Mourning and melancholia

Abstract

Interviewer: ‘So, if you had a time machine you’d go back to the seventies or the eighties, when you were a lad, eh?’ Tony: ‘Look, all I’m saying is that things were better then. Yes, definitely, things were better. For people like me it was better. We had a right laugh at school, and, well, everything just seemed to work. There was jobs then. Everyone worked. People stuck together. And I think the truth of it is that most of the people were just happier, just, I don’t know what you’d call it. It just worked, that’s all… You’re going to say it wasn’t that great back then. Fair enough. Maybe it wasn’t. But I just didn’t see the bad things when I was young, and I don’t think other people did either. It was, the mood of the place, it was just different. Now, everyone knows how bad things have gotten. Everyone is just, well, it’s just not the same. You don’t see the good things, and I used to take all that for granted... I think jobs, real jobs, is important. I think when work started to go the pride started to go. I don’t know. But that’s what a lot of the lads want, not really for them but for their kids. People know that things are getting worse. Everything is fucked. They want that kind of life they had when they were kids. A sense of community, isn’t it? Pride in your neighbourhood. People looking out for each other and having a laugh. That’s what I’m talking about.’ Interviewer: ‘So why the EDL then? Why Muslims?’ Tony: ‘Well, it’s jobs isn’t it? Jobs and a lot of other things. We lost jobs with immigration. It’s obvious. And then it’s people moving in, people moving out. People who couldn’t give a shit about the place, couldn’t care about the people, the history. It’s more and more shit everywhere, everything getting worse, getting harder. It’s just, we’ve been forgotten. We’ve been fucked over and no one cares. That’s it, as far as I can see. Who cares now? We used to have respect and now we’re all over the place... To be honest, the EDL is all done, mate. It’s finished now. At least around here it is. The police, court appearances, no one can be arsed. Nothing happened really.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 79 citations exist upstream.