Arrrghggghgh

The end of the academic year is always bittersweet. There's always the violence-inducing and inaccurate comments from friends and family: 'looking forward to a three month holiday then?', but there is the sweet release of marking your last essay. I love teaching and find 99% of the students I teach to be delightful people with whom I am happy to socialise outside class when we bump into each other. Then marking comes along and the pressure to get through 150 essays on a limited range of topics within a very short space of time turns me into a misanthropic git of the worst sort. The usual safety valve – gleefully circulating the most outrageous howlers – is no longer the done thing, so you trudge through it, gradually losing your own humanity and running the risk of forgetting theirs.

Then summer comes and your attention turns to rewriting last years bad lectures, designing new courses and now and then reading a new book. I graduated 20 years ago so it's probably time I stopped reading out lectures delivered to me back then.* Before you know it, term starts again and all is forgiven: I find that I've actually missed the classroom and the company of the returning students, as well as looking forward to the new starters who will laugh at my jokes for at least one week. The next load of marking is far beyond the horizon and all's well with the world.

It's a bit different this semester. I'm technically on sabbatical, though I'm still course leader which makes things a bit tricky. It means that as I'm still around in the offices I see all the students I'd like to teach without actually doing any teaching, and I feel bereft. Other people are having those odd conversations, pointing them in interesting directions that I may not know about, and giving great lectures. It's all gravy for the students but I've a bad case of FOMO.**

Meanwhile in the outside world, things are getting very nasty indeed. The government wants to get rid of all their overseas-trained doctors: so that's goodbye to my post-retirement age da who still works 7 days a week in the NHS because there aren't enough doctors. Then Amber Rudd, who has a very shady record in business including – and this makes my head spin – directorships of dubious companies located for taxable purposes in the Bahamas, has decided that she wants to exclude foreign students from the country unless they're attending 'quality' courses at 'quality' universities, whatever 'quality' means and ignoring the fact that overseas students' fees keep an awful lot of universities afloat, never mind the manifest cultural benefits of international education. She also wants British Jobs For British Workers, despite her party employing an Australian tax evader to run its anti-immigration election campaign, and a Canadian to be Governor of the Bank of England. Her colleagues meanwhile have decided that universities are going to be ranked 'gold', 'silver' and 'bronze', like the egg and spoon race at your local school. And then, to add xenophobic insult to moronic injury, the government has decided to sack EU academics working in British universities – the ones who actually understand trade law, diplomacy, international relations etc. etc. – from giving them advice on the Brexit process because they might be spies. Never mind: no doubt she's met a cab driver who reckons he knows how to sort it out.

How long before Jo Johnson and Mrs May tell me that I can only teach literature from England by English people which celebrates how wonderful England is? The Collected Works of Melanie Phillips, Richard Littlejohn and Boris Johnson (poetry collection and comic novel about suicide bombers, both of which I have unfortunately read).

What am I trying to say? That the experience of teaching lots of young and not so young people from all over the world is a joyous one. Hopefully they benefit from my work and their encounters with their classmates, and I know I certainly do. But all the pleasures and gains feel like nothing compared to the murk of xenophobic, paranoiac, philistine nastiness emanating from our elected representatives. I want to contribute to making the world a better place but they're making it smaller, meaner and more hostile.

Enjoy your weekend.

*To avoid a tedious exchange of letters with my local paper, head of department and the QAA, this is a joke. Nobody would claim ownership of the puns which constitute 80% of my lectures.
**The young people inform me that this stands for Fear Of Missing Out. Given that my life thus far resembles that of an agoraphobic Trappist, there's a lot of Out to Fear Missing.

Bullshit and the End Times.

Back in the late 18th and 19th centuries, there was a minor craze for contemplating The End, through the medium of vast, thought-provoking canvases of familiar landscapes. Europe's ruling élites were familiar with the ruins of Rome, aware of the parallels between that empire and the various ones they were constructing, and a small proportion of these chaps wondered if sic transit gloria applied to them too. 

One of these was Sir John Soane, who not only commissioned the enormous, Classical, Bank of England complex, but also commissioned Joseph Gandy to paint his new gaff utterly destroyed in some unspecified future.

Joseph Gandy, A Vision of Sir John Soane’s Design for the Rotunda of the Bank of England as a Ruin (1789)

Not that this taste for thrilling contemplation of destruction has gone: there's a rather distasteful aestheticisation of industrial decay known as 'ruin porn' in photographic circles, from Chernobyl to guided tours of Detroit. Then there's Ballard's Tales of the Near Future. 

Why am I thinking about this stuff now? Well, it's been a weird week. On Monday and Tuesday I went to Swansea to examine a PhD and ransack the bookshops of what Dylan Thomas called an 'ugly, lovely town'. Barely a new infrastructural development lacked an EU plaque, yet like all of Wales outside Y Fro Cymraeg voted to leave. I returned to lengthy emails and texts from colleagues and friends from all points on the political spectrum expressing feelings of devastation. One of my friends – a banker – has joined the Conservative Party to vote for the most ludicrous leadership candidate possibly to ensure that they become unelectable. Though looking back on this week, I'm not sure the Tories need the help. 

The Labour Party is ripping itself apart as the right and left wings, the MPs and the members, the pragmatists and the idealists, the capitalists and the socialists engage in a blood bath. Personally I'm stuck in the middle. I happen to agree with pretty much everything Corbyn believes, but I think it's true to say that he hasn't managed to engage in the day-to-day political trench warfare required in this appalling polity. His opponents, however, are awful: most of them are right-wingers whose own constituents defied them to vote Out, a lot of them have blood on their hands from Iraq, and they're precisely the kind of polished, remote, managerialists the public now hates utterly. 

Yesterday I went to London for a British Academy lecture on Writing Political Leaders, which turned out to be a chat with Michael Dobbs of House of Cards fame. I read the newspaper on the train. Stirling had plummeted. Investment had crashed. Farage had insulted his fellow MEPs to applause from Marine Le Pen, a halal butcher's shop was burned down in Walsall, a Polish cultural centre had been vandalised, and several people had been racially abused in the street. The Governor of the Bank of England had announced that billions would have to be magicked up to save the British economy following the vote. The Leavers were explaining that they never really promised to spend £350m a week extra on the NHS:

Actually, I agree: people are quite naturally reading the bus slogan as a continuous sentence rather than as separate sentences. Remember The Simpsons: 

Bart sees an advert for Itchy & Scratchy cells:
Commercial: Each one is absolutely, one hundred percent guaranteed to increase in value.
Voiceover: Not a guarantee.

As I entrained, Boris Johnson's rag doll Michael Gove announced he was standing for the leadership of the Conservative Party. As I detrained, I heard that Boris Johnson wasn't standing, the night after Mrs Gove the Daily Mail columnist accidentally sent a weird strategy email to a member of the public, which advised her husband on negotiating with Johnson. To her, the approval of Rupert Murdoch and the Mail's editor was of paramount importance: the actual citizens weren't mentioned. So we have a Tory lineup (this morning, anyway) of Sajid Javid, a Ferengi who believes only in the Rules of Acquisition and whose favourite book is Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead and whose favourite film is the adaptation of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, Liam Fox who is essentially Major Corkoran from Le Carré's The Night Manager, Big Brother's keener protege Theresa May, Stephen Crabb the (he says former) homophobic bigot who is backed by his associates Malfoy and Goyle, Andrea Leadsom who is a wholly-owned subsidiary of various hedge funds and who likes to send her money away on holiday to some very discreet islands in the sun, and Michael Gove who looks like Pob, sold schools to his rapacious weirdo friends in business and assorted sects, and insisted to a Parliamentary committee that all schools could and should be 'above average':

Q98 Chair: One is: if "good" requires pupil performance to exceed the national average, and if all schools must be good, how is this mathematically possible?
Michael Gove: By getting better all the time.

Q99 Chair: So it is possible, is it?
Michael Gove: It is possible to get better all the time.
Q100 Chair: Were you better at literacy than numeracy, Secretary of State?
Michael Gove: I cannot remember.

The Remainers thought everything would be fine because chaps will do the decent thing. The Leavers never thought they'd win so didn't bother thinking about what might happen if they did. The financial sector is in meltdown (but will recover just fine even if it means stepping over heaps of our skulls). Labour is engaged in a protracted and cynical war and the government of the country is staggering from crisis to crisis like someone stuck in a wasp's nest who has forgotten where the entrance is. One of my friends pointed me to Harry Frankfurt's short book On Bullshit, in which he explains that there's a difference between liars, who at least know what truth is and orient themselves around it, and bullshitters, who speak according to the pressing demands of the moment without having even the regard for truth required to be a successful liar. As an analysis of our post-truth politics, it really works.

However studiously and conscientiously the bullshitter proceeds, it remains true that he is also trying to get away with something. There is surely in his work, as in the work of the slovenly craftsman, some kind of laxity which resists or eludes the demands of a disinterested and austere discipline.  

It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth – this indifference to how things really are – that I regard as of the essence of bullshit. 

Telling a lie is an act with a sharp focus. It is designed to insert a particular falsehood at a specific point in a set or system of beliefs, in order to avoid the consequences of having that point occupied by the truth. This requires a degree of craftsmanship, in which the teller of the lie submits to objective constraints imposed by what he takes to be the truth. The liar is inescapably concerned with truth-values. In order to invent a lie at all, he must think he knows what is true. And in order to invent an effective lie, he must design his falsehood under the guidance of that truth. On the other hand, a person who undertakes to bullshit his way through has much more freedom. His focus is panoramic rather than particular. He does not limit himself to inserting a certain falsehood at a specific point, and thus he is not constrained by the truths surrounding that point or intersecting it. He is prepared to fake the context as well, so far as need requires…It is more expansive and independent, with more spacious opportunities for improvisation, color, and imaginative play. This is less a matter of craft than of art.

The fact about himself that the bullshitter hides, on the other hand, is that the truth-values of his statements are of no central interest to him; what we are not to understand is that his intention is neither to report the truth nor co conceal it. This does not mean that his speech is anarchically impulsive, but that the motive guiding and controlling it is unconcerned with how the things about which he speaks truly are.It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction… He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.

Someone who lies and someone who tells the truth are playing on opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game. Each responds to the facts as he understands them, although the response of the one is guided by the authority of the truth, while the response of the other defies that authority and refuses to meet its demands. The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are. 

Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about. Thus the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a personís obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic are more excessive than his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic. This discrepancy is common in public life, where people are frequently impelled – whether by their own propensities or by the demands of others – to speak extensively about matters of which they are to some degree ignorant. 

No wonder I'm thinking apocalyptic thoughts.

So yes, I went off to London for this Writing Politicians Event. Before that my cool and clever young cousin took me to a glamorous restaurant: we were the only customers who lacked a limo and chauffeur outside, and couldn't discuss our yachts. You could tell it was a great restaurant because despite being a decent cook myself I had absolutely no idea how the various dishes were made. Then we headed off to take in a matinee to cheer ourselves up. It was called The Truth, a French farce in which an incompetent adulterer discovers that his wife, lover and her husband (the protagonist's best friend, who is sleeping with his wife) are slightly more competent adulterers than him. Sparkling, well-constructed and feather light, it promised to be a grand distraction. Only it gradually dawned on me that it was a comical allegory of the British Ruling Classes. There's Boris, betraying his friend Dave. Here's Michael, betraying Boris… et cetera ad infinitum.

Then off I went to the British Academy, the only branch of academia outside Oxbridge that had hundreds of millions of pounds to spare, judging by its accommodation round the corner from Buckingham Palace. It was billed as 'Writing Political Leaders' and featured Dobbs talking to an Oxford Professor of Chinese History. I went because I'm researching politicians' writing at the moment and I had Dobbs on my panel at the Cheltenham Festival. I was hoping to meet other people researching the same thing, and also a tiny bit annoyed that I hadn't been asked to be part of the panel.

Turns out that it wasn't an analytical or academic event at all: it was a mutual love-in for old and young Tories, and my God the larval Tories were terrifying: 18-22 year-olds dressed as their great-grandfathers keen to learn how they too could be Francis Urquhart or Frank Underwood. Certainly a future Tory leader was in the crowd – probably one or two of them have joined the race this morning. It was also rather creepy that not a single female said a word throughout the 90 minutes. Margaret Thatcher was reverentially discussed (Dobbs candidly and admiringly said that she dispensed with his services ruthlessly a week before the 1987 election and Edwina Currie's books got a passing mention), but this was an event for, by and about the patriarchy. Still, on such a dramatic day it was interesting to be surrounded by Tories: they had nothing interesting to say on the subject (Dobbs: 'I don't know whether Boris and Michael are acting out of principle or for personal reason, it's usually the latter') but their very demeanour was instructive. Dobbs wheeled out the same anecdotes he had at Cheltenham and there were no interesting questions. Not exactly up to the level I expected from the British Academy but I suppose they're interested in maintaining links to power. And at least I learned that the field is still free for my amazing revelations…

Who knows what fresh horrors this afternoon will bring?

No, me neither

Unlike the very distinguished professor who said to me 'it's never crossed my mind that there could be a Leave vote. Do you really think there might be?', at least I have the freezing cold comfort of being right this time. I learned my lesson during the last election, the result of which confirmed that neither I nor anyone I know is of or understands the bulk of the British electorate. I have students of most political shades and we do occasionally speak of these things but on the whole they're firm supporters of the Weather Party: politics is like the weather in that it's uncontrollable and happens to them whether they like it or not. So I don't get much of an insight into the general public that way.

I'm also enmeshed in a web of political fantasies: I hang out with Communists, Irish and Welsh nationalists of the nice variety, trades union activists, historians and philosophers. The Britain I carry around in my head has two sides. There's the nuclear-armed Imperialist murderer/American lickspittle with all its freight of fears and prejudices, fuelled by the Daily Mail, the Sun and the Express, resenting human rights, foreigners, benefit scroungers and sniffing out paedos on every corner. Then there's the Britain of Paine, Wollstonecraft, William Morris and Walter Crane, Tolpuddle, William Price, Rowan Williams, Robert Owen and the Co-operators, the Lancashire mill-workers who starved rather than handle slave-produced American cotton, Edith Sitwell, Ivor Cutler, the International Brigadiers, the Commonwealth (despite the Irish unpleasantness), the Levellers, the Chartists, Suffragists, Peter Tatchell, George Formby, John Peel, satire, Cable Street, The Miners' Next Step, Kinder Scout, cricket, the Clarion Clubs, Cymdeithas yr Iaith Cymraeg, Speakers' Corner the Left Book Club, the Guardian, the Kindertransport, Clement Atlee and the NHS, CND, The Field Mice, hunt saboteurs and the Ramblers' Association, trades unions and queuing politely and apologising to people who've walked into you. Basically the side of Britain that doesn't see Abroad as somewhere to be invaded, feared or patronised.

Today it's hard to see that second Britain, the eccentric, open-hearted, generous, funny, radical and welcoming group of nations. I always assumed that its spirit lived on, that the people of the South Wales valleys for instance would remember the hundreds of thousands who marched for their jobs and volunteered to die in Spain for democracy, or the Welsh who struck and wrote and lobbied and committed acts of civil disobedience for their language, their homes and for peace. I was wrong. I cannot see the Tolpuddle Martyrs in Dorset's vote to leave the EU, nor does the spirit of the Pankhursts live on in a country which has decisively decided that it doesn't want any human rights, thank you very much.

What do we have to look forward to? In my immediate surroundings, the loss of European colleagues and students, of access to that sophisticated network of thinkers, ideas and resources, let alone funding. Environmental protection will go, as will employment protection: it's all just 'red tape' after all. Our food will be further adulterated, the air will go foul, the poor and the black will find no refuge and our former colleagues in the EU will have no sympathy at all for this self-inflicted wound.

There's a tiny bit of me that thinks Britain had it coming: never having adjusted to being a second-rate power after losing its imperial possessions, it never tried acting in the collective interest, never tried to play a constructive role, couldn't act as anything other than a wrecking ball in the EU. What surprises me is that the other countries didn't have a referendum on throwing out the UK. Perhaps this is a good opportunity for Britain to learn a little humility, and with the loss of Scotland, perhaps the tiger will be tamed, having lost its embarrassing job as America's sergeant-major. However, these unworthy thoughts won't help the people of Britain, particularly those Out voters who will be the first to suffer when EU development grants and subsidies are withdrawn from the Valleys and the Northern English ex-industrial heartlands.

How did we get here? It's tempting to suggest that the Brexiteers are prejudiced Know-Nothings, but I'm a utopian socialist: I believe that the majority of the people have the capacity for greatness given the right conditions. I don't blame Nigel Farage and his little band of red-faced blazered petit-bourgeois golf-course revanchists. They're a symptom rather than a cause. The cause is the complete abandonment of political vision and trust by the British left. The right has always had two faces: backwards-looking social conservatism of the kind espoused by grassroots UKIPpers, and hardline free market neoliberalism. They've always been completely honest about what they want from the electorate. The conservatives want a society in which everyone knows their place and weirdos (women, foreigners, ethnic minorities, homosexuals, trades unionists) basically anyone who wouldn't be welcome to dinner with David Archer) do what they're told. The neoliberals don't care what colour, sex or gender you are as long you also don't interfere with the distribution of money from the poor to the rich through the financialisation of the economy.

So that's the Right: completely honest. Then there's the left. It had a good 1940s: the war demonstrated that collective effort could bring about good things: defeat of the Nazis, the NHS, widespread nationalisation of industries that had failed in the private sector. It occasionally spasmed back to life: Wilson's Open University, for instance. But on the whole, the Left utterly failed to develop any vision of the post-industrial society that the Right was busy making real. The Right occasionally made gestures in the direction of social conservatism, but it was essentially happy to trade mass employment and high wages for increased shareholder value. That's how we got a Chancellor who said that high unemployment was a 'small price to pay' for low inflation, a Labour Prime Minister proud that Britain had the worst worker protection in Europe, and a legislature made up of landlords and tax-evaders passing laws to make the UK a tax haven.

What did the Left do? Did it (like William Morris) imagine a bright future based on socialist values and kindness to all? It did not. The hard left deluded itself into thinking a revolution was just around the corner, the soft left imagined conspiracies around every corner and the Third Way Blairites and Clintonites gave up entirely and aimed to do nothing more noble than soften the edges while having no critique at all of neoliberalism and the new imperialism. Convinced that the working classes were all paranoid racists, they acted on those assumptions, until we got to the point of Labour – once the protector of the poor and huddled masses – selling mugs promoting crackdowns on immigrants.

How were the people so fooled? The neoliberals were quite happy to misdirect blame from capitalism to immigrants/Europe/whoever while they got on with seizing our water, phones, railways, health service and anything else not nailed down. The Old Right genuinely believed it, and the press – from the screeching Mail to the apparently balanced BBC – either promoted these discourses or allowed them to go unchallenged. Just look at the way welfare benefits and refugees were replaced by benefits cheats and illegal immigrants, scroungers, benefits tourists and the rest.

What I and my friends on the left entirely failed to do was set out both the scale of the economic problem and optimistic, realistic solutions. Labour got used to treating the working class as an embarrassing, lumpen bunch that would do what it was told, but that it avoided meeting as much as possible (not true, of course, of many dedicated individuals) rather than as a source of strength, ideas and inspiration. Such assumptions have a habit of coming true. Into the void came the peddlers of poison: the Tories who should know better and the UKIPpers and assorted fascists who probably don't. They promoted easy solutions and obvious causes and Britain fell for them. It's a commonplace in religious studies that the decline in organised religion doesn't lead directly to atheism: it leads to the mushrooming of 'alternative' spirituality, from Prosperity Churches to crystal healing. I think it's the same in politics: if you deprive people of agency, if you treat them with contempt, they will abandon you and they will listen to those peddling simple, relatable lies.

Before I voted, I asked myself some simple questions. Would my students be more free out of the EU? Could the same be said of my friends who work in call centres and Amazon warehouses? Would my friends under the care of the NHS get faster, better treatment? The answer to all these things was 'no'. Britain hasn't voted from freedom, it has voted for corporate sovereignty, governed by a group of people who see their job as delivering the people to the corporations.

There's a lovely country out there, full of wonderful people. I and my friends simply forgot that it needed water and sun and weeding to keep it alive. While we neglected the garden, the slugs and weeds quietly got on with their job.

Be nice to someone today. It's all we have left.*

*Well, I also have an Irish passport. It might come in handy.