At the Hay-on-Wye literary
festival in May, leading members of the media and cultural elite assembled in
the fine gardens of a Regency house to await the arrival of the great man. They
included broadsheet editors, deputy editors, literary editors, ex-editors,
novelists, actors and John Birt. Afterwards, there would be a "lecture about
world affairs" for which a second division had paid £100 a ticket. Whispered
jokes about Monica and cigars quickly turned to full-throttle obseqiousness when
the great man ambled in. According to John Walsh of the Independent, "the whole
garden party became a queue to shake Bill’s hand, to be photographed and to
rejoin their friends and discuss the experience".
Clinton told them how he
had brought peace to Kosovo, Northern Ireland, et cetera. That he had bombed and
killed innocent people across the world, dispatched tens of thousands of Iraqi
children and eroded the last of Roosevelt’s New Deal cover for the poorest
Americans was not at issue. Only sanitized questions were allowed; they touched
on none of these crimes. The reward for this complicity was Clinton trousering
$100,000.
It was a vivid snapshot of
the age of new Labour elites: a gathering of Blair’s winners. There have been
many such events since May 1997, celebrating fame, fortune and illusion. The
latter included those staged at the Foreign Office at which, with the help of
media celebrities, Robin Cook announced an "ethical dimension" to foreign policy
and "the pursuit of human rights in the new century". Like at Hay, the gallery
was from the liberal establishment: Amnesty, the voluntary organisations,
editors, news readers. They remained silent or bowled lemons. That it was all an
elaborate hoax, as they now know, was not an issue.
A few weeks back, Michael
Jackson, Channel 4’s departing chief executive, told Observer readers that he
had, no less, helped bring about "the profound social changes that have occurred
in British society . . ." He cited Big Brother as representing "a melting pot
for a broader, more understanding and inclusive society . . . an optimistic
glimpse at the ease of presence between a group of people with different
ethnicity, sexuality, religion, class and education". He related this to Blair’s
promised "classless society" and declared, Tony-like, that "we have a more
prosperous economy than at any time in our past".
The clear implication was
that Channel 4, under Jackson, was the television equivalent of new Labour. One
can appreciate his argument. The threadbare liberalism of the new Labour elite,
its tame columnists, lords and terrified MPs, is said to be based on tolerance
for the new era’s sexual and racial diversity. After all, look at all those
black and gay ministers and female MPs. This is a con, of course. All it proves
is that gays and blacks and females can be as reactionary and unprincipled as
anybody.
Recall the lemming-line of
female Labour MPs who voted for a cut in benefits to single parents, mostly
mothers, and the apologetics of the black minister Paul Boateng at the most
regressive Home Office in living memory, and the machinations of the gay Peter
Mandelson in playing court to some of the most ruthless capitalists on earth,
including the purveyors of death in the British arms industry.
That gays and females,
blacks and Asians are capable of moronic behaviour in Big Brother is not "an
optimistic glimpse" of anything. Like the pathetic cast of Jerry Springer, they
merely provide a glimpse of the media elite’s vicarious flirtation with low life
for the sake of a buck and high ratings. No one denies that Channel 4 transmits
some quite brilliant programmes, as it should, given its extraordinary remit and
resources and the film-making talent in Britain; but these are fragments of its
potential.
Liberal elites have always
disguised their innate conservatism and fixed the boundaries of public debate,
and those currently in charge of Britain are no different. As Jackson says, the
drugs debate is important, as is the issue of race. But neither will progress
unless public resources are made available for care and rehabilitation, and for
proper jobs and public services in places like Oldham and Bradford: in other
words, unless the economics of social democracy, at the very least, drives them.
"We have more young people
in higher education than [ever] before", wrote Jackson. In fact, there are more
indebted and despairing students than ever before. The proportion of
working-class students has actually dropped since new Labour made so many of
them pay. In his great work Equality, R H Tawney pointed out that the English
educational system "will never be one worthy of a civilised society until the
children of all classes in the nation attend the same schools . . . The idea
that differences of educational opportunities among children should depend upon
differences of wealth represents a barbarity."
That is the situation
today, with the divisions within state education reinforced by new Labour’s
veiled class conflict. As for "a more prosperous economy than at any time in our
past", well, I suppose you have to admire the sheer nerve of TV executives on
half a million quid a year.
The truth is that Thatcher
and her heir, Blair, have created a society that allows, among the top third, a
gloss of prosperity, mostly on credit, while the majority either cope with
mounting insecurity or vanish into poverty. Almost half the families of Britain
live on this precipice of poverty. Nearly half the children in London are
brought up in poverty. According to recent research at Cambridge University,
roughly 250,000 children in the poorest households are worse off since new
Labour came to office. Indeed, child poverty is 50 per cent higher than when
Thatcher was elected.
None of this is
represented, in any sustained form, on television, and certainly not on the BBC,
where the circus and propaganda of a single-ideology state dominate. It is only
in recent weeks, since the events in Genoa, that the nation’s dumbed-down news
services have interrupted their chorus about the protesters’ "violence" and
begun to recognise the ferocity of state violence aimed at the anti- capitalism
movement. Blair’s defence of the Italian police and his gross lack of respect
for the loss of a young life ought to have seen him grilled by those journalists
who have access to him. But there was nothing: just gloating over Jeffrey
Archer.
Study the fine photograph
in the Guardian on 20 July. There are the Blairs and the Bushes greeting each
other. The wives are waltzing towards their unctuous embrace; the little Texan
has a hand on the effete Blair’s shoulder. Bush, whom the BBC still calls "the
leader of the free world", is the unelected ruler of a dangerous, rapacious,
essentially undemocratic plutocracy. Blair’s leadership of this country,
approved by one-quarter of the electorate, is barely legitimate. Both are
extremists in the literal sense, prepared to use military violence against
civilians. Blair pushes unpopular and violent domestic policies, commodifying
almost everything that is ours, from healthcare to schools, policies designed to
make winners and losers – with those who earn half a million a year the winners,
and the children imprisoned behind a wall of economic hardship, far from the
voyeuristic eye of Big Brother, the losers.
The "optimistic glimpse"
is not at Channel 4, but at the courage and intelligence and sheer strength of
character of the young men and women, black and white and brown, gay and
heterosexual, who faced the organised violence of the state in Genoa and Seattle
and Prague, and will do it again and again. They represent a genuine "profound
social change". Recently, the Asia vice-president of the financiers Goldman
Sachs said: "This is an uprising as big as the revolution that shook the world
between 1890 and 1920. Beware."
Beware indeed.
Information on John
Pilger’s written and filmic work can be found at
www.johnpilger.com
