One of the biggest and most dangerous lies in politics is that “things can only get better”. Instead, when things inevitably go wrong, everything feels worse due to a loss of hope, imagination and collective will. Civilisations, or at least cities, fall. “What could possibly go wrong?” say the clever people at Secret Police HQ who fund a revolution in Petrograd, or took the contract to build the Japanese Fleet in Elswick, as the grim answers measured in death and ignorance roll in decades later as vulnerable humanity pays the terrible price. The fearful powerless then seek the certainty of simplistic slogans as they don’t have the time to assess the nuances or the security as other people’s agendas dictate their lives. “They” say that in any stressed society that the numbers of “rats” who exploit, versus the number of “mice”, who work quietly to make things better, are always decisive. I judge that by the increasing percentage of people who immorally park in the disabled bit of Morrison’s carpark and remember the Dominic Cummings trip to Barnard Castle which, to me signalled that if “the lawmakers” didn’t obey the rules why should we?
Meanwhile, our city is skint; the potholes don’t get fixed, the bridge won’t swing, the other ones are knackered, metros and buses are unreliable, that thing which doesn’t control the Ouseburn tide still doesn’t and traffic policy is unjoined up stupidity with Newcastle, North Tyneside and Gateshead having different regulatory systems. Each project designed for efficiency, safety or environmental good seems to be partial, controversial, divisive and destined to fail.
Aside from the hokey-co*key LTR policy in Fenham, Jesmond and Heaton, the John Dobson Street Skateboard Prohibition Sign with the threat of a £500 fine and the binbag obscured parking charge signs between Greggs (lower) on Shields Road and the St Silas Church are ready to irritate the irritated and further annoy the already annoyed. As if to preserve the feeling of dislocation, Newcastle City Council is putting out nice videos of its aspirational plans to fix the Tyne Bridge four years after they should have done it, if the lousy government had funded it during lockdown when we had a generational opportunity to fix the road, build proper cycleways and mend the bridge.
Having a hashtag #WorTyneBridge just gives me the ick, it’s like putting “talk proper Geordie like” into Google translate. “Wor Jackie” we knew (he presented me the prize for Hoying the Welly in Heaton Park once) and Wor Flags are great artists representing the finest people in our region, but putting such linguistic fakery anywhere near an HMG advert for “Restoring an icon” is patronising and unnecessary; just fix the roads, light the streets, collect the rubbish and stop trying to capture the false positive.
Go and kill the rats swarming in Leazes Park, get the rabbits back on the New Bridge Street roundabout and get a few eyesores knocked down before the freelance voluntary demolition merchants complete their work on The Barley Mow and The Market Street Bus-Gate. Maybe get something done about the Chinese Gate which is netted because lumps were falling off it.
Finally, whilst on the subject of wildlife, consider that whatever benefits kittiwakes give us they also produce foul, smelly, fishy sh*te which has covered Dunbar Castle ruins for decades. They will do the same thing to the Tyne Bridge and the Quayside pavements and, unless we have proof that the tourist income from keen kittiwake watchers exceeds the cost of the removal of the hazardous waste they produce that necessitates protective clothing and respiratory equipment for the workers dealing with that filth we should get some eagles in or shotguns out to clean up properly.
And the European Union?
Whilst I’m showing off the many bees in my bonnet and, no doubt annoying you good people, I’ll make it worse. Many people in progressive politics hope to rejoin the EU, to “get back their star” and speculate about the many benefits that would regain the things that we have lost in the last few years. However, I was talking to a European diplomat recently and got the unwelcome answer that it’s unlikely to happen. People in his position are instructed to be moderate and circ*mspect in the expression of their opinions so people like me would be weeded out at application stage, however, as our conversation relaxed and we’d done all the obvious polite badinage I asked the question “Do you think the UK will rejoin the EU?”
I was hoping for a cheery positive response, the “Yeah no bother, mais oui monsieur, Ja, kein problem” type of thing. The whole, “the offices are still there, all you have to do is get the bus from the airport ,switch the lights in the office, on bring a kettle and some tea bags and replace the pot plants, your car park spaces are still there, see you next year and bring your flag.” Instead I heard a flat, “No, I don’t think it’ll happen.” Then a quick change of subject as his cold negative was, he knew an unwelcome and sobering opinion.
Embarrassing for both of us because he read my desperation but didn’t want to sugarcoat his language and it shows that Great Britain is gone; it’s fallen, it’s the tycoon who went bust and has moved into rented accommodation but still expects the tickets to the Palace Ball. I didn’t ask “why?” because I can imagine the price of getting the EU to trust the British government, media and electorate is too high for all of the individual countries political poker players to pay. Why should Spain agree if it doesn’t get Gibraltar? Why should Slovakia not ask for a few billion? Why shouldn’t the collective EU population not want to kick Great Britain up its big fat arse? I just hoped we’d held onto a backstage pass.
“The EU is an association of laws and rules”. I remember hearing that eight years ago from a feller called Sean Maguire, (not the great Irish fiddler), who was deputy head of the CBI in Brussels at the time as he described the antics of David Davis, our Minister for Totally Destroying the UK Economy ‘cos of Brexit or whatever that department called itself. The meeting between a supreme technocrat from Europe (maybe Tusk, I can’t remember), saying in response to Davis’s bumptious estate agent spiel saying that this process will be “win-win” that, “We will lose access to 65 million people; you will lose access to 400 million people. It’s going to be “lose-lose” and you will lose the worst.”
And so it has been, the German car makers so far being unwilling to influence the French government to allow easy second home ownership by third country nationals, the Spanish Government tightening residence requirements and EU governments prioritising the interests of their own and EU citizens over British holidaymakers and property owners. This problem could affect us up here quite badly. Continental property prices will fall as the expat-Brits come home, (“Quelle horreur Jeremy, the’re making us immigrants instead of expats” as they might opine at the Royal Costa Yacht Club), before looking at property prices in Weybridge and considering that Northumberland might just suffice, (maybe they like kittiwakes?)
The English signs abroad will be replaced, the clubs and societies bulletins will fade and “Bargain Based Brits Abroad” will be Butlinised back to Britain. Instead of pied-noirs it’ll be the revenge of the newly poor pie-eaters or what happens to Hamelin when the Pied Piper brings the rats back from the sewers. The newly enfranchised overseas voters may be the last trump card of a disgusting government frantically ransacking the sides of the settee for the last loose change but it could make a difference when we stay up all election night and see the government retain its workable minority with DUP support.
At home and the Middle East
That seems unlikely at the moment, but any administration which can pollute the country with so much despair whilst implicitly threatening that a collapse in Conservative representation will inevitably bring in the nastier lot. Truss advocates for Trump and Farage. May bought in the DUP to prop up her hostile environment and Johnson prorogued Parliament to get Brexit done and did the DUP in the process.
Kipling’s poem “Recessional” implied some fading Imperial dignity, not this Carry On Colonel Blimp farce – “Far-called, our navies melt away; On dune and headland sinks the fire: Lo, all our pomp of yesteryear is one with Neneveh and Tyre”. Meanwhile the Royal Navy nearly shoots itself with its own missile with the minister on board ready for a (so far unpublished) Trident selfie or fails to get its aircraft carriers to leave harbour cos the propeller shaft is knackered – it would never have happened if it was built in Wallsend, but Gordon fixed that for Scotland.
Meanwhile, Mosul where Nineveh is, was bombed by the Americans a few years ago is seeing Persian missiles fly over heading for Israel whilst Israel bombs the land around Lebanese Tyre. They probably have some hope though, that the bad times might be over one day, when the world realises there must be a just peace; but that’s where the jokes and flippancy end. The tragedies in the Middle East overwhelm any of my poor words.
Review: Fed Up at Live Theatre
The greatest of the many crimes of this Conservative (originally including the Liberal Democrats) government is their decision to impose starvation on children through their austerity policies and Universal Credit. I was privileged to see the revived theatrical production of “Fed Up” last Friday at Live Theatre on Newcastle Quayside. It was first performed in 2018 at locations like the Grainger Market and the Central Library and based its writing on the real stories, testimonies and words collected with care and patience over months by Silvie Fisch and her “Foodbank Histories” team at the Newcastle University Oral History Dept. That unchallengeable authenticity gives the play its immense power.
The cast doesn’t pretend that they are the personal victims of the universally discredited government that behaves more like a hostile occupying power than a responsible administration, they don’t have to. Instead they tell the story using the simple device of “once upon a time there was a boy who hadn’t eaten for three days…” Then they tell the story.
The story itself doesn’t need much description about the humiliation, stupidity, degradation and wastefulness of starving children. The story that things used to be just about ok but then Universal Credit was announced at the Conservative Party Conference in 2010 and then voted for in parliament by the Conservative and Liberal Democrat Parties in The Welfare Reform Act 2012. That mechanism of digitised terror by default seeds the future with troubles that anyone can see coming a mile off.
The story of the feller who said he was born poor, worked all his life to survive and would die as a “poor old man” made the thought of the young kids born into poverty now, the undernourished, the frightened, the ones who don’t say that they are cold, hungry, ashamed and silenced even more immediate and more atrocious. The reminders of the lockdown discipline of “hands, face, space”, clapping the NHS and the community cohesion being utterly betrayed by the Downing Street Tory parties was unforgettable and excoriating.
The lockdown poverty of no school meals until Rashford intervened along, it should be said with thousands of football fans round the country funding foodbanks instead of pay per view. The Two Pieces of Toast for Tea told the story that is recognisable yet informative.
The minor quibbles I have are tiny things; the attention on Man United’s Rashford, (who scores against us), when the whole Fans Supporting Foodbanks network and millions of fans helped feed the hungry, was one. The other was the vaguely clumsy “Spectre of Austerity” referencing Marx (I’m told the original translation said “Hobgoblin stalking Europe” not spectre, but I can’t be bothered to check) and the philosopher whose followers committed collectivisation, the Holodomor and Pol Pot famines isn’t someone I’d consult to sort our food poverty out.
However, they’re kids and they are entitled to their rebellion and the concluding echoing, universal, unanimous cry that we’re all “fed up” spoke to my heart and soul because it’s so true. This production should go on TV soon and might achieve the “cut through” that Mr. Bates vs The Post Office did, it deserves to because this is a story that will be told over and over again.
What next?
There are, it is true incredible community responses to that hunger. The work of the foodbanks feeding the thousands, the volunteers, the collectors, the mutual aid groups doing the hyper-local work in the neighbourhoods, the pantries helping the just about not starving and people everywhere reacting to the emergency doesn’t diminish the overwhelming need to stop this nonsense now. The NUFC Fans Foodbank collection the next morning including a regular bucket shaking appearance from our Police and Crime Commissioner from 10.30am to kick off at 12.30pm netted £4520 which is amazing, but poverty can’t be solved by charity; it requires parliament and the courts.
It requires the actions of government funding the feeding kids at school then keeping community kitchens open and implementing right to food. That’ll save a fortune in mental health and community care as well as being the preventative medicine to produce a healthier, more active and productive economy. In the short term, it requires emergency food distribution for those in need and it requires a Real Living Wage to be implemented with trade union cooperation to ensure that no one in our country ever starves again.
It’s not charity, it’s not even solidarity, it is basic common sense to create a better country. That’s where you come in. Voting is your sacred duty as a citizen and you should treat it as a serious responsibility, not a consumer trend. If you vote like you’re picking from an unsatisfactory menu, this could go wrong because, the menu is all the cafe has got right now you’re voting to get rid of this government and replace it with something better. You must vote to ensure that future government has the support of local, municipal and regional partners to reduce the amount of coalition horse-trading that delivered expensive carrier bags and Universal Credit and, instead produce something decent.
There’s loads to do, too much for one mere five year administration, and if you don’t fancy forgoing the pleasures of one or two of your aspirations about foreign policy or tactical priorities about cycle lanes then think about the kids going to school hungry today. Only the Labour Party, despite its faults and issues can change the whole country now and then build the political process of lobbying that government to encourage a best possible future. The time is coming when the Tory Party from 2010 will be disgraced for generations, but the Labour Party that lost to them for 14 years will be despaired of and their position fragile. The 1945 landslide was out of power by 1951.
In the face of all of the tragedies at home and abroad, maybe we need stop the lamentations for what we have lost, and grab what we can retain, a decent society at ease with itself with hope for a better future as it’s built on wide and diverse foundations. A Greater Britain, with friends and customers everywhere, not a Little England waiting for its recessional doom. The British Empire is gone 3 generations ago, and the British European Dream was shattered by lies, knaves and fools in 2016. It’s over, but it could yet get worse.
Into the future
An English Nationalist Party emerging from the slow-motion Tory crash, boosted by the humiliation of EU returning refugee overseas votes with Farage, Johnson, Truss, Patel, (even Gove who would probably assure everyone that he came from Berwick really) would do very well with a complicit media as it feasts on the national corpse.
They will sniff out and feed off every split in the Labour Party and promote every success of the lonely opportunists and egotists on the left, who pretend that they alone have the answer, whilst we all know that a movement is a team of millions. Insulting Kier Starmer, or our local MPs by having a go at what they haven’t had the chance to implement and blaming them for the actions they have not ordered as they conduct a campaign where a hostile media seek every single opportunity to highlight any possible “inconsistency of message” is self-indulgent to treasonous.
Live Youth Theatre has just shown the way with a passionate advocacy of dignity, family, education and hope. Their future deserves the serious attention of those of us adults with ID who are registered to vote. The next few weeks, months and years is a time for old concepts of unity, discipline and consensus, and when we can feed all of the children, when foodbanks are a despised memory we can perhaps aim for promotion to a bigger league of better nations. Then, when people have full bellies, warm houses and friendly neighbourhoods, we can talk about EU accession or the philosophical perfectability of humankind via joined up political action. Until then let’s not jeopardise the future because then we’ll really be Fed Up. Let’s not find out what that looks like.
