Sidmouth Folk Diary : Thursday

Well that was just about the perfect end of the festival.

Someone has brought marshmallows to the Bulverton bonfire. There are some families with small kids, although I would have thought it was past their bed times. A young guy with an astonishing voice joins in towards the end. Rory McCloud does a good bye song, imitating the sound of a phone with his mouth harp and pretending to take a call from his auntie. A man with a guitar does “which side are you on”.

There are some anti war songs, Johnny No Legs maybe and one by Rory about not never needing a gun. On a wild whim I volunteer to sing my favourite pro war song — Woody Guthrie’s “good people what are we waiting on”. Rory and the man with the guitar bravely improvise around my noise. The other marshmallows toaster join in with “all you fascists bound to loose” which actually comes from a different song.

At about 2.15 am the guitar man apologizes for being corny, and sings Who Knows Where The Time Goes at the dying embers. 

As I say, the perfect way to end the festival. There is actually a whole nother day to go.

# The Middle Bar singing session finished on time, so unfortunately I didn’t miss The Breath (who were opening up for Martin Simpson.

#Martin Simpson sang Deportees, which he says is about dehumanizing migrants, and stuck to his promise to sing Palaces of Gold an every gig until the Grenville Tower families get justice. A new song about a one legged black nineteenth century London fiddler, to a shantyish tune. And one about his Dad, of course…

#There is a version of Another Man’s Wedding, where, instead of wondering how many strawberries grow in the salt sea, the jilted lover ties a yellow ribbon all around his hat.

# Hey John Barleycorn and Ten Thousand Miles away are synthetic folk songs invented by a music hall singer.

Sidmouth Folk Diary: Wednesday

 # MC signals to Rory McCloud that he has ten minutes left. Rory begins to chat about which song he will sing, which song he would have song, who this song is about, what someone once said to him about the person who the song is about. MC signals that he now has five minutes left. 

# If you’ve never heard Rory, look him up. He’s been described as a folkie Ian Dury. There is a rappish digressiveness to his songs, wild free association about people he’s kissed and fruit at Spitlefield market. An utter one off. 

# The final Oysterband gig was of course wonderful. But even better was the “pearls from the oysters” session in the morning, in which story teller Taffy Thomas told anecdotes about the band’s history, while the Oysters themselves chipped in songs. For all the eighties rock stylings, they are still very much a folk band. Hearing Hal En Tow Jolly Rumberlow acoustically in an intimate setting may be the highlight of the  festival so far. 

# Rosie Hood opened for the Oysters in the big tent. I will be singing the song about the ladies of Versailles who persisted for the rest of the weekend, and Roy Bailey’s “everything possible” never fails to evoke a tear. Her own song writing is exceptional: the one about the Norman monk who flew (or at any rate, plummeted) from the monastery clock tower I have heard before, but the one about the Victorian lady who was mauled to death by a circus tiger she had poked, told from the tigers point of view, was new to me.

# Rory’s set was followed by Robb Johnson, who plunged straight in with a song about racism (“the tories outlawed Robin Hood, cut down the hundred acre wood, but blame  it on the refugees) and a presumably week-old song in which a woman in the Blitz wonders which city the Nazis and going to bomb tonight, while a contemporary person wonders which city the far-right are going to riot in. He finished with Be Reasonable And Demand The Impossible Now. The MC described him as the best political song writer  who is also a primary school teacher. I expect the revolution to start any day now.

#Two talks about folk music and Child Ballads by Brian Peters

#Rory turned up to the campfire session on the top of the hill at midnight. He did three songs, joined the tune players on a plastic orange trombone, and listened to all the other singers. The lady who gestilicuates a complicated pagan reimagining of the Twa Magicians. The man who sings funny songs about people in his morris dance group that no one could possible know. The couple singing banjo accompanied songs in possibly Welsh. The big guy in the black hat who sings out of key sea shanties. It is even possible that he assayed The Day The Nazi Died.

Beer 3.5

Pasties 1

Lofty Talls Ships 2

Lakes of Cool Flynn (or somewhere else where there is deep and false water) 2

Didn’t We Have A Lovely Time The Day We Went to Bagor - Very definitely none at all

Total Hours 8 hours

Sidmouth Folk Diary: Tuesday

 

#not all geography teachers

#Nothing particularly against hymns in general, or And Can It Be in particular. You can sing it at my funeral if you like (not any time soon). Visions of heaven sustained us when John Wesley gave us a voice. Merely felt that the church choir on the sea front was a bit cringe.

Writing this at 10ish with coffee and bacon sandwich. Much more civilised than yesterday. Having stopped singing at 2am I naturally decided I needed to be in he art centre at 9:30 , this left no time for shower or coffee although the sea front bakery supplied the largest bacon bap I have ever seen. “Too much bacon” is a concept I was not previously acquainted with.

NO PASTIE all day. Consumed a large persian chicken wrap with salad flaffles,, humus, olives, peter gurney, petr davey, daniel whiddon old uncle tom cobley and all.

Early rise was to see a filmed archive folk club performance by Chris Sugden, aka Sid Kipper. Furiously wrote down some titles an lyrics that I might sing myself one day. The Female Highwayman might have too much cross dressing for modern tastes, but I feel I could attempt “wild mounting time”. Lady who runs ballad session mentioned that she knew Sidney Carter, and played him “I am bored of the dance, said she”. Apparently he was amused.

Thence to Big Tent for Phil Beer and his former musical partner Paul Downes, and then the Spooky Men. I felt the Spookies did a slightly less silly set than usual, which was to their general benefit. A patriotic Ukrainian song, jostled with a new one (to me) about the guy who can’t fix things but sill “just give it ago.” Eschewed Ralph McTell for the “traditional night out” a kind of all star folk club in the arts centre, including Martin Carthy, Tom McCarthy and Jez Lowe. Martin did the one about the Irishman who goes to a funeral snd finds that the fellow hasn’t died. Jez Lowe did one about the miners who worked through the ‘82 strike called The Judas Bus, interleaved with verses of the Blackleg Miner. A man I didn’t know sang a killingly funny song about Greek philosophers. An Irish man told a story about a family who moved to England and took their faithful house gobln with them. 

In tent close to midnight and will be firing on more cylinders today..

Hours of music: 8.25 hours
Beer 2
Pasties 0

Folk Diary Monday

If you tie a green ribbon around your hat you signify that your true love has gone away. If you wear a yellow handkerchief it means your are going to shun flash company. If you tie a bunch of white or possibly blue ribbons all around your bonny boy’s waist it will let tone maidens know that he’s married. Was this some kind of olden days emoji system? I think we should be told.

I believe it was Mark Twain who said that if you tell a man that the are a hundred billion stars in the galaxy he will believe you, but if a public toilet shows “engaged” (“occupied”) he will turn the handle just to make sure.

Some very polite children from the international language school have photographed my hat as part of a scavenger hunt.

Adopting my usual plan of eschewing the camp showers and putting a pound in the box by the rugby club. If a geography teacher would care to come and shout at us, we would have the full 1970s school experience.

Choir from local church singing And Can It Be on the sea front. Wild urge to join in with Joe Hill style communist lyrics. (If it had been a socialist group, would certainly have sung a hymn.)

 I do not think that a diet of beer and pasties is sustainable in the long term. Or even the short ter

 Patronisingly ask small child if they are a fan of Irish Music. Told no, but they are a fan of Mad Dog McCrae. Their favourite songs are Beeswing and Johnny No Legs (which turns out to be a speeded up Mrs McGraw/My Son John.)

 I remember when Mad Dog McCrae played after parties at Trowbridge and pop up gigs at Glastonbury. They are now mighty and legendary. They have undergone a reverse evolution, less punky and more folkie. I am not sure you are allowed to use the word “pikey” in a song, even if he did kill your goldfish, with a fag.

I definitely didn’t have something in my eye during Beeswing and actually sob during Gay Pirates (yo ho sebastian, let’s go far away, somewhere where the captain won’t be mad.)

Definitely the right call to hear the loud party band at the Bulverton and eschew Spiers and Boden at the Ham, (who are iconic, but whom I have heard many times before.) Which suggests that buying the Season Ticket (everything but the headline gigs) rather than the All In Ticket (everything including the headline gigs) was the right call

I am not a gate keeper, but I am far from sure that a funk band becomes a folk funk bad just because it has an accordion in it.

I Am not very good at dancing about architecture. Elye Cuthbertson is apparently winning awards for being most promising musician in any genre. He plays long complex tunes on the accordion: saw him comparing notes with Cohen Braithwaite-Kilcoyne. My notes say things like “zig zag shaped phrases cut off from above”. This may not help anyone very much.

The Wilson Family sang loud unaccompanied harmony music, in the vicinity of Rolling Home and Union Miner Stand Together. Exceptionally good.

The Guide Hut was full for John Kirkpatrick. (I didn’t get in.)

 Ended night in campfire marquee again. Joined by entirety of steampunk morris side who know hundred of songs. Lady with brilliant voice sang a complex pagan inspired version of possibly Twa Magicians. I sang the dirtiest version of Landlords Fill the Flowing Bowl I known. Tom Pearse has sadly to be abandoned because this Devonian crowd didn’t know the chorus.

 It rained. 

On Wednesday there is a three way clash between Robb Johnson, the Oysterband and Granny’s Attic

Pasties -1

Bacon roll -1

Beeswing -1

My Bonny Boy is Young But He’s Growing -2

Songs by Leo Rossleson - 2

Total time listening to music -6.5

 (

Sidmouth Folk Diary - Sunday

Show of Hands is no more. Long live Dream in Colour. Spelt British style:

the last song involved singing “o o o” and “u u u”. And it abbreviates to DIC, and like Cyrano, they have already covered all the jokes. And there was a very rousing Battlefield Dance Floor, and even an encore of Galway Farmer. And some new songs, including one about wild swimming and one about the post office scandal, which isn’t quite AIG, but probably could be with repeated listens. What there wasn’t, of course, was Phil Beer. Instead there was Johnny Kalsi (huge Banghra drum) Bennet Cerven (extreme fiddle) and Eliza Marshall (flute and flute adjacent). So it’s a lusher, less overtly folkie sound. Two things immediately struck me: how recognisable a Knightley tune is,l regardless of what it is being played on; and how distinct and even strange Steve’s voice is. Perhaps the banter isn’s as natural as the old days - the fiddler was trying just that little bit too hard to fill Phil’s boots, but it’s clearly a joyous new direction for my favourite act. Just the same as it always was but at the same time completely different.




Perhaps Barbara Allen wasn’t hard hearted after all. Perhaps sweet William was hanging out in the bar with women of ill repute. Perhaps the kiss was an obvious ruse. Apparently in the gypsy version, her parents had forbidden her in advance from going near him. And that lad who was sent off to college for a year or two while he was growing — was fourteen or sixteen or eighteen? I spent the afternoon listening to Ballads in the hotel and Ballad Session in the hut. Which is a lot of ballads. A youngish guy named Seb Stone did an utterly compelling Tam Lyn, unaccompanied. One of the floor singers did a chilling George Colins. (“if we catch her will crop her she’s a perjuring whore”.)




Having not found much singing in the Swan, intended earlyish night. Stopped off at Bedford, where a singing session was in full swing. The aforementioned Seb Stone was singing, as was the aforementioned aforementioned Dera Yeates. After a few minutes, Eliza Carthy joined us. For some reason I was not called on to sing.




Lady in coffee / bakery shop said to a troop of morris dancers, pointing at me “be careful, he’s going to write about you.”




My singing “jumps between key’s alarmingly”, apparently.




Pastie - 1

Trees they do grow high - 3

Barbara Allan - 2

Beer 2.5

Total hours listening to music - 7

Sidmouth Folk Diary - Saturday

Saturday

“Well, if we like songs where you shout out rude words….”

Sidney Carter was obviously the influential modern hymn writer, but he only knew one tune. Lord of the Dance is a bit overtly religious for folk sing arounds, but everyone sings John Ball. (“I’ll crow like a cock I’ll carol like a lark in the light that is coming in the morning.”)) When everyone has had s drink or two, people can lose their focus on whether Adam delve or Eve span, and start putting slightly too much emphasis on the words “cock” and “coming”. 

We are in a small marquee adjacent to the Bulverton, which is a very big marquee. I have just listened to The Sea Song Sessions, a super group consistIng of Jon Boden and Seth Lakeman and Jack Rutter and Ben Nicolls and Emily Portman.  There is about to be a celidah (which is Latin for square dance). In the small marquee there is a camp fire and a song session. Everything from John Barleycorn to Yellow Submarine. 

I have failed in my plan to listen to music not stop for twelve hours. But only because the venues have changed: the small acoustic acts are now in the Girl Guide hut. Really. Steward has to keep explaining that , no, there aren’t any men’s toilets. The traddy folk concerts are now in the Harbour Hotel. They are about 25 minutes apart, so going straight from one to the other is no longer feasible. 

Still: 11:30, Guide Hut, Macdara Yeats (pronounced Dara.) Young Dublin man with huge deep voice singing Dublin versions of Irish Songs. Everyone knows The Cruel Mother (down by willow sidey-oh). In the Irish street version she is not visited by the ghost of her babies, but by a policeman. Who takes her off and hangs her. “The moral of this story is, don’t stab your baby.”

1:15, Guide Hut, Thomas McCarthy, Irish traveller singer, so traditional he falls off the edge. Long, long chats about Traveller history — Irish travellers are the indigenous population, and used to be greeted in villages as honoured guests. Anti gypsy racism was created  by the blue shirts in the 30s. Yeats was a Nazi sympathiser. The pope said that if the  travellers wanted to be accepted they should stop being thieves and rogues. He sings with his throat and his nose, a world-old drone. I probably couldn’t sustain prolonged exposure.

3.00 The Harbour. The Goblin Band are the most exciting traditional folk band on the circuit. They are young, queer, and dress like hobbits. They play fiddles and hurdy gurdies and huge recorders and concertinas. They do a traditional folk repertoire. It is hard to put my finger on what is fresh about them. Apart from a sustained fiddle improvisation half way through Tom Pearse, there is no overt jiggery pokery. Martin Carthy, in the front row, was visibly moved by I Like To Rise When The Sun She Rises.

Carthy himself did the second half. He is the same age as Bob Dylan now. His gigs run off the love the audience have for him. I hope I am still doing what I love when I am 83. No one sings a better Patrick Spens.

Realising   I wasn’t going to get to the second hour of the ballad session, I proceeded up the big hill to the Bulverton for the Sea Song Session super group. A man who remembers Strawhead also remembered that I was a Grace Petrie fan and confided that we probably didn’t see eye to eye politically. 

And thence to the small tent for the after hours campfire sing around. Robin the Hat from the Bristol shanties is singing Shallow Brown when I arrive. We rapidly get to crowing like a COCK in  the light that is COMING in the morning. So I take t he plunge with a traditional English song collected by Ronald Barker in 1977. 

to take the air and listen to

the twittering of the birds all day

the bumble bees at play.

Rather too much dark stout: the more everyone else drinks, the better I sound. I possibly Ben Kenobi and Sloop John A as well. Broke up with The Partying Glass at about 1am. Two folk gods are still dancing in the main tent.

Pasties - 1

Beer - 4

Barrats Privateers -1

Tom Cobley -1

 

Sidmouth Folk Diary: Friday

Friday

Breakfast at Lookout Cafe on sea front. I will definitely not eat a large cooked breakfast every day, I seem to recall promising my Slimming World rep that I would make good choices. Having sung “tomorrow we’ll be sober” last night, perhaps I will say “tomorrow I’ll be sensible.” I think the only t hing I ate apart from the large breakfast was a pain a raison (sp) from the Cornish Bakery. Beer counts as sensible, though? We are in Sidmouth the land of pasties and cream teas.

12:30 Middle Bar Singers in room above Anchor Pub are a social group that exists all year round, I think, They all know each other and there are ipn jokes I don’t get. They do the thing where they pass a large bunch of leaves round the room and when it comes to you you are allowed to sing, or else pass it on. I subjected them to A Chat With My Mother and Dont Go In Them Lions Cage tonight. No one left and nothing was thrown.

3.00 Steeleye Span in the Ham, which is a 700 seater marquee and the main festival venue. It was a more traditional set then I have sometimes heard them do, including Thomas The Rhymer and Long Lamkin. Maddy Prior’s explanation of how she interprets lyrics was particularly fascinating. She prefers the version where Lankin is a disgruntled mason to the one where he is an invisible child murder who walks through walls. Also New York Dolls They finished up with a song about a hat.

7:30 Harbour Hotel for Intimate Trad Evening. Sara Grey is an American singer and folklorists with a banjo and a detailed experience of where songs come from and who passed them on. Lovely version of Hills Of Mexico, which I know as Plains of Buffalo. She claims (no reason to doubt this) that Andy Irvin learned Arthur McBride from an American source singer who deserves mofr credit.

Apres Folk: To Swan Inn where usual suspects are singing Daydream Believer and DIVORCE. I recklessly say to a stranger that I hope to sing by the end of the week; she now refers to me as “singing man”. (The main thing is having a go, not staying in tune, everyone can sing a bit, you are probably much better than you think you are.) 

The barman recognized me, and remembered I like stout. The lady in the bakery recognized me and remembered that I write. A man I talked to at s Grace Petrie two years ago greeted me with “well we kicked them out.” Do I look particularly memorable?

Beer 3.5 pints

New York Dolls x 3

South Australia x 2

Pasties x 1

Breakfast x 1

Streets of London x1

Sidmouth Folk Diary: Thursday

 Items that I can cross of my Festival Bingo Card.

1: Ate a pasty. 

2: Ate an ice cream (coffee flavored.)

3: Bought items I forgot to pack. (Where oh where do my tent pegs go?)

4: Drank beer in festival branded plastic cup.

5: Joined in chorus of Streets of London

6: Heard “Bound for South Australia”, twice.

7: Saw Nelson kill the Turkish knight, and also saw The Doctor bandage Donald Trump’s ear. (*)

8: Drank beer.

9: Personally sang mildly risqué folk song to audience of strangers in pub, to polite applauses. (**)

10: Joined in chorus of New York Girls on bus back to camp site.  

Festival doesn’t officially start until tomorrow. 

(*) Mummers Play

(**) here’s to the man who drinks real ale and goes to bed quite plastered / never buys his friends a round / never buys his friends a round / never buys his friends a round / cos he’s a miserable bastard

Vibes

At school I studied, if that is the word, Sociology. 

 We had a text book. Themes and Perspectives in Sociology by Michale Haralambos. I believe proper graduate level sociologists look on it with some horror. They think it reduces complex research and nuanced theoretical debates into bite-sized bullet points that can be swallowed and spewed up over exam papers. I remember reading an exasperated examiners' report on an A level paper: it said that no matter what question about the Sociology of Education candidates were asked, a large number of them would reproduce Haralambos's chapter about the underperformance of working class school-children from memory. 

Sociology has a reputation for being a "Mickey Mouse" college subject that guarantees a life-time of unemployment. It has now largely been replaced by Media Studies in the conservative demonology. I didn't take it beyond A level: my degrees are in the much more practical English Literature and Medieval Studies.

But in retrospective, O and A Level Haralambos had a good deal to be said for them. It asked questions that it might not have occurred to us to ask: questions where the answers seemed so obvious that we might not otherwise have noticed that they were questions. "Why do humans live in families?" "Why do communities punish wrong-doers, and how do they decide what counts as wrong?" That was the "themes" part. And unlike everything else on the 1980s Comprehensive School arts syllabus, Mr Haralambus encouraged students to entertain the possibility that there was more than one possible answer. That was what he meant by "perspectives". A French Functionalist would say that Society works like a machine; and we can see various ways in which families and prisons keep that machine running smoothly. No, say the German Marxists, Society is a struggle between rich people and poor people (I have never been able confidently to spell bourgeoisie) and families and prisons are techniques for keeping the poor poor and the rich rich. There were also phenomenologists, who, I think, said that "why" questions didn't matter and it was sufficient to just study families and school and prisons in the way that botanists studied weeds; and symbolic interactionists who.... Truthfully, I have never known what symbolic interactionists do. This was all doubtless very simplistic and I am sure that a lot of the time we repeated what the book said without actually understanding it. I seem to recall that Teacher thought that I was being a bit of a girly swot when I actually ordered some Durkhiem and some Wilmott and Young from the library and found out what they actually said. 

English teachers and History teachers also asked us questions of course, important questions like why Hamlet delayed and the identity of Godot and what caused the English Civil War. But they told you the correct answer (purgatory, death and the king, if I remember correctly) and marked you down if you didn't agree with it. We were rather discouraged from seeing actors doing Shakespeare in the theatre in case the Producer confused us by incorporating wrong answers into his production. I was told very clearly that I was not allowed to think that Fanny Price was a sanctimonious prig; because Jane Austen didn't intend me to think that Fanny Price was a sanctimonious prig; and an honest attempt to explain why I disliked the character and found it hard to engage with the book was dismissed as 'waffle.

Note: Fanny Price is in fact a sanctimonious prig.

I expect this is why Sociology -- and in fact Media studies -- are so often mocked by small and capital C conservatives. If you are editor of the Daily Mail or Sky News, you don't want young people asking questions about how media functions and what effects it has on the people who consume it. If you are Minister for Education, you definitely don't want young people asking "What would a Marxist say schools are for? How would that differ from a Phenomenological Symbolgist." Whoever you are, you don't want young people thinking that there are different, equally valid, perspectives on the big questions.

At any rate, that's what a Marxist would say. I suppose a Functionalist would say that it is good for society to have harmless scapegoats and essays in the Times about sociology being a waste of time are the modern equivalent of burning the devil in effigy.

At university, it turned out that there were themes and perspectives in English Literature as well; only there it was called Critical Theory. Critical Theory is another thing small c conservatives think is a bit of waste of time.

In practice, Sociology was one of those those subjects that music teachers and PE teachers gravitated towards, not because they cared about it but because they needed a second string in their academic bow. Geography was the other one. Many of us still believe that it is impossibly to read a map unless you are wearing an Adidas tracksuit with a whistle round you neck. Lazy and disengaged teachers often encouraged students to Express Themselves about General Issues, during the lesson, meaning that those of us who were quite articulate and quite literate ran away with the idea that we were Good at sociology. If you read books outside school, it wasn't too hard to improvise a good essay on whether gender was nature or nurture without actually having read the required chapter of the Big Blue Book.

It was a long time ago, and memory is not always entirely charitable. They literally pulled my old school down a few years ago. 

I am thinking of the occasion when the sociology teacher thought it would be a wheeze to invite a local police officer to address the class on the subject of Crime and Deviancy. I don't know whether the officer in question was a Functionalist or a Phenomenologist; but it is safe to say that he wasn't a Marxist. For all I know it could have been a member of the local Am Dram society, doing a stereotyped caricature of an English Copper for satiric effect. He began by saying that as a policeman he was not allowed to express, or even have, any political or religious opinions, before explaining that there was no crime whatsoever on the Isle of Man or Saudi Arabia because they still chopped the hands of thieves. (Right up to 9/11, the theory that Johnny Muslim and his good old fashioned discipline had got it just about right was very common among people who didn't have political beliefs.) Pausing only to do a bog-standard "never did me any harm" routine, he explained that there weren't any murders in the 1950s when they had had hanging and there wouldn't be any murders today if hanging were brought back. This was in Margaret Thatcher's golden days.

Now, I wasn't having this. We had Done Punishment and Deterrence in the previous lesson. The text book included a graph of the number of murders in possibly Australia. Possibly Australia had abolished hanging for a while, and then brought it back, and then abolished it again; and it was clear from graph that the presence of absence of a hangman had no correlation to the murder rate.  

PC Plod wasn't having me not having it.

Oh, I'm not interested in statistics, he said, you can prove anything you like with statistics.

It may have been Winston Churchill who made the joke about there being three kinds of untruth: lies, damn lies, and statistics. Checks notes: Actually it was Mark Twain, who was quoting Disralli, who may have been quoting the Duke of Wellington. Let's assume it was Oscar Wilde to be on the safe side. A proper mathematician had written a best selling book called "How to Lie With Statistics": I suspect a lot of people who hadn't read it had heard the title. 

"You can prove anything you like with statistics" could be taken as the prime dogma of the populist right. You may have a gut feeling that vaccination doesn't really do any good. You may once have known a heavy smoker who lived to a ripe old age. You may be pretty sure that there have been more traffic jams in London since Tony Blair invited all the Muslims to live there. If your belief system doesn't allow you to count up the number of smokers who get sick; or look at police records to find out if the roads get snarled up more often than they did in the racially homogenous days, then you haven't go anything apart from gut feeling and anecdote to go on. So anything which challenges you gut is suspect.

We're freer and better off since Brexit because I feel freer and better off. And since I am a fan of Brexit, I was likely to feel freer and better off or at least say that I did, regardless of what the facts on the ground happen to be. You tell me the standard of living has actually gone down? Oh, you can prove anything you like with facts.

Populism is ultimately the worship of vibes. 

It is perfectly true that if you generate a sufficiently large quantity of data and spend a sufficient time staring at it, you are going to be able to find some trends and some correlations which back up your side of the argument. I think it was Winston Churchill who said that his opponents used facts as a drunk man uses a lamp-post: not for illumination, but for support. (Wrong again: It was Andrew Lang, the fellow with the multicoloured fairy books. But we can go with Oscar Wilde.)

I am not talking about seeing the result of the chariot race in the entrails of a chicken; or doing computer searches of billion-character Biblical acrostics, But it is highly unlikely absolutely everything is completely terrible and appalling, even after fourteen years of Conservative government; and equally unlikely that everything is uniformly wonderful, even a whole fortnight into the glorious new Centrist utopia. It's the job of Kier Starmer's spinners to find some numbers which make the Tories look bad, and the job of Rishi Sunak's spinner to find some numbers which make them look good.  

So: that is my prediction for 2029. Regardless of what happens in the real world, Kier Starmer will be able to quote figures that prove that Things Have Only Got Better under his premiership. Wages will have gone up, inflation will have come down, health service waiting lists will be lower, children will be better educated, summers will be longer, women will be braver, soldiers will be more beautiful. And we can also be sure that Priti Patel (I assume it will be Priti Patel I prefer to assume the worst and be pleasantly surprised by the marginally less bad) will be able to quote figures proving that 2024-2029 have been an economic and social catastrophe: that ordinary decent people can't afford to put food on the table; that scarcely anyone coming out of tertiary education can read or write, much less do simple arithmetic and that in many towns old people dare not leave their houses for fear of the mobs of cannibal immigrants eating human flesh because they can't afford baked beans, that...

One of the least edifying aspects of the last election campaign were the gladiatorial debates and vox pops in which the Opposition pointed to a health service on the point of collapse and the government said that it was even more on the point of collapse in Scotland where the Opposition were in charge and the government said that the Opposition were in charge in Wales where things were even worse. One side could quote figures that said that waiting lists were coming down and the other side said that they were only coming down because they had gone up so much and the first side said that they were going up more slowly than they would be if the other lot were in power. Most of us mortals don't have the time or the effort to work out if either side is in the right. Probably the truth is that things are quite bad; not as bad as they could be; and better in some places than others. 

 Which is why a certain number of people will always vote for the big orange fellow who doesn't know much about figures but is quite sure it's the immigrants fault. 

It doesn't matter what Kier Starmer achieves: what matters is what people perceive him  to have achieved. 

This is not quite such a cynical remark as it may seem at first glance. If you are a political wonk, then your facts and figures matter a good deal: and if you work in a niche area then an incremental boost to your niche is very important indeed.

 Barak Obama said that nice thing about working at a state or city level was that relatively small actions could make relatively big changes to the lives of specific groups of people. A small change in the rate of tax on tractor fuel can be the difference between staying in business and going bankrupt to a few thousand farmers. 

I get why Labour Wonks go on and on about the fact that, yes, Tony Blair got us involved in a, yes,  futile war, but on the positive side, he put a lot of, yes,  money into nursery schools. And I am not being cynical. (Well, in fact, I am being cynical, but at least I admit it.) If you've actually seen and lived the positives of SureStart then it must have hurt a great deal when people like me said we were withholding our vote over a dodgy dossier and two hundred thousand dead civilians. And it must be really painful to hear the Left use terms like Tory Lite and say that both sides are as bad as the other one. 

Both sides are not as bad as each other. 

I am not rich; but I am definitely not poor. I can't truthfully say I have noticed that prices in the supermarket have gone up. I have noticed that since Brexit and the Pandemic, empty shelves are much more common. Not even the big shops can be relied on to have all the things I want every time I go shopping. I absolutely admit that "since Brexit there are no tinned anchovies to be had at Lidl, not even for reading money" is so much a first world problem that it barely registers as a problem. I have noticed my fuel bill going up. I have definitely noticed that certain Little Luxuries can be indulged in slightly less often. Pre-Pandemic I used to say "I probably shouldn't spend a fiver on my lunch every day, but it's nice and convenient". Post-Pandmeic I find myself saying "Ten quid for a nice coffee and a bowl of soup, I am not quite sure I can run to that." But honestly, in the economic down-turn is mostly something which has happened to other people. (I paid off my mortgage when I came into some money, so Liz Truss didn't directly harm me. There is a wobbly line on the website of my financial adviser, and it seems to be going steadily upwards, although there was a dramatic dip in September 2022. The fact that I have a wobby line to consult may make you challenge my "I am not rich" assertion.)

In the 1970s, we felt that if we called for an ambulance, one would probably come; and if we turned up at a railway station; there would probably be a train;  even if the guard would be officious, the food would be disgusting; and Hattie Jaques would ask me impertinent questions about my bowel movements. I now feel that if I had a heart attack I would be put on a three week waiting list for an ambulance; which would be diverted via Wivelsfield due to leaves on the line, and by the time I got to my destination I would be inconveniently dead.

Five years is quite a long time; if in five years we have a sense that we can trust the health service and the public services again; we will probably think that Starmer is doing an okay job and give him another chance. If he has to go through the numberwang cycle, then the Emperor has already won. 

You can't prove anything you like with statistics. You can only prove the things which the statistic prove. But the difference between a world where Kier Starmer steps down from the Premiership in 2040 and one in which Nigel Farage enters Downing Street in 2029 will ultimately come down to Starmer's ability to generated good vibes. 

This is also true of the nice American lady who is trying to beat Donald Trump. 

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Feedback

Dear Andrew

Here we go! There is not the slightest evidence that our beloved Fuhrer was ever a racist; in fact, he fought racists all his life and trying to tar him with the same brush proves that you are as I have always thought a woke snowflake working for the demise of civilisation. People like you should be locked up. 



Dear Andrew

It is absolutely typical that you would give a moment's thought to considering whether people on the far far away with the fairies right wing have a good point and trying to distinguish different shades of bastardy among the bastards: your attempt to give a fair hearing to [insert name of right wing person in this space] makes about as much sense as trying to get sense out of the ravings of [insert name of anti-vax flat earther here] and reveals that you are as we have always believed a racist. People like you should be forcibly reeducated.



Dear Andrew

Were you not aware that possession of such a book alone was punishable by death?

Dear Andrew

Yes but have you considered that Congressional sub-document plural double ex zeebra shows that in the third quarter between 1896 and 1897 the calories consumed by the average former slave was in the fact nought point nought nought three percent higher than that consumed by an Irishman who lived entirely on peat clippings at the same time and that therefore the only true liberals were the Kappa Alpha Fraternity? People like you should be openly mocked. 

Dear Andrew

I think that you should take the new season of Prime Ministers Question Time on its own terms, as as bit of light entertainment with some pseudo-science thrown in, and not try to read too much into it. People like you should be ignored. 

Dear Andrew

Has it ever occurred to you that you are in fact completely mad? I have a small pink Pangolin named Napoleon and he agrees with me. People like you should join me in Moscow where I we are intending to retreat. 

Dear Andrew

Your tax rebate has been approved for the 2023/2024 tax year.

Claim it here: [Link]

Substantive Digression: Are All Tories In Fact Bastards?

There's a very good story about an elderly Blitz veteran who was caught up in the 2005 London bombings. As he was being taken to hospital, he remarked "Don't worry: I've been blown up by a better class of bastard than this!" 

It almost certainly never happened, but it is still a very good story.

I have a book on my shelf by Mr Enoch Powell. When he wasn't quoting the Aeneid at people who probably wouldn't be able to identify quotes from the Aeneid, he wrote some very interesting essays on the Christian Bible. 

One of the essays in the book had a significant effect on my own intellectual and spiritual development. The essay is called Bibliotary. He's writing about Jesus's prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane. Saint Mark, he day, goes to some lengths to establish that Jesus has walked some distance away from the disciples, and that the disciples have fallen asleep. Mark can't possibly know what Jesus said; there were no witnesses. He must have made it up. "The narrative and its truth is not that of history; it is that of poetry, or imagination". At some point, some early Christian imagined that Jesus was reluctant to die and introduced it into the story. The question isn't "why did it happen like that?" but "who imagined it happening like that, and when, and for what reason?"

Never mind if the great man's reasoning is correct. (C.S Lewis thought that the evangelist was recording the first few words the witnesses overheard, just before they fell asleep.) The point is that Powell's essay was the first one I read which showed me that you could have a critical approach to the Bible without being a debunker: that you could be a Christian and still treat the Bible as a collection of texts with a history.

Granted, most of his religious theories are plain wrong. He insisted on the priority of Matthew -- the idea that Matthew's Gospel was written first and that Mark's shorter text is a rather inept summary of it. No reputable scholar would now subscribe to this theory: the battle lines are between those who think that Matthew and Luke independently expanded Matthew and those who think that Luke used Matthew directly. But Powell's essay on what he calls the archaeology of Matthew was the first time I had seen someone putting verses from one gospel alongside verses from another gospels and making informed speculations about why they differ.

He also had a theory, that I could summarise but won't, that Jesus was executed by stoning rather than by crucifixion.  [1]

The book is called Wrestling With the Angel. I have a large print of Jack Kirby's drawing of a super-heroic Jacob wrestling with a Celestial angel above my writing desk. I very much hope that is just a coincidence.

Having this forbidden tome in my collection, I have, in fact, also read the political chapters. Some are better than others. I am very unpersuaded, for example, by the argument that since the Church can't do miracles, it has no right to read into the story of the Feeding of the Five Thousand a moral imperative to feed the poor; although I kind of take the point that clergy who think that the main point of Jesus healing the blind man is that National Health opticians are a jolly good idea are stretching their texts.

The essays on nationhood and immigration seem to be coming from rather a different place from "rivers of blood". I don't know whether we should think in terms of clever man who once lost his temper and said some vile things, or a vile man who was good at hiding behind a veneer of scholarship. The Birmingham speech is, of course, indefensible. But the essays I have read seem to be coming from a more intelligible position. 

A country is a group of people with a shared identity: it is defined by it's institutions; flag, Queen, church, literary canon. I would add, though he certainly would not have done, the BBC and the NHS. Also folk music. What makes you British is not your passport or your nationalisation papers or even a good score in a multiple choice citizenship test. And it's not who your parents were and what colour your skin is. It's whether or not you identify with those institutions. You can absolutely be a British person with Ruritanian heritage. What you can't be is a British Ruritanian. And you definitely can't be a British person who feels loyalty to the Ruritanian flag and holds Ruritanian street festivals and feels more affection to Prince Rupert than to King Charles. I don't know if Powell would have admitted the existence of British Communists or British Republicans. I strongly suspect that if you scratched the surface you would find that the Conservative Party was one of those institutions that defined your Britishness. All real Americans support the Republican Party because if you don't support the Republican Party you are not a real American. 

There certainly is or was a widespread belief among the clergy that the Established Church of England was a national Church. If you are English you are a member. If Evangelicals had been allowed to insist that people getting baptised and confirmed and buried had to make some profession of Christian faith, they would have reduced the Church of England to the status of a sect.

Which is pretty much just a posh-school version of Norman Tebbit's infamous cricket test. A person whose parents came from Ruritania can certainly be English; but a person who cheers for the old country in a England vs Ruritania Test Match clearly doesn't think of himself as English. And if he was properly English he would know that cheering at Cricket matches isn't the done thing. [2]

Now: many people have spotted that the current Tory leader and several of the contender to replace him have dark coloured skin. Several of them are second generation immigrants: Rishi Sunak's parents were Punjabi; Suella Braverman's came from Mauritius and Kenya; Priti Patel's parents emigrated to England from Uganda; Kemi Badenoch was born in the UK but grew up in Nigeria. 

Nothing in Rishi Sunak's Prime Ministership became him as the leaving of it. Outside Downing Street on the day after the election he spoke movingly of how a second generation immigrant, albeit a very rich one, could rise to the highest office in the land; and how his young children had placed Diwali candles outside 10 Downing Street. That was one of the reasons that Britain was the greatest nation in the world, he said. 

Bravo, said I. If only you'd spoken like that during the election, I might have voted for you. 

Note: I would not in fact have voted for him.

But during the election, the Tories very much nailed their colours to the anti-immigration mast. The dotty scheme about putting asylum seekers planes to Rawanda was the main thing they wanted to talk about in the election and the main stick with which the right wing press wanted to beat Kier Starmer. 

So a lot of liberals were naturally tempted to say: "Ha-ha. You think there are too many immigrations and want to send them back where they came from. But guess what! Your parents were immigrations! Bet that never occurred to you before! Gotcha!"

But this seems to be fully covered by Powell's theory of virtuous institutions: which he himself regards as the essence of Conservatism. The opponent isn't dark skinned people or people who say "Allah" rather than "Jehovah". The opponent is multiculturalism. There are good immigrants and bad immigrants. The good ones have totally identified with Britain; the bad ones still see themselves as French and Irish and Ruritanian. If I am correct about the Established Church, it is perfectly consistent for someone whose actual faith happens to be Buddhist or Hindu to sincerely believe that "our" country was built on Christianity; that "our shared" Christian values define who "we" are; and that Muslims are watering down "our" identity. The old joke turns out to be political position: the question isn't whether Rishi Sunak is a Hindu; the question is whether or not he is a Church of England Hindu. 

And I don't really get the whole nationalism thing. I think of myself far more as a "person" than I do "a white person". Which is why I am perfectly happy for football to come home, but don't particularly mind if it doesn't. I grok that it is easier for a white person to say that he doesn't do race than for a black person, in the same way that it is easier for a cis-male person to say that he doesn't do gender than for a woman or a transgender person. I can't get my head round the mindset of someone who is annoyed every single time a non-white is shown eating a big mac in a McDonalds commercial. I don't know what is going on in the head of someone whose reaction to Ncuti Gatwa or Paapa Essiedu or Chadwick Brosnan or Kamala Harris is to talk about "box ticking" and "DEI appointments". 

That's the answer to "can you be friends with a conservative". If by "conservative" you mean "a person who says 'us' when he means 'light skinned' people and 'them' when he means 'dark skinned people'" and wants his country back, then no, I don't think I could be.

But I look at the current Reform party and the current Tory party and then I look at Enoch Powell.

And I think "In ye olde days, we used to have a better class of bastard."

[1] Why is Pontius Pilate so important to Christian tradition? Why do people in church to this day chant "crucified under Pontius Pilate" rather than, say "betrayed by Judas Iscariot" or "buried by Joseph of Arimathea"? Answer: because it was essential for the early Christians to pinpoint the time of Jesus's death. You could prove that Jesus was the Messiah because the Passion coincided with the time table laid out in (a particular interpretation of) the prophecy of Daniel. Time and time and half a time and all that that entrails. It is highly unlikely that the historical Jesus's death really did cohere with those particular texts. So Pilate must have been retrospectively written into the story for didactic purposes. But if Pilate is a ret-con -- and if there is no evidence outside of didactic Christian sources that he was even involved -- then do we have any reason to think that the Romans were involved in proceedings at all? Don't the texts make it clear that it was the Jewish authorities thought that Jesus must die, must die, this Jesus must die, because he was a blasphemer and threatening to their position? The Gospels acknowledges that "Pilate" was relatively uninterested in the case. So it doth follow as the night the day: the historical Jesus was killed by the Jews, not the Romans. And only the Romans crucified.

[2] And through the world over, each nation's the same/they've simply no notion of playing the game/They argue with umpires, they cheer when they've won/And they practice beforehand which spoils the fun.

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