Impunity Redux

It might seem paradoxical, but the vulnerability of MPs highlighted by the murder of David Amess has quickly led to a resurgence in their collective sense of impunity; something that also extends to their co-workers in the media. This has been exhibited not only in the illogical claim that a suitable response to the killing is to abolish social media anonymity, despite this having no bearing on the circumstances of the crime, but also in the bizarre suggestion that online sites like TheyWorkForYou should stop interpreting individual MPs' voting records as this simply provides the public with a stick with which to beat members of Parliament online. Inevitably there have been some, such as Margaret Hodge, who have engaged in an unseemly competition to claim that they have received the most abuse (implying that antisemitism is a greater problem than anti-black racism or Islamophobia), while others, such as Mark Francois, have sought to obscure their own murky history of abuse and invective. All are united in pretending that the smears, lies and insults of the last 6 years, predominantly but not only around Brexit and Corbyn, do not disbar centrist and right-wing politicians and journalists from claiming the moral high ground.

The last decade saw a growing dissatisfaction with MPs and journalists, from the no-winner result of the 2010 general election to the anti-establishment upsurge of 2017. While many in the press were keen to blame social media for this, as if the technology were creating anger and disrespect rather than simply providing a medium for its expression, it's clear that the roots of the turn in public sentiment lie in the preceding decade, before social media took off, notably in the response to the Iraq War and the financial crisis. The 2009 expenses scandal, which provided the tinder for the first wave of public anger with the political class en bloc, as opposed to the more focused protests of 2003 and 2008, was happily fanned by the press and TV, employing rhetorical charges, such as hypocrisy and self-interest, that they would later find offensive when deployed by civilians against them. Ten years later, the 2019 general election suggested a return to normality in the form of a decisive Conservative win on an explicit platform of action, but it is clear that the vote was largely a reiteration of the 2016 instruction, and thus a continuation of the anti-establishment animus, rather than a renewed sense of faith in the integrity of the political class. That such an obviously corrupt individual as Boris Johnson should be the prime beneficiary simply reinforced this.

The Leveson inquiry of 2011-12 was the moment when the politicians and journalists closed ranks, as they suddenly appreciated that the foundations of the politico-media system were under threat. It is illuminating to compare the press outrage at the expenses scandal, which involved trivial sums, with the much more muted reaction to multi-million pound government contracts awarded to under-qualified friends and party donors over the last two years. This wasn't simply an example of the tendency to be more appalled by minor breaches of etiquette than systematic abuses: the small lie versus the big lie or the singular human tragedy versus the statistic of mass murder. World War One generated an outpouring of contempt and loathing for the political class, which lived on rancorously through the 1920s and 30s, in the face of massive losses of life and wartime profiteering. At a time when we have experienced something north of 100,000 unnecessary deaths due to the government's handling of the pandemic and wasted billions of pounds shovelling money to favoured para-state enterprises like Deloitte and Serco, the media interrogation of the Johnson administration has been noticeably tame.

Even more glaring is the mountain of evidence that the current incumbent of Number 10 has routinely treated public money as his own and otherwise relied on funding by Russian oligarchs and other dubious sources. There has been a straight line from the near-death experience of the Leveson inquiry to the recent scenes at the Conservative Party conference of senior BBC staff partying with cabinet ministers who are on record as wanting to "sort out" the corporation. Whatever their tactical differences and contrasting imperatives, they share a strategic purpose: to maintain the politico-media class's monopoly on the interpretation of politics. In this light, the sympathetic coverage of the proposal to reduce visibility over MPs expenses on the spurious grounds that it will improve their safety from attack is illustrative. Equally illustrative is that the politico-media class so quickly moved to leverage the murder of David Amess into a demand that social media be restrained and made more respectable. 

What this shows is that the field of contest in the management of public political discourse has shifted from the traditional media to new media. The old debates about bias and lies, which were current up to and including the 2019 general election, have been replaced by establishment outrage over those parts of the electorate that refuse to be mediated. Phone-hacking, which should always be understood as a manifestation of contempt, has been consigned to the history books. While the new concerns are often framed in terms of the nefarious doings of companies such as Facebook, supposedly encouraging bad online behaviour for the clicks, this is largely to satisfy liberal media outlets that would otherwise be uncomfortable adopting such an obviously pro-establishment and anti-democratic stance. For the rightwing media, this is less of an issue, hence the greater emphasis on public impertinence and challenges to orthodoxy. Much of what we refer to under the rubric of the "culture wars" is really just conservatives revelling in their impunity once more. 

The removal of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party and his replacement by Keir Starmer, a man now clearly dedicated to restoring the pre-2010 status quo, has been central to this development. With no electoral threat from the left, and the possibility of the left's future revival within Labour now receding by the day (one expulsion and rigged candidate selection at a time), the only challenge to the continued dominance of the politico-media cartel comes from civilians on social media. While the far-right is often fingered in respect of racist posts, it is clear that the main target for the ire of politicians and journalists is the left, which is broadly defined as anyone that Starmer would be happy to expel and all points beyond. This has even extended to self-policing by the press, hence the never-ending campaign to deligitimise left media, which now includes trying to blackball anyone in the mainstream media, likes Owen Jones, who appears left-adjacent. On the political front, it has led not only to the suspension of Corbyn but to the almost complete marginalisation of the parliamentary left.

This revived sense of impunity has shaped government policy since the 2019 general election in the most disastrous way, but without exacting a political cost. With the Conservative Party's standing in the polls unaffected by recently announced benefits cuts and tax rises, and with the Labour leadership offering only token resistance as it focuses on purging the party, the Johnson administration has now doubled-down on its laissez-faire approach to public health. The recent Commons report on the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic is a litany of failure, much of which can be directly ascribed to a  dominant attitude of "fatalism" (a polite way of describing contempt). With cases rising and too many people blithely assuming the pandemic is over we are facing the prospect of another grim winter under a government that will delay action as long as possible simply because it knows it can get away with it. Fussy questions will be asked in Parliament and the press will dutifully balance concerns against liberties, but the government will not be held to account. Instead, the people will be blamed for their lack of discipline, their vulgarity and above all their impertinence.