SPRING: A CONFERENCE ON THE FUTURE OF THE LEFT

I'm speaking at this event on the 11th of May at the Quaker Meeting House in Manchester. It should be dead good. North-westerners: please come doon.

Speakers include Andy Wilson, Esther Leslie, Aninda Ramamurthy, Ben Watson, Caspar Hewett, and stax more.

ANTI-ST PAUL'S

"At Briggflatts Meetinghouse"

Boasts time mocks cumber Rome. Wren
set up his own monument.
Others watch fells dwindle, think
the sun's fires sink.

Stones indeed sift to sand, oak
blends with saint's bones.
Yet for a little longer here
stone and oak shelter

silence while we ask nothing
but silence. Look how clouds dance
under the wind's wing, and leaves
delight in transience.

- Basil Bunting (1975)

FOOTBALL FACTORY

I (very quickly) wrote about this "football hooligan resurgence" thing for the Guardian.

Didn't have time to point to the obvious connections with Hillsborough, Thatcher, etc, unfortunately.

"THATCHER'S CHILDREN": A PERSONAL NOTE

On this day I remember my mum, who died of breast cancer at the age of 56 in November 2005.

She was everything Margaret Thatcher, who surpassed her by some 30 years, was not.

As the daughter of Republican Irish Catholic immigrants living in post-war Britain, my mum grew up with an inherited belief in egalitarianism and political change, in a society where a tentative form of socialism was making those values more widespread and more potent than at any time before or since. Like many members of the so-called sixties generation, my mum regarded society and our collective improvement of it as the greatest good. For my mum, self-interest, competition, and greed were great evils that had to be combated with a political philosophy of altruism, cooperation, Love.

Margaret Thatcher believed that there is "no such thing as society". She believed that individuals are primarily motivated by self-interest, and that, because of this, they should not be supported in times of suffering by any means other than the largesse of the charitable rich. She was a friend of murderous tyrants and zealously racist political regimes. She delighted in the violence and theatricality of war. She worked hard to destroy the solidarity and unity of British working-class people, to take away their jobs, their communities, their pride.

My life has been dominated in very different ways by these two very different women. Now they are both gone, and I feel very forcefully that it is time for us all to decide whose children we are.

PETER OBORNE IS ACTUALLY A RELATIVELY GOOD LAD, IT WOULD SEEM

The reaction to this Miliband resignation thing is profoundly depressing.

Martin Kettle in The Guardian says:
... many of the things for which Miliband stands will simply not go away, however much Labour's old-time religionists and Pasionaras may wish it otherwise. Labour is not going to lurch into anti-Europeanism or big new welfare spending commitments just because the brainy ex-foreign secretary is heading out of the Commons. It is not going to do these things because it – and this includes Ed Miliband – knows it cannot win or govern on that basis.

Peter Oborne in The Telegraph says:
Yet after Labour’s 1997 election victory he was the poster boy of a new ruling elite which seized control of the commanding heights of British politics. Anti-democratic, financially greedy and morally corrupt, this new political class has done the most enormous damage. Since David Miliband was its standard-bearer, his political career explains a great deal about what has gone wrong with British public life, about why politicians are no longer liked or trusted, and about how political parties have come to be viewed with contempt. 

It says a lot about the ongoing media hegemony of Blairism in Labour-centric discourse that it's an ardent Tory who offers the pithy critique.

I have so much fucking rage for the Guardian right now. I mean, come on, David Miliband was one of the most odious politicians in living memory. How about headlining something vaguely left-wing for a change?

RHIAN E. JONES NAILS BRITPOP

Most people regard Britpop as a dirty word, and of course I can understand why. Pretty much all of the great evils of the present were birthed or crystallised in that funny period between 1994 and 1997. Blairism, retro, and Alex James have morphed seamlessly and without ideological consternation into Cameronism, vintage, and Alex James. We haven't moved on. The mid-nineties are a nightmare from which we're still trying to awake.

So how do we dead awaken? Given that the nineties appear to be at the foundation of the present fucking farce of an epoch, the answer seems to be venture Dante-like into the Inferno in order to see what we can salvage from the flames. Thankfully Rhian E. Jones has been brave enough to do this in what is already the year's most passionate, most brilliant, most enjoyable book.

One of the great strengths of Jones's summary of gender and class debates as they impacted on Britpop is the obvious affection she shows for her musical case studies. It's easy to castigate the bands of this period, and indeed some people appear to have dedicated their lives to this vocation. But too often critiques of Britpop end up sounding like the reactionary rants they purport to oppose. It's elementary to slag off Oasis; it's far more difficult to actually try to pick apart what went wrong in this period, and to try to detach the worthwhile aspects of a variegated populist movement - arguably the last of the really cogent countercultural rock movements - from its obviously wayward, conservative tendencies. Clampdown pulls off this timely intellectual feat with aplomb.

The Manic Street Preachers emerge as obvious heroes of the narrative. But then arguably the Manics are in little need of critical redemption, mainly because they were artsy enough in their early years to secure the enduring affection of the bohemian liberal set. What's far more pithy about Clampdown is its wonderful exploration of a host of bands - Shampoo, Kenickie, Elastica - who have arguably been marginalised because of their association with the ephemerality of the period (and obviously accusations of "disposability" tend to be levelled far more often at female artists). These are sorts of bands people of my age remember with fondness but can't quite put a finger on why. Jones seeks out these forgotten pop fragments and makes a convincing case for their importance.



Clampdown then, is a celebration of the disposable, the ephemeral, the kitsch of Britpop, and a recovery of the political potential inherent in these values. When these largely working-class mores at the centre of British culture, something must be going right somewhere along the lines. The working-class cultural upsurge of the mid-'90s that was briefly epitomised in Britpop was widespread and profound. If its energy was quickly siphoned off by Cool Britannia, that shouldn't stop us from trying to recover something from the rubble.

You must read this astonishing book.

MICHAEL OWEN

An inglorious decline over a number of years due to avarice, self-interest, horse-racing, lack of resilience, and general spectacular boringness.

Or: a lobotomized parody of George Best for the neoliberal age.

CAPITALIST REALISM: WHAT IT IS AND HOW TO FIGHT IT, 13 MARCH, 2013

Right, no excuses, you've all got to come along to this ...

Mark Fisher, Peter Fleming, and myself will be talking at Waterstones in Trafalgar Square, at 7.00pm on Wednesday 13 March, 2013. Tickets are £5 including wine.

The event title is:

Capitalist Realism: What it is and How to Fight It.

Vis aids ...

THE LEADER OF THE LABOUR PARTY The Rt Hon Tony Blair MP

[From the introduction to United - The First 100 Years: The Official Centenary History of Newcastle United (updated edition), 1995]

 

It is a great honour and privilege to write a tribute to my football club on the occasion of the publication of this new book on its history. As someone who was brought up in the North East and now represents Sedgefield constituency, I know how important it is that we now have success in sport.

            The current era is the most exciting for the club and its fans since I first began supporting the team in the early sixties. Becoming leader of the Labour Party puts great demands on my time, but wherever I am on a Saturday I anxiously await the results. And, as someone who has a keen interest in sport, when political engagements permit, I consider it a great privilege to be at the match with the family – especially at St James’s Park. Though I have to confess that there isn’t always domestic harmony at 4.45pm on Saturdays. My elder son, Euan, supports Liverpool, as does his mother, and my younger son, Nicky, backs Manchester United.

            Football is a great passion, loved by countless thousands of people throughout the country. When I get to a match I’m always reminded that Bill Shankly’s famous comment ‘that football is more important than life or death’ s much to Tyneside as on Merseyside.

            I recall as a teenager being elated by Supermac and his hat-trick home debut against Liverpool in 1971. But, of course, in football as in politics we have to live through the darker times as well – and I recall my gloom when we lost the FA Cup final to Liverpool in 1974. I didn’t see Jackie Milburn play, but he and Jimmy Smith, whose genius on the field I did witness, were my great childhood heroes.

            We are very fortunate to follow the club in the current era. This is the most exciting period since I started supporting ‘The Toon’. We are a forward looking club with a magnificent new stadium, an ambitious and enterprising management, on and off the field and, of course, a great squad of players.

            I wish everyone in the club well and know that we can build on our current success. Most importantly we can foster high standards of endeavour and conduct inspiring our young people – which I think is the greatest contribution one generation in sport can bequeath to the next.

            I know that this revised edition of the history of the club will give great pleasure to everyone.

[No commentary needed, I feel]

JOHN SMITH AND SUCH

This piece by Tom Ewing is great.

Those motifs are at the front of my mind right now, what with this and all. Definitely Maybe as a tug-of-war between John Smith and Tony Blair versions of Labourism isn't a bad notion.

By the way, please feel free to send me any virulent anti-Oasis arguments at this point. It's best we get that sort of thing out of the way sooner rather than later. (I know: I should be so lucky).

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On a completely unrelated note, I recently came across the foundation moment of The Fantastic Hope buried in this otherwise highly embarrassing old list of putative band names (Phillip?!). Seeing as I forgot to celebrate the fifth anniversary back in September, consider this right here a fuggin party!