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Ed Webb

One of those days. - by Mic Wright - 0 views

brokenbottleboy.substack.com/...one-of-those-days

UK Britain media politics analysis opinion fascism migration xenophobia racism

shared by Ed Webb on 08 Mar 23 - No Cached
  • The Labour front bench is stuffed with spreadsheet sadists and it’s not my problem that some people find their brand of managerial authoritarianism more palatable because of politesse.
  • ‘We’ assume it will not and can not ever happen here. It is the same British exceptionalism that leads people to believe that everyone wants to come to Britain as a refugee even as the numbers show that is far from the case. The most effective policy our political class has in deterring asylum seekers and immigrants of all kinds is to continue to make this a miserable place to live: a culture defined by paranoia, cruelty, and greed and utterly unwilling to face up to the darkness in its history and present.
  • If Keir Starmer wins the next election he will scrap the Sunak approach, fall back on camouflage waffle about cracking down on people-smuggling gangs and ensuring new safe routes. And the number of people conning their way to a life in Britain by abusing the asylum system will continue to skyrocket, with all the baleful consequences that implies for our rapidly unravelling society.This line of argument from the right is stupendously disingenuous; numbers have rocketed under the Tories’ brand of cruelty. If you really hate refugees and immigration generally, it’s Starmer’s Labour who you want in power.
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  • The morality of the UK government’s policies towards refugees is treated as an afterthought across almost all of the media
  • In a film on institutional racism that wasn’t shown on British terrestrial television, after clips of politicians including Enoch Powell, Margaret Thatcher, and Harold Wilson all expressing variants of the ‘swamped’ by immigration rhetoric, Ambalavaner Sivanandan — the late novelist and director of the Institute for Race Relations — said:Looked at in terms of the history of race and immigration in this country, it says one thing to me: What Enoch Powell says today, the Conservative Party says tomorrow, and the Labour Party legislates on the day after.
  • With a press and media that want to pretend that we have ideological diversity in politics where there is virtually none, we are living in a one-party state that changes which colour of managerial autocrat fronts it once every decade or so.
  • Is it really so surprising that newspapers that are generally too mimsy to print the word fuck would flee from the word ‘fascism’? Especially when the fruits of this system have been so bountiful to their proprietors.
  • make comparisons to the 1930s; its fascism did not arrive fully formed but crept forward day by day. You can’t keep saying it’s “just one of those days”. Those days add up.
Ed Webb

Burning down a burgled house - by Mic Wright - 0 views

brokenbottleboy.substack.com/...burning-down-a-burgled-house

media politics UK Britain opinion analysis BBC public_broadcasting

shared by Ed Webb on 20 Jan 22 - Cached
  • The BBC was a toddler — not yet 4 years old — when it first fell over in the face of government pressure, during the General Strike of 1926. In fact, it was still the British Broadcasting Company, in the middle of negotiations to become a public corporation, gain its first Royal Charter, and wriggle free from the direct control of the Postmaster-General.
  • The BBC has remained in that state ever since: Neither commandeered nor free; at the mercy of the government in funding negotiations. There was never a golden age, the tarnish was there from the start.
  • Orwell — Eric Blair in his personnel file — ‘toiled’ composing propaganda at the BBC between 1941 and 1943. He wrote in his diary that the atmosphere was “something halfway between a girls’ school and a lunatic asylum,” and penned a critique for Tribune in January 1944 that could be from 2022: People are broadly aware that they don’t like the BBC programmes, that along with some good stuff a lot of muck is broadcast, that the talks are mostly ballyhoo and that no subject of importance ever gets the honesty of discussion that it would get in even the most reactionary newspaper.
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  • the latest in a long line of right-wingers raging about BBC bias that stretches back to the halcyon days of bombing, rationing, and government censorship for which she yearns
  • Priestley made his last Postscripts appearance on 20th October 1940. His dissection of his Conservative critics’ complaints could, like Orwell’s criticisms, come from 2022. In a letter to Harold Laski in December 1940, he wrote:[The Tories are] pretending that everything on their side is non-political and not tendentious, but anything on our side must be barred because it is political and tendentious.
  • The farcical idea that BBC is a nest of Marxist revolutionaries is one the Tory Party and its media outriders push whenever an “enemy within” is required. And the response from liberals, especially extraordinarily well-paid BBC stars, plays into their hands every time. Dan Walker — a presenter on £295,000 a year — tweeting that the BBC costs 43p a day is factual but it’s also easily framed as arrogant and out-of-touch.
  • Pretending not to understand the concepts of mutual benefit and cross-subsidisation is a common affliction among right-wing commentators.
  • Seeing the league of extraordinary arseholes ranged against the BBC makes it easy to take the simple centrist line of rushing to its defence unequivocally. But while the corporation does do many things well — children’s programmes, local news, niche music programming — BBC News has big problems and has had them for many years. Big names have let their viewers, listeners, and colleagues down, time and time again.
  • What centrists and the right have in common is a desire for a public broadcaster that looks and sounds like them. The BBC is a creature of the establishment and the licence fee structure means it is also beholden to the establishment. Its natural state is arguing for the status quo and that’s precisely the tendency that leaves it bureaucratic, slow-moving, and prone to shots from both sides.
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