How dare politicians tell us we must be nice to them
ACOMMON delusion of the current age is that the era which preceded the dawn of social media was a bowl of cherries. It’s fondly imagined that we were all tipping our hats as we engaged with each other and offering profuse apologies on those rare occasions when offence was inadvertently given.
Politicians were treated with respect and the use of swear words was to risk being regarded as a sociopath. No matter what issues divided us; what chasms of culture, class and wealth lay between us they were all forgotten when we solemnly watched the Queen on Christmas Day.
These arrangements had been carefully cultivated over decades to ensure that scant opportunity was permitted for meaningful dialogue between ordinary people and those whom they touchingly believed represented their interests at Parliament.
At least you knew back then that there would be an opportunity to change the government every five years or so.
A strictly need-to-know basis and was controlled by the old Etonians and Oxbridge cult who ran the BBC and owned our biggest newspapers.
The journalists and editors who operated the print and broadcast media on the other hand were untouchable and never held to account. What passed for scrutiny of their stories and agendas (there is always an agenda) consisted of a letters page edited by elderly and scholarly chaps nearing retirement.
Thus there was room for seven or eight epistolary interventions by the dear readers, usually by those who could express themselves in the manner of a university lecturer and who could pepper their prose with droll classicisms.
The people who shaped the political and cultural agenda of the UK media could distort perceptions, wreck lives and careers safe in the knowledge that they’d never be challenged.
Occasionally, a political scandal would break beyond the confines of the political and media establishment. For a while, we would be permitted to catch a glimpse of the rich and famous behaving in the same way as us.
The wonder of these came in discovering that the stratagems of the ruling elites could be blown off course by sex, drink and lies. All too soon the show was over and an official report would soon exonerate those with the best connections and a scapegoat was offered for public excoriation.
The Profumo Affair, currently being re-imagined by the BBC was one of these. The imbroglio had started three years earlier with a brief affair between John Profumo, the Defence Secretary and Christine Keeler, a struggling 19-year-old model. The episode was one of those which offered us an all-too-rare glimpse of power at the top of British society.
While the rest of us were being told to hate the Russians and exercise restraint in our personal lives there was the government and the aristocracy cavorting with the enemy and compromising the virtue of working-class girls in the private swimming pool of the House of Astor.
Once calm had been restored and the bed-sheets turned down a compliant judge was found and a whitewash report hastily constructed.
The millionaire Sir John Profumo resigned and dedicated himself to charitable work before being redeemed by Margaret Thatcher two decades later. Stephen Ward, the society osteopath discovered that, without aristocratic blood, his connections amounted to little. He killed himself after being trussed up and fed to the country. Christine Keeler, a beautiful woman of high intelligence and common birth struggled for the rest of her life.
If the scandal had occurred in the age of social media I suspect the losers might have become winners. Ms Keeler’s legal fees would have been crowd-funded and Mr Ward would have found widespread sympathy.
The independence of the judiciary would have been exposed as a sham and, not for the first time, intimate connections between the British elite and the nation’s enemies would have been revealed.
As this new decade dawns messages of hope have been laced with appeals for kindness on social media. In particular, an article by the Scottish Conservative MSP Murdo Fraser has engendered debate. He has been joined by assorted political pundits who purport to desire a sense of decency in the way we engage with each other on social media.
It’s difficult to argue with some of this when you observe politicians being terrorised by psychopathic mobs, often within their own parties, who seek to destroy them for holding reasonable views they can’t stand.
We should exercise a degree of caution, though, before we scold ourselves for being unkind on Twitter and Facebook. Before social media the rules of engagement were set by influential, wealthy and powerful forces to ensure that accountability and scrutiny was kept to a minimum.
Many politicians have armies of advisers and spinners to destroy the reputations of opponents away from prying eyes. They include some with vast private wealth who can employ their own political advisers, some of them former journalists, to drip poison about their opponents into the ears of sympathetic newspapers.
Such strategic cruelty can be far more savage and hurtful than Twitter profanities which are easily blocked.
I also become queasy when fake academic faculties which exist to make failed politicians feel good about themselves urge us all to gentrify the political environment. In the UK and across the world a war of ideas is being fought which will affect our lives profoundly.
Britain is in the hands of a feckless and self-serving fop backed by a party that’s been taken over by an extremist, right-wing sect. To make his hard Brexit fly he must approach the White House’s resident sociopath like a supplicant.
A tonne of leverage will be required to sell the outcome but when you control 80% of the mainstream media and can rely on a BBC still dominated by Eton and Oxford to look the other way you are already halfway there.
In the absence of a functioning Labour Party, social media provides the main opposition. This is no time to be worrying too much about it harbouring bad language and anger.
The Profumo Affair gave us an all-too-rare glimpse of power at the top of British society