12 July 2009

Purity patrol

If you're down on the South Bank showing flesh, a man in a uniform can tell you to pull your jeans up, and if you don't like it he can summon up reinforcements to run you off the premises. Did you know they were "premises"? Neither did I.

I don't normally listen to Broadcasting House, but caught the tail end this morning. The fascists are out in force.

Listen again (for seven days only):
The bit I'm interested in concerns the discussion of public space at the end of the programme. It segues from discussion of the 4th plinth, which starts at around 52.30. Anna Minton (who's just written Ground Control) discusses public space and private ownership, starting at 54.30 minutes, and the clip ends with security guards hassling the interviewer away from the "private" area on the South Bank, after a guard has just asked a girl to pull her jeans up as she was showing a gap... The girl was sitting with her family - it's not as if she was cavorting around drunk with her trousers round her ankles. The goons want the interviewer to stop recording.

We've had it already with hoodies banned from Bluewater, which I thought was was just a weird fascistic aberration, all of a piece with that dystopia. But when you start getting blokes in uniform telling girls to cover themselves on the South Bank, for heaven's sake, I feel a sense of indignation. Who is making these rules, and with what authority? Should people with no mandate other than someone else's money dictate how we conduct ourselves in public?

The Royal enclosure at Ascot, Glyndebourne, the Ritz - most people wouldn't even dream of going there in the first place, so any who choose to can take the dress code deal. This is on an altogether different scale, so the principle is different too. The South Bank looks like a public space. We all feel as if we're entitled to be there. We may not all care to see a butt crack when someone sits down wearing hipsters (I'm assuming that's what the little hitler was complaining about) but I certainly don't want to see people stopped from showing it, especially when they're sitting down with their parents minding their own business.

This is only a symptom of a deeper malaise. As the Guardian headline has it, they sold our streets and nobody noticed.
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3 comments:

Desmond Swords said...

Final Draft

Hello Squared.

Both the male and female guard, listening to their voices, it's clear they are are non-nationals, i would guess having a laugh at work, by the sound of the scene.

They sound like they are not happy, which may very well be just an act, taking the mick and seeing how far they can make others do utterly silly things, on the strength of a straight face, spurious intructions and dress alone.

The clue was when the presenter spoke of one guard telling a young women to pull her top up because she was exposing too much flesh.

The background checks they do for work like this is minimal, and interpreting that specific scenario on the acoustic evidence alone, one could adopt the position that it is two non-nationals acting silly at work in an uber-serious megatroplois for the purpose of winding up two britions- or argue it's another grave and troubling sign confirming the existence of a creaky Britain.

~

I am guesing the South Bank security operatives are given specific instructions about their reponsibilities and role in the War on Terror by their bosses, who are told by theirs and them in turn by theirs - with a chain of command going up to the current incumbents. One must be att all times vigilant and move ANYONE at all along whose behaviour seems suspicious in any way, which the oppos then use to have a giggle at the natives. So used to duplicity from their leaders and doing as they're told by anyone in authority, occassionaly someone from the radio will lose a power-play instigated by a bored security operative and feeling bullied, tell the Listener and contribute to the debate on Terror by introducing first hand experience of Mad Britain.

~

There is a gas show: Naked Camera on RTE television, in which three actors play various characters interacting with the public. One of one's favourites being a jobsworth whose costume is a generic parkie rig-out that passes him off as a semi-official local authority employee.

He has several routines in Stephen's Green, approaching people and behaving in an officious manner, instructing them to perform stupid actions which they don't want to or are confused as to the legitimacy of, but because of the parkie costume and the acting ability of Clifford Crawford, become compliant.



Best of all, asking two middle aged nothern britons smoking a fag outside the Temple Bar pub to "can you keep down your Englishness please?"

They seemed utterly shocked, emotionally recoiling it is plain to witness, but fall for his cod, after first trying to bluff their way out by joking his request off.

"Lads, we've had a few complaints, about your Englishness, could you just try to keep it down please lads?"

And as they, in shock, try to manoeuvre an outcome in which their core human identity is not compromised to the state of servile subservience, are outbluffed by Crawford. One man in semi-officious parkie dress, gets them to try putting on an Irish accent, and it is exquisite to watch. Honest.

~

Unfortunately, the skits in question are not on youtube, but at 2.50 of this 9 min Naked Camera compilation of some of the gags, you will see the actor i mean, getting his hair cut and instructing the hairdresser in such a way as to invoke the gods of comedy to body forth and make you larf.

Sláinte

13 July 2009 at 22:32
Anne said...

Thanks for your comment. I'll watch out for that parkie next time I'm in Dublin.

You may be right that the guards are having a laugh. Broadcasting House isn't a wholly serious programme and they might have been in on the act too. I hope it was just a skit to wind up the likes of me.

Nevertheless, there is a serious issue behind it. The banning of hoodies at Bluewater is well documented and has been followed elsewhere. It needs calling out for the petty tyranny it is.

13 July 2009 at 23:01
Desmond Swords said...

Hello Anne.

My understanding of the Bluewater hoo ha was that there was a genuine problem with louts in hoodies intimidating shoppers.

The goverment here have just passed a bill which will make belonging to a criminal gang a crime. Three people and over can constitute one, and the prosecution of people under the new anti-gang laws, will take place without juries.

There was uproar about it, 133 criminal lawyers signed a petition talking about draconian and dark state powers, the day an innocent father of two was murdered by one of the gang memebers, outside his mother's house. He was a boxer who did a lot of voluntary stuff for his local charities. A stand up model citizen, and the latest in an increasingly more frequent occurence of innocent people being murdered by people overwhelmingly in the teens and early twenties who are rarely prosecuted for killing each other because no few normal citizens will involve themself because when they do, they run the high risk of intimidation and worse.

The clear up rates for the gang murders is very low, less than 15%, and more and more people are getting involved because legislation as it stands, is heavily weighted in favour of the gangs.

A few hundred people at the core of it, so the goverment decided to introduce this new legislation when the last straw was a man in Limerick murdered in his family work place because of an incident so trivial it is terrifying to contemplate how mad it will get.

They brought in a bill in the new year that allows surveillance recordings to be used for the first time, and decided against the no jury courts, until the Limerick murder, and on the day of the vote, the father gunned down, which only added to the public resolve that this was not the dark day for civil liberties the people who make a living defending these gang members would have us believe.

Banning hoodies in a shopping centre, sure there is a principle, but a sense of proportion's needed.

One could say that there are feral hoodie youths who'd cause aggro in shopping centres, and when there were no jury trials of citizens born and living in the jurisdiction of one part of Britain in the seventies eighties and nineties, few on the mainland voiced a concern then i seem to remember. So what's the prob with not being able to hood up in Essex when no jury trials in another province of the Kingdom was tolerated and ignored?

Just saying, but i'm only remote from Britain and will be in England for the Londfon Poetry fest in SE1 in a few weeks to rant in person, maybe we could sort creaky Britain out then, with a poem or two?

14 July 2009 at 01:48

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