THE NIGHT SHIFT - RPM Publications (£4.99)
Has the dust settled
on your previous
book yet? (Dutbingate was a withering
attack on John Prescott’s shady property
dealings in Hull).
Well I was thrown out of
the Labour party
for it. When my renewal came up the
Labour secretary said ‘I don’t think you
should be re-joining because you obviously
don’t get on with John Prescott’. I said ‘But
I’m not the one doing dodgy property deals
am I?’ And she said ‘But he’s deputy Prime
Minister and you’re not’ and that was the
end of that. What Prescott doesn’t know is
that (Dustbingate) was always meant as a
comedy and I’d tried to get my story made
into a film but it kept getting knocked
back. In the end I decided to cast John
Prescott as the star of the story and
started digging dirt on him. Then we got
hold of the story of how he was profiting
from re-possessed houses and before we
knew it there was a media frenzy in Hull
for about a week. Ultimately it was about a
bunch of factory workers wanting to use
John Prescott as a conduit to escape their
mundane lives. It’s the Full Monty of
journalism.
Anyone who’s
ever worked in a factory
knows how important a sense of humour
is to survive the humdrum daily grind and
your book captures this brilliantly.
I worked the night shift
for 12 years and
you do enter a world of cutting, black
humour and it’s this subculture that helps
you survive. The thing about working class
humour is that it’s very raw and
savage but it’s honest and you just don’t
see it in the media or on the TV these days
because everything’s so politically correct.
This kind of humour is the valve that we
manage our diversity by and which we
understand our diversity by. If we shut that
safety valve off our arguments will go
elsewhere and probably result in violence. I
do believe the media is eroding working
class culture through political correctness.
If you look at programmes like Rising
Damp, which I used to rush home from
work to watch, they’re now being shown on
Sky with a health warning! There’s a new
language being used now and everything
is managed in such a politically correct
manner. In the book my nickname is
‘raghead’ and some journalists have
objected to this. Some people have even
called me racist even though they don’t
realise I’m half Yemeni. The people who
call me raghead at work never did it in a
racist way and I’m perfectly capable of
being laughed at. You know when
someone’s being racist and when they’re
not.
Is it the politically
correct ‘standards’
that you object to the most?
Yes. Think about it. Where
do our
standards come from? Do they come from
politicians and the media? I think not.
Standards come from working people not
the top and that’s what makes me angry.
People don’t know what’s right or wrong
anymore because Hooray Henry has
pushed it so far. If we take Tony Blair’s
morality and standards where will that
get us? ‘No it’s not a loan it’s a donation.
It’s not an illegal war, we were promoting
democracy.’ It’s very slippery barrister
stuff isn’t it? All these values and laws
they’re bringing in are very dangerous
because they’re playing social
experiments with people’s lives. I would
rather laugh at politics than take out a
gun and that’s where we’re heading.
Now that you’re
a successful writer how
are you viewed by your former factory
workers?
I come from a very austere
working class
background in Hull and the only thing I
dislike about the working classes is the
resentment felt about people who climb
out of that class. There is a little bit of
that but the book has been flying off the
shelves in Hull so it’s obviously touched
upon something.
In terms of chronicling
the lives of the
working class, there’s not exactly a
huge literary output on this in Britain is
there?
It’s regarded as
unfashionable and there’s
a huge amount of snobbery in publishing
and in the media in general.
MATT BAKER
Author Q&A:
Ian Newton