by
cassandra05
@ 05/05/08 - 20:28:54
London’s election results don’t inspire a great deal of hope for the future of democracy. Along with an unapologetic casual racist for mayor, we now have a fascist on the Assembly. That means just over one-in-twenty Assembly voters, or 130,000 people according to the BBC, cast their ballot for the BNP. Nor are the two entirely unconnected: if most BNP voters (constituting around 2.84% in the Mayoral election) did as their leadership suggested and cast their second-preference vote for Boris Johnson, they are likely to have contributed just over half of his “top-up” votes. Some of the fascist imagery coming out of the Tory camp, indeed, has been quite alarming. Notwithstanding Johnson’s contrast between the “skinny and dark” Iraqis and their American overlords – resembling “a master race from outer space” – according to the Guardian, a Conservative shadow minister jubilantly compared Johnson’s inching to victory to the fascist march on Rome of 1922. This “lighthearted reference”, we are told, “gave a taste of the high Tory spirits”. It’s certainly the image that springs to my mind when in celebrating mood.
In addition, the “new” Conservative party have continued to display their characteristic concern for Latin American democracy, their representative at a recent hustings I attended describing Ken Livingstone’s meeting with a “Venezuelan dictator” (if you failed to notice such a meeting, that’s because it didn’t happen: Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez has been repeatedly elected in an extraordinary sequence of free and fair elections, despite the best efforts of the business-led, US-supported opposition to sabotage his government, on one occasion by force).
Surely most alarming, though, has been the extremely aggressive pro-Johnson campaign on the part of that bastion of fair and honest reporting, the London Evening Standard, led above all by Andrew Gilligan. As Gilligan openly admits, “[t]he Standard helped set the agenda in this election” – not only as the single paid-for London paper, indeed, but since it “could put around 500 billboards on London streets every day” promoting its message. According to one Professor Adrian Monck, cited in the Guardian: “In a city with just one newspaper, the fact it backs one candidate so wholeheartedly feels odd, it feels partisan.” It’s through this kind of insightful commentary, reader, that one becomes head of journalism and publishing at City University. More plausibly, as the Compass group conclude (even if they are far too quick to applaud Ken Livingstone), the Standard has been “used day in and day out as a battering ram, not just against Ken Livingstone, but against the ideals of more democratic, egalitarian and sustainable politics. This is not the freedom and independence of the press but the disfigurement of the fourth estate into a blatant propaganda machine for the rich and powerful”.
The tangle of vested interests involved in this whole affair is actually quite startling: the Standard is owned by Associated Newspapers, whose “contract to supply London underground stations with its free Metro newspaper will run out” in 2010. “The contract’s renewal is a decision for Transport for London, whose chairman the mayor appoints. Metro has proved a success for Associated and it is determined to defend it.” Gilligan, moreover, is a far-from-independent voice, having been “instantly hired” by Boris Johnson, then editing the Spectator, following his ouster from the BBC – which certainly helps account for his willingness to do the Tories’ work for them, smearing Johnson’s opponents and writing risible pseudo-scientific bollocks in his defence. In an attempt to defend his own record, published in the Independent today, Gilligan refers to his success in gaining “the top prize in newspaper journalism” – while failing to recall who it was that actually delivered this prize: the leader of the Conservative Party.
The Standard’s campaign to sink what little remains of the Labour left in London has been pretty extraordinary, then, but in many ways is simply a manifestation not only of newspapers’ domination by powerful vested interests, but the fact that the media and political class are for the most part so close there’s barely a dividing line between them. Overall, the result among the public seems to be a pattern of widespread confusion, delusion, largely in accord with the usual dominant interests, or simple ignorance – which is presumably how we end up in this mess. One example I encountered in London was people’s sheer lack of understanding of how the voting mechanism worked. Two friends intended to cast first-preference votes for Livingstone, second-preference for Sian Berry; one woman I met on the day after the election had voted in precisely this way, selecting Ken first, Lindsey German second. In all instances, these second-preference votes would simply have been wasted. What’s more, if anything these examples most likely under-represent the true level of this failure. I largely mix with students – MA students in fact – whom one would expect to enjoy a level of education a good deal higher than most. If even they don’t understand the voting mechanism, how far do the rest of the population? And if they don’t understand even the straightforward process of how to vote, how do they fare in mustering the necessary information to decide who to vote for?
The implications of the last question are actually rather important. There’s an illuminating case study, for instance, from a recent report by researchers from London, Media Consumption and Public Engagement, which recorded and tracked the media consumption habits of a sample of the public through diaries between February and July 2004. One of the diarists, Samantha, “a beautician living in a run-down part of a southern English city” demonstrates an intense level of concern about her inadequate level of understanding, “commented frequently that she wished she knew more about current events” and is “acutely aware of the limits to the information that she and the general public had available to them”. But “[g]iven her hectic schedule [working up to sixty hours a week], Samantha’s media consumption was understandably aimed at relaxation.” As she writes in her diary:
“we don’t seem to be … aware of everything we need, I don’t think the message is put across. I think we’re sometimes fed what people what you to hear, what people want you to see”;
“why should I have all these unanswered questions, I live in this country and what Tony Blair decides to do does affect me so therefore I should have the information”.
Similarly, the “discussion in her salon provided a context for thinking about public issues, as did media, but insufficient guidance (‘we all seem to know a little bit … but not enough’).” Later on, “[t]owards the end of the diary period her commentary became intense and concerned, even if disturbingly lacking in secure information”. As Samantha recorded during this period:
“Ah, voting week is drawing closer and I still don’t know who to vote for. Very busy at work, so not much time to research therefore relying on TV and radio. I have seen a few broadcasts for the British National Party and quite liked the sound of them, it was simple and got the message across quickly, No to the Euro, No to European government and what a mess the current government have made. All sounds good to me.”
As the authors of the study suggest, the media have a clear agenda-setting effect on the most prominent issues for these diarists, which would seem to include Samantha herself. As she puts it, “[public issues are] just the general day to day, what’s going [on], anything in the world from … the Spanish … bombing to celebrities”. Both her limited access to relevant information and her tapping into (at least some of) the most prominent issues in the media seem to have combined to send Samantha off in an “unpredictable political direction”, quite possibly resulting in support for the BNP.
While it’s often tempting, as Milan Rai has written, to sink into a comfortable elitism at these moments, bemoaning the idiocy of the general public (“Sun-readers” and all), it’s surely an impulse that needs to be resisted. London’s elections no more represent a free and rational choice than would continuing to drink from a water supply that had, unbeknownst to you, been poisoned. Information is integral to the capacity to choose – if the necessary information isn’t there, the choice is unlikely to be meaningful. As the example of Samantha illustrates, ordinary people often demonstrate an acute concern at the lack of much-needed information available to them: it is surely this lack above all which produces such disturbing results.
