THE NARRATIVE WARS
History is written by the
victors, justice too becomes the preserve of those who win. The struggle in free societies between those who have, and
wish to keep it, and those fighting for change is a constant propaganda war, albeit
grotesquely lopsided in terms of resources; a struggle to establish the
prevailing narrative, the story of who and what we are.
Shopping in the local
supermarket, as I was this morning, I was drawn to the Newspaper stand. For it
is here that you witness the propaganda war in full flow. The Sun, The Daily
Mail, The Express, all pour out a rancid and bitter tale, a story of the clean
and upright, the respectable and law abiding, pitted against the lazy and
unwashed, the pathologically dishonest and criminally inclined. It is a story
of the moral correctness of Capitalism and the ascendancy of money and things.
They alone convey the true shape, smell and feel of ‘reality.’ Like a child
with a ball of play dough they mould the world in their own narrow image.
The serious press
sometimes challenge this narrative, though The Guardian, The Independent and
the broadcast media, especially the BBC tend merely play a reactive role,
sometimes shifting the angle of vision, sometimes the emphasis, the particular
nuance of a debate, rarely ever challenging the assumptions behind the
narrative itself. Sometimes however the disjoin between this cosy consensus and
the lived reality of peoples lives widens to become a chasm, the structures of
the narrative become to look suspiciously like cardboard, the Wizard, though
still imposing, does not appear to be all he seems, a subversive voice at the
back of crowd seems to be suggesting that the King is in fact naked.
These thoughts crossed my
mind this morning, ‘they’ve badly misjudged’ I thought when I looked at the
front page of the Sun and the Mail and their coverage of Thatcher’s death. The
establishment are completely out of step with the public who do not feel
Margaret Thatcher’s death as a moment of great national mourning, even those
not openly hostile to Thatcher do not care that much. 10 Million for a state
funeral, in all but name, the stream of eulogies and endless recitation of the
‘achievements’ of the Thatcher years, all strike a very false note. The
Thatcher fan club is much much smaller than The Sun has deceived itself into
believing; they’ve got it wrong.
Such moments are not only
to be savoured; they represent an opportunity in the propaganda wars to seize
the initiative. All my life I have watched as the parameters of permitted
debate being shifted steadily to the right.
I was born into an age
when it was a given that the basic necessities of life should be publicly
owned, the utilities, gas, water, electricity, and yes coal, all should
utilised for the greater good of society as a whole.[1]
The Health Service, transport, the Post Office were about serving the
community, not private profit. The followers of Hayek and Milton Friedman were
seen as extremists.
We have now lost sight of
just how hard a propaganda war needed to be waged to shift the ground
rightwards. The minority had the wealth, power and most importantly resources
in the shape of the newspapers to wage this war. They only needed a standard
bearer; enter the economically illiterate grocer’s daughter and all the
propaganda resources of the rich and privileged, were thrown into the struggle.
And Yet: The battles were
all won, but they never quite won the war. Even at the height of her popularity
Thatcher divided the country, she never won over a majority. She constantly got
lucky in her enemies;[2]
the newly created SDP split the left allowing the Tories to come through the
middle. The Sun pumped out a stream of pro Thatcherite propaganda of the most
virulent kind and demonised organised labour, but a residual resistance
remained. The popular press could declare that we were all Thatcherites now, it
didn’t make it true.
In 1992 the Sun famously
boasted, ‘It Was the Sun Wot Won It,’ and Tony Blair believed it. This
distorted political life in the country for over a decade, allowing the Murdoch
press to dictate the narrative. The Blair years, rather than being the fresh
start that everyone on the left hoped for turned out for the most part to be
the same old same old. The telling moment was Blair inviting Thatcher to number
10 just after his election; Thatcher beamed, he was someone with whom her
legacy could be entrusted. The Sun beamed, plus ca la change; though with
hindsight the late 90’s were the high water mark of the electoral power of the
popular press, unfortunately though not the high water mark of its malign
impact upon the cultural climate of the country.
The Sun has not woken up
to the fact that it is not 1992. We live in a world were the bosses of the
greedy utilities offer themselves ever greater rewards and mercilessly rip off
their customers. Rail privatisation is a disaster, public services that people
are beginning to understand are essential to civilised life are under attack as
never before. Most importantly the banking crisis, that can be traced directly
back to the deregulation of financial services inaugurated by Thatcher, have
wrecked our economy and impoverished us all. Meanwhile The Sun lauds the
architect of all this, pretending not to notice that the building is falling
down around our ears.
The events leading to
Leveson are now part of the history of the popular press. Drunk on a sense of
its own inviolability, thinking itself invulnerable, dizzy with hubris it
crashed through the last remaining restraints, both legal and moral. This was partly
fuelled by desperation, the knowledge that the daily newspaper was becoming a
dying breed. With the rise of the internet, Facebook, Twitter other media were
now beginning to frame the narrative.
After Leveson, the Sun in
particular and the rest of the popular press in general behave as if nothing
has changed, but in reality they are like ghosts for whom the fact they are now
dead has not yet fully sunk in. In short they no longer have the power to
dictate the narrative. That the BBC has not yet caught up with this reality is
neither here nor there, the parrot is dead.
It seems to me that in
burying Mrs Thatcher the establishment have called it wrong at every turn. The
Conservative Party in particular has swallowed its own propaganda and believes
that Thatcher represented the majority of the British people, that she was
British sentiment made flesh and bone. She was not; she never enjoyed such a
position, half the country loathed her and everything she stood for. It seems
to me that you can either be a forceful political leader driving forward with a
clear ideological purpose, because you believe, or you can be a unifying
national leader, you cannot be both.
Atlee had a small private
ceremony, even though he worked tirelessly throughout the war and transformed Britain
Across millions of
Facebook and Twitter accounts and in thousands of blogs, people are
deciding that it is they who will decide who they are and what they believe. The narrative
that is being written is complex, multi faceted, sometimes generous and open,
at others nasty and insular, but it no longer belongs to the likes of Kelvin
McKenzie and the Sun.
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[1] That this was often poorly
done is beside the point, unfortunately the Atlee government stopped short of
community control when nationalising the utilities. That is a matter for
another debate.
[2] If you are going to have a
say in your opponents you could do a lot worse than choose Arthur Scargill and
General Galaterie.
[3] It still rankles with me
that during a debate in the 1970’s I allowed someone to get away with spouting
another ‘myth’, that in 1950 the British people rejected Socialism. In fact the
Labour Party won over a million votes more than the Conservatives, a majority
of votes never seen before or since by a single party over 13 million.
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