It’s All Kicking Off

This week: some thoughts on the riots; a new Redcliffe-Maud; and how do you rename and rebrand six operational London Overground lines, anyway?

There are many things I dislike about Nigel Farage, and Tommy Robinson, and Elon Musk – but conspiring to require me to have thoughts about what look unnervingly like race riots in English towns this summer, just when I was planning to chill out and recover from a few things, is definitely on the list. Even if it is at least possible that I am not, in fact, the main victim here.

The resulting thoughts have not yet attained the level of coherence required to produce what scientists call “a take”. But nonetheless, here they are:

1. Some of the people involved are clearly nasty little bigots, who’ve been looking for an excuse to kick off like this for a while: if it hadn’t been the horrific events in Southport, it would have been something else. Others, though, are less organised and more opportunistic in their racism, and others still probably don’t care about the political stuff at all: they just want a bit of a barney to relieve the monotony between football seasons, and anyway the sun’s out. 

2. The courts, though, are not likely to give the slightest of shits as to which end of that scale someone is at when sentencing them for throwing a brick at a police officer.

3. There probably are people involved who have “genuine concerns” about immigration/the economy/the state of public services. In 2011, after all, some of those rioting were genuinely upset about the way austerity was poised to wreck the life chances of their entire generation, or the cancellation of their EMA. 

4. But that doesn’t mean they’re rioting because of those things. 

5. And the people who argue that this just goes to show we need to talk more about immigration are the exact same people who say that when literally anything happens. They would almost certainly have said it in the 1970s, when Britain had negative net migration yet polls showed many people still felt it was too much, too. 

6. Anyone who claims a bunch of racist thugs would go home peacefully and leave that mosque alone if only Britain had a slightly lower net migration figure is either a moron or a shyster or, in several cases I can think of, both.

7. We’ve spent years having an open and honest conversation about immigration. Could we perhaps try having an open and honest conversation about how immigrants are human beings worthy of respect  and Nigel Farage should f*ck off, please?

8. I can understand why news reports are reluctant to label people racists or fascists. In short: you might end up losing your shirt trying to prove it at an expensive libel trial.

9. But that does not make it any more edifying to witness.

10. And I have no idea why we’re calling them “protests” when they’re not, that I can see, protesting anything. 

11. These events probably do not, in the scheme of things, matter: most things don’t. England is not – despite the thoughts of chairman Musk, which might finally have persuaded the entirety of UK politics Twitter to jump ship to BlueSky – on the verge of civil war.

12. Such outbreaks of disorder have as much to do with good weather as they do to underlying sociological problems. A hint of rain is probably enough to kill this. 

13. And if it isn’t, the dawning realisation that people are being thrown in jail for five years because they nicked a sausage roll probably will.

14. Since the state is in a phase of reminding everyone that deterrents work, though, it’s surely time to prosecute a few of those who’ve been stirring up race hate online or in the media, and giving them surprisingly punitive punishments, too, pour encourager les autres.

15. While we shouldn’t dismiss the existence of the upsettingly large and violent far-right faction all this has revealed, neither should we dismiss the stories of the Imam talking rioters down and hugging them, or those of communities coming together to repair the damage. Those things are England, too. 

16. But such sentiments may not, right now, be of much comfort to those on the sharp end of all this.

That’s it, that’s as many thoughts as I’m willing to have. Feel free as ever to yell at me in the comments. Now let’s talk about something more cheerful.

The bit where I remind you I’ve got a book out, and you all roll your eyes

So a couple of months ago now an alien asked if I’d like to talk about borders (concept) and Borders (book) on his podcast, Trash Talk. I don’t remember much of what was said – this was before the election was even called – but I do recall that Count Binface turned out to be one of the more thoughtful observers of British politics I’ve spoken with recently, though, which I wasn’t quite prepared for. You can listen to the episode here.

You can also read an extract from the book – the chapter on Belgian/Dutch siamese twin towns of Baarle-Hertog/Baarle-Nassau – in tomorrow’s New European, a newspaper whose slogan is, pleasingly, “Think without borders”. 

Me, in the window of a bookshop in Verona. Oooooooh.

And you can buy the book, if you’re foolish enough not to have heeded this advice already, from Amazon, Waterstones, Stanfords, Foyles, Bert’s Books.

So how do you rename and rebrand an entire operational urban rail network?

Six months ago, to great fanfare, Transport for London unveiled the new names for the six lines¹ of the London Overground rail network. There was excitement, in some quarters², about the biggest shake up of the capital’s tube map in many a year. There was rage about the (this from the Daily Mail) “patronising and insultingly twee” choice of names. There was also cheering about the exact same thing, and the fact that it had annoyed the people who were annoyed by it. There were even columns, by humble substackers, in national newspapers.

And then – well, it stopped. The hullabaloo died down, but other than some temporary posters at Overground stations, announcing that the new names were on their way, not a lot seemed to happen.

That didn’t seem right: TfL had said that the changes would be complete this autumn. And there must surely be quite a lot of things to change. Maps on platforms; maps in trains; wayfinding signs at stations (6,000 of them, TfL says); digital information, everywhere you might think of to look for it. All of this must be changed, as quickly and seamlessly as possible.

So what, I wondered, is actually happening? What does a change like this actually involve? And blessed as I am with the sort of newsletter in which I can write about pretty much whatever I damn well please, I decided to ask.

First things first; the names were not the most difficult thing. They may have been the most controversial element, and required a long selection process (consultation exercises, engagement with stakeholders, long list, short list and so on). But “whatever names we had been picked would have been quite divisive,” argues Jon Hunter, Transport for London’s head of design – or as he cheerfully describes himself, “head of crayons”. “So long as there’s a story, people will accept them eventually.”