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Spectator
25-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
The vicious genius of Adam Curtis
In an interview back in 2021, Adam Curtis explained that most political journalists couldn't understand his films because they aren't interested in music. Having known a fair few political journalists, I can say with some certainty that he was right. Most politically motivated types are – not to be unkind, but it's true – total losers. This cuts across left and right, all ideologies and tendencies, from Toryism to anarchism to Islamism and back: whatever you believe, if you believe it too strongly you were probably a weirdo at school. The other kids went out clubbing; you stayed at home, drawing pictures of Lenin or von Mises on your satchel. The other kids were in bands, you were in a reading group. When political freaks grow up a bit they often get very performatively into social binge-drinking, as if to prove a point, but it's all hollow. The joy isn't there. There are important things about the world that will always be closed off to the political obsessive, because political obsessives don't understand music. Adam Curtis considers himself to be a political journalist, and he definitely used to be one. His BBC documentaries from the 1990s and 2000s are thorny and thematically dense attempts to grapple with the condition of the present. Pandora's Box (1992) was about how human reason bumps up against the inherent messiness of reality, and how projects for rationally governing the world end up collapsing into bizarre forms of unreason. Over six episodes, Curtis talks about von Neumann's game theory, Milton Friedman's Chicago school of economics, Kwame Nkrumah's dream of African self-sufficiency, the cult of Taylorism and how it overrode Marxism in the early Soviet Union, nuclear physics, insecticides, and the way our social biases are repackaged for us in the form of a supposedly neutral science. There are a lot of words in there. Plenty of interviews with experts and significant figures, but also Curtis's clipped, precise narration, set to a collage of footage dug out of the BBC archive. Street scenes, offices, factories, politicians getting out of cars, but sometimes more abstract shots of industrial infrastructure and spaceships exploding in the sky. According to Curtis, most of that footage was there because he needed to finish the film on time and couldn't find anything else. But since then, this stuff has become his stock in trade. You know you're watching an Adam Curtis film when you hear someone talking about how plans to rationally control society fell apart to a Burial track and lots of black-and-white archive footage of people dancing at Butlin's. He was convinced he was simply illustrating his ideas. But this was a fantasy. In fact, he was unleashing forces that he could neither control nor understand. And then something strange happened. His style has become very easy to parody, which might be why Curtis has spent the last few years steadily paring it down. Shifty is his most abstract, imagistic film yet. His narration has now vanished entirely; instead, there are a series of sparse title cards that flash up over the archive footage, saying things like 'The Concept Of Privatisation Had Been Invented By The Nazis' or 'Underneath There Was Nothing.' All in all, over five episodes and five-and-three-quarter hours, Adam Curtis gives us significantly fewer of his own words than are contained in this review. They are sparse and stony, less like an argument than propaganda signs glowing in the night. The story he tells with them is – if you've seen any of his previous work – a familiar one. Every episode begins with the same words. 'There come moments in societies when the foundations of power begin to move. When that happens things become SHIFTY.' In Britain, that moment came at the end of the 20th century. Before Thatcher, Britain was about strong communities, solidarity, labour unions, and a productive industrial base. But during the Thatcher and Blair eras, all of that was emptied out, and we became a society of cynical, self-interested individuals, trapped in a fantasy of the past, and led by politicians who no longer believed in anything at all. This story is not necessarily untrue, but it's also not really groundbreaking. To the extent that this country does still have a unifying national myth, it's this one – about how Thatcherism tore all our unifying national myths apart. But it doesn't really matter, because Curtis is doing something different to ordinary political journalism. His constant rummage through the BBC's archives has yielded a lot of good stuff, and he has a real vicious genius for putting it together. At the start of the very first scene, we see Jimmy Savile ushering a group of angelic blond children into Thatcher's office. Once they're inside he gives a chortling thumbs-up to the camera, and then closes the door. Alongside the stories of monetarism and shots of fox hunters riding in front of huge hazy steelworks, there are weirder threads. A dog owner is concerned that their pet seems to have spontaneously switched sex. At the London Zoo, which can no longer rely on state financing, zookeepers now have to be personable and cheerful, play-acting for a public who have become the only source of income. A kid plays with the effects pedal on his guitar. A woman shows off her designer handbags. In the planning meetings for the Millennium Dome, they try to pin down the values of modern Britain, but discover that they don't really have any. In the 'Spirit Zone,' instead of endorsing any particular religion, they've decided to fill the room with fog and write the words 'How shall I live?' on the wall. They're very proud of it. 'I think the question 'how shall I live?' is anything but banal. In fact, I think it's the biggest single question, probably, that's begged in the entire dome.' None of this really coalesces into a single point, but trying to make things coalesce into a single point is part of the rationalist, sense-making project Curtis has been critiquing his entire career. Our world is shifty now, and things will not make sense. You won't understand them with facts, but music. There's far less actual music here than in any of Curtis's previous films. Instead of Kanye or Nine Inch Nails or Aphex Twin, a lot of the shots of decaying industry are set to the sounds of static or howling wind. But music is one of the threads here. In one episode, we're introduced to the Farlight CMI digital sampler, a machine that can take any sound, convert it into data, and digitally reproduce it. The first song to be recorded entirely using samples was 'Relax' by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, which is then banned from the BBC for being too flagrantly gay, but it's already self-replicating around the world. People start using the Farlight CMI to switch out samples in the track and create their own remixes. Which is, of course, what Curtis is also doing. Later, we meet a bedroom producer called DJ Fingers, playing around with turntables in his south London home. 'Basically you're just making music out of other people's records. You know the record inside out when you're cutting up this break.' Once again Curtis has found a vision of himself in the archives. But it's not exactly celebratory. He was one of the first people to point out that in recent decades newness seems to have vanished from the world: we just repeat old fashions, old music, old fantasies about how to live. What does it mean, then, when one of our greatest and most popular documentarians does nothing but rearrange the past? At the end of the final episode, there's a kind of Adam Curtis auto-parody, of the type I just did above. A Bowie song, paired with clips from old films. 'Will People Come Together As They Did In The Past And Fight Back?' his stark title cards ask. 'Or Is This Just Another Feedback Loop Of Nostalgia? Repeating Back Sounds Dreams And Images Of The Past, Which Is The Way The System Controls You, And Is The Way This Series Was Made.'
Press and Journal
04-05-2025
- Politics
- Press and Journal
David Knight: Torry Raac residents need concrete guarantees they will see meaningful compensation
Banging our heads against a brick wall is never a pastime which holds much hope of delivering satisfaction. But with a combination of dogged determination and unshakeable belief in justice on our side, eventual triumph is a possibility. We only have to look at the struggles of wrongly-jailed postmasters, the tainted blood scandal and the damaged babies in Corby, where many families of Scottish descent were trapped in a catastrophic chemical reclamation disaster. A new scandal is engulfing the 'Raac families' in Aberdeen with homes rendered inhabitable by a covering of dodgy sub-standard concrete. Will this prove to be on a similar scale to previous examples of bewildering actions by public officials causing outrage? Residents are also banging their heads against walls, but in this case real ones affected by a kind of concrete cancer. The 'newly-crowned' Lord Gove of Torry nailed his colours to the mast of the Aberdeen cause. Lord Gove, who grew up in Aberdeen before becoming a Cabinet minister, told the P&J that the finger-pointing of blame had to stop and a solution found at national and local government levels. He has strong family roots in Aberdeen and an obvious warmth towards the Granite City; hence his choice of title. Whether passionate Toryism has attracted reciprocal warmth from the city is debatable. But tangible support for the P&J Raac campaign might prove to be a turning point in this relationship: even a lasting legacy of respect for defending the interests of the worst-affected families in the Balnagask area of Torry. These are the private owners in Raac homes, whose property values have eroded far faster than the concrete itself – losing up to £50,000 each. Balnagask translates in Gaelic to 'village in the hollow'; village in the pit of despair now. The real test for Gove is how hard he applies himself with effective contributions from a new position of privilege; to talk the walk, as they say. The Raac families really are on the rack. The medieval torture rack tore people apart. Doctors in Torry report that many Raac owners facing financial ruin are turning to drink and anti-depressants to try to cope with their lives being ripped apart. We all have individual daily struggles on a personal level which help us empathise with those fighting the system on a much bigger scale. As the Fortunes (old 60s band) sang, 'You've got your troubles, I've got mine.' Have you ever felt helpless while challenging a powerful yet seemingly incompetent bureaucracy? Lately, I've been banging my head against a brick wall, too: an imaginary brick wall held together by a plastering of red tape. But it's the kind of personal anguish which often remains hidden from public view. My aged relative is one of the poorest pension-credit recipients Starmer and Reeves made such a show of protecting (in public at least) after their outrageous and ill-judged mugging of old people receiving winter energy payments. Her story begins with a discovery that weekly pension credit payments from the Department for Work and Pensions stopped inexplicably. She's stuck at the bottom of the pile: gripped by dementia in a care home and suffering at least two other of the biggest diseases we fear most. Yet she's still forced to cough up £5000 a month for care fees after being forced to sell her house; that pot is vanishing as fast as a brick thrown into a fast river. So her pension-credit support is a big deal; by the time we found out she was already £500 out of pocket. Endless phone calls to DWP. It seemed the 'system' didn't like a miniscule private pension she received from her late husband, which was about to increase by one pound to the grand total of £48 a month – yes, a month. The potential headlines ran through my head: 'Sick woman, 92, has pension credit axed by DWP for sake of 25p a week – so much for welfare state.' This explanation was soon jettisoned for something far more familiar to us all – the ubiquitous 'IT glitch'. Equanimity was restored by DWP, but only after 10 days of exasperating phone calls and helpless dread. Call handlers were friendly, but the system so cold. They never wrote to flag up the problem, so I doubt if there will ever be a proper explanation. We were stressed out for almost two weeks, so how much worse are the Raac families feeling with no sign of relief in sight? Natural justice points to some form of realistic compensation instead of what they have been offered so far. But how long could that take? Aberdeen City Council is in such a dire state that it makes you wonder where they would find the money. I'm not being flippant, but residents need something more concrete than that. David Knight is the long-serving former deputy editor of The Press and Journal
Times
30-04-2025
- Politics
- Times
Peter Taaffe obituary: old-school Labour agitator
Peter Taaffe believed that Margaret Thatcher was the best thing that ever happened to socialism. Thrusting forward and glaring out from thick-lensed spectacles, the co-founder and leader of the Trotskyite Militant Tendency predicted in 1986 that her dismantling of one-nation Toryism would 'lay bare the realities of the class society' and prompt a 'purist workers' revolution'. When Thatcher announced plans to introduce a poll tax of British adults, the Birkenhead-born revolutionary thought his time had come. He called for nationwide non-payment of the tax, organised workers' 'bill strikes' and was a key agitator of the poll tax riots in May 1990 that contributed to her downfall as prime minister five months later and the replacement of the poll tax with council tax. Taaffe declared: 'With
Spectator
30-04-2025
- Politics
- Spectator
Where should the Tories be worried about at the local elections?
Kemi Badenoch faces her first big electoral test in this week's local elections. The Conservative party has much to lose. Of the 1,642 council seats up for grabs, 940, accounting for boundary changes, were won by the Tories back in 2021. For Badenoch, the only path on Thursday is down. Four years ago, Boris Johnson was at the peak of his 'vaccine bounce'. Those were halcyon days, pre-Partygate, Trussonomics, and Toryism's worst defeat since James II's exile. In May 2021, the Conservatives poll ratings were at 45 per cent. Today, they barely top 20 per cent, falling back from last summer's defeat. Amongst party members, Badenoch's leadership is increasingly unpopular. Thursday's local elections should be inconsequential. Thanks to nine councils taking up Angela Rayner's offer of delaying facing the voters for a year, fewer councillors are up for election than at any set of council elections since 1975.
The Guardian
25-04-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Is one-nation Toryism dead? Not yet, but it can't let Reform and the right provide all the answers
This is not a happy time to be on the one-nation wing of the Conservative party. The final round of last year's leadership election was between two candidates from the right of the party, and since then it has been Robert Jenrick, the more rightwing of the two, who has emerged as the party's centre of gravity – a remarkable feat for a man who lost the race. His recently reported comments about a coalition with Reform UK (or perhaps, as sources close to him insist, its voters) have put the question of the Tories' future direction back in the spotlight. Is Nigel Farage the herald of a fundamental rightward shift? Is this, as one fellow journalist put it to me, 'the final death of one-nation Toryism'? The short answer is 'probably not' – at least not unless the Tory party dies its own final death. The 'one nation' label dates back to Benjamin Disraeli; it survived the reactionary hegemony of Lord Salisbury and the revolutionary one of Margaret Thatcher. So long as there is a Tory party, it will have a left wing and, historical labels being what they are, it will probably call itself one nation. Last year's contest would also seem, on the surface at least, to provide that wing with some bullish indicators. Broadly speaking (for personal loyalties and ambitions confound precise readings from such tallies), James Cleverly and Tom Tugendhat had the support of about half the parliamentary party. It took a real feat of self-sabotage for neither to reach the final. Yet there can be no doubt that one-nation Conservatism is in trouble – and the root of that trouble is that it is intellectually exhausted. Consider last year's leadership election again. Many Cleverly supporters ended up rowing in behind Kemi Badenoch to stop Jenrick. They knew they didn't like the policy direction he was proposing. But the alternative was a candidate who made a virtue of having no policy direction at all and who, on issues such as immigration and the European court of human rights, is now inching towards his positions anyway. Badenoch was an opportunity to hit the snooze button on an intellectual reckoning with the past 14 years, and postponing that reckoning has been the sum of the Tory left's ambitions since the general election. Hence nonsensical arguments such as the Conservatives lost not because of any failure of doctrine, but on 'competence', two things that cannot in politics be so cleanly distinguished. Where was the incompetence on immigration, for example: promising to cut it to the tens of thousands, or failing (indeed, not really trying) to fulfil that promise? The unhappy truth that capital-S 'Sensible' Tory MPs must confront is that any 'lurch to the right' over the past few years was almost entirely rhetorical rather than substantive, and with the exception of Brexit – which, however important you think it is, is not the root cause of our housing and energy price crises – they got what they wanted most of the time. Perhaps that feels counterintuitive, but it's true. NHS spending increased by 25% in real terms between 2010 and 2023 without (post-Andrew Lansley) any serious effort at structural reform; more young people than ever were funnelled into higher education; immigration was allowed to rise to whatever level industry and sector lobby groups demanded; taxation levels soared. Yes, the Rwanda scheme was certainly very right-coded. But not only did Rishi Sunak bend over backwards to try – and fail – to implement it without fundamentally challenging our existing legal and treaty obligations, but the whole thing was in part a way to talk about immigration without talking about legal immigration, which Boris Johnson had casually doubled. This disconnect played a significant role in the Tories' shattering defeat last year by alienating voters on all fronts; Badenoch is right to point out that the party 'talked right, but governed left', even if she cannot or will not offer any compelling explanation as to why. Perhaps the most telling evidence of this intellectual aridity is the way the Tories responded to the rise of Ukip. Like Jenrick now, Nigel Farage was able for years to set the tempo of Conservative thinking – or at least Conservative language – on Europe and immigration; time and again, David Cameron either made promises he had no intention of keeping (net immigration to 'tens of thousands') or didn't expect to have to keep (an in/out referendum). Some one-nation MPs certainly criticised his 'pandering' in this way. But they never furnished him or his successors with an actual alternative solution to the problem of a party that came second in 100 seats in 2015 and was well positioned to walk away with a critical slice of the Tory vote. At root, the problem currently facing the one-nation Tories is, paradoxically, that they are the most small-c Conservative faction; often self-consciously non-ideological, and united around the principle that the status quo more or less works and requires only sensible adjustment to keep the ship of state on course. That is a healthy, conservative cast of mind, of course. But it can too easily ossify into a reflexive defence of the status quo, an instinctive distaste for radicalism mutating into the comforting belief that radical measures are never the answer, compounded in this case by the understandable reluctance on the part of former ministers to admit, even to themselves, to complacently presiding over systems that were slowly falling to pieces. Ultimately, the reason the right is making the policy running is that it is the only force on the field. What is the one-nation solution to mass immigration, save shoring up a Westminster consensus that allows public opinion to be safely ignored? To the looming financial apocalypses in higher education and local government? To the unsustainable trajectory of NHS and entitlement spending? I have no idea, and I write about the Conservative party for a living. It's not that there aren't ideas out there, intellectual threads that could be woven into a relevant one-nation philosophy and programme. But MPs have no right to grumble about their party gravitating towards Jenrick's answers, or Farage's, when for now they are the only people offering any. Henry Hill is deputy editor of ConservativeHome
