BETWEEN 2016 and now, the media and the Leftish executives and supposed social liberals that run it have sustained one punch in the face after another. The Brexit vote, Trump, May’s defeatism being itself defeated, the failure to scotch Brexit, the collapse of the Labour Party into Jew-hatred, infantilism and general idiocy, British and European rebellion against globalist politics, and – tin lid! – Boris Johnson, the politician they hate the most, who’d fronted the Brexit revolt,winning the general election last December.
Then the coronavirus landed from a clear sky. After being taken by surprise just like the rest of us, the BBC, Sky and the ‘serious’ press have seized on this unexpected curse from China as manna from heaven: finally, here was a stick to beat this perceived-to-be-Right-wing government with! Never mind that the country is in a real national financial crisis now (not the imaginary civil service confection of Project Fear) and that the government has spent more in the pursuit of a socialising and authoritarian solution than Corbyn could have dreamt of.
It must be faced that the media seem quite peachy about the fact we are in this unprecedented bind: with personal protective equipment (PPE) they have the narrative of failure and incompetence they have been searching for since the start. Now they can work at putting the skids under Johnson’s government as a matter of first importance. I find it hard to believe they are not being fed their big lines from the increasingly politicised health sector – the very one that Johnson is kowtowing to.
The media’s attitude is startlingly insular, but one that partly takes the load off the globalist agenda, which is starting to look vulnerable. Globalisation isn’t quite so attractive when a fatal and highly communicable disease is the export, plus the EU has been shown up for the collectivist pipe dream it is: borders have suddenly come back into fashion. Also this newfound insularity avoids showing up the culpability of China, a prison camp of a country which the globalists avoid examining closely: they prefer Trump-bashing.
The next favourable development for the centre-Left media has been the replacement of Jeremy Corbyn. At last the holy fool, Bennite protégé, IRA and Islamist groupie was leaving the stage and Sir Keir Starmer was in charge. Sir Keir, fluent, smarmed down, middle-class, potentially sellable to an audience whipped into fury about rotten Tories and NHS front-line heroes, now has the cardboard crown of the Labour Party – and some people are delighted.
There were ominous signs. An approving Times leader for one: the Thunderer’s position, soaking wet Tory Remain in the Brexit battle, shows every sign of itching to get back to its true love: Blairism. At the BBC, decaf neo-Marxism has long been the lingua franca, so Sir Keir’s arrival is good news for them.
Then there was Janet Street-Porter, 73, suddenly being given house room in Lord Rothermere’s Mail Online to slag off the government. This was interesting from a supposed Right-leaning organ. Street-Porter even called on television for Sir Keir to be admitted to the Cabinet, like some latter-day Clement Attlee. All this seems likely to be a bellwether of wealthy liberal thinking.
A few years ago Ms Street-Porter set out in the Independent her reasons for disliking Corbyn. They are perfectly sound. But when she writes about her idea of the Labour Party she reveals the confusion that lies at the heart of many a well-heeled ‘social justice warrior’. The circle to be squared for them is how the utopia can be achieved without costing them personally too much money. Corbyn and Co, who regard the wrecking of British economic life as an ideological duty, were too dangerous: what, 65 per cent top rate of tax and a Syrian migrant in every spare bedroom? No thanks, Jez. That kind of socialism is too rich for their blood.
In her 2016 Independent article, notice how Ms Street-Porter lavishly praised Tony Blair while in the same piece she wrote the following:
The real disaffected in this country are the working people of the lower middle classes, the people who have seen their pensions shrink, whose children are still living at home in their thirties because they can’t afford a home. The workers on part time or zero hours contracts with no job security.
What grand ironies therein. The children of the lower middle classes cannot afford homes because the cataclysmic explosion of immigration into Britain, which was engineered by the Labour Party under Blair’s first and second terms largely out of spite, put a huge premium on accommodation, pushing up all housing costs through the roof. It also flattened wages for the young and the working class by flooding the labour market with immigrants, making the prospect of home ownership more remote – never mind choking public services and making a personal GP a thing of the past. The move was supposed to ‘rub the Right’s nose in diversity’, but as we saw with Brexit sentiment and later voting patterns, it was socially conservative working-class Labour voters who got their noses rubbed in it – and they kicked back. Of this Ms Street-Porter says nothing, but maybe there’s a reason for that: here she is on the town with the Labour elite a few years ago.
The champagne socialists who are the top end of Labour’s support believe themselves to be ‘moderates’. But there are no ‘moderates’ in the Labour spectrum these days; there are only radicals and boneheads. The ‘moderate’ Labour agenda remains the same as it has been for decades: heavy political correctness, increasing state interference in private life, an expanding state, EU-worship, escalating taxation, a neo-Marxist approach to law and order – read weak policing and the de facto decriminalisation of illegal drugs – and massive immigration to be used as a weapon and driver of a ‘social revolution’ under the flag of ‘diversity’, ideas that have also come to take hold of the Conservative Party. We have had our noses rubbed in this agenda for years and very little of it is moderate: just take a look at the country you now live in. And yes, the Tory party – seen as a B Team by ‘moderates’ – has perpetuated a lot of that agenda. The bonehead side of the argument is of course represented by the school of Corbyn.
So, despite all the division in Britain, despite the crisis that if bungled will threaten the very underpinnings of western bourgeois society, the ‘moderates’ are on the march with Sir Keir as their leader. It remains to be seen if he is radical or a bonehead. Either way, he’s a bad idea and they should know better. Either way, there is no chance of a real critique of the Conservative Government’s handling of this crisis.
