Are we really too stupid to be interested in Leveson?
Even by Labour Uncut’s standards, this is pretty poor:
People are suffering out there. Families’ finances are under pressure as prices rise while their incomes remain static……
So imagine how you must have as you realised that there was still a couple of weeks to go until pay-day and the kids needed new shoes or the tax on the car was due. And then you flicked on the news and saw that once again the entire political class appeared to have its collective head stuck up its own arse once again!
The Leveson Inquiry is a political geeks fantasy. I have to confess to being addicted to it and avidly consume every titillating morsel……But I suspect that for many, many more, the vast majority, it is barely noticed, or is a hugely embarrassing waste of time and money.
So let’s get this right.
Someone who acknowledges that he is in the “Westminster village: (he says ‘out there’, not ‘out here’) “suspects” the proletariat are not interested in the Leveson Inquiry, and therefore suggests that those in the Westminster village should stop covering it.
As someone most definitely outside the Westminster village but also interested in Leveson, I find pretty damn patronising Watt’s insinuation that I’m not really up to such intellectual demands. So, I more-than-suspect, would plenty of my friends, who may not follow every minute of Leveson, but would object pretty strongly to the idea that the questions who controls the papers, and in whose interests, is nothing for them to worry their pretty, skint little heads about.
(As Andreas has pointed out on twitter, malign media ownership was actually the subject of a James Bond film not too long ago. I don’t remember too many people leaving the cinema early complaining that it was all a bit hard to get to grips with, and that they’d be better off discussing the price of nails in the pub.)
In the way that Labour Uncut’s Peter Watt thus reduces those beyond ’the village’ to voting fodder, at whom more ‘relevant’ messages are to be directed by those in the know, I’m reminded of an old post by Dave Understanding the politics of intellectual snobbery:
Extreme religion, anti-statism and even fascism are motivated by the lumpenization of the working class. At that point, it doesn’t matter who is objectively “correct” and who is objectively wrong, any more than it matters when armies meet on a battlefield who has the better ideological justification.
But the further this process of lumpenization goes on, the more shrill the liberal denunciations of the unthinking masses.
Which is counterproductive and, yes, patronizing.
Politics as telling the masses what the political elite thinks it’s important they hear, or politics as telling people what might be important? I know which I prefer.
To be fair on that article he doesn’t say it is unimportant just that many, if not most of the general public are not interested and think it a waste of money. The point being that the gen public are fed a diet of lies, title tattle, and blatant political bias that they think that an Inquiry is only going to lead to an already obvious conclusion which will then be kicked into the long grass by Cameron who only set it up after considerable pressure.
I think most people are not able to follow the proceedings, and given some of the tweets under the heading, do not understand how it operates or even what it is supposed to be inquiring into – having been spoon fed by the tabloids who didn’t cover the phonehacking story until they had to (surprise, surprise), not really surprising.
Also to be fair no one is going to know if it has been worthwhile, apart from informing those of us that are interested in the murky world of media, political and police collusion and corruption, until the Inquiry is completed, the findings known and hopefully acted on by Cameron and the Coalition.
I suspect that the rest will continue to graze on their diet of football, sex, gossip and worry about their jobs much as before oblivious to all Leveson related matters.
It’s kind of like the stuff we used to hear in the Blair era, when we were constantly told the working classes didn’t care about civil liberties, or that somehow ultra-right law and order policies were beneficial to our core support.
God, that was the most appalling excuse for a Labour government ever! Never again.
I can see why you took it the way you did. I took it differently. Reading less closely than you did, Leveson for me is an example of how a nit-picking democracy is good at navel-gazing but – when set alongside the euro crisis for example – very poor at the big issues in times of crisis. And with Leveson and cases like those of the Murdochs more generally, our politicians seem to getting better at the former – but worse at the latter. I think the very thing which is good about Leveson – slowly teasing out the truth month by month; that drip-feed journalism which takes its time – is what is leading our leaders and their institutional structures down a route of no-return in relation to the big stuff.
Of course, you may argue if people had been more involved in running our institutions, we wouldn’t be in the situation we find ourselves. My instinct would be to agree – problem is, right now, do we have the right to be that ambitious?
Mil, the fascination of the political elite with the small things, set against their seeming inability to anything about the big things, is a dialectical arrangement. The small things are small precisely because they don’t affect the immediate material conditions of millions, the big things big because they do. So it’s easier for politicians to develop ever more narrow, nit-picky (if you like) ideologies as a guide to their actions because at least that way they don’t come into conflict with any number of large and powerful institutions or with their own understanding of how the world works (i.e. their pro-capitalist stance).
This has got less to do with mass involvement in institutions (though I agree that would help) and more to do with the absolute and crushing failure of socialist and even social democratic ideology within Labour.
Hi Dave – I posted most of my comment above on my own blog as it didn’t seem to get through first time round. I’d agree with your analysis. Some Twitter exchanges I had after my own post yesterday also led us to conclude that the long-predicted end of capitalism was taking place against the backdrop of a non-existent left – at least in the context of Labour, as you rightly suggest, which is why it’s totally unable to take advantage of the opportunities. Thus the apparent logjam.
Your final paragraph encapsulates the issue very neatly. Really can’t argue with any of that.
They’re not called Labour ‘Ucunt’ for nothing.