AUTHENTOCRATS:

CULTURE, POLITICS AND
THE NEW SERIOUSNESS

JOE KENNEDY

AUTHENTOCRATS:

CULTURE, POLITICS AND
THE NEW SERIOUSNESS

JOE KENNEDY

Contents

Introduction

Chapter I       “Seriously, I would have a mug normally”

Chapter II       The Nine Yorkshiremen of the Apocalypse

Chapter III      Authentocracy’s Funky Commercials

Chapter IV       Mass Obviation

Chapter V        All Speaking German by Now

Chapter VI       Sneering at the English

Chapter VII     The Dialectics of Banter

Chapter VIII   Get in the Sea, Hipsters!

Chapter IX      “Grainy, hard-bollocked reality” and the Moment of Corbynism

Selected Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Middlemen have one thing in common with souls in hell, which is that for the most part they do not know that they are middlemen, any more than the souls in hell know that they are in hell, hell being a mere negation of heaven, of which they catch occasional glimpses, too agonising in their positiveness to be borne or remembered for more than a flash of eternity.

Christine Brooke-Rose,
The Middlemen

Introduction

Were you to have driven around the back roads which twist through the arable farmlands of the Vale of York or South Norfolk in the late spring of 2016, you would have seen a good number of billboards rising from behind field boundaries, stark against the wide flatland skies, urging passing motorists to vote for Britain to leave the European Union. Following these routes again exactly a year later, you’d have observed that the billboards had been replaced by campaign advertisements for Theresa May’s increasingly nativist Conservative Party, who were at that time seeking to extend their parliamentary majority in a snap election. The owners of these fields, who allow such signs to be placed in them, are wealthy by any sensible count — land-rich, medium-size employers who often get away with paying the minimum wage, or less in some cases. Yet it wasn’t this demographic the public read about as both pro- and anti-European columnists and broadcasters sought to explain Brexit, predict the result of the General Election and, more generally, theorise an alleged traditionalist shift in the nation’s political weather. Instead, their narrative fulcrum was a group of weirdly homogeneous-sounding people who had, we were informed, been left behind, patronised and demeaned by a high-handed liberal multiculturalism. Often referred to with the adjectival shorthand “white working-class”, or even just “working-class”, or, even more speciously, “hard-working”, this category became a political fetish, as Essex Boys had in the Eighties and Mondeo Men had in the Nineties. A “metropolitan elite”, it was frequently proposed, had overlooked the traditions and particularities of post-industrial and small-town England, and we were now witnessing the backlash.

American readers will be more than familiar with what’s being talked about here. Donald Trump, we have often heard, knew how to speak to the apple-pie truth of the heartlands, the flyover states, the Rust Belt, the Corn Belt, the immiserated, addicted and angry of Appalachia. He was the inevitable reaction to a polity grounded in the needs and preoccupations of big-city sophisticates; there had been simply too much liberalism, too much deference to a vision of the modern which prioritised social justice for everybody except poor whites. Over and over, cultural rather than economic explanations were offered as an explanation for Trump, with too many liberal analysts forgetting that the best solution to the problem of poverty is less poverty, not a more forgiving attitude to what were presented as the “legitimate concerns” — patriotism, militarism and ultimately white supremacism — of non-metropolitan America.

Of course, it is easy enough to find grumbling nativism, blustering patriotism and the meanest, thickest racism in Pennsylvania’s unemployment blackspots, or on the East Lincolnshire coast, or in Pas-de-Calais or Wallonia or Saxony. You can find it anywhere, in fact, if you go looking for it. I hear these sentiments expressed frequently enough where I live, in Brighton, assumed widely to be one of the most liberal, open-minded, progressive small cities in Europe. It would be easy to get a dose of it too in North London’s granola enclaves, in Remain-voting Manchester or Glasgow, or in donnish Oxford and Cambridge. And just as there are a wide range of outlooks on the world to be found in these supposed bastions of liberal Britain, the real stories on the ground of the forgotten realms so beloved by political scientists and data-mesmerised journalists fail to be reducible to clichés about the innate social conservatism of “the working class”. A dominant narrative in the UK at the moment is that “real people” need to be “listened to” and “respected”, but in practice this tends to amount to the circulation of a one-dimensional portrait of “provincials” grounded in a simplistic, badly modelled opposition between them and the “elites of Islington”, or wherever. This attentiveness is neither as attentive nor as respectful as it affects to be.

To be absolutely clear, it is not only, and probably not even predominantly, right-wing ideologues making these questionable claims on the behalf of the left-behind. In fact, one of the spaces in which the elite/forgotten dichotomy has been reproduced most frequently is that constituted by the liberal media “elitists” of London, Brighton, Manchester and so on themselves. Particularly in the spring of 2017, it was almost impossible to move in Hartlepool or Whitehaven without clattering into a well-meaning journalist, clutching tightly to the homewards portion of their day return from the capital, on the hunt for a soundbite about how the Labour Party needed to honour its historical support base by being more noisily anti-immigration. Culture supplements this year have been full of fretful, yet basically approving reviews of post-liberal manifestos by the likes of David Goodhart, Mark Lilla and Douglas Murray, or novels and travel books promising to unlock the troubled heart of mythic Englishness. Often accused by the right of being apologetic and handwringing, liberals were queuing up to do penance for not having been adequately considerate of opinions that were often antithetical to their own most cherished values.

Moreover, not all of this was carried out in good faith. There was also, very clearly, an opportunistic faking of affinity for a hitherto overlooked provincial averageness, and it was typically being carried out by politicians and thinkers who had previously been enthusiastic advocates of technocratic neo-liberalism, the ideology surely more guilty than any other for having ripped the hearts out of a thousand small British towns. Observing Blairites from Westminster and the media talking about how the authentic people of Britain were resistant to left-wing politics, that such views were the concern of a privileged and remote Islingtonite coterie, while knowing that they’d at least tacitly supported the laissez-faire economics which were the wellspring of a public scepticism about politics, was the enraging experience which drove this book into being. My fundamental claim when I began to consider writing it, in the aftermath of the disastrous — for Labour — 2015 General Election, was that Blairism was using a variant of reactionary traditionalism as an alibi. In other words, it was suggesting that it could fix itself by attending to “legitimate concerns” around immigration, security and so on, and using this suggestion to distract from the fact that, as was the case with centre-dwelling “socialist” parties across Europe, its tinkering technocracy was now an intellectually derelict, obsolete ex-modernity. This ruse is authentocracy.

A book arguing this would have been a short, perhaps inflammatory polemic, but it wouldn’t have accommodated the full scope of what I think authentocracy is, namely a laundered, centrist populism that seeks to wield power with reference to an authenticity that is always “just over there”. My argument is that authentocracy and post-liberalism more broadly are entangled with a quixotic cultural lurch away from what is taken to be postmodern flippancy. In my previous book, Games Without Frontiers, I referred to this as a “new seriousness”, and tried to describe it in relation to car advertising. Where the 1990s would have tried to sell us a car, I suggested, with a cheeky wink and the suggestion that it would open up a sunny world of “frictionless” sexual enjoyment, this decade is highly invested in weightiness, in a return to long-established categories of identity and their attendant responsibilities. As such, when we see cars advertised now, they are driven through rain and mud by grim, bearded men battling their way back to their families. This is an apt metaphor for much of what has happened lately in film, where audiences are now offered an earnest “grittiness”, which snowballs inexorably into camp, in what one would expect to be the most light-hearted of movies. It’s there also in television, which trips over itself to find its blackest shade of unflinching noir but in doing so produces something increasingly kitsch, and in literature, no small amount of which appears at present to be locked in an interminable, boring effort to uncover the darkness at England’s — or Britain’s — heart. I want to demonstrate that authentocracy is not simply about Blairite politicians pretending to like football: to really take hold of it, one must do so also in its aesthetic and imaginative contexts.

Here, I’m going to give a brief sense of the shape of this book’s argument. Chapter I opens with a vignette which has become rather notorious in any discussion of authentocracy as a political gambit, and fans out from this to provide some points of reference for what is meant by the term. In Chapter II, I discuss how authentocracy fits into a history of British, and more specifically English, political and literary realism, patching it into a long tradition of truth claims founded on one-downmanship and aggressive philistinism. Here, I also look at a few instances in which a prototypical authentocracy was the target of satirical critique. In the third chapter, authentocracy is positioned in relation to the new seriousness in action movies, fantasy films and detective thrillers. This chapter also brings in arguments from Theodor Adorno’s The Jargon of Authenticity, a work that sets the bar in terms of criticising how political ideas are packaged as unalterable existential truths.

The fourth, fifth and sixth chapters chip away at some of authentocracy’s keystone tropes. Chapter IV looks at a mode of ethnographic political journalism which has flourished over the last decade, and indicts it for an affected concern for local particularities it very often fails to meaningfully heed. After this, the predilection of authentocrats for the sententious gravitas of military commemoration is called into question, and Britain’s ever-vexed relationship with World War II is thought through. Subsequently, Chapter VI asks about the contradictions of a “progressive” English patriotism and the attempts by a number of writers to justify such an idea.

In Chapter VII, we move back to the 1990s to show how Blairism’s cultural motor was a rejection of a certain form of fusty traditionalism, but that its dependence on this atavistic conservatism as a negative image meant the two were always dialectically tangled. Blairite modernity therefore carried within it a deeply reactionary, anti-modern streak which gradually reasserted itself as the New Labour project changed and, finally, failed. The following chapter develops this history to show how the conflict over the political meaning of authenticity has, sadly, become a generational one. My final chapter offers some admittedly provisional comments on what happens now, in light of the apparent success of Jeremy Corbyn’s efforts to reinstate left-wing projects at the heart of the Labour Party. Although there’s some cautious optimism to be had, there’s also a risk that Corbynism as a movement could become seduced by the tedious, triangulating electoralism of authentocracy.

Writing this book has been hard work. Looked at one way, its subject is strategic idiocy, and sifting through countless examples of clowning irresponsibility on a more or less daily basis has been alternately exhausting and infuriating. My stake in this discussion is substantial: I was born and brought up in County Durham and North Yorkshire, in two towns around ten miles apart, both of which voted largely in favour of Brexit. Because of this, I feel a responsibility to do something more than look on aghast as metropolitan journalists, many privately educated and “elite” by my understanding of the term, pontificate about how we need to pay more attention to the “real” people of provincial Britain, all the while generalising maliciously and patronisingly about precisely those they’re trying to save. The myth that has developed around the people David Goodhart calls the “somewheres” has at times felt ubiquitous, and very little space has been given over to people who want to lay bare its ideological clockwork. It’s at times been so anger-inducing that several rewrites have been necessary to tone down the material. With this in mind, I’d like to pay respect to the fact that this book was, in a way, a collective endeavour, with everyone who contacted me to say how repellent they find the authentocratic turn owed a huge thanks for giving me the resources to press on. To those not mentioned by name in the Acknowledgements, I’m very, very grateful.

Chapter I

“Seriously, I would have a mug normally”

In the arches underneath the hall of a well-preserved covered market, facing into Darlington’s spacious, eerily featureless, often empty town square, is a small café called Il Cappuccino. If you’re local to this South Durham boondock, and particularly if you’re a customer, you call it “Cappuccinos”. It has been there since at least the early 1980s, possibly longer. The last time I went in was thirteen years ago, when I persuaded my dad to come to a football match with me on the condition that he got a ham sandwich and — naturally — his cappuccino beforehand. Given it is so long since I last visited, it may have been renovated, but let’s assume poetically that it is still the same as I remember it being between my early childhood and my most recent trip.

There are two rooms. The front lounge, where the shiny counter and the Gaggia machine are, gets what daylight is available in the market arches, and is decorated with photorealistic paintings of Ferraris and Eighties-kitsch Coke adverts. There is an ice-cream freezer with a panoramic photograph of the Bay of Naples on it, out of which you can choose from several flavours of Wall’s. In the back room, which was until not that long ago fogged with the fumes of fifteen chattering grandmothers’ Superkings at any given time, it is greenly dim and mirrored above its dado rail, almost identical, in fact, to the back rooms of cheap cappuccino bars from the Val d’Aosta to the Strait of Messina. A door leading, presumably, to a stock cupboard is entirely papered over with a trompe-l’oeil image of a forest flecked with sunlight.

Throughout my childhood and my teens I was a frequent visitor to this café. The ham sandwiches could have been the outcome of some left-field provocateur’s gastronomic experiment in pinning down the quiddity of cheap food’s pleasures, the white supermarket bread unctuous with preservatives, the oily margarine unabashedly synthetic, the ham as if from some wartime ration tin. By contrast, the eponymous cappuccinos might have been served up in any of the scorching Tyrrhenian harbour towns depicted on postcards behind the counter, and they were what most people who went there — as Darlingtonian a demographic as you can get — presumably went there for.

My dad is from industrial south-west Scotland, so the cappuccino was hardly a novelty for him. Unbeknownst to some, the region of his birth has long been accented by Italian culture. It began to receive substantial migration from Italy in the late nineteenth century, the flow peaking around World War I, and the diaspora has more than left its mark on urban Scotland and its adjacent upland coalfields, where takeaways still carry evocatively Campanian and Calabrian names. Some will also be aware of how significant the Scots-Italian milieu has been in shaping Britain’s media landscape over the last two or three decades, with Armando Iannucci, Daniela Nardini, Peter Capaldi, Nina Conti and Ronnie Ancona just some of the culture’s prominent representatives on radio and television.

Greater Glasgow, Ayrshire and Lanarkshire are not the only parts of Britain beyond London touched by Italian migration. At the same time as their compatriots were being hired to build ships on the Clyde or to dig coal in the Southern Uplands, emigrants from the peninsula were also arriving in South Wales. Though fewer in number, the impression they have made is hardly insubstantial, not least in the form of middleweight boxer Joe Calzaghe’s, the first Welsh winner of the BBC Sports Personality of the Year award for almost half a century in 2007. Calzaghe’s flying fists aside, Italians have also contributed to the general workaday ambience of Glamorgan and parts of neighbouring counties. From the early twentieth century, the Welsh Valleys could lay claim to a surfeit of Italian cafés, with even tiny towns in this heavily industrialised region often having more than one establishment. They became known as Bracchi Cafés, after an Italian surname found often in the region, and, even though they’ve mostly disappeared nowadays, they’re a well-known aspect of local culture, something you’d tend to know about if you came from the area.

It was strange, then, when the politician Owen Smith, in the thick of a challenge to the left-winger Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party in 2016, affected surprise when served with a cappuccino during a press interview in an Italian-owned café in Pontypridd. “I tell you”, Smith exclaimed, breaking off his rehearsed spiel to do so, “it is the first time I have ever been given little biscuits and a posh cup in here […] Seriously, I would have a mug normally”. It’s not quite possible to imagine how this scene must have looked without Smith morphing into Basil Fawlty, trying to bullshit his way out of a situation which never required any bullshit in the first place. Why, asks the alien visitor to earth, or a time-tourist swept forward from the 1990s, would a politician need to pretend that they called a “cappuccino” a “frothy coffee”, or that they were never usually favoured with a “posh cup” and “little biscuits”?

As ever in Britain, class figures substantially in this. The anointed contender to Corbyn, Smith was bearing the hopes and expectations of a faction within the Labour Party whose claims to legitimacy lay on the supposed “elitism” or “metropolitanism” of the incumbent’s beliefs. Despite being largely affiliated intellectually to Tony Blair and his nominally post-class politics, and despite very often coming into Westminster along the itself elitist Oxford PPE route, the anti-Corbynites found it highly desirable to position themselves as the true representatives of working-class experience during the leadership challenge. With his manifestly South Walian accent, Smith seemed a good figurehead for these claims, and yet his own background is hardly industrially callused. His father Dai, an academic specialising in Welsh history, and a one-time member of the panel of the Arts Council of Wales, had been lecturing at the University of Lancaster when he was born and later obtained a professorial chair at Cardiff.

Ironies start to multiply here. Dai Smith was the author of, of all things, the authorised biography of Raymond Williams, the Welsh left-wing literary critic and theorist whose work on the nature of culture was fundamental in rejecting one-dimensional pictures of the working class as the kind of people who’d be impressed by, say, feigned culinary ignorance. In a moving and gently stern essay from 1958 called “Culture is Ordinary”, Williams recounts a day trip he undertook to the English border city of Hereford to look at its cathedral’s Mappa Mundi, dated to the turn of the fourteenth century. After visiting this artefact of global significance, he catches the bus back across the Welsh border to his home village, where his father works as a railwayman and from which both the spires of Hereford and the “smoke and the flare of the blast furnace[s]” to the south are visible. The journey prompts him to think about how there is not a line between “culture”, emblematised by the medieval map, and everything else; in fact, “culture is ordinary”, subsisting, thriving even, everywhere and in everything. “Every human society”, he writes, “has its own shape, its own purposes, its own meanings”, and we ought, therefore, to be careful not to exalt an idea of the “virtues” of the allegedly uncultured. Therefore, any presentation of working-class people — like Williams and his family — as simply not interested, and having no ambition to be interested, in culture is an ideological fix which, in a roundabout way, justifies existing social hierarchies. In a passage hissing with scorn, he lashes out at those who would attempt to pull off such a ruse:

[…] do we need reminding that any crook can, in his own terms, do a good job? The smooth reassurance of technical efficiency is no substitute for the whole positive human reference. Yet men who once made this reference, men who were or wanted to be writers or scholars, are now, with every appearance of satisfaction, advertising men, publicity boys, names in the strip newspapers. These men were given skills, given attachments, which are now in the service of the most brazen money-grabbing exploitation of the inexperience of ordinary people. And it is these men — this new, dangerous class — who have invented and disseminated the argot, in an attempt to influence ordinary people — who because they do real work have real standards in the field they know — against real standards in the fields these men know and have abandoned. The old cheapjack is still there in the market, with the country boys’ half-crowns on his reputed packets of gold rings or watches. He thinks of his victims as a slow, ignorant crowd, but they live, and farm, while he coughs behind his portable stall. The new cheapjack is in offices with contemporary décor, using scraps of linguistics, psychology and sociology to influence what he thinks of as the mass mind.

Owen Smith, son of the biographer of the author of this bracing indictment of consumer capitalism’s complacency regarding the “masses”, had, before going into politics, worked in corporate public relations. Every part of Williams’ denunciation seems relevant to the cappuccino controversy, but particularly the coup de grâceof the last sentence, which takes aim at the way PR half-learns new, potentially liberating intellectual disciplines — sociology, psychology — and then weaponises them against its fabricated conception of the so-called “mass mind”.

In other words, what Smith was trying to do here was to appeal to a focus group’s notion of what the “common man” looked like in order to buttress his credibility as a leader. He was not some member of the metropolitan elite, he was saying, unlike Corbyn: no, he was a real prole, stunned by coffee, dumbfounded by little biscuits. And yet anyone, by spending about twenty-five seconds on the internet, can tell that Smith is by background part of a liberal middle class, endowed with substantial cultural capital, and by profession — namely as a one-time PR consultant for a huge, European-based pharmaceuticals company — precisely the kind of person who could instantly pick a cappuccino out of a lineup of seven hundred ways of serving coffee. Furthermore, Smith’s politics, a variant on the soft, chummy, largely substanceless progressivism, which at the time of writing finds its principle totem in British membership of the European Union, fit very easily into the trajectory the Labour Party pursued under Tony Blair. In its own time, this trajectory was exuberantly cosmopolitan, aspirational and internationalist, plotted in Italian restaurants and proud of its cappuccinos and Chiantis. Its aim — if we’re generous enough to take it at face value — was to ensure that everyone got access to these things.

High Blairism was perkily optimistic about the transferability of culture across classes and nations. Its modernisation agenda was recognisably postmodern, conceived as the relaxed, Ibiza-going alternative to the staid Anglicisms of John Major’s controversy-prone Conservative government. Under New Labour, we were going to be classless citizens of the world: in fact, Britain itself was going to be engineered into a symbol for a funkily post-national flexibility. If there was to be a patriotism, it would be a paradoxical one rooted in cultural openness, diversity and creativity, divested of the lumber of chauvinism. Yet Smith’s episode in Pontypridd is indicative of nothing other than a staged rejection of this openness that closes the door on a classlessness by which “fancy” things become both desirable for and available to everybody, regardless of origin. The British, Smith seems to think, will ultimately fall on the side of what they perceive to be — timelessly — British.

So what happened? Why is it that Labour’s self-appointed moderates, those who (broadly) follow the Europeanist path set by Blair, are now so given to justifying themselves with relation not only to class, but to a notion of class which is rooted in the certainties of a version of national identity arguably more fusty than Major’s? Why, moreover, do they continue to do this in the light of evidence which suggests that this is an oversimplification with meaningful strategic consequences? Even when Corbyn’s policies (and his stagemanship, previously belittled in comparison to shinily “electable” New Labourism) enabled Labour to end Conservative majority government in the 2017 General Election, “soft leftists” like Lisa Nandy and centrists like Graham Jones were still on hand to argue that the shift to the left put the party dangerously out of touch with the “mass mind”. Jones made the following statement, which demonstrates no recognition of the extent to which Corbyn had boosted Labour’s vote share:

How thick does this party have to be? We have not learnt the lessons from the rise of the BNP. Our core voters cannot be taken for granted. These are people who have been let down by political elites for decades. They see themselves as being at the back of every queue.

We have to talk about their concerns — counter-terrorism, nationalism, defence and community, the nuclear deterrent and patriotism.

Of course, the people Jones refers to as “core voters” had been taken for granted by the Labour Party for some time, more precisely in the period between Blair’s election victory in 1997 and Corbyn’s defeat of the well-groomed moderates Liz Kendall, Yvette Cooper and Andy Burnham in the 2015 leadership vote. The statistics demonstrating the sagging in Labour’s vote (and in voting in general, especially amongst young people) under Blair, Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband are undeniable, and yet the likes of Jones have chosen this exact moment in time to start worrying about the “concerns” of working-class people. Most significantly, they have chosen overwhelmingly to represent these concerns, especially since the country voted to leave the European Union — a funereal terminus for Blairism — as cultural concerns coalescing around immigration, patriotism and defence, rather than material ones about jobs, wage stagnation and the housing crisis. Even when employment and housing are touched on, it’s to culturalise such problems by making them into a matter in which immigrants are set against the “working class”, as though immigrants themselves are some kind of coddled elite.

Again and again, the moderates appeal to the workings of an imputed mass mind for authority, seeking to be perceived favourably both by and as what they deem to be “real” people. Think, for example, of the Blairite newspaper columnist Dan Hodges, who rails against the supposed privilege of the “hard left” despite being the privately educated son of Glenda Jackson, the one-time actor and Labour MP. Hodges is Party royalty, economically feathered and as liberally metropolitan as can be, yet he has often tried to score points by dismissing his opponents as inauthentic on grounds of class. And then there’s Jess Phillips, the West Midlands Labour MP whose affectedly shop-floor accent shouts down any Corbynite voice it encounters as effete and bourgeois, conveniently forgetting her own comfortable-enough upbringing as the daughter of a senior NHS manager and an English teacher. These are but two examples among very, very many.

Authentocracy is not the sole preserve of Labour at all, and should be seen instead as a mindset at work within the broad political centre and its adjuncts in culture and the media. To slip into pol-sci storytelling for a moment, though, it’s vital to note the emergence of a particular factor within the Labour Party at the beginning of this decade, namely a supposedly post- or even anti-Blairite group identifying itself as Blue Labour. The invention of the academic Maurice Glasman and a pet project for, amongst others, the MP Jon Cruddas, Blue Labour drew heavily on the writings of George Orwell to argue for a return to communitarian values in which socialism of a sort would be practised, but in a way that emphasised identitarian allegiances to nation, ethnicity and locality. Glasman in particular believed that the only way for Labour to engage once more with working-class people would be to play up its embeddedness in national tradition, to signal its patriotism, to requisition the emotional charge supposedly delivered by the populist nationalism of UKIP.

Blue Labour were positioned as the antidote to Blairism by political commentators who compared the former’s communitarianism and the latter’s frictionless cosmopolitanism, and interpreted the movement in light of a historical division between “centrists” and “right-wingers” in Labour. In a way, such a reading made sense, at least to the extent that the movement quietly renounced some of the complicities Blairism entered with the free market. As Glasman put it in 2011:

Labour needs to address the crisis of its political philosophy and to recover its historic sense of purpose. This includes rethinking Britain’s position in the global economy, which is based on a disproportionate reliance on a financial sector that has proved to be volatile and unsustainable. There was ominously little growth during Labour’s period in office in the regional and productive economies.

This “disproportionate reliance” on a pyretic financial sector was linked to increasing social fracture:

Customary patterns of social life and the flourishing of persons have been threatened, as well as transformed, by unmediated forms of globalisation, industrial decline and the commodification of non-market spheres of life. The free rein given to markets has led to high levels of inequality, the exploitative use of cheap migrant labour in a desperate attempt to fuel economic growth, and a pervasive sense of insecurity. To ensure the social and economic security of the British people Labour will need to recover its role as defender of society, and bring capital under national and global democratic control.

The recipe, then, appears fairly clear: a shift away from New Labour’s laissez-faire economics, a nostalgic emphasis on “productive economies” and a roll-back on cosmopolitanism in favour of “customary patterns of social life”. Such a combination rejects the technocratic Blairite account of the “modern”, arguing instead for a limited, conservative “socialism”.

However, there are virtually no purist Blairite cosmopolitans to fight against any longer. Elsewhere in the essay collection from which Glasman’s statements come, one can find, for example, the arch-Blairite David Miliband trying to reimagine New Labour as particularly concerned with “community, admittedly often from a deficit model of tackling crime and its causes”. This red-faced shoehorning is indicative of what Blue Labour ultimately offered New Labour, namely a last resort by which its failures could be perceived not as the consequence of a capitulation to neoliberalism’s agenda but as the result of a failure to capitulate to the demands of social traditionalists. Consequently, more and more MPs and nominally “left-wing” commentators who are vocally pro-European — in fact, who are furious with Corbyn for his perceived insouciance about Brexit — also sing from the Glasmanite hymn sheet, paying constant tribute to the “real people” of non-metropolitan Britain (and particularly provincial England, and even more particularly its so-called rust belt in the post-industrial Midlands and North). There is clearly a contradiction, a double game, at work here, and I want to posit the idea that it’s one that might be applied to centrist politics and its culture of “moderation” on the whole as well as to Labour more narrowly. It’s in this contradiction that we might start to make a distinction between authentocracy and the populism and “illiberal democracy” that has gripped global politics in the last decade, and whose avatars include Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

There are few dirtier words for centrist commentators than “populism”. Trump and Putin are enduring obsessions of theirs; they will never fail to celebrate yet another so-called excoriation of the current President of the United States by some preening liberal talk-show host like Jon Stewart or Trevor Noah. Nigel Farage, Britain’s would-be answer to Trump, and Boris Johnson, the gurning Frankenstein’s Monster of modern Toryism, are also sworn enemies. Yet the sententious centrist rhetoric of authenticity is at times amazingly close to that used by the forces of small-c conservative populism, which always promises to look after the interests of the so-called little guy. Managing to name every concern of the British working classes, or at least his imaginary version of them, but for any kind of economic redistribution, Graham Jones sounds like Trump, but he’s by affiliation a political moderate, who would presumably want nothing less than a British equivalent to the new authoritarianism. Authentocracy, I want to argue, is not populism, but it is an attempt to harness its energies, doomed from the start but incapable of seeing as such, that can be seen as a scorched-earth defence of the Third Way philosophy represented by Blair. Here, the Third Way puts at risk so much of its substantive content — multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, Europeanism — in order to hang on to its formal existence. It always emphasised electoralism, in the sense that it believed that winning elections by appealing to heterodox political beliefs was the only way of achieving positive societal change, but now it has turned to a kind of Platonic electoralism in which winning elections is literally the only important thing. Here, you make any compromises and concessions necessary merely to win, until you no longer know what you believe in.

Having surveyed what “authentocracy” means on the (political) ground in contemporary Britain, having sampled its rhetoric and doublethink, I want to put forward seven ideas that might help us pin it down as a concept. The first, and probably the toughest to grasp, is that authentocracy always involves reification, a notion that requires some unpacking. One simple way of understanding the idea is to look at the Latin root of the first part of the word: “res” is “thing”, so the term means, roughly, to make something into a thing or, more precisely, an abstract, dynamic idea into a fixed, hardened object. You could think about the way symbols do this: the heart on a Valentine’s Day card reifies the idea of love, pins it to a particular image or symbol, squares an emotion on a particular part of the body. Now think of how the language for dealing with love becomes organised around that image. People still talk seriously about heartbreak, hearts’ desires, matters of the heart, hearts that are empty and hearts that are full. The abstraction has been locked into its image, forcing particular ways of “thinking” it.

There’s a more precise sense of the term for Marxists, although its usage is the subject of fierce debate. In his 1923work History and Class Consciousness, the Hungarian philosopher and literary critic György Lukács quotes Marx’s line in Capital about “social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses”. By this, Lukács explains, Marx means that (social) relations between people are objectified in the commodities such relations produce, meaning that the commodity is perceived separately from what (socially) allowed it to exist in the first place. I’m writing this on top of a table I bought second hand for thirty pounds, as far as I perceive its “qualities”, not a piece of wood, or several pieces of wood, worked upon by people — and who knows how many? — and eventually brought to market and sold, and then passed on to the thrift shop. Social beings, then, such as the maker(s) of the table, become alienated from the products of their labour, which in turn come to define, because their exchange values are prominent, the very nature of the social world and, in this elevation of exchange- over use-value, the nature of things themselves. Our perception of things is a misperception, because it grounds itself conceptually in the commodity form.

In this, we can see how specific modes of production — monopoly capitalism for Lukács, digital late-late capitalism for us — produce a schism between idea and object that becomes general. Lukács talks not only of specific acts of reification, but of “reified consciousness”, which “progressively sinks more deeply, more fatefully and more definitively” into human identity, naturalising itself as authentic reality. Alienation gradually becomes mystified not as a product of a particular historical configuration, but as a fundamental part of being human, as something both “definitive” and definitional.

What I want to do with this idea is far less ambitious than Lukács, or Theodor Adorno, or Gillian Rose or Timothy Bewes mean to be in their own penetrating accounts of reification, but I believe that it is a vitally helpful word in confronting authentocracy. One of the things authentocracy reifies is a suffering of the badness of the present: in fact, that suffering is re-presented and indeed sold to us as a commodified grittiness, a supposedly gallant willingness to puff out chests and confront the awful truth. We’ll see more of this idea in a discussion of the films and television programmes, all made since the Millennium, from which authentocracy could be said to have derived aspects of its moral tone.

The second point, related to the first, is that authentocracy leans very heavily on a reified conception of class, most specifically on what it means to be “working class”. Graham Jones’ list of “working-class” political concerns reifies the class in question by excluding from it a great deal of people who are not keen on “nationalism” and are not keen on nuclear weapons. What, for example, would Jones make of voters from a council estate in Dumbartonshire who would be glad for Britain to be rid of its nuclear deterrent, because they feel its being stationed at Faslane, whose fallout radius easily includes their homes, is not in the interest of Scotland’s urban working class? What of people of colour who have been on the receiving end of enough British or English nationalism for it only to be a “concern” in the sense that they worry about encountering it? What of those workers on zero-hour contracts, without union protection, reliant on in-work benefits to meet the rent and feed their families? Is a lack of “patriotism” what keeps them awake at night?

Another way in which authentocracy reifies class is in its making of moves analogous to Smith’s in the café. When Corbyn quoted Percy Shelley’s “The Masque of Anarchy” at Glastonbury Festival in the summer of 2017, various figures on the political right and centre were quick to take to Twitter to claim that referencing Romantic poetry was hardly an example of the common touch. Imagining how Raymond Williams might have responded to this idea is good fun, to say the least. If you’re tempted in any way to concur with it, think a little longer about the implications of saying poetry, books, music, painting and so on are only for the well-off. It doesn’t take long for this to start looking in its own right like a highly elitist gesture, a way of asserting proprietorship over culture.

Its fixation on (reified notions of) class takes us onto a third point, which is that authentocracy passes its bucks. Imputation is central to its workings: it’s rarely the commentator themselves that wants less immigration or, let’s face it, more racism, but someone more allegedly authentic who is, we’re told, not being given the opportunity to speak for themselves. In this, we see one of authentocracy’s main borrowings from the right-wing populism it professes to find abhorrent. Some might recall 1968 Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech here. In it, the right-wing Tory, an MP in the West Midlands who was devoted to anti-immigration causes, used as an organising trope a meeting with a strategically anonymous “working man” who, Powell claimed, had complained about how “the black man” would soon “have the whip hand over the white man”. Powell went on to say that he had a moral duty to make the speech regardless of the “chorus of execration” that would follow, thus implying that these were tidings he did not want to bear but felt certain he had to. The rhetorical usefulness for an obviously upper-class politician of “crediting” such ideas to a hard-bitten worker is unavoidable.

One of the complexities of the whole issue is that it’s much harder with the authentocrat than it is with populist demagogues like Powell or his natural successor Nigel Farage to determine whether or not they, personally, really do want less immigration, more patriotism or more apocalyptic nuclear weapons. Are they failing to own their own political desires, or are they trying to anticipate and triangulate those of an imagined other? If it’s the latter, should authentocracy be regarded as a form of cynicism, by which politics is reduced to a series of calculations of what the lowest common denominator might be?

Authentocracy’s imputed political hopes are typically pointed nostalgically, which gives us our fourth point of orientation, specifically that this is a worldview that encourages a definition of the present in the terms of the past. Again, this is disavowed, to a degree: the authentocrat tends to present themselves as interested in progress, as conceived by the supposedly post-ideological technocrats of the Nineties. In this sense, though, the nostalgia is double. On one hand, they state that, for “modernisation” to continue, concessions need to be made to the “real people”, who long for VE Day, or a whiter England, or for a country which still “makes things”. On the other, however, their version of modernisation — Third Way managerialism, by which politics is no longer about ideological questions but about the expert tweaking of a system that is the best of all possible ones — is itself no longer modern. Authentocrat nostalgia brings together two, almost antithetical, forms of yearning. Its assertion that “elites” have no right to sneer at the way people in Tamworth or Mirfield supposedly hark back to better days is also a concealed declaration that no one should turn their noses up at those who would love to relive 1997.

A fifth point relates to the notion central to the writings of the late, much-missed Mark Fisher. Fisher’s first book Capitalist Realism forced its reader to consider the ways in which late capitalism (or neoliberalism, something authentocrats like to pretend doesn’t exist or is “too theoretical for normal people to understand”) had made itself the only game in town, arresting all attempts to imagine a future different from the present. In one way, authentocracy is a form of capitalist realism, insofar as it attempts to close off routes that go forward from neoliberalism. In another, it’s very different. As Fisher told it, capitalist realism created a perpetual present of time-wasting, distracting, unenjoyable hedonism or, in his brilliantly precise formulation, “depressive hedonia”. It produced an illusion of fun — a fun based on the endless recommitment of partial attention, on aimless flicking through Spotify or YouTube or Tinder — which withheld energy from worthwhile political and aesthetic projects. Authentocracy fiddles with the capitalist script Fisher did so much to decode, because it often comes down very heavily on the present, lambasting “millennials” and their digital errancy, their so-called “narcissism”, their putative inability to commit. Instead, it wields an imputed past-craving as its disciplining instrument. Capitalist realism created the horizon of expectations that present endless Facebooking as pleasure; authentocracy reprimands those who obey that injunction to enjoy.

Authentocracy, therefore, both is and isn’t capitalist realism. It has a similar relationship to identity politics. Frequently, it pours vitriol on “the left” for having stopped caring about class and instead adopting concerns to do with race, gender, sexuality and so on. Often, it suggests that the only people you’re still “allowed” to hate, as if people go around looking for “permission to detest” notices, are the “white working classes”, such has been the success of identity politics or “political correctness”, which has, as we’ve all heard, “gone mad”. And yet, of course, it avers the inviolability of certain forms of identity, which it depicts as under threat from this phantasmatic left: the “forgotten white working class”, of course, but also English patriots, the military, “hard-working families”. In doing so, it lends credibility to a right-wing version of political correctness whereby it’s wrong not to wear a poppy, or to question British military involvement in conflicts or to criticise the British Empire.

There’s a further point to be made about identity politics here, which is that, while authentocrats often position themselves as being against identity politics, they’re happy to weaponise them when the time comes. Opportunities to present “the left” as anti-Semitic or, particularly, misogynistic are rarely lost by commentators who are often heavily invested in complaining about the strictures of politics of social justice. This is not to say that there is no case to answer on this account, as I shall discuss briefly in my last chapter, but the bad faith of many allegations of an “intolerant” left is striking.

Finally, it should be pointed out that the “authentocracy” I’m discussing differs substantially from its usage amongst American cultural commentators who began using the term in the middle of last decade. This “authentocracy” is closer to what is typically dismissed as “hipsterism” in Britain, an obsession with the pure, unsullied and artisanal, a passion for obscurity and craft. Those under the microscope of my use of the word often set themselves against hipsterism, ridiculing its obsessions with provenance and blaming it, pretty spuriously, for the social phenomenon of gentrification. Indeed, the authentocrats of the political centre, as we shall see, are likely to make a big deal out of the fact they eat at McDonalds, rather than a “posh burger place”, or watch Millwall, rather than one of Britain’s recently popular non-league teams. Authentocracy both values and mocks the pursuit of authenticity.

Hopefully, the seven ideas laid out here will give an idea of the shape of what is being referred to as “authentocracy”. Many will have noticed, however, that the phenomenon in question shares many features in common with a spirit of truculent conservatism which has been a fixture in British culture throughout living memory, and indeed for much longer. How, then, does authentocracy map onto an older anti-liberal, anti-intellectual common sense? How can its pedigree be discerned? To what extent is it simply an innate aspect of Englishness? To begin hunting down an answer to these questions we can turn to another scene, which, like that featuring Owen Smith and the posh coffee, has become quite iconic in contemporary political discussion.

Chapter II

The Nine Yorkshiremen of the Apocalypse

On the Friday evening before the June 2017 United Kingdom General Election, a special edition of the BBC’s political debate show Question Time was broadcast in which Theresa May, the leader of the Conservative Party, and Jeremy Corbyn, who we’ve met already, were invited to York to answer questions from a curated studio audience. Because May had refused a head-to-head debate, the would-be prime ministers spoke separately, and Corbyn found himself on second. May had already endured a vexing time, being forcefully challenged over Conservative cuts, particularly to the NHS, and a related public-sector pay-freeze in a way she clearly found difficult to parry. As the audience had been handpicked for balance’s sake, it was clear that Corbyn would have to endure a similar temperature of scrutiny, but the themes of his interrogation were pointedly different.

By lunchtime the following day, the image of those who took Corbyn to task had imposed itself on the consciousness of not only many on the British left, but on the public at large. Nine audience members’ faces had been screen-grabbed and corralled in a composite image, swiftly circulated on Twitter, Facebook and beyond, which was designed to demonstrate the uniformity of the debate’s conservative counterforce. The youngest of the nine was perhaps in his mid-forties, the oldest slightly shy of eighty; all were men, all white, if also, typically, irately puce. All, moreover, spoke with Yorkshire accents of at least some degree of unimpressed bluffness as they attacked the Labour leader over his perceived sympathies for terrorists and, most strikingly, his reluctance to employ Trident, Britain’s submarine-based nuclear deterrent. At one point, the intensity of the accusations about Corbyn’s unwillingness to “press the red button” hit such an elevated pitch of ridiculousness that a young woman in the audience was moved to enquire as to “why everyone in this room seems so obsessed with killing millions of people”. That what she had to say needed to be said in the first place was a striking indictment of a journalistic class that had, over the course of Corbyn’s leadership up to that point, become creepily besotted with Trident, despite a widespread lack of understanding about what nuclear “deterrence” actually entails, which means many believe nuclear weapons offer some kind of insurance against stateless terrorist groups like ISIS (its job, for what it’s worth, is to dissuade other nuclear-armed states from launching a first attack).

Ruddy, jingoistic old men with vowels flatter than the River Humber’s flood plain are not uncommon in the middle of Yorkshire, but they’re hardly the picture of British demographic averageness in 2017. Perhaps diversity can sometimes be a tough ask when the programme always draws its studio audience from the vicinity of that week’s filming location, but, with only a single episode of Question Time in the lead-up to the election, the presence of such a visibly homogenous opposition to Corbyn looked suspiciously like an attempt to manufacture a conception of the “average” or “commonplace”. A previous media eventin Cambridge, where the leaders of various parties had been quizzed, but which May had failed to attend, was attacked by the Tory press for being untypically right-on, for not speaking for what the notorious UKIP politician Godfrey Bloom once called “the real people in the rugby and cricket clubs” while attempting to normalise a racist joke he’d made. The York broadcast, some speculated, was in part an attempt to redress the balance by a BBC fighting against licence-fee-threatening allegations of left-wing favouritism, and it was in keeping with a recent trend on the part of the national broadcaster to overcompensate in the face of such criticisms by giving a share of airtime to the right-wing likes of Nigel Farage incommensurate with their real electoral (un)success.

Let’s hold this incident to the light a little longer. Put starkly, the BBC, aware that May would be in the line of fire for austerity, chose to counterweigh a progressive argument against the economic immiseration of millions, against cuts to public services and welfare that by any reasonable assessment are ruining and even ending lives, by cultivating an anti-Corbyn bloc in the studio, which would assail him on the grounds of his queasiness about “killing millions of people” in a totally hypothetical conflict. How could such a transparently specious criticism be made to resemble anything like common sense? If the argument had been articulated by someone who looked and sounded like the average BBC political journalist — that’s to say, by a privately schooled mandarin like Nick Robinson or Laura Kuenssberg — wouldn’t it come across as nothing more than sophistry employed, disingenuously, in the service of equilibrium? How could liberal “objectivity” preserve its own fading credibility?

The point here is that the full architecture of authentocracy cannot be grasped merely by looking at the cluster of wound-up men in the Question Time studio audience in isolation. In fact, this structure is as dependent on a strange act of centrist othering of “authentic” people as it is on local-boys-made-Tory chomping at the bit to get on national television and eviscerate a lily-livered socialist. As such, it’s even possible to suggest that there isn’t really such a thing as “an authentocrat” in the singular, for the whole phenomenon owes as much to the PPE grad who works in audience selection as it does to the people they find to compose it. Not desiring, however, to be too obtuse at this stage, it’s worth looking initially at the more immediately apparent side of the bargain, namely the figure of the regional, provincial or otherwise “marginalised” reactionary who uses a relatively, perhaps even spuriously, humble origin to lend weight to political truth-claims.

Curiously, in light of what I’ve just said about the sensibility being more reliant on liberal “elites” than initially appears to be the case, one of the greatest satirical intuitions of something approaching authentocracy came from an enduring and much-loved cultural totem of liberal Britain. Monty Python’s Four Yorkshiremen sketch, originally aired on John Cleese and Graham Chapman’s earlier vehicle The 1948 Show, depicts a group of businessmen from Yorkshire sat around necking pricey claret, having just consumed a “passable risotto”, while becoming increasingly extreme in their absurd one-downmanship. By the end of the routine, the friends’ claims include having once “lived in an old water tank on a rubbish tip” and having been sliced “in two wit’ bread knife” by a parent. The conversation is punctuated unfailingly with stage Yorkshire, “ayes” and “lads” and “nobbuts”, further signalling how the performance might be read as a useful critique of how economic power is, in a country as class-obsessed, class-stratified and class-muddled as Britain, often justified with reference to one’s origins.

Few figures inspire such strange emotions in the national imagination as the accented right-wing entrepreneur, the individual who, according to the straitened narratives about class that are still cherished unconsciously by many British people, is not supposed to be rich and is certainly not supposed to espouse a politics amenable to the Conservative Party (or, latterly, to UKIP). Of course, the uncanniness of this figure has been expedient to the Conservatives for too many years to count, precisely because of the apparently miraculous nature of their existence. They are living “proof” of the entrepreneurial spirit, of how the real way to “get on” isn’t to hang about waiting passively for some great socialist levelling but to grasp the nettle of one’s own destiny. Think of, say, Alan Sugar, the businessman and reality TV star who, in a doggy snarl shaped by the meagre circumstances of post-war east London, will never reject an opportunity to bore about how he began with nothing more than a couple of pounds and the willingness and chutzpah to get out there and sell. (Sugar, of course, was for a while a prominent supporter not of the Conservatives but of New Labour, precisely because of the extent to which the Labour Party under Blair capitulated to the fairy tale of entrepreneurial meritocracy.)

To focus, though, on the manner in which working-class individuals who have been “successful” according to the narrow schema of entrepreneurial ideology are used to corroborate that ideology doesn’t quite tell the whole story. Pointedly, the Question Time audience members who sought to excoriate Corbyn weren’t doing so, in the main, on the grounds of economic philosophy, but because of his pacifism. If the Nine Yorkshiremen were there as emissaries of briny common sense, it was a common sense whose remit extended beyond obviously financial terrain in order to go somewhere more amorphously cultural and affective. Here, pacifism was rendered as an effete, woolly-minded indulgence opposed specifically to the rough-hewn patriotism of hard-working Britons — a value championed by trust-funded dreamers who’d, as the saying goes, never done a day’s work in their lives. In a deft, unfortunately widespread superimposition, something which should have been seen for what it was — inanely bellicose nationalism — became identified with hard graft; a love of country that demands effort and sacrifice and, consequently, is noble.

It is unlikely that North Korea, which is not that much bigger than Scotland, desperately poor, and over five thousand miles away, or Iran, completely lacking in any imaginable incentive, will ever, to use the exact verb thrown down by one of Corbyn’s Question Time critics, “bomb” the United Kingdom with a nuclear weapon. At the very best, such a belief smacks of delusions of an ongoing global centrality lost, in truth, with the Empire. Yet to question the likelihood of such an occurrence as presented by such a blowhard, in the dynamics of authentocracy, is to betray one’s untrustworthiness according to an economy of truth in which rightness is not immanent in a claim but is instead supported with reference to personal origins. Rather than an ad hominem attack, it’s an ad hominem defence. I suspect many of us have an anecdote in which such a perverse algebra can be observed at work.

My own is set in 2011 when, skint and struggling for regular employment in London, I agreed to do some copywriting work for a vague acquaintance who worked in the printing industry and was based in south-west Durham. Over the preceding decade, his business had diversified into manufacturing guidebooks to help people navigate through southern England’s touristic chintz, places a world away from the achingly disadvantaged pit village he’d grown up in. The job he had lined up for me was odd: he wanted me to write a guidebook to every Protestant cathedral, as well as a number of big churches, in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, but had no intention of paying me expenses to actually visit them. Instead, I found myself getting eye-strain at my kitchen table in Camberwell inspecting the flying buttresses of Bath Abbey or the Perpendicular Gothic towers of Beverley Minster on Google Streetview, using Wikipedia and various online guides to track down historical quirks my implied reader might find engaging.

During this project, Occupy London took place more or less on the steps of St Paul’s, and I found myself, unwillingly, discussing it with my employer on the phone. When I pointed out, reticently, knowing what was coming, that the protestors had a point and that even Giles Fraser, the canon of the cathedral, seemed to agree with them, I was hit with a rant about how lacking in real-world integrity the occupiers were, and how none of them would survive five minutes in the sphere of honest work. This should have been a red light, really. A couple of months later, one cynically conceived and half-heartedly written book about cathedrals sitting completed in his inbox, the man who had commissioned me had vanished almost completely, and was uncontactable by any means. Emails went unanswered, phone calls were terminated after a single ring and packed off to voicemail. Increasingly anxiously, I fired off invoices to no avail; I’m still waiting to be paid. “Honesty”, in this case, was mere rhetoric, something exerting no ethical authority over whoever deployed it, but which could nonetheless be used to depict anti-austerity protesters as over-indulged children.

There’s a suggestive long-range prolepsis of this “honest” dishonesty in one of the most politically charged, and ultimately disturbing, of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. “The Reeve’s Tale” tells the story of John and Aleyn, two students at Soler Hall in Cambridge, who set out to outwit Symkyn, a roguish miller who has been swindling their college by giving it less flour, proportionately, than the grain he’s been entrusted with grinding. When the students arrive at the mill, fizzing with cocky virility and convinced that their scheme will restore justice, Chaucer hands the miller an internal soliloquy, which hinges on a classic trope of salt-of-the-earth reaction — namely the notion that no education can match the one offered by the University of Life:

This miller smyled at hir nicetee,
And thoghte, “Al this nys doon but for a wyle.
They wene that no man may hem bigyle,
But by my thrift, yet shall I blere hir ye,
For al the sleighte in hir philosophye.
The moore queynte crekes that they make,
The more wol I stele whan I take.
In stide of flour yet wol I yeve hem bren.
‘The gretteste clerkes been noght wisest men,’
As whilom to the wolf thus spak the mare.
Of al hir art ne counte I noght a tare.”

Here’s a prose “translation” into modern English of the same passage from the University of Maine’s “Chaucer in the Twenty-First Century” project:

This miller smiled at their simplicity. “All this is only done as a stratagem,” he thought; “they deem no man can beguile them. But I vow by my trade, for all the craftiness in their philosophy, I shall still blear their eyes. The more cunning trick[s] they try, the more I will take when I steal. I shall give them bran yet in the place of flour. ‘The greatest clerks are not the wisest men,’ as the mare once said to the wolf. I would not give a weed for their art.”

In Symkyn’s reasoning, not only are John and Aleyn incapable of outfoxing his “thrift” with their book-learning, they are effectively the deserving dupes of his premeditated con as a consequence of it. Their heads are lost to pedantic abstraction, while his intelligence is grainy and worldly, a street-smartness ennobled by the sheer vitality of its cynicism.

“The Reeve’s Tale” is characterised by its flickering interplay of ideas about what it means to be socially and spiritually “authentic” in the England of the late fourteenth century. Even in its framing, anxieties and uncertainties muster: according to Chaucer’s General Prologue, the Reeve, the story’s narrator, was once a carpenter before being elevated to his clerical position, which he uses to chivvy small change from the uncomprehending landowner he works for. Like the miller whose story he tells, he grifts and grafts, skimming a sneaky dividend from the feudal establishment. Yet he does not seem to regard himself as a criminal, and, in fact, takes it upon himself to play the role of a divinely appointed judge of character, dressing in clothes similar to those of a priest and riding scrutinously behind the other pilgrims, who are as afraid of him “as of the (Black) deeth”. His tale is told specifically as redress to another Miller, his fellow pilgrim and rival, who, as many will know, tells a story about an uncomprehending, cuckolded carpenter. The Reeve takes umbrage at this, and therefore his miller, Symkyn, is the butt of the tale’s alleged “joke”, namely the students getting his family drunk and having sex with his wife and daughter in a confused nocturnal encounter most modern readers struggle to interpret as consensual.

If we read the tale according to the logic of the era’s strictly hierarchical feudalism, the Reeve’s miller gets above his station in several ways, firstly by attempting to better himself in marriage (his wife is the illegitimate daughter of a priest, which he erroneously perceives as making her “of noble kyn”) and, secondly, by trying to outdo the legal-religious establishment embodied by the scholars. Taking into account Chaucer’s albeit satirically cautious identification with the existing order of things, critical consensus generally positions the miller, who an unknowing contemporary reader might mistakenly see as representing the hegemonic good sense of the lower middle classes, as a threat to the way things are meant to be. In fact, Symkyn can be taken as a general token of establishment anxiety about the growing independence and individualism of a protean bourgeois class who were materially successful and, in various ways, eluded and then disordered the rigid social categorisations of feudalism. What seems to be English literature’s first authentocrat, then, is not an authentocrat, insofar as he challenges, rather than affirms, an extant political “reality”.

As such, the tale’s account of authenticity is confusing for a reader who fails to imagine their way into the prevailing political epistemology of the late fourteenth century. The clerks, avenging agents of feudal propriety, speak with recognisably northern English accents and hail from “Fer in the north, I kan nat telle where”: the contemporary ear pricks at these details and assumes, perhaps, that we’re dealing with a time-warped Likely Lads, working-class provincials who might, according to the tradition of the Angry Young Men, be expected to set themselves disobediently against establishment “bastards”. In the event, they’re wholly antagonised by Symkyn’s affront, and play their role as the testosteronal forces of conservatism uncomplainingly, and not as reactionary manipulators of regional one-downmanship: there is simply no such thing as a “working class” in this pre-capitalist context, and the accent’s significations are completely unimpacted upon by any notion of proliness.

And yet there is still, in a way, an authentocracy at work here, in the form of the Reeve. Note that it isn’t the Knight, or any of the Tales’ religious figures — not all of whom, admittedly, are wholly respectable — who tell this story of the containment of an anti-hierarchical challenge. Instead, it’s the Reeve, who, by fiddling the books he’s paid to keep, and dressing like a member of the clergy, is himself a rogue unwilling to embrace his lot in the chain of being. Because of this, there’s more credibility in the message that the feudal order should not be challenged than there would be if it were put in the mouth of an obvious beneficiary of that order: the Reeve’s story might be “biased” inasmuch as he dislikes the Miller, but it can’t be accused in any straightforward way of naked class interest. Chaucer, who’s in to bat for kingly, lordly, knightly and priestly authority, and who generally seems troubled by the emergence of something like a bourgeoisie — industrious, worldly and interrogative — gives the moral he wishes to convey credibility by palming it off onto a character who might be seen as part of this emergence.

Time and time again, we will see how authentocracy involves such ingenious displacements, even if the continuities aren’t obvious: the contemporary form of displacement very often involves British liberals laundering their class interests by projecting them, in mutant form, onto a reputedly significant “socially conservative working-class”. While his conception of social propriety is quite different, Chaucer does offer a metaphor for the thorniness of authentocracy and its ability to obfuscate the relationships between class, material affluence and cultural identity. One can persevere along a literary seam, at least for a little while, in order to think about what this obfuscation entails, and how literature alternately critiques it perceptively and falls into its trap.

In Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1848novel Mary Barton, we see one of the earliest cases from the industrial age in which a once-poor entrepreneur is made a major character. Discussion of the novel has tended to emphasise its eponymous protagonist and, perhaps even more often, her father, whose resentment at the appalling conditions suffered by the mill workers of mid-Victorian Manchester leads him to murder. Yet it’s the father of John Barton’s victim Harry Carson who is arguably more interesting. Raymond Williams — the subject, don’t forget, of Owen Smith’s father’s biographical opus — chastised Gaskell for pulling out of a commitment to unprettified social, even proto-socialist, realism halfway through the novel by introducing the sensational murder plot, but doesn’t have so much to say on the sentimental recuperation of Mr Carson. In the early parts of the novel, Mr Carson is treated warily: his former poverty gives him insight into the conditions of working-class life, but he neglects the opportunity to act upon them. At the end of the novel, however, he is redeemed, mawkishly, by his readiness to forgive John Barton for shooting his libertine son dead, and by going on to bring about “improvements […] in practice in the system of employment in Manchester” thanks to the rhetorical authority of his “short, earnest sentences”.

The first half of Mary Barton is not just a meticulous condemnation of the death-in-life suffered by industrial workers, but of the proto-authentocracy, embodied by the elder Carson, which serves to ideologically anchor the conviction that such misery is to be endured rather than abolished. If there’s a wilting of the novel’s critical determination, as Williams suggests, it involves not only ameliorating its middle-class readership by turning away from social realism in favour of eventful sensationalism, but by, gradually, submitting to the notion that Carson is able to access his youthful experiences in a sympathetic way to make “improvements”. Industrial capitalism ends up being presented as the solution to industrial capitalism’s problems, and its capacity to self-heal is founded precisely on its ability to engage authentically — via its socially mobile entrepreneurs, who’ve “seen both sides of the story” — with the misery it brings about.

A century later, another author was able to consider with steelier perspicacity how capitalism uses entrepreneurial mobility as an alibi. Elizabeth Taylor is one of the most underrated of the characteristically unappreciated clutch of British novelists who worked in the aftermath of modernism: her subdued, unshowy fiction concentrates almost exclusively on the annoyances and vagaries of middle-class life, typically in a rather stiff Home Counties setting. Yet she’s not the curtain-twitching conformist many people reflexively assume her to be. She was, briefly, a member of the Communist Party, wrote — like Orwell and Harold Laski — for Tribune, and maintained her Labour membership until her death in the 1970s. The eye she casts over bourgeois life is a sceptical one, attuned to how thwartedness and exasperation are not mere downsides to quotidian existence, but principles that unconsciously structure it.

In a Summer Season, published right at the beginning of the Sixties, is one of Taylor’s most troubled novels, erotically luminous on one hand, but prescient about looming intergenerational conflict on the other. It asks searching questions about a burgeoning consumerist individualism, identifying this as one side of a schism, which will inexorably grow — and, of course, it has grown — within the British middle classes between self-centred, atomised expressivity and collective, morally binding institutions such as family, church and profession. As such, Taylor is pointing towards the same tension between assertive egoism and moral guardianship that Franco Moretti identifies as constitutive of the class in The Bourgeois, his history of middle-class visibility and self-assertion in European literature since Chaucer’s time.

One of the numerous strained relationships in In a Summer Season is between Tom, the cavalier, flippant son of the protagonist, Kate Heron, and his paternal grandfather, Sir Alfred. Tom’s father having died, his relationship with Sir Alfred is a filial one by proxy, and takes the form of the younger man working at the elder’s factory. Tom is unenthusiastic about the work, but is bound to it through guilt, a guilt which means that he is forced to listen obediently as his grandfather “exaggerate[s] his early poverty to make his success more credible”. Taylor figures Sir Alfred as, in as precise a sense as we’ve met yet, an authentocrat: his recognition of poverty exists exclusively in the service of providing systemic inequality with hegemonic approval. At times, his self-justifying gestures are tinged with what the reader is clearly supposed to recognise as bumptious silliness:

[Sir Alfred] preferred to leave and be seen leaving at the same time as his men. There seemed some virtue in this to him, and he would not have believed that other people saw the thing differently. “I’ve never asked a man to do what I wouldn’t do myself, or haven’t done”, he liked to say. This was untrue as well as uninteresting.

There is surprisingly much to say about this brief vignette. Some of it pertains to the increasingly febrile contradiction Moretti establishes between the “creative destruction” of bourgeois individualism and the role of the bourgeoisie as guarantors of collective tradition. Taylor demonstrates here, implicitly, capitalism’s desire to minister its own pathologies. The collectivist left politics of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries produced a sense of solidarity which not only questioned bourgeois instruments of government, education, religion and so on, but offered competition when it came to their governance (a fundamental claim of many parliamentary socialisms is that they can do a better job of managing middle-class institutions than the middle class can). In order to contain the energies of its increasingly disorderly and individualistic id, capitalism had to co-opt a grammar of solidarity from below: its absorption of working-class “successes” served not only to prove the lucrative viability of the entrepreneurial trajectory, but to shore up its own claim to institutional responsibility by commandeering a proletarian vocabulary of interpersonal responsibility.

Taylor makes two other points here, both of which are communicated with less tact, as if she loses patience with her irritating creation in the writing. The first of these is that authentocracy depends on, if we’re being generous, false memory and, if we’re not, deliberate lying. Very often, as we shall come to see, it hinges on fabricating the past to establish the limits of the present and future, particularly when it comes to utilising a vision of the past that emphasises collectivity. In emphasising forms of togetherness, however, it is also, through an intricate ideological mechanic, saving individualism, both by defending it from its own excesses and by demonstrating how successfully entrepreneurial individuals can respect forms of collective identity.

Yet the claim that authentocracy plays rough with the truth while speaking in an accent associated culturally with honest, reliable realism is matched by another. Uncle Alfred’s stories, Taylor writes — and her unusually forceful use of the word “untrue” suggests that she is inhabiting an omniscient perspective, rather than Tom’s here — is “uninteresting”. Authentocracy is boring, sententious, moralistic, dried-up, sexless. In a Summer Season frequently counterposes a droning work ethic to sexual enjoyment, and never more so than here, where Alfred’s chuntering inhibits Tom from doing what he actually wants to do, namely meet up with his girlfriend. Lying might, historically, have been used in search of pleasure, but authentocracy makes it the utensil of tedium, a technology with which joy can be arrested.

In the same year — 1961 — as In a Summer Season was published, another novelist found space to think about the way capitalism authenticates itself. The Middlemen is an early-career work by Christine Brooke-Rose, whose writerly practice was in the process of developing from slightly askew satires of metropolitan morality into a hard-edged experimentalism. Brooke-Rose’s target in this transitional work is a culture of endless mediation and interruption in the increasingly consumerised world, which has resulted in a whole class of “middlemen” parasitical on “productive” activity — advertising executives, PR officers, lawyers, letting agents, market researchers, psychologists — swamping society. Every relationship, both corporate and private, is interceded in by someone offering to handle it, to the extent that there is no longer a viable authenticity but only its derivatives. The question The Middlemen seems to be posing is about the possibility and desirability of a realist art — an art founded on accurate representations of the real — in a moment when all there seems to be is mediation, publicity and spin, and it might be read as interestingly consonant with what Raymond Williams had to say a year or so earlier in “Culture is Ordinary” about the lamentable emergence of PR in the post-war years. At one point, we meet a character called Harry Thorpe who works in “sales promotion”:

Harry had worked his promising way from the Leeds branch of U.V.I. and had never lost his North Midlands accent. Or rather, he had once tried to lose it, in his younger, more resentful days, before the war when accents counter against a man or so, at any rate, those who had them firmly believed; but he had done well during the war, when the backbone of the nation had to be flattered as well as the stiff upper lip, and now, since the democratic revolution, he tended to over-emphasise the strong velar vowels and the rich sing-song, for they gave others, and especially his superiors, confidence in him as a sharp, efficient, reliable no-nonsense man.

Brooke-Rose here gives us something rather like The Four Yorkshiremen or, later on, the Question Time audience, but it’s even more anticipatory of Owen Smith in that it’s a depiction of PR latching onto a particular, culturally specific idea of what it means to be authentic. At a time when the literary and cinematic mainstream seemed obsessed with exploring provincial working-class identity — think of neorealist works such as Alan Sillitoe’s Nottingham-set Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, or David Storey’s craggy investigations of life in the West Yorkshire cloth-belt — The Middlemen seems to counsel its reader against accepting anything accented or regional as necessarily authoritative. In fact, the conclusion that the novel seems to be working towards is that a different kind of narrative art might need to come into being in order to deal with the eclipse of the real, and its author was soon to set a new path for herself as the writer of agitatedly innovative, disdainfully antirealist fiction.

Despite the scepticism towards exaltations of realness exhibited by the likes of Taylor and Brooke-Rose, the post-war period also witnessed the ascendancy of writers such as Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis, both parts of the Movement, a realist, anti-modernist tendency that made tedious provinciality into its vocation. Movement writing affected to bemoan the boredom of contemporary life on one hand, but turned itself almost fanatically against anything it saw as pretension, presenting itself as dry, unidealistic, unimpressed. Any writers even vaguely connected with modernism and the avant-garde became targets for its contempt, which inevitably expressed itself as what Jon Savage and Simon Frith, in their critique of British anti-intellectual intellectualism, call “nervy, man-at-the-bar bonhomie”. In a letter from Amis to Larkin, W.H. Auden is dismissed as “shit, really”, while Dylan Thomas, one of their go-to victims, was said to be “frothing at the mouth with piss”. Savage and Frith see in the Movement’s spitefulness a precedent for the contemporary form of anti-intellectualism embodied by the cultural critic John Carey, whose typical line of reasoning is that “intellectuals”, the pinnacle of whose detachedness came with modernism, have purposefully cultivated a separateness from “the masses”.

Amis, Larkin and their fellow travellers can help us understand something subtly significant within authentocracy. Their belief that the modernist experiment was merely deluded mystification committed them formally to novelistic realism and poetic plain-spokenness, but these literary preoccupations become intermingled in their essays and correspondence with a stylisation of the authorial self which nominates it as part of what Carey later calls “the masses”. The capacity of literature to tell the truth about the world is, in such a formation as the Movement, grounded half in the down-to-earth nature of the writer’s personality, their enjoyment of ale, swearing and being horrible about Virginia Woolf, and half in their ability to commit to an “unpretentious” and “accessible” aesthetic. However, there are convincing theoretical arguments that can be put into play to demonstrate that the apparently unpretentious is but another stylisation, a literary effect as artificial in its own way as the estrangements and experiments of modernism.

Literary realism, as Roland Barthes noted in his 1968 essay “The Reality Effect”, had in fact always relied on a certain sleight of hand to be convincing. He pointed out how the great realist works of the nineteenth century contained long passages of descriptive, “indicial” material which did little to move the narrative forward, but plenty to ground it in a plausible world. Density of description gave a piece of fiction a weightiness that was easily converted into credibility: what we call “realism”, then, comes down to the “significance of […] insignificance”, the way that stories provide us with irrelevant information simply to trope their own honesty. As we know that reality is full of meaningless, contingent junk, we’re more likely to trust writing which shows us an abundance of this. “Reality” in fiction is a trick of the light effected by a temporary foregrounding of whatever isn’t narratively or symbolically meaningful, an “effect” we don’t notice because it is put into play so frequently. In other words, one might say, much of what is regarded as realism in aesthetics is actually more like the reification of the real, the sneaky passing off of ideological commonplaces that make normative claims about the nature of reality as reality itself.

As literary realists who above all liked to trope their own personal honesty, Amis and Larkin can help us to realise that politics also makes use of a reality effect, namely the attribution of a set of values to a “common man”. In his “Rivers of Blood” speech, which I’ve mentioned already, Enoch Powell memorably told his audience that his warning against immigration was inspired by a nameless constituent who had complained to him in the street about the changing composition of his neighbourhood. This unidentifiable individual, whose views Powell declared he was duty-bound to propagate despite the “execration” that would follow, actually does nothing more than anchor the politician’s positions within the everyday. As Harris and Frith note, “populist poses […] construct ‘the people’ as a mythical site of authority”. What we will see time and time again is the use of “the people” in the service of something like Barthes’ reality effect, but for predominantly “moderate” and in many ways non-populist ends: authentocracy, as I have said, is not straightforward populism, but an almost certainly doomed attempt to filigree its terms. Before going on to look in more detail at authentocracy as a political phenomenon in modern Britain, though, I want to examine an “authentic turn” in popular culture that has readied the ground for a particular construction of what it means to be “real”.

Chapter III

Authentocracy’s Funky Commercials

James Bond is pissed off. He’s in a grimy toilet somewhere horrible, garrotting an enemy who he’s just smashed against a sink. This is recorded by a camera that lurches with the battle’s contortions, dropping beneath the fighters, whiplashing into a cubicle as they bundle through its door, springing up behind them, and all in black and white, grainy black and white, austere black and white. It’s the overcontrasted black and white Mathieu Kassovitz used in 1995’s La Haine, that touchstone of latter-day cinematic realism. And this is not the James Bond of Roger Moore or Pierce Brosnan, seeding camp through their martial aptitude, or even of Sean Connery or Timothy Dalton, stylising maliciousness as serpentine elegance. No, this Bond is shorter, squatter, and he flails, and miskicks, not comically, but with the strung-out tetchiness of the car-park brawler whose mistakes will only irk him to further, more extreme, aggression. This is not even Ian Fleming’s ennui-burdened, almost nihilistic Bond, but an imagining of the character in which we’re supposed to perceive more modern pathologies of Britishness: the takeaway punch-up, the terrace pagger, the regretful, but not quite adequately regretful, morning after.

When Casino Royale, the first Bond film to star Daniel Craig in the leading role, came out in the autumn of 2006, it was acclaimed widely as a statement charged with rehabilitative intent. No longer would we be palmed off with pantomimic eyebrow-raising, as we had been by the increasingly schlocky Brosnan era, which culminated in Die Another Day, disliked universally for its almost hostile disregard for plausibility. Instead, Bond was being rebooted. Tangible psychological scarring would replace deadpan winking, fistfights would take the place of space lasers, villains would have bespoke, nuanced motivations rather than specious aspirations towards global domination.

Something interesting is taking place in the post-millennial valourisation of what’s variously called grittiness, edginess, authenticity or realism in pop-cultural texts and genres that had, so the story went, been lost to silliness. Even after over a decade of “grittification”, critics still seem pleasantly surprised when an action thriller or superhero film comes out that goes against alleged expectations and represents in a seemingly detailed way the physical, psychological and emotional effects of violence, which, in many movies of the 1990s and thereabouts, seemed to be more or less consequence-free. However, this grittiness ultimately reveals itself to be built out of tropes that gesture towards a reified idea of what authenticity means: we could even say that the turn in favour of edginess is now just as tired as the schlock it replaced. While I don’t want to go so far as to make the egregious suggestion that the political authentocracy I’ve discussed so far is anything so simple as a direct consequence of a filmic and televisual “new authenticity”, it is surely worth considering the ways that the pop-cultural construction of the real mirrors the political one to the extent that we might be able to begin talking about a broad sensibility. Such a sensibility positions itself as a new seriousness, but is often just sententiousness dressed up as such.

The catalyst in the “realistic” rebooting of big-name film franchises was surely 2005’s Batman Begins, directed by Christopher Nolan, whose previous achievements — Memento and Insomnia — had been small-scale, if rather high-concept, pictures whose effect depended on an effortful appeal to psychological verisimilitude. Nolan’s Batman, method-acted with annoying assiduousness by Christian Bale, imported a version of arthouse aesthetics into the action blockbuster — but only one, selective version, namely that of the study of traumatised character. Batman Begins set out its stall by giving us a Bruce Wayne careering around the backpacker circuit and throwing himself into petty criminality in the name, we gradually discover, of insatiable self-admonishment. After one brush too many with the authorities, Wayne is invited to travel to a lonely monastery in the Himalayas, where he is inducted as a ninja by the League of Shadows, whose leader allows the slumming millionaire access to a vital self-truth: he is enraged with himself for failing to prevent the murder of his parents as a child. The murder is conflated with, or, in stricter Freudian terms condensed into, a terrifying childhood experience in which, on the very afternoon preceding his parents’ deaths, he was attacked by bats and rescued by his father.

Nolan duly gives us Batman on the therapist’s couch. Here, Wayne’s moneyed panache is refigured as an obnoxious decadence that is strategically at odds with the serious, in fact almost radically humourless, Batman persona. The largely enthusiastic reaction to the movie concentrated on the supposed authenticity of a portrayal that filled in the blanks of traumatic origin on the audience’s behalf, and went on to demonstrate that crime-fighting exerts an enduring psychological toll on its representatives. Such has been the success of these tropes, it is now hard to believe that a superhero could be anything other than hard-bitten, that Wolverine or Spiderman might ever have been conceived of predominantly as the possessors of an enviable glamour.

Similarly, the Bond films of the Daniel Craig era all allot to their protagonist, and even, at times, to their antagonists, a traumatic capital that seems to be acceptable tender in the pursuit of modern critical credibility. Each time a new instalment of the franchise appears, reviewers gasp as though they have not previously encountered such a believable Bond, hailing the decision to ditch the frippery and innuendo which had been polluting the series. The character, we’re told, has been re-imagined for the “unpredictable” post-9/11 world, and those around him have been stripped of their (male, Etonian, middle-aged) auratic Britishness to reflect “diversity”. M — until she is “realistically” killed in Skyfall — is a thinly fictionalised version of the former MI5 Director General Stella Rimington; Q is a young, occasionally condescending, socially awkward geek; Moneypenny a sardonic black thirtysomething. Almost profusely, forms of agency are granted to marginalised social groups who have previously been mere means to the ends of Bond’s military and sexual objectives.

Quantum of Solace, the second in the quartet of films composing the Craig era, is perhaps the one most studiously devoted to its own signatures of the real. Grieving following the death of Vesper Lynd in Venice at the end of Casino Royale — inter-film continuity is another stratum of the “realism” of the reboot — Bond throws himself into the pursuit of Quantum, an organisation whose cellular, diffuse operations make them resemble nothing so much as a secular Al Qaeda. Throughout, the audience is harassed with denotations of heightened realism. Bond grumpily and solitarily gets drunk on an aeroplane; a young assistant is brutally and abruptly asphyxiated with oil, having been given just enough screen-time to suggest that she might become a major character.

The latter instance in particular can be used to think about how this is less “realism” as such than a clumsy effort to signal it. When Gemma Arterton’s agent is found murdered there are clear echoes of the gruesome death by paint suffocation of Jill Masterson in 1964’s Goldfinger, but this demise is given twists designed to accentuate Quantum’s difference from its great-grandparent. Arterton plays the role as optimistically ambitious, and, perhaps more pertinently, as ingenuously likeable — that is, as the kind of person we might meet at a Hackney barbecue, talking cheerfully about their new government job. The character is named “Strawberry Fields”, which at once jibes at the flippancy of the earlier films and distances her from the likelihood of an unpleasant fate, thus making her death more shocking. All of this is quite self-conscious, but this knowingness is, paradoxically, supposed to be realistic in that it denounces a long tradition of “unrealistic” silliness in Bond. In the event, however, Quantum of Solace comes across merely as churlishly misogynistic — the real departure from tradition is that the misogyny here is shabbily agentic, subjectifying rather than objectifying Fields by giving her a cache of reasonable motivation only to snatch this away viciously in the name of alleged verisimilitude.

The scene in which Bond goes drinking on a Transatlantic flight is comparably sticky. In the hush of the oceanic night, Craig’s noduled hands paw at a black and white picture of Vesper and a former lover, laid out on a matt-black bar top. After his aloneness has been thoroughly established, he is interrupted by his colleague Mathis, also on the plane; Bond, with the ghost of a slur, offers him a cocktail, which is refused with the implicit suggestion that 007 is acting both self-destructively and self-indulgently. In tenor and colour, this scene does not feel like it belongs in-canon, but, rather, comes across like a transplanted segment of po-faced studies in disaffected modern masculinity like George Clooney’s Michael Clayton, released in 2007, the year before Quantum of Solace. This Bond broods on his failures, misses people, boozes, mutters, “battles his demons”. And yet the audience is never permitted to forget that this scene takes place on a Virgin Atlantic aircraft, or that Bond is drinking Gordon’s gin — the bartender, in fact, makes a point of emphasising the brand. This means that the sequence’s poignancy and depth end up as nothing more than a tonal adjustment of the product placement that had marred the Brosnan era. It’s not that the new way of doing things is sufficiently committed to realism that it turns its back on earlier errors, more that it wants to deploy significations that both proclaim a shift of attitude and imbue the products of partner brands with the increasingly valuable gravitas of angst.

In the end, there’s a more unpleasant way of accounting for the darkening of Bond as played by Craig. His torturedness is configured as expense, as the unavoidable cost of his work: the implicit message is that secret servants are just like “us”, but perhaps more willing to forfeit personal happiness in the name of a greater good, which in this case happens to be the safety and sovereignty of Britain. Bond’s pains are thus imagined as the obligatory price of defence and, more shockingly, as a suggestion that they are the trauma of the torturer. The new films show a protagonist who is willing to use physical coercion to obtain necessary information, but they happily adopt the logic of the cane-waving public-school headmaster who declares that “this is going to hurt me more than it is you”. Bond’s soul is on the line not only because his enemies threaten him and those he loves, but because his work demands that he inflict pain, and his agony comes to suggest that all of this pain is a historically necessary intervention in the protection of a historically necessary politics. Read against Blairite, and subsequent forms of, British (liberal) interventionism, the “realism” of Craig’s Bond becomes more and more obviously reification, an awkwardly stylised cousin to authentocracy.

A little theoretical elaboration might prove useful here. In 1964, Theodor Adorno published The Jargon of Authenticity, a slim work by his standards, which set itself the task of dismantling the rhetoric of the strand of existentialism espoused by Martin Heidegger and associated thinkers. Heidegger, Adorno writes, sought to mystify a sense of meaninglessness or absurdity, which should have been understood as a product of very specific historical circumstances, by claiming that such a feeling of lostness was intrinsic to the human condition. Heidegger’s writings present the individual as alienated by definition, unable to make meaningful social connections in the world, and capable of being authentic only in their apprehension of their own biological finitude. Authenticity, considered as such, is an inwardness autonomous from, or universally present within and therefore unaffected by, history. Adorno argues that such inwardness is in truth the product of objective, historical alignments, and could not have arisen in a less atomised social configuration than monopoly capitalism. Heidegger’s mistake, he says, comes to justify historical forms of domination by positing a reified, inevitable suffering that will happen anyway; at best, it leads to a political quietism and, at the very worst, to active participation in atrocity.

Adorno demonstrates his ability to coin critically provocative catchphrases when, situating Heidegger’s account of authenticity within the Protestant tradition of “absurd belief”, he discusses the performance of a cleric on German television. The churchman’s “behaviour” is fashioned as a kind of heroism, which in opening itself earnestly to ridicule puts itself significantly at risk: he stands in the gaze of the camera, unflinching, testifying artlessly to his belief. Such an apparent lack of guile generates a “trustworthiness [that] supports the credibility of his statements”. If the cleric is willing to be mocked — to suffer, to pay the price — for what he says, then what he is saying becomes more plausible. As such, Adorno says, programmes like this are “authenticity’s funky commercial[s]”: they lend authenticity a resounding heroic charisma. This term can be appropriated usefully in a discussion of the way film and television work in the production of authentocratic affect in the present day.

Superficially, Heidegger’s authenticity, which emphasises the isolation of the individual, appears a world apart from authentocracy, which seems to search for collective meaning in the past. However, the ideas are not always so separate as they might appear. Returning to Bond, or, indeed, to Batman, it’s possible to see how contemporary heroic narratives marry the individual’s angst in an always-already-fallen world to a defence of particular social forms — British capitalist democracy, Waynian philanthropic capitalism — by positioning these forms as the least bad ones, or the ones most likely to at least mitigate subjective anguish.

Authentocracy’s “funky commercials” don’t end with Bond and Batman. Another of the primary dramatic counterparts to its ideology is far more surprising, as it’s a genre that, superficially, has literally no interest in reality whatsoever. The popularity of second-world fantasy over the past decade has equalled or even eclipsed its success in the late Sixties, when Led Zeppelin were writing songs about Lord of the Rings, or the mid-Eighties, when Dungeons & Dragons was causing moral panic across the English-speaking world. Most prominent amongst contemporary second worlds — for adults, at least — are Tolkien’s Middle Earth and the expansive geographies of George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire novels. In the case of both Middle Earth and Martin’s Westeros and Essos, it is not, or at least not predominantly, the literary possibilities offered to the reader to imagine these worlds that have been most successful, but their screen adaptations, which perform the work of imaginative realisation on their audiences’ behalves. Peter Jackson’s cinematic versions of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, and HBO’s rendering of A Song of Ice and Fire as Game of Thrones have brought textual second worlds to life, but in doing so have used them to countersign a particular version of first-world authenticity.

Jackson was a surprising choice to direct Lord of the Rings when it was announced, at the beginning of the millennium, that someone was finally going to make a determined effort to get Tolkien’s work, often seen as unfilmable, on screen. His earliest features, the likes of Bad Taste and Meet the Feebles, were confrontationally gross, their dramatic engines powered by bedroom misanthropy. In fact, they’re almost teasers of modern alt-right aesthetics, dripping with contrived nihilism. Pointedly, though, Tolkien’s version of Lord of the Rings positions itself almost precisely against nihilism, promoting an ecologically tinged conservatism that insists on the value and meaning of tradition. The role of Sauron’s Rings within the Middle Earth mythos’ politicised cosmology is to grate away at order, promoting wars that — for example — disrupt the succession of Gondor, or disally Free Peoples like elves and dwarves.

When Jackson was announced for the project, I, as a veteran of too many teenage readings of Tolkien, remember thinking it was an odd fit unless he was going to give Sauron a role roughly equivalent to the one some of the Romantic poets took Satan to have in Paradise Lost. William Blake and Percy Shelley, amongst others, assumed (most likely wrongly, according to most later analyses) that Milton on some level approves of Satan’s questioning of divine hegemony, and thereby wrote him as the possessor of considerable rebellious magnetism. However, although one might expect Jackson, the well-known provocateur, to paint his Sauron in this light, he stays faithful to Tolkien’s original, in which the villain’s evil is tiresomely one-dimensional. In fact, one might argue that the filmic Sauron’s malevolence overplays the original, bearing in mind Jackson’s decision to literalise the Eye of Mordor, whose textual status is rather ambiguous. The trilogy gives the audience every single visual cue to recognise evil; Jackson’s one grey area is Gollum, who is nevertheless shown very clearly as the victim of the corrupting influence of Sauron and the One Ring. Moral seriousness — sententiousness — is the order of the day here.

Jackson’s commitment to making Tolkien’s moral positions unmistakable extends into his second Middle Earth trilogy. The three films based on The Hobbit constitute an at-times interminable-feeling extrapolation of their source material, turning Bilbo’s largely chirpy quest with Thorin’s soldiers of fortune into but one facet of the gathering storm of the War of the Ring. Where there is a substantial difference in tone between The Hobbit, a piece of children’s fiction, and the epic furniture of Lord of the Rings as they are written, Jackson decides instead to highlight potential continuities, using the second trilogy to provide a more fibrous backstory for the first. Sauron’s re-emergence from damnation — hinted at on no more than a couple of occasions in the novel — becomes a major plot element, and the audience is also given insight into such matters as the tumescing moral turpitude of Saruman and Legolas’ romantic despair. While some of the knockabout spirit of the original text survives, there is, overall, a palpable clouding of mood, not least in Richard Armitage’s scowling depiction of a vengeance-fixated Thorin and the expansion of the one-note, single-function character Bard into a fully-fledged hero spurred by the classically brown-bread incentive of familial responsibility.

All six films tumble unquestioningly onto a notion of grittiness grounded in provincial Britishness. Sean Bean’s Boromir, a flawed hero of The Fellowship of the Ring, is the prototype of this, and his “One does not simply walk into Mordor” line has achieved memetic significance as the catchphrase of the entire concept of hubris-puncturing realism. Bean counterposes Boromir to Viggo Mortensen’s more classlessly stately Aragorn, playing him as a worldly and weather-beaten warlord. Subsequently, worldliness is always conveyed with flattened, unspecifically northern-English vowels: Armitage’s Thorin, a number of the more battle-hardened dwarves, and Bard all leave you wondering little more than which side of the Pennines they come from. The phonetics of this supposed realism also have strong visual equivalents: all these characters have long, meaningfully unkempt hair, beards or stubble, warty leather jerkins in muted, camouflage tones.

While, of course, Tolkien’s telling of the story of the War of the Ring never represents it as anything other than a conflict of absolutely existential magnitude, the novels don’t feel so constantly inclined to trope heroic obligation through signifiers of grittiness that would be equally, if not more, applicable to representations of real earth. The films, by contrast, lean on a quotidian grammar of necessity and toil, by which images of goodness and images of thankless, brutal graft are intertwined, to indicate which side we should take in this supposedly fantastic world. Good, in very many cases in Jackson’s conception of Middle Earth, has an identifiably gnarled quality that is, not least in its accent, authentocratic, and buys into, in a glibly unquestioning way, all kinds of ideas about order, class, family, masculinity and duty. The adolescent anarchism of Bad Taste is rarely glimpsed in the two trilogies, which frequently abdicate the foremost prerogative of fantasy: to be radically different in any way it sees fit from the world as is, or as it is reified. This is “escapism” with no escape; in fact, the message of the films might be taken to be that all worlds are inevitably the same, were it not for the fact that Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit can present themselves as politically vacuous because of their (spuriously) fantastic nature.

That said, Game of Thrones is far, far more given over to this ontologically displaced realism. While Jackson occasionally cares to leaven the War of the Ring with wackiness, even the humour in Westeros can only be used to reassert the grimness of being alive. If a character tells a joke in King’s Landing or Winterfell, it’s inevitably in a mordant register intended to let us know, had we not already noticed, all about the world’s unavoidable shittiness. All pleasure in the series must be subordinated, as explicitly as possible, to a cynicism that purports to belong to the diegetic world but, one suspects, really indicts the one on the viewer’s side of the screen. Game of Thrones posits conflict, strife, untrustworthiness and —frequently misogynistic — cruelty not as historical contingencies but as fundamental conditions of being that can only be contradicted temporarily and in isolated circumstances.

Why such a basically misanthropic work has achieved the level of popularity it has is hard to pin down, but one explanation might be that it passes real-world judgements and disavows them by its ultra-detailed production of a second world. Its audience is allowed to believe that this is “only” fantasy, while being given surreptitious access to the slightly transgressive frisson of a nihilism directed at the real. Because of this, fans of the show who genuinely are misanthropic — and Game of Thrones has no small following on the alt-right — have their worldly judgements underwritten, while its more humanistic followers can use cosmological distance as an alibi for its excesses. The weird doubleness, the hanging between realities I’m talking about can even be seen in the names of its characters, which are often minimally altered, thus uncannily similar, versions of English-language nomenclature (Robb Stark and Margaery Tyrell are but two examples of this).

As with Craig-era Bond, one of the main achievements of Game of Thrones in the eyes of many fans, and supportive critics, has been its commitment to unflinching representations of violence. It supposedly ditches a rose-tinted look at the world in order to expose the darkness of (fantasy) man’s heart, and this darkness is never more unremitting than when sexual violence is onscreen. Even when sex is consensual, the programme has often struggled to conceive of it separately from aggression, but its accent of prurience is most clearly pronounced when rape, which some counts claim has been represented on as many as fifty occasions in six seasons, is shown. The signal case of this came in the fifth series, when Sansa Stark’s rape by Ramsay Bolton provoked countless online arguments between those who felt that the show had tipped into misogynistic gratuity and those who believed that the scene should be congratulated for its fidelity both to the original text and to the unforgiving real world.

Those who felt that the latter was the case were really saying two things at once, and they should perhaps, in a normal conversation, have to some degree cancelled one another out. Firstly, they were saying that the rape scene was justified because that was how Martin had written it in the novels. As such, the show maintained authenticity in respect of its origins, instead of seeking to placate the taste of a broader audience not necessarily as invested in scriptural accuracy as the true believers. However, the parallel defence was that the scene was “realistic” on its own terms: it was horrible because rape is horrible, ergo the programme has succeeded by not softening up difficult material. On one hand, Martin’s fictional creation is honoured; on the other, fiction mitigates its fictionality through belligerently visceral mimesis. Which (so-called) truth is being honoured here? Perhaps it’s the case that Martin himself achieves a marketable difference from other fantasy writers by deploying grittiness as an affordable marker of realism but, if that is the case, we only get as far as a restatement of modern 007’s problem that self-reflexive markers of realism are intrinsically unrealistic.

For Game of Thrones, especially in its screen version, it is fair to say that its tropes of authenticity are not only often clichés, but clichés with weighty ideological payloads. Rough men with Yorkshire accents and beards, Tyrion and Littlefinger’s Machiavellian shit-stirring, chaotic and predictably unpredictable massacres and, all too regularly, sexual violence are used to announce nothing more than that this world refuses to ameliorate itself in the way that, for example, Tolkien’s does with its reliable goodness, homely inns and elvensong. What presents itself as the content of the programme’s realism actually serves to formally distinguish it from the compromises it sees some of its forebears and competitors making. Moreover, by seeking to set itself apart from comparable acts of world-building, it reduces real victims of the forms of violence it plays so uncaringly with to chips in authenticity’s bargains. In doing so, it naturalises violence and aggressive, Darwinian competitiveness as fundamentally authentic components of being alive.

Bond and the second-world fantasy discussed implicate Britishness in various ways, but are produced at least in part internationally, regardless of their fondness for RADA Yorkshire. The final set of “funky commercials” I want to consider, however, are much more ineluctably British but for an awkwardly imported aesthetic sheen. The story begins, however, with a much more literal act of cultural importation, that of a product originating on the other side of the North Sea. Over the course of the last decade, a substantial audience has developed in the UK for “Scandi-noir”, a genre of crime fiction on page and screen that includes Sweden’s Wallander, Denmark’s The Killing and the Swedish-Danish The Bridge. Typically, these shows pit a lone detective, or an oddly matched pair of them, against the hypocrisies of Scandinavian life, as they discover that a brutal, and at first inexplicable, crime leads back to a tangled nexus of political and economic power.

Several things give these programmes a specifically Nordic feel. First, and in contrast to the unmistakable plutocratic corruption faced by the protagonists of Chandler or Hammett, Scandi-noir’s sleuths are usually confronted by a crime that conceals itself in the folds of the superficial gentleness and inclusiveness of their moderate, social democratic societies. Second, a particular set of visual elements are typically in play, very often involving camera filters designed to capture the paradoxical grey transparency of Nordic light. Third, these shows, like the work of Danish directors like Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, synthesise two Scandinavian aesthetic traditions, namely “dirty secret” naturalism, in which a façade of bourgeois comfort is torn away to reveal some kind of scandalous truth, and Expressionist angst, which views the human crisis (as Adorno accuses Heidegger of doing) not as historically specific but as eternal. The protagonists of these shows nearly all bear a torment which can’t simply be explained away by social critique: Kurt Wallander and The Killing’s Sarah Lund are strongly implied to be in touch with profounder, existential melancholies. Scandi-noir, in other words, multiplies Henrik Ibsen by Edvard Munch.

There’s an irony in Britain’s taste for these largely miserabilist series: the kind of quirky, cosy, post-Christie detective shows the UK turns out industrially — Midsomer Murders, A Touch of Frost and so on — are enormously popular across the Nordic countries. Yet soon the inhabitants of Stavanger, Aarhus and Helsingborgs might have to deal with a scarcity of tepid Sunday-evening crimestopping, as British TV producers have recently focused on turning out shows that seek to transpose the Scandi-noir aesthetic into British settings. Line of Duty, Happy Valley, Broadchurch and The Fall collectively eschew the kitschy bumbling that has characterised most successful UK crime dramas of the past few decades and, in doing so, have been widely acclaimed for their intensified “realism”. Once again, however, “realism” turns out, on closer inspection, to consist merely of a deck of tropes that gesture towards authenticity.

Broadchurch, which emerged to clamorous praise in 2013, is an intriguing case of how confusing discussions about what “realism” means can be. For a start, I noticed at least one review celebrating the show’s truth-to-life nature, comparing it to Twin Peaks, which pretty much represents the apex when it comes to a television drama shrugging off pretty much every aspect of realist dogma. Presumably, this analogy was made because of the allegedly credible feature the two programmes share, specifically that suspicion at some point falls on more or less every member of the cast. This, of course, is a well-rehearsed feature of some noir, but it is also characteristic of Christie and associated interwar ancestors of Morse, Frost and so on. Others pointed to the studied Nordicisms of Broadchurch in praising it, but its main inheritance from programmes such as The Killing, other than the positioning of evil as uncannily under-the-nose, was its use of a hoary sub-Arctic colouring in the photography. Given that the (fictional) town of Broadchurch is supposed to be in Dorset, this would seem a strange visual choice were it not for the fact that British audiences have come to make a Pavlovian association between Scandinavian detective dramas and realism, and therefore whatever looks Scandinavian is read as somehow more authentic than, say, Midsomer Murders (which, in its own almost wilfully strange way, is actually not that unfaithful a representation of southern English rural life).

Line of Duty, Happy Valley and The Fall also partook in the visual Expressionism of Scandinavian crime, which is fond of shots that, save for the protagonist, are meaningfully empty in way that’s supposed to index existential unease, the condition Heidegger thought of as being “thrown into the world”. They also, however, purloined a regular narrative feature of Scandi-noir — and once again we find ourselves back at the use of sexualised violence as a metaphor for nothing other than the programmes’ own “brave” dedication to realism. Particularly in The Fall, where Jamie Dornan’s performance as a handsomely woman-hating killer went no small way towards landing him the male lead in Fifty Shades of Grey, rape and sexually motivated murder were transformed into semaphore for an edginess that set the series apart from snug British tradition. It’s vital to restate here that turning a particular form of behaviour into a cipher for reality itself ends up accepting and naturalising that behaviour, but too many British critics, including many who would typically consider themselves feminists, were so won over by the Anglo-Scandinavian aesthetic to remember to protest (the late A.A. Gill deserves credit here for raising objections ahead of the curve).

All of these series had detective protagonists who were, in some way or other, bearers of a dark past, and they also mostly made the typically authentocratic move of using the British provinces — Dorset, Belfast in The Fall, exurban West Yorkshire in Happy Valley — as code for realism. Of course, Sunday evening fare also tended to choose settings far removed from London — Heartbeat’s Yorkshire Moors, Hamish Macbeth’s West Highlands — but this was generally in the service of producing a camply comic dissonance between the loveliness of Britain’s rural scenery and the horror of crime. In contrast, the provincialism of recent years has taken the form of what I want to discuss in my next chapter, a kind of pseudo-ethnography central to political authentocracy that pretends to be getting away from “metropolitan elites” to tell it like it is but, in fact, has already decided what it wants to find when it gets there. Like these ethnographies, Happy Valley affects to tell us about a Britain that has been forgotten by liberal modernity, but in turning what is supposedly outside this modernity into an instrument with which to beat it, it also forgets to “listen”.

If there’s a lesson in all this, it’s that anything that is commandeered to operate as a sign of authenticity ends up being robbed of its specificity to the point of meaninglessness. I don’t mean to say that there is no way in which trauma can be thought of responsibly in culture, nor do I want to suggest that it is inevitable that depictions of sexual violence are instrumentalised by broader reality claims as in the case of Game of Thrones or The Fall. Moreover, and on a different, lesser, and slightly personal note, I don’t want to hear my own accent disappear from television, or see all British television shows set exclusively in London. It is important, however, to recognise that something can “care” about the specificities of the “real” in a way which turns out to be wholly self-serving, as a way of asserting its own credibility, and, in fact, this is central to the whole project of authentocracy. To see how this is the case, I want to turn to a genre of political journalism that situates itself as a new hard-headedness and has played an absolutely fundamental role in defining current conceptions of authenticity in the public sphere.

Chapter IV

Mass Obviation

I hope it won’t be tedious if we head back to Darlington for a while. It’s only lately I’ve tried to write about my hometown; well, the town in which I spent the first five and a half years of my life, before we moved a short distance away to the edge of the Yorkshire Dales. Perhaps because we left when I was young it has taken me a long time to figure out what I think or what I want to say about it. It probably doesn’t help that it’s the kind of place where you have to navigate round the perspectives by which other people see it. Within the wider north-east, as Harry Pearson observes in his self-effacingly insightful football-travelogue-cum-ethnography The Far Corner, the place has “a reputation for producing hard cases”: regionally, “Darlo” seems to be a synonym for intransigent aggression, the small-town scrappiness whose readiness to find a casus belli in the most unlikely scenarios verges on a type of pedantry. Further afield, many who don’t confuse Darlington with Doncaster — an amazingly if not quite inexplicably common error — use it as a cipher for an archetypical northernness, according to which it is post-industrial, Labour-voting, thickly accented, socially traditionalist, ethnically homogeneous, hard-bitten, unlikely to suffer fools.

As the 2017 General Election approached, Darlington became the focus of considerable media attention. It was regarded as a key Conservative target, and expected to return its result relatively early in the proceedings, giving an indication — so commentators thought — of how large Theresa May’s majority would be. In a mayoral election for the wider Teesside region shortly before the national vote, a Tory victory had caused those paid to write about politics to affect shock and announce that the northern working classes were now spoken to more convincingly by May’s patriotic traditionalism than by Corbynite socialism. They’d been warning about this since Corbyn took office, they said, but Labour’s heartlands were finally abandoning the party for real. May had struck a note that “the left”, a left for too long composed of arrogant, ignorant, pacifistic, internationalist mandarins, had abjectly failed to. Like UKIP before her, she had taken the “legitimate concerns” — those listed by Graham Jones — of what Alberto Toscano calls the “sociologically spectral” forgotten white working class seriously.

It’s been a long, slow drift in British political thought and writing towards accepting the narrative that the “white working class” are more interested in missile systems and the Queen’s wellbeing, and particularly in holding on to ethno-regional identity, than any philosophy of economic redistribution. However, it’s certainly the case now that whenever the term is used in a piece of commentary it’s pretty much inevitable that (imputed or semi-imputed) cultural, rather than material, concerns are going to be prioritised. Poverty and the death of British industry are used as contexts, even occasionally acknowledged as causal, but what really needs to be “listened” to in order to un-forget these people is their anger at being culturally sidelined by multiculturalism. As I’ve noted already, this narrative, tellingly popular among the Blue Labour cadre, has massive value for continuity Blairism because it projects Labour’s “forgetting” onto “the left” — another “sociological spectre” to go along with the white working class — when the real abandonment of post-industrial, “Rust-Belt” Britain took place under Blair.

One of the most talked-about books of the beginning of 2017 was the former Blairite cheerleader and current anti-immigration ideologue David Goodhart’s The Road to Somewhere, which claims that people can be divided into into “somewheres”, rooted in their communities, affiliated to tradition and sick of ceaseless societal change, and flouncy metropolitan “anywheres”, the success stories of globalisation who have adapted to its insecurities. This, Goodhart and his supporters claim, is the problem confronting any attempt to extricate the UK from its current set of political impasses. “Somewheres” are found in places like Darlington, “anywheres” are found in places like Islington, where Corbyn of course lives and is an MP. The schism, then, is purportedly between those who want little but a reasonable amount of continuity, particularly demographic continuity, in the out-of-the-way places they live and, surprise surprise, a liberal metropolitan “elite” who don’t see why everyone can’t adapt to their mores.

Goodhart’s is only the boldest statement of the argument regarding the “forgotten”, which has attained the status of common sense despite constantly presenting itself, whether amongst right-wingers or nominal progressives, as a daringly risky position to adopt. The counter-critique that this way of looking at things culturalises a problem of inequality that is actually material is given pretty short shrift, with even the supposedly left-wing media preferring an ameliorated version of Goodhart’s claim. The preponderance of “forgottenness” in the media typically allows us the grimly gratifying sight of long-time Guardian, Observer and New Statesman political commentators, fat-salaried liberal metropolitans all, telling the anywheres that they need to get their heads out of the sand. That poor people live in cities, that many provincial working-class people are left-wing (and, vitally, not white) and that more than a few people in supposedly left-behind constituencies are materially well-off is neither here nor there to them.

Indeed, the obsession with “legitimate concerns” and ministering to the wounded pride of the British Rust Belt has given rise to a whole genre of journalism. Very often, pieces in this vein begin with a brief snapshot of the town’s one-time industry, a closed glass factory or a canal clogged with rubbish and weeds that once took local products “all the way to the sea”. Although this image will be used in a way to suggest an attentiveness to municipal uniqueness, it is always really only a metaphor for a universalised concept of neglect. We then sometimes meet a pair of beleaguered public-sector employees, who might be photographed gesturing at a playground being dismantled or a betting shop that used to be a nursery. Next, we are introduced to someone who used to work in the factory or mine, and used to vote Labour, but says he doesn’t these days because immigration has gone too far, and that this is a consequence of bureaucrats in Brussels and, maybe, if the journalist is lucky, champagne socialists in Westminster. There are a few other people, some unemployed school leavers outside a chip shop or some frustrated community leaders, who are unprescriptive about what can be done, but add to the welling ambient gloom.

John Harris, the Guardian journalist most given to roving the regions, has created a niche for himself with pieces flush with these tropes. It should be said that his writing is in ways well-intentioned: he is attuned to deindustrialisation and its likely consequences, and on some levels admirably sympathetic to the people he meets. However, he also falls into the trap of making everywhere he goes look fundamentally the same, with the consequence that his efforts to rub the faces of “Britain’s elites” in reality’s grit can end up sounding trite. The horror never ends, becomes drudgingly familiar, begins to turn into a sort of wailing helplessness:

If the Welsh town of Merthyr Tydfil sits anywhere in the thoughts of Britain’s elites, it is probably as a fuzzy byword for very bad things indeed: long-term economic decline, welfare dependency, lives so far from the London dream that to some people, they look grimly exotic. One in four of the adult population is on benefits. For every job vacancy there are 84 local people without work. If you travel up the A470 to take a look you’ll find a case study in decades-long de-industrialisation: behind a retail park and T-Mobile call centre lurk problems so ingrained as to often seem beyond hope.

I don’t want to contest the point that Merthyr has stark socio-economic problems, but this piece has been written again and again and again, and about many different places. All that changes are the road numbers. If Merthyr is a “fuzzy byword” in elite consciousness, it’s also shorthand for something in the minds of the journalists who seek to take this elite to task, namely a political and cultural trajectory that is moving headlong towards a low denominator that many writers on this beat seem wary about challenging.

The implied, occasionally openly expressed, conclusion such pieces always seem to reach is that people in the provinces are economically afflicted, both in a personal and communal sense, and that this means that “we’re” — the implied reader is a progressive metropolitan, never an Angry of Merthyr themselves — going to have to attend to “working-class” cultural anxieties, to “legitimate concerns”, in order to form an electoral bloc substantial enough to push back against Tory austerity. If this happens, moreover, perhaps the proles can be gradually turned against Brexit, which they unwittingly betrayed their own economic interests in voting for. By appealing to a narrowly defined, virtually always white, version of the working class, centrist technocracy can gradually minister to its own ills.

Darlington provoked so much interest in the media running up to the 2017 election because it looked as though it would provide unavoidable confirmation of this logic. It was supposed to serve as a kind of Waterloo for the spectral “left”, in fact, a defeat that would lead to a Serious Debate about what progressive politics could do to speak to “legitimate concerns”. However, it failed to accept its allotted role in this narrative, voting to stay a Labour seat, despite the fact that, for all its presentation as a bastion of rustbelt typicality, it’s always been a swing constituency. What really came out of the night of the election in the end was how, in bucking commentators’ expectations, Darlington had inadvertently demonstrated how the media’s interest in and concern for its “somewheres” was largely spurious, because it turned the majority of British settlements outside London into interchangeable figures of provincial anger, paying no attention to the fine details. The rhetoric of “listening” was, in reality, a way of talking over people’s heads.

What the journalist Phil McDuff smartly calls “prole whispering” journalism poses as empirically rigorous, but tends to lack the attentiveness to back these claims up. What I propose to do here, by contrast, is to look round my hometown to bring out its actual particularities. These might not, in themselves, prove anything straightforwardly partypolitical, but they should demonstrate how stories whose moral is the need to pay more attention to supposedly authentic people in actuality erase these people by turning them into metaphors for generic malaise. By getting into the fine detail, one can hopefully be reminded that places are not metaphors, and that “somewheres” deserve better than being roped into reductive Manichaeism like Goodhart’s. If we’re meant to pay attention to what’s been forgotten, in other words, let’s do so in good faith, without patronising whole swathes of the nation.

So, Darlington, in which we moved house three times in the first five years of my life. Nevertheless, all three houses were within a ten-minute walk of one another, in the Victorian terraces immediately west of the town centre. To visualise these streets, picture the slightly threadbare elegance of a southern university city’s inner suburbs. Tall, narrow, red-bricked houses, some covered in creepers not always planted deliberately, flaking paint on the front railings and panes of the basement windows, the sound of musical instruments being practised in rooms with bare floorboards, VWs and Minis and Citroens parked up on the curb, cats snoozing in the shadows of walls on summer afternoons. The centrepiece of the area is Stanhope Park, one of the surprisingly high number of green spaces in the town, and near it was once a well-regarded arts centre, since closed, sadly, and the sixth-form and technical colleges. Some of the houses round here are subdivided into lets, others, when I lived there and I’m sure also now, were owned by young lower-middle-class families and moderately affluent professionals. These were roads where teachers — not headmasters — and doctors — but not surgeons — might live, or journalists on the Northern Echo or the Darlington and Stockton Times, both of which are based locally. The Guardian sold as well as these publications in the newsagents we used to go to on Cleveland Terrace and Duke Street; moreover, this wasn’t a single-street nook of relative comfort, but a considerable part of the town’s footprint.

South and west of here are suburbs spreading down towards the River Tees, which forms the border with North Yorkshire. Down these long, beech-lined avenues, wealth was much more conspicuous, in that specifically 1980s fashion involving mock Tudor façades, gravel driveways, fishponds tucked into punctiliously Alpine rockeries. Some of the biggest houses, on Carmel Road for example, were something to behold: one family used to hold a carol evening in December, where people would gather on a balcony above a large entrance hall, singing, drinking mulled wine around the second storey of a Christmas tree poking through the gap between levels. If the streets I learned to walk in looked like a caricature of a Liberal Democrat safe seat, this part of town explains why it’s not at all absurd that Michael Fallon, the recently disgraced Tory ex-Defence Minister, was Darlington’s MP for most of the 1980s.

This is not to say that there weren’t, and aren’t, conspicuously poor parts of Darlington, especially in the south-east, out beyond the lake and manicured gardens of South Park. Skerne Park, in particular, is spoken of by many locals as a sink estate, and all the usual markers of high deprivation can be found there despite attempts at improvement in the Blair years. Firth Moor, Eastbourne and Red Hall are other fairly run-down areas dominated by social housing, although some of that has, predictably, been sold off. Elsewhere, there are zones of early twentieth-century development where ownership mixes with cheap private letting, up North Road — where my grandmother lived in a weather-beaten Thirties semi — and in the streets around the Denes, a series of parks strung along the valley of Cockerton Beck, the stream which runs behind the hospital. There are also large estates evocative of post-war aspiration, newlywed country even these days, in Hummersknott and Mowden, and more large houses where Coniscliffe Road runs out of town into the pastureland sloping up towards Teesdale.

Darlington, then, is socially and economically mixed, confounding any ambition to depict it as some post-industrial facsimile. We should go on, then, to offer some historical account for the specific qualities of its variedness. Going far back, it occupies a halfway point between major population centres in Yorkshire and north-east, and is at the heart of the London-Edinburgh transport corridor (Northgate, which runs through the town centre, was part of the Great North Road until the A1 bypass was built in the 1960s). It’s also an important east-west transit point between the west Durham coalfield and the sea, which was one of the reasons, alongside the discovery of iron ore in the nearby Cleveland Hills, that the town was central to the development of the railways. Nearby Middlesbrough, the modern regional centre, was first inaugurated as “Port Darlington” by influential Quaker businessmen who wanted to be able to reach markets further afield without relying on other northern ports like Newcastle, Sunderland or Hull.

The Quakers also impacted significantly on the townscape of Darlington itself. South Park and the area I was brought up in were built by investors from the abstinent Society of Friends, which probably explains why there are no pubs: no one round here has a “local” as such. Quaker economic success made the town into a regional industrial driver and this, combined with the felicity of its location — gateway to the north-east coming from the south, gateway to the south coming from the north-east and Scotland, gateway to the port on the Tees if you’re coming from inland — led the town to flourish in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Steel at Darlington Forge and the Rolling Mills, large-scale engineering at Cleveland Bridge, mechanical engineering at Cummins and Whessoe and, of course, railway manufacturing and repair came to dominate productive activity. As many of these workplaces were to the east of the centre, mass housing was constructed there, on the far side of the station, strung around the all-important branch line to Middlesbrough. However, Darlington continued to provide a centre for the farming in the region, with cattle and sheep in the hills to the west and more dependably moneymaking arable land to the south in the Vale of York. Alongside the strangely expansive marketplace I mentioned in Chapter I, there was, at least until recently, still a huge cattle market up by the train station; there’s always been a haziness as to whether this is an agricultural or an industrial settlement.

In recent years, big out-of-town retail centres have become major employers, along with Orange, whose first UK call centre was in Darlington, and the Department for Business, Skills and Industry. Obviously, there is far less industrial work now, but there’s a lot of clerical employment. There’s been de-skilling, but some new skills have been acquired, and there’s still a relatively strong commercial impetus. For all the predictability of industry being replaced by retail and (often low-paid) white-collar work, and of big retail affecting independent stores — but, as we shall see, not at all terminally — the phrase so often-used in grim-up-north journalism that “it’s the same old story” would be misapplied here. The story varies from place to place, and doesn’t lend itself to generalisation.

Darlington, like all places, has an identity that can’t be apprehended solely by broad-brush economic determinism. Global shifts in the mode of production are experienced in ways mediated by national factors; national shifts are mediated by local factors. If you keep yourself attuned, the ambience of Darlington is pointedly different to that of Middlesbrough, ten miles up the road, and Middlesbrough, in turn, has an atmosphere decidedly unlike, say, Hartlepool’s or Sunderland’s. It should of course go without saying that each of these places have suffered hugely from neglect, even from deliberately produced decay, and that they’ve been kicked hard by the withering of industry, but “industrial decline” couldn’t be unanimously identified by each town north of Northampton as involving the same causes and symptoms.

When I think of Darlington, I think of the things that have been lost since my childhood, but also of its remaining signatures. Dressers, a stationers and toyshop that was, when I was small, the epitome of polished provincial uprightness, is now a discount store, that reliable red flag of economic ague, but in the permanently hectic independent butchers on nearby Skinnergate some of the staff still remember me despite the fact I haven’t lived in the town since 1986. More and more businesses may have been blotted out by the Cornmill, a typical late-Eighties town-centre mall like Eldon Square in Newcastle and Middlesbrough’s Cleveland Centre, but there are still a multitude of well-established specialist shops on Duke Street, Bondgate and Grange Road. Binns, the town’s department store on the corner of High Row where the Great North Road used to curve out of town, is now owned by House of Fraser but maintains an air of haughty autonomy like the family-owned establishments in more prosperous parts of southern England. Again, it would be at the very least reductive to suggest that this town, whatever sufferings it has undergone in the process of regional de-industrialisation, can or should be turned into a generic icon of hopelessness.

Once you’ve established the way Darlington is stratified socially, it’s interesting to look at what’s going on in the town’s cultural unconscious. Facing Binns is a shop called Guru, which opened in 1971, and sells joss-sticks, dodgily “ethnic” paraphernalia, army surplus jackets, hen-party innuendo and student-bedroom posters over several floors. This herbally scented warren speaks of an aspect of provincial life rarely registered when London papers send correspondents to the north on a metaphor hunt, namely the way the Sixties and Seventies were experienced beyond the big cities, as a moment in which alterity was grasped in part, but insecurely, leaving a legacy of esoteric dabbling and awkward appropriation which has been partially absorbed as a component of local common-sense. It isn’t only the piano tuners and copywriters living around South Park who have kept this store open for four and a half decades: for as long as I can remember, there has been a nostalgia for the psychedelic, liberatory promises of the (long) Sixties in town, even amongst pub brawlers and otherwise conservative farmers.

Tellingly, Jimi Hendrix played on more than one occasion in Darlington, a fact the Echo never misses an opportunity to memorialise. Maybe it’s a legacy of this that makes the town so musically focused: there has always seemed to be more guitar shops than a place its size would normally require, and their “musicians wanted” boards have tended to betray an aspirant, usually frustrated, bohemianism. When I used to go into town on a Saturday afternoon to watch the football, I’d set off early and head into Williams, the biggest music store, and spend a while at the notice board wondering how there could be so many bands influenced by both Pink Floyd and Green Day. Maybe there’s a band from Darlington now who have successfully achieved that long-awaited synthesis.

Perhaps that’s the point. Any town is always a node at which various, contradictory strands of economic and cultural influence, meaning that something — a band, a way of dressing — can become almost standard in one place and more or less irrelevant ten miles away. Why was the Hell’s Angels chapter in Darlington so notorious? Why did a — slightly rawhided — hippydom get such traction here, and why did punk leave relatively little mark in comparison to Middlesbrough, a twenty-minute drive up the A66? A book I’ve already mentioned, Pearson’s The Far Corner, stands as one of very few persuasive attempts to get below the skin of the north-east, because it sets out with the belief that the region’s unifying traits are counterbalanced by nuances that differentiate the tiniest, most proximate pit villages from one another. Darlington, he points out, can be set apart from its neighbours thanks, amongst other things, to its absolutely unique accent, which blurs nasal Teessider, Pitmatic glottals and the corvid croak of the northern part of North Yorkshire. The accent, of course, mirrors how the town’s specific location has meant that it draws together theoretically clashing cultural attitudes: the probity and occasional suspiciousness often found in Yorkshire with the fulsome sociability of the north-east, the reticent farming culture of the east Pennines with the abrasive geniality of Teesside. And then, once again, there’s that utopianism sublimated in a longing for the Sixties, something it’s too easy to dismiss as vulgar nostalgia rather than identifying as a sign that people once believed that things could be better and may even do so again. Political-science discourse seems to vault over such considerations, taking an interest only in what was (apparently) communicated literally “on the doorstep”, and sermonising about how idealism “doesn’t play well in the Darlingtons”. As someone from the Darlington, I feel confident in pointing out that actually, it’s a lot more complicated than that.

There’s so much more that I would say about the uniqueness of my hometown, a uniqueness which I must stress isn’t in excess of the singularity anywhere else can lay claim to. However, I want to move on and consider the value of descriptive precision in geographical and anthropological accounts, in order to throw into relief the failures of a journalistic culture all too willing to homogenise Britain beyond its metropolises. To do this, it’s necessary to step back in time to the 1930s, a period in which the idea of an “anthropology at home” took off.

Mass Observation was a project initiated in the 1930s by the anthropologist Tom Harrisson, the poet Charles Madge and the filmmaker Humphrey Jennings. The surrealist affiliations of Madge and Jennings are significant, although, notionally, Mass Observation seems diametrically opposed to surrealism in its commitment to the empirical. It was founded on the idea that, up to the point of its inauguration, British anthropology had been exclusively outwardly focused, a tool for surveying — and, of course, for projecting power over — foreigners, and particularly so-called “primitive” people within the Empire. The project’s theoretical impulse was that the real great unknown of British anthropology and ethnography was the population of the nation at the imperial centre, precisely because this country took for granted its anthropological role as observer. To counteract this, Mass Observation began to work towards mapping the grain of the everyday micrologically, drafting a large network of local people, interviewing a huge number of subjects and asking many to keep diaries that were then collected and studied. The Lancashire town of Bolton, refigured as “Worktown” in the early surveys, was the test case as the experiment sought to produce a sonographic ethnography of regional, predominantly, but not exclusively, working-class life.

What’s compelling about the endeavour is its fidelity to what, to paraphrase Barthes’ essay on the reality effect, the “significance of insignificance”, to the infinitely subtle nuances of communication, to the centrality of the inane and superficially ridiculous in the composition of everyday reality. Such was its commitment to detail, it was able to produce book-length studies of individual days, a case in point being the fine sifting of how George VI’s coronation in 1937 was lived through at ground level. The Coronation Day diaries and interviews capture the almost imperceptibly elusive shifts in the affective temperature of a community during a major national event, and manage to isolate and inflate the minutest figments of quotidian reality in order to forensically analyse their morphology and meaning. All this reflected what was, effectively, a surrealist commitment to estranging the familiar, extracting from the flux of everydayness elements that people are typically so habituated to that they fail to notice. The point of Mass Observation was not simply to employ empirical analysis to celebrate facticity for its own sake, but to allow insight into the collective unconscious, to give a picture of the great dream-works of desire, presumption and anxiety which glue together nation, region and class.

Although Harrisson, Madge and Jennings struggled to gain institutional patronage, their work did acquire something like official relevance during World War II, when it became amenable for the state to have some awareness of the drifts of popular morale. Mass Observation’s work during the Blitz is particularly notable for its stitching together of the strident churn of global history with the often bizarre ways in which individuals experience it. One can, for example, access an archive of questionnaires, responses and leaflets in the MO archive at the University of Sussex about how dog owners dealt with their pets during bombing, including materials on canine air-raid shelters and details on what people thought about “a ban on dogs being given bones because of the war”. Such absolutely characteristic work represents an effort to describe how the general, in this case an abysmal intercontinental war, was experienced and coped with at the level of the particular, and the answers to such an enquiry frequently demonstrate that “historical experience” is something processed ambiguously, something that you’re aware of but which can’t by any means be grasped as totality. Mass Observation’s work allows us to suggest tentatively that “history” consists almost precisely of the impossibility of experiencing it as a present reality.

In its unembarrassed enthusiasm for encountering real life at its most dumbly mundane, the venture had a huge influence on modern sociology, along with the academic disciplines of Cultural and Media Studies. This was because it promoted an understanding of the everyday, which states that it is not just a collection of independent and unrelated quirks, but a vast, if obscure pattern of interlocking elements in which a communal psychopathology, what Owen Hatherley calls “an archaeology of the present”, can be read through the lens of the particular. Maybe its special triumph, though, was to steer clear of too much confirmation bias, to be interpretatively passive, despite the leftish political sympathies of its founders. The result of this was that MO wasn’t ashamed of contradictoriness, or of the way the events and objects that came under its gaze could be overdetermined, possessed of countervailing significances.

My slightly meandering tour of Darlington, I hope, draws out a few of that town’s idiosyncrasies in a way that intentionally pays homage to Mass Observation’s covenant with empirical complexity. If you want to get under the skin of a place, as Harrisson, Madge and Jennings did with Bolton, it makes sense to read notice boards in music shops, to ask why so many reputedly no-nonsense people want to spend money on products that signify an interest in the mystical, to think about the social centrality of an Italian café, or to contemplate the niceties of the differences between types of middle-class housing. You “listen” to people, obviously, but you also need to take a critical interest in unspoken social reflexes, and in the political resonances of statements and predilections which see themselves as autonomous from politics. If you’re following David Goodhart’s beliefs, and you want to make a case for the “somewheres”, those supposedly embedded in a particular place, you’d better be willing to be exact about what it is that makes a place “placely”. Realistically, though, those who want to present themselves as the advocates of the “somewheres” generally have very little interest in in doing this, precisely because the role of “somewhere” is fundamentally allegorical.

Ethnographies chasing down the “real opinions” of the “heartlands”, then, should be seen as basically performative. Typically, they read the same whether they are set in Nuneaton, Newport or North Shields: it’s the fact that someone is, after a fashion, taking an interest that is important, rather than the object of interest itself. But when did they begin? Much of the obsession with what the prole whisperers call “legitimate concerns” seems to be traceable to an encounter Gordon Brown had on the campaign trail in 2010 with a woman in the Greater Manchester town of Rochdale called Gillian Duffy, who asked him about immigration and was subsequently dismissed, on microphone, by the then-Prime Minister as a “bigoted woman”. She subsequently became a paranoid obsession for centrist politicos determined not to lose the endorsement of the Sun, and who decided that their strategy would henceforth consist of triangulating “popular” racism and anti-immigration sentiment with their pro-business, pro-European, internationalist optimism.

Consequently, the political centre and the progressive media have spent much of the last decade deferring to the integrity of people in the provinces by behaving as if they are all Gillian Duffy, which is, to say the least, a drastic confusion of the part for the whole. Mass Observation looked to explore how the totality was experienced at the level of particularity; the latter-day approach to the everyday, by contrast, fetishises provincial singularity under the sign of “respect”, but in doing so loses any meaningful sense of the particular. To see how this works in practice, one need only look at the structure of so many feature articles on how the Tories were “threatening” Labour’s traditional constituencies — which may, as in the case of Darlington, not be quite as traditional, or as threatened, as stated — in the last few years.

The proliferating seers of latter-day British malaise seem to think they’re conducting some kind of psychogeography; snake-charming the pissed-off proletarian id from the tote bag of liberal self-satisfaction. This should pass a sad judgement on what psychogeography has ebbed into over the last decade, specifically a projection of official culture’s priorities onto the uneven surface of the locally particular. By contrast, Mass Observation’s methods of collecting material, which sought to dissipate the agency of sociological surveillance, wanted to demonstrate the basic bizarreness of collective identity. As Hatherley demonstrates, its raison d’etre was largely mischievous and disruptive, to “run strikingly counter to the accepted narrative”. By contrast, contemporary reporting on the regions is devoted to the limitation or containment of this strangeness, to extracting a basic common sense that is then presented, with the utmost sententiousness, as an unquestionable given beyond the range of theorisation.

In this, the real precursor of decline porn is George Orwell. Orwell has become the keystone reference for the British political centre in the last couple of years: in one telling exchange, the off-piste actor Russell Brand’s infamous critique of the electoral system in 2013 was in turn dismissed by the prominent liberal actor and writer Robert Webb in the New Statesman with the sign-off that Brand needed to “read some fucking Orwell”. For the centre, the author of Animal Farm is a byword for reasonableness, for a compassionate progressivism, which cuts through the ordure of left excess. He’s cited relentlessly by the cadre of Blairites in the media — such as the Observer’s Andrew Rawnsley, who called him a “writer of the highest carat”, and the Iraq War enthusiast Nick Cohen — as the decisive answer to the supposed pretentiousness and viciousness of what they call the “hard left”; ironically, for this largely atheistic set, Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm have acquired almost the status of scriptural dogma for them.

The value of (this version of) Orwell rests in the superimposition of two more or less-true ideas about him. First, his social observations in The Road to Wigan Pier and other bits of mid-Thirties journalism offered an admirable, sympathetic redress to the excesses of interwar inequality, and could only have been pulled off by someone with a great deal of ethnographic nous. Second, Orwell sweepingly attributed to the industrial working classes a patriotic common sense, which was foolishly ignored by a radical left made up of an allegiance between the “fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist”. These points are conflated so that the capacity to identify and condemn material deprivation becomes accreditation for explaining the psychopolitics of an entire social class.

Orwell’s increasing turn to patriotism in the early years of World War II enjoys a credibility with many centrists that’s basically a dividend on the sociological capital banked by Wigan Pier. This credibility has permitted a series of syllogisms to form by which the provincial means poverty, which means social conservatism, which means the stymieing of centrism’s benevolent intentions, a stymieing represented by Brexit. As such, Orwellian considerations sit at the heart of the shinily modern apparatus of technocrat triangulation. The equation runs as follows: “progressive” values can be preserved if working-class conservatism is acknowledged and, to use the awful, hollow verb so rife in contemporary centre-left discourse, “respected”.

Critiques of this notion are, in proportion to pieces of writing which advance it as an article of faith, depressingly thin on the ground, but there are (at least!) four issues with it that would, in a more assiduously questioning culture, be publicly rubbished. The first is, or should be, the most obvious: why is the immediate response to the identification of material problems (deindustrialisation, unemployment, poverty, drugs, crime) a cultural one, namely the supplication to jingoistic sentiment which quite often seems like a writerly projection? This seems like a careless mishandling of Antonio Gramsci’s account of cultural hegemony, which seeks to demonstrate that socialism needs to gradually assert control over the apparatus of ideas to dislodge the preeminence of capitalist thought. Here, Gramsci seems to be, if not turned backwards or on his head, roughed up somewhat by the suggestion that progressive thought needs to emphasise its comfort with atavistic ideas in order to buy itself credibility. This is an inversion of Blair’s Third Way, which hegemonised right-wing economics in order to leverage socially progressive politics, and is a triangulation being carried out by fundamentally the same people: moderate think tanks like Progress, and much of the theoretically left-leaning media.

The second problem with the argument in favour of “respect” is its reification of particular concepts, not least “working-class”. Here, the British working classes are always white, provincial and conservative, because this is an understanding of class grounded exclusively in culture. As seen in Chapter II, a northern or Midlands accent can buy a lot of proletarian credibility, even if you’re, say, comfortable in property wealth: it’s as if the Four Yorkshiremen have come to life at times, only Britain’s media class have missed the satirical intent. “Working-class”, which one might think of as meaning, say, Ugandan-born cleaners in London or Iraqi Uber drivers in Glasgow just as much as unemployed ex-miners and their families in Barnsley, comes to mean anyone who looks and sounds — to an inexperienced metropolitan, no less! — like the unemployed former miner. The third problem is related to the second: in assuming that everyone outside London is somehow more authentic than everyone inside it, and therefore more deserving of patronising “respect”, it takes all political statements made in a certain accent as a bellwether opinion. This means that a small-business owner from Hartlepool is now seen as a more reliable measure of political disenfranchisement than someone from Peckham who works a zero hours contract in Sports Direct.

Fourth, this interest in the specifics of non-metropolitan Britain typically is in the final account an allegory for allowing us to understand the intellectual limits of a progressive politics trapped in a London (or, more specifically, Islingtonite) “bubble”. This, for example, was what Harris had to say in his piece on Merthyr Tydfil:

Last year, 3.8 million people voted for UKIP. The Labour party’s vote is in a state of seemingly unstoppable decline as its membership becomes ever-more metropolitan and middle class, problems the ascendancy of Jeremy Corbyn has seemingly made worse.

Merthyr isn’t really getting a fair treatment here in this passage: it’s simply being used as the backdrop against which Harris can stage an argument about the conflict within Labour, at its peak when the piece was written, between Corbynites and Blairites and other self-appointed moderates. It’s being used, somewhat coercively, to prove a point. Intriguingly, Islington itself often undergoes a similar figurative reduction, albeit one in which complexity is sacrificed by stripping out details of its working class in favour of emphasising its piein-the-sky progressivism rather than vice versa. Writing in the New Statesman on how Corbyn’s rise was facilitated by the unique milieu of the borough, Dave Hill pictures 1980s Islington as a place in which one would encounter “reggae shops, avocados, bomb-banners, recreational drugs, large, scholarly houses with stripped floorboards, messy kitchens and lovingly unkempt gardens owned by kindly academics, and jam jars of tampons placed on toilet cisterns for all the world to see.”

Islington and Merthyr, or wherever John Harris turns up next, are thus reduced to figures within an allegorical structure that encourages us to see Britain as split between authentic people, patriots tragically immured in deprivation, and a “metropolitan and middle-class” left who are too busy worrying about Palestine to ever take an interest in what’s happening beyond the M25. Yet Hill’s description of Islington, minus the reggae shops, is not impossibly distant from my own of the part of Darlington I grew up in. Come to think of it, I can remember helping my mum cut an avocado in the kitchen the day before I started primary school, and — a flippant point, but maybe a relevant one — the town’s investment in recreational drugs far precedes deindustrialisation. Meanwhile, Islington, as Jude Wanga points out in a New Socialist article intended as redress to the currently popular cartoon version of N1, has vast economic problems that are both caused and exacerbated by the housing crisis. Additionally, she points out, one can find within the area similar figures to the not-racist-just-legitimately-concerned stock characters of all those trips to Staffordshire and Blaenau Gwent. There are English Defence League members on the Caledonian Road as well as in Worksop: this doesn’t mean they need to be agreed with.

It’s not, then, that the Labour Party is totally innocent of frequently abnegating its responsibilities towards particular, invariably poor, communities that are often geographically remote from London. However, the ethnographic turn in political commentary, by instrumentalising such communities in defence of the very Third Way ideology which let them down in the first place, is intensifying, rather than compensating for, such ignorance. It represents those it purports to protect as interested primarily in what are fundamentally right-wing “solutions”, generating an image of the Corbynite Labour left as distant and uninterested in life on the provincial ground. The enormous collapse in the Labour vote under Blair and continuity moderates like Brown and Miliband is glossed over, while “Islington”, for which Corbyn is a synecdoche, is spun as the real problem.

Moreover, the pre-eminence of Blairite voices in the media has somehow transformed “forgotten” Britain into a fetish in publishing, another industry that will fall over itself at the slightest sniff of absolution from the accusations of elitism historically thrown at it. There is, for example, a new literary drive towards provincialism, some of which (David Peace, arguably the inspiration for this shift, and Ben Myers, amongst others) can be admirable, but which can also lapse into the generalising I’ve been discussing elsewhere in this chapter. For example, New Boots and Pantisocracies, a collection of political poetry rushed out by W.N. Herbert and Andy Jackson in the wake of Brexit, contains a number of poems which seemingly chastise the (again implicitly metropolitan) reader for their failure to be interested in the provinces. One poem in particular, Sean O’Brien’s “The Chase”, convinces itself it has managed to ventriloquise the humiliated, hangdog soul of Brexit Britain, warding the putatively unsuspecting reader into “A Mock-Tudor Midland roadhouse” with a car-park “Dogged by doggers”. The insinuation is that this is the kind of place the poem’s audience don’t know about, and gladly ignore as they sit about in London, drinking craft beer and gorging on quinoa — “hipster” food is a recurrent diagnosis of the cause of Britain’s ills in this collection — and voting for Jeremy Corbyn. Once again, though, it’s difficult not to feel that this is actually quite a cheap move, literature covering its back by seeking out an appropriate location to metaphorise the forgetting of the provinces, a forgetting it seems desperate to assign responsibility for to its readership.

Another 2016 publication which did something similar was Anthony Cartwright’s novel Iron Towns, which told a story about a once-great football club from the fictional provincial “Iron Towns” of the title, which splice aspects of the north-west and West Midlands into a cloying post-industrial mulch. The club are struggling to avoid relegation from the Football League, their aging star player is covered in tattoos of great moments from football’s Golden Age — a clumsy symbol of popular historicism — and his father’s middle name is “Stalin”, just to remind us that the (white) working class were socialists before they were “forgotten”. Yet again, the Iron Towns, and their football club, are merely allegorical stand-ins for a forgotten past, and all the standard signifiers of decay are in place: clogged canals, soulless new out-of-town development, rust, addiction. The novel’s sympathies might be broadly progressive, but the writing succumbs almost narcotically to what Wendy Brown calls “left melancholy”, a way of thinking over-attached to a particular, largely anachronistic way of “doing socialism” and therefore limited in its capacity to reimagine radical politics. Cartwright seems to feel that a more equal polity could only have been delivered through the solidarity produced by heavy industry, and that we are now burdened with an exercise in damage limitation.

On the website of the magazine Granta a couple of days after Brexit, Cartwright published an essay containing the following:

People never called him Powell, always Enoch. As in, “Enoch was right”, words that you sometimes still hear whispered in Black Country pubs. I used to think about the rivers of blood when I worked in the Three Crowns at the top of Dudley High Street in my late teens, in between the clack of the dominoes played in the tiled bar by white, black and Asian men, with barely a raised voice between them. I wondered if we mocked Powell’s curse with our actions, or whether his words will come to mock us.

I consider this and look out across North London, because, of course — like the writer in the Victoria Wood sketch who bemoans the destruction of “My north, my north!” and confesses he lives in Chiswick — I moved long ago. I would not be writing this from a kitchen table in Dudley. The distance from here to there is far too great. And that social divide is one of our country’s main problems.

The dawning horror, once again, seems to belong to metropolitans rather than to provincials. Even though Cartwright is originally from the Black Country, the Granta essay, like his football novel, rails against the “social divide” between the capital and the provinces from the perspective of a writer loaded with cultural capital who only belatedly counsels against the “ignoring” of Not London. Once again, this feels like Goodhart’s “somewheres” and “anywheres”, albeit from a vaguely left-wing position — but isn’t the real task of progressive politics to build solidarity by overcoming, rather than continuously reaffirming, divisions grounded in culture? The more supposedly liberal institutions insist on the schism between metropolitans and the landscape of “legitimate concerns”, the more such a gap becomes entrenched, as it erases points of common interest between all the people who are losing out to a manifestly failing neoliberal polity. Ultimately, isn’t there much more materially in common between Cartwright’s disenchanted Black Country ex-miners and rent-poor, precariously employed graduates, or Lithuanians picking vegetables in the Fens, than is generally acknowledged? Doesn’t the insistence on provinciality and, by implication, whiteness and indigenousness (and, for that matter, maleness) merely strengthen the idea that class is a cultural category more than it is a material one?

Investigations of “Brexitland”, of the “forgotten” Britain, which turn each place they encounter into a hieroglyph for ‘the British working class”, as I’ve said, reify both class and regionality by fixing them to one, circumscribed, meaning. In less academic terms, if such narratives turned out in a century’s time to be the only written accounts of the “working-class” and the “northern” (or “Midland”, or “Welsh”, and so on), posterity wouldn’t have much to go on. Compared to Mass Observation, whose meticulous attention to detail and texture de-reified the idea of “the masses” by always showing new ways in which the particular and the totality relate, they are found seriously lacking. Modernism, in the form of MO’s surrealist practices of research, was able to give us a version of reality much more intricate than the failed attempts at gritty Orwellian realism that dominate today’s way of imagining the provincial, and always crash into the metaphorical. As the next two chapters will show, however, the task of estranging the present, of taking it back from a spurious, coercive, authentocratic realism — which is in reality a disguised idealism — will be difficult, given the cultural dominance of two ideas which have been galvanised in twenty-first century Britain: militarism and patriotism.

Chapter V

All Speaking German by Now

A couple of years ago my partner and I decided to get married, and we agreed we’d do so in East Anglia, because that’s where she comes from and we have many mutual friends there. We spent a number of weekends in the early autumn heading up to Norfolk, and to the northern part of Suffolk, scouting fraughtly around wedding venues, the vast majority of which seemed to have enthusiastically embraced passive-aggressive bunting-and-cupcakes tweeness. One morning, we had time to kill before an appointment on the far west side of the county. We decided to stop in the seaside town of Sheringham, where my wife used to go on holiday as a child, and have a late breakfast in a café on the high street.

Sheringham is where the retiree-populated grey belt of the East Norfolk coast starts to fade into the old money, second homes, sand dunes and littoral pine woods that characterise the north of the county. It’s therefore not defined exactly by the traditional, windblown and rundown British seaside one finds in Great Yarmouth and Lowestoft, nor by the overplayed quaintness you can find in nearby Cley or Blakeney, or in more distant “tasteful” resorts like Aldeburgh and Whitstable. Instead, it awkwardly blends haute bourgeois decorum and Saga conservatism. On this occasion, though, it seemed to have located a way of resolving any tension between these milieus. It was the eve of Sheringham’s 1940s weekend, and the whole town, rich and not quite so rich, old and not quite so old, had pulled together to serve appropriate nostalgic justice to the decade of World War II.

Unsurprisingly, the recreation of the 1940s on the Norfolk coast was planning to cling to the first few years of the decade, the period of Dunkerque, the Battle of Britain and the Blitz. There were going to be head-scarfed Land Girls, WRENS, a Home Guard, Air Raid Wardens and members of an Auxiliary Fire Service, and local schoolchildren were giving up their weekends to play evacuations on the heritage railway that runs to nearby Holt. The Eastern Daily Press noted that visitors could “meet Winston Churchill”, amongst other attractions, and many of the shop windows had been done up to resemble the retailers of the era. Everything was very much in keeping with the modishly sentimentalised take on the mid-century described by Owen Hatherley in The Ministry of Nostalgia, the wistfulness embodied in the still almost-ubiquitous “Keep Calm and Carry On” poster, whose resurrection invited the nation to respond to a current “moment of crisis”, the credit crunch and banking crash of 2008, via the “already established narrative about Britain’s ‘finest hour’”.

What was especially notable about Sheringham’s 1940s weekend was that most of the traders giving their windows over to displays, and the people who were featured in photographs of the previous year’s celebrations, were of an age that meant they’d been born between 1945 and the early 1950s. In other words, they might — as my parents do — vaguely recall having a ration book, or have older siblings with memories of the Blitz, or have scampered on bombsites as children, but they had missed the conflict in any meaningful sense. In fact, they were, in generational terms, none other than those who had kicked back against what they perceived to be the sanctimonies of those who had actually fought, or been bombed. They’d been mods, rockers, hippies, skinheads, members of subcultures which had consciously turned their backs on, or at least raised an eyebrow at, what they frequently regarded as the restrictive social mores inculcated by wartime (and interwar) privation. The original iconoclasm of the youth-cultural detonation of the Sixties is plain to see, despite its occasional adoption of certain patriotically charged symbols such as the Union Jack and the RAF roundel. In fact, such appropriations played a role in the battle against the sententiousness of a lingering war consciousness. The Who, the Kinks, the Stones, even the Beatles at points, all sought to provoke an open-mouthed reaction along the lines of “that’s not what I fought the war for”.

Some studies of post-war subcultures have argued that there was typically something safe, something transparently coded as temporary, about these anti-establishment poses, but it’s striking that a generation still loudly nostalgic for its lairy youth now seems to have also accommodated a yearning for its own pre-natal years. It’s hardly inconceivable that a participant in a recreated air raid at a World War II event like Sheringham’s might do this in the morning and head off to watch an Animals or Faces tribute band in the evening. Moreover, it’s also plausible that this person might regard the two appointments as continuous, as both involving callbacks to a long mid-century summer of “real” Britishness, rather than at odds with one another. Perhaps this means that subculture’s chickens, taxonomised by various cultural theorists in the Seventies, are truly coming home to roost: the Who’s “My Generation”, to take one obvious example, is recalled in association with a moment of juvenile insurrection, but one which was ultimately billeted to a more sedate common sense rooted in the lessons doled out by the war. As such, the Sixties are now, perhaps, remembered with guilty indulgence by many who took part in them, who can nostalgically connect to the trace of rebellion’s affect, to an enduring frisson of chaotic glee, but also feel mortified at having disrespected the sacrifices of those who lived through the Blitz.

Living Through the Blitz was the title of one of the most politically influential Mass Observation surveys, and it’s worth nodding towards its conclusions to contextualise the dubiously acquired “memories” of many baby boomers. As Hatherley demonstrates in his withering critique of “austerity nostalgia”, MO’s “archaeology of the [wartime] present” shows an experience far less coherent than many of posterity’s narratives suggest it had been. If there is a guilt involved in the imagining of World War II by those who narrowly missed — or avoided! — it, it’s a guilt that expresses itself in the fantasy that the war was an uncomplicated moment of national unity, of pulling together and getting on with it. It’s this “togetherness”, it is often suggested, that the allegedly atomised, narcissistic, selfie-obsessed present lacks.

Angus Calder’s 1991 study The Myth of the Blitz argued that the experience of World War II was reimagined ideologically even as it was occurring to steady British morale, and that this mythologising remained useful in the post-war period for dealing with, amongst other things, the dissolution of the Empire. Calder’s book expresses a clear concern about the capacity of memorialisation to ring-fence a historical event against critique, to turn it into untouchable mythology. It seems a fair confirmation of this thesis that such perspectives are, at least in the mainstream, not fashionable at the moment. What took place between 1939 and 1945 currently seems to be positioned beyond any questioning; the disputing of historically inane statements about “Britain standing alone” or how, were it not for so many “sacrifices”, “we’d all be speaking German by now” is, at best, not encouraged.

It has hardly been right-wingers alone who have contributed to this stifling obsequiousness. A boom in televised popular history has created swathes of airtime for an almost pornographised Home Front which promises to tell “real stories” about “real people” but instead delivers the historical equivalent of the ethnographic pseudo-particularity discussed in the previous chapter. Then there’s The Great British Menu, a high-end cookery show where all the dishes are generated according to a patriotic historical theme, often one linked to World War II. In one particularly cringe-inducing episode, veterans of D-Day were honoured with a series of farcically elaborate gastronomic celebrations of the Normandy Landings — one featuring dry ice intended as a Proustian evocation of smoke on the beach-heads — made by chefs who were expected to back up their inventions with a series of deferential confessions of generational debt, despite the fact the youngest of them couldn’t have been born before 1975. In Ghosts of My Life, a series of essays on what he eerily called “the slow cancellation of the future”, Mark Fisher argued that a retro-fixated pop culture made the 1960s felt more present in 2013 than they had in 1981, but his claim could be reworked to consider how the 1940s feel more present in 2017 than at any point previously.

Hatherley’s work is excellent on the way Home Front nostalgia has been packaged to justify contemporary austerity policies — a concrete case of the past cancelling the future — but is less engaged with the question of the ideological function of the combatants and the idea that they are owed a permanence of platitudinous gratitude. What’s at stake, then, in this rhetoric of thankfulness? For a start, it flattens out all the military activities of the war into a battle against Hitler, Nazism or Germany, when a relatively perfunctory check could demonstrate how over-determined much of the conflict really was. For example, Britain’s covert struggles against its Japanese opponents in Borneo — where MO’s Tom Harrisson, of all people, was part of a special forces unit — were necessary not only to free up resources to use against Hitler and to defend Australia, but to hold its ailing Empire together. Nevertheless, it is always the just cause, situated overwhelmingly in the European theatre of fighting, which is used to explain the whole war. Imperial motivations are, then, usually slid underneath the mat of the anti-Nazi one. Moreover, that Britain relied so heavily on its colonies, both as a source of troops and raw material and for defence in depth, to survive and eventually prosper in Europe, means that the whole concept of Empire is to a certain degree laundered by the notion of “fighting Hitler”.

The frequently repeated cousin to the claim that Britain “stood alone” against Nazism, namely that “we’d be speaking German” were it not for RAF fighter squadrons, the Royal Navy, the Desert Rats and so on, builds on the assertion about Britain solitarily opposing Nazism, but also manipulates it. By making Nazi ideology appear uniquely Teutonic, it skims away the war’s ideological content and reduces it to a conflict between nations, specifically a cruel, expansionist Germany and a resolute, underdog Britain. In doing so, it annuls any identity between nationalist politics more broadly and Hitler’s Germany, as Nazism is made to look like a German idiosyncrasy: other forms of patriotic and even chauvinistic politics shouldn’t, it is implied, be tarred by association. This is important, as it allows the entirety of World War II to be imagined as a patriotic victory to be understood through a comparably patriotic lens, without anyone having to be troubled by any consideration of where flag-waving ends up.

Although many small- and large-“C” conservatives in Britain talk gushingly about how vital it is to be in touch with history — glossed as “Our Island Story”, in the currently revitalised, treacly idiom — their insistent conviction that we need to pay more attention and “respect” to the version of World War II detailed above actually belies a desire for de-historicisation. The “Britain stood alone” / “all speaking German” narrative in the first instance reduces “history” to emphatic-sounding but actually cavernously empty catchphrases, and goes on to excerpt the conflict from the historical currents that make it intelligible. Such a removal amounts, effectively, to a conservative political correctness that places aspects of the past beyond critique’s radar, even though, as we shall see, the authenticity of patriotic narratives about these events was under question even as they were taking place.

The argument of this book hinges on authentocracy being a structure that works largely through displacement, and I have concentrated on World War II and the prevailing fantasies contemporaneity approaches it with at the beginning of this chapter because such fantasies involve some measure of disavowal. Increasingly, the guardians of the memories of the war are not those who fought it, not even those who, as children, were bombed during it, but their children. Indeed, one of the most resonant voices amongst the combatants who actually do remain is Harry Leslie Smith, who flew in the wartime RAF and often uses his column in the Guardian (and his busy Twitter account) to caution against the way experiences like his are instrumentalised by right-wing politics. Smith’s viewpoint — which is in some ways like the one mapped by Calder in The Myth of the Blitz — is that the conflict is made the object of an enforced deference precisely because it is used to authenticate political decisions taken in the present, whether these are, as Hatherley observes, ones pertaining to domestic issues such as austerity or matters of foreign policy.

Before exploring the ways in which contemporary politics forces the hand of dead combatants to underwrite its own agendas and preoccupations, I want to consider the extent to which the popular sense of World War II has shifted over the last few decades, as more and more of the people with first-hand memories of it have passed away. Subtly, the structures of feeling pertaining to this period of history seem to have altered, and one obvious explanation for this is that memorialisation is largely in the hands of people who, even if unconsciously, want to preserve the ideological weight of the Myth of the Blitz and harness it to their own ends.

Coming of age in the middle of the 1990s, it really could feel as if, pace the neo-Hegelian political theorist Francis Fukuyama, history had resolved itself. Historical eventfulness seemed to belong to the past alone. World War II was not only to be regarded as a past catastrophe, but as a yardstick of the uneventful nature of the present and of the future, a mirror in which we could ascertain the correctness of Fukuyama’s theory of market-led democracy as the mostly peaceful settlement of all preceding ideological tensions. In its very consequentiality, it felt remote, because the notion of historical consequence itself seemed archaic. At this stage, neoliberalism was cancelling the future not through a manipulative use of retro obsessions, but by spinning the lie that the present economic and political conjunction would never need to be changed, only tweaked. Within this privileged present, as Fredric Jameson points out in Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, the sense of one’s membership of history expiring was counterbalanced by an almost arbitrary approach to pastness. Such an approach made of the past a supermarket of styles and images that could be appropriated, with appropriate ironic distance, by a present coolly assured of its own superiority.

Yet the Nineties version of the Forties seems like a historical curio in its own right now. Starting in 1991 or 1992, my family occasionally visited a museum dedicated to World War II in North Yorkshire called Eden Camp, whose long, low Nissen huts had once housed Italian prisoners of war, and which had been refitted according to a variety of period themes. Entering one, you found yourself in a mockup of a Blitzed sweet-shop, scented profusely with a perfume of scorched toffee you could — and I did — buy little vials of in the gift shop. Another hut housed a Fighter Command control room, where children barged each other out of the way, as if in an amusement arcade, to flick switches that made LED lights flick on across a giant map of southern England. The most haunting display was an imitation U-Boat with a soundtrack of incessant sonar pings, which, flaunting its poetic licence, had portholes so visitors could see dummies dressed up to look like drowned merchant mariners “floating” past.

Eden Camp was certainly not wholly free of piety, but it wasn’t, at least as I remember it, defined by it. Its primary commitment seemed to be to rendering the war tactile, to provide impossibly distant-seeming experiences with sensual weight for younger visitors and to act as a mnemonic for older ones. If it had a message, it was, first and foremost, that history had once happened, that the present had not always been present. It’s fair to speculate on whether the museum’s relatively limited tendency towards the demagoguery that dominates discussions of the war nowadays — there could have been less of it, but it wasn’t the overwhelming mood — was down to the fact that actual veterans, many of whom might have been tempted to cut down ideological simplifications in the way Harry Leslie Smith does, were frequent attendees. Were I to go back now, I suspect, the tone might differ somewhat.

Popular culture’s attitude towards the war was in general far less conditioned by parroted veneration. On television, the place you were most likely to see gas masks, ARP wardens and Spitfires was the BBC sitcom Goodnight Sweetheart, which seemed to have been invented to allow the actor Nicholas Lyndhurst to shrug off his typecasting as Rodney Trotter in Only Fools and Horses. In the show, Lyndhurst played Gary Sparrow, a modern-day everyman who chanced upon a time-hole between a slightly wan suburban present of gameshows and the Cones Hotline and an East End pub belaboured spiritedly in the winter of the Blitz. In its later series, Goodnight Sweetheart succumbed to an absurdist mission creep by which Sparrow became crucial to the war effort, socialised with Winston Churchill and got increasingly jammed up in the often tedious paradoxes of a historical double life, but most people remember the early episodes when the central plot device could still lay claim to some novelty. Undoubtedly, Goodnight Sweetheart succumbed to the romance of the past to a degree, not least in allowing its protagonist to engage in some trans-temporal infidelity with the barmaid of the pub, but it was also convinced that the distant-feeling Olden Days had much to learn from the present. Sparrow didn’t — at least early on — use his time-travelling to kill Hitler, as per the often rehearsed pub-conversation “would you?”, but to coax the inhabitants of wartime London from their racist, misogynistic and otherwise illiberal tendencies. One notable episode, set after the entry of the United States into the war, saw Sparrow challenging not only prejudiced cockneys but the entirety of US Army policy after he objects to the segregation he witnesses when some GIs visit the pub.

The message at the core of Goodnight Sweetheart was that, while the past might minister to some nostalgic yearning, it was also under an imperative to adopt the liberal social mores of the present. There’s a very Nineties, almost Fukuyamean confidence in the rightness of modern inclusiveness in the show, despite its vague melancholy about the greater social cohesion of a past lacking the media technologies of post-war consumerism. In fact, even its most frequently deployed nostalgic image, which sees the show’s characters gather round the pub’s piano, that great mythic symbol of defiant East End community-mindedness, is generally played somewhat against the grain of outright nostalgia. It is Gary who plays the piano, and the dominant note of the scene is the comedy of anachronism, because all of his so-called compositions are famous songs by Lennon and McCartney, Elton John, Culture Club and so on. The show’s recurrent insinuation is the optimistic belief that the pop-cultural, multicultural present can somehow reanimate the past while trimming away its follies.

Admittedly, personal recollections of a museum in North Yorkshire and a discussion of a family sitcom from the 1990s are not watertight evidence that the attitude towards the war two decades ago was less reverential, and it’s true that, since the mid-Forties, a considerable part of English identity has centred itself on the Battle of Britain, D-Day and so on. Nevertheless, the insistence on seeing the conflict from the perspective of uncritical patriotism has surely intensified recently in line with a broader military turn within the UK’s culture, a turn that plays a significant role in the construction of the identity of “real people” discussed in the preceding chapter. The morphing significance of the Remembrance Day poppy plays no small part in this, as Smith pointed out in a 2013 article that objected to the way that poppy-wearing had become increasingly enforced at the same time as the flower’s connotations had moved from regret about war to lionisation of British martial valour:

[…] it will be the last time that I will bear witness to those soldiers, airmen and sailors who are no more […] at my local cenotaph. From now on, I will lament their passing in private because my despair is for those who live in this present world. I will no longer allow my obligation as a veteran to remember those who died in the great wars to be co-opted by current or former politicians to justify our folly in Iraq, our morally dubious war on terror and our elimination of one’s right to privacy.

The poppy initially emerged as a commemoration of those who died in World War I, and much of its symbolic recharging can be explained, as Smith points out, by increasing public consciousness of the high number of deaths and life-changing injuries sustained by British forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nevertheless, World War II, with its helpful reputation as a just war in which “we” saved the world from “Germans”, is in a discreet fashion Poppyism’s master signifier. Other conflicts luxuriate in their association with it: ever since its dead were added to village war memorials across the country, the invariably larger number of names listed above them, the Glorious Dead of the “Great War”, are taken to have been lost to a cause comparably noble to that of fighting Hitler. Various revisionist historians and self-appointed historophiles have in fact used the current amenability of the media to just war narratives to argue that World War I really differed only in scale to its predecessor, that the German Empire was bent on subjugating the rest of Europe, and that Britain in 1914 entered the war to guarantee its existential survival. This notably occurred in 2014 when Michael Gove, the one-time Tory Secretary of State for Education, declared that secondary schools needed to stop teaching the “Blackadder version of history”, by which events between 1914 and 1918 are regarded as a catastrophic misadventure driven by ruling-class arrogance, in favour of a narrative more amenable to seeing the British cause as honourable. Declaring, rather chillingly, that the “past has never had a better future”, Gove went on to lambast TV screenwriters and that ubiquitous conservative bogeyman, the “left-wing academic”, for propagating the idea that the Great War was anything but a struggle on Britain’s part to protect the “Western liberal order”:

Our understanding of the war has been overlaid by misunderstandings, and misrepresentations which reflect an, at best, ambiguous attitude to this country and, at worst, an unhappy compulsion on the part of some to denigrate virtues such as patriotism, honour and courage.

The conflict has, for many, been seen through the fictional prism of dramas such as Oh! What a Lovely War, The Monocled Mutineer and Blackadder, as a misbegotten shambles — a series of catastrophic mistakes perpetrated by an out-of-touch elite. Even to this day there are Left-wing academics all too happy to feed those myths.

Gove did not explicitly compare Kaiser Wilhelm to Hitler, but such an argument requires at least the spectral presence of World War II, which offers a template for structuring perceptions of its precedent. Hitler’s demands, and valiant British obstinacy in their face, are (in this case surreptitiously, but usually gratuitously) taken out of their historical context and transposed onto other figures and situations, whether these are Wilhelm, Saddam Hussein or Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi. The flattened understanding of World War II also amounts to a flattening of British diplomatic and military history more generally.

This block-by-block reconstruction of British history as unimpeachably upstanding has created the circumstances by which the refusal to wear a poppy is presented as a moral failing, rather than a political and politicised choice. Neglecting to flaunt one, as the newsreader Jon Snow and the footballer James McClean have discovered, is to court a disapproval that ranges from allegations of hypocrisy — McClean, it’s said, is happy to be paid money with the Queen’s head on it! — to outright death threats. “It’s not a political symbol”, we hear, “but a sign of respect”; a respect, presumably, for unquestionable moral heroism. Such an attitude is enabled by appeasements of uncritical historiographies of World War II, which are not merely a foible of right-wingers like Gove. What Hatherley calls austerity nostalgia fetishises quotidian experience while skirting flippantly over the complex variety of daily life in wartime, reducing it to a few picturesque images: brave evacuees, skimping housewives, busybody fire wardens and all the rest. More and more, though, what we might call the falsely personal is used, often in an essentially well- meaning way, to gloss over the ideological contradictions that people experienced as frontline combatants as well. Various programmes and magazine articles (many involving the apparently inescapable Dan Snow, nephew of the poppyless Jon and the avatar of the new historiographical banality) seek to compile the “human voices” of D-Day, or Bomber Command, or POW camps to remind us that these massive events involved real people, but the “real” stories are invariably organised into a set piece of historically uncontroversial tropes punctuated by an occasional quirky anecdote about a paratrooper who fell asleep on the plane before jumping into Sardinia or a tank gunner writing love letters in his turret. It’s very easy to sell programmes to bien-pensant broadcasters who believe that allowing “actual people” to be pushed into history’s limelight is a laudably generous act, but what it tends to do in practice is reify simplified narratives about conflict as truth by giving us real faces to objectify with our “respect”.

Distorted in the ways I’ve detailed here, World War II plays a significant role in the demands that the left must harness a “progressive” patriotism in order to win round people vaguely classified as “normal”. The war has, the further away it moves in real time, been brought closer and closer, made into an important aspect of a contemporary political reality that all too often insists on patriotic compliance. It seems that the more contemporary populist conservatism insists on its one-dimensional historiography — David Davis, currently the Tory Brexit Secretary, memorably claimed that a nation that had handled the Blitz could cope with leaving the European Union — the more centrists panickingly triangulate their politics according to what they think “the average working-class person” believes resembles proud Britishness. This, surely, explains the hopes invested in Dan Jarvis, the ex-military Labour MP for Barnsley Central, amongst the Blairites and Glasmanites who, as I have already noted, are becoming harder and harder to distinguish from one another. Jarvis, who is strangely melancholy and lacking in the charisma one might expect from his hype, is presented by the usual suspects — the Guardian, the Statesman, and so on — as a leader-in-waiting, someone who can really capture the lost votes of Worktown. His credibility allegedly lies in his record as a one-time major in the Parachute Regiment who saw active service in Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan. These adventures are used cynically by the former SPADs and PPE grads on the Labour right who see in them no small opportunity for reflected glory, and act as assurance of the validity of his positions.

The Statesman offers Jarvis semi-regular column space. In one long article, which many interpreted as a pre-emptive pitch in a future leadership contest, he made the case for a “civil capitalism” calibrated both to encourage small-to-medium entrepreneurship (vintage Blair territory) while rolling back some of the worst effects of Tory austerity. As is often the case in pitches like this, the accent ended up falling on the appeal to business, with the details of any prospective redistribution left worryingly imprecise. Instead of setting out a clear plan for re-funding public services — and there was no mention of nationalisation, the popularity of which can these days rarely be confessed on the Labour right — he played to the gallery of moderate patriotism, talking in studiedly Attleean terms about making “a place we can all be proud to call home”. This was folded in with references to an inadvertently Gove-echoing commitment to maintaining a “liberal international order” threatened by recent political changes in the United States, and Jarvis underlined this by reminding his audience of the seat permanently reserved for Britain at the UN Security Council. Any close reading of this piece would surely come to the conclusion that Jarvis, and his backers, believe that the only way even the slightest hint of economic rebalancing can be achieved in the UK is through an appeal to a patriotic common sense: equality is never, in this worldview, an end in itself, but a tool to be put to work in diplomatic one-upmanship.

Arguably, the reason for this comes down to imaginative limitedness. As the previous attempt at fundamental (but still, of course, cautious) redistribution in British society emerged out of a war, it seems to be the case that for some anything comparable to the achievements of 1945 could only arise out of a context of international antagonism. The NHS, looked at this way, must be understood as a mobilisation of the supposed national unity instantiated by war: socialist ideas are framed as the infrastructural outcomes of an underlying timeless, unwavering, essential love of the homeland. As we have seen so often now, this again involves an imputation of values to a (once again, typically) stereotyped working-class, for whom the cart of a politics that opposes itself in any way to corporate avarice must be pulled by the horse of patriotism. This rationale finds in Jarvis, who seems to be willing to be hitched to a very softly left-wing economics, its horse.

Mixed up with this is the ongoing presence of a faction of extremist Blairism, of which Jarvis is probably an instrument rather than a leading participant, which sees a few concessions to economic justice as a sweetener that legitimises an interventionist foreign policy. It’s worth noting how expedient “authentic” working-class voices like his Iraq War-era consigliere John Reid’s were to Blair once he took his stance as a proud internationalist: they were always available to pour water on the supposed privilege of anti-war politics. Such shameless abrasiveness is no longer looked on particularly fondly by Blairite strategists, so voices like Jarvis’, which blend lip service to social democracy with interventionist arguments, are useful. It’s now often the case that military interventions are couched in a debased workerism, as when Jarvis wrote a piece for the Statesman in December 2015 in response to an important House of Commons vote on whether or not Britain should commit its aircraft to bombing Islamic State in Syria. He wrote that “it was ministers from our party — Clement Attlee and Arthur Greenwood” who, in 1940, made the case for an ongoing resistance against the Nazis, making his parallel clear by stating “Isil are the fascists of our time”. Here, World War II is not just a resource for smearing British history into a continuum of heroism, but of doing the same with the history of the Labour Party and even the labour movement itself. “Proper” British socialism is made to look interventionist in its very character, rather than in the specific circumstances of 1940.

Even more tellingly, Jarvis used this article to hint at the expertise of British workers, writing that the “RAF are world leaders in precision targeting”. On one hand, this is a half-hidden callback to World War II, when the RAF would often act as pathfinders for American heavy bomber raids against Germany, but it also celebrates British technique and craft, just as though he’d been talking about international pre-eminence in coding or manufacturing microscopes. The argument in favour of war is couched in the language not of frothing Trumpian nationalism, but of a gentler patriotism that speaks of an intrinsic national reserve of both moral benevolence and practical capability. Seen in this light, the job of the Labour Party is not to aspire to socialist grands projets, but to tap this well.

Jarvis, then, embodies a dialectic at work amidst Labour’s so-called moderates in which, on one hand, progressive domestic politics must always be seen in the light of 1945, which is presented as a patriotic rather than a socialistic achievement, and, on the other, British participation in conflict is always justified on the grounds of the uprightness of the country’s working class. Both of these ideas are underpinned and authenticated by the prevalent sense of World War II as a patriotic war, as Good Britain against Evil Germany. In turn, this way of thinking about the war has to position it as a moment of peerless national unity, a unity that can and should be brought to bear on the present. Because of this, the war has been stripped of a remoteness it possessed when it was, in historical terms, closer, but in being integrated into the structure of the present it has lost all of its complexity and been elevated to, as Roland Barthes puts it in Mythologies, the level of the “what goes without saying”. It is taken as an example of authentic experience that proves the validity of this or that political position — whether that’s the revanchist blustering of Gove or the soft progressivism of Jarvis — but not as something that can in its own right be interrogated.

Yet, even as the myth of World War II was produced coterminously with the war itself, there were many cases of resistance to or scepticism about myth-building. Indeed, looking at the imaginative literature of the time, it becomes clear that some experienced the ideological drive towards patriotic unity as compromising or even farcical. Mass Observation’s Living Through the Blitz was one example of a contrapuntal take on the official narrative, but literary writing was often equally, if not even more, sceptical. Orwell, who did argue in favour of, depending on how you look at it, a patriotic socialism or a redistributive patriotism, might have a pre-eminence amongst modern readers when it comes to the authors of the period, but his perspective (or, as Hatherley demonstrates, the reductive version of his perspective produced after the fact) should not be regarded as one which was shared universally in the 1940s.

Probably the most moving interrogation of the idea of patriotic pulling together came in Henry Green’s 1946 novel Back. In it, a demobbed soldier, Charley Summers, returns from a POW camp in France at some point after the Normandy landings and during the V-Weapon attacks of late 1944. Summers has lost a leg in the process of being captured, and also returns with shell-shock that intermittently pitches him into fugues of vagrant forgetfulness. Having visited the grave of his one-time lover, Rose Phillips, he is given an address by her father and told to visit it; doing so, he meets a woman called Nancy whose (apparent) resemblance to Rose makes Charley convinced that the latter is not in fact dead at all. After this, the novel consists of a series of vignettes in which an increasingly exasperated Charley tries to prove to a variety of incomprehending people that Nancy is Rose, before he gradually comes to accept the reality of the situation. Finally, Charley and Nancy themselves fall, ambivalently, in what looks like love.

Back is a dizzyingly bizarre piece of fiction, containing a long excerpt of questionable relevance from the eighteenth-century memoirs of the French aristocrat Madame de Crequy, as well as several unattributed citations of Bruges la Morte, a macabre novella by the Belgian Symbolist Georges Rodenbach. It is packed with other intertextual trapdoors, along with narrative ellipses and implausible coincidences, glitchy repetitions and logical incoherences that would, were it not for the cosily English setting, mark it out conspicuously as an experimental anti-novel. What’s interesting in this context, however, is Green’s challenge to the work of nostalgia that he sees as having already got underway before the official end of the war. Charley’s folly in seeing Nancy as Rose, as reading the present in terms of the past, in fact of trying to force the past upon the present is hinted as being nothing but a symptom of a wider cultural malaise. Everyone Charley meets tries to tell him about his own wartime experiences: his actual recollections of the war are always erased by those who meet him, who seem fixated on trying to tell him “how it was”, on working up an appealing record for posterity. Here, for example, is what Rose’s manipulative father has to say to him in a monologue that blurs the lines between sympathetic “respect for the troops” and a bullying received wisdom:

“So I presume you’ve come to apologise, my boy, eh?” Mr. Grant said, walking up and down past Charley on the small patch of lawn. “But there, we mustn’t blame you young fellows. I know. You’ve been through a whole lot, and we all ought to be grateful. What’s more, you’re not looking too fit in yourself. Gone thin. Lost weight? You want to take things easily yourself at first, believe me. I’ve no doubt it’s the food. You’ve been on starvation diet out there so long that, when you’re back, even the little we get is too rich for your stomach.”

Green’s pretty much unwavering recourse to anti-realist, even metafictional, devices in Back suggest a scepticism regarding the idea that reality can be reconstructed through narrative. However, this isn’t, or isn’t only, the playfulness and experimentation of the aesthete. His fractures and incongruities, in fact, work as a formal rejection of the swift assembly of a rhetoric that packages the confused actuality of the war on the behalf of a political project of national self-aggrandisement. Green was hardly a left-wing writer, but his essentially anarchic consciousness seemed, at least in Back, to resent the idea that everybody should fall into line between a story about the war reified in images of plucky coping.

The question here, then, should be about why, if some of those who were directly experiencing the war and its immediate aftermath were highly suspicious about how it might be reconstructed ideologically after the fact, contemporary culture often seems so utterly and sententiously cocksure in its “respect”. Such reverence is something Charley Summers is regularly struck to silence by in Back, as he recognises it as consisting of platitudes, but we’re expected — more and more, it seems, even as there are fewer and fewer individuals remaining to heap this respect onto — to drop into line with an official narrative. Why are people becoming so relaxed about this streamlining of the meanings of the past, when one of the “legitimate concerns” of some of its inhabitants was that a myth of unity would take the place of any complex historical truth? Why is it the case that a failure of historical consideration, the transformation of history into conservative political correctness, is being presented as “caring about history”? Why is it that members of a nominally progressive political party — like Graham Jones, quoted in my introduction — are allowing this balefully banal account of history to pass off as the real thing?

The idea of a “progressive” militarism bears structural similarities with the chimera of a “progressive” English patriotism, calls for which have been a prominent aspect of the authentocratic moment. Before examining these in detail, however, it pays to pause for a moment to remind ourselves that it is by no means clear regarding the extent to which progressive authentocrats are invested either in what Jones calls “defence” and “nationalism”. Do they believe, in a heartfelt way, that these things are being neglected? One explanation might be that, regardless of what they feel personally, they are irritated at this “neglect” insofar as it constitutes a failure to “listen” to what they hear on what, on Twitter, has become known as the #Labourdoorstep. Even this, however, seems a generous interpretation. What is invariably amplified by those who make a point of celebrating the peerless veracity of the “doorstep” is whatever is perceived to be an issue that would be anathema to the current Party leadership: anything consonant with it — around housing, for example, or zero-hour contracts — is put on ice. Yet the attempt to instrumentalise ideas that have historically been the property of the right at such an obviously precarious moment in national — and global — history is marked by a profound irresponsibility. The political (alt-)right have made much of late about alleged “virtue signalling” by the left, by which they mean that the adoption of anti-racist, anti-misogynistic, anti-transphobic (and so on) positions is undertaken in bad faith, or narcissistically. It’s possible that what I’ve been calling “authentocracy” could be regarded in such a fashion, albeit as an inversion of the original concept. What is particularly dangerous is that this cynical posturing on the part of some centrists is regarded by liberal culture as a genuine and praiseworthy attempt to respond to the supposed “desires” of the “forgotten working class”. In the discussion around progressive patriotism, the risks of this become increasingly salient.

Chapter VI

Sneering at the English

Authentocracy fixates on the idea that its despised metropolitan elites are constantly looking down their noses at the little man. They sneer at his nuclear deterrent, his poppies, his cherished imperial history, and they even sneer at his precious country. If the left keeps on going like this, it says, hamming concern, nobody will ever vote for it. In fact, to the authentocrat, pretty much any critique of anything it supposes its beloved white working classes might take offence at is dismissed as unforgivable high-handedness. As this is the case, I might as well stop worrying about paying any lip-service to these identity politics whatsoever; after what I’ve said so far, I’m going to be accused of sneering regardless.

So, here’s a story with a sneer in it. About ten years ago, I was visiting my family at Christmas in the small North Yorkshire town they live in. One afternoon, we walked over the river to a pub we visited from time to time on the hill facing the castle; it wasn’t particularly exciting, but it served a purpose, and the view was pleasant. I was buying a round of drinks when I noticed a piece of lined A4 paper stuck up almost ostentatiously by the bar, and it had a handwritten poem on it, decorated with some St George’s crosses and poppies. The theme of the poem was the subjugation of English identity by “politicians”, who refused to let English people be patriotic even though all other nearby nations — “the Scottish”, “the Irish”, “the French”, even “the Germans” — were permitted to. One couplet in particular stood out, and I can quote it from memory:

What about Shakespeare, Wilde and Shaw?
Nobody teaches them in school anymore.

I don’t know about Shaw, but, having been responsible for teaching lots of students recently arrived at university, and having worked as an examiner in A-Level English, I can say with more than fair confidence that both Shakespeare and Wilde are taught in school to this day. I couldn’t be bothered to point this out, or the more potentially embarrassing (and probably fight-provoking) fact about the troublesome non-Englishness of two of the named patriotic authors. Wilde’s well-known antipathy to patriotism could also have been brought up, as well as the more academic question of whether the point of learning about literature is to shore up a supposedly insecure sense of national identity.

It seemed quite funny at the time, but Englishness has done a roaring trade, and not just in revanchist pub poetry, since this happened to me. Alongside the right’s preoccupation that Englishness should be celebrated precisely because it’s been banned — though no one really knows who did the banning — there’s been a mounting urge to hand-wring about what it means to be English amongst the well-meaning and the trying-not-to-sneer. The more we hear about how you’re not allowed to be English these days, the more obnoxiously present Englishness seems to be. It’s a pretty similar story to the one about World War II, whose heroes we’re allegedly prevented from celebrating despite the fact you can barely go out in the street these days without seeing some new installation of poppy-themed public art.

Englishness, or pride in it, along with the pearl-clutching discussions about what it actually is, takes on two parts within the constellation of authentocracy. The first is to do with the attribution to the “working class”, virtually always English and white here, of patriotism as a core value: think of Graham Jones’ statement in the wake of the 2017 General Election. By “attribution”, I don’t want to suggest that there is no such thing as actually-existing working-class patriotism, but that authentocracy behaves as if working-class identity is impossible to conceive of without patriotism. The second role played by Englishness is found in the way national identity has in recent years been aestheticised and made tasteful by a middle-class, basically middlebrow literary, musical and decorative culture that leans not only on the patriotic penchants nestled in the writing of left-leaning figures like Orwell and the historian E.P. Thompson but on an Anglocentric turn within criticism, fiction, poetry, travel writing and memoir over, roughly, the last decade. This valeting of the dubious aspects of national pride loops back into the imputation of patriotism to a “real people”, in the skewed form of a patrician intent to correct “their” chauvinism. Patriotism is thereby depicted as a value existing naturally and inevitably, but it also becomes yet one more field in which liberal, middle-class good taste can assert its superiority by sermonising on how that value can be expressed through Cath Kidston mugs and suspiciously demonstrative eulogies to, say, badgers or newts rather than through hooliganism at international football tournaments.

Is it possible, instead of “reclaiming” Englishness, to acknowledge that there are many likeable, even marvellous, English things whose particular nature might be explained by facts of history and political geography, but to “love” these things is, really, an end in itself rather than proof of an intrinsic national genius? Such a recognition would not deny that there is such a thing as, say, English humour — although aren’t there actually many species of this? — or English landscape or even English cooking, but it would also aim to acknowledge that all of these things are influenced equally by inter- or trans-national and by more tightly local factors. Consider the poetry of Edward Thomas. Thomas’ writing is frequently acclaimed for its heady, ruminative Englishness, but it’s rooted, pretty doggedly, in its local vicissitudes — and it invites reading as verse which tries to hang onto the local in the face of an internationalised modernity that seems to threaten it. Albeit negatively, the international determines Thomas’ work as it provides the broader canvas against which existential leaps in favour of the local must be made. Here, and I apologise for the obviousness of the choice, is one of his most well-known poems, “Adlestrop”:

Yes. I remember Adlestrop —
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.
The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop — only the name
And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

It’s hard to read this poem and argue (as too many do) that this offers unanswerable confirmation of a “timeless Englishness”. Indeed, the village, which most readers claim epitomises this quality, is experienced only in the soon-over visit of the “express-train”, whose hastiness is something Thomas seems to want us to recognise, a momentary halt that affords the slightest glimpse of the place. Adlestrop, in fact, is a hypothesis as much as anything, an ideal gleaned from the most piecemeal of nominative hints. The loading of our attention onto the brevity of the experience, which reminds us of the scarcity of empirical evidence of Adlestropishness, indicates that this is an ideal that is perhaps even aware of its own status as ideal. David Gervais points out that Thomas is in places closer to continental modernism than the “Englishness” narrative suggests he is, and there’s certainly something of Marcel Proust in the hint here that the short-span experiences of modernity, such as “express-train” stops, prompt compensatory acts of aesthetic invention. “Englishness” here is precisely that which is always already lost; something whose appearance is really a disappearance between the specific imaginative prompts afforded by the local and modernity’s tendency to accelerate beyond the limits of the national. Moreover, but for the local characteristics, what “Adlestrop” describes is familiar to anyone, anywhere, who has stopped on a fast train and used the station sign as a prompt for an imaginative sortie.

Perhaps, then, Englishness is far less robust or meaningful a concept than many seem to think it is, or want it to be. In this light, it’s worth thinking about all the work not done by the epithet “English”, or even “quintessentially English”. The latter term crops up with jarring frequency, often at the head of clickbait articles on Buzzfeed or the Huffington Post, which will offer a list of ten books or tourist locations that deliver such a quintessence, lists which will always end up cramming the most arbitrary qualities into the rubric of “Englishness”. An example that seemed particularly odd came when, in 2011, the former Blur bassist and current cheese manufacturer Alex James decided to stage a boutique food and music festival near his Gloucestershire home. The festival was, with predictable whimsy, called Harvest, and its promotional literature played heavily to a suspectly heimisch sentiment. Describing the Kooks, an insipid mop-haired quartet making jauntily thoughtless guitar pop, the PR puff invoked their “quintessentially English” appeal. Surely “quintessentially English” is shorthand for something here, but for what? Did they lose on penalties in the festival fivea-side, or start the Industrial Revolution, or wield longbows at Agincourt, or write Steptoe and Son? If I relate the term to the image the band attempt to project of themselves, perhaps “quintessential” Englishness here refers to a cheeky summeriness, ready to break out its guitars at short notice, to do the gig right here and maybe winkingly steal a straw hat from a girl in the crowd. However, “English” as an epithet can also refer to rain, gloom, melancholia, Victorianism, repression. Wuthering Heights is celebrated for its Englishness just as often as the novels of H.E. Bates are. The concept has been tinkered with so ceaselessly that it can be deployed to mean completely opposed things; it’s effectively meaningless without some corroborating context or foreknowledge.

So, my sneer is at the concept, rather than at particular things that are English insofar as they are in England. Indeed, it would be deceptive for me to pretend I’m not pretty fond of lots of these things. Walking, in the tracks of Edward Thomas, along the ridge of the South Downs between Lewes and Brighton the day before I wrote this passage, I started mentally listing experiences I’d had in the last year that patriotism might look to deposit in the account of “Englishness”. There was, of course, that walk itself, undertaken in unbroken sunlight as ten or more species of butterfly winged up from a broad apron of poppies — obviously! — running parallel to the dry loam track, stretching half a mile into the distance. Following this path, I thought of how, two weeks previously, my wife and I had stood, late in the afternoon, on the summit of Eggardon Hill Fort in south Dorset in similarly brilliant weather, in immaculate silence, looking over the Channel glinting in the middle distance. I also recalled how, just before Christmas, we’d driven up to the little-known, but startlingly massive, dam of Scar House Reservoir in Upper Nidderdale, where our hired hatchback was almost tipped onto its roof by ninety-mile-per-hour winds that lashed white horses across the lake’s usually expressionless surface. A week after this, following an afternoon in the Royal Academy, we’d wandered Soho’s narrow streets in the winter darkness, something I’ll never fail to find intensely evocative. I also remembered the click of a turnstile at the stadium of a lowly West Midlands football team I’d never visited before, and entering the away terrace to find myself among people speaking in the comfortingly sandpapery accent of my hometown.

All of these places and events are in, or happened in, England, and are like they are at least in part because of where they are, but it’s misleading to say that they can be explained by something called “Englishness”. Indeed, if England is marked by one particular feature, it’s by the surprising scale of its dislocations in relation to the country’s relatively diminutive size, the tonal schisms that are difficult to accommodate under an umbrella signifier of national identity. In the middle of last century, J.B. Priestley, in his English Journey, found himself shocked by the fact that — even in that era’s cars and before dual carriageways — the barely breathable air and teetering slagheaps of the Durham coalfield could be reached in a day from the Cotswolds. Today, with motorways and internal flights and, when it works, a still fairly comprehensive intercity rail network, the disparities are intensified. Even when bits of landscape are superficially similar, there will be differences in crucial details: from my list of “English” experiences, compare the stretched, narrow ridges of the South Downs in East Sussex with the folds, vales and lumpy prominences of Dorset, say. Cityscapes, too, can be wildly various even when close to one another — Newcastle and York, both medieval cities built on top of Roman settlements, and both in the eastern half of the north, are hardly alike, and neither are Manchester and Leeds, nor Brighton and Portsmouth. Meanwhile, the idea of an “English accent”, in a country that accommodates the dialectal extremes of Northumberland and Norfolk, or Lewisham and Liverpool, seems ludicrous. There even seem to be six or seven ways in which one can be considered “well-spoken”.

What I’m saying here retreads Benedict Anderson’s argument in Imagined Communities that patriotism is mixed up with the very acts by which the sense of nationhood is imagined into being. With this in mind, a more-or-less traditional patriotism like the one attributed to Thomas, or that confessed by Orwell in his (sadly) unforgettable passage on old maids cycling to communion through the mist relies on the linking of various local specificities to necessarily capacious signifiers that act as mirages of harmony. Then, one or two of those specificities become, deviously, metonyms for a whole that is actually diffuse to the point of disintegration. As Harry Pearson says in The Far Corner, the “typical” English village, populated by Orwell’s cycling spinsters and serifed by mists coming off the Thames water-meadows, is unrecognisable to anyone from north of Nottingham, even those who grew up in the countryside. This hasn’t prevented it from becoming a synecdoche of national identity. “Englishness”, then, might not really be a particular set of qualities, but the strategies used to stitch those qualities together. Indeed, a literary history of Englishness shows that Chaucer, pushing to elevate the vernacular into the language of poetry in The Canterbury Tales, was, pretty deliberately, trying to agglutinate disparate identities under the sign of Thomas à Becket, the martyr whose shrine the Tales’ raconteur pilgrims are on their way to. The beginning of the General Prologue shows us the pilgrims descending on Southwark from “every shires ende of Engelond”: it’s only by depicting all these individuals in the same place, with a shared purpose, that Chaucer can really convince us that Englishness is a thing, an identity that one can meaningfully cleave to.

All of what I’m saying, though, continues to take patriotism at face value, in that it trusts it to be attached to any positive values whatsoever. Yet the patriotism celebrated by, variously, openly revanchist politicians like Nigel Farage, Conservative traditionalists like Michael Gove, and some of the “legitimate concerns” advocates in and around Labour like Graham Jones is remarkably specious, a formal idea of patriotism lacking nameable content. When it does find objective expression, it’s usually militaristic — poppies, Spitfires, the bouncing bomb — but it struggles to say what exactly the military is there to defend. Part of this is, of course, to do with the tangle over whether it is “English” or “British” values at stake in the defence of the realm, but it’s also because of the act of intellectual origami by which the only way to imagine Englishness at all is as something that one isn’t permitted to celebrate.

In the authentocrat mind, national identity — that thing which the “forgotten” of Bolsover and Bacup and so on are obstructed by “the left” from rejoicing in — has become synonymous with a crustacean defensiveness. Where a genuinely progressive politics might take some alleged “quintessence” of Englishness like rose gardens or real ale and invite a contemplation of their non-English analogues, authentocracy often fixates on a version of patriotism that is sculpted entirely by paranoia. Below the line of just about any online news article pertaining to pretty much any political question at all, one can see the variety of ways in which this pettish mistrust vents itself. Immigrants, the European Union — even more of an enemy for some now that Britain is leaving it — Iran, North Korea, the Scottish National Party, the IRA, ISIS, anti-globalisation protestors, Black Lives Matter, Jeremy Corbyn, Diane Abbott, international football administrators who won’t allow England to play with poppies on their shirts, academics, students, champagne socialists, human rights activists, environmentalists and “cultural Marxists” are all thrown into the mulch against which, and only against which, this Englishness can experience itself.

Julia Kristeva theorised the way that identities are formed through a process of exclusion in her 1980book Powers of Horror, which uses the term “abject” to think about that which is thrown out of individual or collective subjectivity in order to set its limits. In Kristevan terms, identity as such is a process of exclusion, dependent on negative rather than positive terms, and something like this is at work in a patriotism that lacks any visibility other than in the expulsive effect it has on its so-called enemies. So, for all the calls for a “progressive patriotism” from centrist politicians who are respondent to the allegedly legitimate concerns of the “sociologically spectral” forgotten, this recognition really states that it wants to harness the energy, the exclusionary force of abjection. In an essay I mentioned earlier, in the chapter on the metaphorical figure of the forgotten, Toscano makes reference to “the peculiarity of a fascism without movement, without utopia”, and this seems to be the particular abyss the centre and soft left dance on the edge of once they start to make concessions to a contentless patriotism they, like Graham Jones, attribute to working-class people on the whole rather than a vocal minority of individuals of all classes. A patriotism operating exclusively on the fuel of abjection — frothing at immigrants, “left-wing elites”, “traitors” — slips extremely quickly into “fascism without utopia”, fascism lacking even the allegedly redemptive vision of national triumph.

An irate Englishness defined by what it’s not, committed dogmatically to the fantasy that it is oppressed, gives rise to the illusion that a well-behaved, nationally optimistic patriotism is both necessary and desirable. This has become something of a fixation for many on the left who accept the argument Orwell makes in the “The Lion and the Unicorn” about the correspondences between revolutionary and patriotic feeling, but it’s a phenomenon (or irritant) that has transcended the limits of narrowly political discussion. A number of events offer themselves as wellsprings of the progressive demand for an enquiry into Englishness: the ethnically motivated riots in Oldham, Burnley and Bradford in the spring of 2001; the singer-songwriter Billy Bragg’s publication of a book championing left-wing patriotism in 2006; the debates that always occurred around international football tournaments at the same time about whether or not the St George’s flag could be reclaimed from its far-right associations. An obvious touchstone was a resurgence of national consciousness in Scotland, and, to a slightly lesser degree, Wales after devolution began in those countries in the late 1990s. Right-wing commentators and the writer of my pub poem were emboldened to amplify a question they’d long been asking about why St Andrew’s Day, and that saint’s saltire, were considered positive emblems of identity when St George’s Day, and his cross, went, so it was said, without commemoration.

It wouldn’t be cynical to say that this question, and others like it, were useful for a Blairite cadre more than aware of the ways that they had “forgotten” their traditional demographics in the pursuit of Mondeo Man’s vote. By opening up to these grievances and making them the subject of a debate, even if they were on the sharp end of much of it, the much trickier issue of the Labour Party’s root and branch ideological transformation could be sidelined. This is not the place to discuss the intricacies of this sleight of hand, but Blue Labour was not, as I have already argued, something which came into being spontaneously ex nihilo: rather than a turn away from “cosmopolitan” Blairism, which is how the media tended to frame it, the argument for a Labour Party more prepared to evoke sentimental images of nationhood was the get-out clause for those committed economically to the Third Way.

This isn’t to suggest that all articulations of progressive patriotism are “really” Blairite, but they do all tend to play into the hands of its centrist agenda by suggesting that the royal road to redistribution necessarily involves a conciliatory twinning with Englishness. Claims that socialism can be a patriotic project, like Bragg’s, are liable to prioritise the latter in the understanding that the former will follow, but there is little evidence that this is the case. Moreover, a patriotism inclined towards the building of Jerusalem can easily become muddled with another form that ditches the progressivism in favour of a politically desiccated cheerleading for the quintessentially English. The argument runs that “real patriots” will reject nihilism and the ministrations of UKIP that brought about Brexit if liberals and the left can offer them a convincing account of how an egalitarian politics is innate in the English character. In order to do this, a good deal of brow-furrowing is done about what this character entails.

The beginning of the reanimation of an English aesthetic was gradual, and occurred disparately at first. In the second half of the last decade, when I was still playing in a raucous, propulsive, wholly electrified and barely competent band clutching the coat-tails of the art-rock revival that occurred at the turn of the millennium, I began to notice more and more folk bands, made up of people younger than me playing traditional instruments, on the bill at the venues we played. People I knew in Norfolk started talking about things like wassailing. The pricier pubs, and then the not-so-expensive ones, that sold food in the West End of Norwich gradually nudged olive oil drizzles and Thai basil off their menus, replacing them, fulsomely, with locally-sourced ingredients. At the time — for my sins — this all seemed pretty novel, almost like a wilful rejoinder to the superficialities of Blairism. The idea of seizing control of Englishness, or its signifiers, in the name of a way of “real” living was appealing. Like many others, I disregarded the unsavourily nationalistic aspects of this on the basis that this Englishness was “uncanny”, spooky, somehow a critique of patriotic surefootedness in its extraction of the dissonant undercurrents of the English peculiar. As with the title of David Keenan’s book on the experiments of an English musical avant-garde interested in occultism, esoteric varieties of political extremism, atonality and anarchy, I was drawn to the idea of “England’s Hidden Reverse”, listening to Current ’93 and Nurse With Wound, reading M.R. James and Algernon Blackwood, taking trips out into the desolate East Anglian countryside in search of the national weird.

At the same time, an Anglocentric turn was taking place in literary studies, prompted by the conclusions of the American academic Jed Esty’s book on the fortunes of late modernism in England. A Shrinking Island claimed, persuasively, that high modernism in the UK had been open, cosmopolitan, attuned outwardly in a fashion that matched the dynamics of the British Empire in an era of barely regulated international capital flows. Ideas, like finance, easily shrugged off the limits of the national, pouring in centripetally from Imperial peripheries: the modernist experiments in Britain of the early Twenties were, therefore, casting their nets much further afield than these shores. When the Great Depression began in 1929, though, British politics and economics became much more inwardly focused, entertaining for the first time in the industrial era the Keynesian idea of a “national economy”. Culture followed suit, winding in its horizons, and some of the most notable modernist artists of the 1920s domesticated their priorities. This can be seen in the gap between the adamant formalism of Virginia Woolf’s 1927 novel To the Lighthouse and her semi-pastoral 1940 work Between the Acts, which takes as its centrepiece an allegorically loaded village pageant, or in T.S. Eliot’s move from the intransigent, polyglot “The Waste Land” in 1922 to the purring localism of “Four Quartets” in the early Forties. Esty’s argument can be used, amongst other things, to explain Mass Observation’s “anthropology at home”, the ethnographic journeys of Orwell and Priestley and the provincial focus of the so-called “pylon poetry” of Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice and others in the 1930s.

This story of a shift towards a probing of national identity within late modernism is by no means a celebration of a shift away from internationalism: although Esty’s exposure of the colonial exploitation much of high modernist experiment was founded on is disapproving, his work also seems to lament the shortened ambitions of this realignment in favour of the domestic. Nevertheless, the success of his argument opened the door for a less dialectically finessed school of thought in criticism that valourised Englishness, kicking back against the perceived snobbery of critics whose sympathies lay with internationalism. In 2010, the young scholar of British modernism Alexandra Harris produced Romantic Moderns, a lengthy piece of cultural criticism that confounded the expectations of its genre by finding its way into high-street bookstores across the country and whose dust jacket promised to save an England that “has had a bad press from the Modernist disciples of a shiny, high-speed future”. The book — it’s almost expected for critics of Harris to damn with faint praise by noting its lavish production — surveyed a panoply of British (but, really, English) writing, design, music, painting and photography from the Thirties and Forties in order to “prove” that modernism was accepted only conditionally in England, the condition being that it was drafted into a small-c conservative aesthetic that was essentially “romantic” in as much as it concerned itself with homeliness and rurality, with the “old-fashioned and whimsical”, with “souvenirs from an old country that might not survive”. Harris’ modernism was, from the off, not so much a straw man as a Corbusian plate-glass man speaking in Dadaist tongues, a caricature of modernism that portrayed it as oriented exclusively towards the “shiny, high-speed future”.

Despite this foundational error, broadsheet critics leapt in to proclaim the urgent necessity of the intervention, which supposedly corrected the pretentiousness of those whose investment in modernism was grounded in a conviction that it allowed the transcending of pettily national concerns. Kathryn Hughes, writing in the Guardian, wrote that “while high modernism hung out in smoky jazz bars, romantic modernism tended to pile on the jumpers and sit round the kitchen table, scoffing a delicious stew composed of ingredients foraged from the hedgerows”, thus making it seem as if the main objective of Beckett, Mondrian and Webern was the abolition of Mrs Beeton. In the Independent, meanwhile, Boyd Tonkin wrote a strikingly unpleasant dismissal of the “junior critics” who would surely be outmanoeuvred by Romantic Moderns, having previously “pompously opined on” Harris’ subject’s “humanism and provincialism in contrast with those thrilling avant-gardists sur le continong”. Such evaluations were calls for a liberal patriotism that was, if not quite totally unabashed, reasonably obvious.

Few mainstream critics — presumably, in Tonkin’s terms, the “senior” ones — showed much interest in asking about why Harris had characterised modernism so one-dimensionally, or, perhaps even more bafflingly, why she had failed to stake her “romanticism” out conceptually. Reading the book, it seems to have few theoretical or philosophical links to Romanticism proper, other than in an idea of locatedness perhaps derived from Wordsworth. In fact, Harris’ arguments often seemed to boil down to little more than the fact that English modernists often lived in the countryside, that their work reflected a pastoral humbleness, and that modernism was but one style for these artists among many. Therefore, in paintings by Eric Ravilious or Paul Nash, the content is romantically (which seems to mean something like “patriotically”) motivated, but is mediated by a style that allows for a slightly updated experience of Deep Englishness. This is hardly a claim of earth-shattering significance, although its lack of critical risk inevitably means it isn’t appallingly wrong. It doesn’t tell the full story, though. For Nash, for example, the surrealism he subscribed to might have offered a new way of thinking English history and geography, but it also took English history and geography and sucked them precariously close to the edge of radical estrangement, hollowing out their cosiness as much as sucking up to it.

Harris, arguably belittlingly, inscribed modernism within a broader national tradition, or at least a supposed tradition, but hers was not the first well-received, vaguely interminable testimony to the flexibility of an alleged native genius in the twenty-first century. In some ways, Romantic Moderns feels like it inherits its critical prerogatives from Peter Ackroyd’s Albion, a 2002study of how Englishness’ roots probe a well of innate melancholia and insular mist. Ackroyd’s is a muted hymn to an aesthetic of almost ineffable sadness that can be witnessed in church architecture, the teary compositions of John Dowland and Thomas Tallis, in M.R. James’ ghost stories and in landscape gardening. It often reads as a defence of English patriotism on the grounds that a national character rooted in melancholia, spooked by its own shadow, is in its essence too apologetic to flip into aggressive nationalism. The English “language itself […] propels the writer towards plangency”, the reader is told, and the “long sweet note of pathos [that] can be heard equally in the music of Delius and the poetry of Keats” “has always been there”. Albion’s is a non-toxic patriotism, too busy fingering its lute to fight wars of aggression.

The success of these works chimed with a pop-cultural play for the patriotic pound. The Libertines, and especially their frontman Pete Doherty, emerged as part of a glut of chaotic, druggily derivative garage bands rehashing Clash riffs in the early 2000s, but cemented their success in Doherty’s wide-eyed insistence on a myth of “Albion” he carried into his next band Babyshambles. His influence was such that, at Doherty’s recommendation, the NME exhorted its readers to get hold of a copy of Robert Burton’s exhaustive seventeenth-century treatise The Anatomy of Melancholy, a work that also played a central role in Ackroyd’s book, which the chief Libertine had, in turn, almost certainly read. Tapping once more into sad-faced English exceptionalism, Doherty crooned of doomed lovers drinking cheap gin from cracked teacups, an Englishness rooted in dry self-effacement, desolate out-of-season seaside towns and Graham Greene novels, but this air of prettified decline could ultimately be read as an inverted triumphalism. Paul Gilroy’s thesis that Britain (and especially England) is still in the grasp of a “postcolonial melancholia”, a shiftlessness that only just about masks a belief that this country should still rule over half the world, seems an appropriate idea to bring to bear on any attempt to make sense of Doherty.

It wasn’t long, either, before the melancholic Englishness curated and cultivated in various ways by Harris, Ackroyd and Doherty turned into a much more straightforward idea about the niceness of Englishness. The uncanniness and spookiness, even Harris’ soupcon of “sur le continong” experimentalism, was filed off in the ascendancy of what Alex Niven, in a slim polemic called Folk Opposition, describes as “Green Toryism”. This Enid Blyton vision of what it means to be English is graspable in the designs of Cath Kidston or Emma Bridgewater and in cookery shows like The Great British Menu. A whole approach to branding has come about that is recognisable for its epochally blurred vision of the past, absorbing both a chirpy, beard-oiled Victoriana and, as Hatherley observes in The Ministry of Nostalgia, many of the trappings of the middle of last century, notably the last time the nation could be said to be almost homogenously white. On the day of the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton in 2011, and during Queen Elizabeth’s Diamond Jubilee the following year, semi-official street parties were held across the land, with picnic tables festooned with jam tarts, coronation chicken and cakes baked to half-forgotten recipes found in notebooks handed down from grandparents. Bunting flapped between windows and streetlamps in red, white and blue: this was nostalgic communitarianism that sought to demonstrate the chummy inclusiveness of Englishness. An investigation that purported to be as interested in sounding out the nation’s pathologies as in rejoicing in its qualities had tipped over into indiscriminate boosterism.

At the same time as all this was going on, a revival in nature writing took place, and this also began to wear the insignia of progressive — and ultimately regressive — patriotism. One way of thinking about a highly personalised non-fiction that got its boots muddy, and was reminiscent of the prose of Edward Thomas as well as figures such as Richard Jefferies and Gavin Maxwell, was as a pastoralized successor to the increasingly idealess urban psychogeography of Iain Sinclair and his many imitators. Sinclair’s work, at its best, threatened to unlock London with a sub-atomic precision, drawing electrified associations between hardman scrap dealers in Bermondsey, occultist book-dealers off Charing Cross Road and exiled communist militants in Haringey in tribute to the endless combinatorial possibilities of the capital’s chance meetings. Gradually, it came to seem as if he was writing the same book repeatedly, and a horde of copyists sprang up, invariably aping the dominant Sinclairean motif of compulsion (“I was drawn irresistibly into the concourse of London Bridge Station, fascinated by the possibility that Shakespeare had once been initiated into esoteric astrology on this site…” and so on) but shedding its crucially important note of plausibility. Gradually, psychogeography, led by an aggravating Will Self column in the Independent, found itself dragged beyond the city limits, traipsing the Kentish Marshes or producing forcedly “obsessive” studies of Berkshire’s arterial roads.

This second-home psychogeography then entered a confluence with a channel of writing that never had much interest in the city in the first place. What might be called something like New Topographical Memoir found its avatar in Robert Macfarlane, a rovingly energetic literature lecturer at Cambridge whose books reflecting on mountaineering and hiking chivvied a considerable niche that the lesser talents in his wake had no compunctions about cramming into. Macfarlane’s real breakthrough, 2003’s The Wild Places, might actually be read as quite radical in its hunt for skeins of land in Britain and Ireland yet to be fully absorbed into late capitalist economies, and he can hardly be accused of Anglocentrism given his explorations in later works like The Old Ways — a tracking of pre-modern desire lines — are as likely to take him to Galicia as to Essex. In a long essay for the Guardian in 2015, in fact, he counselled against twee pastoralism, looking in detail at artworks that revealed the acts of violence that have shaped and commodified the English landscape and reminding his readers that, rather than being a universal experience, the appreciation of the countryside as peaceful, relaxing and safe might well depend on the bearing of a white subjectivity never put at risk by rural racism.

Nevertheless, Macfarlane’s success, along with his ongoing generosity when it comes to writing encouraging blurbs, meant that, before long, there was barely a single facet of English rural life that wasn’t being prevaricated about from the three-for-two table in Waterstones. Each book in this emergent tradition promised to root about in the long grass to achieve a detailed ecological and social profile of the landscape that could help its readers embed themselves once more in their native soil. Generally, they were marketed as fragments shored against ruins, whose martyr-authors had forsaken many of modernity’s pleasures to salvage a vanishing lore. Nonetheless, they settled swiftly into a set of tropes one could have cheap fun second-guessing. A writer, fed up of the travails of an urban life blighted by disposability and insincerity moves out to a cottage in the Cotswolds or Northumberland. There, they identify species (rabbits/ dragonflies/kestrels) or topographical features (meadows/ hedgerows/haystacks) or earthy practices (wild swimming/ woodcutting/shepherding) “we” no longer know how to love. They struggle to master naturecraft, but gradually find the necessary abilities buried within themselves, then have an epiphanic coming-to about the intrinsic bond between man and land. Taking a stance against a putatively plastic, soulless present, this writing is itself mass-produced, a cookie-cutter poetics of belonging and self-care (or self-indulgence) that hides its formulas behind a suitably meditative tone. It both commodifies an idea of wildness and quietly campaigns for a patriotic traditionalism.

This often-bad writing leverages itself as an alternative to the paranoid patriotism offered by UKIP and the rest of the right. Its good-taste conservationist conservatism looks worthy in comparison to the “non-utopian” fascism of an English Defence League march, and it is thereby implied by some nominally progressive commentators to be what can ultimately save the nation from Faragian nihilism. If the middle classes, the argument seems to run, can demonstrate their patriotism through an optimistic traditionalism, the “sociologically spectral” might be appeased in time.

As I write, a slew of post-Sinclair, post-Macfarlane books are being published that find contrived excuses — walking the Thames from source to estuary, or the route of the proposed High Speed 2 railway from London to Birmingham — to look the contradictions of Brexit Britain in the face. Englishness is still a publishing phenomenon, but it is becoming mingled increasingly with explorations of the damaged unconscious whose symptoms are visible in “legitimate concerns”. Cartwright’s The Iron Towns, which I looked at a couple of chapters back, is an example of a piece of writing that is an alchemy of these modes. Pretty much arbitrarily, its narrative about failing lower-league footballers is impinged upon by what are clearly supposed to be spooky irruptions of memories of long-distant Mercian history. This seems to be a metaphor for the barely repressed chagrin of the forgotten, a rage ready to explode if it is not succoured by some concessions from a supposedly flouncy metropolitan left.

Cartwright can hardly call the trope of a brewing mistral of nativist vengeance his own, though. The idea was previously advanced in 2014in The Wake, a novel written in a form of Old English — updated for legibility’s sake — by the environmentalist and one-time scholar of anti-globalisation activism Paul Kingsnorth. The Wake itself also, seemingly, borrows, this time from the visceral provincial millenarianism of David Peace’s quartet of books about crime and occultism in Seventies Yorkshire; Kingsnorth’s narrator, a Saxon smallholder who organises a campaign of stay-behind terror against the recently arrived Normans, is not at all dissimilar to one of Peace’s few-(almost)-good-cops. This at times extremely violent insurgency against the Norman Yoke seems to be making a point about what “real” Englishness will get up to if it is “oppressed”. The oppressors here might be greedy, hierarchy-obsessed medieval barons, but, for all of the undoubted historical wrongs committed by William and his followers, there’s something fishy about Kingsnorth’s use of a foreign invasion here. It seems to stand in allegorically for anything “alien” to the authentic members of the tribe, anything that threatens difference. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the narrator begins the story at home in the Fens of Lincolnshire, a well-established destination on the agenda of journalistic Brexit tourism.

In the spring of 2017, Kingsnorth wrote a long piece for the Guardian announcing that he had voted for Brexit, using this confession as the lede for a rambling argument claiming that “the left” — the monolithic “left” strikes again! — had thrown in its lot with globalisation. As such, Brexit was an act of resistance akin to the one depicted in The Wake, an angry demonstration of the ongoing significance of the local and national, the only levels on which a snowballing precarity can be resisted. One passage in particular made some strong assertions of conservatism’s allegedly natural political advantages:

Who can promise the return of that solidity? Not the left, which long ago hitched its wagon to the globalist horse, enthusing about breaking down everything from gender identities to national borders and painting any dissent as prejudice or hatred. As ever, those who can harness people’s deep, old attachment to tribe, place and identity — to a belonging and meaning beyond money or argument — will win the day. This might be as iron a law as any human history can provide.

Tribes, place, identity, belonging, meaning as “iron” laws: rather scary stuff. Perhaps this is where the mask begins to slip on progressive patriotism, which presents itself as a guarantee against anything that might become fascism. There’s little doubt that, in an age where digitality endlessly makes the ground disappear beneath our feet, that a recovery of the local, or merely the specific, might act as a bulwark for humanism against entropy, but why is the “tribe” the particular unit that might deliver this certainty?

Even after Corbyn’s relative success in the 2017 election, which if nothing else confounded the centrist claim that Labour were on the edge of destruction, the argument continued to be made that the way to capture the “lost” heartlands vote was through an appeal to a political Englishness. This, we were told, was a lesson Labour could learn from the Scottish National Party and the Welsh nationalist Plaid Cymru, both to a certain degree social democratic in outlook and both relatively successful in using patriotism to articulate progressive themes. Of course, attempts to make analogies between English and Scottish or Welsh nationalism ring false for a variety of reasons: England’s much greater population produces a higher amount of regional difference, for a start, but there’s also the crucial question of historical hegemony. Left-wing nationalism makes some sense for countries that have been forced to shape their polities by the will of another, even when that relationship has enjoyed a significant degree of collaboration and mutuality, as in Scotland’s case. “The English” can tell themselves no such story, at least not without unpardonable acts of historical contortion, even though there seems to be some desire for a narrative in which England is oppressed. One can witness this in Kingsnorth’s invocation of the Norman yoke: the idea that the “real English” have been oppressed by an alien ruling class since 1066 is a way of turning very specific concerns about class and property into specious ones about cultural sovereignty. Brexit, of course, is the signal example in modern British history about what happens when liberal culture plays along with the idea that material inequalities are actually about culture.

More to the point, however, what do those within Blue Labour who, as opposed to the Blairites it shelters, behave in good faith, really think is to be gained through progressive patriotism? Shortly after the 2017 General Election, Jonathan Rutherford, one of the movement’s key academic thinkers, published an article in the New Statesman on the theme of why Labour lost (Labour, of course, might very possibly have won were it not for endless centrist wrecking) which once again insisted on the need for greater recognition of Englishness. This reiterated the argument that people needed to be persuaded that there is something intrinsically English about Fabian socialism, a common good-faith Blue Labour claim, which believes that equality can be demonstrated to be entrenched in the nation’s history through the celebration of historical radicals such as the Levellers. Something here is intrinsically bizarre. Are people really more likely to find policies that make basic, day-today living easier if they can be shown that, for example, the Diggers or the Chartists would have approved of them? Taken at face value, such a claim seems farcically naïve: there is, of course, nothing wrong with normalising socialism by showing how its roots are much deeper than conservatives claim, but there’s also a basic misunderstanding of actually existing social problems in modern Britain here. In fact, for all of the political centre’s indictments of Corbynism’s naïvety, this is surely the ultimate form of self-indulgence, a side-stepping of the urgent need for material solutions that involves suggesting that this will not happen until they have been made culturally appealing.

However, the Blue Labour catechism is only really believed by some of those who profess faith in it. For others, as I have suggested, it is a convenient way for Blairism and the Third Way in general to act out a kind of false penance by which it apologises for the “crime” of forgetting Englishness, thus making the failings of New Labour cultural — and amendable through apology — rather than material and economic. The deeper story here, though, is of how New Labour, in its early days, was energised by a mythology about the intrinsic ridiculousness of the traditional, a mythology that means that it has always carried traditionalism with it in its back pocket. In the following chapter, I examine how New Labour and its cultural manifestation, so-called Cool Britannia, were from the very beginning stuck in a complex dialectical relationship with what was at the time a deeply unfashionable conservative traditionalism.

Chapter VII

The Dialectics of Banter

The 1990s contained two distinct periods, something that is acknowledged too rarely. Often, when people talk about “the Nineties” they’re deploying a lackadaisical shorthand to invoke a period that began around 1996, when New Labour’s momentum became unstoppable, and which wound down around 1999, when “internationalist” Blairism started to gain the upper hand during the Kosovo War. This is only half of the story. The other portion of the decade, the Major Years, is a poorly remembered and in many ways misunderstood slice of British cultural and political history. Yet it needs to be appreciated if one is going to understand authentocracy as the sting in the tail of two decades of centrist moderation and modernisation, and make sense of the centre’s recent passion for the traction of conservative certainty and its over-demonstrative conciliatory interest in the “somewheres”.

The Major Years should not be thought of as an overspill of the Thatcher era, an extension of the long Eighties, despite the ongoing presence of a Conservative government in Westminster. In fact, one could argue that they began when Margaret Thatcher was still in power, in 1990 or even 1989 as the hyperactive deregulation of the Eighties began to slow down, or at least wear a less aggressive mask. Confusingly, however, they came to a close before — about two years before — John Major was unseated by Blair. As Zoe Williams puts it in a perceptive 2003 excoriation of Blairism called “The Cool Con”, from “about mid-1995 […] suddenly everyone hated the Tory Party”.

This period, then, needs to be seen as one in which that ubiquitous hatred came to be, a sluggish decrescence of big-C Conservatism in which popular culture was frequently preoccupied with staging a tension between the to-come and the has-been. On one hand, there was an upbeat futurology instantiated by the End of History, which suggested that the rest of time would merely be a question of technological innovation, increasingly enlightened social attitudes, and the rolling out of liberal democracy across the globe. If capitalism had won, there was no longer a need for hard-line Cold Warriors like Thatcher; neoliberalism could be finessed into amenable forms by progressives. On the other was a social conservatism that seemed, or was made to appear, much more insistent than it had been under Thatcher. The urge to modernise, to seal the deal of an infinitely extending liberalism, held the upper hand in this opposition, but it took no small delight in overplaying the intractability of conservatism. In many popular narratives of the time, the old-fashioned and fusty became qualities of a stock villain, or at least a stock buffoon. In any consideration of the way the “authentic” is cast by many contemporary politicians, it is useful to consider how Blairite modernisation relied on a caricature of traditionalism, a caricature that has returned to haunt it as its way of imagining the future becomes passé itself.

To unpack this, one can invoke a notorious phrase of Peter Mandelson’s. Asked about New Labour’s attitude to the wealthy, Mandelson replied that he and his party colleagues were “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich”. Putting aside the question of wealth, being “relaxed” was fundamental to the self-presentation of Blairism, in as much as it wanted to represent its Tory opponents as pathologically hung-up, neurotically traditional, obsessed with an old way of doing things set out in John Major’s ultimately disastrous “Back to Basics” speech of October 1993. New Labour was to be the breath of fresh air, the detox of reactionary additives, the serotonin-rush late-night confessional where everybody could be whatever they felt they needed to be. Yet their “intensely relaxed” — a tellingly oxymoronic turn of phrase — image was always tethered to its ancillary, the intensely un-relaxed traditionalist bogeyman who, as a bonus, could often be relied upon to be a hypocrite with a cupboard bursting with sexual skeletons.

In the years immediately before Labour came to power, the Tories seemed determined to go on providing modernisers with a folk demon. Indeed, the aspect of the General Election of 1997 that is most frequently retained in the memories of those who stayed up to watch it is the unseating of Michael Portillo, the moral traditionalist who had voted in favour of Section 28 and against a lowering of the age of same-sex consent, at the hands of the fresh-faced, openly gay Blairite Stephen Twigg. This nasty, atavistic gift kept on giving for years, especially under Michael Howard and Iain Duncan Smith, but it couldn’t last forever. David Cameron’s genius has often been declared to be the detoxification of the Conservatives, but less is said about the existential crisis this implied for New Labour, who were robbed of their credibility as uniquely “relaxed”, something they had reliably derived from the image of the Tories as consisting overwhelmingly of hang-’em-all backbenchers fulminating about straight bananas and “cricket tests”. “Red Tory” Conservative modernisation meant that Labour lost the frame for their own — theoretical — modernity.

Blairite serenity connects with a broader culture of untroubledness, admittedly often irreverent rather than tranquil, which flourished from the mid-1990s. “Intense relaxation” came in various flavours, but what they all shared was a dependence on the implication that somebody else wasn’t relaxed, that somebody was always ready to play Mary Whitehouse. The dominant culture of the end of the decade, namely the gurning flippancy of “Cool Britannia”, which branded itself as lunchtime-drunk iconoclasm, was a prototype for authentocracy in that it relied on an imputation of offended traditionalism to other people. This imputation, however, preceded Noel Gallagher’s visit to No. 10 or Paul Gascoigne’s unforgettable goal and celebration against Scotland in 1996, the latter perhaps the exact instant the spirit of the Blair Years was defined. In fact, Cool Britannia’s seditious swagger had been primed by a strand of pop culture that, during the Major Years, had devoted itself to satirising the uptightness of a hypothesised Other.

Riffs on provincial conservative anality were all over the mass media of the early Nineties. I entered my teens during the High Major Years, if such a thing can be said to exist, and, consequently, spent much of the period playing video games. Gaming had entered its second wave of global popularity at the beginning of the decade, and British broadcasters wanted to cash in, so there were two weekly shows devoted to it, ITV’s Bad Influence! and the more popular Gamesmaster on Channel 4. Both had sets catering to an early 1990s idea of what the next century would look like, namely a surfeit of chrome surfaces, flickering screens, mechanised chairs, copious dry ice, and metal grilles. The future, in other words, was diluted cyberpunk, a cut-price version of the factory at the end of Terminator 2, where Arnold Schwarznegger’s fatherly cyborg disappears poignantly in a lake of molten metal.

Bad Influence! was presented by Violet Berlin, whose spiky blonde crop was clearly meant to make the viewer think of Blade Runner-style androids, and Andy Crane, the former children’s TV presented who served as Berlin’s straight man, occasionally wrongfooted by her flashy tech. The show was as noisy and brash as possible, flaunting its confrontational approach even in its title, which leeched on a concurrent moral panic claiming video games were corrupting adolescent minds. Everything was laid out to make the viewer feel wrapped up in a conspiracy against non-gaming squares, with a cheats section on the end credits that one could only watch by recording to VHS and replaying in slow-motion. If you could be bothered to do so, you felt — totally undeservedly, of course — like part of a futurist conspiracy.

Gamesmaster pressed similar buttons, a little more delicately. It was also strobe-heavy, loud and swimming in dry ice, but it cleverly made the war with squares one of its internal dynamics. A section in which young viewers were selected to come on the programme and ask for tips and cheats to get them round gaming difficulties was managed by having them meet the eponymous Gamesmaster, played by the lovably grouchy TV astronomer Patrick Moore, or at least by his head. Projected onto a screen and adorned with some kind of cybernetic prosthesis, Moore was nevertheless recognisable as a part of an older, Reithian broadcasting tradition by which television was there to educate and inform. The idea seemed to be that, in this iteration, his gaming knowledge was a kind of curse, and so he behaved begrudgingly in giving assistance to those who sought his help, as if he was being kept alive on the punishing condition that he memorised the invincibility code for Sonic the Hedgehog. He was, the viewer was meant to think, being dragged unwillingly into a future of fun the audience were meant to anticipate with pleasure and even impatience.

Some of this “rebelliousness” could be traced, presumably, to the way punk’s up-yours aesthetics had, by the early 1990s, been fully integrated by mainstream culture. One veteran of the late 1970s — he’d played a part in Derek Jarman’s punk film Jubilee — who made a name for himself trading in primetime Grand Guignol was Richard O’Brien, most famous for starring in the Rocky Horror Show, and, by 1990, the Nosferatu-like host of Channel 4’s part-puzzle, part-assault-course gameshow The Crystal Maze. On entering the Maze, the contestants — almost always a group of software consultants or quantity surveyors from somewhere along the M4 corridor — would have to navigate four zones of puzzles that would see them get drenched or otherwise embarrassed in search of crystals. Once they had passed through the challenges of “Medieval” dungeons or “Future” tech-labs, they would enter a dome in which they’d spend an amount of time determined by how many crystals they’d obtained jumping around, fairly ridiculously, in pursuit of gold tokens that could be redeemed for a prize.

O’Brien’s usefulness for the producers seemed to be that viewers would see him as confronting the straight-laced yuppies who entered the contest with a perversely mean-spirited, sexually ambiguous challenge to their day-to-day etiquette. His approach to hosting was hyperbolically rude, taking pleasure whenever a task was failed and cackling at the indecisiveness of his guests. Occcasionally, he would make reference to one of the 1990s’ great off-screen characters, his “Mumsie” — nothing is funnier for Major Years comedy than old people — who brought a faint recollection of Psycho to the whole affair. The Crystal Maze was, like Bad Influence! and Gamesmaster, television watchable before the watershed but hinting at transgression, broadcasting that exaggerated the weight of British prudishness and, in doing so, hyped the idea of a future liberated from this.

Sitcom, an artform whose relative strength in the early 1990s has never been given the credit it deserves, was similarly committed to impugning the supposedly repressed nature of both small-c and large-C conservatism. Keeping Up Appearances, which ran from 1990 to 1995 and was therefore almost coterminous with Majorism, is a stand-out artefact of the time. Starring Patricia Routledge, it chronicled the farcical life of Hyacinth Bucket — “pronounced Bouquet!” — a housewife in her late fifties living in a moderate semi somewhere in the South Midlands. She is, significantly, the product of a working-class background: Hyacinth, her sisters and her brother-in-law Onslow, a flabby dole-queue intellectual and the programme’s moral centre, all speak with Merseyside accents of varying depth (the mystery of why these scousers have ended up in Northamptonshire is never addressed). However, she has married Richard, an unassuming white-collar worker, giving her a foot in the door of bourgeois respectability. Despite relatively modest means, she has no intention of allowing her social ascent to plateau.

The reigning comic principle of Keeping Up Appearances is not only that Hyacinth is constantly trying to inveigle her way a little further up the ladder, but that all her points of aspirational reference are clearly anachronistic in the Britain of the 1990s. Her dreamworld consists of “candlelit suppers”, of “literary soirées”, yachting weekends, Rotary Club prominence, a seat on the front pew of her local Anglican church. One way of reading this — a slightly too obvious one — is that this is Chaucerian, a squeezing of socially mobile pretension that employs both the downwards force of an established bourgeoisie who treat suburban aspiration condescendingly and the uppercut of working-class scorn at Hyacinth’s perceived treachery. There’s some truth in the idea that this is a traditional satire on nouveau riche folly, although it’s the working-class resistance to this that is particularly emphasised, thanks to the prominence afforded Onslow and his wife Daisy’s likeable sofa philosophising. What’s more significant, however, is the palpability of the protagonist’s untimeliness, her bearing of social ambitions that would have seemed vaguely outmoded even in the 1960s.

What was served up for comedic enjoyment in Keeping up Appearances, then, was a kind of abject or zombie conservatism, something that has no place, but can’t recognise the fact of its own demise and so goes on sapping the constructive energies of the living. Hyacinth is a source of dread for her anyone trying to get on with their daily business in the show, such as her neighbour Elizabeth, who falls into a neurotic trance in her presence, Elizabeth’s composer brother Emmett, who loses the ability to play the piano when he sees her on the drive, and a kindly but nonplussed young vicar. While she sees herself as a pinnacle of local society, she’s actually constantly undermining it with her pointless, timewasting insistence on derelict protocol.

Conservatism as a draining inanity, paradoxically empowered by its own irrelevance, is also on show in an ostensibly very different sitcom. Filmed on a quasi-futuristic set remarkably akin to those of Bad Influence! and Gamesmaster, Red Dwarf, which first aired in 1988 but was at the peak of its inventiveness in the early 1990s, pulled off the tricky task of rewiring science fiction as popular comedy while maintaining fidelity to its parent genre. Set on a colossal mining ship, which has been drifting intergalactically for thousands of millennia following a disastrous radioactive leak in the late twenty-second century, its story begins with the emergence of Dave Lister, the accident’s only survivor, from a stasis pod he’d fortunately been in at the moment of disaster. Lister, played by the mixed-race, audibly Liverpudlian punk-poet Craig Charles, had been the ship’s lowliest crew member when it still had a crew, and is an amiable slacker who, left to his own devices, divides his time between drinking lager, eating hot curries, watching (futuristic) sport and making barbed anti-hierarchical analyses.

The ship’s sentient computer, on deeming radiation levels low enough to release Lister from his pod, has enough running power to revive one other crew member in holographic form to keep him company. However, instead of choosing to bring back any of his drinking companions or his sometime lover Kochanski, it selects his immediate superior, the pompous junior officer Arnold Rimmer, a buttoned-up, trivially malicious, hierarchy-loving Space Tory. Rimmer, the computer’s logic decides, is the only member of Red Dwarf’s crew at the time of the catastrophe (and whose details are therefore banked for reanimation) who will annoy Lister enough to keep him sane. This pretty much literalises the metaphor of undead conservatism, a politics that will go on quibbling with modernity even when it has no corporeality to speak through.

Rimmer’s anxious passion for order is, of course, nothing new. It calls back to Dad’s Army’s Captain Mainwaring and perhaps to Bob Ferris from Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?, as well as forward to Mark Corrigan in Peep Show, which along with The Office and Alan Partridge stands out as one of the few decent Noughties British sitcoms. Yet there was something very of-its-moment in the way that the character was written: the contrasting of his clipped, colonial-class English with Lister’s neologistic twenty-second-century slang, his creepily portrayed mother fixation, his pointedly “uncool” nerdishness (at one point, we discover that he has a collection of “photographs of twentieth-century telegraph poles”). Even in his naming — ‘Rimmer’ is a euphemism for “arse-licker” — the audience, or those on the inside curve of the joke, are meant to sense how an obsession with authority is a kind of sexual sublimation. Conservatism being a misplaced perversity was almost an article of faith for liberal badinage in the Major Years, particularly after the patriotic moralism of the Back to Basics speech unspooled in a series of high-profile private-life exposés. The undertow of this jocularity was that the neurosis of traditionalism needed to be deposed and desublimated for the good of everybody, not least for the evidently miserable squares like Hyacinth and Rimmer.

A final sitcom that deserves discussion in this context is The Vicar of Dibley, on the surface as cosy a piece of Sunday-night television as one can conceive, but one that was also saturated with proto-Blairite sentiments about the gap between the “intensely relaxed” and their grouchy counterparts. First screened in 1994, it begins with Geraldine Granger — played by Dawn French, a stalwart of the Eighties alternative comedy scene — turning up in the sleepy Home Counties village of Dibley, where she is to take the post of vicar at the Anglican church. When she is unveiled as the new shepherd to Dibley’s flock at a parish council meeting, she is met with disbelief and, in the form of her antagonist David Horton, outright hostility. Geraldine is the model of the easy-going, compassionate Anglicanism that seemed to have got on top in the Church of England’s interminable ideological conflict in the early Nineties: she is interested in popular music and Eastenders, a writer of quirkily accessible sermons and, of course, a willing confessor of crushes in vestry conversations with Alice Tinker, her well-meaning, naïve verger. A hangover of the old squirearchy, coloured additionally with Thatcherite self-interest, Horton is the opposite of this; a moneyed golf-club braggart who anticipates nobody so much as Nigel Farage and ruins his son Hugo’s life with his overbearing entitlement.

Each episode of The Vicar of Dibley has the same fundamental structure, in which Geraldine and Horton end up at loggerheads over some ethical issue arising in the parish. Initially, Horton’s unfeelingly rigid conservatism will seem to have gained the upper hand, but, ultimately, the Vicar finally wins out with her warm-hearted pragmatism. Usually, this openness is seen to be so successful that the two adversaries are brought to a (temporary) conciliation, with Horton admitting that he was wrong, and should have been more circumspect. Again, conservatism is presented as a tyranny without fangs, a tendency to miss the point and, in doing so, slow down the course of liberal refinement.

Writing on how ideas about cynicism and honesty engaged one another at the end of the twentieth century, Timothy Bewes notes the mutually implicating natures of what he calls the “modular or pluralist fetishisation of specificity” and “the holistic fantasy of Majorite ‘back to basics’”. The politics and culture of the second half of the Nineties, the years of the Blairite ascendancy, were characterised by soft pluralism or “modularity”, falling back on a lip service to tolerance and permissiveness that was never that interested in attending to the material causes of intolerance and prohibition. Alongside the pluralism of a “thin” form of identity politics came an ultra-“modular” anti-hierarchical culture that rejected all forms of traditionalist uptightness, sometimes — paradoxically — by flirting with them. David Stubbs writes of Cool Britannia as a milieu in which people found “modular” solutions to the problems of how one might have “holistic” experiences without turning into an uptight reactionary, putting on a kind of ironic, temporary, non-committal patriotism to enjoy watching England play football. The implications of Stubbs’ claim that the mega-concerts of retrogressive guitar bands like Oasis — whose huge outdoor shows at Knebworth in 1996he sees as era-defining — came down to a drive to reclaim collective identities after the entropic individualism of Thatcherism are also interesting, in that another way of looking at this would be to see these moments of togetherness as covertly “pluralist”, instances in which people dabbled in collectivity as part of a broader project of “being themselves”.

Looked at this way, the late Nineties found a way of recapitulating the nasty individualism of Thatcherism as the permissive, anything-goes cultural logic of first-term Blairism. This could happen because the early Nineties, the Major Years, had seen a great deal of energy thrown not into satirising neoliberal I’m-alright-Jackism, but into mocking the (overstated) power of illiberal traditionalism. This mockery, as I’ve pointed out, was abetted by the haplessness of Majorism, always willing to make itself look as stuck in the mud as Rimmer or David Horton. When administrative change became certain, the counterforce to this petty holism took the form of an exuberance centred on the self and a calculated spontaneity. Stubbs is certainly right to argue for the importance of large-scale collective events like Euro ’96 and Oasis at Knebworth at the beginning of the Cool Britannia years, but one of the overriding tones of that period was an irreverence or wackiness that manifested itself in the intense particularity of absurdity, particularly in TV comedy, which seemed to have burst the lid off after all the repression early Nineties sitcoms alleged was going on. Paul Whitehouse and Charlie Higson’s The Fast Show and Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer’s absurdist gameshow Shooting Stars, both programmes discussed by Stubbs in his book on Blairism’s End of History, were characterised by a rampant, irrepressible zaniness, a revelling meaninglessness that seemingly set itself against “holistic” reclamation and seemed to proclaim that “real” truth was to be found in intense silliness.

The culture industry had spent much of the early part of the decade lambasting traditionalism and, in particular, Majorite moralising as sententious, but — as Bewes might be implying — the art that characterised the second half of the Nineties was marked by an inverted sententiousness. There was a morality here but, because its primary injunction was to be iconoclastic, it came in disguise. To revisit The Fast Show or Shooting Stars now isn’t to be entirely unamused, but the modern-day viewer might note something bullying in their hectic stacking of comic hooks and their cargo-cult “surrealism”. When irreverence becomes intensified into a militant version of itself, it isn’t really irreverence any longer; it’s too self-aggrandising. Shooting Stars was especially guilty of this, with its grindingly repetitive nonsense buzzwords (“ERANU!” “UVAVU!”), its “trippy” Dove From Above round, in which a badly drawn cardboard version of the bird in question would descend from the ceiling, and Matt Lucas’ outgrown, drum-bashing baby scorekeeper George Dawes. You were never allowed for a moment to forget how random it all was, but this “modular” arbitrariness looks, admittedly with the benefit of hindsight, strictly premeditated.

The Fast Show, by contrast, participated frequently in the cult of irreverence — everyone who watched it will remember the non-specifically “Mediterranean” weathergirl for whom the temperature was always “scorchio” — but also knew how to parody the Nineties’ aspiration towards iconoclasm. One character, the rhymingly-named office joker Colin Hunt, served as a mise-en-abyme for the whole show; played by Higson, he was always shown disrupting work or spoiling parties with his stalling efforts at comedy, his inadvertently abrasive bonhomie, his novelty socks, his outrageous hair and glasses. Whitehouse and Higson, it seemed, were in part attuned to the shelf-life of insistent jocosity, aware, perhaps, of how quickly it can find itself packaged up as commodified “randomness”. Similarly, they poked fun at the idea of a rebellious, anti-traditional, parent-offending Nineties music scene in an adaptation of regular sketch “Jazz Club”, which usually involved a smooth-talking presenter (played by John Thomson and apparently based on Radio 3’s Geoffrey Smith) burring sophisticatedly about a musician who would then play something hilariously unlistenable. On this “special” occasion, Jazz Club found itself pushed aside by Indie Club, and its regular, laid-back host was replaced by Simon Day — playing a snarling cockney — introducing the band Colon, apparently more radical-sounding than a “grenade going off in a convent” and unwilling to make even the slightest commercial concession. Once onstage to perform their single “Kick in the Sun”, Colon served up sub-Beatles, palely regressive, strummily forgettable guitar pop like most second-wave Britpop bands. If The Fast Show was a keystone of Blair-era popular culture, it also occasionally suggested a consciousness of some of its limitations.

It’s often forgotten that the fact Cool Britannia’s breaks with the inhibiting past, the constituent parts of its nominal “modernity”, were in many ways rhetorical was sceptically intuited in the article that announced the scene to the world. David Kamp’s feature “London Swings! Again!” was published in Vanity Fair in March 1997, a few months before Blair, who Kamp interviewed for the piece, came to power. “London Swings! Again!” is mostly remembered for its accompanying cover photo of Oasis singer Liam Gallagher and his then-partner, the actress Patsy Kensit, lying — implicitly post-coitally — on a ruffed-up bed dressed with a Union Jack. The image suggests, once again, a kind of iconoclasm or deconstruction: the traditionalist symbol isn’t jettisoned, but commandeered to the cause of don’t-give-a-fuck, post-nationalistic cool. All of a sudden, the British, it’s suggested, are “intensely relaxed” about their unifying symbol being sexually desecrated.

Yet when one actually reads Kamp’s article, he’s not entirely persuaded that such gestures are as deconstructive as they affect to be. Similarly to Stubbs, he notes that Cool Britannia involves an “outright reveling in Britishness” that seems to dispose of the uncool ideological baggage of nationalism, but when he mentions how this involves “fetishising and deconstructing the things that set the UK apart from other countries”, it is pretty clear that he believes the “fetishism” precludes the distance and irony that would allow for the full achievement of “deconstruction”. Proceeding to talk about the bands of the time, Kamp is obviously mocking when he mentions Kula Shaker, the awful rich-kid pseudo-spiritualists, who have “constructed [their] entire sound upon the kind of Anglo-Indian fusion only occasionally delved into by George Harrison” and the “grim, humourless […] loyalty” of Ocean Colour Scene to the Small Faces. Cool Britannia’s ability to use traditionalist symbolism and the aesthetics of the past might present itself as cockily disinterested, so the implication goes, but this too often turns into irony-free conservatism.

Kamp also seems to have an eyebrow raised when he meets Karl Hyde, a member of the then-popular techno group Underworld. Although Hyde, unlike Kula Shaker or Ocean Colour Scene, has a genuine interest in progressive (musical) forms and so can’t exactly be accused of conservatism on those grounds, the Vanity Fair writer also notes that he’s a member of Tomato, “a design collective in heavy demand in the advertising world for its obtuse, nonlinear sensibility”. This line points towards the commodity rationale behind the “obtuse” and “nonlinear”, which subverts a traditionalism that had become harder and harder to sell. So, Kamp presents, in a way that at least hints at an uneasiness towards both, the two components of Cool Britannia, namely the falsely ironic “deconstructive” traditionalism of Britpop and Euro ’96 and the reified obtuseness, the rictus-grinned irreverence that pokes fun at tradition but is nevertheless dependent upon it as an opposing force. Blair-era modernity, seen in this light, was never as dynamically, sexily unroped from traditionalism or uptightness as it wanted to convince people that it was.

Williams cuts to the heart of what this “dynamism” really entailed in her 2003 excoriation of New Labour. Swinging London Mark II, she notes, was characterised by a madcap exchangeability whereby:

Traditionally disparate elements — politics and pop, pop and art, art and eateries, eateries and, er, people who took a lot of drugs — all combined in a flash, to create something that may or may not have been greater than the sum of its parts, but was certainly cooler.

The discarding of the hierarchies and categories that typically separate, for example, artists and chefs is, Williams implies, another form of iconoclastic zaniness raising itself to the level of a commandment. Objecting to the disruption of classification — suggesting, for example, that the interests of painting may not best be served by artists whose focus is on the interior design of exclusive Soho restaurants — was a behaviour that could be chalked off as Rimmeresque fun-spiking. In fact, all efforts at critique became dismissible in this context; to say “no”, or even “hang on a minute”, marked you out as part of the uptight establishment whose Augean Stables Blair had been sent to flush with what Kamp called his “informality and shiny newness”.

This deeply uncritical context forms the backdrop of one of the most level-headed and unimpressed indictments of Cool Britannia’s aesthetics, Julian Stallabrass’ High Art Lite, published in 1999 — the year the Blairite façade really began to crack with the Kosovo intervention. Stallabrass gets far beyond the standard, banal critiques of Young British Artists in this book: he’s not that interested in harping on about the offensiveness or the laziness of Damian Hirst, Tracey Emin, Sarah Lucas, Gavin Turk and so on. Instead, the stylised flippancy often demonstrated by this coterie, the consequences of which are deeply conservative, is his target. It was never here nor there whether Hirst (and his contemporaries) “satirised” or arrogantly embraced the commercial or not; in reality, it was their performance of indifference as to the weight of this question that mattered. Young British Art was saturated with a commodified ambivalence: the product was less artworks themselves, but the cocking a snook both at the hyperbolised conservative moralities imagined in the early Nineties and at a supposedly stiff left-wing high-mindedness.

Obviously, Freeze, the YBAs’ breakthrough show, occurred in 1988, while Blair was still a relative unknown, and before the fall of the Berlin Wall and Margaret Thatcher’s resignation. Nevertheless, it’s hard to disentangle the scene from Cool Britannia, not least because of Hirst’s personal prominence in that milieu, which saw him directing the cringe-inducing video for Blur’s awful single “Country House” and, as Kamp notes, collaborating on restaurant projects with the period’s geezer-chef du jour Marco Pierre White. One way of looking at this is to think about how Young British Art stitched together the aesthetics of both parts of the British Nineties, namely the square-baiting of the Major Years and the (essentialised, iconic) iconoclasm that set in after 1995. Stallabrass offers a passage that is extremely useful in an attempt to think this suture:

The conceptual basis of high art lite is most clearly seen in the prevalence of the one-liner work of art. Watching informed people looking at contemporary work is to grasp that the manner of engagement with art has changed: while you might spend half an hour or so with a single Cézanne, no one does this with any single piece of high art lite, for it makes it points swiftly, with conventional signs. To look at this work is a little like doing crossword clues; you get the answer (or more likely the dilemma) and move onto the next.

“High art lite” is an art of the punchline, which is invariably a coup de grace at the expense of various “uptight” straw men: the intellectualising critic, the tutting Shire Tory. We look at the piece — Hirst’s formaldehyde cows, Sarah Lucas’ vandalised sex dolls — and get its provocative “message”, then move on to the next one, unoffended because “we’re” not Tories or fussy intellectual “elitists”. However, the strictly monosemantic nature of the works means that they almost turn away from meaning as such, steering instead towards a cavalier flippancy mocking the idea that art can be meaningful. The works conform to that characteristic pressure of the Blair era, namely the “intense relaxation” that states everything should be stripped of seriousness, and that aesthetics and politics should be reconceived as just two more species of banter.

There are — as Stallabrass is good at showing — nuances within this field, and it is important to qualify what is being said here by pointing out that there was substantial aesthetic diversity amongst the YBAs (it would be unfair, for example, to hold Steve McQueen to account for Damian Hirst’s belligerent insouciance). Nevertheless, there are particular works that can’t really be read for much more than their inflammatory “swagger”. The most notorious of these — other than Hirst’s cows and Emin’s messy bed — is surely Marcus Harvey’s 1995 painting Myra, a large-scale portrait of the 1960s serial murderer Myra Hindley, which, when viewed closely, turned out to be composed of prints cast from a child’s hand. Myra was exhibited along with much of the late Nineties’ other shock-pieces in the Royal Academy’s 1997 exhibition Sensation: British Artists from the Saatchi Collection. The predictable skirmishes that occurred around the display of this painting, which became an icon of Britain’s moral degradation for all the people Harvey clearly wished to provoke and for the alleged extravagances of “high art” and “cultural elites” in general, show just how contorted aesthetic conversations became in Swinging London Mark II. Many of those displayed in Sensation were as interested in annoying critics, who they frequently saw as stuck-up, as in upsetting Outraged of Tunbridge Wells, but in the event they managed to start a secondary conflict between the two groups they imagined as their enemies when broadsheet writers, in a typical fit of neophilia, competed to construct the most sophisticated defences of this unambitious work. The achievement of the painting and the exhibition more broadly, as Stallabrass sees it, was “a hardening of opinion into two opposed camps that never listened to one another, and damned their opponents as hypocrites, dupes or philistines”.

What’s important in all this is how the leading YBAs were able to secure their importance on primarily moral grounds, that is, by looking for opportunities to outrage public opinion in a way that would mean the critics they often despised would have to defend them because of an anxiousness about being seen as stuffy and old-fashioned. In a way, there is something remarkably Blairish about all of this, in so far as, in the second half of the 1990s, plausibility seemed to rest on one’s opponents being perceived as unrelaxed, over-formal, tutting, granddaddish. If you could manufacture, or take advantage of, a situation where it looked like everyone who disagreed with you was an unreasonable, intransigent Colonel Blimp, you tended to win; to take anything too seriously, to refuse the terms of playfulness or banter, was the anathema to a career in politics, music, the media, painting, cooking and so on.

And yet, as Williams points out in “The Cool Con”, ultimately Blair himself was able to spin “intense relaxation” around for another, totally different purpose. The theme of his speech at the Labour Party conference in 2003, the year of the invasion of Iraq and the deceitful machinations that led to it, was maturation and the acceptance of a supposed reality principle. In his address, Blair alluded to the parents of a soldier who had been killed as Britain stood “shoulder to shoulder” with George W. Bush’s America in Afghanistan, noting that they continued to believe that the decision to go to war was the right one. The idea here was that adultness lay in the identification of certain moral constants: that however much we might revel in irreverence, zaniness, “cool”, however chilled-out we might have become about people sprinkling cocaine on their cereal and “shagging”, however much we might gleefully throw a hierarchy of aesthetic values out of the window, some things were always true. In fact, one might say, Blair’s moral certainties were given a sheen of (illegitimate) truth precisely because he had presented himself as being so laid-back and post-ideological before; that is, as someone who would only do something serious if it was absolutely necessary, rather than because he had an “ideological agenda”. The rambunctious, anything-goes atmosphere that surrounded his rise to power ended up serving as the frame for spuriously essential decisions like the one that saw Britain participate in the War on Terror, making it look like a tough choice, deliberated over agonisingly.

The War on Terror and its various disastrous spin-offs, of course, provide much of the context for the new patriotic morality embraced with such vigour by a variety of past and present MPs who belong either on the right or the soft left of the Labour Party and are, typically, sympathetic to Blair or Blairism on one basis or another. Graham Jones, Ian Austin, Hilary Benn, John Woodcock, John Mann, Gloria de Piero, Dan Jarvis, Greg Pope and many others have identified themselves with patriotic and/or pro-military positions that owe their very existence to the post-2001 climate of conflict. It would be much less likely, for example, to see someone like Jones talking about a (supposedly) working-class commitment to “defence” and “nationalism” were it not for the hugely increased visibility of the military in public life that has been a complex consequence of Blair-era foreign policy.

Blair came to power on the back of a broad spectrum of anti-traditionalism that opposed itself to sententious moralising, but has been preserved in the amber of authentocratic neo-traditionalism: “legitimate concerns”, interventionist militarism, progressive patriotism. As the British Third Way’s version of frictionless modernity — a version that involves acceding to the neoliberal consensus — has become increasingly passé, it has sought to blend it with a conservatism that it hopes will shield it from accusations of complicity in economic failure and increasing social fragmentation. By amplifying identitarian, Goodhartish narratives about belonging, and how belonging is threatened by socially liberal attitudes to issues like immigration, it wagers that its historical commitment to gleefully vandalistic economic thinking will be ignored.

Consequently, Blairism survives as an inverted version of itself, in which many of the liberal gains that were supposed to be the payoff of Labour’s détente with the free market are sacrificed to preserve the very idea of “the centre”, of good sense, of compromise. Left-wing critics who dismiss the Blairite rump in the Labour Party, or their allies in the media, as “liberals” are missing the point, in that there is now little substantive commitment to much of the good that inhabits the layperson’s version of liberalism. Rather, all the deals British centrists make with the right are in the service of what is virtually a personality cult, devoted to Blair, and a sect committed to the preservation of pol-sci concepts like “triangulation” — and the notion of a Third Way itself — which are becoming increasingly inane in any practical sense. Moreover, this triangulation now bases itself around imputed traditionalism, by which the provincial conservatives, made unnecessarily synonymous with the “non-metropolitan” working class, that were constantly rubbished in the milieu that gave rise to New Labour are gestured towards as the new conscience of progressive politics. New Labour and Cool Britannia were always inextricably bound up with traditionalism, initially as something to push against, but now, as Blairite modernity becomes un-modern, centrism turns to it as a different kind of resource. The Nineties are to the present, then, an inhibiting tradition, and yet that decade still has its hand on the tiller in terms of how progress is imagined. A clash between the Nineties’ imaginary and a new one, struggling to be born, is — as the next chapter shows — at the heart of an intensifying, yet little remarked-upon, theatre of the wider culture war.

Chapter VIII

Get in the Sea, Hipsters!

In the autumn of 2017, a bizarre argument flared briefly in the British media regarding a dismissive piss-take that had become common amongst the Corbynite left. The term in question was “centrist dad”, and it pointed towards a demographic of men in young middle-age self-identifying as liberals and left-wingers who nonetheless deemed it their responsibility to pour cold water on Corbynism, often in a high-handed, exasperated tone. This group’s main political concern was Brexit, or, more specifically, the folly of it; it was said that you could typically identify them by their use of the European Union flag in their Twitter biographies. After a few pieces on the phenomenon were published by Corbynites, a wave of articles appeared in response by journalists who decided to embrace the insult with a defensive pride.

On one level, it was overblown, and a tendency to point-missing snarkiness was visible on both sides. Some of what emerged from the Corbynites in particular was fatally imprecise: the vision of “centrist dads” became indistinguishable from decades of fogey-mocking humour, and many of the tropes — leather jackets, fast new cars, bad musical preferences — being thrown around can be found in caricatures of mid-life crisis going back to the 1960s. This was a pity, as there is a genuinely pressing sociological and cultural question at stake here. In very few cases are the “dads” in question old enough to be the fathers of active Corbynites, and they’re often people who share a reasonable amount by way of taste and interests with those they’re arguing with. Yet what became evident during the centrist dad “debate” was that a gulf is opening up between progressives in their forties and those in their twenties and early thirties, a gulf that in fact calls into question the very meaning of “progressive”. This is not an argument between “Tories” and “lefties”, but between two sets of essentially well-intentioned people who share causes in common but are finding it increasingly difficult to communicate.

For some time, I’ve been trying to understand what’s at stake in this schism, and the town I live in offers some fascinating material for consideration. Since early 2015, my home has been in Brighton, the sizable, arguably notorious resort on England’s south-eastern coast. Thanks to its closeness to London, as well as historical countercultural connections that have marked it out as a space for social transgression suitable for artistic temperaments, the town was at the forefront of the regeneration of the British seaside that began in the 1990s. During the Blair Years, it became a desirable location for celebrities moving out of the capital; many others, particularly media workers, followed suit, attracted amongst other things by its liberal, environmentalist politics. David Goodhart, no doubt, would see at least the central parts of Brighton as dominated by his “anywheres”.

North Laine, a rough quadrant of narrow, sloping streets between the train station and the seafront, is a place in which the town’s “restorative” transition might be gauged. In the Eighties, it was mostly just run-down houses, full of damp and eaten away by the salty Channel drizzle. Now, however, the streets are almost permanently busy, lined with boutique homeware and clothing stores, galleries, cafés and restaurants. Many of these establishments date to the late Nineties or thereabouts, and — unlike more recently gentrified areas like Peckham in South London or Manchester’s Northern Quarter — there’s a lingering trace of Cool Britannia in the air. In fact, North Laine, and maybe Brighton more generally, might be seen as the last real redoubt of that milieu. Art shops sell giant posters of the hitmen in Pulp Fiction or Ewan McGregor shivering in Trainspotting. Guitar shops display Noel Gallagher-style Epiphones in their windows. You can buy Star Wars figurines, skate shoes, joss sticks, Manga comics, or pick up tickets to watch Blair Years comics like Stewart Lee at the Komedia Theatre. When we were trying to find some confetti for our wedding, we went into a party shop and asked if they had what we needed. “Yes, of course”, came the reply. “But only penis confetti.” At times it is pleasant inhabiting a place so committed to amusement and ribaldry, but, perhaps, it can also be slightly inhibiting: here, one suspects, the Fun Police enforce, rather than prohibit, enjoyment.

Because Brighton is a demographically young city, with two large universities and a music college constantly refreshing the student population, one can see how the “intensely relaxed” mindset underpinning the commercialised jolliness of North Laine has become slightly anachronistic by measuring its preoccupations against those of a new generation of (so-called) hipsters. These (so-called) millennials, who one sees walking down Kensington Gardens or shopping for second-hand furniture on Gardiner Street’s Saturday market, don’t really care about getting their hands on a box-fresh Han Solo and you don’t hear them quoting Pulp Fiction to one another. In fact, when you see people in their early twenties, kitted out in provocative anti-fashion or sportswear and hunting down third-generation grime and fourth-generation techno, in the same pubs and cafés as the neo-mods and hip-hop loving graphic designers who congregated on this part in the Nineties and never left, you’re struck by the realisation of just how outdated the latter version of cool is. Increasingly, one might suppose, the last citadel of Cool Britannia is falling to a pointedly different aesthetic, one deeply unimpressed by the “intense relaxation” of the Nineties. There’s a wiredness, an air of growing political commitment and that things are getting pretty serious again, about Brighton’s twentysomethings, and it undercuts the value system of the first-wave gentrifiers.

Nevertheless, those who turned up in the Nineties and made Brighton into “fucking Toytown” — a piquant analysis Owen Hatherley’s A New Kind of Bleak attributes to its author’s brother — have a significant instrument in their favour, namely property. Houses and flats were cheap in North Laine, or round Seven Dials, or Montpelier, where I rent, in the Nineties, and incomers took advantage, acquiring both homes and buy-to-lets, sometimes only a few streets away from one another. With high numbers of students and ongoing internal migration, there’s a squeeze on property round here that has multiplied house values many times over and, concomitantly, led to biannual, or worse, rent increases. While the caricature of by-to-let affluence might be the blood-spitting, nuke-loving Yorkshire Tories who came in mob-handed on Jeremy Corbyn in the pre-election Question Time, in Brighton you’re at least as likely to be paying your sweated-for rent to someone who has historically voted for Labour or the Greens, believes strongly that Britain should not be leaving the European Union, knows a good Thai restaurant, attends Pride and has seen Portishead play on several occasions. When they hear the word “culture”, they reach for a copy of Time Out. A friend of mine, in his late twenties, tells me that his landlord periodically turns up to carry out house inspections “on a fucking Vespa”, the Italian moped favoured by Sixties mods but rediscovered in the Nineties.

If such a line comes across as throwaway, it shouldn’t. Often, broadsheet cultural analysis positions Britain’s great cultural divide as a scission between baby boomers and millennials, but this elides the significant role of Generation X, those who came of age more or less in time for at least part of acid house and were on their second or third General Election when Blair smarmed his way into Downing Street. Many of the swing voters who backed New Labour, no doubt, were born in the Forties and Fifties, but the cultural pulse of Cool Britannia was supplied by a group who came into the world sometime between the Beatles’ shift into psychedelia and the supposed Year Zero of punk. Generation X were the tastemakers of Cool Britannia, and many of their cultural preferences have survived, in various mutant forms, into a present that pitches them into a complex rivalry with their successors. The tastes of my generation — that nameless one whose early adulthood was contextualised by the “maturation” of Blair into a dogmatic interventionist — and the one beneath it are often conflated, incorrectly, as part of this antagonism, and this is most commonly seen in the derision directed at “hipsters”.

To unpack this derision one needs to look in closer detail at the cultural and aesthetic weltanschauung espoused by Generation X. As I’ve pointed out in the previous chapter, one particular quality celebrated here was irreverence, whatever refused, or seemed to refuse, to defer to specific ideologies left or right, following Groucho Marx’s refusal to join any club that would take him as a member. Of course, this favouring of the “modular” and non-committal looks highly ideological from the perspective of the early twenty-first century, when we can see where post-politics got us, but it made a lot of sense at the time. It’s visible in the programmes I discussed earlier, but it also helps to explain the preternatural success of comedy in the 1990s, or, more particularly, a form of comedy that was “progressive” insofar as it clearly despised Tories but liked to think it was cynical about all ideologies. Perhaps the clearest example of this version of the Nineties comic vision is Chris Morris’ satirical current affairs show Brass Eye, which made a controversial name for itself by tricking various mainstream celebrities into making idiots of themselves over news stories that anyone even vaguely capable of keeping their wits about them would recognise were fabricated. Most notoriously, the light entertainment broadcaster Noel Edmonds, who had revived his career in the Major Years with the aggressively brainless light entertainment show Noel’s House Party, was tricked into coming onto Brass Eye to issue a warning against the fictional drug “Cake”; the radio DJ Neil Fox, meanwhile, was cajoled into alerting parents to a new child safety campaign called “Nonce Sense”, designed to protect the young against paedophiles who, so Fox stated as he read from a “scientific” report, “have more genes in common with crabs than they do with you and me”.

Brass Eye was of its time in that it seemed to regard any position one might take other than a basic, non-ideological decency as spurious. In a way, its edgy topicality should have kept it apart from Shooting Stars or The Fast Show, but it also didn’t want to be pinned down to anything it might later regret, and evinced an End-of-History trust in an essential morality — put simply, “don’t be a dickhead” — which could be apprehended separately from politics. An even more extreme version of this emerged at the turn of the century in the work of satirist Charlie Brooker, who took Morris’ Swiftian incredulity at the scale of human folly and turned the excremental dial to eleven. Brooker first came to public attention as a gaming journalist in the mid-Nineties, then with a website called TVGoHome, which borrowed the page design of the BBC publication The Radio Times and used it to produce fake TV listings that scalped what he saw as the egregiousness of contemporary broadcasting, particularly reality TV and the burgeoning cult of celebrity-for-celebrity’s-sake. At its best, this could be hilariously funny, précising the likes of Daily Mail Island — a reality show in which contestants were trapped on one of the remoter Hebrides with nothing but the right-wing newspaper for spiritual guidance, with predictable consequences — and Wanking for Coins with Roland Rivron, which is pretty self-explanatory. The most impactful of Brooker’s confections was Cunt, a documentary about a moneyed trend-follower called Nathan Barley living in the new East London media epicentre of Hoxton. Arrantly inconsiderate, Barley, often found wearing clothes seemingly made of “charcoal-grey crepe paper” and swilling pints of then-fashionable weißbier, would barge struggling mothers out of the way on Tube escalators while imagining himself the star of a Tarantino movie, listening to the Wu-Tang Clan or DJ Shadow on expensive headphones. This figure, as we shall soon see, would re-emerge as part of Generation X’s culture war black-ops.

Brooker’s crossover success came soon enough, his alternately scathing and pearl-clutching routine winning fans in the Guardian’s mirthful, usually perspicacious Saturday TV column Screen Burn. This exposed him to a wider audience, and soon his had become a commonly imitated style: web forums and Listservs, then, a little later, first-wave social media filled up with people showing off their capacity to swear alliteratively or castigate “undeserving” celebrities in a language coloured with close-to-the-bone sexual violence. As the Blairite project hardened into a permanent state of emergency, Brookerism became raised to the status of a cult, in which one could express their despair at the impossibility of ever improving anything with a riot of profanity, shit-hosing George W. Bush for his stupidity and, occasionally, prominent figures in New Labour for their servile gullibility. Nevertheless, the analysis always came down to an essentialised morality cloaked in lightly-worn dismissiveness. Brooker, whose flippant take on the London Tube bombings in July 2005 was that its perpetrators were “four wankers”, and his followers tended to see the increasingly out-of-control catastrophe of the War on Terror as simply the outcome of the personal failings of its key actors. Bush was a moron, Blair was narcissistic, Bin Laden was a sociopath and, worse, a hypocrite for having come from a wealthy family who had heartily embraced aspects of Western liberalism. Put in these terms, there was no need for anything like a political economy of these supposedly “post-ideological” wars.

Morris, to some extent, and Brooker in particular demonstrated that underneath the wackiness of many of the comics celebrated by Generation Xers, the avuncular silliness of Bob Mortimer, Paul Merton and Paul Whitehouse, there was a stylised curmudgeonliness. Reading the NME and Melody Maker in the Britpop years, one often became aware of a peculiar tension between a boosterism that pretended that unspeakably mediocre bands like Menswear and Sleeper were exciting and a churlishness that asserted that grouchiness and grumpiness were the most genuinely admirable qualities one might find in popular music. Despite it being his most creatively barren period, Mark E. Smith, the frontman of the abrasive Mancunian post-punk band The Fall, was elevated into a kind of anti-celebrity in this period; he could be relied upon for a half-cut, fag-in-mouth interview in which he’d say something drolly sour about another musician. Music writing seemed to operate in a mode that permitted either hyperbole about transparently inane acts or sheer, basically unqualified pessimism, but not that much that fell in between.

The romanticisation of the rant, the screed ready to dismiss anything contemporary as rubbish — which became preponderant as disillusionment about Blairism escalated in the Noughties — shouldn’t be seen as a rejection of the Nineties aesthetic. Jolly irreverence and cynicism are, from a certain perspective, formally indistinguishable; the idea that everything can be good is curiously isomorphic with the idea that everything is terrible. Keeping this in mind, it should be noted that the liberal media’s willingness to give space to criticism of Blair in the early twenty-first century wasn’t in any significant way an argument against Third-Way centrism. The Third Way is a form of thought that affects to place morality and competence above politics; it talks in terms of individual goodness and badness, rather than of ideologies shaped historically and socially. So, late-Nineties zaniness and chumminess suggested that everyone could be a decent person if they wanted to, whereas the hyperbolically irate satire of the following decade seemed to be motivated by the perception that more and more people were letting the side down. Brooker was, in this period, a stated opponent of, in his own words, “neo-con bullshit”, a tireless piss-taker of Bush and the DC hawks, but always from the perspective of a liberal moralism, which laced its vexation with a melancholy that suggested everyone could easily share the same position if they wanted to.

Recent years have seen no abatement in this carnival of exasperation, which takes as its target anything it sees as responsible for the increasing tawdriness of the world. Donald Trump and the Tories are frequent targets, but so is the Corbynite left: in fact, in ideological terms, it’s — funnily enough — Labour’s Blairite and Brownite centrists who tend to emerge unscathed. Beyond politics proper, an almost equally common target as any of the aforementioned is the figure of the “hipster”, who has become a latter-day folk devil in a way notably similar to the place occupied by provincial, old-fashioned Conservatives in the collective comic consciousness of the Major Years.

Comedy that takes hipsters, or so-called hipsters, as its targets is rarely unconfused. Its dubious tradition can be traced to TVGoHome’s Cunt, the satirical angles of which barely make sense in relation to the tastes attributed to the contemporary hipster, an attribution itself rife with contradiction. In his early, online incarnation Nathan Barley is described as dressing in expensive skatewear, and he’s driven — like many in the late Nineties — by both an obsession with the cultural phenomena of the past, especially Seventies leftovers like Star Wars figurines and Blaxploitation films, and a mild orientalism revelling in alleged Japanese eccentricity. Few things can induce him to take anything seriously, and he lives within a prophylactic of almost straightforwardly postmodernist irony. Occasionally, this façade comes down as he uses his media connections for manipulatively sexual ends, a riff Brooker plays to emphasise the moral vacuum in the middle of Barley’s ostentatiously laid-back lifestyle.

This changed subtly in the figure cut by the 2006 television adaptation of the character, written by Brooker and Morris, a veritable Gen-X comic dream-team. Here, instead of masking his bad intentions in chilled-out niceness, Barley actively wished to be perceived as an amoral provocateur and revelled loudly in the form of cokehead nihilism advertised in the mid-Noughties by magazines like Dazed & Confused, Sleazenation and, particularly, Vice, which had reached the UK by this point. A freeloader in a Shoreditch scene revolving around the activities of the fictional magazine SugarAPE, his interests are in art that provokes by being “well futile” and harsh electronic music. Where the online version had a mean, calculating intelligence, TV Barley is stupid to the point of slack-jawedness, irritating the people he encounters thanks largely to a bovine detachment from everyday reality brought about by the independent wealth that permits him to be a “self-facilitating media node”. The show is fleshed out with a set of fools and rogues who are implicated in the world’s giddying thoughtlessness: an ethically empty magazine editor, a journalist intelligent and morally aware enough to write meaningful work but too weak-willed to resist the lure of the idiot pound, a musician who riles his flatmates by making round-the-clock atonal noise, and a photographer, “15Peter20”, whose oeuvre consists exclusively of images of celebrities urinating.

One way of explaining the shift in characterisation is that television comedy requires a modicum of obviousness to work, and the Cunt version of Barley was too reliant on its audience’s having come into contact with the superficialities and unpleasantnesses of the cliquey east London design world. The 2006 edition was designed to appeal to people who had little to no familiarity with anything like hipster culture, who perhaps had never been to Hoxton Square, but who might still find the idea of a noisily unintelligent, undeservedly wealthy trend-hopper funny. Nevertheless, the gap between the two also suggests that the hipster is a figure suitable for the projection of any number of often conflicting unpleasant attributes. Hipsters are calculating, disingenuous, manipulative and irony-protected and credulous, naïve and oblivious, depending on what it is that’s irking the writer at that particular moment in time.

Nevertheless, in comparison to later attempts to lampoon hipster subculture, either version of Nathan Barley looks well considered and acute. Since the mid-Noughties, the presentation of hipsters in the media has changed once again, and the way in which they’re discussed has become more and more jumbled. A single “satirical” piece will swing wildly in its derision, suggesting on one hand that its foils are devoted exclusively to “irony” and, on the other, that they’re fetishistically concerned with authenticity. Future students of the paucity of quality in the British satire of the second decade of the twenty-first century will, hopefully, still have recourse to the online archive of the Daily Mash, a website obviously influenced by the American publication theOnion but lacking its attention to detail, a quality all good invective requires. Instead, the Daily Mash shares the tendency of the late-Nineties music press to misapprehend cussed irritability as penetrating satire, particularly in the tellingly substantial number of pieces it dedicates to hipsters.

A recurrent theme of Mash hipster hit-pieces is the idea that the young and trendy of east — and, increasingly, south

— London take pride in the recherché nature of their tastes in music, that no-one they speak to “will have heard” of their favourite artists. This is spun out to take in comestibles, too: they don’t want their cheese and bread to come from the supermarket, they want it to come from a little-known artisan producer. A particular favourite sub-theme here is the consumption of craft ale, with the bearded connoisseurs — it is, by the way, impossible to imagine either version of Nathan Barley with a beard — only willing to drink beer if it comes from a sincere microbrewer. In this logic, everything has to be as authentic, to be as far from mass-production and mass-consumption, as possible: the hipster is, to invoke the older sense of the term, an “authentocrat” in that they aspire to live below the homogenising beam of commercial culture.

Against this, the Mash also appears to believe that the main motivation hipsters have for taking an interest in anything whatsoever is ironic. Take, for example, a typically unfunny and hurriedly-written piece about how “irony-conscious” “hipster entrepreneurs are planning to re-brand darts”, a scenario in which “darts would be made out of some special bullshit ‘hand-carved’ wood and cost £98 for three”. The allegation underpinning this is that darts is an earthy, authentic pursuit enjoyed by “real” people that hipsters could only possibly enjoy by appropriating as irony, thereby ruining it. So: are hipsters committed to authenticity, or to irony? The Daily Mash seems incapable of making up its mind.

One thing we can be sure of by reading the swathes of coverage devoted to hipsters is that it is itself fixated on coming across as authentic. Unwilling to risk maintaining a single tone in its articles in the way that the Onion does, for fear of making its jokes too hard to understand, the Mash tends to break cover and find a way of saying what it really thinks (“bullshit ‘hand-carved’” being an obvious case of this), and what it invariably reveals itself as thinking is that there are “real” ways that things should always be done. It is preoccupied with a vision of old-mannishness, centred on “proper boozers” and “darts” and so on, which it opposes to the supposed pretentiousness of the hip world. This craze for the gnarly and unaffected can be traced back to the late 1990s, when various parts of London — along with Brighton, and elsewhere — were first being discovered by writers and artists and musicians. Bands like Blur and various YBAs became very attached, in a way it would be hard to see as anything but ironic, to the world of the working-class “miserable old git”. “Proper boozers” full of “dodgy” characters were celebrated for their authentic charm even as they filled up with journalists new to the area who had just got a terribly good deal on a Victorian townhouse. This idea of proletarian realness was, in short, both a projection and a way of concealing property relations that were hugely advantageous to Gen Xers in the early Blair Years.

The Daily Mash idea that drinking bad keg bitter in a stinking pub full of people who perhaps want to stab you is better, because “realer”, than consuming craft ale in a place that sells vegan meals is echoed in the work of the comedy writer Andy Dawson, who had a stocking-filler hit last year with a book called Get in the Sea, a gig he’d been offered by publishers off the back of a wildly popular Twitter feed of the same name. The idea of Get in the Sea is similar to much of the bile in the Daily Mash: Dawson sees something modern that he doesn’t like, and tells it to “get in the sea”, an instruction usually appended with some affectedly irate swearing. Sometimes, the things that need to get in the sea are straightforwardly bad: racists, Tory austerity measures, the alt-right. These things, however, are conflated as the source of Britain’s ills with harmless hipster follies, such as the playing of ukuleles, the public use of vintage typewriters, the wearing of old-fashioned hats and the consumption of avocados. Anti-hipster comedy, it should be noted, is obsessed with the avocado.

Get in the Sea’s subtitle is “An Apoplectic Guide to Modern Life” and, once again, we’re confronted with the covert sententiousness by which some people just are idiots and “bellends” and “wankers” and others, the performatively weary, “sweary”, cantankerous ones just are good. And yet much more is at stake than one would think in this theory. Anti-hipster comedy and its associated attachment to the prelapsarian world of the Dodgy Boozer has had substantial take-up on the part of the right-wing “quality” papers: the Times and the Telegraph both employ several writers whose job seems to involve little but acting as if the greatest social ills facing the UK in 2017 are the popularity of the avocado, the rise of craft beer and the ubiquity of beards. Such writers have an implied audience of comfortably-off professional people — generally men, given the masculinist tone of this writing — in their forties and early fifties who know, or think they know, what a “hipster” looks like and where they can be found. Indeed, the reason they are aware regarding the whereabouts of the people they believe are hipsters is that, frequently enough, they’re collecting rent from them. Nevertheless, it is often claimed that it is hipsters, rather than people who bought vast amounts of cheap property in the Nineties with the intention of profiting from it, who are “gentrifying” areas and “socially cleansing” them.

In reality, the relationship between young “creatives” and gentrification is a complex one, which can in no way be reduced to the banalities of discussions about consumption preferences. However, the Avocado Myth is a gift to neoliberal property relations and their upwards “redistributions” of wealth, which consistently concentrate land and assets in the hands of wealthy property developers who then feudally square up what they have with individually well-off landlords. This dynamic, which does result in social cleansing and is generally supported uncritically by the right-wing press, can be nudged behind an image of the bearded young — and relatively young — fixating on the authenticity of a slice of ham’s provenance, or ironically rediscovering skittles or shove ha’penny. That there are, as Brooker showed us in TVGoHome and Nathan Barley, wealthy, inconsiderate idiots moving in circles that resemble this image is neither here nor there.

Enough has been done, though, by way of making the hipster a sign of the inauthentic — either because they’re too obsessed with authenticity, or too ironic — to allow them to become a yardstick for what’s undesirable. Left-wing thought, particularly that accommodating itself to Corbynism, is now frequently dismissed as the concern of “hipsters” who are insentient to “real working-class concerns”. Where once hipsters were dismissed as apolitical, taken by the likes of Brooker to be a symbol of increasing social atomisation and individualistic narcissism, they’re now a trope used by those smearing Britain’s new left as illegitimate. For some centrists and Blairites, the use of the term “hipster” has, at times, a comparable function to the phrase “virtue signalling” in the lexicon of the new right: in fact, it conveniently allows them to make the same accusation without crossing openly into the territory of Faragian populism, thus allowing them to hang onto some of the kudos of progressivism.

“Sensible” progressive politics seek to set the frontiers of the achievable, and “hipster” self-indulgence is a disciplinary concept that permits limits to be set on ambition. The ambit of the Sensible includes nods to a fairer (but not even really Keynesian) capitalism, vociferous opposition to obvious populist excesses without a materialist critique of how these excesses come about, a heavily commodified sectional feminism, a notional anti-racism and, in the particularly British context, a tendency to argue the case for an overturning of Brexit. It also revels in any political figure who offers even the slightest brake on the so-called “populist surge”: the handsome, platitudinous Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the new French president Emmanuel Macron, the melancholically missed Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton. Even traditionalist conservatives like the German chancellor Angela Merkel get brought into this strange pantheon for the simple virtue of not being Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin. This is a fantasy of moderation that can offer no story about how the supposedly immoderate came about, other than by pointing in the vague direction of “Russia” or “the internet” or “the failure of the left”; it conceives of the Third Way as a natural, authentic state of political being to which anyone “adult” — “adulthood” is a creepy preoccupation of this group — would wish to return. Here, politics is thought of not as ideology, not as a battle of ideas, not as an expression of material contradictions, but as a morally invested proceduralism in which qualified technocrats work for a hazily defined “good”. Advocates of this line of thought tend to see themselves as on the political left, possibly because it’s a position that emerges from Blairism and therefore is associated with the Labour Party, but seem to struggle when asked to say exactly what is “left-wing” about rejoicing in the success of a figure like Macron, a former banker whose main ambition seems to be finding a way of extending the remit of neoliberal politics within a country that has always been somewhat recalcitrant in the face of such ideas.

The Sensible, or Sensible Labour, position has considerable credibility amongst journalists and other media personalities who could broadly be categorised as belonging to Generation X. These are writers, presenters and comedians who are still thought of in some senses as “alternative”, having begun their careers in a mid-Nineties media environment which styled itself in opposition to the most dazzling absurdities of “Back to Basics” Major Years conservatism. This confers the apparently lasting prestige of an edginess or anti-establishment attitude, which, in turn, means that when very softly progressive positions are advocated these too are dressed up as somehow revolutionary in their braveness. It also allows for the policing of more properly radical arguments: those who participated in the Poll Tax Riots and have clear memories of the Miners’ Strike often seem to get away with saying that theirs were the “real” battles, and that contemporary expressions of discontent are always intrinsically disproportionate.

A signal example of this came about in 2011 when, in August of that year, rioting broke out across London (and then, to a lesser extent, in other major cities) after the killing of Mark Duggan, a young black man, by the Metropolitan Police’sfirearms unit. A vigil in Tottenham, home to Duggan’s family, gradually turned violent, and trouble fanned out across the capital, including in a number of increasingly gentrified areas like Hackney and Peckham. Theresa May, then the Home Secretary, famously dismissed any attempts to explain the spread of rioting in sociological or economic terms as excuses made to defend “pure criminality”, as though every single participant were bad to the core and the gaping inequalities of contemporary London were nothing to do with it. This, of course, is totally predictable coming from May, a Tory moralist who, had she been prominent in the early 1990s, would have been under constant satirical attack for her pinched traditionalism. What was more surprising was the reaction of some who had traditionally defined themselves as left-wingers on the side of “youth”, the kinds of people who it is easy to imagine thinking through the causal nuances of — or even openly defending the legitimacy of — rioting in early Eighties Brixton or Nineties — and Sixties — LA. A number of these figures took to Twitter to demand that the government use the army to quell the unrest, a notion that one would struggle to imagine being advocated by any self-described left-winger under Thatcher.

Two of these tweeters stood out. One was Grace Dent, who had succeeded Brooker as the author of the Guardian’s Screen Burn column and who in doing so had — knowingly — garnered a reputation for herself as a disappointedly grumpy left-winger. Dent’s schtick revolved around her northernness: whatever she was doing — and lately, what she’s been doing has often been reviewing expensive restaurants — she’d never allow her readers to forget that she was from Carlisle and put gravy on her chips. When she appeared on panel shows like Have I Got News For You, it was always as a prole-for-hire, providing some pantomime opposition to the “posh” “Tory” participants like Ian Hislop or Boris Johnson. Yet here she was echoing the Tory explanation, namely that what was taking place was a malfunction of discipline that could only be corrected with a military intervention.

A more prominent — but nonetheless comparable — figure, the former music journalist and current Times columnist Caitlin Moran, made similar comments. Moran has pushed the credit of her authenticity to the furthest possible degree, seemingly becoming more and more insistent on emphasising her chaotic-sounding West Midlands upbringing the more detached her readership are likely to be from it. She tends to blend into this a cheery poptimism, celebrating the power of popular music to achieve social change, and an accessible knockabout feminism. It’s rarely the case that she’d be seen taking the side of anyone but the little guy, but in this case her resources of sympathy dried up as she asked “Would it be so bad if the army rocked up now?” The bogus casualness of the tone here is characteristic of her style, as was the moment when she seemed to realise what she was supposed to stand for and sought to dress her militarism up in niceness by adding “I don’t mean the army should SHOOT at people. Just… stand around looking muscly and disciplined.”

Now, it’s important to recognise that the point of this isn’t that the rioters were “in the right” or that those who suffered in the disturbances (many of whom were, of course, members of precisely the communities affected by racist policing) aren’t deserving of sympathy. It’s that “bring in the army” is a position that asserts that the problem is at its core one of failing discipline, a basically moral one, and that the participants, whose motives and actions were hardly homogenous, simply needed knocking into shape. When this argument comes from the political right, we’re unsurprised, because it matches up with basic conservative principles about culpability; but when it emits from people who seek applause for being willing to out themselves as “a bit of a lefty” something strange is taking place. To be “a bit of a lefty” is surely, if nothing else, to believe in contextualisation, to insist on situating an event in broader social and even historical narratives, and, as a result, to forego the simplifications of a notion of culpability that apportions all explanation to the failings of individual discipline.

Furthermore, to be “a bit of a lefty” in the specific way both Dent and Moran have presented their “lefty-ness”, namely as attached to a romantic account of popular culture in which the oppressed express and finally assuage their discontent using cultural vehicles, should have sympathy for a section of the urban young in the process of having their cultural access revoked. The 2011 Riots occurred in a context where Conservative austerity was beginning to cut deep, with the cultural facilities for young people (and particularly young people of colour) in and around London being early casualties of George Osborne’s cackhanded approach to deficit reduction. Such facilities — youth clubs, college music studios — allowed cheap and even free access to the means of cultural production for people who often could not otherwise afford it. Frustration about the impossibility of expressing discontent was a commonly cited explanation by participants in the Riots, as an extensive Guardian investigation carried out several years later showed. Once upon a time, even the mainstream left, the barely-even-left left, would have tended to be generous in the face of such an account, acknowledging that it was in some ways convincing. Now, however, despite the ability of Nineties-vintage commentators, who in the main, are comfortable enough to escape the worst effects of austerity, to recognise the hugely detrimental effects of the Tory government, some seem to refuse to offer the legitimacy of a political explanation to what clearly are expressions of rage — however nihilistic that expression became — at a crazily unbalanced society.

One occasionally hears that what makes contemporary urban disorder differ from, say, the Watts Riots, or the conflagrations that occurred in British cities in the early Eighties, is that the rioters of the past “really knew” poverty and racism, that Thatcherism was an authentic cause, whereas Cameronism is or was not. Such a position can be related to the one which states that all genuine pop-cultural innovation belongs to the past; indeed, there’s some substantial overlap between the theories of “real innovation” and “real oppression”. On Dawson’s Get in the Sea feed there’s a particularly “apoplectic” moment in response to the annoying, slightly inexplicable celebrity-about-town James Corden dressing up for a photoshoot in the guise of Aladdin Sane-era David Bowie. Bowie has a rather particular status in the authentocratic imagination; he is celebrated, of course, for his almost militant refusal of authenticity, his much-vaunted “chameleonic” nature that allowed him to be a psychedelic polysexual alien one moment and a vaguely Sadean Mitteleuropean autocrat the next. Bowie, we hear, surfed identities as a way of fucking with the rabid identitarianism of Seventies Britain; he “brought down barriers” with his radical deployment of ambiguity, mainlining alterity into one of the straightest, whitest, most macho periods in the nation’s post-war history. The authentocrat attachment, however, is always to the “alterity” of the past, the radical gestures that permitted the state of agreeable consensus achieved in the late Nineties and still not out of sight today. Think, to name one obvious but important case, of the valourisation of a certain period of hip-hop’s history amongst those who consider themselves “a bit of a lefty”, which takes for granted that Public Enemy are a genuinely “political” act in a way that much of what follows can never be and pontificates on how the music has departed from its “roots”.

The idea that lies behind this, of course, is that the real political and cultural struggles — which are, according to the Bowie Changed History narrative, the same struggle — have been fought and mostly won, and that a failure to acknowledge that this is true is deep folly. One of the most accurate put-downs I’ve seen in years came just before the 2015 General Election, when a friend and I found ourselves in an argument on Facebook with a culture journalist who’d been regarded as a brilliant, iconoclastic truth-teller in the Nineties. We both said that we were refusing to vote for Ed Miliband’s Labour Party so long as they were prepared to make “Controls on Immigration” such a central detail of policy that it would appear on promotional mugs sold during the campaign. He retorted that Miliband was the best available option, and that to refuse to vote for him was a case of purity politics, even, perhaps, of narcissism. He claimed that his generation understood the long game, that he and his friends had “read Orwell and Gramsci” as teenagers and therefore knew that concessions were vital in any war of position. My friend flashed back, calling this reading of Gramsci “largely imaginary” and, in doing so, cutting down a particular strain of left melancholia that sees the relatively recent past as the site of an authentic popular leftism, against which present-day radicalism must always suffer comparatively.

This melancholia might be read in relation to a corruption of what Mark Fisher described in Capitalist Realism. Fisher’s book railed against the widely held belief that capitalism was inevitable and infinite, and bemoaned the moribundity of an aesthetic sphere seemingly uninterested in challenging this consensus. However, the book concluded on a note of hope, stating that the “tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction that has marked the horizons of possibility under capitalist realism. From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again.” Gen-X left melancholia, which turns either into bitter quiescence or performative contrarianism, feels like a misunderstanding of what Fisher was getting at: it sees value only in the radical causes and the radical aesthetics of the past, and refuses to believe that any attempt to “tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction” in the present is authentic or legitimate. It sees anything produced now as inherently and inevitably moribund. This jadedness often manifests itself as nostalgia for post-war social democratic norms and their attendant culture — Bowie again, punk, acid house — but it often does not seem to believe that even this comparatively moderate polity can ever be reinstated. When capitalist realism is challenged — increasingly frequently by those described as “millennials” or “Corbybite hipsters” — a moralising tone is adopted against it, basing itself on the principle that all routes out have been exhausted. Politics collapses into a reflexive pessimism that expresses itself either as grouchy “apoplexy” or withered passivity. These attitudes have been key to limiting the support for Corbyn amongst a certain demographic, but are there now grounds to think these might ultimately be dispelled?

Chapter IX

“Grainy, hard-bollocked reality” and the Moment of Corbynism

The currently accelerated form of British politics means that this final chapter comes with a necessary caveat. At the moment of writing, Jeremy Corbyn leads the Labour Party, and the Labour Party has increased its share of the vote and the number of seats it holds in Parliament thanks to a better-than-expected performance in the 2017 General Election. This situation forms the basis for what follows; nevertheless, nine months from now there’s a decent chance that a) yet another election will have been held, and Labour win with the result that Corbyn becomes Prime Minister, b) another election will have been held, and Labour fall short with the result that Corbyn is ousted from the Party leadership, orc) something else, unforeseeable, will have happened that renders what follows less relevant than it seems in the mid-autumn of 2017. So: it is inevitable that an air of contingency permeates what follows.

Right now, there are subtle hints that, in some respects, the sensibility I’ve been calling “authentocracy” is on the ropes. At least partly as a result of critiques from a Corbynite left reacting to the tiresomely hostile narratives that dominate the nominally progressive media, claims on the behalf of the “forgotten white working class” are not getting quite the free ride that they were in 2015 and 2016. Even within the paid commentariat, there are figures — Abi Wilkinson, Phil McDuff, Matt Zarb-Cousin — who are managing to advance arguments against reified notions of authenticity, and that’s before one starts to take into account online spaces dedicated to radical analysis such as Novara and New Socialist, amongst others. It has certainly become more difficult to toss out what some mockingly call “authentoclaims” without being held to account. Nevertheless, they continue to be made, and the thinness of their empirical bases often, paradoxically, leads to their being made with more insistent force. Authentocracy is now but one of a range of often contradictory strategies operated by what might be called the Radical Centre, a cluster of politicians, journalists and hangers-on who serve as the vituperative, often outright abusive stay-behind operation of the Blairite consensus. However, it also operates, to a certain — potentially extremely damaging — extent within Corbynism itself. In this final chapter, I want to argue that for Corbynism to have any ongoing significance within British politics, it needs to avoid becoming overly anchored in realism, instead orienting itself to the possibilities opened up by the malleability of political reality.

As a political figure, Corbyn, since his entry into the Labour leadership contest following Ed Miliband’s election defeat in 2015, has always been synonymous — both positively and negatively — with ideas about authenticity. For many of his supporters, he’s taken to be a rare epitome of good faith in politics, a homely character who is fundamentally the opposite to the unctuous careerism associated with New Labour. According to this line of thought, the causes he adopts are selected on a basis of rigorous personal morality, and this is always backed up by the charm of particular personal details: the unnamed cat, the flourishing allotment, the jam-making, the bicycle. Rather like Adorno’s preacher, Corbyn is perceived to do what he does politically not because he wants to, but because he has no option but to do so; it would have been far easier for his career had he, for example, not consistently voted against Blair’s wars, but personal conscience dictated otherwise. Corbyn’s authenticity, it should be noted, has been amplified hugely by the fact that the individuals he’s been pitted against in the last eighteen months have been Owen Smith and Theresa May. Smith, as we’ve noted, has made himself an object of mockery on numerous occasions by trying to come across as an everyman in a way that always appears overthought to the point of silliness; May, notoriously, struggles to exude any personal warmth at all, and is constantly mocked as “robotic”, a notion that has historically been positioned as the opposite to human authenticity. Indeed, by the end of the election campaign in 2017, May’s stiffness had on a purely comparative basis imbued Corbyn with a wisecracking, almost strutting charisma.

However, this personal authenticity has been fuel to those who have accused Corbyn of lacking an understanding of the so-called real world: by staying true to himself, it is said, he is being negligently idealistic. British people, or the “real” people of the “Labour heartlands”, we’re told — and think, one more time, of Graham Jones’ post-election intervention — don’t want what he has to offer, whether that’s an end to public-sector pay caps or the abolition of tuition fees or infrastructural investment, half so much as they want more patriotism or more “respect” for the military or less immigration or the most obliterative warheads. As long as Corbyn fails to appreciate this, he is blocking Labour’s chances of electoral success, which means that those “real people” must continue to undergo the most vicious effects of Tory austerity. In particular, it is said, in a fashion that is nothing if not fuzzy, Corbyn and his “Islington cronies” have let down the “real” working class by investing themselves in “identity politics” issues that don’t impinge on the daily lives of the good people of Merthyr, Darlington, or wherever the iPad Orwells have turned up in any given week.

An early, obscure but rather telling, criticism of Corbyn’s idealism came in a piece in the online music magazine the Quietus. The piece was by Taylor Parkes, whose byline was prominent in publications like Melody Maker in the 1990s and is perhaps best remembered for his inflationary championing of a microscene called “Romo”, a London-based, heavily Bowie-influenced, synth-heavy goth-glam that nominally opposed Britpop but in fact inhabited one of its niches. Romo was perhaps the very embodiment of Nineties poptimism, which is to say it invested itself heavily in popular music’s capacity for fantasy, believing — and Bowie is of course an important figure here — that this could affect change in the political world. If enough people can be persuaded to live fabulously on their nights out, poptimistic philosophy suggests, then they might start wanting to do so in the daylight hours as well, a notion that has imprecisely revolutionary implications. The German Romantic philosopher Novalis called an earlier version of this belief “Magic Idealism” — a conviction that play can fundamentally alter the structure of reality by interrogating its authenticity — and it was exemplified in a “Romanifesto” co-authored by Parkes and his colleague Simon Price, published in the Melody Maker in November 1995. This document contains statements such as the following:

Never forget: all art is, by its very nature, synthetic. Romo is made of plastic, as we all are if only we knew (plastic: having the power to change, to be moulded into new forms, new shapes). Far from being disposable and transient, plastic is in fact the most precious and enduring of commodities. Stone crumbles, wood rots, the flesh dies, but PLASTIC IS FOREVER. After the nuclear war, there will remain: insects, plastic.

Such a statement hardly leaves any room for ambiguity in its commitment to the inauthentic or, rather, to the notion that it is authenticity itself that is inauthentic (if only we knew that we’re really “plastic”!). Twenty years down the line, however, Parkes’ political commentary turned out to be underpinned by a comprehensively different assumption. Travelling out to Essex to see Corbyn speak at a rally, the article initially adopts a tone of head-patting approval: the people who have gathered to see the leadership candidate are well-meaning, pleasant, polite and justified in their desire for meaningful political change. However, all of this is ultimately conceived of as rather naïve:

I think we all know what the problems are. For instance, I’m not what you’d call a hawk, but please: out there in grainy, hard-bollocked reality, Corbyn’s foreign policy would not just leave Britain naked in the conference chamber, but fastened into a gimp mask with a horse-tail dangling out of its arse. Whether we like it or not, there is at least one confrontation coming; you can be sure of that. There are some nasty people in the world, you know. Some of them — get this! — are even nastier than Tony Blair. And even if you leave them all alone, they will not stop. Not for all the tea in Islington North.

After Corbyn thrashed Andy Burnham, Liz Kendall and Yvette Cooper in the leadership contest, there was, in some quarters, triumphalist glee about the use of the phrase “grainy, hard-bollocked reality”, but it has turned out to be a somewhat enduring idea. Parkes — who describes himself as a left-winger, even a “Marxist”, in the piece — cannot get beyond the idea of Corbyn as someone whose beliefs won’t sustain reality testing; this has, subsequently, been rephrased in terms of a lack of “electability”, especially by Blairites hanging onto the ever-more-hollow dogma that “elections are won from the centre”. Let’s however, look a little longer at the particular nature of the metaphor. Reality here, unnecessarily corporealised in the “bollocks”, is “hard”, incontrovertible, unmalleable, precisely devoid of plasticity, something which simply is what it is. Moreover, it is “grainy”, a word that could mean one of two things: either hard to cut, like wood or meat, or hard to decipher, like a fuzzy television screen. The real can’t be changed, and one shouldn’t be overly certain about it.

Like many ideology-bearing figures of speech, this turns out to be quite the oxymoron. Reality is what we can’t change, but also something whose properties we can’t be sure of. If the latter is true, how do we know that it is unresponsively “hard-bollocked”, then? What I think Parkes is attempting to prove to his audience here is that reality is too tough to be transformed by the dogma of leftie peaceniks, whose idealism, it is alleged, is itself paradoxically unyielding, yet the metaphor gets tangled in its own smugness and gives itself away.

These clichés about Corbyn, his followers and their relationship with “reality” have endured for over two years now, despite ample evidence to the contrary. Moreover, they’ve become a totemic figure of political discourse for those who stylise themselves, predictably, as “Real Labour” and commit themselves to “Saving Labour”, a coterie of MPs, apparatchiks, councillors, journalists and others whose anti-Corbynism continues to be militant. Generally speaking, if these people are MPs, they are either foot-to-the-floor Blairites or soft-left Brownites who have made their peace with Blue Labour positions and even, for the purposes of signalling their un-Corbynlike moderation, various “acceptable” Tories. This is a group for whom “reality” is hard currency.

One particularly invidious example of “hard-bollocked” anti-Corbynism is Jess Phillips, a would-be parliamentary maverick whose stock has seemingly risen every time her predilection for self-promotion becomes more evident. Now the author of a column in the Guardian and, fantastically, a commodity-feminist memoir called Everywoman — One Woman’s Truth About Speaking the Truth, the (very deliberately) conspicuously Brummie MP for Birmingham Yardley has gone out of the way to make herself a cause célèbre for authenticity. Phillips talks incessantly about her West Midlands upbringing whilst typically failing to note that it was entirely middle-class, constantly foregrounds the problems of “abuse” in contemporary politics despite having also boasted of telling Diane Abbott to “fuck off” in a private conversation, and presents herself as an avatar of “saying the unsayable” despite the fact that her statements and positions only ever avoid flippant banality when they are grotesquely offensive. Like Caitlin Moran, mentioned in the previous chapter, she serves as an example of how authentocracy has borrowed aspects of liberation politics (in the cases of Moran and Phillips, from feminism) in order to dismiss reasonable critiques of its actions — such as sending the army onto the streets of London, or of telling the country’s most prominent politician of colour to “fuck off”, say — as the nit-picking of privileged “bros”. Authentocracy’s assertion of a claim over “woke” ideas, as is seen here, serves predominantly to allow it to go on stylising itself as progressive, but it also puts certain limitations on so-called identity politics by suggesting that there is a hard-won, “realistic” version of them whose gains should not be compromised by theoretical, or practical, excess (“My granny from Stafford was a feminist but she’d never call herself one, it was just common sense to her”, and so on).

At least Phillips’ authentocracy is relatively sophisticated. Something more inchoate occurred amongst male MPs at the time of the 2015 leadership contest and its pointless sequel in 2016. Owen Smith is an obvious example: in addition to the cappuccino incident, he kept on falling back into a register that, in the 1990s, would have been known as “New Laddism”. At one point, he claimed that he knew how to win because he overcame “1,200 boys” when he “pulled” his wife; on another occasion, he tweeted a picture of “the World’s Biggest Gobstopper” — you really have to stop and check you’re not making it up with Smith — and suggested it was the “perfect present” for Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s First Minister. When challenged about it, he claimed “it was a bit of political banter”, a defence that is, to put it mildly, hardly watertight. Needless to say, the self-proclaimed feminists who were backing his leadership challenge never had anything to say about this.

Smith wasn’t the only one who wanted to be seen as a “hard-bollocked” bloke. As Corbyn settled into his role, various members of the Parliamentary Labour Party who opposed him adjusted their biographies and background photographs on Twitter so no one would be in any doubt about just how much they liked football. Michael Dugher, John Mann and Dan Jarvis all felt the need to let the public know that, given 140 characters to tell the public the most important things about them, around fifty would be given over to identifying themselves as fans of Barnsley, Nottingham Forest or Leeds. The best (and funniest) example of this came from Chuka Umunna, at almost exactly the time the media began to size him up as a potential anti-Corbynite, pro-EU leadership contender. Widely seen as the technocrat’s technocrat, the epitome of Blairite insipidness, Umunna — literally overnight — amended his biography to announce that he was a supporter of Crystal Palace, the Premier League team nearest his Streatham constituency. The cynicism of the move was comically transparent. Other key cultural identifiers of anti-Corbynism are a liking for curry — Dugher, who stepped down at the 2017 election to go into consultancy, often tweets photographs of his culinary work — guitar music and, of course, the army. For the fortnight before Remembrance Sunday some of the Real Labour cadre can become rather competitive in their need to be photographed wearing the poppy.

There’s a risk, of course, that all of this becomes cheap mockery of “bollock signalling”, a playing to the Corbynite gallery. If it is, perhaps it’s a frustrated response to several years of “Corbynistas” being characterised in the way Parkes seems to be moving towards in the quotation from the Quietus article, namely as ingenués lost somewhere on the road between idealism and wildly irresponsible fantasy. To this caricature can be added seemingly endless accusations of privilege, stupidity, dishonesty and much, much more. Yet maybe there’s a bit of space to be charitable here, to offer a suggestion about where some of the impetus of anti-Corbynism, the bit that isn’t attributable to sheer late-Blairite wrecking, might be coming from.

There is, unquestionably, a section of people like Parkes whose sensibilities are, broadly speaking, left-wing, and who, again broadly, felt at best let down by Blair over a range of issues. A memorable turning point in the relation of some Gen Xers and New Labour came only a year into Blair’s rule, when the benefits system was restructured in an ostentatiously punitive fashion, but the real turning point was the War on Terror, particularly the lying over Iraq’s non-existent WMDs. However, there is a meaningful gap between some of those who could originally be placed in the “let down” demographic but did not ultimately embrace Corbynism and those who did, a gap that has widened and filled with bitterness to the extent that many of those in the former camp now cleave back towards Blair. One explanation for this — and it’s in part hypothetical, but also confirmed by what these lesser-of-two-evils Blairites seem to be saying is that this stems from Corbyn’s (and some of his inner circle, such as Seamus Milne’s) alliances within the anti-war movement.

A lot of this links up with the perception, leapt on gleefully by machinating PLP authentocrats, that Corbyn’s only real concerns are with foreign policy, that he has no interest in ministering to any of the concerns of the “heartlands” as long as there is still an anti-imperialist cause to back somewhere in the world. Such a position overlooks the centrality of anti-imperialist thinking to any socialism worthy of the name, but it’s not really my task here to convince people of this point, which is made far more articulately by many others. Instead, I want to try and think honestly about what it is some find suspicious about the anti-war movement and the turn-of-the-century “protest left”.

One of these suspicions is rather reflexive, and perhaps linked to what student politics looked like around the time of the Iraq War. At my university, East Anglia, there was a perception that those who went on demonstrations (or all the way up to Faslane in Argyll to campaign against nuclear weapons) were predominantly unbothered about forming broader alliances or taking their positions into the political mainstream. Like it or not, there was a uniform amongst activists there, a tie-dyed, white-dreaded, loon- panted aesthetic that was linked to the free party scene, and which many associated with gap years and psy-trance. Political causes all too often became enmeshed with a foggy libertarianism, protests became associated with white kids playing reggae and Manu Chao. From the outside, activism appeared cliquey and often appropriative, unaware of what the register of the subsequent decade would call its “privileges”.

Such criticisms, of course, sound horribly like Orwell at his most spiteful, when he was outing all the people he believed to be cranks and fakes and adventurists. Yet there are more pertinent, and less personal, criticisms to be made. Early-Noughties activism — as I experienced it at East Anglia — seemed to lack argument, or, more specifically, to lack an interest in making precise, patient critiques of what it was opposed to. At times, it seemed to mirror Blairism in its willingness to embrace a sententious moral rhetoric. Like Blair in the period when he was hard-selling war, it was possessed of moral certainty and explanatory abstractions — “evil” for Blair became an ill-defined “capitalism” for the anti-war movement — but it never really seemed to want to narrate how this worked, or to make the links between what was happening in (and in the skies above) Iraq and more workaday, mundane problems. All too often, the protest scene didn’t just seem aesthetically off-putting, it seemed anti-intellectual: approaching it, you were expected to understand innately that something was wrong but there wasn’t that much need to know why. (Occupy and the student protest movements of the late Noughties, for what it’s worth, are clear turning points here.)

There was also some fundamental bad judgement when it came to bedfellows. One perception of Corbyn amongst anti-Corbynites, for example, is that he’s cut from the same cloth as George Galloway, a prominent campaigner against British involvement in the War on Terror but also a left-wing buffoon, a figure who almost epitomises the idea of the self-appointedly “radical” crank. Then, of course, there’s the Socialist Workers Party, whose placards still appear at Momentum demonstrations and who Corbyn has not done half as much as he could do to dissociate himself from, in light of the organisation’s institutionalised misogyny. Again, there are many critiques of the SWP written by people — including revolted ex-members — who are highly specialised in its dynamics and this is not the place to add to this, but these reservations about their presence are in many cases expressed in good faith. On top of this, there’s the pressing issue of anti-semitism within the anti-war movement. While this has been instrumentalised by anti-Corbynite commentators who are absolutely comfortable with ignoring the vilest of prejudices in other quarters, it’s still very hard to deny that there are sections of the left where there is a grave problem. The notion that Corbyn himself shares any of this bigotry, misogyny or crankishness is ridiculous, but he could certainly have done more to remove himself from it.

The failure of the left to build a social movement, rather than a protest movement, in the Blair and Brown years meant that its visibility began to wane, producing a gap in which “the left” could be spoken for. This role was taken up by journalists who, usually in their university days, had once been radical but now wanted to repent the supposed errors of their ways by decrying an alleged betrayal of socialist tradition. Foremost amongst these was Nick Cohen, the Observer opinion writer and Man-About-Soho who wrote a book, What’s Left, which asserted that left-wing antipathy towards capitalism and particularly its American form had led it to abandon any semblance of interest in equitable domestic policies. Of course, this wasn’t true, and Cohen’s real job was furnishing Blair’s illegal war with pseudo-Orwellian justifications, but the “protest left” was not astonishingly good at demonstrating otherwise by building alliances at home. Its intellectual touchstones tended to be declamatory — Noam Chomsky, John Pilger — rather than geared towards ideology critique or detailed analysis of the kind of reality management Cohen was engaged in.

Cohen has continued to be an antagonist of the left, but it feels that his increased ire in the face of Corbynism — he called Corbyn supporters “fucking fools” in a recent Observer piece — is stoked largely by the fact that his targets elude his limited understanding. He seems to think, as many centrists do, that he is fighting the Noughties protest movement, emblematised by Corbyn, but he isn’t, and this is where we might return to Parkes’ invocation of “graininess”. Perhaps it is not (reified) “reality” that is “grainy” in this circumstance, but Corbynism in the lens of its critics, and the principle act of misrecognition they commit is assuming that the man and the movement are absolutely identical. This simply isn’t true, and were the centrist media genuinely interested in engaging with Corbynism rather than merely smearing it, they may be interested to see that the movement contains a good deal of (usually comradely, but sometimes quite hostile) disagreement. Corbyn himself has numerous qualities that are useful to the left — he is palpably personally nice, but also helpfully stubborn — but those who vote for him, and particularly those who offer activist support in Momentum, are still in the process of negotiating exactly what the values of Corbynism might be.

This movement includes — and this is by no means an exhaustive list — social democrats, democratic socialists, anti-war activists, anti-racism activists, old communists, Twitter communists, trade unionists, LGBT groups, pro-EU factions, anti-EU factions, people who want to renationalise British Rail, old-fashioned liberals who like Corbyn the jam-making gardener, CND veterans, university students, football supporters, Bennite nostalgists and post-capitalist futurologists. It is not easy to categorise, but one thing about it is certain: it has come about as various particular issues are linked together through the figure of Corbyn, whose real success has been in producing a sense of common interest despite the likes of Cohen insisting on his sectional nature. As this new wave filters into the Labour Party, challenging the hegemony of the predictably irritated Progress and Blue Labour factions, various ideas and ideologies are brought into contact with one another, leading to a standard of collegiate discussion that, frankly, seemed impossible in the moribund Miliband era.

Yet this is continuously characterised in the most point-missing of ways. Corbyn’s supporters, we hear, are not “real Labour voters” and used to belong to the Greens or the SWP before this opportunity for entryism appeared (this criticism is frequently made by people who also believe that the party must win votes back from the Tories and the SNP, making it somewhat contradictory). Moreover, their opinions are homogenous, and their politics are carried out online rather than on the mythical #LabourDoorstep, meaning there’s an “echo chamber” effect in which the opinions of authentic Britain go unheard. These beliefs are mediated through that conceptual keystone of centrist thought, “post-truth politics”, meaning that Corbynism is portrayed as a left-wing populism analogous to the right-wing version headed up by Trump in America and Nigel Farage in the UK. A Corbyn victory, it is suggested, would just be Brexit Part II, another defeat for rational, objective, triangulated politics. Nearly every member of the centrist commentariat, it seems, currently has a book out exploring the “post-truth” landscape and lamenting the rise of the internet, as though the traditional media has always been a vehicle of uncontaminated truth.

Although there are millions of them, so-called “Corbynistas”, supposedly characterised by servile devotion to the man and feverish misunderstandings of how the hard-bollocked world works, continue to be marked as fair game for many mainstream political writers. The latter remain addicted to the claim that working-class voters refuse Corbynism, despite the fact that the only surveys suggesting as such use the hugely outdated NRS metrics (A, B, C1, “C2DE”), which were initially developed for market research purposes in the 1960s. It never occurs to them to consider that the meanings of “working class” may have changed substantially in an employment ecology of low-paid clerical work and precarious or zero-hour contracts. In these circumstances, political journalism is “political” only in the narrowest way possible, focusing only on internecine Westminster matters.

The moribundity of mainstream political journalism is countered by writers emerging from a zone of the precariousness that the traditional media still largely refuses to acknowledge. With so few opportunities opening in journalism “proper” for those who don’t have a nepotistic way in, and with permanent academic work hard to find in the aftermath of funding-hungry universities deliberately oversubscribing their PhD programmes, a new category of young, pissed-off intellectuals is emerging. One of the things that defines these writers is that, bereft of the institutional protection full-time journalistic or academic employment would confer, they have very little to lose and do not need to submit to top-down diktats to the same degree that the self-appointedly “authentic” media do. It is by no means a stretch to suggest that the hostility to Corbynism of professional political journalists like Cohen, Chris Deerin, Jane Merrick and others is motivated in part by a sense of threat generated by the spectacle of writers who are willing to take risks in challenging the status quo. The willful misrepresentations of Momentum on the part of the self-appointed professionals belie not only disingenuousness but desperation: even as they amplify their claims to objectivity, they become less and less open to having an objective discussion about what Corbynism entails, fearful of being outmanoeuvred by the deterritorialised neo-commentariat.

Corbynism, then, is constantly outpacing the “real” media who claim to speak for “real” people, and its burgeoning attractiveness to the population at large should be taken as evidence that the claims to authenticity on the part of the media establishment are getting creakier on an almost daily basis. Corbyn himself might not be the irreproachable agent of political deliverance, but the movement that bears his name has made possible a critical spirit that threatens the claims of a reified authenticity. However, there is a real risk to this from within the movement itself, and this comes in two forms. One is what might be called “euphoric Corbynism”, which over-invests in the figure of the leader and therefore opens itself to disappointment, disillusionment and yet more left melancholia about lost opportunities — as if there hasn’t been enough already — should he depart. Corbynism, in other words, needs to be possible without Corbyn. A greater risk, however, is a “triangulating” version of Corbynism that makes concessions to a version of public opinion spun by the authentocrats. We have already seen this take place in relation to immigration, a lapse of judgement that the political theorist Chris Green critiques as “a certain quasi-Gramscian mode of thinking which sees hegemonic struggle as essentially a task of triangulation, of making gradual economic reform palatable to the kinds of people who want more police on our streets, more nuclear weapons, and so on.”

This “bad” Gramscian thinking constitutes a failure of nerve. Despite the fact that the emergence of Corbynism as a political force has massively readjusted the terms of political debate in contemporary Britain, such “left-wing” triangulation operates on an entirely defensive setting. It suggests a timidity about openly challenging the discursive prominence of “defence” and “nationalism” and nuclear weapons in the public sphere, and underestimates the extent to which flippantly accepted narratives can be interrogated and altered. These errors might be put under the heading of a “class-first” Corbynism which, much like some of the supporters of Bernie Sanders across the Atlantic, is nudged by the media into accepting a divisive narrative about the interests of the “white working class”. There would be a great political irony in Corbynism finally terminating the Blairite ascendancy and then succumbing to an authentocracy from within, one which would see it operating on terms dictated originally by UKIP and the Tory right. Were this to happen, the great possibility of the moment, the reconciliation of the old, workerist, left and new left liberation politics, currently working out vows without committing to them, would be lost.

Some have characterised Corbynism as itself a form of sententiousness mired in longing for the good old days of the post-war consensus, a period, it is said, when self-denying socialist moralists thrived. One line of attack in the era of the leadership contests was that Corbyn was a joyless materialist whose devotion to equality forbade not only hedonism but even tamer species of pleasure. This would be a new politics of killjoy sanctimony, various Observer columnists warned their readers. Yet the moment of Corbynism amounts to the most stringent testing of cultural and political sententiousness in Britain for decades, instantiating as it does a project of holding the authority of the authentic to account that has vast progressive potential. Frothy coffee and “little biscuits” may soon cease to offer leverage in politics, and reality might no longer seem so “hard-bollocked”. There’s clearly much to be done, but the tear in the grey curtain is widening.

Selected Bibliography

Books

Ackroyd, Peter (2004) Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination, Vintage.

Adorno, Theodor (2002) The Jargon of Authenticity, Routledge.

Anderson, Benedict (2016) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Verso.

Barthes, Roland (1987) “The Reality Effect”, in The Rustle of Language, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Bewes, Timothy (1997) Cynicism and Postmodernity, Verso.

Brooke-Rose, Christine (2015) The Middlemen: A Satire, Verbivoracious Press.

Brown, Wendy (2000) “Resisting Left Melancholy”, in Without Guarantees (edited by Paul Gilroy, Lawrence Grossberg, and Angela McRobbie), Verso.

Burton, Robert (2017) The Anatomy of Melancholy, CreateSpace.

Calder, Angus (1992) The Myth of the Blitz, Pimlico.

Cartwright, Anthony (2017) Iron Towns, Serpent’s Tail.

Chaucer, Geoffrey (2005) “The Reeve’s Tale”, in Canterbury Tales, Penguin.

Dawson, Andy (2016) Get in the Sea: An Apoplectic Guide to Modern Life, Michael Joseph.

Esty, Jed (2003) A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England, Princeton University Press.

Fisher, Mark (2009) Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, Zero Books.

——— (2014) Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, Zero Books.

Gaskell, Elizabeth (1996) Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life, Penguin.

Gervais, David (1993) Literary Englands: Versions of Englishness in Modern Writing, Cambridge University Press.

Gilroy, Paul (2005) Postcolonial Melancholia, Columbia University Press.

Glasman, Maurice etc. (eds.), (2011) The Labour Tradition and the Politics of Paradox, Lawrence and Wishart.

Goodhart, David (2017) The Road to Somewhere: The New Tribes Shaping British Politics, Penguin.

Green, Chris (2017) “Poor Gramsci”, in New Socialist (online). Available at: https://newsocialist.org.uk/poor-gramsci/

Green, Henry (2016) Back, New York Review of Books.

Harris, Alexandra (2015) Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper, Thames and Hudson.
Harris, John (2011) “You can’t just catch a bus to a job that doesn’t exist”, in Guardian (online).
Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/jul/06/job-south-wales-fantasy

Harrisson, Tom (1990) Living Through the Blitz, Penguin.

Hatherley, Owen (2012) A New Kind of Bleak: Journeys Through Urban Britain, Verso.

——— (2017) The Ministry of Nostalgia Consuming Austerity (Keep Calm and Carry On), Verso.

Hill, Dave (2017) “How Islington Shaped Jeremy Corbyn”, in New Statesman (online). Available at https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/june2017/2017/05/corbyn-and-cupcakes-howislington-shaped-labour-leader

Jameson, Fredric (1992) Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Verso.

Kamp, David (1997) “London Swings! Again”, in Vanity Fair (online). Available at: https://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/1997/03/london199703

Kennedy, Joe (2016) Games Without Frontiers, Repeater Books.

Kingsnorth, Paul (2015) The Wake, Unbound.

Kristeva, Julia (1994) Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Columbia University Press.

Lukacs, György, (1975) History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, Merlin Press.

Macfarlane, Robert (2015) “The Eeriness of the English Countryside”, in Guardian (online). Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/apr/10/eeriness-english-countryside-robertmacfarlane

——— (2013) The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, Penguin.

——— (2017) The Wild Places, Granta.

Milton, John (2003) Paradise Lost, Penguin.

Moretti, Franco (2013) The Bourgeois, Verso.

Niven, Alex (2011) Folk Opposition, Zero Books.

O’Brien, Sean (2016) “The Chase”, in Herbet and Jackson (eds.) New Boots and Pantisocracies, Smokestack Books.

Orwell, George (2001) The Road to Wigan Pier, Penguin.

Parkes, Taylor (2015) “Last House on the Left: Following Jeremy Corbyn’s Campaign Trail”, in the Quietus (online). Available at: http://thequietus.com/articles/18714-jeremy-corbyn-labour-election-rallypolicies

Parkes, Taylor and Simon Price, (1995) “Romo Manifesto”, in Melody Maker.

Pearson, Harry (1995) The Far Corner: A Mazy Dribble Through North-East Football, Abacus.

Priestley, J.B. (2005) English Journey, Great Northern Books.

Rutherford, Jonathan (2017) “Why Labour Lost and How It Can Win: An Essay on Rebuilding a

Broad Church”, in New Statesman (online). Availableat: https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2017/07/why-labour-lost-and-how-it-can-win-essay-rebuilding-broad-church

Savage, Jon and Simon Frith (1993) “Pearls and Swine: The Intellectuals and the Mass Media”, in New Left Review. Available at: https://newleftreview.org/I/198/jon-savage-simon-frith-pearls-and-swine-intellectuals-and-the-media

Stallabrass, Julian (2006) High Art Lite: The Rise and Fall of Young British Art, Verso.

Stubbs, David (2016) 1996 and the End of History, Repeater Books.

Taylor, Elizabeth (2006) In a Summer Season, Virago.

Thomas, Edward (2011) “Adlestrop”, in Hollis, Matthew (ed.) Selected Poems of Edward Thomas, Faber & Faber.

Tolkien, J.R.R. (1995) The Lord of the Rings, HarperCollins.

Toscano, Alberto (2017) “Notes on Late Fascism”, in Historical Materialism (online). Available at: http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/blog/notes-latefascism

Wanga, Jude (2017) “Islington Redefined”, in New Socialist (online). Available at: https://newsocialist.org.uk/islington-redefined/

Williams, Raymond (2013) “Culture is Ordinary”, in Raymond Williams on Culture and Society: Essential Writings, Sage.

Williams, Zoe (2003) “The Cool Con”, in Guardian(online). Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2003/oct/25/britishidentity.zoewilliams

Film

Bad Taste, dir. Peter Jackson, 1987

Batman Begins, dir. Christopher Nolan, 2005

Casino Royale, dir. Martin Campbell, 2006

Goldfinger, dir. Guy Hamilton, 1964

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, dir. Peter Jackson, 2012

Insomnia, dir. Christopher Nolan, 2002

La Haine, dir. Mathieu Kassovitz, 1995

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, dir. Peter Jackson, 2001

Meet the Feebles, dir. Peter Jackson, 1989

Memento, dir. Christopher Nolan, 2000

Michael Clayton, dir. Tony Gilroy, 2007

Quantum of Solace, dir. Marc Forster, 2008

Skyfall, dir. Sam Mendes, 2012

Television

Bad Influence!, ITV

Brass Eye, Chris Morris, Channel 4

Broadchurch, Chris Chibnall, ITV

Crystal Maze, Jacques Antoine, Channel 4

The Fall, Allan Cubitt, BBC Two

The Fast Show, Paul Whitehouse and Charlie Higson, BBC Two

Game of Thrones, David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, HBO

Gamesmaster, Jane Hewland, Channel 4

Goodnight Sweetheart, Maurice Gran and Laurence

Marks, BBC One

The Great British Menu, BBC Two

Happy Valley, Sally Wainwright, BBC One

Keeping Up Appearances, Roy Clarke, BBC One

Nathan Barley, Charlie Brooker and Chris Morris, Channel 4

Red Dwarf, Grant Naylor, BBC Two

Shooting Stars, Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer, BBC

Two The Vicar of Dibley, Richard Curtis and Paul Mayhew-Archer, BBC One

Acknowledgements

This book was written in angry haste over the summer of 2017 and, first of all, I’d like to acknowledge the camaraderie and encouragement of a wide variety of people encountered both in person and online as I lurched towards the tight deadline I’d given myself. In a way, it feels like a collaboration, an attempt to transcribe a productive, often hyperactive, conversation that was taking place at the time.

More specifically, I’d like to thank everyone at Repeater and Watkins who has been involved in this book and my last one: Tariq Goddard, of course, but also Josh Turner, Alex Niven, Tamar Shlaim, Phoebe Colley and John Tintera.

Working on this project has also allowed me to draw connections between essays and reviews written over the last six or seven years for the Quietus, When Saturday Comes, Review 31, 3:AM, Poetry Review, and New Socialist. I’d deeply grateful to the editors who have commissioned and supported my writing as I’ve gradually elaborated the ideas brought together here.

Four people got heavily involved in the discussion about authentocracy in the despairing aftermath of the 2015 General Election and have therefore substantially guided the direction of this work. They are Robert Vaughan, Tom Gann, Chris Green and Owen Hatherley: I’m significantly indebted to them. Thanks also to those who later provided anecdotes, reading recommendations and observations, especially Eugene Brennan, Dominic Walker and Dan Howdon.

As ever, I’d like to nod in my family’s direction here, but, this time, particularly towards my dad. This book draws heavily on conversations about class and identity we’ve had going all the way back to a pub on Arran when I was sixteen. Thanks for all the expansive, idea-forming phone conversations over the years.

Finally, I’d like to express my profoundest gratitude to my wife Lizzy, who read early drafts and helped set my course as well as more generally allowing me to feel I could get this done, and our son Sam, born on the last day of the year Authentocrats was written. Loads of love to both of you.

Repeater Books

is dedicated to the creation of a new reality. The landscape of twenty-first-century arts and letters is faded and inert, iven by fashionable cynicism, egotistical self-reference and nostalgia for the recent past. Repeater intends to add its oice to those movements that wish to enter history and assert control over its currents, gathering together scattered and isolated voices with those who have already called for an escape from Capitalist Realism. Our desire is to publish in every sphere and genre, combining vigorous dissent and a pragmatic willingness to succeed where messianic abstraction and quiescent co-option have stalled: abstention is not an option: we are alive and we don’t agree.

Published by Repeater Books

An imprint of Watkins Media Ltd

19-21 Cecil Court

London

WC2N 4EZ

UK

www.repeaterbooks.com

A Repeater Books paperback original 2018

1

Distributed in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York.

Copyright © Joe Kennedy 2018

Joe Kennedy asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

Cover design: Johnny Bull

Typography and typesetting: Epub Services
Typefaces: Meridien

ISBN: 9781912248179
Ebook ISBN: 9781912248186

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.