Are Teresa May and I the only people who understand what’s going on with the British political system and Article 50? Everyone is banging on about what a disaster it is that three judges have ruled that Parliament must vote, whereas that’s all part of the plan.
Of course the eurocrats wanted to rush the Conservatives into invoking A50 by royal prerogative. Then they could refuse to accept it at any point in the negotiations because their tame Euro Court had ruled on request that because the referendum was non-binding, the British Parliament had to vote on it. On the other hand, politics being what they are, May could not say that she wasn’t starting until Parliament had voted for it, because the arguments and posturing would have gone on for months, to be decided by a General Election. So by the same mechanism that gets some Private Members Bills through while others vanish, a legal action brought by a hairdresser and a banker gets fast-tracked and accepted. Because your barber knows who to call to start an action like this. Right? So now Parliament will have to vote, not because the Prime Minister has asked nicely but because the Law has told them to. How the MPs will vote is entirely up to their consciences and what the Whip’s Office decides.
The British negotiators will go into the room with a constitutionally solid backing and a remit to report everything to Parliament, who will then discuss it in public. This is the best thing that could happen to them. On the other side of the table is a Belgian lawyer who is used to having his negotiations covered by confidentiality clauses and has never had the press go after him. Any time he tries anything remotely dodgy, the British team can say that while they, no they can’t have secret talks, because they have to report the day’s proceedings to Parliament, and no they can’t do sell open borders for lower trade tariffs because the British people were quite clear they wanted border controls. The EU negotiators will have no such political support. They will have twenty-seven countries which have conflicting goals and will be unable to promise or deliver anything. The British negotiators will look like masters of decisiveness by comparison.
If anyone thinks that Britain is going to stop plundering the world of cheap labour and smart, socialised young people, they have to be crazy. Of course tourists, students and businessmen will be free to come to the UK. Of course builders and economics graduates who have job offers will be free to come to the UK. And more controversially for the workers who voted Leave, of course seasonal unskilled labourers will be let in. There’s no alternative in the short term. Who can’t come in for more than a holiday or a business trip? Anyone who doesn’t have a job.
It’s then up to the British government and British employers if they want to stop dumping large numbers of British-born people on the scrap-heap because it’s too much trouble to socialise them as children in schools and at work. The competitive advantage of Spain, Poland and a bunch of other countries is that they have better parents and better schools which raise better-socialised and more work-ready young people. That, bluntly, is not going to change in a generation.
Here’s what’s going to change: first, the UK will become legally sovereign again, EU laws won’t automatically apply and their courts won’t have jurisdiction; second, the UK will be legally able to secure its borders against un-wanted economic migrants and whomsoever else it deems undesirable; third, the UK will be be legally able to remove people it doesn’t want. Of course, none of the organisations responsible for any of this will have the practical capability to enforce it, so that Brick Lane will still be full of illegal Pakistani cooks and waiters, Midlands factories will still be staffed by under-paid temporary workers from Szeged and Cluj-Napoca, and gangmasters will continue to supply Norfolk farmers with cheap labour from farms around Starachowice. (If you care about bankers, sure, about fifty-seventy thousand jobs will leave the financial services sector in London, but almost none of those will be presently done by British people. All those Japanese and Indian banks will transfer their offices and staff to Frankfurt or Amsterdam.)
What no-one will tell you until they come to write their memoirs is that “everyone” in British politics and banking knew that the UK had to get out of the EU before the Euro destroyed it. There was no way of doing so without actually saying as much, which doesn’t bode well for any negotiations. So a reason had to be manufactured. The British political establishment had to stumble clumsily into Brexit. Which is way Nigel Farage and UKIP were treated as if they mattered. UKIP did get almost 13% of the votes in the 2015 election, even if that translated into only one MP. There was no reason to hold that referendum, but they did. And Remainers conducted a campaign of spectacular stupidity, doing the one thing guaranteed to turn the ornery British voter against them: they talked down to Leavers, and pulled Project Fear. Really? They couldn’t do better than that? Because I could. So could you. Saatchi’s certainly could have.
The catch is that “everyone” isn’t actually everyone. So a lot of people have to be brought onside. I’m surprised by how much allegedly smart people are still on the wrong side of history on this. I voted Remain, and I’m not ashamed to say it, and it took me less than an hour to understand what had happened. I’m with the Brexit because it’s going to happen and we had better get the best deal we can. Teresa May is with the Brexit because she’s a professional politician and negotiating a good deal is her job. If she does it well, she goes in the history books along with Margaret Thatcher. She’s been at the Home Office for several years and knows what the issues are. Oddly, the journalists and other Good People who are still deploring the Leave vote, and show it by their spin on the news, have not worked at the Home Office.
I’m writing this three days before the Trump-Clinton election. I think I know what’s going to happen, but I don’t want to bring down the wrath of the whatever from high atop the thing.
Monday, 7 November 2016
Thursday, 3 November 2016
Monday, 31 October 2016
That Uber Employment Judgement
"Uber loses right to classify UK drivers as self-employed"
"Uber drivers win fight over over job rights"
One is the Guardian, home of all things Good and Decent. The other is that filthy rag of the capitalists, The Financial Times.
Which is which?
Uh-huh. That’s right. The one talking about a multi-billion dollar corporation losing its rights is….. The Guardian! It’s the FT that’s celebrating the workers’ victory.
The FT’s line isn’t as surprising as you might think. The FT is for investors and bankers, not faceless CEOs and managers. Uber is owned by its owners and some tech investors. These people might read the FT, but they aren’t its audience. The FT’s audience doesn’t actually like all these tech companies much: it prefers mining companies, oil companies, retailers, banks, car-makers and other such business that have actual assets, and are quoted on a proper stock exchange. Uber isn’t a quoted company, and the FT is about quoted companies. That’s what its readers can buy shares in. Private companies get mentioned for the sake of completeness and if they have plenty of outstanding bond issues. Uber is, as far as the FT is concerned, no different from the village garage. It’s just larger, incredibly loss-making, and very bad at making friends. The FT’s readers don’t consider platform operators like Uber and Air B’n B as real companies, and the sooner they go away, the better. So now you know why the FT was crowing about the workers’ victory.
But The Guardian? Oh woe is us. The Guardian thinks that Uber has a “right” to classify workers to its convenience. It’s hard to know if this is lazy writing, legal ignorance or a nasty ideology showing through. I’ll go for all three. Workers are classified as full-time, part-time or self-employed by the law, not by their employers. No corporation has any rights: only human beings have rights.
The Guardian is torn. Its urban elite staff benefit from the low prices and service of gig economy providers. They may even have friends whose children need to work these jobs because they cannot find a proper job. They may also know people who really do work these jobs to provide enough of an income to support their careers in the arts or music. It likes the idea that Uber and others are “disrupting” the present bunch of capitalists. The enemy of my enemy, after all. It’s been a long time since the Guardian was on the side of the workers.
Both papers quoted the same comments by the Tribunal judges, the lawyers and the unions. The real champions of the people here are Judge Anthony Snelson and his two colleagues on the Tribunal, who dismiss Uber’s claims with high elegance: “The notion that Uber in London is a mosaic of 30,000 small businesses linked by a common ‘platform’ is to our minds faintly ridiculous. Drivers do not and cannot negotiate with passengers … They are offered and accept trips strictly on Uber’s terms.” Uber “merited scepticism” for the "fictions, twisted language and even brand new terminology” in its documentation. Go judges!
What neither paper has noticed is that nearly all radio cab firms work on this basis and have done for a long time. And how will this affect courier companies like DPD, who are no less keen to pass on all the costs to their owner-drivers.
I’m with the FT: real businesses own assets.
"Uber drivers win fight over over job rights"
One is the Guardian, home of all things Good and Decent. The other is that filthy rag of the capitalists, The Financial Times.
Which is which?
Uh-huh. That’s right. The one talking about a multi-billion dollar corporation losing its rights is….. The Guardian! It’s the FT that’s celebrating the workers’ victory.
The FT’s line isn’t as surprising as you might think. The FT is for investors and bankers, not faceless CEOs and managers. Uber is owned by its owners and some tech investors. These people might read the FT, but they aren’t its audience. The FT’s audience doesn’t actually like all these tech companies much: it prefers mining companies, oil companies, retailers, banks, car-makers and other such business that have actual assets, and are quoted on a proper stock exchange. Uber isn’t a quoted company, and the FT is about quoted companies. That’s what its readers can buy shares in. Private companies get mentioned for the sake of completeness and if they have plenty of outstanding bond issues. Uber is, as far as the FT is concerned, no different from the village garage. It’s just larger, incredibly loss-making, and very bad at making friends. The FT’s readers don’t consider platform operators like Uber and Air B’n B as real companies, and the sooner they go away, the better. So now you know why the FT was crowing about the workers’ victory.
But The Guardian? Oh woe is us. The Guardian thinks that Uber has a “right” to classify workers to its convenience. It’s hard to know if this is lazy writing, legal ignorance or a nasty ideology showing through. I’ll go for all three. Workers are classified as full-time, part-time or self-employed by the law, not by their employers. No corporation has any rights: only human beings have rights.
The Guardian is torn. Its urban elite staff benefit from the low prices and service of gig economy providers. They may even have friends whose children need to work these jobs because they cannot find a proper job. They may also know people who really do work these jobs to provide enough of an income to support their careers in the arts or music. It likes the idea that Uber and others are “disrupting” the present bunch of capitalists. The enemy of my enemy, after all. It’s been a long time since the Guardian was on the side of the workers.
Both papers quoted the same comments by the Tribunal judges, the lawyers and the unions. The real champions of the people here are Judge Anthony Snelson and his two colleagues on the Tribunal, who dismiss Uber’s claims with high elegance: “The notion that Uber in London is a mosaic of 30,000 small businesses linked by a common ‘platform’ is to our minds faintly ridiculous. Drivers do not and cannot negotiate with passengers … They are offered and accept trips strictly on Uber’s terms.” Uber “merited scepticism” for the "fictions, twisted language and even brand new terminology” in its documentation. Go judges!
What neither paper has noticed is that nearly all radio cab firms work on this basis and have done for a long time. And how will this affect courier companies like DPD, who are no less keen to pass on all the costs to their owner-drivers.
I’m with the FT: real businesses own assets.
Monday, 24 October 2016
Simon Kuper: Traitor to the People
Simon Kuper has an article in the FT Magazine about driverless cars. Amongst other things he says “Over the next 20 years, the mostly low-skilled men who now drive trucks, taxis and buses will see their jobs decimated… If you thought Donald Trump was bad, wait for the next wave of male losers from modernity."
The Contempt is strong in this one. As is a total lack of any understanding of economics, business and engineering. He’s an anthropologist. I’m not going to discuss his vision of a driverless future. The man know nothing about rush hours, Poisson distributions, waiting times, school traffic, insurance liability, and the devil that is asset utilisation.
The reason he doesn’t is that he is a Good Person - notice the Donald Trump signal - and Good People don’t engage well with the real world (or they would be alt-Right-ers and conservatives). Notice the dripping contempt. The “mostly” in “the mostly low-skilled men who now drive trucks, taxis and buses” is so he can dodge comments about female trucks, buses and taxi drivers, and while the cab drivers in the Netherlands may rely on GPS, in London it’s very different. Black cab driving is a highly-skilled and literally brain-altering job. “Wait for the next wave of male losers from modernity”. Because the female losers will be silent?
The implication that “modernity” has resulted in waves of “male losers" is typical of a Good Person. “Male losers” since about 1970 have been created entirely by the failure of managements and governments to changes in the world economy. Faced with smaller, more fuel efficient cars from the East, how long was it before Detroit started producing what the market wanted? Uh. It didn’t. It moaned instead. Just as the job of government is to defend the borders of the country and advance the interests of the citizens, so the jobs of management is to change the products and services and re-train the people to meet and beat whatever the competition is doing. A government that opens its borders to one million unskilled young men of military age and foists them on every small town and village in the land is a failure and deserves to be damned in the next ballot and the history books. A management that throws up its hands and asays the customers don’t want what they make and they can’t compete at those wage rates is incompetent and deserves to spend the rest of its life on the dole queue, not enjoying a handsome pension. The job of leaders is to lead their followers to victory or at least from defeat, not to abandon them to the mud, wolves and thieves.
But no. Not in Professor Kuper’s world. In his world there are not treasonous politicians and self-serving managements. There is only the impersonal force of “modernity”, which, oddly, has very PC effects. If “modernity” created a mass of female losers, would Professor Kuper celebrate it then?
The article ends “[T]he smartphone…brought an epidemic of mass addiction. Let’s hope we can do a better job of handling the driverless car.” Ah yes, the usual 180-degree handbrake turn at the end of the article. They all do it. And the smartphone did not bring an "epidemic of mass addiction”. People always did dumb stuff before, the phone is a change of media, not dumbness. The smart people used to work on their papers and jot notes, now they work on their laptops or iPads-with-keyboard. The rest of the world read dumb books and now they read dumb Facebook or watch dumb TV.
Driverless cars are a concept. The spin-offs are in the precision of GPS, sensors and controls. Like Formula One technology reaching regular cars, driverless technology will reach regular cars as well. As for the whole no-accidents thing? You’re not old enough to remember when CDs were never going to slip, stick or lose data. But they were. How’s that working out for you?
All those cameras and sensors are mechanical things, as are printed circuit boards, and it all gets bounced, vibrated, shaken, heated up, frozen, expanded and contracted… Heck, the torque sensors on my Punto are playing up after twelve years and 50,000 miles, and those would be feeding into the self-driving software. As for the possibilities of hacking? If you think that anyone can make their car systems hack-proof, you need to read up on computer security. Yes, it really will be possible for hackers to stand on a motorway bridge and make your car swerve across three lanes while accelerating. (More fun and less dangerous than pouring oil on the road, so more likely.)
I’m seeing the use for an auto-pilot for motorways and main roads, but not some country back road off the B359 at night.
By contrast, the contempt of Good People for ordinary working men and women is not a concept. It is very real. It affects livelihoods, welfare budgets and everyone’s quality of life.
The Contempt is strong in this one. As is a total lack of any understanding of economics, business and engineering. He’s an anthropologist. I’m not going to discuss his vision of a driverless future. The man know nothing about rush hours, Poisson distributions, waiting times, school traffic, insurance liability, and the devil that is asset utilisation.
The reason he doesn’t is that he is a Good Person - notice the Donald Trump signal - and Good People don’t engage well with the real world (or they would be alt-Right-ers and conservatives). Notice the dripping contempt. The “mostly” in “the mostly low-skilled men who now drive trucks, taxis and buses” is so he can dodge comments about female trucks, buses and taxi drivers, and while the cab drivers in the Netherlands may rely on GPS, in London it’s very different. Black cab driving is a highly-skilled and literally brain-altering job. “Wait for the next wave of male losers from modernity”. Because the female losers will be silent?
The implication that “modernity” has resulted in waves of “male losers" is typical of a Good Person. “Male losers” since about 1970 have been created entirely by the failure of managements and governments to changes in the world economy. Faced with smaller, more fuel efficient cars from the East, how long was it before Detroit started producing what the market wanted? Uh. It didn’t. It moaned instead. Just as the job of government is to defend the borders of the country and advance the interests of the citizens, so the jobs of management is to change the products and services and re-train the people to meet and beat whatever the competition is doing. A government that opens its borders to one million unskilled young men of military age and foists them on every small town and village in the land is a failure and deserves to be damned in the next ballot and the history books. A management that throws up its hands and asays the customers don’t want what they make and they can’t compete at those wage rates is incompetent and deserves to spend the rest of its life on the dole queue, not enjoying a handsome pension. The job of leaders is to lead their followers to victory or at least from defeat, not to abandon them to the mud, wolves and thieves.
But no. Not in Professor Kuper’s world. In his world there are not treasonous politicians and self-serving managements. There is only the impersonal force of “modernity”, which, oddly, has very PC effects. If “modernity” created a mass of female losers, would Professor Kuper celebrate it then?
The article ends “[T]he smartphone…brought an epidemic of mass addiction. Let’s hope we can do a better job of handling the driverless car.” Ah yes, the usual 180-degree handbrake turn at the end of the article. They all do it. And the smartphone did not bring an "epidemic of mass addiction”. People always did dumb stuff before, the phone is a change of media, not dumbness. The smart people used to work on their papers and jot notes, now they work on their laptops or iPads-with-keyboard. The rest of the world read dumb books and now they read dumb Facebook or watch dumb TV.
Driverless cars are a concept. The spin-offs are in the precision of GPS, sensors and controls. Like Formula One technology reaching regular cars, driverless technology will reach regular cars as well. As for the whole no-accidents thing? You’re not old enough to remember when CDs were never going to slip, stick or lose data. But they were. How’s that working out for you?
All those cameras and sensors are mechanical things, as are printed circuit boards, and it all gets bounced, vibrated, shaken, heated up, frozen, expanded and contracted… Heck, the torque sensors on my Punto are playing up after twelve years and 50,000 miles, and those would be feeding into the self-driving software. As for the possibilities of hacking? If you think that anyone can make their car systems hack-proof, you need to read up on computer security. Yes, it really will be possible for hackers to stand on a motorway bridge and make your car swerve across three lanes while accelerating. (More fun and less dangerous than pouring oil on the road, so more likely.)
I’m seeing the use for an auto-pilot for motorways and main roads, but not some country back road off the B359 at night.
By contrast, the contempt of Good People for ordinary working men and women is not a concept. It is very real. It affects livelihoods, welfare budgets and everyone’s quality of life.
Thursday, 20 October 2016
Monday, 17 October 2016
Mod
Recently I read Richard Weight’s best-selling book on the Mod Movement. I assume it was best-selling, since it was out on the tables at Waterstone’s Piccadilly. It’s one of those social history books that makes sense while you are reading it, but doesn’t quite hang together in the memory. Weight includes as 'Mod' a number of groups I don’t think belong there. Skinheads: nothing sharp, ironic or racially-tolerant about them. And Northern Soul Baggies are as non-Mod as anything that could be imagined. A lot of the cultural content he ascribes to the movement comes from a group of people who called themselves “Modernists” and went for jazz, continental cooking and design. I have a feeling those guys weren't grooving to Stax and popping uppers in Ham Yard Friday night. I have no idea what Neville Brody and Post-Modernism are doing in there either, even if Brody was a young Mod back in the day. Len Deighton’s creation Harry Palmer just about belongs, although I see Palmer as closer to the Nouvelle Vague and Godard’s louche anti-heroes.
However, this isn't the point. Weight's book is a good guide to some of the fringe groups of post 1960’s British Cultural History.
It leaves you with the sense there was and is a sensibility called Mod, and that it had to do with dressing sharp, liking black music, being racially-tolerant, with Vespa-riding as an option, rejecting mainstream ideas of career and jobs, and with a sprinkle of irony thrown in. But not much more. Misogyny. But then Weight has to say that, because he’s a Visiting Professor at Boston University, so he has to throw some ideological chum to the feminists.
The phrase everyone quotes to define Mod is from Peter Meadon: “clean living under difficult circumstances”. You may feel that since this was said by someone in the middle of drug use and nervous breakdowns, this is possibly a little rich, but let’s go with the words of the prophet and not his actions.
At the very least “clean living” means self-respect, or at least its outward show. Hence the sharp dressing, which is always good for outward show.
Here are some things that weren’t options in the 1960’s: junk food, super-sizing, sugar and soya in everything, snacking; couch-potato living, playing computer games for hours, sitting in office chairs for hours on end; staying up late watching television; central heating keeping your house at near-summer temperatures; wearing sports clothes on the high street; two hundred channels and nothing’s on; around one hundred and fifty genres of dance music; terraced houses in working-class areas that cost ten times median earnings; sending jobs to foreign countries; easy divorce; hours of soap operas on television; effective birth control for women; social media. More people did manual work, and all work was more manual. The entire country was closed on Wednesday afternoon and all day Sunday. Except for cinemas.
What would “clean living” mean now? It would mean resisting all those ways to turn into a slob. It would mean keeping fit, eating well, staying in shape, and not being distracted by social media or slouching in front of the TV. Add being informed about the new in whatever interests them. It would mean focussing on having a good time, getting done what needs to be done and not being drawn into random drama and outrage. Sound familiar? Exactly. Mod was a Man’s Movement. Girls were welcome, but they weren’t the point of all the sharp dressing, Vespa-decorating and dancing to Wilson Pickett.
That’s the insight Weight’s academic political correctness blinds him to. Throughout history, I suspect, there have always been men who simply have not seen the point of family life and producing offspring - though they probably produced offspring, since birth control was pretty haphazard. These men chose to live better than the family man. Whatever “better” meant back then. Mods were the post WW2 working-class take on that. That's why the skinheads and their offspring really don't belong in Mod. When the Mods faded away, leaving only Paul Weller and Paul Smith behind, there was nothing for over three decades until the internet-based self-improvement movement evolved from PUA. That's the real story.
Self-improvers are not Mods. Sharp dressing, and a particular style of it, is the core part of Mod identity. I never dressed that sharp, but I did prefer Stax and Tamla Motown when I was at school. My lot were too late for Mod. Or for Hippies. But I am, however late in life, a self-improver.
The book has a comment from a Mod girl about the Mod-Rocker fights. She recognised some of the Mods in the photographs. They were not the Faces she knew. The rioters were the boys in the lower streams and secondary moderns. The Mods she hung out with were much smarter and were going to pass their exams and have careers. (You could have a better career with five good O-levels then than you can with a junk degree now.) Weight half-absorbs the lesson of this. Mod was an elite, as self-improvement is now. Elite means elite, not hundreds of teenagers in parkas having a riot. Since he's not allowed to like elites, Weight has to conflate the rioters and the Faces, and that's what spoils the coherence of his story. In the end, the art-and-design Modernists just cannot be tied in with the Vespa-riding, pill-popping Mods. Every time he did it, I kept wanting it to work, but it doesn't. Paul Weller and Pete Townsend weren't Mods, for all the parkas, rounders and sharp suits. They were from the start, professional, dedicated and hugely talented musicians, who found in Mod a framework for their ideas. There's a difference between being the thing and being inspired by the thing. The caustic song "Substuitute" is at once man anthem and a critique. It depends how the listener reacts.
On the other hand it does give him something to write about the thirty year wasteland between the death of Mod and the growth of self-improvement.
If you really want to know what Mod was and how it felt, read the first two chapters of Tony Parsons' Limelight Blues. In fact, read the novel: it's Parsons’ best, and one of the best novels of the last quarter of the twentieth-century. Yes. Really. Here’s his protagonist David Lazar in full Mod righteousness:
However, this isn't the point. Weight's book is a good guide to some of the fringe groups of post 1960’s British Cultural History.
It leaves you with the sense there was and is a sensibility called Mod, and that it had to do with dressing sharp, liking black music, being racially-tolerant, with Vespa-riding as an option, rejecting mainstream ideas of career and jobs, and with a sprinkle of irony thrown in. But not much more. Misogyny. But then Weight has to say that, because he’s a Visiting Professor at Boston University, so he has to throw some ideological chum to the feminists.
The phrase everyone quotes to define Mod is from Peter Meadon: “clean living under difficult circumstances”. You may feel that since this was said by someone in the middle of drug use and nervous breakdowns, this is possibly a little rich, but let’s go with the words of the prophet and not his actions.
At the very least “clean living” means self-respect, or at least its outward show. Hence the sharp dressing, which is always good for outward show.
Here are some things that weren’t options in the 1960’s: junk food, super-sizing, sugar and soya in everything, snacking; couch-potato living, playing computer games for hours, sitting in office chairs for hours on end; staying up late watching television; central heating keeping your house at near-summer temperatures; wearing sports clothes on the high street; two hundred channels and nothing’s on; around one hundred and fifty genres of dance music; terraced houses in working-class areas that cost ten times median earnings; sending jobs to foreign countries; easy divorce; hours of soap operas on television; effective birth control for women; social media. More people did manual work, and all work was more manual. The entire country was closed on Wednesday afternoon and all day Sunday. Except for cinemas.
What would “clean living” mean now? It would mean resisting all those ways to turn into a slob. It would mean keeping fit, eating well, staying in shape, and not being distracted by social media or slouching in front of the TV. Add being informed about the new in whatever interests them. It would mean focussing on having a good time, getting done what needs to be done and not being drawn into random drama and outrage. Sound familiar? Exactly. Mod was a Man’s Movement. Girls were welcome, but they weren’t the point of all the sharp dressing, Vespa-decorating and dancing to Wilson Pickett.
That’s the insight Weight’s academic political correctness blinds him to. Throughout history, I suspect, there have always been men who simply have not seen the point of family life and producing offspring - though they probably produced offspring, since birth control was pretty haphazard. These men chose to live better than the family man. Whatever “better” meant back then. Mods were the post WW2 working-class take on that. That's why the skinheads and their offspring really don't belong in Mod. When the Mods faded away, leaving only Paul Weller and Paul Smith behind, there was nothing for over three decades until the internet-based self-improvement movement evolved from PUA. That's the real story.
Self-improvers are not Mods. Sharp dressing, and a particular style of it, is the core part of Mod identity. I never dressed that sharp, but I did prefer Stax and Tamla Motown when I was at school. My lot were too late for Mod. Or for Hippies. But I am, however late in life, a self-improver.
The book has a comment from a Mod girl about the Mod-Rocker fights. She recognised some of the Mods in the photographs. They were not the Faces she knew. The rioters were the boys in the lower streams and secondary moderns. The Mods she hung out with were much smarter and were going to pass their exams and have careers. (You could have a better career with five good O-levels then than you can with a junk degree now.) Weight half-absorbs the lesson of this. Mod was an elite, as self-improvement is now. Elite means elite, not hundreds of teenagers in parkas having a riot. Since he's not allowed to like elites, Weight has to conflate the rioters and the Faces, and that's what spoils the coherence of his story. In the end, the art-and-design Modernists just cannot be tied in with the Vespa-riding, pill-popping Mods. Every time he did it, I kept wanting it to work, but it doesn't. Paul Weller and Pete Townsend weren't Mods, for all the parkas, rounders and sharp suits. They were from the start, professional, dedicated and hugely talented musicians, who found in Mod a framework for their ideas. There's a difference between being the thing and being inspired by the thing. The caustic song "Substuitute" is at once man anthem and a critique. It depends how the listener reacts.
On the other hand it does give him something to write about the thirty year wasteland between the death of Mod and the growth of self-improvement.
If you really want to know what Mod was and how it felt, read the first two chapters of Tony Parsons' Limelight Blues. In fact, read the novel: it's Parsons’ best, and one of the best novels of the last quarter of the twentieth-century. Yes. Really. Here’s his protagonist David Lazar in full Mod righteousness:
They thought they were so special, the creeps on the team [at the advertising agency where Lazar works], but they reminded him of commuters. The suits of the men in the Tube made him smile. What was the point in wearing a suit if you looked like a sack of potatoes in it? They stared at him…and they hated him, because he wore a suit beautifully and for pleasure, and they wore a suit as a convict wears a fetter.
Thursday, 13 October 2016
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