I'd never have watched or listened to him - but I'm still worried

I never bothered with Jonathan Ross, either on radio or television. I always found his shows tediously smug and self-centred, musically either actively bad or just plain irrelevant. But I am still nervous about the implications of his departure, because it represents a victory for a section of British society which simply does not understand the concept of mutual tolerance, which alone has kept the BBC going since Reithianism became untenable. Dacre's mob genuinely appear to resent any of their money going to anything they do not personally like, a frightening level of intolerance which I don't think is shared, on the whole, by those on the other side (of course you get posts on certain forums opining that Radio 3 should be axed, but I don't think it runs to anything like the same extent). Quite apart from the fact that the people who think "their" newspapers want to save at least a high-cultural, hierarchical idea of the BBC simply don't understand that those papers are in fact owned by market fundamentalists who, if they had their way, would end all funding of the sort of broadcasting they pretend to care about. And they, riddled as ever with lies and contradictions, have just achieved a major victory, which will render them far more confident to destroy at some future point - or at least fatally marginalise - those who genuinely are culturally and politically subversive.

Jonathan Ross was not even remotely comparable to anyone on 1Xtra - his shows, unlike those on that station, were full of the new elite and its footsoldiers. But that does not mean that those involved with 1Xtra should not be frightened.

Fighting the conservative within, fighting the conservatives without

Some years back - I forget precisely which year it was now, the mid-2000s all merge into each other - I destroyed a certain number of CDs and books in my posession.  Now I'm no great admirer of most of the material I wanted rid of, but I still think it was a deeply regressive, backward, insular and wrong-headed act to destroy it.  This is partially because I now think it's immensely important to keep some representation of everything you've ever liked or believed, every phase you've ever been through, every ideology you've ever touched, and partially because at least some of the CDs were - for all their often questionable merits - representative of the world which the Right fear most viciously and vociferously (and at least one of them also stands as a foundation stone for much that I listen to now).  I may have tried to dress it up in all kinds of portentous clothing - the music represented selfishness, the antithesis of socialism and even social democracy, arrogance, a warlike mentality, the oppressed fighting each other rather than their oppressors - but deep inside, I have a terrible fear now, what motivated me was pure conservatism, a base-level revulsion at the cultural shift these people's very existence represents.  And the knowledge that I destroyed these things now fills me with the deepest shame, and may have helped me on the road back.

For there is a conservative hidden within me, and the desire to fight it runs in parallel with my desire to destroy similar forces without.  And that desire is the reason why I did not listen to a pre-recorded freestyle (but of course) on Cameo's 1Xtra show this evening.  I simply could not stand being reminded of the way the petty-minded bigotry of a certain part of British culture and society, a part which I was once willing to sup with, even make allegiances of convenience with, has been imposed on the tastes of a quite different part of British society and on stations which no non-specialists would ever touch, has been allowed to overpower the basic cultural principle of laissez-faire (which I only now truly believe in - I will not start on the implications of at least some of those petty-minded bigots' hypocritical support, still dragged on through its ashes, for the economic version of that idea).  I did not want to think of the way they not only attempt to impose ridiculous criteria on every single thing the BBC does (as if there was still "one" nation, one broadcasting audience, which there wasn't even when the pretence that there was was at its height) but are - in several cases - taking such a stance as a cover for a quite different, even more unsettling ideology (to bring in the obligatory Hitchens Minor reference, I suspect that an Anglo-paleoconservative such as PH genuinely does believe that there should be a BBC, he's just too naive and stupid to see that imposing the criteria on the BBC which he dreams of would be the surest way of destroying it).

At least The Sun is honest enough to come out openly against any public service broadcasting, a position it knows will not offend its younger, less literal-conservative readership.  The Mail, Times and Telegraph, read as they are by significant numbers of older BBC loyalists, cannot take the same stance, so they have to be nastily twisted and roundabout in their reasoning: their current great scheme is, I think, to cow the BBC into such submission that it becomes simply a public service broadcaster for the public of 50 years ago (what Mail readers in particular wrongly think both their paper and the Tory party want), to the point where everyone younger and/or freer of thought simply goes elsewhere - in the case of grime to pirates in London, to the internet elsewhere - at which point they can say that the BBC no longer has universal appeal, so a universal licence fee is no longer justifiable, so ... and then, too late, the readers of the more literal-conservative right-wing papers will discover that they have also lost the programmes they like, that their "friends" were disguised enemies.  During the Brand/Ross witchhunt, an entire cultural world was led - as we have rarely seen before in this country - into believing that those who also want to take away their personal preferences wanted to defend them.

(incidentally, re. my comments in that post, I am still no personal fan of either Brand or Ross - but this is a wider issue, and the naivety of David "my grandfather wouldn't even have a Freeview box in his house because you could potentially get porn on it, even if it wasn't free-to-air" Lindsay over this issue pretty much forced me away from his blog and from the wider romantic / trad-left-meets-trad-right / ostentatiously pre-pop view of Britain, probably the right decision on my part.  I also think, in another comment there a couple of days earlier, I should have been much harder on Quentin Letts.  But these are the lessons you learn: there are friends I have lost - through my own mid-2000s ideological fanaticism and desperation for absolute, unattainable, risible levels of emotionless human perfection, mainly - who I genuinely miss, but people like Lindsay are fundamentally anti-me, although for too long my conservative streak was strong enough that I could believe they weren't.)

But I have this profound fear that, far from being a short-term ideological diversion to "get that n***** off the front page" (although even that is before one even begins to discuss the irony of Andrew Sachs' background, and the fact that, had the British government always been in hock to the Mail, he might well simply have been another of the "six million screaming souls"), the Brand/Ross episode was merely the first battle / blow of a political era that hasn't even really begun yet (why else would I still be writing about it, half a year on?).  The Tories of the 1980s and 1990s, having been raised largely in the era of monopoly or at least duopoly broadcasting, had an instinctive emotional attachment to the BBC which, when it came down to it, ultimately overpowered their antipathy either to its supposed leftism, its overt populism, or both.  The new lot - Murdoch's children, every one of them - don't even have that.  No doubt Ann Widdecombe does actually want the BBC the Mail's readers think the Tory party want.  But she has no power, and never will again.  Those who actually do have power in the party don't want the BBC to exist at all.  The worst is yet to come, I fear.

Pots and kettles: belated February 2009 edition

Peter Mandelson was recently quoted as "supporting" the idea of a "people's bank" to be run as part of the Post Office.  Funnily enough, we once had such a thing, started by the Wilson government on a widely-used European model, and privatised at the end of the Thatcher administration.  Now I'm not quite sure who was the ideological leader of the smear campaign against those who supported the renationalisation of what had been Girobank (which by the time NuLab came to power was owned by Alliance & Leicester, but retained its own name and was still a separate business within A&L) as "conservatives who did not understand that the world had changed", but I could have sworn that someone called Mandelson was every bit as much its architect as Keith Joseph had been for Thatcherism.  Funny the things.

The Daily Mail, and others of its ilk, have recently been up in arms about what they claim to have been an organised campaign to remove Carol Thatcher from The One Show, led by people who would never have watched the show and inspired by remarks which were not actually broadcast.  Funnily enough, the Mail was recently behind a successful organised campaign to remove a very popular broadcaster, made up almost entirely of people who would never have listened to his show, for something which, while undoubtedly crass and childish, was what his audience were used to and which therefore attracted precisely two complaints when it actually went out.  Having delightedly set the precedent of the BBC instantly following organised demands for certain broadcasters' removal, the Mail cannot complain when it (allegedly) merely does the same thing, only this time following a campaign led by people with different political views who read different newspapers and find different things offensive, any more than it could complain when its calls for the destruction of trade union power in broadcasting led, indirectly, to a substantial reduction in programming that its readership found acceptable.

The only possible response to the Thatcher affair is "now at least you bastards know how Russell Brand fans feel".  Since his enforced departure, Brand - originally placed on Saturday nights to keep hip-hop-hating Moyles fans in the BBC fold when Westwood was on - has had more in common with Westwood than not, in a way he did not have before.  You will note that, where he used to be, we now have Johnnie Walker with a (yawn) recreation of offshore radio, which is precisely where the institutionalised humbug and double standards of the modern Right have their roots.  This is precisely what was intended.

it was never really about those two men, you know

One lesser-publicised byproduct of the Ross/Brand witch-hunt has been that, since then and specifically since the BBC submission it led to, Tim Westwood has been unable to feature live freestyles on his generally unmissable Sunday night 1Xtra show.  These have instead been pre-recorded, with the sheer power (because music radio never sounds as good when it's not live, whatever its field) inevitably weakened and the show cut up with already overplayed jingles and trailers for other presenters, who are undoubtedly born more deeply into what they do but who lack the sociological heat to turn good radio into transcendent cultural history.

The implications of this (check page 9 of the Christmas issue of Private Eye - unlikely source, I know - for further proof of what I'm getting at) are precisely what the self-appointed censors were aiming at.  Unlike the shows of Ross and Brand, which were made up very largely of music by fully-paid-up members of the New Establishment, or even his own Saturday night show, which is often incredibly exciting radio (in a way that ideologically-sound rap radio could not be today or at any time since Public Enemy's peak) but is made up largely of aggressively anti-socialist, anti-collectivist messages, Westwood's Sunday night show was (and even in its diluted form still is) genuinely socially subversive.  To have neutered him was probably the Mail's ambition all along.  The British Right's view of him is, more than anything else, reminiscent of the view of Peter Hain (before he was Blairised) once held by the South African Apartheid elite and its lickspittles in Britain - for the Right, an heir-turned-traitor is always the ultimate hate figure.

Had I been blogging at the time, I would have said that even people who hated Ross and Brand needed to stand up for them because of the deeper issues at stake - that while neither of those characters have a millionth of what Dennis Potter had, the arguments being used against them are the same arguments that would be used against someone of that calibre if such a person ever appeared again.  That's what happens when someone keeps silent as long as I did.  You get what needed to be said two months ago.  But I fear that we will need to say it many more times over the next few years.  I hope we will not still be saying it, knowing our voice is futile but with no other idea of what we can do to overcome it, when it's all too late.