Labour’s Mods and Rockers battling it out in Brighton? It’s...
QUAD- REMANIA
WITH perfect timing, the Labour Party conference in Brighton coincides with the 40th anniversary of the ultimate Mod movie, Quadrophenia.
In a seamless, if somewhat surreal, sequence on Saturday, Sky Tv switched from coverage of the conference to a trailer for Sunday night’s documentary marking the release of the film in 1979.
Jeremy Corbyn and his groupies were seen strolling along the same seafront where Quadrophenia’s Mods and Rockers kicked lumps out of each other.
For those unfamiliar with the film, it was based on The Who’s rock opera of the same name and stars Phil Daniels, Leslie Ash, Philip Davis, Toyah Willcox, Ray Winstone and Mark Wingett.
In the mid-Sixties, seaside battles between rival youth gangs were as much a part of every Bank Holiday as Kiss Me Quick hats.
Quadrophenia follows a group of scooter-riding Mods from London down to Brighton.
Once there they pop pills, stage running fights with leather-jacketed Rockers and, in the case of Daniels and Leslie Ash, have a memorable, adrenaline- fuelled, mid- riot knee- trembler in an alleyway.
In many ways, Quadrophenia is an ideal metaphor for the battle raging over Brexit right now.
The original Mods embraced Italian tailoring and imported vespa and Lambretta scooters. The Rockers, by contrast, preferred traditional British motorbikes, such as Norton and Triumph.
In Brighton this week, the Mods would be represented by Nonce Finder General Tom Watson.
Given his new- found obsession with cuttingedge fashion, Watson probably fancies himself as the Ace Face, the movie’s supercool clothes horse played by a Roxanne- era Sting, then just starting to make a name for himself with The Police.
These days Watson wears tieless (but with the top button done up) untucked shirts and trendy, midlife crisis sneakers. He looks like an embarrassing dad at a school’s Boy Band Tribute evening.
‘Tonight, Matthew, I’m going to be Harry Styles.’
In the mid-Sixties, he’d have had a top-of-the-range, two-tone Tonik mohair suit from John Collier, the Window to Watch; candy-striped Ben Sherman shirt and handtooled loafers. He would have turned up in Brighton on a chromed Lambretta SX 2000, with half a dozen headlamps and an esso tiger tail tied to the aerial.
When I saw Watson on Tv standing outside the Metropole Hotel, surrounded by adoring supporters, I half expected him to lead a Quadrophenia-style chorus of:
We are the Mods, We are the Mods, We are, we are, We are the Mods.
emily Wossname, Labour’s Lady Muck, probably sees herself in the Leslie Ash role, although she’d find it a struggle squeezing down that same alleyway.
Some of the original Mods sported Union Jack jackets and RAF roundels. Their modern equivalent wouldn’t be seen dead in anything quite so offensively racist. Too white van man, darling. Those ubiquitous eU hats and flags are more their style.
The Rockers — or in Labour’s case, Off Their Rockers — would obviously be represented by Seventies throwback Corbyn. He even had a motorbike when he was younger, taking Diane Abbott on a romantic sightseeing tour of Communist east Germany.
Not sure which side Diane would be on these days. She’s one of life’s Mods, but she’s also all over the place — like a Sixties disco dancer on uppers doing the Wah-Watusi in a Brighton ballroom, before throwing herself off the balcony, like Phil Daniels.
Corbyn is an unreconstructed Brexiteer. He sincerely believes the eU is a capitalist conspiracy, opposed joining and has been all in favour of leaving ever since.
Watson, on the other hand, has embraced europe with the same zeal he devoted to losing half his body weight.
Before last night’s bad-tempered conference vote backing Corbyn’s refusal to hold another referendum in advance of a general election, Watson called on Labour to drop any pretence of honouring the original Leave result.
Meanwhile, the infighting has been as nasty as anything seen on the streets of Brighton in Quadrophenia. Watson only just survived an attempt by the dominant Momentum faction to get rid of his post of deputy leader.
He and Momentum’s grand ayatollah Jon Lansman are at each others’ throats like Mods and Rockers scrapping outside the Ship hotel. A ‘ battle for the future of the Labour Party’ is in full swing.
Actually, it looks to me more like a battle for Labour’s past — a Back To The Future fight to the death.
Although Quadrophenia was set in 1965, it was released in 1979, the year of the first Thatcher victory.
Labour’s post- election, postmortem was held in Brighton that same year and kickstarted the lurch to the Left that kept the party out of office for 18 years.
It was only after Tony Blair junked the red-in-tooth-and-claw legacy that Labour became electable again.
Now, Labour’s ruling faction is determined to turn the clock back, with a raft of neo-Marxist policies to rival the disastrous 1983 Michael Foot manifesto, dubbed the longest suicide note in history. The policies being trotted out at Brighton this week are, as the Mail said yesterday, dripping with the politics of envy.
Make that resentment, too. How else to describe the assault on independent schools, which would hit hundreds of thousands of hardworking middle-class families, yet leave the super-rich unscathed?
Labour’s platform for government is based upon a drunkensailor spending programme, paid for by massive, unsustainable borrowing, and sky-high taxes on incomes, savings and pensions. Private wealth and property would be confiscated to finance a wideranging expansion of the State.
A Labour government would lead to a reckless increase in trades union power, of the type which reduced Britain to penury in the Seventies.
FIRMS would be compelled to introduce a ruinously expensive four- day working week at a time when international competition has never been so fierce.
Deprived of cheap, reliable energy from fossil fuels by 2030, companies would be forced out of business, with the consequent heavy loss of jobs. Farmers would have to hand over agricultural land for ‘re-wilding’.
At the same time, Labour Remainers are hellbent on betraying five million of their traditional voters, predominantly in the North and Midlands, who backed Leave in the referendum.
They, and the rest of us, can only look on as both main parties — indeed, the entire political class — fight like rats in a sack over Brexit.
We’re the bewildered Sixties holidaymakers on Brighton Beach, who can only recoil as the deckchairs rain down on our heads and Mods and Rockers rip each other to pieces.
Never mind Quadrophenia, this is Quad-Remania!
Incidentally, at the end of the movie, a thoroughly disillusioned Phil Daniels nicks Sting’s scooter and drives it off Beachy Head.
Maybe a cliff-edge Brexit is the best we can hope for.