Juvenilia, Part 1

Every day, I look at the news and wish I hadn’t. I look at social media, and I wish I hadn’t. Then 30 seconds later, I look at social media again. Still wish I hadn’t.

Back in the days when I wrote on this blog regularly, I wrote about a lot of political stuff. I can’t bring myself to do that now. The world is so horrible, so depressing and so embarrassing that I find myself unable to engage with it. I can’t even take the piss out of it. If piss-taking changed anything...well, Trump, Putin, May, Farage, Brexit, James Corden... shall I carry on?

So I’m off on a voyage of inner emigration – talking and thinking about other things, to distract myself from the disintegrating world out there. Ah, for a more innocent time...

Well.

Recently, my mum gave me some boxloads of my old school exercise books, photos, newspaper clippings. And so, I intend to share some of the highlights with you. Consider this a Bildungsroman –a portrait of the arsehole as a young man, if you will.

The picture at the top, for example, is from what appears to be my first ever school book – summer 1981, when I was in Class 1 at Hardwick Primary School. As you can see, I saw some men with bagpipes. "Nice" - I am sure you will agree with my teacher.

If bagpipes are not enough to prove that I – like Tiny Tempah – lived a “very very very wild lifestyle”, what about this? My brother’s third birthday party (he’s now 38) – which was attended by “some frends”. All of whom, it would seem, were dressed as garden gnomes. That was the 80s, young people.  

Let’s move forward in time a little. Here is an account of what I did on a weekend in 1983. If I remember rightly (and it’s entirely possible that I do not), this was the year that I vomited all over Mrs Almond as we lined up to leave the swimming pool. If Mrs Almond is reading this, I am very sorry. The memory of puking on you still haunts me.

If only I could go back to those days, when all I had to worry about was not wanting to go to Needham Market – and then being bored when I did have to go there.

Having said that, I feel that there is a real Joycean quality to the work here. Nothing much happens, but we are relentlessly, inescapably inside the consciousness of the narrator, who may or may not be unreliable. Even at eight years of age, I showed a precocious tendency towards modernism. And utter self-absorption. 

Moving on a few more years, here we are at secondary school in 1987, doing maths under the late Larry Veale. He retired at the end of that year, having started teaching at Boston Grammar in 1952. He was – quite literally – old school. Certainly, culture had changed dramatically between when I went into that school in 1987 and when I came out in 1994. 

While these days, school children occupy themselves with iPads, sexting and deradicalisaton programmes, back in 1987, we drew triangles. Lots and lots and lots of triangles. Big ones, little ones – but all three-sided and covered in angles. 

As you can see, I was shit at it.

Ban This Sick Filth

When I was a kid, I read comics like the Beano.

Before I get started, I have a confession. Once, I told people at my school that I had had a letter published in the Beano about dressing up as a ghost and frightening my family. That was a lie and I am sorry to everyone I misled. I don’t know why I lied about it – especially when it could so easily have been disproven by reference to back issues. I have been carrying that around with me for over 30 years now, and I feel a lot better getting it off my chest.

Anyway, my kids Roger Junior and Tancred also read comics. They are 8 and 6 years old, respectively. It seems like only yesterday I was telling you about how boring new-born babies are, about potty training, about pieces of rubbish found in nursery gardens. It’s like you, me, them and Oh Dear. How Sad. Never Mind.  are all growing up together, isn’t it? It’s kind of like a Bildungsroman, only longer and without anyone ever really learning anything.

Dr Strange-Bean is not even a pun

I was glancing through Tancred’s copy of the latest issue of Mega! comic. You may not be familiar with this periodical. You may (on browsing it in your local newsagent perhaps) believe that by mistake you have picked up a 30-page advert for Lego.

The whole thing reeks of "will this do?" And I should know. 

It is not, however, my purpose today to complain about the bombardment of young children with marketing messages for Mario, Skylanders, Minecraft, Sonic the Hedgehog and whatever Marvel character happens to be being whored all over the place at any given time.

It’s not even my aim to draw attention to what appears to be the laziest photo feature I have ever seen

– this one, where Mr Bean’s face is superimposed on various pop culture figures familiar to children and a weakly punning name (involving the word “Bean”) added.

No, what I would like to draw your attention to is this cartoon strip, entitled “The Poo Crew”.

This concerns the adventures of a group of anthropomorphic stools. There they all are:

• Colonel Kernel - So called, I presume, because of the oft-remarked indigestibility of sweetcorn kernels
• MC Plopz and Big L.O.G - Some kind of faecal hip-hop collective.
• iFloat – Not really sure what iFloat’s deal is as he doesn’t seem to feature in the story. I can only surmise that he is buoyant.
• Dumpo – A kind of everyman turd, from whose perspective the story appears to be told. 
• Runny Ronnie – This name is fairly self-explanatory.

Now, this is very much the sort of thing I would have made up as a teenager. Indeed, my sons find few things in life as amusing as toilet functions. The magazine also came with a small plastic toy version of MC Plopz.

This all appeals to my non-parental side in a way, and yet I find it a little shocking. Back in the 80s or 90s, Spitting Image produced a sketch called “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turds”, but that was in a late-night show for adults. This is in a comic for young kids. 

I would also like to draw your attention to the liberal use of the word “fart”. When I was young, this was deemed a rude word.

Anyway, as is often the case with these things, the story made no sense at all – in the end Big L.O.G saved the day by pouring a tin of beans over himself. This frightened off the rat and snake antagonists of the strip (I didn’t catch their names) for whom a living, speaking, bespectacled shit covered in beans is infinitely more disturbing than one that is not.

Oh and before anyone asks, I am claiming the right to reproduce these images under the Fair Use terms of the Copyright, Designs andPatents Act 1988 (as amended) – specifically Section 30 (for the purposes of criticism or review) and 30a (for the purposes of caricature, parody or pastiche), as well as the common law public interest defence – re the fact that parents are probably unaware of the contents of the comics they buy their kids and might be somewhat surprised to learn of them. So any lawyers reading this – go fuck yourselves.

Shocked by what I had seen, I put down Tancred’s copy of Mega! and had a look at Roger Jr’s copy of Toxic, wherein I began to read Team Toxic’s adventures in “Day of the Bottoms”.

Look at that - I got to the end of a post without mentioning Brexit or fascism. 

That Joke Isn’t Funny Any More

Bloody Foreigner - coming here wanting to know what love is

I tried not to write any more blogs about Brexit, really I did.

I’m not one of those people who want to rerun the referendum or stage a military coup to overturn the result (although I do confess to saying that a few times on June 23). I have enough respect left for democracy to accept that the rules of the game whereby if your side loses, you accept the result and move on.

Hell, I even gave serious consideration to voting leave. When I heard the result, I will confess to a little frisson of excitement about what would come next – I’ve always had a soft spot for Schumpeter’s idea of creative destruction.

In fact, I now see – and I hope to god that the Americans take this lesson on board quickly –that more often than not, attempts at creative destruction just result in destruction.

In our case, of anything resembling the kind of liberal political values which have held British society together for the last 70 years and which people like me have taken for granted as defining the sort of country we live in. In the USA’s case, it could be “human life on earth itself” if that fucknugget Trump gets elected president – a proposition which still sounds like something JG Ballard would have not bothered writing a story about on account of it being too far-fetched.

Still, if we are all reduced to radioactive smears on the wall within the year, we would at least not have to witness any more parades of smirking wannabe fascists like this week’s Conservative Party conference.

No, I have gone along with Brexit. I was relatively pleased when Theresa May become prime minister, instead of Boris Johnson or any of the other maniacs left at the wheel of the clown car. I had assumed that the immigrant-baiting we’ve seen over the last couple of months was for show – to please the angry mob with promises of something, sometime, and to scare the European Commission into settling on better terms. That it was just more politician talk that would end up in nothing much.

Until this week. The last straw for me was the idea that businesses should have to report on foreigners they employ doing jobs that could be done by British people, floated by the home secretary, a person called Amber Rudd.

The scales fell from my eyes at that moment. This is really happening. They really want people to be hounded out of their jobs and their homes until they leave the country. People I had assumed were liberal-democratic politicians who would – when it counted – stand up for the values I had assumed we had in common, would genuinely rather see ethnic cleansing on our streets than put their fucking seats at risk.

The country voted, by a narrow margin, to leave the EU. It did not vote for some atavistic, blood and soil, Alf Garnett dreamworld. There must be people who voted leave who do not want what Brexit is turning out to be, who will speak out. Because to my eyes, “Brexit means Brexit” means “Brexit means fascism”.

Do not think for a moment that it couldn’t happen here. The opposition is giving up on parliamentarism in favour of a movement on the streets (and if you look at the form, Black on Red street action tends to work out badly for the lefties when things get serious). Supposedly liberal people are calling for democratic decisions to be voided and while others think that a 52-48 margin means that all discussion of what the leaders put forward is beyond the pale. 

It’s not just the Tories who are contributing to the Weimarisation of this country. We don't realise where we're heading, because we arrogantly believe that it could never happen here - because we're British. 

Are we that stupid and passive and short-sighted that we will sleepwalk into this AGAIN before the last veterans of the Second World War are in their graves?

Apparently, this is my 200th post. Happy anniversary to me. 

The Old Is Dying And The New Cannot Be Born

So...Brexit then... I have to say (along with everyone else in the universe) I did not expect that.

I admit that the last four blogs I wrote on this topic were penned (fingered?) firm in the certainty that Remain was going to win and that the status quo ex ante would soon reassert itself like it always does.

Except it didn’t.

Brexit as it has come to pass is an abomination. I didn’t have to be, but it is. There is seemingly no plan for what to do now, despite the Eurosceptics having had 30 years since the passage of the Single European Act to prepare for this moment.

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear

He was funny in American Pie

So said the Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who would surely have interpreted Brexit as a “morbid symptom” like fascism was in the aftermath of the First World War.

Oh, there he goes - how far did we get before he mentioned fascism again?

But I think that it’s a valid comparison at the sociological level (if not the practical political YET) because this vote is only a vote FOR the UK leaving the EU on the surface. Its true nature is not a vote FOR anything, but a vote AGAINST everything. It is a vast NO - a howl of rage, frustration and anguish at the perceived state of our society from a whole host of different and often incompatible perspectives.

In the brutal light of hindsight, it was entirely rational – if utterly cynical – of the Leave campaign to avoid putting forward any visionof what a post-Brexit UK would look like. Not as cynical as admitting within hours of the result that they had no intention of keeping the promises that were made, but getting there.

Only as a purely destructive force, an instinctive lashing-out could Leave have won. Any positive programme would have given the game away and alienated a part of their angry brigade into making a more-or-less rational choice between commensurable options, instead of just putting on a Halloween party for the collective Id.

But here we are.

Well, ok Leavers – you’ve smashed the system. You’re in charge now. What are we going to do?

Perhaps this will release the pent-up energies of that half of the British population who have been excluded and downtrodden by the EU and the political elite. Perhaps we will see a flourishing of creativity as we, the people, take the initiative and start to forge a new destiny.

Or perhaps not.

I fear not. Ever experience to date suggests that - rather than being capable of rising to the challenge it has set itself - the British public is like a toddler who has (i) been denied a second packet of crisps, and (ii) has then shat in his hands, (iii) wiped it on his face and the furniture and (iv) is screaming “MUMMY CLEAN ME UP NOW!”

I feel it’s only fair to point out that this scenario has never happened with my kids – in all of its details.

Who do they expect to make everything better? Who exactly is going to run this country you’ve taken back?

Postwar consumerism and our collective inability to realise that the party is over have generated such a sense of entitlement that we take for granted everything we have and see everything we don’t have as a conspiracy against us.

And when it doesn’t get better – because Vote Leave don’t deliver any of the things the Brexiters voted for; because the immigrants are still here, offending you by speaking Polish; because there are even fewer jobs to go round; because all the hospital staff have left to work in Germany – who will be the first to cry “betrayal”?

Even if Brexit doesn’t end in disaster, it will get worse before it gets better.

I might manage to be constructive about this next time and think about how we can all pull together to make the best of it - because there are opportunities alongside the risks and at the end of the day we are all stuck with each other for better or worse. Part of me wants to look be constructive, part of me wants to take the piss out of the tantruming Remainers who are now ironically keen on overturning democracy - and part of me wants to entitle this blog "I For One Welcome Our New Dipshit Overlords". I guess this is my compromise.

For now, as we prepare to turn London in the Pyongyang of Europe, I will leave you with these thoughts from 19th Century constitutionalist Walter Bagehot:

A people never hears censure of itself. No one will tell it that the educated minority whom it dethroned governed better or more wisely than it governs. A democracy will never, save after an awful catastrophe, return what has once been conceded to it, for to do so would be to admit an inferiority in itself, of which, except by some almost unbearable misfortune, it could never be convinced.

Welcome Back My Friends To The Shitshow That Never Ends...

A week certainly is a long time, in anti-politics just as much as in politics.

I wrote one version of this post last Wednesday and planned to publish it on Thursday or Friday. Then someone murdered an MP, allegedly shouting “Britain First” and then (on court record) giving his name as “death to traitors, freedom for Britain”.

Suddenly, the warnings I had jotted down that neither losing side would accept the result of Thursday’s referendum – such was the corrosion of commitment to democratic compromise and conspiratorialism the campaign had exposed – looked like truisms hardly worth stating.

Can the liver of British society filter out all this venom, or will it succumb to cirrhosis? Both sides have already got their respective Dolchstosslegendes to blame the stupid or “confused” voters or the establishment and the experts in its pockets ready, and are no doubt preparing their respective Werwolf Organisations to carry on stay-behind operations in future enemy territory.

If anything, the whole shitshow has demonstrated how thin the veneer of commitment to democratic and liberal values – when the chips are really down - is among large parts of the British public.

Well, to hell with you all:

• To hell with the Remainers who think that people who don’t agree with them are too thick to be allowed to vote.
• To hell with the Brexiters who are so irresponsible that they will cynically whip up a latent racism that their leaders (probably) don’t even believe in for votes
• AND to hell with the smirking abstainers, making their impotence a badge of honour, who would rather preserve their immaculate lack of responsibility for anything than have to make a serious choice.

A place for sanctimonious posturing, more like

It’s clear to me (now) that political apathy and the lack of difference between the parties are the only reasons we don’t have to endure this sort of theatre of hate every five years. I suppose Scotland gave us some hints of what would happen – where plenty of ultras are still denying the validity of the result two years on. We should do more to foster apathy and to lower the stakes in future.

But this time, the stakes are really high.

If you don’t stand up for what you have or what you want, then what you get is what you deserve.  

I have voted Remain for reasons relating to me and my family. You may disagree, and that’s your right. If you disagree, use what leverage you have to bring about your favoured outcome. I can respect people who vote Leave, even if they’re voting for reasons I think are bad reasons. I have no respect for people who stand by and dodge responsibility. So I will say it again:

If you don’t stand up for what you have or what you want, then what you get is what you deserve.  

I Decided To Vote Remain

I voted Remain, despite the referendum still being over a week away. “How is that possible?” I hear you ask.

Well, I have a standing postal vote – meaning that I get all my ballot papers a couple of weeks in advance and send them in, by means of an extremely complicated but nevertheless freepost envelope. 

I know that this offends some people’s sensibilities – did our forefathers fight and die so that I could avoid having to walk to a local primary school after work once every five years?

LOL his name is funny

Well, for anyone who holds postal voters in disdain, let me remind you that were it not for postal votes Austria would have a rebranded neo-Nazi as president. What’s more, it now has a man whose name sounds almost exactly like “bell end”, which I regard very much as a successful killing of two birds with one stone.

I genuinely agonised over the decision, and weirdly it was my own previous blog that convinced me more than anything. Yes, I am THAT GOOD.

The process of sorting my thoughts out to a point where I was roughly satisfied enough with them to put them in front of you, dear readers, showed me that I had to choose between the two options that are ACTUALLY in front of me, not the options I might like.

Firstly, as someone who runs a business, it is in my interests to avoid economic instability. If companies stop investing or start leaving the UK, me and my employees and shareholders will suffer. End of. The UK might be able to negotiate trade deals with the EU and the rest of the world, but in the meantime, the businesses that I trade with will have stopped spending money while they wait and see what happens.

That is a totally pragmatic argument, based on economic self-interest. GDP statistics and headline figures are irrelevant to me. You might disagree.

Secondly, for me, the Brexit campaign has squandered whatever merit its arguments might have had by pandering to and stoking anti-immigrant racism. You can’t vote for Brexit without implicitly supporting that agenda, because a vote for Brexit will lead to people coming to power who draw whatever legitimacy they have from THAT impulse.

A clean and noble Brexit option is not on the table – in THIS referendum, the one that is ACTUALLY HAPPENING, leaving the EU is inextricably entwined with social authoritarianism and nativism. 

That is, with the first steps on the road to fascism. Before you lose your minds, let me clarify: a vote for Brexit is not a vote for fascism. BUT it's a vote which makes it more likely and predictably so. 

Because when the UK is out of the EU and finds that it still can’t stop large scale legal or illegal immigration, what then? The inevitable next step will be to turn on people who are already here. And where will that lead? 

I live in Bradford, by the way, before anyone says I don't know what the effects of native and immigrant communities refusing to communicate are really like. 

So that is a “values” argument – about the sort of country I want to live in. I am sad that Brexit has ended up meaning what it does. But it does. I don’t want to be complicit in handing power to people who will make everything worse. I am not voting for THAT.

The alternative

The EU may be shit, but the alternative is even shitter. 

I’m voting for the status quo because the alternative will almost certainly make life horrible. If that’s just a vote “against” Iain Duncan Smithism and not a vote “for” anything, well I accept the charge of week-on-week inconsistency.

That’s what I think. If you think I’m wrong, that’s fine. I don’t think you’re stupid or malicious because you disagree with me - and I'm sorry if I called anyone who isn't one a fascist. I hope we can still be friends afterwards.

Just one more of these EU referendum posts to come next week and then that’s it!

Whoever Wins We Lose

That was the strapline for 2004’s “AVP: Alien vs Predator” - a showdown between two hideous, misanthropic powers in which ordinary people like you and I feature only as collateral damage. Does that sound familiar?

Yes, it's another post about the EU referendum. 

Given the choice between having a living embryo implanted in me which would eventually gnaw its way out of my chest and being hunted for sport, I would probably have to come down in support of the Predator.

But when it comes to voting for Brexit or Bremain, it’s not quite such a clear-cut choice. Our ballot papers arrived yesterday and - having just last week urged all of you to vote FOR something rather than AGAINST - I don’t know what I’m going to do. Brabstention is not an option, but Brapathy and Brisgust are exerting a lot of Brinertia on me.

Why it’s hard to vote Brexit

At the risk of offending my bien-pensant friends who suffer no such atavistic urges, there’s a part of me that wants to vote Brexit. It’s roughly the same part that made me an insufferable teenage wannabe Marxist windbag, an insufferable “punker than thou” music snob and various other species of insufferable arse over the years.

It’s that “anti” attitude which makes one’s default position one of opposition to/distaste for whatever exists in favour of an alternative that doesn’t. 

“Some men just want to watch the world burn”, said butler Alfred in The Dark Knight (a film about a man who dresses up as a bat to fight a man who dresses up as a clown). I’m not sure if that’s quite Roger of Sicily, but I certainly am one of those people who is attracted by a desire to see the look on a lot of people’s faces the day after a “Leave” vote.

But then I think about Boris Johnson’s face and Nigel Farage’s face… And I think, as much as I would like to treat “the issues” completely separately from “the personalities”, it’s these awful people who would be the power in the land come June 23rd.

And as well as believing in leaving the EU (debatable in Boris Johnson’s case), most of these people also hold a lot of other opinions I strongly disagree with. Intellectual, libertarian Brexiteers like Douglas Carswell have disappeared, so that voting in favour of leaving the EU cannot be separated from voting in favour of a whole lot of nativist, racist, social-authoritarian, revanchist “back to the Empire” idiocy. 

We do not have the option of voting for one without voting for the other. Some people are happy with that, but I’m not.

The downside of the Singaporean model

A case could be made for a post-EU Britain reviving itself economically and culturally once the dead hand of Brussels was cast off - although the only version I’ve seen to date is a suggestion that we follow the example of Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore, which is hardly a great model for liberals and democrats.

However, the forces that would take power in the event of a Brexit vote have no idea of how they would achieve that. If they do, they’re keeping it quiet, because I can only assume that it would be to subject the UK to the sort of neo-Thatcherite deregulatory shock therapy the former Eastern Bloc underwent after 1989.

The Brexit camps encompass a lot of different positions, but it’s the entitled, right wing, economic know-nothings who would be in power in Brexit wins. That’s the problem. And that's why I have trouble voting for them.

Why it’s hard to vote Bremain

“I'll forgive and forget, If you say you'll never go. 'Cos its true what they say - It's better the devil you know” said Kylie Miongue in her 1990 number 2 hit, “Better The Devil You Know”.

If taken literally, that is surely one of the most pessimistic and retrograde messages ever committed to CD, vinyl and cassette. Yet it is the sum total of the Remain camp’s argument: everything will be worse if you seek change. You are powerless to improve your lot in life, so surrender to your fate.

Thanks a lot Kylie.

Let me make one thing clear: I love the many different cultures and peoples of Europe. I feel a shared sense of pride in our cultural and economic achievements and a shared sense of shame and humility in the face of our crimes and tragedies. It’s obvious that in a globalised world, some things are better done at a supranational level. I love the German language, French wine, Spanish holidays, Scandinavian crime dramas, Greek philosophy, Balkan brass bands, full English breakfasts, Italian coffee, Slovenian avant-garde industrial music, Swiss AND Belgian chocolate and more. I think I am as far from a Little Englander as it’s possible to be. A real union of Europe would be a magnificent thing. 

But the European Union we actually have is a rotten, corporatist, undemocratic mess. Surely the negativity of the Remain campaign reflects the fact that when you consider the EU on its own merits - as opposed to the spirit it is intended to (but does not) embody or the merits of others it ascribes to itself (eg lack of European war) - it's pretty hard to get enthusiastic about. 

Within the EU, the idea that every political problem has a technocratic solution has metastatized into a self-congratulatory, anti-pluralist “because we say so”, embodied in Jean-Claude Juncker’s warning that “deserters will not be welcomed back” in the event of a Brexit vote.

If the technocrats were competent you might have more sympathy, but they’re not. The story of Greece is just the most glaring example - allowed into the Euro on data everyone knew was false to prove a political point, now reduced to penury for the sake of international bondholders. And that’s what happens to non-deserters...

Europe will continue to exist and Britain will continue to be a part of Europe whether the UK is in the EU or not. Whether the EU survives much longer with or without the UK is another question entirely. 

So endorsing our continued participation in this arrogant shambles is something I find it hard to put my vote towards. 

There you have it: that’s my dilemma. If I follow my own advice and vote FOR one side rather than AGAINST the other, I am unavoidably voting FOR something I find repulsive. 

Not as repulsive as John Hurt’s gruesome demise in Alien, but not far off.