Reflections of a stormy petrel

What I find unbelievable is that eager conservatives such as Damian Thompson should find the publication of Margaret Thatcher's ministerial papers so inspiring. It is true, of course, that the standard of leadership since has been so abysmal, and the media and establishment consensus so revolting, that one is apt to take any demonstration of character as positive in and of itself; but not all character is necessarily good. What these papers reveal was that "that bloody woman" (as the majority of British voters always referred to her, leaving "the iron lady" and other bootlickery to her fans in the Murdoch media) was really what she looked like; that she was the same from top to bottom, and that the substance she was made of was vile. I, like a good 50% of people in Britain at the time, found her personally offensive; these papers reveal that we were right in feeling so, and that the offensive nature of the woman was personal and ever-present. This is the supposed anti-Communist who, on receiving a petition to let 10,000 victims of Communism into Britain, responded that the signatories should be invited to take one of them each into their houses; pub philosophy of the vilest kind, showing that when she said that there is no such thing as society, she meant exactly what she said, neither more, nor less. She could not conceive of any obligations that can and must be taken on collectively rather than individually, and of no duty towards the weaker. For that matter, she did not even conceive of any individual obligations. She did not see any duty to be consistent with her anti-Communism when real victims of real Communists needed your support. This is not only immoral, it is grossly hypocritical. And to make matters worse, the real reason to reject those wretched victims was racial: they were, you see, yellow-skinned, slit-eyed Vietnamese (or gooks, or however her likes would call such inferior breeds). So they could rot in refugee camps in third world countries, or take their chance with the murderous tyranny that had overtaken their country. No bloody wonder that, after seven years of this kind of enlightened social doctrine, the whole country exploded in the phenomenon of Band-Aid; something that, I am willing to bet, she never even began to understand.

Her management principles were all of a piece. On a series of notes complaining about cuts, she wrote "I do not see why we should not be able to do with 500,000 civil servants what we do with 566.000". This, of course, will give a dry orgasm to all those who hate "the state" for its own sake, but in terms of being in charge of an organization that has to deliver certain results, it is not only nonsense, it is poisonous nonsense. Perhaps you may need more than 566,000. Perhas you do, in fact, need less, even less than 500,000. But you have to know what you want to do and how many people are needed to achieve it. She never even asks. She pulls a number out of thin air and demands that it should be kow-towed to as sacred. This kind of invention, the idea (so to call it!) that three men can always do the work of four, and that the less people you employ the better, is right out of the book of the idiot manager, the pseud with no notion of his (in that case, her) job and no thought in his (her) brain beyond cutting costs. It places management in a position of enmity to their own employees, and makes efficiency a punishment and the beginning to further punishment. It is, in short, the summary of everything that is wrong with current business practices.

There is nothing suprising about the fact that this racist, narrow-minded, destructive near-sociopath, who made selfishness into a principle, was also a social libertine of the worst sort. She never saw an abortion she did not like, and took with glee the support of the pornographer Rupert Murdoch and of his intelligence-destroying, crotch-reaching, monopoly-seeking The Sun - a newspaper whose long-term influence is visible in everything about the desolate and despicable lifestyle of chavs and ladettes who grew up in its shadow. Its editor Larry Lamb had easier access to her than her own ministers; something that makes Tony Blair's respect of the Daily Mail look positively constructive and enlightened by comparison. The very notion that someone like that should be in charge of a party that called itself conservative showed that, in many minds, Toryism had been reduced to merely monetary value, to the brute consideration of everything in terms of what it costs. It was a destructive age, and we have not yet recovered from its bewildering and dazed effect; nor from its brutalization.

Look at the British newspaper market and tell me that it in any way reflects the real taste and desires of the British public. Given a wholly free choice, would sixty million Britons limit themselves to less than a dozen newspapers? I doubt it. Would they flock with great enthusiasm to The Sun and The Daily Mirror as their favoured source of news – or what passes for news? Hardly. Even a considerable amount of their own readers treat these newspapers with contempt, or at least with deserved mistrust and profound irony.

The truth is that the current situation of the newspaper market has been the result of a long evolution in which very little has to do with the public’s demand. If demand were the sole factor in newspaper sales, there would be a great deal more diversity at the national level, and rather smaller press empires. What happened is, roughly speaking, this. The invention of the rotary press allowed people who invested heavily in machinery and specialist labour to produce enormous amounts of newspapers at a low unit price. The low unit price is already a knock on the head of smaller local entities, which do not have the use of huge and expensive printing machinery at discount bulk rates – if they have it at all. Now this, in itself, does not necessarily have any effect on demand. The reader of the Tinytown Plain Dealer is not motivated to move to the Monster London Daily Yammerer only because the Yammerer costs him a farthing or two less. At the very least, one would have to accept that the Yammerer has better writers and more interesting features, which is not necessarily the case. But the distributor is. The distributor finds it much more cost-effective to deliver millions of copies of one Yammerer issue than to have to slave to distribute a few hundred or a few thousand copies each of hundreds of little local versions of the Plain Dealer. The distributor either materially favours the Yammerer - which compounds the price advantage it already has over local competitors – or refuses outright to take small newspapers any more.

Then there is advertising. Newspapers have always carried advertising, indeed, in the English-speaking world, they were born as vehicles for advertising. But the large capitalist who has a large advertising budget and wishes to reach a large part of the nation will naturally ignore the Plain Dealer and favour the Yammerer, or one of its few monster London rivals. And this further separates the results of the newspaper market from anything that can properly be described as public demand. The main source of income for newspapers, let alone other media, are not at all the public they claim to serve, but the advertisers. And the advertisers will spread their cash around according to their needs, obviously – not only for national advertising, but for specific demographics; which means that a newspaper that serves a group more likely to spend where a given advertiser is selling, is more likely to receive a juicy advertising contract from that advertiser, than another newspaper that may actually have more circulation but less access to certain specific groups. That is why newspapers in England divide into two groups: broadsheets (although size is no longer what they are judged by), which sell less but serve the more affluent classes; and tabloids – cheap, not very cheerful, vulgar, selling by the millions, taking ads as vulgar and tacky as they are themselves, and producing colossal streams of revenue.

By this time, the Tinytown Plain Dealer has either given up the ghost or reduced itself to a merely local small-ads-and-a-few-local-news-stories vehicle, usually owned by a press empire led by some London Yammerer. The reader of the Plain Dealer, who has developed a habit of daily throwaway reading, moves on, according to taste, either to the Polite Yammerer or to the Tabloid Yammerer; not, mind you, because that is his choice, but because that is the only source of news the market will allow.

The Murdoch press is the extreme, excremental result of this process. Coming late to the party, they penetrate the market by aggressive selling based on sex and violence, curiously associated with a vulgar right-wing populism wearing the trappings of conservatism even as they normalize a kind of daily discourse that would have been unimaginable two generations ago. The importance of the Murdoch pseudo-conservatism and populism lies in lulling the conscience of the reader asleep, reassuring him that the screeching vulgarity that he purchases every day is in fact in some way not a denial of the solid old virtues that he still wishes to be bound to. The Murdoch press offer their readers a promise to have one’s cake of naked girls and sex stories, and eat it to still feel conservative and grounded. How conservative is in fact a society fed on Murdoch pap may be seen by the British abortion, underage pregnancy, divorce and cohabitation statistics.

It seems to me obvious that such an enterprise could not succeed from scratch, in a society that had not become used to an unnatural pattern of media ownership and distribution over generations – one in which the whole discourse of the nation passes through the medium – exactly! – of a few newssheets owned by a couple of dozen people. In a market responding solely, or even mainly, to reader demand, such a product as The Sun would have its place, as pornography always has; but it would not gain centre stage, because it would not be able to use its brutal methods to occupy a large space already cleared and occupied by earlier Yammerers. If it had to compete with a hundred thousand little local news sources, each with its own affectionate public, it would sell maybe a tenth of what it does. But where the market has already been flattened into a nationwide muchness by previous Yammerers, the lower-end of which had already seriously made use of vulgarity and sex as selling tools, the Murdoch tabloid need do no more than use those same means with greater determination and consistency. In the wholly artificial conditions of the English tabloid market, Murdoch was the right man, at the right time, with the right methods. So, of course, was Attila.

I do not think there is one observer of British things in the last forty years who would not agree that Murdoch has been a thoroughly malignant influence. In a press already vulgarized, he has pushed the level further down than it ever had gone before. He has made people used to vulgarity; he has entered families and been the regular reading of children. The next generation has grown up fed on him. The results are visible.