Little Society

Whilst acknowledging the incredible feats undertaken in 2010 by: Crystal Palace FC (staying up on the last day of the season in the most dramatic of do-or-die denouements), the anti-BNP alliance in Barking and Dagenham (despite what you may have seen on Channel 4, it wasn’t Mrs Hodge and her two helpers alone who ran Griffin out of town), the Daggers (a Pub Team from Essex in the same league as Wednesday, Charlton and the Saints), and, of course the Liberal Democrats (2003’s ‘left-of-Labour’ party now propping up the most upper-class elite since McMillan)…the story of the year has to be that of the Chilean miners.

The last two review-of-the-year articles that I’ve read have both stressed the significance to their survival and escape of God. Granted, poor latinos, along with the disadvantaged in many other parts of the world, have long been able to reconcile their religious faith with progressive politics. What these commentators seemed at such pains to avoid is any refernce to the iron discipline of the trade union culture so crucial to the mental and physical strength of the group.

The concept of society has been under attack ever since Thatcher denied there was any such thing. Her ideology was specifically targeted at those institutions that bind people together and value solidarity. Cameron's Big Society is an oxymoron - a veil that hides the transfer of collective responsibility to individuals.

The latest round of train-fare rises was greeted on Five Live with a predictable round of ‘good – I don’t use trains…transfer the burden from the tax-payer to the fare-payer… why should I subsidise the network?’ texts and emails. Why  indeed?  Because a key feature of a civilised society is a an efficient railway system that gets people where they need to go at a reasonable price. Society is all about providing for the needs of those less fortunate, and this is far too significant a duty to be voluntary.

Looking back at the incredible story of Los Mineros, we see a Little Society in which the strong saw as their first priority the needs of the weak, where the group took from each according to their ability and gave to each according to their need.  Individuals all may have said their own private prayers, but the minute-by-minute sustenance of hope came from the strength of the group.

I wonder why no-one wants to use those values as the model for a New Politics?

Just Giving?

Francis Maude, Paymaster General, worth an estimated £3m, has proposed that we should all be giving 1% of our income to charity as a matter of course, when use our bank cards, apply for driving licences and passports or fill in tax returns. It appears that this may be a feature of that as-yet-shapeless dread, the Big Society.

Rather like the speech in which Cameron stated 'well-being can't be measured by money' or any of the odious Toby Young's Free School nonsense, my outrage was instantaneously subsumed by a sense of existentialist terror, a little like the moment in The Shining when the shot of the manuscript - an endless repetition of "all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" - confirms that Jack has gone stark staring nuts. The difference is that here, it's not a chilling realisation of insanity crystallising, it's the final  and conclusive evidence that they do not have a clue about 95% of the nation(s) they are governing.

Do people in high-rises in Stoke get up in the morning and think 'never mind that I haven't got the money to give the kids breakfast, the beauty of our surroundings and the quality of our culture (verbatim Cameron) give me such a sense of well-being, I'll go and volunteer somewhere for the day'?

Do folk stacking shelves at Dagenham ASDA get home in the evening and then think 'I know what, our kids really need a better education; I'll ring a few of my mates and we'll submit an application to Michael Gove to set up our own school'?


Maude, almost fantastically, states 'there's an absolute social norm that if you go to a restaurant you expect to tip between 10 and 15%'. Of course, we all do. You often get stuck behind the family in the queue at the Burnely KFC drive-in as they get try to calculate the appropriate percentage of their Bargain Bucket-for-six bill.

I predicted that we were in for a hung parliament on the basis that however disastrous were the final days of Gordon, White Van Man and the rest of the Sun readership wouldn't let themselves be tele-transported back to an age where Eton ran the show and the rest of us were 6 inches shorter, died 20 years earlier and were condemned to counting well-being on the basis of how much was left for beer on a Friday night.


Short of tattooing 'Out Of Touch' on their foreheads, how much further does this foul collection of poshboys need to go before the penny drops?

Welcome to koolblog

Like most things we do at this time of year, those of us who have been oppositionalist by instinct for the better part of four decades will scoff at the illogicality of new year's resolutions.

Just as we ask 'why should  the birthday celebrations for a man who may well have had considerable personal charisma and a nice line in aphorisms but was definitely not the result of a virgin birth be the only point in the year at which we eat turkey?',  we'll construct an equally materialist analysis of the relationship between the Gregorian calendar  and the size of our beer bellies and make cynical asides about those who'll turn up at the municipal baths on Sunday with new mirror goggles, do 4 lengths of splashy front crawl and disappear for the rest of the year.

And then we'll make a resolution. Or ten.

One of mine is to stop talking so much rubbish. And instead write some of it down. Hence koolblog.

If it's anything like what goes on in my head, it will embrace a lot of politics; rants about hypocrisy, cant and injustice. There will be stuff about music, things I've heard and witnessed and felt. There will be thoughts about things I've read in books and papers and online. As the true highs and lows in life are experienced primarily through football, that's bound also to figure prominently. And then there are the completely random observations and obessions that float in and out of one's mind when you're working, or driving, or running or walking in the greatest city on earth.  

I read so much moronic junk online , and am astonished on a daily basis that so many people are arrogant enough to think that anyone might wish to know the contents of their shopping list, their thoughts on football matches they didn't attend, or precisely how many terms of abuse they can't spell properly. And of course, I am now in the process of producing what will inevitably form part of someone else's moronic junk heap. But I'm not on Facebook, I don't talk nearly as much bollocks in nearly as many pubs as I once did, and the Independent still won't give me a Saturday column.

Hence koolblog.