Why the Olympics Opening Ceremony should concern us

Big article by Tim Adams in the Observer today about the Olympic Opening Ceremony.

The near-adulatory coverage throughout the media (with some exceptions) would make anyone hesitate to criticise the production and risk being described as "curmudgeonly" by Tim Adams.

A Member of Parliament who attacked the multi-culturalism of the parade has been so digitally kicked and slapped that we have the irony of a show supposedly celebrating "dissent" not tolerating dissent of any kind.

But as Oscar Wilde reminded us, there is nothing so false as approval of what is approved of.

So for the third day running I am going to write about why the Olympics Opening Ceremony should concern us.

Of course it was spectacular, and the crowds cheered.  But the 1938 Tag der Deutsche Kunst in Munich was spectacular and the crowds cheered.  The great cultural processions in 1950s Moscow were spectacular and the crowds cheered.  Even today spectacular parades in Pyong Yang are capable of being cheered.  The spectacle and the cheering do not validate the content.  The comparison with totalitarian circuses is deliberate - what we saw on Friday was a paen to totalitarian socialism.

Sports pundit Stan Collymore exultantly tells us the ceremony director Danny Boyle "put us ALL there, all of us".

This is not true.

Not everyone was there.

What was missing from the parade was English conservatism (small c, although the big political C variety was also non-existent).

This matters because British identity is, for me, inconceivable without reference to English conservatism.  To airbrush this out of "where Britain is these days" is both chilling and sinister.  Chilling because is illustrates a depth of socio-ethnic hostility seldom so overtly expressed; sinister because it indicates what English people might be in for as the incubus of anti-Englishness gains respectability and goes mainstream.

Of course, you might argue, there is no particular reason why Englishness should have any part in the Danny Boyle production.

Danny Boyle is from a cultural background of Irish socialism.  Writer Frank Boyce is from a cultural background of Irish socialism.  Many of the commentators whooping it up on the night (Newsnight's Paul Mason for example) are from a cultural background of Irish socialism or Scots-Welsh socialism or Indian or West Indian or African socialism.

What do they know of England who do not know anything about England? (as Rudyard Kipling did not say).

And of course I appreciate what a fine joke Danny Boyle has played on the politicians he obviously despises (according to the Observer Sebastian Coe, Boris Johnson and David Cameron could only look at the plans for the ceremony in the presence of, and presumably mediated by, Danny Boyle and his coterie).  

And is it not a grand laugh that so many of the big wigs in the government, overwhelmed by the sensationalism of the night, have already praised the ceremony to the skies so that they cannot now resile without looking stupid.

We were warned that the Labour party intended to rub the noses of "the right" in the policy of multi-culturalism.  I think we saw a manifestation of that on Friday evening.  It makes you wonder what further surprises might be in store.

Surprisingly candid comment by Tristram Hunt MP in today's Observer.  By the evidence of Friday night the Left have indeed won the Culture War.  And since the economy of a society is subservient to the culture of that society this does not bode well for the future.