margaret thatcher

November 15, 2013

21

Jack Graham 50th anniversary countdown, 80s, advertising, alienation, capitalism, commodity fetishism, consumerism, happiness patrol, margaret thatcher, revolution, thatcherism, totalitarianism 0

Earl plays a C on his harmonica. It starts a sympathetic resonance in the pipes that stretch under and through the regime on Terra Alpha, like the arteries in a body. What flows in these arteries is sugarly gloop, the outpourings of the Kandy Kitchen. It fills the regime with the glucose it needs to survive. And the regime uses it to kill dissidents or refuseniks or men wearing pink triangles, drowning them in sweetness. Earl’s note causes the encrusted, crystallised, fossilised sugar coating the insides of the pipes to crack and fall. Tonnes of the stuff falls on top of Fifi, Helen A’s savage attack dog and beloved pet. She sent it into the pipes to kill the Doctor and the Pipe People, the surviving aboriginals on her colony.

“Happiness will prevail,” says the artificially fruity voice on the colony tannoy system, “Factory guards are joining forces with the drones to destroy the Nevani sugar beet plant here in sector six. We will keep broadcasting.”

This is a revolution. The killjoys are marching and demonstrating, and having their own melancholy parties in subversion of the rules. The factories are falling to strikers. Even the aboriginals are getting in on the act. And, as in ‘The Sun Makers’, you know the revolution is really happening when it even gets on the news.

“It’s only one factory, Daisy K,” says Helen A, dictator of Terra Alpha and obvious Thatcher analogue, “I’ve built over a thousand.” (Not that much like Thatcher then. She didn’t build up manufacturing industry; she calculatedly decimated it.)

“What about the reports of riots?,” asks Daisy K, “And public unhappiness?”

Oh for the days when things like the Poll Tax (which, like so many things, now looks like gnat’s piss by comparison) used to cause good, healthy, necessary riots.

Helen A wants to use her best, most fanatical enforcer… but it turns out that she’s already been detained in her own Waiting Zone (they don’t have ‘prisons’ on Terra Alpha, there being no need for unhappy places in the best of all possible worlds). So instead, Helen A asks Daisy K to…

“Get me the Kandyman.”

“You’re not unhappy about something?” asks Daisy K, noticing the cracks in Helen A’s ideological purity when her own self-interest is threatened… just as Thatcher cried for herself when someone subjected her to the strictures of the marketplace of ideas.

“GET ME THE KANDYMAN!”

The Kandyman answers his telephone.

“Kandyman,” he says. (This bit makes me gurgle with pleasure every time. It’s so arch.)

He’s an evil Bertie Basset. Bassett himself is a PR image, an advert, an avatar of a company, a promotor of consumption, the friendly face of capitalism who cheerily encourages kids to shovel sugary shite into their mouths so his puppetmasters can make a profit. The Kandyman is all this and an accretion of various manifestations of authority. He’s the state torturer of a dictator, a killer brand, a manifestation of the confected malnutritious psuedo-delights of consumer capitalism reconfigured as a psychopathic sadist… and he’s a tool, a machine, a commodity fetishised into life, alienated labour (he is the product of the labour of Gilbert M) that confronts his creator as hostile and alien power. …

April 26, 2012

Opposite Reaction

Jack Graham arthur scargill, labour, margaret thatcher, media, miners strike, NUM, paul foot, philip sandifer, progress, thatcherism, the sun, tories 4

The TARDIS Eruditorum blog recently took the opportunity to connect ‘The Caves of Androzani‘ with the 1984-85 Miner’s Strike. In the process, Philip Sandifer (the author of the blog) writes:

…Arthur Scargill, head of the NUM, made an egregious political miscalculation. Faced with an accelerated schedule for closing the pits and afraid that he’d lose the vote, Scargill declined to submit the strike to a national vote. This was against NUM rules and allowed Thatcher to delegitimize the strike, which she wasted no time doing, comparing striking miners to Argentina in the Falklands.

and…

The propaganda war, combined with Scargill’s inept politicking, kept the strike from gaining broad support with the public, and it ended in failure a year later, leaving the mining industry and union a shadow of its former self.

Sandifer mentions police savagery and also the wholesale media propaganda assault against the NUM (though he talks about the ‘redtops’, as though it was a purely tabloid phenomenon). Ultimately, however, he seems to imply a plague upon both Thatcher’s and Scargill’s houses.

In the various permutations that this view takes, the heroic resistance of 150,000 workers and their families over a year of struggle is always deemed to have been overshadowed by the lack of a formal vote on it. Here’s a vital corrective to such apparently reasonable ‘even-handedness’, courtesy of Paul Foot in The Vote: How It was Won and How it Was Undermined:

Scargill had failed to win three strike ballots because of the divisions among miners caused by the incentive agreements that had been pushed through by the employers in spite of a ballot vote against them. The ballot results left NUM leadership with the agonizing prospect that pits could be closed piecemeal, one by one, or two by two, and that the union would be prevented by hostile ballot results from responding. This was the background to the confrontation that was started by the closure, without consultation, and in defiance of all agreements, of Cottonwood colliery in Yorkshire. Encouraged by the executive, and by a wave of flying pickets from the threatened pits, strike after strike led very quickly to a massive national confrontation, in which pretty well all the pits in Yorkshire, Scotland, Wales and most of the Midlands were on strike, leaving only traditionally less militant areas, Nottinghamshire and Leicesterhsire, at work.

To those who bleated, ‘I wish Scargill had had a ballot’, there was a prompt reply: ‘Suppose he had had a ballot and lost it – what then?’ Were the miners leaders expected to stand aside while the Government and its newly appointed Coal Board laid waste to the British coal industry? The truth was that actions spoke louder than ballots. The sheer size and breathtaking solidarity of the mass strike was the fact, and the suggestion that the action should have been put at risk by a ballot was an argument that could be sustained only by the enemies of the miners’ union. Very soon, moreover, the democratic potential of the miners’ strike was every bit as obvious as it had been in 1921 and 1926, if not more so.

…