The UK Monster Truck Nationals are held annually at the Santa Pod Raceway, in Podington, Bedfordshire. At this year’s showcase, between the vehicular action, I met a man wearing a Looney Tunes Tasmanian Devil hat, carrying a Tasmanian Devil flask and covered in Tasmanian Devil tattoos. He told me that he got them because he really likes the Tassie Devil Truck, which was publicly operative between 2011 and 2012. As a monument to this flash-in-the-pan career, this man had 13 tattoos of the Tassie Devil truck, including a tattoo of the Tassie Devil’s driver’s signature on his back. I told him that I, too, understood what it was like to have such a transcendent experience of an image that I was irresistibly impelled to have it permanently imprinted on my body; that I knew what it felt like to be so affiliated with a symbol that I wanted it to become part of me. This man smiled, and softened. He said we were the same, except he had that experience with the same symbol over and over again.

In The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912), Émile Durkheim argued that the clan’s totem is an emblem that gets carved, engraved and designed onto objects belonging to the clan, and even onto the bodies of the clan members themselves: the emblem is “like the visible body of the god”, a material fixing-point without which a collective sentiment can’t become conscious of itself. Just as a soldier who dies for his flag is really dying for his country, the clan member worshipping the totem is really worshipping the clan, charged with the energy of “collective effervescence”: the heightened unity that emerges when the whole group gathers. The UK Monster Truck Nationals is a clan too, gathered around a symbol; when it comes to symbols, there may be few more potent than a monster truck.

The monster truck originated in the mid-1970s, when Midwestern mechanic Bob Chandler modified his 1974 Ford F-250 with oversized tyres and a reinforced suspension. The result was a machine named Bigfoot after the renowned American cryptid. The first televised monster truck race took place in 1983, in the heart of the Reagan presidency, between Bigfoot and a truck called USA-1. The cryptid self-created American fantasy met the bland, stripped language of state apparatus. Bigfoot won the first race. Modern monster truck shows developed from there, the enhanced vehicles themselves acting as individual athletes, with fanbases and sponsorships.

The Zetkin Collective’s The Great Driving Right Show (2026), published this month by Verso, offers a tempting lens for the Monster Truck Nationals. The “driving right” names the far right’s investment in the fossil-fuelled car: the freedom to drive, to tune, to burn petrol, as a vehicle of identity and grievance. So it would be easy for a monster-trucking-outsider to label this festival the “driving right” in its purest form: the Übermensch of the vehicle, self-optimisation, modification, an Atlantic-crossing fossil-fuel-chugging American fantasy roaring against the green transition. Whoever wrote the arrival instructions for the Santa Pod showcase was compelled to pre-emptively ban hate symbols. But on the day, the reality in the crowd was different. The flags flying from the trucks were gloriously incoherent: a York rose, a pirate skull, a Union Jack, a happy birthday banner. The crowd was just as varied: heavily tattooed punks, Palestine-flag-wearing dads, hordes of mulleted children, and visibly queer friendship groups chugging cider with carnies, to the soundtrack of royalty-free drum and bass and AI-generated country standards. If the monster truck is a totem, it is a promiscuous one.

The monster truck’s manifold symbolism is nothing special. The tendency to imbue seemingly neutral artefacts with conflicting political identities is a familiar habit: consider the rainbow, once a Christian emblem, now inextricable from the gay pride movement (and to the outrage of the evangelical right, owned by no movement at all). Or indeed, the cross or the crescent, transcendent repeated symbols, with stories inscribed by human history. A symbol isn’t wedded to a politics; the link is made and can always be unmade. So the vehicular excess of the monster truck, and its attendant symbolisms, is politically undetermined. If anything, the symbol of the monster truck is a lingering hangover from the birth of US neoliberalism in the 1980s, a time when symbols were consistently emptied of narrative for fear of their political power. This, if anything, is an indictment of meaning-seeking; but as is specially written into the monster truck origins, the cryptid story wins.

Edie Musker

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Yesterday we posted a TANK article from 2022 by Philippa Snow about British appropriation of American culture. “Schrödinger’s Bikini Contest” explores the Miss England Beauty Pageant.

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It was a glorious mid-October morning at the Holiday Inn Birmingham Airport, and everyone seemed to agree that the big draw of the weekend would be a girl who wore no make-up. That Sunday, one Melissa Raouf – a 20-year-old with the glassy, unblemished complexion of, what else, a 20-year-old – would become the first contestant in the almost century-long history of Miss England to compete in the full final with a bare face. “We wish her the best of luck in Miss England,” competition director Angie Beasley told the Independent in late August. “It’s a very brave thing to do when everyone else is wearing make-up, but she’s sending out an important message to young women.” It is undeniable that what is considered to be an ideally photogenic or telegenic female face, per the mainstream, is increasingly unnatural – think, for instance, of the poreless and augmented women of Love Island, or of the phenomenon a make-up artist once described in The New Yorker as “an Instagram face … that looks like it’s made out of clay”. These are faces that owe no small debt to the Kardashians, and as with many things that spring from California and are further popularised in American culture, we have seized on them here, too, and have begun assimilating them in the same way that we assimilate most trends from the United States: a little less expensively, a little less bombastically and at a modest scale. All of this has meant that to suggest the prettiest girl in any country – even one as small and badly organised and, frankly, strange as England – might be one with no adornment or enhancement whatsoever is now radical enough to garner, as Raouf did, coverage in newspapers from New Orleans to New Delhi. So, yes, perhaps something brave, or at least interestingly unusual, was about to happen, and we were to consider ourselves fortunate to have seen it. “We had no press last year,” a photographer on the riser informed me as all 32 women, practicing their smiles, walked slowly back and forth in a rehearsal. “This year, a lot more – because of Melissa.” He paused for a moment and looked out towards the catwalk, where at present all of the contestants were in red promotional T-shirts reading “BEAUTY WITH A PURPOSE”, and then cracked a pageant smile himself. “If she wins,” he added, nodding, “it will go really, really viral.”

Much like versions of the Kardashian face making their transatlantic journey to Love Island, the Miss England competition is a prime example of a thing we have appropriated from the States, then rendered on a smaller scale – if Miss America is, as a journalist wrote in 2020, “a cross between American Idol and a job interview, with the atmosphere of a basketball game at Madison Square Garden”, Miss England is a little more like a cross between a job interview and a talent show at Butlins. Our press passes were, I noted, scrawled on one side of a business card designed to be handed out to girls who might be interested in registering, emblazoned with the slogan “YOU’VE BEEN SCOUTED! ENTER NOW!” I had been overjoyed to hear that the Miss England presenter would be “Jordan”, by which I presumed the speaker meant the mononymic noughties glamour model currently known as Katie Price, although it turned out that the “Jordan” being referred to was a game and cheerful former Mr England. (“Ladies and gentlemen, can I have a big round of applause for our absolutely stunning venue?” he requested during the finale with extreme professionalism, as if we were in the Dorchester and not, as I have emphasised already, an airport Holiday Inn.) That Miss England was a little more sweetly shambolic than an American beauty pageant felt correct, as if in being so it was delivering an authentically English experience – one only has to look at the contemporary government to imagine that a certain tendency towards dishevelment and disorganisation might be part of the English national character. Notably, nobody directly referenced Englishness or England, and in spite of the event playing out in front of a sequinned wall designed to look like two St George’s flags conjoined like post-nuclear mutants, nobody expressed any actual patriotism, either. Maybe the recently crashed economy, the energy crisis and the widespread use of food banks made it harder to demonstrate an appreciation of one’s motherland with a straight face.

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This being a competition, it seemed apt to pass the time by selecting a likely winner on day one. Raouf seemed the logical choice as her win would mean publicity for the event that might renew its relevance – in rehearsals for day two, I watched her being interviewed live for ITV News, and her patter about beauty standards was so smooth and confident, so preternaturally mature for somebody of 20, that her victory seemed assured. If pageant contestants once wished vaguely for world peace, they now have to reckon with a different set of variables: not just war, but climate change; the body-image issues caused by social media; homelessness; deforestation and so on. The times, the organisers of Miss England 2022 seemed keen to point out, are a-changing, and the pageant is a-changing in accordance with them, even if the rules about who can apply – unmarried women under 26 who have never given birth, and who have never appeared topless in a published photograph – have not a-changed that much at all. The famed swimwear round, which formerly required contestants to wear swimsuits or bikinis on the catwalk, has ended up relegated to a competition judged on scantily clad photographs taken in private at the studio of a (male) photographer; in order to escape charges of misogyny or exploitation, the resulting images are never revealed to the audience, suggesting the old saying about falling trees in remote woods. The move from three-dimensional gawking to Schrödinger’s beachwear photos is so perfectly illustrative of the mood and mode of the new, more feminist incarnation of the pageant that I am almost frustrated not to have invented it myself as a satirical touch. I had expected a larger injection of what is broadly termed “girlboss feminism”, which is best defined as feminism that fits neatly on a tote bag – the “You go, girl!” kind, conveniently monetisable and written in hot pink. In fact, the general approach was coy, as if the most appropriate tactic were to quietly deflect from the formerly sexualised elements of the pageant by instead producing, like a rabbit from a hat, a statistic about reforesting efforts.

In spite of Raouf’s status as the biggest media story of the show, my allegiances were split once I caught sight of Georgia Austin, a professional dancer representing Liverpool with a name featuring two separate American locales, the sultry looks of a biracial Megan Fox, the undulating catwalk stomp of one Naomi Campbell and the winner’s quiver of a Grand National racehorse. In an “eco fashion” competition, for which contestants were asked to style themselves in second-hand clothes, three girls cited Audrey Hepburn as an influence; two made reference to the late Diana Spencer and four to the 1950s as a decade; and almost everyone involved at one point or another made some reference to their grandmother. Austin, who appeared onstage in a top hat and tails, a leotard and sheer black tights, high-kicked her way into my heart by saying she had styled herself in “an almost exact recreation” of an outfit worn by Cilla Black, “a Scouse legend”. On the catwalk, she vamped wildly, sliding one elegant hand over the brim of her top hat, and in the talent competition, she won by performing a routine to “I Just Can’t Do It Alone” from Chicago, wearing a flapperish leotard and winking at the judges. It occurred to me that this was pageantry as a kind of cis-feminine take on drag, and accordingly it felt just as disruptive as Raouf’s willingness to give up make-up – some effort had been made to take the sex out of the competition, and yet here was Austin, forcibly injecting it back into the proceedings. I began to mentally prepare to write a text that saw Miss England as a two-horse race, and that two-horse race itself as a reflection of the push-me-pull-you between modernity and tradition that characterised Miss England in the present: a dialogue between camp and empowerment, glamour and earnestness, entertainment and altruism and so on. If neither of these women won, my central thesis might collapse in on itself like a soufflé – but then, to paraphrase a famous girlboss who has graced a number of tote bags, we tell ourselves stories in order to live through two days of pageant rehearsals and festivities at the airport Holiday Inn.

If Miss America is, as a journalist wrote in 2020, “a cross between American Idol and a job interview, with the atmosphere of a basketball game at Madison Square Garden”, Miss England is a little more like a cross between a job interview and a talent show at Butlins.

Mercifully, the contemporary Miss England pageant is less white than it has historically been. Of its finalists this year, roughly a third were women of colour. Last year’s winner, Rehema Muthamia, is British-Kenyan, and Dr Bhasha Mukherjee, or Miss England 2019–2020 – the first title holder to reign through two competitions thanks to the pandemic – is British-Indian. (Demonstrating the good grace and tact that one imagines helped her to achieve the title in the first place, Muthamia barely flinched when one of this year’s female presenters, having previously announced the other judges by their names, appeared to be struck by a terminally Caucasian fear of mispronunciation, and simply described her as “Miss England 2021”. “As Natasha said,” she responded, slyly, before launching into her pre-judging speech, “my name is Rehema Muthamia.”) In addition to Raouf’s status as the first contestant without make-up, it turned out that there were other first-times, too, and they were if anything a little more serious and thus a little more intriguing: India Fenwick from Northumberland would be the first contestant to compete with a prosthetic eye, and Jennifer Carless, Miss East Yorkshire, was the first to compete with a catheter, which she showed off with delightful elan by stalking down the catwalk in a shimmering orange-soda-coloured gown split to the thigh. Both of these women were, of course, white and conventionally beautiful and slender, but each did pose an interesting challenge to the very narrow parameters of the beauty standard, and it had to be admitted that they were not what one thought of as the “usual” pageant queen. At moments, I became aware that I was being won over by the contest’s efforts to rebrand itself as an exercise in empowerment; many of the girls – especially when one saw them scarfing chicken tenders from the buffet or listened to them discussing famous crushes – seemed so earnest and so sweet and so unbelievably young that it was easy to imagine the affair as an assembly at a high school run by, in the form of Angie Beasley, a firm but benevolent headmistress. Still, those entry rules, with their Madonna-whore restrictions, nagged at me, and the competition’s strange conviction that objectification became feminist if it also became anti-sex unnerved me. That impression of backstage camaraderie, too, proved to be partially illusory. “Some of the girls,” one contestant euphemistically told our photographer, “know what they’re here for.”

The night of the final, two blonde audience members of a similar age and build, both similarly augmented, were engaged in what appeared to be a friendly and familiar conversation. Suddenly, it became clear that each had been mistaken when she’d believed she had recognised the other – in fact, they both simply resembled a number of other women in the room. “I think it’s just that I’m tall and blonde,” one of them sighed, not surprised or disappointed, but resigned. Miss England 2022 continually created these small moments of divine, mockumentary-style comedy – the contestant, for example, who announced onstage that she believed that children “are the adults of the future” – in a way that would have made it easy to dash out a catty little bit of reportage that suggested that this modernised beauty pageant was, in fact, exactly like the beauty pageants one remembers from comedy films and television. To do so would have been lazy, however, and would have bordered on misogyny. Two days did not prove to be enough for me to fully solidify my opinion on Miss England, which in some ways felt depressingly outdated and medieval, and in others felt like harmless, female-centric entertainment – effectively, heterosexual high camp. The revelation that the contestants had raised £32,000 between them for their charity causes meant, if nothing else, that some straightforward good had come from the proceedings. By the time the final three were being announced onstage, I was invested, not simply because I had hoped that either Raouf or Austin would prevail and that, in doing so, they would give me a neat ending for this piece, but because I was genuinely interested as to what the chosen winner would reveal about the competition’s current ethos. As it happened, neither Raouf not Austin made the cut. I overheard a bystander saying that Austin had not expected to win – that at 25 she’d felt too old, and that the whole thing had effectively been self-promotion for her career as a dancer, anyway. She had known, as that contestant said, what she was there for. Maybe Raouf had, too, since her brief time as a media sensation had allowed her to illustrate her on-camera cool and her adeptness at expressing her opinions, both attributes proving her suitability for the political career she claimed to want.

Ultimately the winner, representing Lancashire, was a strawberry blonde named Jessica Gagan who had struck me in barefaced rehearsals as a Pre-Raphaelite beauty, and who looked in full-face make-up like a taller version of the actress Isla Fisher. Doll-like and exquisite, she seemed like a traditional beauty queen, although in the speech she gave after being nominated in the final three, she pointed out that there had never been a redheaded Miss England. This would be the big “first” of the year: one small step for the rewiring of beauty standards, but a giant leap for hot, formerly bullied girls with red hair. The decision, in its own way, was a perfect summary of the contest, functioning as it did like a seeing-eye puzzle vis-à-vis progress. Viewed from one angle, Miss England had successfully elevated a member of a group it had previously discriminated against; viewed from another, it had wrung publicity from the diversity and feminist bona fides of some of its finalists, and then selected a winner who was tall, white, model-thin, perfectly proportionate, glamorously made-up, not too sexual and entirely able-bodied. When the final moment came, I expected some hysterics, having only really encountered a pageant coronation in the movies. The reality was somewhat less emotionally fraught. Raouf, with her bare face, would have been free to cry; Gagan, her foundation masklike around her prizewinning smile, knew better than to smudge the image. Carefully and prettily, she swiped a single tear from her right eye, posing, as a crowd of photographers, all male, closed in and obscured her from the audience’s view. 

Text by Philippa Snow, photos by Harry Mitchell

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Last week, news of Cambridge professor Jason Arday dominated the press cycle in a mix of grief, outrage and tails tucked under legs; some outlets focused on deleting previous reporting. The events leading up to his death had germinated in the academic sphere, after some audiences at a conference were left unhappy with his keynote speech, which focused on the hounding of Black academics over allegations of plagiarism – a “playbook” used by conservative activists and right-wing media outlets that can lead to an academic’s dismissal and, on occasion, suicide.

Allegations of Dr Arday’s plagiarism kicked off in July when Nathan Cofnas published a condemnation on Substack, the great equaliser in journalism. In the following 22 days, 249 articles were published on Dr Arday, entering the mainstream news cycle with a Telegraph report and subsequent pile-on from most major newspapers. Some pointed out that white academics accused of plagiarism did not receive such coverage; others have since argued that white professors accused of sexual harassment also don’t make the news. But this media frenzy, fanned by right-wing politicians, scratched a certain ideological itch: once great English universities are rotten with leftist ideology, a parable for the country as a whole.

That’s hardly a metaphorical interpretation. Charles Moore headlined one Telegraph article with ‘The Arday scandal exposes the creeping decay of Britain’s great universities’, opening with a heavy critique of Dr Arday’s book, a recontextualisation of Cool Britannia from the perspective of ethnic minorities. It contains Arday’s lived experiences, writes Moore, “an interesting subject, but not an academic discipline. In Dr Arday’s hands, it is not interesting.” This Monday, The Telegraph published another of Charles Moore’s pieces on the subject: ‘The tragedy of Jason Arday can’t be blamed on the press’, its title reads.

But the press, like its readers, has a clear, voracious hunger for stories like Dr Arday’s – scandals that excite or appease paranoid world views. Around the same time as Cofnas’ Substack post went live, Italy was also salivating over its news story of the summer. The offence dates to April 2021, when jeweller Mario Roggero’s store was robbed by two masked men, who pulled a knife and gun – a fake, it would later be revealed – on him, his wife and his daughter. As the men ran outside to meet their getaway driver, Roggero rushed after them with his own gun, shooting all three. Two died in the street, while the third escaped with injuries and was later arrested at the hospital.

Security camera footage captures the whole ordeal, and its four-minute run, switching from indoors to outdoors to street view, is available as a pop-up when accessing almost any news site covering the matter. The crime is captured with complete clarity, but the debate around it has taken on a philosophical quality – what is self-defence? Can we imagine what Roggero must have been feeling?

Discourse kicked off when 72-year-old Roggero declared he had been sentenced to 14 years and 9 months in jail on an Instagram video – an everyman’s TV feature. It racked up 807k likes, garnering the attention of Matteo Salvini, Italy’s Deputy Prime Minister and leader of the right-wing populist party Lega, who petitioned for a pardon and visited him in prison on more than one occasion. He’s not the only right-wing politician to do so, and Meloni, for her part, supported the petition for a pardon, citing that 14 years is longer than what rapists and paedophiles get. Analysts argued it was a ploy to aid an upcoming election. Online, debate raged on.

In the British media’s inordinate reporting on Dr Arday, the fantasy it appealed to was an obvious one, with fingers pointed gleefully at DEI and liberal academic institutions. But the offence itself was muddled, a collage of accusations ranging from plagiarism to bad writing. With Roggero, the crime was crystal clear, captured from numerous camera angles. It was the fantasy that was blurry, moulded by right-wing politicians and the press: a man, even an unlikely elderly one, must defend his property and his women. These are dangerous times, we are told, and men should defend themselves. It makes for a compelling story, as does the fall of an academic superstar. Both turn complicated events into neat ideological parables, and both offer the same reward: a ready-made villain and a ready-made fear. It all appeals to a certain itch; right-wing populists are there to scratch it, if only you’ll return the favour.

Valeria Berghinz

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Yesterday we posted a TANK article from Spring 2025, about a spate of abusive letters wreaking havoc on the community of a Yorkshire village. By Francisco Garcia.

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Historian Vijay Prashad, discusses Roberto Fernandez Retamar’s seminal 1971 essay “Caliban,” a piece situated in a rich history of debate surrounding the emergence of sovereignty in the colonised world.

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Book your ticket for the final instalment of the Aleph book club here. We’ll be discussing Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (1912), a taut, hypnotic tale that plunges into uncharted waters of obsession.

In my early twenties, I became briefly obsessed with Toughest Villages in Britain, a slice of prime mid-noughties cultural effluence that originally aired on Sky One and has since attained a minor cult following on YouTube. The five-part series documented life in several of the nation’s most isolated and deprived communities, from Skinningrove on the North Yorkshire coast to Grange Villa in County Durham to the extremities of rural South Wales. Potential viewers expecting hard-hitting social-realist documentary will be disappointed. The tone is one of bawdy disgust at the uncouth or downright violent humanity on display.

In Yorkshire, a gaggle of teenagers cluster around the camera. One offers up the story of his birth, with some goading from the unseen production team: “Me mam thought she needed a shit, then I popped out.” In Durham, locals mutter darkly about the area’s reputation for violence and vigilante justice. According to a particularly florid middle-aged drinker, troublemakers and transgressors could expect to finish up with broken bones. The viewer is presented with a front-row invitation to a hyper-stylised, crudely parodic vision of working-class English rural life. It’s hard to argue that the source of its humour isn’t simple cruelty; it is equally difficult to pretend it doesn’t contain several moments of unimprovable farce.

For all of its self-delighted absurdity, I’ve always thought the programme carried the germ of an interesting thought. For those of us who don’t live in them, which is to say the majority of us across the UK, thoughts of “village life” are often a tangle of unquestioned assumptions and clichés formed from occasional visits and holidays, or scraps of dimly recalled sentimental poetry. Village life is here considered as a collection of virtues that are evaporating elsewhere. A state both simpler and more honest than the degraded existence offered in our decadent cities and larger towns. Places where the sky is bluer and the river free of industrial slop. Where generations of the same families have lived and worked in harmony, reasonably untroubled by outsiders. Places with their own quaint, if proudly guarded traditions: the cheese rollers of Cooper’s Hill, Gloucestershire, and straw-bear baiters of Whittlesey, Cambridgeshire. Places where it still might be possible to leave your door unlocked at night without fear. Where everybody knows everything about everybody else. Where secrets are never truly private, but rather collective property.

I suppose these fantasies are what some politicians mean when they appeal to “community”. If these imaginings are supposed to provoke a feeling of comfort, then their concomitant horror is never too far from the surface. “The surface, of course, is what community is all about,” wrote John Burnside in his 1998 review of the late, great Gordon Burn’s book Happy Like Murderers, the nightmarish account of Fred and Rose West’s crimes. “We go to great lengths to preserve appearances, not only for ourselves but for others.” He then quotes Burn’s famous, or rather infamous, meditation on the social life of Fred West’s home village in Herefordshire:

Community strangles. Girls used to be run out of the village because of being pregnant. Their mothers ran them up the Marcle Straight, right out of the village. If a girl was expecting, then she wasn’t wanted in the village. That was another thing that got him with village life: how hypocritical they could be. He had a strong inclination to be private and unobserved. Community throttles.

These lines occurred to me when I came across reports of an outbreak of poison-pen letters in Shiptonthorpe, a reasonably well-to-do village of around 500 in East Riding, Yorkshire. The national press picked up the story last autumn, with the BBC, the Independent and the Guardian dispatching reporters to dutifully canvass residents and parish councillors about the menace that had plagued their community since December 2022. Indeed, it was the Guardian’s correspondent who helped at least partially satisfy my own curiosity around the case, as the only source who would speak to me on record. For two years, the good people of Shiptonthorpe, invariably described as an otherwise “sleepy” or “peaceful” rural idyll, had been terrorised by distressingly vulgar or personal anonymous correspondence, delivered by the Royal Mail and officiously typed. One would-be ward councillor told the BBC that she had been accused “of being a loose woman” who could only make headway in local politics “if I was to perform unspeakable things to men”. The author added a final poetic flourish: if she had any decency, she would turn herself out “on the Beverley Westwood pasture with the rest of the cows”.

Others received notice about their partners’ alleged infidelities, about how they should be honest with themselves and acknowledge their own humiliation. That they should refuse to turn away from the knowledge that could set them free. These were the letters signed from “a caring friend”. Not everyone was so lucky. One resident received a Christmas card simply labelling him a “cunt”. Another, a lengthy prayer that “climate change and Yorkshire weather will deliver lots of rain so your house can be flooded again and again”. Some were more violent still, their Joycean word ordering carrying previously unseen levels of vitriol: “You are an ugly fat old cow who nobody likes”; “most find you revolting”; “Everyone agrees you should rot in hell”; “You use up oxygen better used by Decent [sic] people”; “Kids are frightened when they see you”; and “Hope cancer finds you very soon.”

This sickness did not confine itself to a few unfortunately localised households. Local Facebook groups provided a forum for speculation as to the author or authors’ identity and a means of bolstering solidarity, or at least something like it. For a time, it seemed as if no one was safe, that the terror would never cease. Victor Lambert, the parish council’s venerable chairperson, received his own barely veiled threat. Its author hoped that Lambert would soon be “run over by a bus” on the A1079, the road that cleaves through the heart of East Riding. If local police initially wanted nothing to do with the outbreak of ugliness and local ill feeling, the longer the campaign dragged on, the more impossible it became to ignore. Last September, they announced that an investigation had been launched. Royal Mail provided statements to the press of its shock and solidarity, pledging to aid law enforcement in any way it could.

“A cloud of vitriol has fallen over Shiptonthorpe,” one resident told the BBC. “It is a wonderful village with wonderful people but someone has brought poison to the village.” People moved here for community, he continued. A community that had been poisoned by “one or two devilish people”. If self-evidently dire for the people of Shiptonthorpe, the situation presented an equally obvious opportunity for a writer with an interest in the squalid undercurrents that run underneath the skin of “respectable” Britain.

I thought of obvious questions about the identity of the modern perpetrators and their presumed tangle of motivations. I wondered idly about “solving” the scandal with all the condescension of a London writer rocking up to the village to save the day. Yet such a project seemed futile. Even if it were possible, a grand unmasking was not what drew me to the tale. It was instead the fallout and suspicion, the ease with which the veil of respectability had been torn away. A message board comment from an ex-resident captured it succinctly. “Normality” was something strictly enforced and patrolled; deviance would not be tolerated: “That paradoxically creates some real weirdos – as in the malevolent type, because they quite literally have nothing better to do. And because everyone knows everyone’s business, they’ll always have something to have a go at you about.”

In early November, I wrote to Victor Lambert. Considering his previous interviews spread across Britain’s national news media, I naively hadn’t really expected anything other than enthusiastic participation. “We cannot accommodate your request,” came his prompt, polite reply. “The council have a media policy that we will not comment further on the subject matter.” Leo Hammond, the village’s Conservative ward councillor, had also received letters to his constituency office, written by someone with an apparently keen interest in his sexuality. The letters alleged that Hammond was secretly gay, an accusation “which me and my girlfriend find quite funny”, he told the Guardian. Hammond had developed a theory, faintly chilling in its humdrum plausibility: the letters addressed to him were likely from a different author. Their relatively harmless, essentially childish content simply didn’t compare in menace or vitriol to previous batches. It was likely, he surmised, that they were the work of a fledgling copycat, emboldened by the failure to catch the initial perpetrator. Hammond had another theory. “I’m pretty confident I know who’s sending mine,” he mused. The only snag was that he had no means to prove it.

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I emailed Hammond an interview request more in hope than expectation. If Victor Lambert had been shackled by East Riding council’s media engagement policy, it was likely that Hammond would too. I was instead surprised by his prompt reply. “Hi, yes I will speak with you,” he wrote back, an hour or so after my initial message. My excitement was not unreserved. What did I really suppose the disarmingly youthful-looking local politician – the Guardian’s photographer had captured a muscular, bequiffed fellow in a sharply pinstriped blue suit – would have to offer that he hadn’t already divulged to the newspaper? What revelations could I possibly hope to extract regarding an oddly disarming, if hardly inexhaustible local scandal? I could have spared myself the bout of self-reflection. On the allotted day and time, I punched in Hammond’s phone number to send him a text, which received no reply. My cheery WhatsApp messages and chasing emails were swallowed by the same cavernous silence over the following days and weeks.

Although irritating, it was a silence with its own imaginative possibilities. Perhaps Hammond had been muzzled by shadowy high-ups at the local authority, worried about what any further press intrusion might reveal. Maybe he had received a fresh batch of the most appalling threats and accusations in the post, which required nothing less than the most urgent police attention. I let these fantasies marinate for a few days before confronting the most likely explanation for the steadily lengthening radio silence. That Leo Hammond, the boyish Tory local politician, just couldn’t be bothered to rehash the threadbare facts of the case to another rubbernecking writer suffering from a bad case of morbid curiosity. I began to half-jokingly picture these rejections as evidence of a mild conspiracy of silence, with the village closing ranks on itself to ward off preying outsiders after the increasingly unwelcome glare of press attention.

In early December, I spoke with Robyn Vinter, the Yorkshire-based reporter who had been dispatched to Shiptonthorpe by the Guardian. She was happy to discuss the story, for which she had amassed a vast amount of material that could not be included in the original piece for reasons of both length and potential libel. She told me she was reasonably sure she’d come across one of the perpetrators early on. It was disarming to be invited into their living room, speaking amiably of alternative theories. Soon, it became apparent that they were not the type of person to confess and they were “much more valuable being able to vouch for us to victims in the village, which they did, because they knew them well”. I began to picture the woman as a kind of off-brand Miss Marple, one that had torn out their superego and trampled it underfoot. As for the victims, Vinter described a series of eerie encounters. One was “incredibly skittish”, as if there was another, deeper issue just under the surface of the conversation. “I had heard someone else in the village say this person ‘enjoyed playing the victim’ but I don’t think that was right,” Vinter told me. “It felt more to me like they were used to being the victim, like this was not the only scenario in which they were being victimised.”

Proximity explains how the nearness and closeness of village life could suffocate its inhabitants. Community can shift from comfort to wrapping its hands around your throat.

This wasn’t all. Another villager spoke to Vinter at length about a friend who had received a spate of letters. Later that afternoon, she called back to say she had been mistaken; her friend wasn’t a victim after all. What had prompted such an eerie retraction? Had the woman been warned off speaking to a journalist? Or had she been swept up in the excitement, inventing victimhood when none existed, simply for the sake of furthering the story – of inventing her own little subplot to satisfy an outsider’s imagination? During another, otherwise light-hearted, conversation with a man, Vinter jokingly asked whether he was going to confess. The man’s face dropped. He said he didn’t like words like that being used; they felt like a threat.

As for theories, Vinter had several. She believes there were three perpetrators. The two responsible for the ugliest material were likely working in tandem. They were probably related and very likely pensioners, or thereabouts. Anyone younger, Vinter reasoned, would have carried this campaign out online. The waters were muddied, she continued, “because I also don’t believe there are as many victims as claimed. I suspect not everyone who said they got a letter actually got one, instead making it up to deflect suspicion, which explains why there was no clear thread connecting the victims”. It was odd when several villagers declined to show her the letters they’d received, even in the strictest confidence.

Hinted confessions. Scattergun accusations. Disappearing or backtracking victims. The more Vinter divulged, the less I felt I understood. I had wanted a neat story of a community under invisible siege. Where suspicion could be neatly apportioned, the line between victim and perpetrator easily drawn. Perhaps this was a city dweller’s arrogance at work. Why would life in Shiptonthorpe be simpler than any other variety of existence? I had fallen into the obvious trap of underestimating or misunderstanding the weirdness and intensity of village life. The local characters were no less inconsistent and inscrutable than those found anywhere else – it seemed the only difference was proximity. A proximity that meant grudges could so easily metastasise into ugliness, and that ugliness could then spread so rapidly and corrode so deeply. Proximity explains how the nearness and closeness of village life could suffocate its inhabitants. Community can shift from comfort to wrapping its hands around your throat.

The truth, when it comes to the Shiptonthorpe scandal, isn’t likely to take the form of easy illumination, if it can ever be revealed at all. There was too much strangeness and animosity for that. If there was any relief, it was in the fact that life had begun to drift back into something like normality. Old certainties were gradually being re-established, though it would take time for the wounds to scab over entirely. On the surface, life had begun to move forward. And what, when it came to it, could be more important? The surface, of course, is what community is all about. 

Francisco Garcia

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Having soaked up the sun in Italy in E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View, we continue our European tour to Prague next week. Don’t expect love or fields of violets, though – Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis has something far stranger waiting.

We’ve all woken up on the wrong side of the bed, but not one of us (presumably) has woken up as a human-sized insect. Gregor Samsa isn’t so lucky. One morning, with no warning and no explanation, the travelling salesman finds himself transformed into an “undefined vermin”, and Kafka refuses him any way back. His first thought isn’t horror but mundane irritation. “What a strenuous career it is that I’ve chosen!” he thinks, already calculating how he’ll make his train.

What follows is a slow, physical unravelling. Gregor loses his voice, then his taste for human food, then, after his father hurls an apple that lodges in his back and begins to rot, his mobility. The family that once depended on him starts locking him in his room, then forgetting to feed him, then referring to him only as “it”.

“Was he an animal, that music could move him so? He felt as if the way to the unknown nourishment he longed for were coming to light.”

Few books this club has tackled carry as much critical baggage. Decades of literary criticism have made it a Freudian case study, a Marxist allegory of alienated labour, an existentialist study of estrangement. Kafka himself refused to settle for any easy reading, going so far as to insist his publisher never let the insect appear on the cover. Though useful, such extensive criticism makes the book challenging to wade through. We won’t resolve the argument either, but we will get into where it comes from, whether that be Gregor’s shame at his own body, the family’s drift from grief into relief, or why his sister, the person who loved him the most, is the one who finally calls Gregor “it”.

If you want to leave things as open as possible, the best place to start is arguably Vladimir Nabokov’s thoughts. He had little patience for Freudian readings of the book, and argued instead for something simpler, where the sheer clarity of Kafka’s prose makes the strangeness underneath it land so hard.

“The transparency of his style underlines the dark richness of his fantasy world. Contrast and uniformity, style and the depicted, portrayal and fable are seamlessly intertwined.” (Nabokov, 1991)

But a book with this much interpretive breadth can still leave you short of a way in. Alongside Aleph’s own deep dives, Kafka’s biographical context, and critics like Nina Straus or Gerhard Rieck, visual interpretation can be just as useful a route. Since Gregor’s vermin nature is never specified, artists have taken wildly different approaches to embodying it, from human-sized cockroaches (above) to the emaciated human body (below).

So with audible and visual sources both at hand, Kafka’s slippery little novella should feel a bit less like Pandora’s box by Tuesday. As usual, we invite you to listen to the audiobook on hi-aleph.com beforehand, and arrive with questions, observations and insights to share. Aleph’s there for everything, from the basics to the trickier references – Habsburg bureaucracy, Prague’s German-Czech-Yiddish tangle, fin-de-siècle anxieties – that don’t always survive translation. It’s a slim book of only 70 pages, but Aleph won’t hand you a tidy thesis on what the insect “really” means. What it can do is help you work through the specific knots, line by line, without a script.

So join us Tuesday evening for a book written in the uneasy years just before the First World War, one that trades Forster’s Italian sunshine for something chillier: what happens when the people who love you most can no longer look at you? Wine and nibbles as always, with Aleph on hand for whatever gets stuck. Come with a question, and leave with nothing short of a transformed understanding of this classic book.

Also, keep an eye out for our next session, where we take to Venice!

Death in Venice by Thomas Mann, Tuesday, 25th August, 6.30–8pm

The student-led protests in Delhi and other Indian cities, which recently led to the government’s first retreat in its decade of power, seemed at first to be pointillistic in their principal demand. This was the resignation of India’s education minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, over the repeated leaks of national exam papers. It was a demand quickly put down to student disenchantment with the country’s creaking and underfunded educational system as well as high levels of graduate unemployment. But the protests quickly became a flashpoint for other grievances and a barometer for opposition to the government more broadly. In this way they also signalled the failure of opposition parties to inspire and marshal such feeling in electoral politics. But this situation is not specific to India and illustrates the limits of institutional politics both regionally and globally.

The protests were organised by a parody organisation called the Cockroach Janata Party (cockroach people’s party), which was founded by an Indian student in Boston and took its name from a throwaway comment about unemployed youth by the Indian Chief Justice. Gaining the support of millions in a couple of days, the party soon had more members than the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, with its protests marked by the subversive humour of its parodic founding. This departure from a politics of anger and outrage was new, though there exists a tradition of such deeply felt but nevertheless “civilised” protests going back to Gandhi’s mobilisations during the independence movement. More recently, Rahul Gandhi, the leader of the opposition, has sought to tap into this tradition by appealing to Indians in the name of love against hatred.

Yet the CJP protests disdained the language of love and drew upon a genealogy of mobilisation that had nothing to do with opposition parties. This tradition goes back to the India Against Corruption movement of 2011, in which several of the student leaders cut their political teeth, followed by protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act 2019, seen as discriminating against Muslims, and the farmers’ protests of 2020-21 against the privatisation of agricultural pricing. In global terms, the student protests were part of a wave of mobilisations that include the so-called colour revolutions of Eastern Europe and Central Asia as well as the Arab Spring uprisings. Among these are the specifically subcontinental protests which brought down the Sri Lankan government in 2022, the Bangladeshi government in 2024 and the Nepalese government in 2025.

While they arose in different circumstances and had varying demands, these movements have all targeted states seen as being corrupt and repressive. But it is not so much the similarity of their causes that I find interesting as their emergence outside institutional politics. Only one of them, India Against Corruption, led in that country to the founding of a new political party, the Aam Admi Party (common man’s party), which has not, however, worked very differently from existing political parties where it has been in power. Today’s Cockroach Janata Party has refused to turn itself into a party and in this way resembles other student-led mobilisations around the world. What does this refusal to enter institutional politics tell us about these new mobilisations?

On the one hand, we see the hollowing out of political parties all over the world. No longer linked to specific economic interests, especially with the decline of the working class in post-industrial societies, parties can now appeal to all manner of changing and single-issue constituencies, even abandoning one base for another as has been the case for the UK’s Labour Party among others. This allows them to be taken over from old elites by outsiders in the way that Narendra Modi took over the BJP or Donald Trump the Republican Party. On the other hand, venerable political parties can suddenly collapse, and new ones rise to power as has been the case in countries as diverse as France and Nepal. This suggests the crisis, if not decline, of the political party itself as an organisational form.

Yet by avoiding party politics, these mobilisations might unseat governments but cannot replace them with anything very different. In the Middle East and Eastern Europe, this has often led to military and other forms of dictatorship, while in the subcontinent such revolutions can actually be termed restorations since they put one party in the place of another. This is the case for Bangladesh, for instance, where the ousting of the Awami League led to the election of the BNP within the same political system, which is also what happened in Nepal and Sri Lanka. These governments might be better than the ones overthrown but are not otherwise very different from them. However flawed, in other words, a democratic history allows South Asian countries to remain politically stable.

India, with its much deeper history of democratic government, its sheer size and its diversity, militates against any populist unseating of governments. Only in relatively homogeneous societies does the cause of one part of the citizenry inspire others to provoke a revolution or restoration by extra-electoral means. Given the sheer scale of India, however, entire regions such as Punjab in the 1980s or Kashmir in the 1990s could be on fire without disturbing the tenor of life and even economic growth elsewhere in the country. We are faced with the paradox that political parties in countries like India may remain in power but no longer express popular discontent.

The palpable suspicion of political parties was evident in the cockroach protests, which, like other mobilisations of the recent past, enjoyed only very indirect forms of support from opposition parties, which were themselves barely mentioned by protesters. Yet these movements still make use of slogans and icons which had historically belonged to such parties but from which they have been uncoupled. Particularly important are figures like Gandhi, Ambedkar, or Bhagat Singh and terms like revolution or inqilab. It is as if the new movements are in search of an equally novel political language but are forced for the moment to repurpose old ones. Their mobilisations can be seen as experiments in the making of a new politics beyond the party form, with the CJP turning itself into a popular pressure group outside parliament.

Faisal Devji

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TANK spoke to Anton Jäger about his book, Hyperpolitics (2026), which argues that political action in the modern age has been hollowed out for lack of institutionalisation.

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BRUX brings maximalist UK bass energy to this week's TANK Mix, recorded live at Fred again's USB002 residency.

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Faisal Devji traces the root cause of the endless wars in Western Asia, from Palestine to Tehran.

Carlos Bazua came to India in 1997. He was an exchange student at St. Stephen’s, my college in Delhi. Carlos, a Mexican, was doing a course at Berkeley and was here to learn the basics of Sanskrit – in other words, to smoke a lot of pot. We did a lot of that together. One afternoon we decided to go see a film at what was then the hippest place in Delhi to see a film: Priya Cinema Complex. It was a Steven Seagal flick; I think it was called Nico and it was awful. As soon as the movie ended Carlos demanded food. A spanking new McDonald’s had opened in the complex. Three floors of burgers and fries. It was the first to open in India and there were long queues outside. The sight of people huddled in snake formation got Carlos’ goat. “All for a rotten burger,” he boomed, “when you guys have such excellent cuisine yourselves.” Then Carlos got sentimental. He said there had been similar queues back home when the first McDonald’s arrived there. He blamed them for Mexico’s currency crisis. He said they were evil and they would do the same to beautiful India. He insisted we eat tandoori chicken at Arabian Nights across the road. Being a student, I was perennially short of cash. I pointed out to Carlos that a Maharaja Mac was much cheaper than the chicken at Arabian Nights. Carlos insisted that money wasn’t everything. I agreed grudgingly. We ate chicken that night.

Carlos went back to California after two months. He posted me some acid – three squares of California Sunshine in a brown envelope. Inside I also found a note that said, “Thank you for not eating at McDonald’s that evening.” Carlos became a filmmaker and made short films about things that made him angry: sweatshops, child labour, evil multinational companies. He married a bombshell called Nefertiti. He bought a car. He then drove it off a cliff with Nefertiti inside.

Carlos might not have survived, but McDonald’s certainly survived Carlos’ rejection. It opened multiple outlets in big cities and took small-town India by storm. This year, almost a decade on, the company opened its first drive-in restaurant, in Pune.

As one of the first multinationals allowed in after decades of socialism, it had found itself in a unique position. For the majority of Indians, going to McDonald’s became a way of announcing to the world that they had “arrived.” It was a place to hang out and to be seen. The humble burger had become the carrier of meanings that lay outside the purview of its culinary brief: India had decided to embrace Western-style capitalism and from this McMoment on, there was no looking back.

In contemporary India, by contrast, any work is good as long as it helps one stand on one’s two feet. Independence at a young age is now a prized value, as is personal satisfaction.

In the last 10 years, the urban Indian landscape has undergone a dramatic transformation. Dusty, opaque shop fronts have given way to snazzy, glass-fronted showrooms. Pizza parlours, burger joints, coffee bars and big music stores have opened on the high streets of several Indian towns and cities.

These Western-style outlets have done more than add a dash of neon to an already colourful Indian bazaar. They have been the medium for a genuine socio-cultural linguistic shift, creating a brand new class of people in a country where speaking English once categorically demonstrated that you were above manual labour and above serving yourself, let alone others. They are India’s first English-speaking “working class,” an entirely new class adding another layer to an already complex society. They are willing to abandon desk jobs – almost a birthright for those who speak English – for physical work on the shop floor. Most young, middle-class Indians find this democratisation of toil liberating.

For generations, English-speaking Indian kids were forced into a handful of professions by their parents, aptitude notwithstanding. An Indian father would sit his adolescent son down and lay out the options: medicine, engineering, banking, government jobs. Middle-class Indians had historically displayed an aversion to manual work. If you were educated and English-speaking, you did not lift a finger. The driver washed your car on Sundays and you never even made yourself a cup of tea – the maidservant was there to do that. If your father worked in a bank, you would not dream of taking a job in a restaurant kitchen. In the Indian context, you belonged to the middle class, not the working class.

In contemporary India, by contrast, any work is good as long as it helps one stand on one’s two feet. Independence at a young age is now a prized value, as is personal satisfaction. A new economy spawns new opportunities; new jobs create new identities, new lifestyles and new ways of seeing the world. The average Indian’s attitude to work has changed fundamentally and irreversibly. While a section of the young in the Islamic world seethes with resentment, young Indians are in love with the American lesson that education, competition and hard work bring prosperity. Accompanying this feeling is a newfound respect for physical labour. Class barriers, too, have broken down in these showrooms for global capitalism. The bank manager’s son works side by side with a new migrant to the city, and they both start with a clean slate. Caste identity usually resides in the surname, so when workers wear name tags bearing only their first names, centuries of prejudice are instantly wiped out.

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Ram Chandra Singh, a carpenter’s son, is 25. He comes from Nagrajdhar, a remote village in the Himalayan mountains. For his college education he came to Mussoorie, a hill station dubbed “Queen of the Hills” by the British. While pursuing his BA, he took a part-time job working at Club Mahindra, a time-share resort. The move from village to city wasn’t easy, but Pizza Hut made it easier. “Of course one feels awkward in the beginning. But I like it here. There is no hierarchy. On busy days, even the manager rolls up his sleeves and does the dishes. I am allowed to take my own decisions.” Ram acquired basic skills in English from a small hole-in-the-wall institute, one of many that have mushroomed in post-liberalisation India. While the quality of instruction is often not high, these private institutes serve their function: equipping their students with a functional knowledge of English that enables them to join the global workforce, even if at the lowest level. It is the diploma in English that puts a spring in Ram’s step, gives him the confidence to walk around Pizza Hut like he owns the place. It allows him to penetrate an alien neon world, one that must have seemed impossibly foreign and forbidding from the outside.

Chirag is the son of a senior manager in a bank. Like Ram, he works in Pizza Hut and has no qualms about it. “Look at that,” he says, pointing at a poster hanging on the wall. It advertises “cool jobs” for people with “passion, dedication, mania.” Next to it is another poster; it shows Olympic rings filled with pizza topping. Chirag is the “achiever of the month.” His face has been given pride of place behind the cashier’s desk. He is “Lord of the Rings.” “Initially,” he says in a quiet voice, “my father had a problem. He said it’s not a good career, serving at tables. Now he understands that this is not the same as working for another restaurant. This is a multinational, so there is glamour attached to it. I don’t think sweating it out to earn a living is such a demeaning thing. The Indian fast-food industry is growing at 40 per cent per annum. There are avenues for growth. If I am good in my work, then in a few months I can rise to a higher position.”

McJobs have also encouraged people to move around, to leave the streets they were born in – traditionally, from childhood to marriage to death, a lot of Indians never do – and explore their huge country.

Both these stories are revealing in their own ways. In a developing economy like India’s, unlike in the West, McJobs are not seen as soul-killing. The bank manager’s son is happy to be seen doing manual labour – something he wouldn’t have agreed to 10 years ago – because there is “glamour” to those corporations, no matter what the work. For the carpenter’s son, a “vernie” (vernacular) boy from a remote village, it gives him a foothold in the city. It provides him with an entry into the world of modern jobs. He teaches himself the ways of the world by observing his customers and watching training videos supplied by his employers.

McJobs have also encouraged people to move around, to leave the streets they were born in – traditionally, from childhood to marriage to death, a lot of Indians never do – and explore their huge country. The lucky few even get to see a bit of the world beyond. Amit works at an Indian chain called Yo! China (“Chinese food, Chinese prices”) and, after five years in a youthful fast food industry, he’s a veteran. He comes from Garh Mukteshwar, a village near Meerut, around 40 miles from Delhi. His village has no electricity. His uncle and aunt are illiterate. They cannot fathom what he does. He is a little embarrassed about his uncle and aunt and refuses to discuss them. He did a course in hotel management straight after school. He has worked for Café Coffee Day, Barista (both Indian chains), Costa Coffee and Pizza Hut. He has seen a fair bit of the country – Delhi, Chandigarh, Pune, Bangalore – which is something about which his parents and relatives could only dream, and has just returned from a training stint in Thailand. At 23, he has a team working under him. He writes poetry in Hindi. He picked up basic English at an institute in the city; the rest he picked up on the job. “Globalisation has been kind to me,” he says. “One has to change oneself. Sometimes it is necessary to break with tradition.” He acknowledges the power of travel. “You go down south and it’s a different world. In Bangalore, engineers walk in for a latte and all the conversation is about making jet engines quieter and turbines more efficient. I met a guy who works for Motorola, writing software for new phones; there was someone from Intel – his team was doing things like fine-tuning wireless broadband technology. I wouldn’t have met these people in Garh Mukteshwar. I like meeting new people. When I meet them, I also learn. Maybe my kids will end up working for these IT majors one day.”

“My father wanted me to join government service. He kept harping on about job security. But that is the old way of thinking. Now you can start young and work at various things, find out what you’re good at. Job security is not that important.”

For others, these new restaurants and shops have enabled them to discover their hidden talents. Gaurav Joshi is a lean, wiry 23-year-old who left his village three years ago and hasn’t gone back since. He stays in regular touch with his family on his mobile phone. “My father wanted me to join government service. He kept harping on about job security. But that is the old way of thinking. Now you can start young and work at various things, find out what you’re good at. Job security is not that important.” He works as a chef at Mark Pi’s Crazy Noodles, an American chain specialising in Chinese food and wobbly designer tumblers for beverages. Joshi discovered his passion for cooking as a schoolboy. “There was an emergency in the family. My mother had to leave suddenly. We were totally helpless without her. I tried to make rotis; they got burned. Everything I tried to cook got burned. But I liked being in the kitchen – the heat of the fire, the smell of spices roasting in oil. When my mother came back I started spending more and more time in the kitchen.”

Before, his chosen career would hardly have been seen as cool. Now it is. “I am not seen as a workhorse cook working in some drab kitchen. I am a chef in a crisp white hat. We have an open kitchen so the customers can see me work. They get very impressed when the flames leap past my ears. Especially the ladies. Just the other day this really smart girl came up to me and asked me out to coffee. Imagine this happening 10 years ago – an English-speaking, middle-class Indian girl wanting to go out with a cook. I said no. I already have a girlfriend.”

His kitchen-mate, Ashutosh, is from Delhi. He has also been cooking since he was a schoolboy. Being from Delhi, he has a larger range of references. He went to a good state school so he speaks fluent English. He likes listening to Enrique Iglesias and Ricky Martin; he likes watching movies on HBO. He is happy to be independent. “At home, you always have to change the channel when your father is around. He can’t handle kissing scenes in Hollywood films, or my girlfriends calling. Here I am on my own. Of course there is a generational shift. I’ll be less bothered if one day my daughter has a boyfriend.”

It’s not just the boys who see and exploit these new opportunities. In Yo! China I meet a shy, pretty girl called Ramandeep. Five years ago, no girl would have been caught dead serving in a restaurant. But these chains are different. They have a reputation for treating everyone equally. Parents do not have a problem letting their daughters work in these places because they are safe, brightly lit, not sleazy. Ramandeep says her role model is her mother, a housewife. She is following a childhood dream – to become an air hostess and see the world. She goes to Frankfinn, an air-hostess training school just down the road from Yo! China. Her part-time job at the restaurant helps pay for its expensive fees. Aruna, 25, has been working at Café Coffee Day for the last two and a half years. She would not trade this for anything else. She wants to be named “Brewmaster” of the northern region in the championships the company organises regularly. “I work here 10 hours a day and love every minute of it,” she says. “Outside, you walk down the street and men stare at you, harass you. Inside I am safe. It’s like I am not in India any more.” To Aruna, this new, wipe-clean fast-food lifestyle is like another world, a mode of employment in which the old rules and obstacles that complicated a working woman’s life in her country do not apply. Avantika is studying for a degree in commerce and has been able to move to a new city and start a new life because of her job. “There were problems at home. Pizza Hut helped me to leave that behind. Now that I am earning I can also help my family out rather than just sit around waiting to get married to some boy they choose for me. I have more respect now.”

Make no mistake – he’s lovin’ it. But what about his children? Will they rise in Fight Club-style rebellion against soul-killing monotony? It is difficult to say.

All this independence at a young age means that people are staying single for longer. This might not mean the complete dismantling of the arranged marriage system, but it does mean people have relationships until the time they go in for a partner of their parents’ choice. Long working hours in small spaces mean more workplace romances, some of which are converted into marriage, thus contributing to the breakdown of caste and class barriers. Pradeep is 25 and flips Maharaja Macs at McDonald’s. He dismisses marriage with a dramatic wave of the hand. “Not till 30. I have a girlfriend. On my day off I like to take her for long drives on my Honda CBZ bike. The world is changing. You want to be part of this change rather than getting tied down at an early age. The organisation shows us videos of Westerners working in these joints in their countries. We see how they behave, boys and girls working as equals, being free with each other. We too want to be like them.” Ramandeep’s parents have also stopped pestering her to hurry. “They know my ambition is to take to the skies. They respect that. I will probably find a man in the same profession. But all that is for later. Right now I have to focus on my job.”

Ramandeep’s boss, Amit, strikes a cautionary note. After five years in the business, he feels there is an urgent need to look beyond “the glitz and the glamour,” the neon, the air conditioning and the loud music. “That’s what attracts an 18-year-old initially. Soon he realises that the working hours are long. There is hardly any free time. Kids get frustrated. They come with unrealistic expectations. They want to buy the expensive Reebok sports jacket the customer is wearing, but cannot. Salaries are not that high.” He’s also critical of the management. “In the West these things followed a more organic process. All we do is import, stick labels on things. Somebody buys a franchise – all he wants to do is make money from it, recover investment. They work you like a dog. In the West people get breaks; there is more leisure time. You don’t just go on and on and on, like here.” He mentions a friend in Delhi who committed suicide and another who has picked up a drug habit along the way. “It’s not easy balancing work, family, girlfriend. Some people just crack up.”

Devinder Prajapati, a tall, gaunt-faced man of 22, has a different take. He has been with McDonald’s for three years. He comes from a small town in Punjab. I meet him on a Sunday. He is here even though it is his day off. He did a course in “catering technology.” It taught him a bit of French, but not much English. He shows me two books: Developing Communication Skills and How to Write Correct English. He shows me a page from the second book. The erroneous sentence appears on the left of the page and the correct version on the right (“The servant is attending on him / The servant is attending to him”). He says he picks up a lot just by listening to his customers talk. He agrees that the work hours are long but finds nothing wrong with it. “Look, I don’t want any free time. What would I do with it? When I am doing nothing, silly thoughts come into my head. They scare the shit out of me. Today is my day off but I was going mental sitting in my room. I thought, why not go back to McDonald’s, hang out for a bit? On a weekday I would be in uniform – today I can wear civvies,” he says, casting a surreptitious glance at someone’s gleaming Nike trainers.

Amit feels the kids are being slave-driven. Devinder, on the other hand, could hang around in his workplace 24 hours a day. Is Devinder saying, “Spank me, I like it?” Probably not. For him, this symbolises a move up from where he was. The fancy Japanese cars on Rajpur Road, the air-conditioned workspace, the throbbing music, the false politeness and the perfumed armpits not only seduce him, they make him feel good about himself; he does not want to be anywhere else. Make no mistake – he’s lovin’ it. But what about his children? Will they rise in Fight Club-style rebellion against soul-killing monotony? It is difficult to say. At the moment, Ram is thrilled to have a job – a regular job in a country of a billion people. He doesn’t seem too bothered about his soul. Salvation was never on the menu.

Palash Krishna Mehrotra

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Last week, Caroline and the rest of the Tank team hosted the second Aleph Book Club, where we explored Evelyn Waugh’s satirical Decline and Fall comedy as we followed Paul Pennyfeather’s humorous account of life as an upper-class public schoolteacher in the 1920s.

Next week, our discussions will take a different turn, switching from humour to matters of the heart as we’re transported to Italy in E.M. Forster’s most famous novel, A Room with a View. Featured in our Summer of Love collection, the story follows Miss Lucy Honeychurch, where a simple disagreement over rooms in a Florence boarding house and the kind offer of a stranger turns Lucy’s innocent cultural tour upside down with love and longing.

If you’re a fan of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, or any couples story built on buried yearning and unbearable restraint, A Room With a View deserves a spot on your list. From impulsive kisses among violets in Tuscany to the male love interest caught skinny-dipping in a Sacred Pond, Forster’s novel has all the hallmarks of a great summer romance.

(Julian Sands and Helena Bonham Carter in James Ivory’s A Room With a View, 1995)

Set in the early 1900s, Forster’s exploration of young love unfolds against a city full of beauty and danger. When Miss Lavish promises to lead Lucy on an adventure to discover the “true Italy”, cultural exposure quickly becomes the least of Lucy’s concerns. After witnessing a murder and being rescued by the mysterious George Emerson, Lucy finds herself caught between attraction and unease, not only towards her rescuer, but towards society itself. Against the rigid conventions of Edwardian England, where a sensible match counts for more than romance, Lucy finds “rebellious thoughts swept out in words for the first time in her life”.

With Aleph, you can dig deeper into these rigid social codes and better understand the weight of Lucy’s decision. Should she follow her heart, or her head? As Forster guides us through Europe, from Florence to Surrey, Lucy’s journey reflects a modern “hot girl summer” that must inevitably come to an end. Back in England, encounters with George are few and fleeting, their carefree, sunny romance stunted by the cold of “Windy Corner” in the English countryside. Can Lucy trust what happened in Italy, or did the idyllic beauty of its cathedrals and Renaissance art simply whisk her away?

Not only does Forster’s choice of location create a warm and idyllic backdrop for love to grow, but its warm climate, art and open landscapes also contrast sharply with the cold, repressed manners of Lucy’s engagement back in England to Cecil, which help symbolise the lovers’ situations. Old Mr Emerson’s words on the folly of parting two people in love, “Is not victory. It is defeat,” haunt her as she faces choosing the sensible match of Cecil Vyse or her passion for George, risking social ostracism either way.

As with our last session, we invite you to listen beforehand to the audiobook on hi-aleph.com, and come armed with questions, observations and insights to share. Along the way, Aleph can answer everything from your most basic questions to the book’s more elusive references. A Room with a View is renowned for its rich web of literary, artistic and musical allusions, from the poetry of Tennyson to Amilcare Ponchielli’s opera. In a novel packed with historical references and subtle easter eggs, Aleph can help unpack the meanings behind these details and illuminate Forster’s intentions, all without spoiling the plot.

Then, join us Wednesday evening and immerse yourself in the Italian atmosphere: pour a glass of wine, lay out a board of cheese, and settle in as Aleph brings the conversation to life. Arriving with a deeper understanding of the novel, we hope our discussion will take us further into Forster’s Edwardian England than any book club before, in your own words. You might also like the following two sessions;

Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, Tuesday, August 18th, 6.30-8pm

Death in Venice by Thomas Mann, Tuesday, August 25th, 6.30-8pm

Tickets cost £10, and include drinks, snacks, and a mystery gift, the company and the camaraderie is priceless!

Right now, hordes of children are on their summer holidays, being marched through the art museums of the world. The result is a well-maintained crowd shot through with the odd floating tendril of a tantrumming minor, the seven-year-old for whom an air-conditioned gallery is the worst possible destination when there is a pool to be splashed in. Little does the child appreciate the lesson being absorbed: an education in global citizenship, in orderliness, in reckoning with an empire’s legacy.

This reckoning, staged from inside a prestigious fortress built with the empire’s wealth, turns out to be an efficient method of keeping order: offering the image of reparation, just enough to somewhat soothe well-fitted rage while evading the reparations themselves. In London this summer, the machinery is everywhere in hallowed halls of loot: the V&A’s Rising Voices foregrounds colonial histories, and the National Portrait Gallery keeps reframing Reynolds’s Portrait of Mai around Cook’s voyages and the reach of empire.

This is not to say that crowd control, in its protective function, is all bad, and chaos often begets danger. However, many of the issues with colonialism find a parallel in the dark aspects of control, and sometimes, the faltering of management is requisite for dissent and change. Last week, across a matter of hours, some 72,000 people crossed the border between Morocco and Ceuta, a Spanish colonial outpost on the African coast. Many of the surge arrived on inner tubes, with phones sealed in waterproof pouches, cheering for Spain and kissing the ground as they landed. Of the 72,000 who crossed, 70,000 have been returned across the border they crossed, and at least 70 died in the water and the crush. Though at the time, many read the surge as the rebellion of an occupied territory against its occupier, cheering on decolonialism in action. This, unfortunately, like the art museum efforts of decolonisation, was an oversimplified narrative.

The Ceuta crowd that came with the waves was not quite as spontaneous as it looked. The cause remains officially unclear. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez blamed trafficking networks; analysts pointed at Rabat, still smarting over Madrid’s overtures to Algeria and its refusal to concede Western Sahara, illegally annexed by Morocco, to the ire of the region’s Indigenous population. And then there is the louder, more cinematic theory, now circulating: the surge was engineered by Israel, Morocco’s increasingly close ally, in retaliation for Spain’s conspicuous pro-Palestine stance at the World Cup. The accusation gathered heat after Israel’s UN envoy taunted Madrid over its “colonial enclaves in Africa.” Spain’s government has, for its part, rejected the idea that the surge was manufactured at all.

The circumstantial case for a Rabat–Tel Aviv drift is real enough. Rather than boycotting Israel over the genocide in Gaza as many nations have, Morocco’s bilateral trade with it has climbed: exports reportedly up 64% year-on-year in the first half of 2024. Morocco has signed on to the US-backed International Stabilisation Force, offering officers, gendarmes, police and a military field hospital for deployment into Gaza, and its officers have already toured the Strip to map future zones. A moving crowd, in any form, very quickly acquires a cast of directors.

Crowds are complex. Methods of maintenance are more complex still, and of course, tamed or untamed, the lines of history keep moving onward.

Edie Musker

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In TANK issue 18, Christian Nold explored the militarisation of policing and its institutionalisation in statecraft.

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For the artist Martin Wong, America’s many Chinatowns were a long-term preoccupation. This series of images is taken from a new monograph which celebrates and investigates his relationship with these ersatz Orientalist fantasies.

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Historian Faisal Devji traces the root cause of the endless wars in Western Asia, from Palestine to Tehran.

We realised that we’re overqualified,
we can crush anything our size, but
we can’t crush grassroots movements.

The hardest guy to defeat is
the guy with the stick and
the guy with the drum,
the kid with the rock.

– Chris and Janet Morris,
pioneers of non-lethal weapons

The British police force largely emerged out of a need to deal with riots. The anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780 forced Parliament to set up the Metropolitan Police in 1785, a project which was finally successful in 1829. Prior to the formation of the police force, the army and local militia groups were used to carry out its functions. When civil disturbances occurred, the choice of using the army had been a binary choice between ignoring the actions or the sort of lethal intervention witnessed at the Gordon Riots. The establishment of the police service allowed for a gradated and constant discipline that appeared to depoliticise and distance state control. In order for the public to believe in the military/police separation the two services had to be totally separated with different equipment and training regimes. Thus the demilitarised figure of the English bobby as a “citizen in uniform” emerged.

The psychology of crowds first became a subject for serious study in the nineteenth century when civilisation in France was seen to be under threat from the rising masses. The revolution of 1848 and the Paris Commune in 1871 had motivated the bourgeoisie and the ruling class to try to understand the dynamic of the mass and find a way of combating it. The debate between criminologists centred on whether the individual was inherently irrational or if it was the involvement with the crowd that caused individuals to behave irrationally. One man stood out as synthesising this argument into what became the most well-read book in social psychology, Gustave Le Bon’s The Crowd. He argued that within the crowd, individuals lose all sense of personal identity and therefore lose control of their behaviour and that this accounts for their irrationality and mindless destructiveness. Of course, his position as a bourgeois gentleman looking at working-class crowds caused him to perceive their actions as mindless, because they were meaningless to him. He saw it as his task to develop a psychology which could be used to combat crowds.

At the time when Le Bon was writing in 1895, Darwin’s seminal On the Origin of Species was still a pioneering text. Darwin’s ideas directly influenced the psychologist William James to publish one of the first accounts that compared our biological evolution with our human cultural evolution. It is out of this intellectual milieu that Le Bon’s notion of a biological cultural infectant emerged. He proposed that the crowd feeds on itself through the presence of an outside agent, a “contagion” – an infectious disease that is passed from person to person, obliterating individuality and rationality. It is interesting to contrast Richard Dawkins’ contemporary vision of memes, which “propagate themselves by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation”. Both the meme and the contagion share the need to spread themselves, yet Dawkins’ cultural virus sounds more like a hygienic photocopier when compared with Le Bon’s bacterium that “implants” itself in the subject’s brain. Le Bon’s infectant appears to cross backwards and forwards across the physical divide, sometimes becoming a real biological agent and sometimes remaining a linguistic metaphor. Perhaps it was comforting to believe that the huge social upheaval of the French Revolution had at its core a physical agent like a modern Ergot fungus that caused the masses to hallucinate.

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Somewhere among the Cold War paranoia and its multiple ironies, a new weapon meme sprang to life. Out of the hazy secretive military research and development world emerged the figure of Dr John Alexander. A maverick of both the military and science establishment, he reasoned that it would be easier to disable enemy tanks rather than destroying them outright. Thus, he started the development of revolutionary anti-material weapons that could attack the mobility and communications of enemy tanks, causing mechanical failures while they were still miles behind the battle line.

Alexander finally found a logical use for his non-lethal technology. Realising that existing crowd control weapons were inadequate, he converted his anti-material weapons into a new range of “soft-kill” weapons. TV cameras that would have previously recorded in slow motion the bullet entering the head of a ten-year-old, now only capture intact bodies knocked unconscious, which are hardly worth reporting. Using these weapons, the complicated decisions police officers have to deal with are removed, allowing the military mind to concentrate on what it has been trained for. Alexander’s visionary work found such favour in the military that he has presented policy papers to the White House and NATO conferences and is today acknowledged as the “Father of Non-Lethal Weapons”.

The American military intervention in Somalia in 1995 named “United Shield” turned out to be a real lesson for the future of “other than war” operations. One of the major problems was that the local warlords seemed to be constantly aware of American troop movements across the whole country. The American military, which monitored all radio frequencies, was confused as to how the messages were reaching the interior so quickly. Eventually it was discovered that the news was being spread by drum beat, a method that was undetectable to the military.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are remotely piloted military units used for reconnaissance and non-lethal payload delivery. Currently they can carry twenty-six payload tubes containing noxious odorants, tear gas, caltrops, dye markers and electronic noise generators. Pulse non-nuclear weapons – mounted on cruise missiles or UAVs would disable enemy tanks and early warning radars would be invaluable. When such weapons explode they would produce a momentary burst of microwaves powerful enough to disable all but special, radiation-hardened electronic devices.

Britain is the world’s third largest arms exporter with one in ten of all British jobs being in the arms industry. In the field of crowd control products, the UK is the world’s second largest manufacturer just after the U.S. In fact, plastic and rubber bullets were the products of the British colonial experience in Hong Kong where the flying … teak baton round became the template for future kinetic weapons. These bullets were however regarded as too dangerous for use on white people, so in 1969 Porton Down came up with a “safer” version that was used in Northern Ireland the next year. While plastic bullets have been deployed in virtually every country from the U.S. to Argentina, from South Africa to Israel and China they have so far not been utilised in mainland Britain. Until 1985 these bullets were considered too dangerous for use on the mainland, but police forces have recently started stockpiling plastic bullets to the extent that we now have 10,000 rounds stored throughout the UK. The criminologist Robert Reiner discerns a fundamental strategic u-turn in British policy in the 1970s and 80s towards a “militarisation” in both armament and training, which he blames ironically on the availability of new riot control hardware. With British crowd control weapons being largely consigned for export, the main source of these weapons is the U.S.

After the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the American military perspective shifted towards new enemies. The military planners now predicted that future conflicts would be fought as limited wars contested on a “sub-national” level within foreign countries. Military studies indicate that by the year 2025, roughly eighty-five per cent of the world’s population will live within urban areas. The old model of overwhelming forces rolling back uninhabited national borders has become obsolete. The American answer is the $56 billion Future Combat System, designed to be rapidly inserted into the urban centre of a hostile country in order to seize its strategically important facilities.

So far we have seen some of the precedents for these new conflicts in Somalia, Haiti and Bosnia. These were “dirty battlefields” where civilians and combatants were mixed, and where military personnel were forced into direct conflict with civilians. With the overall increase of “peace-keeping” missions the American military’s role has shifted from one of killing towards acting as a global police force. Suddenly, difficult decisions about how to identify and then deal with the innocent have become central issues.

Cooperative Osprey 1996 is a war-game organised by NATO designed to improve the interoperability between nations in Military Operations in Urban Terrain and Civil Disturbance Operations. Three NATO countries and sixteen Partnership for Peace nations took part in the war-game.

The worldwide military/police convergence has been … assisted by American initiatives like the Clinton administration’s dual-use policy, which was intended to aid the cross-fertilisation between the military and civilian technology sectors. One significant step was the recent setting up of the American Law Enforcement Technology Centre, which handles the centralised police testing of non-lethal weapons, aimed at simplifying the sale of anti-personnel weapons to all of America’s 17,000 separate police forces. Of course, this kind of centralised testing of weapons does not just benefit internal sales but also export sales. In fact, the British police are currently considering the purchase of the Vehicle Mounted Active Denial System [VMADS] from the U.S. arms manufacturer Raytheon Systems … Raytheon also happened to be one of the Labour Party’s major financial contributors at the time of the general election in 1997.

VMADS is one of the new generation of directed energy weapons which, with its range of over 750 metres, easily exceeds the yardstick distance. The weapon uses microwave radiation in the millimetre wavelength range which claims to penetrate less than a millimetre into the human skin in order to boil the skin’s water molecules. The microwaves work just like a normal microwave oven, generating an electromagnetic field that reverses a few billion times per second twisting the water molecules back and forth forcing them to rub against each other, apparently “creating a burning sensation, similar to a hot light bulb pressed against one’s flesh”. While the current test system is set to heat the human skin to only 54º C in two second bursts, the final system will be rheostatic – meaning that the amount and length of exposure can be increased at will to cause fever and death.

The names have changed today. “The beast with many heads” has become the public. The mobile vulgus – the mob – has turned into protestors and demonstrators, and yet the mass still arouses anxiety. The psychologist John Drury argues: “This kind of account recurs when the ruling class feels under threat and when its ideologues in academia have to find some explanation for what the ruling class is doing in order to combat the crowd.”

It is the military and the police today that have best understood Le Bon’s apocalyptic notion of the contagion. Military texts envision the crowd as a bushfire or a flood that unless contained will spread and consume all. The contagious disease inspires fear, and normal law must be put on hold in order to fight back, “nipping it in the bud”. Taking Le Bon’s assertion literally that crowds “are only to be impressed by images” and that it is “only images that terrify or attract them and become motives for action”, the police’s counteractions must be clear, direct and visual.

Today, innovative computer crowd simulations are used to analyse daily crowd flow patterns through existing buildings in order to predict the crowd movements in future buildings. Solid pixel walls are dragged around in order to redirect, deflect and rationalise the computer-model crowd. Until recently, these crowds were conceptualised as a uniform fluid smoothly gushing through entrances around corners and out of exit pipes. It is only the recent experiences of crowd disasters like Hillsborough in 1989 that have led to a general re-think. Eye-witness accounts of these disasters tell of people behaving in “irrational herding behaviour”, that actually hinders them as well as others in their escape. The innovative computer model LEGION attempts to simulate panic situations in a more realistic way. Instead of coalescing like water molecules the crowd behaves like a mass of individual grains of sand falling towards the exit while rubbing and colliding with other grains. Each angular pixel grain is given its own individualistic motivation according to a “least effort” algorithm.

LEGION has been used to simulate disaster situations in Wembley football stadium, the Australian Olympics and various London underground stations. This particular model is based on site measurements from Balham underground station.

The British police use a programme named CACTUS (Command And Control Training and Planning Using Knowledge Based Simulation). This software was developed by the University of Leeds in association with the Metropolitan Police in order to train British police to deal with public disorder. While graphically less spectacular than the American programme, the British system is operationally more advanced since it is used not just for training but to collate and give commands in real-life riots.

Examining the list of declassified non-lethal weapons, the sheer range and diversity of anti-personnel weapons is staggering. The early research for these weapons used car injury reports carried out by the motor industry, but found that the injuries were inadequate in mimicking the exotic wounding characteristics of non-lethal weapons. Fresh tests using live animal “surrogates”, including goats, pigs, dogs and baboons as well as human cadavers, allowed for a more systematic exploration of new weapons. In order to save money and to increase realism a number of reusable inanimate surrogates have been developed. The aim of this research was to discover the subtle human thresholds for irreversible damage. Every human joint has been pushed to the limits of its movement, and its fracture points recorded in order to avoid death. At recent protests in London, the number of protestors has ranged from 5,000 people. If these people were all targeted with non-lethal weapons, then we could expect fifty permanent injuries and twenty-five deaths.

Re-examining the list of non-lethal weapons, it becomes clear just how many of the weapons focus on the human senses of sight, sound, touch and smell. The conduits of external information are the body’s real weaknesses. Tribes in Papua New Guinea today still harness infrasound using giant drums and bullroarers as part of shamanic rituals precisely because of the unusual properties of infrasound.

Both the ancient and modern technologists aimed at rupturing the normal synchronisation of senses in order to induce unworldly fear. The uncanny quality of infrasound, which is used to break the barrier to the next world, is today being utilised to break the cohesion of crowds. This cohesion, based on trust and mutual support, is replaced with fear and paranoia. The aim of non-lethal weapons is to revert the crowd back into isolated and frightened law-abiding individuals. Once isolated, the bacterium of communal behaviour dies. Divide and conquer.

Christian Nold

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EXPLORE TANK ISSUE 18

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I comb my remaining hairs across the top of my head from left to right, and a line forms, extending from front to back on the left side, separating the rightward combed strands from their downward-hanging comrades to the lower left. In French, this dividing line, which is in itself nothing, a strip of baldness, is called, like the crevice between the buttocks or the selachian fish related to the shark and the skate, une raie, while in American English it is a “part”. Both of these words have an august Latin pedigree: radius in the one case, which yields up ray and rayon and radiant; and pars in the other, which gives us, among other fine words, “party”.

Now a party can be many things – Lenin had one, and so, if you live in an American college town, did the rambunctious frat house down the street – but in its essence, it is never so different from the part of the hair: it is some people going off in one way, like the hairs on my head, others going off in another.

I have long insisted that there are only three reasons to go to a party: to get, as they say, fucked up; to pursue erotic intrigue and to advance one’s social standing. The first two of these are either irrelevant or forbidden to me at this stage of life, and the last of them is almost always better accomplished by sitting at home and writing. And so I seldom go to parties.

But I remember them. I remember not yet being able to distinguish these three distinct functions, and how they would all swirl about confusedly in my soul as I arrived at the venue, and everything was charged with such an unbelievable potentiality, where anything could happen.

In reality, what did happen was a disaster. Once, on the occasion of my 16th birthday when mom was out of town and we lived out in some chicken-farming town in California’s Central Valley, the local anglomaniac, two-tone rudeboys, or however they thought of themselves, crashed the scene and made off with all my ska records (it was accepted without argument that no non-member of a youth subculture had the right to possess that subculture’s music). Making his escape, one of them collided on his Vespa with a pick-up truck pulling out of the Country Comfort Lounge, about a mile from our house. The next morning, after the cop cars and ambulances had cleared out, dozens of Specials and Selecter records littered the muddy ditches of our rural route. That was a fairly good party.

—

Not long before or after this crowning moment, sometime in the summer of 1988, I walked out to our mailbox and found my membership card for the Young Socialist Alliance, accompanied by a typewritten letter filled with both practical information, as well as elevated rhetoric about the youth being the future. I had heard that kind of talk before at Catholic Youth Organization meetings, and was annoyed that I was being made to join the mere youth auxiliary of the Socialist Workers Party. But I was 16 and those were the rules, and I was happy enough to now be officially linked to the largest association of Trotskyists in the United States, whose publishing wing, Pathfinder Press, had already taught me so much about the larger world beyond the Sacramento Valley.

By the following year, I had obtained another official document with my name on it, from the Department of Motor Vehicles, which enabled me to drive to the SWP’s national convention at Oberlin College, near Cleveland. It enabled me, while mom, for some mysterious reason, permitted me. In what would have been my junior year, I had stopped attending high school for some months, out of sheer stubbornness, and didn’t seem to have any other concrete plans, so driving off to do something at a university might have been hoped to hold open the possibility of what was known, even then, as a “positive influence”.

So I made it through the high desert of Nevada, through the salt flats of Utah, through the locust plagues of Nebraska, through Illinois, Indiana and, finally, the state in which I would much later reside for two years and where I am still registered to vote: bleak pseudo-palindromic Ohio, microcosm of all that is worst of “these United States”, the state about which Whitman had the most trouble rhapsodising. But it was all new and fresh to me in 1988, and I was happy to go to some bohemian café in the little town next to the campus and meet some dude named Harold who wore the best thrift-shop sweaters and knew more trivia about the Residents and Throbbing Gristle than I did. Harold, man. What a cool guy.

I stayed in some dorm with a “Third World” theme. It was late summer, as I recall, and the students were not around, so all I had were the traces of them. This was my first real visit to a university campus, and I found myself within one of the headquarters of student activism, with its rousing slogans and amateurish wall paintings of Marcus Garvey and Emma Goldman. I wanted to get into it, but I found that the setting was... well, something I could not yet put into words, but that I now recognise, in distant retrospect, whenever I am around people whose social identity is rooted in their sincere political commitments: it was condescending, straight-faced, literal-minded and boring.

I did not need these slogans; I did not need to be told what to think, as if without these simple visual aids, I would not have been thinking at all. I needed weird, cryptic, inscrutable expressions of underground culture, where the political valence requires hard interpretative work. I wanted to go back and find Harold and listen to the Residents together. The SWP congress had not even begun, but by the end of the first night at Oberlin, some kind of dim consciousness was sinking in, of the tension between the things I value most, the things that arise from the belief – often stubborn, often insane or monstrous – of individuals in their own unique expressive power, on the one hand, and, on the other, solidarity.

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Solidarity comes much more easily to many people I know than it does to me. I hate the call-and-response ritual of political demonstrations. I am terrified of, even phobic about, rallies, no matter what principle or objective quickens them. After my YSA affiliation lapsed in 1989, I would never again become a member of any political organisation or party. Well, I am exaggerating a bit. I was a Teamster when I worked briefly as a parking-lot attendant in 1990, and I am currently a member, by default, of the Syndicat Général de l’Éducation Nationale, a French labour union representing my interests, so I’m told, as a university professor. I also joined the PEN American Center shortly after the Charlie Hebdo assassinations in early 2015, briefly convinced that there was a place for me in an organisation dedicated to the global defence of free speech. But honestly, PEN is an organisation of writers, in the same way that Dairy Farmers of America is an association of dairy farmers. But do we really have something that unites us, as they do? If so, I have not yet discovered what that might be.

I am prepared to admit that for some years now I have considered myself an anarchist, as long as you will understand that I do not mean the kind who has ever even considered taunting a mall security guard or throwing a bomb. I take it that anarchism offers no sort of prescription for the sort of world we might wish to bring about, but rather an accurate description of how much of the world is and always has been. The most lucid anarchists are geographers and anthropologists, like Élisée Reclus or Pierre Clastres, watching how people in fact behave, grasping how irrelevant states and parties are for so much of what goes on.

Here, for example, is something a well-known partisan recommended for the advancement of his party’s cause:

Comrades! The uprising by the five kulak volosts must be mercilessly suppressed. The interest of the entire revolution demands this, for we are now facing everywhere the ‘final decisive battle’ with the kulaks. We need to set an example.

This is, again, V.I. Lenin, in a 1918 telegraph from Moscow to the communists of Penza. Lenin implored them further: “You need to hang (hang without fail, so that the people see) no fewer than 100 of the notorious kulaks, the rich and the bloodsuckers.”

Is this, now, the work of a “secretary” or a “chairman”? Or is it not, despite the passage of centuries and changes in the names of the ranks, more or less the same ebb and flow that brought the Mongol leader Batu Khan to cross the Volga and besiege Moscow in 1238? We speak of the “horde” and we imagine scenes of gross torture and spectacle; we speak of the “party” and we imagine pushed papers and the rubber stamps of bureaucrats who are, if not themselves rational, at least working in the service of reason. Let us not be fooled by superficial makeovers.

Consider too what can now only ironically be called the “party of Lincoln”. Donald Trump wished to become president of the United States, as the political arrangement at the time of his decision had no opening for emperor, tsar, or despot. So he joined the Republican Party, not to advance its ends, but his. The GOP, it turns out, had no defining principles at all, no sine qua non commitments without which the metaphysical conditions for identity over time could not hold. The Republican Party is whatever the most powerful or menacing figure claiming to speak for it says it is. And the fools in the party who do not see this, or the grovelling shits who do see it but remain anyway, may as well have joined up with a steppe-combing clan under the control of an illiterate, murderous warlord. The party leader, I could prove with countless more examples, is the warlord made to don a tie.

Maps of old would give, for regions or continents cut in two by the edges of the paper, the label of “part”: the part of Africa that was included in a map of the Mediterranean was called pars Africae; that of Arabia in a map of the Levant, pars Arabiae; and that of the unending expanse of the Russian Empire east of the Urals: pars Asiae. How it is that Russia, which Marine Le Pen recently declared to be part of the “Europe of nations”, could also contain within it a “part of Asia”, is something that has worried Russians at least since Peter the Great. It is as if the “part” here is not one of assemblage, but of mixture: Russia contains “a part of Asia” in the same way that a pound cake contains “one part butter”. But still, whatever the complex history of migrations and conquests, the map can at least help us to settle a few matters: Asia runs off to the east of the Urals, Europe to the west. The Urals, we might say, are the part of Russia, extending in both directions across Eurasia like a comb-over that knows it’s stretching it.

Russia is parted, but the party that seized power in 1917 went “All-Union”, became, as the Soviet national anthem had it, the “popular will” constituting the “singular, powerful Soviet Union”. The USSR technically never had a head of state, since the party secretary was only head of the party, and what kept the party in power was only, well, power itself, of the sort we saw unleashed upon the kulaks in 1918. It is not for ideological reasons, but for mereological ones, when I say that a one-party system is a contradiction in terms. Parties – or, if you will, proper parties – have a share in something larger. To be a party is to be in perpetual contest against other parties, not to eliminate them. Once they are gone, you don’t have a party, but a whole-y.

For my part, as I’ve said, I am a member of no party, nor do I go to parties. But it was not always like this. Once, in Leningrad, in 1991, I was up on a rooftop with my friend Vitaly. This was at the time of the putsch of the hard-line Communist generals against Gorbachev, who they knew was about to dissolve the Union. Vitaly had been in and out of Soviet jails in the 1980s, for crimes like trading bootlegged Beatles cassettes, common hooliganism, partying. During the putsch, he passed the time drinking vodka and walking along the balustrade on the roof of his mom’s high-rise apartment building. I saw him do it. I wasn’t there the day he fell and died, though I feel as though I was. His funeral was a sort of travesty of a party, like all celebrations in the Slavic world: straddling the boundary, the part, between mournfulness and elation. We kissed his foundation-caked forehead in the open casket as the hunchbacked gravediggers laboured, then we closed the casket and lowered him into the ground, pouring vodka and throwing cigarettes in after him. His mom wailed and laughed. I don’t know if anyone’s social standing was advanced, or if anyone found erotic intrigue that day, though I suppose in a sense Vitaly got as fucked up as you can get. That was, in its way, a good party.

I left Russia, the Soviet Union collapsed, life went on. Through 1990s American triumphalism, the discovery of a new enemy in Islam, scattered hecatombs. The Soviet Union, which the headlines of 1991 told us had been sent to the “scrapheap of history”, could no longer be found even there. By the early 2010s, my students for the most part had never heard of it. A thick, squinty little man gradually consolidated power among the scraps, and sought to restore something of what had been lost, but now unencumbered by utopian rhetoric. Post-Soviet Russia is not the same thing as what preceded it, and yet we all know that Putin, in some sense, is the heir to an imperial throne that had previously sat both tsars and secretaries.

By 2016, it had become clear that this throne was directing, or inspiring, or distally causing like some “unmoved mover”, unusual disturbances within the American party of Lincoln. The FBI and the bloggers can go on looking for the secret server revealing a ping from a computer in Trump Tower directed at some Russian bank, but all that really matters is already out in the open, and has been for a while now: that there has been a total and irreversible realignment in international relations, precipitated by the collapse of the United States as a liberal-democratic power, and its delivery over to an ogre lacking speech, to evoke the line from Auden’s poem, who stalks about his subjugated plain with drivel gushing from his lips.

My country has fallen, like a body, and this was able to happen in large part because senseless loyalty made a party’s supporters wilfully blind to the patent truth, that their party had been corroded from within and without. This was, by the time of Trump’s nomination, a very, very bad party: no more erotic than beef jerky, fucked up but only in a moral sense, and – we’ll grant it this much – totally focused upon advancing the status of its own members. It’s not a party, as I’ve said, if it’s not doing at least one of these three things.

I don’t go to parties, and I don’t belong to them either. Looking back, it seems to me now that they turn bad as a general rule, that this is their natural motion: friends end up in the ground, ska records in the drainage ditch, frat boys heaving over the toilet bowl, a narcissistic brute stealing the show, a terror unleashed on peasants for the crime of owning an uncollectivised cow. Heavens, keep me away from parties! Keep me home, safe with my thoughts and words, with my glorious view, from afar, outward onto the whole.

Justin Smith-Ruiu

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Spend any time in Bristol, and it’s near impossible not to have a story about Turbo Island: Google’s AI search labels it a “community garden”, which is like comparing the North Sea to a paddling pool. There are no flower beds, no gardeners. Instead, there is a persistent fire in a steel drum and a reliable supply of intoxication: liquid, chemical, ideological.

Turbo Island once had grass. Elders recall a flourishing cultural period of wall drawings and experimental pyrotechnics. In 1980, the site, formed of paved-over rubble from a factory bombed in World War II, was declared a conservation area. Five years later, the same council that protected it sold it to an advertising company. After a “mysterious mattress fire” in 2022 reduced the site to ashes, the square declared independence once more. The only grass now is what you can roll in a Rizla.

History has a habit of producing strange things from collapse. A utopia for artists, students, squatters and weirdos, it welcomes visitors 24 hours a day: no security, no dress code, no reservations or minimum spend. For some Turbo Island is a national treasure, a rare pocket of anarchic freedom in what is now England’s least affordable place to rent, surpassing even London. For others, it is a public liability, a symbol of disorder that should have been cleared years ago.

Turbo Island is distinctive of Bristol: a place where contradiction is central to its history. A city that prides itself on radical leftist politics perches atop a colonial legacy built on slavery. Today, you can trace that legacy through street names: head down Blackboy Hill onto Whiteladies Road and watch the landscape shift from Georgian houses and student accommodation towards St. Paul’s, home of the annual carnival celebrating Black culture. Alongside the sound systems are crowds of hippies and middle-class students sipping Magnums, eager to celebrate resistance without pausing to ask what they’re celebrating. Maybe it’s because ketamine is dissociative.

Google reviews dub Turbo Island “Bristol’s Vatican City”. The absurdism of this comment demonstrates the emotional resonance the space holds in Bristol’s collective cultural consciousness, one of the last symbols of the anti-establishment in an increasingly sanitised city. But romanticising the atmosphere shouldn’t equate to romanticising the conditions that shaped it. The very freedoms permitted, and the ones the council seeks to curtail, exist precisely because Turbo Island sits on privately owned land. This public-private divide encroaches on the city, zones of freedom exist thanks to private ownership. Bristol’s much vaunted alternative culture depends on the same paradox: a city that considers itself ungovernable is bankrolled by private capital, which invested £2.8 billion into the city in 2025. Other covert financing is laid bare with the university’s overrepresentation of privately educated students, who overrun the city for the duration of their degrees and then leave.

The contradiction extends to the campaigns fighting for Turbo Island’s survival. These campaigns share a desire to resist the squeaky-clean future promised by redevelopment. These are the same people who slated the £20 million luxury redevelopment of the Grade-II listed factory north of the Island, a masterpiece of Victorian architecture, viewed by some as a final bastion beyond commercial reach, whose very protection has left it derelict for 31 years. The chaos of Turbo Island is less a picture of utopian resistance and rather a concentrated pocket of a failing political system that has outsourced its housing to the market. Turbo Island is a city-planning nightmare in miniature; the ghost of redevelopment haunts the metropolis like the Island’s eternal flame.

Lucy McNeil

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Portal rings and swing-set necklaces: in this shoot, we enter Clash de Cartier’s surrealist realm. Photography by Sara Zanoni and set design by Chiara Arsini.

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Missouri Williams’s new novel, The Vivisectors, came out this May and has just been long-listed for the Booker Prize. For this TANK Summer Reader issue, she spoke to Misha Honcharenko on how she developed the novel and how her experience in academia served to inform the ideas therein.

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Read Amelia McGarvey on developments in romance literature, and what they tell us about sex and desire in our unnatural, illogical age.

It was a crisp autumn morning when I walked through the gates of hell. I had arrived at the QEII Conference Centre, a stone’s throw from the Houses of Parliament, for the annual conference of the LGB Alliance. This was a particularly British kind of hell: a place where nice-looking ladies in hand-knitted jumpers hand out teacakes and trade transphobic handicrafts; a place where community, identity and claims to the moral high ground are founded upon a surprisingly voracious capacity for hate.

In the lobby, a woman wearing a Lesbians for Labour T-shirt welcomed guests by playing folk songs on the violin. Friends greeted each other and discussed the day ahead with the kind of excitement usually reserved for holidays and festivals. Were the rumours of J.K. Rowling making a surprise appearance true? The keynote speaker, James Dreyfus – was he in Four Weddings and a Funeral or Notting Hill? While waiting for the elevator, an elderly dyke complimented the person besides her on her top, which was emblazoned with the words, “TERF: I KNOW WHAT A WOMAN LOOKS LIKE”.

Much to the delight of the 600 or so Gen Xers and Boomers who had gathered for the occasion, Rowling did indeed appear. Wearing a giant floppy hat, she beamed into the auditorium from onboard a yacht, a vision of blue skies and sparkling handrails. From these luxurious environs she joked that she had been hounded out of the UK by India Willoughby, a trans television personality against whom Rowling has long waged holy war, and declared herself an ally to the LGB cause. “Lesbians don’t have penises,” she said in signing off. In reply the audience rose from its seats and roared its approval.

During this standing ovation I found myself asking the question that had brought me here in the first place. What had happened in these people’s lives, and in the lives of so many older lesbians, gays, and bisexuals, to turn them against trans and non-binary people? How had the septuagenarians next to me clapping enthusiastically – women who reminded me of former teachers, librarians, neighbours, family friends – been recruited into the gender wars?

One way of understanding the Alliance’s appeal is to view it in the broader context of contemporary identity politics. Much like the MAGA movement, or any of the many identity-based groups that have flourished on the left, the Alliance offers a sense of belonging, moral clarity and a cause to fight for – an attractive tonic for the loneliness, listlessness and uncertainty that have become the hallmarks of 21st-century living. It offers a world view in which people can be neatly sorted into the categories of hero or villain, and it treats identity like a nation state, complete with borders that must be vigorously defended from the threat of hostile interlopers.

Established in 2019 on the principle that embracing trans and non-binary identities directly erodes the rights and safety of homosexuals, the Alliance is fuelled by precisely this cocktail of community and enmity. Its core argument – “if sex isn’t real then there is no same-sex attraction”, a catchphrase Rowling repeated in her video message – conjures a worldview in which the very existence of trans people poses an existential threat to lesbians, gays and bisexuals. Follow this logic, and it will lead you to a choice: either we destroy them or they destroy us.

At its top level, the LGB Alliance is run by well-connected and intelligent operators, including political strategists, legal experts, psychiatrists, and a Labour lord and former governor of the BBC. Since forming it has proven itself a powerful lobbying force, successfully campaigning to end the prescription of puberty blockers to children, and establishing in UK law that expressions of gender-critical views are protected under the Equality Act, akin to religious beliefs. At the time of writing, the Alliance is throwing its weight behind an effort in the Supreme Court to exclude trans women from the legal definition of “woman”, arguing that doing so is paramount to the safety of lesbians. “People born as male who self-define as women, and as lesbians …] are heterosexual men,” reads a statement the Alliance published on the matter. “Men who insist on accessing lesbian spaces and services, despite the hurt and alarm they cause, are coercive, abusive and potentially dangerous.”

Perhaps naively, I had not expected the conference to be a place where transphobia was openly celebrated. The LGB Alliance, much like the wider gender-critical movement, positions itself as a defender of free speech, arguing that trans activists are attempting to silence dissenting voices. (While it is certainly true that the subject of trans rights has become so polarised that there is very little space for discussing, or even admitting the existence of, moral grey areas, the condemnation comes from those on both sides of the divide.) In order to gain press access to the conference I was subjected to a vetting procedure. First, I received an email attempting to dissuade me from coming, and when I persevered I was required to explain my reasons for attending over a Zoom call – a level of caution that struck me as paranoid, and not particularly pro-free speech after all. Yet the man I spoke to assured me that a range of opinions were encouraged at the conference, and that the LGB Alliance welcomed anyone who arrived with an open mind.

As a consequence, I had imagined that the conference would be a space for discussion of the possible dangers of medical intervention, and who gets to access which spaces. I had imagined that I may have disagreed with much of it, but that at least some of it would be in good faith, an attempt to navigate complex moral and ideological terrain. Yet what I found was a tawdry pantomime in which no fruit was considered too low-hanging to pick, and anyone who opposed the Alliance’s views was deemed worthy of dehumanisation. The very mention of Owen Jones and Sandi Toksvig – two gay public figures who have spoken in support of trans rights – triggered delighted cries of “shame” and “what a bitch”.

For the first event of the day a young woman named Alison Ellis was interviewed by journalist Jo Bartosch about the supposed plight of young lesbians. To much whooping and clapping, Bartosch introduced herself as “a professional transphobe”. Within the Alliance there is a notable difference in attitudes to trans women and trans men. While the former are considered the worst of the worst – perverted patriarchs intent on infiltrating our spaces and stealing the categories of woman and lesbian out from under our noses – the latter are seen as a cause for pity, misguided tomboys and lesbians who have fallen prey to a pernicious progressive cult bent on transitioning all the children.

Ellis had been invited as a spokesperson for young lesbians and because she makes TikTok videos ridiculing trans women. During the interview a video of a trans lesbian was projected on to the screen and the audience duly responded with boos and hisses. Protecting young people may be a major part of the Alliance’s message, but the fact that Ellis, who has under 1,500 followers on TikTok despite regularly posting content, was the only person under 30 in attendance was a sign of how little young people want to do with them. On stage she cut a depressing figure: consumed by resentment, utterly lacking in insight or charisma and dazzled by the attention. She was held aloft with a similar incredulous delight to that displayed by far-right groups parading the single person of colour who has somehow strayed into their ranks.

During a panel discussion in which a former Tory parliamentary candidate and an Anglican deacon reminisced about the good old days of gay activism before the LGB gained the T, I left the auditorium to browse the stalls. Among the items on offer were children’s picture books explaining that sex is unalterable, and hairy vaginas knitted from acrylic wool. At a stall offering advice for the parents of trans children, a lady with sad eyes handed me a leaflet. (“Remain calm” and explain to your child that sex “is immutable and cannot be changed even with hormones and surgery”.) Her own child intends to transition, she told me, something she is trying to prevent.

The lady with the sad eyes wasn’t the only person who had turned to the Alliance when relations with her own family had become strained. Across the way, I met a woman doing a roaring trade in satirical gift cards designed to look like the covers of Ladybird Books. These included Being Non-Binary: A Snowflake Guide, and The Wolf-Exclusionary Piglets Build a Safe Space. She showed me the bunting she was selling, decorated with XX chromosomes and the words “Terf Island” – “an affectionate name for Britain among friends in Australia and New Zealand”. She too had become involved with the Alliance when her child decided to transition. “I wasn’t having any of it,” she said. “She’s realised she’s not a boy now, thank goodness, but others haven’t been so lucky.”

One of the most striking features of the gender-critical movement is the extent to which it has become a way of life, dictating everything from the relationships you have (or don’t) to the clothes you wear. The LGB Alliance offers sanctuary to those struggling with their own families. It also offers the possibility of a new family to those who are lonely and isolated, whether because of their intransigent views on gender, or because – like many people – they have been unable to create or sustain an organic sense of community in their day-to-day lives. After a dire set by the Hungry Hearts – two Norwegian lesbians who performed a lacklustre robot dance to electro-pop, and whose claim to fame was being eliminated from the first round of the 2016 Eurovision Song Contest – the conference broke for lunch. During this time visitors were encouraged to participate in a grassroots networking drive called “find your tribe and your vibe”.

To this end, a large room was filled with flags bearing the names of places from all over the UK. Each stand was manned by local delegates, waiting to welcome new members with offers of biscuits and friendship, and talk of conspiracies and genitalia. While tucking into some shortbread at the Edinburgh stand, a retired social worker who had flown in from Canada especially told me that an army of men disguised as women were infiltrating rape crisis centres to commit sexual assaults. Her excitement was such that crumbs sprayed from her mouth as she spoke, which gathered on her lumberjack shirt. Near the stand for the Isle of Skye, a pensioner explained that she’d lost track of how many friends she no longer spoke to because they “didn’t know which body parts belonged where”, but that she was looking forward to meeting likeminded people at the conference. As I discovered when I was approached by a woman from Plymouth, attendees were in the market for romance as well as friendships. Flashing me a hopeful look, she explained that she had joined the Alliance to improve her “dating pool”. Without pausing for breath, she launched into an explanation of the difference between “a real woman’s vagina and a trans woman’s vagina”. One was a “permanent wound that can’t get wet by itself”, while the other was “lovely and moist”.

For a little while, the bizarreness of the world in which I found myself provided a welcome distraction from how profoundly uncomfortable I felt, surrounded by other lesbians with views irreconcilable to my own, who purported to speak on behalf of lesbians everywhere. But as the day wore on, a sadness that had seeded during the morning began to blossom into a terrible flower. Among the more depressing aspects of the conference was the readiness among those long demonised as perverts and a threat to children to vilify another minority group – not least a group with whom they share many historical and contemporary affinities – using the very same language once used against them.

This was particularly apparent during James Dreyfus’s keynote speech. The actor bellowed that “equality was achieved until [charity] Stonewall came along and added letters to the LGB”, arguing that gays, lesbians and bisexuals should have stopped their political campaigning after the gay-marriage bill became law in 2013. Instead, a new frontline had been manufactured by charities such as Stonewall that were unwilling to give up the cause – a “we were here first” narrative that suggests trans people were invented just over a decade ago. As a consequence, Dreyfus said, we now live in a society where “fetishes are performed in public”, and children are indoctrinated “from primary school upwards”.

When a group of teenage protesters released a rucksack full of crickets into the auditorium, the intervention came as a relief. Finally, someone had stuck a pin in the balloon, puncturing the madness that had proliferated throughout the day. That this act of dissent was committed by the very young people who the Alliance claimed to be saving was all the more satisfying. (I tried to contact the protesters but to no avail.) Yet it soon became apparent that the protest had not been so much a pin as a source of oxygen, and that instead of bursting the balloon it had helped it take flight.

As the auditorium was cleared, news of the protest created a mood of frisky excitement, and the air was filled with wild fabulations that warped as they passed between tongues and ears. The bag of crickets transformed into thousands of cockroaches, a swarm of bees, a homophobic hate crime whose perpetrators must be prosecuted, narratives that would soon find their way to the press. “This has only brought us together and made us more determined to fight against the renewed rise of homophobia, which is all the more dangerous for coming wrapped in the rainbow flag,” tweeted the organisation’s CEO Kate Barker, a quote subsequently published by numerous news outlets. Later, the Alliance’s co-founder Bev Jackson delightedly discussed the protest on GB News.

Describing the protest as a homophobic act, given the rampant transphobia on display throughout the day, was an extraordinary feat of revisionism. (Attempting to criminalise the teenage protesters by labelling their actions as a hate crime also gave the lie to the LGB Alliance’s supposed defence of free speech.) Assuming the role of victim as you seek to injure your enemy is an ugly game to play, and cheapening the meaning of homophobia by instrumentalising it for dubious political ends will surely not serve homosexuals in the long run. So why do it? Why insist that there is a profound and irreconcilable distance between lesbians, gays and bisexuals and other queer identity groups, with whom so much cultural history is shared?

Perhaps it is in this very closeness that we can find at least some of the root of the feverish animosity: the narcissism of small differences, a tendency to engage in conflict with those who are similar to us because we feel they threaten our fragile sense of self and security, dovetailing with a deep-seated fear of being returned to the role of the outcast. After all, almost all of the members of the LGB Alliance are old enough to remember what it felt like to live without legal protections or political acceptance for being gay. Fear is a great motivator, and it would be foolish to underestimate the power of the fear of being dragged back out into the cold because of an association with today’s pariahs. In this way, the LGB Alliance’s alignment with conservative values, its willingness to speak on right-wing platforms such as GB News, its parroting of the same language once used to denigrate homosexuals, can be understood as a desperate urge to perform allegiance and sameness to a political establishment its members continue to dread – an establishment which, having bestowed upon its members the legal stamp of respectability, could just as easily take it away, depending on the way the political winds blow.

Yet among the crowd, none of these complexities and their inherent sadnesses were acknowledged. Instead, the narrative of the homophobic hate crime was embraced with glee. With the auditorium now out of bounds, an ad hoc stage was set up next to the tea and coffee stand. A sense of renewed purpose abounded, buoyed by the fantasy of the oppressed kicking back at their oppressors. As word spread that the teenagers had been escorted from the premises by police, a chant picked up: “The Alliance, united, will never be defeated.”

It was then that I fled. I rushed through the crowded room, took the elevator down, and bolted into the afternoon sunshine. Outside the white flags of the Alliance fluttered against the blue sky, the letters LGB surrounded by a black box. No doubt the logo was intended to resemble a border wall keeping out the T, but it looked to me like a prison in which to rot.

Rosanna McLaughlin

This Saturday, London Trans+ Pride will weave its way through the West End, awash with pink, blue and white flags, and flowers pinned to shirts or worn in hair. The flowers are symbolic, worn to honour the transgender, non-binary, gender non-conforming and intersex people who came before, and those who never got the chance to grow old. Founded in 2019, London Trans+ Pride is noticeably more radical than its more established counterpart, Pride in London: I cannot envision the latter having “We believe in love and rage” as one of its defining philosophies. As the corporate financing Pride in London relies upon dries up – the UK Pride Organisers Network has reported that three-quarters of British Pride events saw sponsorship decline this year – it’s worth asking what the money was actually buying. Evidently, the rainbow lanyard was never proof of safety or solidarity, only a bet that queerness had become profitable enough to be worth the risk.

Queer people – trans people in particular – never needed a corporation to teach them visibility cuts both ways. The same exposure that builds solidarity also makes you a target, and no amount of rainbow-washing could alter that fact. We have seen this play out, in increasingly deranged fashion, over the past decade. Trans life has never been subject to such intense public scrutiny – debated in Parliament and gleefully mocked by seasoned columnists who should know better than to punch down – and rarely has it felt more dangerous simply to exist. It is no longer a question of whether trans people should be visible: they already are, in bizarre disproportion to their lived impact. The real question is what kinds of visibility are available, who controls them and what is demanded in return for being seen.

In August, Jane Schoenbrun, one of the only established trans filmmakers currently working in cinema, will release her new slasher film Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. A loving ode to its genre, the film’s villain is a diminutive impaler named Little Death, a trans teenager at the titular camp who was murdered by campers in a hateful attack. Masked and brandishing a spear, Little Death periodically rises from the bottom of the lake in which they were drowned to enact revenge on the next batch of hapless teenagers. Nodding to the French euphemism for orgasm, “la petite mort”, the film positions the character as a kind of libertine, an embodiment of the possibilities of erotic and gender freedom. Neither a tragic victim nor a straightforward avenger, Little Death is cute, practically bouncing their way through the film’s bloody decapitations with the ease of someone who has slipped beyond the categories that once governed their life.

Yet beneath Little Death’s impish exterior is a troubling notion: it took death to escape the braying public’s demand for disclosure. It’s a remarkably dark fantasy: most – but sadly, not all – people don’t get out of the bind of being seen by ceasing to exist. We have landlords, doctors and passport control to deal with, a reasonable wish to take public transport without being hate-crimed. The living answer is less drastic: in defiance of tribunals, grumpy X accounts and ballot initiatives, over 100,000 people are expected to march across central London on Saturday. Nobody there needs to justify why they are wearing flowers pinned to their shirts. The point is not that trans people should refuse to be known; it’s that the terms of knowing shouldn’t be set by tribunals, newspapers and journalists with weekly syndicated columns whingeing about being silenced.

Little Death, joyfully skipping after their next victim, has no interest in anyone’s terms but their own. It’s a fiction, a violent one, but perhaps that’s the appeal: a trans character who explains themselves to nobody, who, when confronted, will slice your head off and swim away. I’ve heard worse metaphors for freedom.

Matteo Pini

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Next Tuesday, join us at TANK GPS for the next edition of the Aleph Book Club, where we’ll be discussing Evelyn Waugh’s caustic masterpiece Decline and Fall over drinks and snacks. Spots are limited, so listen to the book on Aleph and book your place here.

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“You could see classical music’s contemporary function as an antidote to extreme forms of communication and visual media.” Music educator and presenter Daria Challah on finding energy in contemporary classical music.

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Electronic duo Sylvan Esso provide this week’s sparkling TANK Mix, which moves through glitch accents, old school IDM and fearsome club hitters.

Caroline Issa invites you to join an intimate six-week reading series powered by Aleph, the app that turns great books into conversations. Book your ticket here!

Last Tuesday, TANK hosted the inaugural Aleph Book Club, where we discussed Virginia Woolf’s inimitable Mrs Dalloway. Over drinks and snacks, we chatted about Woolf’s hallucinatory swirl of a novel, in which the trivial and the traumatic share a single London day, a single sentence sometimes. In an era of genocide, what does it mean to buy flowers? Woolf’s novel insists that this is not a frivolous question but an urgent one: that the impulse toward beauty, toward the ordinary pleasures of a June morning, persists stubbornly alongside – never quite separate from – the knowledge of atrocity happening elsewhere, or here, just beneath the surface of polite occasion.

Next week, we’ll be speaking about Anita Loos’ hilarious and poignant classic Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, the 1925 novel that gave us Lorelei Lee – perhaps literature’s most gloriously unreliable narrator, a woman who plays dumb so fluently that the joke ends up entirely on the men footing her bills. Told through Lorelei’s own diary entries, the novel is a study of what it costs a woman to survive on her wits and her looks in a world that will only ever reward her for one of them. In our era of scammers, of hustle culture repackaged as self-actualisation, Lorelei is the original girl who understood that charm is a form of capital.

In case you’re not acquainted, we’ll be hosting the Aleph Book Club once a week all summer long, inviting a small circle of guests to TANK’s gallery space on Great Portland Street, to meet and discuss a great book.

Each session follows the same simple format: we’ll invite you to listen to the audiobook on hi-aleph.com, and you’ll come armed with insights and questions to discuss with the group. Aleph’s literary expert can answer all your basic and not-so-basic questions about the book: its context, history, what the author intended, what critics have argued. We hope that the conversation IRL can go deeper than any book club has gone before. Wine, cheese, and a mystery gift are included for guests willing to try a new book club experience.

For those who cannot be in the room, we’ll share an edit of the session here on Substack so you can be part of the conversation.

The programme for the following four weeks is:

Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh, Tuesday, July 28th, 6.30-8pm

A Room with a View by E. M. Forster, Wednesday, August 12th, 6.30-8pm

Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, Tuesday, August 18th, 6.30-8pm

Death in Venice by Thomas Mann, Tuesday, August 25th, 6.30-8pm

Tickets are £10 inclusive of drinks, snacks and a mystery gift. The book talk and camaraderie will be priceless!

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Tonight, England will play Argentina in Atlanta. It is a loaded fixture: the Three Lions still carry the scars of 1986’s divine intervention, while the Messianic totems collapsing around the world signal that this is surely the geriatric Argentinian captain’s international swan song. If we win, we will cheer for our beautiful countries playing the beautiful game. If we lose, there is always the cynic’s consolation: none of it is real anyway.

For many spectators, the financial stakes of the game matter far more than national pride or chasing a childhood dream. The financialisation of sport extends well beyond the billions poured into sponsorship deals, advertising, tourism and infrastructure investment. This World Cup is the largest betting event in history: legal wagers and prediction markets together are estimated at around $7.3 billion. Illegal betting suggests the true global figure is much higher.

Most of the world’s illegal football betting is transacted through Asian markets, set on the banks of the Mekong, hiding in plain sight in the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone. In Bokeo province, Laos, a golden crown forms the roof of the floodlit Kings Romans casino, pointing across the water at Thailand and Myanmar like a lighthouse for a sordid route. Roman emperors line the walls in cast stone. Rolls-Royces idle at the doors. Inside, the corridors are oddly hushed, the gaming floor quieter still. In 2023, an International Crisis Group team watched paperless million-dollar transactions cross the cashier’s desk, and people walking out with bricks of hundred-yuan notes in duffel bags. A short drive from the crown, they logged four guarded high-rises: windows barred, fences turned with razor wire.

On the Cambodian coast, Sihanoukville went from backpacker town to casino boomtown, which imploded when Phnom Penh banned online gambling in 2019. The fibre-optic cable, the dormitory blocks and the fortified compounds simply changed use. More than a thousand buildings stand there unfinished. The UN estimates criminal gangs are holding at least 100,000 people in Cambodia alone, staffing scam and betting operations under guard; survivors describe beatings, electrocution, and being sold on between companies when they fail to make their quota.

The UN’s Office on Drugs and Crime calls match-fixing “an increasingly prevalent modern manifestation of corruption”, corruption of the integrity of sport itself. William Pereira Rogatto, the Brazilian fixer who boasts of having relegated 42 clubs since 2009, told a parliamentary commission from his exile in Dubai that only politics and drug trafficking are more lucrative. In this World Cup, before a ball was even kicked, The Athletic reported that two players bound for the finals had been referred to their national federations over suspicions they had deliberately drawn yellow cards. Meanwhile, several American states are permitting bookmakers to offer yellow-card markets during the tournament.

If games are supposed to model reality in symbolic form, then what better model of the current world order is there than FIFA? A rotten fish corrupted head first, filled with dodgy old men officiating a contest they always win. A delicious intermezzo at the end of the international rules-based order.

Edie Musker

MORE IN YOUR TANK

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For the Summer Reader, Kinza Shenn travels to the mountains of the Kii Peninsula, Japan, reflecting on the potentials of language and translation for finding one’s footing in an unfamiliar landscape.

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This week, we celebrate our 200th TANK Mix! And what better way to get the party started than with this selection of club heaters by SONIKKU.

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Our next book club will be happening next Tuesday, 21st July at 6.30pm!

We invite you to the second session of the Aleph Book Club, an intimate six-week reading series, powered by Aleph, the app turning books into conversation. This week, we’ll be reading Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos. Come along for wine, cheese, a mystery gift and lively conversation.

Caroline Issa invites you to join an intimate six-week reading series powered by Aleph, the app that turns great books into conversations.

The Aleph Book Club is a new kind of evening. Once a week for the next six weeks, starting next Tuesday, July 14th, from 6.30 to 8pm, we’re inviting a small circle of guests (12 in total) to TANK’s gallery space on Great Portland Street, to meet and discuss a great book.

First up? The inimitable Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. One day in London, one woman's mind moving through the city. It's the perfect book to discuss right around the corner where it was written in Fitzrovia.

Each session follows the same simple format: We’ll invite you to listen to the audiobook on hi-aleph.com, and you’ll come armed with insights and questions to discuss with the group. Aleph’s literary expert can answer all your basic and not-so-basic questions about the book: its context, history, what the author intended, what critics have argued. We hope that the conversation IRL can go deeper than any book club has gone before. Wine, cheese, and a mystery gift are included for the 12 guests willing to try a new book club experience.

For those who cannot be in the room, we'll share an edit of the session here on Substack so you can be part of the conversation.

We’ll be kicking off next week for the first session, Mrs Dalloway, on Tuesday, July 14th.

The programme for the following five weeks is:

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos, Tuesday, July 21st, 6.30-8pm

Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh, Tuesday, July 28th, 6.30-8pm

A Room with a View by E. M. Forster, Wednesday, August 12th, 6.30-8pm

Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, Tuesday, August 18th, 6.30-8pm

Death in Venice by Thomas Mann, Tuesday, August 25th, 6.30-8pm

Tickets for the real-life events are £10 inclusive of drinks, snacks and a mystery gift. The book talk and camaraderie will be priceless!

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