The borough I grew up in (and have recently moved back to) can't boast enormous amounts in terms of cultural heritage; it's a tatty, non-descript place in many ways, but it has its charms and character. And a couple of good little museums and galleries, the most noted of which is the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow, devoted to the works of the pioneering socialist, designer and poet, whose opening hours Waltham Forest council now intends to restrict drastically. This is classic example of creating cultural facts on the ground - reduce opportunities to visit, and you can argue that not many people want to go.
I don't go a bundle on a lot of Morris's designs myself - a tad too twee, to my untutored eye - but as a political figure and socialist he was a big deal and someone an area such as ours should be proud of. It's depressingly unsurprising that a Labour-led council should be enacting such cuts (WF is a hung council with the Lib Dems holding the balance of power), more depressing still that a Labour leader of the council should be reported as dismissing campaigners against the cuts as "a middle-class elite". But an ignorance of history and a contempt for their own movement's heritage have long been badges of New Labour honour. And it's a nasty, sneaky trick to pit spending on culture against spending on schools and social services, especially when the bill for private sector consultants is so high.
The petition can be signed here
Friday 23 March 2007
Urban fairytales
In the winter of 1981-82, the local newspapers of east London were all agog with stories of the mythical "Hackney Bear": my hazy memories of this, as an 11-year-old, were that there had been a number of sightings of a bear on Hackney marshes, stomping in the distance across the unkempt scrubland at dask and dawn. My uncle worked on the Hackney Gazette at the time, and at every family gathering he'd bring us updates. It was thrilling stuff, the area's very own Loch Ness/Yeti story, and covering the story must have been the very essence of what local journalism is about.
Of course, it turned out to be a bloke in a bear costume, playing a hoax and taking the piss, as was a pale imitation that apparently appeared a few miles west a couple of years later, the Hornsey werewolf who "stalked" Highgate Woods; it was just an oddball kid who went to my mate's school. But one can only salute the pointless indefatiguability of both the bear and the werewolf.
Another slice of inexplicable non-wacky weirdness from my childhood concerned a bloke who waited at our bus stop going to school throughout the autumn of 1983. Throughout the term, he'd turn up at the same time, as straight-laced and suburban-looking as they come: shirt, tie, overcoat, briefcase, copy of the Telegraph - but no trousers. He maintained this kecks-less state for months, never looking around for attention, never speaking to anyone, provoking suppressed sniggers from us but surprisingly little wider reaction. Wonder why he did it?
I'd like to think that these sorts of pointless traditions are being maintained - though it's actually the opposite of the sort of contrived wackiness of a David Brent or Colin Hunt off the Fast Show, which has been so regrettably nurtured by Comic Relief and their ilk. No, the bear, the werewolf and the trouser-less commuter were part of a richer scene, which preferred anonymity and got on with it. Truly, a scene without heroes.
Of course, it turned out to be a bloke in a bear costume, playing a hoax and taking the piss, as was a pale imitation that apparently appeared a few miles west a couple of years later, the Hornsey werewolf who "stalked" Highgate Woods; it was just an oddball kid who went to my mate's school. But one can only salute the pointless indefatiguability of both the bear and the werewolf.
Another slice of inexplicable non-wacky weirdness from my childhood concerned a bloke who waited at our bus stop going to school throughout the autumn of 1983. Throughout the term, he'd turn up at the same time, as straight-laced and suburban-looking as they come: shirt, tie, overcoat, briefcase, copy of the Telegraph - but no trousers. He maintained this kecks-less state for months, never looking around for attention, never speaking to anyone, provoking suppressed sniggers from us but surprisingly little wider reaction. Wonder why he did it?
I'd like to think that these sorts of pointless traditions are being maintained - though it's actually the opposite of the sort of contrived wackiness of a David Brent or Colin Hunt off the Fast Show, which has been so regrettably nurtured by Comic Relief and their ilk. No, the bear, the werewolf and the trouser-less commuter were part of a richer scene, which preferred anonymity and got on with it. Truly, a scene without heroes.
Wednesday 21 March 2007
Prudence is a progressive cause
News24 is currently dribbling on about Gordon Brown's last budget as chancellor, so I've switched over to the cricket, since the ways budgets are reported are as boring as they are banal. Strikes me on first reading as an incongruous mix of regressive and progressive with - as is Brown's wont - his main priorities being to chuck a few juicy bones to the high earners in the city.
Many epithets have clung to Brown over the years, a bafflling number of them undeserved (such as the idea that he is significantly to the left of Blair), but "prudence" is another. The cheerleader for the high-mortgage madness that is PFI, the provider of a blank cheque for war, the man who's presided over a high-personal-debt economy still gets hailed as "prudent".
And the left should be attacking him, and prevailing rightwing economic orthodoxy in general, on the issue of prudence far more than it does. We're as well placed as ever to call in turbo-capitalism's failure to manage finances sustainably. It's time to turn the well-worn accusation of the right that socialism can't balance the books on itself.
Funnily enough it's football - one of the most short-termist, money-grasping, ineptly run industries around - that's taught me this. Having been involved in, and written about, supporter activism and the politics of the game, one of the most recurring themes is just how unsustainable is the model of management that's run riot in our national sport over the past 15 years. Money swills around at the top, the competition becomes farcically unequal, prices skyrocket, and clubs plummet into debt. For the small clubs, this means frequent flirtations with bankruptcy as their own running costs, dragged up from the top, exceed income; for the top clubs it increasingly means murky embraces with third-party investors, private equity (as at Manchester United and Liverpool), and the alienating process, for fans, of seeing the distance between themselves and their clubs grow more and more remote. And others have spent themselves senseless in chasing a fraudulent dream (such as Leeds United) It doesn't work.
The game, beneath its shiny veneer, is warped, decadent and quasi-corrupt. Its unregulated, unaccountable turbo-capitalism is incapable of balancing the books. And increasingly the arguments of supporters groups and other progressive campaigns rest around this fact. We're the ones arguing for prudence, for democratic community control of clubs, for published accounts to be open to full scrutiny, for a different more sustainable model. And out in the real world, we should be doing this too - over privatisation, PFI, the costly and wasteful use of private consultants in the public sector, haranguing the Brownites and Blairites for their waste of OUR money. If this sounds like the sort of language monopolised by rent-a-rant columnists to slag off the "PC brigade" or whatever, then it's time to drown it out by pointing out that the real wasters, the real piss-takers, the real profligates aren't those who argue for decent wages for public sector and other low-paid workers but the people much higher up. Prudence is a progressive cause.
Many epithets have clung to Brown over the years, a bafflling number of them undeserved (such as the idea that he is significantly to the left of Blair), but "prudence" is another. The cheerleader for the high-mortgage madness that is PFI, the provider of a blank cheque for war, the man who's presided over a high-personal-debt economy still gets hailed as "prudent".
And the left should be attacking him, and prevailing rightwing economic orthodoxy in general, on the issue of prudence far more than it does. We're as well placed as ever to call in turbo-capitalism's failure to manage finances sustainably. It's time to turn the well-worn accusation of the right that socialism can't balance the books on itself.
Funnily enough it's football - one of the most short-termist, money-grasping, ineptly run industries around - that's taught me this. Having been involved in, and written about, supporter activism and the politics of the game, one of the most recurring themes is just how unsustainable is the model of management that's run riot in our national sport over the past 15 years. Money swills around at the top, the competition becomes farcically unequal, prices skyrocket, and clubs plummet into debt. For the small clubs, this means frequent flirtations with bankruptcy as their own running costs, dragged up from the top, exceed income; for the top clubs it increasingly means murky embraces with third-party investors, private equity (as at Manchester United and Liverpool), and the alienating process, for fans, of seeing the distance between themselves and their clubs grow more and more remote. And others have spent themselves senseless in chasing a fraudulent dream (such as Leeds United) It doesn't work.
The game, beneath its shiny veneer, is warped, decadent and quasi-corrupt. Its unregulated, unaccountable turbo-capitalism is incapable of balancing the books. And increasingly the arguments of supporters groups and other progressive campaigns rest around this fact. We're the ones arguing for prudence, for democratic community control of clubs, for published accounts to be open to full scrutiny, for a different more sustainable model. And out in the real world, we should be doing this too - over privatisation, PFI, the costly and wasteful use of private consultants in the public sector, haranguing the Brownites and Blairites for their waste of OUR money. If this sounds like the sort of language monopolised by rent-a-rant columnists to slag off the "PC brigade" or whatever, then it's time to drown it out by pointing out that the real wasters, the real piss-takers, the real profligates aren't those who argue for decent wages for public sector and other low-paid workers but the people much higher up. Prudence is a progressive cause.
Sunday 18 March 2007
Reclaiming the Seventies
I've never liked the use of terms such as "old Labour", painting as they do people who believe in basic social democratic tenets as luddites, nor am I the sort of lefty that thinks we can or should simply go back to the norms of those times. But I wonder whether a bit of historical revisionism isn't urgently needed around the Seventies. Because rarely can history have been so successfully and deafeningly written by the winning side as it was around this period.
A few months back I was having a pint with a mate (like me, a Labour left-ish 30-something) and we ended up chatting about how successfully yer Thatcherites and then yer Blairites have monopolised political narratives of that decade - that everything that went wrong during that period was the left's fault. Yet its most cataclysmic economic events - the oil crisis following the 1973 war in the middle east and the mental inflation it spawned - cannot remotely be blamed on the "unreconstructed old left". That's not to say the left didn't need to change in some ways, but that's almost a different debate. Ditto the "industrial militancy" of the time, which, with a few celebrated exceptions, seemed to be unions, led by more "moderate" people than those who lead unions now, clamouring for their members' pay to keep track with inflation - the equivalent of nurses asking for 3 or 4 per cent a year today. And of course all the "dead unburied" stuff was either gross exaggeration or outright lies.
It's also worth arguing that the Seventies compare well to the Sixties too. A lot of the celebrated political envelope-pushing of that decade (the over-romanticised '68 generation and all the rest) seemed a middle-class thing and didn't filter down to the mass of the population until the 70s, which was when you saw enormously important movements such as feminism making real, practical advances. These were also times when ideas around worker co-operatives and new approaches to municipal socialism were being kicked around. Inventive stuff. It would have been a good time to be political, I've always thought. Look at pictures of a football crowd in 1965. It's still blokes in suits, deferential, conformist. Look at one in, say, 1973 and it's part of pop culture - anarchic, too violent for sure, but radically changed.
The trouble with the cultural nostalgia industry, of course, is that it filters out a lot of the interesting and awkward and conflicting stuff when telling its stories. So the Sixties is reduced to Swinging London, Woodstock, Mick Jagger swanning around with Marianne Faithful etc - all the capitalism-compatible stuff that's easily sold and resold and consumed and reconsumed. And the Seventies has been 'niched' as this kind of era of unreconstructed naffness. Life on Mars, for example, is an excellent programme but I wonder whether it isn't reinforcing some quite lazy stereotypes about a decade's unreconstructed neanderthalism.
I'm not talking from any great experience here. I was involved in none of the Seventies' struggles, what with only being born in 1970 and not being bothered about much more than collecting football stickers and playing cricket during the decade. But I've talked about this sort of stuff to my folks, who in their 20s and 30s and not massive well paid, managed to afford a mortgage early on and bring four kids into the world during this decade, and their memory of the Seventies isn't remotely that it was a "grey, grim" decade. Unemployment was much higher for the entirety of the 80s after all. So while there's no going back the 70s seem due some historical revionism? Not least in order to stop the Right banging on and on about it all the time.
And the pop music was better than it's given credit for, it was a golden age of cinema, and Orient twice knocked Chelsea out of the FA Cup. What's not to admire?
(A version of this was first posted in August 2006 on the onetouchfootball messageboard run by When Saturday Comes. Debate here
A few months back I was having a pint with a mate (like me, a Labour left-ish 30-something) and we ended up chatting about how successfully yer Thatcherites and then yer Blairites have monopolised political narratives of that decade - that everything that went wrong during that period was the left's fault. Yet its most cataclysmic economic events - the oil crisis following the 1973 war in the middle east and the mental inflation it spawned - cannot remotely be blamed on the "unreconstructed old left". That's not to say the left didn't need to change in some ways, but that's almost a different debate. Ditto the "industrial militancy" of the time, which, with a few celebrated exceptions, seemed to be unions, led by more "moderate" people than those who lead unions now, clamouring for their members' pay to keep track with inflation - the equivalent of nurses asking for 3 or 4 per cent a year today. And of course all the "dead unburied" stuff was either gross exaggeration or outright lies.
It's also worth arguing that the Seventies compare well to the Sixties too. A lot of the celebrated political envelope-pushing of that decade (the over-romanticised '68 generation and all the rest) seemed a middle-class thing and didn't filter down to the mass of the population until the 70s, which was when you saw enormously important movements such as feminism making real, practical advances. These were also times when ideas around worker co-operatives and new approaches to municipal socialism were being kicked around. Inventive stuff. It would have been a good time to be political, I've always thought. Look at pictures of a football crowd in 1965. It's still blokes in suits, deferential, conformist. Look at one in, say, 1973 and it's part of pop culture - anarchic, too violent for sure, but radically changed.
The trouble with the cultural nostalgia industry, of course, is that it filters out a lot of the interesting and awkward and conflicting stuff when telling its stories. So the Sixties is reduced to Swinging London, Woodstock, Mick Jagger swanning around with Marianne Faithful etc - all the capitalism-compatible stuff that's easily sold and resold and consumed and reconsumed. And the Seventies has been 'niched' as this kind of era of unreconstructed naffness. Life on Mars, for example, is an excellent programme but I wonder whether it isn't reinforcing some quite lazy stereotypes about a decade's unreconstructed neanderthalism.
I'm not talking from any great experience here. I was involved in none of the Seventies' struggles, what with only being born in 1970 and not being bothered about much more than collecting football stickers and playing cricket during the decade. But I've talked about this sort of stuff to my folks, who in their 20s and 30s and not massive well paid, managed to afford a mortgage early on and bring four kids into the world during this decade, and their memory of the Seventies isn't remotely that it was a "grey, grim" decade. Unemployment was much higher for the entirety of the 80s after all. So while there's no going back the 70s seem due some historical revionism? Not least in order to stop the Right banging on and on about it all the time.
And the pop music was better than it's given credit for, it was a golden age of cinema, and Orient twice knocked Chelsea out of the FA Cup. What's not to admire?
(A version of this was first posted in August 2006 on the onetouchfootball messageboard run by When Saturday Comes. Debate here
Blogtrotter
This is my first post on my first blog. The significance of the blogosphere is, like many things connected with what is still quaintly described as new media, a subject of much hyperbolic debate. Some think that it Completely Changes The Way We Conduct Our Lives, altering totally and profoundly the way politics and society and many other things operate. Others might argue that it's just another outlet for the same green-ink brigade/radio phone-in windbags to shout over the top of people. Most people in the world don't even have a telephone, after all, so are we breaking down old barriers, old equalities, or reinforcing them on new terrain. So the very subject requires a certain sobriety of perspective that isn't always present among either the cheerleaders or the doom-mongers among my own industry (journalism).
But the interweb's a great thing and amid the self-indulgence and the nerdiness, and political bitchiness, there's undoubtedly loads of good thought-provoking blogging out there, and it'd be nice to get among it.
But the interweb's a great thing and amid the self-indulgence and the nerdiness, and political bitchiness, there's undoubtedly loads of good thought-provoking blogging out there, and it'd be nice to get among it.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)