Between a speech and a snore

Starmer accused of breaking lockdown rules for hiring voice coach during COVID

Prime Minister Sir Kier Starmer hired actress Leonie Mellinger in December 2020 when he was Labour leader and when London was in Tier 4 restrictions...

Conservative former minister Richard Holden has written to Sir Keir asking whether he thinks he was breaching the law.

A Labour spokesman said: "The rules were followed at all times."

It is understood Sir Keir was working at the time with a small team that was preparing him for a response to Mr Johnson's Brexit deal, with a TV camera filming it all.


Oftentimes they were asleep, but occasionally might be heard talking together, in voices between a speech and a snore, and with that lack of energy that distinguishes the occupants of alms-houses, and all other human beings who depend for subsistence on charity, on monopolized labour, or anything else but their own independent exertions.

Nathaniel Hawthorne - The Scarlet Letter (1850)

The boundaries of ordinary life

And, true enough, there was a look of gloom, as the twilight fell silently and sadly out of the sky, its gray or sable flakes intermingling themselves with the fast-descending snow. The storm, in its evening aspect, was decidedly dreary. It seemed to have arisen for our especial behoof, — a symbol of the cold, desolate, distrustful phantoms that invariably haunt the mind, on the eve of adventurous enterprises, to warn us back within the boundaries of ordinary life.

Nathaniel Hawthorne - The Blithedale Romance (1852)


After the forthcoming general election, Keir Starmer will go back within the boundaries of his ordinary life. His social class, friends, Labour party workers, Parliamentary colleagues, circle of contacts and the ordinary life of a prime minister as an annexe to all that. 

But after the electoral battle, Starmer will not venture back within the boundaries his voters’ ordinary lives because he was never there in the first place. He may ignore the boundaries of their ordinary lives for at least five years and that’s what he’ll do without ever needing to acknowledge that he’s doing it.

Yet Labour voters will still vote for a party leader who is not and cannot ever live within their world, because their boundaries are not his. Keir Starmer’s boundaries are Tony Blair's boundaries.

Of course this is merely a roundabout way of saying the world of governing elites isn’t ours, but the point to be made is that this claim is far more than the rhetoric of disenchantment. Their world isn’t ours and they intend to keep it that way.

This strange, indolent, unjoyous attachment

On emerging from the Old Manse, it was chiefly this strange, indolent, unjoyous attachment for my native town that brought me to fill a place in Uncle Sam's brick edifice, when I might as well, or better, have gone somewhere else.

Nathaniel Hawthorne - The Scarlet Letter (1850)


Derby is my native town, although it became a city decades ago. I suppose I still have a strange, indolent, unjoyous attachment to it even though we haven’t lived there for almost forty years. Whatever the threadbare attachment might be, it is nothing like my attachment to Derbyshire, its hills, dales, dry stone walls, villages and towns.

These days we visit Derby to have the cars serviced and that’s it. The other day we visited the Derby museum for the Hogarth exhibition, but that’s the first time we’ve wandered around the city centre for several years and we don’t intend to rush back. An accumulation of negative impressions I suppose.

For example, a section of the Derby ring-road near to where I grew up was an ordinary main road in the nineteen fifties. The Airfix model shop was on the other side of the road and as a youngster I could cross it in relative safety without adult supervision. Today it’s a very busy dual carriageway – anyone would be insane to try crossing it on foot.

We don’t seem to be particularly good at improving cities and we aren’t particularly good at preserving what was best about them. They grow and we adapt to the growth and some bits are newer and more modern than they were, but improvement seems elusive.

I remember some years ago, Mrs H and I were sitting by a window in a café on the second floor of the main Derby shopping centre. It was a clear day and in the distance, well beyond the city limits, I could see trees, green fields and a church spire. Below our window were four lanes of busy traffic.

The natural indifference of men

Most men — and certainly I could not always claim to be one of the exceptions — have a natural indifference, if not an absolutely hostile feeling, towards those whom disease, or weakness, or calamity of any kind causes to falter and faint amid the rude jostle of our selfish existence.

Except in love, or the attachments of kindred, or other very long and habitual affection, we really have no tenderness.

Nathaniel Hawthorne - The Blithedale Romance (1852)

Was Hawthorne right? His was a much harsher world than ours, one where those who couldn’t hack it were faced with the most miserable destitution and even starvation. Somehow we have drifted into another world where a grey official version Hawthorne's tenderness may be offered to strangers on our behalf via social institutions. We may or may not approve - the institutions are indifferent.

It is as if the concept of ‘stranger’ has become much more tenuous in our connected world. As if the horrors and tragedies of the twentieth century have squeezed out much of what Hawthorne calls the natural indifference of men by downplaying our notions of 'stranger'.

Ironically the notion 'stranger' changes into the strange one who lives within but does not conform, does not emit the right signals. The internal stranger who deserves no sympathy, support or friendship, who may be abused with impunity.    

Indifference though – it feels natural to me. An aspect of survival perhaps? A natural suspicion of strangers, indifference to their needs or their fate. It seems to go hand in hand with assessing the outsider without any confounding assumption of emotional ties, no attachment to their claims, their stories or their demands. It seems to remind us that people we don’t know are indeed strangers, that strangers still exist in this joined up world of ours.

Our world may be kinder in this respect, but also more superficial, bound up with social approval and the role of the state in setting personal standards to which we must conform. We have become enmeshed in a network of norms to which we are expected to subscribe. Or we don’t subscribe, emit the wrong signals, attract disapproval.

If we don’t subscribe then perhaps Hawthorne’s natural indifference hides itself behind a common enough type of conformity which is visibly reluctant, which conforms only outwardly and makes it obvious that this is so. None of which can be healthy.

Respectable old blockheads

No sagacious man will long retain his sagacity, if he live exclusively among reformers and progressive people, without periodically returning into the settled system of things, to correct himself by a new observation from that old standpoint.

Nathaniel Hawthorne - The Blithedale Romance (1852)

So not a new problem, living among reformers and progressive people who cast themselves adrift from reality. Hawthorne saw it over one hundred and fifty years ago. It wouldn’t matter if more stable folk were left alone to pursue what works and leave the rest alone but now we have mass meddling to contend with.

The second half of this Hawthorne quote bears an uncanny resemblance to blogging.

It was now time for me, therefore, to go and hold a little talk with the conservatives, the writers of “The North American Review,” the merchants, the politicians, the Cambridge men, and all those respectable old blockheads who still, in this intangibility and mistiness of affairs, kept a death-grip on one or two ideas which had not come into vogue since yesterday morning.

I have a feeling that there are many people in the blogosphere with a death-grip on one or two ideas which have not come into vogue since yesterday morning. At least I hope I’m one of them. Not so sure about being a respectable old blockhead even though Hawthorne probably meant it ironically. Maybe it's still better than the alternative.

That sweet, bewitching, enervating indolence

We had stepped down from the pulpit; we had flung aside the pen; we had shut up the ledger; we had thrown off that sweet, bewitching, enervating indolence, which is better, after all, than most of the enjoyments within mortal grasp.

Nathaniel Hawthorne - The Blithedale Romance (1852)

From Wikipedia
The Blithedale Romance is a work of fiction based on Hawthorne's recollections of Brook Farm, a short-lived agricultural and educational commune where Hawthorne lived from April to November 1841. The commune, an attempt at an intellectual utopian society, brought together many famous Transcendentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller. 

In the novel's preface, Hawthorne describes his memories of this temporary home as "essentially a daydream, and yet a fact" which he employs as "an available foothold between fiction and reality." His feelings of affectionate scepticism toward the commune are reflected not only in the novel, but also in his journal entries and in the numerous letters he wrote from Brook Farm to Sophia Peabody, his future wife.

In a somewhat lighthearted way, Hawthorne presents the Blithedale movement as a renunciation of middle class indolence which in his time represented a huge contrast between working people and those who did not work with their hands.

He implies that this is what the middle classes really want and generally achieve - that sweet, bewitching, enervating indolence, which is better, after all, than most of the enjoyments within mortal grasp. It is surely what many of us seem to desire too and here in the twenty-first century a far greater proportion of the population have achieved it.

How securely we don’t yet know, but indolence is attractive. We foster it in numerous ways from social drinking to passive entertainments such as TV and cinema, from dining out to relaxing in the sun. One might even say that fostering indolence has been deliberate and it isn’t difficult to see why that could be so.

A population in love with indolence is laid-back and not likely to upset the established order. It is likely to be generally accepting, easily pleased and manipulated. Not only that but... Blimey I’ve finished my glass of port...

It has stolen my memory

I have long wished to know you, Mr. Coverdale, and to thank you for your beautiful poetry, some of which I have learned by heart; or rather it has stolen into my memory, without my exercising any choice or volition about the matter.

Nathaniel Hawthorne - The Blithedale Romance (1852)

When I originally came across these words, I misread the highlighted part as it has stolen my memory. That’s why I remembered it – Hawthornes’s words stole into my memory. Or maybe they stole my memory.

You’ll wonder where the yellow went when you brush your teeth with Pepsodent... Ich bin ein Berliner... The lady's not for turning... Clunk click every trip... I counted them all out and I counted them all back... The pound in your pocket... No Child Left Behind... A million housewives every day... 'Is there anybody there?' said the traveller... Shock and awe... Lashings of ginger beer... Chromium, molybdenum and tungsten... Every little helps... What’s for dinner?... April fool... They think it’s all over... It is now.

Viewed as a stretch of personal real estate, our memory is stolen all the time and there is no real defence apart from cultivating non-attachment. Unfortunately that tends to come later in life, once we’ve dropped into the rut and filled our minds with too much garbage.

The modern world steals our memory, systematically and deliberately. Oddly enough we remember it happening too. Over and over again. Jingle bells, jingle bells...

The joy of cynicism

What has the internet done for us? Maybe one thing it has achieved is to hone our cynicism into a new and liberating philosophy of life – holistic cynicism.

Cynicism about what though? People – always people.

We have been ruled by cynics forever so perhaps after long centuries of believing all kinds of ludicrous crap it’s our turn to be cynical. Politics, big business and big bureaucracy are extremely cynical, which we always knew but many of us now know it right down to the marrow of our bones. It’s a fact of life on a par with death and taxes.

Holistic cynicism is a necessary if not always sufficient condition for placing ourselves more accurately in the grand scheme of things, for knowing what to expect and what not to expect – particularly what not to expect. Holistic cynicism is a sound way to make at least some sense of the big wide world.

Everything beyond our inner circle is included, from charities to democracy, from government to royalty, from celebrities to institutions, from news to narrative. Rule number one is the strongest, most profound and unyielding cynicism – holistic cynicism. Nothing less will do - abandon rule one at your peril.

We cynics always knew it but the internet has taught us just how cynical we need to be, and even now we haven’t fully mastered the beautiful and eternal truths of holistic cynicism. Unfortunately the internet has not passed this liberating lesson to everyone. There are those who will not learn to be holistically cynical  - they refuse to learn in spite of constant efforts by our political leaders.

A divide seems to be growing between those who find spiritual joy through their innate gift of holistic cynicism and those poor unfortunates who actually watch TV news and believe the mainstream media. Sad I know, but such people still exist in substantial numbers and there is no known cure. 

In particular there seems to be a vast gulf between cynics and those who see two sides to important issues. In reality there is only ever one side to any issue – the cynical side which is not really a side at all, but a starting point for liberating the soul.

Do cynics have souls? Do we need one?

A counterfeit of right

source

There is something so massive, stable, and almost irresistibly imposing in the exterior presentment of established rank and great possessions, that their very existence seems to give them a right to exist; at least, so excellent a counterfeit of right, that few poor and humble men have moral force enough to question it, even in their secret minds.

Nathaniel Hawthorne - The House Of The Seven Gables (1851)

Hawthorne was right. Many people have a strong tendency to accept established rank and great possessions as a realities they never question. For others to do so can be embarrassing or even offensive. Things could be different but the realities of power plus social inertia say otherwise. What we do with the idea is a matter of political taste.

I’m sure Jeremy Corbyn doesn’t see the NHS or the BBC as existing through established rank and great possessions, but his blinkers are there for a purpose.

I’m sure David Cameron sees banks through their so excellent a counterfeit of right because his blinkers are there for a purpose too.

Neither man swims in in a political environment which could ever lead them to question their own assumptions of established rank and great possessions because neither man has moral force enough to question it, even in their secret minds. Although I'm not so sure about Cameron's secret mind. I don't think he cares one way or the other.

Ill at ease

The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits.

 Nathaniel Hawthorne - The House of the Seven Gables (1851)

I don’t see myself as ill at ease and I’m not big on onward impulses, but from a sample of one I hesitate to say Hawthorne was right. There is an itch to know more, explain more, read more and analyse more deeply in that futile pursuit of the ever elusive Answer.

Great swathes of popular culture seem designed to keep us not so much happy as reasonably contented. Presumably the political classes beyond the green baize door genuinely want us to be happy below stairs, almost as if they have quietly given up on merit now lots of useful stuff has been invented for them.

It’s enough to make a chap ill at ease.

No greater bugbear

source

Strength is incomprehensible by weakness, and, therefore, the more terrible. There is no greater bugbear than a strong-willed relative in the circle of his own connections.

Nathaniel Hawthorne - The House of the Seven Gables (1851)

It's a common problem - strong-willed people who lack the capacity to be anything else, who cannot use their inflexibility for the common good. It isn’t merely relatives either.

Hawthorne presents the alternative as weakness which is harsh, but his was a harsh world and what else is it when we strip it bare? Somebody has to give way, be accommodating, turn the other cheek, adapt. Either that or move on, out of range.

A small percentage of such people cause havoc because they cannot be accommodated and without enormous disruption will not be ejected, sidelined or otherwise made safe for everyone else. More than a bugbear I'd say.