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?

John Major and the law of unintended consequences

We all know the horrible tawdriness of the Mandelson and especially Blair memoirs. We all know, unless we are actually Blairites ourselves, that the loss of faith in pop music and pop culture feels like the loss of faith in God after the First World War must have done, and every bit as emotionally painful even as we know it is the only possible way. We may not know that John Major's "long shadows on county grounds" speech of April 1993 was the most important British political speech of the 1990s and the starting point for the Cameronite taunting of Brown. But it was arguably the former and definitely the latter, because without it the Blairites would never have had an instantly-understood basis for their reduction of politics to playground taunts about their opponents' cultural backgrounds rather than actual policy and ideology - the very tactic that was eventually used so cynically against Labour (which is why I can never take seriously Blairite complaints against it).

The actual context of the speech, as with most universally-recognised soundbites, has long since been forgotten if it was ever really known by most: its intention was to convince the Europhobes who Major famously called "bastards" that the traditions they claimed to love would not be threatened by further integration into the EU. That both Major and his supposed enemies completely ignored the much greater role of American influence in eroding that world need not be gone into again. But for the first year after it was made, I don't remember it being quite as famous and widely quoted as it became later, because there was no need for it to be - Labour policy under John Smith was sufficiently different from Tory policy, and the party significantly serious in its approach, that there was enough genuine ideological contrast and division between the two parties for Labour not to need to resort to ill-thought-out trivialities.

It was only once Blair had taken over, and dropped most of the policies that seriously distinguished Labour from the Tories, that the speech became a legend which almost overnight replaced proper politics in this country. The Blairites had to mock Major on those criteria alone, and for his not knowing about Oasis and the Spice Girls, and for his being old and grey, because they had ceased to be a genuine alternative to the Tories in any meaningful way. When Major desperately dribbled in 1996 that "our pop culture rules the world" (a blatant post-imperial lie of course: at the core of the EU at that time, the Backstreet Boys were bigger than Oasis) they thought they had achieved their greatest possible victory. To hear Major, impotent and destroyed, gibbering words like that was far more important than hearing him admit that Thatcherite ideas on the economy and society had been wrong - they would have been actively repulsed had he ever conceded that (as a social traditionalist such as he claimed to be should have), because in some ways the Blairites were more Thatcherite than Major; certainly the last thing they'd have wanted was to see any Tory admit that the mass privatisation of the mind had been a mistake, because that would have killed the whole Blairite myth before it even started.

Without that 1993 speech, the Blairites might well have found something else to put in place of serious politics and ideological differences between parties, but it would surely have been much harder, and had they failed to find such an easy stick to beat Major with, might they not have dropped most policies that were even social democratic, let alone socialist? We will, alas, never know. But as these profound and dangerous things happened, they were cynically hidden behind the facade of Knebworth, itself a perfect setting for the collapse of serious left-wing thought, being a once-crumbling old pile whose aristocratic owners had saved themselves from penury in the '70s via Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones and Genesis. A generation was conned and lied to. A generation - mine - grew up thinking that taunting opponents for not knowing enough about celebrities was a substitute for real politics. Some of them - unforgivably - even thought there was something left-wing about it. And then a Tory clique - an Etonian-led one, at that - used exactly the same criteria to taunt a Labour prime minister, and Blair very clearly sees nothing wrong with it.

If my generation ever had a reckoning, it is now.

Beware the ides of March

(Revised January 2012 to add links to two YouTube uploads of Living for Kicks in full: one is here; the other is here)

50 years ago tonight - the same spring Blue Streak was cancelled and the Times gave up the imperial ghost, while Lonnie retrenched to the old CockErNee world having already created a new one, Cliff opined the new suburban pseudo-perfection and Max sang "I've got words for Elvis P" knowing that they would remain forever unheard - Britain's post-imperial humiliation was manifested on ITV, its single biggest platform at that moment, on two fronts. Barcelona's utter humiliation of Wolves, in the very same Molineux mud where only half a decade before they had been proclaimed the de facto world champion club side, exposed the old ways of English football for the antiquated facade they had become, and after a brief break for the news (really not a break at all, then) Daniel Farson's Living for Kicks exposed - with an almost unique sympathy for mainstream media at the time - the frustration and alienation of the first generation of clearly-definable teenagers, caught in a decrepit political state where exhaustion was everywhere in denial.

25 years ago this week, the old working class as a definable political or social force - and the whole idea of a Britain where everyone was somehow working towards shared ends within the public sphere - finally died as the miners succumbed, and "Material Girl" hit the Top 5 as the first song after Newsbeat (Bob Stanley carmodised that only 5 years later, by the way).

It may be that the historians of a quarter- or half-century from now will look back on early March 2010 with the same ominous sense of a turning point - the beginning of the end of the public sphere in British broadcasting, the moment the BBC lost what remained of its nerve out of sheer fear of a government that hadn't even been elected yet - and backed out of its universal role, finally allowed the pseudo-choice and pseudo-freedom of market brutalism to dictate everything. Maybe I am being too bleak in my assessment. But on a night when BBC Four - BBC Four, for heaven's sake - showed programmes about animals in TV and Skippy the Bush Kangaroo - it is hard to resist the temptation that the BBC almost has a death wish, has lost its nerve, has lost all confidence to speak up for itself and what it ought to be out of sheer paranoia that it may be completely dismantled if it shouts too loud. Maybe Birt should have taken the "Himalayan Option" after all. We may not have had So Solid mixed in with Britney or whatever, but at least we wouldn't have risked losing everything once the Tories regrouped. Maybe we might see a return to "purer" public service principles. But I fear we won't, because 6Music and the Asian Network - unlike the suspiciously untouched BBC3, Cash in the Attic or Holby City - represent the epitome, duly updated and redefined, of what public service broadcasting should be about. They could never be provided by the market and are exactly what needs to be retained. While there may well be a case for spending less on US imports (but, I would venture, more on European ones) and less on sports rights (some events certainly should always be on free TV, but it would be wrong to alienate non-sports-loving licence payers any more than at present) there is no case at all for removing services like these. There is an ugly set of reactions being played to here - a desire to further increase NuTory control of British pop (and who can seriously dispute that 1Xtra would be the next target?), to further atomise the British population so as to strengthen elite power in the guise of FAKE "democratisation", to decisively separate Britain from its European neighbours and effectively complete pseudo-American "restructuring", and to isolate and silence all non-white voices and influences, to create by stealth the pure white state many Tories still secretly dream of.

As the reliably excellent Andy Beckett states in the Guardian, it was only Birt's reforms - which fatally compromised the old independent public service spirit, and may only have postponed the evil day - which managed to save the BBC last time. There are many in the Tory party who still feel let down by his skilful politicking of 16 years ago, who wish he hadn't come up with sufficient internal marketisation and a shift in priorities towards global sales and formatting to convince their leaders that a PBS/NPR ghetto wasn't the only way, and they are if anything more dominant in the party than they were then, as the old guard who felt a psychological tie to Reithian values have almost all retired and are now dying off. There is a determination, as there was with Bush over Iraq, to complete unfinished business.

The relevance of what happened 25 years ago should be obvious. But I think a look back at Living for Kicks is just as telling, because those teenagers - probably now mostly dreading a further fall in what is already Europe's lowest state pension - were dreaming of some kind of escape from the post-war state, some kind of shift towards the privatisation of the mind which for them wrongly equated with freedom. That was the "element of sadness, a wistful hankering after better things" that Farson mentioned at the programme's end. Seeing how the majority were probably only ever after the main chance and their own interests - obviously there were left-wing idealists, and one such speaks at length in Living for Kicks, but that was in Brighton, an unusual, bohemian-London-like place even back then, and even there they didn't seem like the majority - it is safe to say that they eventually got their way. But I know many of them regret it, and the way it has left their descendants in many important ways less genuinely free - in the senses that truly matter, not how much you can watch on YouTube or how much you can say on Twitter - than ever. They were indeed trapped in many ways, but the escape route they chose was fatally immune to exploitation by economic forces who pretend to care for everyone but in fact care for no-one. I will mention without comment that one of the newspaper front pages that appears in Living for Kicks is from the Daily Herald.

Meanwhile, all I can recommend is a well-worded and thoughtful (hysteria will simply strengthen our enemies) email to srconsulation@bbc.co.uk, or similarly expressing your views here. We may never get another chance to say it.

Not remotely offended by "autistic": it has to be said

and said, and said again

we will all lose

if we are not together we are nowhere, and who would not rather be somewhere than nowhere? that is why I am convinced we will see colonisation by the US, subtly introduced via Cowell

these people will alienate us from our true friends and allies more completely than we have ever seen before - we cannot let them win, and if that means giving up pop as a bad job, so it must be

New Forest thoughts

- once, here, I referred to "the Hallowe'en wall". I've regretted that turn of phrase ever since - back in the age I'm getting at, it was still all about Guy Fawkes Night in England - but it's too late to change it now, and anyway I'd mentioned bonfires earlier in the same post, and didn't really want to repeat myself. What may not have been apparent to the casual reader who doesn't know what I know all too well is that this is a real wall, always for me most evocative of wind-blown autumn landscapes, which runs alongside the road which leads Portlanders to Wimborne Minster, or indeed the New Forest, or anywhere else where the Wilson Plot once lurked. It gives the impression of being a distinct dividing line - obviously not on a par with the barrier that split Berlin and the world until 20 years ago this week, or even our own Cutteslowe Walls, but on one side - the side you're driving on - you feel you're part of the mass society, the society of buying and selling, of instant access, of something that resembles democratisation so tantalisingly that you can so easily forget it's the complete opposite. Behind the wall, you sense, strange things may happen, things beyond your knowledge, or your grasp, or your control. I know Charborough Park is a particular family's estate, but somehow I can't help thinking an M.R. James scenario may have happened there, once. In my head, it was the 1970s scene of paramilitary exercises: men rehearsed behind that wall, planning for the day they overthrew the unions and restored feudal supremacy, paranoid that within ten years detente would have quietly turned into something greater, something in which they had no place unless they fought back now. Even now, looking behind the gates has an eerie, disturbing feel: the sense of a never-admitted underbelly of the elite, an underhand, undying refusal of any form of democracy.

The fact that I will almost certainly have a scion of that very family claiming to represent me in Parliament precisely six months from now - the same family that produced five members of the unreformed pre-1832 House of Commons - makes it all the more disturbing: that whole tribe has reinvented itself in terms of mass media while nobody was looking, every bit as morally bankrupt as it ever was, and far more dangerous because they've learnt how to distance themselves from their past, Joss Stone's marketing tactics turned into politics.

- someone had written "civil right or civil war" on the sign leading into the forest: was this a leftover from the era, which seems so much longer ago than it is, when some, myself included, wildly predicted social implosion over foxhunting, a legacy of the age when the Shires could only put their hopes in same vague new GB75 on horseback? Or is it very now, very 2009, born out of a deeper, more profound sense of alienation from the entire system, which will elect the NuTories and vaguely tolerates even the BNP not because of who they are but because of who they are not? Or is it - as I suspect - somewhere between the two: a statement that, without instant and permanent withdrawal from the European Union and a stupid, ill-defined attempt to "reclaim" a country that long since ceased to exist, or even be able to exist, on its own terms, the NuTories will have betrayed those who most strongly believe in them, that a mere continuation of NuLab's vague halfway house will inspire a violent reaction among those so long and so wrongly believed to be inherently peaceable?

- you can still forget everything in a place like the New Forest, still imagine yourself in some parallel autumn, some battle for the future that ended wholly differently, some world that never really existed (because my vision isn't anti-modern at all, it's altermodern)

- I'm pretty much exclusively listening to 1Xtra music while I write these postings

"then they should go and live there" reclaimed

"Then they should go and live there" is an infamous argument for good reason. I am not seeking to defend the way trade unionists abused their power in the 1970s and gave the Thatcherites all the excuse they needed (and I fear those in the Post Office are doing the exact same thing now) but the old rational-argument-destroyer "they should go and live in Russia" was as infuriating as it was primarily because it wasn't true: those smeared as such frequently had an immense feeling for British history and culture, merely a different interpretation of it from that cherished by Tories (Dorset as birthplace of trade unionism rather than as land of feudal lost content, etc.) and knew little, by comparison, about Russian ways.

But I would say the same argument could now apply far more legitimately if reversed and applied to all NuTory supporters, X-Factor watchers, trick-or-treaters and so on, people who - unlike the trade unionists whose knowledge of British culture and history was far greater than you will ever see among the New Etonians - really do owe their cultural, social and (let's not pretend anymore) political loyalties entirely to a foreign power. It is time we responded to these people by saying, quite simply, "if they think the US is so wonderful then they should go and live there". If they are that unable to come to terms with who they are and where they are then it is time we asked them whether they should even live here at all - at least while they remain dishonest about their true aims, for whose achievement Cameron is even now secretly hoping for Scotland to break away.

Never before now have we had so many cultural, social and political fifth columnists, and yet nobody - least of all those who invented the Soviet bedtime bogeyman and tried so hard to do the same to Islam this dying decade - is prepared to acknowledge or admit the fact. The unspeakable truth is that nobody in England really knows their own history and culture anymore. If they did, the phrase "then they should go and live there" would be common parlance - and, unlike in the 1970s, it would actually be justified. It is time we made it so. The alternative is isolation and a living hell ending in the smiling face of occupation from another continent. You can no more watch The X-Factor and condemn neoliberalism and NuToryism than you could read Der Stuermer and condemn Nazism.

Why I don't say the obvious, now

One of my ghosts speculates - in the forum where I learnt and unlearnt almost everything, the one I could not leave alone, however much I knew - that I might post about the parallels between the slow death of New Labour and the final end of Oasis. I considered that, briefly, in August. But I didn't because I've - to use a phrase which will never really fit my writing style but I'll use it anyway - been there, done that. Carmodism cannot be renewed forever, at least not if I want to keep renewing myself. I could easily also be posting here about how every tragic mistake made in the late 1970s has been repeating itself, from the failure to jump at the chance of an autumn election (which, more crucially now than then, could not have had a virtual year-long campaign before it as in the US) to workers in a vulnerable national industry going on strike just at the time when it could be most politically fatal for the very survival of that industry. But I don't, on the whole. Futile escapism, perhaps. But others can write about pure politics better than me. When I do post here, and I hope I will more often, I prefer to create a sense of a parallel universe. When we go, we can at least all go together. Also, Oasis - unlike the band whose reputation they distorted and damaged so much by association, as the BNP do to any national idea, however vague - are simply too depressing musically to want to write anything about them whatsoever, whichever angle it comes from. They heralded an epic lie and fraud. Now we're on the brink of an even greater one. What's new?