I took the day off on November 30th to go and support the strikes, though I am in Unite, my workplace wasn’t big enough to be balloted – and I don’t have a pension for the government to steal. As has been emphasised many times, the strikes are about more than just pensions -they are a response to the class war the government have launched upon us.
The day was amazing from a personal experience point of view; walking around a city with pickets everywhere you turn, Oxford was transformed and the usual barriers we put up between us were replaced with an impulse to talk to everyone with union flags and stickers. Estimates for turnout in Oxford were between 4 thousand and 6 thousand – in OXFORD, hardly union heartland. The strike felt like something big, an escalation in struggle, a key moment, which is why it’s frustrating that Jeremy Clarkson is getting more attention than the strike itself. My partner has described Jeremy Clarkson as an internet troll, but in real life. This strikes (HA) me as pretty apt, here he is sucking out the intelligent important conversations about industrial action and replacing them with the sort of discussions that end with people screaming FREEDOM OF SPEEEEECH at the top of their voices. Nevertheless reading Dave Gorman’s response did make me want to write about it from the point of someone who obsesses over what you can and can’t say for comic effect.
Dave Gorman’s argument went along the lines of ‘we shouldn’t try and get Clarkson off air for this, because we might end up with Stewart Lee/Charlie Brooker off air and in conclusion Bill Hicks’ (Some of Bill Hicks material is pretty misogynist, but hey, let’s save that for a discussion about sexism on the left). I disagree with Dave, and I think it’s all about context - who Clarkson is and where he was. Clarkson is a rich white man, saying that working class women should be shot – he is someone with a lot of power inciting violence on a weaker group. It’s fundamentally different from Brooker saying that Bush should be shot, it’s even different from people wishing Thatcher dead.
In terms of where he was, he was on the One Show, not known for it’s satire or being a comedy venue. I have to be clear here, I wouldn’t think it was ok for a rich white man to wish school cleaners dead if it was in a comedy club, but it would be a different context, and location is an important part of the context of what you say.
Jeremy Clarkson incited violence, and did this on a publicly funded channel. We have a right to punish him for this, and it’s not just about not liking his ideas.
I think it’s interesting to compare Clarkson’s comments, to those of a loud working class woman on a tram, who we have all rightly been shocked by this week. Tram Lady, for me is the new Jade Goody – someone who crudely expresses views we are supposed to find objectionable, so that we can express outrage in order to prove that we are not racist. Tram woman and Jade Goody allow us to frame racism as an aberration, rather than something deep within the structures of society.
Tram woman is working class, and was directly violent to the people around her, Clarkeson is bessi mates with DC, he is being silly, he gets to keep is high paying job – despite the fact that arguably his words will be heard and taken seriously by a greater number of people.
It’s who you are, and where you are which determine your treatment. The BBC won’t get rid of Clarkson because they think Top Gear is important for their ratings, surely flawed when strike support was high. Many of the people who supported those strikes must also be drivers; we had a poster that said ‘honk if you support the strikes’ which we took around with us. Turns out drivers don’t all agree with Clarkey, and it wasn’t just Skoda drivers we had toots from a newish Merc and someone with quite a hot vintage convertable BMW. So there.
