I don’t need a lecture from David Cameron

I need David Cameron lecturing me on moral responsibility in much the same way as I need a layer of icing applied to my lasagne. Cameron had the gall to give this speech on the eve of the Glasgow East by-election campaign, in a deprived city licked to a splinter by the economic policies pursued by his party in the 1980s.

He said:

We as a society have been far too sensitive. In order to avoid injury to people’s feelings, in order to avoid appearing judgemental, we have failed to say what needs to be said. We have seen a decades-long erosion of responsibility, of social virtue, of self-discipline, respect for others, deferring gratification instead of instant gratification. Instead we prefer moral neutrality, a refusal to make judgments about what is good and bad behaviour, right and wrong behaviour. Bad. Good. Right. Wrong. These are words that our political system and our public sector scarcely dare use any more. Of course as soon as a politician says this there is a clamour - “but what about all of you?” And let me say now, yes, we are human, flawed and frequently screw up. Our relationships crack up, our marriages break down, we fail as parents and as citizens just like everyone else. But if the result of this is a stultifying silence about things that really matter, we re-double the failure. Refusing to use these words - right and wrong - means a denial of personal responsibility and the concept of a moral choice.

David Cameron (via anarchaia)

You want to know why we’ve seen a “decades-long erosion of responsibility” David? You couldn’t have a better recipe for rising crime and social decay than ripping the industrial heart out of a community and then leaving it to rot. This demented and wicked act, borne out of the Chicago School and the worship of Milton Friedman, has been repeated throughout the world and always with the same result.

In Glasgow, as with my own city of Sheffield, the resulting resentment of this disastrous encomium to capitalism was left to ferment for a couple of decades by a polity that has now fallen so far wide of reality that it is irrelevant to all but Nick Robinson et ses amis. The urban regeneration of Glasgow city centre in the 1990s never reached here and the concomitant social problems that always come whenever an entire community is thrown overboard spreads its tendrils far and wide. Boarded shops and broken windows; drug abuse and despair; alcohol and violent crime; life expectancy below that of a resident of the Gaza Strip; twenty Bensons and a scratchcard (“How will you feel if you win?”) and above all the feeling that the good times are happening somewhere else.

This is the reality for the residents of Glasgow East and from this fractured society come the feral, illiterate, innumerate children of those broken homes, who have seen what society served their parents and are now so filled with hatred and confusion and incomprehensible rage, that they wander the streets in gangs looking for something to fuck or fight.

This is the legacy his party bequeathed to Glasgow East from their last period in office, a legacy built upon by the New Labour project, seriously relaxed about the rich and pretty fucking comatose about the poor, whom they knew would have nowhere to go as the triangulation began to squeeze. And whilst they are not standing in Glasgow East, almost everywhere else come the fascists, knocking on doors, crowbarred into their suits, with undiagnosed colorectal problems causing a persistent itch, drawing from the same deep well of hatred as Cameron himself hoped to do just three years ago, when he penned one of the most sinister party manifestos of recent times.

No, I don’t need a lecture on self-discipline and respect from a bully. I don’t need a lecture on responsibility from somebody who had it handed to him on a plate. I don’t need a lecture on instant gratification from a political party whose entire ethos, as with that of the world from which it draws much of its funding, is predicated on us buying more and more of that which we do not need. I don’t need a lecture on morality from a fucking PR man. I don’t need a lecture on “fail[ing] to say what needs to be said” from a man who used immigrants as a punch bag when it suited him.

No, I don’t need a lecture from David Cameron.

This piece was also published at Liberal Conspiracy.

Kidulthood

This afternoon, whilst engaging in a thorough rearrangement of my living room furniture, I happened across a plastic figurine I had bought on the internet.

I often find myself spending an inordinate amount of time and an unhealthy proportion of my meagre income on what might charitably be described as juvenile tat. My recent purchases include, but are not limited to, a sticker from 1982 of the French footballer Michel Platini (£3); two small Be@rbrick figures, one in the French drapeau tricolore, the other in the Argentinian Bandera Oficial de Ceremonia (£5 each); a canvas print of a pair of Adidas trainers (£50); an XBOX 360 (£200); a pair of miniture Adidas SL72 trainers in a metal box (£30) and a Star Wars AT-AT toy (£80). I won’t debase myself further here but believe you me, the list could be so much longer.

I am very nearly 33 years old. In other words, I am a man. If I live to be as old as my father lived, I am over halfway through my life. By my age he had emigrated, fought a war and started a family. I’ve got a Scalextric and a guitar. And a plastic figurine, still pristene in its plastic bubble, still affixed to its backing card, onto which the vendor, clearly recognising a fellow traveller, had written the following statement before posting me it from New York:

YOU’RE AN ASSHOLE FOR BUYING THIS.

Come, marvel at my solipsism

When I’m not around here, you’re likely to find me here. If my life is a house, then this is the front room with the Royal Doulton on display and those fucking doily things - I’m reliably informed they’re known as antimacassars - over the back of the sofa. The back room is where I’m mostly to be found, scratching a bollock or two through my underpants on the settee, shouting at the television and fishing Chocolate HobNob® crumbs out of my chest hair.

You’re more than welcome to come over.

Human resources

This morning I wrote a hopeful email: I wrote a hopeful email to my manager, informing her of my intention to apply for a promotion and needing to solicit her advice before doing so. This afternoon I was told by her manager, a short and abrupt bully of late middle age, quite plainly and in all seriousness, that I would not be recommended for promotion. Her entire response was a commixture of astonishment, incredulity and anger at being confronted with what she clearly thought was a ridiculous proposal. I left feeling dazed and humiliated. If there was ever a conversation which had fallen further away from that which I had previously adumbrated in my brain, I have yet to squirm through it. Not even when I turned up at Nadine Poulson’s house on a school night nearly twenty years ago, stewed on several cans of Lee’s father’s best bitter and was subjected to a savaging by her horrified mother, had it gone so spectacularly wrong, so quickly.

The conversation had a beginning, a muddle and an end but before it began came the walk. The walk is what happens in the civil service, when one is ordered to enjoin in private session with a manager. The order is delivered by the walker from a standing position, usually whilst the walkee is engaged in the middle of something else. This has the effect of immediately disconcerting the walkee, who is thrown into a state of confusion by having to arrest their brain from a complex tax calculation or some such tedium and back into the present in a nanosecond. The walker will not wait for a response, for none is expected and none can be given, other than for the walkee to quickly lock their computer and follow. The walker will therefore be several yards ahead by the time the walkee rises and will remain so for the entirety of the whole embarrassing trudge through the office. No conversation can take place, unless the walkee wants to shout at the back of a rapidly accelerating head and so the walkee scurries behind, never quite catching up, never quite achieving parity, for none is intended and the whole damn office knows. This was curious, for I had hitherto enjoyed a pleasant exchange with my manager only a few hours previously, an exchange which resulted in a promise to spend some time later discussing my application. This was altogether different. I began to strongly suspect she had been leant on, for the pace at which she peddled backwards was something to behold. She had, apparently, misunderstood my email and would not be able to help. The whole thing put me in mind of that particular approach banks and credit card companies take when you default on a payment. The first thing to go is any attempt at polite badinage and instead a distant cold replaces it. Helen and Linda and Joanne are your best friends when they’re selling you the benefits of nought per cent on balance transfers until you’re a day late and suddenly it’s like Ving Rhames losing his L.A privileges but instead it’s “this is Mrs. Jackson calling from Barclaycard” and “I’m afraid we won’t be able to help on this occasion, sir” as you’re banished out of town.

So I approached her manager, a woman I don’t much like in the way that I don’t much like all bullies. She took great delight in telling me that I would not be recommended for promotion because, after fifteen months in my present role, after all the 7am starts, after all the times I went that little bit further for a colleague, after all the proposals and after all the procedures I set up, in order to effect a positive change to a microscopic part of a macroscopic organisation, after all the assistance cheerfully given, all the appreciation gratefully - always gratefully (I may be a foul-mouthed misanthrope here but manners were drilled into me as a child) - and genuinely offered, after all the times I expected a colleague to reciprocate the same and was instead treated with contempt or fobbed away with lies, after the times I was left alone on the telephone, out of my depth, unable to assist the person on the other end, whilst every manager in the vicinity sloped quietly away because they did not want to deal with it, after all that I will not be recommended for a job I could do in my fucking sleep because she does not know the first thing about me.

She conceeded that I may well be competent but competence wasn’t enough, although she made it quite plain she did not know either way and had little interest in finding out. She was so obtuse, so wilfully eager to misinterpret my intentions, so drunk on weilding her pathetic and pointless jurisdiction over me, that it rapidly transformed into a farce. She knows my name, the desk at which I sit but beyond that, nothing. Not about my work, not about the man I am, nothing at all. Is often said that the civil service is a ticket to a kind of utopia at the expense of the tax payer, but the truth is that whilst the benefits are good, the pay is poor and the stress levels are through the roof. Yet nothing, nothing whatsoever, in my working life has destroyed my confidence quite like being told this afternoon that I am so insignificant, so unimportant, that I haven’t even registered as a blip on her radar.

Enough is enough.

Don’t you have it?

Coming just weeks after Express Newspapers were handed a £550,000 fine and ordered to make prominent front page apologies to Kate and Gerry McCann in the Express and Daily Star, for publishing over 100 “seriously defamatory” articles concerning the disappearance of their daugher, the Star excelled itself with this story last week:

MUSLIM SICKOS’ MADDIE KIDNAP SHOCK

As Five Chinese Crackers writes “the article isn’t actually about Muslims kidnapping anyone, although you won’t find it on the Star’s website. It’s about some Muslims suggesting on the internet that the McCanns were responsible for their daughter’s kidnapping.”

Considering that most of the population of Europe has been morbidly fascinated with the case of Madeleine McCann for the past year and that terabytes have been expended on endless speculation suggesting the parents are guilty, it seems extraordinary that another in a very long line of tasteless theories expounded online is considered newsworthy at all.

And of course it isn’t. What it does allow, however, is an opportunity to give the most wretched element of our society another fucking good kicking. Coming on the back of a set of decent results for the BNP I’m not much in the mood for restraint right now, so let’s just get to the rub shall we?

If you buy the Daily Star you’re a fucking idiot. This includes those who would claim they only buy it for the football, or the TV pages. If you blithely repeat the lies it prints down the pub or at the bus stop or on your favourite messageboard, and in doing so contribute towards the kind of success the BNP enjoyed last week, then I’ll assume you’re a racist prick. If you attempt to go beyond the very real dismay and anger we feel at the realisation that some are so made that they commit vile atrocities against children and instead rant and rage and jerk spittle down the line to whichever racist magnet you prefer - TalkSport or Five Live, take your pick - and then proceed to take a newspaper which once published a topless photograph of a fifteen year old child, arms across her chest and then promised its readers it intended to publish her naked breasts as soon as she reached 16, you’re a hypocrite and are very possibly aching to penetrate a child yourself.

The decents love to tell us that we’re wrong and in turn we try to make them understand that we’re as appalled as they are, but seek to understand the context behind recent terrorist atrocities. Personally, I try to square my politics with my atheism, which is a harder process than I like to admit when many of those I admire for their stance on the latter dismay me when they turn to the former.

So allow me to adumbrate a question. There’s a definite urge - don’t you have it? - to ask, when one considers the juxtaposition of this vile headline next to the image of poor vacuous Lucy, her pendulous breasts cupped, her arse proffered towards us, her ambition apparently nothing more than appearing in a tawdry rag, acting as an avatar for a particular type of empty male fantasy in which her crimson flue becomes a repository for bollock fulls of gelatinous gloop, a product of grasping capitalism and a willingness to sell ourselves for the right price; there’s a definite urge - don’t you have it? - to ask, considering all that, considering the hateful words alongside, themselves a just a tiny part of an ocean of hatred, state sanctioned and tacitly approved of by an indifferent electorate; there’s a definite urge - don’t you have it? - to ask, when one is told that some Muslim women are mentally ill and that opinion is then endorsed by an otherwise apparently kind and venerable and rational man; there’s a definite urge - don’t you have it? - to ask, is there the merest possibility, of the slightest lacuna, of the slimmest chance, that someone may, for the scantest of moments, feel a flicker of anger and maybe begin to consider the possibility of embarking on a process of which may eventually lead to this? Don’t you have it?

It’s all the in the database or: People who don’t pay their TV licence against the Nazis!

If anything could turn me into a free-marketeer, fists pounding at the keyboard as my bloviated carcus undulates with rage at the latest offence against common or garden decency, this astonishing piece of intimidation from the BBC could well be the catalyst.

First the Kermodian twaddle. Panning across a cityscape, the camera swoops between high rises and under bridges but something serreptitious and sinister is being imparted. All is not as it would appear, for we are the victims of a visual sleight of hand. This landscape is actually a printed circuit board, where electronic components represent the familiar density of a city centre and regimented rows of microchips are substitued for the spread of suburbia. In this distopian mise en scene (a 2:2 in Film Studies is surely mine for the taking) the metaphor is as stark as the insult to our intelligence is clumsy. Our towns, our streets and our homes are under the aegis of the “database,” from which nobody should attempt to escape, lest they wish to hear the dreaded knock at the door, of which we are reminded at the end of the film.

If I were to awake from uneasy dreams to find myself transformed into the insect I described above, I may well issue that moth-eaten cri de coeur so beloved of my fellow travellers, and as no other metaphor will suffice, I must employ here. This is rather nannyish, is it not? Hitching itself onto the current zeitgeist for hectoring us for that we which haven’t done and had no intention of doing in the first place, we are assumed to be guilty and admonished accordingly. Such blandishments are nothing new on the BBC, which these days rarely passes on an opportunity for self-aggrandisement and cross-promotion and never ceases to hotly tell us what “the BBC has learned” when they’re parroting the same line as every other news outlet.

You must not assume that I would wish to see the BBC privatised, nor do I propose here to enjoin with those laptop libertarians who never cease to inform us how we’re in the grip of a liberal conspiracy. Despite all of my misgivings enough fondness for Auntie remains for me to still hope, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that it will recover and thrive in the face of increasing competition.

Whenever I am asked if I caught a particular programme the night previously, for the sake of brevity I often respond that I do not own a television. This is untrue. A portable resides under the bed and occasionally, should the desire take me, it is given temporary berth whereupon it almost never fails to raise the blood pressure, as it did last Thursday evening when it delivered to me the juvenile witterings of Jeremy Vine and the terrifying blank-eyed stare of a second generation Miliband unit. For this I am reconciled to paying the licence fee and pathetically, to be bullied whilst doing so, having no option other than metamorphing into a bug.

A short sketch, entirely unrelated to recent news

“Ok Miley, remember what we rehearsed. Research tells us that when the pictures come out we’ll need to win back the Christian demographic. The corporation has cells within every media node, so we can let them counter any negative publicity. Anyway, they’ve threatened to withdraw the advertising accounts so they’re not gonna be trouble!”

“Uh-huh?”

“So, what do you say? We’ve been over this a thousand times.”

“I say that I’m sorry and that my family and faith will guide me through the journey.”

“That’s good, honey. Real good. Family and faith. They’re the key to this whole thing. It don’t matter how greedy, how shameless, how venal you are. If ya’ got God on your side, you can’t get away with anything in this great land of ours. Hell, even poppa got away with that terrible song! Daddy will feign outrage and claim he’d left the shoot when the picture was taken.”

“Uh-huh?”

“And remember. Put your palm to your chest when you say faith. It’ll look more convincing.”

“Whatever. I wanna gold-plated Lexus.”

Transformed

If Doncaster Rovers win at Cheltenham on Saturday they’ll be promoted to the second tier of English football, ten years after losing their league place in 1998. Chairman John Ryan will have delivered everything he promised when he bought the wretched remains of the club that summer, with the team playing in a new stadium and at a height not seen since Alick Jeffrey’s first spell in the side fifty years ago.

Although I attended games sporadically during those first two seasons in the Conference, relegation was essentially the end of my time as a supporter. My heart was no longer in it. I simply couldn’t summon the renewed commitment, having gone through the protracted death rattle at the end of the arsonist and fraudster Ken Richardson’s tenure as the soi-disant benefactor of the club. Later on, promotion would’ve been difficult to take in its own way, had I been there to witness it. Actually winning something seemed precisely anathema to the whole reason for supporting Doncaster Rovers in the first place. There are three constants in my life: Philip Larkin, Depeche Mode and socialism. A declaration of love for any of them is unlikely to get one laid. “Deprivation is for me what daffodils were to Wordsworth,” said Larkin, who, when he wasn’t humping Betty Mackereth behind the accessions desk occasionally wrote some astonishingly good poems. I don’t listen to Depeche Mode because I think life is a joyous celebration. No, I listen to Depeche Mode because they offer pain and misery in various tempos. When asked what goes through his mind onstage, guitarist Martin Gore responded that he thinks about death and how curious it would be if he expired in front of 50,000 people. Nor do I need to explain here why identifying as a socialist, as I do now, as I did at the last election and as I have done for as long as I knew the world was hugely unjust, does not cheer the soul. If I had wanted success I could have turned to Manchester United. I grew up in Stretford and, unlike the majority of United fans, I’ve actually been to a game. No, keep it miserable and I’m happy.

So, a return to the league in 2003 via a golden goal in the inaugral Conference play-off final was followed by the Division 3 title the next year. Victories over Manchester City, Aston Villa and so nearly against Arsenal in the Carling Cup were an adequate substitute for promotion the season after* and when the subsequent campaign again stalled short of the play-offs, victory in the Johnstones Paint Trophy in front of 60,000 at the Millennium Stadium sufficed. It made me sick.

Ultimately though, it isn’t the success, astonishing and unexpected as it has been which repels me. I may even have returned after a hiatus. No, it’s the fans. More precisely, the new fans, who have emerged in their thousands over the past five years. Families. Children with painted faces. Those for whom football is a leisure choice enjoyed à la carte in the sterilised environment only a £32m all-seater stadium provides. And it’s arse-clenchingly awful.

I still watch from afar. No doubt capricious fortune will likely conspire to deliver a victory for Sean O’Driscoll’s side, but then snatch it away from them, when Leeds United are given just enough points back via arbitration to send Donny tumbling into the play-offs. That would almost be enough to call me back, just so long as it precipitated an immediate relegation and the start of another generation in the doldrums. When those painted faces are being ground in the Doncaster dirt by a group of Chelsea fans at school my heart will sing and when that club-affiliated visa card is being hacked across despairing wrists will I truly belong again. Until that day I remain an exile.

Still, the possibility of Doncaster winning promotion and leaving Leeds United behind them remains. Even I can see that is remarkable. If one could go back in time and tell both clubs their respective fates on this cup night just over seven years ago who would have laughed hardest in sheer incomprehension?

*As Nick points out here, I’ve omitted a season. Apologies for this oversight.

Your retarded

Is there a more objectionable constituency on the internet than that to be found chucking shit at one another in the comments beneath a YouTube video?

In between the debate about the provenance of this clip of an unfortunate television presenter dissolving into laughter, an interrogatory finesse which essentially consists of little more than adopting a contrary position in favour of either Belgium or the Netherlands and then screaming about it in an increasingly vitriolic manner, is an equally unpleasant shit-storm debating the authenticity of the video.

The reality? The clip is taken from the Belgian comedy In de Gloria, which satirises the worst excesses of daytime television. I know this because despite the voices of lucidity and sanity appearing only rarely, they are there and can be found if one is prepared to pick through the YouTube slurry with a pair of tweezers.

A quick reference to IMDB via Google should be enough to suffice, and yet the cacophony of shit-flinging continues unabated. Some claim it to be an extract from a genuine factual programme. Some are horrified. Some are amused. Some are both. Some go so far as to assert that the host was dismissed for offending decency. Some claim he now works in radio. For the other side, some claim it to be a comedy. Some claim it to be fake. Some claim it to be a comedy and to be a fake, which is to open up a whole meta-layer of philosophical introspection I had hitherto not attributed to the average YouTube commentator.

John Gabriel is wrong. Far from hiding behind anonymity, it is a sobering thought to confront what we are reduced to when we’re granted mere pseudonymity and a keyboard. Will Web 3.0 allow us to evacuate our bowels directly down the nearest ISDN line and into the face of someone who dares to claim a video posted on YouTube is actually from Belgium, not Holland? Why, despite lofty claims of interactive, user-generated content breaking down barriers is the internet invariably little more than a saloon bar brawl featuring emoticons, pixels and poor spelling?

If you leave me, can I come too?

This article in today’s Guardian is especially pertinent at the moment. My manager - a relaxed, music-loving, left-wing, genuinely nice guy I’m delighted to have got to know these past months since my return to work - announced last week he is leaving for a post at another agency. He’s been measurably good for me; understanding my mental health problems, always supportive, never remotely placing any pressure on any of us and always on our side. And in a few weeks he’ll be gone, driven up the wall by the myriad failings of our ‘new’ - only eight years old, folks - IT system. in all probability to be replaced by some cocking vapid fuckshard.

He isn’t the only one leaving. I spent many a cigarette break outside with my closest friend at work. A like-minded thirty-something Adidas-wearing socialist relic from the 1990s, unlike me he’s a graduate with cause for genuine complaint that he’s wasting himself here. In a week he’ll be gone and there’ll be no more Friday lunchtimes laughing at New Labour, or the ziggurat-climbing coporate schillings in our place, with their healthy lives and their gym memberships. their Audi TTs and their lunches at All Bar One, their ‘time management’, their euphemisms, their pleonasms and their wholesale support for the ‘journey’ we’re expected to enjoin.

Last night I went for a drink with a colleague on my section (despite liking many of them personally I refuse to use the word team, connoting as it does images of high-fives, paintballing, daily huddles and Key Performance Indicators) and he’s in the same frame of mind. Everyone else I merely tolerate, with their haircuts and their “did you watch Dancing on Ice?” and their “I won’t mind global warming if it means I don’t have to wear a jumper” and their tedious fucking conversations redolent with implicit racism.

My dull, steady little world is untethered from its moorings again and I’m really not good at dealing with the change about to wash ashore. I sure picked a good time to quit smoking. For what it’s worth, I’ll miss them.