A Somerset Lad

What is the fuss about? What difference does it make if someone paid for Boris Johnson to have the flat decorated? Where does such behaviour rank compared to ministers awarding friends contracts? All of it is a diversion, it is what Dario Fo would have called a burp to relieve indigestion, he would have regarded the spat between Johnson and Cummings as manure that fertilises democracy.

Dario Fo used his humour to ask fundamental questions about our political systems. His play Accidental Death of an Anarchist was published in 1970. Set in Milan, it was inspired by the death of an anarchist in the city in 1969, who mysteriously flew out of a fourth floor window of a police station during questioning. The play has gone through constant adaptations, Fo allowed directors to alter the script to reflect the current situation in the country in which it was being performed.

In the original script, one of the more reflective sequences suggests that the free press functions as no more than a tool of fundamentally corrupt governments.

JOURNALIST: So in other words he’s saying that even when there aren’t scandals, they need to be invented, because it’s a good way of maintaining power and defusing people’s anger.

MANIAC: Correct. A liberatory catharsis of tension… And you journalists are the privileged high priests of the process.

JOURNALIST: Privileged? You must be joking! Not in the eyes of our government! Every time we discover a scandal, they go potty trying to stop the truth getting out.

MANIAC: Certainly… our government… But our government is still pre-Napoleonic… pre-capitalist… You should take a look at the governments of more developed countries… in Northern Europe, for example. You remember the ‘Profumo’ scandal in England? A minister of defence, caught up with drugs, prostitution and spying…!!! Did the state collapse? Or the stock exchange? Not a bit of it. If anything they came out of it stronger than before. People thought: ‘The rot’s there, so let it float to the surface…’ We’re swimming about in it – even swallowing some of it – but nobody comes round telling us that everything’s fine and dandy, and that’s what counts!

SUPERINTENDENT: Surely not. That would be like saying that scandal is the fertiliser of social democracy!

MANIAC: Spot on! Manure! Scandal is the fertiliser of social democracy! In fact I’d go even further: scandal is the best antidote to the worst of poisons – namely when people come to realise what’s really going on. When people begin to realise what’s going on, we’re done for! But look at America – a truly social-democratic society. Did they ever try to censor the true facts about the massacres carried out by the American troops in Vietnam? No they did not! It was on the front pages of all the papers – photos of women butchered, children massacred, villages destroyed. And do you remember the scandal of the nerve gas? The Americans had manufactured enough nerve gas in the US to wipe out the entire population of the world three times over. But did they try to hide the fact? Not a bit of it! In fact, when you turned on the TV, there they were. Trains. ‘And where are those trains going?’ ‘To the seaside.’ ‘And what are those trains carrying?’ ‘Nerve gas. It’s going to be dumped at sea… A few miles off the shoreline!’ So that supposing there’s a little earthquake one day, the containers will crack, and the nerve gas will come bubbling up to the surface, glug-glug-glug, and we’ll all die. Three times over!

They’ve never tried to hush up these scandals. And they’re right not to. That way, people can let off steam, get angry, shudder at the thought of it… ‘Who do these politicians think they are?’ ‘Scumbag generals!’ ‘Murderers!’ And they get more and more angry, and then, burp! A little liberatory burp to relieve their social indigestion.

Fo may be right, Western democracy may be held up by the illusion that we somehow make a difference.  The longer the spat with Cummings continues, the more delighted Boris Johnson will be, the substance will be discounted as mere sour grapes, and the indignation aroused will convince people that their opinion matters.

Next weekend should have been a time of May fairs and may pole dancing, it should have been a time of well dressing and Morris men, and all that is celebratory and joyous about the beginning of the merriest month.

There is a sequence at the opening of the video released to accompany Mumford and Sons’ song Winter Winds that evokes images that seems quintessentially English. The four musicians step out onto a country road.  One is dressed in a three piece light coloured suit with bunting draped around his neck; it is home made bunting of the sort that would once have been found at village fetes, there are hand drawn union jacks on the triangular pennants. One member of the group wears a shirt, waistcoat and trousers, like some workman from former times.  Elsewhere in the video, they cross a meadow filled with wild plants.

The video presents a rural England of meadows and sunshine; a place of village greens and garden fetes and white marquees and coloured bunting, an England of the shires, an England where my home county was typical.

The England evoked is a place of fresh scones and Victoria sponges, and home made jam and chutney, and cucumber sandwiches without crusts, and tea served in china cups with matching saucers. One of the band in the video carries a tambourine; it conjures up memories of folk bands, and Morris dancers with bells and handkerchieves.

Maybe the England of May poles and fairs, of jam and Jerusalem, of warm beer and Stilton, of willow on leather and stripy deck chairs and Panama hats, of ladies in frocks and men in sleeveless pullovers, of all those images; maybe that England is a cliché, a piece of fond imagination. Maybe the England of bunting and wild flowers is not the real England.

Sometimes I wonder if England is anything more than Tom Stoppard’s “conspiracy of cartographers,” a geographical occurrence, with characteristics so divergent that it is not possible to say “this is England?” Does England really exist at all?

The Mumford and Sons video images are probably not the real England, they would probably be alien to the students I teach in a provincial town of 100,000 people, but which images are the real ones? England has been in a state of constant change since the Industrial Revolution in the Eighteenth Century, writers like William Cobbett longed to recapture a bucolic past, but even that past was far from ideal.

Perhaps my images are just a piece of nostalgia, perhaps England is not a land of May fairs, but without them it is a poorer place.

“Where are you with the history lessons?”

“The Chartists, but only for one lesson.”

“Did you do the Luddites and Captain Swing?”

“Only briefly.”

Mr Buchanan would have been disappointed that a significant element of Nineteenth Century English social history had received such cursory attention. The writers of syllabuses that provide for only the briefest of looks at important movements would have prompted him to ask questions.

Mr Buchanan was for two years, 1977-1979, my history tutor at Strode College in the Somerset town of Street. He had an infectious enthusiasm for his subject, regrettably my professed interest in the material was never matched by the degree of application required for success.

We studied European history from the French Revolution in 1789 until the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 and British History from the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 until the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. The history of Europe seemed filled with interesting things like wars and revolutions, whilst the British history was domestic, it seemed about social unrest and parliamentary reform bills and campaigns to improve the lot of ordinary people – and Ireland, always there, Ireland was waiting to make an appearance in each chapter.

It was Mr Buchanan who stirred up my abiding interest in Irish history. Whilst he had little time for the nationalism of his native Scotland, believing it diverted attention from more serious issues that needed to be addressed in late-1970s Britain, his presentation of the state of Ireland in the 19th Century evoked my sympathy for O’Connell and Parnell and Redmond.

Perhaps it was the books we read, perhaps it was that the compilers of the history syllabus for A-level students at that time did not want to court controversy, but our engagement with the history of England never evoked a passion in me that would have matched the passion felt in reading accounts of Nineteenth Century Ireland.

It was not Mr Buchanan’s fault. There were books he recommended, books that were in our college library, that I simply did not read. Notionally radical in my politics, I never troubled myself to learn a history that embraced the Somerset community in which I had grown up. I knew about Sans Culottes, and Red Shirts and Communards and Internationalists, but hardly a thing about Luddites or Captain Swing or Chartists. There was an entire radical history that took place in familiar places and that was just overlooked.

As technology continues to de-skill countless jobs and to supplant workforces, that overlooked history becomes ever more relevant.