Running through the park and someone has dug out a series of slightly curved strips of soil, covering about half of the grass area by the children’s playground where the kids usually play football. These are about half a metre wide and several metres long and don’t appear to have any function. Their uniformity implies that they were dug by a machine; the number of them that they were done with some purpose – presumably a municipal one. This might be an attempt to put in flowers to support insect life and add a splash of colour – to supplement the meadowing of the top half of the park – which leaves the long slope down towards the tennis courts swishy with long grass in the high summer. I hope so. As I pass a small group of little girls in hijabs are playing football across them anyway and arguing – as you do – where the imaginary goal post is.

Just by Aldi there is a betting shop. It is the only shop in the street that has hand rails to support infirm people to stagger up the slope a few steps the better to lose their money. Considerate.

In our local straggle of shops and restaurants a new micro hairdressers stands out like a black tooth in a Colgate smile. The window is covered in a deaths head figure holding scissors and a set of menacing playing cards. Below, a range of clippers are laid out like implements of torture. The decor inside is an intense black and white vertical stripe. Its name is something like The Final Cut, or The Close Shave and it looks like a barbers for sado-masochists, or people who confuse a hair cut with living on the edge.

Where I live there are a lot of lookalikes.

I have recently seen Robert Mugabe getting on a bus with his shopping; looking thoughtful, Lenin stacking shelves in Sainsburys; looking relaxed, gone ginger and having put on weight.

Down the hill is an elderly man who is the spit of the late Emperor Franz Josef of Austria Hungary – who, although he has laid down the burden of absolute power in favour of erecting a trellis, continues to drive two Mercedes cars – one silver, one blue. Presumably one for Austria and one for Hungary.

It was the best of shops, it was the worst of shops…

Thurrock  Thurrock voted Leave in the EU referendum by 72% on a 72% turnout. The second highest Leave vote in the country. 

If you go to the Morrison’s in Grays Thurrock, the walls by the tills are dominated by  gigantic black and white photographs of the past. In pride of place is one of Tilbury “A” Power Station from the 1950’s or 60’s. It overlooks the shoppers, solid and dependable –  fueled by vast quantities of coal dug out from under “native soil” and hauled in on the river – just as those of us old enough to remember it can recall it in those corners of the mind in which the past seems solid enough to walk through – its tall slender chimneys pouring out its carbon emissions like a banner. Warming our homes, powering our industry, over heating our planet. Power before we knew the full extent of the damage.

It creates a perverse sort of elegiac pride in nostalgia. Coal, cement, the Docks, heavy industry, hard graft, breathing in the smoky air. This is who we where when we knew who we were. Who are we now? Who are we becoming?

This speaks unequally to the shoppers. There are other old photos of people who are – I think without exception – white. The shoppers in the aisles are now much more mixed than that. Seeking to define a place only by its past threatens to keep it there.

A contrasting set of photographs could lift eyes and hopes.

Alongside the old black and white coal fired station – a similar sized photo in full colour of the London array – the 175 turbine 630 MW offshore wind farm just down the Estuary, in all its elegant enormity – not quite so local but almost, and the second largest offshore wind farm on Earth – something to give some pride in the present and hope for the future.

This is what we used to do. This is what we do now.

Alongside the picture of people in the late 40’s sunbathing by the riverfront at the Wharf pub – all baggy shorts and summer frocks – a full colour picture of people as they are now playing on the beach playground, running on the galleon, climbing the rope pyramid, digging in the sand, drinking tea and eating chips – as you do.

This is who we were. This is who we are.

A montage of self portraits of children from local schools.

This is who we are becoming.

Kingsbury

Brent voted 60% to Remain in the EU referendum on a 65% turn out.

Being a German owned supermarket, the Aldi in Kingbury has a Union Jack the size of a Shankill Road gable end overlooking and dominating the tills. The queues are as diverse as any in the country. Go along any one and you will find several home languages.

You will also find the same lined, hard working faces as you do in Thurrock.

Brent has the largest Romanian population in the country. Evangelicals outside the Tube station often have texts entirely in Eastern European languages. None of these people had the right to vote in 2016, despite working here and paying more into the system than they take out. They have no right to vote for national government either, whatever deal is come to on their rights to remain.

The message of the flag – that someone thought it a good idea to put it up – and to put it up on such a huge scale – seems to be that our future is sufficiently uncertain that overt and in your face expressions of loyalty to traditional symbols is needed to prevent our future becoming more than our past.

The news that, on the day of the EU summit that kicked the UK’s prospective exit six months down the road, some five Brexit supporters swathed in Union Jacks blockaded the Aldi distribution centre in Cheshire by parking camper vans across the road – while shouting “We don’t want German” and “This is Brexit at its best” – might make the company’s attempt to brand itself as a local shop for local people more understandable – but also underlines the self defeating futility of it.  The blockade included several continental made vehicles. One of them German. Sometimes the news reads like satire.

Nick Hornby’s comment in Fever Pitch about the dangerous excitement of being seen as a teenage football hooligan on Saturday afternoons, when the rest of the week he lived a well behaved and humdrum life, strikes a chord with anyone who writes – or reads.

There is an American children’s book called Harold’s Magic Crayon in which a toddler draws lines that become reality. The crayon is – of course – purple.

Authors writing fiction as omniscient narrators are the gods of their own worlds – which often become stranger and more various in the process of writing. Few start with a plan or a story frame beyond the basics of a character and a dilemma which sets a puzzle to be solved – or at least explored. Having a worked out beginning, middle and end before starting – like Michael Heseltine’s life plan – would be to set limits before the start. Life, as Heseltine found out – isn’t like that. The point is the exploration; not the target.

Authors writing in the first person are trying out different identities – which are different possible versions of themselves – or an attempt to get beyond themselves – to try to inhabit a different skin in a different life in a different place.

When we write, we are more thought out and considered than when we speak. A more literate, well referenced version of ourselves. All the insights we pick up then think through, can be backdated as though they were spontaneous. “You – only better” as the American plastic surgery adverts used to put it.

This capacity to live as though we were someone else through fiction is given an additional spin by the existence of alternative online universes wherein people can “live” as souped up avatars. In its simplest form this can be as one character in a series of scenarios combining problem solving with fighting in an endless series of encounters in which you – as your character – are in permanent peril, but with an eternal capacity to be reborn after death and start again. “Life” in these contexts as a series of rehearsals for getting it right one day – Groundhog Day with a mouse – before moving on up to the next level to be “the best that you can be” – within the confines of a game designer’s universe.

The question we might want to think about is to what extent the pay offs that we get from these games – or engagement with social media as such – becomes a more exciting substitute for the messy humdrum realities of real lived sensuous experience – especially if we feel the need to live through an avatar – possible as an on screen Ninja, but not when pulling a shopping trolley to Asda on a rainy Tuesday.

The extent to which the players of the game identify with their character as the way they would like the world to see them spills over into online communication when there is no direct contact. Dating profiles are an obvious form of this.

Loneliness – and a sense the the person you are is not someone anyone else would want – can lead to catfishing – another attempt to explore possibilities and get genuine feedback as a fictionalised version of yourself – or as someone you’d like to be. The paradox of this is that the genuine emotions behind this can connect beneath the subterfuge.

The phenomena of the online political troll is another. President Bolsonaro of Brazil was elected last October on a tidal wave of online disinformation about his opponent co-ordinated by allies of Steve Bannon. His rapidly collapsing popularity indicates that a quickly inflated bubble of bullshit doesn’t necessarily last, but is all it takes in the short term and, in an election, that’s all it takes. In any forthcoming election, be prepared for online broadsides of dead cats.

The slew of stories about Russian intelligence having a big online operation and intervening in political debates in other countries – as though this is the kind of contemptible thing that only the Russians would do –  has had a quieter counterpoint in admissions that all intelligence agencies are at it. One intelligence operator sitting in an office in Moscow, or GCHQ, or the NSA HQ, can be running up to a dozen assumed identities at one time. They will not simply be intervening overseas, but also at home.  They are almost certainly very busy people.

The revelation that at least ten profiles of people posting anti-semitic abuse while claiming to be supporters of Jeremy Corbyn were completely fake – fake names, fake photos – poses a serious question. Who would have an interest in providing false evidence of “far left anti-semitism” while hyping up the tensions inside a party that the powers that be in this country are desperate to keep out of office? This is adopting a caricature persona – a virtual straw man for others to knock over – as a job.

While it is only natural that debates about important issues spark strong emotions – the mutual hostility generated by abusive posts is an end in itself for those who want to sew the seeds of rancor. No one engaged in debate forums should assume that anyone unknown is necessarily a real person. Reflecting that the aim of trolls is to hype up debate so that responses are irrational or abusive underlines the importance of being polite – not rising to provocation – and using facts.

Such debates can become very absorbing – even obsessive – as the desire to find coherent narratives is how we create meaning for ourselves. I argue, therefore I am.

The dominance of social media in our lives now – and the highly manipulative Apps that drive us when we are on it – gives rise to the disturbing thought that real life is becoming relegated to the things that we do to sustain us while we are waiting to get ourselves connected in this extraordinarily alienated way.

The two cities superimposed on each other – as though East and West Berlin occupied the same physical space – in China Mieville’s the City and the City is not too far from the reality of the unexpressed conflicting visions in people’s minds. Two people can walk down the same street and be aware that they are in the same country, but imagine that that country is a  different place from the way the other imagines it. Each person will think that the  view of the other is far more like her own than it is – until there is a political crisis that brings a simplified and caricatured version of those visions out of their heads and onto billboards and screaming headlines.

The EU referendum was one of these crises. Two very different visions of the country – both almost equal in size – were set up to stare aghast at each other in mutual incomprehension.

On the defeated remain side – the  48% of the voters who had complacently assumed that their future was everyone’s-  shocked big cities looked down their noses in horror. Sam Johnson’s Eighteenth Century view that “anyone who lives in the provinces is fit to do so” becoming a common theme among better off, self consciously well educated people in the capital. A furious sense of betrayal among many younger people, who no longer dance to the old “patriotic” tunes with the fervour of their elders, whose sense of identity as “Europeans” was bigger than just “British”, felt the result as an abrupt closing in of horizons – that a terrible ugliness had been born.

The leave vote – 52% of voters, 38% of the electorate – grew from anger especially among older, whiter, maler voters in small towns and old industrial areas at being left behind by the slick, faceless, soulless, distant and unaccountable “Brussels bureaucracy” steamrollering ahead in the interests of big money. This was coupled with provincial resentment at the continuing concentration of wealth in cosmopolitan, metropolitan London and other big cities and spiced up with resentment at comer-inners from overseas. This was expressed very forcibly online by one correspondent who wrote “we should build a wall around London.” Although this rallied around a vision of the country that drew hard on the myths that have sustained its self image in an increasingly compensatory way long after the realities on which those myths were based had gone, many of these people would also seek to defend their health service, the prospect of decent jobs and a bit of self respect.

The extent to which the political debate generated by the economic and environmental impasse of neo liberal capital – with the future feeling like a threat and the present a squeeze – with even life expectancy beginning to decline – has been channeled into two false choices – leave the EU and we’ll be back to being a great independent trading nation with good old blue passports, imperial measures and maybe even thru’penny bits – or stay with the EU and everything will be modern and fine and we can keep eating croissants for breakfast-  is an attempt to limit political options to two dead ends.

The deliberate hyping up of that debate, using pejorative terms designed to create knee jerk reactions and deepen tribal affinities; “traitors”, “remoaners”, “racists”, “metropolitan elites”, “rednecks” – is an attempt to make allegiance to these dead ends the most deeply felt identification in politics. The logic of this is to break and recast the current political parties into a remain coalition – from the Labour right to the likes of Heseltine and Soubry – and a rump Tory/UKIP greater English nationalist party – thereby marginalising Corbyn and the Labour left.

Neither side in an argument posed in these terms is capable of “uniting the country,” because neither is capable of refounding it on a new basis; and each will leave the other resentful and angry and preparing for trouble. Each is led by competing fractions of capital – one relatively integrated into the EU, happy to settle into a north European spiesseburger democracy; the other seeking a more piratical modus operandi as a smaller, meaner version of the United States; or perhaps a version of Jersey with nuclear weapons and a hinterland of slums.

Because neither of these is a way forward, the task we face is to generate a new hegemonic politics out of this debate that goes beyond both the nostalgic delusions of going it alone – including its left variation (which might be called “Social Democracy in one country”) – and the comparable delusion that trying to unite Europe on the basis of a Hayekian minimal state with as little accountability to its peoples as possible is going to be enough to contain the tensions that its failures have generated.

The focusing of an emerging left alternative in the form of a Corbyn government preparing from a Green new deal and a quantum shift in economic strategy and international alignments – which has echoes across the continent and in the United States – concentrates the minds of all those trying to maintain the old broken framework. It makes the current risky polarisation into Brexit tribes an imperative, even when it creates paralysis, because there is an alternative on the horizon and there is palpable fear that it might win an election.

It was the contrast that did it.

The old

On March 15th at 11:20 in the morning there were two groups of secondary school students standing outside the National Gallery on a trip. They looked as though they would do what they were told, accept what they were given; or – if given the chance – resist it in secret underhand ways, damaging to all concerned.

Bedecked in black (always black) Academy blazers, they were lined up, orderly, standing still with barely a twitch, silent, a bit resigned but tense and sullen looking; as though having had to be socialised by psychological defeat. They were collectively individualised; isolated from one another all together: sameness one at a time.

They were staring blankly, incuriously seemingly at nothing, eyes mostly unfocussed and inward, as though the centre of London were no more interesting than a dentist’s waiting room; passive enough to be ready for a future holding little promise of security, a home to live in or worthwhile, well paid work to do.

The established faith – an untruth universally acknowledged –  that education is the way up and out – that if you work hard and get your grades you’ll get on, that each of us is pitted against each other in a battle for a big car and a big house, status, standing or celebrity and that social mobility “up” to a lifestyle that burns its way through the planet’s resources in a desperate search for something to fill the holes in our souls is a real or worthwhile enough dream for everyone to buy into – hanging over them like a preordained defeat; with the occasional Pygmalian escapee only serving to mock those left behind.

No doubt their school would get a “good” or “outstanding” from OFSTED for successful socialisation of the next generation; shaving off the edges of their square pegs the better to fit compliantly into the corporate round holes of a world in which their dulled, test drilled uniformity is the human equivalent of the crash of species – from rain forests and insects to amphibians, big cats and primates; and their replacement by mono-cultural plantations, 5 billion factory farmed cows and 20 billion chickens poisoning water courses in a mountain of manure.

Their teacher stood in front, half looking away, aware but glazed, with the slight smile of a man whose behavior management systems were beyond having to make exceptional personal efforts; but who was nevertheless avoiding eye contact.

A new hope

Five minutes later and a stone’s throw away, spread across the whole of Whitehall, moving fast and tumultuously, laying siege to Downing Street and bouncing up and down on the walls of ministries, thousands upon thousands of their contemporaries came pouring up the road in a torrent of banners, chants, singing, slogans and conversations; calling for their elders to wake up to the threat of runaway climate change.

The Horses on guard at Horse Guards Parade bucked and cantered in a sort of solidarity as their breast plated riders struggled to retain control and blank expressions.

The creative energy was palpable. The intention serious. The mood a mixture of exuberance at taking action, earnest seriousness and a sense of responsibility in getting their message across, defiance in breaking bounds, fueled by an exasperated rage and fear at the cloth eared mulishness of a society so wedded to its old ways of doing things that it is sleep walking into a disaster that is clearly seen yet downplayed to invisibility – in the school curriculum even more than the news.

“I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept” read one of the banners – a welcome echo of the 68 slogan “Be realistic – demand the impossible” because if what seems impossible is what is necessary for us to survive as a civilisation, we have to face up to it.

In the 1960s some people were sufficiently scared of nuclear war to take direct action to try to shock wider society into opening its eyes to the threat. People sat in the road to block traffic. The students did the same. Sitting in the road and chanting “turn your engines OFF!” as a direct comment on how everyday habits of getting around are helping set us up for disaster. The difference now is that nuclear war is an event that could or could not happen whereas climate change is an event that is happening. Every year it gets more apparent and the urgency of dealing with it gets through to more and more people, despite the millions poured into poo pooing it by fossil fuel companies; exhibiting the same profit defending criminal irresponsibility shown by their counterparts in tobacco and asbestos but on an apocalyptic scale.

These students were unsupervised, running things themselves; improvising a route with lively elan and running rings round the police. They broke through the limits of official dialogue and behavior in a self disciplined orderly disorder. Adults with them were supportive participants with no need to exercise control because the students were dedicated to a higher purpose and were controlling themselves.

In finding the voice that their generation needs, they have overflowed the bounds of business as usual. Their understanding, initiative, creativity, formidable organising skills, capacity for coherent and constructive argument, wit, research skills, courage and humour; have developed a sense of agency, mission, solidarity and empowerment that makes them the leaders in society and education today.

Those Ministers and Head teachers who think it enough to mouth platitudes about missed education and threatening detentions – to try to derail this movement and dampen their students down into the same subordinated, depressed  state as the poor souls outside the National Gallery – are failing to grasp the opportunity for social and educational change that their students are serving up to them on a plate; and of course a staggering lack of any sense of proportion. Many of these students have already stepped into a world beyond one in which the old ways have any meaning or resonance.

They have opened a breach in the old order. Time for the rest of us to pour in behind them.

*Quote from Antonio Gramsci.

On my daily morning fitness and shopping run down to Sainsburys – a good route that I can manage  without stopping because its downhill all the way – I pass through a labyrinth of alleyways on the Springfield estate that zig zag down the hill like a mountain terrace.

There is usually a small pile of discarded beer tins and cigarette packets cluttering up along the fences – the suburban detritus of bored youth or demoralised old age – but this morning, rising above all that and neatly duct taped in a line along one of the creosoted fences were three tulips in full bloom. Having been there overnight they were bowing their bright red heads in an elegant silent swoon, like imprisoned princesses awaiting their fate – or a random art installation with no cultural agenda.

It must have been a significant act for someone for them to buy that number of tulips – or, more menacingly, cut them from someone’s garden – bring them to that spot and tape them up in a line – carefully equidistant – just there. An odd place for a romantic gesture; or a shrine; or a ritual: or a warning.

Down at Wembley Asda  – the stadium looming in the near distance like a newly arrived space craft –  there are people collecting money. It’s not very clear what for. One elderly woman – who looks like she is begging because she has no charity sign, but is turned out too smartly and has far too posh a voice has made herself up all over in lime green face paint, so she looks like a very thin version of Fungus the Bogeyman wearing a shimmery raincoat. As she approaches, a small child riding in a supermarket trolley cowers in terror, her safe world suddenly threatened.

On September the 19th 2014 I found myself walking towards Hendon tube station unsure about which country I was in. The Scottish independence referendum had been the previous day and I hadn’t heard the result.

It was like being suspended between possibilities. Schrodinger’s country – alive and not alive at the same time. The early morning street bathed in pale sunlight, and all the people going about their business, would have been the same, and just as solid, but which state we were in, and where we might be heading, seemed fluid, full of possibilities, most of them bleak.

Were we still in the Britain we had grown up in, surviving a little while longer with its familiar outlines, dusty old emblems and narcissistic nostalgia; or had Scotland broken away into a brave new dawn on the back of the enthusiastic support of barely half its people, having to lug along the bewildered resentment of the rest like Braveheart with a limp; leaving behind a wounded greater England (or lesser UK) – with Wales and the North of Ireland as awkward appendages cued up to eye the exit – the long slumber of continuity broken by edgy debates about who – after all – we think we are – or, for that matter, were?

Uncertain speculation was resolved prosaically by the front page of the Metro in the Hendon Central entrance. Return to normal. No terrible beauty born. Continuity had won out, allowing the old order to drive on for a few more miles as though nothing had changed – rather like the Duke of Edinburgh in his 4×4 on a country lane on a darkening evening with poor visibility –  but in reality just as a  chrysalis – a thin papery wrapper with deeper, darker stirrings within it – English nationalism – in its stubborn, bloody minded, “I’ll cut my nose off to spite my face if I want to,  because its my bloody nose; and don’t you come over here telling me not to – its none of your bloody business” mode – probably the worst of them.

Had the SNP won in 2014 they, like the Catalan nationalists more recently, would have faced the problem not only of how and how far to disengage with deep structures of economic, political, cultural, personal and emotional love hate relationship that had been taken for granted for years and years and years, but also how to manage a people polarised – just over half wanting to press ahead with a new identity, with the other half no longer feeling completely at home because they had lost something essential to their sense of themselves – which I suspect would have felt like an amputation to a lot of people; still feeling the sensation in ghost limbs, as an awful reminder that they weren’t there any more

At least, in their case, the nationalism was an inclusive one. Anyone who lived in Scotland would be considered Scots, regardless of their origin or anything else. An adjustment would have been difficult, but there was some sort of forward looking prospectus for it. Continuing to co-exist within the wider framework provided by the EU – setting common ground for the tension with the bilateral relationship with England- would have set relatively limits to the poison and polarisation generated by any divorce – just as it had allowed peaceful co-existence between the “two traditions” in the North of Ireland; pending a long term demographic shift towards a united Ireland. Love (or making it) conquering all in the end.

A loosening of absolute identities, allowing people with a differing sense of identity to share a space to live in, is at the heart of belonging in most countries that are going well, looking forward and outwards. Identities are not simple. They are multiple. Every society is to a greater or lesser extent multicultural, multi ethnic, multi faith, multi lingual and divided by class; and every individual’s sense of belonging is a unique combination of these big things and lots of little ones (illustrated rather graphically by the case of the former Jihadist who abandoned ISIS and wanted to come home because he missed his mum, pasties and Dr Who). To loosen things further, all these aspects of identity also overlap with people in other countries; which creates international identities that can be a challenge to the notion of absolute allegiance that all states seek to foster because they want people to die for them. “I vow to thee my country…”

That means that it is possible, outside of periods of crisis, and unless a state defines itself in absolute nationalist terms as belonging to ONE people, defined by blood, for people to co-exist peacefully; even while imagining the country they live in in completely different ways and as a very different place. A metaphor for this is China Mieville’s The City and the City – where the very different cities of Beszel and Ul Qoma occupy the same space operating on different rules and perceived at different ends of the colour spectrum – while their citizens see each other – and the other city – only as a glimpse on the edge of perception.

It’s at moments of crisis – when the economy no longer holds out a future of promise, when people begin to struggle to make ends meet in the here and now, that mutually exclusive visions become more forceful and frenetic, discourse becomes coarse, the centre falls apart – because the arguments really matter – and implicit aspects of identity become explicit and visible and fundamental. When this occurs there is the shock of a rift and the beginning of a prolonged crisis.

To be continued…