[T]he country awoke yesterday in a frenzy of concern about the perils posed to what passes as British democracy by Nick Griffin, an obnoxious creep, yes, but fundamentally a mirthless joke with the same prospects of affecting public life one iota as Andrew Neil has of being cast as the lead in a Cary Grant biopic.
Meanwhile, this newspaper devoted its front page to news of Mr Straw’s latest assault on the kind of democratic principle we once regarded as sovereign, and all too few eyelids will have blinked in alarm. The Injustice Secretary’s attempt to win the power to render public inquests public no more, and have them held under such blanket secrecy that even the deceased’s family would be excluded, isn’t merely a scandal. It is an outrage that would, in a less ovine and apathetic nation, lead to the overturning of ministerial cars and the lobbing through Whitehall windows of Molotovs.
Unusually, the fact of this one is arguably less offensive than the method. Perhaps it’s just being inured to attacks on civil liberties and human rights after a dozen years under a government that cannot glance at them without sending its valet off for the hobnail boots. The list is so long and familiar (right to silence, right to trial by jury, habeas corpus, DNA storage etc, etc) that the tolerance level rises, as it does to arsenic.
[…]
All one can do is hope, with virtually zero confidence, that David Cameron means it when he promises to reverse this foaming tide of disdain towards the rights of humble subjects.
What startles even this grizzled student of New Labour autocracy is the method Mr Straw deployed, in vain, to get this one on the statute book. Twice before he had tried, and twice been rebuffed. As recently as May, having reintroduced it back in January, he withdrew the measure from the Coroners and Justice Bill, apparently accepting that the political opposition was too fierce.
“It is clear the provisions still do not command the necessary cross-party support,” he said. Within six months of that grudging admission, he elected to circumvent that opposition by burying these proposals deep within the Bill, although not deep enough to evade the prying eyes of the Lords, who soundly rejected them. In one sense, there is something pleasingly holistic about this approach. How better to pass law granting unjustifiable secrecy than by stealth? In another sense, so arrogant and blatant violation of democratic principle induces violent nausea.
[…]
A painful inquest into the death of New Labour approaches, and whatever Jack Straw’s feelings on the matter this one will be held in public.
As the Yarls Wood door clanged shut on her, no doubt Adeoti Ogunsola said to herself, ‘thank God Gordon Brown isn’t a fascist’.
As the life drained out of him, no doubt Manuel Bravo said to himself, ‘thank God Gordon Brown isn’t a fascist’.
As the bullets thudded into him, no doubt Adam Osman Mohammed said to himself, ‘thank God Gordon Brown isn’t a fascist’.
Half the country seems up in arms that Nick Griffin is being allowed near a television studio but when a man, who has done things to foreigners that would give Griffin wet dreams from here to eternity goes, goes on GMTV barely anybody squeaks. Hell, a huge chunk of them voted for him.
Some fat wannabe-Nazi pillock goes on the telly and you’d think the barbarians were at the gates. The Prime Minister is shipping darkies off like so much freight and we’re more worried about whether the one with all the teeth from Girls Aloud is lip-synching on Saturday night TV. And yet Griffin’s never going to wreck the number of lives Brown has – not if he lives to be a thousand.
Griffin’s a bastard in a small, squalid way. You want to see a proper scumbag? He’s running the bloody country.
I know I have a great deal of respect for people who use the word ‘faggot’ on national radio, have four driving bans and a drink-driving conviction to their name, and who skip drugs test.
New Labour marginalised the white working class, assuming they had nowhere else to go, only to find some of them rush into the arms of the far right. Peter Hain has made an impressive stand over the last few weeks. But during the last election he slammed those who were abandoning New Labour as “the kind of dinner party critic who quaffs shiraz or chardonnay”.
But it was always the beer talking. New Labour extinguished all hope of class solidarity and singularly failed to provide principled anti-racist alternatives, leaving a significant section of the white working class to seek cheap refuge in racism and xenophobia. In their identity they see not the potential for resistance against corruption and injustice, but only a grievance. They don’t trust government and don’t see any alternatives. The coming election simply provides the choice between two parties that share the intent to slash public spending, after the gift of billions to bankers.
There has always been more to the BNP than racism and always been more to racism than the BNP, which is merely the most vile electoral expression of our degraded racial discourse and political sclerosis. Under such circumstances setting Straw – and the rest of the political class – against Griffin is simply putting the cause against the symptom without any suggestion of an antidote.
This has been New Labour’s problem all along. While they have long recognised that racism is a problem, it never seemed to occur to them that anti-racism might be the solution. This should not obscure some of the positive things Labour has done – most notably the Macpherson report and the Race Relations Amendment Act. But in the words of the late African American writer James Baldwin: “What it gave, at length and grudgingly with one hand, it took back with the other.”
The BNP’s victories are a product of our politics. Its defeat, when it comes, will necessarily be a product of a change in our politics. But since New Labour’s politics enabled the BNP, it is in no position to disable it. The BNP is a bottom feeder. But the system is rotting from the head down.
There is a commonly held assumption that the Nouvelle Vague (New Wave) movement was a left-wing, politically-charged attempt to destroy the film-making establishment and re-write the rules of Cinema for a new generation – a sort of cinematic punk rock, if you like. It is easy to deduce, from the protagonists’ involvement in the May ’68 uprising, their outright written condemnation of an entire generation of filmmakers, and from the sheer impact of their output, how such an assumption could arise, but it is entirely misconceived. The principal protagonists: filmmakers François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer, were a group of relatively cosy right wing intellectuals who, having bitterly criticised the state of French cinema in print, felt compelled to show how they thought it should be done. Insodoing, they mined numerous influences of their own, including documentary films, Jean Renoir, and most of all, the cool aesthetics of American crime cinema. The idea of a ‘Nouvelle Vague’ arose over a decade later, when it was concluded that a revolution had indeed occurred, not just in Cinema, but in all of French culture. As is often the case, commentators were thus moved to categorise the phenomenon, and gradually suck various directors and writers into it, after the event.
In hindsight, the principal techniques espoused by the New Wave: the use of handheld cameras, outdoor locations, unconventional narratives and unknown actors, were nearly all explainable by a lack of funds. The key tangible difference which marked this rather disparate collection of young filmmakers out from what had gone before, was the achievement of ‘Cinéma Vérité’ (a quest for ‘truth’ through feature film-making) as opposed to the ‘Cinéma de Papa’ (the academistic and formulaic pseudo-literary tradition). The latter ‘daddy cinema’ had strangled the industry since the war and according to Truffaut, was infantilising France and ripping the heart out of the ‘Septième Art’ which the French had invented with the Lumière brothers and Méliès, and without their knowing it, they were about to re-invent.
The colossal influence of the movement (in particular that of Godard, whose pronouncement: “A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end… but not necessarily in that order” remains as iconic a statement as any in the medium) may be important to film scholars and enthusiasts, but what of the films themselves? How have these historical timepieces survived over time? Not all of them well, if we’re honest. A handful, though, remain untouchable classics. Les Quatre Cents Coups was one of the first key films of the Nouvelle Vague and won Truffaut the best director prize at the Cannes Film Festival. It is possibly the finest example of the movement’s richest achievement: Cinema Vérité, in its triumphant depiction of a raw and exhilarating truth about childhood. The film tells the story of a misunderstood adolescent, Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud) who bunks off school (‘faire les 400 coups’, hence the title) and gradually drifts into a life of petty crime. The SMIC, whose appeal is as direct and straightforward as any SMIC could be, comes from a scene where a puppet show is performed at the school. The children gaze in awe upon the crude marionettes, whilst Antoine and his accomplice sit at the back of the hall and plot their next escapade. Without exposition, Truffaut portrays so much about childhood (its innocence and its sophistication)…as well as the very nature of Cinema itself.
Six eggs.
150ml of double cream.
150ml of soured cream.
225g of sugar.
I think substituting the receipe’s required teaspoon of salt with the sodium-free variety will offset that nicely, don’t you?
