- The Guardian
Tuesday 30 July 2019 33
Suzanne
Moore
COVER: RUPERT NEATE/THE GUARDIAN; GETTY. THIS PAGE: ANDREW PARSONS/I-IMAGES; GETTY
people feel about bikini waxes:
fi ne if that’s your sort of thing, but
I would really rather not pay for it.
And yet it is hard not to take heart
in the fact that people all over
Britain can pick up a mainstream
magazine featuring the former fi rst
lady Michelle Obama; New Zealand’s
prime minister, Jacinda Ardern; the
author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie,
the climate campaigner Greta
Thunberg; the boxer Ramla Ali; the
refugee and model Adut Akech; the
health campaigner Jameela Jamil;
the trans actor Laverne Cox and the
Hollywood great and human rights
protester Jane Fonda all in one place.
It makes me excited to think
that in waxing salons, post offi ces,
dentists’ waiting rooms, law courts,
24-hour garages and gynaecologists’
offi ces, you will be able to read
women – intelligent women –
discussing the climate crisis, toe
sweat, international law and money.
You know, just like real people.
This may be the fi rst time that
the September issue has been guest
edited, but it is far from the fi rst
time a member of the royal family
has stepped up to edit something.
As Tolani Shoneye said on Twitter,
the Duchess of Cambridge has guest
edited the Huffi ngton Post UK,
Prince Charles guest edited Country
Life magazine and Prince Harry
guest edited the Today programme.
Does change come from the top?
Rarely. But does it look nice to see
people who look like my mum, my
neighbours and me on the cover of
a shiny magazine? Of course it does.
Nell Frizzellfi rst African American president of
the US. What is Johnson? A chancer
whose expensive education hasn’t
taught him to distinguish rhetoric
from reality.
Surely the next step is the
Vladimir Putin school of power
imagery. While Johnson ascended
to Downing Street, the Russian
president was being photographed
in a submersible as he prepared to
dive in the Gulf of Finland. Johnson
won’t be able to impress people for
long with pictures of him sitting
at a desk, even if he is gesturing
passionately. He too will have to
descend in bathysc aphe if he is to
keep the papers interested in photos
of his working life.
However, for now these pictures
must suffi ce – pictures that ask us
to feel a thrill of pride that, fi nally,
a president of the Oxford Union has
gone on to become prime minister.
Jonathan JonesThe PM’s clear
message to
women: you
don’t matter
T
he fi rst rule of culture war is you don’t talk about culture
wars, even though they are two a penny – we are having
culture wars over abortion rights , sex education and
legalising cannabis. Meanwhile, talk of a Tory “war
cabinet” has been criticised on the grounds that we are
not having an actual war. It is disrespectful, apparently,
but I am ambivalent. We have been having an unacknowledged
culture war for a long time – it led to Brexit and this administration.
Those who want to see this as a rightwing coup lost the culture war,
because their cultural horizons were so limited. Many of them worked
within the cultur e industry, so were doubly enraged by the leave vote ,
and are not used to being on the losing side.
If your job is to produce culture and you didn’t see what was
happening to half the country, or despised those who didn’t share
your views about that country , then it is tough indeed. Having always
believed that culture precedes politics, that artists , musicians and
fi lm-makers are the canaries in the mine, I still feel enraged at what
did n’t happen. There were honourable exceptions, of course – I will
come to them – but every day in 2016 one notable or another told us
to vote remain. It was patronising. None of these people seemed to
be in touch with anything except other people who went to private
views and mused over rubbish conceptual art.
Every time I tried to talk of Englishness as a demon and a
premonition, I was told that I wasn’t internationalist or left enough,
that to discuss Englishness as the Scots had discussed their identity
was verboten.
It is happening again now. On the anniversary of the start of the
2012 Olympics, some people have been saying: “Wasn’t that all
lovely?” to which the militant miserabilists of the “real” left reply:
“It was terrible – bits of London were militarised
and poor people got nothing from it.” This is
stupid, because we should be allowed to think
two things at once. We can celebrate the fact
that the opening ceremony was great ; that
multiculturalism was no longer an idea, but
medal-winning ; that George Osborne was
roundly booed ; and that some people had a really
great time. But also we can understand the bad
stuff : the riots the year before ; the bedding in of
deep impoverishment ; the deliberate breaking up of communities.
We can’t go back to lovely 2012, just as we can’t go back to 2016.
But we can begin to understand that, to have a dog in this culture
fi ght, one may have to be creative. Jeremy Deller has wondered about
national identity in his wonderful show English Magic , drawing new
maps of England based on the routes of David Bowie tours. Grayson
Perry has asked diffi cult questions. Shane Meadows always does. Jez
Butterworth has given us Johnny “Rooster” Byron , a pagan deviant.
PJ Harvey has sung of blood and bones and white chalk and what
makes England shake. Billy Bragg has long been looking for a new
England. Young guys in council blocks have made music that really
was a new England. Most of the cultural establishment, meanwhile,
have been going to events in big cities with new galleries for which
the natives should remain grateful.
This same cultural establishment reigns. In response to Brexit, it
has produce d some of the worst art ever seen, such as Anish Kapoor’s
gaping gash. The establishment doesn’t do provincial, but then is
deeply shocked when people feel no investment in it because art is
meant to be good for us. The ungrateful gits don’t get that, do they?
No-deal Brexit is also very bad for people; don’t they get that, either?
I dislike the ascetism of Corbyn because that is also a cultural
stance. Johnson’s amoral hedonism won him the London mayoralty
and then the prime ministership. In an election, Labour has to do the
very thing Corby n seems unable to do – be attuned culturally to all
the places that exist between the Almeida theatre in Islington and
the Durham miners’ gala. Places of English magic.
Yet because the left has long assumed it owned the culture – and
in many ways it did – it has become comfortable and self-satisfi ed.
It failed to notice it was losing the biggest cultural war of all.We saw it. We didn’t just hear
it. It wasn’t a “domestic”; that
euphemism for the way men
terrorise women every day. We
saw Mark Field, the MP for Cities
of London and Westminster, with
his red face and bulging angry eyes,
push a female activist up against
a wall, put his hand around the back
of her neck and then manhandle her
out of a posh dinner. He later said he
thought she might have been armed.
There needs to be no further
investigation into Field’s behaviour,
according to our new prime minister.
The case has been dropped. New
broom and all; just don’t hit me with
it. Boris Johnson, of course, had to
face down his own behaviour when
the police were called because of
an incident between him and his
girlfriend, Carrie Symonds. We don’t
know what happened, except that
the police did not take any action.
Then, there was a picture of them
sitting in a fi eld. What more is there
to say, except we also know there is
a recording of Johnson conspiring
with a friend to get a journalist
beaten up? But what’s a few
cracked ribs?
The message is frightening and
clear. It is about who is in charge
and about what kinds of behaviour
are tolerated. Male violence, the
violence that all women internalise
as if by osmosis, exists to shut us up
and shut us down.
Don’t fuss. Don’t call the police.
It’s all in the past or a private matter.
Two women every week are killed
by men who profess to love them.
Sometimes, they are strangled to
death in “sex games that go wrong”,
the burgeoning new defence
for murder.
Either violence against women is
a priority or it isn’t. Is it any kind of
surprise that for Johnson it isn’t?How the left lost the
great culture war
for Englishness
Say
what?The 11th Thumb
Wrestling world
championships
were held this
weekend in
Suff olk, and
two members
of the same
family took
home titles.
Paul Browse
won the men’s
competition
and his mother-
in-law, Janet
Coleman, won
the women’s- taking the
title from last
year’s winner,
her daughter
Becky.
Artists, musicians
and fi lm-makers
are the canaries
in the mine
Mark Field ...
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