Chartism

And so we come to the end of another year; another decade in fact, so I’d like to tidy up the bits of cultural rambling I’ve not discussed before, especially as they appear at appropriate points in the various lists that follow these words. Perhaps I ought to have done a top 10 of the decade for albums and gigs at least; actually, I might still do that. Anyway, here’s what I’ve been listening to and reading since the last one of these.

MUSIC:

Only one gig since my account of Ben and I’s trip to Glasgow to see The Raincoats in November, and that was the colossal, brutal, unflinching experience of Shellac at the Boiler Shop. It was the first time I’d seen them, but it did complete my Albini hat trick, after Big Black at Leeds Poly in July 87 and Rapeman at the original Riverside in October 88, which was the last time the man himself had been on Tyneside. No word of a lie, it was like going back in time 30 years, in terms of the number of friends and acquaintances who were around. We could have been going from The Egypt Cottage to the Riverside, instead of Box Social to Boiler Shop; I’d estimate there were at least 50 of us from those days. And, on the night before the election, every single one of us were voting Labour, which meant that when Albini gave an impassioned oration, urging the audience to cast a progressive vote for Jeremy Corbyn, the roof almost came off; tragically, the sky fell in on our world 24 hours later.

From the opening bars of a relentless, unapologetic Canada to the closing, coruscating anger of Dude Incredible, this was a set of astonishing power and grace. There was to be no End of Radio alas, but a terrifying Compliant, the best ever version of the dogmatic, moralistic genius of Billiard Player Song and the unexpected highlight of Wingwalker made this as special an event as any of us could wish for. We await the next album and tour with bated breath, patience and anticipation.

Crate digging provided me with a couple of pearls this month; John Cale’s superb 1977 12” EP on Illegal Records, Animal Justice. The lead track Chickenshit was inspired by a hired hand quitting Cale’s band after the mercurial Taff bit the head off a hen on stage at The Vortex. Marvellous, grungy before it existed, down and dirty blues that inspired The Gun Club, John Spencer and a million others seeps from every bar. The straight reading of Memphis Tennessee is a surprise, before the closing, contemplative Hedda Gabler that shows the former Velvets Boyo has always been skilled at turning the word polymath into a term of abuse by being the most cantankerous bastard outside the Rhondda.

I’m delighted to have filled a hole in my collection by finding a copy of Wah! Heat’s Better Scream, which to me always had more style, gravitas and depth than the slightly too rushed Seven Minutes to Midnight. While it may be a little too much of a tribute to Scott Walker, Pete Wylie proves again, as he did on Somesay, Remember, Death of Wah and several others, he was the true alchemist from The Crucial Three. It is such a shame that his live performances now pander to most commercial moments, though I doubt he’ll ever better this number.

At The Raincoats’ gig, I picked up a copy of Odyshape, to replace the cassette version I’d lost years back, as I discussed in the blog of that weekend. However, I also looked to find a more contemporary piece of the band’s history, in the shape of 2018’s Island by Ana da Silva and Japanese feminist DJ Phew! Now, if you came to this in search of ramshackle DIY Post Punk, you’d be sorely disappointed. However, if you came with an open and curious mind, you’d be rewarded with an intriguing and beguiling experimental set, where the two women, continents apart, bounce ideas off each other to produce a rather special release that combines the dancefloor with the artist’s studio, precise beats and improvised practice. The synthesized drones and stray noises that curl around each woman’s voice when they speak-sing to each other in the other’s native language, make their words fly like detached missives. Their communication shudders out in fits and starts: a corrupted distress signal. Island seeks not to close the linguistic and cultural gap between its two participants, but to explore that vast distance between them.

Island’s strongest, climactic track The Fear Song begins with a whisper and a trace of voice that sounds like it’s sampled from someone’s answering machine. A drone buoys the two voices, and then the voices evolve to take the place of more typical instrumentation.  As the drone swells, Phew and da Silva raise the volume of their voices to rise above it. They sing few notes; it’s not the complexity of their melodies that makes their performances compelling, but the striving quality of their delivery, the searching, reaching urgency to their wails. The beat picks up, and both women hasten their words to match it, repeating the same phrase to each other. It sounds as if they were running towards each other in pitch darkness, navigating only by the sounds of their voices and their echoes. The album’s closer, Dark But Bright, is characterised by joyous melodic development. It even samples birdsong, as if the world inside Island were finally allowing the sun to rise. In these moments, Phew and da Silva sound like the air has cleared, and in the new light, the two musicians can finally greet each other and embrace.

The last time I bought a copy of The Wire, the free Wire Tapper CD on the front introduced me to the brilliant Woven Skull, so I was delighted to find that the issue I bought to keep me entertained on my most recent trip to Glasgow proferred CD number 50. To be more accurate it is a double CD featuring 40 different acts of utter obscurity. Admittedly, as this is the kind of stuff all those lads with the tote bags and bad beards at TUSK Festival go potty over, you’ve got to wade through knee-high piles of landfill ambient and noise synth based twaddle. However, there are plenty of nuggets that can be sieved from the atonal swamp. On CD1, the first three cuts provide a strong, strong opening.  The insane free jazz caterwauling of The Nest on Das Fantastische Kraut, gives way to the sort of jolly African pop Andy Kershaw used to popularise on Han Yan by Carl Stone, before Floating by Lealani recalls the kind of brutal, metronomic Krautrock Miss Kittin became infamous for. Thick Skull by Michael Donnelly is pulsating Sunn>> meets early Swans, while Headboggle’s Blue Guitar is a lovely, Lounge Lizards style amateur be bop mess. There’s unintelligible spoken word cut upss and formal, minimalist piano on Leo Svirsky’s impressive River without Banks and ferocious Lydia Lunch style proto Goth barking at the moon on Scum by MoE, before a joyous harp instrumental, Tier 4 by

Panos Ghikas and Alex Ward, brings the first disc to an end.

In recognition of the fact The Wire has given away 50 CDs over the 20 years of its existence, the second disc is a sort of greatest hits from previous releases. Frankly it is a massive let down on the first part, with far too much welcome to drone club empty sounds. However, as ever, a few joyous snippets exist; Trudal Zenebe’s Gue is the spit and dab of a Klezmer cover of Adam Ant’s Goody Two Shoes, while John 3:16 produce textbook bass led post rock on Into the Abyss. Master Musicians of Hop Frog recreate Sonic Youth circa 1985 on Song of the South and the closing Aphasic Semiotics by Giulio Aldinucci recreates Tangerine Dream a decade earlier.  All in all, this is a top-quality freebie, that points a way forward for some of my future musicological adventures and ensures I’ll get a copy of The Wire every time I’m in a main line station. Providing there’s a CD on the cover of course.

I love Irish Folk Music. I love Scottish Folk Music. I love much English Folk Music, especially the Copper Family and Peter Bellamy’s legacy. However, I fucking hate almost all Northumbrian Folk Music, so I’m not quite sure why I bought the pristine copy of Johnny Handle’s The Collier Lad I found in Tynemouth Market. Almost certainly the main reason was because it was on Topic, the finest exponents of Folk records in history. They released the truly wondrous Canny Newcassel compilation of Tyneside songs and ballads I inherited from the old fella, after all.

The main problem I have with Handle and other proponents of Tyneside traditional song and reworkings in such a tradition, is that once you’ve talked about the privations of workers in mines and shipyards, there’s not a lot else to sing about, apart from drinking Broon in the Clerb.  There’s no articulation of struggle or commonality; nowhere else do folk ballads celebrating male domestic violence than in the Northumbrian canon. Seriously, if you can point me in the direction of a proper ballad of the North East that doesn’t resort to sentimentality or the demotic, other than Tommy Armstrong’s imperious Trimdon Grange Explosion, please direct me to it. Incidentally, Johnny Handle was a school teacher rather than a collier, though I do give thanks to him, Alastair Anderson, Louis Killen, Tony Corcoran and all the others who formed and nurtured the Bridge Hotel Folk Club in the 50s.

BOOKS:

Barry Hines was known mainly for A Kestrel for a Knave, on which Kes was based, as well as later TV scripts such as the bleak, post-apocalyptic Threads. However, his first published work was The Blinder, the story of a precocious Yorkshire teenager who had to choose between an academic career or sporting glory as his home town club’s centre forward. Set in the coalfields of the West Riding, where Hines grew up, this is a muck-and-nettles story that would probably read like science fiction to a present-day 18-year-old Premier League goalscoring prodigy whose agent is negotiating his first five-figure weekly wage packet. The schoolboy Lennie Hawk gets a brown envelope each week containing an illicit £10, the same as his dad takes home for a week at the colliery.

The human side of the story is more important than the football background but Hines does give us a fascinating vignette of a huge tactical change then taking place in English football. Town’s manager lays on extra training sessions for the team to practise the new 4-2-4 formation which is consigning the last vestiges of the old W-M line up to history. In their first practice match, they lose 5-0 to their own reserves. When Hines wrote The Blinder, he was still finding his literary voice, but despite the occasional patches of tentative overwriting and a few melodramatic plot-twists, the story rings true.

Prior to reading Falconer, all I knew of John Cheever was The Swimmer, as a tortured back story of alcoholism and sexual repression. Falconer takes place in the fictional Falconer State Prison and concerns a university professor and drug addict named Farragut who is incarcerated after having murdered his brother. He is subjected to brutalizing treatment by the other inmates, and there is much elaboration of both loving and sadistic homosexual prison relationships. Deeply poignant and meaningful human strivings also are depicted. After beating his drug addiction in the prison, Farragut escapes by hiding himself in the shroud of a dead cellmate. Totally evading all pursuers, he finds himself finally at an ordinary laundromat and nearby bus stop and, in that banal setting; he experiences a new sense of compassion and freedom. Clearly, it is a tale of resurrection and redemption. Cheever examines these grand themes with irony, unforced eloquence, and exhilarating humour, making Falconer a triumphant work of the moral imagination

Without doubt, the serial killer Levi Bellfield, whose victims included poor Millie Dowler and Amelie De Lagrange, is one of the most evil murderers this country has ever produced. The dramatization of his capture, starring Martin Clunes as the copper who ran the successful operation to bring Bellfield to justice, was one of the highlights of home-grown TV early in 2019. However, the book on which it is based, Manhunt by former Detective Inspector Colin Sutton, is a dreadfully dull account of the police investigation, concentrating solely on a meticulous, chronological explication of the stages the coppers went through. There is no human element to it, other than Sutton revealing his character; a typical Tory-voting, golf-playing, Motorsport-obsessed Freemason who I’d run a mile from if he turned up in the local. In fact, Bellfield probably has a more appealing character than Sutton, and I’d long given up caring how justice was served after Sutton’s tedious reactionary asides had rendered me as the kind of poor sap who would confess to every crime imaginable just to get some peace. Anway, here are those lists I promised you -:

Gigs of 2019:

1.      Alex Rex – Cumberland Arms 1^st September

2.      Lavinia Blackwall & Stilton – Cumberland Arms 29^th June

3.      The Raincoats – Glasgow Mono 16^th November

4.      The Wedding Present – Academy 27^th October

5.      Shellac – Boiler Shop 11^th December

6.      Alasdair Roberts – Gosforth Assembly Rooms 16^th October

7.      The Burning Hell – Cobalt Studios 23^rd June

8.      Jandek – Sage 6^th October

9.      The BMX Bandits – Head of Steam 18^th May

10.   Gnoomes – Cluny 1^st June

Albums of 2019:

1.      Alex Rex – Otterburn

2.      Shellac – End of Radio

3.      The Mekons – Deserted

4.      Alasdair Roberts – The Fiery Margin

5.      The Burning Hell – Bangers & Mash

6.      Youth of America – YOA Rising

7.      Various – Wire Tapper #50

8.      Professor Yaffle – A Brand New Morning

Singles & EPs of 2019:

1.      Alex Rex – Night Visiting Song

2.      Lavinia Blackwall – Waiting for Tomorrow

3.      Lavinia Blackwall – Troublemakers

4.      The Wedding Present – Jump In, The Water’s Fine

Albums from Other Years:

1.      Woven Skull – Woven Skull

2.      Josef K – Sorry for Laughing

3.      Ana da Silva & Phew – Islands

4.      The Raincoats – Odyshape

5.      Mike & Solveig – Here Comes Today

6.      Kojaque – Deli Dreams

7.      Unwound – Fake Train

8.      BMX Bandits – Forever

9.      Johnny Handle – The Collier Lad

Singles & EPs from Other Years:

1.      Suicide – Dream Baby Dream

2.      Wah! Heat – Better Scream

3.      John Cale – Animal Justice

4.      Jacques Brel – Amsterdam

5.      Woven Skull – Cracking of Limbs

6.      The Wedding Present – Go Out & Get ‘Em, Boy

7.      Waste Fellow – Post Human

My Albums of the Year; 2010-2019:

2019: Alex Rex – Otterburn

2018: Trembling Bells – Dungeness

2017: Alex Rex – Vermilion

2016: Teenage Fanclub – Here

2015: Trembling Bells – The Sovereign Self

2014: Shellac – Dude Incredible

2013: The Pastels – Slow Summits

2012: Godspeed You! Black Emperor – Allelujah! Don’t Bend, Ascend!

2011: British Sea Power – Valhalla Dancehall

2010: Trembling Bells – Abandoned Love

We Must Not Change Its Colour Now..

This is my take on the election; what went wrong and what we need to do next to win the next one -:

Wednesday 12^th December; Steve Albini is back in town for the first time in over 31 years. Shellac are playing the Boiler Shop and my goodness, they were every bit as brutally powerful as you’d expect. We didn’t get End of Radio, but we did get Albini making an impassioned call for us all to cast aside any noble or ignoble principles, any doubts or disagreements and vote Labour the next day. His words were received rapturously and the 50 or so people I would call friends in attendance at the gig, like it was the late 80s / early 90s Egypt Cottage or the original Riverside brought back to life, put aside the gathering apprehension we’d endured ever since the election was called, and tried to believe a better, kinder future was possible. After all, we knew that the Labour Party, however timorously bureaucratic and factional it is by nature, represents the only workers’ party of significant size and influence in this country.

Sadly, the wave of progressive support for opportunity and the healing of the deep wounds of divisive austerity didn’t materialise and the Tories wiped the floor with us, for nefarious reasons I’ll later expand upon. For the first time in my life, after years of denying its existence, I’m now forced to accept that I’ve been living in a complacent, cosmopolitan, lefty bubble that stands almost in diametrical opposition to the ideology of so many former Labour voters. However, and this is crucial, simply because a sizeable chunk of the white working class has deserted Labour at this time, it does not mean the policies advanced in this election were wrong or need to be jettisoned in a wrongheaded race to appeal to authoritarian populists by abandoning our core, red line beliefs.

In attempting to win back the support of those who abandoned Labour for the far right failed gambit of the Brexit Party or even the Tories, we should demonstrate why their embracing of racist and sexist attitudes is unacceptably wrong, on class rather than moral grounds. Reactionary politics have always been the preserve of the ruling elite and have never provided solutions to problems of poverty, unemployment or any other social ill for our class. The problem was in our tactics as a whole and the matter of Brexit, however unpalatable it will be, and specifically the man who was supposedly leading us. We will laugh for decades at the hideous presumption of the non-entity Jo Swanson that she could be Prime Minister, but how will history come to regard the Corbyn era? Was Jeremy any more credible a candidate to be First Lord of the Treasury? Not in the eyes of all our opponents and probably at least half of our party, both inside and outside Westminster.

As I write, the RMT have successfully closed the whole of the Tyne & Wear Metro down for 48 hours, standing up for workers’ pay, conditions, safety and job security. Their struggle is our struggle and I offer uncritical and unstinting support to them. Unfortunately, the current parlous state of political consciousness among workers means this dispute is viewed with growing hostility by inconvenienced shoppers, party goers and the supporters of Newcastle United. Enraged by this strike, they do not hold central government to task for the chronic lack of investment in the service over the past decade, nor do they excoriate the feckless and deceitful management who deviously seek to blame the consistently appalling level of service on the RMT, rather than their own incompetence. This whole situation acts as a microcosm of current English and Welsh politics, whereby the attitude of ordinary working class people to other working class people is at best antagonistic and at worst virulently reactionary. Undoubtedly, Scotland and the Six Counties are on a very different trajectory to the rest of the UK these days, which I’ll again address later in this piece; suffice to say voters in those regions, in large numbers, rejected the BBC bullshit machine and voted with clear consciences, in the most part, for socially progressive and inclusive policies.

Meanwhile, in England and in Wales, voters, in the face of repeated lies of greater and greater magnitude, demonstrating the contempt in which Johnson and his party hold the working class, were prepared, and in many cases displayed great enthusiasm, for voting in the kind of scabrous charlatans that only previously existed in speculative fiction. This can all be demonstrated by the events that have unfolded since they were granted a significant majority; proposed legislation will enable a no deal Brexit, with workers’ rights jettisoned with immediate effect, the reneging on a promise of a universal living wage, a gerrymandered Boundary Commission to ensure a Tory stranglehold over England in perpetuity and, with no sense of irony, a promise to remove the right to strike for transport workers. This should act as no surprise to any of us; the Tories are our enemies. Nye Bevan’s analysis that they are “lower than vermin” has been the truth since he first uttered the phrase and will remain so forever. So, how is it, in the face of an incompetent, corrupt, arrogant set of rapacious, evil thieves that the Labour Party, our mass, workers’ party, failed so dismally to provide even a token show of opposition in the recent election?

Comrades, and I use the term advisedly, the inescapable truth is that, tactically, we got it very wrong during these last few years. It isn’t enough to look outwards and apportion blame on the shoulders of the usual targets. This election result must be seen as more than the product of vicious right-wing media propaganda brainwashing those too stupid to see through this broadcast blanket of bullshit and willingly accepting the lies of the Tories going unchecked. That may well be part of it, but the attacks on our movement have always been part and parcel of our struggle against the evils of capitalism. We’ve had these things before; from the 1924 Zinoviev Letter to Piers Merchant’s despicable anti-Semitic abuse of Nigel Todd in 1983 and on to the unspeakable lies of the establishment, painting Jeremy Corbyn a racist or a supporter of the long-disbanded IRA this time around, our opponents have a clear track record of smears and innuendo. We should have been prepared for this fallacious character assassination; ready to respond with ineffable logic and policies to wrest the agenda back to the reality of the hellhole our society has become, not cryarsing into a social media echo chamber that it wasn’t fair what the baddies were saying. Capitalism isn’t fair and if you can’t find a way to calmly and eloquently explain your position, the opposition are halfway past the post already.

Throughout the campaign, the electorate were persuaded by the media that, other than an unwavering focus on Brexit, where Labour had completely ceded the argument long before the election started, policy could be replaced by personality as the main battleground of this election; the bumbling, incompetent, venal oaf in charge of the Tories was somehow rehabilitated as a well-meaning eccentric of the old school, while the veteran peace campaigner was stigmatised and slandered as a racist, terrorist supporting anti-Semite. Yes, it was a tough old battle and we never laid a glove on the Tories. The whole campaign was marked by reactive attempts at firefighting and fence mending, as we were on a hiding to nothing from day one for three main reasons -:

-          Brexit was the number one issue in the election, however much we tried to make it about the NHS. The simplicity of the Tory slogan Get Brexit Done was as effective as their 1979 strapline; Labour Isn’t Working. We didn’t have a credible policy; Corbyn’s Lexit tendencies that had shown him to be half hearted at best about the idea of a second referendum, left us as the ones dead in a ditch. We appealed to neither Leave nor Remain in significant enough numbers to hold onto the seats we already held, never mind trying to push on for a majority.

-          While our manifesto was a document designed to save the country, it was presented in such a haphazard and inconsistent fashion, so as to seem almost made up on the spot. Did the electorate really know what we stood for? Without an effective figurehead to champion our key policies, our voice was muffled, indistinct and without credibility.

-          The hardest thing to face up to is that Jeremy Corbyn was hated across the country by ordinary Labour supporters, as opposed to his veneration by post 2015 party members, though his repeated undermining by influential figures in parliament didn’t help. Without question, if he had stepped aside in 2017, perhaps for Dan Jarvis or Yvette Cooper (and I almost can’t believe I’ve just typed that), we would be in power now.

At this point, I must state that Jeremy Corbyn is a good man. His main trouble with his attempts at fulfilling his job description of trying to become Prime Minister is that he isn’t a natural leader. Yes he’s an ideas man and yes he would be a no-brainer as party president, as opposed to the shifty, boorish Ian Lavery, but he wasn’t a leader. The baggage of his contacts with Sinn Fein were a positive boon to the likes of me and many of my cosmopolitan elite pals who unquestioningly support a United Socialist 32 County Irish Republic, but didn’t sit so well with Bill the brickie in Blackburn, whose nephew had been blow up in South Armagh. As regards Brexit, a simple yes or no by the whole party would have sufficed, back in 2016 preferably. Don’t forget, on the day after the referendum, Corbyn told May to trigger Article 50 there and then. If that was to have been our policy, all well and good; many of us would have been appalled and sought to change it, but at least it would have been a line in the sand. Something people would have understood, rather than having to unwrap layers of obfuscatory rhetoric from a timid proposition that satisfied no-one. The received wisdom that grappling over the EU would tear the Tories apart has taken on a grim hue when we look at the raw data of elected members and a closer examination of their allegiances.

The Labour Party, from 2017 onwards, amidst the farcical political stasis in parliament, committed electoral suicide by the unforgivable lack of clarity in our stance on Brexit, though it was sadly repeated so often in many different policy areas, that it was to be our downfall. Frankly, Corbyn stalled after the surprisingly encouraging performance last time around and eventually began rolling back downhill at breakneck pace after 2017; that was his high water mark and if he’d stepped aside then, for whomsoever, we could have built on the protest vote of the previous election to take us to power, because he simply hadn’t a clue what to do next, other than say what he’d been saying in the previous 2 years. So, we blew it and, in staying where he is until the New Year, Corbyn shows he still hasn’t a clue about leadership.

Frankly, while we were right to put our faith in his policies, we were wrong to have any trust in his judgement, regardless of the empty words of the wealthy, tendentious Bolsheviks in their £350k houses, who’ve never so much as delivered a leaflet, much less taken an active role, sniping at long term party members, including both defeated and elected members for questioning Corbyn’s performance.  His error strewn performances during the campaign made it almost seem as if his heart wasn’t in it as polling day drew closer; Brexit was a minefield and even our greatest achievement, the NHS, wasn’t discussed with sufficient clarity or gusto. We haven’t even touched on anti-Semitism yet.

No I don’t think Corbyn is anti-Semitic, but I do think the reek of 70s student politics in the BDS movement and Maomentum’s tacit prolongation of the Trotskyist touchstone of an international Jewish banking conspiracy ruling the world (which is about as credible these days as David Icke’s theories on shape shifting lizards in Buckingham Palace) were not helpful, either in the party or the wider community. The media portrayed Corbyn as anti-Semitic and his twin responses of ignoring the issue or whispering mealy-mouthed apologies did not wash. The time to respond was two or three years previously when the accusations began to fly. However, I’ll state it again; Corbyn is not an anti-Semite, a racist or a proponent of the Armed Struggle, despite what many seek to believe. Sadly, he isn’t a leader either.

Looking north of the border, it is clear that Nicola Sturgeon, despite the tasteless, chauvinistic, personal sneering, courtesy of predominantly English reactionary right wingers, knows exactly how to run her party. Of course the sub judice rules around the elephant in the room that is Alex Salmond’s impending trial for sexual offences helped her no end, but a return of 48 of the 59 Scottish seats is a major triumph. The Tories hold 6 rural seats; covering huge swathes of empty land and the Lib Dems have 4 which, Edinburgh South West apart, are similar tracts of Caledonian tundra. That leaves one single seat in the whole of Scotland, in Edinburgh South, in the hands of the Labour Party.  It shows, in comparison to the SNP’s strident, clear message and articulate, focussed leader, we have become an irrelevance for a country that rightly wishes to be afforded the chance to cut all ties with southern neighbours whose values are utterly different and considerably less community based than those in Scotland. Scotland should be an independent Republic and a member of the EU. I fervently hope this to be the case, though I’d counsel against expecting it any time soon, as Johnson is such a contrary bastard he’ll deny a referendum just because he can. This would not necessarily be bad news for Sturgeon and the SNP, as the imminent social privations that Brexit and 5 more years of Tory rule have in store will simply harden the resolve of most Scots that they want out of the sordid Eton Mess that Britain will become.

Across the sea, the DUP’s idiocy came to bite them on the arse. Even their only functionally literate member, Nigel Dodds, got his cards in North Belfast as Belfast’s mayor John Finucane, son of the Republican solicitor Pat Finucane who was murdered by collusion between British occupying forces and Loyalist paramilitaries, swept him aside. Belfast South was taken by the reanimated SDLP, where the Shinners stepped aside and saw Claire Hanna ensure only a single Loyalist representative from the City at Westminster. Even then Naomi Long of the Alliance Party was a hair’s breadth away from ousting the DUP candidate. However, cross community pro EU politics prospered in the affluent exurbs. The intriguing and principled Sylvia Herman retired, allowing Stephen Farry of the Alliance Party to take North Down. While the DUP, already being demonised for their lack of enthusiasm for the return of Stormont, may be the largest party with 8 MPs, they trail the pro EU bloc of 10 other MPs. It is an inescapable fact that Johnson’s Brexit deal will do more to advance the cause of a United Ireland than 30 years of the Armed Struggle ever did. A 32 county republic is nearer now than at any time since 1920 and it would be nice if the 100^th anniversary of partition was marked by reunification, even if that sticks in the craw of a certain strata of Loyalists.

One of the things that struck me most about this election as it played out on social media was the virulent hatred of Corbyn by former members of the armed forces. I ended up blocking half a dozen people on Facebook for their shocking takes on British democracy. Perhaps I’m being naïve in not realising that the type of person prepared to carry weapons for the state is probably not the sort who is likely to comprehend the nuances of Jeremy Corbyn’s contact with Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness back in the day, or indeed his membership of the Troops Out Movement. That said, even I was taken aback by the endless trumpeting of slogans calling him a traitor or a terrorist, demanding his imprisonment or execution, by seemingly ordinary people who, if you scratch the surface, outed themselves as rabid fascists, ready to take on democracy if the vote went against them. Frankly, it frightens me that the British state is able to plant such fomenters of hatred in the community; they are the potential white Mujahideen in our midst. If social unrest escalates, watch out for their action. They are the ringmasters for the disaffected stormy petrels of the right and 1,000 teenagers waving Not My Prime Minister placards in city centres on cold winter nights won’t have a chance against them.

Undoubtedly, the biggest and worst lie the right-wing establishment was allowed to repeatedly trumpet was the idiotic and offensive claim that Corbyn, a man who has spent his entire adult life fighting racism and injustice, is a racist. He may be many things, but he certainly isn’t that. However, the myth became accepted as reality, while enormous swathes of Labour’s natural support abandoned, hopefully temporarily, politics based on class consciousness and collectivism, in favour of the repugnant ideology of racial politics. And you know what?  Outside the big cities where the progressive, educated, multi ethnic, multi-racial, socialist elite are based, after all I’ve said in this article, I can understand exactly why the white working class have abandoned us.

After three years of being told they were thick, racist meatheads whose opinions didn’t count because they weren’t the same as ours, and I hold my hands up to being one of the worst exponents of such intellectual snobbery, the denizens of Blyth, Consett, Stanley, Spennymoor and a hundred other economically and socially blighted, isolated small towns did exactly what they did at the 2016 referendum. They told the established order to fuck off. The difference being that in 2016 it was the whole political order they set their sights on, whereas in 2019 it is solely the Labour Party who have been humiliated. While there is the temptation to laugh at the scores of balding, middle aged white working class men who will die on the streets, of COPD, Type 2 Diabetes or any one of a string of lifestyle related cancers, as their darling Boris will abolish social housing and sell off the NHS, there is no worth in vicious Schadenfreude I’m afraid. From our perspective, my sympathy for Diane Abbott, a black, female Cambridge graduate, incessantly derided by white, working class men for being stupid (yes, a Cambridge gaaduate), is bottomless. Additionally, I’m heartbroken for Laura Pidcock, who I would have loved to have as Party Leader if she’d been returned, and dear old Dennis Skinner who’ve lost their seats, but both of them would tell you, in no uncertain terms, that the time to mourn is over and the need to move on, in a more inclusive and thoughtful manner is upon us. As the Pop Group said at the end of We Are All Prostitutes; “this is the point where despair ends and tactics begin.”

Other than Brexit, our manifesto was a document designed to save our country, full of policies that, in isolation, are far more popular than those of the Tories on the same subjects. However Corbyn’s performance, the Media circus and the omnipresent, looming spectre of Brexit holed us below the waterline a good 18 months back. For the future, we must not abandon our socially progressive, egalitarian policies and principles, but we need to find a way to express how a better future is possible, in the face of 5 more years of grinding Tory austerity. We won’t abandon the voters who abandoned us; we must seek to reconnect with them and show, with the greatest of respect, how they’ve backed the wrong horse, for the good of themselves and the country as a whole. Who should lead us? Good question, but I’ll take the Fifth on that until the New Year as Marxists can show we’re as nice as Christians at Christmas, especially in your local.

Wednesday 19^th December; the Tynemouth Lodge Christmas Party, where the go to pint is that liquid ambrosia, Bass. Hughie Price has had The Lodge since 1983; in that time, the Bass has remained an unchanging, perfect pint, almost utterly unknown outside of the NE30 area, except for devoted connoisseurs of Real Ale who swear by its potency and power. It is the beer that reminds me most of the perfect, unchanging, impossibilist position of the dear old Socialist Party of Great Britain. Sadly though, the future years will need us to understand why people opt for Carling and John Smith’s…

Insider Trading

There's a weighty missive coming next week, but I've written this for Martin Pollard's benefit, if nobody else's....

Over the past few years, one of my Winter Sunday sporting highlights has been Tynemouth CC’s participation in 6-a-side indoor cricket. Skippered by the Brearleyesque deep thinker Martin Pollard, the Croons have won the Northumberland and then North East titles for the last 3 seasons, before falling a step from Lords in the Northern Final at Old Trafford.  As I normally associate the first rungs on the ladder, at South North, as being contiguous with the opening of Advent calendars, it came as something of a surprise when Poll informed me at TCC’s annual fireworks display that the opening round was taking place the day after; Sunday November 10^th.  The so-called game of the season between Liverpool and Man City certainly took second billing to the Northumberland Cricket Board first qualifying round of the National Indoor 6-a-side competition in my eyes.

Having graciously accepted a lift up to leafy NE3 from the captain, I took my place in a frenetic, hysterical, baying crowd of 2 while a bumper roster of 7, allowing for squad rotation if you please, made short work of Cowgate (loud and messily attired) in the first game and even shorter work of Backworth (young and neat) in the second. As a result, a place in the county final on December 8^th was assured. Over the next fortnight, Benwell Hill and then South North also secured their places in this potential group of death.

 

Last year’s final saw Tynemouth win, in the immediate aftermath of Newcastle’s last second home defeat to Wolves, on the day True Faith’s ham-fisted handiwork had fatally undermined the proposed anti-Ashley boycott of SJP. This year, in front of the lowest crowd for a league game in almost a decade, Newcastle came from behind to grab the points with a late Fernandez winner. Great result. I didn’t attend (obviously), nor did I watch events unfolding on a dodgy stream, but I received updates as I pedalled to a now leafless NE3. There was no lift available on this occasion as Captain Poll was down in Leeds, so therefore unavailable, allowing Andrew Smith to step into the role. Rather like a football team’s supposed interim manager bounce, the hope today, especially against the home side’s Galacticos, was to receive an interim skipper bounce. The rest of the side, showing 3 changes, lined up as: Nick Armstrong, a seriously hungover Matty Brown, the recently retired and then unretired Graham Hallam, David Mansfield and Sam Robson.

Even before a ball had been bowled, the chances of Benwell Hill were dealt a devastating blow as they only had 5 eligible players, though the 6^th one present was allowed to field, but not bat or bowl. Despite the usual trademark Tynemouth chaotic running that saw 3 run outs, we made 127 all out off 11 or our 12 allotted overs, with Sam top scoring with a very useful 57. In response, the Hill spooned a catch via the ceiling from the very first ball and failed to recover, eventually subsiding to 45 all out. While we adjoined to a deserted and closed bar to watch Brighton v Wolves, the Hill did no better against the hosts, leaving the local titans to battle it out in the final, deciding game.

Bowling first, we did well to restrict a side including Adam Cragg, JDT and Jonny Wightman to 96 all out. In response, we took it slow and steady against the naggingly insistent and accurate bowling of Jonny W and Simon West. Despite not being there, MLP demanded updates and after initially sending one each other, it came down to a message a ball as it got tight. However, with 5 needed from 2 balls, my battery died, and the phone switched off. One can only imagine the frustration of Poll, pacing the room down in Leeds, waiting for updates; hoping for the best, though fearing the worst.

He wasn’t to know it until much later, but we won with a crazy 5 from the penultimate ball; 3 for a run that hit the side curtain, followed by 2 more for an overthrow that hit the other side curtain and a scampered run. As a result, we qualify for the North East Final at Durham on February 23^rd or thereabouts; opponents yet to be decided.

Well done lads; let’s get to Lords this time around!

Cestrian Car Crash

Benfield are out the FA Vase, again. It wasn't the best of days....

I would never claim to be well-travelled, other than in Ireland and Scotland. In this country, it is a source of much embarrassment for me that, other than enjoying many repeated visits to Manchester over the years, I have almost no knowledge of the North West other than the Cottonopolis. While I’ve been to most grounds than make up the 92, in its many iterations, there are some shocking gaps in my knowledge of Lancashire, Cheshire and the Wirral. Don’t even start with my non-league ignorance of this area. Consequently, Benfield’s reward for crushing Guisborough 4-0 in the previous round, an away trip to Vauxhall Motors in Ellesmere Port, was a chance to visit an area I know nothing about and a place I’d never been.

Once I’d digested the draw, the reality of the distances involved struck home; coach travel may be less of an ordeal than the 1980s, now we have WiFi, charging points and flush nettys, but 4 and a half hours each way is a challenge for this notoriously queasy road traveller. Mind, the bus was the only option as train fares to Ellesmere Port were an eye-wateringly prohibitive £95 return, with no cheap deals available on a journey that would take longer than the bus. At least it wasn’t a trip to Vauxhall, SW8; home of the horrid Kate Hooey I suppose.

Two days after a majority verdict by the jury had found David Duckinfield not guilty of 95 cases of manslaughter after a retrial at Chester Crown Court, showing that there is still no justice for the 96 victims of Hillsborough, I apprehensively picked my way up the frozen pavement of Benfield Road from Walkergate Metro around 9.00, taking the seat behind the driver, as our coach proceeded to peel away from a frosty Sam Smith’s Park for Ellesmere Port.  After a month of incessant rain had cancelled all but one of our games since the last round, the clear sky and dazzling sun mocked us, as sub-zero temperatures caused another raft of postponements in our area. One glimmer of hope was that it was a good 5 degrees warmer on the far side of the country than this, so we travelled hopefully.

Before noon, we pulled into Hartshead Services where Consett, heading for Wythenshawe Town and Hebburn, on their way to Lower Breck, 250 yards from Anfield on a day when Liverpool were at home, had already stopped for a breather. Handshakes and good luck messages were exchanged, before Vauxhall Motors tweeted that the game was on, unless the officials said different. We left Hartshead in good spirits; certainly better than 2015, en route to Atherton Railways, when I ruined a pair of emerald green New Balance 420s by stepping into a quagmire, searching for a bin to deposit an empty coffee cup and only 3 Benfield supporters made the journey; Allen, Gary and me. This time we’d an almost full bus, though there were many notable absentees, and I’d tipped up £25 for a dozen cans of assorted craft ales from the Waitrose within. They would help me celebrate or commiserate on the long journey back, depending on what the afternoon had in store.

 

The rest of the journey on the baking, arid bus, was spent half listening to the first half of Newcastle v Man City, while gazing out on a solid landscape that showed no signs of yielding, though when we dropped altitude, the earth softened, probably on account of the pollution pumped out by the various factories on the Runcorn to Ellesmere Port corridor. I’ve no idea what the towns are like, but the landscape was reminiscent of the A19 by Billingham; empty green fields with tall chimneys belching out effluent, standing guard. We arrived just in time for the second half of NUFC versus City. If there were to be any doubts as to the allegiances of the locals, that was dispelled by Shelvey’s raking equaliser that almost took the roof off the impressive social club that adjoined the ground. The 2 points dropped by City make it ever more likely that Liverpool will win the title.

Everything about Vauxhall Motors FC was impressive; the ground, the facilities, the welcome. It spoke of a club used to play at a higher level, even if they were a step below us, though probably not for long as they’ve now won 14 successive games. They won this one with ease as, frankly, we didn’t show up. It was not the Newcastle Benfield I’ve long adored, but a frozen shadow of the side we are. The scoreless, attritional first half gave us a false sense of comfort, before VM took us apart after the break. Their performance deserved to be seen by more than the 134 hardy souls who braved the cold. Like Chadderton in 2014, Atherton in 2015 and Northwich Vics last season, we never got started against another one of those determined, muscular sides from over the Pennines, who insist on ruining our best efforts to gain some glory in the FA Vase.

Of course we had chances; a stonewall penalty for the keeper taking out Brassy on the hour that wasn’t given was the turning point, as they broke and scored immediately. A long ball over the top was misjudged by Brad Varga and a VM player nipped in to poke the ball home. Dennis Knight and Cyril Giraud came on, to give us an attacking threat, but another long ball did us. Reece Noble brought down the last man and the red card, penalty; goal triumvirate of doom sealed our fate. Matty Parker’s last second red for 2 yellows was just a sad, though fitting, codicil for the whole day.

After the final whistle, we drank a sad, final glass and clambered back towards home. Stu Elliott came on the bus and, gutted though he was, apologised for the result and performance. It was a great gesture and kept spirits up, as did the big bag of cans, until we landed; drunk and still in despair, around 9.30, by which time thoughts had turned from Wembley to Whickham on Wednesday night.