08.12.2011

Keep quiet and drive

There have been calls for Jeremy Clarkson to be sacked and hauled before the courts for his 'shoot the strikers' tirade. Harley Filben disagrees

And it was all going so well. November 30 saw two million workers on strike, and possibly 200,000 people on marches around the country; despite the rather ridiculous attempts of David Cameron to brand the walkout a “damp squib”, it can nonetheless be chalked up as a much needed show of strength for the beleaguered trade union movement.

It was not Cameron, however, but his Chipping Norton chum, Jeremy Clarkson, who - unwittingly - managed to ruin everything. Clarkson, readers will be aware, is best known as presenter of the BBC’s flagship motoring slot, Top gear; it is widely loved and derided in more or less equal measure for its unabashed macho oafishness and disdain for prissy Guardian reader types.

Clarkson was booked onto another BBC slot, the qualitatively more inane One show, to promote his latest DVD. Not two hours later, the Beeb was pushed into a grovelling apology, after Clarkson’s comments, as they insist on saying these days, ‘went viral’. “I would take them outside and execute them in front of their families,” Clarkson said of the N30 strikers. “I mean, how dare they go on strike when they’ve got these gilt-edged pensions that are going to be guaranteed, while the rest of us have to work for a living?”

By Friday night, the BBC had recorded 21,000 complaints - the most on record since the infamous ‘Sachsgate’ scandal that cost the jobs of Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand. Clarkson’s attempts to claim that his remarks had been taken out of context were just not enough to quell the outrage - he too was forced to apologise. The whole world, it seemed, had gone mad - not least Unison general secretary Dave Prentis, who announced his intention to take legal advice - and possibly refer Clarkson’s comments to the police. Ed Miliband even managed to incorporate the farrago into his tortuous N30 balancing act, calling the tirade “disgusting”. David Cameron could only respond that if Clarkson did say these things, his remarks were “silly”.

This is a good moment to ask the question: did Clarkson call for strikers to be shot in front of their families? The answer is: not really. In this case, the weasel words ‘out of context’ really do apply. The broad outline of the One show sequence is: the presenters half-jokingly asked what his opinion on the strikes was, at which point he praised them to the skies: there was no traffic, you could get a table at any restaurant in London you liked ... to say nothing of the warm glow of 1970s nostalgia. The presenters, very much in on the set-up, pointed out that this is the BBC after all and opinions should be balanced. So Clarkson offered the contrary opinion that has got him into so much bother.

One does not have to be a hardened student of literary theory to understand that there are two targets of this joke. The first is the BBC’s notional commitment to political neutrality and ‘balance’; the second is Clarkson himself, and his own reputation as a belligerent, macho rent-a-gob. Seasoned Top gear viewers will note that the latter accounts for about half the jokes in an average episode. Clarkson knows he is ridiculous, and rather onanistically mines his own reputation for comedy gold week in, week out.

The only insult here to the N30 strikers is, frankly, how little he cares about them at all, being that they are, after all, not Jeremy Clarkson; no doubt, this notoriously rightwing man was not out on a picket line leading a chant of “The workers united will never be defeated”, but one suspects he is rather less put out by them than his tennis partner, Cameron. The closest thing to a devastating put-down here is the hoary old line about 1970s nostalgia.

So why is there such a hoo-ha over all this? There is, it should be noted, a positive side to it: a sense that the workers went into the strike knowing there was an ideological battle that would inevitably accompany an action on this scale. There cannot be many of the two million who walked out unaware of the increasingly desperate admonitions of ‘irresponsibility’ from the government and the increasingly hysterical jeremiads from the gutter press. Indeed, it is a battle we largely won; all manner of polls, from ‘proper’ ones by the likes of ComRes to surveys of the Daily Mail’s internet readers, indicated a wide base of support for the walkout.

Reactionary diatribes are to be expected, in this case - notable is the Murdoch press’s inability to make up its mind on December 1, with The Sun mocking the allegedly pathetic failure of the walkout and The Times talking up the numbers and the disruption. The willingness to seize on the Clarkson insult is complicated, of course, by the matter that striking workers have actually been shot at various times and places - that was Winston Churchill’s favoured course of action in 1926, although he shrank away from it. The red flag is red partially to symbolise the tragic sacrifice of many working class partisans.

Unfortunately, this explosion of brittle, unfocused rage is hardly a positive response. The accumulation of 20,000 complaints against the BBC is a little too redolent of the Sachsgate farce; perhaps more pertinently, it puts one in mind of the storm of controversy over Chris Morris’s Brass eye special on paedophilia (or, more accurately, British society’s schizophrenic attitude to children), in which various leading dignitaries queued up to score cheap populist points against Morris and Channel 4 without bothering to watch the programme.

And so we have Ed Miliband frothing at the mouth in parliament, and Dave Prentis threatening to call in the police to see if Clarkson is guilty of some unspecified ‘hate crime’. These two certainly have the ring of weakness about them, not strength. In the case of Ed Miliband, the reasons are obvious - the pathetic contortions he and his cronies went through on the issue of the N30 strike have been a sorry spectacle for a couple of weeks at least.

There is nothing more miserable than the sight of a Labour leader faced with industrial action, and the problem was accentuated by the fact that the rightwing press and government had failed to turn the population against the strike; Miliband and his cronies had to oppose the strike in order to appease capital, but not condemn it and alienate Labour from the public mood. Clarkson is a convenient foil for the Labour leadership to appear sympathetic to the strikers’ cause, without actually doing anything to help.

As for Prentis, his day in the sun on November 30 should not lead us to forget what a criminally rightwing Labourite he actually is; he does not have much stomach for a sustained battle with the bosses and the government, and if he has his way Unison will now be trooping back to the negotiating table. It is mass pressure that compelled him to go through with the walkout, and he has every interest in diverting that mass pressure elsewhere - even to the most ephemeral scandal.

His prompt recourse to his lawyers more or less sums the man up: a career bureaucrat, with a bureaucratic response to everything. If something goes wrong, drag it through the courts. Prentis, like all bureaucrats, fears mass initiative - his instincts point in a different direction, whereby the fate of his members can, in spite of everything, be left in the hands of the lawyerocracy that has all but outlawed effective trade unionism in the last 30 years.

He was not the only one to suggest that anti-democratic ‘hate speech’ laws might be an appropriate solution to the Clarkson ‘problem’. In this, frankly, he is digging all our graves; it is hardly the case that the left is immune to outbursts of bloodthirsty rhetoric (humanity will not be happy until the last bureaucrat is hung with the guts of the last capitalist!), and, the wider one prises open the remit of such legislation, the greater the risk that even brother Prentis will find himself on the wrong end of legal repression.

This was also the week that Emma West, now immortalised as the ‘racist tram lady’, was arrested for launching into a xenophobic tirade against the ‘Poles’ and ‘blacks’ infesting Britain, on a tram from Croydon to Wimbledon. West’s racism is not a pleasant thing to see, but it was hardly murderous stuff - more of a cab driver moan than a Nuremberg rally-style call to mass murder. She will no doubt go down for some ill-defined hate crime, while the public school racism (and, for that matter, general contempt of the lower orders) typical of the upper echelons of the establishment will go unpunished.

The other widely popular call is for the BBC to terminate Clarkson’s contract forthwith. This is more understandable; after all, do we not fund his antics rather generously through the licence fee? Why should we have to tolerate the contempt of people who make upwards of a million pounds annual income out of our pockets? Even this, though, is pretty ridiculous. The BBC is a propaganda machine for the British state; it presents all kinds of reactionary politics, and most of those politics are presented as bald ‘facts’, behind the fig-leaf of ‘balance’ so crudely sent up by Clarkson in this case. However tasteless his joke, it surely does not compare to, say, the BBC’s obscene coverage of the Mavi Marmara massacre last year.

Clarkson is a reactionary, and not a particularly sophisticated one. A Twitter-storm of affected outrage merely feeds his ego (which is well fed enough already); calls for the BBC to sack him merely make him look like a daring rebel, rather than a fully paid-up member of the Chipping Norton set. Calls for his prosecution are downright dangerous. What, then, is one to do? It would surely be best to turn his own tools against him.

The lefty comedian, Stewart Lee, memorably sent up Top gear’s love of aggressive cheap shots by saying this of the near-fatal car crash of Clarkson’s colleague, Richard Hammond, during a shoot: “I wish he’d been killed in that crash. I wish he’d been killed and decapitated. And I wish the next series of Top gear had been presented by Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond’s severed head on a stick. It’s just a joke, like on Top gear ... But coincidentally, as well as it being a joke, it’s also what I wish had happened.” It was a routine which managed to shock the Daily Mail into another round of ‘Ban this sick filth’ outrage; this time around, the Mail gets to be the voice of reason against the humourless PC brigade.

I would propose, then, that better than 21,000 complaints to Ofcom would have been 21,000 carefully crafted death-threats directed at Jeremy Clarkson. The creativity of the masses has the power to reshape the world - showing an idiotic provocateur how it’s really done should be small work. As it is, the brittle response to his joke is an embarrassment to the workers’ movement, just when we were looking to be regaining our strength.