I grew up on Coronation St. It used to be prime-time viewing, five times a week in N.Z. and my family watched it every night. So I grew up with Bet Lynch, Deidre and Ken, Hilda and Stan Odgen and all of their complicated interminable feuds. The credits rolled against backdrops of red-brick mid-terraces, backyards that were a maze of walls and old sheds, shot against a battle-grey sky. With a cat sitting on a wall.
If you told me that one day, that would be my everyday landscape - that all I'd have to do to see a maze of walls and old sheds against a grey sky was look out my window - I'd never have believed you. The U.K. was a real country, a place where television programmes and news stories came from. Books were set there. Famous people came from there. They had real bands. And Christmas was cold.
Empires cast long shadows. When I was growing up, you could still sometimes find older people who called England `Home,' even though they had never in their lives set foot there.
During the mid 1980s, N.Z. embarked on what proved to be a disastrous experiment in neo-liberalism. If it moved, it got privatised. If it didn't move, it got privatised some more. When neo-Labour was finally defeated by the even-more conservative National government, P.M. Jenny Shipley offered up a dismal diet of more of the same, served up with a side order of racism and xenophobia. There weren't really any jobs - McJobs or otherwise. Pretty much everyone I knew was either a student or unemployed. Those who could do so left - mostly for Australia, but also for Japan, S. Korea, the U.K., and the U.S.
Shortly before I left for the U.S., I remember dancing in a crowded room to The The's ode to Thatcher's Britain and finding it pretty damn applicable.
Beneath the old iron bridges, across the Victorian parks
And all the frightened people running home before dark
Past the Saturday morning cinema
That lies crumbling to the ground
And the piss stinking shopping centre in the new side of town
I've come to smell the seasons change and watch the city
As the sun goes down again
Here comes another winter
Of long shadows and high hopes
Here comes another winter
Waitin' for utopia
Waitin' for hell to freeze over
This is the land where nothing changes
The land of red buses and blue blooded babies
This is the place where pensioners are raped
And the hearts are being cut from the welfare state
Let the poor drink the milk while the rich eat the honey
Let the bums count their blessings while they count the money
So many people can't express what's on their minds
Nobody knows them, nobody ever will
Until their backs are broken, their dreams are stolen
And they can't get what they want, then they're gonna get angry!
Well it ain't written in the papers but its written on the walls
The way this country is divided to fall
So the cranes are moving on the skyline
Trying to knock down this town
But the stains on the heartland can never be removed
from this country that's sick, sad and confused
Here comes another winter
Of long shadows and high hopes
Here comes another winter
Waitin' for utopia
Waitin' for hell to freeze over
The ammunition's being passed and the Lord's been praised
But the wars on the televisions will never be explained
All the bankers gettin' sweaty beneath their white collars
As the pound in our pocket turns into a dollar
This is the 51st state - of the U.S.A.
This is the 51st state - of the U.S.A.
This is the 51st state - of the U.S. of A.
This is the 51st state - of the U.S.A.
Since I moved here, that song's been playing on repeat inside my head, more or less constantly. Because, sadly, it's still applicable here in the U.K. too.
Let me tell you a little bit about where I live now - my little corner of the American Empire. Hyde is a small town on the edge of Manchester. If L.A. is the City of Angels, Manchester is the city of Engels. After all, this is where The Condition of the Working Class in England was written. Beyond the brash glamour of the city centre (much of it newly rebuilt after the 1997 bombing) and the seedy down-at-heel charm of the Northern Quarter, this was an industrial city of cotton and coal. Its landscape dominated by abandoned red brick mills and warehouses, tower housing and the ubiquitous canals that insinuate their way through the city and its surrounding towns and countryside. In typical blagging fashion, it styles itself the `Venice of the North.'
Hyde itself is now best known as the town where serial killer, Harold Shipman, murdered at least 215 people between 1978 and his apprehension in 1998. Indeed, there's barely a street in my part of town where he didn't kill somebody.
But Hyde has another claim to fame. Like many others in this area, Hyde was a cotton town: the cotton produced in the U.S. by slave labourers in the United States, was woven into cloth here. Globalisation is nothing new. As the cotton mills proliferated, the countryside gave way to over-crowded terrace housing. People worked in the mills from 5.a.m. to 8 p.m. for poverty wages. Some died, others were maimed. And reading between the lines, it was pretty common for women and girls employed in the mills to be raped by their bosses. The Chartist movement for universal male suffrage and labour reform flourished in Hyde, its members "powerfully recruited by Recruiting Sergeant Hunger and ably supported by Corporal Discontent". (Tattershall)
In 1848, in that year of revolution in which Marx sat in the British Library writing The Communist Manifesto, events here gave rise to the expression `to pull the plug.'
On 14 August 1848, a band of Chartists, armed with guns, pistols, swords and pikes marched through Hyde at midnight, determined to effect a stoppage of the mills for a month by drawing the plugs of the boilers, thus bringing all of the machinery to a standstill. These occurrences became known as the 'Plug Riots' and even today the expression "pulling the plug" is still commonly used.
You can read more about the labour history of the area
here
Today, the mills are closed - they've given way to ASDA (a Walmart subsidiary) and B&Q. The gentrification that has overtaken parts of Manchester hasn't touched Hyde much, although Gee Cross - just up the road - is definitely posh. And although I wouldn't go so far as to call it an integrated community, Hyde is fairly racially diverse. Because of that diversity - ironically - there are Tory billboards everywhere, even though this is a Labour town. Howard is chasing that disaffected white Northern BNP voter with slogans like `It's not racist to impose immigration limits. - Are you thinking what we're thinking?' Printed in a child-like script, all the better to support his innocent `who, me?' expression - as though he had not the faintest idea in the world that just up the road, in a town much like this one, there were riots only four years ago because of the bloody BNP. Such a slime-ball.
But no matter what happens this election, this country still won't have an independent foreign policy. The Home Office will still continue to curtail civil liberties, in its sycophantic efforts to act as an outpost of the U.S. Department for Homeland Security
Whether it's Tony the Poodle, or Michael the Pit Bull, Hyde will remain a small town in a small province of the U.S. Empire. As The The observed way back in 1986, "This is the 51st State of the U.S.A."