John Pilger ‘Radical’ has been too often appropriated by those who are not. I describe myself simply as a journalist. It’s an honourable term if you retain your independence, if you are an agent of people, never of power, reporting the world from the ground up, never from the top down.

I grew up in a family that believed in supporting the underdog: is that radical? I took that principle and a strong anti-authoritarianism into journalism. I like to think that the origins of my anti-authoritarianism came from my great-great grandfather, who was transported to Australia from County Ruscommon for ‘uttering unlawful oaths’.

I worked my cadetship on a right-wing newspaper in Sydney that might have been a setting for Ben Hecht’s The Front Page. The volcanic proprietor, Sir Frank Packer, counted the paperclips and routinely fired the sub-editors if he didn’t like the first edition – or if his horse had lost.

That said, it was a superb place to learn the craft. I tried almost everything, from crime reporting to sport; by the age of 21 I was a deputy chief sub-editor. It was only when I arrived in England in the 1960s and was sent to report on a world I never imagined that I became what might be called ‘radical’. Since then, much has changed for young journalists, and much has not. A young me would still require the determination to navigate through an essentially conservative or ‘corporate’ system.

Platt Would you agree that that conventional cadetship is all but disappearing from journalism today? NUJ president Jeremy Dear (Red Pepper, Jan/Feb 2010) recently cited a prediction by media analyst Clare Enders that half of the country’s 1,300 local papers will close by 2013, with the loss of 20,000 jobs. The ‘conventional’ route into journalism these days seems to consist of a willingness to ‘churn’ (to use Nick Davies’ word) the same unoriginal material for a variety of outlets, on an insecure contract and a pittance in pay. How does the independent journalist deal with that?

Pilger I agree that the idea of a cadetship – in effect, a craft apprenticeship – is all but lost. I have never been convinced that graduate entry into journalism is right; too many media colleges are run by ex-Fleet Street types or ex-BBC people who merely recycle corporate journalism’s disguises. There are honourable exceptions, of course; I am associated with Lincoln University, whose media people have challenged the notion of ideological ‘war journalism’ as the standard for reporting conflict. I admire that.

Yes, the conventional route into journalism these days is a willingness to ‘churn’; it’s also a willingness to adopt a cynicism about readers, viewers and listeners that the young are encouraged to believe ordains them as proper journalists. That’s not new. When scepticism about power challenges this you have the making of an independent journalist. This often requires an iron determination to keep your principles and not be deceived by siren calls to BBC-type ‘professionalism’.

Platt How does one get round the fact that all of the major news outlets pursue broadly similar approaches? Independent journalism isn’t much use without a vehicle through which to express it. Where is the media of today prepared to give the modern independent journalist his or her head in the way that the Daily Mirror gave you the freedom to report from Vietnam and elsewhere in the 1960s?

Pilger The Daily Mirror of the 1960s/70s is unlikely to come back – although it did so for 18 memorable months from October 2001 under Piers Morgan, proving that nothing is lost forever. For young journalists, the internet and the technology to make films easily (if at times chaotically) is their ‘vehicle’. During the invasion of Iraq, Jo Wilding, a young Englishwoman, filed to her own website some of the best eyewitness war reporting I have read. She succeeded where the embedded reporters failed. Her independence made her journalism believable.

Platt I think it’s not just the Daily Mirror of the 1960s that is unlikely to return but the sort of mass readership that went with it. In the 1960s it was possible for a single feature to have an impact that is hard to imagine today. This was even more so with television. Think of Cathy Come Home, which led to the formation of Shelter, and its impact on attitudes – and public policy – towards the homeless. Does the internet and new technology have the same potential? And how do we filter out the stuff that is meaningful and substantial from the new oceans of dross?

Pilger Yes, sifting through the media dross is a big job, but there was always dross. I don’t agree that powerful popular journalism can’t make a splash these days. The Mirror following 9/11 demonstrated this (‘Blair: Blood on his hands’ and others); and the Mirror played an important part in helping to galvanise the anti-war movement in the build-up to the Iraq invasion. On television, think of the recent Dispatches that illuminated the true face of former New Labour ministers. Yes, there are changing trends and umpteen digital channels, but most digital TV is a stream of sameness. Documentaries that are not themselves dross and have something to report and say would draw the public if they were given a peak-time slot. Remember the public is far more aware than it was in the 1960s.

Platt Some people in the anti-war movement might say that the Mirror piggy-backed on what was already a huge upsurge of popular protest – and of course neither the Mirror nor the anti-war movement in general proved capable of taking that protest further once the war had started. I’m interested in how you think a running story (or a continuing injustice) can be kept in the public eye, which relates to how an independent journalist or campaigner can maintain interest or attention beyond the immediate ‘high points’ such as the 2003 protests. A lot of people’s experience of 2003 has finished up being a negative one, in the sense that in the end not even one or two million people on the streets could stop the war.

Pilger I think you are quite wrong to say the anti-war movement proved incapable of taking the protest forward once the invasion had happened. Stop the War in Britain is a remarkable organisation, which has played an unerring role in educating and supporting a consistent and growing public opposition to the war and Blair in the face of the disintegration of the Labour Party and a blizzard of disinformation, not to mention the hand-wringing of those who believed one demonstration would deter Blair’s fanaticism.

The Mirror‘s role in the mobilisation for the anti-war effort in 2003 was certainly unusual but it was within an extraordinary tradition. In 1945, the Mirror mobilised its readers (and most of the electorate) to ‘Vote for them’ – ‘them’ meaning the returning troops and code for a reformist Britain.

Platt Why do you think it is that the left hasn’t managed to develop and sustain its own media in the way that the right has?

Pilger Most of the press is devoted to a corporate status quo, the Guardian included. Broadcasting is no different; the BBC has an enduring right-wing editorial agenda, regardless of its waffle about impartiality. The Tories nationalised the BBC so they could control it. And governments have, more or less. The left – regardless of its support – will never find a home in the corporate media; it must create its own, which it is doing on the web.

Platt You were one of the first journalists, if I remember rightly, to set up his own website. But am I right in thinking that it has been primarily a ‘shop window’ for your work in other media – film and print? As far as I know, you’ve never produced original work for the web. Have you considered, for example, blogging yourself – and do you read the blogs of others?

Pilger My website was set up by a group of young enthusiasts at what was then Central TV. I was an appreciative bystander. They launched me into cyberspace. One of them, Ollie Doward, has managed the site ever since. As for blogging? I spend too much time on my journalism and other commitments to blog. Also, there is an important difference between good journalism and blogging. Of course, there are excellent bloggers – I’ve mentioned Jo Wilding, for example – but there are too many middle-of-the-night, top-of-the-head blowhards.

Platt Do you follow anyone regularly on the web – or any particular websites? One of the things that strikes me persistently is how little truly original content there is out there: a plethora of regurgitated material and (too often right-wing, bigoted) opinion but far too little evidence of the authors getting up and talking to people, which is at the core of your own – and all good – journalism. What would be your advice to young journalists seeking to make the best use of the web?

Pilger The web is central to what I do now. I’ve long changed the habit of a lifetime. I open a newspaper – the Guardian - only after I have looked at at least four or five websites. I don’t agree with you about the web. It has some quite brilliant sites: trawls/digests some of them, yes, but many with original journalism. I’m long fed up with the right-wing press and with formulaic TV news. Have a look at the links on my website, many of them fine journals in their own right.

Platt Do you find that the interactive aspects of the web have greatly increased your own interaction with people over your work? Where once there were only letters and perhaps public meetings, there are now many more – and much more immediate – forms of communication and contact. Not just a story but a campaign can now go global in an instant.

Pilger Email has made a real difference, especially when I’m travelling. And of course there are the mailing lists associated with the web and all the other wondrous mechanisms for mobilising and informing people. I have just downloaded valuable material from Wikileaks – the equivalent would have taken me weeks or months to unearth, if at all. But these are still only tools.

You refer to when there were ‘once’ public meetings. Are you not aware that the public meeting has never been more popular? Over Easter I attended (in Melbourne) what can only be described as a festival of debate and free speech on issues that the mass media ignores or suppresses. At each event there were up to 500 people present. Public meetings are the real test of public awareness, because they require us to get up from our computers and to take action.

Platt How do you feel about the description of yourself as a ‘campaigning journalist’? You’ve mentioned the anti-war movement. To what extent do you see yourself as an active campaigner, part of a movement rather than just an individual reporter? And to what extent do you think journalists should be involved in campaign activities? Is there a conflict?

Pilger I don’t use the term ‘campaigning journalist’; but as it often comes in good faith, I accept it. I am, above all, an independent journalist, which I have already described.

Platt A letter in a recent issue of the New Statesman, aimed at you personally, levels a complaint that is familiar to radical journalists and the left in general: ‘John Pilger tells us what he is against but fails to set out what he is for, and how to achieve it.’ How do you respond to that sort of criticism?

Pilger That letter was about my column on Haiti. Did you read the letter the following week which answered it? That writer described all that my article was ‘for’ – for example, I am for people living in secure structures that do not collapse because they are jerry-built; I am for people not having poverty imposed on them, and so on.

My job is to help give people the most essential power of all: truthful information, without which nothing can change. This can at times be a daunting task. Through all my work there runs a transparent set of positive, practical and achievable principles which, I believe, are necessary to build a new world. Unlike those who look for excuses, who cry out to be ‘led’, the great majority of my readers and viewers have no difficulty in understanding this.

Platt Of course the truth can set you free – and it’s certainly an essential prerequisite in any attempt to build a new world. But it isn’t enough in itself, is it? Eventually someone has to get their hands dirty and start building, even if it’s not the people who write about it. Are principles enough – or does there have to be practice?

Pilger I think I have done my share of ‘getting my hands dirty’ in order to produce a positive result. Cambodia. East Timor. Palestine. The thalidomide children. The struggle of indigenous people in Australia. Et cetera. If you go to a country that doesn’t have the privileges and, yes, freedoms our society still has, where struggle is raw and dangerous, and you plead, ‘Oh what can you do?’ people will look at you dumbfounded, because the question simply doesn’t arise. They know what to do. And so should we.

Platt Which of the many stories are you are most pleased (if that is the right word) to have covered in your career – and which would you have most liked to but didn’t?

Pilger It’s difficult to single out one that pleased me more than others. But several endure in the memory – Cambodia and East Timor, for example. The impact of the films I made there – five films in Cambodia – had real and positive consequences for the lives of many people. In my book, Heroes, I describe in some detail what happened in Cambodia. Year Zero raised, unsolicited, some $45 million, and led to the restoration of life in numerous forms.

In Britain, my TV and Mirror reports in support of the ‘Y List’ of Thalidomide victims led to their compensation. The Y List were working class children whose mothers had no record of taking the drug and were left out of the original settlement; the X List were mostly middle class children whose mothers had kept the prescription and had the support of the Sunday Times.

My reports about the maternity unit at Hackney Hospital, where conditions were so bad women had died in childbirth, led to its closure and the building of a new unit. I have reported extensively on Australia’s indigenous population, the poorest in the world. This has made me both friends and enemies in my homeland. Last year, I received the Sydney Peace Prize, Australia’s human rights prize. Accepting it in the city where I was born and grew up gave me particular pleasure.

Platt You remain notably optimistic about the potential for journalism in particular and people in general to change the world. So what is the story that is crying out for the attention of the young and optimistic independent/radical journalist of today?

Pilger The issue isn’t really one of optimism versus pessimism, or hope versus despair. (Woody Allen said he felt much better when he gave up hope.) These can replace rational thinking and prevent us from looking beyond the everyday cynicism and propaganda of corporate politics and the media and recognising the gains made in our lifetime by us: not least in our personal lives. The danger these days is manufactured illusion, presided over by a corporate cult of the ‘eternal present’, as Time magazine likes to call it.

The media in all its ephemeral and hi-tech forms is at the centre of this, especially in corrupting political language, fixing the boundaries of debate, promoting rapacious power and seeking to persuade us that ‘nothing can be done’. So I would say the story crying out for the attention of young journalists is propaganda in the media age: that is to say, all forms of the media, including advertising and corporate public relations.

PR Week once estimated that more than half of all newspaper content was PR-generated, particularly in the City and sports pages. The corporatising, or appropriation, of news and facts and truth, and the dereliction of public memory, are probably the most critical issues today – for one thing, they lead us to unnecessary war as a permanent state removed in distance and culture from our everyday lives.

This is barbaric, of course, as is its corollary: unnecessary poverty. We are not automatons; we have no choice but to deal with these challenges as human beings and to support those who struggle on our behalf.

by Lyn Smith

and

The English Rebel

by David Horspool

There is a deep-seated myth about the English that insists on a national character that is rarely roused from Wyndham Lewis’s notion of an ideal Englishman: ‘straightforward, tolerant, peaceable, humane, unassuming, patient’. We don’t do rebellion or revolution here, it has been said since the days of Edmund Burke and his horror at French revolutionary excess.

Even the left has gone along with this self-image. George Orwell, describing his return from Spain in his closing paragraph of Homage to Catalonia, famously bemoaned the fact that ‘it is difficult when you pass that way … to believe that anything is really happening anywhere. Earthquakes in Japan, famines in China, revolutions in Mexico? Don’t worry, the milk will be on the doorstep tomorrow morning, the New Statesman will come out on Friday.’ Here everything was as he remembered it as a child, ‘all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs’.

Of course, as we know, if England was sleeping it was certainly jerked awake by that roar of bombs. And as David Horspool so lucidly describes in The English Rebel (subtitled ‘One thousand years of troublemaking, from the Normans to the Nineties’), there has been no shortage of people who have been wide awake and ready to dissent from any sleepy consensus or complacency in their nation’s past.

Horspool does well to start with those who fought the Norman conquest, an invasion as unrelentingly vicious as anything that the English inflicted on the Irish, Welsh and Scots. And he makes clear how every institution that is seen today to represent the ordered, peaceable tradition beloved of conservative England – church, monarch, parliament, law – has been contested in blood. Why do the conservatives not see it this way? Because, as Sir John Harington put it in 1618: ‘Treason doth never prosper, what’s the reason? For if it prosper none dare call it treason.’

There are plenty of treasonous and other rebels to fire the spirit in this book, not all (or even the majority) of them left-wing of course, and far from all of them violent. Horspool couldn’t do justice to them all, and Lyn Smith’s Voices Against War fills an important omission. Making use of some 200 personal testimonies from the Imperial War Museum’s oral history collection, it takes the reader close to the hearts of some of those who rebelled against a century of warfare – and lets us hear in their own words why they did so.

Steve Platt

Sound appealing? Check out our bookstore for both Voices Against War and The English Rebel.

Half a century later it’s hard to imagine the impact made by the visit of the Berliner Ensemble to London’s Palace Theatre in August 1956, a fortnight after the death of its founder Bertolt Brecht. Performing only in German with no surtitles (‘We shall be offering most of the audience a pure pantomime, a kind of silent film on the stage,’ said Brecht in his last message to the company), the Ensemble’s short season of three Brecht plays (Mother Courage, The Caucasian Chalk Circle and Trumpets and Drums) took the English stage by storm.

For the veteran theatre critic Michael Billington, recalling the visit in his epic State of the Nation: British theatre since 1945 (Faber and Faber, 2007), it was one of two events in the ‘pivotal year of 1956′ that ‘in the short term exposed [Britain's] cultural divisions and in the long term genuinely changed the British theatre’. The other was the establishment of the English Stage Company (ESC) at the Royal Court, whose first productions that year included Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and, most famously, John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger.

Billington notes how the ESC’s director-designate George Devine had seen the Berliner Ensemble at work in Germany the previous year and ‘ended up bowled over by Brecht’s achievement of a “poetic reality”‘. For Devine, as with those who were similarly ‘bowled over’ by the Ensemble in London in 1956, Brecht’s medium was more important than his Marxist message (which the Foreign Office had tried to suppress by way of an unsuccessful bid to deny the East German company entry visas). ‘British theatre practitioners,’ Billington writes, ‘seized avidly on the acting, the decor, the lighting and the austere purity of the productions.

‘For a generation raised on star casting, short rehearsal periods, the encrustations of naturalism and the frayed maintenance of theatrical illusion, the visit of the Berliner Ensemble provided a profound stylistic shock: one that was to permeate the British theatre, and even rival media, over the coming decades.’

Pervasive techniques

‘Brechtian’ theatre techniques have become so pervasive – in film and television as well as on the stage – that we have to imagine ourselves back in the 1950s to recognise just how revolutionary they appeared at the time.

Consider, for example, Brecht’s key objective of stripping away the artifice of traditional bourgeois theatre. He wanted, he said, to ‘drop the assumption that there is a fourth wall cutting the audience off from the stage and the consequent illusion that the stage action is taking place in reality and without an audience’.

We are accustomed today to minimalist stage sets, undisguised staging techniques, open stage wings, exposed stage machinery, visible lighting rigs and all the rest. We are familiar, too, with the use of non-naturalistic, discordant, sometimes non-chronological or seemingly disconnected scenes and storytelling methods.

We are even, despite this age of celebrity, unfazed by casts of actors who, as the critic Kenneth Tynan described those appearing in the Berliner Ensemble’s Mother Courage, ‘look shockingly like people, real, potato-faced people such as one might meet in a bus queue’. No one bats an eyelid when the National’s current production of Mother Courage dispenses with certain stage-set artifices altogether and simply drops down white sheets with ‘A thatched cottage’, ‘A general’s tent’ or ‘An army canteen’ painted roughly on them. In 1956, this sort of thing was still strikingly avant garde, challenging and fresh.

So too was the Brechtian approach to acting. This involved, above all, his famous notion of verfremdungseffekt – the ‘alienation’ or ‘estrangement effect’ (see box, right). Brecht was scathing about the kind of theatre that required ‘the spectator to leave his reasoning powers with his hat and coat [and] to simply engage in a trancelike orgy of feeling’. He sought to get his audiences to engage their ‘critical faculties in assessing what was being enacted, and gain insights’.

In Kenneth Tynan’s words again, the performers in Brecht’s plays ‘do not behave like western actors; they neither bludgeon us with personality nor woo us with charm’. To do so would be to undermine the fundamental intent of Brecht’s work, which was to lay bare the reality beneath the surface of capitalist illusion.

Brecht sought to stimulate the intellect of his audience into recognising how so much of what appears ‘natural’, rational and immutable is in reality nothing of the sort. And, as the Latin American literary theorist Roberto Schwarz puts it in ‘Brecht’s relevance: highs and lows’, an essay recently translated and adapted for New Left Review (May/June 2009), he was convinced that: ‘Once the oppressed made out the strange in the familiar, the irrational in the everyday, and the anomalous in the rule, an acceptable and comprehensive reorganisation of society [would be] close at hand.’

Brechtian politics and theatre

It is impossible to isolate either Brecht’s writing or his production methods from the political beliefs that underpinned them. The Brechtian project for the transformation of the theatre went hand in hand with the Marxist project for the transformation of society. And it was inevitable that once the 20th-century application of Marxism failed to bring about the social and economic changes that its adherents had argued were historically inevitable, so too would the nature of the Brechtian impact on theatre alter.

As Schwarz notes, ‘[when] the place on the leading edge of history that Brecht’s method presumed found itself without support in the real course of things [this transformed] clear-sighted critical superiority into an illusion’. It was the ultimate inversion: the exposer of bourgeois artifice himself exposed as a peddler of political illusion. ‘Under these circumstances, the didactic component of Brechtian estrangement was left without anything to teach, at least directly; and so changed its meaning.’

Brecht was far from alone on the Marxist left in failing to recognise the immense adaptability and social and cultural flexibility of the capitalist order. As Schwarz writes (in specific relation to Latin America but it applies more generally), ‘The “economic miracle” had brought not just a leap in manufacturing and its internationalisation, but a liberalisation of sexual mores, a normalisation of drug use, the partial – and precarious – incorporation of the poor into mass consumerism, and the desacralising commercialisation of culture. The left’s certainty that it was the party of historical progress, while its adversary would be traditionalist, lost its footing in reality. Meanwhile, commercial culture had appropriated the most sensational aesthetic discoveries of the avant-garde, Brechtian drama included, for its own purposes.’

So Brechtian methods found their way into everything from advertising new cleaning products to the exposed stage sets of television newscasts, in which ‘the Brechtian focus on the material infrastructure of ideology – [for example] on the didactic inclusion of the wings on centre-stage … [functioned] as a prop for the authority of capital, rather than a critique.

‘The cameras and cameramen filming other cameras that filmed the studio, the giant logo, the anchormen, all lent weight and immutability to the industrial-commercial apparatus which stood behind the highly partisan account of the world that we would shortly be given.’

What had been a tool in the historic struggle for emancipation was turned into another weapon in the cultural armoury of the ruling class.

An entertaining message

If Brecht’s methods were subject to appropriation, his message could not be so easily adulterated. Tony Kushner’s new translation and Deborah Warner’s direction of Mother Courage at the National Theatre remains true to Brecht’s original concept of ‘epic theatre’, capturing the ‘pointless, grotesquely protracted, gruesome catastrophe’ (Kushner’s words) that was the Thirty Years War. And in its dramatic account of that war as experienced by some of its ordinary participants it remains as relevant and insightful to a 21st-century audience as it did to a world recovering from the ravages of two world wars.

The National’s production also manages to do what the Berliner Ensemble was doing half a century ago. The critic Harold Hobson wrote of the Ensemble in Theatre in Britain (1984) that it exposed the poverty of productions of Brecht that were ‘heavy, sententious and void of life’ with an approach full of ‘verve, melodramatic vigour, and regard for theatrical effect as well as doctrinal orthodoxy’. To the Ensemble – and now to the National – ‘had been revealed a truth hidden from their British rivals, namely that Brecht and entertainment are synonymous’.

It is a myth that Brecht was ever unaware of the importance of entertainment. But stripped of its expressly didactic intent and its purposeful context as part of the transformational Marxist project, Mother Courage becomes, like the rest of Brecht’s work, precisely what Brecht would not have wanted it to become: a classic, rather than an interventionist drama.

Brecht’s methods may have become mainstream and his message may retain much potency in its modern incarnation, but the political movement of which he was a critical member – at least in its dominant 20th-century form – has been consigned to the dustbin of history.

The perfect subject for a piece of modern-day Brechtian epic theatre, in other words.

‘In response to your piece on the poet laureate

[Andrew Motion] I offer my unjubilee poem.

Adrian Mitchell (shadow poet laureate)’

We wanted to let Red Pepper readers know what had prompted this short deadly shot across the bows of the incumbent poet laureate, Andrew Motion.

An interview ensued (see ‘Contra verses from the shadow’, Red Pepper, April 2002). It was, as ever, a joy. Adrian was sharp and quick and funny, and always honest and critical.

Adrian always considered himself an anarchist, rejecting many aspects of the state, and particularly the ways that monarchs and the powerful were puffed up and stroked by the sycophants in all their courtly garb. He was appalled that titles were so easily offered and accepted – and with such gross solemnity and pomposity; he often said of the royals that they were just humans! When, however, a man whom he regarded as a great poet had accepted the mantle, Adrian did not feel the urge to puncture. Ted Hughes had been a royalist and yet was a great poet. But Andrew Motion was no Ted Hughes.

For Adrian such masquerades were intended to gloss over the real world. In those worlds injustice was never recognised and therefore never tackled. Wars maybe could happen to other people but somehow we would be inured or absolved. And the poet laureate could continue to offer the veneer of poetic forms to celebrate a monarch or her spouse, or their grandsons’ army exploits, and nothing new or questioning or uncomfortable would ever be introduced.

He knew he was in the tradition of particular poets – those who had seen and spoken out in the face of great tyranny and horror, such as Byron, Blake or Whitman. And for Adrian, poetry was about speaking to the powerful. Sometimes with great sorrow, sometimes with humour.

Last September when the present incumbent announced that he would be standing down, I wrote to Adrian saying, ‘We’ve been sitting around talking about the bleating of the PL and how his well springs are drying up and who would be the replacement. We thought there ought to be a critical debate about the archaic nature of the position and the need to remove it entirely or to ensure the whole bended-knee nature of the post must be made central … so that anyone accepting it would realise its pathetic nature and poets will say “never no more”. Shouldn’t there be a wonderful, wild, loud, popular, funny challenge to this remnant of the era of Lord Chamberlains?’

Adrian replied that he’d done his bit by declaring himself shadow laureate. ‘I think anyone who disapproves of the post should also declare themselves shadow poet laureates. Maybe there should be an election for the Worst Poet in Britain, who would then get the poet laureateship. That could be fun!’

Jane Shallice

————————————–

Adrian was – and remains – the tallest man I can imagine. When I picture him with his long face, I see a campanile of voices, rhyming, joking, teasing, lamenting, and showing losers how to be tall. Wherever he went, he carried all he had ever heard and observed, everything piled up like plates, inside him. (Infuriated by an injustice, he could throw plates.) When he was young – he wrote songs, dirges, slapstick during half a century – he was already old, and when he was old he was still like a kid. A skylight not a cellar man.

Doctor rat explains

this experiment proves

that the meaning of Money can be taught

to the majority of human beings

His poems are often like ladders. Listening to them or reading them, you climb rung by rung and as you mount, you see further and further into the distance. At the top you have no choice but to jump and like Mercury you find you have wings on your heels. Mercury the god of messengers and crooks.
Adrian loved tall stories because he loathed every form of putting down and keeping in place. Also because tall stories are generous and he didn’t have a speck or smudge of meanness in him.

Poet, playwright and window cleaner. He had large hands. Methodical hands. Whilst cleaning he joked. Joke after joke. Yet when he moved his ladder on to the next window what you saw through yours was painfully sharp.

What men fear in women

is as obvious

as the shining photographs

and cross-section diagrams

in a brochure provided,

with a smile, by a car salesman

What he didn’t know about politics wasn’t worth knowing. But he never fell into the conceit and deceit of knowing the answers.

He could persuade words to stop and to create a special silence, a silence which encouraged listeners to say things together under their breath. Under their breath but with confirmed confidence.

When he himself was reading out loud he could whisper like a kid at the back of the class, and, a moment later, he could assume the immense breathing of a crowd in the streets demanding their rights.

The first two lines in his very first book of poems were:

Good-bye

He breathed in air, he breathed out light.

Charlie Parker was my delight

The doctors say Adrian died of pneumonia. But the campanile remains.

John Berger

———————————————

A children’s tale

In 1997, shortly after I became artistic director of the Unicorn Theatre for Children, Adrian Mitchell invited me to meet at his house. Long a hero of mine – artist-rebel, anti-Vietnam war poet and translator of Peter Brook’s Marat-Sade – I could hardly contain my excitement. After shooing his beloved dog Daisy out of the sitting-room, he proposed that the Unicorn produce a musical trilogy based on his stage adaptations of Beatrix Potter’s tales.

I must have raised an eyebrow. Adrian enthused that it would be like The Ring Cycle, only for juniors. When I told him I’d never read Potter he stared at me in astonishment. But, he protested, she’s one of our greatest writers. He put a stash of her beguiling little books in my hands and sent me on my way. Adrian’s version of Tom Kitten And His Friends had already been a Unicorn favourite. So we started to work on Jemima Puddle-Duck and Her Friends.

Composer Steve McNeff and I thought the text was a little slim dramatically. I approached Adrian to see if he’d consider fleshing it out. Again he stared at me dumbfounded. What on earth for?

I suggested that nothing much seems to happen in The Tale of Jeremy Fisher. Adrian replied that if I’d almost been eaten by an enormous trout I might see it differently. In the end, Adrian’s lyrical economy, especially in the songs, proved a perfect match with Potter’s exquisite sense of wonder and precision. And his love of words, animals and children sang through each note and line.

He was a standard-bearer for the Unicorn, where he was writer-in-residence in the 1980s. He went on to complete the Potter cycle with Peter Rabbit and His Friends, which we produced for Peter’s centenary. But it was that daffy duck Jemima that proved to be our Götterdämmerung. We staged it three times over ten years and with each tiny detailed modification it grew into something special.

I think that Adrian enjoyed theatre for children as much as anything else in his rich, prodigious life. He would sit surrounded by our lively, curious young audiences and laugh and weep and beam with pleasure (and then give me countless notes about how things could be improved). He wanted to share the books and poems and music that had affected him so deeply as a child. Was there anything he liked as much as inspiring children to draw their own pictures, write their own poems, tell their own tales?

Tony Graham

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The dog of peace

When he was about 25, Adrian came to read some of his poems to a group of students in Oxford. I can see him clearly. I’m surprised when I try to think about him now how few concrete memories I have, considering the hole I feel in my life now he’s no longer there. We’d run into each other at a meeting, demonstration, reading, play, over 50 years, and I took for granted his being there, a warm, like-minded, inspiring colleague. The last time I saw him he was walking on Hampstead Heath, as always with the dog of peace. Small vivid images linked by strong feeling, rather as you get in a poem.

Caryl Churchill

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How is it a man dies?

I’ve known Adrian and his wife of 47 years, Celia, for a long time, and in one of those twists of life that make some think beyond coincidence to meaning and fate we’d had much more than usual to do with each other in the weeks leading up to his death before Christmas. Celia and I had been engaged in wrapping up the Medical Aid for Iraq charity, of which we have been officers since the first Gulf War. And I had been trying to get Adrian to pick up his journalistic pen again (his writing career began in journalism), specifically to write about David Tennant’s Hamlet as he’d seen all the great Hamlets of the past half-century.

As it happened, Tennant injured his back, so he wasn’t playing the part at the press night. Adrian said he was too ill to write anyway; he spent the next day in hospital and was ‘desperately trying to rest’ – a notion that barely entered the vocabulary of a man who felt an almost moral imperative to fulfil every request to appear, no matter how remote the venue or small the audience. His unwillingness to rest, his reluctance to miss a reading almost certainly delayed the diagnosis and exacerbated the consequences of the pneumonia he developed last autumn. And as if his writing, his performance and his other work was not enough, he remained a tireless campaigner in the cause of peace.

In his last email to me, a week before his death, he wrote of ‘trying to get Ian Hislop to set his hounds on the New Statesman for regularly printing full page colour adverts for BAE Systems and asking his investigators to trace the effect of the ads on the editorial side of the Statesman’. I had made Adrian poetry editor of the NS when I edited the magazine in the 1990s, and his was an important influence on my editorship well beyond poetry. From Benjamin Zephaniah to Brian Patten, and from Alex Comfort to Paul McCartney, Adrian’s pages – like the man himself – sparkled with enthusiasm, commitment and verve. I’m glad that in what I never dreamed would turn out to be my final email to him, I took the time to tell him how those pages were among my proudest achievements at the Statesman.
Among the many fine poems that Adrian published during our time working together was one that Robert Graves wrote in his seventies, which appeared as part of a ‘Poetry Extra‘ in the NS in 1994. It seems absolutely fitting to Adrian’s memory:

How is it a man dies?

How is it a man dies

Before his natural death?

He dies from telling lies

To those who trusted him.

He dies from telling lies -

With closed ears and shut eyes.

Or what prolongs men’s lives

Beyond their natural death?

It is their truth survives

Treading remembered streets

Rallying frightened hearts

In hordes of fugitives.

Steve Platt

My mum and dad always understood how education matters; my mum even managed to pull off the feat of training to be a teacher and bringing up three kids (when we were old enough to do at least a few things for ourselves) simultaneously. But it was always more in the sense of it giving you some kind of economic security in life – an opportunity of ending that dependence on ‘pits, pots and steel’ for employment that limited (and when those industries closed, blighted) so many lives in my hometown of Stoke-on-Trent. Like most people from ordinary sorts of backgrounds, I grew up in a cultural desert. The very idea of art and culture was something that belonged to them – the upper classes, nobs, southerners, snobs, all of whom were conflated in our resolutely proletarian provincial eyes.

You internalise a disdain for that which you have been denied. The object of potential desire is transmuted into an object of contempt. And so it is with ‘high’ art and culture.

That’s something that Lee Hall, who wrote Billy Elliot and whose Pitmen Painters is currently showing at the National Theatre, understands both intellectually and emotionally. Pitmen Painters, which premiered at the Live Theatre in Newcastle in September 2007, is the story of the Ashington Group of (mainly) miner-painters, who started off by hiring a Newcastle University lecturer to deliver a Workers’ Education Association class on art appreciation and finished up painting their own working-class niche in art history.

The group became famous not only for its art – vibrant, non-nonsense representations of ordinary working-class life by ordinary working men (no women in the WEA in those days) whose harsh lives encompassed two world wars and a seamless cycle of six-day weeks at the colliery – but also for the fact that they remained avowedly ‘non-professional’. They continued with their jobs at the pit, or in one case as a ‘dental mechanic’, even when one of their number was offered a stipend (‘What the bloody hell’s a stipend?’) to give up work and paint full time. They operated as a collective, and any money they made from the sale of their paintings was paid into the group’s funds to cover the cost of materials and other expenses.

These were men who were not unknowledgeable about their subject, for all that Lee Hall’s play enjoys some laughs at the expense of their lack of learning. (‘Let’s see – Titian.’ ‘Bless you.’ ‘Leonardo is perhaps the acme of the entire Renaissance.’ ‘I thought you said he was a painter.’) ‘We’re not thick, you know – well apart from Jimmy,’ says one of the pitmen painters, George Brown. ‘We’ve just done evolutionary biology.’ ‘Most of wi left school when we were eleven, so there’s a lot of things we divvint knaa,’ says Oliver Kilbourn, who was to become one of the best known members of the group and was the one who turned down the stipend from the art collecting aristocrat Helen Sutherland. ‘But that’s why we come here – to find oot about the world.’ In later years, as Hall comments in his programme notes, they were to write knowledgably about Cézanne and Picasso and were ardent devotees of Turner, Ruskin and Blake.

‘Quite clearly, the working classes of the early part of the last century were aspirational about high art,’ writes Hall. ‘They not only felt entitled, but felt a duty to take part in the best that life has to offer in terms of art and culture. That 50 years later I could write Billy Elliot, a story about the incomprehension of a mining community towards a similar aspirant to high culture, seems to me some sort of index of a political and cultural failure.’
Hall says that the fact that the Ashington Group achieved so much unaided and unabetted ‘should remind us that dumbing down is not a prerequisite of culture being more accessible. That is a lie perpetuated by those who want to sell us shit.’ I think it’s more than that. It is a reflection of that poverty of aspirations that does as much, if not more, to keep ordinary working people down as any material poverty. And it is a denial of the opportunity for all of us to achieve something transformative in our lives, whoever we are and in whatever circumstances we find ourselves, and to experience the numinance of art (a word, incidentally, that Hall uses in Pitmen Painters but appears as a noun in few dictionaries and gets only 47 mentions on Google) – basically its spiritual essence, the thing that moves us, that transcends the everyday and the ordinary.

There is a hugely uplifting conclusion to the first act of Pitmen Painters in which the actors deliver a shared crescendo of lines, each speaking a quick phrase or sentence in turn, starting with their experience of a visit to the Tate Gallery; taking in the notion of art not being about money or ownership but about something shared, something cherished; capturing the idea of the force, the energy, the spirituality, the creativity, the inspiration of art; and concluding with the sense of art as something that you do rather than something you consume. ‘You can take one set of things – some board, some paint, whatever. You can take this one set of things – and you can make them something else. Whatever your circumstances – rich or poor … And that is what is important about art. You take one thing – and you make one thing into another – and you transform – who you are.’

It doesn’t have to be painting. It can be poetry, music, film, theatre, dance, football (why not?) or any number of other outlets for the creativity, inspiration and artistic accomplishment and appreciation that lies within us all. Pitmen Painters should be performed at every underachieving working-class comprehensive in the country as an inspiration to those who might need a nudge to appreciate the existence of a world beyond that of Big Brother and celebrity culture; and to every single one of the shabby heirs to the labour movement that gave us the Ashington Group as a reminder not just of what has been mislaid along the cultural way but of how much might be achieved if only we put our minds to it.

Paintings by the Ashington Group were sold at exhibitions to raise funds for materials and running the hut in which the painters worked, but those that were regarded as the best were kept for the ‘permanent collection’. Most of the 86 paintings in this collection can now be viewed in a specially designed gallery at Woodhorn Colliery Museum, Queen Elizabeth II Country Park, Ashington, Northumberland NE63 9YF (Tel: 01670 528080)

My mum and dad always understood how education matters; my mum even managed to pull off the feat of training to be a teacher and bringing up three kids (when we were old enough to do at least a few things for ourselves) simultaneously. But it was always more in the sense of it giving you some kind of economic security in life – an opportunity of ending that dependence on ‘pits, pots and steel’ for employment that limited (and when those industries closed, blighted) so many lives in my hometown of Stoke-on-Trent. Like most people from ordinary sorts of backgrounds, I grew up in a cultural desert. The very idea of art and culture was something that belonged to them – the upper classes, nobs, southerners, snobs, all of whom were conflated in our resolutely proletarian provincial eyes.

You internalise a disdain for that which you have been denied. The object of potential desire is transmuted into an object of contempt. And so it is with ‘high’ art and culture.

That’s something that Lee Hall, who wrote Billy Elliot and whose Pitmen Painters is currently showing at the National Theatre, understands both intellectually and emotionally. Pitmen Painters, which premiered at the Live Theatre in Newcastle in September 2007, is the story of the Ashington Group of (mainly) miner-painters, who started off by hiring a Newcastle University lecturer to deliver a Workers’ Education Association class on art appreciation and finished up painting their own working-class niche in art history.

The group became famous not only for its art – vibrant, non-nonsense representations of ordinary working-class life by ordinary working men (no women in the WEA in those days) whose harsh lives encompassed two world wars and a seamless cycle of six-day weeks at the colliery – but also for the fact that they remained avowedly ‘non-professional’. They continued with their jobs at the pit, or in one case as a ‘dental mechanic’, even when one of their number was offered a stipend (‘What the bloody hell’s a stipend?’) to give up work and paint full time. They operated as a collective, and any money they made from the sale of their paintings was paid into the group’s funds to cover the cost of materials and other expenses.

These were men who were not unknowledgeable about their subject, for all that Lee Hall’s play enjoys some laughs at the expense of their lack of learning. (‘Let’s see – Titian.’ ‘Bless you.’ ‘Leonardo is perhaps the acme of the entire Renaissance.’ ‘I thought you said he was a painter.’) ‘We’re not thick, you know – well apart from Jimmy,’ says one of the pitmen painters, George Brown. ‘We’ve just done evolutionary biology.’ ‘Most of wi left school when we were eleven, so there’s a lot of things we divvint knaa,’ says Oliver Kilbourn, who was to become one of the best known members of the group and was the one who turned down the stipend from the art collecting aristocrat Helen Sutherland. ‘But that’s why we come here – to find oot about the world.’ In later years, as Hall comments in his programme notes, they were to write knowledgably about Cézanne and Picasso and were ardent devotees of Turner, Ruskin and Blake.

‘Quite clearly, the working classes of the early part of the last century were aspirational about high art,’ writes Hall. ‘They not only felt entitled, but felt a duty to take part in the best that life has to offer in terms of art and culture. That 50 years later I could write Billy Elliot, a story about the incomprehension of a mining community towards a similar aspirant to high culture, seems to me some sort of index of a political and cultural failure.’

Hall says that the fact that the Ashington Group achieved so much unaided and unabetted ‘should remind us that dumbing down is not a prerequisite of culture being more accessible. That is a lie perpetuated by those who want to sell us shit.’ I think it’s more than that. It is a reflection of that poverty of aspirations that does as much, if not more, to keep ordinary working people down as any material poverty. And it is a denial of the opportunity for all of us to achieve something transformative in our lives, whoever we are and in whatever circumstances we find ourselves, and to experience the numinance of art (a word, incidentally, that Hall uses in Pitmen Painters but appears as a noun in few dictionaries and gets only 47 mentions on Google) – basically its spiritual essence, the thing that moves us, that transcends the everyday and the ordinary.

There is a hugely uplifting conclusion to the first act of Pitmen Painters in which the actors deliver a shared crescendo of lines, each speaking a quick phrase or sentence in turn, starting with their experience of a visit to the Tate Gallery; taking in the notion of art not being about money or ownership but about something shared, something cherished; capturing the idea of the force, the energy, the spirituality, the creativity, the inspiration of art; and concluding with the sense of art as something that you do rather than something you consume. ‘You can take one set of things – some board, some paint, whatever. You can take this one set of things – and you can make them something else. Whatever your circumstances – rich or poor … And that is what is important about art. You take one thing – and you make one thing into another – and you transform – who you are.’

It doesn’t have to be painting. It can be poetry, music, film, theatre, dance, football (why not?) or any number of other outlets for the creativity, inspiration and artistic accomplishment and appreciation that lies within us all. Pitmen Painters should be performed at every underachieving working-class comprehensive in the country as an inspiration to those who might need a nudge to appreciate the existence of a world beyond that of Big Brother and celebrity culture; and to every single one of the shabby heirs to the labour movement that gave us the Ashington Group as a reminder not just of what has been mislaid along the cultural way but of how much might be achieved if only we put our minds to it.

Paintings by the Ashington Group were sold at exhibitions to raise funds for materials and running the hut in which the painters worked, but those that were regarded as the best were kept for the ‘permanent collection’. Most of the 86 paintings in this collection can now be viewed in a specially designed gallery at Woodhorn Colliery Museum, Queen Elizabeth II Country Park, Ashington, Northumberland NE63 9YF (Tel: 01670 528080)

The rat used to be a bit of fun, at once at home in and livening up the grimy streetscape. Now it’s ‘art’ and, like the Banksy-adorned wall in Portobello Road that attracted a winning bid of £208,100 in an online auction in January, it’s become a commodity that has lost any connection with the ethos that originally inspired it.

What Banksy should do now to preserve his artistic integrity is to flood the market with stencilled street art, playing capitalism at its own game by using the laws of supply and demand to prick the absurdist bubble. It’s the only way to take back control from the folk who think that every act of creative energy has its price.

Spray it loud

I had a brief career as a graffiti artist myself. Jill Posener wrote me up as a ‘graffitist’ (she made up the description, although she put the word into my mouth) in her 1982 book Spray it Loud, which featured some of my efforts. I got picked up by the Special Patrol Group for my troubles, paint pot and dripping brush in hand; and I think I’m the only person alive who ever got prosecuted for ‘putting up posters without permission on the market buildings’ in Widnes. (Actually it was a hand-painted eight-verse poem but the magistrate ruled that was the same thing legally.) A couple of us even redecorated Aldwych tube station, which closed in 1994, in some long-forgotten protest over democracy in Greece.

But no one ever thought of preserving my efforts behind Perspex. I got fined a few times but never got paid for anything, and eventually moved on to other artistic outlets. Now I complain with the rest of them about scratched graffiti tags on bus windows and in communal stairwells. (Since this is the only criminal act that comes with a signed confession as a matter of course, why do the police find it so very difficult to deal with?) And instead of doing it myself I write copy for Channel 4\’s Big Art Project website and the accompanying Big Art Mob, which has won Royal Television Society and Guardian New Media awards for an innovative set-up whereby people can post photos of ‘public art’ from around the country via their mobile phones.

The Big Art Project is based on the notion that public art can transform a space into a place. When a community participates in that transformation, it can change how people feel about living in or visiting that place. So, in October 2005, Channel 4 invited nominations for sites – and communities – where they wanted new works of public art. More than 1,400 members of the public across the UK responded, and seven sites were selected where the local communities have been involved in choosing the kind of public art they want to create and which artists they want to commission to do it.

It’s a ‘bottom-up’ approach that has produced very different outcomes in different places. In Burnley, the first of the seven commissions to be unveiled in March, the Greyworld arts collective has worked with 15 local teenagers to produce Invisible, a series of paintings that can only be seen when lit from an ultraviolet source. The paintings include a series of ‘local heroes’, who range from the Burnley FC mascot to a Big Issue seller, a community worker, a head teacher and a local actor and dramatist.

In St Helens, a group of ex-miners and other local people has commissioned Dream, a 20-metre-high sculpture of a child’s head, from the internationally renowned artist Jaume Plensa for the former Sutton Manor colliery site. In east London, the arts and architecture collective, Muf, is working on a community engagement project to transform the ‘Beckton Alp’, a former spoil heap alongside the A13 that enjoyed a second incarnation as an artificial ski-slope but is now derelict. Other projects are taking place in Mull, Belfast, Sheffield and Cardigan, where the local community is discussing a proposal with Canadian multimedia artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, best known for his huge hi-tech, interactive works using lights and shadows.

Sheffield has been the most controversial site, with Big Art Project supporters pitted against the E On energy giant in defence of the Tinsley cooling towers, which E On has insisted on demolishing. The iconic 76-metre high towers, just 17 metres from the M1 and the first things that most people see on entering Sheffield, have been described as ‘the Stonehenge of the carbon age’ by Antony Gormley, the artist whose Angel of the North has probably done most to demonstrate the potential of mega-public art. Their selection as one of the seven Big Art Project sites was a victory for local campaigners battling for their preservation. When E On refused to back down on demolition and instead offered £500,000 towards the cost of a new regional artwork, the campaigners pulled out of the planning group.

When it comes to a clash between public art (or the preservation of our industrial heritage) and profit, it’s obvious which way big business will turn – and, as in the case of the Tinsley cooling towers, which were getting in the way of a new £60-million biomass power station, the local planning authorities are generally only too eager to march to the profit-makers’ drum. Increasingly, though, business is also alert to the potential of public art in marking out its own profit-making space.

Angel of the South

So it’s no surprise, for instance, that the Thames Gateway development at Ebbsfleet in north Kent includes plans for a £2-million landmark mega-sculpture to put itself on the map (literally, since there’s nothing there at the moment). The ‘Angel of the South’, as it’s inevitably been dubbed, although its official title is the Ebbsfleet Landmark Project, is going to be twice as big as its northern cousin, about the size of the Statue of Liberty. It’s being funded to the tune of £1 million by Land Securities, which is building a new residential development on the site; the rest is being raised by the project manager, Futurecity Arts. The ‘UK’s leading cultural agency’, as Futurecity bills itself, specialises in ‘kick-starting the regeneration of run down, brownfield and post-industrial areas in towns and cities across the UK’. To this list, presumably, it must now add greenfield sites and hills in Kent.

The shortlist of five entries to the competition to design the Ebbsfleet landmark is currently on display, appropriately enough perhaps, at the Bluewater shopping centre. A decision is expected in the autumn between a huge white horse (Mark Wallinger, of State Britain fame); a giant Meccano construction (Richard Deacon); a modernist mausoleum (Daniel Buren); a winged white-concrete disc (Christopher Le Brun); and an artificial mini-mountain with the cast of a house on top (Rachel Whiteread).

The project is being accompanied by ‘one of the largest ever public engagement programmes’ to ‘involve and inform’ the local community and ‘to create a legacy of community ownership of the landmark’. I am not one of those who sneers at the significance of such initiatives, however they are devised and funded, and I have no doubt that the Ebbsfleet Landmark will come to be as highly regarded and locally loved, if that’s not too strong a word, as the Angel of the North, the concrete cows of Milton Keynes, the Tinsley cooling towers, the Millennium Dome or any number of other monuments over which the local community had little or no say in their construction. But it is impossible to resist the conclusion that what is happening here is that the public engagement programme has more in common with a massive, modern advertising campaign to induce brand loyalty than a public participation exercise to find out what people want in the first place.

What the public wants

Of course, what people want when it comes to public art isn’t easy to discern – and it often varies from one person to the next. There are those who can’t wait to say goodbye to the Tinsley cooling towers. There are those who fought for years to stop a statue of Nelson Mandela finding a site in central London (and there are those who felt that a statue of Winston Churchill required improving with red paint and a grass mohican). There are those who believe that the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square should be reserved for yet another statue of a traditional British war hero rather than its current showcasing of different sculptures – living sculptures, 2,400 of them standing on it for an hour apiece, when Antony Gormley gets his go shortly.

I like Gormley’s work, by the way, but I do wish he wouldn’t open his mouth. He may be good at public art but like many artists his ideas about the effect it has on the public seems intended to turn them off. ‘Through elevation onto the plinth and removal from common ground, the body becomes a metaphor, a symbol and allows us to reflect on … the individual in contemporary society,’ he said on winning the chance to put his proposal on the fourth plinth.

No doubt there are readers who think Gormley’s words make perfect sense, and that is as it should be with art and artists. They are meant to challenge; we are meant to disagree. But the fact that the public rarely agrees over what constitutes ‘good’ public art can militate against anything truly imaginative. Seeking to please (or at any rate not offend) the public can too often lead to the corporate and the bland, a kind of lowest common artistic denominator, taking the place of real creativity.

Perhaps the most interesting things about Channel 4′s Big Art Project is what people have chosen to post to the website as examples of ‘public art’ in their localities. Banksy and Banksy-wannabes proliferate, and street art and graffiti makes up the biggest single category. But there are also people’s photos of performance art and installations, alongside architecture, statues and sculptures, by well-known artists and unknowns, temporary and more permanent, from the UK and worldwide. Some of them are good, some are bad, some indifferent (make up your own minds). Some of them will even have been insured by the local council.

And then, almost without pausing for retrospection: ‘Oh God. Don’t quote that. It sounds terrible, doesn’t it?’

‘You tell him. Gloria,’ says the nervy, elderly man sitting next to her. ‘Don’t be afraid. It’s what we all think.’

The scene is Gloria and Jim Sullivan’s smartly-furnished flat on the Exmouth estate in east London a few days after the Commission for Racial Equality announced that they were to take legal action against the Sullivans and 67 other tenants for signing a petition urging the Greater London Council not to move an Asian family into a vacant flat at 84 Clark Street. A dozen or so residents from the estate have gathered to explain their point of view and discuss what to do next.

The Sullivans live immediately above 84 Clark Street, and they say that the first they knew of an Asian family moving in was when they awoke to the sound of breaking glass early one morning last summer. The flat had been vandalised, pigs’ trotters inscribed with the initials ‘NF’ (National Front) had been nailed to the door, and the walls and windows were daubed with racist slogans.

‘People were frightened,’ says Jim Sullivan, who is secretary of the local tenants’ association, and an articulate and intelligent man. ‘The tenants didn’t want innocent people to be affected by this sort of aggravation and violence overspilling onto them. Some people had already had bricks thrown at their windows and that sort of thing.’ He decided to organise a ‘Petition Against Moving Asian Families Onto Clark Street’. With the help of his wife and Nick Griffiths, another tenant, he collected 69 signatures from about 48 flats-a small, if significant, minority of people on the 1,000-flat estate.

Meanwhile, Toahid Ali, the latest of several Asian tenants to be offered 84 Clark Street, had turned down the offer. When he had gone to look at the flat, he had been met by a man who told him, ‘Fuck off-we don’t want Pakis here.’ Since he was being rehoused from his previous home because of racial harassment, he decided not to run the risk of further trouble at his new one.

A week later the flat was accepted by a Vietnamese family-’Lovely people, you couldn’t say a word against them,’ according to Jim Sullivan-and the matter might have rested there had it not been for the GLC passing the petition on to the Commission for Racial Equality. Faced with an appalling incidence of racial harassment and violence-a report at the end of last year detailed over 250 cases in Tower Hamlets-as well as the existence of virtual ‘no-go’ estates in the East End where there were no Asian tenants, the GLC felt it had to do something. It asked the commission to investigate.

Last October, four months after the petition had been circulated, commission officials began visiting the signatories. Two and a half months after that, the tenants were told-by a TV reporter-that the commission had decided to take legal action against them under section 31(1) of the Race Relations Act 1976, for ‘attempting to induce the GLC to discriminate on racial grounds against Mr Ali by refusing his application for the tenancy of the property’.

Jim Sullivan immediately called a public meeting, attended by 150 tenants from the estate, who agreed unanimously to fight the case and pass the petition round again as an act of defiance. It now has several hundred signatures, including those of some black tenants, who have added their names because, as one of them put it, ‘If they lose this case, it affects the right of any of us to sign a petition about anything.’

Bill Smith, a white tenant who claims to have fought Mosley’s blackshirts in the 1930s, said that he signed it ‘not because I agree with it-I don’t-but because they’re trying to take away a basic right. I don’t think people should be dictated to over signing a petition, even if they’re wrong.’ This is a view which is largely shared-to the horror of many of its supporters-by the National Council for Civil Liberties, whose general secretary, Larry Gostin, has described the prosecutions as ‘a violation of freedom of speech. If there is no specific threat-if it is simply the act of making a petition-I cannot see that it is right to take legal action.’

The preliminary hearing of the case was at Westminster County Court yesterday. As the case develops, it seems certain that the ‘free speech’ issue will eclipse the question of racial prejudice, harassment and violence, and the importance of developing a firm and effective policy against it. Already, battle lines are being drawn up on the basis of whether one is for or against ‘free speech for racists’, an artificial divide which fails to get to grips with how to tackle the actual roots of racism rather than just its verbal expression.

The Commission for Racial Equality recognise the dilemma. ‘The prosecutions won’t eradicate racism,’ their spokesman told me. ‘But they are important, not just because of this case, but because of what is happening all over London, where a minority of white racists are preventing mainly Asian families from living on some estates. It is essential that we take this action in order to deter others.’

The problem for the commission is that the Exmouth Estate tenants present particular difficulties for an exemplary, deterrent action of this kind. They are not active or organised racists. The National Front and similar groups had no presence on the estate until after the media publicity surrounding the prosecutions, when they leafleted every flat in the area. Any racist violence and vandalism which had occurred was almost certainly the work of outsiders who didn’t know the estate, because the flats of white tenants were often attacked by mistake. And the small number of black and Asian families on the estate appear to agree that there was very little racial hostility towards them. According to the Asian proprietor of one of the local shops in Brayford Square, ‘The only trouble I ever had here was from young boys who come from a different part of London.’

The white tenants themselves are at pains to deny racism, and the majority of the original signatories claim that the petition itself was not racist. ‘It wasn’t racial,’ says one tenant. ‘There’s never been any trouble on this estate until all the publicity over this. We’ve got coloured families living here, and three of the shops are run by Asians, and they never had any trouble. All nationalities have signed that petition, so how can they say it was racial?’

‘We’re not barristers or solicitors,’ says another man, who is genuinely afraid that he might be evicted for having signed. ‘So we never thought we’d get into bother over the wording. To tell the truth, I never even read it properly. I just signed it because I was worried about the violence and everything.’

Many of the signatories are now clinging to the principle of ‘free speech’ as if it were a lifeline thrown to a drowning man. Unable to justify the anti-Asian nature of the petition, they have claimed a defence in the right to have their say. Some will undoubtedly take up the offer of Sir Ashley Bramall, chairman of Tower Hamlets housing management committee, who has suggested that the action will be dropped against tenants who sign an undertaking not to oppose the allocation of flats of Asians. He would do well, however, to make the offer direct to each individual signatory, since the spokesmen for the tenants are determined to fight on: ‘They have put our backs up now, so we’ll go all the way to prison if we have to.’

The dozen or so tenants in the forefront are no more than mouthpieces for the fears and frustrations of countless white working class people, not only on the Exmouth Estate, but in many other areas of cities. Their prejudices have not been, and are not being challenged. Anti-racist initiatives have failed even to consider how this could be done.

‘You can’t even ask for black coffee these days,’ says one elderly tenant at the meeting in Gloria Sullivan’s living room, to murmurs of approval. A decent, and otherwise tolerant man (he later told me that a violent and intolerably anti-social neighbour needed help, not eviction), he put into words a widespread feeling that whites were now the victims of prejudice as much as blacks. ‘There’s a block of flats in Hackney,’ he goes on, ‘where the blacks have been given £150 compensation because of the bad conditions, but the whites haven’t had anything.’

Then, in quick succession, the stories, myths and half-truths come flooding out. The dam had burst. I am told about the fight between Indians in Beaumont Square, when a white family had called the police and then been arrested themselves for a breach of the peace. I hear about the woman who was surrounded by Asian families, who all had sewing machines going 24 hours a day. When she called the council, they asked her what nationality she was, and when she said ‘English’ they hung up. There was the case of the white child who choked to death after being refused treatment by an Asian doctor. There was the woman who was persecuted by Asians because she was married to a black man. And there was the council house being used as a mosque, from which the council had rehoused ‘half a dozen different families’.

Then there was the tale about how every Asian family had to be given houses with two toilets and bathrooms ‘because Muslims can’t use the same facilities’, and the one about the estate where all the blacks were getting central heating ‘because they come from hot countries’, but not the whites. ‘What about all the old people who’ve lived here all their lives, and who’re dying of hypothermia? Why can’t they have central heating?’ demands one woman.

I ask for addresses, for names, dates and details, but when pressed on the points they raise, without exception they admit they heard it from someone or read it somewhere. How could they be sure it was true? ‘Well the council have never denied it, have they?’ is the most popular response.

It would be easy to caricature the Exmouth estate tenants as ignorant bigots-’the media always make out that East Enders are stupid and illiterate, says Nick Griffiths-but that would be too trite and simple an image. That they are bigoted and in some ways ignorant is undeniable, but no more so than that they are friendly, generous, considerate, helpful and warm-hearted in other ways. It is this apparent paradox which makes working class racism so disturbing and difficult to deal with, and which also renders the ill-considered anti-racist response so ineffective.

That response-summed up by the simple slogan that racism should be ‘smashed’-sees society in stereotypes. It makes no distinction between the evil of racism in its belligerent and organised forms, and the confused and widely varied bigotries of individuals. In attempting to suppress every expression of prejudice, rather than tackling it head on, either by discussion and argument, or by doing something about the conditions in which it breeds, anti-racists are actually reinforcing racism in a very real sense. The only people who are fighting the battle of ideas on the Exmouth Estate are the racist organisations who have moved into the area in force to try to win recruits. The left thinks you can fight racism by fighting racists, so they are losing the actual argument by default.

The courts will decide whether the Commission for Racial Equality interpreted the law correctly in taking action against the petition. But legal action cannot change minds or alter ideas, so unless anti-racists are willing to impose anti-racism by a massive use of the police and courts (perhaps using some of the methods employed during the miner’s strike?), it is necessary to consider the tiresome business of persuasion. Neither the commission, nor the GLC, not anti-racist groups or socialist organisations, not Labour Party members, councillors or MPs, not church leaders, Liberals or tolerant Tories, have been down to the Exmouth Estate to canvass opinion or put their views.

‘No one cares about us,’ says one man. ‘They never have, and they never will. They want our money, or they want our votes, but they don’t really want us. It makes you very bitter.’