So Theresa May will not take part in TV debates ahead of the planned general election, we are to believe she prefers “to get out and about and meet voters” and the BBC meekly recycled that excuse (expect the BBC to have nothing further to say about it!)
This will be the most dumbed down election in the history of Britain – the reasons for this are simple:
Theresa May ain’t that bright – no match at all for Corbyn who is a veteran political debater and a genuine intellectual or Sturgeon, or Lucas. Every time I see May on television I see an over-promoted and cheerless typing pool manager, prepared crib sheet in hand. The idea of placing her in a live debate against any of the other leaders is laughable. May’s job is to dumbly carry water for the usual suspects – independent thinking is not required: she is to be the face of a revived Thatcherism, not the voice.
The Tories don’t want a debate – the whole point of this election is to use the pre-Brexit honeymoon to rubber stamp a dismantling of this once social democratic nation. Debates can be lost, people might start to think and nobody in the Tory Party or the corporate media wants that. Jingoism and tribal hatreds will be the tory motifs of the most intellectually stupid election ever.
The corporate media will run the show of course. Theresa May will be wrapped in the Union Jack, sympathetically lit and protected from any critical questioning or analysis. Meanwhile Corbyn will spend the campaign endlessly traduced, smeared and fending off questions about when he is going to resign.
This election will be played by the media as a royal event and in many ways it is – a token leader will be adoringly ushered to the throne to the strains of Rule Britannia.
Expect nothing better. The mainstream media in this country are not fit for the purpose of facilitating a democratic debate, the most risible drivel will come from the gatekeepers of the laughably dubbed ‘independent / liberal’ media – the BBC and The Guardian.
Stand by for pre-prepared Brexit sound-bites and photo opportunities for Theresa May, there will be no real debate. Expect May to be bussed from smiling children to factory, gate, from church fete to flag waving supporters.
There will no questions about climate change, Donald Trump, arms sales to Saudi Arabia, starvation in Yemen, refugees, Syria, Food banks, benefit sanctions, homelessness, the NHS crisis, the corporate tax gap / evasions, the gig economy, record levels of debt, rampant inequality, rising child poverty, epidemics of mental illness among the young or anything else.
This election will be a royal wedding between what a friend described as an “dead eyed Erdogan with tits” and the euphoric gasps of vulture capitalism. It is the election Royal Dalton have been dreaming of – hurry before all the Brexit tea towels, souvenir pull outs and Theresa May figurines are all sold out.
There is so MUCH that we really should be very urgently concerned about, so the election will be framed in terms that are directly inverse to the crushing need for mature analysis and genuine intellectual debate. This is the function of the political and the media circus now. How much time will we spend talking about the onrushing dangers of potentially cataclysmic climate change, nuclear war or societal breakdown – and how much on a cartoon narrative about Brexit remoaners and saboteurs? We all know the answer.
I doubt much can be done to prevent her majesty’s ascension to the throne – but if you want to try (and at least have fun), spend the election talking with people about ANY ISSUE except Brexit. Believe me, it will annoy the hell out of the establishment and you never know, a few may even stop to think about the direction we are heading in – before we tumble into the abyss of becoming a third world country under an authoritarian regime..
Any issue except Brexit? Here goes. An unpublished letter to the Guardian:
The use of one of the US military’s largest non-nuclear explosive devices – the MOAB – to kill 36 jihadis in Afghanistan is baffling in more than just military and economic terms of cost alone (“MOAB attack on Isis was a baffling choice in cold-blooded terms of cost”. theguardian.com, 14 April, 2017).
What is consistently overlooked, besides the effect on the natural world, (“The west used colonies as laboratories for weapons. It’s not different today”, theguardian.com, 14 April, 2017)is the dropping of the bomb was also the destruction of the vast resources – human, material and financial – utilised in its development and manufacture. This has an economic cost that is disregarded by conventional economics. The American corporations were paid, the US government recorded the production as a positive contribution to GDP and the country got richer, right?
Wrong. In reality, the effort expended to create this destructive force can also be argued to have destroyed previously existing wealth in the form of the resources that could have been used for beneficial purposes and, as a consequence, devalued the currency. Negative production, such as this, can be considered to be a hidden cause of price inflation in essential goods and services affecting us all, which I set out in a Compass (UK thinktank) blog.
”The Tories don’t want a debate – the whole point of this election is to use the pre-Brexit honeymoon to rubber stamp a dismantling of this once social democratic nation.”
The dismantling of this ‘social democratic nation’ in fact began with Anthony Crosland’s book ‘The Future of Socialism’ first published in 1956, a revisionist tract decrying social democracy in which he postulated that socialism in Britain did not have a future and argued instead for a responsible, caring capitalism which would deliver the goods to all and sundry. Which in terms of an early reply from Lenin maintained that ‘’If capitalism could deliver the goods to everyone, it would not be capitalism’’
This collaborationist tendency became embedded in the party gathering strength through the revisionist leadership of Wilson, Callaghan and Kinnock reaching its apogee with Blair and this ‘third way’ – a programme which in essence was a complete capitulation to neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism of which he, and most of the PLP, was the unabashed advocate.
Seems to me that the enemy within, to wit, Blair and his forebears, bear as much responsibility for the demise of social democracy than the Tory enemy without. Never underestimate the opportunism and pusillanimity of Social-Democracy and its leaders.