Polly of the Manor; a tale of Modern Labour

The Lady of the Socialist Manor

I’ve been catching up with Dominic Sandbrook’s three-part telly series on Britain in the mid1970s on iPlayer.  It’s a visual accompaniment to his recently published Seasons in the Sun: The Battle for Britain, 1974-1979, which I acquired fairly recently, opened, skimmed but yet to read properly. 

I admire Sandbrook as a social historian; I have ever since I read State of Emergency-the Way We Were: Britain, 1970-1974, which I reviewed here some time ago (A Tale Unfolds, 21 October, 2010).  He has a nice relaxed style, a wonderful attention to detail and a witty and perceptive way of looking at the issues of the day, be it political, artistic, sporting or cultural.  There was something he said in the final episode of his present series, something touching on the Labour Party, that immediately set a train of thought in motion, ending in an amusing – and frustrating - terminus.

Actually, it wasn’t really about the Labour Party at all; it was about Margaret Thatcher.  It was simply that she wasn’t such a great innovator but she had a unique quality in a politician – she had the ability to listen.  More than that she translated what she heard into policy. 

The big issue here concerns the sale of state-owned council housing, generally believed to be one of the great flag ship policies of the first Thatcher administration.  But this was nothing new; senior figures in the Labour Party had even flirted with such a move after it became evident, from doorstep canvassing, that it would be enormously popular with ordinary working-class voters, many of whom were anxious to join the property owning democracy. 

But it never went beyond an idea, because it was generally understood that such heresy would be blocked by the left, who believe in managed people and managed lives.  Thus it was, according to Sandbrook, that the ideological high priests of Labour effectively handed victory to Thatcher in 1979, pledged to set the people free from council serfdom.  Irony of ironies: Thatcherism was a new Peasants’ Revolt! 

I’ve just come up with the serfdom analogy as I was writing.  My original focus was on nineteenth century novels which touch on issues of class, specifically those which deal with forms of noblesse oblige.  I’m thinking specifically of the work of Jane Austen, where one of the chief pastimes of gentlewomen is to deliver baskets to the parish poor; mercy, charity and condescension all rolled up in one!

That’s it; that’s the modern Labour Party, condescending and patronising in its attitude to the ‘deserving’ poor.  The Islington socialite socialists are the contemporary version of the likes of Emma Wodehouse.  Here the awful Polly Toynbee must stand as an avatar, walking around the homes of the lower orders, wearing her bonnet of self-righteousness and carrying her basket of doles, a perfect fright of snobbish condescension.  

It’s all a huge joke, of course, though like all good jokes it carries a hard core of truth.  Quite frankly I think the Labour Party is a criminal conspiracy against the people of this country.  The last government did untold damage, what with its aggressive wars abroad and its profligacy at home.  We will be paying for its incompetence for generations to come.

But the people who will pay most are this movement’s ‘natural’ constituency, the working class serfs living in council ghettos.  Gordon Brown, the previous Prime Minister, preached to them about ‘British jobs for British workers’, a sound bite of stunning stupidity, even for that charmless Presbyterian ogre.  The truth is he headed a government, as did Blair before him, that guaranteed a bonanza for foreign workers at the expense of the native British.

 I could take my historical parallels still further. I see a new form of the late Roman Empire.  All the work is done by a class of foreign helots, while the plebs are kept alive by bread, circuses, pot noodles, daytime telly and Simon Cowell.  Oh, yes, and there is the occasional basket of cant from the Polly of the Manor.  Why people vote for the Labour Party, why the non-labouring poor vote for it when they are treated with such condescension and contempt, is utterly beyond my comprehension. 

A Frightful Fiend

Look at this picture. Can you guess who or what it is? No? Well I’ll tell you – it’s the new face of Greek democracy! His name is George Germenis, a black metal rocker, although he uses the stage name ‘Kaiadas’, after the chasm where Spartans threw deformed babies.

Germenis or Kaiadas – whose next album, incidentally, is called Long Live Death – was thrown into another chasm - the Greek parliament. He is there along with another twenty members of Golden Dawn, an extreme nationalist movement entering the assembly for the first time ever. It won seven percent of the poll in the election held a week last Sunday, that’s well over 400,000 votes. It’s a remarkable achievement considering that Golden Dawn was long in the murky twilight of Greek politics, securing less than one percent of the vote the last time round.

Kaiadas and Golden Dawn is a sign of the times, said the mayor of Salonika. They certainly are; a sign of the European times, a sign of Greek anger at the austerity programme imposed at the diktat of the European Union, a sign of the madness that has arisen from monetary union. It’s a consequence of the arrogance of the politicians and bureaucrats who govern the destiny of Europe, who believed that national electorates could be ignored and sidestepped with impunity.

Greece, sinking ever deeper into recession, wanted to make a gesture, and it has. In making the gesture, in retreating from the mainstream into the fringe, people were clear what they were voting against; it’s just that they seemed to have no clear idea what they were voting for. Since the election many have said that they were shocked over what they subsequently learned about Golden Dawn.

What have they learned? Why, that it’s racist, violently so, and reactionary, rejecting, in the words of its own manifesto, “the so-called Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.” It is also irredentist, rejecting Greece’s present borders. We are, in short, dealing with a Nazi-style party which has a Nazi-style logo, though it rejects the label, saying that they are inspired by the regime of Ioannis Metaxas. He was dictator of Greece on the threshold of the Second World War, himself inspired by – can you guess? – the Nazis. They had their Third Reich; he had his Third Hellenic Civilization. In time to come – who knows? -there may be a Fourth Hellenic Civilization.

Golden Dawn is led Nikolaos Michaloliakos, once jailed for the possession of explosives. In the best non-fascist style the party’s charter places him in total control. In the best non-fascist style the charter also authorises the straight armed Roman salute, or is that Greek salute? The leader, though, has eschewed such gestures when his people march into parliament. His people, incidentally, include one who was facing trial for allegedly allowing his car to be used for an assault on a left-wing university lecturer. I say ‘was’ because he will be facing trial no longer; he now enjoys parliamentary immunity.

The ascent of Golden Dawn should not be seen in isolation. The door was already held open, ironically, by the socialist Pasok party and New Democracy, the respectable face of Greek politics. In forcing through the austerity package insisted on by the European Central Bank and the IMF, they formed a less than respectable coalition with the Popular Orthodox Rally, another movement on the extremist fringe, closely allied with Golden Dawn. In other words, Greece’s political class, dancing to a tune played from Brussels, effectively made right-wing extremism a respectable choice.

"May God help us. I dread to think that they got in," said Maria Savelona, a 51-year-old widow, who claims not to have voted for the Golden boys. "People voted in anger, without thinking. When they realize what they did, they'll be afraid." They should be. It isn’t just Germenis, his heavy metal makeup, his knives and his fake blood. No; since the election people have been shown images of his party comrades smiling next to an Auschwitz crematorium.

Michaloliakos, in his first public appearance after the election, said that getting into parliament would not turn his "brave boys in black" into moderates. He warned those who "betrayed the motherland" to run scared, banging his clenched fist on the podium, a bodyguard on each side: "We are coming!" They certainly are.

Like one who, on a lonely road, Doth walk in fear and dread, And, having once turned round, walks on, And turns no more his head; Because he knows a frightful fiend Doth close behind him tread.

Love Lost and Won – an American Destiny

Westward Ho!

There is one invariable symptom of a nation entering into senescence and decline: it begins to place a negative value on the past.  Things that were once noble and good are re-examined and reappraised in the light of contemporary concerns.  Old certainties vanish as history is reinterpreted through the perspective of minorities, outsiders and victims; the losers are now the winners and the winners cover themselves in shame for past wrongs.  

With the almost complete dominance of Marxist and liberal thought through much of western academia, the process has advanced rapidly since the end of the Second World War.  Who would dare write poetry in praise of the British Empire; who would now write in the style of Rudyard Kipling, now that we are one with Nineveh and Tyre?  Lest we forget; at last we forget.

I do have a case in mind, not from British history, not from the history of the British Empire, but from the history of America.  If one were to ask what is it that defines modern America I'm sure people would answer in various ways.  For some it would be the principles of freedom and rugged self-determination dating from the Revolutionary War; for others it would be the Civil War, a cathartic moment that established a new birth of freedom; for still others it might be a more recent birth of freedom, following the Civil Rights struggles of the 1960s.  

For me there is only one answer - Manifest Destiny, the history of the expansion into the West; the West itself, those plains, valleys and mountains where a new spirit was carved by courageous pioneers.  Here the old freedom was cast anew in determination, in suffering, in courage and in intrepid self-reliance.  One's destiny was in one's own hands.  There was no fallback. The price of failure was high; the price of success even higher.

But even here that process of guilt and re-evaluation has long been at work.  The history of the West began to be the history of the victims. For some those pioneers were no longer part of a great and noble enterprise but destroyers of an indigenous Eden. They came into the Red Garden; they made a desert and called it progress.

The expression of guilt took many forms, in printed and visual media.  In books we have Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, a classic of re-evaluation, and 500 Nations.  In films we have Dances with Wolves.  In documentaries we have How the West was Lost and The Way West.  Stephen Aron, writing a paper for the American Historical Association, said that in scholarly circles, "the West as America" quickly became synonymous with a "new western history"; detractors claimed this history had rewritten the past as a course in "failure studies." They were quite right of course.  A new mythology was created of the noble savage and the rapacious white man. Just remember those troglodytes in uniforms at the end of Costner's epic myth-making.  

But there have been some who have made a valiant attempt to redress the balance.  I had occasion recently to recall the work of Ken Burns, the documentary film maker, whose visual history of the Civil War achieved viewing figures undreamed of for this kind of show.  He also made The West, a series in eight parts covering various aspects of a compelling story.  The task he set himself was straightforward: "For too long we celebrated a lily-white version of the West: sturdy pioneers fighting savage Native Americans," but of late "we have subscribed to a history in which the European contribution was entirely bankrupt and everything Native Americans did was perfect."

The West was broadcast here when I was in high school.  I loved it; I simply loved it. The whole thing was absolutely fascinating. How I identified with those pioneers and trail blazers, the men and women who opened up the West under the most trying conditions imaginable.  

What I loved most of all was Love!  It was touched on in episode eight, and became a leitmotiv for the whole series; it was the story of one John Love, a pioneer of Scottish descent, who, along with Ethel Waxham, his wife, established a ranch in a remote Wyoming valley. The drama of this couple’s lives was told, and movingly told, by actors reading from their correspondence.

It's heart-breaking and exhilarating at one and the same time.  They faced adversity hard upon adversity.  On one occasion a flood ruined all the improvements they had made on their Wyoming ranch.  With natural disaster came a human one, with the bank foreclosing on a loan that they had taken out to raise sheep.  Nothing daunted, John simply wrote in wry humour that it was a case of Love's labour lost, an allusion to Shakespeare’s play of the same name.  

But they rebuilt, time and time and time again, against all adversity.  Neither of them lost the taste for what Ethel called the "ranchiest of ranchy life."  It was a tale, their son later said, of all the "survivors" who stuck it out. It was a theme Burns picked up on, as Aron said in review, serving the Loves as a tribute to the grit of westerners, to the persevering spirit that allowed so many, if not to triumph over adversity, then at least to battle it to a stalemate.

That for me is the spirit of America. Life is struggle and the most important thing is to not necessarily to triumph but just to fight, fight and fight again. No state, no welfare, no handouts, just a spirit of marvellous and wonderful independence. John Love and Ethel Waxham stand for me as symbols of all that is noble in the American past, all that is noble in the frontier spirit, all that is noble in those pathfinders and trail blazers.  Their destiny was manifest; their destiny was their own.  It is an American destiny.  

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss:
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

Laughing in the Face of Absurdity

Burn the Witch!

I hugely admire Nick Cohen, a journalist and author of fearless integrity.  He is one of those people almost impossible to classify politically.  On the face of it he belongs to the left, but that has not stopped him from voicing the most trenchant criticism of his fellow travellers.  His book What’s Left?: How Liberals Lost Their Way is a brilliant polemic, exposing the shallow opportunism, intellectual barrenness and moral vacuity of so much contemporary ‘progressive’ opinion.  He might be said to occupy the same position once held by George Orwell, for whom honesty came well before party loyalty.

A recent blog of his drew my attention to a scandalous episode of heresy hunting that might even have shocked the witch hunters of Salem.  It concerns the illiberalism of liberal academics in the States.  It concerns a hysterical onslaught against one Naomi Schafer Riley, an education correspondent for The Chronicle of Higher Education.  Rather she was a correspondent for this publication.  She was fired for daring to question an unquestionable orthodoxy. 

What was her offence?  She raised doubts over – horror of horrors – the academic rigour of black studies departments in US colleges.  She wrote a response to a laudatory piece previously published by the Chronicle.  Going to source, she examined a number of graduate dissertations, concluding that they were, to use her words, “purveyors of left-wing victimisation claptrap”.  Her punches were not spared:

Topping the list in terms of sheer political partisanship and liberal hackery is La TaSha B. Levy. According to the Chronicle, “Ms. Levy is interested in examining the long tradition of black Republicanism, especially the rightward ideological shift it took in the 1980s after the election of Ronald Reagan. Ms. Levy’s dissertation argues that conservatives like Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas, John McWhorter, and others have ‘played one of the most-significant roles in the assault on the civil-rights legacy that benefited them.’” The assault on civil rights? Because they don’t favor affirmative action they are assaulting civil rights? Because they believe there are some fundamental problems in black culture that cannot be blamed on white people they are assaulting civil rights?’

All at once the thunder rolled – racist! racist!, racist!, burn the witch.  What price freedom of speech in the land of the free?  Very little, it would seem, when it challenges the shibboleths of the academic left.  They demanded a sacrifice.  The editor of the Chronicle tried to make it an issue of free debate.  But that was not enough.  Shamefully 6500 people, mostly academics, signed a petition demanding that Riley be sacked.  Shamefully the editor gave way to the pressure. 

Cohen’s observation is telling;

Now suppose that the US government said that universities should fire academics who excused the Iranian regime. Or right-wing Christians demanded that the Chronicle fire a writer who insulted teachers at theological colleges. Or universities had acted on Riley’s argument that black studies departments were a waste of space and closed them. Cries of ‘McCarthyism’ would rend the air. Earnest professors would remind us that academic tenure was an essential protection of free inquiry. 

But when the blood hounds start baying there is little room for reason.  The dog who barked loudest was one Stanley Fish, a law professor who writes for the New York Times.  His argument was, as Cohen says, both sinister and clownish.  He told American liberals that it was OK to abandon liberalism.  They must deny conservatives free speech and enforce censorship.  There is no shame here; no, for we are the righteous hypocrites; we demand free speech for ourselves while denying it to all those we disapprove of.    

In defending herself Riley pointed to the black American scholars who have been saying exactly the same thing about black studies department, namely that they reinforce stereotypes and encourage victimhood.  But that’s alright; they are black.  For her to make the same point is akin to a white person using the n word.  You see, by their double standards shall ye know them.

There are no limits to the sea of hypocrisy in which Fish swims.  Oh, but let me be fair: there is no dissimulation here; for he is an honest hypocrite, defending hypocrisy as hypocrisy.  In a recent Times piece he wrote that it was quite in order for liberals to condemn Rush Limburgh for making sexist remarks while excusing Bill Mahler for making equally sexist remarks.  The thing is, you see, the former is one of the good guys while the latter is “on the side of every nefarious force that threatens our democracy”.

One has to wonder about the nature of American democracy, the partial nature that would favour freedom for some and silence for others.  Yes, one does indeed wonder when one reads this piece of idiocy:

I know the objections to what I have said here. It amounts to an apology for identity politics. It elevates tribal obligations over the universal obligations we owe to each other as citizens. It licenses differential and discriminatory treatment on the basis of contested points of view. It substitutes for the rule “don’t do it to them if you don’t want it done to you” the rule “be sure to do it to them first and more effectively.” It implies finally that might makes right. I can live with that.

Such is the degeneracy of liberalism.  People like Fish want to cast democracy in their own image.  This is a pond where the little fishes can be untroubled by countervailing thoughts; where, if they disapprove of what you say they will fight to the death to prevent you saying it.  How Voltaire would have laughed.  That’s all one can do in the face of absurdity – laugh. 

An Never Ending Story

Robert Caro, an American author, has not long published The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson.  It’s an exhaustive biography of the former president, but it’s also exhausting; for this is volume four and it’s not finished yet.  It may, in the end, take Caro longer to write the life than Johnson to live it.  For goodness sake, The Passage to Power just takes him over the threshold of the Whitehouse! 

I love biography, the more detailed the better but there seems to be a certain lack of authorial or editorial discipline here.  It’s now ten years since The Master of the Senate, the previous volume, was published and thirty since the project began.  According to an interview I read in Prospect, a political monthly, Caro “writes fast”; it’s the research that takes up the time.  He is to be commended for his thoroughness, but there are limits, even to the most meticulous research.  Is this, I ask myself, the real-life Book of Sand, a candidate for inclusion in Jorge Luis Borges Library of Babel? 

Writing in Prospect, Sam Tanenhaus says;

Caro is not prolific, but he is prodigious.  The books keep coming, heavy volumes, densely written and meticulously sourced.  The latest, at just over 700 pages, is of medium length for him.  It explores, or excavates, six years in Johnson’s life, 1958-1964 – covering his exit from the Senate, his miserable, deflating years as vice president, and his sudden elevation to the presidency, following the assassination of John F Kennedy.  During five of those years Johnson did, more or less, nothing.

What; does the author take 700 pages to tell us that his subject, more or less, did nothing?!  I’m beginning to feel a little guilty as I write.  I have no desire to talk down this work, a work that I have not read, a work that is unlikely ever to be surpassed, assuming its ever finished (my goodness, Vietnam, the Great Society, race, riots and rebellion are still to come!) but I simply could not resist passing comment on the observation about five years of, more or less, nothing! 

Even Tanenhaus, who clearly admires Caro for his industry, is aware of an inflationary tendency – “Had he written Waiting for Godot it would be longer than Wagner’s Ring, yet with its own idiosyncratic magnificence.”  Just imagine waiting for Godot for hour after hour after hour after hour.  There is only so much the human spirit can stand, even when there is idiosyncratic magnificence! 

Will I ever approach this monument?  Possibly not; there are too many other things to engage me and reading is for life, not life for reading.  Besides, I’m not sure I want to follow the Book of the Life of Johnson, at least in such detail, idiosyncratic magnificence or not.  There is a tragic quality to a man more controlled by events than controlling, a man who inherited a war and lost it; a man who launched massive welfare programmes which had a lasting and negative impact on American society.  But when it comes to tragedy I’m far more intrigued by Herbert Hoover and Richard Nixon than Lyndon Johnson, the wheeler, dealer and failure from Texas.  

Old Soldiers Never Die

With voting in the presidential election scheduled to begin on 23 May, Egypt is descending ever deeper into anarchy and faction.  There have been violent clashes recently with protesters in Cairo and Alexandria, during which journalists were attacked by supporters of the military, one allegedly having his ear sliced off. 

Much has changed since the fall of Mubarak.  Hopes, once high, have fallen low.  The generals seem to be playing a close game, both inciting violence and denying any responsibility for the outcome.  They have no interest in who will emerge as president, they say, no desire to cling to power after 30 June, the day they have promised to step down.  Yes, of course they will. 

There is violence, yes, but there is also an element of comic absurdity.  Hazem Abu Ismail is as orthodox as they come.  With his long white beard he was the front runner for the fundamentalist Salafi sect.  His was a populist platform of religion and revolution.  Unfortunately for him he also had an Achilles’ heel – his mother is an American!  That is to say, she took American citizenship before she died, a fact he kept quiet about and then denied altogether.  Au contraire, Mon Frère; out you go, beard and all. 

It’s all a plot, you see, all part of an American scheme to discredit the poor man, so say the Salafists, because of his anti-Western agenda, though it would seem obvious that the ‘plot’, such as it is, originated far closer to home.  To air their disapproval the beards massed in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, where they immediately clashed with Egypt’s dwindling band of liberals.  That’s one thing; clashing with the army quite another. 

The Muslim Brotherhood, the strongest force in the country’s parliament, was there too.  For long they declined to field a candidate for the presidency.  All at once the hive mind was changed.  Khairat al-Shater was put forward as their drone of choice.  All at once the electoral commission, whose edicts are not subject to judicial review, disqualified him.  Why?  Because he had been convicted in the bad old Mubarak days of being a member of a banned organisation that was no longer banned! 

There is a fallback here; there is Aboul Fotouh.  He’s well-known to the Brotherhood; he should be; he was long included in their ranks.  There is only one problem – he was expelled.  Why?  Because, contrary to the former party line, he decided to run for the presidency! 

Worried by its declining influence, the Brotherhood has now put forward Mohammed Morsy, something of a colourless nonentity.  The army, which favours nobody, either favours Amr Moussa, a former veteran of the Mubarak regime, or Ahmed Shafiq, the former commander of the air force and another Mubarak stalwart.  He has let it slip that the army, which favours nobody, actually favours him. 

The real power in the land is Field Marshall Tantawi, head of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), which has governed Egypt since the fall of Mubarak.  Actually it governed Egypt long before that; it has effectively governed Egypt since the days of Nasser.  Whatever the outcome of the election nothing much is likely to change.  The state within a state will continue to govern the state.  Old soldiers never die.  In Egypt they don’t even fade away.  

Daria and I

If you were a cartoon character, who would you be?  This is a question I addressed myself to recently.  I did not have to hesitate before answering.  There is only one choice for me – Daria!  Daria, if you’ve never heard her, is the eponymous heroine of an American animated television series created by Glenn Eichler and Susie Lewis Lynn for MTV. The series focuses on Daria Morgendorffer, a smart, acerbic, and slightly misanthropic teenage girl who examines the world with dry, cynical humour.

Running over several series at the turn of the century, it was my favourite cartoon show by far when I was in my tweens and teens.  Here was a character I could really identify with, someone who stood apart, a character who could see through the shallow pretences not just of her own peer group but of the adult world in general, a character who could dissect and analyse life with forensic insight. 

The show itself is a satire of American suburban life, with Daria commenting on the various absurdities she encounters in an amusingly sardonic fashion.  It was a pattern I adopted for myself, my own particular form of assertion and rebellion.  As I’ve matured I have, perhaps, become a little more accepting and a little less biting but there is still so much to be cynical about, so much foolishness to challenge. 

It seems to me that the best way of dealing with life’s frustrations is to develop a sense of detachment.  I do get angry with some of the more outrageous things that I see around me, I get angry at the shallowness and banality of so many of our politicians and public figures.  But it is not in my nature to campaign and protest.  Or, rather, such campaigning and protesting I do is through the medium of words. 

I love words and I love language.  I love to express my thoughts, to take arms against a sea of crassness and by opposing have a spot of impish fun.  Ana the Imp is my vehicle, a platform that has allowed me to sharpen my wit through observation and comment, to praise what is worthy of praise and expose what needs to be exposed. I’m a devil with words, I know, and this devil likes to dance! 

Loving words I also love to debate, something I’ve been doing since my school days.  I do not take prisoners, as some have found to their cost, and I have no hesitation in exposing folly, in exploiting weakness and stupidity when it deserves to be exposed.  Debating for me, you see, is just war by other means. 

OK, as I get older I begin to dissimulate a little more than I used to; I begin – heavens help me – to equivocate!  That’s truer of my personal life, of my relations with other people.  A certain amount of equivocation will always be necessary in this area, for the sake of harmony, if nothing besides.  But on the wider issues, the fashionable nonsense that pollutes so much of existence, be it windmills or gay marriage, there is no room for equivocation.  Irony is my weapon, one I will continue to use with ruthless precision.  Daria would expect no less. 

My advice is stand firm for what you believe in, until and unless logic and experience prove you wrong. Remember, when the emperor looks naked, the emperor is naked. The truth and the lie are not "sort of" the same thing.

Daria Morgendorffer