Photo credit: Wipeout Dave
Sedgefield has always had a special place in the history of the Labour movement.
The constituency cuts into County Durham, the mining – and by extension – Labour heartland of the north east. Ex-mining village Trimdon isn’t far away, the village that hosted Tony Blair as he came back from representing Isr– creating peace – in the Middle East to endorse Labour’s election campaign in 2010. It was also central to the formation of the Durham Miners’ Association in 1869.
Just down the road is Beamish, a reconstructed Victorian colliery village/walk-in museum where we’d dress up as primary school-age mining urchins in dirty Grandad shirts, waistcoats and flat caps, get shouted at by some Victorian schoolmaster and gobble the best cinder toffee in the country.
My mate’s Dad even remembers Tony and Cherie Blair attending weekly church coffee mornings in Sedgefield in his mysterious, faintly bearded period between becoming MP and then prime minister. Come 1997 and he was no longer to be seen. Just another whispered myth of modern-day Labour up north.
Current Sedgefield MP, Phil Wilson (who took Blair’s seat in a bye-election after the PM’s resignation) has now made his putsch to restore the heart of the Labour Party – a parliamentarian, trade unionist and north-easterner from a constituency that’s become a symbol of New Labour’s uncomfortable reconciling of its past with its future. His pamphlet, All the pits have closed, demands reconciliation at last.
“Tony Blair was Sedgefield’s MP for twenty-four years,” Wilson begins. “Some will say this pamphlet has been influenced by him. Probably. Others will say he was influenced by Sedgefield. That’s probably true too.
“All I know is: I was there before he arrived in Sedgefield and I am still there after he has left. I’ve lived it – all of it.”
It’s a moving read through a childhood and adolescence horizoned by pits and smoke, railways and Davy lamps. Throughout Wilson is making the distinction between “My Labour” (his Labour life experiences) and “New Labour”. Still, for a lot of the electorate the gap between these two grows with every election.
This is exactly what Ed Miliband needs to address as leader to save Labour’s spirit, but ultimately – and more importantly – to save it at the polls. Wilson is careful not to discard New Labour, with the argument it won elections, suggesting the party needs to listen and respond to the electorate and deliver on aspiration.
Like Wilson says in All the pits have closed, unless you were around in County Durham before the Seventies and Eighties (the time when manufacturing went from a third of our GDP to around just 12% today), now you’d be none the wiser as to where the old collieries, pits and shafts were, and the extent to which they covered the region.
This is something silent documentary The Miners’ Hymns, screened at this year’s Sheffield Doc/Fest, shows. A helicopter’s view of one patch of today’s County Durham shows an old pit site now covered by an industrial-sized Asda: the modern non-unionised services sector of the “post-industrial” working-class. It’s like an invisible scar on the north east that less and less people know about, covered up with a quick-fix scar-tissue that less and less people know is only temporary.
The pits might have gone, but their disappearance has opened up new problems. The exploitation of the workforce, a hire-and-fire job culture, unemployment, terrible youth prospects across society, non-unionised job sectors: these are real Labour issues and they’re happening now. Never mind what we’re told about living in a “post-industrial” or “post-class” society, it is not true. Labour needs to give up its hang-ups and awkward silences about its recent past (enter John Prescott: “We’re all middle-class now!”) and present itself to the electorate as a broad, progressive and modern labour movement that can tackle the Tories. Because it can.
Tom Rollins
Remember the Nineties? When “cutting edge” producers wrestled with the idea of a dystopian future made up of a glutted techno-consumption culture that couldn’t stop itself from eating, hacking and shitting, and TV shows fronted by army generals who bet on the life on some young buck who gets his dudey vengeance at the end and the sexy girl to boot. Technology was scary in the Nineties. “Watch out,” they said. “In the future, entertainment kills, man.”
ISRAEL HAS PLENTY OF PREJUDICED CRITICS, BUT THE BBC ISN’T ONE
Right-wingers love to bash the Beeb. Because it’s a public company it’s guilty of tax evasion, because it aims to be impartial it’s a missive for liberal/left-wing bias. For these reasons combined, the BBC has earned itself the reputation of being a hotbed of anti-Semitic, radical and taxpayer-funded dobbers located a short walk away from the Central line.
Last week Substance featured a little Twitter debate between us and The Commentator – the free market, pro-Israel website which broke last week’s story about the BBC omitting Israel’s capital city in its Olympic profiles page.
The BBC has since responded by altering the page: Jerusalem is now Israel’s “seat of government” although – it adds – “most foreign embassies are in Tel Aviv.” The page for Palestine has also been changed. Benjamin Netanyahu and Mark Regev have both spoke out against Israel being “discriminated against” by the BBC, arguments have been had, articles written. Some corners of the Right seems to be in agreement: rather than an honest mistake or a cowardly attempt to circumnavigate controversy, the BBC acted in an anti-Semitic way.
And yet not one of these reports referred to More Bad News from Israel by Greg Philo and Mike Berry. The landmark study uses an impartial source – fact – to demonstrate bias against Palestine in the Western media. By analysing 4,000 lines of text from evening TV news bulletins between Operation Cast Lead in 2008-2009 and the 2011 flotilla attack, Philo and Berry (like the noir detective team their name sounds like) assessed the frequency of words and phrases that implied a bias, skewed history of events, as well as the disproportionate weight given to Israeli over Palestinian sources. One of the two sources for the book was the “anti-Semitic” BBC.
The view most journalists enjoyed of Operation Cast Lead, due to Israel's press blockade. Photo credit: Prince Roy
The book even claims that two-thirds of the British population were unsure whether Israel occupied Palestine or vice versa. As former BBC journalists have already claimed, Israel has been known to keep in regular contact with those reporting on it, and not in a nice way.
If you thought getting a phone call off Kelvin MacKenzie bollocking you for an off-message story sounded bad, imagine getting it off a nation state. Some journalists have told of “waiting in fear for the phone call from the Israelis” (i.e. embassy-level or higher). The country also employs its National Information Directorate to higher the stakes in the Middle Eastern information war, helping to create a misinformed and pliant international community less able to accurately challenge Israel’s actions in the region. This means two-thirds of Britain are unable to place illegal settlements, attacks on civilians, occupation, administrative detention and a humanitarian crisis in their proper context.
But does this get a look in? Words and phrases like “bollocking” and “complained” reveal an anti-Israeli, pro-Palestinian basis, don’t they?
Instead The Commentator used its own measure of “proof.” Two pictures side-by-side – one of Palestinian youths throwing rocks with the caption: “Palestinians have strenuously resisted Israeli control”; the other of an IDF soldier shouting at a man with the caption: “Israelis and Palestinians have been at loggerheads for decades.”
"Israelis = bad. Palestinians = good." Photo credit: PSP Photos
What does this mean? “Israelis = bad. Palestinians = good,” according to The Commentator. “It’s just that black and white to them [the BBC].” By reversing the website’s own order of preference, The Commentator is simply encouraging an either/or media narrative of an honourable Israel under attack from a radical, bloodthirsty Islamist Palestine. Their conjecture – not fact – is just as unhelpful and wrong as anti-Semitism itself.
The BBC should be a source of national pride. That doesn’t mean it should be free from thoughtful and well-intentioned criticism: quite the opposite. But using small incidents for political capital and selective outrage are not the way to go about it.
Tom Rollins