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).

Not even Sky could take it in the end ...

... as we now know.

I fear it is just about on Five's level, and Ofcom's inaction is not good news, though the sight and sound of Edmonds in full "Stand Up and Be Counted" mode should - hopefully - make them shudder at the implications of such a thing being in almost every home in the UK, rather than merely those who choose to give Murdoch their money.

The political ramifications of the ITV-STV standoff

as reported here.

STV were never the most loved of ITV franchises - for years, they were perceived (as they clearly still are by several posters to this thread) as dominated by a narrow, shortbread-tin version of Scotland, and the impression I get from those who lived through the 1960s/70s is that Grampian (which they have now absorbed, much to the chagrin of many in the north of the country) presented a paradoxically more forward-looking and cosmopolitan idea of what Scotland could be, despite serving a more conservative area (and before the great SNP breakthrough of 1974 still a quite widely Conservative area, despite the collapse of imperial unity). Nonetheless, this is clearly an important moment, especially considering that for a while STV (which intends to show at least two black and white films at peak time on Sunday night, it would appear!) seemed to be becoming essentially an ITV1 relay station.  The conflict seems to anticipate, almost word for word and ideology for ideology, the standoff which is the most likely outcome of the next UK general election.

STV is clearly playing the long game.  It's hedging its bets on Scotland feeling so disenfranchised by a Tory government at Westminster which has, in all likelihood, barely increased its current total of one Scottish seat that it opts to leave the union altogether.  At that point, I suspect, it intends to merge with what is now BBC Scotland to form a new Scottish PSB (notice how it is using that Reithian aphorism, even if it is in a different order).  As is mentioned in the Digital Spy thread, it would no doubt be competing with a wholly deregulated ITV1 on its doorstep, and plenty of other commercial broadcasters which would continue to operate in Scotland (cultural autarky is no longer an SNP aim, really), but it would have an audience, and probably a greater one than most DS posters are willing to admit.

The question is: would that be enough?  Scotland only sustains its higher investment in public services and more "public" social ethos, epitomised in STV's quasi-Reithian language, because of English money.  Likewise, STV can only do what it's doing - aiming to capitalise on a growing sense of disconnection from the UK by moving away from being the ITV1 relay station it had seemed destined to become - because it gets enough viewers for Coronation Street, Emmerdale and The X-Factor to sustain it, at least for the time being.  Scotland's only hope of sustaining its stronger public sector, the strengthening of which would be precisely why many Scots would want to break ties with neoliberal Westminster, would be EU funding, and lots of it.  To be fair, I think Scotland might succeed in that aim, especially if (as would clearly be its role model) it takes the same proactive approach to the EU as Ireland has, rather than whinging a la Westminster.  The question for a post-switchover STV would be: could it find a similar key to the door?

Another whitewashing of the '60s

from Simon Garfield.

Not that what he writes is strictly untrue, of course, but we have all heard it so many times, and now - more than ever - we need to hear the hidden history of '60s rock culture, how its desperate, death-or-glory, inherently pro-self and anti-collective call actually shared much common ground (obsessive desire to break out of the post-war state and its nationalised norms) with the Institute of Economic Affairs, how it failed to see that, in terms of economic equality of opportunity and social provision, the world in which its protagonists then lived - however stodgy and literal-conservative it seemed to them - was, in fact, as good as it was going to get in this country, how its libertarian streak was harnessed and redefined by the New Right, who (I insist) couldn't have done what they did without the groundwork laid by rock culture's opposition to the post-war orthodoxy.

Needless to say, neither Garfield nor the ludicrous film his article is effectively promoting (and which I shall not name) makes no mention of any of this - now, after so many years of '60s rock culture being mythologised to death and beyond, the only interesting thing anyone could write about the offshore radio movement.  Nor does he mention the immensely important (as acknowledged by Andrew Marr, and you don't get more consensual these days than that) political allegiances of Oliver Smedley.  Nor do either he or Johnnie Walker mention the fact that the latter's current Saturday-night Radio 2 show only exists because a gap was left in the schedules when the Daily Mail went into its crazed "get that n***** off the front page" spasms. That very fact alone sums up precisely what the offshore nostalgia movement is today.  No wonder none of them want to admit it.

Self-correction

N-Dubz are wankers.  What was I thinking at New Year?  The Tinchy Stryder & Kid Cudi singles which have also crossed over to Clubland TV are great, though.

best news of the week

he did settle down, he wasn't the rolling stone

Damn right

about the suppression of thought and invention in primary schools - "utilarian and philistine times" indeed

NuLab's obsession with "standards" does not even succeed by its own theoretical criteria, because throughout their period of government they have been in hock to the very forces which do most to erode those "standards", even elevating the most powerful individual in that field to the level of honorary cabinet minister against whom all vaguely contentious policies must be checked and, accordingly, diluted beyond recognition.  They have in fact given us the worst of all worlds, regressing to the most depressingly narrow and rigid elements of pre-1964 education, only with far greater pressure on teachers and completely devoid of the contempt for the worst aspects of mass culture which both Reithians/Hoggartists and rock'n'rollers who thrive on the illusion of rebellion can agree was pre-1964 mass education's only real saving grace (and even if you are of the Brendan O'Neill "hating anything that is popular equates to hating the mass of the population for who they are" school, you must concede that rhetoric about "standards" makes no sense unless such views are also held, or at least accepted).  The only thing stopping me from saying that no government could be as morally low as this one is the knowledge that its successor will almost certainly be even lower.