Games with Shadows

by Neal Ascherson

  Thirdly, there is no real sign of a powerful revival in the Nationalist vote. In the regional elections of May, the SNP achieved some recovery but certainly did not collect anything like that 30 per cent who say that they agree with the SNP’s central policy: independence. The only real change on the party scene is the catastrophic defection from the Scottish Tories as the Government hits its own class constituency with one blunder after another, from freezing improvement grants to mishandling education to enormous rate increases. They have 21 seats out of 72, and – if nothing changes – would be lucky to keep 15 at the next election.

  If Labour win the election and govern by themselves or with the Alliance, there will, I suppose, be an Assembly in Edinburgh. I suppose … but at Westminster there is a wily, Druidic attachment to archaic shrines like the omnipotence of Parliament which may have ways to frustrate it. If the Tories win, then we just have one more note in the crescendo of recent years – the Scots voting with increasing desperation and solidity against Conservatism and being rewarded with another set of Tory Ministers applying London Tory policies from the Scottish Office.

  Another country which had reached this point would be about to boil over. Government by a Scottish Whitehall with no Scottish Westminster to hold democratic control; administration by a party with no popular mandate whose policies are detested; one elector in three prepared to say, even casually, that Scotland should secede from the United Kingdom … but where is the passion that should by now be making the pot bubble?

  The absence of that passion is explained by the most terrible of all the results of Mrs Thatcher’s seven years: the loss of confidence in politics itself. The power of the State grows, and its coercive might; at the same time, government gives up its task of redistributing wealth. We have sunk so far that few believe that elected governments, this party or that, can do much about the curse of mass unemployment or change the face of a decaying city.

  Ten years ago, the nerve of the self-government movement in Scotland was the hope for change: our Parliament, our policies. Now, I believe these poll results with their queer lack of resonance express something different: formless bitterness, despair, the pity and fear of Scottish people for their own country. Iphigenia still makes her lonely sacrifices by the sea, but the warriors with whom she can escape have not yet come to Tauris.

  [1986

  Coals in the Bath, Sun on the Brain

  ‘The more national newspapers there are, the more difficult it is to tell them apart,’ wrote Paul Foot in a recent New Statesman. He concluded that, so far, more seemed to mean worse – ‘an apparently irresistible spiral of declining standards.’ And after displaying some lumps of trivial muck dredged from our free popular press, he noted: ‘As soon as you think the depths have been plumbed, the newspapers – feeding off each other’s garbage – go lower.’

  There is an economic mystery and a cultural mystery here. Ten or 15 years ago, I belonged to a group of journalists peering into the future of journalism. We supposed then that an historic collapse was approaching in Fleet Street, that ‘variety’ would be fatally reduced to perhaps four or five national dailies and Sunday newspapers. We also supposed – wrong again – that the day of the monomaniac newspaper tycoon had passed, and that the Press would come under the control of enormous faceless conglomerates interested mainly in cement or cat-food.

  Somehow, we have ended up with more ‘popular’ national dailies – six, counting the imminent ‘Daily Eddie Shah’ – but even less variety. And the romantic appeal of owning a newspaper still persuades ambitious men to buy one, or several, and to invest millions which would certainly be more profitably dug into cat-food or cement.

  Leaving the economic puzzle unsolved, there remains the cultural mystery. Why, in the late twentieth century, do millions of British people go on reading tabloids whose mental level would not strain the intellect of an over-sexed gnat? Foreigners, presented by British Airways with the Sun or the Star, think of protesting until they see smartly-suited young British businessmen in the next seat immersed in the same papers. Visiting trade unionists, asking their British colleagues for ‘please, the journal of the Left,’ turn over the pages of the Mirror in growing bewilderment.

  The usual explanation is terse: ‘We give them what they want. People buy our papers, don’t they?’ This sinks towards the level of ‘Fifty million flies can’t be wrong – eat dung!’ But it is an explanation which, in this class-ridden society, cuts deep into pious middle-class opinion.

  Part of the awful lack of self-confidence on the intellectual Left arises from the fear that those who read the Sun really are ‘Sun-readers,’ that the space between the ears of millions of British proletarians consists of a tabloid-shaped slot. When the moan goes up, at party or union conferences, about ‘the Tory gutter Press,’ all too many of the moaners think that workers would automatically switch from blue to red, if the slot were filled with a socialist tabloid.

  Seventy years ago, Lady Lilias Margaret Bathurst, proprietor of the Morning Post, told her editor that ‘the public are marvellously ignorant and will believe anything.’ It’s odd to find sections of the modern Left agreeing with her, sharing, indeed, a venerable form of class prejudice: for coals in the bath, read Sun in the brain. It’s even racialist. It implies that there’s a hereditary mental defect in the British people, which prevents them from reading intelligent regional daily papers (as many West German workers do, taking them home to enjoy at night) or absorbing serious news and argument (like the numerous Italian workers who read L‘ Unitá).

  But, of course, there is no hereditary defect. The British absorb hours of news and analysis through television, sometimes of demanding quality. They are not much worse educated than, say, the French. What we have here is a public which is capable of reading infinitely better newspapers than it usually does. And this has been true for generations. Orwell observed during the war that popular papers not only soared in circulation but ‘print articles which would have been considered hopelessly above their readers’ heads a couple of years ago.’

  What, then, is the secret appeal of these papers which treat their readers, in every sense, as boobies? For some reason, I suddenly remembered a scene from many years ago in Argyll. Every so often, an ancient vagrant known as ‘Old Tobermory’ used to appear and knock on the door. When a few people had collected, he would perform a sort of staggery dance and then launch into a whining, tuneless chant whose syllables had once been Gaelic. The custom was to hear him out and then reward him, but this was not mere charity. People got something from Old Tobermory. They got – and I don’t want to suggest a meanness here – the curious but very intense satisfaction of knowing how much better they could have danced and sung those numbers themselves.

  On the whole, the British don’t believe what they read in their tabloids. They trust the sports pages; the rest is assumed to be saucy nonsense lightly seasoned with ground-up fact. It is, in short, a performance to be appreciated precisely because one can see through it and recognise it for a performance. And this recognition, this small daily feat of seeing through the cheeky buggers, is a daily source of satisfaction. The reader of the Star, whose life may otherwise feel like the bottom of a heap, folds away the paper with a sense of having outwitted somebody.

  And the outwitted somebody – that’s a journalist. Those who write these papers, college-educated technicians of ‘writing down,’ often take themselves quite seriously. They worry that they are blunting their talents by processing news to attract the hairy, grunting readers they imagine out there. ‘Laddie, just remember you’re writing for Mrs McGinty of Maryhill Road,’ says the news editor, smashing some faintly challenging story onto his rejection spike. But down in Maryhill Road, it is Mrs McGinty – who has a bust television set and running damp and numerous opinions based on long experience of the world -who is laughing at him. She thinks his paper is daft. That’s why she reads it. Who are the boobies now?

  Reading papers you despise is an addicti
ve habit. Somebody suggested putting up a plaque in the coffee-house frequented by the Viennese man of letters Karl Kraus, worded: ‘Here Karl Kraus sat every day, reading the newspapers he detested.’ But it’s a bad habit, not only because it wastes time and money that could be better used. It is also bad for liberty.

  Where freedom is left unused, there is no freedom, and a Press which does not use its freedom to inform is not a free press. Informing is what counts; columns of opinion (like this one) matter a lot less. In Poland, one may read some bold and witty opinion pieces in papers stripped leafless of real information by the censors. A paper which could keep its readers informed, but chooses not to, is hard to describe convincingly to a Pole. So are its readers.

  Habits are hard to break. But that big joke about the tabloid Press – that the contempt of writer for reader is only surpassed by the contempt of reader for writer – is growing less funny. Readers, I hear, have begun to bombard those papers with articles or ideas for serious stories as they never did before. Some journalists, impressed by this, want to print more hard reporting and less garbage. A ‘quality popular paper’ is not a contradiction in terms, and might do well, if the mad economics of publishing allowed it to survive low circulation at the outset. For how much longer will the working people of Britain – just like middle-class commuters on a train – hide their real face behind their newspapers?

  [1985

  Journalists Behind the Wire

  Like most people, I saw on television the journalists going to work for Mr Murdoch in his new plant at Wapping. Blurred figures filing down between the barbed-wire – I couldn’t make out a face to recognise – they all shared an attitude: hunched-up, heads down between shoulders, collars up in the drizzle.

  ‘The Caudine Forks’ said a memory from Latin lessons. After that battle, the victorious Samnites made their Roman prisoners walk under a yoke. Yes, they must have walked like that.

  So I went along to see for myself. Mr Murdoch, it seems, assumed that his printworks would be assaulted by waves of typesetters with fixed bayonets, supported by light armour and by suicide car-bombs driven by Shiite machine-minders. Roll after roll of razor bladed wire form a defence in depth. Ten-foot steel gates, electronically controlled, are covered by swivelling television cameras. Police, supported by private security men, guard the entrance. There are ramps to block vehicles, searchlights, half-visible men photographing visitors from an empty factory next door.

  A German correspondent, amazed, writes that it is like the East German border, a film set which just can’t be for real in a Western country. He isn’t quite right, for it is even more like a police station in South Armagh. The old East End of London, for those who built this grotesque and horrible place, is bandit country where the natives are hostile.

  The natives? A handful of pickets stand near the entrance, from the night shift who would have been producing the Sun if they had not been sacked. A taxi arrives. A young woman reporter, in a fur coat, digs frantically into her handbag to find her pass, trying not to see the picket who approaches the taxi window. ‘Can I have a word with you? Judas did it for only 30 pieces of silver. Going to sleep well tonight, are you?’

  Her shoulders go into that pathetic hunch; she crouches as the taxi moves on into the defence zone. Presently, two buses come out very fast, lights out, curtains drawn. The picket says his three sentences again, but nobody stops. There are a few boos and groans, and the buses tear away down East Smithfield.

  Those buses contain my colleagues, the journalists of News International who have been defeated. Mr Murdoch did not mess around with them. He ignored all his house agreements with journalists, and told them to choose: go to Wapping and be rewarded with a £2,000 rise and private health insurance, or be sacked instantly and without compensation. Most of them went to Wapping, some cynically, some wretchedly. A few still refuse.

  There is defeat and defeat. It’s nearly a year ago now that the coal miners of Maerdy stepped back to work behind the colliery band, knowing that not one of them had crossed the picket line. This defeat is more complex than the failure of the miners’ strike, but also more devastating in its consequences.

  The TUC’s weakness is manifest. The electricians ignore its commands, indifferent to the threat of suspension. The attempt to block newspaper distribution is failing, because the courts have ruled that it is illegal, but also because union members in the TGWU are indifferent to orders. The printers, so obstinate at the negotiating table, seem impotent and without militancy when turned out on the street. The journalists ignore their own union’s instructions, cross picket lines and take over the jobs which belonged to production unions.

  This is a historic collapse of organised labour, of its old discipline and solidarity. For so long, the print unions blocked the introduction of computer technology which made their crafts unnecessary. In the end, Rupert Murdoch – like a general who loses patience with chatterbox democracy – planned and carried out his lightning act of force, a putsch which in the event met almost no resistance. And it isn’t only newspaper proprietors who will learn from this. All British employers can now contemplate the ‘American way’ of solving labour disputes: mass dismissals, production in a fortified site, the use of foreign technicians on contract to get the new machinery rolling and train a new, far smaller and more docile work-force.

  But I want to come back to the journalists. They should be happy. They always resented the print workers. Now the printers have been liquidated and the journalists are learning to operate thrilling new direct-input keyboards for more pay on newspapers with a brighter economic future. And yet they aren’t very happy. For in spite of all their hostility to the printers and their interest in new technology, Mr Murdoch – when D-Day came – treated his ‘journos’ as just one more enemy.

  He stuck a gun in their back. Sign here, he said, or it’s the bullet. You aren’t worth negotiation, and I’m in a hurry. Get into these buses, disobey your union, cross the picket lines and start work behind the razor-wire of Fort Murdoch – now. Some readers, I know, will say that those who write for the Sun and the News of the World have no self-respect to lose. All the same, there is a stink of loss at Wapping.

  Who do these journalists think they are? There was a time when journalists thought they were gentlemen and professionals – a claim treated satirically by other gentlemen and professionals. Then they concluded that they were white-collar proletarians, although of a superior kind, and joined the TUC. More recently, they have – we have – fancied the title of ‘communicators,’ educated specialists with a particular social responsibility for opening the reluctant official oyster to inspection.

  All these dreams ended harshly at News International last week. Mr Murdoch’s ‘journos’ are as interchangeable as microchips; the chip which doesn’t fit is a reject. And there’s another old-fashioned idea: that – as C. P. Scott of the Manchester Guardian put it – manager and editor walk together, but the manager walks a step behind. The editor is independent, bound first to the journalists he leads. But when Andrew Neil, editor of the Sunday Times, broke the Murdoch conditions to his staff, they heard him speak as an enthusiastic representative of management. He was not ‘us’ but ‘them,’ something alien and new in serious British journalism. And they split down the middle, accepting the move to Wapping by a majority so thin as to be almost meaningless.

  The new way of production will change British newspapers more radically than anything since the abolition of stamp duty in 1855. The fall in production costs may break the financial dependence on advertising. It may soon be possible to launch and profitably maintain a first-class ‘quality’ daily paper with a circulation of 100,000 or perhaps far less – until now, the vain dream of those who long to see a politically varied and responsible Press in Britain.

  All fine hopes. But then I see again those figures hunched in shame, the wire and the guards, the violence done to the independence of journalists and the integrity of editors. It is easy to sneer at ‘t
he hacks who caved in to save their mortgages’; they have little chance of finding another job when they join the 5,000 dismissed printers and the four million unemployed. And yet that new free Press of the possible future will need men and women with guts and high spirits to write it. The self-respect and confidence of this journalistic generation are hanging on the old barbed wire down at Wapping – and bleeding to death.

  [1986

  Ancient Britons and the Republican Dream

  ‘The country is filled with anxiety and ill-feeling, and with the sense of a dishonoured public life’.

  So writes Karl Miller, in the introduction to the latest anthology from the London Review of Books which he edits.1 It is a moral statement, placing in a moral category all that is now amiss with the economy, the political style and the distribution of power in the United Kingdom. As such, I take it to be fully in the tradition of John Mackintosh. One of his gifts, often disconcerting to his party colleagues, was his capacity to judge and speak as a citizen and not only as a politician. This implies a language which is not that of U-turns or of so-called ‘presentation’, but of right and wrong, health and sickness. The United Kingdom, and Scotland within that kingdom, is in a poor way, which is liable to grow in both senses poorer; but there is a strange paralysis of the political ingenuity which might alleviate the situation. As they said in Warsaw in 1981, ‘the Polish crisis is that nobody knows how to find a way out of it’. John Mackintosh was an Enlightenment man, certain that the power of rebellious reason could overcome. I know that he would have found our present-day fog of resignation the real dishonour of public life.