LETTER FROM LONDON JUNE 2015: LOOKING FOR UTOPIA


I have had a busy month providing copy on the 150th Anniversary of Portobello and Goldborne Markets as well as the concurrent InTransit arts festival. More of this later. One thing that the month has reminded me is the way in which when I was immersed in work ‘the news’, massacres, financial crisis, coups, civil wars, famine became just a vague background blur, not really registering. This is how it is in the new globalised world. It takes a particular level of outlandishness, or now an exceptional degree of barbarism to pierce this fog. Butchering people as they lay sunbathing on a beach would do it.
As it happens I stayed in Sousse a few years back, possibly in the hotel targeted. I cannot remember the name of the hotel[1], but it does not matter, I know the beach. I preferred to lie beside the pool and that may have brought me a few precious minutes. Though as far as IS/Daesh are concerned it could have been a beach anywhere full of ‘Kafirs.’ I have lain on many beaches, daydreaming in that somewhat strange state called sunbathing. It would be difficult to imagine a more defenceless state of affairs in which to confront a machine gun wielding Islamist fanatic. Someone though has imagined it, Michael Houellebecq. In his novel Platform, in which sunbathers are massacred by Islamist fanatics shouting how great is God?  It’s worth noting that his description of Islam as a stupid religion landed Houellebecq in court. Whether Islam is a stupid religion or not the idea that such atrocities have ‘nothing to do with Islam,’ certainly is extraordinarily stupid, and, despite this nonsense being trotted out by the Home Secretary this morning, is finally starting to crumble in public, as it has long since in private;[2] Baroness Warsi notwithstanding.

I have recently finished reading ‘Guernica and Total War,’ by Ian Patteson. Guernica, becoming a byword for atrocity and the use of terror as a weapon of war. The casualty figures in the Basque town, 1, 654 people were killed and 889 wounded, were to be literally dwarfed by the mass bombings of the World War to follow, a war ending with the ultimate obscenity of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Our capacity for atrocity just keeps on keeping on.
Interestingly Franco, and the German Condor legion, - who carried out the attack, - denied all responsibility, grotesquely seeking to blame the Basques themselves. Now our contemporary theocratic fascist’s film their barbarism in great detail, so that they might boast to the whole world the mechanisms they use to inflict pain, torture and death. It may be true that they love death more than they love life, though they also certainly love inflicting it.

So against a background of beach towels covering up the dead and news of another assault on Kobane, aimed at killing as many non-combatants as possible. Children, women, the elderly all slaughtered for…well I suppose because they could be. I was travelling to the Victoria and Albert, [V&A], museum to participate in an exploration of Utopia. 

Given the history of the last century the search for Utopia has understandably fallen out of fashion. Too many mass graves mark the most recent attempts to build a perfect society. Whilst on a more personal level one person’s Utopia can be another’s dystopia. Thus it was brave of the ‘InTransit’ festival to co-produce ‘An Other World,’ particularly in conjunction with the Neo Futurist
The Founders of Futurism
Collective,- Futurism having been so badly tainted by its association with Fascism. The result was a collage of ideas, images, monologues, song and dance flirting with notions of Utopia. What the event lacked in coherence it made up for in moments of considerable beauty. Impresario, and artistic Director of the Neo Futurist Collective [NFC], Giuseppe Marinetti (AKA Joseph Young), providing a running thread to the proceedings,
It was difficult not to notice the predominance of the past in Mr Marinetti’s presentation, particularly those intense periods, the early 1900’s and the 1960’s when optimism combined with technology and revolutionary ideas to transform the intellectual landscape and, in the case of the 1960’s, society itself. How distant some of that ardour and revolutionary optimism now seems, as 1968 joins 1848 in the history books and as the decades that followed have seen the concerted counter-attack of reaction. It has been a counterattack replete with irony, with the left now the standard bearers for censorship and the curtailing of free speech, and many on the right fighting against religious bigotry and censorship.

The Old Etonians are back in power, though no longer the patrician type constrained by a noblesse oblige. These ‘Bullingdon boys’ know the price of everything and the value of nothing. The imagination, the idea of self-supporting communities, the very spirit of the 60’s has no value to people like George Osborne,* indeed such an ideology interferes with the unfettered operation of capitalism. Though of course the unfettered operation of capitalism, or more accurately the City and multi-National corporations, is the very stuff of Osborne’s Utopia.

The final act of the event was the reading of The Peoples Manifesto, part of Revolution #10 http://www.revolution10.uk/ a follow on from the Beatles White Album track Revolution 9. A vox populi of ‘ordinary’ peoples wishes for a government. You can read the full manifesto on the website above.

Of course if you ask people what they want they often want contradictory things, and what you end up with is populist rhetoric, as was evinced when the manifesto was read out. Guaranteeing a minimum income for all and ‘living within our means’ may not be mutually compatible. Whilst abolishing all the armed forces at the same time as recognising that, “Our rights are never safe, there is always someone ready to take them away,” would seem foolish.
But there was also much in what people voiced to hearten and indeed inspire. People it seems are not governed solely by greed and self-interest.


Leaving the comfortable atmosphere of the lecture theatre and walking through the garden that lies at the heart of the V&A I watched children playing in the fountain whilst their parents sitting in deck chairs basked in the afternoon sunshine. Of course if I were an Islamist Jihadi I would have just seen lots of juicy targets.

Whatever Utopia is we are a long way from it.

* Unless that is it can be marketed as a T shirt, or used in a clever advertising campaign.  



[1] What I do remember is the courtesy and open hospitality of the Tunisians, so much more relaxed than Moroccans or Algerians. It is this quality in Tunisians that Daesh hate and is seeking to destroy.
[2] For anyone in the UK with access to BBC Iplayer it is worth watching last Sunday’s show to see this nonsensical statement pounded to rubble.

Popular posts from this blog

NESRINE MALIK AND THE UNSUNG VIRTUES OF HYPOCRISY

INTERVIEW WITH TOM VAGUE

LONDON BELONGS TO ME PART ONE