Some highlights from @jeremycorbyn#changethemedia speech this morning. 1. Public money to suppport regional and local news co-ops. You only need to look at the difference @TheBristolCable has made to the city's politics to understand the significance of this.
A national network of news co-ops that bring audiences and journalists together in a partnership to understand where they live, and the world beyond, will have a massive impact on the operations of government at all levels.
We will be able to start developing an understanding of the world on secure foundations, working with people we trust.
2. Democratic reform of the BBC. If we want to talk seriously about the UK media, we have to talk about the BBC. Elections are surely preferable to government appointment. It is important that the electorate have means to assess what people are doing in office ...
... and that election is supplemented with other democratic mechanisms including randomly selected audience panels, and defined, universal powers to engage in consequential decisions about the constitution of public speech.
3. Elections in private media operations. As with news co-ops, I hope this will inspire and energise journalists and would-be journalists. The best of them know that it is punishingly difficult to serve both the public and the demands of the editorial hierarchy.
4. A British Digital Corporation. This is a massive breakthrough. Corbyn is tying media policy to a much broader agenda of economic and social transformation. The current media system is integral to the operations of capitalism.
We make economic decisions in isolation, based on cues from a massive persuasion industry derived from, and constantly reinvigorated by, psychological warfare. Meanwhile the media ignore or misprepresent the broader context in which we must act.
A British Digital Corporation offers us a chance to develop new forms of democratic planning, that dispense with both the advertising mystique and the fictions that surround the fundamentals of the economic order - land and credit above all.
This is a bridge that we can build, in the here and now, to a better way of being together. The question is - do we want it enough? Are we willing to argue for it, to improve on it through discussion and reflection?
Time will tell. But this is a good day. #changethemedia and you have a shot at changing the world. Corbyn has said it out loud and no amount of elite ridicule or condescension can unsay it now.
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In the new NS podcast the team discuss a focus group in Sittingbourne and Sheppey, made up of Conservative to Labour switchers. One presenter, the one who doubted Corbyn had much of a personal vote in Islington, was "a bit taken aback at how punchy and disappointed they were."
It's striking that a political journalist needs to go to a structured focus group to find out what people outside Westminster are feeling. But I suppose this reflects the existing balance of power: voters are a background feature in a drama with only a handful of speaking parts.
Marr noted that politics outside Westminster was different, and that Burnham and Sarwar are more interesting and self-assured than most Cabinet members. But the podcast was 100% Westminster-brained, in that its premise was that 20224 Con-Lab switchers were key.
In my self-appointed capacity as a purveyor of lukewarm takes I have now read That Article. What stands out is the intense focus of the Labour right on media and communications ... 🧵 theguardian.com/politics/2024/…
McSweeney seems to have understood that trusted independent left media posed an existential threat to the right's attempt to regain control: if members understood who the Labour right were, and what they wanted, the game would be up.
According to @AnushkaAsthana "they took aim at news websites they considered to be either alt-left or alt-right, including, perhaps not surprisingly, the Canary." She says their campaign had a material impact on that outlet, forcing them to become "much leaner."
Politicians can say anything to a nodding journalist, no matter how insultingly stupid and misleading, as long as they use a mind-numbingly banal analogy from daily life to do it. Nation's credit card? Sure. Under the bonnet? Yeah, sounds about right.
A great deal of media culture consists of projecting their own inability to grasp basic concepts onto their audiences: rather than explain how parties interact with the state, which would require thought, they happily go along with framing that is simple, familiar and wrong.
Haha, the public don't care about x! (when x is something that's extremely important, that can only shore up oligarchic power in a formally democratic system when people have no idea what x is, and only have brain dead analogies to go on when they turn to the media to find out.)
Labour's plans to use public-private partnerships for new infrastructure will create endless chokepoints for rent extraction for large investment funds, raising the cost of living for the rest of us, for no other reason than a reflexive desire to serve the rich. As in health ...
... if the workers and the materials exist, we can afford to do it: the means create the money and there is not reason to cede ownership of vital infrastructure. It's a political choice that the Greens, the Social Campaign Group and the rest of the left should loudly reject.
And anyone with an ounce of integrity who has railed against Conservative malfeasance and corruption should do the same. The question 'who owns Britain?' ought to be central to our politics for the next five years.
Just thinking about servility in capitalism when I saw this. If you "dig under the surface" of "centrist dad" as a term of abuse, I'd say it's about having one's opinions shaped - unknowingly - so they're consistent with a relatively privileged place in the social order.
A "centrist dad" is a product of domination, inasmuch as he doesn't know why he believes what he believes. There are plenty of liberal capitalists (some with children!) who understand what they are, how it relates to their beliefs. But the centrist dad is made as if from outside.
If we fear the patriarch because he is a clear-eyed tyrant, we're tempted to despise the centrist dad because he doesn't know what he is, while managing to be incredibly smug about everything.
A month ago I was wondering out loud why the British establishment converged on austerity after 2008 and whether it was part of a coherent class project to protect capital from a population that might have drawn dangerous conclusions from the collapse of economic orthodoxy.
While warbling about the role of the Treasury I was gently prompted by @aerondavis to read his book on the Treasury, and I did. It's well worth a look. I don't think we can yet say for sure whether the Treasury in the 2010s was as clear-eyed as it was in the 1920s.
(For one thing we won't have access to the files for 30 years, assuming nothing untoward happens. The kinds of eye-watering memoranda that Clara Mattei unearthed will be under wraps for a while yet.)