I'm No Maoist, Get me Out Of Here!

Fervour.

In the on-camera eyes of James Brokenshire MP, Home Office minister, Aneeta Prem, founder of anti-slavery charity Freedom, and Detective Inspector Kevin Hyland, leading the 37-strong anti-trafficking unit of the Metropolitan Police.

James and his Basil Brush hair; Aneeta of the permanently raised right eyebrow; Kevin with his lower jaw pushed forward like the Churchill insurance dog – and the same blue eyes as ‘ex-slave’ Josephine Herivel.

Despite their personal differences, when interviewed about the three women freed from a South London ‘slave house’, James, Aneeta and Kevin displayed identical levels of intensity.

Instead of releasing three women from the remains of a far left sect, perhaps they’ve all been captured by a rival cult – the cult of victimhood.

Imagine the instructions from the new Comrade Bala: look intently at the interviewer. Don’t waiver, except when talking about your personal contact with the three women (blessed are their names), at which point you may allow a smile to flutter across your lips. If the interview is taking place in an informal setting, e.g. breakfast TV, studio guests will remain pert and alert to what you say.

Report to Central Committee, Cult of Victimhood. During their interviews, James, Aneeta and Kevin waved key words from the little book of bruises: shocked, relieved, psychological, traumatised. Aneeta, especially, made full use of ‘traumatised’: the victims were traumatised in captivity; they have been traumatised by current media coverage; my charity is careful to avoid causing them further trauma.  These comrades have vindicated the socially progressive slogan: power grows from trauma discourse.

It’s not difficult to satirise the rituals of the cult of victimhood, as performed on a screen near you. While the week wore on, the 'slave' story started to wear out. More people were working it out for themselves that if this is slavery, Malcolm X must have been a WASP.

But there’s something else about this melodrama which satire doesn’t do justice to: the pleading look, not in the eyes of the three women (we haven’t been allowed to see them yet), but on the part of the zealots themselves.

Something in their expression suggests they are only just managing to hang on; and only just managing to hold on to the viewers. Looking intently into the interviewers’ eyes, they seem to be saying: don’t leave me; bring me back into the fold, please.

Less like the Red Guards of nearly 50 years ago (on their faces, the lustre of revolutionary zeal), in their anxiety to connect, only connect, the new zealots resemble the parents, teachers and intellectuals who were excommunicated and/or executed during Mao’s cultural cataclysm. 

Even in their finest hour, today's cult-ists are bowed down with anxiety. Whether they are fearful it could happen to them, or that they will be found out, or found wanting – who knows?   

Hypnotized By Crystal Methodist

How did he ever get the job? Splashed by the Mail on Sunday, phone film footage of disgraced Methodist minister Paul Flowers (the Methodists would de-frock him except they don’t wear any to start with) allegedly buying illegal drugs (did you see how long it took him to count out the money?), has got everyone asking how someone with his chequered career could have been appointed chairman of the Cooperative Bank in 2010.

More than two years after the ‘credit crunch’ exposed two full decades of excess (creeping up each year since the previous corrective in 1987), wasn’t British banking meant to be brushed clean by a new broom? So how come this dodgy character wasn’t shaken down and dusted out of the boardroom? Instead of a(r)sked to deposit his fat bottom on the chairman’s seat.

The answer lies on Rev Flowers’ upper lip. His snow white moustache is a chevron of probity. Its prominence is his provenance. By comparison, underestimating The Cooperative Bank’s lending book by £40 billion – a mere bagatelle; overestimating, allegedly, how many rent boys he could party with without coming to the attention of the Party – similarly insignificant. 

The ‘tache tells you to trust him, this honest Bradford broker; pillar of the mill town that was (even if he does come from Portsmouth); the kind of reliable character which local author J.B. Priestley would surely have included in The Good Companions. 

Ignore the string of previous 'resignations' which might have been enough to hang him - even before the trapdoor opened last week. Focus, please, only on the moustache of Monsieur Paul.

The more you look, the more you will find it fascinating…..And you may pick up your coat and bag on the way out, minus all jewellery, watches, wallets etc.

Understandably Stupid

The worst kind of left-wing leftover, with your childish complaints about meedja spooning capitalist conspiracy into the masses.

All the clichés from the old days of anarchist ‘direct action’. Also known as young people trying to validate themselves by messing about with guns; talking themselves into the free act, which in their hands holds no more significance than a boating accident.

In 1994, when five people died after two of your associates managed to botch their first robbery (so much for the rest of the series), the press ignored their political motivation, claiming that Audry Maupin and Florence Rey were copying Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis in Oliver Stone’s film, Natural Born Killers. No doubt you complained about the trivialising tendencies of tabloid journalists…..

That’s rich, coming from your clique of narcissists.

And have you recently picked up a smattering of religion? Anti-Zionist, are we? Vaguely Islamist now the anarcho-whatsit-whatsit isn’t anything anymore?

Mr Dekhar, I had nothing but contempt for you until I saw a photo of the block of flats you lived in 10 years ago, while working in a restaurant here in Britain.

Ilford, not-quite London; non-descript 1990s new-build. Yellow slabs and a little white tower on top. When the letting agent said ‘plenty of light’, he must have meant the thickness of the walls. So thin you could pick them up and carry them.

Now I understand if it was you playing at Deckard in Blade Runner, convincing yourself that Abdelhakim’s run would go down in history. Aged 48 you may have answered the echo of your own fading voice, choosing to hear it as the last call to action – pump action shotgun; anything to escape the Life of Lite.

Still stupid; but understandably so.

Horsing Around With The Lady In Red

The epitome of Britishness, only a Royal princess – her formal title, the Princess Royal, makes the point explicitly – is allowed to say the most unBritish thing: it would be better to eat horsemeat. This for the benefit of the horses themselves, Her Royal Highness went on to say.

You can’t be more British than that.

The argument: owners in Britain would take more interest in their horses’ welfare if they knew they could find a market for their nags in the knacker’s yard.

Addressing the World Horse Welfare conference on November 14th, Princess Anne was a lady in red: coat-dress buttoned up high (scrawny neck?); hair coiffed high on top of her head, in the manner of Edwardian ladies whose hair was never cut – except a lock for a locket when their men went off to war.

Tight-lipped (not given to flashy smiles); but to make that same mouthful as Homer Simpson’s, the teeth behind her upper lip must be bowed forward. When she raises her hands to gesticulate, her fingers are pale and reddish purple, resembling raw chicken.

Yet describing Princess Anne as a kind of cartoon – even without resorting to the cliché that she looks kinda horsey herself – obscures the essential characteristic of her conference address: it was truly (a)live; instead of being a secondary rendition of something-I-prepared-earlier.

Here was someone in public life with the courage to go to the podium and talk through, think through a strongly counter-intuitive argument; without reading from a prepared script or committing it to memory in advance.

We could see she had keywords on cards, but these only prompted the Princess to invent sentences containing those keywords, formulating her speech as she went on; and as she went on she all but stopped using them, anyway.

A tiny instance of what life might be like in today’s public sphere, if we really had one. How peculiar that this illustrative miniature should have come from – of all people – Royalty.

Generation Game Revisited

You say facetious, I say pompous. Facetious; pompous. I’ll call the politicians ‘toffs’. And that’ll be enough to get us off.

Senior interviewer Jeremy Paxman and comic actor Russell Brand were hooked into each other on Newsnight last month, when Brand became guest editor of Labour-leaning political weekly New Statesman, even though he hasn’t ever voted and doesn’t intend to.

Paxman: besuited, bearded, BBC. (Insiders’ intonation is two short syllables and one long: Be, Be, Cee.) While Brand is sex on a stick: perched on top of stick insect legs predisposed to pelvic thrusts. Hippy hair, better bones and brilliant teeth; mouth that’s been everywhere - sexaholic, alcoholic, drug addict. and come back smiling.

Paxman berates Brand for not-bovvering; Brand maintains it’s his choice not to be part of a political ‘paradigm’ which serves only the elite. By refusing to act on social problems and environmental issues, Brand insists, they are the ones who are apathetic.

Eyes flashing, legs akimbo, lips dancing – from sneer to leer to seemingly genuinely warm smile – he succeeds in making Paxman look ponderous. Set against satirical sorties and soaring self-mockery – equal parts arrogant and resonant, calls for constantia – serious, deliberate, consistent – seem unrealistically slow.

But both of them are playing a generation game as old as Paxman himself. In play since the 1960s when Bob Dylan refused to perform ‘press conference’, and John Lennon declared the Beatles more famous than Jesus Christ; hence the title of Russell Brand’s latest stage show, The Messiah Complex. His new revue has been going on for half a century.

Yes, there is something worthy about Paxman; a Sunday School quality which makes even his best work all but worthless. On the other hand, it’s all too predictable for Brand to play at being playful while making it clear, for the avoidance of doubt, that playful is all he’s being.

Much the same script comes shuffling back to the top of the pile, only partly revised for the re-make.

Guilty Pleading

Jumping off her jumper. When a novice police community support officer (the novices’ novice) threatened and cajoled Amanda Hutton into opening the door of her Bradford home, apart from Hutton’s matted hair, the smell of drink and the stench of god knows what, the PCSO noticed there were flies buzzing around her. 

Upstairs in a travel cot lay the mummified body of Hamzah Khan. Dressed in a babygro; though he would have been six years old by then if his mother hadn’t allowed him to die of starvation nearly two years earlier.

In her blue tiled kitchen the white cupboards – still-shiny doorknobs like little golden-eyes – looked down in astonishment as Hutton’s seven other children picked their way through the rubbish piled up on the floor; this and every other floor in the house.

The witch, the bitch, that Mother’s a Medusa with Snakes in Her Hair. Worse than monstrous: even Grendel’s mother cared for her kid; she went after Beowulf to avenge him. Whereas Hutton was truly wretched: hadn’t the energy to lift her boy’s body out of his cot and give him a decent burial.

Flies wouldn’t let her alone,

She was one of their own,

The Walking Dead.

On trial, Hutton claimed that when Hamzah died she held him ‘for quite a long time.’ Maybe she had hated having another one – the last of eight children with her estranged ‘Paki’ partner; and especially this brat with a name like a ‘terrorist’ (Hamza[h]: more Captain Hook than Peter Pan). Perhaps only then – now holding the baby who’d never been allowed to grow into his mother’s love – did she regret the neglect more than she hated herself for having borne him.

‘I was completely numb,’ she explained. ‘As each day went by, I just found it harder and harder to do anything about it.’

Transfixed (like the police officer who was also ‘transfixed’ when he found Hamzah’s corpse). Immobilised. Petrified. A gargantuan effort – monstrous – even to the lay the body down in the travel cot. 

Then pile in the pizza and vodka,

Drink, drink, with no chance of Absolut-ion. 

Pile up the rubbish,

We can all be walled in together.

In the only published picture of Hamzah, he is Bambi Boy, looking up at the lens with doe eyes and a touch too much colour in his pale cheeks (probably feverish). In the mugshot of Hutton, there’s not a jot of colour in the downturned mouth and sandpaper skin, but the eyes are similar to her son’s.

Woe not doe; but pleading all the same. 

On Friday 4th October, Amanda Hutton (43) was found guilty of manslaughter and jailed for 15 years. 

Strange Salute

Splat. Nasty little noise seemingly of no consequence. But the sound and sight of Marine A using a 9mm pistol to kill a gravely wounded Afghan prisoner (captured in a cornfield in Helmand province on 15^th September 2011), were recorded for posterity on a junior soldier’s head cam. Subsequently found on the soldier’s laptop by military police investigating another matter, this evidence led a British court martial to convict Marine Sergeant A of murder. He is due to be sentenced on 6^th December.

Stills from the film (the court released audio and selected images, withholding the full footage on grounds that terrorists might use it for recruitment purposes) show green vegetation and earth the colour purple. Contrary to expectations of sand, more sand and sandy haired soldiers in desert fatigues. 

A mounting frenzy of violence led by Marine A – forget about that, too. 

According to the audio, less Hell than Purgatory: the dead weight of the wounded prisoner; tiresome procedures – ‘biometric enrolment’ – for entering him into the DNA database, whether he lives or dies; routine swearing – each man informing the others how much he hates the hateful job of clearing up after these stupid people. As one of the company is heard to say, ‘I can’t believe I’m doing this.’

After the ‘splat’ of 9mm gunfire, Marine A declares: ‘There you are, shuffle off this mortal coil, you cunt.’ At the court martial he apologised for this grandiose afterthought, as if quoting from Hamlet (‘mortal coil’ is the line following ‘to be or not to be’) were as culpable as the killing.   

But at the very moment of death, perhaps even Marine A recognised the need to rise to the occasion.  Having killed ‘the cunt’ himself, he all but stood to attention; before returning to the vernacular (‘it’s nothing you wouldn’t do to us’), not forgetting to cover his back (‘obviously this doesn't go anywhere, fellas. I've just broke the Geneva Convention’).

Not forgetting the terrible contrast between the men in charge of the gas chambers and the high culture they somehow continued to love, nonetheless his line from Hamlet places Marine A in new terrain. More Hell than Heaven, perhaps; but at least not Purgatory.

Death At The Border

So farewell, then, Thavisha Lakindu Peiris (25). I never knew you personally, but I do know all about your hard working career mindedness. I can see from the published photographs (in your graduation photo you look old enough to be your own father) that you were a credit to your family in Sri Lanka; until you were stabbed to death on your last night as a pizza delivery driver, only hours before starting a new job as an IT consultant.

Of course you never did start that job, because your-young-life was-cut-tragically-short.

I would apologise for addressing you in this clichéd manner; except, if you will permit me to talk past what actually happened to you, I think it is the cliché rather than the actualité which I should be addressing.

I’m not convinced, you see, that the telling of your terrible story is as it purports to be: a sign of how much we value human life. I suspect that Young Life Cut Short On Last Night Of The Pizzas, is really a way of saying: his real life hadn’t even started; he was just about to emerge from that shadowy, zombie existence comprised of not-quite-human creatures who either can’t cook or who can’t get a proper job. (It could easily have been said about you until recently: still delivering at Domino’s two years after graduating in 2011? Must be something not-quite-right.)

Or, if your story is especially poignant because you weren’t really a delivery boy any more, what does that say about the boys – some of them are as old as your father – still stuck behind the wheel with the cardboard boxes in a padded bag, not going anywhere else? Supposing their lives are like a scene from The Walking Dead, it surely shouldn't matter any less when they get stuck with a knife.

Of course the context all but confirms the clichéd account. You died at the wheel of a foreign-made car in a cul de sac on a large-scale council estate – one of the many failed projects of Britain’s 20^th century, on the edge of a Northern industrial city in long-term decline.

Even the name of the street where you died is doubly inappropriate, i.e. ideal for an ‘ironic’ cliché: Southey Crescent. Ha! Because there’s nothing rising, no crescendo coming up from here; and not even the faintest echo of the eponymous Robert Southey – Lakeland poet, essayist, man of the Enlightenment.

Yet the cultural conservative which Southey, like Wordsworth, later became, might have agreed with the reactionary subdivision embedded in the stock account of your death; the subdivision between people who count versus people who don't really count as people.

Sadly, Thavisha, you were fatally stabbed while crossing the border.

Desert Rats

It took a whole day to fix the engine and after that the drivers took us to wait while some people went to get water. For a day and a night they hid us from Algerian security forces in a trench. A woman who protested – they beat her with a hose. They had water in jerry cans but kept it to themselves. They asked us for money and told us to wait while they went for petrol. But they never came back.

Shafa (aged 14) went nearly a week in the Sahara without water - and survived. Revived by milk, rice cake and finally tea administered by a passing motorist: Mister Toad meets the Good Samaritan. Tea: the best drink of her life; brought her back to it when she could easily have ebbed away, like her sisters and mother, like the 87 others who died of thirst surrounded by whirlpools of sand.

Family visit – Shafa finally reached her grandfather in Algeria; or economic migration – this year, an estimated 80,000 bubbling up through Niger to the North African coast? As if the one precludes the other. As if it matters why they started out, crowded into the back of an open truck, sitting on top of god knows what; why they ended up walking towards Algeria in temperatures topping 45 degrees. As if any of this mattered when so many of them toppled over. Had to stop walking, had to sit down, had to stop breathing because, finally, even breathing was more than they could manage.

Whatever they were doing it for, it’s clear they weren’t on equal terms with the drivers, who took us to wait – notice the note of coercion. Beat down any complaints when things got hot, hot, hot; and lastly left their passengers stranded at a crossroads: walk; die; die and don’t walk; walk and then die anyway.

Who wouldn’t blame the drivers? Dirty little killers, we might call them. Gunning the engines and driving away with petrol in the tank and water in the can.

But these drivers had a way to go. Back in Niger, Algeria, at whichever end of the road that isn’t there (only constantly shifting sand), there were lives to be lived, roles to fulfil, chores to finish, demands to be met. The people they left without shade, standing in the full glare of the desert sun, were just shadows compared to real life. Easily abandoned; just like that. 

No harder than me going upstairs now to eat the meal my children have cooked for me (‘Come on, Dad, we're waiting!), immediately forgetting the baked corpses and the desert rats.