BEATS OF LOVE 

172. Toulouse by Latin Quarter

OUR WORLD, where Trump apes Putin and Farage apes Trump, can only exist while the very poor are made to be the problem, the designated villain.

A world like this needs something Corbynism once promised: politics that names the powerful, not the poor, as the problem. To protect rising inequality from scrutiny, disguising lies as necessary tools becomes essential. Learning this from Mandelson, McSweeney infiltrated and sabotaged Corbyn's principled movement, installing Starmer to destroy it.

Labour parliamentarians, no longer a rich mosaic of perspectives, but angrily differing on nearly all issues, are united in vilifying Mandelson, tearing at him with bloodlust, as if his ruin might wash the guilt from their own hands. They're embroiled in his politics of deception, betraying the very people they were elected to protect, unable to agree on anything beyond the idea of the next betrayal.

It's why the same architect of this latest labour fiasco, McSweeney, was nowhere to be seen, ensnared in an ambush of his own making; the strategist outmanoeuvred by his own strategy. His head will roll. But the revolving door keeps turning, and the next shadowy face it delivers will be just as committed to deceit.

This is the byproduct of the factional politics now consuming both main parties, obscuring them from the electorate while Farage, never one to miss a photo-op, apes his way through yet another pub side-door. 

BEATS OF LOVE 

171. Nuts in May VHS

MIKE LEIGH'S wonderfully improvised 1976 film finds its comedy in the open air, and, watched now, its central character feels uncannily, uncomfortably reformy.

Keith replete with dictatorial tendencies and his utterly infantile wife Candice Marie, although insular and odd, navigate the Dorset coastline as laid out in a strict itinerary. The camp-site proves harder to navigate, testing their endurance when, despite them pitching their tent first, interloper Ray, with his annoying radio, invades their sense of idyll. In reform party fashion, they move their tent. 

His real problems begin with working-class Brummies Finger and Honky. First, they want to shag despite being noisily pissed up, which angers Keith, who lies in a sexless state having just refused to kiss his wife's fluffy toy cat Prudence goodnight, then Finger wants to start a fire to make breakfast. Lighting open fires is against the rules. 

Rules dictate everything for Keith, who in a state of gammon faced abandonment hurls in anger the would be firewood, a tree branch, in Finger's direction, after which Keith and Candice Marie pack up and leave the campsite. Again, righteous anger without resolution is very reform.

Ironic, then, that Keith, in trying to impose the same conditions of his suburban life on his trip, blocked his rear-view mirror by overfilling his Morris Minor and attracted police attention. The police also discover his spare tyre was bald. Breaking the rules himself. Reflecting the hypocrisy of reform, who much prefer the idea of imposing rules that don't apply to their voters. 

Doubly ironic is the fact that characters like Keith and Candice Marie, no matter how unwittingly reformy they behave, would never vote for such an unruly party. Finger and Honky probably would.