by Sean Bw Parker (July 2025)
At the end of May, a man in Liverpool found himself trapped in his car amongst a crowd of football supporters, appeared to lose his temper, and drove out of the throng, injuring many. Thankfully no one was killed but several spent time in hospital. Shortly afterwards professional provocateur comedian Andrew Lawrence posted on X ‘no wonder he wanted to get out of shithole Liverpool so fast,’ or words to that effect.
The post quickly went viral, getting millions of views, and thereby expanding Lawrence’s bank account as is per economy of Musk’s social media: outrage sells. Along with this outrage came high-handed cancellations from respected organisations such as Comedy Store, pledging never to work with such a cad again.
All this coincided with Ricky Gervais getting his own star on Hollywood’s walk of fame, where he gave a speech condemning cancel culture, and news that a member of Irish rap band KNEECAP was to be charged with terrorism offences for public support of Hamas, with on-stage incitement to ‘kill your Tory MP.’ Personally I was more ‘groomed’ by Kate Bush back in the 1980s in the ways of pop music impacting impressionable young minds, never mind taking out elected politicians, but times change I guess.
Former Telegraph satirical cartoonist Bob Moran opened an exhibition of his ‘truther’-based work in London, having observed that comedians and satirists were no longer permitted to ‘say anything,’ as their editors and handlers were increasingly controlled by otherwise-affiliated owners. Moran is a major enthusiast of handicraft in arts, and labels the massively incentivised AI putsch as ‘total shit.’ The idea of books and other physical artifacts becoming valuable as objects in their own right, beyond the pressure of actually having to read them in a text-drenched culture, becomes more and more appealing.
The Trump administration has brought along a post-woke shift in culture, as Post-Woke Pete in writing, Ava Vidal and Jay Mack in comedy, Harry Saul Markham in writing and JD Vance in politics acknowledge the existence of woke and its importance, but point towards a more honest, humane, naturalistic way of being. Turner Prize winner Jeremy Deller’s feeling for Britain has long been of a folksy, quirky bent, verging on the ‘situationist happening,’ and he is one of the few mainstream (white, male) artists still allowed to comment on the idea of nation, however obliquely, as he ringleads masked dancers around the malls of the UK.
The British term ‘liberal’ is enjoying a new tension with the authoritarian left, the latter being the US usage of the L-word: if you’re a liberal in Britain you simply believe in freedom; in the US it’s more about being a pronouns-enforcing, perma-progressive ‘cat lady.’ The Marketplace of Ideas, a noble concept ever promoted by free speechers such as Andrew Doyle and the Academy of Ideas, increasingly seems to just mean who can shout the loudest and respond in the snarkiest manner, as actual debate is increasingly impossible unless there is some sort or broad consensus.
If the stories of Andrew Lawrence and KNEECAP have anything to teach us midway through the 2020s it’s that it’s now better to be sorry than safe, people’s limits are increasingly being expanded again, and the More Peaceful World forever pursued by the progressive movement is actually authoritarian, claustrophobic, and culturally speaking, deathly dull. The art world has changed immeasurably as the ridiculousness of Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs) is exposed as the emperor’s new clothes it always was, and carrot and stick crypto art scams fill the X and Instagram inboxes of creatives, forever working for nothing but a sliver of exposure.
Art and resilience in the secure estate (i.e. prisons) are seen as the height of virtuosity, as the inner locus of the average determined, based individual comes up against the autistic spectrum inner locus online, which is furious, generally binary-thinking, and drastically punitive/puritanical, however trans-sympathising. The Art of Synthesis becomes more important than ever, the ability to parse verifiable facts from journalistic rhetoric, and to try to funnel all the frantic messaging into a coherent form.
The cathartic properties of comedy and music dovetail into this synthesis in a saturated information environment—and punishing their makers for their daring to smash it all together is just more evidence of a panicking establishment, aware that it is losing control of any sort of hegemonic narrative.
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Sean Bw Parker (MA) is an artist, writer and contributing editor to Empowering The Innocent, a justice reform organisation affiliated with the University of Bristol Law School.
Follow NER on Twitter @NERIconoclast
