The current Guido Fawkes Quote of the Day features Andrew Neil saying, in yesterday’s Observer, how very hated the ridiculous Derek Draper (a particular Guido aversion) seems to have become, amongst the sort of people who think it worth sharing their hatreds of public figures with the likes of Andrew Neil.
But I found more interesting what Neil says about The Boat That Rocked, the new Richard Curtis movie about the pirate radio stations of old:
The pirate stations were not killed off by a Tory public-school prime minister (as in the film), but by a grammar school boy and Labour PM, Harold Wilson, and the destruction was not carried out by a Tory toff minister (as in the Curtis version), but by a left-wing toff, Tony Benn (then Labour minister in charge of the airwaves).
Yes, that’s certainly how I remember the story.
. . . the pirate stations were shut not by a stuffy Tory establishment, but by a supposedly modernising Labour government. Fact really is stranger than fiction.
I don’t think that strange, any more than I think that the lies built into Curtis’s plot are strange. “Modernising Labour governments” think that they know best how to do modernity, and are a standing menace to the real thing. Having ruined whichever bit of modernity they were obsessing about, they and their supporters then lie about that, blaming – for as long as they plausibly can – capitalism.
See also: the USSR. That was run by people who were absolutely obsessed with modernity, which they thought they could improve upon by dictatorial means. With the result that they stopped pretty much all of it dead in its tracks, apart from the stuff like concentration camps. And for decades, people like Richard Curtis told lies about that too.
Bit off topic, but it would make my day if someone more knowledgeable than myself could fisk this Koletsky article in today’s Times:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/anatole_kaletsky/article6041266.ece
That comment would have gone better with Perry’s post below.
“The end result of ‘progressive’ government is totalitarianism,” the late philosopher Eric Voegelin once wrote. Tracing the long history of the Gnostics, those who believed themselves in possession of “the word,” i.e., THE TRUTH (as in ultimate) he came to the conclusion that such individuals–both individually and collectively–tend always to totalist solutions, as why should inferior beliefs be allowed to muck up the wonders their enlightened works bring their fellow men, so to speak. These wonderous benefits, born of their enlightened views must necessarily be spread throughout mankind undiluted by inferior visions. Or as one Iraqui Suni “militant” who was fighting the American installation of a new Iraqui Constitution put it: “Why do we need a Constitution when we have the Koran?” Indeed. Totalitist systems ALWAYS brook no competition–and strive to eliminate it everywhere they can before it entices the masses to follow false Gods–Pan, after all, beguiled his charges with the “wrong” kind of music and, horned (or horny) God that he was, aroused his charges into sexual hedonistic, self-centered frenzies/thoughts so un-condusive to building new, seriously “progressive” man.
No wonder Harold Wilson hated rock and roll and the pirate stations so tantalizingly just beyond the ambit of his reach.
Curtis is a fully paid up member of the Notting Hill set
I just wrote a couple of long comments in another place about how the left aren’t liberal, but manage to maintain an illusion that they are. Not under my usual name, but my raving is easy to recognise 🙂
I think a key job for libertarians is to peel the social liberals away from the Left. In fact the lie that the Left actually stand for “progress” is perhaps the biggest lie of all.
Why are you people talking about a film on events that happened decades ago!? Internet privacy died in Britain today, and you are wasting time on a stupid film…
Frederick, it is not stupid to talk about the distortions of history, since movies and TV is where a lot of people get their ideas from. Not all folk are libertarian geeks like yours truly. So if a Curtis film spreads the lie that pirate radio was killed by the Tories, rather than by Tony Benn during the Wilson government, that matters. Lies matter, because unless they are called out as lies, people believe them.
I had hoped that the movie might have been riotous celebration of defying the state; let’s hope at least some of that flavour comes across in the film. I must say that Curtis, and his particular brand of movie making, is not one I much care for. I cannot remember the last time I saw a UK film that I actually liked.
I hadn’t realised that that pissant Curtis had distorted the facts in his latest film in this way. Mind you, it does not surprise me, he’s the NuLabor luvvie par excellence. You’d think he and Bono would have solved all of Africa’s problems by now, they’ve been boring the arse off the rest of us about it for 20 years.
Quote of the Day?
John K, there is a hilarious story about how Bono came out on stage at the end of a concert and shouted: “Every time I clap my hands, a baby in Africa dies”. Someone in the crowd shouted back: “Well stop fucking doing it then”.
Heh.
Jonathan:
According to snopes, that story is urban legend.
Wasn’t it also that very same left-wing toff, Tony Benn, who all but destroyed the British automobile industry?
A one-man wrecking crew.
– F. Hayek, 1944, The Road to Serfdom, Chapter 2 “The Great Utopia”.
Ted:
An urban myth perhaps, but one which is funny because it has a kernel of truth, namely that Bono is a midget rock god who gets off telling the world what to do, whilst making sure his money is used in the most tax efficient manner possible. One of the good results of the present recession is that his grandiose plans for the U2 Tower in Dublin have now been abandoned.
I have been thinking about how Curtis has distorted history in this film, and it really gets my goat. Like him or loathe him, Wedgie Benn is one of the few politicians from the 60’s who is still well known to the general audience, and indeed, still active in politics. It would have been rather interesting to have seen him portrayed in the movie, and he is certainly available to discuss his thinking on the matter, I saw him doing it recently on Newsnight. To replace Benn with some fictitious Tory toff doing the dirty on pirate radio just shows what a complete and utter partisan Nulabor fuck Curtis is. So no surprise there then.
Ill be giving this flick a miss anyway I find Richard Curtis’s lightweight sentimental ‘feelgood’ films highly resistable.
As for making the bad guy a Tory, no real suprise there – Most modern conservatives trace every societal ill to the cultural upheavals of the 60’s so it fits in with the contemporary narrative I guess.
I watched an ad for this film some time ago – and I guessed this was the (dishonest) line the film was going to take. And I said so on Samizdata
“But it is only a joke Paul”.
But why can the joke never be at the expense of the left?
Richard Dawkins sketched an excellent reposte to the “But it’s only a [TV program]” line in discussing the irrationalist agenda of “The X Files”. With (of course) impeccable disclaimers, he posited a TV series in which every week’s plot concerned a crime for which there was a white suspect and a black suspect, and every week, without fail, the initial scenario implicating the white suspect and exculpating the black one was found to be flawed.
I just came across this. I am asking myself where I have been all this time.:(
I keep asking myself that too Karen...all the time.
I thought I was the only one.(Link)…haha.