GLASTONBURY : FROG ON THE ROCKS

Apart from crystals, crystal pendants and slices of agate what other commodities do you think we sell in large numbers at the Glastonbury Festival? Could they be condoms, anti-vomiting agents, diarrhoea tablets or cigarette rolling papers? None of these but come to think of it they’re really worth considering if no-one else has got the licence. Okay, I’ll give you a clue. What’s the Festival famous for? Music? Well maybe. Drugs and filth? We’re getting closer but truth to tell it’s none of these. In the mind of the public Glastonbury is synonymous with mud. Heavy rain on the festival site end of June brings with it flooding, washed out tents and mud. The televised image of people wallowing in it, dancing in it and up to their elbows in it is only too typical. All that mud amid all that greenery! And what goes with mud and greenery, croak, croak, croak? Why it’s frogs!

Our best selling items at the Glastonbury Festival are frogs on marble. Little resin made frogs with big blue eyes and broad red lips glued onto pieces of polished marble or granite are the perfect complement to the oceans of greeny-grey sludge that covers most of the festival site after three days of downpour. People just love them. There they are, dozens of them sitting on our table, singly, in pairs or even three together mounted on a single piece of rock looking up at the kids like irresistible talismen. Mud, mud, mud, croak, croak, croak! Sunday mornings we can’t sell them fast enough.

They come from the wholesaler in boxes of three, same as the other resin animals we sell such as rabbits, squirrels and tortoises. One large, two small to a box. Buy them by the gross and they’re cheap. Around twenty pence each. All the small singles, whatever the animal, sell at two-fifty. The large on their own are three. Two small ones together are four pounds, a large and a small, four-fifty. All together as a family group the price is five. Not bad for our customers, the discount always appreciated. Of all the animals we sell, however, frogs outstrip everything else by at least ten to one. Here the positioning of the frogs on the rocks gives real scope for the imagination! We can put two small frogs together side by side facing each other. Very cute! Alternatively we can mount a big frog right behind a little frog, the suggestiveness of which everyone knows at a glance making the posture very much in demand. Another popular display is all three together, the large frog in the middle with a juvenile on each side facing inward or outward.

Given the serious demand and the fact that the frogs are often purchased as symbolic gifts of the Festival and its muddy experience, a great selling point is to customise each of the pieces on request. That means mounting them on pieces of rock just large enough to be written on. An example of this can be Glastonbury 2000. Equally popular is to have the name of the giver, Glastonbury and the date i.e. from John Glastonbury 2010 or even For Mum Glastonbury 2011. Most frogs sold however are kept by their purchasers so Glastonbury and the date are the most common inscriptions.

Each product is heavy and fifty together in a box weigh a ton so transportation is crucial. After making each piece we put them into strong cardboard boxes like those used for carrying bananas. Two full layers one on top of the other separated by a sheet of cardboard. Mercifully these boxes come with a space cut into each short side of the rectangle making it easy for two people to lift so that three or four days before we leave for the Festival our camper van floor is loaded with four boxes each side of the bedding area with six additional behind the driver and passenger seats. A serious weight with all that granite and marble so we need to make sure of the tyres!

Once we arrive we offload the whole lot stacking them up back of the stall, maybe a dozen or so pieces on one of the tables at any one time, most of them being frogs. Yes there’s definitely something about them, all sitting there in a bunch waiting to go to good homes. Simply irresistible if you’re wearing Wellington boots two sizes too big and you’ve already been trudging in filthy deep mud. Even irresistible if there’s no mud at all! They just sit there, on pink Italian marble, polished Aberdeen red granite or Norwegian black larvikite, glaring up at customers through baleful angry blue eyes with jaw to jaw bright red lips all merry with an insouciant smile. However you look at them, face on or from the side, they have a strange sinister demeanour. Almost like they could come alive at any moment, hop onto your cheese sandwich and let go something nasty all over it. And with such charm going for them they sell in hundreds. We just can’t make enough. Everyone loves them to pieces.

I’ve got one sitting in front of me at the computer and boy does it look malevolent! Almost like it knows what I’m typing and doesn’t like it one bit. It wants some fucking royalties out of this post make no mistake and if there’s no slugs to hand it’ll piss all over the keyboard!

You’d better not try that one on you slimy bastard or you’ll go outside on the ledge. You can try hopping off that onto the railings below!

No, seriously, I didn’t mean it! These frogs have been very good to us over the years and are favourably thought of in the highest quarters at Barclays. I’ve even thought of sending one to Chief Executive, Bob Diamond to put on his desk. Hi Bob, thought you might like to see how I get rid of my overdraft. In fact, would it be possible for the bank to lend me half a million so we could set up a factory unit in China. With a billion Chinese we could do serious business!

And what do you know all you banking cynics? You should be ashamed of yourselves. A week ago I got a letter from Barclays Head Office. Dear Valued Customer, it began. I can’t tell you how tearful it made me feel when I read it. Me! A Valued Customer! You could almost cut the sincerity. It was like having a conversation with Nick Clegg! Why, just imagine me being a liberal democrat voter; I wear stripy hooped green and black woollen stockings, pink sandals and a floral dress with water vole motifs on it and I believe in human rights for bluebottles and guess what? Someone at party headquarters phoned me up and told me I was a valued supporter, and furthermore, if I was a banking executive no worries about my million pound bonus.

In this day and age it’s so nice being made to feel that banks and politicians really care about you. It makes you feel you can trust them with any money you’ve got!

Okay, the idea of a German Ruhr size frog gluing assembly line in China on the backburner let me return to Glastonbury where two hundred and fifty thousand potential frog lovers come to chill out. A new approach to selling our frogs recently came to mind and was shown to have definite mileage. Why not, we thought, liven up their character by giving them a national identity? If a French guy or girl came to the stall we’d call a frog Henri, for a German we’d call it Fritz and for Italians Berlusconi! Most of our frog clientele however was English, particularly guys with blond dreadlocks or girls with ripped stockings. That said we needed names that fitted the type. George was out and you could forget Charles and Camilla. We needed cool. We needed iconic. Rooney was good and so too was Elton, but even better was Oggie. The punters just loved Oggie the Froggie!

By Saturday night the boxes were emptying and Sundays were always a landslide. A bit of bubble wrap then into a carrier. Customers lining up though customising took time. Non-stop activity with a gold marker pen. Me flogging the animals, Louise working flat out on the crystals, pendants and trees. We sometimes brought helpers. Young people we knew and counted on being reliable. Plenty of time to go to gigs, free admission onto the site, free food and a decent day’s pay. Sometimes our generosity paid off but not always. More than once on a Sunday, when help was needed the most, they’d fail to show up. Wander in mid-afternoon after unscheduled time in a tent with the drag end of a spliff stuck in an earring.

By late Sunday most of the boxes were empty and the frogs gone to good homes along with rabbits and squirrels. The slowest sellers were always the tortoises. By Monday tortoises were down to a quid. Nobody wanted the fuckers. It took an Attenborough program on the Galapagos to get a few moving and often not even then!

Frogs are always popular, tortoises are not, but at Glastonbury frogs are seriously popular. Why is that? There’s a simple answer. Glastonbury people are froggie people. Frogs, one way or another are full of character. Tortoises aren’t! Frogs are a like it or lump it species of being and if you don’t like it fuck off! They’re opinionated. When they croak they’re probably saying up yours or go fuck yourself. Tortoises are like dipping a knife in water. They’re yes we agree with whatever you say types. They’re well we really haven’t got any opinion right now but if you let us think about it for a few months maybe we’ll give you a call. In the meantime put some more lettuce in the bowl and a few pieces of cabbage.

Frogs are purposeful, tortoises don’t have any ambition. Now saying this you might think that things should be the other way round. You know, Glastonbury types being laid back unwashed hippies with a going nowhere philosophy as maximum cool. But in that you’d be wrong. Glastonbury people are keen to convey that appearance but to stick it on them as a generalisation is a major mistake. They’re mighty purposeful about their likes and dislikes and they know what they want. The laid back image is only an image, a device to convey cool but actually they’re more often full of something one way or another. Whether it’s shit or sound common sense is a matter for debate.

Tortoises on the other hand are full of nothing. They lack character and they lack oomph. They’re definitely not get up and go types. Frogs on the other hand are. They’re we’re out of here characters. Don’t like it and they’re off, same as Glastonbury types. Our Glastonbury frogs are on the rocks all right but the people who buy them know they’re only sitting there for their own convenience. They’re on that bit of rock because it’s where they want to be. They’re free spirits really like the people who buy them. They can hop off or piss off whenever they fancy and because they and their purchasers are genuine free spirits they can both do their thing whenever they like. Buying a frog on marble means two free spirits getting together in a kind of art-deco alliance. We know, and so do the two billionaire Russian oligarchs who approached us recently to set up a frog manufacturing facility in Eastern Siberia. One of them we understand owns a football club somewhere in England.

 

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THE HABSBURG HEGEMONY AND SUGILITE

Now I want to talk about the HABSBURG HEGEMONY.

The what? I tell you it’s about the Habsburg Hegemony, or the domination of Central European royalty and history by the Habsburg family for 800 years. Well actually, the post is entitled…

 

                                   THE HABSBURG HEGEMONY AND SUGILITE

The Habsburgs, bless their little purple cotton socks, ruled much of Europe for a very long time, going back one way or another to the 10^th century, with lands that eventually extended from Austria, Hungary, Bohemia, large parts of France including Burgundy and Lorraine, Germany, Poland, Spain, Portugal, Croatia and the Balkans along with sizeable areas of Italy, the Low Countries…what is now Holland and Belgium, and elsewhere. They occupied the throne of the Holy Roman Empire for example from the mid-15^th to the mid-18^th centuries! They were a kind of extended family with uncles and aunts controlling territories with titles of margraves, counts, dukes, archdukes, kings and emperors with palaces all over the place stuffed with crowns, orbs, sceptres and jewels. You name it they had it! And that wasn’t the half of it. Through family connections they doubled it up with the influence they had. Napoleon didn’t like them one bit and set about doing them over from the end of the 18^th to beginning of the 19^th centuries. But then they recovered, even after the little Frenchman dissolved their Holy Roman Empire and Garibaldi kicked them out of Italy, with good old Archduke Maximilian shot for good measure in Mexico. What did for the House of Habsburg finally was Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria-Hungary siding with Germany in the First World War, losing and having most of what remained of his little Empire broken up into modern day Republics. The real question here is what started off the final collapse and why?

As every schoolboy knows, it all kicked off in Sarajevo in 1914 when a couple of Serbian nationalists decided to assassinate Archduke Ferdinand which they did along with his wife. One thing led to another with Europe forming into two blocs and before you knew where you were there were trenches in every direction from the Mediterranean to the North Pole! So a guy in a car gets killed by a couple of radicals and its 30 million plus dead. Simple it seems looked at through the well-trodden lens of history. An established tale with a well-known formula for war only it all seems too pat. Like the story was being rehearsed. For a lot of people the whole thing doesn’t add up and many have felt quite frankly that there had to be something more to it than that. One side joining another then another and its bang-bang. Indeed, many people now think that there definitely was something more going on and I am now able to say they were right.  A strange discovery has been made only recently. A connection so intriguing, so mysterious, that only now, after much patient research can the truth be revealed. One that can at last be brought to the attention of a wider public in what can only be described as THE HABSBURGS AND THE SUGILITE CONNECTION.

The first thing one needs to consider and indeed wonder at is how this family dominated Europe for so long with a gene pool the size of a pea pod. They were all interconnected through a series of dynastic intra-family marriages where genetic disorders and other disabilities were passed on with such stunning regularity that it led to the wholesale extinction of family lines such as that in Spain. Something you could tell at a glance just by looking at the portraits of the monarchs while most of the Austrian line vanished in the 18^th century.

Well they did most of it through intermarriage and conquest. A kind of family based territorial looting operation. Taking over one place after another with armies and arms, acquiring wealth along the way then sucking it dry.

It was all most charmingly dynastic! The display of title and power across vast regions run by lesser lords amid a vast sea of peasants locked down by religion and feudal obligation with all the symbols of that power displayed in thrones, crowns and jewels. A crystallization of that power, indeed, yet as will soon be made evident, in more ways than one that in a sense is still pertinent today if you consider the symbolic significance and potency that The British Crown Jewels, on display for all to see in The Tower of London, still have today. I refer here though to only one sense of that significance. For the Crown Jewels of the Habsburgs there was another. I refer in particular to the Imperial Crown of the Holy Roman Empire.

From 1438 The Holy Roman Empire centred in Germany was ruled by the House of Habsburg and contained a vast Treasury including the Crown, all of which are now on display at The Imperial Treasury in the Hofburg Palace, Vienna. Interestingly, they were originally kept at Nuremburg then removed because of the advance of Napoleon but returned in l938, exactly 500 years after the Habsburgs took over, by that keen disciple of the occult, Adolf Hitler. Nuremburg as is well known being the scene of his Nazi political rallies. So the Imperial Holy Roman Crown of the Habsburgs had its seat of symbolic power in Germany, left there for Vienna for a while, was returned to Nuremburg by Hitler, disappeared during the Second World War, was found by American troops and eventually returned to Vienna. That’s the known history, but what of its power?

Symbolic? Undoubtedly! And yet something far more. Over many decades admirers of the Imperial Crown have marveled at its many magnificent jewels but, it should be said, merely as tourists. Passive bystanders as it were. Recently however there has been a very different kind of interest altogether! From the end of the 1980’s and throughout the 90’s certain observers with a keen knowledge of crystals and crystal healing have sensed a strange personal magnetic empathy with the artifact. As though in some way they felt drawn to it. Though this was known it was never seriously considered until recent times when a few prominent adepts of healing individually turned their attention to the object. It was then noted on closer examination of some of the jewels that what at first appeared to be an odd kind of transparency was nothing of the kind but had far more of a dense opaque quality and was strangely purple, not even resembling amethyst of emerald at all. Modern knowledge soon clarified the confusion. Though unable to conduct any close examination of the stones or undertake any kind of chemical analysis, it nonetheless became clear, as much through sensing than anything else, that some of the material under consideration was undoubtedly Sugilite.

This was a huge surprise to those in the healing profession who had the experience, if not a shock, and was kept from the Austrian authorities to whom such knowledge would have been meaningless, also bringing possible scorn! The discovery of Sugilite and its exceedingly significant powers has been of great benefit for crystal healing but it has only come in recent decades. The Palace authorities in Vienna wouldn’t have had a clue about its importance and the fact, as mentioned in a previous post, that it had an energy level equivalent to the 12^th power. In short, the discovery of the mineral in the Imperial Crown of the Habsburgs was kept very much in the shadows. The real questions now are as follows. Firstly how on Earth did the mineral find its way into the Crown? Secondly, were the Habsburgs in any way sensitive to its energy levels and powers, and thirdly and much more intriguingly, was there anyone else likely to have had that knowledge?

To answer the last question first. Obviously, at any time in the past such as prior to the First or Second World Wars no-one could have known of Sugilite as the mineral had only been ‘discovered’ in Japan during the 1970’s by Professor Sugi. However, having said that could the Habsburgs or anyone else for that matter have seen it and been aware of its remarkable powers? Thought that it was something quite different to any of the known run of the mill gemstones?

To return to the first question. How did the mineral find its way into the Imperial Holy Roman Crown? This is a real problem. The mineral itself is extremely rare. It’s source of ‘origin’ was Japan and only recently a fresh find was made in the Cape Province of South Africa, both locations quite outside the possibility of discovery for Medieval Central Europeans. So where else it is likely to have come from and how did it get into the Crown when guys like the Habsburgs liked traditional jewels. The bigger the better! The answer, though seemingly improbable, may not be so hard to find. The Habsburgs were the richest most powerful family in Europe. Their wealth was enormous and their contacts universal. They had the best jewelers making stuff for them all over the place. There might have been a tiny source of the material somewhere in Europe or in any of their overseas territories. If any had been found, however small the source, its novelty would have aroused great curiosity. Would have been drawn to the attention of the Ruler, might have found its way in the Crown as a kind of MUST HAVE piece of stone. As a kind of talisman for example, much as greenish mineral Moldavite had been for Medieval Monarchs as a kind of Grail Talisman.

The idea of such a strange violet coloured mineral finding its way into the Crown of the Holy Roman Emperor may not be altogether far-fetched. A more interesting consideration is what effect it might have had on the Habsburg Rulers themselves? Could they have in any way understood its vast energy levels, its very own tremendous power? This to my mind is particularly intriguing. The symbolic significance of the Crown was well known to a whole succession of Habsburg Emperors who only used it for crucially important ceremonies such as Coronations. Even so, their domination of European politics from 1438 till 1806 through it says much. Without necessarily being into crystal healing they somehow must have sensed its spiritual power. Regarded it as not merely a symbol but something more. Something with special qualities. Today they would have understood better and been adepts of the power of Sugilite. Back then they must have surely known that the purple stones in their Crown contained some kind of force that gave them the power of understanding. An ability to rule and command.

This Crown then was part of the regalia that remained in Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Joseph’s Imperial Hofburg Palace during the early years of the 20^th century and was due to be passed to his son, the Archduke Ferdinand when the old man, already well into his 80’s, was dead. Ferdinand would receive not only the symbol of that power but the actual power that went with it. Something the Serbian assassins certainly knew. They were fanatics. Theirs was the struggle of Serbian nationalism. For a Serbia free from the age old domination of Austria. The power of the Imperial Crown was everything they hated. They or their colleagues had certainly seen it. Something out of a German Holy Roman past and being slavophiles themselves everything they despised. There was its mesmerizing power, locked away in an Imperial Palace that had dominated slavophile Eastern Europe for centuries but what to do? Destroy the well-guarded Crown or kill the man who would wear it?

They too must have sensed its power. Its majesty, the authority of its gems at the apex of everything they reviled. Destroying it there in the Palace wasn’t entirely impossible. They might well have considered it but then there was also the man, the hereditary ruler. They knew of the turbulence their actions might cause. Kill the man, destroy the Crown! Destroy the Crown and break up the Empire. Free Serbia. It was never going to happen. The Archduke was killed and the assassination drove Austria’s politicians and old Franz Joseph into the arms of the Kaiser. After the War another Austrian got hold of the crown and began building an Empire, only one that didn’t last either. Even so, those pieces of Sugilite have been at the centre of European power for 500 years. They were deliberately put into the Crown and that’s where they’ll stay, waiting for someone else with ambition to sense their power.

If you visit Vienna on holiday go take a look at the Hofburg Palace. The authorities won’t let you get anywhere near the Imperial Crown but if you are in any way into crystal healing you’ll get the message. And if you’re wearing a Sugilite pendant, watch out. These might not be the crystals that started the First World War, not directly that is, but there’s an undoubted causal relationship. All things have a cause and effect, all things some place of their own in history. Crystal healing adepts see things their own way and their ideas are often just as new, just as exciting as those of accountants who design tax avoidance packages for Google, Amazon, Starbucks and Vodaphone.


If you found this post thought-provoking, why not try some of my e-books, published on Amazon. Samples are free and the full downloads less than £1! One of them, WITH MALICE, is a powerful novel which deal with the above topic. Another, A CONSPIRACY OF TRASH, is a black satire giving the lowdown of the English Literary Profession and what you need to do to get a book published!

STEALING YOUR MONEY: THE GREAT BUILDING SOCIETY ROBBERY

In recent days bondholders at the Britannia Building Society owned by the Co-operative Bank have received a very nasty shock. The outfit they put their money into wasn’t worth a plugged nickel. It was bust even when the bank took it over, something the bank already knew, stuffed with sub-prime mortgage liabilities hanging over it from the American sub-prime fiasco, but it still didn’t stop them taking people’s saving and handing out bond certificates. The latter, as anyone with any sense in their head knows, is a posh looking piece of paper with words and numbers on it. Savings, as anyone with any sense in their head knows, are banknotes that you’ve worked hard for. Physical cash, legal coin of the realm that you’ve worked hard for and handed over for the single posh piece of paper. And to put it into its real nasty perspective, that money you had before you handed it over was legally yours, but the second you handed it over to the Britannia Building Society or any Building Society for that matter, and put your signature on the form for a bond, that money became legally theirs. It wasn’t your money anymore to do what you liked with. It was theirs. They were now the legal owners of your cash.

And if you didn’t know that already you’d better know now! That’s because in the case of the Britannia Building Society and the Co-operative Bank that owns it, they’re going to do things with the money you gave them to literally fuck you over. That is, take away part of it for keeps. Well it is legally theirs now, not yours and they can do what they like don’t you know? Now anyone who says this is theft would be wrong. It might look like theft, it might smell like theft and it might even taste like theft, but legally it isn’t, and there’s the joke really, because according to the financial rules and regulations governing institutions within the financial services sector what they choose to do with what you thought was your money has the whole weight of the law behind it so there, they’re just doing things with it in their best interests. And yours? Well that’s another thing altogether!

All this is particularly important right now because of the dirty big hole that opened up right at the heart of the Cooperative Bank the minute they bought the junk status Britannia. It caused the collapse of their intentions to buy a large chunk of Lloyds Bank branches basically because with the weight of the junk building society round their necks they quite simply didn’t have a pot to piss in. If they’d bought part of Lloyds they’d instantly drown, not buying Lloyds they were still in the shit, in a financial black hole as they say in the City, and still had to get out. In short they had to get the money from somewhere and the somewhere was you, the bondholders.

The only thing that needed doing was cooking up some kind of package. With excellent financial advice coming from the smart city boys, accountants, economic advisers and all, you know, people who know how to get hold of money, they didn’t need to look far. In fact no further than Cyprus. Easy peasie, just trim off people’s deposits. In this case the combined value of all their Britannia Building Society Bonds. First stage, the Cooperative Bank takes over the bonds. Second stage, converts itself into a bank with a stock market listing . Third stage, issues shares to the former bondholders for part of the value of what their bond used to be worth. In the case of the Britannia conversion just two-thirds the value. So, you lucky bondholders, at the stroke of a pen you’ve been fleeced of 33% of your dosh!

Now if I were a jack-the-lad in the City I’d call it real juicy!

And while you’re shaking with fury and rage Britannia bondholders, you might think that help is at hand. Fear not, the Liberal Democrats, those tireless campaigners against bankers bonuses and every kind of financial impropriety under the sun are already riding to the rescue. That the good Nick Clegg and the honorable Vince Cable know your pain. Know your suffering.  Are already figuring out ways they can help! They won’t have this sort of thing happen. They’re already planning some kind of action! They’ll talk to the Chancellor if necessary so don’t be dismayed. Yes, and you’re bound to hear words from Ed Miliband and his friend, that bold champion of all savers Ed Balls. They’ll have none of it either.

And with such fantasies running round your head maybe it’ll help you sleep easier but then maybe it won’t. To hope of anything decent or honorable from the Liberal Democrats is a delusion, plain and simple. These people genuinely can’t help themselves. Either make promises they know they can’t keep or else do what’s best and stay silent and in the case of the Britannia bondholders swindle so far not even a peep or a bit of cheap mouth. As for what used to be Labour, are you just mad? Labour helping bondholders and savers! I mean even the thought’s got to be some kind of joke. Don’t forget, this is the Party that started it all. Think Labour and you’ve got a Government that facilitated tax evasion, Inland Revenue impropriety, Libor rate swindling, money laundering banks, gigantic bankers bonuses for failure while at the same time hateful financial constraint imposed on disabled people, the sick and the poor, with Ed Miliband part of it all. You’ll never hear a word from this gang about the way you’ve been had because these were the rascals who started it all. It’s a bit like asking Jack Straw and his Iranian Ayatollah friends for a loaf of Jewish rye bread!

No, bondholders, you’re out on your own with no-one to help and remember the disease is contagious. Like some kind of financial Black Death. Yesterday Cyprus, today the UK! Soon the bells will be ringing and the savers start coughing it up for the finance executives. Who was it who said, ‘my word is my bond!’ Well how much is the word of any of these people worth these days, especially when they know that the institution they work for is the actual owner of money deposited by investors and savers? Well actually it’s worth nothing. Some of them are probably already working out what bonuses they’ll get for legally fleecing their depositors. What an absolutely brilliant way of making money and it’s all legal. Just invest some excuse why we need all their money right now and give them green shield stamps for the value or promise to pay it back to their great grandchildren in a hundred years’ time, say in some nice bits of paper.

Stealing? Who called it stealing? How dare you say such dirty words!

 

If you found this post thought-provoking, why not try some of my e-books, published on Amazon. Samples are free and the full downloads less than £1! One of them, WITH MALICE, is a powerful novel which deal with the above topic. Another, A CONSPIRACY OF TRASH, is a black satire giving the lowdown of the English Literary Profession and what you need to do to get a book published!

BRITAIN’S FAVOURITE PASTIME

There are many possible candidates for this award, from bonking, eating junk food and allowing yourself to become hideously fat, and last but by no means least, the national obsession among British teenagers for drunkenness and lewd behaviour in Spanish holiday resorts.

To begin without trawling the obvious, an interesting possibility I have in mind for Britain’s favourite pastime is the current obsession across the working class underclass spectrum that also takes in large numbers of the lower middle class and is equally applicable to both sexes is a passion for being tattooed? This is now a flourishing obsession. One which in less than a decade and a half has become an established feature of the British way of life. The adornment of the human body with grafted signs, inscriptions, sayings and pictorial representation, while being a matter of personal choice has fast become something of a ‘must have’ personal fetish. It’s not so much a form of individual artistic expression as a statement about who we are. What we see as attractive and meaningful to us that we want to communicate to others. Tell them about what kind of people we are. This is evident from the fact that it is often arms, lower limbs, upper torso and heads that are most often adorned though it is sometimes the case that a rose is to be found neatly centered above the anal crack of large numbers of women. Most popular among fat under-class women I’ve been reliably informed.

In the latter case I’m hard put to it to understand exactly what impression they seek to convey for the money expended. They can’t see it themselves and only those drunk enough might gain sight of this artistic addition to the said area. In other words why spend money if no one can see it, or could it be that they themselves have sufficient intelligence to enjoy the laconic connection?

No, the penchant for being tattooed has become a runaway train and the question is why? Many of these things are seriously expensive, costing thousands, So what do they express. Obviously something meaningful, but is that something a recent or long term aspect of personal character? And above all, why now, in the last fifteen years? Interestingly enough the rise of the fetish coincides perfectly with the appearance of a new social class on the British scene. Margaret Thatcher’s time in office saw a de-industrialization  of British society and fundamental changes in the structure of the working class, a large part of which became unemployed and socially depressed. This led to the formation of a gathering substrata below it which today is best described as an underclass, with its own well defined characteristics in culture, appearance and habit. In tandem with the emergence and growth of this class has come its expression of self-identity, not simply in speech but more perhaps in appearance. Specifically in the tattoo. The tattoo is a necessary expression of identity in a new social class that needed one. This identity crisis has now extended outwards into the old working class which now, having lost much of its tradition, seeks some other kind of identity to replace it Especially in the case of its youth.

It is logical that the great socio-economic changes within British society over the last thirty years have created a great psychological change in the character of its people most strongly affected. Old traditions have been lost, new identifying mechanisms have been required. The rise of tattooing has perfectly fitted this psychological necessity, this need for identity.

Though a mass phenomenon and one of Britain’s most popular pastimes, it’s not the subject of this post, merely a psychological pointer to what I intend talking about. I mention it here because issues of psychology and their roots in recent profound changes in our society provide an important background for introducing the altogether more serious issue I have in mind. One that’s also psychological in character. That is, the view held by many that one of Britain’s newest and perhaps most disturbingly ugly favourite pastimes is lying. Lying as a way of externalizing personal neuroses. By this I don’t necessarily mean children’s tall stories though they in themselves, given the circumstance, can have consequences that turn out to be deadly. No, by lying I specifically mean going to the police and making statements about the conduct of others whether verbal or physical or in some cases both that are untrue. That are in fact lies.

What I am saying here is this. That in the last two decades, a favourite pastime among British people has been going to the police and making lying, malicious allegations to them about the conduct of others they know to be innocent of such with the sole intention of causing them harm. I’m saying that such behaviour is turning into an avalanche of evil intent and that its consequences, on an individual basis, are often damaging and destructive in the extreme. Such false allegation, such malicious evil intent, while not as common as watching a game of football on Saturday, is fast approaching a tipping point where it becomes part of our everyday way of life and shocking as it may seem, the statistics are there to prove it. It’s become a disgusting nasty psychological scab on the face of Britain.

At its heart lies a curious circumstance. A connection that provides a kind of take off point for its emergence like some kind of social bacillus into the bloodstream of British society. In 1994 Tory Home Secretary Michael Howard’s Criminal Justice Bill proposed a major and fundamental change to the British Criminal Justice System that was to have profound consequences for the relationship between the public and the police. When it became law the police no longer required independent verification of the facts of any allegation i.e. confirmation by an independent witness before they could arrest or charge. This could now be done solely on the basis of the individual making the allegation. In short the police could now arrest or charge on a basis of unconfirmed or uncorroborated allegation. This is an absolutely key change in the administration of British Criminal Justice and police conduct and has, astonishingly, been little remarked on by media commentators. With Michael Howard’s proposals the police power of arrest became extended beyond the bluest ever hoped for horizon. And coincidentally, from this time on a new kind of social behaviour emerged. Tentatively at first but soon gathering pace. That of going to the police and making false allegations.

It became all too easy. Just go to the police and make a formal complaint that a neighbor, or work colleague, or someone you’d  overheard saying something you didn’t like, or someone who’d you’d thought had been rude to you, say in  a supermarket… Someone! Anyone! It doesn’t even have to be someone you know… Just taken a dislike to! Just think up something to say, go to the police and make a statement, then the police could arrest that third party if they wished or at least take them down to the Station. There! Now you felt better! That would definitely teach them a lesson! 

And if you really wanted to teach them a lesson, give them trouble they’d never forget, or better still put them in court, what better than to make an allegation about sexual misconduct! The police would be duty bound to investigate, arrest, take the matter to the Crown Prosecution Service. It wasn’t a malicious evil thing you were doing, making it all up, just making sure a nasty person like that knew trouble and fear. Got what they deserved…

It wasn’t long before the police knew they were onto a good thing, with little to check their power of arrest, and in the case of allegations for sexual misconduct the easiest nick in the world. On the other side, that of the genuine innocent victims of false allegation neurosis, especially those sexual in character, the damage and harm was immense. In the years following the passing into law of Michael Howard’s proposals, malicious allegation became a weapon in the hands of countless neurotics and among this number can be counted children as well as adults! During the 1990s allegations made by pupils against schoolteachers reached epidemic proportions as those with grudges had little more to do than go to someone in authority and have some unfortunate victim summoned in by the head with suspension the least of their worries. Police involvement, dismissal and ruination of reputation and career was more often the outcome of refusing to back down under pupil threat or provocation. Teachers unions have extensive statistics of this rise of malicious allegation within schools and countless well documented cases of uncontrolled juvenile behaviour backed up by violent parental demand. Prior to the 1960’s teaching was a respected profession. From the 1980’s secondary education became an abominable hothouse of pupil-parent control with teachers turned into endless victims of false allegation and malice.

Outside education the bearers of Britain’s collective neuroses post 1994 were now on a roll. False, malicious allegation has now become something of a national sport and interestingly enough, of the many countries in Europe, it is only in Britain that such deeply vicious behaviour has reached epidemic proportions. Such allegations are by no means always sexual in character. They can be about what may be considered threatening language or behaviour. Something entirely inconsequential like a complaint about the behaviour of someone’s dog in a public place. To neurotics such a triviality may be sufficient for it as threatening or aggressive. In short any perfectly decent and innocent person may suddenly be seen as dangerous. Someone to complain about in turn. Someone to lie about, make up a story about and often, if the person is known or easily identifiable, go to the police with a concocted allegation of threatening behaviour when the real issue is that for some reason you didn’t like the way you were spoken to. You felt angry and demeaned. Determined to hit back!

In recent times a deadly and dangerous fragility in interpersonal relationships has become part of the British social scene. Part of the British psychology. People experiencing serious economic pressure for example such as fears about job loss may only too often transfer their anxiety into a variety of other spheres of life such as family, potentially magnifying their psychological character. Anxiety and fear are indeed well known catalysts for the creation of neuroses so it is perhaps no surprise that the recent decade of economic instability has gone hand in hand with the rise of plain bad social behaviour and malicious, false allegation.

It’s not too great a problem in France. It doesn’t sit well with the relaxed amiable French character, and likewise in Italy malicious allegation is almost unheard of. As a widespread phenomenon it’s almost unheard of in Germany and throughout Holland, Denmark and Scandinavia.

Perhaps people who feel under threat have a greater tendency to lash out but such conduct first requires a cause then a release mechanism. Economic anxieties and family dislocation certainly provide reason, a psychological petri dish for the incubation of neuroses… the trigger for an explosion of anger or rage on the other hand may be just about anything! Its intensity perhaps depending on the period of incubation itself. These are factors unknown to the unselfconscious victim of the neurosis, because they are indeed a victim, but they are certainly unknown to the recipient of any such anger or rage, the many perfectly innocent individuals against whom false allegations are made. The terrified, frightened and only too outraged victims of lies, spite and malice.

It’s an absolute farce that most people in Britain believe the charming little folk tale of ‘innocent until proven guilty’ where criminal justice in this country is concerned. Only the legal profession, the judiciary, the police and the Crown Prosecution Service would have you believe such a lie. In practical terms the notion of innocence DOES NOT EXIST anywhere in the British criminal justice system. Once an individual is charged by the police for committing a crime they can either by found GUILTY or NOT GUILTY in a court of law. However being found not guilty is most definitely NOT THE SAME as being regarded as innocent by the Crown Prosecution Service and the judiciary. Technically, you are only NOT GUILTY and in some circumstances the judge in the case may still regard you as guilty and indicate as much in court as recently happened in a high profile case despite the fact that the accused had been found not guilty by a jury minutes earlier

I mention these circumstances to point out that while the burden of any malicious allegation proceeded with by the police falls entirely on its victim, the person against whom the allegation is made, the weight of justice is also entirely against them as the Criminal Justice System, indeed the State, DOES NOT REGARD THEM AS INNOCENT. Indeed, no innocent person once charged with a crime by the State can ever be innocent in law! The other side of the coin to this is that both the police and Crown Prosecution Service are duty bound and heavily committed to act on behalf of the accuser, the person making the false allegations. This commitment indeed goes far beyond a call of duty as many people have learned to their cost after being found NOT GUILTY. Subsequently seeking to bring a private legal action against the person who’d made the false allegation/s against them they’ve discovered to their astonishment that the CPS acts to protect their witness by refusing to allow any private legal action against them. Indeed they only too often tell the real victim that they will allow no private case to be made and should the NOT GUILTY victim proceed with it they will take it over and ensure that it is abandoned. This is a particularly sinister development as there are documented records of the police and CPS using their witnesses, complainants, bringers of false allegations - call them what you will – on other occasions, subsequently AGAINST OTHER PEOPLE, knowing that the first case they brought using that witness was thrown out of court!

What they do in fact is try again using the same witness with a different set of malicious allegations against another person which, in a case that I am aware of, also failed. The woman in question bringing a second set of false allegations of sexual misconduct was again protected by the CPS who likewise refused another NOT GUILTY individual permission to proceed with a private case. Such protection of clearly malicious, neurotic individuals by the Criminal Justice System in this country is an absolute scandal

For victims of false allegation then this is a straightforward double whammy. And there’s the joke really. Only the person making the false allegation is innocent! Unfortunately, the joke goes a lot further. You pay in your rates for the nice policeman to conduct an attack on you on behalf of the lovely sick person making the allegation/s and you pay for the Crown Prosecution Service in your taxes to prosecute you on the basis of false allegation and try and put you in prison! I bet you never thought you were so generous!

Malicious, false allegation has been around quite a while so it may help a little if we went back to the Bible. Hello there, has anyone out there heard of THE TEN COMMANDMENTS? Yes, I know it’s a bit silly to talk about them these days but for some people like the victims of malicious allegation one of them is rather important.

THOU SHALT NOT BEAR FALSE WITNESS… is exactly about this kind of thing. Right up there with killing, adultery, stealing and wanting things that belong to other people. Very much a microcosm of the way British society is today with a bit of football thrown in. However, bearing false witness is extra special. Telling lies about people to cause them harm, and great harm it often is, is a hateful un-human thing. In fact it’s beyond evil because this intention to do harm is deliberate. Harm done in a premeditated way for self-satisfaction and pleasure. However such activity has alas gone a stage further. That of the neurotic telling the unfortunate person they regard as a transgressor that they might go to the police and make a complaint. This leaves a threat hanging over them so that they are now fearful, wondering what on earth they have done. The accuser knows this. Whoever they are they have the ability to malign given to them by the police, a power they are often only too conscious of along with its devastating flip side, the fear of a victim. This transfer of power is significant. In practical terms it is the empowerment of a neurotic to do harm and they are all too often aware of it. They take on a fearful aspect to their intended victim rather like the power of a snake in the animal kingdom.

For decent innocent people well aware of its malevolence, perhaps because they have already experienced it themselves, heard stories from friends or taken the trouble to investigate, its effect, particularly in cases involving sexual misconduct from minor allegations say of indecent exposure up to the most serious of molestation of a minor to rape, the consequences to a man, if innocent, and his family, can be utterly devastating. Prior to allegations involving celebrities in recent times such main line allegations and accusations were relatively rare across the board. Far more common was the lower order stuff from exposure to bottom pinching in crowded trains. Women especially were reluctant to pursue genuine complaint because a certain ‘masculine culture’ pervaded the police and their procedures. This has led to unfortunate consequences. The pendulum has swung back the other way and rightly, but for the sake of equity and justice for genuine victims this should have stayed balanced at the center not taken a 180 degree turn. In recent years a vast slough of serious allegations of celebrity sexual misconduct has dominated the media. Major ‘cultural’ figures have been shown to be serial offenders whose relationship with the police has come under considerable scrutiny along with monstrous cases of child grooming by Asian gangs. Left below the horizon in such high profile reportage are the many genuine low profile cases many of which the police may not be inclined to take up.

Alas, one of the effects of this recent publicity frenzy has been to mask the much wider problem in our society of false, malicious allegation and the equal devastation it has caused so many families. It all rides along together with the many social, economic and cultural changes of recent decades; economic depression and family break up… the rise of an underclass… strange modes of fetishistic personal expression from body piercing to the ubiquitous tattoo… rampant unchecked illicit financial activity...  Everything set in a society in which old traditions and certainties are in meltdown, in which values established over generations are breaking down or under threat, in which norms of conduct and behaviour are challenged or in flux, but above all else, where your place in an order of things with which you were familiar isn’t the same anymore. Nothing the same anymore and you and your place in it under threat. And along with it all the problems and challenges of mass immigration.

Psychologically you’re no longer empowered by the old certainties. You’re now in a world of potential  hurts. In a perfect breeding ground for endless anxiety. Of fears real and imagined. Of neuroses that you can’t get a grip on. You need to hold onto something. Regain a sense of who you are by not letting others get to you by what they say or do. You need to hit back. Show them who you are and what you can do. Yes you’ll teach them what’s what! That you’re someone who won’t be messed with! Teach them a lesson they’ll never forget. Put them back in their place. Teach them what it means to know insecurity and fear. It’ll make you feel strong again. Make you feel that you’re someone!

Interestingly enough, Hitler’s early years in power from 1933 onward saw a staggering rise in malicious and false allegation made by hundreds of thousands of ordinary Germans against one another. Many political many sexual in nature. They called it ‘informing’. Files containing statements made to the Nazi police still exist as a documented record of a febrile society where neuroses ran wild in a people who felt they’d lost their place in the world, made up stories and lies and maliciously informed on their neighbours. Countless numbers of people lied about and informed on died in the Camps.

To find your place in shifting sands you need to be special and you need to be strong. Special enough to recognise your own neuroses and not allow yourself to become a victim of them, and on the other side strong enough to fight malicious allegation all the way to the end and not let it damage you. Just remember the nature of the crime you are fighting and the grim fact that it is state sponsored!  

Finally, at the conclusion of this post, let me say that I hope I have made clear the profound psychological connection between the parallel rise of tattooing as a vehicle for the externalization of neuroses as a compulsive means of self-expression and that of malicious allegation as a neurotic form of empowerment. The psychological locus of such neuroses originate in the times in which we live and may remain with us and evolve into much darker forms in the coming decades.

 

If you found this post thought-provoking, why not try some of my e-books, published on Amazon. Samples are free and the full downloads less than £1! One of them, WITH MALICE, is a powerful novel which deal with the above topic. Another, A CONSPIRACY OF TRASH, is a black satire giving the lowdown of the English Literary Profession and what you need to do to get a book published!

These are questions well worth asking, if only because the Labour Party is generally regarded as the Official Opposition to the Government in Parliament. Or is it?

The Labour Party is supposedly an established independent political party like the Conservative or Liberal Democrat Party and should not to be confused with the Official Parliamentary Opposition though each might claim to be part and parcel of each other. The point I’m getting at is this, how much do we hear about the Labour Party itself these days because it’s most certainly the case that when this Party is referred to in the news media what they actually mean by it is The Parliamentary Labour Party. That is, Ed Miliband and his associates sitting in the House of Commons or Lords. But then again I ask, what is their connection to the Labour Party itself?

Indeed, it is again well worth asking what the Labour Party actually is and why it seems to be such a mysterious entity to the public at national level because, to all intents and purposes, its role and character seems to have been usurped, firstly by its Members of Parliament and more importantly by the Leader of the Opposition to give Ed Miliband his formal title and members of his Shadow Cabinet. It is this Leader and his Shadow Cabinet who have, to all intents and purposes, usurped the name of the Labour Party. They have ‘become’ The Labour Party in the mind of the public! The question then becomes, how representative are they of the Labour Party itself and again, what the hell IS this Party.

When all the world was young, and actually that wasn’t so long ago in the fifties, sixties and seventies, most people whether active in politics or not had heard of a Labour Party. It had an Executive whose members were democratically elected by the free vote of local branches in towns and cities up and down the country along with a trades union input. This Labour Party Executive was an important body that once, together with the trades union movement, dominated the annual Labour Party Conference with either an existing Labour Government or more usually Labour in Opposition, in a subsidiary role. In short, the role of party members through its branches and up through its Executive was the dominant force of the Party, their beliefs and values the driving force of its Parliamentary representatives. Today, this is most definitely no longer the case. The importance of its membership, branches and Executive have all but vanished.

There has been a profound change. The role of the Labour Party itself, that is the views of its members has in practical terms been usurped by its Parliamentary leader and ‘Shadow Cabinet’, a structural process that began mainly from the time of Neil Kinnock and subsumed within the mind of the public by long term media manipulation. The effect of this takeover to all intents and purposes is that the Party membership itself is without political voice and its structure virtually castrated. Indeed to most people it no longer exists. So that when you think ‘Labour’ these days you either think Gordon Brown or Ed Miliband… and what a thought that is! The many hundreds of thousands of people who were once local party enthusiasts are gone. It is the Parliamentary Party that sets its political policies and tone, not its Executive and certainly no longer its members.

Once these members were often socialist. They believed in its ideas and ideals. The leaders of the Parliamentary Party and their cronies have long abandoned such beliefs that were the mainstay of the great immediate Post-war Labour Government of Clement Atlee. Socialism then was the watchword of both the Party and its Parliamentary representation. The latter clearly dominated by the former. The slow, gradual reversal of roles was first begun by Hugh Gaitskell and reached its climax under Tony Blair when the role of the Party itself, its branches and its Executive as a political force was all but wiped out and its role taken over by the Parliamentary Party.

In the 1950s and 60s the Labour Party itself had a ‘left and a ‘right’ wing of membership but its Executive was ‘left’ leaning. Its Parliamentary representation was broadly left-centrist. During the immediate post-war period party membership was mainly made up of the industrial working class and, through trades union representation, the Parliamentary Party included many former manual workers. The political values of both were broadly socialist. They firmly believed in a National Health Service, in the public ownership of a broad swathe of services from public utilities such as water, electricity and gas to transportation facilities such as the railways, aviation and buses. This belief in socialist values incorporated free primary, secondary and higher education and went hand in hand with a concern for social equality and a kind of universal egalitarianism. Things began to change in the 1970s and 80s. The core belief in socialism by the Party itself steadily faded and along with it the central driving political values of the Party, public ownership and nationalization of the utilities. The impetus for this abandonment was the leadership of the Parliamentary Party whose character was changing. The working men and women of the post-war period were being replaced in Parliament by people from other professions such as lawyers, accountants and businessmen.   The working class with its socialist values and belief in a universalized equality was replaced over a period of some thirty years by men and women with essentially middle class values.          

Working class activist Party membership fell away, both under the effect of the middle class moving into the Party and trades union bureaucratic incursion. A process reflected in the fast growing change in the social character of Parliamentary party representation where it became comprehensively middle class so that by the 1980s, socialism, nationalization and a desire for social equality, already now muted, was finally dropped. The architect for this wholesale abandonment of socialism being Neil Kinnock. From the 1980s to the mid- 90s the process continued unabated. The Parliamentary Labour Party and the Trades Union Movement, wilting and partly destroyed under the attacks of nouveau-right Thatcher Toryism, instead of rediscovering its old values and beliefs, finally ditched socialism once and for all under the scorn and hatred of the Murdoch press and took up a fully-fledged belief in Social Democracy. The views of public ownership and social equality became anathema and an object of ridicule. Already dominated by a Parliamentary leadership whose views had become synonymous with private ownership and enterprise, rampant personal wealth creation, fee paying higher education, the loss of maintenance grants for students and the profit motive as a sole governing force in business activity, Labour Party membership fell into steep decline, the social and political character of its Executive falling under the control of different people who believed in different things.

The old Labour Party died. It was replaced by a new infusion of middle class men with middle class values and became The New Labour Party or New Labour, dominated now by men such as Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson all of whom were responsible for infusing the Party with new values. What was contemptuously regarded as Old Labour meant people with outdated anachronistic beliefs such as fairness and equality. The only room for these people was a place in the corner or the butt of a joke. The new fresh faces were there to stay. Their moment of triumph came in New Labour’s stunning victory of the l997 General Election, its architect being Peter Mandelson, and the rise to power of Tony Blair’s Government of private enterprise and above all the financial services industry, based primarily on investment banking and the insurance services. Not a word about socialism, by now thoroughly old hat and dirty. No repeal of Margaret Thatcher’s well hated anti-trades union legislation, no repeal of Michael Howard’s deeply reactionary Criminal Justice Bill of 1994, no equalizing modernization of the Criminal Justice System that allowed so many ghastly miscarriages of justice both under the Callaghan and Thatcher Governments. Instead a total relaxation of controls regulating financial activity, business practice and immigration.

As we now know, the relaxation of immigration control had the effect of allowing into the UK three to four million immigrants from Asia and an additional million from East Europe. A consequence of the former has led to a serious and disturbing cultural change in the character of British society along with many unwanted problems and violence. For some reason, generally unknown, New Labour Home Secretaries allowed Muslim hate preachers to publically denigrate British people of other faiths and values, along with women, unchecked and unhindered. More important however was that in the final years of the New Labour Government led by Gordon Brown, the now out of control financial services sector and a totally relaxed taxation regime allowed a vast and contemptuous fraud and illegality to be perpetrated by the banking system and an equally contemptuous taxation avoidance regime to be perpetrated on Government and its Exchequer by multinational corporations and their financial advisors.

And the general consequences of all this? Under the auspices of New Labour Government there was a near collapse of the banking system causing a gigantic social debt to be placed on the poorest elements in our society. And the means for its payment? Firstly under New Labour an attack on the Welfare State the Party had once set up in the face of terrible social deprivation and inequality back in the days when it cared about such things. Secondly the continuation of such an attack by the Tories and Liberal Democrats that followed them in Government.

In short, Tony Blair’s so called New Labour Government of Social Democracy led to the despoiling of what was once a fine cultural harmony and a generalised lowering of living standards for the poorest in our society. The Labour Party became New Labour. Its beliefs and values changed with the change of its membership and with it the structure of the Party itself. The Labour Party as a Party today barely exists. It has no youth movement, and branch membership has all but imploded. No-one knows who its Executive is anymore, when they meet and what they stand for, except that they almost certainly reflect the views of the Labour opposition in Parliament and its Shadow Government in particular. No discord if you please. In short an independent Labour Party Executive no longer exists and any say its membership has is artificial and manufactured. Worse still, the decisions of its annual conference are likewise artificial and manufactured. There’s no room for any divergence of view as been shown recently when conference stewards recently surrounded an old man representing somewhere or other and bundled him out the hall. A bit like Gordon Brown being caught on camera telling a colleague that an elderly woman who’d asked him a question was ‘ignorant’!

With Gordon Brown putting millions of Britain’s poorest people, from workers and the unemployed to pensioners and savers, into the hands of financial speculators, crooks and exploitative moneylenders you’d have thought that the Labour Party couldn’t sink any lower. But then who’d actually heard of the Labour Party itself during his wretched years in office? Come to think of it for that matter who’d actually heard much about the Labour Party during Tony Blair’s preceding years in power? The Iraq War… the failure to control, or perhaps rather-more encourage mass Asian and Polish immigration… the failure to repeal Thatcher’s anti-trades union legislation… the rise of the Islamic hate preachers… the failure to deal with unemployment and countless other issues the Labour Party of old would have opened its mouth about but instead, time after time on so many of these things, a deafening silence. Apart from a bit of well controlled chatter around Annual Conference time the Party itself is to all intents and purposes a dead dog.

But then I have to ask, do you think that after Gordon Brown, things could get any worse? That what is these days is generally thought of as The Labour Party, sorry, New Labour, could stoop any lower? Alas, the answer is yes. Under Gordon the Labour Party totally abandoned any concern for working people and the poor. Now, in the hands of its new leader, instead of promising to reverse the current Tory-Lib Dem Coalition attack on the Welfare State, it’s publically voiced an intention to maintain it, even take it a step further if it wins the next General Election! Maintain the visceral means tested attack on Disability Living Payments that they themselves began before the Coalition Government took power, continue with the reduction of Child Benefit Payments and cut the Winter Fuel Payment for over six hundred thousand people! In other words maintain the Tory directed attack on the poor.     

So instead of rolling back the Tory attack on the Welfare State by making the poor pay for a crisis caused by the regime of financial speculators and crooks set up and running by the last Labour Government, something that surely would have been fought for by the old Labour Party, Ed Miliband wants to keep it going. That raises a serious question. With the total demise of Labour as a political party IS THERE NOW ANY REAL DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THEM AND THE TORIES? AND JUST AS BAD, IS THERE ANY REAL DIFFERENCE BETWEEN LABOUR AND THE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS? Answer, nothing important that I can think of. There is of course plenty of demonstrable Miliband enthusiasm, along with that of his current Treasury chatterbox Ed Balls, for attacking the Coalition, but if you consider it all carefully it amounts to practically nothing. There are no major policy differences, just a bit of around the edge trimming and smoothing out. Like cutting some of the fat off the old Tory meat. The meat’s still the same only Miliband just wants it to taste a bit better. Make the attack on the poor and the Welfare state a little more palatable. Easier to swallow.

In short the three main political parties all stand for the same thing. There’s no real, no fundamental difference between them. No real opposition from a supposed Official Opposition. So how healthy is that for democratic government when they all believe in the same thing? Answer, it’s thoroughly unhealthy. It’s as if modern parliamentary democracy has collapsed. Died a death with the demise of the Labour Party itself. When the party leaders chatter they all chatter the same way and about the same thing. They talk the same language. Yes, and they even sound the same!

Fear not however. There’s change on the way! Not from anywhere around Labour I have to say but from much further right. New kid on the block Nigel Farage and UKIP are dragging the Tory Party itself, its electorate and a fair section of its back-bench Members of Parliament away from what was once traditional Toryism to somewhere different. With David Cameron now taking his Party into the center ground and Ed Miliband likewise with Labour the two could meet somewhere on the quiet and play Coalition kiss-kiss again with poor old Cleggy out in the cold. Fearsome Farage leading Tory anti-Europe politics from the right with a Cameron-Miliband National Coalition of Tory-Lab Democrats forming Government at the center! A kind of ‘socially responsible national Government. There to save the ‘nation’ don’t you know!

Forget the old Tory Party. Most of it’s sunk under Gay Marriage and Europe and going to UKIP. The rump under Cameron is fast remaking itself as a socially responsible crew and now cuddling with Labour lads who never knew the meaning of social equality let alone socialism, that old long forgotten idea of a thousand years back!

Yes, forget the old Tory Party… And if you vote Labour at the next General Election what you’ll actually be voting for is the New Tory Party, with plenty more kicks up the arse for the poor. That’s what happened to the Labour Party. It took a cyanide pill and became fully fledged NewTory. But please, don’t tell anyone because the rascals doing it all haven’t quite finished pulling the wool yet.

That’s it then. In such a brief space of time a once great political party, forged in the fires of poverty and deprivation, a once great campaigning party for equality and justice, for the betterment of the conditions of life for all working men and women, allowed itself to be poisoned by treacherous values. Taken over and turned into something utterly opposed to what it once was until it died a miserable death of non-existence or better still, contempt from those still old enough to remember. A real shaming of the honor and sacrifices of those who once made it a great and noble creation. Gave us free health care for all and working lives that working men could be proud of.     

So goodbye Labour. Shame you forgot how fine you once were and how you once cared about ordinary people, not just the rich.

ART AND ARTIFICE : IMAGINATION AND IMAGERY - BRISTOL AND BATH… A CULTURAL TALE OF TWO CITIES

The purpose of this post is to contrast the cultural differentiation between two British cities in terms of a specific recent experience. Last Sunday I left the well-known Georgian tourist drag of Bath to visit the Graffiti Art Festival of Bristol. The former rising from its now gloriously sterile architecture before plumbing the depths with Jane Austen’s plaster statue in Gay Street… the latter setting unprepossessing Bedminster alight with a feast of artistic imagination and cultural vitality. Chalk and cheese, chalk and cheese, with Bath coming out cheesy.

Okay, let’s take a look! When Georgian Bath was first hacked from nearby limestone quarries and put together by jobbing builders between 1740-1850 its design concept was revolutionary and beautiful. It’s architects you might say had all the imagination in the world but then not quite as they took many of their ideas from the ancient world, particularly Rome. At the time, what they laid out, partly on the land of the Pulteney Estate, was indeed art. Art as design. Art as architecture. That is to see it in terms of its time or what it was then. Today it’s still beautiful all right but its beauty well worn, Architecturally sterile. True, the local council has been doing its best over many years to stuff up the integral totality of the Georgian design by dumping within it various monstrosities like the Beaufort Hotel, the ghastly neo-Georgian Podium, the desperately ultra neo-Georgian Southgate shopping center along with various house-building adulterations. But then these are just signs of a furiously unimaginative local officialdom trying to show brain though even then still desperately failing to fuck up a decaying concept with their own brand of awfulness.

Georgian Bath still remains sterile, a brushed up thing of the past for the tourists with architectural modernity popping out like venomous pustules all over the place. What was once art of a kind has now become artifice. A kind of decayed picture postcard, a digital snapshot of history that tourists love to be in along with its residents, who do so love to be living in living history. People, let it be said, often so sterile themselves that they take on the character of their streets and buildings. They’re full of swank. Up front like the buildings they live in. Fine masonry work on the outside with everything round the back filled out with breeze block and rubble! Remember it was built on the cheap at the time! And they love doing what may best be described as ‘parading’, much like Georgian ‘society’ did in its heyday only now it’s walking up  and down Milsom Street on Saturday afternoons holding expensive brand name carrier bags despite the fact that most haven’t got a pot to piss in. The bags of course are mostly empty! Swank is the object for this show of post-modern Georgiana. It’s still fun to watch only Jane Austen got there first and sent it up mercifully. Loved the bricks but hated the people!

Having said that Bath’s still a good place to be compared to the modern excrescences surrounding  it like Trowbridge, Chippenham and Peasedown St John. Trouble is, the city itself is like a museum so it doesn’t bother having one of its own. Nothing showing its history and culture unless you want to call the display of artifacts at the Roman Baths a museum which it’s not. No, Bath’s a museum of buildings, mainly Georgian, only all too predictable. No treasures for tourists to see unless you like builders rubble and stone.  

Any imagination it once had is locked away deep. Set in stone if you like. Not that it doesn’t desperately pander to cultural aspiration. Thinking that it’s one of Britain’s great tourist meccas, a place with a history and a cut above so many others, it has its very own Festivals. International too don’t you know. An International Festival of Music, A Bath Festival, A Bath Fringe Festival. A Festival of This and a Festival of That. Its Council wants to give its City an image of quality. After all, its architecture is genuinely special only people can’t live by bricks alone and as long as I’ve known it that’s what those who inhabit its center have been turning into. Pretentious bricky little dullards.

The City has its own local artists who specialize in painting buildings, bricks and bridges. Nothing really imaginative. They can’t be because they only paint what’s already been there 200 years. They’re as passé as the place itself. Their work at best just imagery. A miserable artifice. Smooth, right and tight like the City’s lower middle class Liberal Democrat and Tory voting inhabitants. Most of them simply better than anyone anywhere else!

There’s definitely no artistic vitality in Bath. The place is a cultural desert for creativity and imagination. Bristol is different. It’s a place of colors and contrasts. It’s not as neat and tidy as Bath. Not as right and tight but it’s definitely colourful. At its center you can see terraces of houses with their stucco exteriors painted in blues, yellows, reds, greens, whites and browns. It’s a kind of invitation in itself go looking for street art and no mistake, you’ll often get it. Much just off the center of Bristol is only too often plain ugly Victoria epoch Satanic redbrick factory building ripe for dereliction and change. What it actually is and the social deprivation it appears to contain may be a subject for critical condemnation , thus the critical finger-pointing art of much of its graffiti. What is to be done with it all and where is it going are, like the questions it raises, subjects for futuristic speculation. Thus the social scientific- science fictional dualism of many of the graffiti hoardings I admired along Bedminster’s North Road. You could never have had anything like it in Bath. Bath’s a finished job. It’s smug and self-satisfied. Bristol’s graffiti are buzzing and angry like the artists who create it.

Only it’s an intelligent, imaginative anger. Graffiti Artists for last week’s festival came from all over the world to be there and spray. Maybe it was to honor Banksy, a Bristolian and the art form’s favorite son or just a kind of cultural clanning together. A jam session of depressed nozzles. I chatted to many of the artists, all of them interesting  and thoughtful, and as important as anything else, affable. People with lively minds from whom you might expect just about anything. Much of the draftsmanship was superb and the themes on the hoardings and buildings endlessly lively. It surely won’t be long before we see the millionaire art buyers and nouveau banker-riche of Britain turn from Turner Prize winners and old hat dead sheep and unmade beds to the thought provoking two hundred quid a time Nouveau-Graffiti nozzle-nobbies of Bristol.

I can see it all in my mind’s eye. Bath Bypass bypassed by a procession of Land-cruisers and trailers on their way down to Bedminster with crate loads of Chardonnay or, better still, three litre flagons of semi-rough cider. Quick-quick, flash the cash before the prices get knowledgeable as the dealers get in on the latest thing and start flogging it off to the Chinese for ten times the price. Oh, do you think I’m joking? Many of them are ex-public school with an eye for making dosh out of the art trade just as much as any Royal commercialization of peas and carrots. You’ll be hearing some pretty posh voices around Bedminster and the Bristol Docks soon. I say my fine bearded local fellow, would you like some of these fifties for those painted billboards of yours?

It could be the shape of things to come. Graffiti art boards hanging in the windows of Mayfair galleries. For now though it’s just a feast of the imagination for the local enthusiasts to enjoy, people who’d never come to Bath to look at the buildings. Some I chatted to offered up the fact that they were working class and proud of it. It was strange to me. Culturally imaginative people, happy to be young mums and dads and making a point of what they felt they were. You’d never get that in Bath, especially Georgian Bath where people would rather die than vote Labour and never admit to anything except being self-employed, or then again, most of the large population of working class people living on large estates hidden away across the river and railway line to the far north-west of the City who only vote Lib-Dem! Bath and its architectural artifice make people want to feel better than what they actually are. As Margaret Thatcher once said, it’s a funny old world.  

No, Bristol is active, full of art and imagination. Bath is passé, full of artifice and imagery. One’s up and running into the future. Hopeful and creative despite all its social problems. Bath lies static and smug with its heritage. It’s certainly glorious with its pre-Roman and Roman, Medieval and Georgian character but that’s where it’s stuck emotionally and psychologically. People who live in the center of Bath wouldn’t live anywhere in Bristol, not even the City’s fine and extensive Georgian suburb of Clifton let alone definitely down market inner areas like Bedminster and Ashton Gate. And they certainly wouldn’t touch the socially deprived crime centres of the outer suburbs with a barge pole! Shock and horror.

Georgian Bath has its reputation all right. When people in Bristol or anywhere else within a fifty mile radius of Bath ask you where you live and you tell them they invariable put a finger to their nose and push it upwards in a kind of well-known expression of deference but more actually as a kind of acknowledgement of posh-ness and snobbery. Bath eh? Hmmm…

The City then has taken its architectural reputation and Georgian history of exclusiveness and fashion, (what it once was and the kind of people who came to live there, ‘take the waters’ and mingle with the fashionable people) and planted it in the minds of city dwellers from Bristol to Boston, Hong Kong to Timbuktu. They all come here and love it. There are countless Jane Austen societies all over America. There are people who come to Bath in large parties specially to dress up in Georgian style and parade around the town in groups for days on end. It’s a wonder to see. Jane Austen herself would have had a nervous breakdown because she actually hated the place! That’s the new art of Bath. Reinvigorating the pretentions of old for a fast tourist buck. Talk about poncing off the past. The City does it in spades.

Bristol on the other hand also has a past. Part of it up to its eyeballs in the Slave Trade, part of it heavy in support for Parliament and Cromwell during the English Civil War, other parts Quaker and then heavily into cigarette and aircraft production along with the manufacture of stylish cars. Whatever the City did it had its own kind of style. Imaginative at times in its awfulness and imaginative in its industrial creativity like glass blowing. Above all innovative. Bath doesn’t have that and never repeated its architecture and I for one much regret it. Local politicians who could give it new cultural direction are as unimaginative as the endless chain store shops that clog its streets. It used to be different in the sixties with its many excellent antique and bric-a-brac shops, auction rooms and bookshops. That’s all gone. Replaced by crap coffee chains with people walking around the town like zombies holding plastic cups full of some marshmallow nastiness at two quid a throw! That’s now the bright new imaginative culture of coffee drinking in Bath!

Can you imagine anyone doing graffiti art in Bath? I mean we’re talking death here! But then I have to tell you readers, life is full of surprises and the spontaneous spirit, even in Bath, does find its ways. As for the City burghers the brightest most imaginative thing they could do would be to find a place, and there are many, where local graffiti art candidates might get to work and reinvigorate the cultural scene. Then the Council, being who and what they are, could charge an admission fee and bring more money into its coffers. Residents and pensioners getting a miserly ten percent discount, the tourists paying full whack! Now that’s a really new way of making money out of municipal art and besides, the old reprobates would even come up smelling of roses. But then Bath is Bath and they’d never contemplate such a thing. Or would they? We’ve all heard about people who’d sell their own mothers for a couple of quid.

Finally and more generally, environment is very important, particularly for young people who only too unselfconsciously grow up in them. What they live in becomes part of them. Makes them who they are. In time what they become. Take note of the fact. Let it help you become someone different than a troubled teenager or a self-satisfied prig!