On Whitehall during the last student climate strike – a thousand or two students full of life streaming North past Downing Street and the Cenotaph, all the monumental memorials to futile conflicts, beyond the Ministries and the overbearing equestrian statutes of long forgotten chiefs of the Imperial General Staff, chanting for their future – demonstrating in more ways than one that the old emperors have no clothes.

Alongside them – seemingly from a different universe – a few old men carrying Union Jacks, drifting in the opposite direction down to Parliament Square to call for a Brexit back to  world in which all problems can be solved by closing the borders.

Three of them are also off duty football fans. One with a Chelsea shirt and matching smirk, loudly broadcasting his internal monologue with the self referential swagger of an invading army. No one likes it? He don’t care.

“Bunch of Corbyn supporters. He’s a wanker!” I look him in the eye and give him one of the old fashioned looks that my family has cultivated for generations and saves up for moments such as this.

He looks nonplussed for a moment. Looks back at me slightly astonished.

“Corbyn supporter?” (as if he’d never met a real one)

“Ye -ah” Holding his gaze and saying it as though we’re far more normal than he thinks we are.

Turns to one of his mates – still astonished. “Corbyn supporter!”

Both of them turn to look at me. I look back, smiling benignly. The second, equally astonished _ “Corbyn supporter?!”

“Yeah. Gives us hope.”

They are swallowed up – still looking puzzled – by the oncoming wave of tourists – who are doggedly seeking out the sights of our museum of a society (perhaps not realising that they have just walked past a living example of them).

Last Sunday, in a bitterly cold easterly wind, the neighbour opposite stands on the pavement, staring into the open bonnet of his car. On either side, a furrow browed trio of minders gather and stare with him. Middle aged, Balkan, hunched against the wind, drawing edgily on cigarettes – as people do when there’s an unresolved task at hand – their faces lined by life and wreathed in smoke, drinking glass mugs of strong black coffee – the ghost of the Ottoman Empire in a cup. Wandering to and fro a little.

In front of them, he who knows stands in front of the car with his head bowed in concentration – and perhaps prayer – his hands moving delicately across spark plugs, valves, fluttering over nuts as though casting benediction or feeling an aura, carefully tightening this or that, screws twiddled tighter or looser. No surgeon could show more care. An oily rag is wiped lovingly, almost caressingly here and there; soothing fluids are drained from sumps or poured gently into thirsty orifices.

The minders watch, make suggestions.

Mobile phones are consulted. Fingers point and tap. Heads nod and shake. Bending seriously to get at the innards, a part is transplanted. Hands rub together. Other hands take the pulse.

Liverpool feels like the capital city of a fallen empire. The Vienna of the North West, with its massive, magnificent Georgian buildings, the vast rotting sandstone railway cuttings, streets studded with aggressively martial and regal statues.  Except that the class who shaped all these out of the profits from the slave trade are long gone; leaving the city to be inherited by the people who did the work to build it in the image of their oppressors – strolling, pattering through its broad streets and scuzzy market stalls, singing Beatles covers and Country in the pubs and grills. In one steak bar, two fellers well into their seventies belted out “Please, please me” and partied like it was 1963; notwithstanding that today Gerry and the Pacemakers has a different meaning.

The Docks are now full of museums, restaurants, boutiques and conference centres; the city centre presided over by the Mekon like structure of the Radio Tower. The wide, hazy, stinking sweep of the Mersey empty of shipping.

Outside St Georges Hall hangs a huge banner showing the faces of all the people killed at Hillsborough. “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” Beneath it, a gay couple kiss on the steps, while equestrian statues of Prince Albert and Queen Victoria look the other way. At the end of the colonnade, a young woman poses for a fashion shoot – the photographer holding his tripod off the ground for a better shot. In front, a brooding statue of Benjamin Disraeli glares down in apparent discomfort at a small field of floral tributes – constantly refreshed. Disraeli’s is the only statue that is not adorned with a gull. Perhaps its the ferocity of his expression that scares them off. Even the Duke of Wellington, high up on a column well above the rooftops, and Mr Gladstone in the park, buttressed at his feet by mighty angels holding great tomes of learning and faith, are constantly adorned with a white bird keeping an eye on things and somehow saving them from terminal pomposity. I think they do it on a rota.

Liverpool was a Conservative dominated City from the eighteenth century right up to the middle of the twentieth, but they lost control of the council for the last time in 1972, their last Councillor in 1987 and got just over 4% of the vote in the 2012 mayoral election.

In the entrance to Lime Street Station stands a life size bronze statue of Ken Dodd – comedian and tax dodger – with an anodyne toothy grin and tickling stick. Rendering a floaty ludicrous object like a tickling stick in a material as epic and solid as bronze has sufficient heroic absurdity that the gulls don’t bother to sit on his head. In 1979 I saw the real Dodd working the streets on behalf of the Conservative Party in the Edge Hill by- election and trying hard to be tattyfilarious. The tickling stick – which he deployed on a group of elderly women as though he were dusting them – was blue. He was game. Fifty years of working crowds made this automatic. They giggled a bit – seemingly out of politeness. His minders, two central office heavies with slicked over hair and well tailored camel hair jackets – held fixed smirks that could not disguise their discomfort at their surroundings and the people in them.

The Conservatives garnered less than 2000 votes. Whether the blue tickling stick did them any good has never been analysed.

 

 

 

Approaching Sainsbury’s at a jog last Sunday morning – passing on the way the house with eight solar panels and four air conditioning units cancelling each other out, and the discarded fridge wearing a toilet seat like a hat – and there was a small group of people dressed in green giving out leaflets. Hoping they were environmental activists I made eye contact before realising that they were Christian evangelists.

These are becoming increasingly frequent outside supermarkets and tube stations as the social crisis deepens. Depending on their given path to salvation they sometimes stand mutely awaiting lost souls seeking guidance – or they go out of their way to hassle possible converts with a leaflet, or an opening conversational gambit, whether they feel lost or not. They are a far more present feature of our streets than political parties are and generally argue with fixed smiles from within a labyrinth of arguments that can only be convincing if you accept their faith before you start.

I’m usually polite and don’t start a discussion, but having approached these people assuming they were something they were not, it would have seemed rude not to engage

Trying to have a discussion on what I hoped might be common ground about the world as it is, I asked one of them – with all due respect that they were not Church of England – for his view of the service in Westminster Cathedral to commemorate 50 years of the submarine nuclear “deterrent”. The long tradition of the C of E blessing battleships now at the level of sprinkling Holy Water over weapons capable of incinerating entire cities and killing everyone who lives in them. Blessed are the peacemakers? What would Jesus do? What hymns do you sing at a service like that? All things bright and beautiful? What prayer? “…Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us”? What lesson? “Turn the other cheek?”

He hadn’t heard about it, but quickly interpreted it as further evidence of the “end of days”. Anyone with a passing knowledge of the Book of Revelations can see why any apocalyptic period in human history could be seen in this light. For someone who believes in the literal truth of the Bible, this becomes an imperative , so real life crises – like the climate emergency that everyone should be putting energy into stopping – becomes reduced to nothing more than raw material for a view of the world that welcomes it as evidence of the upcoming rapture.

This provides the delusion of salvation for those who believe hard enough. This is an emotional imperative. Faith based on feeling. The problem is that if that faith is based on fear, any amount of trouble can result from it. Questions that are difficult to answer are simply put in a box marked “intellectualising”; because no one likes a smart arse, experts are not to be trusted, and questioning a faith is the road to breakdown if it is the rock on which your mental equilibrium is built; the port in the storm of uncertain times.

It is also, of course, deeply factional.

Each evangelical sect believes that it has The Answer, usually in the form of seeing The Bible as the “Word of God” and therefore “The Truth”. As any text is subject to interpretation – as they put it in Life of Brian ; “How shall we fuck off, oh Lord?” – each sect holds onto its own reading as the one true way and condemns all the others – with a sad shake of the head and sometimes an unmistakable glint of smugness while contemplating all that hellfire for those that are not saved- as lost sheep that have gone astray.

The next time I have this discussion I will try out a joke that was told to me by a Catholic friend when we were teenagers and see if they laugh in self recognition – as laughter often gets through where reasoned argument doesn’t.

Man dies and goes to Heaven.

He gets shown around by St Peter – clouds, harps, heavenly choir…all the drill.

After a while St Peter asks him if he has any questions.

He looks all around and says – “Yes, that thing.”

He points to a wall that stretches as far as they eye can see, up and down, and from one horizon to the other.

“What’s behind THAT?”

St Peter says “Oh! That’s the Catholics. They think they are the only ones here.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.