The little caesars of the welfare state

The late Sir Rhodes Boyson openly admitted that during his time as headmaster he dealt with misbehaviour in the following ways. With a boy who had climbed onto a roof: “I climbed the drainpipe, collected the boy and we came down the drainpipe together. I held him by various parts of his anatomy, thumping and kicking him all the way down.” With a group of girls smoking in the bogs: “I instructed my caretaking staff to obtain lengths of fire hose and connect these to the water hydrants.” And then hosed them down. These stories are repeated in his Telegraph obituary.

As they say, you don't need to be a Freudian to think something odd was going on there. Boyson was, in his prime, a representative type: a mid-ranking functionary of the welfare state. Short back and sides, clean collar and ties, polished shoes. People of little humour or small talk. Total belief that their own correctness and in 'the rules'. They expected the children, patient or tenants they oversaw to know their place.

These people were reliable servants of collectivism and sincere believers in public service. Boyson began his political career as a Labour Councillor and was head of a comprehensive. (His father was Christian Socialist.) But it's not hard to see how some public servants became supporters of Thatcherism, especially the appeal to restore social discipline in face of open challenge to their authority. Phil has suggested that the left in Britain believes in a 'myth of neo-liberalism' - we were all happy collectivists until an elite group of monetarists took over and ruined it. This is why the current nostalgia for the post-1945 period, extending even to calls to bring back factory work, is myopic. Both the left and the right currently conspire to not understand what all the unrest in the 1970s was actually about. 

In Jack Rosenthal’s drama about prospective London cab drivers trying to pass 'the Knowledge', Nigel Hawthorne plays a terrifying examiner, Mr Burgess. It is a perfect distillation of this social type and made me think of Martin in Brimstone and Treacle. Or perhaps he is a public sector cousin of Basil Fawlty. 20 years later a BBC documentary about 'the Knowledge' focused partly on the creepy Mr Ormes, who clearly enjoys toying with the pupils. The class hierarchies are very starkly drawn in the both the drama and the documentary. The little Caesar types were still going strong in the Public Carriage Office and perhaps elsewhere too.

High on his own supply

"Simon Heffer ... came to see me about his book on Enoch Powell. At the end I asked, "Did Powell ever talk to you about the death of Mountbatten?"

"Oh yes," he said. "He thought the Americans killed him."

I said, "Powell had told me that but I thought it was so way out, I didn't want to mention it to you."

"Oh yes," Heffer said, "he thinks the Americans killed Airey Neave as well, because they wanted to get a NATO base in Northern Ireland."

[Tony Benn, Free at Last! Diaries 1991-2001, p.370]

Like A Naughty Schoolboy

I was just thinking about one of my pet peeves the other day, and it's that people think that "The Eton Rifles" is actually about Eton School and its braying inmates' barracking of the Peoples' Right To Work march. I suppose it's because there's always been a certain kind of writer who thinks it's clever to make out that Weller is rather dim and a bit humourless and literal. But what the song is actually about is how hard it is to present working class protest; the difficulty of maintaining commitment, of keeping people motivated, especially in comparison with the way the well-drilled Ruling Class appear to effortlessly display a united front.

The difference is in the disparity of self-interest. The Elite's class interests generally coincide with their individual self-interest, whereas for the working class, especially those with ambition, class interests and self-interest are often divergent, and it's frequently that those who make the most noise, who whip up the most protest, do so in the knowledge that the most convenient way for them to be silenced is to be welcomed into the fold. Watching those who you trusted the most, who showed the greatest capacity for leadership, whose rhetoric had the most fire, quietly sell out at the first opportunity is always a bitter, deflating experience.

And that's where we come to the song's other message; the necessity of having to dust yourself down and start again from where you've been abandoned. Because some of the lads said they'll be back next week, and Eton School won't be there forever, whatever illusion of permanence it likes to spin. David Cameron flattered himself when he thought that Weller was singing about the likes of him.

Actually, while I am in a musical mood I have to say that another great record from the 70s (though rather different from those posted below) is Armand Schaubroek‘s pretty extraordinary, epic “Ratfucker" a claustrophobic, gummy, misogynist peak into a decaying mind stuck in a collapsing city. As a portrait of the urban and psychic malaise of 70s' inner-city America it is a kind of sonic analogue to something like William Lustigs’ Maniac or Nightmares in a Damaged Brain. And someone has kindly posted it on youtube in its entirety. Enjoy

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At some point in the last ten years as crate-digging, re-discovering lost classics and forming alternate canons reached a pitch, several rock albums/bands from the early ‘70s were held up as being just as good if not actually better than Sabbath etc. Pentagram were one such etc, but personally I think they are a bit over-rated. The three bands that really seem to have been unfairly excluded (but have now been brought into the fold) are May Blitz, both of whose albums are also tremendously unrock in fascinating ways, Sir Lord Baltimore, and Leaf Hound.

Phil Zone reckons Leaf Hounds “ Drowned Myself in Fear” is the Holy Grail of Seventies’ rock and he may well be correct, but I thought I would post something by the the other two bands for your (and my own) delectation and I welcome any corrections/ invitations to explore further in the comments’ box below.

(or any additional posts in this thread by fellow bloggers.)





Update!

Phil also nominates this;



Further update and riposte.

Phil also points out this.


and I remember this...




that's a lot of wah-wah.