Meet the New Boss

Mr Charles Windsor - the man we are now expected to call King, following the death of his mother, Elizabeth - was mentored by a Royal paedophile, Louis Mountbatten, and called Jimmy Savile, Britain's most prolific sex offender, whose advice he sought repeatedly throughout his life, his 'best friend'. Indeed, so chummy was the quondam Prince with 'that nice Mr Savile' (in the words of the busybody Mary Whitehouse) that he allowed this bizarre little man to lick the arms of female staff in St James' Palace, including on one occasion Windsor's then wife, Diana, and even considered naming him as godfather to his son, Harry. 

Still, perhaps we shouldn't blame the man too much for the company he kept. He did, after all, endure an abusive upbringing, at the hands of his bullying father, Philip, who decided to toughen up his effete and sensitive young son by sending him to Gordonstoun School in Scotland, described by one of Charles' classmates as an environment in which 'bullying was virtually institutionalized and very rough', including from the housemaster of Charles' own dorm, Robert Whitby, a man described as 'a truly nasty piece of work' who 'imposed a form of martial law, with ritualized psychological and physical abuse'. 

Gordonstoun, to use a fantastic phrase from Andy Sharp's Phantoms of Liberty (collected in The English Heretic Collection, which we discussed yesterday) 'occupies the same cold parade ground' as the abusive naval training college HMS Ganges, and the Evangelical 'Bash Camps' operated by many British public schools, but infamous for the actions of the camp at Winchester, operated by another paedophile Mary Whitehouse chum, Sir John Smyth QC, who would later decamp to Zimbabwe to share his Christian love with the local children, living there until he died of a heart attack in 2017 after being asked to return to the UK for questioning about accusations of historical abuse which had emerged as part of the rash of enquiries in the wake of Charles and Mary's pal Jimmy's death. 

If Charles and Mary were united in their love for that nice Mr S, they also shared the epistolary habits of the busybody. Like Whitehouse, Charles is an inveterate writer of letters, a habit supposedly picked up during his days at Gordonstoun enduring the sort of abuse Mrs W's barrister liked to dish out. The infamous Black Spider Memos, the contents of which were made public in 2015, paint a portrait of Charles Windsor as a typical boorish media illiterate too given to believing what he reads in the paper, which is somewhat surprising for a man who has been getting monstered by the tabloids since the time he ordered cherry brandy in a pub on the Isle of Lewis when he was fourteen years old, and who sought the assistance of mediamancer Savile to try and overcome his unpopularity with the British public. Perhaps all the beatings he took on the rugger field actually did kick the empathy out of the sensitive boy? Well, not quite: he certainly displayed a great deal of empathy for pro-foxhunting weirdos the Countryside Alliance when he wrote to the Blair government in 2002 that if they were 'any other minority' they would get more protection. Lest Blair be in any doubt as to what the nonced-up heir was getting at, he spelled it out, saying that if farmers 'were black or gay [they] would not be being victimised or picked on' - this less than three years after the Admiral Duncan bombing. Elsewhere, Charles wrote to the then Lord Chancellor that 'our lives are becoming ruled by a truly absurd degree of politically correct interference' - that 'our' sounding particularly (indeed, truly) absurd from a man whose mum had her own personal opt-out from equality legislation so she didn't have to see any blacks in the Palace. 

Most famously, of course, Mr Windsor Has Opinions About Architecture. Jonathan Meades, this country's best writer on the built environment who isn't called Owen Hatherley, described Charles as 'the most ploddingly dogged pupil' of the 'retrophiliac scholarship' of Country Life magazine's architectural criticism. He described the Tricorn Centre, one of the great Brutalist masterpieces of this philistine country's history (now, of course, demolished) as ' a mildewed lump of elephant droppings', a simile Meades rightly decries as 'as vulgar as it is visually inept'. 

A mildewed lump of elephant droppings, apparently

 But Chaz isn't just out to carp, oh no. Unlike the naysayers and nattering nabobs of negativism who, no doubt, are the very people hemming us in with 'politically correct interference', Windsor doesn't just criticise from the sidelines. He has championed, and supported financially, the extension of Dorchester known (perhaps after Mr Savile's two favourite activities?) as Poundbury. This scheme was begun by Chuck's chum and favourite architect Leon Krier, who the Telegraph describe as 'the feted traditional architect', which is certainly one way to describe a disciple of Albert Speer. 

So, then, ecce homo: a moralising friend of paedophiles, a philistine bore who nevertheless possesses the nearest thing his wretched family has to an 'artistic temperament', a victim of physical abuse who describes himself chillingly as 'one of the people on whom corporal punishment worked'. In the spirit of the toast to his late mother included in Secrecy's Jurisdiction then, ladies, gentlemen, people of all genders and none...I give you His Majesty. 

Finding The Others: English Heretic

 For the past three years, following a friend's example, I've been posting every film I watch in the course of a given year to Facebook, and numbering them. In 2020, I watched 161 films, the last of which was Knives Out; in 2021 I watched 165, the last of which was Peter Greenaway's The Belly of An Architect. This year, so far, I have watched 77 films or so, the most recent of which was the Stewart Lee comedy special Snowflake. I say 'or so', because one of these films is literally a YouTube video, and in lieu of a poster or even a title card, I had to use its thumbnail. But I felt I had to include it, because it's possibly the most interesting film I've seen this year. 

The most interesting film I've seen this year is Jackie O-men, the third film in the Escape from London series by Andy Sharp, whose English Heretic project was a big influence on Secrecy's Jurisdiction. 

Neither of the previous films in the series, which are much more traditional video essays, prepares you for the droning, nightmarish collage of Jackie O-men. Inspired by Douglas Gordon's multimedia art piece Between Darkness and Light, in which both The Exorcist and The Song of Bernadette were projected onto the same gallery screen, Sharp mashes up shots from The Omen and the more recent biopic Jackie with his own shots of Brookwood War Cemetery. Sharp describes it as 'a melange of political tragedy': I read it as a cinematic equivalent of James Shelby Downard's wild conspiracy screed King-Kill 33, though thankfully without Downard's sometimes hectoring tone. However you read it, it's definitely an outlier in terms of the kind of content to be found on YouTube. 

The English Heretic Collection, their anthology of Sharp's work published since 2003 under the EH brand, was at the time kind of an outlier in terms of Repeater Books' output when it was published, though since then intelligent, left-leaning occult material has become one of their strands along with more mundane culture 'n' politics stuff, a welcome development given how little occult literature manages to be either intelligent or left-leaning or indeed both.  As someone attempting to mount an occult resistance to Brexit Britain in the aftermath of the 2019 electoral catastrophe, it was obvious that I would find much to draw on in Sharp's subversion of the chintzy world of England's theme park heritage. 

As is the way of these things, of course, hardly anything I got from Sharp's book found its way into Secrecy's Jurisdiction, overtly at least. But I got a lot of stuff which added to the milieu I was working in: if I hadn't been reading Sharp's exegeses on Witchfinder General and Blood On Satan's Claw and the bizarre life of would-be royal kidnapper Ian Ball, I may not have come up with the central image of the collection in 'Time is a Flat Cercle'. And, as you might guess from the above, Sharp led me to a lot of amazing films: not just Witchfinder General but its director, Michael Reeves' previous effort, The Sorcerors; not just Blood On Satan's Claw but the creepy photography-as-alchemy horror flick The Asphyx; and, in the formula beloved of compilation album advertisers, many many more: Psychomania, The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue, even, from a parenthetical aside, David Rudkin's bizarre Blakean sci-fi follow-up to Penda's Fen, Artemis 81, which is another of the most interesting films I've ever seen that can only be seen today on YouTube, in its case in an absolutely appalling YouTube rip which is somehow missing about four minutes of footage (and even missing that it's still four hours long, and barely even VHS quality, with fuzzy audio, at times quite stilted dialogue, and Sting. Obviously you should watch it immediately.). 

In fact, if you read it only as a work of film criticism, you'll be richly rewarded (I actually bought my brother a copy of it as a birthday present with the instruction that he should watch every film Sharp mentions). But engaging with the deeper, weirder stuff that Sharp plunges into, his reflections on Winston Churchill's career as a druid or the wartime death of JFK's older brother (back in Jackie O-men territory again) and the connection between the writings of Kenneth Grant and 1970s Doctor Who, is a profoundly transformative process. It will not come as a surprise to readers that as well as having inspired elements of my last work, this is a book I've returned to in the course of working on the KCACO project: the 'Phantoms of Liberty' section, based on English Heretic's Britain at Occult War commemorations and their satire of this country's obsession with doubleyah-doubleyah-aye-aye have been especially useful in this regard. 

It should be obvious from the last couple of entries that they constitute a sub-series, looking at the elements that went into Secrecy's Jurisdiction in the wake of its publication. Not everything I'm going to cover in this series is something I can entirely recommend - The Goblin Universe, which is in some way one of the most interesting books to be discussed, is a pretty prototypical example of the flaws of Fortean publishing of an earlier age, right down to its Colin Wilson introduction - but The English Heretic Collection is something I can recommend to anyone without equivocation. If 2020 hadn't been the year I read Neoreaction: A Basilisk it would have easily been the most interesting book I read that year. 

Artificial Islands

 Of course, Britain is surrounded by more islands than just those in the channel. Owen Hatherley's new book, Artificial Islands: Adventures in the Dominions begins and ends in two very different examples: the Isle of Wight, on the South coast; and the Orkneys and Shetland in the far North. In between, Hatherley ranges from one side of the globe to the other, to see what Britain's former Imperial possessions in Canada, New Zealand and Australia can tell us about the post-Brexit fantasy of a Neverland called CANZUK, in which we will replace all our trade with the EU seamlessly with a share in the bounty of our Atlantic and Pacific cousins - you may recall Boris Johnson, our former Prime Minister, trying to get us excited about TimTams and trading Marmite for Vegemite (anyone who has tasted both knows whoever gets left holding the Australian spread has gotten the worst of that deal). 

CANZUK, of course, is baloney. Our former possessions are doing well enough alone, trading much more with their geographical neighbours than they do with us. But that doesn't mean that looking at those countries, or rather at a selection of the largest cities in them, can't tell us something useful about ourselves, whether that's how our ex-colonies regard us, or the ways in which they have, as in New Zealand and Canada (decidedly less so in Australia) shouldered issues of decolonisation we in the mainland still prefer to shirk - until we're forced to consider them by the splash of statues falling in the harbour, anyway. 

Tellingly, as Hatherley notes, Australia is the CANZUK nation that looms largest in the minds of Brits dreaming of a life abroad, and that isn't unrelated to their being far less decolonised than New Zealand or even Canada. When the apartheid regime fell in South Africa, a lot of whites who didn't like the idea of competing on a (slightly) more equal playing field flew North, to the UK, which should tell us something: and now that black anger at injustice is getting louder over here, Boers and Brits alike look with hope to Terra Australis, whose government, with their 'Australian style points-based immigration system' (a formula by now so rote that it's a wonder politicians don't routinely elide their consonants when saying it - 'Australiansilepoinsbasedimmigrashunsistem'), have been putting immigrants in filthy, suicidogenic foreign camps since before Priti Patel first started making eyes at the Rwandan ambassador. 

But even Melbourne - known, Hatherley relishes informing us, as Batmania for its first two years, after its original governor, John Batman (no relation) - is not just England but sunnier. And it just gets weirder from there, culminating in a trip to the incredible Ville Souterraine in Montreal, an underground megastructure which allows the people of that city to enjoy urban life despite the extreme chill of the Canadian winter - a way of life which may well become more common as climate change renders the outside world less and less hospitable to human survival. 

Montreal's Underground City

Culminating, but not concluding. As mentioned above, Hatherley finishes his book in Shetland and the Orkneys, islands unusual in having voted to leave neither the UK nor the EU which nevertheless describe trips to the mainland as 'going to Scotland' and whose political fringe maintains 'that the annexation of the Northern Islands was legally dubious and that therefore, they are still de jure an integral part of the Kingdom of Norway.'  

As with our trip to the Channel Islands yesterday, then, we find even at the extreme fringes of the islands the same cussedness and faction-forming as on the mainland, even if our cranks are more likely to attribute magical powers to Magna Carta or believe that quoting a verbal formula renders them impervious to police powers - or indeed to subscribe to the New European and Supertanskii's patreon. Hatherley ends his reflection on the former Dominions and their amputated Metropole with a clarion call to destroy capitalism, which is, at this point - as much as Liz Truss might not like it - the only move we can make if we want to survive, above ground or under; but I found myself wondering about his title. CANZUK, for sure, is as bogus an idea as Batmania, but I wondered if that was the only artificiality being described by the title. All the cities Hatherley visits were once tied much more firmly to our Empire, then gradually decided to go their own way: now that centripetal drive seems to have infected the Home Country, and in the wake of Brexit and the novel coronavirus, and staring at an economic crisis of barely-comprehensible proportions, people are more willing than before to consider radical solutions, including independence and secession, especially as it becomes more and more obvious to anyone outside the Home Counties that this country is largely ran in the interests of the reliably Tory South-East at the expense of all other points of the compass. In Montreal, Hatherley, investigating the landscape left behind by the 1967 Expo, discovers a literal artificial island, the Ile Notre-Dame - but this book left me wondering if it's our own archipelago which is truly artificial. 

Beasts of These Islands

There's a thing writers of fiction say, about how at a certain point the characters take over and start doing things you didn't expect them to. I don't know how true that is, but I will agree with something Jonathan Meades says in his massive selected writing collection, Pedro and Ricky Come Again: that you write to find out what you think. You find out what you think by writing. 

Something like this happens in research: not just the simple pleasure of finding things out, but the pleasure of finding them unexpectedly. For example, I'd seen the thumbnail for Michael Pearce's 2017 film Beast loads of times while scrolling through Prime looking for something to watch. But it was only through doing research for the last entry that I discovered said film is based loosely on the 'Beast of Jersey' attacks, which are alluded to a couple of times in Secrecy's Jurisdiction. So I watched it. 

The first thing to say is that this is no more the 'real story' behind the attacks for which Edward Paisnel was convicted than the hints in my own work. Pearce came to the story more honestly, in a way, than I: he grew up in Jersey and was fascinated by tales of the attacks, while I learned about the case from the bizarre theory the angler and Fortean Ted Holiday puts forth in his book The Goblin Universe: that Paisnel was the reincarnation of Gilles de Rais (!) .  Being a local, Pearce understands the insularity of the island's culture, and the class divisions which are even starker and more insidious than on the mainland - one of the beefs  the film's Paisnel-analogue, Pascal Renouf (Johnny Flynn), has with the more affluent end of island society is that, as his name suggests, he comes from old-time French stock: 'my ancestors probably owned your land' he jokes to the protagonist, Moll, (Jessie Buckley)  and her family. 

It also means Pearce knows how to use the landscape to hint at some of the deeper darknesses of Jersey's past. In researching this article I read a lot of reviews of Beast: where these do mention the setting it's usually to praise cinematographer Benjamin Kracun's dreamlike filming of the island's natural landscape. But there are darker things on which Kracun trains his camera, though to pick them up, you have to literally look closer. Such as, for example, the scene where Pascal and Moll meet, after he saves her from being sexually assaulted by a club date who won't take no for an answer. This takes place against the background of a concrete structure, a World War 2 bunker, not that dissimilar from the kind of pillbox forts or defensive emplacements you might find on the mainland...

...except of course that this is Jersey, which was occupied by Germany during the Second World War. The bunker where Moll meets her saviour (who is, now I think about it, blonde, blue-eyed and impeccably connected to his native soil) is a fortification of the Nazi Atlantic Wall, designed and constructed by the Organisation Todt, and built with slave labour. 

And here, it's just part of the landscape. Our attention is deliberately undrawn to it - Krancun resists the temptation to pan out and show us an exciting cliffscape complete with observation tower. Nazi fortifications are just a fact of life - like handsy boys or country club dress codes or locals blaming the killing on Portuguese ('Porko') immigrants. But once you know that hidden past, it changes your perspective. This isn't a rural idyll being shattered by outside malevolence. The ugly spirit was already here, twisting the narrative into this shape before its protagonists were even born. 

Hidden pasts are a bit of a theme in Beast. Moll is not entirely truthful about a time she assaulted another girl back in school; Pascale turns out to be keeping secrets of his own about a similar youthful crime. Moll's father, who she's tasked with looking after, has dementia. Perhaps this is a nod to the historical amnesia which allows the people of Jersey to go about their everyday lives without being paralysed by moral doubt about whether their ancestors co-operated a little too willingly with the Nazis, or didn't do enough to help the resistance. Or about the tax haven chicanery which makes their island so prosperous today. Or the child abuse scandals.

Oh, did I not mention those? 

Yes, just like mainland Britain, Jersey had its own historic child abuse scandal, centring largely on the Haut de la Garenne children's home, where authorities instituted a 'Dickensian' regime to control the children in their charge. It's not hard to find an echo of this in Geraldine James' chilling performance as Moll's mother, a terrifying disciplinarian determined to prevent her daughter returning to her stab-happy ways. But there is a stronger connection than that between the children's homes of Jersey and the 'Beast' attacks: Edward Paisnel's wife, Joan, ran a foster home, La Preference, where on at least one occasion Paisnel - 'Uncle Ted' to the kids - played Santa Claus at Christmas. A less heartwarming story from the time has Paisnel wandering the corridors in the mask he wore to carry out his attacks. Of course the kids who saw him weren't believed when they said what they'd seen. 

It's worth pointing out that there is nothing uniquely evil about Jersey - or Sark, where the Barclay Brothers hold sway, or Guernsey, where Prince Andrew prefers to stay at Havilland Hall, the home of his banking chum David Rowland, when on official business. The Channel Islands exist for the benefit of the British establishment: their sketchy legal status makes them a valued node in the web of financial secrecy spun by the City of London; their physical remoteness makes them ideal locations for the elite to enjoy themselves in the way to which they've grown accustomed. On an island, there is nowhere you can really run, and very few places to hide. Unless, of course, you have the power to will the ignorance of others, in which case you can hide in plain sight, or find some guy to take the fall. 

Pretty much all of which could also be applied to mainland Britain: it's just that we're a bigger island. We have our own dark pasts, our own historical attacks ceaselessly pored-over for clues by 'enthusiasts', our own complicity with genocide, our own historic child abuse scandals - in the case of the last of these things, the figure who links the mainland and the islands is exactly who you'd think. Their evils are our own, in microcosm. 

Their beasts are of our stock. 

Okay, but what's it about?

 Thirty pages long. 

Sorry, couldn't resist. 

More seriously, though, Secrecy's Jurisdiction represents the pandemic era continuation of a long-running project of mine: undermining the British Establishment, most specifically but not exclusively as it manifests in the form of the Conservative and Unionist Party (other parties are available, and one of their representatives in particular gets a severe kicking in the book). In a sense I've been doing this since before the Coalition congealed, but it's fair to say my strategy has developed over time. My initial attempts were much more obviously protest poems or satire: one-off squibs hurled at obvious targets. The advent of Brexit and Trump, behind which I discerned high-level fuckery much more outlandish than just stealing Facebook data, led me to believe a more sustained campaign would be necessary, and so for a little over three years, from June 2016 to December 2019, I engaged in a sustained, multi-media guerilla project designed to stop Brexit, humiliate Theresa May and get Jeremy Corbyn elected. This was, in magickal terms, a long-form, multi-level working, in some regards a hypersigil, that took the form of a series of essays, poems, videos, sonic and visual experiments, rituals, performances and interventions in the physical environment. Some of these interventions I publicly identified as my work. Some were anonymous. It's quite possible you actually saw some of the stuff I was putting out during this period without ever knowing it was me who was behind it. I was busy. 

If I was staying under wraps successfully though, a lot of people got unmasked. Comedians who had made much of their vaguely leftish sympathies back when there was little chance of a Labour leader introducing policies that might affect the value of their property portfolios jumped on the anti-Corbyn train, a trend skewered by Juliet Jacques, who pointed out they could not 'pretend that they didn’t respond to Corbyn’s challenge to the status quo with the same sneering hostility as the Murdoch press, the Blairite establishment or the Conservative government'. Ultimately, this trahison des buffons, as well as the complete abandonment of impartiality by the BBC (to the extent of covering up the Dear Leader's visible drunkenness at a Cenotaph wreath-laying by playing footage of a similar event from his tenure as Mayor of London instead, and 'sweetening' footage of him taking questions from the public to remove booing, rather in the same way the WWE would sometimes do when the audience failed to take to a wrestler who had found favour with Vince McMahon), did its job and stopped the unthinkable, a government that might have actually cared for the people of these islands and beyond, from being elected. 

Not that the beeb have ever really been impartial, as founder John Reith admits

I was infuriated by the result of the 2019 election. It really was one of those Robinson moments. 'There were, he said, no mitigating circumstances...the middle class in England had continued to vote Conservative because in their miserable hearts they still believed that it was in their interests to do so.'  If I had been outraged at the result of the 2015 election, I was incandescent at this turn of events. The result of that election had been the rejection of the possibility that life might get slightly less worse. In 2019 it felt like English voters had decided to reject their last chance of saving the world. Put it this way: when the novel coronavirus rampaged through this country, I wasn't surprised. And while I cannot, at this stage, reveal how I know this to be the case, I know there would never have been a covid outbreak if Corbyn had been elected. For me, the election of Boris Johnson and the death of millions of people in this country alone are linked by more than just the fact that Johnson's policies pushed the death toll higher as he used the greatest peacetime crisis in British history as a chance to bung vast sums of taxpayers' money to his chums, decrease the surplus population and, we now know, loom drunkenly over Tory staff younger and blonder than his wife in a desperate attempt to pretend long covid hadn't destroyed his libido. 

Furthermore, in the same month as the election, I had received some shattering personal news: abscesses in my axillae that had been bothering me since the summer of 2019 were finally, crushingly, diagnosed as hidradenitis suppurativa, a debilitating skin condition which ruined my mother's life and may have played a role in her eventual death from cancer this year. It felt like a death sentence. It felt like defeat. It felt like the right time to draw a line under the anti-Brexit activism and move on. 

And it felt like the best way to do that was by releasing a collection of the stuff I'd written during this period. That collection was England is the Enemy, and it only exists digitally because the lockdown kicked in weeks after I'd finished editing it and no-one was sure when or if there would ever be physical gigs at which to handsell books again. England is the Enemy was meant to be me swearing off political writing, a record of my crowning failure. At the time I was getting into photography, film-making and music, in all of which I was interested more in the possibility of abstraction than in overt sloganeering.

But then, as Adam Curtis would say, a strange thing happened. I found myself writing about the covid situation. About the lies about the death toll, the laughable inadequacy of the government response, the virus as the inevitable culmination of a trajectory this country had been on since at least 2010. And most meaningfully, about the obvious bullshit of Johnson's 'recovery' from coronavirus. Now, in this I know I'm tacking against the prevailing wind, as the popular conspiracy theory is that Johnson lied about getting the 'rona for sympathy. But I have never believed conspiracy theories just because they are popular. No, my theory is that not only did Johnson catch covid for real, but he still suffers with the symptoms of long covid today - hence the obviously edited footage of him running on a beach during this year's Tory conference, which even an idiot could see had been snipped and zoomed to make it look as if he was running for longer than the pathetic few seconds he could manage. 

Not to fit-shame BoJo - after all, I'm a long covid sufferer myself. But as always it's the lies I can't stand. And the connivance in those lies of our media nomenklatura, whose members frequently attend dinner parties with and organise stag dos for the politicians they supposedly hold to account. And I found I enjoyed stepping into the role of the Exposer of Wrong Doing. And then everything crystallised when I read a throwaway line in Owen Hatherley's 2021 interview with the mighty Jonathan Meades: 

'[Thatcher's] Christmas parties with fun loving Augusto Pinochet and Jimmy Savile who fucked her corpse in the coffin.' It's a great line. Except it couldn't possibly be accurate, because the Iron Lady died in 2013 and Britain's most prolific paedophile predeceased her by two years. Unless...readers of this blog will of course entertain no bien-pensant doubts as to the reality of psychic phenomena. The spiritual technology of willed possession has been extensively documented by anthropologists and occultists who have studied vodoun, santeria, macumba and palo mayombe. It did not seem unlikely that someone in the Tory hierarchy would possess the necessary ritual know-how to call down the spirit of Savile into a human body to effect one final coffin-fuck. This left only the question of identifying a suitable flesh-vessel for the deed. It would need to be someone as close to a literal establishment puppet as possible: someone whose zeal to protect that establishment was matched only by their personal and moral nullity. A tabula so very, very rasa that the cigar-chomping spectre could be scrawled over it with minimal permanent damage, and a person so dedicated that there was nothing they wouldn't do to ensure the eternal success of the Tory party. 

There could, of course, be only one candidate. 

The rest you know. 'Time is a Flat Cercle' (the misspelling a deliberate allusion to Nadhim Zahawi and Rory Stewart's tenures as chair of one of the dodgier 'foreign policy' outfits) opened the door to the creation of a nightmare version of Britain over which I could allow my paranoid fantasias free poetic reign, and which also provided a context for earlier works such as 'La Preference' (about, inter alia, the 'Beast of Jersey' attacks, which had fascinated me since I read Ted Halliday's discussion of them in The Goblin Universe, a bizarre and fascinating book which I wish some Fortean publisher would reissue) and even the much earlier 'The Long Dark Night of Frank Sinatra', which I included in the collection as a companion piece to 'Mr Inverness is tired' - which also, as it happens, alludes to wrong doings in the Channel Islands, one of the network of 'secrecy jurisdictions' which Britain uses to cement its central position in the global money-laundering and tax-avoidance ecosystem (the transposition of the 's' in the pamphlet's title is a Tori Amos allusion - unlike the author of Eskimo Papoose I'm happy to cop to my borrowings from the only good Tori, even though I can disguise them much more artfully). 

For legal reasons, of course, it has to be stressed that when I describe the Britain of Secrecy's Jurisdiction as a 'nightmare version' of the UK I expect the reader to infer that this version of Britain is fictional, poetry being, after all, a branch of fiction. I certainly don't intend to imply that Sir Kieth really did mash his membrum into Maggie's mouldering remains, nor that the Tory party keep one of Savile's jackets in a vitrine in a hidden room of their headquarters for purposes of electoral haruspicy, nor that Edward Paisnel took the fall for an alliance of his island's great and good, or that JK Rowling has been an asset of certain state agencies with very grubby records since long before her one big idea (itself a rehash of an earlier minor idea of Neil Gaiman's) occurred to her on an InterCity train. You would have to be certifiably insane to believe this is what literally happened...

...but as I say in the blurb, every word of it is true. I wanted to capture how it feels to live in a one-party state whose media and government collude to hide the truth of how things really are, and the monsters that breed in the fecund interstice between official version and reality. Goya, after all, told us such things would occur when Reason slept: now that she seems to be using her bed not so much for shut-eye as enthusiastic coitus with Irreason, who knows what fearful byblows will result? 

Secrecy's Jurisdiction: OUT NOW!

 A quick update for readers, Secrecy's Jurisdiction is now live to purchase on Amazon! Obviously I'm going to be buying some stock for gigs pretty soonish, but if any of you are chomping at the bit and want to buy copies and bring them to gigs for me to sign rather than buying one from me there, rejoice for your moment has arrived! Look how excited Soldeed is at the mere thought of buying a copy (ignore Janet Ellis, she's easily confused)! 

'Not a council spaceship, I'm afraid': Fear Her and the Olympics that wasn't

 One of my favourite photos from the London Olympics in 2012 isn't from the opening or closing ceremonies, or any of the events. It's a photo of a shopfront which has decided to engage in some cheeky Olympics-related co-branding. Cheeky, because, as Jack Graham points out, the British government of the time enthusiastically passed a law to protect 'Olympic partners' (you know, organisations like McDonald's, who have done so much to support grassroots sport in the UK). The upshot of this was that shops trying to cash in on the hype - or even ones which had existed for years and just happened to have 'Olympic' in their name - faced censure from Trading Standards Officers. So one shop got around this by having a sign which superficially looked Olympic-related - until you looked a little closer

Computer, enhance:

Who can forget the Lodnon Oimplycs?

It's the dedication of this I love. Everything is exactly wrong enough to not get sued. Instead of rings we have squares, and rather than commemorating the Olympics occurring at that very moment across town, the advert looks forward to the Oimplycs of the future year 2102, to be held in one of the great world cities, Lodnon. It's a perfect example of what they call malicious compliance - when you go along with every single rule imposed on you but decidedly against the actual spirit of those rules. Plus also, to be honest, 'Oimplycs' just sounds inherently funny. Even if there were no Olympics for it to mock, it would still sound funny because of its vowel structure. So, even though the regulations are no longer in effect, I'm going to call the Olympics the Oimplycs for the rest of this entry, unless some context arises where I can't not use the original word. 

The Oimplycs is on my mind because Natalie over at Time and Time Again recently wrote an article about the Doctor Who Oimplycs tie-in episode, 'Fear Her' (2006), pointing out the similarities between this episode and one of the stories in the  black horror anthology Tales from the Hood (1995). In discussing the article with her, it occurred to me that someone must have looked at the differences between the Oimplycs as imagined by Matthew Graham (no relation to Jack) and Russell T Davies in 2006 and the Oimplycs as they actually manifested six years later, VW Camper-riding Willy Wonka Russell Brand and all. 

What was kind of surprising is: it actually appears they haven't. Elizabeth Sandifer alludes to the Oimplyc disconnect in her TARDIS Eruditorum pieces on 'Fear Her' and the Oimplycs itself, but the specific contrast is largely unexamined. Jack Graham, I thought, might have done something about it from his perspective as the pre-eminent Marxist critic of Doctor Who, but aside from the scrapbooky piece quoted above he hasn't given 'Fear Her' a lot of his time - completely understandably, to be honest, as 'Fear Her' is a lot of people's idea of the nadir of Nu-Who, at least until Chris Chibnall came along and showed us how much worse it could get. For those people, the Revival's other crimes - The Absorbaloff, the Victorian Cybermech, the Apple iDaleks - all pale in comparison: not so much 'Fear Her' as 'Hate This'. 

And it's easy to see why. As usual Sandifer has the goods on the episode in terms of a straightforward critical analysis. It's a story that can't decide if it's meant to be scary or feelgood material for the kids, and winds up not being either enough to work; it has some pretty questionable plot calls, and several moments in the episode reach Classic Who levels of zero budget special effects. The disappearance of Ginger, the cat, is accomplished by zooming in and out of a shot of a cardboard box while a strangulated miaow crashes into a sci-fi sound effect (disappointingly I couldn't find video of this triumph, but I did find an adorable blooper of the feline actor repeatedly refusing to follow its cues) and the amount of post-production editing on Chloe drawing made me worry that she might be about to download a handbag at any moment. 

You wouldn't trap your friends in a bunch of drawings. Would you?

This commitment to keeping costs down extends to the Oimplycs scenes themselves, the crowd for which is very sparse (indeed, it's a bit cheeky that they managed to find a diegetic reason to film an empty stadium), one of the most obvious points of disparity between the Oimplycs as the Nu-Who production team imagined them in 2006 and as they actually happened in 2102. But I want to look at the less obvious ones. What are they? And what do they tell us about the difference between the politics of those two different years?

Perhaps surprisingly (or indeed perhaps not), it's easier to note the points of similarity between the Blairite politics of 'Fear Her' and the Cameronism of the Oimplycs themselves (I suspect I am going to write more about the Oimplycs, especially given the totemic place Danny Boyle's opening ceremony occupies in the imaginations of angry Remainers, but in this article I want specifically to consider the aspects of the Oimplycs which can be compared to their imagining in 'Fear Her'). The fact that the episode's monster is defeated by empathising with it is both very Third Way and very 'hug a hoodie', though it's perhaps worth noting that Cameron's hoodie-hugging phase predates his time in government, at which point the gloves were allowed to come off a little, especially after the Lodnon Roits of 2101. And the fact that all this empathising is still ultimately in service of moving on a foreigner whose ways do not fit in with British culture is a cute touch which perhaps shows Graham as a writer aware of the authoritarianism hiding behind the 'socially liberal' facades of both Blair and Cameronism (Graham, M, that is; Graham, J definitely knows that), but that depends on the degree to which the episode is aware of what it's doing and hasn't slipped into 'Unquiet Dead' levels of not actually realising how racist it is. 

In terms of setting, Dame Kelly Holmes Close (something you never want to hear if you're trans tbqh, given Holmes is a tervert) is all Barratt newbuilds and flags put out for the Oimplycs in a definitely-not-racist way. These are New Labour's ideal voters: 'aspirational' members of the working class who've done well enough to upgrade to a house with a garage and a garden where they can have a kickabout with the kiddies. It's posher than the Powell Estate, but there's a suggestion this might just be because the Sensible Economics of Gordon Brown's No More Boom and Bust have Lifted More Hard-Working Families Out of Poverty (remember, this is 2006. The Bank of England haven't fucked everything by putting interest rates up. Yet.) Trish and Chloe are implied to be something of an object of suspicion to their (white, Union Flag shirt-wearing) neighbours even before Chloe starts manifesting her Isolus-activated Paperhouse powers. This made me wonder if Dame I Pretended Not To Be A Lesbian Then Came Out For Clout Close might be a socially mixed development, some private houses and some social housing, and Trish and Chloe have been moved to the latter following the death of Chloe's abusive father, leading to resentment between them and the private residents who see the family as interlopers. However, there's also the matter of the song Trish sings to calm Chloe down, The Kookaburra Song, which is one associated with the Girl Guides, in Britain a largely middle class organisation. I don't think we see a lot of guiding paraphernalia in Chloe's room (and I'm not going back through the episode with a fine-tooth comb to check) so I think it's possible Trish was in the Guides and that's why she sings the song to her daughter. Chloe and Trish's class position is thus somewhat ambiguous, and it doesn't take us long to find out that the Close is actually bubbling with social anxiety and resentment when the residents (and Council Kel) start laying into each other with insinuations and conspiracy theories after briefly taking the Doctor - a strange man in a big brown coat poking around an estate on which children have gone missing - for a nonce. 

The Doctor is only able to calm this Ballardian eruption by literally treating the residents like a class full of primary school children, which is a good bit of Blairite paternalism and also the first sign of one of the defining aspects of the Doctor in this episode, which is that he's basically here to play Supernanny. 

And this gets at one of the key things which marked out the Blairite period in British politics: fear of children. Supernanny was not the only programme in which a strict but well-meaning Behaviourist would descend on families with 'out of control kids' and teach them how to exercise Tough Love - it was just the most popular because, let's be honest here, a lot of The Dads wanted to get spanked by Jo Frost. But they absolutely stand as a key artefact of this era in politics. Like the Doctor's eviction of the Isolus, it's all done out of empathy - It's For Their Own Good - but these programmes also gave British viewers plenty of opportunity to feel superior to struggling mums or exercise their outrage gland over footage of kids acting up (the Jeremy Kyle Show played a similar role in affording Brits the opportunity to point, laugh and shout at the underclass more generally).

It's not that resentment of the young has gone away in British politics - indeed, as I pointed out in yesterday's entry, in many ways it's more established - but the tone has changed. During the Blair era there was an obsession with curing 'anti-social behaviour' through psychological hacks, whether it was Jo Frost's child manipulation techniques or the bizarre craze for using sonic methods to pacify the youth, whether those sonic interventions took the form of playing classical music to make bus stations uncool, deploying an Orwellian gizmo called 'The Mosquito' which emitted an annoying sound at a frequency so high only The Youths could hear it, or, perhaps most disturbingly, getting lamp-posts to broadcast the voice of Jimmy Savile. 

I mean I still would, to be honest

What changed by the year of the actual 2102 Oimplycs was that, as I say, the gloves were off. The Coalition threw out all pretence of actually empathising with young people and their lot along with the Blairite preference for psychological solutions and just went all-in on making kids' lives as hard as possible, with the removal of Housing Benefit from 16 year-olds, the scrapping of the Education Maintenance Allowance, and the introduction of university tuition fees. And there was a strong racial component to all of this: the young people who had rioted in the wake of the Metropolitan Police executing Mark Duggan in 2011 were stereotyped as black thugs (even the white ones, according to David Starkey) while middle class caucasian gentrifiers were portrayed as the acceptable face of the Youth, Keeping Calm and Waving Brooms to clean up their rockabilly gin and cupcake palaces. 

Of course, that's another big thing 'Fear Her' gets wrong about the Oimplycs. Predating as it does the metastasization of KCACO, it doesn't depict how chintzy, twee and nostalgia-obsessed things would become (including the opening ceremony of the Oimplycs itself). It fails to predict those bloody cupcakes or the fact that the New London Vernacular would lead to posh flats being clad in coats of stock brick more artificial than anything in Dame Kelly Holmes Close. Yes, there is a cupcake in the episode, but it's a delightfully artless home-made attempt, rather than the pretentious patisserie proliferation of the Coalition era. 

We can't fault Graham and Davies for not predicting the Coalition, of course. If we can forgive the Classic Era of the programme for having Britain conducting manned missions to Mars in the 1970s, we can forgive the Revival for not realising how catastrophic Cameron would be during a time when he was still establishing himself as the then Leader of the Opposition. But it is still interesting to look at the differences between the 2102 envisioned by the show in 2006, and the reality of it six years later. That the differences are mostly matters of scale is, in many ways, more damning of Blair than it is redemptive of Cameron.