The Media: be careful what you wish for. Or complain about

You cannot hope to bribe or twist
(thank God!) the British journalist. 
But, seeing what the man will do 
unbribed, there’s no occasion to.

Journalism attracts a lot of criticism for its seamier side. 

Just as ferocious as this verse by Humbert Wolfe from the 1920s is the powerful 1931 denunciation by then Tory Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, of the press barons who were, in his view, seeking:

…power without responsibility – the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages

Clearly, the British press has had a lousy press for a long time.

For a contrary view, the journalist Guthrie in Tom Stoppard’sNight and Day tells us:

I’ve been around a lot of places. People do awful things to each other. But it’s worse in places where everybody is kept in the dark. It really is. Information is light. Information, in itself, about anything, is light.

The Press: even the best can be irritating or infuriating
but would we really be better off it without it?

Information is light. Indeed it is. If you want a counter-example, just take Saudi Arabia. There too there was annoyance with a journalist, Jamal Kashoggi. So he was assassinated inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul. Five Saudis have been sentenced to death and three to long prison sentences for the crime, all of them junior figures.

The suspicion is that they are scapegoats for a crime ordered far higher up in Saudi government, quite possibly by the Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman himself. But with strict censorship in place in Saudi, there’s no way those suspicions can be tested there by public debate in the media, any more than they can by the government-controlled courts.

In Britain, there have been two significant events concerning the media this week. First, the government excluded certain outlets from a press briefing, a move which at least was met with resistance by other journalists, who walked out. The British journalist can, it seems, also behave in a principled way.

The second significant event was the announcement that the government is looking at changes to the licence fee system that finances the BBC. Whatever those changes are, and however plausibly they may be justified, it’s clear they will lead to a reduction in funding.

Nicky Morgan, Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, has made it clear that:

As the world around us changes, our laws must change too. It will require the BBC to be innovative and to move with the times.

When the government starts telling the BBC that it needs to move with the times, it’s hard not to suspect that what it’s asking for is a move towards considerably less scrutiny of what government is doing.

That suspicion would be less strong if the government hadn’t already done so much to reduce scrutiny in the past. In the autumn, with the debate over Brexit raging in the House of Commons, Boris Johnson decided that Parliament should be prorogued. Suspending it in that way would indeed have greatly reduced the inconvenient oversight of government that Parliament was insisting on. Fortunately, the move was eventually judged to be illegal in the courts.

Today, with a more than comfortable majority in the House of Commons, Johnson no longer has to worry about parliamentary scrutiny. So now he’s rounding on the Press and the BBC.

Anyone interested in preserving an open society based on democratic values, should be opposing his moves. But there we have a problem of our own creation. The Left has been vociferous in its denunciation of the BBC and of the Press generally, contemptuously written off as the ‘MSM’ (mainstream media). That only plays into Johnson’s hands.

There’s no doubt that the BBC could be improved in many ways. That’s even truer of the Press: things certainly haven’t progressed much since Humbert Wolfe penned his lines and Stanley Baldwin denounced the Press Barons.

But “they say things I disagree with” isn’t a good enough basis for attacking the media. Especially when the effect isn’t really to drive them towards reform, but merely to reinforce attempts to muzzle them completely. When a right-wing government with autocratic inclinations is preparing a hole for the media, it would be a good idea for the Left not to help dig it any deeper.

Just remember: “Information is light. Information, in itself, about anything, is light.”

Things are a lot worse in the dark.

The Prerogative of the Harlot

“Power without responsibility — the prerogative of the harlot through the ages”.

Ringing words from Conservative Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin in 1931 (though they were written by his cousin, Rudyard Kipling). He was denouncing the Press Barons, influencers of events answerable to no one for the consequences. However, the denunciation applies with equal force to a great many others.

Baldwin (right) said it
Kipling (his cousin) wrote it

Take, for instance, a former boss of mine.

He’d founded the company I joined, basing himself on one brilliant product idea. It was, indeed, that brilliance which drew me in. It didn’t take long to discover, however, that the brilliance had stopped with the initial idea. There had been a short period of growth of the business, but then the company had stagnated, and now it was well into the inevitable next phase, decline.

That meant that radical change was needed. That’s what I thought I’d been brought in to undertake. Within a year, it became clear I was doomed to fail.

Nothing happened in the company without my boss’s say-so: no modification of the product, no phase of development work, no sales decision, no sales presentation even. Indeed, his domination of every aspect of the company was such that a naïve observer might have supposed any failure was down to him.

Not so. I was assured on the best of authorities, indeed the only authority that mattered at all in that business, that my boss knew exactly what needed to be done and was straining every sinew to make it happen. Sadly, he was surrounded by people of crass incompetence. Worse than incompetence. Some of the errors were so flagrant that they seemed deliberate, positive and treacherous against the business. Software developers who took unforgivable shortcuts or simply made elementary errors. Sales staff who demanded information and shared it with potential customers even though that could only put them off ordering from us. People like me who had the gall to question his every move and prevented him achieving the progress his efforts merited.

In fact, he exercised autocratic authority, but the responsibility for any failure was down to anyone but him. Power without responsibility. It was a harlotry I couldn’t bear and I left. Though, to be fair, had I not jumped I would certainly have been pushed soon after.

This was all petty stuff. A few people were inconvenienced in their careers. An insignificant company faded towards well-deserved oblivion. A man prey to an authoritarian streak was presiding over the collapse of unearned ambitions.

Now, though, consider a much more substantial backdrop for such behaviour.

A by-election in a massively safe Conservative seat, Sleaford and North Hykeham, has just elected another Conservative. No surprise there. What is more concerning is that Labour, which came second in the General Election eighteen months ago, came fourth this time around. Vernon Coaker, a Labour MP, commented that in the by-election, “everything was about Brexit”.

Indeed. In another by-election, in Richmond a week earlier, the Liberal Democrats had overturned a huge Conservative majority by firmly opposing Brexit. It is the issue of the day. But Labour, sadly, has no coherent position on it. At best, it criticises the government’s handling of the Brexit process. But it seems to have no clear position on the substantive issue: are we for or against Brexit? Will we only accept a soft Brexit – in which we stay in the Single Market or at least the Customs Union – or a hard Brexit in which we cut all such ties?

No one knows because no one in the leadership is saying.

So we drift from catastrophe to catastrophe. The Sleaford result was completely in line with national polls, which put the Conservatives well up on their General Election result and Labour well down.

Now it’s possible to be as naïve as I was about my boss. Some of us might conclude that if Labour is unable to develop any kind of leadership over the one great question that is agitating the minds of voters, then that’s down to the leadership. Or, more to the point, its lack of leadership.

Again, though, that view turns out to be wrong. The backers of the present leader, Jeremy Corbyn, never tire of telling us that he’s outstanding. The problem is he’s let down by those, like the Parliamentary Labour Party, or others who have no confidence in him and who are therefore ‘red Tories’ or ‘Blairites’. On their shoulders and their shoulders alone lies the blame for Labour’s parlous position.

Corbyn and his circle of admirers insist that they have a mandate from the membership. That allows them to dictate our way forward while we just have to swallow our objections and get on with helping them achieve a glorious future for the country. If glory escapes them, however, be sure that it isn’t down to them. They have power within the Labour Party, you see, but no responsibility.

The prerogative of the harlot through the ages.

Time to take our country back?

One of the benefits of having more money than you can really spend is that you have a little to spare for useful investments. Like buying a government.

Now don’t get me wrong. The super-rich don’t necessarily engage in what could be viewed as strictly illegal behaviour. They don’t, or at least don’t usually, pop bundles of banknotes into politicians’ pockets or transfer colossal sums to numbered accounts in off-shore banks. 

No, what they do is fund election campaigns or whole political parties.

Donations to parties or individuals are naturally made in a spirit of altruism. They come from corporations or people of huge wealth whose concern is with giving something back. They don’t expect any benefit for their contribution. 

And if you believe that, you’ll believe anything.

One gift generates an appetite for the next. Clearly, if you do things that will upset the giver, the chances of another installment sink rapidly. So it’s vital to keep these big donors on side. If that means trimming the odd policy here and there, well, that’s quite literally the price you pay.

That the British Conservatives behave this way is obvious. They are, after all, the party of the super-rich, doling out the tax cuts, and led by men – mostly men, anyway – from the great bastions of privilege, the most prestigious public (i.e. private) schools.

What’s less obvious is that Labour too is prone to this kind of behaviour. In 2009 Peter Mandelson, then a Labour Business Secretary, announced that the party was “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich.” That demonstrated that he, and many of those around him, had been infected by the same inability as the Opposition to take on the people who exercise self-interested power with no requirement to account for it.

In a different context, a pre-Second World War Conservative Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, spoke of “power without responsibility, the prerogative of the harlot through the ages.” We really don’t need Labour being relaxed, intensely or otherwise, about such harlotry.

Don’t forget that the people who make sure we get the best government their money can buy, already own a disproportionate proportion of the country. The Equality Trust points out that Britain not only has a high level of income inequality compared with other nations, but the situation is even worse when it comes to wealth: the top 10% own 45% of the wealth, the top 20% own 64%. At the top end of this range are the people who own the Conservatives, and too easily influence even Labour.

It’s that influence, making Labour far too intensely relaxed over matters that ought to concern it more, that is most worrying. If Labour doesn’t speak for those whose voice is least heard, who will? The Conservatives are already firmly anchored in the deepest pockets.

The EU Parliament.
But are these really the most toxic faceless men?

Our remedy is to keep Labour focused where it should be, and find a way to return it to power. At the same time, we need to turn where we can for support against the owners of the country, and the EU has shown it can help: whether on working hours, pensions or holiday pay, Brussles has adopted some measures which at least set a floor below which rights should not be pushed. A floor we badly need, with a government which decided that the appropriate response to the crash of 2007 was austerity. This is a policy that forces the poor to pay for the bankers’ foolhardiness, while preserving or even improving the living standards of the rich (incidentally giving them still more financial power to buy government).

In this context, it’s curious to hear workers demanding their country back. They aren’t wholly wrong. It certainly doesn’t belong to us. Where they’re mistaken is in thinking it ever did, that it’s a matter of getting it back. It’s always belonged to people with huge means, firmly rooted in this country, not some group of bureaucrats from abroad.

Far from being a threat, those bureaucrats, the term used as a popular shorthand for the EU, offer some limited bulwark against our own unscrupulous wealthy.

Workers who demand a vote to leave the EU in order to win back the country from the control of faceless bureaucrats in Brussels, need to be careful what they wish for. They won’t be taking control themselves. They’ll only reinforce the power of the austerity merchants who are inflicting such pain on us already.

Be warned: they’re not just faceless, they’re heartless too.

Betrayal, obscurity, radicalism, disaster: the various models of British government facing Britain today

It’s a hallmark of the political left that its failures often take the form of betrayals.

That’s not surprising. After all, the left is there to speak for the little man against the master class. But, however much we may resent his power, we all tend to admire the master – perhaps Freud would prefer the word father – so we often end up seeking his approbation at least as earnestly as we oppose his authority.

That was Tony Blair through and through. He wanted to oppose the British Conservative Party, but wanted to win their grudging admiration as he beat them. He needed to show, for instance, that he was capable of being at least as patriotic, at least as warlike in his patriotism, as they were. So he’s left a legacy which, despite its many and striking achievements – on child poverty, on healthcare, on human rights – will forever be overshadowed by his catastrophic war in Iraq. A war he waged with overwhelming support from the Conservatives, and against widespread opposition in his own party and across the nation.

That betrayal was only the second worst in Labour history, however. The greatest was carried out by the first Labour Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald. A fine radical figure and even a pacifist, he began to show that fatal desire to be approved by the establishment when he agreed to wear pompous (and expensive) court dress in order to be presented to the King. A trivial matter, but an important symbol: he showed his willingness to bow down, for all his radicalism, to the master and his (allegedly) quaint customs.

Ramsay MacDonald, the first Labour Prime Minister
But the smiles would later turn to tears

The truly substantial betrayal came in 1931. 

Facing a crisis as we did in 2009, he decided, as the present Conservative government has, to tackle it through austerity. That meant cutting spending, including unemployment benefit at a time when unemployment was rocketing; that wasn’t a policy Labour could back, so he formed a so-called National government in coalition with the Tories. Only he and two others of his Ministers joined the new government, however, and it was dominated by the Tories. The 1931 general election saw the Labour Party reduced to just fifty seats in parliament.

With the right, in Britain at least, things tend to be different. You get three kinds of Tory government: the ones which do nothing much at all, just widespread meanness without vision; the ones that leave a deplorable mark in history; and the third kind which are even meaner than the first, but with spectacular success.

Maggie Thatcher is the iconic figure for that last kind of Tory. If you were gay, if you were a miner, if you were poor, if you were a trades unionist, you could expect nothing but the cruellest treatment from her. Why, even if you were Nelson Mandela, you only received contempt. But she did it all with style, with ruthless determination, and she achieved a great many of her objectives. 

Far too many.

The first kind of Conservative is represented by figures who have drifted into well-deserved obscurity. Stanley Baldwin, for instance, who joined the so-called National Government under MacDonald, and emerged as the openly Conservative Prime Minister in 1935. No one remembers much about him, but his time in office was marked by such events as the Jarrow hunger march. It protested against a state in which cities in the North of England had unemployment rates of 70%. Britain was the hub of a great Empire, but had citizens dying of starvation.

Baldwin was followed by the man who is the prime example of the disastrous Tory, Neville Chamberlain. He signed the agreement with Hitler which he claimed would guarantee “peace in our time.” World War 2 broke out a year later. When he presented the agreement to parliament and Arthur Greenwood, deputising for the absent Labour leader Clement Attlee, rose to reply in a House of Commons silent with shame at the government’s cravenness, Leo Amery cried out from the Conservative benches, “speak for England, Arthur.” Such was the depth of the humiliation that even Tory supporters of a Tory government had to call on Labour to reassert some pride.

Why is any of this interesting today?

We have a radical leading the Labour Party. But many among his parliamentary colleagues are mired in the belief that we still need to win the approval of their masters. So who will win? Will he stand firm against the failures of the Tory representatives of that master class and continue to reject what they stand for? Or will he be brought down and replaced by another Ramsay MacDonald?

On the other side, the question is more about what type of Tory government we’re looking at. It certainly won’t be the Thatcher kind. After five years in a coalition administration, and nearly a year on their own, there’s no sign of any great radical act to mark its tenure. Today these Tories look like Baldwins: nasty, but without either courage or conviction. They have, on the other hand, put themselves in a position where they have to hold a referendum on British membership of the European Union, probably later this year. That could well lead to the disastrous outcome of Britain leaving.

In the Middle East, they’re to be pursuing the same Blair approach of reliance on military muscle – and we know where that got us in Iraq.

Baldwins, so far, then. But it looks as though they may be setting out on a different course. Could they be about to turn into Chamberlains after all?

Cameron's great reforming decade

It’s heartwarming to start 2016 with the stirring words of David Cameron ringing in my ears.

According to his New Year message, Britain is living through “one of the great reforming decades” of our history.

We’ve had great reforming eras before. Attlee’s post-War Labour government launched the National Health Service and put in place a welfare state. In the sixties, we saw Labour back under Harold Wilson and making changes that would revolutionise the way we live: doing away with the death penalty for murder, ending the legal prohibition of homosexuality, massively extending access to education. And then, in 1997, we had a Labour government which, despite the Iraq War tarnish Tony Blair gave it, notched up some remarkable achievements: the human rights act provided Britain with the closest thing to a fundamental law in its history, while the introduction of a minimum wage was matched by outstanding levels of investment in the NHS. The government took millions out of childhood poverty and brought peace to Northern Ireland.

If your preference is for the Tory version of reform, there were the Thatcher years too. We had section 28 to demonise homosexuality again, the deregulation of business that allowed unregulated banks to punish us all for their irresponsibility in the 2008 crash, and the crushing of the unions to give us today’s zero-hour contracts and non-living wages.

So what are the great reforms that Cameron has ushered in? Well, there was gay marriage, and we shouldn’t underestimate that change. On the other hand, the first breakthrough came with the introduction of civil partnerships, under a reforming Labour government, in 2004. In the next year or two, we may have a major decision to take over membership of the European Union, but that will lead either to no change at all, or to a regression to pre-1975 isolationism.

Apart from that, what have we had? Five years, now extending to six, of austerity economics. The effect has been of slowly extending hardship across the least well off in society. Less support for the working poor. Severe cuts to assistance to the ill. An onslaught against the unemployed. And, of course, the slow strangulation of the NHS as hospital after hospital goes into the red.

A monument to Cameron's achievement: homelessness growing again

These policies are intended to serve what Cameron presumably views as his big idea: the elimination of the “structural deficit” in government spending (structural deficit is a slightly easier form of deficit to cut than the actual deficit) and the reduction of public debt. However, what he described as the “legacy of debt” Gordon Brown had left to our children in 2010, had grown by well over half as much again by 2015. That’s because progress has been minimal over the deficit – it’s been pain without gain.

Indeed, in October 2015 the deficit reached its highest level since 2009, at the time of the crash.

Not much sign of a major, dramatic turn for the better there then. Nothing to compare with legalising homosexuality or even privatising the railways. Instead all we see is a general greying of society, a growing meanness as those already least comfortable in their lives are made to suffer more, while those imposing the misery retreat into their increasingly valuable houses and shut the door on what’s happening outside.

Perhaps we shouldn’t pay too much attention to Cameron’s notion of a reforming decade. Instead we should focus on the beginning of his messages and the words, “for me, there are no new year’s resolutions, just the resolve to continue delivering what we promised in our manifesto.” That sounds much more like him, doesn’t it? For “no resolutions” read “no ideas, no commitments.” For “continue delivering what we promised” read “we’ll go on with the policies that have failed for the last half decade, and once again miss our objectives.”

A decade of reform? Sounds more like another five years of increasing squalor and low achievement. Rather like the years under Stanley Baldwin's Tory government. If you've never heard of him, or can't think of any of his achievements – well, that would be precisely my point.

Still. Happy New Year. Let’s make it one in which many more people wake up to the fact that they don’t have to put up with this kind of government for ever.