2010: Albums of the Year

'Those mornings, when the burden absorbs me
Those mornings, everything’s on pause
Hours go by, it continues to match me
Hours go by, no constraints or cause'

This article arrives belatedly - to an absurd degree! But no matter, here are my favourite albums of the year.

I have listened to many more albums than for most previous years in the 2000s decade; many were pretty indifferent with the thoroughly capable resting on their laurels just a tad (Goldfrapp, Brian Eno, Mylene Farmer, Belle and Sebastian, T.I., The Divine Comedy). There were those with a trick or two who just didn't entice over a whole album: Die Antwoord, LoneLady, Geneva Jacuzzi.

Before I get on to my top twenty, positive mentions should go out to returning veterans with life and ideas in them yet (The Fall, Edwyn Collins, Wyatt/Atzmon/Stephen, Autechre, Paul Weller, Momus). There were occasionally great but ultimately flawed explorations (Caribou, Actress, SALEM, Forest Swords, Gorillaz, Owen Pallett). There was impeccable, if not overly consistent indie-pop from the studied Beach House and MGMT. If their respective albums had lived up to 'Walk in the Park' and 'Someone's Missing', they would unquestionably have made my main list, but there a sameness to the slickness. Arcade Fire's album is twenty minutes too long, but was close to making the roster - at its best, it is transcendently beautiful. Too often, however, it ploughs a circuitous route around the same old suburbs.

I enjoyed articulately wistful indie (Darren Hayman & The Secondary Modern, Chris T-T) and proficient, if derivitive, music that could have been calculated to appeal to me three years ago (These New Puritans and Moon Wiring Club). There was enjoyable, crafted pop (Robyn's Body Talk Vol.1, the new Kylie, much of Rihanna's Loud, The Golden Filter show inspired flashes and the easy-going Living Sisters project beguiles, to an extent). On the guitar-rock front, I was rather bored by the much-hyped The National, but there were steady, workmanlike efforts from Foals and Frightened Rabbit, with just enough about them to charm. Reliable mavericks like Skream and Sufjan Stevens created eclectic, uneven but likeable records.

My new discoveries included Serafina Steer, Devlin and Nedry. I would highlight the first two in particular: Steer has something of the Alison Statton about her, recording beguilingly English songs, with harp and synthesizer. She has a novel approach and sound that shames these chancers with their facile, Tory rusticity; if you can imagine pre-pop Human League with Mary Hopkin singing, you might begin to imagine what this is like. 'Motion Pictures', 'Drinking While Driving' and 'How to Haunt a House Party' are magnificently deft creations; unassuming folk meeting austere post-punk. Her flawed album just misses out on my Top 20 of the year, but I am certain that Ms Steer is capable of consistently great work. Likewise, Devlin; a fellow Londoner born at the more recent end of the 1980s. His Bud, Sweat and Beers does contain some relatively ordinary material, but also much that is enormously heartening: this is a Grime MC with a social conscience, a vivid chronicler of our unhappy, unforgiving times. Many of the tracks have deeply evocative musical textures and embedded samples: 'Days and Nights' in particular is redolent of down-at-heel London, eliciting memories of the Peddlers and even the dance-band era; inviting some useful comparison with (The Real) Tuesday Weld. 'Yesterday's News' is a rather humbler variant on the usual hip-hop privileging of the ego - an interesting Dagenham counterpoint to Kanye's 'POWER'.

So, I keenly await more music from Steer and Devlin (who almost sound like a Dickensian double-act!). I do not await music from insipid bunting-lovers.

Now, onto the list; few albums have struck me as creating self-contained worlds in the way that Hounds of Love or Jordan: The Comeback do. There tend to be several tracks that compel, and others that leave me rather indifferent. Yet there is so much that is great within these twenty records that it cannot be said that 2010 was a poor year for music.

20. Mucchu - Adventure We Go

 
A cusp-of-spring album, listened to this February half-term, during a half-day at work, whilst heading up to a cafe via Newcastle Central Station. It does occasionally veer towards the twee ('Coral and Shell'), but this is largely a winning album of 'indietronica'; a well-heeled, optimistic pop music that sounds a bit like the Sundays filtered through a Four Tet gauze. Warm, unguarded ingenue vocals from Milky (yes, Milky!), that lend themselves perfectly well to abstract cut-up ('The Place That Knows Me'). There is a delicacy and bittersweet laptop melancholia reminiscent of Owl City's sublime #1 single, 'Fireflies'; just listen to 'Songs in My Room' and 'Getaway Train'. 'Dancing With a Ghost' is worthy of Kate Bush or Thomas Hardy.

19. Ikonika - Contact, Love, Want, Have

'Ikonoklast' is one of the year's finest preludes, and this Hyperdub album manages to delight for long stretches, even if it has occasional longuers. There is a pleasing mixture of stately electronica (the oceanic urban expanses of 'Yoshimitzu') and the genially cartoonish ('Psoriasis' is all computer-game bleeps; Aphex Twin meets 8-bit Bassline). 'Fish' is probably the highpoint, with its skittling dubstep rhythm precociously painted all over with scarlet and purplish synths. I'd love to experience this song in a social context, with a  juggernaut of a soundsystem.

18. The-Dream - Love King

First hip-hop entry, and The-Dream is pleasingly free from the aggressive attitude so often exhbited within the genre. Prince and Akon are obvious analogues for what Terius Youngdell Nash achieves with this album; these are worldly, gossamer light songs of yearning and seduction. The astonishing centrepiece is 'Yamaha', with Prince's Minneapolis sound reincarnated, angular rhythms and celestial synths striving towards the Sublime: this is a sound carefully balanced between the courtly and the carnal. It also has the best ending for any 2010 song, that galloping pick-up in the rhythm at 4:43. Then there is the grave 'February Love', an abstract slow-jam of uneasy piano and languid rhetoric. There is much else besides on an album that never detours into mere mush. Yes, like most hip-hop albums, it does last too long, but only fractionally so.

17. Mark van Hoen - Where is the Truth

This is an especially welcome return from the ambient pop meister van Hoen, whom I have liked for a while - ever since I bought his Playing with Time (2001) in Cambridge and lapped it its serene ambience.

In the context of 2010 politics, 'Where is the Truth', the title-track, feels like passive but not forlorn protest. '1979' sounds like a memory; this is a more personal, evocative 'hauntology' than D.D. Denham achieves. 'Beautiful' is van Hoen at his best: there is a seismic, widescreen impression of unearthly stasis. 'Photophone Call' is Penguin Cafe Orchestra gone electronic, deploying all manner of delays and glitches.

16. Crystal Castles - Crystal Castles

You simply cannot get away from 'Celestica'. It may even have been playing in one of the rare scenes of 2010 Coronation Street that I witnessed on the old gogglebox! A maximalist incorporation of blissed-out Slowdive/MBV noise to a techno beat. Unmistakably pop but not as we know it, it sounds like it is arriving simultaneously from centuries past and future. A dancefloor stormer, a rallying of disparate, dissident spirits. 'Suffocation' is its more sedate, equally epochal sounding sibling. 'I Am Made of Chalk' is a spliced-up child of van Hoen in its doleful reverie.

I like the latterday dream-pop exemplified by Crystal Castles; a cross-continental sisterhood that includes M83 and Cut Copy, not to mention Ladytron and Nite Jewel.

15. Television Personalities - A Memory is Better than Nothing

More downtrodden, heartfelt songs from Dan Treacy; his music sounds especially apt in these awkward times. From the anguished, numbed 'Funny He Never Married' to the rueful, crushed 'Walk Towards the Light', this is clearly not the sort of mindless uplift peddled by nominal 'indie' bands. This is rather an awkwardness to cherish; the snatches of happiness all the more poignant for the surrounding darkness: 'She's My Yoko', with winsome guitar strumming supported by communal organ and slithers of synth. It is a heartbreakingly open declaration of love, the sound of a troubled man coming through the other side. 'People Think That We're Strange', but 'Come Back to Bed' indeed.
 
14. Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti - Before Today

More music for the sad-eyed boys and girls among us. I listened to The Doldrums during my October stay in Southwark, where Simon Reynolds' favourite album of the 2000s started to sink in. It is a truly magnificent evocation of grey sunsets, strange fires and the uncanny, uncontrollable yearning of 'For Kate I Wait' - which summons all the morbid desire of Wuthering Heights. This 2010 album is not quite up to the same consistent standard; some of the rough edges have been sanded down, but who can begrudge the relative success this has achieved? My favourites are 'Fright Night', with its John Carpenter-film spirits dancing to serene D.I.Y. Italo-disco, and the awesome 'Round and Round', which sees Pink taking his patented dreamt pop into the sensual stratosphere.

13. Ellen Allien - Dust

Ellen Allien is my favourite German techno artisan along with Barbara Morgenstern, and this is, to my mind, an absurdly underrated album. The minimal, liminal beats of 'Our Utopie' evoke light-rail transit systems while 'Flashy Flashy' is as defiantly blank and severe as European music gets. 'My Tree' can be compared with the exquisitely glacial music of Antye Greie, as featured in Chris Petit's Content. The fourth track, 'Sun the Rain', enters like the sun on the neck after a lifetime of winters, with an entirely uncharacteristic use of insistent guitar.

'Walking down the street you take my hand.' 

It is heartstopping when listened to after the previous three tracks; like Kay in 'The Snow Queen', being dragged away from his puzzles towards the land of the living. The album does fade slightly after this point, but 'Huibuh' is a masterly (or rather mistressly) five minutes. A slinky, sinuous rhythm reminiscent of Prince (a guiding influence on much great 2010 music), spare minor-chord chimes and bewitching, languorous vocals from Ellen. Yes, Berlinette and Orchestra of Bubbles remain her strongest work, but Dust is a strong release and significantly more engaging than the rather flat Sool.

12. Vampire Weekend - Contra

Not quite as fresh seeming as the debut, inevitably, but an impeccably crafted record of cosmopolitan pop. It peaks with the cantering 'Run' and the sublime 'Diplomat's Son', with its programmed afro-beats, end-of-the-pier piano and urbane, Paul Simon-esque vocals. They are resting on laurels slightly, but the essential template is strong enough to see them through.

11. Field Music - Field Music (Measure)

A marginally over-extended album, but only just. This is an astute cycle of art-pop songs, anchored by vocals wonderfully lacking in smugness or histrionics. The second side contains a winning use of found-sounds. These are Sunderland's finest exponents of indie music; indie as in independent-minded, not in lifestyle-accessory - a band who now include as their bassist a former classmate of mine at Barnes Primary School.

Do listen to the rippling 'mackem XTC' loveliness of 'Measure' or the urgent should've-been-number-1 'Them That Do Nothing'. Lyrics are as elliptical and oblique as ever with these Brewises, but far from lacking in meaning if you dig under the surface. 'Precious Plans' speaks of a thousand compromises; heads being kept down through fear and circumstance. My generation - early 1980s born - realising that the dreams they were sold are illusory. The burden of self-promotion - Nina Power's description of people having to ask as walking-CVs - and dream homes bringing heartache:

'Where are those future-less precious plans / Where we have a place to get to'.

10. Kanye West - My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

Where the brothers Brewis are unassuming and lyrically guarded, Kanye assumes that you know that he is the centre of the pop universe. This is a grandiose, egocentric record that celebrates the self, with all the attendant melancholia and braggadocio. 'POWER' is the stampeding juggernaut that one could take to be West's own persona, mutated hip-hop or schizoid capitalism writ large. He samples Fripp's Blair-anticipating '21st Century Schizoid Man' from Blair-favourite album, In the Court of the Crimson King. 'All of the Lights' is a compelling urban rallying-call, masses of horns welcoming and including the listener. There are crucial contributions from Drake and, especially, a refracted, automated Rihanna. 'So Appalled' is grave in the same manner as much of 808s and Heartbreaks, and is followed by my two favourite tracks: the celestial 'Devil in a Blue Dress', revisiting the sublime pitch-shifted vocal bliss of his debut album. Then, expectant single piano notes lead into the epic expanses of 'Runaway' - the second great track of that name in 2010 (see Devlin's).


9. Big Boi - Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty

A bit of a revelation for me, this, and slightly stronger even than West's lauded album. Big Boi attains a grace and subtlety here only matched by one other urban album of 2010 that I've heard.

What to say of something like 'Be Still'? An exquisite jewel of a synth ballad to match Amerie's gorgeous 'Crush' from 2007. Enveloping emotions and intimations of spring; if synths can hug, these manage it.


Elsewhere, plangent electric pianos ('Turns Me On'), Wu-Tang and Soul II Soul-citing spaceship soul ('Shutterbugg'),  sensuality ('Night Night'); above all, oceanic Avalanches of soul in 'Shine Blockas', with its masterly contrast between vibraphone-led vastness and dub sparseness. 'Hustle Blood' is rather unsatisfactory in its limited world-view, yet has an undeniably formidable use of rhythm and wah-wah. 'General Patton' is another of the three centrepieces; a suitably martial, cinematic cavalcade that evokes that mighty actor George C. Scott.


8. Gayngs - Relayted

Minneapolis melancholy-pop, directly inspired by 10cc and Godley and Creme's imperishable hits 'I'm Not In Love' and 'Cry'. Gayngs is a Broken Social Scene-like amalgamation of elements from various bands, including the Bon Iver singer, Justin Vernon (who also surfaces on album #10 in this list). Songs like 'Ride' are really not that far from the sad urban electronica of Junior Boys. 'The Last Prom on Earth' has some of the most moving use of auto-tune I have heard since Momus' 'Nervous Heartbeat', treading deftly between emotionalism and suave pretence, like Yello did in their prime.

All songs are underpinned by the tellingly sensual/glacial 69bpm rhythms of 'I'm Not in Love'.
 

7. The Radio Dept. - Clinging to a Scheme

Most of this album is eminently winsome indie-electronica of the estimable Swedish school, and is more arresting than jj's latest, which is dream-pop to the point of passive quietism. What elevates it so high in my list is the heart-on-sleeve commitment of 'Heaven's on Fire' with its spoken anti-capitalist broadside at the start and regretful focus on charlatanry. They won't be to everybody's taste, but they are for this fan of New Order ('The Video Dept.' - sigh), Saint Etienne ('Never Follow Suit' - gasp) and the delightful - and much missed - The Embassy. Oh yes. It is music grounded in a lineage I love, and I cannot get enough of it. 'Memory Less', 'David' and 'A Token of Gratitude': hazy, huggable delights.

6. Broken Social Scene - Forgiveness Rock Record

Probably the most consistent record in this list. Maybe it does not quite reach the conquering heights of previous BSS albums, but this is a cleverly conceived, artful album full of mature, beguiling music. Its sheer dogged consistency raises it above the more lauded Arcade Fire album; whilst there is nothing here to match 'Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)', it is a compulsive record, much easier to revisit. They have another artful, distinctive female singer, Lisa Lobsinger, to add to Leslie Feist and Emily Haines (who makes a sedate appearance on 'Sentimental X's'). The communal 'Forced to Love' and 'Water in Hell' suggest that rock in 2010 is not necessarily an irrelevance. 'Meet Me in the Basement' is a thrilling, intricate instrumental; 'Art House Director' bursts with vitality - listen to that swooning transition from 1:48 and those celebratory horns. BSS retain their pre-eminence in terms of creating unpredictable, experimental rock music with a humane ethos.

5. Stromae - Cheese

Could this gent be any other than Belgian? He has something of the worldly oddity of Brel and the fresh face of Tintin as refracted through the vision of Rene Magritte. These synths possess a lifeforce quite of their own, which D.H. Lawrence might have understood had the dirty old bastard lived into the twenty-first century.

Stromae will not, simply CANNOT deviate: he sticks to his euro-pop formula over the context of a 39-minute album with the same sort of focus as David Guetta. This is not the sort of music to parade its eclecticism, as evinced by its single-minded devotion to the beat and those storming, swarming synthesizers. There is an unapologetic European hedonism of the sort admired by Jonathan Meades in the Hamburg segment of Magnetic North; one also thinks of Serge Gainsbourg - brought to prominence again with a well-judged biopic, which I saw at the Tyneside Cinema in the summer. 'Peace or Violence' and 'Rail de Musique' should have been domineering number-ones across the continent. 'Summertime' evokes balearic house with its blazing colours; 'Dodo' starts tentative, becoming a wistful techno lullaby. 'House'llulah' is a rave-informed hymn of devotion to house music and dancing. The title-track brings the album to a rather pensive close with chords just as wistful as usual, but without a beat of any sort. It is a powerful way to end what is perhaps 2010's finest and most characterful dance album.


4. Clubroot - II: MMX

Operating at a junction (or, rather, lock) between idm and dubstep, the St Albans-residing Clubroot is an excellent discovery, recommended by a good friend Andrew Saffrey. If 'Orbiting' is a glorious opener, then 'Waterways' ascends like a dubstep Cathedral Gardens. As well as the ambient John Foxx, there are hints of Eno and the architecturally-minded OMD; Dan Richmond seems to be influenced by that thoughtful strain of British electronica that contains u-Ziq, Ultramarine and Orbital. 'Waterways' gets me thinking of, well, British waterways like the Regent's and the Hackney-to-Stratford canals that I walked for four and a half hours one day in late July 2010. The kaleidoscopic, jarring mix of architectural styles observable along the 14-mile route, suggesting a good many Britains - and always the still, serene green of the water.

It is a testament to this album's hold on me that it seemed to fit equally well with a walk from South Shields metro, through the bleak market square and down to the ferry terminal and the Alum Ale House. 'Running on Empty' speaks of times past and begs for a future - you never want it to end. This is not purely cerebral music; it feels corporeal. Living, breathing humans kiss and caress like weeping statues: 'Cherubs Cry'. One thinks of epochal British children's books like Moondial and Tom's Midnight Garden with their protagonists' immersion in the past. One thinks also of the sensation of holding hands.

3. Hot Chip - One Life Stand

More statues on an album cover. More excellence from this original art-pop band; certainly a much stronger proposition than Made in the Dark - despite that earlier album's featuring Robert Wyatt. This does end and start on the slow side, but really gathers pace with the middle section - tracks 3 to 8. 'I Feel Better' is a wimpy canter, autotune deftly deployed. The title track is a powerful case for monogamy that necessarily feels very social in its embrace of the dancefloor. 'Brothers' wins out through virtue of its unfashionable virtue. Things step up with 'Slush', which does evoke the chill darkness of the Bonzo Dog Band's song of the same name, but applies some choir-boy yearning and good cheer to its doleful waltzing. Next is the album's masterpiece, rightfully praised by many: 'Alley Cats'. Weightless and yet worldly, simultaneously. Listen to in conjunction with Falty DL's 'Discoko' (with its own epiphany coming at 2:05).

The song contains many heartstopping moments: the higher vocals coming in at 2:12 and the ghostly loveliness of the submerged organ chords and voices from 2:38. You might draw comparison with English eccentric Robyn Hitchcock and his animal/plant preoccupations. You might just say it's bloody lovely and sensual as hell - or rather, Mabuse. The album reaches its apex with the following dubstep raver, 'We Have Love'; certainly one of the cleverest bits of sequencing on any album of the year to move from 'Alley Cats''s celestial poise to this gadding merry-go-round.

2. Janelle Monáe  - The ArchAndroid

A significant advance on a promising debut mini-album, The Arch-Android is the sound of a young artist taking things as far out as Prince managed, whilst maintaining a sure grasp of pop. Classical, jazz, soul, folk, electronica and hip-hop infuse these glorious 68 minutes in roughly equal measures; this is surely the most diverse album to come under the 'urban' or 'hip-hop' bracket since Cody Chestnutt's The Headphone Masterpiece (2002). Of course, OutKast are a guiding spirit, with Big Boi appearing on the sure-footed 'Tightrope', though Solange is perhaps the closest direct comparison in terms of non-tunnel visioned hip-hop. This is a true afro-futurist pop - Kelis, Common and Erykah Badu might also be mentioned as kindred spirits.

There are lovely segues between the tracks: for instance, we slide from the Motown-goes-into-outer-space propulsion of 'Faster' to the even more urgent 'Locked Inside', which sounds likes an impossibly well-adjusted Michael Jackson. The pop-rush of its chorus is fucking glorious. This fades out to be replaced by the stately hush of 'Sir Greendown' with its Dudley Simpson organ and medieval courtliness. It is a wondrous sequence of music; one of the most confounding and lovely to be heard in 2010.

'Oh Maker' is a soul song underpinned by a two-note folk guitar loop - all fed through the sort of Boards of Canada gauze that her contemporaries Solange and Amerie have deployed. 'Neon Valley Street' is like the retro pop-deco of Dr Buzzard's Savannah Band submerged in some intangible future world. And if it cannot seem to get any more celestial we have a 'Strawberry Fields' Mellotron entering the scene, and then a regretful guitar solo that rivals the best of the Purple One...

'Wondaland' achieves that glacial/warm dichotomy with the spry insolence of a Cristina or Annie; a Then the Gregorian calm and ancient-sounding folk strains of '57821': a gorgeous chorale accompanied by a plaintive guitar.

Such is the expansive quality of The Arch-Android. There is even a ukulele at an most unexpected moment; one of so many life-affirming moments on an expansive album that suggests a future for pop itself in the long-playing format. This is music to be savoured and treasured; both danced to and played to death on wistful Sunday afternoons.

1. Darkstar - North

And so, to the last album of this list - my favourite of all 2010 albums, though I first heard it in 2011. It spoke to me deeply at an important time; it seemed designed to reach me at a strange time in my life, with its songs of fragility and fortitude. Darkstar were supposed to be dubstep, I thought; then, they go and make an album of sensitive synth-pop that features more piano than bass drops. It is the album that My Computer's Vulnerabilia (2002) attempts to be, but cannot quite manage.

This is music of the post-industrial north as recalled from London with Proustian intensity. Yes, there is the Human League cover - which I did hear last year, via Paul Lester's excellent Band of the Day mixes on the Guardian website. This links them in my mind to other thoughtful electronic operatives - not just Human League, but David Sylvian and Thomas Dolby. 'Deadness' has the melancholy of Robert Wyatt and Ultra Nate's 'Free' (that guitar from 2:50); it has the sort of rich, full synthesizers that loom over and haunt the whole album. 'Aidy's Girl is a Computer' is dubstep - indeed it had been on a previous Hyperdub compilation - but it is dubstep very much as intelligent-dance-music; it might be filed alongside Aphex Twin in its sense of fun and adventure. Erstwhile computer game synths are dragged out to the point of serenity. 'Under One Roof' is shattering, with its shards of rhythm and lead synth the perfect accompaniment to a rueful late-night train journey home. 'Two Chords' is an even more up-front Junior Boys, capturing a boy in a bedsit, bewitched and bewildered by memories.

If you had doubted where you were, there is the corrective of 'North', which captures the region in all its infernal beauty and chipper desolation. The rhythm is like Portishead's 'Machine Gun' in its brutalist compulsion; amid this clatter, there are chiming, minor-key chords drawn out with wintry sustain. One thinks of Wuthering Heights and of the Holy Trinity Church in Sunderland; this is music that is doleful, hymnal, pitiless, resigned. 'Ostkruez' conjures up 'Twin Peaks if it was set in the north of England' - I simply cannot better Kode9's description, but will note the absence of an otherwordly, angelic Julee Cruise to offer consolation amid Badalamenti's melancholy chords.

Then the towering edifice of 'Dear Heartbeat'; first, a patient, tick-tocking intro of about 45 seconds, then the canvass expands: immense bass and synths interweave, evoking a humane Sublime comparable to the J.M.W. Turner or William Blake paintings I pondered in the Tate Britain last October. This is truly an electropop elegy for the ages, to rival 'Being Boring' and 'So This is Goodbye'.

'When It's Gone' laments lost love, that piano resurfacing, heralding Beckettian sentiments - 'I can't go on, I must go on'. Sudden pangs of pain, yet the survival instinct asserting itself.

An astonishingly acute break-up album? An Abstractions of the Post-Industrial North, transposing Basil Kirchin into 2010? A certifiably ace, dubstep-electronica opus? A soundtrack to emotionally-charged journeys north on the East Coast Mainline? Whichever - or all - of these, this shakes me to the core like nothing else in this year. It is a sustained 39 minutes and 36 seconds of unfettered melancholy; an encapsulation of the 'sweet distress' abundant in affairs of the human heart. 

'Dear heartbeat, I need something to soothe me
Dear heartbeat, medicate a dose
Sweet distress, touch and presence not welcome
Sweet distress, now it’s time to go'

We're public spirited

I was part of a 50-strong Sunderland anti-cuts contingent that joined the TUC March on Saturday. A contingent that was a microcosm of the larger march: citizens united by a long-justified hatred of the Tories and what they are doing to us.

This march of probably 500,000 people felt like the best of Britain out in force to defend valued public services against the Tory-led Coalition, with its individualistic synthesis of the Gradgrindian and Ayn Randian - barely tempered by ineffectual Liberal Democrats. A coalition of ghastly Goveians claiming to know the price of everything, yet patently knowing the value of nothing.

There was earthy humour and righteous anger at the country we are becoming, with public servants being made to pay for a crisis they did not cause; government refusing to make the tough decisions to reclaim unpaid taxes and increase progressive taxation, in order to fund vital public services. This government is trying to re-establish a dangerous and anti-academic 'Our Island Story' narrative in History lessons and - absurdly - turn the Arts and Humanities Research Council into a cheerleader for the Big Society. It is also trying to pull up the ladder for students in FE, is happy to see libraries closed and is intent upon dismantling the NHS as a managed, national service without vast disparities - opening it up to ruthless, competitive forces.

This remarkably astute song encapsulates some of the mood of Saturday; providing an instance of the sort of political hip-hop - supporting the underdog and decent values - too long absent:



The media have tried to represent a fundamentally peaceful protest as irrelevant beside the direct action of a small minority (some of which might be supported, e.g. peaceful occupations). The media are foolish to imagine that they can pull the wool over the public's eye, when the public is about to feel the affects of the Coalition's deliberately punitive and divisive cuts agenda.

Serafina Steer's wistful song captures part of the essential character of the marchers; these were not face-scarved anarchists or rent-a-megaphone fantasists. There was a cross-section of Britain in all its diversity: Christians, Greens, Labour councillors, working and middle-class families and teenagers. There were obviously Guardian-readers and long-time leftists, but they were merely one section of an enormous gathering. Tellingly, I spotted 'Charities against the Cuts' and even 'Conservatives against the Cuts', plus all manner of trade unionists, including uniformed firemen behind FBU banners. Ordinary citizens of this country showing that they care about having a society with strong provision for the social good.

'I remain optimistic
By nature [...]
No ear-plugs here,
No invitation needed;
We're public spirited,
You can hang around here
You can hang around here
Don't go quietly...'

-- With thanks to Gary Duncan for the photos

Political music in the present tense, Part I

Enter Shikari - 'Fanfare for the Conscious Man' (2009)



Learned about these via some of my sixth form students; it is the sort of symphonic rock that ELP could never have advanced - informed by electro and righteous politics. It has been rare to hear such an estuary accent (they are from St Albans) declaim such socialist sentiments. Perhaps the sign of changing times.

Devlin - 'Community Outcast' (2010)



I'd be interested to hear whether there is much more politically conscious British music in this vein. The R&B and grime genres have rarely seemed to yield much political insight in previous years, but surely this has to change.

Digital Mystikz, feat. Spen G - 'Anti-War Dub' (2006)



Was speaking to a second-year A Level student recently about how to answer an exam question that concerned the interaction of pop music and politics. The article (from a recent past paper) concerned Cameron's quotes on the Smiths and mentioned the likes of Bragg and Weller. I asked the student about dubstep and he didn't seem to think it could be political, or that the audience could be politicised. This track seems to suggest at least an anti-imperialist current within the genre, and a BBC journalist seems to have picked up on some dubstep influence within the student protests last year: http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2010/12/470259.html

Chris T-T - 'A Plague on Both Our Houses' (2005)




'The house of money and the house of God' - an earnest attack on fundamentalist belief in religious and in the neo-liberal market.


Future of the Left - 'Fuck the Countryside Alliance' (2007)



Dan Le Sac Versus Scroobius Pip - 'Stake a Claim' (2010)




Civil disobedience.

Rude Corps - 'Imperfect (But Alive and Trying)' (2010)





Toddla T, feat. Benjamin Zephaniah & Joe Goddard - 'Rebel' (2009)



Humane Sheffield electro with Hot Chip singer Goddard and Benjamin Zephaniah. Wise call to rebellion.

The Unthanks - 'The Testimony of Patience Kershaw' (2009)



The good old days.

The Durutti Column - 'How Unbelievable' (2009)



That great European elegist Vini Reilly and, movingly, the late Anthony Wilson, lament twelve wasted years.

Suburban Kids with Biblical Names - 'Europa' (2009)
 


The evocative sense of a continent held together by 'people being terribly nice to each other'.

PJ Harvey - 'Let England Shake' (2011)



Martin Parr-like video; this is the title-track (previewed last year on the Andrew Marr show in front of a transfixed Gordon Brown) from a fascinating, meticulously constructed new album.

Comedy and politics

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/06/jim-davidson-play-rightwing-standups

Interesting article from Stephanie Merritt, spurred by the curious fact that the objectionable, arch-Thatcherite Jim Davidson has penned a stage play called Stand Up and Be Counted, in which he stars as a 'bigoted' stand-up comedian who might just resemble himself; who, don' you just bet, will triumph over his 'politically-correct' competitors. Although this follow-up interview suggests at least recognition of defeat for his previously held values.

This sort of comedy is invariably reactionary and right-wing; this man is Davidson's spiritual mentor:



The Manning/Davidson school is appalling and we must move beyond it definitively. Trevor Griffiths' Comedians was written over thirty years ago (and adapted as a Play for Today, TX: 25.10.1979) and sought to criticise the stale, regressive old-school - whilst maintaining some affection for the legacy of music-hall. Clearly the 'alternative comedians' at least initially acted upon its agitational impulse. The desire to undermine evidently bigoted and regressive views. Of course, many of the alt-comedians might have done well to remember that it wasn't all bad in the past - what about Robb Wilton or Frank Randle? There were interesting, unusual figures who emerged from the working-class tradition of music hall.

Much of the early-1970s 'mainstream' comedy was backward-looking, yet an emodiment of a strongly masculine world, before levels of unemployment began increasing rapidly and before the Equal Pay came into effect. You see this in the leery, inconsequential silliness of the Confessions... films and presumably in the Wheeltappers and Shunter's Social Club. It is not a comedy we can or should return to, and nominally progressive or forward-looking comics should be ashamed of offering it up for us today, with their sheepish pretext of 'irony'. Irony is an altogether subtler thing than merely re-iterating the stunted prejudices of your forefathers, Frankie Boyle and Harry Hill.

Comedy and satire is successful when afflicting the comfortable, not in putting the boot into a media-defined underclass. No doubt many will feel personal antipathy to being in close social contact with 'charvas' who match the Little Britain depiction. There might be role for some social satire, but not the same old tired attacks on what is a broad-brush stereotype.

If Michael McIntyre's comedy is non-political - as Merritt suggests - perhaps this is a reflection of our times. It represents the wilful ignorance of many who have never been taught or do not understand the centrality of politics to everything in our lives.

Better 1970s-era comedies tend to be the sitcoms: Fawlty Towers and Rising Damp satirised right-wing authority figures, afflicting them but with some human sympathy. David Nobbs's The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin is a middle-class cry of despair against regimented, predictable institutions - work, marriage, consumerism (in the second-series).

There is a practical reason there cannot be right-wing comedy in the mainstream media - there is not the audience for it, nor the 'talent' within the comedy world, as indeed Misterbaxter argues: 'Actually, the comedy scene in this country is driven by a thriving live circuit - venues of 150-500 capacity putting on mixed bills of three or so stand-ups twice or more a week. [...] The audiences are not by any means Guardian-reader lefties. On the whole, they are young-ish, mostly male, working (although not necessarily working-class), fond of a beer or two, usually out with a crew of mates (or work-mates); not especially racist, sexist or homophobic but open to humour that explores those issues. The BBC simply skims off the top of this thriving subculture; the fact is that right-wing comics simply are not emerging from the live proving-grounds. Perhaps it's because British humour favours the underdog. Rich people laughing at poor people isn't that funny. Comfortable middle-class people laughing at struggling immigrants isn't that funny.'

It also ought to be said that our governments have been economically right-wing in the last 32 years, and generally socially liberal - so a right-wing insurgency will not develop in these circumstances. I anticipate some more satire of rootless liberalism; you see some good satire of this Peep Show and David Mitchell seems to be a rare case of a 1970s-born 'left wing fogey'. However, satirising rootless liberalism is clearly a harder task than assailing neo-liberal fundamentalism, which is more likely to be the tenor of current comedy. This is one of Fry and Laurie's most sublimely funny, telling sketches with clear political commentary:



We have a mainstream media that parrots the neo-liberal, right-wing line, and Merritt neglects to mention that there is comedy that does not fit the left-wing tag. As mentioned in CIF, we do have comic minds who are to the right: Ian Hislop is a Tory, though patently of the One Nation variety, hence his preoccupation with things like the scouting movement. We have, of course, Top Gear, a show far from progressive in what it shows or what its participants say. Many of the alternative comedians turned out to be reactionary - or at least happy to associate with some very reactionary people. Of course, there was also Kenny Everett with his "Let's kick Michael Foot's stick away!" at a Tory Party Conference. There is also the self-righteous, right-wing demogoguery of Noel Edmonds, whose television work ought to count as unintentional comedy rather than light entertainment.

Merritt could do with acknowledging that other forms of comedy are heterogenous and deal with left as well as right wing politics: Armando Iannucci's superb The Thick of It assails both Conservative and (New) Labour politics without compunction. It highlights systemic follies and failures, as well as giving a deeply humane portrait of human absurdities and frailties:



There are also 'comics' such as the Viz, which is even-handed in poking fun at those from all parts of the political spectrum.

Likewise, one couldn't easily pigeonhole the comedy of Beyond the Fringe, Monty Python's Flying Circus or The Day Today other than that there are small-a anarchist and small-l liberal tendencies. The impulse may be slightly more left of centre, simply because right-wing politicians tend to be in power and left-wing politicians are drawn to the right when in power. Comedy has to tackle the powerful, and that is where many so-called left-wing comedians went badly wrong in the Blair era by aligning themselves with Blair; obviously, there were exceptions: Linda Smith, Mark Steel &c.

My favourite current stand-ups are the absurdist Simon Munnery and the provocative, Bill Hicks-influenced Stewart Lee. Lee's more abrasive form of left-wing comedy is especially notable as he is willing to attack cultural relativism:



Lee openly advocates something he believes in (William Blake), whereas the likes of Boyle and other amateur nihilists merely peddle a debased 'irony'. On CIF, Dogstarscribe instructively compares these comedians with their traditionalist predecessors: 'Ken Dodd, who's hugely successful in his format with his audience, is another very conservative comedian. So was Manning - although Frankie Boyle would probably kill for the Manning riff, working a Catholic social club, where he looked at the life size crucifix on the wall and asked 'What did he do? Rob the bandits?' (Which probably says a lot about where Boyle actually sits on the political spectrum - there's nothing socialist or optimistic about cynical nihilism that says we're all shit really - that's the language of the right, not the left).'

Comedy should not seek to play to people's ignorance; if Clarkson does not really believe in the reductive views he spouts he should stop: he does harm and narrows horizons with every cliche he utters. Comedy has to reflect human nature, but also has a responsibility not to make things worse. As Orwell explains in the passage below, comedy will always reflect some of the 'lowness of outlook' that exists in society; this need not necessarily be conservative, homophobic, racist etc, but be rooted in common experience. Perhaps the sitcom went onto take over from the seaside postcards that Orwell is ambivalent - but finally tolerant - about.

'It is only that the other element in man, the lazy, cowardly, debt-bilking adulterer who is inside all of us, can never be suppressed altogether and needs a hearing occasionally.

The comic post cards are one expression of his point of view, a humble one, less important than the music halls, but still worthy of attention. In a society which is still basically Christian they naturally concentrate on sex jokes; in a totalitarian society, if they had any freedom of expression at all, they would probably concentrate on laziness or cowardice, but at any rate on the unheroic in one form or another. It will not do to condemn them on the ground that they are vulgar and ugly. That is exactly what they are meant to be. Their whole meaning and virtue is in their unredeemed low-ness, not only in the sense of obscenity, but lowness of outlook in every direction whatever. The slightest hint of ‘higher’ influences would ruin them utterly. They stand for the worm's-eye view of life, for the music-hall world where marriage is a dirty joke or a comic disaster, where the rent is always behind and the clothes are always up the spout, where the lawyer is always a crook and the Scotsman always a miser, where the newly-weds make fools of themselves on the hideous beds of seaside lodging-houses and the drunken, red-nosed husbands roll home at four in the morning to meet the linen-nightgowned wives who wait for them behind the front door, poker in hand. Their existence, the fact that people want them, is symptomatically important. Like the music halls, they are a sort of saturnalia, a harmless rebellion against virtue. They express only one tendency in the human mind, but a tendency which is always there and will find its own outlet, like water. On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time'.
(George Orwell, 'The Art of Donald McGill', 1941)

Edgelands and left-wing fogeyism

http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/cultural-capital/2011/02/british-problem-auden-moss

During my customary, leisurely read of the New Statesman on Saturday, two particularly interesting book reviews struck me. One might also highlight Rachel Cooke's political reading of South Riding but I am holding off from commenting on that until I have read more of the novel (currently 40 pages in) and watched the 1970s and 2011 TV-adaptations.

Firstly, Ken Worpole's review of Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts' Edgelands: Journeys into England's True Wilderness, two poets' enquiry of our 'bastard countryside': 'Like their hero John Clare, they have found their poems in the fields'. Worpole begins by mentioning independent-minded Marxist Raymond Williams' The Country and the City (1973), which explained that stark distinctions and demarcations between country and city were no longer valid. He then mentions a similarly-minded 'ecological polemic', Richard Mabey's The Unofficial Countryside and also the anarchist Colin Ward and sociologist Dennis Hardy's writings about life "on the margins", in areas not simply city or country or suburb: 'where they found plotlands, allotments, caravan sites, camping grounds, small-holdings and children's hiding places, as well as outposts of artisan industry.'

As well as books I plan to read like Roger Deakin's Waterlog: A Swimmer's Journey Through Britain (1999) and Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees (2007) and Robert Macfarlane's The Wild Places (2007), one is brought to mind of two television programmes. Firstly, Jonathan Meades' 'Severn Heaven', which focused on the improvised dwellings and plotlands along the river Severn near Bewdley - which grew up in response to the Great Depression.

Second is Alan Plater's rather neglected BBC1 Afternoon Play, The Last Will and Testament of Billy Two Sheds (2006), which saw the veteran playwright attempting to bring together disparate dissenters (old socialist trade-unionist, a 1960s hippie, disillusioned but chipper career women &c.) against neo-liberalism. They are brought together by their senseof shared community around their allotments, situated just outside the city where Jodie Whittaker's student studies and works part-time in a burger bar.

She comes into contact with this community as a means of unfinished business: her beloved grandfather kept a shed there, and she re-encounters his ghost (a wonderfully warm James Bolam) whenever she re-enters it. He instills in her a non-conformist love not just of stories and dreaming, but of people and places - the allotment and its varied 'eccentrics'. While the play has its significant flaws and moments of ingrained, 2000s-era BBC blandness - inappropriate, bet-hedging choice to have Mercury Rev playing at the end where Plater clearly would have relished some vintage jazz - it is a distinctive writerly piece that takes its time with ideas, characters and ambience. Watched today, it seems a poignant, stranded refugee of the Play for Today ethos amid a largely barren era of British television drama seeming to be hypnotised by Hollywood.

Worpole's review makes decidedly relevant mention of Owen Hatherley's A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain (2010) and Paul Kingsnorth's Real England: A Battle against the Bland (2008). It is interesting to compare Kingsnorth's intensely felt localism and (Deep, if one considers the whole Dark Mountain project) Ecologism with Hatherley's feeling for European socialist futurism. It may seem difficult to bridge the divide between socialist urbanism and anti-growth small-is-beautiful ecology, but both writers share a concern with urban localism disappearing: they variously document Sheffield and London working-class markets under threat. Perhaps Rob Young's Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music (2010) has a place in this, mentioned approvingly in The Wire's end-of-2010 highlights by another excellent Zero Books author, Nina Power.
 
Some Green writers, such as Ernest Callenbach, are excellent on encouraging an ecological greening of city life, but also in stressing human interactions, neighbourhood diversity and Enlightenment values. The promotion of open public spaces (and parks), education and public transport can surely unite socialists and ecologists. Callenbach, author of an interesting-sounding ecological utopian novel, Ecotopia (1975), is no Luddite, but promotes a selectivity about technology. He actively encourages city apartment block living as ecologically and socially preferable to the sort of suburban or rustic retreats presumably beloved of many romantic British environmentalists - who tend to share the architectural outlook of Pevsner or Betjeman. I think there has to be a middle-ground on this - an encouragement of enlightened city values first and foremost and a defence of modernist architecture up to a point. It would be folly to say that Newcastle Upon Tyne would be a better city if its Georgian heart had been entirely demolished as per T. Dan Smith's masterplan - too many factors mitigated against this: the innate small-c conservatism of many working-class people, the gradual consumerisation of society during the 1945-79 period of social democracy in Britain. 

There has to be unity against capitalist materialism and by definition this has to include over-consumption, which lead to the sort of bland environment documented in Chris Petit's rather haunting recent TV documentary/essay, Content (More4, 2010) - intriguing reflections on the influence of technology and neo-liberalism dominance over the marginal spaces explored also by Patrick Keiller as well as Meades.

The second book review that interested me was Geoffrey Wheatcroft on David McKie's Bright Particular Stars: a Gallery of Glorious British Eccentrics, not so much for the comments on the book itself - fascinating and enjoyable though that sounds - but more for Wheatcroft's assessment of McKie himself. This long-time Guardian writer has published extensively on British politics and more recently on the eccentric and locally distinctive. Wheatcroft places him as perhaps the last of a breed of provincial, non-metropolitan left-wing writers and journalists:

'As his discerning fan club knows, McKie himself is, if not eccentric, salty, sesquipedal and offbeat,but also alittle poignant, as befits one of the last of an endangered species or tendency. It might be called the fogeyism of the left - "Radicals for cricket, railways and real ale" - which once had a billet at the Guardian, whose deputy editor McKie was, and where he later wrote the Elsewhere and Smallweed columns.

There was a time when that paper, too, or rather the Manchester Guardian as was, embodied certain virtues - dissenting, unfashionable, provincial - which are today not so much discounted or despised, as quite vanished. Much more significant than the politics of our media now is their tone: modish, sneering, intensely metropolitan. It is a world that would have disconcerted not only McKie's far-flung villains, but also his heroes.'

One could mention Alan Garner, Alex Glasgow, Jake Thackray, Hunter Davies, Alan Bennett, Dennis Potter and - of course - Alan Plater as others not writing from an exclusive, metropolitan mindset. Who do not automatically sneer at most life outside the capital or assume the worst of people; who embody a kind of humane socialism alien to the patronising, would-be left-liberals, the lifestylers of today. Of course, there are exceptions among those born after 1940; those not entirely giving themselves over to the new individualism: Paul McCartney and Michael Palin to an extent; Roy Harper, Robert Wyatt and Kevins Coyne and Ayers for sure. There were of course English libertarians to whom neo-liberalism was absolute anathema, but who had to play the game.

The 1930s born generation were the last to have personal memories of the Great Depression or WW2. I have written previously about Robert Westall, born just a few months earlier in 1929, though no one embodies the particular generation's strain of socialism as well as Alan Plater. Jazz over rock 'n' roll. Social liberalism within the context of strong social institutions and bonds; an interest in people and life rather than the iconography of self-destruction that is the hallmark of the rock 'n' roll cult.

'All I would say is that those whom with some deliberateness I called enemy artists — I don’t just see
them as different, I see them as enemy — endlessly harp on the failure of relationships, the dislocation of communities, the defeat of noble efforts, the end of idealism. This really is the only thing with which they can defend this social order: not that it’s good, but that it’s inevitable.

People aren’t good enough to live in better ways — this is the heartland of their system. They don’t any longer try and say it’s better. They just say, ‘We understand people, we know they’re out for themselves, we know that if they try something good it fails.’ And because of that there is what I called a bourgeois dissident form of art which shows all this with great power . . .

Everyone who has lived in this actual world already has enough doubts, has enough knowledge of weakness
and of how often things fail. It may be some kind of therapy to see it endlessly replayed, but the moment when
people feel the break from the possibility that at least something can move, some-thing can be got right,
something can be felt . . . I think that at the moment, that kind of celebration of possibility is the most profound
need.'

(Raymond Williams, quoted in: BRITTON, Andrew, ed., 1991, Talking Films: The Best of
Guardian Film Lectures, London: Fourth Estate. p.127-9)

'Will Trotter, who runs the drama outfit there, approached me with a proposition. Essentially, it went like this:

"Would you like to write an Afternoon Play?"

"Tell me more."

"This is the fourth series. We get a very good audience share, which is why they're letting us do some more. But there's a down side."

"Tell me more."

"Because it's an afternoon slot, you've got to shoot an hour-long play in eight days with two cameras. And everyone's paid less - but it goes up again if you get a peak-time repeat, and that's beginning to happen."

"Tell me more."

"Again, because it's an afternoon slot, there's no explicit sex, no drugs, and nobody's allowed to say 'shit' or 'fuck'."

"You've just described Jack Rosenthal's career. And mine, too. If we can ban rock'n'roll as well, you're on."

(Alan Plater, 'The Renaissance of the Standalone Drama', The Independent, 17 January 2006, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/the-renaissance-of-the-standalone-drama-523379.html)

Defending the forests

My first, and so far only, entry into public political debate:

http://sparksunderland.com/2011/02/02/greens-and-tories-respond-to-forest-plans/
(unsure whether the files are still uploaded)

You can almost tell that the Sunderland Tory councillor interviewed, like so many of his kind, did not really believe in this policy. It was clearly introduced by PR man Cameron in order to be jettisoned and gain facile plaudits - the government is 'listening' to the public et al, ad nauseum.

We now have to be concerned about stopping the wider cuts-agenda; an ideological crusade, rightly identified by coalition cabinet member Vince Cable as 'Maoist' in its unseemly rush to attack the principle of local government and the provision of public services beyond adherence to the profit motive.

For Cameron, Gove and Hilton it is about 'frontloading the pain' in order that we might have tea and crumpets, five years down the line... i.e. Fictitious financial-services derived 'Growth' and tax cuts for Middle England. Grotesque and cynical politics; if we willingly acquiesce to it, we may well even deserve a majority Tory government.

Social and Liberal Democracy and other enigmas

This first PPB is well constructed and argued, with Cleese acting as a liberal pedagogue. He personally represents the sort of well-schooled and open-minded professional middle-class person of his generation who was disquieted by Thatcherism's effects on society overall but personally did well out of it. The kind of social-liberal who could never vote Tory, particularly Thatcher-era, but did not rely upon the public services himself.

It could of course be sharper in identifying how Thatcherism was destroying the sort of 'decency' and 'moderation' presumably cherished by liberals, certainly of the David Steel and Jo Grimond ilk.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTLR8R9JXz4

This second PPB of course carries a rather grotesque irony in that the Con/LD coalition is now about to carry out more extensive public-services cuts than were ever carried out by Thatcher - one has to recall that Thatcher decimated heavy industry and presided over manufacturing decline but not especially significant cuts to education funding per se.

One wonders whether Brian Eno is as staunch an advocate of the party now as he was during the election campaign - wherein he sanctioned the use of his gloriously evocative Apollo theme in the above broadcast. Eno is perhaps one of the few figures to aesthetically provide a bridge between Europe and America, where Blair so epically failed on a political level. The Apollo album is a merging of European minimalism - think Gavin Bryars and Ligeti - with the wide open spaces of the US: 'Deep Blue Day' and its cavernous, submerged country twang:



It evokes the awe so many young people felt in the Space Age, but also an academic distance and intellectual thoughtfulness that is particularly European. Of course, he had previously evoked an Englishness redolent of Britten, Ballard, MR James and Paul Nash, amongst many others. A Britain that is not Tory or Labour, that we might associate with the venerably irreverant Jonathan Meades or the liberal paternalism of Sir Hugh Greene. A cultural lineage that greens and socialists should be seeking to claim now that it has been abandoned by Clegg, with his attachment to the Carlton Man/Murdoch racket.

The Owen and Steel-led Alliance in 1987 received a marginally smaller percentage of the vote than Clegg's Liberal Democrats in 2010. One doesn't suspect that Shirley Williams, Roy Jenkins or David Steel would have countenanced serving alongside Thatcher in the event of a hung parliament; David Owen might have, as he was the proto-Blair/Clegg, with a modicum more social democracy about him but with careerism put before principle. There may have been an arrangement of case-by-case, policy-by-policy support 'in the national interest', but no Coalition. Orange Book free-market ideology has clearly overwhelmed Social Democracy or Beveridge Liberalism within the Liberal Democrat party. Clegg is the willing advocate of a rightwards-shift in political and economic policy.