Plague Sunday

Coronavirus and the Capital

To celebrate my birthday – and having grown older than I was frankly comfortable with – I decided to break quarantine and take a train down to the capital to walk among old memories. I was one of perhaps nine or ten passengers on a train with seven carriages. Although I enjoyed the quietness of the quiet coach (which was so quiet that I was seized with the desire to play films and music as loudly as I could) I couldn’t help wondering at the logic of Avanti rail spending huge amounts of money and energy to transport a mere handful of us several hundred miles southwards. When I rose to purchase a coffee at the cafe, the man serving me looked astonished to see another living human.

Euston Station was festooned with signs telling me to go home again. Pushing on, I emerged into a whisper-quiet capital on a glorious Spring Day – clean blue skies and a pan-scouring wind – and cycled east. London’s silence was by no means universal. At Broadway Market, in newly-gentrified Hackney, thousands of affluent and stylish people had gathered to self-isolate among the falafel shops and porcelain boutiques. So many people were self-isolating here in fact that it was hard to move. A little further east, along the road to Cambridge Heath, a patient queue had gathered outside a shop selling deluxe paint.

I cycled north to re-explore the haunts of my early twenties, now under quarantine conditions. Far from a dewy-eyed trip down a path of golden memories, my return generally reminded me how awful it had all been. I was slightly saddened, for some reason, to find that the old greasy spoon in the Underground station I’d occasionally frequented – a greasy spoon that really had earned its name – had now become an upmarket cafe. They had evidently been advertising for staff before the lockdown, and it was interesting to speculate how ‘creativity’ really helped someone serve hot beverages in a cafe environment, but I wished them well for the rocky road ahead. 

With the continent quarantined, and very few trains, staff or announcements, St. Pancras International was mainly reduced to being the country’s most expensive and majestic public toilet. Interestingly, even by this standard it had partially failed, as many of the urinals had apparently been cancelled by the government. Such injunctions raised fascinating questions: how exactly could a single urinal be ‘closed’? I resisted the temptation to experiment.    

I reached the market at Borough amidst lengthening shadows. Here a rather passive-aggressive poster campaign graced the walls of stalls that had lapsed into late-evening silence. What was London if it was shorn of human interaction? If daily life was to be reduced to sombre economic transactions, was it still a ‘city’ at all?

Pushing into the depths of the market canopy, I was oddly reminded of the interior of an old pier long abandoned to the elements. Evening sun danced on rust. I couldn't escape the impression I was uncovering a lost civilization that had teetered and finally fallen – a once mighty world that resided on a river first colonized by the Romans 2,000 years ago.

Further west along the southern shores of the Thames the sky erupted into flame as a dying sun devoured the river. I was reminded of a poem by Wordsworth, but found it difficult to recall it in any detail, because an extremely insistent car alarm had gone off somewhere around Blackfriars.

Fighting darkness now, I took a pathetically trite photo at Westminster Bridge – so recently the locus of terror attacks, environmental protests, and now the locus of nothing at all – and pushed on into a West End so dark and still that I fancied nothing like it had been seen since the blackouts of World War II. A single gaggle of rough sleepers guarded the mouth of Leicester Square underground station. Antique bookshops frowned over police vans as they purred up and down a deserted Charing Cross Road.

Nearing Covent Garden I could make out the scrape of a single security guard’s shoe as it echoed across the flagstones. I found a secret delight in the silence. Part of me wanted to stand in the middle of the street and practice Yoga, or close my eyes and meditate. A romantic couple wandered hand in hand around the piazza and gazed at the plants displayed down the colonnade, their leaves set free by the wind, in a marketplace that glowed with illicit light.

I wove northward, finding strange little alleys colonized by wealthy boutique stores, where displays of pointillist mirrors and glass were accompanied by the burble of recorded music seeping out from in-store alarm systems. A mother and a daughter were – for some reason – traipsing through the alleys. Their footsteps felt deafening. After they’d passed, I stopped for a moment to enjoy the peace. I realised I’d never actually listened to the city before. The night hummed with new nocturnal symphonies: car alarms, siren flutter.

I slunk back furtively for my evening train, feeling, in some way, like a fugitive. Less than a handful of people were heading back north with me. The sky outside was now pitch black and the wind had become savage. Nobody checked my ticket.

19^th April 2020

The Christmas Carol doesn’t make me think of the Nativity: it makes me think of Kermit the Frog as Bob Cratchit doing a tap-dance

We all know what Christmas Day is about. Gazing through suburban drizzle at the Tesco Metro sign behind the slate grey rooftops and wondering how long you can last without self-harming? No: it’s about snow, and family, and a roaring fireside, and tradition. Or more accurately it’s about watching snow and family and a roaring fireside and tradition on a massive Toshiba plasma while you attempt to stifle domestic resentment with an evening of Sky One and burpy alcoholism.

Yes! All up and down the country, the blissful, holy peace of Christmas morning is aflutter with the happy sound of gigantic flat-panels flickering to life and bringing Victorian sideburns and hansom cabs clattering into the living room… It’s Christmas; it’s yet another adaptation of Charles Dickens.

Feeling the festive spirit

I tried reading a book by Charles Dickens a few years back. I advise against it. Dickens wrote over six hundred novels, each of which is twenty thousand pages long, and every single paragraph is couched in impossibly meandering, ornate thickets of narrative foliage. Sometimes it seems to take weeks just to reach the next full stop; the average Dickens sentence is longer than many modern short stories. 

I've never understood the national love-affair with Dickens. The Angelic children and chaste maidens, the saintly paupers, the grasping social climbers – it all just feels so stagey, so hackneyed. Call that a character? I swear I’ve cut out figures from the back of Frosties packets with more psychological depth. I wonder if investing all the Dorrits' money in that precarious pyramid scheme is going to turn out well? Who could that mysterious, motherly old crone be who keeps coming to watch like a mother at the gates of the factory that belongs to the “orphaned” Thomas Gradgrind? It’s all about as surprising as a GPS update; so how can something so well-loved feel so howlingly obvious?  

Well, there’s a very good reason: TV adaptations. In other words, the reason we feel like we've seen it all before is because… well, because we have seen it all before. If the twentieth century represented a sort of mass move towards literacy, then the twenty first heralds the rise of the post-literate culture, a world that’s moved beyond the book. Media has cycled and recycled the giants of literature into marketable (and profitable) cliché. The result is that we’ve encountered their motifs so frequently that it almost feels underwhelming when you come across them in print.

“What’s Scrooge doing in a book?” was what occurred to me, as I flicked disinterestedly through the Christmas Carol in Waterstones. He actually felt rather out of place there, as if he’d strayed off the screen from an ITV special and accidentally got left behind, presumably wishing he’d stayed in his trailer. Why would anyone read about Fagin when Fagin's currently co-starring with Danny Dyer on the West End? Or bother to churn their way through about nine hundred chapters of the saintly orphaned Nell when they can see the saintly orphaned Nell doing Celebrity Come Dine With Me?

In this sense, the adaptation has become more important than the work it’s based on. It would take a very high minded household to produce a young adult today who came to Dickens afresh; in fact, I’d say it’s almost impossible for someone born in the last few decades to approach the great writers except through adaptations. How many people recall Pride and Prejudice for its sensitive exploration of social propriety and familial bonds, against the ones who just remember Colin Firth jumping into a fishpond? Say ‘Dickens’ to most people and they don’t think of books, they think of fake snow and Bafta-alumni. In my case, A Christmas Carol doesn’t evoke the Nativity: it brings to mind Kermit the Frog tap-dancing to upbeat musical numbers as Bob Cratchit. 

Not that any of this is particularly new of course. Humanity has always spent a significant part of its time rewriting its bygone sages. Shakespeare was ‘reinterpreted’ with rather astonishing results in the nineteenth century by various luminaries including Thomas Bowdler, who cut out all the nasty stuff for a family edition – effectively a pre-television age of editing for the watershed. Poet laureate Nathan Tate went even further and improved King Lear by giving it a much-needed  happy ending, an interpretation which seemed to go down well with Victorian audiences. In our own day the production line of recycled literary classics chugs away so fast that the adaptation is arguably a whole new genre in itself. A recent Wuthering Heights movie played like a cross between a German silent expressionist film and an extended episode of Emmadale; Nicholas Nickleby was combined with social commentary on abuses at elderly care homes. At this rate it can't be long before we see Bleak House presented in three minute story-bites acted out in text-speak by a group of hooded youths standing beneath a flashing T-Mobile sign to a backing track of pounding dubstep. Well, at least it’d give the Rada graduates some new dialogue to learn.

The result is that the Dickens industry acts as a sort of colossal ‘spoiler’ to anything he actually wrote: the staples of classic fiction feel familiar because we’ve already met them elsewhere. A post-literate society doesn't necessarily know more, but it is more knowing. So perhaps that’s why I groaned as I stumbled through yet another Dickens ‘revelation’ that was so obvious to me it might as well have been painted on the side of an articulated lorry and driven through the narrative crushing curiosity shops along the way. ‘You can’t seriously expect me to buy that,’ I gasped to myself: it was just so trite and hackneyed that it felt…

… Well, how shall I put it? For want of a better word, it felt positively Dickensian. 

Tragic massacre of the people? Yeah, but look at the beards

They’d sell you the air in Manchester. God knows why you’d want to buy it, but that’s Manchester: gritty, mercantile. These days of course the thing Manchester really wants to sell you is history. The city that once produced a quarter of the world’s calicos now produces a third of the planet’s industrial heritage museums. Professionals dream of installing a Power Shower in the exact corner of a converted mill where Victorian children once had their limbs ripped off. History retails at 50 quid per square inch. Slums are now luxury condos. Around the cholera-rich rivers of the 19th century, you can now bear witness the oppression of the people by buying a £4.20 cappuccino and an Emily Pankhurst fridge magnet.

So watching Mike Leigh’s Peterloo – a new film about the vicious 1819 massacre of a peaceful protest of mill workers by the local yeomanry – can frankly be a bit of a strange experience. It didn’t help that I saw it in HOME, the megabucks glass cube (sorry, “arts centre”) nestled in a shiny corporate landscape of chain bars – hipster central, in other words. (One of the streets is actually called Tony Wilson Place). 

Unfortunately for the film, cobbled backyards, vintage costumes and cart tracks are also the kind of landscape I’ve learnt to subconsciously associate with various species of 21st century twat: Northern Quarter bartenders, street food entrepreneurs, background DJs. Considering that this is a film about the plight of the working poor the effect is a little unintentional. In some of the outdoor scenes I half expected to glimpse a Dirty Burger stall in the background, or for someone to lay a laptop on one of the rough plank benches and ask the haggard Maxine Peake for a Flat White. This isn’t helped by the fact that almost all the men have magnificent “Peak Beard” facial hair; you’re supposed to believe they’re grimy mill workers but you can’t escape the feeling they should be serving you a £12 Margarita. Part of me expected to see someone wandering in and out of the slain bodies at the film’s climax looking for somewhere to plug in their phone.

Still, what about the film? Well, it’s a mixed bag: interesting in places but uneven, and much, much too long. There’s a whole universe of characters who never get developed. Some pop up for a single scene and then disappear. Others even seem to cancel other characters out: there’s much made of a spy doing a sort of covert-ops sting on the protesters, for example, with dark shadowy meetings in dark shadowy tunnels – but it’s largely pointless because the local constable (Big! Fat! Dark cloak!) is hanging around outside like a bad smell anyway, clearly listening, in what must make him the shittiest spy in history. In fact during almost every bloody meeting in the film this constable seems to be hanging around at the edges, like a slightly creepy dumped boyfriend who hasn’t got the message yet. In one scene where Maxine Peake cuddles up with her husband I was surprised not to see him sharing the pillow.

Normally I’m usually someone who hates historical films because they reduce that nebulous thing called history into a series of clichéd and inaccurate set pieces. Or worse, shoehorn some crap modern “empowerment” sub-plot in. Were this not Mike Lee I might have gone in, for example, dismally expecting a late stage reversal as some plucky teenage mill worker heroine suddenly dons a bandana and singlehandedly wipes out the 15^th King’s hussars to a soundtrack by Beyonce (available on iTunes).

“Bollocks,” I always think to myself. “This was a product of historical, social and economic forces and was actually much more complex and nuanced.”

Well, Peterloo’s got nuance and complexity. It’s got so much nuance and complexity that frankly you sometimes wonder what the fuck is going on. Be warned: if you’re not already an expert on obscure religio-political movements and the fluctuation of Regency-era grain tariffs (believe it or not, some people aren’t) this might stretch you. Yes, it’s true that history until recently has mostly been made by self-important men in crowded rooms making farty speeches. But that doesn’t make those speeches any less farty (nor the men any less self-important). At one point Maxine Peake’s family discuss the Corn Laws in a bit of background exposition so creakingly functional I half expected to see footnotes flashing up and a pop-up request to donate to Wikipedia.

What about the good things though? Well the historical period is fascinating. We get a mesmerizing range of co-existing social landscapes here that convey just how conflicted that age really was: an age that could see the squalor of 19^th century industry interrupted by full-costume Royal hussars, that could support the ancestral offices of the Guardian and a burgeoning modern press at the same time as a Prince Regent with a private love-nest resembling Ancien Regime Versailles. Performances are excellent – including someone I know, Neil Bell, playing a bumptious northerner called Samuel Bamford who’s smitten with a self-regarding orator called Henry Hunt. (Actually this had extra comedic value for me at the thought of my friend licking the arse of some silver-tongued southern pansy, and not, for example, sticking a glass in his posh fucking face, though I have to admit this is probably a bit of a niche reaction).

Ultimately it’s a slightly clunky telling of an important tale, but that doesn’t mean the message isn’t still important. As I walked out I looked around at the glittering hipster metropolis of modern Manchester, with its cliff walls of luxury apartments for the rich and footballer bling masking the poverty-stricken council estates and fucked, high-unemployment, satellite towns beyond; maybe things haven’t changed so much after all.

Er... Did I Just Become a Neo-Nazi?

 

I didn’t, by the way.

Apologies for the title, but it was the only way I could really convey how much the slur stung. I mean, I’m far from perfect. But fascist? 

I should make it clear that I always like to receive feedback. Anybody who actually knows me is probably aware that a scruffy, guitar-playing, tightrope walking, Labour-voting, degenerate libertine like myself would probably choose not to live under a fascist dictatorship. This isn’t just because I disagree with them. It’s also because I’d be shot.

Yet according to a few comments over the years, Dale ‘goes to rallies of the far-right’ and ‘wants to re-introduce a fascist state’. This is news to me, and not just because the views of the far right extreme are abhorrent. The only intimate dealings I’ve ever had with skinheads was fearing getting beaten up by them for the crime of being British when I lived in Poland. This has not predisposed me towards ethno-nationalists.

Whatever. I know that everyone calls everyone a Nazi on social media, and that it’s probably not all that important. But I’m a sensitive, delicate flower, and it actually kind of upset me. Why? Frankly it just seemed a little unfair. The word fascist seems an odd kind of slur to hurl at someone who’s published in umpteen leftwing newspapers and magazines, who canvassed for Jeremy Corbyn – yes, I did – and who’s chosen to spend their adult life in the some of the most multi-cultural areas of some of the world’s most multi-cultural cities. Would a ‘fascist’ choose to live in London’s Greek-Cypriot Green Lanes? Or contribute to the pro-feminist, pro-#BLM Huffington Post? Would a white supremacist take a room in the Madrid barrio of Lavapies precisely because they loved its rich mix of Arab shops and North African street markets? I don’t personally know any fascists so I can’t really find out. Perhaps I should contact those Polish skinheads and ask them.

But here’s my guess. I don’t think the ‘fascist’ slur was really anything to do with my actual views. I have a feeling I know why I was called a fascist. I think it’s because... well, how can I put it? I fail to take things very seriously.

Perhaps some context might help at this point.

Let’s rewind half a century. Britain is a drizzly, prim kind of place, racism is rife, police patrol public toilets for cottagers, plays are pre-approved by the Lord Chancellor and sex is banned except in exceptional circumstances. Anything deemed too racy, too raunchy, too radical is squashed at birth by Mary Whitehouse and an army of Sunday Times letter-writers. The conservative right don’t just think they’re on the right. They think they’re in the right.

Enter the rebellion. From New Wave cinema’s attacks on the bourgeoisie to the hippies leading the anti-Vietnam marches, from Python in the 1970s to Alt-Comedy gunning down Thatcher in the ‘80s, a cultural tsunami began to crash against the waves of the United Kingdom flattening every conservative social more beneath it. It was messy. It was loud and it was lewd. It might not have been party-political, but it was certainly political: Civil Rights, CND, student protests, Ban the Bomb, burn the bra, Greenpeace, Greenham Common...

These struggles might not have been identified with a single political party – few political parties would have wanted to be identified with them – but they were all swept up in the general fervour of what’s sometimes called the New Left. This form of leftwing sentiment was a cultural rebellion as an economic one. In fact it was closer to a moral rebellion. It was a protest against propriety. Sex, swearing, shock, lewdness and decorative atheism were all part of it. It felt infantile at times and sometimes pointless. In fact that was kind of the idea. The point was sometimes to be pointless. If there was a salient theme here, it was to desecrate the sacred and reproach the irreproachable. In other words, it was to be irreverent.

Irreverence. It sounds like such a generic staple of any comic stance. And indeed it is. As a kid I grew up on much of that ‘80s and ‘90s satire, watching the likes of Jo Brand or Ben Elton tear the Thatcherite government to shreds for its attacks on welfare and low taxation (before they got rich and famous and mysteriously learnt to see the value of low taxation themselves). Watch a show like The Young Ones or the original Spitting Image and the range of targets is breathtaking. Everyone comes under fire. Government. Citizens. Landlords. Hippies. Police. Protestors. Capitalists. Anti-capitalists. There’s something incredibly inclusive about this, at least by today’s standards; nobody was too high and mighty to be above criticism.

Perhaps that’s a good thing. After all, you only have to watch a few ’70s sitcoms to see what a racist and sexist place Britain was back then, and even just a generation ago mainstream jokes contain stuff that feels pretty unpalatable today. Most of us feel instinctively that jokes probably should, on the whole, be directed at white rich men; after all, they held most of the power for most of human history. 

The problem however is that if you create too many No-Go areas for criticism, then you effectively disenfranchise the citizenry from a fundamental human right – to criticise other citizens. If this becomes entrenched, it starts to feel stifling. I think Meghan Markle was probably spot-on about the Royal Family being racist (is anybody actually surprised?) but that doesn’t mean she and Harry should be insulated from all critique in their luxury palace in Los Angeles. I mean, Harry went from wearing swastikas at parties to lecturing the world about anti-racism. Come on. That’s at least a little bit funny.

Instead we’re encouraged to shy away from criticism. The Royals and their rich mates are off-limits; only nasty people would go there. While I understand where this reluctance comes from – there was something a bit grubby about the tabloid press’s antipathy to Meghan for example – it has the danger of polarizing the population rather than protecting the vulnerable. Are some of the richest and most powerful celebrities on earth really beyond critique? Increasingly we’re obliged to revere an ever-expanding circle of sainted millionaires even while millions go hungry or jobless; there’s only so many breathtakingly privileged, privately-educated people lecturing the world about social justice I can take.

I think the reason people call me a fascist is because it’s precisely this kind of thing that someone like me likes to take the piss out of. ‘Taking the piss’ is a very British thing, by the way: technically it translates as ‘satirize’ or ‘mock’, but it really means something much more nuanced and more down-to-earth than that. Friends take the piss. Family take the piss. There’s something strangely inclusive about it, too; one of the ways to initiate someone into a friendship group is to expose them to a little light sarcasm. 

I like this about Britain. In fact it’s one of the things I like most. One of the reasons I don’t want to live in Tehran or Beijing is because I think the ability to laugh at oneself, to be laughed at, to not take things too bloody seriously, is a really important aspect of society working. It also just makes for more likeable people. Humour is a great path to humility.

For this reason, I’ve always thought it a kind of moral duty to criticize anybody and everybody. Nobody should be immune. I’m not a comic – as many people who’ve witnessed the silence I can create at dinner-parties will attest – but I am irreverent. There’s just something so deliciously self-important about modern liberals that makes me want to tear down a few of their pedestals. That doesn’t mean punching down. It doesn’t mean reinforcing old hierarchies or protecting rich white men. But it does mean treating powerful people as legitimate targets for satire even when they don’t happen to be rich white men. 

The sad thing about all of this is that I end up criticising the left more than the right. Partly this is because the right are often just so ridiculous that they pretty much satirize themselves: I mean, Trump jokes? Talk about ducks in a barrel. People who founded a comedy career for attempting to make Donald Trump look ridiculous were always going to be outdone by Donald Trump’s attempts to make Donald Trump look ridiculous. Worse, the right also seem to thrive by being satirized. Drawing attention to Boris Johnson’s haircut is not undermining the authority of Boris Johnson. It’s what helped him get elected.

But it’s also because the left have largely taken up the mantle of moral righteousness that used to be the preserve of the right. If you wrap yourself in an unassailable force field of virtue that protects you from all criticism, what do you expect? If you come across as overwhelmingly pious, don’t you think someone might try to puncture that piety?

It genuinely bewilders me that mocking the piety of today’s liberals is now seen as a gateway to fascism. What was the ‘60s counterculture doing if not attacking the values of the comfortable establishment? Was François Truffaut a fascist too? He was an acclaimed filmmaker, true, while I’m a lonely man with a laptop who should probably get out a bit more – but so what? Even if I lack every shred of rhetorical skill, why does that make me fascist? It just makes me a bad writer. It certainly shouldn’t affect my right to write.

Being a provocateur is bound to provoke reactions. But I think that the fury of the reactions it provokes is fascinating. Part of the reason I think it does is that over the last half century left and right have, silently and invisibly, swapped places. Economically speaking they’re pretty much in the same positions they were fifty years ago: both claim to believe in social progress, only the left backs welfare and the right backs enterprise as the main driver.

But culturally and morally they’ve switched. Just think about any of the last half dozen moral scandals you can remember from the news over, say, the last month. When a gallery exhibition is banned, when a Facebook page is taken down, when a politician is sacked, chances are that it’s a part of the left – a student union, a Twitter campaign, an anti-racism group – that’s doing the banning here.  

Now of course this is a complex picture. The old conservative right still exists. The likes of Mary Whitehouse haven’t gone away, it’s just that they don’t really matter in the cultural conversation any more. Their letters go unread. Their complaints fail to go viral. How on Earth could a cultural conservative of the old kind, after all, really survive in an age of Puppetry of the Penis? Or a Turner-prize winning art piece about tampons? How could a spokesperson of the old religious right hope to make their voice heard in a world where New Atheist God-bashers get their own ineffably smug radio shows and abuse the devout on Twitter to showers of applauding retweets?

I think we’ve forgotten about the importance of irreverence. The term taken literally means the failure to revere, the refusal to take seriously what one is expected to. Without question, it lies at the heart of all satire. But it goes much deeper than that. It lies at the heart of all good journalism, all good writing, good art, good criticism – at the heart, ultimately, of public life itself: for what is citizenship if not the right to raise an eyebrow at the powers that be? Who are we if we can’t take the piss out of one another?

If we’re allowed to cast a ballot now and again for the party we want to see in charge, we should also be allowed the space to puncture the self-importance of the powerful – in other words, to have our carnivals, have our jokes, have our memes. These are safety valves. The right to laugh, in other words, is seriously important. Comedy is no laughing matter.

That’s why the fascist slur rankles so much. It suggests that I have no respect for democracy or civil society. In fact I’d argue the very opposite. What on Earth is the connection between being a bit irreverent on Facebook and donning the swastika? The Nazis were not famous for their playful capacity for irony. Light satire did not surge at the time of Stalin’s purges or Mao’s mass-exterminations. These things are not a gateway to fascism; they’re a bulwark against it.

Until recently being a bit centrist and a bit sardonic was not perceived as problematic. Saloon wits were seen as apolitical, blow-in-the-wind; they weren’t necessarily required to have a position. Their agents didn’t call them if they didn’t put the right picture in their Twitter bio. Now anybody who dares to challenge the establishment consensus, with its limited list of permitted targets, will learn to regret it. Mock Boris Johnson’s hair, but don’t mock Boris Johnson’s lockdown. Mock Trump’s aggressive nationalism, but don’t dwell on the horrific persecution of ethnic minorities in China, Myanmar or the other hundreds of places it’s happening around the world (sometimes, rather inconveniently, at the hands of other ethnic minorities). As for mocking faith... Remember what happened to those cartoonists.

Ultimately it doesn’t matter all that much if someone calls someone like me a fascist on Facebook. It might hurt my feelings, but I’m not going to starve to death. I do, however, think that the deeper culture of piety that leads to these slurs has consequences. If the left presents itself as a moral project rather than a political one – if the main feature of being on the left is simply that you’re basically a nice person and you watch what you say all the time – then we can look forward to a lifetime of Tory governments. The Tories can move leftwards on social welfare and state spending. Where does that leave the opposition? With more policing of free speech, right thinking? More calls for harder lockdowns? Should we vote for Labour so that it’s easier for us to get banned from Facebook?

By far my keenest critic has been a man called Peter, a charming and thoughtful man fond of hurling abuse at people in the name of tolerance, and who genuinely seems to believe that the fact I find Owen Jones a bit sanctimonious means I want to build gas chambers for Jews (point of fact: I’m a smidgeon Jewish myself. Now remind me again: which UK political party was investigated for anti-Semitism recently?)

Few people call others fascists for the crime of disagreeing with them as often as Peter. I could get angry. But let’s consider the point of this article: haven’t I been arguing for tolerance, for levity, for a sense of humour? Am I in danger of condemning Peter for the condemning me? 

Although I don’t know him personally, my instinct is that Peter’s not such a bad sort really. I can’t help picturing him as the sort of guy who still sleeps with a pile of his childhood teddies, perhaps, only pausing occasionally to pick up his phone and tweet to someone that they’re a #FuckingNazi#CuntWhoNEEDSTO!DIE before settling happily back to sleep.

In fact – and I should make it clear for legal reasons I’m just speculating here – there’s something so insistent about Peter’s accusations that I can only take them as a back-handed compliment. Or perhaps more. It wouldn’t be the first time unconventional men have been sexually attracted to me, and expressed that attraction in bizarrely-passive aggressive (or even just aggressive) ways. If that is the case, Peter, then I’m touched – but sadly I have to decline. You’re just not my type.

Ultimately Peter is just one person – but he represents many more: people who think that screaming at someone for not agreeing with you is a fun way to start the day, people who believe that the best way to create a more tolerant, caring society is to accuse anyone who disagrees with you of being Adolf Hitler. Ironically, the thing all of this really reminds me of is the atmosphere of 1930s Germany. So if Peter’s right, and I am a fascist, then he is too. Eh Peter: let’s kiss and make up. Or don’t Nazis do that?

Reassuringly shitty: where did the London I knew disappear to?

Something interesting struck me while watching the charming and inventive film London (1994). Essentially it's a weary love letter to a city in decline, blighted by post-industrial entropy and decades of Conservative rule.

But it's also a utopian fantasy - about a city that could exist.

I once remember the writer Geoff Dyer saying he moved to Paris because London in the 1990s didn't have a café culture. How could you be a writer if the best part of the job - sitting around drinking coffee and pretending to work - was forced to take place in a greasy spoon? 

I know what he means. Every writer needs a good café to be pretentious in. Ask J.K. Rowling. And the director of London seems to agree. Patrick Kieller’s interweaving of Rimbaud, Baudelaire and the Parisian demi-monde in his love/hate letter to London reflects a wish for precisely that kind of cafe cosmopolis. One where poets and bankers live cheek-by-jowl, where contemporary art hangs in cafes, where buildings shine afresh from beneath their tarnished veneers.

Believe it or not, all that still felt very far away in the early '90s.

Fast forward a quarter century. Now you can buy a flat white on practically every street but have to travel miles to get a mop or a toilet brush. London’s a city where the kebab shops are being lost among the cappucinos, a city of "food deserts" and pop-up galleries where the template shitty London neighbourhood I used to love - a gritty street with mixed shops and stalls and fag-ends and drizzle - is fast disappearing in a fog of funky art and espresso steam.

I moved to London in 2000 and I know it well. But returning I barely recognise the place. Hackney? Brixton? Camberwell? The idea that these would be des-res boroughs would have seemed like satire at the start of the century. I still have to pinch myself to believe it.

Now decline and dilapidation are a rare commodity in the centre, pushed to the Zone 5 edgelands and beyond. In fact decline and dilapidation are rare enough to be fetishized in their own right; an endless succession of scruffwashed warehouse bars and gritty outdoor BBQs have repackaged grit as a designer commodity for the urban middle classes. Now bars lay out floor-pallets and hang art on their walls in areas where the artists disappeared long ago. The poets and painters, needless to say, can no longer afford the rents.

So, then, Kieller and Dyer got their wish. London’s a true cafe cosmopolis, and a much cleaner and less smoky one. But I find myself wishing for the tarnished, dingy city of the film. I used to love that city. Not despite the fact that it felt shitty but because of it. It was a city where houses and rents were still just about affordable, where drifters and losers like me could survive, where grime and grit were part of the fabric of the city rather than just a marketing commodity. 

As elsewhere, the dream of a more liberated culture became a template for turbo-gentrification. Did visionaries like Patrick Kieller precipitate the end? Can you kill utopia by simply wishing too hard for it?

Is the internet good or bad? "Yes"

Is there a Moore’s Law for human progress?

Not according to the writer Andrew Keen and his new book How to Fix the Future. The power of computing doubles every few years, but according to Keen – or the daily news – human ethics don’t seem to show similar progress.

But what does that mean for the rest of society struggling to play “moral catch-up” with the tech giants? Today’s digitally mediated landscape often feels barren and toxic, plagued by fake news, social media turf wars and polarized communities. What’s the answer?

That’s the question that How to Fix the Future attempts to answer. Instead of doom mongering from an armchair, Keen talks to various people throughout this book who have a role to play in offering a future that’s different from the one Trump, Putin and Big Tech have dreamed of.

Keen, who I interviewed for VICE a few years ago, is the enfant terrible of the world of Silicon Valley – someone who became a tech-entrepreneur himself before turning to punditry and regularly turning the guns on the industry that cultivated him. Since his bestselling polemic The Cult of the Amateur in 2007 he’s been a kind of embedded reporter in the tech industry, offering gloomy prophecies about the threats to our privacy, creativity, finances and even our souls from the digital revolution.

How to Fix the Future asks big questions. How can we avoid the “surveillance capitalism” of Facebook? What about jobs, copyright, privacy? How will the flexible workers of the twenty first century form a union?

The book forms a series of interviews interlaced with reflections, and Keen hopes some of them will shed new light on complex topics.

He talks to movie/music producer Jonathan Taplin about ways to combat the “sharecrop”  profiteering of the streaming sites, such as a “creative strike” among artists, or the rise of sites like Patreon, Flattr and Blendle which allow artists to develop (remunerative) relationships with their consumers. All this is part of a wider picture of the rise of “platform co-operativism”, such as Uber drivers unionizing, in one of the first examples of a digital precariat learning from the lessons of the first industrial age.

In the same spirit Keen talks to former deputy Danish prime minister Margrethe Vestager about “productive regulation”, which sees the state as an important mediator between government and people in the digital economy. The aim isn’t to stifle the market: it’s actually to increase the chances for innovators to reach an audience in a less monopolized landscape.

This raises an interesting point. We all know the unregulated Wild West of the first tech boom was hardly great news for most of those outside Wall Street. But currently, attempts to oppose regulation of tech (and enforce taxation) meet a knee-jerk reaction: such proponents are branded as dreamy socialists and quickly dismissed.

Keen refutes this. In his opinion, as well as that of many of his interviewees, more regulation and decency in big tech would promote rather than stifle business – just as in the financial world minimum standards help to build the trust.

The overriding theme is a need for citizen agency in the digital economy – a new kind of social contract between the private, public sector and the individual. An emerging “ethical tech” movement is currently floating start-ups focused on the creation of jobs for the underprivileged. These include apps to help ex-cons get work after their release, or to remove bias from hiring decisions or offer workers legal advice.

And why not? We hear endlessly about the gig economy threatening jobs, but why don’t we talk more about how the same tech might also empower people?

It’s easy to sneer at these initiatives. Perhaps they are just first steps – first drafts for an unknowable future, building blocks to a better way of doing things. But why should we always assume that life online should always revolve around brutal profit-hunting and corporate behemoths? Why should the future belong to Silicon Valley at all, when so many people around the world – governments, entrepreneurs, artists – are now attempting to redeploy digital tools to meet communitarian, local and non-profit needs?

Optimistic lines of thought tend to plough into a big wall, however – the fact of automation. Are there any solutions? In his final chapters Keen talks to speakers advocating a “universal basic income” – like social security but without the stigma, for an age when more and more jobs will be performed by machines. He also talks of the need for moving beyond the “industrial age school” to a more person-centred education, training creative thinkers for a “freelance society”.

Personally I have to say that sounds like hipster Hell, but I see the rationale. How to Fix the Future might not have firm answers but it does ask important questions. Human progress might not keep pace with the iPhone. But it’s still due the occasional upgrade.

Know your place. Or should you?

Recent piece for Red Pepper magazine (print).

Dale Lately talks to Nathan Connolly, Lee Rourke and Gena-mour Barrett about their new book “Know Your Place: Essays on the Working Class by the Working Class”

DL. Nathan, I’d like to start with you. As the editor who put this collection together and contributed an essay yourself, could you tell me a bit about the genesis of Know Your Place.

NC. So in 2016 in the wake of the EU Referendum our publishing company Dead Ink saw a tweet from Nikesh Shukla, the editor behind The Good Immigrant book, a collection of essays which aimed to give voices to the BAME experience in the UK. His tweet basically said that someone should do the same thing, but for class – a “state of the nation book of essays by writers from working class backgrounds”. And something clicked. We just thought: that needs to be published. And you’d think that someone, somewhere would be doing precisely that. But they weren’t.

DL. You’re right, you would assume that the mainstream would already be doing things like this. But I think you’ve been aware for a while how little the mainstream seems to connect with the +working class.

NC. When I started out in publishing I went down for jobs in London with well-known publishers and was basically told: unless you can intern for free in London you basically stand no chance. There’s no way I could do that. Neither could most of the people I know. So I thought fuck it, came back up north, and just started my own publishing company.

DL. You make it sound so simple! And you were doing it without the support networks and social capital that many middle class kids in the same position would enjoy. I guess that’s why you feel this book’s important – to give a voice to people like yourself. That being said, you’ve got an incredibly diverse set of voices here, far from any single stereotype of the working class. Through the prism of “class” these essays actually explore race, LGBT, even the country / city divide – I really liked the essay that reminds us that “working class” is very much a rural thing too, something we tend to forget. Is this diversity an attempt to explore the intersectionality between class and lots of other aspects of marginalization?

NC. What you got recently in the wake of Brexit and Trump was literally thousands of pundits across the media claiming to understand the voices of the “working class”. But the vast majority of these pundits – 43% in British publishing for example – come from comfortable backgrounds and are privately educated. Even in today’s supposedly meritocratic age, so much is written about the working class but little is written by the working class. When I raise this point people say “What about Orwell”? – but Orwell was an ex-public school boy slumming it in Whitechapel. There’s a real crisis of representation going back decades, even centuries, that badly needs to be addressed. So yes, it’s important not only to record the voices of the working class but also how diverse they are.

DL In that spirit, then, I think we should open this debate out. All three of you have contributed essays to this collection. Can I ask what motivated you to write on this subject? And have you experienced any resistance from the publishing industry on the basis of your class background – snobbery, prejudice?

LR. For me I fell into writing as a “bad habit” – there were no social and political reasons behind it. For me to even be here feels like a strange thing. In some ways I don’t even really know how it happened. It’s not like I had some kind of working class drive to better myself. And to be honest it’s a hard slog. What you realise when you actually become a writer or work in publishing is that the whole industry is such a conveyor belt of marketable commodities.

GB. Yeah. With me, writing was something that I actually originally almost tried to avoid doing! I went to a school that frowned upon anything that wasn’t rewarding financially. It groomed us to becoming lawyers and doctors. When I told my careers adviser I was thinking about journalism they were almost shocked.

DL. Perhaps that attitude is reflected in the publishing industry itself? I think it was the writer Sukhdev Sandhu who once described a certain strand of London-based writing as “desiccated bibliophilia” – that is, novels that see perhaps the most multicultural city on earth solely in terms of a very white literary history, largely written by middle class white people for other middle class white people. How true do you think that is?

LR. I’ve been a writer for a while now, and I really don’t meet that many writers like myself. I used to work in publishing and all my editors were very middle class. I just couldn’t escape the feeling that I shouldn’t be there. I don’t know if you’ve experienced the same Gena-mour...?

GB. Partly. I certainly agree about the feeling that “working class” seemed to mean something very specific. Before I got involved in this book I felt it was something that didn’t seem to 

encompass my own experience – because everything I’d been shown about it had been controlled by one singular narrative.

DL. Gena-mour, your essay is about not only class but a particular feature of what used to be associated with being working class – living on a council estate. I really responded to that! Right from when the Kingsmead estate formed a backdrop to A Clockwork Orange to the recent use of a rough estate – I think it was the Heygate – as the Channel 4 ident, we’ve seen this casual demonization of the grit and griminess of the estate. It’s almost a Pavlovian reflex: concrete equals grit equals gangs equals danger. But your essay was a really refreshing riposte to that. 

GB. Yeah. I was keen to mount a defence of council estates. I think in a way it’s partly a product of being young – and the nature of having a space that is way more communal, and everyone does things together, you don’t have your own garden, your own space. There’s this myth that living on an estate is something shameful and I wanted to challenge that.

DL. In a sense you graduated to the British dream of the small suburban house but you seem to have actually disliked it; you could no longer lie in bed and hear your friends playing outside and feel comforted by this sense of wider community. 

GB. Yes. The British dream – that ideal – feels like a very white ideal. When we were moved to another estate, as I talk about in the essay, things were much more isolated. Suddenly we felt racial tension we hadn’t felt before. And how does that feel for someone who’s not only working class, but black working class? – that’s what I wanted to explore here.

DL. So had you actually felt more comfortable back on the estate? Because that challenges a lot of dogma about council estates from both sides of the political spectrum.

GB. I did back then. Do I feel like that now? I’m not sure. But at the time the estate felt like a place that was way safer. It was more of a level playing field. The estate almost felt like a support system, a kind of family. They certainly shielded me from the death of my father. I felt it was a community that helped to raise me.

DL. It almost confirms the work of early sociologists like Willmott and Young and their work north of the Thames – in the face of economic adversity you get these strong kinship and social ties. I think an interesting dimension to this debate is that now, of course, many of these traditional working class communities are disappearing as the old council estates are cleared. Gentrification is a huge factor now.

GB. Absolutely, and it’s something I see a lot. I was born and raised in south London and I still live in the general radius – and it’s interesting to see those communities being broken down. And it literally is communities they’re breaking down. In Kidbrooke I’ve seen the entire destruction of a very big estate I used to know. I’ve no idea where those people have gone. And they’ve been replaced with newbuilds and something that looks like a shiny new community but has a completely different feel. But I wouldn’t want to say it was always a rosy picture. I mention in the essay the turd waiting for us on our doorstep when we were moved to a newer estate later on. It doesn’t make you feel very welcome. And then another time when my mum got a new car and some people shouted down from the balconies sort of accusing her of selling out.

DL. That’s another really interesting thing to explore, and all the essays in this collection touch upon it. You mention here a kind of reverse snobbery. Nathan, I’d like to ask you about that. Many of the essays you’ve chosen for this collection explore a kind of guilt they feel at “rising” up into middle class professions like writing and publishing. Since the rise of that Blairite dictum that idea that “we’re all middle class now” we’ve sort of tried to sweep class under the carpet – but how far do you think a person is bound by their class origins? Can they “transcend” class in the Blairite fashion?

NC. It’s a difficult question to answer, but I’m wary of this sort of angle. I mean, I went to university. That makes me not working class, right? But we were a single parent household. And we were on and off benefits at times. There was a lot of stuff that people from comfortable homes didn’t have to deal with. And now I work in publishing, is all that meant to count for nothing?

DL It’s easy to see how those arguments can play into the hands of the right. Since it’s so hard to define class, is that why you made one of the criteria of this collection that the contributors had to “self-identify” as working class?

NC. There's no way to categorise it with solid lines and as soon as you try you end up in a bigger mess that you started with. Also, I think there's something a bit insidious about being strict with your definition. It becomes self-selecting and what you end up with is some sort of Socialist Worker image of the working class which nobody actually lives up to. Dave isn't working class because he went to university. Jenn isn't working class because her mum was a manager. Liam isn't working class because he failed to meet his production quota this month. Are we going to say that Shelagh Delaney wasn't working class because she ended up writing for the BBC? Technically you could, but it would be ludicrous. If someone loses their ability to be working class the moment that they press the boundary then you consign the working class to be a monolithic bloc of faceless factory workers who are not allowed their own voice. You're saying only the middle class can represent them.

GB. I think it’s something that Nathan actually picked up in the Literary Fiction podcast – when you progress, do you lose that ticket of authenticity? In the case of my family I think we were trapped between two worlds – progressing into a world where we felt we weren’t good enough, because we weren’t middle class, towards a world where because we’d progressed so far, we almost were encouraged to feel better than the people we started with. I have friends who feel that now I’m living this middle class lifestyle I think I’m better than them. When I began at the grammar school one of my friends – on my first council estate – actually said “You talk white now”. It was beyond resentment. But at that school I was called a chav on my very first day! I think this stuff’s very complex.

LR. This idea of changing voices really strikes a chord with me. Where I’m from most of my family think since me entering writing and publishing, my voice has changed. And it has. But when I’m down here [London] I’m still thought of as the northerner! I’m from a very tough inner city part of working class Manchester. And I’ve just had to lose certain parts of my accent over the years simply because the people I mix with professionally don’t talk like that.

DL. I got that! When I moved to London for university I’d have this bizarre thing where I was perceived as some kind of flat-capped broad northerner, while I’d always been seen as a snob back home. It was almost like there was no place for me anymore. It was a kind of limbo almost.

LR. Yeah. It’s a limbo. Which in a way I kind of like – because it suits me to be detached in a way, a little bit outside society. But it’s very real. A lot of working class writers talk about that limbo. Zadie Smith wrote a wonderful essay about this in a collection called Changing My Mind. When she said that it really struck a chord with me. It’s all about changing your voice – the need to change and adapt.

DL. I was fascinated by the essay in the book which explores how many working class kids undergo some kind of emotional breakdown when they go to university. I certainly remember this myself studying in London alongside oligarchs and aristocrats. The sheer distance between us produced this kind of dizzying social gravity. And this Blairite pretence at a meritocracy – it’s nonsense, and actually quite damaging because it invalidates many peoples’ experience of meeting those barriers.

LR. I think there’s a sort of deep trauma in society from precisely this lack of representation that we’re discussing. If you look at books being published it’s a very white middle class kind of affair, there’s no kind of even spread. This is very much what I felt when I entered publishing. In my experience there’s also an expectation from a working class writer to write a gritty realist drama and bring a certain set of psychological tropes to it. And for me that’s anathema. It doesn’t interest me. I’ve never really been interested in serving up what’s expected of me.

DL. In other words, there’s an extent to which working class life has not just been ignored by the mainstream but actively exploited. My area in east Manchester has been used for this kind of poverty porn and I’ve even encountered TV producers on the end of my street casting for locations! I’d like to ask Gena-mour about this expectation to conform to a stereotype. Did you feel you were being asked to be, in a way, the voice of the council estate?

GB. To be honest with you, it didn’t feel like something I had to get off my chest and proclaim. It’s just the way you’ve lived. I haven’t gone around with a label on my head saying ‘I grew up here’. But it’s exactly like you were saying Lee – even when you do meet people who’ve come from that kind of background, they’ve at least been moulded to suit the expectation of what someone would look like – coming from a very privileged educational background, which I myself have had, coming from a grammar school and a Russell group uni. So there’s a problem there – that even when the mainstream feels like it’s giving a voice to someone from an ethnic minority or working class background, how much actual access are you giving them?

DL. That’s interesting though. Because you’re almost painting yourself as someone who’s already differentiated yourself from the people you grew up with, or at least been divided from them in a different social and professional loop. Does that make representation a problem?

GB. In what sense?

DL. I mean, do you feel that that means you can only really represent a certain section of the working class – the ones who managed to successfully jump through those hoops, educationally speaking?

GB. Oh definitely. I can’t pretend that I’ve been through what many of the people on my estate have been through. That’s not to belittle my own struggles, but I can’t act as if I’ve experienced as much educational adversity as someone who went to state school and then tried to become published. There’s a big cultural side to all this too. Because I went to good schools I learned how to modify my voice, use different language in different situations and so on – and that’s not something you really learn at state school. There’s still a lot of people outside who didn’t have those opportunities knocking on the door and not being listened to.

DL. Because they don’t have those social cues.

GB. Because they don’t have those social cues, yeah.

DL. It almost goes back to Bourdieu’s idea of cultural capital, doesn’t it? It always struck me that schools and universities are really factories for manufacturing middle class people. The more you conform to middle class norms the better you’ll do. Nathan, one of your contributors, Abondance Matanda, describes how because black working class families didn’t traditionally feel part of the mainstream art world, they ended up curating their own lives; they turned their homes into living galleries. It’s like a quiet voice of defiance: “we want to be remembered.” 

GB. People want to be heard. If you look at things like this independent anthology, at the Good Immigrant, the rise of these independently funded projects – these things didn’t happen by accident. There’s obviously a need for it. Unless these big publishers pay attention, it’s going to happen anyway.