[The story so far…Ed Balls has failed to break into Rod Lidl’s Top 5 Most Irritating Politicians list; Messiah White has applied for membership of The Spiked Armadillo; and Slavoj Zizek is still sending deranged analyses of Grayson Ellis’s poetry to Janice Moor]
The 2010 Liberal Guilt Society Conference
Feeling frisky, Noseybonk this week swung by the annual Liberal Guilt Society (LGS) jamboree, subtitled No Excuse to Feel Bad and hosted in the grand Old Prudential Building, Holborn. The venue is but a two minute creep from Chancery Lane tube station, so having scuttled along the topside of the Central Line tunnel I slithered through a sewer pipe and found a comfortable lair under the Yoghurt-Coated Raisin stand.
Our Guilt-Facilitator this year was Comment is Free (No Really, You Can Say Absolutely Anything) stalwart Theo Hobson, whose opening address expanded on many of the penetratingly incoherent points made in his article Liberal guilt? Good for you.
Hobson rose to the podium amidst eager papershufflings and Pavlovian drools, magnetism slooshing from every gland. “There is no excuse!” he bellowed confidently, “There is no excuse for failing to feel liberal guilt about race and class!”
Here his tone switched to a charismatic whine…
The fact is that it is excessively hard for the vast majority of people from ethnic minorities, and from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, to attain the cushy lifestyle that one was born into and takes for granted. One can either react to this fact by pretending that one’s good fortune is one’s natural right, and by boasting that one has “worked hard” for it (well done, for turning up to banker school, or to that internship your uncle wangled); or one can react with humble awareness that our social world is still packed with injustice…
Bellowing again now…
…an awareness known as Liberal Guilt! [Applause]
…If this little parade of privileged anxiety fills you with derision, then you are a Tory! [Boos] Rejection of liberal guilt is the very cornerstone of the Tory soul! [Audience member: “What Tory soul?!” Laughter]…The unofficial definition of Tory!
Here Hobson begins to weep gently…
Toryism is a posture of world affirmation. It works by rubbishing reformist angst, painting it as neurotic hypocrisy.
Wipes eyes, becomes angry…
This is the thing that unites every sort of Tory, from Norman Tebbit to Nick Boles. They all find liberal guilt risible and dangerous. Its risibility is highlighted by fat jocular types like Boris Johnson. [Boos.]
Bloody furious now…
Its peril is highlighted by wide-eyed humourless skinny types like Thatcher. [Wild applause] The phrase liberal guilt is obviously a Tory coinage. It ought to be called “The Necessary Self-Accusing Anxiety Accompanying Liberal Idealism”! [uncertain applause, some boos]
Later in the conference, a motion to rename the Liberal Guilt Society as NSAAALIS (The Necessary Self-Accusing Anxiety Accompanying Liberal Idealism Society) was defeated by 654 votes to 1.
After this thunderously pinheaded opening the day dawdled somewhat. Deranged Academic Slavoj Zizek toiled through his tiresome charade of thanking “his friend, the poet Grayson Ellis, for coming along” expressly to hear him. All piffle, since the reclusive genius Ellis was at that moment peering into a remote well, deep in his beloved Shropshire.
Non-identical Siamese twins Tom Hampson and Jemima Olchawski, who share half a brain and represent the Fabian faction of the LDS, wrung each other’s hands and explained at wildly tedious length why it is no longer permissable to use the words ‘chav’, ‘yob’, ‘scumbag’, ‘chippy little northern bastard’ or ‘git’.
You cannot consider yourself of the left and use the word ‘chav’. It is worse than other forms of snobbery because it so clearly links poverty and being working class to criminality and fecklessness… [they droned in unison.]
The middle classes have always used language to distinguish themselves from those a few rungs below them on the ladder – we all know their old serviette/napkin, lounge/living room, settee/sofa tricks. But this is something new. This is middle class hatred of the white working class, pure and simple. From now on we shall audibly “tut tut” and wince whenever we hear the word used. You should too.
Things only picked up again when keynote speaker Decca Aitkenhead took to the stage to perform highlights from her celebrated opus Their homophobia is our fault: Real liberals would realise it is meaningless to vilify Jamaicans for attitudes that Britain created, an ingenious ‘double-shame’ thesis allowing white British LGS members to feel guilty about both the victims and the perpetrators of Jamaican homophobia. “The vilification of Jamaican homophobia implies more than a failure to accept postcolonial politics,” screeched Aitkenhead, staring about the room willy-nilly in a muffed attempt at a public speaking technique she’d read about called ‘Random Eye Contact’.
It’s a failure to recognise 400 years of Jamaican history, starting with the sodomy of male slaves by their white owners as a means of humiliation. Although activists are right to campaign about it, it’s wrong for public opinion to seize on the issue with no thought for political context.
A better emotion would be CULPABILITY. Every ingredient of Jamaica’s homophobia implicates Britain, whose role has maintained the conditions conducive to homophobia, from slavery through to the debt that makes education unaffordable. For us to vilify Jamaicans for an attitude of which we were the architects is… SHAMEFUL.
Suitably pepped, the LGS cheered like gibbons as facilitator Theo Hobson arose to deliver the closing remarks. Thanking summit sponsors The Socialist Worker and Asda, he advised members that further materials were available on the website and that informal Shame Workshops would continue in a nice little Greek bistro restauranty type place round the corner.
“If you take one thought away with you today,” he summarised, as the impatient delegates inched towards their party bags, cake and complementary branded spacehoppers…
It should be that just because something is insoluble or none of your business or happened many hundreds of years before you were born in another part of the world entirely, and is not something you’ll ever get round to doing anything practical about, those are not excuses for you to just get on with your life without worrying too much about it or feeling a fundamental sense of self-loathing. Above all, there is no excuse. No excuse. No excuse for not making sure everyone you know feels as loathsome as you… are.
What next for Balls?
One notable absentee from the LGS conference was Ed Balls, excused on the grounds that a rare medical condition renders him incapable of feeling shame of any kind. Both Bilimands and The Other One, Andy Something made desultory appearances. Diane Abbott, being black, is barred from membership.
At the precise moment that non-identical Siamese twins Tom Hampson and Jemima Olchawski were sidling clumsily to the podium, and elusive poet Grayson Ellis was trudging dismally away from his Shropshire well, Mr Balls’ Personal Dogsbody Pamela Spanks was reading her wireless messaging device.
What the fug use is 6th? Do something about my fugging profile said the message. Sighing infinitely and massaging her weary brow, Pamela consulted a sheet of parchment, on which a list of Possibles was printed. Question Time was already ticked. Snuggling On The Tiny Red Sofa with Portillo was already ticked. Gok Wan’s How to Look Good Naked was already ticked. Pamela rattled a biro pensively between her gnashers, and pondered….
Noseybonk, I know that you can see me but it is rather disturbing to learn that you can see into my dreams.
I dream about Ed Balls and in my dream he is naked.
It is Dublin Bay, but the clear cerulean skies and warm aquamarine waters belong to the Bay of Naples. I’m there with my wife, both of us 15 years younger, honeymooning, happy. We begin to swim.
And up looms the member for Morley and Outwood.
He really is very naked.
Obviously, I need to explain this to myself. Could it arise, somehow, from the fact that I used to know EB very, very slightly? We overlapped at college: I can’t remember anything particularly bad about him, although everyone now seems to expect me to. I don’t think I ever saw him stripped to his namesakes. Not sorry: even then he was a young man of, I would say, limited physical appeal.
Ah, there we have it. He got into my dream as a personification of the common idiom “stark bollock naked”. That’s the way dreams work, you know. There is no other possible explanation.
Reading that, my advice would be to stay awake at all times, Jonathan Law.
Jonathan –
“Up looms the member…” dear me, quite an image. It was lovely up to that point, what with the clear cerulean skies and warm aquamarine waters and whatnot….
that decca aitkenhead piece about Jamaica is so terrifyingly stupid it is actually far beyond parody. good grief, Hope Noseybonk haunts her every lucid-dreaming moment.