Effective blogging is very rarely about playing to the gallery. The Slog attempts to explain why.
Today is Thursday, a name derived from Thor’s Day. Why Thor had to have the day before Friday remains uncertain, but what I can tell you is that in Norse mythology, he was a hammer-wielding barmpot associated mainly with thunder, and war. In old Hochdeutsch, his name was Donar, from which derives Donner (thunder) and from there (having been multiply invaded by Thor’s admirers) we too got thunder.
As far as I know there was no God Norse or otherwise called Tosh, but it doesn’t really matter because today is just another Toshday: the Chancellor’s Autumn statement is about to be read out in the Chamber of Horrors. By choosing the 5th December as the day to deliver his Autumn statement, in fact, George Osborne is giving us all a signal that he’s absolutely on it.
As usual I will feel obliged to listen to yet more tosh about turning corners and the accelerating economy, while the Other Lot will respond with tosh by displaying a lamentable dearth of either insight or commercial ingenuity.
Every day is Toshday in 2013.
I have long felt that there is a continuum applying to any issue of importance, and it runs more or less like this: a solution, another solution, a debate, the formation of camps, a growing rivalry between camps, growing evidence that no one camp is entirely right, each camp digging its heels in, an absence of new ideas, the rigid intolerance of new ideas, and – finally – tosh. The next stage – dictatorship – doesn’t really count as part of the continuum, because in a dictatorship all philosophical and economic debate stops, art in all forms becomes turgid and didactic, and in place of discussion there is doing what you’re told. Tosh turns into idolatry, some time before which the best bet for all sane citizens is to bugger off while they can.
In the West right now – but especially in the UK – we are in the tertiary stages of blanket Tosh. But while two things above all have facilitated its spread since around 1990 – media owned by mad people, and an internet inhabited by mad people – this is symptomatic, not causal: Tosh is ubiquitously dominant today because the confidence and trust in the State’s institutions (and future) have gone. When that goes, fear of the future arrives – and along with that free thinking and balanced analysis leave. The vast majority of citizens retreat into a tribe closest to their closed-mind view of the world, and analysis declines further. The only thing that increases is the volume of yelling at other tribes. Yelling too is a clear symptom of fear.
To offer some simple examples of this, in British culture at the moment we have pc v spade-calling, Wind v Nuclear, Labour v Tory, Neoliberal v Collectivist, Multicultural v integrational, Climate warmists v denialists, Conspiracy theory v chaos theory, Racism v Islamism, and BBC v Something Else Not Defined. Having delved at various depths into all these issues over the last seven years, I think all of them display two things: incompleteness of analysis, and neither side having all the answers. But whatever you or I think, that isn’t really my point here. For what we have is division and bitterness where there should be empiricism and a growth in understanding. And without those latter elements, the residue comes out as non-stop Tosh.
It is at this point that the dictatorial mentality begins to solidify its position while most of the tribes are busy developing bigger and bigger megaphones. There are myriad signs that this is happening, and they are empirical not imagined: security services clamp down on inconvenient facts from leaks, FOI requests are routinely ignored, immunity from investigation clauses are quietly slipped through half-empty chambers, social issue campaigning is curtailed, suing journalists becomes a cost-free exercise, civil policing becomes politicised, whistle-blowers are criminalised….the list in just the last four months across the EU alone is (at least for a rapidly ageing political scientist brought up in a more intelligently aware society) so clear as to be terrifying. It is not, however, as horrific as observing the citizenry’s apathy in the face of it.
A tendency (in the broader econo-political sense) is moving stealthily into position here in Britain. It is neither plot nor conspiracy, but rather what my friend Anna Raccoon calls “the likelihood that shared interests will behave in a complementary way”. She’s right: a network is not a conspiracy, it’s a collection of minds and ambitions that inevitably keep bumping into each other. Having met and established a shared aim, they may cooperate here and there to variously erase something embarrassing, stop an investigation, campaign for media duality or whatever.
This is what the Levenson Enquiry was formed to examine in the shape of media, political and police overlap….the separation of powers being a vital part of democratic liberty and the Rule of Law. Indeed, the fact that in the end Levenson skirted round the main issue – and instead recommended nuking the blogosphere – tells you pretty clearly just how unseparated those powers are.
But it’s not a conspiracy, just a shared goal. In a way, they do represent simply another tribe, but it’s looser than even that – and the key difference is that they broadcast nothing to give away their true Weltanschauung. Far from wanting (at this stage) bigger megaphones, they work using whispers, secrets, subterfuge, spin, smear, obscure law…and that trademark blank expression meant to signify a calm innocence. The situation in which they most thrive is where a 24/7 megaphone war is yelling out thirty different versions of tosh….for that provides the confusion and distraction within which they can quietly get on with taking over.
There are various professions within this tendency I describe. The security services want to monitor all of us, the ISPs cooperate with them, the internet they control is largely a dishonest, hard-capitalist, scattergun scam, the old media owners buy into it to avoid extinction and take advantage of a more deregulated environment, multinational producers and retailers learn more about their target audiences, banking uses the Net to cut customer service costs and quietly defraud, politicians spot early on how invisible p2p persuasion can occur, civil policemen increasingly apply for access (either legally or illegally) to its intelligence-gathering, and the social networks are there to feed the constant cacophony of banal social intercourse as a break from writing tosh on blogs.
Having morphed from telling people something to selling people anything, the internet is unsurprisingly a vast repository of tosh. But the hidden agenda and the secret surveillance is what ensures that the dictators, as I said earlier, keep on and on discovering just how much they have in common.
I could try to describe in detail what the personality features of the rising tendency are, but we’d be here all day. The nearest thing I’ve yet developed is a sort of ‘shorthand spectrum’ of what such people are about. Broadly, I’d list the colours in the spectrum as control, material greed, power, sociopathy, megalomania, and a perpetual air of hurt insouciance. The two most obvious members of it are, in my view, Boris Johnson and Rebekah Brooks, but further comment than that about these two would be unwise at this juncture.
Last but by no means least, the one thing almost entirely absent from both the tribes and the emergent tendency is humour. The less you tolerate the opposite view, or move your position based on ever-emerging data, the less funny anything seems. Islamists, bankers, ecowarriors and coppers don’t do gags and they don’t watch Have I Got News for You. If you’ve ever watched Marcus Brigstocke on HIGNFY then you’ll have gathered that he’s about as funny as a wastebin, and equally if you’ve ever been subjected to Jim Davidson’s live act then you have my sincere condolences. Agendas aren’t funny: they’re bits of A4 paper that are placed before directors in Board Meetings, and illuminate you about precisely nothing.
It has been alleged that Boris Johnson can be fun and indeed is funny, but this is because the man is a genius: his agenda is so well hidden, he wouldn’t dream of letting any of it creep into his act. When on public display, he does his frightfully witty, ordinary-bloke shtick. In private when cornered, however, there are times when BoJo behaves like Adolf in Der Untergang.
For what it’s worth, it is this deceptive ability to be underestimated that made me first finger Johnson in 2008 as a good candidate to be Britain’s first dictator. I’ve seen nothing to change my mind on this, chiefly because the London Mayor indulges in talking tosh when the money/influence equation is right. In that role he has allegedly tried to head off investigations into Newscorp and Elm House, dissembled about taxi emissions, and spouted megatosh from the Telegraph. I understand why, but again there is no conspiracy in play: Murdoch, Tim Yeo, the Big Tory Beasts and the Barclay twins are all men with stipends and influence on offer, and they are all of one mind. But put those personalities in a room together and you’d be more likely to see the death of several attendees before the birth of a plot.
Variously from time to time in the past I have been cutting about Tosh when it involves an agenda of which I don’t approve and for which – equally important, this – there is little or no empirical data to support it. This inevitably gets one embroiled in personal unpleasantness with a veritable gaggle of tosh-spreaders, ranging from Guido Fawkes, George Galloway, Ed Balls, the entire Camerlot Cabinet and Bob Diamond, through to Harriet Harman, Bojo, Lord McAlpine, Gordon Brown, Andy Coulson, Rebekah Brooks, The Groucho Club, Chris Spivey, Lehman Brothers, Jim Devine, Tim Yeo, Len Wardle, Stephen Hester, and as of yesterday, Mark Williams-Thomas. I’m happy with the list: I am yet to be proved wrong about any of them, and I don’t withdraw any of my observations, accusations or predictions made in the past.
It’s never much fun taking on an icon, but the job of any investigative blogger is not to feed the baying mob. It is to dig up facts, join up dots, and ask questions. A lot of it I have described in the past as ‘informed speculation’, but I have never libelled anyone. Not once. Which is why I’ve never been sued. Libel is the publication of a malicious falsehood likely to damage a person’s standing. You can’t be done for libel by evidentially telling the truth….although give Camerlot time, and I’m confident they’ll get round to it.
It is 9.45 am and I must away to bone up on econo-fiscal tosh detection ready for Grogee Orbnose this afternoon. Meanwhile, keep digging: it is the only way.
The Slog 