Category: Politics

Fiftysomethings - man we is useless.

25/9/2018

This is something I’ve been giving a lot of though to, recently.

My generation which, let’s say for the purposes of this argument, stretches from people aged between 50 and 60, I have a theory about us. And it is this. We are the most fucking useless generation ever. Seriously. I’m talking the UK, but for all I know it’s a worldwide phenomenon.

OK, name one of us who is a colossus. Someone who is indisputably the sine qua non of their field of expertise. I’ve spent six months thinking about it and can’t come up with anyone. I’ve challenged friends when drunk and they’ve been unable to either. They’ve gone away and asked other people and other people have been unable to either.

Not artists, nor writers. Not musicians, nor actors. Not scientists, nor politicians – holy fuck, not politicians. Not gamechangers, innovators, philosophers or truth tellers. The best – and I really do mean this – we’ve been able to come up with is Paul Weller and Hugh Grant. And they’re not exactly Paul Simon or Cary Grant, are they?

In the paper they have a daily birthday list and for six months I’ve perused it waiting for the day when the greatest name on the list is one of my own. It’s a bit like looking for Fulham results. So far, nothing. No-one. Nada.

We do boast some right cunts though. We own half the FTSE 100 directors and similar who have gold-plated their own nests, despite their share prices being god-fucking awful, and them being so grey and mediocre, all the while leaving the proles to eat cake.

And of course, there’s our full set of aces, Boris Johnson, David Cameron, Michael Gove and Nigel Farage – the four cunts of the apocalypse. God it makes you proud.

Here’s my suggestion. Us, my generation. We suck. We’re a busted flush. At our best we’re incompetent. At our worst we’re evil. (And apologies to all the normal fiftysomethings just trying to do their best, to get by, to be nice, good, decent, honest people – please carry on.)

But power? No, I think we’ve proved ourselves incapable. Before we totally fuck up the country - or the world – enough’s enough. Time to step aside. Time to give youth a go. They can hardly do any worse.

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The Siege of Krishnapour - or "we've all rather had enough of experts"

9/7/2018

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I’ve just read The Siege of Krishnapour by JG Farrell – a sort of Flashman meets Carry on up the Khyber – and it contains the most incredible Brexit parable, not least considering it was written in 1970.

The English camp is under siege by ‘mutinous sepoys’ in deepest and darkest India. There is an outbreak of cholera. There are two doctors still alive in the camp. As people start dying of cholera the rest of the camp takes to carrying around cards saying which doctor they want to be treated by should they be afflicted. Each doctor believes they know what causes cholera and from that have deduced a cure. One of them – let’s call him Doctor Boris – is sure that the cause of cholera is poisonous vapours in the air. He is flamboyant and eloquent and does a very good job of convincing all of those around him that he must be right and that his cure must be the way forward. The majority of people in the camp have his name written on their card. The only problem is that his patients mainly die.

The other doctor is more of an expert – let’s call him the Good Doctor – and has been reading up on the latest studies, especially that of Jon Snow, and believes that cholera is a water-borne disease. He shares with the camp lots of dull and dry statistics, and all but bores them to death with his considered suggestion that probably the best way to treat the disease is through rehydration. Many of his patients recover, though not all. Plus, you know, boring.

They even have an evening where both are allowed to present their ideas to the camp – dashing Boris thundering and showboating, evangelical and proselytising, whilst the dry Doctor mumbles and suggests and doubts. Boris has the numbers against him, but he’s a showman, and a charlatan, and people prefer that despite the evidence. Plus, he knows the importance of a grand finale. One, where to prove his case, he drinks the “squits” of a cholera patient. Brings the house down. And his pants shortly after, as he catches cholera.

He orders his daughter to treat him by his own sure-fire method. Grows delirious. Unconscious. Dying. In despair, the daughter calls for the Good Doctor, who changes the treatment to his own method. Boris recovers. Wakes up and praises his daughter for following out his instructions.

The daughter admits that it was the Good Doctor who saved him. Boris is furious, demands that his daughter goes back to the leeches and the juju and whatever else make up Boris’s own treatment. The daughter complies. Boris falls again into a coma. The daughter again calls on the Good Doctor. His treatment again leads to Boris’s recovery. Boris is furious. Calls his daughter a traitor and forbids her to go against his words again. She doesn’t. Boris dies. (At this point, it should be said, I stood up and cheered.)

And the rest of the camp? They still can’t decide. Perhaps, if the daughter had stuck to Boris’s path for longer, then perhaps he’d have recovered. Perhaps the Good Doctor’s ministrations were the real cause of Boris’s demise. Perhaps, they fancied themselves as amateur experts and found themselves on the wrong side of science. Maybe they had taken sides based on a hunch and couldn’t bear to admit they’d been horribly, horribly wrong.

Or possibly, just possibly, humans are fucking idiots.

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Closed Windows

30/6/2016

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Closed Windows
(with apologies to Philip Larkin*)

When I see a couple of oldies
And guess he's a fucking racist and she
Gets her facts from the Daily Mail
I know this is the hell

Many of us have dreaded all our lives -
Bonds and kinship pushed to one side
Like an outdated mobile telephone
And everyone young going down the long slide

To misery, endlessly. I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, That'll be no life;
No good any more, sweating for zero

Hours, if that, and having less to live
On than those who came before. Him and her have
Already enjoyed their long slide and then sold
It from under us. And immediately

Rather than words comes the thought of closed windows:
An uncomprehending absence,
And behind it, the dark dank stench, that promises
Nothing, and is everywhere, and is endless.

(*Although the old bastard would definitely have voted to leave.)

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Day Four in the Big Brexit House

28/6/2016

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I cried watching the news tonight. I don't mean I howled, grumbled or scorned as I usually do. I mean I burst into tears. Not intentionally obviously. It caught me completely unawares. And not in a sentimental way - which admittedly is a lot of my life these days. But it wasn't like I was watching a film, or sport, or some other uplifting whatnot.

I mean it was the same as when something deeply personal happens - like my Dad dying. Like Karin dying. Like Monkey or Laurel dying. I've never done that before. Just watching the news. Cried for my country dying.

Um, that's all...

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Happy Families (a sideways glance at Scotland)

11/9/2014

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I wasted some time today looking for a Granta essay which had a big impact on me years ago but, of course, I lost all my Grantas in the great Shifnal flood. Shame, because it seems to have even more weight right now and seems to add something critical that doesn't seem to have been part of the great debate. It was written when I was working in Glasgow (mid 90s) and encountering wonderful warmth from some people who have become lifelong friends but outright hostility from others simply because I was English, when normally it's because I'm a twat.

As a result, when I left Scotland I made a conscious decision to call myself English rather than British thereafter and that's still how I fill out forms etc. I can't remember who wrote the essay, nor the full detail, but its grand sweep was something like "if we don't have our hatred of the English to bind us, then what? Given that we seem to hate each other." In essence, that chimed with my experience of a basically sectarian Glasgow.

I've been around Britain this summer. In Sunderland I was fully expecting some Geordie-bashing. None occurred. In Swansea I was treated like royalty by everyone bar the Mecure hotel chain. But on the course I ran in Edinburgh there was a rant from a lovely woman about how the "East and West up here hate each other". Such a nation coming out of a referendum split 50/50 is surely a worry either way....?

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European Elections - I felt a bit ashamed of my country today...

22/5/2014

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I voted in the European elections today. I'm not actually sure I have hitherto, not recently anway. In truth I've always been vaguely pro Europe in a “let's all stop fighting each other and start sharing food recipes” kinda way, whilst remaining ambivalent about building a bureaucracy around it.

But Nigel Farage made me feel I should vote. Made me want to man the barricades. Made me want to walk through the rain to stand up for what I believe in (although in truth Anne drove me there). Because, often against the evidence, I still believe in and am proud of living in a tolerant land. And because I hate charlatans and weasels and pub bores and stooges for big business, and smug fucking hypocrites, all of which he inhabits whilst selling people some perverted version of integrity. (And yes I am some of those things sometimes, also. I don't like myself for it.)

The voting sheet was a lengthy thing – a couple of feet – full of proportional possibilities. Eleven parties after my vote. Seven of them centred on base instincts – hatred, envy, chippiness, blame - club little england circling the wagons against an imagined enemy – not least considering Shropshire is 99.8% Olde English, where it's always 1954 and raining. And I haven't included the Tories in that count. It comes to something when to someone like me they feel like a plausible tactical vote against right wing extremism.

One of the parties was called The Harmony Party. Its tagline was “zero immigration”. I actually felt ashamed. Mainstream politics is wildly, criminally, out of touch. I get it. I agree. I rage against the dying of the light. But we need to wake up to the fact that horrible people with bad intent are filling the vacuum. Quickly.

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Constitutional Peasants

24/7/2013

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A friend posted this classic sketch up on Facebook as his response to the media-frenzy surrounding the royal birth.

I was watching it and thinking to myself, “actually, we really did speak like that back in the day.” By which I mean the late 70s and early 80s. And when I say, “we” I mean those of us engaging with politics, usually with a left-wing slant. Back when “socialism” was a word people could use seriously. And when I say seriously, I grant you, even then Middle England took us for idiots. Anne's first job in London in 1983 was at St Katharine's Dock. It was not a noted hot-bed of Marxist collectivism. Indeed, her co-workers used to call me Trotsky.

Thing is, when did you last hear anyone called a Trot? Or a socialist? Or a lefty, pinko, tree-hugging weirdo? When did we stop having any engagement at all with left-wing politics? With political thought, full-stop? For me it seemed to happen somewhere between the end of the miner's strike and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Maybe, with the benefit of hindsight, there was a sense that capitalism had won. Or maybe it just happened to me. After all, that time-span coincided with when I got married, bought a house and started working for the Man.

Either way, all things considered, it seems a shame...

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Fiftysomethings - man we is useless.

The Siege of Krishnapour - or "we've all rather had enough of experts"

Closed Windows

Day Four in the Big Brexit House

Happy Families (a sideways glance at Scotland)

European Elections - I felt a bit ashamed of my country today...

Constitutional Peasants

Writing

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