Lab To Become The New Lib?

Nobody held a gun to Nick Clegg’s head and forced him to enter into a coalition that was, to many, a walking oxymoron. At least no one did so in the pseudo-physical, extortionate or even figurative sense. However, that doesn’t completely dispel the notion that a merge onto the side of the Conservative party was chiefly an escape route, or move for survival, just as parasites would sooner choose a new host to feed on than waste away alone. Abysmal election results and a growing roar of hilarity from the media dogs surrounding Clegg’s press office would no doubt have fuelled the hatred from within the party itself, and who knows if Clegg would have been forced to stand down after such a chaotic, unstable and ultimately futile act of rebellion against traditional party politics? The heretic, it seemed, could either be burnt at the stake or make a prompt conversion and enter the fold. And the latter, according to politicians and journalists across the spectrum, is exactly what he did.

 

So Clegg married Cameron to keep a legacy for himself. Any mindless walking penis would probably do the same out of sheer desperation. Yet the strange pseudo-conservative policies and ideals being peddles by the Liberals in their slice of the pie, and a strangely docile opposition to Tory policy itself as only served to stoke up once again the fuels of heresy and discontent in the Lib Dem party. This, presumably, is why a large number of high profile Liberal bénévoles famously defected over to working class ‘saviours’ Labour in a desperate bid to recoup some of their fundamental values. By the same token, rumours are spreading across London this very second which suggest that Charles Kennedy, once leader of the Lib Dem party, is now also planning to defect. He may have half-heartedly denied the claims in a hastily scrawled press release, but if this isn’t a love letter to the Labour party then...well....what is?

 

So why are these head honchos and grass roots rioters alike all deciding to flock elsewhere to get off on centre-left policies (sort of the soft porn of British politics, if you will). The political field seems to undergoing a great deal of reshuffling, with the Liberal Party drawing closer and closer to the dreaded political purgatory of The Centre and, who knows, might precariously wobble there for months before finally taking a chaotic plunge into the murky world of old world elitism and class-consciousness. An unpleasant place to be indeed. Meanwhile, the Labour party, grotesquely loaded with faux-liberal, young new faces and the golden Milliband Brothers, is making appeals to the jaded Liberals of the left, namely those who were once part of the renegade SDP. Ed Milliband’s speech earlier this week was a thinly concealed appeal to those frustrated and disillusioned with their bizarrely draconian post-9/11 policies:

 

"I believe the argument is being won that on issues like ID cards and stop-and-search we became too casual about the liberties of individuals. And I believe the argument is being conclusively won that we must recognize the profound mistake of the Iraq war. I want to take my party on a journey to a different identity for the future: social democratic on economic policy, standing for redistribution and tackling inequality, liberal in our respect for individual rights." (Guardian)

 

Yes, that was me dicking around with the italics, not the Guardian, which is a respectable and established paper, as opposed to a moron with a digital screen. Anyway, the repetition of words such as ‘casual’ and ‘individuals’ and of course ‘liberal’ would make any young cynic of the decontracté variety sit up and listen. Whoever wrote this speech – probably not Milliband himself but I suppose there’s always hope – clearly wants to open the floodgates for the so-called ‘true Lib Dems,’ or rather those repulsed by the coalition. As long as the Liberal party stays joined at the hip to the Tories, no one’s going to look to them for entertaining the more radical liberal policies – so why shouldn’t they try their luck with what could quickly the become the new Liberal Left?

Those Yellow Bastards

I’ve started to entertain the notion that the ‘The Masses’ aren’t anything like as prodigiously stupid as the discursive forces of our time would have us believe. The probability of stumbling across a newspaper column with substance, be it online or on those soggy rag-pages themselves, seems to be an increasingly unlikely occurrence. It’s no surprise that papers are just as saturated with mindless, grotesquely ignorant and egotistic trash as they have ever been, but the sheer vacuity of reporting in general (and to claim that certain papers must be more than vacuous would be a dangerous statement indeed) seems to have seeped, like a viscous poison, into the once feather-light world of Opinion columns. So-called Free opinions. Deft prose. Provocative ideas, or notions or theories. Anything to resonate with that strange and nebulous human mass, The Readers.

Hell, maybe The Readers are simply getting more and stupid with every terrorist attack, famine, flood or other temporary infraction of moral order which passes them by. But a more likely cause for the sudden downturn of quality amidst the pages of Opinions columns seems to be located far closer to the throbbing wound in the newspaper industry itself: the manic, Ritalin-crazed keyboard fiends themselves gnashing their teeth wildly as they concoct potions of widespread fear and ignorance. The columnists themselves. Those Yellow Bastards. Who would have ever suspected that that self-same, self-inflicted lobotomy (the gesture of reading the news features of a politically aligned tabloid) could slither, invisible, onto this hallowed ground of free speech? Maybe I’m getting a little twisted here, trying to knot two strands of argument together in the same post. Time for another beer.

(Lobotomy with Icepick, circa 1950)

Where was I? Ah yes. Bitching about stream-of-consciousness writing – the sheer hypocrisy of it, the bare-faced goddamn hypocrisy. But let’s return to those lucky perpetrators who are actually remunerated for such atrocities. Richard Littlejohn. Amanda Platell. Giles Coren. Giles Whittel. The notion that The Readers are able to ingest this kind of material, day in and day out, without contracting some kind of strange and terrible affliction is an absolute mystery to me. The Crimes against Coherence (even if the phrase shouldn’t be capitalized, it deserves such a merit) which are committed by these word smiths are broad in their numbers. The first is an almost complete inability to construct a logical argument, of which a perfect example is this column, where a dyed-in-the-wool Tory waxes lyrical about a nonexistent Golden Age of fun, and guilt-trips The Readers simultaneously by promising that he, the archetype of good parenting, would never alow his children to be mentally sodomized by video games.

Further down the spiral, there is the thinly concealed plethora of ‘isms’ and phobias in the columns of the Daily Mail. (Ironic imagery of sores in LJ's column) That poor gaggle of victims, The Readers, is protected from absolute trauma only by sparse advertisements, which act as garish interludes between the deviant symphonies of a dissonant orchestra of Fear. And there are the laughable ad hominem arguments, seducing The Readers into adopting the political alignment of the paper – simply because the Millaband brothers do have bog-brush hair, or simply because David Cameron does present himself as something of a class-conscious rah. (Wait a second – if we’re going to start verbally assaulting such types, let’s start at the rotten core itself, and peel our way outwards. But that’s for another time...)

Yet the worst element of such columnists is not necessarily what they write, but the perverse turn of fate which allowed them to inhabit this privileged yet ultimately hollow position in the first place. The veil of meritocracy which conceals the hideous truth of our lives, a brutally nepotistic nightmare, is rarely as frail as that which shrouds the Journalism industry. There is no such thing as a simply perceptive columnist – although there are possibly exceptions, such as Caitlin Moran - simply because it is impossible to become a columnist without having enjoyed the sweet nihilism of celebrity. There are no everyman reporters or skilled, rebellious or visionary journalist working the columns because, according to the columns themselves, people don’t want to read about the subjective experiences of a ‘nobody’. People seem to have forgotten the fact that presidents and paupers alike will all feed the worms at some point in the next hundred years and rot away into complete nothingness, with nothing but a faint scratch of memory on the wall – so who the fuck is supposed to be a somebody in our society?

It all seems to spiral downwards towards – of course – an unwanted and unlikely cultural phenomenon. Something not dissimilar to ‘That Yellow Bastard.’ I’m not alluding to the racist term for an Oriental gentleman here, but that rather odious character from Frank Millers acclaimed comic strip (and blockbuster Hollywood movie of course) Sin City. Check him out. That Yellow Bastard wouldn’t have got to where he was without the help of some well-placed contacts in the family. Potential is irrelevant. And just as That Yellow Bastard is able to abuse his unsuspecting victims due to a position of power which he does not merit, Those Yellow Bastards in the papers are violating our brains with party-ties, fear-mongering and ignorance –all under the guise of a candle-wick celebrity with sequins for eyes.