Tory Scum

 

According to The Sun* a Tory MP’s Mum was called scum after Angela Rayner accused Tory MP Chris Clarkson of being scum. He demanded that Angela apologise to his Mum as apparently the word was invented in parliament this week. The newspapers are outraged that a Labour MP should use such language and the suggestion is that such “shameful” language is being encouraged by a Labour MP daring to say what most of us think. (*I almost wrote “The Sun newspaper” there, silly me.)

Meanwhile, Chris Clarkson, MP for Haywood and Middleton (see the image at the top), joined 321 of his colleagues to vote against an opposition motion to guarantee meals for school children during school holidays. Scum? Perhaps we need to think of a more polite word, but allowing poor children to go hungry does seem like the definition of scum behaviour to me. 

It did seem that this week was one in which Labour’s right-wing grew a backbone. What with Rhondda MP Chris Bryant telling TalkRadio’s resident nutter-in-chief Dan Wootton that he was a “dangerous nutcase” for peddling the ‘herd immunity’ myth. The Sun, inevitably, sided with the radio nutcase.  In Greater Manchester Labour Mayor and former leadership candidate Andy Burnham faced off against the Government’s imposition of Tier 3 status. Although, of course, this was reported in a number of papers as ‘Andy Burnham has become a sex symbol’ as the British media always manage to get to the heart of the matter.

Forgetful media

Faced with a government seemingly in free fall, their loyal friends of what is known as the ‘Fifth Estate’ (just the media to you and I) have found it difficult to maintain the charade of impartiality. But, impartiality is not so much what the media tell you, it is what they ‘forget’ to mention. 

The mainstream media did remember to tell you about the landslide victory for Jacinda Ardern’s Labour Party in New Zealand. However, the election seemed to take them by surprise given the lack of pre-election coverage, and is of such little consequence that it has warranted barely a mention since. Indeed, before the day of the election there was only one mention of politics in New Zealand and that was an anti-Ardern piece on the left behind in South Auckland. Compared to the 3 news pieces on the New Zealand election there are 2-3 daily pieces on the US Presidential election and these go back months.

The British media assume that you are obsessed with American politics to the exclusion of everything else, bar our own politics. The British media also managed to pretty much miss the landslide victory of Bolivia’s Movement Towards Socialism (MAS). This was a rerun of a previous election in which MAS leader Evo Morales was forced into exile by a CIA backed coup against him. He could not be on the ballot paper but backed current MAS leader Luis Arce, who gained over 50% of the vote. As Bolivian journalist Ollie Vargas told Democracy Now: “It’s an extraordinary election. In 2019, Evo Morales won by a margin of 10%, of just over 10%. And now we have a margin of over 20% with which the left is ahead. So it’s an extraordinary election.” And, yet, since reporting on the exit polls the BBC have been silent.

The rest of the British media either ignored this “extraordinary election” altogether or gave a short report on the result. The Guardian, nominally Britain’s most left-wing national newspaper had the sum total of 2 reports. As a comparison it has so far had 6 reports on Strictly Come Dancing’s 2020 series. But, The Guardian are an interesting case when it comes to telling us what to think about, because often they like to tell us what to actually think as well. 

News is not, as you might think, interesting stuff that happens, it is what suits the particular agenda of news proprietors, editors, journalists and advertisers. The Guardian was one of the main beneficiaries of the Wikileaks data that showed the abuses of American troops in Iraq. On 22nd October 2010 Nick Davies, Jonathan Steele and David Leigh filed a front page report headlined “ Iraq war logs: secret files show how US ignored torture”. The report was based on information provided by Chelsea Manning to Julian Assange. WikiLeaks released US State Department cables, Iraq war logs, top-secret files on Guantanamo detainees and a video depicting the US military killing Iraqi civilians and Reuters journalists from an Apache helicopter - with all the records leaked to the organisation by former Army private Chelsea Manning, a computer expert.

Julian Assange

Julian Assange, as I’m sure most readers of this blog will be aware, now awaits the result of a trial to extradite him to the USA, where he faces charges of espionage and a probable life time in a maximum security prison. I’m not going to go over the case here because both Craig Murray and Jonathan Cook have covered it extensively. What is interesting, however, is that a trial described by one person as ‘the trial of the century’ has received little or no coverage in the U.K. press. In fact, if you were the sort of person who gains all your news from BBC or Sky News or from a daily newspaper you could be forgiven for thinking that Julian Assange did not exist or that the election results in New Zealand or Bolivia had no significance beyond those countries. Or, that the most important thing to happen in the British Parliament this week was Angela Rayner telling the truth about Tories who have no issue at all with children going hungry.

You might think that what I’m pointing to here is a press not doing it’s job. Jonathan Cook makes this point regarding supposedly left-wing Guardian journalists. The problem is that they are doing their job. The existence of journalists like John Pilger, Paul Foot, Martha Gellhorn and Marie Colvin is the anomaly that allows the mainstream media to profess to champion freedom of the press whilst consistently closing down debate and supporting the establishment view of the World.

The problem is not just the press, but also politics. One of the characteristics that made Jeremy Corbyn so unacceptable to the establishment was that he actually cares about the views of ordinary people. Labour’s apparent growing of a backbone this week was a false dawn. Angela Rayner apologised almost instantly for her language. Dennis Skinner, the veteran MP for Bolsover was excluded from parliament on at least 10 occasions for so-called unparliamentary language including calling then Prime Minister David Cameron “Dodgy Dave” after he was named in the Venezuela papers. He did not apologise. 

Andy Burnham did not get the relief package he requested. His response was to ask parliament to take it up. In a letter to the leaders of all the main parties he said: ““This could be done by Parliament calling an urgent debate and vote this week to establish a cross-party consensus on what constitutes a fair financial framework for people in areas under tier three restrictions.” In 1985 when then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher refused to allow Liverpool City Council to set an illegal budget (an anti-austerity budget) they called a city wide strike and had 30,000 workers on the streets in support of the stand they were taking.

The Establishment

I wouldn’t want to give the wrong impression. I am certainly in favour of people in the Labour Party standing up to the Tories. I’d prefer it if they didn’t back down so quickly, but my concern here is with the political implications of a press which is simply a mouthpiece for the establishment. And, here I should perhaps be clear, when I talk about the establishment I do not only mean the Conservative Party. Owen Jones, the Guardian journalist, has written a book called, interestingly enough, ‘The Establishment’. In it he defines the establishment as “powerful groups that need to protect their position in a democracy in which almost the entire adult population has the right to vote.” (Jones, 2015, p.6) He goes on to describe those groups as: “politicians who make laws; media barons who set the terms of debate; businesses and financiers who run the economy; police forces that enforce a law which is rigged in favour of the powerful.” (ibid., p.7) Notice how he includes all politicians but only media barons. Perhaps to point the finger at journalists who work for those media barons is a little too close to home. 

As Jonathan Cook and MediaLens have pointed out the silence of The Guardian over the persecution of Julian Assange included those ‘anti-establishment’ figures George Monbiot and, who would believe it, Owen Jones. These are probably the two most prominent left-wingers employed in the national press yet neither of them whispered barely a word in defence of Assange. There are unwritten rules about what is permissible for journalists and the hypocrisy of the newspaper industry is beyond what any journalist would dare to write, particularly if employed at the top of the journalistic tree. A while back I was at a conference where the guest speaker was Will Hutton, The Observer journalist. He spoke about the economy and how it was mismanaged. He had nothing good to say about the Tories who he thought were incompetent. I nodded along in support, but I was genuinely surprised when he turned his attention to what he referred to as “the left”, by which he seemed to mean anybody more radical than him. At that point it hit me that whilst he was not a supporter of the Tories, his real venom, and it was venom, was reserved for “the left” for whom he set up a set of straw man arguments in order to show how they had no idea how the economy worked.

The press, in the UK and elsewhere, do not report news. Of course, some things cannot be ignored. But it is surprising, or perhaps not, how much is ignored. Defending their refusal to cover the Assange trial BBC executives will point out they did cover it. They, in fact, had one piece at the beginning of the trial and nothing since. It was an omission that was repeated in every mainstream newspaper and news outlet. The lack of outrage at the treatment of Julian Assange has been as manufactured, to borrow the phrase coined by Noam Chomsky, as the mass hysteria around Princess Diana’s death was manufactured following her death. For most people it is easy to ignore things which do not impact upon your immediate daily life. But, when the press tell you non-stop that you are in grief at the death of very rich young woman, then you are likely to start believing it. When somebody approached me on a tube station platform and asked me to sign a card of condolence for Princess Diana it so took me by surprise that I just stared at her and said “why?” Its not that I am lacking in compassion but the death of a Princess, or for that matter the birth of one, or their wedding, has no intrinsic interest for me. Yet, when I hear that a young left wing activist - Nathan Harmer - had died recently I felt genuinely moved and saddened.

For what its worth this is my view. We spend far too much time placing our trust in people to do things for us. Those people invariably put their own interests before ours. The exceptions do actually prove the rule here. Why has the press been silent on Assange, on New Zealand’s success with Covid, on the Bolivian left’s remarkable comeback? Why did the British press consider the general strike in France so unnewsworthy? Why do they not follow what is happening in Europe, but obsess over America? In a way the press set the agenda which politicians, on the whole, follow. There have only been 16 tweets about the Assange Trial, a quarter of those from Richard Burgon. Only 17 MPs took to Twitter to congratulate Jacinda Adern on her victory. Not a single Conservative, but only 15 from Labour. There were only 12 tweets congratulating Luis Arce on his victory in Bolivia and one of those was from New Labour’s grim reaper lookalike Andrew Adonis criticising Jeremy Corbyn for congratulating the “anti-American” MAS Party, whilst condemning him for not being enthusiastic enough about “moderate” Jacinda Adern.

News is not neutral

News is not neutral. News is what somebody else decides you need to know. You don’t need to know about Julian Assange because, frankly, your life is best served by not knowing what ‘your’ forces are up to when you cheer them off to war. And, why would we need to know about New Zealand’s success at eradicating Covid when our narrative is one of anti-lockdown and herd immunity. Even supposedly left publications, who may realise that ‘herd immunity’ is up there with other Covid myths, rather like the fact that it is being promoted by scientists. They are also rather fond of pointing the finger at so-called #Covidiots, who you may notice are usually working class and very often young. And, as for Bolivia and France well everybody knows that openly socialist parties never win elections and that strikes never achieve anything. The dominant narrative is abundantly clear. In short, it is repeated ad nauseum in its various guises to convince you that you have no agency in your life. Others - politicians, journalists, business people, scientists - know better what is good for you. Yes, you get a vote but in practice your choice is limited to which members of the establishment you want to run society in their interest. 

The trick is to convince you that in supporting the status quo, even when that keeps you in various states of poverty, that you have a kinship with those who despise you. You grieve for a dead royal whilst condemning workers killed in the pursuit of their  livelihood.  111 deaths at work last year and unless you were personally connected to one of them (in which case my condolences) you will not know a single name. Tory MPs are keen to talk about ‘personal responsibility’ and extrapolate this to the idea of the deserving and undeserving poor. People are poor because of their indolence not because the system is rigged to keep them that way. The press dutifully repeat these notional ideas of ‘taking responsibility’ so that our empathy is chipped away. But they don’t really want you to take responsibility for your own life, any more than they really want a free press. What they want is for ordinary people to cede responsibility to those who can be trusted with it. MP’s, doctors, scientists, lawyers and even journalists all of whom are more than made aware that their role is not just to do a job but to maintain the illusion of freedom whilst at the same time supporting a system that denies even basic freedoms such as food to many of its co-citizens. All the professions are over-represented by people with a public school background and even those few oiks who are allowed in find themselves surrounded by those who have been brought up to believe in their basic social superiority so that they imbibe their prejudices and spit them out as ‘common sense’.

Socialism is the antithesis of establishment superiority. The reason they hate the left and trade unions is precisely because they encourage the pernicious belief that ordinary lives matter. As socialists we can’t simply ignore the all pervading influence of the establishment. But, neither do we have to surrender to it. When we put our faith in leaders we negate our own ability to work collectively in our own interest. When we wait for journalists to keep us informed we subscribe to the narrow world view they allow us. As socialists we cannot change the system overnight but what we can do is avoid falling into the trap of believing the system can be made to work in our interest. We can support alternative media (The Canary, Morning Star, Double Down News) and progressive blogs such as Charlotte Hughes and Northern Lefty and we can stop waiting for MPs and other self-appointed leaders to move us into a new era. 

Self-help is a peculiar 21st Century obsession (just type self-help into Google to see the number of nonsensical books published on the subject) but it is also the very essence of socialism and has been since socialists first began thinking about a better future. Self-help, in this context, is not about individuals pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, but about ordinary  people joining together in unions, in campaigns, in community organisations to change the narrative that only members of the establishment truly understand what is going on and only members of the establishment can be trusted to change things for the better. Tory scum come in all shapes and sizes, and it really is time we stopped pandering to them.