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.’ Jones continues:

‘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. Whatever language I need to learn to begin living outside This Shit, 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.

Cameron tellingly still thinks that free markets are moral and effective, even after 2008. The Conservatives are little but a PR machine when it comes to issues such as these, and so are Labour, to be fair. But it’s important that we don’t forget Public Enemy No.1: The Conservative Party.

The post on Thatcher’s death I picked up via Brockley Bob at Obliged to Offend was good. I agree that the left, instead of celebrating the end of the wicked witch when it comes, should look back over its littered last thirty years and work out why it screwed each one of them up so thoroughly before throwing it on the floor for the mice.

But again, I need to remind myself here that all this Labour-bashing shouldn’t be the primary objective. Owen Jones, in his book Chavs, described being invited to talk to a key Tory at a retreat, when he was a journalism student. As the logs crackled on the fire, this un-named individual explained to the gathering that the Conservative Party are the party of vested interests, and that their game is to give just enough, to just enough people, in order to get away with being the party of the elite. Of course we knew this already, but it’s good to know that it’s right there on Page 40. Jones effectively follows this up in The Guardian, explaining how Cameron has cleverly turned a market crash into a public spending hangover, painting Labour’s largesse as the problem, when he backed Labour’s spending plans all the way up to 2008, at which point he siezed upon his current rhetoric, with an election in the post.

The public majority are Turkeys voting for Christmas in all this, fed pellets of news, fattened on working class-bashing headlines. If they’re going to start removing honours, they need to strip Sir James Crosby of his knighthood too, for sacking his risk manager, which effectively led to the collapse of HBOS. There are many other deserving causes, and unless this process is followed-through across all the other examples, this is just spin. Ultimately, it’s very simple (although I believe not practically easy) to remove the laurels from people like Goodwin, whilst leaving the structure of the problem, and their real power, capital, completely intact.

Notes

Jones (2010) Chavs. London: Verso, and http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jan/13/david-cameron-cynical-propaganda

21st Century Manifesto; Arguing the World; Blood & Treasure; Cautiously Pessimistic; David Osler; Ecological Headstand; Fat Man On A Keyboard; Flesh Is Grass; Jack of Kent; Joe Moran’s Blog; Left Outside; Lenin’s Tomb; Lump of Labour; Mark Fisher; Mark Rainey: Edifying Discourse; Never Trust A Hippy; Norman Geras; Obliged To Offend; Owen Jones; Peter Risdon; Shiraz Socialist; Sit down man, you’re a bloody tragedy; Stumbling and Mumbling; Terry Glavin; The Bad Old Days Will End; The Centre Left; The Encyclopedia of Decency; The Third Estate; Though Cowards Flinch; Unspeak; Winston Smith – Working With The Underclass; Your Friend In The North.

All the links for them are down the side here. Grimmer Up North, it seems, closed in March last year. With a post entitled ‘Labour Must Find Its Spine’, author Susan Press wrote ‘Not much blogging of late. I have been too ill with various viruses. And I have been too angry.’ Nothing has changed there then, including the state of Labour, but I am searching for a decent Calderdale-ish Labour politics blog if anyone knows where to go.

One New Year resolution of mine is to have a more outward-looking blog practice and check out other people’s writing more, Bob From Brockley is very good at doing this, and it seems to be working so far.

Sometimes I’ll be on a train and I’ll suddenly wince and shudder over a line or paragraph and change it as soon as I get home, because I know it can be seen. This is the main benefit of writing in public for me, or rather, that’s the benefit of using an interactive ‘electrical notebook’, because I take writing from my blog to use for bits of publishing, it’s the testing ground before it goes to print.

But checking out your stuff – the other blogs I go to regularly – really opens me out. The diversity of material, the fact of glass half full to my half empty writers, all refresh the discourse in a good way.