Shove your broomsticks up your arse: KCACO, the London Riots and scabbing on the Fringe

No sooner do I identify KCACO as the problem, but we witness a startling example of it rearing its head in an extremely KCACO-permeable context - and, to judge by results, falling flat on its Blitz-spirited arse.

I speak, of course, of the fabled Fringe Litter Pick - a transparent attempt to try and oppose the Edinburgh bin strike by tapping in to the spirit that saw gentrifiers take to the streets in the days following the 2011 uprising in London and shove their broomsticks in the metaphorical faces of the impoverished youth of the very areas the broom-toters were in the process of turning into yet another craft beer Disneyland. Those young people had rioted in protest of the Met's racist policing and the Tories' austerity policies - which had been wrapped up, for the narrow (and narrowing) band of the middle and upper classes which both main parties in this country seem to regard as the only acceptable voters, in bolts of KCACO flummery about being 'all in this together'. And in the days following their collective howl of rage and despair, while the spooked-up weirdo currently in charge of running down the country's main supposedly left-wing party after it engaged in an excess of socialism prosecuted people to the full force of the law for the crime of looting sacks of basmati rice, they were forced to witness the further humiliation of brush-toting 'flashmobs' gathering in their streets and being feted by the same media that demonised those who had rioted. 'England riots: are brooms the symbol of the resistance?' gushed the BBC in one of their more cringeworthy anilingual interactions with their Tory masters. 

So you can see how the idea of rallying the ragtag army of stage school brats, nepo babies, tedious self-publicists and, worst of all, poets who infest the city of Edinburgh every August to counter the bin strike with a little light scabbing must have seemed like a PR winner. The papers would get to run lots of juicy photos of overrunning bins to criticise the strikers, and even more posters of quirky Fringe performers - perhaps even dolled up in their stage outfits, at least for the publicity shots - cheerfully wielding grabbers and depositing jolly little crisp packets in jolly little plastic refuse sacks. A narrative could be created of plucky little Hermiones and Fleabags coming together to resist the evil Stalinist Union Barons who are doing Putin's job for him by undermining good old Blighty. Indeed, a conspiratorially-minded individual might note the large amounts of media space given to earlier community litter-picking photo opportunities involving Ukrainian refugees and those fucking Womble cunts and wonder if the public was being softened up for a contingency. 

Such, no doubt, were the images which danced in the minds of our country's Tory press barons and BBC apparatchiks when they noticed 'Fringe Litter Pick' start cropping up as a topic on Twitter. What they got, however, was a picture of one living statue half-arsedly placing a piece of paper in a bin - and to make matters even worse, he was in mufti when he did it: 

Honestly, fair play to Kevin Powell - his deadpan deposit has managed to satirise this laughable attempt at propaganda better than most professional comedians ever could. You just know the BBC were looking for anything that looked even slightly more eye-catching, but aside from a bunch of high-vizzed, more traditional scab workers, there was nothing. No clowns, no mimes, no crusty jugglers - most stinging of all, no future Waller-Bridge's, buoyed up by family money very few Fringe acts could even dream of, to rebuke more left-leaning performers while at the same time titillating their Blimpish readership. Kevin's what you're getting, lads - deal with it. 

I could have told them it wouldn't work, because the Fringe is fucking exhausting. The last thing you want to do after a hard few hours' watching tourists shove the flyers you've proffered straight in the bin is pick up all the ones that missed. And the problem with relying on the Fringe aristocracy is they DGAF. Some of those bastards are rich enough not to have to do their own flyering - who worries about cleaning the streets when all you see of them is the taxi from your landlord relative's charming little flat in Portobello to the gig? And the actual Festival acts, the faces in various shades of gammon pink hawking thinly disguised romans à clef about their media colleagues or taking a wry look at the goings-on in Westminster, are hardly going to risk getting their well-manicured hands dirty. And besides, comedians just haven't had the cut-through since they all showed their arse about Corbyn. 

No, as far as the media is concerned the Big Fringe Litter Pick is a non-starter: not least because, as much as the media barons might patronisingly think performers are all empty-headed little prima donnas who'd flash their gash if they thought it might get their audience into double figures for one night of their run, we're not stupid. And while it might seem it's always the people whose parents' names are in blue on their Wikipedia page who make out like gangbusters at Fringe (well, them and the landlords, for whose benefit, in all honesty, the whole shindig really occurs), the fact is that a lot of performers would be doing well if they could afford to run their operation on a shoestring, and are driving themselves further into debts they'll have to pay off with precarious humiliating day jobs when the party's over. You're less likely to scab when you might wind up striking yourself.