steal as much as you can (nathalie olah)

Sometimes I wonder why i have ended up living as an exile. What lead to me ending up on the other side of the world. As much as one might want to say it’s all about to do with the wonders of my present surroundings,  which in part it is, it’s also to do with the country I was born and raised and lived most of my life in. A strange country with a variety of names. The United Kingdom. The ironic Great Britain. England. Formerly of the European Union. Olah’s provocatively titled book gives some insight into the reasons why, as a white middle-class person born into a certain strata of privilege, one has to either embrace the system or run away from it. Because the system is so obviously skewed towards the class I belonged to. And no matter how officially free the speech and thought is within that system, it sets up its own structure of traps and rules to ensure that the structure of the system maintains itself and colonises any signs of resistance. Olah identifies the way in which class perpetuates its structure not just through the distribution of wealth, as is well known, but also through the application of taste. Defining cultural norms which exclude is just as important as defining economic norms that exclude. 

In truth, one might have liked a little more flesh on the bone of what is, as the title maybe suggests, a manifesto-type text. There’s a great deal of scope for the writer to amplify and develop her thesis. Nevertheless, it still feels as though she’s putting her finger on what happened to Britain in the post-Thatcher world. Her comments on education are as sharp as her comments on culture. The UK has evolved an educational and cultural methodology which has reinforced the individualistic, anti-social Thatcherite doctrine. In the process, those who cannot master the cultural codes find themselves on the outside, seeking to create an entity founded in enmity rather than solidarity. The era of the great working class actors has come to an end; the Burtons and Caines and Courtenay’s etc. Now, our culture reflects this notion of a great, hollow Britain, which dines off its former glory, encapsulated by the idea of a monarchy and the class system which is geared towards it. The Crown and Downton have become the acme of our cultural output, as well as fixing a vision of social boundaries which are just as relevant today as they were a century or more ago.

Of course every country has its flaws, every country has its inbuilt prejudices and class systems, with their embedded corruption. However, Steal as Much as You Can does a great job of dissecting one of the most hypocritical of them all. There’s plenty in the text which I didn’t agree with, (I was always more dubious about Corbyn than the author, and find it perplexing to talk about him without mention of Seamus Milne, etcetera), but there’s enough there to make one breathe a sigh of relief that someone is kicking back. 

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nb - this morning in an email exchange with Mr Curry I find myself coming back to a story I discovered a decade ago, about a soldier who came back from Iraq, clearly suffering from PTSD, and went rogue, ending up in prison. The story was real. I went and visited the soldier’s father in Birmingham. Then, through a friend, took the idea to a small production company with offices i Soho. They were initially excited and took the story to their commissioning contacts. Pretty soon it became clear that if the story was going to advance, it would only do so through a more ‘positive’ filter. (The mother’s story etc). This was made very clear. The interest in the story was how it impacted on a ‘human’ level in the UK, rather than anything addressing the ‘secondary’ issue of the war. Everything about this made me feel uneasy. This sense that the story was more important in how it could be manipulated to suit an idea of mainstream taste, rather than addressing the issues that seemed to me (and the father) of real consequence. The soldier would become secondary to his own story. Of course there are arguments to be made, that this was the ‘best’ aesthetic choice, or that the production company was right and this was the only way the story would get told, or that I too in looking to develop the story was guilty of everything being discussed by Olah. However, the whole business left me with a sense of unease, the sense of people who believed they were arbiters of taste deciding how a story they had no connection to should be told. A story that went nowhere, as the soldier sat in prison and the war which the British participated in continued.