I’m not sure how many members of the London Labour party I’ve met over the last 20 years or so. A thousand? Must be something like that. Sitting in local authority buildings which smell slightly of gas, the night outside cold and damp, ploughing through an interminable agenda of candidate selections; or down the pub after canvassing. Nice people, largely — you’d be surprised.
I’m not a member any more but a lot of my friends still are, so it’s a constituency I know very well. If you polled them on their views about the Royal Family, I suspect that somewhere between 1 and 2 per cent would declare themselves as monarchists. The rest would express an opinion anywhere on a spectrum leading from ‘they are a complete waste of time and money, an utter irrelevance, although I quite fancy Harry’ at one end to the more rigorous ‘they and their running-dog lickspittle lackeys should swing from the gibbets hewn by the honest labour of the working classes’. My own view always tended towards the former position, although I sometimes fell in the latter camp, usually just after the Duchess of York had been on TV talking about herself.
Pete White, a former parliamentary agent and prospective Labour council candidate in Essex, summed up what I believe would be the moderate, majority view of London Labour members when he said of the Queen, ‘She milks this country for everything she can’, and that Buck House should be open to the public. He also added that she was a ‘parasite’ and ‘vermin’ which moves him towards the leftish quartile of the chart, I suppose. He made these remarks on the blog of the Conservative MP Andrew Rosindell, which you may well consider to have been a tactical mistake, all things considered. That terribly familiar thing then happened — a campaign was whipped up to punish him for his views. The local newspaper alleged Mr White had provoked a ‘world-wide storm’, which presumably meant they’d got an email in from the last royalist in Harare. Then poor Mr White was required to do that other familiar thing — the grovelling, humiliating apology. But of course even that wasn’t enough, and he lost his candidacy. Highly thought of, was Mr White, before he dissed the monarch. But he said nothing that is not believed by most Labour activists and probably a majority of councillors too. Just not articulated too loudly in public.
Labour agent sacked for being a republican? Hell, almost as bizarre as a Conservative MP sacked for stating that the party should, in the long term, probably favour tax cuts (Howard Flight, 2005). Or a Tory adviser sacked for having said in flippant exasperation on a blog, when told that the election of Boris Johnson as London Mayor might produce an exodus of African-Caribbeans from London, ‘well, let them go’ (James McGrath in 2008). Such hair-trigger sensitivity and such a loss of talented people; there are countless more whose cases I could bore you with. Same process every time — honestly expressed comment, enforced (and thus meaningless) grovelling apology, sack.
I’ve had a bit of this in the past week, having written a blog for The Spectator about the attempted murder of a pregnant girl by two young black men in London. There was a minor squall, rather than Pete White’s exciting world-wide storm. Article in the Independent, follow-ups in Telegraph, New Statesman, Daily Mail, typically witless report on the BBC London News by an idiot, plenty of condemnation and vitriol, Twitter and Facebook campaign and stuff from bloggers feverishly hammering away at their Apple Macs in that crepuscular bloggerland.
It’s an interesting time, this new age of direct democracy, of immediate internet campaigns which can garner tens of thousands of names, of online petitions to Downing Street, of demands for retribution and vengeance. There is a gap, a gap of some distance, between the sort of discourse which appears in our newspapers, in the world of MSM (mainstream media) as the bloggers have it, and that which exists in bloggerland. Pete White was hoisted by a remark he made in reply to someone on a blog; his response was immediate — this is the point, the immediacy — and clearly not what he would have written were it a press statement put out by Havering Labour party and approved by the local general secretary and some unspeakably ghastly media manager. It was an unrestrained and personal view and was designed to read in the context of other unrestrained and personal views on Mr Rosindell’s blog. Stripped from that context, his comments seemed troublesome and hysterical; he had been talking about plans for a party to commemorate the Queen’s diamond jubilee, or something similar. His views were not mediated but intended simply for that particular discussion, in the context of what had been written before. This was precisely the problem which affected Boris Johnson’s adviser, Mr McGrath, who I mentioned earlier; he responded, tersely, in context, to a blog. By the end of play, each were out of a job.
The gap between these two forms of discourse will narrow; the question is — in what direction? Either the blog, Facebook, Twitter and so on will remain clear of the restrictions imposed upon the MSM and those who subscribe to such forms will have sufficient wit to realise that this is a privilege which carries with it certain stipulations. Most importantly that they are not quite the same as a press statement issued from central office, or an article on a leader page, and therefore should not be taken as such, no matter how tempting politically it might be to do so. That’s the idealistic vision for the internet. Or — far more likely, I reckon — those who use the electronic media for comment will eventually resist the immediacy of the medium, and its proximity to what we might call normal, human, conversation, and will bring precisely the same constraints to bear as existed before, both imposed by their organisations and imposed, out of self-preservation, by themselves.
Still, you should all be aware; the sacking of Mr White must convince you that the Labour party is four square behind the Queen, and nobody should dare say otherwise.
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