This is England?

‘We all thought it was strange,’ my Dad told me, recounting his family’s response to the Queen’s 1977 Silver Jubilee after recently immigrating to the UK from Ireland. The erection of trestle tables in the streets, stringing up of bunting and feverish flag-waving – all to celebrate a remote woman born into vast wealth and privilege whom few would ever meet – must have intensified the experience of living in a foreign country. Strangely, my Dad’s experience has become my own: during the celebrations of the Diamond Jubilee this weekend, the country in which I was born and live will seem to become someone else’s.

This happened last year, on the day of the Royal Wedding. I was finishing up my final year at Falmouth, a largely arts and humanities-based (and, as such, left-leaning) university. ‘Who’s going to turn up to that?’ I thought, of a party organized on Marlborough Road, a street with a high student population. I stayed in. Throughout the day friends popped back to the house for something, merry with sun and Pimm’s, telling me the party was really good and not even about William and Kate, really, just a good excuse to get drunk. But that night, as I watched YouTube footage of a mass, pissed rendition of ‘God Save The Queen’ in a street packed to capacity with students, I unexpectedly found myself in a minority within my own generation.

Part of what defines that minority is opposition to the hereditary principle. But, more than that, we are defined by sheer incomprehension as to what is being celebrated with the cucumber sandwiches and plastic Union Jack hats. During royal events a different Britain is celebrated from the one in which we actually live. This weekend, I’ll glimpse it again from my window.

Kony 2012: Political Activism for $30

‘Humanity’s greatest desire is to belong and connect.’ These are some of the first words that narrator Jason Russell speaks in Invisible Children’s record-breaking viral video Kony 2012. They are a reference to the capacity of technology and social media to bring us closer together by allowing us to share information. The explicit message of the film is that linking to videos, liking statuses and tweeting hashtags constitute a new form of political activism by spreading awareness of campaigns and uniting people in support.

But, as has been pointed out elsewhere, the immediate reaction to the release of Kony 2012 was not one of connection but of division. The internet was split into two camps: one enthusiastically supportive of Invisible Children’s campaign, and one critical of the calls for US military intervention, the film’s lack of context surrounding the war in Uganda and it’s portrayal of Ugandans as without power or agency.

Put another way, one camp bought (figuratively or literally) what Kony 2012 was selling, and one didn’t. Has the campaign given the former the sense of connection and belonging that Russell claims social media can provide? It’s difficult to see how because what supporters of the campaign share is a basic human reaction of shock and sadness at the footage of Jacob Acaye, a Ugandan boy abducted by Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army, talking about his experience – a reaction they share with just about everyone, non-supporters included. So what else defines Kony 2012 supporters as a group? They’ve all watched and shared the video, bought $30 Action Kits or donated to Invisible Children.

Kony 2012 and Invisible Children’s various other products are consumed by a network of isolated individuals who believe they are taking part in a collective act of political protest. And, as well as employing the familiar ‘soothe some guilt, donate money’ approach used by many charities, the movie deliberately exploits this desire to belong to a movement with a common cause. ‘The fight has led me here, to this movie you’re watching, because that promise is not just about Jacob or me, it’s also about you,’ Russell claims about a promise he made to help Acaye. This direct address to the viewer establishes the illusion of a community that we can join, as do the images of thousands of young Americans running around the streets in Kony 2012 t-shirts, putting up campaign posters.

Will Invisible Children’s ‘Cover the Night’ event, planned for 20^th April, actually provide the sense of community sold by the movie by bringing the Kony 2012 campaign into the physical spaces of cities? Russell narrates:

‘This is the day when we will meet at sundown, and blanket every street in every city ‘til the sun comes up. We will be smart and we will be thorough. The rest of the world will go to bed Friday night and wake up to hundreds of thousands of posters demanding justice on every corner.’

This part of the video very carefully constructs a spectacle of activism. As a dubstep track plays in the background, we see young people sprinting through the streets, throwing flyers off buildings, unfurling huge banners and one guy staring at himself moodily in the mirror, pulling a red bandana over a black face-painted nose and mouth. These images draw on a lineage of representations of protest, from photographs of students throwing flyers from the windows of the Sorbonne during the May 1968 protests to more recent news footage of black-bloc anarchists clashing with riot police on anti-cuts marches. In short, ‘Cover the Night’ is advertised as an exciting, collective act of subversive protest.

But in order to take part you need to have bought an Action Kit or donated money to Invisible Children. What looked like collective activism is exposed as coordinated consumption. The people meeting that night to put up the posters they’ve bought may feel a sense of connection, but perhaps only in the way that, say, a Mazda driver might feel towards other attendees at a Mazda convention. Blanketing the streets with branded posters therefore seems less like a political act and more like free advertising for Invisible Children. ‘We are making Kony world news by redefining the propaganda we see all day, every day that dictates who and what we pay attention to,’ Russell says of the campaign. In reality, Kony 2012 posters are not that different to the billboards of Coke, Dior and Mercedes-Benz adverts shown in the video.

That what supporters of Kony 2012 share is that they’ve bought Invisible Children’s products and not much else says something about the larger purpose of the charity and its campaign. Grant Oyston, on his Visible Children blog, criticizes the charity’s finances, arguing that more goes towards ‘awareness programs’ (including film-making) than directly to Uganda. He also claims that a lot of what is sent to Africa is used to fund the Ugandan military, itself accused of similar human rights abuses to the LRA. And it has been pointed out that the problem with using a military assault to arrest a man notorious for abducting children and forcing them to become soldiers is that he is probably guarded by children whose lives may be put at risk.

The minimum of $15 million already raised from selling Action Kits is likely to go on making the next Invisible Children movie and funding an approach that may exacerbate a volatile situation, while failing to address many of the problems facing children in northern Uganda today, such as unemployment, prostitution and AIDS. Meanwhile, young westerners can carry on buying things to feel like they belong to something bigger than themselves.    

Pound-thirty-five-an-hour-land

There is a land, a strange, unfamiliar land in which bland pop music and beeping checkout scanners can always be heard. The world outside is largely shut out – visitors wander its aisles under the pallid glare of electric light, pulling colourfully-packaged objects from its shelves and depositing them in baskets. The inhabitants of this land spend all day putting more objects on the shelves and mopping the floor, marked by the visitors’ footsteps. In return, they receive a tiny amount of money, well below the minimum wage to which you and I are accustomed. It’s barely enough to live on. But the inhabitants don’t have a choice because in this land, there is no other work available to them: without it they’d starve. This land is called Pound-thirty-five-an-hour-land, and is also known as Britain.

Cait Reilly is an inhabitant of Pound-thirty-five-an-hour-land, an unemployed graduate on Job Seeker’s Allowance forced onto the coalition’s workfare scheme. Last week she published a piece in the Guardian about the court case she is launching against the government, on the grounds that the scheme violates human rights legislation. In her article, Cait points out that workfare merely disguises, rather than decreases, unemployment figures (over a million young people and counting), as well as taking up overtime that could be given to paid employees. She also talks about the highly personal backlash she’s received from the right-wing media, in particular Jan Moir’s piece for the Daily Mail.

Jan Moir is literally nuts, a friend posted during the week, linking to the article. She’s right, as can be observed in Moir’s assertion that Cait’s plight is ‘hardly like being incarcerated in a Nazi prisoner of war camp for five long years, never knowing each day if you would live or die, sewing cross-stitch samplers to stop yourself from going insane.’ Too late, Jan.

But it’s worth debunking some of the myths that Moir, whose writing reads like the ill-considered ranting of a hormonal teenager on Facebook, sets up. She criticizes Cait (‘a student with barely an NI payment to her name’) on the grounds that working for nothing at Poundland constitutes putting ‘something back into the pot’. If Poundland, and Poundland alone, paid JSA to every single unemployed person in the UK, it might be accurate to describe its revenues as ‘the pot’. But the JSA pool is actually funded by every single employed person in the country. So if claimants were required to put ‘something back into the pot’, it might be a better idea for them to volunteer in the public or charitable sectors, doing something that benefits communities. Increasing the profits of Poundland by providing free labour only benefits, well, Poundland.

But why force people to do any sort of unpaid work in exchange for benefits? Workfare is counter-productive: the more time someone spends stacking shelves at Poundland, Tesco or Asda for nothing, the less they have to dedicate to finding paid work. Looking for a job is a full-time occupation to the unemployed – scale that occupation down to weekends and the chances of success decrease. The scheme is also unethical: for people that need JSA, the alternative to receiving the benefit is starvation. That is to say, there is no alternative. The workfare scheme is tantamount to slave labour because claimants cannot choose not to do the unpaid work.

Moir, however, is resolute that nobody ‘owes this girl [Cait] a living’. Okay: let’s for a moment close off our peripheral vision and look at this issue from the narrowest of perspectives (Moir's). Let’s think of Cait’s £54 a week JSA as her ‘living’, earned in exchange for forty hours of work a week at Poundland. Her hourly wage? £1.35. Somebody owes Cait more of a living than that.

But in the ludicrous, soulless world of Pound-thirty-five-an-hour-land, nobody’s going to give it to her. There, Cait and others like her could stack shelves and mop floors for free in order to receive their benefits for up to six months. Which is why she’s decided to fight for it herself, through the legal system. As she says in her Guardian article, ‘A case such as this cannot result in significant damages; from day one, my challenge has been about the principle, not the money. It is about social justice.’ Now that really is putting something back into the pot.

Cameron vs Orwell

After reading the first few paragraphs of David Cameron’s New Year message on Monday, I experienced familiar sensations: a heaviness of the eyelids, a nodding of the head, a wandering of the mind towards Facebook. It was clear that this speech, like so many other examples of political writing, didn’t really mean anything. Vague, general and devoid of specific details, it embodied nothing more than a PR exercise designed to make Cameron, and the government, look good.

As I scrolled wearily down to the end of the piece, I wondered how much of my time is taken up reading stuff in the press that is meaningless. Determined that the three or four minutes I spent reading Cameron’s message weren’t going to be consigned to the internet waste bin, I decided to glean as much as I could from the piece with a little help from the rigorous and bullshit-intolerant analysis of Mr. George Orwell. As there wasn’t much meaning to be found in the content of the speech, I’d look for some in how the speech tries to avoid meaning.

‘Politics and the English Language’ was written in 1946. ‘In our time,’ Orwell wrote, ‘political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible.’ In 2012, not much is different. Almost every statement, speech or article written by a coalition minister tries to defend policies that are causing a huge amount of damage to the lives of ordinary people. This is done by (mis)using language in very deliberate ways which Orwell identifies and categorizes in his essay. In Cameron’s message, they pop up pretty frequently.

The first paragraph is worth quoting in its entirety:

'This will be the year Britain sees the world and the world sees Britain. It must be the year we go for it – the year the coalition government I lead does everything it takes to get our country up to strength.'   

The mind glides over these lines like a skate over ice – there is nothing to grip onto, nothing to stop the reader from passing serenely by. They almost repel attention. What is Cameron talking about? The first sentence is most likely a grand allusion to the Olympics, but the second is impossible to understand exactly. This is because of the slippery nature of phrases like ‘go for it’, ‘do everything it takes’ and ‘get[…]up to strength’. Orwell calls these ‘Operators’ or ‘Verbal False Limbs’: ‘The keynote is the elimination of simple verbs. Instead of being a single word,[…]a verb becomes a phrase, made up of a noun or adjective tacked on to some general-purposes verb.’ Instead of using single-word verbs like ‘cut’, ‘privatise’ and ‘change’, Cameron uses vague phrases that have no precise meaning to refer to policy-making that is having a negative impact on a majority of people.  

Elsewhere, similar phrases point to a lack of meaning for Cameron himself, who can’t seem to find appropriate words to describe the people he governs: ‘The British people have got what it takes – and the government has got the ideas and policies we need.’ The British people have got what it takes? What is this, Europe’s Got Talent? Are we all part of some continental talent contest to see who can get by on least without complaining? Oh, you’re much better at austerity than Greece is, Britain. But prove it by undergoing six more years. If there’s no more rioting, you win.

Cameron can, however, find the right abstract nouns to describe what the Queen represents, as he tries to buoy spirits by anticipating her diamond jubilee: ‘in the 60^th year of her reign, we honour our queen as the finest and most famous example of British dedication, British duty, British steadiness, British tradition.’ These words, used as they are here, fall into the category of what Orwell simply terms ‘meaningless words’: ‘Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.’ To be dedicated, we must have something to be dedicated to. There are different types of duty: moral, patriotic, professional. But Cameron doesn’t specify because meaningless words allow him to appear to be talking about Great British Qualities. In fact, when he implores us to ‘use these things as a mirror of ourselves too, a mirror of the nation’, he’s talking about obedience to the State, unnecessary self-sacrifice and suffering austerity in silence.

Another category of Orwell’s is that of the ‘Dying Metaphor’: ‘worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves.’ Here’s Cameron’s description of the Eurozone crisis: ‘We’ve got clear and strong plans to bring down our deficit, which gives us some protection from the worst of the debt storms now battering the Eurozone.’ We’ve heard so much in recent months about ‘turbulence’ in the Eurozone that the storm metaphor has ceased to, as Orwell puts it, ‘assist thought by evoking a visual image.’ When I first read this sentence, no mental picture was created for me. Instead, just the vague notion that there’s a bad situation in Europe that’s to do with debt. Cameron is thus able to refer to the crisis without having to define exactly what the crisis is. There is no need to mention investment banks, bailout loans or economy-shrinking austerity measures.

Towards the end of his essay, Orwell argues that ‘political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.’ Cameron’s New Year message is itself one big euphemism: an attempt at talking about what the Tories are doing without offending anyone.