Gullible travels in the world of lines

I’m quite certain that I’m by no means the only person to have spotted that the next Domesday decision after tapering is the raising of the interest rates from the Dead. And equally, many others I’m sure have noticed the squeals of pain coming from some quarters as both the British and US targets on interest rates v unemployment levels edge closer to being ‘realised’.

It really is a tangled web these gargoyles weave, is it not? Lies about unemployment and prices turn rapidly into élite horror: “OMG, we said things are going well, oh sh*t oh sh*t oh sh*t…now we’re going to have to keep a promise”.

There are moments when the UK’s central banker Mark Carney seems delightfully naive. He piped up briefly earlier this week, and airily mentioned the 7% unemployment rate pledge….at which point eight large former England scrum-halves jumped on him gently. Ever since he’s hedging and weaving more into the yesnomaybe space. “It’s really about overall conditions in the labour market, overall amount of slack in companies…we wouldn’t want to detract from that focus, which really is properly developed both in the market and amongst business people, by unnecessarily focusing too much on just one indicator,” he told a gullible Beebonaut on Thursday. The Wall Street Journal called it ‘downplaying the 7% threshold’, which I thought extremely kind of them under the circumstances.

Poor Mark: he still thinks the folks around him are for real. Also, he has a disturbing habit of sometimes looking genuinely surprised. This is very bad form in central banking circles: it took Bernanke three years in a Tibetan retreat before he finally mastered the art of coming over like something that escaped from Mount Rushmore. Carney doesn’t have that much time.

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The straight face, brass neck and unbelievable nerve are all vital today if one is to transmute the leaden lie into the golden whopper. To catch the whopper of course, you need a strong line – and that’s what spin has done in recent years: convert lies into ‘lines’.

The current George Osborne line on the EU, for example, is that we’re only going to stay in if they start not just having rules, but also occasionally obeying the damned things. Twenty years of unsigned Commission accounts and exceeded debt/gdp ratios tell the bushy-tailed observer that Hell and snowballs are involved here, but that’s OK because the British Chancellor didn’t aim the line at the EUnatics: it was for the consumption of the swivel-eyed voter tendency in Britain – those who like gunboats to be applied to foreigners – and the LibDem/Tory europhiles who still think reform is possible.

The main thing Mr Osborne needs to discipline is how many lines he takes in a given day. In offering such an opinion, however, we are straying into the area of criminal libel, and so I’ll put it another way: George needs to keep an audit of what he said and when, otherwise he too will get tangled in the web….and thus hoist by his own facades. In 2009 (when still in a purely shadowy role) Little Osborne gave a high-profile speech demolishing those who would trade with the human rights crushers in Beijing. This is now returning to haunt Scrooge bigtime: there is, after all, something of a mismatch between the high horse of four years ago, and the lowlife who last October told his Chinese audience, “I don’t want us to try to resist your economic progress, I want Britain to share in it”. In fact, throw in a cheap reactor squire, and the country’s yours.

My favourite experience of the last decade of risible Government denial would without doubt have to be when, five years ago, I’d run a piece about the nature of Gordon Brown’s antidepressants. It went rapidly viral, and so a Downing Street Spinette rang me up to say what utter tosh it was. The fact that she’d bothered to do this only encouraged me of course, and a day later (having been sent what seemed at first sight to be documentary proof of Gordon’s need to emerge from a dark place) I rang the lady back.

“What would you say,” I asked her, “if I told you that I have in front of me a prescription made out to the Prime Minister?” There was a pause.

“Well,” she began, “In that case our line would be….”. (The prescription, by the way, quickly turned out to be a hoax).

Anyway, there I stood this grey, drizzly French morning, at the window watching my drive slowly submerge, and wondering not how I’d get to the shops, but how exactly I’d get back to the house afterwards. The depression brought on by such pondering needed distraction, but so far it’s been a slow news day…as Saturdays often are. The level of desperation involved can be measured by the fact that I was reduced to reading a comment thread at the Daily Telegraph website.

Website threads in the old media have an interesting structure. The first twenty or so comments involve the inevitable syntactical clash between the fundamental nature of the Boss Class pauperising the noble working man on the one hand, and it’s about time somebody got to grips with these malingerers on the other. As the knuckle-draggers join in, increasingly pugilistic threats bounce back and forth, eventually smoothing out into an at times funny series of exchanges between the wannabe impalers in the attic, and the genuinely witty unemployed blokes on the sofa. (It often occurs to me, in fact, that while the lock on the attic door should be checked regularly, the wits on the sofa represent a foolishly closed mine of wasted talent, and should be added to the workforce without delay. Were it up to me, I would have one employed in every office by law).

Between these two thread-segments, there might be a short lapse of concentration, during which period the regulars forget the subject matter entirely in favour of having a chat amongst themselves. There’s a little hello Fred how are you here and some blimey Debbie you’re late today there, perhaps followed by some badinage in f’nar-f’nar mode, and then a short pause. Attila in the Attic sits poised and ready to pounce on the next sign of sanity, but once in a while at this point, scrolling down through the dross reveals a nugget. Sometimes it is of shining insight, at others a black exasperation that forces the mind to stop and consider. Today I found one of the latter, and it was this:

‘Never in any other so called developed nation have I come across people who are more willing to believe the government line without question than the British.’

It’s what one might call a telling comment,even though it seems at first reading to be telling us very little beyond the need to nod at it in agreement. At the same time – while offering nothing at all in the way of a solution to what is, I think, a very real and terrifying syndrome – the statement almost goads the reader into interrogation. One instantly thinks, “How true….I wonder why?”

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For me, the British Establishment gets a ridiculously fair hearing almost every time it comes out with unutterable bollocks. I think there are three reasons that explain this.

First, there was a time when most people had good reason to suppose the statements were genuinely informative if nothing else. Back then when the word was young, ‘official’ announcements were at least genuine in their intent, even if not entirely truthful in content. When Churchill said on BBC Radio in May 1940 that he could offer the British only “blood, toil, tears and sweat”, he was spot-on accurate: apart from broom handles, the odd gas mask and the Home Guard, we were almost completely unarmed.

There was of course a tradition of not just inspiration attached to Winston’s radio broadcasts, but also frankness. Were that May 1940 speech to be made today by David Cameron, it would sound something like this:

“Now let’s be clear about this, I don’t want to pull the wool over your eyes, this is going to be tough. We’re going to have to give some tough orders, and you’re going to have a tough time carrying them out. But we’ll all be in it together, rolling up our sleeves to give our toil, tears and sweat equally on a level field of battle, and very occasionally losing a small amount of blood which will soon be replenished by the NHS we all so much admire and wish to preserve. And then not too long after that – when we’ve had more time to think and consider, get a proper perspective and analyse the numbers to death – we’ll be showing you some positive signs. But we need to be patient, make sacrifices, and pull up our socks. I want a battle plan that achieves a victory to benefits everyone equally, that is sustainable not just for East Sussex, but also South Shields….in the manner to which residents of both places have become equally accustomed”.

To say that doesn’t cut it is to say that Ed Miliband lacks conviction: it’s obvious. And yet, because there remains this deep-seated race memory of when patrician figures in political life told the truth, never buggered little children, and quite possibly didn’t even do Number Twos, the sort of very obviously shifty drivel served up by Cameron is given house-room in a particular mould of British mind. The mind involved in such cases lives in neatly trimmed Southern England, and is kept in the head of those with a tendency to find golf, roses, Max Hastings, Sudoku, actuarial tables, and antiques programmes either matters of huge interest, or activities to which they should aspire. It is the mind of older Middle England, a mind far away from which I’ve tried to be for my entire adult life.

Second, there is that desperate need among the higher end of the post-Thatcher working class and slightly beyond to believe that everything’s alright really because obviously these people know what they’re doing otherwise they wouldn’t be where they are. They say things like, “I like ‘im, ‘e’s a larf an’ ‘e speaks ‘is mind and ‘e’s a safe pair of ‘ands an’ the reason you don’t like ‘im is ‘cos your just jealous” (the blokes) and “Well you know, I watched him on that debate on the telly and it must be terribly difficult to do that and you know he’s got an air about him, his hair’s nice and his wife looks really bright and determined to back him up” (the women).

These judgements are riddled with so many irrelevant criteria and inaccurate perceptions, together they offer an instantly comprehensive explanation as to the success of everyone from Napoleon via Hitler to Nick Clegg and Boris Johnson. The thing that baffles the objective observer, however, is why they seem unable to spot the pulsating weirdness and deranged vacuity of such people: and why, damn it, they never learn from their terrible past misjudgements. The voters who latched onto Thatcher after 1979 veered like prick-seeking barnacles towards Tony Blair after 1995, and have now settled like, so many desperate limpets, upon Boris Johnson as the Chosen One.

But the third and in many ways most nightmare-inducing group are those who have, over two whole generations now since 1975, been unable to recover from the will-sapping, brain-numbing experience of the Comprehensive State education system. It was from Day One – and still is – a system designed with the intellectually average in mind, but paradoxically one in which only the very bright and genetically self-possessed could ever hope to thrive. The intellectually absent yet streetwise thickies at the bottom have always spotted it for the soft billet it is, and opted out almost immediately. A frightening proportion of them arrive and leave British education with the exact same volume of emptiness between their ears.

The ironies involved in the Comprehensive Education System seem to me both darkly amusingly and genuinely tragic at one and the same time. While the Labour Party set out to make it work and the Conservative Party set out to neglect it into failure, it continued to survive for over forty years without being discernibly changed by either of them: it remained tenaciously crap to the very end. And although the Left sought to infiltrate it as a vital politicising medium, it produced a bizarre generation of apathetic yet politically correct kids with almost no interest in real politics whatsoever. Specifically, it produced a mind-boggling, uncritical acceptance of multiculturalism and universal entitlement. (The taxi drivers who went through it are the ones who talk about some things being “a dibokull libtee in terdayz multkultsighetee”).

This dogged achievement by the Comprehensives of a result diametrically opposed to what education is supposed to do was an outcome we are unlikely as a nation ever to exceed or (hopefully) repeat.

Today’s most dysfunctional adult products of the system and its assumptions were described more fully last night. I would repeat that we must get real, and accept that they are a growing, although as yet still a relatively small, minority…and by and large, they don’t vote. But made desperate enough by the robotic systemism of some neoliberal thinkers, they would support. Unlike the first two groups above, they wouldn’t just believe the old toss: they’d smash windows, burn books…in fact do anything so long as they were given the necessary (and well-documented) distractions with which Mammon has fed them pretty much from birth. Armies may march on stomachs, but mobs will torch on drugs….be they booze, crack or telly.

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All this helps explain why many foreigners and other thinking observers see us today as frighteningly gullible. Having mooched about quite a bit during my life (and especially in recent years) I would agree that there is no fool like a British social liberal or economic neoliberal. Neverthe less, other nations are not behind the door when it comes to unfeasible acceptance of piffle.

It is, for instance, very easy to keep Klaus happy as he bowls along the Kurfürstendam of a Saturday afernoon. His outlook is largely based on “Mutti Merkel knows best”. Similarly, while the Prime Minister of Greece is clearly an over-promoted idiot, Greece’s main centres are, trust me, full of fat-headed middle class dupes who think he is all that stands between them and catastrophe. They haven’t yet noticed that the bus went past Catastrophe on its way to Humiliation months ago, but when they do it will be Syriza’s fault, of that you can be sure.

But we of the United Kingdom that has neither unity nor King have somehow created our own super-league of acceptance beneath the all-encompassing response, “Yeh, wotevva”. And yet, it is very hard to say when this easy digestion of outrageous cobblers took hold.

Despite belief in the Churchillian Bulldog of 1940, it led in short order to the 1960s satire boom in humour and the 1968 student scepticism. However, at some point afterwards, the mainstream British electorate stopped knowing what they were at, and started instead picking up turds to better examine what they might be. The objects looked and smelt like turds, but at some stage a willingness to accept that turds might be collectible set in.

I’m clear on why it happened, but not when.

In 1966 Harold Wilson devalued Sterling and went on TV to tell us the Pound in our pockets was still worth the same really, and a still discerning nation laughed as one. When Dick Nixon’s jowls wobbled into action to declare there would be no whitewash at the White House, everyone aged under 55 watching at home mouthed the word “liar” out loud. But in 2011, Obama said unemployment was falling and the economy was returning to normal. And yesterday David Cameron said his team’s statistical analysis proved we were all better off. There wasn’t so much as a muffled giggle or smirk anywhere in the UK. There was only Dan Hannan breezily declaring that America was booming, and if we wanted to join the Yanks, then it was time to get fracking.

There’s a serious thesis to be written about when, somewhere between 1972 and 2011, those with less moral fibre in the thinking kit first began to believe in New Paradigms. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t 1979, because although some people wanted Maggie to plonk the TUC back in its pram, at the same time most of us realised in private what a shrill old ratbag she was. And it definitely wasn’t Harriet Harman talking about paedophilia as “part of the rainbow of sexual experience”, because that was earlier still – and I can’t remember anyone at the time even noticing to be honest.

Trickle down wealth might have been a turning point. I do remember one second after I heard it for the first time thinking, “So why isn’t everyone in the gutter rich?”. And I definitely have clear memories of otherwise perfectly sane people explaining to me why they felt TDW was an absolute truth. Soon afterwards, I recall, horr-hoor blokes at table began saying “There is no such thing as an obscene profit”. I do remember vividly a messy supper party contretemps in Dulwich Village one Friday when I enquired as to whether Swiss Banks and Jewish gold teeth might qualify.

Perhaps it was Weapons of Mass Destruction that marked the passing of our citizenry from being a critical faculty to a kindergarten class of wide-eyed infants. We shall probably never know. What I can however say with certainty is that by mid 2013, the process was complete. For at that moment, British adults outside the asylum walls sat quietly reading as MI6 issued a report saying one of their agents had zipped himself into a holdall and asphyxiated.

The most mystifying thing about the widespread and sudden evaporation of cognitive judgement is also what keeps me going: for some people are as immune to the pandemic as others are powerless to fight it. While I do have one hypothesis (I think We the Doubters simply have more time to read, Google, think and compare through being retired or unemployed) it still doesn’t explain why the golfer atop the Cobham Christmas tree thinks David Cameron is an honest man doing the best he can, and I know he’s an unpleasant dissembling windbag. Cameron that is: the golfer’s merely been hit on the head too many times by flying Titleists.

Anyway, it’s always been a fine line between lies and lines, but today lines are thrown, stick around, and eventually line up on the Truth Team. Even those of us with our arses on the line walk around with a willingness to toe the line, perhaps because we’re in line for a promotion, or in the firing line. But it still behoves we commentators to read between the lines and occasionally get out of line, before everyone at the end of the line skimreads the topline, and signs on the dotted line without thinking too much about where they need to draw the line.

That’s my line, and I’m sticking to it.

Last night at The Slog: The moral maze that is State depopulation