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.

In defence of staff rooms

News today that new schools won't in the future be required to have staff rooms:

As someone who until very recently was an outsider to the world of teaching and education I can see why people who don't have the luxury of an equivalent  'staff room' at their own workplace might not see the need for teachers' (and support staff) to have such a place.

I didn't realise it until I spent time in schools how intense and isolated the life of a teacher actually is. Intense, because when you are teaching, you are teaching - performing on your feet with no respite in front of thirty so highly critical pairs of eyes. Isolated, because for the majority of your day you are doing this on your own with precious little adult company.

Whereas in most jobs  - however hard you work at times there is an inevitable large amount of 'down time'. And this is taken up with - for want of a better word  'fucking about'. I know,  I've done my fair share of this - when we were a manual craft industry it involved endless practical jokes and the odd game of 'studio cricket' - in the modern studio environment the equivalent is probably messing about on the internet. And as an executive there is always the liquid lunch and lost afternoon. At whatever level we feel - quite rightly - that the busy times earn us the right to goof around occasionally. And even if you're not goofing around, most workplaces give you an opportunity to down tools and have lunch - whether it's a Gregg's pasty or lunch at the Ivy.  Not so if you're a teacher - as I've found you even have to plan ahead with your toilet breaks ...

All of which points to the need for teachers' staff rooms if only as basic workers' right. I deliberately don't mention the use of the staffroom for all those impromptu meetings done on the hoof between teachers than are essential to the daily running of the school. Because adequate 'non-contact' time should be scheduled to sort all that out. As a manager in my previous life 'meetings' of one sort or another were the single biggest part of my working week. Nobody told me that I should be conducting all these meetings in my own  lunchtime - or that I would have to conduct them all standing in the stair-well.

But let's face it - the move to do away with staff rooms is primarily a political one. Teachers seem to be in the forefront of opposition to the ConDems nowadays and they are rapidly becoming one of the more militant layers of the labour movement. And the first rule of anyone in the business of suppressing opposition is to deny the dissidents their freedom of association ...

Messing about on the river

Lenin said that it was the tops of trees that shake first in a storm - as a metaphor for the phenomenon that the stirring of elements at the top of society, and in particular the youth of the ruling class, was the first indicator of revolution. Historically this seems undeniable. But when I see one posh boy risking life and limb to disrupt another bunch of posh boys' fun I'm inclined to think that it is just more twatish high jinks than a bit of situationist agit-prop:

Trenton Oldfield who swam across the path of the Boat Race and temporarily halted the annual gathering of the braying tribes of Barbour-clad young hoorays claims he was making a statement about elitism. I will pass over the irony of his own private school education or membership of the Royal Society of Arts. He works in urban regeneration management and claims that his choice of target was not simply the symbolic elitism of the annual Oxbridge fest - but  also the route of the race which takes in one of the posher stretches of the Thames. Hmmm. There a couple of serious points to be made here.

The current  domination of the political class by the products of Oxbridge has taken us back two or three generations before the liberal sixties or the supposed meritocracy of the post-war boom. And whole swathes of our inner city that were once  thriving working class communities have become desolate wastelands of chicken outlets, betting shops and pound stores just waiting for yuppiefication. So looking at my own neighbourhood - not quite an Olympic borough but bordering one - I have sympathy for the Stratford demonstrators. Amidst all the hype and pomposity about Olympic heritage and legacy they are raising a small voice to ask 'what's in it for us?'. Good luck to them.

On the other hand I fancy that Trenton Oldfield has struck a blow primarily for his own publicity. And that in the future he will resurface as some sort of minor personality. If I've done him an injustice or am proved wrong in the future  -I will apologise in advance now.

A licence for bullying and casualization.

The ignorant bullying face of Lord-Sir-Allun-Fucking-Sugar has become the totemic icon of 'entrepreneurship'. How apt. As of today the qualifying period for a worker's entitlement to raise a claim of unfair dismissal has been extended from one year to two.

I've got three different angles on this - as someone who was made redundant - as someone who was a manager and had to implement redundancy and dismissal procedures - and as someone who knows a blatant bit of class warfare when he sees it. And this is wrong from every one of them.

Losing your job fucks with your life. Up there with divorce and bereavement it is a life-changing moment and one of the most common causes of stress and clinical depression. Fortunately for me it went the other way - and although I still feel the occasional pang of bitterness it has allowed me to start on my way to a new and happier life. But I'm lucky - and unusual. Most people who lose their livelihoods in middle age are screwed. And - although this shouldn't need to be said -  people are not simply economic units of labour or in the newspeak of management 'resources' to be turned on and off at will.

If you're a responsible manager - or even just a half way decent human being - sacking people is difficult and traumatic. Emotionally and legally it can be a minefield. Which is exactly as it should be. I'm not proud of it ,but over the years I've had to lay people off - I've even sacked a couple for disciplinary reasons. I'm not asking for  sympathy but I lost sleep over it, I wrestled with my conscience and I think I can hand on heart say that I acted fairly - and legally. However ethical managers are not necessarily the norm - and so if we can't count on them to act according to their consciences, we could at least make them act according to the law.

The previous regulations were no more than a fragile safety net, often circumnavigated by the unscrupulous. But they were a safety net nonetheless. Now it has been taken away by a ConDem government who has no scruples about openly demonstrating that it is on the side of bosses in the name of making it 'easier' for businesses. Of course it will be. In the private sector -  as I know all to well - contracts are hardly ever awarded by big businesses to their suppliers for more than two years. So bosses will effectively be able to hire and fire at will within the life cycle of these contracts - in other words they can operate on a risk-free casualized basis. 

And why should it go without question that things should be made 'easier' for business ? I imagine that the abolition of the Highway Code would probably make things 'easier' for motorists - and Jeremy Clarkson is probably lobbying for this right now. Have a look at some of the arguments put forwarded by the business lobbies and you'd think that the previous employment legislation was tantamount to workers' control. Rather than just a baseline of procedures and administration as to what constitutes 'fair'. Which frankly if you didn't have the competence to keep up with - you shouldn't have been running a business in the first place.

Although as we know this government takes a far more lenient attitude to questions of competence in business - particularly in big business and banks - than it does with the rest of us. 

Birth of a nation

A recent study has shown that the previously believed death-toll  of the American Civil War has been seriously under-estimated. Based on census returns, Prof David Hacker of Binghampton University has  calculated the total killed as 750,000. Staggeringly, an proportional equivalent  based on  the US's current population would be 7.5 million.

Records for the English Civil Wars total death-toll are more sketchy, but 185,000 for the years 1642-51 is a reasonable estimate. Again, a proportional equivalent  based on  the UK's current population would be around 2.8 million.

The numbers alone are shocking. 

But consider the social and economic effect of prolonged fighting - four years in the US - and (depending how you count it) nine years in this country. Or the immeasurable impact on the political and cultural development of both societies.

My experience of the levels of awareness of the American Civil War in the states is only second-hand. But I do know that in this country general awareness of our civil war is woefully low. 

In our schools history lessons often  seem to revolve repeatedly around the Great War and the Western Front, and Hitler and the Nazis. I don't want to jump on the reactionary band-wagon of old farts that wants a return to 'our island story' in schools. But I'd dearly love to see the Levellers and the all too short-lived English Republic salvaged from obscurity ...

One Bradford Spring doesn't make a Socialist Summer.

He said that the mainstream parties all told lies, they supported the same wars and the same neo-liberal economics. And he was right.  I just wish it hadn't been Gorgeous George who said it.

I really wish that this was the breakthrough everyone on the Left has been waiting for to seriously challenge Labour in their heartlands. But it isn't. 

What it is - and there's no point in fudging it - is a victory of opportunist communal politics. Not a step forward but a throw-back to the  kind of boss-politics of the US Democratic Party - with whole communities delivered as an ethnic electoral bloc.

I look at Galloway and I see the ghosts of Derek Hatton and Tommy Sheridan at his shoulder. But actually Galloway for all his undeniable charm and guts  represents something far worse - the personality cults of Deza and Tommy may have succumbed to vanity and hubris, but they never so shamelessly politically degenerated into opportunism.

  

Galloway - a Catholic (?) who is happy to play up to the religious sensibilities of his Islamic supporters - says that the extraordinary election result was 'by the grace of god'.  I'm looking at the sad looking pile of TUSC and local anti-cuts alliance leaflets in the corner of my living room - and thinking that building genuine grass-roots resistance isn't quite as spectacular  or miraculous as that .

In/out - shake it all about

Setting aside the hilarity of the  government squirming over the 'do/don't panic buy petrol' fiasco -  and that 'toffs like pasties too'  fiasco - here's some more overlooked, but equally contradictory news from planet Tory.

Here in Haringey - so very obviously a part of the inner city - Education Secretary Michael Grove has finally woken up to the anomaly that schools here have been receiving per capita funding as if it were an outer London borough. Of course this never made any sense geograhically, sociologoically, economically or culturally  - but there you go.

It might just have something to do with the 'poor performance' of schools here that led Grove to target the borough's schools for academisation - even against the will of staff, parents and governors if necessary. 

Because as with hospitals - or any other public service you can think of  - whilst  funding may not be everything, it doesn't half help. And in that light the decison does represent something of a climb down by Grove - but not I imagine to the extent of withdrawing from his academisation crusade. 

But then again in a classic bit of contradictory  thinking - as they give with one hand comes another suggestion that they take with the other  - and  a ludicrous proposal from the 'riot quango' that schools should actually be fined for not meeting literacy targets. 

Looks like this fuck-wittery knows no end ...

Told you so.

Usually if you start spouting off about 'the state'  and 'class interests', people's eyes glass over and you're dismissed as a doctrinaire loony. Then every once in a while a story comes along to  remind us exactly of what's what in society - this morning there's two:

Ray's got in there first on The Cruddas Affair - Tory chairman caught red-handed flogging lobbying access to 'Lord Snooty' Cameron himself. The only surprise is that business interests had to pay at all - although presumably big businesses,  like the ones engaged in the Workfare scandal, have their own direct hot-line anyway.

And then there's the news that the army are being trained up to take over from UNITE tanker drivers who have balloted to strike over the bank holiday. Of course the British Army - often smugly seen as superior to the military  in those dodgy countries who dabble in politics -  has a  long and ignoble history of intervening in 'trade disputes' on the side of employers.

Maybe the loonies aren't quite so marginalised after all ...

A depressing challenge

I observed a history lesson yesterday - Year 11 pupils looking at Nazi Anti-Semitic propaganda from the 1930's. 

This was in a typically diverse London secondary school - with seemingly every ethnicity represented -   except Jewish. 

In my liberal-naivety I thought lessons like that would be tricky because they were shocking and upsetting for the pupils. In fact this one was tricky because may of the kids took the position that given the weight of Nazi propaganda there couldn't (and I quote) 'be all that smoke without some fire'. 

Fucking hell that's depressing. 

The teacher did a valiant job of challenging it: Parallels were drawn with Anti-Semitism then and Islamophobia now. But I'm not sure they were won over. I'd like to think that one day I might do it better. It certainly makes me thing that it's vitally important to try. 

Most of all it makes me think of Christopher Hill's quote which should be carved on the walls of every school:  

‘History, properly taught, can help men to become critical and humane, just as wrongly taught it can turn them into bigots and fanatics.’

Thomas Holmes & the London poor

The Victorians had an obsession for collecting and classification. The rural curate with too much time on his hands scouring the countryside with a butterfly net  is something of a stereotype. And the social do-gooders of the age tended to be all too-similar. 

Henry Mayhew's  definite survey of the London working class is a masterful piece of work - but it is also strangely lacking in affection and human warmth. I don't know about Mayhew specifically, but I suspect that like the naturalists - or the enlightened imperialists of the age of the 'white man's burden' - many of these philanthropists regarded the poor as a different species to be studied, pitied and possibly helped -  but still essentially different.

I've just been re-reading a very different kind of late Victorian social commentary - Thomas Holmes' 'London's Underworld'. By a strange quirk, in the last years of Victoria's reign,  Holmes lived in Tottenham only a couple of streets away from where I am now. Then it was not the  inner city area it is now but a new suburb for the emerging lower middle class - often clerks working in the City. Holmes himself was a crime reporter and perhaps it was this not-quite-respectable job that drew him to the poorer sections of London's working class (and he used 'underworld in the sense of the under-class rather than of a criminal network). He certainly writes about them without the condescension of other do-gooders.

In fact his writing shows genuine affection for the chancers, wide-boys and scammers who would have horrified many who considered such types the 'undeserving poor'. He even has admiration for the ingenuity and invention  of  the con-artists who he was frequently taken in by himself. And far from standing aloof and disapproving from his subjects, he often invited them into his home  maintained friendships with them for years and even lent them money with little hope of repayment.

Most significantly he had no time for the 'self-help' schemes of the moral-improvers and temperance factions - who all wanted to make the under-class respectable. Nor did he have much truck either with philanthropists and charities - including the Salvation Army. In fact in an early glimpse of the welfare state, he argued that all charities should be combined into a single entity run by the government. 

I can't find anything that connects Holmes to the pioneering socialist or labour movements of the time - and he did have some fairly odd ideas about 'incorrigible tramps' and compulsory boarding schools for the bright children of the poor - but he is definitely worth a read.

Unity still over-due

A year on from my guest piece at 'On This Deity' to mark the anniversary of the Kronstadt Uprising. Also about a year ago I wrote a piece about an over-due rapprochement of the various tribes of the Left.

A year later and another year wiser  - and I think it's truer than ever. 

Last year, in the course of the local anti-cuts campaign, the campaign against workfare and the pensions strikes,  I've campaigned alongside various characters -  Anarchists, SWP,   Labour 'lefts' and former Stalinists  - and been inspired and frustrated in equal measure. And this seemed to have been dependent not upon their historical label or tribal allegiance but on their  individual integrity, decency  and good sense. 

So no apologies for the repetition and re-linking to previous posts. Here's to the future and its possibilities ...

The not-so 'real world'

Being around schools these days, an expression I often hear in reference to everything outside education is 'the real world'. And being in a strange sort of betwixt and between position of also freelancing in my old field I am well placed to comapre the two.

Yesterday I had to drop off a job at a typical central London design agency:

Standard layout of offices - a bar and a pool table in reception - smoked glass and minimalism in abundance. I had to meet the production director and the account manager. The production director was a chap about the same age as me who looked as if he had been subject to some sort of queer-eye-for-the-straight-guy make-over by the combined talents of Gok Wan and Jean-Paul Gautier. He looked as if he'd be more at home watching Clarkson with a mug of cocco but felt obliged to dress for work in skinny jeans and one of those scooped fronted tee-shirts to display his slighly portly male cleavage. The account manger was an attractive woman in her thirties dressed fairly normally from the waist up but sporting a pair of skin-tight 1970's hot pants and stilletto shoes. 

For about half an hour they pondered the 'job' I had taken in - a printed mock-up of a magarine tub - with the intensity of two archaeologists examining a precious Ancient Greek artifact - musing wherher or not their concept 'worked'.

Sometimes in schools I  have difficulty keeping a straight face whilst over-hearing teachers ponder if pupils' shoes displaying logos qualify as  trainers and consequently merit a 'leadership detention'. And I wonder if I'm doing the right thing in getting into this world. But then after a glimpse over my shoulder at my former world I am in doubt as to which one is 'real'.

Catholic home goals again.

Sometimes it's just too easy:

Earlier in the week we had the head of the Catholic church in Scotland talking in a truly staggering example of Orwellian news-speak about gay marriage as 'a violation of human rights'. And then a slightly more tempered bishops' letter read out in all churches in England and Wales condemns the  proposed reforms to  make gay  marriage legal as some sort of an affront to the moral fabric of society.

In between these two self-righteous pronouncements there came the news on Friday that Fr Alexander Bede Walsh was sentenced for 22years for sexual offences against young boys over a twenty year period.

Why any organisation with as dodgy a record as the Roman Catholic wouldn't observe a self-imposed dignified silence on anything remotely connected to human sexuality is a bit of a mystery. But religion and sex have always had a bizarre and fatal connection,  and the Catholics - more than most - just don't seem able to leave it alone.

Guns (and truncheons) for hire

These days it seems to be a fairly safe bet that if you want to access some dirt on a celebrity, find out the details of trade union activists so they can be black-listed, or even just fancy borrowing a horse for the weekend - all you have to do is 'phone a bent copper.

Even by the usual standards of Tory insensitivity it's pretty staggering that in a week where all these stories are in the news, plans are revealed to put out certain police functions to tendering from private security firms.

Of course dealing with private firms as well as streamlining the whole  business of bribery and corruption will take policing one significant step further away from public scrutiny and accountability. Which I suspect is no accident - it's a process already well-established in the intelligence and security communities where the use of shadowy arms-length private contractors has proved  very convenient in the world of covert and 'dirty' operations.

I can't help recalling that even Machiavlli regarded the dependence of any state for its security on mercenary companies or condottieri was symptomatic of it's moral and political decadence. He had a point.

Changes. Or not.

The more observant of you may have noticed that I have change the 'About Me' on the side panel of this blog. 

It reflects some changes in my life - and I suspect that this might be mirrored with some changes in the subject matter of my posts. There will probably be more about history and education. 

But then again I won't be able to help myself with political posts. And martial arts and bikes remain a big part of my life - so they will continue to creep in too. And 'life and other stuff' has a habit of getting in the way of everything else. 

So maybe no changes at all ...