March of the Lemmings Page 20
As an ardent Remoaner, I was at least looking forward to enjoying a degree of post-Brexit Schadenfreude, as Leavers were forced to own their bullshit. But Trump’s ‘would’/‘wouldn’t’ strategy must be a great comfort to our bold buccaneering Brexiteers, many of whom have recently quit their jobs in order to avoid being held accountable for statements they made two years ago, now demonstrably revealed as dishonest and undeliverable.
Now the brave Brexiteers can merely rewrite what they said in retrospect. What’s that squeaking noise? It’s Brexiteer privateer Daniel Hannanananan, peering out from behind an effigy of Elgar, to declare: ‘Absolutely nobody is not talking about threatening our place in the single market.’
And there, towelling himself down in the sauna on a Union Jack Jolly Roger, Liam Fox announces that the Brexit deal ‘will not be one of the easiest in human history’, before hopping onto a bus emblazoned with the legend ‘Let’s not give our NHS the £350m the EU doesn’t take every week’, driven by a doleful Boris Johnson, looking at a cake he has on the dashboard, but which he is, on this occasion, unable to also eat. Once you were post-fact. Now you are post-post-fact. That’s going to work out well. Not.5
‘I spent the weekend at the Latitude festival in Suffolk with my children, Nelson and Mandela.’ Sheesh. The left is far, far beyond parody at this point. Baconbutty
‘Meanwhile, our cowardly, self-interested … traitors’. Oh dear Stewie, Is Dacre writing your material now? TonyDZ
About as funny as root canal treatment. Notmytype
1 An orangutan threw its excrement into my gran’s hair from its moated island in Dudley Zoo in 1972. I think this had a big impact on me as a child. I mean, this is the third time I have mentioned it in this book alone. I have no memory of falling down drunk while talking to Sonic Youth in Boston in 2002, which I apparently did, according to others who were present, but this orangutan shit thing seems to be indelibly lodged in my consciousness. How come I have forgotten so much, and yet remain fixated on this?
2 Why are news agencies so cowardly and weak and non-forensic? Brexit and Trump could have been stopped in their tracks if people had just asked the right questions.
3 An attempt by pro-EU MPs to force us to remain in a customs unionstyle arrangement was defeated by 307 votes to 301.
4 As I write this, it is February 2019, and I am genuinely stockpiling tinned foods and toilet rolls in the utility room where the cats’ bowls are. I am also stockpiling the cats’ Science Plan biscuits, as they are made in the EU and are unlikely to be prioritised in the increasingly likely event of a no-deal Brexit. The vet told me to.
5 In January 2019, a pro-Remain guerrilla group called Led by Donkeys took to posting the Brexiteers’ historic and now proven lies on massive billboards around the country, holding them to account in a way the mainstream media had utterly failed to do. But by then it was probably too late.
Bannon’s crush on Britain’s old bootboys
12 August 2018
‘The skinhead smashed the still steaming grill plate of the state-of-the-art Breville sandwich toaster into his red face, to stem the violent impulses rising within him. His skin fizzed, like cold piss on a hot Guy Fawkes bonfire. Ancient burned pieces of cheese and tomato, remnants of his well-heeled host’s cocaine-fuelled midnight snacks, buried themselves in the tight fuzz of his No. 1 crop. Through the open window of the politician’s luxury million-pound west London flat Robbie could smell the stench of the Notting Hill night wafting into the exclusive mews of former stable buildings, where some famous film actors and racing car drivers also lived. Goat curry. Chicken jerky. And sweet sweet waccy waccy tobaccy. “Those spades got one thing right,” conceded the skinhead, closing the lid of the sandwich toaster and putting it back on the Formica surface of the expensive designer kitchen’ (The Right Honourable Skinhead by Richard Allen, 1981).1
It’s well known that the racist news-website wizard and former Trump confidant Steve Bannon, currently planning a pan-global far-right resurgence called The Motion, was inspired by Jean Raspail’s controversial 1973 French science-fiction novel The Camp of the Saints, which uses an invasion of western Europe by disenchanted brown people from below the equator as a satire of white European privilege and colonial guilt.2 But is it possible that Bannon’s current championing of the sunbed magnate and mortgage fraudster Tommy Robinson as ‘the backbone’ of the UK has been inspired by his acquaintance with a less well-known piece of fascist-flavoured fiction?
The Canadian alcoholic Richard Allen is thought to have written 290 novels in his lifetime, and between 1970 and 1980 he penned eighteen violent books set in the milieu of Britain’s fractious youth culture, such as Skinhead, Skinhead Escapes, Skinhead Returns and the martial arts-themed Taekwondo Skinhead.3
Principally chronicling the adventures of a racist skinhead thug called Robbie Tomlinson, the books were top sellers for the cheap and nasty New English Library imprint, also home to Alex R. Stuart’s disreputable Hells Angels series Angel, Angel Escapes, Angel Returns and the martial arts-themed Taekwondo Angel.4
Allen was rediscovered in his twilight years by the experimental author Stewart Home, who was inspired by the novels’ repetitive formula, and it is possible to view Allen’s skinhead as a Nietzschean anti-hero akin to Henry Williamson’s instinct-driven, eponymous animal protagonists Tarka the Otter, Salar the Salmon, Valkyrie the Vole, Mitford the Moth, Hitler the Hamster and the martial arts-influenced Taekwondo Hitler Hamster.5
But Allen’s last skinhead outing, which was due to be published in 1981, proved too controversial even for the ambulance-chasing New English Library outlet, and saw the character retired. Allen’s final job for the publisher, under his real name, James Moffat, was an ignominious novelisation of a suppressed erotic film entitled Queen Kong.6
Queen Kong was the first in a doomed series of giant-monster sex comedies, in which the genders of famous horror-movie creatures were reversed, all due to feature the dream team of Robin Askwith, Rula Lenska and Carol Drinkwater from All Creatures Great and Small. However, legal action ended the project before filming on the follow-up, Queen Kong Versus God-Sheila, had been completed, let alone the series’ third, martial arts-themed instalment Taekwondo Queen Kong Versus Gwonbeop God-Sheila.7
Allen’s sad monkey book appeared in a cover very different to the iconic street-style imagery of the Skinhead series, depicting as it did a man dressed as a giant female ape, with permed hair and exposed furry genitalia, looming over the London skyline in a frenzy of animal lust for Robin Askwith. And yet it is from the author of this ape-sex work that Breitbart’s Steve Bannon appears to be drawing his current political thinking.
The unpublished manuscript of Allen’s nineteenth New English Library youth-violence novel, from 1981, is somehow available for download on the dark web, and is entitled The Right Honourable Skinhead. The overlap between the plot points of Allen’s final skinhead outing and Bannon’s apparent plans for the far-right activist Tommy Robinson is too great to be coincidental.
Having failed to capture the hearts of the nation’s disenchanted voters via the scripted racist gaffes of a posh clown-puppet politician called Horace Thompson, a secret cabal of fascists sets about trying to position the street-brawling racist football thug Robbie Tomlinson as a serious political player, and the character gives voice to the same voter discontent Bannon clearly hopes to weaponise through the conduit of Tommy Robinson.
‘Bloody MPs, he thought. They got elected to do what their constituents wanted done and the bastards thought they were little tin-gods better than the voters! If he had his way every politician would be slung in prison and given a taste of what they deserved’ (The Right Honourable Skinhead, Richard Allen, 1981).8
Indeed, Steve Bannon seems to be carrying vast sections of dialogue from The Right Honourable Skinhead around in his head, which spill unbidden from his careless face. Bannon said, off air, to the LBC presenter Theo Usherwood, who had queried his support for Tommy Robinson, ‘Fuck you.
Don’t you fucking say you’re calling me out. You fucking liberal elite. Tommy Robinson is the backbone of this country.’9
And on page 103 of The Right Honourable Skinhead, the news magnate Steve Mannon, Robbie Tomlinson’s chief cheerleader, who differs only from Steve Bannon in that he is a Welsh born-again Christian, addresses radio presenter Leo Isherwood thus: ‘Flip you, boyo! Don’t you flipping say you’re calling me out. You flipping liberal elite. Robbie Tomlinson is the backbone of this country, by which I mean the whole UK, not just Wales.’
Worryingly for Britain’s embattled liberals, while the unscrupulous New English Library considered Allen’s dystopian fascist fantasy The Right Honourable Skinhead too hideous to publish, Steve Bannon seems intent on belatedly making its bleak fiction a chilling reality.
It’s all true. arghbee
No it isn’t. Stewart Lee rewrites the wiki pages and links so that you think it is all real to play with your mind and make himself out to be a intellectual obscurantist. And then he goes back in time to recreate the past to make the web true in for the geeks that try and delve further into his twisted world. And every time he does that the world gets crazier as lies chase truth along the Moebius strip of reality. Have you ever noticed that his name is an anagram of Wattle Seer? He’s a practitioner of the medieval art of divining the future from bumps in the wall. Franklyn Howe
Lets just stay nice and safely within the parameters of liberal establishment orthodoxy. Meanwhile populist movements grow ever stronger though the champagne socialists find it far beneath them to ever wonder why. The Debunker
The writer really should have studied the difference between Skinheads/Hard Mods and Oi Punk inspired Boneheads. lazy journalism. Gate13
Who makes the Nazi’s? Bad television. ManUpTree
‘Principally chronicling the adventures of a racist skinhead thug called Robbie Tomlinson,’ Wasn’t it Joe Hawkins? SpencerCGB
Yeah. but in this newly discovered masterpiece which has only ever been rumoured to exist, the name is changed to something suspiciously like Tommy Robinson’s current name. Either the manuscript is a fake or maybe it doesn’t really exist. The other half, who has read some of these, has pointed out that the protagonist is Joe Hawkins, not Robbie Tomlinson. So either this was a shift from the original series, or, it has been changed or fabricated to suit Bannon’s weird Tommy obsession by giving the protagonist a similar name. Simpletheory
Those small New English Library paperbacks were aimed at working class teenagers, so it is to be expected that they would be regarded with disdain around here. I must have read hundreds, you could trade them in on Preston Market and get more for 10p each. They were meant to be outrageous, with lots of random sex and violence, not to represent any sort of reality, and the readership were plenty sophisticated enough to know that. Very interesting to know that having read the ‘Skinhead’ series now qualifies me as some sort of neo-nazi. BrainDrain
Honestly can’t remember the last time I saw a skinhead. Maybe, instead of tedious hand wringing, Guardian columnists should reflect on why Europe and America have lurched significantly to the right. Brotherlead
The jester performs his old routine and the courtesans chuckle at his tribute to their wisdom and grace. Outside the palace walls, the streets are restless. Edmundberk
Stewart Lee (AKA Stewart Home) stole my name in the 80’s to promote his metropolitan liberal Elite art strike agenda, before letting himself go and becoming a left wing self parody of johnny vegas. Karen Eliot10
So, to summarise, despite all the ‘is it possibles’ and ‘too great to be coincidentals’ you haven’t got a clue whether Bannon has even heard of Allen. Bluefinch
Tommy Robinson and Robbie Tomlinson (the protagonist of the book) are such similar sounding names that it’s almost a stretch to believe they are coincidental. Hades59
1 There is no such novel as The Right Honourable Skinhead. James Moffat (1922–93), a Canadian alcoholic hack paperback writer, churned out novels about Britain’s violent ’70s skinhead subculture under the name of Richard Allen, and lived long enough to see his work critically rehabilitated for its undeniable vitality, if not for its protagonists’ distasteful politics. The extract from The Right Honourable Skinhead has been created by cut-and-pasting different bits of Allen’s work, keeping the dialogue more or less intact and changing some of the nouns, and this falls within the law of ‘fair usage’.
2 It is true that Bannon loves The Camp of the Saints. Normally alt-right readers rave about Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, like it’s the only book they’ve ever read, so Bannon’s choice is a little bit left-field.
3 Allen’s martial-arts skinhead book is actually called Dragon Skins. There is no Taekwondo Skinhead.
4 I don’t really like Allen’s skinhead books, but I love Alex R. Stuart’s biker series, which has a weird folk-horror feel to it. Peter Cave’s Hells Angels series, for the same publisher, is more reactionary and not as imaginative.
5 I devoured Williamson’s 1927 novel Tarka the Otter when I was about nine, as Puffin had repackaged it as a children’s book rather than as a piece of experimental adult fiction, and it made me a lifelong lover of otters, though it does read a little differently when you know Williamson was a Nazi sympathiser.
6 When I was a kid, my dad would often take me to stay with his parents in Budleigh Salterton, in South Devon, in the school holidays, and in retrospect I realise how good it was of him to give my mother, from whom he was divorced, regular breaks from her precocious child. Most days, Dad would sit on the beach all day, spying on sunbathing women through a pair of binoculars he called his ‘bird-watchers’, and I would be given a small allowance to spend in the beach shop, its spinning racks full of American horror-comic anthologies and pulp paperbacks, which weren’t so easy to source in the Solihull suburbs. It was here that I first discovered my later literary hero Arthur Machen, in an uncredited adaptation of his story ‘The Bowmen’ in DC’s Weird War Tales 29, from September 1974; it was here I realised Robert E. Howard, whom I knew only from his Conan books, had written swathes of blood-soaked semi-historical fiction, re-pressed by the cheap-looking Orbit imprint; and it was here that I read Queen Kong, a novelisation of the 1976 Robin Askwith movie of the same name, whose satirical feminist subtext escaped me. I did not know that its author, James Moffat, was Skinhead author Richard Allen writing, unusually, under his own name. I was into Moffat about fifteen years before he was critically rehabilitated. Even as an eight-year-old I was a cultural influencer.
7 Queen Kong was in fact prevented from being released by the film producer Dino De Laurentiis, in order to protect his investment in the 1976 remake of King Kong. I recently found it on a dodgy DVD and thought it a better film than, for example, the acclaimed Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.
8 This is a more or less verbatim quote by Allen’s skinhead character, Joe Hawkins, but I forget which book it appears in.
9 Verbatim quote, from an off-air incident at LBC, 15 July 2018.
10 According to Wikipedia, ‘Karen Eliot is a multiple identity, a shared nom de plume that anyone is welcome to use for activist and artistic endeavours. It is a manifestation of the “open pop star” idea within the Neoist movement. The name was developed in order to counter the male domination of that movement, the most predominant multiple-use names previously being Monty Cantsin and Luther Blissett.’
A floppy-haired beast of Brexit walks among us
19 August 2018
The Herefordshire legend of Black Vaughan tells the story of an evil fifteenth-century nobleman who returns in various spectral forms – a black fly, a black dog, a black bull, some gerbils – to molest farm girls, spill milk and upset apple carts.1
But the dead aristocratic pest is eventually subdued by twelve priests and a pregnant woman in the Welsh border town of Kington, in a priest/pregnancy-based variant on Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai.2 Folklore tells us that we too could defeat our current existential crisis, or Boris Piccanin
ny Watermelon Letterbox Johnson, as it is commonly known.
Despite initially supporting people’s right to wear the burqa this week, cake-and-eat-it style, Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Letterbox Johnson ridiculed the ancient holy face window, simply to court the support of shy racists in his Gollum-like quest for the ring of power.3
Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Letterbox Johnson was doing the same thing when he embraced the Brexit he never believed in, a lie built on bendy bananas, non-existent NHS funding promises and millions of imaginary migrating Turks coming over here, with their massages, their baths and their Delight.
While there is a need for a robust debate on the role of religious symbolism in a pluralistic society, it is not clear if Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Letterbox Johnson is the most sensitive thinker we can throw at the issue. Especially when Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Letterbox Johnson appears to be colluding with the white supremacist news-fabricator and former Trumpeteer Steve Bannon, who hopes to initiate a far-right rising across Europe, while simultaneously wearing as many shirts as possible.4
Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Letterbox Johnson is a fat naughty dog, running away from the butcher’s with a string of racist sausages, made of all the least nourishing parts of already discredited arguments, chased by betrayed Leave voters in straw hats and blood-stained aprons, shaking their fists and waving their cleavers.
As my wife will happily tell you, barely a day goes by without my referencing the mythology of our isles to decode current events, and indeed I file this column from a campsite on the cliffs of Tintagel, deep in King Arthur’s Cornwall. My wife claims to be working all summer, and I have taken the children, Gina (seven) and Miller (eleven), away in a two-man pop-up tent, now strewn with filthy pasty wrappers, empty clotted-cream cartons and unspooled Jethro tapes, pilfered from garage forecourt bins.