The ‘Strong Economy’ Soundbite

For the best part of 20 years, soundbites have become the lingua franca of careerist and dishonest politicians. We can see this whenever the subject of the National Health Service or public services is raised in an interview with a Tory minister: they’ll trot out the familiar soundbite of “in order to have a properly funded NHS, we need to have a strong economy”. What this actually means when it’s translated is “we’ll keep running down the NHS, until we get it into such a position that we’ll have to sell it off”. When it’s unpacked, the ‘strong economy’ soundbite is actually an admission that the economy is actually weak and not as “strong” as the Tories suggest. The Tories will then contradict themselves by telling us that the economy is “strong”, even though many of us know this is not the case. Why? Because we can see the evidence of a weak national economy with our own eyes.

If the economy is so “strong”, then why are working people forced to go to foodbanks? If the economy is so strong, then why are public sector workers having their pay effectively cut year on year? If the economy is so “strong”, then why are people put into a position where the only jobs available to them are casual and short term jobs?

So, if  the Tories are to be believed and we have a weak economy, does that mean we can’t have an NHS? Nonsense. After the Second World War, Britain was broke and its economy was weak, yet we still managed to have an NHS.

The mass media – especially the BBC – is failing the public by refusing to challenge Tory politicians on their claims and their meaningless soundbites. They are helping to undermine, not just the democratic process (the election), but our flimsy democracy too.

We deserve better from our politicians and our mass media.

 

Predicting Election Results: A Mug’s Game

No one can predict the future, so let’s put the notion that people can predict future events to bed straight away . Since Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the Labour Party, I’ve had many people tell me that Labour will lose the [next] election badly and be consigned to electoral oblivion for a generation. I even had some Kipper tell me that Geert Wilders would become Dutch PM and Marine Le Pen would win the French Presidential Election. He added that he’d “been right in the past” because he “studied the polls”. Of course, neither Wilders nor Le Pen won their respective elections and as I told this Kipper, “If you’re so certain, then perhaps you can give me this week’s winning lottery numbers”. He declined. If I had the gift of second sight, I certainly wouldn’t be boring the pants off of people on comments threads with my tenuous claims of precognition. I’d be lounging about on my own Caribbean island and donating money to left-wing political parties.

When it comes to Labour’s chances of securing victory in next week’s General Election, the pundits have mostly been of one mind: it’s curtains for Labour. The Tories will win a landslide and that’s that.  Even the Tories themselves have said, in not so many words, that they’re on course to achieve a manifold increase in their tiny majority.  In City AM last September, QMU’s Professor Tim Bale offered us a slice of expert sagaciousness,

Unless everything we think we know about politics turns out to be wrong, the Tories are going to win the next election. They are way ahead of Labour on both economic competence and best Prime Minister. Just how big that win will be partly depends on when they go to the country. If Theresa May does what any normal politician would do in her position, she will engineer a contest in the spring or early summer of next year – before the compromises she’s going to have to make with Brussels become overly obvious, before the economy begins palpably to slow down, before the continuing squeeze on the NHS makes waiting lists and times even longer – and before Labour can dump Jeremy Corbyn. And even if she waits until 2020, she’ll still win. But if she goes sooner, she stands a chance of achieving the sort of majority that the Conservatives have only been able to dream about for 30 years. Carpe diem!

Bale obviously didn’t count on May’s less-than-engaging personality and her party’s weird mix of spite, control freakery and incompetence. Not to mention the cowardliness of May herself. Carpe Diem, indeed.

The supposedly Labour-supporting Daily Mirror claimed that Labour was “certain to lose the 2020 General Election. Their story was based on a Fabian Society report, which claimed the party will only hang on to around “140 seats”.

Last April, the Independent’s John Rentoul indulged himself in an extraordinary masturbatory fantasy in which Bozza is now PM and Heidi Alexander is now Labour leader (I know, I know),

Heidi Alexander, had fought the hopeless fight. Indeed, since she had defeated Jeremy Corbyn six months ago, in the fourth Labour leadership election in four years, she had showed great skill in neither fully renouncing nor standing by her predecessor’s programme.

Jesus, that’s terrible.

Even G*d-bothering Liberal Democrat leader, Tim Farron, keeps telling us that the Tories will win a landslide. Dim Tim told The Guardian “The worst governments are the ones with the weakest oppositions. The Liberal Democrats are in a very strong position now to fill that space.” Are those are the same Liberal Democrats that slipped between the sheets with the Tories in 2010 and helped to implement some of the most savage cuts to public services for a generation? I’ll take no lessons from you, Tim. Thanks, but no thanks.

If the general election result is such an outright certainty, then why bother having an election in the first place? Why not just have a lavish coronation ceremony for Theresa May instead? I mean, what is the point in this supposedly pointless democratic exercise if the Tories are certain to win a landslide? Let’s just get the coup out of the way and then we can move on – if that’s what you Tories and media pundits want, of course. Because let’s face it, when the Tories and the Lib Dems talk about the need for a ‘strong opposition’ what they really mean by ‘strong’ is antonymous; it’s the authoritarian’s definition of a strong opposition. The last thing the Tories want is a Labour party that stands up to them, hence their resort to personalizations and smears. Does that sound like a party that’s confident of its impending electoral success?

So here’s an appeal to the media pundits and self-imagined political soothsayers, please don’t give up the day jobs. You don’t have magic powers that allow you to predict the future. You’re hacks, who just happen to be a little too close to political power to be truly objective.  Your special insight, such as it is, is limited to the tiny world you inhabit. You speak for no one but yourselves and your masters. If you want to predict the future, get yourselves a seaside stall, a pack of tarot cards, a crystal ball and a black obsidian mirror.  No one’s stopping you.

Nothing in life or politics is certain. But one thing is true: the Tories have run a terrible campaign and Labour has performed better than the media expected. On that basis, it seems reasonable to suggest that the Tories won’t do as well as the pundits have predicted.

(S)He’d Send In The Army

Given the current situation, this seemed appropriate. Just change the pronoun’s gender.

This Is Not Journalism (Or Anything Like It)

If you aren’t careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.
~Malcolm X

The British press is in a sorry state. Claimed by its defenders to be part of a mythical ‘free’ media, the press in Britain takes a cavalier attitude with regard to its role as news providers and opinion formers. Its proprietors and managing editors believe themselves to be immune from criticism and, at times, above the law of the land. Worse still,  when it traduces members of the public it receives little more than a slap on the wrist. It is, as Chomsky and Herman (1994) would say, an unofficial ministry of information,which works principally for the Conservative Party in and out of government.

Here at Nowhere Towers, we have always been aware of the many shortcomings of the British press and its tendency to sensationalize and engage in smear campaigns against political figures not belonging to the Tory party.  Yesterday, two titles that are sympathetic to the Tories have plumbed new depths of depravity and mendacity.  Unsurprisingly, those titles are The S*n  and The Daily Ma*l.

After Monday night’s terrorist bombing of the Manchester Arena, The S*n’s front page looked like this.

Here is a blatant attempt to use an unrelated story to make the suggestion that Jeremy Corbyn is responsible for Monday night’s atrocity. But there was something nastier lurking within the rag itself.  The S*n’s leader column, The S*n Says, made a gargantuan leap of logic by claiming that Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell were responsible for the bombing.

This isn’t journalism or anything like it. It’s a blatant smear; a character assassination that is based entirely upon a historical revisionism.  But The Cat has a question: who signed this off? This is evidently libellous and we know Murdoch has pockets that are as deep and as wide as the Pacific Ocean, but did The S*n’s editorial team think it could swerve around the law? Clearly it did and the paper has learned nothing from the Leveson Report.

I hasten to add that I did not buy The S*n, nor would I contemplate breaking my 30+ years boycott of the paper. The people of Manchester should do the same as the people of Liverpool have done and boycott The S*n.

Although, strictly speaking, a political cartoon isn’t journalism, it is carried by a newspaper that claims to employ journalists. Yesterday’s Mac cartoon in the Daily Mail followed The S*n by making the claim that Corbyn and McDonnell are active terrorists. Mac, or Stanley McMurty to give him his real name,  is known for his racism and homophobia.  This cartoon has two figures in paramilitary garb walking up a garden path carrying weapons.

The caption below it says “Oh dear. Will you answer the door? I think they’re canvassing for Jeremy Corbyn”. Mac can claim he’s being humorous, but it doesn’t wash: this is a blatant piece of propaganda dressed up as humour. In this, it is reminiscent of the cartoons found in Der Sturmer, the official newspaper of the Nazi Party (below).

What is quite absent from the claims about Corbyn’s non-existent sympathy with terrorists, is any acknowledgement on the part of the media’s interviewers and commentators of the role of the British state in Loyalist violence. Worse, perhaps is the morbid nostalgia that seems to accompany these claims. It’s as though the Good Friday Agreement never happened and the power-sharing government never existed. Instead, what we’re treated to are selected fragments of Tory memory larded with a narrative that’s been constructed from misrepresentations and outright lies. For the Tories and others, the Provisional IRA is still active and still bombing the country. Meanwhile, the Loyalist paramilitaries are treated, in not so many words, as heroes or simply not mentioned.

Conveniently for Theresa May, electioneering has been suspended. Her own campaign was floundering and now, after Monday night’s atrocity, she can look stateswoman-like in spite of her evident weakness and terminal indecision. For seven years, the Tories have cut the numbers of the police, military and firefighters. May was Home Secretary for six of those years. You do the maths.

Who’s the bigger threat to the country? I’d say it’s Theresa May and the British press.

Reference/further reading

Bourdieu, P., & Wacquant, L. (2003). Symbolic violence. na. Available at: http://cges.umn.edu/docs/Bourdieu_and_Wacquant.Symbolic_Violence.pdf Accessed 29/2/16.

Gramsci, A. (ed.) (1971) Selections From The Prison Notebooks, London: Lawrence & Wishart.

Herman, E. S. & Chomsky, N. (1994) Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, London: Vintage Books.

The Worst Election Campaign Ever?

When Theresa May announced her cabinet last July, I remember thinking how it seemed redolent of John Major’s cabinet: incompetent, crooked and potentially sleazy. Boris Johnson as Foreign Secretary? You’re having a laugh! The disgraced former Defence Secretary, Liam Fox as Trade Secretary? What have you been smoking?  Priti Patel as International Development Secretary after she said how she wanted to see the department abolished? Did I fall asleep and wake up in Bizarro World?

Last week, a friend and I were chatting about the election when he said to me “I think the Tories are trying to throw the election”. “Really?”, I asked. “I wouldn’t credit them with that much intelligence”. To be sure, May’s Tories are an arrogant bunch but brainy? I don’t think so.

When May called the election a few weeks back, it reminded me of Ted Heath’s petulant ‘Who Governs Britain’ snap election campaign in 1974. Heath, whose own government was pretty incompetent, went to the country confident of a massive victory. He lost. Like May, Heath’s campaign was run along narrow lines. For Heath, it was about his macho image and facing down the National Union of Mineworkers. For May, it’s apparently about getting a mandate for the Brexit negotiations. Something she already got when Article 50 was passed by the Commons. The Cat thinks the negotiations should be conducted by representatives from all the parliamentary parties and the party in government, but that’s a subject for another blog.

Few people can be in any doubt as to how shambolically the Tory election campaign has been run. From the day she called the election to the launch of the manifesto and now the sudden and apparent volte face over the what’s  been dubbed the Dementia Tax, the Tory campaign has been a disaster. Not even the exceptionally dull ‘Strong and Stable’ slogan can mask the evident ineptitude with which the campaign has been conducted.

Compare Corbyn’s campaign to that of May. Corbyn is happy pressing the flesh, having selfies taken with people and holding babies. When May’s been exposed to the public, she looks uncomfortable. She’s not a people person.  I mean, when did you last see her having a selfie taken with one of her followers? May’s appearances around the country have been highly stage-managed and local reporters have been locked away from the main event, while specially selected journalists are permitted to ask Chairman May vetted questions.

What about that manifesto? Oh, the manifesto. Didn’t that seem as though it was thrown together at the last minute? When Labour launched their manifesto last Tuesday it was met with the predictable sneers and swipes. All of our favourite clichés were summoned up: “it doesn’t add up”, “Labour is the party of high taxation”, that sort of thing. But Labour’s manifesto pledges of the renationalization of key infrastructure, the abolition of university tuition fees and general decency – all of them popular –  put the weak and unstable Tories into a spin. The day following Labour’s manifesto launch, the Tories arranged a hasty press conference where they ‘warned’ (sic) of the ‘dangers’ of electing Jeremy Corbyn (not the Labour Party).  It was panicky and, frankly, the whole spectacle was rather comical. The dismal May and her equally dismal sidekick, Philip Hammond, trotted out their stock of anti-Labour tropes. “There’s a black hole in Labour’s manifesto” claimed Hammond. Actually, Phil, the black hole is in your mind.

Yesterday’s campaign posters today!

There’s a vacuum at the heart of Tory thinking and, at times, it’s felt as though the Tories have recycled the 1992, 2010 and 2015 General Election campaigns and simply pressed them together in the hope that no one would notice. Themes from each of those campaigns have made an appearance in this campaign: the tax bombshell, the bold claims of being ‘economically competent’ and the ‘coalition of chaos’ have all been dusted down, patched up and sent out to fight the enemy once more. But this is a combatant that should be seeing out its last days in a retirement home  instead of being ordered to fight again.  Lynton Crosby and Mark Textor, the Tories’ apparent election masterminds, have clearly lost their touch.  Maybe they should employ someone like, say, John McTernan instead? He couldn’t do any worse, then again…

I can’t remember when a manifesto u-turn has happened in the middle of a General Election. Surely this is a first?

How Much Will It Cost? (Revisited)

The questions of “how much will it cost?” or “How will you pay for it?” are always posed by the media’s journalists to the planned spending proposals of Labour and all the other parties, bar the Tories. That the Tories have dominated the economic discourse since the 1980s cannot be denied.  Indeed, political journalists have accepted the economic orthodoxy uncritically in the decades that have followed and there are, in my mind, two reasons why they do this. First, they’re not economists and second, they’re lazy. Even the economics editors of the major news organizations tend to be drawn from the Thatcherite School of Household Management Economics, and will base their analyses and their questions on its flawed logic.

Now, I’m not an economist but my instincts regarding national finances are correct: household analogies are nonsense and journalists who repeat them are foolish. The reductivist economic dogma of the Tories and UKIP has dragged this country into recessions (there were three during the Thatcher years) and have forced people into ever greater poverty, while the rich have seen a manifold increase in their incomes.

In an article by Richard Murphy of Tax Research (two days after my piece), he puts to bed the myths that have passed for economic competence and credibility for over 30 years.  He opens by saying:

The most dangerous question in political debate in the UK is the one always rolled out by every journalist, on air or in other media, which is to ask a politician ‘How are you going to pay for it?’ where ‘it’ is whatever the politicians has just proposed to do.

He then provides three reasons why this question is a dangerous one and provides handy replies to the clueless hacks who insist on asking the question.

You can read the rest here.

All governments borrow and spend money. That’s how national finances work. In seven years, the Tories have racked up more debt than the previous Labour government did in 13 years. Moreover, Labour has a better record of paying off debt. In 1976, the Wilson government was forced to take out a loan from the International Monetary Fund to pay for the Sterling Crisis, which was caused by the Heath government’s economic mismanagement. It was paid off by 1979. Thatcher’s Tories continued to use the IMF loan as a stick to beat the Labour Party even though the loan had been repaid. Yet Kinnock refused to counter these lies. Finally, the Corbyn-led party has awakened to the need to counter the Tories’ myths and lies about the national economy and borrowing/spending. And about time too.

Tory Election Fraud: No Charges

Few people can be surprised that the CPS will not be prosecuting Tory MPs and agents for failing to correctly declare their elections expenses.  This is a serious blow for democracy in the United Kingdom, which continues to operate the archaic First Past The Post system to elect its legislators. It is well known that the Conservative Party is awash with money from shadowy donors, who are themselves drawn from the 1%.

The BBC only really started reporting the story in its television and radio news when it appeared certain that no charges were to be brought. Now, one could suggest that this was a non-story and that is the reason the BBC avoided it. However, The Cat would narrow his eyes and say “nonsense”.

The response from the Tories was predictable and shrill. Patrick McLoughlin, the Conservative Party chairman claimed  “false and malicious claims” were made about his candidates on the Internet and added:

“After a very thorough investigation, we are pleased that the legal authorities have confirmed what we believed was the case all along, that these Conservative candidates did nothing wrong.

“These were politically motivated and unfounded complaints that have wasted police time. We are glad that this matter is finally resolved.”

Make no mistake, if  Labour or Green candidates had been accused of falsely declaring their election expenses, the Tories would have made a lot of noise. Hypocrisy much?

Karl McCartney,  the Tory candidate for Lincoln, said:  “This whole saga amounts to no more than a politically-motivated witch-hunt.” You clearly don’t know what a witch hunt is, Karl.

Jeremy Corbyn told BBC: “I am interested and surprised by it. We will have to look at the details.”

One case, that of Craig McKinlay in Thanet South, remains in the hands of the CPS. There could still be prosecutions.

Democracy is for sale.

EDITED TO ADD; 10/5/17 @ 1612

Tory Party chairman, Patrick McLoughlin, has threatened to sue anyone on the Internet, who he claims have made:

“A number of false and malicious claims continue to be spread on the internet. People should be aware that making false claims about a candidate’s personal character and conduct is an electoral offence, as well as being defamatory.”

Tim Ireland of Bloggerheads was forthright:

Do your worst, CCHQ.
I wasn't in violation of the law previously, and I'm not now. You're a corrupt party with corrupt candidates. Deal.

— Tim Ireland 💙⚜️🔥🎤 (@bloggerheads) May 10, 2017

The Tories are bullies (qv. Lucy Allan, Mark Clarke, Grant Shapps et al) and will threaten anyone that speaks up with the courts. Why? Because they have the money and money talks. The legal system doesn’t work for the majority; it works for those that have the money, power and influence.

To McLoughlin, I’ll say this: come and get me.

 

 

 

BBC Complaint

The BBC must think we’re all as stupid as their journalists. I recently complained about a puff piece that Newsnight ran on Theresa May a couple of weeks ago, and Laura Kuenssberg’s appallingly biased Tweet. Naturally, the BBC saw nothing wrong with either of them. Here’s their reply to me:

Dear Mr Hell

Reference CAS-4338575-LYC8NX

Thank you for contacting us about BBC News output.

I understand you feel a recent interview with Theresa May in ‘Newsnight’ amounted to a ‘puff piece’ and Laura Kuenssberg’s post on social media regarding Jeremy Corbyn’s campaigning in Scotland and the Prime Minister’s absence in comparison displayed bias against Mr Corbyn.

We were naturally concerned to learn of your unhappiness but we’d explain that all BBC correspondents, reporters, presenters and editors are very well aware of our key commitment to impartial reporting at all times.

All staff are expected to put any political views to one side when carrying out their work for the BBC, and they simply try to provide the information and context on the story or issue using their professional insight to allow our viewers, listeners and web users to make up their own minds.

BBC News aims to show the political reality and provide a forum for discussion on issues, giving full opportunity for all sides of the debate to be heard and explored. Senior editorial staff within BBC News and the BBC Board keep a close watch on programmes to ensure that standards of impartiality are maintained.

The key point is that the BBC as an organisation has no view or position itself on anything we may report upon – our aim is to identify all significant views, and to test them rigorously and fairly on behalf of our audiences.

We always strive to be robust and consistent in our dealings with politicians and figures of public interest. The interviewer’s role is to put the questions that audience members want to know the answers to.

Our journalists seek to hold politicians and public figures to account by asking them pressing questions on a variety of topics, however the nature and tone of these questions may well be different depending on the programme or juncture the interview is broadcast on.

As the BBC’s Political Editor, Laura can’t publish ‘personal’ views on politics. Her role instead brings a professional and informed insight to events, based on her specialist knowledge and experience in the field.

This tweet conveyed the contrast in the two leaders, reflecting the tactics and mindsets in each party’s campaign. Laura was making the point that because of the conflicting positions on Trident within the Labour party, the Conservatives had made a conscious decision not to engage on the issue at that time. Senior staff are engaged in making sure that all BBC News output, including social media, is in line with our editorial guidelines.

Please be assured we do value your feedback about the points raised. All complaints are sent to senior management and in this case the BBC News team every morning, and I included your points in our overnight report of audience feedback.

These reports are among the most widely read sources of feedback in the BBC and ensures that your concerns have been seen by the right people quickly. This helps inform their decisions about current and future programmes.

Thank you again for contacting us.

Kind regards

Nicholas Bannon

BBC Complaints Team

First, I put it to the BBC that if they were going to run a puff piece on May, were they going to do that same for the other party leaders. The silence, as this reply illustrates, is deafening.

As for Her Ladyship’s tweet, you will notice how Mr Bannon swats away my complaint by telling me she (Kuenssberg) “can’t publish ‘personal’ views on politics”. Oh? So why did she take to Twitter to air them? She certainly wasn’t doing that in a personal capacity.

The BBC’s claims to “impartiality” don’t stand up to scrutiny. Indeed, Mr Bannon’s reply to me amounts to little more than gaslighting.

I will be escalating my complaint to Ofcom.

That’s My Club!

I love this story. Tomorrow, the Kop will unveil a massive banner of Jeremy Corbyn. Yesterday, the BBC’s Six O’Clock News told us that support for Corbyn’s Labour Party was “crumbling” in the newly-created Liverpool City Region.  I kid you not.

Come on, you Blues and Whites (Tranmere), let’s see yours!

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn may have had a tricky week – but he is set to play a starring role atAnfield tomorrow.

A special banner will be unveiled on the Kop for the Reds’ lunchtime clash with Southampton in recognition of Labour’s success in this week’s Liverpool Metro Mayor election.

The banner depicts the Labour leader as well as his shadow chancellor John McDonnell and also shows support for the Hillsborough Justice Campaign.

In a message to Labour supporters and working class voters to get behind the party, the flag includes the slogan: “What unites us is greater than what divides us”.

You can read the rest of the story here.

 

 

The Tories, Time And Selective Memory

Many of you will know the phrase ‘The victors write history’, some of you may know Marx’s famous line from The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon. “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce”. We live at a period in time in which lies have become the new truth and history itself is being rewritten before our very eyes. The revised version of history, which has been constructed to serve the interests of Britain’s socio-economic orthodoxy, is simultaneously tragic and farcical. Tragic because the historical revisionism that we now find ourselves watching can only end badly. Farcical, because the historical claims made by commentators, politicians and armchair pundits are easily challenged if you make the effort.

Yesterday as I was watching the impartial coverage of the local election results on the BBC, I noticed how commentators and politicians alike kept referring to the 1980s.  Indeed, since Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the Labour Party, the media can’t help but refer to the Eighties. Peter Kellner of YouGov, for example, reminded John McDonnell that Labour’s losses, in what are traditionally Tory heartlands, was reminiscent (for him and those like him) of the Local and General Elections of 1983.

Naturally, Kellner couldn’t resist summoning up the ghost of the much maligned Michael Foot. But McDonnell snapped back that perhaps 1974 was a better reference point than 1983.  Kellner grudgingly conceded but appeared to stick to his original position. So what is this obsession with the 1980s? Well, as someone who lived through that decade, I can tell you that the public memory of that decade is faulty both in terms of history and the wilful mischaracterization of Foot as some radical left-winger. This is a recent historical revision of the 1980s and it must be challenged.

In this previous blog, I pointed out that May’s calling of a snap election was actually more redolent of 1974 and Edward Heath’s “Who Governs Britain?” and not the 1980s. The Tories and, seemingly, the media would rather you didn’t remember what happened in 1974.  They would prefer that you remembered the decade’s specially selected highlights: the power cuts, the three day week and the mythical ‘Winter of Discontent’ (coined by The S*n).

So why don’t they want you to know what actually happened in the 1970s?  Is it because Heath’s government was pretty inept but also hellbent on smashing the trade unions? Maybe it’s because the Tories and their allies in the media imagine that history only began when Thatcher was elected in May 1979? Are we now living in the Year 38AT (After Thatcher) instead of the (much contested) 2017AD/2017CE?

Many people forget that it was the Heath government, not Wilson or Callaghan, that introduced Value Added Tax and abolished free school milk (overseen by Thatcher). A few weeks ago I had to correct someone when they claimed the three day week took place under Labour.  They even had the gall to conflate it with the ‘Winter of Discontent’.  Where do historical revisionisms like this come from? Who is responsible for producing these lies? It is possible that the media’s opinion formers play their part with the collusion of politicians – especially Tories and right-wing Labour MPs who join in with their game – in the production of these warped narratives? Of course, it is. You only have to look no further than the likes of Hilary Benn and his license with Spanish Civil War history to see it in action.

Since the 1980s, a cult has grown up around the personality of Thatcher and this cult replaced the earlier cult of Churchill. For these cultists, what Thatcher represented is more important than either her personality or her ‘achievements’. She was either ‘The Iron Lady’, ‘The Saviour of the Nation’. Theresa May might have poured herself into Thatcher’s power suits but it’s a bad fit. Thatcher, for her part, was a Churchill cultist (she also belonged to the Powell cult) and channelled his spirit during the Miners’ Strike and her final days in power. It helped to finish her off.

Adam Curtis’s series The Living Dead examines the way in which politicians will use history to suit their objectives – with disastrous consequences.  Below is an episode from the series, titled ‘The Attic’, which looks at Thatcher’s adoption of the Churchillian mantle as a means to appear tough and in control.

History is a contested space in which each of us writes our histories every day.  We write about our own lives and our interactions with others when we tell colleagues and acquaintances what we did yesterday or the day before.  The word ‘write’ is important here: the French word for story is histoire, which also happens to be the same word for ‘history’. That tells us that history is a narrative and is subject to, and a product of, an individual’s or a group’s ideology. Events on their own don’t make history, they need a backstory to make sense. If you can add some lies, then you have a full blown propagandized narrative that blinds people to the truth about their own pasts.

So what about Michael Foot? Wasn’t he some crazed hard left loon? Well, no he wasn’t. He was considered rather soft left; a ‘safe pair of hands’; the compromise candidate. Sure he was a member of CND and a unilateralist, but they were pretty common in the Labour Party in the days before the Thatcher’s cultural Year Zero (0AT).

So, whatever anyone tells you: this is not 1983, 1987 or even 1974. The year is 2017 and future cannot be divined by poring over past events and summoning up their spirits. If you want your fortune told, there are plenty of seaside mystics and other ‘scryers’ out there who will take your money. But don’t waste my time with your cod second sight baloney.

Reference

Marx, K. (nd.) The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon. Marxist Internet Archive. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/18th-Brumaire.pdf . Accessed 6/5/2017