Sir David Amess: Blaming social media is a distraction

The murder on 15 October of Sir David Amess, the MP for Southend West, was horrifying by any metric. A 25-year-old has been charged and will be tried next spring, with the Terrorism Act invoked.

The killing came almost five and a half years after the murder of Yorkshire MP Jo Cox, in a crime where the UK’s Crime Prosecution Service subsequently confirmed that her killer is officially classified as a terrorist.

One MP killed by a far-right terrorist; another by an alleged Islamic terrorist. There have been other murders and attempted murders – in 2010, MP Stephen Timms barely survived stabbing by an Islamic terrorist. In 2000, Andy Pennington, the aide of Lib-Dem MP Nigel Jones, was murdered trying to protect Mr Jones, by a disgruntled constituent who seemed to have forgotten the help the MP had given him previously.

But in the wake of the death of Ms Cox, there were calls for a kinder, gentler politics.

In the wake of the death of Sir David, there have been calls for a kinder, gentler public and political discourse.

Only days after the latest killing, Mark Francois MP called for a new ‘David’s Law’ in memory of his friend, to curb online targeting of MPs and end anonymity on social media.

And here is where we run into problems.

Let’s be clear: the political and public discourse in this country has been dreadful for years. And the online abuse of politicians – or anyone else – is unacceptable. Threats of death or rape are inexcusable. Any improvement would be most welcome.

But whatever Mr Francois might like to think, it’s probably not Facebook or Twitter where someone was groomed to be a terrorist and the murderer of Sir David, should that be proven in court to be the case.

Yet the MP for Rayleigh told the House of Commons that he was “minded to drag Mark Zuckerberg [CEO of Facebook] and Jack Dorsey [CEO of Twitter] to the bar of the house … if necessary kicking and screaming so they can look us all in the eye and account for their actions or rather their inactions that make them even richer than they already are”.

There’s a certain lack of self-awareness here – and not just in terms of the violent actions he was prepared to carry out – but because Mr Francois is himself a rabble-rouser, to use a rather old-fashioned term.

In 2019, he compared Luxembourg’s Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission from 2014-2019, to Hitler, noting that “Herr Juncker in the bunker would say that, wouldn’t he?”

He told his fellow Conservative MP Phillip Hammond, a minister at the time, “up yours” on Radio 4 regarding Brexit and, on another occasion, went full Luftwaffle, noting: “My father was a D-Day veteran. He never submitted to bullying by any German. Neither will his son!”

Bombast and rhetoric to amuse the masses. But not grown-up politics.

I have no reason to believe that Mr Francois isn’t deeply upset by the brutal murder of his friend, but he himself is part of a deeper, wider problem.

And he is far from being alone. In the wake of the murder, Labour’s deputy leader Angela Rayner was accused by several commentators of aiding this situation with her recent description of Conservatives as “scum”.

No – it didn’t cause the murder in any way (it seems that the accused had been planning something for two years, so it’s not the pandemic either), but it doesn’t help.

As Andrew Rawnsley makes clear in today’s Observer, such language is not new. Winston Churchill suggested Labour would institute a British Gestapo, while Nye Bevan called the Conservatives “lower than vermin”. Neither played well with the public – but neither had anything to do with a social media that didn’t exist.

But back to Mr Francois. His party leader, Prime Minister Boris Johnson, has had many columns published in the Daily Telegraph containing lies – ‘EU to outlaw prawn cocktail crisps’ is one of the more obviously egregious.

The Daily Mail also excels in this – and in whipping up hatred and distrust. It’s spent decades demonising public service workers – teachers and social workers in particular. I recall my mother singing from the Mail hymn sheet about how teachers, untrained in sport, were refusing to do unpaid overtime, meaning that we didn’t win much at the Olympics.

As the UK has seen in recent years, splashing the cash – via the National Lottery, to fund training properly – Is What Actually Works.

To be fair to my mother, when she heard counter points – such as why should anyone do unpaid overtime in something they’re not qualified in – she acknowledged that those points were logical.

But are we less respectful than previous generations? Social media amplifies things, but otherwise, I really don’t think it’s so simple.

In the last year of his life, my father was grumbling about Gary Lineker’s politics. “I can’t respect people with different views to mine,” he opined. “Oh,” I responded, “so you don’t respect me?”

That, apparently, was “different” – presumably in that blood somehow defies one’s own logic somehow. But, y’know ... Mail readers. In those last months, I started taking him a regular copy of Private Eye. We never discussed the contents, but he actually stopped the carers picking him up a Mail every day. Something had jolted him – and one day, he ruefully hinted that it was the Eye, when he told me not to pick him up a Mail when I went to the shops for him.

Yet I also recall, a week or so before the 2016 referendum, his shouting at me, over the phone: “I don’t want to be ruled over by the Nazis!”

And I think back to some of the things he said over the decades and it was little different to what happens on social media – albeit without the ‘coarse’ language. Because for my parents, saying ‘fuck’ was far worse than much else.

Furriners were to be despised (well, until you met them personally). The English, the English, the English were best ... “I wouldn’t give tuppence for all of the rest”. As Flanders and Swann put it. Satirically. Yet my mother in particular seemed to hold it ups as a second national anthem.

Long enough in the tooth, I can look back and think longingly of the era when the Telegraph was a very fine newspaper, which absolutely kept opinion and reportage separate. How sad to look at the paper’s online forums now and see a nasty, anti-intellectual bear pit. How sad to see a once-great publication as a propaganda sheet for a serially lying prime minister.

For clarity here, I am no social media saint – but a lot of what I’ve written here expresses why I get so exasperated that I swear about and indeed, to, politicians. What recourse do we have when the prime minister can lie in the House of Commons with apparent impunity, yet anyone saying, in the House of Commons that he does so, is punished?

Why is wearing a tie in the House of Commons (for men, obviously) important, yet the prime minister lying is less so? And let’s be quite clear ... Boris Johnson lies almost as readily as he moves his lips – and that is a fact. Most of his Cabinet are little better.

But the Murdochification of British media – together with the demands of 24-hour digital news media and the need for click bait for revenues – are other factors that have brought us here.

Social media is without doubt a problem that humanity has nowhere near solved yet, and it needs dealing with, but it is *not* the origin of the issues that we face now – specifically in the UK – in terms of public and political discourse, and pretending it is, can only be convenient for others who are part of the problem.

The murder of Sir David Amess was – as every murder is – awful. But to try to pretend that it is somehow and primarily the result of the failings of social media issues is, while those failings most certainly exist, a deflection from reality.

 

 

The Tories care about people? Well, some of them don't

If anyone ever tells you that the Conservatives don’t care about people, ignore them. The Conservative and Unionist Party most certainly care about people. 

Or at least, some members of the Conservative and Unionist Party care about some people.

 

Unfortunately, if you fall outside the select band, then it really is a case of ‘screw you’. 

 

And the past few weeks have offered two perfect examples of that.

 

At the end of September, I received an email, ostensibly from the secretary of state for health, Sajid Javid MP, on the basis that I had been advised to shield last year, when the pandemic got into full swing.

 

Let’s be entirely clear: I had cancer in 2018. “Had”, in that I am currently still free of it after major surgery – and a massive thank you to my GP practice and my local hospital for ensuring that checks have continued throughout the pandemic – though it could still come back.

 

I have high blood pressure (only diagnosed in 2019, so I’m going to blame the bleedin’ Tories) and I’m overweight.

 

But not exactly being at death’s door. I have had just two days off sick during the pandemic, continuing to work full time throughout, from home – and indeed, being part of a very small team that has won an external award for the work that we have done during that same pandemic.

 

Though of course, if you read the Express, Mail, Sun, Telegraph or other such publications, you’ve probably been told that nothing like that has happened and that anyone working from home hasn’t been ... well, working.

 

For more clarity: although I live in a very small flat, I’m fortunate enough to be able to work at home with a decent physical set up, as I’ve previously been a freelance journalist, self-employed. The OH, though never freelance, was also in the same position in terms of his ability to work from home, prior to his retirement in June 2020, which was planned 12 months before.

 

But let’s consider Javid’s email advice to those who had been shielding – in other words, those who had been described by their own GPs as “extremely clinically vulnerable” to COVID-19.

 

“You should continue to follow the same general guidance as everyone else,” it declares. This can be found at https://www.gov.uk/coronavirus. But “in addition to any condition specific advice you may have been given by your specialist in recent weeks ... as someone with a health condition you might also want to think about extra things you can do to keep yourself and others safe.”

 

Okay ... so what might those be?

 

“This could include:

• considering whether you and those you are meeting have been vaccinated – you might want to wait until 14 days after everyone’s second dose of a COVID-19 vaccine before being in close contact with others;
• considering continuing to practise social distancing if that feels right for you and your friends;
• asking friends and family to take a rapid lateral flow antigen test before visiting you; 
• asking home visitors to wear face coverings;
• avoiding crowded spaces.”

So, these are things to “consider”, right?

 

To start with, there is no mention of clinically vulnerable people – or members of their family – being expected to travel to workplaces.

 

There is a sense that those who are ‘genuinely’ clinically vulnerable will be old, retired and not with members of their household expected to attend an external workplace.

 

Still, I suppose it made a change from the paper snail-mail letters ‘signed’ by “Matt” [Hancock] and Robert Jenrick.

 

However, it is a total abrogation of any responsibility for public health from the health secretary. 

 

A couple of weeks ago, having been informed that I must be in the physical workplace at least two days a week, I sat in a room for a hybrid meeting, where the social distancing was not what it should have been. Given my personal circumstances, I was very close to freaking, walking away from the physical meeting and joining it online.

 

I have heard the argument that I need to learn to live with the risks. Yet this seems to assume that I need to learn to live with me increasing the risks to my partner too. That is ethically appalling.

And all it would have taken was for the UK government to say that, if you had shielded last year, then if remotely (there's obviously a joke here) possible, it would be best to continue working from home.

 

Instead, people have been put into an invidious situation whereby employers can demand they do something that increases the risk – not only to themselves, but to others in their household who don't get to make that choice.

And of course, at the time of writing, COVID-19 cases, hospitalisations and deaths are rising.

 

And nobody saw this coming as a consequence of ‘Freedom Day’.

 

However, this is not the only example of the state of the UK’s government. Just before the start of the Conservative Party conference in Manchester, Prime Minister Boris Johnson was challenged in a television interview on how to measure his promised ‘levelling up’ between the country’s regions.

He answered: “I’ve given you the most important metric – never mind life expectancy, never mind cancer outcomes – look at wage growth.

“Wage growth is now being experienced faster by those on lower incomes. It hasn’t happened for 10 years or more. That is what I mean by levelling up.”

As it happens, the claim about wage growth is a lie – but then again, his lips were moving – but what a thing to openly state: that life expectancy, falling in the UK for those not as well-to-do as the prime minister, and cancer outcomes* don’t matter.

 

It’s almost like the Conservatives ... some Conservatives ... really don’t give a flying one about the masses.

 

* Just a note to say, let’s not forget that, while his then wife was being treated for cancer, Boris Johnson was busy shagging another woman.

** And another note to say that the cartoon used above is from @chrisriddell50, and I hope he forgives me for using it here.

 

 

 

Richard Osman scores again with joyous second novel

Back in February, I wrote that I’d just read Richard Osman’s debut novel, The Thursday Murder Club, and really enjoyed it, noting that it had surpassed my expectations.

So much so, indeed, that I pre-ordered the Waterstones exclusive signed edition of the second book. Which landed on the doormat a week ago yesterday and which I finished at the weekend.

As it happens, having been reminded that the second book was due, I’d re-read the first – and I believe it’s unique for me to read a book twice within a year, if not for school purposes.

Returning to it though, even after such a short time, saw me laughing. Again. And crying. Again.

And with The Man Who Died Twice, it was a similar experience.

We return to meet once more in the jigsaw room (very shortly after the first book) a group of pensioner friends living in a luxury retirement village: former intelligence agent Elizabeth, former trade union leader and firebrand Ron, former nurse Joyce and not-entirely former psychiatrist Ibrahim.

All are members of an informal club at the village that pores over cold murder cases. Except when the cases in question are not very cold at all.

Stephen Spielberg has bought the rights to both the first two novels – and a third. Apparently, Osman himself gets told in the street about casting options. There’s a popular vote for Helen Mirren to play Elizabeth, apparently ... and to be frank, I wouldn’t disagree.

I also rather like the idea of Judi Dench as Joyce. The Great Gambon would be perfect as Ron and maybe Art Malik as Ibrahim?

The books are good enough to demand such talents.

Oh ... but this book, now.

This time, one of Elizabeth’s exes appeals to her for help after getting in trouble with the secret service and, worse yet, the mafia.

Did he really steal some diamonds ...or not? And if he did, where are they?

As with the first instalment, it’s often laugh-out-loud funny, but also makes you cry in places, because the characters are believable and, while flawed, you care about them.

There is moral complexity – and the characters themselves are also complex, never ducking thoughts of impending mortality or the dreadful toll of dementia. The author never lets such threads dominate his story, but they are present and dealt with gently and respectfully.

This is a brilliant second take from Osman and I heartily recommend it – and bear in mind that that comes from a crime fic fan who worships Chandler, Simenon and Mankell. It is no mean praise at all.

I can hardly wait for the third instalment – as I can hardly was it to spend more time with Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim and Ron.

The first book reviewed

Politics in sport? It's not as new as wannabe culture warriors would have you think

In 1895, rugby clubs in the north of England made the decision to break away from the Rugby Football Union (RFU) to form the Northern Union. What they created became rugby league. And the reason for the split?

Well, most of the players worked for a living, in the mills and pits. To play rugby competitively, they had to forgo some of their wage.

The northern clubs wanted to make this up to them in the form of what were called broken-time payments. In other words, not some sort of profit, but compensation for wages lost.

 

However, the RFU was having none of it and in 1893, voted against a move to allow such payments.

 

Two years before that, Leeds president James Miller had noted: “It is unreasonable to expect the same ‘amateurism’ from the wage-earning classes as from public school men. It is unfair to expect working men to break time to play football without their being remunerated.”

But the cult of amateurism remained in place in rugby union until 1995 – a century of spiteful, vindictive, petty behaviour that saw players barred from union for as much as playing a single, unpaid game for an amateur rugby league club.

For instance, if someone had played the game recreationally in the north of England, while working as a doctor, and then moved to the south west of the country, they wouldn’t be allowed to play recreational rugby union.

I recall, from my own days as a sports editor (so pre-1999), a pompous ass of an ex-British Army officer defending this, intoning that if someone with such a past wanted to play recreational RU, they could jolly well ‘join the armed services’.

But the point of mentioning this now is that we find ourselves suddenly hearing the cries of ‘keep politics out of football!’ – including from, err, politicians trying to whip up a culture war in the UK.

The cult of amateurism was a political one, because class is political.

To be a successful amateur athlete, you needed time to train – and working-class people didn’t have that luxury since they had to do actual jobs in order, as old Charlie Marx might point out, to keep a roof over their (and their families’) heads and food in their bellies.

Amateurism was not exclusive to rugby. It was dominant in the UK (particularly England) in many sports. For instance, in rowing, Steve Redgrave’s achievements are all the more remarkable given that he came from a working-class background and didn’t go to public school.

In 1882, the Amateur Rowing Association (ARA) was founded and, a year later, it set out a definition of an amateur. To give just a single example of its exclusionary criteria, anyone who had ever been “employed in or around boats, or in manual labour for money or wages, was not an amateur”.

 

So you couldn’t row in ARA competitions if, for instance, you were a Thames lighterman as your job.

 

The issue around class and sport still features in the life of the UK today. How often do you see snotty newspaper stories about rugby union players or golfers or tennis players or F1 drivers – unless, in the case of the penultimate one, it’s snotty English stories about dodgy Scot Andy Murray or, in the last one, the rather non-white Lewis Hamilton?

 

Those sports are – in England at least (it’s particularly a different case in Scotland around golf) – seen as being for A Slightly Better Class of People. In other words, you probably need a bit of dosh and time to participate.

And goodness, look back at cricket and the entire concept of 'gentlemen and players' – amateurs and pros: the snobbery – and the politics – are enshrined in the language.

 

Football, however, remains culturally working class – for all the money coming into the English game from some exceptionally wealthy sources.

 

Think of the many times have there been negative stories about ‘wealthy footballers’ – the only group the UK’s Conservative government ever suggested should give up some of their pay because of COVID-19 – and also a group that routinely sees negative stories about them in the press.

 

And square that if the player in question is black – see the contrast between the Daily Mail’s reporting of how Manchester City duo Raheem Sterling and Phil Foden have spent some of the money they have been paid by their employer.

Today, the Sun, which has rubbished Sterling more than once for being 'flashy', 'unethical' etc, lauded him on its cover of Monday's edition for scoring the winning goal against Croatia in the European Championships. Glass houses spring to mind

 

Let’s be quite clear – racism and politics are interconnected.

 

Culture secretary Oliver Dowden and – of course – PM Boris Johnson are currently fannying around complaining about ‘politicising sport’. In the former’s case, commenting on the reaction of his employer to historic, racist tweets by an England cricketer, and about England players taking the knee, in the latter.

 

It took a passionate yet calm article from England’s football manager Gareth Southgate on the subject – and the reaction to it – to persuade Johnson that, oops-a-daisy, he should actually condemn those who were booing England players taking the knee.

 

Now, as Kenan Malik pointed out in today’s Observer, taking the knee might mean little – and it might mean virtue signalling – but the England team is not a bunch of Marxist anti-capitalists who want to end our way of life, blah blah blah.

 

Though to be fair, I doubt that anyone applauding the suggestion that they are, whichever cretinous Tory MP or shock jock suggests as much, actually has a great deal of a clue as to what ‘Marxism’ actually is. 

 

But there you go – that’s the constituency that this Conservative government’s culture war is being aimed at.

 

The reality is, that as long as sport has existed, politics has been entwined with it – and Malik’s article gives other examples.

 

Of course Dowden has dived in – this is an individual who now has himself pictured in his office, with a whopping big Union flag, much smaller flags of the constituent nations of the UK (watch out Ollie – your leader won’t like that) and a large portrait of the queen – presumably for the simple reason that he believes it to be convenient for his career.

 

He also has a similar relationship with facts as The Dear Leader. Apropos his tweet at the weekend – subsequently deleted – falsely claiming that the Minack Theatre in Cornwall (which hosted a G7 partners’ event) had received government financial aid during the pandemic.

 

It hadn’t. And he hasn’t apologised or made a correction. Just deleted the tweet.

 

But hey – taking the knee is ‘politics’.

 

For my parents, politics in sport was people trying to stop cricket tours to apartheid South Africa. Because somewhere along the line, they'd missed the idea that apartheid itself was ... ‘political’.

 

But that highlights a point: while the German Nobel literature laureate and anti-Nazi Thomas Mann said that “everything is politics”, for many, it doesn’t become so unless and until it challenges their view of the world.

 

It’s only ‘politics’ when women challenge the privileged role men have in society.

 

It’s only ‘politics’ when LGBT+ people dare to raise their heads about the parapet and demand equality.

 

It’s only ‘politics’ when black people call for meaningfully equal treatment.

 

It’s only ‘politics’ when disabled people dare to suggest that they might have their needs considered.

 

It’s only ‘politics’ when a museum wants to take down an external statue of an individual who profited from slavery.

 

But of course, it’s not ‘politics’ when the secretary of state responsible threatens the museum in question over that issue.

The status quo is never ‘politics’.

 

So, if you think that removing the statues of those who profited from selling other human beings for profit is ‘politics’, you probably don’t want to really think about the history of this country.

If you think that England players taking the knee is ‘politics’, you probably don't want to spend time learning about the actual, real history of this country.

 

You want to stay in a history comfort zone – because you perhaps need, for the sake of your own sense of self, to feel that the country of the accident of your birth, is brilliant and far superior to other countries, making you superior to lots of other people.

And if you think that, if some statues are removed, history will end, then you might need help.

 

If this is the case, then the NHS can still get you counselling – even in this time of COVID.

• The photo at the top is of protestors dumping a statue of Bristolian slave trade Edward Colston into the harbour in 2020, from Kier Gravil – ksagphotos.

 

Are you from the real world – or not?

Are you real? Do you live in the real world? In order that we might all be able to judge – what paper do you read?

I’m only asking because, on 7 May, just after the various elections across England, Scotland and Wales, I found myself deep in Twitterworld.

There, one (on the surface) quite coherent contributor was asking why, in the Hartlepool by-election, Labour had “put up a Remainer in a Brexit town?”

 

That was a coherent question and I was drawn in – more fool me, perhaps.

 

But then they continued: “Did they do that deliberately so Starmer could pin the blame for any defeat on the candidate rather than him? It was a gross error of judgement. But the fact is that the Lab party only represent Guardian readers, not real people.”

 

Oh dear. To which I responded by positing the obvious question (if you have a brain): “What are ‘real people’?”

 

Since I read the Guardian, does that make me ‘unreal’ – or is such ‘unrealness’ balanced out by my not only reading the Guardian, but a wide variety of other media too? After all, I still sometimes look at the Telegraph culture sections for the opera!

 

“If there is such a concept [as real people] and it isn’t ALL people, then what are ‘unreal people’?” I asked. “What would that actually mean?”

 

But then I found myself getting rather engaged. So I mused that it would be fun to try the concept “based on newspaper readership: what paper would the most ‘real people’ read ...? The Times? The Sun? The Mail? The Mirror? What newspaper makes you most ‘real’?

“What about FT readers? How real or unreal would they be? And as for the Express ...”

 

I have a subscription for Private Eye – where does that put me on the spectrum of real to unreal? Honestly, I’m wondering if I and Ian Hislop are about to fade away into unrealness.

 

The poster in question has still not responded.

 

The thing is, this all sounds like a bit of a laugh. But it isn’t. Earlier today, I looked back at the account that had tweeted this nonsense and discovered that it is currently lauding anti-lockdown demonstrators and similar idiots.

 

Such phrases have become a regular riposte from people with no actual argument. I’ll go further: it is almost a boast that they have no logical argument – and let’s face it, to have a proper argument would risk making them a “girly swot” and we know where that doesn’t get you.

 

At the most basic level, it ‘others’: it says that some people are not “real”. It promotes a sense that, if some people don’t share the same views as you do, then they are not as good as you. And it is widespread in social media.

 

It’s all part of – or at least connected to – a deeply anti-intellectual, anti-fact, anti-democratic and anti-free speech conspiracy culture. 

 

It’s also no distance from the similar comment heard for years of: ‘in the real world’.

 

Let’s ask the same questions: if there is a ‘real world’, then what is ‘the unreal world’?

 

Does ‘the real world’ include a favella in Brazil? Does it include astronauts in outer space? Does it include Trump’s gold lift? Does it include children scouring waste dumps for things to salvage and sell to survive? Does it include those with the dosh to live on board luxury private ships all year round, cruising the globe? Does it include people trying to flee persecution for whatever reason? Does it include the nurse using a food bank to help feed her children?

 

Of course, we all know what it means: select from the following word salad – ‘metropolitan, liberal, lefty, artsy, luvvie, elite’.

 

Whatevs.

 

But let’s take just one – that ‘luvvies’ tag. Actors and performers, who seem to be mostly quite politically/socially progressive – possibly because the trade actually demands an ability to empathise/put yourself in someone else’s shoes, though are rarely anywhere near as far left as, say, Vanessa Redgrave – come in for huge stick. And they are most certainly not of the ‘real world’.

 

One assumes that those in ‘the real world’ never watch any sort of thing that involves dodgy presenters – that’s Match of the Day out, then, given Gary ‘woke’ Lineker, but obviously not Top Gear, given the general views of petrolhead star and conservative media columnist Jeremy Clarkson – or almost all films and TV drama and sit-coms.

 

But then again, consistency has nothing to do with this.

 

In the last year of his life, I remember my father ranting that he couldn’t ‘respect anyone who doesn’t have the same beliefs I do!’

 

Having no knowledge at that stage of how it’s best to simply agree with those with dementia, I bridled and rasped back: “So, you don’t respect me, then?”

 

That confused him. Somehow, it’s different with family. Yet of course, that excludes logic, which goes down the toilet – victim to simplistic gammon-faced ranting.

 

The simplistic gammon-faced ranting wouldn’t be important – except that in recent years it has had, and continues to have – a massive influence over the public and political life of this country: across the UK as a whole, but particularly in England, where it seems to be endemic.

 

My parents, Brexit voters both, were not uneducated. My father in particular achieved way more than most of those with whom he grew up with in a tiny, rural Cornish outpost. Little more than a Cornish peasant, he became an ordained Methodist minister and spent his working life moving around England – an incredible achievement.

 

But as with my mother, who came from far less humble a background in east Lancashire, his education was very England-centric. And both maintained a lack of enquiry into anything outside the UK as a whole.

 

I recall, in my late thirties, my mother seeing me reading a book and asking what it was. Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, I replied. My father had never heard of it – my mother seemed almost to blanch in fear.

 

After my father retired, they travelled a little on the Continent – and actually enjoyed it, though it often, in their reports, seemed to have been a revelation that, for instance, Germany was so clean and the Germans so ... friendly.

 

The first time they went was just after my father retired. It was a retirement present from his congregations, a trip to see the 2000 the Oberammergau Passion Play. He was almost terrified beforehand – it was, after all, the land of “the Nazis”.

 

They were neither stupid nor uneducated – but they were ill-served by a very limited and limiting education that severely constrained their horizons. They could list kings and queens of England, but knew almost nothing of the world outside the UK, except where that involved the wonderfulness of the British (English) Empire. And note – that was the what they could cling to as the ‘good bits’.

 

I strongly suspect that, in terms of Brexit and where we are now on a wider scale, this is a situation that was not limited to two people, on an individual level, growing up and being educated at almost opposite ends of England and in quite different socio-economic situations.

 

The English, with their long-term distrust of ‘intellectualism’, have allowed a culture to grow where we now ‘have no more need of experts’. Add to that a sense among (largely) older generations of not knowing what their identity is in a context of devolution and the end of empire, and you have fertile ground for opportunists, nationalists and populists.

‘The real world’ is simply a psychologically monochrome world view, where everyone ‘real’ is a mental mirror image of oneself.

It cannot, therefore, allow for free speech, political plurality and democracy, and any kind of diversity.

 

And that is why ‘real people’ and ‘the real world’ are not simply jokes, but are symptomatic of the problems we face in the UK as a whole – and most particularly in England – and why they need challenging at every turn.

Hold my pint: Mentioning the 'B' word

It has been strictly avoided. A bit like the plague. Or COVID-19 (fingers crossed, until now at least, on a personal level). But there comes a time when the word must be spoken, when the reality must be faced. And that word is ... Brexit.

That’s right, people. Brexit. BREXIT. The absolute bloody clusterfuck that is Brexit.

 

‘Why now?’ you ask – perhaps warily, if you yourself are familiar with the shambles, and are aware that I have avoided it on this blog, choosing indeed to tread lightly because of the divisiveness of the issue.

I made no mention of it at the beginning of this year. I have not said a word here about the UK government having screwed UK fishing communities – and now preparing to screw UK farming communities (and the irony that both these are traditional parts of the constituency of the Conservative Party).

 

That avoidance has been five years in the making – not least because I have also spent a lot of that time trying to understand it through the prism of my Brexit-voting parents (who then died in 2017 and 2018, without hanging around to see the godawful mess that their votes had helped to create) and finding that my attempts to understand them (and myself) is still, even now, largely bound up in trying to understand Brexit and English exceptionalism.

 

So why now ... why today?

 

Because Tim ‘Not-Very-Nice-But-Definitely-Very-Dim’ Martin has decided that, in spite of having been one of businesses’ few high priests for the cult that is Brexit, he now needs EU economic migrants to pull the pints in Wetherspoons, the chain of pubs that he founded, and wants regulations ‘liberalised’ in order to allow that.

 

To be fair, he has a BA in law from the University of Nottingham and qualified as a barrister in 1979 (though has never practiced) so is clearly a Brain of Britain candidate.

 

Not.

 

In 2018, on Brexit, he said that his pubs would stop selling EU-sourced products ... because, well ... The EU! Nose, spite, fucking face.

 

But honestly, this is from an individual who was reported in The Guardian on 30 March this year as having recommitted to a massive, 10-year expansion of ’Spoons, including 75 projects, made up of 18 new pubs and 57 major extensions to existing venues, creating 20,000 jobs.

Oops ... what if you can't fill those jobs, Mr Martin?

 

So it’s hardly difficult to see why he’s suddenly had a change of heart about immigration – okay, less a “change of heart” and more an ‘OMG! My personal pocket!’ religious conversion.

 

And this, girls and boys, is just part of why Brexit is a clusterfuck – because it has been guided by imbeciles and private profiteers who aren’t even intelligent and/or self-aware enough to recognise the impact on their own businesses and profits. Never mind on anyone else. They can't even managed enlightened self interest!.

This is not written from a position ofsnobbery. ’Spoons often do really good cooked breakfasts at a really great price (I’ve enjoyed them before a match in Manchester more than once and in Cardiff during Millennium Magic). And the beer they sell isn’t just dross, such as that 'brewed' by Interbrew.

 

But Martin’s comments illustrate that, while Wetherspoons is essentially a (socially) working class brand, he doesn’t give a toss about that group of people (however you would categorise the working class) and only about his own pocket.

As is clear, given that this is an employer who refuses to pay his own staff extra for working on bank holidays or allow them to have a soft drink while working on really hot days (like today).

 

Brexit in a fucking nutshell.

Sign a petition too get Wetherspoons to pay its workforce for bank holidays

 

Back to the gallery – but Rodin is no blockbuster

As our frenzy of COVID-19 lockdown-easing culture blitz continues, The Other Half and I nipped over to Tate Modern for The Making of Robin exhibition.

A little note: it might feel like a “frenzy”, but while getting out and about a bit, we’re also avoiding the centre of London and venues that would entail using the Tube or crossing central London. Let's all be sensible.

 

Living in east London, Tate Modern is easy for us as it’s a single bus ride and a walk away. I’d deliberately booked for late on the Sunday morning of a bank holiday weekend as that was almost certainly going to be quite quiet. It was. And we also walked most of the way home – but that’s a different story.

 

Now, this is billed as a major exhibition, but while it is interesting, it’s no blockbuster for the uninitiated. That said, we are living through exceptional times, so leeway has to be given as arts organisations try to get back up and running in the face of a deeply anti-arts government in Westminster.

 

The exhibition concentrates on the processes that Auguste Rodin used in creating his iconic sculptures. This means looking primarily at how he created, used and re-used the plaster works that were rarely intended as being finished items.

 

So, for instance, there is an entire display cabinet full of hands that were initially created when he was working on The Gates of Hell. These are really interesting ... but particularly if you’ve seen a finished version of The Gates of Hell. The OH and I are fortunate enough to have visited the Musée Rodin in Paris twice, spending time with castings of many of the works we see represented here in their development phases. Including The Gates of Hell.

 

Personally, I love Rodin’s monumental Balzac ... but can you fully appreciate all the maquettes (both very large and very small – and there are many of them) if you can’t see or haven’t seem one of the final castings?

 

Equally with The Burghers of Calais – although at least visitors to this exhibition can go and view the casting that stands in Victoria Tower Gardens, next to the Houses of Parliament without too much difficulty.

 

For me, the most interesting works shown here in their own right are those representing the Japanese actor and dancer Ohta Hisa, known as Hanako (left). They include works in bronze and glass and are fascinating.

They were unlike any Rodin works we'd seen previously.

It was also good to see a couple of works by Camile Claudel – Rodin's lover and co-worker – yet I find myself wonder whether, by forcing this tiny representation in, the exhibition doesn't do her a disservice rather than a service.

 

Indeed, the OH and I have a long history of finding some curators’ notes impossibly pompous or priggish. Here, this becomes the gallery’s attempt to be ‘woke’ (and I hate myself having to describe it as that).

Further, it actually risks misrepresenting Claudel's life – reducing her problems to her connection with Rodin, rather than noting, for instance, the massive damage done to her by her mother.

 

And seriously, who really needs to be pointed, via QR code, to a chat between two women saying that there was a “gender imbalance” in art in the 19^th century? Not least for an essentially art geeky exhibition ... is Tate really assuming that visitors won’t know that the 19th century was deeply unbalanced in gender terms in general?

 

Equally, do we need a mini lecture on ‘cultural appropriation’? I mean – the examples of Rodin's personal collection of objects from the far east, then turned quite casually into new works are genuinely interesting. But would the gallery also, in such context, mention Ai Weiwei, or is smashing centuries-old Chinese vases and claiming that doing so is a ‘work of art’ okay if you’re Chinese and the centuries-old vases you smash in the name of art are themselves Chinese?

 

Look ... it was great to get back into a gallery. In terms if Tate Modern, the social distancing etc all works well and allows you to feel comfortable, for which I am genuinely grateful, but this exhibition is, in essence, for Rodin geeks. If you haven't seen finished versions of these plaster works, then it's probably not worth visiting.

 

And such things can be done better. See Matisse in the Studio in 2017 at the Royal Academy showed how – my thoughts here.

 

And as for Rodin – some thoughts from the last time the OH and I visited the Paris museum.