Era Of Vandals

There's a moment in the movie Die Hard when Hans Gruber, after executing the hapless Harry Ellis whose life he had sought to trade for his stolen detonators, utters to McClane the neglected but immortal line: "Sooner or later, I might get to someone you do care about!"

The war over the Confederate Statues follows the same logic: a war in which - since the point is to provoke - the "Abolitionist" side will always move to the next target in line. Once the statues are gone, the next targets will be "Sweet Home Alabama" & "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down". Warner Bros. will withdraw Gone With The Wind from sale. After that, Civil War reenactors will be prevented from commemorating any battle won by the Confederacy; then anyone wearing a grey uniform for such purposes will be egged or worse. If you don't care about any of these things, don't worry ... eventually they'll get to something you do care about.

Today's Guardian floats the idea that Nelson's column should be next: it comes complete with a cartoon showing not the statue being removed to a museum, but pulled down, evidently to smash on the ground below. Are you provoked yet? Don't worry, we'll get there.

The author of the article, Afua Hirsch, appeared in the newspaper in 2012 dressed in what Sordel supposes to be traditional Ghanaian clothing and announcing herself as part of the diaspora now returning to the country. During her time there she produced a number of articles of patient virtue including the important (with titles such as Ghana's cashew farmers struggle to share in the profit of their labours & Ghana accuses Environcom of illegal fridge imports) as well as the frothy (Ghana: the new Ibiza for international party set). Now, however, she lives in the UK and writes things designed to upset you and get picked up in social media. Sordel was previously irritated by her article about her experiences as a black student at Oxford but not quite enough to contribute the nutshell's broad readership to her circulation. But she'll get to someone I do care about one of these days.

We in the UK are very on-message about hate speech. It helps that it is prohibited by law of course (no such luck in the U.S.) but it also helps that we don't care about the American Civil War and that the people with the swastikas self-identify as the bad guys. So the Vandals are going to have to go after more central British cultural images: Colston Hall (mentioned of course in Hirsch's article); Admiral Lord Nelson; the Last Night of the Proms. Do you really care about these things, faithful Reader? No, me either.

How are you on the Pre-Raphaelites? All those ivory skins and red hair; an art market explicitly fostered by the profits of the Victorian Age. Alma-Tadema's white-washed vision of the Classical past. Or how about Plato & Aristotle themselves, those idle speculators in a culture propped up by the labour of slaves? Sooner or later ...

The thin end of the edge is already in. Perhaps the seeds of this age of idol-smashing was the fall of Saddam's statue. Sordel watched it live on TV: the all-too-ironic way that a U.S. vehicle tore down the statue because the protestors were unable to tear it down themselves. The symbolism was spot on. But then, last year, one of the Iraqis who was involved gave an interview in which he says that he regretted doing it: "now there are 1000 Saddams". If you don't have anything to put in its place, why destroy anything?

The age of great statuary is over. We can't afford to build new statues even if we could agree on who should be there. There is an empty plinth in Trafalgar Square where artworks stand for a short time before being removed, but soon all the plinths will be empty.

We are in the midst of a slow, relentless replaying of Mao's Cultural Revolution, and as with its precursor it is the young who will execute the policy. Civic pride is a vice of age; irreverence for institutions is a virtue of youth. But these young will be led by those like Hirsch "doing well by doing good". And the Vandals didn't stop at the gates of Rome.

Some Guy Behind The Editor's Desk

Sordel learnt a valuable lesson from the example of Jonathan Aitken.

For those too young (or perhaps too old) too remember him, Aitken was one of what seemed at the time a great many Conservative politicians forced to resign by various scandals last century. This one is rather more interesting to us today than some of the others because it involved the Saudis, but what people tend to remember is not the scandal itself but the speech that Aitken made when embarking upon a catastrophic libel action that landed him in prison for perjury:

If it falls to me to start a fight to cut out the cancer of bent and twisted journalism in our country with the simple sword of truth and the trusty shield of fair play, so be it, I am ready for the fight. The fight against falsehood and those who peddle it.

And the lesson that Sordel learnt from this episode is that the clearest evidence available to us that someone is a scoundrel is the grandiloquence with which they appeal to high principle.

At which one turns to Michael Gove.

Gove - whom under normal circumstances one would have dismissed as a pompous nitwit perhaps shortly before he opened his mouth but certainly shortly thereafter - has managed to hold much of the country thrall beneath his mesmeric, piscine glassiness during his tenure as Secretary of State for Education. He is rather like an unsettling child who, having been liberated from the need to blink by genetic abnormality, settles all arguments with a staring competition.

"Good fellow, Gove" we mutter nervously, leaving him in the classroom at break to eat flies and cogitate on future improvements to the English Baccalaureate.

His appearance before the Leveson Inquiry yesterday revealed, however, the man's Inner Aitken as he proceeded to lecture Lord Leveson about the Freedom of the Press and admonish him pre-emptively for seeking to curtail it in any way.

Gove (like Aitken as it happens) is a former journalist who finds himself on the Westminster side of a revolving door. Presumably having been rendered giddy by passing through it, Gove seemed to have forgotten himself completely, regarding his testimony as an opportunity to bloviate insufferably in a manner that is fairly characterised by Esther Addley in The Guardian.

Clearly his dizziness was infectious as well, since it was clear from the tone of voice employed by both Robert Jay and his judicial master that their eyes were rolling almost as persistently as Gove's vainglorious oratory. Go watch the full performance if you can find the time.

Clearly such a man is not to be contained in my Promethean nutshell: like the Press itself he strides free of such bounds bearing the simple sword of truth and the trusty shield of fair play.

Still: it might be appropriate for him to remember that those editors of whom he speaks in tones befitting deities did all put their trousers on one leg at a time. The Press is all very well in abstract, but in particular some of them might prove to be the sort of odious tick who would presume to lecture a judge on his public duties for the sake of striking a public pose.

In such cases it is surely justified to extend the right to freedom of speech only grudgingly and with scant reason for celebration.

Some Guy Behind A Desk

Here at Bounded, we take research pretty seriously and our policy research team has really been putting in the hours. In fact, we are offering our expertise to all media outlets as The Association of British School Leavers.

Seriously.

Any newspaper running a story on the subject of, for example, University fees, or voting preferences amongst young voters, or drug use, or Post-Compulsory Examination & Accreditation Standards, can now ask Sordel and - as a representative of The Association of British School Leavers - I am authorised to give a view on that in the name of the Association, for attribution.

Sordel has been inspired to do this by the Taxpayers' Alliance which, as you will be aware, regularly comments on public policy and which, since it has a name, must be a thing. Personally, I always assumed that it was a bit like Mumsnet ... which, for all I know about Mumsnet, it might be. It is, after all, Britain's Non-Partisan Grassroots Campaign for Lower Taxes and Better Government. They say so themselves.

They're on Question Time and everything, so it must be true. (Note to BBC producers: The Association of British School Leavers is able to furnish spokespersons for broadcast events.)

Yet, for a grass-roots campaign, The Taxpayers' Alliance does not have especially "grass roots" origins. A rather elderly article from The Guardian informs me that they are or were actually funded by a small number of affluent businessmen. Nothing wrong with that, of course: millionaires are taxpayers too, after all, nearly as much as the rest of us.

The representatives of the Taxpayers' Alliance are also, quite probably, taxpayers. (Sordel did, at some point in the distant past, leave school.) But they aren't exactly canonical examples of your concerned taxpayer. For the most part they are right-leaning policy wonks & bloggers, much as one would expect of an organisation with a professed hostility to increased public sector expenditure.

If you want, you can join the grassroots side of their campaign, although on their site the section on Our Branches is "Coming Soon". (We at The Association of British School Leavers hope to get details of our University Liaison Programme up even sooner. Watch this space.) Careful how you use that site, though, because if you happen to leave your name there, then you just joined their campaign.

There is absolutely nothing sinister about any of this, except for the fact that our response to a story might be very different if the newspaper decoded its source slightly more than it does.

It's not The Taxpayers' Alliance, speaking for millions. It's not The Association of British School Leavers. It's just some guy behind a desk.