Siobhan O’Donnell on government by committee, punk rock, and the particular rage of being Irish in London
Tuesday. Raining. Obviously.
I wrote this from my kitchen table in Hackney while The Clash played on my phone and the rain did what rain in London does in June, which is arrive without warning and stay until it has made its point. The fishnet is a separate incident that I am not ready to discuss except to say it happened during a response to the evening news and that I feel the destruction was proportionate to the provocation.
The provocation was this: the Prime Minister announced a new inquiry. Into what, specifically, I will not say because it does not matter because the inquiry is not the point. The inquiry is what you announce when the actual response to the actual problem is politically complicated, which every response to every actual problem is, which is why we have so many inquiries and so little of whatever the opposite of an inquiry is. Action, I suppose. Policy. Change. The words that inquiries are announced to temporarily substitute for.
What Punk Always Knew About This
The Clash knew this in 1977. The Sex Pistols knew it with less nuance and more volume. What punk understood, and what I think about every time a politician announces an inquiry into something that requires a decision rather than a study, is that the gap between identifying a problem and doing something about it is not a technical gap. It is not a knowledge gap. It is a political gap, filled with the interests of people who benefit from the problem continuing and who are in a position to fund the campaigns of people who have the power to close the gap.
An inquiry keeps the gap open while appearing to address it. This is its function. If you find this cynical, I recommend you read the findings of the last five major public inquiries and calculate how many of their recommendations have been implemented in full. I have done this calculation. The number is available upon request. I will not spoil it here because I want you to still be in a good mood when you click the link.
London This Week Otherwise
The London Prat covered several other things this week that I have opinions about: the proposed extension of the Ultra Low Emission Zone (correct policy, handled with the communications grace of someone explaining a root canal to a person who has never experienced dental care), the latest planning application for a tower in a place where a tower will make several people very rich and several thousand people very annoyed, and a piece on the state of live music in London that made me feel things I am still processing.
The live music piece is the one I want to stay with. We are losing venues the way cities lose old buildings: slowly, then quickly, and mostly because the decision-making about what replaces them is made by people who do not go to them. I went to a gig in a 200-person room in Dalston last Thursday. The band was called something I cannot remember. They were extremely loud and completely correct about everything. I bought the record. It cost eight pounds. Eight pounds for something someone made entirely from scratch with their hands and their fury. The inquiry into that value system has been ongoing since approximately 1976 and its findings remain unimplemented.
Also: NewsThump had a piece about political communications this week that I recommend without qualification. My fishnets are mourned. The rage continues. SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
