Post-crisis Olympic blues, and the militarisation of the Olympic spirit

A couple of weeks ago I was standing five-deep on the platform at Stockwell tube station, staring up at an empty departure board. A train had broken down somewhere up the line. People were late for work, it was very hot. It was the worst week of tube delays so far this year, with, according to TfL, 33 incidents of severe delays and line closures. Eventually a train arrived, and after cramming on board with hundreds of others, we sped away leaving the platform as busy as it was before. As soon as we were in the tunnel, the stern delivery of the Victoria line announcer filled the carriage, with the warning now familiar to any user of railways in Britain to not leave your bag unattended, or run the risk of it being ‘destroyed by the security services’.

I’ve never liked the Victoria line announcer. She has a sternness in her voice you would never find infecting the chirpy breeze of the Bakerloo line announcer, or the spritely and professional candour of the Northern line. The Victoria line announcer addresses the worms squeezed on her trains with a contemptuous pity. She is busy and modern, as evidenced by her shiny new carriages, compared to the tan and taupe, ’70s hangover trains on the Bakerloo line. When she has to tell you where to alight for a palace or an eye hospital, you are inconveniencing her.

She issued her threats to mind your baggage several times during my short journey to Green Park, laced with a couple of chirpy warnings not to give money to beggars. It might have been the fact that I knew I was going to be late, or just suffering the all too familiar sensation of boiling in a scrum of strangers in a dusty underground tunnel. Or it might have been a combination of the tube-fatigue and the repeated announcements from what, at the end, sounded like a deranged Tory backbencher at the announcer’s helm. In between being warned not to feed the beggars, and with the hot breath of the omnipotent security services on the back of my neck, its sweaty palm clutching my bag, I had a premonition of the future. The near future, that is, and a dystopian one. Yes, the Olympics.

Hourly, Londoners are reminded of this hell on the horizon, looming ever closer like a metropolis-bound meteor in a shit film. The heady days of 2005, when the entire country was in Olympics rapture, seem a long time ago. We were like the party animals on the roof of the skyscraper in Independence Day, with the alien spaceship hovering overhead, holding aloft signs welcoming this strange visitor, gleeful smiles on our faces and dancing madly at the prospect of alien contact. I bet the Bakerloo line lady would have been up there, her carefree moves inspiring even the most demented apocalypse day looter to stop and twist. But, of course, the party skyscraper was the first to get zapped by the spaceship. We’re now six years on from those halcyon days of Labour boom, the pungent smell of big profit and finely pressed suits lining the shining boulevards of the square mile, all the jobs, all the credit, the family home that could function as a never-ending cash machine, always ratcheting up its price with each sweet passing minute. But then, one day in 2008, when an American investment bank called Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, we were all zapped, as if without warning.

A couple of days ago the EU decided (again) to formulate a last-minute plan to contain the eurozone debt crisis, in part continuing the austerity drive in Greece that is in the process of turning the country into a client state of the IMF. Italy has promised to implement its own austerity programme. The Bank of England is now warning that Britain faces a ‘significant chance’ of going back into recession. But there is light on the horizon. In the face of this apocalypse we’ll have the Olympics. We are still being sold the Olympics as, at best, an event to rescue the British economy, and at worst, something that will at least cheer the hearts of those suffering. We will still have the Olympic Spirit. A desperate cry if there ever was one, and one that rests on an interesting interpretation of exactly what this ‘Olympic Spirit’ might entail.

As well as magnificent feats of athletic prowess, the Olympics also has the added bonus of often resembling a military coup. Prior to the Athens Games in 2004, 70,000 police and troops were drafted into the city to clear ‘undesirables’ from the streets, mostly drug addicts, immigrants, and the homeless. It was reported during the preparations for the Beijing Games that around 1.5 million residents were ejected from their homes. 720,000 were displaced during the Seoul Games of 1988, in a fine demonstration of newly re-gained democratic principles (the Sixth Republic of South Korea had been declared only a year earlier after nearly a decade of violent military rule). The Athens crackdown was repeated again in 2010 in Vancouver, where there were widespread reports of police clearing homeless people from poor districts. I’ll expect to hear the Victoria line announcer warning of more ‘undesirables’ in the months to come. For all this, it also looks as if the cost of the London Games is going to quadruple from initial estimates to over £9 billion.

Aside from resembling a very expensive military crackdown with fireworks and a little athletics on the side, the Olympics also beds with some rather odd company. Athletics sponsored by, among others, such health-conscious companies as Heineken, and McDonald’s, who have pledged to build a 1,500 seater, ‘world’s largest’ outlet on the Olympic site. In direct proportion to this, another ‘international sponsor’, Dow Chemical Company of Bhopal gas leak fame, has so far pledged nothing to the families and victims of the disaster that killed 3,787 people and has caused at least 8,000 deaths since.

For the population, the salesmanship of Parliament, City Hall, councils, and their underling agencies of this bonanza of sports has been schizophrenic to say the least. After constantly being told of the economic benefits of  the Games, which will be short-term to say the least, we are confronted with weekly prophesies of doom from Transport for London. Waiting times on several tube lines will be over half an hour, and we are told the network will only ‘cope’ if 60% of workers go absent. Those who can’t work from home, which is probably just about everyone, are being advised to ‘go to the pub’ after work to allow station congestion to clear. A public transport Games indeed, although not quite so when one considers the 109 miles of road that will have a lane sectioned off solely for those travelling to the Olympics, with punitive fines for those who stray into them. If you were planning on taking the bus to avoid the chaos, think again.

London will likely become clogged with armed police and guards, as security companies vie with each other for lucrative contracts. And if that wasn’t enough, another happy addition to the Olympic Spirit fraternity is the constant news stories of the possibility of tenants in rented accommodation across the capital being evicted so that landlords can charge sky-high rents (up to £10,000 a month) to Olympic revellers, a practise that has been confirmed illegal by only six borough councils out of thirty-two. And what will become of the Olympics site after the Games? A few weeks ago the Westfield Stratford shopping centre opened with a fanfare approximating it almost messiah status, a shopping juggernaught-Christ to single-handedly resurrect a leprous economy. A combination of consumer goods outlets encouraging us to spend our way out of recession, and a likely recreation of the now infamously derelict Athens site will most likely appear in the ruins of the cavernous journalists centre.

Simon Jenkins, in the Evening Standard, echoing the concerns of Londoners (a poll in the same newspaper revealed 80% of residents would not be buying Olympics tickets), has called the Games ‘elitist, exclusive and stupefying’ and likened them to a ‘festival for the cosmopolitan rich and their armed guards’. Will Self, in an appearance on Newsnight, described the Games as a ‘creation of capital’, a hangover of the boom years in a dead economy. This analysis looks all too pertinent now. While during the boom years the Olympics might have been the feather in capital’s cap, the icing on the cake that had supposedly brought prosperity to the nation, we now know that that prosperity was a lie, a grim combination of imaginary money, ceaseless credit, and the cooked books of outfits like Lehman Brothers. Six years down the line, the prospect of this Olympic extravaganza is more than faintly depressing, resembling a half-finished temple to the Gods long after Rome has succumbed to the barbarian hordes. And where is everyone? Lining up at the soup kitchen, looking back on the drunken orgies on the last days of empire and feeling more than a little embarrassed.

Kind Hearts and Coronets, the post-war middle class, and the massacre of the nobility

The English aristocracy have always been a crisis-prone sort. When not nearly rendering themselves extinct in the Wars of the Roses or hand-wringing over a bunch of 18^th century peasants rioting across their estates (see my previous post), they were busy envisioning their doom at the hands of the inter-war proletariat. In the end, it wasn’t so much a menacingly Bolshevik working class or any Europe-haunting spectres standing nonchalantly beside a dripping guillotine; it was the war itself and the rise of that ceaselessly aggressive social phenomenon, the middle class.

Having just bankrupted itself by participation in the Second World War, the social winds of Britain changed course irrevocably. A beleagured population, emerging from six years of war and the dawning realisation that Britain was no longer as important, or as rich, as it once was was, was not the same docile beast that faced the aristocratic classes in the inter-war and Edwardian period. For the great mass of the population who had to struggle through the war years, the idea of hereditary wealth no longer fit the national mood, and the long march of decline for the English nobility began at the hands of the middle-classes.

When faced with the grimly determined, Protestant work ethic-fuelled assault of the professional classes, typified by the pre-war, suburban, Orwell character of George Bowling, they stood no chance. George Bowling appears in Orwell’s underrated 1939 book Coming Up For Air, the melancholy story of a middle-class man whose life is defined by mediocrity. He inhabits one of thousands of suburban homes, he thinks little of his family and his job, but merely carries on with his life regardless, escaping for relief into the ecstatic, high jinks memories of his Edwardian youth.  George Bowling, or more dynamic versions of him, were precisely the kind of people who, in the post-war atmosphere of shared sacrifice were storming the (faux-Tudor) ramparts of the stately homes of nobility, their entitled and hereditary wealth now an aberration in the national narrative of hard work and sacrifice.

And while George Bowling himself, given over to fatalism as his character is, lacks the capacity to improve his own life any more than he already has, this new middle class, and their ghettos of strip suburban development, had always in reserve a thousand more George Bowlings to take his place. This is the same middle-class that, two months after VE Day, dispensed with the conservative Churchill government and flocked en masse to Labour, awarding them a landslide victory on the promise of full employment and the welfare state. A general levelling took place, not in favour of any idea of working class emancipation, but on the vaguely general principles of ‘the people’, the middle classes and workers, as opposed to the nobility. The times of the idle gentry quietly surveying their lands, or knocking croquet balls on the lawns of Mandalay were over, and their Late Victorian and Edwardian heyday must have seemed a distant memory.

It is this insurgent middle-class that manifests itself in the character of Louis Mazzini in the Ealing Studios classic, Kind Hearts and Coronets. Although set in the Edwardian era, the film was made in 1949, the highpoint of post-war Labour government, and so displays a contradictory setting of being set during the last hurrahs of the English nobility, while displaying fully the politics and sensibilities of the post-war, post-aristocratic era. The politics of 1949 are being played out in 1910.

The film begins with the protagonist’s mother exiled from her inimitably aristocratic family, the D’Ascoynes. Having married beneath her station, she finds herself living in a cramped house in Clapham with her young son, her husband having since died. Demeaned and humiliated by her family, she teaches Louis the injustice of their situation, constantly drumming into him the fact that, no matter where he lives or what job he is doing, and despite his mother’s exile, remains a distant heir to the Dukedom of Chalfont.

Despite his heirdom, Louis’ situation is resoundingly middle-class. Having finished school, he further demeans his true station by taking a job as a draper’s assistant, eventually working his way to one promotion after another, thus proving that enduring piece of middle-class folklore that nobody chooses poverty. He becomes the archetypal professional man, all the while becoming more embittered over the injustice of his situation.

After being publicly humiliated in the shop by a distant relative of his and being sacked for his angry response, Louis resolves to murder all the members of the D’Ascoyne family that stand between him and the dukedom, or his birthright, as he puts it.

After doing away with the young playboy who cost him his job, suitably by drowning him and his mistress at the fashionable weekend resort of Maidenhead, he moves on to the others.

He ingratiates himself with his next victim, and proceeds to blow him up while he is developing photographs in his garden shed. Through the course of the film, he goes on to poison a priest, shoot down a hot air balloon, blow someone else up, lure an elderly man into a bear trap and shoot him in the face, rejoice at the news of a relative dying of a stroke and celebrate a pair of infant twins dying of diphtheria. And still, at every point, the viewer is encouraged to sympathise with Louis and cheers him along his rampage through the aristocracy.

The aristocrats he kills off are painted in an entirely unflattering light. The best of them are shown to be nice-but-dim types, while the worst are dinosaurs; callous, lazy, rude,  uncaring, dishonest, mean-spirited and completely lacking in feelings or tact. Louis, on the other hand, is hardworking, witty, urbane, displays honour and dignity, and expresses himself in ways that only a modern man would. For instance, when invited to go hunting with the clownish elderly gentleman, Ethelred D’Ascoyne, he refuses to take part in any shooting, claiming that it would contravene his principles. We are clearly supposed to be rooting for the protagonist, even as he takes part in what is, to all purposes, an incredibly brutal, comedic killing spree that resembles something like a comedy of manners version of Shane Meadows’ Dead Man’s Shoes.

Needless to say, Louis avoids any inconvenient investigations into his spree and becomes the 10^th Duke of Chalfont, bagging the charming wife of one of his victims along the way. Displaying his modern (read, post-war, 1949) levelling sensibilities, he tells the servants at the D’Ascoyne family home that his first priority will be to ensure them a good life. He is then promptly arrested for a murder he did not commit, and finds his hard-won dukedom, and his life, hanging in the balance.

Louis aspires to become a member of the aristocracy, but once he is there he behaves nothing like them; he is enlightened, and cares for his servants. He perfectly embodies the post-war, ceaseless aspiration of the professional middle-classes, importantly, through hard work and not entitlement, to occupy the position of power previously held by the dying nobility. Many merely yearned for power and wealth, but for every George Bowling, there was always a hundred of his neighbours willing to take his place. But instead of occupying the now unaffordable landed estates of this beaten nobility, now resentfully left open to the public as museums of another age, they moved up the professional ladder, bought homes, and built conservatories. Kind Hearts and Coronets, like the bankrupted post-war nation, is the literal massacre of the nobility.

The Making of the English Working Class, and Lord Byron hugs a Luddite

I’ve recently been re-reading E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class. For this book, ‘magesterial’, ‘dazzling’, ‘sheds lights on an overlooked period of our history’ and all the other dull clichés are for once apt. If these terms didn’t make me cringe so much I would employ all of them to describe what was Thompson’s ‘magnum opus’.

If anything, ‘often overlooked’ would be a startling understatement in this instance. The book covers the years 1780 to 1832, and examines the political agitation of those victims of history; the artisans and craftsmen who would soon find themselves made obsolete by the factory system, consumed by the black cloud of the industrial revolution, thrown to the urban slums and joining the mass of the newly emerging industrial proletariat. In the preface, Thompson describes his wish to:

‘rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the “obsolete” hand-loom weaver, the “utopian” artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity’

These years truly were the ‘making’ of the new working class; the decline of a predominantly rural economy of artisan trade to one of mass industrialisation, urbanisation, slums and wage labour. The gates of Merrie England had been broken down by Adam Smith and the enemies of this outdated mercantilism of craftsmen, and the masses were being led towards the sooty heights of Cottonopolis and the workhouse.

There is little overlooked about the Industrial Revolution itself, it was covered heavily when I was at school, and seems to feature to a significant(ish) degree in the collective memory of the nation. We think of child labour, we see the slums, the words of Dickens, Brunel’s bridges, the counterbalance of the Romantics, Turner’s ominously blurred steam trains drifting through as yet unspoiled pastures.

Thompson’s focus, the ‘overlooked history’, is purely on those on the front line of these great changes, their political consciousness, aspirations and responses to what he calls, ‘these times of acute social disturbance’. He describes the activities of the followers of Jacobinism in England, reformers and revolutionaries who saw hope for salvation in the radicalism of the French Revolution, many of whom later prayed for a French invasion of Britain that would topple their own ancien regime. He describes the struggle for the vote, the growth of trade unionism among artisans, highly secretive and illegal, a mysterious picture conjured of masked craftsmen meeting nightly in wooded clearings, taking part in oaths and initiation rituals, drilling with pikes for the coming “‘levelution.”

The London Corresponding Society, the radical weavers of Spitalfields, Nottinghamshire, and Lancashire, the revolutionary journalists of Republican, Cap of Liberty, and Medusa are all brought back to the life. Radicals and demagogues, certainly popular men or devils, depending on who you spoke to, in their own time, are all but forgotten now. From speakers and campaigners like William Cobbett and Henry Hunt, to doomed conspirators like Arthur Thistlewood, leader of the Cato Street Conspiracy, and Jeremiah Brandreth, the unemployed stocking maker and ‘Nottingham Captain’, who led an ill-fated attempt to occupy the city in 1817. Compared with later popular history that was preserved at length by the socialist movement, the world Thompson describes is a labyrinth of riots, uprisings, conspiracy, insurrection, hanging and treason.

The Making of the English Working Class is a wealth of forgotten history, and the history of English radicalism is almost certainly forgotten, not being one that sits well with the still adored myth of the passive, stiff upper lipped, ‘free-born Englishman’. Two incidents described and analysed at length in the book exemplify this national amnesia, and both have current relevance.

The first is the obvious example of the Luddites, the radical handloom weavers of Nottinghamshire, Yorkshire and Lancashire. Threatened by the introduction of the automated looms of factory production that would render their trade somewhat obsolete, they rioted, smashed factory looms, and torched mills from 1811-1813. Many were executed, and hundreds were transported to the colonies. In our current understanding of the word ‘Luddite’, the radical political factor has been completely removed. Thompson is at pains to differentiate between our meaning of Luddite; a derogatory term for someone who is anti-technology, and this leading to a false idea of the weavers’ motivations; and what a Luddite was, an artisan making a futile attempt to protect his livelihood. Luddism also contributed to the agrarian riots of 1830, discarded in the popular imagination, known as the Swing Riots, which occurred in the southern counties and were one of the largest popular uprisings in the history of England.

The true meaning of Luddism is all the more surprising considering the appearance of a national celebrity in its midst. In 1812, after several years swanning and inseminating his way across the continent, Lord Byron took his seat in the House of Lords and made three speeches in defense of the rioters, and against the introduction of the Malicious Damage Act of 1812, that made frame-breaking a capital offense. Byron was one of the few parliamentary defenders of the Luddites, if not the only, and the law was passed. He never entered the House again, but instead devoted his pen to the cause of Radicalism for years to come, penning his Song For The Luddites, The Landlords’ Interest, and Wellington: The Best of the Cut-Throats. This was an episode where politics and literature truly crossed paths; as this monster of Romanticism, that enemy of the Industrial Revolution and mechanisation, found common cause with the riotous victim of the age, the unemployed weaver.

Nick Clegg and David Cameron both namechecked the 1832 Reform Act when they took power last year, pledging their tinkering with civil liberties law would resemble such a momentous event. Thompson does a wonderful job of exposing the fallacy of the idea of a historical ‘British democracy’ in describing the often violent and widespread campaign for male suffrage that led to the election of radical MPs and the passage of the Reform Act. Far from being a benevolent gift from the Commons to the people, the Reform Act was prefigured by decades of relentless agitation by reformers, the bloody highlight of which was the Peterloo Massacre, a massive meeting of radicals in Manchester that ended at the hands of charging cavalry. For all the habits of the modern politician to describe our democracy as ‘historical’, ‘great’ or ‘longstanding’, it takes only a cursory glance at Thompson’s work to remember that full suffrage was not granted to women and most men until 1918. In the true manner of reform granted by the state after popular agitation, the final legislated product promised little, the Reform Act still leaving the vast majority of men (six out of seven, it is believed), without the vote.

While lucidly describing these forgotten episodes of our history, Thompson also reveals the fallacy of many modern myths about the docile nature of England and its people. The book ends at the point of 1832, a watershed where artisan radicalism gave way to mass factory trade unionism and the beginnings of the socialist movement. In describing this transition of radical politics from one phase to another, Thompson mirrors the world of radicalism he found himself in as a leading light of the New Left, that crossroads between the Communist Party and its subservience to the Soviet Union, and anti-Soviet socialism.

The Hungarian Revolution of 1956, when the people of Budapest rose against their Communist rulers, proved the breaking point for many socialist intellectuals. Like the Dreyfus case, which proved a litmus test for a person’s politics for decades afterwards, the subsequent Soviet suppression of the uprising, and a person’s reaction to it, would reveal whether or not they were of a pro-Soviet persuasion. Thousands around the world abandoned their respective Communist parties in the face of the bloodbath in Budapest.

Many left the Communist Party of Great Britain, and EP Thompson was one of the first out the door, unlike our other ‘great’ socialist historian, Eric Hobsbawm, who has experienced a recent renaissance of sorts, who issued some fairly unflattering articles in support of the Soviet authorities, albeit, ‘with a heavy heart’. Thompson remained a socialist and criticised the Labour governments of the post-war period from a left-wing perspective, and was a major figure in CND, becoming partly famous for speaking passionately about nuclear weapons to Glastonbury crowds in the 1980s. His speeches in favour of nuclear disarmament, and against all too easily embarked upon wars must have resembled Byron’s impassioned speeches supporting the Luddites in the House of Lords. Through the jeers and shouting, he condemned the lawmakers who sat beside him;

‘When a proposal is made to emancipate or relieve, you deliberate for years, you temporize and tamper with the minds of men; but a death-bill must be passed off-hand, without a thought of the consequences’

It was the last time Byron would sit in Parliament, and like those frame-breakers and radicals who could find no redress through the laws of the land, Byron would contain his political activity to his poetry, mirroring Thompson’s overall argument, that the most radical reform can never be bestowed by parliaments.

Riots 2011: Against the riots, and against a ‘return to normality’

Last night was relatively quiet in London, although the same cannot be said for the rest of the country, but here at least it looks as though things may be calming down. Boris Johnson is back in town, being heckled by some and (bizarrely) cheered by others. Between the interruptions and heckling from residents and shop owners in Clapham Junction, he said that he didn’t want to hear ‘socio-economic reasons for the violence’.

This is a dangerous game to play, and already indicates a dangerous trend that seems to be gaining ground; namely, an unwillingness to talk about the reasons for what has happened. And I will take this opportunity to repeat what I said in my last post, that debate over the reasons of the rioting is not the same as ‘sympathy’ for, or ‘understanding’ those who are taking part.

There has been a lot of talk of ‘returning to normal’, and on the BBC news feed this morning there were several comments from people deploring the media for focusing on the ‘negative headlines’ and ‘bad news’ of the riot itself, and urging them to focus instead on the positive response to them, such as the Twitter organised clean-up operation. This is a dangerous game to play, and one that could backfire if taken seriously.

Yes, it’s unpleasant to see the constant images of violence, the burning buildings and the mugging of bystanders. But ignoring the violence is a dangerous distraction, and solely focusing on events such as the volunteer clean-ups, which, while laudable and heart-warming, are something of safe distraction from the real forces at play here.

It should be clear to everyone now that thousands of people around the country did not wake up the last couple of mornings and spontaneously decide they wanted a new pair of trainers. Again, debating this is not the same as sympathy for the rioters. But this does not change the fact that thousands of people, in one way or another, have become completely alienated from the society in which they live, and the reasons for this need to be discussed.

This violence did not magic itself out of nowhere, and the conditions for it clearly existed before Saturday evening, but to most people they were invisible, simmering below the surface and hidden on housing estates. They were present in the ‘normality’ that commentators are calling for a return to. To return to ‘normality’ would leave these conditions unchanged, and keep them merely hidden again. If we return to ‘normality’, quietly disdaining debate over the reasons of what has happened, nothing will have changed and we risk a re-run of this in the years to come. Pondering when Egypt would return to ‘normality’ was a fairly big feature in the British press when Cairo was rioting during the first stage of the revolution. Egypt did not want to return to normality, normality was what caused the riots in the first place.

Something else that should be avoided would be for the country to be enveloped in some kind of moral panic, indications to which are already becoming clear. There is a lot of ‘what happened to my country’, and, ‘ashamed to be British’ talk going around. These comments indicate the personal level on which people are feeling the force of the riots, but, although difficult, we should try to view them as dispassionately as possible. We should be cold and objective, and not be scared to discuss the implications of this for a long time afterwards.

Perhaps it is because events such as these are a rare occurence in Britain that they elicit such a personal response. The headline of Le Monde’s coverage of events yesterday was ‘the British press dramatises and tries to understand’. We should not be dramatising, and it is to the credit of the French that, due to the fairly recurrent nature of rioting in their own country, they have the ability to analyse them without the moral panic the British press are prone to.

After the nationwide riots of banlieue youth in 2005, a widespread national debate ensued concerning the riots that made no attempt to de-politicise them as David Cameron, and Boris Johnson, with his ‘no socio-economic reasons’ remark, have been attempting to do. Being shy of asking questions of social and political significance is akin to sticking your head in the sand. The French debates covered everything from politics to unemployment, government policy, housing, gang culture, immigration and national identity. We cannot afford to have a right-wing press inspired period of moral outrage followed by silence and a ‘return to normality’. We need a reasoned debate, not panic and outrage.

George Orwell’s famous indictment at the end of Homage to Catalonia of Britain’s impasse to events happening in Europe that would lead to World War II should be remembered here,

‘The huge peaceful wilderness of outer London, the barges on the miry river, the familiar streets, the posters telling of cricket matches and Royal weddings, the men in bowler hats, the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, the red buses, the blue policemen—all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.’

The bombs have roared for the past four nights, and the worst thing we could do is to go back to sleep. Something is wrong here, and it needs to be discussed openly. The violence has to end, but we should ignore the calls to return to ‘normality’.

London riots, 2011, we need more conjecture, not less.

This is the second personal post I’ve made on this blog, and there probably won’t be too many, but given the unprecedented situation in London at the minute I think it’s worth writing something about it.

Yesterday morning I walked down to Brixton from my home in Clapham, in South London, which has (apart from a few broken windows on the high street) so far managed to avoid any serious violence. Brixton Road had been completely wrecked and was closed off, as was the tube station, and there was broken glass everywhere. Last night we listened to the constant wail of sirens and sat up for hours checking the Guardian live blog to see where the trouble was spreading next. There was reports of rioting in Clapham, but thankfully this turned out to be in Lavender Hill and around Clapham Junction station, which is actually in Battersea and at least a bus ride from here.

The official response so far has been fairly woeful. A Cameron/Clegg/May or ministerial minion will show up on television with the usual pointless clichés to ‘deplore’, or ‘utterly condemn’ what is happening, followed with a lot of grandstanding talk of ‘you will be caught’. The police have been equally vocal in their threats to catch the perpetrators, perhaps even more unjustifiably considering the criticism they have faced for their slow responses to looting. In the case of Brixton, residents told reporters that looting just 100m from the police station was allowed to continue for over half an hour. And in the East End, shopkeepers and residents have formed vigilante groups to protect their homes and businesses, having given up on the police.

The general response from the public has been mixed. There are those complaining that the police are restricted in their actions and scared of seeming too aggressive in dealing with looters, mostly because criticism they have been under recently for their heavy-handed policing of the student and TUC protests earlier this year, and their handling of the G20 protests last year that led to the death of Ian Tomlinson. I don’t buy this; given the amount of criticisms levelled at the police over the years for their policing of public order situations, as well as the shooting of Jean-Charles de Menezes and subsequent half-arsed cover up, they are unlikely to suddenly learn their lesson now and go softly-softly as half of London burns.

Others, including a few overzealous MPs and UKIP’s Nigel Farage, are going further still and calling for the military to be deployed. This is unlikely to happen, and would be virtually unprecedented in British history excepting a few occasions, notably the Rhondda riots in South Wales in 1910, and the 40-hour strike in Glasgow during the Red Clydeside era. On a practical level, the military is already incredibly overstretched, and as one military officer from South London said in a message that featured on the BBC’s live blog this morning,

‘As an Army officer, please do not go on about bringing the military in. More or less all the army has been in a warzone within the last two years, they have been fighting literally for their lives. I would have great concern that our troops are too prepared for using lethal force to be placed into an environment of violence on British streets.’

I’m inclined to agree with him.

The explanations for what has been happening also seem a little inadequate. The shooting of Mark Duggan was obviously the catalyst in Tottenham, but its more difficult to use his death as an explaination for rioting all around the country. It’s fairly pointless to speculate on what happened when he was killed, or what kind of man he was, as a thousand different theories have been thrown about in the last few days, and the Independent Police Complaints Commission is being as weirdly mysterious and non-communicative as it always is. As with Jean Charles de Menezes and Ian Tomlinson, the truth will appear eventually. Many on the left are claiming that the riots are the result of poverty and the governments cuts to public services and welfare, and while I’m sure these play a part, this is by no means the complete picture.

Some are going further and painting this as a political protest, which, although it may have begun as a demonstration against the police, has now taken on an entirely new character. And the support of what is going on as a political protest now seems bordering on the ridiculous, with the obvious fact that people’s homes are being burned down, and the multiple muggings and stabbings that have occurred during the riots. To think that people are looting outlets of JJB sports for a new pair of trainers are doing it for political reasons is laughable.

But equally ridiculous is the attempt by others to completely disengage what is happening from any kind of analysis, political or otherwise, seeing it in some way as being ‘sympathetic’ to the rioters, or attempting to ‘understand’ them. It’s not, and the reasons behind what is happening need to be discussed.

Events have definitely gone beyond the death of Mark Duggan, and it is hard to reconcile the idea of a sincere protest over perceived police brutality with looting widescreen TVs from a burning Curry’s outlet. Unemployment and social deprivation obviously have a part to play, but it’s hard not to place some blame on the political culture that many people my age (in their early twenties) have grown up with. Namely, the culture of complete individualism that has been actively encouraged by the political class in this country for the last thirty years.

Under Thatcher, we were essentially told, in the words of Gordon Gekko, that ‘greed is good’, and actively encouraged to see people like Gordon Gekko, albeit tamer versions, as role models. The message carried on under Labour through the boom years of the late 90s and early 2000s. And although they didn’t say it quite so crudely as a red-blooded Tory would, the ‘no such thing as society’ doctrine was carried on through the glory years before the crash of 2007-2008. Make as much money as you can was the message, and damn the effects on wider society. When generations are taught to aspire to be like the successful businessmen to semi-illiterate millionaire footballers that are treated like gods in the media, and when, as has happened since the 2007-2008 crisis, these aspirations turn out to be a cruel joke with no chance of fulfillment, there are consequences.

We were encouraged to be greedy, and selfish, and it was exactly this greed that led to the worldwide economic crisis, and you can see exactly the same greed now tearing through the high streets of Tottenham, Hackney, and Brixton in these last few days. Decades of state-encouraged selfishness have their consequences, and last night those consequences were looting and burning a Debenhams on Lavender Hill.

It’s 14:09 and the sirens outside my window are getting more frequent. BBC news has just reported that the riots have now claimed their first life, and there are reports that there has been looting in Hackney already. It’s going to be another long night, but let’s not confuse discussing the reasons for what is happening with sympathy with those who are doing it. They are not the same, and the calls for ‘going back to normal’, as if nothing had happened, are pointless, and will lead to nothing but a repeat of this violence in years to come. We can’t shy away from discussing the causes of what has happened; we need more conjecture.

Summer With Monika: Pre-sixties youth revolt in a changing Europe

Summer With Monika, directed by Ingmar Bergman, tells the story of two Stockholm teenagers, Harry and Monika, who fall in love and agree to escape from the drudgery of their lives by running away from home and living a nomadic existence sailing around a series of deserted islands. It takes the form of a classic runaway film, with a pair of young lovers fleeing from the responsibilities of adulthood, but also reveals a truth about life in post-war Europe, and the prospect of changes to come.

Monika ostensibly runs away from home to escape the oppression of her family life. She lives with her violent and alcoholic father, her mother, and her loud and mischievous younger brothers. Their apartment is cramped, the children all sleep in cots in the kitchen, and their poverty is emphasised by the excitement generated when the father can afford to bring home ‘a bottle’ one evening.

When Monika first meets Harry, it is in the setting of a workman’s cafe near to their respective workplaces. Later, see see Monika sexually harrassed by her workmates; she is the subject of lewd jokes, and several times she is touched inappropriately, leading her to break down in tears. Harry, working nearby, also has a hard time at work, and seems to despise his boss and the general drudgery of his life. He is also subjected to bullying at the hands of a cruel foreman. When Monika and Harry first meet, they both fantasise about escaping from the drudgery of their lives, signified in their boredom and harrassment at work, and the oppressive nature of Monika’s family life.

Later, after her father hits her, Monika runs away from home and arrives at Harry’s apartment, suitcase in hand. Fearing the watchful gaze of his visiting aunt, Harry sets them both up in the cabin of his father’s boat. Monika quits her job, and the next day Harry does the same after an arguement with the bullying foreman. They both meet back at the boat, and Harry says,

‘Remember what you said about travel? Well, to hell with the others now. Let them slave away, what do we care.’ To which Monika answers, ‘I’d like to kill all those who want to hold us back and make us crawl.’

They agree to leave, and sail away on the boat to begin a summer of roaming adventures, sailing to and living on various deserted islands in the seas around Stockholm. They have run away from the world of work, obligations, and have chosen to disengage with society. It is here that we see Summer With Monika in its curious historical epoch. Made in 1953, and, strangely for a country that remained neutral during the war, Summer With Monika presents an almost perfect vision of the post-war melancholy and malaise of Europe, personified in its two main protagonists. Stuck between the old world of war and ideology of the first half of the 20^th century, and the ‘new world’ of individualism, consumerism and uprooted social attitudes of the 1960s, we see both the history of the old world and the future of the new.

Their decision to flee the world is a basically individualist one; they are alienated from society (work, family, their own poverty) but instead of attempting to change these conditions, they merely commit themselves to voluntary exile to live a life of blissful isolation. They invert their alienation from the world and completely disengage from it. This attitude shows us the future; that it has been a hallmark of alienated Western youths in the latter half of the 20^th century to form subcultures to try to create a world separate from society itself. Harry and Monika’s breaking away to live their own nomadic existence resembles most easily one of the central concepts of the hippie movement, which would have been in full flow only fifteen years later. But while hippies disengaged from society and travelled, or founded rural communes, it was usually framed in the language of a vague spirituality. Their reasons were given as esoteric or metaphysical, as manifested in the slogans to ‘find yourself, and ‘return to the Earth’. An interesting, if unintended indication of the new freedoms and changing social mores of the 60s can be seen in the controversy surrounding Summer With Monika on its release, namely its frank depictions of sexuality and nudity. Controversial at the time, the depictions of nudity would probably not have raised an eyebrow a decade later.

Harry and Monika’s motivations are different, and strikingly materialist; they have left their lives in Stockholm because they experienced poverty, the daily drudgery of their lives at work, and the fraught problems of family life. Here we see the past; the base problems that the ideological battles that pre-war Europe sought to resolve. In 1953, most of Europe was still rebuilding and coming to terms with the legacy of the war, and being pulled East or West in defense of opposing geo-political interests in the burgeoning Cold War. Whatever idealism had existed in the socialist movement of the first half of the century was gone, buried by the Stalin years and the transformation of European Communist parties into mere proxies for the Soviet state. It is easy to see, in a hypothetical Summer With Monika made twenty years earlier, Harry and Monika’s complaints against society and their own poverty being absorbed by the socialist and trade union movement, which formed a strong Europe-wide opposition for working-class people throughout the first decades of the century. Or for the more dramatically inclined, an action film where our protagonists join cells of a leftist terrorist group, a Swedish Narodnaya Volya.

Like many who now look back on Europe in the 1950s, Summer With Monika, feels like a film trapped in the remains of the past and the seeds of the future. Harry and Monika’s alienation from society is purely material, but lacking the ideology of the pre-war era, they cannot confront them, but instead choose the path of escape to lead a nomadic existence, something more suited to the esoteric motivations of post-war youth subcultures. These subcultures, whose opposition to society was clear (and remains to be), saw that attempts to change society were useless, and, lacking the language in a post-ideological world to express this frustration, merely formed their own socieities outside of it, often based around things like music or fashion, with corresponding values.

Harry and Monika’s response is individualist and non-political, and if the film were made in later decades we could imagine them becoming hippies, or punks, or a member of any other pyriad of subcultures in Western Europe. As it is, Harry and Monika exist in a kind of time warp that reveals the changing world of Europe in the 20^th century, one that could never return to the past, and had only a bright, brave future to march towards, leaving Monika to wander somewhere between a picket line and a muddy field of bongo enthusiasts.

Shakespeare and conspiracy: the prospect of Roland Emmerich’s Anonymous

“What if I told you…that Shakespeare never wrote a single word,” plainly states Derek Jacobi at the beginning of the trailer for Roland Emmerich’s upcoming Shakespeare film, Anonymous. Shakespeare has made surprisingly few appearances on film, the last being 1998’s Shakespeare in Love,  a sort of Notting Hill-era Britcom with codpieces. It is, therefore, a shame Anonymous is not a film about Shakespeare, but takes as its subject the most peculiar aspect of Shakespeare’s legacy, the conspiracy theory that ‘the man from Stratford’ did not write the plays attributed to him.

The ‘anti-Stratfordian’ movement, as it is known, dates back to the mid-19^th century, and the reasons behind the claims that somebody else wrote the plays are numerous. They frequently rely on reading the plays as autobiography, denial of evidence, and bizarre codes and ciphers believed to be hidden in the plays themselves, as well as a good dose of snobbery towards Shakespeare’s background. For a comprehensive debunking of the anti-Stratfordian myth, it is worth reading James Shapiro’s excellent book, Contested Will, or alternatively simply viewing the surprisingly clear Wikipedia page.

As for the candidates themselves, there are currently over fifty contenders, including Christopher Marlowe, Mary Sidney, Francis Bacon, Walter Raleigh, King James, and Elizabeth I. No less eclectic are their supporters over the years, who count among their ranks Mark Twain, Charlie Chaplin, Malcolm X, and Sigmund Freud.

Two prominent contemporary figures in the anti-Stratfordian camp are Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance, who, in 2007, issued a ‘Declaration of Reasonable Doubt’ that features the signatures of several high-profile doubters, as an attempt to rally the anti-Stratfordian cause. In recent years the Shakespeare authorship conspiracy has gained greater mainstream interest:  the fact that Rylance even served as Artistic Director of Shakespeare’s Globe theatre between 1995-2005 reflects this. Jacobi and Rylance will both appear in Anonymous, and director Roland Emmerich’s signature featured on the 2007 declaration.

While favoured candidates for an alternative author swap positions fairly regularly, the current frontrunner is Edward de Vere, the 17^th Earl of Oxford, an aristocrat, adventurer, playwright, and literary patron. Anonymous intends to fight his corner – with a few embellishments, namely that de Vere was also the illegitimate son of Elizabeth I, and had an incestuous relationship with her. Even in anti-Stratfordian ranks, this is a fringe theory, and one often met with derision.

By showcasing this dramatic and controversial theory, Anonymous could prove to be an own goal for the anti-Stratfordian camp. Oliver Stone’s JFK , released in 1991, is the daddy of conspiracy cinema. It succeeded in cementing the idea of a conspiracy in the public mind; following its release, more people were convinced of a cover-up and the US government even reviewed their records of the assassination. Its success lay in the simplicity of the plot, and the fact that it followed established and prominent theories of the Kennedy assassination, the ‘magic bullet’, the ‘second gunman’ etc. Could it be that Emmerich’s desire for blockbuster success via the most controversial and bizarre plot possible has overridden the anti-Stratfordian desire to maintain an image of legitimacy? Anonymous runs a serious risk of exposing them to ridicule.

In fact, the choice of such a bizarre theory seems so poorly considered that an intriguing, and just as unlikely, conspiracy of its own could be considered. What if Roland Emmerich is in fact a Shakespeare supporter,  is deep undercover in the enemy camp, and has gone to the trouble of shooting a multi-million dollar film that contends that Shakespeare did not write his plays, but with the most preposterous storyline possible – all as some kind of cunning ‘false flag’ operation to discredit the anti-Stratfordians. But, like the conspiracies themselves, this is an unreasonable theory based on zero evidence.

Belief in conspiracy theory in the modern world is widespread, a 2003 poll indicated that 75% of Americans believe in a JFK cover-up, a 2006 poll found that nearly half of all Britons believe the death of Princess Diana was not an accident, and we have only to look at recent conspiracies surrounding the 9/11 attacks and Barack Obama’s citizenship to see that the appetite for conspiracy remains strong. Not to mention the images of ‘Da Vinci Code tours’ that appeared in the wake of the book’s popularity, ferrying hundreds of Dan Brown enthusiasts around the Vatican to conduct their own examinations of the Sistine Chapel for hidden codes.

It is difficult to understand the current widespread appeal of conspiracy theories. In explaining his opposition to the Shakespeare conspiracies in Contested Will, James Shapiro writes, “No doubt my attitude derives from living in a world which truth is too often seen as relative and in which mainstream media are committed to showing both sides of every story…I don’t believe that truth is relative or that there are always two sides to every story.” This can seem a strong statement to make in our tolerant age, in which giving a fair hearing to every argument is highly placed. It is also a refreshing indictment of the very postmodern notion of treating every opinion as equally valid, often rejecting any notion of objective truth, even when such truth is provable.

In an extreme example, the devastating consequencies of this policy were made clear in the UK media’s reporting of the possible link between the MMR vaccine and autism. The scientific paper that made the link in 1998 was widely discredited by the medical community as ‘fraudulent’ and ‘dishonest’, and the scientific consensus is that there is no link between the MMR vaccine and autism, yet, in its mission to present both sides of the arguement equally, the media rejected the possibility of objective truth and carried on reporting the link as either possible, factual, or at least as important as the other arguement, leading many parents to deny their children the vaccine and thus leaving them exposed to potentially harmful infections.

Recourse to conspiracy theory can also be an act of desperation, or a response of collective hysteria to a profound event for which ready explainations are not forthcoming. They can also be interpreted as a response to what the anthropologist George Marcus termed a ‘crisis of representation’, or the widespread disengagement and disillusionment from political structures in Western society. Here, a direct connection is made between the disappearance of meta-narratives – ‘grand explanatory schemes’ – or the decline of ideology in an postmodern and post-political age (the idea that politics no longer offers positive ideas to improve the world, but merely sound administration through crisis, of which we are almost always in a permenant state of), and the need to seek answers elsewhere, often in conspiracy. The crisis of bureaucratic democracy becomes a crisis of truth. It is an outlet for frustration, where the majority no longer sees any real ‘choice’ in the political process, to quote Slavoj Žižek,

‘The political frustration of the majority is thus understandable: they are called to decide, while, at the same time, receiving the message that they are in no position effectively to decide, i.e. to objectively weigh the pros and cons. The recourse to “conspiracy theories” is a desperate way out of this deadlock, an attempt to regain a minimum of what Fred Jameson calls “cognitive mapping.”‘

Compared to these grand speculations, the world of the Shakespeare question is an almost insignificant one, but suspicion of Shakespeare has followed the general trend of more widespread acceptance of conspiracies, and the alternative theories have recently gained a degree of respectability. At the beginning of the trailer for Anonymous, when we see his ‘Shakespeare never wrote a single word’ speech, Jacobi is not hunched beside a fire in the back room of some dingy pub, but in a packed and professional looking auditorium, minus any kind of tin foil headgear. It is indicative that having once been a mark of eccentricity, the debate has become respectable, and despite the ridiculous storyline, Anonymous has the opportunity to re-energise the debate. And it intends to do this aggressively: in a press conference last year, Rhys Ifans, who will play Edward de Vere, mentioned that the character of Shakespeare will be presented as an ‘illiterate drunk’, a reference to the more snobbish aspect of the conspiracies: that Shakespeare was too poorly educated and un-gentlemanly to have written the plays. The inclusion of the incestuous royal relationship storyline could be a coup for Shakespeare loyalists,  but the real test of the film’s success will be whether it legitimises questioning the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays, or marks a return to the days of the tin foil hat.

A shortened version of this post appears at blogcritics.org – http://blogcritics.org/video/article/shakespeare-and-conspiracy-the-prospect-of/