many places where, during the night, that thing slouching, inevitably, towards Bethlehem, rested en route, leaned on mesh that at a squint has something of the hammock or trampoline about it, leaving what-rough-beast impressions as if invisible trees have fallen
In 2011, the British Con-Dem coalition government imposed massive cuts to public spending, ostensibly to reduce the national deficit. The funding shortfalls produced by this austerity programme were to be met by opening up essential public services –schools, hospitals, universities, hospitals, libraries, and so on – to corporate investment and, where the profitability was likely too be too small or too distant in time, voluntary work within the affected communities. This latter option, known as the Big Society initiative, met with little success and was quietly dropped from political and news agendas. Not, however, before introducing the country to an array of costumed crimefighters and, eventually, a handful of genuine heroes.
Memos and recordings of secret high level meetings leaked to the press in 2015 show that, in an attempt to reduce the cuts to the police service, senior officers conspired to provoke the wave of protests sweeping the UK into violence. They reasoned that the greater the threat to property – one tape reveals officers agreeing to use ‘public order’ as a euphemism – the more likely corporate bosses were to pressurise politicians into maintaining, perhaps even expanding, the police budget. This strategy proved disastrous. Many aspects of police work were suddenly opened up to competitive tender, with tax-payers’ money diverted into the coffers of multinational security consultant companies. The size of the police force was massively reduced. Many former officers found themselves employed by these new ‘security providers’ as freelancers or on short-term contracts, doing the same work for little more than minimum wage. Only the least profitable of police work – crimes against people, particularly in the poorest sectors of society – were left to the police force.
Meanwhile, the Big Society initiative encouraged neighbourhood watch schemes and other community groups to police their own streets. And while many people were concerned about the violence and injustices this introduced, the media lapped it up. Steven Seagal presented four seasons of the reality TV series Have-A-Go Heroes, a ratings hit that inspired numerous imitators, including Ross Kemp’s Britain’s Hardest Heroes and Danny Dyer’s Village Vigilantes. Richard Branson, Simon Cowell, Andrew Lloyd-Webber and Alan Sugar joined forces to produce Britain’s Got Talents, a show which uncovered the nation’s would-be superheroes, and The X-Factory, which followed each season’s finalists as through superhero boot camp. For a while, every school-child wanted to be the next Wicca Man, EastEnder, White Van Man, Hammer or CiderMan, the west country cyborg.
Most irritating of all after the interventions of knights is the debris of the defeated.
This city is a fucking scree of dead parts.
Such acts of worship are conducted with a fervour that seems wholehearted but defensive
If our spans, like antique notebooks’, were contained by endpapers! Two, three days before a baby is born, a great flat page appearing in the prepared room, by the crib, silent, intently examined by parents-to-be. They strive to parse patterns. They might smile guardedly at gilt filigrees & pleasing coloured stock, wince at ogees or particular paisleys, seeing troubled adolescence.
Much mottled, that paper to appear again, graveside.
Again, & again: handstand
Handstand
Corvids have always written collective dot-dash sky-code. They are past scornfully enjoying the obliviousness of human observers. They no longer shape out rude slogans or rococo aerial slanders. No provocation ever provoked. There is a mournful air to their more recent, equally unread, messages.
hush listen you can hear the sound of their rustling clothes, they are on their way
Triangular loci, unexplained phenomena
Farewell to the Working Class
Bold & provocative Gorzian sociological taxonomy showcases Africa’s burgeoning middle class.
Like, you know, waiters, & workers in phone shops, & hat shops, & a supermarket. All those middle-class people, sashaying around on their $2/day.
So many reports. So many questions.
an exhaustion so great, in its eventual sleep the sleeper surrenders form, even of eyes
We Need to Talk about Coleman
‘One of the people I would consider a public intellectual, for example, is David Coleman. He’s a demographer. And he’s written some very brave analysis of immigration to Britain. Some of his ideas are growing more acceptable to give voice to: asking the hard questions about what is a country, what is a culture? And he was writing about this kind of material when multiculturalism was all the rage.’
It is thoroughly awesome to see one of Britain’s brave top public intellectuals bigging up another. Discussing this brave man, cowardly so-called commentators in the lamestream media & so-called academics & such like typically get all oooh, leader-of an-indefatigably-right-wing-organisation this; all aaaah, methodological-bullshit that; all eeeeh, not-so-covert-racist-tropes-&-myths the other; all uuuuh, keen-to-use-libel-laws-to-punish-critics the rest. At least one brave novelist & political commentator, herself bravely prepared to bravely recite the sort of predictable political-correctness-mocking benefits-layabout-baiting Muslim-population-growth-phobic Cameronianism that terrifies cowards into suicidal weeping in the back of taxis driven by the bravest taxi-drivers, is bravely prepared to laud the bravery of David Coleman.
Brave public intellectualism in Britain is brave.
Penultimate page of Batman Year Minus One.
Inadvertently printed without text boxes.
