Runnymede memorial. © Wyrdlight 2007

What the Cold War lacked in direct conflict, it more than made up for in monuments. Throughout Britain alone, remnants of the forty-year standoff pepper our towns and cities. From the ‘golf ball’ radar systems of Menwith Hill and Fylingdales, to the ‘Magic Mountain’ base in Cambridgeshire, to the ghostly pagodas of Orford Ness in Suffolk, these concrete relics are gradually becoming a more celebrated part of our national heritage.

This international struggle was not only contested over military supremacy, however: the Cold War could was as much about culture and ideology as guns and missiles. In a humble water-meadow on the Thames near Egham, Surrey stands a memorial to the sealing of Magna Carta in 1215. A stone gazebo of English granite commemorates the place where King John put into law a document limiting the extent of state power over individual freedom: an act long recognised as the foundation of civil liberties and English democratic society. This memorial is, however, a relatively recent addition to the meadow; and those who erected it were not the guardians of British political heritage, but rather an organisation of American lawyers.

On 29th July 1957, The Times recorded the official opening of the Magna Carta memorial. Four thousand people gathered to watch E. Smythe Gambrell, former President of the American Bar Association (ABA), dedicate the structure. As the report makes clear, however, the ceremony had as much to do with 1957 as with 1215. Magna Carta is recast as not only the formal basis of English civil society, but as bulwark against Bolshevism: “the difference between what the monument represented and what Communism represented,” suggests The Times, “was freedom under law”. In a speech at the event, Sir Hartley Shawcross MP makes explicit reference to the uprising in Hungary the previous year; despite such repression, Shawcross argues, “in the end the individual will transcend the state.”

This, to be sure, was a very different time. One cannot imagine such a partisan speech being given at 2015’s octocentenary celebrations. What the 1957 celebrations and The Times’ coverage tell us is that democratic heritage is never just heritage: rather, the constitutional milestones of the past are vital in forming the way we think about our own democracy today. Our Democratic Heritage is drawing upon the upcoming anniversaries of Magna Carta to reinvigorate our appreciation of these important events; and as the Runnymede memorial shows, open debate is a central part of this legacy.

To see the original Times article, click here. Image courtesy of Historic Newspapers.

A while back I wrote a piece for the alumni magazine of my old Durham college, Josephine Butler. The piece isn’t online yet, but here is a picture of the physical copy if you did want a read. It’s about the North, the South, and the Mad.

“When it feels right, why would you want to go anywhere else?”– Kevin Campbell

I’ve always believed that the number of international caps a player has tells you more about the context of that nation’s football scene at the time than it does about the player themselves. Wayne Bridge, for example, is the proud owner of 36 England caps, despite being, by common consensus, no great shakes. Andrew ‘Andy Cole’ Cole, by contrast, despite being the Premier League’s second-highest English goalscorer (with a majestic 187 goals), only earned fifteen caps for his country, and scored a single goal. When Cole retired from international football in 2002, ‘retired’ was usually ensconced firmly between two insulting inverted commas.

Kevin Campbell is, by contrast, the Englishman with the most Premier League goals never to have been capped. You won’t hear this cited as one of the great injustices of modern English football. You generally won’t hear his name at all. Those 86 Premier League goals– along with his hauls in the Championship and Turkish top tier– have dropped off the face of football’s consciousness.

I would like to make a case for Kevin Campbell. Not a case that he should have been capped– who needs it?– but rather, that he should be fondly remembered as a striker of considerable quality, and of possessing a first touch that belied his burly frame.

Born in 1970 in that crucible of footballing talent, South London, Campbell came through the ranks at Arsenal and established himself in the first team by the age of 20. That such a young English striker was playing at such a high level, winning the First Division title in 1991, was remarkable; and yet, he was never quite at the forefront of public attention. The arrival of Ian Wright added to a feeling that Campbell was a good player without being destined for the very top of the English game. Despite playing regularly in one of the country’s best teams for five full seasons, a total of only 59 goals in 224 games seems rather meagre. One can make the comparison with a player like Nicklas Bendtner: leaving aside his peculiar personality and off-the-field problems, Bendtner is clearly a very capable striker: like Campbell, he combines physicality and technical ability, and, considering he is only 24, he has shown enough quality to suggest he has a good career ahead of him. His statistics are actually rather better than Campbell’s– 33 goals in 98 league games– but, as with Campbell, if you can’t score consistently in teams that are going to create plenty of chances, your career path is liable to drop off swiftly. It is no surprise that Wenger has lost patience with Bendtner and sent him on loan to Sunderland, and he’s hardly set the Wear on fire either.

Kevin Campbell, Paul Davis, David Rocastle and Lee Dixon with the First Division trophy in 1991

Campbell himself dropped down the prestige ladder in 1995 to Nottingham Forest. After two mediocre seasons, Forest were relegated; however, Campbell’s part in their immediate return to the Premier League was recognised by Turkish side Trabzonspor. Despite being apparently well-loved by the fans, not least for this well-taken hat-trick against an excellent Galatasaray side, Campbell’s time in Turkey ended unhappily, as the club’s chairman Mehmet Ali Yilmaz criticised his £2.5m signingfor being a “discoloured cannibal”. Rather than ignoring such abuse, Campbell admirably drew a line in the sand and declared his foreign adventure over: “I am first of all a black man,” he said. “I can accept routine criticism, but when comments are made concerning my race, football is not important.” He surely deserves credit for moving abroad, something regrettably uncommon for English footballer, and I suspect that Yilmaz wouldn’t last as long in Brixton as Campbell did in Trabzon: a city that appears to be a mixture of Chernobyl and Back Swamp, North Carolina.

Campbell was back in England on loan at Everton by March of 1999, and it was surely this loan spell that did maketh the man: if Campbell Also Served, then surely in was in the last eight games of 1998-99 that he Served best. Scoring nine goals, Campbell etched himself into the heart of every Everton fan as he single-handedly kept Walter Smith’s utterly average side in the Premier League. His fifty other goals, I suspect, don’t really matter when a player does something as extraordinary as this. I experienced a very similar thing 2006-07 with Manchester City: it took the arrival of a past-it Belgian, Emile Mpenza, to keep Stuart Pearce’s terrible Blues up, and the dreadlocked man-tank will be lovingly remembered forever in the Blue half of Manchester; this despite only scoring three goals, one of them in a 2-1 defeat. Campbell scored nine in eight games.

As with Danny Mills, I suspect that Kevin Campbell’s career could conceivably be summarised in a single crazy season. In 1998-99, he had shown himself to be free-thinking, mentally unbreakable, deadly, and lovable. It had never been better than that, it would never get better than that. After signing for Everton in the close season permanently, Campbell stuck around for five and a half years, regularly captaining the side, albeit with gradually diminishing returns. His later spellsat West Brom and Cardiff would not do justice to his former stature, and he retired in 2007.

I’ll remember Kevin Campbell for the statistic about England caps, and that’s not really fair. But if Campbell’s story does anything, I hope it dispels any stigma attached to the figure of the journeyman pro. We hear so much crap about one-club-men, ‘die-for-the-shirt’ types, and look where that gets us. Journeymen can love and be loved too, perhaps moreso. Their love is the best kind of love: impure, accidental, fleeting. Irresistible.

A great compilation of Campbell’s Arsenal goals, and Everton goals.

— Jane Jetson, ‘The Swiss Family Jetson’, 1985

On Wednesday 28th March I’ll be delivering a talk at London’s Science Museum as part of their Lates events series for adults. More details can be found at my FB event for the talk or at the Science Museum’s website. I’d love to see a few friendly faces there! Although, as the old cliché goes, everyone in London is friendly anyway. In any case, I thought I’d post a rundown of what I’m going to be talking about in a bit more detail.

A live-action movie version of the classic Hanna Barbera cartoon The Jetsons has been ticking along for some time now—apparently with Kanye West as creative director. Taking the prophecies of the first season of The Jetsons (aired in 1962) seriously, we should already be living in the scientifically-perfected future George, Judy, Elroy and the gang inhabited. What went wrong?

By examining the differences between the original 1960s rendering of The Jetsons and its 1980s rebirth (which accounts for 51 of the 75 extant episodes of the series), we can begin to pinpoint where the dream of enlightened scientific progress began to unravel. Was the later George Jetson a nostalgic throwback to a past where the future was—so to speak—present? Or is the future that the 1980s episodes portray fundamentally different to—and darker than—the naïve Googie vision of tomorrow that 1962 foresaw?

Utilising a number of humorous clips from the classic cartoon, I will attempt to explain why contemporary cultural visions of the future are key to historical understanding of the past. Moreover, we might ask what the new movie will tell us about our own vision of the future of science? What beautiful dark twisted fantasy does Kanye have in store for us?

What I like about his hypothesis is that it really does tend towards a ‘primal scene’– a semi-imaginary scenario that nonetheless is structurally true; the real life situation of now precedes the imaginary content of the scene. I think that this hypothesis– or rather a hypothesis like this– could structure an understanding of football history that is at once historical and formal. Freud’s Primal Scene– where the child witnesses their parents having sex, their own formation telescoped into the now– is not true, but it is structually true: the fact that it appears to be the past reconfigured to fit the present should not be a criticism of the mechanism of the Primal Scene.

My issue with the hypothesis as it stands is then not whether I am right, but rather whether the structural qualities of the scene are valid: as it stands, I am not convinced. I think that part of what makes me uncomfortable with it is the issue of ‘money’. Perhaps a discussion of relative ‘energies’ might be more appropriate. For what are people paying for (or not, in the case of park football) when they watch the game? Paying for your hot dog at the football is a simple equation to hypothetically imagine in this hydraulic-economic way: in a kind of zero-sum pessimistic economics, one spends enough on the hot dog to give one enough energy to put back into working enough so that one can buy another hot dog. Marx’s theory of surplus value complicates (rightly) this simple model. However, in any case, what might the hydraulics of paying to watch football entail?

To pay to watch a game of football is, in essence, to pay to watch the next game of football: just as the animal has already died before the vegetarian chooses not to eat the steak, the game of football will take place whether a crowd is there or not. To argue that you are paying to see the football match at hand is absurd; as absurd as arguing that when one puts the money in the fortune-telling machine at the fair, one is paying for the previous fortune. Payment is encrypted in temporality, repetition: ‘again,’ the fan says, ‘again’. The fans screams not ‘Bravo,’ rather, ‘Encore.’

Viewed in this way, the energy input of the supporter is a libidinal loan that must be repayed in time. The supporter is, viewed properly, the prime mover of every midweek kick up the backside from the coach, every meal of pasta ‘n’ tuna the players are forced to consume.Fan precedes player.Our emergent primal scene of football economy might be, rather than the amount footballers are paid being equal to the amount people are willing to give them, that the energetic output of theeleven players is proportional to the preceding energetic input of the crowd.

This, to me, seems a more promising working thesis. From this point, this imaginary primal scene can begin to interact with the other energetic economies of football: owner capital, infrastructual investment, and, above all, television revenue.

This starts with the name of the club itself. Millwall, as many of you will already know, is located in the Isle of Dogs, south of what is now Canary Wharf: a considerable distance, mentally and geographically, from the spot between Bermondsey and New Cross where the club that bears the name of ‘Millwall’ has been based for just over a hundred years. The sense of being exiles: not only from this relocation, but also in the sense of being an overwhelmingly white club in an overwhelmingly black area (although, happily, I did see a decent number of black guys in the crowd) surely feeds into their supporters’ not-entirely-erroneous reputation for evil. Their name is empty, then: while Arsenal’s relocation is remebered proudly in their crest, Millwall’s is barely commented upon, a deleted history, a silence at the heart of the club.

The famous rivalry with fellow East-Enders West Ham United also adds to this strange atmosphere around the club. A derby would normally give meaning to a club, establishing some kind of Saussurian difference at the heart of the team: ‘we are x because we are not y.” In the popularly-cited origin myth of the rivalry between these two teams, however, no such difference is possible. Two clubs of dockers, during the 1926 General Strike, Millwall-supporting scabs refused to walk out, to the outrage of the proud proletarians of West Ham. Or, West Ham-supporting scabs refused to walk out, to the outrage of the proud proletarians of Millwall. It depends who you talk to. The difference between these two rivals is nonexistent: they are each both scabs and strikers, good and bad, x and y at the same time. The derby brings Millwall FC no closer to possessing a true centre.

The club’s owners have not clarified affairs. Known until 1900 as ‘the Dockers’, the club’s nickname was changed by the board to ‘the Lions’. Ah, the Lions! That most unique of symbols. The fact that both England and Scotland have been defining themselves unsuccessfully as Lion nations for centuries is indication enough that the animal is an utterly empty symbol, a universal signifier of very little. Only recently has the club introduced ways of reaccomodating its supporters’ stevedore heritage, with a stand at the Den being renamed ‘the Dockers”. The team crest, similarly, has been switched so often in recent years that supporters, such as the bloke on the left in the above photo, have generally opted for both designs.

His t-shirt would seem to present a veritable smörgåsbord of empty icons: the badges, the name, even the colour has changed frequently in recent years. Perhaps this is what makes Millwall FC such a frightening prospect for football authorities: a club proud to be nothing, to have no twee founding myth, to be utterly debauched for no reason. No ground is as anonymous as the Den, and yet is that not a kind of identity? Could we say that being a club without content the most authentic content there is?

I saw this billboard campaign at Bond Street the other day (at 0608 in the morning, as you can see from the Central Line’s helpful info board). It really struck me as being politically insidious, and not just because it was promoting The Economist. The basic premise is, as you can see, one billboard with a list of reasons why social media should not be censored, and another with reasons why it should. The fact that we’re even having this debate is worrying enough; however, what I is think is important is not the content (which you can’t even see on my photo), but the form of the advertisement.

Let’s think about what one’s reaction to this advert might be. As you make your half-asleep way to work, this advert would seem to imply a set of finely-balanced political scales, each with the same ‘amount’ of merit. This is the only possible way to read it, of course: it seems doubtful that the advertising regulators would allow an advertising campaign that came out on one side or another of a dicey political debate. The advert necessarily implies that there is as much logical reason to be in favour of censorship as against it.

We can see that the advert promotes a specific physical figuration of political discourse: that of the balanced scales. Even the colour scheme reinforces the essential equivalency of the two billboards: the two arguments are opposite, yes, but each is also an equivalent tracing of the other. How, then, does ideology figure in this conceit? For there are undoubtedly people who hold views either for or against social media censorship. Really, it comes down to a question of where one ‘stands’ (to use the billboard’s own term). Of course, where one stands in the immediate context of this advert is entirely arbitrary: more often than not, where one stands on the tube platform is dictated by finding a space between other people. Taking a ‘stance’, then, becomes a product of a negative and childish wish to differentiate oneself from others around one: it is impolite, an attempt to engineer an advantage through sly and insincere means.

The ideal position, the billboard maintains, is somewhere in the middle. From there, we can see both sides of the political discourse clearly (unlike in my photo). We remain safe in the knowledge that no possible argument can outweigh ours, because we have none. From the middle, we can remain authentically ourselves, unlike those on the left or right, whom we can only imagine as equal and opposite mirror images of their doppelgangers. There is only one of us in the middle: no shadow self, no creeping suspicion that we might not be right after all; that all debate is pointless, that rhetoric is the only surplus value, that there is no distinct content to political convictions, just continuous points on an arbitrary scale.

I don’t believe this. I believe that certain things are better than others. I believe that the physical figuration of left-right is a means by which people are psychologically undermined into lacking the courage of their own convictions, a way of making people believe that desiring collective control of the means of production is somehow a mirror image of being anti-immigration, sending your kids to private school, and believing that striking during the Olympics should be illegal.

It’s not, it’s bloody different, it’s better.

Photograph: Tom Jenkins/Guardian

“Mills is just a fucking idiot”– Paul Ince

Danny Mills, during the middle years of the noughties, became something of a stock joke among football writers: the optimal illustration of those weird and mysterious days between Sven’s appointment as England manager and the firm establishment of the Golden Generation’s first eleven. This interstice became the home of Trevor Sinclair, Darius Vassell, Chris Powell– but none of them took on the joke status that Norwich-born full back Danny Mills would have to shoulder.

Part of the reason was surely the uncultured nature of Mill’s play. In many ways the archetypical English full back of the 90s school, Mills was mildly quick, mildly attacking, and extremely hard. In spite of the fact that this was what English football demanded at the time of his development, Danny Mills has been pilloried. In some ways, he can be seen as one of a few players of that era who swiftly became fishes out of water as the Sky boom really took flight around the turn of the millenium: think Robbie Fowler, Chris Sutton, Darren Anderton.

And yet, as we are so often reminded with patronising incredulity, Mills played every minute of England’s 2002 World Cup finals campaign. In many ways, the year of 2002 defines Mills’ whole career, and it is worth zooming in on the unfolding of the year to get a better sense of the man.

Mills, at the start of the year, seemed a man bound by his own rage. His career had thus far been fairly unremarkable, if peculiar in its bloody-mindedness. He left his hometown club with no regrets, and when he completed his next move– to Leeds from Charlton for £4m in June 1999– he blasted Norwich City with remarkable agression:

“Norwich have got double now what they got for me when I left and I’m showing a few people there what I can do. Some people at Norwich were pleased to see the back of me because they didn’t think I was good enough and I’m delighted to prove them wrong. I’ve always had belief in myself and now I’m playing for a top Premiership club. It took me a long time to get out of Norwich and when I did a lot of people thought I wasn’t good enough for the First Division. I’m glad they are now eating humble pie.”

In reality, of course, the size of the fee reflected not his own worth, but Leeds’ baffling spending profile of the time. What they got for their four million was a full back who was as shy and retiring as he was hirsute. By January of 2002, despite a slow start to his Leeds career, Mills had become first choice, and the lack of any specialist cover for Gary Neville led to his name being mentioned– somewhat reluctantly– in England circles. However, after several instances of fairly outrageously violence, leading to a cumulative six-game ban, Mills had to take purposive action to reform his behaviour. His disciplinary record would remain a black mark on his CV for years to come.

Despite this growing sense of becoming a pariah, luck would shine on Mills as summer approached. After Neville was ruled out of the World Cup with an injury, Mills’ main rival to England’s number two jersey, Wes Brown, failed to impress in the pre-tournament friendlies. To the amazement of journalists and fans alike– not to mention Mills’ club manager David O’Leary– England were heading into the World Cup with, in the words of Luke Nicoli, “the most vilified player at the country’s most vilified club” as their first choice right back.

In England’s first game, against Sweden, it was Mills’ technical, rather than mental, limitations that showed strain. By his own admission, he was entirely at fault for the Scandinavians’ equalising goal in a 1-1 draw. However, Eriksson kept faith with the headstrong full back, and his performance in the game against Argentina was acknowledged to be crucial in a 1-0 victory. He retained his place throughout the rest of the campaign, even managing to get Ronaldinho sent off with an outrageous dive in England’s defeat to the eventual champions, Brazil. Danny Mills ended the campaign an established international full back.

While luck had shone on Mills in the lead-up to the World Cup, the next season would be one of heartache. Off the field, he tragically lost his son that Autumn to spina bifada; he has been an extremely keen supporter of The Association of Spina Bifida and Hydrocephalus ever since, and recently completed a marathon in a wheelchair for the charity. At Leeds, things took a sharp turn for the worse under new manager Terry Venables, and Mills found himself alienated from the first team following an argument with Mark Viduka following the game against Sheffield United in November. 2002 had been a strange year for Mills: the microcosm, turning point, and high point of his career. He never recovered his form for Leeds.

The next seven years of Mills’ career took place over the course of two regrettably long contracts with two clubs who did not want him. While the start of his time on loan at Middlesbrough saw an improvement in form, they failed to offer him a permanent deal in the summer of 2004, by which time his international career was utterly finished. He moved to Kevin Keegan’s Manchester City on a free transfer instead; however, more bust-ups with Keegan and his successor, Stuart Pearce, meant that his time at City was effectively finished only a year into a five year stay. He saw out his contract with loan spells at Hull, Charlton, and Derby, before retiring in 2009, mourned by few.

How are we to reconcile the sad career of Danny Mills? The man has written eloquent columns for the Guardian and has become something of a likeable presence on football radio and television coverage; at the same time, he violently fell out with every manager he ever played under (except Sven, of course), and was described by former referee Jeff Winter as having “a snarling lack of respect”.

I think that the key to Mills lies in 2002. Whereas some peoples’ reaction to getting lucky is that of ‘easy come, easy go’, it seems Mills recognised his limitations at the start of the year, was given rewards far exceeding his abilities in the summer, and had the rug pulled from under him by the end. Since then, his career was a slow descent: but one that we perhaps might imagine was a controlled one. Rather than trying to press on and stake a claim for a number two shirt he perhaps knew he wasn’t good enough for, Mills used his new status as a ‘big name’ to take his career gently downwards, buffeted by two high-salaried contracts. He got a lot out of the game:  money, fame, and a place in history far exceeding his actual quality. And can a man be blamed for that? Too much has been said for earnest workhorses. Here’s to Danny Mills: cynical underminer of the modern game!

It turns out there’s something of a literature of these places, and even a Wikipedia page. I’m not that interested in attempting to rehash this backlog. However, I want to give a few thoughts of my own about the strange expanse of the Greater London map that lies between the spokes of Watford and Uxbridge. Apparently named ‘Metro-land’ in the Victorian era, the area attracted commuters seeking a slice of the home county good life, while remaining a single trip on the Metropolitan Railway away from their jobs in the City.

At present, the area’s best-known feature is surely Wembley Stadium. Leaving Wembley Park station, one is presented with a view that looks over towards the stadium–  which, in my opinion, is a bit of a failure– but also towards the horizon behind it. It seems perilously close. The grey sky above seems a dome, drooping to meet the faux-utilitarian arch of The Home of Football.

Climb down the steps to Wembley Way, and walk past the empty kiosks, with their promises of a “A Better Sausage” or “A Better Burger”. The immediate surroundings of the stadium are as you would expect, and probably impossible to judge architecturally when only you yourself (along with a few other silent matchstickmen) inhabit them. The view, again, is singularly threatening: a foreshortened view towards London, the BT Tower, Shard, and Canary Wharf tiltshifted into toytownism. Wembley is grey, intimidating, and unforgettable.

Other parts of Metro-land are more welcoming. Greenford, beyond Wembley’s southward horizon, has green brownfields, and its own branchline, one of the last of its kind in Greater London. Chesham, beyond the M25 and the bounds of London itself, is utterly unremarkable: a redbrick-pavemented town centre, with obligatory M&Co, is pleasantly framed by hills– snow-covered on my visit.

Chesham, however, is rather too Country Life for my tastes. As a northerner, I believe if you’re going to do countryside, do it properly: a judgement that obviously rules out the vast majority of the South. Moreover, it wears its place within Bucks far too prissily on its sleeve. What is wonderful about true Metro-land– the parts within London– is its placelessness.

I have no sympathy with groups like the Association of British Counties– a pressure group seeking to restore the UK’s pre-1975 county borders– not least because they fail to recognise the banal nature of all county affiliation. For every Yorkshire loyalist in places like Saddleworth and Barnoldswick, I have found there are two who embrace their new county with myopic assurance: county loyalty is always peversely stronger along counties’ borders than in their supposed heartlands. This is surely the most stupid kind of regional belonging.

The suburban inhabitants of Metro-land– those whom I have had the pleasure to have known– have virtually no such identity. Do they feel like they live in London? “Not really. I’ve got a couple of mates at UCL, so I go over and see them occassionally.” How freeing it must be to have no socially acceptible answer to the awful question: “Where do you come from?”

I catch the train back into Paddington: the city reappears much too quickly. Metro-land: the ur-suburb, the home of the quietly dispossessed.