YOU BETTER NOT LOOK DOWN [456]

Sir Keir Starmer's official Prime Ministerial portrait

“Whoso pulleth out this sword from this stone and anvil is the true born King of all Britain.”

The opening spoken passage of Rick Wakeman’s “Arthur” is just about the only part the BBC have not used to introduce their General Election coverage since 1979, but with each seat having been contested contested on the premise of “may the best person win”, a place could surely be found.

I followed this election through my fingers from the moment it began. The unforced errors of Rishi Sunak’s Conservative Party campaign ranged from calling it in the pouring rain, announcing the return of National Service, leaving the D-Day commemorations in France early, through to investigations into party members’ insider knowledge for betting on when the election would take place, and the disputed “£2,094” per household that having a Labour party in government would cost. Having a working state for the cost of a Sky TV subscription, something Sunak counted not having as a deprivation in his childhood, could be a good deal.

While Sir Ed Davey seemingly went on an extreme sports holiday to bring attention to the Liberal Democrats, and Nigel Farage decided we were worth his attention over Donald Trump, all Sir Keir Starmer had to do was remain statesmanlike, talk about returning politics to service, and following through on that once elected... 

Then the election became about keeping transgender women out of women’s spaces, with Starmer saying he thought they shouldn’t be allowed, and offering to meet J.K. Rowling to discuss her concerns, as the de facto leader of the “gender critical” movement, which abjectifies an entire group of people by asserting sex over gender at all costs. Starmer wants there to be a “reset moment” for trans people, removing the toxicity from the national conversation, but I would love to find out how he will do that.

Once again, I tried to watch the election results through the night, expecting the momentum prompted by the exit poll’s prediction of a Labour Party landslide to drive the TV coverage. I had seen enough polls predicting a “supermajority” of five hundred seats for Labour, but I was expecting a result like that seen in 1997, which was 418 Labour seats to the Conservatives’ 165 seats. The exit poll had 410 versus only 131, and while the thirteen forecast seats for the right-wing Reform UK were concerning, this was explained as being due to lack of sampling data, expected to be revised downwards. There was enough to talk about, but the first hour of coverage was dominated by a race to declare the first result. 

I mostly stayed with the BBC’s TV coverage, as ITV and Channel 4 had opted to include former politicians in their core teams – one verbal spar between Alistair Campbell and Nadine Dorries put me off Channel 4 for the night – and ITV had centred its coverage around one massive, visually uninteresting desk. After a full day’s work, and no longer able to keep my eyes open, I wound up retiring to bed at 12.45am, with only six results having been called. I woke up again at 4.40am to Rishi Sunak winning his seat for the Conservatives, but conceding the race – Labour’s Sir Keir Starmer had become Prime Minister, his party eventually winning 412 out of 650 seats, with a total of 33.7% of votes cast, on a 60% turnout.

What the public was voting for appeared not to be Labour, but Not-The-Tories, or Not-The-SNP in Scotland. Tactical or protest voting caused seats previously safe for one party to become more marginal this time around. People punished the Conservative government for leaving the country in a worse condition than when they assumed power in 2010. Meanwhile, some independent candidates won over parties due to specific issues like the war in Gaza. The First Past the Post system rewards the winner, but it means Labour enters Parliament with a shallow voter base.

The biggest protest vote was for Reform UK, the fourth party under which Nigel Farage has run for Parliament, which won five seats despite receiving 14.3% of votes, splitting the right-wing vote with the Conservate Party. If your party gets few seats because most of your candidates came second or third, then of course you could have done better if the rules were different. Changing to a proportional representation system would have benefitted the Liberal Party in 1974, the SDP in 1983, and Reform UK in 2024, but wanting to change the system because it would benefit you specifically is suspect, especially after a referendum in 2011 to change to an “alternate vote” system was, well, voted down.

It is imperative that, for whenever the next election take place, the Conservative Party regains its focus. British politics is usually fought from the centre ground, moving further left or right leaves people behind. Voting for Farage’s parties has been used most effectively as a blunt instrument in previous local, general and European elections, and while Farage talks of professionalising Reform UK, still currently a limited company over which he has the most voting shares, his stated aim of supplanting the Conservatives won’t happen if the Conservatives take his place first.

As for the new Prime Minister, all he needs to do is make our lives better while keeping the noise down. If he does, we might allow him to keep doing it.

AND NOW THE WORDS JUST SLIP AWAY [305]

Is it still possible to ignore something until it goes away? The expectation these days is to react, fight, stand your ground, voice disapproval, and close the other side down.

As someone whose school years were not the best of their life, I believe the bullies did win after all, or at least everyone chose to adopt their tactics. But the bullies receded eventually, perhaps bored or no longer fulfilled, because I ignored them as much as I could. It takes as much effort to say nothing as saying anything at all.

 

But bullying makes news, hectoring makes news, provocation makes news. Anything written on Twitter by Piers Morgan is routinely written up by newspapers, including the one he used to edit, the “Daily Mirror”, legitimising the way he uses it, if not condoning it.

 

This playbook appears to have been used by the television channel GB News, which has generated an immense amount of heat, but very little light, since it launched on Sunday 13^th June. GB News courted pre-launch comparisons with the rabid Fox News Channel, touting items on Andrew Neil’s flagship 8pm show with titles like “Wokewatch” and “Mediawatch.” These were initially addressed by Neil’s programme on the channel’s launch night, talking about how the channel would “lend an ear to some of Britain’s marginalised and overlooked voices” and speak up for “their voice has not been heard in the mainstream media.”

 

Online traffic about the channel, which includes boycotts of advertisers and poking fun at numerous technical errors suffered, is led by controversial statements made by presenters, particularly former talk radio “shock jocks” Nigel Farage and Dan Wootton about the England football team “taking the knee,” the Royal National Lifeboat Institution rescuing refugees at sea, “doomsday scientists” running a “Covid scare campaign” that “terrified the public into supporting lockdowns,” and anything else that speaks to how a culture war is being waged by “woke” people. Eschewing traditional news bulletins for leading with conversation, the subjects discussed are few and repetitive.

 

In itself, GB News is rather boring to talk about, for the extent to which its tumultuous launch and continued existence has been taken apart in numerous news articles and opinion pieces, there is really nothing left to say about it that hasn’t already been said, because everyone has said everything about it from the moment the channel was first announced. The broad narrative of overambition and hubris – its viewing figures are currently in the tens of thousands, below what it needs to prove its viability – also invites comparisons with the launch, collapse and overhaul of TV-am when that launched in 1983, suggesting not only that the crisis at GB News, whose director of programmes at launch has already left, suggests not only that the current problems experienced by the channel were not only expected, but forseen. TV-am eventually became more popular, but only by changing itself almost entirely.

 

Since Sunday 13^th June, I have watched a total of three hours of GB News – one was the opening launch programme, followed by bits of other shows, including a Sunday morning with the deliberately provocative title of “The Political Correction.” The repetition of talking points became boring, and seeing a parade of mid-shots of people talking is visually uninteresting, not helped by having a studio set with black walls and no windows. 

 

So, I ignore the channel, and ignore the discourse surrounding the channel. Its viewing figures confirm I cannot be the only one. I am not interested in what the presenters have to say on the same few topics, especially as its competition, as a politically right-leaning channel, is most national newspapers, talk radio stations, and vast sections of the internet. It can only make noise to attract attention, and can only provoke a reaction by creating heat. I already learned to avoid things like that.

THIS LAND IS YOUR LAND, THIS LAND IS MY LAND [71]

Never having lived under an authoritarian, nationalist regime, it is easy for me to say, as a British person, that I am not a fan of fascism.

In modern history, Britain has never had a regime that took itself seriously enough for anything remotely fascist to work - the British national character, or our idea of one, likes to take overly successful or self-important people down a peg, so the personality cult found around many fascist leaders cannot materialise. I need not go over (again) the shortcomings of Nigel Farage, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin because they are both apparent, and well known to all of us, but those shortcomings mean they do not make the grade as a fascist leader – no, they’re not good enough for that either.

Replacing the existing British political system with fascist control would be too radical, and far too much work. Groups like the British National Party are tiny, but no “centre ground” party exists either, because the Conservative and Labour parties always vie for control of the middle ground in general elections. Dragging everyone towards the far right really requires a decisive, seismic event, and even the Second World War couldn’t manage that.

In the absence of a personal test, I agree with a passage often used to confirm British hostility to Fascism. It is found in the 1938 novel “The Code of the Woosters,” by P.G. Wodehouse, where Bertie Wooster repudiates Roderick Spode, leader of the Blackshorts. Spode is an analogue of British fascist leader Oswald Mosley, who was imprisoned by the British Government, with other far-right sympathisers, in 1940:

“The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you’re someone. You hear them shouting ‘Heil, Spode!’ and you imagine it is the Voice of the People. That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is: ‘Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags! Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher?’”

While the writings of Pelham Grenville Wodehouse embody the manners, the thoughts and the language of a Britain now gone, the sheer British-ness of the man himself got him into trouble. He initially did not escape his home in France when the Nazis invaded Paris in 1940, and was later captured after making an attempt. The following year, interred in Berlin, Wodehouse was made to broadcast five radio talks, directed to the United States and Britain, titled “How to be an Internee Without Previous Training.” In these talks, he confirmed, “I never was interested in politics. I'm quite unable to work up any kind of belligerent feeling.”

In the absence of knowledge about the circumstances that produced these talks, Wodehouse was decried in Britain. After the liberation of France in 1944, he returned to New York, where he also mainly lived before the Second World War began - his pre-war picture of Britain, as presented in his writing, was preserved. The broadcaster Malcolm Muggeridge, who was a MI6 intelligence officer when he encountered Wodehouse after the liberation, later said he was “a man singularly ill-fitted to live in a time of ideological conflict, having no feelings of hatred about anyone, and no very strong views about anything. ... I never heard him speak bitterly about anyone—not even about old friends who turned against him in distress. Such temperament does not make for good citizenship in the second half of the Twentieth Century.”

Where does that leave me? When modern-day fascists – “alt-right” really is just a branding exercise - feel emboldened by the actions of leaders, you have no choice but to speak out against it but, as usual for social media, you could be denounced for trying to censor someone to promote your own views. Plurality of opinion is ideal, but threatening the safety of others, in order to promote your own agenda, is simply stupid.

People can believe whatever they want, but if you do want to cut your nose off to spite your face, don’t be surprised if people happy with their own noses decide to offer you a scalpel – and if you think this will work instead, trying to sound reasonable will not work either, especially if the words are not there.