Mark Perryman of Philosophy Football describes Dad’s Army as the most popular front of all

1968 was a tumultuous year. The Tet Offensive, the civil rights movement, the May events  of ‘Paris, London, Rome, Berlin, We shall fight, we will win’ and the Prague Spring.  This was also the year, 15^th April to be precise, that Dad’s Army, unarguably Britain’s most loved TV comedy series, was broadcast for the very first time. Quite remarkably almost fifty years on never-ending repeats from the nine original series are still being broadcast as primetime Saturday night TV.  Over Christmas a drama-documentary closely based on fact We’re Doomed : The Dad’s Army Story appeared on BBC, again in prime-time. And perhaps most amazing of all Dad’s Army has been remade into a new feature film, not reinvented for a 2016 audience but recreated to be as close as possible to the original version.

That very first appearance of the Walmington-on-Sea volunteers featured Jones the butcher sabotaging any threat of a Nazi invasion by reversing the road signs ‘To the town’ and ‘To the sea’ . Of course the result was obvious, a local motorcyclist stops, takes now the wrong turning and off camera there is a loud splash. A comedy classic has begun. It is easy to mock but a decisive connection is made via Dad’s Army with the Popular Front against Nazism which is ever-present amongst all the English slapstick humour.  The Bank Manager, his hard-pressed Chief Cashier and the most junior of junior cashiers, the butcher, the miserabilist undertakerwho is an English coastline economic migrant from Scotland, the pensioner, the local ducker and diver, the vicar, the verger and their precious Church Hall, the busybody greengrocer. What brought them all together? The defence of Britain and all it meant to them from all that they feared Nazi rule would do in the name of hate.  Only a few years previously Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascists was being cheered on by the Daily Mail ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts’. Despite the best efforts of the stalwarts of Cable Street even in the autumn of 1939 after the declaration of war Mosley was still able to attract crowds to his so-called ‘peace rallies’ numbering in their thousands. The mood of appeasement remained ever-present spearheaded by the Tories’ Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax.  The middle-class , and very English, pomposity of Captain Mainwaring of 1940 is too easily confused with the nasty populism of  UKiP 2016 but this is to seriously misunderstand and misrepresent what Walmington-on-Sea’s finest were all about. These were ordinary men (women, apart from Mrs Pike and Mrs Fox are almost entirely absent) doing extraordinary things and in the course of this reinventing what Britain could become.  The selfless sacrifice of Mainwaring’s volunteers in the face of a Nazi Blitzkrieg that to date had laid waste to all resistance in its path is remarkable. In 1941 Hitler would launch Operation Barbarossa and do the same to any resistance in his way on the Eastern Front, until Stalingrad started the turning of the tide of course. The sacrifice is obvious in every episode, the heroism perhaps less so, although when a washed up U-Boat Commander tries to take over their seaside town Mainwaring’s epic order after the Nazi demands his young private’s name ‘Don’t Tell him Pike’ creates perhaps the show’s funniest moment of all. Never mind, the fierce and heroic resistance is obvious in Mainwaring’s voice and puffed up chest, no fascist was going to push old blighty around.

Of course class divisions remain within the platoon, as they did right across the war effort. But it is the public-school educated Sergeant Wilson who invariably loses out in the battle of will and leadership to the grammar-school educated Captain Mainwaring. It is however on the ideological front that in the fictionalised Walmington-on-Sea and the real Britain of 1939-45 a battle of ideas was being fought, and won. A popular mood of co-operation, the common anti-fascist cause and a wide recognition that a society led by and benefitting solely those most used to being in charge was no way to win either the war, or the peace. All of this  created the basis for Labour’s 1945 landslide including the election of two Communist Party MPs, and the electoral defeat  of Churchill’s Tory Party. We’ll never know whether the Walmington-on-Sea constituency went Labour, countless similar seats certainly did, but we can be sure that for at least a time the town wasn’t the place it was pre-1939.

There is a danger in dismissing the cult of nostalgia that Dad’s Army represented both in 1968 and in today’s version that we lose the meaning of that moment.  Mainwaring, Wilson, Jones, Frazer, Godfrey, Pike & Walker were in their own way the most popular Popular Front of them all. Harking back to World War Two has created a peculiar version of English patriotism. The politics of anti-fascism are airbrushed out. The Labour victory in ‘45 despite Churchill’s wartime leadership scarcely mentioned. The Battle of Britain reduced to a football chant ‘Ten German Bombers and the RAF from England shot them down’ what kind of ill-informed tribute is that? World War Two memorialising becomes translated into a petty anti-Europeanism framed by a resentment at France ,and particularly Germany, but not Britain being the dominant forces in European politics. Dad’s Army gives us an alternative framework of understanding Britain then, and now. Unlike that other long-running BBC comedy set in World War Two Allo Allo the Germans rarely make an appearance and thus their fascism is never trivialised or turned into a misjudged excuse for a laugh. Mainwaring’s platoon are hopelessly funny but they are a joke. The opening credits spelt out what was at stake in 1940, Britain versus the swastika making its mark across Europe.  This was an anti-nazi war not England vs Germany of ’66 vintage and ever since.

Dad’s Army was broadcast for 9 years, 1968-1977. Its ending pre-dates the rise and triumph of Thatcherism. It was under Maggie that Europhobia, or more accurately Germanophobia, came to define the Tory Right and would eventually create the basis for UKiP’s growth too. Given UKiP’s heartland support lies in England’s left behind coastal towns it is too easy to rewrite Walmington-on-Sea’s  Mainwaring as Thatcher, or Farage, incarnate. But no, rather this was a platoon of community, common cause and if called-upon no little courage.  You have been watching? The people vs fascism.

Philosophy Football’s 2016 range of Dad’s Army T-shirts are available from www.philosophyfootball.com

Remember David Bowie but Mark Perryman of Philosophy Football argues with a purpose

A cultural icon passes away and the routine of acres of newsprint, pullout supplements and memorial keepsakes follow in a mediated moment.  What was it that Marx once said ‘All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned. The commodification of grief and loss creates a spectacle that amounts to wrenching the artist’s work  out of any meaningful context their purpose denied the meaning that they intended. When David Cameron feels the need to share tales of surreptitiously listening to Bowie under the bedclothes  of his Eton dormitory, the end of history surely beckons.

When Bowie sang that we could all be heroes, ‘we can be us’ just for one day he was celebrating a fundamental challenge to models of masculinity, gender and sexuality. The ever-changing Bowie was the most public of alternatives to rock music’s traditionally 1970’s macho culture, a popular internationalist equally at home in London, Berlin and New York, appreciative and understanding of each of these cities’ cultures and histories. He made us feel part of his world, not apart from it. Amateurishly daubing our own lightning flash across our faces, dyeing our hair and cutting it into a soulboy, or soulgirl, wedgecut, scouring the second-hand clothes shops to keep up with Bowie’s ransacking of fashion’s histories for his the latest change in how he  looked and dressed.  

Yes he had his off-moments. None more so when like too many artists he flirted with nazi-chic. It was a mistake that led directly to one of the most significant fusions of popular culture and protest in modern times , Rock against Racism. Bowie found himself on the wrong side of the argument but it was never where he belonged and he soon enough realised that.

Writer and cultural critic Suzanne Moore  was one of the few mainstream commentators  to sum up what Bowie at his best meant : “ That door. He unlocked it. For me, for you.  For us. He gave us everything. He gave us ideas, ideas above our station. All the ideas and a specific one. Of life. The stellar idea that we can create ourselves whoever we are. He let us be more than we ever knew possible. There is nothing greater.”

There is a danger of course that this process of self-discovery results simply in an individualistic narcissism for adolescents, this is what pop culture back in Bowie’s peak years was founded on after all. The pin up poster on the bedroom wall, the fandom scrawled on the cover of a school exercise book, the latest release on the hi-fi . But to dismiss this and the resultant, for some, politics of identity as disconnected from social movements of change would be a profound misunderstanding .It was via these movements of feminism, gay liberation, black pride in the late twentieth century that politics was transformed  to the evident discomfort of some pre-existing models of political change. Bowie represented a politics of identity that finds individual expression via committing personal acts of rebellion but most of those who were influence via his music to engage with their identity  never lost sight of the the need for collective change too. If racism, sexism and homophobia are to be truly challenged then it it’s we who have to be heroes, not me. Bowie was part and parcel with those social movements that sparked in the course of his long, but ended too short, career changes for the better. Not just providing the soundtrack but becoming a symbol of what those changes might look like too. 

Perhaps most significant of all to his identity David Bowie didn’t come from a privileged background.  All art is socially constructed. When musicians and actors are increasingly drawn from the ranks of those who have benefited from the best musical and drama private education money can buy it is only right the question should be asked, why? Bowie’s 1960s and 1970s state education afforded a sometimes difficult child with opportunities to learn and develop via painting, design and dance that are being increasingly denied working-class teenagers today, particular in post-16 Further Education. Philosophy Football is therefore remembering Bowie with a purpose. Bowie memorial shirts  to raise funds for Arts Emergency which supports FE students who have the will and the ambition to study the arts but neither the finances nor the ‘right connections’ to do so.  Via a very practical programme of advice and mentoring Arts Emergency provides key support at a crucial time in young people’s lives. They are being denied in the 21^st century the kind of educational opportunities to explore themselves artistically Bowie enjoyed more than 50 years ago. And the consequences? Arts Emergency patron Stewart Lee explains “Arts Emergency are highlighting the reversal of decades’  of social access to the arts, and by association the possible disappearance of  whole strands of  discourse and the loss of educational enfranchisement to  future generations. Save the thinker!”

Bowie as an artist  fundamentally challenged the social construction of art. In celebrating the life’s work of Bowie we cannot, and should not, forget the conditions – uneven as they were – that allowed the ideas he sang and symbolised to develop and sharpen and the norms he tested to destruction. CH-CH-CH-Changes was what Bowie was about more than anything else, for him, for us, for ever.

Note: David Bowie fundraising T-shirts for Arts Emergency are available from Philosophy Football 

Mark Perryman ofPhilosophy Football lists his top ten political books to help avoid being surprised by anything in 2016

The end of history? 2015 well and truly put paid to the age of the smug.

Syriza win in January, call the Troika’s bluff with a referendum and a landslide victory rejecting the terms and then #thisisacoup  derails most of the hope. In Britain the polls and the pundits are united in predicting a hung parliament while the Tories sneak back into office behind all their backs. Scotland follows up losing the independence referendum by going SNP. And Labour gobsmackingly elects Jeremy Corbyn leader, a result an indecent chunk of Labour MPs clearly still don’t accept. In the US a socialist is running a Clinton close in the Democrats’ race for the Presidential  nomination. In Spain aparty barely 18 months old that grew out of the Indignados movement busts apart the two party system that hitherto ruled their country. In Portugal the Left Bloc makes a surprising comeback too. While on the streets of Paris terror reigned twice and the British Parliament votes to bomb Syria with Hilary Benn leading the charge , sadly in 2015 there are some events that are less of a surprise.

My all-time favourite Billy Bragg lyric ‘When the world falls apart some things stay in place’ is a pretty good starting point when things move, and change, with a degree of unpredictability.  It’s a line from Billy’s Levi Stubbs Tears where Billy is accompanied by a superb trumpet solo from Dave Robinson.  A Lover Sings  contains the lyrics to this song, plus a host of others personally selected by Billy, for those of us of a certain age, and politics, they tell us the story of the past thirty years and in line after superb line provide us with a hope and a vision for the next thirty too.

Looking back to find a way forward can trap us in a certain kind of conservatism.My next two choices for 2016 are a pair of books that challenge this in the way they address the past.  Eric Hazan uses a single instrument of resistance and rebellion to produce a unique history of the processes of social change  in A History of The Barricade.  Kate Evans has produced a graphic biography Red Rosa to bring the life, times and ideas of Rosa Luxemburg alive in a vivid and striking manner text alone will never match for impact and engagement.

One of the more pleasant surprises of 2015 was the failure of UKiP to stage any kind of electoral breakthrough and in particular Farage not being elected an MP for the embarassingly umpteenth time. Though the former was principally down to the rotten electoral system we are lumbered with on the basis of the scale of the votes they did attract in coming second, third or fourth in constituency after constituency they certainly merit more than just the one MP, like it or not. Matthew Goodwin and Caitlin Milazzo meticulously map UKiP’s politics and appeal in their book UKiP : Inside the Campaign to Redraw the Map of British Politics  essential reading ahead of the Euro Referendum in which UKiP will no doubt feature strongly. My prediction? SNP win overall majority in May Scottish Parliament Elections then campaigns successfully for yes vote in Scotland to stay in EU. England votes to leave. The Union is finished, UKiP reinvents itself as the English Independence Party leaving Tories hopelessly divided over whether to save the Union  or exit the EU.

Syriza began the 2015 political year. Podemos more or less ended it. The latter is looking increasingly likely to be of the more lasting political significance. Not only by breaking Spain’s own version of the two-party duopoly but in transforming how politics is done. Podemos combine a politics of populism with a party culture of popular participation. Pablo Iglesias sets out the scale of his vision in Politics in a Time of Crisis, if Corbynite Labour is to mean anything it will need to conjure up something similar, to transform what was an increasingly moribund party into a social movement. The 2016 clock is already ticking on that one.

The era of the protest song began in 2015 to show some signs of a return, a subject I will return to in a future, musical, review. But for now most signs of a revolution in sound remain firmly located in a more distant past. It is a subject the author Jon Savage is superbly well-equipped to address as he proves in his splendid new book 1966 : The Year the Decade Exploded which details twelve months of CND, Vietnam, Warhol , Motown and The Beatles.

One of the characteristics of the musical movements that Jon Savage records was their global appeal, and this all pre Web 2.0. English culture remains despite the revolution in information technology naturally inward-looking. The project of the always brilliant Pushkin Press via the translation of the very best in modern European Literature for an Anglo –audience. My pick of their bunch from 2015 isthe Spanish writer Iván Repila’s  allegorical novel  The Boy Who Stole Attila’s Horse.  Human desperation vs the necessity of hope, told via fairytale, this is big picture writing at it’s most imaginative and unpredictable.

A business book may appear at first sight a strange choice to include in my top ten for 2016 political books but then as a co-founder of self-styled ‘sportingoutfitters of intellectual distinction’ I’ve found on more than a few occasions such texts provide just the kind of organisational acumen conventional politics so sorely lacks. And my choice is no ordinary business book either, cult beer label James Watt’s Business for Punks.  Whether or not you are part of that happy band who combine commercial ambition with political principle this is a hugely educational book on how to get organised for change. Real ale was for a period in the 1980s one way to define a counter-culture, today the same can be said of craft beer. This is the book to read and find out why. 

Alongside craft beer all things culinary in 2015 continued to dominate the terrain of popular culture. It’s a space where the political is typically absent yet absolutely necessary. This has become a kind of peculiar obsession of mine,  why doesn’t the Left take what it eats more seriously when a huge chunk of the population seems absolutely transfixed by the subject. What if this was to change in 2016? For a textbook version of the creativity of utilitarian cooking look no further than the latest in Leon's series of cookery books Leon : Family & Friends by Kay Plunkett-Hogge and John Vincent.

My number one choice of book to read in 2016 effortlessly mixes politics, punk, poetry, football and beer and it is because he makes that combination so much fun that Attila the Stockbroker’s autobiography Arguments Yard  is such a compelling story. Those who trample the past in their headlong rush to find the new won’t give such a book more than a second glance, writing off the 35 years Attila has spent helping to establish a radical culture of live poetry and ranting rebellion. That will be their loss, don’t let it be ours. A book to read, a mission to sign up for, a practice to learn from.  A truly wonderful piece of writing, thanks Attila.

Note : No links in this review are to Amazon, if you can avoid buying from the tax-dodgers please do

Mark Perryman is the co-founder of the self-styled ‘sporting outfitters of intellectual distinction’ aka Philosophy Football. His new new book 1966 and Not All That is published in May.

Sanjiv Sachdev reports for Philosophy Football on a recent seminar about the meaning and significance of Podemos

In December’s Spanish General Election, Podemos (‘We Can’ in English), led by the charismatic Pablo Iglesias, emerged as the only clear cut winner. It did much better than the polls had predicted, securing 69 of the 350 seats in parliament (the Conservative Partido Popular won 123, the Socialist PSOE 90). Its share of the vote was just below that of the Socialists (21 per cent versus 22) - a remarkable achievement for a party that only formed in January 2014. Sociologist Carlos Delclos is based in Barcelona, at the seminar he explained Podemos has gone, in two years, from fifty people protesting in a plaza to 69 seats in parliament.  

Like Syriza, Podemos has given organisational form to a new European left-wing populism (what it calls ‘la nueva politica’). The PSOE has been seriously damaged by its role in implementing cuts and by corruption scandals. There has been a dramatic reconfiguration of Spanish politics, which remains in a state of febrile flux.

Podemos defines itself as a party, an electoral machine and a movement. Paul Kennedy, an academic specialising in modern Spanish politics joined the discussion to identify the roots of Podemos. Agreeing with Carlos he located these in the huge 2011 Indignados protests against Spain’s political system in the wake of financial crisis of 2008. The crisis left a quarter of Spanish families living below the poverty line; 400,000 families were evicted over the next few years while three million home lay empty.  Unemployment rose above 26 per cent and above 60 per cent for the young. Deep cuts have been made to public spending and public sector jobs and it has been made much easier to sack workers. Moreover, corruption scandals have scarred political debate (even the Monarchy has fallen foul of this in the courts).  Podemos emerged to challenge what it calls ‘la casta’ – the political and business elites (political recall is key demand of the party).     

Key actors of Podemos came from a group of politics lecturers at Madrid’s Complutense University – including Iglesias - who sought to channel the energy of the Indignados, devising a strategy based on people versus ‘la casta’. Starting with an amateur TV discussion programme, ‘La Tuerka’ (and later ‘Fort Apache’), it built up a substantial on line presence, seeking to challenge and change conventional political debate and reach new audiences. Podemos sought to go beyond class to wider appeals embodied in the slogan: ‘We are neither left nor right. We are the people of the bottom going for people at the top’. The desire to win elections – and the realpolitik required to this end, has also been a key component of its approach.

Strategic alliances with Basque, Catalan and Galician nationalists also contributed to its success, going into the election as four groups (a outstanding issue is whether they will remain as four groups in the new parliament) but the issue of Catalan independence is potentially difficult one for Podemos (it supports a referendum on independence but opposes independence) and a potential stumbling block to forming a non-PP government.

Developing Gramsican concepts, the writings of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe are hugely influential in Podemos thinking. The ideas of hegemony, sovereignty, multitude, radical democracy (the desire for ‘real democracy’ was a key component of the Indignados critique) and populism are widely used. The notion that identities are constructed and not an objective reality is a cornerstone of their thought.  

It is a politics of emancipation, with a focus on a broader, more inclusive category of ‘people’ rather than ‘class’ as a category of emancipation.  New concepts such as ‘revolving door’, the ‘Berlusconisation' of politics, the 'Bunker' (to describe the two main parties), have been deftly deployed by Podemos to shift the terms of political debate.

‘Radical democracy’ includes challenging supra-national notions of power that do not benefit democracy. Spanish sovereignty is seen as having been usurped by the forces of global capital (represented by the Troika) with cooperation of the country’s elites. Sirio Canos from Podemos GB and recent speaker at Philosophy Football’s ‘Scroogeonomics’ event cited at the seminar as an example the constitutional change enacted in 2011 by the PSOE and PP that made it a legal requirement for Spain’s governing party to designate balancing the budget a priority over public spending and investment. Reclaiming sovereignty is now a key objective for Podemos.

Spanish politics has a history of institutional experiment. Podemos began as an innovative blend of social media and grassroots politics. Internal democracy has been one of the key innovations of Podemos – although its scope and success is both debated and contested. The party has set up assembly-style ‘circulos’ or circles, a network of groups convened online or in person, defined either by geography or by area of interest or identity (science, sport, LBGT etc) to inform debate and policy development – one of the panel contended that most of the circles have become zeros, being mostly discarded in day-to-day practice (some prominent exceptions – such as sectional and international circles - were also identified).

Digital technology has also been enthusiastically embraced and adroitly used as a means of campaigning and internal democracy, but so have conventional media such as television (one critic dubbed Podemos as ‘A Leninist media project’). An App has been devised to enable voting.

The political discourse in Spain has traditionally been very pro-European (this included the once influential Communist party). The economic and political benefits of EU membership are widely accepted. The actions of the Troika in Greece has tempered this enthusiasm, but Podemos remains broadly pro-European, arguing for a different type of Europe, not underpinned by neo-liberal norms. Moreover, Spain’s economic situation is different to that of Greece, in that its economic plight is not as grave and it is more central to the European economy than Greece.

The key conclusion of the seminar was that Podemos has opened a new political space, changing the political terms of debate in key areas – in the words of one of their slogans: ‘making what appears impossible, possible’. And the relevance outside Spain was startlingly obvious for the British Left too,  issues such as the challenges represented by the bond market, winning amid a hostile media, maintaining and enhancing internal democracy, accommodating regional calls for greater autonomy or independence are salient for the UK as well as Spain.

Further reading: Pablo Iglesias  Politics in a Time of Crisis: Podemos and the Future of Democracy in Europe, published by Verso                                                             

Mark Perryman ofPhilosophy Football picks his favourite reads for the new sporting year

Football’s European Championships featuring England, Wales, Northern Ireland and the Republic, the Rio OIympics, the Fury vs Klitschko rematch and the Ryder Cup will undoubtedly dominate the 2016 sporting summer and autumn, while cycling’s World Track Cycling Championships coming to London in March will be a domestic highlight. But then every year has its customary roster of the Six Nations, Grand National and Epsom Derby, Wimbledon fortnight, Le Tour, Formula One’s Grand Prix circuit and the weekly soap opera that modern football has increasingly become. Love it, like it, loathe it, ignore it or hate it, sport is inescapable. Its enduring appeal for the enthusiasts is located in the unpredicatability of outcomes, and long may that remain in 2016.

How to explain the social and cultural emergence of spectator sport as the pre-eminent global community it has become? The best single volume chronicle of its dominance is provided by Rob Steen’s quite extraordinary Floodlights and Touchlines, reissued in 2015 as a handy paperback edition.

The Heyday of the Football Annual, compiled and written by Ian Preece and Doug Cheeseman, takes the reader back to an age when football wasn’t all things to all men (and some women) and more like simply a sport. The mix of illustrations and text captures wonderfully the process of change, mostly for the worst, in England, home of the Premier League monster, at least. For the superlatives in modern football we have to look to Germany. World Champions, cheap match tickets, no foreign-owned clubs, safe standing and drinking while you watch a game, what’s not to like? Das Reboot is Raphael Honigstein’s highly readable account of the national team’s recovery from the relative lows of early exits at World Cup ’98, Euro 2000 and Euro 2004 to reigning World Champions.

Few other sports can match cricket for the quality of writing it has inspired. There is something about a five-day test, complete with lengthy breaks for lunch and tea, the crucial role of the toss of a coin to choose who bats or bowls first , and of course the ever-present threat or saving grace of ‘rain stopped play’ that creates a sporting drama, and literature, quite unlike any other. Charlie Connelly’s fictionalised account Gilbert: The Last Years of WG Grace is a splendid addition to the genre, as he tells his own imaginary story of WG’s twilight innings. Witty, appreciative of the sport’s history, and highly original.

2012’s ‘Wiggomania’ was British cycling’s breakthrough moment and it has hardly looked back since. Bradley Wiggins is not only an incredibly gifted cyclist, but is also steeped in the traditions of cycling. His 2015 hour record as described in his new book My Hour was thus not only a world record but a tribute to all those who had gone before him to beat the clock. This beautifully produced book records in words and pictures the significance of both those ambitions. Neither Wiggins nor ‘the hour’ came out of nowhere. A much needed semi-social history of British cycling has finally been written and very good it is too. Kings of the Road by Robert Dineen records the sport’s early beginnings, the characters and events which framed its growth, and the most recent period of sparkling success and popularity.

The recent Tyson Fury furore (sic) has reignited debates around the brutalised version of masculinity that boxing invariably frames. Though when this becomes immersed in the hapless non-entity of the BBC Sports Personality of the Year award, the issue becomes merely trivialised. Where does it say in the programme notes that the nomination is for only the ‘good’ personality? Donald McCrae has produced perhaps the finest retort to the acres of useless newsprint commentary on the subject with his new book A Man’s World telling the otherwise untold story of Emile Griffith, black World Welterweight boxing champion and gay man.

There was a period when World Heavyweight boxing champions – Ali, Frazier, Foreman, Tyson – were indisputably the most famous sports stars on the planet. Nowadays sporting culture is more diverse, fragmented and niched, so it isn’t so easy to nominate who would claim that mantle in 2016. The strongest contender however would surely be Usain Bolt. Richard Moore has written a string of superbly revelatory sports books, his latest The Bolt Supremacy investigates not only Bolt’s rise to become the world’s most famous sportsman, but also the athletics culture of Jamaica that produced him. A superb read ahead of Rio 2016.

But the core appeal of sport is that it is, in principle at least, for everyone, not just the gold medal winners and world record-breakers. We can all take part. What we are embarking on when we cross that line from inactivity to activity is to engage with some kind of testing of our potential for endurance, strength or speed. Few however will ever reach the heights of ultra-runner Lizzy Hawker. Yet as she recalls in her book Runner there is an unbroken connection of experience and ambition between the novice jogger taking their first tentative steps on a New Year resolution run to get fit and her superlative achievement of running up and down mountains for 24-hours at a stretch.

Which is how I ended up with my pick of the sports books to read in 2016. Hugh Hornby’s Bowled Over. The latest in the incredibly ambitious ‘Played in Britain’ publishing series, author Hugh Hornby explores a sport little known outside of its coterie of enthusiasts, bowling, yet absolutely woven into the fabric of English life . The history and changing culture of that connection tells us so much about both the intrinsic value of sport and the making of Englishness. A sport that barely features on the back pages, but with roots that rival, if not exceed, the money-fuelled TV extravaganza of football, rugby, cricket, formula one that fills the TV sporting schedules. Never mind the hype of the Premier League, Rio, Wimbledon and so on, Bowled Over is my number one book to help us understand the true meaning of sport in 2016.

Note: No links in this review are to Amazon, if you can avoid purchasing from tax-dodgers please do so.

Mark Perryman is the co-founder of the self-styled ‘sporting outfitters of intellectual distinction’ akaPhilosophy Football. His book1966 and Not All That is published May 2016.  

A mean-spirited employer exploiting a low-wage economy to his own ends while undermining the human solidarity of families and communities. Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol of 1843 sounds all too familiar on Christmas Eve 2015.

David Boyle , author of the excellent book How to Be English explains the enduring relevance of Scrooge.

"The phrase “bah! humbug!” has long since passed into the English language, as a symbol of the mercantile approach to Christmas. It did so six days before Christmas in 1843, when Dickens published A Christmas Carol, at his own expense and single-handedly reinvented an English Christmas – with roast Turkey, families, presents, bonhomie and a very English kind of over-indulgence.

The title of Dickens’ book was deliberately chosen. It made the story sound mythic, ageless and reached back to the days when the English sang Christmas carols – and hastened the day when they would sing them again. But then, this may not have been Dickens’ main intention when he wrote the book, though he carried on writing annual Christmas stories until 1849, when he was too busy with writing the great slab of David Copperfield to have time. His main intention was to extract a little generosity of spirit from the English in their most mercantile of moods.

And if we ever doubt that change is possible, a quick re-read of A Christmas Carol can reassure us. There never was a transformation quite so instant as Scrooge’s, but Dickens takes him through a process which makes it possible for us to have the same experience, part memory, part shame, part exorcism. As it is, he seems to have succeeded in resurrecting Merrie England from the bare, dry bones of utilitarianism and as such deserves the last place in this book – in the hope that someone might repeat the trick again some day soon."

Danny Dorling is one of the country's  leading experts on inequality. Philosophy Football commissioned Danny to provide an explanation of Scrooge 2015. Danny's text is combined with cartoons by Ella Furness, and music we also commissioned from Nia in a short film produced by Simon Green of Eventful. Danny explaines the causes and consequences of inequality and how, despite the intervening 172 years since A Christmas Carolwas published, because of low wages, rising personal debt - especially student debt - and lack of affordable housing, 2015 remains positively Dickensian for many.

For a small company Philosophy Football has big ambitions. When we set out on the idea of linking Christmas 2015 to Dickens' Scrooge of 1843 we not only commisioned music and ideas plus David Boyle's reading of his explanation of A Christmas Carol but also a poem by Matt Abbott. 

And in search of alternatives to Scroogenomics, Philosophy Football organised a seminar for a group of our customers and friends with Andrew Simms of the New Weather Institute who brought along a panel featuring the architect of 'Corbynomics', tax justice campaigner Richard Murphy, one of Jeremy Corbyn's economic advisers Ann Pettifor, and co-author of The New Materialism Ruth Potts. From their afternoon of duscussion they devised this 10-point  alternative to Scroogeonomics. 

1. Capital Controls: the right wing in Britain campaign against membership of the European Union by appealing to fears over sovereignty and yet, ironically, they support a far greater threat to economic autonomy: unconstrained capital mobility. Step one in replacing Scroogeonomics is the ability to make finance a servant to the useful economy and not its master, subject to democratic checks and balances.
2. Tackle the Tax Gap: the Government should publish and tackle the multi-billion tax gap – the difference between what companies and their wealthy owners should be paying and actually are. What’s missing is the glue that binds society together and pays for it’s needs and ambitions.
3. Replace wasteful, unsatisfying and debt-fueled consumerism with a healthy relationship to the material world: good work in a green, circular economy in which we care for, share and repair goods can create a ‘new materialism’ that helps everyone have what they need and flourish within planetary boundaries.
4. Better Economic Alternatives Already Exist: from banking to tax, investment, food, transport and energy the world is full of better policies. There are unsung stories of hope from communities producing their own renewable energy, creating their own currencies, growing their own food, running their own budgets and making the transition to a fair, zero carbon economy.
5. Speak Up About What is Being Lost: from libraries to essential services and the arts, counterproductive austerity policies are destroying many of the things that makes life good and society hold together. Austerity creates a domino effect of lost income, it is not prudent
6. We Have the Power to Change Things: a chaos economy is not inevitable, but a political choice made by those who simply don’t believe the mess should be managed and who, by-and-large, are wealthy enough to avoid the pain when things go wrong. We can choose to manage the chaos, rather than have the chaos manage us.
7. There Will Be Another Crash: this time there is no excuse not to see it coming. We should plan now for what to do after in the inevitable state of flux, asking what sort of society we want and what kind of economy can support it. More than learning from the past so as not to repeat it, like there was for Scrooge himself, there will be a chance for a new beginning.
8. We Are Better Together: our human ability to cooperate could be our greatest distinguishing feature among other animals, explaining our success as species. Culturally and economically we are interdependent yet economic policy promotes selfish individualism. Even the International Monetary Fund believes collective action through trade unions is vital for economic flourishing. The policy pendulum swung too far towards atomised individualism and must find a better, more communal balance.
9. Do Not Fear Failure: building a better economy is not easy, those who try shouldn’t beat themselves up if things don’t always work because the forces aligned against progressive change are large.
10. The Public Sphere Needs Re-asserting: from the neighbourhood to all our public goods, it is there to catch things when they fail – as it did, thanklessly, for the banking sector in 2007-2008 – and to make life better for all. Yet, through an ideological infatuation with private finance and interests, the Scroogeonomics of an overconfident establishment is undermining itself and the very public sphere that markets, and all of us, ultimately rely on

All for Christmas Eve 2015. 'We don't sell T-shirt' has always been, and remains, our proud boast. T-shirts as a platform for ideas and ideals. Creating sparks of creative collaboration through music, poetry, film and ideas. Enjoy the season and here's to a more peaceful new Year than the last one. 

For One Night Only! The Philosophy Football Christmas Party with Bridget Christie vs Scrooge

So the celebrated organisers of a good night out, aka Philosophy Football, have teamed up with the Peoples Assembly and the RMT supported by the FBU for a huge Scroogeonomics Christmas Party on Saturday 19 December at east London arts venue Rich Mix.

The first Spanish player in the English league? A Basque refugee from the Spanish Civil War. Scorer of Blackpool’s fourth and final goal in the ‘Matthews Cup Final’? A refugee from the racist South African regime. What have Puskas and Zlatan Ibrahimovic got in common? Clue - Ferenc never sported a ponytail. From which Balkan conflicts had members of the Swiss Squad who faced England during the Euro 2016 qualifiers escaped?

Philosophy Football's Mark Perryman and Hugh Tisdale describe the night St George was replaced by Le Tricolour

But life is full of contradictions, this is politics. A hegemonic politics pushes at the limits of the contradictions, taking them as the start of a conversation, not a reason to close it down. The sociologist Stuart Hall once wrote of the importance of popular culture as a space where ideas are formed and changed, "the cultural dimension seemed to us not a secondary, but a constitutive dimension of society." That's why Wembley's night of solidaritéwas so important, so effective and we were proud to play our part in helping to make it happen because we absolutely believe in the cultural dimension, especially at the popular level, as a spsce where change happens. We were inspired originally, after all, by the words of Albert Camus, "All that I know most surely about morality and obligations I owe to football." For Philosophy Football, that's not a marketing slogan, it's our credo.

Half of Philosoophy Football is based in Lewes, where Tom Paine lived, worked and wrote. One of this country’s most famous writers, defender of the French revolution, put on trial for sedition in a British court, elected to the republican National Assembly in France. His most famous words are the means to shape humanitéout of horror. “The World is my country. To do Good is my religion.” After Paris these words are our beacon of hope, then and now.

Mark Perryman from Philosophy Football provides a rundown of new books for the #jezewecan majority

It would have taken a forecaster of the most extraordinary power to predict in the early days after the General Election when the Labour Right were rampant explaining Labour’s defeat on being too left wing, not Blairist-Brownite enough, that in September Jeremy Corbyn would be Labour leader.

By this time next year there will no doubt be an avalanche of books, some sympathetic, some not, seeking to explain The Corbyn Insurgency. But that doesn’t mean there’s not already an awful lot of decent reads to help shape thinking about this late flowering of Labour as Britain’s new radical left party.  One of the best places to start is with an understanding of the widespread disaffection with Westminster Bubble politics. This is what #jezwecan connected to in and around Labour and will need to extend that connection far wider if electoral success is to follow, especially next year in London and Scotland where key elections will be held. Peter Mair’s superb short book Ruling the Void is rightly regarded as the essential text on the subject.  It is a tad early to identify where the new thinkingwill come from to provide the basis for the open-ended radicalism that Corbyn promises to become the new face of Labour. But one thing is for sure sticking to good principles isn’t the same as being restricted to old certainties. The brilliant Inventing the Future is testament to that, a post capitalist politics that understands social, economic and cultural change without being seduced by it. But for a single volume to provide both a compelling read and more than enough newl thinking to write the next Labour Manifesto look no further than Paul Mason’s outstanding Postcapitalism: A Guide To Our Future.

But of course its not enough for a Corbynist Labour Party to promise a better tomorrow, the radical appeal needs to be rooted in improving the here and now too. No writer has done more than Danny Dorling to develop our understanding of the consequences for us all of the inequality that affects some more than others. Two of his classic works of recent years have now been fully revised as post-election editions. Injustice: Why Social Inequality Still Persists and Inequality and the 1% are two essential reads for a politics to make a difference. Nobody likes a tax dodger, closing down tax avoidance is not only the right thing but is just the kind of populist leftism that suits Corbyn's Labour. Gabriel Zucman’s new book The Hidden Wealth of Nations is set to be a key text on one aspect of this, tax havens. More broadly the closest thing yet to what is already being dubbed ‘Corbynomics’ are the ideas of Richard Murphy, prominent campaigner for tax justice. Handily his new, and very accessible for non-economists, book is out with surely the best title of the quarter The Joy of Tax.

None of this breathless forward-thinking denies the need to learn from recent efforts towards radical change of varying degrees of success.  Andy Beckett’s Promised You A Miracle charts the Left’s failure not only to combat Thatcherism but even to begin to comprehend the challenge its brutal originality posed. Kevin Ovenden provides radical reportage with a style that fizzes with excitement. His first book Syriza: Inside the Labyrinth reveals an important new voice and leaves the reader wanting to know when his next book will be out.

In Scotland a Corbyn effect has already happened, its called the SNP and reduced Scottish Labour to a rump party. There may be some kind of recovery at the 2016 Scottish Parliament elections but unlikely enough to make more than a small dent in Nicola Sturgeon’s hegemonic position representing Scots progressivism. Labour will be forced therefore, willingly or unwillingly, to address ‘The English Question’. Don’t be fooled by the lighthearted tone David Boyle adopts in his magnificent book How To Be English this is a richly incisive book to help address what kind of mix a hegemonic English progressivism might end up looking like. Satnam Virdee’s Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider is that rare thing nowadays, an academic book that not only engaes with a wider public but also provides a sharp campaigning edge to the analysis. Historical and broad in its coverage this is one of the best accounts of contemporary racisms published in a good long time.  If Corbynite Labour is to really challenge the mainstream consensus on immigration Satman provides the kind of thinking necessary fo that vital project.

It was no accident that the first ‘test’ Jeremy Corbyn faced was the singing of the National Anthem (sic) at a commemoration of the 75^th anniversary of the Battle of Britain. There will be many more such so-called ‘tests’ for him to face between now and a 2020 General Election. More than almost any country English national identity is warped by too close a relationship with both the martial and the imperial. In that mix how WWII is defined is of particular significance. Robert Gildea’s gargantuan account Fighters in the Shadows is one very useful way of appreciating that conflict as an anti-fascist war in which popular resistance played a not inconsiderable role, and the politics of that resistance, in France as well as elsewhere, would often be communism. Not quite how the British Establishment marks these commemorations is it? Fighting On All Fronts edited by Donny Gluckstein magnificently extends this critical point to champion resistance movements of Algeria, Slovakia, Burma and the Philppines as well as internal oppositions in Ireland, Australia, Japan and elsewhere to subvert the traditional means of understanding World War Two without ever losing sight of the essential cause of anti-fascism, then and now.

Corbynite Labour at its best will combine both a politics framed by new social movements and  a process of reclaiming and remaking old traditions and principles of socialist Labour. The recently re-issued From Serfdom to Socialism by Keir Hardie is an excellent starting point for the latter while John Newsinger’s Them and Us is an excellent pocket guide to the momentous period, 1910-1939, in which the British Labour tradition was more or less founded.

But of course the history of the British, and international left, is not restricted to Labourism. It seems more than likely, given his past record, that Jeremy Corbyn will be considerably more open to drawing on these other contributions than any Labour leader of recent times.  It will be up to others to choose to creatively reciprocate. The Leadership Election ‘purge’ of thousands who had applied as Labour supporters to vote suggests however that plenty remain prepared to block any such dialogue by means, fair or foul, at their disposal. The journal Twentieth Century Communism provides a regular digest of all that could be good in such a relationship, its latest edition chronicling the imaginative diversity of a political culture framed by communist ideals from France in the 1930s to Germany in the 1960s via music , Eurocommunism and street-fighting protest. From Kirstin Ross Communal Luxury adds to a growing literature which seeks to explore and explain the founding ideals of the Communist vision. Kirstin recounts both the impetus behind the Paris Commune of 1871, a key part of an idealised version of early pre-Soviet communism but also its enduring inspiration today. The towering majesty of what the Communist ideal was once  capable of inspiring is superbly captured by Owen Hatherley’s Landscapes of Communism. His book is subtitled as ‘ a history through buildings’ but this is too modest, Owen has pioneered a style of writing that borders on the unique combining well-written travelogue, incisive design commentary and bold politics. A captivatingly unusual mix.

No single thinker has done more than the Italian theorist and writer Antonio Gramsci to influence the case for the continuing relevance of at least parts of an early twentieth century revolutionary tradition. A welcome new edition of  Roger Simon’s Gramsci’s Political Thought has just been published, without much doubt the best introduction to Gramsci and excellent timing for the Left revival. Of course support for Corbyn cannot be characterised as crypto-communist, though elements of the media lunatic front will do their worst with such labelling. But the scale of his support and the unique nature of his politics as an elected Labour Leader means the idealistic impulse that he represents to all intents and purposes now occupies a space on the Left so definitively no other formation of any significance is likely to get a look in. So musing over the communist tradition in these circumstances does have some merit. Nicholas Deakin has edited a most interesting collection in this regard, Radiant Illusion? traces the history and experience of middle class recruits to the British Communist Party in the 1930s, a period when Communism, just like Corbyn today, had no serious rivals in terms of radical appeal, and as a result enjoyed significant cross-class support. Not quite the same as the Blairist-Brownite futile hunt for the middle ground still peddled today by the likes of Tristram Hunt and Liz Kendall. Geoff Andrews’ magnificent The Shadow Man covers similar ground while focussing on a single individual, James Klugmann, a key figure in the British Communist Party’s political development both in the inter-war years and post-war too. This is political biography at its best, weaving the individual and the movement they were part of together into a single compelling narrative. 

Much of the Marxist Left has never really reoriented since ’89. Battered by fundamental challenges to its most basic principles – Blairism, an Islam of varying versions of militancy, the precariat, civic nationalism, climate change and more – not only losing its appeal but its way too. It is refreshing therefore to read the latest from Neil Davidson, We Cannot Escape From History a writer never shy to polemicise, yet with a turn of political phrase that has the capacity to persuade too. Richly historical, splendidly accessible, this is what good Marxist writing should read like.

It is the regular contention of these quarterly reviews that the prerequisite of a radical renewal is the remaking of the political. The success or failure of Jeremy Corbyn won’t be judged by most using this measure yet its long-term viability, and radicalism, will in large part nevertheless depend on its ambition towards this direction. For a model of how the utilitarianism of fast food needn’t be an excuse for poor nutritional value the pocket-sized edition of Leon Lunchbox is an excellent starting point. Of course class is a key determining factor in shaping a nation’s eating patterns  but an effective political movement would embrace what we eat and why as a central issue, its too important to be left to the foodies. Gizzi’s Healthy Appetite gives readers an idea of the potential that nutritional recipes can save to inspire in and out of the kitchen. 

Remaking the political begins for many by placing parenthood and children at the centre of politics unlike the fringes at best where they, and the issues they are most concerned with, too often find themselves.  Jessica Lahey’s The Gift of Failure carefully and sensitively seeks to deconstruct the modern cult of over-parenting towards a childhood founded on the right to take risks and make mistakes. From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs Basil E. Frankweller and The Secrets of the Wild Wood are two childrens’s books from the ever impressive Pushkin Press who positively celebrate risk-taking, magical or real, as they weave the most marvellous tales around urban and rural wonderlands.

Of course the best, and most radical, political cultures encourage and empower risk-taking by adults too. Perhaps more than anything else this is what the victory of #jezwecan will enable in and around the Labour Party. There are precious few better symbols of such a practice than the huge growth and popularity of political graffiti, Banksy has a capacity for an exciting intervention around an issue few individual politicians can come close to matching. The reissuing and updating of Roger Berry’s The Writing on the Wall originally published in 1976 is therefore most welcome to give some kind of backhistory. A book of great photos of 1970s political graffiti and the environment out of which it emerged.  Michael Rosen’s poetry is perhaps best known for children and young adults, his latest collection Don’t Mention the Children reminds us that whatever the age-group Michael’s combination of wit, passion and idealism is absolutely captivating.

The late 1970s and early 1980s  were a kind of high-point for the clash of politics and pop. Elvis Costello, headliner at the second Rock against Racism Carnival in ’78 is an artist whose music has absolutely stood the test of time, his musical journey beautifully recorded via prose just as good as his tunes in his autobiography Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink. Elvis Costello, The Clash, Steel Pulse, X-Ray Spex, Misty and Roots, Tom Robinson Band, The Ruts, Sham 69, and more, these were the stalwarts of Rock against Racism, and now given a superb visual history via the Rock against Racism book featuring the work of photographer Syd Shelton. Jeremy Corbyn has already attracted the support of a 2015 range of artists, musicians, poets, film-makers to match the ’78 vintage, the key will be whether such support can be turned into a politics that effortlessly mixes the cultural with the political.

Inklings of what this might look like are provided by two novels. Bernard Wolfe manages to turn the minutiae of Trotsky’s assassination into a powerfully written thriller, The Great Prince Died. Linda Grant revisits more recent history for her novel Upstairs at the Party, the student radicalism of the 1970s.

How to make politics fun? Passion and idealism are not sufficient in themselves to reach much beyond the already committed. A politics that is a pleasure to be a part of, enjoyable and entertaining, the value of a good laugh. There are precious few spaces that combine all that. Any time spent with Mark Thomas certainly will, on TV, live or by reading his new book 100 Acts of Minor Dissent.

Our book of the quarter combines a similar mix. The most important new voice of comedy and writing of the past few years Bridget Christie, never lets up on her anger while refusing to give ground either to those who cannot bear to see satire be used for committed ends. This is explosive stuff, given an extra edge by an unapologetic feminism still rare in the mainstream. The future face of a political culture worth being a part of? Bridget Christie is absolutely that, her new book A Book For Her a riot of a good read.

Note: No links in this review are to Amazon, if you can avoid purchasing from tax-dodgers please do so.

Mark Perryman is the co-founder of the self-styled ‘sporting outfitters of intellectual distinction’, aka Philosophy Football