Yesterday, Maria and I were chatting over a hospital meal about (of all things) Labour's disastrous local election results. The conversation was animated because there's an element of schadenfreude here: as far as I'm concerned, the authoritarian thugs who run this country deserved what they got.
But that's by the by. Specifically, what Maria and I were talking about was Labour's explanation for the results, which amounts to one word: the ECONOMY. Everything boils down to this. Every single Mouthpiece of Sauron who's spoken up after Labour's defeat on behalf of the government - every single over-paid flunky who's risen to obscurity in Gordon Brown's cabinet - comes out with the same "spinned" (spun) explanation of what has happened: people are dissatisfied with the state of the ECONOMY at the moment - i.e. at the price of petrol / bread / baked beans - and they want someone to deal with it. When, in their infinite wisdom, Labour have dealt with it, then the voters will return by the million.
This is rather brilliant as an explanation and as political spin: it informs people retrospectively why they were disgruntled, in the hope that those people will trundle away and say "Ah, yes, that was why I was disgruntled." It is a way of reducing people's disgruntlement to a manageable unit which can be gradually eliminated - which is much more containable than a generalised, diffusive disgruntlement and feeling that lots of things are wrong, but no one is quite sure what.
It's also a subtle version of what Labour do every day: tell people what they are thinking, why they are unhappy with the state of things. People don't quite know what they're thinking - so the Labour logic goes - so we need to "help" them. We know better than them what they're really thinking, so we can instruct them, guide them.
No doubt this all stems from the old left-wing ideas of false consciousness and ideology - those old notions that the people don't really know what they want, what they think, but the leaders / the state / the government / the party / Karl Marx's representatives on Earth (please delete as appropriate) do. As I get older, more and more I think this deeply damaging and deeply authoritarian ideology (and it is itself an ideology) lies at the root of all left-wing politics, from New Labour to Old Labour to radical feminism to Socialist Worker to the green lobby to Ken Livingstone to northern councils and so on and so forth.
I hasten to add here that, as everyone knows, I'm no true-blue Tory - God forbid. Thatcherism and its predecessors espoused other forms of authoritarianism (despite claims of laissez-faire capitalism and free-trade - never trust anyone whose claims include the words "free-trade"), many of them more outwardly, physically violent than the mental violence of New Labour.
But at least the Tories - in their most liberal, old-fashioned, inept incarnations - pretend to uphold individual liberty, whatever that means (the liberty to make money at someone else's expense, the liberty to starve). Labour don't even pretend. Instead, they determinedly tell us what to do, what to think, what to believe all the time. They determinedly believe that they (the party) know best, and that anyone else who disagrees is not only wrong, but morally wrong. This is a form of religious fundamentalism, of self-righteous sanctimoniousness, of ethical conviction. Anyone who disagrees needs to be forced to agree (at C.C.T.V.-point), and will go to hell if they don't.
It never strikes New Labourites (and here I mean the cabinet, not the back-benchers) that maybe one of the reasons that people voted against them in the local elections is that they are thoroughly bored with sanctimoniousness, with moralising, with being told what to do, what to think. It never strikes New Labourites that maybe, just maybe, they might be wrong on some points and the people right (erm, Iraq?). It never strikes Labourites that telling people why they voted against the party might just be adding salt into the wound. No, it never strikes them - not for a moment - that they might, for once, actually listen to people, actually ask them why they voted against the government.
Showing posts with label New Labour. Show all posts
Showing posts with label New Labour. Show all posts
Tuesday, 6 May 2008
Thursday, 6 March 2008
New Labour and the Proms
How reassuring that Margaret Hodges, so-called Minister of Culture, has come in for a huge amount of criticism following her attack on the Proms. There's a particular good letter from the cellist Steven Isserlis in The Guardian today, which about sums it up:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/mar/06/politicsandthearts.musicnews?gusrc=rss&feed=news
Amongst other things, Hodges said: “All too often our sectors are not at their best when embodying common belongings themselves. The audiences for many of our greatest cultural events - I’m thinking in particular of the Proms - is still a long way from demonstrating that people from different backgrounds feel at ease with this.”
Now, I think the Proms as a whole is a fantastic festival. As regards the Last Night, well, it's a bit of fun and (in my nostalgic old age) I don't object to Patriotism as much as I used to, as long as it doesn't slide into crude Nationalism.
But the idea that Art might be there just to be enjoyed "as a bit of fun" is anathema to New Labour. Art is there to promote New Labour thinking - a certain kind of British integration posited on authoritarian inclusiveness.
This, to my mind, demonstrates a typical New Labour attitude towards culture. Culture, for this government, is there for the following reasons:
1. to stop people stealing cars
2. to stop poor white people stealing cars
3. to stop poor minority ethnic people stealing cars.
Government policies on the Arts are all founded on these three central tenets. Music exists in order to stop people stealing cars. Literature exists to express the consequences of stealing cars. Plays should all feature someone stealing a car and facing the consequences. If said plays can also feature the consequences of gun crime and knife crime, all the better.
This is the utilitarian, gradgrindist world of New Labour Arts Strategy: the Arts are there to make people more amenable New Labour subjects, who will not steal cars, fire guns or stab people. More or less every single Arts and Culture-funding body in the country now has a form which you have to fill in to show how your music / literature / stage play will help poor, misguided people from doing wrong.
This is about as far from an Aestheticist or "Arts for Art's Sake" attitude as it is possible to get. It's also a long way from what the Arts are really about. Gosh, imagine telling all this to Richard Wagner - "Yes, Herr Wagner, 'The Ring of the Nibelung' is all very well, but at times it seems to promote knife crime (when Siegfried stabs Fafner), teenage rebellion (in Brunnhilde's misguided attitude towards her father, and Siegfried's attitude to Mime), and even stealing (in Siegfried's appropriation of the ring). Can't you write something, well, a bit more socially responsible next time? Otherwise, Herr Wagner, you're going to have your Arts Council funding cut, and be given an ASBO."
Real art, real culture can be violent, anti-social, apocalyptic, dangerous, subversive. Real art and culture might, in some contexts, promote the stealing of cars rather than the other way around. Real art and culture doesn't obey the programme of any ruling class - be that ruling class bourgeois, Conservative, New Labour, Communistic or Fascist. No signed-up, single-minded, hood-winked flunky of any political party will ever be able to accept this. Real art is anarchistic in the widest possible sense - it escapes being pinned down to one meaning, one role, one policy, and flies dangerously free of fixed political agendas - even those of the creator him or herself.
To retutn to the Last Night of the Proms and one of its famous moments, what ignorant New Labour flunkies don't and can't understand is that Elgar's famous Pomp and Circumstance March no.1 isn't just jingoistic tub-thumping - it's also other things as well. It's also aspiration towards a utopian vision of England that's never been realised; it's also a pastoral and nostalgic memory of an England that never was in the first piece; and, as many people have recognised, the dying fall at the end of the famous march rather subverts the jubilation of the words which have been imposed upon the music.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/mar/06/politicsandthearts.musicnews?gusrc=rss&feed=news
Amongst other things, Hodges said: “All too often our sectors are not at their best when embodying common belongings themselves. The audiences for many of our greatest cultural events - I’m thinking in particular of the Proms - is still a long way from demonstrating that people from different backgrounds feel at ease with this.”
Now, I think the Proms as a whole is a fantastic festival. As regards the Last Night, well, it's a bit of fun and (in my nostalgic old age) I don't object to Patriotism as much as I used to, as long as it doesn't slide into crude Nationalism.
But the idea that Art might be there just to be enjoyed "as a bit of fun" is anathema to New Labour. Art is there to promote New Labour thinking - a certain kind of British integration posited on authoritarian inclusiveness.
This, to my mind, demonstrates a typical New Labour attitude towards culture. Culture, for this government, is there for the following reasons:
1. to stop people stealing cars
2. to stop poor white people stealing cars
3. to stop poor minority ethnic people stealing cars.
Government policies on the Arts are all founded on these three central tenets. Music exists in order to stop people stealing cars. Literature exists to express the consequences of stealing cars. Plays should all feature someone stealing a car and facing the consequences. If said plays can also feature the consequences of gun crime and knife crime, all the better.
This is the utilitarian, gradgrindist world of New Labour Arts Strategy: the Arts are there to make people more amenable New Labour subjects, who will not steal cars, fire guns or stab people. More or less every single Arts and Culture-funding body in the country now has a form which you have to fill in to show how your music / literature / stage play will help poor, misguided people from doing wrong.
This is about as far from an Aestheticist or "Arts for Art's Sake" attitude as it is possible to get. It's also a long way from what the Arts are really about. Gosh, imagine telling all this to Richard Wagner - "Yes, Herr Wagner, 'The Ring of the Nibelung' is all very well, but at times it seems to promote knife crime (when Siegfried stabs Fafner), teenage rebellion (in Brunnhilde's misguided attitude towards her father, and Siegfried's attitude to Mime), and even stealing (in Siegfried's appropriation of the ring). Can't you write something, well, a bit more socially responsible next time? Otherwise, Herr Wagner, you're going to have your Arts Council funding cut, and be given an ASBO."
Real art, real culture can be violent, anti-social, apocalyptic, dangerous, subversive. Real art and culture might, in some contexts, promote the stealing of cars rather than the other way around. Real art and culture doesn't obey the programme of any ruling class - be that ruling class bourgeois, Conservative, New Labour, Communistic or Fascist. No signed-up, single-minded, hood-winked flunky of any political party will ever be able to accept this. Real art is anarchistic in the widest possible sense - it escapes being pinned down to one meaning, one role, one policy, and flies dangerously free of fixed political agendas - even those of the creator him or herself.
To retutn to the Last Night of the Proms and one of its famous moments, what ignorant New Labour flunkies don't and can't understand is that Elgar's famous Pomp and Circumstance March no.1 isn't just jingoistic tub-thumping - it's also other things as well. It's also aspiration towards a utopian vision of England that's never been realised; it's also a pastoral and nostalgic memory of an England that never was in the first piece; and, as many people have recognised, the dying fall at the end of the famous march rather subverts the jubilation of the words which have been imposed upon the music.
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