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Here’s what the illiberal media doesn’t want you to know about the Finsbury Park attack

Rich Will6 Comments

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My wife and I used to live just up the road from the Finsbury Park Mosque, but now we live in Rome with our four-month-old daughter. How will we cope with bringing up a child in a time of mounting global turmoil, with terrorist attacks and climate disasters assailing us on almost a daily basis? In much the same way that previous generations have: by telling her stories which introduce and explain the world as comfortingly and as gently as possible, tales which allow her to gradually sense the dangers but also to imagine herself into the world as a protagonist as well as (we hope) a responsible citizen.

Adults tell each other stories in much the same way. The internet has sped up the process of the fabrication of fairy tales. Within minutes of an event like the attack in Finsbury Park, there are already rumours circulating online. Why did the police take so long to arrive? Could it be connected to the Grenfell Fire, or to London Bridge? Did it really happen? Is it all a distraction, a ‘false flag’?

Such gossip reassures people. It tells them who they are and situates shocking events in a familiar context. It reminds people they are powerless, that the world is under control, while also allowing them to pose in their heads as both initiates and heroes, privy to and sharers of occult and dangerous truths.

But while as parents we have our daughter’s best interests at heart, wanting to protect and prepare her for the joys and hazards of existence, purveyors of internet fairy tales do not. They use stories to manipulate, to promote an view of the world which benefits particular interests.

The mainstream media can operate in similar ways, but without as much blatant dishonesty and manipulation. Where that does exist, it tends to be infinitely more complex and sophisticated and not by any means always conscious. Recent exceptions to this, most notably Blair’s dodgy dossier and the lies of the Brexit campaign, have discredited democracy and the media and encouraged people to get their information about the world from even less trustworthy sources, ones that make a virtue of their antipathy towards formal media standards and regulations.

Someone in a Jeremy Corbyn Facebook group this morning was quick to blame the Finsbury Park attack on the “New World Order”. His kneejerk recourse to that phrase suggests he may have come under the spell of that most fraudulent of all tricksters, Alex Jones, who just by coincidence (really, Richard? Is that what you think?!) was the subject of a horribly misguided puff piece on NBC just last night. Jones is prominent nowadays as he has the ear of the President* and also because for the last few years he has been telling the world that the Sandy Hook Elementary School Massacre didn’t happen, that the children who ‘died’ and their ‘grieving’ parents were all actors. In promoting this story Jones achieves several objectives: drawing attention to himself, posing as someone who’s wise to what ‘The Establishment’ is secretly up to, and (most importantly) letting gun-lovers off the hook. The NRA is, of course, one of the most powerful and dangerous organisations in US history.

You don’t have to dig very far to see how the fledgling roots of these online fairy tales connect to some of the most powerful reactionary interests in the world. Online conspiracy theorising is, after all, a deeply conservative phenonenon, even though its often those on the Left who fall prey to it. Yesterday someone in the same Facebook group someone posted a link to an article which promised to tell you the facts that the ‘liberal media’ want to keep hidden about the Grenfell Fire. The article cut and pasted a post from the far-right website The Daily Caller which blamed environmental regulations for the disaster. The same material has been published days earlier by the right-wing British tabloids the Daily Mail and Express. While we can choose to ignore news outlets which we know to be controlled by political and/or business interests and place our critical trust in more independent, transparent and accountable publications, the internet exposes us to much more insidious attempts to hack our brains and install ideologically toxic misinformation.

No wonder Jones’ ‘friend’ Donald Trump instructs his supporters to ignore everything the ‘liberal media’ writes about him, while boasting that all he knows about the world he learned online. Progressives have to be cleverer and more critical than him when dealing with information about news events. That shouldn’t be too difficult, in theory. Just stick to news and commentary sites designed for adults, learn to question what you read without rejecting facts and arguments out of hand for no good reason, and steer well clear of those purveying internet fairy tales.

ps. If you’re seeking the facts as they stand in relation to the Finsbury Park terrorist attack, here are some sources which can help you:

http://www.guardian.co.uk
http://www.bbc.co.uk
http://www.independent.co.uk

Ps. This, from the University of Sheffield politics blog, is a very compelling argument which we Labour members and supporters ignore at our peril:

The ‘rigged economy’ conspiracy theory

In a previous critique of Corbynism, I examined the ‘personalised’ critique of capitalism which underlies the worldview of Corbyn and many of his supporters. This perspective sees poverty, economic crashes, inequality and even war as being the result of the conscious behaviour of shadowy ‘global elites’, usually in the financial sector.  Such a viewpoint, common amongst right and left, fails to grasp capital as an abstract social relation, dominating both rich and poor alike, and at its most extreme can lead to anti-Semitic conspiracy theories of Jewish plots to rule the world through control of the banks.  The prevalence of this kind of foreshortened critique of capitalism (or neoliberalism, as popularly understood) goes some way to explain the spread of conspiracy theories about the ‘Rothschilds’ and ‘Zionists’ through much of the ‘Canary’/‘Skwawkbox’ left, as well as the alt-right – they are not contingent or accidental, but the consequence of pushing an analysis of capitalism as conspiracy to its logical conclusion.

Since his ‘populist turn’ at the start of the year, Corbyn has severely ramped up this kind of talk.  Throughout the election campaign there were endless references to the ‘rigged economy’ set up by elites which had ‘ripped off’ the British people.  Like the isolationist foreign policy, this discourse has an appeal to both the ‘anti-vax’ wing of the Green left and the Trumpian-UKIP right, with the vagueness of the ‘rigged’ concept allowing people to point the finger of accusation at whatever scapegoat fits their particular prejudice.  While it can be effective, there is an inherent risk in this kind of approach to politics, in that it can rapidly spiral out of control and in unexpected directions if not strictly supervised.  There is no guarantee that once let out of the bottle this kind of personalised critique of capitalism will inevitably lead in a progressive direction.  If it is true that Corbyn has managed to patch up a right-left electoral alliance on these grounds  –  along with implied migration controls and an isolationist foreign policy  –  it will require extreme vigilance to ensure it does not veer onto a regressive track.

(http://speri.dept.shef.ac.uk/2017/06/13/reassessing-corbynism-success-contradictions-and-a-difficult-path-ahead/)

13 questions about the death toll

Rich Will2 Comments

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Any one of a huge number of people online: “I demand to know exactly how many people died in the Grenfell Tower! It’s my right to know as soon as possible!”

Someone level-headed: “Err…did you live in the tower?”

AOOAHNOPL: “No.”

SL-H: “Did you have any family members there?”

AOOAHNOPL: “No.”

SL-H: “Friends?”

AOOAHNOPL: “No.”

SL-H: “Do you know anyone who’s missing?”

AOOAHNOPL: “No.”

SL-H: “Are you a reporter?”

AOOAHNOPL: “No.”

SL-H: “Do you work for one of the emergency services?”

AOOAHNOPL: “No.”

SL-H: “Are you employed by the council to concern yourself with such things?”

AOOAHNOPL: “No.”

SL-H: “Are you a coroner?”

AOOAHNOPL: “No.”

SL-H: “Do you even live in the area?”

AOOAHNOPL: “No.”

SL-H: “So…what’s this pressing, prurient and rather macabre interest all about then? Isn’t it enough to know that lots of people died?”

AOOAHNOPL: “N…well, I saw a report on Press TV with someone who claimed to be a local resident (but didn’t want to give her full name, and (perhaps because she was clearly emotionally distraught) obviously hadn’t considered the difference between people having died and having been confirmed dead), and then the same interview was used on Russia Today, and someone posted a blog on Facebook which said that the Government had banned the media from broadcasting the death toll, and although that turned out to be absolutely unsubstantiated, entirely baseless, the same blog the following day printed a link to a tweet from a random person which linked back to the same story on Press TV, so…”

SL-H: “Right. Have you seen this story from Metro?”

AOOAHNOPL: “But Metro is MSM!…er, no. What does it say?”

SL-H: “It says that as of February this year Conservative ministers were boasting about having slashed fire regulations.”

AOOAHNOPL: “Oh. Er, that’s bad, is it?”

SL-H: “Yes. It goes a long way towards explaining the conditions that allowed the disaster to happen. What are you going to do about it?”

AOOAHNOPL: “Er…I dunno. It’s scary. I think I’m going to spend the morning reading Wikileaks and Infowars. I find it kind of comforting to think that the world’s run in secret and there’s nothing we can do about it except spread David Icke-style gossip all day on social media.”

SL-H: “Right. Are you at all interested in reading this?”

AOOAHNOPL: (glances briefly) “Er…no.”

In defence of the ‘MSM’

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Supporters gather to rally with Trump in Minneapolis
This t-shirt was a common sight at Trump rallies late last year.

Here are three facts which shed some light on the tragedy that took place in West London last week:

  • In 2012 David Cameron boasted that he would “kill off safety culture for good”.
  • Last year Conservative ministers openly boasted of reducing the level of protection that ordinary people have from fire.
  • The last Tory Government established a scheme to encourage civil servants to scrap two regulations for each new one they introduced.

How do I know these things? They were reported in the press, by newspapers. They are publicly-available verified and substantiated facts.

The truth about injustice in the world is not hidden, and it’s no secret who and what is responsible. In this country in this case it’s politicians subservient to the notion that the market knows best, that the private sector is always more efficient than the public, that there is (to quote Margaret Thatcher) “no such thing as society”, only private interests.

To counter this ideology, people with progressive values need to insist on the primacy of the public good, to demand proper and sufficiently regulated public services controlled by people who are democratically elected and thus accountable. If instead we spend our time and energy spreading unsubstantiated internet-derived rumours about secret measures carried out by occult forces, we miss the bigger picture and end up repeating a lot of the agenda of the far-right, one that, by making out that everything that happens is the result of a secret conspiracy, emphasises our powerlessness rather than what we can do to change things.

Luckily on our side we have some sections of a relatively free media which can investigate and highlight corruption and injustice. Clearly that doesn’t mean the Murdoch-owned press or the Daily Mail or Express. In this country the main left-leaning daily newspaper is The Guardian. It is not by any means perfect but it is what we have. It employs professional and conscientious journalists working according to a set of standards and has a number of mechanisms which make it relatively accountable to its readers. It also publishes columnists such as Owen Jones, Aditya Chakrabortty and George Monbiot, whose view of the world is basically the same as ours.

There are countless other publications (both on-and offline) working hard to establish and interpret facts about the world, all of which is a careful, riguorous and very resource-hungry affair. Comment is free, but facts are expensive, as no serious investigative journalism can be produced using only Google and social media. If we follow the advice of Twitter’s own Donald Trump and regard all the mainstream media as ‘fake news’, we leave ourselves open to massive manipulation and end up knowing not what we need to but what we want to, believing not what is true but what we would like to be the case. That’s what operations like The Canary, Skwawkbox and (for that matter) Breitbart are selling. Issues like Climate Change demonstrate what a catastrophic mistake we are making if we only choose to believe the type of media outlets that do not employ and back up professional reporters but instead simply tell us what we want to hear, that invent realities in order to appeal to our emotions and to reaffirm our sense of who we are*.

Some mainstream media organiations (and we (should) all know which ones) are biased, dishonest and corrupt. Competetive pressures mean that the practice of ‘churnalism’ is ever-more prevalent,  and some outlets are so compromised by commercial considerations as to be useless. They are all to be avoided. However, the existence of ideologically-based reporting and coverage which primarily serves business interests does not change the fact that across the world journalists risk their lives to expose injustice and hold the rich and powerful to account. I used to live in Mexico, where dozens of reporters are tortured and shot dead every year for daring to investigate corruption. To fall for the lie that the chief role of all mainstream media is to take part in a conspiracy to defraud the public is to do them and ourselves a huge disservice.

Nonetheless it’s become increasingly fashionable to cynically and lazily misapply a debased version of the work of Noam Chomsky in order to pretend that no journalist or news outlet can be trusted. In doing so, one makes oneself immensely more vulnerable to manipulation by power; it doesn’t make you smarter or better-informed, but rather much more gullible and ignorant. If you don’t believe me, take a look at this example of a well-known person who has nothing but contempt for the ‘MSM’:

Nothing more to add, your honour.

*Climate Change is also one major reason why so many people avoid the news altogether.

Q: What’s wrong with this picture? A: The placards

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Here are some situations in which the phrase “I used to be in the Socialist Worker’s Party” might not stand you in good stead:

  • On your professional CV
  • On your Guardian Soulmates dating profile
  • On your personal blog*

Here goes my online street cred: I was, for a stint at university, a few years in Dublin in the mid-nineties and another short period in London about ten years ago, a member of the SWP. I embodied some of the most oft- and rightly-criticised traits:

  1. A simplistic view of the world. I used to write reviews for the party newspaper of cultural products, such as books and films, evaluating them solely in terms of their contribution to the building of the revolutionary party. I also believed that there could be a thing called a ‘revolution’, just like in 1917 (or at least in Eisenstein’s inspiring rendition of it), which would be over by teatime and would not inspire a phenomenally violent and complex period of post- and counterrevolutionary violence. As recently as 2013, when I was involved in the laudable but short-lived initiative Left Unity, I witnessed an actual non-tongue-in-cheek discussion in the pub between SWP members about what they would do “on the day after the revolution”. Luckily George Orwell was just out of hearing distance (buying some more crisps at the bar as I recall), otherwise he might have eaten them all alive.
  2. Sectarianism. I viewed members of similar political organisations as more significant enemies of the class struggle than the police and the army, regarding them as rival species to be wiped out in the struggle for survival and eventual (but inevitable) triumph. I was not so much an activist as an evangelist.
  3. My main political concern was with the growth of the organisation, evidenced by increased newspaper sales, better-attended meetings, larger and louder demonstrations called and led by us, and the visibility of our placards on media coverage of said demos**. Of course, all of these things waxed and waned, but I was encouraged to believe that there was a deeper historical trend at work, that people were angrier than ever before and that provided they would get on the bus to the demonstration we would be able, nay obliged to, recruit them so they would sell the paper to their friends and workmates and the whole pyramid would grow to the point where the working class would soon be gleefully hurling the heads of capitalists down it.
  4. Hijacking events, using demonstrations and meetings in a purely instrumental way to build the party rather than the campaign itself. Oh, how we got sick and tired of being accused of doing this. Oh, how I got sick and tired of actually doing it, until the point where I became deeply cynical and (repeatedly) left the organisation.

How is this relevant in June 2017? Because the organisation is reclaiming a certain protagonism. On demonstrations over the Grenfell tragedy its placards are ubiquitous. This is, I think, dangerous for the reasons suggested above and also because:

Firstly, the SWP tends to mislead. Its chief figures are articulate and very adept at getting themselves onto platforms, but their strategy and tactics will lead any given movement down the same garden path to where the fairies live, on smaller and smaller national demostrations until everyone just stays at home and shouts at the TV instead.

Secondly, the prominent presence of the SWP is off-putting in at least three ways. Firstly, to the public. Someone once waggishly pointed out that the largest political group on the British Left is made up of ex-SWP members. Even for people who’ve never read the paper or attended a protest, Socialist Worker placards are a sign that the usual suspects are up to their old tricks again. Then there’s the fact that it allows the media to misrepresent the protest as a rentamob, as happened on Twitter last night in relation to the protests in Central London. Thirdly, it alienates potential campaigners and activists in the longer-term, in that very many people who come into contact with the organisation become, like me, cynical towards all forms of radical political activity and deeply undemocratic in their attitudes to the organisation of political campaigns.

Now, there remains an important thing to say, which is that for all the faults of the organisation, individual members of it should not be demonized. Despite the sometimes horrendous and often shameful antics of some of its leading members over the last few years, which have left many to abandon their political home (to be replaced each September by a new cohort of fresher-faced footsoldiers), most long-standing SWP members I’ve known have been heartfelt in their belief that the party is the best thing for society. To call them all ‘rape apologists’ is counterproductive and wrong. They’re mistaken and possibly morally compromised, but they are sincere***. Nevertheless, their attempts to play a leading role, whether in the Grenfell campaign or in Momentum should (continue to) be rejected. If other activists in the movement  don’t tell them, to use a phrase that’s been doing the rounds, to ‘get stuffed’, the right-wing media will use the presence of the party to discredit all those involved. 

The SWP is a bureaucracy and as such its aim is to survive and thrive, regardless of the success or failure of whatever cause it attaches it to. My past involvement in the party tells me that as an organisation (just like one or two very similar parties) it does not have the best interests of any given campaign at heart.

*Although I hope its obvious that I’ve only mentioned it in one of those contexts, I do admire the example of a perma-unemployed friend of mine who, when forced to produce a resume in one of those “HANDS OFF ME PENS!” job clubs mandated by the DSS came up with a piece of paper with his name, address and the details of his erstwhile role as local SWP branch secretary.

**Basically a branding exercise.

***It was meeting some very impressive and charming individual activists in East London in around 2007 that led me to briefly become a member again.

If you work for the Daily Mail or the Daily Express, you are going straight to hell

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Sawsan Choucair doesn’t know if her family are alive or dead. The Guardian reports:

She stood at the tribute wall at Latymer community church, talking to as many reporters as she can. Choucair said she is “devastated” and is desperate for information from the authorities, which she said has been lacking to non-existent.

She is missing her mother Sirria; her sister Nadir; her brother-in-law Bassem; her 14-year-old niece Mirena; her 11-year-old niece Fatima and her three-year-old niece Zienab.

You might think that in a free and democratic society she could turn to the press to help her find out the truth. There are, of course, reporters of integrity trying to do exactly that. However, the editors and so-called journalists at two leading British newspapers (The Daily Mail and The Daily Express) don’t care about whether her family are alive or dead. If they died in the fire then so be it. The role of those newspapers is not to investigate and publicise facts in the public interest. It is to promote a political agenda based on self-interest by scapegoating the victims of political corruption.

The owners and editors of the Express and the Mail have an intimate relationship with the Conservative Party. They (to use the phrase of the day) ‘rub shoulders’ with those same ministers who refused to countenance the notion that people in the UK should live in houses fit for human habitation. The Prime Minister even met with Paul Dacre, the spectacularly vituperative and staggeringly snobbish editor of the Daily Mail, during the election campaign to receive her instructions directly. His newspaper is a mouthpiece and an attack dog for Conservative Party interests.

The facts as they stand suggest that the fire happened because of cost-cutting in a variety of areas, some of which was not just encouraged but actually mandated by government policy decided by ministers and voted for by MPs who themselves profit directly (as landlords and shareholders) from the atrocious lack of regulation in private and public housing. But as I say, the newspapers, both of which employ hundreds of people who tell themselves and their friends and families that their profession is ‘journalist’, are not remotely interested in facts. What they produce instead is pure propaganda.

The political agenda of this Conservative Party is anti-‘red tape’, pro-Climate Change (as in, against anything that might mitigate it) and anti-EU. If they are given half a chance they will walk away from the Brexit negotiations, plunging not just the country but the entire continent into absolute chaos. They will then use their newspapers to point a burning finger at whoever the most convenient scapegoat may happen to be. Both newspapers also habitually lie to their readers about the most basic facts regarding the climate, repeating verbatim absolute lies and smearing anyone who professes to care about such matters which whatever shit they can muster.

They’ve used today’s front pages to ‘speculate‘ that EU environmental regulations were responsible for the fire. The editors who commissioned the stories and the journalists who wrote it know that it’s not true. They know that it’s an absolute lie told to deflect the huge and absolutely legitimate anger at the causes of the disaster, which (taking as true what has been published and broadcast by serious news outlets) can almost certainly be traced to British Government policy.

I’ve met a few people who worked for the Daily Mail. They were generally genial people who (understandably) enjoyed a drink and felt that what they did for a living didn’t define them as individuals. Like most people in their profession, their personal opinions were to the left of the stance of their employers (how could they not be?). They saw their job as an unfortunate compromise on the path to doing something more worthy (some of them had got stuck along the path. Maybe they had a blister or something). To compare them to concentration camp guards might be a tad unfair. But given the suffering occasioned by their highly-paid work, and the fact that they are not driven by fear for their own lives but by professional ambition, if there is any sort of divine justice at the end of the rainbow, they full deserve to suffer all of its wrath. In the meantime, the frankly satanic political organisation on whose behalf they practise their trade but be kicked as far away from power as soon and as firmly as possible.

The West will rise again

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When I first visited London I was only 13 or so, and at that impressionable age I half hoped that I’d find Neil Tennant sashaying across the concourse of St Pancras Station with a recalitrant Chris Lowe six paces behind. That video defined my image of London throughout my teenage years, and without my ever reflecting on it, the lyrics to the song firmly established the east-west class divide as the central feature of my mental map of London.

When I moved there properly (at the start of 2006, after a short-lived stint in 1993) I gravitated towards the east. It was cheaper, and in any case the west seemed sort of sloaney. It never occured to me to live there and I tended to look askance at those who did. The west was the land of chinos and jazz funk. Every country has its pijos, fighetti, betinhos or yuppies, and this was their kingdom. The West seemed, in a word, naff.

The more I lived in London the more I sensed that there was much more to the area than my lazy dismissal had acknowledged. Visiting there for any reason always felt like a trip to a slightly exotic foreign country. There was more to West London to yuppies and carnival, and that event itself revealed a working class city in amongst the refurbished portico mansions and lambroghini showrooms. I reflected on the other elements: Nick Roeg’s Powys Square, the emergence of The Clash, and the influence of reggae soundsystems, the riots of 1958 and 1976, the complex interplay of different Afro-Caribbean communities, thw downbeat parades of Bayswater and Queensway which I knew from Martin Amis’ ‘Success’, the extent of the west with all its jealously-guarded class distinctions and postcode markers, from Portobello to Knightsbridge and North Kensington to South Acton.

Last year (2016) I spent a couple of weeks in an affluent part of Shepherd’s Bush and wandering around Goldhawk Road towards Hammersmith and was constantly reminded that gentrification is never total. Even with the eye-wateringly unaffordable housing, there remains a palimpest of communities: Syrian, Lebanese, Irish, Somali, Ethiopian and Sikh.

Another less noticed feature of West London is the huge working class estates. With possibily even more intensity than other parts of London, they’ve been the site of immense battles in the last few years as new phases of social cleansing set in. As we’ve had cause to hear several times over the last few days, the area around Notting Hill and Kensington is among the most highly-prized territory on earth. The tower blocks which house hundreds of thousands of ordinary Londoners have become outposts of affordable life in a world predicated on aspiration or annihilation, get rich or die trying.

Under what had come to seem like ‘normal’ circumstances, in which your Boris Johnsons and David Camerons were still in the ascendant, the fire could aid the process of hypergentrification, the fate of the victims might be seen as an unfortunate charred blot on a landscape undergoing permanent enhancement. But there’s something about the national mood which will not let that happen. News channels are full of working class people who had been written out of the story of London as a successful global city. As it happens those working class people come from all corners of the globe and have made London their home even as London seems to repel their efforts, their energy and cultural inventiveness welcome only insofar as they serve as enticing images to attract yet more global capital yearning for exponential returns. Those people are West London in its purest form and their resurgence will renew it as a living and breathing place with its own proud history rather than a bland pre-retirement resort for the global elite.

This guy embodies the spirit of the true West London. It’s no accident that behind his righteous invective, honed over years at Speaker’s Corner (a place I’d always dismissed as tourist fodder/a breeding ground for mad mullahs), that he’s also a social historian. He’s spot on on the subject of gentrification and social cleansing, and in this clip is ferocious and trenchant on the role of the media in normalising such deadly inequality and dismissing out of hand the notion that there could ever be an alternative.

Two months ago Iain Sinclair, who has know more Londons than most, declared that this is the final one. I was inclined to agree. The area where he lives and where our flat is is being hollowed out of all historical and cultural content, turned into a computer simulation of the suburbs of Dubai or Shanghai. In what I’d come to think of as an encroachment of the values of West London on the working class East, the role of the yuppies is played by weekend hipsters, just as keen to amass cultural capital by snapping up everything sticking out of the ground, until every rugged feature of the terrain has been smoothed over for international investors. Few places on earth are as bland as the new East London, with its ‘international standard’ apartments and Porsche showrooms. Meanwhile, back west, the furious ashes of the Grenfell Tower contain life; local identity is reasserting itself in an area which I, unfairly, was inclined to dismiss as socially and culturally moribund. If there is hope for London as a living city, it lies in the west.

Interview with Owen Jones on ‘Chavs’ and the London riots

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The sea change currently taking place in British politics would be inconceivable without Owen Jones. From his sudden rise to prominence with his book ‘Chavs’, a cogent and concise overview of the changes wrought to working class life by Thatcherism, to his always-compelling Guardian column, he’s been an ever-present positive influence on the Left during one of its most difficult periods in modern history.

In November 2011, in the wake of the success of his book, I interviewed Owen on the subject of that summer’s riots and how it related to the premise of his book. The interview was published in a small monthly left-wing publication and I’d forgotten all about it until the other day. As it’s not available online I thought I’d post it here so it doesn’t entirely disappear into the ether.

RW: First of all I’d like to ask you what kind of reaction you received when you told people what kind of book you were working on.

OJ: When I was writing the book, I struggled to tell people its title – mentioning that you’re writing a book entitled ‘Chavs’ is guaranteed to raise eyebrows. But I think people were interested in the fact I was writing a book on class which – in my view – has been neglected for so long. As much as I’d like to take the credit for the way the book has been received, it has everything to do with the fact that class has crept back on the agenda. If you deny class at a time when the pay of the FTSE 100 chief executives has gone up by 55%, while the average Briton is experiencing the biggest squeeze on living standards since the 1920s – well, you’re a Flat Earther.

RW: Would you say that the demonisation and dehumanising of the working class as encapsulated in the word ‘chav’ is also an international phenomenon? Do you know if there has been an increase in anti-white trash discourse in the US, for example?

OJ: Unequal societies provide fertile ground for demonising those ‘at the bottom’. You see it not just in the US, but also in – for example – Latin American countries, where dehumanising class-ist and racist rhetoric are often intertwined. It’s a way of rationalising inequalities – they become justified on the basis that those at the top and those at the bottom all ‘deserve’ their places.
But it’s also very much the case in both the US and the UK that individuals are expected to get on in life through their own individual efforts. Failing to do so is seen to be the product of personal failure. However, I do think Britain was unique in the nature of the all-out assault on the working-class as a collective political and social group – including the attacks on unions, council housing, industries that sustained entire communities, values like solidarity, and so on. After that, the consensus was that everyone should aspire to be middle-class – and being working-class was no longer something you were encouraged to be proud of, if you like.

RW: I wonder if you are familiar with the work of Owen Hatherley, in his depiction of the physical architecture of the New Labour years is there an affinity with your analysis of the socio-economic climate? And in the light of the increasing profile of Richard Seymour, Mark Fisher and Nina Power is it fair to talk about a new generation of radical and critical thinkers in the UK?

OJ: I’m a huge fan of Owen Hatherley. His work is very powerful because it stands as a damning indictment of New Labour, but with a very unique angle that allows you to understand the politics through the architecture. The likes of Owen Hatherley, Richard Seymour, Mark Fisher and Nina Power are brilliant, powerful left-wing writers, and the movement is very lucky to have them. But I think the emergence of a new generation of young left thinkers has everything to do with the changing political climate, than their undeniable talent. It’s just one manifestation of the radical ideas that are bubbling away among a section of young people. Having grown up in an age of reaction, it’s very heartening to see.

RW: How do the recent riots fit in with the thesis you develop in the book?

OJ: Obviously my book didn’t predict the riots, but I think there are two ways the book and the riots link together. Firstly, the book looks at how skilled, industrial jobs disappeared in a very short space of time and were replaced with fewer service sector jobs that were more insecure, had worse pay, and were less respected. While many young working-class men could leave school at 16 a generation ago and get a relatively well-paid apprenticeship that was a gateway to a long-term job, that’s no longer the case today. The fact that the rioters and looters were overwhelmingly men from poorer working-class communities who were both out of work and education is – I think – hardly surprisingly. Secondly, the book links in with how the post-riot backlash was manipulated. People were understandably and angry and scared in the aftermath of the riots. Right-wing politicians and commentators manipulated it to talk of a “feral underclass” – an escalation of the idea of the undeserving poor: they’re not just undeserving, they’re like animals. David Cameron used the aftermath to attack people on benefits, arguing that one of the solutions was to take on a welfare state that promotes “idleness”. He backed plans by councils to evict rioters and their families (i.e. collective punishment) and to remove benefits from rioters. Talk of taking away benefits is now being extended to all those who break the law. As well as establishing the principle that, if you break the law and you are poor you will be punished twice, it’s also trying to cement the idea of a lawless underclass. ‘Chavs’ tried to take on the idea we’re all middle-class, apart from a problematic rump of the old working-class. That’s a theory that – tragically – has been reinforced in the aftermath of the riots.

RW: Is the politics of aspiration that you refer to sustainable in a recessionary climate?

OJ: Individual aspiration is all about the idea of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, that there is room at the top for those who work hard enough. But at a time of protracted economic and social crisis – when people are experiencing the biggest squeeze of living standards since the 1920s through no fault of their own – that myth becomes far harder to sustain. It becomes almost farcical to argue that where you end up is a reflection of your abilities. With a collective attack on people’s rights, I hope that there is a collective response. The recent teachers’ and civil servants’ strike was a form of collective aspiration – people coming together to defend themselves from a tax on public sector workers that’s being used to pay off the deficit.

RW: And finally, given that you contribute to the Labour List website, what are your predictions and hopes for the future of the left in and outside the Labour Party, especially in the light of the Blue (and now Purple, it seems) Labour projects?

OJ: The left everywhere – in Britain and across the world – has been overwhelmed by a perfect storm since the late 1970s. There was the rise of the New Right (best embodied by Thatcherism and Reaganism, but also the juntas in Latin America); the defeats suffered by the labour movement, particularly in Britain; the capitalist triumphalism unleashed after the collapse of Stalinism – There Is No Alternative and The End of History and so on; and neo-liberal globalisation. It’s in this context that New Labour emerged. The reality is that the left still does not exist as a mass political force in the aftermath of this perfect storm, despite the crisis of capitalism that began four years ago. At the top of the Labour Party, Blairites are still very strong and there’s not a strong enough countervailing pressure coming from the left. If we’re going to have a Labour Party that properly represents the working-class majority, that means the unions using their powers far more effectively within the Party, but also a strong grassroots movement both inside and outside the Party that can drag the leadership (kicking and screaming if needs be) to a progressive position.

The Grenfell disaster should help us reconsider our indifference to homelessness

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The fire is the Grenfell tower block is still burning more than 24 hours later. Dozens have been killed and hundreds left destitute because the ‘market’ decided it was worth the risk.

The outpouring of solidarity and charity shows that pretty much everyone in the country has imagined themselves in such a situation. There’s also rage and revulsion at the economic forces and social structures that the fire lays bare. Those Conservative Party defenders criticising the ‘politicisation’ of the disaster resemble Isis supporters demanding that no one hold it responsible for bombings and beheadings.

Then there’s the slow apocalypse of individual homelessness. Is it wrong to imagine the frustration of people already homeless upon seeing the attention this catastrophe has generated? No wonder destitute people from other parts of London have apparently been turning up at the disaster site looking for food and shelter. Who wouldn’t? In Kensington and Chelsea itself one out of every 29 people is homeless. Those displaced by the disaster might count themselves lucky that their council has not followed the example of neighbouring Westminster in its proposal to make feeding them illegal, or various other boroughs in fining people more than the price of a hotel room for sleeping rough. Everyone in London knows how easy it is to find oneself between flats, stretching the hospitality of friends and family to the point where a night in a park starts to seem like a more comfortable option. It’s fair to say that probably most of London’s population lives in conditions of mild to extreme housing insecurity. It’s a slow-burning, invisible conflagration.

A sudden loss of home like that experienced by the Grenfell residents must be traumatic almost beyond repair. We help others in such situations partly in the hope that if something similar were to happen to us our neighbours would look out for us and give us refuge. The fact that similar things are happening on a global scale might give us pause to reflect on the irony that so many British people, in the wake of the Brexit vote, immediately started looking abroad for other options. Doing so is never a bad idea but our history should teach us that our plight doesn’t make us a priority for resettlement.

Nobody lives a more precarious existence in London than council or former council tenants in areas of high demand. Those out on the streets in West London right now are exactly the kind of people being turfed out of the ‘Golden Postcodes’. There’s an irony in the use of the hashtag #IamLondon in response to terrorist attacks, for only a dwindling minority of locals can afford to live there. Thanks to the hard work of Boris Johnson and central government, the city is becoming almost medievally exclusive. When we rented out our flat in East London the prospective tenants mentioned to the letting agent that it was a shame we didn’t have a better view over the (council) block opposite. Don’t worry, he said, it’ll be gone soon, oblivious to the fact that there are no current plans to get rid of it and the hundreds of people who live there. There’s a deeper logic at work, a bizarre but serendipitous seismic anomaly that only brings down those buildings which ordinary people can afford to live in. As it happens, the company which developed our building and those on adjacent streets did so with the enthusiastic support of one Brandon Lewis, then Housing Minister and proud advocate of Letting The Market Decide. The use of cheap (and apparently inflammable) cladding to cover the Grenfell Tower obeys a similar logic: if you can’t push the poor out through legislation, purposeful neglect or repossession, disguise their very presence. It’s worth the risk.

Just up the road from our flat there’s a Tesco Express with an ATM outside, next to which one or other homeless person is permanently stationed. Talking to them is always a deeply enraging experience. Any of those we step over on the way to work may have been left on the streets by a fire or kicked out by a landlord who refused to carry out essential repairs. As we pass such people, it’s easy (and understandable) to blame the media for cultivating our indifference to their plight. Actually there are ways in which we’re complicit, as the political philosopher Louis CK explains in this clip:

It’s noticeable that those who claim that people begging make thousands of pounds a day never do so themselves. There’s also the sandwich response, those who insist on buying people begging for money food instead, as though becoming homeless were the result of individual failure, rather than the result of a crime on an enormous scale, a crime which goes by the name of the market but is actually much more recognisable as the highly profitable operations of a mafia-style cartel. Complicity also means voting for parties that say that mass homelessness and near-universal levels of housing precarity are an acceptable price to pay for the prosperity of very few, or accepting without question an ideology that says the insatiable appetites of the global ‘market’ must be appeased at all cost. Taking it for granted that the lives and homes of others are worth the risk, little more than plastic chips in a giant, members-only casino where the owners always win. We need an immediate mass movement to join those left out on the street, to confront power and argue that decent, safe and affordable housing is a basic human right, not a prize in a game of Russian roulette.

I don’t understand cricket, and that’s become a problem

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The Bangladeshi guy in the shop under our apartment in Rome is puzzled. He doesn’t understand why I keep pretending that I don’t understand the rules of cricket. My pretence has been going on for months and it’s starting to grate on him. I’ll pop in for another bottle of Bucanero and he’ll joyously proclaim, England are all out and Pakistan are 117 for 2!, to which my only response is, er, so who’s winning?

I’ve explained the social context for my genuine ignorance numerous times to no avail. I think he sees it as something shameful. Maybe it is. I certainly find it a bit embarrassing. As far as he’s concerned, I’m an educated person from the country that invented the sport, so even if I didn’t understand, I surely wouldn’t want to lose face by feigning a lack of knowledge (my evident lack of patriotism is also a source of some bemusement). One issue is that he prefers to speak about cricket in English rather than Italian, and while his command of my language is considerably better than my mastery of his (restricted as it is to a handful of food words that on reflection are probably Hindi anyway), his lack of basic grammar combined with the fact that his cricket vocabulary supercedes mine in any language gets in the way of effective communication.

So I explain again that in the UK only rich people play cricket (‘posh’ is a bugger of a word to explain), that I didn’t go to the kind of school that taught and encouraged an interest in the sport. Cricket isn’t the most popular game in Britain, football is. It’s a political thing. He’s not listening. After all, he spends all day every day around Italians, and he’s not a big fan of Italy. The Italians don’t even play, let alone appreciate, cricket! Whereas in me he has a full-blown, native-born cricket enthusiast to marvel at the game with. He loves talking about cricket with me, even though the only players I can think of are Geoffrey Boycott and Johnny Wilkinson, and I can tell you even that took quite a lot of effort.

Right now there’s a tournament taking place, which as I write has reached the semi-final stage. Pakistan are beating England (I think) and tomorrow India take on Bangladesh. He’s going to close the shop for half a day to follow the game. I’m genuinely excited to see his excitement – I’ve interviewed so many IELTS candidates from India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka for whom cricket is the driving force in their lives. But half an hour ago, having endured another failed attempt to explain the contorted relationship between class and sport in British society, I promised to him and to myself that I would go and study the rules. It is, in several senses, absurd that I don’t understand what the numbers mean, how wickets relates to overs and overs to whatever the other one’s called. If there even is another one.

The problem is that I came back up here, cracked open the beer and started writing this. Ever time I think about googling the rules of cricket or opening onto one of the few parts of the Guardian website I’ve never ventured onto before (although shouldn’t I really go for The Telegraph?), I start to feel slightly dozy and more than a little bit chippy. I could not give a flying fuck about cricket. I hope Bangladesh win. I hope they crush England 7,000 runs to love. Christ, imagine what a boost it would give Boris Johnson and Michael ‘fucking’ Gove if the English cricket team were to win the Cricket World whatever-it-is right now. The bloody Daily Mail would probably photoshop a picture of a triumphant-but-dour Theresa May with Will Carling (or whoever) and call her QUEEN OF THE ASHES. So here’s to Shakib Al-Hasan, Mashrafe Mortaza, Tamim Iqbal and even (if it’s not too late) Virat Kohli. Anyone but England. Forza! everyone else.

Ps. According to the Daily Telegraph website my beloved Pakistan have apparently beaten England, I’m off to buy some Pimms :-).

Three people I met in Brazil

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Although Brazil is officially my favourite country in the world, I’ve only ever actually spent about three weeks there, which kinda puts me in the same category as that fabled tourist who ‘loves Brazil, but has only seen four square miles of it’. In my defence, I do have a Master’s degree in Brazilian and Portuguese Studies, which she almost certainly doesn’t, but then again, to be scrupulously fair, she does have the unfair advantage of never having existed, so she sort-of wins.

I existed in Brazil in November 2010, but apart from this, and this (and, er, this), I’ve never got round to writing about the country, partly because it’s such a vast, complex and dynamic place that it’s hard to know where to begin. So I’m starting at a fairly random point by writing about three people I happened to meet on my holiday, all of whom just so happen to be men and all of whom taught me something remarkable that has stayed with me. That doesn’t mean that these are the only or most extraordinary people I met, but as they almost say in Portuguese, when it comes to both writing and scratching your arse, the difficult thing is getting started.

The first was a middle-aged German who had set down his roots there and who was therefore, annoyingly for me as a self-appointed expert on Brazil, a self-appointed expert on Brazil who actually lived in Brazil. I got talking to him in a tiny bar in the Pelourinho in Salvador de Bahia, where travellers stroll around to the sound of practising Oludum drummers and small children plaintively asking for milk powder which they can then sell to buy crack. In the course of our short conversation the German kept reaching out to touch my arm, just above the elbow, almost falling off his barstool to do so. It suddenly struck me that I’d witnessed Brazilians performing the same gesture thousands of times, to the point where, without realising it, I’d started doing it myself. The fact that he made the gesture in a way which drew attention to it, whereas when I did it I did so without even noticing, gave me some hope that I was managing to fit in (it is my lifelong ambition, along with fathering a child with a perfectly round head (tick!) and winning the Nobel Prize for Blogging, to be mistaken, just once, for a Brazilian). I found it curious that it had taken another foreigner to teach me something so basic. Touch is very important in Braxil – it can be intrusive or seductive, and sometimes both. It’s part of that willingness to connect which I personally find extremely endearing. I once read about a study of how many times friends make physical contact over a coffee in different countries. The statistics were remarkable: for Brazilians it was roughly 100, in the UK about ten, and in Japan (a culture ostensibly very different from Brazil, although I tend to think there are certain unacknowleged points of comparison) zero.

On a beach somewhere to the north of Salvador I met a guy who lived in a house made of plastic bottles. I don’t remember how we got got talking; maybe he asked me for the empty bottle I was holding so he could start to build an extension. He made a living-of-sorts selling handicraft to tourists, of whom on that undeveloped stretch of coast there were few, although there were a couple of fledgling resorts. (Also, in an encouraging sign of an upturn in economic activity, two suspected drug dealers had been shot dead the previous week just next to where the bus stopped on the coast road (or so I was told by the taxi driver who kindly advised me not to walk up to the village but to allow him to let me pay him to transport me instead)). My new friend had taken full advantage of the subsidies that various PT governments had provided. He was extremely enthusiastic about the changes that Lula had wrought in his life and vehemently insisted on taking me to see where he lived. Sadly, partly because it was getting dark and partly due to a near-death experience I’d had in Salvador a few days previously (nothing to do with the German), I declined, although we did drink a bottle of cachaça and I did pay him over the odds for a couple of carancas and various other nicknacks, so we both stumbled away materially replenished and very, very drunk.

In Rio, within a couple of hours of my arrival in the country, overlooking Lapa with a jetlag-relieving drink in my hand, I fell into conversation with the young guy manning the hostel bar. He must have noticed my Portuguese accent, one which to Brazilians sounds distinctly yokelish. Moving on from the icebreaking topic of how unwittingly hilarious Portuguese people are, we got onto the related subject of colonialism. It turned out that one of my favourite Brazilian films (‘Central do Brasil‘) had been the subject of a thesis he had written. It’s the story of an older woman (whose surname is Guimarães, which is significant, as that’s the city where Portugal was ‘born’) living in Rio, where she witnesses the accidental death of the mother of a young boy from the Northeast. She takes it upon herself to rescue the young boy from the dangers of the streets and takes him to track down his father up north. It’s therefore mostly a roadtrip and (my new best friend explained) an exploration of the tangled relationship between the spinsterish colonial power and the orphaned colony, and thus about identity, my very favourite subject. It was a joyous hour or so of intense conversation, a meeting of rapidly addled minds as the Brahma bottles clinked and the maconha fumes fumed. I didn’t know at that point that my nbf was to lose his job the very next day, sacked by the expat owner for spending too much time, er, fraternising with the clientele. At the time, gazing over the undulating contours of what was clearly the friendliest and most picturesque city on earth, I found myself thinking, this is going to be the greatest holiday of my life. It wasn’t, for various reasons, but still.