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 ?

Guardians of morality or dangerous fuckwits ?

In  the big scheme of things  luvie-nepotism may not be the worse source of hereditary privilege - but the sight of the progeny of celebs pursuing careers in the arts after a jump-start from mummy and daddy especially pisses me off.

So in normal circumstances I wouldn't have much time for Jamie and Tyronne Wood - the sons of the other guitarist in the Stones - the one  who isn't Keef - and their proprietorship of a Mayfair art gallery.

But I warmed to the celeb-brats when I saw the news that they had been questioned by the Metropolitan Police - who had forced them to take down a  piece that they had deemed offensive Apparently a particularly sensitive copper has spotted photographer Derek Santini's interpretation of the story of Leda and the Swan through the window of the galley from the top deck of a passing  bus.  

Police officers sent to order the  offending piece removed were unswayed by explanations that the story of Zeus taking the form of a swan to seduce Leda, (mother of Helen of Troy) has inspired artists through the centuries - including Michelangelo . They just said they'd never heard of the myth and that it seemed to be 'condoning bestiality'.

I could be depressed at the puritan  philistinism of those in authority but then again at least whilst they're defending outraged public morals in  Belgravia they are not shooting unarmed black men in the streets of North London where I live.

Mail comes full circle

Notoriously back in 1934 the vile-then-as-it-is-now Daily Mail ran the headline 'Hurrah For The Blackshirts'. The BUF and Nazi sympathising press baron and Mail-owner Viscount Rothermere proclaimed that  'The sturdy young Nazis are Europe's guardians against the Communist danger'. 

Unlike many other national newspapers the Mail does not have an online archive - so I can't provide a link to the relevant article*. This is probably no accident  - the Mall loves to wrap itself in wartime nostalgia with constant references to the virtues of the wartime generation and give-aways of classic British war movie DVDs  or recordings of Vera Lynn singing wartime favourites. 

Happily though they just can't help giving themselves away. 

On the day when France goes to the polls and it looks like a victory for the 'Socialist' candidate Hollande, and a more inspiring upsurge for Melenchon and the Left Front - the Mail reverts to form: '... the only responsible vote in France next Sunday is one for Marine Le Pen'.

It's not too alarmist to remember that first time round, the street-fighting boneheads of the Far Right only became a serious threat when paranoid sections of the ruling class decided that they were the lesser of two evils.

 * The clipping at the top of the page is actually  from  a Rothermere editorial in the Daily Mirror in which he  also had a  share-holding.

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Holocaust Memorial Day today - and I have a piece over at 'On This Deity' to mark the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943. 

I wanted to do it - but I'm also conscious that it's one of those stories so powerful that almost anything that can be written is in danger of being inadequate.

There's nothing I can add to the story of the Holocaust that hasn't already be said better by others, But for any activist who has ever  faced  the inevitable cynics' question  - why struggle when all the odds are stacked against you - the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising does  perhaps provide the ultimate inspiration.