DREAMS THAT DIE: misadventures in Hollywood — review

EDIT JUN 2021: Well, another white male lefty puts the boot in. A year or so ago, as sinophobia deepened and spread, I appealed to John Wight, now making a name for himself on the UK Left, for some sort of support instead of reinforcing the left hostility and blackout that was going on. We'd been in communication for a few years and I regarded him as a friend, impressed enough with his writing to review his autobiography favourably. His response to my reaching out was not to talk, engage or exhibit any curiosity or comradely concern, but to courageously block me on Twitter. So no solidarity for me but brownie points earned for himself within a wretched left.

Dreams that die, indeed.

I've decided to leave up my review of his book I posted on 3rd March 2013 as what I wrote was genuinely felt and written in good faith. Rewriting history is something I'll leave to others.

More background here.

REVIEW

In Dreams That Die, lefty journalist John Wight tells a good yarn very well, which is to be expected from a budding screenwriter who had the nerve to take off for Hollywood Mecca with nothing but a script and a few hundred quid to his name.

Charm and a Scottish accent only get you so far in La La Land. Luckily, his 6ft-plus frame and sheer determination earn him the just about liveable wage of two hundred bucks a week working as an elite bouncer and film extra while he touts his script round town.

He's punched out bullies at the Mondrian Skybar; been trapped in an enclosed space with Matt LeBlanc and his methane emissions without so much as a "how d'ya do?"; worked as Ben Affleck's movie stand-in; and guarded Jimmy Hoffa Junior in the midst of a Teamsters union war. He's been an extra in Friends, Alias, ER and CSI among a slew of TV series.

He also got stuck into the American anti-Iraq war movement after 9/11, helping to organise events, culminating in the huge 70,000 strong San Francisco demonstration in 2003.

Full of lively detail laced with juicy Tinsel Town gossip, this autobiographical tale of an awakening political consciousness set against the backdrop of capitalism's own Sodom and Gommorah stands out from the usual Hollywood stories by bringing a class dimension to Wight's experience.

He describes the delusion that keeps the "oppressed, humiliated, maligned and bullied" in their place so well you can taste it. The promise of fame, fortune and the intoxicating prospect of taking their higher position up the food chain like lost princelings and princesses regaining their rightful status and restoring some sort of cosmic equilibrium ensures nothing changes. Nowadays they don't just shoot horses; they feed them back to you in fast-food Soylent Green stylee and all you can say is "yummy!".

"In this dystopia of desperation and delusion, the American Dream remained a living, breathing entity, one that belonged to all who were willing to abase themselves before it. Thus any attempt to instill a class consciousness was doomed from the start."

Well, duh. But it's fun watching him try.

I read this with a certain pleasure of recognition as there are a number of amusing parallels with my own experience of trying to balance cultural warrior with political activist. My screenwriting led to time in the early 1990s as a script editor and consultant, working like a dawg by the swimming pool round the corner from the Carolco building, Tower Records and the Viper Room, shaded by palm trees and drinking cocktails with brightly coloured paper umbrellas and laughing at the cheek of it all. I have had the entire restaurant menu recited to me by the most stunning movie-stars in waiting and then had to apologetically ask them to do it all over again as I was too overwhelmed by the oddity of such a pointless hierarchy-enforcing task to take it in the first time around, multi-tasking going to the wall under the pressure of the novelty.

Wight and I must have overlapped at the Mondrian as I stayed there in 2002, failing to recognise a single sleb in the Skybar and opting for early nights so I could go sight-seeing. I have ridden horses in the same Aguora Hills where Wight managed to make an extra couple of grand in a rather unconventional walk-on part from which he was lucky to escape with his teeth intact. Verily, I have drunk from the same pool of vulgarity and I understand its lure. And, like Wight, I have been aware of the contradictions.

And made the same bone-headed choices that meant — in his case — turning down a potentially career-making meeting with Sean Connery in order to attend an antiwar conference in New York. I am infuriated with his decision but I understand it utterly. That's what happens when politics get in the way of ambition.

It's certainly a whole lot more attractive than the charlatans of the British left who I've seen drop all principles the moment something was up for grabs.

This book is a page-turner with substance, clear as a window-pane to make George Orwell proud, and should be read by anyone interested in working-class leftist culture. In the time-honoured tradition of all great Hollywood stories, the hero fails in his original quest, gains his soul and (almost) gets the girl. What could be better than that? Apart from world revolution, an end to war and a million quid in the bank?

The Opium War by Julia Lovell book review: Smoke and mirrors

The Opium War by Julia Lovell

Book review by Anna Chen

The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.
George Orwell

With renewed calls for the West to assert its imperial might in the interest of "capitalism and democracy ... if necessary by military force " (historian and BBC Reith Lecturer Niall Ferguson), it's useful to examine one episode in Britain's history when we attempted to do so, with catastrophic results for the conquered nation.

Britain’s craving for chinoiserie in the 18th and 19th centuries resulted in a trade imbalance which threatened to empty the treasury. In order to pay for the tea, silks, spices and porcelain we liked so much, the East India Company mass-produced enormous quantities of cheap Bengal-grown opium and, along with other British merchants, sold it on to China, turning an aristocratic vice into a nationwide addiction.

The profits from the opium trade made fortunes, earned revenues for the British government, paid for the administration of the Empire in India and even financed a large slice of the cost of the Royal Navy. In 1839, when the Chinese tried to enforce their own laws and halt drug imports, the narco-capitalists persuaded Foreign Secretary Palmerston and Lord Melbourne’s government to go to war in order to protect their profits. The first military conflict — thanks to superior technology, more a series of massacres — lasting a bloody three years, resulted in the Treaty of Nanking and the transfer of territory including Hong Kong to British rule. In waging the second war (1856-60) the British finally achieved their goal of seeing opium legalised in China.

That the Chinese government might use this notoriously brutal example of British imperialism to bolster their power is little surprise. That western authors now seek to diminish British culpability and shift responsibility onto the nation that suffered the predations of drugs and war is disturbing, though probably inevitable in the current febrile atmosphere of the China-bashing seen by many western intellectuals as a substitute for informed criticism.

The latest in a string of histories reviving positive images of Empire, Julia Lovell's The Opium War is on a mission to reassess history, presumably seeking to replicate her literary agent stablemate Jung Chang's success with Mao: The Untold Story.

Lovell's argument hangs by the revisionist thread that, far from creating a market for opium, the British were only satisfying what was already there. "What had happened," she asks, "in those four decades [to 1840], to transform opium-smoking from an acceptable displacement activity for an idle emperor-in-training to a perilous scourge?" Not British traders — who were only exploiting an existing weakness, it seems — but the Chinese themselves who were gagging for it and therefore the authors of their own doom. The point that opium was an expensive luxury until the British were able to mass-produce it cheaply in India and transform the market, is buried in a welter of smoke and mirrors.

Lovell sets out to correct the Chinese government's overplayed narrative of victimhood but overbalances into a 400-page vilification of the Chinese: theirs is a response to a Western threat "supposedly" determined to contain it ("supposedly" is wide open to argument); the 150th anniversary of the first Opium War "offered a public relations gift to the government"; it is a "founding myth", a mere "border provocation". Opium is a "scapegoat" for the emperor's problems, those who opposed it "ambitious moralizers" and "ambitious literati".

The Chinese are capable of only the basest motives in their efforts to wipe out the drug that is crippling the nation, their emotional and behavioural range running the Sax Rohmer gamut of dehumanising tropes: stupid, arrogant, cowardly, lazy and pragmatic. "Perhaps they objected for Confucian, humanitarian reasons; or then again, out of indolence, maybe." Their avowed repulsion and fear of what opium can do is dismissed, individual suffering skated over and characters never humanised. I'm not sure I detected any irony in her use of that old colonialist favourite, "wily", and the drooling pages of lurid descriptions in the Yellow Peril chapter might have made room for the moving contemporary accounts of the destruction of the Summer Palace, for example, or the massacres of the Chinese which shocked even hardened British soldiers.

In contrast, although some of the inescapable truths about the British drug-dealers and perpetrators of war are acknowledged, their actions are ascribed to human feelings; they are "generous"; their inner lives are explored; their flaws are treated with understanding for they are men on a quest to better themselves against a monstrous Empire that will not give them what they want.

When the moral high ground runs out, equivalence is strained: it was "mutual incomprehension that pushed both sides towards war". "Contemporary China's line on opium transforms it into a moral poison forced on helpless Chinese innocents by wicked aliens. The reality was more troublingly collusive." Both were as bad as each other. When everyone is guilty, no one can be innocent.

The book's selectivity is irritating, ultimately undermining the story. The British who grew industrial levels of opium and sent the price plummeting, are "diligent", their supply benignly "reliable". James Matheson is described kindly as a "tough Scot" and "living under the influence of the holy spirit", but whose banishment to the wilds of Canada of 500 residents of the Isle of Lewis — which he bought and decorated with Stornoway Castle on his drug money — is overlooked in this hefty tome. Of Charles Elliot, Chief Superintendent of British Trade in China, one of the architects of the first Opium War and later first administrator of Hong Kong, she writes sympathetically that he " ... instinctively disliked the opium trade and everything bound up with it: both its moral dubiousness and its ungentlemanly profit-hungry merchants". Sentimentally, "his weakness was to see a little of everyone's side: he understood the economic imperative of the opium trade, even while he hated the vulgarity of its perpetrators; he understood that his duty was to protect the British flag in Canton, even while he detested what some of Britannia's children were doing in the China seas."

Commissioner General Lin Zexu, who destroyed 20,000 cases (each holding 140 pounds) of British opium in 1839, is presented as a bureaucrat (Niall Ferguson couldn't even bring himself to name him in his account), albeit an incorruptible one, caught between a rock and a hard place. Lovell complains that "History has been kind to Lin Zexu", although it's not difficult to see why such an incorruptible force who tried to right an injustice might be a much-needed inspiration today. Her extensive research does, however, unearth the little gem that, once Elliot had finally handed over the opium stash, Lin made a gift to him of prized roebuck meat before which he "was careful to kowtow nine times".

There are some asinine reductions: "The Ming Dynasty was brought down in 1644 by insurrections led by a postman who happened also to be a failed candidate." (Note the snobbery — how would a humble carpenter fare in her scheme of things?) The Taiping Rebellion with all its fascinating complexity and humane objectives (the abolition of landlordism, the redistribution of wealth for all, and the prohibition of prostitution, bound feet and the smoking of opium) is reduced to a nervous breakdown of a "provincial schoolmaster" — a movement crushed, incidentally, with the aid of the British acting in concert with the Manchu imperial army during the Opium Wars, a fact missing here, at a cost of 20 million lives over 14 years.

It's not as if the Chinese need any lessons in the part played by the rotten Qing Empire in the nation's downfall. The "disorganisation and cowardice of its own officials and armies" is already well known. There was indeed much "self-blame", "self-pity" and outright "self-loathing" during and after the conflict which is still going on, as documented ad infinitum in China, with local militias fighting where Qing armies feared to tread, such as at Sanyuanli in 1841 (also derided by the author). It was the corruption of the old empire which led to its fall in 1911 and the establishment of a republic under Sun Yatsen, and which added grist to the communist mill in trying to stamp out the remnants of the old system described so luridly by Lovell.

Reading her account is a bit like hearing a rapist declaring his innocence because his victim wore a short skirt as she walked up a dark alley. Not only were there an estimated 120 million addicts in China at the trade's peak, but national treasures were looted or destroyed, and massacres and rape perpetrated by the invading troops intent on forcing the drug on the nation. So bad was this savagery that large swathes of British public opinion clamoured against the opium-driven conflict, led by the voices of such as Richard Cobden, William Gladstone and the Chartists. But Chinese outrage is ridiculed, with no room for the possibility that they might authentically feel empathy and concern or be justified in their anger. While paying lip service to some acceptance that a crime had been committed, Lovell offsets the gravity of the injury with a running national character assassination and a downplaying of facts already known and documented.

It's difficult to relax into the rollicking story that's fighting to get out as you are constantly poked in the ear with the author's "they made us do it" mantra. Lovell is much stronger when she tells the story straight and without pro-imperialist spin, but it is largely marred by an unfortunate sneering tone which plays to a gallery of prejudice and jingoism, a Great Wall that will keep out any reader whose bigotry is not being fed. This is a shame because she has done a formidable job by laying out the story in so much riveting detail.

However, far from presenting a brave new take on the history, this is an old dish reheated, a rebranding of Empire (do we still call it the Indian "Mutiny"?). Lovell replays the excuses made in Britain at the time by the narco-capitalists and Lord Palmerston, who tried to win over a public opinion revolted by the idea of a narcotics war by playing the insult to the flag by the Chinese and the "liberating values of Free Trade" cards. To this she adds a steady poisonous drip of various distancing devices and systematic "othering" of the Chinese.

The narrative spin dehumanises the Chinese, divesting them of moral capacity while painting violent drug dealers as acting out of a higher calling, themselves passive victims of force majeur. Hence, while Elliott considers opium smuggling to be "a trade which every friend of humanity must deplore", he wants the Qing to "legalise it, because it would force the Chinese to take full responsibility for its moral dubiousness", the opium trade being the fault of the addicts and not the suppliers. Elliot has a "conscience" while Lin is merely a bureaucrat who is described from the outside in, a bundle of facts with no heart. Elliot possesses an interior landscape. His "weakness was to see a little of everyone's side". He "understood his duty was to defend the British flag in Canton" even though he "detested" what his compatriots were doing. Yet, like Lewis Carroll's Walrus, he weeps into his handkerchief over the plight of the poor oysters while scoffing the biggest ones himself when he lands the British government with the inflated £2 million bill for the confiscated opium and thereby hands them the final excuse for war.

The rest of the book similarly struggles with balance in a scattergun outpouring of distaste for nearly everything and everyone Chinese. Lovell's account of the breakdown of the Copenhagen climate summit in 2009 is ludicrously one-sided — she makes it appear that it was all China's fault, with no mention of the Danish Text stitch-up of the talks by the wealthy nations — and she has nothing to say about China's massive efforts to cut carbon emissions and combat pollution. She condemns Chinese anti-Japanese hysteria but never mentions former Prime Minister Koizumi's provocative visits to shrines of war criminals and rewritten history books. Sun Yatsen is a "chancer" who was snubbed by the head of state and that's why he brought down the Qing. Bored students obsess about their careers. Interviewees interrupt their "self-loathing" denunciations of the West with requests for job-tips and enquiries about how to get on in the land of the rising shun. Chinese don't need to indulge in self-loathing while Lovell's on the case because she can loathe for England. By the end, you are willing the poor woman to retrain in another field altogether just so she can find some peace of mind.

Perhaps it's the illustrations which tell the story best. A photograph of Akmal Shaikh, the Briton executed in China in 2009 for smuggling heroin, is juxtaposed favourably with one of an emotional protester following the US bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999, killing three journalists — an outrage claimed by the US as an accident even though the allies had the map co-ordinates and knew where the embassy was. Those of us opposed to the death penalty argued that a prison sentence was a more humane and apt option for Shaikh, especially if he was ill as claimed. But if one picture is worth a thousand words, then the juxtaposition of these two photographs speaks volumes. The British smuggler of 4 kg of heroin into China is portrayed with sympathy while the other is not. It is a deeply flattering, almost saintly, portrait revealing the humanity of the drug-dealer, set against the ape-like rictus of the Chinese protester in the grip of a feral rage. One is humanised, the other dehumanised. One life has value, the three dead and 20 injured Chinese do not even warrant a mention anywhere. This twisted morality evoking a visceral response — empathy for us and revulsion for "them" — as employed in the use of the photographs, permeates the book.

Lovell seeks to make a case against the communist government, but her thrust replaces one orthodoxy with another. In describing the fundamental rottenness of an ossified and decadent empire (China's, not ours) she inadvertently stirs a degree of sympathy with those men and women who tried to build a better society in response to the horrors visited upon a country on its knees but who have tragically failed to avoid writing their own catalogue of misery despite doubling life-expectancy and raising 600 million out of absolute poverty. As a demolition job on the upstart rival on the global stage, this book is sure to do well among those less scholarly than the professor who will seize on this exercise in exculpation with glee.

Anna Chen wrote and narrates The Steampunk Opium Wars.

Niall Ferguson dismisses the Opium Wars

At last, someone else has done a thorough analysis here at Hidden Harmonies.

Militarised Hamlet at the National Theatre: review

A fighter plane roars overhead. Lights come up on a bleak black-and-white Elsinore Castle. Soldiers in camouflage strike the familiar high-shouldered automatic rifle-toting power-pose so beloved of army recruitment ads, sorry, TV & movies. Who needs a bare bodkin when a Bullpup SA80 can do the job?

Two youths — Hamlet and Laertes — lose their fathers and seek revenge, leading to much blood-letting and misery all round. The plot is familiar but director Nicholas Hytner tries to find a modern spin for his first-ever bite at the great Dane.

Hytner chooses a modern militarised setting with new king of the castle, Hamlet's Uncle Claudius, ruling by way of a surveillance society, and bumbling old Polonius actually a Walsinghamesque head of the secret service. Something is indeed rotten in the state of Denmark, possibly the whiff of testosterone permeating the masculine iconography. Armed spooks in snappy suits and earpieces lurk like club bouncers, while soldiers in trousers at half-mast over sexy high-laced bovver boots are on call at the flick of a switch to coked-up banging techno.

No wonder poor sensitive Hamlet is driven half mad.

When his father's ghost (James Laurenson) tells his son that his Uncle Claudius (Patrick Malahide) is both regicide and fratricide as well as schtupping his dipso mother, tough-as-old-boots Queen Gertrude (Clare Higgins), Hamlet, recently-bereaved Prince of Denmark, is galvanised into inaction. Should he take arms against a sea of troubles or smoke a fag?

It's a mark of any good Shakespeare production that the audience can understand words from another age requiring a different register of thought, and Hytner's Hamlet is excellent on this score. Marred only by appalling sound at the beginning (the actors are all mic'ed up), and vastly improved by sneaking into the empty balcony seats further towards the middle of the Olivier auditorium where the acoustics thrive, the text is delivered with full clarity and meaning.

Rory Kinnear earns all the plaudits he's been getting. Looking well for his age, this star of the NT repertory company gets away with everything except murder. Playing two modes — loony and ultra-sane — he uses his feigned madness to outwit an entire oppressive regime. Although you have to ask if this was the status quo way before Claudius's promotion, implicating Hamlet senior in the creation of this grim world, and makes you wonder if he got what he deserved.

Hamlet's quicksilver backchat is matched by leaping and gambolling, running rings around his antagonists in every way. But if he's so smart, why can't he restore nature's equilibrium, right wrongs and correct an off-kilter world? Lacking the nerve to self-slaughter, he must marshall his internal forces to wreak revenge and lay ghosts to rest ... at least in the outside world, if not in his own mind.

There's a satisfying amount of "business" — the stuff not in the text — discovered in the creative process as well as thrust into play by the director, who will have been wrestling with his production for months if not years. In conversation with the stolid Polonius, Hamlet transforms an open book into a bird as his thoughts fly away apparently unanchored to terra firma. His smiley-face Watchmen graffito becomes a symbol of defiance, the gormless mask he is able to slip on to facilitate his deceit. When Ophelia (Rugh Negga) wears the smiley T-shirt you know she too is caught up in the game: in this version, the power-play of her puppeteer father. Ophelia, whose madness Ruth Negga strains for but never quite grasps, comes to her watery end by an unexpected means that feels a bit forced.

The choreography for Hamlet's play-within-a-play which will unmask his father's killer is brilliant and the scene becomes a vital building block in the story rather than a tacked-on addendum. The star of the show for me is James Laurenson who stood out as the deceased King and Player King, possessing the sort of charisma you just don't get any more.

These positives aside: if each Hamlet reflects each age, then what is the National Theatre's production telling us about ourselves?

The bouncer/squaddie trope is cringingly patronising to the National Theatre audience — although Team Hamlet is probably banking on approval when it tours the provinces from next month — and a sense of pandering to an audience brought up on the stale TV imagery of media, muscle and sex. Is this all we can understand? Each time another camera crew came on to capture the moment I wanted to reach for my AK47.

A deeply conservative vision runs through this production: the air of an etiolated middle-class establishment appropriating imagery of working-class males serving the ruling class as its bully-boys, rather than challenging the power structure. It may be a comment on the creeping authoritarianism of successive governments, but it ultimately communicates a pessimistic view of our society's potential while keeping usurpers of power in the driving seat.

Fascism wins out when the hippy Prince dies, embodied curiously in the shaven head of Fortinbras as revealed in a news bulletin tableau when he surveys the carnage at the end. My Lovely Companion noted a visual reference to the paratrooper in Pontecorvo's Battle Of Algiers. No time for grand thoughts and grooming here. The shaven male head becomes a symbol of raw male power, the jettisoning of sentiment and human tenderness for the great smell of brute function, the quality required to survive in the world. This scene comes perilously close to celebrating military restoration of order: it's a dirty job but someone has to do it.

Hamlet
By William Shakespeare
Starring Rory Kinnear
Director: Nicholas Hytner
National Theatre ends this week.
National tour from 11th February 2011: Nottingham Theatre Royal; Salford Lowry; Plymouth Theatre Royal; Milton Keynes; Woking; Luxembourg

What A Carve Up! review: ‘a point where greed and madness can no longer be told apart’

I don’t know which induces nausea in me the most: whether it’s Tony Blair’s Joker Jack grin as he trousers £20 million thus far for services rendered, or Stephen Byers’ ‘gorblimey, I’m only a cabbie, mate, at five grand a shot’ routine.

Who makes me reach fastest for the sick bag? Could it be Geoff Hoon, Iraq War dogsbody, who was prepared to do whatever it took to make his bones and get the Iraq war going and will do the same to join the ranks of the Croesus Class as revealed in the recent Channel 4 sting?

Or, on the other side: Eton posh boy David Cameron taking de-elocution lessons to mispronounce words like “probbly” instead of “probably”, who voted for the Iraq war, who flipped his house and who now distances himself from the expenses scandal like he and his party had nothing to do with it? Or the other posh boy, Nick Clegg, who is even wealthier than Cameron and, like him, descended from royalty but who constantly implies his roots are Sheffield salt-of-the-earth?

Welcome to the three wings of the one-party state: the Business Party.

As Fabrice Tourre, the accused Goldman Sachs trader, wrote before he unloaded worthless investments to ‘widows and orphans’: ‘ … the entire system is about to crumble at any moment.’

Fabrice was specifically referring to the banking system, but we can hear the creaks and the groans of the whole edifice before it goes down.

Career politicians are like the canaries down the mine. They know what’s coming, which is why they’ve ditched any pretence at social concern or ‘stakeholding’ and are leaping desperately like salmon in spawning season to join the super-rich as they shear off from the rest of us. For three deregulated decades, the powerful have been psychotically pillaging us and our poor little planet and now, ‘at the point where greed and madness can no longer be told apart’, it just can’t take it any more.

It’s this lunacy that drives the plot engine of Jonathan Coe’s What A Carve Up!, and about which he is so viscerally angry. In his 1994 novel, Coe compresses the criminal class running the country — and the world — into one sociopathic, homicidal, fratricidal family: the Winshaws.

They have already carved up the key industries between them. The family seat , Winshaw Towers in Yorkshire, has spawned Henry, a backstabbing Tory minister; Thomas, a voyeuristic banker who creates nothing tangible and yet, as one of Thatcher’s beloved ‘wealth creators’ pockets a fortune in ‘commissions, interest, fees, swaps, futures, options … no longer even paper money. It could be scarcely said to exist’; and Hilary, a media mogul who doesn’t believe a toxic word she writes in her populist columns. Dorothy, the battery farmer who wouldn’t touch the cruelly-reared unhealthy muck she feeds the masses, carries shades of Margaret Thatcher whose chief contribution to the world in her former career as a food scientist was to devise ever more effective methods of pumping air into ice-cream, so making even bigger profits from thin air. What a brilliantly untoppable metaphor that was. Roderick, the lascivious art dealer, creates the market of mediocre crap from which he profits. And Mark, the little shit who sells arms to Saddam even as the West is gearing up for the first Gulf War, is a portrait of homicidal malice, organising William Tell-style shooting competitions for his arms-dealing buddies aiming at apples balanced on the heads of hapless Filipino prostitutes.

Minor author Michael Owen is commissoned by mad Aunt Tabitha Winshaw to write a family history which she hopes will expose them in all their rottenness and maybe exact a revenge for the murderous betrayal of her beloved brother, Godfrey, the only good person in their grotesque number, by his own kith and kin. In delving into the family mystery, Michael comes to learn who he is and suffers at first hand from the predations of the dreadful clan.

Coe’s satire might have been overtaken by grim reality, but it still gives us a searing perspective from which to make sense of the current crop of horrors: of Blair; Iraq Mk II; of Tourre’s revelation of how bankers run the economy with mad pointlessness, their sole aim to move money into their own pockets: ‘What if we created a ‘thing’ which has no purpose, which is absolutely conceptual and highly theoretical and which nobody knows how to price?’

The banks took our money and, like all good monsters, bounced back more profitable than ever. And yet there is still practically no public control or accountability. Frigsample, they refuse to lend for mortgages although the Tories sold off the public stock and Labour refuses to build anywhere near realistic levels of new housing. How’s that for being caught between a rock and a hard place?

You’d think this was the time for the party we voted for to take charge and protect us from the predations of the corporations. New laws, perhaps. But, no. The governent bleats that its hands are tied. The blackmailing swine might take off to where regulations are even slacker, where taxes for those who can most afford it remain at rock bottom.

Yet miraculously, one holiday aboard music industrialist David Geffen’s yacht and Lord Mandelson criminalises British children who want to share the little pleasure left to them with anti-downloading laws. The government also rushed through legislation to bang up youth who imaginatively find new legal ways to get high while Ken Clarke who, as boss of British American Tobacco, brought the cancerous joys of smoking to a new generation of young Chinese, runs for political office. Again.

Talking left before an election as ever, promises are whispered by Labour of a Robin Hood tax of 0.0000000001 per cent on deals done throught the City, the same City that’s supposed to yield riches for ‘Britain’ which never trickles down to us. I think they mean ‘trickle down’ in the sense that we are the sparrows stitting by the horse’s arse to see if any nourishment gets pooed out. Will that legislation see the light of day? Will it, fuck!

Don’t wait for the politicians to protect you. I watched the videos of last year’s Orwell Prize debate. If you sit through Nick Cohen’s headline-grabbing indictment of the liberal press and giggle at Peter Hitchens’s retort that Nick was pissed (yeah, yeah), you get to the really telling stuff. Labour right-winger (at least he was pre-Bair when everything shifted tectonically to the right) Frank Field warns us ominously of something nasty coming down the pipeline. At first, I thought, yay! Someone’s warning us that the looting of society by Milton Freidman fans at the top has gone too far and unless we rein it back we are in for an Apocalypse. But, no. As we leave the Age Of so-called Enlightenment behind, what is Frank’s concern? Not that life for ‘Brits’ (meaning the middle and working classes) is turning into a living hell, but that the ‘mob’ is getting out of hand and has already, shock horror, targeted the home of a banker. When you deduce that the banker in question is the questionable Fred The Shred it makes you realise where these politicians’ misplaced priorities have been leading us.

Frank wouldn't like What A Carve Up! one little bit, themed as it is around the 1964 movie of the same same starring Kenneth Connor, Sid James and Shirley Eaton in the low-brow comedy thriller about a revolting family who get bumped off one by one at the reading of a dead patriarch's will. One man's revenge fantasy is another man's nightmare.

Now I understand why Frank’s lot have been building prisons and training up riot police to do their worst.

Coe not only made me laugh darkly in recognition of the state we’re in, but he also made me cry and rage at the same time. His unfolding of the personal tragedy of his protagonist through the grinding destruction of the NHS and how it affects real lives is one of the most moving things I’ve read. These are the people who’ll be in the ‘mob’ protesting when they realise that none of the political parties will defend them. These are the people for whom the issues are of life and death while the fiddlers burn down the town in their insatiable hunger for more, more, even more moolah.

And what happened to the far left forces who were supposed to have built a powerful alternative by now? An honest movement that would have trounced the Business Party at the polls and maybe led us into a world where we produce for need not greed? Well, during my sojourn in their ranks organising the press for the Socialist Alliance and Stop The War Coalition, I watched them creaming themselves at the first sight of fame in the public eye. As one prominent SWP member told me when I objected to the destructive swathe left by one crass opportunistic, nepotistic and exploitative leader, now trying to kick-start his media career via his breakaway RCP-style sect, ‘Self-interest and ego will always play a part. So what?’

Clegg, Cameron and Brown, differentiated only by the colour of their ties, declare in an anti-Spartacus trope, “I am Tony Blair!” “No, I am Tony Blair!” “No, I am Tony Blair… and so is my best friend!”

A carve up indeed. More gravy?

What A Carve Up! review: ‘a point where greed and madness can no longer be told apart’

I don’t know which induces nausea in me the most: whether it’s Tony Blair’s Joker Jack grin as he trousers £20 million thus far for services rendered, or Stephen Byers’ ‘gorblimey, I’m only a cabbie, mate, at five grand a shot’ routine.

Who makes me reach fastest for the sick bag? Could it be Geoff Hoon, Iraq War dogsbody, who was prepared to do whatever it took to make his bones and get the Iraq war going and will do the same to join the ranks of the Croesus Class as revealed in the recent Channel 4 sting?

Or, on the other side: Eton posh boy David Cameron taking de-elocution lessons to mispronounce words like “probbly” instead of “probably”, who voted for the Iraq war, who flipped his house and who now distances himself from the expenses scandal like he and his party had nothing to do with it? Or the other posh boy, Nick Clegg, who is even wealthier than Cameron and, like him, descended from royalty but who constantly implies his roots are Sheffield salt-of-the-earth?

Welcome to the three wings of the one-party state: the Business Party.

As Fabrice Tourre, the accused Goldman Sachs trader, wrote before he unloaded worthless investments to ‘widows and orphans’: ‘ … the entire system is about to crumble at any moment.’

Fabrice was specifically referring to the banking system, but we can hear the creaks and the groans of the whole edifice before it goes down.

Career politicians are like the canaries down the mine. They know what’s coming, which is why they’ve ditched any pretence at social concern or ‘stakeholding’ and are leaping desperately like salmon in spawning season to join the super-rich as they shear off from the rest of us. For three deregulated decades, the powerful have been psychotically pillaging us and our poor little planet and now, ‘at the point where greed and madness can no longer be told apart’, it just can’t take it any more.

It’s this lunacy that drives the plot engine of Jonathan Coe’s What A Carve Up!, and about which he is so viscerally angry. In his 1994 novel, Coe compresses the criminal class running the country — and the world — into one sociopathic, homicidal, fratricidal family: the Winshaws.

They have already carved up the key industries between them. The family seat , Winshaw Towers in Yorkshire, has spawned Henry, a backstabbing Tory minister; Thomas, a voyeuristic banker who creates nothing tangible and yet, as one of Thatcher’s beloved ‘wealth creators’ pockets a fortune in ‘commissions, interest, fees, swaps, futures, options … no longer even paper money. It could be scarcely said to exist’; and Hilary, a media mogul who doesn’t believe a toxic word she writes in her populist columns. Dorothy, the battery farmer who wouldn’t touch the cruelly-reared unhealthy muck she feeds the masses, carries shades of Margaret Thatcher whose chief contribution to the world in her former career as a food scientist was to devise ever more effective methods of pumping air into ice-cream, so making even bigger profits from thin air. What a brilliantly untoppable metaphor that was. Roderick, the lascivious art dealer, creates the market of mediocre crap from which he profits. And Mark, the little shit who sells arms to Saddam even as the West is gearing up for the first Gulf War, is a portrait of homicidal malice, organising William Tell-style shooting competitions for his arms-dealing buddies aiming at apples balanced on the heads of hapless Filipino prostitutes.

Minor author Michael Owen is commissoned by mad Aunt Tabitha Winshaw to write a family history which she hopes will expose them in all their rottenness and maybe exact a revenge for the murderous betrayal of her beloved brother, Godfrey, the only good person in their grotesque number, by his own kith and kin. In delving into the family mystery, Michael comes to learn who he is and suffers at first hand from the predations of the dreadful clan.

Coe’s satire might have been overtaken by grim reality, but it still gives us a searing perspective from which to make sense of the current crop of horrors: of Blair; Iraq Mk II; of Tourre’s revelation of how bankers run the economy with mad pointlessness, their sole aim to move money into their own pockets: ‘What if we created a ‘thing’ which has no purpose, which is absolutely conceptual and highly theoretical and which nobody knows how to price?’

The banks took our money and, like all good monsters, bounced back more profitable than ever. And yet there is still practically no public control or accountability. Frigsample, they refuse to lend for mortgages although the Tories sold off the public stock and Labour refuses to build anywhere near realistic levels of new housing. How’s that for being caught between a rock and a hard place?

You’d think this was the time for the party we voted for to take charge and protect us from the predations of the corporations. New laws, perhaps. But, no. The governent bleats that its hands are tied. The blackmailing swine might take off to where regulations are even slacker, where taxes for those who can most afford it remain at rock bottom.

Yet miraculously, one holiday aboard music industrialist David Geffen’s yacht and Lord Mandelson criminalises British children who want to share the little pleasure left to them with anti-downloading laws. The government also rushed through legislation to bang up youth who imaginatively find new legal ways to get high while Ken Clarke who, as boss of British American Tobacco, brought the cancerous joys of smoking to a new generation of young Chinese, runs for political office. Again.

Talking left before an election as ever, promises are whispered by Labour of a Robin Hood tax of 0.0000000001 per cent on deals done throught the City, the same City that’s supposed to yield riches for ‘Britain’ which never trickles down to us. I think they mean ‘trickle down’ in the sense that we are the sparrows stitting by the horse’s arse to see if any nourishment gets pooed out. Will that legislation see the light of day? Will it, fuck!

Don’t wait for the politicians to protect you. I watched the videos of last year’s Orwell Prize debate. If you sit through Nick Cohen’s headline-grabbing indictment of the liberal press and giggle at Peter Hitchens’s retort that Nick was pissed (yeah, yeah), you get to the really telling stuff. Labour right-winger (at least he was pre-Bair when everything shifted tectonically to the right) Frank Field warns us ominously of something nasty coming down the pipeline. At first, I thought, yay! Someone’s warning us that the looting of society by Milton Freidman fans at the top has gone too far and unless we rein it back we are in for an Apocalypse. But, no. As we leave the Age Of so-called Enlightenment behind, what is Frank’s concern? Not that life for ‘Brits’ (meaning the middle and working classes) is turning into a living hell, but that the ‘mob’ is getting out of hand and has already, shock horror, targeted the home of a banker. When you deduce that the banker in question is the questionable Fred The Shred it makes you realise where these politicians’ misplaced priorities have been leading us.

Frank wouldn't like What A Carve Up! one little bit, themed as it is around the 1964 movie of the same same starring Kenneth Connor, Sid James and Shirley Eaton in the low-brow comedy thriller about a revolting family who get bumped off one by one at the reading of a dead patriarch's will. One man's revenge fantasy is another man's nightmare.

Now I understand why Frank’s lot have been building prisons and training up riot police to do their worst.

Coe not only made me laugh darkly in recognition of the state we’re in, but he also made me cry and rage at the same time. His unfolding of the personal tragedy of his protagonist through the grinding destruction of the NHS and how it affects real lives is one of the most moving things I’ve read. These are the people who’ll be in the ‘mob’ protesting when they realise that none of the political parties will defend them. These are the people for whom the issues are of life and death while the fiddlers burn down the town in their insatiable hunger for more, more, even more moolah.

And what happened to the far left forces who were supposed to have built a powerful alternative by now? An honest movement that would have trounced the Business Party at the polls and maybe led us into a world where we produce for need not greed? Well, during my sojourn in their ranks organising the press for the Socialist Alliance and Stop The War Coalition, I watched them creaming themselves at the first sight of fame in the public eye. As one prominent SWP member told me when I objected to the destructive swathe left by one crass opportunistic, nepotistic and exploitative leader, now trying to kick-start his media career via his breakaway RCP-style sect, ‘Self-interest and ego will always play a part. So what?’

Clegg, Cameron and Brown, differentiated only by the colour of their ties, declare in an anti-Spartacus trope, “I am Tony Blair!” “No, I am Tony Blair!” “No, I am Tony Blair… and so is my best friend!”

A carve up indeed. More gravy?