I haven’t been in the UK for about 2 months now and left more or less just as the student protests were kicking off. What I’m suspecting is that a whole swathe of people who even three or four months ago were broadly dismissive of leftist-y rhetoric and positions, cleaving to well-worn Late Capitalist orthodoxies of dismissing class-based grievances and struggles as relics of the past and congratulating themselves that they were smarter and more modern, cooler, than all that earnest, shouty and angry political stuff are now, sensing that maybe the fashionable, the “cutting edge” thing to be in 2011, is committed and anti-apolitical are, with varying degrees of success no doubt, now trying to reposition themselves as “he/she who knows” and doubtless with the same ego-salving, loftily dismissive air: “yes of course I was always of the Left, but at the time we all quite reasonably believed..” will be one strategy, another will be to broadly approve, with several “mature” objections so that you don’t seem to be too desperately reversing your position just because like, it now seems kind of unhip to be saying that stuff…

These people will scrabble after the authoritative discourse and try to cloak their essential emptiness in a little of its glory every single time there is some kind of shift, cultural, political, economic, whether to the left or the right, depending on where they feel they need to be situated in regard to power or the thrill of the underground. Prior to the financial crisis they dismissed predictions as scaremongering and racked up debt: straight after it they were telling you of course it couldn’t go on that way and were into bargain hunting, boasting how they had an i-phone app that let them compare the price of onions on any British high street, austerity being breifly the clever-person's choice. There is a left inclined version too who will have gone from “progressive Left-liberal”, dismissing any critical talk of Neo Liberalism or redistribution or revolution as Old-thinking, to being excited by its shiny new, Twittered-up rebirth, quietly trying to bury that old self they used to take such pride in and desperately reading up on all the right names and notions to drop in blogposts, tweets and pub chat. Political principle is this year’s lifestyle choice! Irony is starting to look so Last Decade...

So maybe it's time to scrap that novel you were writing, designed to demonstrate the range of your classical erudition yet heavy with pop culture references, wacky incidents, multiple narratives, kooky characters and smartarsed riffing on the minutiae of Late Capitalist life (but with a kind of diffuse melancholy thrown in so that it has some like, gravitas, yeah?) and go for something angry about the New Disaffected. They look like what’s happening right now. Maybe something about a gang of mixed race Urban youths who get involved in a protest, all set over one day, that exposes the divisions in our society and the vested interests and state power, kind of Kidulthood meets Saturday, or a British La Haine. Of course that way you can also show off your ghetto-smarts with the street-speak and the Grime and dubstep refernces, but it'll be an act of sympathy and solidarity with the underclass! Yeah, maybe that’s how you’ll get to be the voice of your generation.

Hey! Maybe this post will get re-tweeted by exactly the kind of people it attacks as a way of helping them kid themselves/others that it's talking about someone else!