FOXHOLE

Whichever way one looks at it, this has been a good week for the bourgeois media class that controls so much of the flow of information that filters down to the proles. From the impending ‘retirement’ of Rupert Murdoch to Suella Braverman’s painfully accurate assessment of multiculturalism to the furore over Laurence Fox’s frankly idiotic comments about female journalist Ava Evans on GB News, there’s been plenty to get in a lather about and point to as vindication of its holier-than-thou stance. In the case of the Digger, few would argue that he has been pivotal to the general coarsening of discourse since the 1980s, though I suspect the Guardianistas of this world are less concerned with Murdoch’s odious influence in this respect than in the fact he turned the masses away from their own patronising notion of what the plebs should and shouldn’t believe in. At least the MSM can breathe a sigh of relief at Murdoch’s announcement, just as it can regard the Home Secretary’s latest speech as another nail in the Tory coffin, and the current GB News scandal as one more point on the board that edges it closer to cancellation.

Of course, the channel has been mired in controversy ever since its original figurehead Andrew Neil jumped ship early on, turning the admirable anti-Woke experiment into – in the eyes of its critics – a British equivalent of the terminally-toxic Fox News. Such comparisons have been a tad disproportionate, but finally we have the kind of moral panic GB News’s opponents have been praying for. The fact that Laurence Fox’s outburst occurred on the show of Dan Wootton, a presenter currently under investigation courtesy of his alleged ‘inappropriate behaviour’ in the workplace of his past tabloid employers, was the icing on the cake, I guess – especially coming at a moment when former radical darling Russell Brand has been so publicly excommunicated on the strength of other allegations; such behaviour not only shows ‘the Right’ is justifiably worthy of eternal condemnation, but proves the opposition was correct all along. Fox should’ve known better, though; one way you can highlight the difference between you and your enemy in this battle is to not replicate the playground insults of the other side. By all means air a critique of a journo, but at least exhibit a little verbal eloquence and don’t stoop to saying ‘Who’d want to shag that?’, FFS.

‘Show me a single, self-respecting man who’d like to climb in bed with that woman,’ said Fox, amongst numerous other stupid compliments. He has subsequently apologised, but it doesn’t really make any difference; the damage is done – and in doing so Fox has given the green-light to establishment figures on ‘the right side of history’ such as Owen Jones and Adam Boulton to denounce GB News and its right to broadcast. This is the long-awaited scandal the likes of Jones and Boulton are clearly relishing – and these are the same morally-righteous characters who say nothing when natural-born women fighting to preserve hard-won women’s rights are bullied by men in drag and are bombarded with the kind of misogynistic threats that make Laurence Fox’s comments look like gentle teasing – those who turned a blind eye to the recent treatment dished-out to Róisín Murphy, or who say nothing when a Person of Colour refuses to play ball and is then fair game to be subjected to online racist abuse that is somehow permissible, unlike when black England footballers receive the same treatment from racists who don’t hide behind the ‘anti-racist’ banner.

To be fair, GB News didn’t piss about in dealing with the aftermath of this storm in a teacup; it suspended Laurence Fox from his regular spot and Dan Wootton himself issued a swift apology for not challenging Fox’s outburst. After all, the station may well only receive MSM publicity when something like this happens, but on the whole it employs its fair share of non-Right (not to say non-white) voices who would’ve been Left through and through before the Left decided to hand over the running of its asylum to the lunatics. I suspect a sizeable proportion of the station’s audience are similarly inclined; they’ve not had anywhere else to turn to for the past decade, so understandably welcomed the advent of a news outlet that didn’t pander to the same ideology that has infected every other mainstream platform. I mean, there are people out there who genuinely believe CNN broadcasts the Gospel, implying the likes of GB News is little more than Antichrist Television. Therefore, when someone like Laurence Fox lets the side down, the sense of being under siege is intensified because the knives were already out, and Fox has undermined the good work being done by the likes of Neil Oliver and Andrew Doyle – intelligent and articulate broadcasters whom the MSM won’t touch with a bargepole because they don’t subscribe to the consensus.

Even before GB News began broadcasting, social media was full of hysterical warnings of how the station would be a hate-preaching mouthpiece for every right-wing fruitcake in the country, as though it would effectively be BNP TV; but this was more a reflection of the media class’s mortification over the fact that anyone would dare set up such a station in the first place, not to mention its fear that the masses might actually tune-in and possibly get ideas above their lowly stations by being exposed to an alternative narrative. GB News’s critics were exhilarated when Andrew Neil quit, scuttling in the direction of Channel 4 and dishing the dirt on his former employer, confirming every prejudice held against it in the process; and ever since, they’ve been on permanent watch, waiting for the station to put a foot wrong so they could generate a fresh round of outrage and demand its closure.

Laurence Fox deserves a kick up the backside for not having the imagination to phrase his criticism of Ava Evans in a manner that didn’t sound as though it belonged in a Millwall taproom; but guests on live TV programmes broadcast on any channel sometimes fail to be controlled by their host. Just ask Bill Grundy. Thames didn’t lose its franchise because of The Sex Pistols’ four-letter incident in 1976, and there’s no reason why GB News should be shed of its licence due to this moment of laxity on the part of Dan Wootton. GB News isn’t perfect, by any means; but it does feel vital right now that we have some sort of freedom of choice when it comes to rolling news. Otherwise, we may as well just all watch that nice North Korean lady reading the headlines in her kimono.

MICHAEL GAMBON (1940-2023)

I first became belatedly aware of Michael Gambon around 1985 when he played Oscar Wilde in a BBC2 dramatisation of the great wordsmith’s fatal dalliance with Lord Alfred ‘Bosie’ Douglas. I was ignorant then of Gambon’s 20-year career as a respected and revered stage actor, one of many who were fortunate to fall under the patronage of Laurence Olivier. The Dublin-born thespian belonged to the same generation of acting talent as Derek Jacobi, though wider appreciation through film and TV work was fairly threadbare until the 1980s. He often talked about his audition for Bond in that interim period between George Lazenby and Roger Moore, yet it’s hard to imagine such an un-suave actor as a convincing 007; perhaps one might have initially struggled to picture him as Oscar Wilde too, though Gambon bore more of a physical resemblance to the renowned wit of his own hometown at the period of Wilde’s life in which the BBC2 drama was set, and he captured the tragic downfall of an overconfident man deluded by the untouchable invincibility of fame and fortune as brilliantly as any actor ever has. Not long after, Gambon’s sideline career on the small screen went into overdrive when he was cast as the lead in Dennis Potter’s controversial critical triumph, ‘The Singing Detective’, the role for which he probably remains best remembered – and maybe rightly so, as it still stands as Potter’s finest achievement, which is saying something considering his CV. As far as CV’s go, Gambon went on to have a fairly impressive one himself; his passing at the grand old age of 82 is sad, but he did make one hell of a mark.

© The Editor

Website: https://www.johnnymonroe.co.uk/

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HIGH-STREET BLUES

It may have sometimes been a thrifty option for penny-pinching skinflints forever on the lookout for a bargain that would enable them to avoid breaking the bank, but Wilkos was for many years an essential oasis for those living on (or hovering around) the breadline. Even when it was known as Wilkinson’s, the discount store familiar to most high-streets and city centres for the best part of 30 years became a go-to shop for all those odd, unglamorous items every household is often in need of – light-bulbs, loo rolls, cutlery, candles, cushions, plates, plasters, plant pots, plugs, picture frames, printer cartridges, pens, pans, paint, paracetamol, pillows, pet-food, note-pads, wrapping-paper, photographic paper, soap powder, seeds, screws, shampoo, shaving foam, razor blades, mugs and drinking glasses, air-freshener, mouthwash, washing-up liquid, toothpaste, throat-sweets, jiffy-bags, bin-bags, bubble-bath, bed-sheets, bleach, brollies, birthday cards, bubblewrap, blank DVDs, CDs and (at one time) VHS tapes; come Christmas, it could also be a handy place to pick-up reasonably-priced presents, such as the rocking-horse I bought my niece when she was a toddler and carried all the way home on foot.

Today I visited my local branch for what will probably be the final time; the signs in the window announcing a virtual closing-down sale boasting half-price goods have been changing on a daily basis of late, with the latest announcing it was the last day of trading itself. The past few weeks have seen the stories circulating in the media as to the store’s imminent demise impact on the consumer, with the shelves in the shop gradually emptying bit-by-bit. A few days ago, the upstairs section of the store – which specialised in what one might refer to as the DIY items – was taped-off from the shopper as though it were a police crime-scene, and I’ve noticed more and more empty aisles being blocked, reducing the size of the shop in the process as though the walls were closing-in, redistributing goods that used to be housed in specific sections to the remaining, increasingly-threadbare shelves still standing. It’s an unsettling experience, wandering around a shop as it prepares to meet its maker, seeing the place stripped bare and the parasites descending in search of a bargain; the natural reaction is to refer to those cynical opportunists struggling to navigate the aisles whilst weighed-down by half-price items (like kids on ‘Crackerjack’ playing that game involving cabbages) as locusts, but I suppose one can’t really blame them; they won’t have another chance where Wilkos is concerned.

When Wilkos goes, what goes with it is an entire post-war physical shopping culture that has long depended on at least one high-street store providing the customer with goods at a decent, non-extortionate price without descending to the tat market of the pound-shop. Personally, I think Wilkos itself has never really recovered from the panic buying that characterised the first wave of lockdown; I don’t blame Brexit at all – which seems to have become the default excuse of late; for me, the disappearance of items from the shelves that panic buying provoked is a legacy of the pandemic that changed Wilkos (along with many of us) forever. I often found many of the bits and pieces I’d long purchased exclusively from there were also available in Sainsbury’s at no greater price, and often on the Sainsbury’s shelves when absent from the Wilkos ones. Therefore, I haven’t been as dependent on the store post-pandemic as I was before it, and nowhere near as dependent as I was when every other shop in the neighbourhood would stretch my limited finances to breaking point. At the same time, it’s only now that it’s on the cusp of vanishing that I’ve belatedly realised how much I still relied upon it for some of those items listed in the opening paragraph, items which I’ll have no choice but to purchase online in future.

Indeed, one might take an approach that views the demise of Wilkos as possibly another move in the ongoing and concerted effort to persuade the proles to conduct all their exchanges online from now on. People sometimes wonder why so many today buy everything on Amazon or eBay instead of doing so in person at an actual physical store, but it’s increasingly the case that consumers are left with no other option, confronted by boarded-up shop fronts on their local high-street or a limited selection of goods in the stores that have yet to be converted into cafés or charity shops. Blaming it on Brexit is a cop-out that overlooks something that has been going on for far longer, and no amount of lame ‘levelling-up’ initiatives on the part of government will alter a trend that has been engineered as much as it has happened organically. The out-of-town retail parks that materialised for the benefit of the motorist from the 90s onwards accelerated a deliberate drift away from the city centre and the high-street as the primary location of shopping, and the hideous American-style malls that were imported to this country around the same time have continued to offer an illusion of choice, containing the same tired chain-store brands housed under the same uninspiring roof and narrowing actual choice so that a store like Wilkos remained an essential port of call out on the old high-street for the pedestrian plebs.

Like many a nationwide shop with its roots in humble origins, Wilkinson’s started out in provincial obscurity, with its first store opening in Leicester as far back as 1932; an East Midlands and South East institution by the war years, a glimpse of its Beaconsfield branch can apparently be sighted in a scene from ‘Brief Encounter’ (1945). I myself remember a high-street branch in Leeds in the early 1970s, though the business didn’t seem to morph into the more familiar Wilkos form until the end of the 80s, by which time it could boast 78 branches across the country; upon the death of founder James Kemsey Wilkinson in 1997, Wilkinson’s had 150. The founder’s son Tony had inherited the running of the empire in 1972, a position he held until handing down the business to his daughter Lisa upon retirement in 2005. Under Lisa Wilkinson, the name of the shop was abbreviated to Wilko and the family – led by Lisa – began to receive handsome dividends of £3 million from the board, a trend that continued throughout awkward economic periods, such as during the 2017 plan to axe 4,000 jobs and the 2022 closure of 15 stores.

2023 has been a difficult year for an increasingly-rare family business that had yet to sell out to foreign ownership, unlike endless other British institutions. At the beginning of this year, Wilkos revealed it had borrowed £40 million from ‘restructuring firm’ Hilco Capital and then announced it was planning upwards of 400 redundancies; in August, news broke that Wilkos was appointing administrators whilst seeking a buyer, entering administration that month – a decision that led to the revelation that the family owners of the business had helped themselves to the best part of £77 million from the company over the past decade. Multinational variety store chain B&M may have spent £13 million on 51 Wilkos stores, but 52 were still poised to close along with over a thousand job losses; Poundland purchased an additional 71, promising to hire ex-Wilkos staff to run them, whilst the Wilkos brand and intellectual property rights were snapped-up by The Range. Whichever way one looks at it, however, it’s evident the era of Wilkos as an affordable option on a diminished and expensive high-street is over.

The loss of once-familiar high-street and city centre chains to have vanished over the past 15 years – BHS and Debenhams being the most prominent – didn’t really affect me personally, as I rarely ventured into them. Wilkos was different, though, being one of the few stores those in my social demographic at the time could regularly afford to shop at. Now it’s gone, I’ve no doubt online shopping will extend from its current position of specialising in niche goods to covering everything a quick trip to Wilkos entailed for so many years. Just don’t blame the shopper for the death of the high-street.

© The Editor

Website: https://www.johnnymonroe.co.uk/

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I WEREN’T EVEN THERE

Say the name Fred Dinenage to anyone of a certain age and chances are they might yell ‘How!’ – reflecting the fact Dinenage co-presented the long-running children’s show from the mid-60s to the early 80s. ‘How’ emanated from the deceased ITV franchise-holder for the South-east, Southern Television, and Dinenage continued to work on programmes for Southern’s successors TVS and Meridian for decades thereafter, as well as having a stint as a sports host for Yorkshire Television in the 1970s and a spell as one of Dickie Davies’s understudies on ‘World of Sport’ during the same period. Like many a veteran MSM presenter for whom more than one generation has a kitsch affection, we cannot really hold the great, blameless Fred responsible for the actions of his offspring, such as his daughter Caroline. Dame Caroline Dinenage has been MP for Gosport since 2010 and currently serves as Chair of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee. This week, her signature appeared on a widely-circulated letter with worrying implications for the continuation of the ancient English presumption of innocence before guilt, and one containing far wider implications than whatever one’s personal opinion of Russell Brand happens to be.

The letter in question was addressed to the Chief Executive Officer of Rumble, an independent online platform that serves as a mouthpiece for many who have fallen foul of Big Tech’s hypocritical double standards, including Russell Brand. I’ve read one or two articles decrying YouTube’s decision to demonetise Brand’s YT channel in the wake of allegations that have yet to lead to Inspector Knacker requesting his assistance in helping the Force with their inquiries; most seem shocked that YT would stoop to such a kneejerk response to the storm with Brand at the eye of it, but I can’t say I was remotely shocked; in many respects, I’m amazed it took YT so long. After all, YT thinks nothing of demonetising, suspending or terminating channels that don’t chime with its Sillycunt Valley groupthink, as I know only too well; the fact it was going easy on a character bringing in a sizeable amount of advertising revenue wasn’t a surprise, but I figured it would only be a matter of days before YT capitulated to the increasing hysteria in which everyone has to be seen to act.

‘The Culture, Media and Sport Committee is raising questions with the broadcasters and production companies who previously employed Mr Brand to examine both the culture of the industry in the past and whether that culture still prevails today,’ reads the letter bearing Caroline Dinenage’s signature before going on to say, ‘…we are also looking at his use of social media, including on Rumble where he issued his pre-emptive response to the accusations made against him by the Sunday Times and Channel 4’s Dispatches.’ This sentence suggests Brand was somehow out of order in using the platform to issue a legitimate denial when it’s perfectly fine for any other media outlet to accuse him of every heinous crime under the sun without fear of legal reprisals on the part of the accused.

‘While we recognise that Rumble is not the creator of the content published by Mr Brand,’ continues the letter, ‘we are concerned that he may be able to profit from his content on the platform. We would be grateful if you could confirm whether Mr Brand is able to monetise his content, including his videos relating to the serious accusations against him. If so, we would like to know whether Rumble intends to join YouTube in suspending Mr Brand’s ability to earn money on the platform. We would also like to know what Rumble is doing to ensure that creators are not able to use the platform to undermine the welfare of victims of inappropriate and potentially illegal behaviour.’ As my late, much-missed friend Barbara Hewson routinely pointed out, the casual use of the term ‘victim’ to describe those who have hurled an accusation without first being tested in a Court of Law has devalued the term so that an unproven allegation is enough to bestow the title ‘victim’ upon a claimant and naturally places the accused at an unfair advantage. The arrogant, entitled tone of the letter sent to Rumble at least provoked a publicised response that articulates the outrage of free speech advocates everywhere.

Rumble’s response to the Culture, Media and Sport Committee’s letter doesn’t mince its words. ‘We (Rumble) stand for very different values (to YT),’ it says. ‘We have devoted ourselves to the vital cause of defending a free internet – meaning an internet where no one arbitrarily dictate which ideas can or cannot be heard, or which citizens may or not be entitled to a platform. We regard it as deeply inappropriate and dangerous that the UK Parliament would attempt to control who is allowed to speak on our platform or to earn a living from doing so. Singling out an individual and demanding his ban is even more disturbing given the absence of any connection between the allegations and his content on Rumble. We don’t agree with the behaviour of many Rumble creators, but we refuse to penalise them for actions that have nothing to do with our platform.’ The response signs-off with this: ‘Although it may be politically and socially easier for Rumble to join a cancel culture mob, doing so would be a violation of our company’s values and mission. We emphatically reject the UK Parliament’s demands.’

At times like these, I can’t help but recall the superb 1976 movie, ‘The Front’, which deals with the McCarthyite witch-hunts of the early 50s; Woody Allen plays a character who acts as a front for blacklisted TV screenwriters still seeking to make a living despite their sudden pariah status, though when the House Un-American Activities Committee widen their remit and eventually drag him in to testify, Allen’s character doesn’t submit to their authority, exiting the hearing by telling the Committee to ‘go f**k yourselves’. I’m also reminded of PJ Proby, the mid-60s pop star whose career was curtailed by the unfortunate incident of his trousers splitting during a live performance; appearing on a 90s TV show recalling this, he spoke of how Mary Whitehouse visibly relished her part in ensuring he was effectively rendered unemployable as a result. The mean-minded morality of those who justified their self-appointed role as judge, jury and executioner by highlighting the alleged immorality of others is something that seems to be echoing all the way down to the here and now as a government department appears to believe it has the right to deny someone an income simply because of unproven allegations backed up by a MSM that is turning a blind eye to its own involvement.

The Sun is now using Russell Brand as a fresh stick to beat the BBC with, conveniently neglecting to mention the fact it applauded and rewarded Brand’s debauched reputation in the noughties by awarding him the title ‘Shagger of the Year’ for three years in a row from 2006-9; similarly stricken by canny amnesia, the Grauniad condemns Brand whilst strangely forgetting his association with the paper itself, i.e. the eight years in which he penned a weekly column for it, right in the thick of his alleged theft of the virtue of innocent maidens; further condemnations have come from the New Statesman, forgetting the time ten years back when Brand was invited to be guest editor of the magazine for a special edition. Photos of leftie luminaries like Owen Jones and Ed Miliband cosying-up to Brand during the brief spell when a desperate Left was so bedazzled by Brand’s star quality that it somehow saw in him a means of recapturing the Yoof vote says more about the Left’s naive opportunism than it does about those it chose to push forward as this year’s model.

When Brand was a comedian using his fame to enhance his virility he appealed to the tabloid mentality, just as his move into anti-Tory ‘radical’ politics earned him the admiration of liberal broadsheets; his post-pandemic shift into conspiracy theory territory on YT left the Left feeling abandoned by its celebrity darling, lumping him in with the Alex Jones and Andrew Tate types as it licked its wounds. The allegations to have emerged over the past week or so have provided it with additional justification for its estrangement whilst simultaneously ignoring the part it played in creating the monster it now denounces. There’s nowt so queer as folk, it would seem.

© The Editor

Website: https://www.johnnymonroe.co.uk/

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RISING WITHOUT A TRACE

The clock radio that woke me this morning was – as usual – tuned into the ‘Today’ programme, simmering away in the background like polite white noise till I eventually sat down in front of this screen with my first cup of coffee and began to listen. Nick Robinson was interviewing someone my ears quickly surmised to be a politician – hardly surprising considering the programme; but I knew this was someone skilled in the art of speaking at length without saying anything that lingered in the head for more than a handful of seconds – probably some Whitehall waste-of-space, I thought; yeah, another anonymous Minister reciting a script peppered with meaningless buzzwords that could have been lifted from any political mantra of the past 20 years. As with one’s imagination painting portraits of characters from ‘The Archers’ with no idea of what the actor bearing the voice looks like, I started to try and pin the politician down solely on the strength of his vocal chords – it couldn’t be George Osborne, could it? Gideon seems to pop up everywhere these days, often in the company of his ‘bromance’ buddy Ed Balls, quizzed on topical issues as though his opinion matters. No, I listened a little more attentively and calculated the voice belonged to someone closer to the seat of power in 2023 than George Osborne is; I didn’t realise just how close until Robinson addressed his guest as ‘Prime Minister’.

The late lamented Mike Yarwood would once nail and exaggerate the Prime Minister’s quirks and ticks so succinctly that an impersonation of the PM could be replicated in any school playground across the country, with the nation’s leader standing alongside Frank Spencer or James Cagney as an instantly recognised caricature with the requisite catchphrases. Indeed, this was a time when the PM of the day was such a dominant pop cultural presence that it was impossible to watch any non-political programme on TV without their name being referenced somewhere in the script; when sitcoms sat at the top of the ratings this trend was crucial to setting the comedy firmly in a Britain the viewing public knew as home. The words Ted and Heath regularly crop up in the early 70s run of ‘Till Death Us Do Part’, as does the name of his nemesis on the other side of the House. I was also reminded of this when recently viewing the first (1975) series of ‘Fawlty Towers’, with one episode seeing Basil’s routine habit of avoiding all responsibility for his actions manifested as an impassioned cry of ‘Bloody Wilson!’ Fast forward a decade and I guess it would be impossible to watch any 80s product bereft of an occasional mention of Thatcher’s name; indeed, the spectre of Maggie hangs over the television output of that decade – particularly comedy – as though she were an unseen cast member ala Mrs Mainwaring. Similarly, in more recent times, ‘Boris’ would probably figure loudly; but what of the here and now, though?

Has the name ‘Rishi’ been cried out whenever a character is desperately seeking someone to blame for his own failings? If I watched what passes for mainstream comedy these days perhaps I could answer that, though I suspect even if I did I wouldn’t be any wiser. Our incumbent resident of No.10 is either eager to avoid being noticed at all or he’s so blandly forgettable that he’s no idea how to be noticed. Okay, so it’s something of a cliché in political leadership that a larger-than-life character is superseded by a church mouse or a nondescript executive-type; it was certainly the case when John Major succeeded Mrs T, and Gordon Brown was hardly a man ideally suited to wear Tony’s shoes with the same brash, overconfident panache as his predecessor. We received a reversal of the pattern when Theresa May came before Boris, but once Johnson had burned his bridges we had the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it interregnum of Lady Jane Truss before returning to business as usual with a slick salesman whose blatant Blair-esque technique nevertheless lacked the far-reaching impact of New Labour’s greatest communicator.

Rishi Sunak made more of an impression during his stint as pandemic Chancellor, when his luminous appearances alongside shabby, shagged-out Boris and his brandishing of the golden furlough chequebook made him a momentary glimmer of hope for a desperate populace under house-arrest. Since his eventual elevation to the highest office in the land, however, Rishi seems to have become increasingly invisible, his apparent leadership feeling more and more like an irrelevant act of treading water, playing out time till the next General Election. Another cliché – that of the ‘safe pair of hands’ – is often evoked to deflect criticism of the blandness of a less charismatic PM who follows an overbearing colossus, though it can serve to obscure the failings and ineptitude of a politician out of their depth, such as Theresa May. Even if a ‘safe pair of hands’ is usually seen as a sensible option especially in the wake of the kind of chaos we endured in the traumatic fall-out from both Partygate and the 44 days of Truss, not every Minister to inherit that label upon promotion to Downing Street will necessarily emerge as a Harold Macmillan figure improving upon the mess left behind by Anthony Eden. The label may not therefore be one Rishi Sunak would relish as he seeks to make his mark, even if it seems he may have to settle for it as his mark is pretty much translucent to date.

Keeping a low profile in order to emphasise one’s positive difference from such a negatively domineering predecessor (Boris, not Truss) makes sense, but such a tactic has its limits. Rishi Sunak, admittedly, is in something of an unenviable position, with every policy announcement greeted by a cynical shrug of the shoulders, treated as another tiresome attempt to court favour with floating voters in anticipation of 2024. Whatever he does will receive the same response, though knee-jerk reactions to the latest headlines trending on social media or on Fleet Street’s 24-hour rolling loop deserve to be read as early electioneering, giving the impression the PM is a principle-free zone who will stoop to any populist vote-grabber if he thinks it will present him with a pre-emptive advantage over the opposition. Naturally, Prime Ministers and politicians are not averse to responding to what they or their spin-doctors perceive to be the most in-demand needs of the electorate, though even Sunak’s ‘U-turn’ on hitting Net Zero targets – whilst welcomed by those aware of just how damaging the pursuit of Net Zero could be to those least able to shoulder the burden – has a whiff of aiming to please about it.

It probably doesn’t help Rishi Sunak that he’s the fourth consecutive Prime Minister to have inherited the premiership of the UK rather than winning it in a General Election; yes, both Boris and Theresa May did eventually have their positions certified by the electorate, but the trend of every new PM now being internally elected without the public having any say in the matter has a habit of re-emphasising the Us and Them factor, making the incumbent occupant of No.10 more of a distant figure with whom the electorate feel less of a connection than they perhaps felt in the past. It’s possible the stark contrast with the now-incurably unpopular Boris is something Sunak regards as a strength, though his virtual anonymity compared to a big, blustering beast like the ex-World King could also work against him when the people are called upon to decide; perhaps he’s fortunate his prime opponent next time round will be an even greater vacuum of personality than himself.

So, a boy named Sunak is apparently doing his job, allegedly running the country and desperately hoping he doesn’t put a foot wrong as his Party tries not to slip even further down the polls. His invisibility whilst attending to his business is either a by-product of operating in the still considerable shadow cast by Boris or is simply a reflection of his own lack of charisma; whichever the case may be, it’s nevertheless often easy to forget we still have a Prime Minister at all.

© The Editor

Website: https://www.johnnymonroe.co.uk/

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THE AGE OF CONSENT

Was there one specific gag that took the kind of boundary-breaking comedy of 20 years ago as far as it could go before even the broadest of minds thought it had gone too far? In the 2000s it often seemed comedians and comedy shows were constantly trying to out-gross both the competition and themselves, desperately seeking sacred cows to slay as sacred cows were rapidly becoming an endangered species. Audiences expected comedy to be near-the-knuckle, and the need to maintain the shock factor meant the fine line between acceptable and unacceptable was being routinely redrawn. The comedy of the grotesque that had been pioneered on ‘The League of Gentlemen’ was dragged to another, albeit cruder, level by ‘Little Britain’, whereas the characters inhabited by Sacha Baron Cohen – i.e. Ali G and Borat – made fools of people who had no idea they were engaging with an actor cruelly taking the piss out of them; Frankie Boyle would crack jokes about the Queen’s genitalia and Katie Price’s disabled son because he knew that’s what sold out tours and led to TV shows on BBC2 and Channel 4; and Boyle was merely one of the fashionably foul mouths that found infamy on the panel show, perhaps the key vehicle of this last era in which television was central to setting and defining trends in comedy.

Although a household name since the late 80s, Jonathan Ross resuscitated his career on the panel show, entering into its Wild West spirit by pushing the limits of what he could get away with saying; he also became pals with a fresher face who was a product of this ‘anything goes’ scene, a comedian/presenter/actor looking more like a rock star should at a time when a rock star looked like Chris Martin. Naturally, I’m talking about Russell Brand. Because shock and outrage sold in the noughties, Russell Brand wasn’t banished to the outré fringes as Derek & Clive had been 30 years before, but appeared solely on mainstream terrestrial TV as well as acting in Hollywood movies; he even had his own show on Radio 2, one that came to an abrupt end in October 2008 when Ross and Brand’s frat-boy humour seemed to cross one line too many for both the Daily Mail and the BBC. The broadcast of obscene messages that the pair left on the answer-phone of ‘Fawlty Towers’ actor Andrew Sachs blew up into a media moral panic that resulted in Brand resigning, Ross being suspended, and the Beeb receiving a heavy fine from Ofcom. In retrospect, it also seemed to mark the point at which comedy atoned for its sins by disengaging itself from bad taste and setting out on a cleansing path that would gradually see it evolve into the lame showbiz wing of identity politics that few beyond its puritanical (not to say hypocritical) clique find remotely amusing.

Russell Brand survived the ‘Sachs scandal’ and has reinvented himself several times since; in more recent years he has devoted most of his time to a YouTube channel in which he questions perceived wisdom and challenges the mainstream narrative on current affairs, or – if you’re not a fan – spouts increasingly paranoid conspiracy theories. There are plenty on YT of this type, but as long as the audience is big enough (and the advertising revenue thus plentiful), the moral guardians of YT turn a blind eye to videos that a creator with a smaller following and less of a ‘brand’ would invariably have had removed along with the channel itself. It happened plenty of times during the pandemic, where any querying of lockdown, the vaccine, or the effectiveness of masks would result in an instant strike. So, if we are to accept the theory that a high-profile figure like Brand is nevertheless bound to attract the attention of those who want to silence his awkward questioning – a theory Brand himself subscribes to – there appear to be one or two tactics that can be used to great effect when all else fails.

Having already been road-tested on the likes of Joe Rogan, one weapon is to dredge up some clip or tweet from 10-15 years ago that implies said target was once – and may well still be – racist; if that doesn’t kill his career, are there any women out there prepared to claim he groped them over a decade ago? With the MeToo thing still being a hip prism to view the male of the species through, chances are this could work and may well encourage ‘more victims to come forward’. Let’s be honest, though, it’s relatively simple where Russell Brand is concerned, as he did once have something of a reputation as a randy rat up a drainpipe. Charlie Brooker once referred to him as a ‘Dickensian dick-monster’, and no one doubts he was endlessly in like Flynn and out again as a young man about town; but at the same time we should also acknowledge that – like it or not – there are some young women out there who are themselves rather predatory when it comes to celebrities; these sirens pursue pop stars, footballers and film stars with an unsentimental ruthlessness that hapless narcissistic chaps who can’t see beyond the ends of their dicks are easy prey for. In many respects, they deserve each other – as long as both acknowledge the rules of the casual sex game, of course.

The quaint idea that Brand was some devilish Regency buck and serial seducer who charmed wholesome, virtuous virgins into his boudoir without them having the faintest idea what was going on is as ludicrous as every other ‘octopus’ narrative that one of the century’s most profitable boom industries has supplied the MSM with over the past decade or so. At the peak of his powers, Brand was not a man one would hire to babysit one’s unsullied teenage daughter; he was an unashamed egocentric, arrogant, rock ‘n’ roll rascal no different from the revered musical icons he modelled himself on; yes, unsullied daughters ought to be locked-up whenever such a character is around, just as they ought to have been whenever The Rolling Stones or Led Zeppelin flew into town on their private jets like coked-up Vikings in the mood for some rape and pillage. However, it’s an inconvenient truth that some daughters know exactly what they’re letting themselves in for when they consciously drift onto the radar of a character like the young Russell Brand, and they’re not anticipating cucumber sandwiches followed by a slide-show of English parish churches.

We now more or less expect this storyline to surface at a certain point in an entertainer’s career, and if they can’t be exposed as a nonce, at least we can depend on a few of their consensual encounters to emerge suddenly amnesia-free from the woodwork with newfound naivety as to the nature of the distant dalliance. In some respects, it’s been quite a journey to have travelled all the way from the dirty old men of Radio 1 and BBC Light Entertainment in the 60s and 70s, picking-up the odd forgotten face from the 80s and 90s en route, and now finally reaching the 2000s to hone-in on a figure neither past-it or passed-on. Over the last 48 hours the same old hackneyed claims and allegations (along with the familiar apologies of those who feel they have something to apologise for) have been dusted down and wheeled-out once again, most probably on yet another of those ‘documentary’ exposés which apparently aired on Brand’s former employer Channel 4, after having been trailed online and in the tabloid press beforehand. I had no interest in watching as I once spent a good couple of years satirising such excuses for documentaries in my ‘Exposure’ series. I mean, they even revived the ‘In Plain Sight’ cliché, FFS. Say no more.

There are a lot of people out there who think Russell Brand is a wanker who had it coming to him, and I can definitely imagine him being an insufferably obnoxious prima donna to have been around during the period when he’s supposed to have committed his crimes; he may well even be guilty. But the problem with what we’re currently being bombarded with is that it’s like being in court and only hearing the case for the prosecution, with every allegation served up as indisputable fact and we the jury offered nothing but hearsay and speculation as we are steered towards our inevitable verdict. I would imagine a rape/sexual assault helpline number appeared onscreen at the end of the C4 programme – which is fine; but was there, I wonder, a helpline number for men who have been falsely accused of rape/sexual assault? Probably not.

© The Editor

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MURPHY’S LAW

So, take a week-and-a-bit off and return to be confronted by the same old stories straight from the Emperor’s Indian summer wardrobe. Okay, there’s the Trans thing once again – as ever, a dependable source of crackpot stories and genuinely disturbing developments; but haven’t we done it more than enough? Not when yet another woman is being targeted by angry men that the Law refers to as ‘women’, no; and this is always a topic that throws up its fair share of irony. For example, I suppose it is amusing that a government so desperate to signal its virtue via irrelevant gestures concerning crimes committed centuries ago is simultaneously, not to say aggressively, promoting a lifestyle choice that has led women prepared to defend their hard-fought rights being publicly demonised in ways that evoke the demonisation of women who were branded witches back in the safely-distant past. Yes, only the obsession with independence can compete with the SNP leadership’s fanatical embrace of Trans ideology, though where the latter is concerned the Holyrood administration is hardly unique, as a cursory visit to any public space or institution will swiftly confirm; subscribing to the unhinged Stonewall vision of Britain is seemingly compulsory in the corporate world, and much the same can be said of many one-time public bodies that have engaged in so many private/public partnerships over recent decades that the two have become indistinguishable.

The alphabet spaghetti of extending initials that has replaced the word ‘gay’ is now a lobby with such disproportionate clout that anyone who steps out of line and dares to air a critique of its demented dogma will be forced to stand alone against the onslaught – though when it occasionally happens at least the ‘inclusive’ rainbow veil slips to expose the misogyny-in-drag at the root of Trans activism. The fact that the most extreme LGBTXYZ lunatics genuinely believe all it takes to be a woman is to adopt the external window dressing and that this will serve as a backstage pass into all private women-only areas utterly unchallenged goes hand-in-hand with the psychological indoctrination and surgical butchery inflicted upon pre-pubescent children, intended to convince them their effeminacy or tomboy traits are not a sign they might be gay but indicate they’re ‘Trans’; and the wider world is simply supposed to accept this and say nothing. When a brave individual actually steps forward and feels compelled to point out this is not only bullshit, but utterly unethical bullshit at that, a code of silence enforced by fear of repercussions is broken and the hounds are released as friends and colleagues scurry for safety, denying they’ve ever met the problematic pariah.

If the guilty party happens to be a man, such as comedy writer Graham Linehan, he can probably kiss goodbye to a career in the mainstream ever again; if it’s a woman, however, she can expect the same but can also be reclassified as a witch for our times, exposed to far more vitriol and genuine hate (an overused word, but this time in its truest form). Just as a Person of Colour who has the wrong opinions – such as voting for or representing a political party of the Right – is fair game to be subjected to racist abuse online by ‘anti-racists’, any woman who criticises the Trans consensus is immediately dehumanised by her stance and therefore every vile punishment to emerge from the sexist cesspit of a Incel chat-group or the equally murky mind of Andrew Tate is perfectly legitimate to wish upon her. Following a trail blazed by JK Rowling, the latest natural-born woman to publicly question the beyond-dubious ‘morality’ of extreme Trans ideology and thus feel the force of imaginary women as a consequence is Irish singer Róisín Murphy.

In the 1990s and 2000s, Róisín Murphy was the vocalist with the smart and sassy Dance act Moloko, whose two biggest hits – ‘Sing it Back’ (#4) and ‘The Time is Now’ (#2) – appeared on either side of the Millennium. Since then, Murphy has pursued a solo career to general critical acclaim and has never been plagued by household name status, allowing her to do her own thing under the mainstream radar. It was only when she aired her anger at the blacklisting of Graham Linehan on her private FB page and this was then copied and pasted onto the public bear-pit of Twitter that she attracted the attention of the usual suspects and was nominated as this year’s contender for the burning effigy at the next Pride parade. Murphy’s crime was to condemn the casual employment of insidious ‘puberty blockers’ on children – yes, terrible, isn’t she; Murphy described this odious medication as ‘fucked, absolutely desolate’ before going on to voice her opinion that confused teens all-too quickly labelled ‘Trans’ by a medical establishment in thrall to this fantasy are ‘little mixed-up kids who are vulnerable and need to be protected’, with ‘Big Pharma laughing all the way to the bank’. Time for the ducking stool, methinks.

The orchestrated outrage that followed has become as predictable as such moral panics once were in the heyday of Fleet Street, when it used to be the oldies getting in a lather about the young ‘uns; it’s the flipside of that tradition today, but the potential ruination of reputations and careers is the same, if a tad more vicious. Following the public exposure of concerns aired in the supposedly private arena of a Facebook account only accessible to a select few friends, Róisín Murphy was suddenly transformed into the Public Enemy No.1 of the moment, with fans falling over themselves to condemn her ‘transphobia’ and a couple of forthcoming London live shows cancelled as a result. Perhaps the only mistake Murphy made in the wake of this hysteria was to issue an apology, for no one need ever apologise for doing nothing wrong, especially not to the members of a religious cult that recognises no redemption. Nothing one can ever say will wipe the slate clean in the Identitarian eyes, so why bother?

Another reason why Ms Murphy needn’t have bothered is that the campaign against her has run smack bang into a brick wall of refreshing resistance, which hopefully highlights the fact that people are really beginning to become thoroughly sick of this now. The worrying normalisation of every pronouncement by the Trans morality police – despite the fact most could give Caligula a run for his money in terms of nonsensical proclamations – appears to have ground to a temporary halt as the boycott of Murphy’s new album demanded by this self-appointed authority has been ignored. As The Sex Pistols or Frankie Goes To Hollywood could’ve told you in the old days, nothing helps a sale quite like censorship or scandal, and Róisín Murphy’s new LP ‘Hit Parade’ has shot to No.2 in the album charts, giving her the biggest solo success of her career so far. Whether tempted to buy the record as a means of demonstrating solidarity with the singer or simply because a curious investigation of her art by the uninitiated uncovered some decent tunes, the triumph of ‘Hit Parade’ over the curse placed upon it gives one a degree of hope that the acceptable face of bullying in 2023 is not one with limitless powers.

Even Irish novelist John Boyne raised his head above the parapet to denounce the demonisation of Róisín Murphy, giving us a rare and long-overdue criticism of cancellation from within the arts itself, which is all-too often a hypocritical hotbed of moral preaching and cowardly self-preservation. Others have pointed out the attempt to destroy the life and career of an uppity woman whose only crime was to suggest vulnerable children should be protected shares parallels with the reaction to Sinead O’Connor’s protest against the Church of Rome’s own treatment of children 30 years ago. Many who eulogised O’Connor following her passing concluded that her stance had been subsequently vindicated, and what Murphy has to say about a very modern form of child abuse will also be recognised as truth by the majority one day. If anyone is on ‘the right side of history’ in this debate, it’s certainly not those who tried – and failed – to kill another career.

© The Editor

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TICKET OFFICE POLITICS

Having recently (not to say belatedly) picked-up ‘Fawlty Towers’ on DVD for next-to-nothing, it was interesting viewing it with John Cleese’s commentary and hearing him air the too-true opinion that most British hotels are run for the convenience of the staff rather than the guests; one almost gets the impression such places would be extremely well-oiled machines were it not for annoying visitors getting in the way, much the same as the classic ‘Yes, Minister’ episode when Jim Hacker tours a new hospital boasting a complete absence of patients, those whose presence would only bugger-up the smooth running of the NHS. Similarly, how much simpler co-ordinating a rail network would be if bloody passengers weren’t present; well, the Fat Controllers are currently doing their best to rectify the situation, not only by refusing to budge on the wage demands that lead to seemingly never-ending strike action, but by removing the few remaining outposts of one-to-one contact with the pesky public.

Blackfriars, East Croydon, Finsbury Park, Victoria, and Sutton are the five London stations that will apparently be spared the cull of ticket offices poised to render the majority of the capital’s points of human interaction on the railways null and void. The official description is that the survivors of said cull ‘will have the ability to open their ticket offices to retail specialist tickets’. Of course, London isn’t the sole victim of an axe Dr Beeching would’ve gladly got his hands on given half the chance, but it has naturally received the most headlines. The rail industry nationwide is today confronted by an inevitable financial payback, having been propped-up by government during the pandemic and now forced to cut costs in order to repay the debt; eliminating the human element when the arrogant assumption is that the world and his wife conduct all business online via ever-helpful apps means closing ticket offices is seen as the easy option for train companies. The public, however, don’t see things quite so simply, with disability organisations and rail unions registering their mutual displeasure.

Rail companies say their proposals are prompted by the fact only 12% of ticket sales are now conducted at station kiosks, and whilst this may indeed be the case, declining to mention the fact that they’re under pressure to save precious pennies and that axing ticket offices is provoked by this factor rather than the excuses provided strikes the public as both dishonest and characteristic of the untrustworthy practices of privatised industries for the past few decades. A public consultation into the plans has led to 680,000 responses, a record reaction according to passenger watchdogs and one that has caused the conclusions of those same government-funded watchdogs entrusted with assessing the responses, London Travelwatch and Transport Focus, to be postponed until the end of October. The ultimate decision as to whether the plans can be executed as intended or revised in the face of opposition may well end up in the in-tray of the Transport Secretary if the watchdogs rule against them.

In some respects, the railways are now catching-up with the public’s growing dissatisfaction with automation; anyone faced with out-of-order cash machines and vacant buildings that used to contain bank branches will be familiar with the inefficiencies of a system sold as a perfect 21st century successor to the old idea of dealing with fellow human beings, just as they’d recognise the exhaustion that arises when trying to communicate with either recorded voices or unintelligible broken English down the telephone line when seeking to chase-up evasive utility companies all-too quick to inform customers how much they allegedly owe yet unprepared to admit they got it wrong. Nobody ever expected the Speaking Clock to engage in conversation, but few anticipated we’d reach the stage whereby every service we’re unfortunately reliant upon sought to dissuade us from querying their unimpeachable authority by placing such infuriating obstacles in our path.

The inconvenient fact is that there are certain demographics within society for whom the seamless conversion to an entirely online way of doing things isn’t quite as straightforward as it is for the majority – something the forces herding the masses in the direction of their apps have repeatedly failed to take into account, probably because they couldn’t care less. For those afflicted by disability, the presence of ticket offices at stations is essential as a focal point where they can purchase tickets for a journey and ask for assistance; indeed, the blind are generally taught to locate the ticket office at a particular station as opposed to having to learn the full layout of the place. Vivienne Francis of the Royal National Institute of Blind People has said, ‘The modernisation of the railways shouldn’t mean leaving anyone behind’, adding her organisation was ‘standing behind this groundswell of opinion and vehemently opposes these proposed changes’; ex-paralympian Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson has echoed such comments on the subject of the closures. ‘Disabled people have a legal right to be able to turn up and get a train,’ she said. ‘We don’t have to book, but actually if there is no staff on these stations, we’re not going to be able to just turn up and get the next train.’

And what about our senior citizens? Yes, that term now has a later starting-point than it used to due to the extension of the retirement age, and whilst most folk under the age of 60 are now tech-savvy, the numbers thin out once you get into the seventies and eighties. I keep being reminded of an anonymous pensioner’s reaction to decimalisation in 1971 as she pondered on why the government of the day couldn’t simply wait till all the old people had died before doing away with £sd. The consultation process over this particular issue has served to highlight the concerns of a public one feels the rail companies would otherwise rather not have getting in the way of ‘progress’. Robert Nisbet, a spokesperson for the Rail Delivery Group (representing the franchise-holders) last week said that ‘nothing has been agreed, nothing has been decided’ when asked if the amount of ticket offices scheduled for closure might be fewer than initially envisaged as a response to the public backlash against the plans. He added, with characteristic blandness as befitting his position, ‘the direction of travel should be towards a digital future for the railway’. That said, full marks for avoiding the word ‘sustainability’, anyway.

In the absence of staffed ticket offices, those incapable of adapting to the systems the rest of us are being forced into using without much say in the matter will have to settle for ticket vending machines if unable to buy online. The fact that today’s vending machines are flat touch-screens inaccessible to the blind doesn’t appear to have been taken into account; ditto the outrageous truth that many with learning disabilities prefer cash, something most of these machines won’t accept. Sarah Leadbetter, a sightless activist who has initiated a legal challenge over the plans, makes a valid point in relation to the rail company’s insistence that staff will still be available to assist members of the public in and around the station despite the disappearance of ticket offices. ‘I’m a disabled woman standing on a platform by myself with my guide dog,’ she says. ‘How do I know that the person coming towards me, saying they’re a member of staff, is actually a member of staff?’

Considering we live in a time wherein the needs of the most minority of minorities appear to be catered for over the needs of those numbering many more – and I include the expensive addition of empty cycle lanes contributing towards traffic jams on increasingly-narrowing roads – it seems odd that numerous sections of the public with a genuine right to be heard are being overlooked and ignored in the relentless march towards the great digital future that seemingly takes no prisoners. But that’s progress innit.

© The Editor

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SCHOOL’S IN/OUT

A recent view of a ‘Coronation Street’ episode from 1972 saw Ken Barlow resume his original career as a teacher by accepting the post of deputy head at the school he himself had attended. This storyline included a scene whereby ‘Mr Barlow’ arrived at his new workplace for the first time; and the inaugural sighting of what was evidently a real school situated in a rundown inner-city neighbourhood immediately provoked an unwelcome flashback. It was classic Victorian redbrick design of a grim type most over a certain age would instantly recognise, and what enhanced the creeping menace of the scene even further was that it appeared to be shot on a dark, dank and chilly midwinter’s morning – the kind you had to be dragged from your bed to venture out into as a child, with merely a bowl of Readybrek to insulate you against it. The tuneless drone of children singing a dreary dirge in assembly could be detected drifting through the open doors, and I could almost smell the unmistakably ominous odour of a brewing boiled dinner permeating cold corridors of polished floors that echoed to the cacophonous clatter of Clarks shoes; it was bloody horrible.

Such a sight retains the ability to strike fear in the hearts of even the most ex of ex-pupils; it matters not that one may well be half-a-century or more away from the days when one had no choice but to be there from Monday to Friday, for so deep was the impression made on an impressionable psyche that it only took a glimpse of the place to bring all those buried sensations flooding back to the surface. But if one were to shed a few of these irrational reactions and prepare to be a little generous, the fact that those 19th century seats of learning brought up several generations of children spanning a hundred years or more says they were really built to last – sturdy, solid edifices that mirrored the unswerving, evangelical grit of the distant reformers determined to give every child in the country an education. For decades, most state schools in this country still resembled the one Ken Barlow entered as deputy head 50 years ago – at least until the post-war period of dramatic reconstruction. Not only did houses, city centres and the road network undergo the most comprehensive facelift in a century, but schools and universities followed suit, reborn and rebooted as shiny, streamlined Modernist palaces straight from the pages of ‘The Eagle’.

The fourth of the five schools I attended contrasted with the familiar Victorian model in that it had only been built in the 1960s; on the surface, this one was a textbook example of the aforementioned post-war architecture, yet even then (the late 70s) there were worrying signs that the Utopian vision had been achieved on the cheap; I remember my previous school had celebrated its centenary when I was a pupil there, yet this ‘new’ building had disappeared within a decade of me leaving it, standing for barely 25 years. The future had already been and gone. As for schools erected after the 60s, it seems the materials used in their construction were no more durable than those utilised to cut corners 60 years ago; in some respects, the revelation that more than a hundred of them have been labelled potentially unsafe on the eve of the new term beginning seems symbolic of the crumbling infrastructure in this country – everything from the impossibility of securing a GP’s appointment to empty supermarket shelves to the lamentable state of public transport; and now a section of society that has been damaged ever since lockdown faces yet another challenge due to a combination of incompetence and ambivalence.

Reinforced Autoclaved Aerated Concrete – or RAAC for convenience – is something that constituted a sizeable chunk of the constitution of most new school buildings erected up until the middle of the 1990s, and now it would appear this short-term fix of a method for saving money is finally going to cost far more than simply employing a superior system in the first place would have. RAAC – which was routinely used on not only schools but new-build hospitals, police stations and courts from the 1950s through to the 90s – has a lifespan of around 30 years, something that would have been known at least at the time it stopped being used 25 years ago. The Local Government Association claims it has been issuing warnings about RAAC since 2018, whilst the Government says its awareness of the plentiful presence of RAAC in public buildings stretches all the way back to 1994, adding it has recommended schools themselves have adequate contingencies in place for a good five years; teachers’ unions, meanwhile, have criticised the Department for Education for leaving it so late to go public with these latest warnings, most of which came as a complete surprise to the majority of parents who are now wondering if their kids will be returning to school next week after all – even though the risk of building collapses was made public by the National Audit Office back in June, weeks before schools broke-up for the summer holidays.

According to reports, of the schools surveyed and found to be at risk, 52 were deemed as critical; when the Schools Minister Nick Gibb was asked if the anticipated problems could possibly see the collapse of the affected buildings, he replied ‘Yes, and that’s why we took action.’ Belated action, as many parents see it, considering we’re now at the end of the six-week summer holidays and schools are gearing up to welcome pupils back. In Scotland, which has already had its own infamous problems with shoddily-constructed schools, apparently has 35 schools containing RAAC, whereas both Wales and Northern Ireland are undergoing urgent checks of their own. The fact that some affected schools have had to close-off threatened sections and plan to re-house classes in temporary accommodation does evoke memories of the new school I myself attended, which had a series of prefab classrooms in the playground due to failings in the main building. Again, you didn’t quite have those same problems with its Victorian predecessor.

Some schools are regarded as so unsafe that a return to ‘online learning’ of the kind piloted during lockdown is being mooted; coupled with disruptive strikes by teachers over the past twelve months as well as the lingering effect of Covid countermeasures, the ongoing damage to the education of those unfortunate enough to still be at school appears to be something that is destined to carry on indefinitely. Not to worry, though – Education Secretary Gillian Keegan said the Government’s plan for dealing with the RAAC problem will ‘minimise the impact on pupil learning and provide schools with the right funding and support they need to put mitigations in place to deal with RAAC’; a spokesperson for the Government has spoken and all fears have therefore been allayed. At the same time, it’s hard to not read this current cock-up as yet another in a long line of cock-ups presided over by an administration that was evidently never taught how to distinguish its arse from its elbow when at school itself. The Department for Education has said it will fund the cost of temporary classrooms, though schools will have to bid via the Department’s capital funding process should they want to permanently replace classrooms or buildings no longer regarded as sufficiently safe.

Gillian Keegan also spoke of her regrets at how children ‘looking forward to getting back to school’ might have their new term disrupted by the RAAC issue; perhaps the fact Ms Keegan actually believes children who’ve just enjoyed six weeks away from the institution would be ‘looking forward to getting back to school’ is one more pointer to how detached our elected representatives are from the lives most of the electorate and their offspring lead. I left school nearly 40 years ago, yet look how the sighting of a school resembling one of my former alma maters prompted the resurgence of the cold sweat it provoked at the time. Formative years produce lifelong impressions, and the same applies to those children whose schooling has already been conducted clad in masks and socially-distanced; the possibility of them being herded into sheds due to the risk of their classrooms collapsing could well be the source of future outbreaks of cold sweat, though in the absence of anecdotes concerning canings and Chinese burns maybe they’ll serve as useful bonding exercises come reunions 40 years hence.

© The Editor

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