Too much 'Gaiety' & Lord Mayor of Manchester?

THE art historian, journalist, and critic, Brian Sewell, died in 2015 aged 84.  Four years before his death in July 2011, he wrote in the ‘Daily Mail’:

'Is it true that the lives of heterosexual Mancunians are haplessly intertwined with transvestites, transsexuals, teenage lesbians and a horde of homosexuals across the range?  Is Manchester now the Sodom of the North? Where once we had no gaiety at all, we now perhaps, have rather too much.'

Sewell’s article, ‘What have they done to Corrie?' focused on how Coronation Street characters were becoming increasingly gay, something almost unthinkable, in the days of Ena Sharples and Minnie Caldwell. He wrote:

'The Lesbians, Sophie Webster and Sian Powers caught ‘in flagrante’ by Sophie’s mum Sally. Sean Tully, the barman, set to tie the knot with boyfriend Marcus Dent. Middle-aged cross-dresser, Marc Selby and Hayley Cropper, the first transsexual to appear on the screen in 1998.'

Although Sewell acknowledged that the creator of Coronation Street, Tony Warren, was a homosexual as well as scriptwriter Daman Rochefort, he seemed to think that in this age of political correctness and equal opportunity, minorities are given the opportunity to punch above their weight. After all, gay men are supposed to make up just 6% of the British population. More importantly, he pointed out:

'Scots favour Scots, Irishmen favour the Irish, Armenians favour Armenians, Jews favour Jews, homosexuals have always favoured other homosexuals. Its how minorities gain strength through influence.'

Manchester is known for being one of the most LGBT- friendly cities in the UK. It also has one of the highest numbers of people living with HIV outside of London. The City Council recently elected a 44-year-old gay man, to be the Lord Mayor of Manchester.

'Sworn into his historic role - with a quote from disco legends Abba', Councillor Carl Austin-Behan, from Crumpsall, a former ‘Mr Gay UK’, left school with only one GCSE in drama.  In 1997, he was drummed-out of the RAF when it was discovered that he was a homosexual. Previously employed with Great Manchester Fire Service, he now runs a cleaning company. Councillor Austin-Behan has said that he’s ‘passionate’ about promoting the achievements of Manchester’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, (LGBT) community and will,

'Use his year in office to highlight prejudice towards the Tran’s community and work to make HIV testing more readily available in Greater Manchester.'
The Lord Mayor also believes, that: 

'People with different identities and sexual orientations, shouldn’t just be respected in Manchester, but celebrated.'

Just why any of us should pay respect or celebrate someone, because they are of a particular identity or sexual orientation isn’t quite clear, but it sounds like the most conceited nonsense. Surely, respect is something that is earned and not owed to anyone?  

While Councillor Austin-Behan is to be applauded for his stance on fighting discrimination and for trying to make HIV testing more readily available, it’s clear, that the Lord Mayor’s horizons are extremely limited.  In fact, they don’t seem to stretch much further than Canal Street, the ‘Gay Village’, and what lies in the interests of homosexual’s. To be a successful politician, one needs to be far more circumspect and never forget who is paying you.

Apart from its claim to be a ‘gay-friendly’ city, Manchester also has another claim to fame. In 2011, it was dubbed the child poverty capital of Britain, with some 25,000 children growing-up in severe poverty.  In April 2016, more than 50,000 emergency food supplies were handed out to families across Great Manchester who were struggling to feed themselves in the sixth richest nation on earth.  For many, living in Greater Manchester, life is akin to living in a Northern Poorhouse rather than a Northern Powerhouse.

What the Lord Mayor of Manchester thinks about this appalling state of affairs, isn’t quite clear, because he’s too wrapped up with LGBT issues.  But if anybody deserves our respect and ought to be celebrated, it is in my view, the seven courageous homeless campaigners who Manchester City Labour controlled council tried to jail in September 2015, for up to two-years, for fighting homelessness in the city. I say, give them a medal!

The Secret Agent in the City

IN the light of the recent showing of the The Secret Agent on BBC, I note that the anarchist Colin Ward in his introduction to the Folio edition writes: 

'A series of journeys are evoked as a cast of characters traverse “the whole town of marvels and mud, with its maze of streets and mass of lights”... and the secret agent's walk through shadow and sunlight from Soho to the Embassy, as well as several more sinister or desperate urban voyages which an extraordinary shift in scene and mood for the chronicler of travels under exotic skies.'

Reviewers, when The Secret Agent first appeared in 1907, were surprised and commented on the Dickensian evocation of London, because hitherto the author, Joseph Conrad, had dealt with exotic places and adventurers on the high seas.  Last Saturday, in the FT Janan Ganesh wrote of a London which not only embraces the enlightenment of other European nations but that 'tips over into something else.  It  has a taste for chaos, whose ultimate expression is the physical anarchy of the city itself – the architectural incoherence, the “labyrinthine obliquity” of its layout, as Peter Ackroyd puts it, You can see it from the hill on Greenwich Park: a weird panorama of Christopher Wren and Norman Foster, the Georgians and the Brutalists.  In Conrad's time too, the city was a maze.' 

Anomie or the 'absence of social consensus' in the society of the turn of the 20^th century was a big influence upon writers such as Joseph Conrad and Henry James who in the late 19th century wrote another novel about London anarchists in London called 'The Princess Casamassima'.  The mood music was perhaps best expressed in the poem written in 1919 by the Irish poet William Butler Yeats (1865-1935):  

       THE SECOND COMING

    Turning and turning in the widening gyre

    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

    The best lack all conviction, while the worst

    Are full of passionate intensity.