This pith squirt stings because we want our politicians to be motivated by high ideals and compassion and not to secretly seethe every time Harry Styles impeccably saunters through the public mind with hair that gently binds his scalp to the heavens and mankind to the angels.
When I met Caroline Lucas MP, the member for Brighton Pavilion, in an electromagnetic instant I was assured that I was in the company of a high-caliber individual. For a start, and I suppose this shouldn't matter, she's attractive and could probably, if she so chose, feature in Downton Abbey as a highly prized and conscientious scullery maid.
Or she could've been in Pan's People in the 80s.
However when Pan's People were sashaying around on Top of the Pops, no doubt with one nervous eye on the curiously gurning host, Caroline was at Greenham Common campaigning for nuclear disarmament. Caroline has a legitimate background in activism and on meeting her it is clear, the way it's always clear, that she is a good person. We know, don't we, instantly when under the tutelage of a good teacher, we feel it in the timbre of their voice, we can feel the subtle, invisible flow of their good intention. Similarly when held in some schoolroom Beirut, the captive of a gin-blossomed pedagogue who barrages his hostages with a spit-flecked, halitosis tempest we recognise a system gone awry. Sat in a plastic chair, chained to the radiator knowing, beyond intelligence, beneath experience that the howling goon at the front of the room spluttering chalk dust and dogma did not care what we learned, only yearned, as we yearned for the bell and The Bells.
With all authority figures we can intuit intent. You can always tell when pulled over by the old Bill if you're in the vindictive grip of an impotent tit, working through his own playground trauma by waving his truncheon in your direction. What a joy it is when you come across a copper who's just a person like you muddling through life, doing their job trying to do what's right. You take a nicking on the chin when dispensed by a decent fella.
The greater the power the greater the obligation to be decent. Or as Stan Lee put it – in the mouth of Spider-Man's uncle – "with great power comes great responsibility", a maxim so irrefutably neat that I'd prefer it were Socrates.
But there it is, I'm quoting Spider-Man's uncle.
Spider-Man's uncle's equation though is frequently subverted; often with great power comes a right arsehole and on entering the Houses of Parliament one begins to understand why.
The whole joint is a deeply encoded temple of hegemonic power. John Lydon, erstwhile of the Sex Pistols, once said of his state education that it seemed to primarily be the installation of a belief system that placed his generation and class at the bottom of an immovable hierarchal structure. "Look at all these amazing people," his teacher said of Shakespeare, Churchill, Brunel and Keats, "they're great and you're not."
Luckily it turned out he was, but this format of designating power beyond the reach of ordinary people is shockingly visible in the Houses of Parliament, a place which nominally represents our power actually demonstrates its absence.
I was being shown around first by Melissa Gurumurthy, who works for Caroline Lucas, then by a bloke called Derek who does security there.
His knowledge of the building, its numerous incredible artworks and history, far outweighed the dilettantish witterings I endured from Melissa (who obviously I fancy). My favourite bits of Derek's parliamentary wander were: a clock that's literally priceless "that means no insurance company will take on the burden of insuring it". My mate Gee, on the tour with me, retorts "could say the same thing about my old Capri". In the House of Lords there are two thrones, one for the monarch and another for their plus one. The Queen's is (an all-important) quarter of an inch taller. Philip must sit there fuming; in the context of marriage a quarter of an inch is a big deal. Also in the Lords amongst the phalanx of red leather benches is a solitary seat curbed by an armrest provided for a perpetually drunken Lord (hence the saying?) who required it to prevent him tumbling soused onto the hallowed ground.
There too on the table where orators stand, including Churchill who made his near mythical speeches here, not in the Commons which was being repaired after bombing (apparently there was a war on), there are fist-shaped divets ground into the wood. Legend has it that it was the signet ring that Winston wore that carved the table in urgent pumps as he pounded out great gob-fulls of history. All this elegant data was gleaned from Derek, who is present in parliament solely to prevent argy-bargy. This next was my favourite morsel.
Around the modest gallery where the ladies would sit there is a knee-high velvet curtain to shield the eyes of the Lords from the inadvertently revealed ankles of the watching women. In this we see the way institution must bow to nature, how chauvinism is manifest. A curtain has to be installed to prevent men at work from ogling women's foot bones. Were all the pomp and grandeur indicative of any actual substance it would be enough to say to these divine, governing beings "don't stare at the birds' legs, you're meant to be running the country". Presumably they tried that and it didn't work – the Lords just continued to salivate and stare, the running of Blighty relegated to a distraction from their blue-blooded erections, till one day the maintenance people, the Dereks of the day, thought "fuck it, we'll put a curtain up".
This demonstrates what we actually all know; the people that run our country are no different from us, flawed and flailing they flummox and flounder their way through the day. Melissa momentarily interrupted her deference to Derek with one astute observation as we sat in the gallery of the House of Commons. Behind the thick, glass panelling installed in response to "The Fathers For Justice" purple paint ejaculation into the power paddock below some years ago, we sat and watched the harrumphing. I literally heard one bloke, a Tory, stood at the front near that mace, where Betty Boothroyd used to be, it's a bloke now, this Tory went: "They should be sent home to prisons in their own countries." I thought "yep, that's the sort of stuff I expect to hear". Validating in its adherence to stereotyping; like hearing an Aussie holler "throw another shrimp on the barbie mate". Cliche saves us from thinking.
Melissa now observed that our beautiful surroundings, you've all seen them on the telly (you could go and have a look, a security man downstairs said anyone can come, "it's surprising people don't bother") – the green, leather benches, the relentless oak panelling, the Hogwarts fugue all look the same as the halls and chambers of Oxford University. Or Cambridge. Or Eton. These great monuments to privilege and power all deploy a consistent design and symbology. A symbology which is alien to the majority but comfortably familiar to the privileged few. When most of us are in these rooms we feel daunted and belittled, remember, "they're great and you're not", but the bloke up the front near the mace has spent his whole life in rooms like that, schools like that. The fact is though that it is an illusion. The power has to be so articulately asserted because it isn't there.
The power is within us, the people. We can at any time elect to ignore that power, or overthrow it. The reason I was in parliament to meet Caroline Lucas, a person who is there, oddly, for the stated function of the place – to represent us, is because she is proposing that the government investigate the efficacy of its current drug policy. The prohibition of narcotics, the criminalisation of addicts, the prescription of methadone and the demonisation of people in the grips of an illness. Of this I can speak first hand. In all my years as a junkie I never encountered an addict who was persuaded to stop using by their drug's legal status. "What?! This is illegal? Oh no! I've been taking it EVERY DAY!!!" Drug addicts don't care that drugs are illegal, it's irrelevant. If you're addicted to drugs, you are going to get drugs at any cost.
This is not a moral quandary but a physical necessity. My belief is that the only way to help drug addicts is to get them off drugs and to help them stay clean one day at a time. It is a lot harder to do this if they are regarded as degenerate from the get-go. It skews our perspective. But what do I know? Perhaps what the government is doing is working, a thorough study will reveal how effective current drug policy is. That is what Caroline Lucas is proposing, I'm advocating and I am asking you to support. Let's look at the evidence and then see what we should do. If we get 100,000 signatures on this online survey – http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/45969 – then Caroline can push it in the House Of Commons.
I've signed it, it is a bit boring, it took about 90 seconds but I'm a bit of a techno-div. Also it's against my nature to fill in a survey like a little square, I'd prefer to smash a window or throw some paint but I don't think it's the answer. In Caroline Lucas, on this issue and I suspect many others, we have someone in a position of some power who actually cares about things that affect us. She's not there so that she can get hold of a Cheeky Girl or meet Louis Theroux or get her toes sucked by an equine brass, she is endeavouring to enact the needs of the people.
So please sign this http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/45969 – it's hardly a fait accompli, perhaps the survey will reveal that all is well, that nothing could be improved, in which case we can all relax, watch Britain's Got Talent, or parliament on telly and await further instruction from our representatives.
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Additional:
Russell Brand
Thursday 11 August 2011
Big Brother isn't watching you
I no longer live in London. I've been transplanted to Los Angeles by a
combination of love and money; such good fortune and opportunity, in
both cases, you might think disqualify me from commenting on matters in
my homeland. Even the results of Britain's Got Ice-Factor may lay
prettily glistening beyond my remit now that I am self-banished.
To
be honest when I lived in England I didn't really care too much for the
fabricated theatrics of reality TV. Except when I worked for Big
Brother, then it was my job to slosh about in the amplified trivia of
the housemates/inmates. Sometimes it was actually quite bloody
interesting. Particularly the year that Nadia won. She was the
Portuguese transsexual. Remember? No? Well, that's the nature of the
medium; as it whizzes past the eyes it seems very relevant but the
malady of reality TV stars is that their shelf life expires, like dog
years, by the power of seven. To me it seems as if Nadia's triumph took
place during the silver jubilee, we had a street party.Early in that series there was an incident of excitement and high tension. The testosteronal, alpha figures of the house – a Scot called Jason and a Londoner called Victor – incited by the teasing conditions and a camp lad called Marco (wow, it's all coming back) kicked off in the house, smashed some crockery and a few doors. Police were called, tapes were edited and the carnival rolled on. When I was warned to be discreet on-air about the extent of the violence, I quoted a British first-world-war general who, reflecting on the inability of his returning troops to adapt to civilian life, said: "You cannot rouse the animal in man then expect it to be put aside at a moment's notice."
"Yeah, that's exactly the kind of thing we want you to say the opposite of," said the channel's representative.
This week's riots are sad and frightening and, if I have by virtue of my temporary displacement forgone the right to speak about the behaviour of my countrymen, then this is gonna be irksome. I mean even David Cameron came back from his holiday. Eventually. The Tuscan truffles lost their succulence when the breaking glass became too loud to ignore. Then dopey ol' Boris came cycling back into the London clutter with his spun gold hair and his spun shit logic as it became apparent that the holiday was over.
In fact, it isn't my absence from the territory of London that bothers me; it's my absence from the economic class that is being affected that itches in my gut because, as I looked at the online incident maps, the boroughs that were suffering all, for me, had some resonance. I've lived in Dalston, Hackney, Elephant, Camden and Bethnal Green. I grew up round Dagenham and Romford and, whilst I could never claim to be from the demographic most obviously affected, I feel guilty that I'm not there now.
I feel proud to be English, proud to be a Londoner (all right, an Essex boy), never more so than since being in exile, and I naturally began to wonder what would make young people destroy their communities.
I have spoken to mates in London and Manchester and they sound genuinely frightened and hopeless, and the details of their stories place this outbreak beyond the realms of any political idealism or rationalisation. But I can't, from my ivory tower in the Hollywood Hills, compete with the understandable yet futile rhetoric, describing the rioters as mindless. Nor do I want to dwell on the sadness of our beautiful cities being tarnished and people's shops and livelihoods, sometimes generations old, being immolated. The tragic and inevitable deaths ought to be left for eulogies and grieving. Tariq Jahan has spoken so eloquently from his position of painful proximity, with such compassion, that nearly all else is redundant.
The only question I can legitimately ask is: why is this happening? Mark Duggan's death has been badly handled but no one is contesting that is a reason for these conflagrations beyond the initial flash of activity in Tottenham. I've heard Theresa May and the Old Etonians whose hols have been curtailed (many would say they're the real victims) saying the behaviour is "unjustifiable" and "unacceptable". Wow! Thanks guys! What a wonderful use of the planet's fast-depleting oxygen resources. Now that's been dealt with can we move on to more taxing matters such as whether or not Jack The Ripper was a ladies' man. And what the hell do bears get up to in those woods?
However "unacceptable" and "unjustifiable" it might be, it has happened so we better accept it and, whilst we can't justify it, we should kick around a few neurons and work out why so many people feel utterly disconnected from the cities they live in.
Unless on the news tomorrow it's revealed that there's been a freaky "criminal creating" chemical leak in London and Manchester and Liverpool and Birmingham that's causing young people to spontaneously and simultaneously violate their environments – in which case we can park the ol' brainboxes, stop worrying and get on with the football season, but I suspect there hasn't – we have, as human beings, got a few things to consider together.
I should here admit that I have been arrested for criminal damage for my part in anti-capitalist protest earlier in this decade. I often attended protests and then, in my early 20s, and on drugs, I enjoyed it when the protests lost direction and became chaotic, hostile even. I was intrigued by the anarchist "Black bloc", hooded and masked, as, in retrospect, was their agenda, but was more viscerally affected by the football "casuals" who'd turn up because the veneer of the protest's idealistic objective gave them the perfect opportunity to wreck stuff and have a row with the Old Bill.
That was never my cup of tea though. For one thing, policemen are generally pretty good fighters and second, it registered that the accent they shouted at me with was closer to my own than that of some of those singing about the red flag making the wall of plastic shields between us seem thinner.
I found those protests exciting, yes, because I was young and a bit of a twerp but also, I suppose, because there was a void in me. A lack of direction, a sense that I was not invested in the dominant culture, that government existed not to look after the interests of the people it was elected to represent but the big businesses that they were in bed with.
I felt that, and I had a mum who loved me, a dad who told me that nothing was beyond my reach, an education, a grant from Essex council (to train as an actor of all things!!!) and several charities that gave me money for maintenance. I shudder to think how disenfranchised I would have felt if I had been deprived of that long list of privileges.
That state of deprivation though is, of course, the condition that many of those rioting endure as their unbending reality. No education, a weakened family unit, no money and no way of getting any. JD Sports is probably easier to desecrate if you can't afford what's in there and the few poorly paid jobs there are taken. Amidst the bleakness of this social landscape, squinting all the while in the glare of a culture that radiates ultraviolet consumerism and infrared celebrity. That daily, hourly, incessantly enforces the egregious, deceitful message that you are what you wear, what you drive, what you watch and what you watch it on, in livid, neon pixels. The only light in their lives comes from these luminous corporate messages. No wonder they have their fucking hoods up.
I remember Cameron saying "hug a hoodie" but I haven't seen him doing it. Why would he? Hoodies don't vote, they've realised it's pointless, that whoever gets elected will just be a different shade of the "we don't give a toss about you" party.
Politicians don't represent the interests of people who don't vote. They barely care about the people who do vote. They look after the corporations who get them elected. Cameron only spoke out against News International when it became evident to us, US, the people, not to him (like Rose West, "He must've known") that the newspapers Murdoch controlled were happy to desecrate the dead in the pursuit of another exploitative, distracting story.
Why am I surprised that these young people behave destructively, "mindlessly", motivated only by self-interest? How should we describe the actions of the city bankers who brought our economy to its knees in 2010? Altruistic? Mindful? Kind? But then again, they do wear suits, so they deserve to be bailed out, perhaps that's why not one of them has been imprisoned. And they got away with a lot more than a few fucking pairs of trainers.
These young people have no sense of community because they haven't been given one. They have no stake in society because Cameron's mentor Margaret Thatcher told us there's no such thing.
If we don't want our young people to tear apart our communities then don't let people in power tear apart the values that hold our communities together.
As you have by now surely noticed, I don't know enough about politics to ponder a solution and my hands are sticky with blood money from representing corporate interests through film, television and commercials, venerating, through my endorsements and celebrity, products and a lifestyle that contributes to the alienation of an increasingly dissatisfied underclass. But I know, as we all intuitively know, the solution is all around us and it isn't political, it is spiritual. Gandhi said: "Be the change you want to see in the world."
In this simple sentiment we can find hope, as we can in the efforts of those cleaning up the debris and ash in bonhomous, broom-wielding posses. If we want to live in a society where people feel included, we must include them, where they feel represented, we must represent them and where they feel love and compassion for their communities then we, the members of that community, must find love and compassion for them.
As we sweep away the mistakes made in the selfish, nocturnal darkness we must ensure that, amidst the broken glass and sadness, we don't sweep away the youth lost amongst the shards in the shadows cast by the new dawn.
Russell Brand is donating his fee for this article to a clean-up project.
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