‘She thinks the crash of 2008 should have “resulted in the rejection of capitalism and many of its basic economic and political assumptions”, and that the UK’s coalition amounts to a “hyper-competitive, imperial/militaristic, climate-change-ignoring and privatising government”. She is also a proud republican, who refuses to attend the kind of official events at which the Queen turns up, and was once thrown out of the Welsh Assembly for referring to the reigning monarch as “Mrs Windsor.”‘

My kind of girl. Is the language I need to learn to start living outside of all this Welsh? I know a little already. Harris essentially backs this up by pointing out the differences between Welsh and English life, as an ex-resident:

‘There are no Sats tests in Welsh schools, and until they are seven, children in primary education follow a “foundation phase” based on ideas from Finland and Italy, and built around “play and active involvement rather than completing exercises in books”. Prescriptions are free, and the Welsh NHS will be unaffected by Andrew Lansley’s market-based revolution. When the coalition in London raised tuition fees to £9,000, the government in Cardiff guaranteed to meet the cost of the increase for any student who lives in Wales. As with Scotland, there is a sharp sense of a shared politics well to the left of what prevails in England: I lived in Wales between 2004 and 2009, and though its brand of Celtic social democracy is far from perfect, there’s a palpable sense of a society run along kinder, more communitarian ideas than those that hold sway to the east.’

I am also an ex-resident of five years, and I certainly felt better looked after in Wales, with its free prescriptions, museums and galleries. But Harris rightly sounds a note of economic caution:

‘Of the Welsh workforce, 27.5% is employed by the public sector, and according to some estimates, government spending accounts for as much as 70% of Wales’s national income. In short, as Jones says, far more is spent by the state in Wales than is raised in tax – and in the absence of assets as handsome as North Sea oil and gas, the case for independence contains a gaping hole. You need only drive around the classically post-industrial expanses of south Wales – where the economy seems split between the state and big chain stores – to grasp the deep problems that afflict them, and how difficult any plan for economic revival would be.’

I got a sense of this when visiting other towns such as Swansea. Wood responds to this with a set of very vague proposals, which are worrying not only in their flossiness, but also in their potential for inward-looking, provincial, parochial nationalism:

‘Some of her ideas about creating a new Welsh economy are condensed in a document she calls a “Greenprint” for her native south Wales valleys, which draws on examples set by the Basque region and the Danish island of Samso, and sets out a vision of “food sovereignty” and “self-sufficiency.”‘

Something tells me that she has at least glanced at certain projects in my current home town, there are more questions than answers here. Cardiff University’s Richard Wyn Jones ‘points not to some shining new Welsh dawn, but a much more troubling prospect: turbulence and strife, with no clear resolution’. Essentially he says that Wales should be careful what it wishes for, that England may cut it loose, along with Northern Ireland, as both are viewed in some quarters as financial drains, and this would hurt, economically.

Still, these are interesting times, and I welcome any dissent from stifling English conservatism and Labour’s continuation of the neoliberal project.

Notes

Harris (2012) ‘Could Wales leave the United Kingdom?’ in The Guardian, Weds, Feb 01

At the City Gallery, I had another look at Grayson Perry’s ‘Print For A Politician’, but was cheered to see an original Steve Bell on the opposite wall, depicting a queue of workers waiting to go up a ladder, then straight into a black toilet, looming large on the Manchester landscape, with Beetham Tower in the background. Beetham is aloof, a place to view and dis-engage. Steve Bell was commenting on the loss of 2,000 council jobs in Manchester, using Lowry’s work as an aesthetic quotation. Bell later attended the Tory conference in Manchester. The first ever Occupy encampment in this country began during that event, as an offshoot to the protest march (again, see my photographs and writing on that below somewhere). Manchester has never been backwards about going forwards, in radical terms.

His painting of Southend in 1846 was very interesting, essentially a rural scene, but with the docks and cranes visible in the background, and a red jacketed pony and trap driver, assumed to be a postman. A very modern scene, which linked up with my thoughts on the Oldham Panorama, created thirty years later (see the post below).

Madox Brown’s unfinished ‘cartoon’ for John Kay was interesting too, depicting a struggle between a loom owner and a loom breaker. Its finished version is one of the twelve ‘Manchester Murals’ in the town hall, but this one, with its white space, looked like some sort of postmodern intervention. What’s interesting about this unfinished piece is that the white space can be read as utopia, literally an a-topos, but a space of possibility. It’s perhaps also poetic that the white space was eventually filled in, and is now protected within a municipal space, regulated and maintained by the state, but perhaps I’m reading a little too much into it with this last point.

We arrived at the gallery and strolled around the block, There seemed to be something of a cultural quarter in Oldham, small though it was, and the gallery was very nicely done.

The ‘Oldham Panorama’, a joined set of three wide images, all from 1876, returned us to the era E.P. Thompson covers in his seminal work, revealing a coal mine of some sort, right in the town centre, along with new build houses, and scores of factory chimneys. Just look at the houses, they are modern, and are being built factory-style. It’s a scene most people would place just after World War Two, if asked to take a test, rather than in the late-Victorian era. Places such as Oldham were becoming the centre of things in the early nineteenth century, but they have now moved from their status as globalizing centres, to simply being other territories within globalization.

On the same programme, we heard from a researcher who called to bring back flogging as a replacement for prison, and a Tory who claimed that £43k per year is not the salary of a well-off person, and yet another who announced that Nick Clegg has ‘another thing coming’ if he thinks that he is going to tax high earners, which he described as ‘the striving classes.’ On his terms this means people who want more unearned surplus, rather than, say, the classes who are currently striving to scrape together enough to pay the council tax. Owen Jones, as a journalism undergraduate, was invited, in 2005, along with his peers, to speak to what he describes as an ‘extremely prominent Tory politician from the moderate wing of the party’:

‘So that he could speak candidly, aspiring student journalists were barred from reporting on the speech and we were sworn to preserve his anonymity. It soon became clear why. As the logs crackled in the fireplace on a rainy November evening, the Tory grandee made a stunning confession. “What you have to realise about the Conservative Party,” he said as though it was a trivial, throwaway comment, “is that it is a coalition of privileged interests. Its main purpose is to defend that privilege. And the way it wins elections is by giving just enough to just enough other people.”‘

That, let us remember, is from a moderate. Of course we already knew about this, but it’s good to have stark reminders every now and then. Whatever language I need to learn to begin living outside all of this, I need to start learning it now.

Notes

Owen Jones (2011) Chavs. London: Verso. Pages 39-40.

The human world is surely ‘natural’ in that the struggle to survive is strongly impressed on language and culture, one only has to think a little about the surfaces of David Cameron’s speeches and sense the slaughtered antelope under their sheen, surrounded by hyenas, with vultures lurking in the trees, the flies already feeding. The media landscape is saturated with this struggle, the dog eat dog life. When reviewing Hayek’s Road To Serfdom, George Orwell criticised his laissez faire advocacy by saying ‘the trouble with competitions is that somebody wins them.’ In television entertainment such as Dragon’s Den and Deal Or No Deal, the great thing about competitions, is that somebody wins them. It is Milton Freidman television.

And this is before we have even left the house, to work in offices, call centres, industrial units and prisons. This comes to us before we close the front door to go and undertake an ethnography of the local magistrates court. This is the landscape of culture, rather than nature, that my friend wills the number nine to skid on black ice to deliver him from. This said, having thought a little about post-retirement life expectancy recently, I also suspect that ‘the struggle’ keeps us alive, and there is a further dialectic to be had there. None of this was ever going to be simple.

Despite mulling over some of the issues it raises, I take my friend’s point, and despite not having reached forty, I strongly agree with it. What Heidegger said about never experiencing our own death is relevant to mention here too, how can you miss anything when you are not ‘there’ to experience the absence? In which case it is time to do some walking in nature, constructed or otherwise.

It’s an honour to have my photo of Tom on that recording, both musically and politically. Tom Rapp is the legendary folk singer of Pearls Before Swine, the influential ESP-disc late-1960s group.

Ken Livingstone keeps newts in a tank, you know, hopefully along with that other swivel-eyed reptile, Boris Johnson, soon…

Allen Ginsberg - A Supermarket in California / Schmidt and Spoerri – Rapido de Noir / Radio 9 - Pianosong / Mesma – In The Cards / New Fast Automatic Daffodils – Why The Hard Man Fail / Sabres of Paradise – Wilmot Meets Lord Scruffage / Miles Davis – Black Satin / Vaclav Nelhybel – Cosmic Awakening / The Jonny Teupen Group – Tropical Scene / Can – Moonshake / Evolution Control Committee – Rebel Without a Pause. 

If you want to reproduce it, segue all the tracks into each other. The Ginsberg and the Schmidt and Spoerri – the first two tracks – should be started simultaneously. Drop in the opening lines of Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’, at the end of Rapido de Noir, twice.

In the Top 10 searched-for posts are two of my book reviews for Networks, one of Culture and Power by John Storey, and another of Visible Signs by David Crow. ‘Mind the Gap: Psychogeography as an Expanded Tradition’, my Street Signs article, is still in the Top 10, and got very good hits from the moment it went up. My Ptolemaic Terrascope interview with Will Sergeant still gets big pulls too, it flatlines to nothing, then spikes to hundreds, and then vanishes just as mysteriously.

I sort-of understand all of that. The borderline is my review of a four CD box set of Velvet Underground barrel scrapings on Captain Trip Records, originally written for Ptolemaic Terrascope. This is a piece of negligible significance. But persistent all the way through has been a photograph of a scrap of Spirograph drawing I found on the floor. Right up there. Always popular. A real hit. Not a confidence boost, that one.