Rent-a-rant

The wonderful thing, at least from a humour viewpoint, about the English middle classes is their ability to make mountains from molehills, to take a small 'offence' and turn it into grand issue of principle, riding as many hobby-horses along the way as they can round up. The message quoted below is a prime example. It's taken from a mailing list for fans of Watford FC of which I've been a member for a good decade or so. The list usually pootles along quietly enough, with the occasional hotter contribution if, say, we've been tanked 3-0 at home by Crewe. A bit like a slowly bubbling mud pool. Now and then, and very unpredictably, the list explodes into raging 'discussion' on a seemingly innocuous topic, and this is the cue for the Green Ink Brigade to emerge from their dens, mouths foaming. A bit like a sudden geyser in the mud pool.

Yesterday a list member posted a mini-rant about receiving a parking ticket after going to the Watford-Sunderland match on Tuesday night. The next thing you know, there's a thread with 28 messages on this, plus subsidiary threads about parking popping up all over the place. The contribution below, from a list member who I'll simply call Hi-Ho, is the biggest mountain that was made out this particular molehill, and I'll let it pass mostly without comment. I did take particular offence at the insult to traffic wardens as my sister's long-term partner, Antonio, a quiet Italian who's one of the most pleasant, gentle and genial blokes you could ever meet, was a traffic warden in Hackney for a year or so, picking up barely 10k/year and getting regular verbal abuse and threats. He didn't do the job for the "power" it gave him, he did it because he needed the sodding money, and he got out as soon as he found a better job as a postie. As for the rant about asylum seekers, that's pure self-parody, but it does illustrate wonderfully the way the GIB can bring in all their favourite hobby horses into an argument.

> I agree with Jon. Most parking attendants are officious little pricks
> who get off on their little power.
>
> This is yet another example of broke councils obtaining money from people
> who have money - ie. the motorists. Jon - you should just go down to
> Heathrow Airport tomorrow morning, hand your parking fine to the first
> Asylum Seeker you see, which shouldn't be hard, thereby cutting out the
> middle man. The said Asylum Seeker can then put the money towards a new
> mobile phone.
>
> And Doug, are you sure you are an IT worker, you come across as a left
> wing Social Worker. "Their job is to look after ALL Watford's residents
> " ... Like parking on a grass verge at night time really harms the
> local residents. It's all about balancing the books - taking from the
> have's to give to the have nots, a Labour Government Special.

Bye bye Aldborough

There was a story at the fag-end of Channel 4 news last night about how Aldborough on the Norfolk coast, famous (so the report said) for artists, composers, and luvvies in general, was in danger of becoming an island due to coastal erosion. This is hardly a surprise: most of East Anglia is reclaimed land which is increasingly indefensible due to sea level rising. What caught my attention was the comments of the owner of a tower near the village, which is now barely 10 metres from the sea. He said something like: "the government spends billions on defending borders here and overseas, so why can't it spend money on defending our borders against the sea?"

This shows a staggering lack of understanding of natural processes, and a blind self-centred parochialism of staggering proportions. I remember hearing a similar sentiment on the radio years ago from some old guy who lived near Easington on the East Yorkshire coast complaining about the lack of sea defences, who said that (I paraphrase) "we defeated the Germans in two world wars, so why can't we can defeat the sea?". This is so typically English, in two ways:

1. A bullheaded 'bulldog spirit' that believes that indomitable patriotic will can defeat any threat to the nation, regardless of its nature. The glorious Dunkirk spirit (although Dunkirk was a defeat, but what the hey).

2. The raising of grand moral and political principle to cover parochial self-interest. It's like when there are boundary disputes between neighbours, where each claims a foot of useless garden as "our property" - these are always dressed up as fights over grand issues, not petty squabbles over nothing. "I'm not doing it just for myself, it's the principle of the thing that counts." Well, matey, if it's the principle of the thing, how come you've never before taken up cudgels on behalf of all other victims of injustice? How come you suddenly decide that there's a principle, nay a human right, at stake once Mr Jones from next door starts planting on the edge of your lawn? Once you've won your battle with him, are you going to offer solidarity and help to others 'fighting' for the same 'principle'? Are you going to become a flying crusader for houseowner's property rights? Let me guess the answer...

It also completely ignores physical reality. I used to live in Hull, and frequently visited the Holderness coast which is a marvellously quiet place. This coast is eroding at the rate of 3 metres a year on average - in undefended places far more - for the simple reason that the whole of Holderness is composed of boulder clay laid down by glaciers in the most recent Ice Ages. In some 16,000 years time, a blink of an eye in geological time, the East Yorkshire coast will be along the chalk escarpment from Bridlington to Hessle, where the Humber bridge starts - everything east of this line will have been eroded away. This will happen - it's a natural process that can't be stopped without inordinately expensive countermeasures which would have incalculable and disastrous consequences. For the residents of Hornsea, Withernsea (truly a town where "every day is like Sunday", as Morrissey sung), Easington and the rest, to complain that they're not being defended is simply pissing in the wind. As it happens, these towns are being defended, but all the defences do is move the erosion to non-defended areas, so slowly but surely they're becoming peninsulas.

So why not put defences all down the Holderness coast? Well, even if it was worth defending - would you spend 100s of millions keeping an awful dump like Withernsea on the map? - there would be serious consequences. John Pethick, in his inaugural lecture at Hull University when he was made a Chair of Coastal Studies (then was head-hunted by Cambridge soon after) which I went to, explained in simple terms that defending Holderness would result in the flooding of Hull and serious damage to the Low Countries. Why? Because the sediment from the erosion (the reason why the sea off the coast is brown) is deposited at the mouth of the Humber, reducing tidal surges (and Hull already has a tidal reach of 10 metres) into the estuary, and over time Holderness sediment is also transported across the sea to the Low Countries helping keep them above water.

But do the people of Holderness care about this? Do they put it above their narrow parochial interest? Do they feck! John Pethick is loathed in the area for stating the simple truth, that Holderness will go into the sea, as it has been doing ever since the glaciers retreated. Any attempt to sensibly manage coastal retreat is greeted with howls of protest. The residents scream and yell for more defences, not caring about the consequences for others. And some, like yer man at Easington, make it into a Churchillian crusade against the 'enemy', the sea.

And it doesn't seem to be any different down in Norfolk and East Anglia, where rising sea levels will steadily reclaim the land that was borrowed from it. Pethick and others have outlined plans for 'managed retreat', in preference to hard defences (walls, rocks) which just don't work (cf. the Mississippi floods a few years ago) - the sea would be allowed to encroach onto land near the coast which would spread its erosive energy over a much larger area than a narrow coastline, and into the bargain create some handy wildlife habitats. Yet even this is being resisted by the narrow-minded locals, going by TV programmes I've seen, who seem to think they can do what King Cnut famously couldn't.

Let's face it. If you go to live in a town on an eroding coastline then you accept that fact - to do otherwise, to move there then scream for protection as if you're an innocent victim of nature's ravages, is just plain 'bad faith', to use the existentialist term. You do have the right to call on society to help relocate you, and IMO it would do the residents of Withernsea, Hornsea, and the rest, a major favour moving them further inland to new houses and new towns (it would improve their inbred gene pool, for a start). You could maybe legitimately call for some degree of compensation from the State and/or insurance companies for your losses. What you can't in any conscience do is complain about unstoppable natural processes.

PS: there's a useful map at the University of Hull which charts coastal erosion in Holderness over time.

This Ingerlan

Today Ingerlan played Wales at Old Trafford (sorry, The Theatre of Dreams™) in a World Cup qualifier, running out 2-0 victors, not unexpectedly. Normally I wouldn't give a toss, my attitude towards Ingerlan being one of agressive disinterest. All week the Press, even the feckin' Grauniad, was full of fluff hyping up the "big match" which I was able to skim over. Then I figured I'd go into Nottingham centre this afternoon so that I could both avoid the match on TV/radio/sub-ether waveband and take advantage of a nice quiet city centre. At one point in my wanderings I made the mistake of walking into Dixons to look for some cheapo headphones, and of course the Ingerlan match was on the big plasma-screen TVs with volume turned up. And what was the first thing I heard? "God Save the Queen"! And not the Sex Pistols version either.

This says it all about this country, This England, This Happy Breed (cough!), that the lumpen vanguards of its patriotism sing a song celebrating subjection and imperialism, which invokes a stolid, jaw-jutting, racist, lachrymose "my country right or wrong" nationalism and a nostalgia for a mythical glorious past when Ingerlan ruled the waves and Johnny Foreigner got a dose of cold steel if he was uppity. Another of their fave grooves is Land of Hope and Glory, an even more blatant imperialist celebration, with the immortal line "Britons never ever ever shall be slaves" sung without any sense of irony by the red-shirted 3-lions-on-my-shirt hordes working as wage-slaves in crap jobs in an economy ruled by multinationals and a State more authoritarian than any other in Europe, which itself is under the subjugation of the US hegemony. Britons have never been more enslaved than they are now, but these Sun- and Star- and Daily Mail-reading knuckledraggers haven't the consciousness to comprehend this simple fact. And these little ditties are positively family-friendly compared to the old favourites of "No surrender to the IRA" and "I'd rather be a paki than a Turk".

I despair of This England: backward, reactionary, deeply racist, and in terminal decline, its people with the political consciousness of a lobotomised fruit fly. A people that nurtures the rise of the petit-nationalist and petit-bourgeois UK Independence Party, wonderfully described by Jeremy Hardy as "fascism lite", and the dangerously fascist BNP. A people that accepts as normal the presence of Nazis in council chambers in Northern towns. A people that accepts the dehumanisation of refugees and their incarceration in modern-day concentration camps. A people that bullishly celebrates its own decline and its deliberate isolation from the rest of the world. A people that, even now, a year into the invasion of Iraq when even the most brain-damaged knows that it's a war of plunder the excuses for which have been shown to be complete and premeditated lies, gives a 42% approval rating for the invasion, not far down from the 53% support at the start of the war [1]. Can you believe it? Still, after all that's happened, nearly half of the UK public supports the war. Staggering.

There's no hope left for Ingerlan. Come the inevitable Euro referendum it will just as inevitably vote No, isolating the UK from the EU and putting it further into the US sphere of control. As the country declines, economically, socially and politically, its rabid nationalism, a form of national paranoid schizophrenia, will become every more virulent and violent and xenophobic.

[1] YouGov poll, 7/10/04

Wot, another weblog?

Time to start a new weblog, as my rants about England are darkening the atmosphere of the Hamster weblog. As my girlfriend says, you don't go to a log called Harry's Happy Hamster Home and expect to see dark despairing pieces about the country going to hell in a handcart. So instead I'll put rants about life in England in the noughties in this log from now on.