THIS ENGLAND
Recently the BBC’s news magazine programme Newsnight carried a report concerning the threat to the Library service across the country. As part of the debate a young man from the Institute of Economic Affairs,[ IEA], a right wing pressure group, asserted that there were “...thousands of alternatives to the public library system.” When asked to name one he said that there were lots of cheap books available on e-bay! This cretinous response, was stupid at so many different levels. Leaving to one side the idea that everyone has access to the Internet with a degree of surplus income to spend on second hand books, it misses, I suspect intentionally, the whole purpose of the ‘public’ library. Caught in a Thatcherite time warp, for these people there is no such thing as society.
At the weekend the government released some of the weakest reasons given by fraudulent benefit claimants for all of us to have a good giggle over. This is of course part of a broad strategy to undermine the validity of benefits for those who are unable to work, or for whom no work is available. In this narrative all but a tiny minority are presented as scroungers, the very reverse of the truth.. I incidentally look forward to a similar exercise in lists of bankers excuses for continuing to accrue large bonuses, despite having virtually wrecked the economy, though suspect I may wait in vain.
Again a spokesperson from the IEA appeared on the BBC declaring that at least one quarter of those on incapacity benefits were capable of work. No proof was provided, but such ‘facts’ were 'common knowledge.' This unpleasant little organisation has formed an unspoken alliance with another Tory front organisation, which masquerades as being independent, The Taxpayers Alliance. This unpleasant double act is now being presented to us a the settled opinion of ‘middle England.’ For these people the only valid citizen is the taxpayer, for the unemployed, for students, for claimants of any description there can be no truly legitimate role.
Amongst the squalid and corrupt phenomenon that represents the FIFA affair there was a give-away line from the morally bankrupt Mr Sepp Blatter during his Ceaușescu style press conference, he described FIFA as a ‘family.’ Now in my time I have worked as a manager, sometimes as a fire-fighter working with teams in the voluntary sector experiencing difficulty; as soon as someone informed me, as they sometimes did, that the place was ‘like a family,’ I knew I was in trouble. Families being places with unspoken resentments, anger, jealousy, skeletons in cupboards, mixed feelings, love and sometimes hate. My own weary feeling was always ‘well, you have no business being a family, grow up and get professional.’ Though there are of course other family values, those of the Corleone clan and it seems that it is these particular family values that FIFA has so closely embraced.
In Barnsley the police are apparently intending to ‘clampdown’ on public swearing, the boys in blue now to become the morality police.*
Swearing is one of those curious human phenomena, attaching particular negative values to certain words, creating ‘bad’ language. Swearing it would seem it universal, and for some reason I always enjoyed swearing in German. The Russians apparently have the largest vocabulary of expletives in the world.
The poet Lious McNiece described swearing as one of the pleasures of life and there is something truly satisfying about a loud declaration, a string of expletives exploding into the room, or a quite ‘bollocks’ muttered when being subjected to boredom or bombast. I swear all the time, though like to savour particular expletives for the right moment. As Stephen Fry, also a confessed swearer, hardly an example of inarticulacy, points out, the silly idea that swearing indicates a small vocabulary is a complete nonsense, some of the most erudite are masters of the art of the curse, and a well placed fuck from someone with an obvious command of language can have a wonderfully liberating effect. On his death bed George V is famously said to have uttered the phrase ‘bugger Bogner’ the comic effect of this phrase solely created by its regal origins.
Now here I am not defending the stream of expletives, little more than a verbal tic, emanating from the mouths of, usually, abusive drunken young men and more depressingly young women. This is dialogue at its least imaginative, sometimes combined with threatening behaviour, which is already a criminal offence. However seeking to criminalise swearing, another intrusion by the state into areas it has no business involving itself in, is likely to be as successful as the so called ‘war on drugs.’
*Though I also wonder at the level of language in your average police canteen.
At the weekend the government released some of the weakest reasons given by fraudulent benefit claimants for all of us to have a good giggle over. This is of course part of a broad strategy to undermine the validity of benefits for those who are unable to work, or for whom no work is available. In this narrative all but a tiny minority are presented as scroungers, the very reverse of the truth.. I incidentally look forward to a similar exercise in lists of bankers excuses for continuing to accrue large bonuses, despite having virtually wrecked the economy, though suspect I may wait in vain.
Again a spokesperson from the IEA appeared on the BBC declaring that at least one quarter of those on incapacity benefits were capable of work. No proof was provided, but such ‘facts’ were 'common knowledge.' This unpleasant little organisation has formed an unspoken alliance with another Tory front organisation, which masquerades as being independent, The Taxpayers Alliance. This unpleasant double act is now being presented to us a the settled opinion of ‘middle England.’ For these people the only valid citizen is the taxpayer, for the unemployed, for students, for claimants of any description there can be no truly legitimate role.
Amongst the squalid and corrupt phenomenon that represents the FIFA affair there was a give-away line from the morally bankrupt Mr Sepp Blatter during his Ceaușescu style press conference, he described FIFA as a ‘family.’ Now in my time I have worked as a manager, sometimes as a fire-fighter working with teams in the voluntary sector experiencing difficulty; as soon as someone informed me, as they sometimes did, that the place was ‘like a family,’ I knew I was in trouble. Families being places with unspoken resentments, anger, jealousy, skeletons in cupboards, mixed feelings, love and sometimes hate. My own weary feeling was always ‘well, you have no business being a family, grow up and get professional.’ Though there are of course other family values, those of the Corleone clan and it seems that it is these particular family values that FIFA has so closely embraced.
In Barnsley the police are apparently intending to ‘clampdown’ on public swearing, the boys in blue now to become the morality police.*
Swearing is one of those curious human phenomena, attaching particular negative values to certain words, creating ‘bad’ language. Swearing it would seem it universal, and for some reason I always enjoyed swearing in German. The Russians apparently have the largest vocabulary of expletives in the world.
The poet Lious McNiece described swearing as one of the pleasures of life and there is something truly satisfying about a loud declaration, a string of expletives exploding into the room, or a quite ‘bollocks’ muttered when being subjected to boredom or bombast. I swear all the time, though like to savour particular expletives for the right moment. As Stephen Fry, also a confessed swearer, hardly an example of inarticulacy, points out, the silly idea that swearing indicates a small vocabulary is a complete nonsense, some of the most erudite are masters of the art of the curse, and a well placed fuck from someone with an obvious command of language can have a wonderfully liberating effect. On his death bed George V is famously said to have uttered the phrase ‘bugger Bogner’ the comic effect of this phrase solely created by its regal origins.
Now here I am not defending the stream of expletives, little more than a verbal tic, emanating from the mouths of, usually, abusive drunken young men and more depressingly young women. This is dialogue at its least imaginative, sometimes combined with threatening behaviour, which is already a criminal offence. However seeking to criminalise swearing, another intrusion by the state into areas it has no business involving itself in, is likely to be as successful as the so called ‘war on drugs.’
*Though I also wonder at the level of language in your average police canteen.
