Category Archives: just me then

Fuller, narrower, and more critical

22 September 2025 – 12:36

When I first got into legal theory I was very taken with Lon Fuller’s The Morality of Law; Fuller was actually the second legal theorist I ever read, after Pashukanis. Although any reasonably focused and analytical reading of TMoL – to say nothing of Fuller’s responses to critics – shows Fuller’s argument to be full of holes, wider reading has left me with the inconvenient conviction that he was onto something. Not the idea of a ‘morality of law’, that is – and certainly not the idea that lawyers make law through an intuitive engagement with the meaning-laden fabric of the law, which those literal-minded positivists could never understand – but… something. I’m still getting to grips with what that was, though.

Here are a couple of abstracts, showing how my thinking on Fuller’s evolving. One’s for a paper that you can, if you’re interested, read here; the second, longer one is for a round-table event planned for November.

 

Fuller, Narrower: A New Reading of Lon Fuller’s The Morality of Law

In Lon Fuller’s The Morality of Law, Fuller identifies eight criteria which legal systems must meet and argues that they constitute an inner morality of law. Fuller argues that meeting these criteria to some minimum degree is necessary to law as a practice; that meeting them more fully produces better law; and that the minimum threshold value cannot be specified in theory, but only through a good-faith effort to make law well. Presented as a challenge to legal positivism, these claims met a hostile critical reaction, which Fuller did not effectively counter. However, Fuller’s critics focused mainly on supporting assumptions grounded in Fuller’s moralised conception of law, rather than on the core claim that conformity to formal criteria is associated with substantively better outcomes. This paper suggests that this core claim may be sustainable independently of Fuller’s moralised assumptions, identifying an association between law, the eight criteria and respect for personal freedom of responsible action. By reference to recent developments in counter-terrorist and public order law, departures from the criteria are shown to be associated with decreasing respect for personal freedom of responsible action; this supports a modified Fulleran association between conformity to the eight criteria and the quality of legal outcomes, and hence a modestly value-laden model of law.

 

Knowable legality: ideal or irrelevance?

This paper develops an account of law as a mode of social organisation, definitionally distinct from modes such as custom, administrative direction and command. Law’s distinctiveness lies in its address to its subjects, considered as rational agents capable of understanding authoritative guidance and freely ordering their own activities accordingly.

Law’s mode of organisation, deriving from the form of subjectivity which it addresses, has inherent in it qualities of generality, intelligibility, followability and justification. Law’s generality enables it to guide rather than direct. Law’s intelligibility means that its guidance is unambiguous and that general rules are sufficiently coherent for specific guidance to be derived in novel situations. A law is followable in the sense that subjects have a justificatory rationale which motivates them to follow it, independent of sanctions for non-compliance.This further entails the criterion of justification: where no valid rationale exists or can be shown, any law should be liable to amendment or withdrawal.

This model of law’s nature can be considered both as constituting an ideal and as setting a threshold – albeit a floating threshold. Any recognisable instance of the social institution we call ‘law’ will be characterised by generality, intelligibility and followability, developed to the standard regarded as requisite in its social setting. Further development of these qualities will facilitate the particular mode of social organisation characteristic of law, shifting the institutions and practices of ‘law’ further away from unlawlike modes of organisation. This represents a non-moralised version of Fuller’s argument for the ‘internal morality of law’.

To call for the law to be more fully or widely ‘knowable’, on this argument, is to call for it to be more distinctively ‘lawlike’, approximating more closely to this model of law and legal subjectivity. Laws will be more knowable to the extent that they are more general, minimising the need for specific conditions and qualifications; more intelligible, obviating the need for specialist interpretation; and more followable, their rationale motivating law-compliant behaviour by according with law’s subjects’ beliefs and desires.

The tendency of this critique is to preserve or restore the law’s integrity as law. This may be a politically liberal programme, asserting the interests of the legal subject over and against those of the state. State authorities can benefit from clothing command and administrative direction in the forms of law: departures from generality, intelligibility and followability, making law less knowable and disadvantaging law’s subjects, may be functional to the requirements of government,. However, this may also be a conservative programme, resisting progressive attempts to impose rules and distinctions which are not generally ‘known’. More fundamentally, the question of whether or not law’s address to its subjects is ‘lawlike’ has no purchase on – or relevance to – the question of who those subjects are. Ironically, the ideal of a wholly knowable legality sketched here may be compatible with very great iniquity.

By Phil | Also posted in academe, legal matter | Comments (0)

…and why are we in this handcart?

9 May 2025 – 20:20

Now I’m not one to rub your nose
In reams and reams of purple prose
(Which is why I wrote this song)
And I’m not one to chew the fat
When all that need be said is that
There’s something very wrong
– Edwyn Collins

Back in February I looked at opinion polling since the 2024 election – and, in particular, since the 2024 election campaign, over whose six weeks Labour’s support dropped by 10-12% – and asked, ‘is this normal?’. Short answer: no, it isn’t. Losing a few % points during a General Election campaign – well, it never happened to the last guy, but it’s certainly been known. But after the election Labour’s support just went on falling, and that isn’t just one of those things. It’s not (just) the kind of thing that happens to Labour support after an election; or to the incoming governing party after an election; or to Labour support in years they win an election; or… It’s not normal; and the key factor underlying this situation – the fact that Nigel Farage’s Reform UK is polling in the mid- to high 20%s and has been for some time – is very abnormal indeed; unprecedented, even. UKIP has polled in the high teens; at one point in the second half of 2019, the Brexit Party repeatedly broke 20%. But, quoting my earlier post,

Never before have we seen a substantial and sustained growth in support for the Farage party, either continuing over nine months or taking their support to the mid-20%s – not in 2019, not in 2015 or 2016. I’ll go further: never before – literally never – have we seen a substantial and sustained growth in support for any party to the Right of the Conservatives, continuing over nine months (or anything close to it), taking their support to the mid-20%s (or anywhere near it).

How new and different is our current situation, though – and should it, as I wrote in February, be treated “as an emergency, on a par with the rise of Trump or Marine Le Pen”? To put it another way, are we looking at the inexorable rise of a far-Right party to dominate British politics, or something less permanent in its effects, less threatening, or both – just another twist in the long history of British parliamentary democracy?

Very much in the “life’s rich pageant” school is Peter Kellner’s Prospect article headed “The UK’s Labour-Tory duopoly is over”, which was discussed and elaborated on by Simon Wren-Lewis and, somewhat less respectfully (“banal when not fatuous”), by David. Both take the view that a series of long-term changes have brought us to the point where there are four significant nationally-organised parties in Britain, not three as before, and that this will make future elections a lot more unpredictable; Wren-Lewis also sketches out a route whereby we might find our way back to a three-party system, if the Labour and Tory parties play their cards right.

I confess, I see things in more alarmist terms. The headline, for me, is that Reform UK’s support in opinion polls has doubled – from 14% to 28% – since the 2024 election, while Labour has lost 11% – from 34% to 23%. Moreover, that’s a double understatement of Labour’s loss of support: firstly because it’s calculated from the already startlingly low base of the 2024 election, which would otherwise be seen as a problem in its own right; secondly, because the Labour vote at that election was depressed in part by local protest votes, so should if anything have recovered slightly – presumably nobody’s telling pollsters that if there was a General Election tomorrow they’d vote for Ajmal Masroor or Andrew Feinstein. Worst of all, neither the rise in Reform support nor the loss of Labour support was a one-off event: both were continuing processes, and as far as we can tell still are continuing processes. The Faragists are up a lot, Labour are down a lot, and there’s no end in sight.

Kellner states that one of the most significant shifts in voter opinion since the 2024 election has been a 4% shift from Labour (currently down 10%) to the Lib Dems (up 1.5%); this is second only to the 5% shift from the Tories (down 2%) to Reform UK (up 10%). (I don’t know what we do with the other 6% and 5%. I’m sure Kellner knows what he’s talking about, but I’d like to see the workings.) Diagnosis: redistribution within centre-left and centre-right blocs, Labour to Lib Dem and Tory to NF. The next stop is a familiar narrative, the secular decline of the Labour-Tory duopoly as measured in joint General Election vote share. Here are the relevant numbers (although they don’t match Kellner’s, as he was using Britain-wide statistics – more accurate, but (as I’ve found) harder to get hold of). Each of these paired charts shows the UK-wide vote distribution in nine successive General Elections, 1966-1997 and 1992-2024; two columns (1992 and 1997) are repeated, because in some significant respects those elections were both the end of something and the beginning of something else (I can be less specific).

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Kellner’s time series begins in 1997 – the second column on the second row here – and on that basis he reads the data as a simple story of declining polarisation, interrupted by a single, two-election blip. The name of the blip, of course, is Brexit, which “polarised the electorate, not between left and right but between in and out”. Once that single issue had been resolved, normal politics resumed, the 2024 figure in effect picking up and continuing the steady decline of 1997-2010 (the Britain-wide figures Kellner quotes don’t have that inconvenient uptick in 2015).

As for the causes of that secular decline, you hardly need me to tell you. We’re no longer in the world where “[w]orking-class voters identified overwhelmingly with Labour, middle-class with the Tories”, or even in “the days when ‘working-class’ and ‘middle-class’ had clear-cut meanings”. On one hand, the decline of heavy industry ate into Labour’s core vote; on the other, the growing predominance of the service sector required an increasing take-up of higher education, which in turn eroded the Tory vote. These processes of disaffiliation continued, fed on each other and gained a momentum of their own, and suddenly there we were with (in the words of Kellner’s headline writer) “a tight three-way race in Britain between Labour, Reform and the Conservatives, with the Lib Dems not far behind”. Yes, the Liberal Democrats are certainly the story of the moment. I mean, they’re up a point and a half since the 2024 election, which was itself half a point higher than their 2019 result! Can’t argue with numbers like that!

Two points. Firstly, did heavy industry not decline at all before Tony Blair? Because, while the figures do show the Labour/Tory vote declining as prescribed from 1992 (high 70%s) to 2010 (mid-60%s), earlier elections – shown in the first row above – show nothing like as clear a pattern. There’s an abrupt drop between 1970 and 1974, as the Liberals establish themselves as a viable third party rather than as also-rans, but it’s a one-off; after that we’re looking at mid-70%s for both 1974 elections, 80% in 1979, 70% in 1983, then back up to the mid- and high 70%s for the next two. Unless Kellner would argue that class-based politics wasn’t declining before 1992, but fluctuating year to year – and that 1992 saw its highest level since 1979 – the ‘decline of class identification’ thesis seems to be in trouble.

Secondly, about those Brexit elections. Is it really the case that the electorate was polarised, in both 2017 and 2019, around Getting Brexit Done? Calling 2017 a Brexit election raises the question of why the Remainer bloc would rally to a party which made a lot of noise about social justice and anti-imperialism, but generally avoided saying anything about Brexit at all. In 2019 Labour was at least committed to a second referendum – but for that election the evidential bar for a Labour Remain bloc is even higher, considering that Remain-leaning centrists had been noisily dissociating themselves from Labour for most of the previous year. A simpler explanation is surely that, as much as Theresa May and Boris Johnson might have wanted it to happen, it wasn’t Brexit that polarised the vote in those two elections. At least, it wasn’t only Brexit: May and Johnson both built a substantial bloc of Tory votes by invoking Brexit, but Labour weren’t playing the same game. The 2017 vote was heavily polarised, to Left as well as Right, because Labour’s campaign was independently popular – and, just as importantly, because the Right saw this as a threat and rallied to the Tories in response. The 2019 vote in turn was rather less polarised because, while the Right continued to rally to the Tories – both for the sake of Brexit and to stop Labour – many of Labour’s voters were led astray by centrist will-o-the-wisps. To put it more bluntly, the polarisation of 2017 was partially unwound in 2019 by the operation of a third campaign, which had the wholly negative aim of disaggregating the left bloc and preventing a Labour victory under Jeremy Corbyn – even at the cost of a Tory victory. But accepting this analysis would require accepting that a left-wing Labour Party – and not the prospect of stopping Brexit – did in fact attract 40% of the vote in 2017, and that in turn would make the deterministic narrative of inexorable depolarisation fundamentally untenable. So best not go there. We don’t talk about 2017!

Simon Wren-Lewis for his part broadly accepts the “long-term depolarisation (2017 and 2019 don’t count)” narrative, but argues that the decline hasn’t been continuous. Looking at election results over a longer time period than Kellner, he identifies two ‘step changes’. The first is the enduring drop in the two-party vote which took place (as we’ve seen) in 1974, with a sharp rise in support for the Liberals. The next step change came in 2024, when the combined vote share of minor parties (and independents) topped 40%. Before going any further with Wren-Lewis’s analysis, we may pause for a moment to ask what we’re actually explaining. Hypothesising that changes in party identification happen in a kind of punctuated equilibrium, with a relatively dramatic ‘step change’ followed by a period of stability, certainly explains what happened (or didn’t happen) between 1970 and 1997. The trouble is, it supplies the same explanation for what happened between then and 2019. In particular, it treats as irrelevant the steady decline in the major-party vote between 1992 and 2010 which was Kellner’s original explanandum, incidentally removing any need to explain the return of polarisation in 2017 and 2019. It might be valid to replace a trend with “a series of step changes”, but when it’s a series of two events, fifty years apart, we may wonder how much explanatory power it can have.

In any case, Wren-Lewis has a relatively simple explanation for both step changes, based on ‘median voter’ theory. In the early 1970s public opinion shifted against trade union power and against the Labour government’s attempts at industrial management. From the point of view of the median voter, Labour had shifted to the Left; this created an open goal for the Liberals and their dynamic and personable leader. Later in the decade Margaret Thatcher’s election as Tory leader sealed the deal by shifting the Conservatives to the Right, meaning that former Conservative votes as well as former Labour votes were now up for grabs. This was the cue for a new centrist party to emerge and sweep all before it, pushing Labour’s support down below 30% and turning an unpopular Conservative leader’s single term into three (not that I’m bitter).

As for the second step change, that shoe dropped in 2024 when the median voter was deserted once more, this time by the Labour Party following the Tories to the Right. On one hand, we (in England, at least) may now be in a four- or even five-party system, with Labour unwisely scrapping with both the Tories and Reform UK over the “socially conservative/economic Right” area of a liberal/authoritarian – economic Left/Right quadrant chart. In this case Labour is likely to come out ahead, owing to its toehold in the “socially conservative/economic Left” quadrant (“the Lib Dems have a good chance of keeping their high seat total … [o]therwise the main beneficiary of this Reform/Tory battle is Labour”). If Labour are wise they will edge further into the “economic Left” and “socially liberal” zones, taking votes back from the Lib Dems and Greens while leaving the Tories and Reform UK to fight it out; if the Tories are wise (although clearly we’re moving deeper into counterfactual territory here) they will also look to their “socially liberal” flank. A couple of years of that and we’ll have three-party politics back! So, yes, 2024 was a step change, but nothing that can’t be fixed by politicians having a bit of sense.

What’s that, Sooty? What about the 2015 step change? What step change – the Tories and Labour between them took 68% of the vote in 2005, 65% in 2010 and 67% in 2015: nothing to see there, surely? Well, maybe. Let’s look at the figures another way.

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The third- to nth-party vote, previously shown as a single yellow-shading-to-purple block, has been split into four categories. ‘Left’ includes the Greens/Ecology Party and all minor Left parties, including an estimate for Left independent candidates in 2024; ‘Lib/Nat’ includes the Liberals/SDP/Alliance/Liberal Democrats, the SNP and Plaid Cymru; ‘Right’ includes the National Front, British National Party, Referendum Party, UKIP, Veritas, Brexit Party and Reform UK; and ‘Other’ includes Northern Ireland parties, plus all other small parties and independents.

This doesn’t do much to the first row, but some quite interesting trends start to emerge from 1997 on. Firstly, the declining major-party vote share from 2001 to 2010 is clearly due to growth in both the ‘Lib/Nat’ bloc and the ‘Right’ bloc (up from 21% to 25% and from 2% to 5%, respectively). Secondly, 2015 sees a substantial fall in the ‘Lib/Nat’ bloc, corresponding to the collapse in the Lib Dem vote, and an almost exactly equivalent jump in the ‘Right’ bloc: the two account for 25%+5%=30% of the vote in 2010, 13%+13%=26% in 2015. (There’s also a glimmer of life on the independent Left that year, with the Greens profiting from the Lib Dem collapse and taking nearly 4% of the vote.) Thirdly, polarisation in 2017 squeezes the Lib/Nat and Left votes and collapses the Right vote, down to 11%, 2% and 2% respectively; in 2019, partial depolarisation on the Left sees the Lib/Left vote share rising to 16%, with the Right share unchanged.

An alert reader may infer from this that Corbyn’s Labour, in 2017 and 2019, was able to attract substantial numbers of 2015 UKIP voters. To that reader I would say, “yes, and a good thing too”. Also, “if only they’d gone on voting Labour, wouldn’t that have been good?”. Concluding (bet you’re wishing you hadn’t said anything now, alert reader!) with, “if you’re suggesting that Jeremy Corbyn’s brand of Labour politics might have some kind of affinity with the Faragists, you should perhaps compare his policy statements with those of the current leadership“. There’s more than one way to skin a cat, and the art of attracting Labour voters who might also find Reform UK appealing doesn’t only consist of taking a leaf out of Reform UK’s book of policies; in fact, it may not involve that at all.

None of this really figures in Simon Wren-Lewis’s model. He does acknowledge that there were changes under the surface in 2015 – “the LibDem vote collapsed, but the UKIP vote, and to a lesser extent the Green party vote, rose to almost compensate” – but under the surface is where he leaves them. But it seems to me that the UKIP vote share quadrupling in 2015 is a story in itself, not just a footnote to the Lib Dem vote falling by two-thirds (as dramatic as that was). I can only see two possible readings. One is that a far-right populist party gained a lot of support at the same time that the Lib Dems lost most of theirs (owing to disappointment/disillusionment with their role in the Coalition): this would say something alarming about the reserves of support that the far Right can tap into and the failures of gatekeeping which allowed them to do so. The other is that a far-right populist party gained a lot of support because the Lib Dems lost most of theirs. While this would suggest that there wasn’t quite so much latent far-Right support out there, it would say something almost equally alarming about the reserves of anti-political populism that the Liberal Democrats tapped into, until they discredited themselves by joining a Tory government – and in particular about their failure to develop that bloc of support, to build any kind of political consciousness beyond “the big parties are all the same”. (The alert reader from the last sidebar might say that Corbyn’s Labour didn’t do any better hanging on to the ex-UKIP voters of 2017 and 2019, to which I would say, “you’re really not letting this go, are you?” – but also “the next electoral test wasn’t till 2024, so the blame really has to lie with Starmer’s Labour”.)

Either way, what happened in 2015 really can’t be brought under the heading of “the median voter, having been deserted by both Left and Right, opted for the centre” – and what happened in 2024 certainly can’t. In 2024 the independent Left took 9% of the vote, up from 3% in 2019; the Right bloc showed even more dramatic growth, taking it from 2% up to 14%; and the Lib/Nat bloc (surely the home of the median voter) was slightly down, with 15% of the vote from 16% in 2019. (And, while a 14-day average of current polling puts the combined Lib Dem + SNP + PC vote right up at 17.5%, it also puts Reform UK on 28% – up 14% from the election.) The door that UKIP were allowed to push open in 2015 was closed firmly in 2017 by the return of left-right polarisation, and rather less firmly in 2019 by Boris Johnson’s personal hegemonisation of the Brexit vote. Come 2024, the door was wide open – and, rather than cannibalising the anti-system portion of the Lib Dem (and Green) vote, the Faragists are now preying on the main parties’ vote. The result is to drive the main parties’ support down as never before, with nobody profiting from it apart from Farage (and, to a much smaller extent, the Greens), and no reason to imagine that the process is not going to continue.

The story of 2024, in other words, is not about the centre ground or the median voter. Wren-Lewis’s summing-up

Essentially the Conservatives first moved to neoliberalism, and then to right wing populism, and now Labour has moved in that direction leaving a large part of policy space empty for other parties to fill.

is so inadequate that it would work better as the statement of the problem: if both the main parties have moved into the populist Right, leaving almost all the policy space vacant to their Left, why is it the populist Right that is profiting?

David usefully complicates the picture by bringing in turnout: not what proportion of people voted for the main parties but how many. What happens if we revisit those voting figures with that in mind, by including non-voters?

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Once again, there’s nothing much to report on the top row. Turnout dips a bit in 1970 – the first election at which 18- to 20-year-olds could vote – but only to 72%; thereafter it wavers between 70% and 80% until 1992 (78%) and 1997 (71%). However, the second row shows that towards the end of the century there was a step-change in turnout, called “New Labour”: after falling from 78% to 71% in 1997, turnout falls again in 2001 to 59%, and never reaches 70% thereafter. (Even the highly polarised 2017 election only saw turnout of 69%.) The two main parties’ share of the electorate falls below 50% in 2001, and only goes above the 50% mark in 2017 and 2019. 2024 combines the depolarisation of 2015 with the disaffection of 2001, taking the Labour/Tory vote share of the electorate below 40%; for the first time, voters for the two leading parties were outnumbered by non-voters.

David suggests that the process underlying all these changes is the “disenchantment of politics by economics”: the progressive sequestration of political process from democratic control through the continuing consolidation of neoliberalism. Which, of course, was not invented in 2024, or even 1997:

[Labour and the Conservatives] have both subscribed to the Thatcherite dispensation since the late-1980s, which has ultimately put them at odds with the public. This has led both to salutary landslides, whose purpose was to “kick the bums out” … and to the determination of the political cartel and its media to extinguish any glimmers of democratic hope, as happened after 2017.

Perhaps we can tell the whole story of this period in terms of alternating waves of popular disaffection and enthusiasm, aroused by some new and different political force which seems to promise to reinvent politics – or, at least, to make it work the way it used to. While positive in itself, and a potential vector for democratic renewal, that enthusiasm is necessarily fragile – and the seeming inevitability of the moments when hope is dashed gives the returning mood of disaffection added bitterness and alienation.

  • 1974: Mild disaffection with two main parties allows Liberals to establish themselves as a credible third party (step change). Two main parties’ share of vote does not go above 80% after this, with rare exceptions (1979 (81%), 2017 (83%)).
  • 1979: Enthusiasm for Conservatives under Thatcher takes Labour/Tory vote share back up to 80%.
  • 1983: Enthusiasm for Liberals and SDP entrenches large Lib/Nat block of votes, which in turn entrenches Conservative government.
  • 1997: Enthusiasm for New Labour. Disaffection with Conservatives under Major, aggravated by seeming inevitability of Labour victory, prompts substantial alienation from democratic politics on the Right; turnout falls relative to 1992.
  • 2001: Disaffection with New Labour, whose first term has redefined Labour government as managerial and politically unaccountable, hits Labour vote, driving turnout even lower (step change). Turnout does not go above 70% after this. Low turnout means that those who do vote are proportionately more likely to be motivated by ideology and/or by anti-system resentment.
  • 2010: Continuing disaffection with Labour amplifies mild enthusiasm for Liberal Democrats, enabling Lib Dems to gain 57 seats on a 1% increase in vote share.
  • 2015: Disaffection with Liberal Democrats, who have discredited themselves as vehicle for anti-system votes; partial reversal of first step change. Some enthusiasm for Faragists, who effectively take the place of the Lib Dems, taking the far-Right vote above 10% for the first time and legitimising their presence in mainstream politics (step change).
  • 2017: Enthusiasm for Labour under Corbyn, leading to partial reversal of second and third step changes: turnout is the highest since 1997 and UKIP vote below 2%.
  • 2019: Disaffection with Labour and enthusiasm for Conservatives under Johnson. Polarisation slackens, with lower turnout, higher Lib Dem and Green vote shares, and a low but targeted Faragist vote (2% overall, but with more than 100 saved deposits and four second places).
  • 2024: Disaffection with the Conservatives. Some disaffection with Labour, particularly on the Left: limited gains in vote share are undercut by losses to the Lib Dems, Greens and left independents. Some enthusiasm for Faragists, but overall a general lack of enthusiasm, leading to lowest ever turnout. The Lib Dems make huge seat gains while Labour gain a large overall majority; in both cases the party’s gain in vote share since 2019 is trivial, and the number of votes cast for the party is actually down. Large-scale loss of Conservative votes to the Faragists is responsible for most Labour and Lib Dem seat gains.

Putting it all together, I think we can see that all the people I’ve cited have got part of the picture. Even Kellner was right to identify a long-running process of declining polarisation – indeed, declining political structuration of society and social life – although he was clearly wrong to date it no further back from 1997. Simon for his part was right to single out the drop in the main parties’ vote caused by the rise of the Liberals in 1974: in retrospect we can now see Jeremy Thorpe as the first prominent and successful anti-system politician in British politics. Simon was also right, or partially right, in identifying certain changes as particularly significant; I’ll even grant that 2017 and 2019 represented a partial reversal of an earlier trend, which reasserted itself in 2024, although I don’t agree with Simon (or Peter Kellner) as to how. Lastly, David was right in identifying the slump in turnout of 2001 as significant, and in naming the overall process as one of disaffection and disenchantment: a process whereby politics ceases to work, either in the sense of affecting tangible change or in the sense of commanding loyalty, making some kind of emotive sense.

I think what the above rundown of recent election demonstrates is that the process of disaffection is cumulative. A ‘step change’ is unusual not in being irreversible but simply in its scale; almost all the recent elections listed above made an enduring change (if not necessarily a permanent one) to the political landscape. Disaffection is hard to reverse – all the more so when it follows a preceding wave of enthusiasm – and, as successive elections pass, more and more political forces are hit by popular disaffection. Who now will run up flags for Margaret Thatcher (1979) or Tony Blair (1997)? Who now agrees with Nick (2010)? Who now believes Jeremy Corbyn will change the world (2017), or that Boris Johnson got Brexit done (2019)? It’s particularly noticeable that, while both Labour and the Conservatives have come back from one episode of disaffection (2001, 1997) to a renewed wave of enthusiasm (2017, 2019), in both cases a second wave of disaffection followed within a couple of years.

The cumulative effect is that, as time passes fewer and fewer people engage with politics at all – and let’s face it, voting once in five years is about as low a bar as they come. Of those who do engage, a larger and larger proportion are motivated by anti-system beliefs, while fewer and fewer have any enthusiasm for established political forces, which now come to us pre-disaffected. Small wonder that the only political forces putting on support are those which have never gone through the enthusiasm/disaffection process – and that by far the biggest gains in support are going to the one whose political programme is the clearest, the simplest, and the most intransigently and resentfully anti-system.

Is the Labour/Conservative duopoly over? My answer would be, yes, but that’s the least of our worries. I think the duopoly ended some time in June 2024, when large numbers of former Conservative voters decided that they wouldn’t continue to lend their support to Labour, but they wouldn’t go back to their old political home either. I don’t know quite what Keir Starmer did to pull the plug on Labour’s polling – which drained away from 44% to 34% in six weeks, and then went right on draining – and perhaps that’s the wrong question. Perhaps Labour’s polling had only risen as high as 44%, under Starmer’s assiduously Tory-courting leadership, because people assumed that we were still in a Labour/Tory duopoly, so that getting rid of the Conservatives would require them to vote Labour. Perhaps, once the election was called, the election result looked like a foregone conclusion, meaning that voters disaffected with the Conservatives could go elsewhere (as in 2015) or stay at home (as in 2001). Perhaps, as in 2001, disaffection with both the main parties led to an unprecedented slump in turnout, leading to wildly disproportionate results. And perhaps, as in 2015, the anti-system cynics and reactionaries of the Farage party were well-placed to profit – as they have continued to do ever since.

I don’t think 2024 was a ‘step change’, though; nothing particularly new happened. We’ve known for a long time that a political party that arouses positive enthusiasm can sweep all before it, particularly if it’s presented as in some way an outsider to or an opponent of the existing system: 1979, 1997, 2017. We’ve known for a long time that when parties lose popular support they can lose it rapidly and hard, and that a party that used to arouse enthusiasm but no longer does is as attractive as yesterday’s chewing gum: 1997, 2010, 2015, 2019. We also know that the Tories are led by people who worked with Johnson and Truss, and that Labour’s led by someone who worked with Corbyn and looks up to Blair (and how, if I were thinking about this as an ordinary punter, would that even work?). The Lib Dems haven’t put their partnership with the Tories behind them, and in any case they’re still irrelevant, having got fewer votes in 2024 than in the wipeout that cost Jo Swinson her seat. You can’t associate Nigel Farage with any of those things, though. He represents something different, without being an unknown quantity – he’s been a minor political celebrity since 2014. And it’s not like anybody’s got any problems with him – not any real problems, they would have come out by now – and he’s an MP now, so there you go. It was time for something new and different – again – and this time round the far Right supplied it. They’re good at getting a foot in the door (especially the doors of TV studios, ho ho), and this time they can claim democratic legitimacy. They aren’t going away.

Nothing particularly new happened in 2024 – nothing that wasn’t a continuation of some well-established trends. But we’re in a new situation now, and a very alarming one. There’s many a slip between now and the next election, but right now the question isn’t whether Labour and the Conservative Party will continue to dominate British politics but whether Labour and the Conservative Party will survive – and in what form.

Postscript While thinking about this morning-after revision (a bad habit of mine as a blogger), I came across this on Twitter:

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Right now, I’m expecting Reform UK to form the next government. Hopefully it won’t come to that – I’ve made lots of predictions that didn’t come true, and I’d be delighted for that to be one of them. But with a Labour government like this, they’re already winning.

By Phil | Also posted in blogology, Britain, cheery thoughts, history, pinkoes, politics, stats, the Right | Comments (0)

Going, Staying

24 March 2025 – 15:52

Quick list post: I went through my stock of CD EPs the other day and identified a few that definitely didn’t need to be there. Here’s what I’m chucking and what I’m keeping. I don’t think there’s anything properly valuable in there – CDs very rarely are – but if you like the look of anything in the ‘going’ list I can give you the address of our local Oxfam. (I wouldn’t get your hopes up, though; they’re going for a reason.)

Going

Air, “Playground Love”
A CD of one song, viz. the theme song to The Virgin Suicides. It’s sung by Gordon Tracks – of whom I know nothing, although he’s said to be miserly as an employer; “No Bonus” Tracks, they call him. Thanks, I’m here all week.
All Saints, “Pure Shores”
William Orbit innit.
Richard Ashcroft, “A Song For The Lovers”
Edward Ball, “The Mill Hill Self Hate Club”, “Trailblaze”
Guy from TV Personalities whose solo pop career never quite happened.
The Beach Boys, “Good Vibrations (Mojo Greatest Single Of All Time)”
The Blue Aeroplanes, “Broken & Mended”
I really like the wordiness of Gerard Langley’s work, but the not-actually-singing-ness doesn’t work for me over more than a track or two.
Blur, “Tender”
lan Brown, “My Star”
Embrace, “Come Back To What You Know”
At one point I thought – and told anyone who would listen – that Embrace had gone as far beyond the Verve as they had gone beyond Oasis. Hmm. In retrospect Embrace only really did one thing, although they did do it extraordinarily well. After going through a break-up, men (young men in particular) experience a Kubler-Ross-esque range of emotions: the conviction that the breakup was just a misunderstanding and it would all blow over; acknowledgment that the relationship had ended, and yearning for it to restart; regret at having screwed things up, tinged with retrospective embarrassment at the thought of what they’d put their partner through; finally, a sense of having moved on, having grown as a person, no longer depending on the ex-partner, hardly even thinking about them these days. All of which (being young) they think are vividly new and important, and (being men) want to tell the world all about – no, here’s a better idea, want to tell the ex-partner all about! That’ll be good! Plus combinations and permutations of all the above, some of them knotty and self-undermining (“I was such an idiot, I’ve learnt so much, I’m no longer dependent on our relationship… so how about giving it another go?”). And that’s what Embrace put into their lyrics, over and over again, earnestly, even solemnly, certainly without the slightest self-consciousness; one of the biggest, most sonorous songs on the first album is about drunk-texting the ex (“So, something that I tried to stop made its way to you…”). They meant a lot to me at one time, which I find it hard to explain now – I wasn’t even that young. There are four tracks on this CD; the title track is in the “yes, I know we said it was over, but how about trying again?” genre, the others… I forget. Can’t really listen to this stuff now.
Fatboy Slim, “Halfway Between The Gutter and The Guardian”; “Star 69 / Weapon Of Choice”
The freebie EP is much better than it needed to be; the other one includes the Christopher Walken video for “Weapon of Choice”. Videos on CDs were a big deal in the days of dial-up.
Genelab, “Anorak Lou”
Bigged up in the Guardian Guide singles column. Sank without trace.
Elton John, “West Coast Songs”
Another freebie EP, which I held on to because it had “Tiny Dancer” on.
Oasis, “Roll With It”; “Some Might Say”; “Wonderwall”
Speaking of things that meant a lot to me a long time ago…
The Polyphonic Spree, “Soldier Girl”
Everything about this baffles me, including the designation of the drastically edited and abbreviated single version as the ‘Album Version’ (the CD also includes the original album track, as well as an even shorter ‘Radio Version’).
Super Furry Animals, “God! Show Me Magic”; “Something 4 The Weekend”
These were worth getting for the B sides, but then they brought out Out Spaced.
Transglobal Underground, “Temple Head”
The 1993 re-release; I think this was one of the first CDs I bought, after getting a CD player to play the Pet Shop Boys’ Very. (My TGU 12″s aren’t going anywhere.)

Staying

Apollo 440, “Lost In Space”
Staying a) because it’s a banger and b) er, that’s it.
Beck, “Select Magazine CD”;  “Jack Ass”
Another free EP that’s better than it needed to be, and a terrific selection of alternative versions; “Strange Invitation” is a highlight, as is the mariachi(!) version “Burro”.
Beirut, “Lon Gisland”
“Elephant Gun” – a glorious, joyfully abandoned song of drunken nihilism – and others. If you haven’t got this EP, do get hold of the retrospective collection Artifacts – it’s on there.
Boards Of Canada, “Trans Canada Highway”
If you’re not familiar with the lead track on this one, “Dayvan Cowboy”, do yourself a favour and watch the Kittinger video (speakers on). You may wish to set aside some time, and a reasonably soundproof room.
David Bowie, “Slow Burn”
Julian Cope, “Paranormal In The W. Country”; “Ambulence”; “Planetary Sit-In”
ISTR getting ‘Paranormal’ by mail order. The other two were quote unquote single releases from Interpreter, probably Cope’s last album of pop music. “Planetary Sit-In” is a recorded/staged/collaged “phone-in programme”, and doesn’t really repay repeated listening. “Ambulence” (a.k.a. “I come from another planet, baby”) is something else, in every sense. It’s in large part the work of Thighpaulsandra, and it’s every bit as strange as that alternative title might suggest (“Now, let us drink the reindeer’s piss!”). It’s worth sticking with, though, if only because the places it takes you make the eventual return of the main theme really effective. Never have the words “I come from another planet, baby” sounded so much like the Second Coming.
Cornershop, “Brimful Of Asha”
Darkstar, “Graceadelica”
The band formed when Terry Bickers left Levitation (which he’d formed after leaving the House of Love). Those names take you back, eh? I only got this for the sleeve art, which (like King Crimson’s Starless and Bible Black) is by Tom Phillips.
The Earlies, “EP4”; “Morning Wonder”
I was and remain a huge fan of these guys. Certainly the best two-guitar/five-keyboard/sax/trumpet/trombone/flute/cello/bass/percussion/drums combo I’ve ever seen.
Espers, “The weed tree”
Richard Frisson, “Christmas EP”
A singer-songwriter friend of mine from folk club days; witty and thoughtful, with a trenchant turn of phrase. Not actually folk, but neither were Espers and they did all right.
Robyn Hitchcock & The Egyptians, “So You Think You’re In Love”
Robyn Hitchcock & The Venus 3, “Sex, Food, Death and Tarantulas”
Rather a good mostly-live EP, from 2007 (making it, jointly with a couple of others on the ‘staying’ list, the most recent thing here).
Hood, “The Lost You”
I bought this after reading a positive review – possibly in the Guardian Guide singles column – and wasn’t very impressed; “the year of the lost you” seemed like rather a drippy sixth-form-poetry conceit. I should have listened more closely, I realise now; Hood were a really interesting, experimental band, working similar terrain to Flying Saucer Attack. This EP was part-produced by Choque Hosein of Black Star Liner and featured contributions by Doseone of cLOUDDEAD and a Robert Wyatt sample – I mean, come on, 2004 Phil, we’re not talking Embrace here. I may have some catching up to do.
Hookers Green No. 1, “Three-Track Demo”
Bigged up on the, er, Channel Four Teletext singles review page, and bought by mail order. Much more complex than it had any need to be; the words ‘all over the place’ might also come to mind. Big in Aberdeen.
The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, “Experimental Remixes”
I have fond memories of listening to this one while playing Duke Nukem with a user-designed ‘ancient Greece’ skin, in breaks from working on my doctorate. Bangers all, but the Beck and Moby remixes are particularly fine.
Kraftwerk, “Expo2000”
Shame about Kraftwerk; shame they hadn’t retired some time before this. Nice lenticular CD case, though.
Laika, “Antenna”
The band formed by Margaret Fiedler after she left Moonshake. I only discovered the other day that Louise Elliott was in Laika – the Louise Elliott, from Laughing Clowns! I saw them live and everything, and I never knew! Anyway, great EP, great sleeve design.
LFO, “Tied Up”
This was, among other things, my introduction to Spiritualized’s “seriously blissed-out” phase, via a remix on this (otherwise very banging) EP.
The Magnetic Fields, “The House Of Tomorrow”
From my retrospective-Magnetic-Fields-completist period; five ‘loop songs’ (i.e. sung over an eight-bar loop for a backing track). Much better than that sounds.
Many Hands, “World In A Room”
A New Zealand mate of mine was in Many Hands, whose instrumentation made the Earlies look tame – think reeds and tablas and djembe and erhu and highland bagpipes and, and… and bass and drums. World music? They had it.
Beth Orton, “Best Bit”
Bought in New Orleans, when I was there for work; not sure it was released over here. (Don’t talk to me about New Orleans; I got a cold from the air conditioning & hated the place, although I did like the beignets.) Features two tracks with Terry Callier, including a sublime reading of Fred Neil’s “Dolphins”.
Pete Royle, “They are helpless”
This is by another mate from folk club days, who got some friends into a studio and recorded a single about the 1999 Sudan famine, in the hope of selling it for charity. Sadly, he couldn’t get it released, and ended up handing out copies to friends and fellow folkies. I was at the folk club one week when another performer came up to Pete and gave him the CD back, seemingly having thought Pete was lending it to him (“it’s not really my sort of thing”). After he’d gone Pete turned to me and said, “There you are – I actually can’t give them away!”
The Soft Boys, “Side Three”
Additional tracks from the Nextdoorland sessions. Like that album, it’s not great, but it’s a lot better than it could have been.
Spiritualized, “The Abbey Road EP”
Spiritualized, orchestrated. Big, very big.
Stereolab, “The Free Design”
I prefer early, mostly-motorik Stereolab, but later, mostly-lounge-jazz Stereolab is still pretty good.
Super Furry Animals, “Ice Hockey Hair”
A fantastic track – seven minutes of psychedelic post-punk neo-prog loveliness. I learned the other day that the band thought of it as a joke song, “ice hockey hair” being what I believe is known as a “diss”. I don’t care, I still love it.
Suzuki K1 >> 7.5 cc, “Satellite Serenade”
From my Orb period.
Uilab, “Fires”
Ui/Stereolab collab consisting mainly of versions of Eno’s “St Elmo’s Fire”. From before my Magnetic Fields period.
The Verve, “The Drugs Don’t Work”
Magnificent as it is, the main song isn’t really the Verve. But the EP also includes rather a good guitar instrumental, as well as a mad James Lavelle remix of “Bittersweet Symphony”.
Wir, “Vien”
Wire mk. 3 (Newman/Lewis/Gilbert) in full “interesting but not necessarily listenable” mode.
Wire, “Read & Burn 03”
First recordings of Wire mk. 5 (Newman/Lewis/Grey). “23 Years Too Late” is a highlight. The band cancelled a Swedish tour when Wire mk. 1 split up in 1980, eventually playing Sweden in 2003 – when they were greeted by ranks of greying Wire fans in punk leathers, to all appearances the same people who had booked to see them twenty-three years earlier.
Robert Wyatt, “A Short Break”
James Yorkston, “Hoopoe”
From my, well, James Yorkston period, which is to say the period before I (a) got more committed to trad folk than he is and (b) noticed that all his own songs seemed to be about J. Yorkston’s sex life (which to be fair sounded quite varied and interesting, but enough is enough). Great version of “Sir Patrick Spens”, though.

By Phil | Also posted in blogology, flummery, folkie, geekage, popular singing groups | Comments (0)

An album a day: August

30 September 2024 – 12:39

At the beginning of this year I set myself a task: I’d listen to an album I owned, from start to finish, in one or at most two sessions, every day. Not only that, but the day’s album would be (as far as I could manage it) the first music I played that day, and the album would not be one that I’d previously listened to as part of the project.

Here’s what I listened to in August.

the Beatles, Abbey Road
Truth to tell, this is quite a patchy album, but the good tracks are very good – “Something” and “Come Together” on one album! The Long Medley is still very engaging, too: its combination of energy, melodic invention, larky silliness and at least the appearance of profundity, as well as its sheer variety, make it a very appropriate end point to the Beatles’ canon (even if Let it Be was still to come).

Peter Blegvad, Downtime, Just woke up, Hangman’s Hill, King Strut and other stories; Peter Blegvad and Andy Partridge, Orpheus the Lowdown
Bit of a Blegvad kick this month: four albums of songs, one of experimental poetry with electro-acoustic backings provided by Andy Partridge. The ‘smart’ thing to say would be that these two sides of Blegvad’s work aren’t really so far apart, and there’s some truth in it; the pieces on the Orpheus album aren’t nearly as jagged or far out as they appeared on first listen, and there’s some difficult listening on all the ‘song’ albums (the feedback storm that closes “Bee Dream” on Just woke up, or the cacophonous backing that Andy Partridge (for it is he) added to the song “King Strut”). But I value Blegvad most as a songwriter, albeit one who really listens to the sounds he’s making. The spare, clattery backings of the songs on Downtime (dominated by the spare, clattery kit playing of Chris Cutler) are a particular favourite.

the Blue Nile, A walk across the rooftops
Like a number of these albums, I bought this one several years ago. I think I’ve now listened to it twice. It made a bit of an impression on me, but I should probably go back to it. “Like Prefab Sprout, but with less convoluted lyrics and a much better singer” was one thing that came to mind – although I suppose that wouldn’t be much like Prefab Sprout at all.

Graham Coxon, Happiness in Magazines
Oh, Blur. Everyone loves Blur – there’s the speccy one, the Tory farmer, the Labour councillor and the utter twat. The speccy one was always my favourite. He’s been very productive along the way; this was his fifth album, and it does include some really good songs, mostly lurking in dense tangles of grungy guitar. I could have wished quality control was a bit tighter, though. Put it this way, this would have made a stunning EP.

My Computer, Vulnerabilia
Speaking of productivity and quality control, if it ever occurs to you to wonder what else My Computer have come up with, I would advise repressing the thought. This album from 2002 (their/his first outing) is pretty good – I got it on the strength of the opening track “All I Ever Wanted Was A Good Time”, which could have been huge – but there isn’t enough there that’s good enough to make this an album to go back to.

Rodion G.A., The lost tapes
Oh, Record Store Day. Everyone loves Record Store Day. This was a Record Store Day exclusive, and if you think that those are the only conditions under which I would ever buy a double album of unreleased progressive rock synthesiser improvisations from 1980s Communist Romania, well, I’m not sure how I’d answer that.

Various, Miniatures
Ripping this was no more difficult than for any other LP, but splitting it into tracks did my carpal tunnel no favours at all. 51 tracks, would you believe, all under 1 minute 10 seconds and mostly a minute exactly (give or take a second). Morgan Fisher, formerly keyboard player with Mott the Hoople, put this together in 1980, pulling in contributions from Gavin Bryars, Michael Nyman, Robert Fripp, Lol Coxhill, Ivor Cutler, Ron Geesin, Robert Wyatt, John Otway, Joseph Racaille, Hector Zazou and, inevitably, many more. There is – also inevitably – a “hey, here we are filling up a minute” larkiness about several of the pieces, which wears thin quite quickly; it’s probably best listened to on shuffle (not that that was an option in 1980). It’s different, though.

FILE UNDER: FOLK

Peter Bellamy, Tell it like it was, Second Wind
Two LPs I’ve only just got round to ripping. 1975’s TILIW only contains six traditional songs, as against five of Bellamy’s own compositions and two by other writers. The traditional songs include The Bold Privateer and On board a 98, while the contemporary songs include Al Stewart’s Nostradamus, of which Bellamy was rather fond (having been persuaded, like many people who read Erika Cheetham’s book on Nostradamus, that there might be something in this prophecy lark after all). Dating from ten years later, Second Wind similarly includes equal numbers of contemporary and traditional songs, with two songs from Bellamy’s ballad opera The Transports. The sheer range of Bellamy’s interests is attested by the fact that two of the non-traditional songs are by the Australian writer Henry Lawson, while two of the traditional songs are American (Motherless Child and Maria’s Gone).

FILE UNDER: A BIT BEFORE MY TIME

Family, A song for me; Gentle Giant, Gentle Giant; Roxy Music, Roxy Music

More adventures in ripping secondhand vinyl. Family are a taste I acquired from my older sister; this is their third album, which I never heard at the time. After the first couple of albums they always were a bit patchy on record, and I don’t think this is one of the greats. I was very into Giant into my early teens, although again this is an LP I never heard at the time. Listening to it now, you can hear the band that they became, as well as the self-importance and the maudlin pop balladeer leanings that they mostly left behind. As for Roxy, this isn’t quite the finished article – that would be For Your Pleasure – but it still sounds like music from the future. Which is quite something, considering that it’s half a century old.

FILE UNDER: A VERY GOOD YEAR… OR TWO

Godley and Creme, L; The Only Ones, The Only Ones; The Rezillos, Can’t stand the Rezillos; Wreckless Eric, Wreckless Eric

A long time ago, I picked up a meme or challenge from another blog. The idea was that our musical tastes are formed in our teens: if you talked about what you considered to be the ten best albums released in the year you turned 18, that would encapsulate your musical tastes in ways that might be interesting. I began by identifying my top ten LPs from the relevant period, then got a bit bogged down. At first I thought ten album reviews in a row would tax the reader’s patience, and tried to whittle the list down to five. The more I thought about it, though, the more albums pressed themselves on my attention, and I ended up with a list of 15. Slightly perversely, I thought that what I’d do was write about numbers 11 to 15. I never got round to it, though… until now. (Well, nearly; there are only four albums here, the fifth of the 15 being National Health’s Of Queues and Cures.) I could say a lot about all of these, but won’t, if only to keep this post within bounds.

L is self-evidently the side project of two very successful musicians; of the album’s eight tracks, three are about how horrible it is to be in a successful pop group. Still, sometimes when you let musicians record whatever the hell they want, the results are weird, surprising and generally fun – if sometimes difficult fun. I’ve heard this album likened to Zappa, but never found a Zappa album I liked as much. The Only Ones’ debut album, as is the case for a lot of bands, isn’t their best; there are some great tracks on here, though, notably heroin epic The Beast (not to mention Another Girl, Another Planet). Listening to the Rezillos album again made me realise how unusual, and how innovative, their sound was. The combination of bubblegum pop, raucous guitars and, crucially, a hyperactive bassline (for which I guess we have William Mysterious to thank) was very punk, but – like a lot of things that were very punk – nobody had really done it before; and nobody did it quite like that again. And, speaking of things that were very punk, there are few things more punk than Eric Goulden – a really gifted songwriter – setting out quite deliberately to make himself look and sound offputting, from the subject matter of his songs to the release of his album on brown vinyl. (The ten-inch, eight-track version, that is.) The songs are good, but that particular niche… well, it had its moment.

Athletico Spizz 80, Do a runner; the Spizzles, Spikey Dream Flowers; John Cooper Clarke, Snap crackle and bop; Joy Division, Unknown Pleasures, Closer; Ultravox, Systems of Romance

What does postpunk mean to you? All of these albums were made by survivors of punk, although in a couple of cases they’d been working well before. I’m rather fond of the Spizz albums: when Spizz Oil first appeared in 1977, I’m not sure anyone (even Spizz) thought there was more than a couple of singles in it, but two early 80s albums – on A&M of all labels – suggest otherwise. Probably no one else on this list needs any introduction. John Cooper Clarke’s second album, recorded with Martin Hannett and friends, is as good as, or possibly even slightly better than, his first one; I should probably lay hands on his third. (Shame about what happened after that.) As for Joy Division (speaking of Hannett), these albums are just as monumental as you’ve heard they were, even now – although admittedly some of the electronic drums on the second album sound a bit dated. Lastly, Systems of Romance: Ultravox’s third album, their last with John Foxx, and one of my favourite albums of all time. Produced by Conny Plank, it’s a kind of four-way collision of the rigid electronic rhythms the band would go on to explore, Robin Simon’s lacerating rock guitar lines, Foxx’s gnomic, meditative lyrics and all the opportunities Plank’s studio provided to make it new: the swooping synthesiser line drifting on- and off-key in “When You Walk Through Me”, the dropped-in acoustic piano in “Just for a Moment”, the metronomically regular but constantly shifting pulse in “Dislocation”, the whistling in “Maximum Acceleration” (whistling!)… It was lightning in a bottle: nothing Ultravox mk II did with Slik veteran Midge Ure came close. On his second solo album The Garden, John Foxx was evidently going after the same sound (Robin Simon appears on guitar, and there’s even a track called Systems of Romance), but it’s not the same. There’s something particularly powerful about bands pulling in multiple directions (ask Simian; ask Soft Machine), as difficult an experience as it can be to live through.

Next: September, which will be shorter (or at least contain fewer albums)

 

By Phil | Also posted in blogology, folkie, popular singing groups | Comments (0)

An album a day: July

13 September 2024 – 11:07

At the beginning of this year I set myself a task: I’d listen to an album I owned, from start to finish, in one or at most two sessions, every day. Not only that, but the day’s album would be (as far as I could manage it) the first music I played that day, and the album would not be one that I’d previously listened to as part of the project.

Here’s what I listened to in July.

Clinton, Disco and the Halfway to Discontent
Made by Tjinder Singh and Ben Ayres, this is basically a Cornershop album, and it’s as good as that suggests. Big 70s sounds filtered through an idiosyncratic (but always political) consciousness.

Future Bible Heroes, Eternal Youth; Partygoing; The EPs

These are the second, third and fourth albums in the three-album complete Future Bible Heroes compilation (which is called, rather neatly, Memories of Love, Eternal Youth and Partygoing). Claudia Gonson takes all the vocals on Eternal Youth, while Chris Ewen contributes several short instrumentals; Stephin Merritt is much more to the fore on Partygoing, even contributing to the instrumentation on a couple of tracks (possibly suggesting that the FBH you-play-’em-I’ll-sing-’em approach had run its course). But really the only way to assess these is the Stephin Merritt Good/Great Song metric, on which they score as follows. EY: 3 Good, 2 Great; PG: 3 Good, 3 Great; EPs: 2 Good, 2 Great and a cover of Don’t You Want Me?. It’s a good tally.

Robyn Hitchcock and the Venus 3, Propellor Time
From 2010, this album rounded up a few tracks that had previously appeared in different forms, and overall was something of a pendant to the previous year’s Goodnight Oslo. Of the two I greatly prefer it, though; it’s more relaxed, more playful and frequently more cryptic than GO, and all the better for it. Plus it contains my personal theme song, at least since a certain election result. Some day we’ll rise…

The Magnetic Fields, 69 Love Songs
Since listening to this (not at all coincidentally) I’ve heard a touring lineup of TMF (Stephin, Sam, Shirley, Chris and Anthony Kaczynski) perform all 69; most things worked as well as on record (even in the absence of three of the original vocalists), and several were greatly improved. But this isn’t a review of the concert. It’s not a review of 69 Love Songs, either – I haven’t got all day and neither have you. All I’ll say here is: 20 Good, 8 Great – and that’s a conservative estimate.

Robert Wyatt, Rock bottom; Ruth is stranger than Richard; Old Rottenhat

“Seaweed tangled in our home from home…” On Rock Bottom Robert Wyatt somehow manages to take sounds that you’ve literally never heard before (and lyrics that make absolutely no sense) and make them sound normal, even familiar; he had an ability to get the listener on board that feels almost cult-like, in a good way (well, a harmless way, let’s say). He was working in (or created for himself) an extraordinarily fertile musical space, part jazz, part experimental, part progressive rock, part pure British nonsense. And what a list of contributors – Mongezi Feza, Hugh Hopper, Fred Frith, Ivor Cutler… Ruth is less intense but just as playful – and just as doggedly, and mesmerisingly, its own thing (“What do cubs and brownies do at night after a boring day?”). But my favourite of Wyatt’s albums is still Old Rottenhat. It’s a great shame that this album is only represented on the Different Every Time compilation by the drably programmatic “Age of Self”. Most of the album is much stranger than that, more inward-looking and allusive – although just as political. There’s a wordless passage involving a musical box which always makes me well up.

FILE UNDER: TAKES ME BACK
The Beta Band, The 3 EPs; The Shins, Oh, Inverted World; Chutes Too Narrow

For personal reasons I spent the last half of the 00s listening only to traditional folk, with a very few exceptions. The early 00s – and what I listened to back then – consequently now seem very distant to me. I was very into the Beta Band for a while back there – and, indeed, why not? There is some extraordinary stuff on those three EPs. Similarly with the Shins; I thought Chutes Too Narrow was an absolutely perfect pop album, and listening to it now it’s hard to disagree. (Although I have grown very fond of Oh, Inverted World, whose title track is also my theme song.)

FILE UNDER: TAKES ME RIGHT BACK
The Chemical Brothers, Come with us; cLOUDDEAD, Ten; Underworld, A hundred days off

The early 00s – and what I listened to back then – now seem very distant to me, and none more distant than this dance/hip hop stuff. To be fair, I wasn’t particularly into the Chems’ fourth album, or Underworld’s first album without Darren Emerson, even back then; my opinion’s gone up a bit on re-listening, but not all that much. (I’ve still got a lot of time for both bands’ first couple of albums*, though – dubnobasswithmyheadman is a stone cold classic.) As for cLOUDDEAD, they always did sound seriously weird, so I probably need to give this one another listen or three before I have any opinions about it. As it happens, I have on two different occasions found myself on my feet and halfway to the hi fi before I realised it, putting the wish to take that bloody thing off into action before I was consciously aware of it; this happened to me the first time I listened to the album cLOUDDEAD and the first time I listened to the Goldberg Variations. (In both cases I sat back down and stuck with it, and eventually got it.)

*yes I do know about Underworld, no I’m not counting Underneath the Radar, OK?

FILE UNDER: REALLY TAKES ME BACK
A. More, Flying doesn’t help; Pere Ubu, New Picnic Time; The Teardrop Explodes, Wilder

I stopped buying contemporary albums circa 2006 (and, with a few exceptions, never really started again), but of course that’s not when I started. Dear me no. New Picnic Time isn’t my favourite Pere Ubu – that would be Blame the Messenger, or if that’s not permitted Dub Housing – but it’s definitely them, from back then, doing that thing they did. The other two, I’m glad to be able to confirm – a slightly scary 40 years after I bought them – are absolute classics. If you don’t know Flying doesn’t help, I’m not at all surprised, but I do recommend seeking it out: like Rock bottom, it’s an album that creates its own musical language. It’s as if an experimental composer – the kind of person who can’t see a piano without plucking the strings, or a reel of tape without cutting and looping it – had set out to make a collection of pop songs, but without changing their approach to music in any way. (Which is more or less what happened.) As for Wilder, it’s probably still the best thing Julian Cope did in the twentieth century (I plead ignorance for almost all of his more recent work). It’s aged surprisingly well, thanks to a clear and spacey production by Clive Langer (and, on one track, Alan Winstanley). Also features the magnificent lyric I’ve got a good car but it’s not a good car – delivered at breakneck, can’t-stop-to-think speed in the “Reward”-like “Pure Joy”. Copey was also very good at getting the listener on board.

(No folk at all this month; perhaps all the Magnetic Fields concert prep put me more in a ‘well made song’ vibe.)

By Phil | Also posted in blogology, everyday life, flummery, popular singing groups | Comments (0)

An album a day: February

2 April 2024 – 14:18

At the beginning of this year I set myself a task: I’d listen to an album I owned, from start to finish, in one or at most two sessions, every day. Not only that, but the day’s album would be (as far as I could manage it) the first music I played that day, and the album would not be one that I’d previously listened to as part of the project.

Here’s what I listened to in February.

The Associates The Affectionate Punch
Apparently Alan Rankine came up with the piano figure for Party Fears Two while punk was still in the ascendant, and had to keep it stashed away until fashions had changed enough to make it acceptable. In the mean time, they channelled his extraordinary musical imagination – and Billy Mackenzie’s even more extraordinary voice – through the urgency and skronky edginess of post-punk. With, well, extraordinary results – this is a truly great album, even if it isn’t what they actually wanted to do.

David Bowie Young Americans, Station to Station
Bowie completism has its rewards: you may have spotted the deep soul influence on Young Americans, but how about the Latin rhythms, or the attempt to ‘do’ Springsteen? (And that’s just the title track.) A much better – and much odder – album than it appears at first. Bowie completism won’t help you get under the surface of Station to Station, though; I’m not sure what would, short of going on a diet of cocaine, sleep deprivation and Aleister Crowley. (But what a surface.)

Cornelius Point
This album is really nothing like Pet Sounds, or Chill Out, or The Faust Tapes. Even apart from being Japanese. It’s just that you feel you’ve wandered into someone’s multi-tracked musical dream, and that it’s rather a nice place to spend 45 minutes.

Eno Another green world
Hmm. A bit of a rag bag – less than the sum of its parts. (I’ll Come Running is wonderful, though.)

The Magnetic Fields Distant plastic trees, The wayward bus, The charm of the highway strip, Get lost, Distortion, Love at the bottom of the sea
Do you have a favourite band? More – much more – from Stephin Merritt. These are, respectively, the first, second, fourth, fifth, eighth and tenth albums by the Magnetic Fields, recorded between 1992 and 2012. Three of them can reasonably be called masterpieces, which is a pretty good hit rate (particularly when you consider that album #6 was 69 Love Songs, which absolutely is one). Different stylistic choices come to the fore on different albums – Phil Spector on TWB, Country and Western on TCOTHS, repeating loops on Get Lost, the Jesus and Mary Chain on Distortion; some feature few synthesisers or none (Get Lost, Distortion), some feature little or nothing else (TWB, LATBOTS – although, as Merritt noted, the synthesisers he used on the latter album hadn’t been invented at the time of TWB). The songwriting throughout is extraordinary: a dry, heartless wit, masking – and failing to mask – sorrow and yearning as deep as a well.

Scott Walker ‘Til the band comes in
If I was feeling cranky I’d say this was Scott Walker’s best collection of songs before Tilt; it’s certainly head and shoulders above Scott Four. It’s just a shame he only had 26 minutes’ worth of songs and had to pad the album out with covers.

Wire Object 47
The album that Read and Burn 03 is better than. It’s fine – there’s a lot to like about it – but it’s not a total return to form (see Red Barked Tree).

FILE UNDER: JAZZ

The Necks Vertigo; Soft Machine Hidden Details
Vertigo (a single 44-minute track) is one of the Necks’ edgier, more unsettling pieces; I should probably invest in a few more for comparison. What they do – extended trio improvisations, basically – is a very distinctive way of making music. As for the Softs, that band and I have history. I got this CD when I saw the Hidden Details band – John Etheridge, Theo Travis, Roy Babbington and John Marshall – playing live in 2019; only the second time I’d seen the band, the first time being with the lineup of Allan Holdsworth, Mike Ratledge, Karl Jenkins, Roy Babbington and John Marshall. They’ve drifted a bit further into jazz than I’m entirely keen on, and I’m not sure I’ll be following them any further – particularly now that the lineup consists of John Etheridge, Theo Travis, Fred Baker and Asaf Sirkis (John Marshall RIP). (The Venn circle for “long-term Soft Machine fans” is included within that of “lovers of Rock Family Trees”.) It’s a decent album, though, with a lovely version of The Man Who Waved At Trains.

FILE UNDER: FOLK

Bob Lewis The painful plough; Various Dark Holler; Brian Peters Songs of trial and triumph
Bob Lewis is an English traditional singer from whom I’ve learnt a great deal – I’ve learnt the extraordinary tunes to some of his traditional songs, and I’ve learnt to emulate his high, clear tenor, or at least to have the nerve to give it a go. (Indeed, it would be difficult to sing some of his tunes without emulating his singing voice.) Dark Holler is a Folkways compilation of unaccompanied singers from North Carolina, recorded in the 1960s: some strong and distinctive voices deliver what to a British folkie is some surprisingly familiar material, albeit in unusual forms: Dillard Chandler’s song Little Farmer Boy, for instance, appears on Brian Peters’ album of Child ballads, under the more familiar title of The Demon Lover. Brian sings The Demon Lover unaccompanied, but accompanies other songs on Anglo concertina, melodeon and guitar – electric guitar in the case of Twa Corbies. It’s a great selection, well delivered; I’ve already borrowed Brian’s versions of All Alone and Lonely (a.k.a. The Cruel Mother), Fause Foodrage and Six Nights Drunk (a.k.a. Our Goodman), although I’m not sure that Brian’s version of the last-mentioned is entirely traditional (“Who owns that crash helmet where my bobble-hat ought to be?”).

FILE UNDERIN THE REGION OF: FOLK

Alistair Anderson Corby Crag, Steel Skies; Jim Causley Cyprus Well II; Ed Kuepper Today Wonder
Two instrumental albums from the multi-instrumentalist (English concertina and Northumbrian pipes) Alistair Anderson, exemplifying the odd fact that ‘tunes’ – instrumental traditional music – can absorb new material in a way that ‘songs’ can’t. Perhaps it’s just that few people are as steeped in traditional song as someone like Anderson is in traditional music. Steel Skies is all original compositions, and it’s terrific. Jim Causley is a folk singer, but this CD – produced at home, in lockdown – is his second collection of settings of poems by his distant relative Charles Causley. It’s good stuff: sensitive arrangements of some memorable and moving poems. Lastly, my favourite Ed Kuepper album; also the (studio) album recorded the quickest and cheapest, and the one containing the most folk or folk-adjacent material (Pretty Mary (a.k.a. The Wagoner’s Lad); a terrific version of Tim Hardin’s If I were a carpenter; and the title track, a medley of the Animals’ White Houses and Donovan’s Hey Gyp – a song which in turn goes back to Taj Mahal’s Chevrolet and ultimately to a 1930 song, Can I do it for you by Memphis Minnie).

(I do like those Rock Family Trees…)

And that’s it for February. Round up of what happened in March coming soonwhen I get round to it.

By Phil | Also posted in folkie, popular singing groups | Comments (0)

An album a day: January

16 February 2024 – 12:50

Around the beginning of the year, it struck me that there had been quite a few days when I hadn’t listened to any music at all – and that, when I did play anything, it was liable to be a dip into one of several gargantuan playlists (not that I’m an obsessive or anything, but my iTunesApple Music apparently library includes approximately 22 hours of music by Radiohead, 29 by Robyn Hitchcock in various guises and a slightly alarming 67 hours (can that possibly be right?) by David Bowie). (OK, five hours of that is Tin Machine, but that still leaves 62 – and it occurs to me now that “I’m No Bowie Obsessive, Says Man Who Owns Five Hours of Tin Machine” lacks a certain something.)

So I set myself a task: I’d listen to an album I owned, from start to finish, in one or at most two sessions, every day. Not only that, but the day’s album would be (as far as I could manage it) the first music I played that day, and the album would not be one that I’d previously listened to as part of the project. (This criterion is already starting to trip me up, and it’s only the middle of February.)

Here’s what I listened to in January. (Not a full month – it was a slow start.)

Peter Blegvad Go Figure; John Greaves, Peter Blegvad, Lisa Herman Kew. Rhone.
Peter Blegvad (13 hours) is a writer, an illustrator, a singer-songwriter; if he has a theme it’s the power of imagination and the limits of language, and/or vice versa. Some of his work is light, witty and whimsical, some forbiddingly surreal and weird, most somewhere in between. Go Figure, his most recent solo album, is a nice, well-executed collection of songs; essential for Blegvad aficionados but probably not the best starting point. Way over at the other extreme, 1977’s Kew. Rhone. [sic] is an album of big-band jazz with lyrics by Blegvad, mostly belted out by a small choir in vaguely Brechtian style. There’s a piece (‘song’ would be pushing it) consisting of words spelt with the letters in the (never explained) phrase ‘Kew. Rhone’; another consists of specially-composed palindromes; “22 Objects and Their Descriptions” offers brief, riddling word-pictures of objects which are then described conventionally, turning out to be weird, surreal assemblages. It’s all very pataphysical.

Shirley Collins Archangel Hill
I’m not going to introduce Shirley Collins (9 hours, not counting some as-yet unripped vynil). This is the third and probably last of her late-life, post-return albums; it includes one track which appeared on the now out-of-print collection Within Sound and re-recordings of three others, along with six traditional songs and three new pieces. If you’re into folk at all you should have this.

Bob Dylan Good as I been to you
An album of traditional songs and (slightly to my surprise) a really good one; although I’ve got the CD, I listened to this one on YouTube on our TV (progress eh?), and by the end of the album found myself just looking at the (static) screen, thinking, how are you doing that? This doesn’t refer to Bob’s guitar work (detailed and fiddly though it is) but his interpretation of the songs, some of which are quite familiar. Recommended.

Future Bible Heroes Memories of love; The Magnetic Fields Quickies; Stephin Merritt Obscurities
Stephin Merritt: 16 hours. Respectively, these are the first of Merritt’s albums of lyrics to Chris Ewen’s synth-pop backings; the most recent album from Merritt’s main band, with 28 songs in 47 minutes backed by a deliberately limited set of instruments; an album of B-sides and out-takes. None of them’s a masterpiece, but they’re all well worth your time. (Almost anywhere is a good place to start with Stephin Merritt.)

Robyn Hitchcock The man downstairs; Shufflemania!; Robyn Hitchcock and Andy Partridge Planet England (EP)
Respectively, an album of demos, live tracks and out-takes; Robyn’s lockdown album, a set of home-studio collaborations with musicians around the world; an endearing and very English set of four songs from 2019. Planet England is a small gem (and would put Robyn at two degrees of separation from Peter Blegvad, if the two of them hadn’t in fact played together). As for the albums, there is some great stuff there, but I’m not the one to judge – I’ve been buying Robyn’s records since 1977, so I’m hardly going to stop now. If you are looking for an entry-point, I’d probably start with 2017’s Robyn Hitchcock (crazy name!).

Kraftwerk Autobahn
Nothing like a 20-minute track to justify a full-album listening session. Although I must admit that, as much as I love the title track, I’ve grown to love “Morgenspaziergang” even more. The road (or footpath) not taken…

Livingstones Kabinet Dead of the Night
Tidying out some old files in preparation for getting a new Mac, I found an old “want list” – very old; 2004 to be precise. Halfway down was a reference to Livingstones Kabinet, with a note underneath saying that the CD was only available by “mail order”. Not long after saving that file I stopped listening to anything except traditional folk songs for a couple of years, and the gap that created in my listening habits meant that I never followed up on most of the list. It turns out not only that Livingstones Kabinet are still out there – albeit they’re now a Danish theatre group rather than a cabaret duo – but that a couple of their albums are available to download on Apple Music, this being one of them. It’s not the album I was after in 2004, but it is rather good, if you like your cabaret music dark and surreal.

Love Forever Changes
I’m not introducing this band either, let alone this album (other than to say that I hadn’t previously realised just how many of the songs are about reincarnation). I mean, what is there to say? “The red telephone” alone is a major cultural landmark.

Wire Read and Burn 03 (EP); Red Barked Tree
Wire: 14 hours. These are, respectively, the last recordings by Wire’s fourth and the first by the (current) sixth incarnation. The first two Read and Burn EPs formed the basis of the Send album, of which I’m very fond, but this third EP is particularly strong – it slightly overshadows the Object 47 album that followed. I’m especially fond of “23 Years Too Late”, a song about touring Denmark 23 years after the band had originally planned to go and being greeted by what looked like the same audience, 23 years older. Red Barked Tree marks a definite break from the heads-down-no-nonsense style of Object 47 and Send, branching out [sic] in several different directions; there’s even a song in 6:8. I’m still a few years behind on Wire, but I look forward to catching up with what they were doing in the 2010s.

And that’s it for January. I’m not going to plough straight on with February, you’ll be glad to hear; I’ve got the Box of Forty Science Fiction Hardbacks to write about. Or I might do something on current affairs, or have a moan about the Labour Party…

By Phil | Also posted in blogology, England, folkie, popular singing groups | Comments (0)

Angry man

5 January 2022 – 16:06

Now that Labour seem to be heading back down the New Labour route, there’s been a bit of debate about just how bad the Blair years were. Iraq we know about, of course, and PFI, but apart from that – it was a Labour government, after all, wasn’t it? They did fund public services properly – after 2001, at least; and there’s the Human Rights Act to think of, and the minimum wage, not to mention Sure Start… Lots of stuff in their favour, surely. Lots of reasons to vote Labour, even if Labour meant New ditto – a choice that may be confronting us again soon.

Looking for something else just now, I stumbled on a letter I sent to Jack Straw – in his role as Shadow Home Secretary – in March 1996. I knew I hadn’t voted Labour in May 1997 – which put me in quite a lonely place, even on the Left – but I’d forgotten that I’d made up my mind about the blighters some time before then. In March 1996, at any rate, I knew what I thought.

Before I quote the letter, here‘s the news story that sparked it off.

Labour wants to change the law which forbids research into juries, to allow academics to find out whether working-class or unemployed jurors are more likely to acquit defendants than middle-class ones. Jack Straw, Labour’s home affairs spokesman, says that at the moment the evidence is little more than anecdotal but, he says, “There should be research on who refuses jury service and on the composition of juries.”

Even if research produced no correlation between class and acquittal rates, he still says everybody should sit on juries as part of the obligations as good citizens. Mr Straw believes that too many of the middle classes evade jury service.

Stephen Ward, the Independent. Ward adds:

An earlier smaller study in Birmingham, before research was banned in 1981, showed no correlation between sex, age or class and the number of guilty verdicts, and found manual workers were under-represented on juries.

This, as you can imagine, struck me, and I wrote to Straw asking whether he actually meant what he appeared to be saying. (The new improved WordPress editor makes it almost impossible to write a quoted block of multiple paragraphs and won’t allow a quoted block containing bullet points at all, so you’ll just have to imagine the formatting of the following.) (Update: there’s still a back door to the “Classic Editor” – go in via yourblognamehere/wp-admin/edit.php.)

Take it away, 1996 me:

Dear Jack Straw,

For the last fifteen years I have always voted Labour, at council, General and European elections. I think it’s only fair to mention that at present I can see no prospect of being able to vote for the party again, and that your actions and pronouncements as Shadow Home Secretary have a lot to do with this decision.

However, I’m writing about a more specific point, on which I would genuinely appreciate some clarification. You have been reported as saying that the propensity of wealthier individuals to opt out of jury service, results in juries which are disproportionately working class (my terminology) and hence less likely to believe police evidence, which is a bad thing and likely to result in perverse verdicts (your deductions).

Assuming you were reported correctly and believe what you were saying, I wonder:

  • do you believe that Britain’s police forces operate to such high standards of probity and accuracy that credulity can safely be preferred to scepticism?
  • do you believe that working class people suffer from some sort of irrational bias against the police, to which their social superiors are immune?
  • how does this argument against the working class fit in with New Labour’s aspiration to represent the whole nation equally? (I assume that you regard the party’s association with the working class in particular as so much historical baggage).

One final query. Now that Labour stands for an ideology as socially reactionary as it’s economically timid, what do you recommend to those of us who support common ownership and legal raves, who believe in raising income tax and decriminalising soft drugs? We’re clearly not welcome in the Labour Party any more. Any chance of a referendum on PR?

Yes, now it can be told – 25 years ago I was in favour of a new Left party, just as soon as one became electorally viable. (If I’d lived in Scotland I might have ended up wasting an awful lot of time.) As far as Labour went, though, there was hardly anything there to vote for, let alone campaign for – or perhaps it’d be fairer to say that there was a lot there to vote against, and even to campaign against.

I think the point I’m making is that there’s no shame in being opposed to New Labour, Sure Start or no Sure Start. (Did you know SS was a Home Office project, by the way? Tough on crime…) Let’s be blunt: we’re not talking about “holding out for your dream manifesto” or “refusing to settle for 70%” – and we’re not talking about ancient history either. Within the last 20 years, the Labour Party has advocated (and implemented) policies in a range of areas that no one on the Left could support or even tolerate.

New Labour was a huge lurch to the Right relative to the Labour governments of the 1960s and 1970s, let alone the 1945 government. We’re not back there yet, but it’s pretty clear that that’s the direction of travel. As the neo-New Labour settlement emerges from the triangulating murk, we need to see it for what it is and be prepared to act accordingly (…a Labour Party member writes. I didn’t say we need to act immediately.)

By Phil | Also posted in cheery thoughts, class, history, new labour, pinkoes | Comments (2)

What happened?

6 February 2020 – 17:04

My MP has just asked me – and a few thousand other members of his CLP – what went wrong in December: what do we blame for Labour’s defeat?

Now, you don’t ask a ‘quantity’ question if you want a ‘quality’ answer; if you wanted to hear a measured argument weighing up multiple factors before coming to a judiciously qualified conclusion, you wouldn’t ask several thousand people at once. Presumably what our man is after is something to replace the row of dots in a statement like “Members have told me over and over again that…” or “What I’m hearing again and again is…”. So I don’t suppose my MP will be reading and considering my arguments very carefully, or (to be brutally honest) at all. But I wanted to get it straight in my head, so I thought it was worth doing for that alone. And hey, free blog post!

What do I blame for Labour’s defeat in 2019?

1. Brexit. Brexit has to be top of the list; it was always going to make winning in 2019 a long shot. Ultimately I don’t think it mattered very much exactly where Labour’s policy ended up – we were always going to lose x% to hard Brexit parties and y% to hard Remain parties, it was just a matter of which was bigger. Perhaps a more Brexit-friendly position would have saved some (net) votes and seats, but we can’t be sure – although I definitely don’t think that going any further towards Remain would have helped. What we do know is that the constant lobbying and nudging to shift Labour’s Brexit policy didn’t help at all – it made us look indecisive, made our policy look incoherent and exacerbated divisions within the leadership. In retrospect we should have set out a line quite early on and stuck to it – even if that line was ‘accept Brexit but blame the Tories’.

2. Populism. Brexit also exemplified a broader problem – the way that politics (“the art of the possible”, objectives and how to achieve them) has increasingly been supplanted by a kind of populist spectator mentality, in which people cheer on their side and don’t care what actually happens as long as the other side loses. Talking policy to an audience primed for slogans is a waste of breath – but how did we end up with an audience that wants slogans, and how do we get them to think about policy again?

3. Margaret Hodge. Or if that’s giving too much prominence to one person, I blame the lack of loyalty and discipline within the PLP more generally. Like him or loathe him, after 2016 there was no possibility of removing Corbyn as leader; anyone who continued to agitate against him, under those conditions, was only working for a Tory victory. But, as disgraceful as many MPs’ conduct was, they don’t bear all of the blame here; Corbyn’s lack of interest in party management came back to bite him, and us. The next leader must do better, which means learning (selectively) from New Labour. (A little Leninism goes a very long way, as Philip Gould once said.)

4. Online. Postal votes are one of the things killed us – I suspect that many of the people I spoke to on the doorstep, and thought I’d persuaded to consider voting Labour, had already voted Tory. I think the underlying lesson is that the Tories’ online operation – particularly targeting Facebook – is scarily good; we need to work on ours. (We also need to rethink what we think we’re doing – and in particular who we think we’re talking to – when we do online campaigning.)

5. The manifesto. The manifesto was a programme for a sweeping social-democratic transformation of the economy; we could never have done it all in one term. I don’t think there’s much wrong with the proposals themselves, but we should have been clearer about what we were proposing for the first term and what was more of an aspiration. Also – most importantly – we should have been working towards those policy announcements from 2017 onwards, not springing them on an unsuspecting electorate with a few weeks to go till the election.

6. There is no point 6. I’m not saying a word against Jeremy Corbyn – plenty of people will do that for me – but even if I did I wouldn’t put the leadership’s contribution to our defeat any higher than sixth in a field of six. Scapegoating Corbyn might be satisfying, but it’s a distraction – and won’t help us win next time.

By Phil | Also posted in pinkoes, politics, the local news | Comments (1)

On the (non-)existence of international law [re-up]

14 August 2019 – 09:00

[Updated and moved back to the top 13th August]

I’ve just finished the paper I’ve been working on for the last couple of months (or years, depending how you look at it). I think it’s pretty good, but it’s a bit of a departure, even from the last few things I’ve written (which are broadly about how best to approach political extremism under the rule of law). When you consider that I’m employed as a lecturer in Criminology, this paper is – well, ‘departure’ is scarcely the word. Any (constructive) suggestions as to what to do with it will be welcomed!

It’s also ratheralmost certainly far too long (23,000 words), so some surgery may be required. (Ironically, the sprawling beast I’m looking at now was originally planned as the first part of a two-part paper; in part two I was going to (and indeed eventually will) explore the implications of assuming that international law does exist, a question that I promise you is more theoretically fruitful than it sounds.)

I do think it’s pretty good, though. For info, it divides up as follows:

Introduction: 500 words
Austin and ‘positive morality’: 1000
Kelsen and ‘primitive law’: 1800
Hart and secondary rules: 2700
Realism and neo-realism in IR (Morgenthau and Waltz): 3600
Koskenniemi and the force of the dichotomy: 6200 (!)
Miéville and Pashukanis: 3600
Conclusion: 2700

Here’s the abstract:

New maps of denial: On the (non-)existence of international law

International law is unlike other areas of law in the regularity and confidence with which its existence is called into question. International law’s effective existence has been denied by scholars from multiple traditions, with different presuppositions about the existence conditions for a legal system; their convergence in challenging the existence of international law suggests that entrenched ideological rivals may share certain unexamined foundational assumptions.

This paper will review some of the main ways in which contemporary scholarship challenges the existence of international law, assessing the strength of the arguments advanced to support these challenges, the underlying assumptions of those arguments and the implications which follow from them. Prompted by Miéville (2004a), the paper will consider critiques of international law advanced by Austin, Kelsen, Hart, the Realist school of International Relations, Koskenniemi and Miéville himself. Respectively, these have denied (or have been cited as denying) that international law qualifies as law; that it is law in the same sense as municipal law; that it constitutes a legal system; that it exerts a determinant influence on nation states; that it can offer any coherent and non-contradictory guidance; and that it can be a force for emancipation and progress in the world.

In conclusion, the paper will identify the assumptions required in order to consider that international law does in fact exist – and exists as a coherent legal system with the potential to deliver emancipatory reforms – and the implications of doing so.

and the very end of the conclusion:

As a social achievement, international law is both imperfect and precarious; it is both law “in the making” (Lesser 2014: n.p.) and law which risks being unmade. International law’s relative lack of institutional underpinnings highlights the grounding of law in normative practice:

law ‘governs its own creation’, but not in the sense that the creation of law is made possible by higher legal rules: rather, the idea of law governs its own realization. Law, we may say, is the process of its own becoming.
(Simmonds 2007: 11),

International law must needs wear its normativity on its sleeve, in other words – and it is this, perhaps, which explains why it has proved so enduring a target of sceptical attacks, whether informed by legal positivism, foreign policy realism, deconstructionism or Marxism. The discourses and practices sustaining and reproducing international law are thoroughgoingly normative discourses and practices, impossible to fully understand or even demarcate without some adoption of a Hartian ‘internal point of view’. It is understandable that critics unwilling to buy into what they see as liberal illusions, and alert to the role played by international law in sustaining and ratifying an unjust global status quo, should decline to adopt that point of view – but the effect is to overstate the strength and coherence of the ideological underpinnings of the status quo, and to discard a potentially powerful set of normative resources for change.

and, to give you some idea what area I’m working in, the references:

Austin, J. (1832), The province of jurisprudence determined. London: John Murray.
Balbus, I. D. (1977), “Commodity form and legal form: An essay on the relative autonomy of the law”. Law Society Review 11(3).
Benjamin, W. (1921), “Zur Kritik der Gewalt”. In Benjamin, W. (1965), “Zur Kritik der Gewalt” und andere Aufsätze. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Binns, P. (1980), “Law and Marxism”. Capital and Class 10.
Brierly, J. (1955), The law of nations (5th edition). Oxford: OUP.
Brierly, J. (1958), ‘The basis of obligation in international law’ and other papers. Oxford: OUP.
Derrida, J. (1990), “Force de loi: Le fondement mystique de l’autorité”. Cardozo Law Review 11(5-6).
Finnemore, M. and Sikkink, K. (1998), “International Norm Dynamics and Political Change”. International Organization 52(4).
Fischer Williams, J. (1929), Chapters on current international law and the League of Nations. London: Longmans.
Fischer Williams, J. (1939), Aspects of modern international law. Oxford: OUP.
FitzMaurice, G. (1956), “The foundations of the authority of international law and the problem of enforcement”. Modern Law Review 19(1).
Forsyth, M. (1992), “The tradition of international law”. In Nardin, T. and Mapel, D. (1992), Traditions of International Ethics. Cambridge: CUP.
Garfinkel, H. (1967), Studies in ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Gihl, T. (1957), “The legal character and sources of international law”. Scandinavian Studies in Law 1.
Hart, H. L. A. (1957), “Dias and Hughes on jurisprudence”. Journal of the Society of Public Teachers of Law 4.
Hart, H. L. A. (1961), The concept of law. Oxford: OUP.
Hart, H. L. A. (1983), Essays in jurisprudence and philosophy. Oxford: OUP.
Henderson, E. (2013), “Hidden in plain sight: Racism in international relations theory”. Cambridge Review of International Affairs 26(1).
Imbusch, P. (2003), “The concept of violence”. In Heitmeyer, W. and Hagan, J. (eds.) (2003), International Handbook of Violence Research. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Jenks, C. (1964), “Fischer Williams – The practitioner as reformer”. British Year Book of International Law 40.
Jones, J. (1935), “The pure theory of international law”. British Year Book of International Law 16.
Jütersonke, O. (2010), Morgenthau, Law and Realism. Cambridge: CUP.
Kelman, M. (1987), A Guide to Critical Legal Studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Kelsen, H. (tr. Wedberg, A.) (1945), General Theory of Law and State. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Kelsen, H. (tr. Knight, M.) (1967), Pure Theory of Law. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Kennan, G. (1951), American Diplomacy, 1900-1950. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Kennedy, D. (1978), “The Structure of Blackstone’s Commentaries”. Buffalo Law Review 28(2).
Kennedy, D. (2001), “A semiotics of critique”. Cardozo Law Review 22(3-4).
Knox, R. (2009), “Marxism, international law, and political Strategy”. Leiden Journal of International Law 22.
Koskenniemi, M. (2006), From Apology to Utopia (second edition). Cambridge: CUP
Lesser, A. (2014), “H.L.A. Hart on international law”. Kritikos 11.
Macnair, M. (2006), “Law and state as holes in Marxist theory”. Critique 34(3).
Marx, K. (1976 [1867]), Capital, volume 1. London: Penguin.
McDougal, M. (1952), “Law and power”. American Journal of International Law 46(1).
Miéville, C. (2004a), Between equal rights: A Marxist theory of international law. Leiden: Brill
Miéville, C. (2004b), “The commodity-form theory of international law: an introduction”. Lieden Journal of International Law 17.
Morgenthau, H. (1940), “Positivism, Functionalism, and International Law”. American Journal of International Law 34(2).
Morgenthau, H. (1948), Politics Among Nations. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Morgenthau, H. (1951), In Defence of the National Interest. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Morgenthau, H. (1954), Politics Among Nations, second edition. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Morgenthau, H. (1973), Politics Among Nations, fifth edition. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Murphy, G. (2010), Shadowing the White Man’s Burden. New York: New York University Press
Nadel, S. (1957), The theory of social structure. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
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By Phil | Also posted in academe, legal matter | Comments (1)

I’ll Show You The Life Of The Mind

2 December 2018 – 18:16

This account of an awful Oxford interview got a lot of attention recently. The process it describes is not so much an interview in any recognisable sense as a kind of upper-class hazing ritual, beginning with the bizarre seating arrangements

There are three people in the room; a woman is lying on a chaise longue by the door and, standing in the corner a man with a black moustache and curly hair, who I discover is the admissions tutor … There is an empty chair in the room, which when I sit makes me higher than everyone else, and behind this chair, slouched against a bookshelf, sits another man.

and continuing through the ‘shocking’, ‘outlandish’ questions thrown out to challenge the unsuspecting candidate

‘Why do you think people listen to the radio?’

This at least is a question I know the answer to …

“Erm, because they’re lonely.”

She smirks. Naive again, but what else should I say?

“So do you think that the radio should be under the auspices of the Social Services then?”

That kind of “épater les bienpensants” right-wingery seems an even clearer class marker than the chaise longue.

It rang a bell with Adam, even if his experience wasn’t quite so grotesquely awful:

 

For myself, I was warned by my English teachers that Oxbridge interviews were both tough and weird, with a kind of toughness and weirdness you might expect from gatekeepers of hundreds of years of privilege. One Cambridge interviewer supposedly used to sit reading the paper with his feet up on his desk, then glance across at the candidate and say, “Impress me”. My English teachers liked a good story – one of them specialised in stories beginning “When I was in the diplomatic corps” or “When I was in the SAS” – but even they never suggested that a college admissions interview might be conducted partly from behind the interviewee and partly from a chaise longue. Truth is stranger than fiction.

And yet. Perhaps the people I met at Cambridge had all been unusually lucky, but all that my wife recalls is a fairly ordinary office, with chairs at the same height, and a reasonably relaxed conversation (as much as it could be) about Macbeth’s moral universe, with a rather posh but friendly old man. (She’d applied to Cambridge as a lower sixth-form student at a college in Preston.) My best friend at the time had a slightly harder time of it; his specialist topic was Keats, and he’d armed himself with several quotations from the “Ode to Autumn” – which he confidently sourced to the “Ode to Melancholy”. He didn’t help his case, when the interviewer politely suggested that they turn to the “Ode to Autumn”, by insisting that it was the “Ode to Melancholy” he wanted to talk about. Still, he got in too. Me, I didn’t have an interview – I never found out whether it was in recognition of my performance in the college entrance exam or just an oversight.

Several years later – clearly – our children both applied to either Oxford or Cambridge, and they both experienced pretty much the kind of interview that Oxbridge colleges tell the world that they administer: friendly but persistent questioning, drawing the student out to the limit of their existing knowledge, then pushing them a bit further and seeing how they coped. The main difference from our time was that they each had two or three separate interviews, mostly with more than one person. One thought the interviews mostly went all right, one thought two of them were fine but the last was a car-crash; one got a place, one didn’t. (Not necessarily in that order.) But neither of them was scorned, deliberately humiliated, exposed to ridicule or ambushed in any way.

But I wouldn’t want to end the story there. Take that college entrance exam: I got in on, among other things,

  • an essay on doubled perspectives in Wuthering Heights (which I had just read)
  • an essay on Shakespeare based on Wyndham Lewis’s The Lion and the Fox (which I had just read)
  • an essay on late-Romantic poetry, focused entirely on Edward Lear

My method, in other words, was

  1. Read a lot (at the last minute)
  2. Come up with some mad idea that people may not have thought of
  3. Follow through said idea, taking it completely seriously

The first message I got from Cambridge was that this was in fact the way to do it – and that it was quite in order for me to value the ability to work this way, because Cambridge valued it too. This was also one of the last messages I got from Cambridge. My single best paper in Part II, at the end of third year, was the one where I compared a passage in Melville’s The Confidence Man (a character struggles to convey the precise meaning of the word ‘certain’) with a passage in one of D. H. Lawrence’s essays on American literature (Lawrence struggles with the word ‘nature’); in the same paper I made use of quotations from two separate essays which I’d only read on the morning of the exam (Eliot on Henry James and Henry James on Thoreau). I had fun.

So there was a certain[sic] amount of “Owl Post” about being admitted to Cambridge, for me, and an element of “sorted into Ravenclaw” on top of that; there was a feeling that, now that I was in, I no longer needed to conceal or apologise for the stuff I was interested in or the way my mind worked. What I did have to do was demonstrate that I could get results – and then demonstrate it all over again. Over the three years we were expected to work at a pretty high level, with little or no supervision, and to put in fairly Herculean amounts of reading. Typically you’d be given two weeks to write an essay on an author and then left to your own devices; the first step was to read everything they’d written, or have a good stab at it. A friend who was ‘doing’ Hardy was advised by his supervisor to swerve Jude and Tess and begin with a book neither of us had so much as heard of, A Laodicean. (He said he’d discovered that it was actually the first book in a trilogy – A Laodicean, A Quiet Icean and A Completely Silent Icean.) Given that that was how ‘Cambridge’ worked, the college entrance exam that we took – and, perhaps, the interview too – could be justified as a way of selecting for people who could work, and thrive, under those conditions.

But there was more to ‘Cambridge’ than that. On one hand, what you’d been selected for, or sorted into, wasn’t just an environment where you could get intellectual work done without distractions (although it certainly was that). It was a wealthy and luxurious environment, making it a privileged setting in itself; and it was also, unavoidably, a setting for the maintenance and reproduction of privilege in other forms. On the other hand, in a setting where studiousness and creativity are the price of admission, studiousness and creativity are weirdly undervalued: to stand out you needed to be really good, or else you needed something else to trade on. Flash helped; ‘front’ and a certain amount of extroversion helped; boundless self-confidence helped. (See above, ‘reproduction of privilege in other forms’.)

In the absence of those things you’d find yourself, sooner or later, relegated to the B team – and, labelling processes being what they are, once you were in that position it was hard to think your way out of it, or even to maintain the intellectual self-confidence that had got you that far. One of the English Fellows at my college was notorious among my friends for her unapologetic division of sheep from goats; several of our essays were damned with the faint praise of ‘solid’ (which, as the term wore on, she alternated with ‘stolid’). She was much more impressed by another student’s twenty-minute presentation on food in Shakespeare, which was mainly devoted to exploring the psychic resonances of food and eating through lengthy quotations from Lévi-Strauss and Melanie Klein, touching base with Shakespeare by way of what sounded like a trolley-dash through a concordance (“Come, let’s to dinner” – Henry IV Part II).

It’s odd how intimidating ‘front’ can be – particularly when the person with the front is succeeding and you’re watching them do it. Thinking of that presentation now, I think “lots of reading, check; mad idea, check; follow it through, check” – it’s not as if I didn’t know how the trick was done (see above re: Melville). At the time I felt thoroughly outclassed and resented it deeply: if I’d known that was what you wanted, I would have – well, I couldn’t have done that, obviously, but… I’d never felt overshadowed by the more ‘popular’ kids at school – I always felt that I was a roaring success at being me, and all I lacked was wider recognition of this accomplishment. At Cambridge, quite a large part of what I valued about being me was put in the scales, weighed and found… fine. Absolutely fine. Nothing wrong with it. Solid. Stolid, even. (What would a stolid essay even look like? Not that I’ve borne a grudge for the best part of 40 years or anything…)

By the end of first year Cambridge’s original, welcoming message to me

  1. It’s good to think the way you do, and care about the things you care about.
  2. There is a place where thinking the way you do is valued, and you’ve reached it.

had mutated into something less benign:

  1. It’s good to think the way you do, and care about the things you care about.
  2. There is a place where thinking the way you do is valued; not only valued, in fact, but rewarded with luxury and privilege. But it’s not for you.

By the time I graduated, I sincerely and straightforwardly believed all of this, and didn’t even think of returning to higher education for another ten years. (It wasn’t unusual to give up on the Life of the Mind after three years of Cambridge English, if the group of twelve I studied with were anything to go by; only three or four of us went on to further study, and out of those only one was actually studying English.) In the longer term I was left with two antagonistic – but complementary – convictions, both equally baleful: the conviction that somewhere out there, perhaps behind a green door in a sixteenth-century wall, is my ideal career, a career consisting almost entirely of deep academic thought; and the conviction that I personally don’t deserve anything like that and will never see it. (The last of these is almost certainly correct, of course.)

I don’t think that Oxford and Cambridge are just like any other university in terms of teaching, or that their students are no different from other students; I think that they genuinely promote high-quality academic work and that their admissions processes genuinely favour people with the ability to do it. But I also think that they do a lot more than promote high-quality academic work, and that they select for a lot more than academic ability – with the result that, if academic ability is your only strong suit, Oxbridge may make promises it doesn’t intend to keep. So I sympathise with everyone who didn’t get through admissions – everyone who was repulsed (in either sense of the word) by a selection process which was also a rejection process – but I also think that getting in was a mixed blessing for me. The selection process didn’t stop when I got in.

 

 

By Phil | Also posted in academe, awfully deep, big stuff, you young people | Comments (2)

Written on your face

13 July 2018 – 14:05

“Looking back on life is such a retrospective thing,” Pete Shelley once wrote (although he probably doesn’t like to be reminded of it). Actually, an awful lot of life is a retrospective thing. We all live in the past to some extent; if you didn’t you’d have terrible trouble finding the stairs.

Popular music is one of the more retrospective things, if you’re old enough not to be discovering it for the first time (and if you’re reading this, what are the chances?). I’ve written about Robyn Hitchcock three times on this blog before now, if you set aside brief references in posts on nonsense verse, dreaming and death (2006, 2017). In 2005 I looked back on a 1993 gig, and how Robyn dealt with hecklers during the introduction to a song about watching his father dying; in 2008 I saw Robyn on TV and looked back at my memories of seeing him live, going back to 1979; in 2009 I mused about a recently-completed paper (which would never be published) and a dream about Barack Obama, while listening to a song from 2003 in which Robyn looked back on 1976.

This really ought to make me feel old, but in practice very few things do that. What it does make me feel is slightly dizzy – not so much “the past inside the present”, more the past inside the past, inside the past, inside the past, inside another past – and all of those pasts inside the present, for now. (Will I be looking back on this post in a year’s time – or ten years’ time – and writing, In 2018 I looked back on...? Let’s hope so.)

And it’s been a lifetime
And with you I celebrate my life

I didn’t feel old when I went to see Robyn Hitchcock the other month (I did later, when I had to run for the bus home, but that’s another story). I was a bit startled by how old everyone else was, though – the venue (“Club Academy”, which turned out to mean the basement of the Students’ Union(!)) seemed to be packed out with grey-haired men, with a scattering of grey-haired couples. There were a lot of more or less smart-looking older men, a smaller number of ageing rockers and folkies and a few people who looked as if life hadn’t been very kind to them; what there wasn’t, as far as I could see, was more than a handful of people under 40. I realised what was going on, and wondered if anyone else had been in the audience the first time I saw Robyn, a Soft Boys gig at the Hope and Anchor in 1979; I tried to edit our over-55 selves into my memory of that pub back room, but we looked very out of place. Noticing the number of people checking their phones, I automatically edited my mental image accordingly – black or beige plastic, rotary dials, wires trailing – but now it just looked silly.

It’s been a lifetime – my adult lifetime, anyway. I first saw the Soft Boys a few weeks before I went up to university and last saw them shortly before I graduated, by which time they were in the process of splitting; in between I saw them another three times, including one gig where a couple of friends of mine had talked themselves onto the very bottom of the bill, as an unofficial (and unpaid) support act. I’d been trying vaguely to get started as a singer, and persuaded them to let me take vocals on one of their songs – the fact that neither of them knew the lyrics was what swung it for me. (No, they couldn’t just look them up. It was 1980.) So it was that I made my performing debut, singing the Stranglers’ “Grip” with the (loosely-defined) band Shovel Robinson, supporting (a couple of other bands who genuinely were supporting) the Soft Boys. There’s glory for you.

The last time I saw the Soft Boys was in 1982, after Kimberley Rew had formally left the band; the other three started the gig without him, and he only joined them on stage for the last few numbers. I only mention this because one of Morris Windsor’s drum pedals malfunctioned mid-gig, leading to a hiatus in which little could be heard apart from intermittent shouts of “Kimberley!” from the back of the room; to this Robyn responded, “I love Kimberley dearly, but he can’t be used for hitting a drum”.

I don’t remember seeing Robyn after that until 1993 (Manchester Academy, with the Egyptians – Morris Windsor and original Soft Boys bassist Andy Metcalfe).

The missing Avenger planes
Will never return to base
Don’t you wait up for them

How often have you boys said
“I ain’t gonna bump no more”?
We ain’t gonna bump no more

Over the subsequent 25 years (steady – touch of vertigo again) I’ve seen him another seven times – solo, with the Venus Three and with other combinations of musicians, including on one occasion Morris and Kimberley, of all people. But that 1993 gig still sticks in my mind: Respect material – still my favourite Hitchcock album – and played by the old gang, or 3/4s of it (supplemented by an additional guitarist). I’ve never seen staging like it, apart from anything else; rather than sit at the back behind a drumkit, Morris Windsor stood at the front of the stage alongside Robyn and Andy Metcalfe, behind a tiny and mostly electronic kit. (And a vocal mic, of course; three-part harmonies were always part of the deal.) The additional guitarist, whose name was Eric, was left to lurk at the back. At one point Robyn, Morris and Andy got into a semi-serious discussion of who’d worked with Robyn longer, who’d been there “at the start”; Robyn wound it up by saying, “Of course, Eric was there all along. Eric’s been there longer than any of us – it’s just that he’s only recently become… apparent.” The Yip Song was amazing (Morris’s ‘kit’ included a real snare), as was its intro; Robyn was on good introductory form generally. Other than that I mainly remember a couple of solo songs mid-set. Robyn did “I’ve got a message for you” and, seemingly irked by the number of people singing every single word back at him, went off-piste in the middle eight:

Though I’m not a piece of veal
Or a piece of beef
The way you sink your teeth in me
Is beyond belief!

I burst out laughing and clapped quite loudly – which Robyn responded to (I was standing right in front of him at the time) by going into an extended drunk-Elvis “Thankyou-ladeez-an-gennelmen-ah-thangyew-so-verr-verr-much” routine. So that was fun, not to mention a bit weird (“Ah felt like I was bein’ fitted with a new artificial arrrm…”).

In the same solo section, Robyn did “She doesn’t exist”, a song which (in 1993) I didn’t know but (at the age of 32) thought was quite pretty and rather sad. After the song I saw Robyn give his eyes a quick dab with a bar towel and thought, “that must really mean a lot to him”; it certainly didn’t mean anything to me. Twenty-five years later, at Club Academy, he did the song – again – as one of a few solo songs mid-set; as soon as I recognised it I thought, you utter bastard. Then stood there for three minutes with a wet face.

They didn’t do “The Wreck of the Arthur Lee” the other night; I don’t remember if they did it that night in 1993, either, although it seems probable. I do know that Arthur Lee was another subject of which I was ignorant, back then. It was three years later that I met the friend who introduced me to the music of Arthur Lee and his psychedelic band Love. That in turn was seven years before she got to meet and hang out with Arthur Lee, which was three years before he died, which is twelve years ago now. The past inside… the past, inside the past, inside the present.

Meanwhile back at the Hope in 1979, Robyn’s switched to bass – a rather striking blue Danelectro ‘longhorn’ bass – and he and Andy are sharing the dense, skittery bassline of “Insanely Jealous”. On guitar, Kimberley is having fun experimenting with feedback and playing with the volume knobs – muting his guitar completely, hitting a chord and then fading it in or wa-wa-ing it in and out. And that’s just the accompaniment. When it’s time for his solo he goes… I wouldn’t say he goes crazy, exactly, not least because that would imply a strong contrast with how he was for the rest of the gig. It’s more that the solo lets him do what he does, only without reining himself in: when it’s time for his solo, he goes. He had – and for all I know still has – an extraordinary sound, reminiscent of Floyd-era Barrett and not really of much else; a kind of lucid, liquid howl. I remember that solo, the best part of 40 years on, and I remember Kimberley’s weird range of ‘psychedelic guitarist’ mannerisms – the gurning, the pouting, the chin-jutting, the Fab Four head-shaking… Kimberley always did have quite an impressive mop of hair, although the last time I saw it I didn’t immediately recognise it, or him (like Robyn, he seems to have more or less skipped ‘grey’ and gone straight for white).

And who is this, on stage with Robyn in 2018 at the rock and roll toilet that is Club Academy, rhythmically jutting his head and pouting, shaking a greying mop of hair as he gets stuck into the solo on “Insanely Jealous”? It’s Luther Russell, of course! Well, of course. And he’s pretty good; seems like a nice guy, too. He doesn’t quite have that sound, though (nobody does). More importantly, there’s never any danger that he’s going to pick the gig up and run off with it; never any question about who’s on stage with whom. It’s odd, though – while he’s no spring chicken himself, Luther would have been only just into secondary school when the Soft Boys broke up (not to mention being located on the wrong continental landmass). He must have watched a lot of videos – and I didn’t think there were any videos.

It was an odd gig; it mostly consisted of 1980s material, although Robyn was also promoting a limited 2011 album which has just had a full(er) release and – almost incidentally – a new album. The new album looks good, sounds excellent (some really nice, gnarly guitar sounds) and includes some of his best material in years; it’s even called Robyn Hitchcock, which might seem to suggest a push into a wider market. There weren’t any copies on sale at the gig, though, which may be why Robyn’s efforts to promote it were fairly perfunctory. That, and the difficulty of selling anything these days. “This is from the new album, which you can’t buy from us, although you can buy it… somewhere. But the music is available everywhere.” (On a side note, I ordered the CD direct from Yep Roc in the States. Postage was reasonable and HMRC didn’t make any trouble.)

Oh God, you were beautiful
Oh God, you were beautiful
Oh God…
Mad Shelley’s letterbox is full of birthday cards

Alternatively, perhaps the passage of time has been weighing on Robyn’s mind as well. (Quick question: why would someone’s letterbox be full of birthday cards? Yes, that, obviously. But why else?) And perhaps Robyn’s opening remarks on reaching retirement age but still being on tour (he turned 65 in March) were more than just rueful banter. The past (“Insanely Jealous”), inside the past (“Chinese Bones”), inside the past (“Madonna of the Wasps”)… inside the past (“Sally was a Legend”), inside the past, (“Goodnight Oslo”), inside the present. You have been listening to: Robyn Hitchcock.

 

By Phil | Also posted in awfully deep, history, popular singing groups, you young people | Comments (0)

A song of the past

4 October 2017 – 10:44

Glen Newey died on the 30th of September, unexpectedly and far too soon (he was 56). Glen and I were acquaintances at best – our contacts between 1982 and 2017 amounted to one brief email exchange and a vague commitment to meet up when it was possible. I didn’t know him particularly well before 1982, come to that.

However, we were at the same Cambridge college for the same three years, and he did make an impression on me then. He certainly stood out. I remember thinking he looked like something out of Cold Comfort Farm – big-boned, raw complexion, blank, unyielding stare – and being surprised to hear through friends that he was one of the brighter and more hard-working students in his subject group, almost certainly heading for a First. To talk to he was reserved and brusque; he didn’t say much or invite small talk. (To talk to he was hard work, to be honest. Mind you, so was I.) He told me once he’d grown up in Guernsey. What was it like? I asked. “A shithole,” he said, then gave a small smile.

It was fourteen years after leaving Cambridge when I saw Glen’s name again, in the letters column, and subsequently in the main body, of the LRB. From his earliest review – of Habermas’s Between Facts and Norms – he had a distinctive style, a kind of punk donnishness. This isn’t just a matter of interleaving tightly-worded argument with references to Harry Secombe and the Great Train Robbery (“eligible conceptions of the good are unlikely to include those of Ronald Biggs”); Terry Eagleton would do as much. Glen went further, as in his reminiscences of a trip to Berlin:

In deference to the BSE brouhaha, posters in every public eatery in town vouchsafed that the dead quadruped on offer was rein deutscher Herkunft – of pure German origin; grim photos in Der Spiegel showed British bovines being shoved into Topf-style incinerators. Irony, or even memory, was at a discount.

The relentless tastelessness of the Nazi allusions here was very Glen, as was the combination of circumlocution and brutality with which it was delivered. When a reader from Frankfurt complained a couple of issues later, Glen declared himself “happy to make with the smoking calumet”, continuing:

I count Germans among my closest friends, some of whom I stay with when in Berlin. My Significant Other herself hails from the tribe – indeed, her mother is a proud alumna of the Hitler Youth’s female branch, with memorabilia which she showed off to me when I was first presented for her approval.

He then pointed out the flaw in his correspondent’s logic. He had fun.

A few years later, an article on the royal family – memorably headed “About as Useful as a String Condom” – gave Glen’s punk-donnish style free rein. Some correspondents found it a bit much, and I was inclined to agree. Well, sort of.

Letters, 20 February 2003
You describe Glen Newey as a reader in politics rather than Reader in Politics (LRB, 23 January). From this, and from his cheerful pee-po-belly-bum-drawers prose style, I infer that he is a first-year undergraduate shaping up for a career as president of the students’ union. It’s not too soon for him to learn some useful lessons.

First, to label a columnist more talented than yourself as ‘drek’, and a political journalist more serious than yourself as vacuous, may not convince your readers that you yourself are free from these defects. Second, it is a long time since anyone believed that abolition of the monarchy necessarily guaranteed the achievement of a democratic and egalitarian society. [continues]
– Anne Summers

(Along the way, Glen had characterised Jonathan Freedland as ‘vacuous’ and Julie Burchill as ‘drek’. Seems fairly mild, to be honest.)

Letters, 6 March 2003
I can set Anne Summers’s mind at rest on one point (Letters, 20 February): Glen Newey served his time as a first-year undergraduate several years ago, in a cohort including such eminences as Anatol Lieven and myself (parsing that last clause is left as an exercise for the reader). Like Summers and others, I found the style of Newey’s piece on the monarchy distracting; it suggested a sustained and ultimately rather laborious attempt to disguise his native tones as those of an intellectual Richard Littlejohn. Ars est celare artem, of course, but another time I’d rather have more of Glen’s own voice and less from his ars.
– Phil Edwards

I know, it’s dreadful. (Even the formulation is wrong – logically it should be ‘and’, not ‘but’.) By way of context, I was 42, I was midway through my doctorate, I was supporting myself as a freelance journalist – mainly writing opinion columns in computing magazines – and applying for interviews for academic jobs, none of which I got. So when the opportunity presented itself to demonstrate that I, too, could put a Cambridge education to the service of being rude in ornate language, of course I jumped at it. Not that it did me any good, and I’m not sure how I thought it would. Sympathetic magic, really; might as well flag down a flying saucer.

And that’s almost all I can say about Glen Newey. He went on writing for the LRB and became an established presence on the LRB blog. (And hey, I’ve written for the LRB blog too! Twice!) He did dial it down – a bit – but never lost that relish for épater le bourgeois, and épater la galérie while he was about it. It was seldom gratuitous. He knew that sometimes – more often than you might think – people need a bit of a shock to see things how they are; sometimes – more often than you might think – telling things how they are is shocking. Our paths crossed briefly a few years later, when he was at Keele and I was applying for a job there; we couldn’t arrange to meet on the day of the interview, though, and I didn’t get the job, so that was that. No ending; the story just stops.

Brian Barder died on the 19th of September. Brian started blogging in 2003; he was in his late sixties and a retired diplomat. When I started the forerunner of this blog, a couple of years later, Brian’s was one of the first I added to my blogroll. Back in the glory days of blogging (circa 2006-8), I commented regularly on his posts and he occasionally on mine, sometimes pursuing our debates through email. I agreed with him strongly on the merits and limits of the international legal order, in particular its lack of support for interventionist adventurism; I also shared his Old Labour loyalties and his heartfelt disdain for the New Labour crew, then very much in power.

We disagreed on other things; in particular, Brian took (what I would call) the conventional view that “terrorists” are beyond any conceivable pale, and that for states to take terrorist actors into account in any way when pursuing their own interests would be tantamount to succumbing to blackmail. I argued the opposing position at some length – pointing out, for example, that if an organised crime syndicate has recently started operating in a certain country, that country’s government will naturally take account of this fact when deciding whether to grant new casino licences, if only by managing things so as to frustrate the crime syndicate. Brian was immovable: the only principled response to terrorism was to say “I see no ships”. (And I’m not saying that he was wrong, necessarily. Certainly organised crime syndicates don’t set out to influence governments in the way that terrorist groups do.)

I was twenty-six years Brian’s junior, as well as having neither qualifications nor experience in a field where he had both; I’m sure he sometimes found my questions and comments impertinent or gauche. For all that, I found him almost invariably wise, thoughtful and kind, and was hugely gratified when he endorsed my readings of international law (most recently in 2013, with regard to R2P and Syria). If there was sometimes a touch of de haut en bas graciousness in there, he carried it off well.

Some time in the late 2000s, the glory days of blogging ground to a halt. When the music stopped I found that, as well as posting a lot less often, I was reading and replying to an almost completely different group of bloggers. So, farewell then, James C-M, Justin McK and Jarndyce; hello, Rodent, WbS and Splinty. A few bloggers from the first group made it into the second, and Brian was one of them. Brian last commented here in 2016, while my last comment at his place is as recent as June this year.

By then, however, a new and more serious disagreement between us had arisen. Old Labour though he was, Brian was never especially left-wing, and he had no time whatever for Jeremy Corbyn or his supporters. As well as distrusting Corbyn on foreign and defence policy – no small matters for a former diplomat – I think Brian simply couldn’t be doing with Corbyn as a politician; for him, I think Corbyn’s failure to control the PLP betrayed lack of power, charisma or both, while his personal scruffiness and penchant for mass meetings were the mark of a dilettante extremist.

I myself had opted for Corbyn even before I thought he had any chance of winning the leadership, and hadn’t seen any reason to waver in my support since then – certainly not since the election, in which Corbyn’s leadership was genuinely impressive. Given another couple of years I think even Brian might have been won round. Sadly, he didn’t have another couple of years. I’d known since earlier this year that Brian was suffering from a life-changing illness, but it barely even crossed my mind that the outcome might be worse than that. 83 is what we used to call ‘a good age’, but it doesn’t make the news of his passing any less of a shock. He leaves a gap in my life, even though I never met him, and I can only commiserate with all those who knew him much better than I did.

NB I didn’t ‘Sir’ Brian in life – entirely with his approval – and don’t intend to start now.

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To you, with regard

30 August 2017 – 21:01

So what have I been writing about, these last couple of months (to a lack of interest which has, frankly, exceeded my low expectations)?

Well, I’ve been thinking about death; about the way that death affects us and appears to us; and about what we can infer from that about life and how to live it. Just the big stuff, then.

In post 1 I talked about the impassable, indescribable devastation that is being bereaved, before mentioning a curious experience which I and others have had after losing a loved one, and which seems oddly to be evoked in the Sermon on the Mount: Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted. As I said in post 3, it’s as if for a moment someone is telling us “it’s all right”; let’s not beat about the bush, it’s as if they’re telling us “it’s all right”. I talked about this in more depth in post 8, suggesting a possible psychological mechanism for it while also accounting for my sense that it’s an essentially benign, constructive experience.

More broadly, what’s interesting about experiences like these is what they tell us about how we imagine personal survival, or rather how we imagine personhood: that intuitive sense of individual identity as something essential and even indestructible. I talked about this sense of there being an irreducible core of individual identity – the soul, roughly speaking – in post 2, with a bit of help from Neil Hannon. In post 4 I contrasted Emily Brontë’s frankly panpsychist articulation of her own sense of irreducible identity with Robyn Hitchcock’s frankly materialist version; I discussed these, together with George Eliot’s unsatisfactory but intriguing attempt to square the circle (eternal life, but not for people), in post 5.

As well as being a useful corrective to the mystical individualism of Emily Brontë, George Eliot’s social perspective – her sense that we may live on through our influence and our contribution to the continuing life of the human race – connects with another intuition: the sense that, if we are each an individual with a unique identity, it is possible for us to develop those identities while living together. The sense, in other words, that it is possible for humanity, as a whole, to be humane; to be kind. I pursued this sense in post 6 through some of the novels of Kurt Vonnegut, as well as relating it to the person-centred psychology of Carl Rogers (Rogers and Vonnegut are a good fit).

All of which is a kind of backdrop for the thought-experiment which I’d been carting around since last December, which I revealed to the world in post 7 and then debunked in post 9. Post 7: suppose that we survive eternally after death, our identities formed by the life journey we completed before dying. Wouldn’t we find ourselves suddenly in the benign presence of everyone there is – our worst enemies included? And doesn’t this give us the strongest incentive to live at once the fullest life and the best, kindest life we possibly can? (See the post to have it set out in detail.) Post 9: suppose, conversely, that our life journeys come to a full stop when we die and our unique identities are mercilessly snuffed out; doesn’t this indescribable, impassable devastation find its repressed reflection in fantasies of eternal, harmonious, individual survival? And doesn’t the ridiculous horror of death actually give us an even stronger incentive to live a fuller and a kinder life, while we can? Again, see the post to get the detail (and for a rebuttal of the Atheism Fallacy of which I am rather proud).

On a personal(!) note, I started this series rationally convinced that the Heaven fantasy I’d come up with was just that, a fantasy; all the same, I found it a very appealing fantasy, and did wonder if dwelling on it over several weeks was going to induce some sort of conversion experience. I’m glad I risked it; here at the end of the series I’m more certain than before that this life is all we get. If we want a moment worth waiting for, we’re going to have to make it.

 

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To you, with regard (8)

13 August 2017 – 15:46

And the voice said: “This is the hand, the hand that takes…”

Location: a busy street in a south Manchester suburb, on a sunny Saturday morning. We see PHIL coming out of a newsagent, a hessian shopping bag in one hand. A passer-by accosts him.
VOICE: Phil, could I have a word?
PHIL recognises the voice, turns towards it and answers without thinking.
PHIL: Sure, what’s it about? Oh, wait…
Seeing the bystander who had addressed him, PHIL freezes and shrinks back. His mouth moves uncertainly before he speaks again.
PHIL: You… I’m sorry, have we met? I know Jan had family, but…
The bystander returns PHIL’s baffled gaze with an expression combining patience, impatience and amusement.
BYSTANDER: Phil, it’s all right. You can say what you see. What was your immediate reaction when you heard my voice?
PHIL: I thought you were Jan.
BYSTANDER: And what was the one possibility you utterly refused to consider?
PHIL: That you were Jan.
JAN: Well, then. Which way are you headed?
—
PHIL and JAN walk up the road in silence. Eventually PHIL finds his voice again.
PHIL: So, you wanted a word?
JAN: Thought you were never going to ask. You’ve been thinking about regret.
It’s not a question.
PHIL: Well, since you… And thinking I’d never see you again… I mean, we had that disagreement… more of a misunderstanding really… and I never went to see you when you were in the… before…
JAN: Before I died, no – no, you didn’t. It’s all right, don’t worry.
PHIL: Don’t worry? That’s just it – if I was worrying I could do something about it. I’m a bit past worry.
JAN: You’re not, though – that’s the point. You’re not even on the same track as worry. I’m not explaining it very well – have a word with this gentleman.
They are approaching a bridge over a canal. A path branches off from the pavement to run down beside the canal. A FAIR-HAIRED MAN, wearing flared jeans and an embroidered waistcoat, has just pushed past them onto the path.
JAN: Not so fast! Peter, a word?
PETER BELLAMY stops, turns and grudgingly walks back to join them.
—
PHIL: You’re… you’re actually him. You’re actually Peter Bellamy. I don’t know what to say.
PB: Stop there, I should, you’ve already given me my next publicity campaign. “Peter Bellamy – He’s Actually Him.” How can I ever repay you. Don’t answer that, for God’s sake. My amazing talent of actually being Peter Bellamy doesn’t seem to pull the crowds somehow.
JAN: Come on, Peter, give it up – stop pretending that stuff still matters. Actually it’s regret that I was wanting to talk to you about – I was wondering if you could say a few words on the subject to my friend here.
PB: Oh, very well. [To PHIL] I guess you regret never having met me, or even seen me, when you could.
PHIL: Well, yes. I mean, I was thirty years old when you… I wasn’t into folk back then, but I’d been into Steeleye Span…
PB: You said it, not me. Go on.
PHIL: I had Pentangle albums, I’d gone to Lark Rise… But somehow I never even heard your name till much, much later. I’d heard one track by the Young Tradition, but I didn’t get it at the time – I just thought you sounded like a bunch of mad Yorkshire reactionaries who were determined to make themselves sound as antiquated as possible.
PB: Did we record with the Watersons? I don’t remember.
PHIL: I didn’t have a very good ear for accents. So when I found out what I’d missed – how much I’d missed – who I’d missed… It felt like claiming that I was into classical music when I’d been living round the corner from J.S. Bach and never known.
PB: You weren’t, though, were you? Living round the corner, I mean. Going to the same folk clubs, whatever.
PHIL: Well, no, our paths didn’t cross, that was…
PB: And you were talking in the pluperfect, which is a dead giveaway.
PHIL: Sorry?
PB: “How much I had missed” – pluperfect. You’re thinking in the pluperfect, and that’s why you’re wrong – and that’s why it’s all right. For a start you’ve got to distinguish between ‘losing’ and ‘having lost’. Losing is when you’re clinging on to the rockface and feeling it slip away from under your fingers; lost is when you’re falling, or when you’ve fallen, and it’s all over. Losing is sitting by the phone all day with the growing certainty that it isn’t going to ring; lost is remembering that day a year later. Or you can think of it in terms of songs. Take Reynardine or the Recruited Collier – some song that you sang a couple of times when you were just getting started and never thought about since.
PHIL: And will probably never sing again.
PB: And will probably never sing again – exactly. That’s lost. But you learned those songs, once – you learned the lines, forgot the lines, struggled to remember the lines, got them, lost them again, learned them again… That’s losing.
PHIL: I suppose so. But where are we going with this?
PB: I was planning on a bit of a walk by the canal, but since your friend roped me in… No, the point is: how do you feel about not knowing the second verse of Reynardine, or the penultimate verse of The Recruited Collier?
PHIL: I’d never really thought about it. Nothing, really – I don’t make any claim to know those songs.
PB: Although you did once?
PHIL: I did once, but they’re gone. They mean nothing to me.
PB: And those are songs you used to know. Suppose you heard that there were some interesting songs in a book you’ve never seen, and that the only copy’s been lost?
PHIL: That would be sad, but I wouldn’t regret it personally – that would be like taking responsibility for something that never happened or never could happen.
PB: And yet you think you regret not meeting someone you never could meet, not hearing music you never had any chance to hear. It may be sad – it might have been good if those things had happened – but there’s nothing there to regret. Your life is your life; what happened, happened. It’s all right. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to resume my walk, and if you won’t excuse me I’m afraid I’m going anyway. Val de ree, and so forth.
—
PHIL and JAN are standing side by side on the bridge over the canal, leaning over the parapet and looking out into nothing. For a few minutes nobody speaks. Eventually PHIL sighs.
PHIL: That’s reassuring up to a point, but surely there are things to regret in situations like…
JAN: Like mine?
PHIL: Yes! We shouldn’t have fallen out, I should have explained myself better, I should have made more of an effort… All those things I could have done, and now I can’t.
JAN: Now you can’t. Tell me, what would you think of a religious leader who said that everyone had a moral duty to avoid anger, pride, lust and the rest of them at all times? No exceptions – anyone who committed any of those sins, even inside their head, would be drummed out of the church. What would you think of that approach?
PHIL: I’d think that was cruel and exploitative, as it’s a standard that almost everyone is bound to fail.
JAN: Almost everyone, yes. And what would you think of the idea that everyone has a moral duty to go back in time, after they’ve sinned, and avoid committing the sinful act?
PHIL: I’d think that was ridiculous – you can’t have a moral duty to do something impossible.
JAN: No indeed. And you can’t have a duty towards someone who doesn’t exist. Maybe you did the wrong things back there, or not enough of the right things, and maybe you’ll want to do better if you’re in a similar situation in future. But you haven’t got anything to regret. You don’t owe me anything – how could you?
PHIL: So maybe I did owe you something…
JAN: And maybe I was well aware of that. Or maybe I thought you owed me something different from what you thought you owed me; maybe I would still have thought you owed me, even if you’d done everything you thought you ought to do. Whatever. The point is, that story’s over now. You can’t owe Jan something if there isn’t any Jan for you to owe anything to. Try and do better another time, but apart from that, go on, go in peace. It’s just you now.
PHIL: I suppose… when someone dies, we lose the person, but we also lose the whole entanglement of expectations and obligations and shared understandings and misunderstandings and grudges and guilt that grows up around a relationship over time. Laying all of that down, letting it all blow away, isn’t the same as having the other person actually tell you they don’t care about any of it, but it could feel like that. I suppose it’s the difference between a debt being settled and a debt being cancelled – which is to say, if you’re the one with the debt, there is no difference. Losing somebody is pain, but there’s also a release: a chance to wipe the slate, let all the nonsense go, see the person as they were and feel your affection for them as it was. A chance to hear those words –
PHIL straightens up, steps back from the parapet of the bridge, looks around. He is alone.
PHIL: “It’s all right. It’s really all right.”

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To you, with regard (5)

12 July 2017 – 21:18

All I ever been is me
All I know is I
And I will turn to nothing
In the second that I die

– Robyn Hitchcock, telling it like it (spoiler) probably is.

What interests me about that formulation is that the scepticism about the afterlife goes along with a strong sense of self – an awareness that whatever any one of us has experienced, wherever we’ve been, whatever we’ve done, ‘I’ have always been there. Whoever you are, there’s a unique consciousness looking out at the world through your eyes; it’s you, it always has been and it always will be – until you aren’t any more.

So on one level Robyn Hitchcock has a surprising amount in common with Emily Brontë: they both express a fascinated, wondering awareness of what it is to be here, what it is to be an ‘I’. On another level, of course, their disagreement is pretty fundamental. Emily Brontë envisages, not only her own removal from the scene, but the disappearance of the world, the sun, the universe; and she looks on it all with equanimity:

There is not room for Death
Nor atom that his might could render void
Since thou art Being and Breath
And what thou art may never be destroyed.

For what thou art is also right here:

Life, that in me hast rest,
As I Undying Life, have power in Thee

She pictures God as ‘resting’ by stepping his energy down to the level of creatures such as her – very much as matter effectively slows down spacetime from its default setting of c – while at the same time linking them back up to the source of all energy. Consciousness of self, for Emily Brontë, is consciousness of something immeasurably – infinitely – greater than her physical existence. Death is nothing to fear, because strictly speaking there is no death to fear: all there is is return to the source, reuniting the spark of creative power that looked out through her eyes with the vastness of the power that had created the world she saw.

When I was doing English Language O Level one of the exercises we had to do was ‘précis’. Tell me what this 500-word piece is saying, in 100 words; when you’ve done that, do it again in 50 words. Generally the source texts were on the flowery side; you’d get very good at skipping to the end of sentences, then working back through the sub-clauses and checking if any of them were needed. George Eliot’s poem reminded me of that. It’s 43 lines long, and a précis would look something like this:

O may I join the choir invisible
Of those immortal dead who live again
In minds made better by their presence: live
In good deeds, deep thoughts and generous impulses.

That’s heaven: to continue to have an effect in the world
Helping to make people’s lives better and better,
Ultimately bringing about the ideal state of affairs
Which we failed to achieve in our lives.
After the body dies, our better self
(Generous, contemplative, religious)
Will live on.

May I reach that purest heaven
Inspiring others to good and generous thoughts
(Lots of others, including people I don’t know).
So shall I join the choir invisible
Whose music is the gladness of the world.

Apologies to any George Eliot fans or poetry-lovers, but I think that’s the gist of it. Here’s the question (and you can check back with the original): what kind of survival is George Eliot talking about here? “So to live is heaven”, “This is life to come”, “that purest heaven”; is the ‘choir invisible’ Heaven? Or is it some more diffuse blending into the enspirited natural world, such as might appeal to a panpsychist like Emily Brontë or the young Wordsworth?

I think the answer is ‘neither of the above’. This poem is often linked to the closing lines of Middlemarch:

Her finely-touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Alexander broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

And, I think, rightly so. George Eliot’s imagination was social, as full of people as Emily Brontë’s was full of landscape. She envisages herself as living on, in a pure and near-eternal state, among other people, for as long as other people exist – or rather, through other people. Read the poem through carefully and you’ll see that there’s no reference to continuing subjective survival, no sense that Mary Anne Evans’s consciousness will continue after the heart in Mary Anne Evans’s body has stopped beating. The continuing existence George Eliot hopes for – the glorious, near-eternal, purest-Heavenly continuing existence – is the continuing existence of her influence on other people, as experienced by those people in their own lives. She hopes to have been a good enough person for her memory to inspire other people to be good, and to have been a wise enough person for her insights to help other people to be wise. And – this is the crucial, very George-Eliot-ian point – she recognises and gives thanks for all the other people who have already gone before: all the other people whose good deeds have inspired her to be good, whose insights have helped her to have insights of her own. She presents the history of humanity as a continuing story of collective improvement, continually renewed, and continually spurred on by the example of those who have gone before. It’s a big picture; something well worth aspiring to be part of. But it offers no glimmer of hope for the person who was looking out through Mary Anne Evans’s eyes. Yes, we will go on, as a species – not forever, but for a good while yet. But the same can’t be said for you as an individual: when you’re gone, you’re gone. It’s also worth noting briefly that, as well as there being no sense of personal survival, there’s no reference to God here – you aren’t there, and neither is anyone else (just us).

Schematically:

Robyn Hitchcock Emily Brontë George Eliot
Where do we start from? Me (“All I know is I”) Me and God (“Life, that in me hast rest”) Us; society, humanity
What happens after death? Nothing; we cease to exist There is no death, only reunion with God Nothing, but people remember us
Is God there? No Yes, and He’s right here too! No
Is there any point?
 No, there’s just this life Yes, but it’s a mystery Yes, people will remember us

Three views of personal immortality or only two? I’ll leave it to you to decide.

It’s worth mentioning, incidentally, that Robyn Hitchcock has written about death and the afterlife several times, usually not in quite such clear-cut terms; perhaps “Where do you go when you die?” was a response to over-enthusiastic readings of some of his earlier work on the subject. Well, call me over-enthusiastic, but I have to say I prefer this (musically as well as in other ways).

When I was dead I wasn’t interested in sex
I didn’t even care what happened next
I was free as a penny whistle
And silent as a glove
I wasn’t me to speak of
Just a thousand ancient feelings
That vanished into nothing
Into love

NEXT: science fiction, with space travel and everything!

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To you, with regard (3)

8 July 2017 – 12:11

Not the Victorian poetry – I’ll get to that soon – but a footnote to part 1. In that post I wrote briefly about the Beatitudes, ‘blessed are they that mourn’ in particular :

where the meek inherit the earth and the merciful are shown mercy, what mourners are to be endowed with is ‘comfort’; specifically, the Greek says that they will be visited or called upon

Karl Dallas on Peter Bellamy:

We met for the last time on November 5, 1990. It is surprising to me, in retrospect, that though we had been close for a quarter-century … I’d never done what I could call a “proper” interview with the man I’d always regarded as the primus inter pares of the post-MacColl revival.

We settled down on a Monday afternoon for a trawl through all those 25 years, talking about influences, pursuing that endless and ultimately fruitless search for a definition of folksong. Playing back the tapes today, the man lives again in my head as I transcribe the over two hours of conversation, the chuckles and belly laughs, the way he could bat a question back at me like a Wimbledon champion going for game-set-and-match, the muscular integrity of the man.

He was bitter over some things, and I felt his bitterness was wrongheaded, telling him so. That difference spilled over into the interview as published in Folk Roots, and after it appeared he sent me an annotated copy of it, indicating where he felt I had got it wrong. I was hurt by his criticism (we critics aren’t used to subjects who bite back) and for the first time I felt estranged from him. We never met again, and when he died I wondered (as I am sure must many of us) what part I might have played in his decision to take his own life. Of course, each of us has the right to end our story as we wish; to deny that right is to deny our very humanity, I do feel. But the guilt remains.

Looking back, as I re-play the tapes, I have to admit that the article I wrote was a great missed opportunity. By concentrating upon his strictures upon the folk scene (and some of its leading protagonists), I missed the greatness of the man, his enormous humanity, his wonderful contribution to the joy that this process we miscall a revival has given us all. At the funeral, I was still in shock, burdened by guilt. As I knelt in the chapel, I felt Peter’s very presence. He seemed surrounded by light. And I distinctly heard his words, in that unmistakable blend of Norfolk vowels and English grammar-school education. “It’s all right,” he seemed to be saying. “It’s really all right.”

I felt something similar – although much less intense – after my friend Les died recently. Although he was a huge influence on me musically, we were never at all close, partly because we didn’t agree on the types of music we really valued. I wasted a lot of energy alternately resenting not being in with Les’s musical ‘in crowd’ and reproaching myself for not making more of an effort to join in. Ideally I should have talked about it with Les, but he was never particularly voluble – and how do you talk to someone about the fact that you’ve never been close? Anyway, I was fortunate to be among the musicians at the get-together after Les’s funeral, where there was a small display of pictures of Les through the years, many from long before I’d known him. As I looked at the pictures, all that resentment and self-reproach came churning back up like indigestion. But then I felt… not Les’s presence or anything like that, but I did feel precisely those words: It’s all right. It’s really all right.

I remember, too, the evening of the day I heard my friend Madeleine had died; I had a whisky and a hot bath, and suddenly nothing was wrong, everything was perfectly, blissfully all right. It wasn’t just exhaustion (or alcohol); I remember reflecting on how strange this feeling was, even wondering vaguely if it was a stage of grieving that Elisabeth Kubler-Ross had missed. I went to bed and slept like a contented child. (Then in the morning it all began again, of course.)

Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.

I’m not insisting on the reality of these experiences. To put it another way, I absolutely am insisting on the reality of these experiences – they did really happen – but I’m not insisting there was anybody there but me. I do think there’s something interesting here, though.

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To you, with regard (2)

7 July 2017 – 11:33

THE STORY SO FAR. At the back end of last year (shortly before reading The Thing Itself) I had a weird idea – and though the dream was very small, it would not leave me…

A riddle:

I’m the darkness in the light
I’m the leftness in the right
I’m the rightness in the wrong
I’m the shortness in the long
I’m the goodness in the bad
I’m the saneness in the mad
I’m the sadness in the joy
I’m the gin in the gin-soaked boy

I’m the ghost in the machine
I’m the genius in the gene
I’m the beauty in the beast
I’m the sunset in the east
I’m the ruby in the dust
I’m the trust in the mistrust
I’m the Trojan horse in Troy
I’m the gin in the gin-soaked boy

I’m the tiger’s empty cage
I’m the mystery’s final page
I’m the stranger’s lonely glance
I’m the hero’s only chance
I’m the undiscovered land
I’m the single grain of sand
I’m the Christmas morning toy
I’m the gin in the gin-soaked boy

I’m the world you’ll never see
I’m the slave you’ll never free
I’m the truth you’ll never know
I’m the place you’ll never go
I’m the sound you’ll never hear
I’m the course you’ll never steer
I’m the will you’ll not destroy
I’m the gin in the gin-soaked boy

I’m the half truth in the lie
I’m the Why not? in the Why?
I’m the last roll in the die
I’m the old school in the tie
I’m the Spirit in the Sky
I’m the Catcher in the Rye
I’m the twinkle in her eye
I’m Jeff Goldblum in “The Fly”
Well, who am I?

Apparently Neil Hannon’s Mum got the answer straight away; I suspect his Dad did too.

NEXT: late Romantic poetry, Rogerian psychotherapy and The Sirens of Titan. Not necessarily in that order.

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Not writing

8 June 2016 – 20:09

“I haven’t written a thing since last October!”

The thought came to me with an alarm-clock-like jolt: – yes, it really is that time (of year)! And what have I been doing?

When I was insecurely under-employed, I shared an office for a while with a rather senior but semi-retired Law lecturer. When lecturing ended after Easter, he was off, generally in a camper van: “I aim to spend the dark months teaching and then spend the light months travelling”, he told me once. If that were me, I thought at the time, I’d at least spend the light months writing…

Here we are in the middle of June – pretty light – and I haven’t written a single damn thing since October. What have I been doing all this time? Teaching, obviously – this year just gone, I delivered all the teaching (and assessment) on two optional third-year units, along with sizeable chunks of a Foundation Year unit and an MA unit. Then there was marking, which remains the single most intellectually exhausting task I’ve ever carried out in my life. But none of that’s writing.

At least, it’s not writing writing. But some of it does involve writing, in the old-fashioned sense of forming words out of letters in a visual medium. Here’s a rough list:

Review of a new edition of a textbook: 1,000 words
Student references: 1,000
Small grant bid (successful): 2,000
PG Cert ‘reflective writing’ assignments: 8,000
Contribution to large grant bid (unsuccessful): 8,000
Assessment feedback: 144 essays + 40 exams + 6 dissertations = ~20,000 words
Emails: 1200 emails = ~60,000 words

Fair amount of writing involved in assessment, it turns out. (Not many words per essay, but you do have to choose the right ones.) And those emails! Never mind the constant drizzle of incoming email (28 yesterday, none of them from students); I’ve sent 1200 emails in those eight months. That’s 150 emails per month – five a day, seven days a week. For comparison I totted up the number of emails I’d sent from my personal account; the total was 150 for the entire eight-month period.

So it turns out that I have in fact been ‘active’, as they say, when it comes to putting words on screen (and in some cases even on paper). I’ve written around 100,000 words since last October – twelve academic papers’ worth. It’s just that three-fifths of them have been in emails – and most of the rest were ephemeral too.

Oh well, back to work.

By Phil | Also posted in academe, everyday life | Comments (0)

He knows so much about these things

25 May 2016 – 10:39

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Eddie Izzard, interviewed (paraphrased?) in the Times magazine’s “What I’ve learnt” column, 7th May:

I’m not a transvestite. I have some of the same genetics as women, so I’m transgender. When I see a pair of nice heels I think, “Yeah, that could work. That could be kind of fun, kind of sexy.” Anyone can feel that. We’re obsessed with the differences between someone with a penis and someone with a vagina. Everyone should calm down and take a chill pill.

There is, as you’ve probably noticed, quite a lot of this stuff around at the moment. Opinions are divided – rather bitterly – as to just what it is we’re seeing. Is it a liberal movement, a claim for rights by a new constituency – are transgender people a disadvantaged and hitherto overlooked minority, whose struggles for recognition the rest of us should support? It’s worth pausing here to say that if that were all we were talking about, there wouldn’t be anything to talk about: singling out Sally (who I know or suspect to have been born male) for any kind of special treatment is no more appropriate or justifiable than doing so with Sam (who I know or suspect to be Jewish). That’s not controversial; it’s barely even political. In most social situations, the liberal assumption of universal human equality gets us all where we want to be: people are people, and that’s the only starting assumption anyone needs.

But it sometimes seems as if the trans thing is about something more than that, or something else entirely. Is it a more unsettling form of radicalism, a new wave of gender-subversive activism which seeks to challenge the pink/blue girl/boy female/male binary order most of us live in, rather than staking out a place within it or alongside it? Or is there something else again going on – something not particularly radical or even liberal? I mean, what does “a pair of nice heels” have to do with anything?

I was troubled by Eddie Izzard’s comments – not to mention his decision to rewrite his own identity as transgender rather than transvestite. (He’s been out as TV since the early 90s, but to my knowledge he’s never claimed to be transgender before this year.) I flashed back to this LRB column from a few years ago by an occasional cross-dresser: “I like wearing a dress and tights, and I want to look good in them, and I like being addressed as Stephanie … I like my life as Stephen just fine, so long as I get to be Stephanie now and again”. I wondered, is it wearing a dress or is it ‘be[ing] Stephanie’? Does Stephanie ever wear trousers? (My daughter’s been in trousers since she could walk – she only frocks up for parties.) The writer attends a makeup workshop at a trans convention:

The workshop itself was helpful but intimidating. ‘To be born woman is to know,’ Yeats wrote, ‘Although they do not talk of it at school,/That one must labour to be beautiful’: adults who weren’t born as women have a hard time learning later on. Among the lessons of the session were that girlish looks need more blush, sophisticated adult looks less, though they may need more mascara.

Heels and genetics, mascara and being ‘born woman’. The slippage goes both ways: first, wanting to look like a girl – to present in ways that have been coded as female – turns into being female; then it seems that being female (as 51% of the population are generally agreed to be) requires looking like a girl, labouring to be beautiful, dragging up. Just as it did in Yeats’s day, and just as it seemingly always had done. There’s a wrong turn somewhere here.

I was also reminded of a friend of mine, and of what we talked about one time when I dropped in on him just before Christmas. I found him and his family – wife and two kids – putting up decorations. They had some long, heavy coloured tinsel garlands, for hanging on the wall in swags; when I came in my friend had two of these draped around his neck like feather boas, and was giving one of them a twirl. The effect was very camp, but not in a mocking, exaggerated way; he looked remarkably comfortable like that, twirling his boa, chatting with his kids. I said “oi, Conchita!” or something similar. We got talking about Eurovision, and we agreed that Conchita Wurst’s performance had been stunning; my friend said what an amazing moment it had been when Conchita won, how inspiring and how right it had felt. (I remember we both avoided using the words ‘he’ and ‘she’ – Conchita this, Conchita that…)

Later, we talked some more about camp and about drag. My friend said he and his wife had bonded, years ago, over the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Frank in particular – that ‘sweet transvestite’, somehow coming across as both fussily camp and powerfully macho, in heels, stockings and a basque. Role model? I asked. He laughed – well, not exactly… but it would be nice sometimes to have that element of display, you know? I guess I was spoiled by glam rock… (And we talked a bit about Bowie.)

Later still, my friend said to me, You know, my best friend at school was always a girl – always. Well, not when we moved and I went to a single-sex school – but right up till then. Other kids said we were going together – when I was eleven or twelve, this was – but it wasn’t like that. From about the age of six it was always a girl I looked to, when I wanted someone I could talk to properly, someone I could trust. And of course when I started having girlfriends that’s what I wanted from them – someone to trust, someone to talk to. Always wanted to start with that, not with the dancing and flirting and silly fun stuff. Probably missed out. But I wouldn’t want a relationship that wasn’t based on it – friendship, I mean.

I don’t suppose I’ve ever told you about my trans period. Mmm? (I tried not to look startled.) No, I know I haven’t – I don’t think I’ve ever told anyone. I would have been about fourteen, struggling a bit with puberty. I was an intellectual little sod and I had very mixed feelings about being permanently randy, like you are at that age: puritanical mixed feelings, mostly. Basically I hated my body. I was at a boys’ school by this time, so I had lots of exposure to the less attractive side of masculinity – rugby, bullying, people going on and on and on about sex… I used to read the Guardian, including the women’s page; I had several female role models, people I’d always looked up to – older sisters, a godmother – but not much in the way of male ones… It all stacked up. Long story short, I turned against maleness in all its forms & decided that I should have been a girl. But I did have enough self-awareness to realise that if I were a girl I would still be attracted to girls; in my diary I referred to myself as a male lesbian.

You go through a lot in your early teens. Oh, you do – you try things out. It must have been around that time that I converted to Buddhism for a week; it wasn’t meant to be temporary, but it just happened it was the week before Easter, and on the day itself I had an intense emotional response to Christianity and promptly converted back. This lasted a good bit longer than that, though. It wasn’t an intellectual pose, either; the consciousness of not being a girl made me genuinely unhappy for quite a while.

What happened then? A couple of things. One was that I told my best friend, who was taken aback, but not in the way I’d expected – it turned out that he’d been working up the courage to tell me exactly the same thing about himself, and he clearly felt I’d stolen his thunder. I don’t remember ever discussing it with him again. But his actual sex life took off quite soon after that – and that he did discuss with me – which made the whole thing a bit academic. (I saw his name in the paper the other day, incidentally; he’s OK, and still a bloke.) The other thing I did was tell my Mum; she was sympathetic, but took the view that I should think about it for a good long time before committing myself to anything I might regret. She recommended Jan Morris’s Conundrum, which I got out of the library.

The classics, eh? Oh yes. Mum recommended Orlando, too, but I was more curious about somebody who’d actually been through it. The main thing I remember is how certain Jan Morris was, after completing gender reassignment, that she felt different, thought differently and even saw the world differently: she was more emotional than he had been as James but less interested in politics, and she’d acquired the ability to look at distant objects and see them as toys. (“So you see, Jan, these are small, but those are far away…”) I ran some of this past my mother; she didn’t quite give it the Nora Ephron treatment, but she was distinctly unconvinced. That stayed with me; it may have occurred to me even then that the qualities I admired, in the women I admired, didn’t include susceptibility to flattery or tolerance of being overcharged by tradesmen.

The other thing that stuck in my mind from that book, oddly enough, was Jan Morris’s retrospective celebration of the joys of being James Morris. There was a certain kind of energy and physical confidence which (Jan believed) went with being male as well as young and fit; and there was the memory of having sex with his (and subsequently her) partner, for which Jan didn’t see any need to apologise. “For when your lover pants beside you he is not necessarily enjoying the orthodox satisfactions of virility” – but this is your lover, and he is panting beside you, and that’s not nothing. It makes me think now that there might be loads of heterosexual men out there having sex without “enjoying the orthodox satisfactions of virility”, whatever that actually means; but Jan Morris didn’t reflect on that. Anyway, it was a small but definite influence on me, that book; a reality check (it can be done, she did it!) but with a bit of “Lord, what fools these mortals be!” thrown in (…and now she likes men holding the door for her?).

So you didn’t want to… Transition? (He grimaced.) No, there was no danger of… But actually, you know what, I’d say I did: I transitioned into being the person I wanted to be. It took me a few years, but I got there in the end. I remember thinking 27 was a very good age to be. Things have got better for me since then – much, much better. But by the time “Suedehead” came out I pretty much knew what was what.

Why do you telephone? Why indeed. Great unanswered questions of our time.

So what was 27? Mostly, 27 was not being one of the kids any more; it was feeling that I didn’t have anything to conform to any more – or to rebel against conforming to. It made everything a lot simpler. What was the person I’d wanted to be, after all – the person who I’d thought couldn’t possibly be male? Someone like my mother, my godmother, my aunt – someone intelligent but also caring, sympathetic but thoughtful, cultured but funny…

Sounds like quite a family. OK, someone like an idealised version of those people. But you take the point. Wanting to look good was part of it – I was so disappointed when I discovered ‘menswear’! – and wanting to move with a certain amount of grace, not just barging through everywhere. Hating my body was part of it, too; thankfully I got past that, eventually. But mostly it was about the kind of person I wanted to be – and after a while I found I could try to be that person without worrying, or being made to worry, about being a man. I mean, once you get to 27 there aren’t so many people calling you a ponce for using long words, or telling you that boys don’t talk about their feelings. There aren’t so many people policing the way you move or the clothes you wear, come to that, so you can pick up that side of it as well.

I don’t know if a 27-year-old woman would agree with that last part. Perhaps not. And that actually relates to one of the things that bothers me about the trans moment we seem to be in, culturally – the draggier end of it, anyway. Femininity seems to have become a site of transgression for men without ceasing to be a uniform for women. I’m willing to bet there are workplaces out there where a man who came in wearing makeup would be frowned on less than a woman who came in without it – he’s being bold and transgressive, she’s just not making an effort. It’s as if patriarchy reserved a second-class space for women – a space for emotion, not logic; for the body, not the mind; for falsity and display (“paint an inch thick”), not for the unadorned truth – and now men are even entering that space. While still trying to keep women inside it – we frock up to play at being something we’re not, but for women femininity is what they are. (When we’re talking about trans we always seem to be talking about women in the end.)

Aren’t you over-thinking this? What about that confused, lonely teenager who just wants… What about him? Didn’t I just explain that I was that teenager? I’m prepared to believe that my gender dysphoria was milder and more short-lived than many other teenagers’, but you’re not telling me that it wasn’t genuine. Besides, if it was mild and short-lived, mightn’t the reaction it got have something to do with that?

Are you complaining? No, I’m getting ahead of myself. What I’m saying is that the guarded tolerance with which my mother greeted my story gave me no encouragement, and no condemnation to react against either. I was left to share my feelings with my best friend, with my diary and with a book by Jan Morris. All of these did something to keep those feelings alive, but after a while I got interested in something else and they faded away. And, thirteen short years later, I was 27. It was a hell of a slog getting there – “will Nature make a man of me yet?” and so on – but growing up usually is.

So my message for that confused, lonely teenager is: “Hang on. You’ll be fine. It’ll all be all right. It doesn’t seem possible now, but it will be. You can be the person you want to be; you will be the person you want to be. And it doesn’t have to involve surgery, or drugs, or cross-dressing, or even changing your name.” (Although I was obsessed with changing my name when I was a teenager – the search for the perfect pseudonym occupied me for years.)

Should we call you Conchita after all? No, no, it was my surname I wanted to get rid of – I couldn’t imagine becoming a rock star with a name like mine. And it’s true, I never changed my name and I never did become a rock star.

So, “hang on”… And is that what you’d say to teenagers who think they might be gay? Should everyone wait till they’re 27? No, of course not. I would advise fourteen-year-olds not to think that whatever they’re going through is necessarily going to last forever – but they’d never believe me, so there’d be no point. But seriously – when I was seven years old I wasn’t attracted to women; I also wasn’t a practising Christian, a Labour voter or a well-meaning middle-class Guardian reader. My parents expected me to grow up to be all of those things – that was our house for you – and so it came to pass, by and large. But if I’d grown up to be gay, or a militant atheist, or even a Tory, it would still have been a story I could tell from a shared beginning, a story that could make sense. By contrast, my parents didn’t have any expectations that I would grow up ‘as’ a boy – they knew I was a boy, from the moment I was born. (So I was a boy who didn’t like football, who liked wearing bright colours, whose best friend was a girl – so what? Still a boy.) To say that your entire past is a lie – not that your beliefs or your desires have developed in ways you didn’t expect, but that you never were what you were – is an awfully big step, for you as well as for everyone around you. Besides which, saying what you’re not doesn’t enable you to say what you are. You may have a deep-rooted feeling of revulsion against the sex you were born into (I remember that feeling), but you can’t possibly feel that you are the other sex – you’ve no idea what being the other sex is like. I’m a straight, Labour-voting mild agnostic, but I know from personal experience what it’s like to believe in an empty and meaningless universe, what it’s like to vote against Labour and what it’s like to be attracted to another man. What it’s like to have periods – or what it’s like not to have a prostate – I can’t begin to imagine.

All this is without getting into what committing to a trans identity, particularly as a young adult, will commit you to from that point forward. At the very least, going down that route is letting yourself in for years of distress – that’s what I’d say to that teenager. This isn’t about intolerance or prejudice; it’s changing something fundamental about yourself, socially and culturally as well as physically fundamental. I can’t think of a bigger change you could make, with the possible exception of some forms of extreme body modification. So yes, if you possibly can, hang on. But it’s a hopeful message as well – not just “hang on, don’t risk it”. “Hang on – you’ll be fine. It’ll all be all right. It doesn’t seem possible now, but it will be.”

Some would say you’re trivialising… Yeah, maybe. As I say, it’s possible that the gender dysphoria I experienced was an unusually mild and fleeting thing; maybe most kids identifying as trans these days ‘just know‘ who they are, undeniably and unshakeably, and know it from an early age. But I’m not sure. I saw some research the other day vindicating the reality of trans kids’ gender identification. One way we know that trans identities are real & deep-rooted, apparently, is that trans kids tend to socialise and bond with kids of their adopted gender, not their birth gender. So, there you go – me and my female best friend, what does that tell you? (Or should we be asking about her and her male best friend? Good heavens, what kind of weirdoes were we back then?)

At the end of the day, I can only picture the cultural landscape that would face me if I were an unhappy fourteen-year-old boy in 2016, and if I’d become convinced (as for a time I did) that being the wrong sex was the root of all my problems. I picture it and I wonder. I think of the resources of information, support, validation and enablement which I’d be able to find and tap into, and I wonder what my life would be like by the time I got to 27, or even to 21. I don’t think it would have gone the way it did. I might have ended up perfectly happy; I don’t believe in the inevitability of trans misery. But I do believe that there are many routes that most lives can take, many ways that most people can find to be happy – 14-year-old people especially. And if there are many routes to happiness, it seems like a good idea to choose a route of minimum self-imposed transformation and maximum self-acceptance – acceptance of your life, your body, your self.

That sounds like the cue for a song. What, ‘Rise Like a Phoenix’?

No.

By Phil | Also posted in awfully deep, big stuff, wimmin, you young people | Comments (7)
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