On Swansea City and England

I wish there could be an English Swansea City - a club simultaneously rooted in its community and traditions, outside the control of plutocrats and conscious of football in the fullest global and European senses.  I wish nothing more in the world.  All these things are what I wish for England; they are deep within its history, theoretically possible, never entirely buried.  But I keep fearing there cannot be such a club here, and perhaps never could have been at least in any world that actually did exist (though there could have been had the 1980s and beyond been as Bernard Nossiter envisaged them in 1978), that there is something too profound, something too deep-rooted in our history that prevents it.

There never was proper democratic ownership of English clubs as still exists in Germany, of course, and never could have been outside that hidden path where we meet ourselves coming back, that road not taken.  There never could have been because of the strength and power of the essentially feudal class system in England.  While that system remained essentially unreformed and undefeated, whether by socialism or deregulated capitalism, all that could ever replace it was its modern successor, the repackaged feudalism of plutocracy.  And so it has been; English football went, as we know, straight from aldermen to billionaires - the feudalism of one world to the feudalism of another - without an intervening period of democracy.  It went that way because of England itself, despite, not because of, all the many extraordinary manifestations of creativity that England can take such pride in, but still because of, and not despite, the essential foundation stones of its society, where the new form of feudalism was allowed to take command just when the old one seemed to be on the rack and crumbling.

Germany has obviously not been a freakishly stable state with a moment such as 1066 defining all that followed, and 1066 is certainly not the foundation stone of Welsh national identity and social relations today; the Norman invasion was much slower and more haphazard and was much more seriously resisted.  This is not, I think, a coincidence.  Swansea City can remain locally-owned, with their supporters having a share, and the great clubs of Germany can remain under the control of their supporters, because localism can be democratic in places where 1066 isn't a defining moment (this isn't "Norman yoke" English nationalism, just historical honesty).  In places where it is the defining moment, localism can - I fear - only ever be what it was in pre-Hillsborough, pre-Sky English football, a front for outrageous divisions between the clubs' owners and their actual fans, with the latter treated as wholly different and inferior species without any concern for their livelihoods or even their lives. In Wales, without such a deep feudal division between ruling class and mass, it is that much easier for a club to be locally rooted without exploiting, dividing and conquering its fans, because the fans were always much more part of the same culture and the same world as the bosses, the latter much likely to have risen from the ranks of the former (as Swansea's chairman did, and as many old-school English football chairmen never did).

You realise, based on this, why so many English people - myself included in many of my previous posts here and elsewhere - consider the products of plutocracy to be almost, accidentally, progressive in context and by comparison.  You realise why so many fewer Scots - and, I would suspect albeit in the current absence of relevant sales statistics, Welsh people - want Frank Ocean or Disclosure (note that I am not suggesting for one moment that either of these acts represent Cowellite plutocracy - they are in fact as far as pop gets from it - I am simply pointing out that they are for me and for much of the English Left, along with Motown, a kind of surrogate socialism of desperation).  They don't want them because they don't need them; their ancestral culture is not tainted by feudalism to the point where they have to look beyond for anything progressive.  I need Frank Ocean and Disclosure like I need oxygen because all I can get from my physical environment is feudalism.  English clubs, in some ways, need plutocracy because they could only otherwise be governed by something even worse; small-town feudalism and institutionalised classism against their own fans, as indeed they were for a century. Their environment simply does not contain the potential for a democratic club, combining roots with a sense of 21st Century Europe, such as Swansea City are.  When Richard Scudamore, of all people, describes Swansea's management as ideal, he must be ruefully aware of this; he must know the aspects of English history which prevent it from happening here, the aspects which for 40 years have driven the English Left into being pro-Murdoch by default out of a sense of common enemies, a corner we cannot get out of in the way that Swansea can.

The other aspects which separate Swansea from the norms of English football are also culturally specific; the club's sense of stability, of slow advance and long-term, uninterrupted endeavour, has to do with the fact that the national myth of the buccaneer, the individual who cares neither for the past nor the future, is simply not embedded in Wales (or indeed Scotland) in the way it is in England.  There is much more valuing of order within a gentler capitalism, in part because the idea of "knowing your place" is much less tainted in Wales and Scotland because it can have a progressive meaning, a meaning that can assert working-class pride and openness to the wider world rather than simply being about subservience to a ruling class that hates you - the desire for the internal rules of capitalism to be torn down, as they have been in England in my lifetime, was less potent because localism, maybe even a slight cosiness, could actually be socialist and reasonably equal.  There is a sense in which England's immense creativity in popular culture is born out of that national sense of the buccaneer, the people who gave us everything from Motown to grime, that the short-term culture that has isolated English football is born out of the exact same criteria that make England exciting in other fields, that the mass ownership by plutocrats has the same roots (however much of a perversion it has become) as the internationalism that make England's popular culture so fresh and stimulating - that, in short, for there to be an English Swansea City, rather than merely a succession of paler and paler imitations of Tony Pulis's BNP FC, England would have to become less exciting and stimulating in some other fields.

There is this niggling, ongoing sense that English football culture is narrow because broader English popular culture is exciting - not least because the latter's instinctive, elemental ties are mainly to the non-football world, which puts English football, as a part of English popular culture, in a deeply problematic position without even intending or wanting or choosing to be.  Swansea's outstanding absorption and development of the Spanish-style passing game, their bypassing the usual Sun-friendly list of Big Names and having the sheer chutzpah to get Michael Laudrup to a club that spent most of his playing career routinely drawing 0-0 with a Mansfield or a Rotherham, their sense of ambition and desire to escape the norms of their environment, to not have to do everything through the great power next door but to make their own alliances and their own friendships and their own alignments, has to do with an instinctive political desire to separate themselves from the Anglosphere, to exist outside the domain of England-as-seafaring-global-trader.

Politically, the latter idea - driving force not only for Cameron but for people, almost unbelievably, far worse - is simply poison, socially terrifying and economically suicidal (which is why the CBI types that the Tory Right desperately wish could support it mostly don't, much to the headbangers' impotent infuriation).  In terms of popular culture, though, it is still - despite everything - a force for inspiration, just when you don't want it to be.  There is much to be admired, socially and politically, about the greater European consciousness of many Welsh and Scottish people (could David McAllister becoming Chancellor of Germany be the moment of serendipity that Scotland still hasn't quite reached, the moment it all falls into place, and finally freezes out any chance of England being what I myself am, against my will, a reason why it cannot be?).  In terms of football it is, as we know, obviously the only way.  But if pretty much everyone in England who understands football knows intellectually that it is the only way, is there something deep emotionally within us - within our popular culture and our working-class consciousness - that stops our football taking that path?  If we accept that football can never be divorced from the context of wider popular culture within the working-class consciousness, we can then recognise that high and low, posh and pop, have been less historically divided in Scotland and Wales and that this in itself may lead to a more mature understanding of football - where a European consciousness is not identified, in that very English way, with "toffs in the Albert Hall" and thus with class treason - that history denies the English.

And maybe this is the reason why there is still a moment when Avicii or Swedish House Mafia aren't quite enough, when that serendipity and social perfection feels like an imperfect evocation of the human condition and specifically of the problem of England.  There is a moment that hits you, just when you wish it didn't, when this almost unimaginably idyllic social democracy of pop (that is what "Don't You Worry Child" is, like nothing in my lifetime), feels incomplete.  You want it to be all you need - and maybe it would be all I needed if I were Scottish or Welsh - but eating away at you is a sense that it isn't, that the aggression and brutality and disregard for all established sensibilities of Anglo-Saxon capitalism, that which has conquered English football with the rest of English popular culture, is somehow necessary too.  And you hate yourself for it.  You wish that "Levels" - shimmering and untouched as if that were not suspicious - was all the pop you needed to be emotionally whole, and that Swansea City could have happened on your own doorstep, with equal and simultaneous longing and sadness.  And you realise anew that, just as the IBA and Sky are different from and alien to each other in every conceivable way other than both being different forms of non-democracy, neither paternalism nor plutocracy representing "the people" in the way the Dutch broadcasting system has been able to do, English football - in terms of its actual ownership and control - never really was "the people's game", that it can only be so in Wales because it is only there, and in Scotland, that "the people" in the sense the Mirror was going forward with, as opposed to "the people" The Sun was going forward with when it first purloined that slogan, have ever really been sufficiently socially cohesive and dominant to run a significant institution.

And yet there are still moments when I wonder if everything I've written above is a lie, a desperate attempt by an English Leftist marooned in the worst, the least historically promising part of England to live second-hand, just as I might in other moods live second-hand through urban pop.  When Swansea fans sing "oh England is full of shit", they can't all really be saying "England is full of plutocrats and Cameronites and Europhobes".  Some of them must, I know, be saying "England is full of spongers and blacks and Asians". When a Swansea fan shouts racist abuse at a Norwich player, I don't invoke post-colonialism to say it is somehow more acceptable than if it were the other way round (and they must surely be two of the whitest cities to have ever had Premier League teams); I actually find it much worse, because in my position - and shoot this down as delusional romanticism by any means - you expect so much more, in terms of openness and tolerance, from those who see themselves as socialistic and European-minded from those who loudly and aggressively do not.

And yet I know that much of the history of Old Labour is a necessary corrective if your vision of the working class is simply as an anti-racist (let alone "anti-imperialist") vanguard, and I know all too well how much the culture of post-industrial areas has changed and how rapidly the tradition of the autodidact, the self-taught working-class intellectual, has been eroded; the change between the Manics and Stereophonics or Lostprophets, barely a flick of the eyelid apart in age, is so vast and so total that it might in other times have required an entire human lifetime to take effect (I always thought this was a factor in Noel Gallagher having, however buried and however perverted by parochialism and fear, some kind of working-class consciousness that his brother completely lacks; his anger at Liam dedicating "Live Forever" to Diana Spencer was surely, somewhere within, a sign of Noel's having been that much older during the Winter of Discontent and the miners' strike, and indeed the political use of her wedding).  I do not, of course, pretend that Swansea City and their fanbase are unaffected by this.  But I still think they have something very good and very necessary happening there, and it still breaks my heart that the weight of history prevents it from happening here.

I don't want Scottish independence to happen because of pure selfishness and self-interest from my position as a socio-political outcast in my geographical environment.  Unlike many of those in England whose politics are based around selfishness and self-interest (and who often, perversely and paradoxically, also oppose Scottish independence when they, unlike me, stand massively to gain from it), I'm honest enough to admit that.  But it still fills me with shame.  So does only feeling able to live through others, those born to things I wasn't.  But honesty still feels to me like the only way, especially when filtered through with sadness and melancholy.  Hopefully I've shown it here.  Hopefully I've told the truth.

In the new spirit of reconciliation and freedom from history ...

... between the English and the Irish ...

... may I make the polite request that those who would have historically considered themselves most ineffably opposed to the English anti-Catholicism with which it unfortunately became mixed up (Sinn Fein voters, Celtic fans - come on, it's not as if anyone else will be able to win the SPL for the foreseeable future) - make a conscious effort to reclaim the tradition of autumn bonfires?  They are, after all, part of their own tradition, part of the Celtic pagan inheritance.  They got mixed up with the Protestant revolution and all the unnecessary hatred and bloodshed, lasting well into my own lifetime, that resulted, and they were (unforgivably, and almost certainly hastening their decline in England) misused by certain Mail or Express-reading types to suggest that all Irish people were potential terrorists.  But that does not change their origins, nor does it change their immense potency and power, their evocation of things beyond normal human understanding, their sense of - ultimately - life and death.

More to the point, it has become necessary to champion them simply as a means of detracting from the imposition of American-led commercialism on the process of the seasons for all of us in both the islands, and of undermining the ludicrous pretence of some in Ireland (who really, really should know better) that a victory for US big business is in some sense a victory for them (when in fact those commercial forces menace the autumn traditions of Ireland just as much as they do those of England, and for very much the same reasons and with - thus far - seemingly as little serious resistance). Autumn bonfires were a means of marking the change of seasons centuries before the Gunpowder Plot.  They can and should be so again.  The divisions and hatreds that have turned families and brothers against each other for centuries - and thus the inability, until now, to create a unified front for all the peoples of the two islands against the forces of exploitation and degradation - have been a significant factor in the forces of global commerce laying waste to the traditions of all parts of the two islands, and exploiting the arguments of the left (which it would not otherwise care about one iota) to present them as "racist" or "backward" (when what it really means is that it cannot make enough money out of them).  Now that those old hatreds are seemingly - finally - dissipating and being recognised as impositions and restrictions which hold us all back in a way that can no longer be afforded, could this also be a moment for the English and the Irish to come together in favour of autumn bonfires, for whichever reason you want them and whoever or whatever you want to commemorate or not, as against the Americanised version of the festival which the Irish and Scots once thought was theirs?  That festival and autumn bonfires share the same origins.  It is time to use the reconciliations of 2011 and 2012 in both parts of Ireland to bring them together again.

Daily Mail Socialism and the Barnsley by-election

The dramatic scale of the difference between Lindsayism/Daily Mail Socialism and the more outward-looking, cosmopolitan version espoused in the West Coast Main Line cities can best be defined by the simple statement that, had the Liverpudlian working class identified - as Lindsay wishes the entire British working class would, and cannot face the fact that many of them never did - with the landed aristocracy rather than with those as marginalised in the United States for racial reasons as they were for social class reasons here, there would simply never have been such a thing as the Beatles; the impetus which brought them into existence would, without argument, simply not have been there. Now you can argue at length about whether or not that would have been a better or worse Britain or a better or worse world - I can certainly see both sides - but it would have been, equally without argument, an almost indescribably and unimaginably different Britain and arguably an even more different world. It would also, of course, be a Britain and a world in which enough people would identify with quasi-feudal ideas of "community" for Lindsayism to make sense.

The historical reasons why Daily Mail Socialism has been much stronger in north-east England, Scotland and Wales, places where a deep-rooted antipathy to the Tory party is combined with an equally deep-rooted social conservatism, than in the WCML cities (whose populations have been far more shifting and varied) and in the southern English shires (which have been, broadly, C/conservative in both the party political and literal senses, and whose self-image has seemed ever more ridiculous and ill-thought-out in recent years through the irreconcilibility of the two), have been gone over well enough already. It is not surprising in this context, and in that of Liverpool's very specific history where both traditional socialism and most (in my lifetime, all) forms of Toryism have seemed equally alien and out-of-place, that the only use Google reveals by anyone other than myself of the term "Daily Mail Socialism" is by a Liverpool season-ticket holder criticising Gordon Brown's use of the term "British jobs for British workers".

This was and is wholly accurate; my partial defence of Brown here in the past extends only to the crude Blairite/Cameronite taunting for reasons that have nothing to do with his politics rather than out of any real defence of those politics themselves; now the dust has settled, the pathetic, futile nature of such rhetoric is most reminiscent of the utter impotence of Major's ministers opposing aspects of Sky's influence, having previously done nothing to stop it while there was still time. Brown, as a leader with some residual, sentimental ties to the older incarnation of his party following an overpowering political personality who had achieved unprecedented electoral success at the expense of the party's entire cultural base, stands perfect comparison; while he had never been as wholly committed a cheerleader for neoliberalism as the Blairites themselves, he had no meaningful opposition to it either, certainly not sufficiently so to prevent him waving through such policies in his decade as chancellor. For him then to mouth vague statements in favour of the organisation of the economy along the lines of heavily protected and separated, psychologically socialist nations, when he had spent the previous decade happily pushing through economic policies which aggressively confined such things to history, just made him look stupid and weak. Of more direct relevance to the issue being discussed here, though, is that a Liverpudlian should use the term "Daily Mail Socialism" to describe the rhetorical language of a Scot, a fact which seems aptly to sum up the differences between the dominant versions of socialism in these two left-leaning places.

This of course also explains the recent political history of Barnsley, a town where a disillusioned "Old Labour" emotional feeling of betrayal combines with a profound insularity and fear of outsiders, and where the residual Tory vote - obviously never anywhere near enough to win the seat even in an election like 1959, but still greater than they could expect now - felt so alienated by the party's abandonment of "One Nation" politics and confrontational attitude towards South Yorkshire during the 1980s that much of the area's Tory vote collapsed for good, perhaps to the Lib Dems in the days (how long ago they now seem) when they were a protest vote for disillusioned supporters of both larger parties. While a Tory vote could obviously never be any kind of protest vote now, it could - without the legacy of the 1980s - have been a protest vote against Labour when they were still in office, but in practice could not be because the hatred for the party's handling of the industrial disputes of that time (one far above all others, of course) was still too strong.

This dual alienation led directly to the disturbing success of the BNP in the 2009 European election (where the party won 16% of Barnsley's vote, a significant factor in the shameful election of Andrew Brons to the European Parliament) and in last year's general election (more than 3,000 votes in Barnsley Central) - sheer despair and isolation, the long-term legacy of a cultural fear of the much more hybridised, cosmopolitan style of socialism "over the Pennines" (and even, to some extent, in Leeds and Sheffield), and the insular racism and Europhobia of certain aspects of "Old Labour" culture (typified in the late 1990s by Austin Mitchell's Mail on Sunday column and defence of the Duke of Edinburgh's dodgier remarks because, effectively, "everybody said that in my day and it never did us any harm", and by Dennis Skinner's claim that the German owners of Rolls Royce were "getting too big for their jackboots", both arguably worse than the worst Blairite) manifesting itself on the most odious level imaginable. Last week, the BNP's decline since the general election was thankfully evident (though they still won more votes than is comfortable to think of) and it was inevitable that the Lib Dems would have fallen as far as they did (as they undoubtedly will, for the same reasons, in the Scottish and Welsh elections) seeing that they are propping up a government that many in Barnsley will see as something akin to an occupying power, but UKIP's second place was deeply depressing, and clearly very much the same kind of misguided and deluded protest vote, inheriting both the Daily Mail Socialist and Tory-but-for-Thatcher tendencies.

We can say, as much without argument as that both Britain and the wider world would have been unrecognisably different without the Beatles, that the comparative success in Barnsley of parties like UKIP and the BNP is one of the worst legacies of an organised safe tribal war that never needed to happen. This Hugo Young piece - written three months before the death of John Smith - is a fine example, with all the eloquence and command of language that The Guardian still misses, of what is probably the second best point of departure other than "In Place of Strife" succeeding. As things are, though, the political alienation of so many in Barnsley is very precisely the legacy of 1984/5, and as depressing and enervating as anything else that can be so described.

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.

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.

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?

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.