Re-view

I have, as usual, to revisit some of my previous opinions on stuff. In my post about White Heat I drivelled on at length about the author's less than deep coverage of culture. What I totally failed to point out, and something else that I really like about the book, is that quite long bits of it work well as metaphors and allegories. It is almost as if Dominic Sandbrook is an historian who thinks we can learn from the past (which is quite refreshing). For example, the Brown/Wilson relationship is discussed at length. George Brown comes across as, no doubt, what he was: vain, drunk, aggressive and unreliable. Wilson's paranoic and manipulatively selfish approach to politics is shown to be part of his outlook from 1966 onwards (at least); and the cabinet infighting between characters and departments obsessed with their own power that prevented the serious decisions being taken before the economic situation became desperate is told with some sadness, as well as acuity.

The Brown/Wilson thing is there in such depth, not just to shed light on mid 60s politics, but to hold up a mirror to our own era with its important decisions hidebound and suffocated by personal political relationships: Blair/Brown; Blair/Bush; Brown/anyone else. In the 60s of course, the country faced more serious economic problems than it appears to today; but the result is similar - stagnation, inaction, disaster. In our case it is foreign policy and therefore domestic unrest that has been caused by all this, as well as constitutional chaos, criminal justice being completely ignored, and the gradual, perceptible severing of the links between governed and government. In today's Sunday Telegraph for example, Nigel Farndale recounts a letter he has received which carries all the pomposity and self-importance of the President of the USA - from his local council, giving serious and detailed consideration as to whether to let him have another bin.

The chapter on Swinging London has echoes of the Cool Britannia nonsense that Blair's government started off by championing, in which a time where there is a genuine cultural renaissance (however small in the late 90s' case) becomes instead a byword for the sordid and ultimately boring lives of a few celebrities, often drunk on their own importance, to the exclusion of ordinary people. Sandbrook points out that the Swinging London phenomenon was essentially an elitist and restricted one, but one which people were encouraged to see as the centrepoint of culture. The parallel with today's celebrity rubbish, a hangover from the sudden celebrity boom of the late 90s, is evident.

I must point out that these readings of the subtexts of the book are mine; I have literally no idea whether the author would agree or not. But sentences like this one seem to support my case:

...the effects of change were often manifested in ways that seem disappointingly mundane to writers who like to sneer at "Middle England".(p190)

This, surely, is a modern habit of people who live and work in a similarly restricted circle to the Swinging London celebrities, but who happen to think their circle is the entire ethical and political world. Fortunately for us, blogging's rise means this won't last. It also brings me back to my previous point, which I still agree with, that Dominic Sandbrook writes with as unbiased a style as anyone who has read the likes of Kenneth O Morgan, Clive Ponting or David Childs -all on postwar Britain - could wish for.

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Apropos of nothing, today's Catholic Herald prints that speech of the Pope's in full. It also reserves its fiercest criticism in the whole row for the BBC, who, in its view, by failing to provide the persectives of Catholics on the dispute, and leading so consistently for nearly two days with the story in its bulletins, as well as by giving what it thinks is ludicrous amounts of airtime to Islamic extremists, has stoked the fires very effectively. It is a view I've seen on the blogosphere and one it is, frankly, hard to disagree with.

Still on the Catholic Herald (but not wishing to turn my blog into papist propaganda), I liked this quote on the Westminster Cathedral demo last week from Assistant Commissioner of the Met Tarique Ghaffur on the lack of arrests despite the calls for the death of the Pope:

We have a long history of facilitating lawful demonstration and are keen to continue dialogue with any group wishing to protest.

I'd like to know if this applies to the likes of Stephen Green, or is it just people who threaten actual violence who get away with it?