Micronews

Earlier this year Bozo Johnson's communications chief, Guto Harri, threatened to unleash a newspaper vendetta against the BBC in retaliation for its 'biased' coverage. The examples listed in the email are bizarre in their microscopic focus. Don't bore yourself unravelling the logic behind this, there is none, except that the Tories are using the current political juncture not to govern judciously and fairly in difficult times but to drastically gerrymander the terms of politics for the foreseeable future. If the Mayor of London is allowed to micromanage his (or her) coverage in supposedly independent mass media, we are living in a truly sick society.

But there's more, and it's more interesting. How can this be a plausible threat, for the Mayor of London to use the right-wing press to bring down the British Broadcasting Corporation? Have you been following the Leveson inquiry? This week's theme of investigation is the links between the political and media elite: it should be revealing (Tony Blair was today's star witness, according to him phone calls to Rupert Murdoch in the run up to the Iraq war were "nothing odd").

And finally, if you need any more evidence, just how thick these theives are, Guto Harri is now the communications director for News International.

That time again...

The results of this week's BBC Question Time Bullshit Bingo, as curated by Keith Watermelon (remember this week was a Triple NHS rollover):

• The phrase "irresponsible strikes..."
• Blatant racism from one or more of the panel.
• Pretending everyone on housing benefit is unemployed.
• "The mess left by the last Labour government..."
• "Wealth creators" as synonym for employers.

How did you do?

Bourgeois adjudicator finds bourgeois advocate not guilty of anything - shock

So why are we circling round this story like a dog round some tasty vomit? Here's a clue.

Jeremy Clarkson prompted more than 30,000 complaints when he said on BBC1's The One Show that striking public sector workers should be shot. But media regulator Ofcom has cleared the programme of breaching broadcasting regulations, saying viewers should be familiar with the Top Gear presenter's "provocative and outspoken nature".

Yes, folks, you could have expected Jeremy Clarkson to say something disgusting and right-wing about striking trade unionists, just as much as you'd expect the broadcasting establishment and press to back him to the hilt... but that's missing the point. Why should we expect it? Why should people have to put up with it? Jeremy Clarkson is a symptom, albeit a prominent symptom, of the coarsening of public life. Thanks to people like him public debate has become ever more scabrous and deceitful (e.g. Clarkson, in between calling for ironic death-squads, had the gall to describe public sector pensions as "gold-plated"... last year Clarkson earned more than £2 million).

What is going to be done about this decline in public debate? Clarkson certainly hasn't given pause for thought... why would he? We need to teach the upper class yahoos who rule us some manners... more strikes more frequently would help.

But there is another dimension to this. Jeremy Clarkson has provocative and outspoken views... really? So what? I have provocative and outspoken views. Many, many people have provocative and outspoken views. Why does a supporter of the hard-right English Democrats get a free pass when, for example, a Labour party councillor is suspended for liking rambunctious facebook statements regarding Margaret Thatcher and the IRA...? A rough example, but you get the picture.

In this world coarseness, prejudice and abuse is allowed, so long as its directed downwards.

You pay his wages - he advocates your murder.

And in the topsy-turvy Land of Chocolate most right-wingers inhabit that's fair exchange no robbery. If Top Gear is Britain's cultural expression of fascism I suppose we have to comfort ourselves it's ironic fascism (it's all just a joke you see, can't you take murder fantasies with a pinch of salt?). If Clarkson and co get the upper hand we'll have ironic jackboots, kitsch swastikas and self-reflexive zyklon B.

[Extra note] The point about Jeremy Clarkson's statement is not that it shows him to be a violent minded idiot, there are plenty of those in the world. Clarkson and his Top Gear cohort consistently push aggressive, bigoted language from a public platform into everyday life, acclimatising people to violence. Where does it all end? One example is Anders Breivik, the Utoya mass murderer, who was inspired and encouraged to do what he did by over a decade of bigoted mainstream language and attitude directed against multiculuralism and immigration in general, muslims in particular. Amongst other things Breivik was a Clarkson fan.


It's a small thing in the long run but you can make your complaint here.

The weird world of nazis

Or it's really is a mad, mad, mad, mad reich... Last night Panorama broadcast another show about the British Nazi Party. It was generally instructive; professional fraud, amateur kidnapping, lies and general nastiness (what, no solidarity among the master race?). The climactic scene was fittingly menacing and bizarre. The reporter managed to secure a meeting to put various accusations to Nick Griffin. He was led a merry dance round various carparks of Greater Leicester by BNP security men until they reached a hotel. Once inside their furher read out a brief, whacky, paranoid statement in front of some cameras before hot-footing, leaving his goons to surround and intimidate the reporter and his crew.

There was only one problem, the documentary deliberately left aside the issue of racism and fascism. There is no apart-from-the-violent-racism with the BNP. You cannot interview loonies like Mark Collett (Mark "AIDS is a friendly disease because blacks, drug users and gays have it" Collett) like they're just members of the public... Unless, of course, you're a BBC reporter.