FORUM: Illtyd Harrington: ‘as i please’

Published: 8 April, 2011
by Illtyd Harrington

The old Marie Antoinette school of economic theory 

 

I MET a friend the other day who seemed in the throes of that obscure medical condition “spontaneous self-combustion”.  This occurs when anger boils over and the victim bursts into flames. 

He is the uncrowned prince of amateur dramatics hereabouts and had just heard that the entire grant for his group and social centre had been chopped. Not cut but completely obliterated.

He did not take kindly when I suggested they changed the group’s name from Prospect to the Beachy Head Players.

Cameron and his Rag, Tag and Bobtail group of collaborators might on a good day concede that this is “community and society at work”.

I once overheard at an Oxford senior common room dinner as the port and brandy were passed around that humanity could be divided into two groups – Cavalier or Puritan.

Macaulay, the 19th-century historian said something appropriate for 2011. “The Puritans did not ban bear-baiting out of concern for the pain of the bear but to stop the enjoyment of the onlookers.”

Can it be so long ago that the arts blossomed under the indomitable arts minister Jennie Lee, Nye Bevan’s widow, aided and abetted by Lord Goodman as chairman of the Arts Council?

These two arm-twisters used every emotional and political blackmail on Harold Wilson so that eventually he agreed to fund the Open University.

Bevan, like Michael Foot, was a socialist bibliophile, theatre and concert-goer and a buyer of art. It took his nerve in 1948, the grimmest year in the time of austerity, to give local authorities the power to spend a sixpenny rate on leisure, pleasure and the pursuit of happiness.

To get some idea of this, a penny rate for Greater London on the City of London would have yielded about £15million. 

Going down Nostalgia Street, 20 years ago Camden was able to mount a festival of the arts which drew much European approval and comment. The Hampstead Theatre came about in that stimulating slipstream, and its triumphs and defeats are part of our theatrical yardstick.

A new generation of self-confident trade union leaders would do well to read resolution 42 over 40 years ago when Vic Feather, its general secretary, steered it through the TUC.

He chummed up with Arnold Wesker and its most palpable result was the Roundhouse.

Beryl Cook, a one-time drinking companion of mine and my favourite painter after Rembrandt and Picasso, drew activities in the pub, the beach, the street, and my dog.  

And – curl your upper lip if you like – but the X Factor’s phenomenal success proves that people want to entertain and perform.

After a triumphant exhibition of Henry Moore’s work in Kensington Gardens in 1978, even the prime minister, grumpy old James Callaghan, came. 

I went on to spend a day with Moore in Essex and talked about his wonderful drawings of people in the Underground during the Blitz. I did everything in my power to get him to give us a statue for the South Bank. He compromised and donated a large maquette which was set up for the enjoyment of thousands outside Kenwood House.

Our national sense of dance involves a little more than Morris dancing outside a pub.

I’m amazed at how many million people who watch Strictly Come Dancing have never seen a ballet performed.

As a precocious six-year old politico, I heard in our political household the name Dimitrov.

It was patiently explained that he was being tried in Nazi Germany for organising the burning of the Reichstag. 

His chief accuser was Hitler’s deputy, Field Marshal Hermann Goering. 

Dimitrov called his bluff during cross-examination and the Field Marshal bellowed: “Wait till I get you outside.”

Fat Hermann – a First World War flying ace, morphine addict and crossdresser – offered another contribution to political life: “Whenever I hear the word culture I reach for my gun.” 

His other poetic contribution was “guns before butter”. I’m sorry to report he died in agony at Nuremberg after swallowing some concealed cyanide pills.

And so to Ed Miliband. Here is an honest and uncomplicated man banging on about the suffragettes Mrs Pankhurst, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela. 

Is it my disgruntled old age, but this current crop of professional politicians seem to be from the Marie Antoinette school of economic theory, ending up as pastry cooks.

A worrying symptom and a cause of concern to old troublemakers like myself, Labour seems to want to tread water rather than walk on it until 2015.

I used to sing the Red Flag every Monday night at the Labour Women’s section with my mother and other kids – it’s a hymn Labour reserve for the quiet of the crematorium, Has no one heard of Edward Carpenter, the great socialist who wrote “England Arise, the Long Long Night is over…”? 

This included the line “Over your face a web of lies is woven.”

Now that’s defiance and whatever is left of my water tells me that is what we need.