Daisy May Cooper as M: does that mean James Bond is turning into a comedy?
You can have the good news first. At last, the ceaseless pounding drumbeat of speculation over who will play the next James Bond has paused. A semiofficial moratorium has fallen over the shrieking clickbait dedicated to wondering aloud whether Aaron Taylor Johnson or Idris Elba or about eight people from Game of Thrones or any actor seen in public in a suit will be chosen to succeed Daniel Craig as James Bond.
Now for the bad news: this has happened because there is now a ceaseless pounding drumbeat of speculation over whether or not Daisy May Cooper from This Country will be the next M. For this week, everyone has suddenly decided that this is a thing, even though it probably isn’t.
Several outlets have reported that Cooper is either definitely going to be M, or in discussion with Eon Productions about becoming M in the next Bond film. The rationale for this reporting is either that producers want her because she is close friends with Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who wrote some of the last James Bond film, or because they think she “opens the door to [the franchise] being a bit lighter and more comedic going forwards”.
It’s hard to know exactly where to start with this, isn’t it? There’s the fact that, just a month ago, producer Barbara Broccoli told reporters that no script exists for the next James Bond film, and no casting decisions have been made whatsoever, and that it will probably be two or three years before any sort of casting announcements are made. So, even if this story was true, this would mean that Broccoli would be prepared to stake the entire future of a 60-year, $7bn film series on whether or not the most sought-after leading movie stars of the day have a convincing screen chemistry with the woman from Am I Being Unreasonable.
And then there’s the C-word just sitting there, daring us not to gag. James Bond might still have a place in the world – currently the best way for that to happen would be to rip off the visceral flesh and blood stuntwork of the Mission: Impossible films – but not if it means making it comedic. The world needs a James Bond comedy like it needs to be smashed in the shins with a golf club. A wry quip here and there might be OK, but please let’s not make it an out and out comedy. We deserve better than that.
But maybe I’m being shortsighted here. Maybe Daisy May Cooper would be a brilliant M. As a source – who might just feasibly be Cooper’s manager, but what do I know? – told the Times: “Daisy is a proper Rada-trained actress who everyone wants to work with. She is funny, has bags of personality and is very hot at the minute.” Maybe she really does have the heft to follow in the footsteps of Ralph Fiennes and Judi Dench.
Or maybe comedy is just the way things are going. Maybe a new James Bond is an opportunity to reset the clock on the series, by pretending that Daniel Craig, Pierce Brosnan and Timothy Dalton never existed and simply revert back to the cheeky, improbable whoops-a-lummy Bond of the Roger Moore era. Sex jokes, cheap sets, slapstick, inappropriate age differences, the lot. Full Austin Powers. What the hell.
If this really is the way that 007 is heading, then the least we can do is lean into it and turn it into the best version it can be. If Daisy May Cooper is going to be M, then let’s hire Charlie Cooper – Daisy’s brother and the cocreator of This Country – as the new
Moneypenny. We would also need a Q. My sincere recommendation would be to keep the new character off screen at all times, yelling at Bond from another room. Daisy May Cooper proved she could do this incredibly well in This
Country, as her character’s mother, so let’s get her to do the same here. And now, with these supporting roles secured, we would finally be in a position to hire the performer most suitable to play 007 in this lighter and more comedic Bond: the double-taking pigeon from Moonraker.
tirely by women, who sat side by side on benches or sacks of fabric. These were typical sweatshop scenes: low-ceilinged factories crowded with scores of workers in hairnets labouring at sewing machines alongside piles of clothing under fluorescent lights.
Reports hailed an “economic boom” of rapid industrialisation and rising employment, but this relied on increasing aid flows from the South African government, with transfers of 120m rand (about £16.3m today) in 1984 alone. A rise in the price of gold – one of the nation’s key exports – filled state coffers and allowed it to set up some of the world’s best investor incentives in the Bantustans. In the supposed “laboratory experiment” of free markets in Ciskei, investors were offered a deal too good to pass up, as the state paid the wages of their employees, subsidised 80% of the cost of their factory rentals and billed them for no corporate taxes.
While investors were lured to Ciskei by the carrot of state subsidies, they also profited from the apartheid state’s liberal use of the stick. The wouldbe libertarian utopia operated hand in glove with the South African security forces, which punished everyday civilian acts of resistance and actively enforced the prohibition on trade unions. One activist, Priscilla Maxongo, described how women in the labour movement were routinely arrested, interrogated and tortured. She recounted having a rubber tube tied around her neck to cut off her air supply until she divulged information about the groups organising for workers’ rights.
In 1983, police killed 15 protesters when they shot into crowds demonstrating against a bus fare increase. The New York Timescalled Ciskei an “ugly little police state”. Thozamile Gqweta, the secretary of the South African Allied Workers, had his house set on fire with the front door wired shut; his mother and uncle died when their houses were similarly set on fire; his girlfriend was shot by police as they left his mother’s funeral; and he was himself detained for three months and tortured with electric shock. In the same year that the American libertarian magazine Reason celebrated Ciskei as a “haven of prosperity and peace in South Africa’s back yard”, security forces entered a Ciskei church commemorating the 10th anniversary of the Soweto uprising and beat the congregation with whips made of rhinoceros hide, hospitalising 35 and killing a 15-year-old boy.
The tragedy of the libertarian partnership with the police state was starkest in 1987. That year, Louw travelled to Dakar to meet members of the African National Congress (ANC) in exile. He hoped to persuade the socialist ANC that privatisation was a better way to reform South Africa. Months later, the Black civil rights lawyer who had organised the meeting was found in the back seat of his own car bound and beaten to death by the Ciskei security forces. Louw’s partners in building a libertarian utopia were actively exterminating the democratic anti-apartheid opposition.
Ciskei was a “Trojan horse to topple apartheid”, claimed a British neoliberal thinktanker on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. But it was no such thing. Rather, as a South African libertarian economist conceded with resignation after praising the results of Louw’s experiment: “If the ANC came into power in South Africa, they would conquer Ciskei and integrate it again into South Africa at large. So the continued success of Ciskei depends upon the continued survival of the South African government.”
The libertarian Bantustan was not a lever to weaken the grip of the apartheid state. Rather, it served a role in the public relations strategy of the apartheid state as a Potemkin village of supposed Black self-determination and economic liberalism, which needed the apartheid state to live.
But libertarians around the world refused to recognise this. At a time when the truth of violent state repression in Ciskei could be easily read about in major newspapers, an American neoliberal thinktanker called for Ciskei to be recognised as a separate country, even though nobody but South African elites bought the idea of Bantustan independence.
“I think [Ciskei] is a beacon for all of us on South Africa, and I am very happy with what’s going on there,” he said. “Can we have a Ciskei here?” he asked of the United States. Like many other libertarians, he saw the height of economic freedom in the form of a state unburdened by representative democracy, stripped of its capacity to tax and redistribute, and trained by the threat of capital flight to always put investors’ needs first.
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Even as the Ciskei experiment showed troubling results for those who claimed to believe in freedom, Leon Louw sought to scale up the model of the business-friendly zone to a reform plan for the whole nation. In 1986 he published South Africa: The Solution, written with his wife, Frances Kendall. The book was one of South Africa’s most successful political titles at the time, selling close to 40,000 copies.
In their book, the couple proposed that South Africa and the Bantustans be fractured into a checkerboard of “cantons” where residents could “vote with their feet” by leaving with their capital whenever they desired. The central government would control no major revenue sources, make no major transfers between cantons and be constitutionally bound to respect private property rights. All education and land would be privatised.
The outcome would be what Louw and Kendall called a “marketplace in politics”. They believed that most cantons would be multiracial – but a key feature of their proposal was that “people of a particular race or ideology can cluster together in ‘national’ or ‘ethnic’ cantons to satisfy their particular preferences and escape the kind of governments they reject”. The freedom of movement would be constitutionally secured but, crucially, the right to settlewould not be. In other words, you might take a job in a segregated canton but might not be allowed to live there.
This was precisely how the existing labour market worked in apartheid South Africa, as Black workers moved in and out of white areas for employment but had limited rights of residence, let alone property ownership. For Louw and Kendall, the freedom to privately discriminate was central. They hoped the division of land into many cantons and the decentralisation of control over natural resources would safeguard against policies of racialised revenge by ensuring that no Black government would be able to seize and redistribute resources from the centre. Louw left no doubt about this implication when he told Time magazine: “We want to make it possible to let the tiger – the Black majority – out of the cage without whites being eaten.”
The libertarian solution to government-imposed apartheid was voluntary racial segregation. Louw and Kendall illustrated this in the epilogue to their book, which imagined a near future where their solution had been realised. They prophesied a variety of coexisting political forms, including a canton called Workers Paradise where “everyone was issued with a copy of Mao’s little red book” and racial segregation was reinstituted because Black and white leftist radicals “refused to mix with each other socially”. Another canton was imagined as a “mini Monaco” in which pot, prostitution and pornography were legal, everything was deregulated and traditional land was privatised. A last speculative canton was dubbed Witwaterberg, “South Africa’s radical white separatist canton”, where automation and white labour replaced Black labour altogether and racial covenants ensured that residents remained white only.
In the event, it was only the last one that came to be. In 1990, a group known as the Afrikaner Freedom Front bought a patch of land and buildings in central South Africa, evicted its mixedrace residents and opened the white Boer enclave of Orania the following year. Designs for the settlement dated back to the early 1980s, when Carel Boshoff, head of the thinktank South African Bureau for Racial Affairs, had pitched the so-called Plan Oranje for the establishment of a white homeland. As Boshoff described it at the time, because “white supremacy” was doomed in the long run in a majority Black environment, the best thing to do was withdraw to a white redoubt while continuing economic relations with the surrounding non-white communities. In the 1990s, with Boshoff in residence, Orania took as its logo a small white boy rolling up his sleeves, a gesture signalling a willingness to work – but also, unmistakably, a willingness to fight.
Before Orania was founded, Louw and Kendall wrote that “people laugh at the proposal of Afrikaner separatists … to establish an independent homeland” in the near-desert. But the lack of natural resources should be no problem, they said. An “Afrikaner homeland” just needed a “low-tax or no-tax policy to attract hi-tech, skills-intensive business to the region”. The miniature ethnostate need only become a zone.
Today Orania counts more than 2,000 residents. At the annual meeting of the South African Libertarian Society, which was held there in 2015, Louw jokingly referred to the town as an adaptation of the homeland model to create an “Afrikanerstan”. According to libertarians, the foremost attraction is less its racial segregation than its structure as a private corporation in which residents buy shares. Rather than a mayor, Orania’s leader is a chief executive. Orania also issues its own currency, the ora, and has moved into cryptocurrency and blockchain technology to further insulate itself from the central government.
Orania has gained traction worldwide. In 2019, Australian far right groups were using Orania as a template for creating “Anglo-European enclaves” as bases for a coming race war. In the US, the white nationalist group
American Renaissance praised Orania as a place where Afrikaners “could keep white and where they could preserve their language and culture” and “set up a private corporation to run it, with the power to grant residency only to certain approved Afrikaners”.
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On 11 February 1990, footage of Nelson Mandela walking out of the front gates of Victor Verster prison after 27 years of incarceration appeared on television screens across the world. When Mandela spoke from a balcony in Cape Town partially covered with a red Soviet flag, people pressing in and lifted up on shoulders and arms to see him, his message was clear and unambiguous: “Universal suffrage on a common voters roll in a united, democratic and non-racial South Africa is the only way to peace and racial harmony.” The next month, the Ciskei government of Lennox Sebe was overthrown in a coup, with a crowd chanting: “Viva ANC! Viva the South African Communist party!”
The events of the early 90s looked like a refutation of the canton schemes and their fantasy of fragmentation. There would be no drastic redrawing of the maps. The inherited borders of the South African state remained as they were, and the artificial homelands rejoined the unitary nation in 1994. When Mandela won in a free and fair election, he spoke of South Africa as a “rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world”. Historians mark the election as the 20th century’s last act of decolonisation, proof that empire had passed from the world stage in a triumph of the nation state.
But there were signs that the dream of the zone was not going quietly. What had happened in the hinterland of the Eastern Cape, with its clusters of sweatshops, was very modern, and in some ways the future. In 1986 there were only 176 zones globally. Today there are more than 5,400. One of the biggest sites of recent growth? Sub-Saharan Africa, where there are already 200, with 73 more announced for completion. Just north of South Africa, libertarians are consulting on a “charter city” for Zambia. There is always a new fantasy island just over the horizon.
This is an edited extract from CrackUp Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy, published by Allen Lane on 4 April.
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potentially legally potent, will not wipe out what has already been revealed. Erin Murphy, a lawyer representing the network, said in court this week that Fox cannot be held liable because it was merely airing allegations from representatives of the sitting president. Any reasonable viewer, she said, would have understood that they were allegations. Even if top Fox executives were generally aware of what was being broadcast and didn’t believe it, Murphy argued, that’s not enough to hold them liable. Eric Davis, the Delaware judge seemed skeptical of some those arguments.
Tucker Carlson’s messages, Murphy pressed on, aren’t really relevant to whether other Fox officials knowingly broadcast false information.
A jury will ultimately decide on the liability issues, but seeing one of the network’s most visible stars forcefully disagreeing with what was going on onair will probably be what endures in the mind of the American public.
Undergirding the litigation is also a dueling vision about the power of Fox and the role that it plays in American media. As Murphy, Fox’s lawyer, told it, Fox is just another news network where conservative opinions are sometimes sprinkled in on air. Its decision to air the allegations about Dominion were merely an attempt to help its viewers understand, she said, once comparing their work to C-Span, which strictly airs political proceedings with no commentary or narrative.
But Dominion’s lawyers painted a more realistic picture of Fox, emphasizing the immense influence it has among conservatives. When the network chose to air the false claims about Dominion, it wasn’t just airing allegations, the lawyers said, it was pumping it into the veins of the American public. Fox didn’t just give Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani airtime, the network made them household names.
There was a “deliberate decision … to release the kraken,” Rodney Smolla, another Dominion lawyer said on Tuesday, quoting Powell.
Stephen Shackleford, another Dominion lawyer, made a similar point in his argument on Wednesday. He noted that when Powell began appearing on Fox, she hadn’t been formally hired by Trump and was being shut out of meetings at the White House. Fox still chose to give her a platform.
“Sidney was hunting for someone to make her relevant and Fox made her relevant,” said Shackleford. “While it doesn’t matter legally, the historical record needs to be clear.”
The full trial in the case is scheduled to begin on 17 April.