The Griper's Times

IN order to finally turn the tide on the dangerous populists whose influence is ever growing we need to assert a simple truth - the past was pretty shitty for almost everyone. A sort of hazy nostalgia for a time not so long ago is a powerful tool for extremist parties such as the AfD, MAGA Republicans and the UK's own Reform. If only, they argue, we could get back to when our countries were simpler, quieter and (let's be honest) whiter. A period sort of around the late 1990s but without Tony Blair in charge. When we could have a touch of the Blitz spirit without the actual bombing. Indian takeaways but rather fewer actual Indians. A green and pleasant land but none of that green transition nonsense. And maybe a bit of childhood meningitis (because no vaccines, obviously). You swiftly get the whiff of wistfulness in Facebook heritage groups when a picture of an old high street conjures up memories of an era when kids were safe to play out, men whistled on their way to work and i

DURING the grimmest period of Covid I took a call from my then news editor asking me to investigate reports that the local ice rink was to be used as an emergency morgue. The claim was one of many circulating during a time that was, much as now, rife with anxiety and fast-spreading rumours. As it turns out the ice rink story was entirely untrue, although I was able to confirm contingency planners had indeed earmarked a hangar at Birmingham Airport for a similar purpose.  During the often chaotic weeks and months that came after I also had to investigate reports of army helicopters conducting flights over the borough, plans to bring the area into local lockdown and care workers without PPE using bin liners for protection. Some claims were true, others were partly factual but perhaps exaggerated or distorted and some proved entirely bogus. The job of any responsible reporter when alerted to a whisper on Twitter or an anonymous email is to establish quickly whether there's anything to

"We should treat the 2017 manifesto as our foundational document, the radicalism and the hope that that inspired across the country was real." --- Keir Starmer, January 2020. EXACTLY seven years ago this week I was stood in the city centre getting - what the kids might describe - as "low-key pissed on" with a pretty big smile on my face. The "get out the vote" rally was organised on the eve of the eve of the election it's generally hoped we've forgotten these days. If only because the shock surge in support for Jeremy Corbyn might give the strange impression that socialism can be quite popular actually. A few thousand people - most of them young, many of them with more interesting haircuts than mine - had flocked to Birmingham city centre to see the then Labour leader speak. Every poll going was predicting a Tory landslide, Corbyn himself had been traduced and abused as everything from a terrorist-sympathiser to a Jew-hater to the most dangerous al

AN OBVIOUS but often unnoticed consequence of the death of the local paper is that future history might be rather flimsier than today's. I'm about to start work on my dissertation, which will delve into the Welsh workhouses of the nineteenth century. An obvious advantage in trying to understand social conditions in this period - compared to say 1512 - is the increasing abundance of press coverage which offers insight into daily life at the level of local towns and villages. While no source is infallible, print journalism was a form of record-keeping that tilted coverage much more firmly in the favour of ordinary people.  Initially of course such outlets were not the platforms of community news they would later become but fast forward to the twentieth century and titles were undeniably offering your average resident a platform. School fetes, political rucks, footie matches, live shows and crimes were set in type and published. One of the few joys of my brief stint as acting edit

THEY talk in hushed whispers in a hundred and one creative writing classes of the writer finding "their voice". Which might imply that there's some triumphant moment when you can suddenly draw it like a sword from the stone and bellow defiance at the heavens at your new-found authorial authority. I suspect though it's more a gradual process of feeling your way with sentences. At some point eventually you squint down at the page and think "oh, yeah, I do tend to do that don't I." Except I'm never sure I've ever even quite done that, so here I am on a chilly Monday evening, trying to. Here goes. I'm probably a writer who likes testing what he can do with the language. I like assonance, I like the way sounds repeat, I like the way you can really rub your reader's nose in a point. Then let go. Because speed makes it urgent. Maybe. That sort of poetry in prose approach comes, I think, from my love of Ray Bradbury. If it's possible to imagi

SO many villages and towns around Britain have a story so good it would definitely benefit from what I would tentatively call a "Black Plaque" scheme. If English Heritage's little blue signs are intended to single out sites with links to celebrated historical figures, the Black Plaque - by contrast - would be the benchmark for folklore. "It was on this spot the people of Woolpit greeted the Green Children in the reign of King Stephen" or "In this place Spring-Heeled Jack caused a coach to crash in 1837." I can't imagine the idea would take off in the corridors of Whitehall but what's interesting is the way that local communities themselves often embrace old folk stories in the knowledge that, centuries on, it's still very much their thing. Let's take Bungay in Suffolk, a small market town which even today scarcely has 5,000 people living there.  Here in an August storm of 1577, a gigantic black dog was said to have manifested in the mid