We've talked about the dead, let us now consider the living. The new measures Boris Johnson announced on Wednesday were certainly, well, confusing. The Rule of Six, redolent of something half-inched from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, prohibits private gatherings of no more than six people. No more house parties, drinks out or a meal if participants exceed the magic number. You won't even have a socially distanced gathering in the park. And then we have the infection rate, which reported over 3,500 new cases on Friday and an official R rate of between 1.0 and 1.2. Local lockdowns are popping up quicker than Russian oligarchs at Tory fundraisers, and Johnson is musing a 10pm curfew. The measures are half arsed and, remember, don't come into force until Monday. You can imagine some, just like the weekend before lockdown, hitting the town one last time before restrictions are imposed - a blow out that can only blow up the positive tests and hospitalisations. Incompetent and reckless, yes. Incoherent, yes. But isn't it funny how the loops and contradictions in the management of the crisis map onto the Tory party's coalition of interests? Perhaps we need to stop giving the Tories the benefit doubt by putting Coronavirus failures down to their hopelessness. It's time to start treating their decisions as deliberate and pre-meditated. They know what they're doing, and their first concern is not the health of those in harm's way: it's the wellbeing of capital and, in particular, the capital strategically allied to the Tory party. This is a topic visited here on several occasions. The Tories are not simply the 'party of business', but - like the Labour Party - a coalition of (business) interests whose composition has adjusted over time. There is a certain continuity, however. Keeping the City of London the pre-eminent global hub for currency exchange, brokerage and share trading, and finance is a priority and touchstone of Tory statecraft (and, for that matter, Labour governments too). As such, the bankers, traders, and financiers in the City have tended to look to the Tories for political protection, while personnel flit between the City, the Treasury, and the Bank of England - not to mention around the Conservative social circuit - at a speed matched only by algorithms modelling derivatives. Since Thatcher's Big Bang in 1986, sections of the City closest to the Tories tend to be those who viewed its best interests served by repositioning the City as a no-questions-asked clearing house outside the regulatory reach of the European Union. Another section of the City, particularly those whose commercial interests are tied up with sourcing finance to EU-based firms, take a different view. Additionally, a subset of the City - finance capital - is closely aligned with the Tories. Based on the creation of debt, this is big capital grown fat off the two property booms of the last 40 years. They simultaneously have an interest in inflating property prices and ensuring supply can never satisfy demand, which creates a synergy of interests with the small but politically important layer of landlords. Limited owner occupation ensures a healthy rental market for landlords, as well as avenues of investment for institutional investors, private individuals, and pension funds. All of a sudden, Tory failures and limited measures on home building and, as we've seen, help for renters, makes perfect sense. The Tories have always been closely tied to the land. As Geoffrey Ingham notes in his masterful Capitalism Divided? The City and Industry in British Social Development, successful capitalists in Britain have tended to acquire the aristocratic habitus and the taste for a big pile and acres of land as signs of what we now call cultural capital. Jacob Rees-Mogg typifies this tendency. Despite his ridiculous affectations, neither of his parents were drawn from aristocratic stock and his fortune comes from his investments in the City, not inherited wealth. It's a confidence trick repeated by the well-heeled for three centuries, a conscious effort of cultural appropriation to associate one's lofty position not with contemporary money grubbing but the trappings of England's ancient past. In addition to city slickers-turned-country gents, farming, small scale and large, have traditionally looked to the Tories because of ties of loyalty and deference to landowners, but also protectors of the rural interest - above all the supply of cheap, non-union labour to do the labouring and picking. This was guaranteed by a combination of feeble protections for workers, and subsequently shielding them from above minimum wage rises thanks to migrant labour. This intensive use of labour also underpins Tory support from the service industry. The age differentials built into the minimum wage allows big chains and small businesses to simply hire in help cheaply, and the cheapest of workers are, of course, the young. Our good friend Tim Martin is an ideal typical personification of this tendency in capital. It's worth remembering that capital is a social relationship, but one based on irreducible inequality and exploitation. Those at the commanding end of this relationship - the bosses, the managers, the owners - have a sense for what's good for the immediate interests of their businesses, but this is not based on perfect information and their recognition of their interests are filtered through lifetimes of prejudices and loyalties, many of which reinforced by their lived experience as owners and controllers of the means of production. In some cases, their attachment to the Tories can be viewed in terms of rational choice/rational actor theory, but not always. But rather than seeing the Tories as the expression of these interests, we should see them as their articulators. The insights of Mao Zedong are not usually aired here, but his discussion of democracy and the mass line is useful for understanding this. He suggested democracy existed in as far as party militants and leaders have a feel for the diffuse currents and interests among the popular classes. These voices are condensed and distilled into slogans, demands, and programmes which are taken to and win over the masses. The democracy, he argues, lies in this process of dialogue, of listening to the people and feeding into strategy. The Tory party works in a similar way, albeit with smaller groups of people. Its reputation as the party of business is alone enough to draw in business support, but it does not need a cabal of the rich to tell them what to do at every turn. To keep the money flowing, it instinctively knows, has a collective feel for the sorts of people and interests it should be supporting - and this feel comes from the traditions, ideas, and the personnel of the Tory party itself. They're embedded in their class, or rather particular fractions of it, and away they go. How does this work? The contradictions in the Tory coronavirus strategy is a perfect case study. The government's refusal to apply the rule of six to workplaces shows, as far as they're concerned, people are primarily profit fodder. The new control measures are to be enforced in what they regard as the ancillary requirements of labour. i.e. Life outside the purview of the capitalist. Indeed, all throughout lockdown the Tories have fretted over the consequences of furlough and refused point blank to issue a general business closure notice: for most organisations outside of retail and services, whether workers were required was down to the judgement of individual employers. And so, whatever measures the Tories consider over the next few weeks, telling people to stay home is never likely to feature. Labour discipline is at stake. The second is opening the service economy is the attempt to throw a bone to a key layer of Tory support, and it's this undoubtedly driving the newly-accumulating levels of infection. As we know with the panic about ghost city centres and the memes around dying for a sandwich, the Tories want people back in the office so the multiplying effects of passing trade and revive retail - a scenario uniting chain stores and the small newsagent. On top of this is an overall concern with the death of the office. In as far as the Tories have a properly thought out economic strategy, it is clustering as many businesses into big cities to drive up property prices, rents (commercial and residential), and provide a relatively stable property environment for finance capital and pensions funds to profit. There are further happy electoral consequences of doing so too. If this model breaks, those funds, the investments are in big trouble and property-led economics becomes more difficult to sustain. Desperate moves at getting people back into the workplace is to try and derail this move, and protect those vested in the model. But the result? Overwhelming support by business, ostentatiously sympathetic media coverage of the government's efforts to get Britain moving again, and a bedrock of unmovable support in the polls. On the surface, what the Tories are doing is nonsensical and counter-productive. To get any sense of what's happening, we've got to stop treating Johnson's government as a bunch of incompetents responding to a health problem. The Tories have a political strategy, and their concern is the health of the class relationships they articulate and champion in this period of biopolitical crisis. Rising to the difficulties of Coronavirus demands we have a political strategy of our own that opposes and pressures the Tories, and this is only possible if we are fully aware of what the Tory party is, what they're doing, and why they're doing it.
"Abide by the rule of six!" exclaimed Boris Johnson during a rare appearance at a Coronavirus press conference this evening. Announcing new rules, all settings should be restricted to no more than six people - unless you are on a train, going in to work, walking into a shop, or heading into the classroom. As any scientist will tell you, Covid-19 is a notorious respecter of the places people gather to sell their time to their boss and only becomes infectious in private, home settings. Following the fourth day in succession of 2,000+ ne winfections, Johnson's new measures which, he says, "breaks his heart", are not going to curb transmission much. He doesn't want a second national lockdown, but if cases keep going up the political consequences of not acting become increasingly expensive. Fluffing the containment of Coronavirus twice is a can the Tories would rather not carry. Yet there's a strange absence from the discourse, a void barely remarked upon by leading politicians of the government and opposition. The press are uncharacteristically quiet on this issue too and the left, even the left aren't banging on about it. The absence I'm speaking of is the absence of absent people: the dead. At the time of writing, the official count says 41,594 people in the UK have died of Covid-19. Excess deaths in total are between 50k-65k since the start of the outbreak. A lot of people who should still be with us are just not getting talked about. Why? Back before the lockdown, we had occasion to consider Tory strategy ahead of the calamity about to engulf the country. What the theory heads refer to as necropolitics. If biopolitics is how a state goes about managing its population at a remove via forms of governance selecting for, nudging, and using the stick to encourage acceptable patterns of behaviours and styles of living, necropolitics is the management of death and the risk of death. From the off, the Tories' management of the risk of death was slapdash and cavalier. They were slow to lock down and let hundreds of sporting events take place, including Cheltenham which, alone, led to dozens of deaths and thousands of infections. Then, to clear the hospitals ready for a wave of Coronavirus patients, elderly people were discharged back to care homes, some of whom were already ill (but untested). A recipe for death on a huge scale which, peculiarly, has yet to trouble any conspiracy theorists. These criminal failings go hand in hand with the Tory abandonment of track and trace at the very moment it was most needed to stamp out the spread of disease. Instead, they allowed Covid-19 to flair out of control until the closure of practically everything brought the rates of infection down. A mix of complacency and incompetence characterises, and continues to characterise their management of risk. If negligence of this magnitude had taken place in a company, the boss would rightly face a battery of charges. And yet, far from punishment, Johnson and the Tories continue to enjoy handsome polling. One of the reasons why is because, so far, they've successfully depoliticised the necropolitics. The question "why are 60,000 people dead?" is yet to elicit an answer along the lines of "because of the Tories." And the government have managed this accomplishment by a mix of design and fortuitous accident. There were two phases to the lockdown. The first was a zealous campaign of curtain-twitching and over-enthusiastic coppers busting people for taking the dog for a walk in the middle of nowhere. Stories abounded of feral youths being ... outside, and panics about lockdown not getting taken seriously. There was cringe talk of reviving the Blitz spirit (replete with VE Day congas that, strangely, did not attract the press's critical attention), but the stress here was on the individual responsiblity we have not to make others ill. With hundreds of deaths piling up everyday and government uniformity backed up, as ever, by the media , the lockdown zeroed the public's imagination down to social distancing and being careful. As such, the background presence of death underlined the seriousness of the situation. And yet, for all its ferociousness, it struck seemingly at random, a consequence of chance, poor luck, or failure to behave responsibly in the new situation. All the public messaging rammed this point hope: stay at home, control the virus, save lives. This is where the accident of Dominic Cummings's legendary trip to Barnard Castle actually helped with managing the necropolitics. This blatant case of hypocrisy caused the Tories some pain, and while it did undermine people's trust in the rules, it placed renewed stress on individual responisbility. Cummings's breach of lockdown did not lead to a generalised popular critique of the Tory handling of the crisis, instead it helped justify rule-breaking while affirming one's responsibility for Covid avoidance. If you're daft enough to do a Dom and catch it, the government is not to blame for your foolhardiness. As the lockdown restrictions have eased, the press and TV news regularly pepper their output with illegal raves and huge house parties. There was also plenty of faux concern in the Tory papers about the health consequences of Black Lives Matter protests. And so as we see with the building wave of infections, because the young this time are disproportionately affected a whole summer of reportage on their irresponsibility allow the government to escape its share of the blame, despite the failures over testing - something even Boris Johnson guffawed about in the Commons earlier - and the debacle of test and trace mk II. But the point needs stressing. The vectors of infection aren't because a few young people have secretly met under tree cover to indulge their mutual love for repetitive beats, but thanks to the government's ludicrous eat out to help out scheme. Epidemiology isn't string theory. You have large numbers of people encouraged to visit cafes, bars, takeaways and pubs then the people most likely to fall ill will be those exposed to a flow of patrons for long periods. And guess which age group is overrepresented working in these trades? The 18-24s. The Tories wanted to depoliticise the dead, and they've found a willing partner in the Leader of the Opposition. The strictly limited terms of Keir Starmer's opposition is a stress on Tory incompetence. A wider critique is off the cards: contesting the politics of coronavirus is limited to only nibbling at the edges. Whether this is thanks to now-is-not-the-time-ism or thinking plodding managerialism plus a refusal to take up a firm critical position will endear him to Tory voters (or, for that matter, both), the result is the same. The Tories get to define the necropolitics of Covid-19 uncontested, and while some might fetishise the inquiry to come, it's naive to suppose what they're doing and getting away with is going to come back in 18 months and wreak catastrophic damage on them. The Tories then are winning. Whatever happens over the next four years, they've boxed out the damage tens of thousands of totally unnecessary deaths should have caused them. Whether they can carry on doing this as the next wave laps at the country's toes depends on whether the opposition changes tack. If not them, who will speak for the dead and those who are about to die? Image Credit
How's Brexit going? According to the latest bombshell heavily trailed all day, it's proceeding according to plan. This morning, the papers led with the news Downing Street was planning on tearing up withdrawal agreement provisions struck last October. You'll remember it. The deal Theresa May took to the Commons and had it rejected on three occasions (and voted down by Boris Johnson on two of them), but was suddenly a last minute master-stroke once Johnson was in the saddle and took it to Brussels himself. So good is the withdrawal agreement that the Prime Minister took to The Times to crow how Britain would "prosper mightily" if this forms the basis for the UK's future relationship with the EU. Prosper so mightily in fact that his deal allows Northern Ireland to remain in the EU's single market and customs union because being outide would be, um, profoundly damaging. Johnson's latest Brexit move involves passing a new UK internal market bill, the full details of which are to become available on Wednesday. On BBC Breakfast this morning, environment secretary George Eustice tried gamely to make it sound like a technical matter, a case of checking the commas and evacuating the colons. But it is not. The specifics would make changes to seemingly arid aspects of the withdrawal agreement around customs arrangements and the rules governing UK state aid for Northern Ireland. These, however, could risk unilaterally revising the agreement. Over a year of Johnson in government should have insulated Westminster watchers against Number 10's contrivances to shock. And yet. The first thing we have to keep in mind is who this theatre is aimed at. Allowing the flames of ambiguity to get fanned by half-hearted denials opens the door to reports of "concerns" in Brussels. While a frisson of panic is sending shivers down the spines of remainers, it guarantees favourable editorials in the Tory press and more red meat for the hungry Tory base. Seeing the government self-consciously and ostentatiously acting tough with and trolling the EU is something they definitely love to see. Would the Tories be so petty? When you consider we're stuck with Brexit because a Conservative Prime Minister wanted to stop UKIP winning a couple of parliamentary seats, the answer is a definite yes. This latest round of Brexit brinkmanship is faithfully reproducing behaviours past, then. There is another good reason to view it as pure bluff: the fact we're dealing with an international treaty. As we saw before when, for a while in 2019, May telegraphed to her honourable members how she didn't really mean the things she signed the UK up to and we wouldn't have to abide by them anyway. Or Johnson's rhetorically playing fast and loose with the law a year ago, there is a very simple fact of geopolitical life the Tories cannot escape from. If they renege on treaties, the trading relationships they're going to get Tony Abbott to negotiate for them won't happen. A Brexit deal with Japan won't fail because of Liz Truss's red lines on Stilton, but simply because the UK cannot be trusted to abide by legal agreement. That means no deal with the EU, none with the emerging markets supposedly poised to replace trade volumes with our closest neighbours, nor the holiest of holies, the United States. If some weird hobbyist writing from the back streets of Stoke-on-Trent can discern this, so do the civil servants, the politicians, and the UK's chief negotiator. This posturing is not without risk. The Tories' stance could box them in to not striking a deal at all. And the interests closest to the Tories could live with that. With an opposition at best "measured" in its criticisms, the Tories can rely on its press friends and supine broadcasters to bury the damage of a chaotic Brexit amid the Coronavirus winter wreckage. And if Johnson does strike a last minute deal (which remains more likely than walking away), it will be thin and fall far short of the oven-ready promises made last year. Not that this is overly concerning: they can again call upon their friends to herald it a triumph. You can write the Daily Express headlines already. Where does this leave the rest of us already at the sharp end of a pandemic and an economic depression exacerbated by the Tories? With a serious organising job to do. Because the Tory constituency is somewhat shielded from the consequences of these three crises now coming to a head, Johnson thinks he can carry on as he has for the last year. Labour for its part is left without a strategy of breaking up and disorganising the Tory coalition, unless making nice to the Mail and the Telegraph is it. Until the left comes up with a disruptive strategy of its own as well as continuing to organise our people, they shall rinse and repeat it all the way to 2024 and another unconscionable victory. Image Credit
We can now add former Stone Roses frontman Ian Brown to the roll call of stupidity. Tweeting on Saturday afternoon, he wrote "NO LOCKDOWN NO TESTS NO TRACKS NO MASKS NO VAX." Utter bobbins, but remember he did release a song called Dolphins were Monkeys so science was never his strong point. We know it's not just him, though. Last week Piers Corbyn copped a ten grand fine for organising the anti-mask protest in Trafalgar Square, and to him flocked all that is naive, foolish, and downright thick. The banner of the British Union of Fascists made an appearance, and circulating among the anti-maskers were adherents of QAnon, climate change deniers, and assorted far right and conspiracy hobbyists. When a small clutch of people do something, you can put it down to idiosyncrasy. But when large numbers are involved, with input from right wing politics and celebrity has-beens hungry for the hit of the spotlight, we're talking about a social phenomenon. It therefore behoves us to understand more than the cultural roots of this form of conspiracy thinking, as interesting an exercise that is, but what matters most immediately are the reasons why anti-Coronavirus conspiracy thinking and its anti-mask message has efficacy. These processes are fairly well understood in general terms, but it's worth spelling them out. Mass stupidity in advanced capitalist societies is not because people are ultimately brainwashed or lacking in the grey matter department, it's a question of how we "become", of what type of human beings we are and why our society has churned our like out for decades. And this is inseparable from the N-word no one ever hears on the BBC: neoliberalism. Instead of conceiving neoliberalism as a set of economic-oriented policies emphasising market fundamentalism, privatisations and, with it, attacks on workers' movements and workers' rights wherever it takes hold, neoliberalism has to be thought about at its most pernicious: as a mode of governance, a diagram for shaping, manipulating, and relating to human beings, particularly at the interface between institutions and organisations as collective entities and people as atomised, individuated bodies. Let's unpack that a bit. Thanks to successive interventions by the state across all areas of social life, what you might call the consuming self has become the model of citizenship. Think of the prototypical shopper. They go into a shop and choose what they want to buy, and as consumer markets have expanded so have the choices available, provided money is available to take advantage of the array of choices. What someone decides to buy, how much, and how frequently is solely a matter of individual determination, of weighing up the options and choosing. This sensibility was raised to the pinnacle of public policy under Thatcher, and has informed governments red and blue ever since. Education, for example, a matter of parental choice, and this has justified the semi-privatisation of schooling and the introduction of metrics to evaluate schools by. Enhancing the ability to choose between private or public health providers was a long-held Tory policy objective, and enabling patients to make choices about their treatments, who treats them and where, continues to justify the ongoing marketisation of the NHS. And on and on it goes at all level of public service. Yet it is not enough to simply be offered choices. Successive governments were just as concerned with turning out people capable of making choices. This depended on inculcating a sense of the entrepreneurial self. Consider schooling. At school children are taught about individual self-responsibility. So what is new? That has always been a feature of the education system. But married to this are batteries of test regimens backed by an increasingly authoritarian school culture in which teachers are performance-managed by the inspections regime and fidelity to grade targets set by management. This encourages informal streaming, exclusions, and the move toward screening entrants. In many schools some children are simply told they're not getting entered for a particular examination because their performance reflects badly on the school's reputation, which is measured by league table positioning. While wider culture is tending toward more cooperation, children and young people are addressed as isolated monads thrown onto their own capacities, skills, and resources. Whatever they do with them, however these are deployed is, again, down to choice. No one is responsible for their application or lack thereof than them. This critique of education of the last 40 years is also well worn. It advantages middle class children, and those who refuse, reject, or find this approach to schooling alien to their background are wheedled out. They chose not to succeed, and it's only a hop, skip, and a jump to suppose they chose (and deserve) the fates awaiting them. But this interpellation of a neoliberal self, which is reinforced by the way public institutions address someone and, depending on the organisation, administer sanctions as disciplinary measures to reinforce future compliance comes with a political bonus. If the institutional landscape is set up to address everyone in a similar way, and everyone has more or less the same shared capacity to access services and abide by expectations placed on them, the micromanagement of everyone by a Whitehall bureaucrat becomes moot. Neoliberal selfhood is the most efficient way of managing populations because governance is overwhelmingly self-governance. Micromanagement in fact mushrooms under such a regime as administrators are needed to track metrics and managers are required to reinforce conformist behaviour, but it immediately appears spontaneous and not directed from the centre, effectively depoliticising the running of the services the state provides. "We do not comment on operational matters" has become a staple of the government lexicon. The neoliberal self comes packaged with other consequences: on how the individual sees themselves in the world. While this mode of governance is prescriptive about individuality, choice, and responsibility, excludes collectivism (Thatcher might well have said there's no such thing as the economy, only individuals and their families), and reinforces one's powerlessness in the face of the world, it compensates by endowing the neoliberal self with ontological and epistemological sovereignty. Put plainly, I'm all that matters and I know best. If then the cultural accent is on self-responsibility and effort, there is no higher power dictating what is and isn't true apart from your own opinions. If previously "objective truth" resided in the claims of experts and the rules of evidence, the systematic denigration of politically inconvenient authorities by governments and the number of occasions experts have shown themselves to be wrong reinforces the belief of individual discernment. If I want something to be true, then it is. UFOs, climate change denial, QAnon, homeopathy, chemtrails, Rothschilds, lizards. No one can tell me otherwise. Which brings us to covidiocy as the latest manifestation of the social propensity to stupidity. Primacy of the self involves more than just scepticism of authority: the sovereign individual is anxious the state is out to get them or curtail their fundamental capacities in some way. In other words, its a sensibility of self that heightens a sense of (narcissistic) paranoia. This is the logical end point of the individuated, isolated neoliberal self: an affirmation of their right to choose as it shrinks in terror from impositions of state authority. Therefore, the lockdowns and the partial closure of public life, the insistence on facemasks and bans on large gatherings, these are straightforward power grabs to force people to wear masks in public forever more (why?) and police the conduct of the citizenry. If that is the first concern, then the rest makes sense: Coronavirus isn't more serious than a case of the sniffles, or Covid-19 is a manufactured disease, or is totally bogus. The reality (or not) of the disease is secondary to people, in the absence of collective sources of symbolic belonging/reassurance, clinging to and fetishising the structural principles of their perceptual universe. This is the how, but what comes next? How to beat this? Politics and hope. Variations of the discussion on the dynamics of mass stupidity can get written and find their audiences, but elaborating this critique and explanation won't dent the potency of these notions. The alternative, the only alternative, is by challenging the position neoliberal governance occupies. And again, that requires critique, but is doomed to impotence if it is not merged with a movement challenging not just the Tories but capitalism itself. This is not a cop out. Ideas can't change the world by themselves. Conspiracy theories were (mainly) harmless eccentricities until millions of people across the globe took them up and began acting on them. The same is true of our ideas too. Writing them is the easy part, making them part of the everyday is the difficult slog. But it's worth it. The struggle opens the way to real freedom where true individuality, not it pale, stunted, neoliberal version, can take wing and soar, unencumbered by authoritarianism and the banshee call of superstition. 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Thanks to The Times by way of the ridiculous Corbyn book, Left Out, news reaches us that Ian Murray was all set on being the eighth founding member of our old pals The Independent Group/Change UK/The Independent Group for Change. Some might congratulate Murray for making the right decision to stand by the red team, but I'm not one of them. Having pulled out from TIG/CHUK's opening presser at the 11th hour and electing to stay has condemned him to drawing his handsome Westminster salary and getting to play the Big I Am in Scottish politics trading off his last man standing/shadow Scottish secretary shtick. Someone much more capable and honest could have had the seat he's now squatting in. Unlike the others who traded in their seats for the boards of water companies, trade union-busting consultancies, and chairing the pressure group for bailiffs. According to the people he's been yacking to, “I didn’t want to hand my seat to someone from the Corbyn wing of the party and felt loyalty to all the people who had worked so hard to help win over the years" was the post-facto justification. The same article also says that if the seat had fallen to the SNP (which was a doubtful prospect), he'd have suffered "major reputational damage." Hard to sell yourself as a competent consultant if you appear too self-interested, though it hasn't slowed down his contemporaries. He goes on to say "All my life I’ve fought for a Labour government", except for the past five years when he did all he could to prevent one from happening. Scabby behaviour like Murray's is nothing new to the Labour Party. It takes place at all levels and is, in many ways, inscribed into the political DNA of Labourism. As a party wedded to forming majorities in Westminster as the sole (permitted) agent of social change, many of its MPs think they were elected on the basis of how wonderful they are as opposed to the Labour ticket they ran on, which in turn gives them license to behave as they please. The utter failure of Murray's would-be confederates last December would, you think, drive home the brute fact of MPs' dependence on the party label for electoral success. But it won't. And then there is the privilege afforded the back and forth of procedure, votes, committee hearings, and the rest of it. This is a venue for compromising or, if you want to be blunt about it, peddling away principles and the interests of constituents for a minor policy concession here, or a bit of preferment there. John Mann and Ian Austen being prime, but by no means unique examples of crapping on the people who put them into the Commons for Tory approval and cash. Labourism's exclusivist parliamentarism therefore insulates those on the inside from the pressures on the outside, a position that simultaneously flatters them as artful practitioners at the top of politics and people who know its realities (and secrets) better than the constituency activist and trade union branch secretary. It's a place where banalities like "we need to win elections" become profundities, and factionally convenient myths assume the status of eternal truisms. This is the lot for most Labour MPs and why they tilt toward reconciling themselves with the received way of doing things - it's a social thing, not just a matter of personal failing. Ian Murray is a creature of this environment, a duplicitous toad inhabiting his pool alongside all sorts of pond life. He should be sacked from his shadow role, sent to the back benches and face deselection. But he won't be. His fate as Labour's token Scottish MP in this parliament is assured, and makes him invulnerable to shenanigans, scandal, and the consequences of his own banal, unremarkable mediocrity.
NB What do you know. Ian Murray was also in negotiations with the Liberal Democrats about defecting. Charming. Image Credit
Many of us do bullshit jobs, or have jobs that come with thick layers of bullshit. Here's David Graeber, who sadly passed away yesterday, talking about the five broad types of bullshit jobs that exist. Rest in power, comrade.
Writing about video games is a difficult business, so compiling a six-part documentary for Netflix must have been a nightmare. Yet a critical piece could be done on the restrictive practices of hardware manufacturers, the toxic work cultures of programming, the questionable tropes recycled endlessly into games, and how games have contributed to the gamification of life and work with its metrics and endless apps for quantifying the self. Sadly, High Score, which began streaming in late August, did none of these things. If the problem with the bulk of writing about games is its refusal to break with the evaluation of the play experience, this show does not even approach these well worn parameters of video game criticism. Choosing what should and shouldn't be covered was always going to be a difficult task, but you do expect something about the early days of video games to avoid distorting history. Like how, for instance, video games were almost entirely American-centric. Japan merits a mention thanks to its dominance of the US market from the mid-late 1980s and the influence of arcade games coming from the likes of Taito, Namco, and Nintendo, but if the viewer is entirely new to the history of video games it suggests nothing of any consequence was happening outside of these territories. Indeed, so egregious was the US-centrism at times that it failed to mention how Sega's Genesis was known as the MegaDrive in its country of origin, and everywhere else bar Canada. Naturally, the documentary makers might not wanted to have got bogged down in the home micro revolution in Europe either but given the subsequent impact British and French studios and publishers were to have globally, perhaps a smidgen of acknowledgement would have been the polite thing to do? The significant omissions pile up. The 1983 crash which, again, was a US-only affair, was not thanks to E.T. on the Atari VCS upsetting kids and annoying parents, but was thanks to the glut of poor but pricey software. Which also included the appalling 2600 iteration of Pac-Man. The episode about adventure games overlooked the importance of Adventure on Atari's machine, and you would be forgiven for thinking Sega were also-rans before Sonic the Hedgehog arrived. Other readers who happen to know anything about video game history can watch High Score and find their own nits to pick - there are more than enough to go around. Pretending the world outside America and Japan doesn't exist is one thing, but then there are the choices about what to focus on within these self-imposed limits. The beginnings of Atari and arcades, okay. The arrival and dominance of Nintendo. Yes. The challenge of Sega and the 16-bit console wars - essential. And I would also agree with the focus of the other three outings of High Score - adventure and role-playing (episode three), fighting games (episode four, with the spotlight on Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat, but at least the prior history of beat 'em ups should also have got some acknowledgement), and lastly 3D games with Starfox and Doom taking over the episode. But here, there are major problems with how these stories are told. Three types of people provide the bulk of the narrative. The artist/visionary/programmer, the businessman, and the player. For example, we hear about how Roberta Williams (later of Sierra Online) encountered a text-based adventure and it inspired to write her first adventure game, Mystery House. John Romero of id software talks about his part in the creation of Wolfenstein and Doom. Tom Kalinske, the celebrated head of Sega of America in its heyday waxes about his multi-pronged strategy for carving up Nintendo's American market share. These constitute moments of individual brilliance, and set up their celebration/veneration as auteurs. They might have been creative and insightful and made contributions to the development of video games, but these contributions were collective efforts assisted, supported by, and dependent on staff who don't get the same spotlight treatment. And besides, are we really to believe there would be no polygon-based games without Argonaut software as per the implication of High Score's overestimation of the importance of Starfox, or would first-person shooters never have become a thing had Romero ended up developing business software instead of games? This sort of naive, impressionistic history sits awkwardly on a streaming service sharing space with complex and multi-layered dramas. Alongside the legend of the auteur, we have an entirely needless narrative of player-as-athlete. Even in the United States, the championships Nintendo and Sega ran were marketing gimmicks marginal to popular video game culture, and so the inclusion of four tournaments completely over-eggs their contemporary resonance, and for what purpose? Just for a little note at the end to say esports are becoming a thing? I suppose this accomplishes two things. It celebrates the cult of the hardcore gamer, which has taken something of a pummelling in recent years thanks to associations with toxic masculinity and the harassment of women in the video game industry. And by demonstrating the serious time kids put into Space Invaders and Tetris, the power of capturing and holding attention underlines the seriousness of video games as a medium, as if anyone in 2020 believes otherwise. This is the gamer as addict, as someone who can't get enough and is, therefore, the ideal consumer. Why casual gaming didn't merit a mention is another peculiar editorial decision given the size of its market, but it certainly doesn't fit the image of the player the documentary laboriously and annoyingly works to establish. There are a few occasions where the role of women, black, and LGBT people are mentioned and briefly profiled, but it's strictly on the level of individual contributions and looks tacked on. Which, overall, is entirely consistent with the viewpoint the show's production team chose to privilege. Rarely does High Score lift itself above the horizon of a corporate documentary telling the world how wonderful, progressive, and economically useful the video game industry is. It's glossy and interesting if you know nothing about the topic, but it is not critical. Indeed, you could be forgiven for thinking no one put out an awful video games after 1983, and that the Nintendo Seal of Quality ensured shovelware was a thing of the past. And this is the most galling aspect of High Score. Everything is lovely. Games are fun, and we should play them. One or two gestures toward the representation of minorities fails to establish how, like all cultural artefacts, the production, reception, and commentary upon video games is a seething cauldron of struggle cutting across production and consumption. The terrain is contested and this should not be papered over or ignored. When a documentary fights shy of making an evaluation - the singular feature of most video game coverage - and goes in for the uncritical celebration of games and gaming, as a history it's useless save as a Noddy's introduction to the very basics. At best, it's a marketing exercise. And for this reason, High Score belongs in landfill with those mouldering 40 year-old E.T. cartridges. Image Credit
A Tory placeman wants to curb criticisms of the Tories? An attitude appropriate to some failing tabloid rag surely, but the Director General of the BBC? The new boss, Tim Davie, has taken umbrage at left comedians telling jokes about racism, Brexit, and the government. How brittle must our betters be if even Mock the Week can bring them out in multiplying fractures? A throw away comment then to commence his tenure in the big chair which, as it happens, started today? As with all things, this seeming statement of intent has to be seen in context. Of which there are two most immediately relevant to our analytical eye. The attempted striking of a new Tory settlement enabling Johnson and his successors politically dominate the first half of the 21st century in the same manner they shaped the second part of the last and, crucially, the BBC's place within it. Yet what is being suggested is not the murder of BBC comedy, but a suggestion of more balance. If there's any justice, hopefully Have I Got News For You will get swept up in the dragnet and finally disappear some 20 years after its bin by date. There might be new opportunities too. Shappi Khorsandi ponders how producers might have to think beyond the knackered panel show format. Though TV fans need not worry, the same boring celebs and tax-dodging comedians laughing at each other's jokes will have their safe place over on Channel Four. Is this complacency on my part? Are Davie's comments the thin end of a very thick wedge? Perhaps, but surely this should be seen more as right wing genuflecting to the press gallery - a signal that one of them (Davie, after all, is a former Tory association chair) is ensconced in the top job. Of greater concern is the likelihood of more marketisation at the BBC. With a background in marketing, Davie has long been part of the management cadre who've overseen the neoliberalisation of the national broadcaster and are responsible for dumbing down content and overseeing compliant news coverage - as Tom discusses in his book. The position the BBC is in cannot be discounted. It is vulnerable thanks to continuous pressure over the licence fee, and the government expects it to make good on the promise the Tories made to the over-75s five years ago. Abolishing the charge for them means swingeing cuts or, some BBC tops hope, a new fudged understanding with the government. Appearing to be reasonable on right wing peccadilloes might enlist wider support from among the Tory coalition for a softer settlement if Davie is seen to get tough on the lefties while gesturing toward value-for-money concerns. And there are competitive pressures too, especially from the streaming services. So far Britbox, the joint BBC-ITV alliance appears to be doing well in North America with over a million subscribers but the pressure is on to provide it more exclusive content to make it a worthwhile proposition for British viewers, which then raises the legitimacy of the licence fee. Tacking right on the rhetoric front might keep the press off Davie's back as these are dealt with. We have to pay attention to the politics too. For the Tories, the BBC is a crucial institution. The newspapers play a key role in cohering and frightening their coalition of voters, so they cling on to the party all the more tightly. The BBC as the national broadcaster, for its part, remains a trusted source of news programming for many of them, and is therefore strategically important for popular opinion formation. The way the Tories have tried ensuring coverage favourable to them has come via the repeated ideological attacks and threats to break the BBC up or scale back the licence fee, which has, coincidentally, beget some of the most conformist and compliant reporting not normally seen outside of war time. And there's always the threat of introducing new competitors, such as the oft-repeated promise to set up a British Fox News as a means of diluting the BBC's influence and privileging something else more reliable for generating Tory talking points. This is especially the case now as fear and irrationality plays an ever greater role in gluing the Conservative alliance together - there can be no space for criticisms or awkward questions that might upset the apple cart. Within the Tory imaginary, the role of the BBC is something stripped down and offers little to no critical resources to apprehend the order they wish to build, and have worked and will continue working until this objective is realised. Whether this is Tim Davie's view of the BBC's direction of travel is a moot point. Given his sympathies and record, he's not about to prove himself resistant to reaching this destination. Image Credit
