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The Wish List

July 5, 2024

Win or lose, it’s a national pasttime to tell the Labour Party what to do. An incoming government can expect to be weighted down with unsolicited advice and wild expectation, from pundits like myself who have no idea what things really cost and how hard it is to get stuff done. So in that spirit let me share my completely uncosted and unrealistic ideas for what the new Labour government could do.

– Immigration: Dismantle border control industry and the Home Office income generation machine. Cut visa fees to attract the best talent. Send a message to the world that Britain is open to business and a place of sanctuary for people fleeing persecution. Repeal anti-migrant laws, reconfigure the Home Office so that it’s focused on real threats to our national security rather than ‘stop the boats’. We could beef up law enforcement so that they can work with the FBI and Europol to catch rich criminals laundering bad money through our country. (Oliver Bullough’s Butler to the World has some great advice and detail.)

– Welfare: Benefits system to be replaced by universal basic income. Dismantle welfare reform industry, tear up our contracts with Serco and all the other crap companies, close the job centres, end the assessment process. Use the savings to help people to help themselves.

– Housing: Reform the planning system so we can build more houses and vital infrastructure. It’s not just new homes, it’s GP surgeries, flood defences, prisons, reservoirs. Take away the veto power of nimby groups and local government. Britain’s problem is scarcity. We need more homes, not just council houses but HMOs and private rentals. The usual suspects will complain. Let them. We need to build.

– Constitutional: Establish a British constitution that begins with a First Amendment style law protecting freedom of expression. The constitution should be brief and include clear declarations of other rights that will complement the international treaties we are signed up to. Replace the Lords with an elected senate and introduce regional assemblies with tax raising powers. Reform the honours system so that only people who have demonstrated obvious courage or compassion are rewarded. Support freedom and democracy at home and abroad.

– Health: Public health in this country needs to do real public health – sorting out air pollution and ensuring safe food standards rather than hassling people who are just getting on with their lives. Cut tobacco control projects and any government money for anti smoking and anti alcohol lobbyists. Cut duty for cigarettes and alcohol. The state needs to chill out and stop lecturing people about their lifestyles. Starmer promised ‘a politics which treads a little lighter on all our lives.’

The new government will probably not do any of this though.

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You Had To Blow It Up

May 22, 2024

You always think you know when something is coming to an end. There are moments that seem to mark the closing of a chapter, then they pass and things continue as they were. You are still grappling with the same ongoing problems, or relaxing in the same state of happy leisure. Tomorrow looks much like today.

Politics is a bit like that. Westminster has to feel exciting if you are a lobby journalist rushing about at the edges of the circles of power. People in politics are always declaring the end of an era and the beginning of a new dawn. But in politics as in life, often things don’t change. You wake up in the morning and it’s just another day. 

This time they say it’s different. We now have an election date of July 4. Every poll out there says that the Conservative Party is headed not just for a loss but for an extinction event. I’m still sceptical. Polls are just polls, and many things can happen between now and the fourth. 

I hope, though, that what the polls and pundits say is true.

A couple of years ago the Westminster journalist Paul Waugh sat in on a focus group in Wakefield. This is what he heard:

Ali is a dad who rarely sees his daughter because he has taken a second job at weekends. Lucy is a mature student nurse whose childcare costs mean she’s worse off than she was as a stay-at-home mum. Fiona is a part-time worker and single parent who reluctantly went to a food bank.

For these members of a focus group in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, there is only one story in town: rocketing energy and food bills.

At least two of the participants talk about ‘free days’, but they don’t mean free time; they mean days when they spend literally no money on themselves or their children. They’re going to the local park because it is one of the few leisure activities that doesn’t cost a penny.

When David Cameron came to power in 2010 I was still in my twenties. I worked in people facing, public sector advocacy type roles. I saw more poverty and suffering than I was prepared to see. A lot of it could be traced back to specific policies introduced in the austerity years, or simple economic mismanagement. I worked in these jobs for years, but like Paul Waugh in the focus group, I know that I only ever got a glimpse of the misery that is out there. The scream on the other side of silence.

The Wakefielders are close to the epicentre of the cost of living crisis, in the way that frontline clinicians were at the centre of the pandemic. But you don’t have to live in very unfortunate circumstances to have your life impacted by decisions over the last fourteen years. Twenty years ago a wait in A&E was four hours. Now you can be sitting there for a day and a half. Once food banks were a curiosity. Now they are the bedrock of our welfare state. Courts were not always backlogged by two years. Rivers didn’t always flow with human waste. Rents didn’t always cost the earth. And a walk in the park was not always considered luxury.

Economic trouble is one thing. You could argue, as Rishi Sunak will do, that we were hit with the 2008 crash, COVID and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and you can’t legislate against that. But global events can’t explain away everything about the Conservative Party that has made voters sick of them. Their disinterest in the public realm: cheerily letting to ruin not just council housing and law centres but prisons, courts, roads and reservoirs. The billions they wasted on friends, fraud and halo projects. Their escalating bureaucracy. The micromanagement of more and more areas of public life. The contempt for ordinary people in this country, and the visceral loathing for ordinary people trying to enter from outside it.

You could ask: would Labour be any better? Maybe not. If (I still think of it as an if) Starmer gets in he will be firefighting and fixing the roof, not pressing on with bold reforms. And there are plenty of people in the Labour Party who are just as bad as the Tories. Tomorrow would not be a paradise. It might just be more managed decline. But I have the hope perhaps we will get to a place where you feel like you live in a country that works – as, more or less, it worked the last time Labour were in power. 

To quote Mike Ehrmantraut:

‘We had a good thing, you stupid son of a bitch!… We had everything we needed, and it all ran like clockwork. It was perfect. But, no, you just had to blow it up. You and your pride and your ego! You just had to be the man. If you’d done your job, known your place, we’d all be fine right now!’

Image: BBC

You can register to vote here.

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Spread the Word: Case Closed

January 17, 2024

I was delighted to be commended in Spread the Word’s crime writing competition, run in partnership with the C&W Literary Agency. The full announcement is here with details about the contest and the selected authors. I was particularly interested in the winner Liz Cornell’s legal murder mystery, which sounds brilliantly written and I hope I can read a published copy of it one day soon. 

It has been a while since I did one of these updates. Over at Shiny New Books there are reviews of books that have interested me over the last couple of years:

– Skylark, Alice O’Keefe‘s novel about the spycops scandal;

– RV Raman’s country house murder mystery, A Will to Kill;

– My Monticello, by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson;

– Kalina Pickhart’s novel of the Maidan, I Will Die in a Foreign Land;

– The recent epic of family and capitalism, Age of Vice by Deepti Kapoor;

– Priya Guns’s gig economy barnstormer, Your Driver is Waiting;

– Southern gothic mystery The Kingdoms of Savannah, by George Dawes Green;

– Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow.

Update: The Bookseller reports on the prize.

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Junkyard Wilderness

January 1, 2024

Until I read this book, I thought the Ozarks were just in Missouri. This was because my only knowledge of the region came from the TV show ‘Ozark’. Wiki tells me that the mountain region also covers north Arkansas, and it is there that Eli Cranor‘s novel takes place. 

The small town of Taggard can trace its decline to the loss of the nuclear power plant, which closed after ‘the reactor scare back in 1999. The sirens had wailed, sending the entire town into the surrounding Ozark Mountains. Turns out, there wasn’t a problem with the reactor, just a faulty alarm system.’ After the plant closed, ‘Taggard became a ghost town with barely ten thousand residents’ and things got worse from there:

A chicken plant popped up in the aftermath, a sprawling compound similar to Nuclear One but filthier. What jobs the plant had to offer went to men and women who didn’t mind getting their hands dirty, immigrants who’d work for pennies and didn’t ask questions. Wasn’t long before racially charged factions like the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Steel, and the White Arkansas Resistance, or W.A.R. for short, started forming across the Ozarks… Times had most definitely changed in Taggard, but the cooling tower still stood ancient and imposing out on the edge of Lake Dardanelle, a totem of days gone past.

In this febrile moonscape Jeremiah must raise his granddaughter Jo, left in his care after her father Jake was sentenced to life for murder. Eighteen years later, he has managed it – Jo is a grown woman with college acceptance letters and even a good shot at being crowned Homecoming Queen at the graduation ceremony on the football field. The story begins at this event, and Jeremiah, who rarely leaves the junkyard he operates for a living, is considerably nervous at the graduation, full of townspeople he feels are judging him. His fear and resentment are palpable. Jo doesn’t make Homecoming Queen – the title goes to the daughter of some local bigwig – but Jo doesn’t care: she leaves the event with her football hero boyfriend. Shortly afterwards, she is kidnapped – and then begins the real story of Ozark Dogs: it’s not so much about a postindustrial community as the mountains, rivers and lakes themselves. 

In James Dickey’s Deliverance, four men from the Georgia suburbs take a two-day canoe trip into the river wilderness. Things go awry when they are jumped by two locals with shotguns. The city men are lost in the wilderness, and tested by this unfamiliar terrain. In Ozark Dogs, the characters are mostly local people who know the landscape well – but it’s still a long terrible night for everyone concerned. Jo is brave and smart enough to escape the neo-Nazis who kidnapped her, but the Ozark river is a far greater challenge. The novel is a long night running wildly through dark forests. 

Ozark Dogs is a Western novel. The characters are distinctive, brilliantly written but, well, kind of Western. There is a hardass Mare of Easttown style woman sheriff. A hooker with a heart. Generic cartel bad guys. Moody fatalism and the weight of the past. Family feuds that go on for generations.

Bunn Ledford is an old-school Klansman who also cooks meth. His face is half ruined from an explosion in his makeshift lab. While Bunn is ‘leading revivals way up in the hills, preaching the gospel of white supremacy to a meth-mouthed congregation’ his son Evail, the real villain of the story, has yet more sinister ideas on how to grow the Ledford business and help his family dominate the region. Jeremiah himself is a Vietnam war veteran and a recovering alcoholic, haunted by guilt and grief. 

We return briefly to civilisation when Evail sends his henchman, Dime, to find a woman called Lacey Brewer. He discovers Lacey in a cheap motel, ‘face deep in the lower fold of a fat man’ – the same man whose daughter took the Homecoming title from Jo, earlier in the evening. Dime tosses out the fat man and hits Lacey in the back of the head. But Lacey is about to turn the tables. ‘Dime looked as if he were going to spit again, but instead swallowed. ‘You know why I’m here?” he asks… shortly before Lacey tricks him, stealing his car and gun. 

There are other subtleties in this book, too. When Jeremiah remembers the family of Vietnamese civilians he massacred in the war, he thinks ‘The girl was still beneath his feet’ – always, wherever he goes, beneath his feet.

In this broad-brush Mexican standoff of a book there is also marvellous detail like points of mica glowing in the mud. It is also a powerful novel of the wilderness, and the old lie that blood is thicker than water.

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The Artefact

June 17, 2023

In Stephen King’s The Tommyknockers there is a spaceship buried in the woods of a small New England town. The ship has been under the earth for hundreds of years, its occupants long dead. Yet as townsfolk get curious and start digging up the alien artefact, its radiation seeps out and wreaks dramatic changes on people around. Not even HG Wells, one of the diggers reflects, predicted an invasion of ghosts.

For Frank Landau in Nina Allan‘s Conquest the ghosts have been here for a long time. Frank hangs out on UFO forums. Frank believes that he is being watched by people he calls ‘the n-men’. Frank’s paranoid. He prefers the postal service to email, because to his mind it is

Like sending an email in slow motion, the slow spray of data through the fabric of space, a burgeoning of spores like the vortex of midges that swarmed the copse at twilight or after rain.

Frank’s thoughts are structured like this, measured and beautiful, but often his anxiety takes over, pressuring his words, so the prose deteriorates into panicky run-on sentences:

For Frank the anxiety of knowing he was under surveillance was less than the anxiety of being spied on in secret. You could even say there was something energising in knowing for sure, a sense of forward momentum even of power yet he knew he should be careful not so much of them as of himself the ceaseless careless spooling of his unguarded thoughts. 

Frank’s problem is diagnosed as generalised anxiety disorder. He’s been in and out of locked psychiatric wards since the age of fourteen. Despite this great psychological drag, Frank has a lot going for him. He can code, well enough to earn a freelance living. He still lives with his mum because he is afraid of change, but there’s a lot of love there and he is an active participant in his family. He has a girlfriend, Rachel, who can get past his craziness because she loves him. Frank doesn’t have the monomania of the typical conspiracy theorist. His brother Michael describes going to a UFO conference and being struck by ‘the way the speakers seemed to take it for granted that everyone in the audience thought the same way they did, that they all knew the truth and anyone who didn’t agree with them was either an idiot sheep or part of the conspiracy.’ Frank is never like this – he doesn’t force his ideas on others, they are not at the forefront of his conversation, they are more like a quiet hum in the background. Michael also says: ‘I could never get my head round it, the way he could be perfectly normal, sitting there having a pint and laughing about some show he’d seen on TV and yet all the time he’d be having these thoughts, these beliefs that stood completely outside the way most people see the world.’

Frank’s key text is a novel called The Tower, written by an ex serviceman named John C Sylvester in the 1950s. It is an SF novel in which the Earth has concluded a war with a distant civilisation called ‘Gliese’ – concluded successfully, though at great human cost. A New York architect named Archimbaud Aspen wants to build a gigantic tower to mark Earth’s victory over the aliens. It is called the Conquest Tower and Aspen sees it as ‘a city within the city, an exclusive gated community that would function as a magnet for trade and an advertisement for its creator’s planet-sized ambition.’ Aspen’s big talking point is that he wants to build the tower from stone imported from the ruins of the defeated Gliese. This stone, unfortunately, is not ordinary stone. The artisans who build Conquest Tower ‘spoke of the malleability of the stone, or the stone ‘knowing what it was doing’, of the affinity they felt for it even’. Aspen himself is a paragon of self-confidence. His fluent vision drives the project to success. Yet once the tower is actually built and he is living in it, Aspen starts having bad dreams – and in these dreams it is New York in ruins, a burning wartime hellscape, and alien soldiers are chasing him. Aspen’s faithful PA Sidney Kruger notices a change in him: ‘an increasing propensity for small mistakes.’ Aspen is afraid to leave the building because this makes him feel like ‘whole aspects of himself were coming adrift, releasing themselves from their moorings and unspooling inside his brain.’ The problem – understated but obvious – is that the stone itself is alive. 

After twenty years of a settled life, Frank takes a trip abroad for the first time, to Paris to meet fellow enthusiasts from the UFO forum. Nine months later, he hasn’t come back, or made contact in any way. Sick with worry, Rachel hires a private detective, Robin Clay. Robin begins to unravel the mystery of Frank’s disappearance. The more conventional parts of the novel are about Robin’s investigation in the present, and her interrogation of the past. She is uncovering something huge, and so are we. Reading Conquest is to be in thrall to a evolving mystery, colossal and gorgeous. It is the kind of novel that defies analysis. In the face of Allan’s spectacular horizons the critical part of your brain just short-circuits, leaving you to enjoy the book on a deeper level. 

Disappointments? Longueurs? Sure. Allan includes lengthy essays from Frank’s friends on the UFO forum, which are beautifully written but also annoying because they make explicit the themes already so well developed in the story sequences. The precocious legend of Frank Landau gets irritating after a while – he is compared to a medieval saint near the end of the book, and by this point you agree with Robin’s advice to Rachel: ‘You have already given twenty years of your life to him. You need to think about yourself, about your future.’ Among their commonalities, the characters have a fondness for Bach, talk about him endlessly, comparing different recordings, the language of music is key, but again we already understand this, just from Frank’s early lines: ‘Words were slippery… So unlike code, or music, which had to be rendered perfectly or it wouldn’t run.’ Allan’s prose is so brilliant and well thought out you can understand the connection with music altogether, and I wonder if she actually based some of her sentences on the Goldberg Variations, as Thomas Harris was said to.

Whatever Allan was doing, it has worked. It’s rare that you read a book that makes you feel you’re a different person after finishing it.

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The Writer’s Wife

November 21, 2021

My story of this name appears in the ‘Abandon Hope’ issue of Vamp Cat, a wonderful zine that takes its name from one of Terry Pratchett’s best subplots, in Witches Abroad: ‘Vampires have risen from the dead, the grave and the crypt, but have never managed it from the cat.’

I’m proud of this story, but admit the idea of the trapped muse has been done before – most famously by Neil Gaiman in his Sandman episode ‘Calliope’. The Wiki fan page for that tale notes ‘Though the story of ‘Calliope’ was not criticized for unoriginality at the time of its release, its concept has apparently become a very popular one since; a list of overused story ideas at Strange Horizons included ‘Creative person meets a muse (either one of the nine classical Muses or a more individual muse) and interacts with them, usually by keeping them captive.’

Anyway, I hope you enjoy my take on this old myth.

There are also several reviews for Shiny New Books, from the spring and summer:

Civilisations – Laurent Binet

Greenwich Park – Katherine Faulkner

The Absolute Book – Elizabeth Knox

A History of What Comes Next – Sylvain Neuvel

My favourite of these was The Hard Crowd, a collection of essays by Rachel Kushner, whose novels I discovered a couple of years ago. The Mars Room is probably her best book, but her whole back catalogue is worth reading – and the essay collection the best thing I read this year.

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The Two Musicians

May 8, 2021

I really must say a few words about Kirstin Innes’s fabulous second novel, Scabby Queen, which I have just got round to reading. It’s about an idealistic Scottish singer who has one big hit – a protest song about the poll tax called ‘Rise Up’ – then spends the rest of her life in activism and low key experimental music. Her first big tour is of Highland towns – ‘Thirty dates, none of them in cities. That’s what makes it revolutionary’ – Oban, Ullapool, Fort William, the kind of towns no London Brexit columnist would be seen dead in.

Clio Campbell is considered D list as a celebrity, but she makes a strong impression on everyone she meets, and her story is told through the perspectives of the people who knew her best – her parents, people who grew up with her, the men she married, the artists she inspired, the activists who shared her squat in Brixton in the 1990s. Innes has a gift for mimicry and epistolary detail, and I particularly liked the op-ed clippings from the right wing newspapers and the music press about her. The very names – ‘John Biddie’ – ‘Pete Moss’ – are a delight. 

Martin Amis writes in his Inside Story that ‘There used to be a sub-genre of long, plotless, digressive, and essayistic novels (fairly) indulgently known as ‘baggy monsters’… For self-interested reasons I like to think this sub-genre retains a viable pulse; but broadly speaking the baggy monster is dead.’ Surely Scabby Queen is a classic baggy monster novel, long and digressive but certainly not plotless: Innes manages to keep an array of characters, cities and timelines going without once losing our attention. It’s a fractured tale, and a great novel about uncertainty, and fractured lives.

Clio’s childhood in industrial Ayrshire is torn between her lazy, irresponsible father Malcolm and her respectable mother Eileen. Her contemporaries follow the rules, keep their heads down and train for jobs that, in the event, vaporise when the industrial base is destroyed in the 1980s. But Innes doesn’t romanticise the road Clio has taken, either. At a squat reunion in 2009, Clio’s old friend Sammi reappraises her activist peers of two decades back: ‘She saw them now, frayed, middle-aged and flustered, people who’d never held down a job, raised a kid, had managed to coast through to their forties and even their fifties on outrage and vim, untroubled by any real responsibility.’ Scabby Queen is not an advertisement for dropping out. 

Her own inspiration is Robert Burns, and I wonder if the whole story is set around this Burns poem, that we hear towards the end of the novel: ‘There was a lass and she was fair,/At kirk or market to be seen;/When a’ our fairest maids were met,/The fairest maid was bonnie Jean. And ay she wrought her Mammie’s wark,/And ay she sang sae merrilie;/The blythest bird upon the bush/Had ne’er a lighter heart than she.’

But the next verse takes a dark turn: ‘hawks will rob the tender joys/That bless the little lintwhite’s nest/And frost will blight the fairest flowers,/And love will break the soundest rest.’ Burns warns that the world breaks people who dare to rise above a certain level of mediocrity, and that’s more or less what happens to Clio. Her world is full of decent people but also hawks, circling the skies, waiting to strike. After her death, her story is rewritten, just as Burns is mainly read in golf clubs and Rotary dinners these days. Innes establishes the erasure of working class women’s stories with more deft and clarity than any contemporary academic discourse. 

Just before an Iraq war demo in 2003, Clio meets her father for the first time in many years. Malcolm is also a musician but not a songwriter: ‘If I’ve learned anything, it’s that people really only want to hear songs they’ve known before…. hear those songs that mean things to them… Och, what’s that word – nostalgia.’

Clio is subdued during this argument. She just says ‘It’s important. Make a big public stand.’ Malcolm, in full wind, goes on to say this:

You can’t stop these bastards from doing what they want to do and hang the ordinary people. It never changes, lass, believe your old father here. You know that. You’re hardly a wee girl now, are you? All the likes of you and me can hope to do is cheer them up with a couple of tunes. That’s why we were put on this earth. That’s our purpose, you and me. You’ve got a God-given gift in that throat of yours, lass – you use that rather than your feet. Sing a song for people and at least you give them some hope.

Clio wants art to be more than that. She wants change, not hope. Who is right in this argument? Should art move the world and change it? Clio’s friends don’t know where the talent and passion ends and the actual person begins. She’s a mystery, and in Scabby Queen there are big plot twists but also the nagging sense that you are not being told the whole story, that there is important stuff we’re not privy to. For how can anyone really know anyone else?

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Decant

January 9, 2021

This story has now been published in the literary journal of the Abergavenny Small Press.

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Liberals in Lockdown

May 17, 2020

It’s not made the papers, but there’s been a lot of noise and merriment about the anti lockdown protests happening this weekend. Social media echoed with images of mad old men holding enormous placards and Piers Corbyn being dragged away in handcuffs. The derision is understandable – the London Hyde Park demo drew only dozens, rather than hundreds, of people, which makes it more successful at least than the ‘mass gathering’ planned for Leeds Hyde Park, which attracted no protestors at all. The LS6ers don’t much like conspirazoids. And on a Saturday, they don’t get up before noon.

There have been small periodic protests since beginning of lockdown and they have come to represent the silly and toxic opposition to lockdown – Spiked Online, the increasingly deranged comment pages of the Daily Telegraph, Nigel Farage patrolling Dover beaches looking for immigrants, the idiots who tear down 5G poles, the President telling us to drink bleach and the rowdy yokels of certain American states. The worst people in politics gather in opposition to lockdown.

And yet, part of me’s with the yodellers in pickup trucks.

We’re used to the slow-witted David Icke and his pathetic followers shouting and grifting on the internet – they’ve been doing it for years. These weekend proved they are in the minority. But what of the stalwart supporters of the corona lockdown?

It’s a truism to say that the pandemic has brought out the best in us. Chaos tells you who people are. Hundreds of thousands signed up to the NHS volunteering scheme. Colonel Moore raised millions padding around his garden. Neighbours help each other out with food and medication deliveries. And every Thursday sundown rings with applause and pots and pans.

But there has also been a darkness to this time, and not all of it has come from the conspirazoids.

Toronto philosopher Regina Rini wrote on the ethics of disease control at the beginning of the pandemic when cases were first beginning to appear in her country.

What is so ethically troubling about epidemic disease is that it pushes us toward the objective attitude. We cease thinking about victims as persons, but instead as vectors of disease or ambling contaminated surfaces. Thinking of people as systems to be brought under orderly control helps us tamp down our own fear, even as it erases their humanity. When this disconnected attitude joins itself to underlying social prejudice – against Jews in medieval Europe or gay men with HIV in the 1980s – our response goes beyond the merely crass to the harmful and threatening. In all but the most extreme cases, the disease itself ends up being less dangerous to human wellbeing than the panicked, bigoted attitude.

In her piece Rini accepted the need for social distancing. Brute virology doesn’t care about our feelings. But she also urged ‘moral caution’ – we need still to look at people as people, not just ‘vectors of disease’.

The weekend before Boris declared lockdown, people were outraged at the numbers of city dwellers hanging out in parks and rushing out for a last pint on Friday evening. Walking through East London on March 19, NS editor George Eaton complained that he had ‘seen pubs and restaurants still half full – ‘nudging’ doesn’t appear to be working.’

But it takes time for awareness of threat to filter down. Once it did, we got the message – loud and clear.

In mid April, poet Salena Godden wrote:

I saw Goody Proctor
and John Proctor
walking side-by-side
holding hands
two-abreast
with devils breath

I saw Goody Proctor
clapping for the NHS
she were too very close
to her neighbour
and both
without bra or manners

Godden’s satire of public lockdown attitudes was close but didn’t cover half of it. Under the local kindness and volunteering was a drive of enthusiastic conformism that couldn’t stop hunting heresies. Neighbours shopped neighbours for jogging too much, shopped carers for visited loved ones, shopped people for sitting in their back gardens. Northampton police chief Nick Adderly told the BBC that ‘We are getting calls from people who say ‘I think my neighbour is going out on a second run – I want you to come and arrest them’.’ I’ve heard of forces having to set up new COVID-19 reporting mechanisms to divert the surges of reports that overwhelmed 101 and 999 dispatch centres. That’s a hyperbolic comparison – Britain in lockdown is not Soviet Russia! – but I couldn’t help being reminded of Robert Conquest’s line from The Great Terror: ‘Nevertheless, just as Nazism provided an institutionalised outlet for the sadist, Stalinist totalitarianism on the whole automatically encouraged the mean and malicious. The carriers of personal and office feuds, the poison-pen letter writers, who are a minor nuisance in any society, flourished and increased.’

Like Conquest says – the enthusiastic citizen rule enforcers are a part of any society at any time. It’s a part of human nature to follow The Rules and judge others by how well they can follow the Rules, in what strength of fidelity and detail. What has annoyed me is the atmosphere of enthusiastic conformity among the commentariat. It was not just the strength of their support for national emergency legislation – what David Allen Green called The Clamour – but a refusal to admit or even entertain potential adverse consequences of policy – and in a national emergency that’s any policy. A bemused Marie le Conte remarked that ‘I’ve been feeling so out of step with most of Twitter recently; it should be possible to talk about how tough the lockdown is’.

Not on Gov.UK Twitter, it wasn’t. Liberal Remainers who were up in arms, and rightly so, when Boris suspended Parliament last year, said nothing when it shut itself down for COVID-19. Unprecedented authoritarian legislation? Dead silence from the progressives. The questions of inequality, class and privilege that run through Britain under lockdown like the lettering in a stick of rock did not interest them either. Nothing on the people trapped in substandard housing or abusive relationships, the asylum seekers dispossessed because their informal networks have been shut down. Nothing on the surge in mental illness or the thousands of non-COVID deaths at home. Where there was criticism of the government, it was that emergency measures were not passed soon enough, or did not go far enough. Follow gov.uk guidelines, and listen to the experts (not that gov.UK Twitter’s own lack of expertise in infectious diseases did not prevent it lecturing us at length).

Of course what liberals say on social media is a minor issue and probably doesn’t affect anything but it represents, I think, an embarrassing failure of intellect. It will become more embarrassing for them as other countries begin to open borders and public spaces (dumping on every country that eases restrictions reveals the insecurity of our own intelligentsia’s position on this issue.) Chaos tells you who people are. Most people are wary of the COVID-19 conspiracy theorists – no one wants to be associated with them. But I am also looking around at my fellow liberals. And I’m afraid to say I am a little wary of them, too.

(Image: LeedsLive)

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The Almanac

March 25, 2020

I wrote this story, I think, just after the EU referendum. I know people who spent the whole day in bed that Friday. I couldn’t imagine reacting like that, I didn’t feel this big sense of despair and loss, I knew the EU wasn’t all good – its horrendous treatment of non European migrants was, and is, one of the great world scandals of present times. So initially I thought Brexit might be an opportunity as much as a disaster.

Over the next three years my heart hardened. It got too culture war. People got sick of being denounced as ‘the elite’ just because we voted the wrong way in the summer of 2016. The narrative of cosmopolitan Remainers versus working class Leavers took hold and stayed there. We were transactional, materialist, unserious, unworthy of being part of the new community of values, place and belonging. I don’t exaggerate – even the very intellectual and respected Leavers framed the debate in these terms. This is Matthew Goodwin, writing in January:

Our leaving is the result of a collective decision, taken by a majority of its people, about the destiny of their national community — or what most consider to be their home. And this decision, contrary to the liberal view of citizens as autonomous individuals who are mainly driven by self-interest, was never rooted in transactional considerations about money.

Nor was it focused on individuals. Rather, it was anchored in a collective and sincere concern about the wider group, about the nation, and in profound questions about identity, culture and tradition. Who are we? What kind of nation are we? What holds us together? Where do we want to go, together, in the future?

Remainers never grasped the potency of these questions — or how to answer them in terms that the majority would recognise. At times, they presented a vision of Britain that was fundamentally at odds with how most people see it — a random collection of individuals who have little in common aside from the pursuit of economic growth and ‘openness’.

That’s the level of debate we have had. The idea that anyone who voted remain – 48% of us – might have thought about the EU referendum on a political or philosophical level seems to have been beyond Goodwin. Such stereotyping and lack of allowance for human complexity inflamed the culture war. People complained about the People’s Vote movement and their gigantic demonstrations but that movement only reflected Leavers failure to win support and sell their case. But the spectacle also legitimised the tactically useful communitarian idea that we were a country divided into two very distinct tribes.

Here is the problem. Brexit was always analysed as a reaction to rather than a call for, it was sold to us as a cry of pain from an oppressed majority waiting to overthrow their neoliberal overlords. What we were going to do outside the EU, what a post Brexit Britain would look like, barely entered into it. Take away the stuff about free ports and state aid rules, and there wasn’t much there.

Take this piece from Jonathan Rutherford, one of the founders of the communitarian Blue Labour movement, writing (like Goodwin) on the verge of our offical exit from the EU. What is his vision for Britain post Brexit? ‘It will require a national economic development strategy which focuses on improving and modernising the everyday economy of child and elder care, health and wellbeing, education, utilities, and the low wage sectors of hospitality, retail, food processing and supermarkets which sustain daily life.’ This is New Labour without the style.

And who cares about this now anyway? It all seems so very long ago. Now of course we are fighting the coronavirus. A culture war doesn’t matter so much when you’re fighting to stay alive. Even Trump’s attempts to trigger the libs by labelling corona the ‘Chinese virus’ seem tired and perfunctory now.

So all of this is to say that when I wrote ‘The Almanac’ I had no idea how Brexit would turn out. It’s a story that plays on ‘Project Fear’ not as prediction but as concept: what happens when everything that could go wrong does?

It has been published by The Selkie and I should thank the appreciation and guidance of its editors.

And from now on, I swear, I will try to keep this place a Brexit free zone!

Image: Bloomberg. The stamp is from the Austrian post office. As the report says:

Austria had planned a stamp to commemorate Britain’s departure from the European Union, but when the presumed deadline – March 29, 2019 – came and went with no Brexit, the postal service found itself with 140,000 stamps bearing the wrong date.

Fast-forward 10 months, and as Britain finally heads for the exit, Austria is releasing the stamp–with the original date crossed out and Jan. 31, 2020 printed just below.

Posted in Fiction, Northern Hinterlands, Political, Short Stories, Writing | Leave a Comment »

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