journeymanblog

League tables of inequality

2012-01-26T16:39:00.000Z

These days I take more than usual interest in stories about education. It's that time of year for the schools' league tables. And the usual bollocks about 'failing schools'... 'failing teachers' and life chances.

You don't need to be a genius - or even a sociologist - to work out that whilst the odd working class hero might buck the system thanks to a few inspirational teachers, some innate talent and quite a bit of luck, your 'life chances' are pretty much determined at birth. It's called capitalism - and it stinks.

For the terminally hard of thinking have a look at these two maps from that hot-bed of class warriors - the BBC: The first shows the distribution of 'good' GCSE results - the second the distribution of child poverty.

Corduroy and leather elbow patches are out.

2012-01-20T13:18:00.005Z

Strange coincidence - on the same day that the new head of the V&A museum is mourning the decline of tie-wearing by the modern British male I went for an interview with a headteacher. In the nicest possible way he told me I could come back to do a couple of days in his school but only once I'd had a haircut and wore a suit. He wanted his staff to project a 'smart business-like image'.

I made a half-hearted attempted to tell him that in my previous life - 'in business' - nobody wore a suit and tie but I think his view of creative businesses probably stopped around the Mad Men era. Just to be clear I wasn't wearing my usual uniform of combats and t-shirts - I was actually in my 'smart mode' - wearing a shirt and tie, black canvas jeans and a corduroy jacket. My hipster version of a stereotypical wannabe teacher's garb - circa 1970's I suppose.

Anyway that kind of 'history man' nonsense apparently doesn't wash in the post-Thatcher academy-ised era. Stepford-like conformity is everything nowadays so that staff and kids look like Mormon missionaries or sales assistants in Currys - or young offenders preened for their first court appearance. Maybe it is teaching the kids valuable lessons in preparation for post-school life after all....

At the end of the day I want a job and to help me get it I want as much experience of what modern schools - for better or worse - are really like. So I'll grit my teeth, have a trim and dig out a suit - I just have to remember not to roll my sleeves up - a glimpse of my tattooed arms would probably send the head into apoplexy.

Keep the information super-highway open

2012-01-18T13:39:00.002Z

I'm not joining in the online blackout in protest at the US government's attempts to keep control of information firmly in the hands of big business. But only because I'm sure that nobody gives a toss whether or not they can access this blog. Otherwise I'm right behind Wikipedia's stance today.

Copyright's is a funny old thing: Before Gutenberg and Caxton changed the world forever with movable type legislation wasn't really necessary - the Catholic Church had pretty much got the medieval media sewn up on its own. Printing blew that apart and the artisan printer / publisher (because they were often the same person) was often a fee-thinking radical too. So the first copyright laws were all about ensuring control of reproduction by the state - such as the1534 charter from Henry VII to the Cambridge University Press. And nothing much seems to have changed.

For a while the waters got muddied and we all got bogged down in the idea that copyright laws were there to protect the little guys. Certainly it sometimes looks that way in my former world of the 'creative industries'. Laws are there to stop designers and photographers having their work ripped off by bastard clients. But in the real world these laws are only as good as they can be practically enforced. And if you're a sole-trader designer pursuing a multinational brand from using the work you did as part of an unpaid pitch - then best of luck.

But that's another argument - and not at all what the present rows over SOPA / PIPA is about. The fact that Rupert-sodding-Murdoch and his empire of evil - the modern day version of the Holy Inquisition when it comes to media control - are behind the US government's attempt to police the internet is probably enough reason in itself to support Wikipedia.

Everything has a price tag

2012-01-11T16:57:00.002Z

None of this is a surprise and bemoaning it is hardly original - even so it has struck me personally this week:

For the first time for many weeks I am actually earning some money. I've been 'consulting' - a poncey name for casual labour - in my old industry of print and graphics. I've also been applying - without any success yet - for Teaching Assistant posts as a prelude to getting on to some sort of teaching training.

Of course I knew it all along - but it's a hell of a wake-up call to realise that this consulting pays something like five times the wages of a lowly teaching assistant. And I'm only talking about doing a bit of freelance selling for a small printing buisness on a shitty industrial estate - I'm hardly some corporate reptile at McKinsey & Co.

I bloged some years ago about the value of viewing work through a child's eyes. To a child a teacher - and those who work alongside them - are the most important people in their world. Even in this celebrity fixated age - it's difficult for them to imagine anyone else more deserving of status. My own kids are reasonably aware of how things work these days - but even they struggle to see how a teacher can be rewarded less than a plodding junior manager or administrator. And they're quite right.

As a 'consultant' am I better academically qualified than a Teaching Assistant ? No at all; Am I more skilled ? Not really - only in the art of bullshit; Is the work harder ? Certainly not; Is it more socially useful ? You've got to be kidding.

Roots 4: Water Lane.

2012-01-02T10:44:00.004Z

Over the holidays, I met up with an old mate to see the rugby at Twickenham. Afterwards we walked down to Richmond to enjoy a couple of pints of Youngs Special in the White Cross on the riverfront.

It's a part of London that these days oozes affluence from every pore, so it's hard to imagine that a century ago the little streets leading down to the river were a working community - and home to a very peculiar and distinct breed of artisans. It's where my mums' family lived for many years, in White Cross Yard with a boathouse on the river front, and before that in Water Lane - where another Youngs pub still stands - the Waterman's Arms.

The family were Thames Watermen in Richmond going back to at least the 1750's for certain - and very possibly beyond that. It's easy to establish this continuity from the records of apprentices and licensed Watermen still held by the Company of Watermen. Amongst the few family heirlooms I have inherited are three generations of apprentice's papers - eldest sons indentured to their fathers.

Even in my grandfather's time, this apprenticeship lasted for seven years, during which the waterman would learn boatmanship and the complex geography and shifting currents of the river. In the upper reaches of the river the role of Watermen who conveyed people, and Lightermen who carried freight were combined - although down river in the docks the two trades were usually distinct.

By my grandfathers' time suburban omnibuses and railways had started to signal the death of the river as a commercial highway. The family concentrated on the pleasure-boat business and had a small boatyard with boats for hire. The business did not survive the depression and so in the 1930's my grandfather gave up the yard and put his skills to work as a river policeman and moved to the docklands.

Thus ended an incredibly stable way of life: Whilst other strands of my family led a precarious existence ducking and diving over the generations in various trades and moving around to scrape a living, the watermen part stayed put in the same couple of streets for the best part of two hundred years - and in the case of my grandfather married a girl from the next street.

Relatively prosperous, fiercely proud of their status these Thames Watermen were notorious for their stroppiness and uppityness. Henry Mayhew records in his study of London's labouring classes:

'The character of the Thames Waterman... was what might be expected from slightly informed, or uninformed and not unprosperous men. They are hospitable and hearty to another ... civil if such fares are civil to them; but often saucy, abusive and even sarcastic'.

Then as now, there was nothing the do-gooding middle class feared more that workers with a few bob who wouldn't be patronised or take too much crap.

Black Jacobins remembered.

2012-01-01T10:28:00.001Z

Starting the year on an up-lifting note - I'm on a roll at the moment with yet another piece over at On This Deity - the anniversary of the Haitian Revolution of Toussaint L'Ouverture and the Black Jacobins. And a moment too to remember CLR James - Trotskyist and sportswriter - a true revolutionary renaissance man.

Unfestive.

2011-12-29T22:20:00.005Z

It's that weird time of year 'twixt one holiday and another - a punctuation in the flow of normality that prompts introspection. And not necessarily of the healthy kind. I can't help dwelling on the fact this time last year I had no inkling that I'd lose the mum I'd known for 45 years, or the job I'd known for 23.

Back when I was in work I used to hate the 'festive' season: Parties for clients. Lunches for clients. Drinks with clients. Corporate gifts for the clients. Departmental parties. Company parties. Lunch for the sales team. Lunch for the managers. Secret-sodding-Santa.

But now that's all gone - I can't escape a nagging feeling that I'm somehow missing it: Not the people; not the work; not the bullshit from clients; not the doubt and self-loathing I felt when I thought I was becoming part of that bullshit. Not even the money really. Although I do miss the not-having to worry about money. Mainly I miss the reassurance and security of routine and ritual. Of having an answer when people ask me what I do.

Rationally, I know it's like a released prisoner who craves being inside again.

So enough already - I will choose to end the old year and start the new one like Papillon in the final scene of the movie, floating to freedom after his last and most desperate escape - "Hey you bastards - I'm still here !"

Rasputin.

2011-12-29T09:37:00.002Z

I'm to be found again over at Dorian Cope's 'On This Deity'. Today is the anniversary of the murder of Rasputin.

He's probably had far more historical attention than he deserves - but if nothing else his life is a weather-vane pointing the way to the real story of the Russian Revolution.

Portrait of the young man as a sell-out artist

2011-12-27T11:29:00.001Z

My local MP writes today about the riots at some length in today's Guardian:

Hold the front page: Riots are bad. Communities are good. But life in Tottenham sucks. Cameron and his toffs are out of touch. Big business doesn't care - in fact it makes money from it all.

Lammy's answer ? Labour got it wrong with the nanny state - what we need to do is share the profit - share the power.

OK - I'll sign up for that I guess.

But hang on what does Lammy mean ?

Actually he explains - worker representatives on the boards of big business. And dividends not fat cat bonuses. Just like they do in Europe.

Because of course there's no economic crisis there. Fucking hell.

Even that near extinct species, an honest social-democrat could find something a bit more progressive to point to in the European model: Maybe a still-functioning public sector that wasn't constantly portrayed as a parasitic pariah, or trade unions that hadn't been emasculated with generations of restrictive legislation.

Given the usual trajectory of Labour politicians towards the right - fuck knows where Lammy is going to end up. Right now he seems to be one of Labour's rising stars - and one of the very few who they think can speak to the inner cities and the yoof.

I predict ...

2011-12-24T10:42:00.000Z

'Tis the season for looking back to the old year and forward to the new.

I'll leave the celebration of the Arab Spring and the return of class politics in 2011 - and anticipation of an inspiring year of struggle in 2012 - to my comrades.

As the ghost at the feast I'll predict a year of nauseating nationalist flag-waving. We have all the ingredients:

• The gloom of recession that needs warming with an excuse for a street party

• London hosting the Olympics

• The queen's diamond jubilee or whatever the fuck it is

• The long anticipated death of Thatcher and her funeral

• Ditto the Duke Of Edingburgh

Of course it doesn't have to be this way ...

Police want even more...

2011-12-20T17:00:00.001Z

Given that the riots this summer - which started literally in my backyard - began because the police shot someone, you'd think that the obvious conclusion would be that they shouldn't be so trigger happy. On the contrary though the Inspectorate of Constabulary reports that they weren't trigger happy enough. Apparently the riots could have been nipped in the bud if only they had been more willing to use rubber bullets - and even live ammunition. Worse still the top coppers private club claims that they don't need any new laws to make this possible - they claim they are already within their rights to shoot 'arsonists'.

Scary stuff.

I'm reminded of a conversation with my dad shortly after the riots:

Bear in mind he's a lifelong labour-man (with a small l these days) but he's also 84 and lived most of his life in the homogeneous affluent white working class hinterland of London - so you can maybe forgive him if his social attitudes are occasionally a bit conservative ( but always with a small c). Indeed when he spoke about some of the disturbances in his own area he did talk about copycat 'yobs'. But when we spoke about how it had all started here in Tottenham - he was amazingly spot-on: "Stupid police shot someone they didn't need to AGAIN. They bungled dealing with local people AGAIN. And then they lied to cover their tracks AGAIN."

And now the same police want more powers and more guns....

Day trip to Chelsea

2011-12-17T11:45:00.001Z

With time to kill and an eye for free stuff - I took myself down to Chelsea to see the Warhorse exhibition at the National Army Museum. We went with the kids to see the play at the National Theatre and I thought it was great - but the exhibition was a disappointment.

I say free but I picked up TWO parking tickets with a face value of £260 - apparently in Chelsea you need a permit to park a motorcycle in a motorcycle bay. The two tickets I hope are an error as they were issued within two minutes of each other- but who knows. So possibly my verdict of the exhibition is retrospectively prejudiced, but then again I was already pissed off after riding around the ridiculously smug moneyed backstreets of Chelsea. If we could spare Warrs Harley Davidson off the Kings Road, there would be a strong case for nuking the whole fucking borough and all the hoorays who live there.

But I digress: The exhibition managed to be both a not-quite-the-history of the British cavalry - and an attempt to convey the horrors of the Great War by anthropomorphising a horse and its sufferings. I wasn't too comfortable about this - I can well imagine that many of the officer class 1914-18 being more upset at the loss of their favourite hunter than a few working class oiks...

Actually the exhibition came across primarily as a lure to bring kids into the National Army Museum - much like the exhibition of the history of Commando war comics going on at the same time on the upper floor.

The museum itself is a strange one: full of the traditional glass cases of uniforms, weapons, dioramas and the history of military campaigns - which I have to confess I'm a sucker for - but also an underlying message of 'join the army-it's great'. A message told with a poorly concealed subliminal attempt to be inclusive and politically correct.

So we have mannequins portraying a soldier at Waterloo from the West Indies (factual but hardly representative) and a lot of coverage of empire troops in the Second World War. But no explanation of why the British army was fighting a succession of campaigns in Africa, India, Burma etc - although these are grouped in a gallery titled with unconscious irony 'Changing The World'. We are also treated to another gallery singing the praises of post-war national service which seems to have been a bit like a lads' holiday with camping and paint-balling thrown in. And another gallery about life in the modern British Army - apparently it's all about 'the army family'.

There's a gift shop on the way out with a mixture of fairly esoteric military history books and a range of kid's versions of modern camo-clothing and equipment. The eleven year old me would have signed up on the spot and I didn't even visit the 'kids zone in the basement' ....

Unilever strike

2011-12-10T15:48:00.001Z

Eclipsed in the news by Lord Snooty's Churchillian 'we'll stand alone and fight them on the trading floors and in the city wine bars' moment - there's a breaking story that is a telling slice of real life in contemporary fucked-up Britain:

At Unilver's Gloucester plant 2,500 workers went on strike yesterday over their pensions. These weren't the 'pampered' public sector scroungers who we are told are now the enemy within. These are workers in that paragon of all Tory values - a profitable private business. Profitable to the extent that unlike many well known brands these days, business is actually booming for the nation's leading supplier of grocery products with profits last year of £6.5 billion. No wonder the chief exec trousered a package of over £3million.

So just why are Unilever trying now to get rid of their final salary pension scheme ? The only answer is because they think they can. Capitalism is a rapacious beast at the best of times - and in the midst of a depression it is savage. And the supposed Quaker antecedents of the firm and its heritage of ethical business is whimsical bollocks. Just as it was at Cadburys a couple of years ago.

Jeremy-twatting-Clarkson

2011-12-04T18:25:00.001Z

It shouldn't have taken 'The One Show-gate' to confirm that Jeremy Clarkson is a smug, mean-spirited Little Englander Tory-tosser.

Regardless of taking his comments in or out of context - I'm troubled by the backlash over his comments about having public sector strikers taken out and shot.

Asking for an apology - whatever that means - tends to cast the injured parties as humourless and self-righteous, something the Left hardly needs more of. And equating him with General Pinochet - who of course really did shoot trade unionists - is on a par with calling parking attendants Nazis; it's simply disproportionate, historically inaccurate and offensive to the memory of genuine victims.

There are plenty of genuine villains really worthy of our rage from the strike last week - the entire Tory Party, the vast majority of the Labour Party and fat-cat fuckers like Philip Green who lecture the rest of us about tightening our belts. A b-lister with a dodgy perm who has built a career out of having his mid-life crisis in public, comes some way down the pecking order.

Historic ?

2011-12-01T08:49:00.001Z

Any socialist who has been around for a few years will have heard the word 'historic' much used to describe things that almost certainly aren't.

Yesterday was one of those rare occasions when its use was actually justified. The biggest strike since the General Strike of 1926 - and perhaps most importantly the biggest strike since the Thatcher watershed. Having spent the day from the early morning riding around visiting pickets in my borough, going on the central London demo and finishing up with a shop stewards meeting in a pub in Whitehall - I'll happily confess that I was caught up in the euphoria of the day. And why not - there is something qualitatively different about a demonstration of striking trade unionists - it means so much more than the usual suspects on a day out.

But the morning after is possibly the time for a bit of sober reflection: General strikes are a very big deal in this country: Rightly so when 2milllion plus workers are involved. And the idea of 'general strike' will forever be associated with that oh so un-typically 'British' moment when the country came close to revolution. But 24hour general strikes occur quite regularly in much of Europe. They are treated as ritualistic fete-days for the labour movement. And we shouldn't be under any illusions that the TUC would happily adopt this European custom.

Survival of the insecure

2011-11-28T10:50:00.001Z

I can't deny that I've got time on my hands. Too much fucking time - there's only so many hours you can spend online job hunting and researching.

Whilst surfing through the nauseatingly smug cliches of the ever growing 'how to cope with redundancy' industry I came across an academic paper from Cranfield University - a study of redundant executives. A category I reluctantly have to accept I fell into.

There's a lot of pseduo-socio-psychological padding to it but the gist of it is that redundant executives in their survey group show the following personality characteristics in comparison with their peers who weren't made redundant (or in bollock-speak 'out-placed').

More calm
More socially bold, uninhibited

Much more imaginative and unconventional

Less shrewd, more natural, forthright

Less self critical

Less tense, overwrought

I think I tick all of those boxes - although some who know me may laugh at the idea of 'calm' - in a work context I was perfectly stoic it's only motorcycle electrics that drive me psychotic.

In fact I could add a couple of more categories of my own:

Less likely to play golf with the boss

Less able to network / generally brown-nose

More inclined to take the piss out of corporate bullshit

Or in other words, businesses like their managers to be properly socialised - and a bit jumpy. No shit Sherlock.

I don't know if any of this makes me feel much better - I never felt that I sense of inferiority that I'd got the bullet when others didn't - but now I realise that I'm deficient in those attributes that will get me back in the game ....

My trade union CV

2011-11-25T09:36:00.002Z

In the past few months I have written out my CV dozens of times - so many times in fact that I'm even starting to bore myself. So just for a change - I thought I'd set it out in terms of the chronology of my trade union membership.

I have to say it's not an inspiring story:

• TGWU - in between school and uni I worked as a lathe operator in a factory making photocopiers. It was an old-fashioned shitty assembly line and played no small part in getting me politicised. The factory was run on the lines of a caste system; the T&G was the union for the 'un-skilled and semi-skilled' - we wore grey overalls; there were engineers (AUEW) who wore blue lab-coats; and technicians (ASTMS) who wore white lab-coats. Paranoia about demarcation and a kind of apartheid system prevailed. I wasn't there long enough to form a proper view of it all but it did seem like something out of disutopian sci-fi movie.

• NUS (students not seamen that is) - I couldn't really take this seriously as a proper trade union. Certainly at that time (the 1980s) and place (Oxbridge) it was a drinking club with overtones of political correctness. The high-point of this was an occupation against the proposal of fees (sounds familiar) - but being a respectable bunch the union actually booked the venue they were occupying in advance.

• SOGAT - joined by mistake whilst I was a student at the London College of Printing. We used to go down to Wapping on a Friday night - which is where I was first at the receiving end of police thuggery . Once I started work - in the pre press sector - I found that I was in the wrong union. It then took about six months of arguing and pleading before I was allowed to transfer to the right one.

• NGA - I came in at a time which might considered the swan song of ascendant craft unionism. The chapel had a degree of control over recruitment and working practices which seems almost impossible in these post-Thatcher days. I thought it was great and in retrospect was a bit seduced by it all. It was corrupt and riddled with nepotism, racism and sexism. And whilst new technology was about to bury us - the union was burying its head in the past. In my section many of the members identified more with the pre-merger( even more arcane) craft unions- like SLADE and the ASLP. The leadership was more concerned with defining who could and couldn't join - certainly not the new generation of mac heads who did 'desk top publishing'. The trouble was this was the next generation who were poised to replace many of our jobs.

• GPMU - at last a single union for the print. Trouble was the stable door was bolted after the horse had run away. The union at my place - and many other smaller companies - had already been de-recognised and members were largely an aging minority.

• AMICUS and then UNITE - successive swallowing-ups and the union became increasingly remote and irrelevant. Out of 80 odd people in our place there were three members and one of them was me - supposedly a senior manager.

Which brings me to the latest installment: When I phoned the union offices a few week ago - the first time I had spoken to anyone there for years - to tell them that I had been made redundant, they could tell me only that as I'd been in for 25 years I was eligible for a free 'retired members' level of membership. They didn't even ask me if I was happy that I'd received my statutory rights or offer me any support or advice. I was seriously tempted to tell them to poke my union card - although I have kept it as an 'unemployed member' out of some sort of misplaced sentimentality.

Here's hoping that wherever I end up next has something resembling a healthy union ...

Let's work together

2011-11-22T14:43:00.001Z

Divide and rule is an ugly game as old as the hills - and the latest flavour of this seems to be pitting private against public sector workers. Now just to be clear, I've never worked in the public sector - although it looks like I might be about to reverse the much touted trend of public sector jobs flowing to the private sector.

This supposedly inevitable drift to private enterprise is heralded as somehow emancipating. Because it's an ideologically driven impulse from Thatcher's heirs in the form of Lord Snooty and his chums. But it's not emancipating - and I speak from personal experience here - it sucks - statutory redundancy after 25 years and fuck-all pension to go with it. I don't feel liberated by the market I feel shafted.

But I'm not jealous of the public sector. Well actually I am - but not in the way that the Tories want me to be. I'm jealous that even the most 'lowly' of public sector workers goes home at night knowing that they have done something - however menial - that makes their community a better place. Like many others in private business, when the sun goes down on another working day I can only reflect that I have helped someone else get a bit richer than they were this morning.

And there's the simple truth - only a tiny number of capitalists (the 1% ?) truly depend on the private sector - for the rest of us it tends to be the public sector that delivers those things that make life bearable.

So when the mini general strike on November 30th comes around those like me who have never worked in the public sector should get their arses down to the picket lines to let the strikers know that there is no such thing as 'the general public' to be pitted against them - only a different kind of worker. And we're all in it together. Literally.

A bit inspired. A lot frustrated.

2011-11-18T19:43:00.003Z

I've just finished a week spent in a secondary school as preparation for applying to teacher training. It's been a strange week - after all I haven't even really been in a school since I was at school - maybe thirty years ago. I suppose the good news is that the experience hasn't put me off - in fact I want to get some more time under my belt - but it has made me much more frustrated about how I can now change direction.

Contrary to all those ads - and the articles about bankers seeing the error of their ways and turning to something more worthwhile - nobody is falling over themselves to lure people into teaching with incentives to change careers.

Certainly not if - like me - you're thinking about teaching something as 'un-useful' as History. Maybe I might stand more chance if I'd elected for Business Studies - god knows I've had more than enough experience in that area, but I've also had enough of that shit and I just don't think it belongs in schools.

It gets worse: Forget about any golden handshakes - even those 'earn while you learn on the job' GTP schemes just don't seem to be available for 'non-shortage' subjects either. If I get a place on a PGCE course for the next academic year I will have to face the prospect of living on not much more than fresh air for a year whilst at college. And only then after several years of working my way up to get something like an average wage. But first of course I've got to find something to keep me going for before I can start in Autumn 2012 - and whilst I'm fully resigned to never again earning as much as I did in my previous over-paid existence - I'm still wrestling with the implications of inflicting that on my family.

And that's all assuming I can even get on a course - the laws of supply and demand mean that applications for teacher training are up 40% this year - as a result of redundancies and mid-life crisis - or in my case both simultaneously. There's a catch-22 too of having to demonstrate in your application that you have spent time in schools (inevitably unpaid) - which is a hard thing to do when you've also trying to find a paying job to keep you going and puts the 'mature' career-changer with responsibilities at a big disadvantage against the recent graduate in their 20's who can afford to take a gap year volunteering.

Perhaps I should make a case for age discrimination.

A true revolutionary role model

2011-11-17T19:12:00.002Z

I'm running a bit short of blogging inspiration this week - so I'm just going to repost a link to an anniversary piece for Victor Serge that I wrote a year ago.

Amongst the 'dead Russians' he's maybe not the greatest of revolutionary theoreticians but these days he's probably my favourite.

'Early on, I learnt … that the only meaning of life lies in conscious participation in the making of history … one must range oneself actively against everything that diminishes man, and involve oneself in all struggles which tend to liberate and enlarge him. This categorical imperative is in no way lessened by the fact that such an involvement is inevitably soiled by error: it is a worse error to live for oneself.'

The radical face of Remembrance ?

2011-11-11T10:05:00.002Z

Looking back at past posts I notice that at this time of year I always seem to say something about remembrance. Why is this ? For starters for anyone not entirely happy with the world as it is, then there is no better illustration of the fucked-up way our societies are run than war in allits poignancy. And when this poignancy connects with family history and personal experience it is a powerful way of making the big ideas human and digestible.

And that's why it pisses me off so much that remembrance is claimed by the political Establishment. All the pomposity of the cenotaph ceremony - and the poppy one-up manship of public figures (by the way what is it with those special VIP super-size poppies that seem to get more prevalent each year?).

Remembrance is about ordinary people and it certainly isn't about armies and governments.

I've spoken before about how despite the remoteness of 1918 the whole remembrance thing is still very firmly rooted in the image of the Armistice of the Western Front:

There used to be a myth propagated that the armistice of 1918 came about because eventually right prevailed over the horrible Huns. Now this seems to have been replaced with a idea that the powers that be of the war-weary protagonists had some sort of brief moment of clarity and so agreed to stop the slaughter.

Bollocks. The end of the Great War came about because the German ruling class decided that they would rather make peace with their counterparts amongst the allies than fight on and probably lose a revolution against their own people. They had the salutary lesson of the Russian revolution only a year earlier. And in fact at that time things might have gone very differently when the French army mutinied en masse and their ruling class also had a wobble - saved only by the US turning up to save the day.

If there is a lesson to take from the Armistice it is not just that war is horrific - it is that just occasionally ordinary people can take their fate in their own hands.

We're all anti-capitalists now.

2011-11-07T09:57:00.006Z

I'm too young to be an old hippy - but Buffalo Springfield's lyrics keep ringing in my head at the moment:

There's something happening here

What it is ain't exactly clear

I think it's time we stop children what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down

I had a job interview on Friday and - as I was in the area - found myself in the bizarre position of calling in at the St Paul's occupation if not exactly 'suited and booted' then certainly not in my usual scruffy state.

I didn't stay very long - but I was struck by a diverse bunch of committed people stoically enduring the miserable autumn drizzle and at great pains to explain what they were all about to anyone who would listen. Quite eccentric and very English.

But these days I apply a kind of acid test to any movement - would it connect to the people I live with in Tottenham - the diverse inner city dispossessed ? or the people I used to work with - the white working class ? or to my daughter's friends - the next generation of activists ? If something doesn't hit at least one of these criteria then however well-intentioned it's probably barking up the wrong tree. And I'd have confess that I came away from St Paul's still a bit ambiguous. But then a couple of surprising things happened at the weekend:

I went to the SP's weekend school 'Socailism 2011' and attended the session on the anti-capitalist occupations. I was prepared for some hack-interventions making predictable criticisms of the occupiers for not having a rounded-out socialist programme or connecting to the labour movement. But there was none of that. In fact there were several young comrades who had been on the occupations themselves - here, in the US and in Europe. They looked and spoke just like the people at St Paul's only they had pushed the anti-capitalist thing that vital last few yards into something like socialism.

Then I rode down to Kent on Sunday for lunch with my dad. He's 82 and although he's been a Labour man all his life you could forgive him for carrying a certain conservatism at his age. In fact though - like Tony Benn - he seems to have got more radical as he's got older. He wanted to know about St Paul's what was going on - what it was about - what did I think? As he said - and I quote: 'after all - we're all anti-capitalists now'.

Kiel Mutiny 1918

2011-11-03T13:11:00.001Z

Another guest piece over at the wonderful 'On This Deity' - the anniversary today of the Kiel Mutiny and the start of the German Revolution of 1918.

History. Honesty. Tribalism. And PhD's.

2011-11-03T09:41:00.005Z

Amongst the various wild geese that I have been chasing in my current unemployed state, one possibility I considered was doing a PhD. Not because I seriously considered a new career as an academic but because it's something that I've always figured on doing at some point as a bit of self indulgence.

Having looked into some of the practicalities, and got some very helpful advice from friendly academics I've decided not to pursue it. Quite simply there's a world of difference between having a pet subject you research a bit when you've got nothing else to do and a consuming passion that will keep you (and your family) going for three to five years of poverty without much prospect of employment at the end.

My particular hobby horse (one of many I pick up and put out down regularly from time to time) was British Trotskyism and the Second World War - with a particular look at its disconnect with how Trotskyism in recent anti-fascist campaigns has appropriated the mythology of the 'People's War'.

That may well sound like a typically academic 'angels dancing on pin heads' subject - but it also highlights a much more important and practical point - the invention of tradition and the honesty of organisations about their own history. I'll admit that a lot of this was aimed at the IS/SWP and the ANL /UAR tradition - but it also applies to some extent my own organisation and its predecessors.

There's not exactly a body of scholarship on this subject - which can be interpreted as hole in the market - and what there is falls pretty much into the category of 'party family histories'. These seem to consist of tortuous and labyrinthine attempts to demonstrate a continuity between an organisation's antecedents and its current position - and it goes without saying - the correctness of these positions on every occasion. This strikes me as basically ahistorical - but worse than that - fundamentally dishonest.

It reminds me of when I first got involved with Trotskyism having come from a very brief flirtation with the YCL / CPGB as a teenager. I was given a book by Alan Woods called 'Lenin and Trotsky - What They Really Stood For'. It was a pretty good rebuttal of the Stalinist misrepresentation of Leninsm. But it also perpetuated the idea that Marx, Lenin and Trotsky were some kind of holy trinity - a single indivisible being of one mind in three incarnations. Even at the time I was uneasy about this - nowadays I'm still more so.

On a purely facile level I quite surprised myself when I took one of those daft online 'what kind of Marxist are you ?' quizzes - and I came out as a 'Luxemburg-ist'. Thinking about it, these post-everything days I'd rather define myself (if I really have to) as a 'Libertian Marxist from the Trotskyist tradition'. I don't think it undermines my continuing membership of the party I've been in for the past twenty-something years - but it's certainly more honest.

Go to gaol at the Southbank

2011-10-28T18:42:00.002Z

I went to the Southbank the other day to see Steve Earle - as mentioned here before I'm a bit of an obsessive fan and have to catch him every time he tours. It was a great night - and I thought one of the best performances I'd seen from him for several years.

But enough of that: Whilst waiting for the show to start I looked around the free exhibitions in the foyers. Since I've slipped from the ranks of the frankly over-paid to those of the unemployed I've developed a particular appreciation for that kind of thing.

First up there was an exhibition of prisoners' art. In terms of quality I suppose you could say it was mixed. Some of it looked like school room stuff - although the best of it could have sat in any 'proper' gallery. But all of it was moving and real. - And in other circumstances if I read something like that in connection with looking at pictures I'd be the first to consign the author to pseud's corner.

I also saw the GoToJail installation. A reconstruction of a cell - complete with a couple of ex-prisoners you can enter the cell and talk to.

I've never been inside a cell - other than a short spell in a police station after being nicked at a demo. But the thought of being in prison - usually in some kind of Kafka-esque unexplained way - is a recurring nightmare. Now I know that this is no irrational night terror.

The installation is a recreation of a modern cell - so presumably it is a bit more bearable than the Victorian cells in many UK prisons. It may be plastic and clean, but it is an unimaginably tiny space for two adult men to share with no privacy and no personal space. In fact I was reminded of the cabin of a cross-channel ferry - without the en-suite shower/toilet obviously - you'd have to co-ordinate your every movement with your cell mate because there's not enough room for you to both stand up and move around at the same time.

And everyone of those Daily Mail prison's like a holiday camp fuckers should be forced to spend 24 hours in it.

One strike worth a dozen protests. But good luck anyway.

2011-10-23T12:31:00.001Z

Of all the reasons to have a go at the anti-capitalists camped out at St Paul's - the most spurious are that they are disrupting the life and community of the church. St Paul's isn't a parish church in some sleepy corner of middle England that serves as the hub of a local community. People who choose to get married or Christened there are toffs or people with some tenuous connection to the great and good of the City. Or in other words - 'fair game'. And let's be honest it's not exactly a quiet spiritual haven amongst the hurly -burly of city life - its a sodding tourist theme park. They even charge admission.

Some Christians of a liberal bent have welcomed the protests - citing the medieval tradition of the church giving sanctuary to the people in their battles with the secular power. OK - but let's be honest, whilst the medieval peasant might well seek sanctuary from the church against the local landowning nobles, often the church itself was the landowner. Then they'd likely as not seek the patronage against church and nobles alike from the monarch. And that's exactly what happened in the 1381 peasant's revolt. It didn't get them very far and their leader Wat Tyler ended up being - both figuratively and literally - stabbed in the back for his illusions.

What's the point of this medieval detour ? Well Engels pointed out that the problem with such peasant's revolts was that they would only ever be protests - they were incapable of challenging for power because they appealed to someone else to champion their cause. And with respect I think the same goes for the anti-capitalist movement. However much I admire the camp's commitment and emotion, I can't help but think that essentially the sentiment is the same as the peasants of Olde Englande: 'this is unfair - something needs to be done and someone needs to do something about it'.

Fair enough if the camp raises consciousness and makes people who wouldn't otherwise do so ask questions - but as far as challenging capitalism - or even trying to knock off some of its sharpest edges - then I'd have to argue that implicit in almost any strike is something far more revolutionary; people becoming aware of and learning to flex own power.

Time to change ?

2011-10-19T11:23:00.001Z

Apologies for the introspection - I'm now one week into redundancy. More will doubtless follow but I've not forgotten that there's a whole world in crisis and injustice either.

Pop-psychology would have it that being made redundant is something like being bereaved. Having been through that too recently I have to say 'it was only a job - only a job'.

It is hard to shake off being defined by your job so when you take the definition away you can't help but feel empty. But then again, I always cut a pretty unlikely - if not downright bizzarre - figure in my old job and felt like an imposter as a 'senior manager'.

And my life - I hope - always had more dimensions - as my profile description says; 'biker. socialist. martial artist - in no particular order. It's probably no accident that I didn't include what I did to pay the bills.

And on that subject - I'm really not sure whether I want to go on doing the same thing: When I went to my mum's funeral I was struck by how people I didn't know came along - they had been her pupils over the years and were now adults. And in her lifetime there must have been literally thousands of others like them. But I'm damned sure none of my clients from work would come to my funeral. And my lasting legacy would be mountains of now-discarded print.

Easy to say whilst I still have a bit of my pay-off to live off of. And I don't know if I could hack it as a teacher. But it makes you think.

Capitalism. This time it's personal.

2011-10-12T18:34:00.002Z

I got made redundant yesterday.

I thought I'd created a funky little haven at work - I tried to be a 'decent' boss and was a big fish in a small pond. Until that is the absentee owner decided to pull the plug.

23 years in the same firm is pretty unusual these days. As is the slightly paternalistic old-fashioned ethos we tried to maintain. At one point we even had three sets of brothers working in the studio. I was quite proud of that. If we hadn't had that ethos I would have been less inhibited in parring the workforce down when we hit the recession with a vengeance back in the Spring. Who knows it might even have got me a stay of execution this week - but at least I can look everyone in the eye and say I tried to do the best for them.

It was also some comfort on a spectacularly shit and emotional day to have a number of people with tears in their eyes thanking me and saying goodbye. And I'm not ashamed to say that I struggled to keep it together too.

But I'm not kidding myself - tomorrow I'll be at home but their work will continue without me. Everyone will work progressively harder for progressively less - until the next bump is hit when they are undercut by a bigger company with more automation or more off-shoring.

You can read all that stuff about the inherent contradictions of capitalism and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. But it's another thing altogether when it gets up and bites you on the arse.

A measure of civilisation ?

2011-10-11T09:37:00.007Z

Until recently I had always thought that funerals were nonsense. Having no religious belief I felt that my corpse could just as meaningfully be quietly disposed of at the nearest council incinerator or land-fill. But then when my mum died this summer I found her funeral very important. Although a painful day by the end of it I had got some sort of - and I apologise for the hideous use of psycho-babble - 'closure'.

My archaelogoical studies tell me that funerary practices are often the defining part of a culture - such as the beaker people. Of course sometimes that's just lazy-thinking because graves and grave goods are the only tangible evidence left behid to speculate over. But attitudes to death and its rituals are a pretty good indicator of the underlying nature of a society. Think of the transition around the European Neolithic period from the communal 'houses of the dead' to the individual graves and how this mirrors the transition to a 'land-owning' economy with hierachies and elites.

All of which is a long-winded preamble to my depression at the news that 'pauper's funerals' are on an alarming increase. This Victorian concept applies to people who die without even the assets to cover their funeral expenses - and therefore have them provided by the local authority. It's often said that an indicator of civilisation is how a society treats its young and old - and you might as now well add how it treat its dead. It makes me wonder how future archaeologist's will characterize our society.

Capitalism in a turtle-neck.

2011-10-07T08:59:00.003Z

In my little bubble of the graphics / media world the death of Apple's Steve Jobs seems to being treated as somewhere up there with the loss of JFK and Martin Luther King.

So this is a plea for a bit of fucking perspective: He wasn't the messiah -although he was undeniably a design visionary. I'll readily admit I've become one of those medja-wanka fashion victims who thinks that macs are for cool people and PC's er ... aren't. And I defy anyone who has used both not to come to the same conclusion.

Jobs was a vegetarian Buddhist and may well have been a very nice man. I'm sure he was a much nicer man than Rupert Murdoch, Philip Green or that knob-head trader who had his 15 minutes of fame when he told the BBC that capitalists can benefit from recessions. He also made his millions by designing stuff that was genuinely new and marketing it brilliantly - rather than on the roulette tables of the world's markets. So in a very limited sense he represented a rather less morally bankrupt version of capitalism.

But one of the turning points in Apple's history was the closing down of their manufacturing in the USA along with the 'downsizing' of about half the workforce and their replacement by cheap off-shored labour in China. Where there have since been repeated reports of appalling working conditions and abuses.

And possibly more than any other compnay, Apple is the personification of the age of 'the brand' - where consumers are manipulated to have relationships with brands to fill the aspirational spaces which were once filled by ideology, belief and community. To the point where so long as you prefixed it with a lower case 'i' and put it in a frosted white box with a minimalist logo - you could literally package and sell a dog-turd.

In other words capitalism is still capitalism - even when it's funky.

Martial brotherhood

2011-10-06T09:01:00.002Z

I'm not a natural joiner of things. Although my politics leads me to be a member of a fairly orthodox left party, I've never been entirely on message and I'm certainly not comfortable with 'party patriotism'. I'm also a member of a bike club - and although I'm happy to talk bikes until the cows come home with anyone who will listen, I don't actually involve myself in the social life of the club at all - and the thought of riding around in a group seems to negate one of the major attractions of biking - the solitude.

Martial arts is essentially an individual pursuit, certainly in comparison to most sports, and in some respects it can be positively lonely. But I find a genuine camaraderie with my kung-fu brothers like nothing else I have experienced in any other area of my life. I'm sure I'm not unique in this but it's not something I have heard many people acknowledge.

I'm just back from a fantastic weekend seminar in Ibiza: My teacher lives there nowadays so I go back periodically - but also to catch up with other guys scattered all over Europe. It's as much about the eating, drinking and chilling as it is about the training. We must come across as a pretty odd bunch - a diverse mixture of races, nationalities, ages and individual styles. Particularly so on that island which is party-central for the white tribes of England with its twenty four hour full fried breakfasts and football-pubs along the horrific 'west end strip' in San Antonio.

One night at a restaurant we were asked what had brought us together and what the occasion was. Preferring to keep a low profile on the martial arts aspect which can often provoke some stupid, embarrassing and potentially even dangerous interest - we said that we were a family having a reunion.

And at the risk of being overly sentimental I think that's a pretty apt description. My teacher talks about how martial arts are best practiced with intensity between friends because accidents so easily happen, misunderstandings occur and ugliness results. Very true. But I've found more kindred spirits in my training than anywhere else. Perhaps its because we require a degree of mutual trust when we place our safety in each other's hands. Maybe by - literally - sharing blood, sweat and tears we inevitably forge closer bonds over the years than by sitting around in committee meetings.

American girl

2011-10-04T11:30:00.005Z

I haven't followed the circus around Mereditch Kurcher/Amanda Knox/the Italian bloke that nobody can remember/and of course the ~~fall guy~~ black guy in prison that is now no more than a foot-note.

I don't know the facts but that shouldn't make me feel any more inhibited than any of the others who are jumping in with their opinions. In the US corner we have the rescue of an all-American damsel in distress from the clutches of the bungling and corrupt Italian courts and police. And in the Italian corner we have a well-financed PR machine disrupting the sovereign operations of their justice system much as Uncle Sam bullies and buys his way around the world to protect his own .

As I say, I don't know and can't say if justice has been served. Maybe I'll wait until the movie comes out. But here's a parting thought: If the crime had happened in many parts of the USA - the accused would probably have been either executed or languishing on death row by now. And if Amanda Knox had not been a photogenic white-bread girl from a middle class family but a young black man dependant upon the public defender system - there is no probable about it.

The ties that bind ?

2011-09-29T08:58:00.003Z

It's been around twenty years since I jumped out of the Labour Party - before I was pushed. It's even getting on for 10 years since my parents left in outrage at the decline of the party they had been lifetime members of:

So just when will the time come that I finally stop feeling a sense of betrayal, anger and frustration with the Labour Party ? Because despite a theoretical understanding that the party has passed the point of redemption and that the task now is to build something new - I still can't help looking over my shoulder and feeling an emotional tug. And despite all our denunciations of Labour's bankruptcy I suspect many others on the 'ultra' Left,if they are honest ,feel the same.

But at some point I will settle for the resigned cynicism that labour movement activists in the US must habitually feel towards the Democrats. A sense that they have been continually used and abused by a party that needs their support but fundamentally doesn't give a toss about them.

This year looking at Ed the geek 'the only thing I have fought for is my career' Miliband or Ed 'don't expect us to reverse the cuts' Balls - and their shiny faced army of a Mormon-like new generation of party hacks - I think the time has finally come...

Legal lynching of Troy Davis

2011-09-22T09:14:00.003Z

Whilst I've been a member of a Marxist party for pretty much all my adult life (bloody hell) - for a similar length of time I've also been a member of Amnesty International.

I know there are some contradictions here - Amnesty is essentially a middle class liberal organisation with some serious political flaws. BUT when some of my comrades point this out I'm reminded of the scene in Monty Python's Life of Brian:

My rationale - without illusions - is that so long as people are actually being imprisoned, tortured and killed in the real world then writing a few letters on the outside chance that it might make a slight difference isn't going to derail the revolution with a revisionist petit-bourgeois deviation-ism. Simply sometimes doing something - even if it's pissing in the wind - is better than doing nothing.

I feel depressed at the news this morning that Troy Davis was executed. And also absurdly guilty - although I've written previous letters I forgot to send an emergency last minute email - I was too wrapped up in stupid work shit.

Roots 3: Dark satanic mills - John and Kitty

2011-09-19T14:55:00.013Z

More family history: Frustratingly I know very little about the paternal line of my family - the bit whose surname I carry. My granddad died twenty years before I was born and the records have proved very elusive.

Although actually from the point of view of social history these gaps are every bit as telling as the certainties. Inevitably there's a bit of speculation here thrown into filling these gaps - but it is informed by a background knowledge of a particularly grim phase in England's rise as the major industrial nation:

The pivotal couple in the family's story seem to be my great-grandparents, John and Catherine (Kitty) who were both born in the middle of the nineteenth century and lived in Dewsbury West Yorkshire.

John was a whitesmith - a craftsman who made household objects in tin and lead - but his origins are confusing and there doesn't seem to be any record at all of his birth. He was apprenticed to his step-father who bore a different name - which he briefly used himself before adopting his mother Ann's maiden name.

There seems to be no record of Ann being previously married and she first appears in the records in her mid-twenties working as a live-in domestic servant to a small middle class household. The illegitimate children of the poor were fairly invisible to the authorities in those days, and so it doesn't seem too great a stretch to conclude that she gave birth to John out of wedlock and only married later in life. If so - that must have been quite a story.

Now days this part of my family are Catholic and I had assumed that, like the other Catholic side of my family, this was because they belonged to one of the peculiar pockets of English Catholics in the north of England who managed to dodge the reformation. But in fact John's mother wasn't Catholic and it seems safe to assume that he simply married an Irish Catholic woman and the family's religious tradition began when the children were consequently raised in their mother's church.

Catherine or Kitty as she was known, is also difficult to pin down in the archives. There is even some confusion as to her surname - possibly because of some mis-transcribing in the records or more likely because she was illiterate. We know this because she was only able to make her mark on a number of official documents and it looks as if the surname was mis-heard at various times.

She was a worsted spinner - a fairly usual job in the mill towns of West Yorkshire - and was born in County Leitrim. The west of Ireland was one of the regions worst affected by the famines of the 1840's - and consequently one of the most depopulated by mass emigration. Leitrim was also a textile producing area and it's not hard to imagine why the people from there would be drawn to the booming mill towns of the West Riding. These hell-holes were the engine rooms of the golden age of British capitalism - which needed the cheap Irish labour as much as they needed relief from their own sufferings at home. As Engels said: 'The rapid extension of English industry could not have taken place if England had not possessed in the numerous and impoverished population of Ireland a reserve at command'.

Of John and Kitty's six children, four would go on to work in the mills at alarmingly young ages. One of them, my grandfather, was taken on as an errand boy on a local newspaper. Later - just after the Great War - he would come south to work on Fleet Street. And a new family tradition - of which I'm now the third generation - of working in 'the print' would begin.

The free and the unfree.

2011-09-13T09:18:00.007Z

A nice angle over at The Bad Old Days Will End on the 'travellers and slavery' story. Or possibly non-story.

The discovery of a group of slave labourers at Leyton Buzzard site in the run up to the eviction of the travllers' community at Dale Farm is both convenient and suspicious.

Ray is quite right in his post to also raise the danger of us freedom-loving types instinctively siding with the outsider who lives on the edges of society. Up close such communities can reflect exactly the same shit we see in the mainstream. In my own world I confess that sometimes I find myself romanticizing the outlaw MCs. But in reality, whatever the nobility of much of their ethos, they often just act as predatory bullies. And ironically those worst affected are often a group only slightly less on the periphery - although indistinguishable in the eyes of Jo Public - the wider biking fraternity.

But specifically regarding the slavery angle in this story I do wonder about the police's motivation: Working in Soho I know that only a few yards away from my studio there is an open doorway to a staircase with a crudely hand-written sign advertising 'lovely new eastern European girl in town'. And its a sign that gets updated with a disturbing frequency.

I realise that the workings of the sex industry is more complex and nuanced than simply human trafficking. But I also suspect that for every story of a Belle-de-Jour making an informed and voluntary career choice there is a parallel story about the exploitation of the vulnerable. Whilst I'm usually loathe to suggest conspiracies of corruption, I can't help but notice that coppers must walk past these doorways every half hour, often passing the respectable and be-suited punters on their way out. It seems like modern slavery doesn't raise too many eyebrows when it's an established part of the status quo. Like Woody Guthrie said:

Well, as through the world I've rambled, I've seen lots of funny men
Some rob you with a sixgun, some with a fountain pen
As through this world you ramble, as through this world you roam
You'll never see an outlaw drive a family from its home.

A day which will live in infamy - and myth

2011-09-09T08:13:00.005Z

I can still vividly remember exactly where I was when news broke of the attacks on the twin towers ten years ago and the unfolding horror of it all - and I only say that as a preamble to make it clear that I'm as sensitive to the human tragedy as the next man:

Even so. Maybe ten years is too soon to try and get some historical perspective - but it is necessary when myth-making spillls dangerously into policy-making. And doing so needn't take anything away from the individual tragedies nor does it add to the conspiro-loons or Islamo-fascists and their apologists.

Watching all the coverage of the 9/11 anniversary I can't help but recall the words of the historian Shelby Foote on American hubris regarding their civil war: “We think that we are a wholly superior people – if we’d been anything like as superior as we think we are, we would not have fought that war. But since we did fight it, we have to make it the greatest war of all times... It’s very American to do that.”

History - and suffering - is not a numbers game. But sometimes numbers do give a perspective. It's often quoted that more people died in the 9/11 attacks than at Pearl Harbour in 1941. True - but if we are measuring recent civillian casulaties then 41,000 were killed in the war in Bosnia and another 70,000 in the Darfur conflict. These are often forgotten - simply because they occured in obscure parts of the world in countries that aren't global players.

Of course it's not just about the numbers. 9/11 also defined a turning point in American relations with the outside world. The attack on the US homeland was something unprecedented and so represents what has been described as a 'loss of innocence' for a nation, which unlike many others, even in Europe, has not endured foreign attacks, invasion or occcupation. Undeniably 9/11 changed international relations and heralded in the new concept of 'the war on terror'.

But such interventionism by the US is nothing new. The US empire (Howard Zin's phrase not mine) has been policing the rest of the world in defence of its own interests since the nineteenth century. And specifically when it comes to the Middle East and relations with the ex-colonial (and coincidentally or not Islamic) word, America has been waging undeclared wars for many years.

Which leads to an ironic footnote - the date of 9/11 will forever now be remembered as it is - rather than for the anniversary of the US inspired and financed military coup of 1973 in Chile that eliminated the democratically elected socialist government of Salvador Allende and installed a fascistic-regime that enjoyed the support of US and British governments for the next seventeen years.

No such thing as the 'criminal classes'

2011-09-07T10:36:00.003Z

Ken Clark - the supposedly acceptable 'wet' face of the lounge-bar Conservatives - has been talking recently about the 'criminal classes.' Traditional Tory nonsense is nothing if not resilient.

At home I have a treasured early edition of Henry Mayhew's 'London Labour & The London Poor'. It isn't a revolutionary work in the sense of Engel's 'Conditon Of The Working Class In England' but it was in it's own way radical.

Granted it reflects the Victorian obsession for recording and categorising everything in pedantic detail and you do sometimes feel that Mayhew, like a butterfly collector would like to stick his subjects on a pin under a glass case. But it is ground-breaking in that it records the stories of London's working class in their own words - without too much middle class moral commentary. Most of all it paints a picture of the poorest elements of society - including those who make their living from crime - as victims of circumstance. Specifically of social injustice.

At the time this kind of thinking certainly wasn't the norm. Received wisdom would have it that there was some psychological or genetic flaw that defined the 'criminal classes'. Just have a look at Conan Doyle - all very entertaining - but Holmes is constantly explaining to Watson how the 'degenerate' jawline or the low fore-head of a suspect confirms their innate villainy. This kind of thinking went hand in hand with racial theories that mis-appropriated Darwinism in order to characterise some races as more primitive than other . Pseudo-science gave moral legitimacy to capitalism at home and imperialism abroad.

It's incredible that the idea of a criminal class is now being revived. But then again maybe it's the natural corollary of the old school toffs taking charge of government again. Because by implication if one class is born to riot then another must be born to rule.

No platform (literally) by the RMT

2011-09-02T08:44:00.006Z

I've suggested in the past that the blanket application of 'no platform' could be past its sell-by date.

The debates around the legal banning of the EDL march in Tower Hamlets this Saturday illustrate this. Just possibly the campaign for a ban might have a benefit greater than the ban itself. In the sense that the campaign could have been a tool in mobilising opposition to the fascists. But I'm not convinced - reliance on such measures is a bit too much of a fig leaf for the 'institutional Left' to hide behind. And in practical terms the 'ban' might prevent a march but it doesn't keep the fascists out of the East End - in fact it facilitates a ritualised stand-off of 'static demos' by the EDL and UAF - with all parties able to go home with the feeling of having had a good day out.

But the announcement from the RMT union that if the fascists went ahead with using Liverpool Street as an assembly point their members would close down the station on the grounds of 'health and safety' - strikes me as a perfect and meaningful instance of applying the principle of no platform.

It opens up all sorts of possibilities for similar actions by workers - bus drivers might be able to do the same thing. Hell even those 'workers in uniform' - the police community support officers - are in a union these days. Remember, these groups of workers in London are probably some of the most diverse workforces in the country. And the use of health and safety is a great way for workers to circumnavigate decades of anti-trade union legislation aimed at preventing unofficial and solidarity action - because any worker has the right to refuse to work in a situation or environment that might put himself or others at risk. Campaigning for this kind of action in the workplace would have a far politicising effect than any number of state bans.

The wrong trousers ?

2011-08-30T16:30:00.004Z

Much to the amusement of my family I brought myself a new pair of waterproof trousers this weekend. They are the fluorescent green/yellow hi-viz kind issued to workmen - prompting the derisive calls of 'you look like a council bin-man'.

I have no snobbish qualms about this - being classed as workwear they seem hard wearing and being classed as safety equipment they are VAT free. I've had expensive purpose made motorcycling waterproofs, I've had dirt cheap ones, and I've had military surplus ones. They all leak at some point and it's more a question of when and not if they will let you down. So I have no embarrassment about how I may look in them.

I remember reading somewhere that hi-viz is the new ubiquitous everyman uniform. Much as the Victorian middle class didn't notice what their servants looked like, and much as those sepia photos of workers pouring out factory gates reveal a sea of indsitinguishable flat caps and donkey jackets, so today - ironically - hi-viz has become a guarantee that you won't be noticed. In fact for anyone wanting to perpetrate an armed robbery I would suggest a hi-viz jacket as the perfect get-away costume. Chances are you will be take on the anonymous persona of 'street funiture' - and no witness will be able to give up a discription.

My only concern about my overly leary new trousers is that they could be taken as some sort of endorsement of the latest Euro-inspired bollocks to compel motorcyclists to wear hi-viz gear. Another misappropriation of state power for our own good and another insidious shift of responsibility to the rider to make himself seen and away from the car-driver to ensure that he looks where he's fucking going.

So to restore karmic balance to my purchase of these hideous over-trousers I would ask everyone to sign the e-position here to oppose the latest misguided proposals.

What is being done to our kids ?

2011-08-25T14:00:00.002Z

It's decision day today for thousands of school-kids who get their GCSE results. And this year my eldest is one of them.

This comes in the same week that Tony Blair has admitted (kind of) that a generation of kids have been fucked over, and it was announced that the number of "NEETS' has risen to 18%. 'NEETS' being taken as equating to the index for 'disposable teens' who make up the pool necessary to ensure that a large chunk of the remaining 72% are kept in Mc Jobs.

And as we are constantly told that GCSEs, A levels, and university entrance are getting progressively easier every year - so the pressure on our kids to excel in order to just get by is becoming ever more intense.

The two fold effect of this is that at one end of the spectrum there is a joyless approach to education which has little to do with real learning, and at the other, an inevitable sense that if you fall at the first hurdle then you're going to be left on the scrapheap for the rest of your life. Either way it's a recipe for teenage depression or - and this isn't melodramatic - riots on our streets.

I am so thankful that I grew up in the 80's when there was still a chance for a smart-arsed slacker like myself to scape through into the hallowed halls of higher education.

I'm also thankful that my daughter did pretty well today - but it does trouble me that she is going to face so many more hurdles to achieve the same. Along the way she is going to face more spoon-feeding, more bullshit, and a greater sense of every little thing mattering than ever I did. But at the same time the actual quality of her education will unquestionably be inferior.

It makes me sad for the kids as individuals, and it makes me angry for society as a whole - every year we are becoming more qualified, and yet also somehow rather less educated.

Back to Tottenham

2011-08-22T09:48:00.004Z

I'm back after two weeks away. It's a surreal experience to watch your own high street go up in flames on foreign television. And then to have your neighbourhood dissected online by quasi-anthropologists. Or see royalty visiting the area as if it was some sort of colonial outpost hit by a natural disaster.

It's also infuriating to follow the subsequent debates online - from the 'bring in the army' cries of an almost fascist horrified middle class, to the predictably infantile cries of 'turn riot into revolution' from the usual suspects on the opportunist ultra-Left.

I wasn't there at the time so I'm not going to shine any light on the specific causation of the riot on 5th August. Nor am I going to ride the band wagon of local 'experts' who seem to have created a cottage industry out of sharing their own experience of life in this corner of North London. But I have lived in Tottenham for 23 years and so I think I am entitled to put in my personal two-pennyworth:

I moved here in 1988 when I bought my first flat just outside of the Broadwater Farm estate. You could say that it was a cynical move - at the height of the housing boom and in the wake of the previous riot this was one of the cheapest post codes in London. I have since moved around the area but I have always stayed in Tottenham - and I have come to regard it as home. A place I just don't recognise as the gangsta-ghetto characterised lately in the media. In these 23 years I have seen governments come and go, and with them recessions and booms - but for Tottenham not much seems to have changed. For better or worse we have remained immune from the gentrification that has affected neighbouring areas. It remains what it was when I first got here; a community that defies stereotypes by being well integrated and doing it's best to make its way in some pretty shitty circumstances.

Circumstances where - to use the post-Blairite lingo - 'life chances' only seem to get worse. Which is why - putting aside the specifics of whatever catalysts triggered the events of 5th August - anyone who cannot see the causal link between social deprivation and riots must have their heads so far up their middle-England arses that they cannot see the wood for trees. Or maybe it was just because I was out of the country that I missed the coverage of the riots in Cheltenham and Tunbridge Wells.

One parting thought though - and a disturbing one for a socialist parent: Back in the 80's the riots were about social deprivation viewed through the lens of race. This time around it seems to be through the lens of a generation gap. That's not to say that the police have stopped being racist - but in particular now there is a generation under 25 who see no place for themselves in our community. I think a 'disconnect' is the correct pop-sociology expression. A generation that is spoon-fed a dose of spurious education to arm them with bullshit vocational qualifications for jobs that don't exist, or if they do are over-subscribed at a rate of 50 to 1. And most of these are future-less low grade / low pay service and retail opportunities. For a minority an academic route out might be possible. But if successful that will generally mean either working or living away from the community. No more EMA and ever-rising tuition fees mean that the odds for that option are rapidly reducing too.

However I promise that any resemblance to anything Tony Blair said this weekend is purely superficial ...

Back soon

2011-08-04T08:53:00.000Z

Time for the annual shut-down

- back in a couple of weeks

Nostalgia through rose-tinted Mark 8 goggles

2011-08-03T10:44:00.002Z

I'm aware that it's the ultimate hipster cliche - 'of course I like the early stuff before they went all mainstream': On a whim one bored afternoon at work I brought a couple of things on ebay - a book of the late Jim Fogg's biking short stories "Fogg On the Road' - and an old 1984 issue of Back Street Heroes. And reading them I was instantly transported to another more innocent and more authentic age.

Flicking through the magazine I see an editorial bemoaning the right-wing pro-business bias of Fleet Street and defending Ken Livingston and Tony Benn. (Imagine finding that in a custom bike magazine these days). A regular column by the much-missed Maz Harris taking the piss out of Harley-hobbyists and vintage-obsessives. The featured bikes are mainly Jap big in-line fours and old British twins rather than American Vs. A Blues Brothers mural on the tank. There's no visible attempt to be self consciously 'old skool' or retro. Not a single bloated OCC style cash-magnet creation in sight. And some quite decent short fiction that doesn't feature mythical celtic warriors or bad-ass outlaw MC's. It just feels so such much more 'real' and more like the village newsletter of a community than anything you're going to see nowadays.

I suppose it's inevitable that every sub-culture will either die or eat itself as it enters the commercial mainstream. And perhaps the 'cool' of our own youth is always going to be way cooler than the cool of today. Even so I can't help but get misty eyed about the era when I first discovered BSH (about 1986) or when I first went to the HAMC's Kent Custom Show in 1988. I think there were about 20,000 people at that event on Romney Marsh - and it felt as if every biker in the country was gathered in one place. But that unique annual gathering of the tribes is now long gone; four years ago twice that number attended the Bulldog Bash - and that was just one of several similar events.

I'm off with my slippers and coca now ...

What do they know of cricket who only cricket know ?

2011-08-01T08:45:00.003Z

Proof if ever there was that there are some on the Left who could start a fight in a broom-cupboard: Have a look at the comments on Socialist Unity arguing over ...cricket.

Somewhere along the line the 'my dad's more working class than your's ' card is played - and now I'm just waiting for the accusation that 20/20 cricket is a form of petit-bourgeois revisionism.

I grew up in a house where cricket was treated with almost religious reverence - interminable test matches watched on telly with the sound off and the radio on. Unsurprisingly, and notwithstanding CLR James' inspirational marrying of cricket with libertarian-marxism - I grew up loathing the sport.

In fact I developed a rule of thumb that if it doesn't involve blood or sweat (or better still both) then it probably isn't a sport at all. So that rules out curling, darts and synchronised swimming. And before anyone jumps down my throat with a worthy exception to prove the rule I'll concede that it's just a working hypothesis. BUT STILL: I'm quite prepared to acknowledge that the generous behaviour of the Indian team in the second test this weekend was something really rather wonderful.

Now can we just leave it ?

1945 - Labour's missed opportunity

2011-07-27T08:07:00.001Z

I've got another guest slot over at 'On This Deity' today.

Another anniversary of a great radical 'alomost might have been' moment. And a sort of an epitaph for an increasingly extinct species.

It's the Mail wot done it

2011-07-26T15:55:00.002Z

One trouble with Murdoch-gate is that it can distract us from just how fucking horrific the rest of our tabloid press is. Whether it is the opiate cocktail of celebrities and tits - or just downright reactionary lies that fuel racial hatred and division. A special place is held by the small minded spitefulness of middle class middle England that is personified by the Mail

Getting wound up by that hateful rag is an exercise in futility. So I don't usually bother. But the Mail is given out as freebie in quite a number of places - including my gym. And sitting in the sauna I am something of a captive audience.

So on Saturday morning I sat there relaxing after my workout reading how the horrific attacks in Norway were the work of an Islamo-mentalist group called the 'Friends Of Islamic Jihad'. There were several pages of authoritative commentary from various historians and sociologists about how the overly-liberal multicultural societies of Scandinavia were doomed to tragedy as deranged immigrants were bound to bite the hand that fed them. And this - it was implied - should serve as a warning to all of us.

Of course roughly by lunchtime it was clear that this was all complete bollocks.

The perpetrator of this atrocity was not some swarthy incomer, but an extremely Aryan-looking conservative patriot. And a fundamentalist Christian too - who fancied linking up with our own homegrown EDL.

So against my better judgement, the following morning I had to look at the Mail On Sunday: I scoured it for a retraction or apology - but found none. Only that Anders Behring Breivik was being reported as a lone nutter with a background that was unfortunately 'arch-conservative'. And no mention of course that his hate-fueled agenda bore more than a passing resemblance to the kind of reactionary shit the Mail has been pumping out for years.

Print's not dead

2011-07-21T10:12:00.002Z

More and more I seem to find myself an analogue Luddite in an increasingly digital world: I like old-fashioned air cooled v-twin engines - and the smell of ink on paper in the morning.

Sometime ago my alma-mater, The London College of Printing blandly re-branded itself as the London College of Communication. Now I see that one of the industry's newsletters - Design Week - has stopped publishing a print version and is only available online.

This depresses me on a number of levels. Despite wasting a lot of my time reading (and writing) stuff on screen I really do love the tactile and sensory experience of ink on paper. I celebrate the craftsmanship of understanding the manual processes behind design - and I had some of my happiest times fiddling about with hot-metal setting at college.

But this 'digital' obsession reflects the narrow elitism of a media world that is firmly up its own arse. 98% of the UK population don't own a tablet device let alone an I-Pad, two-thirds of the country don't own a smart-phone and a quarter of households don't even have an internet connection. And that's national - if you look at statistics for impoverished areas like the North-East you'll find that the digital stats drop alarmingly.

As a kid growing up in the 70's I remember being fed images of the year 2000 where we would all be wearing silver jump suits, commuting to work on our own personal hovercrafts and eating our meals in tablet form. Thankfully that all proved to be bollocks - and so I suspect is the predicted death of print. As it first was in the sixteenth century, the printed form stills represents the most universally accessible means of communication. Just ask anyone with any sort of political involvement - what's the first thing we all do - in almost any circumstance - produce a leaflet.

And here's another thought: As an I-Book, I-Phone user who works in a graphic studio in Soho I suppose I have to acknowledge that I could be seen as a card-carrying 'meedja-wanka'. But I can't help noticing with some ironic satisfaction that the signature object of desire for so many of my fellow meedja-wankas is that most basic of technologies - the fixed gear bicycle. They wax lyrical about the purity of its unity of form and function - I wish they'd apply the same logic to print.

Are they really all in it together ?

2011-07-19T10:10:00.003Z

I'm naturally cynical about conspiracy theories. Bizarre and brutal behaviour by the ruling class can just as easily be ascribed to shared greed, mutual self-interest and a degree of bungling as it can to the global machinations of the modern Illuminati.

But ... Jesus Christ. You literally couldn't make this shit up:

Police commissioners resigning. Newspaper executives arrested. Whistle-blowing journalists dying mysteriously. And a web of entanglements that connects big business, politicians and the forces of the state. Is fresh-faced toff David Cameron a naive victim witlessly implicated in this web of corruption and deceit ? Or is he the evil genius at the very heart of it assisted with his comedy side-kick Boris ? And of course we have the double act of damsel-in-distresss Sienna Miller and quintessential Englishman Hugh Grant as the crusading hero of the hour to save the day.

What are those movie rights worth ?

Bullshit brand ethics

2011-07-13T11:19:00.004Z

I have a battered old NGA 'Don't Buy The Times, Sun, News Of The World' mug on a shelf at eye level in my workshop. I'm reminded of the Wapping dispute every time I park up my bikes - and I never have brought one of Murdoch's scabby rags.

So I want to rejoice over the hacking-gate saga - the closure of NOW, bent coppers and now the apparent denial of Murdoch's attempt to control the airwaves too - it's the perfect shit-storm. But I'm afraid this isn't some victory of people power - it's a triumph of the bullshit of supposed 'corporate ethics'.

Some of the marketing wankers I have as clients refer without batting an eyelid to their brands' ethical capital. In their strange fucked-up world the perceived morality of their companies is an asset like any other. I'm sure business text books have been written on this but you can quickly get the idea - fair trade organic coffee = good, oil drilling and refining = bad. In an indirect way it acknowledges the simple fact that those of us who live under capitalism - 'consumers' - are generally not too happy about having the worst excesses of the system rubbed in our noses. So any business that can mitigate that is on to a good thing. And that I'm pretty sure is why Ford started the advertising boycott avalanche that led to the NOW's demise.

With a record of union-busting, funding and co-operating with dictatorial regimes, and of course the notorious Pinto case when they decided that compensation for fatalities made better economic sense than product recalls - the Ford Motor Company has not historically been on some sort of moral crusade.

But in positioning itself as the corporation that takes the moral high ground it effectively wrong foots all the others: Which car manufacturer wants to then be branded as the one who isn't sympathetic to the family of a murdered child ? The positive PR is fantastic - and so much cheaper than taking out those pages of advertising space.

An inadequate obituary

2011-07-08T16:35:00.004Z

After what can only be described as a horrific past three months, my mum slipped away in the small hours of Wednesday morning. Although we've had a long time to get our heads around this, and although the way she finally died was in the circumstances probably the best outcome we could have hoped for - nothing really ever prepares you for your mum dying, or in my dad's case - your partner of almost 50 years.

In the future sometime - once I've worked out what exactly they are - I'll probably write something about my feelings. But right now the best I can do is to repeat the potted biography that I have had to write up for her funeral. Admittedly it's a pretty inadequate way of summing up someone's life - it doesn't even touch the important things that defined her as a wife, mother and grandmother - her love of life, her sense of fun and her passion for fairness and justice ... or cricket or teddy bears.

But I still think it's worth saying anyway - the cruelest aspect of dementia is how it robs a person of their own identity so that even their loved ones can struggle to remember the person who once occupied those same frail flesh and bones:

Jo was born in Surrey in 1927 to a family that joked that Thames river water not blood ran through their veins. There are records of the Browns as watermen and lightermen in Richmond-Upon-Thames dating back to the middle of the eighteenth century. By time that she was born, the river trade and the family boatyard were struggling so when her father finished his apprenticeship he broke with tradition but maintained the river connection by becoming a Thames river policeman. In her childhood Jo moved around various parts of London following her father's postings. By the outbreak of the war he was stationed at Wapping and the family lived in the East End throughout the nightly bombing of the blitz. Jo left school at 16 and started work as a technician testing optics for the Admiralty at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington.

After the war she moved with her family to Germany. Her father was promoted and posted there to help re-organise the Rhineland Waterways Police as part of post-war de-nazification. It was there that she helped out at the schools on the British bases, and so sparked her life long passion for education.

Returning to England she studied for her teaching diploma at Birmingham University and then went on to take up her first position in Portsmouth at a boarding school for the children of naval personnel. Returning to London she worked in Putney at one of the country's first Comprehensive schools, and started to specialise in the pioneering field of special needs education - or 'remedial teaching' as it was then known.

For a while she took a break from this demanding work when when she became one of the first woman instructors for IBM. At around this time she met her husband - John. They were married in 1963 and settled in Staines, where two years later I was born. When I was old enough Jo returned to work and taught in a number of schools in the area. It was at this time that her concern for education led to her becoming actively involved in the National Union Of Teachers and the Labour Party.

This activism continued after she and John moved to Kent in 1991 following the relocation of his work there, and Jo continued teaching well into her sixties as a supply teacher at several local primary schools. Following her eventual retirement she continued to be very active in the community as a school governor and town councillor in Greenhithe and Swanscombe - often working as a double act alongside John. She continued in these roles until chronic arthritis made it impossible for her to carry on. After two years of being house-bound, three months ago she suffered a very rapid mental decline - from both depression and dementia. Two weeks ago it was clear that she had literally given up the will to live and slowly slipped away from us...

Good riddance to Haye

2011-07-04T09:34:00.002Z

I like boxing but I'm not a boxing fan. Partly this is because I still baulk at the idea of giving any money to Rupert Murdoch so I won't ever have the facility to 'pay for view'. And Mrs Journeyman, whilst quite happy for me to return from my own training with fat lips and black eyes, finds something ethiclly questionable about me watching other people suffering the same.

But even so I appreciate boxing and boxers. I have to admit to buying into the romantic notion of the sport as possibly the purest expression of athleticism and competition, and hanker after a (probably illusory) idea of an inherent dignity to the sport. And if anyone doubts this as pretentious twaddle, I suggest they first read 'The Sweet Science and 'The Gloves'.

I also think that all boxers - almost irrespective of their ability level - are worthy of some respect for having the guts both physical and psychological to put themselves to the test in the ring. But my big problem with many pro's is that with with their trash-talking and arrogant self-promotion they come across as ignorant cringe-worthy knobs who bring discredit to the sport.

And no more so than David Haye - with his notorious gang-rape pre-fight analogy and now his pathetic post-fight broken toe excuses. Maybe he's misled by his management and entourage, but I have to say that the right man - someone who brings some much needed dignity and intelligence - won on Saturday night.

J30 - brief impressions

2011-07-01T09:25:00.008Z

I took the opportunity to take a day's 'solidarity holiday' with the strikers.

My day began with a visit to the teacher's picket line at my daughter's school. The NUT / ATL had sent out a letter to parents asking for their support and it seemed only right to respond. The 'picket line' was very good-natured with only a few managers and support staff going in - the latter rather embarrassedly because of their own union's - UNISON - cravenness in not joining the strike. They atoned with sympathy, donations to the strike fund, and tea and biscuits. I've never seen or been on a teacher's picket line before - and I was struck by how genteel this was in comparison to any others I've seen. I was also struck at how young they all seemed - maybe I'm just getting old - and how politically raw they were. Many were joking that they'd never been on a demonstration before let alone been on strike.

After a local rally at the FE College I headed into town for the main demo at Lincoln's Inn Fields. The same atmosphere prevailed - but most of all this was very much more than just the usual suspects. It certainly wasn't the Greek-style insurrection that some have been talking about - nor was it really even a one-day general strike. But - and this isn't based on the usual rhetoric of the leaderships because I never actually got into the hall to hear it - there was a genuine sense that it was the start of something new.

On the negative side I have to say that the private/public sector divide and rule game has had an effect. My colleagues - who have never known anything other than private pension schemes - simply can’t understand why I was supporting the strike. I fear that they are representative of many in industries who have been squeezed repeatedly since the Thatcher years - and it will take a lot of explaining to counter the politics of envy arising from the race to the bottom. But this explaining has to be done: We can huff and puff about general strikes as much as we like, but at the end of the day capitalism is a cold-hearted beast that rates profit over public opinion: Schools, colleges and job centres shutting might piss the system off - but walk-outs at commercial businesses hit it where it actually hurts.

Roots 2: Soldier of the queen - Fred & Florence

2011-06-27T11:52:00.008Z

Another installment in my on-going project to research my family history: This is one of my maternal Great Grandfathers - Frederick Albert.

He was born in 1871 in Richmond in Surrey - his father Albert was a former soldier and bricklayer who died before his son's eighth birthday leaving his widow Caroline with six children. She supported the family as a needlewoman so it is fair to assume that life was pretty tough for them. Fred worked initially as a milkman but at the age of 18 followed his father into the army. He opted to join the Royal Artillery as a driver - presumably his experience in working with horses helped equip him to drive a gun carriage. In fact shortly afterwards he transferred to the more glamorous Royal Horse Artillery as a gunner - all artillery being horse-drawn at the time but in the horse artillery the gun crews rode into battle rather than marched. And being equipped with lighter guns they provided close fire support to the cavalry. Like most soldiers at the time Fred signed on for twelve years - the first seven of these to be served in the regulars and a further five in the reserves subject to recall in the event of war.

His father had served in the army in the Crimea era when soldiers were generally held in pretty low esteem as the dregs of society. By the time of Fred's service it was the golden age of Kippling's 'soldiers of the queen' and some sentimental regard had developed for the common soldier. Reforms in the army had abolished some of the abuses of an earlier age - flogging and the purchase of officers' commissions - but life in the ranks still tended to be harsh and brutal. Four of Fred's seven years were served in India on the North West Frontier and this posting would have produced mixed feelings. Unlike home postings, there were numerous possibilities of action in policing operations even when there weren't full-on hostilities ,and there was the constant attrition of disease. On the other hand, pay went much further in India than at home, and even the rank and file would enjoy the benefits of being part of the race that ruled the empire - with native servants and a more relaxed barrack regime than the spit and polish of Woolwich or Colchester. Fred appears to have made it unscathed through these years - although when he transferred to the reserves in 1896 it is recorded that he had severely sprained his left knee 'in action'.

Other than marrying Florence and starting a family, we don't have any record of what Fred did back in Richmond for the next three years but in 1899 with the outbreak of the war in South Africa he had the misfortune of being recalled to active service. War with the Boer settlers had broken out after a shameless adventure of land-grabbing by the British to secure the gold and diamond fields of the region. It was arguably the British army's first 'modern' war - fought against an opponent who combined guerrilla tactics with the use of European weapons and so embarrassed an army used to colonial victories against indigenous peoples with inferior arms. As a foretaste of the First World War the fighting was fully in the public gaze; the civilan population was galvanised with a call for volunteers to supplement the regular forces, and comfort parcels from home were sent to the troops.

Fred landed in South Africa in 1899 and was posted to 'G' Battery - his medal record shows that he served at the battles of Paardeburg, Dreifontein, Johannesburg, Diamond Hill and Kimberley. There's little doubt that he would have been in the thick of it - one of the frequent British tactical errors was to deploy their artilery too far forward in the open where the gun crews made an easy target for the skilled Boer marksmen.

Happily my Great Gandfather survived all this and was finally discharged in 1902. His record shows that he was never an exemplary soldier - throughout his service he never managed to rise above the rank of Gunner and he seems to have regularly forfeited and regained his good conduct pay. On his discharge his character merited only a 'good' - but this was obvious sufficient for him to secure a saught-after position on his return to civilian life in Richmond as the town's resident fireman. In an age when the public sector was almost none existent fire brigades were generally formed of volunteer part-timers with only the resident fireman as a fulltime paid position - much like the coxswains of the RNLI today he was also the caretaker of the fire station and responsible for the maintenance of the equipment. Again his experience with horses would have stood him in good stead for this. The position would also have secured a certain status and security - reinforced when his wife Flo became the caretaker of the new municipal public conveniences. Not too glamourous perhaps but aslo a position of trust and relative status - and with the added scope of earning tips from the customers.

Largely because of Fred's military service, in the course of twenty odd years he had risen from poverty to working class respectability. The family memories of Fred in his old age are of a fairly stern and forebooding patriach. But poignantly there is no one left to remember the impact it must have had when his own son, following the family's military tradition, was killed in action at the age of 18 in 1917.

NB: Although the photogarph above has been kept by the family we have no idea which one of the men is Fred although we can be sure that he isn't one of the NCO's. His medical record at the time of his enlistment descibes him as short and stocky with a ruddy complexion and scars to his cheek and forehead, he also had tattoos on both forearms. It looks like his genes have run strong ...

Barbarossa legacy

2011-06-22T09:43:00.013Z

Today is the 70th anniversary of Operation Barbarossa - the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. One of the defining moments of the 20th century it deserves to be marked by more than just the Stalinists apologists I have seen online so far.

In Eastern Europe it marks the start of suffering on a scale and level of barbarity that eclipses anything seen in the West. But in this country the event went a long way to re-orientating the political compass for generations - for society as a whole and spcifically for the Left.

To mobilise the war effort Churchill and the ruling class had to evoke the idea of a 'Peoples' War' - a dangerous game for them to play as would be seen in the 1945 Labour landslide. But in the dark days of 1941 when Britain was isolated, Hitler's attack on the USSR was a gift to rallying the working class to the cause. The cynical creation of the character of 'Uncle Joe' Stalin as the lovable popular patriarch of Russian workers, and propaganda campaigns the stressed solidarity with beleaguered Soviet fellow-workers, were all part of a drive to increase industrial production in the cause of 'arms for Russia'. This was notoriously assisted by the British Communist Party who had little difficulty in doing an about-face from their previous defence of the Nazi-Soviet pact and denunciation of the war effort as an 'imperialist war'.

Leaving aside the jesuitical isomersaults required of the CP to justify this - the significance of popular support for Russia was felt by a much wider layer than those sections of the industrial working class influenced by the Stalinists. If many on the Left had come to the conclusion in the 1930's that Communism and the USSR were the only bulwarks against fascism - Hitler's war against the USSR spread this thinking to a much wider audience. - From the radicalised youth of the ruling class such as the Cambridge spies who used their privileged positions within the establishment to assist Stalin's war effort - to a very much wider layer of workers for whom the propaganda rubbed off: Ordinary 'non-political' people who came to see the USSR as a glimpse of a possible alternative - and better - way of organising society. Of course this was to become steadily eroded by the Cold War and the spreading realisation of the realities of Stalinism, but it was not to be altogether extinguished until the 1990's.

I was born almost 25 years after these events - but still the impact of the post 1941 era has in a sense defined my own political identity, and many others on the Left: The label of 'Trotskyist' is still worn in the early 21st Century, but essentially it takes its definition and reference from that time. And as I have said before, whilst it is important to understand this history - and even to acknowledge the pull that it has a generation of CP-ers - I am not sure that it is useful to allow these things to continue to define us. I think of my daughters who now study this period as school-history. Questioning and radicalised though they may be, the controversies - and resulting labels - are about as relevant to them as theologians discussing the schisms of the early church. Time for the Left to move on.

Cosiness isn't the alternative to sectarianism

2011-06-17T11:41:00.001Z

I was at a local meeting the other night to support the action of UCU members at the local FE college. It was celebrating an all too rare but (partial) success for once. A ballot with overwhelming support for strike action had persuaded management to climb down over a vicious cuts package that targeted most of the leading union activists for redundancy. The meeting was dominated by the SWP. And I couldn't argue with that - they have a number of activists at the college and appear to have led the movement there - they also lead the local Trades Council in whose name the meeting was called. What I was surprised at was their attitude to our local Labour MP - David -'pull up the ladder behind me' - Lammy.

An invitation to attend the meeting I can understand -t's a chance to put him on the spot for his record whilst higher education minister in the previous government and now as shadow education minister. But there were no questions about whether a future Labour government would restore EMA - a massive issue in our area - or what would be done about student fees. And this was a meeting where the forthcoming public sector strikes on the 30th June, and the events in Spain and Greece, were greeted as virtually the start of a revolutionary situation in Europe. But Lammy wasn't even asked if he supported the strikes or if he would be coming to visit local picket lines on the day.

In fact he was only politely thanked for lending his support to the campaign at the college: Of course in the forum of a public meeting none of these awkward questions could or should have been put in a personally aggressive or sectarian way - but they need to be asked nonetheless. If we're being doctrinaire about it (although I'd rather not) you could say doing so is a classic 'transitional' approach. It's fair enough to proclaim 'one solution - revolution' but it really does wear a bit thin when over-used - and it becomes a ritual if it's not linked to the day-to-day.

Strangely the SWP sometimes remind me of my happily brief time in the CPGB in the 1980's. Whilst feeling a smug 'more-revolutionary than thou' glow, in practical terms the CPGB could amicably co-exist with the dreaded 'social democrats' of the Labour Party as some sort of pressure group / custodian of the socialist conscience of the movement, and so enjoy a place in the Lefts' great and good. The political vocabulary of the SWP is obviously different - but the similarities in the social and psychological cosiness are striking.

Entrepreneurs ?

2011-06-16T10:23:00.006Z

History repeats itself first as tragedy and then as farce:

On a Wednesday night I'm usually out and manage to come home just in time to catch my family watching the last ten minutes of The Apprentice. This is actually the optimum duration to see a summary of the week's farcical cock-ups and then witness the ritual culling of one of the disgusting talentless and avaricious moral vacuums that comprise this years' 'hopefuls'.

Lord Sugar is usually fed with some well-scripted humiliating put-downs for these wannabes - and in the process reinforces his own brand positioning as the 'peoples' entrepreneur' - the same persona carefully nurtured by the previous Labour government. His folksy message is an insidious one - business people are just like the rest of us and business is good for all of us - 'entrepreneurship' is the best hope of the common man.

But much as I detest the show it does serve some purpose as a metaphor for everything that is wrong with capitalism. And this week Lord Sugar came out with something that unconsciously revealed the bankruptcy and degeneracy of our age: 'I've never met an engineer who made it as a businessman'.

Back in the day - when Marx himself grudgingly allowed capitalism the credit for having developed mankind's resources - 'entrepreneurship' did mean something: Richard Arkwright, James Watt, Richard Trevithick, Henry Bessemer, Isambard Kingdom Brunell may well all have been heartless bastards who didn't give a toss about the human suffering that was the price of progress and profit - but they did make their money by invention and manufacture. And in doing so undeniably transformed our material world along the way.

They didn't do it like Lord Sugar by knocking out inferior copies of other people's products sourced from cheap components, or by property speculation, or by making profits from supplying the needs of a starved public sector. But then you don't need to be an engineer for that - just a parasitic modern day 'entrepreneur'.

Poll Tax - First time round

2011-06-13T09:27:00.004Z

Today I've got a guest slot over at On This Deity - to mark the anniversary of the Peasant's Revolt of 1381:

"When Adam delved and Eve span - Who was then the gentleman ?''

John Ball (1338-1381)

The 'mad priest of Kent' - itinerant Lollard preacher and possibly the first English socialist.

Out of town interlude

2011-06-08T09:52:00.006Z

Feeling in need of a bit of unpolluted air for a change, I pointed my wheels East(ish) and took off for a couple of days in Cambridgeshire and the Fens:

First stop was the Cambridge Strawberry Fair. I hadn't been since the early 1990's when 'new age travellers' were still the folk-demons. I remembered it as a very mellow affair where dreadlocked crusties happily mingling alongside the WI and scout groups. When I saw that the police had cancelled it last year it stirred me to visit it again. The old (and not so old) 'alternative' types were still there - along with a large showing from the very pissed-up white underclass of Middle England. As a Londoner that's a phenomenon that we just don't see here - and certainly not the open and casual display of EDL regalia in a non-political context. As I was riding I couldn't drink more than a couple of pints, but I still had quite a pleasant afternoon people-watching - albeit slightly unsettling and nostalgic for the old days.

I spent the night in a Travelodge: Like so many of these soul-less joints this was located next to an equally desolate Little Chef in the middle of nowhere on an A road that was once a major route but has been superseded by another motorway or by-pass. Now stranded in time and space it has the distinct feel of the Bates Motel. However I survived the night and headed off to the depths of the Fens to visit my friends who have built a new small-holding life up there (with a bit of bike work on the side).

I then headed off to West Stow Saxon Village - but taking a couple of wrong turns managed to take in Ely which is definitely not on the way. It bills itself as the 'oldest English village' which in a narrow sense is true in that it is possibly the oldest dated Saxon settlement - but the timber houses in the 'village' are all reconstructions. Really aside from a small museum which could do a much better job of describing who the Anglo-Saxons were and how they lived, the main purpose of the village is experimental archaeology. Being something of an amateur geek in this respect I was impressed to see how this had transformed the idea of what a Saxon house had looked like from the ski-chalet like illustrations in the text books that I grew up on to something that looked much more like a modern construction. An amateur living-history group were giving a surprisingly good demonstration of burial rites raising more sophisticated questions than I had expected - were grave goods really deposits of valued personal possessions or could they be goods of individuals that had no heirs to bequeath them to - or were they gifts deposited by the deceased's friends and relations ? Well it kept me happy for a couple of hours anyway.

I then took a very long and rambling route to join up with the M11 for the final stretch home to London. In the course of my pottering ( and getting lost ) I had managed to take in Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire. Despite getting so soaked in the rain at one point that I managed to ruin my phone - I felt rejuvenated. (I'm a simple soul really).

Festival Of Britain

2011-06-02T08:53:00.002Z

I went to the South Bank yesterday and grabbed a quick half an hour at the exhibition there to mark the 60th anniversary of the Festival Of Britain. As often seems to be the case these days I found myself thinking about my parents. What has happened in this country since the festival of 1951 - and to to them - seems like a melancholic metaphor for the decline and dead-end of our society.

I know Mum and Dad both visited the festival - at the time they would have been in their early to mid twenties: Having been kids in the 1930's, teenagers in the war and then coming of age in the glow of the 1945 Labour government - they represent precisely that generation filled with the optimism and faith in the future that the festival was trying to capture.

The festival was a scheme of the 1945 Labour government - a project inherited by Churchill's Tories that they couldn't cancel. It was intended to be a celebration of the 1945 vision of a post-war reconstruction - continuing the idea of a People's War into building a fairer society with opportunity for all.

With the perspective of sixty years the faith in social democratic reform seems pretty naive and flimsy. But my parents - and many of their generation - brought into it, and for a while at least it looked as if it was working. Their parents had known hardships before the war that they would never experience. Education, home ownership and foreign holidays would blur the demarcation between the working and middle classes - creating a murky hinterland between the two. This was seen as 'getting on' - not just in terms of opportunist individual social mobility but collectively as a society. Aneurin Bevan - still one of my Dad's heroes - articulted this vision explicity with 'In Place Of Fear'.

It probably never occurred to them how precarious this would prove - but it is dawning on them now they are elderly and having to call upon that infrastructure of the welfare state they played their small part in building.

Mum is probably having to go permanently into care and Dad is reeling as social services telling him that after a lifetime of working their modest savings will have to be swallowed up before the state will help. They are not particularly well off - but inevitably after nearly fifty years of working they have the modest assets that you would typically expect to find amongst the skilled working or lower middle class. And this is becoming a fairly universal predicament for their generation, most affecting that very section of society that the brave new 1945 Labour meritocratic project - and the 1951 Festival - were built upon.

For my Dad it's not really about the money - there are many other more powerful emotional tugs in his mind at the moment, but one underlying thought - although he would never express it in these terms - is that after a lifetime he is now left wondering 'what the fuck was it all for?'.

Legal but dishonourable

2011-05-31T09:01:00.001Z

It's not often I find myself agreeing with Diane Abbot but here goes:

These days I'm a boss (kind of). I have to say that despite the stress this brings it's quite nice being a boss. It's not really about the money- in a business like ours there's quite a few people 'under' me who are considerably better paid than I am. In my case I simply never really liked having anyone 'over' me so being a boss - albeit one who does his best not to act like an arsehole - is definitely a preferable option. But one thing about being a boss is that the buck stops with you - for better or worse.

Sometimes - despite your best efforts to be decent and honest - you soak up undeserved glory rightly accruing to people under you - and sometimes you shoulder the burden when they fuck up. Those are the breaks and if you can't hack it - don't do the job, whether it's being the managing director, the captain of the darts team - or the head of children's services at a local council earning £150k a year.

That's a fucking lot more than I earn by the way - but if you were going to justify it at all you could say that when my team fucks up maybe a typo gets printed and we lose a client - whilst when a social services team fucks up a child dies.

I've no doubt that Sharon Shoesmith was hung out to dry and scapegoated by Haringey Council and most of all by cowardly Ed Balls in response to a lynch mob reaction to the death of Baby P. I'm also sure that the legal decision was well founded in employment law - and I hope that it ruins what little political career Ed Balls may have left.

But on a personal ethical basis - for Sharon 'I don't do blame' Shoesmith to pocket any compensation for her dismissal is simply dishonourable (sorry I can't think of a better less old-fashioned word) - inappropriate is probably the PC jargon but that doesn't cut it.Granted she probably won't now be able to get another senior exec's job in the public sector and she has lost a decent pension - but there's nothing to stop her just keeping her head down and quietly earn a modest living doing some thing a bit more mundane. In the circumstances, whatever injustice she may feel she has suffered, that would seem like an honourable course of action.

Of course if she was only seeking the courts' decision to highlight the government's and council's scapegoating - maybe now she has achieved this she could donate the settlement to a campaign to defend public sector jobs and services - or at the very least to a kids' charity. But I wouldn't hold your breath ...

Genocide lessons for our generation

2011-05-27T10:10:00.003Z

Recent posts seem to be concentrating on legal-ish issues - and here's another one:

For someone with any sense of justice it's difficult not to suppress a sense of jubilation at the sight of Ratko Mladic - military leader of the Bosnian Serbs in the years of civil war and ethnic cleansing - being called to account. And yet at the same time for anyone with a sense of history it is difficult not to associate the concept of 'war crimes' with victor's justice. But just for the moment I'm deliberately going to set that debate aside:

In our schools the Holocaust is taught as a defining moment in our recent history - when taught well it is an opportunity to educate new generations about the fragility of 'civilisation' and 'human rights'. Rightly so - it must never be forgotten - but there are problems with using it as such a vehicle. The passage of time and the emphasis on the 'otherness' of the Nazi regime has a danger of enshrining the holocaust in a time capsule that new generations simply can't relate to. But in the very recent history of Balkan Europe there is a much readily understood example of what Hannah Arendt called 'the banality of evil'. The thoroughly modern racism of neighbour against neighbour ... to the backdrop of MTV, Sony Walkmans and Benetton adverts. So close to our daily lives - and yet it is so swept under the carpet.

If the trial of Mladic is to achieve anything it could be to show that ethnic hatred is not something far away - either in history books or 'developing' countries. And although I'm delighted to see a new generation learning about 'The Boy In Striped Payamas' - I'd also like them to be reading Joe Sacco's 'Safe Area Gorazde'.

Super injunctions - not just about celebs

2011-05-23T10:02:00.003Z

It's a very British thing: a meeting of the obsession with 'privacy', and a prurient fascination for other people's sex lives - all fused with the lynch-rule of a puritanical mob. Throw in a footballer or a celebrity or two and a not-really-a-celebrity photogenic gold-digger - and bingo we have the perfect storm. Then give it an added comic twist with some judges proving that they are indeed silly old farts by trying to police what is being said via social-networking on this new-fangled inter-web thingy. And let's not forget the biggest gold-digger of the lot - Max- fucking -Clifford.

It's tempting to say good riddance to the whole circus.

But then I remember that the first time I heard the expression 'super-injunction' was when Trafigura tried to hush up their dumping of toxic waste on the Ivory Coast. 100,000 people required medical help for which the company accepted no liability but still paid the government $200 million in hush money. So footballers and gold diggers aside there's a very important issue here - free speech in this country is something of an illusion when it can be brought off by the highest bidder.

Libel laws may once have been intended to protect the individual - although historically that seems dubious - but when it costs about 150 times as much to bring a libel suit in this country as it does in the rest of Europe, and there's no legal aid available - it does look suspiciously like a law only for the benefit of the rich.

Orwell anniversary

2011-05-20T11:02:00.002Z

There's a piece over at Poumista today to mark the anniversary of George Orwell being shot on this day in 1937 whilst serving with the militias in the Spanish Civil War.

I vividly remember discovering at the age of sixteen a copy of Homage To Catalonia in the most unlikely of places - the library of my Catholic school. I took it out again and again and re-read it many times over.

I'm not sure why - probably the teenage romantic notion of being a revolutionary - but it had a profond affect on me that has stayed ever since.

However it goes no way at all to explaining why I should ever have concluded that it was a good idea to join the YCL at the age of 18. Fortunately it only took my six months to realise what a fucking dumb idea that was ...

Why double jeopardy matters

2011-05-19T09:10:00.003Z

I would not have been at all troubled if summary justice had been meted out at the time to this racist gang in some darkened alley in South East London. So why do I feel squeamish that in the case of one of them - Gary Dosbon - the legislation of 2003 has been used to revoke the ancient common law principle of double jeopardy so he can be tried again for a crime for which he was previously found not guilty ?

Some sentimental twaddle has been written about a cornerstone of 'our' justice system by those whose heart is in the right place but whose grasp of history is wanting. Freedom in this country - or any other - has not been guaranteed by legal principles. Yes - double jeopardy was meant to give the individual protection from persecution by a state that without it could manipulate evidence and juries until it secured the desired conviction. But throughout history arbitrary imprisonment and punishment by the state has managed to go unchecked because - and no apologies for getting a bit doctrinaire here - the state does not exist separate and apart from politics and class conflict.

I've even seen some things written on this case that evoke Magna Carta. A basic understanding of the thirteenth century would tell you that this much misrepresented document was the product of the fragile balance in the struggle between the feudal class and the emerging centralised state represented by the crown- and nothing to do with a concept of universal human rights superimposed centuries later. In fact significantly Magna Carta only really entered the popular consciousness in the seventeenth century when it was dug out of obscurity and used to give legitimacy to another struggle against another arbitrary and repressive state - the Stuart monarchy. In otherwords it was politics - and specifically the radical popular movements of the English Civil War - that linked universal freedoms with legal principles.

But my squeamishness about double jeopardy isn't based on any notions of 'ancient principles' - it's very practical.

Quite simply allowing the state the possibility of a second-bite for a conviction actually facilitates and perpetuates the kind of incompetent and corrupt police investigation and prosecution seen at the time of the Stephen Lawrence murder. And anything that lowers the bar on the already plummeting standards of justice is a real threat to all of us.

The new class warriors.

2011-05-16T09:15:00.002Z

So Toby-fucking-Young (as he is not so affectionately known in my house) could only summon up three hundred or so of his mates from Notting Hill for the laughable 'March against debt'. Good riddance. Although it's tempting to wish for some unattributable disaster that would not have backfired on the perpetrators to have wiped out this bunch of wankers - a damp squib is probably their best epitaph.

This mob who have misappropriated the label 'libertarian' are the same chinless wonders of the Federation of Confederation Students in the 1980's - only now they've grown balder, fatter and more be-mortgaged. Back then they wanted to legalise heroin and hang Nelson Mandela as a terrorist - now they say the world capitalist crisis is the result of a feckless and greedy working class grown flabby on the welfare state. They thrive on the shock value of supposedly saying the unsay able - so for once I'm inclined to agree that ignoring them is the best way of attacking them.

But - their cer-wazy ideas do actually have a little more traction amongst a constituency within the middle classes with a smug consensus that 'something needs to be done about debt' and that cuts are necessary. Until of course their children's drama group is closed down or their parks and libraries shut and sold off. Most of all these people believe that society has become infected with the poison of debt and greed.

However, this supposed infection only applies to the materialistic white-van-man who has a mortgage for his home on a new-build estate, or maybe a loan for a car or a holiday. And of course those unemployed and unwashed who are actually dependent upon state benefits are even worse and have completely lost their moral compass. It's obviously a completely different matter if you have to borrow money to buy up and renovate a period home in a decaying urban area that is on the up. Or if you take out a loan to finance a sabbatical year whilst you give up work so that you can start that little bijou-business that you wanted all along before you ever got on the corporate ladder ... Cunts.

Running on empty at the moment

2011-05-11T13:50:00.001Z

Recently posts may have been a bit slow and uninspired - I’ve been fretting over posting something as personal as this. But given some of the inconsequential crap that has often been the basis for my posts, not writing something here about a subject so important seems somehow dishonest and disrespectful - apologies if it is uncomfortable to read:

My Easter bank holiday was – and I can’t think of any other way of putting this – a fucking nightmare. My mum, in her 80’s, housebound with chronic arthritis for the past 18months and cared for by my dad, rapidly developed some mental problems over the course of a couple of weeks. So I went over to see them - and made a decision that my dad simply couldn’t cope anymore. We called an ambulance and she was carried out screaming - possibly the last time she will ever leave her home. After a weekend spent in the observation ward attached to the A&E department – during which various doctors argued about whose responsibility she was – she was finally admitted to a specialist geriatric psych unit.

That was getting on for three weeks ago and she is still there for assessment – we haven’t been told yet if it is depression, delirium or dementia or what we can expect to happen. But I have experienced an insidious shift towards acceptance of a situation that a month ago was unthinkable. Occasionally this is interrupted by hope I can ‘get her back’ - but more often by guilt that I have come to terms with the fact that I won’t.

When I see her she is by turns subdued, angry, frightened, depressed, delusional and aggressive. Whatever she is – she is not is the person that I knew: The mother and wife. The woman with a passion for life and fun and an intense sense of justice, - strong-willed and independent. A career woman before her time, she left school at 16 to work as a lab technician in wartime and went on to train as a school teacher in the pioneering days of comprehensive schools and special needs (or remedial as it was then) education … and I’m already writing this as an obituary because it’s hard to believe that that person is still there.

As an unswerving atheist I often find that the writings of Marcus Aurelius are a source of humanist comfort and wisdom. Not so when I remember how he identified the ‘self’: ‘A little flesh, a little breath, and a Reason to rule all - that is myself’… and by implication when that has gone, what is left?

I just can't help hating the LibDems

2011-05-09T10:27:00.004Z

I have to confess to a not-entirely-irrational hatred of Liberal Democrats. Despite boycotting the AV referendum myself I can't help but take pleasure from the shit they undoubtedly now find themselves in. There's dangers in this of course - it's a distraction from the real bastards in the organ grinder / monkey coalition - and getting sucked into the nuances of the inner workings of that can come close to a kind of 'parliamnetary cretenism'.

Nonetheless I'm still rejoicing at the LibDems discomfort - maybe it's a local thing. My area was one of the very few in the country to show a majority for AV.

There's an invisible Berlin Wall that bisects my home borough of Haringey: To the west angst-ridden middle classes and a LibDem MP - and to the east a poverty-stricken ethnically-diverse working class seemingly stuck with a Labour MP presumably until the dwindling turnout reduces to nothing. In reality these chattering classes to the west have the same politics and NIMBY-ism of any old-fashioned Tory from the shires - but they read the Guardian instead of the Telegraph, and derive their over-valued incomes from the media and the arts rather than anything as vulgar as business. Maybe they were daringly left-wing in their student days - now they can salve their consciences that they haven't altogether sold out to the Right by being 'progressive and liberal'. Are they're genuine in this or is it just sanctimonious hypocrisy that stops them from being proper Tories? Who cares?

If they ever were 'progressive' they must be feeling pretty shitty these days in having facilitated this vicious austerity government coming to power. So now they're lobbying to save their precious arts funding or their particular local services - which apparently unlike everyone elses' are especially precious. The one lifeline of self-justification they could cling on to was that they were securing some democratic reform that might just be worth the price that the rest of us were having to pay. Now that's blown up in their face and we are facing the possible political death of the LibDems for another generation.

Good. Wankers. Next...

King William - bloody good bloke & reactionary bastard. A prequel.

2011-05-04T13:25:00.005Z

One of the more odious aspects of the royal wedding circus was the re-cycling of the Ladybird 'king and queens of England' school of history. So much so that the BBC's Robert Preston has got in to trouble for tweeting that the collective noun for the constitutional studio pundits - including Andrew Roberts and Simon Schama - was 'a lick-spittle'.

There haven't been a lot of previous royal Williams - the first one (the 'conqueror' or the 'bastard') was a thuggish warlord who ruthlessly introduced feudalism and imported a whole new ruling class. The second was a footnote who got himself killed in a hunting accident at an early age. And the third was the first 'constitutional' monarch whose reign marks the historical compromise between the capitalist and land-owning ruling classes that characterises the modern British state.

The fourth one is often eclipsed by the reign of his niece Queen Victoria whose reign came to personify the high water mark of British capitalism and imperialism. But actually William IV or 'Sailor Bill' provides some interesting possible parallels with the future King Wills.

William IV came to power when the royal family were pretty low in public esteem. His elder brother - first as Prince Regent and then as George IV - had made himself unpopular as a profligate glutton and serial-shagger at a time of growing radicalism and widespread hardship. By contrast William was a modest character. His coronation cost the state only a tenth of his brother's ten years earlier. As a younger son he had previously had a frustrated career of sorts in the Royal Navy and enjoyed nothing more than dressing up in his admiral's uniform and messing about in boats. In comparison to the extravagence of his extrovert brother he lived modestly with his long term mistress and even went on incognito 'walk-abouts' around the country. From a style point of view if nothing else, he was arguably the first 'modern' monarch who derived his legitimacy from his subjects (at least the middle class ones) identifying him with their own lifestyles.

But beneath this cloak of 'bloody-good-bloke-ishness' that beat the heart of a reactionary old bastard every bit the equal of his predecessors. As a younger son and royal duke he had sat in the house of lords and made a name for himself as a champion against the abolition of the slave trade. As king, after initially supporting the reforming Whigs, he did his best to obstruct their 1832 Reform Bill that would have enfrainchised a section of the middle class. When the reformers went to the polls to get a mandate, he ignored their victory and tried to impose a minority prime minister - the arch-reactionary Duke Of Wellington. Forced to back down from constitutional crisis and a potentially revolutionary situation, William eventually had to accept the reformers. But two years later he imposed a minority Tory government on the country despite there being a clear Whig majority in parliament.

But as Tony Benn would say, it's about politics not personalities.

It doesn't matter if the monarch captures the popular mood with a blokey style - and 'WillsandKate' seem determined to project a more modern and accessible image than the old-fogeys of the Charles and Camila generation - the institution still serves the same purpose in class society as it has always done. A panic lever for the ruling class to pull when things get a bit sticky in the hurly-burly world of real politics.

To AV or not AV ?

2011-04-27T11:06:00.000Z

I've just taken the AV quiz on the Guardian website and apparently the conclusion drawn from my answers is:

You scored 52 out of a possible 85: A tactical voter or frustrated voter perhaps? You appear to want a different electoral system, and maybe the alternative vote is the one for you.

Obviously they don't have a method for computing a more accurate analysis of my motives:

You scored 52 out of a possible 85: A socialist who thinks that elections are as much about raising political consciousness as they are about the actual result - regardless of which, the prospects of meaningful change are limited so long as the system remains a capitalist one. You want a different political system but regard dicking around with how we vote as nothing more than re-positioning deck chairs on the Titanic.

'Some day our prince will come' ?

2011-04-20T08:50:00.000Z

Like many other sane people I'm groaning under the weight of the media frenzy surrounding the marriage of William Windsor and Kate Middleton.

I find myself reaching for the calendar to remind myself that - yes it is really 2011 and still we are having to endure this monarchic nonsense. But on reflection there is a fairly recent new twist to this reincarnation of the people's princess:

Previous royal-worshipping has been underpinned by deference and difference. They might display an occasional condescending/endearing 'common touch' but ultimately the message is that the royals are simply better than the likes of you and me. This time around though the message is that Kate is actually just like us. You know the sort of thing - her great grand-father was a miner and she's the ultimate girl next door (assuming you live in a fucking big house in Berkshire).

Consequently her social trajectory is being portrayed as the ultimate evidence of an open society and the fulfilment of some sort of American dream played in tweed and pearls.

In different ways the issue of social mobility has popped up in a few recent posts. In particular how the most meaningful vehicle for social mobility - universally accessible free education to the highest level the individual is capable of attaining - is now being denied.

In that context the whole Middleton-phenomena is quite significant. It draws a line under the meritocratic mythology of the post-war boom - of working class boys done good through their own efforts and abilities - whether it was the grammar school technocrats of the Wilson era or the cheeky geezers of swinging London. In it's place we have a return to the Cinderella story of the poor working girl who becomes a princess.

Of course having aspirational parents who own a successful business, a £1 million property in the shires, and being hockey captain at £30,000 a year Marlborogh College does give a girl a bit of a head start...

Clerkenwell crafts - nostalgia and melancholy

2011-04-14T09:29:00.006Z

A really nice glimpse into a world of craftsmanship in Clerkenwell today over at one of my favourite blogs.

My first job 'in the print' was in Clerkenwell. When I describe it to people now I am conscious that it sounds like something from the 1500's - in fact it was only the late '80s. I was a production junior in pre press - having done a short course at the then London College of Printing - it was a backdoor route into the trade and the possession of that precious union card at a time when four year appenticeships were the norm and graduates virtually unheard of.

The first couple of years I spent in a small trade house was a fantastic education. My duties were general dogs-bodying around the studio and no small part of this was being a runner dropping off and collecting work around the small concentrated area of tenement-style buildings behind the Clerkenwell Road . These buildings were a warren of small businesses often with only half a dozen guys occupying a single room and engaged in some very specific operation in the spectrum of arcane crafts that made up the 'print'. We were a lithographic planning/plate-making house - and that was all we did - so a typical project would require me to scuttle back and forth from the scanning house around the corner, the cromalin company next door, the wet proofers in the basement and the typesetters at the end of the street.

Thinking about it now I have no idea of how costs were recorded or even who was working for who - the client / supplier relationship would oscillate between different projects - often several times a day. It wasn't really clear either who was the management - most of the businesses were owned by one or two working managers who themselves were hands-on or 'on the bench'. Everybody seemed to have worked with - or for - everyone else at some point. And everyone of course was in 'the union'. In fact the union acted as part HR department and part recruitment agency - the officials were usually of the same generation as the working owners and they colluded in placing their old mates in the best jobs. This was the age of the 'green list' and 'white card' when vacancies in other houses were only advertised by the union, from which you had to get a permission slip in order to go for an interview - to be presented to the Father Of Chapel before you spoke to a prospective employer.

I'm almost getting dewy-eyed as I type all this - but of course the reality was a far cry from some sort of workers-controlled halcyon age. The system was rife was nepotism and corruption and a self-perpetuated clique that kept out outsiders - particularly women and minorities - and a culture of bullying apprentices / juniors was almost institutionalised. But for centuries it created a layer of affluent skilled workers who took immense pride in what they did and didn't take too much shit from anyone. I feel privileged to have been a small part of that world for the last decade of its existence. By the mid '90s Thatcher, Murdoch and the Apple Mac had effectively killed it off. Some of us are still going having reinvented ourselves several times over in a digital age and shrouded ourselves in the bullshit of the 'creative industries'.

I suppose we are still a privileged little world - as working environments go it is probably better than most and a damn site better than the service industries and soulless white-collar jobs that nowadays are the norm. But I can't helping thinking that nearly all those things that first drew me to it are now a part of history. And whilst there might be a whole lot of renewal currently going on in Clerkenwell, I did notice the other week that the workshop where my first company was is now a gastro-bar packed with media-lovies...

War by other means

2011-04-12T10:25:00.004Z

The anniversary of the first man in space - Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin - is being celebrated not just by nostalgic Stalinists but also in some unlikely places - with praise for Gagarin's proletarian origins or with wonder at the achievements of a 'planned ecomony'(albeit in a deformed workers' state).

But I just can't bring myself to join in this romantic view of the desire to 'boldy go where no man has gone before'. Because you can't separate space exploration from the political context any more than you can detach adventures in the exploration of the 'dark continet' from the brutality of the race for empire. As imperialism goes it doesn't get much more distasteful that the cold-war-by-other-means that was represented by the space race - culminating in the ultimate absurdity of sticking the stars and stripes in the moons surface and then going home again.

The thought that this represented some sort of pinnacle of human achievement when at the same time as it was rushing to the stars, the Soviet Union was sending its own people to the gulags - or the United States was busy bombing an impoverished ex-colonial nation 'back into the stone age' - is all rather obscene.

As far as Yuri Gagarin himself goes - by all accounts was a lovely chap from humble origins - but at the risk of repeating previous posts I'm afraid social mobility is no more evidence of social progress in space than it is here on earth.

Young bullshit detectors

2011-04-11T10:40:00.002Z

Owing no doubt to the large number of evangelical churches in my neck of the woods I have come to accept the sight of people wandering around the streets clutching bibles like security blankets.

Stepping back for a moment this is actually quite bizarre. I mean they can't all be on their way to and from church and I can't imagine many real life scenarios in North London which require instant access to the surreal guidance of a holy book. To be fair though may be I underestimate the practicality of some of the seemingly crazy-shit advice such as this gem from Deuteronomy: 'If two men, a man and his countryman, are struggling together, and the wife of one comes near to deliver her husband from the hand of the one who is striking him, and puts out her hand and seizes his genitals, then you shall cut off her hand; you shall not show pity'.

It says something about my reaction to my own religious background that - in a house groaning under the weight of books - until last week we didn't have a copy of the bible.

Unlike myself, my kids have been brought up as freethinkers (and I use that old-fashioned term intentionally). So when my eldest asked if she could have a bible I didn't feel too concerned or threatened - she is of that age now when some of her friends are 'finding' religion and was just intrigued to check out what the attraction was. Ironically through her friends she was probably better informed about Islam than she was about Christianity. So last time I visited my parents I borrowed on her behalf one of their several bibles (approved Catholic versions of course).

A week later I'm very happy to report that her independent findings are that from a historical, logical and ethical point of view the bible is every bit as nonsensical as I concluded myself at a similar age. In fact whilst I may have attuned my expectations to my environment she is stunned and outraged that so much dangerous and reactionary rubbish is treated with so much respect.

The revelation that 'religion is nonsense' is hardly an original topic for a blog post - but these days as a parent I set great store in trying to view things through the eyes of a young mind untainted by forty years of 'experience'. Sometimes it opens your eyes and makes you question some long held assumptions - and just occasionally it reassures you of some fundamental truths that are worth be reminded of.

Is it ironic or just taking the piss?

2011-04-06T09:38:00.002Z

We already know from his outrageous lying and betrayal of angst-ridden liberal Middle-England fretting over tuition fees that Nick Clegg has no sense of shame. Now in taking on the role of the government's champion of social mobility he shows he has no sense of irony either.

You have to question just what PR genius came up with the idea of putting a toff - with a few Russian aristocrats in his family tree who got his first career break when old-man got him an internship at a merchant bank and who got into politics via the European Commission gravy train with the help of family neighbour Lord Carrington - in charge of social mobility. Even some hard-nosed mean spirited lower-middle class type from the provinces (remember a certain shopkeeper's daughter ?) would have had a bit more credibility.

I've said before that social mobility isn't all it's cracked up to be. And the obsession with getting 'ordinary' kids to Oxbridge as an index of this mobility (and take this from one such kid) is hardly representative of a fairer society. BUT a lack of this mobility , or declining mobility such as we have nowadays, is conversely a pretty good indicator of a society that is choking on privilege and inequality.

And putting the bloke who probably more than any other in the ConDems personifies the shitting on the aspirations of working class kids - with the removal of EMA and increased university fees - just looks like gloating.

In-fighting: actual & political

2011-04-01T09:53:00.002Z

Like most people I live my life in neat compartments. In my case they correspond to the sub-headings of this blog. Once in a while one of these will spill into another:

My chosen martial art of Wing Chun has a pretty bad rep these days. Thirty years ago it was the bad-ass of the martial arts world. Partly this is a question of fashion - Karate exploded in the west in the sixties then in the seventies Wing Chun was the enfant terrible. The original style of Bruce Lee that by-passed the stylised formality and choreography of traditional Karate and replaced it with the simple practicality of Hong Kong street fighting. Then along came along Brazilian Ju Jitsu and Mixed Martial Arts - the new kids on the block that made everything that went before look staid and unrealistic. Of course none of this is, or has ever been, true or does justice to any of these arts but always in fashion perception is everything.

And the Wing Chun world imploded. We lacked the discipline and structure of the Japanese and Korean styles, which were also reinforced by the need for governing bodies for their sporting aspects, and we turned in on ourselves. Rival schools and lineages engage in wars of words - and less frequently of fists – trying to prove they are purer/more authentic / more effective than each other. Some of this is just simple commercial rivalry – and some of it is born of a sense of inadequacy. Go online and have a look at any Wing Chun forum - it is a depressing minefield of infantile bitching and macho posturing.

So sadly the style that I love and have practiced now for over 20 years is in some respects now frankly something of an embarrassment in the wider martial arts community. But that doesn’t make we want to give up or change to another style - although it does make me less mindlessly loyal to my own tribe and a bit more reflective and respectful of other lineages, styles and traditions. Funnily enough talk to most mature practitioners of any martial art and you’ll often find the same. Maybe it’s because if you’re confident in what you doing, tolerance and open-mindedness isn’t a betrayal of your tradition.

And there’s an inescapable parallel to be drawn with the politics of the Left …

Nice cop. Nasty cop. Lying bastard cops.

2011-03-29T11:50:00.003Z

Of the 201 people arrested on Saturday's demo - 145 were from the distinctly fluffy UkUncut occupation at the discerning toff's favourite tax-dodging grocer Fortnum & Mason.

Have a look at the footage below and the exchanges between the softly-softly female chief inspector and the legal observor inside the store and contrast with the robo-cop from the TSG a short while later:

The nice inspector tells the protestors that they are going to be 'let go' and that as they are 'non-violent and sensible', that on leaving the store they will be taken to a safe area to avoid getting themselves caught up in some breaches of the peace so that they can then 'get away to the tube stations'.

What happens next is that the protestors are taken into a kettle manned by the likes of robo-cop, where they are held, a few of them are smacked around a bit and then they are all individualy arrested - and subsequently held at police stations for hours until charged on Sunday.

Empty rhetoric to the right. Stunts to the left.

2011-03-28T08:43:00.006Z

Like one of two others I marched - or to be more accurate wearily but happily trudged - on Saturday's demonstration. Being somewhere near the back I didn't get to Hyde Park until after 4pm - and then I had a wander around Oxford Street and the West End to have a look at some of the other actions there.

Earlier on when I had spotted my local MP, 'David - pull up the ladder behind me - Lammy' and a contingent from the local Labour Party I feared that the march was in danger of being hijacked by an unrepresentative minority. My worst fears were later confirmed when I saw on TV the speech from Ed Milliband that I'd missed in the park. (Incidentally remember a time when Labour leaders at least felt obliged to join in with marches ? None of that nonsense for our Ed). A number of ConDems have quite justifiably pointed out the hollow opportunism of this - despite all Ed's talk of the civil rights movement and the Suffragettes essentially Labour has the same position as the government on the cuts. They claim that for every £10 the government cuts Labour would cut £9 - and in local authorities such as my own this is already what is happening.

On the other hand on Saturday night we put up at our house a few of my daughters' friends from out of town that she had met on other student protests. They'd missed their coach back after having been run around the West End in the evening and were buzzing with tales of the actions there against shops and banks. Most of this was youthful bravado and I imagine they were cheerleaders rather than hardened activists of the black bloc - but it got me thinking. If I was their age - and most importantly if I hadn't grown up in the context of a Labour movement background in the 1980s with some political points of reference that weren't completely useless - I think I would feel the same way.

Re-reading that sentence it could me misconstrued as patronising - it really isn't - I think the instincts of this new generation are fantastic, I just wish they were better focused:

We need stunts - and let's be clear occupying a shop or trashing a bank are publicity stunts not 'violence'. We also even need a bit of rhetoric - although not the empty rhetoric of a bankrupt leadership. But most of all we need action - industrial action. Because at the end of the day only that will stop these attacks on our living conditions. We can argue the niceties of the slogans - an all out general strike or a public sector strike, 24 hours or indefinite, official or unofficial - but above all we need action.

The cliche of the slumbering giant of organised labour is over-used but if ever it was appropriate it was on Saturday. And when everything else settles down the most important thing to take from the demo is that it might just be a step in building the confidence for it to finally stir out of bed.

The sheer cheek of it.

2011-03-24T12:42:00.003Z

When I came home from work to find a personalised letter from Haringey Council Leader Claire Kober I assumed it was just another vacuous piece of feel-good PR from the council along the lines of the cringe'worthy 'Haringey People' magazine that is regularly sent to all residents of the borough.

However closer reading showed it to be from the councillor in her Labour Party capacity. Asking around a few other local people none of them had received it - so I can only think that my name must be on some database as a former Labour Party member. It's safe to say that they must be getting pretty bloody desperate - I think I left the Labour Party as recently as 1991 or 1992. I can't be sure because embarrassingly I didn't have the badge of honour of actually being expelled. I just didn't renew my subs, and even that was after a year or two of simply ignoring the local party as the irrelevant and moribund organisation it had become over the poll tax period.

Essentially the letter explained how horrible the ConDems were and how the cuts they were making would devastate Haringey - along with an explanation of how in spite of this the local Labour Party were heroically doing their best to mitigate the damage.

So as well as giving me her reassurance that they will save what they can (apart obviously from all the stuff they voted a couple of weeks ago to cut), I am invited to join Councillor Klober in her 'campaigning against these savage cuts'. And most extraordinarily to join her in marching for an alternative on 26th March...!!!

March for the alternative-or more of the usual ?

2011-03-21T10:45:00.002Z

There's a lot of talk about parallels between the TUC anti-cuts demo on the 26th March and the anti-war demo of 2003 - and the dangers of allowing the mood to similarly evaporate. Fair enough. I would also throw in memories of the TUC demo against pit closures in 1992 - a huge demo that really turned out to be nothing than more than a wake for something lost quite a while before. But despite being a jaded old veteran who has been marched up and down the hill many times over, I'm not embarrassed to say that I'm actually getting excited at the prospect of next week's demo.

Although this is not also without a degree of wariness:

The TUC - having clearly gone in to full panic mode upon realising that they have probably unleashed something they can't control - seem to be in danger of turning the demo in to one focused against themselves. Of course there's the usual phenomena of both them and the Labour Party trying to use the event as some sort of pressure release valve. You know the drill - have a day out in the capital, get roused up by Tony Benn then go home and hope that everyone is too distracted to notice that it's Labour councils delivering the cuts and the union leadership standing back to allow them. A new development this time though is TUC's plans for stewarding - from the use of private sub-contractors to an unprecedented integration with the police control and communications. This would seem to indicate a conscious tactic to use the stewards as the first line of policing. More surprisingly Liberty - an organisation I've always had respect for - have allowed themselves to be compromised by being co-opted into the operation as 'officially sanctioned' legal observers.

All of which will on the day re-direct the anger of a significant layer of the demonstrators towards the march's orgainisers. And on this other side of the fence some people are already seeing the 26th as the catalyst for some sort of quasi-insurrectionary moment. Amidst the perfectly justified plans for 'unofficial' actions and platforms there is also an awful lot of bollocks being spoken about the politics of the street and the creation of autonomous zones. Don't get me wrong here I'm all for the idea of camping overnight in Hyde Park to make a point about who legitimately controls public spaces - but talk of turning the park into Tahrir Square not only massively mistakes the current political situation it also dis-respects the position facing comrades in Egypt. And if not carefully handled can be a form of vanguardism that will provoke the full wrath of the state on a wider layer.

And in the interests of being even-handed in my wariness: My heart sinks when I see that my own organisation - no doubt like most others on the Left - has inevitably set targets for paper sales and recruitment. It all looks horribly like the crap I have to put up with at work and is equally ineffective motivationally.

Demonstrations are just that - demonstrations of a wider movement. They are not revolutions - although historically they can and have been the catalysts for revolutions but there's always a context to this. More often they are milestones in building something. And they are no less important for that.

Kronstadt anniversary

2011-03-17T13:40:00.002Z

By sheer coincidence, following my piece about a rapprochement between Anarchists and Marxists, I got asked to write something for On This Deity around the anniversary of Kronstadt.

I attempted to write it in the spirit of 'truth and reconcilliation' - if it pisses off the polemicists from either side of the debate then I'll know I've hit the right note.

Self determination. Yesterday. Today. Always.

2011-03-17T10:12:00.004Z

It's a hobby horse of mine so indulge me for a moment - this is going somewhere:

Maybe it's because I had a Roman Catholic background, maybe it's because I just have a thing for hairy 'barbarians' - but I tend to regard the Roman Empire as the root of many present day evils. Perhaps my on-going collection of iron-age tattoos is some kind of subliminal protest.

I've blogged before about how it was historians from later empires - and most notably the British one - who presented the Romans as the great civilising force of the Western world. This has increasingly been challenged by a generation of archaeologists and historians who paint a picture of indigenous peoples doing quite nicely thank you on their own before the Romans ever came along. In particular the 'Ancient Britons' have been shown to have a sophisticated and far-reaching culture based on exchange rather than conquest. The latest example of this is a road in Shropshire previously assumed to be an example of that Roman engineering that brought civilisation to the dark and savage corners of Europe - such as Britannia - but in fact has been discovered to pre-date the Roman invasion of Britain in 43CE.

But why should this matter to anybody other than people like myself with an eccentric interest in our distant past ?

Because again there is an ideological offensive around the civilising role of empires. We see this in the thinly disguised propaganda of Niall Fergusson's pompous new tv series. And most urgently we see it in the Blair-ite concept of liberal interventionism in the Middle East and the call for western nations to step in to 'help' democratise the region.

Whether in Shropshire two thousand years ago, or in Libya today, history is testament to mankind's infinite capacity to struggle to improve its environment - physical and social - and to do so best when left to it's own devices.

Sign Of The Times

2011-03-16T13:37:00.001Z

Shit you couldn't make up:

I'm sitting in a noodle bar in the West End having my lunch when I notice that the suit sitting next to me has one of those complimentary nylon briefcase things that they give out at conferences and exhibitions - usually with the sponsors' branding.

Only this one says "Public Sector Efficiency Expo" - and the strapline reads 'doing more with less'... Fuck.

Is the Olympics bollocks ?

2011-03-15T11:31:00.003Z

Well if you take the view of my other half that essentially all sport is bollocks - then obviously so is the Olympics. I feel the same way about ballet, opera and a lot of classical music but that gets me branded as a philistine.

More seriously though, if you take the view of community activists you would also conclude correctly that the claims to be giving a social and economic leg-up to a particularly depressed part of London are nothing more than a thinly disguised bit of big business' brand promotion and nationalistic willy-waiving.

Despite acknowledging the politics of all this, even so I have found myself applying for tickets today - for boxing, judo and wrestling. I can't even claim to be a follower of any of these sports - although they come closest to my own martial arts - so I suppose I am just going for the spectacle. My dad still talks about going to the 1948 Olympics and it simply feels too much like a once in a lifetime opportunity to let pass.

Although I do hope for suitably shambolic opening and closing ceremonies. Something quintessentially British - maybe a brass band, morris dancers and Bruce Forsyth as master of ceremonies. Recalling the grandiose Fascistic precision of the Beijing celebrations still sends a shiver down my spine.

Census snooping

2011-03-11T14:21:00.001Z

I had a little peak inside my census form yesterday. Fucking hell ! I do tend to suffer from a kind of form-o-phobia at the best of times but I don't remember it being as extensive and intrusive as this ten years ago.

I've heard it said on a few occasions now tin the anti-cuts movement that we should encourage everyone to fill it in to ensure that we get the public services we need. Hmm. I'm not so sure there's anything 'progressive' about the census it seems suspiciously like another excuse for the big brother state to stick its nose even further in to our lives.

The people who argue this used to be called Left reformists' - they have a vision of socialism by social engineering. Ironically often they're the same people who talk about the Second World War as being the time when the economy was best planned for the common good (unless you happened to live in Hamburg or Dresden of course). But guess what? - 1941 was the one ten-year interval that we didn't have a census. Just a thought.

A piece in The Guardian reports that we've been feeling suspicious about the census ever since it started up in 1801.

Like many others I've used the historic census returns published online to get a snap shot of my family history. The early censuses were 'taken' by officials actually calling on people's homes and asking them questions. Infuriatingly for any historian it's often a bit hit and miss. Names are spelt inconsistently. Place and date of birth varies over the years. In some cases the census taker's scrawl is illegible and throws out some wacky transcriptions - one military ancestor of mine is recorded as being a private in the 10th Huggers (I'm pretty sure it's meant to say 'hussars'). I've another relative who manages to get recorded in two places at once, and several who are fishermen and manage to disappear from the record altogether presumably because they were at sea in boats too small to have their own records.

However questionable the data recorded may have been, there weren't many other options at at time when there were few other statistical databases and the great unwashed masses (often illiterate) couldn't be trusted to fill in and return a form by themselves. But today we now live in an age when we are all barcoded, profiled and indexed many times over - by all sorts of bodies. So much so that it is difficult to believe that all the information ever needed doesn't already exist somewhere else already. In fact I'm surprised that the government doesn't just ask Tesco or Amazon if they can borrow their databases ... or even just cross reference the information they must surely already have.

Maybe I'm just paranoid.

Friend or foe ?

2011-03-09T12:24:00.002Z

Having just got nicked for an illegally sized number plate on my ride to work this morning in an affable but totally ludicrous police mass spot-check, I have to say this through gritted teeth - but there's some interesting stuff over at the Third Estate about the Left's attitude to the cuts now facing UK police forces.

Inevitably references are being made to the fantastic scenes from Wisconsin where police joined municipal workers occupying the state capitol building in protest at local union-busting policies aimed at state employees:

But I can't help wondering if in a similar scenario any force in this country would behave in the same way. This may be another instance where things here are not in fact so much more progressive and enlightened than they are in supposedly reactionary US. Listen to the speech made by the police office at the Wisconsin occupation. He cites 'protect and serve' as his ethos and duty as a public servant.

I just don't think coppers here have the same consciousness - after all they take an oath of allegiance and talk about keeping the 'queen's peace' - whatever the fuck that means these days. That's not just a matter of semantics - it seems ingrained that they apart and distinct from the communities they police.

Of course there's no denying the humour in watching the Police Federation squirm to defend themselves and even try to behave like the very trade unionists and activists they have happily beaten the crap out of for years now. But that's a road to nowhere. At some point we will need to have at least elements of the police come over to our side. Recent events in Egypt showed that the defection of some of the state forces was a tipping point - as it has been in pretty much every revolution. That won't be achieved by our attitudes alone - it will essentially be by the pressure of events - but having a hostile attitude is a sure-fire way of ensuring that it won't happen at all. So I'll grit my teeth and defend the 'workers in uniform'.

HD - 'return to core brand values' ?

2011-03-08T11:42:00.002Z

It's just been announced that Harley Davidson has struck a deal with the unions - the International Association of Machinists and the United Steelworkers - that will keep open their plant in Kansas City Missouri.

At a price - under a new seven year agreement the workforce will be cut from 685 full time jobs to 540 with a further 145 'flexible 'positions - albeit for unionised labour.

It looks as if the Moco has pulled the same kind of blackmail on the unions there that it did to the workforce after the 2007 strike at the much larger plant in York Pennsylvania - sign up on the company's terms of they will pull out of the city altogether. The same stunt was also pulled last Autumn at the historic headquarters plant in Milwaukee Wisconsin.

The financial problems that precipitated the most recent shenanigans - the first losses in a quarter for 16years - resulted largely from problems in the credit and financial services market. And some dumb decisions like the bizarre acquisition of the super luxury performance MV Augusta brand. And maybe just a few too many branded cuff-links and cheque-book covers.

None of this is really news. The HD brand-personality of an iconic union-made product for the American working man has been wearing thin for years with the emphasis on a recreational lifestyle brand with all the branded products that go with this.

But the fact that this has just happened at the plant where they make the Sportster and Dyna models is particularly telling - and not just because I own a pair of Sportsters.

I would have to say that of all the HD ranges, these two models are the truest to that now largely bullshit brand-personality that has been contrived by the MoCo over the years. They are basic, no-frills motorcycles simple and accessible to work on and customisable for the ordinary enthusiast. They are also probably the least glamorous and most neglected models in the HD range - despite the fact that the rest of the range - with the exception of the big tourers - aren't much more that factory copies of the kind of customised machines that people have been knocking out of their garages at home for years. Only with cringe-worthy silly names like FatBoy, Crossbones, Rocker, Heritage and Streetbob for aspirational types who want a bad-ass accessory of the shelf.

So rather than continuing to push out a plethora of these models with just tiny differences in the paint work or different combinations of parts why not just re-emphasise the 'pure and raw' appeal of the Sportster and Dyna models backed up with a range of custom-goodies that can keep the owner-enthusiast hooked for a lifetime of ownership ? Perhaps a return to core brand values for HD might not just have an emotional appeal - it might even make good business sense too.

Commonsense and good humour

2011-03-07T09:43:00.000Z

Just resurfacing now after a few days feeling very sorry for myself with a dose of man-flu:

I went to the discussion day / conference of my local anti-cuts campaign at the weekend. After the protest and occupation of the council chamber a week or so before the turnout was a bit disappointing - but I actually went away inspired.

After the more spectacular mass events, the composition of the meeting has returned to the usual(familiar suspects) Anarchists, SWP, a handful of us SPers, Greens, community activists - and who knows maybe even the occasional Labour Party member although if so they were keeping it quiet. But despite all the fuss about competing anti-cuts bodies, and despite the differences over attitudes to Labour Councils - there was unanimous support for the opposition to all cuts and a challenge of 'fight or resign' to Labour.

Maybe the local SWP comrades are not quite 'on message' with the national line, or maybe its a practical realisation that our borough is a one-horse Labour sinecure and that the cuts here are some of the worst in the country with a disproportionate impact on this already royally-fucked up and fucked-over area. Either way I'm not crowing - I'm just genuinely pleased that we can agree.

Which was pretty much the tone of the whole day.

And that's my point - sometimes inspiration comes from the spectacular - maybe revolutions in North Africa and the Middle East - or maybe protest on your doorstep where new people are galvanised for the first time. But it also sometimes comes from the mundane. Such was the weekend's meeting - a prevalence of commonsense and genuine good humour. Too often scare commodities on the Left and sadly too often missing from our various party programmes.

The (original) February Revolution

2011-02-28T08:57:00.002Z

I wrote this piece a few weeks ago as a guest spot for On This Deity.

I never thought that the mechanics of how revolutions unfold would have been so topical ...

Bury the historical hatchet ?

2011-02-24T09:48:00.003Z

Looks like Kronstadt is being re-fought (online of course) at Socialist Unity and Ian Bone's site.

Bloody hell it's depressing. No - the anarchists are not the enemies of the labour movement. In terms of actual damage done I'd have to say that New Labour is far better cast in that role - but I'm not even going to go there - we know who the real enemies are - the ConDems and the Far Right. Everything else is infantile sectarian nonsense.

Are some anarchists - especially the 'life-stylists' - irritating and disruptive pricks ? You bet - but I don't have any more time either for the android party-hacks often found in the 'Trot' ranks either. So let's just accept that all traditions have their own crosses of embarrassment to carry.

When it comes down to the politics - I have to say that I find much more in common with the anarchists than I do with supposed 'left' Labour councillors who whinge that they have to make cuts - or with some of their apologists. Of course there are differences - the whole SP/NSSN thing was evidence of that - and there are still very clear distances between us on the question of attitudes to trade union structures and the tactics of elections.

But here's a heretical thought: The Left in general often has an unhealthy preoccupation with its own past worthy of the most bigoted Ulsterman. We Trots are accused of being obsessed with dead Russians but I'd have to say that anarchists are often every bit as pre-occupied with Makhno and Durrati. Now by training I'm a historian and see the need to understand the past more than most - but isn't it time to move on ? Actually it's now 145 years since the First International split - 90 years since Kronstadt - 70 years since Trotsky was murdered - and come to that it's now over 20 years since the Soviet Union fell apart.

So how about a bit of 'truth and reconcilliaton' ? We are living in a post-just-about-everything world these days and yet the political labels we wear are often references to the defining moments of previous generations. I have to say that if we left some of the adopted baggage of our various traditions at the door we much actually find that the landscape on the Left was in fact quite different from the one that many of us assume. And dare I say it - we might even find that unity - without trying to hide our differences - is strength.

Now I'll duck for cover - incoming accusations of naivity and revisionism from both sides ...

The embarrassment and dangers of strange bedfellows

2011-02-22T17:04:00.004Z

Those of us of a certain age will remember the WRP of the 1980's with a mixture of horror and humour:

In many respects it was a nightmarish parody of a wannabe revolutionary organisation - complete with their 'Marxist College of Education' where its full-timers could learn the use of small arms and short-wave radios - and the monstrous leader Gerry Healy with his coterie of celeb hangers-on and harem of young female members subjected to a revolutionary 'droit de signeur' - in fact a leadership cult much like the corrupt gurus of a sixties.

But most of all it brings back memories of the party's slavish admiration of Gaddafi's regime and his 'green book' pseudo-theory of third way Arab radical nationalism.

To quote a WRP congress resolution of 1980: "the Workers Revolutionary Party salutes the courageous and tireless struggle of Colonel Gaddafi whose Green Book has guided the struggle to introduce workers' control of factories, government offices and the diplomatic service, and in exposing the reactionary maneuvers of Sadat, Beigin and Carter... We stand ready to mobilize the British workers in defense of the Libyan Jamahiriya and explain the teachings of the Green Book as part of the anti-imperialist struggle."

Not surprising at the time the WRP's extraordinary feat of producing a daily colour newspaper - The Newsline - was attributed to funding by Gaddafi. More sinisterly there were also rumours of Newsline photographers sending Libyan security services pictures of dissidents on demonstrations in London.

Partly for this reason, and partly because of the details about the party regime revealed at the time of their very acrimonious and very public split in 1985 the WRP became something of a laughing stock on the Left.

But there were all too real dangers too: Healy was a monster and it was simply good luck that he was only in the position of leading a small political sect - he would have been equally qualified to head up some horrible regime in a deformed workers' state.

But most importantly the story of the WRP show the propensity of some so-called Marxists to grasp onto the most unlikely and dangerous sources of inspiration. Theirs' wasn't the first instance of this - and it won't be the last - Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Saddam have all fulfilled this role - as has guerillaism, 'third-worldism', various nationalisms and most recently radical' Islam.. all in the name of anti-imperialism.

Ultimately I can only think that this phenomenon is born of desperation in dark times of political downturn and defeat - and a lack of confidence that the working class has the ability to re-assert itself politically. But whatever comes out of the current events in Libya is testament to that ability.

The fetishisation of commodities

2011-02-18T09:43:00.001Z

Marx was very struck by his visit to the Great Exhibition of 1851 - the show meant to be a celebration of the progressive and civilising effects of Victorian capitalism on the world. But his views on capitalism sometimes surprise first time readers - the humanist liberal in him morns the degradation of the human spirit resulting from the reduction of all relations to the cash nexus and the alienation of people from their own labour. But the historian in him doesn't flinch from acknowledging, in relative terms, the progressive role of capitalism in developing society.

Of course in his day capitalism was quite young and was still playing the role of dragging society out of the last vestiges of the middle ages. But nowadays capitalism is sickly and creaking. And if Marx visited an industry trade show at the Birmingham NEC - as I did this week - I don't think there would be anything ambivalent about his reaction - there certainly wasn't about mine:

Forget about faith in a bold progressive future and civilising forces - what I saw amongst the stands, the seminars and most of all the 'netwoking areas' was a display of sad little men and their tedious little worlds. I say sad - but actually false joviality is more accurate, and I say little - but bloated and red-faced would be more appropriate; they are however invariably men. And so much waste - if not of talent then certainly of energy - in getting over-excited about the progress in whatever esoteric gadgetry they are responsible for . But most of all in the snatches of overheard conversations - endless conspiring and gossiping about the labyrinthine internal politics and jealousies of their companies - like a strange cross of plotting Renaissance courtiers and bitching adolescent schoolgirls.

And somehow I seem to have found myself stranded in this world ...

'Break the law not the poor' ?

2011-02-15T12:40:00.002Z

I've commented before on my amazement at the sometimes bizarre common ground between the SWP and so-called Labour Lefts - and the resulting easy ride that the SWP gets as a result: Look at the column inches (if there is such a thing in cyberspace) devoted to feigned outrage at the NSSN's launch of an anti-cuts campaign at the initiative of the Socialist Party. I'm not re-opening that debate -but just compare it to the relative non-controversy of the recent anti-cuts meeting of the ~~SWP~~ (sorry) ~~Right To Work Camapign~~ (sorry) People's Convention.

The main point of contention there seems to have been the attitude we should take to Labour councils who make cuts. It appears that the SWP are saying that we must work with Labour councillors who argue that some cuts may be necessary - and that they are better made by people who will try to minimise the damage than by Tories.

This is no more than a re-hash of the 'dented shield' argument put up by some 'Left' councils in the 80's. It was a crock of shit then and it's a cock of shit now - a moral fig-leaf for capitulation - just as it was when Liverpool and Lambeth councils were left to fight on their own.

In fact history is repeating itself as farce - first time round these Labour Lefts at least started off by talking up a fight - but this time their equivalents have jumped right into defeatism from the off. Ironically changes in the law since the 1980's actually mean that councillors who pass deficit /needs budgets actually do not risk the same personal penalties that the Poplar councillors did in the 30's of the Liverpool '47 did in the 80's.

So why this bizarre defence of the indefensible by the SWP ?

I'm not stupid or sectarian enough to believe that it's because they aren't actually serious about fighting the cuts. I can only think there are fundamental political political reasons behind it: They seem to have the impression that the Labour Party is being /will be radicalised again after the post-election increase in membership. Or maybe they really think that the resources of the Left are so weak - or so finite - that they must make desperate bed-fellows.

In typically python-esque Left fashion accusations of the "Third Period-ism' have been thrown at the SP and of "Popular Frontism' at the SWP. I'm not going to go there - personal experience of working together locally in TUSC reminded me that there is more that unites us than divides us. So I won't dig up any unhelpful and over-dramatic obscure historical analogies. But how about a simple common sense formula ? - That the anti-cuts movement should be working with any group or party (that isn't fascist or racist) so long as it refuses to implement austerity cuts.

One man and his shed .

2011-02-14T14:30:00.001Z

News from the domestic front:

After a particularly pointless tantrum I had to have my garage door replaced. Not quite sure how I managed it but in throwing it open with an angry flourish I managed to fuck up the 'up and over' doorsbeyond redemption so I've replaced it with the old-fashioned kind - which is much more in keeping with my workshop which was built long before 'garages' were considered a household necessity.

Apart from the outlay for the new doors I also had the floor levelled - and this spurred me to have a thorough clear out. It took me most of the day on Saturday. And then - because I now have a proper workshop that is comfortable, clean and tidy - I spent a far bit of Sunday buggering about with my bike.

In most aspects of my life I don't consider myself a hoarder by nature in fact - unless it comes to books and CDs - I actually get a perverse kick out of throwing things out. Or so I thought. But apart from the inevitable generations of kid's discarded toys - the garage seemed to have collected a ridiculous number of bike parts.

I made a point of throwing away all the broken bits of bikes that I don't own any more - including some I haven't owned for over ten years. Even so I seem to have an alarming quantity of parts for my current Sportsters - including five exhausts, four seats, three sets of bars, three carbs and air cleaners, and two trays of miscellaneous spares.

I blame the addictive power of ebay...

The future is plural

2011-02-09T09:54:00.001Z

Contrary to Cameron's Munich (slightly unfortunate choice of venue) speech - I'd have to suggest that multiculturalism is actually easier in practice than it looks on paper.

Sometimes it's difficult to take on board that the Tory-boy lives in the same city as I do: Any time spent in an inner city would reveal that multiculturalism is simply the default setting for ordinary people going about the daily business of making lives for themselves and their families. Sometimes there are tensions, often there are misunderstandings, but on street level it works because it has to.

Just on my own street Polish shops sit cheek by jowl with Kurdish shops. My daughters' anglo-french-jewish-hungarian heritage is probably the least exotic and most ethnically homogeneous of their circle of friends. Nobody I know even notices or cares.

So what is the alternative Cameron proposes - monoculturalism ?

He hankers after a state-defined set of national values taught in schools and measured by a citizenship test. Examples of country's with such imposed artificial constructs being the USA and France - both far less integrated societies in practice than the UK and with ethnically defined ghettos in their cities the like of which simply don't exist over here.

Or maybe he just wants to sentimentalise some non-diverse national heartland - like the parts of this country that are still demographically homogenous. I grew up in one of these - the London suburbs of thirty years ago. 'British' values - specifically the values of the affluent working class and the lower middle class - ruled the roost without challenge - mowed lawns, washed cars, pubs and Sunday roasts. It was fucking tedious and depressing...fortunately it is dying a natural death.