Hell on earth

So, the USA's 90th-minute goal is the reason why England are playing Germany rather than Ghana.

Europeans being turned against each other - and specifically English people being turned against Germans - is what the powerful right-wing forces in the US dream of, as it quashes any kind of hope that the EU might be a great power in itself, no longer dependant on US backup.

The upsurge of English nationalism which would follow an England win - that may seem unlikely, but never underestimate the ability of English players to play above themselves against the country they have mostly been brought up to despise - might make it almost impossible for millions who know no other land to live in England, quite apart from the push it would undoubtedly give to Scottish separatism (already boosted by the election, of course) and the ethnic-nationalist-led chaos that would cause in England.

I would not rule out the possibility that the CIA fixed the USA game on the (as it turned out, correct) assumption that Germany would beat Ghana. Even if they didn't, I knew from the moment that goal went in that Germany would win. The USA couldn't prevent England playing Germany. It would have refuted everything they want the most.

The pre-history of ethnic cleansing in England might decisively begin today.

The complete collapse of all journalistic integrity in broadcasting even before it's been officially approved part 34621

ITV News on Saturday night began with fast-cuts of David Cameron appearing to repeat the word "change".

And there are in this country people who think party political broadcasts no longer exist other than at election time.

I note also that the latest Presley wankfest - an ever more desperate reminder that, for our rulers, what were in fact the British state's greatest missed opportunities in the last 100 years were in fact great and wonderful things because their long-term legacy allowed our current rulers to shape and define themselves and the whole neoliberal agenda - is all over BBC Four, as well as everywhere else. I don't recall it being so five years ago this month, when amid terrible, unbearable desperation we at least had the best Dennis Potter season ever. Never forget: "choice" is a chimera. I know how much DVD has boomed and how much Blu-Ray will, but in many ways they merely give the elite the excuse for greater control of everybody else.

Just one other thing: I know downloads of individual tracks are the dominant force now, but the top two British acts on the first album chart published in 2010 are both Scottish (I've no love for either - Nutini is in many ways far more aesthetically offensive than Boyle - but still). The top three English acts all come from either private schools or the West Country, until the shakedown of the last decade just about the two most un-pop environments in England. I think that might give some idea over who will in all likelihood come out best from the decade to come. And, of course, who will come out worst.

Setanta and the myth of the market

When Setanta's UK operations started they fairly quickly found a niche (much as Eurosport, which everyone now forgets was the first sports channel Sky ever had anything to do with, has done in recent years) - the Scottish Premier League augmented by a range of European football beyond anything any UK broadcaster had ever got together before (the top divisions of Italy, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Portugal were all shown at one point) and by relays of RTE's GAA coverage (which was the reason why my father subscribed). They had a raison d'etre. They had a position, and (better still) one which reflected the much greater European feeling and awareness of the Celts compared to the English. That's supposed to be what the modern-day market economy encourages.

Unfortunately, in practice, it doesn't. The system that theoretically encourages diversity in reality merely encourages smaller companies to make desperate attempts to copy larger ones, and when they inevitably fail merely reinforces the logical end of the alleged free market, namely oligopoly. ITV found that out some years ago when, instead of having the sense to create something akin to what Freeview has become now, decided instead (mainly out of a desperate and self-destructive hatred for Sky which had festered throughout the system since ... well, since at least 1989, really) to attempt to build another Sky Sports on the second tier of English football, and feigned shock when it failed.

In the case of Setanta, what they thought would be their route to status as a genuine competitor to the oligopoly in their particular field began - ironically - as an indirect result of the very same factors which for some of us give Michel Platini all the justification he needs; namely the fact that, in the context of the involvement in Europe of the political state dominated by England, Sky money is blood money. Anyone who understands how international politics work knows that the EU's insistence that no one company could own all six packages of live Premier League games had more to do with a completely justified wariness of precisely what Sky represents, and where its money is coming from, than anything else. The problem is that the very system that has elevated Sky to its current status - a system which the EU if anything currently intends to further institutionalise - cannot really stand competition (a natural aftereffect of the UK's inability to reach a halfway house during the 1970s, and the way it was all thrown away when it had almost been arrived at).

Armed with its 46 Premier League games, Setanta then started to acquire as much sport as it could from under the noses of Sky, often sport which could not be more now, more part of the rules of big business and post-colonial rules-reversal (most obviously the Indian Premier League). It is true that the economy had yet to fall off a cliff at that stage, but the warnings were there, and right from the start Setanta ran the very serious risk of being beaten by the very game it was now playing. That which is supposed to empower minorities all too often ends up merely reinforcing the tyranny of the majority.

The company's likely fate is yet further proof of the truth that unfettered market capitalism doesn't even work by its own criteria. Quite apart from anything else, it could have severe political implications. For a company of Irish origins to indirectly bring about the financial ruin of Scottish football clubs through its obsessive chasing of the English market, at a time such as this, could go quite some way to further unbalancing the Union.

Incidentally, considering how little ITV seem to be interested in him, the BBC should really get Jon Champion back. Like Barry Davies before him, he pisses off pseudo-rebellious inverted snobs so much that he really has to be defended - no commentator who angers those who regard a command and knowledge of their own language as actually A Bad Thing can be without merit, and Champion has a scope of knowledge and awareness of both the game and the wider world far beyond most of his contemporaries.

Why I went missing is a fictional truth

Five weeks. A voluntary silence. I simply didn't feel like communicating anything with anyone. I simply didn't feel I wanted to exist at all, socially. I shut myself off even from the few friends I have. And then one horrific night I lost all control, almost (literally) cut off the arteries forever, simply could not face the legitimisation of fascism which is the logical aftermath of the mass's powerlessness against both centuries of division and the legacy of neoliberalism in our own time. I still wonder how I survived.

But I did, and it was only today that I wanted to engage myself again, felt some desire to make something of the present, tempting as it is to forever live in irrecoverables, whether you yourself experienced them (the Royal Festival Hall twenty years ago, singing my life out before it had even begun) or whether they were never within my reach in the first place (British industry when we could still con ourselves that it existed). I wanted to say something, at least. The thought cannot leave my mind that, if not quite a post-partition South Ossetia or Serb-dominated area of 1990s Bosnia, north-east England in ten years' time may at least be the equivalent of, say, the Russian-majority areas in Ukraine. The man I was most cowardly to isolate myself from (there can be an excuse, but there can be no true defence) is welcome to comment on that. I did, actually, feel a certain amount of relaxation and happiness today - perhaps it was having the best ride for ages on Friday afternoon, cantering to the point of quiet elation. And it's when that happens that I feel there's still a reason, and I want to engage again. I can only hope it lasts.

What are the aims ...

... of those who have instigated the parliamentary expenses scandal?

I maintain that their long-term intent is to pass England into the ipso facto ownership and control of the United States - to have it literally ruled from Washington, with a puppet government holding no genuine power.  I say "England" advisedly: they would ideally impose such a fate on the entire UK, and they would not be happy if Scotland became a "glaring gap" in NATO's defences, but they have come to accept that Scotland and Wales would never accept complete control from Washington and, on the principle that selling most of their territory would be better than selling none of it, have come to accept that the partition of the UK would be necessary for the achievement of their aims.  To bring this about, they have to reduce English confidence in Westminster to the point where significant numbers in England would regard it as so rotten, so irredeemably corrupt, as to be worth abandoning altogether and replacing with a mere rubber stamp, while at the same time further increasing public feeling in Scotland, and to a lesser extent (at least for now) in Wales, that it is such a discredited, lumbering old monolith that they can get by perfectly well without it.  This past week, they have achieved far greater success in these aims than they could ever have hoped for.

But in the short term the effects of the past week's revelations will be manifested in revulsion against the entire "Westminster mafia", in a belief that anyone who isn't implicated in this universal (and clearly deliberately exaggerated) corruption must be, in some way, preferable. Including, I fear, a British National Party which almost certainly feels it has gained more than anyone else from the scandals - when Nick Griffin says his party is "unquestionably now part of the mainstream", he speaks with the self-satisfaction of someone who knows he's on the brink of some kind of victory, even if only by default, that the mainstream is now so hated that absolutely anyone who isn't part of it, however vile their views would have been considered previously, is to be admired simply because of who they're not.  This is what we are left with when Blair's post-politics - the abolition of politics, almost - completely collapses - all reasoned arguments, proper debates, were silenced on the assumption that post-politics would last forever.  It hasn't, but its legacy is that there is no true politics on any side left to replace it, and that (combined with the Tories' alienation of the ex-industrial North and Midlands in the 1980s, which has killed off what used to be a strong "respectable working class" / lower-middle-class Conservative vote among owner-occupiers in those areas, which is the main area - not the largely non-voting underclass - in which the BNP has built a support base) is why the BNP has got where it has.

Griffin predicted in 1997 that the coming New Labour years would see UKIP becoming the main party of protest votes in the shires, with the BNP - if he succeeded in taking control of it - gaining a similar role in the former industrial areas.  The accuracy of this prediction, which many would have complacently dismissed at the time, alone shows how much he understands and how strong his sense of where the wind is blowing is - far beyond any other far-right leader probably in British history (Mosley had the knack for a few years, but lost it rapidly in his own self-absorption - Griffin seems to understand realpolitik in a way no other British far-right leader ever has, which only increases his danger).  The most worrying thing is that the two parties of reaction - popular not for who they are but for who they are not - seem to be growing strength, not weakening, as New Labour dies.

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?

The death of British pop revisited

Sorting out mid-1990s editions of Melody Maker isn't like sorting out any old magazines.  It's like going through a litany - at once both personal and public - of lost dreams ("we could just be seeing the most art-literate generation since the mid-60s, and in a roundabout way you can thank Blur for that" - Taylor Parkes in November 1994, a tear in the retrospective eye), dying worlds, collapsing subcultures, bloated new-elite arrogance, the birth of a false, lie-built consensus, and the ultimate end of almost everything the magazine itself had stood for.  It was much more cathartic than I thought it would be. And I think, as with almost everything else, that it was the power of timing that did it.

In January 1994, two structures which now seem impossibly irrecoverable - the genuinely political (as opposed to showbiz by other means) structure of Conservative and Labour parties, the latter fairly recognisable as historically Leftist, both essentially pre-pop and pre-marketing, and the idea of subculture in British music established by punk and redefined by rave - still existed in the present tense, even though actual public belief in the relevance of the former and confidence in the latter's cultural power among its exponents had been in decline for years.  Within two, certainly three years, neither existed in the same sense, nor could they ever exist again.  We were into a whole new world by now - of British politicians defining themselves by jumping aboard pop bandwagons (adopted by NuLab largely because all the genuine political differences that had previously told them from the Tories had been thrown on the scrapheap, and later by Cameron because all the supposed genuine political differences that told him from the old Tories didn't actually exist), and of what had been a subculture defining itself by its absorption into a Radio 1 which within a year of Blair's election had decided it no longer needed them because fashions had changed.  The cultural dynamic which British pop had thrived on since its post-Suez prehistory had well and truly died: from this moment, nobody pretended that it could ever be more than a tool of the neoliberal state. 

I am not saying that there is no good pop music being made in this country - indeed, if you know where to find it, there's at least as much as there ever was, whether it's Chipmunk or Rachel Unthank and the Winterset (parallel pops which in truth have far more in common, inasmuch as that both define and express the experience of those who never had credit to play with as if normal economic rules had come to an end during the Blair era, than dogmatic camp followers of either would ever want to admit) and of course there are means of bypassing the industry middleman that simply weren't around 15 years or more ago - but when everyone has their own clique, and nobody needs to take the "norm" because that norm simply isn't around anymore other than as Simon Cowell's plaything, having collapsed in its vainglorious last gasp that came with Britpop, you can't blame people for feeling a sense of loss, a sense of frustration that the most potentially transcendent pops are happy to exist in their own ghettoes while the elite ideology becomes an ever more brazen mistranslation of pop's essential opportunism.

It's incredible, in retrospect, just how much non-thought, and how many non-ideas, were justified in the mid-'90s on the grounds that they weren't the same thoughts and ideas as had prevailed in THE EIGHTIES (spoken of almost as if it had been an actual, as opposed to mere pop-cultural and political, war crime).  In a manner all too typical of how the Blair government would turn out, genuine thought was suspended, and criticism of the era's holy grails was seen almost as blasphemy, as a distraction from what turned out to be a deluded, false promise. NuLab had to be the wholly good because at least it wasn't full-on Thatcherism, the Premiership had to be the wholly good because it was the opposite of what football had become in the mid-'80s, Britpop had to be the wholly good because it was a different situation from that of a decade earlier when Phil Collins had been dominant and the Smiths stalled at number 26. There was a good deal of justification to the anti-1980s attitude, but it's increasingly shaming to reflect on how few people dared to say that NuLab did not represent a genuinely radical or profound shift from Thatcherism, or that football might eventually become every bit as unequal, dominated by plutocrats and removed from the lives of most of its followers as it had previously been squalid and outmoded, or that Britpop's denial of the very idea of a subculture, and abandonment of interest in all territories beyond the singles chart, might do profound, long-term cultural damage.  All that mattered was short-term interests and being the opposite of the '80s.  We can see the results of the pop-cultural short-termism all around us, and we can see all too viciously that NuLab proved to be simply a continuation of all the aspects of the '80s most portentously condemned in the mid-'90s, which in some ways might reach their natural conclusion in a regression even further back, combining the essential self-centredness and disdain for public provision of Thatcherism with the autocratic / aristocratic rule of the '50s and early '60s as it would have been without the Attlee settlement as a constant background presence.  If Britpop remains for the foreseeable future every bit as untouchable and beyond the pale as prog used to be - and I can only see its reputation declining even further - it will be the political nature of its con trick that damns it, not its regressive but, in itself, unremarkable music.

It hadn't been the best of weekends, after all.  Hearing ELO's "Telephone Line" half-asleep on Sunday night hit me harder on pure emotional level than any song has for some time - I've always loved the song, responded to its desperate all-or-nothing, now-or-never last gasp as an accurate emotional reflection of its time (I'm not suggesting that Jeff Lynne specifically wrote about "living in twilight" to consciously mean the twilight of Butskellism, more that the feeling of the time was so total and all-pervasive that it affected very nearly everyone on some level) but now it's intensified and full-blown, because that 1977/78 feeling that even those of us who weren't even born at the time know almost as if we were there, that balance of dread (which briefly dissipated, it would appear, in the mirage summer of '78) and certain knowledge that everything is up for grabs, that whoever wins the next election has complete ownership of our forseeable future, feels so unsettlingly like now.  When Cameron invoked Hadrian in his New Year message, could he have been implying a coded message that he might even become an ally of convenience of the SNP when the final shoot-out is on?  And could the harsh moral of the mid-1990s - that what seemed to be a fantastic rebirth of British pop as we had known it actually turned out to be its death rattle - have been merely a trial run for the same fate befalling the Labour Party, even in its most neoliberal incarnation?