Picnic Books

 The biggest difficulty for most authors is not finding inspiration but finding time. Most of us have “real” jobs that take absolute priority. Writing Empires Apart has taken me an age and there have been many months when I haven’t had time to write a single word.

In the age of the Blackberry work is always just a click away and I am one of those sad people who can’t go to bed at night without clearing my office inbox. On the other hand if inspiration does strike I can now quickly jot a note on the Blackberry and file it away for when I have time to remember that there is life beyond work. (I keep trying to remind myself that nobody ever lay on their death bed thinking “I wish I had spent more time in the office”.)

Thus this morning I was on the train looking forward to tumbling into the madding crowd at Waterloo station (sad) and thumbing through last week’s Finance Week (very, very sad) when I came across an article that dragged my thoughts away from business and made me reach for my Blackberry.

Oleg Mukhamedshin, director of capital markets at United Company RUSAL, was extolling the benefits of the economic, legal and fiscal reforms in Russia in the last decade. They had, he assured readers of Finance Week, fundamentally improved the prospects for foreign investors and allowed many “first and second tier” Russian companies to gain access to a “variety of financing products” involving debt capital and loan syndication.

The article triggered off all sorts of thoughts. Francis Fukuyama famously declared that the end of the Cold War had marked the end of history. For him America represented the highest form of society and there was nowhere further for history to go. That declaration was of course absurd but if Mukhamedshin is right Russia does seem to be turning into an American-style corporatist democracy. But of course Mukhamedshin, like Fukuyama, is not right.

In Empires Apart I argue that American democracy has been transformed by the advent of corporate power. Abstract legal entities – corporations – are deemed to have human rights like the right to free speech. Corporate executives are allowed to spend millions of dollars of their corporations’ money to promote the corporations’ political agenda (by which of course is meant the corporate executives’ private agenda) As US President Rutherford B. Hayes famously recorded in his diary in 1888 “This is a government of the people, by the people and for the people no longer. It is a government of corporations, by corporations, for corporations”.

At first sight Russia seems to be going the same way. Its “tier one” companies are now enormous. UC Rusal is the world’s largest aluminium producer employing more than a 100,000 people on five continents. No wonder Russian corporations like UC Rusal are such important players in the global financial markets, and no wonder they occupy such powerful positions in contemporary Russia.

But Russia is not turning into an American style corporatist democracy.

The Founding Fathers created a democratic edifice in the United States which remains largely untouched – corporations didn’t change the edifice, merely its occupants. Corporate bosses moved into the corridors of power and evicted the common man (common woman had never dwelt there).

In Russia there has never been a democratic edifice nor any human rights for corporations to usurp.  Russia is becoming not a corporatist democracy but a corporatist autocracy. Far from corporations bending the forms of democracy to suit their own interests in Russia the autocrat Putin is bending the corporate form to suit his policy objectives. Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in Putin’s use of Gazprom, the Russian energy behemoth. Gas supplies to neighbouring countries are turned off and on and prices ratcheted up or down for reasons that everything to politics and nothing to economics. One of Putin’s objectives is clearly to start to re-establish the Russian Empire lost by Gorbachev and Yeltsin, and one of his tools in doing this is corporate power. In a way Russia is now fighting America with America’s own weapon. And that fight seems to be hotting up – or looked at another way cooling down.

Just last week President Medvedev declared that “Russia is ready for a new Cold War”.

“We don’t want a Cold War”, chorused western leaders in reply, “but if you start one ……”

I didn’t notice anyone in the media comment that there is something profoundly odd about the idea of a new Cold War. The last one was supposed to have been a battle of ideologies – Communists proclaiming universal brotherhood and solidarity with the world’s oppressed battling Anti-communists extolling free expression and free markets. Now all that claptrap has vanished. We suddenly have two empires facing each other – as in fact we always did. True Putin may be proclaiming solidarity with the poor oppressed South Ossetians and Bush may laud the plucky freedom-loving Georgians but hardly anyone imagines we are in the middle of a gigantic ideological struggle for minds and hearts. This is imperial conflict at its crudest. Fukuyama may have thought that history had ended but the empires are striking back.

 The problem with writing about history is that there are rarely neat start and end points. I decided to start Empires Apart at the Battle of Châlons in 451 but I could have chosen dozens if nor hundreds of other dates. The problem is worse if you want to bring the story up to modern times because there is always something happening right now that you feel ought to be included.

Empires Apart tells the story of the American and Russian Empires and the events in Georgia over the last few weeks obviously warrant inclusion. But how? To add a few sentences or paragraphs on to the end might make the events appear as something altogether new when the whole point is that they are merely the latest manifestations of ages old tendencies.

On the American side there is the quest to control the world’s oil supplies. Perhaps I should amend the section in my book which deals with President Franklin Roosevelt’s meeting with the Saudi King in the middle of the Second World War. Roosevelt had flown to meet the king after his meeting with Stalin and Churchill at Yalta, just across the Black Sea from Georgia. The secret wartime meeting had made concrete American imperial designs in the Middle East. Roosevelt agreed to provide military assistance to the Saudi monarch in return for access to oil; the situation in Georgia today has remarkable similarities. But lots of other people are already pointing to the importance of oil in the Georgia dispute; I should try to find a less obvious angle.

From the very beginning the aggrandizement of America has been largely driven by the desire to gain resources belonging to others. But equally important, I believe, is the American conviction, going right back to the first New England Puritans, that their ideology is superior to all others. Perhaps I should approach the Georgia issue by discussing the way that American neo-conservative ideologues have infiltrated Georgian politics and got their man elected as President.

Or perhaps I should just concentrate on American opposition to Russian power and draw the obvious parallel with Hungary in 1956 when the CIA and others urged Hungarians on with promises of support that evaporated when the Russian tanks rolled in.

On the other hand I could concentrate not on American actions but on Russian: straight forward, old fashioned imperialism. Russia has regarded Georgia as part of its empire for two centuries. The dismemberment of the Russian empire at the end of the Cold War did little to change Russia’s underlying imperial ideology. Putin is clearly determined to recreate the Empire Yeltsin lost and the antics of the Georgian leaders President Bush had hoped would act as America’s proxies in the region gave him the excuse to act. Putin’s imperial policy reminds me of a phrase from an unlikely source and that I decide is the hook I am looking for.

Robert Kagan is a right wing ideologue who was part of President Reagan’s team at the time of the US invasion of the tiny island nation of Grenada. He is not a man I would normally warm to but he has written a very good book on American imperial history, although that is not a term he would be likely to use. Writing about the American purchase of Louisiana, violent conquest of Florida and opportunistic acquisition of Pacific coastline in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, Kagan noted the paradox that “American leaders had a clear vision of a continental empire” but “had no specific plans to obtain it”. Imperial expansion in the period he characterized as “determined opportunism”. It is a marvelous expression and one that seems to fit Putin perfectly.

Today’s Russian leaders are looking for opportunities to recreate their imperial sphere of influence whether in Estonia or Georgia or somewhere in between. They know what they want to do but not necessarily how, when and where the opportunities will arise. Just as America knows it wants to encircle Russia to maximize its imperial sphere of influence without knowing exactly how, when and where it will gain its next foothold.

That’s settled. I will stop this blog now and go back to my manuscript and develop the theme that the way America grew by opportunistically conquering neighbouring peoples in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is the way both America and Russia have always acted and continue to act. By doing so I will illustrate their and my determined opportunism.

  “The English invented champagne in the seventeenth century.”

That was going to be the opening line of my book, Empires Apart, due to be published by Picnic on 2^nd April next year. It was the only part of the introduction I did not write and rewrite over and over again as I struggled to find my narrative voice. It was a line I was proud of: whimsical, arresting, unexpected, succinct. All qualities I would value in a novel – but Empires Apart is not a novel.

Empires Apart describes the parallel histories of the Russian and American empires. It is a serious book that I would like to be taken seriously. Whimsy is not a quality readers of serious books can be expected to warm to.

Writing a book, like writing a blog, is a marvellous way of expressing yourself. I really enjoy writing. I like to play with words, push the boundaries of English grammar, jest with juxtapositions and to alliterate. I know nothing about scansion or metre but I love sentences for the sound they make in my mind as I read them to myself. If I was writing for myself all that would be fine but I like to pretend that I am writing for others. Perhaps the greatest difficulty an author faces is to constantly remember the audience. Novels can be about the author, indeed many seem to be about nothing else, but good non-fiction allows no such self-indulgence. And yet part of me still thinks that what grabs me might grab others.

The truth is that part of me is simply selfish and conceited – I want to put in the puns and quips that appeal to my sense of humour and, let’s admit it, my vanity. I like writing that the early Russian conquests led to a “steppe change” in Russian history. It amuses me to suggest that the Portuguese navigator Joäo Vaz Corte Real may have reached America first and that if his publicists had been as good as Amerigo Vespucci’s “Americans” might today be “Realists”. I enjoy the idea of starting a book on modern political history by referring to the ancient battle that took place in the fields where the champagne grapes now grow as more brutal than brut.

At the same time I feel passionate about my subject and want others to feel that passion. And I recognise that self-indulgent puns are not going to convince anyone to take me seriously. So I write at speed whatever springs to mind and then edit out the frivolous and meandering, or at least most of it. And that I hope leaves a mostly serious book on a decidedly serious theme.

The first English settlers crossed the Atlantic and the first Russian settlers crossed the Urals at the same time and I have long been fascinated by the similarities between the two nations as they expanded to the Pacific and then strove to rule the world. The two great powers that dominated most of the twentieth century, and may still dominate much of the twenty first, appear at first to have so little in common but in reality have so much. It seemed to me that here was an exciting story that deserved to be told in an exciting way, in a way that would grip the reader like a novel rather then impress as an academic thesis. But that doesn’t include whimsical introductions.

My manuscript now has an opening paragraph rather than an opening sentence, and it tries to convey what the whole book is about:

“For America the road to Iraq started on Roanoke Island when the first Englishman stepped ashore and claimed a God-given right to take everything he saw. In the four centuries since then the world has been transformed but that first colonial philosophy has changed hardly at all. The central certainty has remained: Americans are special; they are due more of the earth’s riches than other nations. How those riches are to be gained, whether through the power of the musket or the dollar, may have changed but the continuity of empire is as clear between George Washington and George Bush as between Ivan the Terrible and Joseph Stalin. America’s first President and Russia’s first Tsar spoke openly of their dreams of Empire; their twentieth century successors had the same dreams but convinced themselves that an Empire by any other name would smell more sweet”.

Who knows the editor may decide to change it once again. I will of course listen to him. I just hope he doesn’t want to change the line buried about twenty pages in: “The English invented champagne in the seventeenth century.”

 I’d like to use my final blog post this week to tell you about my new narrative history of the Plantagenets, to which the latest Picnic Author Update referred.

I am writing the book for the best of all reasons: I have been looking to buy and read it for thirty years, but it does not exist! Like most of us, history at school always seemed to stop with the Norman Conquest and start again at the battle of Bosworth and I was always left with a sense of emptiness caused by not knowing what happened in between. This book (or rather, two books, since it will almost certainly run to two volumes) tells that story.

It is written very deliberately as narrative history as it is aimed at the general reader, not the historian, and thus there are no footnotes, and no references to primary sources. It has been written largely from memory, as over the years I have devoured all the books I could find on the period, most of which deal with a specific person or event, and many of which are out of print; one of my bookshop finds some years ago, for example, was a biography of Philippa of Hainault published in 1910. I have however gone back to my bookshelves repeatedly to check facts, dates and names, most notably from the wonderful Oxford History of England series.

It is the story of a largely dysfunctional family. At one stage, all four of Henry II’s legitimate sons were in rebellion against him, and his wife tried to flee disguised as a man to join them (she was caught and held prisoner for twenty years). John personally killed his own nephew, quite possibly having had him blinded and castrated first. Edward II was deposed by his wife and her lover. From Richard II onwards, first legal murder and then just plain murder became commonplace. If the narrative were fiction nobody would believe it, but it isn’t – it’s fact.

The working title is Crown and Empire, though suggestions would be welcomed, and the author is feeling very depressed as he has just killed off Henry II. I have no doubt that you will hear a lot more about this project in the months ahead.

Finally, it only remains for me to say how very much I have enjoyed posting on this blog over the last week, and to thank Picnic once again for their generosity in allowing me to plug a book that is actually being published by someone else. Hopefully no such accident will befall the Plantagenets.

I am leaving you in the capable hands of Brian Landers, a director of Penguin Books, who’s Empires Apart: the American and Russian Empires from the Vikings to Iraq will be published by Picnic, 2 April 2009.  I will stick with the Plantagenet Empire. Much sin but no spin.  It did not pretend its missiles were good for you.  And, of course, it lasted longer . . .

 I have heard writers say many times that their motivation for writing a novel is difficult to explain. If so, how much more so when you are actually writing a novel in somebody else’s style and using their characters?

For me with Major Benjy I think the reasons were partly general and partly specific. The general ones were admiration for the writer and a desire that the world should have another “Mapp and Lucia” book to enjoy. Specifically, I wanted to fill in a key gap in the narrative (including the total disappearance without trace of one particular character) and flesh out the supporting cast (an acknowledged issue with Benson’s writing). It’s not for me to say how well I might have succeeded, but thankfully the reviews to date have been very kind.

It is probably worth mentioning a few words about the copyright situation, since I know others may be considering writing sequels to well known books or series. The rule in the UK at the moment is that copyright runs for 70 years from the end of the year of death; thus Benson, who died in 1940, goes out of copyright in the UK at the end of 2010. Not in the US, though, since they have a different rule which operates for 95 years from the date of publication of the work, and there is currently much discussion about the US rules being adopted in Europe (but no word on what might happen to books which would fall into a hole (i.e. would have gone out of copyright and then would apparently go back into it) if that were done. This is an important point since I know many enthusiasts like to write fan fiction and post it on the net. This is actually in breach of copyright and you are putting yourself at risk should the relevant estate choose to do anything about it.

For my part, though my written agreement covers only Major Benjy, there is a gentleman’s agreement with the estate that I will also be writing two more: Lucia on Holiday and Au Reservoir. However that can only happen if Major Benjy is a success. Nobody (not even Picnic!) is going to publish a book which is unlikely to be commercially successful, so please run out on 1^st September and order it (preferably supporting your local bookshop in the process).

In my fourth and last post, I will be telling you about my new narrative history of the Plantagenet family, the infamous “devil’s brood” who ruled England for three and a half centuries, but spent most of their time fighting amongst themselves.

 E.F. Benson died in Rye, which he had made his home for the last twenty years, in 1940, having written over one hundred books: a diverse mix of history, biography, fiction, plays, and books on ice skating, of which sport he was a pioneer. The vast majority of these books are today known to us only by their titles, and that is probably no bad thing since their quality is very patchy. There is growing recognition though, that the best of them, of which the Mapp and Lucia series would probably be the best known examples, are very good indeed. So good, indeed, that a major re-appraisal of Benson’s stature as a writer is probably long overdue.

Benson was both well-known and well-connected during his lifetime, numbering Conan Doyle, H.G. Wells, Henry James and Queen Mary (wife of King George V) amongst his acquaintances. He was widely read by the likes of W.H. Auden, Noel Coward, Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh; I personally believe that Major Benjy, whom we first encounter in Miss Mapp, coloured the character of Apthorpe in the latter’s Sword of Honour trilogy. In other words, his influence as a writer was much more widespread and important than many might today suspect, particularly since he also found time amongst his hectic writing schedule to be a very active reviewer of other people’s books.

His ghost stories are said by those who know about such things to stand comparison with Dickens and M.R. James. Some of his novels such as Paying Guests and Secret Lives have survived in print on a stand-alone basis, while The Blotting Book is an excellent courtroom drama. It is the Mapp and Lucia series, however, by which he is inevitably best-remembered.

There is a great deal of evidence that he originally conceived both Queen Lucia (1920) and Miss Mapp (1922) as one-off books. He revived Lucia for Lucia in London in 1927, but it was not until 1930 that he had the stroke of genius for which we will all ever be grateful and brought these two hilariously dreadful creations together in Mapp and Lucia, following that with two more books, Lucia’s Progress and Trouble for Lucia, the latter being published just a few months before his death.

The central theme of these last three books (the true Mapp and Lucia series) is a battle for social supremacy in the fictional town of Tilling, which was in fact the Rye Old Town which Benson knew in real life. No deception is too devious, no lie too monstrous, no stratagem too outrageous in this ongoing duel. A glorious supporting cast includes the effeminate Georgie, a compulsive embroiderer and doily maker, the rumbustious, bibulous Major Benjy, the unconventional artist Quaint Irene, a vicar from Birmingham who speaks determinedly with a Scottish accent, and Susan Wyse MBE, who wears furs on even the hottest of days and negligently leaves her medal in full view whenever friends come to visit.

Part of the reason for Benson’s reappraisal is being driven by gay fiction courses in the States. There is no doubt that he was gay, living openly with different men at various times and in the early books both Georgie and Quaint Irene are clearly signposted as gay characters, but these references are dropped abruptly in the later books – was he warned off by a friendly word of advice, and, if so, by whom? Such studies are probably unhelpful. Nowhere does Benson’s fiction depend on any gay plot device, and in any event Georgie is camp rather than gay, while Irene is also hinted to take a healthy interest in male anatomy.

The true scale of his achievement, however, lies in the simple fact that his books have endured for the continued pleasure of a consistently loyal fan base in a way in which no others have, apart of course from the Jeeves and Wooster stories, and here there are clear parallels, with their highly stylised characters, and high drama woven from what are actually fairly mundane happenings, albeit of highly charged social importance. None of his contemporaries writing supposedly humorous fiction have survived to anything like the same extent, no matter how wildly popular they were at the time; Dornford Yates would be a perfect example.

So, if you have not been fortunate enough so far to have been introduced to these wonderful books, please go out there and get reading. In my next post, I will be talking about my own modest contribution to the canon.

 In the first of my blog entries here on the Picnic authors’ site I really should start with a huge apology, since by some unaccountable oversight I am not actually a Picnic author at all, at least not yet. My new “Mapp and Lucia” book, Major Benjy, is in fact published by Troubador in Leicester (already out in the US, out in the UK on 1 September). However, the good Major has sent Picnic a very sweet letter acknowledging that this was not the conduct to be expected of an officer and a gentleman and that he will try to do better in future.

I have a theory that all good writers (and I know that Picnic only take on good writers!) start off as good readers. After all, what greater motivation can there be for wanting to write a book than an existing love of the things, usually coupled with cardboard boxes scattered around various locations full of old friends from which we really cannot bear to be parted, because to take a few to the charity shop, as our partners frequently urge us to do, would feel uncomfortably like boiling a beloved golden retriever down for glue.

This was certainly true in my case. I was fortunate enough to grow up in a house without TV and therefore would begin reading a book when I woke up in the morning, and would continue until it was time to go to bed. Even there, the story did not end, because I used to take a transistor radio to bed with me, hide under the bedclothes with it turned down as low as possible, and listen to “A Book at Bedtime” on Radio 4. It was in exactly this way that, at the age of ten, I first made the acquaintance of the redoubtable Mrs Philip Lucas (as she then was) when I experienced Queen Lucia. Even though I now think (as probably most Benson fans do) that this is probably the weakest of the “Mapp and Lucia” books, I was captivated and resolved to get them out of the library one by one.

There was a slight problem here in that they were in the senior library whereas I only had a ticket for the junior library next door, but my mother rose to the challenge and insisted that I should be issued with a full ticket six years early with the simple but effective argument that I had in any event already read everything in the children’s library at least once.

The books have been firm favourites since then (there are also two sequels by Tom Holt which are now sadly out of print, as seems to have become a badge of honour for good writers), and they are looking at me now as I write this from the couple of shelves I keep for books which I re-read over and over again (The Alexandria Quartet is also there, but I will leave you guessing about the others – a man must have some secrets).

For those poor few unfortunates who have not previously encountered the “Mapp and Lucia” stories, take heart! You still have the pleasure of reading them for the first time (there are six by Benson, the first couple of which you could safely ignore and come back to later, plus two by Tom Holt and now Major Benjy by yours truly)! Briefly, they tell the tale of two absolutely frightful ladies who end up inhabiting the same genteel seaside town, which Benson calls Tilling, but is actually Rye where he lived in Lamb House, as he has both Mapp and Lucia do in turn (though in the books it is called Mallards), and where he was twice Mayor, as he has Lucia be.

Neither can bear to be anything other than the acknowledged number one in any matter affecting Tilling, but of course there can be only one absolute ruler, and so the books may be compared to two prima donnas in constant search of the same role. The stratagems, untruths, and downright deception that attend these efforts have ensured that the books have endured as acknowledged comic masterpieces in a way which is rivalled only by Jeeves and Wooster.

Later in the week, I am planning to tell you more about Benson the writer, and attempt to place him in context. Then I will write specifically about Major Benjy and what I was trying to achieve when I wrote it. Finally, I will tell you about my next project, a narrative history of the Plantagenets which, a little to my shame, is where Picnic enter. But now, dear ones, I shall collapse positively drained by the effort of it all, and retire with a nice cup of Earl Grey.

 Discussing the original IPCRESS FILE with a personal friend of Len Deighton’s recently, we both concurred how difficult it is to get hold of classic British movies of a certain era.  When I was doing my PHD, I used the BFI in London but they don’t hire out and it’s a killer going down to the big bad smoke -where bed and breakfast gaffs are around 70 quid a night – to watch a movie in a cubicle. More recently, I’ve been acquiring some gems through my mate, Dave Collins, the half Iranian co-author of my Iranian political thriller SACRED WINDS which was taken to the Cannes Film Festival this year by a London producer whose name escapes me.  Dave’s got a cousin in Paris and it so happens that CANAL PLUS have bought the rights to a number of British and American classic films.  Thanks to this Parisian connection, I have recently obtained VILLAIN, with Richard Burton, Paul Scharder’s THE SORCERER, Stacey Keach in THE SQUEEZE and a whole rake of goodies – particularly including Lindsay Anderson’s IF with Malcolm McDowell.
       This is fortuitous as Paul Mitton and myself are currently working on a street history retrospective that is almost like a sequel to IF.  And guess what, it’s a street history that doesn’t have a working class protagonist.  Neither does SACRED WINDS for that matter.  Am I selling out?  I don’t think so but I’ll come back to my own proletarian credentials in a moment. For those who don’t know, IF is a surreal story of an insurrection in a public school that would seem partly inspired by George Orwell’s essay, SUCH, SUCH WERE THE JOYS.  My mentor in the film business, Peter West, worked as an editor on this movie which was filmed AFTER the formation of the March 22md movement in Paris but immediately before the Sorbonne events with which it has been subsequently identified.  A good account of the film’s making and significance can be found in Ian Raikoff’s book, INSIDE THE PRISONER: RADICAL FILM AND TELEVISION IN  THE 1960s.  Raikoff was the South African Trotskyist who wrote the Prisoner episode where Patrick McGoohan found himself in a wild west town and was big mates with Nick Roeg and Donald Cammell of whom more in a minute.
      In our pseudo sequel, FAT BOY, a character loosely based on that of Malcolm McDowell, does serious time for shooting up a vile public school and killing his PE teacher Diggins.  This customer has gathered around him a bunch of FLASHMAN TYPES known as Diggins’s lads, some of whom are killed in the insurrection of 1968.  A decade or so later and Diggins’ lads are still Flashmans, but part of the Thatcherite economic counter-revolution by which finance capital asserts its primacy over manufacturing industry.  In league with East End gangsters – overlapping the territory of THE LONG GOOD FRIDAY and EMPIRE STATE - they seek to develop the East End as a financial centre but having been snubbed by the US/Italian mafia, their principle source of finance is Russian.  Meanwhile, the kid who shot up the public school with his 1968 mindset very much intact, is released from prison with a new identity and is looking for revenge.
       As well as IF, this story draws on THE LONG GOOD FRIDAY (my  second favourite film after GET CARTER) and EMPIRE STATE, which opened out some of the themes of THE LONG GOOD FRDAY in a rather didactic and one sided way.  It also draws on the themes in some of Joseph Losey’s movies (particularly including THE SERVANT by Harold Pinter)  but also Donald Cammell’s PERFORMANCE (with Mick Jagger and Edward Fox) in which a weak aristocratic character finds himself manipulated by a kind of proletarian Leviathan – a working class bad boy rebel turned bad who now parasites on the community from which he was derived. 

In this way, the later movies of Anderson and the crime movies (like Performance) to which I refer prefigured a trend in Thatcherism whereby it supplanted old ruling class old money (and their patrician values) as it created a dog eat dog society through false populism.  Thatcher and her ilk were far nastier than Old Etonians like Harold MacMillan who preceded them.  This isn’t to say that Stuart Hall, Martin Jacques and the Stalinist rabble that ran Marxism Tody were justified in abandoning working class politics, in the building of the broadest possible of fronts against Thatcher.  It does mean that while the working class was the principle focus of Thatcherite attack (particularly during THE MINERS’ STRIKE with which ENEMY WITHIN deals) other layers of society also lost out once the workers were defeated and the new Coercive State form was consolidated.  This was signalled early but rendered manifest when the Special Branch raided the BBC Glasgow studios over Duncan campbell’s SECRET SOCIETY programme and at the Battle of the Beanfield. 

What makes this salient today is that only by politically refounding the labour movement can the present Thatcherite regime which persists under the coercive state, whichever passle of Tories wins the next election, can only be defeated by politically refounding the labour movement but that its unlikely it will reconstitute itself around the traditional miners’ strike battles of the past.   Rather, it needs to refound itself around issues of democratic rights.  It’s also likely the professional middle classes and intelligensia might be part of this process as they’re getting damn all out of the present order of things as well.

Finally (because this is my last blog), there’s the issue of race and etnicity.  This has GOT to be a focus for STREET HISTORY and realist drama and literature today.  This cannot be done, however, by following the post-modernist or post structuralist fetish (eg in SCREEN) for emphasiising identity at the expense of class.  Arguably, this is a problem with films like JASMINE and BRITZ.  In our society, ethnic identity politics proliferate because of the political defeatc of the working class and suppression of the left.  This applies to fascism in the socially excluded white working class and to islamic Fundamentalism.  What we see in ethnic identity politics is a manifestation of primitive rebellion in the sense that the term is used by Geoff Pearson (editor of the British Journal of Criminology) to refer to “authentic but limited proletarian responses” to a deepening social crisis.  Again, it’s all rooted in alienation which is the core theme of kitchen sink and street history alike.
        

And again, it’s a case of the left participating in its own demise.  By scabbing on the anti-fascist struggle – eg in Brick lane – and leaving the Asian community to stand alone, the SWP and ANL contributed to the rise of Islamic Fundamentalism before ever Salman Rushdie wrote THE SATANIC VERSES or the collapse of the USSR SEEMED to render Marxism redundnat.  This again is a theme of COOL BRITANNIA – the sequel to ENEMY WITHIN – set during the 1990s. 

Thank you for staying with the blog this week.  It has been fun. I will be here again when PICNIC publishes ENEMY WITHIN in Spring 2009. 

Finally, PICNIC bloggers will know it is custom for the outgoing blogger to introduce the incoming. I have asked PICNIC all week to whom I am handing over -it works out its Blog Rota months ahead - so I could prepare something welcoming to say in advance.  But I kept being fobbed off.  Now I know why: our publisher, has been having some fun . . .       

So, it is farewell from this Old anti-capitalist Trot and, as of Monday, welcome to GUY FRASER-SAMPSON of Cass Business School, founder and partner of a dedicated European Venture Capital Fund of Funds, previously with the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, and author of the best-selling PRIVATE EQUITY AS AN ASSET CLASS, the only definitive textbook on the subject in the world.

It gets worse: GFS will be blogging on his new book MAJOR BENJY – the further adventures of the character from the much loved Mapp & Lucia series based on characters created by E.F Benson.  It is endorsed by Gyles Brandreth – ‘What Joy! What Bliss’ – I WARNED you it got worse!

Therefore, it is now definitely Au Reservoir, as the Major might say, from Roger Cottrell and ENEMY WITHIN.

 I’m starting to get some comments on my blog and so I’d like to acknowledge these, before launching into today’s tirade.  Firstly, thanks to Kim Fleet for her interesting comments on how the decline of British crime fiction has been complimented in a similar decline of British comedy.  This is both important and true and I’ll come back to it in a minute.  I also want to thank my good buddy Stuart Christie down there in Brighton and to plug David Douglas’s important new book on the miners’ strike that Stuart is publishing. 

GEORDIES WA’ MENTAL is a realist account of the miners’ strike by a Geordie anarchist that sort of compliments my own book, ENEMY WITHIN – a crime thriller that occupies similar space and territory or at least moves through it.  I’m told that David (whom I’ve never to my knowledge met) wants to review ENEMY WITHIN and that of itself is worth a plug.  You can look his book up on Stuart’s BRIGHTCOVE site which is on google.  Basically, we’re back to the relationship between the realist novels of Alan Sillitoe and the crime thrillers of Ted Lewis (again) with the one being the alter ego to the other.  I think we’ve covered this in a previous blog.
        

For those who don’t know who Stuart Christie is let me introduce you.  In the 1960s, when he was a young lad of 18, he was involved in a courageous but not very well thought through plot to assassinate Franco in Spain.  Having served actual time in a fascist prison, he returned to the UK just as things were hotting up in 1968.  All of this was before my time of course but it is visited in my self publsihed book, HOLLYWOOD BOWL, the ISBN for which is ISBN 978-1-4092-0565-4   You can order this from http@//www/lulu.com/content/2720961   But I digress. 

Stuart was framed as a member of the Angry Brigade who also feature in my book as fictionalised characters.  As my novel is total fiction, I have the whole Angry Brigade manipulated as part of an Italian style strategy of tension during the Cecil King military coup plot against Harold Wilson which in this novel actually happens.  It’s parapolitical street history, OK, and was the reason that Stuart and I came to know each other.
      

Basically, I sent Stuart a copy of HOLLYWOOD BOWL which he liked.  He DID reprimand me for representing several members of the Brigade as middle class hippy flakes (particularly Hillary Creek and Anna Mendelson) and I’ve apologised for this since, particularly to John Barker – another former member of the Brigade.  Nonetheless, Stuart liked it enough to commission me to adapt his anarchist memoir , GRANNY MADE ME AN ANARCHIST, published by AK Books in Edinburgh, as a vfeature film.  I’ve since written this script and have to say that both Stuart and myself are rather pleased with it.
       

On Kim’s remarks about comedy, I am in agreement – the last really good comedies I can remember on British TV were RAB C. NESBIT and RED DWARF although I’m a sucker for STILL GAME on BBC2 about those two old boys on a Glasgow housing estate that looks like my ex brother in law’s gaff in Paisley.  In the early 1990s, when I’d been fired as a provincial journalist for being a Trotskyist git and wasn’t really cutting the mustard as a freelance, I had a sortee into the world of financial services and for a time (based on this experience) was working on a TV series called SCUMBAG HOLIDAYS with a stand up alternative comic from Worcester called Shane.  It never came to anything.  The premise was that a dodgy holiday firm was being run by a failed spiv in a provincial West Midlands town whose catch phrase was “there’s money to be made in this game” and who drove around in an MOT failed 1970s Ford Cortina which looked like it had been in too many car chases back when the Sweeney was still being filmed in Dulwich.  All his employees are total rejects and losers who’ve only taken the job because they’re under threat of having their giro pulled.  The best scene, for me, was when this Jack the lad was trying to sell a dodgy timeshare deal on the street to a well heeled elderly couple in Solihol.  Next moment, along comes FASHION CASUALTY COLIN, his drug dealer, armed with a shotgun and demanding money with menaces.  Fashion Casualty Colin, I should add, is a white guy in an Afro who was still wearing flares in the early 1990s and mimed to Barry White in his bedroom mirror.  I have to admit I think I’m better at thrillers than comedy but then again, I’m trying to get some work on the new MINDER and some of the SCUMBAG HOLIDAY sketches would work in Arthur Daley land.

Final blog tomorrow folks.  It’s been fun. x

. . . .

MESSAGE FROM ADMIN:  I have seen the final blog.  I thought he was leading up to saying he’s now a Tory.  But nah, he’s not. But then again, he did mention Peter Hitchens in an earlier blog . . .

 You can’t blame a chap for writing something and not making it available elsewhere – particularly if he has a nightly blog to write.  Below is the letter I have just written to the IRISH EXAMINER in a shameless attempt to promote ENEMY WITHIN: I made it clear it was also being posted on this blog.  I will be blogging ‘properly’ again tomorrow.