TO VOTE OR NOT TO VOTE: The media Establishment is deliberately trying to present Russell Brand as just another Labour Luvvie

BRAND CLEARLY HAS THE ELITE RATTLED. BUT HE HAS TO DO MORE TO ATTAIN REAL CREDIBILITY

By John Ward: A couple of years ago, I watched Russell Brand giving evidence to a Parliamentary Committee on drug misuse. In one half-hour spell, he offered the Westminster Red Carpeteers more solid, commonsense advice about the problem than they have received from the media in the last forty years. He also did it in a manner so engaging and free of jargon, I decided there was a lot more to the bloke than I’d hitherto realised.

Since then, I have made it a priority to Google him once a week and see what he’s done and said. The output is usually worth listening to, and always very funny. I watched him reduce a US news network show to tears earlier this year, and was gripped by his encounter the other day with Jeremy Paxman. His performance on this last occasion has spawned, as everyone awake already knows, a combination of vicious attack from the nasties and untutored praise from the fluffies.

Now he’s straight, Mr Brand is much more of a serious contender in the debate about whether our culture goes straight down to the sewers, or might be stopped at least temporarily on the way. His younger goggle-eyed routines I found clever but undisciplined. His sober efforts these days give him the potential to be Britain’s George Carlin and more – if he wants to do that in the first place.

There are several things about Brand that lots of vindictive, envious Brits don’t like: the fact that he went to Hollywood and made some money, the fact that he looks like a hairy, the fact that he challenges the drivel churned out by Westminster and Wapping every day – but above all, the fact that every woman I know between 25 and 75 thinks him drop-dead gorgeous and hysterically entertaining….with a serious side. It’s that undiscovered and little-revealed dimension that always gets the ladies. I envy the bloke in a quiet but firmly benign way: frankly, I’d love to be in his shoes.

I mention him in the same breath as the late genius and American hero George Carlin because Brand is one of the few radical entertainers I’ve so far discovered who doesn’t want to be in a tribe, parroting all the usual pc make-believe crap and using liberal syntax like deprived, disadvantaged, challenged and so forth. In fact if anything, some of his utterances sound avowedly Marx meets Kropotkin and Shaw in nature. I find this naïve, but then I prefer naivety to cynicism, because cynicism is to me very nouveau naiveté: it produces exactly what the British political class wants at the moment: apathy.

So it’s odd in a way that Russell Brand has allowed himself to be so easily snared by the reactionary press robots as a purveyor of just such apathy…..in that he says “Don’t vote – it’s a waste of time”. I agree with him and share that sentiment by the way – as Slog regulars must surely know by now. But the bloke seems to me to be making two mistakes, which I will now try to deconstruct in a supportively constructive way, if that isn’t too smart-arsed or contradictory.

Brand is in error on two points. First, it isn’t enough to say merely “don’t vote”. If enough people followed that advice, gargoyles like Michael Fallon would simply introduce legislation to abolish voting. Don’t smirk at that idea: the Tory Right really has the scent in its nostrils nowadays. There’s nothing they wouldn’t try and do.

Secondly, he needs to stop spouting Utopian cobblers. That verdict isn’t based on the cynicism of an ageing wrinkly, it’s based on one political scientist’s empirical experience of human nature, and his amateur interest in social anthropology. That experience tells me that we have had upwards of 237 years trying to get the “totally egalitarian and fair socialist society” Russell espouses, and the results have been fourfold: the USA today, Napoleon until 1815, the Soviet Union after 1922, and New Labour under Tony Blair after 1997.

The human species is not wired for equality, detests forced equality, and suspects all States of control freakery. So do I. So did Locke, Rousseau, Bentham, and George Carlin. We are pack animals, we tend towards tribalism, but despite the impression gained by watching Jeremy Hunt’s slippery antics, the badhats are in reality a tiny minority. What sets our species apart is both its dark and light sides: on the one hand we kill for fun, but on the other we do not like Might is Right. We prefer packs under a Rule of Law that keeps the elite in check. And not all our compassion appears to be self-interested.

We didn’t invent pack good sense, by the way: watch baboons in the wild. If the alpha bloke is strict but keeps most people fed while killing the arseholes, he can remain leader for upwards of twenty years. But if he forms a cabal of aresholes who get fat while the rest get thin, natural selection produces enough young ladies to fancy enough young bucks to kill them. Red in tooth and claw, harsh but fair? Get over it – it’s who we are: sometimes crap, often remarkable.

Just because obvious wide boys like Grant Shapps have now risen to positions of power doesn’t mean our species has been infected by some odd genetic hobgoblin. What it means is that our Western culture has been first diluted and then derided. And while the Right is the matador currently trying to insert the sword into John Bull’s neck, the Left and liberal fraternities are just as much to blame. And yes, I do include myself and most of my weekend-hippy generation in the regiment of the blameworthy.

What makes Russell Brand promisingly unique on the UK scene is that he grasps this. What makes him easy to dismiss is that his solution lacks originality.

A solution to this second part of his weakness could nevertheless be solved by him addressing the first one – ie, stopping at “Don’t vote”. The words he lacks here (in my estimation) are these: ‘because’ and ‘instead’.

Don’t vote for crooks because all you will get is more crooks. Instead, work to change the system from outside the political arena by cutting off the crooks’ blood supply. Then start working with and for people who want what most of us want: decency, equality before the Law, ethics in public life, and the greatest possible contentment of the greatest number.

I know all that wouldn’t fit on a banner, but I don’t do soundbites or protest marches. They’re the past: what real radicals want is a better future for most of us, not a predatory one for a few of us. A few points here might suffice to illuminate my divigations.

Having spent time here describing our tribal nature, on the big issues we are capable of stepping outside to join with others. Humanity’s “success” as a species is based on both selective competition within the tribe, and cooperation between tribes. To my mind, that’s one of many things separating us from the higher apes – for which I am hugely grateful, because I don’t fancy baboon women. I mean, some of them have tits like pitta bread. And the blokes can shit everywhere while wrecking your tent in ten minutes.

Russell Brand is important in this sense, because (like for example, Rupert Everett) he seems to dislike bollocks – be it of the Left or Right. Also I don’t detect any bestial tendencies.

Second and related to the above, never ever get tempted into politics that involves any incarnation of either the mass Party or lobbying systems. Monied influence is destroying our culture and using the politicians to do it. Work with people who can understand the power of mass digital action to make life impossible for those who employ lobbyists. Then the lobbyists will stop giving money to the politicians, and they’ll all crawl back under the stone along with Grant Leopold Hector Shapps-Green and Lord Bell.

Next, he might be surprised to learn that it was an advertising guy in the US (Leo Burnett) who once remarked, “If you don’t aim for the stars, your backside will always be in the ditch”. Like Burnett – and Bernbach, Pearce, Abbott, Chiat, and my other advertising heroes – I share Brand’s view that we must aim for the ideal.

What we mustn’t do, however, is have a hissy fit and start shooting folks because we don’t get to the ideal human society. With Homo sapiens as the currently available raw material, we are never going to get there. Accept that: go for all, but be happy with “most”: to manage anything close to even that would be an astonishing achievement.

Further, don’t dismiss all communications advice as sleeping with the enemy: many of us have nothing but distaste for the way media spin is destroying liberal democracy. Remember that the media can just as effectively promote reality as tell lies and demonise people.

But perhaps above all, keep it real and keep the Moscow syntax to a minimum. Myself, I’m a confirmed mutualist convinced that what we need is a non-Globalist, self-sufficiency economic model that trades in surpluses – but is based on a mixture of motives rather than just Bourse-capital multinational neoliberalism. I don’t mind profit, but I abhor profiteering. I admire success, but not success based on cheating people. There are tens of millions like me in Britain alone: some of us know we are disenfranchised, some of us don’t. The task is to enlighten every one of them about the sham that is our democracy in 2013.

I admire Paxo immensely, but he’s a bit too eeeuuurrr for the average voter. I think Eddie Izzard is the best surreal comic on the planet, but he should stick to that: his politics are at nursery level. But Russell Brand is already a star, with enormous potential for practical good in our society.

So please mate, don’t blow it.

As I have no connection into Russell Brand at all, I’d very much appreciate somebody sticking this argument in front of him – and please, not on the slush pile or else it just won’t get read: that’s the problem for the guy at the minute: he’s got every Thomas Hobbes, Dick Turpin and Harry Belafonte trying to recruit him.

Instead, just do something understated by bombarding his Twitter account with Slog supports Brand etc etc.

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