A couple of decades ago, with a handful of weeks unexpectedly spare, I squeezed in an extra scheme of work on John Boyne’s Holocaust novel, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. Not having taught the text before (it had only just been published) I hadn’t anticipated that the story of a friendship doomed by state xenophobia would afford me one of those quiet privileges that teaching delivers so well: the experience of watching thirty ‘lively’ tweenagers simultaneously grow up.
Turns were taken to read aloud against a background of miraculous, pin-drop silence. Mardy arses, for whom carbonara was a bit exotic, followed the subtitles on Life Is Beautiful without complaint. To my surprise, tears crawled down many faces, leaving tracks that turned silver in the screen’s reflected light. We finished as the novel’s final paragraphs invite us to: by researching whether such events could happen – were starting to happen – again.
A couple of years later, the film version was released. The same students, most of whom I no longer taught, came looking for me, keen to describe how they’d made a point of seeing it. The attitudinal shifts that many had undergone were, evidently, still intact – a fact that remains especially gratifying as, unknown to me back then, several lived in an area with long-standing connections to the National Front.
Studying The Boy…was, thus, as happy an accident as BBC2 broadcasting the film immediately after Newsnight discussed the dehumanising rhetoric coming from the Home Office. Like its progenitor, the cinematic version depicts the propulsive power of language in the ‘othering’ of entire peoples. I double-checked the TV listings for that night, wondering whether a lowly deckhand had slipped the film into the schedules in defiance of the captains steering Auntie Beeb to the right.
However, the most lingering element of the novel, for me, is a minor character. Lt Kotler, a young SS officer, has long circled my consciousness, occasionally making his way to the front at the zeitgeist’s beckoning. With his aggressively blond hair and inconvenient background, Kotler once brought a Johnson/Kemal or two to mind: I’d imagine the future discovery of a BoJo-shaped exuvia, carbon-dated to the mid-2010s and constituted from the family history (all that Middle-Eastern stuff shared with Jesus and St George) that he shed for his greater good.
These days, it’s Kotler’s compensatory violence that resonates most. Boyne drops various hints that this Aryan archetype may be of problematic stock – most explicitly, in the novel’s dinner party scene during which Kotler fleetingly mentions his papa’s decision to leave the Fatherland. To allay the barrage of suspicion this prompts, Kotler seizes the flimsy excuse of an accidental drink spillage to beat a Jewish servant to death. It’s a sickening scene that merges performative punishment with a brutal infliction of something close to self-hatred, and full of stains that run deep and red,
The aetiology of Kotlers should be familiar to anyone who grew up in the UK during the 70s or 80s and, hopefully, won’t become so to any child growing up now. Back then, it was unremarkable to hear adults publicly declaring their hatred for all [insert chromatically/ethnically/politically derogatory term] and, usually, hoping to be heard by those so described. Children engaged in the same, often capping their efforts (as some adults did) with an exonerating coda for those they claimed as friends: “Not you – you’re alright”.
After the initial stun of what-the-fuckery, recipients of this honour usually took one of several paths. Some interrogated the offered exceptionalism, dismantling its “’Cos-I-know-you” logic and returning the pieces to its practitioners, to pop back up the ideological bumhole from whence it came. Others responded more noncommittally, neither speaking up nor walking away though similarly unhypnotised by dangled carrots. And then there were the most pitiable – and dangerous – of all: the ones who chowed down, issuing thanks through mouthfuls of beta-carotene and meaning every syllable.
Once groomed, there are few depths of useful idiocy the last group won’t plumb to retain their tor/mentors’ approval. Kotler may well have been among their number. Despite her superhero surname, Suella Braverman appears to be so to this day, unswerving in her loyalty to Sir John Hayes and whichever iteration of the Monday Club he currently represents. For the most powerful tool in the kit of each one’s master is precarity: the only way to retain that place in his good books is through regular demonstrations of allegiance.
Which may explain the alacrity with which Braverman jumps at any chance to punch down at people who look a bit like her, in ways chosen to sate those who’d ‘repatriate’ her in a heartbeat. Characterising small-boat arrivals as pillaging invaders echoes the ‘Great Replacement’ conspiracies belowed of white supremacists who, with their proud claims to Viking ancestry, still have a way to go before being consistently opposed to invasion and pillage . Withholding a £3 ‘healthy food’ allowance from toddlers and pregnant women fleeing real war zones plays to the same by appearing to jeopardise brown people’s reproductive capacity.
So, too, the decision to not widen a Home Office scheme providing community-based accommodation for Ukrainians, in favour of herding other refugees into barracks and barges unfit for human habitation. Never mind that, day for day, the community scheme cost less than half the amount spent on hotels which, in turn, cost less than the barges; nor that the UN hailed the first as highly effective and humane. Manufacturing a problem that fattens the bank balance of some undisclosed acquaintances while furnishing the optics of bestial holding pens must surely count as a win-win?
A pity, then, that Braverman’s support for Nigel Farage and his seashore loitering only furnishes an amphibian riff on Dick Dastardly and his obsessive quest to Stop the Pigeon. The Home Secretary, you may remember, identified NF’s commitment to Stopping the Boats as the root cause of his banking woes (wrongly, it now transpires) and, like some kind of Mystic Muttley without the titters, confidently foretold that first they came for the bigots. For anyone who’s not a Wacky Race-ist, Dick and Mutt never get the pigeon; they just get hurt. By their own weapons.
Should all of the above not sufficiently pathologise that mainstay of human history, the intercontinental movement of people of brown and black people, May’s National Conservatism Conference continued the job while never once reminding Braverman’s enablers that it’s an occurrence to which many owe their white skins and the ‘one drop’ rule owes its comedy value. Repeatedly positing immigration and gender equality as threats to whiteness and Christianity, the Nat C Con also exemplified the menace of erudition: attendees who’d evidently nodded off during Geography lessons appear to have done so during Biology and Religious Studies too.
Held at a venue ideally situated between the Home Office and Tufton Street, 2023’s Nat C con boasted speakers who were, almost uniformly, committed FFF-KKKers, located at the convergence of ‘faith, family and flag’ and ‘kinder, kuche, kirche’. Political ballast came courtesy of Braverman, the ever-hovering John Hayes and several Conservative MPs chosen, it would appear, for their susceptibility to a hefty dose of nominative determinism: Jacob Resmog, Miriam K-K-Cates, Danny ‘Dunning’ Kruger and Lee Anderthal.
Michael Gove was there too, although in rather less of an education-focused capacity than may previously have been the case. That responsibility fell, instead, to his own protégé: headteacher Katherine Birbalsingh (seeing a pattern, yet?) who, though self-characterised as a maverick, burbled compliantly before singing the praises of her school’s patriotism curriculum. It’s a jolly affair that, according to Professor David Buckingham (ex-UCL, Loughborough and Kings College and, thus, one of those Actual Experts of whom Gove has had enough), obliges students ‘’to sing patriotic songs…wear poppies and celebrate the Queen’s birthday [sic], and to support the England team at football’’.
Perhaps this does, indeed, nurture the “uplifting unity” that Miss Snuffy, as Birbalsingh’s known online, claims. Scientists have yet to confirm, however, whether a verse or two of Vindaloo by Fat Les can assuage the pangs of “lunch isolation” – a sanction of reduced rations, served in a room far far away from the lunch hall, that Birbalsingh’s students get to experience if their parents don’t pay for a half-term’s worth of lunches in advance. Which not everyone can. Eat my Goal, anyone?
Extolling/imposing the virtues of shared identity, while bemoaning identity politics, it’s no surprise that Birbalsingh’s argument ran counter when it suited. Should the values of a “woke” school feel incompatible with theirs, parents were encouraged to let unity go hang and remove their children from said institutions. It’s a strategy long endorsed by far-right groups that see home education as the best way of ensuring delivery of a racist curriculum – not unlike the one that Bruno is forced to follow in The Boy…Indeed, some far-right groups have banks of teaching materials for this very purpose.
Partial or reframed information is fundamental to the purposes of the hardline theocrats who fund the activities of the Nat C movement. It’s also a recurrent, if unadmitted, theme among the like-minded ‘think tanks’ to which the US-based Edmund Burke Foundation, organiser of last May’s conference, opened the symposium’s arms. These included several British organisations as well as Hungary’s Danube Institute – a state-funded outfit that has been allowed to flourish on the watch of Viktor Orban who – along with slavery-defending Ron de Santis – also happens to be a Nat C alumnus.
Exemplifying the ‘buy-one-get-the-box-set-free’ principle that seems to apply in so many cases, Orban’s shelf boasts the full complement of divisiveness dressed up as its opposite. At the Danube Institute, misogynistic, anti-Semitic (in all senses: look up ‘Semitic’), white supremacist, anti-LGBTQ+ and climate change-sceptical stances come wrapped – as they do at Nat C con – in an allegedly Christian nationalism that hails the first two innkeepers as the heroes of the Nativity story and never seems to ask “What would Jesus do?”.
Ever the altruist, Orban has also been spreading his creed to the credulous credo-less through the Matthias Corvenus Collegium which, in 2020 alone, received more than a billion pounds of funding and assets from the Hungarian government. Its modus operandi will sound familiar to anyone aware of how Claire Fox’s / Frank Furedi’s Institute of Ideas works in the UK: while claiming to be a forum for free thought and speech, MCC graduates confirm that its purpose is to push a singular political vision, which it safeguards by ensuring that teachers and invited guests share Orban’s views.
The sense of deja vu extends further. A current student has described how MCC selects its intake from presentably bright students of modest backgrounds, who it then proceeds to dazzle with foreign trips and dinners in lavish restaurants. Throughout, they are exposed repeatedly to hard-right talking points, often delivered by the ‘stars’ of the scene, as well as to reminders of the ministerial glories that may await them if they stay on track. It’s a potent combination – a sort of “I hate plebs. Not you: you’re alright”, if you will – designed to nurture acolytes who will spread the word.
Having introduced a training programme in Brussels, late last year, MCC has since signed a deal with ESMT University in Berlin and has purchased a significant stake in Vienna’s Modul University. If reports are correct, its next stop will be London, where it plans to set up another branch on the Liszt Institute’s premises near Whitehall. Its aims include placing MCC students into British universities through an arrangement with the Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation, albeit not so much to learn. More, to disseminate.
In the Venn-diagrammatic way to which we’ve become accustomed, MCC’s key contact at the Scruton Foundation is Dr James Orr. A Cambridge theologian intimately involved with the Nat Cs, Orr has again joined forces with Miriam Cates, Danny “Pagans ahoy!” Kruger and [yawn] John Hayes to create the New Social Convenant Unit: an organisation dedicated to trouncing the Noise Abatement Society by enabling fellow travellers who don’t care for Travellers to have their dislikes amplified. Furthermore, Cates, Kruger and Orr sit on the advisory board of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, whose claims to centre-right-ness may yet help to shove that Overton windowframe closer to the far.
For, with Hungarian state affiliates now controlling the country’s theatres and bookshops, MCC exemplifies how some of the NCC-NSCU-ARC-ers would like to operate – a mission-creep upon which the current UK Government has, arguably, begun. A text here, a module there and before you know it, you’re capping numbers on entire “low value” degree courses and the institutions that deliver them. Helpfully, the Prime Minister has clarified exactly which courses he so deems, lest the electorate concludes that the least valuable degree to a functioning society is PPE at Oxford: those that, within 15 months of completion, do not lead their graduates to professions, further study or entrepreneurship.
With no mind paid to context or privilege – the cost of postgraduate courses, the role of existing connections in gaining entry to certain fields – it’s fallen to others, again, to observe that the institutions and students most likely to be affected are the least advantaged. That and the likelihood that social sciences, the arts and creative subjects will be hardest hit. Which may not be so bad given that, together, they do tend to encourage interrogative ways of looking at the world, argumentative skill and awareness of how language can be used to manipulate. And we can’t be having that.
Should these plans come to fruition, the baby that could be thrown out with the bathwater may be the other kinds of knowledge that novels, plays and sociology, among others, tend to nurture: understandings of how people – even those far removed from ourselves – arrive at their places in the world and their views of it, within which lie reminders of an easily forgotten truth. That a ghastly perpetrator – like Kotler, like Braverman – may once have been and, perhaps, still is a victim.
Mind you, if it’s a black baby in the bath…
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