Sorry but I think I would have thrown that egg myself*

The problem with an old-fashioned egging is that it lacks political nuance. Last Sunday's assault on Young Conservatives in Manchester has quite rightly been greeted with universal disapproval by the media and it doesn't really matter that 60,000 people didn't hurl eggs. One chose to vent their anger in yolk form and it was wrong, not least because this act of free-range stupidity gave the Tory party the perfect story against which to define themselves at the start of their annual conference. They can now claim to be the party that doesn't hurl eggs, or, at least, not outside the context of a dining club hazing.

Conflict is hardly new when the Tories come north. Political debate in this part of the country is a snarling business but that emanating from the left often seems more snarl than substance. Jeremy Corbyn can ask for gentler politics and Topman himself from collar to cuff but the crowd at protests will usually attract some braid-wearing pert-nippled class warriors with a good arm, lucky aim and a misguided notion of free speech.

Yet amid the sham outrage and sham counter outrage, I noticed something very familiar about the video titled ‘A Tory just got EGGED!!’ when it popped up on Youtube. I recognised the scene of the 'crime'. I spent years working in an office just around that corner on the edge of Chinatown. I've stood where the Tories stood and know how tempers run hot in a city that often feels like it has more Bez tribute acts than it has Tory voters.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZB8_RMwFfI

Because I know the corner so well, I wonder how those Young Conservatives found themselves standing at that junction of Portland Street and Oxford Road. It's the latter road that channels protest marches that routinely run out of the university precinct to the south. That corner is the closest point that protesters get to the security barriers protecting Tory attendees. You'd have to walk a few minutes back towards Central Library in order to reach the Midland Hotel and further still to reach the conference venue.

It makes it hard not to question the motives of those Young Conservatives when they picked that spot to openly wear their conference passes (against the advice of event organizers) and to wave copies of The Telegraph, conference brochures, and pictures of Margaret Thatcher. These are perfectly legal things to do, of course, but perhaps not wise in the middle of an anti-austerity march unless your intention is to provoke the other lot into proving what a despicable bunch they can be. And, as usual, somebody in that other lot was only too happy to oblige.

The result is online sniping between the hard left and hard right. The left justifiably feel they have statistics on their side because it was only one among 60,000 who committed the terrible deed. The right justifiably feel that they have morality on their side because they claim the right to dress how they like and walk the streets unmolested by egg yolk. Yet it's hardly partisan to point out that the Young Conservatives seemed delighted to have provoked that response.

Manchester has many virtues but bow ties are rare and the v-necked sweater with old-school tie is not a look that wins many friends. Seen through my eyes, at least, the Young Conservatives looked just that: very young and very Conservative. I would also argue that you don't need to be on the political left to have a visceral reaction to the smugness of youths flaunting their privilege in a context in which others are protesting genuine poverty and government policies that are leading to the deaths of vulnerable people. Given the anger, the noise, the passion of the moment, I'd have been hard pressed not to lob an egg myself. Except, sitting here coolly and rationally, I also know that I wouldn't. Or perhaps I would. That's the problem with passion. It makes reasonable people do things they would regret and often those things are far worse than throwing an egg. The bigger question is why people attend a political march carrying eggs in their pockets and it's in the premeditation that my sympathy for the protesters ends.

The difference between passion and premeditation is, I suppose, at the heart of my argument. It's the premeditation of protestors looking to hurl eggs and the premeditation of the Young Tories looking to stoke the anger of the crowds. Yet the story also expresses a deeper reality about the Tories annual pilgrimage to Manchester. That they tend to hold their annual conferences in Labour heartlands makes as much sense as Blackpool’s Tower Ballroom hosting the Last Night of the Proms. The whole thing feels like a premeditated provocation on a scale grander than either the Young Conservatives or Dim Eggthrowers could ever hope to organize. It implies a reach into cities and regions that simply doesn't exist or is overstated. In the north, the Tories are largely successful in areas of affluence, the suburbs on the outskirts of major conurbations where gardens are large and every shadow cast by leaf or Range Rover. Elsewhere they are the second, third or even fourth choice party. For a few days, they might fortify themselves inside a heavily protected compound in central Manchester but the security only highlights how removed they are from ordinary Mancunians and how much effort they need to expend to truly understand the city, the people and its culture.

And that's what the story highlights to me. Throwing an egg was unconscionable but what the Young Conservatives were throwing back was cheap, snide, and self defeating. It was a militant distain about the cares of average people who will never know or enjoy their privilege. It was a lack of compassion, consideration, or conscience that only encourages more people to take to the streets and make the divides in our society feel deeper and more wilful than we've ever known them in our lives.

Whilst the Left need to identify the anarchists and trouble makers polluting their message through violence, the Tories need to rethink their own strategy and stop countenancing the fetishism of cruelty sometimes displayed so overtly by their youth.

* The title of this article was obviously intended as 'clickbait' but that doesn't actually stop some people from thinking that I would throw an egg or I'm defending the people that do throw eggs. I wouldn't throw an egg. I've never thrown an egg and I can't conceive of a context in which I would throw an egg. I'm not saying that I'm incapable of throwing an egg. If the conditions were perfect and I lost my temper and happened to have an egg in my hand, I can't be entirely certain about my actions. But, generally, I disapprove of all egg throwing and general misbehaviour with eggs.

 

#OpenComics The College

I drew this for the #OpenComics Untold Stories Eyewitness thingymabob over at The Guardian.

The Old FE College

'I voted Labour,' said the woman at the bus stop. I was riding past and despite the weeping rain  encouraging me to hurry home, I squeezed the brakes a touch so I might catch what she said next. 'I always vote Labour. We all vote Labour but we rarely get Labour.'

'Locally we do,' piped up another.

'Oh, yes, locally... But we never voted for Tories and look what they do.'

Momentum was my enemy. Even with my brakes slowing me down, I was soon beyond earshot.  Yet I didn't need to know the rest. I know what 'they do'. Everybody knows what they do. They take away hope.

Hope used to exist in the form of the town's further education college. Nearly all of the locals had passed through its doors at one time or another. It was a much loved building and reassuringly solid, crafted from red brick and the local sandstone artfully arranged in a style of the late nineteenth century. Buildings of the same kind dot the North West, the last reminder of the patronage of industrialists who lived among their workers rather than across the globe. The buildings usually have impressively old dates and reassuringly down-to-earth names inscribed on various slabs. Ours was the kind of old municipal building that was built when people took pride in their town. I'd never studied there but I'd used its library often. It was full of the kind of technical books missing from the local library next door. It also had the only quiet study room in miles.

The college had been there over a century before cuts turned it into a smashed derelict. Developers then arrived and offered to turn it into flats and they assured locals that they'd respect the much loved facade. Protests were started but the council allowed the sale to go through. Then there was an announcement that the much loved facade was providing difficult to respect. It wouldn't fit into designs. There was a request to demolish it but then the protests turned more serious. People amassed outside our much loved college. It was something they cared about.

I can't emphasise that enough. The town has never had that many buildings to help distinguish from any other. We had a beautiful art deco cinema which (handily) succumbed to fire after developers couldn't get permission to demolish it. We have a town hall that stands empty and I have no doubt will eventually go the same way, despite it being the town's chief landmark and one of the venues where the Beatles played before they became famous.

Yet no building felt quite as important as the college. It was the place where many relationships and marriages began, careers were formed, and opportunities taken. It was the place where new mothers went to learn the skills of motherhood. My own mother went there to learn dressmaking, which accounted for all the home made trousers I wore as a child back when 'austerity' wasn't a political catchphrase but a grim reality. Fathers went there to learn skills such as plumbing or plastering. It even had a small sense of academic credibility. You could study for 'O' levels at night in subjects such as French and Maths. After it closed, it was replaced by a local community centre where you can study subjects ranging from 'crystal reading' to 'Zumba' or whatever weird new fitness craze is currently popular. If I weren't so depressed, I'd have written that line better. It would have been funny.

The old college was part of what made this sad little working class town different to all the other sad little working class towns. Then, one morning, not so long ago, the town woke up to discover that the old college had been completely flattened overnight. It's now a bloody big hole in the ground. There were protests but nobody really fights too much about a pile of rubble. I don't know why I care or I choose to write about it on this wet pleading Friday at the barrel end of another five year Tory government. Around here, very few people voted for the government and the government will know it. I guess things will get worse before they get better. And complaining about it does so very little.

Like everything I write on this blog, this post enters the void of internet banalities which all ultimately mean so little. Read this or look at a cat meme. It all means nothing. Is there even any meaning behind a load of red bricks piled up a certain sensible way a hundred or so years ago? The Tories would probably say there isn't. The bricks of the old college have now been sold on to provide the authentic Northern working class look to some town houses in one of the more fashionable middle class zones in Manchester, Liverpool or beyond where the bankers and footballers live.

Those of us who used to cherish having a local college now just have a hole in the ground and, coming soon, some bland jumble of the modish and the mod con.

And I don't really know what I'm trying to say other than it was very grey in town this morning and I got very wet.

A Cartoon About European Politics

 

You have to admire Merkel, hobbling around for days before she'd realised she'd fractured her pelvis. I wonder how long Osborne will wander around before he remembers that he hit his head those many years ago.

Still, six solid days of blogging and my New Year resolution holds. I will, of course, eventually run out of steam or I’ll have a day involving punctures, animal slurry, and a gypsy curse which makes it impossible to blog and then there will be a long gap as I seek psychiatric help about my inability to blog. However, for the moment, I’m celebrating nearly a week of being back to webface and my cartoon ideas are slowly returning. Tonight I might draw Michael Bay running off stage at the Samsung event at the CES in Los Vegas ([drool] where they launched their 12 inch Samsung Note Pro [/drool]) but perhaps it will be a picture about Boris and ringfencing. My immediate job is to render out a video I promised somebody a week ago and then I want to finish something I wrote yesterday that needs to be posted today. That’s my big ambition for the day: two blog posts inside 24 hours. It’s been done before but I never thought I’d manage to do it again.

Republican Talk

I’m not exactly a republican but neither could I be called a monarchist. I don’t want to be ruled over by anybody, so if somebody is going to presume to do so, I guess I prefer it if that person isn't some vampish celebrity troll voted in by the British people. I’m not happy that our ruler is the descendant of some brutish psychopath who in the dark ages of English history used their might to seize power and oppress the people but, when the alternative is Vernon Kay, it really doesn't seem that bad.

Yet I read this morning that HMQ is about to come into some money. The Times reports that the Queen is to receive ‘£37.89 million from the State, a 5 per cent increase on this year’s Sovereign Grant of £36.1 million.’

Yesterday our Chancellor changed the rules so that jobseekers would have to wait seven days, not the previous three, before claiming benefit. It seemed spiteful, mean, and calculated yet typical of the man who once belonged to the Bullingdon Club where an entry requirement was supposedly to burn a £50 note in the face of a tramp.

The disparity here is of course a matter of scale. In terms of government spending, even £37.89 million is a sniff whereas Osborne will no doubt say that the changes to the rules will save the country hundreds of millions. To give it some scale: in 2006, the British Army bought 67 Apache helicopters for £2.5 billion, which works out at about £37 million each. So, one year of monarchy costs the same as one gunship.

It all makes me deeply angry, of course. As austerity bites the poor around the ankles, those at the top continue to get even more. Here in the north, we feel austerity more because the Tories know that locally their votes don’t matter. St Helens (which is my electoral constituency) has voted in successive Labour candidates since 1983 when the constituency was first created. Tories can squeeze us until we no longer have the energy to squeal and they know it won’t affect their vote in the rest of the country. In fact, it might make them even more popular among many who increasingly think that London and the South West should declare independence from the poorer parts of the UK.

Fractures like these become more obvious when times are tough. We’re all told to tighten our belts because a few pounds saved here and there will make a difference. Yet, a few million extra slipped to the Queen isn't supposed to count…

But there is, of course, an obvious solution.

We could simply replace the Queen with an attack helicopter. Not only could an Apache hold its own flyovers, it has a certain natural awe attached to it, plus it has more firepower than an 87 year old lady. Not only that, at £37 million a year, we could have a brand new Apache each year. And it’s surely a truer representation of what monarchy is about: an artificial sense of belonging imposed by a privileged few whose ancestors were at one point willing to back up the force of their arguments with the sharp end of a stick.

Doughtnuts

I love drawing this style of cartoon, blatantly nicked from B. Kliban, but I hate trying to explain them. The inexplicable is half the pleasure. It’s about ramping up the degree of absurdity over the course of four panels. The only logic is that there shouldn’t be any logic.

Speaking of logic, I’d naively assumed that because the pro-austerity party had won (albeit marginally) the Greek elections, the markets would have been singing cheerful ditties this morning. As it is, I wake up to find that the world is still going to hell in a handcart bought on high interest terms from the Chinese. Perhaps somebody can explain to me why over the last few years, talk of war in the Middle East, Japan facing nuclear meltdown, and the continued existence of Jedward have never had the same effect on the world markets as the debt problems of a nation whose main industry seems to be tourism and hairy Lotharios in tight speedos.

Okay, I have jobs to do, the first of which is to decide which job to do. I’m tempted to start work on an animation but I’ve had a long enough break from writing that I should really knuckle down and work on the book.