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Dan Hind Profile picture
@danhind
Aug 28, 2018 • 6 tweets • 2 min read • Read on X
I wrote this the last time @OwenJones84 was denounced for stating some incontrovertible facts about the UK media. Since I wrote it the Labour leadership have made a set of proposals to #changethemedia
thereturnofthepublic.wordpress.com/2018/04/21/owe…
Many senior journalists are much more comfortable explaining why they deserve every single bit of their wealth and prestige in the current order than engaging with the substance of these proposals. This is understandable, but it is also fascinating in its way.
The ability to distinguish between the facts of biography and the broader 'structural' context within which we all make our lives, and to bring them into meaningful connection, is close to the heart of any properly human science.
C. Wright Mills called this 'the sociological imagination'. He thought we would develop it for the sheer delight of knowing how we fit into our times. It's clear now that we must actively create conditions in which career success does not depend on a kind of energetic idiocy.
Yes, I know that many journalists understand perfectly well that they live in a society and can distinguish between the drama of their own lives and the economics, architecture and embedded traditions of the theatre in which they play their parts.
If you want nuance, read my books.

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More from @danhind

Dan Hind Profile picture
Jul 2
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.)
Read 5 tweets
Dan Hind Profile picture
Jun 28
We are drifting into another round of PFI boondoggles, in which energy and other essentials will generate rents for the world's laziest plutocrats. A movement for constitutional reform worth a damn would declare this illegitimate and campaign to stop it.

We *know* we need to invest heavily in renewable energy, in food security, and in all kinds of public infrastructure. There is no reason to rely on private rent seekers to finance it. To repeat, we should make it clear from the outset that any revival of PFI will be reversed.
Labour can give as much free money as it wants to its favoured partners in the private sector. But we must organise to expropriate them all at the earliest opportunity. Otherwise the shiny new economy will be a re-run of the old, and we'll all be working for the same reptiles.
Read 6 tweets
Dan Hind Profile picture
Jun 17
Interesting thread on the composition of panels on Question Time. Two points to note: 1. Lucas appeared more often than Farage because the study begins in 2014. An analysis of 2010-15 had a different result. theguardian.com/news/datablog/…
2. There's a startling absence of trade unionists among regular non-politicians, and an overwhelming preponderance of (right-wing) comment journalists. This results from the labour movement giving up its communicative assets after 1945, putting its trust impartial liberal media.
3. Because the labour movement doesn't have its own media it hasn't trained up nimble and appealing commentator/analysts of its own. This speaks to a profound degeneration of its capacity to protect its members' interests, let alone sponsor a broader social democracy.
Read 8 tweets
Dan Hind Profile picture
Jun 14
The most important left grouping in France is led by a former Socialist Party politician, Jean-Luc Mélenchon. I would have thought that a Popular Front in the UK would need the left in the Labour Party, including major figures, to walk away, like Mélenchon did.
There's a very real chance that Labour will implode on contact with office. It's a brittle political project, and its own structures and broader institutional hinterland have decayed into cronyism, much like the Socialists in France. Starmer might be Labour's François Hollande.
Political pacts are based on self-interest. Greens can squeeze left-wing micro-parties in Bristol and Brighton, and remain free to pitch to disaffected, environmentally conscious centrists and soft right voters in Herefordshire and Suffolk. They don't have to choose.
Read 6 tweets
Dan Hind Profile picture
Jun 1
🧵 What's always going to puzzle me is why the 2015-2019 leadership team didn't do everything they could to give the Guardian readers in Labour a crash course in what they were up against, especially when their head of strategy had worked at the Guardian for most of his career.
They must have known that the Guardian wasn't going to tell their readers what was going on and what was at stake, would do their best to defeat them, so why didn't they do everything they could to displace it as the main source of information for most of their supporters?
Hindsight is 20/20. But left-wing political movements need to pay much more attention to the way that knowledge is generated and how it circulates within our own spaces and more broadly. No more trusting the impartiality of platforms or broadcasters, no more voluntarism, either.
Read 4 tweets
Dan Hind Profile picture
May 6
Yep, that's definitely what happened. No need for further analysis, let alone investigation. Another layer of journalistic lacquer on what happened in 2019, and we're left with half-formed questions and a vague sense that something untoward is going on. theguardian.com/books/article/…
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Gosh, why would that be, and what does it tell us about the recent behaviour of both the duopoly parties? Fragmented and politically complex in what ways? Again we are left surrounded by question marks, like a concussed duck in a Loony Tunes cartoon. theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
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A great deal of centrist and centre left political commentary seems determined to skirt round the politics of any given situation in its haste to put on a kind of satyr play, in which stock characters deliver the lines their readers and listeners have come to expect.
Read 5 tweets

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