Why the Daily Mail and the Tory Right hate and fear the Olympics opening ceremony

Is there still, nigh-on half a century after Enoch Powell and Peter Griffiths, something in the water in the West Midlands (which begat Aidan Burley)?  Am I wrong in fearing that anyone I hear with the accent (which in itself, unlike seemingly everyone else from the rest of the country, I rather like) has moved here for all the wrong reasons?

But my very existence shows how dangerous the Mail's hysterical (the hysteria of those facing and fearing defeat and comeuppance, as I will come round to later) attacks on the opening ceremony actually are.  I'm white.  I've lived more than half my life in Dorset.  I like grime.  I like it because I find it far more relevant to my life than Official British Music (whether that is classical or rock).  I am sure that Paul Dacre would have me and many others hanged as race traitors, but that is the truth.  This isn't 1963-style fogeyism.  Nor is it simply considering rap to be a new and unfamiliar form, as it might once have been (Burley is only 18 months older than me; British acts like the Cookie Crew and MC Tunes were having crossover hits when he was a kid; when "Rapper's Delight" charted, he'd have been in the cradle).

This isn't about music or the way music sounds; this is politics, pure and simple, and it has its roots in the defining territory of left-right politics ever since "we all agreed" on economic matters (Hitchens Minor's objection to the very inclusion of suffragettes - suffragettes! - is, even in Mail land, too far gone to be worth discussing; Burley's assumptions unfortunately aren't).  Burley's belief that Dizzee Rascal "didn't belong" is simply a result of the fact that it contravened the right-wing idea that Britishness is a multi-tiered thing - that some people who know no country but this are less British than others, that national belonging is not something equal to all those born and brought up here but something tightly graded and classified and separated.

The same philosophy dictates - actually for arbitrary reasons which are dressed up as though they were objective and final - that a form of music which has been hybridised and mixed in with other forms here for thirty years in a way that would never have been possible anywhere else (certainly not in the US) must still be considered less British than other forms which are equally imported and, quite often, more second-hand in the process.  There are plenty of other people and forms which do not get anything like this opprobrium whose claim to absolute, unalterable belonging here is just as subjective as that of Dizzee or the form of rap generally.

This has been the main factor separating Left and Right since the drawn-out collapse of traditional socialism (really a twenty-year process between roughly the mid-70s and mid-90s); the Left, broadly, believe that everything said or done in Britain is equally British, and that all people born and brought up here are equally British, whereas the Right believe, broadly, that there are levels and degrees of Britishness and that certain people and things need to stay in some kind of notional quarantine for longer before they can be seen as the equals of other people and things.  Sometimes the Left can go too far; some parts of the Left, out of a well-meaning desire to avoid seeming paternalistic or dominant, have failed to stand up for the victims of sexism and homophobia among British Muslims, and I don't defend that for one moment.  But even when Leftists allow cultural sensitivity to stop them standing up for people in minority groups who are treated badly, at least their intent was not to discriminate, even if it was misjudged.  Even when they go against their own principles over sexism or homophobia - and sometimes they do, and to their credit many who once did now admit that - it has been because they regard Britishness as a cake of which everyone living here has an equal share.  That is a far more noble mistake or misjudgement than anything made by Aidan Burley.

The main reason why the Mail and its fellow travellers have disliked the ceremony so much is that it fatally weakens their own politics. For decades, they have made fertile political capital out of the politics of "either-or" and "us-and-them" and ridiculous "if-you-want-this-you-must-want-that" assumptions and equations; if you like Elgar you can't like Dizzee and vice versa, if you think diversity is broadly a good thing you must think everyone who lives outside a major city is a fascist, if you support the NHS you must want ice cream vans nationalised.  Having seen the success of their American counterparts fuelled by the "culture-wars" narrative, they had worked out that they could achieve comparable success if they thought in similar terms, as the principal dividing line between them and the Left now that the latter had abandoned traditional economic goals.  And despite the universality of the BBC offering a residually common narrative which simply doesn't exist in the US (which of course is precisely why they want it carved up; had the Tories of 1986-1994 succeeded in reducing the BBC to a Telegraph letters page version of PBS and NPR, Dizzee would never have escaped his ghetto), they have had a good deal of success with it.

But then all of a sudden the Olympic opening ceremony comes along, and millions of people sense - instinctively - that it isn't either-or or us-and-them.  You can like and respect and respond to both Elgar and Dizzee, both the romantic national myth of the countryside and the achievements of the Industrial Revolution, both the older traditions cherished by the Right and the post-war developments cherished by the Left.  On Friday night, miraculously, it suddenly all seemed to be part of one narrative, part of a shared national story.  Millions of people - many of them the very people the Right think of as natural allies in a culture-wars narrative - had seen Dizzee and weren't frightened.  They recognised that this music isn't a break from the narrative of our history but a continuation of it.

And suddenly a disproportionately powerful minority - along with, much worse, their lumpenprole footsoldiers - get frightened.  They know that their power and success - at dividing and conquering - depends on one sort of working class seeing another sort of working class as alien, Not Like Them.  They know that if the Middle England millions think of Dizzee as part of the same culture as them, part of the same narrative rather than something outside it, that fatally weakens their dominance, their ability to set the national narrative in terms of who or what "fits" or "belongs".  They know that the Olympics' very ethos is wholly opposed to theirs - and they know that its application to Britain exposes their reading of our history as a partial and politicised one.

So really the success and popularity of, and national coming-together over, the Olympics opening ceremony suggests that millions of people who the Mail and the Tory Right thought were loyal footsoldiers in the culture wars might actually hold a far more open and broader view, a far less narrow and exclusive one, of what it is to be part of this country.  And a certain set of people cannot face that, as they know it might mark the end of their ability to set the agenda. It's exactly the same as the retrenchment to fear and nativism that has gripped the US Republicans since the moment Obama got in, and which lies behind their terrifying attempts effectively to fix the election through disenfranchising his most likely supporters.  It would have been far more surprising if people like Burley hadn't been so upset.  Twenty years ago nobody like Dizzee would have been there at all, because multi-tier Britishness was still far more dominant across the board.  The frustration of people like Burley is really the frustration of the impotent, those who know - secretly - that their short-term victories in culture-wars gesture-politics hide a deeper, long-term defeat.  And we know how that kind of frustration tends to come out ...

You may like to know

that the woman you saw last week on the Brits with Dizzee - a collaboration you would have put at number one were it not for elite pseudo-guilt and pseudo-care - sang the song of Yum-Yum from The Mikado by Gilbert & Sullivan at the memorial service for her grandfather, the former Daily Telegraph journalist Colin Welch, two weeks after the 1997 election, also attended by the likes of Charles Moore, Paul Johnson, Frank Johnson, Daniel Johnson, William Rees-Mogg, Philip Howard, Peregrine Worsthorne, Tom Utley, Peter Tapsell and Peter Hitchens, all of whom - odious as they mostly are - represent a far more peripheral threat to the public sphere than the NuTory clique which includes a considerable part of the British pop industry, and can be characterised by the worst and most culturally heinous accent in the history of British English, which does not even have the minor saving grace of being rich and fruity on an indulgently enjoyable level.

The me of 2003 would probably have welcomed with naive joy the day when such a thing could happen, when the man who represented my own coming cultural revolution could mix, without any apparent irony or public comment, with such a woman on the biggest pop stage of the year. But that was before I knew how capitalism actually works, and before I knew how deep-rooted inequality still is, before I knew that this sort of "coming-together" is worse than a sham, is a dangerous counter-revolutionary diversion planned to convince the ITV1 audience that All Are Equal Now, that Cameron loves you all and knows precisely how you live just because he used to work for us, that pop can Unite The World, can single-handedly eliminate the massive institutionalised divisions and structural unfairness of British society. I would have longed for such a day. I was wrong. It has come and the Right are cawing with greater satisfaction than ever. It means less than fuck all, worse than fuck all. It's an indictment of pop as safety valve, as subtle means of papering over every crack in the Cameron doctrine.

I still think Dizzee has a far greater talent than most who are allowed to get where he is - but he really ought to use the platform he has far more politically, to find some way out of his own contradictions. He has dramatised Britain's culture wars with vicious accuracy in his videos - that for "Sirens" makes clear precisely who would freeze him out of his own country, however much they may now dress themselves up in that other Machine (and isn't that the aptest band name ever? Pretty much an admission that this is a reassertion of elite control by other means) but the harsh truth is that, when he takes that ITV1 stage, he is little more than a dancing monkey for those very forces. At the very least, KLF 1992 tactics were necessary. But back then both major parties were led by serious politicians, and pop could still do such things. Now Dizzee is what I always hoped he could be, and it's the only thing worse than nothing.

Calm Before the Storm or The Camera Loves Me. At least nobody could ever pretend that those two could ever co-exist. At least both are, in their own wholly opposed ways, resolutely anti-Cameron. At such a time that feels like the only thing that matters at all.

However much he can irritate, nobody else could do this

nobody except Dizzee Rascal could get this on every music channel that might conceivably show it (and this version when I'm posting on here, exhausted). Nobody else could get into such a public environment such a brutal description of what neoliberal capitalism literally does: literally, the bonfire of thought, the symbolic destruction of any ambitions or aspirations anyone ever had that weren't built wholly on financial gain (that Diana shot is, clearly, not coincidental).

I'm still frustrated that he can't go further, indeed contradicts himself on the next track. But for this alone he deserves the praise of all those who want the pop myth destroyed and shown for what it is. He may still be that close, but he's closer than anyone else that deep in the public domain.

Should the below sound too much of a Jeremiad ...

these two 2009 UK number ones are the kind of pop that still speaks to me, somewhere within (Guetta/Rowland especially). And although it is very, very easy to get tired to death of it and it's obviously a miniscule fraction of what he's capable of, there is something about hearing Dizzee Rascal up there expressing precisely the state of permanent confusion so many of us feel (which is also, I think, what makes so many of us in England feel that Scotland or Wales, once so isolated and provincial and removed from where the action was, may be a better place for us not so long post-2010).

(It is significant, I think, that none of the main protagonists in the above songs are white and English ...)

And there's also this. It is strange to think that Jay-Z was ever the voice of relentless commercialism and self-promotion against the legacy of 1980s hip-hop (but oh, he was, and oh I hated/loved/hated/loved him for it). Perhaps he has become a reactionary, merely defending his territory. But all I know is that "Death of Auto-Tune" is as lacerating a six minutes as I've heard in aeons, and that it absolutely has to be heard.

Soulja Boys of the first colony

whatever you think of it, even if you think it really is the last trump, I think you must concede that this, like Soulja Boy Tell 'Em in the ruling power, is Where Things Are Right Now, where the lumpenproletariat finished up once all the structures died, everything that tells the New Culture from anything we knew even a few years back.  this, from now on, will be the norm.

(cannot stop myself remembering Dizzee Rascal's words of six years ago, to the effect that very soon his culture, or an interpretation of it, would be wholly universalised, and the panic and culture-war mentality that would create among the parental generation who'd got away from the cities specifically to avoid it.  looking at Portland now, you sense that moment has arrived.)

they have to be listened to - and noticed, and understood - by anyone interested in precisely where the places whose previous culture collapsed so swiftly in the 1980s, and which will almost certainly soon feel as alienated and as unrepresented as they did then, are going.  they surpass academia.  they're appallingly necessary.  I can't stop listening to them.

No. No. No. Please God, no.

No.

I long since lost any meaningful faith in Dizzee, of course, but even now I hope he has the faith not to play any part in 'Reload: The Next Generation While I Can Still Talk'.