The Audacity of Dopes

Merry fucking Christ, the media launched their election frenzy as full pelt. From now until May, probably longer, we'll have nothing but tedious bullshit on the news, in the papers and in various partisan blogs.

After the hundredth dreadful and tenuous metaphor on BBC News last night I gave up interest in the early coverage. That's not to say I'm not interested a t all, but by comparison 'The One Show' seemed like a fucking documentary. Let's hope that the party leaders don't decide that Adrian Chiles and Christine Bleakley's sofa is the place to campaign, although wedging them between items about leeches and diseased cat shit would be quite fitting.

I'll probably regain interest once it stops being so fevered and ridiculous. Or should that be 'if'. Actually who am I kidding, I won't be able to avoid it without getting rid of TV, burning the modem and barricading the doors.

They're trying to turn it into the media circus that the US elections are, making it all about imagine and personalities rather than policies. And there's probably a section of the population that likes this sort of shit, but not a big section. At a time when trust in politicians is at an all time low (and that's saying something) it's going to be hard to stomach a month of wall to wall lies and spin.

There's every chance I'll watch the live debates, in the same way I'll slow down to have a gleg at the scene of an accident. The fact that it was Sky News who did most of the bullying to make it happens tells you a lot about how they feel it will go, considering News Corp have already come out in favour of the Tories. Cameron is probably the most media savvy of the party leaders, and it's going to take a sterling performance from the other two to make any headway. He'll have been watching Obama's performances from 2008 on loop. He's not as cool a customer as Obama though - he makes it look easy and natural, whereas Cameron always seems to be trying too hard (WebCameron anyone?). Clegg is a bit of an unknown quantity (quite literally for some people), but it's Brown who will mostly likely struggle under the glare of the studio lights.

Considering the hatchet job the papers have done on Brown and Labour in the last few years it comes as a surprise that Labour are anywhere near the Tories in the polls. It would be nice to have what is constantly referred to as a 'hung' parliament, or what the rest of Europe calls a coalition government. There's a fair few countries who operate quite nicely with such a thing, such as Germany. I'd rather the Lib Dems were keeping one of the others in check, and I think Vince Cable probably has more public trust than any of the parties leaders or cabinet and shadow cabinet members - him as Chancellor in a coalition government is probably the best case scenario.

I tend to vote for a candidate as much as a party, since that's how our system actually works (note to tabloid editors...), although that's increasingly difficult in this day and age.

Last time around I was in the Withington ward, where John Leech ran a nasty campaign for the Lib Dems mostly involving lies about Christies, a specialist cancer hospital, being 'closed by Labour'. And they were outright lies, the sort of 'make the bastard deny it' shit that has been used in politics for too long - it became the agenda, and it worked, outing the sitting Labour MP who've been there since the 80s. It put me right off him, although he's not done a terrible job since getting elected. If I see any such bullshit this time around my few readers can expect to see an angry post about whichever lying bastard is responsible.

What I'm not going to do is tell you who to vote for. I'm not stupid enough to think a lone voice on a blog with a tiny readership will make a difference.

Class and politics ramble

Some scribbling on class and politics:

I should probably give up trying to establish a class identity. It’s fairly irrelevant to most of our generation and all of the generations below us, except those that get involved in socialist/anarchist politics – and those people would come under ‘middle class’ really anyway as they’re either a) students or b) people with enough leisure to time waste at such meetings. I used to bother to defend my alleged ‘working class’ roots but sadly the media own such debates now and ‘working class’ now seems to mean ‘dole scum’ i.e. the non-working class.

[It’s as tragic as the misappropriation of the word ‘emo’ to describe a recent fashion trend rather than an excellent 90s sub-genre of punk. I can’t even use the word now. Post-hardcore isn’t really the same, but it will have to do as a description for the future now that 'emo' is forever tainted.]

There’s isn’t a classless society as some politicians might like to suggest, but once clear lines are now faint to the point of barely existing, like a recently cleaned whiteboard.

I have perhaps in the past exaggerated my relative scumminess in comparison to the people I generally see these days, i.e. university educated, some of whom went to public school. I’ve probably been in more fights than most of them having lived in Mansfield from birth ‘til uni, and my family are far from rich, but I’m hardly a council estate kid selling hash and robbing pensioners.

To skip back to a half made point, it seems the people most interested in things like marxism and anarchism are students, especially the students who get involved in student politics. They don't seem to recognise the irony there.

It doesn't help that political debate in this country and others has been reduced to stupid reactionary debates, led by tabloid agendas set by media moguls who think it's their right to try to influence elections. It's created a situation where the papers will bang on about immigrants and muslims being the root of all evil using misinformation, outright lies and picking at latent prejudices, and if you speak to people who don't know much about politics there are the issues they will talk about, informed by the slow drip of hate coming from various media outlets. When the BNP try to campaign on exactly these issues (sometimes using quotes from these papers) the papers attack the BNP, having failed to notice that they have created a climate where their ideas can be accepted by people who would normally find such parties abhorrent.

Then the problem is created that expressing fairly liberal opinions on these issues leads to accusations of somehow agreeing with islamist terrorists and 'hating this country' because it's been turned into some stupid 2 sided argument (I hesitate to use the term 'black and white' here...) when in reality it's far more complex than that.

Then there's the feedback loop of parts of the media accusing other parts of 'dumbing-down', a debate so unhelpful it's ridiculous. When a newspaper accuses the BBC of dumbing down and then spends 3-4 pages talking about Katie fucking Price what conclusions are we supposed to draw from that? Even the 'quality' papers are increasingly guilty of this kind of shit.

Then in the same paper there will be talk of the government encroaching on our freedoms with tracking technology, CCTV, airport scanners etc, while encouraging the government to 'crack down' on crime and 'illegal immigration' . What do you want? A police state or anarchy? If you want it black and white then those are your choices. The reality lies in the middle, as ever. Some people like the idea of a crack down until it stops them doing what they want, as quickly as they want (see any UK airport, or any kind of police cordon anywhere), while others love the idea of anarchy until they get robbed or someone pushes in front of them in a queue. I could go on, but I've already rambled to much for now.

You can have it both ways - we've had a version of it for a long time - but it needs some tweaking. I have no faith that any of the political parties currently in existence will be able to make these tweaks.

Agenda

All news outlets have an agenda. Blogs are no different. Reporting with the least bias possible is actually the definition of good journalism, but it’s hard to sell and as such hard to find. No one reports ‘the facts’ on their own anymore, it has to go through the filter of whatever editor or news values the particular outlet has. From the perspective of someone under 30 I find a lot of these positions a bit outdated. It’s obvious to anyone who has even a vague interest in politics that the old certainties of right wing and left wing and now more of a grey muddle, but not many newspapers have embraced this. Scratch that. No newspapers have embraced this. While The Guardian comes up with some great journalism a lot of the more frivolous articles (especially the lifestyle stuff) live up to old stereotypes – the ‘liberal lefty’ middle class sandal wearer who buys organic and worries about shit that will never directly affect them. If it wasn’t for this angle seeping through sometimes it would be without doubt the best newspaper online. It’s not far off already. It is the only remaining leftish newspaper - The Mirror is a joke these days, trying to straddle a line between a half arsed socialist agenda and peddling the same crap as the other tabloids. The rest of the press lives up to a stereotype that has existed for some time in politics and media academia - that the press are much further to the ‘right’ than the general population. And all of them, including the Guardian, like the beat the BBC with any stick that’s thrown their way.

It’s rare for me to be on the same side as Peter Mandelson, but he was spot on when pointing out the likelihood of Sky News following the agenda of other News Corp companies in giving tacit support to the Tories. Rupert Murdoch certainly used to be a very hands on owner (stories of terror sweeping through The Sun offices as he stormed through are legend), and it’s unfeasible to think that he doesn’t have at least some of the chief editors (or does he delegate to a ‘chief whip’ these days?) of his empire on speed dial when he needs to set the angle on the day’s news.

The less said about the Daily Mail the better. Check out the Enemies of Reason blog for regular dissections of their nonsense.

So where is this one coming from then? I’ll let you decide for yourself, as I can’t be entirely sure how this all comes off to someone who isn’t me (if anyone is reading at all).