Talking Points

A lot of politics is about generating talking points to frame the narrative. There are some interesting examples of how they can be done, and it's particularly interesting to see how one isolated news event can influence the future coverage (and therefore interpretation) of news events.

One example is with the importance of rejecting divisive rhetoric in politics, and how the intervention of one MP who gave a passionate speech about it (I remember listening to it on Radio 4) sparked a future news narrative about the importance of truth in politics.

Of course, this does not imply that without the intervention of this particular MP, a healthy discourse above cynical appeals to nativism, tribalism, and so on and so on, would not be an important theme of modern politics, or a point of discussion. After all, we have seen Guardian opinion pieces about the importance of rejecting division - or creating new 'narratives' - before, and we will doubtless see them again (though they have no value).

Equally, the response of certain parts of the press to breaking news events can divert political discourse down unhealthy and pointless cul-de-sacs. For instance, the response to Extinction Rebellion from much of the mainstream press focused on whether it's right to use children in protests.

The response to this would emphatically be a 'yes'. Martin Luther King's Civil Rights Movement, with its strategist Wyatt Walker, used children in Birmingham as part of the campaign to end racial segregation. The famous photo of the dog attacking a teenager, who stands helpless, appeared on every major national newspaper and struck an emotional and political chord across the country.

However, we must examine the reasons why the press chooses to cover news stories according to constituent questions. There is firstly a question of practicality; it's easy to ask questions about specific, controversial aspects of a story rather than according to general principles. Secondly, it can help to keep the news reader engaged, distilling potentially complicated issues into simple dilemmas.

Radical thinkers such as Noam Chomsky would refer to Manufacturing Consent, which highlights the importance of ownership. In this case, the press diverts attention from the constituent questions of a news item which genuinely challenge wealth and power, and instead chooses homogenised points of interest which are covered in different ways across different parts of the media.

Importantly, the same news story could be covered in a radically different way across news outlets, and across the political spectrum. Nevertheless, Chomsky would argue that this merely forms part of an ecosystem which creates the illusion of choice through vigorous debate in order to limit the range of acceptable opinions. The appearance of political engagement preserves a certain political and economic power structure.

Similarly, Orwell would argue - along the same lines as Manufacturing Consent, that much of the press is owned by 'Atlantic millionaires'. This is not to say the news media is incapable of challenging wealth and power, or exposing wrongdoing. Rather, ownership matters, and, much like the priesthood in the Middle Ages, or indeed in any period in time where the religiously ordained wielded a monopoly on the tenets and assumptions by which people would live and behave, you don't just buy a newspaper in order to make money; you buy one to control discourse, and to tell people what to think.

Nevertheless, I don't want to push the ownership point too much. It sounds too much like a conspiracy theory and long-winded rants about 'media bias' are among the most tedious tropes of modern politics. I've been to too many Labour meetings where an old bore drones on about how the BBC or the Times covered a particular story.

I mentioned it in the first place to discuss how talking points can be used to frame the narrative, and really there is a great deal of room for manoeuvre for political movements even on the left (up to a point).

Blair Quote - Murdoch University

Blair (Murdoch University): the SDP appealed to 'middle-aged and middle-class erstwhile Laboru members, who have grown too fat and affluent to feel comfortable with Labour and whose lingering social consciences prevent them from voting Tory'.

Who to Blame?

There are some claims about politics - and political issues - that utterly infuriate me, but also offer interesting insights into society and the media.

I will briefly set out some assertions: McDonalds workers shouldn't earn £10/hour because it would disincentivise me to work. Labour will tax everyone because taxing the top 5% for their promises is unrealistic. Life is shit and then you die. A four-day week is unrealistic because people won't be more productive.

These claims, though depressingly pessimistic, are revealing and important. 

I will address the McDonalds point first. This is interesting because it reflects psychological research which shows that people are highly comparative; they would rather see an opponent lose more than they would rather than see both gain - and to see themselves gain by a relatively smaller amount. I can't remember the study that showed this. 

Similarly, my colleague (on a wage marginally above the minimum wage) would rather McDonalds employees didn't get more because it would look like he was relatively earning less. One assumption he seems to be making is that McDonalds employees making more directly makes him worse off, which clearly isn't the case to any reasonable extent. I think this corroborates William Von Hippel's point on the Joe Rogan podcast. 

My colleague's point depresses me for a few reasons. Lower/lower medium earners particularly in his line of work are increasingly overworked and underpaid, all whilst dealing with pressure from increased housing prices and dilapidated public services. He is being underpaid under exactly the same set of circumstances as those who work in McDonalds, and being subject to exactly the same financial pressures. 

Indeed, he's being underpaid for the same reasons - a decline in the power of collective bargaining, for instance, and increased job insecurity. Those at the top keep the value his labour creates whilst paying him less. Yet he doesn't express his resentment towards those at the top, but those at the bottom. 

I will address more of these points in future posts. 

Rory Stewart

Currently, the Conservatives are dominated by the hard right, and they're probably going to trounce Labour in over a week's time. This is despite the perception that most people hold - reflected, I think, in hard policy evidence - that public services have in many ways deteriorated.

People feel apathetic, cynical, disillusioned with politics and politicians. We have seen the longest stagnation of living standards since the Napoleonic war. Education spending has fallen in real per pupil terms since 2010. Police numbers have been cut since 2010. We've seen an explosion in precarious work, with a huge rise in in-work poverty, a more than doubling of homelessness; rampant inequality, the erosion of the principle of the NHS. The union is in danger. The super-rich are living ever more extravagant lifestyles because more wealth is being extracted from working people. The media is failing in its job of scrutiny, facilitating the Conservative campaign rather than challenging Mr Johnson's record; dismissing Mr Corbyn as a terrorist sympathiser.

I put it to you. Had Mr Corbyn described 'watermelon smiles', dismissed death threats as 'humbug', led a political career of cynicism, backstabbing, been sacked for lying and gathered such an eminently incompetent record in his ministerial career, would the media treat him as a figure of amusement? Would they, as the Mail, the Telegraph and the Express have done, describe him in the tradition of Churchill?

For leading a campaign of ideological purification - removing the whip from 40 centrist MPs - and overseeing the most ideologically extreme cabinet since the 1970s, would they laud him as a great reformer?

More broadly, this article was supposed to be about Rory Stewart, but unfortunately divulged into a rant about the media.

I am watching Joe's interview with Rory, and he's such an eccentric, lovely man. I think his brand of politics would hugely benefit the UK.

In part, this is because he's non-ideological. As Prisons Minister, he actually had a really good record. He wasn't dogmatically bound to privatising the prisons; franchising them out as America has done (to disastrous effect).

It's frustrating that he would be a really good Prime Minister, certainly in policy terms, and yet much of the electorate seriously think that electing Boris Johnson would be a good idea. Five years later, with a record of incompetence - and an ideologically extreme cabinet, people will realise that actually he hasn't dealt with the very things that made them frustrated in the very first place.

This goes back to the reasons why people are frustrated. In part, I think it can be linked to tensions in modern capitalism. Inequality (regional, wealth and income) and globalisation; these, in turn, are linked to stagnating living standards, the tedious, underpaid and insecure reality of work in modern Britain, the absurd cost of housing and crumbling public services. People are also starting to care more about the environment, which is a wonderful thing to see, and I feel guilty about not getting involved with ER. I'll write more about thinkers like George Monbiot, and I'd like to investigate whether we need to get rid of capitalism to deal with the environmental crisis (as he tells us).

More to the point, people feel really cynical and angry, but why on earth would they seriously think that a person ideologically aligned with the forces that facilitated these tensions in the very first place is the person to solve these problems? 

Yeah, all very depressing.