Real politics, please

The lead headline on BBC Radio 4’s 10 o’clock news was the ’story’ that there are calls for the resignation of Lord Myners, City Minister (‘City’ minister? wtf?), over claims of “misleading parliament” (trans: telling porkies). The issue? Whether or not he knew the “full value” of the pension to be paid by RBS to fat cat retiree Fred Goodwin. This is the top ’story’ on a major national news programme, a complete non-story that illustrates:

a) the insularity and incestuousness of the English political class

b) the absence of any real political issues in the country

After all, who gives a monkeys whether or not some identikit NuLabor apparatchik will get the sack or not? Who gives a toss about whether or not he knew irrelevant fact X at time Y? Absolutely nobody outside the political class and its media fanbase. A complete irrelevance to real life.

Contrast this with a country like France, where there’s real news, and real politics with sharp ideological and class struggle: massive general strikes, weekly street protests across the country, factories occupied and bosses taken hostage by workers, the birth of a new radical Left party, and much, much more. Can you image what a French person in England must think when s/he watches/listens to/reads the news? Gobsmacked astonishment at the sheer triviality, irrelevance and pointlessnes of what passes for ‘news’ and ‘politics’ in the UK, or at least England. Together, perhaps, with tristesse at the loss of real politicas and real issues of ideology, principle and class, wihch in France, and indeed any normal European country, govern the news agendas. If s/he’s of a certain radical bent, s/he might even be reminded of the Situationist theory of The Spectacle.

That the UK political class and the media, locked together in unholy incestuousness, consider the ‘Lord Myners affair’ to be a news story at all shows how sterile and baroque political debate has become, and how divorced the political-media complex has become from ordinary life. The danger of this, in a country like Ingerlan where White Van Man and Warm Beer And Cricket Man rule, where the working class hasn’t recovered from the crushing defeat of the miners 25 years ago and which consequently has the collective political consciousness of a lobotomised bumblebee, is that populist demagogues and parties (BNP, UKIP come immediately to mind) will exploit the gaping political vacuum and climb to power on a wave of reactionary, perhaps even fascist, ‘anti-politics’ populism, with The Scum, The Mail, and The Express cheerleading all the way. Which would have consequences only too worrying to contemplate…

Myners defends RBS pension stance. BBC Online, 3/3/09

McKillop: No RBS pension ‘ruse’. BBC Online, 31/3/09

Oh Nottingham…

is full of scabs
Oh Nottingham is full of scabs
it’s full of scabs, scabs and more scabs
Oh Nottingham is full of scabs

(To the tune of “The Saints go marching in”)

Why does this little ditty come to mind? Perhaps because Nottingham’s inglorious history as fifth column during the Miner’s Strike is always on my mind, having the misfortune to live and work in the hole. Every day I feel dirty just being here, but a job’s a job these days and us 50-somethings can’t just up sticks and expect to get work anywhere. Today it comes to mind because I’ve twice experienced the standard Nottingham aggression on the roads on my bicycle. Just going from A to B on 2 wheels does offend some, particularly white van men, and they feel that they can honk and gesture at you as they want (though I doubt they’d have the balls to get out of their metal cradle and have it out face to face), so any bike ride on a road risks abuse and aggression, not to mention the standard bad driving (a cycle doesn’t mass a tonne so can’t do you any damage and thus isn’t worth respecting).

However, the aggression on Nottingham’s roads is just an extension of the aggression that’s a default with most of its inhabitants. You just have to go into tahrn on a Saturday afternoon to do your shopping to be pushed around and walked over/through, and to hear and see aggressive behaviour as a matter of course. I’ve not come across such a base level of aggression outside London, and certainly not in the Yorkshire towns I’ve lived in for 15 years prior to (very reluctantly) moving South of Sheffield. Maybe it’s a byproduct of their ‘original sin’ of scabbing. The scabbing broke the strike and decisively defeated the whole of the working class, including the workers of Nottingham. We’re all feeling the effects of this betrayal 25 years on, as defeat has led directly to all the working class having to work longer hours for less pay in more dangerous conditions with fewer rights, and indirectly to the Security State which surveilles and controls us all 24/7, cradle to grave.

Nottingham suffered too – their reward for scabbing was for their pits to be closed as well, and for their communities to be destroyed. You just have to go up to places like Bestwood, Bilborough, and Broxtowe to see the grotty sink estates that are what once-coherent communities degenerated into once all the jobs went. Pits at Annesley, Babbington and many other places suffered the same fate as the Yorkshire pits, and the communities that had grown up around them sunk into despair, unemployment and McJobs. The difference being that the Nottingham miners brought it on themselves. The sheer grinding poverty, drug crime and rampant violence of lethal areas such as St Anns (if Nottingham is the gun capital of the UK, St Anns is the gun capital of Nottingham), Meadows and Radford also results from the destruction of the jobs and real communities that the mining industry used to provide. So whilst the scabbing miners and their communities deserved everything they got, their sin is being visited on the innocents of successor generations who are suffering mightily without having the consciousness to be able to understand their suffering or the community solidarity that would enable them to withstand it.

So perhaps the aggression that’s in the (boiling) blood of Nottinghamites is a result of the lack of community and solidarity stemming directly from the scabbing. That’s what it feels to this reluctant resident, anyway. The sooner I get away from this hole the better – I feel soiled just living here, and find it difficult to regard the denizens of Scab City with anything better than anger. Which of course makes me aggressive at times…

Oh, and it’s a shit accent too.

With it being the 25th anniversary of the Strike there’ll be more on  its legacy, and Nottingham’s traitorous role, in future posts. Watch this space…