I bought a hoodie the other day, since the nights are starting to get quite cool in Brisvegas. In Britain, this would now be considered by the morally authoritarian Blair regime anti-social behaviour, I’ve since discovered. The Times of India puts it beautifully:
Never mind the attractive hooded sweatshirts on sale around the world as the shapeless uniform of urban noughties youth. The message from the political catwalks of London, straight from the mouths of grizzled political bears such as three-term PM Tony Blair and deputy prime minister John Prescott: wear a hoodie at your peril; it’s anti-social and you might find yourself breaking the law.
The extraordinary fashion directive, which some may liken to India’s saffron strand diktat some years ago against pubescent girls wearing tight jeans, came just hours after Britain’s largest shopping centre banned hoodies.
The ban is the first time a garment has officially gone on a shopping centre’s anti-social list. It is thought to paint the hoodie in new colours, very different from the roseate view of its wearers.
Blair backed the ban on Thursday. Hoodies and baseball caps were an ugly symbol of British abdication of respect for authority, he suggested. The hoodie could be intimidating, he said.
Blair’s fiat against the hoodie was in tune with his deputy PM’s publicly-expressed aversion to all the garment had come to symbolise at British shopping centres and urban melting pots.
Commentators said the controversy over the Iraq war may be dying, but it had given way to the equally controversial politics of the battle against the hoodie.
For, the hoodie has become the political punching bag for a generation of British politicians yearning to return the Anglo-Saxon West to an old-style sense of courtesy and traditional mores.
Of course, the real lives of these non-traditional youth are far more complex than generalisations about a culture lacking respect and deference would suggest.
Coincidentally, I was going through some old videos the other night and happened upon a BBC special on the House of Lords made in 1999 – prior to the removal of most hereditary peers. The Lords were voting on (by a large majority to reject) a Commons’ amendment to align the age of consent for gay and straight kids to 16. Outside, there was a spirited demonstration with protesters chanting “house of shame, house of fear”. There was a grab of a distinguished looking elderly legislator, Lord Annan, who turns out to be a life peer and a film maker and author speaking. Among his remarks recorded in Hansard are these gems:
People say that this involves a health hazard. All sexual activities present a health hazard. I shall not weary the House with a list of diseases which occur in heterosexual intercourse. Homosexuality does not cause HIV and AIDS. The HIV virus causes AIDS. What causes AIDS is unprotected sex for both men and women; and the BMA Council maintains that the present law inhibits efforts to safeguard the health of young men. Why is it that the important bodies connected with the young–they have been listed already today–are so adamantly in favour of the Bill? The noble Baroness said that she was surprised and pained by that. But she never went to see those bodies. She expected them to come to her.
I was just about to say that I was right at the end of my speech, and I was imploring the House not to be insular, not to ignore our role in Europe, and not to have a fit of the sulks just because life has changed in the past 40 years. We are not living at the beginning of the 20th century; we are living at the very end of it.
In an interview on the programme, he argued that politicians had no right to judge people – and young people particularly whose behaviour is often the subject of moral panics – and that the maximum amount of personal liberty was the aim that legislators should have.
Noble sentiments indeed, and ones that Tony Blair would be wise to ponder.
Elsewhere: More on hoodies at Rob’s.
Sadly, Lord Annan died about a year later.
Incidentally, on the article quoted, India and Pakistan are the last places on Earth where English is written beautifully.
Speak for yourself, Kim. I blog with tight words. Fully sick, eh.
Perhaps somebody should send one of those old (now worthless) $100 notes to Tony Blair—one of the ones with Mawson, bourgeois polar explorer, in a hoodie?
Is there not a contradiction between freedom of consumer choice and shopping centres banning the wearing of hoodies?
The hoodie Mark bought is dusty pink (from Industrie), I’m given to believe, and might prove intimidating to some.
Um, Liam, the paper notes are still legal tender. So far from being worthless they’re worth $100. Don’t send it to Blair. You could buy a really nice hoodie with one.
I’ve tried… I’ve tried again and again. I just can’t do it. It’s just not possible for me to look at the word ‘hoodie’ spelled out on a page or screen without thinking about circumcision.
What’s ‘noughties’? Nighties? Naughties? Nought ’tis? Nor tease? Naught ease? I’m lost.
I think I get it now. Silly me.
An attempt to resolve the difficult question of a name for this decade! It works better than one radio station’s slogan of “best hits from the 80s, 90s and now” since a song from 2001 could no longer be plausibly described as “now”. Still, I don’t like it. Since (I think) the practice of naming decades began in the Nineteenth Century, what was the comparable period called at the beginning of the Twentieth Century?
I mean – apart from La Belle Epoque?
Didn’t they do it by monarchies? I’m sure that when I’m 70 I’ll bore the young people with my stories of how it was when Howard was in power.
Mind you, he’ll probably still be there on life support.
Seriously though, Mark, sometimes there are garments that should be banned outright and their wearers criminalised. The white caps of the Klan, for instance.
What are we going to call the second decade? The teens? The tenties? This needs some serious thought.
A hoodie? Get real Tony. The world’s biggest violent, civil and economic crimes have all been perpertrated by men in bad suits.
Good to see though Mark, yer checking out the Times of India. It’s part of my morning coffee “what’s happening in the world” internet round. Indian journalists still go out there and break stories on the ground, love the language and believe journalism is a vocation not a career. Plus India’s about as non-aligned as you can get in the current geo-political cockpit.
One of my English teachers at school was an ex-Bangladesh journo who insisted, yea demanded, that we read HG Wells and RL Stevenson with a comb of the finest teeth, and led a class of 12 years olds in a sympathetic deconstruction of Kipling’s “Kim” – which, as he explained, injected the Indian term”pundit” into the popular western consciousness.
“What are we going to call the second decade?”
The Twoties.
You have got to be joking. Dont British pollies have anything better to do?
Funny, if I was reactionary enough to try and curb chavs in Pomland I’d be banning Burberry and Kappa myself…
Seems they’re concerned that teenagers engaged in criminal conduct use hoodies to conceal themselves from CCTV cameras in shopping centres. Must be true: I see it on The Bill all the time, when they let up from the soap operatic stuff.
Dave bought our two year old a couple of hoodies for winter. I put one on him the other morning and put the hood on his head and told him that if he was going to pull little girls hair he had to have his hood up so the daycare staff couldn’t see who he was.
Ha! Mindy – don’t tell Tony!
I’m wearing a black hoodie as I type. And now I’m off to hang with my homies. We’re going to terrorise little old ladies at the Claremont railway station and nick stuff from the BayView shopping centre.
Nothing new to my oldies who wouldn’t have dreamed of not taking off their hats indoors in their younger days. Coats and brollies too. Haven’t been able to wear my motorcycle helmet inside a bank for about 15 years either. Sounds like good old fashioned courtesy, rather than the end of civilisation to me. Sort of thing lefty govts(Bracks public transport regs?)have to legislate for now after a few decades of lefty inspired manners have taken root.
So now we have the manners wars, Observa? Of course going without millinery in public is all the left’s fault…
The swinging pendulum always overshoots Mark. Expect to be blamed for the weather next. Sweet Jesus, these Labour govts are better at it than bloody conservative ones and even the Swedish PM has had a turn(cover up that naked flesh girls)The fundies are driving all this.
Talking to an English friend of mine, this has been rumored for ages and there is no way in hell its going to happen. It’s just not practical. Hoodies are litterally as common as jeans over there, it being cold and all, everyone owns at least one. There is no way they could be banned.
All this is going to do is make them laugh at him even more. I suspect hes just trying to make a statement, or has completely lost his mind.
There’s no difference from Bob Carr’s claim some years ago that you could tell “gang members” because they wore baseball caps.