About Binface

 

There has been some talk, even from those unsympathetic to Nigel Farage, that the candidacy of Count Binface, the highest-profile opponent to the Reform leader in the upcoming Clacton by-election, is somehow unserious and indicates something flawed in the very soul of our society. Well, yes. Which is why he’s exactly the right person to take on the Poundland Spode.

Farage himself is the most prominent manifestation, in Britain at least, of the wave of populism that has taken hold following the financial crash. People, it seems, want content-free politics, and are less interested (or maybe they just lack the patience to read) sober, costed policies. They want politicians who appear to get how they feel, politicians with whom they can have a pint, politicians who are good for a laugh. Brexit was the most obvious example of this: people voted for it on instinct, not really knowing or caring what it might mean, a great many of them apparently not really thinking it would happen. So nobody thought through how it could be implemented, which is why the country’s extraction from the EU became such a bloody, painful mess.

And Binface is just the logical extension of this. He’s funny, he’s an underdog, he’s a bit of a wally, he doesn’t act like a politician, nobody really expects him to win, which gets people thinking that he might just. His policies are paper-thin, but nobody cares. He is Farage’s worst nightmare. He is also almost entirely Farage’s own creation and Farage’s own bloody fault.

About Sheffield

The algorithms have directed me to a rather enticing box set of music created in Sheffield between the late 70s and late 80s. The track listing includes material from most of the major acts I remember from that time and place (The Human League, Heaven 17/BEF, ABC, Pulp – but no Def Leppard) as well as a few bands (Chakk, Clock DVA, Danse Society) that I probably wouldn’t be able to pick out in an identity parade but the names of which I vaguely recall from the NME or night-time Radio 1.

And there’s more. Much, much more. Names, glorious names, so glorious that I rather suspect the compilers have invented a few, just to keep us on our toes. So, here’s a conundrum. Below is a list containing the names of nine Sheffield bands from the period and one that I’ve invented. Your task is to spot the fake and there’s an imaginary bottle of Henderson’s relish for the first person to guess right.

Hobbies of Today
Repulsive Alien
The Naughtiest Girl Was A Monitor
Fish And Breadcake
Quite Unnerving
Defective Turtles
Acrobats Of Desire
Bongo Camisole Time
Peter Hope And The Jonathan S. Podmore Method
The Wacky Gardeners

Best of Yorkshire luck. And here’s one of the real bands, a few days ago.

About cultural plausibility

An article about parents who hire tutors specifically to buy social advantage for their children is mildly depressing until one of those tutors rather lets the cat out of the Birkin with the admission that “an English accent implies that you're well-read, that you're well-educated, even if you're not.” Now it seems that we’ve got beyond Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital and Hirsch’s cultural literacy into a state where cultural plausibility is all that matters. And even then, we know it’s bullshit, but still go along with it. I mean, would anybody who’s actually read The Great Gatsby attend a Gatsby-themed party, let alone throw one?

I’m guessing Zadie Smith has read Gatsby, and a few other books as well. But the number of people who can say the same is falling, as she suggests in an article excoriating the British Library for its treatment of its staff:

You know a country by its values. By what a country values. And it turns out that what a country values can change over time. Sometimes, though, there’s a sort of cognitive delay between the country you think you are in, and the country you’ve actually become. For example, you can keep selling yourself, to foreigners, as the country of William Shakespeare and Jane Austen, and luring busloads of tourists to Stratford-upon-Avon and Bath, and put a statue of George Orwell in front of the BBC, and imagine yourself a cultured and literate nation, which the rest of the world admires for its devotion to the written word – but if you then chronically underfund your cultural institutions, and treat your cultural workers with contempt, many people will suspect you of being full of it. And as the decades pass – and fewer and fewer Shakespeares and Austens and Orwells emerge from your little island – even more people will begin to suspect that in truth you do not value culture at all, and are in fact running a giant heritage museum in which the only cultural workers you respect are the dead ones.

And as the man who hasn’t read Gatsby puts the frighteners on the BBC, maybe all that we can look forward to is increasingly implausible parties.

About English

The UK government has decided that migrants entering the country under skilled worker visas will now need to demonstrate the ability to speak English to a B2 level (equivalent to A-level). Now, having taught English to both native speakers and non-native learners, I actually have some personal experience upon which to base my usual scattergun pontification, but plenty of people have already come to the same conclusion anyway: this requirement would mean that any such migrant would be speaking the language at a standard that the majority of natives couldn’t hope to match. And in their comments about the change, the anti-migrant contingent just reinforce the point with all the eloquence one might expect: 

What this policy does prove is that no serious political force wants to stop immigration, merely to ensure that the migrants are at the very least plausibly middle-class. Even that ferocious boat-stopper Nigel Farage is happy to lure migrants who are prepared to pay £250,000 for the privilege. And this is the paradoxical endgame of Brexit. If you didn’t like it when a Polish plumber came round to unblock your toilet, well, congratulations. The Polish plumber’s gone back to Kraków. But he’s been replaced by an Indian doctor, a Nigerian lawyer, an Azerbaijani hedge fund manager. And now you get to unblock their toilets. Enjoy!

About Dover Beach

Mad-eyed, foam-flecked rumours on social media that Saturday will see a mass invasion of Dover Beach. Not one led by migrants, though. This time it’ll be stout-limbed, pink-hued defenders of the British way of life on the sands, doubtless screaming bleeding chunks of Matthew Arnold at the baffled boat people until they skedaddle back home.

...and we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

About bookshops and GBS

News from Clitheroe in Lancashire, where another bookshop closes and the owner complains not only of punitive rents and the more general decline of the high street but also our old friend dumbing-down. I’m not sure of Paul Hamer’s logic here, as he appears to blame the insidious intellectual hollowing-out of Western society on the prevalence of vape shops and nail bars, but I can certainly offer some sort of anecdotal evidence. I’ve been a London commuter on and off for over 30 years and when I first did it, I reckon at least half my fellow travellers would be reading something, even if it was a tabloid or lad mag. Now I’m very often the only person with any kind of print matter to hand and, yes, maybe some of the phone-gazers are getting to grips with a new translation of Dostoevsky or Derrida but when I do sneak a glance at their screens, they’re really not, are they?

And then to David Hare, who bewails the current tendency of the National Theatre to prioritise star vehicles with West End/Broadway potential over its old repertory policy. And for some reason, George Bernard Shaw gets in on the act:

Do the English people want a national theatre? Of course they do not. They never want anything. They got the British Museum, the National Gallery, and Westminster Abbey, but they never wanted them. But once these things stood as mysterious phenomena that had come to them, they were quite proud of them, and felt that the place would be incomplete without them.

Except that I’m not so sure they’re proud of them any more. Or even know they exist. 

About the election, if only briefly

I was going to say something profound about the political events of the past few weeks but Rafael Behr got in there ahead of me: 

To an extent, Sunak’s failure was seeded in the unstable electoral coalition that Johnson assembled in 2019 with the promise to “get Brexit done”. Implementing an agenda in government that might satisfy the divergent interests of a culturally and geographically incoherent voting bloc – the ex-Labour working-class north and the traditional Tory southern shires – was an impossible feat of political alchemy.

And Cold War Steve makes art from schadenfreude:

About Turner

Have gone dahn to Margate. Passer-by just called me an ‘arty farty cunt’ for reading a blue plaque about Turner.

— Snide Hampton (@Badger5000) January 15, 2022

About noise

Sad news from Barrow, where a public piano in a market has signally failed to create a harmonious atmosphere. “If they were playing Beethoven or Mantovani or something nice that would be OK,” says one local trader, “but it’s just kids jumping up and down on them and creating just utter noise.”

Leaving aside for a moment the aesthetic equivalence between Beethoven and Mantovani, some people would pay good money for a nice bit of noise.

About bad art

I assumed at first that the One Britain One Nation project was meant to form part of this weird culture war we’re currently embroiled in; a bear trap for bien-pensant liberals who instinctively giggle at any ostentatious expression of patriotism and are then immediately tarred as sneering quinoa-munching metropolitans, out of touch with the stout yeomen of Albion, yada yada yada...

If that’s the case, though, the whole thing seems to have backfired. Not (just) because of a general revulsion against drilling young minds into ostentatious demonstrations of sentimental patriotism – a practice with which even arch-Imperialists such as Kipling were uneasy – but because ultimately, it was a bad song, a banal dirge with vapid lyrics. Those who might stand by the sentiments will flinch at singing along with something so cruddy. “Tear him for his bad verses,” as the luckless Cinna’s assassins yelled.

And similarly, we can side-step another cultural skirmish, about whether or not a hereditary monarchy is more trouble than it’s worth in the 21st century, when we consider the merits of otherwise of the new statue of Diana, Princess of Wales. As Jonathan Jones puts it, “Perhaps not even for Diana’s sincerest believers, for the statue group’s emotive symbolism is undermined by its aesthetic awfulness.” It’s dreadful. That is all.

That said, of course, since we have a governing class that seems intent on sidelining what we’re supposed to call the creative industries (less a war between cultures, more like a war on culture in general), maybe simply expressing any kind of critical/aesthetic evaluation is just as subversive and dangerous as mocking patriotism or the monarchy...

About German magazines

“

In the past few days, two German magazines have put out covers depicting two right-wing foreign leaders in highly unflattering guises. That said, the difference in tone suggests that one of the countries in question, as awful as its current boss might be, still needs to be taken seriously. The other, perhaps not so much.

PS: More stuff:

PPS: “...how the others must see the faker...”

PPPS: And, by David Foldvari:

About Theresa May

Written statement from PM later today

— Laura Kuenssberg (@bbclaurak) 11 March 2019

About Brexit (Hey, is that still a thing?)

(I posted this on Facebook last night and a few people liked it. Here’s a slightly amended version.)

“It’s not the Brexit my constituents voted for” seems to be a mini-meme running through the current batch of resignations. OK, let’s look at this. 

Some people voted Leave from a long-standing, principled objection to the EU itself, whether from a right-wing perspective (it puts too many restrictions on free enterprise) or from the left (it’s in hock to corporate capitalism). 

Some voted Leave because the balance of power in the 21st century is leaning away from Europe and the US, and towards Asia, so we're better off getting cosy with China and India. 

Some voted Leave because, whatever the originating principles of the EU, it’s become moribund and corrupt. 

Some voted Leave because they object to a supranational body having any kind of control over a sovereign nation (although why these people don't extend this concern to the fact that Parliament in London still has ultimate control over the people of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, I’m not sure). 

Some voted Leave because they were worried about immigration/freedom of movement, on a continuum between mild worries over jobs/housing/health services on one hand, and good old-fashioned swivel-eyed, gammon-cheeked racism on the other. 

Some voted Leave because they want to return to some weird prelapsarian amalgam of 1945, 1955 and 1970, where Kenneth More won the war, the Suez debacle never happened and TV on all three channels consists of frilly-shirted comics telling jokes about blackies and poofters in your face forever. 

Some voted Leave because they believed all that bollocks about straight bananas — these people are idiots, but they're still entitled to their say. Ditto the stuff on the bus about £350 million. Oh, and blue passports. Gotta have those blue passports.

And some people voted Leave as an atavistic reaction to what they perceive as political elites, simply doing something they knew would annoy the likes of David Cameron and Tony Blair, or people who work at the BBC, or live in London, just because. 

Now, all these people voted to leave, they voted against something, and all together they added up to a (bare) majority. But beyond that, is there really one coherent end-point that they all, every single one of them, voted *for*? Is there any single state of being that would satisfy all of them, from the grumpy Little Englanders to the post-Eurocentric global liberals and all points in between? So how the hell can anybody say that this or that document doesn't deliver something that never existed in the first place?

Oh yeah, and the Irish border. Doh.

You know what, I’m starting to think that maybe this Brexit thing wasn’t such a great idea after all.

PS: This, by Stewart Lee.

About Shelley and Corbyn

From Joe Kennedy’s anti-Blairite screed Authentocrats:

When Corbyn quoted Percy Shelley’s “The Masque of Anarchy” at Glastonbury Festival in the summer of 2017, various figures on the political right and centre were quick to take to Twitter to claim that referencing Romantic poetry was hardly an example of the common touch. Imagining how Raymond Williams might have responded to this idea is good fun, to say the least. If you’re tempted in any way to concur with it, think a little longer about the implications of saying poetry, books, music, painting and so on are only for the well-off.

Well, yes and no. Obviously, poetry, especially the poetry of a dazzling radical such as Shelley, *should* be on the lips of everyone. But it really isn’t, is it? If I were to amble into my nearest branch of Lidl and ask them who wrote The Masque of Anarchy, what sort of strike rate should I expect? In fact, I rather suspect that going to Waitrose wouldn’t be any more productive and the vast majority of those who Kennedy would define as “well-off” wouldn’t recognise a line of Shelley if crawled up their trouser legs and returned the trains to public ownership.

Which is, to Kennedy, probably Tony Blair’s fault, but it’s still true.

About football

I don’t know if you’d noticed, but there is some football about the place, which is fine; and a hell of a lot of talking and writing and singing about football, very much of which is not. Apart from anything else, I’m getting overwhelmed by overly helpful articles that aim to explain what the world was like in 1990, when England were last in the World Cup semi-finals, especially the fact that the country they played then (West Germany) no longer exists; and the country they play tonight (Croatia) didn’t exist then, nor did the country (Russia) where the match is taking place, at least as independent entities. I just feel old, especially when I remember that 1990 is closer to 1966 than it is to 2018. And don’t get me started on clickbait offering a gloss on what exactly Three Lions means...

England’s (up to this point) successful campaign has also prompted a few Panglossian pieces on how this ramshackle band with roots in Yorkshire and Jamaica, London and Nigeria, Ireland and Portugal, offers a vision of a new, inclusive rainbow patriotism, which is all lovely. But this multiculturalism in motion smudges over the fact that the country is also split along lines of age, class, income and levels of educational attainment. The sense of complicity that we snowflake libtards feel about the twin cataclysms of Brexit and Trump mean that social snobbery, especially when used against white males who don’t shop at Waitrose, is now almost as unacceptable as racism, sexism or homophobia; see how the tide has turned against the “gammon” jibe.

That said, on Saturday, after I’d watched and enjoyed the Sweden match, then made my way across London to a birthday party in (of course) Islington, where architects and psychologists and quite a few people who may not be able to stay around when Brexit finally bites, ate Spanish food and drank French wine. And on the way I encountered plenty of loud, drunk, aggressive, incoherent, beer-spraying, Caucasian men, draped in red-and-white flags, screaming that bloody refrain like a toxic battle cry and doing that weird fistypumpy dance, as if they were pulling on the teats of some enormous, mutant cow, encouraging it to spurt yet more lager into their pink, upturned faces. And three things came to mind; first, that if this is what they’re like when they win, God help us when the bubble finally bursts, whenever that is. (I’m writing this a few hours before the semi-final.) And second, the words of Martin Amis:

At my last football match, I noticed that the fans all had the complexion and body-scent of a cheese-and-onion crisp, and the eyes of pit bulls. But what I felt most conclusively, above and below and on every side, was ugliness — and a love of ugliness.

Which is sneery and snobbish and nasty, but then I didn’t have my taxi or ambulance smashed up, my shop invaded, my police dog hassled for being German. And finally, for some reason, I recalled an interview in the NME with oddball Chelsea/Everton winger and Joy Division fan Pat Nevin, some time back in the 1980s. “What do you love most about football?” he was asked. “Playing football,” he responded. “And what do you hate about it?” “Everything else.”

PS:

Three Lions is actually about heroin.

— Richard Blandford (@rblandford) 11 July 2018

About housing

Amidst the current brouhaha involving Facebook data being used to manipulate what we used to call democracy, it’s good to remember that lots of politics is carried out via good, old-fashioned leaflets through the door – and also that the tactics involved can be just as toxic. Here’s a glorious example of othering from my local Conservative party, in advance of the local elections. *Their* residents parking on *your* streets. Incomers, strangers, newbies, you’re not from round these parts, are you? Get off my land (or at least my parking spot). And, you know what? I bet it’s going to work.

And, on a related note, I posted the image below on Instagram, and within a few minutes it had been *liked* by an account called mortgageslondon.

PS: And more false dichotomy from the local Tories: street art (can be) good; graffiti bad.

About education

Education secretary Damian Hinds on proposals for variation in tuition fees between courses:

What we need to look at is the different aspects of pricing — the cost that it is to put on the course, the value that it is to the student and also the value to our society as a whole and to our economy for the future.

“Value.” Such an interesting word.

About that reshuffle

Our new Culture Secretary.

About Chile

Greil Marcus, discussing the UK post-punk scene, circa 1980:

Among the many mysteries of British culture I know I will never solve is the meaning of “Chile Solidarity Disco.”

About passports

A few months ago, I unearthed my first passport. It was the long-defunct British Visitors version, acquired at the age of 13 to enable me to go on a school trip to France, during which I would have my first snog, but that’s another tale for another day, or maybe never. A BVP was only valid for a year and allowed entry to a strictly limited array of countries, most of them in Western Europe; you could go to West Berlin, but only by air. Any other mode of transport would involve setting foot on Communist soil.

Which inevitably got me thinking about how much Europe, and travel, and life have changed in the years since; and how much some people apparently wish they hadn’t. Apparently we’re all going to get dark blue passports again, something apparently greatly to be desired by many Brexit voters, along with smoking in pubs, incandescent lightbulbs, pre-decimal currency and the death penalty (we are not informed whether this will be carried out in public). It all rather supports my gut feeling that Brexit is less about leaving the EU, more about going back to an imagined yesterday of Morris Minors and outside toilets, where everything is grey or beige, except the people, who are exclusively white.

But back to the passports. It’s well documented that there were some clear correlations between voting in the referendum with regard to age (older people voted to leave, younger to stay) and educational background (the higher up the learning ladder you went, the more likely you were to be a remainer). But another interesting statistic shows areas that voted heavily for Brexit also had the lowest levels of passport ownership. Which suggests that for many people, the desire for a blue passport is yet another abstract yearning for something that doesn’t really exist.