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Agitprop deluxe

Last week the BBC broadcast a feature-length drama which drew a fair amount of praise from critics. Called Freefall, it was about the financial meltdown as experienced by a city trader, a mortgage broker and a young married couple who take on a new house way above their means.

Many conservatives get rightly exercised by the unbalanced treatment of political parties and the bias in news-reporting. But in the longer term, the worldview which underpins most of the non-news output of the BBC is far more insidious in the effect it has on our cultural drift.

Freefall was exceptionally well made, flawlessly acted and absorbing. But from a political point of view, it was utterly predictable; it could have been written ten, twenty or thirty years ago. And doubtess it will be made ten or twenty years hence. 

The trader and the broker were appalling characters with no redeeming qualities. Not only were their actions irresponsible; they were as individuals repulsive: empty, selfish and amoral. The young couple, on the other hand, were virtually saintly; the only weakness the husband could be accused of was naivety (which is, in this universe, hardly a defect at all.) 

Why the Arts Council Should Go

Earlier this year various big hitters from the arts establishment met in a closed-door colloquium to talk about the way in which the arts are funded in this country. At the end of the meeting, after the chief executive of the Arts Council Alan Davey had left, an informal vote was taken among those present on whether they would abolish the Arts Council itself. Six voted for the Arts Council to undergo “radical surgery”, but 18 - a good three quarters - supported total abolition. No one supported the status quo.

This story features in The Arts Council - Managed to Death, a report just published by the New Culture Forum. We got a good crowd along to the launch event, and the author Marc Sidwell did a great job of defending his main recommendation - that the Council in its present form is simply not working, and should go. They’re understandably not that keen on this idea, and have spent a far amount of time issuing rebuttals.

But the fact is, criticism of the Arts Council comes from many different sides these days, and not just from what we used to know as the Tebbit-tendency in the Tory Party. You don’t have to be a philistine to lose your temper when £30 million is lost on projects like the disastrous The Public, the gallery in West Bromwich which is now known as The Pink Elephant. Of course, it can be difficult getting those who receive funding to speak out. You’re asking them to bite the hand that feeds them. It takes some time for the supposedly unsayable to become sayable. But it’s beginning to happen.

There's another interesting fact which Marc highlighted: it seems that the last thing  the Arts Council’s founder John Maynard Keynes envisaged was a bureaucracy dealing in hundreds of millions. Keynes has suddenly become fashionable again amongst those who crow about the end of free markets, but when it came to the fine arts he was quite a free marketeer himself. He believed that in the long run they could and should pay for themselves. Keynes - who'd have thought it?

Brought down like Al

According to today's poll in the Telegraph, a majority of voters blame MPs rather than the system in which they operate for the scandal over expenses. Two thirds of those questioned agreed that there was "nothing fundamentally wrong with Britain's constitution providing that MPs are honest and competent".

It's astonishing, and very reassuring, that, amidst all the headless chickenery and idiot talk of texting people with info on the progress of various bills through Parliament, the mass of voters, while intensely angry, remain remarkably level-headed about the basics of this crisis. 

The political class, so well described and dissected by Peter Oborne in his 'The Triumph of the Political Class' has been brought low by a money matter, rather like Al Capone was got, in the end, for some quite measly tax evasion. It wasn't, of course, the main cause of his notoriety. 

The same can be said of our political establishment. Peter Hitchens, writing yesterday in the Mail, is the only commentator who has really got the measure of the situation. Years of being talked down to, or simply ignored,  over such issues as social breakdown, unlimited immigration and rising crime are fuelling the current feelings of revulsion against those in power. When Hitchens made this point on the This Week programme recently, Portillo and Abbott could barely muster a response. 

People have learned to live with a massive failure of will on the part of those who govern, or aspire to govern, this country. They increasingly perceive politicians not as their representatives but as people there to tell them that they are simply wrong in their concerns. 

With their talk of 400 MPs and fixed term Parliaments, there is no sign that the parties have quite got this.

Sir Simon

Watching ITV's Britain's Got Talent last night, I was confirmed in my view that Simon Cowell should be regarded as providing a vital public service. He should even be accorded the status of national treasure.

During this time of political and economic crisis, this show is the most effective booster of national morale we have. The clue is in the title: Britain. The set is unashamed in its use of the Union flag. The prize for the winning act is the chance to sing in front of the Queen. It has the feel of an old-fashioned variety show, and generates a warm kind of patriotism. The participants are young and old, black, white and Asian. It is inclusive. It shows people trying and maybe failing, but it is mostly good-natured. It showcases odd little skills that people have mastered, as well as fruitcakes. Choirs and groups of dancing mini-majorettes remind one that round the country, people put in time to go to practise classes to perfect activities which often go unnoticed. And thank God, there is no overlay of distancing irony. It is, right now,  the most important use of culture in its widest sense. The arts establishment, so exercised now by the need to show the importance of culture in a recession, must look on with a bit of envy, and wonder how they do it.

There is something else too. Cowell is regularly reviled for the supposedly heartless way in which he punctures the illusions of the hundreds of contestants who come before his various panels, convinced that their God-given creativity is going to take them to the top. But he should instead be congratulated for his refusal to ingratiate and patronise.

Must Try Harder

It was great that Boris Johnson decided that, after years of wanton neglect, St.George's Day should be properly marked this year, and launched London's celebrations himself on Thursday at Leadenhall Market in the City.

So it's a bore to carp, but it has to be said that the culmination - a St George's Day Festival in Trafalgar Square - proved a dismal, threadbare affair. Bereft of flags or decorations, the Square, with its fountains covered in scaffolding, looked rather forlorn.

The crowds that came - and these were drawn from all age groups - were treated to a succession of folk bands and performers who must have been unfamiliar to most of them, all playing at high decibal level. It seems to be assumed when public events of this kind are organised now that this is what people want - simply to stand and listen to live bands. But it almost never works. It tends to alienate and dominate at the same time. It takes the focus off the event and puts it instead onto the anonymous figures on stage.

There was also virtually nothing for kids to do (surely a couple of brightly decorated carousels can't cost much?), no stalls to speak of, and a general air of nothing-to-see-here.

It's a great idea to celebrate, and it's to be hoped that yesterday's half-hearted display doesn't put people off in the future. If you're going to do it an event such as this, you might as well do it properly

Here's something we made earlier

You might have read this in yesterday's papers:

'Too many children start school without the social and verbal skills to be able to take part in lessons and to behave well. Too many are starting school unable to hold a knife and fork, unused to eating at a table, unable to use the lavatory properly. These children will not be living in absolute poverty. The majority will be living in homes with televisions, computers and PlayStations. What too many of them do not have are adults who are prepared to give their time and energy doing that difficult, but most essential of jobs: raising their children properly...'

The Mail perhaps? Or the Telegraph? No - it appeared in that mainstay of a thousand progressive Sundays, The Observer.

An article by Mary Bousted, General Secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, warned that parents were now failing to socialise their children at the most fundamental level. And attacks on teachers were not only common place, she wrote, but were now often aided and abetted by parents - that is, when they were not doing the attacking themselves.

It might take a long time, but it's just possible that certain truths are dawning on the liberal elites who have been in charge of setting the cultural tone of the country for decades now - as well as forming so much of the social policy inspired by it.  Perhaps the results of what were, for these people, nice ideas on paper, are finally confronting them like a brick through the sash window.

Whoops Apocalypse

The Sunday Times reports today that the environmentalist campaigner Jonathan Porritt will this week repeat his assertion that population control in Britain is vital if we are to build a 'sustainable' society.' 

Or rather, he goes somewhat futher than that: the country needs to reduce its population to around 30 million.

When Porritt first pointed out that we should limit the amount of babies we are having for the sake of the environment, one could fairly assume that he was aiming his diatribe at those whose ears would already be open to his message: white, middle-class and with an 'environmental' conscience.

In which case, he needn't worry. This part of the population - indeed, the whole of what was once called the indigenous but is now more frequently referred to  as the 'traditional' population - are reproducing less and less.

Drowning them out

Liam Fox is absolutely right that people should 'drown out' the extremist voices that we heard at the Luton parade this week. 'For once,' he says 'the silent majority needs to get off the sofa and make its voice heard.'

And I'm sure that, in that, he includes all parts of our population. Indeed, wouldn't the Luton parade have been the perfect chance for moderate muslims to have joined their voices with those of the rest of the hundreds of people on the route?

Jonathan Isaby today congratulates Sayeeda Warsi on her 'impressive' performance on Question time last night. On the programme she said that 20,000 leaflets had gone out asking for there to be a protest against the homecoming troops (who sent these leaflets out? who paid for them?) She concluded triumphantly that, as only about twenty turned up, this was proof of how moderate muslim opinion rejected the extremism of a tiny faction and was as proud of our troops as anyone else.

She rather went for Charles Moore, who was daring to suggest that extremism in one form or another was perhaps a little more widespread than perhaps she was allowing. He mentioned the various bodies which are listened to, and get money from, the government. Warsi was having none of it.

But I would ask the Baroness, why were there no Muslim voices in that crowd angrily denouncing the protesters? Why did there appear to be virtually no Muslims amongst the crowds lining the pavement? Why is there no 'Not in Our Name' campaign by moderate Muslims? These are the questions to which we need answers.   

A weekend drive

Yesterday afternoon, I decided to amble up West to take in the Van Dyck exhibition at the Tate. No congestion charge on Saturdays, so thinks, why not drive? Big, big mistake.

I left my corner of South East London at 3pm. I arrived back in the evening at 8.10pm. Of this 5 hours 10 minutes, a paltry 1 hour 50 minutes was spent not in the car. The distance I travelled, by the way, was under ten miles each way.

Before you reach for your keyboard to suggest using public transport, I would say that I have manfully tried that on two recent occasions. Two overland trains cancelled for no apparent reason, the full suspension of the Jubilee line and the part suspension of the Circle line amounted to just another level in Dante's hell.

Our vibrant, dynamic, blah blah city is slowly packing up. A decade ago, this car journey would take 50 minutes each way on a bad day, 35 on a good one. At the weekend, it was usually a bit less. Now, all these times have more than doubled in length.

How to spot a villain

You really don't have to look as far as Michael Moore or Naomi Wolf and their unhinged anti-America celluloiud rants to see how, over a long period of time, even popular culture has a way of making conservatives feel, well, a bit beseiged.

Last night I watched the movie Misery, a great thriller from 1990 with James Caan and the wonderful Kathy Bates, based on the Stephen King novel. I'm sure readers might know it - the one where a famous pulp novelist, Paul Seldon, is held captive in a remote farmhouse by one Annie Wilkes, a crazy, murderous woman who professes to be his number one fan.

Annie is one of the screens most enjoyably deranged villains. But before she decides to smash Paul's ankles to smithereens to stop him getting away, we're given all sorts of little clues, over and above Annie's sudden blasts of anger, which are meant to indicate that this woman is a major loony-toon.

First, she doesn't like the swearing Paul uses in his book. Secondly, she is religious. Thirdly, she is obviously unpopular socially. And finally, when Paul is secretly looking through her scrap back of photos and momentoes, we see an old  'Vote Nixon' sticker nestling between the pages.   

Well, small things perhaps. But it's indicative of a certain approach, a set of assumptions. Would anybody like to add similar observations?   

A protest we should support

The growing protests by groups of workers over the use of foreign labour is evidence perhaps that working people, battered into submission for years by a contemptuous governmental, cultural and media establishment, are finally turning. Enough, they are saying, is enough.

Against a surreal - and indeed, obscene - background which has workers imported from Europe keeping their heads down in massive floating hotels, British workers are tentatively and, indeed, in a very orderly way, questioning quite how such a situation has been allowed to arise and indeed accepted as the norm.

In today's Times, Janice Turner is spot on:

"Many will dismiss the protests at the Lindsey oil refinery as evidence of the meat-headed ignorance and default racism of our white working class... In 2007, when Gordon Brown announced that he would be “drawing on the talents of all to create British jobs for British workers”, I was lambasted by friends and colleagues, even called a BNP stooge, for agreeing. Because I interpreted his words to mean that it is amoral to leave an idle British underclass to rot on sink estates just because the CBI finds it cheaper to employ young, willing Eastern European graduates than give Britain's poor training and hope...Some who would call me racist have themselves the most hateful, almost eugenic disgust for the white working class: the chavs, the pikeys, the Tennants-swilling pram-faces and hoodies whom they mock and fear."

Crazy name, crazy guy!

Get this. Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor, the head of the Roman Catholic church in England and Wales, has said that just as communism had died with the collapse of the Berlin wall in 1989, so in 2008, 'capitalism had died' with the credit crunch.

He made the claim (was he having a laugh?) at a lavish fund-raising dinner at Claridges attended by rich donors who were pledging hundreds of thousands of pounds to the catholic church.

Is anyone actually taking these sorts of statements seriously? If so, all it does is reveal their profound lack of understanding, or indeed the extent of their wish-fulfilment fantasizing. Even the Times, when it ran the obligatory piece some weeks ago asking various commentators whether Marx had been right after all, had the sense to place it in the frivolous T2 section.

Welcome to their world

Rod Liddle notes in passing in today's Sunday Times the words and phrases not used by the BBC in its continuous coverage of the Mumbai attacks: Islam, Islamist, fundementalist, Muslim, jihad etc.

Similarly, some of Channel 4 News's coverage exhibited such a state of denial that I thought a couple of times that maybe I had misheard. The killers, announced Jon Snow at the top of the show, showed a "wanton disregard for race or creed".

Excuse me?

Snow later wrote on his daily email : "I suppose the nearest parallel would be the school killing at Columbine, near Colorado".

Thankfully Charles Moore had a riposte to this moronic observation in yesterday's Telegraph.

'No! The Columbine killings were isolated actions of two young minds disturbed. They were not the product of a paramilitary, worldwide, politico-religious ideology,' he wrote. ' After Columbine, websites of international religious organisations were not buzzing with conspiracy theories to excuse the killers.'

'I'm now so old, my pussy is haunted'

Stopped laughing yet?

Or still can't get enough of that, edgy, provocative, experimentalism that is modern British comedy?

This witless line would probably make older women in any audience feel insulted and uncomfortable.

It was said on BBC 2's show Mock The Week on Wednesday. And it was said about the Queen.

One of the comedians on the panel came out with this pearl of comic genius when asked to come up with something in response to 'What the Queen didn't Say in her Christmas Message.'

Coming during the Ross/Brand storm, it has gone by without so much as a whisper. But it shouldn't be allowed to. I would urge you strongly to complain.

As we at the New Culture Forum said this week, the cultural establishment has, over the past decades, been remarkably successful in setting a tone of public discourse which brands public feelings of disgust, anger or violation as simply the ravings of the provincial and reactionary.

Warning: We intend to be thoroughly offended

'Inter-faith advisers' are warning the Metropolitan Police that the commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the massacre of Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists at the Munich Olympic Games, a commemoration which is planned for the 2012 games, should not offend local and travelling Muslims.

This would be one way, apparently, of reducing the threat of any possible Islamic terrorist threat to the London Games.

One of these experts is Michael Mumisa, an Islamic scholar, who has been hired by Scotland Yard to train the police this week on inter-faith issues. He said that the commemoration of the 11 Israeli athletes, killed by Palestinian militants from the Black September Organisation at the 1972 Munich Games, could become a national security threat if it was not managed properly and was perceived by Muslims to be “hijacking” the Games.

What would constitute 'hijacking' in the eyes of these 'experts'? A ceremony perhaps, a two-minute silence maybe, which is then reported on by the media?

And what would it take for such a commemoration to be 'perceived' by some Muslims as hijacking the games?  We already know that the bar for what is considered offensive or insensitive is set very, very low.

And what does 'managed properly' mean? Kept to a minimum, perhaps? Kept quiet?

What is it that's most offensive and worrying about such advice?

Perhaps it is the knowledge that the Metropolitan Police will heed every word, and that they will be backed up by our supine cultural and political establishment.    

Andrew Green vindicated

As posted on ToryDiary today, Dominic Grieve makes the following point in the Standard today:

"Of course, some economic immigration brings benefits but not all. The Government has consistently overstated the economic advantages by emphasising only the contribution of newcomers to overall GDP, when, as the Lords Select Committee on Economic Affairs points out, it is the impact on GDP per person that counts, and immigration has had only the most marginal impact on that measure."

It's good to see that he's taken this point on board - but shouldn't most credit go to the excellent Andrew Green of MigrationWatch, who consistently pointed out this marginal impact long before the select committee?

I am socially deprived, so I cheer on a suicide

Yesterday at Comment is Free there was an article by the feminist and trade union activist Cath Elliott about what's being called the Broken Society. With the usual apologies to her readers, she found herself agreeing with David Cameron.

The piece was shot through with a genuine fear about what is happening to us. One of the instances she cited was of the suicide last week of Shaun Dykes, when a crowd gathered and goaded him as he prepared to throw himself off a building, and then gathered to take pictures of his dead body on their mobile phones.

Like Cath, I was horrified to hear of this incident, which, in the complete moral void it illustrated, was in a way more alarming than the rising knife crime statistics.

Then there was this neat little line in her article: 'Arguing about who or what is responsible for this moral decline gets us nowhere.'

Really?  It seems to me to be of the utmost importance to establish how this situation has come about if we are to have the remotest chance of turning it around.

The Real Culprits

The playwright David Edgar yesterday blamed the Tories and Thatcherism in particular for Britain's 'broken' society.

This line has become the received wisdom, at least amongst those who generally form our cultural agenda for us: that the Thatcher years unleashed an aggressive, greedy cult of individualism, that we are still paying the price for her supposed belief that there ‘is no such thing as society.’  Ostentatious hedonism, self-absorption, a hysterical obsession with celebrity and yobbish bullying are all put forward by commentators from the cultural establishment as signs of a decadence brought on by an excess of capitalism and it’s trading of people as commodities.

This argument is not only utterly inadequate in explaining the extent of the changes in British society, but it also absolves the liberal elites from having to face up to the results of their handiwork.   

The Right might well have won the economic battles, but large parts of it never really understood the culture war which was happening under its nose throughout the post-war period. What started off as a counter-culture became the ruling orthodoxy, and, to a remarkable degree, it is still in place. With one or two exceptions, its effects have largely been destructive, and the air is thick with chickens coming home to roost.

It can certainly shoulder much of the blame for the way in which traditional identities have been repudiated. Its distaste, if not outright contempt, for the idea of the nation or a belief in national pride has become part of the collective psyche; it t is now so embedded we no longer see it, taking it for granted as the natural way of looking at things. A vigorous satirical tradition is one thing; systematic self-denigration to the point of oblivion quite another. 

Similarly the undermining of the family was as much a philosophical as fiscal process; the nuclear unit was portrayed as the route of much emotional and psychological trauma (and for Marxists, the basic component holding up the hated capitalist structure). And in education, despite growing mountains of evidence of its shocking failure, an egalitarian approach is still, remarkably, clung to by many of its practitioners, as is the mistaken belief, discussed in an earlier chapter, that learning should emanate from the omnipotent pupil itself.

Underlying these attitudes, and most importantly perhaps, any form of restraint, either internal or external, came to be judged on principle to be a bad thing. This belief, which has seen perhaps it’s most disastrous results in the junking of discipline in schools - amounted to nothing less than a betrayal of subsequent generations. Individuals, it was said, should be encouraged to express themselves in any way which they saw fit, regardless of the consequences and effects on others, or indeed on themselves (a close friend, a thorough-going product of the ‘68 generation, related with amusement how he and his friends would sit on the floor of a railway station, getting filthy in the process, because sitting on the seats provided would have been regarded as simply too ‘establishment’).

Self-restraint or self discipline were seen as oppressive, old-fashioned, even anti-creative. A simple exposure to the rigour with which real artists or entrepreneurs apply themselves to their work was all the proof that was needed to show quite how big a lie this particular mantra was. And authority in whatever shape or form, be it uniformed or moral, was, naturally, there to be resisted and dismantled.

It is no wonder then that, amid the chaos, so many people feel a sense of unease and unhappiness. The wholesale degradation and discrediting of structures, institutions and traditional collective identities has left many in our society stranded. 

As a gay man, should I celebrate this diversity?

Tomorrow evening Channel 4's Dispatches programme will show women preachers at London's Regent's Park Mosque urging followers to kill homosexuals.

The programme is a follow-up to the Dispatches on Undercover Mosques.

In this new documentary, a female reporter infiltrated women’s study circles. In one, a preacher using the name Umm Amira tells followers: “We are not going to be like animals . . . or to be like the homosexuals, God save us from that, you understand? We have to take the judgment, the judgment is to kill them.”

There is only one single valid response to this. They should be prosecuted for incitement to murder.

It would be tempting to dismiss these calls as the ravings of a lunatic fringe.

So it is important to point out that last year a wide-ranging survey of Muslim opinion showed that 71% - yes, 71% - of young Muslim men (aged between 16-24) thought that homosexuality should be illegal. 

I hope that the gay community wakes up a little, so far as this issue is concerned.

A new Great Satan

Say it quietly, but I think there are signs that the zealotry surrounding the religion of environmentalism in the West might have peaked.

This is not because George Bio-pot has just come over all ambivalent about nuclear power. Most people are unaware of the various arcane sections and sub-sections within the environmentalist movement.

Rather, it has simply been the TV and press pictures of the quite incredible smogs enveloping the Olympic Stadium in Beijing and the Great Wall.

China is now the world's biggest polluter, and boy, does it show.

The long term effect of such images will be to take the massively anti-American, anti-Western steam out of the environmentalists' argument.

Expect to see the more vociferous, especially left-leaning elements in the movement gradually, ever so softly, backing away.       

Clothes maketh the manchild

In the Telegraph today, Charles Moore asks why it is that, at a time when decent clothes are more affordable for more people, general standards of dress have never been so dire.

It's quite brave of him, because taking on a subject like this means one runs the risk of being dismissed as a a disapproving blimp. But he's right; it's no coincidence that so much of the nostalgia we might indulge in relates to the fashions of even the very recent past. I wrote about this in Look at Me: Celebrating the Self in Modern Britain:

"Much of it comes down to a form of selfishness. The belief that you should ‘express yourself’ through what you wear is a relatively new one, very much part and parcel of the values of the Me Generation identified by Tom Wolfe in the Seventies and the counter-culture of the decade which came before it. Expressing your own individual sense of style, or dressing in what makes you happiest and most comfortable regardless of the context, is the unchallengeable criterion now. You can cover yourself with tattoos, pierce your eyebrows and belly buttons and wear t-shirts with lame slogans ( Do I Look Like I’m Interested? ) which are designed to simultaneously alienate others while drawing attention to aspects of your character you have decided are interesting.

Dressing with some degree of smartness, or at least in what might be appropriate for the occasion, was all about. The instinct to not turn up to a funeral in jeans, or a wedding in shorts and trainers, came not necessarily from an innate preference for suits or ties, or a slavish desire to uphold convention, but from a sense of consideration and respect for others. Unshined shoes, the Vogue editor Diana Vreeland famously said, are the end of civilisation; it followed that how you appeared to those around you said as much about what you thought of them as you did of yourself. If you have been encouraged not to care what others think, or, as is increasingly the case, are not even aware of those around you, then it is hard to see why you should give a damn. Such a lack of consideration or effort, with its implicit selfishness, has a demoralising, energy-sapping effect on public life.

Dressing well went along with a strong sense of collective identity, something which could be found especially amongst the traditional working class. This has been misunderstood by generations of middle class interferers who rather arrogantly assumed that they were imposing their own bourgeois standards on the workers, who should be freed from such restrictions. I remember as a first generation college boy from a working class family in the late seventies being confronted with Trotskyite public school boys who, in their desperate attempts to appear down with us proles, took to swearing a lot at Union meetings, not shaving and dressing as slobbily as possible. They were completely misguided if they thought this was what being working class meant of course, as well as being outrageously insulting.

But somehow they won the day; over the past thirty years, what is left of the working class has indeed transformed itself into something it never was, and is now fully living up to the middle class view of it. The result has been an army of what we might call kidults, who can be seen in any high street or shopping mall: chubby middle-aged men in long shorts, baggy slogan-covered tops and trainers, waddling like huge babies, clasping bottles of water topped with those special drinking teets."

1981: Having a cultural moment

Twenty-seven years ago today, Prince Charles married Lady Diana Spencer. In his book The Triumph of the Political Class, Peter Oborne rightly identifies this event as the centrepiece of a shortlived counterblast by an old Establishment which was soon to collapse - The Empire Strikes Back, if you like.

That same year, a large part of the country was in thrall to that lavish saga of doomed aristocracy, Brideshead Revisited, which was showing on ITV - yes, astonishingly, ITV. In the cinema, Chariots of Fire and its tale of gentlemen runners competing for King and Country was a home-grown hit which went on to win the Best Picture Oscar. In the pop charts, the new romantic Prince Charming himself, Adam Ant, was standing and delivering, a celebration of the traditional British penchant for dressing up and eccentricity. 

Peter York and Ann Barr published The Sloane Ranger Handbook and had a massive bestseller. A sub-division, known as the 'Young Fogies' , made a brief appearance. Jeremy Hackett realised there was quite a market in clothes of the tweed and four-button cuff variety and so started a little sceond-hand shop selling them on the Kings Road. The 'Season' had a revival, and with it reappeared black tie and ballgowns.

What was all this about? Not, as yet, Thatcherism; in 1981 the 'loadsa-money' city yuppy had yet to make an appearance on the scene. With its strong aristocratic and nostalgic aesthetic, the cultural scene of that year could hardly be seen as a celebration of a new competitiveness and entrepreneurialism. It was instead perhaps a reaction to the grim uniformity and utilitarianism of the 70s, the nihilism of punk, and the general ropey, dingy quality of public life. We were looking upwards at the aristocracy, and backwards at our past.

Well, Brideshead is back, in a new cinema version, but already appears still-born. The New Sloane Ranger handbook was published this year, and sunk without trace. Looking upwards, there is no aesthetic inspiration to be had in a disconnected class of Russian oligarchs. And for the young in particular, the past, which has been gradually erased from the popular imagaination, is no longer an option. As we stare in the face of a new recession, and watch as the social fabric melts away, where do we avert our eyes to this time?

It's lawlessness which is on the increase

Crime figures are going down, according to the Government stats. People are sceptical. As an old TV commercial used to say, the stain says Hot, the label says Not.

The final impotence of those with no solutions and a fare share of the blame, is to bleat about the sensationalism of the media. On the contrary, I would suggest that in various ways the media actually plays down the extent of the problem.

Of course we know that the likes of the Guardian will pretend there isn't any kind of breakdown. To say there was would be to admit to the results of years of liberal handiwork, and that would require real moral courage. It's not going to happen.

However other, more populist papers such as my own local, the London Evening Standard, have striven manfully to keep afloat the 'narrative' of the capital as a great, diverse, dynamic city like no other which is a massive success story, and a model for the world. I am a Londoner and love the city, but this is a myth. Like New York before Guiliani, London is slowly becoming unliveable in.

The strain on the train

Can I add my voice to Graeme's excellent and vivid piece?

The compliant and cowed majority have ceded control to the bullying tendency. For example, on my journey home on the train to South East London, it is depressing to see how commuters now actively accommodate and work round those who impose themselves unthinkingly on what is a communal space, effectively taking it over and diminishing everybody else in the process. For such individuals it’s now de rigour to stake out a space by putting their feet up on the seat opposite. This increasingly common and apparently victimless practise is in fact one which combines all the worst aspects of anti-social behaviour: it is utterly selfish in the context of a public place, it implies a complete disregard for fellow travellers, and a contempt for the person who will have to sit where dirty shoes have been.

In our new universe, if asked to remove his feet, it is the bully who looks utterly offended – insulted that he is being shown such disrespect. If he complies, he will, in his myopic view, look silly in the eyes of others. On a couple of occasions I have tentatively asked for feet to be taken off the seat, only to be told how fucking rude I was, and asked who the fuck did I think I was. This was then followed by a mobile phone conversation during which these points were made again, loudly, so that my humiliation could be further drawn out.

Samir Shah forced to resign from BBC

Not.

Samir Shah, a non-exec director of the BBC, pointed out this week that while ethnic minorities were largely absent from the top ranks of the BBC, there was a tokenistic over-representation on screen.

Mr Shah said that politically-correct broadcasters often "over compensated" by bombarding programmes with black and Asian faces - so much so that "even ethnic minorities are slightly embarrassed by the plethora of brown faces they see on the screen".

"It's almost impossible these days to find a television news programme that doesn't have a black or Asian presenter as part of the team - even in areas of Britain where black and Asian faces are quite thin on the ground among the population as a whole," he told an audience at the Royal Television Society in London.