Today in Short Answers to Stupid Questions: New Labour transport minister Tom Harris asks why everybody in Britain is so bloody miserable.
This has been another edition of Short Answers to Stupid Questions.
New Labour
The voice of the soft Labour left
Reading David Osler’s blog is always interesting, because he always manages to capture the views of the soft, making excuses for New Labour left, like Polly Toynbee with better writing skills and slightly more self knowledge. A good example is his commentary on l’affaire David Davis. For those who didn’t pay attention last week, shadow home secretary David Davis resigned his seat in parliament to force a by-election after the government won the vote on extending the time terrorism subjects could be held without charge from 28 to 42 days. According to Davis (and I would agree with him) “42 days is just one – perhaps the most salient example – of the insidious, surreptitious and relentless erosion of fundamental British freedoms.”
So how did Osler respond to this? By portraying it as an opportunistic stunt of course, sounding little different from Harriet Harman:
Part of me almost admires the gesture he is making. In so far as it will keep up the pressure on the government to rescind the disgraceful legislation that the Commons carried last night, I’d even go as far as to call it a good thing. But a gesture it remains, and a deeply opportunistic one at that.
Myself, I’m with Blood and Treasure:
It seems to me that the choice available over this is to outsmart yourself by trying to uncover the “real reasons” behind his resignation or take him at his word and push the issue. And whatever else Davis might have in mind, and whatever you think of his framing it as “fundamental British freedom” this is the issue.
That seems to me to be a much more productive attitude to take than jeering about how opportunistic Davis is, or how much of a rightwinger. But that’s the soft left for you. A guy like Osler always ends up making excuses for Labour, letting tribal loyalty overrule his disgust of the party’s policies by arguing that the Tories would be worse, even if it’s getting harder and harder to do so with a straight face. That’s why he has to rubbish Davis.
“Tonight ,Matthew, We’re Going To Be The Republican Party”
New Labour continues to draw from Karl Rove’s bag of Republican dirty tricks in the Crewe bye-election:
There have also been Labour attempts to smear Edward Timpson, the Conservative candidate, as a “friend of the paedophile” because he has occasionally defended sex offenders in his job as a barrister. “I think you will find he is not the type of lawyer he claims to be,” one Labour MP said.
In further evidence of negative campaigning, Labour activists have been accused of telephoning Crewe voters in the middle of the night posing as Conservative canvassers. A Tory campaign source said: “It would not surprise us if Labour was stooping to this level. Its entire campaign has been marked by mean-spirited stunts and dirty tricks.”
They are also appealing to the BNP vote by circulating a leaflet accusing Timpson of opposing ID cards for foreigners – even though the actual policy is for no ID cards for anyone. I await the inevitable breaking into of campaign headquarters and the polling-booth voter challenges with interest.
How much lower can New Labour sink? Well, since you ask….
Legacy Labour and A Load of Cobblers
I know that I’ve advocated class war but this isn’t quite what I had in mind…
Crewe and Nantwich, in Cheshire, is a diverse constituency that (in tv terms) embraces 2 Pints of Lager, Footballers Wives and To The Manor Born all the same time. It has a bye-election next week to elect a replacement for the much-lamented Gwyneth Dunwoody (whom I rarely missed tearing MPs off a strip every Sunday night on Radio 4 on ‘In Committee’. Now you know what a sad wonk I am).
The campaign is exposing just how particular class war in Britain can be: while there’s always been constant internecine class warfare in Britain, it’s not as a rule between the peasantry and the toffs, it’s between the various gradations of the middle classes. Take the current series of the Apprentice for example; the one genuinely working class contestant immediately teamed up with the undoubted toff leaving, as always, the uncertain middles to fight it out amongst themselves.
The scrap is getting particularly vicious in Crewe, where we’re being treated to Labour accusing the Tory of being posh:
A central plank of Labour’s campaign is that the Tory candidate, Edward Timpson, is “one of them”, a posh boy who has not got a clue how people in a down-to-earth place such as Crewe think and feel.
Labour has mocked Timpson by dressing activists in top hats and morning suits, continually pointed out that he lives in a £1.5m mansion, and has gleefully drawn attention to the “exotic South American llamas” that roam the fields around his country pile.
But a quick visit to the Timpson pad 15 miles north of Crewe reveals that not all is as it seems. Certainly, his house is lovely, enjoying splendid views across to the giant Lovell telescope at Jodrell Bank. But the lush fields that feature in the Labour photograph of his home are not his. And the llamas belong not to him, but to a local farmer. The roping of the llamas into the Labour campaign is one of the “dirty tricks” that Tory leader David Cameron claims he is receiving reports of every evening.
All is indeed not as it seems.
New Labour has a track record of copying Republican campaigning techniques and one that proved the most effective for the GOP (or at least it did for a long while) is projection: project onto your opponent the weakness you yourself have, in order to draw the media fire away. Labour are still campaigning like it’s 2005, but times have moved on and those campaigning techniques have long been discredited by Wikipedia and the fact-checkers of the blogosphere. Neither Crewe or national voters are fooled. For all Labour’s attempts to portray their candidate Moyra Tamsin Dunwoody-Kneafsey as Tamsin Dunwoody, girl socialist and ‘one of us’. it’s not the Tory candidate with the listing in Burke’s Peerage or the country pile with paddocks in leafy Wales.
The gradations of British class warfare can be infinitely subtle; who’s more in tune with the plebs, the wealthy one-nation Tory descendant of philanthropic cobblers or the well-born, well-connected daughter of a career parliamentarian attempting to hold on to her mothers’ seat as of right? Strangely enough it’s the latter whose supporters (in typically lower-middle fashion, deferring to the class just above them by handing them a sinecure) trying to convince a working-class electorate that she’s one of them.
Oh no, she’s not:
Dunwoody was born in Totnes, Devon, the daughter of the late Labour MPs, Gwyneth Dunwoody, and Dr John Dunwoody. Through her mother she is the granddaughter of former Labour Party General Secretary, Morgan Phillips and Baroness Norah Phillips. She was educated at The Grey Coat Hospital and the University of Kent.
It doesn’t matter which candidate is posher, both are posh. If they really must settle the matter over who’s the most posh, then the media’s going to have to start going into cultural signifiers like what newspapers their au-pairs buy, where their nanny was educated or whether they use napkin rings and say ‘toilet’.
Of course New Labour could have selected an actual working class candidate rather than another posh legacy Labour type whose spent her career getting the New Labour equivalent of wingnut welfare, but the one constant in this kind of electoral class politics is that the actual working classes are barely on the radar when it comes to candidates. No, they’re just consumers, box-tickers and payers of taxes, not actual participants in the process, and they’d better know their place which is to be sold to. Meanwhile the various gradations of privilege on both sides of the aisle carve up Parliament amongst themselves.
Hypocrisy is A Smiley Face Telling A Fairytale
Sometimes I just want to bang my head on the wall with the sheer jaw-dropping, mind-numbing hypocrisy of it all.
The Guardian’s Jackie Ashley writes this morning about the New York Times April ‘expose’ of Rumsfeld’s paid media sockpuupets, already exposed by many, many progressive bloggers; and in the light of the Times own trumpeting of the White House line and Judith Regan’s fake reports, it’s frankly a bit of a joke.
Ashley purports to be horrified at what the NYT reveals about the revolving door between the media, defence industry, government, military and lobbyists and about US media figures’ personal complicity in building a false case for an illegal war.
So what are the darker messages for us from this American scandal? I was struck by the way in which the deal between the analysts, the TV bosses, the Pentagon and – behind them all – the military contractors, never needed to be explicit. The Pentagon didn’t need to offer cash, or lean on anyone. The TV networks did not ask too much about their experts’ sources of information, or their outside interests.
That this comes as a surprise to her makes me wonder where this woman, who’s paid well to be plugged into politics and world affairs, has been for the past few years. Has she not met the internet? The central narrative of progressive blogs since 2000 has been the complicity of mainstream journalists in pushing the right-wing, pro-Israel, militarist neoliberal line and parroting the White House’s fake war rhetoric.
It;s not as though she’s shown herself unaware of the Murdoch press’ in particular’s role in making the case for war; this is what she said in 2003 during the David Kelly/BBC/Gilligan affair:
Those papers have been intertwined with New Labour ever since it became clear that Blair would be in Downing Street. Blair wooed them, and from the first Murdoch, sensing a winner, responded.
Sun and Times journalists were courted and favoured with leaks, which they could promote as scoops; Murdoch editors were treated as visiting royalty when they were entertained at No 10 and Chequers. It is shameless, unabashed, and was driven both by Blair and by that high-minded socialist and critic of journalistic standards, Alastair Campbell.
Why do they do it? Because the deal is frank, and even on its own terms, honest. Murdoch wants media power and Blair wants reliable media support. So long as nobody takes journalistic principle or the public interest too seriously, then there is a deal to be done. One day, if Murdoch gets his way, he will be in a position of terrifying influence over any future government. So this is a dangerous time for the BBC. In some ways it has been here before. In the wake of the Falklands war, when Alasdair Milne was director general, Margaret Thatcher berated him about BBC funding and journalism in terms almost identical to those we hear from Labour now. John Birt had his rows too
Yet this is the woman who professes to be horrified at the way the system in which she works works.
It was all nods and winks. Does this begin to sound familiar? It wasn’t cash for peerages. It was propaganda for access. But isn’t the underlying structure – you do me a favour, I’ll see you right, while neither of us says a word – just the same?
Why yes, it is just the same.
Has it never, ever occurred to Ashley – New Labour’s cheerleader-in-chief this past decade at New Labour’s favourite newspaper – that she’s had privileged access to the PM and cabinet ministers and their aides because, funnily enough, she repeated their lies, supported the party and no matter what her disclaimers, as a result was objectively in favour of the Iraq war ?
Apparently she thinks all that access and tips and cosy invitations and the like came because they like her. Nothing to do with the fact her partner is also a chief political bigwig for the BBC either, oh no. It was all for the sake of her beaux yeux.
Surely no well-educated, observant opinion writer for a major modern newspaper could be either so naive – or so disingenuous – as to truly think that the British punditerati are less compromised than those in the US, could they?
We see the cost of not having an honest, open argument, whether about Pentagon strategy or about how the banking system really works, and the media feel embarrassed: “How did we miss that?” In Washington, and elsewhere, the answers are often the same. It comes down to unspoken deals between powerful people, and smiling faces telling fairytales.
“How did we miss that”? I’ll tell her how she missed that; you never see the dirt you’re sitting in.