The faces of Cool Britannia ?

Last week I went to the Judo - I sport I have a limited knowledge of, and last night to the Graeco-Roman Wrestling - a sport I have no previous knowledge of at all. I had a great time at both. Doubtless my enjoyment would have been greater if  I'd had understood more of what I was watching - Graeco-Roman manages to be both deceptively simple and also highly technical - but after a few minutes I was completely immersed into it.  

This wasn't because I was a partisan spectator either -  Team GB were not represented at all - and with the  USA favouring  Freestyle Wrestling, Graeco-Roman seems to be dominated by Eastern Europe and Central Asia. So in the same vein as my previous post - the fact that I can came away from the Graeco-Roman so engaged speaks volumes about the 'pure' and universal ability of sport to inspire. 

There's a lot in the papers today about the feel-good factor of a weekend where Great Britain enjoyed record success in the 'mainstream' area of track and field. 

Sober reflection on this would say there is an undeniable element of jingoist distraction from the gloom of austerity in all this. I am fairly immune to this - and personally my immediate reaction to the announcement on the PA that the ever-miserable Andy Murray had won gold in the tennis was to just  groan inwardly.

But as with the 'Cool Britannia' opening ceremony, my cynicism is tempered.

There is certainly a whiff of 'one nation' bullshit about all this attempt to be all-inclusive. I'm sure there was an element of it in Lord Coe's decision to feature Jessica Ennis as the 'face of the games'. But it is worth remembering that in this country there remains a significant minority of nasty Little England shits, who would deny us the idea of a multicultural society, and wish that our society had been frozen in the Chariots of Fire era of sporting toffs we could all look up to.

One of them is Rick Dewsbury of the Daily Mail talking about the opening ceremony:'it is likely to be a challenge for the organisers to find an educated white mother and black father living together with a happy family in such a set up...'

The very visible success of a young state school educated, mixed-race woman from a working class background must stick in his throat and that of many others like him. And for that reason alone - despite the disgrace that 50% of British medals went to athletes educated at independent schools that cater for a mere 7% of the population - it worth (briefly) joining in the celebrations.

I promise my next post will be about something other  than the Olympics ...

Sport as culture

Yesterday I went to the first of the two Olympic events that I got tickets for (over a year ago back in the days when I still had money). And a great day I had too - from the sport itself to a totally painless experience of getting to the venue and passing through the much discussed security.

Recently I have spoken about going to the Olympics to a few of my 'right-on' friends who seem to think that doing so was some sort of petit-bourgeois deviationism. 

What sanctimonious bollocks. There is a peculiar trend in certain parts of the Left that regards sport as at best a kind of modern day opiate of the people, and at worst  an inherently reactionary celebration of competition. And of course they  throw in the obvious (and undeniable) points about the corporate manipulation of sport as profit.

It's a philistine attitude that they wouldn't dare make about any other aspect of art and culture. Because that's exactly how sport should be considered -  as a physical expression of human culture. As it was at the original Olympics - and in modern times too until 1952 - when medals were given for sculpture and so on just as they were for athletics.

Nobody living in London who has their head screwed on needs to be lectured on the highly dubious 'legacy' that the Olympics will leave behind in the capital's most impoverished boroughs. And we can hardly help but notice the branding onslaught that big business have taken the opportunity of the games to unleash.

But the answer to all this can be found in simply watching the reaction of South African gold-medalist Chad  Le Clos's father being interviewed. His reaction shows why sport can express everything that is great about being human.

As Ray says - let's now just sit back and enjoy the games - we can argue about them later.

De-skilling in schools

I've spent the past twenty five years in an industry where de-skilling was a constant issue. Since PC's started to be found in every home the world and his wife have become typographers. Our trade was flooded with hipster designers who knew their way around a Mac but hadn't a clue about kerning, leading and ligatures. Now -  just I am about to invest time and money into joining the teaching 'profession' the same thing is happening there.  

Whilst Olympic euphoria is grabbing the nation, Education Secretary Grove has  snuck in an announcement that Qualified Teacher Status will no longer be required by teachers in academies. This matters because he also has a declared vision that the majority of schools will be academies - and in some parts of London they already are.

Perhaps Grove is trying to emulate 'independent' - or to give them their proper name    - fee-paying schools where teachers have never had to be formally qualified. Perhaps he really thinks that this in itself is the reason for their better academic results - with the implication that this is because of better teaching. Translated to the state sector, with all the very different real world challenges it faces, de-regulation of teaching represents one thing only - teaching on the cheap and de-skilling. 

Since being around schools one of the big differences I have seen from my own schooldays is the proliferation of people in the classrooms who aren't actually teachers. I have seen some very experienced, effective and highly motivated cover supervisors and Higher Level Teaching Assistants but they were never intended to replace teachers - although the pressure of work and scarcity of resources means that they are often called upon to do the work of teachers. This too is a form of creeping de-skilling.

There is a huge contradiction at the heart of current Tory education policy -  an unresolved clash between free market de-regulation and traditional paternalism. On the one hand more stringent 'skills tests' for student-teachers, and on the other no qualifications needed at all. Obsession with a prescriptive national curriculum - and a crusade to build up 'independent' academies, and free schools who don't have to follow it. Or harking back to traditional 'proper' subjects, whilst encouraging competitive league tables that drive academies to put students through questionable 'equivalent' vocational courses in order to hold their place in the rankings.

None of this deters me from wanting to be a teacher - or taking the year required to get my PGCE (followed by another NQT induction year).  It may not be necessary for much longer - but it remains to my way of thinking, the right way to do it. I am dubious about the coded class-distinction that differentiates 'trade' from 'profession' - but  in de-skilling I see the same trend that seems to permeate every aspect of late capitalism. A trend of 'good enough' and 'to a price' that de-values peoples' skills and belittles their pride in the work they do. To the detriment of everyone.

London Olympics open at last

Like the finale of Hey Jude - or Paul McCartney's career in general - the Olympic opening ceremony went on far too long.

But it wasn't nearly as bad as it could have been: Tory-twat Aidan Burley has got himself into trouble for branding Danny Boyle's pageant 'leftie-multicultural rubbish' and Her Maj appears to have run the gamut of emotions from bored shitless to mildly disapproving. So it can't have been all bad.

We did have a new version of the Whig interpretation of British history: Merrie England with (much anticipated) cows, village cricket and may-poles was rudely replaced with a spectacular Industrial Revolution. This was overseen by a very smug looking Kenneth Branagh as the supreme creator - Isambard Kingdom Brunel. You were left with the impression that this was a noisy and messy process but unquestionably a Good Thing because Britain became the workshop of the world. Or something.

It  then all became a bit less portentous and pompous. Danny Boyle managed to sneak in the NHS as one of Britain's greatest achievements - which doubtless must have caused a few Tories to squirm awkwardly  in their seats. But the moment passed as the pageant moved on again to remind us that although we might not have any industry or empire anymore, Britain is still really the top nation because we are the funniest (cue Mr Bean), the hippest (cue Dizzy Rascal and the Arctic Monkeys) and the nicest to kids (cue JK Rowling). So suck on that Mit Romney.

So there you go. Although I was struggling to stay awake by the end - the opening ceremony kind of surpassed my expectations in that it was NOT entirely awful. In fact it was a damn sight better than previous opening ceremonies with their overbearing  and fascistic undertones. But I couldn't help wondering if the doctors and nurses who had been roped into performing in the celebration of the NHS wouldn't have preferred instead to have just received a bit more funding. And of course we should have had some Morris dancing ...

Remploy strike

For the past couple of Thursdays I have been dropping in on my nearby Remploy picket line. Like many others it is faced with imminent closure - and my local factory is a small one that has been deemed 'uneconomic' for quite a while. The workers there are solid in their support for the strike - nearly all of them have been on the pickets - but in truth they don't seem to be holding  out for much more than a decent redundancy. Although they are still pinning some hopes on the union fighting it out  in the courts. 

I've seen quite a few picket lines over the years - but I don't think I've ever seen one where there was a stronger  sense of 'solidarity' between the workers. And I don't mean solidarity in the hack-sense of jargon-ese but of genuine mutual care and awareness for each other. It may be says something about the undeniably special aspect of Remploy workplaces.

It's a special something that the Tories who are effectively now withdrawing funding for  Remploy have no respect for.  Whilst also  adding insult to injury with a hypocritical spin that this is  not about austerity but about better 'integration' of disabled workers  who will now be supported by charities and quangos to gain work in 'mainstream' workplaces. 

Talking to the people on the picket yesterday they reckon that only  a third of current Remploy employees will be able to hold down work in these 'mainstream' workplaces. The rest simply won't be able to get the levels of support they require -  and so will join the ranks of those who are having to navigate their way around the increasingly punitive benefits system for disabled people who can't work. Most of all though - they said that they will all lose the sense of identity and mutual support that working together at Remploy has given them.

In giving these workers our support - it is not at all a question of patronisation or condescension - the rest of us could quite simply  learn a thing or two from them in terms of solidarity and class pride.

Armed bodies of men in our streets

In the summer of 1911 - almost a hundred years ago to the day - Britain was on the brink of civil unrest and a potential revolution. A dispute in the London docks had spread to the other major ports, railwaymen had gone on strike as well, and engineers had followed them. 20,000 troops from the Woolwich and Aldershot garrisons were put on standby to impose order in the capital when the Port of London Authority backed down and made concessions to the dockers' demands. Strikes continued in the other ports and in Liverpool two warships were ordered up the Mersey and troops deployed in the streets. Shots were even fired over the heads of protesters. It was not the finest hour for Winston Churchill the gung-ho Home Secretary who earlier in the same year had overseen the sending of troops into the Rhonda to impose order against striking miners.

Right now HMS Ocean is moored up near Tower Bridge, we have air to surface missile sites in the East End,  and there are large numbers of troops in camo uniforms all over the place. It is probably the most visible military deployment in London since the Second World War. But interestingly the general public response has been sympathy for the squaddies who have been obliged to give up leave after returning from Afghanistan in  order to pick up the pieces for the bungling of Olympic security by the ConDems and big-business private security contractor G4S. It speaks volumes though that  I am far more troubled by the sight of squads of tooled-up wannabe robo-cops from the Metroplitan Police. 

PC Simon Harwood, the un-convicted killer of Ian Tomlinson personifies the psychological type drawn to their ranks. An aspiring action man with a hair-trigger temper who hasn't got the bottle to join the real army and fight anyone who shoots back - so he opted for the safer option of combating unarmed civilians at home. If that seems like an exaggeration I challenge anyone (if they dare) to go and inspect any serial of TSG cops. The likes of PC Harwood or Sgt Delroy Smellie seem to fit a certain profile that is a prerequisite for the Met's goon squad.

Most ordinary people will treat the squaddies - disproportionately from the most economically shat-on parts of the UK - with good natured class solidarity, but they have every reason to be wary of the pit-bulls of the  Met currently  straining at the leash. I am certainly going to be careful about treading on the cracks of the pavement in the next few weeks ...

Hypocrisy of John Lewis

I have to confess to having had a soft spot for John Lewis/Waitrose. I know that an Orcado account has become almost a compulsory requirement for the card carrying liberal chattering classes of North London, but even so I can't help but feel that they are ethically preferable to the bare-faced cuntishness of a company like Tesco. And from a strictly consumers' point of view it seems that John Lewis' benevolent paternalism towards their own staff pays off in having a helpful workforce who generally seem to give a shit about what they do.

The story of how they become a profit-sharing partnership is - on human terms at least - not easy to ignore. The heir to the family business comes back from World War One having  experienced some sort of egalitarian epiphany as an officer serving alongside the working classes in the trenches .  So he resolves to share the profits and create a benevolent paternalistic business with generous staff benefits. It's certainly wasn't workers control but only the most doctrinaire  would not see this as anything other than massively preferable to the McJobs culture that dominates most retailers.

But the story that contract-cleaners at John Lewis are now on strike to secure a living wage blows this whole ethical mythology to pieces. It may not be a question of conscious hypocrisy on the part of the management (although of course it may be) but it is an insight into the dark vacuum at the heart of big business.  Quite simply they want to pay cheap prices -  for everything - and don't ask of their suppliers how these cheap prices are possible. Through some moral contortionism, the left hand of corporate ethics chooses not to know what the right hand of corporate procurement does. 

The same  contortionism means that these big business can have policy statements galore about minimum wages or  how they won't use child labour or how they recognise the right to join trade unions - but just so long as their sub-contractors sign up to these they won't ask them too many questions. In fact the John Lewis story is just a little too close to home: Over about five years I saw the small business I worked for rung dry by retailers who looked for savings year-on-year without any thought as to how these savings were possible. Then the same retailer cried crocodile tears when we were finally unable to give away any more because we weren't prepared to off-shore our own jobs. And if I sound bitter and twisted about it - it's because I am.

Union exit strategy

I feel as if I have crossed the Rubicon - I have finally cancelled my membership of UNITE (London Graphic branch).  It's no more than an acknowledgement of what I've known for some time - I'm not going to be working in the industry any more and in a few weeks I'll be in the NUT. 

Even so after twenty-five years it does feel like a bit of a milestone and it didn't feel right after so long to just cancel my direct debit as if I was cancelling a gym membership. So I phoned them up to let them know what I was doing and why.

As it turns out cancelling a gym membership is more of an emotional process. They at least ask you why are you cancelling your membership - Are you joining another gym? Were you unhappy with the services they provided ? My union on the other hand couldn't give a toss. In fact they seemed a little put out that I was disturbing them to let them know something they would have found out when my subs just didn't come through next month.

It was much the same when I phoned them back in October to let them know that I had been made redundant. They downgraded my subs to the unemployed rate but there was no concern expressed or follow-up. Nobody even asked if I was satisfied that I'd received my rights and I didn't get a standard hand-out to tell me what these rights were.

I knew that since the heady days of the 1980's most unions  have  became little more than  friendly societies providing discounted car insurance and legal support. But I didn't realise  that  even by the limited criteria of other service providing businesses - their level of 'customer care' is found wanting. In fact it seems that  KwikFit care more about me than the union I've paid my dues to for all my working life. 

At least every time I buy a  new tyre from them I get a text and a phone call asking  how my 'customer experience' was. I know they don't really care but at least they have the decency to pretend.

Economic migrants

Just listening to some non-story on Radio 4 this morning about the worry of Hollande's policies sparking a flight of capital from France. 

One 'entrepreneur' interviewed is off to Signapore to escape regulation and capital gains tax. It seems that his self-proclaimed public-spirited dedication to assisting start-up business is conditional upon tax breaks. And Brits from Muswell Hill drawn to the Dordogne by the lure of  sun,wine, cheeses and cheap period properties to restore are now  running scared of punitive taxes on second homes. Apparently these are the dangers of a government trying to make the better-off in some  way shoulder  their share of the pain of recession in a modest attempt to alleviate the worst of austerity. Such governments should be aware of the risks of the middle classes sulkily upping sticks and moving away.

Good. Fuck them all. When it comes to economic migration, the levels of  class hypocrisy and double standards is simply staggering: 

Imagine the outrage of a migrant worker blatantly saying that he was fed up with his own country where there were few prospects of employment and no welfare or health system -  so he was heading off somewhere that better suited the needs of him and his family - someone like Britain for example. The Daily Mail would bust a bollock in outrage. 

Reasons to be cheerful ?

Since church-going has declined, new opiates-for -the-masses  have replaced religon. Celebrity obssession is one. But the old stand-by of patriotism to distract us from hard times is never far away - and this year more than ever.

The prospect of a triple-whammy of Jubilee, London Olympics - and Andy Murray winning Wimbledon just makes want to dive under the covers and not come out until September.

Setting aside 'our Andy's' apparent total  lack of personality - or to more precise  his utterly  boring, dour and sulky personality -  his  only apparent saving grace is that he is British. I'm afraid it all adds up with a horrible predictability -  Wimbledon with its  lawns, strawberries and cream, blazers and panamas - and much-discussed rain is about as British as it gets. 

So I wince at the flag-waving prospect of a Murray victory this year echoing Virginia Wade's victory in the silver jubilee year of 1977. Just wake me up when it's all over.

Bomber Command Memorial

I usually feel ambiguous around Rembrance day - and  I was even more troubled at the prospect of the unveiling of a memorial for Bomber Command on Friday. And today, realisng that it is Armed Forces day - an unabashed rehabilitated day of flag-waving and militarism - I am doubly so.

The story of the 'bomber boys' of the Second World War has been undeniably neglected. The popular image of the wartime RAF is the romance of the fighter pilots - a small band of  cavalier public-school boys saving us from invasion in the Battle of Britain.  Our own version of Thermopylae and the 300 Sparatans. On the other hand, the story of the bomber crews has been swept under the carpet.

For starters the bomber crews were more numerous and less glamorous. Their role was not to dash around the skies in aerial dog-fights but to sit in tight wing tip-to-wing tip formations every night like sitting ducks. Waiting to be picked up by searchlights or radar and shot down by night fighters or flak. Statistically they faced the most dangerous job on the allied side - one in twenty odds of not returning from a mission when an operational tour lasted thirty missions. It is not surprising that a kind of stoic fatalism and dark humour characterised  Bomber Command.

Their social composition was more diverse than Fighter Command - many sergeant-pilots were working class or at least lower middle class grammar school boys.  Becoming  an air-gunner was one route in which an 'erk' from the ranks could actually get into the air.

But most importantly, unlike the fighter pilots of 1940, they were not the heroic defenders preventing the bombing of women and children - they were the ones doing the bombing. Causing death and destruction on an industrial scale that between 1942-5 eclipsed anything seen in the Luftwaffe's attacks on this country.

It can be - and is - argued that the young men of Bomber Command cannot  be held responsible for the morality of decisions made by their political and military commanders. Maybe so - and maybe we are in no position to judge from the comfort of our peactime lives - although clearly many veterans did feel this responsibility for the rest of their lives.

It is an added tragedy that many wars seem to generate buried tales of  heroism. Perhaps in this case simply telling their forgotten story is more appropriate than commemorating them in stone. 

Shake hands with the devil ?

In no particular order:

Shal Palavi of Iran. King Faisal of Iraq. Idi Amin of Uganda. Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe. King Hamid al-Khalifa of Bahrain. Presient Mobutu of Zaire. King Faisal of Saudi Arabia. President Arap Moi of Kenya. King Khalid of Saudi Arabia. Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu of Romania. King Hassan II of Morocco. President Mubarak of Egypt. President Jiang Zemin of China. The list of brutal heads of state met and feted by Queen Elizabeth II just goes on ... 

And it's not just a question of a quick  meet and greet with these dictators either -  Her Maj's government has actively collaborated with these regimes who  are guilty of the systematic widespread and  brutal suppresion of their own peoples. Many on this motley  list of  dictators have been aided in their bloody business by the sale of arms, diplomatic support, and training given to these regimes by successive British governements.

I don't share  Sinn Fein's politics  - but can we get some fucking perspective about her 'historic' meeting with Martin McGuiness today ?

In defence of localism.

I helped an old friend move this weekend. He was relocating all the way from one side of the square to another in the funky little enclave  that bizarrely sits in the shadow of some very ugly seventies tower blocks n Vauxhall. And then the next day another old mate - who has swapped Brixton for a new life in Devon -  got  in touch about the possibility of collaborating on some sort of project that connects my urban life with his rural life. It's got me thinking. 

For a moment I was hard pressed to think of something to make the connection.  The superficial contrasts between inner city and sticks are overwhelming. But since I've been out of regular work I've become much more aware of the community that I am surrounded by. The time I have spent in local schools has helped. And so has getting off the commuting treadmill that took me in and out of  the West End and relegated my home turf for the past twenty five years to little more than a dormitory.

I've seen something that strongly connects life in the inner city with life in the country: Life - economic, social and cultural - is local. And consequently not being bound by the necessity to rush from one area for work to another for sleeping, it is  slower. It can also appear to  involve more - for want of a better word - pottering.  

Nowadays all that strikes me as altogether more real and more civilised. And it needs to be preserved from creeping suburbanisation and homogenisation.

Jimmy Carr and the moral bankruptcy of business

It says something about the state of political debate when a Tory posh-boy points the moral finger at another posh-boy's financial morality - who happens to be a tax-dodging comedian. 

Particularly whilst he counts industrial-scale tax dodger Philip Green as one of his special chums and advisers. 

The irony is then further  compounded by the comedian Jimmy Carr  being  defended by none other that the leader of the Labour Party.

I have always suspected that Jimmy Carr is a bit of a cunt. He wants to have it both ways by playing the knowingly ironic post-modern liberal card whilst taking the money from playing up to lowest common denominator prejudice and bigotry. And working as a gag-writer for Jim Davidson - who of course we can unequivocally identify as a cunt.

Maybe Ed Miliband has a point about changing the law. Of course the law needs to be changed. Socialism can't and won't just be achieved through fairer taxation - but it probably won't be achieved without it. It's no accident that 'progressive taxation' is one of the  things mentioned in the programme of the 1848 Communist Manifesto. 

But at the same time, nobody should be allowed the ethical get-out clause of not having to take the consequences of their actions. Jimmy Carr is simply guilty of doing what most capitalists do - divorcing and compartmentalising the consequences of their financial decisions from their personal morality. In my former life I saw countless middle managers working for my clients - and come to that my own former employer - otherwise decent individuals who could still happily make business decisions without the need to refer to this inconvenient moral compass. 

And as I write this some reptile from a leading accountancy firm is being interviewed on Radio 4 about how it's not his firm's job to moralise only to help their clients be as 'tax efficient' as possible. Of course he's quite right. And it makes him a cunt too.

'A damn near run thing'

I have another guest piece over at Dorian's On This Deity today to mark the anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo. 

I've tried not to dwell on the military side of things but on the Napoleonic legacy and the struggle to secure the bourgeois revolution.

An Eastenders story that needs telling

Since volunteering in schools I've been struck how they don't seem to teach local history - at least not in the ones I've seen. Often there's just not the room in the national curriculum - and with Michael Grove's promotion of the LadyBird school of history I suspect there will be even less. Which is a shame because it has the potential to be a great way of telling the 'island story' he's so fond of. 

Of course here in London where there's every chance that a history class will have pupils from anywhere in the world 'local' does not necessarily mean what you might first assume. But then again, the flip-side of this is that London has always been like that. 

Which is why I have jumped at the chance to teach a couple of lessons about a subject very close to my heart - the changing face of London's docklands. With Chinese, Malaysian, Indian, Somali and Eastern European communities established there since the early nineteenth century, the history of the docks almost holds up a mirror to the  classrooms of modern London

So as a bit of preparatory homework I took myself to the excellent Museum of London in Docklands. Telling the story of docklands from Roman times to it's recent 'regeneration', this is proper 'warts and all' local history. Which is to say that it doesn't romanticise the thriving golden era of the docks - which were inextricably linked with the slave trade, nor does it omit the conflicts of he great dock strike of 1889 or the battles a century later between the displaced dock communities* and the London Docklands Development Commission. 

But sadly stuck in the shadow of Canary Wharf and the corporate barrenness that is modern docklands - the museum was almost totally deserted on a Saturday morning. At the end of the tour you are invited to take a post-it and stick your thoughts and impressions up on a 'comments wall'.  Someone has quite rightly suggested that all the bankers and traders who work at Canary Wharf should be compelled to spend half a day in the museum.

*My mum - who grew up around Wapping in the war years -  returned there in the early 1990s - she considered retiring to  one of the new flats. The flats themselves were lovely but she was very upset that she couldn't find the streets and squares she remembered as a child - because they simply weren't there any more. The LDDC had accomplished what six years of the Luftwaffe couldn't.

Roots 5: Seamen & Papists

The last instalment tracing the family history of my four grandparents:

As a child I remember my paternal grandmother's family as pretty grim and forbidding. They came from Whitby on the North Yorkshire coast and consisted of a couple of elderly unmarried aunts - sisters of my grandmother. 

I recall going up there for one of their ninetieth birthdays. Although Whitby now seems Gothic and romantic - back then Hilda and Winifred seem to have scarily taken on the grim and grey bleakness of the wind-swept town. Both had worked in domestic service and both had ended up as doctors' housekeepers. Even in the 1970's they dressed the part of modern day Mrs Hudsons. And they lived together in a two-up two-down on one of Whitby's steeply cobbled side-streets - without phone or television - and with coal fires.

They were also extremely Catholic - and the height of Hilda's  birthday celebrations was a special private mass held  in her house by a visiting priest. Looking back there was some humour in this when in a panic Hilda had to hide a bottle of brandy (brought as a present by the same priest) from her friend who was 'chapel' and strictly temperance.

After their deaths, I effectively forgot about this branch of the family - they certainly weren't much fun when I was small - and in retrospect I probably held them responsible for the Catholicism which I came to regard as something of a stain on the family identity. With no living members of this part of the family, they were the last branch to get my attention when I started to look into my own history. 

In fact it turns out they were actually a bit  more colourful than I had given them credit for:

If the river dominates my maternal grandfather's arm of the family - the sea dominates my Whitby ancestors: Matthew, the oldest of them that I can trace, was born in 1811 and was a ship's master who went on to become an innkeeper when he married as his second wife was a widow who kept a pub.

Looking at their marriage certificate from the 1840's, they were married in the rites of the Catholic church. It looks as if, unlike my paternal grandfather's family where Irish immigration introduced Catholicism  -  they were part of that peculiar minority of English Catholics. Both were born locally, neither had Irish names, and this remote part of North Yorkshire was not a place that attracted Irish immigration at the time. Like parts of Lancashire, Cheshire and Cumbria pockets of Catholicism had managed to survive the reformation and produced crops of local martyrs - although the records of Catholicism amongst ordinary people who weren't recussant toffs or priests on the run are very hard to track down.

Most of the men of Whitby earned their living from the sea as whalers and fishermen. Mathew had three sons and the eldest two both went to sea. The middle son John drowned when his ship sank - a reminder of how precarious that life was  - and perhaps as a consequence, Robert the youngest stayed ashore and became a cabinet-maker. The eldest son, another Matthew went on to also become a ship's master. Amazingly the manifest book of his ship - the Mary-Eliza built in South Shields in the 1860's - has survived. The ship was a small coaster that worked the East Coast and North Sea routes with mixed cargoes - a kind of floating white van of its time.

Matthew had no family but his brother Robert the cabinet-maker did - and reading between the lines it seems as if son John was discouraged from or tried to avoid going to sea. He had a number of short-lived jobs ashore - including that of 'sewing machine sales agent' - but in his late twenties he too became a merchant seaman. He died at sea  in his forties when working as a steward on a small cargo ship bound for South America and is buried in the English cemetery at Buenes Aires. 

He left behind five children and life must have been extremely tough for my great grandmother on her own. The two boys left home to become engineering apprentices in Bradford - one of them becoming in later life a metalwork teacher in an approved school.  Two of the sisters - the forbidding aunts that I remember - went into service and the third, my grandmother, married and moved down to London where her husband worked on Fleet Street. 

All the Whitby relatives were extremely Catholic but unusually they either didn't marry or  had small families, and I am the last one of the line left. I have little evidence of any of them other than some sepia photos, the ship's manifest  and  an odd collection of missals and other prayer books - one of which is a Latin text of Thomas Aquinas' 'Imitation of Christ' dated 1720 - which in itself must carry quite a tale. For someone like myself who has a bit of an obsession with the civil war and seventeenth century radicalism, it is rather disturbing to find that one section of my ancestors would have probably been found at that time in the ranks of some of the most fanatical Royalists.

And that last instalment pretty much now rounds up my family story.

The hap-hazard nature of public records means that for the majority of us ordinary folks  it is pretty hard to trace our antecedents beyond the late eighteenth century, but I will go on trying. It is a great window into social history. Although my background is relatively stable and ethnically dull (other than an unexpected Irish influence) certainly in comparison to my partner's family - this in itself reveals something about the lives of ordinary working people: Three generations of print-workers, three generations of soldiers, and at least three generations of seamen and five of boatmen.

It's a story that takes in the ports of the North coast, the mills of West Yorkshire, London's East End and suburbs of West  London. It also covers the full range of working class historical experience from prosperous artisans to others who sought refuge from poverty in soldiering. I had no expectation or desire to find any connections to the famous or notorious - and said when I started that I just hoped not to find any 'toffs or Tories' lurking in the family closet . I haven't really found either - although these English Catholics were possibly the very first Tories - from whom the name was first derived as a term of abuse for anyone outside the Whig and Protestant consensus.

Raining on the parade

So that was the jubilee. 

I did my best to escape it. I saw some bunting but I didn't see any street parties. And I don't know anyone who did. 

I did my best to avoid the interminable television coverage. The endless slow-paced boat race nonsense  and the parade of the mediocre and middle-of-the-road music stars of yesteryear. It did nothing for me - nor by the looks of it did it do anything for Her Maj either who throughout the whole circus looked as poe-faced and miserable as ever. In the evening I sought distraction from the rolling news saturation coverage of these non-events by watching some slashers on the pay-for-view.

Yesterday - the first time I can remember having a bank holiday on a Tuesday  -I went for a ride out to see George Bernard Shaw's cottage deep in the hear of moneyed Hertfordshire. It was shut - obviously the National Trust were confused as to whether it was a bank holiday (when it is usually open) or a weekday (when it isn't). So I came home - and get wet riding back in the rain.

That was my jubilee - all pretty appropriate really - and much I suspect like most people's experience of the 'feel good weekend of the year'. 

Right now though I am savouring the PR home goal of using benefit seekers to do security at the event  for nothing, get changed in the open  and sleep under a bridge for the privilege...

Happy to reign over us ?

The royal jubilee is getting into gear, and whilst the tabloids are giving us advice on how to make our street parties swing, the broadsheets are ruminating  about the legacy of the 'New Elizabethan Age'.  Inevitably it is a time for comparing 'then and now'. 

Of course there are undeniably significant contrasts with the monochrome Britain of 1952 and today. Most of all we are now a multicultural society and women's role in the workforce has been changed. And no doubt those are probably the things that still  most piss off the red-white-and-blue brigade who are hanging up their bunting this weekend.

But it seems to me that essentially the jubilee is a celebration of sixty years of the same bastards being in charge: 

Back in 1952 we had a Conservative government dominated by public schoolboys who didn't know the price of a pint of milk. Looking back it looks like society was rigidly bound by class, but in fact the gap between the richest and the poorest then was then considerably smaller than now - and the prospects of social mobility actually much greater.

At home  the government of toffs was desperately trying to undo the  previous reforms of the 1945 Labour Government. And on the world's stage they were  trying to justify a place at the table of top nations by crushing independence in Malaya and Kenya, developing their own Atomic bomb and playing second fiddle to the USA in Korea.

Plus ca change. For most of us it's been sixty years of putting up with the same old shit - perhaps with a brief respite in the1960's. And the only real reason to celebrate is to show  solidarity with another old pensioner forced to work well past her retirement date.

Not so beautiful game

So I am enjoying an economy lunch of egg and chips in my local Morrisons. At the  next table behind me  are a small group of England's finest. Probably my own age but looking considerably older - bald or shaved heads, really shit tribal ink,  and football shirts or Hackett polos featuring big St George's crosses - all straining against their beer guts.

In the short time it takes me to demolish my double egg and chips I hear wafting over from their corner offensive conversational snippets of casual racism: 'Lazy coons' ...'theiving Eastern Europeans' ... and 'fucking Muslims' ... All this in London N22 where the fact that the chances are they will be surrounded by the very groups they are abusing doesn't seem to bother them. Just as I am weighing up whether I should get involved - all three are big old lumps but they don't look in the best of condition - they get up and walk out. 

On the back of one's Arsenal shirt is a number and a player's name -  and I don't know whether to laugh or cry - the name is  Adebayor.

Workers of all lands ...

Who the fuck is Christine Lagarde ? 

Ok it's a rhetorical question - she's the IMF boss who slapped Cameron's wrist for pushing austerity a bit too far but most recently has told Greeks that they've had their fun with profligate public spending and now they just have to suck up the debt and suffer the consequences of austerity. 

Until now I haven't paid much attention to her. She's was a corporate lawyer, a French Tory and a mate of Sarkozy. Her appointment seemed like a smart  PR move at the time after the scandals of  sex-pest Dominique Strauss-Kahn. But in every respect she seems like the kind of backroom political bureaucratic that is fairly ignorable. And right now she could arguably be the most powerful woman in the world -  we would do well to pay careful attention to everything she says because in reality this is real power speaking not the empty rhetoric of posing politicians.

Listening to the news - we seem to be gearing up for a European economic war of sorts, and a familiar language of nationalism is on the return. Throw in the nonsense of our own '2012 Jubilympics', and its all to easy too let some of this reactionary bollocks slide.  

We shouldn't: When I hear things like 'the Greeks' I'm reminded of a scene in 'All Quiet On The Western Front' when they are in the trenches discussing the causes of the war. One naive young soldier suggests that one country has insulted another. An older wiser head asks if this means that a river in France has insulted a mountain in Germany - because he's met very few Frenchmen but from what he's seen they seem very similar to him and he has no quarrel with them.

And right now, when the chips are down and we are being set against each other we need to say again workers have no country. It's not 'the lazy profligate Greeks' - it's ordinary Greek people trying to hold their lives and  families together and it's not the 'industrious canny Germans' - it's German people  doing exactly the same.  And neither have anything in common with  the privileged apparatchiks of the international political class like Ms Lagarde who are attempting to call the shots that will decimate the lives of ordinary people everywhere. 

Apologies for preaching to the choir - but sometimes it is necessary to remember  the bleeding obvious. That is all.

Downhills School - and community

Very appropriately  on the day before I (kind of) officially start my new life with the welcome day tomorrow at the university where I will be doing my teacher training - I went along for the picket line at Downhills School  followed by the family fun day in the nearby park.

Downhills is my local primary school and the strike is against its 'forced academisation'. (For those who haven't followed the case, Michael Grove has introduced this new verb into the language to signify the taking over of a community school be a private  management company against the wishes of it Governors. And its teaching staff. And its support staff. And its parents).

The campaign puts a lot of emphasis on the idea of 'community'. And today at the family fun day  - listening to the wonderful  Michael Rosen giving a very simple but powerful speech about what the right to the best possible education for all actually means, eating a free picnic of Caribbean food donated by supporters, and crawling around pretending to be a cat as a part of a kids' poetry workshop - I get what they mean by 'community'.

It's something that only truly dawned on me once I had started volunteering in local schools: Schools are in every sense the heart and soul of a local area. They reflect every bit of its character - its strengths and its problems. Many people, particularly in London don't get the chance to appreciate this. I didn't, when I spent most of my waking hours working in a completely different 'community' - only six miles away but very far removed from where I live. In fact for the past  ten years I probably identified more with the 'creative industries' ghetto of Soho than I did with the area where I have lived for 25 years.

So - it is only since I was made redundant, and since I've been around schools  that I really  get this 'community' thing. It's an over-used concept by most politicians - but despite the spin it does actually exist. And hopefully the Tories will find that they fuck with it at their peril.

Staines-upon-Thames

Today my home town of Staines officially becomes Staines-upon-Thames. And thoroughly depressing it is too.

Is this to distinguish the town  from Staines-upon-somewhere else ? Er no - Staines is unique as a place name in this country. This name change is nothing to do with clarity - and everything to do with an snobbery and a social inferiority complex.

Unlike Kingston-upon-Thames, Richmond-upon-Thames or Walton-upon-Thames - plain old Staines  used to be a proper town and not just a dormitory suburb for London's middle classes. It had a famous - and pungent -  Lino factory and an Hawker-Sidley engineering factory that our house backed onto it. 

Staines was a prosperous working class town that only ended up in Surrey by an administrative quirk when Middlesex was broken up. It actually used to have more in common with the new towns on the opposite edge of London - in Essex. Which is no accident - because like many new towns to the East of the city  - bombed-out Eastenders were relocated to Staines after the war to take up work in the new light industries there.

Not any more. Staines' main claim to fame is now two shopping centres - full of the same  homogenised retail outlets that can be found just about anywhere in the UK. So maybe the whole Staines-upon-Thames  thing acknowledge this by  relocating the town in Middle England.

It is a thoroughly post-Blairite bit of re-branding. Proof that whilst you may not be able to polish a turd you can at least give it a new name...

Creeping commodification

I had some more ink on Saturday - my version of pampering therapy I suppose. I always enjoy the experience. In terms of describing the kick out of being tattooed ,  I'm afraid it is just one of those classic 'if I have to explain you won't understand' things.But in addition to that, I always enjoy the inevitable chat whilst captive in the chair. 

To those burdened with the usual prejudices about people with tattoos - it would may be come as quite a shock to hear the subject mater we managed to cover:  Amongst other things - academic Mary Beard, the despicable role of the Catholic church in repressing women for two thousand years, the demise of progressive ideas about education, and gentrification and inner city renewal. It had been a while since I'd visited the tattoo shop so a certain amount of time was also spent on catching up on personal news - in particular the end of my time in the graphic world and my switch to teaching. In return I was told  that times are tough in the world of tattooing too. So much so that my much-loved tattoo shop - where all my work so far has been done - is now struggling to keep going.

The parallels with my former trade are all too strong. Tattooing may not be about to be off-shored to India but time-served craftspeople are being undercut by those who've watched a few episodes of LA Ink, have a rudimentary grasp of Adobe Creative Suite and can grab some basic inking equipment on Ebay.

'Scratchers' are of course nothing new. But the depressing recent phenomenon is that everything is apparently being reduced to price and instant gratification. People shop around for the cheapest quote not for the best tattooist. They haggle over the cost. And apparently the latest development amongst the hipsters is to ask for their tattoos to be 'aged' and weathered to provide that authentic old-skool look -  immediately. Fucking hell.

I shouldn't be surprised. As the great man said, all relations under capitalism are doomed to to reduced to 'the cash nexus'. But it is particularly sad to hear that it has crept into a funky little word which I had hoped was somehow immune from all that shit.

A walk in the bank holiday drizzle

On a quintessentially English rainy and miserable May bank holiday what could be more appropriate than a stroll in the drizzle through Highgate cemetery ?

Only a couple of miles by car but about a million miles in social terms from the bit of North London where I live - Highgate village is a glimpse of how city living could be: It's all nice pubs, unspoilt historic buildings - and independent book shops. If only there was some sort of Neutron bomb device to ethnically cleanse the area of its LibDem-voting, smug  chattering class residents ...

The cemetery is rather wonderful though - and walking around it with rain dripping from the overgrown vegetation that is gradually swallowing up the Victorian Gothic monuments all adds to the atmosphere.

Of course I had to pay my respects at Marx's tomb. It's undeniably impressive, although I like to think the great man would have had  little time for its over-blown pomposity.

In fact the original tomb was  a much simpler affair - more in line with the modest funeral that only drew a dozen or so mourners.  Apparently the original monument is still somewhere in the cemetery - but I couldn't find its location advertised. The present globally-recognised monument only dates back to 1954 when it was installed by the Stalinist Communist Party of Great Britain. It's upkeep is now allegedly  paid for by the Chinese Embassy. 

I'm pretty sure that Karl - who had a healthy disrespect for authority and pomposity  in all its forms - would be spinning in his tomb at the thought of that ...

Maybe it's becasue I'm a Londoner ..

I am profoundly depressed at the prospect of  Boris once again waving the flag in front of the world's cameras in August purporting to represent my home city. How can this wonderful city with all its diversity, all its problems and all its glorious grime be represented by a Tory cunt. 

He may sometimes be a funny cunt, he may occasionally be a disarmingly honest  (for a politician) cunt -  but he let's never forget that he is  always a Tory cunt. Of the very very worse kind -  the naked face of unapologetic class privilege.

I am also at a loss to explain the appallingly result for TUSC in London - something below 1%. There are parts of the country where TUSC polled a credible 30% or more - and there are some genuine grounds for hope .  But not in London. 

We can talk about the appallingly low turn-out. Or the fact that nobody seems to know what the London Assembly actually does.  Or the enormous constituencies. Or the low-voter registration that has created an invisible layer of the most disadvantaged. Or the 'doughnut effect' where the middle class suburbs vote and the working class inner city boroughs don't. 

But there  remains an undeniable gap between the radicalised return to class politics seen in the  recent public sector strikes -  and finding a political voice to express it. 

At least there is in my city at the moment.

Radical rituals ?

For the first time for many years I found myself on the May Day demonstration from Clerkenwell to Trafalgar Square. I know it's a great slice of radical heritage - but I can't help thinking that essentially it has become something of a hollow ritual.

Setting aside the always impressive contingents from Latin American, Turkish and Kurdish Left organisations for whom the May Day tradition is still very much alive - if you based it in the rest of the contingents, you'd come away with a fairly depressing picture of the a picture of the British Left. 

Old Stalinsists, a rainbow of ever more obscure Trotskyist and Maoist sects and a smattering of a younger demographic Occupy types. 

The elephant in the corner notable by its absence was the working class.

Of course you could say the same of many Labour movement events. But the particularly grating aspect of May Day is the sight of trade union leaders' making a succession of stirring speeches calling for the overthrow of capitalism utterly out of sync with what they do or so for the other 364 days of the year. I'm thinking in particular of the leader of my own union (not for much longer though) Len McCluskey.  The great hope of the Left in the unions that never quite

It puts me in mind of some Church Of England clergymen who  are otherwise essentially agnostic playing along with the rituals of belief for the sake of appearances.

I have a hearty respect for radical tradition - probably more than most - but I have to ask if these rituals still help the cause ?