The unbelievable in pursuit of the unbearable

I don't know about you, but I'm getting pretty sick of the sterile, pointless farce that masquerades as political debate these days. Last night I watched Newsnight, that bastion of 'well, he thinks you're an idiot: what have you got to say about that?' discourse, and I think I finally, after many many years, reached the end of my tolerance.

If you're in the UK, you can watch it here. You'll see Chloe Smith, the Conservative MP for Norwich North, and Rachel Reeves, MP for Leeds West and Shadow Chief Secretary to the Secretary. The subject was IMF boss Christine Lagarde's speech about the British economy.

The first depressing element of the exchange was the suspicion that both parties and the show had put up young female politicians to make it look like they're representative of the parties, and to make economics somehow more approachable. The Tories are more to blame for this one, I feel, as Reeves is actually in an economic role, whereas Smith is just a backbencher. Then, the presenter pointed out that Smith refused to debate with her Labour counterpart - she simply demanded a pulpit from which to pronounce her interpretation without challenge.

But the worse aspect of the whole sterile encounter was the robotic determination of both parties to parrot ready-cooked lines. If you watched the speech, you'd have noticed that Lagarde had some supportive things to say about the government, and some very critical things to say.



If you only listened to Rachel Reeves, you'd think that Lagarde had turned up, kicked Osborne in his gentleman's area while mocking his innumeracy and economic insanity. Conversely, if you listened to Chloe Smith alone, you'd have left with the impression that Lagarde had slipped Osborne some tongue, then pinned the Grand Order of Economic Genius medal to his chest while begging for his autograph.

In sum, it was a pointless exercise in spin. Neither politician could afford to state the obvious: that the speech was ambivalent about both their ideas and politics is more complicated than 'he said/she said'. Instead, they just repeated the pre-cooked lines until the 8 minutes were over. Smith announced that we'd all be living on the Big Rock Candy Mountain by next Thursday, while Reeves announced that Labour opposed the 50p tax rate cut while repeatedly avoiding the question of whether Labour would reinstate it.

Personally, I view Chloe Smith as a Tory seat-warmer and quite like Rachel Reeves as an effective communicator and sharper mind - but they're both prime examples of how intelligence and personality are subjugated to political discourse as the greasy pole is climbed. Lagarde is yet another example: once a vaguely liberal-left critic of global finance, now she's it's international shill.

What a waste of their time and mine.

The media cycle… ugh

This weekend, the news was dominated by Stephen Hester and the £1m bonus he was due to get (on top of his £1m salary) for managing the disposal of RBS, the bank we all spent £45bn rescuing.

The Tories didn't want to stop him getting his bonus, nor did they want to talk about it. After all, the Chancellor was given £3m on his 21st birthday, so he doesn't really have a problem with acquiring large sums of unearned currency. Nor did the Tories want to talk about the other £35m Stephen Hester will 'earn' by the end of his 5 year contract.

So what do they do? They follow the time-honoured tradition of throwing out some moral outrage for the Mail readers. This time, it's a plan to deny injury compensation for anyone with a criminal record - a statistically tiny amount. Aided by the claim made by Soham child-murderer Ian Huntley after a fellow prisoner slit his throat, they're trying to foment a lynch-mob on the issue.

Personally, I think Huntley and any other victim of crime should get their compensation. The point of laws is that they apply equally to everybody, whatever they've done. If you start making moral exceptions, you end up with tyranny. Good laws are made on points of principle. Bad ones are made using extreme examples to whip up horror.

However, the wider point is that this is another importation of American politics. Thomas Frank's What's the Matter With Kansas? asks how poor Americans have been brought to the point of voting against their own economic interests. This is how: they're encouraged to focus on personal and moral politics (gay marriage, guns, 'family values') while the professional politicians continue to create a Land Fit For Financiers. This is exactly what the Tories are doing: while we argue about criminals, they enrich themselves and their donors.

None of this is helped by Labour's David Lammy MP making a grab for rightwing territory himself, by claiming that the ban on beating children led to the summer riots. A couple of points for you David:
1. How do you know these people weren't beaten as children?
2. Most were in their late teens and twenties - the ban only came in during the late 1990s.
3. Grow up.

Floundering politicians always reach for the smack.

Immortal satire

Just before I dash off to buy new clothes (I am going to the ball), here's some fun.

I've just been to Alan's brilliant lecture on political satire and political communication (and then marked the best set of Pol Comms presentations of my decade here. This first clip from Yes Prime Minister was shown: it's still the best popular summary of the British newspaper landscape - with a killer zinger.



The second is still absolutely spot on about party political broadcasts. Now the economy's utterly fornicated, expect to see a lot of leather-bound books and hear a lot of Elgar.

How much are the police snorting?

I meant to rant about this yesterday, but had so much to do that I forgot.

The police and their shady friends were all over the press yesterday proclaiming their amazing success in restricting the flow of cocaine into the country, increasing the wholesale price. Paul Flynn rips this PR bollocks apart over on his site. Also, the Ministry of Defence claimed that they'd seized £50m of heroin from the Taliban a while back: Bad Science's analysis reveals that actually, this was PR-speak (i.e. lies) for $126,000 of opium, or $250,000 of heroin, and so on.

What interested me was that the boys in blue said that the street price hadn't changed because dealers were mixing the coke with any old shit they found lying around.

Well, that's OK then. What a result. Lots of stupid people are being poisoned because they're snorting rat poison, Persil or whatever, as well as a little bit of coke. It seems to me that the cops have got totally the wrong end of the wedge on this one. We're always going on about the NHS becoming a health service rather than a sickness service. In the 'war on drugs', we should be reducing demand for drugs (mostly through education and treating addiction as an illness) rather than by firebombing Peruvian peasants and encouraging dealers to poison their customers.

Never trust a copper, never read The Sun

Do the police lie to us? Of course they do. But most of the time, they merely mislead, dissemble and distort. Why? Because every branch of public service has been encouraged to see itself as a 'player' in the information game. Each agency has an internal PR team - which isn't the same as a communications team - trained to play offence/defence spin rather than to provide accurate, cautious, checkable and honest information. The police have their friendly media contacts and they know which papers (I'm looking at you, The Sun - 'G20 anarchy' indeed, and you Daily Mail) will print whatever they say without bothering to check using boring old journalism - and in the case of Tomlinson, may have added further imaginary details simply to suit their pre-mixed 'story', as Nick Davies points out:

There were six days of substantially false coverage about a man who apparently died of a heart attack as he walked home while a screaming mob of anarchists hurled missiles at the police officers who tried to help him. Any inquiry into this media misinformation will want to find out whether that was simply the hyperbole of ignorant reporters or the product of bad practice at the Metropolitan police, the City of London police or the IPCC.

They got caught this time thanks to citizens ignoring threats to treat filming cops as 'aiding terrorism', but it must make you distrust pretty much every account of any major event prior to this. Nick Davies has a good piece in today's Media Guardian. How's this gem?

when an IPCC investigator came to the Guardian, with a City of London police exhibits officer, he asked for the video to be removed from the website on the grounds that it could prejudice the police inquiry and would upset the family. The deputy editor-in-chief who met him declined and pointed out that the Tomlinson family at that moment were in another part of the building, talking to Paul Lewis, the reporter who had driven the story, and publicly thanking the paper for its help.

But this isn't simply a problem for the rozzers. It's a fundamental journalistic failure brought about by financial concerns (investigative journalism is expensive: transcribing 'sources' and press releases can be done by the office monkey) and by the collapse of a public sphere independent of hegemonic forces: papers have grown dependent on 'authority' and close to power - they'll automatically cite established, discrete power blocs such as police forces and governments rather than test their claims (except for climate stories, in which case they'll print the ravings of any mad liar (Johnny Ball, Bellamy, Lawson, Monckton) rather than the 99% of actual climate scientists who know we're screwed).

The wages of spin

Damian McBride, Derek Draper and LabourList (a propagandist mirror of the much more independent conservative.home) are so utterly embarrassing for the left. They're symptomatic of a party hierarchy that's totally lost sight of its purpose and of any strategic aims. Rather than communicate the positive benefits of a Labour government, or the genuinely evil aims of the Tories, they've decided, because they all read Guido Fawkes and the other nasty-minded Tory bloggers, that the voters don't care about ideas. Instead, think these toads, gossip and ad hominem attacks are what matters in politics now. They're so tragically old-fashioned it's sad. They read Fukuyama's The End of History in the 90s and believed the argument that socialism was dead and capitalism had won. Once there's no ideological debate, party politics becomes a matter of marketing, of triangulation and of personalities.

But capitalism is utterly wounded now. The Tories have a clear line on this: taxpayers should save capitalism and the rich, and then everything will be alright. Labour are screwed because it took so much psychological effort to become capitalists that they can't get out of their 90s mindset that anyone with a Blackberry and a second home is automatically morally and politically superior to us all. So the party minions like McBride et al. ape their opposition and waste their time with silly stunts, persuading everybody that there isn't a single politician out there who actually cares about the country rather than himself. Actually, there are - people like Paul Flynn, Norman Baker and Dennis Skinner.

Evil, cynical genius

In the old days, politicians would appeal to your political interests. Now, it's just a matter of selling you a lifestyle. This is both the best and worst political broadcast I've ever seen. Want policies? Tough. The message is, nice girls don't boff socialists (she cries because she's just slept with someone who has filled in an application for the Socialist Party of Austria). But that doesn't matter. It could just as easily sell holidays, insurance, the Nazis, whatever. Hollow… so hollow that it doesn't need dialogue.