As arguments for EU membership go, portraying Britain as a pot of cold baked beans isn't a good one

It takes a particular sort of mindset - that famously self-hating mindset of the English intellectual middle classes - to produce a visual metaphor like this one



This, we're told is Brexit. On the one hand a wonderful collection of foods from across Europe. on the other, cold baked beans. Now I understand the motivation of those who produced this, trapped as they are in the mythology of British food - we don't produce anything edible and that without Europe we'd, well, be stuck eating baked beans. This feeds the "Europe Good, Britain Bad" message that excites a certain type of enthusiast for the UK staying in the EU. And it acts to wind up people like me, a moderate eurosceptic, by displaying Britain as an austere, dreary, uncultured place made better by access to the goodness of Europe.

It's better, think this group of fanatics, to trash the thousands of great British foods so as to make a cheap point about Brexit. At the core of this, however, is the dislike of Britain - especially the English part of Britain - that the intellectual middle class has cultivated. Over there, you know, the roads are better, trains smoother, food better, drinks classier and women prettier. The clothes are better, the language cooler and, let me tell you, there's this little place just off the Rue St Martin that serves divine little pastries and coffee, you don't get that sort of place in England.

Forget about the possible damage done to Britain by Brexit, let's consider instead the actual damage done to Britain, to its image and standing in the world, by generations of smug intellectuals telling us we're a dull, grey little island with nothing to offer (while making sure Jolyon and Miranda get to go to our brilliant public schools, then to the best universities in the world and to live in London, the world's greatest city).

Much of the attacks on people who voted to leave the EU is couched in these terms. Any enthusiasm for things British - let alone English, that really is beyond the pale - is dismissed as the ignorant babbling of stupid people. Snarky little comments are made about how these are uneducated provincial people who wouldn't understand about the sophisticated stuff you only get in grand European capitals. We're all fat ignorant thickos who should just follow the lead of the shiny clever Europeans - a lead that has trashed Greece's economy, is destroying Italy and created a migrant crisis while blaming it on everywhere and everyone else.

I don't know about you but I'm proud of my culture. Not is a "remember the Empire" way but in seeing the bit of the world where I live as a fine place not as cold baked beans. I re-read Roy Porter's 'Enlightenment' recently and was reminded that Britain was, more than almost anywhere, the place where the ideas that shaped modern, liberal Europe were born. And not just the coffee shops of London but the Scottish Enlightenment of Smith and Hume, Birmingham's Lunar Men and the practical, creative engineers of Yorkshire and Lancashire. I'm proud of this contribution to a better world.

I'm proud of British food - we've escaped from the idea that it is uniquely bad (it never was but those middle class intellectuals with their creamy French cooking thought it so) and now have as rich and varied a choice of great local food and drinks as anywhere in Europe. Hundreds of different cheeses, better meat than Europe, great beer, some of the best sparkling wines, and shops and markets filled with fresh local produce. But I also love those sneered at working class dishes - parmo, rag pudding, fish and chips, the sausage roll and the steak pasty. Nowhere else has food like this and they are the poorer for not having it.

And yes I like morris dancing, village galas, home made jam and cake, folk songs and vintage tractors. When you fly back into Britain you look down and see that it really is a green and pleasant land, the best mapped, most networked, most accessible green and pleasant land in the world. For the cost of some decent boots, an OS map and a packed lunch you can spend a day tramping over hill an dale, along the rivers and canals enjoying nature in a landscaped shaped by generations of Brits.

So I will continue to get angry at those who belittle my country, who dismiss it as a small island of not much consequence. There's an argument about trade and our relations with those European neighbours - let's have it. But let's not make that argument about British culture, let's not dismiss that culture, our traditions and history as a pot of cold baked beans.

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Modern cities - creations of humanity's selfishness

Joel Kotkin writes about the sex recession and, in doing so, provides this striking statistic:

The most extreme cases of libidinous decline are in Asia. In 2005, a third of Japanese single people ages 18 to 34 were virgins; by 2015, this had expanding to 43 percent. A quarter of men over 50 never marry.

Kotkin points to technology and a millennial generation who find personal interaction troubling or stressful ("...a survey of American millennials found 65 percent don’t feel comfortable engaging with someone face-to-face, and 80 percent prefer conversing digitally...").

Some of the outcomes from this de-sexed society are probably a good thing - fewer teenage pregnancies, for example - but it does give us another example of the prurience of modern youth culture, a puritanism embraced with enthusiasm by a generation of helicopter mums and judgemental fussbuckets.

The main reason, however, probably isn't culture change but rather the consequences of economic circumstances. For sure, employers like kidults - university educated millennial sorts who probably aren't going to do anything inconvenient like settling down to have a family - but the circumstance of people's lives also matters - people can't afford the risks of sex (also known as children). Here's Kotkin again:

High property prices and rents associated with dense cities correlate closely with low marriage and fertility rates. The places where child-bearing has plunged towards historic lows, are generally those with the highest house costs — including Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai, Tokyo, New York, Los Angeles, Boston and San Francisco.

This utilitarian urban culture represents, as I've said before, a dead end for humanity. Cities and the life of dense urban civilisation is anti-child. Such places are designed to entertain young adults (a definition now extending to adults into their 40s) rather than the old-fashioned purpose of our presence on the planet - having a family. The environmental argument about population provides cover for such indulgence - having a family is portrayed as more selfish than living an essentially unattached life in one of civilisation's urban wonderlands.

Perhaps, in thinking about our society, we'll one day wake up and realise that two generations of anti-family public policies did not represent a liberation but, instead, were a period of spectacular selfishness on behalf of humanity.

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Is our future suburban?

Interesting little article by Tyler Cowan:

As American travel infrastructure decays, and traffic congestion worsens, what we used to call cities and suburbs won’t be able to rely on each other so much, as trips become too exhausting and time-consuming. That too will encourage cities and suburbs each have their own mix of jobs, retail and cultural opportunities.

I suspect he makes the point more strongly that will be realised - elite culture (and other elite institutions) will remain in the cities as will the wealthy elite that populate them. But the everyday sort of leisure and pleasure, what most of us do mostly, will be more evenly spread especially in centre urban rents continue to climb.

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Children in cities

I've observed before that cities aren't designed for children. And that this is something of a problem if we are to become a more urban society. Indeed there are some people out there trying really hard to rediscover play in our hard-edged and adult city spaces like Emma Bearman's Playbox in Leeds. There's still a problem, especially in the biggest and grandest cities, and this from Aaron Renn sets it out:

These global cities are where the culture is made, where the media are, etc. To the extent that they represent a very atypical demographic profile that largely excludes families with school-aged children, this only perpetuates the “bubble” in which America’s leadership class often lives. The values and priorities of people without children are different from those with children. One example is the value people put on space. In our central cities populated with largely people who have no children, a big obsession is changing zoning regulations to allow smaller units, including so-called “micro-apartments.” These kinds of developments would enable more upscale young adult singles to live in cities. That’s good in itself. Yet it is not paired with equal concern about creating more housing for families.

I've a feeling - it's just that as I've not dug around for evidence - that densification, the process Renn describes above, makes having a family less likely and more difficult. The successful, well-educated London couple living in a great little rented apartment in Shoreditch or Stockwell will have a pretty decent life - good money, plenty of social life and a plethora of little consumer pleasures. They know, however, that having a family means leaving the heart of the city. Here's Renn again - speaking as a new father in New York's Upper West Side:

...it’s hard not to notice that while there are lots of very young children here, there are far fewer school aged ones. I don’t have any desire or plans to leave, but I have to recognize that children have a way of changing your priorities. Realistically, most people with school-aged children still seem to move to the suburbs. Those I see raising older kids in the city are generally well-off enough to afford large apartments or even single family homes (in cities like Chicago). They can also either pay the premium to live in a high quality neighborhood school zone or pay the freight for private schooling.

In some of these great cities we make matters even worse because of the deliberate limitation of housing development through such things as zoning and green belt. Not only is raising a family in the city open only to the very rich (who have the cash) and the poor (who often have no choice) but increasingly the same goes for suburbia. This semi-detatched round the corner from where I was brought up now sells at about £450,000:



Maybe that's affordable to our hypothetical successful and well-educated London couple but I suspect the truth is that most of such people see this perfectly ordinary semi in an average South London suburb as beyond their means (not least because they'll probably need £45,000 cash deposit). So they stay right where they are putting off have children for another year, hoping for another promotion or a great new job that will make the family possible. And because there are fewer and fewer children, there are fewer and fewer facilities for those children. Why set up a ball park or soft play zone when there are no children to use it. Worse still those adults in the city without children resent the noisy intrusion and attention grabbing of children - even to calling for them to be banned from pubs and restaurants.

I don't want to change cities particularly. Central London was never all that child-friendly and I guess the same goes for Manhattan and San Francisco. But we create a problem if we see the great city as the model for everywhere - dense, crowded living, unsafe public spaces, congestion all leavened with 'culture'. Near every local planning document will talk about increasing housing density which means smaller gardens, more flats, less open space, narrower pavements and smaller rooms. All things that make bringing up children more difficult. The cities don't care - they're just importing the next generation of workers from other places and other countries - but, for all their finery and beauty cities like this are mistletoe, parasites on the productive, healthy apple tree of society. Good to kiss under but not not much else.

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Immigration is a success. Integration is a disaster.

Immigration is a success. Britain is a richer place with a stronger economy because of immigration. We have kept the wheels from falling off our health and care system, maintained the provision of cheap fruit and vegetables, slaughtered a lot of chickens and built the world's greatest financial sector on the back of immigration.

Immigrants are more likely to be working, less likely to be claiming benefits, contribute more in tax than they take out and bring a bewildering variety of new experiences to our great nation. Immigration is not the cause of NHS crises, the lack of school places or the shortage of housing - short-term policy-making and a daft planning system are far more to blame for all this. And compared to similarly poor communities, immigrants commit less crime.

So why is immigration such a problem? How did migrants and refugees arriving in the UK cause such an outcry and, in part, contribute to the decision to leave the EU? Are the British incorrigibly racist? Is it the result of the drip drip of nasty bigotry from dubious newspapers? Or is there some other reason such as lousy public policy?

Let's begin with a couple of myths. Firstly, "it was the media that did it".

The referendum was won on a drumbeat of anti-foreigner sentiment. It’s the same tune being played by demagogues in every corner of the globe. It’s the same tune that was played in the 1930s. It’s the same old beat that rises in volume when people are afraid. In the UK, it’s echoed by a rabidly right-wing press and unchallenged by a flaccid establishment media. Mixed by a band of unscrupulous liars and political zealots, it has become a tsunami of bile that has downed and drowned a once great nation.

Now I don't want to get sucked into the vortex of the Brexit debate but the gist here - from LSE economist John Van Reenan - is that the driving force for Britain's 'anti-foreigner sentiment' was that 'rabidly right-wing press'. This is pretty much received wisdom amongst the intelligentsia but is just baldly stated, no evidence is presented to substantiate the argument that the British people - and the English working classes in particular - have been led by their ignorant noses by a corrupt and Fascist press working hand in glove with those 'unscrupulous liars and political zealots'.

This just isn't true. Not that the press is innocent or perfect, it's a long way from that, but that Van Reenan has cause and effect in the wrong order. The Sun, Daily Mail and Express are commercial enterprises - they exist to make money for those who own them. This means they deliver what they think the public wants, they are like the advertisers they depend on for income - mirrors of society not the creators of society's mores or values.

The second myth is that the problem comes from the values of immigrants - most specifically that these are in some way not compatible with nebulous and vague 'British values'. We talk about honesty, decency, respect for the law, family and so forth as if these ideas only exist as values in the UK, that somehow immigrants - Muslims in particular - don't share these essentially fundamental views about behaviour. Now, while I'm happy for core values to be part of what we teach children and young people, I don't see that you can isolate a particular set of values and say they are in some way exclusive to Britain.

To suggest that, for example, Islam doesn't contain these values is to misunderstand that faith entirely. For sure different emphases are evident - more stress on justice than on rights for example - but these are nuances within those values not a different set of values. It's true, however, that these higher order values are a damn sight easier to elevate when we are economically successful and secure. And it is here, at least in part that the problem with immigration starts. Just as there is a tendency (not always without reason) for immigrants to see their status as a factor in their poverty, there's also a feeling among the poor communities where migrants arrive that these new arrivals contribute to the poverty of those already there. The lump of labour idea may be false but it is emotionally appealing.

So if it isn't media manipulation or differences in values and only partly economics, what is the reason for the rise in what Van Reenan calls 'anti-foreigner sentiment'? It seems to me that the problem is one of culture combined with a terrible failure of public policy. In economic terms immigration is brilliant and, for us successful folk with good jobs and good incomes, something of a boon but in cultural terms immigration over the past thirty years has been a disaster. We have left established communities across Britain - and particularly in England - with the feeling that, at best, their culture is something to be sneered at and, at worst, that it's based on bigoted, racist, Little Englander attitudes that have no place in the modern world.

In simple terms the adoption in the 1980s of a policy based on multiculturalism led to a complete failure of integration and sowed the seeds of today's 'anti-foreigner sentiment'. And once the feeling that the great and good considered immigrant cultures to be superior had established, it was a short step to concerns about immigrants taking jobs, stealing our women and generally ruining everything that's good about England. Public policy seemed to say that bangra was more important than brass bands, that Christmas should be turned into 'Season's Greetings', and the last night of the proms was a slightly sleazy exercise in jingoism. Strategies to 'celebrate diversity' featured every kind of imported culture and none of the home grown stuff. Integration failed because public policy deemed it unnecessary.

Nobody is suggesting here that English culture - and specifically English working-class culture - is somehow superior to cultures from elsewhere, merely that it ours and it deserves more prominence as the culture of the people who already live here. We tend to think that "when in Rome" refers to abiding by local laws but, while this is true, it goes a lot further - it's about respecting the mores, values and culture of the people you've come to live amongst. Multiculturalism, for all that it was well-meant, resulted in some immigrant groups feeling that this no longer applied.

None of this is to suggest that racism and xenophobia doesn't exist. Rather it is to say that multiculturalism is a failed policy that has contributed more to our current attitude to immigration than the media, populist politicians or misunderstandings about values. To go back to where we started, in economic terms immigration is a success, The problem is that in cultural terms we've allowed it to be a disaster. And unless we begin to give a greater prominence to indigenous culture and especially the culture of those some sneeringly refer to as 'the left behind', we will continue to face these problems.

Immigration is a success. We are all richer for people coming here and contributing to Britain's economy. We should direct our efforts to integration rather than pretending that closing the borders will solve the problem. Back in June I listened to some people express their concerns about immigration. Except, as I pointed out, their concerns weren't about immigrants but about people who were born here, for whom Bradford is just as much home. This makes it all our problem and not one solved by immigration control. It's multiculturalism that has failed us not immigration.

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UKIP, Momentum and the SNP are no more cults than the Liberal Democrats

I know it sometimes looks that way. Especially if you spend too much time paddling in the more febrile parts of social media. But politics has not become a contest between competing cults - Corbyn's success isn't cultic nor is euroscepticism or Scottish nationalism.

Although some seem to think so:

The political faithful dream of a glorious future: a Scotland free of English tutelage, an England free of the domination of Brussels, a Britain free of greed and poverty. Like the great religious dreams of the past, these causes take over lives. But all present formidable difficulties. In political as in religious cults, believers must be insulated against doubts. The most effective method is to blacken the outside world, and make alternative sources of information appear like the Devil’s seductions that tempt the godly into darkness. As Professors Dennis Tourish and Tim Wohlforth put it in their study of political sectarianism: “There is only one truth — that espoused by the cult. Competing explanations are not merely inaccurate but degenerate”.

Calling the forces challenging your world view a cult is a convenient excuse for worldly wise Guardian readers safe in their well-paid publicly-funded jobs. Now it's true that these causes do take over the lives of a few people - all of the causes and their leaders have a collection of fan-children, resplendent with badges, hands tightly clutching banners, faces suffused with joy at the sight of their campaign's human manifestation. But the people turning out to a damp Corbyn rally, sitting on uncomfortable village hall chair waiting for Nigel Farage or handing out yellow and black leaflets to Glasgow commuters - these folk aren't members of a cult but really do want things to change.

Nicola Sturgeon, Nigel Farage and Jeremy Corbyn aren't the leaders of cults but are the fortunate beneficiaries of people's political will - admittedly not all the people (so far it seems only Farage can lay claim to success in his campaign) but enough people to challenge the certainties of managerialist and technocratic centre-ground politics. Calling supporters of Scottish nationalism, UK independence or state socialism cultists may be jolly fun on Twitter or in your column in New Statesman or The Guardian. But it simply isn't true - or at least no more true than calling Blairites a cult - or, for that matter, doing the same for the growing band of Remain refuseniks and Brexit deniers.

It is true that we gather with people of like mind - I follow and am followed by far more West Ham fans than you because I'm a West Ham fan. And, in amongst the banter and vigorous discussion of why we haven't got a right back, we behave very similarly to those political in-groups with particular enemies and consistent lines of comment. Indeed, that group of West Ham fans will moan about how we're always last on Match of the Day, how teams like Chelsea and Liverpool get far too much coverage, and how the football authorities have it in for us. This doesn't make us a cult any more than very similar assertions by followers of Corbyn or over-enthusiastic cybernats makes them a cult.

The real point about cults - from the Manson Family and Jonestown through to Scientology - is that they get people to two things: cut themselves off from normal society to live within the cult; and get people to do things they wouldn't otherwise have done ('free love', suicide, even murder). And cults are characterised by leaders who control and direct the actions of members - none of the political leaders we've mentioned fit this characterisation.

For all the adulation afforded Corbyn, Farage and Sturgeon they are not leaders of cults. Rather they are the vehicles through which the political mission is delivered - Scottish independence, leaving the EU and a socialist Labour Party. So long as these leaders deliver - or seem to deliver - success their position is assured. Nicola Sturgeon is the First Minister of Scotland giving nationalists the hope that the mission is still achievable. And Corbyn looks likely to have his leadership affirmed by Labour members - a victory that, in the view of Momentum supporters, sustains that momentum towards 'socialism' (however loosely defined). If, for whatever reason, either of these positions falters does anyone think supporters won't turn to a different leader to take up the cause?

Cults are not made by confirmation bias or the clustering of people as communities of interest. Cults are deliberate creations that use ideologies - religious or political - as the vehicle for gaining and securing power for power's sake (although what is meant by power will vary). The adulation, the conspiracy theories, the aggressive defence of the mission, and a 'you're either with us or agin us' attitude that we see with political movements such as separatism are not features that define a cult even if they are things we'd superficially associate with cults.

What the solid, dependable centrists need to understand is that, very often, they fit the same pattern and description (if you don't believe me check out Liberal Democrat social media). Just because your mission is defined as 'mainstream' doesn't mean it doesn't take on those same cultic characters - clustering with like minds, aggression, adulation of leaders - that are falsely attached to separatist, far-left and right-wing causes.

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In which alcohol researchers discover something called a "party" - and want it stopped

Intrepid Alcohol Researcher learn about the Party

John Holmes the neo-puritan who runs the Alcohol Research Group at the University of Sheffield has stepped away from his usual reliance on using computer modelling as his source or evidence to look at actual human behaviour. And our intrepid researcher approaches this study with the arrogance of a 1950s social anthropologist describing the marriage practice of some previously unknown jungle tribe.

However, we also see occasions that are commonplace but attract less attention from policy makers and public health advocates. For example, 14% of drinking occasions involved domestic gatherings of family and friends, perhaps at house parties and dinner parties or to watch the football. On average people drank the equivalent of a bottle of wine or four pints of beer on these occasions and, in many cases, they consumed more than this. Yet such occasions are rarely discussed when identifying the kinds of drinking problems that need to be tackled.

The discovery that people have parties must have been pretty shocking really. Who knew? And what a delightfully neo-puritan statement concludes Holmes' discovery of the party - "...identifying the kinds of drinking problems that need to be tackled". You and your friends and family chilling round a barbeque (assuming we actually get some sunshine), celebrating a new job or maybe just getting together to share a drink and have a laugh - these events, my friends, are "drinking problems that need to be tackled".

Holmes goes on to fret a little more. You see the neo-puritan fussbuckets at Sheffield have been the main advocates of minimum unit pricing as a means of stopping people (in particular poor people) from drinking. This advocacy was almost entirely based on the torturing of Holmes' computer model plus some very creative interpretations of price elasticity. At no point did the Sheffield researchers ever consider actual drinking behaviour by real people. And now, having seen how real people consume alcohol, the conclusion is that something else must be done to stop all this partying, pleasure and drunkenness:

Introducing a minimum price for alcohol and providing drinking guidelines for those deemed lower risk might reduce habitual alcohol consumption, but these policies might do less to tackle heavy drinking where getting intoxicated and letting the hair down is the main motivation and where the location, company and timing are all conducive to sidelining concerns about price and long-term health.

You see the problem don't you. When we get in a few bottles, cook up a big chilli and invite folk round to celebrate a new job, a big win or a graduation, we're not thinking about our health or how much all that lovely booze is costing. We're just planning on having a damned good night and waking up in the morning with a hangover. This is, of course, exactly how parties work - unless of course, you're working in an Alcohol Research Group where, presumably, celebrations are more muted featuring only tap water and decaffeinated coffee.

The sad thing is that, now these researchers have discovered that people like to have a drink at parties, they'll be working overtime to develop 'strategies' intended to stop this happening. We'll get the usual finger wagging fussbucketry - ad bans, turgid lectures about drink, more licensing restrictions - and to this will be added new wheezes like limiting how much booze you can buy at a time. Of course what these neo-puritans actually want is prohibition and they plan on introducing it by stealth.

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In which The Guardian reminds us why we like Top Gear

Cars - what's not to like?

It was good of The Guardian to remind us why we like Top Gear:

Top Gear fetishises the totally unnecessary consumption of fossil fuels in the name of sport, entertainment and feeling better about your premature ejaculation disorder; it normalises dangerously fast driving; it contributes to the hunger for more and more cars that we neither need nor can sustain; it treats the sheer act of moving a machine as if it’s a display of heroic bravery and skill; and it paid Jeremy Clarkson’s salary for over 25 years.

I don't know where to start with all the goodness in this quotation for it gets right to the heart of Top Gear's appeal which is to wave those two fingers made famous by English archers at Agincourt in the direction of all the spiritless, pinched, judgemental, snobbish bores like Nell Frizzell, its writer. What Top Gear provides is a brief escape from the endless dribble about climate change, from the institutionalised attack on the motor car, and from the dreary moral high ground inhabited by people who write for The Guardian and appear on Channel 4 News.

Cars are great. They sit at the heart of our civilization. Nearly 90% of journeys made are made in cars. The manufacture, sale, maintenance and support of cars is a massive slug of our economy. The modern car is a remarkable feat of engineering, filled with innovation in engine management, fuel efficiency, communications and comfort. And millions - I really mean millions, far more than ever even glance at The Guardian - enjoy the stuff that goes with cars and motor sport.

So Nell Frizzell doesn't like cars (I probably don't believe her on this one but we'll take her at her word). That is, without question, her loss. For the rest of us, we'll carry on enjoying programmes that celebrate cars and car culture, that do so with wit and charm, and that provide the tiniest piece of opposition to the endless boilerplate of green nonsense that infects our media.

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A bad week for culture in Bradford (and The North)

It has been a lousy week for culture in Bradford. First we had the announcement that the Royal Photographic Society (RPS) collection of art in photography would be transplanted from Bradford to a new 'centre' somewhere in London. And then today we got a second bombshell as the National Media Museum pulled out of the Bradford International Film Festival.

My view of all this is that it underlines the utter and complete domination of arts and culture by a narrow, London-focused elite. The Trustees of the V&A are all based in London and it wouldn't surprise me to discover that many of them, while they've visited Paris, Venice and New York haven't visited Bradford, Gateshead or Wolverhampton. For this elite such places are for talking about - you know 'deprivation', 'poverty', 'the underclass', gritty Northern films on a left-wing theme - rather than visiting. For the London elite the best that can be said is that some of them consider the North somewhere to be patronised - not in a physical way but by appearing on late night arts shows and saying how important it for the North to be recognised culturally (just so long as we don't have to go there).

There's nothing new with this problem - it remains perhaps the biggest challenge facing England. We talk a lot about the imbalance between London and 'The North' - indeed the Arts Council spends most of it's briefing pages on funding trying to demonstrate that it really does care about 'The North' and that most of the money doesn't go to London. It remains the case that roughly twice as much money goes to London that to the whole of the North. And let's remember that The North's population is around double that of London. meaning that per capita Londoners get four times as much arts funding as Bradfordians.

More to the point, London is also much richer with more access to the private sector funding that being one of the world's great cities brings. And this means that the wider infrastructure of arts and culture - commercial theatre, art markets, music and so forth - is much stronger (or at least appears that way). So while the efforts of the Arts Council, Heritage Lottery Fund and others to redress the imbalance is welcome it doesn't get close to the heart of the problem.

This heart - the central challenge - is the assumption that major national institutions have to be based in London. This was the essential problem with the decision by the Science Museum to hand over the RPS collection to the V&A. Not that a new 'centre' for art in photography isn't a great idea but rather that the centre could only be created in London. It seems that the Trustees of the Science Museum Group, at their meetings in London, didn't even consider suggesting to their new partners at the V&A that locating the new centre in the North might be the right idea (we can't be sure because the minutes of this almost entirely publicly funded organisation are not public).

So the RPS collection goes to London, which is sad. But worse than this, there's nothing but a gap left behind. Bradford no longer has that inspiring collection and nothing will replace it (a new 'interactive gallery' at the National Media Museum doesn't work since it's not really new and isn't really culture). The decision is a narrow one driven by a combination of cost pressures on the Science Museum Group (mostly being resolved by cutting the budgets of its three Northern museums) and the in-built bias towards London.

The actual decision was taken - without engaging with stakeholders in Bradford so far as I can tell - back in July 2015 with the time since then presumably spent thrashing out the details with the V&A. I don't know when the second decision, sacking the Bradford International Film Festival, was taken but it's announcement in the same week at the RPS collection decision suggests either a similar timetable or else a desire to get all the bad news out in one week. And now the museum, from being to go-to place for the culture of photography, film and TV, has become a mere adjunct of the science museum proper, a place of buttons and levers dedicated solely to showing off science stuff rather than curating the artifacts and the content of these classic media.

What's missing - from the V&A as well as the Science Museum - is any sense of the damage these decisions are doing to Bradford as a city. London is awash with film festivals whereas Bradford had just three - all now gone or under threat. All killed off by the narrowing of the National Media Museum's focus and by the blind ignorance of that London elite running the museums. The closure of a gallery or reconfiguration of a museum in London may be agitating but it does little real damage to that city's arts and culture infrastructure. Here in Bradford - just as almost everywhere in the North - the decisions made by the Science Museum to withdraw from involvement in culture has left a raw, bloody gash in the UK's only UNESCO City of Film.

It's true that Bradford people will pick themselves up, will gather together and put what pressure they can on government, on the Arts Council on the museums. And maybe a few conciliatory crumbs will come our way as a result, doubtless loudly trumpeted by those London institutions as great news for poor old Bradford. Of a considered approach to that bloody gash in Bradford's cultural life there will be none. The big arts and culture institutions won't set up a group to work on mending the wound their decisions have made, instead they'll spin what little (and it is vanishingly tiny) they've done until such a time as the national media stop taking any notice.

Even more, without some sort of big stick from government there's no way for us 'stakeholders' in Bradford's culture to influence the decisions made by that rich London-based elite that makes the decisions about how England's arts and culture infrastructure should be developed. I'd like them to visit Bradford - let us ask some questions of them. Not just about why everything has to be in London but about how they can support those of us who want to create a cultural heart for the North of England, who want to see the arts infrastructure developed and who are fed up with being supplicants to grand men and women in London who have - as we've seen in Bradford - the power to thoughtlessly tear great chunks from the cultural life of Northern cities.

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Quote of the day: on the Arts Council

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From Lloyd Evans in the Spectator:

The Arts Council, of course, is not an artistic organisation. It distributes bribes. And as a vassal of the state, it unconsciously mimics its political masters who have no faith in the people.

And those bribes - for all the talk of 'diversity' - are overwhelmingly directed to the grand institutions of high culture rather than towards the promotion of creativity. Probably because it's not really about art at all.

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We have Mr Potter's "discontented, lazy rabble instead of a thrifty working class" - and the left don't like it!

There was a time when the mass of the population – you can call this the ‘working class’ if you like – looked like the crowd at one of those football games from the 1930s. Packed shoulder to shoulder, dressed the same, thin, pinched and unhealthy. Back in those days and through into the 1950s, those ordinary people stayed in the narrow confines of their regular lives – most worked in manual jobs, skilled or unskilled, and their pleasures were limited by the narrowness of their income. Football (as today’s fans keeps telling us) was cheap and the men topped this up with thin beer and stodgy food.

And during this time those men were uncomplaining – we had few if any riots, public drunkenness was rare and levels of crime were low. But looking at those men and women in old photographs, we see that their lives were hard and, by today’s standards, short. Most working class men didn’t live long past retirement age and there were plenty of premature deaths from disease, illness and injury. Despite this hard life, most ordinary men were accepting of their lot. Yes they voted Labour, electing one of their own sort into parliament, but that Labour Party – for all the radicalism of the Attlee government – didn’t want to change the structure of the economy other than to replace private ownership with state ownership.

Then something happened. The success of the economy plus the effectiveness of union campaigns saw wages rise. Those ordinary men – and increasingly the women too – began to cast off the cheap drab and to make a cultural contribution. Some of this – the music of the early sixties, for example – is overplayed as working class culture. The big bands like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were management not workers but, along with other changes, this music gave the ordinary population a justification to party. And from that time in the sixties right through to the millennium that’s just what we did – we went on a great binge.

We drank more alcohol trying out new drinks like wines and lagers, we ate out more as we embraced the burger, the pizza and lumps of chicken daubed in a secret mix of spices and breadcrumbs. And while we did this, the elite – those who had run everything and liked the old supine working class – grumbled about taste and the bad choices of other people (by which they meant those workers eating burgers and drinking lager). This was the change cursed by Mr. Potter, the scheming old banker in ‘It’s a Wonderful Life” when he said:

A discontented, lazy rabble instead of a thrifty working class.

We still see echoes of this when – just as that old rentier Potter did – left wing writers like Michael Rosen rail against debt. Borrowing money is fine for the likes of us, say folks like Rosen, but the ordinary people should be stopped from taking on debt because it’s bad for them:

Debt - one of the features of modern capitalism is the level of personal debt - whether through mortgages or loans. To my mind, this is the system's police force. Once we have debt, we have a legal system to terrify us with threats of non-payment. At any given moment in which we might feel that we have to (or want to) challenge the system, there is a voice in our head which says, 'But will this endanger my chances of paying my debts - my mortgage payments and my loan payments…?' This used to be a 'middle class' anxiety and was thought to only affect (or create) the attachment of the middle classes to the system.

The working class must be thrifty, must live within its means and mustn’t take on the trappings of their betters let alone put anything at risk in aspiring for a better future.

So we binged. And while we binged we all carrying on getting richer and piling up wealth. The wealth once held by landlords – state and private - and wealthy capitalists began to spread through society. We bought houses and saved money in pension schemes while enjoying cars, foreign holidays, meals out and central heating. Our lives were immeasurably better that the lives of those men shuffling to work a ten-hour shift and those women spending  80 hours a week feeding him and stopping the house filling up with soot.

From out of this change – this great binge – came a real working class culture. Not the make-believe one idolised by wealthy writers, that sort of Mike Leigh homage to a crap life so typical of how those who have present the culture of those who haven’t. And bits of that culture came as something of a shock to the left – they discovered that the working class is patriotic and that it will display that patriotism with enthusiasm. 

After years of sneering at the idea of loving one’s country, the left couldn’t somehow understand how ‘their people’ still sang the songs and flew the flags, celebrating Britain and, worst of all, England. These left wing folk still struggle – I listened to a Guardian journalist on the radio talking about singing by England fans. This man wanted us to stop singing ‘Rule Britannia’ and ‘The Great Escape’ because he was uncomfortable with ‘what they symbolised’.

The cultural elite don’t like this – not just because of the nationalism but because, like draping your house in flags, it all seems just a bit tacky. When we visit my parents at Christmas, we have a little drive round to look at the Christmas decorations – not the state-sponsored and approved ones on the high street but the fantastic displays of kitsch plastic reindeer, flashing lights, gnomes and Santa people put on their homes. North Kent is great for this sort of display and the Isle of Sheppey – as a sort of distillation of everything North Kent – is best. But that cultural elite doesn’t like this sort of display and reserves sort of its best sneering to describe brash Christmas decoration:

“And what can I see from my office in Carnaby Street? I can see a giant, pneumatic, puce-coloured reindeer with white spots suspended from tension wires in space.”

This is from Stephen Bayley described as “…one of Britain's best known cultural commentators.” For which you can read arrogant snob. It is a short step from this to a very wealthy Islington MP tweeting, slightly sneeringly, a photograph of a house draped in England flags. A tweet that got that MP into trouble (although, for the record, her resigning was one of the dafter – if admirable – decisions in recent UK politics). It has though brought out the worst is the left as they set about defending Emily Thornberry:

“I thought that hanging flags with a red cross on a white background out of you house windows was telling the world that you aspired to be a right-wing thug who hated everything from abroad (except lager and curry) and wished that a bunch of ex-National Front neo-Nazis ran the government of Little England.”

This, as much as Ed Miliband’s laboured efforts to look cool and trendy, is Labour’s problem. The people who run the Labour Party – at every level – simply don’t relate to the bloke who flies a big England flag on his house or indeed to that man's neighbour who, as we speak, is putting up Christmas lights, an inflatable snowman and a great big sleigh. The same is true for my party but we’ve an excuse – for much of our recent history, we simply haven’t tried to represent the ordinary worker. I think this needs to change because it’s absolutely plain that the left with its patronising, snobbish and judgemental attitude to people who fly the flag, eat burgers, give their kids a bar of chocolate and like X-Factor has nothing to offer those people. Right now the void – a voice for people with kitsch Christmas displays, great big England flags, white vans, tattoos – is being filled by UKIP, a bunch of people who think the modern world is crap and wish to return to some mythical Elysian past.

This view is the very opposite of aspiration, of the thing that George Bailey offered the ordinary folk of Bedford Falls. Rather than offer people opportunity, choice and a better tomorrow – the things that allowed us to change from a supine, shuffling working class to a brash, in-your-face flag-waving populace – what people are being sold is a comfort blanket, a message of ‘hold onto this and it will all be fine’. Instead of a world of new exciting things to do, see and play with we’re promised safety, security and the oversight of our behaviour by our betters. I don’t think this is what people want and I’m absolutely sure that, whatever people do want, it isn’t snobbish, patronising judgement of their lives, choices and pleasures.

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You and your racist garden!

OK so the lefty sociologist didn't merely jump the shark, he did a back flip and double somersault over said fish:

“Gardeners’ Question Time is not the most controversial show on Radio 4, and yet it is layered with, saturated with, racial meanings.

“The context here is the rise of nationalism. The rise of racist and fascist parties across Europe. Nationalism is about shoring up a fantasy of national integrity. My question is, what feeds nationalism? What makes nationalism powerful?”

Dr Pitcher said the “crisis in white identity in multicultural Britain” meant people felt unable to express their views for fear of being called racist, so expressed their racial identity in other ways, such as talking about gardening."

Apparently all that talk of 'native species' and 'pure soil' is giving Dr Pitcher palpitations - a sort of belief that liking gardening is really a manifestation of 'blood and soil' nationalism. Now what we're seeing here is one man's projection of a perceived crisis onto anything and everything he sees - so gardening becomes fascism because everything he doesn't understand or appreciate is fascism.

But like many things, gardening is an import - something from soft and sunny southern Europe. And those Southern Europeans weren't taken - here's Tacitus:

"The climate is unpleasant, with frequent rain and mist, but it does not suffer from extreme cold."

And the truth is that 'native' doesn't really apply to many plants - at least in the British context. As Maggie Campbell-Culver described in her delightful book, "The Origin of Plants":

A small number of plants did somehow survive the onslaught of the millions of years of ice to emerge triumphant into the post-glacial period...There were in all probability no more than two hundred or so species in total, certainly little growing that could have been turned into a sustaining meal or a posy of flowers.

So nearly all of the plants and trees we love - the daffodils the bluebells, the horse chestnuts and the lilies - arrived after the ice age had finished. And a goodly number - even such forgotten plants as Alexander - arrived because humans like to grow them in fields or gardens.

My garden - a glimpse is in the picture above - has the regular mix of 'native' and 'non-native'. There's a willow tree, yellow flags, currants and primrose - all pretty native. And then we've rhododendron, geranium, azalea and Japanese acer - definitely immigrants. But what of the the more recent mish-mash - the fancy hybrid primula, the tea roses, the day lilies? These plants - immigrants all - are the real glory of the English garden because gardeners have tweaked, crossed, selected and encouraged them to become the splendid things they are today.

It is this magic - the human intervention that makes for the wonders of our gardens - that our lefty sociologist fails to understand. Perhaps a bit of this is the snobbery of the urban trendy, the dismissing of gardening as something that boring old people do in dull old suburbs, but there's also a profound ignorance about the garden, the way in which we try to balance the natural order with the new and exotic.

So the idea that talking about gardening is suppressed racism may be gibbering, dribbling nonsense but underlying such a statement is something else - an ignorance of the garden, the dismissing of the pastime as some sort of 'white, middle-class' obsession and the desire to make something as quintessentially English as gardening somehow an ethnic marker rather than a cultural wonder.

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D-Day. The very least we can do is treasure the prize of liberty those men won

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Sometimes you hear something that shows someone gets it, understands what liberty - choice, opportunity - is about and why it is central to what we are:

Society is not determined by some herd of hand-wringing heifers and steers in a departmental subcommittee's focus group. Culture is not ordered off a left-wing menu like some half-strength double decaf soy latte in a recycled paper cup. Society and culture are about people. Our culture is the function of our people—all the people, not just a select few. It is a combination of the lives, the actions, the thoughts and the choices of individuals. Some individuals will choose to drink alcohol. Some will choose not to. I do not believe the non-drinkers have any moral right or obligation to enforce their view and their personal choices on to anyone else's. This is not your culture; it is our culture. 

On a day when we try to recall - to understand - why young men of 18 and 19 gulped down their hearts and headed under fire onto a beach, these words resonate. The example was the nanny state but it could have been free speech, the over-reach of 'law-and-order' or the extensions of secrecy.  We're still the free world - and are so because of what those young men did 70 years ago. But that freedom slowly atrophies in the face of assault - from the advocates of a security state scaring us with tales of terrorism, from the health fascists and nannying fussbuckets who think they have some right to tell us what choices we should make about our lives, and from the offended mob that hounds the dumb and polices the words of the ordinary man.

Perhaps we should take this moment to consider what we're doing when we lock up some sad twenty-something for saying something unpleasant on Twitter. To consider whether it's right to take children off their parents, force the elderly into homes or conduct terrorist trials behind closed doors. We might also ask why we make possessing something a crime, why we feel the need to photograph and film every aspect of people's ordinary lives and whether requiring people to show ID to buy a drink undermines trust and civility.

We should wonder whether requiring an ever more bewildering collection of permissions, licenses and seals to do the most mundane of things - the sort of act that, in the world those young men fought to save, was taken for granted. Why should you need the permission of some bureaucrat to extend your house, put up a shed, open a shop, set up a business or sell a car?

So take a moment. Remember we fought a war that both liberated and defended liberty. And ask whether taking another's choice from him is what those men fought for - whether it's a choice to drink and smoke or a decision to build a house on the edge of his wood or open a business in his front room. I have no tales of D-Day to tell but I will shed tears of remembrance at the astonishing, incredible things that ordinary men did to protect our freedom. They succeeded. Our freedom was saved.

The least we can do is treasure that prize.

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Michael Rosen, snob.

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He's feted by the left-wing bien pensants, quoted and tweeted and shared by all those people who like their thought processed and precooked. And he loves to pen polemics castigating those who don't share his bigoted, judgemental world view. But worst of all, Michael Rosen is a snob.

This will come as a shock to Michael. I'm guessing he feels his inherited socialism, steeped in the world of a Marxist educational mafia, means that he is connected to the ordinary bloke. But this, a typical piece of his prose (not a patch on his poetry), reveals the truth - Michael's a snob, a cultural snob:

Perhaps you're mad keen on culture. Perhaps in between making all that money you were hanging around galleries, theatres, cinemas, concert halls, comedy clubs, libraries, dance studios, painting classes. Perhaps you've seen how people manage on a shoe string, perhaps you've seen the awful conditions backstage in many theatres, perhaps you know about the crap wages most people in the arts work with. Perhaps you know about the terrible crisis we have in libraries, depriving people of access to knowledge and culture.

You see - the man he's writing about was busy 'making money' so wasn't able to consume any of that 'culture' that Michael is so keen on. Nasty, unappealing, noveau-riche money-grubbing mean you can't 'get' culture. Instead you should eschew all that for some sort of bohemian hair-shirt. Only then, in Michael's arrogant painting, will you qualify to speak of culture.

Like many from comfortable, middle-class origins, Michael Rosen is utterly dismissive of anything that looks like trade. There'll be lots of fine hand-wringing about how artists struggle and special pleading about The Arts. But the truth is that the business of culture that Michael holds out to us is a privileged, exclusive and incredibly snobbish world.  It's a world filled with judgement, with sneering and with a puffed up disdain for people who do the jobs that make it possible for us to fund what Michael calls "my sort of culture".

It's not Michael's ignorance that makes me despair (although he parades it in style every time his writes). We're all ignorant in our own way. Rather it's the way in which he assumes the superiority of his sort over the sort who work in banks. Yet everything Michael has, everything, comes from those bankers and businessman he loathes. The sense of entitlement, the demanding way in which Michael thrusts his collecting box under the noses of taxpayers, this is the truly shocking part.

Michael didn't write the hatchet job on Sajid Javid because he was a banker and a Tory. No he wrote the nasty little open letter because Sajid is a working-class lad made good. And that, in Michael's snobby little world makes him the worst sort of Tory banker.

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The culture of social work (and the arrogance of the law).

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None of us know the whole truth about the tragic case of the woman forced into a caesarian only to have her baby taken into care and put up for adoption. We will have seen the original story, the related comments from Christopher Booker and John Hemmings MP, assorted clarifications from within the system including Essex County Council and a selection of writings from legal bloggers explaining why those criticising the system are wrong (or even suggesting, without evidence, that the facts are so very different from those printed in the newspapers). Plus latterly the interviews with the woman herself.

Because I don't know the whole truth, if I comment as a non-professional (i.e. not a child protection social worker or a specialist lawyer) then what I say can - and will be - simply dismissed by the system's defenders. Indeed, the easiest option for such defenders of the system is to attack the writer's credibility. You know how this turns out when the author (who is no more able to assess the "facts" than others but believes, also without evidence, that they are more able in this regard) starts with this sort of line:

So who are Christopher Booker and John Hemming?

This is followed by criticism based on unconnected matters (Booker's views on climate change, for example) and selective quotations from cases where either Booker or Hemming - or both - had been involved or had made comment. This isn't to say that Booker or Hemming are right or wrong but to observe that using anecdote (and a selected quote, albeit from a judge, is just anecdote) to destroy credibility is a classic tactic in ad hominem attacks.

The problem here is that the writer in question is, for all his attempts at being right-on, essentially an insider to the system - a government lawyer:

I’m a barrister, and worked as a government lawyer for twelve years, advising ministers and government departments on a wide range of public law issues from tax to terrorism, from freedom of information to pensions, from discrimination to health and from defence to broadcasting. My career in government included stints at the Cabinet Office, where I advised on the EU Constitution negotiations, and at the Attorney General’s Office where I advised Lord Goldsmith on a wide variety of legal issues. I have advised nearly every government department, from the Home Office to Health and from the Treasury to the MoD.

I note with interest that the author is emphatically not a specialist in family law, social work or issues relating to mental health. Rather he is concerned to defend the system whereby social services, health and the courts were able (again whether this is right is not the question) to force a woman into a caesarian section, take her child into care and subsequently put that child up for adoption.  And when journalists, MPs or other lay people challenge or question the system it is imperative that it is defended - and especially that the cultural assumptions of, in this case, social work are not opened up for examination.

I've written before about the ideology of social work - the assumption of societal guilt, non-judgementalism and rejection of heterodox, or seemingly hetrodox, choices - but here it is the culture that is more important. In one respect this is a culture of self-protection, closing ranks and hiding in process and paper trails - things that are not surprising in a large bureaucratic organisation of any sort (and child protection systems such as closed courts make this much easier). However, there is a broader cultural factor - social work, like the law and medicine, presumes that only it is qualified to decide on a course of action and that any options from non-professionals are quite simply wrong.

Moreover, the culture is reinforced by the very familiar form of words in response to enquiries about specific cases: "(name of organisation - usually a local council) does not comment on individual cases". Thus the organisation can plead protection of privacy (for the subject of a case) in order to prevent any questioning of its decision-making. Indeed, in nearly all child protection cases, the actual decision-making process is not subject to any lay scrutiny and the secrecy of the courts inevitably leads to problems for reporters - such as Christopher Booker - in reporting concerns.

Even where there is a formal opportunity for lay enquiry within the system (such as is afforded to me as a local councillor), we are strongly advised that our remit is with the proper administration of the system not with the decision taken. A councillor is able to question whether the council has conducted the process correctly (and there are routes for action if this is not so) but, in essence, if the paperwork is correct, we are unable to challenge the basis of the decision.

Finally, the system of non-identification is used to protect the names of the decision-makers as well as the names of social services clients. This makes it more difficult to have adequate lay scrutiny at a departmental level and provides a strong incentive and opportunity to cover-up. Here in Bradford, the full Hamzah Khan serious case review is so redacted as to provide little practical value to us as councillors. We are forced to rely on the report summary  - and the assumptions it inevitably makes - rather than have the ability to review the actual data upon which that summary is based.

It may be (although I doubt it) that the actions taken in the Essex case were the only reasonable options available to the Council and other agencies. But so long as we cannot know (and 'we' does not have to mean full disclosure to the public merely disclosure to individuals or organisations that are not instruments in the decision-making itself), there will remain doubts about why certain decisions are made, the professional ideology of the decision-makers and the secretive organisational culture that engulfs social work.

Perhaps, rather than engage in ad hominem attacks on those struggling to expose possible flaws in our care systems, great legal minds - the full arrogance of the law - would be better directed to finding ways of allowing proper scrutiny of social services' decision-making and the operation of the family courts without unduly compromising the necessary protection of client identities.

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Not answering the phone is a failure...

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So I'm trying to speak to someone at the hospital to find out how my Mum is - it's 250 miles away so I can't visit easily. And no-one is answering the telephone - or at least nowhere near enough to give me any reassurance. In a fit of irritation and anger I turn to Twitter and splurge out that the inability to answer the telephone is a failure on the part of the NHS (although, more specifically, on the part of one particular bit of the NHS).

The response was as predictable as Twitter always is on the subject of the NHS - a series of 'how dare you criticise the NHS'. 'the nurses are busy saving lives' and 'answering the telephone isn't a priority' tweets. And I guess they're right on one level - we don't employ nurses and doctors to answer the telephone, we employ them to look after patients. So I'm probably - in a frustrated sort of way - pleased that the nurses aren't answering my call.

However, not answering the phone is still a failure. In the main people don't idly ring up hospital wards just for a chat - when someone rings they're likely to be worried, upset and concerned about a friend or relative. And this is why the phone should be answered and why not answering it is a failure of service. I appreciate that on the scale of NHS service failures it's down the list - way below not giving a thirsty patient a drink, dishing out the wrong medicine or sending someone with throat cancer home because you think it's tonsillitis. But it is a failure - a failure that starts from a lack of humanity from the institution, that's a real, worried person on the line, and continues through failing to mitigate (having an answer phone, for example) to not considering that finding a solution makes any sense.

The point here is that I'm entitled to criticise the NHS as an institution when it fails me - and, unimportant though is may be to those steeped in NHS culture, not answering the phone is a failure.

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Process or people?

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Surrey County Council let an old lady starve to death:

Officers from Surrey Police have begun an inquiry following the death of 81-year-old widow Gloria Foster.

She passed away at Epsom Hospital on Monday (February 4) after being found abandoned, starving and dehydrated at her home in Banstead.

Mrs Foster was left alone at the property in Chipstead Road after the Sutton-based firm that cared for her, Carefirst24, was shut down following a raid by the UK Border Agency and Metropolitan Police in January.

I don't know the details of the case so can't say whether anything criminal was done. But I have a question - was Mrs Foster killed by the process or the people?  And it's an important question because it impinges on the failings in our National Health Service as shown by the enquiries into various hospitals and hospital departments, most recently Mid Staffs NHS Trust.

If it's the process - or the system or the "culture" - then we must ask how it is that repeated reorganisations and restructures have affected our care provision. Has each revolution in NHS or Council organisation merely, in Kafka's words, resulted in "...the slime of a new bureaucracy"?

Or is it the people - should we really be asking how someone - or worse still several people - can leave an old lady without the care she needed to live for nine days? That's nine days turning up to work with the request sitting on the desk, nine days to make a phone call and arrange some care, nine days to do something so Mrs Foster can live.

Is it the people? Those altruistic nurses passing by a bed where an poorly woman lies in her own urine and faeces - was it the process, the system, the culture that made them neglect her needs? Time and time again, not just in Stafford but across the NHS and in Council care provision, we read of this neglect, this failure to do basic, civilised acts of caring.

Can we ask again - is it the process or the people?

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Stephen Bayley is still a cultural snob...

The victim of Stephen Bayley's scorn

Three years ago Stephen Bayley - then described as  “…one of Britain's best known cultural commentators" - had a pop at what he dubbed 'kitschmas'. At the time I found this a terribly snobbish and ignorant approach:

But Stephen Bayley and his ilk wouldn’t understand this – schmoozing round their charmed circle of the cultural trendsetters, these folk are nearly as out of touch with the real world as Ed Balls. And they annoy me…I like my inflatable reindeer, grossly overblown Santas, great fat snowmen, kids singing “Away in a Manger”, over the top lighting on private houses, German Christmas markets, re-runs of “White Christmas”, happy drunks in plastic reindeer horns…all the trappings of Kitschmas. I loved it that the car parked next to mine outside PC World had horns and a red nose.

You’re welcome to your smug little view Mr Bayley – but it doesn’t reflect what the rest of us want.

It seems that nothing has changed - yet again the Spectator has given this monstrous snob space to tell us who like our Christmas kitsch-filled that we lack taste. He even enlists another hideous snob - this time a Marxist one:

Thus the gross Furby is the embodiment of our too brightly coloured contemporary Christmas and the redundant gifts and trick effects that are part of it. The Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm is rarely quoted, directly or indirectly, with approval in The Spectator, but here is an exception. Hobsbawm said that the less educated the consumer, the greater his taste for decoration. I do not know that Hobsbawm, who unfortunately died before the relaunch, was aware of the brightly coloured Furby, but he would surely agree that, if temporary decoration may be compared to ludicrous merchandise, his idea applied here.

Perhaps next year the Spectator might like to give someone the space to make the case for house bling, tinny carols and artificial snow rather than giving this so-called "cultural commentator" another chance to parade his ghastly prejudice.

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