Archive for the ‘Comment’ Category

Secondary education is most certainly a right, but university is a privilege. Those who continue to stress that higher education ought to be free at the point of use like a visit to the doctor are engaging in magical thinking. Three years spent at some of the world’s great academic institutions in the company of prestigious minds is something that must be paid for.

But the notion of a ‘graduate tax’ – as was recently proposed by Vince Cable in his first major speech on higher education – is not a fair or sensible means to footing the bill. A 2.5pc tariff on students post-graduation is but a levy on success, ambition and self-improvement. It is a form of misguided reparation and another state-led attempt at societal engineering. Moreover on the part of Cable at least, it is a cynical and poorly-plotted attempt to navigate around the ludicrous manifesto pledge to abolish tuition fees outright.

So long as loans continue to be provided, the tuition fee – capped or otherwise – remains the most just and meritocratic method of paying for a university education that places a tangible value on a degree. Regardless of background, those who possess the required academic nous to obtain a place can get a loan to pay the fees. Moreover, those who cannot afford to maintain themselves without aid receive grants based on parental income.

The graduate tax only serves the satisfy the more socialistic aims of the social democratic arm of the Liberal Democratic Party, whose who opposed the current coalition in favour of a ‘progressive’ government of all the losers. It reeks of Marxism. More than this, such a levy does not solve in any regard the most pressing problem facing our universities – the funding shortfall.

This can only be alleviated by raising the cap on tuition fees and granting academic centres greater freedom to set their own levels of charge within certain parameters. Wendy Platt of the Russell Group – which contains UCL, LSE and King’s College – has argued that ‘the fairest and most effective way to protect the quality of UK higher education is higher fees’.

Certainly, the great Yankee colleges demonstrate all that is possible with a model of privatisation and unregulated fees: no British establishment has the financial wherewithal to attract Tony Blair to teach seminar on faith in the world, as Yale did last year.

Yet our government ought not to be too hasty as to lift the lid on Pandora’s Box and allow the corporatisation of our universities through the escalation of charges to untenable and unsustainable levels. We must remember all that is good about the British educational system: its fairness and space for opportunity and social mobility. The tuition fee not only remains just and practical, but a slight increase in rates can accommodate the scope to address budgetary deficits.

The graduate tax is not the answer.

Perhaps the most brutal and punishing scene in Todd Haynes’ 1991 ‘queer’ drama Poison – a film largely renowned for its barrage of brutal, punishing scenes – is one in which a young homosexual is beaten, verbally taunted and, with his jaw prised open, spat on by a group of jeering male peers. The boy quietly wilts in a corner, petals being rained on him from above, the bright blue sky and soft, sepia tones jarringly incongruous to the horror being inflicted upon him. The scene, dubbed “repellent” by many on its initial release, is now seen as one of many decisive turning points depicting the homosexual experience onscreen: unapologetic in its imagery, unflinching in its symbolic violence, though applicable to any social group that had been deemed abnormal by contemporary society. In reflecting the ostensible prejudices of a straight audience back at them, Haynes had successfully rendered homosexuality not as the unique affliction of a few, but a wider problem of social exclusion and confused, rootless identity that had the potential to affect all who could bear to watch.

Haynes’ underrated feature-length debut remains possibly the most powerful example of the so-called ‘New Queer Cinema’ movement of the early 1990s, which was a rare confluence of common themes and purposes from gay directors that aimed not only to redress the imbalance of negative cinematic stereotypes of the past, but also to shock its viewers out of their complacency. Drawing upon the underground experimentation of their cinematic forbears (Kenneth Anger, Derek Jarman, et al) and flourishing at Sundance in a period that would also give rise to Quentin Tarantino and Steven Soderbergh, this clutch of films that included Gus Van Sant’s Mala Noche, Tom Kalin’s Swoon and Gregg Araki’s The Living End, announced these directors as major cinematic talents, and not simply gay ones. Their films were bigger than life, often abrasive, always deliberately confrontational; seeming to encapsulate the possibilities of American independent filmmaking at the turn of twenty-first century. Now, in 2010, with their names rapidly becoming as anonymous as straight indie icons like Whit Stillman and Hal Hartley, one wonders whatever happened to this school of cinema which may splutter into life occasionally (Mysterious Skin, Savage Grace, Tarnation), but has ultimately been superseded by an onslaught of benign camp, ironic kitsch, and straight actors ‘gaying up’ in often successful attempts to win Academy Awards.

Painting a picture of current ‘gay’ cinema this bleak is perhaps somewhat unfair, as it is a fate that has befallen all American independent cinema of late, marked by being toothless, mawkish, and often bereft of any individualism that dares venture outside of an accepted comfort zone of ‘kook’ and ‘quirk’. The perception in the mainstream, however, is decidedly different. Surely an Oscar year that promises major nominations from three openly gay men (Nine, A Single Man, Precious), coupled with several blockbusters that peddle subtextual homoerotic themes featuring “very butch homosexuals” as their protagonists (Sherlock Holmes and, for my money, Star Trek) is reason in and of itself for celebrating the gains wrought by gay rights in recent decades. You need only glance at the meteoric rise of Gus Van Sant from underground cult figure to mainstream celebrated Oscar-winner, with Milk the latest and most successful prestige picture after Brokeback Mountain and Philadelphia to be spotlighted by the Academy. Similar conclusions may be drawn about savage iconoclast John Waters, who used to make films about drag queens eating faeces, and is presumably now basking in the glow of royalty cheques following both the remake and Broadway success of Hairspray. John Cameron Mitchell, too, has admirably traversed the boundaries of gender identity in Hedwig and the Angry Inch and Shortbus. This is without mentioning the brilliant ‘coming out’ scene in Bryan Singer’s X-Men II, gay presence on television in Queer as Folk, The L Word and Doctor Who, Lynn Shelton’s Humpday, the international prestige of Pedro Almodóvar, or even the ubiquity of Sacha Baron Cohen’s Brüno. It would appear, on the surface of things, a great time to be gay.

The willingness of Hollywood to accommodate only the aspects of homosexuality that accord with award prestige or box office expediency, though, has the potential to either expose pre-existing bigotry or simply reinforce it. One need only look at the way in which such lazy stereotyping has been exploited in the witless Horne & Corden sketch show with its screeching, casual homophobia as objectionable as a blackface minstrel show; whilst ‘You’re so gay’ remains the schoolyard pejorative du jour. The limitations of cinema in perpetuating this singular viewpoint is particularly noticeable in the dearth of documentaries – films such as Before Stonewall and The Life and Times of Harvey Milk, once so decisively instrumental and examples of cinema itself instigating change by debunking harmful myth, now a thing of the past. Robbed of any essential edginess that was present in mainstream cinema as recently as Bound, The Talented Mr. Ripley and Peter Jackson’s masterful Heavenly Creatures, the consignment of New Queer Cinema and its ilk to the rubbish-heap of cinema history is emblematic of both how normalised and unadventurous gay cinema has become; homosexuality something to be achieved as readily as Nicole Kidman donning a false nose and flouncing about doing her best Virginia Woolf impression.

1991 never seemed so long ago.

And so the race to the bottom begins. Yes, despite lengthy election campaigns beginning to draw to an end, the whole process is only just under way. Or perhaps better put, it is only now restarting. The friend of a friend who only last week discovered there was a General Election on the way must have been living under a rock. Yet I can’t help but feel jealous, and I can’t help but feel that actually not realising makes perfect sense. How much of a juncture will this May really be in our
lives?

The whole thing – the whole circus of self-serving politicians, queuing up to cut, slash, or hatchet public spending for the “good of the country” – is nothing short of depressing. Now I know why General Elections are almost always in springtime: suicide rates would probably triple if it weren’t for the welcome return of sunshine to our daily lives.

So while politicians clamber over each other to shove recyclables through my door, in a constituency where my vote is worth only 0.107 of a vote according to the Voter Power Index (voterpower.org.uk), I have made the firm decision that millions others will be making this year. I’m not voting for a single one of them. And why the hell should I? While the global economic system has run itself 6 feet below the ground, banks swell with enough of our money to continue forking out eye-watering sums – to those who understand the system so well they couldn’t see the crisis coming.

It’s already becoming faux pas to harp on about grossly unjust City pay-scales, “bashing the bankers” being made out to be some kind of irrational rant, as if money-manipulators and financial-fiddlers worldwide aren’t get six, seven, even eight-figure sums, while those who clean the floors under their feet languish on the few crumbs that their ever-hungrier gobs decide to allow to “trickle down.”

Gordon Brown promises he’s got a plan to deal with it coming. Nick Clegg has already said their bonuses should be taxed. David Cameron? Well, I think he was too busy meeting “40 year old” black men who have served “30 years in the Navy.”

But I’ve chosen just one issue. Just one point in each manifesto which does less than fannies around; it completely ignores, overlooks and neglects the heart of the problem, the very nature of the system itself. Recessions are inherent to the logic of capitalism – irrational booms and homicidal busts are what make it what it is. It’s not a simple matter of adding sums up wrong, it’s about building empires out of imaginary money, and then clinging on to privilege when faeco-ventilatory collisions occur.

And yet which of the parties might be willing to admit that, even to themselves? And how in such an entrenched system might they hope ever to change it from where they stand?

At least the recession is still on the agenda. Despite one of the most significant volcanic eruptions of living memory screwing up ohmygodeverything, “the environment” hasn’t even passed the lips of any of the major parties.

Science tells us quite unequivocally that carbon emissions have to peak within the next five years to avoid run-away climate change. (Do you remember “climate change”? Before it became about Nick Clegg being slightly less shit than the others in opinion polls, I mean). With the far-right on the march I can understand entirely why voters in target BNP seats might feel inclined to vote for parties they normally wouldn’t touch with a barge-pole.

But how are we to relish the decision between voting for one of the three most vicious, exclusionary and sensationalist immigration policies of recent times in order to keep anti-immigrant parties out? It’s a farce. The campaigns have been dominated by lies, damned lies, and vacuous bullshit. The Conservatives have forgotten the meaning of their own name, masquerading as the “party of change”. Labour are promising a “future fair for all” – will there be dodgems and hook-a-duck? “If you don’t vote, you can’t complain” is the most fallacious sentence ever uttered in English. If you don’t vote, you don’t give legitimacy to a system that doesn’t represent you. If you don’t vote, you’re not part of the problem.

“Democracy” doesn’t mean one Thursday in early May every 1,461 days, it means being the difference you want to make. We’ve got to stop kidding ourselves. Spend the whole of your year active, organising and campaigning, being creative and acting purposefully. And for chrissake, if you have to go sniff out a polling booth, and least do the decent thing and spoil your ballot paper. One million spoilt papers will be more effective than two million wasted votes. And remember always: if voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.