Read All About It!

Just as the recent big probation story broke, I saw this in the Guardian about Durham coal-miner's daughter to top White House aid Fiona Hill and have wanted to find an excuse to quote it ever since:- 

When we talked in May, Hill was back in seclusion but so was the rest of Washington. She was speaking from home, where she had an array of books spread around her feet. She had laid them out to try to piece together an explanation of why the three countries with which she was intimately familiar – the UK, where she was born; Russia, the country she had spent her life studying; and the US, where she has lived since 1989 and risen to the highest level of government – had all failed so spectacularly in handling the health crisis.

She is one of a handful of people to have stood at the nexus of these three disastrous governments, to have been in the room to witness Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Boris Johnson operate. “It’s a story really about how the US, UK and Russia have all ended up in the same spot weirdly, not just in terms of Covid-19 but also populist politics and many of the same out-of-control inequalities,” Hill said.

In her view populist governments are useless at handling complex problems of governance, almost by definition. If leaders are fit to govern, they generally don’t need populism to get elected.

“It’s all about style and swagger and atmospherics, with superficial solutions to things, with lots of sloganeering, and obviously dealing with a pandemic is pretty methodical and boring. It requires an awful lot of planning and logistical organization and you can’t just sort of do it on the fly with an ad hoc coalition.”

What interests Hill is how the three such different countries end up in the same boat, run by populists and significantly less able to cope with a pandemic than their neighbours. She believes the critical common factor is the heady rise, and then the catastrophic collapse, of heavy industry and the failure of their governments to manage the fall and cushion the impact on their people.

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It's a very strange world isn't it when 'populist politics' gives you dreadful leaders who actually aren't that popular. The penny has already dropped with Putin and Boris, whilst with Trump it's obviously going to take a little longer as he finds some way to rationalise the suggested Tulsa million with the actual 6,200 quoted by the local Fire Department. Apparently hundreds of disgruntled teenagers used TikToc to rain on his parade by requesting thousands of tickets, but with no intention of showing up. What pesky liberal losers and lowlife's! 

The secret of this 'populism' is of course media manipulation and it's something we should all pay close attention to, posing as it does a serious threat to our democratic processes. In the middle of a national crisis, how is it that our government can get away with a boycott of BBC Newsnight and Channel 4 News? Of course both are public service broadcasters with legal obligations regarding 'balance' and impartiality, but alarmingly each is under serious threat from a Tory government seeking retribution for daring to hold it to account. Boris Johnson has threatened to sell Ch4 and the BBC faces numerous threats to its finances with forced funding of the World Service, free licences for the over 75's, decriminalisation of licence fee avoidance and financing of local democracy reporters. It will be interesting to see how the new Director General (a former Tory) will handle probably the most serious threat in the BBC's history. 

The virus lockdown has given many, including myself, the opportunity of sampling Piers Morgan on Good Morning Britain and to be frank it's been a revelation! An irritating twat from memory, his routine lambasting of government and mediocre ministers has earned him a total boycott for weeks which he proudly confirms has turbo-charged his viewing figures. But it's more than that, his championing of issues such as Grenfell, Windrush, Covid-19, NHS, Dominic Cummings and more recently the tragic death of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter has been fearless, forensic and utterly unapologetic - in short a revelation. To be honest it's caused me to reconsider the whole issue of so-called 'balance'. If you think the government is lying or a minister is useless - say so!

On the issue of 'balance', I see Twitter have finally lost patience with professional troll Katie Hopkins and said they have permanently banned her and of course LBC similarly decided to ditch the dreadful Nigel Farage. With Facebook and Twitter deciding to clip Trump's wings and even Sky trying to rein-in the likes of Adam Boulton, we seem to be in very interesting times indeed on the media front. Watch this space as they say.