Cynicism for a Social Age

Red Ed [Miliband]’s in a strop with the Mail […] what has made him vent his spleen — indeed, he has stamped his feet and demanded a right of reply — is a Mail article by Geoffrey Levy on Saturday about the Labour leader’s late father, Ralph, under the arresting headline ‘The Man Who Hated Britain.’

‘An evil legacy and why we won't apologise’ MailOnline 1^st October 2013

THE PAPER THAT HATES BRITAIN

Paul Dacre's pledge to ‘tweak the noses of the liberalocracy which effectively run Britain’ is a homage to his reactionary newspaper. So what does the Daily Mail really believe in? The answer should disturb everyone who loves this country

On a hot summer day, a middle-aged paper made its way alone out from under a rock in Central London to mark a lifelong obsession.

Solemnly, it stood at the grave of a spinning Britannia and said, in its own words:

“The way stateless Jews from Germany are pouring in from every port of this country is becoming an outrage. The number of aliens entering the country through the back door is a problem to which the Daily Mail has repeatedly pointed.” [1]

The year was 1938. The paper was the Daily Mail, a spiteful chancer that would flee from this story just a few years later to join in with the condemnation of the Nazi Holocaust.

The Daily Mail, today edited by Paul Dacre, died and went to heaven in 1968, soon after Enoch Powell gave his ‘rivers of blood’ speech. It was soon after scaled down to tabloid format, offering what might be termed ‘Cynicism For A Social Age.’ In this form, the venerated national moralizer and emetic continued to espouse its lifelong Populist cause, representing “the views of millions of ordinary Britons.”

One voice, however, noted how, in its attempts to control who ‘counted’ in this British population, the Daily Mail was vehemently pursuing a lost cause. It was that of a longstanding senior news reporter at the Mail. He did not mince his words.

“They phoned me early one morning and told me to drive about three hundred miles to cover a murder. It was a woman and her two children who’d been killed. I got an hour and a half into the journey, and the news desk called me on my mobile and said, “Come back.” I said, “Why’s that?” They said, “They’re black.” [2]

As Paul Dacre once commented: “Racism appalls [sic] me and I wish I could get more black and Asian reporters working for us, but they don't come into journalism.”

In the explosive interview, given to British Journalism Review in 2002, Dacre revealed how obsessed he was with maintaining his paper’s “conservative with a small c” legacy.

“I shall go to my grave believing that children need a father and mother and a stable upbringing. I am not saying that people who grow up in single families don't have wonderful mothers or wonderful dads, but I believe children should be conceived in love and, in an ideal world, have a father and a mother. The breakdown in that belief is responsible for a lot of the unhappiness in the 21st century.”

How proud his ‘family-centric’ Daily Mail must have been to hear him describe readers’ interests when responding to the Leveson Inquiry in 2011:

“The Hampstead liberal with his gilded life-style understandably enjoys the Guardian – a paper that deals with serious issues. But does he or a judge have any right to deny someone who works ten hours a day in a Sunderland call centre and lives for football, the right to buy a paper that reveals the sexual peccadilloes of one of his team's millionaire married players.”

Dacre mentioned his interest in football player’s peccadilloes just minutes after criticizing Daily Express owner Richard ‘dirty’ Desmond for having made his money from pornography. Meanwhile the Daily Mail’s ferocious defence of marriage is evident from articles like “I feel guilty for ogling girls in mini-skirts. Yet no one would call my wife a dirty old woman for fancying a handsome cricketer.”

The newspaper’s stance on liberals is uncompromising. “Leftie bishops, liberal judges, a biased BBC” were all listed in an article which attacked many of Britain’s national institutions by claiming they were dominated by liberals (such as former Conservative Party chairman Lord Patten, who was: “several degrees to the Left of what used to be called ‘Right-wing Labour’”).

Another article, this time attacking the cherished National Health Service, said: “Members of tribunals are trained to be concerned only with upholding the rights of perceived ‘persecuted minorities’. Their verdicts are guided by the doctrines of ‘sexism’, ‘racism’ and a litany of fashionable ‘phobias.’” Still another: “How Labour threw open doors to mass migration in secret plot to make a multicultural UK.”

This is the publication that profits from its position as the second best selling newspaper in a country whose non-white population is over 9 million.

As for the diverse country that buys it and pays its keep, the newspaper wrote in its RightMinds section in 2009:

“It is hard not to reach the dismal conclusion that a society faced with violence in pursuit of the goal of overturning Christian values and conquering Britain for Islam [The Mail referring here to a protest against Israel’s military action in the Gaza Strip] turns tail and runs away - while at the same time coming down like a ton of bricks on any expression of those Christian values which underpin British society, in the interests of ‘equality and diversity’.

This is the way a society dies.”

This geriatric distaste for the British character certainly didn’t stop the Daily Mail availing itself of the lucrative reportage there was to be had from praising the fine Olympic Games opening ceremony this country offered last year.

Indeed, while ignorance of popular opinion is a charge Paul Dacre usually aims at the ‘liberal’ press, his newspaper found itself doing just that over the Olympic ceremony.

One article called Labour’s praise for the inclusion of “Working class history, multicultural[ism], NHS, CND, gay kissing” ‘taunts.’ Another piece commented: “NHS beds dominated the infield for so long that it seemed more a political message than a tribute to our hardworking nurses.” The paper then had to admit that this comment was out of step with what ordinary people thought, “Still, Boyle’s £27million creation dazzled, winning him thousands of new Twitter followers by the second.”

How passionately the Daily Mail must have approved of its editor’s sinister admission that his ‘Lesson One’ was that “Brains and education have little to do with the craft of journalism.”

Dacre relished his own contribution to what he called “the chattering classes' dyspepsia with [Daily Mail owner] the Rothermere press,” adding that “no day is too busy or too short not to find time to tweak the noses of the liberalocracy which effectively run Britain.”

Such tweaks by the Daily Mail have included:

• The May 1993 “How Race Militants Hijacked a Tragedy” article that downplayed the racial issues raised by Stephen Lawrence’s murder. The case had apparently been “swept into a whirlwind of high-profile publicity organised largely by anti-racist groups on the short path towards the making of a cause.” [3]
  
  
• The claim in 2011 that gay Britons were becoming McCarthyites: “schoolchildren are to be bombarded with homosexual references in maths, geography and ­science lessons as part of a Government-backed drive to promote the gay agenda.”
  
  
• The many snide digs at diversity, claiming that pride in and respect for Britain’s wonderfully varied population is a conspiracy hatched by a tiny liberal elite. This one from 2009: “'Diversity' is just another way of persecuting decent people trying to go about their daily business... The most intolerant people in Britain are always those who preach 'tolerance' most loudly.”

Paul Dacre himself, in his 2008 speech to the Society of Editors, declared: “The problem is Britain's liberal class – the people who know best and who really run this country – by and large hate all the popular press.”

He also made plain his disdain for what he called the “subsidariat” (media outlets paid for by subsidy), which, to his mind, were nothing less than a kind of old boy network. “Large parts of the media are increasingly populated by a privileged elite of top university graduates who, too often, have only ever operated in subsidised environments.” This included, as he later said at Leveson, the “high priests of the subsidariat,” the BBC.

“The corporation has all but seen off ITV's news services, both nationally and locally, has crippled commercial radio, is distorting the free market for internet newspapers and now, with its preposterous proposal for 65 ultra local websites, is going for the jugular of the local newspaper industry.  Lines must be drawn in the sand…

It is destroying media plurality in Britain and in its place imposing a liberal, leftish, mono culture that is destroying free and open debate in Britain.”

Given this tirade, one is entitled to wonder whether Paul Dacre’s anti-liberalism is actually fuelled by a giant-sized social chip on his shoulder, or dick on his forehead.

Or perhaps Stephen Fry’s “vile bastard” does indeed, against all the odds in a country with so much to be proud of and champion, choose to stand for everything that is wrong with Britain.

==============================================================================

[1] Daily Mail, 20^th August 1938.

[2] Nick Davies Flat Earth News, (London; Vintage, 2009) p. 371. [“The book, which began with a presumption of guilt, was itself a pretty sloppy piece of journalism, full of half-truths, anonymous sources, gossip and urban myths presented as facts, and the very selective reporting that it accused papers of employing.” – Paul Dacre]

[3] Paul Harris, Peter Rose, ‘How Race Militants Hijacked a Tragedy,’ Daily Mail, 10^th May 1993.

“Morally I Think it’s Wrong, But I Done it” - Thatcherism and the Left

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There is an observation in American politics that some Democrats and voters are secretly relieved when the Republicans win an election. This is because the 'nasty party' is expected to make all of the hard choices that the Democrats, privately, think are necessary but feel duty, honour and conscience-bound to avoid making themselves. Things like welfare cuts, lambasting of migrants, cuts to government spending, privatizing troublesome or money-haemorrhaging industries...

There is a collective sigh of relief when the traditionally right of centre party gets in. The tough decisions will be taken and those on the centre left can benefit from them without feeling guilty. Hell, the liberals can even publicly protest, abuse and indict the Right over their policies—it'll be no skin off their nose; the Right thrive on reciting commanding and unyielding self-justifications. 'It's time to stop being a pushover' etc.

Before the last election there was talk of closet Conservatives existing in the Labour heartland—voters who now felt that the Conservatives had the answer. These were people who presumably felt that Labour weren't working, who felt that maybe welfare could do with reining in, and who, if they're honest, were bothered by immigration. David Cameron could feel the electricity of liberation running up and down these voters' spines as he told them that it was all right for them to think this. They weren't betraying their background. They weren't bigots. It was all right.

What about applying the 'secretly relieved' theory to the Thatcher government of the 1980s? Did Thatcherism liberate traditional Labour voters who felt guilty about bemoaning strikes and disruption, never-seen-the-like pay rises for unionized workers, welfare rewards... We might start to talk about Thatcher opening the door for Tony Blair and New Labour. Once Thatcherism had eliminated the sacred cows—the hitherto rough consensus between Labour and the Conservatives on providing welfare, on the unions as a political voice, on having nationalized industries, on keeping the monetary hand on the tiller—there was scope for Labour to reinvent themselves, to lose all their past difficulties with those sacred things and present a new style not as a betrayal (for that was Thatcher) but as pragmatism, as dealing with the world as it now is and has to be. We might thus talk about the blurring between the two parties' lines on the economy—on free enterprise, privatizing industry, deregulation...

We could say that the ostensibly left-leaning and anti-Thatcherite in this country did, if they were honest, benefit from the tough decisions taken. Thatcherism was morally repugnant and yet devastatingly necessary. People could noisily protest and lament while quietly feeling sweet relief as a belligerent and uncompromising government swept away, utterly defeated and humiliated, all of the elements that Labour and the Left could not, neither in ability nor in all conscience, deal with themselves. With Lady Thatcher's death and funeral the media's even-handedness amounts to: 'whether you think she was right or wrong, it had to be done.' Surely this means: 'whether you think she was right or wrong, she was right.'

“This is the end of consensus politics and it's you guys who opened the door and let her in. Just remember that.”

The death of consensus politics—the social contract, post-war consenus, Butskellism, Keynesianism—then. Whatever the name, Thatcherism brought a sea change. Depending on your view, Margaret Thatcher either tore the wonderful thing down and ruined working people's lives and British society thereafter... or replaced a worn-out economic model that had proved its obsolescence through the unstoppable economic decline and industrial unrest of the 1970s. What consensus was, roughly, was an idea that the government, Conservative or Labour, focused on the workforce—the demand side of 'supply and demand.' People's wages were controlled through tax, the welfare state looked after them and unemployment was to be kept low at all costs. Related to this was post-war nationalization of industries, house building, the NHS… If the market dipped and a business was going under the government would step in to tide it over with investment until things picked up.

Thatcherism focused instead on supply—the goods available, the market place. The free market could do the job instead of and better than government. Nationalized industries would be privatized. The government wouldn’t intervene if a business failed; laid off workers would be swallowed up by a market gap opening elsewhere. The government controlled the supply of money, in particular limiting government borrowing and spending—monetarism (this might sound familiar). Inflation was now the thing to be kept down at all costs. Unemployment was viewed as regrettable but inevitable. How about this for baiting armchair/barstool welfare reformers: we might even need a level of unemployment for a healthy economy.

For or against the above, Margaret Thatcher clearly didn’t come up with everything personally, nor in some precedent-less vacuum.

“The Radical Right had not been alone in thinking that, were it only possible, some limitations on the rights of unions would be beneficial to the economy as a whole. […] Criticism of the way in which the economy was actually operated had been endemic since the early sixties, with growing appreciation that financial management was lax, economic decision-making unpredictable, and power given to the big battalions inimical to genuine individual initiative. The principle of universality in the Welfare State had long been abandoned, both to try to contain costs, and to target aid where it was most needed” [1].

Ted Heath’s Conservative government set out to do in 1970 much of what Thatcherism later promised. Journalist Simon Jenkins comments that “Heath’s plans for government were more ‘Thatcherite’ in 1970 than were Thatcher’s in 1979” [2]. Heath failed (he turned, whether he wanted to or not). In 1976, after an IMF bailout, Prime Minister Jim Callaghan's speech to the Labour Party conference said things like: “The cosy world we were told would go on for ever, where full employment would be guaran­teed by a stroke of the Chancellor’s pen, cutting taxes, deficit spending, that cosy world is gone.” And “We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession, and increase employ­ment by cutting taxes and boosting Government spending. I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists.” The result: spending cuts, wage controls, Winter of Discontent.

Economics is rather nebulous, though. It’s tricky to judge how government policy affects matters (if at all) and how long it takes for any effects to be felt. It could be argued that Margaret Thatcher came to power at the end of a long period of economic trouble and then enjoyed the calmer period after. Historian Arthur Marwick:

“Britain in the mid-seventies, when both inflation and unemployment rose menacingly, and in the early eighties, when they rose catastrophically, was directly affected by the deepening world trade recession. After 1982 trade revival, and in particular the renewed growth of the American economy, was certainly a critical factor in the growing sense of well-being of the later eighties” [3].

With the government in the tail end of this up to 1982 Thatcherism had, according to Jenkins, a slow, realistic waiting period. Thatcher had moderate figures, ‘wets,’ put in charge of things like union reform as a ‘badge of our reasonableness’ [4]. It was after the famed ‘Falkands Factor’ from 1982 when Thatcherism was in the ascendant and tougher legalisation appeared. ‘Employment’ Acts became ‘Trade Union’ Acts. With this came the history-making stand-offs in domestic and international politics.



In recent tributes, the 1978-79 Winter of Discontent has been cited as what life was like before Margaret Thatcher. Here the country, the ungovernable, sick man of Europe, was on its knees (pretty hazardous, what with all those mountains of uncollected rubbish about). The unions monopolized the running of the country and paved the way for Thatcherism’s tough but necessary revolution. But the Winter of Discontent was not like the industrial action Thatcherism battled in the 1980s. Those who were striking Shakespearian were *deep breath* nurses/NHS workers, ambulance drivers, caretakers, dustmen, gravediggers, lorry drivers, train drivers, car plant workers. Thatcher’s government was contending with *and another* steel workers, printers, dockers, teachers, seamen, postal workers and, clearly, miners.

The Thatcher government's more direct response to the 'Discontent' strikers was not all that different from its supposedly 'pwned' consensus predecessors: “[the July 1979 budget] had to confront the fact that, during the election, Thatcher had bribed public-sector unions with the promise of large pay rises” [5]. Indeed, public spending rose from 44.6% of GDP in 1979 to 48.1% in 1983—trying pragmatically, in this first term of office and before the later cuts, to cope with rising unemployment and the resultant drain on welfare. What with the ‘catastrophic’ inflation and Chancellor Geoffrey Howe’s near doubling of VAT, people’s benefits didn’t go as far. This hardly helped matters for the crazy kids of Toxteth and Brixton.

Also, the power of the unions seemed to be abating alongside the Thatcher government's Employment Acts of 1980 and 1982, rather than simply because of them.

“Previous attempts to bind and gag the unions had met with widespread opposition; this time, when the union leaders called for demonstrations and protest strikes, their members looked the other way.

Not only did many workers feel that events of the winter of discontent - real or as reported - justified the Conservatives' backlash against the unions, they were cowed by the sharp rise in unemployment and by the sobering experience of unions which tried to challenge the government”

David Brindle, 'Tories Cripple Trade Unions' The Multinational Monitor, December/January 1986/1987

Marwick notes a ‘most unimpressive’ level of support for the TUC’s day of action against the 1982 act [6]. Clearly though the reforms criminalized many strike practices that had previously occurred. Union funds were now liable for any damage caused by illegal strikes. A third act in 1984 required secret ballots to be held before a strike was called (generously: this stopped the militant elements from taking over and forcing moderates, ordinary workers, to strike; sceptically: this expected union divisions to render most strikes non-starters and criminalized the existing miners’ strike). Illegal meant stoppable—footage of the battles between police and miners attests to this particular sea change. The reforms also addressed the closed shop, which had been a tricky issue for Labour in the 1970s. In 1975 Conservative MP Norman Tebbit had attacked Employment Secretary Michael Foot over the 'Ferrybridge Six'—six power station workers who'd been sacked for not joining the union and then denied unemployment benefit [7].



Were Labour secretly relieved by the reforms and their effect on the unions? Leader Neil Kinnock was fairly quiet over the miners’ strike, seeing a hopeless situation. Later in 1985 Kinnock made his famous party conference attack on the Trotskyite Militant tendency’s position in the Labour-controlled Liverpool City Council—a ‘party within a party.’ An expulsion of Militant supporters within Labour ensued. Retrospectively these events have been placed along Labour’s long route from factionalism and left wing dominance to the electable party eventually headed by Tony Blair. Of course, Blair and Brown were even more taken with Thatcher…

In terms of Thatcherism leaving people 'secretly relieved' the most profound or devastating effect is that on the electorate. Witness the vehement intolerance Thatcher lovers and haters have of each other. Both feel that the other's argument has to be challenged and their own defended. Thatcher played on the guilty conscience in us, whether you bought her line or not. If you hated Thatcherism you still recognized and agonized over the working class frustrations it identified and played off of. If you went with Thatcherism you recognized and agonized over the betrayal others saw in you. The very sense of betrayal is what Thatcherism sought to sooth in the electorate, to gain votes. “Morally I think it’s wrong, but I done it”—said a man who’d bought his council house under ‘Right to Buy.’ He was one of many ‘ordinary’ voices featured in Radio 4’s The People’s Thatcher.

Morals indeed. In 1977 Margaret Thatcher told the Greater London Young Conservatives that welfare, unions and the state were producing ‘moral cripples’—people who couldn’t think for themselves. She could just as easily have meant that Britain was crippled by morals, by moralizing—over what we owe the poor, the unions, our duty to welfare.

“Inside Britain there is a parallel threat from the Marxist collectivist totalitarians too. Small in number, those anti-democratic forces have gained great power through the trades union movement. Just to state that fact is to be accused of 'union-bashing'—often by people who know it to be true. Such people are to be found in the Conservative, Liberal and Labour Parties.”

(So famous it's on wikipedia)

Norman Tebbit, also from 1977. He wasn't right. He wasn't wrong. He was POTENT in articulating it that way. That's what's so devastating. Where others were wringing their hands over the thankless impossibility of seeking compromise between still-valued elements, what emerged as Thatcherism took the gap, the silence of caution, and presented it as malevolence to the disenchanted voter and party member. Instead of consensual compromisers, these people, these politicians, unionists and thinkers, were going to attack you for complaining, for having an opinion. Thatcherism realigned the vocabulary and 'made it all right' to feel resentment (we see this today in the appeal of UKIP—and the BNP and EDL—over migration). 



‘Mrs Thatcher underestimated the miners.’ While this is certainly true of their culture and dedication to each other, it’s not true that she underestimated their reaction. She predicted it and saw its political capital, particularly how Arthur Scargill’s inflexibility (and his likelihood to resort to now illegal flying pickets in lieu of a pre-strike ballot) would appear to ‘right-minded’ people.1981 saw the start of plans to stockpile coal for an 18-month stoppage so that little disruption would be had to the country’s power supply [8]. The 1984-85 clashes between miners and police could be allowed to play out, to demonstrate to the public the full horror of the union situation. A year of violence and hardship to those at the pickets was followed by workers returning, having suffered to prove Thatcherism’s point. “She’s just bloody laughing at us”—a returning miner from The People’s Thatcher; you should hear the anger. The watching electorate, full of decent principles, would slowly be reassured in their private thoughts that things would be better once the whole painful episode was over—like an anaesthetized reality. ==============================================================================
[1] Arthur Marwick, British Society Since 1945, (London: Penguin Books Ltd, 2003) p.237

[2] Simon Jenkins, Thatcher & Sons: A Revolution in Thee Acts (London: Allen Lane (Penguin Books Ltd), 2006) p. 29

[3] Marwick, p. 236

[4] Jenkins, p. 55

[5] Jenkins, p. 58

[6] Marwick, p. 229

[7] Kenneth O. Morgan, Michael Foot: A Life (London: Harper Perennial, 2008) p. 347

[8] Jenkins, p. 95