legislation encourages the opening out of healthcare commissioning and provision to "any willing provider". Commissioning budgets are unlikely to be controlled directly by GPs, but by private corporations. Clinical decisions and referrals will become increasingly influenced by corporate business plans, most notably the need to deliver a profit to shareholders. Similarly, healthcare providers (particularly hospitals) will become independent of the NHS, and they will be regulated on the basis of promoting competition, not patient care.

- If commissioners and providers are allowed - nay, encouraged - to drift away from the NHS, what will be left of the NHS? Nothing more than a brand name, a mechanism for passing our money into the hands of corporate providers.

The RCN's overwhelming vote of no-confidence in Andrew Lansley this week marks the Government's lowest point to date. The Government has announced it will "pause" and "reflect", claiming that it has failed to effectively communicate its message. This is nonsense. Doctors, nurses and patients are quite clear about what this legislation means. It's just that until now, the media has turned a blind eye or failed to analyse the Bill's implications. Cameron's immigration speech on Thursday aimed - rather successfully as it turned out - to deflect attention away from the Government's woes.

But with the majority of doctors and nurses opposed to Lansley's proposals, and the public now starting to pick up on them, the storm is unlikely to die down. Lansley will probably have to go, if only so that Cameron (who, unlike Lansley, clearly has no understanding of the NHS and has looked very out of his depth in the last week) can regain control. It has become the new pub game: what will be the Coalition's poll tax moment? Last week, the privatisation of the NHS took poll position.

VERDAMMT DAZU, EWIG ZU WERDEN, NIEMALS ZU SEIN

2011-04-10T16:24:00.015Z

We returned over a fortnight ago, but I’m still a bit stuck for conclusions about Berlin. We all know more about the recent history of this capital city than any other (and if there’s anything you need to brush up on, every Berlin street corner has a helpful noticeboard or diagram to explain what happened, when and where), which makes it difficult to experience Berlin in the here-and-now. Wherever you stand, you feel compelled to think “what did this place look like in 1989?” or “am I in East Berlin or West Berlin?” It wears its history with some pride (we came through all this and survived), but you wonder if Berliners view it as something of a millstone round their neck. As someone who cannot get enough side-by-side, then-and-now photos of urban life, I guess I found Berlin seductive but resistable.

Maybe I’ll post more substantially in due course, maybe not, but in the meantime, here is a little photobook of highlights.

Each day, the Raspberry and I left our flat armed with itineraries and lists of buildings to look at. I’ll get onto the buildings later (many of them left me rather cold), but this one called out to me from nowhere. It’s near the Hackescher Market and I still don’t get it – how did that rather classical looking collonadey thing get to be cut out of an International Style curved corner? I can’t find anything on the internet, and it’s probably not really important, but it intrigued/s me.

Norman Foster’s dome was closed, so we didn’t go into the Reichstag. The Platz der Republik felt a bit like a festival, but without the beer and homegrown – the architecture obviously has the same effect of dulling the senses.

The Holocaust Memorial doesn’t quite work. But how could it ever work? And what do we even mean by “work”? It is composed of thousands of ‘stelae’ – columns which traditionally commemorate the dead via long inscriptions. Each of the Holocaust Memorial’s stelae is blank – actually more than just blank, smooth and bland and hard-edged. Its opponents have criticised it for not mentioning the dead by name. But a memorial to the victims of the Holocaust must surely recognise that the Holocaust was more than just a genocide against individuals – it was the attempt to annihilate an entire race. The Nazis destroyed the records of many of their victims, so complete list of people killed exists. Its architect, Peter Eisenman, wanted visitors to feel the disorientation felt by the jews during the Holocaust – on this basis, it plainly fails. Maybe it fails for the same reason some of Berlin’s modernist architecture fails – it has the cool air of being slightly too pleased with itself. Shortly after it opened, Easyjet notoriously filmed a fashion shoot there for their inflight magazine. Some people are also upset by the opportunities it affords for clambering, for jumping from column to column, or for playing hide and seek. There’s no doubt – it does encourage playfulness. This disturbs us, but we can also see that it is irresistible. It reminds me of a Zizek passage where he talks about cinematic portrayals of the Holocaust. After considering Schindler’s List and Life is Beautiful, he concludes that the Italian farce Pasqualino Settebellezze (“Seven Beauties”) is the most apt...

Anhalter Bahnhof was, in the time of Bismarck, the largest railway terminal in Continental Europe, linking Berlin to Frankfurt, Munich, Dresden, Prague, Vienna and Italy. Like St Pancras, it had a grand hotel attached to it (the Excelsior) via an underground tunnel; and like St Pancras, it was an almighty piece of architecture, perhaps the most startling in scale that Berlin then possessed.

Under the Nazis, thousands of Jews began their journey to the death camps from Anhalter Bahnhof. The deportations continued until March 1945. Nevertheless, Speer’s plans for Germania did not include Anhalter Bahnhof, which he planned to turn into a massive swimming pool. In the end, the station, virtually destroyed by Allied bombs, clung on until 1960 when it was demolished, except for the facade which survives today next to an astroturf football pitch.

Karl and Friedrich have been temporarily moved from the middle of the park on Karl Liebknecht Strasse, and are currently sheltered under some linden trees, protected by metal fences. It’s difficult to tell whether they’re pleased with this development or not. Engels has that look of a man who is constantly put upon – it looks like frequently sweeps his hands through his hair in frustration.

This is an original Bruno Taut siedlung – the Wohnstadt Carl Legien in Prenzlauer Berg. Taut was Weimar Germany’s answer to Berthold Lubetkin – defending his opulent housing for working people, he said "we want to bring the lower levels of society higher." Carl Legien was the first chairman of the German equivalent of the TUC, and the flats named in his honour are quietly lovely: colourful and oriented to their copious back gardens. It occurred to us that it rather strange that decent, artistically designed housing for the masses becomes a tourist attraction. Maybe it’s not really a tourist attraction, but it seems sadly part of another world when today’s governments are not interested in providing their people with good, secure places to live.

An image from the East Side Gallery, the largest surviving portion of the wall, now covered with murals by artists from around the world. Ms Raspberry took this photo; I was in a mood that day.

Peter Behrens’ mighty turbine hall for AEG. More of this later.

Mies's Neue Nationalgalerie, with a reflection of the state library (the latter a far superior building to my mind than the former).

NEUE NATIONALGALERIE

2011-03-29T22:29:00.003Z

Post on our trip to Berlin to follow, but in the meantime here is an original review of Mies's Neue Nationalgalerie from the September 1969 issue of Domus magazine, part of what is now the Kulturforum. It was his swansong.

PUPPET TO THE MAN

2011-03-29T22:27:00.000Z

POSTSCRIPT

2011-03-28T19:55:00.002Z

Richard Osley, a journalist from the CNJ (an acronym that will need no spelling out for Londoners who live north of the Thames), has written two interesting posts about Saturday's demo.

The first is about the Labour Party's response to the march. This was certainly the first march I have been on (I'm 30) where Labour banners gave the streets a red glow - indeed, I can't recall a march in the last ten years at which a party member would have been seen dead. "Red flag after red flag showed the different branches of the party on parade: presumably this means a Robin Hood tax will be in the party’s next manifesto," suggests Richard. "We’ll see." I am sure that the scale of the march on Saturday will be keeping Ed Miliband up at night far more than it will disturb Cameron or Clegg. Labour, not untypically, are way behind the rest of us in this debate. It is good to have their support, at least in name, but there are few signs yet as to how they might use this movement to the advantage of the people they claim, still, to represent.

And the second refers to Miliband's comparison of this struggle with that of the Suffragettes, and rebuts the claim that the Suffragettes achieved their objectives through peaceful means alone. I wrote earlier that we should stop apologising for acts of violence against the property of the people who are the cause of these cuts - if the Suffragettes had simply turned up, chanted a few slogans, cheered on a Labour Party leader and then went home, we would not be talking about them today.

MARCH 26 PROTEST

2011-03-28T19:44:00.008Z

A march or demonstration that is reasonably well-attended can lull you into a false sense of security. I’ve been on plenty which, however well-organised, have hardly set the world on fire and, surrounded by people with the same unshakeable faith, I have come away feeling ever so slightly complacent. We came, we protested, we conquered, we went home with a fuzzy glow.

The fact that Saturday’s march against the Coalition’s cuts was so well-attended – and for half a million people to travel the length and breadth of the country in order to walk uncomfortably slowly in the drizzle is a really extraordinary thing – means such complacency is impossible. I did not go home with a fuzzy glow (though two and a half pints in the Shakespeare at Victoria afterwards did give me a fuzzy head). In fact, we stayed up until late worrying and deliberating about where this protest should go next – such is the massive opposition to the cuts, a general strike is an absolute minimum.

But any such conversation inevitably proceeds from opposing the cuts to opposing the whole structural framework of society. A long and sorry saga tells of how the global economy got into this current mess, but while the politicians and business people still desperately cry “business as usual,” I really think that most people who were marching on Saturday – and many people across the country and the world who did not march – were marching for a new society.

Even if people cannot yet articulate what that new society could look like (I’m not at all sure myself), most people know that it wouldn’t involve older people’s day centres being the price we have to pay to convince the financial markets that we are credit-worthy; nor would it involve a teenager selling his or her right to go to university by buying a pair of jeans from Topshop; now would it involve unemployed people being hounded into finding work, while workers from the public and private sector are thrown on the dole; and nor, most of all, would it look like ANYTHING resembling the Big Society.

One banner on Saturday summed up the mood that something big has got to change: “This is just SILLY”.

Finally, a word about those marchers who were, shall we say, not quite so well-behaved. First and foremost: they smashed the windows of a few branches of HSBC, they sat down in a few high-street stores whose owners refuse to pay their taxes, and they wrote “tax the rich” on the entrance to Fortnum and Mason’s. Really, if this is what you mean by evil (or fascism, as the Deputy London Mayor described it), you’ve led a very sheltered life. Secondly, it’s not good enough to dismiss this as the actions of a renegade minority: all the marchers shared a feeling of visceral anger, which some vented by creating wonderfully inventive banners, others by playing the Brazilian drums at full pelt, and others by throwing paint at the police. Far be it for me to predict which of these tactics will prove most effective. Thirdly, on Saturday (and at numerous demos recently) the violence can broadly be categorised as that against property (windows, cash machines, cars etc) and that against people. The perpetrators of the former are vilified, while the perpetrators of the latter (overwhelmingly the police) are portrayed as the victims. This says something very damning about the priorities of our ruling classes. And fourthly, I think we all need to stop apologising for the antics of others and stop worrying about how many middle Englanders they will upset. People have generally picked their sides already, and it is ours that is in the majority.

THE ALTERNATIVE

2011-03-19T22:29:00.003Z

Before I go to Berlin tomorrow, I'd like to invite you all to spend next Saturday with me, my wife, several of our friends and colleagues and hundreds of thousands of other people in the Hyde Park area of London.

This manifesto neatly sums up why we'll be there:

We stand for:

* The opportunity for everyone to access work, safely and for fair reward.
* Good jobs that give people fulfilment and a chance to develop.
* More green jobs and a more sustainable economy.
* Quality public services, available to everyone that needs them.
* A vibrant and democratic civil society, respecting human rights.

We won’t stand for:

* People being exploited at work, union members or not.
* Unfair employment practices and bad political decisions that encourage them.
* Greed, tax dodging and speculation that damage the productive economy.
* Inequality that traps people in poverty, debt and drudgery.
* Business models based on a race to the bottom on standards.

And as internationalists, we hold to these principles for people in other countries, as much as we do for those at home.

These are the foundations on which even the most basic civil society must stand, but they are being chipped away (or, in many cases, dynamited to the ground). So, sociable types that we are, we look forward to meeting you, you and definitely you there next Saturday.

MORE SOLOS

2011-03-13T13:04:00.002Z

Three more solos, then let's speak no more on the subject:

Holy moley - this is the shit. A variation on the solo-as-song, Merle sings a verse, plays a finger-pickin' solo, sings another verse, plays a Hawaiian-style slide solo, and so on until he's run out of styles. Proof that being a virtuoso doesn't have to be pretentious (or long - the whole thing is over and done with inside of three minutes).

I love this not just for Wyatt's incredible lyrics which make Dylan's original seem earthbound, or for the duelling solos at the end, or the murky riffs that run through it, but the fact that the lead guitarist on this unashamedly arty piece of rock is ... Paul Weller!

Does in 40 seconds what most groups would have spread over several albums: a hard rock jam with nine solos in total. McCartney's bars are the most technical, Harrison does his best Clapton impression, but it is Lennon's proto-grunge riffing which stands out.

GRASPING THE BULLET POINTS WITHOUT GRASPING THE ARGUMENT

2011-03-07T21:30:00.003Z

"People who cry out for change in the NHS always cry out against the past. They see only ugliness and failure, never success, and, like Simon Jenkins writing in the Guardian last month, they seem content to throw out the baby, the bathwater, the taps, along with the reservoir supplying the taps."

An interview with Kentish Town's very own Roy MacGregor, on the subject of the imminent death of the NHS.

SKELETONS IN THE CUPBOARD

2011-03-06T21:34:00.003Z

The greatest guitar solo of all time is, of course, the one Joe Cocker plays in his head while he sings “With a little help from my friends” at Woodstock. Strung out on acid at the festival to end all festivals, Cocker becomes the every-teenager in his bedroom, arching his shoulders, creasing up his face like the most clichéd of jazz-cats, his fingers lacing arpeggios over an imaginary fretboard. It is at the same time phallic and submissive – and anybody who has played air guitar knows what he is feeling. It is a deeply uncool thing, the guitar solo, an over-the-top pleasure which can only really be enjoyed alone.

Which leads me to some initial suggestions for the guitar solo meme. Most of them are played by dinosaurs: pale-faced, embarrassing creatures whose dirty monologues we prefer not to air in public. There are a few, also, whose company we can be proud to be seen. And your narrator (me) is, if I may say so, the archetypal guitar solo fan: the kind of person who makes up for his failure to master a solo of any kind by learning all about different makes of guitar and boring others with his knowledge.

What kind of solos are there? First, there is the solo which develops from the rhythm part so effortlessly that it is almost impossible to distinguish one from the other. The master of this is Robbie Robertson of the Band (“the only mathematical guitar genius I’ve run into who does not offend my intestinal nervousness with his rearguard sound,” said Bob Dylan). And in a similar vein, we must face two Oedipal challenges head on by learning to love the man all of our fathers got into when their collective musical taste began to wane (Mark Knopfler), and by delving into their own childhoods by hearing the genius chop/riff/solo fusion of Mick Green of the Pirates (“My babe” is not on Youtube, but is on Spotify).

Solo at 3'37".

Solo at 4'08".

Secondly, there are solos which are very much solos: searingly direct, shamelessly virtuoso, or simply (as in the cases of Lindsey Buckingham and Neil Young) tearing at the same string over and over again.

Extraordinarily dense, sharp solo from McCartney at 1'13".

Having played second fiddle (ha!) to a barrage of horns for most of this song, Jeff "Skunk" Baxter lets rip at 4'47" (holy-fuck!-moment-alert at 5'21")

It's really only for the sake of variety that a list such as this must feature guitarists other than Richard Thompson. Solo starts at 4'30", goes on for five minutes, never lets up.

Turn it down!! The moment David Gilmour begins his slow, howlingly loud solo at 3'06", you realise the rest of the song has merely been a warm-up to the this moment. Really gets going at 4'30".

Solo starts at 3'18".

Solo starts at 2'10".

Sometimes the solo turns into the song itself. There is nothing to "Maggot brain" or "Eruption" besides the solo - the former owes a deep debt to jazz, where the soloist steps forward to the front of the stage and the others take a back seat, except that in this case Eddie Hazel sounds like he's stepped into another world (I know that sounds like a cliche, but I mean it literally); the latter just makes me want to kiss everyone to thank them that I'm alive.

Solo starts at 3'20". Don't bother with the previous 3'19".

"The disgusting stink of a too-loud electric guitar - now that's my idea of a good time." From one of Zappa's many interminable albums, this is his greatest moment - pay attention from 2'40", but especially from 3'57" when he switches from Gibson to Fender Stratocaster.

And finally, there is the solo which isn't a solo at all, where shards of feedback pierce through the very of fibre of the song. In the first clip, Masami Tsuchiya solos at 1'30", but his breaks are all over this performance of "Art of parties" on the Old Grey Whistle Test (again!). The second clip, of King Crimson playing "Frame by frame" on OGWT (yet again!), effectively has three lead guitarists (if you count Tony Levin on the Fairlight Stick) - Fripp plays an exhausting acoustic guitar arpeggio, while Adrian Belew exorcises animal noises by whacking the headstock and yanking the whammy bar. All very technical, you might say, but jesus, what a sound.

PRETENTIOUS FACADE

2011-03-06T12:06:00.001Z

If Michael Gove were a building, he would leak. He would crack and crumble on faulty foundations. He would be windy, but also overheat. Behind a pretentious facade, he would be shoddy in design and execution.

'BOUT TIME...

2011-02-01T22:01:00.002Z

I have the good fortune to be married to an exceedingly talented writer. Frankly, the early days of our courtship were conducted through blogging. No, let me rephrase that. I fell in love with her in no small part because I loved reading her blog so much. That blog - Darling Vicarage, whose archives you can read here - has been sadly inactive for too long, but happily Ms Paddington (who, fittingly for a woman who has recently married*, has changed her name to Raspberry Beret Girl) is back with a new blog. You can read her thoughts on Black Swan (and I hope, in future, much more) here.

* I should like to point out that this view is not shared by the present writer.

CHILDREN OF THE REVOLUTION

2011-01-24T20:45:00.002Z

Following my earlier post about the longest strike in history, my good friend Alex has pointed me towards this: a documentary (made in the 70s, I think) about the Burston Strike School. It features interviews with the schoolchildren, including the strike leader Violet Potter. I especially like the toothy chap, who recalls the village's unofficial speaker shouting, "Stick, stick, stick the shit to the blanket!"

COBBETT REVISITED

2011-01-18T19:30:00.002Z

At home or abroad, whether it's students marching against fees or Tunisians overthrowing a dictatorship, when a crowd of angry people gathers and protests, we hear the same threats and accusations:

To speak of them, as the Times has done, as an organised rabble, easily beaten by the soldiers; and to say, that it may be desirable that the spirit should break out in all places at once, so that the trouble of subduing it may be the sooner over; to talk in this light and swaggering manner is calculated to swell disconent into rage and despair [... They can find no agitators. It is a movement of the people's own.

Twas ever thus. This is William Cobbett writing in 1812. Attitudes towards those who, dissatisfied with what their rulers offer them, come together to challenge them have altered little. Unions of whatever kind - but especially of workers - are viewed as conspiracies, as though a spontaneous and widespread desire for justice is simply impossible. The people (or so our politicians and commentators opine) would never wish for such things of their own accord: there must be somebody stirring them up.

Cobbett came to the conclusion that forming trade unions was not only necessary, but perfectly consistent with the ideology (then, as now) of economic individualism. This ideology rests upon the sanctity of private property. The liberty that allows a person to do what s/he will with that property reflects individual freedom in the broadest sense.

The principle upon which all property exists is this: that a man has a right to do with it that which he pleases. That he has a right to sell it, or to keep it. That he has a right to refuse to part with it at all; or, if he chooses to sell it, to insist upon any price that he chooses to demand: if this be not the case, a man has no property.

Anticipating Marx, Cobbett argues that the only property which workers possess is their own (capacity to) labour, and that this should, therefore, be subject to the same rights as other property.

That the law failed - and still fails - to apply property rights to labour is a contradiction, but a necessary one, for it papers over the central ideological and economic contradiction of the system. The law in an economically individualist - neoliberal, entrepreneurial, call it what you will - society cannot permit workers who own no property but their labour to unite in order to demand their price. Any argument about whether workers, when choosing whether or not to go on strike, should obey the law is based on a fallacy. They are, a priori, outside of the law, and must act accordingly.

MONK TIME

2011-01-18T19:17:00.001Z

WE WANT OUR TEACHERS BACK!

2011-01-03T22:51:00.007Z

It is obvious that the prescribed way out of our economic troubles will anger the public in ways which the powerful will not be able to control. There are limits to how far people will undergo austerity before they decide that enough is enough.

What was so inspiring about the recent protests was that they were led by the very people who are supposed not to be interested in politics: the young. Not just A-level or university students, but younger secondary and primary school pupils. Maybe we have learned that these are the most purely political people. Untarnished by ideology, children and young people can see most clearly what is right and what is wrong.

This article from the Eastern Daily Press is typical:

Placards saying “Dumbledore would never let this happen” and “these men have Eton our futures” were displayed during the protest yesterday and passers-by were urged to sign petitions against the tuition fees increase, cuts to the Education Maintenance Allowance, and the end of transport subsidies for sixth form students in Norfolk.

Children and teenagers from all over England made the same point, though it must be said that young people in Norfolk have a certain track-record when it comes to refusing to know one's place. Readers who are unfamiliar with East Anglian history may not know the great story I'm about to tell, so I shall whet your appetites with a quiz. Who was responsible for the longest-running strike in British history? Coalminers, perhaps? Dockers? Transport workers? Journalists? All these are plausible, but all wrong. It was, in fact, a bunch of school-children.

In 1902, the Conservative Government passed the Education Act, which passed into statute the obligation for local authorities to educate working class children. While apparently progressive, the aim of the Act was to teach children their place in society - in other words, to maintain the status quo. At that time, rural East Anglian was divided sharply along class lines, with a few powerful landowners renting their land to farmers and managing the running of the local community.

Into this society stepped Tom and Kitty Higdon, two school teachers who had moved to Norfolk from London. They were Christian Socialists, opposed to a system which they saw as a tool for empowering the elite, and dedicated to broadening the minds of ordinary children.

When they arrived at the small school in Burston, near Diss, they had already been kicked out of one Norfolk village for upsetting vested interests. They found at Burston a school which was insanitory, which set the expectations of children at the barest minimum (boys were to be farmhands, girls domestic servants), and from which pupils were seized, mid-lesson, by farmers who needed free labour. The Higdons knew from experience that this was a life shared by most poor children across England. One morning, when a group of children arrived at school soaked to the skin after walking for miles in the rain, Kitty Higdon lit a fire in the hearth to dry their clothes and hair.

The school's management board, made up of landowners and the local rector, sensed trouble. The Higdons were challenging the divisions which they claimed were the natural order. They charged Kitty on a trumped-up charge of not asking permission before she lit the fire. Tom's landslide victory over the rector in a parish council election in 1912 was the final straw, and the board referred the Higdons to the local education authority. They were found guilty of discourtesy towards management, and ordered to leave the school.

What the management board had not counted on was the sympathy and support the Higdons would get from pupils and parents. They had vocally sided with labourers and their families in local disputes, and the people of Burston were in no doubt that they wanted their children taught by the Higdons, not a teacher who had been shipped in by the board. When the new teacher arrived on 1 April 1914, she found an empty classroom with the words "We are on strike" written on the blackboard.

Outside, a girl called Violet Potter led her fellow pupils on a march through the village high street. The children carried drums, trumpets and placards, and the scene resembled a great carnival. The management board thought it was an April Fool's prank. But Violet led her young comrades and their parents to a marquee on the village green, where the Higdons had set up a make-do school. Of 72 children, 66 chose the Higdons over the Council school, even though many parents knew they would face the sack or eviction from the local landowner. The Higdons' method of schooling was to let the individual talents of each child blossom, so it's little wonder that the children themselves embraced their new school.

The school couldn't continue for long in a marquee, nor in the village's empty warehouses. But the Burston Strike School had caught the imagination of the labour movement up and down the land, and donations poured in from Trade Unions and co-operatives to build a proper school. The new school was opened by Violet Potter in 1917.

This is where I must declare a personal interest. In the late 1910s my great-grandfather, Robert Ratcliffe, was a driver on railways across Suffolk and Norfolk. A leading light in the Ipswich co-operative (and, later, Trade Union) movement, his trains would stop at Burston and he became a keen supporter and fundraiser for the strike school. When his wife Ruby gave birth to their third child in 1917, they named her Lillian Burston Ratcliffe. I knew her as Auntie B, and she died only a few years ago. Here are pictures of the Higdons with Violet Potter outside the school in 1936 and, below, my Auntie B (then aged 18).

And here's one of B with her parents, Robert and Ruby. The stones commemorate the strike school's benefactors. They are a little difficult to read, but I can make out the Gainsborough and Kirkby-in-Ashton branches of the Independent Labour Party, and the Tottenham branch of the NUM.

Robert died before I was born. He became a Labour Mayor of Ipswich in the 1950s and wrote a four-volume called The History of the Working Class Movement in Ipswich. Apparently there are only three copies in existence. Ipswich Library has one, my uncle has another. I wonder who has the other.

Anyway, back to the story. The management board quickly realised that Burston Strike School was no flash in the pan. Some of the parents were fined for not sending their children; others were thrown out of their homes and jobs. But the high-handed action of the management board only served to fuel Burston's solidarity. The strike school continued to educate children until Tom Higdon died in 1939. During the 25 years of the strike, the Council-run school was forced to improve its conditions and standards in order to compete. When the last remaining pupils were transferred to the Council school in 1939, it had become a school to which parents were happy to send their children. This was, in large part, due to the vision and labours of the Higdons.

Each year, Unionists and activists meet at Burston to commemorate the strike. Here is a clip of Tony Benn's at last year's event. I especially like the parable / anecdote he ends with.

ONE DAY AWAY FROM YOUR HEART

2011-01-03T17:59:00.004Z

Soon after dawn salt-air awoke the seagull. It hovered above the water for a while then, distracted by movement on the cliffs, changed its course. But six, seven, eight o’clock all passed without a mouse on the grass or a fish in the sea presenting itself as breakfast. Tourists would arrive with food. The cheap ones would offer bread. The expensive might have fish pate to steal. But nowadays the expensive ones went to Eastbourne or Lewes.

*

Roger had driven down on his motorbike with Doreen as pillion. Jimmy had borrowed his father’s coupe. Margaret, his current ladyfriend, had expected to travel down with Jimmy, but had been disappointed at the last minute and had instead caught the bus.

It had promised to be fine from sunrise. Mr Gormley, Jimmy’s father, had risen early and had heard the forecast. Mr Gormley had always risen early on a Saturday. Nowadays, there was no reason to, but then again there was no reason not to, so at seven every weekend he left his wife snoring in bed and went downstairs to listen to the forecast and make some toast. On this particular Saturday morning, Mr Gormley ate with a furrowed brow. There was something on his mind.

Mr Gormley saw his boys not with the pride that often accompanies fatherhood, but as the potential for nuisance. Growing up, Peter, the youngest, was the more spirited of the two and his parents’ early favourite. While Jimmy had to cultivate generosity and charm to gain friends, life was easy for Peter who simply scooped up the younger siblings of his brother’s friends. At an early age he noted Jimmy’s aggression and his frequent tantrums and used them to emphasise his own meekness and good grace. But, aged eleven, Peter had suddenly grown quiet and withdrawn and had stayed that way ever since. He had not told his father the cause of this shift in character and his father had not asked. But Mr Gormley now saw nothing of himself in his youngest boy and so he turned his attentions to Jimmy who had taken to adolescence with gusto and, in doing so, had capitalised on Peter’s introspection. He was an early-developer and, while many of his colleagues were still trilling girlishly, Jimmy was speaking with an impressive contralto before his fourteenth birthday. A ladder of hair climbed from his waist to his sternum and his shoulders broadened hurriedly. For a while, he was source of some hilarity amongst his male peers but his interest in the opposite sex was at once voracious, an interest which he had pursued with stamina in the nine years since.

Which explains why today Mr Gormley, knowing full well his eldest’s intent on wooing that poor Margaret Patterson in the back of his saloon, ate his breakfast despondently. But as it went, Jimmy drove his father’s car to the Beachy Head without mishap and he completed the foursome which sat picnicking on finger-sandwiches and admiring the Channel.

*

“Good thinking to bring the dog along, Jim. But what will your father say?” Roger, a friend of Jimmy’s since their heady days of puberty, was jocular if somewhat nervy.

“I thought he’d be good for cricket. If the weather keeps up, I thought we might go down to the beach later on and play a bit. Argos umpires impeccably.”

Margaret Patterson was quite exhausted. She had left her house that morning brimming with confidence and unperturbed by the failure of Jimmy Gormley to provide her with a lift. But, sitting opposite an aloof Jimmy on the cliff-top, her poise was waning. He could be a real brute, sometimes. When it was just the two of them and he looked with big brown eyes into yours – well, that was different. Windows into the soul – well, who’s to know? Girls say they know Jimmy Gormley. Really know him. Well – I know him too. Better than they do. Or at least as well.

Roger was getting hungry. “Jimmy, go and fetch another packet of crisps, will you?” he asked. “I would go myself, but we know how protective Jim is of his coupe.” He looked at the others, grinning hopefully.

Jimmy smiled briskly. “It’s not a case of being protective, Roger. But it’s my father’s coupe. It’s his pride and joy. He calls it a saloon. One scratch and I’d be dead meat.”

“You know we’d be careful though, Jimmy” Doreen told her boyfriend’s best friend.

“I’m sure you would, Dor. I’m sure you all would.” He glanced cursorily at Margaret. “Actually – I’m not sure you would, Mags. You’d try to be careful. You’d try not to scratch it. But you know how you are. Terribly clumsy sometimes. Silly girl Margaret!” Jimmy laughed mannishly. “First time I met her – first time we went out, wasn’t it?” He appeared to be asking the sea as much as Margaret. “Well, she had a knock on her. Looked like a burn. Really - ” he searched for the right word - “purulent. Turns out it was a wall.”

“A door.” Margaret said blankly.

“As I say – terribly clumsy.”

Roger grinned at Margaret and she warbled with a giggle that tried to suggest she was enjoying herself. There was a brief pause as the warm breeze gathered pace and flattened the longish grass on which the four lovers had made their picnic.

“I’ll go and get the crisps.”

“He’s a funny sort, isn’t he?” said Roger once Jimmy was out of earshot. “Ever so reckless, loves the sauce, real bounder when he wants to be. And yet he’s so particular when it comes to that car. Fancy making Mags catch the bus down here! All the way from Ramsgate! I mean, really!”

“You could have come with us, Mags” said Doreen kindly. “I’m sure you could fit two in the sidecar.”

“Or I could ride on the back with Roger!”

“Steady on, old girl! That privilege is enjoyed by Doreen only!”

Doreen took another bite of her tuna sandwich. “You can ride in the sidecar on the way back to Ramsgate if you like.”

“Oh no. Thanks anyway, Doreen, but three’s a crowd. I wouldn’t want to be a gooseberry. And I bought a return ticket anyway.”

The three of them carried on chatting. Margaret relaxed a little as Roger made daft jokes and Doreen smiled kindly at her, and in no time she had forgotten about that beast Jimmy Gormley. After making Margaret laugh for a fourth time, Roger grew bored and walked back to the car in search of his friend.

“Jimmy’s a real sod,” said Doreen, once Roger was out of range. Margaret emitted a prudish gasp. “He should treat you better. You’re a lovely girl, Margaret. What are you doing with him? He’ll have moved on to someone else soon. He always does.”

*

Roger had reached the car but, expecting to find Jimmy filling his arms with picnic goodies, he instead found his friend hunched in the front seat of the car. Roger walked round to the passenger door, found it was open, and sat down beside Jimmy.

“That Margaret’s a lovely girl, isn’t she Jim?” Jimmy stared at Margaret and Doreen talking shop, while Roger continued. “She’s the belle of the ball. A real knockout. Better than all those other girls you wasted your time with, anyway. Could she be the one?”

Jimmy grew a little red and straightened his tie in the rear-view mirror.

“The one? Don’t know about that.”

“She loves you like mad, I bet. Don’t know what they see in you, Jim, I must say, but all these girls – well, you seem to be quite the catch.”

Jimmy turned on the radio. They were playing a song from last year’s chart. It was their song – him and Margaret. Or one of those girls anyway.

“Have you - ” Roger, never the best judge of propriety, was winding his friend up.

“What?” asked Jimmy.

“Have you – you know - ” He was jutting his elbow and making provocative movements with a balled fist.

“Oh, really Roger!”

Roger was smiling stupidly. “Sorry, Jim! But she is a funny one, Wanted a ride with me and Dor earlier.”

Jimmy opened the car-door abruptly, stepped outside and marched imperiously back to the girls. Roger watched, bemused, and wondered what on earth Jimmy and Margaret ever did.

*

Mr Gormley had been in the garden until early afternoon but a nascent drizzle had developed into quite a downpour. As he put his fork and weed-tray back into the shed, he thought of Jimmy and that poor girl and sighed. He walked back through the kitchen and, seeing Peter in the sitting-room, went upstairs to sit on the bed.

*

The rain was coming down heavily and Margaret had run for cover to join Roger in the car. Blotches of rain beat down upon the windscreen, obscuring the Channel. The rainwater hammered down incessantly upon glass and metal but still Roger and Margaret kept their voices lowered.

“Quite a storm brewing.”

“Doesn’t seem to put them off though does it?” said Margaret. Roger murmured in restful agreement. “I wonder what they’re talking about.”

“Must be important to get this wet about. I’d rather be in the warm.”

“Me too.”

Over the din of the rain and the occasional distant rumble of thunder, Roger and Margaret continued chatting in an understated monotone. The radio was still on and Gene Pitney sang over the lulls in conversation.

“What were you doing when this got to number one?”

“Number one?” Margaret pulled a face. “I can’t remember, Rog. I remember hearing it on the radio. I was in the kitchen with mum. We were baking a cake.”

“Really?”

“Yes, for Susannah’s birthday. She was 17 and I was going to be 20 the following week. I did like that Gene Pitney. Still do. I’ve got a poster of him on my wall.”

“I like him too.”

“Really, Rog?”

They stared out to sea and sang the song’s chorus.

“But I was only – twenty-four hours from Tulsa.”

They both laughed.

“So where is Tulsa?”

*

The rain was proving persistent. Jimmy, ever hardy, was unruffled by it, and Doreen actively enjoyed rain, and they continued with their picnic.

“What do you and Roger talk about?”

Doreen let out an unpleasant laugh. “Oh, Jimmy! Talk about? Cricket. His dad, the Lance-Corporal. The Shadows. That sort of thing.”

“No, I mean really talk about.”

“Really, Jim! That is what we talk about. You should try it. It’s riveting.” She gazed unwaveringly out to sea.

“I talk to Roger about those things too.” Jimmy said.

“Then you’ll know how fascinating it is.” Doreen finished the last sausage-on-a-stick, bit her tongue and raised a sandwich to Jimmy’s mouth like a mother feeding a small child. Jimmy took a bite while Doreen held it up for him.

“So what else do you do?”

“Well, sometimes Roger tries to get me pregnant. And other times we go on picnics to the seaside with you and your various girlfriends. Speaking of which, when are you going to settle down with one girl?”

“When I find one I like.”

“Girls are not toys, Jimmy.”

Doreen was getting a little acid for Jimmy’s liking.

“I’ve got girlfriends who have been with you. You don’t treat them like ladies, that’s your trouble. I’m not sure I’d stand for it. I suppose - ” Doreen paused for effect as thunder clapped overhead. “I suppose if you were worth the effort, I might put up with it.” Jimmy looked back towards the coupe. “But I’m not sure you would be. I think you might be a timewaster. There’s a lot of men out there, Jimmy. A lot of men to try and get me pregnant. I don’t think I’d have the time to waste on you.” She paused, then smiled. “I’m speaking hypothetically of course.”

“I wonder what Roger and Mags are doing?” Jimmy was getting fidgety and wished he was no longer on this soaked piece of cliff-top. “I hope they’re taking care of the car.”

Doreen unbuttoned her cardigan, took it off and handed it to Jimmy. “It’s soaked right through, Jimmy. Put it in your bag, will you?” Jimmy obeyed. “So how about it then? You and me? Would you be worth my while?”

“I – I – oh, Doreen – do stop it! You’re pulling my leg!” Jimmy was laughing weakly.

“Up to you, Jimmy.” Doreen’s wet blouse clung to her as she ran a hand through her dripping hair. Jimmy suspected she might not be wearing a bra.

“I wonder what they are doing?”

“Roger and Mags? Jimmy, they are doing exactly as us probably. Except that they are dry and we are wet.”

The rain poured down on them as the grey sky glowered overhead.

“You really shouldn’t do this, Doreen.” Jimmy said quietly, looking down. “It’s just not on.” Jimmy looked out to sea like a little boy, the rain teeming through his hair and over his body.

Doreen looked on inertly. “I know, Jimmy.” She paused. “It’s getting awfully wet. I’ll put away the things.”

*

The seagull had circled the cliff-top a hundred times and Argos the dog was driven mad by courting couples. He had been shut in the car all day, but had now pawed apart the knot which tied his leash to the toe-bar and freed himself to make light with the mocking bird. Roger and Margaret sang along to "Long live love" by Sandie Shaw while Jimmy stood at the edge of the cliff watching the lighthouse and Doreen cleared away the picnic. The gale was rough and the seagull had surrendered all sense of direction to be swept along by currents of wind and rain.

Argos bounded over the grass. He loved Beachy Head: the ships, the sea, the stories from newspapers. That sickly, salty wet air. He had felt it in his fur before, but not on a stormy day like this. No, this was special¸a one off. All he could see ahead of him was grey – grey skies full of grey clouds separated from the grey sea by a grey horizon – and all of it beckoning him, willing him in. Running towards the edge of the cliff, he leapt past the kneeling Doreen towards the swaying gull, taking Jimmy with him. Dog and master flew through the air, the rain driving into their wet faces as they watched the rocks and the foam hurtle thrillingly towards them. They shut their eyes one final time while Doreen packed the picnic into the boot and Roger drove slowly home.

2010 REWIND

2010-12-24T08:30:00.014Z

At the beginning of December, I was walking round telling people that this year, finally, I'd got Christmas under control. Presents would be bought, food would be prepared and - most importantly - I had actually listened to enough records this year to write an end-of-year round-up which would plausibly make me look a lot more hip than I actually am.

Well, events have conspired against me. I planned to write about my 10 favourite albums, and precis the rest. As it turns out, I have only had time to sketch a thought or two about the top 9, and you'll have to make do with youtube clips for the rest. Not to worry, as Dan at the End Times says, mine is only one more ill-considered resume among many on the web. My list is not bracingly original (though I haven't seen anybody else choose my top tip as album of the year), not are my comments terribly insightful. Never mind - it has given me much pleasure, and I hope a few of the tracks please you too.

Merry Christmas and all that, and get yourselves plenty of rest. 2011 is all set to be hectic.

1. The-Dream, Love king

Unable to enjoy the sexual exploits which he brags about, Terius Nash buries himself in the studio and produces the most agonisingly perfect album of the year. On “Yamaha,” the keyboard literally becomes his object of desire, but the whole album dribbles with displaced erotic feelings. Here there is none of the confusion or struggles of emotion that is pop’s hallmark – every last misery, every last frustration, is consciously felt and impassively conveyed . Pay attention to the lyrics. But it is the music – the acute attention to detail, the fact it seems to drip with post-coital fluids – that gives the game away. And skip the last track.

2. Robyn, Body talk

I’ve included the abridged version for the purposes of space, but the mini-albums have given me even greater pleasure. Inexplicably, on the round-up album “Include me out” – which starts off all Grace Jones, features a rap with the word “whachamacallit” in it, and is swathed with a restlessly bilious bassline – doesn’t feature. Happily, “Dancehall queen” – pasted by critics and bloggers alike – does. As do “Dancing on my own,” “In my eyes,” “Don’t fucking tell me what to do” and 12 other pop landmarks. Just think: this is her best-of-2010. Most artists won’t produce a better career best-of.

3. Flying Lotus, Cosmogramma

Evocative of Alice Coltrane in so many ways – the fact Steve Ellison is her nephew, the preponderance of harps, the wariness towards the material world. Sometimes it’s individual sounds that grab the ear – the tugged guitar strings in “Clock catcher,” the juggernaut basslines in “Pickled,” the quivering strings of “A cosmic drama”. Other times – especially “Arkestra” – it is the way he creates an entirely cosmological schema. I like this anecdote about childhood memories with Aunt Alice: “She was super tough on me when I was a kid. She wouldn’t let me play the piano unless I was gonna play it. I was like, Auntie, can I play piano? And she was like, ‘Yeah – if you’re gonna play it.’”

4. Oneohtrix Point Never, Returnal

For me, this isn’t quite classic OPN. His great observation – “all of us on some level are sentenced with having to relate to society whether we side with it or not” – works better when he’s obsessively flanging or compressing Fleetwood Mac and Chris de Burgh. But it works for me in a similar way to Eno’s On Land, in that it’s topographical – I know the landscape Eno is logging better for listening to him. I’m not sure which place Daniel Lopatin sinks his music into, but I feel like it’s impressed on my mind. It’s clearly in the tradition of Fourth World music (see Eno and Hassell’s Possible Musics) – the geography doesn’t matter and nor, ultimately, does the music. What you are left with, though, is something which illuminates both – like the Impressionists. To really get it, get into what he’s into.

5. James Blake, CMYK EP

Quotes – like you hadn’t worked it out – Kelis’s “Caught out there” and Aaliyah’s “Are you that somebody?”. Mike Powell says it best: “This is canny for plenty of reasons, I think, but I'll be brief: Blake takes two R&B archetypes-- the Spurned Woman and the Secret Lover-- and imagines them in a back and forth. It's modern homage to old ideas. But if you know the songs already, it's also an exercise in warming up your cultural memory-- both tracks are over 10 years old but under 15, a kind of dead zone for nostalgia, not yet retro-ready but no longer current. He's not reminding us of something we've forgotten or telling us about something we never knew about, he's reanimating songs that are probably just at the edge of peoples' thoughts.”

6. Beach House, Teen dream

I don’t know why I downloaded this. It is just the sort of Pitchfork-approved boy/girl indie that usually brings me out in a rash. I don’t even know if it’s really that good. But for the fortnight of our honeymoon in the Adriatic, it was my favourite album of the year. And I still maintain that it is my sixth favourite album of the year. Songs for swinging lovers, I suppose, and infinitely preferable in that regard to The-Dream.

7. Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti, Before today

The higher fidelity brings him to life. On earlier records, the glitches and crackles sometimes impeded the feelings or memories he was using the music to evoke. He could be conveniently lumped in with the hauntology set, and studied at length. I’m not knocking it either – his early records are great. But the beefed-up production and full-band back-up is no sell-out – it brings him to life. We saw him at the Scala earlier in the year, and I’d still compare him to Todd Rundgren – the way he walks the fine line between sadness and psychosis. “Round and round” = single of the year too.

8. Janelle Monae, The archandroid

Her interviews read better than her record sounds – I was surprised when I first heard it how conventional it was. Unlike Ariel Pink, this is a real retro-record, with all the funk-prog concept album styles ticked off. But it too springs to life – not so much on the suites, but definitely on “Cold war” and “Tightrope,” where she unleashes her secret weapon – her upper vocal range.

9. Emeralds, Does it look like I’m here?

Fact mag review of choice-cut “Genetic”: “Opening with the kind of Philip Glass-ular rippling repetition you might expect to soundtrack a montage of rushing rivers, newspapers and money being printed, it summons images of myriad digital seraphim batting their wings against the neon stained glass of the Church of Kraftwerk. For twelve minutes it ebbs and flows, but with ever-building inertia. Electric guitar once more shows Emeralds’ fearlessness in the face of retro or corniness, as it adds to the tonal palette of the piece, as well as the welcome audacity of the band. From here we get early 90s Orbtechre synth-waves and random Sounds of the Future. Perfect for balmy summer evenings, especially in the last few minutes when the mix turns itself inside out, a la Kyuss’ ’50 Million Year Trip (Downside Up)’.” Balmy summer evenings ... remember them?

10. Dylan Ettinger, New age outlaws

11. Nite Jewel, Am i real? EP

12. John Foxx, D.N.A.

13. Tricky, Mixed race

14. Starkey, Ear drums and black holes

15. Big Boi, Sir Lucious Left Foot ... The Son of Chico Dusty

16. Neil Young, Le Noise

17. Vampire Weekend, Contra

18. Wyatt/Atzmon/Stephen, For the ghosts within

19. Indignant Senility, Plays Wagner

20. Drake, Thank me later

Bubbling under...

Kode9, DJ-KiCKS
Hot Chip, One life stand
Mark McGuire, Living with yourself
Paul Weller, Wake up the nation
James Blake, Klavierwerke EP
Pantha du Prince, Black noise
Rick Ross, Teflon don
The Roots, How I got over
John Grant, Queen of Denmark
Matthew Dear, Black city

Not quite / not nearly...

M.I.A., /\/\ /\ Y /\
The Drums, The Drums
Charlotte Gainsbourg, IRM
Iron Maiden, The final frontier
Suzanne Vega, Close up Vol. 1, Love Songs
Babybird, Ex-maniac
Pierre de Gailande, Bad reputation

Not heard sufficiently / at all to comment...

Kanye West, My beautiful dark twisted fantasy
Actress, Splaszh
Robert Plant, Band of joy
Ikonika, Contact, love, want, have
Salem, King night
Giggs, Let em ave it
Magnetic man
Sun Araw, On patrol

CAPTAIN BEEFHEART R.I.P.

2010-12-18T15:02:00.003Z

THE BOY DONE GOOD

2010-12-15T18:52:00.000Z

Johann Hari tears Richard Littlejohn limb from limb:

SHOPPING THE SHOPKEEPER

2010-12-04T22:25:00.002Z

I never thought shopping at Topman could ever be a pleasure, especially on a Saturday in December - but I am extremely pleased to be proved wrong.

ARMCHAIR TRAVELLER

2010-12-02T21:50:00.006Z

http://web.mit.edu/~jmcmicha/www/globegenie/

You know those books - A Rebours is a good example - where the protagonist experiences the world without ever leaving his house? Well, click on the link above and you can be that protagonist!

What I love about it is that it takes you to such uninteresting places...

...and that, out of the billions of people, trucks and houses in the world, you happen to find this woman, this truck, this house...

...and that parts of Kansas could easily pass for Suffolk...

...and that this is what Antarctica looks like (and that somebody from Google Street Maps has actually gone to the Antarctic and taken scene-by-scene photos)...

WITH OUR LOVE WE CAN SAVE THE WORLD

2010-11-30T23:22:00.004Z

Beatles fans who have never come to terms with their break-up like, by way of a parlour game, to indulge in a spot of historical revisionism. What if the Beatles hadn’t split up in 1970? What if they had carried on for another five years? What would their twelfth album have sounded like? Put aside the fact that their early solo albums were by and large essays in exorcising the group they had lost, and I like to think it would have sounded like this:

WAH-WAH (Harrison)
IT DON’T COME EASY (Starr / Harrison)
INSTANT KARMA! (Lennon)
REMEMBER (Lennon)
ANOTHER DAY (McCartney)
ISOLATION (Lennon)
WHAT IS LIFE (Harrison)
OH WOMAN, OH WHY (McCartney)
WELL WELL WELL (Lennon)
MAYBE I’M AMAZED (McCartney)
GOD (Lennon)
AWAITING ON YOU ALL (Harrison)*

When the Beatles began to break up (or break down) is the subject of considerable debate. Only their first two albums are wholly group efforts, as they reprise their live setlist in the studio while trying to keep a straight face. By the time Beatlemania hit, Lennon was clearly the leader, taking the lion’s share of writing, singing and media duties. When his body became bloated and his mind shrunken from too much LSD, McCartney assumed the mantle of svengali, motivating force and (I use this word reluctantly) genius. The White Album, Abbey Road and Let it Be are solo albums in all but name. People generally agree that the end begun when Brian Epstein died, but McCartney’s and Lennon’s romances with Linda Eastman and Yoko Ono were equally liable (not to mention, after the Filipino leg of their 1966 world tour, a morbid fear that celebrity had dealt them a death wish).

That celebrity, that entrenched feeling that the Beatles are untouchable, complicates the task of listening to their records today. To do so unmediated would be ingenuous, though having Ian MacDonald’s Revolution in the head as your companion helps the jaded fan to hear with fresh ears. The only album that I can listen to and thoroughly enjoy, the only one which transcends the notoriety and mythology, is Sgt Pepper. Marcello Carlin suggests that this is because Sgt Pepper is rooted in childhood, the hallmark of English psychedelia. That is true. But Sgt Pepper is not a childlike record. Indeed, now maligned for its widescreen production and overwrought concept, it is still blamed for stripping pop of its innocence, for canonising it, turning it into Art. If this is a return to childhood, it returns with adult eyes – by affirming fantasy and retreating from reality.

Whereas Revolver and Rubber Soul had opened with homages to black American music, Sgt Pepper begins with the nostalgic sound of an English crowd (recorded by George Martin with the Footlights crowd in Cambridge). Having recoiled in terror from live performance, it seems odd that the Beatles should immediately recreate the sound of an audience. But here the audience is manipulated – it laughs and cheers in the right places, it sounds conspicuously grown-up, a throwback to a bygone colonial age.

The Beatles had intended to depict the Liverpool of their childhoods (an idea that had been knocking about since “In my life”), until “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane” were snapped up for a single release. In the end, Sgt Pepper became a concept album in search of a concept, born from a band desperate to rise above its own constraints. “I thought it would be nice to lose our identities,” said McCartney later, “to submerge ourselves in the persona of a fake group.” This fake group would introduce a roster of acts: the affable Billy Shears; an LSD trip; three kitchen-sink dramas; a circus performance; a hymn; three short comedies; and a final, atonal, crescendous "orchestral orgasm".

But as the Sergeant’s first act comes on stage, the crowd mysteriously disappears and “With a little help from my friends” is unfurled. Over a Pet Soundsy drum and bass, Lennon and McCartney provide Starr with dreamy harmonies as they ask, “do you believe in a love at first sight?” Starr / Shears replies, all worldly-wise, that he’s certain it happens all the time. This is a wonderfully touching, fragile moment – there is a divine composition to the group (Roger McGuinn described them as having “combined minds”), as if (to quote Aquinas) their complexity is merely infinite simplicity perceived by the finite mind.

“Lucy in the sky with diamonds” is the only blemish on the record – like “Across the universe,” it is a poorly recorded dirge, a trip that goes nowhere. Its lysergic overdrive sounds (peculiarly for a psychedelic record) out of place here. The real heart of Sgt Pepper – and it is a hard heart – is to be found on the next three tracks, three of the greatest songs Paul McCartney ever wrote. “Getting better” is, in a way, typical of McCartney, all clever unorthodoxies and crotchet beats. His bass comes out of nowhere, underlying a brutal lyric which belies the typecasts of McCartney-the-blithe-formalist and Lennon-the-hardnosed-realist (though it must be added that Lennon had a hand in writing the lyrics and, in the midst of an LSD trip, singing them). In “Fixing a hole,” we are presented with a more ambiguous second act to this drama. Beginning with a descending harpsichord, the song is a slow-march made interesting by McCartney’s bass arpeggios, Harrison’s double-tracked guitar solo and the expression of a desire to be hermetically sealed off from the distractions of reality, so that the mind is free to wander. Perhaps this escape is what the protagonist of “She’s leaving home” has in mind, but we are never told as much. Over strings which in anybody else’s hands might be mawkish, Lennon and McCartney tell the story of a girl running away from home from the point of view of her mother. That in itself is extraordinary – who else would have taken up this position? An extraordinarily detailed and laconic lyric (the use of the word “clutching” has been much remarked upon) stops short of moral judgment, the mother blankly accepting (via McCartney’s artless vocal) that “fun is the one thing that money can’t buy.” This is, as Ian MacDonald says, “represents, with ‘A day in the life,’ the finest work on Sgt Pepper – imperishable popular art of its time.”

The curtain closes on Act / Side One with a trip to the circus, but this is the most bilious of light reliefs. Listening to the whirls and swoops of the carnival feels something like being churned around in a washing machine. Abruptly, the music stops and we are regurgitated, hosed down but soiled from what we have just witnessed. It is therefore fitting that Act / Side Two opens with a hymn: George Harrison’s “Within you without you.” This is didactic stuff, but performed with a grace and buoyancy that is rarely found in Harrison’s songs:

We were talking about the love that's gone so cold and the people,
Who gain the world and lose their soul
They don't know, they can't see; are you one of them?
When you've seen beyond yourself, then you may find peace of mind is waiting there.
And the time will come when you see we're all one, and life flows on within you and without you.

The Beatles have redeemed us, even if the audience is too stupefied with laughter to realise it. Thus rescued from the casual violence of Act One, we are ready for a comic trilogy: “When I’m 64,” “Lovely Rita” and “Good morning good morning”. If the first is winsomely nostalgic, the second and third sound like nothing else produced in 1967. Bulging with automatic double-tracking, heavily compressed and distorted, both shimmer in spite of their hollowness, and both are remarkable for their instrumental solos. “Lovely Rita” has a piano played by George Martin which is sped up and subjected to ruthless vibrato; “Good morning good morning” features drums so high in the mix that they might as well be soloing, and a searing guitar from McCartney. Fatuous doesn’t get any more thrilling than this.

A last hurrah from Sgt Pepper’s band brings us to – well, let’s just call it the most analysed pop record of all time. You know “A day in the life” as well as you know your own mind, and I’m loathe to say anything that has been said better elsewhere. Better to quote Ian MacDonald...

Made in a total of around 34 hours, “A day in the life” represents the peak of the Beatles’ achievement. With one of their most controlled and convincing lyrics, its musical expression is breathtaking, its structure at once utterly original and completely natural. The performance is likewise outstanding. Lennon’s floating, tape-echoed vocal contrasts ideally with McCartney’s ‘dry’ briskness: Starr’s drums hold the track together, beginning in idiosyncratic dialogue with Lennon on slack-tuned tom-toms; McCartney’s contributions on piano and (particularly) bass brim with invention, colouring the music and occasionally providing the main focus. A brilliant production by Martin’s team, working under restrictions which would floor most of today’s studios, completes a piece which remains among the most penetrating and innovative artistic reflections of its era.

...and to draw your attention to two further things. First, the moment at around 2.45 when McCartney sings “somebody spoke and I went into a dream” and Lennon then apprehends his friend’s innermost thoughts and sings his dream (this, for me, is the moment that encapsulates Sgt Pepper). Second, you have not heard this song until you have heard how it was put together. It’s a rough, brutal manner in which to end a piece about this painstaking masterpiece, but what better way to finish?

* a good album, for sure, but it sure as hell explains why they never got around to making it...

FORT/DA

2010-11-30T21:07:00.003Z

Speaking of the ghosts which may one day be exhumed from sites of great exhibitions, this is extraordinary:

By Entschwindet und Vergeht, who hosts a wonderful blog about hauntology and cadences and iron and glass and decay and all sorts of other things here.

FRIENDS IN NEED

2010-11-28T19:39:00.001Z

James Meek writing about the Irish bank bail-out on the LRB blog:

You could be forgiven for not noticing it, but the new British government has just been forced to do what the old British government was forced to do: bail out Britain’s banks. The bail-out of Ireland marks a new stage in the privatisation of government by the financial system. Two governments, the British and the Irish, have been effectively taken over by a venal banking network which, using ordinary savers and productive businesses as hostages, forces the state to cough up whatever sums are required to save it from the consequences of its own greed and idiocy.

Even before coming to power the dominant Conservative side of Britain’s governing coalition was making Gordon Brown the scapegoat for the UK being broke, maxed out, skint, and claiming that only by savage cuts in state spending could Britain hope to salvage some vestige of public services among the ruins. Why, then, is this same British government about to lend Ireland, a member of the Eurozone, some £7 billion to see it through its current financial difficulties?

The answer is straightforward, although you wouldn’t think so from the way the story is being reported. The Conservatives have been remarkably successful in promoting a false version of the events of the past couple of years – that excessive government spending is the cause of the present mess.

The fact that the first great Eurozone financial crisis, in Greece, really was caused by crazily loose public purse strings has helped spread the lie. But the truth is that Britain and Ireland, like Iceland and, indeed, Spain, are in trouble not because these governments spent and borrowed too much but because households, businesses and banks spent, borrowed and lent much too much.

What is being presented as a loan by the British government to the Irish government is, in fact, a loan by the British government to the remnants of Ireland’s commercial banks, which are melting down. And the reason the British government is lending to the Irish banking system is because British commercial banks lent so much money to Ireland in the boom years. British banks hold less than £10 billion worth of Irish government bonds. But they hold something like £130 billion worth of other Irish debt – property loans, business loans and so on. George Osborne is not, as he claimed, helping Ireland because it is ‘a friend in need’. He is to all intents and purposes bailing out British banks.

It has been depressingly easy for the Cameron administration to hypnotise the British public into forgetting that our current economic plight is a result of reckless lending by the country’s banks rather than reckless Labour borrowing. £7 billion, the government must feel, is a small price to pay to avoid another British banking crisis, and to avoid the country waking up and remembering that we are much more like Iceland than we ever were like Greece.

MUD AND SPECULATION

2010-11-28T19:28:00.010Z

An expedition

Sometimes, quite by chance, you find yourself in the right place at the right time. A view or an experience which might be quite unremarkable on any other day suddenly acquires a magic and takes you somewhere unexpected.

A short time ago, I took the day off work and went for a walk whose route was largely determined by where I needed to be that evening. It’s no good walking through Enfield Chase (my original plan) if you need to be in Bexleyheath early that afternoon. So I changed my itinerary, took the DLR from Bank to King George V and followed my nose. That route, overground through Canary Wharf, Poplar and Silvertown, is fascinating. No. 1 Canada Square; Robin Hood Gardens; Millennium Mills; the DLR stations themselves. There is no better high-level tour of London’s pluralist approach to architecture, nor a better series of contrasts between different versions of Britain.

I got off at George V and walked through North Woolwich, a district cut off not only from the rest of London, but from Woolwich itself. It consists of a few estates, some shops, a scruffy pub which advertises striptease nights and family nights from the same washed out blackboard, a surprisingly sylvan park, and the north terminus of the Woolwich Free Ferry. I’d intended to walk under the Thames via the Woolwich Foot Tunnel, but it has been temporarily closed because of structural problems, so I walked past the queue of cars and lorries, down the steps of the ferry, sat on the bottom deck and opened a packet of wine gums.

The Woolwich Ferry is a remarkable thing – it seems like a folly until one considers that there are no bridges between Tower Bridge and the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge at Dartford. It carries over a million vehicles per year (hence the queues) but passenger traffic is minimal. I shared the journey with a young man on his way back from the gym, another who downed a bottle of Becks in one gulp and promptly cracked open a second, and a middle-aged man with a pushchair who seemed rather lost. It is the only mode of public transport I can think of in London for which you need not pay a penny.

The south side of Woolwich is more bustling, though no less depressed. I stopped to look at the splendid art-deco buildings which house bingo and evangelical services at the end of Powis Street, then turned right towards the City. There is much to catch the eye here; not on the landward side, all late-era social housing resigned to the Right to Buy; but across the river, planes come and go from the City Airport, the factory of Tate & Lyle (sponsors of the glamorous galleries upriver) stands as an isolated bastion of industry, and the Thames Barrier fences off (and protects) Central London.

Built after the catastrophic floods of 1953, the Thames Barrier is made up of seven beady eyes looking towards the east, ready to protect the city behind them from surges passing south from the deep waters around Scotland and Scandinavia to the shallower parts of the North Sea. Forecasts of high water levels trigger the closure of the barrier, and all navigation routes to the Thames are blocked. In 1987, the barrier was closed twice; in the last decade, there were an average of eight closures per year. It is a work of art, a deconstructed Sydney Opera House which proudly flaunts its functionalism.

I walked on towards the Hope and Anchor. It was 4.00pm, and the scene through the window looked inviting, but this must be a pub for watching sailing boats, roaring planes and swooping cranes on summer afternoons, so I carried on walking. To my left, containers bunked one on top of the other to form prefab porta-cabins; to my right, brick walls were crowned with barbed wire. At Lombard Wall stood a twelve-foot high pile of rubble. A road to the left led to the safety of New Charlton, but I was more interested in what lay straight on: an aerial network of cranes and trolleys pitted against a darkening sky.

The CEMEX works are a reminder that the Thames was the engine of industry. The gentrification which was supposed to accompany the Millennium Dome never reached this stretch of the south bank. The artists’ impressions portrayed people walking down the tree-lined avenues here, watching movies in the multiplexes, shopping in the malls; North Charlton was to become a glamorous suburb of the City, within winking distance of One Canada Square. Instead, it remains beyond the perimeter of tourist London. Mountains of debris gather, waiting to be loaded into chutes, stirred into quicklime and sold as cement. The dust sticks to your clothes and catches in your throat, and at dusk the narrow paths that skirt the edges of the plant do not feel safe. But whether you arrive at it from the Dome or the Barrier, it is quite unexpected, and the shock forces you forwards.

Was this what the Greenwich peninsula was once like? The topography was different, of course – underneath the Dome is marshland, Bugsby’s Marshes to be precise, and the tube line at North Greenwich is built to float on the quagmire. Before the 17th century, the air around the marshes was not too different from that of the Paraguayan Gran Chaco – malarial, sulphurous, clammy, sickly. Later, its northernmost tip was chosen as the place to hang pirates in cages until they dissolved into the air. Later still, when London’s most contaminated land became ripe for exploitation in the name of Empire, the peninsula became the site for industry: cement, asbestos, animal feed and, of course, gas. But the East Greenwich Gasworks only blistered the air further, and the peninsula remained largely unnavigable, except for the Provisional IRA who bombed the largest of the gasholders in 1978.

The discovery of North Sea Gas rendered the gasworks obsolete, and the advent of Thatcherism in the 1980s destroyed the ashes of riverside industry. I remember, in the early 90s, standing in the offices of the Daily Telegraph in Canary Wharf (really, don’t ask) looking down on the site as some sub-editor crowed about the regeneration of Greenwich. And what has this regeneration bequested? The Millennium Village – a new suburbia where people have bought up riverside flats not, as was once the case, because there is any inferential reason that they should live there, but because the market demands that they must. The Millennium Dome, now badged as the O2 Centre, a glorified tent which, like Alf Garnett, has become loveable only because it has descended into pathos.

There is a strange story about the Dome, concerning Simon Dee. When Dee was expelled from Radio 1 in the 1960s and cast out of the Establishment, he reinvented himself as an architect, apparently commissioned by the Moroccans to design a dome for them. Up until his death last year, Dee maintained that his plans – never funded by the Moroccan government – had got into the hands of the Secret Service, who had passed them onto the British Government. The Millennium Dome, ostensibly designed by Richard Rogers, was in fact the brainchild of Cyril Nicholas Henty-Dodd, aka Dee himself. It is now a music-hall, hosting some of the grizzled acts whose discs Dee played 40 years ago.

Ten years on, it is difficult to loathe the Dome. Built on a foundation of mud and speculation, it is a bombastic monument to neoliberalism. After ushering in the new millennium a year early, it searched vainly for a purpose, its fundamental uselessness gradually winning over residents of London who, deep down, prefer folly to grandeur. Its millennial exhibits were so absurd that few bothered even to turn up: “Body” sponsored by Boots, “Work” sponsored by Manpower, “Learning” sponsored by Tesco and – best of all – “Money” sponsored by the City of London. Why would we pay to see that when we live it every day?

Now, New Labour’s version of the Festival of Britain has found its function: as a venue where people buy inflated tickets to see inflated egos, usually playing on a stage so far away that they are invisible to the audience. Sponsored by a mobile phone company, it exceeds the wildest dreams of its grim trio of auteurs: Simon Dee, Richard Rogers & Peter Mandelson. All have moved on, men of an earlier era. The Dome, too, seems every bit as anachronistic.

A DREAD THAT SHAKES MY BODY

2010-11-18T23:40:00.000Z

ARGENTINA & THE COLLAPSE

2010-11-15T18:49:00.001Z

Nestor Kirchner, who died suddenly of a heart attack last month, was the only Argentine President since the coup of 1976 who left the country in a better state than he found it. Today’s tourist who stands in Buenos Aires’s Plaza de Mayo, pointing his camera towards the Casa Rosada, might scarcely believe that less than a decade ago mounted police were beating back elderly ladies on the ground on which he stands .

But in December 2001 it was a place of seething anger. Fires swept through neighbourhoods, and the streets rattled to the sound of thousands of people angrily banging on saucepans. Their immediate complaint was the freezing of their bank deposits, following the International Monetary Fund’s suspension of loans to Argentina, but this was a broader eruption after years of passivity. Police on horseback stormed the plaza, whipping workers, pensioners, housewives and students with their truncheons. They fired tear gas and killed five people. But the siege did not work. The people did not leave. They staged a sit-down protest, while President de la Rua quietly resigned and fled the Presidential Palace via helicopter.

By the turn of the twenty-first century, there was more poverty and more premature death in democratic Argentina than there had been during the dictatorship. An economic model which had been forced upon the people had combined with an uncontrollable debt and extreme corruption to bring Argentina to its knees. How had a country which was once the richest in Latin America managed to bankrupt itself?

The story begins in the early 1970s. Although Argentina generated much of its own oil, the 1973 crisis hiked its foreign bills and wiped out its trade surplus. Across the world, petrodollars funded cheap loans to developing nations. By the early 1980s, interest rates had risen to 16% and Argentina awoke to the legacy of a brutal dictatorship. Inflation reached 300%, wages were frozen, domestic industry had been destroyed by neoliberalism and the country was saddled with a foreign debt of nearly $50 billion.

In 1983, Argentina returned to democracy, but almost immediately the government used public money to bail out debt speculators and by 1989, when Raul Alfonsin resigned amid instability and hyperinflation, foreign debt had reached $54 billion. Much of this debt was what we might call nationalised debt – i.e. loans that had been made by parent companies to their subsidiaries, which had then been added to the public debt.

Alas, during the 1990s, Argentina’s foreign debt more than doubled. The new President, Carlos Menem, all dashing sideburns and celebrity stardust, had campaigned on a traditional Peronist ticket to raise living standards, tackle corruption and default on the foreign debt. But as soon as he took office, Menem betrayed his electorate and changed course, proclaiming that there was no alternative but to align with the neo-conservatives and sign up wholesale to the Washington Consensus.

By 1992, Menem’s tactics became starkly clear: he would negotiate with the US to pay off Argentina’s debt by selling state companies at a fraction of their actual value. Privatisation met with little resistance from unions, and the medicine appeared to work: Argentina was credible again. The economy grew and foreign capital – much of it repatriated – flowed back into Argentina. Privatisation yielded more than $30 billion to the nation coffers, and helped to reduce the deficit.

But these gains were short-lived. Profitable state companies were sold for a pittance, and suffered massive downsizing and asset-stripping. When Argentina’s railways were privatised, for instance, much of the rolling stock and lines were simply decommissioned, leaving the provinces economically isolated and the population forced to move to the cities. The reserves of the massive state oil company, YPF, were sold on 25-year contracts for a price equivalent to nine months of production. Towns built to house YPF workers were abandoned, the new owners leaving behind vast deserts of inert machinery. Gas del Estado was sold for 10% of its actual value to Repsol, who polluted the local water supply so that local people now extracted pure gasoline from their water pumps.

To understand how Argentines were beginning to feel, we might imagine the NHS being sold at 10% of its value to a fraudulent conglomerate which then ran it into the ground and was compensated for its lack of productivity. While politicians and business people alike profited and allowed privatised industries to under-perform, hundreds of thousands of workers were laid off. In northern Argentina, per capita income was on a par with Bangladesh by the end of the 1990s.

Menem and his neoliberals may have accepted this as a sacrifice for economic boom, but when the global economy contracted in the mid-1990s, Argentina’s monetary policies ran out of steam. In order to keep the peso strong against the dollar, Menem had been forced to borrow from abroad. Argentina lacked the power to use high interest rates to attract foreign investment, and peso-dollar convertibility became increasingly difficult to maintain.

As debt service costs soared, panicky investors withdrew their capital and Argentina fell into recession. By April 2000, a beleaguered new President, Fernando de la Rua, was staring down the barrel of a default. He asked the IMF for help, and was offered a deal: a $40 billion loan in return for cutting welfare in the provinces and further privatisation (a joke, since by this time there was little left to privatise). By late 2001, the voices of the Argentine people rang out loud and clear: they rejected all the political parties at the ballot box and withdrew from their bank deposits (at one point, $1 billion was being withdrawn per day from Argentine bank accounts). When Finance Minister Cavallo froze deposits in December, the streets filled with people who had worked hard, saved all their lives and could only watch helplessly as their savings evaporated.

Argentina was now forced to stare the legacy of neoliberalism in the face. The last days of 2001 and first of 2002 saw Argentina – under the leadership of interim President Saa – default on $132 billion worth of debt, the largest default in history. The pego was unpegged from the dollar and allowed to devalue. Inflation surged, GDP plummeted, 19 million Argentines were officially in poverty and 7.5 million couldn’t afford food. In the rural provinces, children starved while hospitals and schools closed their doors.

In 2003, Nestor Kirchner was elected President of the Argentine Republic. Realising that any deal with the IMF would be utterly compromised, he issued a challenge: the IMF, he said, had changed “from being a lender for development to a creditor demanding privileges” and must be fundamentally reformed. Looking closer to home, Kirchner built up ties with other left-leaning Latin American governments. In late 2005, Venezuela agreed to buy $1.6 billion of Argentine bonds which Kirchner used to settle Argentina’s debt to the IMF once and for all. Kirchner also clamped down forcefully on tax evasion and invested increasing revenues into welfare.

Meanwhile, some semblance of financial stability had returned to Argentina. This was in large part due to the “fabrica recuperado” movement, an innovation whereby workers took over premises where businesses had gone bankrupt and managed them co-operatively. As well as generating growth, these “recoveries” have initiated progressive networks of left-leaning groups determined to reverse the decimation of industry under neoliberalism. A devalued peso has also meant that traditional Argentine exports – soy, cereals, meat – are highly competitive again. Between 2003 and 2008, Argentina recorded $77 billion of trade surpluses.

Kirchner’s legacy is not without blemish. Wealth inequality has fluctuated in the last ten years, and people in the Buenos Aires slums and many of the provinces still live in dire poverty. He did not managed to eradicate the graft that seems to be part and parcel of Latin American politics, and he and his wife (the current President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner) are accused of establishing a “shared presidency” in which they allegedly planned to rule, if elected, until 2020. This last accusation, in particular, has the taste of sour grapes. But Argentina is undoubtedly a healthier place than it was in 2003, economically and psychologically. For the first time in its recent history, it is a major player on the world stage, at the heart of the Latin American progressive left, and beholden to no one. That, in large part, is down to Nestor Kirchner.

PROTESTANT WORK ETHICS

2010-11-11T22:21:00.004Z

Iain Duncan Smith had some of us fooled there for a while. After his ejection from the Tory leadership back in the early 2000s, he laid low, set up a thinktank called the Centre for Social Justice, visited estates, met some of the poorest people in society and emerged as a quasi-progressive figure who would sort out the iniquities and complications of the welfare system.

Such was the shock at seeing a Tory taking an interest in the plight of the poor, some on the left even gave him a cautious welcome when he was appointed as Minister for Work & Pensions. Imagine their deflation today when they read IDS's White Paper, entitled Universal Credit: welfare that works. The general thrust of its contents will have taken nobody by surprise, but its lack of nuance, its wanton warping of reality and its clodhopping crudity are remarkable.

The Centre for Social Justice always contained a strong Protestant strain. It linked poverty with social malaise and moral deficiency, which in turn was linked to welfare itself. It said that people don't work because they have been made apathetic, indolent, fatalistic and dependent by the existence of a welfare state. Hence the headline-grabber: three strikes and you're out. There is no indication of how many benefit claimants have refused offers of work; indeed, commentators have noted that most jobseekers would jump for joy if they got a single job offer, never mind three. With 18 people applying for each job vacancy, how many applications would you have to complete to stand a realistic chance of getting three job offers?

Defenders of these reforms (and how that word has been bastardised in recent years) ask: well, if there are so so few jobs around that this policy won't actually affect anyone, what is there to worry about? The answer is the rhetoric, the idea that the unemployed deserve to be unemployed. The White Paper sets up this idea; the Comprehensive Spending Review, with its massive cuts to benefits and public services, will punish the undeserving poor by hacking back benefits, by stymying growth, and by creating disincentives to finding work (see my earlier post).

There is one other important point to make. These policies will leave vast numbers of people with medical conditions and disabilities in poverty. Duncan Smith has said the DWP's Work Programme scheme will provide tailored support for people with disabilities who are looking for work. The Tory Minister for Disabled People, Maria Miller, has said she wants to see a million more disabled people in work; yet the number of places available on the Work Programme for disabled people had just been cut by George Osborne to 16,000 per year. Perhaps a greater mathematical mind than mine will explain how you get 1,000,000 from 16,000.

Furthermore, a group of Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat MPs have just blasted Pathways to Work - a similar scheme on which the Work Programme is based - for failing to provide disabled people with sufficient support. The private sector, they said, had performed particularly badly. The Work Programme, of course, will be delivered by the private sector.

Local Authorities have known for several years that Pathways didn't work, which is why extra funding was ploughed into support provided by local charities which had expertise in working with people with learning disabilities, mental health problems, single parents etc. With a 28% hole in their budgets, some Councils may be forced to cut this funding, leaving the most vulnerable and stigmatised in society without the support they need.

Labour is in no position to oppose these measures seriously. It was they who introduced Pathways, they who contracted ATOS to assess people with serious medical conditions as being fit to work. They must abandon the cautious line that Douglas Alexander took today and return to first principles. Universal Credit is based on making the most unwell and financially disadvantaged people pay for capitalism's mistakes. These cuts are unnecessary, and they will create poverty on a massive scale. Yesterday gave a sense of the public's anger towards the Coalition. The cuts may go through, but in time they will be the undoing of this government.

A HUNDRED MILES IN A FEW YARDS

2010-11-05T20:30:00.004Z

Nairn’s London by Ian Nairn is long out-of-print, but I have just borrowed a copy from my wife’s uncle. Published in 1966, and with his name and family home written in careful loops on the inside cover, it is the perfect antidote to Pevsner. Pevsner’s guides are a stunning body of work – an almost comprehensive inventory of the buildings of England – but they are technical, architectural, concerned primarily with the buildings themselves, rather than what they bring to the feel of a place. Nairn’s book is witty, subjective and journalistic. In a few choice phrases, he reveals a place's character without denuding it. He is often extremely funny but never trite, and a short entry on a familiar building or street makes one hungry to re-visit it, to loiter around it, and to soak up its moods.

KING'S HEAD, UPPER TOOTING ROAD

Here he is on Muswell Hill: “a period piece of unruffled cheerfulness; when the suburbs were new, there were green fields next door and war was still rather jolly.” On Hampstead Village: “Hampstead is a bit of joke, though many of its inhabitants are deadly serious about it. As soon as a picturesque street or alley gets well started and you can begin to live the refined life, along a great hospital or board school or block of tenements ... it is not an amusing or exciting contrast either, just head-on conflict which ends in stalemate. But socially, it has undoubtedly saved Hampstead from becoming intolerably precious.” On Battersea Power Station: “this is one more London building that sticks in spite of the architecture rather than because of it. The timid fluting on brickwork and chimneys, novel at the time, would have made Telford or Rennie throw up.” And on the King’s Head in Upper Tooting Road: “a great, lucid, late-Victorian pub between Tooting and Balham ... the plan is a tour de force, with a central elliptical bar counter and the relative bar areas worked out so that there is never crowding or claustrophobia ... very rational and discriminate.”

Nairn is especially good on pubs, because he clearly spent an awful lot of time in them. They were where he got the real gist of a place, and where he slowly killed himself with Guinness.

City of Sound has a fine article on Nairn’s London, with pictures and more quotations. Many of the buildings he describes have gone, many of the streets – especially those around the river – have been compromised or emasculated. The streets around King’s Cross and St Pancras stations certainly have been, but the kernel of what he says in the entries for these places is still pertinent today. I will copy them out in full:

St Pancras Station
St Pancras is the most Continental of London train sheds. By comparison, the others are put together additively, like an English cathedral; this is one huge all-embracing sweep of the same family as Hamburg or Cologne. A vast throbbing hangar; the phrase needs to be repeated sixteen times to make enough weight in the book and convey the overwhelming solid force of this beginning or end to journeys. It is painted light as some kind of campaign to 'brighten the image of British Rail', but its only true colour is jet black.

Gasholders loom up at the far end of the platform. They are worth a closer look, and to get there turn right out of the station. The concoction in front of the shed is by Sir George Gilbert Scott, incredibly clever in composition and incredibly heartless. No Victorian quaintness here, in this competent reckoning up of fees-per-crocket. Right again, and you are in Midland Road. You might as well be round the backside of New Street at Birmingham or London Road at Leicester. It is one of the most astonishing transformations in London, a jump of a hundred miles in a few yards, achieved with the unemphatic red brick and hypnotic arcading of the Goods Station. London for a moment - and just for a moment - seems fussy and flurried, using two words where one will do. Anyone whose heart was lost to bricky Leicestershire would find this place unbearably nostalgic.

Up Midland Road to the traffic lights, turn right under the railways bridges; then, in Goods Way, the gasholders come back, a cascade of intersecting circles, a shout of sheer joy from the most unlikely place. All of them come to the party equipped with classical columns, simple Doric and a kind of gasholder Composite. The nineteenth-century equivalent of a Baroque angel is not a Victorian angel but a Baroque gasworks.

The whole of this place at the back of St Pancras is incredibly moving: tunnels, perspectives, trains on the skyline, roads going all ways. If you get nothing from it at first, stay there until something happens: it is really worth the effort.

King's Cross Station
Overwhelming honesty, taken to the point where it is something far more than a component virtue. The shape is the building, a point made straight away by comparison with the clever fribble on the front of St Pancras, next door. The defects are the building, like a drawback in someone's character which flows inevitably from their good qualities. Cubitt provided two identical train sheds side by side and scorned any of the deceptions which the nineteenth century would gladly have provided to disguise the fact. Nothing but yellow brick, grand proportions, and in the last few years the eerie other-worldly whinny of big diesels. Outside, two sheds, hence two huge brick arches. A clock, hence a turret perched in the valley between them, spoiling the composition in an academic sense, yet right on a deeper level. Cubitt wanted a brick tower here, which would have satisfied both. It was cut out of the budget, and he scorned subterfuge. The railway reorganisers need their noses rubbing in this quality until they feel it as impossible for the station to go (it is due to be replaced in the 1970s) as it would be for the Church of England to demolish St Paul's.

THE DIVINE DAVID

2010-11-05T19:19:00.002Z

AGAINST THE ORTHODOXY

2010-11-03T15:14:00.002Z

Read this excellent interview with Hugo Radice from Leeds University at the New Left Project. These two responses are particularly helpful:

The cuts are being justified in order not to spook the financial sector – in particular the bond markets. How accurate is that? Is the financial sector really desperate for these cuts?

Well I don’t think they are. I think the support of the city for the cuts is part of a more general ideological offensive. As far as the bond markets are concerned, my view is that throughout this crisis there has been clear evidence that there is a global savings glut. In other words there are funds available that are looking for a safe and well-remunerated outlet, and what we are seeing is that countries like the UK have actually been able to borrow with very little difficulty throughout the crisis. And this is largely because over the last thirty years or so there has been a very substantial redistribution of income from labour to capital, from wages to profits. What that has generated is a massive amount of capital available for investment in all sorts of activities. With the collapse of business investment after 2008, investors simply transferred their funds to the government bond markets instead; and in the course of this year UK bond yields – in other words the costs of government borrowing - have remained at remarkably low levels. There doesn’t seem to be any difficulty in meeting the expectations of the bond markets.

Even if this claim about the bond markets is unfounded, as you say, what does it suggest about the power of the financial sector over the political sphere that this claim is even made?

I don’t think it’s particularly helpful to see it in terms of a power relation or a power struggle between the two. The political sphere has been moulded over several centuries around the primary task of maintaining the power of private property, maintaining the power of capital. Now there’s no honour among thieves, and so because certain sections of the ruling classes benefit from certain policies and other sections benefit from other policies there are always going to be arguments about how to move forward. It has often been argued that the city somehow has excessive power vis a vis industry, but really there is a symbiotic relationship between the city and industry, making up a more general business interest – the interest of capital as a whole. And the same applies to what we can call the political class: the system of government, the main political parties, the state apparatus, will only break with the basic interests of private property in the most exceptional circumstances.

ISAO TOMITA

2010-11-01T20:46:00.001Z

This song goes out to my dad, who has been playing this to me for years, and to my wife, who made realise it's ok to like it.

JOINED-UP GOVERNMENT

2010-10-29T07:27:00.003Z

Earlier this month, in his address to the Conservative Party Conference, Iain Duncan Smith suggested that the Coalition's welfare reforms would incentivise people to find work:

"Our implementation of the Credit alongside the comprehensive work programme will make sure that everyone out of work will be given the greatest support to find work and every financial incentive to stay in work, because work will pay.This is the biggest reform of the welfare system in a generation ... No longer will they be able to say it isn't worth their while going to work. No longer will they be trapped in a complex system which means they have to ask an advisor if they will better off in work than on benefits. We will change this broken system to help those at the bottom end make a new start and change their lives through work."

A week later, George Osborne announced that funding for social housing would be cut by 60%. To pay the costs of building and renovating its housing stock, Councils and Housing Associations will now have to massively increase rents to tenants, who will now have to pay 80% of market rates. But given that many social housing tenants receive Housing Benefit to support them with the costs of housing, this will inevitably mean a huge pressure on the welfare budget - in effect, the Government has passed housing costs from one Department to another.

The Guardian reports that "in areas where rents are already high, such as the London boroughs of Camden, Hackney and Haringey, many tenants moving into new social homes would face bills of £340 per week for a three-bedroom property. Even if people could get a job, their earnings would disappear in high rent repayments." The National Housing Federation, the umbrella group which represents housing associations, has argued that the cuts will act as a powerful disincentive for unemployed people to find work. People living in high-rent areas, "would have to earn at least £54,000 before they could get off housing benefit and be in a position where they could keep the bulk of their additional salary and find themselves better off in work".

Eileen Short, a Council tenant in Tower Hamlets and Chair of Defend Council Housing, has called on other tenants, politicians, Unions and anybody else with a vaguely progressive bone in their body to oppose the cuts:

"Attacks on secure tenancies, cuts in housing benefit and forcing up rents will create more debt, evictions and homelessness. Tenants have fought hard for our secure tenancies and lower rents, and we will expect trade unions, Councillors and MPs to join with us in this fight to defend them.

"Tenants did not cause the housing crisis - we need investment in more and better council housing to provide homes for all those priced out of the market, to make council housing once again a mixed and sustainable tenure of choice."

THE NEW POLL TAX?

2010-10-27T20:58:00.003Z

What, if anything, will bring down the Coalition Government? What will be its Poll Tax moment?

I've been reading about the Kubler-Ross model of how people deal with tragedy or grief. In 1969, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross wrote a book called On death and dying, in which she described the five stages by which people react to bereavement or the diagnosis of a terminal illness. First, people try to deny that the tragedy occurred. Second, upon accepting that it has occurred, a person may be angry, raging against a world that has allowed it to happen. Third, a person will try to make the best of it, hoping they can prolong life, or that they can reverse their terminal illness in exchange for living a better, more worthy life. Fourth, they become resigned, fatalistic, depressed and nihilistic - this is how things are, they might say, so what's the point in doing anything? And finally, the person comes to terms with the situation, fully accepting that the end is nigh.

This model fits the tragedies which Kubler-Ross was describing, because they are truly irreversible. But can it fit a political tragedy? At what stage are the millions of people who work in or rely on public services, whether they realise it or not? The denial stage has passed - partly because their worst fears of what the CSR might bring have been realised, and partly because public services have been subject to various efficiency drives for many years. Denial is no longer an option, and the Government no doubt hopes that the public will skip the second stage.

Maybe they are right. But if they are, what are the possible outcomes? That people who have been made redundant will exchange the wasteful years of public servitude for private entrepreneurialism? The news that Britain's economic growth remains extremely shaky suggests otherwise. Will people who can no longer afford the rent on their Council flat move to less desirable areas without a fight? Perhaps, but then how will Councils outside London and the South East cope? Will people who are out of work, pushed even further from the labour market by a thoroughly confused and botched set of welfare reforms, turn to nihilism rather than radicalism? Again, maybe - but this would spell the political death of the Coalation.

But I don't think they are right. The budget cuts are so comprehensive, and so kamikaze, that I think many people from many walks of life will become very angry, and for very different reasons. Among this plethora of resentments, which will be the one that kills off the Government? It is too early to tell, and there is an embarrassment of options to choose from.

But Tom Clark suggests one cut that has largely escaped the notice of journalists and, I suspect, the public. The Government has handed responsibility for Council Tax rebates to Local Authorities, and has deliberately given them less money than the Government believes is necessary:

"The Institute for Fiscal Studies suggests that one way councils could respond to the funding shortfall would be to withdraw council tax benefit much more rapidly as families begin to earn. On the basis of their modelling, I calculate that the effective tax rate that some poor workers face as their benefits are withdrawn would rise to 98%. Some local authorities will respond in other ways creating new perversities, and with different perversities in different parts of the country, IDS's £2bn overhaul of the benefit system to create nationwide rationalisation that makes it pay to work becomes outright impossible.

A final flaw in the half-baked plan is that it will reward councils who drive the poor out of their town. Just as new housing policies purging them from well-to-do districts are coming on stream, councils could find they are quids in if they can persuade people entitled to a rebate to get out of the borough. Shirley Porter, the council leader who pushed the poor from Westminster in the 1980s, would approve wholeheartedly."

FAREWELL WELFARE?

2010-10-16T20:53:00.003Z

September 22nd was the 50th anniversary of the climax of the St Pancras rent strikes, which I’ve written about here before. During the 1950s, the Tory government wanted to limit the creation of social housing by increasing rents, so that people would be forced to look to the private sector for more affordable tenancies. In 1959, when the Tories won St Pancras Borough Council from Labour, they squeezed Council tenants even further by introducing the “differential rent scheme,” which increased rents for the majority of tenants.

The Council tenants of the day, who only 15 years earlier had fought a war for democracy and a welfare state, saw their achievements being eroded. They acted as one and went on strike. But as 1959 became 1960, more and more tenants gave up the strike, until only two – Don Cook and Arthur Rowe – were left. “We had a ship’s bell on Ellen’s balcony that we’d ring if we saw the bailiffs,” recalls Don’s wife Edie today. “People came streaming out of their flats as Ellen rang the bell. The support was unbelievable – there were thousands of people there. Leighton Road was chock-a-block.”

On September 22nd, the police and bailiffs arrived at Kennistoun House in Kentish Town, where the Cooks had barricaded themselves in. After a struggle, they gained entry, emptied the flats of the Cooks’ possessions, and evicted them. “We had just started getting a decent home together, a nice little respectable home,” Edie recalls. “Seeing all of our possessions being thrown over the top of the balconies and smashing down on the ground below... well, I was heartbroken. I lost so much personal stuff – photographs, things you couldn’t replace.”

In a case of history repeating, on Wednesday a Tory Chancellor will announce the biggest series of cuts the British public sector has ever seen. Councils up and down the country are planning for a number of scenarios – in the worst case, they will be forced to reduce budgets by 40%; if they only have to cut by 20%, they will have got away lightly. This will clearly impact upon social housing, and Councils are likely to move as many people as possible into the private sector.

Except that this won’t work either. The National Housing Federation has predicted that cuts to Housing Benefit will leave a million people at risk of being driven into debt, falling into arrears or losing their home. The government itself predicts that almost a million of the poorest people in Britain will lose an average of £12 per week next year, and more than 40,000 households will lose more than £1,000 per year. More importantly, the capping of Local Housing Allowance could make 750,000 private-rented sector tenants in London and the South East homeless (Newham is the only London Borough whose rents fall at or below the new LHA rate caps). This will increase the pressure on Councils (whose budgets may have been slashed by 40%) to provide housing at affordable rates.

There are two facts which are blindingly obvious, but which have been blacked out by the media and the government, so bear repeating. The first is that the deficit was caused by the government’s intervention to save the financial sector in 2008/09, and the reduction in tax revenue arising from the recession. It has nothing, repeat nothing, to do with public-sector spending. Even when New Labour spending was at its highest in the mid-2000s, the public debt was lower than it had been for 30 years.

The second point is that there is no rush to pay off this deficit. The majority of the loans do not need to be paid back for years, or even decades. For the party of business to start paying back debts that don’t mature for so long, when it doesn’t have the money to do so, and when this risks Britain falling into a double-dip recession, is extraordinary – but it also makes a kind of sense. As John Gray has recently written, the Lib Dems, no less than the Tories, have a deep ideological aversion to the public sector. Their brand of liberalism is entirely in hock to the market, even if the market makes people less free.

But there are rumblings. I have spoken to colleagues – lapsed lefties, people who don’t consider themselves to be political animals, even people who voted Lib Dem and now regret it – who are planning to strike for the first time in decades, or even for the first time in their lives. What Gray says about Greece applies to Britain too: “no democracy will accept steeply declining living standards in return for nebulous promises of growth in a hypothetical future.” The resistance begins on Wednesday with a rally outside Downing Street. For the first time in my life, I expect to see a hell of a lot of new faces.

THE PRUITT-IGOE MYTH

2010-10-09T21:21:00.004Z

Watch this:

The tower blocks which we see from above as half-deserted slums, and from below as they spill to the ground, make up the Pruitt-Igoe housing development in St Louis, Missouri. It was built in the early 1950s and demolished at 3pm on 16 March 1972. Charles Jencks, in what sounds suspiciously like a meta-narrative statement, later that 16 March 1972 was “the day Modernism died.” Many go further, citing the Modernist style of Pruitt-Igoe as the direct cause of its failure.

There is no doubt that Pruitt-Igoe was a failure. Post-war St Louis was experiencing white flight on a massive-scale, and its deserted and dilapidated houses were filled with poor black families. Yet, Pruitt-Igoe replaced one kind of segregated slum with another. From its conception it was cursed by political and economic constraints – the emergence of the Right, the need to divert funds to the Korean war effort, endemic racism and segregation of neighbourhoods, and a growing opposition (somewhat coloured by McCarthyism) to welfare. The final development – 33 11-storey blocks, nearly 3,000 units of housing – was under- occupied, cheaply built and suffered from poor elevation and non-existent ventilation. By the end of the 60s, Pruitt-Igoe was ridden with crime and decay (though, through the efforts and protests of some residents, pockets of well-maintained domesticity remained).

But can it really be wise to blame Modernist ideals and methods for its ills? In The Language of Post-Modern Architecture Charles Jencks, cheerleader of the postmodern movement, wrote that,

Pruitt-Igoe was constructed according to the most progressive ideas of CIAM ... and it won an award from the American Institute of Architects when it was designed in 1951. It consisted of elegant slab blocks fourteen storeys high, with rational “streets in the air” (which were safe from cars but, as it turned out, not safe from crime); “sun, space and greenery”, which Le Corbusier called the “three essential joys of urbanism” (instead of conventional streets, gardens and semi-private space, which he banished). It had a separation of pedestrian and vehicular traffic, the provision of play space, and local amenities such as laundries, crèches and gossip centres – all rational substitutes for traditional patterns.

This is something of a straw man argument, suggesting that Pruitt-Igoe was an archetype of Modernism, and that its failures could be applied to CIAM-influenced projects as a whole. In fact, Pruitt-Igoe never won an award; it was always compromised by economics and politics (which Jencks fails to mention); and it seems rather convenient to pick out the very worst example of Modernism in practice to denigrate the whole movement. Katharine Bristol notes that a Pruitt-Igoe myth has flourished, in which a writer like Tom Wolfe can invent a public meeting where the residents elected to dynamite the buildings – a complete fabrication.

According to this myth, people like Jencks can put forward the notion that if its architecture had been more vernacular, more sympathetic to “traditional patterns” of behaviour or local history, Pruitt-Igoe would have been a success. As an argument, it is astoundingly insular, and utterly blind to outside forces. In its own way, it is even more dogmatic, even more wedded to the principle that society can be engineered by design alone, that Modernism as its Highest. It is understandable that the architectural profession would put forward such an argument – it legitimates them as the be-all and end-all of the urban environment. But as Bristol notes, “what this obscures is the architects’ passivity in the face of a much larger agenda that has its roots not in radical social reform, but in the political economy of post-World War II St Louis and in practices of racial segregation.”

This over-emphasis on architecture lets other actors, policy-makers and politicians whose actions were far more damaging to Pruitt-Igoe, off the hook. St Louis’s Public Housing Administration, under pressure from a Congress more interested in bombing Korea back to the previous century than building housing for its own citizens, insisted that the site accommodate a higher density of people than in the old slums. The poorest sections of the black community were placed there and, unable to fill it, the Housing Authority lost income and struggled to maintain the scheme. The elevators stopped only at every third floor (a consequence of housing policy rather than design), and the galleries which were originally designed to instil a sense of community were viewed by residents as “gauntlets,” where they could be bullied or attacked by gangs. The myth that faulty architecture was wholly to blame had a racist tinge to it, with some (including the architects themselves) claiming that middle-class, white architects had designed a building without taking into account the “behaviours” of its intended residents.

There are a number of anomalies which cast a shadow on the “Pruitt-Igoe myth”. Firstly, a nearby development called Carr Village – built according to the same principles, housing a similar demographic, but subject to less damaging external factors – was a success. Secondly, Pruitt-Igoe;s architect also designed a building – put to an entirely different use – which has become a symbol of economic and political patriotism: the World Trade Center in New York. Thirdly, what the right wing of the postmodern movement fail to mention is that many of the most notorious Modernist public housing scheme were commissioned by right-wing (Conservative and Republican) governments who built them cheaply and treated them as slum clearance. And fourthly – and perhaps we might be permitted a little schadenfreude here – it turns out that Poundbury, that monarchist-pomo wet-dream, is a crime-infested hellhole too!

QUO VADIS

2010-10-07T20:43:00.003Z

The only book I managed to finish on honeymoon was Huysmans' A Rebours, in which the "anaemic and highly strung" Duc Jean des Esseintes flees the vulgar commerce of the bourgeoisie by designing his own hermetic world in the country: a house where the air is suffused with assiduously chosen perfumes and bouquets, whose walls are filled with paintings by Moreau, and whose shelves are lines with Catholic theology and classical literature.

Chapter III provides an acid - and occasionally ardent - overview of Latin works. I realised, upon reading it, that everything I had been taught at school was wrong...

the gentle Virgil, he whom the schoolmastering fraternity call the Swan of Mantua, presumably because that was not his native city, impressed him as being one of the most appalling pedants and one of the most deadly bores that Antiquity ever produced; his well-washed, beribboned shepherds taking it in turns to empty over each other's heads jugs of icy-cold sententious verse, his Orpheus whom he compares to a weeping nightingale, his Aristaeus who blubbers about bees, and his Aeneas, that irresolute, garrulous individual who strides up and down like a puppet in a shadow-theatre, making wooden gestures behind the ill-fitting, badly oiled screen of the poem...

...It is only fair to add that, if his admiration for Virgil was anything but excessive and his enthusiasm for Ovid's limpid effusions exceptionally discreet, the disgust he felt for the elephantine Horace's vulgar twaddle, for the stupid patter he keeps up as he simpers at his audience like a painted old clown, was absolutely limitless...

The only Latin author Des Esseintes has any time whatever for - and who, indeed, he loves - is Petronius...

In villas full of insolent luxury where wealth and ostentation run riot, as also in the mean inns described throughout the book, with their unmade trestle beds swarming with fleas, the society of the day has its fling - despraced ruffians like Ascyltus and Eumolpus, out for what they can get; unnatural old men with their gowns tucked up and their cheeks plastered with white lead and acacia rouge; catamites of sixteen, plump and curly-headed; women having hysterics; legacy-hunters offering their boys and girls to gratify the lusts of rich testators, all these and more scurry across the pages of the Satyricon, squabbling in the streets, fingering one another in the baths, beating one another up like characters in a pantomime.

It is such fine literary criticism that I notice Wikipedia's entry on Petronius quotes verbatim from Robert Baldick's translation of A Rebours. Meanwhile, I'm going to skip over Virgil and Horace and find myself a copy of the Satyricon.

EXCUSES EXCUSES

2010-10-04T18:59:00.002Z

That silent tumbleweed sound you've been hearing round here lately? That's the sound of a boy planning to get married, getting married and going on honeymoon. And it was the best six weeks of my life, I might add. Still, we're back at work, it's now dark when I get up and when I get home, and blogs don't write themselves. Forward - march!

A WHISPER IN THE CORNER

2010-08-20T22:10:00.001Z

Map of massacre locations and deportation and extermination centers - click here to enlarge.

Wishing to swat up on Kemal Mustafa Ataturk, the man around whose personality Turkey continues to build a cult, I bought a book about him while I was in Istanbul. Given that it is published by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, it is no surprise that this pamphlet – entitled Ataturk’s Legacy – is a hagiography. Nevertheless, I was struck by the economy of this description of Turkey’s participation in World War One:

The CUP committed many errors ... In 1915, the CUP government opened a front in the Caucasus against Russia late in the fall season. They hastily moved troops from the Palestine front to the Caucasus without proper provisions. Logistical support to the troops in the front was either too late in coming, or was consistently intercepted by Armenian militia who were in open revolt against the empire amidst war. The Ottoman General Staff, aiming to prevent these assaults, decided to relocate the Armenian population that resided along the only railroad available. What began as a military contingency turned out to be a tragedy, with reprisals or just for the sake of marauding conducted by local tribes against the Armenians, coupled with deaths due to starvation and disease. The other side of the tragedy was that close to 60,000 Turkish soldiers starved or froze to death in Sarikamis, north of Erzurum, in addition to numerous Turkish civilians killed by the Dashnak (a communist revolutionary party) Armenian militia.

The gist of this is that the CUP made a strategic error in the Caucasus which led to “reprisals” against Armenians, and which led to the murder of thousands of Turks – a peculiar way of describing the deliberate murder of up to a million and a half Armenians by the Turkish military. It is rather like describing the Holocaust as something which got a bit out of hand and caused distress to lots of German gentiles. Just what is it that makes Turkey so incapable of facing up to the Armenian genocide of 1915?

The story of the Ottoman Empire’s decline and eventual extinction in the bloodbath of the 1914-18 war is well-known. The Empire had been nibbled at by its rivals – mainly France and Russia – throughout the 19th century. In 1878, it lost its Balkan states of Serbia, Montenegro, Romania and Bulgaria to independence movement. Thirty years later, a group of young soldiers caught wind of British and Russian plans to carve up the old Byzantine lands of Rumelia and launched a coup against the Sultan. The coup of the Young Turks / CUP, whose main objective was to preserve and rebuild imperial power, won widespread support, but the CUP lacked a nucleus around which it could unite the ethnically and religiously disparate peoples of the Empire.

By 1912, the last Ottoman province in North Africa (Libya) was lost to Italy. Istanbul, Anatolia and the Arab lands as far as Suez were all that was left of the Empire. Yet even though the Empire was now 85% Muslim, when the predominantly Muslim state of Albania defected, ethnicity replaced religion as the core of the CUP’s ideology. Although Islam remained a useful rallying point, Turkishness was now what divided and ruled the Ottoman people.

In 1914, the Empire joined the war on the side of the Central Powers – an opportunity to regain much of the land it had lost to Russia in 1878. In the harsh winter of 1915, the Minister of War, Ismail Enver, led an ill-fated attack on the Russian border in the Caucasus from which few troops returned. The Armenian people were strategically important to both the Russian and Ottoman empires, split as they were across the borders of each. As Christians, they had been the subject of pogroms by Sultan Abdulhamid in the 1890s; as an Armenian nationalism emerged and thousands of Armenians enlisted into the Russian army, they became targeted by the CUP too. In March 1915, seeking a scapegoat for the Caucasian whitewash and fearing that the Armenians might defect wholesale to the Russians, the CUP passed a motion that the entire Armenian population in eastern Turkey be deported to Syria.

In fact, deportation was a cover for genocide. Enver’s brother-in-law – the governor of Van – ordered that all Armenian males over the age of 12 be exterminated. “By early June,” writes Perry Anderson in an authoritative piece on Kemal, “centrally directed and coordinated destruction of the Armenian population was in full swing. As the leading comparative authority on modern ethnic cleansing, Michael Mann writes, ‘the escalation from the first incidents to genocide occurred within three months, a much more rapid escalation than Hitler’s later attack on the Jews.’” Two thirds of the Armenian population – up to a million and half people – are thought to have died. The genocide was systematic, but its purpose arose not so much from any racial ideology (despite the CUP’s pragmatic nationalism) as from a need to remove the perceived Armenian treachery which might lead to the final dissolution of the Empire.

In the aftermath of World War One, and during the war of independence, Turkish nationalists placed a great deal of importance on the 1915 massacre. They believed it had saved the Empire, and Kemal’s hostility towards Enver arose not from a belief that he had gone too far, but because Enver had not done enough, allowing an Armenian Republic to be created and recognised by the Allies. Turkey was the only defeated power whose ruling powers were not overthrown by revolutionary forces, and a mixture of good intelligence, Soviet solidarity and Allied divisions meant that Turkey was able to emerge from the 1922 Treaty of Lausanne as an independent republic with internationally accepted borders. Meanwhile, the Armenian Revolutionary Party took it upon themselves to bring rough justice to the perpetrators of the genocide, searching them out from Germany to Tajikistan and killing them. The few survivors were offered positions in Kemal’s government.

Ninety years later, the denial of the 1915 genocide and the continued existence of statues and streets celebrating its executioners (“as if in Germany” writes Anderson, “squares, streets and kindergarten were called after Himmler, Heydrich, Eichmann, without anyone raising an eyebrow”) is an obstacle to Turkey’s biggest prize: EU membership. The similarities between 1915 and the Final Solution are striking – both conducted in wartime by people working in secret who knew their activities were criminal, and who worked systematically under the guide of deportation – so why is the latter multilaterally and internationally abhorred and commemorated, while the former is disputed and largely neglected? Why is it that, even today, the Turkish government “do not seem to blanch at the term ‘massacre’ but are besides themselves when the G-word is mentioned?”

Partly, because Turkish writers and historians are hounded for asking difficult questions; partly because foreign historians are denied access to key primary sources; partly because the West, well aware of Turkey’s strategic importance in the Cold War and the War on Terror, is loathe to offend its partner (Madeleine Albright’s dismissal of Nancy Pelosi’s resolution to discuss the genocide in 2007 is a case in point).

But partly because of differences between the two genocides: differences in their causes, and in what they reaped. Whereas the Nazis were ideologically driven (the Jews presented no strategic threat to the Reich; indeed, the exterminations distracted it from its war effort), the CUP’s genocide was a necessary strategy in maintaining the Empire. The Armenians, proportionally more significant than the Jews in Germany, were scapegoated because of their position on the border of a rival Empire – and, as we have seen above, their extermination was a major factor in the Turkish victories of the 1920s. As Perry Anderson says, “one genocide was the dementia of an order that has disappeared. The other was a founding moment of a state that has endured.”

The legacies of these genocides provide a clue to how they are seen today. “One has become the object of official and popular remembrance, on a monumental scale,” writes Anderson. “The other is a whisper in the corner, that no diplomat in the Union abides.” Both have as their inheritance a state, each a key ally to the West. “Israel, a pivotal ally in the Middle East, requires recognition of the Judeocide, and has secured massive reparations for it. Turkey, a vital ally in the Near East, denies that genocide of the Armenians ever occurred, and insists no mention ever be made of it.” While it is practically unlikely that any admission would lead to a redrawing of Turkish borders, or even compensation to the Armenians, strategically if Turkey were to concede that one and a half million Armenians were systematically killed in 1915, what then of other massacres – of the Greeks in Istanbul in 1955, of Cypriots in 1974, of Kurds throughout modern Turkish history – which have consolidated the unity of the Turkish nation? It might also be added, pace Edith Durham, that “no connection is made between the genocide of the Armenians and Muslim civilian losses: the millions of Muslims expelled from the Balkans and the Russian Empire through the long 19th century remain part of Europe’s own forgotten past.” No clearer illustration can be found of the ideology of “human rights,” recognition of which is claimed to be universal, but which in reality depends on shady geopolitics.