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Folk Opposition
For David Cameron and ‘Big Society’ Tories, folk culture means organic food, nu-folk pop music, and pastoral myths of Englishness. Meanwhile, postmodern liberal culture teaches us that talking about a singular ‘folk’ is reductive at best, neo-fascist at worst. But what is being held in check by this consensus against the possibility of a unified, oppositional, populist identity taking root in modern Britain? Folk Opposition explores a renewed contemporary divide between rulers and ruled, between a powerful elite and a disempowered populace. Using a series of examples, from folk music to football supporters’ trusts, from Raoul Moat to Ridley Scott, it argues that anti-establishment populism remains a powerful force in British culture, asserting that the left must recapture this cultural territory from the far right and begin to rebuild democratic representation from the bottom up.
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90 pages, Paperback
First published November 16, 2011
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About the author
Alex Niven
21 books23 followersAlex Niven is an English writer, poet, editor, and former musician.
Niven was a founding member of the indie band Everything Everything, with friends from Queen Elizabeth High School in Hexham, Northumberland. He played guitar with the band between 2007 and 2009 before leaving to study for a doctorate at St John's College, Oxford and pursue a writing career.
Niven's first work of criticism, Folk Opposition, was published by Zero Books in 2011. The book attempted to reclaim a variety of folk culture motifs for the political left, and excoriated the "Green Tory" zeitgeist that had accompanied the ascendancy of David Cameron's Conservative Party in Britain in 2009-10. His second book, a study of the Oasis album Definitely Maybe, was published in Bloomsbury's 33⅓ series in 2014.
Formerly assistant editor at New Left Review and editor-in-chief at The Oxonian Review, Niven has also written for The Guardian, The Independent, openDemocracy, Agenda, The Cambridge Quarterly, English Literary History, Oxford Poetry, Notes and Queries, The Quietus, and a number of collective blogs in addition to his own blog The Fantastic Hope. His first collection of poetry, The Last Tape, was published in 2014, and his poem "The Beehive" provided the epigraph to Owen Hatherley's 2012 architecture survey A New Kind of Bleak.
He is currently Lecturer in English Literature at Newcastle University and an editor at Repeater Books.
Niven was a founding member of the indie band Everything Everything, with friends from Queen Elizabeth High School in Hexham, Northumberland. He played guitar with the band between 2007 and 2009 before leaving to study for a doctorate at St John's College, Oxford and pursue a writing career.
Niven's first work of criticism, Folk Opposition, was published by Zero Books in 2011. The book attempted to reclaim a variety of folk culture motifs for the political left, and excoriated the "Green Tory" zeitgeist that had accompanied the ascendancy of David Cameron's Conservative Party in Britain in 2009-10. His second book, a study of the Oasis album Definitely Maybe, was published in Bloomsbury's 33⅓ series in 2014.
Formerly assistant editor at New Left Review and editor-in-chief at The Oxonian Review, Niven has also written for The Guardian, The Independent, openDemocracy, Agenda, The Cambridge Quarterly, English Literary History, Oxford Poetry, Notes and Queries, The Quietus, and a number of collective blogs in addition to his own blog The Fantastic Hope. His first collection of poetry, The Last Tape, was published in 2014, and his poem "The Beehive" provided the epigraph to Owen Hatherley's 2012 architecture survey A New Kind of Bleak.
He is currently Lecturer in English Literature at Newcastle University and an editor at Repeater Books.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
September 10, 2017
I found this an incisive, and compelling polemic. It details the ideological vacuums of David Cameron's conservatism- and how he filled them with a rhetoric which was subtle and poisonous. Niven's use of the banner 'Folk' as a remedy is inspired.
February 14, 2023
It’s clear from reading this short but insightful and prescient book by Alex Niven where the genesis of many of the issues and concepts he raises in his excellent The North Will Rise Again come from. In Folk Opposition, Niven highlights that anti-establishment populism must be harnessed by the left to ensure that it is not used and abused by reactionaries and their ideological cousins in the far right. This is a prescient viewpoint given the Brexit debacle and the subsequent election of the clownish Johnson Tory government and the apparent rise in support for reactionary views amongst a significant section of the population. However, Niven sees causes for optimism and hope in the progressive nature of the football supporters’ movement for fan ownership and against Big Money and also in the innate potential of working people, especially in the north, to come together around common issues of social change, the arts and regional devolution. Summing up the need to do things differently and strive for change, Niven ends his book by quoting Kevin Keegan on the occasion of his second coming at Newcastle United. “They want us to have a go, and that’s why we’re here. We’re going to have a go.”
December 25, 2011
The idea of the ‘folk’ is woven through a wide range of political and cultural questions. Ian McKay, in his excellent The Quest of the Folk, sees the idea emerge as a powerful force in Nova Scotian identity making as an anti-modern motif in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, for instance, while a particular notion of the Volk played its part in Europe’s 20th century crimes against humanity. A more benign but still insidious image of the folk emerged in the mid 20th century, with urban and urbane repacking of a British rural ‘folk’ music where rustic bearded types with sandals and Aran sweaters romanticised the peasant girl’s reciprocated love for the lord, and other trite tales. In each of these, and so many other cases, these folk become or remain complicit in the established politics of power.
This sanitised British folk of the mid 20th century has never really gone away although it has remained kitsch (in its pejorative sense) as Morris dancers and their ilk are trotted out in villages across the country to play to a tourist market and nu-folk bands such Mumford and Sons continue to strip the peoples’ music of its politics and resistance – just as so many of their mid-20th century brethren stripped class struggle from the music they ‘revived’. Every now and then, however, something of that peoples’ music slips through, such as the zither on P J Harvey’s politically uncompromising album of songs about war Let England Shake – possibly the best album of the last five years.
In this (very) brief book (76 pages) in the outstanding Zero Books series of essays, Alex Niven takes us beyond those sanitised, saccharine folk images to show a political and politicised British culture of class hatred (think of Little Britain not as humorous – it isn’t anyway – but as an expression of contempt for the people), as a place where folk culture is idolised/idealised while the people are derided and denigrated while being deprived of outlets for their anger and frustration. In Niven’s case he explores this anger through the problematic expressions of support for Raoul Moat during his attacks on his ex-partner, her partner and various police officers in the middle of 2010 – but the could have easily have been citing Britain’s inner city ‘rioters’ in the summer of 2011. Tellingly, his invocation of the Moat case is not to condemn people but to explore how options for the expression of discontent have become limited.
This is not, however, a despairing book that sees contempt for the people accompanied by their silenced marginality. Niven looks to expressions of popular organisation as models of popular opposition, and finds telling examples assertions of regional virtues and in football club supporters’ trusts drawing especially on North East England (which makes the Moat example more poignant) as highlighting the potential for and possible characteristics of folk opposition. Amid all of this, it is quite difficult to identify Niven’s politics – but they seem to be a form of Labour Leftish-ness with perhaps a liberal/libertarian anarchist tendency, although his what-Labour-needs-to-do denouement may also be an element of North-Eastern pragmatism where Labour is, to a large extent’ the only game in town.
As with so many of the other books in this Zero Books series, this is sharp, engaged, polished and provocative – just what a good essay should be. The analysis is crisp and the propositions worth paying attention to, and given that my working world is one that deals with the cultures and politics of sport in this case particularly welcome.
This sanitised British folk of the mid 20th century has never really gone away although it has remained kitsch (in its pejorative sense) as Morris dancers and their ilk are trotted out in villages across the country to play to a tourist market and nu-folk bands such Mumford and Sons continue to strip the peoples’ music of its politics and resistance – just as so many of their mid-20th century brethren stripped class struggle from the music they ‘revived’. Every now and then, however, something of that peoples’ music slips through, such as the zither on P J Harvey’s politically uncompromising album of songs about war Let England Shake – possibly the best album of the last five years.
In this (very) brief book (76 pages) in the outstanding Zero Books series of essays, Alex Niven takes us beyond those sanitised, saccharine folk images to show a political and politicised British culture of class hatred (think of Little Britain not as humorous – it isn’t anyway – but as an expression of contempt for the people), as a place where folk culture is idolised/idealised while the people are derided and denigrated while being deprived of outlets for their anger and frustration. In Niven’s case he explores this anger through the problematic expressions of support for Raoul Moat during his attacks on his ex-partner, her partner and various police officers in the middle of 2010 – but the could have easily have been citing Britain’s inner city ‘rioters’ in the summer of 2011. Tellingly, his invocation of the Moat case is not to condemn people but to explore how options for the expression of discontent have become limited.
This is not, however, a despairing book that sees contempt for the people accompanied by their silenced marginality. Niven looks to expressions of popular organisation as models of popular opposition, and finds telling examples assertions of regional virtues and in football club supporters’ trusts drawing especially on North East England (which makes the Moat example more poignant) as highlighting the potential for and possible characteristics of folk opposition. Amid all of this, it is quite difficult to identify Niven’s politics – but they seem to be a form of Labour Leftish-ness with perhaps a liberal/libertarian anarchist tendency, although his what-Labour-needs-to-do denouement may also be an element of North-Eastern pragmatism where Labour is, to a large extent’ the only game in town.
As with so many of the other books in this Zero Books series, this is sharp, engaged, polished and provocative – just what a good essay should be. The analysis is crisp and the propositions worth paying attention to, and given that my working world is one that deals with the cultures and politics of sport in this case particularly welcome.
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August 12, 2020think at some point he just stops talking about folk culture
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews