Fragments of Elisabeth Murdoch

Yes, yes, of course the full speech for the most part is nothing like the bits everyone has quoted, being mediaspeak incomprehensible to anyone else.  And it's easy to be cynical about the positive citations of "the best of the old Britain" and Lord Reith, Dennis Potter and Alan Bennett, easy to say that she's only saying that now the Olympics have put "Old Britain vs New Britain" if not to bed then at least taken it up the stairs, now it's safe, now some of the old battles and hatreds by which her father thrived don't feel quite so raw.  And yes it is blindingly obvious and realised by some of us long before it would have occurred to her that, once they had won all their battles and usurped the old paternalistic order in every part of British society, The Sun lacked the absolute purpose it had, rightly or wrongly, had from (say) 75-87 and Sky likewise lacked the purpose it had from (say) 89-95; because they weren't really for anything to anything like the extent they were against the older elites, they had nowhere left to go after their triumphs, and were simply the embodiment of a much greater problem that the new capitalism, defined by its piratical rebellion, reached once the Keynesians and the Reithians were the ones locked outside the party - a problem of self-definition which could only have ended in the crash (and is also shared by almost all the babyboomers Murdoch got rich by targeting in their young adulthood when nobody else dared).  But even though it isn't a (counter-)(counter-)revolution, it is the closest we've got so far to the "Suez moment" that suddenly became possible in July 2011.

Consider that Murdochism was, at heart, the radical Right claiming for its own purposes a set of anti-establishment ideas on democratisation and opening up of the media which had originated on the radical Left of the 1960s and 1970s (search any New Society from that era and you'll find similar language on media reform to the sections of the 1989 speech she now selectively quotes, without the naked-capitalist bits she leaves out).  Consider that much criticism of it from the Left, however well-meant, has appeared barely distinguishable from Tory paternalism in its attitude to working-class tastes, and has thus merely worked towards Murdoch's grand plan; to split and divide the Left by rendering it the true voice of fogeyism, inherently resistant to every aspect of the modern world, simply a stooge for the stuffy old buffers it once raged against.  Through accepting the legacy of the people her family has for so long caricatured, as though the only Britain that existed before '69 or '89 was the stuffiest, most class-ridden 10% (the idea that Potter and Bennett were indistinguishable from some fire-breathing shire colonel was the single greatest myth The Sun and Sky alike had to create to get where they got), Elisabeth Murdoch, probably without even knowing it, has opened the door for the Left - however reformist, however cautious - to reclaim ideas on organisation of the media and society which it originated and developed in the first place.  That has to be some kind of important moment, however compromised and shrouded.

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?

Murdoch: some thoughts

Those who bring about institutionalised corruption in any country at any time - the sort which absorbs virtually the entire elite (politicians, police, the judiciary) and renders it almost impossible to gain power without yourself being absorbed by it - only ever get away with it because they have sensed, and exploited, a pre-existing public demand for what they are good at cheapening and perverting, and also sensed that the mass won't be able to tell the difference between what they do and the real thing. A good comparison is between Rupert Murdoch and John Poulson, who in his time was at the centre of as sensational an affair as this (and one which arguably, through discrediting both old-school Toryism and post-war Labour utopianism, gave Murdoch a far greater space in which to operate). Poulson was only able to corrode and corrupt British public life in the way he did because of the initially wholly progressive post-war desire to build a "New Britain", which he duly perverted beyond recognition. Murdoch, likewise, was only able to do what he has done because of the longings and desires of '60s pop culture, which he initially exploited when he first bought into the British market in a way no other newspaper proprietor at the time would have dared to.

But this comparison - at least for a defender of other, better aspects of post-war British development such as myself - opens the way to a more nuanced view of pop culture than I may have displayed in my previous post. If I do not blame Le Corbusier for the corruption indicted when the Poulson affair went public, I also cannot blame '60s pop culture for the corruption and distortion of British life that Murdoch's power has brought about; the parallels, in terms of a positive and progressive movement being perverted almost beyond recognition for the empowerment of the venal, self-serving and destructive, are astonishingly close. It would be as unfair for the people who make the music associated with Channel AKA, or those behind the non-exploitative, non-tabloid channels which have used the Sky platform (and there are some!) to be tarred with Murdoch's brush as it was for certain architects who stood for everything Poulson didn't to be tarred with his brush, as they inevitably were in the Mail/Express mind, after everything went public. Almost immediately after that, of course, Britain suffered the disastrous year of 1974, when the extremist, Europhobic wings of both major parties were decisively empowered, and the centrist, European-minded wings of both fatally weakened; an all-round corrosion of balance and reason within the British political mainstream whose horrendous consequences we still suffer every day, not least because The Sun gained strength as a direct result of the void thus created. Every abuse of trade union power from 1974-9, culminating in the height of futility which was the 1979 ITV strike (whose political impact was, arguably, the real birth of Sky) represented thousands of alienated Mirror readers and, accordingly, thousands of mental blank canvasses for Murdoch. In its own way, this whole business is the single worst aspect of the corrosive legacy of socialism's fatal February, which appeared to some at the time - both its critics and its supporters - to be potentially a world-changing victory, but was in fact the beginning of a terrible, long-term defeat.

One argument I absolutely do not endorse is the idea that if "somebody else would have done it anyway" that makes the bad things that actually happened somehow more defensible, not least because, when it comes to extreme forms of corruption, somebody else probably wouldn't have done it anyway. Someone else probably would have exploited the "New Britain" dreams to build cheap crap, and someone else probably would have exploited the impetus of '60s pop culture to publish cheap, crowd-pleasing crap (even if he hadn't been so politically odious, Robert Maxwell would undoubtedly have done just this had he won the battles for the News of the World and Sun in 1969, quite apart from everything else we know all too well). But someone else probably wouldn't have done the other, more profoundly damaging things that Poulson and News International have both done in their respective times. The difference is important, and should be kept in mind when cynics and reactionaries on the Right, or SWP tribalists on the Left, say "it was always inevitable anyway" - an absolute fundamentalism which renders any kind of progress impossible. It is possible for popular, mainstream media to be wholly socially responsible if properly regulated and balanced. Even today, Ofcom has sufficient power - just - to ensure that no major channel could become quite so shameless and venal (which of course is precisely why the Murdoch tabloids constantly attacked it as though it had the IBA's powers), while the pre-Murdoch history of British mass television offers a shining example, probably better in that field than anything else that has ever existed anywhere in the world, of cheerful populism combined with a fearless sense of moral responsibility.

Which brings me round to the argument that what may happen now doesn't really matter because Murdoch's real business and real wealth comes from the United States and other international markets, and the UK is small beer for him. While technically true, this doesn't really apply if you've lived your whole life in the UK and intend to stay here for some time to come; of necessity, your concerns will lean more towards his impact on the world you grew up in and felt had been snatched from you before you could fully inherit it. His impact on American television simply cannot be compared to his impact here; while Fox undoubtedly changed the content of US network TV, appealing to an audience that previously hadn't been recognised and willing that audience's cultural norms to become far broader (and thus, ironically, upsetting many of the viewers of the news network that uses the same name), it didn't bring about a comparable change in the form, which had always been structured on populist, market-led grounds virtually as a foundation stone of American broadcasting itself (which is precisely the reason why the pre-1990 ITV was set up as it was - or, more accurately, wasn't).

The changes he brought about in Australia, where it all began for him, were possibly more profound, but replacing a cultural cringe towards one empire on the other side of the world with a cultural cringe towards another empire, also on the other side of the world, hardly compares with Murdoch's impact in Britain (and was already such an irresistible force in Australian society that someone else would undoubtedly have exploited it - as indeed a "someone else" as significant as Kerry Packer also did). Also, while the official, establishment culture of pre-Murdoch Britain obviously depended to some extent on the suppression of the working class, it does not compare with the absolute, over-riding racism which was the foundation stone of the nascent Australian state, and much of Australian society, at that time. It is worth noting at this point that even a soul act as mainstream and melodic as the Supremes only managed (I think) three Top 40 hits in Australia during the '60s: the first-gen Murdoch model of absorbing American pop culture in place of a dying imperial culture in fact retained exactly all the faults, down to and including the inveterate racism, of the culture it supposedly swept away, in exactly the same way that the Murdochisation of British culture would do in my own lifetime.

We must not let the chance to build a better, more equable future for Britain slip away from us. We must keep up the pressure. We must see any reduction in Murdoch's power that may follow as the start, not the end. We must tell ourselves that the unfolding story vindicates every refusal we have ever made to conform to the ruling ideology of the day, just as much as 1989 vindicated every refusal the dissidents of Eastern Europe had ever made. But we must not become complacent. If things really do change for the better, we can tell ourselves with pride that we never gave up, just as much as Walesa and - in his own way, in his own context - Mandela could. But we have a long way to go yet. Let's seize the moment. Let's push things forward.

(It has been pointed out elsewhere that I do not mention the Wapping dispute in this piece. That is merely a byproduct of the way I tend to come at these things - mainly because nobody else does - and not any kind of ignorance of the event's importance in modern British history, which is indeed immense, not least as the closest thing to the miners' strike that was ever experienced in London.)

Murdoch is everyone's problem and everyone's responsibility

Too much humbug at the moment. Too much "not us, guv". Yes, obviously what the News of the World did is almost unspeakably vile even by their standards, and anything that can be done to reduce NewsCorp's power and status within British life - however minor, however much rearranging the deckchairs - has to be some kind of positive gesture. But it all goes far deeper. Remember that he began to gain ground, even before Labour's fatal victory-by-default, because much of the British working class had got drunk on '60s pop culture and had decided that the Daily Mirror was therefore too redolent of the old ideas of betterment and self-improvement. Think of how often you've heard people pretend to hate Murdoch "and all he stands for" while gleefully celebrating and enthusing over forms of mass culture which have got where they are very largely through his promotion and exposure. Think of how often you've heard people parroting anti-Murdoch rhetoric because it's what people of their political side do, while simultaneously laughing at the idea of the autodidact and dismissing the very concept of learning for its own sake. And think on. Where the anti-Murdoch Murdochians are concerned - those who think Murdoch is simply one phenomenon in isolation, rather than part of a far deeper and more embedded problem - the final bars of this song have never seemed more relevant.

Marx, Murdoch and the market

Marx's oft-forgotten belief that capitalism could be an ally of convenience in the creation of a proletarian/socialist society, to the extent that it worked to reduce the power of quasi-feudal national elites and could, through clearing away the debris of tradition, make it easier for a new order to then be created, may be better-known than it once was due to its legacy in the recent past as the one residual element of their youthful Marxism that continued to influence the New Labour elite. While the Blairite desire to create some kind of new world obviously had no real remaining connection with socialism, and had far more in common with the "creative destruction" of the Thatcherite interpretation of Manchester liberalism, there was still a desire to make it impossible for the Tories ever to retake power unless they distanced themselves utterly from residual cultural ideas of nation and lost all the discomfort they still showed in the 1990s with the aftereffects of capitalism. Once they had done this, the Blairites tellingly showed no meaningful opposition to the Tories whatsoever, and indeed felt more at home with them than with a Labour Prime Minister who had residual ties to another kind of traditionalism. As neoconservatism generally is in many ways a mutation of Marxism with the ending changed, the massive importance of pop culture in the Blairite ideology was a specific, localised form of the same thing - the New Labour elite had retained the Marxist desire to use capitalism to render national tradition obsolete forever, but dropped all the stuff about socialism and equality once that had been done.

This is the context in which we must put the final step in Rupert Murdoch's long march through the institutions. While it was obviously Tory deregulation which pushed him through in the first place, the residual hints of cultural unease which used to permeate from the Tory backbenches and backwoods are now entirely gone, in large part as a result of the Blairite capitalist interpretation of one aspect of Marxism - dissenting opinions are simply not allowed, and meaningful political differences between those who want to erode opposition to Murdoch out of an ideological desire to suppress traditionalism (whether of the Somerset/Shropshire or South Yorkshire/South Wales variety) and those who want to erode opposition to Murdoch simply because they want to make as much money as they can have ceased to exist. The Blairite project - the abolition of politics, at least in the sense of genuine debate and a range of opinions on this matter within the mainstream - has utterly triumphed. Vince Cable's role was bound to have been eliminated by some means or other; certainly, there were powerful and deep-rooted forces which knew that he was, by the standards of the modern elite, an enemy within and alien presence, and were determined to weed him out.

The context of Murdoch's victory - and, in a different way, the background context of the success of the referendum to increase the Welsh Assembly's powers, a potential increase in the power of a more collectivist and less US-based method of organisation within the UK, which could lead to internal fractures and potential problems for those who support unbridled Murdochian control - is the dichotomy of capitalism itself, and the fact that it has become as powerful and dominant as it has for a reason, which has to be dealt with and understood before a serious, advanced critique of its effects can be put forward. While it can promote greed, social decay and environmental destruction, it also has the potential to make many - myself included - feel that there is a bigger, more varied and challenging world beyond the petty prejudices and fears they were born to. However delusionary this may ultimately be, its appeal and resonance - in the form of anything from Motown to Kid Cudi, Stax to Nicki Minaj - should not be lumped in with the blatant exploitation of Cowellism. A society without any form of capitalism would, almost certainly, be a feudal society and not in any way socialist. However distorted and misconstrued it was by the worn-out radicals who became Blairites and lived 13 years under the delusion that their government wasn't essentially a slightly more socially compassionate latterday Tory one, the Marxist idea of capitalism as potentially clearing the ground for socialism cannot be dismissed as easily as may seem tempting.

This is why, while I loathe the form of capitalism represented by Murdoch, I also absolutely do not embrace the David Lindsay version of socialism, which is pretty much "the working class should form an alliance with landowners and masters of foxhounds so as to keep out Mistajam and Logan Sama". There are deep-rooted historical reasons - the landed aristocracy regrouping much more successfully in heavy industry than elsewhere, Newcastle never being an Atlantic port and thus the local population remaining far more ethnically homogeneous - why this form of "Daily Mail Socialism" should have had the potential to grow in north-east England, and I have a feeling that much of what may seem progressive and forward-thinking in Scotland and Wales also fits into this category, at least when attempts are made to apply it to England; the kind of socialism you can get away with when your communities have been comparatively closed-off and secure within themselves, but which simply does not make sense when you never felt you needed an identity outside an empire that went round the world and has made it inevitable that that same world would come back to you. This is not to criticise Scotland and Wales, just to suggest that England's very specific problems need something else altogether.

Similarly, when it comes to the multifarious forms of pop music I love, I cannot help thinking that the contrast between the English and Celtic experiences make it impossible for either to have it both ways - that, while I love Martin Solveig's "Hello" and wish it had sold as well in England as in Ireland and Scotland, its sheer European-ness (and let's not kid ourselves that we don't usually mean "whiteness" when we say this in a mass-cultural context; it's a long way from the perfect balance of European and American influences reached in "When Love Takes Over") will prevent it from resonating in the same way with those who have lived at the cutting edge first of the original colonisation and then of the reverse of the process that created the other pop I love - that the very diversity of modern England and its openness to hybridising and further radicalising the music of the American margins, something I will always support and advocate, will render other songs that speak to me meaningless, incomplete. At the same time, the historical factors which render audiences in the non-English parts of these islands more open to the idea of European pop will also make the lineage of "urban"/multiracial pop both less meaningful and, in a deeper sense, less necessary there. And, in my tastes just as in my parentage, I am caught (I would be interested to know whether others of Anglo-Irish parentage find this piece particularly potent). Which is the best to have, economically, socially and culturally, and which fits best with my deeper philosophy on politics and life? Which is most necessary, most important, most valuable?

Does my obsessive desire to take the sounds and styles of the socio-political margins' engagement with capitalism and then radicalise it - the side of me that thinks "Hello", wonderful as it is, is not enough - betray a deeper, more profound weakness, both in my own life and in my country, if that country is accepted to be England rather than what remains of the Union? Could it be, in short, that black pop, from the Marvelettes to Durrty Goodz, has the immense place it has in my life and my engagement with the wider world precisely because of a more profound political and cultural void in post-imperial England - that I need it because I don't have anything else? And, if this is true, should it even matter? Macmillan privately admitted at the time - safe in the knowledge that the pre-Murdoch media would never have made such elite doubts public - that he pushed consumerism and affluence as strongly as he did because he was frightened that the people he claimed to represent might otherwise react so badly to the political state's loss of power and pride, might feel the wounds so personally and viciously, that they would turn violently against the exhausted, worn-out state and bring the edifice of privilege on which his own life depended crashing down. In other words, the political importance of the consumer boom in the Tories' post-Suez recovery plan, the foundation stone of everything that reached its final fruition for Murdoch this week, was born out of sheer expediency, rather than because the Tories of that time particularly wanted it or would have had to rely on it in their ideal world - the electorate had to be given something to fill the void of imperial collapse, something to fall back on and convince them that everything was alright really, simply for the security and safety of the state.

And this, really, is how the state dominated by England has kept itself alive ever since. The main reason why some in England have come to see themselves, rather than the Irish, as the real prisoners of history is a deep-rooted doubt as to whether pop culture, even in its most potentially radical forms, is enough to fill the gap left by the death of the British Empire, and this is where the inevitable accusations of romanticisation and retreat come in. But the referendum result suggests that a new fusion of past, present and future is being created in Wales, which makes this an apposite time to pose the question: who will come out of this era best, and who is in the best position to face the future - the people of 2011 England, almost indescribably varied and open and hybridised and outward-looking (though varying wildly between further radicalisation of those marginalised within the US and the mere consumerism of the alienated mass in a place like the one I live in) or the various peoples commonly described as "Celtic", for so long on the fringe, latterly on the fringe of the fringe, but kept together by a deeper identity held together by that very marginalisation and now taking that sense of themselves, modernising it and using that modernisation to find a role for themselves within Europe, as opposed to the pop-cultural mass which is all that modern England can exist within? Is it better simply to take in everything and to have never had to fight for a communal identity - to live as a post-modern nation, a post-nation, with the strongest ideological differences being over whether simply to consume or to radicalise and reinvent mass culture, and nothing else really mattering - or to have defined an identity in adversity, and to have a sufficient history of freedom-fighting not to need Trilla or Ghetts or the whole Bradford and Nottingham scenes in anything like the same way?

I don't know, really. One thing I do know, though, is that Marx would absolutely have supported and aligned himself with British urban pop, even in its more populist forms, against the quasi-feudal resurgence of Mumford & Welch, and that the current state of British pop and the current nature of the relationship between England and the rest of the Union are both among many things in the present era that he really should have been alive to write about. While we have the market, the best thing we can do with it is to genuinely radicalise it, rather than - as the previous government did - simply co-opt the language and rhetoric of market radicalisation in the name of unbridled, unreconstructed capitalism, and in doing so make it far easier than it would otherwise have been for a quasi-feudal elite to come back through that very economic system. There are, at least, people with one foot in the door of market radicalisation. The challenge for them, and for all of us, is to follow through, rather than - as Wretch 32 is wasting his hard-won position by doing - simply to rehash that aptly-named central statement of my own lifetime's Manchester School, "Fool's Gold". It's really far too late for that sort of thing.

Never forget

that the old Daily Herald was the authentic voice of a particular way of existence, overwhelmingly shaped by collective endeavour and determination to create a more equable society (and let us not forget Dennis Potter's early involvement), and that the original Sun carved out of its remnants was, like Wilson's government itself, a tantalising attempt to bring the whole concept forward into the age that never truly was, the popular daily of a better world.

Exactly 40 years have passed since Rupert Murdoch acquired the latter paper. Today's Pick of the Pops - even if Dale doesn't play "Oh Well", perhaps the greatest single ever made that could reasonably be defined as rock music, right to the bitter end, as Peter Green returns to the forest, retreats from the world that made him and that he already knows is turning sufficiently that it would destroy him - will undoubtedly be a lacerating experience, so much so that I'm actually scared to listen to it. Because everything, in terms of equality and public stake in society, was steadily getting better until then. At that precise moment, the seed was planted for the passive-aggressive, narcissistic mess of reheated prejudice and market brutalism we live in today. A passing of ownership that went almost unnoticed was the beginning of the end for Butskellism and the start of the breakup of British public life and the descent of the working class into pathetic safe tribal wars: at that moment, those who had learnt over decades to work together began to be taught to hate each other, because Murdoch knew that a collective spirit, if not broken, would make it forever impossible for people such as him to restructure society as they intended. Within the middle class, the seed was sown for the world of unashamed knowledge and education for its own sake to also slowly die, though that would take another twelve years to really take effect - it was still hanging on when the working class had already been smashed, and I just about managed to catch its end, those Saturday mornings at the Royal Festival Hall, but the point is that had Murdoch not destroyed working-class solidarity first, he'd never have had the economic or cultural base to effectively do the same to the middle class in February 1981, in an act which some misguided Marxists thought even as late as that would be the last step before they took over.

This is, within the British cultural context and to some extent beyond it, at least as important an anniversary than the one recently marked in Berlin. Everything that is depressing and self-perpetuating about our present society, everything that alienates us from our neighbours and true allies, has its roots in that moment. I am not a reactionary. Sometimes the truest form of radicalism, and belief in some kind of positive future, is to condemn the false consensus of the present.

Why Chelsea fans cannot have it both ways

The general consensus this week has been that Barcelona's frankly hilarious injury-time equaliser against Chelsea was the result of a UEFA conspiracy to prevent an all-English final. And I dare say it probably was.  I dare say Michel Platini really does feel that the Premier League is becoming too dominant on the European stage. But - and here is where I nail my colours unreservedly to a flag which will probably see me lynched into exile within the next 24 hours - I do not see what is wrong with this.

I do not defend corruption in sport (though I suspect that it is far too deeply-rooted in many sports for many reasons to ever be eliminated), and I do not defend what has now been proven to be corrupt refereeing which prevented Liverpool from reaching the European Cup final in 1965 and prevented an all-British European Cup final and an all-English UEFA Cup final 25 years ago this year. But it should be remembered that two of the above three incidents involved clubs from Italy (probably the only other European country, at least out of the long-established multi-party democracies, to be as institutionally corrupt as England and the only one to be in as dispiriting a political state at the moment) and that, in the case of the 1984 incidents, they had a point.  At that moment 34 years of development towards equality of opportunity and the erosion of squalor, want and bigotry - Britain was at its most economically equal in 1977, and its quality of life peaked in 1978 - were being systematically wrecked, and north and south were being set against each other as never since the Great Depression, leading directly to our present predicament where Chelsea/Man U pointscoring takes the place of serious debate and engagement between people who - I regret to say - genuinely despise each other, let alone everyone else. What was wrong with symbolically standing up for the European social model at the precise moment that Britain was abandoning it? The following year it became obvious what the cultural ingraining of suspicion of "foreigners" (while still taking an entire culture from a different sort of foreigner) had led to (while the Heysel Stadium was undoubtedly outmoded, this should never have been the excuse for Euro-bashing it became in the British press, least of all at a time when, as had been brutally exposed at Bradford 18 days earlier, almost all British football stadia were also largely unchanged from the days of Luke Haines' carrot-cabbage winters).  I have genuine sympathy for the likes of Oxford, Luton and Wimbledon - none of whom will be in the Football League next season - whose fans could reasonably have been trusted to behave themselves and who were denied unrepeatable European campaigns by the ruling.  My own team, Crystal Palace, suffered the same fate after finishing third in 1991, when the ban had been lifted but only the top two qualified, and although I doubt whether we would achieved much, simply playing in the UEFA Cup would have made us seem more fulfilled.  But the post-Heysel ban wasn't a conspiracy. It was the only way UEFA could possibly have reacted to the perversion of England itself by the creed which turns the north-west Europeans against their own.

Chelsea fans need to realise that they are spoilt.  Their culture is (regrettably) the dominant one that is being promoted at the expense of the native cultures throughout the world.  They have it all their own way.  They do not know how it feels to be under genuine threat from rapacious neoliberalism, to have the social and economic model they cherish continually attacked by the dominant ideology of the day (those of us who cling to the European social model in Britain do know how that feels, but Chelsea's current support base seem to be the children of neoliberalism, they literally do not know or understand anything else).

Most of their fellow Europeans, and especially the French, know all too well how that feels. They want a multipolar world, and for that I applaud them.  They also feel, quite justifiably, that pan-European competitions should not be put out of the reach of those who are committed to the European project by money and power which emanates from directions which symbolise England's disdain for it. Perhaps The Sun is actually right when it screams that a dummy page on UEFA's website on Wednesday afternoon predicted almost exactly the outcome.  But it ought to wonder precisely why that is, and ask itself whether its own pro-NAFTA propaganda, and its obvious connections with the forces that have taken the Premier League to its current financial level, is the real reason why football at this level has become so intensely politicised.  Most importantly of all, it speaks with forked tongue when it attacks the death threats which have shockingly been directed at the referee.  It has itself created that mindset over four decades by encouraging the working class to pathetically hate each other, or "foreigners", or the "nanny state", because the collectivised unity which was that close to achieving genuine, lasting change was genuinely scaring those who had taken power for granted (and who, in most cases, would ironically lose that power to deregulated global capitalism).  If The Sun in its current form had never existed, death threats directed at football referees would be utterly unthinkable in this country. 

I will no doubt being accused of being a "hater".  Wrong.  I don't hate English football, or Chelsea, or Manchester United, or Liverpool, in themselves - what I do hate is the process by which the Europe I love is being turned into a playground for big business and consumerism, the range and diversity of interests and tastes in England is being slowly narrowed down to Blairmurdochcamerongoodyboylewhoeveritisthisweek (and, again, who can blame UEFA for wanting to make a symbolic stand against the encroachment of this closing of the public mind into the continent?), both pop culture and high culture in England - and, through its influence, the rest of Europe - lose their fascination and thrill through becoming incompetent imitations of each other.  And I think Chelsea fans in particular should look at themselves, look at their tastes in music, food, drink, newspapers, television und so weiter, and ask themselves how they look to anyone not bound up in the irrational hysteria the Murdoch media have created around football since they took it over.  Ask themselves whether they might perhaps look decidedly hypocritical and humbug-ridden when they moan about all things European and yet expect complete and permanent dominance of the UEFA competitions without ever giving anything back.  Ask themselves why it always has to be their fellow Europeans who have to change while they must never themselves change or absorb anything outside their experience that has not been presented to them by a tiny clique of media controllers.  Ask themselves how much longer they can expect to have it both ways. As will probably happen to England itself sooner rather than later, the reckoning may well come before too long.

I am not actually saying that English football should be exiled to CONCACAF, but this would be the logical conclusion of the Murdochian nightmare of England, one which I insist he still desperately wants to see come true before he dies.  It is curious how you will never get a Sun-reading, Sky-watching, rock/rap (depending on age)-listening, fast-food-eating, Coke-drinking follower of Chelsea, or whoever, to call for England to move from UEFA to CONCACAF, even though every other aspect of their vision would fit perfectly with such a conclusion.  No, they expect to take everything away from Europe and give nothing back.  They read newspapers riddled with hatred for their fellow Europeans and expect nothing but love in return.  English football has got where it is financially purely because of one man who would have us out of the EU and straight into NAFTA if he could and still they wonder why there is antipathy on the continent to English dominance and why they are even now so hated.  I say again: they cannot expect to have it both ways.  Not while they issue death threats against referees, and not while they hurl abuse at "foreigners" while barely knowing anything about their own history, culture and literature.

It is time that those empowered by 40 years of Murdoch and by the self-hatred of both the Left and the traditional Right started realising how things appear when the boot is on the other foot. It is time they stopped attempting to build a surrogate Empire in their own back yard.  Let us create a Europe of equals.  And if it has to be without England (Scotland and Wales could still be in) let that be.

I do have a long piece on the ramifications of Hillsborough in my head which I didn't feel like posting at the time of the actual anniversary.  Hopefully I will this weekend.

Murdoch's long game - a prediction

Sorry for the October 2008 flashback, everyone.  As I said, I should have started again a long time before now.

And now for an April 1992 flashback, far more horrific of course.  But back then, as its English edition warned the last person to leave Britain if Neil Kinnock became Prime Minister to turn off the lights, the Scottish edition of The Sun took a rather different line, encouraging its readers to vote for the Scottish National Party.  At the time, many were surprised by this stance - quite a few attributed it to the strong possibility that the vote in Scottish marginal seats might decide the balance of power at Westminster, and suggested that Murdoch wanted to split the vote and encourage those who might otherwise have voted Labour to vote SNP and thus increase the Tories' chances.  How much effect that had we cannot be sure.  But I think he was playing a longer game.  He had already, strategically, decided to support Scotland's secession from the UK so as to strengthen (as it undoubtedly would, massively) his own ideal socio-political model in England.  As far back as 1995, long before anti-Scottishness among English right-wingers had reached its current hysterical level, Jonathan Miller (not that one, but a truly loathsome Sunday Times columnist and obsessive campaigner against the BBC licence fee) was only half-jokingly proposing to stand as an SNP candidate in his ultra-safe Tory Hampshire seat so as to make the point that such areas, and their inherent politics, would be much more likely to have things their way at Westminster if the "socialist stragglers" of Scotland were hived off.  It was only the transmutation of the Labour Party into something Murdoch could accept on both political and cultural levels, coupled with the exhaustion of Major's Tories and (importantly) their continued allegiance to an essentially pre-Sky vision of Britain, that put him off continuing this simultaneous pro-Tory (because he meant it) and pro-SNP (for strategic reasons) stance.

Now the time seems to have come for that stance to return, with all it may bring with it this time.  I predict in doom-laden tones that The Sun in May 2010 will support the Tories in its English edition, and the SNP in its Scottish edition, and will know precisely what it's doing and why it's doing it, even if plenty of its own readers don't.  I may be wrong.  But I think the odds are in favour of my being right.