Here is the News. In an attempt to hide D-Notice censorship, neocon foreign policies and the unjustified bombing of Brexit, a united front of media owners has spent the last two months talking about Novichok, chlorine gas, anti-Semitism, Home Office racism, Jeremy Corbyn and Amber Rudd. Never in the field of media conflict has so much spin been bowled by so many for the benefit of so few.
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It’s a man’s life being a Spinner in the 21st century. For 300 days a year, you work hard to get bollocks into the media, and then for the remaining 65 you slave day and night to keep the Truth out of the media. But over the last two months in Britain, both modus operandi have done about two years work in two months. It’s a Spin boom readers, and I have no doubt that Phil ‘Snide’ Hammond will find a way to include it in the gdp figures before too long.
The Government kicked off the game of kicking out news on March 12th, when it issued a D-Notice to ban any UK medium from naming the spook who was out for a stroll in Salisbury and suddenly stumbled across two gravely wounded double agents. From an MI5 viewpoint, that’s sort of fair game; but the political reason was that Boris didn’t want his “decent ordinary Bobby doing his duty mercilessly attacked” drivel to be revealed for the, as it were, drivel it was.
As human rights activist Craig Murray pointed out that MI5 had been breaking a lot of arms inside Porton Down’s Room 101 to negotiate an agreed load of old tripe about Novichok, Boris went on a European tour of Ambassador withdrawal encouragement, and used it to rubbish Murray’s claim. The cunning strategy BoJo used was lying his fat head off, while MI5 went the marginally more subtle route of asking suppliant media hacks to smear Murray’s character.
Craig’s role in the tableau so far has been to play a sort of Iceland to global bank scare-mongering: you know the form….the Icelanders put all the bankers in jail but the country didn’t succumb to a plague of boil-carrying locusts, so now we must nuke Iceland. Being a truculent sort of cuss, Mr Murray continued to be proved right, and then committed the cardinal sin of revealing Act III’s denouement while the audience was engrossed in a study of doorknobs and dead pets in Act II.
I wonder if it ever occurs to MI5 that, given they require an army of spinners to put into other words what Boris Johnson says at any moment, wouldn’t it be better all round if they just slapped a D-Notice on him?
Instead, they and other person or persons unknown but almost certainly Alastair Campbell decided that it was time to drive some Truth out by putting some old news back in. It was thus suddenly discovered that Britain’s Hard Left don’t like Jews. Karl Marx was, of course, a Jew, but cognitive dissonance has never held Marxists back. I have befriended Marxists on and off for over half a century, and it never occurred to me that they were anything other than rabidly anti-Semitic.
Jeremy of Galilee the Islington Nazarene has been saying anti-Jewish things for most of that time. He and Ken Livingstone are as one on the issue: as long ago as 2012, Jezzer admired an anti-Semitic mural and Cuddly Ken was suspended from the Party for his endless Julius Streicher impressions. Momentum points out that Jesus was a Jew, but this is a result of their over-exposure to the deadly nerve-agent Propaganchok having blurred the distrinction in their minds between He who died to forgive all our sins, and He who lives to save us all from ourselves.
And so the story grew and grew, and umpteen Labour Blairites came forward to say how often they had suffered abuse at the hands of Corbynistas but never quite had the courage to come forward before now. Things were looking bad for the Islington Messiah.
Behind the scenes, however, media-savvy Labour Luddites were labouring at the spinning wheel to warp some weft in the other direction, and this was how everyone came to notice out of a blue sky that the Home Office had been somewhat over-zealous in its attempts to deport people who shouldn’t be here. Or Theresa May had been. Or Amber Rudd was. Or all three of them.
Tory Spinning-mill owners For Theresa now burnt the midnight oil to blame it all on Amber, while Weavers for Rudd laboured to blame the civil servants. But none of them had a mouth quite so unfeasibly large as David Lammy’s, and he was going all out for resignation or death. Labour loves nothing better than yet more evidence of Institutional Racism, and so Ms Rudd was in a tight corner.
Thus very few people noticed that we were bombing a foreign power having staged a second false chemical attack, or indeed that Real Brexit was being dismantled fish by fish, migrant by migrant, and border by border. Instead, every day they read the media roadsigns that said turn Left to be a Nazi, or Right to be a Boer.
As last week proceeded, the Home Secretary’s noose gradually became tighter. She went from being off-message to on the blink, then on the brink, and then on the brink of going. The media kept saying “the scandal isn’t going away” which is easy to do if you’re working round the clock to keep it in the public domain. The Amber light turned Red last night, and Rudd was a goner.
She will not be missed, but the show isn’t over: having gone from grovelling apologisers to race heroes in a little over a fortnight, Labour now has the original Windrush culprit Theresa May in its sights. Or at least, half of Labour does; the other half is hoping that Jeremy Corbyn’s caravan slows down just long enough for them to get a potshot at their nemesis.
All of which leaves the cheated female 1950s born SPA Reform victims exactly where they were seven years ago: out in the cold. In just one month – effectively, to save its own neck – Corbyn Labour has taken a Cabinet Big Beast scalp as the result of highlighting the still unquantified hardship meted out to some black British people. In seven years of Opposition, it didn’t force the resignation of a single DWP nonentity or Treasury official who chose older women as ‘an easy target’ in exactly the same way as the Home Office decided to dump on the Windrush generation. And as long as Labour prefers media-spun minority bandwagons to righting a wrong done to 3.65 million older women, people like me will observe that the Party is for the few, not the many.
But then, that’s what we wicked non-violent cognitive dissident extremists do. We repeat over and over, “IABATO!”……….It’s all bollocks and that’s official.
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The Slog 