Corblimeyn

TelevisionIf you keep deceiving people you will end up believing your own lies.

The Cor Blimey response is wearing off as people get used to the prospect of Jeremy Corbyn becoming the Leader of the Labour Party. Support for him has surged far more than most Members of Parliament expected. Why didn’t they see it coming?

Opponents still go out of their way to rubbish him, as Martyn Shrewsbury illustrates. However a new mood is sweeping across Europe, expressed by Greece’s Syriza, Spain’s Podemos and Scotland’s Scottish National Party. The political establishment is no longer fit for purpose: there is growing pressure for radical change.

My focus here is on the UK and information control. The general reasons for the new mood were well presented in the Church of England’s bishops’ statement Who is My Neighbour? which I reviewed in February. Attlee’s system, with the Welfare State and social security, worked for a while. Thatcher’s very different system was found acceptable for a similar length of time, but that too no longer satisfies. Any system of government will eventually get manipulated by the clever and powerful at the expense of the less fortunate, so maybe every system should have a time limit; but did anyone seriously think present trends could continue year after year, with employees expected to work longer and longer hours while their pay, pensions and holidays kept being reduced, knowing that the rich were getting richer and the queues at the food banks were getting longer?

Why was the new mood so unforeseen? Why could Labour Members of Parliament nominate Corbyn while assuming he stood no chance of getting elected? Quite clearly they had no idea of this groundswell of opinion demanding real change.

In case anyone has forgotten, we elect MPs to govern the country. To do that, they really ought to know what is going on. Why were they so ignorant?

Whatever other reasons there may be, there is one which I think undermines the democratic process: control of information. They gave us a false picture of reality, and ended up deceiving themselves.

It happens. Decades ago I read an article – in New Society, I think – describing a study of elderly people’s beliefs about the crime rate. All over the country elderly people said they thought the national crime rate was going up, but in their own area it wasn’t. Obviously this cannot have been the case. What seems to happened is that the people surveyed drew on different sources of information. Asked about their local area they could draw on what neighbours told them and their own memories of the past. Asked about the country as a whole, they depended on newspapers and television programmes.

I suggest that the same mismatch has applied to people’s political judgements. Reality and the dominant narrative have gradually drifted apart. During the Second World War and for a long time afterwards the British Broadcasting Corporation had a worldwide reputation for the quality and balance of its programmes. Since then privately owned programmes have increased their share of followers, and most newspapers these days are owned by a tiny number of extremely rich people. The result has been a drift of political balance, towards the interests of the very rich. The more this happens the more the BBC will appear left-wing, unless it follows the trend.

For increasing numbers of people, personal experience is now so far removed from what the national news say about the state of the country that the credibility of the establishment narrative is collapsing.

Here is a democratic deficit. How do the voters work out who to vote for, if the available information is overwhelmingly controlled by vested interests?

Since the seventeenth century there has been a consensus that government should be by the consent of the people. So how do the people decide what to consent to?

Most British people were amazed that the voters of the USA could elect George W Bush as their president, and are equally amazed that Donald Trump is being taken seriously. It is not that Americans are more stupid than the British. The difference lies in the question of who owns the television channels. The American system is more effective at misleading the public. As long as government is based on consent, power resides with those who control the means of communication.

Opposition is helped by the internet. It is now possible to gain information from an almost limitless range of sources. Many commentators think this has dramatically reduced the power of political establishments, as they have less control over the information their voters receive.

If this is the case, it is a massive indictment of newspapers and television. They have been suppressing what we really wanted. Given alternative sources of information, people change their views with enthusiasm. It is as though Corbyn’s supporters are saying ‘At last! Something we can believe in!’

Over the years neo-liberal economics have dominated the thinking of the political establishment. Their power over the mass media means that, little by little, values and views they disapprove of get squeezed out as unacceptable. More and more, what they want us to believe is echoed in what our newpapers and televisions tell us. We don’t need a conspiracy theory to explain it: it’s just ordinary human misuse of power, putting unspoken pressure on those who don’t want to lose their jobs.

The internet helps, but the motive for the change is the real life experiences of increasing numbers of people, for whom the establishment narrative is no longer credible. For different people there are different triggers: the privatisation of one more element of the National Health Service, benefits sanctions, reduced pay, deteriorating conditions at work, the closure of some facility or other, David Cameron’s misjudgement of the public mood about refugees. Uniting these is the common theme, the need to reject the neo-liberal economic ideology of the political establishment.

MPs have a duty to know what is going on; but the story they were telling the rest of us was a much rosier story, the one they wanted us to believe. They ended up believing it themselves. So the truth came as a surprise.

If not even MPs understood the situation, what chance did the average voter have? And if the average voter did not know what was happening, democracy is a sham. Power lies with the controllers of information. Control needs to be taken away from the elite and dispersed among the people.

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