It's grim ooop north (3)
Monday 30 April 2012
Knee deep in drought yesterday, cold wet and windy - too grim to be grim. But, to make up, Mrs EU Referendum and I did a swift foray into the boondocks today - a place mid-between Northowram and Halifax, on the western outskirts of Bradford.
     
I'm sure you're beginning to get the point now ... quite how grim it is ooop 'ere, with all the over-crowding, immigration, poverty, pollution, noise and traffic. You can see now why we're all rushing sarf. People just have no idea how much we are suffering.
Richard North 30/04/2012 |
Filling the vacuum
Monday 30 April 2012
 There is an interview of George Galloway in The Guardian today, which is worth reading if for no other reason than to discover that Bradford's latest MP was on his last legs, politically, before he finally gained the seat. Had he been rejected by the electorate, that would probably have been the end of him.Getting inside the events of last March, it does actually appear that Galloway has no more of an idea why he won than anyone else. And, in that sense, some of the establishment pundits may be right. He could disappear as fast as he came. After all, we have been here before, and the current anti-party mood has been seen before. Interesting it is, therefore, that Charles Moore was in the Failygraph over the weekend, pleading for us not to rush to judgement on The Boy, and to give him another chance. And now he is back in the paper this morning warning of revolution. Reviewing his mate's book, with which we were not terribly impressed, Moore is telling us that we, "the many", are losing the unequal struggle against the power of the oligarchy. The oligarchs are in charge of Britain. Actually, this thesis is just as fatuous as much of that which Moore has on offer these days. He and his mate Mount are taking a tiny snapshot of Britain, and looking at the downstream effects of a singular problem – the fact that the march towards democracy has stalled. My original objection to Mount's thesis is that he asserts that democracy has failed, and he would offer us nostrums to restore democracy. But anyone who takes a really clear view of our history cannot help but conclude that we have never had a democracy. It has always been an aspiration – a direction of travel – never an attainment. Democracy, in its literal sense of "people power" has rarely come our way, and one example I give is in the early stages of the Blitz, where the people of London (some of them) defied their masters and sought shelter from Nazi bombing in the Tube stations, forcing a change in the shelter policy. That the resultant sense of victory resided in folk memory is given dramatic shape by a forgotten cartoon in the left-wing Tribune magazine, first published on 1 November 1940. The cartoon reflects the huge scandal at the time arising from the thousands made homeless from the bombing, with no provision for them.
Despite this, there were many empty houses and flats, some of them empty for the duration, their owners having gone to the country where it was safer. There was enormous pressure for these properties to be requisitioned, and - as the cartoon indicates - for more direct action to be taken.
Such an independent spirit, which occasionally did manifest itself, could not be allowed to survive. Ever since, the establishment has sought to bury this spark of independence, of rebellion - partly by substituting its own legends and distorting the history of the period. For this reason, we have the technocratic myth of "The Few" coming to the rescue of the many, replacing the fact that "The Many" were forced to engineer their own salvation. The idea that people can be self-reliant, that our rulers are not needed, is not one that the British establishment can permit. To keep "The Many" in their place, the establishment, then and now, has sought to instil a sense of dependency, projecting the idea of a paternalistic government on which the people must rely, gulling them into a belief that they are without power. Alas, our masters have succeeded all too well. Sixty years of the welfare state, and the destruction of our education system, has reduced our population to the condition of powerless dependency, conformity and obedience. What little power the people had has gone. And into that vacuum has stepped the groups which Moore and Mount have finally noticed. One of those, we are now told, is the EU. Invoking populist sentiments, Moore concludes in his review that it is "certain" is that, so long as the EU exists in its present form, the power of oligarchy will grow. This, he avers, "makes it equally certain that the risk of revolution will increase". Moore, though, is blowing wind. The EU is a downstream problem – a symptom of the malaise, not a cause. Furthermore, having explored the issue to its nth degree, we are not going to have a revolution. We said this last June, when we noted that developed western countries seem to have lost the art of truly political protest. What we have lost most of all, though, is the sense of our own power – that very sense embodied in the Tribune cartoon. When we regain that, we can have our revolution, but when we regain it, we won't need one. The vacuum, which the Moore/Mount have noticed, will have been filled. COMMENT THREAD Richard North 30/04/2012 |
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