Why the Beatles sound better under Cameron than under NuLab

Yes, yes, I know I posted here many times in the run-up to the last election that I'd never be able to listen to the Beatles again once the social tribe I had wrongly believed they had laughed out of power for good in 1964 was back in government.  Yes, yes, I did listen to "I Should Have Known Better" on election night, staring desperately at the sea I've so often wished could be drained to nothing, genuinely believing it would be the last time.  But strangely enough, things didn't turn out that way.  The Beatles actually sound better to me now - stranger, more rebellious, more of a challenge to the dominant ideology of the ruling elite - than at any time since before the Blairites and their pop-cultural allies got hold of them and turned them into a front for all the timewarping and imposing of fixed agendas on the working class that they ever opposed in their time.  The Beatles - or at least their mutant, uncontrollable side (why did I ever dismiss "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" as blues-bore purism?  It's easily the best and strangest thing on Abbey Road - an album which otherwise offers ample proof as to precisely why their split was necessary, and the fact that a teenage Alan Parsons was an engineer on it is frighteningly, chillingly apt) - have been rehabilitated, freed from elite manipulation, by the very event I thought would finally rob them of all meaning for good.

What has made the difference is that our current rulers come from the first generation for whom the Beatles are Before Their Time, a mere detail that contains no personal or emotional resonance and may have been dismissed as an unwelcome parental imposition (indeed, their adolescence was during the very period often dismissed during the Blair/Britpop ascendancy for not sufficiently venerating the band).  George Osborne was born a year after Let It Be was released. But Ed Miliband was also, crucially, born when they had more or less ceased to exist.  It works both ways; the Beatles being History (if not quite, yet, Proper History) to a politician may be a factor in a complete inability to see that alternatives to neoliberalism even exist, a significant reinforcement in an institutional belief that pop culture is merely a front for increasing elite power, but it might also be a reason (Miliband was born at Murdoch's first Christmas; McDonald's first came to London when he was four) for that politician being open to at least quasi-socialist ideas on the organisation of British society, without being blinded - as the Blairites were - by the misleading childhood glamour of Radio Caroline and tabloids and fast food seeming exotic and unobtainable.  Not having lived in the pre-Murdoch world utterly closes some politicians to other options, but makes some politicians far more open to other ways than those who actually grew up in it were.

Virtually throughout the first thirty years of my life (with a slight reversion to older ways under John Major) Britain was governed by former members of one or other of the two great revolutionary movements of 1974.  In my childhood, during which most of my considerable pleasures came from the dying embers of the pre-1979 world, those who - after early political careers which they would later dismiss, with Britain itself at that time, as drifting and directionless - sensed that their time might be coming when they Found Themselves as part of the right-wing anti-state movement of the mid-1970s held sway.  In my late teens and twenties, from which I can take few positive recollections of any kind, erstwhile members of the mid-70s radical student-left who had also supported the withering away of the state, albeit for entirely different reasons, came to the fore, having created a brilliantly cynical hybrid between their old pop-cultural loyalties and 80s neoliberalism which they (absolutely and entirely correctly) now recognised was a far more potent and workable method of enforcing their anti-old-establishment cultural visions and post-Marxist enthusiasm for global capitalism - the capitalist stage of the Marxist process with the ending changed (a phrase which effectively describes New Labour, the American neoconservatism it embraced so enthusiastically, and to a great extent Thatcherism; never forget Alfred Sherman's political origins).

But now, for the first time, those whose political thinking was developed during the tumult unleashed by Harold Wilson's cathartic defeat-in-victory have retired from the front rank, never to return. In the process, the Beatles really have become Proper History - and thus, as they never were before 2010, immune to the distortions and misinterpretations of the political process.  Nothing can touch them now; the elite no longer care anyway.  We have a rising political elite for whom the mid-1970s were about nothing so much as Brian Cant and Geoffrey Hayes (if even that), not a grand-scale left-right power struggle.  And that can mean anything the politicians want it to.  It can mean what George Osborne wants it to mean, or what Ed Miliband wants it to mean.  What do you want it to mean?  That is as decisive a question in 2012 as "what do you want the collapse of the post-war consensus to mean?" was in 1975.  Nobody can afford not to answer it.  There is the Cliff Richard / Duran Duran / Dappy answer, or the Beatles / Human League / Trilla answer.  How will you answer for yourself, if the judgement of history condemns you for not giving the latter answer sufficiently loudly and forcefully here, now?

2012 as reverse 1975: further evidence

Shiraz Socialist think Jon Cruddas is hopeless and any new ideas Labour might have are futile.  Well, with the best of respect (and they deserve quite a bit, not least for being one of the few left blogs not to put opposition to "the West" in totality before the right of the Jewish people to a place of safety), they would.  They're theorists, so obsessed with ideological purity that they're above concern about people's actual lives.  The left equivalent, in some ways, of those on the right (and there were quite a lot of them, though very few would admit to it later) who thought neoliberals were already permanently defeated by 1975 so shouldn't even bother trying to seize power.  And this is where the key comparison steps in; as I've written previously, almost every aspect of current British politics is redolent of the mid-1970s, only with the right in the position the left were then, and vice versa.  Dominic Sandbrook's recent work has been well-timed in a manner he probably did not intend, and may well disapprove of.

Raised as my generation have been in an environment where capitalism has seemed unalterable, irreversible and unreformable, we cannot easily consider a time when, having recently made a stalled and overpowered attempt to assert itself over the dominant ideology of corporatism, it momentarily stood on the sidelines, humiliated, forced out of government almost overnight, genuinely seeming doomed in the eyes of quite rounded and educated people (it is incredible how little the Barber Boom / Slater-Walker Government period, so rapidly overthrown and so widely seen as ineffective and compromised, but in fact so crucial as a blueprint for what now had to be enforced much more aggressively and forcefully, is even talked about now, and I'll give Sandbrook his due for recognising its importance - I'd be surprised if 1% of the people who've heard The Dark Side of the Moon, which however codified and vague and globally-applicable its lyrics may be wouldn't exist without that context, know who those people and organisations were).

Hauntingly, a Welsh miner in the 1975 polemic The Miners' Film - repeated, with rueful introduction and epilogue, on Channel 4 during the strike a decade later - says, without irony or ambiguity, "we're gradually understanding now that the greatest power, the most important people, are the people that produce.  And I believe that 1974 was the turning point, when this power was realised for the first time".  At that point, few could see that it would be the turning point, but the turning point for a counter-revolution; not the moment where the working class began to take over, but the moment which unleashed and set free the neutering of that class's political power. There is, I'll confess, not a day - sometimes not a moment - when I don't imagine how different my life, and the norms I came to take for granted, might have been had the Tories won the February 1974 election (and they very nearly did) and the radicalisation of capitalism had not been given the platform to grow.  Might we have become a completely different country; no destruction of industry, no Murdoch empire, no commodification of politics?

But when the radicalisation of capitalism gained irresistible traction - despite having come about merely through an accident and a fluke of history, and despite being institutionalised after its early struggles in government through, as we've all been reminded this year, an even greater accident and fluke - it did so out of a sense of emergency, of absolute determination and now-or-never politics-of-apocalypse, out of a genuine and justified fear that if they didn't get back in next time, their whole world would have crumbled and could never be restored (when do you think you the phrase "late capitalism", which seemed a sick joke by the time I became familiar with it, was first used?  Why do you think, even though Roger Waters is so clearly a nihilistic cynic with little if any faith in the radical potential of humanity, Animals ends with the hint of genuine revolution?).  In Cruddas' Observer interview, the same feelings in reverse - a determination that this radicalisation of a three-decade consensus, by its creators now turned far more fundamentalist and fanatical than they could ever have been when the seeds were first planted, has to be reversed for everyone's sake and not just the sake of the class the party may be seen to represent (part of Thatcherism's genius - and it was a genius; hardly anyone else could have sold such ideas to the working class and won - was its ability to convey essentially pro-ruling-class politics as more democratic than those which had preceded them, to redefine the position of the working class as making Andy Gray rich rather than allowing Trevor Griffiths to exist) - can, fascinatingly, be sensed.

However tentatively, and however problematic some of the communitarian ideas may be in practice, Cruddas is hinting at the idea that what may be presented by the ruling class as "unalterable reality" may, in fact, be reformable by those with the will - in other words that it is time for the left to "think the unthinkable" as the right did then (and this is where many left blogs are, ultimately, as relevant to the lives of the people they claim to represent as those who felt neoliberals should remain in their academic fringe groups rather than push to "change the way a generation thinks about politics" were relevant to the capitalist class and its self-interest in 1975).  His talk of "the edge of a crisis" has not been heard in quite this way from thinkers in a recently defeated party, seen as lacking in vision and confidence and with a need to reinvent itself, since that time, when those with an interest in maintaining their own privileges blamed an economic implosion caused by global forces wholly outside Britain's control, even then, on the strength and power of the British working class, and interpreted any kind of working-class role in the institutions of the state as a harbinger of the collapse of the state itself.  The sense of time running out before neoliberalism becomes utterly irreversible - that the even flow of politics, with one ruling party seamlessly giving way to another and little really changing, has to be replaced with something more dramatic and fervent - is also redolent of the Tory radicals who emerged in the wake of Heath's humiliation; a desire to remake/remodel politics as an urgent battle, a fight to the finish that must be won by the side remaking itself in opposition, lest everything that side has ever fought for be destroyed irreversibly.

Cruddas' refreshing indifference to the power of the Daily Mail and its ilk is redolent of the mid-70s Tory radicals' lack of concern for the Daily Mirror, then still the most read and most important newspaper for the mass of the population and a key cipher in its relationship with the elite, a paper that - even with the fast-rising Sun nipping at its heels - it was still felt you did not mess with if you wanted the working class on your side.  And the fact that the elite ideology of the last 30 years was created in what seemed the least welcoming and receptive environment imaginable to capitalism reigniting itself and owning the near future - and indeed that of its two defining newspapers, The Sun in 1968 did not even exist in its current form and the Mail was on the racks, facing a seemingly insoluble identity crisis and inability to find a niche for itself - should remind us of an important fact; that what seem like unalterable, unchangeable ideologies only become so because a few people think the unthinkable against all the odds and against both subservience to the elite ideology on the side that created it and "you can't change anything now" cynicism on the side that didn't.  This is so both for the current ruling ideology and for the ruling ideology that came before, the one that radicals of both sides were tearing at by 1974.

This is the sick joke behind those who say that rejecting neoliberal capitalism now would be like rejecting breathing or eating, that it is an unchangeable reality on a par with air or water.  It only became so because a few people believed that the world didn't have to work like that.  If it can happen once, it can happen again.  This is the main lesson we can learn from the 1970s; that predictions that a change is "unworkable" and "impractical" may well be viewed by history as, quite simply, wrong.  And just as the knowledge that in the 1930s most of the ideas written into the British state after the war would have been seen as hopelessly romantic and deluded probably convinced many Institute of Economic Affairs ideologues that there was mileage in practical politics for them after 1974, it is this which keeps me away from the anti-political cynicism of the far-left, however accurate some of their other analyses may be.

Of course, I'm acutely aware that I could have got all this wrong. Perhaps, out of sheer desperation and desire to escape from the world that made me and which I rejected as assuredly as the makers of modern Britain rejected the corporatist world they had been brought up to see as unchangeable, I am seeing things where they don't exist. But it does seem as though, just as the radicalism of a minority Labour government convinced a previously marginalised and embattled right that the platform was there for the unthinkable to be thought and the future redefined, so has the radicalism of a government without a mandate, which was formed out of almost nothing and which speaks for nobody except the privileged, opened the door for ideas which it seemed might never have a place in the Labour Party again.

Had the right confined itself to theoretical writings and Peterhouse debating societies, Britain might well have become permanently socialist; that alone should convince far-leftists who see practical politics as beneath them that for those of us who care about any kind of social justice and equality, this is an emergency, a time when normal rules of politesse cease to apply, every bit as much as it was for those of the other side in the mid-1970s.  Just as was the case then, there is a straight choice of outcome for the next general election (the Lib Dems' involvement in the coalition has effectively ended the century-old centre-left divide and, surely, pushed much of their support towards Labour): either the paradigm shift that history teaches us should happen every 35 years or so, or the inverse of the ending that to many seemed most likely in the mid-70s, neoliberalism's long march through the institutions being completed beyond repair.

Last time, they won, and successfully changed the ending from the one widely seen as inevitable to the one that created the only world I've ever lived in.  This time - however much it would compromise some people's self-regard - we need to make sure that we win, and change the ending to our advantage.  They only won because every last one of them joined in.  If we realise that, then 2015 could well be remembered as the next in the lineage of 1945 and 1979.  Anti-political cynics should not complain if Cameron leaves office, never seriously challenged, in about 2021.  They will have got precisely what they deserve.  Amid that 70s tumult, Roy Harper correctly wrote that the victor writes the books but the loser speaks the lines. But in moments of crisis and uncertainty - such as we have now entered again - losers have the chance, which comes along perhaps only three times in a normal human lifetime, to become victors off their own back, a chance that simply is not open to them in normal times of complacency and certainty.  This is such a moment.  Even if "reformism" seems narrow and restrictive, we must remember that the initial ideas of the Centre for Policy Studies, which were to revolutionise much of the world, initially seemed merely the Tory equivalent of reformism.  The door is open.  To help our enemies to close it in the name of our own sectarianism and purity would be the most dangerous decision of anyone's lifetime, one for which our grandchildren will hate us.  The time simply isn't there.  Critique and question Cruddas' ideas by all accounts; there are certainly plenty of holes there.  But don't, whatever you do, ignore them.

English football and modern England: getting America wrong, badly

(Many thanks, as so often, to David Conn in The Guardian for placing the idea of this article in my mind)

Between the collapse of the culture of imperial entitlement and autarky and the rise of the culture of neoliberalism and institutionalised inequality and poverty disguised as "democracy", getting America wrong was what made Britain great. For all that it may have been used as a sticking plaster on Britain's ongoing failings in so many areas (it is important for those of us who prefer the economic model of that time not to deny that the seeds of its demise were sown very, very early on), the creative misinterpretation of American music - specifically the music isolated and ghettoised in a semi-apartheid society - was the starting point for a cultural rebirth, genuinely convincing many that the collapse of British power could be the starting point for a whole new form of invention and challenge.

Everything in English football that has led to Liverpool's statement of intent yesterday is the byproduct of the years when all that broke down, when Sunday evening Channel 4 brought in a misunderstood image of American-ness - now with no pretence to any kind of true democratisation, merely the neoliberal mirage of "freedom" - as the way out of a dying prole culture that was by then so rotten, so vile, that it didn't deserve to survive. This piece is a brief argument - a whole book could be written about it, and should be - that with different politics and a different way of seeing the world, we could have found a quite different way out, which quite apart from being truer and fairer to the people of modern England, would also have been truer and fairer to the people of the United States.

This is very obviously not how the NFL appeared to British audiences during the Huey Lewis / Miami Vice years that unconsciously begat the Premier League, but American sports are in at least two ways profoundly un-American, at least in terms of the idea of American-ness that defines modern Britain; they have a quasi-socialist structure (a vitally important fact which is not generally known in the UK for all the most predictable reasons; both new and old prejudices are at fault here) and they are not globally exported. If they had been - for which you would probably have needed the US to have been an active, unashamed imperial power in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Oceania when Britain was, rather than mired in its own isolationism whose legacy is still reflected in sport - English football would have been most unlikely to gain its scale of global appeal; it has got this big because England seems, on a broader cultural level, like the Next Best Thing to aspirational Westerners, and the involvement of American capitalists in English football has to do with the fact that it offers them the chance to be American in the most stereotypical (and, within British socialism, pejorative) sense - extreme financial dominance over their lesser rivals, without any institutional structures to bridge the divide and make the sports more fair, and status as a ubiquitous global product - which they could have if they worked in the US film or pop music industries, but which their own sports deny them.

It is a harsh irony that it is Liverpool that should have instigated this; when the Beatles got America wrong, they made its influences much more socialist, much more collectivist than they had been originally (yes, yes, I know, first track on Revolver from now till doomsday, yes, yes, I know, Oliver Smedley, but earlier on they'd taken "Money (That's What I Want)" and somehow, miraculously, made its legacy, its impact, seem wholly compatible with the politics of the Left), but now the city's most successful team - which was at the core of the tragedies from which Thames Estuary politics dictated that neoliberalism was the only way out, even though most of their core supporters knew, and still know, that it wasn't - have taken one of the few aspects of American society that is comparatively socialist and collectivist and made it a parody of greed and selfishness; a parody of its supposed inspiration that only reveals how little it knows about it, and what it is, and why and how it is what it is (Thatcherites, Blairites and Cameronites, in this respect, have actually understood America significantly less than Macmillanites did back in the birth years of British consumerism).

This is the inevitable legacy of the Thatcher-and-onwards interpretation of American-ness which gets its source wrong in a manner as socially alienating and divisive as the beat groups getting America wrong (not least in terms of identifying with its oppressed classes, and recognising the Bobby Vees and Neil Sedakas as the playthings and safety valves of the very same overclass that had oppressed them, here) was socially unifying and utopian. To say that English football has become "more American than the Americans" would be too simplistic, only halfway there; a fairer analysis is that it has become the embodiment of a fundamental misinterpretation of a country which in fact - however it presents itself today - was not founded on mere consumerism and certainly not on glorifying inequality for its own sake, and is every bit as patronising, ahistorical and anti-democratic as any "Greece to their Rome" paternalism ever was. English football in 2011 is not doing America proud. It is, in its own way, letting America down just as much as the Tea Party.

Obviously English football was broken beyond repair in the mid-1980s (which is why those who call Stoke City a "breath of fresh air" are so enraging) but those who, desperate to escape Songs of Praise and Highway, flicked between "St Elmo's Fire" on the Network Chart and the Chicago Bears during the blackout really didn't know what they were doing. It wasn't their fault, obviously; they were the victims of someone else's ideology. But think of the difference; the Beatles didn't know what they were doing when they first heard R&B and Motown, but they did something wonderful and liberating almost by accident. The gridiron class of '86 also did something almost by accident, but something that strengthened and enforced elite power as definitively as pop originally promised to erode it. In the light of what the Premier League has become, that moment stands out as the decisive time when getting America wrong ceased to be a force for liberation and became a force for dehumanisation, when it ceased to be our national saving grace and became, instead - sadly unpredicted and unpredictable - our greatest national sickness.

Radio considered as a metaphor for a nation: part 32413

So Capital Radio - a London behemoth for 37 years - is coming to large swathes of the rest of the UK on FM. In reality, it's merely the logical conclusion of a process that's been under way for two decades. Like the post-war mixed economy model that created them, the original ILR stations - the ones that routinely interspersed "(Keep Feeling) Fascination" and "Blue Monday" with plugs for jumble sales - were, for all their positive attributes, uneasy hybrids constantly being pushed in two conflicting, irreconcilable directions. One of these decisively triumphed over the other with the Act of 20 years ago, and within half a decade most of what existed in the commercial sector was "local" only in the most theoretical sense, coming from interchangeable buildings in interchangeable towns and playing interchangeable music. The development of British commercial radio - instigated by Heath, stopped in its tracks for a while by Labour and the Annan Committee - was flawed and compromised on multiple levels, but it could not have been anything else because to get on the air at all, even 30 years ago, it was necessary to appeal to local elites, quasi-feudal fiefdoms whose power even as late as that now seems literally unbelievable. The quasi-nationalisation of commercial FM pop radio in Britain seems to sum up the final death of restricted, small-scale local semi-capitalism, the point when the last link (outside, perhaps, a few unrepresentative fringe areas, many outside England where the rules may still be different) between pop and the old structures it used to have to fit itself around is symbolically broken for good.

Inevitably, the very people who lament the coming of unbridled Top 40 commercial radio on FM, with no lingering ties to place and history, are very often the same people who yearned for precisely that kind of radio (the offshore stations were every bit as short-term capitalist and dismissive of all other interests as Global Radio is, the only difference was that the political consensus then didn't approve of such things) during their formative years, usually some point between Suez and the coming of the new capitalism, roughly 1956 to 1984. For all they moaned about the "communist" tactics of the Wilson government against the offshore stations, and lamented the poor reception of Radio Luxembourg, they'd have been secretly repulsed had the British state embraced and celebrated pop music, and given them multiple commercial networks plus a BBC equivalent. Had such a thing happened back then, most of these future Thatcher voters would have been exposed as establishmentarians in disguise, at least as right-wing as their parents, and that would never have done. The old restrictions were deceptively convenient for the boomers to the extent that they gave them a platform to define themselves as "rebellious" and "anti-establishment" far beyond their true status as such on the issues that really mattered.

As pop has become the establishment culture to which all seeking power must conform (Brown's real undoing; we're just too close to it to see it yet) the more intelligent and thoughtful of those raised between the collapse of British power and the advent of naked capitalism in the UK may well feel, as I do, disillusioned with pop as a direct result of the Blairite degradation of the political process. But they are outnumbered by those who merely wish for the old restrictions to be continued as a means of covering their tracks - anything to avoid facing how right-wing and kneejerk they actually are, anything to avoid dealing with the fact that they are the masters now. Most of the rest of Europe has had national commercial FM pop radio for years, and in many ways it makes sense for Britain to follow, and use digital methods to fill the gaps; the only reason it hasn't had this sort of radio until now is deep-rooted official inertia (the continental equivalents of Radios 3 and 4 manage to take up far less of the spectrum than their BBC counterparts) and the fact that the decision-makers when the national commercial licences were given out in the pre-Blair early '90s were still of a wholly different generation. But the further institutionalisation of Britain as a deregulated quasi-American economy - everything the ILR anoraks wished for when they were young - unsettles that generation on multiple levels; quite apart from finally exposing them as the self-serving right-wingers they've been for practically half a century, it makes bad pop sound, for the first time, exactly as bad as it is. For every "Good Vibrations" or "Strawberry Fields Forever" the offshore stations played vast quantities of boring banality which, in itself, was and is no better and no worse than most of what the new Capital will play. It's just that the old romanticism of scarcity made bad pop sound good. Now it has to stand up for and of itself, and within the orthodoxies of Anglo-American capitalism it isn't pretty. Now, more than ever, we have to look elsewhere.

Message to HKM

Why should you be surprised about Mick Jagger doing a right-wing song in 1987? He did more to promote neoliberalism in Britain, and break down the post-war settlement, than even Keith Joseph.

30 years of unfettered support for neoliberal capitalism and hatred of socialist "restrictions" on business end ...

... here.

It is hollow, aimless, nihilistic rage in the end, of course, which will not achieve its supposed aims, partially because there is still no major party that supports them, partially because our inherently corrupt electoral system prevents such a party emerging, and partially because - however much it may resent the "fat cats" now - Middle England is quite simply hoist by its own petard.  The process that has trapped it in impotence is of its own making.

Revisit how it started tomorrow night (ultimately, though, the guilty parties are those who voted Labour in February 1974 because Enoch Powell told them to, thus giving the unions a rope long enough to destroy themselves and give the neoliberals justification for their grand-scale fuckup of almost everyone else's lives).