Rural Rides


William Cobbett – 542 pages – published in 1830

Cover of Rural Rides

If you’ve read any of China Miéville’s New Crobuzon novels, like Perdido Street Station, you’ve got some idea of what pre Parliament reform England was like in the late eighteenth andearly nineteenth century. It may have had a parliament and some semblance of a constition, but it was far from a democracy and it ruthlessly repressed any political movement that attempted to change things. Despite this repression there was a long and diverse tradition of reform and in the early nineteenth century there were few more impressive figures within the radical reform movement than William Cobbett.

Cobbett started his professional life by taking the stagecoach to London on a whim, spending several months as a clerk before becoming a soldier. In the army he got disgusted with the endemic corruption, brought charges against his officers and had to flee to France just as the revolution there broke out. He then spent time in the United States, until bankruptcy forced him back to England. At this point he was pretty much still a monarchist Tory in his political outlook, but this slowly changed towards Radical, especially after his conviction for treasonous libel after he protested the flogging of local militiamen by Hanovarian mercenaries.

In 1802 Cobbet founded his own newspaper, the Political Register, which ran until his death in 1835. During this entire time it was one of the most well known and consistent Radical publications, with a popularity unmatched by any other. In it, Cobbett agitated for Parliamentary reform and an end to the rotten boroughs and corruption, against the tax eaters, the clergy with their tithes and in favour of the honest working folk of England getting a decent living for their labours.

His politics in short were a mixture of genuine radicalism coupled with a nostalgia for a bygone England, where there were masters and labourers, but both with rights and duties towards one another. His ideal was an England of smallholders, small independent craftsmen and masters, each trading with another directly, without interference by capitalist middlemen. His sympathies lay mostly with rural England, rather than the cities.

Rural Rides is the logical outgrowth of Cobbett’s politics and sentiments, an attempt to discover the real state of the English countryside. Originally published in the Register, it covers a period of four years, from 1822 until 1826. Its strength, the reason why it is still in print is that it is not just a political examination, but a portrait of a countryside now long gone, still partway in its transformation from the medieval to the modern.

Cobett has a real love for this landscape, and a real hatred for the pressures that are transforming it or have transformed it. Furthermore this love is coupled with an admiration for the people who inhabit it. Time after time in his descriptions the condition of the people in a given town or county is as much a reason as its natural beauty for Cobbett to praise it.

You can therefore not read Rural Rides properly if you discount its politics, decouple it from its context. Cobbett was a partisan observer at a time of deep political turmoil, with the forces of capitalism –the owners of great estates, the new factory masters, the free trade ideologues– were mounting their assaults on the ancient priviledges and rights of the English country people, when people like Cobbett were not only defending these ancients rights but were attempting to extend them. There’s a deep anger in Rural Rides, an anger at the changes happening in England, a very personal anger.

His egotism is delightful, because there is no affection in it. He does not talk about himself for lack of something to write about, but because some circumstance that has happened to himself is the best possible illustration of the subject and he himself is not the man to shrink from giving the best possible illustration from a squamish delicacy. He likes both himself and his subject too well“. It is this personal feeling that keeps Rural Rides in print, because his anger, his despair and his joy are still palpatable more then 170 years after first publication

Also published at my booklog.

Asbo nation

The asbo, antisocial behaviour order, is one of the more odious pieces of social control Nu Labour have managed to bring in. As it is a civil procedure, it has none of the safeguards of criminal proceedings, can be brought against people to disallow behaviour that is not criminal in itself, but carries criminal penalties. You could find yourself in jail for something as innocuous as walking down the wrong street or wearing your underwear where people can see it.

The BBC News Magazine has done an occasional series on asbos handed out, some of which are plainly ridicolous, some of which are responses to things that are indeed serious nuisances, but all of which are basically NIMBY responses: Not In My Back Yard. Play loud music, attempting to commit suicide, addicted to petrol sniffing? We don’t care, we just do not want you to do it here. It’s the institutionalisation of Mrs. Grundy, with the government in the role of social arbiter. It is the ultimate in symbol politics, as it only treats the symptoms of “antisocial behaviour” rather than its causes.

It is also dangerous, as at least one attempt (scroll down) has already been made to penalise free speech…

Chagos islanders win court victory

Three years ago I wrote about the plight of the Chagos islanders, who were kicked out of their archipelo back in the sixties to make way for the enormous US military base of Diego Garcia, located on the largest island of the Chagos archipelo. The Chagos islands were then and still are now a colony of the UK and it was the UK government who forcibly removed, “compensated” and dumped the inhabitants, the Ilois, in Mauritius, recently made independent. That would’ve been the end of it, if not for the incredible determination of the Ilois, who are still fighting for the right to return to their islands.

And that right came a step closer this week when they won a High Court judgment, which ruled that their removal was illegal. However, since it also granted the government the right to appeal, this is not the end of it. Also, even if this judgment is not appealed against, there are still other hurdles for them to jump through: the US has already stated it will not allow any of the islanders to return no matter what the UK courts decide…

Labour caught redhanded?

I think Dead Men Left is right when he suspects the “student Benjamin Virgo, 34” in this story:

Elsewhere in Bethnal Green, student Benjamin Virgo, 34, explained what had happened to him on Tuesday night. ‘On the way out to the corner shop to buy milk and bread I passed a couple of young guys. After I’d crossed the road they threw a bottle at me. They became more aggressive, so I reached for my mobile and started to call the police. They followed me into the shop and announced to the other customers and staff that I was a racist. Then, fists in my face, they ordered me to stop my call, reminded me that they knew where I lived and threatened to burn my house down. The police never came. George Galloway is now my MP.’

Is the same as the “Ben Virgo, 34” who is “studying classics at UCL” in this story:

Meet the Virgos from Bethnal Green. Ben, 34, used to work in the City, but he gave it up to become a
drugs counsellor, and now he’s studying classics at UCL. His wife Rachel teaches part time at a local
primary school. They have three lovely children, Gilbert, five, Theo, three and Albany, one. They seem,
by all outward appearances, a rather ordinary domestic collective, but last week the media dubbed them “Labour’s rent-a-crowd” when they were pictured standing behind the prime minister and the chancellor at a poster launch. Elements of the so-called Virgo family, it transpired, had also appeared at a previous Labour launch. They were there, according to one commentator, as part of a “human shield of party activists” designed to protect Blair from journalists. The Daily Mail went so far as to described the atmosphere of the event as “redolent of the old Soviet Union”.

The smoking gun turns up in the middle of the article:

[…]It all began with a letter to their local MP, in their case Oona King, asking her to help them in their quest for a larger council flat.

Coincidence? I think not

More on Blunkett’s resignation

Recently started blogging again Take it as Red has a good encapsulation of why Blunkett was so horrible and what did him in:

Apparently Tony, the expert on integrity and honesty – where are those WMD, Mr Blair?- thinks Blunkett “…is a force for good”. No, no and again no. He’s a selfish, selfish man whose first loyalty is to himself and no-one else. Everything he has done has been about how he himself feels; he has shown no consideration towards his duty to the country, let alone any human concern for his ex- mistress or putative child or even his existing family, and his main concern all along has been that he escape the consequences of his actions. Why else would he appear on BBC2’s Newsnight last night, looking for the sympathy vote and telling the world “It was all worth it for that little lad”? He does not even know the child is his, except by some magical sixth sense, and even if it were he is merely the biological parent. How ironic if the DNA test proves the child is the husband’s.

The BBC has been enjoying this a lot, and I don’t blame them one bit. As I said in an earlier post, it’s the Establishment that will do for New Labour, and now the Establishment has the smell of blood in its collective nostrils. The letters and emails that have come to light would never have done so without the co-operation of the civil service; the story wouldn’t have had legs if Blunkett, in his hubris, hadn’t continued to bombard the BBC with constant protestations of his honesty; in doing so he gave the BBC and Civil Service just the ammunition they needed.

Indeed.