Last weekend, I stood on a remote Derbyshire moor with my flask and surveyed the romantic remnants of a once-flourishing society that faded out, forgotten, 5,000 years ago. Civilisations hang by threads and can collapse, as Hemingway said, “gradually and then suddenly”. Watching the Conservatives and their media allies dissolve objective notions of truth before my eyes daily these last two weeks I wonder if the Great Britain we loved is entering the “suddenly” phase.
Paul Marshall, the £680m financier and father of Mumford & Sons’ banjo-playing Jordan Peterson fan Winston Marshall, funds the libertarian-lite wankstains’ website Unherd, where Nick Cave is finally able to speak without fear of censure by the wokerati. And Marshall Sr also backs the inexplicably unregulated conspiracy-theory-and-saloon-bar-opinion funnel GB News. But Marshall, it transpires, has been sharing unambiguously, and now mysteriously disappeared, Islamophobic material online, like your shit Christmas-dinner uncle but with his own multimillion-pound media propaganda platform. Yes, Uncle Paul. Allah wants British people to be replaced. Yes, Uncle Paul. Winston is doing very well on the banjo at school. More sprouts?
It’s hard to imagine the Daily Telegraph, Britain’s worst newspaper, becoming even more rightwing, and even less trustworthy, but Marshall plans to buy it and then it will become a mere tissue of Tufton Street talking points. On Marshall’s GB News, rightwing politicians present rightwing talkshows where they interview rightwing politicians to promote rightwing policies, while Ofcom looks the other way like bent cops in The Sopranos. If you work for Ofcom, what is the point of your life exactly? Why don’t you go and work for the Environment Agency, where your experience of failing to deal with Paul Marshall will surely be valuable in ensuring the ongoing flow of raw sewage into our rivers? We need broadcasters and newspapers that will hold lies to account, not propagate them, or democracy dies.
Last month, Conservative party social media accounts selectively clipped news footage to make the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, appear antisemitic, using a mid-sentence stumble he immediately corrected. On Times Radio, the Tory party chair, Richard Holden, defended the Conservatives’ circulation of the fake footage, largely unchallenged in my opinion by the accommodating presenter, Calum Macdonald. The important thing, apparently, was not whether the video of Khan was real or not. What mattered was what it told us about Khan. I used to tell a long, false, but plausible story on stage about David Cameron making me eat his vomit when I was a student. The punchline was that it didn’t matter if the story was true, because what it told us about David Cameron was true. An absurd, self-parodic joke of 15 years ago is now an actual Tory attack strategy.
Eight days later, the GB News presenter, former Tory Party deputy chair, and Ashfield MP Lee Anderson appeared on Paul Marshall’s GB News. He was being interviewed in his capacity as a Tory MP by a GB News presenter, rather than interviewing another Tory MP in his own capacity as a Tory MP GB News presenter. Speaking of the London mayor, Anderson said Islamists had got control of “a very cowardly Khan” who was, among other things, letting down the Jewish population. Anderson soon had the whip taken away from him, technically for failing to apologise, but essentially for speaking ill of someone his own party had tried to smear in a similar fashion by using edited footage just over a week earlier.
Throughout the week it became clear that Tory MPs had been briefed that Anderson’s comments were serious enough to be condemned, but that they were not to alienate potential voters from the valuable racist and Islamophobic communities by condemning the comments as racist or Islamophobic. In Wednesday’s PMQs, Keir Starmer, by criticising the Conservatives’ relationship with Nigel Farage, made it clear he was finally happy to let those same voters swing to Reform plc, where the red wall referendum cannon-fodder whose votes holed Britain below the waterline for a generation can be farmed like pigs for political power by Richard Tice.
Someday, the communique advising all Tory MPs to just use the word “wrong” over and over again all week in respect of Anderson’s comments, without ever defining what “wrong” means, will come to light. Michael Tomlinson, who is the Tory MP for both Mid Dorset and North Poole simultaneously, used the word “wrong” seven times, without defining it, before being cut off by the normally compliant Nick Ferrari on LBC. On Monday, the Tory Forest of Dean MP Mark Harper told Sky’s Kay Burley that Anderson’s comments were “wrong” 10 times, but refused her repeated invitations to clarify. On Wednesday, Croydon South’s disposable Tory MP Chris Philp told her Anderson’s undefinable comments were abstractly wrong three times. When discourse is this degraded, democracy is, suddenly, entering the palliative stage.
Last weekend, a helpful farmer pointed me in the direction of the Brand End Stones, said I was welcome to walk across his land on what appeared to be a Roman road, and confessed that the smaller of the two monoliths was now considerably shorter, having been kicked by a horse. The pair were still impressive, in their imperious isolation, a white mist billowing up from the Dove Valley beyond. The farmer pointed out another stone on the horizon, undocumented by archaeologists, with which he said they aligned, but when I looked for it later I was unable to find it. He asked me what the stones were for exactly. I said no one really knew. No records remain. Down in the valley, he said, there were ancient earthworks, but they had been rendered unrecognisable by quad-bike damage. I expect these Neolithic stargazers thought their way of life would last for ever. Then maybe someone started lying about stuff. And things deteriorated rapidly.
Stewart Lee’s Basic Lee is at Plymouth Theatre Royal 3 March, Truro Hall For Cornwall 4 March, Darlington Hippodrome 16 March and Portsmouth Kings theatre 21 March; see more dates here
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