Yes We Have No - Nik Cohn

 YES WE HAVE NO - NIK COHN

Maybe it's just me but I often get Nick Cohen and Nik Cohn mixed-up. It's obvious why, of course. Nick Cohen, whilst full of insights and cutting political cynicism is ultimately pretty depressing. I wonder if anyone has ever told him that? You shouldn't shoot the messenger but the thing with Cohen is that not only is he the messenger but he's also the message. Nik Cohn, on the other hand, has a knack for enthusing because Cohn himself is enthused. He's keen, and it comes across in his writing. I'm baffled, however, how his first book he wrote was such a success that from the proceeds he bought a seventeenth-century cottage in Hertfordshire. I'm jealous, really, because I think: why can't I do that?

Yes We Have No, by Nik Cohn is one of those 'in search of England' books where the author travels around from city to city meeting all kinds of disparate people and recording the conversations in a bid to discover Albion - or at least something similar. Books such as these can often be entertaining at the very least as skirts are lifted, stones upturned, and windows into peoples' lives opened. The conclusions, however - if any are ever reached - are usually debatable and whether they're positive or negative ones, often seem to rest on a flick of a coin.

Is Englishness a moveable feast? It's a moot point. Is England built on shifting sands or sinking sands? This is the more pertinent question. These men of old England on a raft with sharks circling, as someone once sang. But who are these old men nowadays, and who or what are the sharks? We all have our own opinions about all of this but as it's Nik Cohn's book it's for him to discover and for him to divulge.

With his dissecting eye and his way with words, Cohn cuts a picaresque swathe through the wreckage of England circa 1999 and discovers a nation within a nation populated by the jobless, the homeless, and the fucked. A nation full of trouble. Violent and dispossessed. Many millions strong, holed-up in tower blocks, housing estates and inner cities. In places such as Bristol, which just happens to be my hometown. And where in Bristol does Cohn first venture? Why, Stokes Croft of course, taking in Montpelier and St Paul's. If Cohn is after stories then these are areas he's going to find them and amusingly (in fact, highly amusingly) one of the stories he picks up on is that of Bristol's very own black transvestite legend, Sapphire. 

Everyone in Bristol knew Sapphire - or at least knew of him - so to have him mentioned in a book is worth the price of admission alone. 'Sapphire got away with murder,' Cohn is told 'but he had style'. And then comes tales of how Sapphire would pull straight white kids off the dancefloor and give them blow jobs in the toilets. 'Buttocks wouldn't melt in his mouth,' another says, and the thing is - it's all true. Nowadays his antics would probably get him on a register but back in the day, Sapphire was a clubland legend. In fact he should probably have a blue plaque with his name on it somewhere - such as outside the Lakota, saying something like 'Sapphire played here. If you know you know.' 

From Bristol, Cohn heads down to Cornwall and a travellers camp called Fraggle Rock, populated by remnants of the Peace Convoy and others who seem to have no choice but to live this lifestyle. The camp is a last refuge - until the occupants are moved-on and another muddy field at the end of another side road takes its place. It's like an Indian reservation for New Age Travellers in a done-by alternative reality where the Battle of the Beanfield was the Battle of the Little Bighorn, and the travellers were the massacred U.S Army's 7th Cavalry.

From Cornwall he's off to Blackpool and when describing the nightlife there, it's like Hunter S Thompson's Las Vegas on acid as described in Fear And Loathing:

'Crowds descend on the pubs like packs of Visigoths, knocking back two or three drinks for every round, then rushing on again. We are accosted by a dwarf on stilts selling peppermint-flavoured condoms. Then we're in a transvestite cabaret called Funny Girls. A heart-stopping boygirl in black leather thigh boots and a black leather tunic cut just below the crotch is singing 'Send In The Clowns'. A papier-mâché  dragon with two heads asks me for a light. Past the arcades and strip joints, the barkers and tattooed love boys, the musclemen flexing, the jailbait pouting, the draw and E and bad cocaine, till we reach Pleasure Beach, the amusement park, where all things are biggest and best.'

Cohn's Blackpool makes today's annual Rebellion punk festival held there at the Blackpool Winter Gardens look restrained, conservative and positively quaint.

And then to Liverpool where Cohn is educated on the Toxteth Riots. The London press, he is told, called them race riots but in reality it was actually people versus police. The same with the St Paul's riot in Bristol. 'It was never black against white; it was a political statement. Toxteth just said "We're not having this. We're tired of being treated like crap." All of us were on that. But blacks, of course, they were treated worst of us all, so their protest was the most extreme.'

The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there, as L P Hartley once said. And so too is the North of England but in the plural: the North is foreign countries, they do things differently to the South. The North also has things done to it by the South. Industrial genocide, for a start. We're talking; of course, about the Thatcher government's decimation and wholesale destruction of the coal industry along with the closure of the shipyards and steelworks. 

Everywhere Cohn goes in the North; every town, every city, every village, it's all the same picture. No jobs, no money, no future. Yet bewilderingly there is still hard cash being spent at night in the pubs and clubs but no-one seems to know where it comes from. The closest answer Cohn gets is from a builder who says somewhat mysteriously 'Other people's pockets', and by this he can only mean from the black market. From cash in hand - and no questions asked.

Down South, to the detriment of future generations people may have been able to buy their council house but up North, Cohn is hard pressed to find anything of benefit from all the years of Conservative rule, with Tony Blair's New Labour government being no better. Aye, it's grim up North.

So come the end, does Cohn discover the spirit of England? Does he find Albion? The answer is both yes and no. What he finds is an England turned-in on itself. An England that may like to think of itself as being a republic but has in actual fact been thrown to the wolves. An England under the yoke of the free market where everything has a price and anything that doesn't is surplus to requirement. Cohn finds an England Disneyfied, under a free market Disneyfied tyranny.

It's complicated, for sure, but only in the sense of when 'It's complicated' is used to describe a person's relationship status on Facebook. What you see is what you get and what you see - is what you are.

John Serpico

Riotous Victorians - Donald C Richter

 RIOTOUS VICTORIANS - DONALD C RICHTER

It was Thatcher who advocated for Victorian values, seeing in them the path to a better Britain. Hard work, self-reliance, thrift, and sexual propriety were the cornerstones of her vision but you have to wonder: how did Thatcher ever come to such a mindset? It was chemistry she studied at Oxford, not history, so where did she come by this perception that Victorian times were some sort of golden age of higher morality? 

And whilst we're on the subject, what is it with those on the Right and their harking back to 'better days', as if better days ever were? Conservative Prime Minister John Major was the same with his 'back to basics' campaign, calling for a return to so-called 'traditional values', before his government being drowned in an infinity pool of sexual and financial scandals. 

The 'We want our country back' advocates are the modern-day equivalents, but back to what exactly? When were these supposed harmonious times when everyone was happy and the streets so free of crime you could leave your front door open for the Kray Twins to pop in and borrow a cup of sugar?

Riotous Victorians, by Donald C Richter, makes the case that Thatcher's ideal Victorian society was in actual fact rife with lawlessness, violence and riot. And a pretty convincing case it makes too. Published in 1981 by Ohio University Press, which means it's an academic book full of footnotes citing sources, but then when it comes to history and debunking revisionism this is no bad thing. Unusually for an academic book, the language is accessible and the style of writing is free-flowing which makes for a far easier read.

The sheer amount of episodes of rioting during the Victorian age that the book chronicles is actually quite bewildering, proving that Britain during this period was an extremely disorderly society and that any other version of it is a misconception.

Policing at that time was in its embryonic stage and the powers of those recruited for the work were vague and undefined, one of their major tasks being to prove they could uphold the law without military aid. In particular, that they could control crowds and combat rioting through the use of truncheons instead of guns and cutlasses. The military was always in waiting of course but even more so were the threats of prison, hanging, and being transported to Australia.

Unintentionally, some of the outbreaks of rioting of which Donald Richter writes are actually quite amusing, especially when quoting the politicians and newspapers of the day. For example, describing mobs as 'a great lot of roughs', 'frivolous elements', and 'riot-for-the-fun-of-it types'.

One riot where a labourer was urging a crowd of one thousand to kill the constables trying to restore order is described as 'Never was there such a hurly burly'. And what better phrase to describe a riot than 'a hurly burly'?

Another great turn of phrase is in regard to the proscribing of public meetings at Hyde Park, where placards on the gates of the park declared 'Meetings for the purpose of delivering or hearing speeches, or for the public discussion of popular and exciting topics' were banned. Exciting topics?

Not to be outdone, certain rabble rousers had a way with words also. For example, Protestant lecturer William Murphy, who would taunt Catholics by telling them their wives and daughters were being 'exposed to debauchery in the confessional, and are betrayed and kidnapped into convent prisons, and there kept the dupes or slaves of priestly lust'. Moreover, he would advise that 'all the convents in England ought to be burnt' and that 'if ever there was a rag and bone gatherer in the universe it was the Pope himself'.  

These were obviously not the Victorian values that Thatcher had in mind, but in the scheme of things were probably a lot more appreciated at that time than sexual propriety and thrift. And rightly so. Thatcher was dreaming a lie. As was Major and as is Farage and co today. The past is a foreign country, as they say, where you visit for a cheap holiday in other people's misery only to find it's not as it's depicted in the brochure at all but you send home a postcard saying 'wish you were here' anyway.

'History is written by the victors' as Hermann Goring said at the Nuremberg trials. And as George Orwell said: 'Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.' The urge to rewrite the past is the urge to rewrite reality and is the foundation stone of totalitarian-type control. And in this light, how Thatcher, Major, Farage, Trump and all the others try to rewrite history starts to make sense for why should they even bother if there was nothing from it for them to gain?

John Serpico

The Squeeze - David Craig

 THE SQUEEZE - DAVID CRAIG

Yes, that's right. That's Freddie Starr on the cover, as featured in the film of the book. And yes, as well as being an unpredictable comedian he could also act and surprisingly well too. And yes, that's Stacy Keach on the cover as well, playing the part of the main protagonist in the film alongside such notables as David Hemmings, Edward Fox, Carol White, and blink-and-you'll- miss-him, a young Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols.

The film is a cult classic, notable for its depiction of a pre-gentrified, rundown London in the 1970s when parts of it was still bombed-out wastelands from the Blitz and World War Two. There's also its cast of dislikeable characters and general downbeat feel that's very 1970s/The Sweeney/get-your-trousers-on-you're-nicked/Men-in-stocking-masks-armed-with-sawn-off-shotguns-and-baseball-bats robbing Securicor vans. All good stuff, of course. London hard stuff, basically.

Before being turned into a film, the book on which it is based was originally published under the title 'Whose Little Girl Are You?' before being published again with its new title, The Squeeze. The book is a breathless affair with no let-up or deviation from the plot involving hardcore London gangsters, a kidnapping, a heist, and an alcoholic ex-detective.

'All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun', as Jean Luc-Godard once said. And that's true. When the main character is also an alcoholic, however, it adds a whole other twist to the story. It's the alcoholism in fact, that is a major theme along with how the main character attempts to redeem himself. The other major theme is 'humiliation', either self-inflicted via the ravages of alcoholism or inflicted upon others by the gangsters, demonstrated on two occasions by them forcing people to strip naked.

Is there any point in reading The Squeeze, you might ask? Well, it's not great literature by any means, and it's not quite pulp fiction of the classic kind either. It's a companion-piece to the film, essentially. An example of a cheap novel inspiring a half-decent cult movie, but that's more than a lot of other books and is more than enough to merit it being read. As for the eternal question over which is better - the book or the film? - on this occasion, it must be said, the film wins out.

John Serpico