Penge Revisited (Again)

Perhaps I keep going back to Penge because living there nearly a half century ago was the last time I experienced being part of what I thought was a normal, loving family.

This almost feels like a macabre thing to write because my brother certainly couldn’t go back and risk triggering the childhood trauma he went through in that south London flat. For me, the trauma came later. The self-harming certainly started in Penge though. This isn’t good when you’re nine (or at any age).  However, the photographs from that part of my childhood don’t automatically trigger the shit switch. And my schooldays there were, mostly, ok. However, after two pints of Guinness in The Pawleyne Arms and then walking aimlessly after an abandoned bus ride up Crystal Palace Park Road, I was desperate, crying, and asking my mother to forgive me.  My Mum killed herself. Not in Penge but in the last of the three horror houses my parents lived in after we left London.

There were constant reminders all over town of the festive season. I recalled some nice Christmases in Penge. However, Christmas would be poisoned later. That, and the imprint of my desperate, early teens, lunge into Christianity has left me unable to embrace Christmas as an annual secular glorification of childhood and mindless consumption. Walking round Penge at Christmas also brought up memories of a much later time when I drove to Sussex to cook Christmas dinner for my then elderly Mum, arriving early morning so that I could leave almost as soon as we’d eaten the rudimentary roast. I remember that there was so much smoke in the kitchen that the benign Orwellian monitoring regime kicked in. A disembodied broadcast voice, that of a ‘Life-Line’ operative, asked, ‘Are you alright Mrs Partrick?’ ‘Yes, I’m fine dear,’ I feigned in reply.

You were totally alone Mum, and I moaned at you about how much you needed to get out more, and do this, that and the other. I made you feel like a burden and ultimately that was a key reason why you killed yourself. That, a lifetime of depression, and then learning about your husband’s sexual abuse of your children, all played their part.

I am determined to write this. Though right now I am seriously having my doubts. I sincerely hope that other family members do not see it. If I don’t send them the link, then I guess they won’t. I do want some people to see it though. Perhaps those for whom I continue to ‘perform’ in some guise or other, whether professional or voluntary, playing the responsible and supposedly well-informed person. Everything managed, everything in its place.

There was something very familiar in those desperate feelings I experienced walking near Crystal Palace. It was a sense of abandonment that is deep and goes right back to childhood. That same feeling has this week sent me out running into the darkness of the small hours, unable to sleep, lost in the ‘child’ that these memories evoke or the vulnerability that contemporary triggers engender.  At least I am now able to recognise these feelings. Likewise, I know that going back to Penge for the second time in a little over a year was a risky exercise.  On each return visit the nostalgic excitement progressively diminishes and the darkness is always just around the corner. Of course, the darkness is always there. I have known its contours, its associations, its symptoms ever since that Penge boyhood.

I gazed up once again to the outside of my first home. I can see the bedroom where I first remember things going wrong. I recall an evening when my brother and me had ‘child minders’. I was very upset and pleaded to the evidently distraught Godsmarks that they ‘Tell my parents that it’s happened again.’ What had actually ‘happened’, they didn’t ask. I think I had meant time spent alone in my bedroom unable to cope with my feelings and feeling compelled to either poison myself (Pot Ash) or clean myself from within (soap). I don’t remember the Godsmarks, or any other child minders, ever coming again. Prior to that evening I do though remember the excitement of Mr Godsmark driving me to the centre of London in his (open top) white Triumph Vitesse.

The family flat, High St Penge

This same self-harming nine-year-old was frightened of certain girls; way more than any of the Malcolm Junior School boys (now the 'Harris Academy'). My eventual fight-back against the hardest bullying girl brought down on me the wrath, and one-sided physical punishment, of a deputy head mistress. Having been slapped hard several times on the back of my legs with a ruler, I railed, amidst angry tears of righteous indignation, at what I thought was a self-evident injustice. All of this presumably relates to the horrors I was infusing at home, even if I was not (yet) personally experiencing them. The last time I had gazed up at the front of our former High Street flat in Penge, the shop below was in business and there were signs of life above it. Not so in the relative darkness of this visit (see photo above). Circling the block once more, I walked past the Cromwells’ wall, now fantastically adorned (see below), and tried to work out exactly where the Godsmarks’ old house was. 

Montrave Road, Penge

In approaching the very familiar sight of ‘our’ part of the High Street once again, I saw, for the first time since boyhood, that there was still an entrance to an alley from where you used to be able to get to the back of where we lived.  What’s more, this time the huge gate to it was open. I nervously waited for the owner of what I later realised to be the manager of the nearby ‘Penge Masala’ restaurant to get out of their car and enter the premises. Strangers snooping about the back yards of people's houses after dark, surreptitiously taking photos, would not be welcome. I finally summoned up the courage to go down the familiar and very dark alley. Heart pounding with child-like excitement, feeling half crazy, I stumbled past the back of the curry house, past an abandoned fridge, and nearly fell over the rubbish that was strewn everywhere until I found what had once been the entrance to the back yard of the shop that we’d lived above. All was roughly boarded up and totally impenetrable. Was I going to break in? I had tried to blag my way in via the front door to our flat the last time I was here. I hurried back up the alley, adrenalin racing, past the voices from the kitchen at the back of Penge Masala.

Alleyways of childhood

Through the darkness the light of the street became visible. However, like later when I walked past the edge of Crystal Palace Park, I’d wanted somehow to fall out of the light into the darkness of the old familiar alley and be swallowed up by it. Sometimes, like much later that same night, running in the darkness of Leyton and its filter beds, I imagine deliberately falling into the blackness. Either side of that Leyton path, I could have fallen into the ice-cold water below, but I recoiled at the likely horror of what this would bring.

Back into the light

Walking up past Crystal Palace Park, I had spied the iconic broadcasting tower, strangely barely illuminated but still overwhelming in scale. After veering into sidings and photographing aspects of the area’s Victorian remains (see immediately below), I slipped into the park itself, mindful of the strangeness of all that was being illuminated. 

Crystal Palace gothic

Crystal Christmas

All part of some Christmas shopping spectacle, it seemed. Well-dressed, well-heeled couples walked into the main entrance where merchants offered choice trees and scented candles.  Imaginary conversations went through my head as I strode about in a slightly moth-eaten 20+ year old Crombie coat. You don’t know anything about me, I stated to imaginary interlocutors.  Don’t presume anything.  I am not what you see.  I am not of you.

I’d never fully appreciated that there had always been part of Crystal Palace that was moderately well to do. Large houses still abound. My father used to say we were from Crystal Palace, partly to help people locate where we lived and partly out of social embarrassment at what ‘Penge’ somehow connoted. A thoroughly middle-class white family strode by. Perhaps the children attended the Langley Park grammar school located a bus ride away. I am not of you, I quietly intoned. 

I had no interest in revisiting Langley Park Grammar School for Boys. I had only attended it for nine months, but the elitism of a state-funded institution and its almost exclusively middle-class demographic never left me. My brother had somehow slotted in. He worked hard, kept his nose clean and found some long-haired members of a more rarefied socio-economic grouping to play the officially disapproved of sport of football with during break times. Very aware that I was neither of the council estates nor possessed of the leafy assuredness that comfortable dwellings provide, I though never felt at home at Langley Park. Harold Wilson became an instant object of sympathy for me when I heard the roar of appreciation from the grammar school staff room when the news broke that he had resigned as Prime Minister.

That part of Penge High St that is close to Crystal Palace is undergoing a gentle gentrification including a bourgeois-looking café and a tap room (empty). Some of this process is even finding its way into Penge proper, although plainly not the parade that includes our former High Street flat. I saw a lot more estate agents in Penge on this return trip, and in Southey Street, behind the High Street, a sign pointed the way to a micro-brewery and adjoining tap room. However the street art in Southey Street looked way more enticing (see below). 

Southey Street art

When in 2017 I made the first of a series of return visits to Penge I saw a lot of boarded up shops and very few estate agents. Penge though is only 15 minutes by train from Victoria and has three walkable, overground stations. So, amidst London’s ever-present property price insanity, the attraction to the middle classes of its less salubrious outposts is I suppose obvious. In any case I wouldn’t have noticed so much as a kid that Penge had probably always had its ‘comfortable’ parts. Almost across the road from where we lived, Avington Grove has some large and impressive late Victorian family houses that look as if they have maintained that status. The Wilsons (no relation) lived opposite us in this (see below) quite smart house (although I think it had already been converted into flats back then).

The Wilsons' home

On Kent House Road, where the big houses that I used to steal milk from meet Thesiger Road, there’s a parade that now has an upholsterer’s and an upmarket carpet shop (and this more modest shop, below, whose awning may not have changed in the last 45 years).

 

Kent House offie

Reviewing Southey micro-brewery's website a little later, I noted that among the beers available for four days a week in the Taproom, and anytime if you order online, were the pointlessly offensive ‘Lazy Jesus’ and ‘Hazy Jesus’. The online Lazy Jesus though was proving so popular that it was listed as ‘out of stock’. St John’s Parish Church Penge is only open to the public for an hour a week. I share the anger that some fellow Survivors can feel about a ‘Man in a Purple Dress’ , even if I have retained my childhood respect for a Christian faith that gave me love and salvation. It also taught me to equate the consequences of my abuse with sin. I am still dealing with the shame of that.  

I eventually left Penge in a state of high agitation. I felt pathetic that a trip that I had taken because I couldn’t face a day with either myself or anyone else, had brought a lot of upset.  Unlike the last time I came, this was no journey of self-discovery I thought. I’d arrived in the actual darkness and had continued to dwell there.  However, I had come because I had wanted to ‘feel something’. Writing this now I realise it revealed a lot more than I had thought. Feeling shame isn’t anything new. However, if I am helping myself to process my mother’s suicide nine years on, then this is a good thing. The Pawleyne Arms’ cheap beer had only contributed to what was always going to be an emotional roller coaster. It also brought me a wonderful mash up of a 40-year-old Stranglers’ song (‘Golden Brown’), an all-time favourite number that always instantly transports me to being 17.

The Pawleyne Arms, Penge

A good friend asked me if, in blogging this and other forms of life writing, I felt ‘held’ enough. Perhaps not. But as it isn’t free writing, is typed and is constantly being edited, even mid-sentence, perhaps these are the ‘constraints’ that keep me in check.  I don’t want to be in check though.  I’d hoped this could convey the scream I had wanted to come out, especially by the side of Crystal Palace Park Road. However, hitting ‘publish’ is fairly ‘un-boundaried’ I guess. So here goes.

    

 

Doin' Her Utmost to mix pop with feeling

The new single by The Big Believe 'Doin’ My Utmost' C/W 'Hundreds' is a writing collaboration between Amanda Thompson and Daniel Wylie (of Cosmic Rough Riders fame). The Big Believe though is essentially Amanda, who writes/co-writes and performs most of the material, when she’s not busy being a Necessary Animal that is. As The Big Believe, Amanda Thompson has carved out a distinct niche fusing pop electronica with an Indie sensibility and catchy but emotional vocals.

Single cover artwork by Peter Quinnell 

The 2020 album Juggernaut provided the perfect showcase for this fusion; the single from that album, 'Tania Was A Truth Teller', was an absolute corker.

Album cover artwork by Peter Quinnell

The new single has Necessary Animals’ collaborator Fritz Catlin (23 Skidoo) at the mixing desk, Marcus Sullivan on additional guitar, and Rufus Stone on bass and percussion. While Amanda would no doubt modestly deny that The Big Believe is essentially her, the new single is very much in a groove that she has established as her own. Her promotional material stresses ‘melody’ and ‘energy,’ and these are very much what 'Doin’ My Utmost' is about. 

It’s no surprise that she’s currently getting more airplay Stateside. When it comes to intelligent pop and rock, the US had long favoured broadcasting direct and upbeat songs over the Brits’ more typical knowing introspection. The Big Believe are more than just catchy though; they want to uplift with feeling, and this single is no exception to their musical game-plan. ‘Hundreds’ does the same thing, with just a little less bounce. The Big Believe could be the next big thing. You read it here first.

'Doin' My Utmost'/'Hundreds' can be purchased/listened to via this link.

A Man in a Purple Dress

Passion, anger, self-righteousness, humility, equivocation. It’s all in here. Unsurprisingly this late period Pete Townshend/Who song says more about the author than the subject. Its target is moralising prelates; its visual embodiment is a pope (written pre-Pope Francis). However 'A Man in a Purple Dress' is full of contempt for figures of high orthodoxy in any monotheistic context. More importantly the anger is timeless, focused, articulate; the older Daltrey delivers a vocal that’s emotionally intelligent, mannered and sincere. Townshend accompanies him on acoustic guitar. Nothing more, nothing less. The song is complete. 

Unplugged but wired, circa 2016 Photo © La Stampa

Townshend isn’t saying that for a man to be wearing a long purple tunic is inherently absurd, more that it compounds the inherent risibility of those presented as infallible, or at the very least those who would have us believe they’re wise, moral and well-informed when they preach. Of course Townshend knew when he handed down these lyrical judgments to Daltrey to try to embody, that he hadn’t been above dispensing moral and political lessons to his followers for a few decades either. Toward the end of the song, Townshend, via Daltrey, notes that he too dresses up for ‘grand awards’, and that at least those apparently embodying religious certainty aren’t weighed down by moral equivocation (or ‘astride the fence’). That comes with middle aged agnosticism, presumably. Listening to it today, 15 years on from when it was released, I get an immediacy and a power, a righteous rage that could rightfully be addressed to any public figure who tries to dispense moral authority from within the confines of morally compromised power structures. Take another bow, Pete.   

‘A Man in a Purple Dress’ is on The Who album ‘Endless Wire’ (2006)

A late period classic, released 2006. Cover artwork © Polydor/Universal

Free and experimental music at the Kino-Teatr St Leonard's

Hastings and St Leonard’s music scene is re-emerging in difficult, even controversial, circumstances. However in the large, open and relatively safe space of the Kino-Teatr Gallery area, it felt ok to spend a Sunday afternoon hearing, for free, some top-notch performers. Masks are of course optional and they do make singing difficult, not to mention eating or drinking. We had witnessed music performed on a Sunday in the Kino-Teatr's Upper Gallery a few weeks earlier and therefore had a sense of what to expect on our return visit on August 1.

Back in July, ‘Simon and The Pope’ had excited the modest gathering with their funky, spacey vibe (‘punk funk drum and bass’, according to the description on Soundcloud) driven by a dextrous bass player (John Pope), cool drum patterns (Simon Charterton), and special guest Keith Rodway on keyboards/synth. However when Simon, The Pope, and fiddle player Robert Rosenthal get together they constitute something quite different; namely ‘The Aftershave’ . Dubbed ‘countrydelic’ in the Kino-Teatre’s pre-gig publicity, that genre, previously unbeknownst to me, more or less sums up what they do. 

Upper Gallery view of The Aftershave (Pic: Amanda Thompson)

I’d initially been reminded of McGuinness Flint as in a semi-acoustic catchy ‘70s folk-pop shtick, but there’s a musical versatility and an ‘otherness’ to The Aftershave that soon made them escape the confines of my initial impression. For one thing the fiddler knew how to make the relatively simple (and I mean no disrespect) sound out of this world. Simon kept things tight but loose on the drums whilst singing lyrics that were alternately funny or deeply moving but which probably escaped most of an audience that was seated below him in the lower gallery area. I heard an audience member express concern about the acoustics of the music space. However for the most part (aside from hearing the lyrics, which are never easy to discern at gigs) the bands came through well.

The Aftershave (Pic by Amanda Thompson)

Punters' view of Afrit Nebula performing in the Upper Gallery, Kino-Teatr

First up on on Sunday Aug 1 had actually been Afrit Nebula, named in part after an Arabian djinn, and at times, due mostly to the soprano sax playing of Elaine Edwards, they definitely had a Middle Eastern feel. Her first solo sounded more snake charming than ‘Naima’, but as the band’s set progressed Ellen’s playing eclectically tapped African-American, Arabian, and entirely her own vibes. Speaking of which, her keyboard provided a xylophone accompaniment at one point. Frontman, in a sense, is Ken Edwards, whose bass playing, like that of John Pope above, was stellar and conducted with feeling. On drums, percussion, and occasional bursts of acoustic guitar, was Yair Katz.

Afrit Nebula (Picture by Amanda Thompson)

This was Afrit Nebula’s first live gig since Covid, and it’s a new line up from the one that provided an inspired accompaniment to a Butoh dancer in the Kino-Teatr two years ago. Founder-member and vocalist and percussionist, Jamie Harris departed in May, but the trio, having recruited Yair Katz on percussion, have maintained the quality. What they lack – at least when they perform songs – is a decent vocalist. Having a confident and assured singer would in some way detract from Afrit Nebula’s equalitarian focus on the music; the songs though would benefit from a definably lead vocal. That said, Yair’s singing in both English and Hebrew on one number was in the emotional zone, as was the multi-musicianship he displayed at the same time. Nerves probably played their part in lessening the impact. 'Spoken singing' works for some renowned performers; it just needs assertiveness. Don’t get me wrong though, Afrit Nebula are excellent.

Necessary Animals should have been the stars of the show and, despite only performing as a duo with keyboards apiece and having technical issues, in some ways they still were. The difficulty in playing for a lunch time crowd is that in order to at least keep them in their seats, or better still up and bopping, you need to …eh…play to the gallery. 

Keith Rodway and Amanda Thompson are the nucleus of a band whose music explores the outer reaches of psych, avant rock, cosmic pop, jazz, and all spaces within and without. Much of that was communicated in their set, aided by backing tapes and samples, but only if you were among the increasingly small number who were actually listening. Amanda’s vocals are always excellent, whether with the Necessary Animals or her electronica pop outfit ‘The Big Believe’ . However this was a hard sell, especially when the tapes included a spoken voice offering disconnected ‘commentary’. 

The number ‘Acceptance’ was introduced by Keith as, I think, an exploration of coming to terms with a stalker (maybe he meant ‘Stalker’ – Ed….). Some of the Kino’s passing trade voted with their feet, which was a real shame because this is a band that deserve a lot more attention. My friend commented, ‘F*** the audience.’ Whilst this is a sentiment I understand, they can have their uses.

Necessary Animals Keith and Amanda (Pic: Amanda Thompson!)

Necessary Animals did warm up though, a recent single ‘Driving Out of Town’ mined anomie post Brexit and mid-Covid, and by the time of their closing number they were decidedly hitting their stride. Their sense of having bombed though was evident in Keith’s muted goodbye; so muted in fact that it wasn’t clear that they’d actually finished, and a couple of fellow musicians had to get a clap going. My friend and me applauded as heartily as hand strength would allow. A possibly ironic ‘more’ was distinctly heard. In truth I can’t believe that Stuart Maconie and his wigged out (Sunday evening) ‘Freak Zone’ (BBC 6 Music) or the wonderful Mark Riley (ditto; Mon-Thurs 7-9pm) haven’t discovered them yet.

Anthony Moore is something of a musical legend; a term that gets tossed around with wild abandon in these hyperbolic times. However, having been a member of renowned progsters 'Henry Cow', played with Kevin Ayers, collaborated with Paul Young (sic), and both produced a wonderful album by Manfred Mann’s Earth Band (‘Angel Station’) and written a song covered by them (‘Third World Service’), he really is something of a star. 

Playing to a, by now, much emptier gallery, Mr Moore is these days a one-man band. Various guitars were deployed as well as some peddle effects to accompany the man and his voice. Not exactly Caruso but full of emotional range, and with lyrics (if you strained you could make most of them out) that had a whole lot of edge. He’s almost 72. However, viewed from the Lower Gallery, he looked (and sounded) way younger but (forgive me Anthony) still old, though in a good way. Initially I was getting (contemporary) Roger Waters unplugged, but Anthony is very much his own man. So expressive, whether apparently lauding the ‘perfect English’ of the BBC World Service or musing on, I think, ‘The Blackhills’, this was a man whose oeuvre is probably for the older and more discerning listener. Too bad that so many who’d comfortably fit at least part of that remit had actually left the building. 

Anthony claimed that he was getting more nervous as his set wore on, and he was plainly putting a lot into the performance, including some deft playing alongside his impressive vocals. My friend and me were very moved, and I’d only consumed two beverages from the excellent adjoining bar/restaurant, and she was sober. I resisted shouting ‘Moore’.

Anthony Moore (pic by Amanda Thompson)

Closing the bill were ‘Simon and The Pope’. Anthony stayed resolutely in his chair, seemingly relieved to just be just strumming in a band setting. Keith once again guested on keyboards, offering some BBC Radiophonic Workshop touches. It’s not for nothing that Keith Rodway is increasingly known as the Brian Eno of the South Coast.

Simon Charterton and John Pope are the nucleus of this white funk punk combo. They kicked things off with the irrepressible ‘Space Bossa Noodle’, before the awesome bass riff of Miles Davis’ ‘It’s About That Time’ (from his earliest jazz fusion phase) greeted us. Two numbers later and the tune had morphed, more slowly, into ‘It’s About Time’, emphasised by Simon’s repeated spoken delivery of the phrase. Simon and The Pope are only the second band I have ever heard live covering anything by Miles – the first was an African-American outfit performing in The Cotton Club….a bar in Chicago that is. A musical musing on being ‘At the bus stop…smoking a fag’ funkily followed, while another number seemingly spontaneously segued into something for the remaining older folks, T-Rex’s ‘Get It On’. That went by largely unnoticed too.

As we raced for a train, Simon and The Pope were, sadly, performing their last number. However they’ll be back. In fact the Gallery at the Kino-Teatr, St Leonard’s looks set to be a regular venue for free gigs offering variations of the above acts, and probably others, for the next few Sundays. Check it, and them, out.

Simon and The Pope, with Anthony Moore (left) and Keith Rodway (inside right) (Pic: Amanda Thompson)

For a taster of the music performed in the Kino-Teatr Gallery on August 1, click here for Keith Rodway’s video selection 

 

Interring the state with the bones of its leader’s husband

I don't believe in disrespecting any public figures at the moment of their death. However I was appalled that Prince Philip, who held no constitutional status or constitutional role in the UK, was so absurdly and endlessly lauded on UK media. I have recently been reminded that very well-established protocols cover the state media's handling of such events, and no doubt it would, by established convention, have been required that there be a uniform and (for viewers at least) black-tied announcement across all BBC TV and radio platforms. In addition, the supposedly 'no fuss' duke may have been a party to some of the more recent media pre-planning. However it still came across as beyond excessive in an era of proliferating media platforms and a supposed lack of deference. This felt like the death of George VI redux, minus that monarch's constitutional status. 

For example, all BBC domestic radio platforms - including Radio 1 and BBC6 Music - were for three hours carrying an identical diet of semi-deification of a man who was no more no less than a hardworking consort of the head of state. He was a war hero and launched an impressive public service scheme. However Middle Eastern dictatorships, many of with which I'm familiar, would do a lot less in propagandist wall to wall coverage - in part admittedly because of modesty over what would be, by definition, a female 'consort'. Why though is the state media of our great British democracy engaging in serial broadcast hagiography of a figure who, by definition, represented no one - and, constitutionally speaking, did not even represent or deputise for the Queen.

 

Copyright The Daily Express 

Part of the answer is the BBC's irresponsibility and institutional cowardice. This publicly-subsidised state broadcaster has a greater operational and political distance from the UK government than officially independent media in most Middle Eastern states or in, say, Russia or China. However state patronage wielded via a regressive flat tax (AKA 'the TV license'), that these days only the old-fashioned who watch terrestrial TV on quaint TV sets actually pay, has been under political threat from the Right ever since the 1980s. The BBC's coverage of Philip's death has exceeded the wildest dreams of even the most zealous monarchists (the PR sop of an online complaints page was soon snuffed out). The state broadcaster has sought to give itself domestic political cover at a time when an opaque hereditary institution that determines our head of state is deemed crucial to the establishment's rear-guard action to save the Kingdom. Intra-Windsor fighting has though long weakened the royals' ability to embody our imagined Union. And an out of touch terrestrial media won't breathe life into that old firm, any more than it can ol' Phil, by behaving as if its role is to serve the rulers of the state rather than to educate as well as entertain HM's subjects. Meanwhile the mullahs heading our state religious cabal were widely deployed across the BBC in an anachronistic and sacrilegious application of unction on a departed member of the royal institution that invented the Church of England. Incredibly, nearly a century after its last serious political opponent left No 10, Anglicanism still plays its dutiful part in a UK national project rooted in the holy trinity of Royalty, Church and State. 

The crass, belated, neo-nationalist pincer movement of the last few days may come to seem like a last hurrah for a Union about to collapse into far less than the sum of its non-consensually joined parts. The castration of the UK's international influence is the irreversible result of a prolonged period of strategic self-abuse. This first began, unwittingly, with Blair's politically unnecessary introduction of devolution, and was then deepened by both of the UK's leading unionist parties being unable to hold Scotland in the 200 year old monarchial bloc. Those unionists constituted in what the BBC these days absurdly refers to as the 'nation' of Northern Ireland were probably inevitably set to lose the numbers game, and, dangerously, in the process lose control of their angry and economically struggling community, in favour of Irish reunification.

Copyright The Daily Record

The grotesque UK ruling class folly of unthinkingly ramming through Scottish and Welsh self-rule was though avoidable. Its ineptness was revealed in Cameron granting, via the monarch, a Scottish independence referendum that he had no political clue how to win, and seemingly little real political concern about either way. The close-run survival of the state after that particular indigenous challenge could not withstand a further Cameron role in the inevitable destruction of the Union. Our international relevance, long a key part of the contemporary construct that is the UK, was then decimated thanks to Cameron providing an unnecessary and highly irresponsible referendum on Brexit, followed by Johnson's grossly inept, spatchcock, delivery of it. 

After the widely admired Elizabeth II will shortly come Charles III or perhaps an in-house monarchial putsch in favour of William V. More relevantly, the rulers of a rump England, with maybe the Welsh principality for company, will need for the first time in the sceptred isle's history to admit to 'their' people that the future can no longer be anything like the imagined past. 

Who rules, and how, can never be reduced to a binary referendum question. However there is a desperate need for some very complex questions to be asked and for their resolution to be widely debated. Post-Covid, this must, of necessity, mean mass and tactile engagement, not the bougeois liberal stage-managed 'debate' in so-called Citizens' Assemblies. The supposed 'citizens' need to wake up to the inherently pre-democratic way in which they, as monarchial subjects, are governed, and to the fact that their supposed sovereignty is in fact loaned to political administrators wielding pre-democratic monarchial powers rather than actively exercised by the 'citizenry'. This by no means necessitates embracing a solely Left-inclined agenda, or even necessarily becoming a republic. It does require awareness of how we are governed and how little authority we, the people, have (in or out of the EU). Otherwise the political mire of division and petty nationalism will continue in an England overseen by an almost natural Tory 'majority'. The propaganda machinations of the Windsors, the Anglican Church and the BBC, conjoined with a Covid era nationalist add-on tritely called 'our NHS', won't save an England that has never been able or even interested in defining itself distinctly from the UK. 

(This is an expanded and updated version of what I wrote on Facebook on the day that the death of HRH Prince Philip was announced)

A Labour leader with intellect and passion who advocated defence, patriotism and peace

Michael Foot's reply to Margaret Thatcher in the emergency House of Commons' Falkland Islands debate in April 1982 was the speech of a statesman, delivered with passion, wit and intellect. Its assault on the Thatcher Government’s signal failure to deliver on the first responsibility of any government, that of protecting its people, ought to have made a mockery of the Conservatives’ vaunted defence credentials. It was delivered by a Labour leader who believed in conventional military deterrence and who rhetorically asked why Margaret Thatcher seemingly didn’t, in practise. The previous Labour Government, of which Foot was a very senior member, had mobilised a flotilla in advance of an Argentinian threat, thereby successfully preventing the possibility of invasion. Given the current Conservative Government‘s announcement of a large defence expenditure expansion amidst economic retrenchment, when the Con-Dem Government had previously recklessly slashed defence spending and left the UK without an aircraft carrier for many years, it would be wise to once again question the credentials of a Conservative Government on defence. Foot of course could reach back to his own assaults on another Conservative Government being soft on defence and on fascism (I use the word advisedly) in the latter 1930s. Sad that this great man should have been so pilloried and so parodied to the detriment of appreciating the power of his reason and his rhetoric. Sad that after the moronic disdain for defence shown by the last Labour leader we don’t have one now who's able to rip apart the Tories’ pretensions as the ‘patriotic party’. To hear Foot's speech click on this link