It seems increasingly apparent that the outside world no longer seems to really exist beyond the cliffs of Dover, as far as the government, and large swathes of the media are concerned.
Michel Barnier has reminded the UK government for what feels like the umpteenth time already what leaving the EU and the single market will mean to Britain. But time and again, the government, supported by like-minded media moguls, dismiss whatever the EU has to say as simply "Project Fear". Time and again, Barnier reminds the government that the EU is simply responding to what the UK government has said it does and doesn't want. It was May's decision to leave the single market and customs union. It was the UK's decision to leave the EU. Barnier just reminds Britain, time and again, that actions have consequences. If the British government in incapable of accepting that basic fact, then that is not the EU's fault. It is not the EU's fault that Britain's government chose to leave; it was Britain that chose to leave the EU. If "Brexit means Brexit" and "leave means leave", then the EU simply is acting according to the legal consequences of those British decisions.
But this is the unreality that passes for life in the British media and politics. As European politicians are now seeing, as Britain before wanted to be in the EU but with lots of "opt-outs", now Britain wants to be out of the EU but with lots of "opt-ins".
This is what the British government's position boils down to. European politicians can only scratch their head at this attitude. Don't the politicians in Britain understand how the EU works? As Barnier explains repeatedly (as to a small child) how can they not see that this is simply not possible? The answer is that, no, most British politicians do not understand how the organisation Britain has been a part of for forty years works. Most have just never bothered. Besides, the fact that Britain has repeatedly achieved "opt-outs" over the years while in the EU simply reinforces the "delusions of grandeur" that many in the British government now possess, Theresa May included. They cannot get their heads around the simple fact that now Britain is an exiting member of the EU, the (last-minute) compromises that worked in the favour when they were a member are legally impossible with Britain as a "third country". Again, these are facts that the British government chooses to ignore.
Theresa May makes speeches declaring her "red lines", which are largely aimed for domestic (political) consumption. But because the government makes no other effort to coach this in its true (internal) context, outside interests such as the EU or foreign multinationals can only assume she means what she says. What other evidence have they to go on?
As was once said, "idle talk costs lives"; in today's context, May's "idle talk" is costing the country its reputation. The belligerent talk at the EU from both the government and supportive areas of the media (seemingly working in concert) can only be interpreted by Brussels at face value. If Britain sees the EU as a "hostile power" that is trying to punish it for leaving, then the EU can only respond in kind, as a matter of self-interest. The damage being done to Britain's reputation and its future can only be laid at Britain's door. The EU is simply responding to what Britain is doing.
The sense that the British government and the media are ignoring reality is hard to miss. Some newspapers and some politicians are eager to explain to whoever is listening of the sheer madness of the government's "red lines" (as well as parts of industry explaining how, if implemented, they would likely wipe out segments of Britain's economy). The problem is that these facts are dismissed by the quiescent media, well-connected interest groups and the government itself as "Project Fear", again and again; these well-founded fears are further discredited by seeing such talk as defeatist or worse, borderline treasonous. Thus the average person in Britain is faced with a mainstream media industry that is simply not telling them the truth, probably because many of them either support the government ideologically, or have ulterior motives.
In this sense, the "free" press is no longer interested in facts, but the dissemination of opinion and propaganda. Reports about the EU and Brexit are only reported if they can be "spun" to suit a certain agenda, such as the wider ideological bent of the editor. For many papers, talking of the dangers of "Hard Brexit" is tantamount to career suicide, due to the symbiotic relationship (from the commercial necessity of scoops and exclusives) that they have with the government. The BBC is as guilty of this as the more usual suspects; they need to keep in the government's "good books" for the licence fee, and to ensure that their "impartial" reputation with ministers allows a steady stream of Westminster gossip to fill the airways.
This facile and self-serving relationship large parts of the media have with Westminster therefore dumbs down the tone of debate to something puerile and self-serving, where political trivialities are seen are more interesting to report on than the far more consequential "boring" technicalities. In this way, even those media outlets naturally sceptical of the government's strategy are forced to repeat their nonsense to maintain a worthwhile line of communication, or risk being black-marked. Meanwhile, in the ideologically-supportive press, the consequences of the government's "red lines" when explained by the EU are explained as either scaremongering or a "negotiation tactic". The sad truth is that if someone in Britain wants to get reliable information about Brexit, they would be better to look outside the UK.
Aside from the inherent unreliability of the mainstream media for all the reasons mentioned, the government itself is the last person to go to for information on Brexit. Apart from the obvious self-serving agenda is the fact that information is so hard to come by in any case. While the EU's negotiation strategy is published regularly for public consumption, the British government's strategy is hidden from the public eye, with access to all relevant documentation to Brexit tightly-controlled. Even parliament struggles to obtain any useful information (such as the (in)famous "impact assessments"). Again, like with the media's treatment of information on Brexit, even the government's own reports that explain the likely effect the government's "red lines" will have on the economy are dismissed by the government as scaremongering. When you are up against such an attitude to government as this, what chance is there of technical experts getting a fair hearing?
In terms of the negotiations, the British government isn't even "negotiating" with the EU in any real sense. It is arguable that it never really was, in a true sense of the word, because it saw its negotiations in a zero-sum perspective and was thus not interested in working in mutual advantage. While the government declared that it was in both the UK's and the EU's interests to avoid cross-border friction for trade, the British government refused to accept any of the suggestions that the EU offered that were feasible, such as membership of EFTA. Instead, Theresa May created her "red lines" that unilaterally reduced Britain's options, meaning that the only legal option left for the EU was some form of future FTA with Britain. And still the government insists that what it wanted was something else, more "ambitious", that took account of Britain's "unique" status as a former EU member. Thus, unable to see beyond the self-obsessed insularity of its own historical power, Britain demands that the EU break its own rules to satisfy the whims of a non-member. Unable to see that it was Theresa May's "red lines" that were creating Britain's problems for it, the government insists that it is the EU that must break its own rules to solve the problems that Britain created for itself. The abject inability of the government to see how pathologically myopic its behaviour is has demonstrated how dangerously detached from reality "Brexit Britain" has become.
The government and media's chronic insularity means that all the talk of the Brexit negotiations is about what the various British government ministers want to achieve post-Brexit, regardless of if this is even remotely acceptable to the EU. The story is repeated week after week, with the media obsessed with how the government argues with itself about what Brexit "vision" it has at that moment, with no thought at all to what the most important player in the negotiations would think: the EU. If the "negotiations" are meant to mean anything, then Britain has the obligation to find a "deal" with the EU; the alternative is "no deal". But Britain's position is so self-obsessed that they either cannot see this, or refuse to believe it. Instead, they see the EU's position as secondary to the government's own interests, which it ties itself in knots over in any case. The British government can't even negotiate with itself, let alone the EU. Meanwhile, the government's interlocutors in Brussels become more and more baffled with the aims that Britain's ministers say the country wishes post-Brexit, as they are completely incompatible with reality. To outsiders, it looks as though London is ruled by either madmen or morons.
It is this "parallel universe" that outsiders experience when they encounter the British media or political establishment. Much of the media have lost all objectivity; those who are not supportive of the government are dismissed as doing down the country, while even facts presented that are somewhat accurate fail to provide anywhere near the right level of detail. Meanwhile, the government pursues its own internal squabble over Brexit, completely detached from reality.
Tuesday, June 19, 2018
Friday, June 8, 2018
Are "Brexiteers" the real "enemies of the people"? Libertarians, the role of media barons and interest groups
If you feel that Britain has perceptively changed since the referendum, you might not be alone. There is plenty of evidence that the "change" is deliberate.
What does it mean to be "British"? This is one of the cultural questions that the referendum campaign inevitably raised. Also inevitably, your answer depends very much on your background and worldview.
According to research, the thing that Britons are most proud of is the NHS. What's telling about this is that, compared to other values and older institutions (e.g. the monarchy), this is a relatively recent addition to British life; even though it is clearly taken as an integral part of British life, the NHS was only created thanks to a "socialist" government after the Second World War.
What this also tells us, and what the EU referendum told us, is that there are two distinct forms of British identity: one might be called the "communitarian" world-view (i.e. seeing the world as a community), and the other the "individualistic", which sees it through the lens of individual actions and individual moral responsibility. This mirrors the "open" and "closed" views reflected in the "remain" versus "leave" camps, also referred to as the "Anywhere" versus "Somewhere" culture wars.
In understanding where people's value for the NHS comes from, it's also important to remember that "charity" was something almost unheard of until Victorian times. In fact, it was government "moral aversion" to help the starving that led to the Irish Potato Famine; the government didn't want to encourage the idea of "something for nothing", and was largely indifferent to the fate of the starving millions across the Irish Sea. This government culture of indifference to the suffering it has created (and a scepticism towards "need" in general) is one that the current Conservative government has restored in all its inhumane glory, when you look at the wider effects of austerity and the "hostile environment".
Thus, the idea of good-natured "British values" is not something that was innate, but was created over time, relatively recently. Before the Victorian sea-change in the moral attitude towards charity, those in need were left to fend for themselves in a "sink or swim" society that Ayn Rand and her Libertarian fans in the current UK government would recognise. This is, in large part, the society that still exists in the modern-day USA, in spite of their high levels of taxation (which do not pay towards people's health and well-being!). The modern idea of British values of compassion towards the worse-off and vulnerable in society is exactly that: a modern construct, largely non-existent before the 20th century, and only made large progress forward thanks to the "socialist" Attlee government after the Second World War. The Conservative Party's embrace of those same postwar values was what allowed them to return to government.
It was only the complex challenges of the 1970s that allowed the Libertarians like Margaret Thatcher a chance to get into power. This enabled them to gradually reverse many of the "socialist" strategies that had been used up till that point since the war. The author has explained elsewhere how this small group of ideological extremists were able to take control of the Conservative Party, taking it in a direction that many of the traditionalists were initially highly-uncomfortable with. In short, it was about turning Britain, step-by-step, into a small-scale clone of the USA, parked next to the European continent.
This is where we see how Libertarians are, in many ways, trying to turn Britain into a foreign country. The progress that had been made in making Britain more egalitarian, more compassionate towards the needy and vulnerable, was quickly undone by Thatcher and her successors (even, to an extent, during the Labour years in office). While the Labour government did make some modest progress in reversing some of Thatcher's inequality, it followed other areas of her economic strategy almost without a second thought, leaving some parts of the country with chronic levels of deprivation, while London grew ever wealthier.
The financial crisis was a direct product of that short-sighted economic strategy, with a new generation of Libertarians, thirty years on from Thatcher, reaping the electoral benefits of Labour's misguided desire to ingratiate themselves with "The City". The austerity strategy was the Conservatives new method to strip back the role of government in people's lives, to a form of "small government" that even Thatcher was too wary to attempt.
Manipulating reality
Throughout this period - the thirty-year era from Thatcher's rise to power to the effects of the financial crisis - the print media played an integral role. Newspapers like the Sun, Daily Mail and Express account for the bulk of Britain's readership, and they claim to "speak for Britain". The reality is, not surprisingly, very different. There is plentiful evidence that they speak to Britain, and are able to manipulate their readers' perception of reality. This will explained about more a little later.
There was a time when the Sun was a Labour-supporting newspaper, but by the time the Libertarian Margaret Thatcher had succeeded Ted Heath as Conservative Party leader, that was no longer really true. Newspaper editors could see ways that they could get rich from a Thatcher government, and so did their best to create an impression of a country that was falling apart under Labour. At times this wasn't difficult, given the challenges that government all across the world were facing then. Her intent to radically reduce the influence of the unions was manna from heaven as far as they were concerned as, from their own point of view, it meant newspapers could then more easily lay off staff and reduce their overheads. Meanwhile, loosening other regulations meant they could more easily expand their profits and buy out smaller competitors.
When Thatcher did get into office, this also meant that inconvenient truths could be ignored. In her first few years in office, unemployment tripled to levels far higher than they had ever been under the previous Labour government. However, it was more common to see stories about crime, race riots and union unrest in the news; these stories fit into a "moral narrative" that fit the agenda. Rather than rising crime and unrest being down to social and economic factors brought on by government policy (i.e. the millions of unemployed), it was explained (and implied) that it was down to individual choices. Whereas before Thatcher crime and unrest was the result of the Labour government's weaknesses, under the the Thatcher government crime and unrest was now the result of weaknesses in society that were being manipulated by immoral individuals.
This common theme ties back to what was said about individualism and British values. Media barons were more equating British values with "individual responsibility" than compassion for the worse-off. This also explains how news stories can easily manipulate their readers' perceptions of reality.
If a newspaper editor decides that the paper needs a "campaign" on an issue, the newspaper then becomes disproportionately saturated with stories related to the campaign. Usually, this is over some form of "moral panic". Thus the newspaper creates an artificial environment for the reader where they think that this issue has become one of national importance, rather than (in reality) an agenda of the editor.
By the 1980s, stories in the three newspapers mentioned that related to the then EEC projected almost universal negativity towards Brussels, and this has remained unchanged ever since. Thus the reader got the consistent impression that Brussels is bad, for one reason or another. Again, this links back to the editors' Libertarian "agenda": they are against any form of regulation that impinges on their lives, and as the EU (the EEC's successor) wanted to increase regulation, they were against Brussels.
Meanwhile, the Libertarian agenda saw London (the home of Fleet Street) boom. After the financial crisis, the austerity agenda resulted in a reduction in state spending unprecedented in modern Britain. As the editors had done with the difficult early years of Thatcher, they did the same with Cameron. They instead attacked the Labour Party's record, while making stories like the 2010 student protests, the 2011 riots and the crippling social effects of government policy all a matter of the failings of individual moral responsibility. The plethora of stories about benefit "scroungers", disability fraud and so on are all supplied to provide moral ammunition for the government's austerity agenda and the destruction of Britain's social cohesion.
Thus "British values" had become further skewed towards the "individual" and away from the wider community. When it came to immigration, the agenda set by the editors was to entrench the fear that economic migrants were taking other people's jobs and destroying Britain's sense of identity, regardless of the reality. In this way, while the reader was informed that their "community" was being eradicated, they were also being instigated into animosity towards other ("foreign") parts of their community. Thus communities were being culturally divided by the anti-immigration agenda; society was becoming further and further atomized, split between socially-open and socially-closed communities.
All these themes had a part to play in the "Brexit Agenda". Like the Thatcherites in the Conservative government and the Thatcherite media barons, these are people who are Libertarians at heart. They do not really believe in community or society, but in individual actions. They do not truly believe in "charity" in the traditional sense, and are callous towards the suffering of others. As their ideal is to convert Britain into a state like Singapore, can they even truly be said to be "British", from a cultural or social point of view? Are they, in fact, the real "enemies of the people"?
Along with the special interest groups like Legatum, the IEA, and the ERG group in parliament itself, we see an agenda that has very little of "British values" in the modern understanding of the term. The agenda is about socially turning back the clock well over a hundred years, to a time when Britain had few regulations, little in the way of a safety net, and far fewer human rights. The only countries in the modern world that are comparable with this state of affairs are third world countries or corrupt dictatorships.
What does it mean to be "British"? This is one of the cultural questions that the referendum campaign inevitably raised. Also inevitably, your answer depends very much on your background and worldview.
According to research, the thing that Britons are most proud of is the NHS. What's telling about this is that, compared to other values and older institutions (e.g. the monarchy), this is a relatively recent addition to British life; even though it is clearly taken as an integral part of British life, the NHS was only created thanks to a "socialist" government after the Second World War.
What this also tells us, and what the EU referendum told us, is that there are two distinct forms of British identity: one might be called the "communitarian" world-view (i.e. seeing the world as a community), and the other the "individualistic", which sees it through the lens of individual actions and individual moral responsibility. This mirrors the "open" and "closed" views reflected in the "remain" versus "leave" camps, also referred to as the "Anywhere" versus "Somewhere" culture wars.
In understanding where people's value for the NHS comes from, it's also important to remember that "charity" was something almost unheard of until Victorian times. In fact, it was government "moral aversion" to help the starving that led to the Irish Potato Famine; the government didn't want to encourage the idea of "something for nothing", and was largely indifferent to the fate of the starving millions across the Irish Sea. This government culture of indifference to the suffering it has created (and a scepticism towards "need" in general) is one that the current Conservative government has restored in all its inhumane glory, when you look at the wider effects of austerity and the "hostile environment".
Thus, the idea of good-natured "British values" is not something that was innate, but was created over time, relatively recently. Before the Victorian sea-change in the moral attitude towards charity, those in need were left to fend for themselves in a "sink or swim" society that Ayn Rand and her Libertarian fans in the current UK government would recognise. This is, in large part, the society that still exists in the modern-day USA, in spite of their high levels of taxation (which do not pay towards people's health and well-being!). The modern idea of British values of compassion towards the worse-off and vulnerable in society is exactly that: a modern construct, largely non-existent before the 20th century, and only made large progress forward thanks to the "socialist" Attlee government after the Second World War. The Conservative Party's embrace of those same postwar values was what allowed them to return to government.
It was only the complex challenges of the 1970s that allowed the Libertarians like Margaret Thatcher a chance to get into power. This enabled them to gradually reverse many of the "socialist" strategies that had been used up till that point since the war. The author has explained elsewhere how this small group of ideological extremists were able to take control of the Conservative Party, taking it in a direction that many of the traditionalists were initially highly-uncomfortable with. In short, it was about turning Britain, step-by-step, into a small-scale clone of the USA, parked next to the European continent.
This is where we see how Libertarians are, in many ways, trying to turn Britain into a foreign country. The progress that had been made in making Britain more egalitarian, more compassionate towards the needy and vulnerable, was quickly undone by Thatcher and her successors (even, to an extent, during the Labour years in office). While the Labour government did make some modest progress in reversing some of Thatcher's inequality, it followed other areas of her economic strategy almost without a second thought, leaving some parts of the country with chronic levels of deprivation, while London grew ever wealthier.
The financial crisis was a direct product of that short-sighted economic strategy, with a new generation of Libertarians, thirty years on from Thatcher, reaping the electoral benefits of Labour's misguided desire to ingratiate themselves with "The City". The austerity strategy was the Conservatives new method to strip back the role of government in people's lives, to a form of "small government" that even Thatcher was too wary to attempt.
Manipulating reality
Throughout this period - the thirty-year era from Thatcher's rise to power to the effects of the financial crisis - the print media played an integral role. Newspapers like the Sun, Daily Mail and Express account for the bulk of Britain's readership, and they claim to "speak for Britain". The reality is, not surprisingly, very different. There is plentiful evidence that they speak to Britain, and are able to manipulate their readers' perception of reality. This will explained about more a little later.
There was a time when the Sun was a Labour-supporting newspaper, but by the time the Libertarian Margaret Thatcher had succeeded Ted Heath as Conservative Party leader, that was no longer really true. Newspaper editors could see ways that they could get rich from a Thatcher government, and so did their best to create an impression of a country that was falling apart under Labour. At times this wasn't difficult, given the challenges that government all across the world were facing then. Her intent to radically reduce the influence of the unions was manna from heaven as far as they were concerned as, from their own point of view, it meant newspapers could then more easily lay off staff and reduce their overheads. Meanwhile, loosening other regulations meant they could more easily expand their profits and buy out smaller competitors.
When Thatcher did get into office, this also meant that inconvenient truths could be ignored. In her first few years in office, unemployment tripled to levels far higher than they had ever been under the previous Labour government. However, it was more common to see stories about crime, race riots and union unrest in the news; these stories fit into a "moral narrative" that fit the agenda. Rather than rising crime and unrest being down to social and economic factors brought on by government policy (i.e. the millions of unemployed), it was explained (and implied) that it was down to individual choices. Whereas before Thatcher crime and unrest was the result of the Labour government's weaknesses, under the the Thatcher government crime and unrest was now the result of weaknesses in society that were being manipulated by immoral individuals.
This common theme ties back to what was said about individualism and British values. Media barons were more equating British values with "individual responsibility" than compassion for the worse-off. This also explains how news stories can easily manipulate their readers' perceptions of reality.
If a newspaper editor decides that the paper needs a "campaign" on an issue, the newspaper then becomes disproportionately saturated with stories related to the campaign. Usually, this is over some form of "moral panic". Thus the newspaper creates an artificial environment for the reader where they think that this issue has become one of national importance, rather than (in reality) an agenda of the editor.
By the 1980s, stories in the three newspapers mentioned that related to the then EEC projected almost universal negativity towards Brussels, and this has remained unchanged ever since. Thus the reader got the consistent impression that Brussels is bad, for one reason or another. Again, this links back to the editors' Libertarian "agenda": they are against any form of regulation that impinges on their lives, and as the EU (the EEC's successor) wanted to increase regulation, they were against Brussels.
Meanwhile, the Libertarian agenda saw London (the home of Fleet Street) boom. After the financial crisis, the austerity agenda resulted in a reduction in state spending unprecedented in modern Britain. As the editors had done with the difficult early years of Thatcher, they did the same with Cameron. They instead attacked the Labour Party's record, while making stories like the 2010 student protests, the 2011 riots and the crippling social effects of government policy all a matter of the failings of individual moral responsibility. The plethora of stories about benefit "scroungers", disability fraud and so on are all supplied to provide moral ammunition for the government's austerity agenda and the destruction of Britain's social cohesion.
Thus "British values" had become further skewed towards the "individual" and away from the wider community. When it came to immigration, the agenda set by the editors was to entrench the fear that economic migrants were taking other people's jobs and destroying Britain's sense of identity, regardless of the reality. In this way, while the reader was informed that their "community" was being eradicated, they were also being instigated into animosity towards other ("foreign") parts of their community. Thus communities were being culturally divided by the anti-immigration agenda; society was becoming further and further atomized, split between socially-open and socially-closed communities.
All these themes had a part to play in the "Brexit Agenda". Like the Thatcherites in the Conservative government and the Thatcherite media barons, these are people who are Libertarians at heart. They do not really believe in community or society, but in individual actions. They do not truly believe in "charity" in the traditional sense, and are callous towards the suffering of others. As their ideal is to convert Britain into a state like Singapore, can they even truly be said to be "British", from a cultural or social point of view? Are they, in fact, the real "enemies of the people"?
Along with the special interest groups like Legatum, the IEA, and the ERG group in parliament itself, we see an agenda that has very little of "British values" in the modern understanding of the term. The agenda is about socially turning back the clock well over a hundred years, to a time when Britain had few regulations, little in the way of a safety net, and far fewer human rights. The only countries in the modern world that are comparable with this state of affairs are third world countries or corrupt dictatorships.
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