Stop! Fraud! Nobody likes the Tories – apart from the rest of the country

What a night. Did you stay up? Did you watch last Thursday? What a great night. Not for half the country, of course. Not for the low-waged. Not for the NHS, not for the Unions. Nor for Britain, probably. But it was good for the bookers of Strictly Come Dancing – watch Douglas Alexander and Harriet Harman partner up for a sexy tango – and as a raft of reality TV producers hoover up all those unelected MPs we can presumably look forward to a parade of deeply depressed career casualties faking smiles as they’re forced to regurgitate live ants into a bucket of shit on a tropical beach. Or whatever they do on reality TV now. Who said the left had no future. 

Being alive these days involves an odd form of cognitive dissonance. My friends are all left-wing. My family are all left-wing. I hang out in cities, comedy nights and parks that are all left-wing. Moving in the circles I do, in fact, it’s easy to get the impression that everyone in Britain is Labour, except the government.

But then cracks start appearing in the belief-bubble. You see Farage trending on Twitter. You’re forced to share a meal with your uncle. You move to Nuneaton. Or – and this one has me in cold sweats – you wake up and realise the country’s just voted overwhelmingly for David Cameron. I’m still hoping that never happens.

Except - Christ - it just did; and not only did they vote for Cameron, but they’ve wiped out the left of centre. And the centre. And some little bits of left in the corner. Within hours a smug and freshly Photoshopped Prime Minister was back off out to meet the Queen, who forced down her radical socialist inclinations to anoint him the ruler of the country.

Now it’s wound-licking time for the losers. Or rather it’s time to reach around on the floor for their decapitated heads. To which part of the entertainment industry will Miliband now turn his unstoppable charisma? Can the “Edstone” be successfully dismantled and reassembled into some kind of cabinet to house all his untouched bottles of champagne socialism? And what of the Party? Amidst the talk of reconstruction I see pieces from people like Owen Jones talking about the need for a “politics of hope and optimism”, presumably because he feels the reason Labour lost was because they were just too realistic about their chances. This is where I part with the rest of the left. Are people really the selfless altruists we would like them to be? I’ve hung around in a fair few places in Britain and I didn’t see much desire for the politics of hope and optimism. I saw a lot more desire for the politics of tax-lowering and immigration control. The left still wants to believe nobody actually likes the Tories; who does, apart from most of the rest of the country?

Then there’s the Lib Dems. Or rather there isn’t. The entire membership of elected Liberal Democrats could now be seated around a small table in Nando’s – the one at the back beside the door to the toilet. More people come to my poetry nights than actually won a Lib Dem majority. No doubt they want to choose a new leader, but under the rules, candidates to replace Clegg need the support of 10% of all the Lib Dem MPs elected to make it on to the ballot paper. Since there’s only 8 Lib Dem MPs now, that means 0.8 of a Liberal Democrat. In their current state, you get the feeling they could probably even lose that one.

And then David Cameron. Promising to radically break with the leadership of the previous corrupt, incompetent administration, Cameron is now crowing about Conservative “achievements” – like taking personal credit for a global upturn that would have happened anyway, taking personal credit for a growth spurt that would have happened anyway, and taking personal credit for lowering unemployment by creating millions of shitty, low-paid jobs on zero-hours contracts. Which would have happened anyway.  

We all know what five more years of Tory rule will mean, and it’ll be one of McJobs and punishing austerity; of corporate enrichment and a London owned by oligarchs; one of sanctions and cuts and war-on-the-poor and “the stick and the stick”. Given this kind of mandate Cameron is already edging so far right along the political spectrum he’s in danger of falling off. Now half my family and friends are talking about moving to Scotland – except apparently they’re not so keen on us up there any more. Small wonder. Now will someone please pass the live ants and the bucket of shit?

Labour – slightly less shit than the other ones!

When Russell Brand recorded a five minute interview with the Labour Leader last week it said a lot about our times. Not just about politics-by-media, of course, or about celebrity power to act as kingmaker – but a somewhat depressing irony: that to retain some influence, the most powerful man in leftist politics now has to associate with someone like Ed Miliband.

Ah, Labour. What happened? Remember back to 1997, that landslide? No? Christ, you were just four years old. Well, it was a magical time; it was a wonderful time; it was a time when children sang, old ladies danced, and the –

Actually it wasn’t all that great. Politics, though – that was really good. That Labour landslide! Who could forget the excitement as we watched a country emerge from two decades of eroded freedoms, Tory benefit cuts and privatization into a brave new era of eroded freedoms, benefit cuts and privatization under New Labour? People believed in the whole thing back then. 

Not like now. "We're not great," runs the Labour defence now, "but come on - who else do you want to see elected?" Now that's an inspiring platform. In a terminally hung parliament, you’re a terminally “hung voter” and the result isn’t policies but last-minute promises, the kind you might make to a pissed-off girlfriend after you’ve forgotten your anniversary. This’ll be remembered as the election of “flexi-manifestos”. Want free school lunches? How about 20 billion off the budget? It’s like watching a failing clown at a child’s birthday desperately throwing out sweets to placate the toddlers. Catch.

And voting becomes game theory, packed with counter-intuitive outcomes. Vote Labour and the Tories will probably get in; vote Tories and the SNP will probably get in; vote Liberal Democrats and the Japanese Yakuza will get in. So confused am I by now that I half suspect that if I walk in to the booth and put a cross next to the Green candidate for South-East Manchester I’ll inadvertently elect Nigel Farrage.

Now, I’m probably closest to Labour in my bones, but even I have to try pretty hard to like Ed Miliband. Put that staggering charm deficit aside; just look at his behaviour. Why’s he spending so much time in parks? Who are all these voters who’ve supposedly come up to him to start conversations? Labour or not, if Ed Miliband struck up conversation with my daughter in a secluded place in the hope of a soundbite, I’d have him arrested.

I miss the honesty of the old days – when the political classes were happy to admit they were from the political classes, when the left quaffed champagne socialism without trying to pretend they “got” you. 

You might laugh, but the only English leader left I’d actually vote for is Nick Clegg - who I dislike as much as I dislike most politicians (though I do think he’s got potential as an autotuned pop star). But here’s the brilliant thing about Nick Clegg: he’s a hypocrite and he knows it. None of that carefully massaged press apology for him, none of that media misdirection. He can’t wriggle out of it. He lied.  

He lied – and so Nick Clegg represents something we’ve forgotten how to value. Pure, unadulterated hypocrisy.

We live in a landscape that’s systematically devalued hypocrisy. Political debate has become a huge lie-detector test, with the interviewer cast as a flimsy amateur DCI as they attempt to prove that the exact words / opinions / thoughts of the interviewee bear some tiny discrepancy with the exact words / opinions / thoughts of the interviewee from 5 or 10 years ago. The result is that politicians spend their days in an endless cycle of arse-covering, never daring to make a definitive statement lest it be retracted afterwards. Public debate becomes the “survival of the least quotable”, with politicians reduced to smug, media-smoothed robots. Slot machines for tweetable soundbites.

Now, I haven’t achieved a lot in my life, but I am rather proud of my hypocrisy. I’ll sit in Starbucks skimming through lefty opinion pieces about the evils of multinationals. I’ll go to trendy cafes and imagine machine-gunning the poseurs I see tapping out imaginary novels onto laptops, then get out my own laptop and start writing it up as a scene in my new imaginary novel. I’ll get indignant about the “voice of the people” being ignored in modern society, and then get equally uncomfortable when the “voice of the people” votes UKIP.

People think hypocrisy is easy. It isn’t. Real hypocrisy takes work and commitment. You’ve got to trust to the weakness of your own convictions, to engage in complex mental manoeuvres simply to reconcile the divergent strands of your personality. The big parties have a lot of personalities to reconcile, which is why they seem more hypocritical. In contrast those at the fringe - take mop-haired pantomime star and occasional Mayor Boris Johnson and boozy, friendly racist-next-door Nigel Farage - are seen as more "real", "authentic", because they'll "call a spade a spade", or possibly much worse than a spade. If they’re going to be our markers for integrity then give me a hypocrite any day.

Jobless? All you need is pluck, aspiration and a Channel 4 Production crew

A few years ago I happened to watch something called the Fairy Jobmother. Ostensibly a lightweight reality show, it felt more like a multi-episode PR release from the Coalition government to defend its carve-up of the benefits system. An “employment expert” (…?) called Hayley Taylor was helicoptered into an area of high unemployment to scrub up a load of jobseekers on benefits for dream jobs as Specsavers assistants or call centre slaves, in what might be called the neo-Victorian TV genre of "reform the poor". The last decade specialized in this ouvre - we'd had experts pointing accusingly at working class parenting, experts pointing accusingly at working class dinners, experts even pointing accusingly at working class turds. But this working class wasn’t working. This – to give it the title they really wanted to use – was Proles on the Dole.

The Fairy Jobmother told you more about coalition Britain than an entire binder full of Hard Working Families conference quotes. The claimants were portrayed either as shiftless work-shy scroungers or heartbroken Dickensian poor, while Hayley strode around around in spiky post-Apprentice businesswear, like the wife of a Gestapo commandant doing a photoshoot for Zara, breathing Business Studies slanguage from the very pores of her skin. You’re not looking for a job - you’re “seeking career opportunities”. You’re not pawning your left toenail to buy your child’s Poundstretcher Christmas gift, you’re “problem-solving your way through a new challenge”. Hayley could rebrand a drunken piss against a wall as a challenging urine disposal scenario.

For me the real hero was Dave, a pudgy, human swearword on a sofa whose get up and go had long ago got up and gone. I half wondered whether Dave was actually real or a breathtakingly convincing CGI creation co-funded by Cameron’s government and the Daily Mail, so stubborn was he in his refusal to be “improved”. Unsurprisingly, Hayley didn’t have much luck with Dave. “I’m hoping Dave moves forward with his negative feedback and takes it all on board,” she tutted, as they got the No-Call from a prospective employer over a job application. The only thing I could see Dave moving forward that evening would be the rest of his Tandoori.

But here’s why the show said so much about our times, in the way that earlier narrative masterpieces like Oliver Twist or People of the Abyss said so much about theirs. Because what was strangest about The Fairy Jobmother was that it wasn’t really about jobs at all. None of her flock of The Saved were actually trained for anything. There was no teaching, no skills imparted; you didn’t actually have to know how to do a job or any of that boring stuff to get one. The only currency here was “motivation” – which was raised via inspirational sequences like standing in the middle of a rainy street singing to passersby because it's, like, you know, empowering.

What could say more about modern Britain. In an age where jobs have been downsized, automated and deskilled to the point where they bore even the robots, this is what's left: a sea of infoshite edutainment, buried beneath the hollow language of aspiration. Why actually train for anything in this age, when it’s immaterial finance that makes money rather than the ability to tune an engine? Why blame joblessness on the lack of jobs when you can enlist some self-help snake oil to "motivate everybody"? Why expect to ever get paid more than survival wages when you'll probably be priced out of your city to make way for essential core services like PR specialists or hedge fund managers? 

Once upon a time Victorian Temperance Societies campaigned to “save” the poor by closing their pubs down; now, in our more caring times, they just put them on a reality show and film them mopping the toilets of the local multiplex. This is social justice via Paul McKenna – all you need’s a bit of faith, and a TV crew and you too can realise your dreams. Just so long as your dreams pay £6.08 per hour.

“How do you feel, Ellen?” the beaming Hayley asked a single mother on landing her a dream position at Iceland stocking the frozen peas. “I’m lost for words,” the Chosen One breathed. Then the Fairy Godmother sat down with the rest of them and discussed structural unemployment as the major cause of social inequality. Guess which part of that isn’t true.

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Slavoj Žižek? Be honest, you don't understand him either

As Schopenhauer once said, probably, the point of knowledge isn’t expanding the consciousness of humanity. What it’s really about is impressing people at parties. As a Wikipediaphile, hooked on easy-readers, Made Simple and For Dummies and all the other forms of McKnowledge, I hold myself as something of an expert on this theme – in fact I could probably do a PhD on the subject. Except that would be beside the point. I’m insufferable enough as it is; imagine what I’d be like if I actually knew something.

What I do know is that all those years of study, learning, academia are a complete waste of time – all you really need to sound clever is to quote someone with a serious sounding name. Someone like Julia Kristeva, or Milan Kandura. Something austere, east-European. Like Slavoj Žižek. Žižek – a kind of updated Jean Paul Sartre played by an ageing David Brent – is today’s hipster philosopher of choice, someone who invites such fawning sycophancy by quasi-intellectuals and quote junkies you’d think he could epitomise the human condition just by breaking wind.

Slavoj Žižek. Go on, try it out. Roll it around your tongue. Sounds good, doesn’t it? If you’re going to quote anyone, quote Žižek. He reaches the questions other philosophers don’t reach. He’s so cool he could turn post-structuralism into a guitar solo – a “rockstar” thinker who narrates documentaries about Freud in modern cinema like he was delivering the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus instead of talking over a clip of Porkies. Never mind the Marxist theory, just being able to pronounce his name practically qualifies you as a cultural sophisticate. 

Needless to say I've never read Slavoj Žižek. How could I? His books are all ten thousand pages long and utterly incomprehensible to a carbon based life form; the prose style exists on a wavelength pitched between somewhere Sigmund Freud and the Higgs Boson and you have to be eighty times cleverer than Gary Kasparov just to make your way through the sleeve notes. 

No, let’s face it, nobody has ever read Slavoj Žižek. By all appearances even Slavoj Žižek has never read Slavoj Žižek - or he might have indulged in an arcane process known to lesser writers as “editing” and reduced his 1,300 page books into a punchy 900. But it doesn’t matter. Slavoj Žižek doesn’t exist to be read. He exists to be quoted. The important thing is to read about Slavoj Žižek: to throw Slavoj Žižek-shaped poptarts of information down your gob and roll them around in your mouth before artfully spitting them out again at the right moment.

“Žižek suggests that consciousness is opaque, citing Descartes' problem of the possible automaton in hat and coat,” you can casually throw into the conversation, as you get up to order a packet of nuts. Just memorising five lines from his Wikipedia page can provide enough pretentious waffling fuek to power an entire post-arthouse movie discussion.

And that's the point. To quote, not to know. As we speak, the base of human knowledge is changing. Knowledge is happening faster now. It's getting wider and lighter. Humanity's intellectual heritage is starting to resemble a sort of gigantic, fluffy pancake – a soufflé of feeds, links and listicles, an “ambient” knowledge that’s trivia rich and fuelled by social media. We know a Hell of a lot less about a Hell of a lot more. This isn’t dumbing down. It’s dumbing around.

Just consider the example of Wikipedia. Why ever read anything again when you can have it shoddily summarized by a crowd of poorly-informed amateurs? Why trust boring “encyclopedias” and “experts” when you can trust to hyperlinks, which give every high-level query the feel of a pub quiz? 

Take a book like Fathers and Sons by Turgenev. “Ah, Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons,” I hear you cry. “That fascinating chronicle of two generations split between conservative tradition and revolutionary nihilism in nineteenth century Russia.”

Wrong! Fathers and Sons is actually: a 1970 song written and originally performed by British singer Cat Stevens; an album by Muddy Waters, released in 1969 on the Chess label, and featuring Donald "Duck" Dunn of Booker; and it’s the M.G.'s and “Paul Butterfield” of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Oh, and it’s also a chronicle of two generations split between conservative tradition and revolutionary nihilism in nineteenth century Russia. Yawn.

Philosophers once said that the answer to democracy lay in educating the people. I disagree. I think the answer to democracy lies in making everybody equally stupid. In a world where we can never hope to understand a tenth of a thousandth of a millionth of all there is to know out there, our only defence against info-geddon is edutainment, TED talks, Fast Facts. And quoting Slavoj Žižek. You heard the one about Descartes' problem of the possible automaton in hat and coat?