The Outside Of Everything

Chapter 29
The Class War

One day, Our Friend Stan, the old rascal who had the lock up next door but one to us, seemed to be in a bad way. We, however, knew better than to take any notice of Our Friend Stan when he was in a bad way. We knew from experience that Stan in a bad way spelled trouble. And trouble tended to mean hard work. So, for once, we were determined to let Stan stew. We continued to do what we were doing, which wasn’t really very much, but that wasn’t the point. We might have been sifting through old music papers, or something equally enthralling. That wasn’t the point. We knew about Stan and his troubles.

But Our Friend Stan wasn’t easy to ignore for long. Particularly not when he was standing right over you. Which he was. So we gave in. I blame myself, said Stan. It was a good opening line, we thought. I tried my best, said Stan. It was a pretty good follow up, we agreed. It’s that son of mine, moaned Stan. Ah yes, we knew all about that. Little Stan. The bane of our friend’s life. Little Stan was, shall we say, something of a disappointment to his father. Our Friend Stan had a mischievous streak. Little Stan was as straight as they came. Stan the elder had run a successful little business for many a long year. Stan the younger was a local mini cab driver.

He’s only gone and been turned down by the local Conservatives association, groaned our friend. Went and put his name forward for the local elections, bemoaned our friend, and got turned down. Can you believe it, said Stan? Oh the shame of it. He shook his head in desperate despair. How am I going to be able to show my face in the clubroom of the local football club, implored Stan? They’ll all have heard. They’ll all be laughing at me. He had a point, and we did our best to sympathise.

Privately we thought anyone who put their name forward as any kind of candidate needed their head examined. We were not fans of organised or orthodox politics. And we were exceptionally suspicious of people that got overly involved. Let’s not confuse issues here though. We were very much political animals. But in our own way. Oh we knew left was right, and right was wrong. That was straight forward enough in itself. It’s just that we’d come across a number of people in our time, on the left and on the right, that were into orthodox organised politics. And we were very unclear about their motives. Which left a funny taste in our mouths, and suspicion in our minds.

Take Little Stan. He wasn’t the sharpest of pencils in the pencil tin. But he was ambitious in his own way. He drove his local mini cab for as many hours as he possibly could. He wanted a good life for his wife and family. He wanted to be respectable. He thought that belonging to the local conservatives association was a good way to get on. He thought they accepted him. He didn’t realise it was his subscriptions they were after. He didn’t realise that he would never really be one of the inner circle. Not then. Later, of course, they’d have anybody. But then they were very much in charge. And Little Stan desperately wanted to be on the winning side for once.

We’d seen similar on the other side. We’d even gone along to a few meetings when we were younger. The Young Socialist League. I think. Back when, well, when you saw YSL sprayed on a wall and it had nothing to do with designer brand recognition. And the meetings were horrible. Grim. Dour. Speakers were horrible. Grim. Dour. One of the ones we saw is now a cabinet minister, but that changes nothing. Nope. The whole thing left us cold. There was nothing there to engage with. There was no attempt either to engage with us. Oh sure there was a lot of doctrine and dialectics and hectoring. But that was not going to make the lady on the till down the local supermarket take a sharp left turn. Far from it in fact.

Without wanting to come across all Pete Wylie declaiming Sal Paradise’s words about city intellectuals and the folk body blood of the land, we did struggle with the idea of where the left was going, and how it could connect with the people in a supermarket at any given time. An idiot in a donkey jacket trying to flog a Militant newspaper on a street corner, say, or a clown in a cagoule carrying a Socialist Worker placard at any demo under the sun. They were never going to change a thing. But they could be as absorbed in the struggle as we might be in an old Subway Sect single.

Class war will never change history while parallel lines are in the shroud of mystery, or something. That’s what Vic Godard and Subway Sect sang. We listened to that song all the time. And we got quite confused about class war. It was another of those phrases bandied about. It scared some people. But it confused us. Some of the people with their Class War banners. Well, they seemed frightfully well spoken. Okay, you don’t choose your families, and you don’t choose where you’re born, but even so. And then there was the other side of the coin. The petty in-built prejudices. The seams of snobbery. Snobbery of the inverted sort. The sort of situations you can still get where a football manager says going to the match in the North East is the same as people down South going to the theatre. The Redhead saw that in the paper the other day, and rang me up fizzing with rage. When was the last time you went to the theatre, he raged.

There used to be a lot of that sort of thing. Alternative comics with Marxist credentials making a name for themselves. Peddling cheap stereotypes. Jokes about stuck-up soft Southerners. Sell-out shows at The Comedy Store in Leicester Square. By The Prince of Wales cinema. The cinema we’d often go to as it was dead cheap and you could catch some good films for next to nothing and waste away a day. But nearby ambitious Northern comics would peddle their class war. And we’d read about whatever up ’n’ coming comedian and want to grab them by the throat, and say let me show you round the South East. Look here’s the Medway Towns, the Isle of Sheppey, Hackney and Harringay. Let me take you by the hand and lead you round the streets of Thamesmead, and we’ll even leave you there to give the Rottweilers something to make you change your mind. Of course we never actually did. We never even ever got close to it. Too busy looking for old jazz records I suspect.

But we did start some hares running once. There was one comic. He was really playing the political card. The class war thing was central to his act. And before you knew it he was a bit of a media darling in the listings mags and The Guardian, New Society and New Statesman, The Face and Arena. Channel Four and Radio Four were sniffing round. The NME wanted to be his friend. And we absolutely hated him. With a vengeance. He really got up our noses. He was about as funny as sinusitis. And just as annoying. We were not what you might call fans. The final straw was when the journalist Jon Savage said something glowing like in print about this comic telling bitterly funny stories from the desolate heart of a Northern town. Glowing? Absolute mint balls, said The Redhead.

Some of this, of course, could be embellished, embroidered, and pure fabricated, but you get the picture. You could see why in such circumstances we felt duty bound to do something. Why we needed to do some debunking. Set a few hares running. A few tongues wagging. We’d done the same sort of thing before when we’d been involved in some local difficulties. But this was different. It was a national emergency. Absolutely imperative we do something, said The Redhead.

So we did. We made up a list. This comedian. The man of the people. The scourge of the establishment. Went to public school, we wrote. Family has a castle in Ireland, we added. Only ever been to Wigan to stay with his nanny, we put down. Dabbles in stocks and shares, we made up. We passed this list on to a friend of a friend who had a friend on The Sun. Ah yes, The Sun, we said. The good old currant bun. The voice of the people. The scourge of the loony left. They’d love to get their claws into this character.

A few days later our friend got back to us. Word had been passed back down the chain. From The Sun. They thanked us for our information. But they knew all that already. And didn’t really want it all getting out yet. You see, said our friend in confidential tones, it suits them to have a figure on the left to lob bricks at. A wide-eyed staring Trot to terrify the working class. A loony left loud-mouthed lout to lampoon was always handy. And this comedian, this man of the people, the scourge of the establishment, he knew The Sun knew. So, in time, he would betray the left, oh little by little, get himself a glamourous model girlfriend and a regular slot on a TV chat show, retire from politics, do a sit com, and write a raunchy blockbuster. It’s the way things work now, said our friend. We shrugged our shoulders in despair. The Redhead smashed a few things up. We didn’t understand the rules of engagement anyway. So we went back to our Subway Sect singles and our jazz LPs. We were more attuned to the mysteries they suggested.