Flames in Gothdom's Mecca

Probably like Goths all over the UK this morning I have been looking apprehensively at the awkward BBC shots of the fire at Camden Market, trying to work out the extent of the damage and what remains. In recent reports on prejudice against Goths it is often stated that the kind of proof that they were a Goth was that they had visited the Whitby Goth Weekend. However, in almost all cases you will find that Goths had made an earlier pilgrimage to Camden. In the Muslim religion one of the five pillars of Islam is that you should make a pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in your life, and I feel that a similar rite of passage exists in the Gothic world. To some extent, like the Islamic world, the Gothic one is less about geographical boundaries and more about shared attitudes. It does connect with the physical world in locations and Camden is one of them.

Camden Market of course has never been the preserve of just Goths. Many ravers, fetishists, interior designers could all legitimately claim it as its own. Millions of tourists to London have been there and usually heavily outnumber the people from the sub-cultures who visit. Camden, like any London district, is also trendy with its restaurants and wine bars as much as almost any borough in London. Even the Open University has its London headquarters there. However, it is the coming together of retail outlets which provide Gothic clothing and the venues that host performers that Goths like (amongst many others of course) that has made it a focus. Camden is often where someone actually becomes a Goth, they kind of 'come out' to steal a gay phrase, or possibly better termed for Goths, a word a friend of mine uses they are 'turned'. With the age of the internet of course you can pick up Gothic clothing anywhere, but there is nothing like going from shop to shop; stall to stall and getting a coat, boots, trousers, dresses, jewellery, etc. Once you have done that you feel that no-one can now challenge your Goth credentials. I remember going from shop to shop to buy my girlfriend of the time her first pair of New Rocks and feeling a real tingle as if she was on the verge of something exciting and I just loved being part of that. Despite his hectic nature, weirdly, Camden can be a location of many very personal journeys.

I remember the first time I went into the market. It was late afternoon in the Autumn so it was turning dark but not late enough to close. With its food stalls with frying Chinese food and the small lights picking out stalls of memorabilia, large halls of glossy black clothes and seemingly as we wandered among piles of 70s clothes and furniture it seemed to me like a mix between a scene from 'Blade Runner' and something I would expect in the Marrakesh souk. It is labyrinthine and you can see why it would burn so quickly with all its narrow alleys. The assortment of items is just bewildering and you come to learn where you need to pick among the stalls, ushering passed stalls with furniture if you are just seeking out vintage clothing. Many of the stalls would not be out of place in a Home Counties craft market or car boot sale, with huge candles and wooden games, second-hand books and cutlery and postcards and Far Easten puppets and boxes. Then you come across a dark one with rave gear or impossibly long boots. The diversity tempts you into straying into new areas and even a Goth can come away with an old paperback and a sandalwood box. The rambling area has more than one location for stalls, the very grid-like pattern area closest to the underground station, the squeezed in stalls along the edge of the lock and then the main zone mixing buildings, free-standing structures and stalls among the stables. Sewn between all these are the leatherwear shops and the boot shops and the pubs and the venues, even just newsagents and grocery stores. Nowhere I have been has such diversity of products in such a small space. There is the mundane, but crucially there is also the very exotic.

What happens now? Is Camden dead? Well it has always been a commercial place with a spiritual aspect simply laid on top and capitalism and its commerce is robust. Many of the traders are small and you hope they are well insured and can revive. There has already been the encroachment of corporates into the area and the smaller, more individual stallholders, I have long feared, would be muscled out. This fire may accelerate this process. Hopefully the authorities will not simply put a big fence around it and let it mould away as sometimes happens in fire-damaged locations. No doubt though, the density of stalls will be decreased and some traders will never get back in. Hopefully it is not transformed into a kind of Camden theme park simply a shadow of what it once was.

Camden has been ever-changing and will change again, but hopefully it rises from the ashes quickly and without losing its vibrancy and its independence. There are few places in the world that I know where not only can you walk down the street, fully 'Gothed up', not only with pride but feeling you really belong and the back-pack wearing muggles can just look on in awe. That maybe a selfish wish, but it is important for any community to have a place where you feel at home. Okay so we can buy our boots online, but nothing will beat striding out with your bags of new clothes that you have got in Camden. For a new Goth it is almost a test of faith to go and shop alongside members of the community you wish to join. It is the second time you visit that makes the difference, when you step from the underground station in all the newest things you have and now feel you have come home.

The Regimentation of British Youth

I have realised that I am beginning to feel rather guilty that a lot of my postings are simply responding to news items I see on television, the internet and in a single newspaper. I feel that I should be out there scooping up much more of what is going on from a range of sources. If you live in the UK and travel abroad and watch the news as I often do, say in France or Germany, you are very much aware of how many more news stories they cover in an average bulletin. In the UK we often have the view that 'there isn't much news today' when in fact there is always tons it is just the UK channels cannot be bothered, do not have the interest or the resources to report it. This does not only go for international news (I have not seen anything on Afghanistan or Iraq or Zimbabwe or Pakistan reported for many days now, though I am sure that a lot is currently happening in all these countries) but also within our own country. The clearest example of levels of news in a country, that I have seen, is in Belgium. There you kind of step down the hierarchy from international to national to regional to your town news. While there I literally watched the news for the town I was staying in. They also have specialised news sections, for example, I saw the military news section of the programme and they have weather for people sailing as well as standard weather reports. You might say Belgium is small and has to make the most of what news it had. However, I would argue that all towns have things going on and in the UK often you do not find out about them even though they may impinge on you more immediately than big international stories.

Sorry, I am well off track now, the news was not the focus of today's posting, rather it is a report that I heard of today which fits in with many of the themes I have been exploring over the past few months about British society and especially education within it. If you do not know, whilst the legal age that UK children must start school is 5, most now go to proper school at the age of 4 to join 'reception' which proceeds Year 1 but is no less rigorous and certainly my housemate's young boy was expected to be able to write in joined-up handwriting before he even reached Year 1! Reports today contrast this start date with Sweden which has much better academic results despite the fact that the children do not start school until the age of 7, three years after their British counterparts. At the age of 7 in England (Wales and Scotland have scrapped this, but England covers 83% of the UK population) they sit their first exams, called SATS. They do more at 11, 14, 16, 17 and 18. The age of 18 is now the age children are permitted to leave school in the UK. English children are the most examined in the world, now even outstripping the Japanese. Whilst see these tests as much a monitor of the quality of teachers (and according to government statistics 17,000 'incompetent' teachers are in post teaching 100,000 children in total) they also put immense pressure on children from the start. There is no appreciation of the different ways in which children learn or the different ranges of abilities with different skills or the differences between girls and boys which is very sharp at this age (notably the desire for discussion vs. desire for activity).

The British government, however, has dismissed the latest findings because they go against their whole philosophy of constant testing and people attaining 'standards'. I would be happy to be corrected, but as far as I know the UK is the only country to have set targets for children under the age of 5. Yes, there is the so-called Early Years Foundation Stage Curriculum which was launched in March 2007 and covers anticipated levels of achievement for children aged 0-5. Nursery schools who do not comply with the targets for 3 and 4 year olds will lose state funding. Apparently handwriting should begin between 16-26 months old! If you are interested in the targets, 'The Daily Telegraph' newspaper has an online list of them: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/03/14/nedu114.xml

I think one motive for the government supporting children starting school at 4 is because as I have commented before they want more mothers in the workforce and effectively they see schooling as childcare, given that the cost of actual childcare is beyond the incomes of most even middle class people let alone working class ones. The Blair governments and the Brown one which has followed also have long clung to the belief that quantitative measures of things equals qualitative gains. Of course that is sometimes (or often depending on the circumstances) not the case. Human nature cannot be squeezed into tick boxes. None of us want a poor education system but neither do we want every aspect of a child's life from the moment they come out the womb under scrutiny. I can envisage that before long we will have guidelines about what music should be played to the foetus to help its language skills development.

There is no evidence that the government's requirements are bringing any benefit to English school children. We still have the highest level of teenage pregnancies in Europe; we still have half our pupils leaving school with not a single qualification. I accept that many of these things are caused by the anti-learning attitude prevalent in UK society. What we do see is record numbers of suicides among teenage boys and whilst much of this may come from societal pressures, given that such behaviour is characteristic of Japan which for decades is renowned for the pressure it puts its young people under, there seems to be some connection. I know this government's simplistic attitude is that to slacken requirements is to lead inexorably to increased failure. However, we are dealing with people not machines. The USSR tried to plan its economy through 5-year plans throughout its history and ended up with an entirely wrecked economy. The UK is trying to plan its children's personal educational development and I fear is going to (or is already) facing a similar outcome to the Soviet economy. The British population is increasingly obsolete in global markets and this attempt to pursue regimentation of children along some 'Brave New World' model seems to doom them to even worse standing. The government needs to swallow its pride and look at the more relaxed and far more successful examples of successful educational approaches which are around us in Europe let alone across the world. Of course the Blair regime wallowed in utter arrogance which allowed it to concede nothing to any challenge and the Brown government has remained as hard-faced and as short-sighted.

Blogging the Blog 4: The Case of Hu Jia

Previously in my thread 'Blogging the Blog', I mentioned how I had heard about Chinese people using blogs as a way to get the truth about what was going on in China out to other people both within and outside China. A particular example, Hu Jia, came to my attention this week and shows the risks that Chinese bloggers can face in producing blogs. Hu Jia used blogs including one he posted on daily, webcasting and online videos to focus on human rights abuses in China. He was arrested on 27th December 2007 and his wife, Zeng Jinyan and their 2-month old daughter have been placed under house arrest. Last year Jia and Jinyan were under house arrest for over 7 months. Chinese officials can deny him access to a lawyer and he can be held for up to 7 months before a trial is called (Mr. Brown, do we really want to start resembling China? Stop your plans to extend the period of detention without charge!). In theory Hu was not breaking laws by sending out information about China but clearly it is embarrassing to the government. The Foreign Ministry of China has told foreigners that they should keep out of China's human rights affairs and look to their own countries' behaviour instead. Such attitudes go back to what I have posted earlier about defending liberal humanism in an age of fundamentalism (which effectively the Maoist-Marxism pursued in China is a form of). There are certain baseline principles such as freedom of speech and civil liberties that everyone has the right to protest about no matter where they are challenged, whether in your own street or right across the world. Hu Jia is a hero of such liberal humanism.

In 1936 when Berlin was to host the Olympics, the German authorities released a number of political prisoners in the hope that it would calm criticism from journalists coming to the games. In contrast in 2008 when the Olympics are going to Beijing, the Chinese authorities seem set on showing up what kind of regime they run, to the full. Other dissidents such as Yang Chunlin and Liu Jie have also suffered in the current repression. I imagine my blog is now one of those China will block access too, but I am grateful that is the most they can do for me. Us residents of the blogging community should send our support to a fellow blogger punished for doing what we love and something that he has put to use for such a good cause.

Not Forgetting and Not Forgiving 1: My Parents

The British poet Philip Larkin (1922-85) wrote the following poem (beloved of bloggers it seems) in 1974:

This Be The Verse
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.

The reason why I thought of this poem was that my father turns 70 next month. In his middle-aged years he always said he wanted to take a pill on his 70th birthday and to simply fall asleep and die so that he was no longer a burden on society. I think this partly stems from the burdens elderly relatives in his and my mother's family inflicted on him in his 40s and 50s. As the date approaches, statements he has made seem to indicate that he may follow this prescription. Now, regular readers of this blog will know that it is one of my beliefs that we should do nothing to stop someone who wants to take their own life. It would be hypocritical for me to intervene and anyway there may be nothing I can do, especially if he is determined. What I did realise was that I had no emotional regrets about his imminent departure from the world. I have selfish regrets that a source of income and of woodworking and electrical skills will be cut off, but beyond that I simply feel numb about the occurrence.

Throughout my teenage years, probably in common with many people, between bursts of thinking about killing myself, I plotted how I would kill my father. Before I go any further I should emphasise that I was never sexually abused or physically abused. However, I do blame him very directly for screwing up a large chunk of my life. I am certainly not as forgiving as Larkin is. I believe part of his actions were getting back at his own father who always favoured his younger brother in terms of support financially and otherwise. My father was rarely violent towards me though he kicked me right across a room when I was about twelve and he threatened to cut off my ears off with a kitchen knife when I was sixteen and we were wrestling over it. (even now he is physically stronger than me), but I think that incident stemmed very much from his misreading the situation and thinking me threatening to take my own life was aimed at threatening to kill him to somehow win my mother from him. It was only later that my plans against him crystalised and they were only ever for my own sense of revenge and had nothing to do with my mother.

The ways in which my parents, especially my father, earned an undying hatred (and I call it so accurately because even 20 years on it is as strong as it was at the time and I envisage it never burning out) is because of how they undermined my life leaving it distorted probably for ever more. It was really not until I turned 34 and a woman proved willing to sacrifice her happiness on my behalf that I really came of age. I had been kept back from maturing properly into an adult by the psychological burdens my father put on me.

The first element is not going to seem shocking, but it was the way I was free labour for my father. He owned one third of an acre (about 0.13 ha) on which he grew vegetables and I cannot remember a weekend when I was not forced to weed or water 'the land' as he called it. There were bushes to clear and lawns to mow and fruit to clear up, jobs for every month of the year in the cold, the hot, the rain, whatever. He grew a vast range of vegetables and every kind of temperate climate fruit available at the time. Each Summer and Autumn there were things to be harvested. Once we had exhausted the crop from this source it was out into the woodlands to pick buckets of blackberries and rosehips. Then it was backbreaking work picking up innumerable sweet chestnuts from the floors of other woods. I know self-sufficiency was popular at the time, but I simply felt like a serf. I received my board and lodging and some pocket money, but was never paid for this incessant year round work. Refusing to work or treading in the wrong place on 'the land' or dropping or spilling something all resulted in bed without dinner or a smack (still legal in the 1970s). When friends were out on their bicycles or at the park or playing board games or listening to cassettes, I was out there serving one man's empire. I have an intense loathing of any gardening to this day and will go nowhere near it.

The second thing that I despise my father for distorting my life with was mock examinations. I lived in a county that had scrapped the so-called 11-plus examination (taken at 10, which chose which school children went to at the age of 11, it is still used in Kent and Buckinghamshire) even before I started school. However, this did not stop my parents sitting me down in examination room conditions to incessantly do mock 11-plus papers from at least the age of 9 onwards. I found them difficult (they had IQ test questions as well as the usual short essays and mathematics you expect on entrance papers), especially the logic problems and the mathematics, both skills I quite lack. However, the fact that I might find them impossible was never taken into consideration. In my parents' view I only did badly on them because I was lazy and did not apply myself. This treatment was worse than the gardening as the room I had to do the tests in looked out on the road and I could see my friends cycling by to the park while I was stuck indoors. There was absolutely no point doing these mock examinations. I went to the local state secondary school at 11 anyway and you had to do no examinations to get in there. I did reasonably well and see no benefit from doing hour-upon-hour of these tests. I blame it on some high expectations of my parents. I know I said disappointment is the highest form of flattery, but I wish they had simply taken a more realistic view of my abilities and not inflicted these useless tests on me, that gained nothing except making me loathe them even further.

You may note that I have shifted from 'him' to 'them'. My father was the clear instigator of all the activities I mention here, but my mother was a clear accomplice. It maybe she was frightened or she believed in what my father insisted upon. However, if he had adopted a more humane line towards me I am sure she would have gone along with that too.

The element of their behaviour which caused me greatest difficulty was the humiliation. Now, I know that all parents embarrass their children at some time or another, but it does not usually form the basis of sustained action. I had always felt to be an outsider in my school. Everyone in the area was well off, but we lived in the 'wrong part of town', we lacked the consumer items most people had, I had a strange name and had never been baptised. All of these things were aspects pupils ridiculed me on, but I could resist those jibes. What totally undermined me was the humiliation from home which began around the age of twelve and led to stress-related illnesses and made it almost impossible for me to operate in the adult world until many years later. For some reason my father decided that the way I spoke sounded like 'the hooting of an idiot child' and that the way I walked was like that of an 'imbecile' or someone who was mentally handicapped (as the term was in the 1970s). I was constantly reminded of these deficiencies in public as well as criticised incessantly about them at home as if they were something I could alter and was refusing to do so. Attempts to walk and stand differently to avoid such criticism simply led my mother demonstrating that I walked like a woman trying to defend herself from being raped! You can imagine what that felt like to a boy in his teenage years. Most people lack self-confidence as a teenager and are self-conscious of their appearance. I am not an attractive man and am clumsy, so to be constantly told by your parents that you look like someone who has such difficulties makes you feel there is no point. At school I would simply hide in the school library all the time so as to avoid going into the playground. Seeing a victim (and my parents blamed me for making myself that victim when I was beaten up in a public library) I became the butt of jokes and the 'Laurel and Hardy' theme would be whistled whenever I passed. Ironically, it was only my ability to overcome the stress-related illnesses that I began to suffer that won me any standing at school (though of course not at home where I was clearly blamed for these illnesses).

Once I left home, I had no confidence that anyone could find me anything more than a replica of the elephant man and I simply threw myself into work and hanging out in libraries until they closed, as a refuge. I tried to eat myself to death by bingeing on cakes and then I tried alcohol, drinking until I could stomach no more every night of the week. These things dulled the pain but did not kill me. To some degree it was planning my revenge on my father that carried me through and slowly I was able to develop my own identity as something worth people's time, but it took years. How I wish we had had blogging and chatrooms back then, it would have been less isolating. The only real escape was into cakes, beer and the fantasy fiction I wrote.

My life has been many times better than that of people who have suffered sexual and physical abuse and I believe they are the real courageous ones in our society. I have thought with time that I would find forgiveness of my father, but a quarter of a century has passed and I feel the anger no less strongly than when I left home. I do not think I have the capacity to forgive him for how difficult he made my life, especially personal relationships. If you entirely strip away every iota of someone's faith in themselves they have absolutely no basis that they can interact with other people on more than a superficial level. My memory is failing as I have commented before, and as I cannot offer my father forgiveness, he may get forgetting out of me, but surprisingly (or maybe not) the incidents are still very raw in my mind and whilst many other things have faded from it, these stay there very clearly. I have no idea what motivated him to behave the way he did, I never really cared. I would have preferred an absent or oblivious father to the one I got and I will not mourn his passing.

As for the rest of us, as usual, I return to the kind of sentiments Larkin outlined at the start and I am thinking of making my motto:

'Get out as early as you can/And don't have any kids yourself.'

Wise words.

End Voyeur Radio: Graham Torrington's 'Late Night Love'

If like me you have driven anywhere much in the UK late at night whether on business or pleasure, you will probably have encountered Graham Torrington droning out from your radio. For the past 12 years apparently he has hosted a programme called 'Late Night Love' which starts at 10pm and runs on to sometime later (I have never heard it end, but it must sometime) and it is on every Sunday-Thursday so only Friday and Saturday are clear. It is syndicated to local commercial radio stations across the UK to such an extent that it is difficult to find any other programme on while you are driving along at that time of night. Coming down the M1 (the main motorway between North-East and South East England) once from Leeds going to London, I kept on thinking that I would move out of the area, but of course the next local stations either side of the motorway as I got South had also bought the programme so I could not escape it. Around Luton was an even worse thing, where some local station which straddles a number of towns in that area has a different transmitter for each locale (and presumably during the day, slightly different local news) and I kept crossing the boundary between two of them and they were seconds out of step so you would hear the same sentence you had just heard repeated it doubled the agony. The only respite seemed to be some real backwater station coming in from somewhere in East Anglia that seemed to be broadcast from a shed and had features with the DJ just telling you about obscure villages.

When you are driving, especially late at night, you want music that will keep you awake, not talk radio. Torrington effectively forces talk radio on to music stations. Yes, he does play a few romantic songs but the bulk of his programme is talk. His voice drones on and he sounds like a grumpy depressive. Most of the programme is not about people ringing up and saying how much they love someone else (though there are elements of that), most of it is about the relationship problems they are having, though these quite quickly spiral off into more general social problems with loads of women seemingly falling into debt and prostitution even on the few occasions I have heard the programme. Torrington is noted for his judgemental approach. I accept he sometimes gives people numbers to call for help, but he also lays down a moral code of behaviour for their behaviour and tries to shame them into doing things. In some ways he is the audio version of the plethora of programmes like 'Trisha' and 'The Jeremny Kyle Show', modelled on US programmes where people outline their problems in front of a baying crowd and fight with their ex-partner. The lack of sophistication of radio means you simply get Torrington's judgement then those of other people who leave messages. Back in 2001 I used to have the programme on the background for not wanting to tune off my local station for when it woke me in the morning, but these days I would avoid it like the plague and especially carry Torrington antidote tapes if I stray passed 10pm. I thought he would have gone out of business, but I heard him straying on to the station in my current area and going online I see his approach has not changed and he has even been awarded for it. I am not the only online commentator who bemoans the existence of this programme

Torrington is painfully self-righteous and smug and his programme subsists on the misery of others. He has no medical, counselling or psychology qualifications. You might as well tell your troubles to a barman. The one incident that made me laugh was when a young man telephoned in saying that he had seen his male partner kissing another man at a fair and was cut up about it. Torrington heard a woman's voice in the background of the call and assumed that this was actually the man's girlfriend and that the caller was faking the whole story. He got angry and cut the man off. I thought, what was the point. Does it matter if the stories are real or not? Airing them may help the callers, it may harm them further. Torrington offers minimal constructive advice, just basically criticism, so why should not the stories be fake, it would have as much impact as real or simply exaggerated ones. The benefit of the whole exercise is clearly for gossip mongers and those who simply love poking their noses in other people's businesses. It is the nosy woman on the corner writ large across the country and aside from pandering to such tastes, gives nothing of benefit to the UK.

I beg radio companies to please put on music at night. Please have pity for us poor drivers who have listened to our cassettes or CDs thirty times on a journey. Twelve years is far too long, purge the unqualified Torrington and his totally misnamed programme (it should be retitled 'Late Night Misery') from our radios. Maybe I should ring in and say I was driven to suicide whilst driving down the M1 hearing his programme and see what he suggests. This is an appalling case of voyeur radio (presumably that should be 'entendeur' radio to be accurate). Please just give us a break. Not only us, but the bulk of callers would be better off for it.

When Songs' Technical References Become Out-Of-Date

Like many of my comments on pop music my thoughts on this one have been bubbling around in my head for a while, so it is probably a good time to flush them out. In March 1985 when Dead Or Alive sung 'You spin me right round, baby/Right round like a record, baby/Right round, round, round/You spin me right round, baby/Right round like a record, baby/Right round, round, round' in their Number 1 hit 'Spin Me Round' (23 weeks in the UK charts with 2 at Number 1) they could have no fear that any listener would not understand what 'like a record' meant. 

I was rather surprised in 2004 when Kyle Minogue sang 'Can't focus I can't stop/You got me spinning round, round, round, round (like a record)' on 'Red Blooded Woman'. I understand people often sing along with lyrics which they do not understand, but how many 14-year old pop fans have actually seen a record actually playing? Even 'round like a CD' would seem a little outdated now, more like 'spinning around like the patterns on my PC when I download a track' would have been more appropriate. I know it takes a while for songs to be written and get to the charts and maybe Kylie was trying to appeal to an older demographic, but she could update herself a bit. 

Another similar anachronism was in the single by The Cardigans of 1998, 'Erase-Rewind'. (It was most successful in the UK reaching Number 7). This one goes 'I've changed my mind/I take it back/Erase and rewind/'cause I've been changing my mind/Erase and rewind/'cause I've been changing my mind/Erase and rewind' and so on (it mentions 'erase and rewind' 8 times in the song). Now I know cassettes and video cassettes were still around in 1998 but the whole concept of erasing and rewinding has long gone and to hear it now seems pretty archaic. This began me thinking about others and I must confess there are not a great deal.

I suppose many classic songs represent a time when the public telephone was more common and there were no mobiles. You have to find some less obvious examples '5.7.0.5.' by City Boy released in 1976 which it talks about 'but there's no reply', these days you would get an answering service I am sure, and the other thing is no-one now puts their number on the wall, they enter it into the memory of their mobile at least. 

References to 'the operator' began to lead me down the hellish path into more naff 1970s tunes, 'Sylvia's Mother' by Doctor Hook (1971) has a chorus, 'And the operator says "40 cents more for the next 3 minutes"' (though actually the song only lasts 3 minutes it is to get the sense of desperation across). The sense of an operator interfering with a call and you having to slot in more coins again seems very strange in the 2000s. 

Blondie were a bit better off with 'Hanging on the Telephone' in 1978 with 'I'm in the phone booth, it's the one across the hall/If you don't answer, I'll just ring it off the wall'. These days, even in student halls, I doubt you would find a phone box inside a residential building. Even in 1975 when Manhattan Transfer released 'Operator' with the immortal lines 'Oh, operator, information/Give me Jesus on the line/Oooohhhh, operator, information/I'd like to speak to a friend of mine' and more of that ilk (I forgot this when talking about gospel crossovers in the UK) it was pretty rare to be unable to connect direct dial with who you were calling, though I accept William Spivery had written it in the 1950s and it was 20 years before it became a hit in the UK. 

Maybe naff songs are aimed at older people than better quality pop songs and it is referring to their nostalgia. In these cases the change of technology would remove the tension of the circumstances. Imagine the difference if they simply got the dialling tone or the engaged signal, it would leave little to sing about. The Rah Band with their 'Clouds Across the Moon' (1986) may have foreseen the future with calls into space: 'I'm sorry to interrupt your conversation, but we are experiencing violent storm conditions in the asteroid belt at this time. We may lose this valuable deep space communication link. Please, be as brief as possible. Thank you. BRIDGE'/ 'or it's...or it's...Hello? Hello operator?'/' Yes, we've lost the connection!'/' Could you try again please?'/ 'I'm sorry, but I'm afraid we've lost contact with Mars 2-4-7 at this time.'/ 'Ok. Thank you very much...I'll...I'll try again next year...next year...next year...next year...' Yet, even here they have to have the 'galactic operator' get in on the act to provide the tension in the song.

Some may come back to life as technology moves on, Elvis Presley's 'Return To Sender' (1962) with the lyric 'Return to Sender, Address Unknown' could be brought up-to-date for the email generation. To date, the only pop song that I have heard which seems to mention the kind of communication technology is 'Horny' by Mousse T released in 1998 (so the same year as The Cardigans 'Erase - Rewind') with the lines: 'I tried to call you but I can't find the telephone/I sent a message through the internet but it rejected' suggesting she has lost her mobile and the email system is screwed. Hopefully more tracks will actually embrace the kind of technology we now use rather than things like records which are soooo 20th century! 

P.P. Whilst researching this posting, I also found out that misheard lyrics are termed 'mondegreens'. Since posting this I heard 'Get The Party Started' by Pink (2001) and in that there are the lines: 'I'm your operator/You can call anytime/I'll be your connection/To the party line' which is referencing technology which was around before Pink was probably even born. Most young listeners or anyone not versed in 1950s-60s technology would probably assume 'party line' is something like a premium call service, but in fact more than forty years ago it was when there was only a single line going to two or more flats so that you had to wait until the other people, i.e. the other 'party' was off the line before you could make your call. This kind of technology offered the opportunity for difficulties that formed the basis of humour in things like Doris Day movies of the early 1960s. Thus, the lyrics have taken on a new meaning because they actually refer to well out-of-date technology.

The Death of 'Democratic' Capitalism

Many people would argue that capitalist economies by definition are exploitative. That they rely on comparatively cheap labour to produce items to sell to consumers who are generally the cheap labour themselves and their pay is kept at a level which is only sufficient to allow them to buy those things in the long-run and not to advance through accumulating their own wealth so they can establish their own exploitative businesses. However, for most of the 20th century and certainly following the Second World War, there was a gradual movement away from that crude form of capitalism towards something more tempered. Most visibly we saw the evolution of welfare states across Europe which meant that by the 1960s most people were guaranteed housing, schooling, health care, public transport, etc. which allowed them to accumulate enough to allow them to enjoy things like holidays and consumer goods. This in turn boosted the consumer industry and capitalists found it was quite a good idea to keep this going especially as heavy industry began to decline in the 1970s and the service industry sector boomed. In the UK it is now sustained by credit rather than decent salaries, so is pretty fragile, but elsewhere in Europe and other industrialised parts of the world it is still roughly in place. The Communist states provided the basics for their people but had very little to offer in consumer items and with the fall of Communism they gave up the basics in return for opportunity to have access to such consumer items, and even more sharply than in the West, those who could get access did well, those who could not (the majority) were worse off, hence the continuing popularity of the Communists in the post-Communist countries as after the First World War.

As the Italian historian Donald Sassoon (see 'One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century' (1998)) who has spent his life looking at Socialism, has argued, actually more things that Socialists aim for such as health care, education, care of the elderly, decent salaries and working conditions, etc. are not achieved when capitalism is in crisis but when it is booming. I have termed this 'democratic capitalism' in that while consumers and workers are still effectively exploited, they also receive protection from the worst fluctations of the capitalist economies. In addition, there is an element in this 'democracy' which tends to get overlooked. The workers and the big capitalists are the usual focus of commentary on our economies, but I would argue, that those who make the jump and stop working for someone else and begin running their own business are also a characteristic of that democratic element. In the same way one would contrast say a monarchy in which only members of the royal family could run the country with a democracy where, in theory, anyone can be elected prime minister, and also take up many other lower positions locally, regionally and nationally to which they would have no access in a monarchy or a dictatorship. In the UK small business people gained this right gradually from the the 18th century onwards and while it took time for such people to be accorded anything like the access to influence that big businesses (especially those based on land) had, by the 20th century they had clearly won it. Thus, I see the ability of people to turn from workers to running small businesses as a further element of the democratic capitalism we once had. Of course many business go bust and these people return to the workers, but like someone who loses an election, generally they can try again.

So, you might be thinking, well this is a common example of capitalism with big business, small business and employees, with protection for those people who need it. However, I am arguing that such a form of capitalism is now dead and that we have almost reverted to the unfettered capitalism of the mid-19th century which meant the rich were immensely wealthy and the bulk of the population lived vicariously; in addition, the rich shaped all governmental policy and behaviour and anyone beneath them had no power. In addition, the ability to make the jump from worker to small business person is being crushed by the all encompassing corporations. In 1996 Michael Heseltine when Deputy Prime Minister (1995-7; he had been Secretary for Trade & Industry 1992-5) advised large companies effectively not to settle their bills to small businesses knowing that once they collapsed they would not be liable for the debt. This came from a leading Conservative and the party was supposed to be the one that backed business people whatever their size. Heseltine of course had become a millionaire at the age of 30 in 1963 so could be scathing of those struggling with small businesses. What this seemed to mark was a shift in the UK from backing any capitalism to backing the capitalism of the super-rich (or turbo-rich as they seem to be being called now). This was aided through the Thatcher years (1979-91) by selling off utilities which became very profitable businesses. On the surface this seemed to benefit small investors, but of course by the 1990s all their shares had been bought up by the big investment companies. Similarly encouragement to allow people to buy their council houses seem to be the democratisation of house ownership, but in fact with the slump of 1990-3 engineered by Thatcher's government and that of her successor John Major (1991-7) they lost control of these to the hands of multi-property owning landlords who rose to be millionaires too. Thus, the 1980s and 1990s saw the squeeze put on those people who would normally have been rising capitalists in favour of the richer.

Of course, Thatcher also ran through the welfare state stripping it of funds, making people feel guilty about using it and blaming anyone who did (which is one reason why millions of pounds of benefits go unclaimed each year), banning councils from building social housing, wrecking union rights, forcing public sector jobs to go to private companies paying the lowest wages, not allowing pensions to rise with inflation and so on. She did a very good job of stripping away so much of the safety net that had taken decades to construct. This is why the UK saw the rise of the underclass who have dropped out of society that no longer makes an effort to support them. Pressure on ordinary people came from many directions. I have noted how invidious the utility companies are and just today are reports about the percentage of poor families with children who cannot afford to heat their homes properly. Due to the use of metered utilities poor people actually have to pay more for their fuel than rich people, the same goes for food as they cannot access out-of-town stores that have the cheaper food; they cannot get bank loans and even legitimate loan companies can charge quite legally many times as much interest as those richer people can access. Thus, the system is engineered in the UK that once you have fallen into the poor category you are never going to get out. Increasingly, nor are your children, as schools become more selective, and as I have noted in previous posts even intelligent poor children fall quickly behind at school, they are condemned to live the same lives as their parents, however hard they might work. Due to the attitudes fostered in the 1980s such people are made to fill guilty and portrayed to the rest of us as lazy and deserving of their situation. Every class has lazy people in it, but poverty is an incredible motivator and I believe the greatest scroungers are among the rich.

So, for over twenty years, Britain has been moving to a less democratic capitalism, in which those who have least ability to pay are paying more. This was shown most sharply by the so-called Community Charge (better known as the Poll Tax) introduced to Scotland in 1989 and to the rest of the UK in 1990 and scrapped in 1993 following some of the most severe civil unrest the UK had seen for almost a decade. This tax was deemed 'fair' because everyone in a district no matter what they earnt paid the same amount to live in a house or flat in that district no matter how scummy or luxurious the property was or if they just rented one room in a house or had a whole mansion to themselves. About 1 million people disappeared from records overnight as they sought to avoid being stung by this tax which made up much more of your outgoings if you were poor or if you were rich. Even now in a borough like Tower Hamlets (small but densely populated, in East London) there are 60,000 (out of a population of over 200,000 people) fewer on the census register than registered with local doctors, because of the lingering fear of being found, despite the shift to the Council Tax which is based on property size.

Despite this steady erosion democratic capitalism it has now entered a new phase going beyond even the rich of the past. Even they are weak in the new set-up. This has been highlighted in a new book 'Who Runs Britain? How the Super-Rich are Changing Our Lives' by Robert Peston (2008) which though apparently flawed, highlights how that the people who run the UK are these so-called 'turbo-rich', going beyond the plutocrats of the past in their wealth and power. Of course Thatcher laid the ground for this by scrapping restrictions on taking capital generated in the UK out of the country, though this was simply jumping the gun as the EU insisted on it for all member states by 1990. Now, if a wealthy individual dislikes the government's policies they can simply threaten to shift some of their wealth elsewhere. Apparently, according to Peston the 1000 most wealthy people in the UK (out of a population of 62,000,000) owns £360,000,000,000 (€496 billion; US$716 billion) equivalent to 50 times the economy of Uruguay; roughly the same as the economy of Taiwan or Indonesia (which are the 20th and 21st richest countries in the world; about £10 billion more than even oil-rich Saudi Arabia in 22nd place). Beneath this 1000 must be many more billions owned and think of this replicated across the USA, Germany and Japan. In past postings I have referred to a map which showed the percentage of people living in various parts of the UK who were wealthy enough to be exempt from the norms of social behaviour. These 1000 people are rich enough to be exempt from the norms of government behaviour. They can murder people, make them disappear, drive them out of their homes and business and no-one can stop them.

You may say, well there have always been the rich. What is worsening the situation is the permitting of things like equity funds which simply buy up successful businesses and then load them with debt like a parasite draining their host rather than allowing that business to grow, pay better wages and employ more people. The richer you are the smaller a percentage of your income goes on tax. Multi-national companies learned this as early as the 1910s with oil companies leading the way. Peston claims that the tax 'efficiencies' of the super-rich deprive the government of equivalent to the rest of us paying 5p in the £ (i.e. a 5% tax rate) and so equivalent to hundreds of schools, hospitals, houses, battleships, space rockets, whatever you want to spend it on. This is just what we lose through their tax fiddles. They have distorted the economy of the whole South-East of England as I have noted before, pushing the cost of housing out of the reach of the bulk of even well-off people, and because their friends in the Thatcher regime smashed social housing, people cannot fall back on that as they would do in the past. It is almost as if these super-rich want to rub our noses in the muck to show how deprived we actually are. They are further pushing into health care, prisons, the Post Office, all the utilities, places where we previous got a bit of leeway if were not that rich, or in fact just comfortable. It is as if it is not only their greed wishing to earn more than whole states, it is that they feel they have to get us back for the 20th century when they were pressed a little bit to contribute to the rest of the population who actually power the businesses that they suck money from. Now we are being told, you stepped out of line, accept your station, here is the whipping to remind you not to get cocky again, not to ask for a welfare system, but to fight with each other for health and a house and an education so that you have no strength and we can pay you as low as we like to.

This is what the New Right agenda of the mid-1970s was working to. It was put into action in the 1980s and 1990s in the UK and the USA effectively forcing other more reluctant countries to follow suit (now with Sarkozy in France even the last outpost of a welfare society is being dismantled) and the countries coming out of Communism to rush blindly down the same path. As I have noted before Bush has favoured the super-rich as his core constituency and has engineered wars on their behalf (I think they fear fundamentalist Islam because it does not support consumerism and Iraq was just about the oil supply and business opportunities anyway). In Britain Blair was too enamoured of the Thatcher image to challenge it and even courted the super-rich. Maybe a Labour victory in 1992 was the last chance to reverse it, maybe it was too late by then, it certainly is now.

So what is our future? Well, probably by 2030 we will look very much like 1830. The welfare state is crumbling so fast in the UK that free at point of need dentistry is all but gone and health care will follow. Schooling is increasingly segregated and opportunities increasingly limited. There will always be a few people who will break out, but increasingly it will be because they win the lottery or a talent show than through hard work. Optimism will be sapped from us, the sense that we can achieve, especially through establishing our own businesses, will be taken from us. We are returning to a kind of feudal society in which we remain in our place in society and the bulk of us get the basics we need to surivive at the sufferance of our suppliers. Once we become old or no longer useful we are discarded. I think if even Winston Churchill, the Conservative prime minister (1940-5; 1951-5) let alone the ministers of Clement Attlee's Labour governments (1945-51) would look in utter horror at beggars so numerous on Britain's streets. We are charging back to the Victorian era with the plutocrats farther reaching and more powerful than ever before.

Suddenly while writing this a quote came back to me which I managed to track down and now it seems eerily prescient. It was made in 1983 by Neil Kinnock warning the audience about what would happen if Margaret Thatcher won the election (which she did with a large majority). He was Shadow Cabinet spokesman on education at the time but went on to lead the Labour Party to defeat in 1987 and 1992. He was condemned as a 'windbag' but actually was more a old school speaker who used rhetoric in the way Welsh politicians of the past like Aneurin Bevan and David Lloyd George did, so was increasingly out of step with the 'sound bite' era rising in the 1980s. This, I think seems a classic and it may weaken my argument to refer back so far for a comment and to someone unsuccessful, but I do not think it weakens the warning which is probably even truer now than it was 25 years ago.

"... I warn you.

I warn you that you will have pain — when healing and relief depend upon payment.

I warn you that you will have ignorance — when talents are untended and wits are wasted, when learning is a privilege and not a right.

I warn you that you will have poverty — when pensions slip and benefits are whittled away by a government that won’t pay in an economy that can’t pay.

I warn you that you will be cold — when fuel charges are used as a tax system that the rich don’t notice and the poor can’t afford.

I warn you that you must not expect work — when many cannot spend, more will not be able to earn. When they don’t earn, they don’t spend. When they don’t spend, work dies.

I warn you not to go into the streets alone after dark or into the streets in large crowds of protest in the light.

I warn you that you will be quiet — when the curfew of fear and the gibbet of unemployment make you obedient.

I warn you that you will have defence of a sort — with a risk and at a price that passes all understanding.

I warn you that you will be home-bound — when fares and transport bills kill leisure and lock you up.

I warn you that you will borrow less — when credit, loans, mortgages and easy payments are refused to people on your melting income.

...
— I warn you not to be ordinary
— I warn you not to be young
— I warn you not to fall ill
— I warn you not to get old."