Sir David Amess: Blaming social media is a distraction

The murder on 15 October of Sir David Amess, the MP for Southend West, was horrifying by any metric. A 25-year-old has been charged and will be tried next spring, with the Terrorism Act invoked.

The killing came almost five and a half years after the murder of Yorkshire MP Jo Cox, in a crime where the UK’s Crime Prosecution Service subsequently confirmed that her killer is officially classified as a terrorist.

One MP killed by a far-right terrorist; another by an alleged Islamic terrorist. There have been other murders and attempted murders – in 2010, MP Stephen Timms barely survived stabbing by an Islamic terrorist. In 2000, Andy Pennington, the aide of Lib-Dem MP Nigel Jones, was murdered trying to protect Mr Jones, by a disgruntled constituent who seemed to have forgotten the help the MP had given him previously.

But in the wake of the death of Ms Cox, there were calls for a kinder, gentler politics.

In the wake of the death of Sir David, there have been calls for a kinder, gentler public and political discourse.

Only days after the latest killing, Mark Francois MP called for a new ‘David’s Law’ in memory of his friend, to curb online targeting of MPs and end anonymity on social media.

And here is where we run into problems.

Let’s be clear: the political and public discourse in this country has been dreadful for years. And the online abuse of politicians – or anyone else – is unacceptable. Threats of death or rape are inexcusable. Any improvement would be most welcome.

But whatever Mr Francois might like to think, it’s probably not Facebook or Twitter where someone was groomed to be a terrorist and the murderer of Sir David, should that be proven in court to be the case.

Yet the MP for Rayleigh told the House of Commons that he was “minded to drag Mark Zuckerberg [CEO of Facebook] and Jack Dorsey [CEO of Twitter] to the bar of the house … if necessary kicking and screaming so they can look us all in the eye and account for their actions or rather their inactions that make them even richer than they already are”.

There’s a certain lack of self-awareness here – and not just in terms of the violent actions he was prepared to carry out – but because Mr Francois is himself a rabble-rouser, to use a rather old-fashioned term.

In 2019, he compared Luxembourg’s Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission from 2014-2019, to Hitler, noting that “Herr Juncker in the bunker would say that, wouldn’t he?”

He told his fellow Conservative MP Phillip Hammond, a minister at the time, “up yours” on Radio 4 regarding Brexit and, on another occasion, went full Luftwaffle, noting: “My father was a D-Day veteran. He never submitted to bullying by any German. Neither will his son!”

Bombast and rhetoric to amuse the masses. But not grown-up politics.

I have no reason to believe that Mr Francois isn’t deeply upset by the brutal murder of his friend, but he himself is part of a deeper, wider problem.

And he is far from being alone. In the wake of the murder, Labour’s deputy leader Angela Rayner was accused by several commentators of aiding this situation with her recent description of Conservatives as “scum”.

No – it didn’t cause the murder in any way (it seems that the accused had been planning something for two years, so it’s not the pandemic either), but it doesn’t help.

As Andrew Rawnsley makes clear in today’s Observer, such language is not new. Winston Churchill suggested Labour would institute a British Gestapo, while Nye Bevan called the Conservatives “lower than vermin”. Neither played well with the public – but neither had anything to do with a social media that didn’t exist.

But back to Mr Francois. His party leader, Prime Minister Boris Johnson, has had many columns published in the Daily Telegraph containing lies – ‘EU to outlaw prawn cocktail crisps’ is one of the more obviously egregious.

The Daily Mail also excels in this – and in whipping up hatred and distrust. It’s spent decades demonising public service workers – teachers and social workers in particular. I recall my mother singing from the Mail hymn sheet about how teachers, untrained in sport, were refusing to do unpaid overtime, meaning that we didn’t win much at the Olympics.

As the UK has seen in recent years, splashing the cash – via the National Lottery, to fund training properly – Is What Actually Works.

To be fair to my mother, when she heard counter points – such as why should anyone do unpaid overtime in something they’re not qualified in – she acknowledged that those points were logical.

But are we less respectful than previous generations? Social media amplifies things, but otherwise, I really don’t think it’s so simple.

In the last year of his life, my father was grumbling about Gary Lineker’s politics. “I can’t respect people with different views to mine,” he opined. “Oh,” I responded, “so you don’t respect me?”

That, apparently, was “different” – presumably in that blood somehow defies one’s own logic somehow. But, y’know ... Mail readers. In those last months, I started taking him a regular copy of Private Eye. We never discussed the contents, but he actually stopped the carers picking him up a Mail every day. Something had jolted him – and one day, he ruefully hinted that it was the Eye, when he told me not to pick him up a Mail when I went to the shops for him.

Yet I also recall, a week or so before the 2016 referendum, his shouting at me, over the phone: “I don’t want to be ruled over by the Nazis!”

And I think back to some of the things he said over the decades and it was little different to what happens on social media – albeit without the ‘coarse’ language. Because for my parents, saying ‘fuck’ was far worse than much else.

Furriners were to be despised (well, until you met them personally). The English, the English, the English were best ... “I wouldn’t give tuppence for all of the rest”. As Flanders and Swann put it. Satirically. Yet my mother in particular seemed to hold it ups as a second national anthem.

Long enough in the tooth, I can look back and think longingly of the era when the Telegraph was a very fine newspaper, which absolutely kept opinion and reportage separate. How sad to look at the paper’s online forums now and see a nasty, anti-intellectual bear pit. How sad to see a once-great publication as a propaganda sheet for a serially lying prime minister.

For clarity here, I am no social media saint – but a lot of what I’ve written here expresses why I get so exasperated that I swear about and indeed, to, politicians. What recourse do we have when the prime minister can lie in the House of Commons with apparent impunity, yet anyone saying, in the House of Commons that he does so, is punished?

Why is wearing a tie in the House of Commons (for men, obviously) important, yet the prime minister lying is less so? And let’s be quite clear ... Boris Johnson lies almost as readily as he moves his lips – and that is a fact. Most of his Cabinet are little better.

But the Murdochification of British media – together with the demands of 24-hour digital news media and the need for click bait for revenues – are other factors that have brought us here.

Social media is without doubt a problem that humanity has nowhere near solved yet, and it needs dealing with, but it is *not* the origin of the issues that we face now – specifically in the UK – in terms of public and political discourse, and pretending it is, can only be convenient for others who are part of the problem.

The murder of Sir David Amess was – as every murder is – awful. But to try to pretend that it is somehow and primarily the result of the failings of social media issues is, while those failings most certainly exist, a deflection from reality.

 

 

Are you from the real world – or not?

Are you real? Do you live in the real world? In order that we might all be able to judge – what paper do you read?

I’m only asking because, on 7 May, just after the various elections across England, Scotland and Wales, I found myself deep in Twitterworld.

There, one (on the surface) quite coherent contributor was asking why, in the Hartlepool by-election, Labour had “put up a Remainer in a Brexit town?”

 

That was a coherent question and I was drawn in – more fool me, perhaps.

 

But then they continued: “Did they do that deliberately so Starmer could pin the blame for any defeat on the candidate rather than him? It was a gross error of judgement. But the fact is that the Lab party only represent Guardian readers, not real people.”

 

Oh dear. To which I responded by positing the obvious question (if you have a brain): “What are ‘real people’?”

 

Since I read the Guardian, does that make me ‘unreal’ – or is such ‘unrealness’ balanced out by my not only reading the Guardian, but a wide variety of other media too? After all, I still sometimes look at the Telegraph culture sections for the opera!

 

“If there is such a concept [as real people] and it isn’t ALL people, then what are ‘unreal people’?” I asked. “What would that actually mean?”

 

But then I found myself getting rather engaged. So I mused that it would be fun to try the concept “based on newspaper readership: what paper would the most ‘real people’ read ...? The Times? The Sun? The Mail? The Mirror? What newspaper makes you most ‘real’?

“What about FT readers? How real or unreal would they be? And as for the Express ...”

 

I have a subscription for Private Eye – where does that put me on the spectrum of real to unreal? Honestly, I’m wondering if I and Ian Hislop are about to fade away into unrealness.

 

The poster in question has still not responded.

 

The thing is, this all sounds like a bit of a laugh. But it isn’t. Earlier today, I looked back at the account that had tweeted this nonsense and discovered that it is currently lauding anti-lockdown demonstrators and similar idiots.

 

Such phrases have become a regular riposte from people with no actual argument. I’ll go further: it is almost a boast that they have no logical argument – and let’s face it, to have a proper argument would risk making them a “girly swot” and we know where that doesn’t get you.

 

At the most basic level, it ‘others’: it says that some people are not “real”. It promotes a sense that, if some people don’t share the same views as you do, then they are not as good as you. And it is widespread in social media.

 

It’s all part of – or at least connected to – a deeply anti-intellectual, anti-fact, anti-democratic and anti-free speech conspiracy culture. 

 

It’s also no distance from the similar comment heard for years of: ‘in the real world’.

 

Let’s ask the same questions: if there is a ‘real world’, then what is ‘the unreal world’?

 

Does ‘the real world’ include a favella in Brazil? Does it include astronauts in outer space? Does it include Trump’s gold lift? Does it include children scouring waste dumps for things to salvage and sell to survive? Does it include those with the dosh to live on board luxury private ships all year round, cruising the globe? Does it include people trying to flee persecution for whatever reason? Does it include the nurse using a food bank to help feed her children?

 

Of course, we all know what it means: select from the following word salad – ‘metropolitan, liberal, lefty, artsy, luvvie, elite’.

 

Whatevs.

 

But let’s take just one – that ‘luvvies’ tag. Actors and performers, who seem to be mostly quite politically/socially progressive – possibly because the trade actually demands an ability to empathise/put yourself in someone else’s shoes, though are rarely anywhere near as far left as, say, Vanessa Redgrave – come in for huge stick. And they are most certainly not of the ‘real world’.

 

One assumes that those in ‘the real world’ never watch any sort of thing that involves dodgy presenters – that’s Match of the Day out, then, given Gary ‘woke’ Lineker, but obviously not Top Gear, given the general views of petrolhead star and conservative media columnist Jeremy Clarkson – or almost all films and TV drama and sit-coms.

 

But then again, consistency has nothing to do with this.

 

In the last year of his life, I remember my father ranting that he couldn’t ‘respect anyone who doesn’t have the same beliefs I do!’

 

Having no knowledge at that stage of how it’s best to simply agree with those with dementia, I bridled and rasped back: “So, you don’t respect me, then?”

 

That confused him. Somehow, it’s different with family. Yet of course, that excludes logic, which goes down the toilet – victim to simplistic gammon-faced ranting.

 

The simplistic gammon-faced ranting wouldn’t be important – except that in recent years it has had, and continues to have – a massive influence over the public and political life of this country: across the UK as a whole, but particularly in England, where it seems to be endemic.

 

My parents, Brexit voters both, were not uneducated. My father in particular achieved way more than most of those with whom he grew up with in a tiny, rural Cornish outpost. Little more than a Cornish peasant, he became an ordained Methodist minister and spent his working life moving around England – an incredible achievement.

 

But as with my mother, who came from far less humble a background in east Lancashire, his education was very England-centric. And both maintained a lack of enquiry into anything outside the UK as a whole.

 

I recall, in my late thirties, my mother seeing me reading a book and asking what it was. Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, I replied. My father had never heard of it – my mother seemed almost to blanch in fear.

 

After my father retired, they travelled a little on the Continent – and actually enjoyed it, though it often, in their reports, seemed to have been a revelation that, for instance, Germany was so clean and the Germans so ... friendly.

 

The first time they went was just after my father retired. It was a retirement present from his congregations, a trip to see the 2000 the Oberammergau Passion Play. He was almost terrified beforehand – it was, after all, the land of “the Nazis”.

 

They were neither stupid nor uneducated – but they were ill-served by a very limited and limiting education that severely constrained their horizons. They could list kings and queens of England, but knew almost nothing of the world outside the UK, except where that involved the wonderfulness of the British (English) Empire. And note – that was the what they could cling to as the ‘good bits’.

 

I strongly suspect that, in terms of Brexit and where we are now on a wider scale, this is a situation that was not limited to two people, on an individual level, growing up and being educated at almost opposite ends of England and in quite different socio-economic situations.

 

The English, with their long-term distrust of ‘intellectualism’, have allowed a culture to grow where we now ‘have no more need of experts’. Add to that a sense among (largely) older generations of not knowing what their identity is in a context of devolution and the end of empire, and you have fertile ground for opportunists, nationalists and populists.

‘The real world’ is simply a psychologically monochrome world view, where everyone ‘real’ is a mental mirror image of oneself.

It cannot, therefore, allow for free speech, political plurality and democracy, and any kind of diversity.

 

And that is why ‘real people’ and ‘the real world’ are not simply jokes, but are symptomatic of the problems we face in the UK as a whole – and most particularly in England – and why they need challenging at every turn.

The apotheosis of the idiocracy?

Is it just possible that we live in an age that is seeing the apotheosis of the idiocracy?

The last few weeks seem to have provided ample evidence of such a state of being.

First (for the sake of this post) there was the sheer obscenity of ‘Black Friday’.

People falling over themselves, fighting, screaming and altogether behaving like total cretins in order to get goods that they probably have no need for, which in many cases were being marketed as ‘cheap’ when the price before this sale madness had been hiked to enable that.

And don’t pretend that it was just the lumpen poor either, simply because TV cameras went to the shops where some of them would be congregated. The likes of John Lewis was advertising ‘Black Friday’ nonsense too.

But setting even that aside, let’s remember that this is not (yet) the US and we do not (yet) celebrate Thanksgiving.

So why the hell have this obscene nonsense?

Not that that is likely to stop anyone, as we increasingly see an Americanised Halloween merchandised and sold to the credulous as a major event, while an increasing number of schools have ‘proms’.

What was wrong with signing each other’s school blouses/shirts and, if you were so inclined, chucking some flour and a few eggs around?

Now, we have a situation where stupid parents are encouraged to behave ever more stupidly; encouraged to try to ensure that their brat has the most expensive outfit and arrives in the most stretched limo of any of their peers.

I absolutely shudder at the thought of being forced to go through all that. Thank god I grew up in saner times. Now, there’s even a rise in proms for ‘graduation’ from nursery school, as well as from primary school.

Only a generation and a half ago, most people would have seen through the keeping-up-with-the-Joneses cult for precisely that – and laughed at those who played that game.

Now, we’ve turned it something that’s so important that it’s central to the economic calculations (I use the word loosely) of the Chancellor, who is basing his predictions on households going ever deeper into debt.

Moving on, this Christmas – even before we had reached Advent – decorations were going up (and not just in the big stores), while stalls had set up selling Christmas trees. Who is stupid enough to buy one so early? It’ll be dried up before Christmas itself!

Indeed, why the creep of the start of Christmas ever earlier and earlier?

I know that, historically speaking, the long Christmas shopping season started in WWI when families in the US were sending presents and cards to their loved ones in the trenches.

But it has lengthened further for entirely commercial reasons in more recent years, and now Christmas seems to start as soon as the Halloween sales opportunity is done for another year.

Of course, it’ll only be a week or so before we see the first adverts for Easter eggs.

Like Christmas tree sales, decorations were going up at hotels and businesses, as well as in homes, before the start of December this time around.

Generally speaking, most people only decorated their homes a fortnight before Christmas Day itself, and the time to take them down is 5 January, the 12th Day of Christmas.

And what’s with the ‘buy a sweater for one day a year’ thing – never mind that being followed by: ‘pay £2 to wear it to work and that will go to charity’?

Instead of spending £15 on a sweater (probably made of crap acrylic, in a sweatshop somewhere), and then £2 on your charity giving, put a tenner in the collection box.

Still, if you live to shop, then it just gives you another excuse to … well, shop.

Not that this is just about Christmas and commercialism in general.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not against having fun, but when I see adults scooting past me on over-sized scooters of the sort that were designed with small children in mind, wearing wooly hats with animal ears on them, I wonder if we are also in an age of increasing infantilisation.

And then there’s the total logic deficit that we are increasingly witnessing in other walks of life.

Take the case of Russell Brand. Now I’m far from being a fan (and I think his opinions on voting are misguided at best and downright dangerous at worst), but in the present instance, with his involvement in the campaign to try to stop the tenants of the New Era estate in Hackney being evicted by a US business that will then hike the rents through the roof, he is most definitely on the side of the angels.

But what does he get accused of? Hypocrisy.

Now admittedly, this was from the Sun, with the Mail in hot pursuit, but the story seems to be that he rents – and not cheaply – and that his ultimate landlord is not the most ethical.

Now if Brand was calling on everyone to check the ethics of every individual or company that they do business with, while not doing the same himself, that would be hypocrisy.

But this really seems to come down to a view I’ve heard espoused from right-wing cretins more than once: that, if you are doing okay yourself, it is hypocritical to care about anyone who is not doing as well as you are.

Further, I’ve seen it suggested that, if you are in the above situation and you dare to think that people should be paid a living wage, for instance, then you should somehow use your wage to achieve that.

And then there’s the guff about how ‘socialists’ should not earn £X, because they should only ever be on low incomes.

‘Socialists’ has become a word used by the terminally (if only) imbecilic to damn anything they simply don’t like. Few have any concept of the actual economic philosophy behind it.

It’s reminiscent of the woman filmed calling Obama a ‘communist’ during the last US presidential election. When asked what she thought a communist was, she had to admit that she hadn’t a clue.

Of course it also means that we’ve moved so far to the right in UK politics that when someone says that people should be paid a living wage, it’s considered not as ‘fairness’, but as something to be slagged off, either bizarrely as ‘envy’ or as ‘socialism’!

To the dolts out there: if people cannot afford to live, how do you think that will impact on recruitment, retention, sickness rates and productivity?

And why do you think that the tax take has gone down even as the number of people in work has risen? That’s right: because we’re in the middle of a drive by business to a low-wage economy, with hundreds of thousands (about 1.4 million, to be accurate) on zero-hours contracts, many more in insecure jobs and yet more forced into ‘self-employment’ that gets them off the books, but can see them earning well below what is needed to live.

Mind, all this sees us looking at a media that is increasingly dumbed down, even in the supposed quality press, with increasing amounts of bias too and far less good-quality reportage.

What’s so depressing is the sheer number of people who appear to believe at face value anything they read in print.

You can bet that the same papers that are railing against Brand are not railing against the new owners of the New Era estate wanting to throw the residents onto the street.

And if this all sounds like a rant, that’s because it is. But honestly, look around you and at the things I’ve mentioned above and tell me that it doesn’t make you want to do a combination of ~head > desk~ and ~face palm~.

Adding to the UK’s democratic deficit

Douglas Carswell: the first MP from outside the 'Big 3'

What might politely be referred top as the UKIP ‘issue’ has been discussed on this blog before, but after last week’s momentous event, it demands attention once more.

Douglas Carswell was elected as Conservative MP for Clacton in 2010. This August just gone, he defected to UKIP, sparking a by-election, in which he was last week duly returned to Parliament – as a UKIP MP for the constituency of Clacton.

Most importantly, this made him the party’s first MP – such a staggering event that, in the days since, UKIP leader Nigel Farage has been invited to participate in next spring’s pre-election debates between the leaders of the main parties, the Conservatives, Labour and the Lib-Dems.

And all because no other party has ever achieved anything like this: no other party has ever broken through that established trio to gain even a single, solitary seat in the House of Commons.

UKIP’s win last week changes the make-up of the House of Commons out of all recognition, as revealed by this up-to-date (and obviously very brief) list with four entries in it:

Party                              MPs

Conservative                         303

Labour                                  257

Liberal Democrat                    56

Democratic Unionist                8

Scottish National                    6

Sinn Féin                               5

Independent                          3

Plaid Cymru                            3

SDLP                                    3

Alliance                                 1

Green                                   1

Respect                                1

Speaker                                1

UKIP                                     1

Vacant                                  1

Total number of seats            650

The DUP's Ian Paisley Jnr – MP

It’s hard to work out what all the excitement is about. Or, more to the point, if UKIP has produced such a revolutionary result that it deserves its place in pre-election debates, then what about other parties that also have one MP or more?

In the media Establishment’s excitement, it is blatantly favouring one ‘alternative’ party over any and all others.

There is absolutely no logical reason why UKIP should be included in pre-election debates, over and above any other party. If UKIP gets on to the debates, so should all the others.

Anything else has nothing to do with democracy and everything to do with a media Establishment that is delighted to promote one particular party and its ideology.

Once again, we see that the bulk of the mainstream UK media is not remotely interested in being part of what could be considered an honourable Fourth Estate, but simply in pushing the personal ideologies of proprietors and editors.

Sinn Féin's Michelle Gildernew – MP

Some observers are particularly upset with the BBC’s attitude in all this, harking back to some time that never existed.

The BBC may be wonderful in many, many ways, but on politics, it has always been a supporter of the status quo, from the General Strike of 1926 on, when director general Lord Reith made it clear that his idea of ‘impartiality’ in terms of newscoverage by the new broadcaster would not ‘offend’ the Establishment.

If we were really talking about the will of the people – and as discussed previously, the rise of UKIP is reflective of one reaction to a widespread disenchantment with mainstream politics in the UK – then based on the change-everything criteria of UKIP having won a single Parliamentary seat, all alternative voices should be heard.

But of course UKIP has councillors and MEPs too.

Yes: and so do other parties in that list.

The Green Party's Caroline Lucas – MP

If ever you wanted an illustration of the bias in much of the UK’s mainstream media, and of the agenda of its owners, then look no further.

The manner in which it has promoted UKIP – and ignored other alternative parties – would make Reith’s version of impartiality look like the real deal.

And good luck to the Green Party, which is considering taking legal action – if it can raise the funds – to challenge this blatant bias.

Perhaps the other parties being disenfranchised in terms of TV election coverage could join them in that endeavor. Now that might be some sort of victory for British democracy.

change.org petition to include the Green Party in any such widened debate (you can add a note that all parties should be included)