Okay, here’s a couple more sketches of notable entertainers, Max Wall and Lemmy from the Heavy Metal band Motorhead. Motorhead’s greatest hit is probably ‘Ace of Spades’. In an interview years ago, Lemmy dispelled the notions that it was about Satanism or anything deeper, explaining that it was just about gambling. It was inspired by the Watford Gap service station and playing the fruit machines their on the way to and from gigs.
Decades ago the News Quiz, when it was still worth listening to, published an apology to Mr. Kilminster, for running a story about his sexual antics that got the details wrong and so made it sound less debauched than it really was. They had reported that he had a hung a woman upside down in his cupboard for a few hours. Not so. He had tied her to the bed, and this had gone on for three days. Lemmy complained, and the paper duly issued a correction and apology. Rock and roll!
He also makes a cameo appearance as the pilot of a water taxi in the 1980s British SF movie, Hardware, about a sculptor, who restores a killer war robot her boyfriend has bought from a scavenger in a radiation desert. The machine upgrades itself and goes on the rampage. The film was directed by Richard Stanley, who also directed the recent film version of Lovecraft’s The Colour Out of Space starring Nicholas Cage. Hardware’s story is extremely close to the 2000 AD ‘Future Shock’ story, ‘Shocc!’ and Stanley was successfully sued by the comic and the strip’s creators. This hasn’t prevented the film from being considered by many as one of the best British science fiction films.
Lemmy wasn’t racist, but I can’t say I’m comfortable with the cod-Confederate uniforms he used to wear. I dare say it was done just to signal he was a rebel and possibly the southern American origins of much rock, but considering what the Confederacy stood for, it is tasteless.
Max Wall was the performer best known for his silly walk, bent over, bum projecting and knees bent, rather like Groucho Marx. I was reminded of him while thinking about the Asimo robot. This was unveiled by the Japanese in the 90s and was one of the first humanoid walking robots. It looked a little like an astronaut with a huge pack on its back and a head that resembled a space helmet. It also walked with its legs bent, which inspired me to draw this sketch of the robot channelling Wall.
I didn’t watch either the Grammy’s or the Brit Awards this year. I can’t say I’ve been into either of them, and today’s pop music largely isn’t to my taste. I grew up in the 70s, 80s and 90s and it’s largely the pop music from those decades that I listen to, although I do follow some more contemporary musicians. And looking at some of the very flamboyant and outrageous fashions sported by Lizzo and Sam Smith did two things to me. Firstly, it suggested that they had got their fashion taste from Lady Gaga and had pushed the dial up to eleven (Spinal Tap reference). A few of the journos writing about it suggested that some of them were taking their sartorial cues from the great pop stars of the past. Harry Styles’ outfit was, in the view of one of the journos, partly influence by 70s Bowie. I think that’s probably true, but in its camp quality it reminded me of David Lee Roth when he split with Van Halen to do ‘Just a Gigolo’. I like the song and the video, but unfortunately millions didn’t and it ended Roth’s nascent solo career. Two – I got nostalgic for the days when bands came on Top of the Pops in their normal, everyday clothes, and simply performed. Of course popular music has always been linked with fashion, since the days when Jazz fans in America dressed in Zoot suits, through the Beatniks, Hippies, Teddy Boys, Skinheads, Glam Rockers, Punks, New Romantics, Two Tone Ska peeps, Gender Benders, Goths and Rockers. And I did hear that some of the camper styles came about because many of the bands’ managers were gay. A friend of mine was reading a book by one long-time pop manager, who was gay. This chap claimed that the fashion for cravats, velvet and so on in the early 70s was creation of the bands’ managers. They were gay, and this was their taste in clothing and so they insisted or encouraged the bands they managed to dress similarly. I also heard a rumour that suggested another reason why Noddy Holder’s outfit also joined in. They were originally a skinhead band and really didn’t want to adopt the new style in case people thought they were gay. But as the Skinheads have a reputation as violent thugs, they were nevertheless persuaded otherwise in order to allay possible public suspicion. Also, one of the former members of the one of the Glam Rock bands – I can’t remember if it was Sweet or Mud – said that they started wearing makeup as one evening on Top of the Pops their dressing room was next to that of Pan’s People, and it gave them an excuse to go there and talk to the ladies. But I also remember moments in the late 70s and early 80s when bands turned up on TV in their T-shirts, jeans, pullovers, tank tops or whatever and simply let the music speak for itself.
One band have been following on and off for the past few years is the robot band Compressorhead. These really are robots, created by a team of engineers based in Germany. I think they comprise three Germans and one Brit. As you’d expect, they play Rock/Heavy Metal. There are videos out there of them playing Motorhead’s ‘Ace of Spades’ and Blitzkrieg Bop. They used just to play the instruments, but they added an awesome vocalist a few years ago. I found the video below on YouTube. It shows them playing a gig in a workshop, with human audience but with a robot bar. This has robot arms pouring the drinks, and, I noticed, spilling them.
But it reminded me of Greasy Gracie’s, the underground robot bar, from 2000AD’s ‘Robusters’ Strip’, created by the legendary Pat Mills and the sadly deceased Kevin O’Neill.
Here’s the Compressorhead video from MicroGreenGardening’s channel:
And here’s a recent depiction of Greasy Gracie’s hangout, where exhausted droids could enjoy a cool lube at the end of a hard working day by zarjaz art droid Clint Langley in ABC Warriors: Return to Ro-Busters by Mills and Langley (Rebellion: 2016).
In the original Robuster’s story from back in the 1980s, the robots are dancing and one of them is singing ‘I Am Your Automatic Lover’, which was a hit back then for one of the punk ladies.
OK, we haven’t got anywhere near human-level intelligence in robots. Looking forward to the millennium in their issue for the last weekend of 1999, the Independent quoted robotics’ scientists and engineers as saying that by 2025 machines would be about as intelligent as cats. But I think that’s optimistic. Nevertheless, reality seems to have caught up just a bit with Mills, O’Neill’s and Langley’s SF imaginations.
As the very stylish, computer-generated video jockey Max Headroom used to say in ads for Channel 4:
Well, Starmer has had his cabinet reshuffle, and as Mike and the good folks on Twitter are saying today, the poor, the unemployed, the disabled and immigrants should beware. Because he’s just made Yvette Cooper Shadow Home Secretary. Cooper previously had the job from 2011 to 2015 when, according to Damian Willey, she was all but invisible except for the times she deigned to give us all the benefits of her views on immigration. In 2014 she denounced Tweezer’s immigration bill as too soft on it, the same bill which caused the illegal deportation of the Windrush migrants. She also wanted to stop immigrants and asylum seekers claiming child benefit for children living abroad, and her voting on immigration is comparable to Priti Patel’s. Daniel Grigg summed up just what her appointment means on this issue: “Nothing says couldn’t give a toss about migrants’ rights more than promoting David Blunkett and Yvette Cooper. So this is Labour now is it?”
The vile woman was responsible for the introduction of the Work Capability Test in 2008. These were subsequently kept in place by those Tory monsters, Iain Duncan Smith and Esther McVile. Kahlisee is right when he says, “In policy terms, it would appear Cooper has more in common with the Tories than she does with Labour values.” And other Tweeters described how Cooper’s fitness for work tests would dock points from the disabled for the following:
Amputees using their stumps to lift objects.
People being able to walk using an imaginary wheelchair.
People with speech problems who can nevertheless write down what they want to say, and deaf claimants who can read it.
On international issues, she voted for the illegal invasion of Iraq five times, 14 times voted against an inquiry into it, voted eight times for the use of British armed forces in overseas operations, and also voted to replace Trident with another nuclear missile. She and Ed Balls also flipped their homes three times. Ed Poole said of her appointment: “Yvette Cooper is an ableist nightmare. Among other things. If you need any more evidence that Labour is finished as a force for equality, democracy, socialism or just plain human decency her promotion is it.” And Julie Harrington said, “Labour is now a hard right party.”
And then there’s Starmer’s appointment of David Blunkett to his ‘skills council’. This has proven something of an embarrassment as the internet never forgets, and his critics were able to find a clip from years ago in which Blair’s former cabinet minister made a homophobic slur about legendary Queen singer, Freddie Mercury. Aaron Bastani posted a piece on Twitter which seems to be an extract from a longer film about Queen or Mercury. It begins with members of the band, including awesome axeman and astrophysicist Brian May, describing how hurtful some of the comments were when their friend and bandmate passed away of AIDS in 1991. This is followed by a clip of a much younger Blunkett on some kind of panel show saying that he didn’t want people idolising Mercury because of his ‘bizarre and perverted lifestyle’.
Now you could be generous, and argue that this is not homophobic but just fair comment about rock and pop stars. Gay, straight or whatever, pop music, especially Heavy Metal, is associated with debauchery and excess. Sex, drugs and rock and roll, as the old saying goes. I can remember the rumours going around college that the name of American rockers, WASP, was an acronym standing for ‘We Are Sexual Perverts’. Other suggestions are that it also stands for White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, or, as their lead singer answered a question about it on a chat show, ‘We Aren’t Sure, Pal’. Some of us can also remember that momentous occasion in the ’90s when Motorhead’s Lemmy got a letter of complaint and an apology published in one of the Brummie papers. They claimed that he’d hung a woman upside down from a cupboard for a day during about of rock and roll debauchery. No, corrected the late Mr. Kilminster. It was three days, and he tied her to a bed. The newspaper was happy to print apologise and print the correction. Which must be one of the few instances where someone has written to the press complaining that their article about them has made them appear less degenerate and degraded than they want to be known.
It may also have been a clumsy attempt to point out the dangers of getting AIDS through promiscuous sex. Part of the problem was that at the time there were parts of the gay community that were extremely promiscuous. I can remember one of the gay journos on the Observer writing an article about it back in 1984, with the detail that there was a self-group, Orgiasts Anonymous, in either LA or San Francisco. The group was set up to like Alcoholics Anonymous, but to help talk gay men out of going to the bathhouse every time they felt the overwhelming urge. Not that the dangers of catching the disease was limited to gays. It also affected promiscuous straight people having unprotected sex, as well those who caught it from their partners and haemophiliacs from contaminated blood products. It would have been possible to make a comment about the dangers of excessive sex without sounding anti-gay. But Blunkett didn’t. His comment about a ‘bizarre and perverted lifestyle’ sounds like the standard denunciations of homosexuality.
In fact Mercury’s sexuality really wasn’t all that remarkable, and not what he was celebrated for. The 1980s had seen the appearance of a number of openly gay and gender-nonconforming pop stars – Marc Almond and Jimmy Summerville with the Communards and Bronski Beat; Boy George of Culture Club, Holly Johnson of Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Marilyn and the Pet Shop Boys. I can’t remember if Elton John and George Michael had come out of the closet by the time of Mercury’s death. And Mercury didn’t, as far as know, have the reputation of being the most promiscuous of them. There were rumours, for example, that either Almond or Summerville, I forget which, had had to have their stomach pumped following various shenanigans with a rugby team. I honestly don’t remember any such rumour about Freddie. And I think there were probably far more angry headlines in the Heil and other right-wing papers about Marc Almond and Frankie’s relax video than I ever remember about Mercury. People didn’t idolise him because of his sexuality or lifestyle, although I did notice than there was a fashion among young gays at the time to dress like him. What people celebrated him for was what he was: a superb performer with an incredible vocal range that even now few others can match.
Mercury passed away thirty years ago, but is still a towering presence in British pop music with legions of fans, many of whom will not have been best pleased by Blunkett’s denigration of their hero. As I doubt will many gays and their allies. Tony Blair was the Prime Minister who set the ball rolling for gay marriage with the introduction of civil partnerships, and this makes Blunkett’s comment seem very homophobic after the intervening years. And if Bastani hadn’t forgotten Blunkett’s views on Mercury’s death, you can bet others won’t have either. Quite apart from the other vile policies Blunkett shares responsibility for as a member of Blair’s cabinet.
Starmer has appointed as part of his team people who have caused untold suffering to the poor, the disabled, asylum seekers, immigrants and been responsible for the destruction and looting of an entire country, Iraq, for the benefit of the oil industry and multinationals. These are good reasons for anyone concerned about the massive growth of poverty and inequality and real imperialism and exploitation to despise Starmer and what he is turning the Labour party into.
Get Starmer, Cooper, Blunkett and the rest of the Blairites out before they do further damage.
I found this trailer for a forthcoming movie version of H.P. Lovecraft’s short story, The Colour out of Space, over on YouTube. It stars Nicholas Cage and is directed by Richard Stanley.
Lovecraft was a master of cosmic horror, and the creator of the Cthulu mythos about malign, alien gods that seeped down from the stars untold aeons ago. Although they were banished from Earth by the ancient Elder Races, they are constantly seeking ways back. And when the stars are right, and the sunken city of R’lyeh rises from the deep, Cthulhu, the bat-winged, octopus-headed god will rule over a mankind reveling and killing. And in untold aeons even death may die.
The trailer says it marks the return of Stanley to directing. This is welcome news. He made an excellent film about a berserk robot going on the rampage in a decaying future, Hardware, back in 1989. 2000AD sued and won for plagiarism, as the film’s plot appeared to be stolen from a short story from comic, ‘Shocc!’, drawn by the master of macabre art, Kevin O’Neill. This was about an explorer, who finds a war robot and gives it to his girlfriend. It then comes back to life, and goes on the rampage. The film has cameos with Lemmy, a member of the Goth band The Mission, and Iggy Pop as the DJ, Angry Bob, and the soundtrack includes Motorhead’s ‘Ace of Spades’, The Mission’s ‘Power’ and Pil’s ‘Order of Death’. There’s a reference to the earlier film in the trailer. A shot of the family’s kitchen shows a framed Biblical quotation, ‘No flesh shall be spared’. This was also used in Hardware to explain the B.A.A.L. robot’s genocidal mission to exterminate all humanity.
Stanley disappeared from directing movies, although he continued to make documentaries and pop videos, after the debacle of a version of H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau. Stanley originally intended it to be a relatively low budget film, but the studio wanted a big star. Stanley chose Marlon Brando. Big mistake. Once in the movie, Brando proceeded to do his best to wreck it through bizarre demands and massively arrogant behaviour. There was a documentary made about this whole shambles a few years ago. One of the actresses provided an example of Brando’s weird, cavalier attitude to the film. She went to him to ask the great Hollywood star for acting tips. He told her to carry on doing whatever she liked, because it didn’t matter as the film would be shut down in three weeks anyway. He also asked a member of the production crew if they should ‘f**k with’ one of the producers. When the man asked why, as the producer was a good guy, Brando made a very lame excuse. It’s pretty clear from this that Brando didn’t have any respect for the film. With costs and time overrunning, Stanley was sacked, and a veteran Hollywood director brought in instead to salvage something from the mess. The result apparently is a competent film, but it’s not the really amazing movie that would have appeared if Stanley had been able to complete it according to his vision.
It’s a pity that there was that plagiarism case between 2000AD and Stanley over Hardware. 2000AD want to produce films based on their characters. Two films have been made of ‘Judge Dredd’, but both have performed less than expected at the box office. The most recent, 2012’s Dredd, starring Karl Urban, was a critical success. There’s too much enmity there, but I’d say that if anyone could direct a great movie based on 2000AD’s cast of heroes, Stanley is the man for the job.
Looking at the trailer for the movie, it seems to have rejected Lovecraft’s original plot for the Hollywood cliche of a happy American family that moves into a rural area, only to find something sinister and threatening. It’s a long time since I read the original story, but I don’t think it’s the one Lovecraft wrote. Still, it looks like it could be a really good film, even if it is somewhat less than faithful to Lovecraft.
And to show everyone what Stanley’s Hardware was like, here’s a video for Pil’s ‘Order of Death’ using clips from the film from Hert Zollner’s channel on YouTube.
More robotics now. I’ve put up a number of pieces about the German all-robot heavy metal band, Compressorhead. I found this video on YouTube yesterday of them playing Motorhead’s ‘Ace of Spades’. They’ve done it before, but this time they’ve got a robot singer for the vocals. As he was in the late 80s SF movie, Hardware, about a war robot going berserk in a devastated future, I feel the late, great Lemmy would have loved it. It even begins with a dedication to him.
The whole style of the piece reminded me of the old ‘Robusters’ strip in 2000AD. In one story, the two heroes, Rojaws and Hammerstein, go to ‘Greasy Gracie’s’, a robot cafe and nightclub. There, as the robotic clientele drink their pints of oil – what else? – other robots dance the light fantastic while a robot band plays hits like ‘I Am Your Automatic Lover’. A few years ago, writer Pat Mills revisited this story. In this version, the two are still helping robots flee Earth and human oppression. However, the strip also draws on the Black experience during slavery and segregation. The Black slaves on the plantations developed the Cakewalk dance as a parody of the airs and graces put on by the White overlords as a piece of very conscious social satire. So robots, the slaves of the future, parody humans by mimicking them dancing. Thus Rojaws and Hammerstein climb onto the stage to perform ‘We Ain’t Got a Barrel of Money’ before the joint is raid by the human police. One of the characters, a robot resistance leader, is a blind bluesman.
‘Greasy Gracie’s’, from ABC Warriors: Return to Robusters, Pat Mills writer, Clint Langley, artist, Annie Parkhouse, letters, (Oxford: Rebellion 2016).
Fortunately for human artists, robots aren’t so intelligent yet that they can actually write songs, except through programmes written for them to produce music like particular artists. But in Compressorhead, Mills’, O’Neil’s – who was the first artist on the ‘Robusters Strip’ – and Clint Langley’s vision of a robot nightclub is coming close to reality.
As readers of this blog will have gathered, I’ve an interest in robots and robots as musicians. Compressorhead are an all-robot band from Germany, who play Hard Rock and Heavy Metal music. They started as purely musicians without a singer, but have at last built one. He’s called ‘Mega-Wattson’. The robot rolls around on caterpillar tracks, has a structure where a human’s eyes would be that resembles sunglasses, and, as a singer, has a massive mouth full of teeth. Oh yes, and he has a Mohican that raises and goes down in emphasis to what he’s singing. The band also sports a new guitarist and backing vocalist, ‘Hellga Tarr’. Her name seems to me to be a pun on ‘Hell Guitar’. She is very definitely female, as they’ve given her a waist and plastic boobs.
The song’s Motorhead’s ‘Ace of Spades’, and it’s dedicated to Lemmy!
Here’s the clip from YouTube:
This does, however, remind me of piece from the 2000 AD strip, ‘ABC Warriors’, in which the ‘Meknificent Seven’ of robot warriors for truth and justice discuss their favourite bands. It ends with Hammerstein saying that everything was rubbish after Led Zeppelin.
It’s from A.B.C. Warriors: The Volgan War – Volume 3, by Pat Mills and Clint Langley. I don’t agree that everything after Led Zeppelin was rubbish. And this is pure rock and roll. Rock on!
And one of the comments is also funny. One of them suggested that after this, there’ll be Cyborgs banging around down in the mosh pit.
Over the past few days Mike’s put up a few more posts about the Blairites and their attempted purge of the Corbynites in time for the leadership elections.
Among their various antics, they sent a tweet to one victim of the coup, who had been told they did not have the right to vote, in the middle of the night asking them to support Owen Smith. Which is, as Isabel Waby, a friend of Vox Political, observed, simply adding insult to injury. Another person, Catherine Starr, was banned because of an ‘inappropriate’ tweet. She had made the cardinal sin of posting that she ‘f**king loved the Foo Fighters’. Richard Burgon, the Shadow Justice Secretary, responded to this woman’s ban with the jocular comment that he preferred Motorhead, but liking the Foo Fighters was certainly no reason to ban someone. Quite. Nor is foul language on a completely unrelated topic. I realise the ‘F bomb’ is still very shocking to quite a few people, but it’s now so widely used that it is using much of its ability to shock. If you want an example of this, think of the number of times Paul Merton and some of the other panellists on Have I Got News For You have cussed. When I was at school, the use of the word got Jools Holland thrown off the Friday early evening pop show, The Tube. Admittedly, this show was on much earlier, at about 6 O’clock, while HIGNFY is on after the 9 O’clock watershed. But even so, Merton and co are still going, and the shows as strong as ever. Starr was planning to vote for Jeremy Corbyn, so it looks very much like the Blairite National Executive was simply trying to find an excuse to ban her.
Corbyn was moved to tweet his own disapproval about the one-sidedness of the purge: “I’m very concerned that some people seem to have been unfairly removed from the ability to vote in this election. I’ve written to Labour’s General Secretary to raise concerns about members being suspended from voting in the leadership contest often without knowing why, being given an option to challenge or appeal.”
For this, the Labour leader got told by a Scottish Labour councillor, Stephen McCabe, that he should have some faith as leader in the NEC, knowing perfectly well Corbyn can contribute, but can’t control what they do.
Among the other victims of the purge is Ronnie Draper, the General Secretary of the Baker’s, Food, and Allied Worker’s Union. He was told that he was being denied the vote on the basis of an unidentified tweet. He has also been given no opportunity to refute the charge, and no hearing has been set for him to challenge it.
According to Mike, 200,000 people have been denied the vote by the NEC. The process of deciding who gets to vote, and who doesn’t, is overseen by Joanna Baxter. She tweeted that the decisions were made by 2 panels, comprising three people from the NEC, and supporters of Jeremy Corbyn and Owen Smith. She did not, however, give any details on the criteria by which the suitability of the voters was assessed. Furthermore, Baxter is no longer a member of the NEC, and so has absolutely no right or obligation to oversee the purge.
Mike concludes:
So far, it seems you get the boot for comments made at any time since you joined social media – no matter how long ago and never mind whether you have changed your mind since. Use of profanities at any time means you’re out – if you’re a supporter of Jeremy Corbyn. Tweeting support for a point of view put forward by another political party – out. Publicly disagreeing with Owen Smith – out.
It is hard to tell the criteria by which supporters of Mr Smith are likely to be removed from the voting register. Does anybody know?
Mike also has put up the advice, given by one of his commenters, that anyone intending to appeal against the decision to ban them should throw in a Data Access Request for Data held on them under the Data Protection Act. As data holders, the Labour party will be obliged to provide them with all the data they have on them.
Mike also warns that as Baxter complained that she was receiving abuse even before these shenanigans began, she’s now got a running commentary on her twitter feed about the abusive messages she’s receiving. Or claims to have received. As Mike says, it’s unknown whether these are ‘false flag attacks’ or not. But he strongly advises his readers to be polite in any case.
I remarked before, when the purge began a few days ago, that this is New Labour and the Blairites behaving exactly like Stalin. He took over the Russian Communist party by purging the membership of his rivals’ supporters. Once installed as the president of the USSR, he continued his purges, not by merely throwing his opponents out of the party, but by sending them, and millions of others, to the Gulags and the firing squads as enemies of the Revolution and so forth. Baxter and Smudger aren’t sending people to forced labour camps, but in other respects they’re following Uncle Joe’s tactics. As he said, ‘it’s not who votes that counts, but who counts the votes.’
It’s also all very Kafkaesque. In his novels The Castle and The Trial, the Czech novelist described farcical bureaucratic tyrannies, in which the regime’s victims were arrested, tried and condemned without knowing what their crime was, or who their accusers were. Which is pretty much what’s happening here, with people being told their banned simply on account of ‘inappropriate comments’.
But only Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters, apparently. Lord Sainsbury, who is now supporting the Lib Dems, has, it seems, not lost his right to vote. Never mind. As Mike has put up in a later article today, after the election there will be a reckoning of this bureaucratic tyrants.
David Cameron, showing off the toned physique for which the Tory front bench is known.
Just when you thought the Tories couldn’t get any more mean-spirited, bullying and petty, they prove you wrong. Yesterday they announced that they would strip benefits from people they considered obese. Mike over at Vox Political has put up this story about it Tories say the obese should ‘lose weight or lose benefits’. Pot, kettle, black. It begins
The Conservative Party seems determined to sink itself into the deepest, blackest hole ever created by a political organisation for itself.
While other parties unveil attractive policies designed to bring voters onboard, the Tories have said they want to remove benefits from people they have decided are fat. Here’s the Independent story, and for good measure we’ll throw in the BBC‘s coverage too.
You might be thinking to yourself, why not? They’ve already attacked people on Jobseekers’ Allowance, ESA and DLA as scroungers; they’ve pushed pensionable ages back by years; and they’re about to attack people who are on pensions, already. Why not continue proving what a bunch of spoiled little schoolboys they are by picking on fatties as well (oh, along with druggies and alkies)?
Perhaps because, as ‘Neti’ pointed out on Twitter: “Medication can mean that people gain weight and not be overeating.”
He notes that the British Medical Association attacked the plans of Westminster Council to deny overweight people benefits on these grounds in 2013 as ‘draconian’.
He quotes David Cameron as saying of this new Tory strategy:
“It is not fair to ask hardworking taxpayers to fund the benefits of people who refuse to accept the support and treatment that could help them get back to a life of work,” he said.
The good folk of the Twitterverse are much less impressed. One of these is John Wight, who commented that it was ‘a wheeze designed to appeal to the smug middle classes’.
The Social Snobbery of the Slave Owners
It is. And it shows the arrogance, the preening sense of superiority of Cameron and his crew, as they sneer at those they consider to be physically as well as socially inferior. And lying even further underneath is the assumption of the feudal elite that we are chattels, and they should have absolute control of our bodies as well as our labour.
Private Eye published a revealing piece of gossip about the sneering mentality of the Tory grandees towards the plebs back in the 1990s. One of their contributors or spies had been at the special dining hall set up for the very rich at the Cheltenham Festival that year. This was lavishly laid out with the very finest cordon bleu cuisine. In the room at the time was one of the Tory bigwigs. I’ve got a feeling it was Lord Archer of Weston-Super-Mud, but I can’t be sure. The Tory looked out of the window at the rest of the crowd below, eating the meals they’d bought from the burger stand. ‘Oh, look at all those people with their little bits of plastic,’ he sneered.
It’s the same mentality. “Oh, look at all those fat chavs! They clearly don’t eat their greens, and especially not those specially picked and cultivated by elite chefs somewhere in Tuscany or the Vale of Evesham. And they don’t know what balsamic vinegar is! How dreadful!”
Hellraiser’s ‘Butterball’: Not known to be a relation of Eric Pickles
Now this is, of course, as Mike points out, deeply hypocritical considering the physiques of many of the Tory party. Like Nicholas ‘Fatty’ Soames, or Eric Pickles, who looks to me like nothing less than the ‘Butterball’ Cenobite from Hellraiser. And whatever it is about, it’s really not about getting the nation healthy or back to work.
The Alternatives: Changing British Shopping and Food Labelling
There are ways you could get people to eat healthier food by changing the way people shop and work. One suggestion was to label very clearly the fat content on foods, so that people were aware of just how many calories they were putting in their bodies. One other suggestion was to levy a ‘fat tax’ on fatty, unhealthy foods, like pizzas, fish and chips and so on.
You could also encourage people to eat better by bringing back local shops close to where they live, rather than supermarkets to which they have to drive. This was brought out in one of the series with Jamie Oliver, where he went to one of Britain’s fattest cities to encourage the townspeople there to lay off the chicken McNuggets and eat their greens and muesli instead. One of the mothers he enlisted in his campaign actually burst into tears about this. She bought her kids KFCs and McDonalds, not because she was lazy, but simply because that was all she could afford. She could not afford to travel outside her area to go to the supermarket to buy the super-healthy greens and foods Jamie was recommending.
The Poor, Depression and Diet
And there’s also another, emotional reason why the very poor and the unemployed eat fatty foods: they make you feel better after another depressing, dispiriting day. This was discussed again back in the ’90s by the American broadcaster and columnist, Joe Queenan, and his guests on the Radio 4 show, Postcard from Gotham. This was the time when the news had just broken that America had an obesity epidemic. They noted that, in contrast to Britain and Europe at the time, America really was the ‘land of plenty’, where the food portions were massively bigger. But they were aware that the poor ate badly because of the miserable condition of their lives.
Cutting Fatty Foods and Resistance from the Food Industry
Now the last thing the Tories actually want to do is start putting taxes on food, or have the fat content, or anything else in them clearly labelled. Many Tory MPs have very strong connections to the food and drinks industry. It’s why, for example, John Major’s government did precious little about dangerous alcohol consumption for so long, and consistently blocked legislation to limit consumption. That’s state interference, which is by nature Wrong and Oppressive. Worse, it may damage profits.
Similarly, blocking supermarkets and encouraging a new generation of Arkwrights to set up their own, s-s-small businesses, as greengrocers, family butchers, bakers and so on is another idea that definitely ain’t going to get anywhere with the Tories. Not when the supermarkets seem to be on the march everywhere, driving out their smaller competitors.
Levelling the Playing Fields
And this is before we get to the way successive administrations following Maggie have sold off public sports facilities, like school playing fields, public baths and sports centres. Private Eye has again been covering this scandal for some time in its ‘Levelling the Playing Fields’ column. This has been such as scandal that even the arch-Tory Quentin Letts has pilloried it and the Tory minister responsible in his book, 50 People who Buggered Up Britain.
All of this means challenging vested commercial interests, and reversing decades-old developments in the way people work, exercise and shop. It’s expensive, would require careful thought and planning, and could take years. Besides, it would attack the very industries that fund the Tories and provide their MPs with an income. It’s far easier for them to do absolutely nothing, and go back to doing what they do best: sneering and attacking the poorest.
Westminster Council and the Homes for Votes
It’s no surprise that this move also came two years ago from Westminster Council. The Tories there have been on a very long campaign to cleanse the area socially of the poor. In the 1990s there was the ‘Homes for Votes’ scandal, where the leader of the council, Tesco director Dame Shirley Porter, and her minions arranged for good Tory voters to be housed in good building, while the poor were removed to an asbestos-ridden tower block. This seems to be have been another ruse to drive the lower class and poor out of the area, so they could keep it as a low council tax, pristine area for the very rich.
Seasoning the Slaves
And ultimately, behind all this – the class snobbery about the bodies of the poor and the poor quality foods they consume, is an even more sinister, essentially feudal assumption: that the slave master should have absolute control over the bodies and physical fitness of his slaves. During the slave trade, the captains of the slave ships during the long journey across the Atlantic to the Caribbean and America would take their slaves up on deck and make them exercise. This was to keep them just fit enough so that some of them might survive, and fetch a good price. Once there, the slaves could be seasoned for a year so that they could recover and be fit enough to be a worthwhile commercial investment for their purchasers.
That statement by Cameron about it not being fair to ask ‘hard-working’ people to fund people who are too fat to be available for work shows something of the same mentality. It’s the attitude of the feudal lord complaining about the laziness of his peasants. John Locke, the founder of modern liberal political philosophy certainly was no opponent of slavery. He worked for the Board of Plantations when the English government was expanding their colonies in America and the Caribbean. The constitution he drew up for Carolina was strongly feudal in character. Nevertheless, he believed that free people should have absolute control over their bodies, to the point where military commanders could only ask troops to risk their lives, not command. This latest move by the Tories undermines this fundamental principle. It shows they still have the deep-seated feudal assumption that they have the absolute right to control the bodies of their serfs.
Acting Out Totalitarianism
I also wonder how far this new move is an attempt by the Tories to discredit the welfare state by being as totalitarian as possible in its name. For many Americans, the welfare state is just about synonymous with totalitarian Communism. A little while ago American Conservatives opposed to Obamacare were looking at the various campaigns of the Blair government to cut down on obesity in the name of saving the NHS money as examples of the totalitarian assumptions of the British welfare state. “Look! They actually tell you what to do at that level! That’s what Socialism is really like!” It looks to me that the Tories have taken over those arguments, and decided to act them out and push them as far as possible, in order to cut down on ‘welfare dependence’.
The Nanny State vs. Nanny Cameron
And finally, let’s call out this latest measure for another piece of hypocrisy. Quite apart from the fact that the Tories have their fair share of gutbuckets, remember how the Daily Mail and the other Tory rags screamed blue murder when Blair’s government started trying to get people to be more health aware.
Such as the various posters that were stuck up on hoardings up and down the country, telling you not to overdo the amount of salt you put in your food.
They immediately shouted that this was the ‘nanny state’, and that it showed the overbearing, micromanaging mentality of New Labour. The Tories were against all that. They stood for sturdy self-reliance against such petty meddling with people’s personal affairs.
Except now, they don’t. Not when it reinforces their middle and upper class prejudices. Not when it humiliates the lower orders even further. Not when they can deprive people of benefits, make the poor and sick starve, and force them out of house and home.
Well, here’s a musical response to this. It’s the mighty Motorhead’s ‘Eat the Rich’. Enjoy!
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