Toque

This weekend Mrs Toque and I are celebrating our fifth anniversary. So I'm off for a long weekend in Devon, and I've decided to take her with me as a reward for good behaviour.

Five years ago I was blogging about my first, and to date only, poncy haircut, an ordeal forced upon me by our upcoming nuptials. How time flies.

Little Man in a Poncy Haircut

Exasperated by my unkempt and often disheveled appearance, and with just eleven days to go to our wedding, Mrs Toque phoned up her hairdresser and booked me in for an appointment. This was a turn up for the books - Little Man in a Toque had never been to a posh salon before - for me it had always been the barber's shop, the sort that is usually situated adjacent to the boozer or bookmakers and owned by a proprietor that resembles a Greek or Italian pirate brandishing a cut-throat razor.

Barbers shops are great places, a last bastion of male sanctuary, where lewd and politically incorrect jokes can be told, or dignified silence can be observed, without women talking about emotions and stuff. Typically, when I'm in England, I will go to the barbers when I am hung over on a Saturday. I just turn up, no appointment necessary, and take my place on a bench with the other customers. Tabloid newspapers, mens magazines and a TV showing sport (football, horse-racing, F1 or rugby) are the in-house entertainment. Chat, if there is any, revolves around those sports; the page three girl, or rather her breasts; how you came to be so pissed last night, and with whom; and cars. But pleasantries are not necessary, and conversation is only offered on the mutual understanding that it is wanted.

You are summoned from your reverie by the call of "Next"; the chair is dusted down, but not enough to prevent you getting other people's hair on your jeans; you are given a five second consultation on what you would like done; a napkin is tucked brusquely into your shirt; your head sprayed with musty water from a plant mister, and then you get a short back and sides regardless of what you asked for. This takes about five minutes from start to finish, but sometimes it seems shorter because the frantic clicking of the scissors or whir of the clippers can send you into a deep Zen-like trance.

In posher establishments the barber will offer you a paper napkin to dust yourself down with and will run some slimy substance through the stubble on your head before taking £5 from you and ushering you out onto the street, but to me this is just prolongs the humiliation. Usually on offer in these upmarket barbers is the X-treme sport of having your skin peeled face-shaved with a cut-throat razor. A skilfully wielded razor is a sight to behold, but as I usually recognise the barber from the pub the night before I rarely take up this offer.

Anyway, today at 9am I set off for the 'hair salon' to "get a decent haircut". I arrived late, of course, having got lost, but as luck would have it there had been a cancellation so they could still fit me in. The inside of the place was open-plan and all natural wood, glass, chrome, halogen lights and mirrors. To me it looked to all the world like some sort of nightclub with the lights on. The girl at the front desk asked if I would like a cup of tea, and I replied "Yes. Thank you". She then introduced me to my hairdresser and disappeared.

My hairdresser ushered me to a cubicle where I was to take off my shirt and put on a black silk smock - or poncho or something - that came down to my knees. This I did. I looked in the mirror and raised my arms out sidewards to find that I looked amazingly like batman, but without the headgear. Next I was taken to a chair by a sink and given a head-massage with some smelly balm type substance. I guess this was supposed to be relaxing, but in these surroundings it just felt kind of strange. I was told by the hairdresser that if I felt uncomfortable with any of this then it was optional.

Hairdresser: "You know?....Some guys just aren't comfortable with this sort of thing. But it's free, so I say 'why not' eh? One guy that comes here...he's been coming here for years, he's a cop, a policeman as you call them in England, well....he never has any of this stuff done! I guess he thinks it's a bit gay or something.”

Little Man in a Toque: “Really?”

Hairdresser: “I'll tell you what we are going to do, just so you are OK with it. I'll wash your hair, and then cut it. And then I'll give your face a quick moisturise and hot-towel treatment. How does that sound?”

Little Man in a Toque isn't some macho guy by any means, but I am a bloke’s bloke and I like bloke things like football, beer and err....football and beer. I figured....I'm pretty damn sure that I'm not gay, and that I never will be. And if, on the off-chance that I do have some latent homosexuality, then it's probably best to go through with this test now before my wedding. Anyway, sod it, I'm not afraid to explore my feminine side. Stupid cops.

Little Man in a Toque: “Ummm...sounds good”.

So after the head massage my head was washed and I was escorted, in my silk robe, to the hair cutting station; a huge free-standing mirror with a comfy black chair in front of it. Tea was placed in my hand - I say tea but it was yellow and had bark in the bottom of the mug - and the real hairdressing and conversation began. Now Little Man in a Toque isn't a bad conversationalist, but he's not good at small talk - and remember this was early in the morning too. Unlike the barbers, where conversation is optional, here it was unremitting and apparently mandatory. The hair-cutting was painfully slow, and no clippers were used, so Zen-like meditation could not have been achieved even if it were practicable, and under those lights I was sweating like a pig in a fleece. Forty long minutes later my hair was cut and the girl knew more about me than my own mother.

I was sent back to the sink, sat down, and tilted horizontal to wash the hairs off my head. Then I was flipped vertical and moisturiser was applied to my face before it was covered with a hot-towel of the sort given out on aeroplanes. Flipped horizontal again I lay there with the hot-towel on my face for what seemed like an eternity.

"There, wasn't that relaxing", she said, as she removed the towel - my irises contracting to pin-pricks - and began to wipe off the previously applied moisturiser.

"Yes, very", I lied.

Then back to the hair-cutting station where my hair was blow-dried and waxed. And that was it! Almost. We went back to the cubicle where she got out another towel, dusted it with some powder out of a salt cellar, and wiped my neck with it. "There, all done."

And I had been, $45 dollars and an hour and twenty minutes out of my life, for a haircut. Still, the girl who gave me the tea was quite tasty, so at least I wasn't gay.

As it turns out the haircut was a decent one. Just the same as one I'd usually get from a barber, but without my side-burns which weren't up to scratch, and blow-dried to make me look like a ponce. However, you do take pot-luck with barbers sometimes so perhaps this was for the best on this occasion. Anyone know a decent barber's shop in Edmonton?

Jeremy Hunt, Secretary of State at the Department of Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport, has decided to merge Sport England and UK Sport to reduce costs. He is also looking at the status of Visit England and English Heritage. Arts Council England is to be spared but it will be required to take on the work of the MLA, who are presently in charge of the Museums, Libraries and Archives of England.

Jeremy Hunt has no power to axe the equivalent organisations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, though I expect that the governments of those countries will have to cut their cloth accordingly once the spending cuts in England impact upon their budgets. But importantly they will have a choice. The Scottish Government will decide whether Scotland requires a national stand alone Arts Council; Wales will decide whether Wales, as a nation in its own right, is best served by its own stand alone Sports Council; and Northern Ireland will decide whether its culture is unique and important enough to warrant a distinct Hertitage body (as a point of interest the Northern Irish Heritage body is less distinct than the equivalents in the rest of the UK because the Northern Irish choose to consider natural and built heritage together under the auspices of the Northern Ireland Environment Agency).

England doesn't get a choice. The UK Government can decide at a whim to abolish the non-departmental English bodies that - in the absence of English government - provide the only tangible institutional recognition of English nationhood. And because the England-only non-departmental bodies fall exclusively under the command of Jeremy Hunt at the DCMS, England at a governmental level exists only at the discretion of Jeremy Hunt. Hunt will take his decisions purely on the grounds of cost, the issues of nationhood and cultural distinctness do not come into play as they do in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. No account will be taken on what is best for the governance of England; our sense of place, nationhood and identity will play second fiddle to the need to drive down the administrative costs of UK PLC.

Under Blair and Brown it was no different, England was adminstered as the rump of the UK rather than governed as a national community with its own distinct needs and policies. Administrative functions were devolved within England to 'regions' that ignored any sense of community, so that regional quangos could deliver UK Government policy in England under the guise of localism or regionalism, dictated to by the centre but without the sort of devolved autonomy provided to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. England was administered under the 'constrained discretion' of the Treasury, with policy dictated on the basis of cost and best delivery of services. For England there is no populism or nationalism, purely marketisation in 'consultation with stakeholders'.

Labour went back on their 2004 decision to abolish the English Tourism Council, recreating Visit England as a stand-alone English body in 2009. There was no national discussion about how England might like to market itself domestically and internationally, nor any public discussion about how England might like to structure its tourism council, this was a purely top-down bureaucratic exercise. Under the Tories English Tourism will hopefully have its regional structure swept away, but I suspect that it may find itself being incorporated back into Visit Britain on the basis of cost rather than what is best for England. A nice option for the cost-cutters in the British Government, but less good for England, and extremely bad for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland who presumably do not have the option of consolidating with Visit Britain and must find savings elsewhere.

The name Alfriston is possibly derived from "Ælle fyrst tun" (the first town of Ælle).

I thought about patriotism. I wished I had been born early enough to have been called a Little Englander. It was a term of sneering abuse, but I should be delighted to accept it as a description of myself. That little sounds the right note of affection. It is little England I love. And I considered how much I disliked Big Englanders, whom I saw as red-faced, staring, loud-voiced fellows, wanting to go and boss everybody about all over the world, and being surprised and pained and saying 'Bad show!' if some blighters refused to fag for them. They are patriots to a man. I wish their patriotism began at home... - J.B. Priestley

Wales Online carries some interesting comment from Alan Trench in an article titled Why Eurosceptics are not (always) Little Englanders. Trench argues that the Conservative's fresh commitment to the Union, in spite of their continued failure in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, stems from two Tory anxieties:

1. Dissolution of the Union would result in further integration of the Union's constituent parts into the EU
2. Dissolution of the UK would diminish England/Britain's international prestige and influence (no seat of the UN Security Council for England alone).

Mr Trench said the strategy of fighting seats in all parts of the UK had "bombed".

But he is adamant that Euroscepticism within Tory ranks is a key reason why the party remains determined to keep the UK together, despite the failure to advance in Scotland or win any seats in alliance with the Ulster Unionist Party in Northern Ireland.

He said: "It's one of the things people don't give enough attention to when they are trying to understand the Conservative party... All the evidence is Euroscepticism is one of the defining threads of the modern Conservative party."

During his lecture in Cardiff hosted by the Institute of Welsh Affairs, he said: "I think part of what's going on in this is if you are a serious Eurosceptic you are talking about Britain - the UK - being able to stand for itself on the world stage."

The United Kingdom has a population of more than 62 million, of which England accounts for just over 51 million - significantly less than Germany (81.8 million), France (65.4 million) and Italy (60.2 million), and only just ahead of Spain (46 million).

In other words, without the UK, England would be a midde-sized European nation which happened to have a few nuclear submarines. Would Japan (127.4 million people) see the UK as a peer or a pretender to be a great power?

It is essentially the contrary argument to that laid out by Robin Harris in The Rise of English Nationalism and the Balkanisation of Britain.

I tend to agree with Trench that Eurosceptic thinking is important in the debate over the British Question. The Tories are not 'Little Englanders' in the true sense of the phrase, they are anything but. I would say that the Tories want to keep Britain together because they are 'Big Englanders' or 'Greater Englanders' for whom Britain - or more correctly Westminster - is a device for projecting power and retaining sovereignty. They are what Chris Bryant refers to as the Anglo-British in his 2003 paper "These Englands, or where does devolution leave the English?":

I prefer to associate the Anglo-British not with an Anglocentrism whose epicentre is London, but rather with those in all regions and all classes in England for whom the difference between being English and being British, is, for the most part, unclear, unimportant and/or irrelevant. Many of them would see nothing amiss in the title of Clive Aslet’s Anyone for England? A Search for British Identity (1997). They inhabit an Anglo-British England.

The Anglo-British do not notice when an institution or person associated with England performs a British function. For example, it goes unremarked that the Bank of England is the central bank for all Britain, or that the Archbishop of Canterbury, the primate of the Church of England, crowns the sovereign of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Nor do countless references to ‘England’ which should have been to ‘Britain’ grate on the English ear. Walter Bagehot’s famous The English Constitution (1964 [1867]), for example, does not strike the Anglo-British as mistitled. Similarly, it is the 900-year continuity of the parliament at Westminster – originally English, later British – that enables Rebecca Langlands (1999) to speak of the English core of the British state.

The Anglo-Brits are also people who say 'British schools' or 'this country' - instead of 'English schools' or 'England' - when they are talking about Education policy in England; they are people who tolerate the fact that non-English MPs vote on English matters, even though they can see it is undemocratic. The Anglo-British are everywhere but I do think there is a class and age bias. The Anglo-Brits are particularly prevalent amongst the upper classes and the privately educated, and they're also more likely to be older (at least in my experience). However, they're not just confined to England or the upper echelons of society. Scots like Gordon Brown are Anglo-British in their understanding of Britain, which is why he uses an English narrative and English values to try and forment a sense of Britishness. But it's amongst Tories that you find the classic unreconstructed Anglo-Brit, Englishmen for whom the sun never sets, and for whom 1707 and 1801 marked the creation of a new Greater England, a colonial expansion. Yes it was a shame about the Empire, but chin up lads, stiff upper lip and all that...We still have Scotland and part of Ireland, ungrateful bastards though they are. Tally ho! What, what.

It's the Anglo-British 'Big Englanders' - rather than Little Englanders - who oppose an English parliament and a federal Britain. Robert Key is one such Tory:

One thing that is absolutely clear is that we should make every possible attempt to ensure that this House remains the Parliament of England. I do not wish to see any other Parliament established anywhere calling itself an English Parliament. That would be appalling and would go against 1,000 years of our history.

Mark Pritchard is another:

I am afraid I do not support your campaign as I feel it will play into the hands of European federalists by breaking up the United Kingdom, even more than Labour have done already. I think that there would be many in the European Commission and elsewhere on the Continent who would be delighted at seeing the United Kingdom become nothing more than a country of regions - a type of “divide and rule” concept.

I know that the CEP has the best interests of England at heart, but I don’t think that an English Parliament is the way to deliver these interests.

Liam Fox another:

I think our national identity is being stripped away in order to prepare us for being engulfed by those who wish to see Britain merely as a region in a European superstate. I believe our integration has already gone far enough and I will resist any moves to diminish British sovereignty in any way, shape or form.

The Tories prefer to avoid the issue of the EU, and so for this reason it is UKIP politicians who we turn to for an honest description of Eurosceptic Conservative thought on the subject of devolution. The following is taken from a letter from Jeffrey Titford, UKIP MEP and former Tory, again in opposition to an English parliament:

From our point of view, there is little point in establishing an English Parliament, while we remain members of the European Union. In fact, to do so would be to play into the hands of the EU, which is quite happy to see the United Kingdom broken up. We can only enter into sensible debate on this issue, after Britain has left the European Union.

This UKIP view of devolution is embellished by Derek Clark MEP, again in a letter opposing an English parliament:

We see the UK as a sovereign nation independent of the political construction known as the EU but otherwise co-operating with the countries of Europe. I believe that this view is shared by the majority of people in the UK. What is happening is a deliberate destabilizing process by the EU with the active support of both this government and previous ones. As a result all sorts of movements have sprung up in support of one view or another. Frankly the campaign for an English parliament can only help to assist the break up of the UK and further the cause of the EU agenda.

It's not only in the field of politics that the Anglo-British rear their ugly heads. Dave Richards of the English Football Association provides a classic example of Anglo-Brit thinking:

"It's time for a British boss, somebody who understands our passion, belief and commitment. There's no distinction between English and British."

Incredibly Richards made this statement in the context of advocating Martin O'Neill as the next England manager whilst opposing a foreign manager of the England team. For Anglo-Brits the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is simply - England writ large (at least to all English intents and purposes, they are rather more tactful when addressing a Scottish audience). It is the thinking of these people that is the greatest obstacle to English home rule - to them British sovereignty is English sovereignty.

David Cameron is another Anglo-Brit, as Trench notes:

Mr Trench was struck by Mr Cameron's commitment to the union in a December 2007 speech in Edinburgh in which he said in a "choice between constitutional perfection and the preservation of our nation, I choose our United Kingdom".

The academic said: "That was the first time I noticed a Conservative leader come up with a reason to support the union... What he said was the importance of the union was it was part of the UK's wider standing in the world."

The Anglo-Brits have a very whiggish interpretation of Britishness. Devolution is an asymmetry that can be tolerated and explained because sovereignty remains with the Imperial Parliament. In that way the unbroken continuity of English/Anglo-British sovereignty is preserved. Tradition, continuity and incremental progress are more important than democracy. For these Anglo-Brits it would almost be preferrable for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to be allowed to whither on the English vine and drop off rather than contemplate a federalism by which Westminster's sovereignty is diminished but an entity named Britain remains. They would internalise the managed decline of Empire by treating Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland as colonies - as peripheries to the English centre - rather than undergo a radical re-imagining of the centre that disturbs their narrative.

I don't hold out much hope for a federal Britain. I see the future of Britain as one of 'managed decline' in which Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland claim ever greater powers from Westminster. The only way this will be averted is by the decline of the Big Englander and the rise of the Little Englander. In this respect I think demographics are on England and Britain's side, the youth of Britain being far more comfortable with the multi-national nature of Britain than is the post-war baby-boomer generation.

We Little Englanders do not necessarily view Westminster as a benign force for civillisation and progress; we talk of the Norman Yoke in the same breath as mention of Westminster; we sing Jerusalem instead of God Save the Queen or Land of Hope and Glory; and we view our politicians as corrupt and elitist, and invariably British.

It was the postcard that he received from Nick Clegg that first aroused the suspicions of David Davis.

Bluddy brilliant that is.

Via Popbitch.

In his book on the British Empire, Outposts, Simon Winchester attempts to explain the mindset of the Falkland Islander prior to the Argentine invasion:

I once bought a house in an Oxfordshire village from a pair of elderly ladies who had decided to emigrate to New Zealand because, they explained, 'it is like England was in the Fifties, and that's the time we liked so much. We don't like England today. We want to find a place that's like what it used to be.' And as with New Zealand, so with the Falkland Islands. What these people wanted, when they or their fathers set out on a ship so long ago, was just what my old ladies wanted: a country with no crime, no television, no permissiveness, no coloured people, no disco music, no drugs....These were the people for whom Carnaby Street meant the beginning of the end, and for whom progress was a dirty word. And the land they had found, and for all its faults the world to which they clung so eagerly, was about to be desecrated.

I know one Falkland Islander and she's not at all like that. New Zealanders, on the other hand....

It's an interesting book, and one that will give you itchy feet to visit some far-flung outposts.

Philip Davies was hassling David Mundell over the West Lothian Question yesterday.

The biggest threat to the United Kingdom comes not from Scotland but from the resentment that people in England feel at the current constitutional settlement. My right hon. Friend and I both stood on a manifesto promise that we would stop Scottish MPs voting on matters in this House that related only to England. When will that happen?

Mundell informed Davies that "This coalition Government, unlike the previous Government, are determined to deal with the issue". It would be interesting to know what discussions on the West Lothian Question Philip Davies has had with his dad, Peter Davies, Mayor of Doncaster. Has the English Democrat mayor ever mentioned the West Lothian Question or made a case for an English parliament? He must be the most high profile English nationalist that doesn't do English nationalism ever.

Iain Dale, yesterday at 10:54am:

If ever you wanted an example of the difference between Gordon Brown and David Cameron as Prime Minister, look at what's happening in Washington.

Brown and his Ministers cow-towed to the Americans over the one-sided extradition treaty and refused even to raise the subject of Gary McKinnon with their American counterparts.

I suspect that Iain was typing that blogpost before he had read this story:

David Cameron has been criticised after mistakenly saying the UK was the "junior partner" in the allied World War II fight against Germany in 1940.

He made the historical slip, neglecting the fact that the US had yet to enter the war, on the second day of his first trip to the US as prime minister.

We all want and expect a prime minister to have at least a reasonable understanding of modern history, but let's put to one side Cameron's historical illiteracy and ask the question 'why did Cameron feel the need to refer to the UK as the "junior partner" in World War II?'

The only answer I can come up with is that Cameron was kowtowing to the Americans.

Why Iain Dale feels that Gordon Brown and his ministers were towed by cows to talks on Gary McKinnon's extradition treaty remains unclear. Possibly an Eggcorn.

Many moons ago, when I was just a stripling at Leicester University, I went along to the Charlotte Pub in Leicester for a gig by Dr Phibes and the Wax Equations, or it may have been Skunk Annaisie, I forget.

What I do remember is the support band, a little known group at the time named Radiohead.

I needed a piss and unwilling to queue to take a slash I popped upstairs to the lesser-known 'locals toilet'. Standing there at the urinal, knob in hand, I was joined by a strange looking fellow.

"Alright, how y'doing?"

"Yeah, OK. I'm here to see Radiohead. You?"

"I'm Thom, I'm the lead singer. See you down there".

"Will do"

What followed was an amazing gig. The only reason I knew Radiohead was from a song of theirs, 'Creep', which had been played by John Peel at the Glastonbury Festival. Amongst the mayhem of Glastonbury that song had stood out like a classic, enough for me to come and see them as a support band that night. Creep had not been released yet but I had made a point of buying a 12" version of their debut single 'Drill' which was not great but good enough to justify me being there that night.

A couple of months later and Radiohead were doing a record signing in a Leicester city centre record store. I took the morning off lectures and went along to get my copy of Drill and the newly released Creep signed by the band.

You know the rest of the story - Radiohead are now massive, and my signed copies of Drill and Creep are work a fucking mint. And the point of this laboured anecdote? Well, I just want you to check out this flash animation of Creep - the acoustic version used there is not as good because it doesn't have the booming, crunching feedback but it's still a cool little animation.