Stephen Fry’s long article on who he will vote for, and why, reminds me of David Foster Wallace… in tone, topic and structure.
Tag: Politics (Page 35 of 57)
Let’s start at the end: I think Cameron won this one. He looked much more confident than in previous debates, and seemed on the front foot in the back-and-forth. His soundbite about the “confusion” between goverment and economy was a new idea since last week’s debate (though variations on this theme have been on Tory posters for a couple of years) and was craftily put, the sort of thing that might persuade undecideds, rather than a preach to the choir. It is not a truism by any means, but Brown failed to muster comparable rhetoric to fight back.
Cameron also had very strong rhetoric when he spoke about “saving £1 in every £100 spent”. He suggested that this could mean saving on a local council’s glossy brochure, a highly dubious claim (do authorities with a £1bn budget really spend £10 million on communications?) but he nevertheless sounded credible.
Clegg looked beleageured in the first 10 minutes, but came into his own on the question about manufacturing. His Sheffield constituency brings him a certain credibility. He began by raising the need for growing the green industries – Clegg has always been the first to mention the environment, and it is a noteworthy difference between him and the other two men. As in the previous debates, he looked strongest when under attack on his illegal-immigration amnesty policy. It is humane and pragmatic and both Tories and Labour look ‘nasty’ when they belittle it.
Oh yeah: I made a prediction earlier, which turned out to be correct:
At no point in #LeadersDebates has anyone sunk to tabloid level. So I predict #Bigotgate will not be mentioned tonight.
Brown excelled when he was speaking like a Chancellor of the Exchequer. If ever there was a walking example of the Peter Principle, Brown is it. With the housing question, Brown gave a lengthy four point answer on building societies, and was clearly enjoying himself.
Overall, I think these debates have harmed the Labour campaign. How could they not? Brown is fighting the election on a 13-year record, and each and every question in these debates is on a problem that has not yet been solved. This stuctural handicap was most stark during Brown’s “no life on the dole, that’s my policy” soundbite. Cameron threw that right back at him, and many Labour party members would have let slip a small nod in agreent with the Conservative leader. A little later, Brown mentioned NEETs, and Cameron again easily pinned failures on the Prime Minister’s collar.
It’s no great insight that the debates have been a boon for Clegg, who has been the most talked about politician this past fortnight. Ultimately, the Lib Dem leader has looked comfortable and credible alongside the other two – but can you imagine the debates with Sir Menzies Campbell in his stead?
The BBC turned in the best production of the three broadcasters. We saw an uncluttered set design and an equally sparse screen. Much less claustrophobic. The only weird element was the slowly changing screen colour, which was a distraction, but forgivable. Dimbleby, a veteran of Question Time (as well as, incidentally, the Bullingdon Club) made one or two interventions which were shrewd and kept the conversation moving.
This is a great development in British politics. The rise of Clegg could, and should, deliver a hung parliament, which in turn should result in electoral reform. More political engagement will be the result.
At the heart of the Gillian Duffy story is, I think, a debate about sincerity (a theme I have touched on before).
First, of course, we question the sincerity of Gordon Brown, who – shock! – said one thing to a voter’s face, and another thing behind her back. I think that the Lib Dems captured the right mood. Nick Clegg said that “if we all had recordings of what we mutter under our breath we’d all be crimson with embarrassment” and Dr Evan Harris made the “there but for the grace of God go all” point this morning. Meanwhile, the Tories (in the shape of George Osbourne) came up with a marvellously hypocritical, holier than thou response which could easily be exposed by a Tory counter-gaffe at any moment. Cue question’s about the Conservatives sincerity too.
But the “bigot” label is also, essentially, a question about Mrs Duffy’s sincerity too. With Brown’s accidental on-air muttering, he was voicing the thought that such questions about immigration are somehow illegitimate. On the face of it, he is clearly wrong to think this, and wrong to dismiss the concerns of what should be his core constituency. Nevertheless, the particular type of language that Mrs Duffy used is an echo of the shrill misinformation we get from the tabloids. For many people (and I count myself among them) when they hear it, they become suspicious, and percieve the effects of propaganda. At the Angry Mob blog, Uponnothing analyses this unease:
The ineloquence of Gillian Duffy seems to stem from what tabloid newspapers have tried so hard to create; a kind of unthinking acceptance that the country is overrun with immigrants. What happens is that people like Gillian pick up the general narrative but can’t quite remember the details, largely – I like to think – because their brain subconciously rejects them as bollocks. Look at the way she talks about claiming benefits for example:
But there’s too many people now who are vulnerable but they can claim and people who are vulnerable can’t get claim, can’t get it.
You can see she is trying to regurgitate the narrative that she has been fed, but it doesn’t come out quite right. You can see she is trying to say that immigrants get all the benefits whilst people in need get nothing, yet something prevented her. Maybe when people write about what a genius Littlejohn is, and how he can put into words what the rest of us cannot, perhaps there is some truth in this. Perhaps if Littlejohn had been responding to this statement he would have been able to quickly draw agreement from Gillian: ‘You mean that we’re showering immigrants with benefits whilst British taxpayers, pensioners and vulnerable people suffer?’ Littlejohn might reply. ‘Yes, that is exactly it’ Gillian would presumably exclaim, marvelling at Littlejohn’s mastery of basic narratives.
(I have percieved similar sound-bites perculating into the general language around other tabloid issues too. I remember a discussion about terrorism once, where the chap I was talking to expressed worry about “people who would do me and my family harm.” The formulation “who would do” stuck out – it was out of keeping with the language of the conversation and not how he normally spoke. It was recognisable as a sound-bite, a piece of rhetoric that had been written and practiced.)
The problem with this insight is that it is only useful if you live inside a liberal-left bubble. Unfortunately, it is a useless account of the world if you seek to persuade people that you are worthy of their vote. I’ve long held that the Daily Mail readership are persuadable by good and sincere arguments, and alienating people through gaffes is not the way to do this.
The Angry Mob is on much less ephemeral grounding when takes on the “you can’t talk about immigration” trope. Former UKIP candidate Will Burrows made this point during the Cambridge Union debate in October, which I was pleased to be able to quash:
So when a taloid journalist or politician makes some bigoted remark like ‘immigrants are ruining the country’ we are right to be outraged. Because they are ignoring the subtlety, the complexity, of these political debates.
You can have a debate on immigration in this country. They do it all the time in think tanks, in Whitehall. What you can’t do is say something crass and expect the rest of us to accept you as a genuine political player.
To illustrate the sort of subtlety I mean, here’s a moving post from elmyra, a self described “flocking Eastern European”, on how isolated and attacked the immigration debate makes her feel:
A desperate need to justify myself. I pay higher-rate income tax. I contribute to the UK economy, I contribute to UK society. I probably pay into the tax system more than I get back out of it. Extending that justification to other immigrants – parts of the UK economy probably would collapse without immigrant labour; I wonder how much immigrants contribute in total to the economy; we all come here to work, and we work damn hard. A range of other economic arguments, all around contribution, all around this incredibly Tory notion of my money being the only thing that entitles me to anything like decent treatment from this society.
More anger. This time at being disempowered and disenfranchised; at being a cheap target for political point scoring because Gillian Duffy and the 60 million people like her have a vote, and I and the couple of hundred thousand people like me don’t, and therefore she will always get a grovelling apology from the Prime Minister, and we won’t.
A desperate attempt to reclaim power, to find some leverage: I wonder if I can stop paying taxes, if I can get some sort of campaign going for all immigrants to stop paying taxes – I bet they’d notice us then. Oh, I wonder if I can challenge Gillian Duffy to take the citizenship test.
The slow, sad realisation that the political culture in the UK is such that no politician has any choice but to grovel to the bigots. Because standing up and explaining to them instead that immigrants make a massive contribution to the economy, let alone that all people deserve to be treated with dignity and respect regardless of nationality, citizenship or contribution, would be political suicide.
Effective and persuasive, because it is sincere.
For those living on Europa or Enceladus; for those reading these archives on other worlds, ten thousand years hence, when all our election chatter will be no more than a particle of sand on a mite in a desert; and for those on the Isle of Wight… Yesterday’s news story was all about a Gordon Brown gaffe. He had an unsatisfactory exchange with a voter, and then was caught muttering that she was a bigot. The BBC picked this up on one of their microphones, and Brown was forced to apologise. Cue a media and internet frenzy.
The first thing to note (again) is just how quickly the political news cycle rotates these days. By the time most of us had found out what had happened, the Prime Minister was already on the doorstep of Mrs Gillian Duffy, apologising in person and then (bizarrely) smirking about it.
The First Spin of the Top: The Gaffe
In the digital age, politicians are coming under scrutiny in a way they could never have been before. Previous Prime Ministers would not have had disposable lapel microphones trailing off their jackets, and news teams would not have been able to disseminate their utterances in real-time to the world. Every mobile phone is a microphone now, or a bug, if you will. Mehdi Hassan reminds us that Barack Obama’s biggest gaffe was very similar, when he said that many people “cling to guns and religion”. Moreover, with Internet in our pockets and on our desks, we are Funes – we all have a perfect memory of what has been said and written, and it comes back to haunt us: bloggers, aspiring politicians and party leaders together.
The Second Spin of the Top: The Propaganda
This draining of power away from the politicians has been evidence ever since we gave the name ‘spin doctors’ to the PR men who try to control the message. To name them, to allow them to be celebrities in their own right, is akin to pointing out the curtain in The Wizard of Oz – Once you know its there, you cannot help but look behind and expose the crippled wizard for what he really is. We live in highly skeptical times… and that’s great.
The Third Spin of the Top: The Backlash
What has changed since the last British General election, is that the mainstream media have also lost control of the narrative. They too are being subjected to this scrutiny. I discussed last week how the spin placed upon stories by the media is equally as unreliable as the politicans at the centre of the discussion. The public reaction to the story itself, and also to the woefully inadequate media coverage of the Mrs Duffy incident, was easily discernable via twitter and teh blogs.
@BeauBodOr: Sky News Breaking: Exclusive interview with nephew of Channel 4 reporter who interviewed Gillian Duffy’s niece
This development is also great, and interesting. As always, a consensus emerges from the chatter. Its interesting that in this case, the media narrative (hugely damaging to Brown) is in fact tempered by the commentary and analysis that appears online and can be shared through Twitter. The new media counters the traditional media and balances it. Hard to believe, but without the new technology, I think yesterday would have been worse for Mr Brown.
I posted this on Liberal Conspiracy yesterday. Happy to say it got a lot of RTs.
The pathetic and desperate hatchet job on Nick Clegg, by our friends at the Daily Mail, was pretty much instantly rebutted last night, in just 140 characters.
@DougSaunders: British journalism in microcosm: 2002 op-ed by Nick Clegg: http://is.gd/bCESl Resulting Daily Mail front pager tomorrow: http://is.gd/bCETh
Merely linking to the article that was the basis for Tim Shipman’s front-page piece shows the real context, debunks the Mail‘s outrage, and exposes their highly partisan agenda. Iain Dale is right: this will backfire on the Conservatives (regardless of whether they actually had a hand in placing the smears), and further highlight The Slow Death of the British Newspaper As We Know It.
Alongside the online rebuttals and link-sharing, we see the rise of the satirical #hashtag, in this case #NickCleggsFault (seeded by Justin McKeating, I believe), and Chris Applegate has updated his seminal Daily Mail Headline Generator to capture the Zeitgeist:
WILL NICK CLEGG GIVE YOUR HOUSE SWINE FLU?
A few questions present themselves. The first is the obvious perennial: how deep does this sort of ridicule penetrate into the national conversation? Are these jokes just a distraction for a insular blogosphere, the “Twitterati”, or does the meme spread out enough to properly counter the spin being spread by the Mail?
Social marketers will spend all election trying to answer this question… but whatever the level of influence right now, I think it is safe to say that it grows on a daily basis. Meanwhile, the tabloids diminish in stature. This is now a given.
But what I really want to know, is this: What do the journalists at these outlets really think about the satirical attacks on their paper? I can well imagine a bunker mentality affecting the editorial team at the Mail, or the Express, or the Telegraph – these are intense and high-stakes positions, after all.
But does this attitude extend to, say, a young journalist working on the news desk? Or the sub-editors? Or the music reviewers? Or the poor chap (or chapess) who has to moderate all the angry comments!? What do they think when they see the Daily Mail Headline Generator and the #NickCleggsFault hastag cluttering up their screens? Just as the Mail’s readership is not a monolith, we know that their staff cannot be either.
I would love to know their reaction to these kinds of online surges – and not out of any sense of schadenfreude, fly-on-the-wall, Downfall-type snigger. I think it would be a genuinely useful insight into how major media operations operate in the second decade of the 21st Century.
Any pseudonomynous contributions in the comments would be gratefully received.