Happy New Year

Happy New Year, 2010, and welcome to the decade without a name, or much in the way of history to define it. I can recall relatively well the mood of ten years ago, the hype and the optimism that the millennium generated for a people looking forward to the far future. It may seem, however, that we’re in a worse position ten years later compared to that from which we started. In the last ten years Britain became embroiled in two controversial, far-flung wars of dubious legality. In both instances British troops were sent to remove enemies – The Taliban and Saddam Hussein – that were former tactical allies of Europe and the US, that had been supplied arms and money in the past to act as Middle-East bulwarks against the spread of Communism by the Soviet Union and radical Islam by Iran respectively. In the last ten years, new counter-terrorism laws were passed in the wake of terrorist attacks in New York and London, curbing our civil liberties. Public trust in government was further damaged throughout the decade with an insight into the culture of spin-doctoring at Number 10 and its role in the formation of the ‘dodgy’ Iraq dossier. And then we learned how MPs had for years been using expenses claims to supplement their income and the attempts to prevent this information coming to light. To round out the last couple of years, the under-regulated banking system brought itself to near-collapse and put us into a global recession by lending money to highly questionably borrowers who defaulted on their mortgages.

This is a summary of some of the low-lights of the 2000s. It is not meant to be a balanced picture but a cause for reflection of one the biggest failings of recent times: the failure to hold government to greater account for its actions. For this we are partly responsible; we live in an increasingly depoliticised and disengaged society. We have an ineffective, commercial media that is supposed to keep our government and corporations in check, to keep us informed and ask difficult questions of our politicians, but it is undermined by commercial pressures. Journalists are discouraged from investigative journalism (the MP’s expenses evidence was revealed to The Telegraph rather than being uncovered by them, but was published in a profitable, drip-feed maner). Instead government sources are taken as legitimate and trustworthy sources of information at face-value. Inexpensive, sensationalist stories such as celebrity scandals and reporting, with little to no political value, help to pad out the news. The blame lies with the commercialisation of the media and the concentration of newspaper ownership in the hands of a small number of tycoons, like Rupert Murdoch, who owns The Sun, News of the World and The Times newspapers in Britain, a 39% stake in BSkyB and a 17.5% stake in ITV. News stories are pursued or discarded on the basis of profitability and to protect the interests of advertisers who determine the profitability of newspaper publishing and other media. When we consider the direction of the next decade we should address the commercialisation of the media and the concentration of media ownership in the hands of powerful businessmen who have no obligation to act in the public interest. Only then can we have more control over the political decisions of the next ten years.

One particular image hit me whilst watching the new year celebrations on television. The image cut to the crowd of spectators, a sea of levitated arms watching the fireworks display through their tiny camera-phone screens. It captured the essence of a consumer culture nicely, a consumer culture that has grown with the decline of political culture since the middle of the last century. It was absurd and slightly tragic to behold dozens of people watching a firework display through their tiny mobile screens, with a worse view than me, watching a television half-way across the country. Lord help us.