Look Up, BREXIT & the great healer.

10 Thursday Oct 2019

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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BoJo, BREXIT, Cab Drivers, Chinatown, Churchill, Corinthian Columns, Earlham Street, European Union, Firestorms, London, Long Acre, Mercer Street, Old Compton Street, Optimism, Royal Opere House, Seven Dials, SOHO, the London Blitz, Treaty, Treaty of Paris, Treaty of Rome, WW1, WW2

Screen Shot 2019-10-10 at 14.56.10.png

The sun strikes the Corinthian uprights of Barry’s Royal Opera House building.

And unless the world spins on its axis, gets jolted by a passing asteroid or we find we are inadvertently sitting on the fault line between two tectonic plates, nothing will change in the nature of how the sunlight falls across these columns from when morning breaks across them to when nightfall takes them back again. [Other than when London’s cloudy temperament muddies the moment.]

To feast on London, to receive her positive charge, is to look up, especially on a crisp blue-sky day like today as the sun fires up the masonry above and around me.

And at no time in recent history do I think we need a little upward-looking optimism.

The art in this though is to prime this upward-looking optimism in ourselves without waiting for anyone else to delver it to our door – especially anyone from our political classes. And there’s plenty to distract ourselves wit is we choose.

To walk [especially in the quieter hours of the morning] past the fascia of the Opera House, to then turn left down Long Acre, cutting through Mercer street to Seven Dials – and then along Earlham Street to Cambridge Circus and to the Palace Theatre in front of you, is to find your eyes constantly being drawn upwards.

Porticos, balustrades, fascia decorations and old advertisements painted on the walls above the line of shop fronts.

To cut through to Old Compton street as the collision of scents and aromas rolls up to meet you – of restaurants prepping garlicky delights, bars scrubbing off ale-soaked floors, the warm wrap of air from the Chinese bun bakers, and the beep beep beep of Vans reversing into lay-bys with crates boxes and bags of ingredients and supplies – all mixed with the sharp acrid bright citrus of industrial bleaches and disinfectants slopped into doorways and across the restaurant and bar thresholds. To swim in this soup and yet to look up and watch the light as it crosses buildings [much as it has done so for some hundreds of years] is truly a beautiful thing.

To find a complex yet staggering simple beauty in London, one need only swim in her streets while looking up at how the sun light falls on her building tops.

To immerse yourself in this continuum can smooth even the bumpiest times and the greatest turbulences out of your mind – like a de-wrinkler for the soul.

As I walk through the streets I hear people barking BREXIT platitudes for and against. People crouch crowd and squat over their screens sniggering at cruel memes, bathing in podcasts and trading ugly human politic in gif format.

And as these people teem about me, snippets of conversations are scraped. A slathering of WTF! and ‘its all gone to shit’, with a fistful of Keep Calms and a mouthful of ‘They’re all as bad as each other’s.

Off-hand paens to BoJo float towards me as devout van drivers flick a V to both cyclists, foreigners, and ‘the lot of ‘em’.

Pacifists and anarchists fight each other with words and slogans shouting off the front pages of newspapers as wi-fi-eared drones march ever forwards to the beat of their spotify drum.

London teems with the bleary eyed and the upright, the dishevelled and the dandy, puffer jacketed tourists clutch street foods as TV producers and media types clatter across paving stones vaguely chewing-gummed together. But they are all simply the colouring in. They are the water running through it, human flotsam and jetsam that either surges onwards or washes up at the edges of the streets in cafes and bars and restaurants. The true riches lie above the screen line of ordinary people.

A sharp neon hum over Bar Italia draws our eye to the blue John Logie Baird plaque above it. Twas ever thus. Almost all of London’s most famous sons and daughters are celebrated in blue and white above our general eye line. And something pushes our eyes up to meet them. There is an irrepressible something that comes up through the ground London walks on. Something that vibrates up through it. Pushing our thoughts and dreams skywards. And none more so than in Soho. If ley-lines are a thing, then I sense a cluster of them collide under SoHo’s streets.

Theres an over-powering sense of timelessness here. The past and future are one – tied together by the Now. Today is simply a bridge between yesterday and tomorrow. And on we go.

And, in much the same way, so do many of these buildings, enduring as they have always done – weathering the collapse of societies, the chess game of Royal In and Royal Out, decay of Empire, financial crashes and crunches, street riots and both World Wars of course, especially the one that peppered London with every nature and type of bomb, incendiary or otherwise, and on the back of which and calls of Never Again led directly to first the Treaty of Paris in 1951 and the reconciliation of France & Germany as promoted by Winston Churchill and closely followed by the Treaty of Rome in 1957, in which European Union was made material and binding.

In much the same way these streets and buildings have weathered one European firestorm, I am certain they’ll weather this one. And in much the same way that they now simply carry the echoes of the many who lived through those times and whom are now long dead, they will carry the echoes of my footsteps and the noise of our current european furore that echo up and around these streets..

In the long run October 31st. will be a date like so many others whose import will whither and fade. But right now…

Sticks & Stones & BoJo’s bitter pills.

02 Wednesday Oct 2019

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American Rebolution, Bert, BoJo, Boris Johnson, BREXIT, Conspiracy Theorists, East Sussex, EU, Founding Fathers, George Soros, Inflammatory Language, Juwes, LEAVE, Lewes, Mary Poppins, Radicalism, Remain, Ripper Murders, Robert Bowers, Surrender Bill, The Queen, Tourettes, Traitor, Trolls, Trumpeteer, White Genocide, Whitechapel

So. Apparently bluster, divisive phrasing and inflammatory language do nothing to stoke any kind of aggressive nature, hate or violence against the person or property.

Well that’s frankly bollocks as we all know.

Both sides of this current ugly debate make a lot of decrying their adversaries in the most pestilent terms . The only thing that is slightly disappointing is how easily BoJo can scatter a few Churchillian phrases around the place and get such an immediate and rousingly patriotic response regardless of the veracity of what he is spouting.

It seems you really do just need to walk around shouting patriotic anti-foreigner things and everyone is there flags a waving and bunting a buntin’

Never Surrender. Traitors to a man. It’s them foreigners wot done it G’vnor, and no mishtakin’!’

The language seems to have become a vague collision of Churchillian oratory and some form of patriotic Tourettes as dispatched by what I can only assume to be Bert from Mary Poppins.

It is a short hop from ‘surrender’ language to ‘traitor’ – that ultimate betrayal

[The loose use of the ‘T’ word does though seem rather rich given the Judicial view-point of the Prorogue of Parliament as having required BoJo to ‘sham’ the Queen; surely the only person in pole position to comment on what traitorous behaviour might look like. But I forget. The judiciary are just another part of the Liberal Global Jewish Conspiracy – more of that later]

Traitor is a word that carries. And if you happen to be Jim Cornelius, a pro-Remain Liberal Democrat living in Lewes East Sussex, it is carried on both sides of a brick and hoofed through your window.

Ugly blame games are an ancient human art of divide and rule.

We’ve been using blame, public decrying and propaganda to take the spot light away from the real crooks and miscreants for centuries. And we like nothing more than a highly complex set of adversaries and a complex conspiracy to fuel the moment. The more ridiculous and elaborate the better.

Lewes in East Sussex is traditionally a hot spot of radicalism. From hosting one of the founding fathers of the American Revolution to happily embracing the Anti papist firebrands in support of the protestant Martyrs [we like to burn Papal effigies in Lewes] it is home to some rather punchy political dissent and exclamation.

Traitor Bricks are just one accessory for the discerning Lewes radical. A good old fashioned tin of spray paint is another. Thought the content, as a modern media person might point out, needs a little work. Or does it?

‘FUCK THE EJEWS SOROS’S WHORES AND TRAITORS’

This was emblazoned across a new fence of a perfectly nice house in a perfectly nice road in Lewes the other morning.

Now, once the surprise of what it says wears off and one starts to dissect it, it would be rather funny, if it wasn’t so desperately sad, deeply sinister and a blatant outcome of the kind of divisive crap people are increasingly spouting in the cold light of day.

The current climate has without question let some rather unpleasant people out of their fetid rat-pits of trollery and ugly blame into the waking world.

So lets start with the EJEWS. Did the perpetrator simply miss-spell I-JEWS. Did I miss a new product accessory from Apple’s Israeli market, available with every new i-phone?

Or are EJEWS simply electronic Jews, like emails are electronic mail. And if so, what are they? Where do they come from? Why do EJEWS exist? And how exactly are EJEWS different to non E Jews? Are they electronically generated Jewish people – like alter ego avatars in Sim City? Or is it the platform name for real jewish people whom exist in virtual environments?

Or are the EJEWS jews from the E.U. or Pro European jews. Simply put, are they jews who’ve moved here from Europe or British jews who voted Remain?

So many questions.

Whether Pro EU, European, electronic, wholly virtual or simply virtual versions of a real person, the one thing we know from this graffiti is that these EJEWS are busy. Boy are they busy. And it seems they are in cahoots with one George Soros.

Now, for anyone not paying attention, George Soros is a Hungarian-born jewish Holocaust survivor who has made billions speculating on the currency markets. More importantly he is vilified by the Alt-Right as being at the heart of the global jewish conspiracy, blaming him in no uncertain but rarely proven terms for everything from the Charlottesville Rioting to Fake Bomb plots against himself and Barack Obama – and whom is presented in the social posts of one Robert Bowers, murderer of 11 jews in a Pittsburg Synagogue, as the ‘jew that funds white genocide [the global jewish liberal conspiracy] and controls the press’.

So in the heart of an East Sussex town, on a fence are words that echo the disturbing belief system of a dangerous and sometimes murderous cabal, obsessed with some global jewish conspiracy and whom in this time of division feel free to publicly and explicitly conflate it with the BREXIT sentiments and traitorous brick throwing events.

To posit that the two are separate incidents and not linked by any direct evidence would be to deny historic hindsight’s tendency to show us after the fact that human beings act in waves and urges – their sentiment coagulating in emotional clusters of activity that though in some ways seem at the time unconnected prove themselves retrospectively to have been part of there same toxic malaise or momentum.

In some ways the EJEWS piece with its shoddy spellings smacks of the Goulston Street graffito scrawled on a wall near one of the Ripper Murders in Whitechapel in the late 19th Century. The graffito stated that ‘the Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing’. Ironically it was written at a time when frankly the jews were being blamed for most everything, and subsequently has been viewed as Anti Semitic propaganda that was designed to stoke ill feeling and create an uprising against the new arrivals.

In much the same way that White Genocide and the Global Jewish Conspiracy is increasingly present in the ghoulish theatrical nightmares of the likes of Robert Bowers in our here and now, so it was in the late 1800s in the East End.

The jewish influx, though seen initially with sympathy due to the pogroms and harsh treatment they had received in Russia Poland and Germany from whence they fled, was soon to be seen, first as a blight, then as both a soft invasion and a commercial coup [Jews were blamed for increasing output and decreasing quality, flooding the markets with cheap shoddy fare to the detriment of older East End manufacturers and producers] Eventually, as the anti semitic sentiment increased and locals became more incensed, the Jewish problem was to be regarded as an affront to all that was truly British and wholly against the social balance and social improvement of the East End. As unemployment rose and housing became scarcer the usual spectres rose up and the jews were blamed for indigenous East Enders increasingly precarious and perilous existence.

John Law AKA Margaret Harkness, in her book Out of Work, put the sentiments of many residents of the East End of London into the words of one of her characters – the wife of a radical carpenter:

“Why should all them foreigners come here to take food out of our mouths…”

Twas ever thus.

So when BoJo spouts Surrender schtick and fires up the mood against Johnny Foreigner, and when he attaches the memory of the murdered Jo Cox to a successful BREXIT – and when traitor bricks get thrown through windows while troll conspiracy theorists scrawl EJEW graffiti on fences in sleepy Sussex towns, it is time to be alert.

Because we can be sure that those words can become sticks and stones can all too easily. Sometimes murderous ones.

So lets tread carefully and take responsibility for what comes out of our mouths. Starting with our ‘leaders’. And when I say that I mean all of them. Not just the flaxen-haired Trumpeteer.

Bash Street, The B Word & a search for Castlereagh.

26 Wednesday Jun 2019

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Back-Stop, BoJo, BREXIT, Castlereagh, Democracy, Euro, Europe, Exit Agreement, farage, Gove, Henry Kissinger, House of Commons, Hunt, Jingoism, Johnson, LEAVE, Leisure Centre, Lewes, Libido, Niall Ferguson, Rees Mogg, Referendum, Remain, Sauna, Special relationship, Spelling Mistake, The Bash Street Kids, The Beano, Topper

It’s 7a.m. in the sauna at the Leisure Centre; a tight dog-leg affair tucked into the corner, to the left of the baby pool.

It’s 7 a.m. and someone said the B Word.

It’s 7 a.m. and someone said the B Word and things are hotting up.

It’s 7 a.m. and someone said the B Word and things are hotting up – and the temperature is rising. (This is somewhat of a first as usually the temperature in this sauna would barely warm a cockle let alone boil a shrimp. If the least that the B word might do is to bring the sauna to a serviceable and job-fulfilling temperature, I’m all for it.)

Someone said the B Word.

And silence falls.

From me at least. To begin with.

I choose to stay out of it [which for a very over-opinionated man takes some doing].

This sauna resides in a broadly LEAVE realm, heavy with the fust of Faragista.

In this particular sauna, tucked as it is into a small green corner of East Sussex, a mix of ages, genders and ethnicities all broadly ascribe to an Anti-European, Self-Determining future with incumbent bumps, recessions (double dip or otherwise) and social crunches as a wholly acceptable part of the bill for the heady freedom.

We’ll struggle through.

We’ll manage.

Sure we’ll figure it out

Ok so it’ll be tough but we’ll soldier on.

And, much like flatulence;

Better out than in.

In the sauna the language is of a wartime nature. Valiant struggles. The underdog. The enemies abroad. The vision of prevailing. The idyll of remaining free!

What did we fight for in the first place?

In some ways the years from 1945 to now seem to have simply fallen away.

The odd usurper brings a whiff of Remain into the room, emanating enlightenment. They are mostly brimming with humanitarianism and belief in diversity of culture as a healthier model for that inclusive society. Many of them work in and are supportive of the Public Sector, a strong social contract, and an inclusive society.

Sensibly [I sense], they hear a whiff of cod Farage/Bojo speak and just stay silent or leave.

These are not wall flowers – simply people who mostly prefer to discuss the complexity of this matter in a rather less heated, cramped and sometimes overbearingly ‘righteous’ atmosphere.

Now our LEAVERS, lets be clear, do tend to index towards the cliche – being older, white males and females of what someone once cruelly described as the ‘Little Englander’ variety. They are [publicly at least by their own admittance] Express and Mail readers, or, otherwise, don’t read the news at all:

Its all bullshit

Can’t trust a word of it

All written by lefty Guardian types.

So in the Leisure Centre sauna, as the Weather Girls sang, the humidity’s rising – barometer’s getting low…and, in BREXIT terms, politically at least, its raining men.

White. Privileged. Righteous. Right leaning. Men. To be precise.

Which brings me to the point of this piece, and the types of leader we desire and aspire to. And the issue of whom do LEAVERS respect and laud – and why?

My concern is that the nature of our current slew of would-be LEAVE heroes strikes me as the antithesis of what we need to get through this coming B Word Debacle by the skin of anyone’s teeth.

BREXIT is not a simple puzzle to crack whatever the common wisdom or otherwise about No Deal Dead Stop all out departures

Given:

the complexity of the Exit Agreement;
Legal mandates, preexisting agreements and precedents;
the supplementary conditions & back stop issues;
the number of British & European stakeholders;
the back room Trade Bloc chess game of Yes trade Deal No trade Deal played by everyone including our Special Relationship cousins;
the subsequent civil strife, bad feeling, victimisation, bullying, vitriol, political mismanagement, jingoism and blame throwing generated by a referendum based upon a rather spurious question surrounded by disinformation, propaganda, and smoke and mirrors on all sides;

it’s a wonder anyone in the normal world has even half a handle on what’s going on (and some would say that, given the nature and degree of popular feeling, most do not.)

At a time when we need steely resilient statesman-like acuity, a labyrinthine capacity for detail, a prodigious Machiavellian sensibility and most importantly an ability to ‘stick with it’ – the banality of it, the wheezing mind numbing boredom of it all in room after musty, hot-shoe room – to secure the right exit for Britain, what do we have?

Well at first glance it seems the majority of England have abdicated responsibility for robust discourse, reasoned debate and seasoned global geopolitical nous to the writers of The Beano and Topper.

And it is their characters that we now see striding towards Downing Street, keys jangling in their fat sweaty greedy hands.

And the ‘unts and the Bojos are not the only power players here – we must include the minstrels in their populist galleries, Farage and Rees Mogg. And though down, His Right Royal ’my hand is on the tiller of environmental destiny’ Gove is certainly not out. [I am uncertain as to whether he or anyone else realised that his sole task was simply to make Bojo look more presentable and capable.]

It seems that at a time when we need the zenith of political nous, insight, application and a tireless irrepressible pragmantism, we have:

A philandering, straw haired clownish buffoon with a Churchill fetish.
The greatest reoccurring spelling mistake in British politics
A Gin, Jag & Fag spiv in a camel coat,
A turncoat with a cocaine stain on their heart
A monocled monochromatic Victorian Undertaker with a taste for off shore trading

Frankly between Bojo’s ego libido sandwich salad combo, ‘unts self righteous ‘only real alternative’ sorry that’s my Olympic accolade shtick, Gove’s yearning hands & insincere masque, Farage’s blatant people-powered self-interest [and tendency to run for the hills at the first sign of real responsibility] and Rees-Mogg’s fun-fair side-show Victorian Toff (there’s definitely a market in putting coin-operated ‘Victoriana Stove Pipe Hatted Rees Mogg Fortune Tellers on every British Seaside Pier), we really have all drawn the short straw.

I said.

Loudly.

In the sauna.

My Inside voice outside voice mechanism had failed me.

Ah well. In for a penny in for a pound.

Yeah and it would be a cent and a euro, not a penny and a pound, if you lot had your way.

The immediate flavour of the room was not favourable

After some uncomfortable shuffling and murmuring I was able to point out that, given the result and what we need to do as a country, I was in fact simply offering an opinion (which in a democracy that sanctifies the freedom of speech I feel more than happy to do). I was offering an opinion on the quality and measure of the politicians the LEAVERS were celebrating as our potential leaders out of this fine mess we’ve gotten ourselves into, Stanley. Leadership Quality of the right calibre and nature to be specific.

My punt is that what we really needed all along was not a Churchill or a Disraeli. We needed a Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, 2nd Marquess of Londonderry.

A much maligned yet highly influential British politician of the 18th and 19th Centuries, it is is not for his suppression of the Irish Rebellion, Act of Union, Treaty of Chaumont, Engagement of Wellington (a fellow Northern Irishman) against Napoleon or his forthright Leadership of the House of Commons that I invoke him.

No.

It is specifically for his dogged resilience in carving out the greatest and most stable outcome possible for post Napoleonic Europe at the Congress of Vienna. In collaboration, collusion and sometimes in spite of and against Metternich, Castlereagh forged something unheard of out of a snake pit of self interest, bile, vengeance and self service: a long-term period of stability in Europe that united the great powers. And he did not forge this through compromise of our trading position. His vigilance in regards to Britain’s imperial interests was unsurpassed.

It is unsurprising that Henry Kissinger, whose Harvard Dissertation was an idealistic entreat in support of the realpolitic of pragmatists like Castlereagh said of him that ‘he developed a reputation for integrity, consistency, and goodwill, which was perhaps unmatched by any diplomat of that era.’ [Kissinger’s re-invention as a widely misunderstood politician and statesman is brilliantly set out by Niall Fergusson in his book Kissinger: 1923-1968:The Idealist]

So, no-ones perfect, but some people are perfect for their time. Castllereagh was just such a man, destined to be in the right place with the right influence to do something humanity struggles to do all to often when left to its own devices. Get over itself.

To exit where we are requires I believe, the irrepressible pragmatism and the stoic ability to ‘stay in the room’ that Castelereagh exemplified in his engagements in the Congress of Vienna – an ability to keep talking, and to not allow a descent in to some bar-room oratory or scrappy jingoistic sleight every time we don’t quite get out way. [Sound familiar?]

When using those leadership criteria, I do not see a man or woman for our time. I do not see in our ‘leaders’ the requisite traits and character.

If we’re lucky we’ll scratch under the cod Churchillian crack and reveal a streak of Castelereagh in someone somewhere and we might all be better off for it. If not I say lets match the Topper Toff throwbacks like Rees Mogg and raise them – and get The Bash Street Kids to take over the Commons. (Though some might venture that between the Conservative, Liberal Democrat and Labour Parties we have already got that strategy pretty much covered off – which begs the question who Danny, Plug, ‘Erbert, Fatty, Sidney, Smiffy, Spotty, Toots, Wilfred, Wilfred, Cuthbert are currently masquerading as?)

The sauna fell silent.

Knob.

Too clever by half.

Got a right to his own opinion though.

Fair enough.

Anyways, Castle who?

Class, satire & the dark art of playing the gallery.

10 Friday Aug 2018

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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1970s, Ainslie, Boris, Boudicca, BREXIT, Brideshead, Castlereagh, Chimpanzees, Class System, Dashwood, Downton Abbey, Eton College, EU, farage, Great British Public, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Leavers, Most Exotic Marigold Hotel, Nostalgia, Snobbery, Social Order, Somerset, Thatcherite, Toffs, Topper, Trinity Oxford

At a point in history when the nuance, deft politic and human insight of a Castlereagh might come in handy – and the strong hand, fierce purpose and earthiness of a Boudicca wouldn’t go amiss; what do we have?

Jacob Rees-Mogg.

Our representative for the broad constituency of ordinary people in the UK is a comical Toff who seems to have fallen off the pages of Topper Comic (well, the 1970s version).

There is a sublime logic in this as the Brexiteers seem to have decided that, if we’re going to apply a Back to the Future strategy, 1970 seems like a good Back to start a Future from; This obviously falls far short of the idyllic late 1940s and early 1950s that some Brexiteers would rather hark back to, the zenith of our victorious pre-Windrush Post WWII Golden Age, when you could still happily and openly show prejudice against anyone you so chose while playing an Over on the Green under a Spitfire sky, eating trimmed sandwiches of fish paste and cucumber and sipping lemonade and lashings of ginger beer; all played out amidst the buzz of an endless British summer.

There are the upsides: Britain in the 70s was a crash of paisley purple and burnt orange, brilliant Bowie, Prog rock, Punk, Disco and the chiaroscuro of British Light Entertainment: the brilliant beacons of the Two Ronnies and Morecombe & Wise peppered with the misshit social commentary of ‘Til Death Do Us Part (Alf Garnett being to the 70s what Loadsamoney was to the 80s – both caricatures being an exercise in sharp satire gone horribly wrong.)

But it was also the decade of sclerotic public services and infrastructure, lazy builders, 3 day weeks, dusty industry (why change what’s worked for 100 years), street battles between Right and Left and, of course, Maggie Thatcher, the goddess in Jacob’s temple.

So our champion – Jacob Rees-Mogg – whose first tweet was in Latin. What a knob.

One would hope that the lower echelons of the Daily Mail readership (as they choose to self identify) will welcome having a bucket of cold water poured over them and a toe swung towards their arse for good measure when they realise what’s being done to them in the name of BREXIT.

But I have a feeling they are going there willingly.

This kow-towing and fawning adulation is simply the saloon-car-driving, beige-coated, ploughman’s eating, comfortable-walking-shoe version of the chimpanzee putting their wrist up towards the alpha and bowing their head. Or arse kissing upwards to put it in coarser, more feudal terms.

Far too many of the Great British public are playing out some twisted piece of Tom Brown and Flashman theatre – and gleefully so.

It seems a large swathe of the Great British public are seemingly more than happily prepared to play ‘Jean Ainslie’ to Rees-Mogg’s ‘Graham Dashwood.’

In the film, The Most Exotic Marigold Hotel, the Jean Ainslie character is the epitome of the small-minded, deluded, disappointed and utterly class-fixated snob (a rather smarter and more polished version of Hyacinth Bucket – pronounced ‘Bouquet’ – from Keeping Up Appearances). And Graham Dashwood is the dashing, elegant, intelligent, worldly (and quietly gay) Barrister from a much higher social order.

Everything crushes into one moment where she states in a moment of professed love and adulation:

“In fact I think I’ve been looking for you for a very long time.”

There is the populist voice speaking.

Right now it seems that the Great British public are staring into Rees-Mogg’s eyes and professing much the same sentiment.

So how has Jacob conjured this whorl of feeling? What is it about him, his nature or his background that makes the masses lick upwards?

Well he ticks every box, in many more ways than Boris.

He is of good stock – but not a toff by birth. Tick.

(His father was only made a lifetime peer in 1988. So an ‘arriviste’ by old money standards. And they bought Ston Easton Park in Somerset, not inherited it. So in Alan Clark’s world view on inherited class, Rees Mogg’s family ‘bought their own furniture.’)

Jacob attended Eton and Trinity, Oxford. Tick.

Jacob made an extraordinary amount of money in Fund Trading, so he can claim the status ‘self-made man’. Tick.

But most importantly he ‘looks and sounds’ the part. Double Tick.

Jacob is the epitome of the Comic toff caricature that many over 40s grew up on. He is in that way a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Rees-Mogg realised long ago that image is everything (whilst still at school if the highly confected nature of the Eton College Collections portrait is to be believed). And presentation is nine tenths of the social law.

If you believe that people are still inherently feudal and like the idea of some Brideshead meets Downton Abbey world of ‘them in the big house up there and us down ‘ere doffing our caps’ model of social order and happiness – then you play to that gallery. Starting with your veneer.

Jacob realised the value in looking like you are from central casting’s stable of fragile toffs with a wilful streak and a stubborn self-righteousness born of an irrepressible Right of Entitlement. People look backwards at times of volatility and chaos. They seek older orders and touchstones to reassure themselves – even comic book ones. Nostalgia is a powerful opiate.

But that on its own is not enough. There is a darker, smarter judo move in Rees-Mogg that points to a very media savvy individual ‘playing the moment.’

Rees-Mogg has self-selected himself to be parodied, lampooned and satirised – he has made himself the butt of his own jokes. Genius.

This garish characterisation delivers on two counts. It makes him highly visible and discernible. And it presents him as self-deprecating – a faux proxy for humility in this case.

Everything he does presets him to ‘control’ the satire against him. (Sound familiar?)

So while Boris attracts all of the rockets with his stamping politic and straw-haired buffoonery – and Farage continues to present himself as the self-interested, small minded provincial barracker that he is (noticeably still collecting his MEP cheque and watching the World Cup from another EU subsidised bar in Brussels), Jacob slithers into every vapourous opportunity and out of anything solid or substantial with a whiff of the snake charmer wafting about his overly-combed head (brilliantine wouldn’t go amiss).

He is the quietly sneering, self-preening critic sitting in the corner seat at the dinner party, using the compound effect of his coy theatre of fragile child, his ‘blinking’ intellect and uncomfortable pauses to be eviscerating while seemingly ameliorating.

Some would venture that we get the politicians we deserve. If that is the case then the UK is generally suffering from a desperate case of ‘doffing’ – junked up on the need to be ruled by some retrograde smugness of the ‘Big House’ variety.

Thank heavens for that. There was a danger there for the briefest moment of us looking like an advanced, enlightened society with a clear understanding of the diversity of humanity that shaped us and a clear line of sight on the delicious collision of natures, skills, outlooks and open optimism we need as a nation to evolve and thrive.

But sanity prevails. And with the rise of the Rees-Moggs of this world we show ourselves for the fawning, recidivist, class-riddled, insecure ‘know your place’ society we really are.

Irritatingly I have to take my hat off to him. He knows his audience and their fragile desires intimately. He’s good. Really good.

So I’m off to buy a new cap to doff!

Walking slowly, Old People & the art of human deceleration.

03 Monday Jul 2017

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21st Century Living, 4x4s, BREXIT, Celebrity, CO2, Consumerism, Deceleration, East Sussex, Hoorays, Hyper Vigilance, Lewes, Living In The Now, London, Meaning, Metropolis, Mindfulness, Newton, Old people, prosperity, RangeRovers, Remain, Renewables, Southern Rail, thriving

Speed of life is a funny thing.

(Funny obtuse that is, as opposed to funny Ha Ha)

From what I can tell, it seems that the faster we go, the less we seem to actually do: relatively.

Or to be more precise, the more our doing becomes about the speed at which we do it, the less it becomes about the thing we’re doing.

It seems that in pursuit of speeding up the process of doing something we transform it. The relentless acceleration of the task pushes it to a tipping point where ultimately, thereafter, that task becomes secondary to the process or system by which we accelerate it and the accelerant we use to do so.

We stop doing something faster.

Going faster becomes what we do.

“What are you doing?”

“No idea! But Christ I’m doing it super hyper fast. AND I’m connected to a squillion people so not only am I doing it faster – I am sharing it faster. I am not only a speeding bullet but also a skin-searing wildfire. I’m going like awesome shit-off-a-tech-shovel, me.”

I’d always hoped that there was a simple equal and opposite (satanic Newtonian shyster that I am) to the hyper accelerating self.

For some time I’d put my money on the ‘car-crash slo-mo’ of our primal sensory faculty, which, when engaged by danger or crisis, helps us maintain some semblance of equilibrium and control in that moment by slowing everything down to enable us to comprehend and avoid the particular parts of it that may well, well, be the death of us.

But my monkey/pigeon/lizard brain’s ability to shutter down the speed of any one hyper-fast occurrence, thereby allowing me to scrutinise every infinitesimal piece of detail and information and subsequently better navigate and ride its turbulence doesn’t lead me to avoiding the worst of its consequences. It simply leads me to developing a greater ability to absorb utterly meaningless stuff at speed through the porous edges of the moment.

So that’s not helping me.

The other thing that might have been well-placed to put some brakes on the worst vestiges of my hyper accelerated self would have been Mindfulness.

But Nope. Not doing it for me either. I mean, I get it. To learn and properly understand what it means to live in the Now. To remove the distractions of past and future, to truly concentrate on the moment you are in, appreciate it, bathe in it, turn it over in one’s palm like a polished stone: a remarkable ability.

My only concern is that the Now, devoid of past or future – experience and potential, memory or dream, and all of the information both emotional and rational that comes with them – seems incomplete to me.

Mindfulness seems to do the very opposite for me of what it should do. I kick out any traces to allow me to super-focus on the moment – a form of hyper-vigilance of the Now – but I end up with a load of random other stuff pouring into the spaces left behind – spaces I’d rather fill with the past and future brackets that should encase each experience.

So, what else?

A shift in context and environment perhaps? Well, again, yes, to an certain extent.

Having moved from London to Lewes has compelled me to exist at a pleasantly slower pace of life some of the time.

(At which juncture I’d like to thank Southern Rail profusely for their concerted and sustained efforts in disavowing me of the idea that I live on a highly efficient arterial rail line into and out of the breath-taking speed of the metropolis.)

But like mindfulness, for all of one’s best endeavours, the slower Now of Lewes is forever bracketed by what has gone before (chasing the dollar in London) and what follows (chasing the said same dollar). So solely relying on context and environment alone are not the answer.

And in our relentlessly connected world one can never really escape the accelerant of prosperity.

Even in sleepier Lewes, the long shadow of thriving, or what constitutes the current shiny, slebby ‘got stuff’ model of it, seeps into everything.

Lewes has a great mixture of types: it’s not all DownFromLondons like me.

You have the My F@*%ng Red Trousers of the hollowed-out East Sussex Hooray and their crisply Lavender-ironed wife – the ex-Brighton burn-out, sporting a dog on a string and blue dip-dyed hair shaved on one side clutching a gig flyer – the blue-cloud green-horizon landscape of artsy-craftsy Sussex potter/painter/candlestick and scatter cushion maker – the vintage Linen Interior of the LifeStyle shop owner– the white Sussex Van Man & Scaffolder Bloke, bastion of BREXIT, with a vocal dislike of anything or anyone foreign or exotic; apart from the ‘Chinky’ Chinese and that ‘Itie’ Pizza Place of course.

(Their cultural myopia seems to simply melt away like a wood fired Quattro Formaggi amidst the scrolling menu of Just Eat and Deliverooo. Note to Self: Deliveroo as the Open University of Multi-Culturalism – a distribution platform for culturally enlightening and Pro Remain data and facts to Little England).

And there’s plenty of the Hunt Supporter tractor-chic squad here to fill the spaces between the stripped oak floorboards of Lewes society.

And then of course we have that herd of shining individuals, floating above the ground, thrusting towards Waitrose in their hovercrafts of enrichment.

The gleaming lines of Range Rovers and Landrovers (and every other over specified, under-utilised 4X4 you care to mention) with their wholly unused Hi Lo gear ratios (the cockyx of the car world – a left-over from the cars once utlitarian past – not dissimilar to the vestige of a tail that we carry behind us) whooshing up and down the high street – are busy as they are in the furious industry of Doing Well.

(Hands up who leases their 4×4? I rest my case.)

There is no absence of the merry middle class dance here. All manner and strata of people parking up outside elaborately ordained pubs on weekends for overpriced Sunday Roasts and a scrum of collective thriving, cawing loudly of new this and expensively experienced that; of particular schools and exotic holidays – puffing up the brightly-coloured wings of their success, clutching menus like divining rods to the well of contentment hidden somewhere in front of them, just out of sight and reach.

They’re certainly not going to help me decompress from the consuming rush of 21st century existence.

So; the standard socio-economic ladder meets tribal segmentation of life offers little to ease the accelerating self.

In fact, with one’s ears too wide open and a thinner skin on, quite the opposite might happen here. Devoid as charming market towns are of the anonymity of the blurring vari-speed white waters of a city – everyone gets drawn even further into the accelerated need to succeed under the hot spotlight of local visibility.

BUT there is one group – a higher tribe – rendered by life experience and tenure rather than by culture creed profession or class – to whom homage pays dividends.

And they are the source of my new self-penned Sioux-like name – Walks Slowly With Old Folks.

For someone who walks far too quickly at the best of times (as to whether I am walking away from myself or towards someone or something more interesting I’ve not yet fathomed), slowing down to the walking speed of old people is a remarkable fillip to an accelerated or accelerating life.

Various things happen:

Sight – old people spend less time furiously concentrating on the aspect and angle of their trajectory though life – which means they have more time to be aware of what is immediately about them. They don’t suffer what I like to call Thrive Blindness (the loss of the ability to see what’s immediately in front and around us that comes from rushing towards the next ratchet of prosperity.) That’s a good thing.

Connection – old people are far more capable of engaging with those around them because they are not moving so fast that they ‘can’t stop’. Watching various professionally busy White Rabbits (always so terribly late for some important date) in grave danger of tripping over their own feet if they were for one moment expected to stop, turn and actually engage with another human other than those whom might improve their situation makes for little easing in the speed of life dept.

Smell – old people exist in an old world model of associated scent. Simply put, when you slow down your speed of passage through the world you actually smell the environment you are in or are travelling through. Sight and sound and smell and the emotions they generate are more likely to remain in tact, inextricably connected to each other as they should be. A rushed life leads to misappropriation of smells, constantly slung as they are to a newer or abstracted reference point, as opposed to the one just that actually created them.

Mortality – old people exist in far greater proximity to their own demise. They do not need the trending self help manual du jour to tell them that every moment is precious, especially those spent in pursuit of the things that make us truly happy. Relentlessly reminded as they are by the passing of their friends and peers and the shrinking of time in which that passing occurs, they don’t need help making the most of the Now. Its all they have left. The clarity that comes from being able to count the springs summers autumns and Christmases they have left in which to enjoy these things is a tainted gift.

The other observation is that there seems to be a better balance of sensibilities when Old people are present. They are an off-set strategy – renewables of humanity amidst the dirty coal of the industrious being of youth. Trees to the CO2 of an accelerating tech-fuelled life.

So it is my intention at every opportunity to Walk Slowly With Old Folks. Because even at their grumpiest, they prove that all of us eventually will shrug off this distemper of the projected, accelerated and visibly successful self, and replace it with something far more meaningful.

Three cheers (and a walking frame) for that.

Saviano, Populist Poisons & the Rise of An Ugly Society

04 Sunday Dec 2016

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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Aquila, Barzini, berlusconi, BREXIT, Camorra, Care In The Community, City Of London, Drug Cartels, Gattopardo, Global Financial Corruption, Gonzaga, Jo Cox, Krays, Mafia, Margaret Thatcher, Mental Health, Ndrangheta, Offshore Banking, Pax Romana, Rome, Saviano, Sforza, Tancredi, Trumo, youth

I have just finished reading Roberto Saviano’s My Italians: True Stories of Crime and Courage. A hugely redeeming yet desperately saddening book by a master of investigative journalism.

I read books such as this – and The Dark Heart of Italy and Illustrious Cadavers (and even Barzini’s comprehensive yet slightly sentimentalised The Italians) with a bitter sweet sensibility.

It is a sensibility born of being someone who, though bred and raised in England, is by blood pretty much wholly Italian with a smattering of Yar French – a product of the Piedmontese and Ligurian bloodlines that shaped me.

I am therefore still firmly attached to Italy, the umbilical cord un-cut. I love Italy. Which is why I feel a sense of creeping shame, sometimes frustration and sometimes rage at the dreadful toxicity, cruelty and self-serving nature of some of its leaders and its population.

These books I have mentioned focus on the medieval nature of Italy’s power structures, the darkness of its feudal and criminal heart, and the complicity of the people who are either too scared to act against it, or too indifferent to others to care. Something that until recently had seemed another country to how we live in the UK.

As I explained to someone a few days ago, Italy is more than corrupt. It is Beyond Corruption. My belief is that this issue arises because Italy is an old world culture – its modern civic and political infrastructure is built upon ancient foundations.

This has given the opportunists crooks and toxic tribes amongst its people over 2000 years to explore and exploit the structures of bureaucracy and power – studying their shifts and flaws – inveigling themselves but more importantly inveigling their nature, intention, motivation and desire – building it into the structure and the fabric of Italy.

Rome and its Pax Romana, administrated via favour, tax and violence, the centuries old corrupted relationship between Papal church and State, the internecine wars of the Ducalities and Principalities – the birth of the chiaroscuro of Diplomacy – a truly dark and light art – in the era of the Gonzaga and Sforzas. Every one of them an opportunity for the shadiest and most self interested to set their chair at the table and systemically expand their influence and network.

In Il Gattopardo, Tancredi states this simple tenet – that ‘To remain the same, everything must change’ – a tenet that underwrites Sicilian Culture: riven, over run and over lorded so often by so many. To maintain real power and status, you must offer the illusion of change as the fuel of advancement – while behind the scenes securing even faster the immovable truth of who rules. This is equally true to wider Italy.

These books of the dark heart of Italy project Italian society as a Commedia Dell’Arte – a society populated by slippery clowns, tortured psychopaths, stooges and idiots. The characters that populate the stage of this bizarre human theatre and their painted grins always hiding a darker truth. They seem to prove the rule.

And the courage of the people who write them should not be underestimated, given the forces they are more than likely to unleash in doing so – especially those of the likes of Saviano.

He has rightly pointed out that his books are dangerous to the dark forces buried into the earth of Italian society because he does not take the pose of an academic distant observer. He speaks as someone who loves his country and its people, who writes as one of them, telling real stories, stories that join the dots and point fingers. His books make people not only angry about those that mock them but also names names, to create a focus for the people’s anger.

We need more of these books, books that real people read, not just the academics and the Demi Monde. But we need them to be not just of Italy.

The UK is the place where I was born and bred. And it has my heart and my loyalty. But it is smug and complacent when it comes the darker side of human nature. Simply put, our Norman-Saxon culture is written through with complacency and smugness.

Couldn’t happen here.

We still act as if this blight of crookery – the gangsters, the traffickers, the double dealers, the pimps and the tyrants – are all another country. If one is to believe the golden Norman courtly myth, none are home grown but hark from across the channel, travelled up from the Mediterranean and the Levant, the Arabic traders and merchants, or across the steppes and along the silk road.

But recent events have shown that the dark hearted clowns of Italy are merely the pre shock of a wider truth.

Berlusconi was for a me a cartoon version of a rather frightening, avaricious and problematic pseudo political creature – that of the trickster business man riddled with deceits and back room plays holding up the shining glow of ‘business’ as an alternative to the ‘old political guard’ – rallying the people away from the traditional self-serving political class and towards a golden future of a country run like a company. And who better to do that than a ‘successful’ businessman.

The repulsion I feel for people like Berlusconi, and the way he has been trumpeted in Italy and fawned on puts a rip in my soul – and rents my passion and love for a country that shaped beautiful memories and a sense of belonging.

All I could do was watch from a distance and sigh and wonder why a majority could fall for such idiocy and blatant self-interest. But the problem with the Clown and his burlesque is that he takes your eyes off what is going on around him, the tendrils at work in every corner. The clown is also the master of obfuscation.

The redemption in Saviano’s book is part philosophy and principle – but it mainly points to the courage of a rare few people and their compulsion to act against these dark creatures– and how these creatures in turn despoil the names and destroy the lives or if needs be, snuff out the people brave enough to do so.

BUT as Trump and Farage have demonstrated more recently – until the professional political class stop talking to themselves and paying lip service to the people and their very real trials and tribulations – the chancers and the tricksters like Berlusconi and Trump – with their Boy made good, one of the people masquerade will win turnaround votes and shock nations.

There is a stark similarity between the Italian communities and the dynamic of their relationships with the Mafia, Camorra and Ndrangheta criminal families featured in Saviano’s book and those who vote for people like Berlusconi and Trump.

By voting for the ‘shiny’ successful businessmen of politics and their political stooges we create a contract between us and them that says ‘do what you need to do’ – just don’t shove it in my face.

Yes, people are scared. We live in very volatile times. Yes, the professional political classes have lost the trust of the people. But we need to be wary of what we think we’re buying with the others. And more importantly we need to be held accountable for what gets done in their and our name.

We have to take responsibility for unacceptable acts inflicted on innocent people under the guise of the politics we collectively support.

Every BREXITEER who has dismissed or not recognised the random acts of violence and rise in hate crimes directly attributable to their cause and not acted against the perpetrators, or make excuses for or exceptions of them are saying Do This In My Name.

How ironic that it is usually these people who are the first to question and pillory an Imam for not immediately damning and casting out the terrorists and hate peddlers in the midst of their communities – and we damn them with charges of complicity and harbouring.

The truth is, with the likes of Berlusconi and Trump and to a far lesser degree Farage, there is a collateral damage strategy being condoned here as part of a Necessary Act – like those that excuse the taking out the odd hospital while bombing an I.S. enclave.

Some people in post BREXIT post TRUMP world are going to ‘get it’ – they are going to be that acceptable collateral damage that happens when people want to bring about seismic change.

This is the simple human truth of the contracts we are happy to make to secure our immediate interest.

This culpable relationship is little different to the nature of the relationship that existed between the Krays and the East End community they called home. Boys done good. Smart. Nice clothes. Money. Businessmen. And they took care of their own.

“You could walk the streets when the Krays ran things around here.”

“They loved their mum.”

”Things were better then.”

You certainly could walk the streets. They certainly did love their Mum. And they also terrorised people and unleashed a particular and sadistic rule of thumb on all about them – but while they do it to others like them – and it didn’t touch the edges of ordinary people’s every day, so be it. It is acceptable.

The logic goes – If I am afraid, up against it and feeling vulnerable I will support the scariest creature who claims to act in my interests – at any cost, even that of my personal liberty and pride – and some collateral damage on the way.

Collateral Damage is so often in these cases a euphemism for human suffering and pain. Destitution. Cruelty. Fear-mongering. Bullying. Threats. And often, death.

As I have said before, the ‘people’s vote’ has on many occasions throughout history unleashed tyrannies to which they happily ascribe if the tyrant protects their interest. We’re not talking news here.

As we have seen, there seems little to separate the sensibilities that exist between marginalised communities and the gangs and criminal networks that thrive amongst them – and ultimately the kinds of politician they will support if they are provoked into having to make a political ‘point’.

The key word in the previous paragraph is the words ‘seems’. Smudging the line between the desires, integrity, morals and motivations of the ordinary person and that of the political trickster the shark and the gangster is a purposeful strategy.

This is a reoccurring theme in Saviano’s book. The blurring of the distinction between those who are compromised and those who are doing the compromising. To draw everyone into a web of complicity is to have to make them like you, you like them. You have to have created a sense of ‘We’.

That is how you get people to accept the Collateral Damage and the toxic underside of what you’re doing. By removing the vantage of morality or judgement.

To accept the toxic contract between ourselves and those who would twist the world in their interests while pretending to support us, the common people – to find this state of affairs ‘acceptable’ and to be complicit in their existence, we have to have decided and accepted that everyone is broadly the same – and that there is little difference between the self-interest of a person looking for a leg up into a job in hard times and the nature of the ‘fixer’ and the ‘spiv’ – the politician gangster or local face – who can make it happen for that person through their contacts and influence.

Saviano states that to not be complicit, we must first recognise and reject the idea that we are all the same in the end – flawed human beings who will do bad things in extenuating circumstance – for example, due to personal duress, war or extreme poverty.

We are not the same. We do not all take the slippery road – to crime, or graft, or the inflicting of human pain and misery on others in pursuit of our own gain. However hard it becomes for some people. This is not the only answer. Just one answer chosen by a certain kind of person or group.

He sets out that the greatest power we have is to say I am different. We are different. We are flawed perhaps and human. But we are not like these people. And never will be.

We will not accept that what they do is acceptable in itself or as part of greater transformation strategy.

So in the UK when we see the dark materials of BREXIT played out in acts such as the one where a Polish worker is beaten to death, we have to say I am different. I am not complicit with the people who do this. I will not hide from them. Or gift them my silence – a soundless ‘understanding’ of why they do what they do to others under the guise of defending the culture or their nation. I reject that ugly contract of collateral damage for better.

It also requires us to join the dots. To see how things interrelate and intertwine. How one act can lead to another. It demands that we interrogate how things connect – the levers and pulleys of how our decisions and those of the leaders we support play out. Not just short-term, conveniently useful snap-shots that allow us all to turn back to our own little bubble.

Jo Cox was killed by a man shouting Britain First – a man fired by the madness of the political zealot. But even here the old adage of be careful what you wish for and careful who you Vote for comes to the surface – both as cause and effect.

The key word here is ‘madness’. The ‘insane act’ of the political or religious activist, terrorist or assassin is rooted not in their belief systems but in how their existing mental condition or illness warps or allows beliefs to be twisted to acts of callous barbarity and murder.

In that way Jo Cox’s death just may also be attributable to a culture and society we choose to lobby, support and vote for. And the policies they put in place in our name.

Why? Because the fundamental flaw in how we identify and manage mental health issues in the UK. The systems in place to manage extreme mental illness are simply not fit for purpose – and they are more than less likely to leave people like Thomas Mair unchecked, un cared for and at large.

The desperate state of Mental Care in the UK can be traced back to a very particular point in time.

Jo Cox’s death is not only attached to a current populist zealotry but also by a long thread to a populist Tory movement that thrived in this country for over a decade and whom the new noisy BREXITEERS hark back to – a Tory movement that put some very anti-social policies in place.

Care in The Community began with the best intentions, removing people from the crumbling victorian institutions commonly known to offer substandard and sometimes subhuman care for their ‘inmates’.

But in the hands of the administrators it dies the death of a thousand cuts and for some it is now viewed as an utter abdication of responsibility by the people who govern us for those in our communities blighted by mental health.

It was was undertaken by a populist Prime Minister who was pro Britain and all about backbone and making one’s own opportunities – and being for the simple people of Britain.

But she also demonstrated the trait that accompanies this self-made mentality – a dismissive dislike or sometimes explicit repulsion towards those who are weak and flawed.

Let their families take care of them. Let them be cared for in the hearts of their community. It’s a better way.

Agreed, as long as government delivers the support systems and funding it promises to enable those families and communities to take back responsibility from the state. The idea of letting us return to a time when we take care of our own, intimately, with all the human discomfort that comes with it is laudable.

But the underlying systems that were meant to support that belief and the communities living it out were systematically diminished and dismantled within a matter of years – leaving the mentally ill to stalk like the dead through their communities, barely held in place by the kindness of strangers and an overstretched social system.

Populists governments have a tendency to not keep their promises if the promises do not serve their evolving agenda.

The reoccurring theme of the mentally ill and vulnerable amongst us struggling and often failing to avoid violent encounter, drug abuse, alcoholism, prostitution and dereliction is there for all to see.

And it just gets worse. Mental Health care for the Young is on its knees – at crisis point. In a hyper connected accelerating world, the fragile amongst our young and old will suffer and we have no safety net for them.

All roads as they say lead to Rome. We are the cause of the policies our elected government enact. Unless we stand up and say otherwise. In some quarters the silence is still deafening.

Those whom we elect to run our countries and the webs of interest and shadier nature of those who support them throws a long shadow that we rarely take any responsibility for.

In Saviano’s book a similar point is made. He tells a story of Aquila, the university town, and of the young people who died when the earthquake struck. The building in which they died collapsed because it was found to be shoddily built with watery cement and insufficient structural integrity and no screening for earthquake resilience in a region renowned for tremors of varying magnitude. The local politicians weep and despair at the loss of life. The Christian Democrats roar at the iniquity. But they are complicit in awarding the crooked contracts that built the building that killed their young people. They have to take responsibility for the cause.

On one last point, at the Hay Festival this year Saviano stated that if we want to know the capital of global financial corruption, look to the City Of London and the UK.*

“Ninety per cent of the owners of capital in London have their headquarters offshore”

“Jersey and the Caymans are the access gates to criminal capital in Europe and the UK is the country that allows it. That is why it is important, why it is so crucial for me to talk to you because I want to say: this is about you, this is about your life, this is about your government.”

He makes a direct link between ordinary people of Britain and the environment and opportunity our political class create in our name.

So, does it prove what the BREXITEERS have been saying all along? That the southern biased political elites have little interest in the rest of the country and its woes, blinded as they are by London and its skyward ascent.

Does it prove that the City of London and its powerful political friends are a self-interested gold-plated throng throwing us to the dogs? – allowing as they do the foreign stain of corruption and criminality to seep across our borders through their personal avarice and their pursuit of neo-liberal financial policies and the removal of regulation to enable them?

Perhaps.

What is interesting is what Saviano went on to say. He ventured that leaving the EU would in fact undermine joint attempts to fight illegal economies but removing the bigger picture.

“Leaving the EU means allowing the Qatari societies, the Mexican cartels, the Russia Mafia to gain even more power,”

“We have proof, we have evidence. Today, the criminal economy is bigger than the legal economy. Drug trafficking eclipses the revenue of oil firms. Cocaine is a £300bn-a-year business. Criminal capitalism is capitalism without rules. Mafia and organised crime does not abide by the rule of law – and most financial companies who reside offshore are exactly the same.”

Saviano pointed to the fact HSBC had paid $1.9bn in fines to the US government for financial irregularities in dealing with money that had come from cartels.

I find it interesting that Saviano has also become a Distant Son to Italy. He has been put behind glass, an observer now. His armed guards and two bullet proof cars proof that he manages to speak to the heart of the matter. Otherwise the mob would not mark him for death and the politicians would not publicaly diminish and de-legitimize him.

We need to grow up in the UK. And start to see what is really going on in our midst. This is not about being anti Tory, anti Farage, anti Money or anti Business. This is about being pro-people.

There are many, many people in the UK who are both successful and soulful, who ‘give a chuff’ as one such person said to me recently – people untouched and uninterested in the gilded cage of super money and its slippery bedfellows.

Surely that is good. Thriving does not need to equate to graft and back handers and crooks as it now so often invariably does in Italy.

BUT I worry that the more we skate over the issue -seeing a BREXIT vote as job done – and the more we ignore the issues in our society, the greater the chance that we will breed the opportunity for a situation like the one Saviano refers to to thrive and survive unbothered and untouched.

I worry that – though only measured in hundreds and not thousands of years – the administrative infrastructure and the increasing interrelatedness and interweaving of the political and capital classes, both socially, culturally but most importantly systemically in the UK will create a web of complex self-interest similar to the one in Italy – one which becomes increasingly in thrall to and manipulated by the staggering scale of criminal money washing through its coffers.

It may be a wholly anecdotal assertion when I say that the bed-fellows nature of ugly money is an absolute truth but I challenge anyone to go to a Top Tier art happening in London’s Hanover Square and not find the elite gathering swollen by a number of Asian, Russian, European and Middle Eastern ‘businessmen’, and their super banker and fund trader friends, and the Politicians and Influencers who are party to their cause.

The more that the gap between the haves and have nots visibly and palpably grows, the angrier the people will become. And the more disenfranchised and disenchanted they will get until eventually, in extremis, people will look in greater and greater numbers to make those toxic contracts, bury their heads and turn a blind eye – and we will all be the worse off for it.

SOURCE: Roberto Saviano. London is heart of Global Financial Corruption. The Guardian On Line. Dan Carrier. May 2016

Speaking loudly in a Public Place & The art of conversing sustainably.

28 Monday Nov 2016

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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80s Casuals, BREXIT, cars, Class War, Education, fashion & Beauty, Fotball, gene Pool, Genetics, Golf, Harry Enfield, Hilditch & Key, Holidays, Identity, Living The Dream, Llandeilo, Macclesfield, MAMILs, mobile, Notting Hill, Petworth, Prince Regent, Rugby, Semi Detached, Sex, Skiing, Sustainability, Tacchini, Tech, Trainspotting, Trump, Withal & I

19af089861d58143e7bcffbf177b0f51.jpg.png

Love us. We just can’t help ourselves.

For all the homespun wisdoms and studies around how being more socially aware of, sensitive to and inclusive of those around us creates a more resilient society, we just can’t help banging on, sounding off, shouting out, and blahing about – loudly, relentlessly and shamelessly – about us, us, us.

There’s a touch of Blackadder’s Prince Regent’s about us.

In Blackadder the Third, Sense and Sensibility, Rowan Atkinson’s eponymous butler is trying to coach Hugh Laurie’s roaring roistering and very shouty Prince Regent in the art of public speaking, unhelpfully aided by two ‘actors’.

‘Unaccustomed as I am to speaking loudly in public place…’.

Yup. That’s us.

We’re simply oblivious to the cascade of fog horning we actually do. Or simply don’t care.

Perhaps it’s all part of our genetic makeup. Not happy with our messenger genes working furiously, invisibly, silently on our behalf, perhaps we need to openly trumpet our superiorities and assert ourselves on something, anything, to demonstrate our fitness for gene pool ascension. A sort of oral chest beating. A belt and braces approach to social assertion.

We’ve certainly got plenty of topics to choose from with which to do it:

Holidays (boutique off beat long haul 6 star glamp “please find me interesting” and package all-inclusive entertainment included “… but it’s great for the kids…” meets the urbane city break couple with an ironic burlesque trapeze in their suite)
Homes ( and the whole region meets post code fascism thing that goes with them -you know who you are London)
Fashion & Beauty (naked stripped back Paraben and orang-utan free meets hi bake crusted fake slathered super gloss with a centre ground of super-drugged over doses of buy 3 get none free )
Cars (muscle car versus hot hatch versus electric versus petrol head versus bike versus Classic versus Zip)
Sex (socially this is open season – from “euughhh no thanks!” princesses and the blank-eyed cote d’Azur lizard lover to semi-detached Tudored, Tweezered and GoPro-ed all-in wrestling and Breezer bus-stop procreation)
Education – (Toffs going state-side leaving the Publics to the oligarchs and bankers , the rise of the Old grammar, and the Churchy state scrum versus post code lottery shitsville Secondary in an over-pressured catchment area kind of thing)
Sport (especially things like Golf and Formula 1 – but Rugby versus Football is good for a class fight – but then so is Union versus League – yikes – and cycling’s for MAMILs)
Technology (is that the latest super triple upgrade diamond encrusted razor thin i-phone meets digital poverty and second hand devices with digital dementia)
Drugs (council estate pill heads, skunks and suburban speed freaks rub up against school study stoners and coke horse fashionistas – with a sprinkle of Withnail and Trainspotting for good measure)

There is endless fun to be had for anyone with a Class calibrated slide rule and an eye for an accent, a shabby cuff, an overturned trainer instep in whitest white and a social smoke machine.

All of the above and many more subjects besides can offer multiple signposts to our ability to secure, protect and expand the gene pool – as a mate and provider – and more importantly, where we think we currently are and hopefully wish to land on the great ladder of Life.

But many of these subjects are impenetrable to most of us in the flow of our accelerated lives – and carry a complex and subtle range of degrees not immediately obvious.

Impact demands some quite bloody and explicit sign posting and you’ve got to pick the right ones if you’re going for the ‘speaking loudly…’ option.

If chosen properly, to suit both the environment and the audience, the best ones can be a source of endless amusement for the seasoned observer are the ones where our social anxieties, bombast and terrors come rolling boldly into view unmasked and unfettered.

Now before we go on and just to clarify, on the technology front, there is of course a whole sub section beyond the basic noisy snobberies and tribalism of who’s got what “look at my device” technology, rooted in a whole new behaviour – that of a Life lived like an open wound on mobile loudspeaker.

Who has not had the unmitigated pleasure of listening to someone blah on in full voice about riveting subjects such as the process of returning the cardigan they bought on sale for £7.39 …but I had to return it but then I find out that the sticker bar code had rubbed off so I had to go to the second counter, yeah the one across the other side in charge of bar codes, who’s that?…in the background?….ahhhhhh….how is he….anyway, and you wouldn’t believe it they only sent me back to the first one…ooh…he’s always dropping things that boy….and anyway that snooty cow was there you know the one and anyway…bip bip….oh sorry thought the bus was being re routed so anyway they put a bar code on it and scanned and then the machine woudn’t w…

SHUT UP!!!!!!

Why anyone thinks that listening to the utter banality and mundanity of them honking on about everything from Cheese and Onion crisps to their bunions holds the slightest bit of interest for anyone else within 20 yards of them beggars belief. Do they care. No. On and on they go. At top volume.

Perhaps fog-horning into our mobile while staring listlessly or sometimes cluelessly out of train or bus window makes us feel more alive, or alternately, less dead, or inert.

Or perhaps we all blah on because we’re afraid of the silence. Silence is very scary. Especially in the glittering noise of our conspicuous consumption world. The Silence gets filled up with stuff like thinking about over-drafts, and unpaid bills, and the car we can’t afford: the person we aren’t. And the fact that your other half seemed to pay far too much attention to old slippery bollocks with the ‘hot hatch’ at the pub AGAIN. Oh no. Fill that silence RIGHT NOW.

Or maybe it’s just a sign that we are lonely creatures relentlessly reaching out with any excuse to just talk to someone about something anything. Nail clippers. The benefits of GREGG’s foot long sausage roll (which to be fair does demand quite a lot of conversation).

Who knows. Anyway. Ear plugs in. Crack on.

So where was I? Oh yes. The deafening hawk, crackle and scrape of social laddering grinding across the room at full volume is a wonder to behold, especially in England, that bastion of crippling class consciousness and the emollient cold eyed Cheshire cat smile of its courtly Norman culture.

Now whether these conversations happen in a semi in a cul-de-sac in Macclesfield, a terrace in Llandeilo or a townhouse in Petworth, the broad trajectory and oath is the same.

I – the fog horn – being of sound mind and body – shall peak loudly in such terms as to clearly communicate to those gathered within ear shot what level of lifestyle I have, the laissez faire with which I take or leave ‘work’, the shade quality or quantity of leisure time I have and how I spend it – and ultimately – really really – whether I am, to quote the great Philosopher, Harry Enfield, “considerably richer than yaow”.

(NOTE: This dynamic becomes doubly interesting with couples who might in the secrecy of a closed conversation or room be accused of marrying ‘below’ or ‘above their station’: as this creates an explicit external dynamic – between the individuals and those outside around them – and the implicit internal one between two people in intimate contact and with an intimate knowledge of each other’s foibles and failings in the class department)

So, for example: hands up who’s sat in a restaurant or bar listening to the rallied ranks cawing about a skiing holiday they have just been on or upon which they are about to embark?

Amazing. It is such a perfect storm of social drama. Which resort? Which slope? Drive or Fly? What grade? Mogul? Age of Youngest on Skis? (since he was 3 months old…Obvs). dangerous off-piste-er? French skier? Snowboarder?

And up diddly up up it keeps going. Heli Skiing. Cloud skiing. Rain Skiing. Skiing across a killer whale’s back juggling a bottle of fizz and a Grey Goose chaser.

“Ohh Jasp, you ARE a just SO fucking OUT THERE”.

The ratcheting upwards of who’s the biggest cock in the skiing conversation is a great example of a topic hijacked by our social and genetic need to assert ourselves and is a miracle to behold.

And when I use the word ‘cock’ please do not think I am removing the female gender in this. Social climbing and social fog-horning reaches its apogee in the open mouths of some of the women in these conversations in much the same way with the men.

Don’t get me wrong: I really enjoy skiing. I am not terribly good at it. But I have fun. Moving from bar to bar at high speed across snow is a right laugh. But life’s too short to spend more than 15 minutes talking loudly about it. Isn’t it? And let’s be clear. I am not referring in this piece to people who actually really do LOVE skiing. The die-hards any-weather, can’t live without it addicts. I could listen to their stories all day long.

No. I am talking about the people who haul themselves and their families up a collection of slopes every year, more out of social terror for what not doing it might mean to their school run dinner party schtick than the actual pleasure of doing it.

Golf has a similar schtick. Come on. We’ve all witnessed it. The arcane yet very loud golf-speak followed shortly after by ‘the swing’ with invisible iron finished off with a tongue on roof of mouth ball ‘TSCHH” sound effect. Marvellous. And what’s interesting in the social malaise is that someone using Golf to publicly assert themselves socially may not even realise that someone else might be judging them silently for the fact they actually pronounced the word GOWLF instead of saying GOFF.

(Careful out there. The issue with social ladders is once on them, there tends to be people both above as well as below you. And the same rules apply. ‘Betters’ are like Bosses – everyone has one – somewhere – somehow – even if they are not immediately visible. They are there.)

Christmas is also a mine field of social fog-horning as it allows the social fog-horner to draw string together a whole host of levers and pulleys.

Consumption and exotic gift purchasing. Rare party invitations. Travel – preferably long haul. Higher order experiences. Exceptional distance from ‘here’ (everyday life)

Witness in a Notting Hill coffee shop three women, all American, just at the ordering point, a casual collision while all on their different morning threads – to work, to yoga instructor, to next coffee shop – living the dream, replayed in coffee shops up and down the country at every rung up and down the social ladder. (You do not need to have a banker for a husband or as a job to pretend that you can live like someone who does. What are credit cards for!)

So the first asks the second:

“So hey, when are you heading out?”

“Oh gawd, we HAVE to go to New York first, some dull party but then up to the Cape, and then straight to Vale as soon as his mother lets us escape. How about you?”

“Yeah pretty much the same. He’s on his got to get away tip at the moment. Dunno. Might go to St. Barts over New year but that’s about it.”

The deafening silence of the third woman is palpable. Both turn to her and one speaks.

“Hey what about you guys?”

VERY LONG PAUSE.

“Well, think we’re going to have to stay put this year what with John’s work …”

BIGGER PAUSE – SILENCE – and she turns to the server.

“…can I get a Grande decaf cappuccino please…”

SHUT DOWN – SMALL COMPRESSED SMILE – OUCH.

The pause and silence is deafening. All the signs are big: really, really BIG – and not in a good way.

The two ladies look at her, shuffle a little, small smiles to each other.

This is uncomfortable. Not this is AWKWARD.

Three large klaxons have sounded above the lady’s head accompanied by flashing neon.

STATUS ALERT – might not be able to keep up/social death/slightly embarrassing

MONEY ALERT – might not be able to afford shiny life this month or year – do we invite her?

JOB ALERT – husband shaky job position or worse – NO ONE stays in London over Holidays.

Hopefully her remarkably over-priced hot, wet frappecrappachaiccinolate will take the edge off the moment. Nothing says Everything is Awesome quite like an over-priced coffee.

That much cow product in one over glazed cup would put most people into a cow coma of dairy proportion – something that I think she may well appreciate at this very moment.

Sometimes things scream louder in public than any raised voice – or should I say sometimes the world of logos and marques SCREAM louder in public that any raised voice but to much the same effect. And of course there is the collision of semiotics and invisible gesturing that needs to be folded into this. Social sign posts come in all manner of variants

In one conversation with a very sartorially obsessed man, I noticed the usual scoffing at a large bloke in a Tacchini sweatshirt – 80s Footie Casual FLASHBACK.

The gentleman pointed out that it was a larger than life example of crass status making –vulgar logo bright colours – gaudy etc.

When I mentioned that he and the Tacchini man were no different he looked aghast. The higher order pomposity of him was firmly pricked.

My point to him was this. I ‘knew’ that the shirt he was wearing was from Hilditch & Key. I had one in a similar fabric, French cuff, cut away collar. His shirt SCREAMED Jermyn Street – in much the same way that Sergio Tacchini man’s screamed Wembley Market.

This stuff matters – to everyone. No-one is immune. This stuff – this pointless scrabbling for identity and the scatterings of ‘things’ that prop it up – it’s part of who and what we all are – whether the ascetics of the Sustainability world like it or not.

(To be fair our ability to wield the Luxury Of Conscience as a day job is a massive assertion of status, identity and educational favour in itself – one that few on this planet, even those in the emerged western cultures, can dream of let alone afford to pursue.)

We need to be really careful when we incite people to stop consuming shiny things they can’t afford and that damage the planet.

So, when someone tells me they’ve developed a new sustainability methodology, garnered some new insights or developed a campaign that involves the words or sentiments ‘stop, reduce diminish, lessen’ and all of the other reductive words we use in sustainability communications, I think of all of these people speaking loudly in public places – sometimes shamelessly, sometimes unconsciously but always slightly desperately asserting their social ascension or at its very least their social survival on the ladders of the ‘look at me’ gene pool.

If we stopped trying to mitigate and compress their competitive genetically fuelled need to assert themselves in the world – and equally stopped trying to erase their ‘terrible’ world view (good luck with that) perhaps we might be quicker to find a language of human resilience in which we can all share and take part – and somehow get more than the usual 7-13% depending on your think tank or academic referencing to give half a crap about how we live and what we consume.

NOTE This piece was sparked by my reading yet another recent and of course exhaustive Sustainable Lifestyles White Paper Report while sitting in a pub in East Sussex populated by a rather noisy cross section of society.

They were all outwards and upwards – celebrating their very survival in the game called life. They were all at the end of their week, sweeping grumps and whines away with pints and wine and thoughts of pies, curry, pizza, pork scratchings, or clubbing and gear followed by lie ins, golf, swimming, mountain biking, shopping, shooting (birds not films), movies, football, rugby and then what form of Sunday they might have before the shitty bitty day job and weekly worries heaved back into view.

I can safely say that not one of them was at any juncture discussing climate change, acidification of the oceans, human suffrage or equality and diversity – and until we find a way or theme or thread that brings these conversations into the pub meaningfully and without sounding like the Vibe Killer has just turned up – we’ll stay on the margins wondering how ‘terrible’ things like BREXIT TRUMP and the rest of the sorry shower of deniers and their master plans manage to get the thumbs up in this world

23.06.2016

18 Thursday Aug 2016

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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Aspiration, BREXIT, Childhood, EU, Halcyon Days, Identity, Little England, Populism, provincialism, Roots, Sovreignty, UKRIP, United Kingdom, Xenophobia

Why dig up an 8-year-old, slightly clumsy, over-written story to publish in chapters on a blog?

Firstly because ‘SAIL’ (the writing of which I scratched over for 2 years) has a good heart and some redeeming tracts of writing in places (just).

But mostly because one very British day in June and the aftermath of it compels me to do so.

The nature of the story – that of a young boy who inadvertently unties England and in the process of doing so unites himself with his true beginnings – has an additional resonance given the spiritual and soon to be constitutional separation of our fair island from our Europeans cousins.

So that is what I shall do.

Starting tomorrow, I will upload two chapters of SAIL, on every successive Friday for 12 weeks.

I will put the Amazon Kindle Publishing link at the bottom of each published chapter if you feel the need to leap ahead; but after 24 short weeks you’ll have it for free.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sail-Julian-Borra-ebook/dp/B00B6E4AKK

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Tag Archives: BREXIT

Look Up, BREXIT & the great healer.

Sticks & Stones & BoJo’s bitter pills.

Bash Street, The B Word & a search for Castlereagh.

Walking slowly, Old People & the art of human deceleration.

Saviano, Populist Poisons & the Rise of An Ugly Society

Speaking loudly in a Public Place & The art of conversing sustainably.

23.06.2016