Pish, Politicians and the Press

Our modern day politics is corrupted by spin, lies and deceit, writes James Smyth.

Occasionally, the nice, sane and moderate people of the world get riled about something. Often, their reasoned anger is directed at certain aspects of society which steer us away from living in the sort of world we could be dwelling in, if only everyone could get along like these nice, sane and moderate people I speak of. I guess one whole group of the few things that get nice people rather annoyed (I wouldn't pretend to know for sure, as I still don't know whether I should be so self- assured as to class myself with these guys) are the various ranty, bombastic, overly-opinionated, self-righteous newspapers and blogs which, because of the ever expanding internet and television networks, make up a worryingly large part of our collective psyche.

I hope this doesn't sound too self-absorbed, but it's been troubling me for a while. In 2011, I pushed myself into the world of politics. I got elected to the Scottish Youth Parliament, and also started out as an activist for a political party. I've always been pretty interested in politics - which is a statement I tend to shy away from now, as I've realised how much it annoys me when I hear other people say it. But I have always been interested, let's just admit it. Interested in the potential to change things, inspired by the belief that a better world is possible with the right pieces of legislation - or, in some cases, the right pieces of legislation being loosened or removed - and the correct conditioning and educating of society - which sounds very ominous. But I mean well, don't I. As a consequence, I've met a lot of very political people over the last year. I've had a lot of nerdy debates and I've expelled a lot of passion. (Look at older articles that I've posted and you'll see a whole load of self-righteous opinion, putting the world to rights as though I could do a much better and more professional job myself. The tell-tale signs of how immature and unprofessional I was, or am, are also there, nullifying all of my points. I voluntarily opened myself up to ridicule. Bad spelling, bad grammar, boring, uncreative ways of expressing things. Long, possibly made up words. In fact, just keep reading this.) But I've also discovered that the sort of people I once almost worshipped, looked up to and wanted to work with, get a lot of their knowledge from rather shaky sources, just like the general public do. It's just better organised in their heads, and much more harshly articulated and set out in arguments. I'm not talking about top politicians: Ministers, Secretaries of State, seasoned and professional MPs and MSPs. I still can't work out what goes on in their heads. I'm talking about people who, like I once did, aspire to take the place of them. Young activists who think they know it all, the 'young politicians' who the media love to talk about. The young people who, if you were paying attention, took up the seats of MPs in the House of Commons one day in November last year. I was there. We are heralded as the leaders of our generation; the politicians of tomorrow.

We all think we'd do better than the current lot. Naturally. At the moment, politicians are looked upon as the scum of the earth; heroes who are paid and pampered as such, but who have done nothing whatsoever heroic - unless you count as heroic the amount of corruption they pedalled for so many years without any of us catching a sniff of it. We have to believe we'd do better. We wouldn't have forced our way into the game otherwise. But what I've seen, among various shards of light who buck the trend (although there aren't a lot of them), is actually quite depressing. What I see is a hierarchy in youth politics. I see the majority of young activists, without party affiliations, stripped of the influence they should have been given when they made the decision to stand up for their generation by joining an organisation which does such. And I see the minority who have joined a party, giving themselves almost all the power. So the influence in our generation, a generation thought to be very different to preceding ones, sits with the people who have already decided on a pre-set ideology to follow. People who are very interested in the sort of party-politics which ruins democracy, which is at least disliked and at most despised by non-partisan people.

You may have realised I've gone rather off-topic, and probably that I've said a lot of irrelevant and, in some cases, contentious things which I didn't need to say in this post. So let me drag us back. How do these newspapers and blogs I was on about, fit into this? Well, like political parties, they tend to spin facts in favour of a particular ideology. They select, twist, simplify and amplify aspects of any impartial information which they come upon.

In the late 90s, Birmingham City Council organised a festival called 'Winterval'. It comprised of various Christmas themed, secular and other events happening in late November and the duration of December, the aim being to encourage people into the rejuvenated city centre. The Daily Mail, notorious for its alarmist right-wing stance on many issues, picked up on this, selected a few facts from the variety which made up the truth, twisted them, and then amplified them in its simplified, vitriolic tone. It claimed that 'Winterval' was part of a scheme to eradicate Christian culture from Britain. A way of appeasing Islam. They said that in some parts of the country the term had 'replaced' Christmas. A conspiracy by the liberal elites, using the scapegoat of offended minorities to excuse their aims. And so the public who read it in most cases believed it; too busy to hunt for the real, unbiased facts. The Daily Mail likes to pedal rumours of minorities being offended by Christmas, and other aspects of Western culture. The growth of the phrase 'Happy Holidays' as a replacement for 'Merry Christmas' is oft-used to back up this claim. I think that's more down to businesses who want to get in all our purses around the festive period, and not just those of native westerners. But that's another rant, for another day filled with nothingness. The thinly veiled Islamophobia that is spouted by the Daily Mail and other such publications - The Daily Star (98% of whose readership apparently support the EDL) for example - can sometimes create the sort of hysteria within a person which will result in one of those Facebook rumours, telling offended minorities to 'leave our country' if they don't agree with Christmas, or don't like poppies or something.

The aim of the Daily Mail and Daily Star is primarily, I think, to sell papers, not to run a knife through society. But I don't doubt that a genuine dislike and suspicion of minorities lurks in there somewhere. To quote Humza Yousaf, an MSP from Glasgow, "[I've] never met a Muslim who is offended by Christmas - met plenty who are offended by the Daily Mail though!"

It's not just the Right I'm on about though. Often, on shows like 'Have I Got News For You', laughter is provoked at the expense of the ridiculous and hysterical right-wing papers, and the equally ridiculous and hysterical left-wing press gets let off the hook. This left-wing press, with some exceptions which include parts of The Guardian and The Morning Star, tends more to come in the form of blogs, websites and even internet virals. I suppose we could now start classing Facebook and Twitter among news websites, spontaneous, people-driven news, as that is one of their many functions. Jeremy Clarkson's infamous joke about the November public sector strikes provides good examples of this. I'm probably one of the only pro-environment, pro-trade unions, gay, left-wing people who watch and enjoy Top Gear. I am ready for the occasional offending remark which comes out of Clarkson's mouth. But I was just as taken aback as many other people were, when I saw an image come up on my news feed depicting Clarkson's face beside the quote "I think all public sector strikers should be taken out and shot in front of their families". I soon discovered - because I have the time to find out - that this quote had been taken completely out of context, and that he had essentially been making a joke about the fact that he couldn't be biased while on a BBC programme. Again, the theme is constant: Select, twist, simplify and amplify - this time through social media instead of well-selling papers - although they picked up on it the next day. It wasn't a very funny joke, and it was pretty ill-judged, but it was a joke all the same. And while Clarkson does lean somewhat to the right, having read his books, execution of strikers is clearly not one of the things he espouses. The full clip, including the bit where he says how much he liked the strikes, has been played a lot on the BBC since the original broadcast, if for no other reason than to try and clear his name and defend themselves from the ranting, hate-filled, vitriolic, bloodthirsty press. Not the right-wing press though; this time it was the wishy-washy left-wingers. And he is nominated for the 'Dick of the Year' award on the Scottish lefty-green blog Bright Green. The nomination letter for him is just as stupid, illogical and personally insulting, if not worse, than what you'd expect to find in the Daily Mail. 'Bright', my arse.

In an immature way, I used to think that the left-wing was the home of the nice, compassionate, thoughtful people. It seems not. It's a lot more complicated than that. Elements of left, right, authoritarian and libertarian blur and mix together all the time. In my eyes, people in the world are divided into a different set of adjectives: Nice, nasty, intelligent and stupid. To work out which of these words corresponds to each of the first four would cause such disagreement that I can never see the human race destined for any kind of peace.

I feel this article is far too long, and I should probably wind it up, snip it in two and write one article about press vitriol and another about the confidence in the next generation of politicians which is currently haemorrhaging from me. Or maybe I should get a life and do neither. But I refuse not to say that these two things are connected. Right now, politicians are wondering whether to implement better regulation of the tabloid press, because of the phone hacking scandal. But the regulation would only affect how newspapers can invade privacy; it wouldn't affect how they preach such hatred against people, movements and parts of society. It wouldn't affect their ability to twist facts, apply huge levels of bias and print downright lies. Do you see the connection? They do very similar things to what political parties and individual, ideology worshipping politicians do. They take the pure facts and they play around and manipulate them until they can use them to justify some law, some spending cut or 'reorganising', some order to push people around, or whatever they want to do which fits in with the world view that they've decided, or have been told, is more important and correct than anyone else's. They go further than just doing the same things though, it's well documented that they work in conjunction with each other to keep the big lie spinning. If newspapers are to be regulated in order to stop the lies and the spin, politicians must first stop benefiting so much from those lies and that spin, and that's never going to happen. And even then, such regulation of newspapers and blogs (which, remember, are on the sacred internet), would be totally immoral and completely against freedom of expression - as much as freedom itself is done away with by the indoctrination which stems from these papers, parties and other media.

If this generation - my generation - is to change anything at all in any meaningful way; if we are to really live up to the potential that we have, we cannot be represented by people who tie themselves to the ideas of old. The world needs independent thinking. We need scepticism of the current system - not just from people who aim to go into politics, but from the wider, conscious public too. It needs people with a real drive to change things, in whatever way that may be, who don't fear the wrath of powerful columnists with clawing hands and shouting, foaming mouths. It was summed up by a woman who works in the youth wing of my local council, while she was giving me a lift in her car once.

"A lot of things need to change in this country."

Forget manifestos. That's the only idea you need to cling onto, to make a political career worthwhile.

James Smyth