The meaning of England is different for everyone who lives in it. Its physical reality – its actual and emotional landscape – resonates at different frequencies for all of us. But whatever tone we hear, it is increasingly drowned out by the louder but flatter sound of landscapes being levelled, colour being drained and character being driven out by money and self-interest and over-development. Whether the real England, for you, is the local newsagent or the local church, the thatched cottage or the city terrace, the hardware store that clings on in your high street, the struggling street corner pub, the patch of overlooked waste ground, the chaotic street market, the hedgerows or the downlands, an old farm or an urban canal: you can be sure that if it is not sufficiently profitable or obedient, then it is not safe from the accelerating forces of homogenisation and control.
Paul Kingsnorth, Real England
Giving someone like me this book was guaranteed to trigger a detonation. It calls for a halt to the homogenist agenda of the Korporate Kontrol Kulture and a return to the essence of what constitutes ‘real’ England, something I’ve been banging on about for ages. Not to suggest that the author is deludedly-smitten with the fantasy of the whack of willow on leather, lukewarm pints in the pavilion, red telephone boxes and swallows nesting in the eaves of the church. Paul Kingsnorth is a veteran campaigner on what might be simplistically- termed ‘Green issues’ and has walked his talk in places such as the besieged Zapatista villages of Mexico to the tribal enclaves of West Papua, and he’s also swept the floors in a McDonalds. From the outset he makes it very clear where the battle-lines need to be drawn – between those who cherish the unique characteristics that define the spirit of a particular place, and those whose only allegiance is to shareholder profit and short-term investment “yield”. It is that very mentality that is destroying all the last vestiges of England, the England that still prevails – albeit barely – outside of the monoculture. Often those fighting to preserve their local pub, their boatyard, their market, have little in common except for a shared enemy, which is often a nebulous collusion of government policy, business rapacity and institutionalised cretinery. Time and again we see that the corporate emphasis on profit and “growth” to the exclusion of any and all other considerations has leached through into every aspect of daily life.
Time and again the enemy shows itself in forms we can all recognise: second-home buyers from Surrey reducing Cornish villages into ghost towns; the overpaid idiots who move into rural Somerset and then write letters of protest about the farmer muck-spreading; the pub-chain companies who deliberately ruin landlords and their hostelries in order to make a fast profit on the sale of the vacated property; the developers who knock up identikit Lego apartments that sit unoccupied whilst private security firms beat up the homeless sleeping in the unused communal doorways. All of them are the enemy, otherwise collectively known as “The Wankers.” The Wankers conform to a totalitarianist agenda that they would struggle to recognise in that light, and yet totalitarianism is exactly what it is. This fact first struck Kingsnorth when he took a trip to the Bluewater shopping complex in Kent. He walked into a world that was totally ordered, totally controlled, designed specifically for one purpose and one purpose alone, and was in almost every aspect of its conception totally at odds with basic human values. The Third Reich could not have conceived of something like the modern shopping mall, and I wonder if Speer and his mob would have approved or said, “Now come on, that’s just going too far.” There is something very, very, very fucked up about these places, and anyone who feels comfortable in such an environment really needs to pause and consider their position in the universe. They are cathedrals of corrupted desire, engine houses specifically designed to sell you shit that you don’t need. The damage they’ve wrought upon the traditional English high street and our general cultural wellbeing is probably incalculable, and they are just one manifestation of this creeping rot of development, “regeneration” and “improvement” that is actually doing more harm than good. Not every empty space is a plot waiting to be built upon. Not every river’s edge is demanding of a piazza and a row of apartments. Not every town and city needs a clone zone of Philpott’s, Starbucks and Tesco Metro barnacled around the kind of “enterprise parks” that sent J.G. Ballard’s imagination racing. And yet to express opinion to the contrary is, in certain company, heresy. I recall overhearing a conversation at work in the wake of the recent G20 protests (that left one man dead and several other people with serious injuries). A young woman, probably in her late twenties, was complaining about the protestors and demanding that they just “shut up and go home,” an attitude that her colleagues echoed. They honestly could not see what they had to complain about, and was eager to see the status quo maintained, even if that meant cracking a few crusties heads open along the way. If you’ve got a significant portion of the population (and I’m confident that there’s thousands out there like them) eager to be willing victims of vampire capitalism – whose attention might only be captured if their most conveniently-located branch of Pret got firebombed – then how in he hell are a few well-meaning hippies and chunky sweaters from CAMRA going to stop the rot?
Well, as far as I’m concerned if you’re not part of the solution, then you are very much part of the problem. Some may not agree with how the corporate monoculture operates, but their apathy puts them inadvertently on the side of The Wankers. In my own case, I’ll admit that I’m not out there manning the barricades and offering immigrant families shelter in my own home. Neither is Sting, for that matter. My contribution to all of this is to wherever possible resist the monoculture. That means wearing clothes with no logo’s, slogans or any other “branding”, thus preventing me from becoming a walking billboard offering free advertising for The Wankers. That means never using the dining facilities offered by high street fast food chains (though in a pinch I’ll use their bogs). That means only replacing equipment in my home when it actually breaks – as proven by my 14-year-old TV set, 12-year-old video recorder (yes, I’ve still got one of those), and 10-year-old PC. I don’t drive a car, and couldn’t afford one anyway. I keep it cheap by necessity, and keep it simple out of choice. No mobile phone, no Twitter, no Facebook updates, none of that bollocks. By completely ignoring much of what is foisted upon us by the mass media, my life is far less complicated than almost anyone else I know. This allows far more time to contemplate the world – time that I consider vital – and leaves me free to spend time with my family and to paint and draw and write pieces like this.
Paul Kingsnorth also maintains a blog, and a damn sight more useful it is than my own indulgence. I would recommend a careful study of its contents, and if it steers you towards a cause that you feel you can contribute to, all well and good. Be it the beleagured village pub, rural post office, urban market, greenbelt meadow, local hospital, struggling greengrocers or developer-targeted playing field – whatever it is that The Wankers have set their sights on destroying, then just out of sheer bloody-mindedness alone it’s worth standing up for these last vestiges of what makes this country such a frustrating but fascinating place to live. ‘Cos once they’re gone, they’re gone forever, and you’ll be living in a Wanker’s paradise.
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