disgraceful scenes

Despite the poor and patchy form we QPR fans have suffered since our side was promoted from the Championship last season, we are a resilient breed. Defying both logic and the evidence of our own eyes, we are able to send a couple of thousand souls up to the windy north-west of England with hope in their hearts, chattering excitedly about the reunited strike force of Zamora and Cisse, about plans to throw a few inflatables around in the crowd and about a gut feeling that victory could be ours.

But a day which began with such charming optimism ended with what can only be described as disgraceful scenes. 

No, this is not about our team's failure to overcome fellow strugglers Bolton Wanderers up at the Reebok Stadium. This blog never attempts to offer a detailed analysis of QPR matches, but let's go so far as to say that today's performance was by no means the worst showing by the Superhoops of late. Yes, it's maddeningly frustrating to be scrapping to avoid relegation and failing to get points from the other teams around the foot of the table. But, while mistakes were made and opportunities missed, this did not seem like a gutless or clueless performance. Moreover, this could have been an entirely different game had a perfectly good goal not been disallowed. The ball crossed the line. But the officials didn't see it and it was the home side that chalked up the first officially approved goal.

Bolton's Reebok Stadium: scene of more disappointment for QPR fans

The disgraceful scene, then, was what some of us had the misfortune to witness at Euston Station at about 6.45 this evening.

The QPR team had travelled back to London by the same train that some supporters had joined in Manchester. For some of us, the journey itself passed uneventfully. Carriage D offered a quiet and comfortable ride home to the capital. In other carriages, however, it seems that the drinks were flowing and that some of the drinkers were making a nuisance of themselves. A few of these herberts clearly knew the players were on the train (presumably in a first-class car towards the front) and by the time we reached the end of the line, they had decided to vent their frustration towards the team on arrival. As those of us who'd travelled in carriage D began the trudge along the platform, we were overtaken by a very small group who ran past us in their eagerness to confront the QPR party.

Opinions vary. Perhaps some people think it is helpful and constructive to tell a group of recently defeated players that they are a "waste of money" and angrily to ask them how much they are earning. Perhaps some people genuinely think this will be motivating and is in the best interest of the club and the supporters. It seems unlikely, but let's give the singers of such songs and the doers of such deeds the benefit of the doubt.

What is beyond the pale, though, is squaring up aggressively to our players, as one particular idiot did. Any reports you may hear about Jamie Mackie or other players reacting badly are false. Mackie looked justifiably rattled but it is the pleasant duty of this blog to report that all QPR players witnessing the outburst acted with restraint and commendable professionalism given the provocation. Clint Hill stood out as an especially cool head and Djibril Cisse was seen to remonstrate only very gently with those who saw fit to air their complaints.

As the players boarded their waiting team bus, the majority of decent supporters on the scene applauded and offered a traditional "U RRRRRRRRssssss." Some were keen to impress upon players and club officials - including the charmingly calm and pleasant Phil Beard - that the idiots were very much in the minority. It is to be hoped that this message really gets through to the team - that whatever the level of disappointment and frustration we all feel, only a very small number of utter tools would be stupid enough to seek an angry confrontation with the squad.

Let's keep this in proportion lest outsiders (press, fans of other clubs) try to use it to our detriment. No more than five people behaved very badly, and just ONE individual behaved appallingly tonight at Euston. Almost frothing at the mouth and doing his best to get up in the faces of our players, he turned in a performance that, we can only hope, he will be very ashamed of as he sobers up and reflects upon it. You know who you are, feller. Middle-aged, perhaps in your mid-40s. You wore a dark jacket and have shortish hair. You're a dismal excuse for a supporter and your brand of 'passion' is misplaced and unwanted by the vast majority of people who are able to temper disappointment with common decency.

Let's see if a miracle can be worked when an under-performing but basically half-decent Liverpool side come to Loftus Road. There are ten games to go. The way ahead looks bloody difficult and relegation may indeed be a reality before too long. But for God's sake let's keep our dignity.

U RRRRRRRRRRRRssssssssssssssssssss 

Watching from the South Stand: hoping for the best, fearing the worst

crazy names, crazy guys?

A top Twitter trend this afternoon is 'Gaylord Silly'. Say what? Mr. Silly is a Seychellois runner competing in the World Indoors Athletics Championships in Istanbul. This morning he broke his country's 800m record but still failed to qualify for the next round of his competition, coming in behind four other runners. But the name has struck a chord and, somewhat inevitably, there now seems to be a Gaylord Silly fan club on Facebook.

But this is not the first time that the little republic in the Indian Ocean has produced an exotically and amusingly named athlete. The IAAF website tells us that over 20 years ago, Silly's homeland was represented by a hurdler who rejoiced in the name Giovanny Fanny and who failed to make much of an impression at the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona.

crouching monster

Reading the excellent Patrick Hamilton's The Slaves of Solitude - published in 1947 and set during WWII. A long lifetime away, but anyone who commutes into our capital today will surely think that the opening two paragraphs could have been written about yesterday or tomorrow:

London, the crouching monster, like every other monster has to breathe, and breathe it does in its own obscure, malignant way. Its vital oxygen is composed of suburban working men and women of all kinds, who every morning are sucked up through an infinitely complicated respiratory apparatus of trains and termini into the mighty congested lungs, held there for a number of hours, and then, in the evening, exhaled violently through the same channels. 

The men and women imagine they are going into London and coming out again more or less of their own free will, but the crouching monster sees all and knows better.

Paddy's power to shoot the chavs

Back in July, this blog offered thumbs up to a book which gained quite a lot of attention last year - Owen Jones's Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class. Jones reported on what seems to have become an increasingly mainstream, widespread and unchallenged sense of middle-class contempt for British working-class people. His account for how this state of affairs came about is persuasive, taking in the neutering of the trades unions, the dismantling of British industrial centres and the communities around them, and the successful propagandising about a culture of aspiration and social mobility.

Some reviews of the book, though, question whether Jones's analysis is sufficiently nuanced. In an otherwise positive critique, Lynsey Hanley felt that Jones fails to acknowledge splits within a social class that he prefers to treat "as a single political bloc". These splits are exemplified, argues Hanley, by her observation that "a great deal of chav-bashing goes on within working-class neighbourhoods, partly because of the age-old divide between those who aim for 'respectability' and those who disdain it". She also points out that "inverse snobbery can also be expressed towards those perceived to be 'stuck-up'".

Ask a broad selection of people what they understand the word 'chav' to mean. It seems likely that you will get a few different answers. Some respondents may opt for something close to Wikipedia's definition, which is quite a narrow one. Here, the word refers specifically to a certain stereotype of "teenagers and young adults from an underclass background" dressed entirely in sportswear and committing petty crimes. But Owen Jones's book opens with his account of an incident that motivated him to write it and which suggests the term can have rather wider coverage. He was at a dinner party, surrounded by  a group middle-class friends whose liberal sensibilities are taken as a given. One of the group attempted a joke: "It's sad that Woolworth's is closing. Where will all the chavs buy their Christmas presents?" Whatever the intention, Jones took this to mean that all of Woolworth's regular customers were being labelled as chavs. He therefore felt offended by what he perceived to be a put-down of working class people in general and by the fact that his companions, not all of whom were white or heterosexual, seem tacitly to accept this particular expression of prejudice. We can't read the minds of Jones's fellow diners that night, but it seems feasible that many of us could find friends or colleagues who use the term 'chav' to mean any person displaying what they perceive to be simply working-class tastes, values or behaviours.

There is, then, a lack of consensus about what this ugly little word means. Nowhere is this semantic haziness more obvious than in a TV advert which was (possibly?) recently aired and then (maybe?) swiftly banned:

In this ad, a Cheltenham race day is cleansed of "chavs" by a hit man's tranquilliser darts. So who gets shot? Interestingly, none of the victims is wearing a shell suit, a fake Burberry baseball cap or any other item associated with the fearsome and feral youths described by the Wikipedia entry for chavs. The first person shot wears an unremarkable jacket and shirt. What makes him a chav? Is it that he is drinking lager? Whatever his offence, he is described as a "bit of a tool" before he is taken down. Next to be dispatched are two loudly dressed women. They are described as "vajazzlers", a reference to a term for a form of adornment of the female pubic area which was apparently brought to public notice by one Amy Childs, a star of the awful dramality show The Only Way is Essex. Interestingly, given that she has cropped up in this discussion of class, Ms. Childs was educated at an independent school, where she was appointed Head Girl.

So who else gets shot by the sinister chap employed by betting firm Paddy Power? Well, the dart misses one intended target, a man in a polo shirt. Presumably it's for his gold chain that he deserves to be removed from the race course. Then the next to get the treatment is a rowdy young woman vulgar enough to show her almost bare backside from the grandstand. Then it's the turn of a fellow in an unremarkable dark quilted jacket. 

It's a mixed bag. Some of the people shot seem to be behaving a little obnoxiously and some are dressed a little loudly. It's not hard to imagine some elements of the crowd at an English race course preferring not to have to look at them. But the other folk who get tranquillised just seem to be fairly unostentatious punters whose offence is to be working class - or to be perceived as such.

Imagine using this analysis as the basis of a complaint about the advertisement. Imagine presenting that complaint to the ad's creators, or simply to anyone who enjoyed it. This is only a guess, but would the most likely outcome be an accusation of 'not getting the joke' or of having 'no sense of humour' or perhaps being a member of the 'PC brigade'? Is it hard to imagine someone defending this ad as being just a bit of banter?

The thing is, there's a pretty good chance that the joke here is more clever than it may appear to anyone who bristles with indignation on seeing it. Which is not to say that it's actually funny. But there may be a sly kind of cleverness at work here. Many readers will not equate the online betting services of the Irish bookmaker's firm with the refined tastes of the urbane middle classes. So perhaps the writer of this ad is poking fun at Paddy Power's own customers. If so, are Paddy's punters an unwitting patsy in this gag? Or are they invited to laugh at themselves with knowing self-deprecation? It's hard to tell, but either explanation seems more likely than this being an attempt genuinely to position Paddy Power as a premium brand for a discerning  and affluent clientèle.

Nothing easily discovered in the public domain explains why this advertisement failed to get a sustained showing on TV. A brief article in Ireland's Independent states that the ad "didn't even have chance to be complained about, never making it past the regulators". Presumably this means the ASA, but notice of any ban is not obvious on the agency's website. Was it ever actually banned? The bookmaker's own YouTube channel offers a fairly garbled version of events: "Shockingly, our last TV Ad has been banned after just four days on TV. That's some kind of record, even for us. This commercial, dubbed 'Chavs', didn't even pass the powers that be so it will never be seen on TV." It was on TV for four days or it will never be seen on TV? Which is it, Paddy? Or are the YouTube clip (so far unmolested by any censor) and your comments just part of a stunt that nods knowingly at your firm's history of having its advertising censured?

Either way, should an advertisement like this ever be banned? Probably not. After all, it would be good to believe that nobody is stupid enough to take seriously the notion that chavs/ordinary working class folk (take your pick) should be hunted down for having the effrontery to enjoy a day at the races. 

That said, some fairly predictable enthusiasm for the idea can be found in the comments section of the dear old Daily Mail's short piece about the ad. "Splendid idea," remarks one Mail reader. "But why stop at just chavs? I'd include football lager louts, benefit scroungers, anyone wearing a shell-suit and couples who wear matching jumpers or coats..!!" Another wag weighs to exclain "What a magnificent idea, rid us of the Chavs and Louts - all for shooting em all and will make for a much better world." It's worth pointing out, though, that the second comment was offered by someone using the name "Race Lover Upper Middle Class". That MUST be a joke, right? Someone lampooning other commenters' apparent blood lust? Here we are again. Who's joking and who's not? Who gets the jokes and who doesn't? Ah, the tricksy minefield of British class consciousness, snobberies, ironic stylings and humour.

Though Paddy Power's ad probably doesn't warrant a ban, it's nevertheless not a bad thing that it isn't gracing our TV screens. The Daily Mail comments box is proof that some people would take it as part of an acceptable further normalisation of the spiteful class hatred against which Owen Jones rails. Apart from that, it's another dubious artefact not likely to contribute to any slowing down of the steady coarsening of public debate and tastes.

Still, if you like this kind of thing, you'll be pleased to know that by 'liking' the Paddy Power Facebook page you can play the "Cheltenham chav-spotting game" in which you're invited to sort out slices of "orange plebeian" from people who are "more civilised". Have fun. Knock yourself out while, depending on your take on all this, you either enjoy a harmless pastime or engage in a spot of class hatred. 

Bloody hell. English society is complicated. Especially when an Irish bookmaker sticks his oar in.

Why the long face, Dave?

For almost all of the fifty years during which it has been acting as a prominent critic and lampooner of the incompetent, the corrupt and the pompous in British public life, the indispensable Private Eye has featured a largely unchanged cover design. Speech bubbles are added to black-and-white photographs, creating a topical joke every fortnight. The quality varies, but they are often very good.

A particularly insightful gag graced the cover of the fiftieth anniversary issue (Eye No. 1300). For all the legal battles won and all the scandals uncovered, the Eye guys admit that after a half century of the organ's relentless efforts, the nation today remains, in some very important ways, surprisingly similar to the one which the magazine began satirising in the early sixties. A bold headline reads "HOW SATIRE MAKES A DIFFERENCE". Under this, to the left, a photo of Harold Macmillan is captioned "1961: Magazine pokes fun at Old Etonian Prime Minister surrounded by cronies making a hash of running the country". To the right, a picture of David Cameron is captioned "2011: Er..."

Writing last week about the hilarious Horsegate affair, journalist Iain Martin contends that the ostensibly silly business tells us (or reminds us of) a few important truths. Among these, Martin argues, is that Downing Street was worried to the point of being initially inclined to deny the allegations being directed at the PM. "For days they squirmed," writes Martin, first denying that Cameron had ridden the retired police horse loaned to former News International Chief Executive Rebekah Brooks by her inappropriately close friends at the Met. Then, Martin continues, the people at Number 10 were "saying they didn't know, and then that he might have done." Cameron's team, he argues, will be concerned about the ongoing Leveson enquiry and what else may come to light if it "gets stuck into the links between the political elite and News International management when it is done dealing with journalists and the police."

Another of the lessons Martin draws from the affair of the borrowed steed is that Cameron's greatest weakness, in terms of his ability to connect with the country as a whole, "is the perception that he doesn't understand what motivates and concerns millions of his fellow Britons, particularly the people he needs to vote for him next time." As Martin observes, the Prime Minister leads a cabinet of millionaires and a government that has brought a lot more people than ever before into the 40p tax bracket. Many of those same people, Martin reminds us, are about to receive a new blow with the removal of their child benefit. This measure seems very poorly thought out.

The Guardian's Polly Curtis suggests that the current plan - cuting child benefit for households that include one higher-rate taxpayer - has three main problems. Firstly, she observes, a couple could jointly earn £80,000 and continue to receive child benefit while a single parent earning £43,000 would lose it. Secondly, Curtis argues, a "cliff edge" effect is created, whereby to move up a tax bracket is to incur a double whammy or financial penalties - losing child benefit at the same time as paying more tax on any extra income. Finally, says Curtis, major bureaucratic hurdles must be overcome - our tax system is designed around collecting money from individuals and would therefore need to be re-engineered to find ways of assessing the income of households.

For those of us who spent our formative years under the Premierships of Thatcher, Major and Blair, it seems hard to understand why a Conservative government would want to squeeze the incomes and the standard of living of the middle classes in this way. All three Prime Ministers did rather well out of selling a middle class lifestyle to the country at large. Thatcher worked hard to eradicate the political and social culture of the British working class, seeking to create new generations of voters naturally inclined to favour her party at the ballot box. Her plan was multi-faceted. On one hand, the power of the trades unions was relentlessly attacked during the reign of the Iron Lady, with her most notable victory being over the miners, whose leaders were naive enough to be tricked into a war of attrition that the government had, for some time, been equipping itself to win. On the other hand, billions of pounds' worth of social housing stock was almost given away. The right-to-buy scheme offered council house tenants the option to purchase their homes at rock bottom prices and was part of a wider plan to create a 'property-owning democracy'. Bit by bit, the Conservative Government of the day bullied and bought the stubbornly Labour-aligned working classes out of existence.

By 1990, John Major was predicting that "in the next ten years we will have to continue to make changes which will make the whole of this country a genuinely classless society." The deputy to the notionally Labour PM Tony Blair suggested, albeit in different terms, that this project was complete when he remarked in 1997 that "we are all middle class now." All of this was about the normalisation of a set of values around the desirability of everyone aspiring to own a home, prioritising wealth over everything else and looking down at those whose lack of ambition or ability kept them 'stuck' in 'dead-end' jobs. As was discussed here at some length back in July last year, without people prepared to do those 'dead-end' jobs (cleaning the floors of our hospitals, wiping the backsides of our elderly relatives, stacking the shelves of the supermarkets), our civilised and comfortable society could not function.

So by the second decade of the twenty-first century we have a arrived at a state of affairs whereby, as Owen Jones argues in his excellent book Chavs, open mockery of hard-working people with poorly paid jobs  has become widespread and mainstream. We have also seen an expansion in the coverage of the ugly word that Jones chose for the the title of his book. Who are the chavs? Do we just mean hostile, trouble-making youths dressed in polyester? Or do we mean just about any working class person who stubbornly refuses to aspire to the trappings of a middle class lifestyle? It depends who you ask. Either way, ours is a society in which the  aspiration to have that middle class lifestyle is seen as an undeniably good thing.

In electing David Cameron as their leader, however, the Conservatives have installed a Prime Minister who does not represent the triumph of that kind of aspiration. Cameron's life has been markedly different from the lives of the two previous Tory premiers. Margaret Thatcher, famously, was the daughter of small-town grocer and was raised in the flat about one of her father's two shops. John Major was the son of a music hall performer and the grandson of a bricklayer. The careers of both could be seen to represent a triumph of the aspiration and self-reliance at the heart of their party's values. Cameron is of quite different stock, the Eton-educated son of a stockbroker and grandson of a baronet. Critics can easily argue that his rise to power harks back to an age when a high-born elite could expect to run the country while grocers' daughters and grammar school boys were expected to know their place.

Iain Martin notes that the "imagery of Horsegate is not helpful to the Tories". The image, then, is of an Old Etonian enjoying country pursuits in the company of an old schoolmate who gets a free horse from the taxpayer-funded Metropolitan Police. The timing, as Martin has reminded us, is unfortunate, given that those who have lived Tory values by working to get a comfortable salary are to be rewarded with an erosion of their standard of living. As Martin argues, "there is no sense that the government understands those people, or, even more importantly, the many more earning a good deal less than the level at which 40p in the pound is paid, but who aspire to get there one day through hard work."

Cameron's performance when finally admitting that he had ridden the police horse borrowed by his old chum Charlie Brooks and his wife Rebekah was not reassuring for anyone feeling alienated by any perceived attack on the middle class standard of living and on the culture of aspiration to achieve that lifestyle. 

"If a confusing picture has emerged...", Cameron begins, using the agentless passive voice.

A "confusing picture" cannot just "emerge" on its own. People working for the Prime Minister deliberately created a "confusing picture", very probably on his instructions. An more honest rewording, then, would begin "if I have created a confusing picture..."

These opening few words are then followed by "I'm very, umm, sorry about that." But this part is skipped through more quickly and quietly, with that moment of hesitation before uttering the actual word of apology. The parents among us may be reminded of the reluctance with which our offspring insincerely apologise for their little misdeeds only when compelled to do so.

When Cameron speaks about his friendship with Charlie Brooks, he sighs with audible impatience. The little sigh and the irritated frown speak volumes. Cameron is affronted by the need to explain himself. He is not used to having his actions questioned because he has gone about his life with a sense of being entitled to all the advantages his upbringing has conferred upon him. The script prepared by Dave's people appears to contain a few self-deprecating jokes. But the delivery is humourless and peevish. In this interview, Cameon's lack of the common touch is striking - and the common touch may be just what's needed if people are to be sold the line that the Government's relentless push to reduce the country's deficit must come at the cost of making it harder for ordinary folk to live comfortably as a result of hard work and the kind of ambition the Tories have spent decades selling to us as a good thing.  

'ave a banana

a mush in shepherd's bush

you see some right moody boats round Shepherd's Bush on a match day...

tatty

let's play the word association game.

coffee table book. Seinfeld.

no, no... start again...

coffee table book. Habitat catalogue. Coldplay. beige. polenta. drizzle. Snow Patrol. talk of house prices. Florence & the Machine. carefully restored floorboards. moving house to get Josh into a school with no pramface mums or foreigners. Damien Rice. balsamic vinegar...

but maybe some coffee table books are alright. maybe SHIT LONDON is alright. maybe it isn't even big enough for the coffee table. maybe it's a bog read instead. either way, Patrick Dalton's round up of aggressive  hand-written notices, vandalised signs, horrible shop names, flagrant flytipping etc. is about the non-gloss London lauded only this week here at this is my england. Dalton rightly describes all this quotidian "folk art" as "transient". it's safe to say you'd fail were you to try to find everything he's snapped here. much of it will have been painted over, demolished or shifted in the short time since this little book was printed. get yer camera out. your own SHIT LONDON (or shit wherever-you-live) is all around you. the collection collated by Dalton, meanwhile, is not static. the book is a frozen snapshot. but the pile of glorious wank keeps growing at the website of the same name.

for dummies

not much action of late down at that white rectangle on the side of Camden Town's former district housing office. the creator of the cash QR code (and many other works besides, all now long gone) had predicted that the area's feral junkies et. al. would strip the coins from their solvent bed. but, no. all still remain. we are told that sometimes passersby have a little feel. but nothing worse than that.


the only new development is the appearance of a little sticker which refers to the coiny code and says "SCAN  ME". as if instructions were needed... question is, was this dummies guide stuck up by young stu or by some other wag?

peeling layers of london

Out among our towns, at the better end of the English humdrum high street - Starbucks, Costa Coffee, Tesco Metro, Sainsbury's Local, Pizza Express, Zizzi, Carluccio's, Crabtree & Evelyn, The Body Shop, Jack Wills, Fat Face, French Connection.


Out in the provinces, at the shittier end of the tedious English high street - Poundland, 99p Stores, pay-day loans parlours and boarded up travel agents' shops.


The blanding and the homogenisation of our towns is nearly complete. Perhaps a more sustained period of a bad economy will smear the gloss from the fascias of some more chain stores and dining experiences. Perhaps an extension of the tough times will see a multiplying of the outlets catering to the skint and the desperate. This could add character of a sort.


But one lovely aspect of our capital is that away from its most prosperous suburbs, the character of its streets continues to be a hodgepodge of ill-matched and flaking paintjobs and a jumble of eccentric enterprises, thriving, dying and dead. The grandiose dreams of earlier eras are not quite forgotten, their echoes felt by anyone who glances up at what's left of some magnificent but long-abandoned structure. Away from places where prissy crews of NIMBY residents worry the local politicos into maintaining dull standards, the nomadically shifting populations drifting through much of London never find the time to become boringly obsessed with the look and feel of their surroundings. Safe streets and good times are wanted. What goes where and what colour is has to be? Meaningless.


Take this bright morning stroll along just one of London's arteries, Essex Road N1...


Behold the Egyptian stylings of what was once the Carlton cinema, crafted lovingly in the 1930s by a noted architect of the genre, one George Coles. It's been a while since the last punter was guided to a seat by a uniformed usher; ages since the Pearl & Dean theme thundered in the darkness. Bingo was played in George's ornate palace in the years that followed the final picture show. But even the last cry of "two fat ladies" is a distant memory now...

Further along Essex Road, on an outside wall of a pharmacy, we find a work by Banksy, which appeared in March 2008 and which had been defaced two years later as part of a feud between the street artist and graffiti bigwig King Robbo, despite the efforts of the pharmacist to protect the original piece...

Continuing down towards the Angel and Upper Street, we can look up and see evidence of the commerce of a bygone era. Doubtless, the painters of London's old shop signs and advertisements thought in terms of the touted names having resonance for countless years. But who remembers the full name of this "night cure" for catarrh and pains in the head? With no advertising standards authority to deter them from doing so, the makers of the product claimed boldly that it could prevent influenza. When was this painted? When was the last bottle of this quackish stuff glugged back by some hopefully credulous Londoner?

Schlepping south and flashing back towards the present day, we see that one shopkeeper has taken a particular approach to discouraging the taggers and graffiti artists from customising his storefront in unwelcome ways. This is done by commissioning a graffiti piece of his own... 

Peeling layers of jumbled London. You can stick your gentrification where the sun never shines...