ED

Very cautiously optimistic.

When I was eight or nine years old I took part in a dance at my small first school in Northumberland. It was part of an annual event called Coffee Evening, during which the whole school would be turned into a sort of village fete-cum-bring and buy sale. I don’t know why it was in the evening rather than the day, and come to think of it, I’m pretty sure it took place on two consecutive evenings: Thursday and Friday. It was always sometime in June or July.

The Coffee Evening I’m thinking about would have been my last or penultimate one at first school. As one of the older kids I was taking part in what we would call a country dance. Country dancing was what we did every other Wednesday afternoon with an elderly local couple called Mr and Mrs Gamble. Square dancing I suppose is the correct term for it.

But the particular dance we were doing this Coffee Evening was a maypole dance. The maypole was white and antediluvian. The wood creaked and squeaked when we danced around it, as we tugged on the frayed multi-coloured ribbons that criss-crossed in beautiful geometric patterns on the pole if we got the dance right. If somebody messed up, the ribbons would get horribly knotted and the whole thing would fall apart.

On the Friday night we performed the maypole dance in the front yard of the school. Almost everyone in attendance at the Coffee Evening had gathered round to watch. At least one of my parents would have been there. The two guttural-voiced, gargantuan-stomached coaches of Newbrough Hunters FC, Tommy Gradwell and Philip Leadbitter, would probably have been there too. Our headmaster Mr Moore was of course looking on to check that everything went OK, and I suppose also out of pride for his school and pupils.

We danced to the folk music coming out of the speakers of the massive black tape player. Everything was going according to plan, but then I felt the ribbon go slack in my hand. It had snapped because it was so old and frayed. I shrugged. There was not much else for it but to gather up the remains of the ribbon, and to carry on with the dance. I must have looked pretty stupid dancing around the maypole with no ribbon, weaving in and out of all the other kids seemingly without purpose. But we made it to the end of the dance as though nothing had gone wrong, and the geometric pattern on the pole was formed perfectly. There was a little gap where mine should have been, but this was barely noticeable.

Mr Moore said in Monday morning assembly that me carrying on with the dance was the best thing that had happened during the whole Coffee Evening, and at this point I became overwhelmed with an almost unbearable happiness. 

TOONIAN MODERNISM: MORE THOUGHTS

Maybe it was a September thing. Newcastle this time around seemed overwhelmingly bleak: a place of monolithic grandeur, of roaring silence punctuated by the sound of the wind.

The multiple levels of the city, its bridges, walkways and steep changes of view, give it a rare sense of spatial drama ...

Owen Hatherley's description is well judged.

It strikes me that SJP is very much part of this tradition, a rare instance of bold, industrial modernism in an epoch of endemic PoMo/corporate-modernist timourousness. It might have been the brainchild of Thatcherite monsters like the Halls and Freddie Shepherd, but regardless, it's the perfect embodiment of a flamboyant, unremittingly ambitious community (much more so than celebrated recent Quayside developments like the Sage and the Millennium Bridge, I think).

A sort of inveterate, brash idealism is the common thread which unites Grainger Town, the bridges, viaducts, the sixties walkways and high rises, the Metro system, Byker Wall, the public art and slogans, the train station, Ouseburn: everything really, aside from the egregious yuppy flats of the past two decades. It's odd - or perhaps weirdly fitting - that the football stadium seems like one of the few latter-day buildings to have stayed true to the Geordie genius loci.

Lads.

I particularly like the post-war modernist lettering here: an archetypically Toonian iconoclasm, but one which also hints at the continuity between neo-classical and later idioms.

Vista from the walkway outside the Gallowgate Stand at SJP. The last gasp of British modernist poetry took place in the mid-1960s, just to the left of those white buildings.

MORLEY ON TOP FORM

Just finished watching a nigh-on heroic appearance by Paul Morley on The Review Show.

Unphased by either the blandishments of Miranda Sawyer, the aggressive high-brow stuffiness of Tom Service, or the spectacular vapid corporatism of new(ish) NME editor Krissi Murison, Morley was on hand with an unflinching stream of pithy, PoMo-free rationality (for once).

I quote from memory:

... music festivals are talked about in the same way as Epsom or Ascot ... 

... the Mercury Prize is pure marketing...

... what you're talking about are business models ...

... live music is a leisure industry ...

... no actual music is heard at live gigs ...

... I've recently started using Marxist terminology again ...

... what you're lacking is a narrative of how music is produced ...

... what is music for? ...

... the gatekeepers have been removed ...

... there is no desire to subvert or disrupt any more ... 

Here's the link, for as long as it lasts.

TEN TABOOS

Death
Learning
History
Marxism
Feminism
Humanism
Poetry
Aging
Sadness
Paternalism

MORE SURREALISM

The present-day Labour Party? Tribal?!

W...T....F....

Anyway, surely the best way of winning back Lib Dem voters is by adopting a broad-left, "tribal" Old Labour standpoint on foreign policy, social equality, law and order, etc?

"ESSENTIALLY NAIVE", PROFOUNDLY DEMORALIZING

Cruddas and D. Millipede in bed together?

This is so wrong I don't know where to begin. One of the most strikingly upsetting things is the evasive politicospeak of Cruddas's rationale:

We should not just be running from the record but having a nuanced approach to some of the things that went wrong, as well as defending the things that went right.

Such vapid bullshit.

I'm aware this is probably the outcome of some sort of long-brewing Granita-esque pact that will see Cruddas winning an influential right-hand position under David, but I really can't get my head around the sheer insincerity of the endorsement. The most outrageous claim is that DM is a "communitarian":

What was interesting to me about this was when he started talking about belonging and neighbourliness and community, more communitarian politics, which is where I think Labour has to go. He's the only one [of the leadership contenders] that has got into some of that.

I've been following the leadership race pretty closely and I haven't once heard even a hint of sentiments like this from the elder Miliband. To me he seems very clearly and unambiguously the least community-minded of the six candidates, the least in touch with the notion of grassroots, the least human. It would be difficult to imagine a more cold-blooded, imperious mandarin.

For those that need reminding, here is a useful summary of David M's standpoint, somewhat approvingly relayed by the Telegraph last week. You just cannot justify phrases like

... big in heart but essentially naive, well-meaning but behind the times

I could throttle the superior little Fabian shit.

Let's hope Cruddas knows something we don't, but I very much doubt it judging from the vague, spurious reasons he gives for his backing in the New Statesman piece.

Sorry Jon, but I won't be voting as you advise me in your official campaign email. In fact, I'll probably resign my scarcely 2-month-old Labour Party membership if your man gets in.

Short review of this over at the Oxonian.

On reflection, a world full of "instantly canonical, mature hip-hop" might not be too hot.

Neat record though.

Pretty good wasn't it?

RAOUL MOAT VS. NEWCASTLE, UNITED

“And even those who still have the power to cry out, the cry hardly ever expresses itself, either inwardly or outwardly, in coherent language. Usually the words through which it seeks expression are quite irrelevant. That is all the more inevitable because those who most often have occasion to feel that evil is being done to them are those who are least trained in the art of speech. Nothing, for example, is more frightful than to see some poor wretch in the police court stammering before a magistrate who keeps up an elegant flow of witticisms”. Simone Weil, “Human Personality”.

Recently, The Sun published one of its classically vituperative articles, featuring allegations of pro-Raoul Moat chanting by Newcastle United supporters at the pre-season friendly against Carlisle:

Sections of the 2,000-strong away support sang “there’s only one Raoul Moat” during United’s 3-0 win at Carlisle.

They also copied an old terrace song about 1960s triple cop killer Harry Roberts when they sang: “Raoul Moat, he’s our friend, he shoots coppers.”

The Toon Army also tried to mock home fans with the chant “Who the **** is Derrick Bird?” – a reference to the Cumbrian gunman who murdered 12 people in a shooting spree last month.

There is subtle gallows humour in this passage, and some comic misreading on the part of a sanctimonious tabloid media of what is basically tongue-in-cheek, carnivalesque Geordie braggadocio (albeit of a wildly inappropriate kind). Nevertheless, it’s true that responses to the Moat Saga over the last few weeks have ranged from slightly misguided to downright alarming. Witness the misogynistic, vigilante-ish comments on pro-Moat Facebook groups, where epithets for Moat have included “total warrior and legend”,  “martyr”, and – my personal favourite, for sheer gall – “the British Mandela”.
Writers like Charlie Brooker, John Tatlock, Martin Robbins, and Mark Fisher have written brilliantly about the implications and resonances of all this. I mostly don’t have anything to add to these analyses. (Fisher’s phrase “Britain’s anti-Diana moment” is trenchant to the point of genius.)

However, I have to say that I think Tatlock’s Quietus piece, with its accompanying Spotify playlist on “how folk heroism warps reality”, is massively misjudged. Casual anti-establishment populism can warp, no doubt about that, especially with the help of media exaggeration. Raoul Moat was a deranged, pathological killer – of course he was – and any outright valorisation of the man and his actions is ridiculous. But there was undoubtedly something more to the story than media hype, more to the popular reaction than neo-right mob hysteria. Most importantly, and presciently, I think, was the clear intimation that what you might term folk-opposition remains a powerful extant force in British culture, even after 30-odd years of neoliberal hegemony.

END OF STORY? THE CENTRE AND ITS OPPOSITE

The word folk (and especially its German correlative volk) has extremely dangerous connotations, of course, and from a certain angle, the Raoul Moat narrative does seem like a frightening tale of Robin Hood-style mythologizing eliding with a resurgent thug-libertarianism. Nevertheless, this interpretation necessitates overlooking a number of important contexts. Most notably, there is the whole tangle of social, cultural, political and historical factors that constitutes the identity of the north east of England. What John Tatlock’s piece doesn’t allow for is the fact that: 1) The vast majority of the “support” shown for Moat was from this region, and 2) That such sentiments were, at bottom, an expression of a profound antipathy to the media, to London, and the police force, which may have been utterly misplaced as regards Moat, but must not thereby be dismissed as mere chauvinistic “Geordie nationalism” allied to a sort of anarcho-gangsterism.

The sources of such attitudes are too numerous to list here (though the 1980s would be a good place to start). Suffice to say, Tatlock’s blasé-rationalist dismissal of “folk heroism” does not entertain the fact that there might be entirely sound reasons for the anti-establishment, anti-media, anti-London attitudes which somehow – stupidly and unfortunately – found an avatar in the figure of Moat. Instead, Tatlock explicitly sides with David Cameron, whose “full stop, end of story” rejection of “public sympathy for the callous murderer” Tatlock finds “pithily accurate”. Anyone from the north east, mindful of David Cameron’s recent attack on the region – one of the places where the state has “got too big [sic]” and where “we need a bigger private sector” (surely the prelude to an imminent full-blown Thatcher-style jobs cull in the area) – would think twice before accepting Tatlock’s equable appraisal of Cameron’s good common sense in “taking down” Moat. (Charlie Brooker has interesting things to say about Cameronian sympathy, in a follow-up piece in The Guardian).

In light of such lofty, centrist disdain for populist feeling (however reasonable in the case of Moat taken in total isolation), and in addition to the frankly neo-colonialist, Boys Own-style behaviour of the London media in Rothbury (as reported by Brooker and Robbins), the actions of a minority of Newcastle supporters in eulogizing Moat begins to look, at the very least, a good deal more complicated and ambiguous than the narrow, Old Tory, “full stop, end of story” reductionism of Cameron and Tatlock implies.
As everyone knows, Newcastle United fans are used to being deprived of a voice, and to being treated as “mugs”; “dogs” if they happen to be female. (These two terms were first deployed by former NUFC director Douglas Hall in a Spanish brothel in 1998.) For decades now, Toon fans have been denied representation and dismissed as primitive imbeciles. In such circumstances, people will inevitably latch onto, and identify heavily with, desperate causes, outsiders, even homicidal loners. Hence the whole history of football violence eliding with far-right politics. Hence, “there’s only one Raoul Moat”. Hence, the tragic appropriateness of Gazza – a desperate victim of media celebrity if ever there was one – appearing in Rothbury with a can of beer, determined to go for a fish and “have a chat” with “Moaty”.



It is depressing that Gazza, along with a significant minority of north easterners, was able to overlook the very real crimes committed by Moat, sad and absurd that an apolitical, sociopathic individual should be posited as a kind of bizarre, postmodern Bobby Sands. But conversely, and more importantly, the whole narrative underlines the sheer depth of oppositional feeling in places like the north east to a London-centric nexus that is now, once again, unequivocally Conservative, hard-line, unsympathetic, given to scapegoating individuals, and wholly unapologetic about launching explicit attacks on entire localities like Northumbria and Northern Ireland.

 

RUMOURS OF COLLECTIVITY

While the pro-Moat chants at the Newcastle vs. Carlisle match represent the benighted, if lightly-meant, actions of an extremist few, there have also recently been signs of a more constructive, less macho and hot-headed, form of folk-opposition beginning to take root in the north east, with football at its centre. As Mark Fisher has written:

Football has been at the forefront of the total re-engineering of English culture, society and economy wrought by neoliberalism over the last thirty years. 

This is self-evidently true, and Toon supporters know better than most what it is like to be on the forgotten fringes of an aggressive, market-driven regime. Neoliberal English football culture has not been kind to the north east. (This fact is reflected in the current England team, which consists almost entirely of players from West London’s Chelsea and clubs within commuting distance of Cheshire like Man United and Liverpool. Contrast this with the Italia ’90 north-east main artery of Bobby Robson – Bryan Robson – Waddle – Beardsley – Gazza. Added to this, the region’s main teams – Newcastle, Sunderland, and Middlesbrough – are all now firmly entrenched on the inferior “second tier” of club football.)

However, after years of muddled acquiescence to all manner of “inevitable” corporate encroachments (inevitable because “investment” is ultimately “for the good of the team”), the actions of the NUFC power-elite reached such an extreme of absurdity and anarchic ridiculousness in the past few years, that the support base has arguably taken the first steps towards radicalization, or at least to something resembling old-fashioned-style collective representation. The Newcastle United Supporters Trust (NUST) is hardly the Fifth International, but the establishment of this independent body (and one that has a genuinely popular base) represents a significant milestone. The efficacy of organizations like this has not yet been proven, but their very existence is a testament to a more hopeful, less-fatalistic climate, and to ways in which the folk-sentiment that found an unfortunate outlet in the Moat debacle can be put to more positive use.

It is becoming increasingly apparent that football is the battleground on which many of the most vital political and cultural debates of the next few years will take place. Indeed, the growing popular discontent with the Premier League and the F.A. might represent first signs of a thaw in the neoliberal winter, the first chinks in the armour of an adversary hitherto regarded as unbeatable. With this in mind, it is encouraging that certain sectors of the Labour Party have sought to establish links with organizations like the NUST, in this crucial (to put it mildly) period of ideological renewal. Chi Onwurah, who represents Newcastle Central, is one of a handful of newly elected Labour MPs notable for being archetypically Labour in a way that has become increasingly rare over the past couple of decades. As an individual Onwurah offers a reminder that, for all the invidiousness of Blair and New Labour, there are still sizeable and numerous individuals and enclaves wholly resistant to being incorporated into the new centrist/centre-right political orthodoxy. Onwurah both symbolically and actually represents a constituency that is something close to the antithesis of David Cameron in almost every sense, so it came as no surprise when she recently announced her membership of, and support for, the NUST. Hers is a constituency that encompasses the extreme fringes of pro-Moat sentiment, but it is also the constituency of Newcastle United supporters who have finally exchanged apathy for a semblance of organized resistance.

In these sorts of oppositional matrixes, and these sorts of allegiances, there is an ocean of potential for the British left. Tragically, it seems that the only Labour leadership candidate who understands this is the otherwise arch-Blairite Andy Burnham, who was a member of the Football Taskforce in the late-nineties, and who makes great show of his role in opening the dossier on the Hillsborough disaster last year. For all his New Labour odiousness in other areas, Burnham at least has the prescience to recognize that a renewed British left must re-engage with its grassroots on the sort of “folk” territories of which football is by far the most prominent and pithy example. The Moat narrative underlines just how vital it is that the sort of folk heroism so disdained by Tatlock and Cameron, should not become the province of the far-right, that it should be re-channeled and re-directed to become a major bastion of its historical home, the Labour Party. Unfortunately, this a truth that will probably always evade the technocratic, mandarin, classically neoliberal sensibilities of the Miliband brothers (both of them), who appear most likely to shape Labour policy for the next few years. Meanwhile there are millions of Britons – and not just in the north east, of course – who hate the establishment, hate David Cameron, hate the media, who hate what was happened to football, and who hate neoliberalism, even if they couldn’t put a name to it. All they are lacking is someone better than Raoul Moat to speak for them.

screenshot from the NUST website