Manchester's 'Save our Children' Protest, 22nd August 2020

 

The End of the World - a Local Perspective

A "Coronadventure" in Three Parts

Day One

For the final part of my ‘Covid Trilogy’ I decided to concentrate on home – and attempt to document the city I actually live in.

A bus thick with evening heat took me to the airport, where today’s arrivals included flights from Doha, the Isle of Man and a delayed afternoon flight from Islamabad. One of the interesting dimensions of the pandemic was that normally interesting places were now boring, and normally boring places were now interesting; train stations, for example, had become ghostly militarized zones full of distant shuffling employees, long silences, and teetering unread piles of the Metro. Ironically they were actually more pleasant than before the pandemic.

The Departures hall was whisper-silent: an empty shell scraped by slivers of sunlight, long evening shadows and a distant air-conditioner hum that reminded me of the exploratory gurgles of a recently-purchased fridge. Beggars bedded down on the carpet amongst the upbeat marketing promotions. If this city were to descend into some kind of Mad Max Armageddon, the warring tribes would end up massacring one another against a backdrop of posters from regional funding bodies about diversity and inclusion.

In the Departures hall a single attendant stood behind a single desk; half of the room had been plunged into darkness to save on electricity bills. Arrivals had been cleared of any stragglers, so those waiting to pick up their families had been confined to the grand, sun-baked ziggurat of the Terminal 1 Short-stay Car Park.

Day Two

As I set off on the second day of my journey around my virus-stricken city I received a text from my local GP practice asking if everything was okay.  

A shopping trolley that someone had helpfully left in the beauty spot beside my local reservoir seemed to rear up as I approached, as if it were begging for scraps, its hind legs gleaming in the afternoon sun. The cycle path was full of hundreds of people self-isolating; there were so many that my journey became a torturous gauntlet woven between wheezing families and their increasingly indignant dogs. 

The recycling containers seemed especially colourful and gleaming outside my father’s house in Chorlton, as if they were looking forward to swallowing the pile of leftwing magazines my father was putting in the bin.

I dropped in on my friend Adam, who told me he was planning to get into self-sufficiency gardening in order to shore himself up against the potential collapse of civilisation. He was looking well – in good spirits as he popped open a couple of beers – and declared that he had that very morning taken delivery of a thousand litres of compost.

Deckchairs were arranged in the garden at a suitable distance from my friends, and we chatted amiably while the next-door neighbour lifted weights to a series of metal bands. As we talked a head emerged from a window above us, and I recognised a man called Dan who I knew from local parties. 

We chatted for a couple of minutes, and Dan revealed that he had spent a brief time in the local park that morning to get a bit of fresh air. 

Day Three

On the third day of my adventure, I decided to negotiate the city’s shopping mall, a place where in less afflicted times I spend much of my daily life in the bookshop café. The mall was ghostly in its silence; beautiful sun bathed the complex in dappled light, so that one felt like one was moving in a kind of meditative trance, even if technically one was actually only moving towards the Prêt-à-Manger.

I stopped and purchased a carton of Medium Fries from an establishment called ‘Dixy’s’, and took them into the adjacent park to consume on one of the benches. The park was drenched in evening sun and the fries were even tastier with liberal sprinklings of salt; how remarkable, I thought to myself, that a scene of such Sylvan beauty could sit fifty yards away from a Wetherspoon’s!

As I made my way around the park I couldn’t help feeling that this place had never looked more peaceful, with its scampering children and playful families. Perhaps this outbreak might lead us on a new path, I reflected, one where we became less reliant on intensive global supply systems and and began to accommodate ourselves to our delicate planet; I began to feel a cautious hope for humankind and our long journey ahead, before cycling back home past a building site where work was resuming on expanding our neighbourhood Tesco Extra. 

The Sludge of Nostalgia

Being unable to move in space, I decided instead to move in time – and so decided, for the second part of my Coronavirus adventure, to make a sojourn to the town where I grew up.

The platforms at Victoria Station all seemed to have had their benches cordoned off, on the assumption that the nation's health would be improved by depriving passengers of the ability to sit down. Prerecorded messages boomed around the empty concourse in search of a listener. As my train rolled in, an urgent missive warned me of the disastrous health consequences of vaping.

When I alighted at my home town I was immediately reminded of why I’d left it. At first I was rather overcome by the empty streets, the shuttered shops and hooded gangs – until I remembered that this had nothing to do with Coronavirus but was largely down to it being in the North of England.

I set off to explore, with that odd feeling of retracing footsteps I’d made in other decades, in other centuries. Almost every street elicited memories of a childish or teenage me. In the glare of an afternoon sun a nightclub promised tantalising thrills of downtown glamour, while opposite it stood a wall that had once boasted a sweet shop where my mental progression into adulthood – and the realisation that happiness did not solely depend on injections of sugar – had been prompted by the purchase of a small papery bag of bonbons.

The Hippodrome Theatre: a place of dreams! This gleaming citadel of high culture had been the locus of my artistic aspirations ever since the age of nine, when I was cast as a munchkin in a production of The Wizard of Oz. It now stood opposite a large Lidl, which boasted a new kind of dream of multiple discount bargains. Today’s delights included a 60 pence reduction on a bag of conference pears as well as 2-for-1 deals on home barbecues.

The tearooms my mother used to take me to as a child were largely still there, albeit having undergone a rebranding as espresso bars, a sign of incipient gentrification which seemed optimistic given the rest of the town. One sign in particular caught my eye. I had no idea who Libby might be – I pictured an energetic 25-year old with reddish curly hair and two cats – but I wished her and her pies all the very best.

I was surprised to find my old house now resembled a rural paradise; it was difficult to tell whether a road sign nearby was out of date because there was a global pandemic, or simply because nobody really cared. A fridge sat abandoned on the pavement, as if it had somehow wandered out one night and forgotten the way back.

Although nostalgia is often portrayed as a stroll through a rose-tinted garden, it occurred to me that this only works if you actually have enjoyable memories in the first place. For me, nostalgia was more like a walk through a sludgy railway embankment near a council estate; diving down into it did not recover pearls and treasure, but rather the mental equivalent of old shopping trolleys and discarded cans of White Lightning. There was nothing particularly noble or heart-warming about any of the memories this journey conjured up, and largely I wished I could have had some different ones. Such reflections caused me to miss a good photo of the town’s most famous statue, so that one of the most influential campaigners to improve the plight of the industrial working poor was now chiefly remembered here for his feet.

Crossing the park, I couldn’t help feeling the fence around my old school carried a sense of menacing incarceration, until I remembered that my school had actually felt like that even when it was open. I was saddened that the nearby pie shop of my childhood had been replaced by an all-purpose grocery store boasting posters for drum lessons and massage therapy.

As I approached the outdoor market an impatient hooded young man on a BMX shot around the corner, and disappeared into the settling dusk. If I’d waited another hour the market would have been immersed in artificial floodlight and created a wonderful, striking photo, one that would have been rich in drama and meaning, and left my readers impressed with the tragic beauty of post-industrial decline. But somehow I didn’t feel this town deserved it so I took a picture of the bus stop and caught the train home.

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?