The Great Moving Right Show II: The Kirsty and Phil Years

'guardian guide people'

Just as a sidenote, John Patterson is my new vote for the worst journalist currently writing in Britain today

Worse than Sam Woollything?

everyone wants to be on the side thats winning.

Freedom of choice, innit? Isn't it about the fear of your losing your audience? That if you don't keep it simple and shallow and glib that people can always buy another newspaper/ watch another TV show - one that's equally simple and shallow and glib because they have exactly the same mindset as you?

Two centuries ago, William Cobbett described the establishment in Britain as "The Thing": utterly convinced of its own rightness and utterly resistant to change. Today's establishment may appear more reasonable, but it is every bit as powerful. Its strength explains much about the virtues and vices of new Labour's time in government. Two centuries ago the centre of gravity of "The Thing" lay in the aristocracy and the leading factions of the main parties. Today, the aristocracy (and monarchy) are at its edge. Its centre of gravity lies in the media and business. It includes swaths of the senior civil service (though most are somewhat to its left), some of parliament, and the "international class" in every profession. It is firmly committed to market capitalism. It is internationalist, more pro-American than pro-European, and divided on questions of social order.

Labour's ability to court "The Thing", to convince it that the new government would not be a threat and might actually do some good, was the precursor to victory. It meant that Labour ruled from the centre in more senses than one, co- opting, flattering and recruiting an extraordinary army of business leaders, artists, writers and consultants to its cause. All of this was made easier because Blair embodied the liberal end of "The Thing". Unlike his predecessors, he didn't have to pretend to care about the views of business leaders and newspaper editors: much of the time, the respect was genuine.

http://www.newstatesman.com/200705070029

Worse than Sam Woollything?

-- Tom D., Friday, 17 August 2007 14:04 (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

"Now some of you may think that Sam Woolaston's reviews are bad, but my friend likes them, and when you're drunk and eating a kebab, they're a bit of a guilty pleasure. Am I right guys?"

So... the media shifted to accomodate the Blair world, or the media was already changed due to Thatcher and Blairism helped perpetuate that... what's the conclusion Paul?

This is known today as "perception man agement". The most powerful are not the Max Cliffords but huge corporations such as Hill & Knowlton, which "sold" the slaughter known as the first Gulf war, and the Sawyer Miller Group, which sold hated, pro-Washington regimes in Colombia and Bolivia and whose operatives included Mark Malloch Brown, the new Foreign Office minister, currently being spun as anti-Washington. Hundreds of millions of dollars go to corporations spinning the carnage in Iraq as a sectarian war and covering up the truth: that an atrocious invasion is pinned down by a successful resistance while the oil is looted.

The other major difference today is the ab dication of cultural forces that once provided dissent outside journalism. Their silence has been devastating. "For almost the first time in two centuries," wrote the literary and cultural critic Terry Eagleton, "there is no eminent Brit ish poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the western way of life." The lone, honourable exception is Harold Pinter. Eagleton listed writers and playwrights who once promised dissent and satire and instead became rich celebrities, ending the legacy of Shelley and Blake, Carlyle and Ruskin, Morris and Wilde, Wells and Shaw. He singled out Martin Amis, a writer given tombstones of column inches in which to air his pretensions, along with his attacks on Muslims. The following is from a recent article by Amis:

Tony strolled over [to me] and said, "What have you been up to today?"

"I've been feeling protective of my prime minister, since you ask."

For some reason our acquaintanceship, at least on my part, is becoming mildly but deplorably flirtatious.

What these elite, embedded voices share is their participation in an essentially class war, the long war of the rich against the poor. That they play their part in a broadcasting studio or in the clubbable pages of the review sections and that they think of themselves as liberals or conservatives is neither here nor there. They belong to the same crusade, waging the same battle for their enduring privilege.

http://www.newstatesman.com/200707260028

WARNING JOHN PILGER

Isn't Pilger just talking about a straight-forward move to the right rather than the emergence of the crypto-Tory?

The trouble with this is we're gonna end up conflating a certain axis of ilx's grievances with certain columnists and newpapers with more general generalizations.

The thing is though Dom your faves, Jackass, Vice, Morris etc were harbingers of all this in the yoof mould. The slow loss of empathy. That's what it is... the dehumanization of others. It's Manning gentrified. I'm not quite sure how G2 comes into it. Apart from "the side whats winning" stuff.

I tried it here:

Gentrification, "Coffee Table", the 90s, Broadsheets, False Consensus and "The New Punk Rock"

Inspired by the Worst Mercury Music Prize Winner thread: Have the last 15 or so years seen a shift in the way record companies operated, that whilst folks have yelped about "manufactured" this and "x factor" the industry has in fact become a lot better at exploiting and mainstreaming "underground" music? Someone on that thread posited that everything has "slid to the centre" ie the nme, the broadsheets, tv etc are far more unified in the position they'll take on any act. When did "edginess" become marketable? Is this the final triumph of a certain set of values?

Is the state of pop, in Britain at least, analogous with the politics: Thatcherite divisiveness to Blairite false consensus.

-- acrobat, Tuesday, 19 June 2007 13:56 (1 month ago) Bookmark Link

There does seem to be a LOT more agreement on "what's good" than there used to be - 15 years ago the NME, the Broadsheets, Radio 1 would have been 3 different centres. Radio 1 has had probably the biggest shift in role I think.

-- Groke, Tuesday, 19 June 2007 14:28 (1 month ago) Bookmark Link

The thing is though Dom your faves, Jackass, Vice, Morris etc were harbingers of all this in the yoof mould. The slow loss of empathy. That's what it is... the dehumanization of others. It's Manning gentrified. I'm not quite sure how G2 comes into it. Apart from "the side whats winning" stuff.

-- acrobat, Friday, 17 August 2007 14:21 (1 minute ago) Bookmark Link

If anything Jackass is the inverse of this, being as it is quite an intelligent reworking of 1920s slapstick comedy stylings (Keystone Cops especially) for a skateboard generation. I mean, there's heart in Jackass, when Bam gets five dicks branded onto his ass he goes and shows it to his mother afterwards, there's a definite familial heart there.

The Thing analysis rings true. i've worked in health quite a bit, and the strangest thing i couldn't get my head around was how quangos -- basically -- worked, how they got set up. at the high levels of The Thing there's no difference between private and public sector, certainly not in ethos, and people hop from one to the other.

what *feels* corrupt is the bidding process by which quangos (or whatever the fuck) are "empowered" (typical word) to do their thing. they know what the bid needs to be because they are part of The Thing already, and can easily skip from being part of the sector that commissions to being in the sector that gets commissioned.

private eye usually carries a story or two along these lines, it's low-level, but i don't even get how one becomes part of it. they aren't particularly posh, they have no interests to speak of, but they are bright, work all the fucking time (all of them are hotdeskers -- though are terrible at using, say, excel), and know everyone. it's not like the old-style civil service.

Dom, maybe, most people I knew where laughing at grown men hurting each other. Revelling in the cruelty, there maybe yr camradie there but watch it with a bunch of "lads". You can't like Dirty Sanchez though. Jackass did have its merits but like Morris it's imitators have kinda made its worse aspects rather more apparant.

What is a "hotdesker"?

Hot desking originates from the definition of being the temporary physical occupation of a work station or surface by a particular employee. This work surface could be an actual desk or just a terminal link. In any event the concept of the hot desk is that the employer furnishes a permanent work surface which is available to any worker as and when needed. There is no personal domain pertaining to a particular worker and physical facilities are employed as and when needed. A collection of such workstations is sometimes called a mobility centre.

Look at The London Lite. It's a crazy balancing act. In the front you have supposedly neutral journalism with an undercurrent of broiling Daily Mail / Evening Standard nastiness then you turn to the back and we're lolling it up with Josie Long and grooving to the hot sounds of MIA and Modest Mouse.

the idea that amis ever offered dissent is idiotic

eagleton has always been part of the gatekeeper class -- pilger is a bit of a peabrain on matters cultural

also CARLYLE wtf?

That's why I gave a WARNING Mark. I was searching for something related to this a while back and you had far stronger words against Pilger than that. I'm not a fan of Pilger but I like the fact he has the ability ot annoy me. This was the line that got to me in that particular piece:

"The other major difference today is the ab dication of cultural forces that once provided dissent outside journalism."

I'm not sure he's "right" though. I think that would link into Dom's continual attacks on The Guardian though.

This isn't the thread I was even thinking about but it seems interesting. Relevant even. does the anti-war left have a cultural bead on what just happened?
Pilger and his ilk will never be on the side that's winning. Can they even imagine being? I met Atilla The Stockbroker once, I said to him he had his songs but they had flipcharts and money. He said he knew and it made him sad. I'm not sure. He performed a poem that lambasted Eminem and one that struck out at women who don't eat enough. I didn't rate them. How does POP fit into this? Does it? Conflating, conflating. When did things get Poptimistic? Is it anti gentrification? Why was Nick Southall so angry at ILX in 2001?

heehee, i have abdicated my cultural forces mellowed with age i guess

i don't actually think the grau and the obs have moved right in the last 20 years -- i think they are pretty much where they always were, i considered them the cultural enemy in the 80s (haha after they FAILED TO GIVE ME WORK yes wot of it?) and i don't think that's changed -- they almost NEVER gave work to the actual valuably daring elements out in the "culturally dissonant" territories

the problem with the "cultural provision of dissent" -- in my not-very-clearly-worked-out opinion -- is that the cultural forces that provided it were seriously damaged by being coerced into conformity with the polytechnic anti-hippy left in the early 80s as IT rode (relatively) high in media terms, and as that left lost momentum (courtesy v.fragile social base, in contrast to its at-the-time rather effective platform), were unable to remuster themselves

Why was Nick Southall so angry at ILX in 2001?

bcz we were INSUFFERABLE CUNTS

"were"

jokes bruv, jokes

i could explore this at length in ref the particularities of the music press and style press as this is the "dissenting media" i know best but i am meant to be filling in referee papers to allow [...] to become an adoptive parent so had better leave it for today :\

So what would you consider as the key cultural examples of the coercion into conformity Mark?

bcz we were INSUFFERABLE CUNTS

"... you must learn to suffer better than that if you want them to weary of punishing you - one day."

torch-handover in effect lo these ___ years bruv!

polytechnic anti-hippy left in the early 80s as IT rode (relatively) high in media terms

I can only think in terms of Pop about this. Gang of Four and Wire as opposed to erm Zounds and Crass?

the citylimits- and redwedge-ification of nme in the mid-80s i guess

i'm not claiming that as "key" for the entire world,m just key for the world i lived in (haha ie the nme)

anyway like i say i have to focus my mind elsewhere a bit for now -- BYEEE!

"the legacy of Shelley and Blake, Carlyle and Ruskin, Morris and Wilde, Wells and Shaw"

this is eagleton ripping off raymond williams, after shitting on him in the '70s.

Oh, and Southall: if you don't like the thread, push off.
But don't be surprised to learn that the vast majority of the decisions that shape the world are predicated on discussions such as this one. Your attitude -- "stop thinking and just do" -- is what makes the world safe for fascism.

-- Nitsuh, Monday, 23 July 2001 01:00 (6 years ago) Bookmark Link

Taking Sides: Objective vs. Subjective

i think nick had just read sokal and bricmont!

ha sokal is bad man! but old ilx did seem to take a lot of critical-theory uncritically but i may only think that cos my ilx life was concurent with a degree in analytic philosophy where sokal is thrown at yr head if you say "i am interested in that french stuff".

the french theory stuff (that eagleton ate up) was part of the first Great Moving Right Show, though it didn't think it was. it's kind of ingrained now, but hells lot of its rhetoric is against things that were part of the old activist political left. i imagine it had its uses but now you get second-generation types like esther leslie saying that walt benjamin was a "political revolutionary" and so on, so they obviously feel the need for a "doing" left but their heroes are all theorists.

but I think we're a nation of Reaganomic crypto-Tory shitbags, rather than a nation of Thatcherite ones.

i must be missing a joke here or something... i don't see much daylight btw reaganism and thatcherism.

there is a difference -- our middle-class pinched puritanism vs yr mental evangelicals -- but i'm not sure what dom means here.

NRQ Richard Rorty wrote good stuff on the abandonment of New Deal / Unionist Left in America for the "Critical Left". I think the joke is that we aren't exactly being activists here y know. Relativism does seem important though cos it doesn't seem to free minds or whatever but make kids more lazily nasty. It's OK to say anything! Outcomes a world of Clarkson not Bill Hicks, Peep Show not Brass Eye! Who'd have guessed?!

"Peep Show" guys (partly) write "The Thick of It"? Or have I got that wrong?

given how wrong eagleton gets most french theory and how his guides to it were the coles notes for most students, it must BY LOGIC be his politics which drove GMRS pt1!

(pt2 = the repressive return of universalist "anti-pomo" imperialism obv) (CONTROVERSIAL)

(i have no intention of defending either of these points)

pragmatism = gettin deep into the weeds of how things actually get done, ie activism
theory is mostly gussied up moralism

there is a difference -- our middle-class pinched puritanism vs yr mental evangelicals -- but i'm not sure what dom means here.

I mean, if said somewhat clumsily, that the people we're talking about here aren't your classic British right-wingers, they're taking their queues from an American style of conservatism.

"Peep Show" guys (partly) write "The Thick of It"? Or have I got that wrong?

-- Tom D., Friday, August 17, 2007 4:35 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

one of them does -- but not exclusively, there are about 4-5 writers.

the "mental evangelicals" weren't such a constitutive force of the american right back then, i don't think of them as a major leg of reaganism anyway, which = deregulatory fervor & unceasing hawkishness wrapped up in a national renewal set of mythemes = basically a def of either thather OR reagan, which is why i don't get what dom was trying to say.

xp see that doesn't clarify things much either dom, esp as american style conservatism is undergoing some serious implosion of late along its usual fault lines. i don't get what you're trying to shorthand here.

"usual" = "already understood"? not being very clear myself, sry

Would you not agree that, to take a random example, Jeremy Clarkson has more in common with the classic American right than the classic British right?

Seems like everybody be hatin' on "Peep Show" these days while biggin' up "TToI" (xxp)

(pt2 = the repressive return of universalist "anti-pomo" imperialism obv) (CONTROVERSIAL)

within the academy part two is "saint paul = lenin" stuff, i think. which may be the same thing.

mark, what is moralism, or how is having "moral" scruples/sensibilities bad? or conversely how can your politics *not* have a moral component?

Oliver and Olivia top names' list

Never trust a man called Olly.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/nov/22/maggies-nightclub-inspired-by-thatcher

Cheaper to hang around outside and punch the clientele in the balls on the way out.

subject to louis's approval, hope some misguided students burn the fucker down

j/k gchq bros. not actually going to burn down an airport.

big protests tomorrow btw

What, at Maggie's?

o word?

busy in the LIBERRY like a real pro

also REDACTED super-excited

xpost

"It's not a Tory club," he says carefully, but rather a tribute to the 80s – a bit of "childhood nostalgia for the decade of our birth". The reference to Britain's most divisive politician, he says, is tongue-in-cheek. "I know she's divisive, but I do admire her. She's a leader."

it's not about politics, it's about leadership.

While Gilkes would love Thatcher herself to visit sometime – despite conceding "her nightclubbing days are probably over"

where's that strikethrough function...?

Sonic The Hedgehog not rilly a symbol of Thatcher's 80s is he now

also didn't the Graun run a piece on this already this year?

"Adam Ant's down quite a lot," he says

your most namedroppable celeb client is a man only notable in recent years for his public displays of mental illness = let the good times roll

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/nov/26/kate-middleton-conservative-style

i basically like suzanne moore but thought this was kind of like an entry-level version of this thread. then i remembered she was ex-marxism today, or whatever it was called, and was probably consciously drawing on stuart hall in the first place.

secret supper club

it's ya boy

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/sep/12/march-of-the-neoliberals

this trend of naming things 'the great british ___' is dreadful

6:30pm The Great British Winter
7:30pm Great British Menu

british people are lower than vermin

You do yourself a dishonor, nilmar. I find british people quite on a par with vermin.

http://i.imgur.com/K6Yz9PU.jpg

looking forward to what the uk political class have to say about this girl allegedly being killed allegedly by a latvian migrant

And litigants (or more importantly litigators) have been reminded that they should look first to the common law to protect their fundamental rights: radical suggestions have been made about the power of judicial review to protect them. Whether this trend is developing as a response to the rising tide of anti - European sentiment among parliamentarians, the press and the public, whether it is putting down a marker for what might happen if the 1998 Act were repealed, whether it is a reflection of distinctive judicial philosophies of the judges who are at the forefront of this development, or whether it is simple irritation that our proud traditions of UK constitutionalism seemed to have been forgotten, I leave it to you and to the academics to decide.

http://supremecourt.uk/docs/speech-140712.pdf

thats the 98 human rights act obv

idk where to post this excerpt from the wikipedia page about the manhattan project

i will post it here since it neatly encapsulates the assymetric nature of the delusory 'special relationship' which is so integral to the current right and its belief that the uk can do without distant/sclerotic/treacherous europe

The opportunity for an equal partnership no longer existed, however, as shown in August 1942 when the British unsuccessfully demanded substantial control over the project while paying none of the costs. By 1943 the roles of the two countries had reversed from late 1941;[51] in January Conant notified the British that they would no longer receive atomic information except in certain areas. While the British were shocked by the abrogation of the Churchill-Roosevelt agreement, head of the Canadian National Research Council C. J. Mackenzie was less surprised, writing "I can't help feeling that the United Kingdom group [over]emphasizes the importance of their contribution as compared with the Americans."[54] As Conant and Bush told the British, the order came "from the top". The British bargaining position had worsened; the American scientists had decided that the United States no longer needed outside help, and they and others on the bomb policy committee wanted to prevent Britain from being able to build a postwar atomic weapon. The committee supported, and Roosevelt agreed to, restricting the flow of information to what Britain could use during the war—especially not bomb design—even if doing so slowed down the American project.

Sort of a metaphor for ILX really

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2014/oct/28/tower-of-london-poppies-ukip-remembrance-day/print

“Total public spending is now projected to fall to 35.2% of GDP by 2019-20, taking it below the previous post-war lows reached in 1957-8 and 1999-2000 to what would probably be its lowest level in 80 years”.

The OBR warned that the scale of the projected spending cuts – which would leave public spending per head of population cut be a third during the 2010-2020 decade – would lead to slower growth from 2016 onwards and require the Bank of England to boost activity at a time when interest rates were at rock-bottom levels and the outlook for UK exports was weak.

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/may/28/bbc-defends-reality-show-involving-poor-dubbed-hunger-games

the trend of “poverty porn”

this is amazing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SvRqVvctQk

https://twitter.com/stephenkb/status/746169256727953408