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.

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[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.

Period Drama and Prejudice

“Anyone who reads this document can see that it promotes acceptance of the homosexual lifestyle,” one mother said at a six-hour school board meeting in late September.

Erik Eckholm, ‘In Efforts to End Bullying, Some See Agenda,’ New York Times, 6 November, 2010.

In Britain and America we live in societies where homophobic, racist, sexist and similar discriminatory abuse is believed to be defeated, or at least it’s generally professed as being so. All of these kinds of abuse are clearly wrong and despicable, out of date, the acts of dinosaur comedians and why the ‘70s were bad. This is suggested in the way that any examples of homophobic, racial or sexist abuse/violence reported in the media are presented as departures from the tolerant norm and as thoroughly shocking – particularly when celebrities and politicians are involved. The daily, street ubiquity of all these types of abuse is denied, or at least largely invisible on TV and in the media generally.

When Alan Davies gave us a tour of his teenage years a couple of months ago he admitted to the racism of his past, and that of Britain in the 1970s and ‘80s. He met with the Pakistani shopkeeper that he and his school friends had jeered at and shoplifted from, and later talked with an ex skinhead, who discussed racism and Paki bashing, again in the past tense. While the programme called for them to be talking only about their pasts, there is also a suggestion that ‘it’ doesn’t happen like that anymore. In dramas, BBC-safe ensemble casts of straight, LGBT, female, male, black and white characters all get on without batting an eyelid in the portrayed present – or maybe with a few lovely ‘ironic’ examples of knowing abuse. Any actual arguments they might have are strictly non race, gender or sexuality – that could be a Saturday night show. It’s only when such a mix of characters inhabits Life on Mars, Downton Abbey or Agatha Christieland that they will get nasty with each other’s identities – period drama and prejudice. ‘The days before political correctness’ – how’s that for nauseating understatement? Mad Men can show racial abuse because it’s set in the ‘60s, and that’s when people were racist.

Time travelling Doctor Who is good for this, or at least the 2005 onwards incarnation is. When set in the present or future, a character might make some remark about having ‘struggled through the ranks’ or some similar allusion to having had a hard time because of their gender, sexuality or colour. It is only when the stories are set safely in the past that descriptions and experiences of discrimination are more explicit, such as responses to homosexuality ‘1926, it’s more like the Dark Ages’ (The Unicorn and the Wasp, 2008) and racial abuse ‘with hands like those, how can you tell when something’s clean?’ (Human Nature, 2007).

If people do discriminate in the televisual present - and this is true for British and American shows - they are shown to be abnormal in some way. Desperate Housewives’ Bree Van de Kamp might have wanted to ‘correct’ her son’s homosexuality, but then she’s presented in a context of neurosis and comically exaggerated small c conservatism (from Live Alone and Like It, 2005). In The Bill the only people who had problems with the black and female police officers were the criminals, particularly those of the nasty, sell their own grandmother, psycho-thug kind.

This combination of down playing and fencing off discrimination and abuse owes either to media and political ignorance/wishful thinking, or else it’s some attempt to deny it into extinction – if we are told that no one is racist anymore, then we will stop being racist, or homophobic or sexist or…

The focus on successful, established diversity is not necessarily wrong of course, but it does create an offshoot problem, asides from the false Mission Accomplished assumption. The problem with this common mantra of diversity - that homosexuality isn’t wrong or something to be ashamed of, that men and women of all colours and cultures are equal, that people are tolerant, that employers are tolerant - is that people tend to get ‘sick of it’, imagining that they are putting some level of effort into all of this tolerance. Then they will say things like: yes, sure, gays are fine, they make their choices and I accept that, BUT….

It’s all right to be a little homophobic, sexist and racist in a society that’s defeated sexism, racism and homophobia. There’s a sense that people are no longer kicking these groups when they are down – not now that legislation and tolerance is on ‘their side.’ Now they have got want they wanted we can re-introduce some common sense. It’s a neatly polarised assumption that the violence and discrimination of the past – the past of lynching, the past of the AIDS (cures gays) scare/celebration, the past of the un-voting and housebound little woman - is incommensurable with today. Today there is ‘none of that’ and there are certainly no modern parallels. Any groups or persons continuing to suggest otherwise are wearing a bit thin.

Somehow the same people who profess a tolerance of homosexuals can still criticise things for ‘promoting acceptance of the homosexual lifestyle.’ Homosexuality isn’t wrong? Fine, but accepting it as normal, as a valid alternative, is wrong. There is a contradiction there that people don’t like to have to deal with. I suppose the level of tolerance we have achieved, barring examples of intolerance and violent intolerance out there, is one that says: being black, gay or a woman is fine and I won’t judge you for it - you can’t help it. But for Chrissakes let’s not encourage any more of them. For gender, race and sexuality there are similar sets of ideas and voices that say we can take equality too far. Cutting to it: I still don’t think you’re normal - homosexuals, black people and black culture, women who work in industries that surprise me - but I won’t attack you because of that. That’s unless you start attacking the things I like and claiming that they suppress you and your sort. The things that I like are all part of what I view as normal.

So the parameters and definitions of tolerance remain in flux, malleable whether in politics, media, the workplace or in individuals’ lives and consciences. As America sees the debates surrounding don’t ask, don’t tell go on, the right of openly gay troops to serve remains a controversial possibility. The BBC continues to fight its own sexist and ageist demons, and depending on which paper you read, Britain’s most popular boy’s name is either the sum total of various spellings of Mohammed (Mail, Express, Telegraph) or Oliver (Guardian, Sun, Times, Independent). Who knows, perhaps in twenty or thirty years we’ll be watching the future’s equivalent of those BBC Four productions – historical biopics that will look back at today’s shows and their stars and reveal the discrimination and human dramas underlying the onscreen diversity of the 2000s and 2010s.