Interesting:
Labour is not welcome to Brighton
By Paul Hayward
(Filed: 29/09/2004)
This Government is doing its best to be the Brighton Pier of British politics - neon, boisterous and throbbing with power - but many in the city prefer to compare it to the West Pier: a rusting, skeletal hulk that is falling into the sea, a short walk along the promenade.
As seaside metaphors go, a tale of two piers works just as well for Tony Blair and his Chancellor, Gordon Brown. But which is which? The bad news for the Prime Minister is that Brighton is a hall of mirrors. If you want disillusion with the Blair "project'', it can be found both among the liberal intelligentsia who fled London in search of clean air and cheaper property and in the less affluent communities of "old'' Brighton, where, according to a recent Wealth of the Nation report, one child in five lives in poverty.
Every Brighton resident's favourite joke about his home city is Keith Waterhouse's observation that, "It looks like a town that's helping police with their inquiries." These days, the Sussex constabulary has more to worry about than crooked antique dealers and scheming bookmakers.
The razor gangs no longer slash their own up on the racecourse. They grapple for control of the drugs trade between the two piers that symbolise the polarities of modern Britain: consumption and neglect, side by side.
We who live here wonder how this Government has unleashed such extraordinary hostility among its own people. This week, the seafront has been overrun by hounds and their masters, anti-globalisation protesters, fair-trade proponents, anti-war demonstrators and a legion of Brighton and Hove Albion fans, who wait like beggars at the gate for John Prescott to approve the club's application for a new stadium at nearby Falmer.
In the pollster's lexicon, "mistrust'' is the new mantra, in Brighton as much as anywhere in Britain. It is the virus in the Government's software. Neither Mr Blair nor Mr Brown - the mod and the rocker of New Labour ideology - can afford to ignore the two main components of this disaffection. Hunting aside, Brighton's middle-class Labour voters are almost uniformly outraged over the invasion of Iraq, while the "indigenous working class", as Julie Burchill has referred to them, see no substantial improvement in local public services, despite the Chancellor's tax-and-spend policy.
Thatcherism unleashed a comparable moral counterforce, of course - but from its opponents, not from its own infantry. Not a single Brighton Labour voter of my acquaintance - and there are many - can currently bear the idea of drawing a cross in Mr Blair's box at the next election. This, in a city that celebrated wildly when Labour returned to power. After all, many of the architects of the New Jerusalem would come home to Brighton after a hard day's social engineering.
The joyous mood, as I recall it, expressed the hope that prosperity would be put to better use than mere endless consumption. It was time to address the country's chronic public investment deficit. In the meantime, Brighton was turning into Right-on.
In childhood memory, Sussex's biggest hub was a nicely decaying seaside town, where you watched cricket at Hove, football at the Goldstone Ground and spivvery at the racecourse.
In its desperation to regenerate and be hip, the council has turned the place into a giant pre-club bar. At weekends, former Londoners who traded two-bedroom flats in Putney for four-bedroom houses in Hove awake to find their parks and beaches trashed by the many "festivals'' that - a cultural elite on the council has decided - are the city's new raison d'être.
Much of "old'' Brighton feels alienated by this drive to turn the borough into a Bacchanalia for guests who leave chaos behind when they jump back in their cars. Liberty, here, means doing what you like and then demanding that someone else clear up the mess.
When Mr Brown talks of economic miracles, local people wonder why the Brighton and Sussex NHS Trust received no stars in the annual performance ratings by the Healthcare Commission published in July. These placed the trust among only 10 in the country to be given no stars and officially classified as failing. They wonder why local state secondary schools are being given £2,771 per pupil per year by the Government when the figure in some inner-city boroughs is £6,000.
The shoppers now being guarded by police with machine guns see government spending rising, but strain their eyes to see the results.
This local take on the Labour conference comes from a community where many of the dark comedies of British life are concentrated. Delegates travelling south on Thameslink trains will have noticed that guards are not guards any longer; their badges identify them as "revenue protection officers''.
Commuting from Brighton to London has become a task for Captain Oates ("I am just going outside and may be some time''). Men and women who moved to the coast to escape the indignities of the capital stagger off delayed evening trains, haggard and tearful, their misery alleviated only slightly by the presence of a Marks & Spencer food hall at the station. "Honey, I'm late again, but I've brought us some fresh ciabatta."
Burchill, a refugee from the Groucho Club, began by praising Brighton as a Utopia for the sea-loving and the open-minded. But soon her sharp journalistic radar was picking up new signals and she was turning her guns on the arts and media mafia who, many here feel, now run the place. It may be no coincidence that Brighton's most famous resident is Jordan, who, like our city, has been artificially inflated to dazzle the eye.
With the sea in front and the glorious South Downs behind, Brighton is still a fine place to live: salty and idiosyncratic, as well as smug. There ought to be no more welcoming venue for a Labour conference, except that many Left-leaning voters here regard the Government, in caricature, as warmongers who have squandered the chance to revive our public services by wasting Mr Brown's great slew of tax revenues.
"New'' Brighton and "Old'' both wait to be reconciled to Mr Blair's Messianic promises. They wonder which of the piers fits his future best.
Labour is not welcome to Brighton
By Paul Hayward
(Filed: 29/09/2004)
This Government is doing its best to be the Brighton Pier of British politics - neon, boisterous and throbbing with power - but many in the city prefer to compare it to the West Pier: a rusting, skeletal hulk that is falling into the sea, a short walk along the promenade.
As seaside metaphors go, a tale of two piers works just as well for Tony Blair and his Chancellor, Gordon Brown. But which is which? The bad news for the Prime Minister is that Brighton is a hall of mirrors. If you want disillusion with the Blair "project'', it can be found both among the liberal intelligentsia who fled London in search of clean air and cheaper property and in the less affluent communities of "old'' Brighton, where, according to a recent Wealth of the Nation report, one child in five lives in poverty.
Every Brighton resident's favourite joke about his home city is Keith Waterhouse's observation that, "It looks like a town that's helping police with their inquiries." These days, the Sussex constabulary has more to worry about than crooked antique dealers and scheming bookmakers.
The razor gangs no longer slash their own up on the racecourse. They grapple for control of the drugs trade between the two piers that symbolise the polarities of modern Britain: consumption and neglect, side by side.
We who live here wonder how this Government has unleashed such extraordinary hostility among its own people. This week, the seafront has been overrun by hounds and their masters, anti-globalisation protesters, fair-trade proponents, anti-war demonstrators and a legion of Brighton and Hove Albion fans, who wait like beggars at the gate for John Prescott to approve the club's application for a new stadium at nearby Falmer.
In the pollster's lexicon, "mistrust'' is the new mantra, in Brighton as much as anywhere in Britain. It is the virus in the Government's software. Neither Mr Blair nor Mr Brown - the mod and the rocker of New Labour ideology - can afford to ignore the two main components of this disaffection. Hunting aside, Brighton's middle-class Labour voters are almost uniformly outraged over the invasion of Iraq, while the "indigenous working class", as Julie Burchill has referred to them, see no substantial improvement in local public services, despite the Chancellor's tax-and-spend policy.
Thatcherism unleashed a comparable moral counterforce, of course - but from its opponents, not from its own infantry. Not a single Brighton Labour voter of my acquaintance - and there are many - can currently bear the idea of drawing a cross in Mr Blair's box at the next election. This, in a city that celebrated wildly when Labour returned to power. After all, many of the architects of the New Jerusalem would come home to Brighton after a hard day's social engineering.
The joyous mood, as I recall it, expressed the hope that prosperity would be put to better use than mere endless consumption. It was time to address the country's chronic public investment deficit. In the meantime, Brighton was turning into Right-on.
In childhood memory, Sussex's biggest hub was a nicely decaying seaside town, where you watched cricket at Hove, football at the Goldstone Ground and spivvery at the racecourse.
In its desperation to regenerate and be hip, the council has turned the place into a giant pre-club bar. At weekends, former Londoners who traded two-bedroom flats in Putney for four-bedroom houses in Hove awake to find their parks and beaches trashed by the many "festivals'' that - a cultural elite on the council has decided - are the city's new raison d'être.
Much of "old'' Brighton feels alienated by this drive to turn the borough into a Bacchanalia for guests who leave chaos behind when they jump back in their cars. Liberty, here, means doing what you like and then demanding that someone else clear up the mess.
When Mr Brown talks of economic miracles, local people wonder why the Brighton and Sussex NHS Trust received no stars in the annual performance ratings by the Healthcare Commission published in July. These placed the trust among only 10 in the country to be given no stars and officially classified as failing. They wonder why local state secondary schools are being given £2,771 per pupil per year by the Government when the figure in some inner-city boroughs is £6,000.
The shoppers now being guarded by police with machine guns see government spending rising, but strain their eyes to see the results.
This local take on the Labour conference comes from a community where many of the dark comedies of British life are concentrated. Delegates travelling south on Thameslink trains will have noticed that guards are not guards any longer; their badges identify them as "revenue protection officers''.
Commuting from Brighton to London has become a task for Captain Oates ("I am just going outside and may be some time''). Men and women who moved to the coast to escape the indignities of the capital stagger off delayed evening trains, haggard and tearful, their misery alleviated only slightly by the presence of a Marks & Spencer food hall at the station. "Honey, I'm late again, but I've brought us some fresh ciabatta."
Burchill, a refugee from the Groucho Club, began by praising Brighton as a Utopia for the sea-loving and the open-minded. But soon her sharp journalistic radar was picking up new signals and she was turning her guns on the arts and media mafia who, many here feel, now run the place. It may be no coincidence that Brighton's most famous resident is Jordan, who, like our city, has been artificially inflated to dazzle the eye.
With the sea in front and the glorious South Downs behind, Brighton is still a fine place to live: salty and idiosyncratic, as well as smug. There ought to be no more welcoming venue for a Labour conference, except that many Left-leaning voters here regard the Government, in caricature, as warmongers who have squandered the chance to revive our public services by wasting Mr Brown's great slew of tax revenues.
"New'' Brighton and "Old'' both wait to be reconciled to Mr Blair's Messianic promises. They wonder which of the piers fits his future best.
