15/06/10 - Cameron's Black Tory

‘Young Black Farmers’ was a Channel 4 docu-reality series loosely based on the idea of getting disruptive, challenging school kids into farming by sending them off to a Devonshire farm with a mentor.
On first glance one could ridicule this as a token initiative to instill these disaffected ‘youths’ with a passion for agriculture.
The viewer is presented with a false dichotomy; manual labour and traditional ‘rural’ values against the rebellious, disobedient iPod generation. ‘The two are surely incompatible?’ we are led to assume. But no, ‘Wilfred’, (-note that the double barrel surname was dropped in hope of rendering him more down to earth) - who markets himself as the ‘self-made man’ rides to the rescue. This man is meant to epitomises social mobility in Britain, proving that his humble Brummie working class origins are certainly no barrier to wealth.

Come to think of it, self marketing is one of the very few distinctions I can make between ‘Wilfred’ and ‘Lord Sugar’ of BBC’s Apprentice. It is cringe-worthy to see that Sugar has now resorted to taking on young, impressionable ‘junior Apprentices’ who routinely try to outdo their peers in a test of who can appear the most sycophantic.

Maybe their varying PR approaches are indicative of their position (or in Emmanuel Jones’ case, lack of position) in the current power system, both formal and informal. Emmanuel-Jones’ parliamentary election campaign in Chippenham, Wiltshire can be seen as a continuation of the ‘Black Farmer’ brand in the field of politics whereas Alan Sugar’s peerage is the mere afterthought of the Labour Government after the Amstrad founder had already amassed great personal wealth, throwing a healthy £200,000 in Labours direction.

Brand ‘Sugar’ is confusing and paradoxical. On one hand he attempts to shake off all links to the established order as he presents himself as a straight-talking Jewish Del Boy-like character. Yet Sugar insists on engineering an authoritarian top-down style of management, must be addressed as ‘Sir Allen’ or more recently ‘Lord Sugar’ and he sets BBC producers the task of capturing his ostentatious Rolls Royce from every perceivable angle in a 5 second montage. Sugar surely cannot claim to represent the everyday East-End beetroot seller whose straight talking style often displays contempt for the ruling class, whilst holding a seat in the Lords? Sugar leaves many on the liberal left split. How are we to react to him? Humble upbringings, yes, we like that. He is Jewish, yes we appreciate plurality especially in the business-sector. But a ruthless victimiser? Well, I suspect people seem to overlook that point. Or maybe we just reject the question on face value as the BBC ‘dumbing down’ – not all corporate environments are so brutal, are they?..

By comparison, the Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones presented on ‘Young Black Farmers’ a few years ago seems so different from the pompous PPC documented in ‘Camerons Black Tory’ (2010). Maybe this suggests that the ‘Black Farmer’ brand is a multi-faceted one that can easily adapt and evolve to fit the underlying messages in either of the aforementioned documentaries.
In ‘Cameron’s Black Tory’ there is little reference to Emmanuel-Jones’ early life. He was brought up as one of 9 children in a Carribean family living in inner-city Birmingham. References to his upbringing fit more easily into the narrative of ‘Young Black Farmers’ where his modest origins render him more sympathetic and accessible to the ethnic-minority school leavers he seeks to inspire.

Mr Emmanuel-Jones, the Chippenham PPC decides not to embrace this aspect of himself but would rather assimilate with those who he hopes to become his constituents, the majority of whom are middle-class and white.

I may give the impression of undermining the concept of social mobility, but this is not at all my position. I am just keen in exploring the inconsistency of Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones public image, which I feel raises serious questions about the nature of the ‘Black Farmer’ brand. Wouldn’t it be much more valuable for the then-Chippenham PPC to seize this opportunity to tackle grassroots racism (prevalent amongst his own local party) rather than seek to reaffirm his ‘sense of Britishness’ by courting the archaic and cringeworthy oddballs at the Royal Society of St George?

Emmanuel-Jones markets himself like any other successful brand – subject to change and reinvention in order to appeal to differing audiences. I suspect that Cameron and his Tory Party saw a little bit of themselves in their Chippenham PPC in the first place.

Although self-styled contrarian of the liberal left, Nick Cohen does share the same view as them regarding the ideology (or non-ideology) of ‘Cameronism’. They assert that the Conservatives claims to be relevant to political culture for longer than any other party are due to the ‘swallowing of their principles’ for electoral gain. From Disraeli’s dropping of his opposition to the Corn Laws to the acceptance of the welfare state in the fifties, pragmatic decisions can be seen as cynical attempts to regain power. At the end of the day this is realpolitik. Despite the Black Farmer losing out to the Liberal Democrats in a Wiltshire seat – the Tories did end up with the most number of seats after May 6th and this can be partially attributed to Cameron’s reinvention of the party.

I will readily accept the Tory party’s shift to the centre to appease swing-voters. This watering-down of politics suits me well. However, I still find it somewhat alarming that Emmanuel-Jones readily accepts the parochial views of some Chippenham bigots with an air of fatalism, and accepts the underlying need to assimilate into white-middle class culture purely for electoral gain. This is a sad state of affairs as it presents such a sharp contrast to the motivating ‘Black Farmer’ that was presented to us several years ago.

Blair, Machiavelli & God 23/03/09

A reply to: Metro article 20/03/09 – ‘Leaders ‘must do God’ – Blair

Tony Blair yesterday said world leaders must ‘do God’ to engage with the modern world. The ex-prime minister, whose spin doctor Alistair Campbell famously said ‘We don’t do God’, claimed faith was as key to this century as political ideology was to the last. He added ‘Leaders, religious or not, have to “do God”.’

In this article, I sensed hints towards the rhetoric of a certain renaissance political philosopher. Was it not Machiavelli who wrote, in 1513 ‘It is necessary to cultivate the appearance of a God’? However, Machiavelli states it less ambiguously than the crude cultural relativist, Blair.

At the heart of New Labour are seeming principles of ‘equality’ and ‘respect’(although the latter chimes also with unfashionable Daily Mail speak that Blair sought to distance himself from).

Does Blair not realise the implications of ‘doing God’ (as he so elequently puts it) – this could range from decent liberal ‘churchgoing’ but by definition it must also encompass and address the islamofascism of militant Wahabists and inter-community warfare of Northern Ireland.

The ‘irresponsible parent’ analogy of the hip over-liberal parent who turn a blind eye to smoking cannabis only to foreshadow a later life-long habit of narcotics, is one that springs to mind here.
Blair,as is typical of many fathers enduring a mid-life crisis, is simply too ‘cool’. The ‘down with the kids’ approach of appeasement is at best cringeworthyand at worst politically damaging.

The nonchalance with which Blair comments ‘Leaders have to do God’, is a symptom of the ideological malaise that many attribute to the dropping of Clause 4 in 1995. Labour – as in the ‘real’ Labour attributed to Fabians, Webb-ites and Benn-ites ceases to exist as well as the secular tradition of the left. The compassionate Tory paternalism and trendy multiculturalism that ‘New Labour’ embraced so fervently, some speculate, marks the ‘end of ideology’.

What is more, in attempts to involve the apathetic and ethnic minorities (by all means a good thing) Blair and Giddens’ brainchild – ‘New Labour’ is counterproductive. In an attempt to include all aspects of society within one mediocre and watered down mass movement, this realignment in the centre-ground of politics perhaps increases voter fatigue further. Cultural relativism or what E.P. Thompson called ‘the enormous condescension of posterity‘ rejects the notion of a’truth’ rendering all search for objectivity and concrete meanings futile. Leaders must do God because if they do not, their liberal credentials and ‘tolerance’ are doubted by the left (and they are ultimately remain unelectable on the right).

That the idea of ‘doing God’ can contradict the enlightenment values we cherish, and that a tolerance of intolerance is clearly absurd, is not a concept that Blair and his New Labour predecessors have grasped.

When Machiavelli talks of the role of divinity in politics, this is ‘realpolitik’, (and this must of course be considered in a 16th Century context) but when Blair attempts to tackle the subject there is an air of fatalism that is bordering on arrogance. Perhaps this was where ‘New Labour’ went wrong. Behind Campbell’s spin we feel that we are admiring the ‘emperor’s new clothes’.