Budget narratives
Our newspapers aren't there to tell us what is happening. They're there to repeat a set of familiar stories to spark outrage, fear and anger.
Every Labour budget comes with the same narratives from certain quarters. It is, inevitably, a 'war on the middle classes' or a 'tax raid on the middle classes'. It doesn't matter if it is or not. That's what it becomes because that is the tramline the story is set to run along.
So today we have
A 'tax raid on the middle class' in the Telegraph, and
a 'stealth tax raid on the middle-classes' in the Mail.
Great minds, and all that. I'll leave it to others who are brighter than me to go through the details. Perhaps it is a tax raid on the middle class(es) this time. I don't rule that out. But all I will say is that it's the very familiarity of the story that makes me a bit suspicious. Let me give you some examples.
March 2008: 'WAR ON THE MIDDLE CLASS' said the Mail. What was the evidence?
Gordon Brown was facing a twin backlash last night over Budget plans to raises taxes on alcohol and motoring which are clearly aimed at the middle classes.
Because only the middle classes drink or drive. Obviously! You thought everyone did. But no.
March 2008: The Telegraph worries about 'a clampdown on middle class motorists' using figures from the Taxpayers Alliance. Apparently a Saab is a 'run of the mill car' for which families are being 'clobbered'.
June 2008: The Telegraph frets about how the 'middle class' are suffering most. How did they define 'middle class'? Well, they worried about the £20,000 school fees. As I'm sure we all are. It's about how you define middle class, I suppose. If you mean 'all top rate tax payers' then fine. But I don't see it that way.
January 2009: The Mail says 'Harriet Harperson' (sic) is declaring 'WAR ON THE MIDDLE CLASSES' by offering incentives to teachers to stay at less well performing schools. Incentives for teachers? WAR!
And so on, and so on. They drag up CLASS WAR every now and then - keeps it fresh, doesn't it? You never know which you'll get: will it be LABOUR'S CLASS WAR or LABOUR WAR ON MIDDLE CLASSES, or the 2010 vintage, TAX RAID ON MIDDLE CLASSES? I did see our old friend CLASS WAR as the main headline on the Mail website yesterday, so they'll keep juggling them around I guess.
Is it true? It might be. Depends on who you think these war-ravaged middle classes are. People who drive Saabs and pay £20,000-a-year school fees, who have £1million homes? Maybe I wouldn't quite say that's the entirety of the middle class, but there you are. What do I know? I'll give them this though: they're remarkably resilient, these poor folk, despite constantly being raided for taxes and having war declared on them; they just keep going. How do they do it?
PS I couldn't go without letting you have a laugh at the Express. In many ways I see my job here as facilitating people's laughing and pointing at the Express. So here you are:
They want to tax your car? Jesus. Imagine that! What will they call such a nasty tax? I imagine it'll be called something like 'vehicle excise duty' or something like that, and we'll all have to pay it. Yeah, it'll be really nasty. Luckily we don't pay that at the moment, though. Good of David Cameron to warn us.
Anyway, if Labour is taking 'revenge on Britain's hard workers' then I guess Express workers have nothing to fear, having already run the 'NOW A TAX ON HARD WORK!" rubbish back in 2008 for that Budget and simply having done the same story again. Ah well, plus ca change, as they say. They write the same stuff; I write the same stuff attacking it. My only comfort is not having to worry about the £20k-a-year school fees that middle class people do...
Telegraph ‘linked with rise in fuckwittery’
A new report claims that people who believe what they read in the Telegraph are more likely to be fuckwits.
The study, of gruff Tories who are a bit scared of foreigners but not too worried to buy the Mail, showed that when reading a fuckwitted article about Facebook they start becoming more fuckwitted themselves.
"It's as if they don't even question it," said one researcher. "Because they're a bit behind with technology, Telegraph readers don't understand that the idea of Facebook as a place to meet for casual sex just doesn't make a lot of sense, and that in all probability other social networking sites which do offer much more convenient opportunities for that kind of thing may be more likely culprits.
"But even then, it's a massive leap from correlation to causality, isn't it? Isn't it? Oh, I see. It doesn't matter. Not when you want to scare people in your newspaper by talking about the evils of social networking.
"The other reason, we think, that these newspapers are leading to a rise in fuckwittery is because some of the hacks who work at the Telegraph, when not copying and pasting press releases and then slightly re-writing the intro, then calling it a fucking day's work, don't really understand the difference between these things. And don't care either."
A spokesman for the Telegraph said: "Why are you singling us out? Everyone us is going to report this shit. It's not as if we'd single one social networking site out above all oth... oh fuck, we did, didn't we?"
Don’t get done, get non-dom
How generous of Lord Ashcroft to finally reveal his tax (avoiding) status. And how wonderful of him to promise that he will start paying tax properly, soon, if the law is changed. How jolly decent of him. Well, I suppose that wraps everything up nicely and means that it's all OK, and we don't need to worry about it, then?
Except... no. You hope at times that politicians won't descend to the level of six-year-olds - I say 'descend' but in all probability it's ascend from their usual poo-throwing state - but already Ashcroft's mates have rounded on Labour, saying "that boy did it first!" and "he started it!" and "I'm telling!"
It's lamentable. If you want to be involved with politics in this country, particularly if you're making or amending laws, you should be paying tax like everyone else. That's the top and bottom of it. Roaring "But, but but, it's not fair! They're doing it as well!" isn't a defence. It's infantile. Yes, everyone should pay tax properly, meaning everyone, meaning your multi-million-pound donor who sits in the House of Lords yet seems to think his role as a citizen is a fairly opt-in and opt-out affair. And if there are equally snake-like rascals on the Labour side, them too.
I think this whole business will blow over quite quickly, anyway. There's not the appetite to go for the Tories in the press, despite their miserably weak campaign so far. If you took a quick glance at the front page of today's Telegraph, for example, you'd be forgiven for thinking the Conservative Party was cruising towards a comfortable landslide - I hope all that confident use of the future tense doesn't go and bite them on the bum.
Thank goodness the Tory win is definitely going to happen, and just in case you're unsure, there's BoJo up the top to try and convince you. I was hoping for a bit of political insight from someone who isn't a close friend of David Cameron, so that should make really interesting reading; I imagine he'll take a really objective view of why Gordon Brown shouldn't be Prime Minister and why his schoolmate should. Oh, and there's a bit of woman-hating from Melanie McDonagh if you need a break from all the relentless Conservative Party delights.
I don't know. It may well turn around again. Labour may lose ground and the Tories may well get that landslide. All I do know is that I haven't heard a tremendous amount about what these people are actually standing for. Cameron talks of 'duty', pushing the abstract nonsense that his ancestor Tony Blair enjoyed so much, but what about things to vote for that will improve the country? How about some of them, to get any of us excited? And how about, instead of 'welcoming' the fact that your massive donor mate has finally admitted what so many people suspected all along, saying that he should do his 'duty' right now - and pay his full taxes?
Tangerine dream
Robert Popper appears to have spoofed the Financial Times*, The Sun and the Telegraph with his phone call to London radio station LBC in which he claimed to be a factory worker who'd seen Gordon Brown throw a tangerine and call the manager a 'citric idiot'.
What I find interesting is that the host on the LBC show seems to be a bit suspicious, and makes it clear there isn't any independent corroboration. But that entirely reasonable and understandable level of scepticism is absent from the press reports. The comical but jarring phrase 'citric idiot' is missing from the Sun's coverage - they prefer to say Brown called the manager 'an idiot':
A FACTORY worker claims that during an official visit to his plant the PM hurled a tangerine into a laminating machine after flying into a rage while on a phone call. He said: "The fruit got stuck in the machine and clogged it.
"It was very embarrassing, we had to stop the tour and he got even more angry. He called the person that gave him the tangerine an idiot."
So you have to wonder why they omitted the word 'citric' in the quote. Is it because it made the claim seem a bit more iffy, and that's not what they wanted?
But then you see how these things progress. The Telegraph simply C&Vs what it read in the Sun:
One of the factory workers told The Sun Mr Brown became angry and threw a tangerine he was holding into a laminating machine causing it to breakdown.
The worker said: "The fruit got stuck in the machine and clogged it. It was very embarrassing we had to stop the tour and he got even more angry. He called the person who gave him the tangerine an idiot."
Ice clearing: What’s the truth?
There's a lot of confusion at the moment about what the legal position is over clearing your path (or a neighbour's path, or the path outside your house) of ice - with urban myths and elf'n'safety bollocks getting trotted out, of course. Most news outlets have had a bash at the story, including the BBC and the usual suspects. Richard Madeley has been banging on about it almost all day on Twitter, bless him; but is the Express columnist right when he says:
Legal knowledge mine Jack of Kent, however, is a little less worried by the whole thing. If you do clear a neighbour's path, for example, he says:
Ah but where's the fun in that? Surely the most important thing for a news outlet to do is not represent the facts of the situation, but instead create a nightmarish vision of the world in which the spectre of elf'n'safety or compensation ambulance-chasing bastards who SHOUT AT YOU DURING THE ADVERTS IN JEREMY KYLE are taking over the world, and there's nothing we can do to stop them. Why bother with accuracy, when you can take your readers for a ride in the ghost train?
The Daily Mail's effort appears to be rather similar to the Telegraph's on the same subject - notethe use of the word 'could' and 'may', carefully crafted on this occasion to represent "could well" whereas in fact the truth is "could possibly, under extremely unlikely circumstances". The Mail says:
Householders and businesses have been warned not to clear snowy pavements - as they could be sued if someone slips.
The Telegraph says:
Yet the professional body that represents health and safety experts has issued a warning to businesses not to grit public paths – despite the fact that Britain is in the grip of its coldest winter for nearly half a century.
Householders and businesses with the Mail; just businesses with the Tele. Who are these experts, anyway? Telegraph:
Clearing a public path “can lead to an action for damages against the company, e.g. if members of the public, assuming that the area is still clear of ice and thus safe to walk on, slip and injure themselves”.
I would say that if that's the case, it's not really 'clear' is it, but then I'm probably nitpicking. Both the Mail and the Telegraph quote John McQuater, who gets a nice bit of publicity with this quote:
John McQuater, president of the National Association of Personal Injury Lawyers, admitted: 'If you do nothing you cannot be liable. If You do something, you could be liable to legal action.'
Which is odd. Because look at this quote in a Guardian article which mentions ice clearing:
4. I've cleared the snow from our driveway. Am I opening myself up to a claim if someone slips?
This is an urban myth. If you do the reasonable thing and clear your drive, you are not opening yourself up to a possible claim, except in very exceptional circumstances.
"This is a common misconception," McQuater says. "By clearing the snow from your paths, you do not invite any extra liability that wouldn't have existed had you done nothing and left the snow on the ground. The only circumstance in which you might invite a claim was if you acted completely unreasonably, and somehow created a new latent hazard that had not existed before your actions."
Yes, it's our old friend John McQuater! Funny how the 'except in very exceptional circumstances' in the Guardian from McQuater becomes 'could be liable' in the Mail and Telegraph. I wonder if he qualified that quote when he spoke to them with an 'except in very exceptional circumstances' and that bit didn't make it into the final printed copy?
Who knows. But as ever, news stories aren't about the truth - they're about a certain worldview which needs to be reinforced. So if you think compensation culture is running rampant and elf'n'safety has truly gone mad, why bother finding out what the facts actually are, when you can go looking for the quotes that support your point of view, and which will infuriate your readers most?
Thanks to Iain for the tipoff!
Simon Heffer and cheap shots
Simon Heffer in the Telegraph:
Since Labour has an election to win, and since if it doesn't win it Jack Straw will probably be a candidate to pick up the poisoned chalice of leading the party, it is little wonder the Justice Secretary has jumped on the police-bashing bandwagon. He knows most people only encounter the police when being stopped for a minor motoring offence, or when the police are failing to clear up a deeply distressing crime. He knows how dismayed the public is by stories in the media about the police pursuing people who (for example) express disapproval of homosexuals, while failing to pursue burglars. So, in the words of one senior officer who disliked Mr Straw's remarks, this was a cheap shot.
Do 'most people' only really encounter the police when being stopped for a 'minor motoring offence'? Does Simon Heffer never go outdoors, to his town centre, where he can see police officers at work? He may not approach them, that much is true; but that's not their fault. You could just as easily say "Most people, of course, do not encounter doctors when being treated for some minor illness, or when they are failing to clear up a very serious disease."
The police, though, do not pursue people who have 'expressed disapproval of homosexuals'. (see comments - sometimes they do, if it's possible someone could be breaking the law. But burglars, unlike writers of things denouncing gayness, don't generally leave signatures saying "I did this" unless they're particularly stupid; and police don't make the laws up, they simply enforce them. If a law exists, it's there to be enforced, including things that Heffer might disagree with, like traffic offences or saying gay people are bad; or other stuff, like burglarly or murder) It's Heffer's cunning way of introducing the classic 'PCgonemad' gambit into his article. Poor old middle-class man, driving at 85mph outside a school, for some reason gets stopped by PC Plod, yet burglars smashing into a nearby house are sent on their way with a cheery wave - but look what happens when you try and write "Gays must die" in dogshit on someone's car, then for some reason everyone makes a big PC song and dance about it and for some reason that's a so-crime in Bonkers Britain... Heffer really isn't even a notch above Littlejohn and the like. He's worse. He's not even trying to be funny, which Littlejohn does (and admittedly fails at, but hey, he has a bash); he's being deadly serious.
What's his evidence for police pursuing people who 'disapprove of homosexuals' but not pursuing burglars? Is there any?
They ceased to be a crime-fighting operation and became instead an instrument for the imposition of political correctness. New Labour came in to power with a set of beliefs about minorities of all sorts, and sought to make the police the enforcers of that creed. The wheels fell off at that point.
Examples? Oh, there are none. It just happened, therefore it's true. Cheers Simon, I don't need examples, if you could just make the aeroplane noise while you're forcing the spoon into my mouth... actually, fuck it, just ram it down my throat like Robert Morley being force-fed his dogs in Theatre of Blood. I'd much prefer that, then I wouldn't even bother having to think about it. Could you do that, Simon? Could you? I mean, you don't have any evidence that 'minorities of all sorts' (can't you feel the seething stench off the words?) and beliefs about them drove New Labour's policies - but no matter. Let's carry on. Wasn't it all better when all coppers were like Gene Hunt?
The unlamented Sir Ian Blair was the high priest of this form of policing. The way in which he had Scotland Yard pussyfoot around the question of Islamist terrorism after the horrific attacks on London in 2005 exemplified his priorities: appease minorities first, fight crime second.
I'm sure everyone noticed how Sir Ian Blair 'appeased minorities first' when an unpale-skinned man was shot seven times in the head on the Tube. Ah, it must be wonderful in Heffer's world, where criminals are only not caught because of that damned PC Brigade chasing the cops in their big pink diversity van, ensuring that no-one is offended. Oh! If only the police weren't so busy being PC about everything - obviously I don't have any time to put in any evidence at all, just decide that I know best about everything, and you, solemn reader, will just believe me because I am a respected journalist and not a second-rate hack stitching together a stinking load of old cobblers with no substance to it whatsoever, essentially so I can say that no-one should vote Labour.
Didn't the Telegraph used to be better than this? Or don't we need any evidence for any arguments any more? Shall we just all give up and all shout a bit louder?
Tiger Woods: Who gives a shit?
I should put my hands up here at the very beginning and admit I don't like golf. Other than knocking a ball through the windmill at a windswept Camber Sands when I was younger, I've never played it. And yet quite rational people I know, who are perfectly reasonable in other ways, seem to regard it as some kind of religion. When they 'get golf' you hardly see them ever again; their lives consist of wearing slightly odd-looking trousers and knitwear, and disappointedly tut-tutting at you for not wanting to be frozen to death at 7.20am every Saturday. You find yourself slipping out of their lives as the golf takes a stronger grip on them, until... then they're gone. The golf has won.
Watching it on TV has never really interested me either. A bit of green, a bit of blue, a bit of green - and some screaming nutcase roaring "Getinthehole!" when the ball is quite clearly not going anywhere near it - like it'd listen to him anyway.
But that's beside the point. Even I've heard of Tiger Woods. And despite his massive celebrity, I can't help asking the question: who gives a shit? What's happened over the past few days has been fairly ridiculous. Sure, he had a car accident. And...? Ah, but there's something else involved, a suspicion that he's had an affair, and the papers have reverted to their 1970s type. Ooh men and women doing it, they whoop, like teenage boys talking about fucking behind the bike sheds! And then you have the tragic misogyny of the Sun, as ever, talking about a 'girl' who is Tiger's 'birdie', I mean how cheap is that?
Oh sorry, my mistake, that was the Telegraph, Britain's top selling quality newspaper, who decided that kind of outdated shit was worth putting on the front page of their paper. Good on them for outdoing the tabloids and getting something thoroughly unpleasant and derogatory into a national newspaper; well done for that. Still, now that Woods has appealed for privacy over his private and personal affairs, it's obviously open season:
I'm still wondering who really gives a shit, though. So what? I don't know if there's some attempt to expose hypocrisy but I don't remember Tiger Woods moralising to the rest of the world about what a great guy he was and how he'd never have an affair, or even traded on his family image in advertising. I don't think so, and even then it'd still be fairly tenuous as to why we were meant to be reading about this in our newspapers. Aren't there more important things going on in the world?
But they're all at it. The women said to have had affairs with Woods are mere window-dressing for these newspapers and I find it all a bit juvenile and faintly tragic, but maybe that's just me. Maybe everyone else is really interested in all this and amazed by every single detail. Maybe there's something else going on about the blackness of Tiger and the whiteness of the women involved, but I don't really understand that either.
Maybe I'm missing something. Maybe this is really important news and I don't understand it because I'm too slow, but a lot of people in the media seem to think that we're all dumbfounded and gripped by this story. I'm not. I couldn't care less. Even if I liked golf, I think it'd be a case of: so fucking what? So human beings behave like human beings - is it really worth invading their privacy? Is it really to our benefit to hear the phone calls, see the photos, have all the details of this spilled out in the papers, while elsewhere there is real news that is being ignored?
Maybe this is about it being cheap journalism, where newsdesks can be spoonfed everything they need without ever bothering to leave the office. All the pictures and video and audio come straight to them. Maybe I am missing the point entirely and this is the biggest story in the history of the world ever, and we'll look back in 50 years and say: Do you remember where you were when Tiger Woods had a car accident and then some people said they'd fucked him? Do you remember that? Cor, hasn't journalism gone downhill since then?
Does the benefit system favour migrants?
It does according to the Daily Telegraph, who are just as capable of repeating BNP immigration myths while simultaneously distancing themselves from the extremists.
In a piece entitled 'Telegraph View' (I believe it's the leader column) published on Friday, there appears this line:
The white working class who live there are resentful of the way the benefits system is skewed towards immigrant families: the long tail of this recession could whip up yet more support for the BNP, despite its leader's feeble performance on Question Time.
Let me just run that past you again:
The white working class who live there are resentful of the way the benefits system is skewed towards immigrant families
Not 'appears to be' but 'is'. No evidence to back that assertion up. It just is. Skewed.
Now I know this is an opinion piece and as a piece of polemic is representing a particular point of view rather than an objective look at the facts. That's fine by me. But how is the benefit system "skewed towards immigrant families"?
The myths of queue-jumping have been exploded very clearly, time and time again. For example, one national newspaper in July this year covered a story which was headlined
Immigrants do not get housing priority, study shows
which had this quote:
The far-right [BNP] spread rumours in target seats that immigrants were given precedence in the queue for social housing accommodation.
Does that sound a bit like
the benefits system is skewed towards immigrant families
to you? Because it does to me. Still, the newspaper (which you have by now correctly identified as the Daily Telegraph) carried on:
The IPPR found no evidence of queue jumping or abuse of the system by immigrants but warned that those perceptions were widespread in certain areas.
Yes, I wonder which nasty types have been creating such perceptions? I imagine the kind of people who would say that the benefits system favours migrants - people like the Daily Telegraph, in its leader column - the column which "is the opinion of the Daily Telegraph".
Does the system favour migrants? Well, a look back through the Telegraph's very own archive yields this article, which states quite clearly:
A policy that stops Eastern European migrant workers accessing most benefits for at least a year is to remain in place amid fears lifting the restriction will increase unemployment among Britons.
The continued existence of the worker registration scheme for European migrants would appear to suggest that, far from actively favouring migrants, the benefit system is actively skewed against them.
How you get from that to saying the system is skewed in favour of migrants I'm not too sure. But it's nice to know it's not just the tabloids who are capable of mixing it with BNP-style rhetoric while at the same time pointing at Griffin and saying: "Ooh, look at the bad man".
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