The day of reckoning is coming
THE ingenuity of tabloid newspaper journalists to flush out reluctant prey often reveals Machiavellian tendencies. During a guiltily pleasurable few years at Her Majesty’s Daily Mail, I watched in awe each week as a cannily resourceful picture editor went about his dark business. On one occasion he sought to obtain the smudge of a man accused of various offences known to be hiding in a Lanarkshire housing scheme.
The photographer tasked with snapping the accused had a lens on his camera that could have captured the occupants of the international space station playing on their trampolines. To no avail. On the verge of calling off the stake-out our picture editor went for the nuclear option: the trusty Domino’s pizza delivery. The hapless victim, his curiosity piqued by the seductive aroma of an extra-large beef doner with onions, popped his head out the door and the snapper had his picture. On occasions such as these you didn’t know whether to celebrate or to hang your head in shame for having been an accessory after the fact.
In the age of 24-hour social media surveillance such artful dodges are now largely redundant. This week, it was Nicola Sturgeon’s turn to fall victim to the smartphone detectorists.
Our First Minister, normally the epitome of iron-clad rectitude, was snapped without a face mask as she mingled at a socially-distanced wake following the recent death of a colleague. For a few seconds, it seems, she forgot to wear the covering as she talked with a group of fellow mourners.
An opportunist, sensing the prospect of a few hundred quid, duly snapped her in those rogue moments and off to the The Sun went the prized image. It’s important to state here that, in spite of the tabloid’s front-page treatment of the picture and invitation to condemn, none of the actors in this episode was guilty of any wrongdoing. Ms Sturgeon, having sat through the funeral service with a mask, maintained her social distance throughout. She merely did what we’ve all done and let her mind wander for a few moments.
No matter what your opinion is of her as a politician, Scotland’s First Minister has put in a mighty shift for her country. Any who rushed to condemn her should be examining the source of their orchestrated outrage.
The urge to vilify the sneak photographer is strong here but should also be resisted. Nine months of the pandemic have made us all frayed and edgy and left many impoverished, so let’s dispense with any of our own fingerpointing sanctimony. The Sun, meanwhile, simply did what it had to. To have refused the offer of the picture would have risked the Daily Record getting it instead. You can’t expect an alligator to turn vegan on these occasions.
This entire tableau, however, provided us with a microcosm of something otherwise wretched that’s crept over us as the pandemic has proceeded. In this weird social media panopticon, we have begun to turn on each other for failures and lapses that arise from nothing much more than carelessness.
It was first discernible early in the contagion when assorted Tory politicians and lickspittle journalists eager for future government advisers’ roles began casting sly aspersions. There was a barely perceptible curl of the lip at the conduct of northerners for failing to observe social distancing rules. The BBC gloried in footage of Mancunians, Scousers and Geordies carousing in city centres at weekends or thronging beaches in the summer weeks. All of them were being sized up and fitted out to take the fall when the time comes for blame to be apportioned.
There was rarely any criticism of those firms which, taking advantage of the non-unionised gig economy and zerohours contracts, exploited the low-paid and insisted on making them cram into underground carriages for work. Nor was there any acknowledgement that many in these places are stalked by lethal pestilences and contagions in their daily lives stemming from chronic deprivation and health inequality. Coronavirus is just another to be added to a long list.
The Boris Johnson administration now teetering on the brink of absolute fecklessness and lamentably ill-equipped to handle Britain’s greatest peacetime challenge literally gave people discounts to eat out in the middle of the pandemic. In this it genuflected to the self-seeking demands of owners, many of whom already possessed sufficient reserves to inoculate themselves effortlessly from the economic effects of Covid. We have already forgotten the actions of billionaire owners and chief executives who, rather than dip into gathered profits of prosperous decades, wasted little time in sacrificing employees.
Mr Johnson toured a hospital ward and shook hands with Covid patients, an action that owed much to his own persistent narcissism which won’t permit being associated with bad news or negativity. This man and the government of millionaires he leads are content to ensure that the UK’S economic recovery from coronavirus will take far longer than it otherwise would have done if they had been willing to conduct themselves responsibly in trade negotiations with the EU. Sitting across from him on this most supine of opposition benches is a shameless careerist who knows that by saying and doing nothing he will eventually get his turn to take Mr Johnson’s place.
The inequalities that underpin the social and economic fabric of the UK have been exposed in all their avaricious malice during this pandemic. Capitalism and cronyism have gathered to prey on huge PPE contracts and when austerity inevitably follows it will, of course, be those irresponsible northerners who’ll be made to pay. This is when they would normally expect the Labour Party to fly to their defence and fight for them. But Labour has now been hollowed out by a millionaire knight of the realm and his acolytes who will simply hold the jackets in the class war that’s coming.
When it comes time for a reckoning for those who chose to reap rather than share there will be many who must be made to answer. Ms Sturgeon may soon have to account for some of her own administration’s errors. Her momentary lapse at the funeral of a friend isn’t one of them.
The inequalities that underpin the social and economic fabric of the UK have been exposed in all their avaricious malice