The Olympic Opening Ceremony as Popular History and Public Enterprise; or, in your face, David Cameron

18 July 2020. Apparently, last night there was a repeat of the London 2012 Olympic opening ceremony, so I thought I'd revive this. It's sad, though, looking back on it. As the post makes clear, Danny Boyle's ceremony seems to celebrate the best of Britain--the parts that are proudly progressive, multicultural, and outward looking. It seems like a very different place today.   

2 January 2013. I wrote this post last summer and just add this note now in appreciation of Danny Boyle's decision to turn down a knighthood in the New Year's Honours because, as he put it, he is "proud to be an equal citizen." That of course is entirely consistent with the spirit of the Olympic ceremony that he directed. Something obviously lost on whoever decided to offer him this spurious form of recognition. Public life today is densely packed with venal people of no principle, although it has been in the past as well. But, whatever, how great it is to see a person of such talent show such adherence to principle. Yay to Danny Boyle. The man deserves a knighthood....

Back to July:      

Like many others, when I first heard what is now clear were the injudicious leaks that Danny Boyle’s Olympic Opening Ceremony was going to feature green fields, farms, sheep, chickens, and cricket, I indulged in the unpleasant cynicism that is the birthright of all freeborn Britons. While others made clever jokes on Twitter about large piles of burning mad cows, I made a lame effort about an entire nation pooing itself with embarrassment, my equally lame excuse for which is that I was indulging in the unpleasant scatology that is the birthright of all freeborn Britons. Watching the ceremony the other night, however, I found myself caught up in the magic of the show, entranced by the technical prowess, awed by the artistic awesomeness, seduced by the sentiments, and filled with patriotic pride. It was like I’d turned into an American, or something.

And even in the cold light of post-ceremonial reflection, I still feel the same. Sure, in a show that first featured a representation of British history, and then of modern British culture, that lasted a little less than 90 minutes and had to appeal not just to a partial but to a national and not just to a national but to a global audience, there was bound to be something for everyone but also, by the same token, something for everyone to complain about. First off, I was scrunch-faced with deep concern about the history and present state of the nation being represented largely though the medium of contempoweh darnce. Soon enough, however, the cynic in me was overwhelmed with admiration for the technical miracles achieved by the set people, as well as by the obvious artistic brilliance of the performers. Even the latter wasn’t too badly undermined by Kenneth Branagh’s adoption of the hamminess that is apparently obligatory for all Britain’s “great” actooors. On the other hand, to give Branagh the benefit of the doubt, Victorian cameras took a long time to take in enough light to make a picture, so photographic subjects had to stand still and maintain the same facial expression for a long time, and expressionless stiffness verging on sternness is the easiest apparent attitude to maintain for what must have seemed like forever for people for whom having their picture taken undoubtedly felt even more excruciatingly unnatural than it does for most of us today. So, maybe, contrary to pictorial evidence of an overly formal-looking stiff-neck, Isambard Kingdom Brunel in real life really was a nostril-flaring gurn-merchant with a theatrically shit-eating grin. 

Anyway, then I thought, well, what do I want here? Or, rather more to the point, what does the world want here? An actual history lecture? Of course not. Especially as media types today seem to believe there are only two historians suitable for big occasions. That would have meant either Starkey the Dinosaur boring on about Henry VIII, again, or, worse still, yet more nostril flaming hamminess but this time provided by the post-tumescent totem of post-imperial diminishment that is Niall Ferguson. So, really, I was pretty glad that it was an entertainer and not a historian who was paid to portray Britain on this occasion. And I’m glad too that that entertainer was Danny Boyle. We could after all have ended up with a qwhite tedious festival of twee by Richard Curtis, or, worse, of the ghastly petit-bourgeois snobbery and spite that for some inexplicable reason makes Mike Leigh so popular. But no, the working-class Lancastrian of Irish-Catholic origin who went to a Welsh University (Bangor) was the right choice to give us what we needed. 

But did he give us what we needed? I think he did. Sure, I’ve seen some people say what he failed to give us, and the historian in me knows it’s a true point if not necessarily a fair one, such as the police beating up strikers and suffragists. I myself was ultimately dashed in my hopes of seeing a gigantic Godzilla-figure in a blonde wig and a blue dress ferociously smashing down the industrial-era chimneys with an gigantic handbag. But Boyle’s mission no doubt was to come up with unifying themes we could all celebrate, given the occasion. And, given the occasion, given that consideration, he could have come up with something arse-achingly anodyne. Yet, in fact, given the occasion and necessary consideration, Boyle came up with something that struck me as highly thought-provoking and perhaps surprisingly subversive. 

First, those fields, farms, and cricket pitches were peopled by peasants rather than knights in shining armour doing their derring doo doo. Then, out of that weird hill thing at the end of the stadium, emerged industrial workers, hundreds of them, and Jarrow marchers, and suffragists, and migrants off the Windrush. Excellent—a people’s history! And on the latter point, the Windrush people for once weren’t represented as Britain’s first black people. There were people of all races in the pre-industrial part of the show too, quite rightly in a representation of a country that had a population of up to and perhaps over 20,000 non-white people in the eighteenth century. Yes, there were capitalists, the best of them represented by Brunel, if perhaps less so by Gurnagh, but the others looked a bit useless and shifty to me, waving their arms about and vaguely giving directions while the working people did the actual work of building Britain and making it what it is, right up to the hardcore steelmaking of the Olympic rings themselves. This was not unalloyed celebration, though. This section of the show was called “Pandemonium,” recalling Milton’s hell in Paradise Lost, raising the spectre of the suffering of early industrial and even some of today’s working people, and there was a Great War memorial moment, reminding us of the horror of industrialised armed conflict. But it’s also as if Boyle was saying that Thatcher might have unmade these industries, but these industries were made by these people, and so it was these people who made Britain what it is even to this very day. That Britain is about its makers, its workers, not its un-makers, its Thatchers. Prime Minister and vicious, right-wing Death-Moomin David Cameron is probably too dim to get it, but, nevertheless in your face, David Cameron.

Another in-your-face-David-Cameron moment came with the arrival of the dancing nurses and patients of Great Ormond Street Hospital. Apparently, Cameron gave out 17 tickets to the opening ceremony to “Big Society” volunteers. Seventeen. Danny Boyle gave us 600 dancing NHS staff and patients—trained, professional public servants and members of the public they serve. What a wonderful celebration of an institution that manifestly benefits all and that therefore our currently governing Eton and wannabe Eton millionaire elitists so transparently despise and want to destroy.  There are pictures of the dancers and of that hands-off-our-NHS slogan all over the internet now, daring Cameron and his bully boys to have a go. It was also interesting to see the nurses, doctors, and patients dressed in old-style uniforms and bed ware, and to see the beds with distinctly old-fashioned-looking metal frames. As if to say that this institution is part of our history, and, Cameron, if you make a speech tomorrow pretending to celebrate this celebration of British history, you’re celebrating the NHS. Of course, Cameron and his born-to-rule bully brigade will remain as arrogantly able as they always have been to pretend to respect the NHS while taking what action they can to destroy it, but Boyle has given them a warning and has given those of us who oppose them a new and gorgeous and globally celebrated totem of resistance. We will put it in your face, David Cameron. Reminder: Aneurin Bevan, architect of the NHS, described Tories as “lower than vermin.” He was correct.

The NHS, particularly in period costume, and still surviving at the point of writing, of course links the past and the present, the history and the present state of the nation. On the latter, the Boyle show was, for me, just as great and satisfying. People asked in the past how the British ceremony could top China’s, raising the rather dubious question of whether Olympic ceremonies are actually supposed to be as competitive as the sporting events themselves. Well, if one must, one can change the rules—Danny Boyle didn’t necessarily go for the faster, higher, stronger that a much larger country with a totalitarian regime’s control of people and resources can muster, but whereas the People’s Republic dubbed a child singer’s voice but replaced her in the stadium with a “prettier” example, Boyle had a choir of children with hearing-impairments and other disabilities singing God Save the Queen. Even the subject of the song herself managed to raise her facial register a notch or two above the “what the heck was thet?” expression that we know and love her for. Not that these ceremonies should be competitions for national supremacy, as opposed to celebrations of the great things all nations and peoples have. Boyle made the point himself when he said “The ceremony is very proud, but I hope in a modest way,” a point about a Best of Britain attitude that was somehow missed by those politicians and media people who bored on the following day about how Boyle showed how Britain is Best. We also had Emeli Sande doing a bonkers but beautiful version of Abide with Me, with her nose ring.  And we had Millie Small, the Beatles, the Kinks, the Stones, The Who, Pink Floyd, Queen, the Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Jam, The Specials, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, the Arctic Monkeys, and Dizzee Rascal, as well as, quite rightly of course, a bit of Shakespeare, Blake, and Elgar. And he gave us a bit of a laugh at ourselves too (never a strong feature of totalitarians or Tories), with James Bond (and not just Daniel Craig but also National Treasure David Beckham speed-boating up the Thames, Bond-fashion), with “the Queen” parachuting into the stadium, and with Mr. Bean among the London Symphony Orchestra and then sending up Chariots of Fire (and, with his beach-running shenanigans, perhaps sending up the very silly British or at least English sense that we have a unique “sense of fair play”—and what better place to laugh at our darker flipside, the implication that Johnny Foreigner is a bladdy cheater, than the kick-off of the Olympic Games?). Happily, and importantly, and tellingly, Danny Boyle did not wheel out Cliff Richard. Nor did we have Elton John whoring his once-great homage to Marilyn Monroe into a brown-nosing travesty of a tribute to spoilt royalty, or any other such buttock-clench-inducing betrayal of the point of post-rock-and-roll popular music. We also had celebrations of British film and TV and of the people who watch them, and of modern communications, all ultimately personalised in the form of the internet-originating romance of Frankie and June, interestingly old-fashioned names for two very modern-looking mixed-race young people—all symbolising British people who are happily connected and united across generations and races, with no false talk of “dividing lines of...”, and scenes with sentiments far, far, far from the fear-mongering, divisive, hateful, and actually anti-patriotic cant of the Daily Mail and of David Cameron’s “Broken Britain.” 

And indeed no cynicism about the internet, portrayed here as a phenomenon that can and does bring us together far more than it divides us. Danny Boyle even had Tim Berners-Lee in the show, and described him as “the scientist who invented the World Wide Web, and even more important than that he put it in trust, made no personal gain,” leaving it “free to us all.” How different again from the Cameronian cynicism that says that the best can only be produced via motives of profit (unless it’s care of the elderly, disabled, and otherwise disadvantaged, in which the work can be done by unpaid “Big Society volunteers” with random levels of training, competence, and commitment). And that brings us back to the politics of the ceremony. Asked by the Daily Telegraph whether his ceremony was “overtly political,” Danny Boyle denied that it was overt. “The sensibility of the show is very personal,” he said “.... we had no agenda other than values that we think are true.” It seemed to me pretty clear from its contents what the show’s true values were. It was also pretty clear what the message of the method of the show’s creation is or certainly ought to be. That is, isn’t it great what Danny Boyle and his dedicated team of not-for-profit creatives, organisers, and artists could do with the investment of £27 million of public money (a sum, let us never forget, that would barely fill one board of bankers’ bonus bags with taxpayers’ bailout cash)? They certainly did a better job than the go-getter entrepreneurs of G4SClub7, the for-profit “security” firm that couldn’t spot a terrorist threat if a large man with an eye patch and hook-hands walked past them carrying a black spherical object with the word “BOMB” written on it. Thankfully, we have the (still) state-funded, non-profit-making dedicated professionals of the police force and the army to bail us out yet again from the cut-price incompetence of money-minded racketeers.  In your face, David Cameron, in your shiny, hammy, wobbly stupid face. 

“Foul Play” by “Cowboy” Journalists; or, how to be an internet troll.

Regular readers of my rants will know that from time to time (regularly and often) I criticise what I see as dangerous and destructive ethics and practices increasingly being forced on academia from without and within.  If you’re not a regular reader, check out the last two posts and you’ll see what I mean.  It was with some widening of the eyes therefore the other morning that I read an email from one of my bosses about “allegations” and “accusations” made against my employer, Swansea University.  (It was very clear what said boss felt about the accuracy of these allegations and accusations, but as it was an email from him to staff I don’t feel it’s right for me to put anything but the neutral terms he used into the public domain.)  I soon realised, though, by virtue of another email, that in momentarily thinking that the first missive might have something to do with something I’d written, I was vastly overestimating my own significance.  The momentary relief that followed, however, was very soon replaced with anger at the second email and, on this occasion, total sympathy with my boss and empathy with his sentiments.  I trust that my previous perhaps all-too-well-documented criticisms of the current state of the sector I work in will only add weight to the defence I make here of my colleagues and my institution against what I will say is certainly an appallingly unfair attack in terms of its methodology and I would guess at this stage an appallingly unfair one in factual terms.  (I’d say here as well that even in my critical moments I am in fact defending my colleagues and my institutions and indeed academia itself, however much some inside and outside of academia may disagree with that self-assessment.)

The attack I read that morning came from a group that calls itself UK Academic Monitor, or, to give it its IT moniker, ukacademicmonitor.org.  The essential accusations are that certain colleagues of mine in a cognate department wrongly declined to award a student a PhD degree at his first attempted defence of his thesis, then unfairly denied the student the opportunity to appeal against the deferment of his degree award—before awarding the student his PhD at his second attempted defence just under a year later.  It’s perfectly normal, by the way, for PhDs to be deferred, which means go back, do some revisions, and defend the thesis again after a period of time commensurate with the extent of revisions required—thus allowing the maintenance of standards while giving a student a second chance, rather than saying at the end of his or her three or more years, that’s it, one strike and you’re out, you’ve failed, end of, bugger off.  It seems to me an obviously sensible and fair procedure in general, though, admittedly, unfairness is always possible in particular cases.  But, anyway, my university more broadly is accused of failing to have sufficiently robust procedures to prevent these alleged injustices or to discipline the colleagues concerned for committing them and indeed in engaging in secrecy and a cover-up of these misdeeds and failures.  Now, as a historian, and as, I hope, a fair-minded person, I hereby provide a link to the accusations that was emailed to me and all my colleagues, as produced by UKAM and as is on their website.  I believe that one of the first things that may become clear from your reading of this report, though, is that its writers did not do those they are accusing or indeed you the reader the same basic courtesy.  The criticisms that follow are, like this one, mostly methodological.  They are not about the case itself, but about the conduct of UKAM.  They alone, however, ought to cast some considerable doubt, to say the very least, on UKAM’s supposed findings about this case.  You can find their findings and from there their homepage here: http://www.ukacademicmonitor.org/

Indeed the first thing that becomes clear is that it is not at all clear who UKAM is or are (I’m going to assume the organisation consists of more than one individual, though, and call them are from here on in).  As I’ve said, they call themselves UK Academic Monitor, which is very grand.  That “UK” and that “Academic” might invite readers of their website to suppose that UK Academic Monitoring are some kind of official authority.  That they are perhaps legitimated if not licensed by an independent university sector investigator (such as a University Visitor, analogous to the Police Complaints Authority or the Press Complaints Commission, for example), or by the government itself (a kind of educational ombudsman or a QUANGO, maybe), or, best and most appropriate of all, given the circumstances, by the National Union of Students whose job it is, after all, to look after students’ interests.  All I can find about UKAM, however, is a kind of mission statement on their website (linked above) and a short chain of likes and mentions of them on Facebook—from just three pages worth of citations a Google search threw up, suggesting the group is new as well as unauthorised by anyone but its website founders.  Also, Swansea so far is their only target, although their website indicates that there is at least a plurality and implies that the generality of UK universities are short-changing their students and covering it up.  But, anyway, the point is there are no known associations with any known authorities by which one might know the provenance or judge the legitimacy of UKAM. 

Indeed there is no way of knowing anything about them at all, as neither do its members name themselves as individuals.  They might argue back on that count, I suppose, that they are maintaining anonymity for their own personal protection.  To which I answer (and from here on in I switch register and address UKAM directly): guys, you’re alleging unfairness to university students—it’s not exactly Ayan Hirsi Ali territory, is it?  And if you’re worried about the effects on your career prospects (as opposed to your lives, like Ayan Hirsi Ali), well, as I say, I frequently have a go at the authorities over me and it might get me in trouble one day and it might already have buggered up my promotion prospects, but that doesn’t bloody well stop me doing so and from doing it under my own name with my name, contact details, photo, and bio all there for anyone and everyone to see.  I know a lot of others go under pseudonyms, but in all cases they give enough away so you know where they’re coming from and usually enough so you can even figure out who they actually are, rather like eighteenth-century radical pamphleteers who called themselves Cato and Plato but who weren’t fooling anyone and who knew they weren’t fooling anyone.  It’s a matter of honesty and honour. 

It’s also a basic principle of justice that any kind of accused person, whether accused by the media or in a court of law, is entitled to know the identity of their accuser and thereby among other things to have a fair chance to answer back and explain or defend themselves.  Whoever you are, UK Academic Monitor, like some vigilante group, you have deprived those you accuse of these basic rights. 

It’s also a matter of your own credibility with anyone who might read you.  First of all, how can anyone take your accusations of secrecy and cover-ups on the part of others seriously when you refuse to reveal anything about who you are?  It’s just a little hypocritical, isn’t it?  And really, more seriously still, how dare you—HOW VERY BLOODY DARE YOU—“name and shame” others as you, exposing them to extremely serious accusations, while protecting yourselves with anonymity.  I guess you think of yourselves as masked avengers of some kind.  To me you’re just cyber-muggers, nothing more than bullies in balaclavas.  Also, how can anyone credit anything you say, hypocritical or not, when no one even knows who you are?  For all anyone knows, you could be anyone at all.  You might be perfectly nice, decent, fair-minded people (and just be misguided and if so perhaps now regretful of your balaclava-wearing antics), and maybe you’re simply out to the help the less powerful and the aggrieved.  On the hand, you might be just a bunch of internet trolls.  Or, worse, you could be undercover Daily Mail journalists.  No one has any way of telling.  At the very least, one might quite reasonably suspect that you have some sort of axe to grind, and that for that reason, whatever it is, you might be less than fair and partial, and you might even be total liars.  Who knows?  I don’t.  I can’t.  No one can. 

That said, and continuing with theme of your methods, having read your accusations, I can see that you are at the very least manifestly less than fair and partial.  Or, rather, having read between the lines of your accusations, I can see that you are indeed at the very least less than fair and partial, as it’s what you don’t say as much what you do say that says so much about you and possibly about your accusations as well.  Just as your title, UK Academic Monitoring, gives an impression of legitimacy, so your long narrative of events gives an impression of authoritatively forensic investigation.  But, just as there are no affiliations, links, or even individual names to go with your title and therefore there is no real legitimacy, so there is something missing from your narrative, and therefore from its authority.  And it’s rather a big thing too: namely, THE OTHER SIDE OF THE STORY.  Did you give any of the people you shamelessly named, and who you accused of serious malpractice, a chance to answer or explain themselves?  Did you even ask a university spokesperson for a comment before you attempted to blacken an institution’s name in cyberspace?  If you did, and they refused to comment for whatever reason, you do not say, and nor do you give what might in the circumstances be perfectly good reasons for not doing so.  Even the basest tabloid journalists at least make a show of asking for comments from those they accuse of whatever they accuse them of.  They might not be sincere and might not relate their accusers’ answers fairly or properly, but even then at least they acknowledge the existence of and make at least a show of following these basic rules of fair and proper journalism.  You don’t even do that. 

Because you apparently forewarned no one of the accusations you made the other day, I no more than anyone can comment on their factual veracity.  And, unlike you, I’m not going to take half a story and present it as fact.  That is why all I’ve done so far is take your anonymity and your story-gathering or presentational methodologies, and comment on those alone.  If you are the perfectly nice, decent, fair-minded (but misguided) people I acknowledged you might be, then I hope you will retract your accusations or at least revise them extensively accordingly.  I’m certainly not going to comment on the student or his case.  He may very well have felt aggrieved at his deferral and at the difficulties of the appeal process, for whatever reason, rightly or wrongly, fairly or otherwise.  These things happen in all organisations.  That’s meant neutrally and it’s all I can fairly say.  I do know, though, that the student got his PhD from Swansea University, and I trust my colleagues enough to presume that he deserved it.  And I know he got his degree because you said so in your story, albeit very late in your story, indeed very, very late in your story.  I guess that putting the happy ending at the beginning, even though it’s a rather crucial part of the story as a whole, would have put your hoped-for readers off reading the rest of what turns out in fact to be not much of a story at all: student gets PhD—difficult process, as it often is, it’s the highest academic qualification anyone can get after all, but he got it. 

A couple of other facts I do know and will comment on.  I know the people you accuse of all the above, and who you labelled “Cowboy Academics” in yesterday’s version of your web story and committers of “Foul Play” in a previous iteration of it.  They are not cowboys and they do not do foul play.  They are highly dedicated and professional people who are in university teaching to help people get degrees, not to hinder them.  So I say the following with the fullest confidence.  At the end of your narrative you say that “the public, and, more importantly, the thousands of students who,” you proclaim, rather hubristically it seems to me, “will now have second thoughts about applying” to Swansea, are the best judges of whether Swansea is a university worth applying to or not.  Yes, there’s some truth in that, your hubris aside.  I suggest that “the public” or those prospective students indeed come to Swansea and talk with the members of staff concerned (you named them, so they’ll be easy enough to find), and indeed any members of staff, and to other Swansea students, and see what we say we have to say and to offer, and then these prospective students can make the judgement in fairness, having had the chance you didn’t given them to see if there’s another side to all of this.  They definitely shouldn’t and I hope won’t make any judgements about my colleagues or about Swansea University on the basis of manifestly one-sided accusations made by anonymous, untraceable, unknowable, faceless, unaccountable people like you.        

A couple of final things....  If you want to have a go back at me, you can easily do so as you have my name, contact details, picture, bio, etc.  You know who I am and can easily find me.  But if you do have a go at me, and indeed if you have a go at anyone else for that matter, how about you do it fair and square and equal?  That is, how about you take your mask off so I and others can see who you are?  And finally, if you want to put right anything you feel is wrong or unfair in what I’ve said about you in the above, please reply in the box below and I will acknowledge and correct all verifiable errors.  I hope you will see fit to offer others the same opportunity in the future.

PS I put a link to this post on UKAM's Facebook site this morning.  They have since taken it down and issued a denial of my claims while depriving of access to them.  Which couldn't be in closer accord with what I claim about them.     

PPS http://whois.domaintools.com/ukacademicmonitor.com

Britain’s Top 100 (actually 28) Rejected Pop Singer/Band Names (and some other stuff)

Judging by the All Staff emails my university’s suits occasionally send to everyone every day, I am, by implication, like every other non-suit in our learning environment, no longer dynamic, innovative, thrusting, and quite probably bumping and grinding enough to be an entrepreneurial academic in the modern world going forward.  I have therefore been attempting to break into the relatively genteel, service-based, and more old-fashioned intellectually-oriented world of television.  My attempts so far include a once-retweeted suggestion of a sexually-explicit drama about the violent struggles for control of a chain of seven medieval bakeries, called Game of Scones.  Then I had the idea, which received a similar level of Twittaffirmation, of an ancestry-based programme but with a more personal and critical edge than any so far broadcast, called Who the Fuck Do You Think You Are?  I also once blogged in more than 140-character detail a conceptual revamp for Extreme Fishing with Robson Green, called Really Extreme Fishing with Robson Green:  http://stevesarson.blogspot.fr/2012/04/really-extreme-fishing-with-robson.html . I have yet, however, to hit TV pay dirt.  Then, when watching one of Channel 4’s Britain’s top-100-whatever programmes, I realised I had been wrong end of things money-wise.  Each of the ideas I’ve had so far would cost literally money to make, but I need to make my mark at the cheaper end of entertainment before being allowed a budget.  And then, while watching Channel 4 in its it’s-the-weekend-we-can’t-be-arsed mode I came up with the idea of Top 100 Rejected Pop Singer/Band Names, which, over the course of several hours on a Saturday night, will reveal 100 pop band and soloist original names that, for various PR and PC reasons, had to be abandoned before the band or singer concerned, using a slightly different name, could finally become famous. 

Obviously, all the names below are totally made-up, but it doesn’t matter because link-man Vernon Kay will “remember” them and talk about them as convincingly as he does for all the other things on such programmes that he recalls from many years before he was born.  Kay is also perfect for the aforementioned economic reasons, because you only need to pay him minimum wage, which saves on the Pete Waterman standard fee of a Ginster’s scrotum pasty and three pints of Old Speckled Flatulence for a an hour or so of off-the-cuff scripted segments.  All I need to do now is write the script for the guffawing Kaymeister, whey hey, get in, as the rejected names of the bands and soloists are below, in roughly chronological order so that I can somehow marry up thematically to cartoonishly reductive representations  of their respective eras.  We begin in the Fifties, an era of absurd outfits and even more absurd hairdos, and end in our own time, an era of absurd outfits and even more absurd hairdos.  

Little Dickie
Stiff Richard
Willy Fury
Winklespurt Pumperdick
The Floaters (kept original name)
Cocker Joe
Mongo Jerry
The Pervs
Marvin Battyman
The Bo Gees
The Bumgay Dance Band
Stegosaurus Rex
Gadd the Ladd and the Kiddie Fiddlers
Alvin Spanglepants
Hot Chocolate Starfish
Sticky Little Fingers
Spastic Bertrand
The Cottage People
Spazzin’ Stevens
Kakapoopoo
Lemonorama
The Travelling Dangleberries
The Foo Foo Fighters
Pjork
Chaka Will
Boyz 4 Men
Nelly Farturdo
Gob’Shite

And that’s it.  I know I said Top 100 and this is only 28, but there are two reasons why the shortage doesn’t matter.  First, even I can only take so much of my childish bum jokes and knob gags, never mind the tendentious rest.  Second, by the time we get to number 28, it’ll be about 10 o’clock on the Saturday night of what the French call the emission, and so members of the target demographic will have pre-loaded and be on their way to a “nite”-club to spend the rest of the evening ululating to loud, repetitive pounding noises, like a tribe of savages who’ve just sacrificed a virgin, before starting a fight in a kebab shop, blowing chunks over the arresting officer, and losing what passes for their consciousness in the caged but heavily-padded environment at back end of a twat wagon.  Actually, that sounds, on reflection, a bit on harsh on those who comprise, after all, my intended audience.  So I’ll finish by admitting that their assaults on the concept of civility and the basic tenets of human social and cultural evolution are, obviously, nowhere near as barbaric or destructive as those of the suits I mentioned at the start. 

Wanted: Excellent Graduates To Work For Nothing. A Little Battle in a Big War over the Future of UK HE PLC--or not

There is currently a kind of culture war going on in the UK between those who believe in maintaining the ethics and practices of service in public institutions and those who believe in either abolishing public institutions altogether or at least forcing them to adopt the ethics and practices of private enterprise.  There need not be such a war.  The two sets of ethics and practices can co-exist in their respective domains, and have done so for a long time.  Indeed, we don’t even have to see them as being as polarised as, for the sake of argument, I am currently doing.  Public servants can be entrepreneurial, as long as the ultimate aim remains public service, and private businesspeople can adopt service ethics, as long as they make the profits they need to make.  Yet private-enterprise fundamentalists right now are attempting to enforce their ethics and practices on public services, when they’re not busily privatising those services altogether.  And at present they seem to be largely succeeding.  Too beleaguered and too scared of losing our jobs, made insecure as we are in the wake of an economic crash caused by private-enterprise fundamentalists, we mostly just stand by and let them do what they will, hoping we’ll still be in work at the end of it.  This isn’t good enough.  We are ourselves betraying what we believe in if we don’t start talking back more and fighting back more.  So, at the risk of blowing the ballbags off what I sometimes laughingly call my career, I nevertheless want to say what follows.

Every day I feel more and more like I’m living in a parallel universe, a bizarre one and not at all a nice one.  It is in some ways like an Orwellian dystopia where our rulers maintain their rule by telling us that black is white, that bad is good, and, most recently and what occasions this particular post, that unpaid labour is voluntary and honorary.  In a rational and reasonable universe, when a private enterprise system leads an entire hemisphere of a planet into financial crisis, plunging the large majority of its people into frightening uncertainty and many of them into appalling poverty, one might expect that the ideology and practices of that economic system would be thoroughly examined for faults, if not entirely discredited.  Indeed, one might expect that politicians, those charged with protecting the interests of the people, in a democracy anyway, would look for an alternative model of future economic conduct, especially as that same economic system had repeatedly created chaos and poverty roughly every 30 years since grossly irresponsible speculation caused the South Sea Bubble crisis in 1720. (We can be fairly sure that the inquiry announced yesterday into the conduct of banks won't go as far as this, though I would love to be wrong about that.)  It is true that this economic system has created unprecedented wealth, wealth that allows for the existence of large public service sectors in modern civilised countries, sectors where trained experts provide education, health care, and the needs of those who for can’t fully provide for their needs themselves (which is nearly all of us, eventually or at some point or another).  But recent events prove (not at all for the first time) that the spirit of free enterprise is a dangerous beast when not reigned in.  As it is not in the nature of the beast to reign itself in, governments, supposedly protectors of the interests of the people, should enforce effective regulations.  The government could, for instance, force large private companies upon whom so many people depend for their livelihoods, to adopt and abide by service missions that would protect those people's livelihoods rather than endanger them.  You might expect right now, in the current financial crisis, that exactly that should and would be happening.

  

But no.  The opposite in fact is happening.  Public services are being forced by governments to adopt the ethics and practices of the economic system that has so recently and destructively discredited itself.  The process began some time ago, and it is not just a Tory thing, but it has recently accelerated significantly.  And it's happening in all public services, but the one I work in is higher education and so that's what I can talk about best.  By the way, you might well be wondering what happened to all that stuff in the title about excellent graduates being wanted to work for nothing.  It's coming, it's coming, I promise.  Sorry for the delay.  Just let me finish this wider context bit and then I'll get to how a university expecting graduates to work for nothing (it failed, but one of them tried) is the most recent example of the effects of the ethics of private-enterprise fundamentalism creeping into the higher education sector.

As I say, it's not entirely new and it's not just a Tory thing. New Labour introduced student fees and then moved responsibility for Higher Education out of the Department for Education (where else would it be?) ... to the Department of Business, Innovation, and Skills.  The Business Secretary responsible for this crass machination, Peter Mandelson, referred to students as “consumers of the higher education experience,” utilising with subtle but devastating deceptiveness a language that evokes images of choice, control, value for money, happy customers, and so on--a language quite deliberately crafted to make you forget that entrepreneurs don’t seek to make profit for you, but seek to make profit from you.  Indeed, this you-pays-your-money-you’re-the-boss hocus pocus was used to justify the most significant step so far made in the businessification of higher education: the raising of student fees to a maximum of £9,000—a level thought to be high enough to replace all public funding of teaching and almost all public funding of research, effectively privatising higher education (to a certain extent*).  When asked about the enormity of these fees in a TV interview, a man I shall call Harry Callaghan, a member of the Browne Commission that recommended the fee hike, and Vice-Chancellor of what I shall call Bourneville Tech, said that “it puts students in charge.”  For more on Harry Callaghan and Bourneville Tech, see Historian on the Edge (who first coined "Harry Callaghan" and "Bourneville Tech": http://600transformer.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/more-trouble.html  and http://edithorial.blogspot.fr/2012/06/birmingham-blues.html

As the above suggests, this creeping hegemony of business fundamentalism is aided by the co-option of individuals and institutions.  Hence the significance of Peter Mandelson, who was of course a chief architect of the New Labour project that transformed the Labour Party into what is effectively the left-wing of the Conservative Party, which itself was transformed by Margaret Thatcher into the political wing of big business.  Hence also the significance of the aforementioned Harry Callaghan, formerly a Professor of Social History, who once delighted in lecturing about the Chartists, and about Karl Marx, but is now the closer-downer of the more “unsustainable” sections of the Department of Classics, Ancient History and Archaeology at Bourneville Tech.**  As well as helping to privatise and as well as being the hammer of archaeologists, Callaghan dislikes dissent, and is on record for effectively criminalising peaceful campus-based student protest: see here Birmingham University gets high court injunction against sit-in protesters, here Birmingham University protest ban attacked as 'aggressive and censorious', here Student protesters get evicted by universities, and here Birmingham students seek to overturn protest ban.

The latest news is that Bourneville Tech, thinking outside the box, in a dynamic, thrusting, goal-oriented move going forward, decided to try to desist from paying some of its employees—if what we mean by thinking outside the box is stealing discredited ideas recently reluctantly tipped out of a shabby old Tesco box—and if what we mean by dynamic, thrusting, goal-oriented moves going forward is the resurrection of a labour system that was outlawed in British dominions in 1833. Like Tesco and like Caribbean slaveholders before them, though, Bourneville Tech has now backed down in the face of questions about the morality and legality of its attempted actions, and has withdrawn its advert for unpaid employment (see below).  Exactly what role Harry Callaghan played in the conception of this latest ill-fated innovation, I do not know.  The advert was for a position in the School of Psychology, but, as he is Vice-Chancellor, one has to assume it is a major one.  And he is a clever man, and good with words, despite apparently tripping over the law.  And, as implied above, words are important here.  There is a link below to the advertisement, if it still works.  Do read it if possible (though I’ve quoted most of it below if it’s gone).

Now, it’s not that Bourneville Tech doesn’t have high standards, of a sort.  The work the *successful* applicant would have been required to do is very important and requires high-level training, expertise, and sensitivity, involving as it did “conducting clinical assessments with adolescents and young adults who are seeking help for mental health issues.”  “The role will also,” the advert continued, “include ongoing assessment of participants and some data entry and management...”, all of which is “aimed at understanding psychosocial, environmental and biological predictors of the onset and course of major mental illnesses (depression, bipolar and schizophrenia).”  Accordingly, and rightly so, the person Bourneville aimed to *employ* was to be highly qualified.  “Applications are invited,” the advert said, “from excellent graduates of Psychology or a related discipline....” Furthermore, because of the sensitive nature of the work, a “recent enhanced CRB [Criminal Records Bureau] clearance is required,” again, surely rightly so.  The position was supposed to be part-time, but nevertheless would have required considerable commitment.  The “minimum time commitment required”, the ad specified, “is two days per week.”  Also, applicants “must have access to a motor vehicle to drive to assessments (there will be full reimbursement for mileage).”  Any applicants hoping for reimbursement for their time, labour, and employment of their highly accredited skills, however, were to be disappointed.  And here’s where obfuscatory language really kicks in.  As the first sentence of the advert said, the post is entitled “Honorary Research Assistant.”  The next sentence began as follows: “The appointee will work on a voluntary basis.”  A little further down it says that “The posts are offered on a voluntary basis.”  I’m not going to get into the issue here of whether what at first appeared to be one post then became two or more.  My point here is that at no point did the advert say that the applicant’s work would be unpaid, except of course that it very much did.

How is unpaid labour in a semi-public institution in a free, democratic country in the 21^st century justified?  Harry Callaghan may well have used the advert’s line that applicants “should be keen to learn core research skills for clinical assessment.” In other words, they were to gain knowledge and skills.  Yes, true, but young people used to gain knowledge and skills and still get paid properly for the time, labour, and expertise they gave to their employers.  Any job anyone does enhances knowledge and skills.  That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be paid some money for doing it--so you can buy your food and pay your rent or your mortgage and so on.  I’m a historian of slavery, among other things, but no expert on modern employment legislation, yet surely British or European law has something to say about unpaid labour?  If not that, then equal opportunity laws surely do?  The particular point here is, if you can afford to support yourself, or your parents can afford to support you, while you do unpaid work, you can apply for the *job*.  If you or your parents can’t, you can’t.  In short, if you can’t afford to work for free, you can fuck off.  One thing I do know, though, is that it is already clinically proven that among the “psychosocial, environmental and biological predictors of the onset and course of major mental illnesses (depression, bipolar and schizophrenia)” one can list exploitation and undervaluation in the workplace.  Perhaps, then, in another spectacularly cynical linguistic subterfuge, when Bourneville Tech said it wanted an “Honorary Research Fellow,” what it was actually looking for was a guinea pig.          

It does indeed appear, judging by the Times Higher story (below), that Bourneville’s plans fell foul of employment law.  Yet I cannot believe that whoever came up with this plan and whoever endorsed it did not guess that there might be legal implications.  It certainly didn’t take them long, less than a day indeed, to be persuaded to back down.  It seems, then, that they tried it on but found this cunning plan didn't work, at least on this occasion, and they were ready for that.  If so, then Harry Callaghan, like his filmic namesake, appears to see the law as an obstacle to be challenged and hopefully overcome, rather than a codification of civil rights that deserve to be respected.  And, like another Machiavellian film character pushing the boundaries of legitimate behaviour, he’ll be back.  And so will others like him.  This little battle is won, and indeed it’s a happy thought that these battles can be won—if we choose to fight them.  But we do still need to fight them.  The war is still on. 

Here’s the advert: http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/AES213/honorary-research-assistant

Here’s the story of the withdrawal of the advert, from the Times Higher: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=420451&fb_source=message

Here’s some notes clarifying the asterisked points above:

* Except that universities are not entirely privatised.  Their funding base is, but the government nevertheless retains an enormous degree of bureaucratic control.  The logic of marketisation, as many have said, would allow each university to charge whatever it can, which could leave them entirely free from government, and that might make them less useful as tools of the private sector, as many, probably most, professors and lecturers are old-fashioned service-oriented people, which is why they went into teaching and research in the first place.                                          

** Of course not all academics do what they're told by the powers-that-be. Very recently, Professor Teresa Sullivan, President of the University of Virginia, was, in a test of strength by the Board of Visitors, fired for refusing to cut language provision and for generally failing to ascribe to the business-based ethics and practices of private sector fundamentalists who took control of this venerable institution, and indeed for her adherence to the service ethics of a public university passed down by its founder, Thomas Jefferson.  In a test of the strength of those who believe in service ethics and practices, a public campaign saw President Sullivan reinstated and the businesspeople of the Board of Visitors not only defeated but deservingly humiliated.  For a brilliant account of this affair and of why the supposed “inefficiencies” of public universities (in fact, the long-term usefulness eschewed by private enterprise) are actually for the benefit of everyone—including the private sector, see Siva Vaidhyanathan, Why Our Universities Are Supposed To Be Terribly Inefficient:  http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2012/06/teresa_sullivan_reinstated_as_the_president_of_the_university_of_virginia_.html?tid=sm_tw_button_chunky