London's millennium dome – a large corporate tent

[Workers Power Britain, February 2000]

Paul Morris writes,

I visited the Dome in the early days when the Tory press was still fuming about its “political correctness” and “populism” – so my first reaction was to look for a reason to like it. I couldn’t find one.

The Millennium Dome is New Labour’s ideology projected into the soul-less space of a trade fair. It combines all the tacky insincerity of Blairism with all the shoddy showmanship of the UK private sector and its failing, second rate “brands”.

In theory the exhibits celebrate different aspects of living in Britain today: faith, the environment, travel, time and so on. In practice the actual content has been designed under the control of the sponsoring capitalist corporations, moderated only by the heavy hand of Labour’s former spin chief Peter Mandelson.

Ford’s “Journey Zone” is an excellent example of the blatant ideological pedantry at work in the Dome. It is meant to chronicle the history of travel and look at the alternatives for the future. The same lack design imagination that produced the Ford Mondeo has been at work in the Journey Zone. The story of the first few thousand years is told in writing stuck to the wall. Then you come to the first of many TV screens where a video shows about 12 actors simulating life aboard a replica Roman galley. Further up there is another video where the same 12 actors simulate a Viking raid – and so on.

The first real exhibit is – a Ford Model T. My problem with this was not so much the shameless self-promotion of Ford: the Model T was, after all the car that gave us the production line and thus some of the finest wildcat walkouts in the history of trade unionism. No – my problem is that the car is suspended 15 feet above the visitors, meaning that no one can touch it, get inside it.

Things get worse. After a replica of Stephenson’s Rocket (behind glass, don’t touch) you soon come to “the future”. To simulate the future, Ford has commissioned students from various universities to design futuristic integrated transport schemes. What would have been really innovative was to have actually built one, but instead they are portrayed as models, behind glass. Now the strange thing about every one of these future transport schemes, whether monorail, chemical powered or computerised traffic flow, is that they involve a small metal shell that takes about four people to an individual destination. Or a car, as it is currently termed. Public transport? Dream on.

Coincidentally, on the day the Journey Zone opened Labour transport minister, Lord Gus McDonald stood next to the chief executive of Ford UK on the steps of the exhibit, saying: “This puts paid to the idea that Labour is anti-car”.

It’s the same deal wherever you go. The Environment Zone, instead of being about how to save the Brazilian rainforest, takes you on a tour of a tacky English seaside resort. There is a Punch and Judy man who tells you to avoid dropping litter, signs of fake broken toilets tell you to report vandals to the police, fake arcade games encourage you to recycle things. There is no game encouraging you to re-plan the earth’s economy to stop environmental destruction, because that would mean nationalising Ford, Boots, Tesco, Marks and Spencer and all the other household names that have funded the exhibits.

As for the rest of the “experience” it is an insult to our intelligence as well. There is only one real restaurant – and that’s so expensive that it has become an exclusive retreat for the corporate types who are paying for the whole jamboree. For the rest it's Upper Crust, MacDonalds and all the other fast food outlets you find on an identikit British high street or railway station concourse.

If the Dome is meant to be a “symbol of our times”, as it's not-very-good web site proclaims, what does it symbolise?

First and foremost the relationship between New Labour and its private sector paymasters. Private sector money has paid for the Dome, but even under capitalism that is no reason to turn it into one big marketing mall. Coronation Street is funded by private sector advertising but nobody at Granada is stupid enough to make Emily Nugent stop mid sentence, turn to camera and say “Wella – because I’m worth it”.

Labour has allowed the Dome’s sponsors to indulge in relentless “product placement” and branding because it dares not and cannot ever try to lead the ruling class. In the Tories the ruling class has a confident political cadre that thinks in “centuries and continents” – and is often prepared to be at odds with public opinion. Labour – which governs for the ruling class but still has roots in the working class – always has to follow or guess ruling class opinion: it can never lead, never go out on a limb and, as the Dome shows, never sa

y no to a private sector marketing executive in a suit.
Because Labour cannot project a vision other than what it thinks the bosses will accept it is obliged to look for the lowest common denominator. Blair and Mandelson have managed to turn what could have been a good but pointless capitalist exhibition into a very bad one. That, presumably, is why the right wing press is on Labour’s back about the Dome as well as the traditional left.

But in addition to what it reveals about Labour’s relationship with the ruling class, the Dome also shows the ideological emptiness of modern capitalism. The Great Exhibition of the 1860s, and the 1951 Festival of Britain each had in common the belief in capitalist expansion. The theme of the Dome’s Work Zone is “no skills and flexibility, no job” – what a great future to inspire young children with!

Certainly there has been great culture produced in the last 50 years of modern capitalism – but whether it’s the paintings of Aboriginal artists, the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe or the films of Martin Scorsese - all modern culture teems with criticism of the way things are. It vibrates with the creativity of young people and working class people. That is why there is no place for it amid the Dome’s plastic seating and fluorescent lights.

In the Dome, despite its “faith zone”, there is only one god and it is profit. Tesco, Marks and Spencer, Boots, de Beers, Ford have constructed their exhibits like the rich family chapels in medieval cathedrals – ostentatious symbols of wealth and power.
But unlike medieval peasants, modern workers are not impressed. That’s why the Dome is losing money and popularity in equal measure. It’s no reflection on the workers who built it – or those who wear the yellow uniform of the Dome “hosts” – but the Dome is garbage. Don’t go.

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