Tuesday, June 29, 2004
Glastonbury, faith and pleasure
Tribune, 2 July 2004
The Guardian took a double-decker Routemaster bus to Glastonbury last weekend, in the hope that some of the stars of the festival would hop aboard between (or, more likely, during) cloudbursts and provide the paper with some free copy.
Sir Paul McCartney, the English National Opera and the now apparently drug-free Gallagher brothers all forgot their bus passes. But there were still more than enough sort-of-star visitors popping by to justify the expenditure on the Jack Daniels, Jim Beam and limitless supplies of loo paper.
(It's always a good festival crowdpuller, that last one. I once had the inspired idea of giving away a free toilet roll with every copy of the New Statesman we sold at Glastonbury. We got through around a thousand – and some of the purchasers were even compos mentis enough to know which one to read and which one to use for other purposes.)
One of the Guardian bus passengers was Michael Franti, now with Spearhead and formerly with the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy (which is possibly the only band in British music history ever to have insisted to its advertising agency that its records must be advertised in a political weekly).
Franti is not long back from Baghdad. He told the Guardian: "I wanted to go there and see first hand what was happening. I just took my guitar and went over there. I said, 'I want a tourist visa', and they just looked at me like, 'Yo maan, if you're stupid enough to come here, just come on in!'"
The way Franti tells it, he walked the streets of Baghdad, playing for anyone who would listen. "I wrote a song with just one word, 'habibi'. Habibi means, like, sweetheart, and it's the thing that everyone says, like 'Yo dude, what's up?'" he explains. "I sang it on the streets, and crowds would gather round and just with that one word people would open their hearts up."
A few years ago, I travelled with a sound system across southern Africa from Cape Town to Lusaka, putting on impromptu "raves" (for want of a better word) at various open-air venues en route. So I understand the power of music to bring together the most unlikely participants in the most improbable places.
Even so, the notion of playing in Baghdad at the moment seems to be stretching the old hippie festival ethic to its limits. Some local Christians once erected a huge wooden cross on the ridge overlooking the Glastonbury festival site in a kind of protest against the pagan goings-on in the valley below. The mind boggles at how the imams and ayatollahs of unreconstructed Islam might react to even a shadow of this bacchanalian festivity.
The Guardian dipped the tiniest of toes into this gaping cultural divide by taking its Iraqi columnist, Ghaith Abdul Ahad, along for the ride to Glastonbury this year. Ahad had never even been to Britain before, let alone a gathering along such lines as these. So culture shock was to be expected, and shock was what he got.
But it wasn't the open sexuality, the drug-taking, the drunkenness, or any of the other works of Satan that are haram, or forbidden, to Muslims that constituted the biggest shock. Rather, according to Ahad, "The shock came from the actual feeling of the festival, from seeing so many people together in one place, enjoying themselves despite the amazing amount of mud and rain."
For someone who had previously experienced only two kinds of festival – the stage-managed "celebrations" of Saddam and all his works, or the self-flagellating processions of the great Shia ceremonies – the "true sense of having fun", of simply enjoying oneselves, was something new.
Ahad makes what I can only assume to be a tongue-in-cheek suggestion to take Glastonbury to Iraq. It would, he says, "be a great opportunity for all those organisations that usually set up tents and hand flyers to people half-drunk talking about the poverty in the world to do the same thing in a place where poverty and hunger is the norm".
As indeed it would. But is it – could it ever be – compatible with unreconstructed Islam? Or, for that matter, with any other fundamentalist religious doctrine that seeks not only that its own adherents stick to its particular version of the "straight and narrow" but that everyone else does also?
Those of us of the Bacchanalian tendency – which, judging by the continuing success of Glastonbury, now stretches well into the British mainstream – have no problem with the essential arts of compromise that allow us to indulge our passions while others keep theirs in check. Can the same be said of those who have a different take on faith and pleasure?
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Tribune, 2 July 2004
The Guardian took a double-decker Routemaster bus to Glastonbury last weekend, in the hope that some of the stars of the festival would hop aboard between (or, more likely, during) cloudbursts and provide the paper with some free copy.
Sir Paul McCartney, the English National Opera and the now apparently drug-free Gallagher brothers all forgot their bus passes. But there were still more than enough sort-of-star visitors popping by to justify the expenditure on the Jack Daniels, Jim Beam and limitless supplies of loo paper.
(It's always a good festival crowdpuller, that last one. I once had the inspired idea of giving away a free toilet roll with every copy of the New Statesman we sold at Glastonbury. We got through around a thousand – and some of the purchasers were even compos mentis enough to know which one to read and which one to use for other purposes.)
One of the Guardian bus passengers was Michael Franti, now with Spearhead and formerly with the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy (which is possibly the only band in British music history ever to have insisted to its advertising agency that its records must be advertised in a political weekly).
Franti is not long back from Baghdad. He told the Guardian: "I wanted to go there and see first hand what was happening. I just took my guitar and went over there. I said, 'I want a tourist visa', and they just looked at me like, 'Yo maan, if you're stupid enough to come here, just come on in!'"
The way Franti tells it, he walked the streets of Baghdad, playing for anyone who would listen. "I wrote a song with just one word, 'habibi'. Habibi means, like, sweetheart, and it's the thing that everyone says, like 'Yo dude, what's up?'" he explains. "I sang it on the streets, and crowds would gather round and just with that one word people would open their hearts up."
A few years ago, I travelled with a sound system across southern Africa from Cape Town to Lusaka, putting on impromptu "raves" (for want of a better word) at various open-air venues en route. So I understand the power of music to bring together the most unlikely participants in the most improbable places.
Even so, the notion of playing in Baghdad at the moment seems to be stretching the old hippie festival ethic to its limits. Some local Christians once erected a huge wooden cross on the ridge overlooking the Glastonbury festival site in a kind of protest against the pagan goings-on in the valley below. The mind boggles at how the imams and ayatollahs of unreconstructed Islam might react to even a shadow of this bacchanalian festivity.
The Guardian dipped the tiniest of toes into this gaping cultural divide by taking its Iraqi columnist, Ghaith Abdul Ahad, along for the ride to Glastonbury this year. Ahad had never even been to Britain before, let alone a gathering along such lines as these. So culture shock was to be expected, and shock was what he got.
But it wasn't the open sexuality, the drug-taking, the drunkenness, or any of the other works of Satan that are haram, or forbidden, to Muslims that constituted the biggest shock. Rather, according to Ahad, "The shock came from the actual feeling of the festival, from seeing so many people together in one place, enjoying themselves despite the amazing amount of mud and rain."
For someone who had previously experienced only two kinds of festival – the stage-managed "celebrations" of Saddam and all his works, or the self-flagellating processions of the great Shia ceremonies – the "true sense of having fun", of simply enjoying oneselves, was something new.
Ahad makes what I can only assume to be a tongue-in-cheek suggestion to take Glastonbury to Iraq. It would, he says, "be a great opportunity for all those organisations that usually set up tents and hand flyers to people half-drunk talking about the poverty in the world to do the same thing in a place where poverty and hunger is the norm".
As indeed it would. But is it – could it ever be – compatible with unreconstructed Islam? Or, for that matter, with any other fundamentalist religious doctrine that seeks not only that its own adherents stick to its particular version of the "straight and narrow" but that everyone else does also?
Those of us of the Bacchanalian tendency – which, judging by the continuing success of Glastonbury, now stretches well into the British mainstream – have no problem with the essential arts of compromise that allow us to indulge our passions while others keep theirs in check. Can the same be said of those who have a different take on faith and pleasure?
Tuesday, June 15, 2004
A rush of blood to the head
Tribune column, 18 June 2004
In the end, I had a rush of blood to the head and voted for Respect. I think it was David Aaronovitch who did it. It was such a snide and unpleasant little reportage that he wrote in the Guardian about some ill-attended Respect meeting a few days before the election that it brought out all my 'Well sod you then!' infantile leftism on behalf of the outside-left underdogs. Like a large chunk of the electorate last Thursday, I suspect, I decided that a more considered opinion on how my vote should be cast could wait until the next election.
But now we really must start to get serious.
For reasons that I outlined in this column before the election, the rise of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) poses more immediate problems – both tactically and strategically – for the Tories than Labour. UKIP could do to the Tories what the SDP did to Labour in the 1980s by taking away enough of their potential supporters to fatally weaken the opposition vote. Five to 10 per cent for UKIP in a general election would see Labour and the Lib Dems laughing all the way to Westminster.
There is a more important issue at stake here, however, than short-term electoral advantage. UKIP represents the sour old face of narrow English nationalism. (Forget about the UK bit of the title: the party is Little Englandish to its bitter, malcontented core.)
It's the suburban anti-asylum seeker sorts, who've never spoken to an asylum seeker in their lives. It's the petrol pump desperadoes who put cheap motoring before schools and hospitals (and whose idea of civil liberty is the inalienable right to roads free from speed cameras). It's the subsidy-hugging irrationals who think the world owes no one a living except themselves. It's the anti-government angries, who are against not just this government but any government that isn't only for them.
It's England as it never was imagining an England that will never be. And although UKIP may be loathe to admit as much, far from being something specifically English, it's actually a localised eruption of a more widespread European disease, with long-suppurating sores such as the French Front National now being joined by the likes of the League of Polish Families – and UKIP.
In the glowering visage of Robert Kilroy-Silk, moreover, England has now got its very own shock-jock tinpot demagogue to compare with the worst of Europe's far-right ranters. Kilroy's wild-eyed interjection signalling an intent to 'wreck' the European parliament looked for all the world like the action of a man who's been mainlining vitriol for so long that he's run out of veins to stick the needle in.
Eyes bulging and arteries throbbing like a suntanned Norman Tebbit on amphetamines, Kilroy has the presence of an Ian Paisley about him, but without the belief in any god other than himself – or of a latterday John Tyndall, but with a more certain conviction about his own perfection. If there's another ego in UKIP that's half as big as Kilroy's, the entire continent of Europe will not have space enough to contain the explosion when they clash.
You wonder, when you see him in action, how or why this man ever served as a Labour MP. And then you recall the political trajectory of one Oswald Moseley.
The times are different. Kilroy is no Moseley. (He lacks the refinement, for a start.) UKIP has no programme beyond 'wrecking' the European Union and no prospects beyond the European elections. Most of their supporters would no more like to see Kilroy in Downing Street than I would George Galloway if the prospect should somehow ever become a real one.
Yet the ragtag collection of prejudices that rallied millions under the UKIP banner represents an ideological army with which the left must do battle. The British National Party may be a more obviously nasty political enemy on the far right, but in essence UKIP is only a more respectable manifestatation of the same forces.
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I only managed to vote at all last Thursday by breaking the electoral law. Although not living in one of the all-postal voting regions, I nevertheless have a postal vote. Having managed to delay posting it until the last-possible minute (a journalists and deadlines thing), I suddenly realised that I'd not got anyone to sign the new slip that must accompany the ballot paper verifying who you are.
With just five minutes left before the last post that would give my vote a chance of arriving in time, I filled in and signed the paper myself. Did anyone notice? Will the police come knocking on my door?
I doubt it, but the whole postal voting system seems so open to abuse that a lot more thought needs to be given before rolling it out nationwide.
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Tribune column, 18 June 2004
In the end, I had a rush of blood to the head and voted for Respect. I think it was David Aaronovitch who did it. It was such a snide and unpleasant little reportage that he wrote in the Guardian about some ill-attended Respect meeting a few days before the election that it brought out all my 'Well sod you then!' infantile leftism on behalf of the outside-left underdogs. Like a large chunk of the electorate last Thursday, I suspect, I decided that a more considered opinion on how my vote should be cast could wait until the next election.
But now we really must start to get serious.
For reasons that I outlined in this column before the election, the rise of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) poses more immediate problems – both tactically and strategically – for the Tories than Labour. UKIP could do to the Tories what the SDP did to Labour in the 1980s by taking away enough of their potential supporters to fatally weaken the opposition vote. Five to 10 per cent for UKIP in a general election would see Labour and the Lib Dems laughing all the way to Westminster.
There is a more important issue at stake here, however, than short-term electoral advantage. UKIP represents the sour old face of narrow English nationalism. (Forget about the UK bit of the title: the party is Little Englandish to its bitter, malcontented core.)
It's the suburban anti-asylum seeker sorts, who've never spoken to an asylum seeker in their lives. It's the petrol pump desperadoes who put cheap motoring before schools and hospitals (and whose idea of civil liberty is the inalienable right to roads free from speed cameras). It's the subsidy-hugging irrationals who think the world owes no one a living except themselves. It's the anti-government angries, who are against not just this government but any government that isn't only for them.
It's England as it never was imagining an England that will never be. And although UKIP may be loathe to admit as much, far from being something specifically English, it's actually a localised eruption of a more widespread European disease, with long-suppurating sores such as the French Front National now being joined by the likes of the League of Polish Families – and UKIP.
In the glowering visage of Robert Kilroy-Silk, moreover, England has now got its very own shock-jock tinpot demagogue to compare with the worst of Europe's far-right ranters. Kilroy's wild-eyed interjection signalling an intent to 'wreck' the European parliament looked for all the world like the action of a man who's been mainlining vitriol for so long that he's run out of veins to stick the needle in.
Eyes bulging and arteries throbbing like a suntanned Norman Tebbit on amphetamines, Kilroy has the presence of an Ian Paisley about him, but without the belief in any god other than himself – or of a latterday John Tyndall, but with a more certain conviction about his own perfection. If there's another ego in UKIP that's half as big as Kilroy's, the entire continent of Europe will not have space enough to contain the explosion when they clash.
You wonder, when you see him in action, how or why this man ever served as a Labour MP. And then you recall the political trajectory of one Oswald Moseley.
The times are different. Kilroy is no Moseley. (He lacks the refinement, for a start.) UKIP has no programme beyond 'wrecking' the European Union and no prospects beyond the European elections. Most of their supporters would no more like to see Kilroy in Downing Street than I would George Galloway if the prospect should somehow ever become a real one.
Yet the ragtag collection of prejudices that rallied millions under the UKIP banner represents an ideological army with which the left must do battle. The British National Party may be a more obviously nasty political enemy on the far right, but in essence UKIP is only a more respectable manifestatation of the same forces.
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I only managed to vote at all last Thursday by breaking the electoral law. Although not living in one of the all-postal voting regions, I nevertheless have a postal vote. Having managed to delay posting it until the last-possible minute (a journalists and deadlines thing), I suddenly realised that I'd not got anyone to sign the new slip that must accompany the ballot paper verifying who you are.
With just five minutes left before the last post that would give my vote a chance of arriving in time, I filled in and signed the paper myself. Did anyone notice? Will the police come knocking on my door?
I doubt it, but the whole postal voting system seems so open to abuse that a lot more thought needs to be given before rolling it out nationwide.
Tuesday, June 01, 2004
Gorgeous George and the St Tropez factor
Tribune column, 4 June 2004
I suppose we ought to be grateful to Joan Collins. The Seventies' soft-porn star from St Tropez has at least enlivened the forthcoming Euro elections by hitching her absentee wagon to Robert Kilroy-Silk and the UK Independence Party. In the salons of Lower Holloway we now debate into the wee hours which of three Euro-egos we would least like to wake up next to on the morning after the election. The choice is between Collins, Kilroy or the outside left's own version of a celebrity candidate, "Gorgeous George" Galloway.
This ungallant political parlour game is justified on the basis that each of these characters, in their own inimitable fashion, thinks of him or herself as among the sexiest creatures in God's creation. And each of them, in their own way, shares the same vanity of believing that their supposed popular appeal in the groin department will translate into votes in the ballot box.
My prediction, for what it's worth, is that the UKIP will indeed mop up enough low-level prejudice against Europe, immigrants and the "go soft on crime brigade" (whoever they may be these days) to add to its existing representation at Strasbourg. This may be no bad thing from a Labour Party election strategist's point of view, since it will undermine both the BNP vote and any developing Tory revival without posing a serious threat to Labour beyond the Euro elections.
At the same time, a perceived three-pronged right-wing challenge from the UKIP, BNP and Conservatives will probably prove scary enough to keep sufficient Labour supporters on board to avoid any effective electoral challenge from the left. The unholy alliance of the Socialist Workers Party, the Muslim Association of Britain and George Galloway under the Respect banner seems unlikely to get any closer to an electoral breakthrough from the left than past endeavours along similar lines. It might even reduce the effectiveness of the left-of-Labour vote by splitting the support that would otherwise have gone to the Greens.
In short, I suspect that Labour will come out of these elections less damaged than it might have feared under the circumstances. The Liberal Democrats, no doubt, will make inroads here, there and everywhere in a scrappy, inconsistent sort of way. But they'll probably lose ground, as well as take it, as a result of the Conservative revival.
The Conservatives, for their part, may re-establish themselves as a competent opposition, and even retake a few more of those places in local government that you wonder how they ever lost. But they're unlikely to do any better than that; and a competent opposition does not a government-in-waiting make. Michael Howard, moreover, may discover that the Euro Curse that Margaret Thatcher bequeathed to his party will re-emerge to haunt him as it has his predecessors – except that this time it has Joan Collins's face on it.
As for the purported challenge from the left, well make me eat the unread copies of this column if I'm wrong, but it really doesn't feel as though Respect is on a roll to me. If George Galloway squeaks home on a low London turnout I'll be surprised. If any other Respect candidate gets to represent us in Europe, I'll be flabbergasted.
The English left's best big chance of busting open Labour's electoral monopoly came and went with Ken Livingstone. It was possible to imagine a Livingstone-led alliance of the left polling perhaps 10-15 per cent of the national vote in elections such as these, and doing a Scottish Socialist Party south of the border. Livingstone in London has displayed just the mix of populism, pragmatism and principle that can reach beyond the ghettoes of the outside left. But with him back in the Labour fold, no one else comes close to creating the same crossover appeal.
If this sounds as though I'm saying that personalities are more important than policies when it comes to getting elected, it's because to some extent I am. At any rate, it's important who you get to project the policies and how.
But in the longer term, serious electoral ambition requires serious electoral organisation. That's one reason why Ken Livingstone decided against remaining an outsider: even the biggest personalities find it almost impossible to go it alone.
It also requires commitment that goes beyond just one election. It remains to be seen whether the SWP will tire of its latest political adventure, or Respect's Muslim and other supporters look elsewhere, if this week's election results turn out to be disappointing for them. It's hard to see them being in it for the long haul of local election campaigning, though. Getting a councillor elected in Preston is a bit of a come-down when you've been pitching for the overthrow of the whole world order.
Whatever happens on Thursday, by the time of the general election, we'll be back to the same basic choice of Labour versus the Tories, with the Lib Dems chipping away at the edges. And Joan Collins sitting it out in St Tropez.
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Tribune column, 4 June 2004
I suppose we ought to be grateful to Joan Collins. The Seventies' soft-porn star from St Tropez has at least enlivened the forthcoming Euro elections by hitching her absentee wagon to Robert Kilroy-Silk and the UK Independence Party. In the salons of Lower Holloway we now debate into the wee hours which of three Euro-egos we would least like to wake up next to on the morning after the election. The choice is between Collins, Kilroy or the outside left's own version of a celebrity candidate, "Gorgeous George" Galloway.
This ungallant political parlour game is justified on the basis that each of these characters, in their own inimitable fashion, thinks of him or herself as among the sexiest creatures in God's creation. And each of them, in their own way, shares the same vanity of believing that their supposed popular appeal in the groin department will translate into votes in the ballot box.
My prediction, for what it's worth, is that the UKIP will indeed mop up enough low-level prejudice against Europe, immigrants and the "go soft on crime brigade" (whoever they may be these days) to add to its existing representation at Strasbourg. This may be no bad thing from a Labour Party election strategist's point of view, since it will undermine both the BNP vote and any developing Tory revival without posing a serious threat to Labour beyond the Euro elections.
At the same time, a perceived three-pronged right-wing challenge from the UKIP, BNP and Conservatives will probably prove scary enough to keep sufficient Labour supporters on board to avoid any effective electoral challenge from the left. The unholy alliance of the Socialist Workers Party, the Muslim Association of Britain and George Galloway under the Respect banner seems unlikely to get any closer to an electoral breakthrough from the left than past endeavours along similar lines. It might even reduce the effectiveness of the left-of-Labour vote by splitting the support that would otherwise have gone to the Greens.
In short, I suspect that Labour will come out of these elections less damaged than it might have feared under the circumstances. The Liberal Democrats, no doubt, will make inroads here, there and everywhere in a scrappy, inconsistent sort of way. But they'll probably lose ground, as well as take it, as a result of the Conservative revival.
The Conservatives, for their part, may re-establish themselves as a competent opposition, and even retake a few more of those places in local government that you wonder how they ever lost. But they're unlikely to do any better than that; and a competent opposition does not a government-in-waiting make. Michael Howard, moreover, may discover that the Euro Curse that Margaret Thatcher bequeathed to his party will re-emerge to haunt him as it has his predecessors – except that this time it has Joan Collins's face on it.
As for the purported challenge from the left, well make me eat the unread copies of this column if I'm wrong, but it really doesn't feel as though Respect is on a roll to me. If George Galloway squeaks home on a low London turnout I'll be surprised. If any other Respect candidate gets to represent us in Europe, I'll be flabbergasted.
The English left's best big chance of busting open Labour's electoral monopoly came and went with Ken Livingstone. It was possible to imagine a Livingstone-led alliance of the left polling perhaps 10-15 per cent of the national vote in elections such as these, and doing a Scottish Socialist Party south of the border. Livingstone in London has displayed just the mix of populism, pragmatism and principle that can reach beyond the ghettoes of the outside left. But with him back in the Labour fold, no one else comes close to creating the same crossover appeal.
If this sounds as though I'm saying that personalities are more important than policies when it comes to getting elected, it's because to some extent I am. At any rate, it's important who you get to project the policies and how.
But in the longer term, serious electoral ambition requires serious electoral organisation. That's one reason why Ken Livingstone decided against remaining an outsider: even the biggest personalities find it almost impossible to go it alone.
It also requires commitment that goes beyond just one election. It remains to be seen whether the SWP will tire of its latest political adventure, or Respect's Muslim and other supporters look elsewhere, if this week's election results turn out to be disappointing for them. It's hard to see them being in it for the long haul of local election campaigning, though. Getting a councillor elected in Preston is a bit of a come-down when you've been pitching for the overthrow of the whole world order.
Whatever happens on Thursday, by the time of the general election, we'll be back to the same basic choice of Labour versus the Tories, with the Lib Dems chipping away at the edges. And Joan Collins sitting it out in St Tropez.
