Hyde Park London, The Rolling Stones, Margaret Thatcher, Sarin and don't trust any Government

London has sun and shadow bouncing around the buildings and jumping around the pavements, parks and greens. It’s as if the day is nervous, it can’t stand still as the slight breeze makes the leaves throw lace patterns around that dance and jig in their excitement - a sunny day, at last!

We decide that Hyde Park is the place to be, a great green carpet in the heart of London, an everyman space, provided and maintained by the ratepayers and taxpayers of London for everyone, rich, middling, poor or destitute, you are free to wander here. It is a superb symbol of the municipal spirit, the idea that there are some things which can’t be bought but can be paid for out of the common treasury.

The earth shall be a common treasury!

So said The Levellers and Gerard Winstanley in the 17th Century of Oliver Cromwell’s England.

His utopian experiment in Christian communism was broken up by Cromwell’s troops, but he will be smiling today as he peers down on the public parks of Britain, feeling that here, at least, is one legacy, unacknowledged, that he can claim a part in.

But stop!

The Rolling Stones, ancient and aging troubadours of the 1960’s, are going to hold a concert here in the park and will charge over £100 a ticket!

The Stones remind us of the African religion that holds that there are some spirits which can kill people but the victims do not realise that they are dead, so they wander around, dazed and confused, often making fools of themselves.

These spirits must have chosen the Stones as victims some time ago, for they are surely perfect examples of the living dead - ‘ the graves did open and the sheeted dead did squeak and gibber in the streets’ to paraphrase the bard.

In 1969, they played in Hyde Park for free.

What happened, apart from the fact that in the interval they have earned a large fortune from record sales and broadcast fees, to drive a wedge into the principle that the park is free for everyone?

Was it Margaret Thatcher and the enterprise spirit which she unleashed?

If there is no such thing as society, why should there be public parks?

We don’t know, but when it comes to politicians, democracy and distrust are the only safeguards we all of us have.

My parents look back on 1953, the year I was born, as a time of decency and order, the year that things got going again after the war.

But in that year, the Conservative Government invited British servicemen to take part in research into a cure for the common cold.

They were lying - it was the nerve gas sarin that they were researching.

One Ronald Maddison died a horrific death from its affect.

This was, of course, suppressed with all the secret power of the British state, and my parents, along with the rest of the country, were able to hang on to their patriotic illusions.

A report in  Daily Telegraph about Porton Down, theGovernment research centre into nerve gas, reveals that this old trick ofdeceiving our servicemen into helping out with research into the effects ofsarin gas was still being played, and suppressed, in 1983, under Margaret Thatcher’sgovernment.

She may have changed some things for the better, but some of the big bad things seem to have just carried on calmly, as the old war poster advised.

And carry on calmly they did, from the auspicious year of 1953. One man who could have claimed to have been a genius and to have saved his country was Alan Turing, the mathematician. (He cracked the enigma code the Nazi military used during WW2)

But he was a homosexual, so in 1953, when homosexuality was illegal, the authorities hounded him to his death by insisting that he take a course of injections to change his sexuality. These caused him to commit suicide.

If this is what they will do to a national hero, none of us is safe.

Especially since, as we've seen, some things don’t change, but others are now charged for and youth grows spectre thin and rolling stones do gather moss.........

The secret courts are on their way, so tread warily on your way.

Russian ballet in London, bedroom taxes and tax dodgers William and Kate

‘ Happy the nation whose people has not forgotten how to rebel’

So said R.H. Tawney, the great English radical historian, a man who despised the acquisitive society of his own time and would certainly be apoplectic about the obsession of our times with the accumulation of consumer tat.

He might also have been dismayed, at least, with the condition of the English working class, which seems to have sunk into a mire of televisual tripe, ballooning out on a diet of adulterated junk food without protest, uncomplaining of an education that leaves them defenseless in the face of global corporations that pump bread and circuses into their heads, the distractions of which leave them as putty in the hands of their political class.

When they do revolt, it is into the shops, which is not what Tawney had in mind, I suspect.

Still, back in London, we were enchanted by the Mikhailovsky Ballet’s production of Laurencia at the London Coliseum and encouraged to find an audience of young and old, black, white and every shade in between sharing our delight in a visual and aural banquet, a dramatic tale of love, lust, power and revolt told entirely in mime and music, colour and gesture.( our clip below shows the same show in the same theatre in 2010, it is well worth watching )

We left the theatre with hope in our hearts, and like everyone else, we were smiling and feeling glad to be alive - the exact opposite of how I felt as I finished watching Tarantino’s Django Unchained, the pleasure from which I felt ashamed to have felt, as it relentlessly rehashed the American idea that all problems are solved by firepower.

The excuse for the glorification of violence that the film epitomises is that it is a western, and so is true to the past and to the genre - but no, this is a lie, the America of that time could not have produced that many bullets, and the only way the hero of this film could have fired as many bullets would be if he was followed by a mobile arsenal to replenish his Colt 45.
Another excuse might be that the film is a cartoon, metaphorically speaking, but this won't wash, because we know now how these things affect us - film and music go straight into our brains, bypassing our critical faculties and settling into our unconscious minds, shaping the way we interpret and understand the world. Our minds are not equipped to operate a filter that prevents metaphorical violence from slipping into position, ready to govern a response at some later date.

What the film does is act as a form of propaganda for the idea that what’s good about America is there because the gun made it possible, and that guns will keep America good. If you’re a good American, with God on your side, you will be heavily armed and a damn good shot.

The last time London had a riot, in August 2011,the spark was provided by a small time gangster,Mark Duggan, who had been shot dead by the police because they thought he had a gun. He did indeed have a gun on him, but nobody trusts the police version because the police are always being caught lying, the latest example being the ‘Plebgate’ affair in which the police fabricated evidence against a member of parliament, accusing him of calling the police 'fucking plebs’ - perhaps a fairly accurate assessment for some of them, let’s hope they haven’t seen Django Unchained too many times - it might give them ideas.

We thought there might be a riot over the bedroom tax and cuts in welfare budgets, which the government has combined with tax cuts for wealthy folk and barely any tax cuts for lower paid workers - which when combined with inflation leave most people worse off, but most people feel that welfare has gone too far, even those that get it, and the bread and circuses prevent them from noticing that the politicians claim to make work pay would be achieved if they would only tax them less - but the government needs the money for their mates, who will be about £50 grand a year better off as a result of their tax cuts.

Talking of tax and bedrooms, Prince William and Kate are living on Benefits too and they're moving into a ten bedroom pad in Sandringham - will they have to pay the bedroom tax?

I doubt it, as they don’t pay any tax at all - actually, none of the Royals do.

You’d think this would be good for a riot, but everyone seems to love Kate, despite her utter lack of character or sex appeal - and despite having all the time in the world, she has never said anything of any interest whatsoever.

Mae West, a marvellous woman, once said, ‘ It’s not the men in my life that matters, it’s the life in my men’

It's unlikely that she would have fancied William.

Ans she knew something that Kate will never know - how to live your own life.

It takes guts.

It's good to be back in London and Elena caught this shot of our black cabs at work from the top deck of the 189 bus!