The lead headline on BBC Radio 4’s 10 o’clock news was the ’story’ that there are calls for the resignation of Lord Myners, City Minister (‘City’ minister? wtf?), over claims of “misleading parliament” (trans: telling porkies). The issue? Whether or not he knew the “full value” of the pension to be paid by RBS to fat cat retiree Fred Goodwin. This is the top ’story’ on a major national news programme, a complete non-story that illustrates:
a) the insularity and incestuousness of the English political class
b) the absence of any real political issues in the country
After all, who gives a monkeys whether or not some identikit NuLabor apparatchik will get the sack or not? Who gives a toss about whether or not he knew irrelevant fact X at time Y? Absolutely nobody outside the political class and its media fanbase. A complete irrelevance to real life.
Contrast this with a country like France, where there’s real news, and real politics with sharp ideological and class struggle: massive general strikes, weekly street protests across the country, factories occupied and bosses taken hostage by workers, the birth of a new radical Left party, and much, much more. Can you image what a French person in England must think when s/he watches/listens to/reads the news? Gobsmacked astonishment at the sheer triviality, irrelevance and pointlessnes of what passes for ‘news’ and ‘politics’ in the UK, or at least England. Together, perhaps, with tristesse at the loss of real politicas and real issues of ideology, principle and class, wihch in France, and indeed any normal European country, govern the news agendas. If s/he’s of a certain radical bent, s/he might even be reminded of the Situationist theory of The Spectacle.
That the UK political class and the media, locked together in unholy incestuousness, consider the ‘Lord Myners affair’ to be a news story at all shows how sterile and baroque political debate has become, and how divorced the political-media complex has become from ordinary life. The danger of this, in a country like Ingerlan where White Van Man and Warm Beer And Cricket Man rule, where the working class hasn’t recovered from the crushing defeat of the miners 25 years ago and which consequently has the collective political consciousness of a lobotomised bumblebee, is that populist demagogues and parties (BNP, UKIP come immediately to mind) will exploit the gaping political vacuum and climb to power on a wave of reactionary, perhaps even fascist, ‘anti-politics’ populism, with The Scum, The Mail, and The Express cheerleading all the way. Which would have consequences only too worrying to contemplate…
Myners defends RBS pension stance. BBC Online, 3/3/09
McKillop: No RBS pension ‘ruse’. BBC Online, 31/3/09
