In a few weeks, here in the UK, we will be voting for our representatives in the House of Commons. It is seriously important for us to make sure we know what we are voting for.
I don’t ever remember a time when we were in such a dreadful state, politically. I was a child through the sixties, a teen through the seventies, a young adult through the eighties, and I was well aware of current affairs from an early age. There were some very strong conflicts between opposing points of view, but I always felt that the majority of people wanted fairness and decency, even if they had to riot to get it. I didn’t expect them to cheat. At the very least, I believed they wanted honesty. This no longer seems to be the case. Now, we are seeing smear campaigns and misrepresentations on a scale that I used to think belonged only to propagandising authoritarian regimes. Politicians are shifting their positions weekly, daily, even hourly, then denying they had ever said what we had witnessed them saying earlier. Political parties, newspapers and other media are doctoring film clips and photographs, as well as misrepresenting themselves on social media, to give an impression that is the opposite of what really happened. These tricks do not belong in a modern Western representative democracy. They are the tools of totalitarianism.
I see a pattern here. We are being exposed to more and more information without having the means to decide what is true or accurate, and what is false or misrepresentation. Trump, who has said he admires Kim Jong Un, as well as Putin, has contributed greatly to this , by repeatedly bleating “Fake News!” Johnson has done it by using his “dead cat” theory. Throw a dead cat on the table, and it will become the only subject of conversation, distracting everyone from what you don’t want them to think or talk about. Farage simply makes false claims, and snorts with derisive sub-laughter, low-chuckling at any dissent. The right wing of the Labour party are slinging sexist and anti-Semite mud at Corbyn. The news media misrepresent Labour whenever they can, and avoid reporting on Corbyn’s activities unless it is to belittle him. The last Speaker, John Bercow, was accused of bullying and favouritism. It seems to me, though, that many people can’t get enough of this deceit. For example, it has been made clear in government and EU documents that the UK has always had sovereignty, and that that sovereignty was never in any danger, but people still want to believe Farage when he lies that our national sovereignty is under threat, that the EU makes our laws, and controls our finances, all of which statements are simply untrue. Why? Why do they want to be taken in? It is as though they want to be deceived. They want to believe in problems that don’t exist. The trouble is that the solutions being offered to them are very real.
Communications theory describes the signal to noise ratio. The signal is the information that you want to receive, but noise masks it. The more noise there is, the harder it is to receive the signal. There are two types of noise: one is random noise, which has no discernable pattern, like the hiss of an old amplifier. It isn’t so difficult to remove that noise, and so see what the signal contains. The other type of noise comprises irrelevant signals. These may contain either information that is true, but nothing to do with the signal you are looking for, or simply be untrue. Being able to work out what is relevant or not is a useful skill, and allows us to choose the pertinent signal. However, it does not help us when the noise is made up of lies, especially if those lies are built on statements that are very relevant to the signal we are interested in.
Johnson has mastered the generation both of random noise and irrelevancies. They are distracting, and annoying, but ultimately, we can identify his “dead cats,” and see where they are being thrown. The problem for us (and this is Johnson’s intention) is that he throws out so many of them that we don’t have time to get to the truth. Further, both Johnson and Farage have become skilled at presenting relevant untruths. This means we have to do some work to find out whether what they are saying is true or false, and means once again that we waste time checking statements rather than looking at the truth.
On the other hand, if we don’t do the work, we just swallow the lies. These media manipulators know most of us neither have the time nor inclination to check the facts, or analyse the arguments, and they take advantage of that. It is also what has happened with the smearing of Corbyn and the Labour party. We tend to say that there’s no smoke without fire, and mistake the noise for signal. But what I want to know is why is there so much noise being aimed at the Labour party’s leadership? Labour itself still seems to me to be oddly interested in attacking its own. Surely it should be showing up the failings of the Conservative party?. Why is this? Laying the blame on Neo-Blairites was one explanation, but it simply stoked the fires of division, and made worse Labour’s difficulties in becoming a united force. That divide became very heated and is still splitting the party. Who gains from that split? The Tories, yes as a party, but who gains from Tory ascendancy? Who stands to gain from Brexit?
I am wondering now whether Brexit is Johnson’s biggest dead cat of all. While so many people are focused only on how or even whether the UK will split from the EU, there is the possibility that we won’t take notice of how the parties want to deal with other aspects of governing our nation. What can we do? What could be done? The only thing that we really can do is to look closely at the manifestos of each party, if they have one. If they don’t, then really we should just ignore them. You shouldn’t vote for a party who do not make their intentions clear to the public.
Think about state involvement in infrastructure and services. Should we allow these matters to be controlled solely by the market, where the only driving force is the profit motive? Or do we want to balance financial considerations with responsibility to the people? Should communications, power, education, water, health, law and order, defence and international relations be run solely on a business model? Is trade the only way nations relate to each other? Or should we recognise the duty of government to control, in our own country, the influence of the self-interest of global business corporations? Leave the financial sector to regulate itself? Or apply to it the rule of law rather than the market? Look after and help the weakest and least able in our society? Or let them go to the wall, because they are simply a drain on the rest of us: “useless eaters”?
Decide what kind of country, society, what kind of world you want to live in. Do you want political leaders who are neither interested in, nor care about, poorer people, as Dominic Cummings said about the Conservative Party. Or do you want single issue chancers who are only interested in furthering their own interests? Do you even care what those interests are? I do. I want to know why is there a concerted effort from all quarters to belittle and rubbish Corbyn, and McDonnell? Why are they being smeared as “extremists” and “far left” when really they are just left of centre old Labour? Who is it that wants us to see them that way? Who benefits from the UK having more inequality, less state involvement, less taxation on business and high wealth, as well as being separated from its biggest trading partnership?
What are the answers to these questions?
I do not know. I can speculate, but then I could be wrong. What I do not believe I am wrong about is in thinking that the Labour party is the only current hope for a turnaround in this nation’s fortunes. And when I say “fortunes,” I do not only mean financial hoards. I mean our well-being; our sense of self worth, self belief, self esteem. Farage and Johnson’s dead cat of Brexit has undermined our belief in our own sovereignty, and our own national unity, as well as dividing the nation over something that didn’t even hold our interest until three and a half years ago. Since then, we have also seen conspiracy theories about the EU tax haven laws, and worries about what will happen to the NHS. Fears about being forced to adopt American standards for food, thus allowing chlorinated chicken, hormone fed beef, and genetically modified who-knows-what. There are concerns about human rights regulations, as well as what effect our membership of the EU has on the possibility of renationalising certain industries and services.
Let’s say we do get this current withdrawal agreement through parliament. Then we will have to begin all the trade agreements that will need to be renegotiated not only with the EU, but all the other nations and blocs that we want to do any kind of business with. That will take some time. “Get Brexit done” should be recast as “Get Brexit started,” because we have no idea how long it will take to get finished, nor what the effect on the economy will be during that time. If this does all go ahead, we should remember that the last time there was a financial crisis, austerity was brought in to protect the banks that perpetrated it. In other words, the government took public money and gave it to private companies, so they would not have to go bankrupt. I do not believe another Tory government would hesitate to do the same and worse if the fiasco of Brexit were to destroy even more of our economy than it already has done. Just as Robert Maxwell raided his employees’ pension pot to keep himself in riches, the Tories are perfectly happy to raid the nation’s coffers to keep themselves and their backers in a style to which the rest of us will never become accustomed. There are some proper reasons to worry about Project Fear, but we need to look past Brexit, and focus on rebuilding a political system that is truly “for the many, not the few.”