Here we go again. Theresa May's announcement of an inquiry into the abuse of parliamentary candidates came a day before racist toff Rhodri Colwyn Philipps got sent down for Facebook threats against Gina Miller. What with the proximity to the anniversary of Jo Cox's murder and the declaration of war by, I'm not making this up, the Daily Mail against "hard left bullies", we've reached another of these crescendos where comment on internet abuse is glutting the web.
What does and doesn't constitute abuse? There is a fine line between abuse and rudeness, but it exists nevertheless. Straight up abuse looks like this. It's the crap that Diane Abbott has put up with for three decades, it's the rape threats, the death threats, the anti-semitism and racism. It is designed to denigrate, humiliate and, in some cases, put people in fear of their lives and mental well-being. It is an order different from the usual rudeness one finds in the cut and thrust of politics. Abuse is not losing your rag in a discussion, getting angry at a figure of authority, or bluntly and sarcastically stating the idiocies of an opponent's position. A simple "that's bullshit" is not abuse, it's rudeness and rudeness serves the politics, albeit occasionally counter-productively. Abuse however is antithetical to politics, it's linguistic violence for its own sake.
You know that already. Nevertheless, while all abuse should be condemned and discouraged not all abuse is created equal. Or, rather, abuse comes from different directions and depending on its point of origin, reflect certain positions that exist in the great out there. The job of a left wing social media strategy is to understand and explain in order to think about effective means of tackling it. Only those carrying a pall of bad faith or a small imagination assimilate this to excusing abuse. Secondly, the targets of abuse matter. It's public figures who attract the lion share of vitriol and there are no prizes for noting women, ethnic minorities, and LGBT folks cop the heaviest loads of flak. That in itself says something.
The basic distinction I want to make is between abuse from below and abuse from above. That doesn't imply the inchoate insults flung from the many at the few is progressive or some such nonsense, but it does have a distinctive character. Such abuse usually stems from a position of relative powerlessness. By this, we're talking the strange frustrations Western cultures weave about our social being. How we are made as individuals sees us flattered, talked up, seduced and, at least officially, empowered to make choices about our lives. Regardless of where you stand in the pecking order, that message is constantly reinforced by public institutions, work, and popular culture. To get on you have to adapt to these rules or you fail. And herein lies the problem. We are all set up to fail. A sense of lack, of something missing is fundamental to the conditions of life, and that's because while we are inculcated and hailed as authors of our own destinies we're very clearly not. The promises of individuality and freedom ring hollow in the age of anxiety, where the good life fills our minds from infancy and yet is put out of reach by limited opportunities, crap and insecure jobs, sliding living standards, a dearth of affordable housing, and the persistent, nagging sense everything is changing and you're having a hard time holding on. A sense of trying to take back control is sublimated into hundreds of different pursuits, including voting for Brexit, and for a small subset of people trolling and abusing public figures is one way of getting a purchase. Abuse offers a simulation, a simulacra of mattering, of being someone who counts - especially if the target responds or reacts. The unnoticed is suddenly noticed, even if they're hiding behind an anonymous handle and all they're doing is shitposting, success in getting a rise is still success.
There are two further subdivisions that can be made here. The first stems from a nihilist narcissism, of finding exhilaration and affirmation in abuse, a catharsis in attacking public figures, particularly if they're women, black, or gay. For whatever reason, their anxieties associates with scapegoats and bigotry, and these terms are mobilised to harass and shut down particular personifications of trends they deem unacceptable. Don't like black people and think they have no place in public life? Attack Diane Abbott. Think gay people have too much visibility and shouldn't be accepted? Owen Jones is the journo to go for. Jealous/threatened by women? So many female MPs, journos, and celebs to choose from. The second comes from anger. Yes, the nihilists are angry, but the key difference here is the former are happy/fatalistic enough to carry on as they are. The latter group are moving, and they're moving towards politics and in the direction of active engagement. For this group, abuse is a crutch, an inarticulate substitute for the feelings they cannot put into language. A fusion of anger, resentment and frustration - for whatever reason, and for whatever politics - is pushing them along and for some a phase of abuse is just that, a moment on the way to developing a political consciousness of some description. The danger is that abuse never entirely goes away and they might feel it entirely reasonable (and justified) to conjure up such terms and tones later on, that abuse is a legitimate weapon. Though that poses more for left, which is a politics about building anew, versus the right, a politics set on preserving the old.
From the bottom, the abuse flies in and swarms over their targets. Except for a rare few cases, it is almost entirely self-activating. There is no coordinating intelligence malevolently targeting certain people and unleashing the hounds, but frequencies of abuse go up and down depending on targets' media presence and, more generally, what's happening in the news. Again, should we be shocked David Lammy has received abuse and death threats for his Grenfell fire campaigning work? We should be, but we're not. Abuse on social media is almost banal.
Then there is abuse from above, which is an entirely different kettle of fish. Again, we find ourselves looking at two different sorts that differ in form but accomplish the same thing, more or less. Our friends The Daily Mail and the tabloid press have done more than anyone to poison politics in this country. They demonise ethnicities, nationalities, they pruriently ogle semi-naked teenagers while attacking (liberal and left wing) women for defying their twisted conventions on what being a woman is supposed to be, and they properly monster fleeting or long-running hate figures. Even 17-year-olds are fair game. This abuse is read every day by millions of people and gives succour to the nihilists. Every time they attack Diane Abbott, that marks open season. Every feeble expose of "hard left" activists stirs up and mobilises its mob. The consequence of all this fear mongering and hate goes beyond providing an ideology bank loaning out bigotry for social media abuse, it helps cohere the base of the Conservative vote. It may be in long-term decline, but it cannot be dismissed. The other consequence, of course, is those receiving the orchestrated abuse have to waste time erecting defences and dealing with it.
The second is the next rung down, that is the minions of established politics and the media. While mostly not as overtly foul as a Paul Dacre op-ed, politicians and pundits have used their platforms not just to harass and bully, but also direct abuse coming up from below as well. They may have public spats with other names fairly frequently, and that usually pulls a train of abusers behind them, but they are likely to assist the demonisation of whole groups of people and some times highlight an ordinary Twitter user for a going over. They effectively try and make use of asymmetry, of the media power they find expressed in their following, to drive normal people out and disrupt their opponents. As established figures they tend to lean toward the right and cynically manipulate their followers, and therefore abuse, to keep them going. This is especially important as professional commentary is in crisis, and not just because the general election completely confounded their expectations. It's because in a world where everyone can be a commentator, no one can be a commentator. Social media menaces them and their old media bosses with existential threat, and at an instinctive level they know it.
These distinctions are analytical. One should not confuse the things of logic with the logic of things, and they dovetail and overlap. But they offer ways in to thinking about where abuse comes from, why people do it, and what ultimately can be done about it. Abuse therefore is a political question and demands a political, not a technical response.
Got your lanterns and hard hats ready? I want us to take a trip down the memory hole. We don't have to go too far down, just a couple of years or so. That's right, go through the gallery in the dead centre. See the opening glowing with the yellow of liberal smuggery? There's our destination. You might want goggles because the shine is intense. Okay, we're here. Can you make out the halo of images flickering on the rock face? Look, there's one of Tony Blair telling Jeremy Corbyn supporters to get a heart transplant. There's another! Ian Dunt of politics.co.uk calling Brexit voters thickies. Who else? Ah yes, the shining talent of Britain's liberal intelligentsia valiantly taking on extremes of left and right. And there we have an ensemble of Graun columnists mocking UKIP's support. Calling them Flat Earthers, that'll learn 'em!
Liberalism as a current of thought and movement in wider society is in crisis. The party that bears its name in Parliament is a runt comprised of meaningless, shapeless non-entities. The liberal wing of the Conservatives, if one wants to be generous and style Dave and his Cameroons, were such a shallow shower that even Theresa May had no problem brushing them aside. And in the Labour Party not only do we find their standard bearers reduced to penury but also, thanks to the election result a complete collapse in their strategy and therefore their politics. Sad times for them, better times for socialist politics.
Having undertaken a too long apprenticeship on the far left, I know a thing or two about what happens when you're politically irrelevant. You can double down and carry on grinding in exactly the same way, hoping reality will swing your way eventually. Not unrelated to this, you can indulge in the expressive politics of identity display as a substitute for making a difference. Or you can retreat from a world you find bewildering and frightening, firing off angry brickbats about how everyone but your smug, liberal self is stupid from the comfort of your hermitage.
Along comes Nick Cohen with another episode in this retreatism. Our poor little group of do-gooding centrists, or "internal exiles" as Nick terms them, aren't politically apathetic like the "fools" who fell for the Moon-on-a-stick promises of Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson. They care. It's why they shout at the telly and swear on Twitter, but cannot countenance participating in public life because there is no way of winning. Why waste your time struggling when there's an Aga to clean? And we're told this disengagement of the engaged will have serious repercussions. If the liberal intelligentsia loosen their attachment to the country and give up on activism, then bad things will happen.
I know Nick is a doyen of comment but, to employ a phrase beloved of the imaginary campus radicals he frequently fulminates against, he could do with checking his privilege. The elite liberal strata he champions haven't done too badly over the last two decades. Cameron's "centrist" cuts always hit those at the bottom the hardest, just as Blair and Brown's third way wonkery shafted the "undeserving" poor. The "scientists, technicians, academics, managers, civil servants, doctors", on the whole, didn't have as bad a time of it - there was no clobbering. Their status remains intact, their role in society, the rewards they receive (I'm assuming Nick had senior civil servants in mind), and the security they enjoy are a cut above the rest. And scanning the pantheon of writers to have scored regular gigs in The Publications That Matter, there is hardly a dearth of liberal middle class people giving liberal middle class takes on things.
Yet he does have point. His people, his tribe are on the slide, but it's more serious than the oikish classes refusing to listen to their betters any more. For one, large numbers of the middle class are abandoning liberalism. Being on a good salary is one thing, but to be forced to swallow year-on-year real terms salary cuts with no let up in the workload focuses the mind a bit. There is no greater teacher than experience and this applies to the liberal pretense that class does not matter as much as any other political myth. The second, and more horrifying prospect given the invective Nick has thrown the Labour leader's way, is large numbers are turning towards Corbynism. It would be a serious mistake to call it a middle class fad, because it really isn't - the data proves it. Nevertheless, Corbynism's power lies in its articulating a broad range of interests. Nick then isn't even talking about all liberal-leaning middling people, but a small media set in and around comment journalism and news production. You know the sorts, the people now arguing (hoping) that Corbyn's coalition is going to break up once those remain-supporting Labour-voting layers realise he isn't going to reverse the EU referendum. Yes, this is the best they can do at the moment.
And there is a third, more serious element: obsolescence. With the rise of the networked worker, where shelf stackers, fruit pickers, and assembly line workers are, like more privileged layers of working people, plugged into a dense web of social networks via the supercomputers in their pockets, the liberal centrist scribbler - of which Nick is the archetype - doesn't have the reach. People getting drawn into politics are more interested in those writers whose work is about organising, and less switched on to what the liberal on their perfect perch miles above the fray has to say. If that wasn't bad enough, the people caught up in and remaking the Labour Party are learning more from each other. They have an intuitive grasp if not a deeper sophisticated understanding of the world precisely because a) they live it, and b) their political imagination is not straitjacketed by piffle. As one wag on Twitter put it, you had teenagers with the handles 'Tories are nonces' putting out more savvier and better takes than our liberal media heroes. Good. They are becoming their own media, their own comment, their own means of making sense of politics.
What Nick represents is a lament for a strata whose privilege and standing is evaporating. And so next time I recommend pausing before clicking his narcissistic whinges. Be kind and pass over - following through only means you're prolonging his agonies.
What an amazing night. We'd had hints from the YouGov and Survation polls that things were going to be close, but even those who allowed a few meagre rays of hope into their hearts were haunted by the memories of so many times the pollsters were wrong. And not forgetting that a good chunk of polling opinion still indicated the Tories could look forward to commanding a thumping majority in the House. There are so many things that can be written about the 2017 general election, but more on trying to understand the return of two-party politics, the battering the SNP took in Scotland, and the Tories' love-in with the Democratic Unionists later. Right now I want to focus on the result itself or, rather, why so many pundits got this election completely wrong.
On one level, it's obvious. Your Dan Hodges, Andrew Rawnsleys, Laura Kuenssbergs and practically everyone who has a berth in broadcast and print media didn't have all the facts, and then didn't join them up the right way. What they sorely lacked, and why they get caught out regularly is because they do not have a sociological imagination. That is the simple but obvious (and yet overlooked) idea that society consists of and is constituted by dense webs of social relationships, and their influence effectively makes us as individuals (or subjects, if you insist on the parlance). And, of course, these relationships are configured in particular ways and certain types of them exert greater weight than others. The role of sociology is to untangle these dynamics and produce research projects and theories aimed at trying to understand how they work. What you then do with such knowledge is the subject of much debate, but as far as I'm concerned it's about providing theory and analysis the labour movement finds useful so it can meet socialist objectives.
The diagnosis of one problem begs another. While commentators and pundits are, in general, intelligent (with some notorious exceptions) and quite capable of reading books, why have none of them cottoned onto the fact that a) political parties are coalitions of strata of forces and interests, b) that political parties reflect deep underlying structural principles that organise broad swathes of social life and impact on all of it in some way, and c) when there is movement among these forces, political parties and votes at election time express them? It's not because they're especially ignorant, nor that the ideas of political sociology are particularly difficult or airy-fairy: it has everything to do with the situation they find themselves in.
Consider this, for example. I felt very optimistic before going into last night's results, despite past experience telling me to keep a hard head. Disappointment was the default setting of socialist politics often times in recent years. Yet the optimism kept bouncing back, despite trying to shut it down. Why? I'm plugged into my social media echo chamber like everyone else, so that had an effect. At work, being surrounded by Labour supporters enthused by the campaign, that had an effect. Speaking to friends and acquaintances who have never voted before but were going to turn out for Labour, that had an effect. And lastly speaking regularly to students, most of whom take much more of an interest in politics than was the case for my generation at university, that had an effect. And you cannot discount the campaigning, especially that first weekend of the dementia tax where I saw previously sceptical voters (don't knows and againsts) all coming to Labour, that cannot but have an effect. It's a case of my being, i.e. what I do and who I come into contact with in everyday life, conditioning my consciousness. This works on all of us, all of the time, all our lives.
A similar sort of process is at work with our professional Westminster watchers, but is ramped up to a higher degree. Firstly, consider what mainstream commentators observe. They watch the comings and goings, the toings and doings of senior politicians. They see how MPs club together in the Commons, formulate policy, take legislation through the House and involve themselves in massive rows with one another. This, more or less, forms the basis of copy that comes to thousands of hours of broadcasting and millions of words year in, year out. And this is politics. What happens in the chamber matters simply because that's what appears to matter - it's where policy is brought forward and enacted into law. What goes on in politics outside, like local council and devolved administration stuff simply isn't on the radar, because they don't see it. Likewise, movements that occupy the streets or, indeed, transforming a political party are curiosities but unworthy of real analysis and understanding. It's all such a sideshow to Parliament's main event.
This focus is also bounded by the media the commentators produce. Famously, the BBC take its lead for what the hot politics stories are from the front pages of the broadsheets. Likewise, hacks in other operations parasite off the BBC and each other to fill the schedules, put stuff out, and meet the insatiable appetite for hot takes. The result is little time for thinking, a scramble for a story or an original angle, and a tendency toward herding thanks to the recursive universe generated from the quantum foam of chatter. It produces a mode of thought that is based entirely on appearance without trying to understand what may lie behind what immediately presents itself. For instance, the Tories are the new party of the working class because minimum wage rises. Labour's members have foisted the disaster onto the party because atomised members of the public tell focus groups. There is no sense of movement, little idea that parties as expressions of interest evolve and move, nor that the people who support them, actively or passively, have connections with multitudes of normal people that can pull, persuade, cajole masses of them and transform them into a collective that starts making its own history. As none of them regularly go on the doors outside of the capital, they have to rely on what the pollsters tell them and, as we saw last night, only two of the established firms come out of the election with any sort of credit.
The worldview of the pundits then is a distorted view, and it is also one shared not just with media people but with politicians too. Again, it's not because they're thick but because they have a common outlook underpinned by an economy of how media people need to do media things. What last night's result has done is bust it wide open. They will settle on some explanation - young people, May's missteps and u-turns, the weather - before it closes up again and returns to its recursive ways. What they won't consider is what actually happened: the political mobilisation of a rising class of working people, of the networked worker overcoming its atomisation and making its presence felt through the Labour Party. And because they don't know, let alone understand this composition of a new constituency of people, they are likely to get caught on the hop time and time again.
Brexit is calamitous and regressive. But do you know what would be even worse? Ignoring a democratic vote and staying in the EU. That is why Labour were absolutely right to ignore the siren calls of the hard remainers, and why it will oversee Brexit if we're able to pull off the biggest political upset since 1945. However, the polls are against us still so I want to concentrate on the imminent danger: Theresa May's approach to Brexit. Not because she won't get a better deal than Labour. It's far more likely that she won't get a deal at all and crash us out of the EU. A disaster that doesn't bear thinking about.
In her trailed speech today, May returned to the Brexit theme. Anything to put distance between polling day and her abject cowardice. She talked about the "national mission", of talking up the opportunities of Britain and seizing a place for it in the international firmament. This will be a Britain that matters again, a Britain free to make its own opportunities and its own success. In her usual projection tactics straight from the Tory playbook, Labour "haven't got a plan", "doesn't have what it takes" and, bizarrely, "doesn't respect the decision made by the British people". The Maybot is clearly malfunctioning.
May's speech was a word stew designed to make good gravy for the right wing press and shore up her fracturing coalition. Unfortunately, her hardcore vote would guzzle up the Brexit dumplings rather than choke on them. But, again, that ominous and moronic phrase - no deal is better than a bad deal - keeps getting repeated. Like so much of the Tory manifesto, she refused to put specifics and a cost on what this actually means when she faced Paxo on Monday. And it's this vagueness that is so dangerous and makes the possibility of crashing out more likely.
Want my workings? Here you go. Repeatedly, the Tories have shown themselves utterly unfit to be the custodians of the interests they represent, let alone preside over the rest of the country. Since 2010, for example, the Tories cut public spending when the economy was crying out for stimulus. That meant jobs lost unnecessarily, hard times inflicted on millions, and a further deterioration of Britain's competitive position in world markets. Then we had Dave gamble Britain's future on a minor threat to the Tories in a handful of constituencies - and lost. And now May and her car crash election, wasting Article 50 negotiation time just to wrack up a few score more seats in the house. Petty minded and stupid about sums this lot up. They are not to be trusted.
With 'no deal is better than a bad deal', May has painted herself into a corner. Consider for a moment, who gets to define what is a good or bad deal? One that sees Britain hand over an annual sub for tariff free access to the single market, plus cooperation on science, security, trading standards and so on seems totally reasonable to me. However, May and her ghastly Brexit team - Boris Johnson, David Davis, and disgraced serving minister Liam Fox, are operating according to a different set of stakes. Details of the negotiations are going to leak like Trump's White House and the government are in for constant badgering by the right wing press. As soon as costs come in, they will splash them, particularly if the sums are large - which they will be. Ditto with Britain's Brexit bill. May will be under constant pressure to reject them. Furthermore, as she has set herself up as a "bloody difficult woman" the temptation to grandstand the EU27 will be too much. Thatcher had her Falklands moment, and May is not averse to cast herself as the mother of the nation standing up for British pluck against the continental monster. Never mind that she can't even stand up to Woman's Hour on Radio 4.
The sad truth of the matter is all the pressures on May, all the political capital she can reap will come from refusing to sign a deal. What small details the interests of our people and the health of British capitalism are compared to favourable Daily Mail headlines and wrapping the Tory party in the flag of British intransigence. The additional danger is the stupidly bellicose rhetoric indulged by the government is setting up the same dynamic for the EU27 negotiators. If May is behaving like a petulant child, so the political benefits of collapsing the talks and booting Britain out grows. Here too, remember, for their own short-sighted reasons the EU were (and still are) happy to destroy Greece's economy even though the interests of EU capital-in-general was and remains in a speedy return to solvency, not eternal debt and austerity.
These are the stakes then. It's not inevitably, but the stars are aligning for the most ruinous of Brexits and no deal with the EU. That will damage economies across Europe, but would prove to be a catastrophe for our faltering recovery. A Conservative government led by Theresa May makes this all the more likely, and why she must be stopped.
It's a truism that the worst in humanity brings out the best in humanity. Yet amid the solidarity and support shown folks caught up in last night's suicide attack in Manchester, there were those for whom another concern came to mind: themselves. It takes a real decency bypass to think about how the murder of 22 people can raise one's profile, or score petty points, but the laws of probability indicates such people are bound to exist. A coincidence then that exhibitors of amoral psychopathy are clustered in our leading news media organisations?
Out front was, of course, the execrable Katie Hopkins who, for the sake of a higher profile and several hours as a trending topic, called for a "final solution" to Islamist-inspired terror. Yes, that's right, the language of genocide is fine and dandy for a few extra retweets. Paul Waugh of HuffPo got into the soulless spirit of things by using the occasion to imply Jeremy Corbyn was soft on terrorism. Not to be outdone, and in full knowledge of what had taken place, The Sun ran this front page penned by a former Special Branch plant in the IRA, while The Mail went to print with this cartoon. Then we have sundry trolls circulating fake news.
If this was a one off, we could put it down to individual turpitude. Unfortunately, it happens time and again. Any tragedy, any awfulness, there are commentators and "celebrities" eager to pile in. There are trolls looking to shock, poltroons sharing bullshit stories, and the vacuous scoring points no one's keeping track of. Unlocking what's going on requires something, and that would be understanding the political economy of the moral lobotomy.
Naturally, Hopkins is the queen of the scene, but she's harvesting what was long-cultivated by the likes of Melanie Phillips. Or, to be more accurate, benefiting from a media business model based entirely around trolling. As papers lose physical sales and have moved operations online, scraping profit revolves around selling ad space, and that demands large audiences. The Daily Mail, as a case in point, runs creepy celebrity stories because there's a huge international appetite for tittle-tattle and ogling celebrity bodies. Trolling with racism and the usual bigotry has the same effect - it cottoned on long before most that outraging left wing and liberal audiences who would never buy their paper could nevertheless drive page views. The Sun, was a late comer to running a free "news" website, now try and get the audience in to sell them services. Advertising, after all, is an unstable business - websites dependent on it for sole income are taking a risk.
The logical extension of trolling-for-business is adapting it as a strategy for personal media branding. It doesn't turn on advertising in this case, but the attracting of attention to remain relevant. Again, Hopkins is the master, even if it has led to occasional brushes with the law. And her notoriety gives her gigs. She'd be long forgotten as a former Apprentice contestant if it wasn't for a sustained and cynical outburst of calibrated bigotry. And what it required was a surgical removal of her moral centre and her continual parading of the fact. This logic then is abroad. And so Paul Waugh sacrificed what was appropriate for a smidgen of notoriety. The Sun and The Mail were banking on a surge of concern in terrorism for their hatchet jobs in their hope to reverse the slide toward Labour in the polls.
And the bottom feeders who do the same? The same attention-seeking logic is at work here, even though paid-for bigoted berths in the mainstream are already rammed. Retweets and shares means attention, and can flatter a mutilated sense of self-importance. What does someone else's suffering and pain mean as long as you're being seen to matter, that you are the centre of a storm you summoned? For people crippled by a sense of everyday irrelevance which, let's face it, is the lot of the overwhelming majority of us, it's a heady brew for some. Particularly as being and being seen to be a special individual is the pinnacle to which one can aspire in Western cultures. Having a moral lobotomy as a route of getting there as good as any other.
Why this happens then is because there's an economic logic underpinning callous hot takes. And, as night follows day, economic dynamics transmute into cultural dynamics, made all the easier by the quantitative character of social media. But there is only a market for hateful fare for as long people sustain it by serving it, and here responsibility lies squarely with the media operations of the right.
There's a headline. It's from the BBC, written by no less a figure than the corporation's chief political editor. Not something up to the standards expected, you might say. As readers know, I tend not to moan much about the recipient of the licence fee. As a general rule, its news coverage is much better than most and where it fails in impartiality, it can make up in balance - particularly with regard to its flagship current affairs programme, Question Time. But there have been plenty of Labour people outraged by the behaviour of senior BBC journalists of late. Here are some much-shared and criticised examples.
For the last seven years 'more spending, more tax, more borrowing' has been repeated ad nauseum as an attack line by the Tories. The spending line specifically is a charge that the Tories and their friends in the press have used since 1979. Kuenssberg knows this, she isn't stupid. And it's outrageous.
What's going on then? As we have seen before, the BBC is a biased institution: it tilts towards the political establishment. Since Jeremy Corbyn took the leadership of the Labour Party, it, like the rest of official politics and the state, have looked on in a mixture of fascination and horror, almost as if Labour was plotting an insurrection followed by full sovietisation. Not a mild programme of social democracy that would move Britain more in the direction of noted communist power, the Federal Republic of Germany. In the avalanche of destabilisation and attacks on Labour and its leader and the subsequent dumbing down of debate, the BBC has played its part with alacrity.
Also, it finds itself in a particular pickle. Since 2003 and the fall out from the dodgy dossier and the death of weapons expert David Kelly, the BBC has even more diligently bowed the knee to sitting governments. The powers that be want to retain the Royal Charter and therefore carry on as a going concern, and this sentiment is shared across all senior staff, including those in front of the camera. In the context of this general election in which the Tories are widely expected to win, the BBC is playing supplicant and not giving them anywhere near as hard a time as Labour. They hope the Tories will leave the corporation well alone. This is no conspiracy, nor will you find documents instructing senior reporters to go easy, but it's a structure of feeling working its way through what they do and say.
Is Laura Kuenssberg a Tory then? Who knows for certain but she, like many others, know which side their bread is buttered on.
British politics has long had an absurd streak, and in this regard we should commend the Prime Minister for preserving this fine tradition. Consider these exhibits from the last week of general election campaigning:
Theresa May visits a factory. She refuses to take questions from the press and the employer forbids workers from talking to the hacks.
Theresa May visits North Derbyshire and is interviewed by BBC Radio Derby. Asked about what Boris Johnson meant by calling Jeremy Corbyn a "mugwump", she replied "What I recognise is that what we need in this country is strong and stable leadership."
Theresa May drops into another workplace in Leeds. Rather than engaging with members of the public, the party takes over the building after the doors close and a few dozen party members are bussed in. Interestingly, all of their paraphernalia is branded with Theresa May as opposed to the Conservatives.
Theresa May takes a helicopter ride to a wee hut in the forest near Aberdeen. The press are invited, but it's miles from anywhere and there's no mobile reception, hence live coverage is impossible. Questions are from pre-approved outlets and, again, Tory activists are substituted for the public.
You have to ask yourself, what the hell is going on with the Conservative Party general election campaign?
When the Tories are polling ridiculous numbers, their fear is they can only head down, and those taken from the last couple of days show Labour's vote appearing to firm up. Not enough to challenge the Tories at this stage but hey, a year of political volatility and all that. Hence the absurdity of the most control freakish election campaign ever mounted by a mainstream party. For all her 'strong and stable leadership' talk, she knows - and Crosby knows - that she would not survive first contact with the public. Everything must be done to keep her aloft and remote. Campaign images surrounded by adoring Tory activists are serviceable enough for the news. As far as her team and the pollsters are concerned, she could spend the next five weeks going from one invited audience to the next. The votes are in the bank, so why do anything else?
Also, the disappearance of the Conservatives from the branding in Yorkshire and now in Scotland isn't a new thing. It was road tested at last year's Holyrood elections. In Ruth Davidson, the Scottish Tories found a personable vessel unencumbered by politics or scandal onto which all kinds of things could be projected. With their name mud after the Thatcher years and near destruction at the hands of Labour, to have a genuinely well-liked politician at the helm saw them dump their branding. It was Ruth Davidson's Conservatives. If you don't like the Tories but you like Ruth, why not give her as opposed to the party a punt. It was a clever pitch and it worked. Now look how the Tories are doing. Out rolls the same approach again in the North and Scotland. Theresa May is more than a Conservative politician, she's fighting for you to make sure the EU doesn't take Brexiting Britain to the cleaners.
May's appeal is her confected grown up, serious image. Some voters, older voters especially, find this reassuring. She might be a Tory, but she seems to be a safe pair of hands. Especially when you half-listen to her speeches about poverty, workers, inequality, etc. The 'strong and stable leadership' appears to contrast sharply with the other parties, and, of course, after the 18 months of backbiting, whingeing, sabotage and, in some cases, scabbing in the Labour Party. This has to be tackled head on, especially when May's leadership is anything but strong, let alone stable.
With nothing to lose, Jeremy Corbyn's energetic campaign is outward facing and engaging - the polar opposite than our "strong" PM's. That's one dart in the wallet. Another is how this looks like askance. For people leaning decidedly toward May, the fact this man the press, the Tories, and some of his own side have derided and traduced is making a good fist of it might be enough to give pause. He is, after all, not running away from a chance to debate May on television. These voters might not like him/think he's not up to it, but at least he's having a go. Ordinarily in politics, this wouldn't matter. In the dynamics of an election, between May and Corbyn poll after poll have shown a big preference for her. However, as we've noted previously, Labour's campaign is following a twin track approach. Jeremy is doing his leadership campaign on steroids thing, and sitting Labour MPs dubious of the leader's vote catching creds are going all-out local. Who's going to stand up for Stoke, for instance? Rob Flello, Ruth Smeeth, and Gareth Snell or a Conservative Party that has spent seven years cratering the Potteries with brownfield sites? Others are going one step further with Ben Bradshaw in Exeter arguing that Labour aren't going to win, but you can safely continue voting for him to provide opposition knowing Jez won't be entering Number 10. These local tactics, which result from Labour's difficulties, can play out in constituencies where the MP is dug in in who knows how many ways. In other words, if doubt is put into enough voters' minds about May's leadership, it could be capitalised on by Labour localism.
May's campaign, her person herself is coming across as absurd and frit. If that can be made to stick as much as her strong and stable nonsense, there is a chance the Tories won't have it all their way on 8th June.
And they're off! This is less a two-horse race of LibDem leaflet fame, and more a thorough bred tearing up the track as the knackered and no-hopers settle into a canter. At least that's how the Conservatives and their helpful friends in the press and broadcast media see it. And, understandably, they want to maintain that ridiculous lead. A stumble here, a distraction there, in these volatile political times who can say with any confidence that the Labour horse won't put on unexpected speed and take a surprise victory? One for Arthur could become One in Theresa's Eye, if they're not careful.
The Tories know this. They become their sharpest and most self-aware when an election is in play. The return of Lynton Crosby to the fold, now "Sir" in recognition of the scurrilous campaign he ran in 2015, provides advance notice of what to expect. Smears of leading Labour figures, the ceaseless opposition of Labour chaos to Tory stability, scapegoating and fear-mongering over immigrants, nonsense about public spending, and, latterly, the need for a strong hand to see down the dastardly Eurocrats in the Brexit negotiations. A recipe for the worst in living memory, the only saving grace this general election has is its tight timescale. And so, as far as electoral politics go, the Tory task is a simple one. Maintain the coalition corralled by 2015's fear and loathing, scoop up the returning UKIP vote and strike just enough of a One Nation pose to grab disaffected Labour, and job done. The LibDems might take back a few seats that fell to the Tories, but the sacrifice will be worth the pick ups they expect elsewhere.
We'll see these attacks when they arrive, but foremost in CCHQ's mind is ensuring the wheels don't career off the wagon. This is difficult when their best card is their biggest weakness. Theresa May, in some respects, is the perfect candidate. Throughout the Dave/Osborne years, she was an absent presence, a shadowy figure who sat at the Home Office and let the toffs get on with fronting up the government. Where she did court controversy, as with the racist van wheeze, liberal public opinion got indignant but it enhanced her standing with the withering Tory grassroots and she emerged unscathed. Her coronation after the joke of last year's Conservative leadership contest meant she evaded scrutiny of her record and the policy platform she favoured, and so when she took to the podium outside 10 Downing Street and delivered her Ed Miliband speech, for most people it was the first time they'd properly seen her. And so an address that few, in the abstract, could disagree with, a politician feted as a "grown-up", and a country in the biggest hole its has ever dug for itself, May presented as a figure that all kinds of hope could be projected onto. This was also a very favourable contrast to Jeremy Corbyn's person, who through a mix of missteps, internal sabotage and the worst coverage a Labour leader has ever attracted, was (and is) cast as a figure who epitomises the crisis of politics.
At her introduction as the new Prime Minister, May was therefore something of a Tony Blair figure, and it's no accident that she's running a 1997-style campaign. By that, I mean while the Tories are ahead in the polls by the sorts of margins New Labour commanded, they are hypersensitive to anything that could go wrong. With Blair, that was mostly at the level of policy, which was why anything smacking of "old" Labour - trade unions, the 's' word - were expunged from the campaign lexicon. It's different with the Tories this time, as May doubles up as their biggest weakness. Anyone knows that at Prime Minister's Questions, more often than not she is left looking robotic, dithery, shifty, and unable to think on her feet. If points scored at the weekly ding-dong translated into points on opinion polls, Labour would walk the election. However, it is a minority pursuit and so the confected assumption of May's competence and maturity remains untroubled. Tory objective number one is to maintain that standing, therefore no leaders' debates. It's not that they fear Jeremy Corbyn would be able to turn it around on the basis of a couple of set piece events, but that she would stand utterly exposed as hapless. If, after all, she can't beat the Labour leader in a debate, how can she negotiate a decent Brexit deal with hard nosed folks across the Channel? It also explains the difference between the style of the two emerging campaigns. While Jez held a rally (of course) and took awkward questions, May helicoptered to a golf club the other end of the country for the softest of launches with tame Tory councillors and assorted lickspittles. No journos, no members of the public. Crosby's nightmare is to have her cornered and expected to answer questions where "we're spending record amounts" won't do as an answer. Their strategy has to be based around keeping her away from the public. There is nothing to be gained from engaging with them, and possibly a few losses as well.
You don't have to be a genius to see how this could store up problems for May. By neglecting the media and allowing more coverage of the opposition parties, that can feed into her stability vs chaos pitch - especially if a leadership debate goes ahead without her. They will also be banking on the idea that the more the public see of Jeremy Corbyn, the less they'll like him. It's a gamble, though, especially in these politically febrile times. The flip side of this is the media will start running 'where's May' pieces. Already, they're chafing at the PM's studied non-engagement. The point will come when the campaign has to decide whether this silence is damaging, and they'll try neutralising it in a couple of ways. One would be a Q&A with "the public", which they haven't ruled out - though I would imagine May would have difficulties if her interlocutors are allowed follow up questions. And the second will be Crosby's dead cat. When the press is jam full of complaining and moaning, expect them to push hard on the IRA or Islamist stuff. They won't have any new material, the old stuff dredged up by two Labour leadership campaigns will do the job well enough. And when that happens, Labour has to be ready with a counter of its own.
Another interesting side strategy is expectation management. In stories "leaked" to the press this morning, punters are being fed the derisory nonsense that opinion polls in the key marginals could be out by as much as 15%, and so every vote counts. Utter nonsense, of course, but rational - from their point of view - nonsense. Assuming the Tories win, doing so without speaking to the public is bad enough, but on a turnout significantly below standard numbers stores up legitimacy problems for the future. That might not matter if the majority is a thumping tally, but it certainly will for a Prime Minister determined to prevent Scotland breaking away. If May wants to pose as Britain's authentic voice, she'd better have a strong vote backing her up.
A public facing campaign without the public. This is what we can expect from the Tories and, unless something major happens, it should see them through. More's the pity.
Trolls sometimes get their comeuppance. While the bigoted and the dishonest continue to rant and rave from the platforms provided them by Britain's most poisonous media outfits, it seems one can go too far. That's if Kelvin MacKenzie's suspension from The Sun is anything to go by.
As far as I can tell, MacKenzie's done nothing qualitatively worse than your average Melanie Phillips or Rod Liddle nudge-nudge-racism piece. Readers will also recall his appalling attack on Channel Four News's Fatima Manji in the pages of the paper, and no action was forthcoming. Though to make a cheap jibe at Liverpool's expense given his and The Sun's previous here underlines an arrogance that comes with the belief of being untouchable. Anyhow, it is now a matter for the police. Which is just as well because it's not MacKenzie's unreadable boilerplate that interests me: it's his suspension.
Yes, who'd have thunk it? The most terrible enfant terrible of 1980s journalism, the man whose editorship powered the currant bun to its soaraway success and made tabloid reporting synonymous with scapegoating, jingoism, racism, smearing, and dumb-downed tittle-tattle. Yes, that Kelvin MacKenzie, hung out to dry by the paper he made. First things first, as large numbers of people have asked, why did MacKenzie's piece appear in the first place when his column must have gone through gates kept by sub editors, legal, and the editor's office? Surely it wouldn't have taken much to spike it? I'd wager that didn't happen because it's Kelvin MacKenzie. He's a legend and comes with as much swagger as he has history and status. The editorial office might prefer to have someone else take up his slot, but there's always Uncle Rupert to worry about. No longer as hands on as he was during MacKenzie's day, nevertheless senior hacks, senior legal, and senior executives have to work towards the fuhrer so everything's a-okay in case a call comes through from New York. MacKenzie got leeway, and arguably his comfortable berth in Friday's paper, because of his association with the Dirty Digger.
Why hasn't MacKenzie's friendship with the proprietor got him off this time? Perhaps the suspension is for show, but equally it could be a consequence of moves within The Sun and News UK. Like most of Britain's newspapers, it's at something of a crossroads. Present daily circulation is around the 1.6m mark, having lost 1.4m readers since 2010. Yet since dropping Murdoch's pay wall, traffic to its family of websites has doubled. As of January this year, the paper is claiming around 25 million page views per month, putting it slightly ahead of The Mirror (though they dispute this) and trailing The Mail and the BBC. Online is obviously where the audiences are, and The Sun have tried all kinds of stratagems to get the punters in. It's invested heavily in Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram, and is trying to work out how to turn growing audience numbers into pound signs. After all, with The Mail's huge global audience of over 200m/month, that translates into ad revenue of £23m per quarter. Not a lot, really. Since The Sun came out from behind the wall, it's searching for other ways to make online pay - such as its dedicated betting platform and other paid-for services ancillary to normal newspapery content.
Emerging into a mature market, The Sun's strategy is an interesting one. Whether it turns a buck, however, remains to be seen, especially as profits in the internet age are overly dependent on cornering a market. For this strategy to be a success, The Sun is trying to carve its own niche. The Daily Mail model, which relies on piling up audiences for ad revenue, accomplishes this via notoriously voyeuristic celebrity coverage, and to a lesser extent providing hyper partisan right wing coverage and comment that brings in the "right old fascists" of which MacKenzie once opined, and outraged liberals and lefties aghast at their latest outrage. Those markets are more or less sewn up. The paper could provide a straight up copy, but it would lose. The second problem is The Sun needs to bring in young audiences to replace the oldies still buying physical copy. While it still casts around for a strategy that can capture them (as per above, their approach to social media is making a good fist of it), revenues depend on not upsetting the apple cart.
Which is what MacKenzie's column does. Everyone knows The Mail is an appalling outfit, but it's not dependent on the editorial line for the audiences generated by stalking celebrities. The Sun, which does not have that luxury, must chase younger internet users. As social attitudes surveys consistently show, the younger you are the more likely you are tolerant of racial/ethnic difference, immigrants, non-heterosexual sexualities, and so on. With a rising, more cosmopolitan generation The Sun cannot blast them with the halitosis of racism and hope to be a success.
As I said, the suspension might mean nothing beyond cynical damage limitation. MacKenzie could be returned to his inglorious perch and his comments long forgotten by the time he gets another invite onto Question Time and the like. But that the higher ups felt the need to do this when they might have shrugged it off is interesting, and only makes sense in the context of internet tabloid economics.
It's getting to the time of year that Constituency Labour Parties are selecting their delegates for party conference. This time both the right and left of the party are scrambling members for the monthly meeting because there's something substantial on the table for when we meet in Brighton in September: the McDonnell Amendment. For readers not au fait with party jargon, this rule change for how the party selects its leader is very important. To qualify for a place on the ballot paper for a leadership contest, a candidate must now acquire the nominations of at least 15% of the parliamentary and European parliamentary party. Under the shadow chancellor's proposals, this would be reduced to five per cent. The right have set their face against, while the left are mobilising for it. In this case, the left are right and the right are wrong. Indeed, I would go so far to say that the party as a whole - all of its wings - would benefit if the amendment passes.
In an article from last August, Caroline Flint makes the case against. She argues that Labour is a party that uses the machinery of government to meet its objectives, has the tricky task of forging an electoral coalition crisscrossing a plurality of interests, and must have a leader who commands the support of the parliamentary team. The latter point is, ultimately, the litmus test for exercising confidence in the country as a whole. The role the PLP and its European counterparts have in acting as a gatekeeper - not her phrase - is balanced by the responsibility it carries as the main public face of the party. As she notes, politics is "a team game", a "collective effort". I therefore wonder if Caroline was one of the precious few Progress-affiliated MPs who tried reigning in the moaners and the whingers straight after Jeremy Corbyn won the the first Labour leadership contest in 2015?
No matter. There are two important features of the PLP, a strength and a weakness that cannot be separated from one another. The first is their collective proximity to mainstream public opinion. Taken as a whole, their positions on the NHS (keep it free), immigration (more controls), defence (replace Trident and support Our Troops), and the economy (growth and fairness) correlates roughly with the bulk of the electorate. Every time a poll drops from YouGov or whatever listing voters' priorities and fears, MPs can feel their views are shared by millions of people "out there". This then is a key resource MPs draw upon to legitmate themselves as representatives of constituencies rather than delegates of constituency parties, and its powerful because it is true. Getting a bellyful on the doorstep or a postbag bulging with complaints about immigrants, for instance, tends to reinforce the view that controls on immigration is a sensible position to take. Being conditions consciousness and all that.
The PLP's weakness is, well, their collective proximity to public opinion. What they think the electorate thinks is framed by the polls and the focus groups, and is subject to further filters. Every window looking out into the wider world is tinted by the preconceptions and hobby horses of the press, broadcast media and Westminster watchers. Effectively, the apparatus of the media is synonymous with public opinion. It washes over them all day every day, and is confirmed when one breaks free and speaks to constituents at surgery and suchlike. Politics here becomes reduced to addressing "very real concerns" and convincing voters that Labour has the means to sort them out. Of course, that is what any party should aspire to do, but also it should try to lead public opinion. Labour is the condensation of the interests of pretty varied groups of working people, a position guaranteed ultimately by the affiliation of the country's largest trade unions. To stand up for those interests in the context of a capitalist society in which a) workers are subordinate to capital, and b) the latter of necessity ceaselessly struggles against the former requires a knowledge of what the Labour Party is, who its natural constituents are (i.e. the vast bulk of the population), and a determination to challenge public opinion. For instance, introducing markets into public services helps break up our electoral coalition. Chasing the tabloid press into the gutter instead of challenging the lies told about immigration undermines the solidarity of our coalition. Promising to get tough with people receiving social security delegitimises the very idea of collective responses to market failure, putting a question mark over what our coalition is supposed to be working toward. And so on. In the topsy turvy world of Westminster, accepting the status quo as immovable and immutable is providing an effective opposition and leadership. Even raising questions about it, let alone vociferously attacking it is lefty indulgence.
There is, however, another link MPs have to the wider public, and that is through the party membership itself. While, as a rule, more left than the electorate (in much the same way the Tories' dwindling rolls are further to the right), they have far greater familiarity and exposure to what ordinary people think and say. The woman at constituency who bangs on about the bedroom tax, she knows people who are having a very tough time because of it. She might even be one of those folks herself. The chap who is concerned about the government's stance on bombing Syria - he works in a warehouse surrounded by blokes just like him, and knows how racist and xenophobic views ramp up when war talk is in the air. The new member concerned about Theresa May's encroachment on internet privacy works three part-time jobs and is struggling to scrape together a deposit for a flat. The old member who is concerned about the party's perceived distaste for the "traditional" working class is, at the same time, fighting for a care package for his wife. And there are those nice, "just-about-managing" middle class-types as well. Too many Labour MPs have little time for the members beyond their ability to deliver leaflets, but our army of unpaid couriers are more in touch with life in 21st century Britain than they because they live it in far less comfortable circumstances. More often than not, their politics are stamped indelibly by their experience. There is that, and the small matter of the members putting MPs there in the first place. There is not one, not a single Labour MP who'd be sat in the Commons without the party label.
And so, ultimately, I support the lowering of the threshold for exactly the same reason why I've always supported mandatory reselection for sitting MPs. If the parliamentary party has to actively work to keep onside members, to build deep roots in their communities to support them and ensure the party heads in the direction they desire, the less likely we are to see Labour actively pursuing policies that harm the universal interest. i.e. That of working people, of anyone compelled to sell their time to an employer in return for a wage or salary. Lowering the threshold means we won't ever have the spectacle again of what are effectively personnel managers (with the politics to match) being serious contenders. MPs who want to lead would have to up their game and pay attention to what Labour was set up to do in the first place. For sure, it's going to take more than nice write ups from your mates in the media.
This isn't a recipe for turning the Labour Party into a pure, permanent leftist opposition. The amendment is about building the rooted politics that has weight in communities across the land, a politics unashamed of its truly representative and transformative role. Socialism is the movement of the immense majority in the interests of the immense majority, after all.
Choose your delegates wisely.
I once attended a demonstration called by the local PCS branch that attracted a mammoth 14 people. Not great, but it was enough to get a hack from the local rag to run a story about their grievances. But have you seen this nonsense about the protest outside the New Statesman offices this evening? Sparsely attended and completely messed up, this just makes Corbyn supporters look mad and brittle. But, as with all things, there is a logic.
Having previously piddled in the puddle of far left politics, I know doing something about setting realistic and achievable goals. For a small group of activists, this can help develop camaraderie and deepen solidarity among those taking part in an action. Selling 100 newspapers in a week, filling a coach, getting a fair few to a rally, delivering 5,000 leaflets in super quick time, no doubt some would sneer at such things but it's these myriad actions that have kept the far left going long past their use by date. If you break out the microscope and focus in on the foundations of the Labour Party, the trade unions, and the cooperative movement, you'll espy pretty much the same thing going on there too.
And so, the protesters' demand that the New Statesman hands 30 of its pages over to pro-Corbyn voices probably won't succeed. But in a sense, it has. Political Editor/Generalissimo George Eaton came down to see what the fuss was about and was followed around by a man with a placard (protest pro tip: use oven gloves). Buzzfeed were there and threw something together about it and, most importantly, it attracted the attention of the early evening Twitterati. In the age of trend or it didn't happen, I think the organisers will be pleased with the outcome, even though it makes them and Jeremy supporters look like a box of tools.
What this underlines, again, is the political weakness of the left. Over 18 months on from the Corbyn surge, there is little sign of a deeper politicisation of the newly activated. There has been a slow burn involvement of new comrades getting drifting into party structures and big campaigns, but there has been no concerted effort to develop them further. The recent Momentum conference sounded more like a management away day than a group interested in equipping its support politically for the struggles in the Labour Party and wider society. Likewise the web-based media that have grown influential off the back of the Corbyn movement - The Canary, Evolve Politics, SKWAWKBOX - merely reflect back to the reader what they know or already suspect. There's little attempt at analysing things, understanding things. I haven't the foggiest why the excellent Left Futures blog isn't heavily promoted via Momentum's extensive social media networks, which does deal in the weightier stuff and might help shift things along.
The longer the political gap goes unaddressed, the more pointless and counterproductive stunts there will be.
Yours truly was at the last Sociology Research Seminar Series at the University of Derby. On this occasion our speak was Simon Speck, also of Derby. His paper, 'The Cynical Image: The Critical Potential of the Political Cartoon in the Age of Self-Satirising Authority' took a look at how the powerful have absorbed the bite of satire and transformed it into something that helps legitimise them, and whether using humour to attack those interests was still possible. This was explored this through the medium of political cartoons.
He argued that satire takes the powerful as its target, and locates humour in the contrast between the lofty ideals they espouse and their often grubby practice. In this sense, satire is close to the immanent critique often associated with the Frankfurt School/critical theory, of the practice of confronting something with its foundational principles. For example, the controversial Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons send up the piety of Islamists by forcefully contrasting their sacred pretensions (Jihad motivated by the glory of God) with the profane (Heaven stuffed full of virgins).
In liberal democracies, however, satire has become incorporated, and in few places more so than the UK. The cutting Supermac cartoon by Vicky for the Evening Standard in the late 50s, early 60s sent up Harold Macmillan. They set out by taking the mick, but over time the demeaning caricature came to be a nickname and latterly the title of a MacMillan biography. And so the satirical monicker was incorporated into an appreciation of him, and the humour attached to it a sign of his sacralisation into the hall of the political establishment, of having made it. Similarly, former Tory education secretary Kenneth Baker, who on Spitting Image was regularly portrayed as a slug thanks to his slimy reputation, managed to recuperate the attack by noting how, as a self-described historian of satirical cartoons, his depiction was part of one of the fine traditions of British democracy.
The logical end of this incorporation is someone like Boris Johnson, who has astutely and assiduously built up a self-mocking, self-satirising image. He was quick to realise, helped in part by regular Have I Got News For You appearances, including four stints as the host, that not only does it raise his profile but the laughter directed by him and at him could be harnessed to confer legitimacy. Hence Johnson was once regularly referred to as the most popular/most recognisable politician in Britain, purely because he was a bit of an oaf. He exploited it to the hilt during his campaign for the London mayoralty, and drew deep once again during the EU referendum campaign. Like many other MPs, liking a joke and being able to laugh at yourself shows up your human side, it papers over power and interest by showing how "down to earth" they are. Johnson, however, took it a step further. His false bonhomie, which is entirely tedious for some, has another happy - for him - consequence: he can use it to evade criticism, and often "humorously" did so when he was in office. Satire then not only flatters, it can make careers.
In these conditions, following Sloterdijk's Critique of Cynical Reason, with the disappearance of political alternatives to the status quo, the more cynical society become about itself. This, for Simon, is also the lot of satire now. The spreading of cynical sensibilities means that satirical critique is marketable and feeds into open irony. Vicky's Supermac attack was an ironic attack on Macmillan as a blundering fool. In the 21st century, Johnson contrives to be a blundering fool.
Does this mean satire is now impossible? Not necessarily. Exploring Sloterdijk's use of ancient Greek understandings of satire, of kynicism as opposed to cynicism. This was an underdog perspective that set itself against dogmatism, abstraction, and the theoretical while celebrating the disinhibited, the embodied, the gestural, the shameless, and the animal. It has an insubordinate, profaning impulse that made the Greek authorities of the day uncomfortable?
In the realm of political cartoons, for Simon there is a cartoonist working with this sensibility: Steve Bell. His cartoons are able to avoid the kinds of incorporation suffered by Vicky because he eschews tradition (particularly the liberal tradition, despite most of his work appearing in a liberal paper, and established ways of doing political cartooning), but more importantly his depictions are viscerally materialist and shameless. Physiques are blown up and caricatured in grotesque ways, eyes constantly wander and possess a crazed look, bad language is a staple, and he merges the animal, the inhuman, the synthetic and, in Dave's case, the prophylactic. It's difficult to see Osborne finding flattery in his rendering as a ring-nosed gimp, or May her depiction as a scrawny clown, Bush jr as a simian, nor Blair as an unhinged grin-agog. This aesthetic doesn't make any grand statements or pay tribute to a tradition curated by the likes of Kenneth Baker, but captures the ground ceded by satire in the age of cynicism and ironic incorporation.
Is satire possible? Yes, it would appear. But only by abandoning tradition and getting visceral can it regain its bite.
I hear tell of George Osborne applying for the Evening Standard vacancy only after other people came to him for advice on their applications. What a charmer. Still, his landing the editorship of London's biggest free sheet is as shocking as it is audacious. How is it someone barely able to string a sentence together, let alone lacking journalistic experience of any kind, can simply drop into and run one of the country's biggest titles, and carry on doing another five jobs, including the nominally full-time role of representing the good people of Tatton?
Connections, of course. Standard proprietor, Evgeny Lebedev said "I am proud to have an editor of such substance, who reinforces The Standard's standing and influence in London and whose political viewpoint - socially liberal and economically pragmatic - closely matches that of many of our readers". Lebedev is the son of an oligarch who got stinking rich thanks to the plundering of Russian industry after the fall of the USSR, and has basically spent his entire life swanning around the jet set and organising parties for celebrities and other chums in London. Osborne and Dave are previous attendees of these lavish jollies, which is pure coincidence, of course. For Lebedev, buying the former chancellor for the pocket change of £200k a year ensures he has an in where the future of the Conservative Party is concerned. Favours rendered always come with the expectation of favours to be conferred.
Of Osborne himself, this move nakedly demonstrates the incestuous character of our elites and, fundamentally, how they work. It shows how the dispositions, networks, and cultures of our gilded rulers form a social mesh that automatically qualifies them within the terms of that social world for the privileged positions of running our most powerful and influential institutions when such opportunities arise. It doesn't matter that Osborne isn't and has never been a journalist, his social weight and inertia helps ensure it is not a matter of plugging a square peg into a round hole. This process of fitting, of integrating individuals was something the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu spent his career exploring. Permit me a moment of self-plagiarism:
His basic ideas are that each of us are endowed with a set of dispositions and preferences acquired throughout our lives (the habitus), and this acquisition is always overlaced by patterns of domination and (relative) privilege. My working class Tory background, for example, is part of my being and conditions my interests, dispositions and position-takings in ways I am aware and not aware of. And it will always be the case. More obvious examples are how the physicalities of our bodies, the genders, ethnicities, and disabilities condition and shape the habitus. The habitus is socially acquired and is irreducibly social. Bourdieu also argued that societies can be understood as if they are great meshes of overlapping fields. All human endeavour, from the operation of culture, through to the internal doings of institutions and right down to the pecking order in the local bowling club can be understood as if they were economies. The marketplace is typically a scene of competition (and collusion) between actors to secure market share, hence profits, hence economic capital for themselves. Other human activities can be understood the same way. Education systems see pupils compete through a battery of assessments for grades, i.e. cultural capital. Literary fiction is a competition among authors for the cultural capital specific to that field - prizes, critical acclaim, recognition. Politics the acquisition of political capital, and so on. What Bourdieu does is to link up habitus and field. Through socialisation, education, extra-curricular interests, work and so on one's habitus acquires social and cultural capital, and the more one possesses the better fit there is between the individual and a greater number of fields. It's not that Oxbridge graduates are especially brainy, it's that their acculturation and networks disproportionately favours their chances of succeeding across a greater range of social fields. They have the strategies and know how to get on that puts them at an advantage vis a vis the rest of the graduate population ... This, however, is not a theory of unproblematic social integration. It's a theory of best fit.
What the ownership of large quantities of cultural capital does is endow an over-exaggerated sense of one's self-worth as well as entitled expectations. Osborne, having effortlessly done the Member of Parliament thing (the benefit of having staff who can do the job for you!) and undermined the position of British capitalism from Number 11, again without breaking a sweat, for him the editorship of the Standard is merely just another set of meetings he will attend to, a few bits of documents to shuffle through, and a few decisions to be made for others to carry out. This mode of working is pretty standard among our social betters. For ridiculous money and wedges of prestige, their actual responsibilities barely extend beyond reading and commenting on briefing notes. These are hyped up as difficult, complex tasks that only the super-talented can do, but all their discharge actually requires is acculturation and a bit of front.
The politics of the move are more than foolish. Osborne, hailed as a genius by people who can't tell the difference between it and deviousness, could well end up harming his prime ministerial ambitions and the standing of Lebedev's comic. While most people who read papers know they have a political affiliation and editorial line, the legitimacy in part derives from their formal separation from the parties they back. The little bit of critical distance confers authority on editorials, and also means that politicians themselves pay attention. Because Theresa May and Sadiq Khan know the Standard is a vehicle for Osborne's views, neither are going to take its criticism and cajoling at all seriously. Indeed, in Khan's case - despite his ill-judged congratulations - they can be publicly dismissed with virtually no electoral backwash from Standard readers.
And so, George Osborne. The move into journalism, if it can be called that, is certainly a hubristic one. But we all know what follows on after.
