LOOK TO THE FUTURE NOW – IT’S ONLY JUST BEGUN…

Look to the Future Now - It's only Just Begun...

Thursday, 23 June, 2016

I went to a brass band concert last Saturday evening. It took place in a heritage centre down the hill from our village. I think this probably makes me a bad person.

But wait - I should begin, as Kenneth Williams probably said in that lost 1975 masterpiece Carry On Up the Referendum, by laying out my credentials.

I’m old, white, male. A husband, father and grandfather. A card-carrying member of the Labour Party.  Not Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party. A lifelong Guardian reader.

I heard my Dad talk repeatedly in the early ‘70s about the theoretical virtues of world government. Like millions of others, he had served for six years in World War II. More singularly than most, he had reached the conclusion that the only way to avoid such conflicts in future lay in making common cause. He voted enthusiastically in Harold Wilson’s EEC referendum to stay in Europe - and so did I.

I’m a Remainer to this day.    

But I’ve been much struck throughout - and particularly lately - by the desolate, threadbare nature of debate on both sides of the argument. So great a matter. Such a puny level of engagement and leadership by the politicians. So many lazy lies and venomous half-truths.

Most journalism has been like trench warfare. Predictable and fruitless, rancid with the smell of space-filling gas and the echo of foam-flecked orders from proprietor-generals behind the lines we read. The BBC and other media have been hobbled by the arid demands of impartiality. Meanwhile, Facebook continues to publish pictures of cats and Twitter has demonstrated that sewers can be electronically pure but still horribly unclean to the nth human degree.

All of this – and a shattering added component of jaw-dropping tragedy – has produced a harsh dislocation among us which to me looks possibly beyond repair, regardless of who wins today. I’ve recently seen the divide described like this: -

Leavers are xenophobic, insular, narrow-minded, self-regarding, racist, confused, brainless, extremist, hateful, economically-illiterate, un-Christian Little-Englanders and swivel-eyed conspiracy theorists.

Remainers are sneering, aloof, arrogant, vicious, supercilious, evil, unhinged, hypocritical, ageist, lying, duplicitous, cavalier, collaborators, traitors and bullies.

Charles Sorley, a little over a century ago, was strangely prescient: -

And some are mounted on swift steeds of thought

and some drag sluggish feet of stable toil.

Yet all, as though they furiously sought,

twist turn and tussle, close and cling and coil.

Odd, therefore, in the midst of this mighty threshing about that I find myself irritatedly hung up on the transient words of a low-level one-trick newspaper columnist (the trick is, as someone had it, “passing insults off as wit”) – A A Gill of the Sunday Times.

Two middle-aged youngsters on my Facebook timeline have posted and commended as admirable a recent longish piece by him on the virtues of Remain.  A A Gill is 62 and therefore not an obvious poster-boy for the fading young. He’s the man who wrote that Mary Beard’s physical appearance put her “this far from being the subject of a C4 documentary.” He meant The Undateables. He’s the man who referred to Clare Balding in a television review as “the dyke on a bike.” He’s the man who is Jeremy Clarkson’s best friend. Just a bit of context there…

But old A A is actually in my camp and boy, did he tear into those pesky Brexiteers. Here’s a taste: -

“We all know what “getting our country back” means. It’s snorting a line of the most pernicious and debilitating Little English drug, nostalgia. The warm, crumbly, honey-coloured, collective “yesterday” with its fond belief that everything was better back then, that Britain (England, really) is a worse place now than it was at some foggy point in the past where we achieved peak Blighty. It’s the knowledge that the best of us have been and gone, that nothing we can build will be as lovely as a National Trust Georgian country house, no art will be as good as a Turner, no poem as wonderful as If, no writer a touch on Shakespeare or Dickens, nothing will grow as lovely as a cottage garden, no hero greater than Nelson, no politician better than Churchill, no view more throat-catching than the White Cliffs and that we will never manufacture anything as great as a Rolls-Royce or Flying Scotsman again.”

“This is all the expression of a sentimental nostalgia. In the Brexiteer’s mind’s eye is the old Pathé newsreel of Donald Campbell, of John Logie Baird with his television, Barnes Wallis and his bouncing bomb, and Robert Baden-Powell inventing boy scouts in his shed.”

“There is a reason that most of the people who want to leave the EU are old while those who want to remain are young: it’s because the young aren’t infected with Bisto nostalgia. They don’t recognise half the stuff I’ve mentioned here. They’ve grown up in the EU and at worst it’s been neutral for them.”

You begin to see how A A has made me start to doubt myself. After all, I’m demonstrably old. I quite like the odd bit of nostalgia. I kind of do think it’s unlikely that rivals to Shakespeare and Dickens will emerge anytime ever. I revere the memory of Barnes Wallis and his bouncing bomb, not to mention Richard Todd playing Guy Gibson, not to mention the Dam Busters March. And to me, cottage gardens are beyond beautiful. A A doesn’t mention brass bands in his roll of infamy but the Grimethorpe Colliery boys and girls did play Nimrod on Saturday evening, and it’s likely that Elgar is somewhere on his little list.  And then he hits me with these killer left-right combinations; peak Blighty; Bisto nostalgia. No hope for me. I’m on the floor, crawling brokenly towards my saviours, my true buddies, in Brexit, where I obviously belong. I clearly don’t have any right to love Europe and want success for the EU.

He’s vicious and funny, contemptuous and dismissive in the default mode which is his trademark. Clearly he makes some Remainers – like my two wrinkled semi-youths - feel warm inside. After all, Brexiteers are all like Farage, aren’t they? Braying, angry hate machines, none without a semi- coherent Nazi thought, all definitely thinking that If is the best poem ever written and each one needing to be shovelled aside with no afterthought as Remain advances to sunlit glory.

Gill’s writing is symptomatic of a deepening tendency in politics in favour of the laddish bludgeon. But I don’t believe this kind of cheap hustling for a cause is useful. It’s not useful because it makes simplicity from complexity. It kills the possibility of dialogue in favour of irreversible hammer blows and abuse. It sets up ingrained enemies and denies the possibility of understanding and reconciliation. It’s a version of demagoguery as rancid as anything Farage produces but the difference is that Farage is, for good or ill, serious. Gill is a bully who does it for a laugh.

I suppose the lesson is that both sides have pernicious bombasticos among their cohorts and that full-throttle campaigning will always produce scraped knees and bruised knuckles. But I think we need to overlay the referendum question with another. How will we calm ourselves down and get back in tolerant step together after Thursday? Whatever the decision, it’ll stick. And we have to live with it – and one another.

So I’ll keep with my nostalgia and brass bands and Barnes Wallis if you don’t mind. And quite out of A A Gill’s expectation, I’ll vote Remain today with an ancient, wizened heart – valuing the past but looking to the future.

Any passing hipsters fancy a sesh with the DVD of Brassed Off and a flagon of Sanatogen over ice?