June 2010

The iconography of Northern Ireland is changing – and with it the official narrative of what that armed conflict stretching across three decades was all about.

The priest Edward Daly waving his bloodstained handkerchief as he escorted Jackie Duddy’s body out of the firing line in the Bogside on 30 January 1972 is the iconic moment.

It now accompanied by another defining image: The look on the face of his sister Kay Duddy, and that handkerchief -  now a  rather sacred relic – that was brought out to the Guildhall to greet the publication of the Saville report.

The relatives of the dead and wounded on Bloody Sunday wore “a look of liberation,” says Professor Christine Bell, one of Northern Ireland’s premier experts on peace processes and transitional justice.

The acceptance of the Saville report by the leaders of the unionist and loyalist parties, and the visit of Protestant church leaders to the relatives, mark a radical change of tone and dialogue.

We have known for three decades what happened, we have always known that there were no guns, nail bombs petrol bombs or grenades in the hands of the casualties. Citizens were shot for being there.

Bereaved families now have it on record. It needed to be said officially. And Saville has now said it. David Cameron’s repetition of those words, ‘unjustified and unjustifiable’, was eloquent and unprecedented.

So, what now? Prosecutions are hardly the relatives’ priority. But the limits of the Saville report – what happened on that day -  produced a political trap.

Blame now attaches not to the victims but the people who pulled the triggers and who ‘knowingly put forward  false accounts.’

Yet everyone knows that culpability lies with their commanders and the context created by the political and military systems.

Prosecutions of 1 Para squaddies won’t take us any closer to those systems. They won’t answer the question: why were paratroopers known for excessive violence positioned to police a banned civil rights march? Which generals and politicians were talking about shooting civil rights leaders? Why was such talk tolerated? Why was there no redress for socio-economic and political injustice in that place?

We don’t need prosecutions and we probably don’t need another public inquiry to answer these unanswered questions, but we do need another part of the process.

If an obvious forum has not emerged it is not for want of trying to imagine what it might be. It is very difficult. But it is only difficult. It is not impossible.

Professor Bell suggests that the British state could just open the books. The paramilitary organisations, too, could open their books. The government could appoint a custodian of those archives and improvise a process of disclosure.

We can’t close the book if we haven’t opened it. Meanwhile, we cannot exaggerate the iconography of joy and the Bloody Sunday Inquiry’s importance in narrating a new national story.

Big society – small state

Marlboro man meets Russell

Within a couple of weeks of the general election Nick Clegg  staked his political reputation on the coalition not scything Britain with the savagery for which Margaret Thatcher was simultaneously loathed and loved.

He will use his authority ruthlessly, he said, to stop the coalition leaving Britain broken.

He had already swerved into a U turn – beckoned by the Bank of England, he signed up to cuts of £6 billion immediately.

His alibi was a contradiction in terms: ‘progressive cuts’,  and the model promoted by Canada and Sweden.

His  best friends should tell him: this stinks. The scythe is savage; it’s meant to be. Public sector cuts will hurt those with the least – the public sector sector workers, a majority of whom are women, who service us, the public.

Innovation will be starved, research will be pruned,  progressive development will be disabled, green shoots will be trodden down.

Clegg will be undone: his reputation will be ruined, because Britain will be broken.

If anyone profits it will be Cameron’s new Conservatism, if only because the cuts will create the context for Cameron’s ‘Mad Men’ moment: the Big Society.

Cameron conjours a dream in which the Marlboro myth of the big country: solitary cowboy on horse between big sky and craggy landscape segues into Up and its heroic little, loveable Russell. Russell’s allure is that he only wants to be kind -  he needs to get another helpfulness badge and who but a curmudgeon could resist him! He is blessed by indefatiguable curiosity and a talent for empathy.

Russell is, of course, a solitary child. Like Marlboro man – who he’ll never become – Russell belongs nowhere. We are reassured that he is a loved child, whose resilience comes from a good mother – but only after we have witnessed his heroism. His valour flourishes up in the air, up, up and away. Away.

Russell, like Marlboro man, is de-contextualised.

They live in places where there is no society.

Cameron, of course, repudiates the crazy Thatcherite mantra ‘there’s no such thing as society…’ But he is mobilising ‘Big Society’ in the service of anti-statism, against the ‘Big State’ as if the state were the enemy of ‘society’.

Cameron’s Big Society is also de-contextualised. It enlists the rhetoric of community activism whilst erasing its history in Britain.

Like many Big Ideas borrowed from the US to animate New Labour and New Conservatism, they are bereft of time, space and history.

Britain has a long history of community activism, but now its civil society is shrivelling. It is neither apathetic nor under-developed. On the contrary, it is exhausted. It has been angry, its anger has flared to little effect and it has become depressed.

Two examples:

1.    if society is a living, breathing form of intelligent life, than what does it do to its spirit to mobilise the biggest ever public demonstration on its streets only to be ignored? More than a millon people marched against the Iraq war and yet had no impact on the parliamentary outcome of Tony Blair’s war misson. That experience can only yield a kind of depression. It isn’t apathy, its angry and its hopeless.

2.    Sure Start, inspired by feminist stalwarts in the Labour government elected in 1997, promised to repair the anomalous lack of good publicly funded child care in Britain. Its emergence depended on these politicians’ convergence with other interests and agendas within the Labour Cabinet. Sure Start was, therefore, always the subject of multiple and sometimes contradictory pressures.

It innovated a novel structure – high quality provision for children plus engagement with parents needs, not just as parents, but as people, in alliance with sturdy professionals. At their best, Sure Start projects were a model of ‘community development’ that sought to empower localities with ‘action ‘research’. That was a template that flourished in the 1970s, and the best of Sure Start brought together ‘action research’ – finding out what people needed and what worked -  while improvising new alliances between professions, parents, children and their localities.

Sure Start was hobbled, however, by Tony Blair’s political interventions that skewed its mission, and by  a reluctance to roll out the programme as a model for universal child care. That left it vulnerable to Tory scepticism.

So, these  are two  examples disrespect for civil society. In the first, the art of active dissent was disabled by the crushing reaction of Parliament to the movement against war in Iraq. It remains a peculiarity of the British Parliament that its indifference has been matched only by so much blether about the need to ‘listen to people.’

In the second, the dialogue between the state as provider, professionals and parents will be destroyed by the Conservatives: the community development model will not be honoured, provision will not be expanded, indeed it will be scaled down to meet the needs of children in crisis not children in general. Children’s services will not, therefore, be allowed to become the hub of community spaces.

So, the community activism template promoted by the New Conservatives will be a way of NOT doing community development. The notion of a community army may skill up neighbourhood champions, but it will not empower neighbourhoods, nor will public and private capital be invested in economic development.

Millions has already been spent on refurbishment in ailing  neighbourhoods since the Tory Environment Secretary Michael Heseltine introduced City Challenge – a bidding competition for urban regeneration – in the 1980s.

Poor communities have been consulted to the point of exhaustion.  Often their homes have been transferred to the non-state social sector. They may or may not be better managed. Regeneration programmes seem to have had minimal impact on unemployment and economic sustainability.

‘Social renewal’ was predicated on the perception of these neighbourhoods as a ‘social problem.’ They stayed poor because social renewal was not matched by sustainable economic regeneration.

Unless Cameron’s notion of a community army is not to be a kind of Dad’s army – a home guard for the poor , bob a-jobbing – the coalition government will have to deliver a matrix of educational and economic investment. The Tories believe, of course, that the market will do it. But why would the market do for Marlboro cowboy and little Russell (not to mention their sisters) what it hasn’t done in Belfast, Glasgow, Tyneside or Hastings or Rhyll for the past 30 years?

Not because he groaned ‘bigoted woman’ – he wasn’t wrong; not because the top man hadn’t answered a customer’s complaints – he had; not because he couldn’t spin an explanation of party policy – he had; not because he had failed to manage a conversation with Labour Party kin – he had; That was his problem – he ‘managed’ his dialogue. He answered her, but he didn’t engage with her. He made no concessions. What he, and everyone around him – and many commentators, too, didn’t appreciate was that the white woman in Rochdale also managed: she wasn’t an ingénue, she wasn’t ignorant, had a clear, coherent and unyielding critique of her party that should have engineered equality but decided not to. Her final poignant protest about student fees should have alerted Brown and his comrades to what was exercising Gillian Duffy: this women knew exactly what was different for the working class between now, and then – when her own generation could enjoy ‘great expectations’ but her grandchildren’s generation seems doomed to hard times. Immigration reared up, as it always does, as both bigotry and as a proxy for pitiless disappointment.

The tragedy of the encounter was that he expected her to be grateful, and she was angry about everything.

There’s a spookie tone about Neil Boorman’s latest spiffy idea. Neil Boorman has ideas, he’s a writer and music promoter, and one of his most celebrated spectacles of anti-consumerism was to torch his designer wardrobe (he could have given the stuff away!) and live without retail therapy for a year.

His new bad idea is promoted on WWW.itsalltheirfault.com. You might be expecting the banks to appear somewhere in this blame blog. But they don’t. Instead he targets the babyboomers – people born after World War 2, the generation that was blessed by the National Heath Service, free universal education and mass public housing. It seems they were blessed by everything, and now they are blame for everything. Boorman has launched a campaign to kick out the baby boomers – not because of their age, oh no, but because of their generation.

He recommends the hypothesis offered in David Willett’s book, the Pinch, (see my Guardian Comment is Free blog, 21 Feb 2010).

Willetts, a rare thinker among Tories, argues that the babyboomers are the selfish generation: among their many social felonies, they are spendthrifts who have priced their children out of the housing market. Willetts is wrong – it wasn’t the babyboomers who created the crazy housing market, it was Thatcherism in the 1980s, and every government since. It wasn’t the babyboomers who introduced student fees; who sold off 1.7 million council houses; who created the pensions crisis and left the infrastructure to rack and ruin while the people making loadsmoney went on making loadsamoney.

By a sleight of hand, a political project has been re-interpreted as a generational mission.

Thatcherism, albeit audacious and surgically successful in our dysfunctional electoral system, never actually secured a majority of votes cast. But it tilted the centre of  gravity of English Parliamentary culture to the right. And there – alone in these islands -  it has stayed.

Boorman rehearses the Willetts’ rhetoric. But with more bile. ‘In 650 days time the babyboomers will start to retire, they’ll stop feeding money into the system with taxes and start sucking out of it with benefits…we don’t have the money to pay for them.’

He complains that ‘we are going to be slaves to our parents, working longer hours, paying more taxes, getting further into debt, just to pay for their retirement…’

What should we do with them, then? He doesn’t suggest mass euthanasia, just mass contempt and electoral eviction: ‘Kick them out,’ he says.

So, the ghost of Margaret Thatcher lives, inflaming angry young men with nothing to lose but loadsamoney and their labels.

But do not despair, babies of babyboomers: check out the Green New Deal, read the  Green Party manifesto, www.onlygreen.org.uk – there is another way, it will put the smile back on your face, and hope in your heart: vote Green.

Starts at 6.30, all welcome, entry by donation.

We are the green shoots of British politics. Even in our hostile electoral system our presence is being felt and it is helping to renew our bedraggled political culture.

In the last European Parliamentary elections,  the Greens came ahead of Labour in the South East and the South West. Greens beat the Tories in Brighton and Hove, Oxford, Norwich, Liverpool and Manchester.

The devolved jurisdictions in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have introduced forms of proportional representation and their governments are manifestly more representative of their voters. Not so in England where the unreformed Parliamentary electoral system has for the last 40 years distorted our political sentiments.

It is in local government that Greens have been able to get past our crazy electoral system. Already the Party’s impact is palpable.

Hampstead and Kilburn is a progressive constituency – the combined vote at the last general election shows that the anti-Tory vote is overwhelming. The addition of Kilburn wards makes the constituency even more like the Londoners who make London what it really is.

People say: but won’t voting Green risk letting in the Tory who currently trails behind Labour’s Glenda Jackson and the Liberal Democrats’ Ed Fordham? I say it is time for people to be allowed to vote for the candidate they really want to elect. If your priority is to keep the Tory out, don’t vote Tory.

Pressure for electoral reform is becoming irresistible – all the more reason to show by our votes that we want an electoral system that expresses Londoners’ green values, our social justice sentiments and diversity.

Let the green shoots grow!

You can contact me through this website

Beatrix

Following the initiative of Adrian Ramsay, Green Party candidate in Norwich North, I’ve signed the Green Clean Campaign pledge. I invite Hampstead & Kilburn candidates to sign up to:

1. Conduct Clean, Positive & Honest Campaigning
2. Tell the Truth about what we stand for, and what we have achieved, and what others stand for and have achieved.
3. Refrain from Personal Attacks & Abuse.
4. Make only Reasonable & Feasible Promises.
5. Be Honest about Public Spending.
6. Publish online details of all Donations of more than £1,000 in line with election rules.

Feminism in London 09 took place recently at Conway Hall. Read the speeches, view photos and much more on the Feminism in London website.

There’s a full evaluation of the event over here.

It would have been his idea of hell. When Greater Manchester’s former chief constable, James Anderton, accused the city’s gay population in 1987 of “swirling around in a human cesspit of their own making”, little did he know he would come to be regarded as one of the instigators of Britain’s gayest city, and perhaps the most successful gay village in Europe. The roll call would also have to include Margaret Thatcher, whose notorious Section 28 – a clause in the Local Government Act passed in 1988 – galvanised a spectacular coalition, ranging from theatre impresarios to librarians, to defend the right to a gay life. Neither could have anticipated how their crusades would conjure up a queer constituency. Back then, Canal Street in Manchester city centre was still a red-light district. Anderton, an evangelical Christian, encouraged his officers to stalk its dank alleys and expose anyone caught in a clinch, while police motorboats with spotlights cruised for gay men around the canal’s locks and bridges.

This kind of surveillance was nothing new in the area. In 1880, a notorious raid on a nearby temperance hall halted “disgraceful proceedings” at which almost 50 men, half of them dressed as women, gathered “for the purpose of inciting one another to commit abominable offences”. They were dancing the cancan to the accompaniment of a blind harmonium player.

Raids on gay clubs were rife in the late 80s. “The biggest perpetrators of hate crime in the city were the police at that time,” says Mary Murphy, a lesbian city councillor. The effect was to activate the gay community, which forged an alliance with the city council, which, in turn, gave support to gay businesses. Now the place is so successful that it simultaneously welcomes and dreads hordes of straight invaders.

The ghost of missionary Anderton was finally laid to rest when the current chief constable led his gay colleagues’ contingent at EuroPride 2003, a 10-day Mardi Gras in the gay village.

“I love the village,” says Sergeant Jan Brown, one of the team that polices the 24-hour city centre. “It’s vibrant – and what could be nicer in summer than sitting by the canal, lovely food and lovely ambience? Crime? Next to nothing.”

A place notorious for “drinking, robbery and cruising” has been through a cultural revolution, says Pat Karney, one of the city politicians whose time as a councillor spans Manchester’s metamorphosis from a dirty old town run by rightwing elements of old Labour to a modernising metropolis run by a maverick, new-left council that is neither old nor New Labour. These municipal radicals took over the council during the 1980s when government money poured into inner-city regeneration and cultural entrepreneurs played midwife to Madchester’s pop renaissance.

But the very success of the gay village brought its own risks – it has had a trajectory which the gay quarters of other cities might recognise.

Back in the 1980s, there were only a couple of pubs on Canal Street, remembers Iain Scott, who now runs Taurus, one of the village’s many cafe/bars. “If you got off the bus and turned up your collar and turned left, you’d head for the Union or the Rembrandt – it was a sign to other people of your inclination.” Those were the days when gay punters had to “knock twice and ask for Dorothy”, Scott says. Gay men had cause to be wary, and as for lesbians, few bars made any women welcome.

The era of the bar-as-bunker changed in 1990 when Carol Ainscow and her business partner Peter Dalton bought a wreck of a building in Canal Street and opened up Manto, a gorgeous, glass-walled bar that turned everything inside out. Ainscow, a lesbian property developer from Bolton, says, “I didn’t feel comfortable in the places I was drinking in, and they weren’t particularly women-friendly. I felt sick of having to knock on doors and hide.”

French-style cafe society’s incarnation in Canal Street had a wider significance for the city, says Drew Stokes of Marketing Manchester. “We had the Hacienda, the made-in-Manchester new music and drugs culture, and the rise of frightening doormen but, for both gay and straight people, Manto and the village were stylish and safe.”

For all that, says Ainscow, “For the first six months we lost money: people were frightened to be seen.”

Metz, then run by Scott, followed across the canal from Manto, modelled on a Prague cafe/bar. “Our approach was, don’t discriminate, integrate, we don’t care how old you are, what language you speak, you are welcome.” That spirit was to define the village.

Every autumn, a new generation joins the city’s massive student population, curious, freed up, drinking too much and, for some, coming out. Michelle Reid arrived in Manchester in 1986 as a student from a small Northumbrian town, at a time when the gay village existed more in spirit than in space. “It wasn’t a beautiful place to be then, but it was magical. I looked around and saw all these gay people – it was a brave new world. I’d never come into contact with people with extremes, living a life, looking very different – I’d come from a place where there was only one black family – and I felt I could be part of this. There were moments when I thought, ‘Jesus – this is my life!’” Reid never left.

There had been a plan to clean up the canal and the dingy streets approaching Piccadilly station, but there had never been the cash. Then in 1988 a development corporation was set up by the government and, says one city hall insider, it “came riding into town with saddlebags bulging with money. It was like the IRA bombing of the Arndale Centre – we could access money for stuff we wanted to do, anyway.”

It was the ghost of Section 28 that seemed to spirit the gay village into existence. “There was no sense of a village,” recalls Ian Wilmott, a gay liberation activist and now a Labour councillor. “The main dance clubs were outside the village, and what gay space there was existed only once you went through the doors and paid your money. The concept of gay space didn’t exist. Section 28 was such a monstrous attack on civil liberties that hundreds of campaigners came together to oppose it. People were feeling besieged. We had no homeland, no part of the city. We needed somewhere … It had to be more than a club. We willed the village into existence.”

But if Section 28 brought together three communities – customers, commerce and the council – there was by this point another galvaniser: Aids. John Hamilton, now chair of the Village Business Association, arrived in the city 16 years ago as an HIV health adviser. “Everybody had heard the message from the government ads, and nobody was taking any notice.” He worked the venues and events to raise funds and awareness about Aids. All that activity, he says, was “integral to bringing the village together”.

When a vigil was organised spontaneously in the village in memory of a man killed by the virus, it metamorphosed into the Gay Pride every August bank holiday which, after a few years of sulks and spectacular success, climaxed in the triumphant EuroPride 2003. That, too, was backed by the city council.

The village’s hot sex, drugs and rock’n'roll culture was famously showcased at the end of the 1990s when the television screenwriter Russell T Davies, encouraged to “go gay”, wrote Queer As Folk. Nothing like it had ever been shown on British television: men at work, bickering, buddying, cruising, swaggering and shagging. If people weren’t already consuming the village as an urban erogenous zone, they became tourists to Canal Street, which was now, like Coronation Street, “As seen on TV”.

Businesses loved it, and their influx provided an attractive model which has been admired and attempted by other provincial cities such as Newcastle. But it can be a victim of its own success in that it can move through the cycle of undesirable area to desirable very quickly indeed and the gay people for whom the area was once a haven find that it soon becomes yet another place in which they feel alienated. A change in the gay village was under way, and punters felt as if they were in a zoo. “As soon as the corporate breweries arrived, out went discernment about who was coming into the area,” Scott says. “They didn’t care where the money was coming from, they just wanted to get ‘em in. The people working the doors didn’t care, either. They were predominantly big, straight guys who let loads of girls in for hen nights. So there were large groups of girls who felt they could have a fun time, they felt safe, they weren’t harassed. Says something about straight bars, doesn’t it?”

Former Take That manager Nigel Martin-Smith opened his Essential club in 2000 and remembers truckloads of hen parties, “wearing bunny ears and flashing bras, having a savage night out. But they were followed by coachloads of lads”.

As Scott confirms, “Big groups of straight lads were looking for totty and late-night drinking, and they started taking it out on gay men.” By the beginning of the new millennium, one of the police officers patrolling the area noticed a “straightening of the village”. And it was generally agreed young, straight men cause the problems in city centres.

A safe sex worker in the village recalls recoiling from the hordes of party people “who didn’t understand the gay lifestyle. They were abusing us – undesirables without any manners, people who didn’t understand where they were”.

Sergeant Brown says, “The gay community are great – they’re very keen supporters of safer clubbing.” But two-thirds of the big new bars on Canal Street were now heterosexual and corporate, and some venues were “commercially driven to sell as much alcohol as possible, and didn’t care about the consequences”. Suddenly, the village seemed at risk from the straight invaders.

“I remember sitting in a bar reading the Pink Paper and a huge party of women came in, and I felt they were pointing and laughing at the funny gay people,” recalls Michelle Reid, now chief executive of one of Britain’s oldest HIV trusts. It was lesbians, above all, who found themselves unwelcome. Nick Dearden, a solicitor who regularly parties in the village, doesn’t have much time for “unchecked masculinity” at large, but says that “hen parties, a load of women out in the white stretch limo, can visit a lot of grief on your lesbian friends. They may celebrate the poofs, but straight women are not nice to lesbians.”

Brown reckoned “some straight men seem to think that gay men’s very presence is waving a flag at them”, and by meeting it with aggression, they felt they were “reinforcing their own sexuality”.

Difference, it seemed, had to be met by domination. “I’d like to say, ‘You’re welcome in my space – which is tiny, as it happens,’” added Dearden, “but I don’t want to have to account for myself.”

Now the village is changing yet again. “It would not exist without the clubs and bars,” says Martin-Smith. “The corporates moved into the village and they thought money could be made out of the pink pound. But the gay community began to think: you’re not investing in us, you’re exploiting us.”

Hamilton calculates that at least half a dozen straight, corporate bars on Canal Street have had to sell up in the past year or so. “You can’t just come in as a corporation and hope you’ll make money,” he says. “You have to know your clients.”

Claire Turner, the director of EuroPride, treasures the moment when the Slug & Lettuce chain was confronted by the community: the chain didn’t support EuroPride, but decorated its windows with rainbow bunting as if it did. “People just went in and pulled it down.” If it didn’t support the community, then the community would use its power and withdraw its custom. The Slug & Lettuce closed. Martin-Smith acquired it and cheekily reopened it as Queer, a dance and internet venue next to Velvet, an elegant eaterie, and Scott’s community cafe bar, Taurus, which offers free space to gay organisations and artists. “None of this is rocket science,” says Scott. “It is back to basics.”

When Steph Kay, formerly general manager at Manto, canvassed the banks to bankroll a women’s club, however, none would. But backed by Colin Rigby, whose Cruz 101 appeared as Babylon in Queer As Folk, she created Vanilla, the village’s only lesbian club. It prospers. She directs custom to other venues, because though her club may be small and perfectly formed, it can’t house a kitchen or a lounge; she puts on club nights at other venues, too, because Vanilla attracts a bigger constituency than can be satisfied by a little lesbian nook. “I have to get deliveries four times a week because our cellar is probably the smallest in the village,” she says, “but it’s a cracking business.”

The ratio of independents is growing, the space is becoming more diverse, and Ainscow reckons, “The village is going gayer again.”

DISNEY will earn more from The Lion King than from any other cartoon in history. That’s not just because Disney is the best marketing machine in popular entertainment, but because this movie offers a fantastical solution to that most vexing political problem of our time: the role of fatherhood.

This fantasy is far more important than the accuracy of the film’s detail. As it happens, The Lion King is an insult to lions, hyenas, Africa and children. My cinema was packed with children who were forgiving and enthusiastic; they quarried the cartoon for laughs and filled the place with the sound of their own pleasure. They forgave this cartoon its formulaic score and crass zoology. They rewarded Disney and their adult relatives with the goodwill of having a good time.

But The Lion King demands something of them that they don’t deserve: that they minimise their literacy as spectators of nature. Children are now more informed than Disney about lions, hyenas and Africa. The science of natural history, popularised in nature programmes, and politicised by the Green movement, has transformed the way humans interpret animals. But Disney has deployed discredited anthropomorphism for a project that has nothing to do with Africa and everything to do with a psychic crisis in America.

Lions are inscribed in human myths of power and pride. So it has been a hard lesson for Man the Hunter to learn that the lion community is sustained by Lioness the Hunter.

Climatic changes 25 million years ago created grasslands, and with them the great grazers – wildebeest and zebras. They were stalked by cats and dogs – the lion and the hyena. The lioness can run at only 80mph. But she is strategic, she stalks, she plans, she organises among her sisters. The lioness is the only cat to co- operate. She is a swift, surgical killer. Lions aren’t kings, they are studs. They hang around their communities, driven not by social mastery but genetic survival. Any addict of David Attenborough knows all this.

But in The Lion King we get a shocking reinterpretation of lion culture: in a story that has been dubbed Bambi in Africa, the narrative of mother and child has been displaced by father and child. King Mufasa fathers his cub and rules his community. The lionesses are almost erased: they slink, elegant, enigmatic and marginal. The death of Mufasa, the blond king with flaming mane, is plotted by the black prince, Scar. This thin, camp Polonius inhabits the shadows between lion territory and the cavernous ghetto of the hyenas. The racism is palpable. Scar mobilises the hyena horde to overwhelm his kin and cast them, with him, into the dark ages.

Now for the hyenas. Not so speedy as wildebeest or lions – they go at about 65 mph – hyenas are known to be the most sophisticated communities, organised around mother hunters. Their language of sound and sign is elaborate, their sociability renowned. What they lack in speed they make up for in strategy: they pre-plan their stalking and killing, they collaborate, they ambush, they are successful. Humans have reinterpreted their conviviality with contempt – the laughing hyena.

Because humans needed their myths of mastery and majesty they misread the relations between lions and hyenas. Humans assumed that hyenas scavenged their morsels from the great white hunter, the lion. We now know hyenas are so assiduous that lions often prey upon the hynenas’ harvest.

What does The Lion King give us? Hyenas as slithering and sly, squatters in an apocalyptic ghetto. This could be Compton, LA. When they celebrate Scar’s coronation, the hyenas are represented as not only Faustian but fascistic, dependent sidekicks of the royal cats. And the cats? Well, they can’t live without their kings.

Finally there is the landscape. Disney didn’t care that lions don’t live in jungles – we’ve got Simba living, like a happy hippie, in the jungle anyway. There is more to this than artistic licence, there is contempt for a continent: Africa is merely the set for an American parable.

The great Disney feature- length cartoons transformed landscape from a still life to an ambient star in its own right. Forests were not just the gothic maze of the fairy story, a lair of fright. Landscape became an April shower, a storm and, most magnificently, Tyrus Wong’s dense, misty meadow in Bambi. In The Lion King, the landscape is once again subordinate, flat and inert.

Not only has the West appropriated someone else’s prairie, it has subliminally scripted its own problem on to it. In the US and the UK there is a crisis of the flawed, flaky father; from this chaos The Lion King has rescued the royal father. This figure is simultaneously powerful king/president and paternal authority, presiding honourably and dutifully over his territory.

Oddly, the film lacks the passion of parenting. There is nothing so subtle and devastating as the mother’s murder in Bambi or mother love in the all-singing, all-dancing Dumbo. In this movie mothers are the disappeared ones in a populist fantasy whose object is to redeem the father and the reputation of presidents.