THAMES: 7) The Eaten

Eton College. What a pain.

The cannon is because they knew we were coming.

There is no straightforward way to handle this one. Most English people know of Eton College, if more through its mythos than the thing itself. And one does not simply know Eton College. Generally speaking, to know Eton College is to either adore it or to resent it to every monied brick in its crenellations.

Why, indeed, does a school need crenellations?

Perhaps to call it a school is misleading. It is a school, of course – the most infamously exclusive in England (and needless to say, one of the most expensive) – but only in the first instance. In the ways that matter it is so much more.

What we have here is an England. Eton College is an embodiment of this country, or rather of a specific vision of it which, though only a tiny minority of its population ever passes through its doors, wreaks so reekingly powerful an impact on the majority that it needs no introduction. A vision so storied, so intractable, that to its detractors, and there are many, Eton is no less than the principal sausage-factory of England’s white, male, upper-caste forces of destruction and the ultimate locus of fault for the ruin of their land.

Thus while physical Eton nests safe and snug in the Thames Valley, imaginary Eton is a castle under permanent siege. And behind its walls, as much as anywhere else in the world, there is no hard border between reality and imagination. That, perhaps, explains the crenellations.

Is it fair to lay guilt for so supreme a crime at the gates of one mere school? The real significance of the condemnation of Eton in these terms is perhaps less literal, more mythic: a permanent counter-mythology which, in crashing upon the school’s mythology, becomes half the dialectic nest of narrative power which sustains the legend of Eton. But in factual terms the case is not without grounds. To say nothing of its graduates’ perpetual dominance in media, commerce, religion and the military, the twenty prime ministers it has manufactured include both the individual who instigated the Brexit crisis for no reason, David Cameron, and the one who now consummates its descent into the abyss of authoritarian nationalism, Boris Johnson. This entire saga can and has been read as the continuation of a tussle between these two bully-boys which started in Eton’s playgrounds: rollicking, soaked in seven varieties of bodily fluids, now spilt out to nation-wrecking scale. And then, goes this telling, once the country’s breaking is complete, the lives of everyone in it laid waste, and their chisel lodged securely in their mortal wound to the post-World War II European peace settlement, these Etonian man-boys will bear none of the consequences but march away across a burning horizon, underpants overflowing with multiple multimillion-pound incomes for doing nothing while they slap each other’s backs, chortling at what a fun game it all was – and really believing it.

The game. Here and in the wider English public-school universe, this seems to be the operating principle, the nexus to which everything returns. The world is your game, and this is how you play it. If that means the Boris and Dave Show is Eton’s doing, how often has the same been the case for the political currents that shaped England and Britain in the past? Conspiracy theories are dangerous and should not be mistaken for serious consideration. But the distance between reasonable suspicions on the one hand, and the mythic image of this place as the puppeteers’ tower behind so many of England’s imperial misdeeds and perennial structures of oppression on the other, is not great enough to satisfy scrutiny.

What shall we do with it? There is no getting around it, because cross the bridge from Windsor and there it is, lording upon the northern bank where it secretes a power uniquely its own. A power not jewel-studded or glintingly solid like the stone towers of royalty it faces across the river, yet nonetheless every bit its equal and in practical terms quite possibly its superior. Its crown is made of different material: subtler, less tangible, wafting and oozing and sausaging rather than towering, all the more challenging to pin down for how it is in that very swirl of myths and symbols, ever elusive to those they are designed to ward away, that is concealed the source of Eton’s power.

Upon Windsor Bridge, facing upriver (west) with Windsor at left and Eton right. The college’s old boathouse facilities at right have been re-done into apartments; instead of the river they now train at a colossal artificial lake further upstream.

Less a school, then, and more a phenomenon: one built right into the heart of both the stories and power relations of the phenomenon called England. Its class system, its problems of race and gender, its land, its empire, and now its post-imperial nervous breakdown – everything refracts through the Etonian prism in ways that are impossible to grasp, because as soon as you get close, it moves, teasingly, just enough, like the well-timed evasive twist of a cricket bat, then chuckles down at you that you’ll never really get it because after all, it’s just a game, and you’re not special enough to play it.

Maybe so. But it so happens we’re playing a larger game here and Eton is in the way. Let’s devour some sausages.

Your barricades will be of no use, Eton College.

Start: Windsor Bridge (nearest stations: Windsor and Eton Riverside; Windsor and Eton Central)

End: Maidenhead Bridge (nearest station: Maidenhead)

Length: 10.5km/6.5 miles

Location: Berkshire – Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead; Buckinghamshire – South Bucks

Topics: Eton College, Eton’s backyard, Boveney and St. Mary Magdalene’s Church (which is special), vampires (Oakley Court) and cannibals (Monkey Island, Headpile Eyot), Bray, Maidenhead

THAMES: 6) Curse of the Magna Carta

Once upon a time two reptiles sat by the river. One was a lizard which could open great frills around its head to appear much larger than it was. The other was a chameleon, constantly changing its colours to match its surroundings.

So might have opened Rudyard Kipling, the poet of empire, who had quite a fondness for animal fables. Instead, when he made his contribution to the legend of the riverbanks ahead in 1922, his preferred imagery was less animal, more animist:

And still when Mob or Monarch lays

Too rude a hand on English ways

The whisper wakes, the shudder plays

Across the reeds at Runnymede.

To which we might reply: well go on then?

Runnymede. Lots of mud, but no shudder. Was Kipling’s idea of English ways the same as the Thames’s?

Seventy-five years later, in 1997, I arrived to find an England rapt in triumphalist swagger. The Soviet Union had fallen. A fresh-faced Tony Blair had just swept to power. They had won. Their stories had won. They had won history.

To any suggestion that this country had serious problems, let alone that it was not as free and democratic as it claimed to be, the standard response was mocking hostility. The scorn for dissent and difference here alienated me even before its deeper structural cruelties, especially of gender, made that alienation catastrophic over the years to follow.

And then that history burst from the grave and clamped its bloodied hands round their necks on 9/11. Real history had kept going, indifferent to their myths, and in their reverie it totally blindsided them. It then unleased two of the most distressing episodes in England’s modern history, and these, at last, have shaken the general population’s confidence to its roots.

One was the invasion of Iraq in 2003. No-one who lived through that here will have forgotten the ugliness it brought down on the English social atmosphere (which nevertheless pales before what it did to Iraqis). The other is the unfinished Brexit-austerity-racism nightmare of the 2010s, whose most potent symbol is the blistering eruption of Grenfell Tower, a funeral pyre of something which, for its absence, the English psyche now unravels. The least that can be said coming out of these bloodbaths is that the gulf between England’s self-congratulatory myth of democracy and human rights on the one hand, and its inveterate tendencies to casual and mean-spirited violence on the other, appears to trouble far more of its people than it did at the turn of the millennium.

North from Staines Bridge to a land of legends. How much has this view changed in those twenty years? How much in eight hundred?

I didn’t have to wait twenty years for that. In 1997 my instruction in the gap between myth and reality was immediate, traumatic, and lasting. Entering an English boys’ school brought me in contact not with accountable leaders but a bristling-moustached, foam-at-the-mouth adult authoritarianism the likes of whose bellowing arrogance I had never encountered, even in a far less likely bastion of democracy, colonial Hong Kong. And the pupils, far from being a courteous and enlightened citizenry that knew its way round a social contract, exhibited instead a barbarism that was hysterical, violent and sometimes plain racist, eagerly following their scripts in that divine-right-of-adults diorama. If it was all to meld into a single message, it would have been this: We are a democracy, so STFU.

In that shock and turmoil one image has never left my memory. The back wall of the history classroom, packed floor to ceiling with parchments. Each was brown with a red wax seal, and though the handwriting varied, each’s text began, in huge capital letters, with the words: ‘JOHN, BY THE GRACE OF GOD, KING OF ENGLAND…’ before the text size diminished to illegibility.

English history was a morass to me. I had had next to no exposure to it and its contents were totally foreign. Kings with weird numbers after their names instead of Chris Patten; cryptic symbols everywhere like lions (but they don’t have any?) and fleur-de-lis (but they don’t like France?); important people named after places they had nothing to do with and weren’t pronounced how they were spelt, and endless random wars for no sensible reason. I went by the English name John then – were those suspicious documents directed at me? What would I want with the grace of their god? My history teacher’s name was also John. Was this about plastering his authority all over the wall, revering him as no less than their king?

That wall of charters, unexplained and ever-present, loomed over two years of English history lessons which, for lack of foundation and context, left me lost at sea. It was only much later that I pieced together what it was about. It was what they had studied the previous year, which I had missed on the other side of the world. It was the foundation. And the foundation revolved around a single document, one they deemed so important that they got each boy to re-create his own, dunk it in some yellowy-brown chemical to make it look historic, then hoist it high with the others so as to dominate the visual experience of the history classroom through all the centuries of material that followed.

Eventually I managed to put a name to it. Magna Carta. In English imagination, possibly the greatest story of all – the key word, of course, being imagination.

The Magna Carta Memorial at Runnymede.

There are facts, and there is myth. Both matter in history. In this particular history, the myth has mattered a hundred times more.

But charters are made of paper, and paper, real or mythic, has two sides. The English’s claims to democracy and rule of law are writ on the sunlit side. How often do they look on the shadowed side? They do not – because it screams. It screams a racial exceptionalism which wetted the chops of undying English authoritarianism and drove it on a genocidal rampage across the Earth. They do not look, because it still burns their eyes.

Oh yes. Today’s journey through the meadows where Magna Carta was verbally agreed (not signed – signatures as a binding instrument came much later) shall not be the same pilgrimage made by a neverending crocodile of approved storytellers, excited lawyers and awestruck schoolchildren. My path is the dark path and here it leads through the underworld. Come, if you dare face a reckoning with the Runnymede Horror.

Staines Bridge in the light of an especially cold winter morning. Staines’s significance as a ford town as explored in the previous section will be of continued importance.

Oh, and there is also a great big fortress called Windsor Castle. That might be important.

Start: Staines Bridge (nearest station: Staines)

End: Windsor Bridge (nearest stations: Windsor and Eton Riverside; Windsor and Eton Central)

Length: 12km/7.5 miles

Location: Surrey – Borough of Runnymede; Berkshire – Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead

Topics: The Magna Carta – history and mythology in Runnymede and Dark Runnymede; Old Windsor, Datchet, Windsor Castle, the Charter of the Forest

THAMES: 5) Cross Purposes

Today we have a tale of two towns.

Chertsey and Staines emerged for opposite reasons. One was for going to, the other for going through. Each owed this to a singular crux: in one case a house of the Christian cross, in the other a river crossing. Those structures are long gone, yet the towns they birthed stand to this day as important crossroads on the river. Add to that that one can hardly cross their paths without being made cross at the political situation, which has seriously crossed a line, and you begin to – well, that’s enough talking across them.

Although, it really did cross a line. And don’t take my word for it. In the present constituency, Runnymede and Weybridge, it was a line too far even for some individuals on the highest balconies of the party responsible.

On the electoral map we are now well into hardcore Tory Thames, blue surrounded by blue. In the December 2019 election they changed their minion in parliament regardless. This was because up till then it happened to be former Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond. It isn’t anymore.

Chertsey Bridge is approximately the same colour as Philip Hammond’s lugubriousness.

Hammond controlled this country’s treasury during some of the cruellest years of the Tory austerity programme and must take his share of responsibility for its dire human rights abuses. Yet relatively speaking, he was a moderate: more concerned with outcomes – however poorly he assessed them – than ideological zeal, preferring to deal in arguments rather than slogans. Ultimately this found expression in a stubborn resistance to a hard Brexit which turned him into a hate figure for the Brexit-rapture demagogues who clawed their way to power under Boris Johnson. At the crunch, Hammond was one of twenty-one Tory MPs expelled from the parliamentary Conservative Party, some of its grandest veterans among them, for voting against Johnson’s Brexit deal. Like many other conservatives he has since wandered into the political wilderness, no longer at home in a party he believes has left him.

It is one of the many subplots of England’s present crisis, and one which will most trouble the hearts of old Tory heartlands like this. The death of English conservatism, a tradition devoured by its own children. It always had its grievous flaws and made terrible mistakes. It had its part in the worst atrocities of industrial exploitation and colonial racism. But somewhere in there was also a more scrupulous dogs-and-meadows-and-fireplaces conservatism that meant something better than violence against dissidents and minorities. An honest and venerable tradition existed, born from legitimate shock at the carnage of the civil wars and the French Revolution, whose instinct was to place a steadying hand of caution on the shoulder of swift and hot-headed change; that enjoyed discussing disagreements over tea and earnestly sought to learn from them; that did not beat its chest about the wonders of industry and empire, but made pragmatic use of those systems to try to do good with their own little bits of them. A conservatism, that is, with integrity in its bones – integrity which to the Brexit revolutionaries, in their contempt for truth and hatred of dissent, has been totally indigestible. Those bones, spat out with dripping conceit, are all that remain of the English conservative tradition: scattered, lost, with a body no longer, washed away on the river.

Today’s direction of travel: the view north atop Chertsey Bridge.

But that is what the river does. To the people who live on its floodplain, it brings possibilities and it takes them away. But it does not choose from them. Only they, the English and their predecessors and successors, can do that. Let’s look at a few they did.

Start: Chertsey Bridge (nearest station: Chertsey)

End: Staines Bridge (nearest station: Staines)

Length: 6.4km/4 miles

Location: Surrey – Borough of Runnymede, Borough of Spelthorne

Topics: Chertsey Abbey, Laleham and the Earls of Lucan, the Penton Hook, Staines

THAMES: 4) Into the Valley of Imagination

Dawn of a new year, and a new phase. Our journey up the Thames’s central valley begins here, and like the future of its people, the first light of 2020 finds it lost in fog.

The triumph of Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party (a.k.a. the Tories) in the December 2019 general election presents the English people with a new phase in their own journey. Our exploration began with them mired in a protracted struggle over whether to leave the European Union – ‘Brexit’. As of now, Brexit is secondary. The new government heralds not only the triumph of the Brexit movement’s most fanatical high priests but a far more ambitious project of cultural transformation, whose values have manifested over this decade in the Tories’ austerity and hostile environment policies – or to call them by their proper names, social and ethnic cleansing. 

Swans seek their breakfast on the river below Kingston Bridge, shielded by fog from the world of human folly.

No secret was made of these leaders’ admiration for the darkest demons of twentieth-century nationalism, whose violences of gender, race and class, and contempt for the very concept of truth, have burst back out through the crust of the Earth in so many places worldwide. The English saw what they stood for. They chose it anyway.

The most violent consequences will fall on those who did not choose it, who did not consent, and this will bury once and for all the English’s claims to a democratic polity. As for those who did select this: they have chosen their fate, and will learn the cost when the lights at the end of their tunnel turn out to be the fires of hell.

The river, which precedes and outlasts their mistakes, shall guard the true light in the meantime.

As for their organised resistance, the opposition Labour Party crumbled dramatically in England’s fallen industrial heartlands to the north as its traditional working-class supporters deserted what they saw as its arrogant and complacent leadership. Here on the Thames, that world could not feel further away. The Thames valley, so the stereotype goes, is the winding spine of England’s protected southeast: the lounging, cosseted, corpulent body of the octopus which sucks the rest of the country dry. Monopolised by some of the most privileged sections of English society, these provinces are some of the wealthiest in the country and have returned a nigh-unbroken ocean of Tory blue in election map after election map, disturbed only by the occasional red or yellow blip in headstrong urban centres like Reading and Oxford.

They include the domains of some of the Tory Cabinet's most absurdly impervious figureheads of mediocrity. Beyond Kingston we must cross the constituency of Esher and Walton, then Spelthorne, respectively the lairs of foreign minister Dominic Raab and business minister Kwasi Kwarteng, two of the most accomplished performers in the vacuous trolling that has become the signature of Tory politics. In spite of this both were returned comfortably in the election, the former in the face of a committed challenge from his opponents, the latter by an overwhelming 20,000-vote majority.

That speaks foreboding things about the populations we are about to traverse. The crimes of Boris Johnson’s Tories – whose ideologies seek and mock the death of people like myself, and whose abuses have brought hideous suffering to my friends in marginalised communities – make it discomforting to venture into strongholds of such evil. How uneasy lurks the prospect of accepting its populace as they walk past, as though their murderous voting behaviour can be excused? How irrefusable the instinct to hold them to immediate account right there on the towpath one by one?

If they are to be spared it then let it be out of respect for the river itself. It is above their sordid politics, does not deserve to be poisoned by having them pushed in it, and might yet have important stories to tell about just what twisted things had to happen in order that a nation, any nation, could put itself in so small-spirited and shameful a position.

Today's section is broad, so click if you want a better view.

After all, what can explain the middle Thames’s unyielding grasp on the neck of English society if not some sturdy historic roots? At a glance, these appear as varied in shape and texture as they are deep. From the constitutional totems of Kingston and Runnymede to the elite scholastic keeps of Oxford and Eton, from the commerce of rich monasteries and industrial boomtowns like Reading to the warlords’ big damn walls at Hampton Court and Windsor Castle, the wealth and power of this valley is as much in its stories as in its physical stuff – as much in emotion and imagination as in armies and bank accounts.

The armies and bank accounts give them power, but it is the stories that have turned that into structures of power. Resisting siege after siege from their critics and passing it down from one generation to the next, these bastions on the river guard their power well. They are the Privilege Forts of the central Thames valley, and a notebook, camera and pair of walking boots might not enough to topple them. Nonetheless, England’s redeeming characters will continue to siege them, and can only liberate their treasures on an understanding of how they came to be what they are, their habits and assumptions, their strengths and weaknesses. On this account, it might be hoped, this passage could one day be of some use.

Start: Kingston Bridge (nearest station: Kingston)

End: Chertsey Bridge (nearest station: Chertsey)

Length: 17.7km/11 miles

Location: Greater London – Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames, Borough of Richmond upon Thames; Surrey – Borough of Elmbridge, Borough of Spelthorne, Borough of Runnymede

Topics: Kingston upon Thames and the emergence of England, Surbiton, punting in Thames Ditton, Hampton Court, Molesey and the waterworks, Sunbury and Walton, the Shepperton and Weybridge Ferry

THAMES: 3) Arcadia

The chill light of a winter morning falls on Putney Bridge, riding a tide that rises beyond the capital city. Having cleared the urban core, the water’s mood changes dramatically as it swings hard to the south in a great ninety-degree bend. Could this be a memory of 20,000 years ago, when the glaciers of the last ice age advanced all the way down here and shunted the Thames to the south?

Coincidence or otherwise, the bottom of that arc sends it right into what in a single human lifetime has become the corner of the Greater London conurbation, where on meeting the water that falls from the English interior, the sovereignty of the tides finally ends.

The limit of the tidal Thames, at Teddington Lock.

But more than water comes and goes this way. For thousands of years before trains and motor vehicles the river was the prime means of travel for the people of its watershed. Far better after all to let the tides take you where you want to go than drag yourself and your belongings up and down the muddy, potholed, bandit-ridden land routes.

If you had the means and status for it, that is. Under English class hierarchy, this privilege of escape from the struggles of London was primarily the preserve of those on the highest levels of the social pyramid. Above all that meant the monarchy, whose palaces and hunting grounds duly colonised all the best floodplain they could grab off the common folk. In their wake came their obligatory orbiting constellations of nobles, clerics, sycophants and concubines, some of whose families still occupy these prize mansions and riverside villas. Theirs are the upriver domains of Richmond and Kingston, towns whose roots lie in the legends of English royalty, but the intervening distance was settled by the middle-class affluents on the next tiers down as they popped up through the thick foam of the industrial revolution, into the fresh river air, and followed the old nobility out that way. Entranced by the splendour of the riverscape, these escapees imagined up and passed down an Arcadian paradise of swans and ducks and herons, of comfortable housing whether ruddily historic or ostentatiously gentrified, of lazy promenades lined with elaborate lamp-posts and hanging flower baskets, along a riverside of leaves and willows everywhere managed and in places manicured.

Yet the question, the very English question, remains. Who is it for?

Before we embark, ongoing events should serve as a reminder that history is alive around us. Not two days after the previous section’s article there was a terrorist attack at one of its most prominent landmarks, London Bridge. The attacker stabbed two people dead in the hall of the Worshipful Company of Fishmongers before being shot by police on the bridge, having been subdued by, among others, someone wielding a narwhal horn from the aforementioned institution. This violence fed into one of the dirtiest and bitterest general elections in this country’s living memory, in which, as has typically been the case, the old royal lairs on the path ahead were some of the most fiercely contested constituencies in the country. Past and future, local and global: all are present and inseparable.

It was not a regular election. The outcome has struck a whole new level of shock and despair into many people and looks likely, to say the least, to irreparably alter the destiny of Britain and England. But even in this extraordinary instance, the boroughs of Richmond Park, Twickenham, and Kingston and Surbiton defied both the national trend and that of London’s division into working-class Labour Party urban areas versus white and affluent Conservative Party sub-rural outskirts. This corner alone chose a third option and put in Liberal Democrat MPs with comfortable majorities: the sole phalanx of Lib-Dem amber on a map that has otherwise scattered it to particles.

Pinned between core and periphery; shaped by both upstream and downstream worlds but not entirely of either. Who are the people who live on the riverbend, and what makes them different?

Start: Putney Bridge (nearest stations: Putney Bridge, Vauxhall)

End: Kingston Bridge (nearest station: Kingston)

Length: 20.9km/13 miles

Location: Greater London – Borough of Wandsworth, Borough of Richmond upon Thames, Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames

Topics: University Boat Race, Barnes, Hammersmith, Chiswick, Mortlake, the National Archives, Kew Gardens, Syon House/Abbey, Richmond, Isleworth, Twickenham, Teddington Lock

THAMES: 2) The Great English Power Struggle

‘The Tower’, they call the shortest of these buildings. Do they not get the feeling its name has been somewhat overtaken?

Upstream of Tower Bridge, the tidal Thames ebbs and flows through the current power centres of both the English nation and the larger constitutional vehicle it presently rides, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (a.k.a. ‘the Union’) – although that ride feels wobblier by the day.

Many people think of this country as a democracy, and one of the oldest in the world at that. Its civilised, courteous, tea-sipping national persona fuses in their minds with the landscape of its capital city’s riverside, where red buses link the likes of the Palace of Westminster, the Victoria Embankment and St. Paul’s Cathedral. It is in pride of place at the downstream culmination of this catalogue of modern wonders that stands the Tower of London, which draws in some three million awestruck visitors per year.

The original Tower consisted only of the central keep, the White Tower, built in 1078. Wards, lodgings, and fortifications were layered onto it down the centuries, and then a moat, filled in the 1840s. More recent restorations have polished it up into the postcard-friendly attraction we see today.

But there is a problem here.

The Tower was a political prison, torture dungeon and killing field. Erected by William of Normandy as part of a network of castles to scare his conquered populace into submission, by the time the English nation consolidated under the Tudor dynasty (1509-1603) the main use of this fortress had shifted to confining, torturing, and oftentimes decapitating high-profile political dissidents and prisoners of war. Thomas More, Anne Boleyn, Lady Jane Grey and William Laud were among the dozens who had their heads handed to them here, and even four hundred years later it was dragging German spies in front of its firing squads in both World Wars. Yet nowadays you can pay a hefty £24.70 per head – and keep the head – to go in and take carefree selfies on top of those corpses while marvelling at this architectural symbol of a country which, they would have you believe, has political freedom and human rights in its national DNA.

That story of democratic destiny has been incredibly powerful in the English self-consciousness. But as we follow the Thames right through the middle of its ancient nuclei – the City of London and the City of Westminster – the river will have a quite different story to show us: of a heritage packed, like everyone else’s, with greed, oppression, and violent struggle. A story in which for every piece of democracy these people have scrapped together, they have had to fight and die for it and could never be sure they wouldn’t lose it again at any moment – and in which its worst enemies have not been external threats, but the impulse for the abuse of power that has ever lurked in their own culture.

Power. Yes. That will be the Dark River’s melody today.

The King’s Reach – the stretch of the Thames beside the old city – as seen from Tower Bridge, looking upriver. Yet never forget that twice a day the water goes in, and twice a day it goes out. Can you see the real power in this picture, far exceeding any of these glass pretenders as it looks on from high in the sky at left?

Start: Tower Bridge (nearest station: Tower Hill)

End: Putney Bridge (nearest stations: Putney Bridge, Vauxhall)

Length: 16km (10 miles)

Location: Greater London – Borough of Southwark, Borough of Lambeth, Borough of Wandsworth

Topics: Power versus democracy amongst the City of London merchants, Southwark bishops, Bankside and Lambeth recreationalists and the English Parliament in Westminster, then escaping through Vauxhall, Battersea, Wandsworth and Putney.

Today’s exploration is long. If you want to keep to the three main discussions, they are the City of London (immediately below), the story of Parliament (skip to ‘City of Westminster’), and the Putney Debates (skip to ‘Putney’ at the end.)

The Fall of World of Warcraft

Videogames and Politics in a time of Authoritarian Revival

Some time ago, I wrote here of a very special computer game.

A game which saved my life. A game which grew into a core aspect of my existence, so much more than ‘just a game’. It offered me community, belonging, friendship, a sense of fulfilment, and the power to hold authoritarians to account by hurling fireballs at them – all things denied me by the corrupt societies of Earth, yet provided by this game in sufficient measure that I could endure by moving between the two worlds as needed. More than fourteen years have now passed since I first stumbled into the vast and beautiful world of Azeroth that forms the main setting of World of Warcraft (WoW).

It wasn’t a paradise. There were terrible times in it as well as good ones. But it was – is – part of who I am. It was the closest thing I have known in this world to home.

And then, in the space of one week in October 2019, World of Warcraft fell.

Two Stories

The company responsible for WoW, Activision Blizzard (originally and colloquially just Blizzard), has grown into a behemoth of the videogames industry on the back of WoW’s titanic success. Together with its other major franchises like Starcraft, Diablo, Overwatch and Hearthstone, its subscribers span the world and number in the millions.

Eventually this rise propelled it into the extremely lucrative Chinese market. In the same period, the People’s Republic of China has lurched into a resurgent authoritarianism under the rule of Xi Jinping, a distinct feature of which has been an obsessive coercive control over the Chinese information environment. Foreign companies operating there are in effect required to abide with strict government expectations that they will not contain even the slightest hint of dissent at the ruling party, its vision, or its increasingly atrocious abuses of those of its people – be they political opponents, social activists or ethnic minorities – who do not fit the official narrative of China’s national character and journey.

The definition of this under Chinese law is extremely vague. That is deliberate. Under its present authoritarian leadership China lacks an independent rule of law. This relates directly to the current crisis in Hong Kong, which in turn has been directly pertinent to the fate of WoW. The immediate trigger of the Hong Kong conflict was the threat of new extradition laws that would break down the barrier between Hong Kong’s legal system, with its relative political independence, and the arbitrary system in mainland China where legal outcomes are often politically-determined.

What that system means in practice for games companies is that compliance tends to take the form of prior self-censorship to lower the risk of problems in the first place. The infamous covering-up of undead characters’ exposed bones in the Chinese version of WoW was a prime example. More generally, games are shepherded into conformity by the local partners through which foreign companies have to operate, in Blizzard’s case the Chinese company NetEase.

Perhaps that coercive environment is one reason Blizzard’s games are phenomenally popular in China. If there is a common thread to all its games – their gameplay, their storylines, their experiences – it is heroism: the ability of random anybodies from humble backgrounds to work hard, gradually build their power and renown, and through courage, sheer strength of will and good old teamwork, vanquish one after another of a rogues’ gallery of tyrants, warmongers, demons, dragons and malevolent gods. Good ultimately prevails over evil; freedom overthrows oppression. ‘The world could always use more heroes’, says Tracer of Overwatch in that game’s famous signature. ‘No king rules forever’, one of WoW’s most tenacious dictators was reminded as he lay dying.

There are obvious ethical complications in this view of the world, which in our neo-colonial reality tends to get parsed rather tiredly through arguments about cultural diversity and individual rights versus community interests. Explorations are certainly possible into how far Blizzard’s games derive from the company’s American background. But on a personal level I for one found it incredibly empowering to enter WoW as a Level 1 gnome with a stick, stumbling through the snow on a journey which within a few years had turned him into a meteor-flinging pyromancer blasting down one arrogant oppressor after another. At best this accountability was administered side-by-side with some fabulous teams of people, many of them likewise considered eccentric by the outside world and finding in WoW a validating alternative to outside societies’ abusiveness and hostility to difference. If WoW did so much for them and for me, then what of its service to people living beneath the totalitarian judgementalism of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)?

What we were watching here was WoW’s story growing in two incompatible directions. On one branch was etched those words: ‘no king rules forever’. But at the same time, the other branch was twisting and bending to enter the story of a bloodthirsty king obsessed with living forever – so obsessed that he died from consuming mercury in his search for an immortality elixir, but who lives on in Xi Jinping atop a Chinese civilisation his authoritarian worldview has cursed for two thousand years.

A WoW of heroic struggle against oppressors, and a WoW of expedient submission to them. To be both at once was not sustainable. The time would come to choose between them.

When it did, they chose poorly.

The Fall

On 6th October 2019, a participant in Hearthstone televised professional competition, Ng Wai Chung – known as ‘Blitzchung’ – protested the CCP’s violent repression of Hong Kong by stating ‘liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times’ in Chinese during a post-match interview. Blizzard responded by summarily throwing him out of the tournament, rescinding his $10,000 match winnings, and imposing on him a one-year ban on competitive play. On top of that, the two TV casters who had been interviewing him, guilty of nothing, also had their contracts terminated.

The public backlash was instant and ferocious. Players, professional competitors, journalists and current and former Blizzard staff lined up to condemn the company for appearing to do the bidding of the Chinese authorities in suppressing freedom of speech and voices for human rights. The damnation was particularly intense in the United States, where a pattern of similar high-profile China censorship scandals was befalling the National Basketball Association (NBA), Apple and several other companies. People began cancelling their Blizzard subscriptions; the hashtag #BoycottBlizzard started to trend on Twitter. Another Hearthstone team, American University, held up a ‘Free Hong Kong, Boycott Blizz’ sign during one of their matches and were later also banned for their trouble. Some thirty Blizzard staff walked out and staged a protest outside their California HQ, covering up the slogans ‘Think Globally’ and ‘Every Voice Matters’ on a statue displaying the company’s purported values. Other games companies spoke out either to wiggle their fingers against ‘political’ speech like Blizzard had, or more courageously, to declare they wouldn’t punish their players for it (and here I extend respect to Tim Sweeney of Epic, whose classic ZZT was a staple of my childhood). Most potently, the character of Mei from Overwatch began to appear as a symbol of the Hong Kong protests, raising the possibility that a clampdown from the Chinese censors might punish Blizzard in the very markets they thought they were protecting their presence in.

Blizzard remained silent throughout this storm, giving the impression they hoped it would die down of its own accord. When it didn’t, they contrived to make matters worse. On October 12th President J. Allen Brack released a long statement that attempted to justify their punishment of Blitzchung, while also halving his ban and reinstating his prize money. It was an extremely unconvincing non-apology that only served to further inflame Blizzard’s critics, and as people like former Blizzard designer Mark Kern deconstructed it more carefully it came to look downright suspicious: as though it had originally been written in Chinese, and was aimed not as an apology to aggrieved fans but a promise to the Chinese authorities that such an embarrassment would not happen again.

Video Games are Political

Not everybody shared in the anger at Blizzard’s actions. WoW is a complex world that different people experience in their own ways, and a great many were not sufficiently invested in either Hong Kong or the more general problems of humankind to care. A common line you hear in gaming discourse is ‘it’s just a game mate’, and no doubt for many people WoW is indeed ‘just a game’, providing them with enjoyment which they value more than strangers harmed by the company’s political decisions. (But let us not even dignify with attention the adherents of free-market ideology who claim that it is in businesses’ nature, rather than choices, to prioritise profit over the welfare of people affected by their actions.)

In fact there is no separation between games and politics any more than there is in sports, whose inherent political character goes back millennia and is as salient in this age of oppression as it ever has been. To claim to be apolitical is itself a political position: a satisfaction with and de facto support for the status quo. At best it is naïve; at worst it is perniciously disingenuous; and either way it speaks from a position of privilege not available to people who get no say in whether the politics happens to them.

Video game politics, despite the relative infancy of their history as a medium, already have baleful form. While on the one hand they have been empowering and liberating, their notorious dark side as a tenacious harbour for racism, stigmatisation of disabled or mentally ill people, and especially misogyny, transphobia and other forms of gender-based bigotry is news to no-one. The GamerGate hate movement anticipated a whole new generation of toxic-masculinist far-right political thuggery that then found world-changing expression in Trump, Brexit and similar truth-unravelling, social-media-savvy forces that have risen to power worldwide; in some ways it directly laid their operational foundations.

In WoW I witnessed those strains of political poison disgorged on a regular basis whether in random groups, in-game public channels, or the forums of external websites. As in many other game communities, no-one has bothered, even after a decade and a half, to design a method for holding those behind it to account. That strain of politics – ultimately, fascism – is in effect deemed acceptable. Conversely, expressions like those of Blitzchung or others calling out oppression or attempting to improve either the representation or experience of, say, women, gender-diverse people or ethnic minorities in videogames, are regularly met with a scathing cacophony of ‘stop making it political’ or ‘it’s a game mate, keep your politics out of it’, if not outright punishment by the game authorities as in the Blitzchung affair.

Let’s be clear what this means. The politics of videogames has already played a decisive role in helping the most murderous political forces ever known on this Earth, as a matter of historical fact, to reawaken as a real and present threat to all humankind in the twenty-first century. Possibly the most serious threat, given its implications for the climate and ecological catastrophe as well as human freedom and safety everywhere. Blizzard’s decision to suppress voices challenging that threat must be read in that context as an explicitly political act: one that favours the trolls and tyrants, and promotes the suffering of dissidents and people considered different.

That context doesn’t go away if game developers pretend it’s not there. In their attempts to do just that, Blizzard had, in effect, declared in support of violent authoritarianism, and in opposition to the heroic struggle against it.

No authoritarian takes and wields power entirely by themselves. Atrocities from those of Hitler and Stalin to the present-day American border concentration camps, the English attempt at ethnic cleansing through the ‘hostile environment’, and Chinese cultural genocide in Xinjiang (yes, let’s call things what they are) can only take place because they are enabled by a sufficient mass of the population which, even if not in active support of those crimes, are cowardly or indifferent enough to keep their heads down and carry on business as usual. In a world like that, the atrocities will never stop – not until ordinary people take responsibility to think critically and speak out against blatant and egregious violent decisions.

Actions like Blizzard’s have real consequences. In this case, they signal to the CCP that its behaviour is acceptable, thus helping to enable further violence against people in Hong Kong as well as China more widely (including serious threats to Chinese overseas). They also signal to those oppressed that if they open their mouths to complain about it or call for help, they can expect a video games company, of all things, to join in their punishment. The belief that after all that there remains a respectable ‘keep politics out of it’ position to take does not even deserve consideration.

A Home No Longer

WoW was never without its problems. Humans play it, after all, and find the capacity to be terrible within it in all the ways they do so outside it. Toxic relationships, abusive groups, racist and gender-based hate speech, egomaniacal power-tripping and appalling cruelty are all things players encounter in it, and over fourteen years their presence in WoW at times caused serious injury to my life outside it.

But WoW as a whole is larger than any such villainy, and none of it upset what that world meant to me at a fundamental level. Blizzard’s decision to take the side of the authoritarians did. It devastated, instantaneously and utterly, everything that WoW has meant to me for nearly half my lifetime.

Not only because Hong Kong and China both have deep personal significance to me. Opposition to authoritarianism – rage at the heinous suffering it inflicts on this world, and at the destruction of my youth in bitter struggles with its English variants (which are just as barbarous as the Chinese ones) – has been the core of my political consciousness since a childhood when, like nowhere before or since, I called Hong Kong home. For most of the years since, if I had yet to find a way to confront the scourge of authoritarianism with a more decisive challenge, WoW was the place where I could do so by proxy, in a different world, at least to experience the sensation of it and get better at it till a time I could do so in this one.

Blizzard’s action stripped WoW of that entire meaning at a stroke. What substance remains in fighting the monsters in it, if the subscription money is going to those who support the monsters outside it? What is left of ‘the world could always use more heroes’ if at the first sight of actual heroes that world’s custodians brandish staplers at their mouths?

After the first two or three days of this scandal, the world I was logging into each morning already felt hollow. Routines that had been part of my day for so many years – to zoom around the world completing quick quests for gold or artifact power while chatting with fellow guild members – suddenly tasted so futile that they fell away in a few moments. WoW belonged to the authoritarians now. It was terminally corrupt. And suddenly, after a decade and a half in it, I realised with mounting anguish that it was no longer a home.

In the hours that followed this realisation was confirmed. I was a member of two different communities in WoW. They were led by marvellous people and had given me opportunities for regular and meaningful social activity in a way the outside world never had. This is something I believe many people whose most important and rewarding relationships (not to mention families) originated in WoW will relate to. But as hours and days passed, it became apparent that a gulf had opened between me and these fellows. Some of them were critical of Blizzard and offered supportive words, but at an essential level, they were all still able to find comfort and enjoyment in the game. I was not. That sense of connection had gone, and to stay there surrounded by people having fun in it as usual while the tear gas, rubber bullets and condescending bluster of the oppressors of Hong Kong ruled the air was too painful to bear. The only recourse to protect my mental health was to leave both communities, and so WoW’s significance to me as a social world evaporated too.

After some final record-taking and exchanges of contact details, I left WoW and cancelled my subscription. This has meant ruined friendships and the loss of my main social circles, much of my daily routine, and indeed an entire world whose masters decided it was worth leaving behind not only me and thousands of other disgusted players, but the very values which made WoW a strong place; a good place. In effect it has been a bereavement, requiring a painful full-scale readjustment of my life.

Though it may appear a principled choice, the fact is that there was little choice in it. I did not leave WoW so much as WoW left me. Those to whom it was so much more than ‘just a game’ – those to whom it brought love, hope, safety, freedom, a future – will understand just what level of hurt Blizzard’s actions have inflicted, and perhaps forgive description of these events with a word we should be extremely careful about using but which I believe matches the gravity of their deeds: betrayal.

In complying with the authoritarians, they betrayed their players. They betrayed their basic human duty to do no harm to other people. But perhaps worst of all, they betrayed their own stories, and it is from that last that those involved will never recover.

A beautiful world, the world that saved my life, is no more. I mourn its passing.

'There was not even any sound, because of the sand.'

Meanwhile something dark remains in its place, which short of drastic political change within the company can only sink deeper into the abyss. Which raises the question: will Activision Blizzard be held to account?

After the Fall

The weeks following the Blitzchung affair saw it swell from a tremor in the gaming industry into a full-blown international scandal. Blizzard’s repute was sullied across the pages of mainstream newspapers and media outlets. Their behaviour is under scrutiny not as mere corporate naughtiness but as a political phenomenon condemnable in the strongest terms, both from the left as a danger to human rights and from the right as a civilisational threat: namely, compliance in the CCP’s attempts to spread its censorship policies beyond China’s borders to suppress freedoms in other lands. Even the U.S. Congress deemed it serious enough to issue an open letter to Blizzard’s Chief Executive to express their ‘deep concern’ about the mistreatment of Blitzchung and urge them to reconsider; it was signed by several representatives including the formidable Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a rare instance of American cross-party cooperation.

As pressure mounted, a launch event for Overwatch on the Nintendo Switch in New York was cancelled at short notice. So was a WoW 15th anniversary event in Taiwan. Observers began to wonder how the scandal might overshadow BlizzCon, Blizzard’s massive annual convention and the biggest event in its calendar, held on 1st-2nd November in Anaheim, California. Sure enough, barely two days ahead of it, it emerged that the Taiwan branch of Mitsubishi Motors had pulled out from sponsoring Blizzard’s e-sports events following their punishment of Blitzchung.

BlizzCon itself however was a disappointment for those hoping for signs of either reckoning or lessons learnt. Most of the attendees are dedicated fans who book their coveted places months in advance and pay considerable sums of money to travel to it, so it was never a likely setting for nemesis to strike. A small but vigorous protest did make itself seen and heard outside the site’s layers of security, while a couple of courageous individuals succeeded in raising Hong Kong’s name in a Q&A session of the convention itself, plunging the hall into a guilty silence.

Protesters outside BlizzCon 2019 (from the Washington Post).

Most visibly, J. Allen Brack, in whose name the dubious non-apology of October 12th was issued, opened the convention with an actual apology this time. This was effective in spreading headlines that Blizzard had uttered the word ‘sorry’, but otherwise was as vague as a professional PR team could possibly have been designed it to be. They had apparently ‘moved too quickly in (their) decision’ and were ‘too slow to talk with all of you’ – the apology went that far, and no further. Though Brack stated he would ‘accept accountability’, he made no specific reference to the Blitzchung incident or Hong Kong and suggested nothing further as to what form that accountability would take, whether in terms of actions or policy changes; or whether the original punishments would be reversed; or how the damage done by their favourable signalling to authoritarians would be repaired; or whether something similar could happen again in future. The opening then seamlessly segued into what was effectively a feelgood self-congratulation for their role in ‘bring(ing) the world together’ with ‘the positive power of videogames’, followed by the dramatic unveiling of new games and the next WoW expansion. After the convention, it was quietly confirmed that no, the original punishments would not be rescinded.

As such, it seems Blizzard is continuing in their approach of pursuing business as usual and hoping that criticism will die down, save from a small minority of affected former players whose market impact can be ignored. I shall not predict whether that strategy will succeed, because that is a matter not of facts of life, but of choice. Every individual involved with Blizzard and their games, be it with producing them, playing them or talking about them, has a responsibility to reflect on as to whether they are okay with this situation, and if not, then on what means are available to them to hold such behaviour to account.

There are many ways to do that. Cancelling subscriptions to Blizzard’s games is the most obvious, but there are legitimate reasons that might be difficult – the human cost I have borne from doing so attests to that – and there are plenty other recourses if that is not an option.  You can take part in protest events like those at BlizzCon. You can get involved with groups like Gamers for Freedom, and write of your concerns to Blizzard, its sponsors, or your political representatives (and this matters – remember that even the likes of the US Congress is involved in this now). If nothing else, simply speaking up about it in your everyday life helps to make public discourse more difficult for the authoritarians and those who enable them to operate. Acknowledge the politics of video games and make yourself more aware of it, as well as of politics in general. Confront those who deny there is a politics or who abuse those who speak out. Be alert to prevent the hijacking of this movement by the tribalists of the far right, who are always looking for such opportunities; keep the discussion safe for people across the wide spectra of human diversity, and reject its mis-shaping into a racist attack against Chinese people. The problem is not China, nor even ‘communism’ (which is a different conversation altogether), but authoritarianism, which has no flag and ruins all nations.

If enough people’s choices amount to a critical mass of such action, you will not only effect political change at Blizzard in this instance, but empower the people of Hong Kong in their struggle for freedom, place pressure on the authoritarians in the CCP and elsewhere, and just possibly, have a contribution you can sign in the history books to reshaping the long-term politics of this world to make it a kinder and safer place for all human beings.

Right now, the conflict in Hong Kong grows darker and more violent by the week. Though part of me anxiously hopes it will not be the case, the current Chinese leadership’s total failure to empathise with Hong Kong’s people, and knowledge of no other means to address problems beyond insults and vicious force, make me fear that serious bloodshed lies ahead.

If it does, it is in that outcome that Blizzard and those involved in their games will have to weigh their responsibility. My authoritarian-blasting gnome, now returned to my soul, shall be weighing it too.

No king rules forever, Mr. Ying Zheng.