Oh, Aunty!

This morning I heard the news that the BBC Promenade Concerts will go ahead in virtual form with the last few days and especially the world renowned Last Night, live at the Albert Hall. The British Broadcasting Corporation has been part of British soft power for generations, spreading the news, informing the world and presenting an image of the United Kingdom as a bastion of tradition, morals, culture and statesmanship; something to be admired; something to aspire to.

But what must the world think now of the Britain the BBC portrays? Constant attacks on government when they should be bolstering the government's measures against the viral threat. Embracing the largely unwanted phenomenon of multiculturalism and repeatedly rubbing our noses in diversity. And in the case of the Proms, over the last few years using the last night as an occasion to indulge in EU propaganda with a sea of blue and gold flags where once only the red white and blue flew.

There is a rising tide of patriotism and nationalism which the BBC believes must be ignored, derided and side-lined. In the face of growing disquiet at what appears to be favourable embrace of islamic culture, the national broadcaster chooses to have a muslim as head of its religious programming. They have exercised discriminatory employment practices, rejecting applicants from white Britons in favour of brown people, regardless of competence. And it bangs the drum for every minority cause going.

Watch any political programme and you will see it stuffed with commentators who toe the approved line introduced as authoritative voices while those whose views veer even slightly away from leftist doctrine are invariably introduced with qualifiers such as ‘right wing activist’, or ‘hard right campaigner’, thus prejudicing the audience from the off. The left-wing talking heads are given respectful free reign to put across their point but woe betide the ‘Nazi’ who tries to complete a sentence.

 George Orwell’s statue at Broadcasting House stands next to an inscription of his words: “If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” No doubt this is what the BBC thinks it is doing but it is about time the BBC itself faced up to some uncomfortable truths. The mealy-mouthed non apology following Emily Maitlis’s blatantly biased and judgmental introduction to Newsnight on Tuesday is indicative of an organ which, while pretending it is showing contrition, showed nothing of the kind.

I grew up with the BBC and until very recently I would defend its quality, its reach and, to some extent, its impartiality because no matter what it looks like the Beeb does believe it is impartial and frequently points to the fact that it receives flak from both left and right and so must be doing the right thing. The trouble is, though, it judges itself, it marks its own homework, and when people refer to the media bubble, that description practically defines the culture of the BBC. Orwell himself was critical of their groupthink even back then.

The Corporation is supposed to serve the country, not just those it believes hold the correct opinions. The licence fee is seen as an unfair tax on those who feel unfairly browbeaten by its agenda prone programming and especially unfair on those who have stopped watching altogether. In the light of some quite blatant ignoring of its guiding mission to inform, educate and entertain, maybe it is finally time to let the market decide.

Doubling Down

Who could have predicted it; after three and a half years of Parliament and the media doing their level best to scupper Brexit  a team steps up with the balls and the popular appeal to demand that the will of the British people be honoured. An 80-seat majority for a Conservative government was a dream after ten years of compromise and half-arsed virtue signalling. At last we could get on and rebuild the country after the damage wreaked by the last Labour government and their project to screw our demographic makeup.

Deficit neutralised, debt repayment well on track and Brexit in the finishing straight, we could finally relax the minimal austerity programme and begin work on improving productivity, education, the health service, transport and infrastructure with no serious opposition. After the general election even the Remain lobby seemed to have finally accepted their defeat and plunge into irrelevance. But then along comes a gift.

Who could have predicted the corona virus outbreak? In fact if some opinions are taken into consideration, WHO should have predicted it. The still new government took command and control and did what every western government did. They watched, took advice, waited, regarded the experience of other countries then launched what seemed to be the only plausible short-term solution; lockdown.

The press was ecstatic; here was the chance they had been waiting for – because no matter what any government did, it could be spun as the wrong thing. At every stage. Deeper lockdown; why not earlier? Lifting the lockdown; why not now? After the lockdown: more deaths bad, but also fewer deaths bad because too much lockdown. Astute spanner throwers could see that whatever the government response was, they could persuade people that it was clumsy, incompetent or poorly communicated.

But still the public broadly supported the government, most of us logically figuring that their handle on the situation was always going to be better than ours. Other countries’ experiences could be edited , as with statistics to tell whatever story the press wanted to tell. If such-and-such has plenty of PPE why don’t we? Well Thisland didn’t lock down and nobody died. And Thatland has been testing since day one. And of course, the darling of the left, Jacinda Arden, managed New Zealand’s perfect response.

The fact that what has happened in every country is largely a matter of fortune, good or bad, is irrelevant. There is no news, good or bad, that cannot be pressed into criticism of our situation. And of course the press still wields powerful influence because once a hackneyed hack has invented an attack line, many of the public will subsume it into their psyche and say they always thought this way. Hypocrisy is built into the human model; it is remarkably effective and the press have pressed every button they could put their grubby fingers on.

Still it was not enough to shift public opinion away from Boris’s crew… but then there was Dom. The bête noire of the chattering classes; a man with a brain so big nobody could fathom its depths. A man with a disdain for idiots that could be pressed into service in the line of toppling the government. A figure to hate, and hate comes so readily to the left-leaning that all they had to do was paint him as the evil genius who deliberately engineered the corona crisis in order to hurt poor people… who he despises!

At last there was a chance to revive all the old animosities. It has been widely reported that during the illnesses of both the PM and his closest advisor a plot was hatched to quietly extend the Brexit transition period. Another bite at the remain cherry in some eyes; an opportunity to engineer the softest of Brexits. But Cummings put a stop to that on his return to duty, thus incurring the wrath of some very senior civil servants.  A leak here, a word in the ear there and the race was on to pin something on him.

I'm not alleging conspiracy, but...

There can be absolutely no doubt that the pursuit of Cummings is entirely political; people have done far worse without being censured in any way. But as flimsy as it is Durhamgate is the red square they have bet all their remaining stake on. Even the virus has been abandoned in the unseemly melee to destroy this man. But I have a suspicion he is made of sterner stuff and I hope that Boris stands by his man. When the wheel stops spinning, let’s hope it lands on black.

Panto Season

It’s behind you! Oh no it isn’t! As the press pack crowd together, totally abandoning any pretence at social distancing, but knowing full well that their transgression will be ignored, they focus on the minutiae of events of six weeks ago. Just like a pantomime plot, their aim couldn’t be more transparent; harass and hound a man they hate until he snaps or is snapped. But this man is not for snapping, it seems.

The Dominic Cummings hate industry has grown from being a cottage affair to become a seething, polluted and festering metropolis; every broadcast ‘news’ outlet is Cumming 24-7. Confected outrage has been whipped up among the public who, as ever, bark on command. Sitting here, working from home I hear, one after another, callers to phone-in shows repeating the words the press have planted in their clouded minds.

The media is the message. This isn’t anything to do with seeking the truth. This is blind hatred and possibly fear of one slightly built man who yesterday comprehensively shot their fox. The press conference really should have been the end of it, but in any pantomime a willing suspension of disbelief is necessary to endure the hackneyed script that we have heard a thousand times before. Our fox cannot be dead, they cried, for we have not been satisfied.

Today the pursuit continues unabated. Disaffected Tories join with the remain establishment and the unruly gallery does its best to drown out the voices onstage. By now, Mr Cummings is at least as vilified as Charles Manson, or perhaps Anders Breivik. I mean, he was already ‘literally Hitler’; a super-villain for the social media age, a Moriarty to the Meeja’s Sherlock, a Machiavelli for the moment.

But now the story becomes ‘why’? Why hasn’t he stepped down? Why hasn’t he made a grovelling apology to the genius reporters who ‘forensically’ examined all the evidence that he himself actually laid before them? Why hasn’t he shown humility and shame for being in a better position than many who are enduring lockdown in flats and back-to-back houses in northern suburbs? How dare he not break down and beg forgiveness?

Quite simply, because he has no case to answer. I am not just slavishly toeing the Johnson line here; I am no uncritical BoJo fanboy. Others have pointed out that Stephen Kinnock wasn’t censured for visiting his parents, that Ian Blackford took himself over the sea to Skye. I couldn’t care less because none of them endangered anybody. But only Cummings has been so brazenly challenged over an issue which is long past its sell-by date.

I'm waiting for the ugly sisters...

Now it is the press who have questions to answer. Why are you so afraid of this one man? How is it that you have failed to land a single blow in all your skirmishes? How come the rules and guidelines you accuse him of breaking don’t apply to you? Haven’t you got some actual news to report? Why do you need the country to hate him so much? Will you only be satisfied if your actions cause permanent harm to him and his family? And shouldn’t you all be thoroughly ashamed of yourselves?

Stop the Press

I am not going to write about Dominic Cummings except to say that the press must be truly desperate to unseat the government to dig up a two month old story and plug it relentlessly when most reasonable people are shrugging and saying, so what? As we begin to relax lockdown rules, who cares that somebody the left fears and hates did a reasonable thing without any apparent risk to others? Meanwhile, we have been inundated on a daily basis with videos of police, press and certain communities blatantly disregarding the rules and no action being apparent.

The press is supposed to inform us but more often than not it acts like a self-serving behemoth, gobbling up snippets of information and regurgitating it as fancy. The world as portrayed by the newspapers is simply not real, it is a fiction designed to sell newspapers. How’s that going for you, The Independent? If you have ever been involved in something that has been written about in the papers you will know the extent to which they write the story first and disregard the facts.

The language is invariably hyperbolic, more resembling the Four Yorkshiremen Sketch than Woodward and Bernstein. So much so that the Man Booker Prize would be more appropriate than the Pulitzer for these fanciful distortions. A mild annoyance is described as ‘fury’ or ‘rage’ in an effort to whip up interest about a story which may not even be true. The adjectival use of ‘incandescent’ is trotted out daily and everybody involved in a press sting is red-faced. There is rarely any attempt to use the fabulously rich English language when all you have to do to is stick to the assumption that your readers are too stupid to demand better.

A source close to government could just be somebody who lives in the constituency of a cabinet minister. A Senior government source is an unnamed and thus unaccountable sacked minister or, these days, a Remain voting backbencher. In anti-government stories (all stories right now) ‘Parliamentary’ sources are, obviously, opposition MPs and even when the source is named the partisan nature of their contribution is so blatant as to be an argument for the other side.

The papers, however, are dwindling in their influence, handing over the baton to the broadcast journalists. But such is the clamour for fame and the gotcha interview that the whole charade gets even more ridiculous on air. Relentless phone-in shows hosted by antagonists with clear agendas for discord. Fatuous magazine shows like Good Morning Britain whose main aim seems to be fame for their presenters. And of course we have the social media based news outlets where the political stench is overwhelming.

He's played you all

The news is rarely about the news, but about what interpretation of events the outlet wants to sell. The affiliations of the main organs is widely known so if you are a taxpayer who has never been on a protest it’s probably a good idea not to read The Guardian and if you are a rabid, red-flag flying Trott the Spectator isn’t going to be your cup of tea. Which means that the only reason you read your favoured papers is for its authors. The story here isn’t about Dominic Cummings, it’s about the storytellers.

Unskilled and Unaware

Many people will be familiar with the Dunning & Kruger study from 1999 which broadly tested the thesis that people with low levels of knowledge tend to overestimate their own competence. In a nutshell, a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing. This axiom is universally accepted – the study was merely to formalise an understanding of it – and it is nowhere more widely demonstrated than in the national discourse on any topic you care to name.

Another axiom – better to remain silent and be thought stupid, than to speak out and leave no doubt – might better be observed by the plethora of armchair experts who, on the basis of a few headlines, suddenly know all you need to know. In the delayed debate on the Immigration Bill, David Lammy (a near perfect example of the Dunning-Kruger Effect) tweeted out: “Just voted against the Conservative's Immigration Bill. I still can't believe this government has the nerve to call countless key workers in this pandemic 'low skilled' - and legislate to make others like them no longer welcome in the UK.”

Conflation is at the heart of being unskilled and unaware and the logical fallacy post hoc ergo propter hoc is regularly deployed to create arguments such as this, which have no merit. A working definition of ‘low-skilled’ could be work which could be performed by the majority of the population, in contrast with work that can only be undertaken by very few who have the aptitude and have put in the countless hours acquiring the necessary skills. Anybody in reasonable shape could re-stock shelves in a supermarket; very few could ever be trained to perform brain surgery.

This is self evident. What might be less so, but is nonetheless true, is that just because you may be highly educated and niche-skilled in a particular discipline, it does not automatically follow that you are better placed to comment on an entirely different topic than any others. Your doctorate in astrophysics does not make you an epidemiologist – I’m looking at you Brian Cox – and your pre-eminence in the entirely self-indulgent discipline of philosophy does not endow you with omniscience in matters political, Mr Grayling.

So, it is entirely appropriate to refer to the mass importation of foreign labour as low-skilled and to honestly examine who they are and why we do it. In theory we invite in the lowest paid and most productive workers from all over the world, they busy themselves enriching us while we Brits get to live the life of Riley. Then, once the economic units have done their bit they get to go back to their mud huts with a bit of cash so they can feed the family they have been absent from for so long.

When I worked in North Africa, all those years ago, we employed people from all over the continent, working 7 days a week, in grim living conditions, often for years on end with very little paid leave. They were happy because in their own countries of origin what we were paying them was very attractive and they were prepared for the hardship because the reward offered them a better life. But there was never any option for citizenship, for permanent residence, or for benefits of any kind. Once the work ended, home they went without question.

But that was Libya; this isn’t. In the caring, liberal, virtue-driven west we have a thing called ‘human rights’ which seems to exist purely to defend the rights of the least desirable elements in society against the majority opinion. Once a worker is here in the UK they appear to gain most of the rights of UK citizens, to the delight of the employers and the chagrin of the rest. It is a murky area because reality is obscured by the tabloid stories of excessive migrant benefits and the cries of ‘racist!’ whenever the subject comes up for scrutiny. We, the hoi polloi, are not well enough informed to make valid judgements, but the politicians are hidebound by their ideologies, making their judgment equally questionable.

More accurate than you dare to think

Having the debate about the true cost and benefits of immigration is long overdue and the bill may be a necessary instrument in imposing controls. But the left will not countenance a second tier of residency, the right will not question the supply of low-cost labour and the general population will continue to be informed by talking heads from the press and entertainment industry. The Immigration Bill may look like we are doing something but the chances are that nothing will really change.