I have voted, not feeling exhilarated as I might if the national polls had been more like they were c.20/04/10, but satisfied that I have voted the best way I can. Upon arriving at around 6pm, Hendon Library Polling Station did not exactly display the signs of 'Election Fever' reported elsewhere. Just saw two other voters beginning the process as I left. Hopefully Sunderland Central will turn out in far larger numbers than in 2001 and 2005, and go Lib-Lab, turkeys not voting for Christmas and all that. The Tories have targeted the seat, with an endless waste of paper, erm, barrage of Cameron-Blairite leaflets, depicting Lee Martin, the local candidate - with a glint well and truly in his eye (he's the airbrushed hologram to the left):
The seat needs a 12.5% swing to go Tory, so this enabled me to vote as I want to do: Liberal Democrat. I would place myself well to the left of their leadership, yet find far more of their policies agreeable than Labour's: opposition to the Digitial Economy Bill, reform of the tax system to redistribute to low earners and away from bankers, private jet owners. Abolition of the ID card scheme and a commitment to lower class sizes and protection of front-line education. Not resorting to the kneejerk Tory-Lab position of renewing Trident no matter what, but saying it should be reviewed in the context of the modern world. All of this in the context of having voted for them at thelast two elections when the social-democrat Kennedy led them, with their relatively - if not entirely - principled stance on the Iraq War.
Prediction for Blighty, per se:
CON 35% (307 seats) * inc. the Thirsk seat
LAB 28% (222 seats)
LD 28% (89 seats)
OTH 9% (32 seats) - Greens to win first seat, UKIP and BNP not to.
Turnout = c.71%
This represents the Tories gaining about 30 seats above and beyond the national swing, most probably in the West Midlands, parts of Yorkshire and Wales. This would be a result we could live with, so long as Lab-Lib play their hands well - let the Tories flounder with a minority government, making their unncessary, ideological cuts this year, living to regret the lack of detail given during this campaign. The Tories' campaign has been disastrously scattershot, propped up by the Murdoch and tabloid press, desperately trying to project Cameron as some sort of visionary figure, 'ordinary bloke' or, ludicrously, lapping up his late attempts at being an athlete.
I obviously hope the Tory figure is lower and the Lab-LD ones higher (with the potential for a loose coalition and voting reform), but sadly reckon that this seems the likeliest pattern, though turnout - especially of the young - is a key variable. I am certainly aware plenty of students from the College I teach in (those who are 18 and eligible) have been voting in numbers for Lab-LD, but then the vast majority are Tynesiders, with a smaller number hailing from Northumberland and Wearside. The Newcastle results will, I am certain, see the Tories in retreat again from 2005. Sunderland sadly not, too many choosing to vote in fear, with the Tories likely to gain quite a few more votes compared to 2005. Admittedly, the Labour establishment in Sunderland has been complacent and lacked any great municipal vision, but things could have been worse in the city these last 13 years, that much most should accept.
SUNDERLAND CENTRAL
Prediction:
LAB 41%
CON 30%
LD 23%
BNP 4%
UKIP 2%
Turnout: c.58%
NC: The 1977/8 Lib-Lab pact, which sustained James Callaghan's Labour administration in power, was in fact extraordinarily successful: during that time both inflation and unemployment fell and the general economic outlook improved considerably.
And what on earth was wrong with Britain's wartime coalition governments? Did they lead to weakness and instability? Those who argue that 'strong' single-party governments always out-perform 'weak' coalitions really ought to get out more - at least across the English Channel.
Can anyone seriously maintain that Britain, with its 'strong' governments over the past 30 years, has been better governed than the likes of Germany, Austria and The Netherlands, where coalitions have been the norm?
MC: You see, people like Gillian Duffy and Daily Mail readers have no real reason to hate immigrants, or the Labour Party. The people they hate most are themselves.
They see themselves as uncared for, shat upon, unloved, unwanted, dealt the worst hand in the deck. They played by the rules – well, some of them did – and can’t understand why they don’t feel fulfilled. [...]
You can't understand it. You played by the rules and others who didn’t even acknowledge rules raced past you and prospered.
Those immigrants. How dare they. They come here, work harder, work more hours and take less money than we would be prepared to work or take, and they end up getting all the jobs. It’s a disgrace! [...]
Everybody’s fault except mine.
Of course I know deep down it’s my fault. But you see I can’t live with that self-knowledge. No one could. We’d all top ourselves.
Much easier and far more relieving to find, or be directed to, the easiest, biggest target and blame them instead. After all, everybody else does. It helps me cope and makes me feel I’m not alone.
So let’s bring down a “bad person.” Like those MPs who have the nerve to take salaries and claim expenses when they should, I don’t know, wear sackcloth, ashes and sandals and work for nothing.
[...]
I mean, I can be a real shit of a human being at times; if I don’t have easy targets to rail against, then who knows what I might be capable of doing?
That’s the mindset, the inner dialogue, with which most voters in Britain will be wrestling as they venture into the poll booths on Thursday.
Nick Clegg and the Lib Dems? Not perfect. Not by any means. But a substantial Lib Dem wedge in Parliament would make a drastic difference. Stop either Cameron or Brown going too hardcore with their actions, temper extremity, urge a new and more purposeful debate about Britain’s political future. It might actually be the first step in getting us out of our self-built rut. But do we have the courage to scale the ladder that’s being offered? Or are we simply content, out of gullibility and cowardice, to settle for five more years of genuine shit, because shit you know is better than food you don’t?
In my constituency the Tories are going to walk it. But I’m still voting, since if proportional representation does come in – and it surely must, regardless of what either Labour or the Tories are saying – then my vote’s going to count for even more than it currently does.
MR: [...] some on the left – particularly the academic left – desire a ‘perfect fit’ politically before getting their hands dirty. In this election, these ballot-spoiling impulses of the left have more significance than usual: after all, shouldn’t we be hoping for a hung parliament and putting the appropriate tactical votes in the ballot box rather than indulging in pathetic juvenile protests? The motive is clear: if the Liberal Democrats have any sense at all, they will make electoral reform in the form of proportional representation a precondition for any post-election coalition. This could mean a future electoral system in which any party breaching a 4 or 5% threshold will gain seats. Under similar conditions, the Scottish Socialist Party gained 6 seats in the Scottish Parliament. And the presence of some far left parties in European parliaments would be unthinkable without PR.
Incidentally, I disagree with David Osler’s diagnosis that the rise of the Scottish Socialist Party was rooted in Scotland’s supposedly “social democratic political culture”. Aside from the problematic notion of a “political culture” (what, after all, happened to Afghanistan’s political culture that it could vote in a communist government one decade and then become a Taliban-run basketcase of a country in the next?), the achievements of the SSP were down to good, old-fashioned hard work in areas which the Labour Party had previously taken for granted. Therein lies the real opening for any radical alternative to Labour under PR: hard work at a local level. Labour has for decades taken for granted large swathes of the North and, in some patches, will be shockingly unprepared for the work necessary to keep those areas.
But some who should know better don’t care about any of that. They aren’t interested in understanding the successes of comrades in neighbouring countries. All they say is that they can’t vote for a party like the Liberal Democrats. Maybe it would be too embarrassing for them – a state of affairs which already indicates that we are in the realm of the juvenile. Or perhaps they just aren’t prepared for the hard work which electoral reform will demand if its opportunities are to be exploited…
The higher the turnout the better - all votes cast are going to matter, whatever the position in the seat. The higher the LD/Lab/TUSC/Respect/Green combined vote and the lower the right-wing vote the more likely the balanced parliament and electoral reform - and potential for a left revival. By all means vote tactically to deprive the Tories of an outright majority. A majority gives them authority to carry out ideological public-sector cuts this year with Osborne's "emergency budget". We should all be worried about that, along with the prospect of greater Murdochian control over our media and the rolling back of the BBC and the Welfare State.
Authority, on likely no more than 35-38% of the popular vote!? If the unutterably unctuous Mr Gove (see my video warning below) has the temerity to claim any sort of Tory mandate tonight with a vast majority of the public voting against them... the public will clearly not buy this smug entitlement, the old establishment claiming what they see as their birthright. If not, the public have been more brainwashed by the media than this campaign has suggested they are.
Education is about trying to make what is complex seem manageable and achievable for students - it is about raising the bar, the standards, without it even being realised at first.
- a personal credo; thoughts brought on by experiences at work, The Bodines' 'Heard It All' (looping on iTunes forever), Adam Curtis, and this urgent, very 2010 northern pop requiem:
Why always requiems? Because there's a bloody lot to mourn, sat here waiting for a new culture to come into being, to supplant that of the last 25 years. 'Sat here', writing and thinking is better than nothing at all. Even if I am not achieving anything like what is being done by Zero Books, I am writing about what I care about, rather than merely larking around 100% of the time, because 'nothing really matters'. Did Freddie Mercury mean that line...? Maybe not, but too many have taken it as a defining philosophy.
What started as a game Became a chore before too long
The lyrics are still elliptical, cryptical, only more so. Importantly open to serious interpretation. This cannot help but make me think of the general malaise of British and postmodernist culture; so much less healthy a culture than the vigorous democracy of 1966 captured in this film that Adam Curtis embeds in this blog here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/2010/02/do_people_heckle.html#comments
A vital contrast to the depopulated shards of Sunderland captured in Field Music's video.
Where once we asked for lessons Now it's all to be ignored How do we trust the speaker When his calling is to calm
Ever more exlicitly, this accords with Adam Curtis' oft-repeated trope that the media seeks to pacify through fear. The command to 'chill'. The resort to charity as an end in itself, heads-in-the-sand-as-regards-politics since Live Aid / Miner's Strike. The withdrawal into private space. The delusions of the casually anarchic, refusing truly to learn anything... The absurd delusions fostered by the Positive Thinking industry.
This music is part of a minor renaissance in thinking British music that happens to use guitars: the xx, Wild Beasts, Los Campesinos!, plus older hands like Camera Obscura, Richard Hawley and The Clientele.
If we worked hard and behaved, We'd be anything we choose
This gets the past mantra of my FE alma matter, the COSC (City of Sunderland College), to a tee! 'Be who you want to be' and all the PR guff, though strangely enough it did allow me to do so. Like Alan Bennett, I refuse to bite the hand that feeds. State education; the ideals should be enshrined, the reality constantly improved.
Postmodern British Education often omits learning which goes beyond the script (mere study guides and pure exam focus), and allows the learner to forge their own path. If this was to be nurtured, you will have citizens who can think critically for life. Obsessions, love and hates, autodidactism need to be accommodated and nurtured within the broad curriculum for state-school pupils and FE state college students. That 4000 word piece I was able to write at the COSC on the 1979 Winter of Discontent opened my mind in so many ways: the curricular focus on seeing all sides and weighing up evidence was intensely helpful, enabling me to rationalise and contextualise my previously vague, if strongly felt, left-wing leanings. The A2 Extended Project - which I have a professional interest in - affords this chance; it is a real release for those students who seriously approach it at A Level. The moot question being: can this sort of thing ever be rolled out to all?
Steering back from professional reflection, I would urge readers to investigate the Field Music corpus; not just as they are also from Sunderland*, but because the Brewis Brothers produce music that is at times magnificent: check out the School of Language and The Week That Was albums, as well as the current 72-minute album. There is deft deployment of field recordings, appositely enough, and echoes of 'Penny Lane', XTC and the Beach Boys through John Carter's imagining (those chords from 01:57 of 'Something Familiar', evoking the grand canyons of the final section of Stamford Bridge's 'Arizona Lost and Gone'). 'Precious Plans' if anything cuts even deeper than 'Them That Do Nothing', reflecting the submerged dreams of townfulls, refracting back to me so much in and of myself.
A telling passage from a recent interview here; my emphasis added by italics:
'What sort of music were the young Brewises listening to when they were teaching their protégé? "Mine and Peter's first musical love was Led Zeppelin - not that you could tell that from the first two albums. As I got older I became kind of embarrassed of that and ignored the stuff I used to like. There was a lot I didn't like about that sort of music - the sexism, the self indulgence and hippy mentality that really grates on me. But it's a shame to let the great things about it escape.
"When I first started writing songs I was very shy and embarrassed about everything and there was a kind of conviction against rock mythology. You know, people might say Oasis's first albums were great and stuff, but to me the kind of attitude they've fostered, I wanted to go in completely the opposite direction. Noel Gallagher seems an intelligent guy, but then he says that he never learnt anything at school and things like that, and I think 'You total dick - you don't really think that'. It's patronising. It's such a cliché. Actually, I'm a fan of clichés - they can be great if you take them in a different context and convert them. Bands like Roxy Music took cliché and turned it into something else." ' http://www.musicomh.com/music/features/field-music_0110.htm
Park Lane bus interchange, nearby me in Sunderland, is pumping out music on some sort of PA system audible to all around the station, whether walking through as I do, or waiting for a bus: on the way into town it was some old-time oompah music (even including backing vocalists stating "oom-pahs") and on the way back home it was "Shakin' All Over" by Johnny Kidd and the Pirates. This today, on a blustery, Siberian Sunday in Sunderland. This has been policy for a while now - certainly most of last year - and this extends to buses being 'named'. A friend's bus to Ryhope is now known as 'Drifter', bizarrely. Who decided this? What sort of mindsets and policies were at work?
Very odd indeed, music being piped out (at a not overbearing, but decisively dominant, volume) in a bus station. An attempt to 'rally the troops', to make it a public space in the today's sense: which means constant exterior stimulus and background noise.
Crucial point for Sunderland today at Bolton Wanderers, and a much better performance - with the only weakness being a terminal inability to hit the target. Indeed, Bolton ended up getting closer, Sunderland saved in injury time by an allegedly excellent save by the Hungarian Marton Fulop.
Even more critical was the return of Teemu Tainio in the centre of midfield, surely the best and most consistent player Sunderland have had in that defensive-midfield position since the days of local legend (but of course, Portsmouth born) Kevin Ball. He works hard, wins many tackles and distributes the ball simply, as well as having a good shot and cross; protecting a fallible defence and supporting an at times detached attack. The only problem is that he is a bit injury prone and also that he isn't always given ninety minutes; once replaced today by Reid, Bolton had their only really concerted period of pressure in the entire game. It should also be remembered that he was dropped for last week's dismal capitulation to Everton, and made one of the tackles of the season at Old Trafford in a game that Sunderland almost drew. He is a good player and a Finnish international because he does the crucial things consistently well - unlike the likes of Whitehead, Murphy, Richardson and Reid. A five-man midfield with Malbranque and Tainio prominent in the centre must be the way for the rest of the season.
So, the European players save the day. Not safe yet, but much more confident of gaining at least a point from the last two games, which would probably be enough considering the goal differences, form and remaining fixtures of Newcastle, Hull and Middlesbrough. Newcastle deserve cutting down to size - need a humbling, considering the arrogant expectation of so many of their fans, who, it should be remembered, were behind Shepherd in sacking Sir Bobby Robson a few games into a season (a man who achieved arguably as much as Keegan, in steering Newcastle to consecutive seasons of European qualification, finishing 4th, 3rd and 5th in the 2001-2, 2002-3 and 2003-4 seasons respectively).* An idiotic move, sympomatic of the club's short-termism, speculating insanely on player wages and transfers and employing nine managers (including caretakers John Carver, Nigel Pearson and the hapless Chris Hughton) in less than five years since.
The spectacle of local opera singer and prize porker, Graeme Danby, on the pitch of St James' Park, employed to try and stir up local feeling, was symbolic of the rotten state of the club. He sang complete renditions of 'The Blaydon Races', which one suspects all too few of the 47,000 or so crowd would know the words to. Like the nouveau-riche chairman Ashley, he wore a black and white replica shirt, and also brandished a black and white flag, a rather pathetic reminder of the times Hall and Shepherd exhorted the 'Geordie Nation'. True Newcastle fans will tell you that gaudy flags and overpriced replica shirts merely mask the void at the heart of the club; it used to be about the community knowing and enjoying their football, stood on the terraces, sharing in something.
It is surely all the sadder for the true fans that their relegation may now be presided over by one of the few men in football who might grasp what the club used to mean: Alan Shearer, whom, going by anecdotes at least seems a modest and generous man, staying truer to his working-class roots than many. So far, however, he has used 21 players in 5 games, showing little tactical or motivational nous; he is accompanied by relegation expert Iain Dowie and, crucially, has not started, let alone achieved, the UEFA Pro Licence course supposedly required to manage a Premier League side.
For Danby, and unfortunately too many, supporting Newcastle is about being part of a herd mentality; the singer displayed a vulgar, adverserial loutishness, verbally lambasting the 441 Portsmouth fans who made the longest journey in the Premership for a Monday night fixture: yelling "Have you come in a fucking car? You're the Mackems of the South Coast". This sort of 'passion' is an Empire of the senseless, to paraphrase the Mekons - demonstrating how little true pride and wisdom there is in the area these days, compared to the pre-Thatcher/Blair days.
Football is now about money and consumerism (never the same for me since my days at Roker Park as season-ticket holder in the Fulwell End, c.1990-7) and Newcastle United are one of the chief culprits; their relegation would provide a great feeling of Schadenfreude. If they stay up it will be by the skin of their teeth and clearly down to the failings of Hull, who unfortunately also believed in their own hype and got complacent; many fans, and the chairman, foolishly adopted the Us-against-Them moniker of The Tiger Nation.**
So, I hope it's a draw or even a Boro win on Monday; whilst there's a lot to dislike about them, they at least have more of an emphasis on developing a youth system and have a chairman who is a proper football chairman, trying to think for the long-term and avoiding most of the Leeds-Newcastle pitfalls. However, they did sign Alves for £12.7million, who was laughable last week, and has been all season.
* Robson is one of very few figures unreservedly respected in both Tyne and Wear, and not without reason; a survivor of the old north-east of Brian Clough, Norman Cornish (now 90, a key remnant as identified by Gordon Burn in his excellent Born Yesterday: The News as a Novel, 2008) and Robert Westall?
** There are 443 hits on Google for "tiger nation" and "hull", against 10,400 hits for "geordie nation" and "newcastle", which may indicate that most Hull fans have seen sense and not branded themselves thus, or done it more humorously if so. However, that dwarfs the 61 hits for "mackem nation" and "sunderland" - and I have never heard any Sunderland fans using such a term. Of course, there are many bad elements in the support for Sunderland, or, say, Stoke (and far too many BNP local election votes cast in both northern cities), but these clubs have realistic expectations.
