Tory Culture Wars

I have developed a habit of reading as I walk,
And today on my way to walking football,
I read the report on the Tory Party Conference opening;

Now I am not one to get angry as a rule,
I’m usually quite cold under the collar,
But what I read affected my play today:
I knew that I needed to re-read the piece,
And gather my thoughts in studied contemplation,
Rather than gather a pass and beat the goalkeeper.

‘If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.’
Did Josef Goebbels really say this?
Even if he didn’t, it’s a handy definition of propaganda.

I have developed a habit of reading as I walk,
And today on my way to walking football,
I read the report on the Tory Party Conference opening;

Now I am not one to get angry as a rule,
I’m usually quite cold under the collar,
But what I read affected my play today:
I knew that I needed to re-read the piece,
And gather my thoughts in studied contemplation,
Rather than gather a pass and beat the goalkeeper.

‘If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.’
Did Josef Goebbels really say this?
Even if he didn’t, it’s a handy definition of propaganda.

Gaslighting:
When the powerful twist a victim’s sense of reality;
You feel dazed and confused;
In short, you are manipulated.

So, when senior and sundry other Tories
Invoke chimeras such as ‘woke aggression’,
And that other favourite, ‘cancel culture’,
Do they really believe what they say?

When Oliver Dowden constructs his artifice:
Cancel culture: the ‘bullying and haranguing of individuals’ and …
‘Anyone … who objects to this woke aggression –
is branded as instigating culture wars’ and …
‘That is why we must be robust … to stand up to this bullying’ and …
‘We must empower institutions to stand up to bullying …
and keep our national heroes in place’
And Nadine Dorries says the BBC will need reminding
‘What is expected of it if it wants to keep its licence fee’,
And when Liz Truss says,
‘We reject the illiberalism of cancel culture,
and we reject the soft bigotry of low expectations
that holds so many people back’,
You know that they are denying structural racism,
And when Dowden blows his red wall whistle,
‘…to keep our national heroes like Nelson, Gladstone and Churchill
in the places of honour they deserve’,
You know what he is up to.

But when he also complains about British citizens
Who perceive a current nation state,
As ‘dominated by privilege and oppression’,
He gives the game away, I think.

Gaslighting:
When the powerful twist a victim’s sense of reality;
You feel dazed and confused;
In short you are being manipulated

Jack Zipes

Munich, Arsenal and Frankfurt

Twenty years after Neville Chamberlain
Proclaimed ‘Peace for our time’ at Heston,
On his return from the Munich conference,
The ‘Busby Babes’ played their last ever game
In England, against Arsenal, at Highbury:

The Munich Air Crash would take so many lives and minds,
And leave a city and a nation frozen in grief;
It was a long journey from February to the summer.

But the World Cup followed the end of the season –
Pele amazed the world with his precocity –
Before close season training at Highbury,
With eyes upon the coming fixture list;
When Jack Zipes, an American student,
Would leave Coleridge, Wordsworth, Thelwall et al

Munich, Arsenal and Frankfurt

Twenty years after Neville Chamberlain
Proclaimed ‘Peace for our time’ at Heston,
On his return from the Munich conference,
The ‘Busby Babes’ played their last ever game
In England, against Arsenal, at Highbury:

The Munich Air Crash would take so many lives and minds,
And leave a city and a nation frozen in grief;
It was a long journey from February to the summer.

But the World Cup followed the end of the season –
Pele amazed the world with his precocity –
Before close season training at Highbury,
With eyes upon the coming fixture list;
When Jack Zipes, an American student,
Would leave Coleridge, Wordsworth, Thelwall et al

On the metaphorical touchline,
To join the star players of the Gunners:
‘Yank to save Arsenal’ proclaimed the headline,
In a theatrical echo of Cold War politics;
‘All I have to do is dream’ sang the Everley Brothers,

Number One that summer.

And so it was that Jack Zipes began his journey,
Along the metaphorical left wing,

From the Arsenal to the Frankfurt School;
From Tommy Docherty – ‘The Doc’ – to a doctorate;
From Ode to Melancholy to Herbert Marcuse;
From the Lyrical Ballads to Critical Theory;
And so to radical deconstructions of fairy tales.

Let’s make dreams reality,
For the many not the few,
All I have to is dream
And just bloody vote Labour.

‘Fairy tales, including reinvented ones, seek to foster a sense of social justice.’
‘It is up to us as readers to realise the dreams and fantasies of these tales.’

On Seeing The Grave of Sir Fabian Ware at Amberley

On the surface, it all seems quite equal,
The Great War cemeteries and gravestones:
Identical – uniform – symbolic –
Equality of sacrifice in death;

But a different story lies beneath:
Officers: seasoned wood for their coffins,
And lids that were carefully screwed down;
Men and other ranks: had unseasoned wood,
And lids that were brusquely nailed and hammered;

1918 saw the vote given to some women –
But not the canary girls and phossie jaws,
They had to wait another ten years –
But also some five and a half million men:
Only 60% of males had the vote
When war broke out for King and Country.

On the surface, it all seems quite equal,
The Great War cemeteries and gravestones:
Identical – uniform – symbolic –
Equality of sacrifice in death;

But a different story lies beneath:
Officers: seasoned wood for their coffins,
And lids that were carefully screwed down;
Men and other ranks: had unseasoned wood,
And lids that were brusquely nailed and hammered;

1918 saw the vote given to some women –
But not the canary girls and phossie jaws,
They had to wait another ten years –
But also some five and a half million men:
Only 60% of males had the vote
When war broke out for King and Country.

Upstairs, Downstairs:

All those men over the age of twenty-one,
Giving their lives for King and Country,
Vote-less;
All those eighteen year olds,
Giving their lives for King and Country,
Vote-less;
All those women,
Giving their lives for King and Country,
Vote-less;

Stanley Baldwin on the new MPs of 1918
(‘The Khaki Election’):
“A lot of hard faced men who look as if
they had done very well out of the war.”

‘If I should die, think only this of me,
That there is some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England’ …
For there they lie:
‘Dulce et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori.’