A state of parallel worlds determines almost everything we do and how
we do it, everything we know and how we know it. The word that once
described it, class, is unmentionable, just as imperialism used to be.
Thanks to George W Bush, the latter is back in the lexicon in Britain,
if not at the BBC.
Class is different. It runs too deep; it allows us to connect the
present with the past and to understand the malignancies of a modern
economic system based on inequity and fear. So it is seldom spoken about
publicly, lest a Goldman Sachs chief executive on multimillions in pay
or bonuses, or whatever they call their legalised heists, be asked how
it feels to walk past office cleaners struggling on the minimum wage.
Just as elite power seeks to order other countries according to the
demands of its privilege, so class remains at the root of our own
society’s mutations and sorrows. In recent weeks, the killing of an
11-year-old Liverpool boy and other tragedies involving children have
been thoroughly tabloided. Interviewing Keith Vaz, chairman of the House
of Commons home affairs select committee, one journalist wondered if
“we” should go out and deal personally with our vile, mugging, stabbing,
shooting youth. To this, the nodding Vaz replied that the problem was
“values”.
The main “value” is ruthless exclusion, such as the exile of millions
of young people on vast human landfills (rubbish dumps) called housing
estates, where they are forearmed with the knowledge that they are
different and schools are not for them. A rigid curriculum, a system
devoted to testing child-ren beyond all reason, ensures their
alienation. “From the age of seven,” says Shirley Franklin of the
Institute of Education, “20 per cent of the
nation’s children are
seen, and see themselves, as failures . . . Violence is an expression of
hatred towards oneself and others.” With the all-digital world of
promise and rewards denied them, let alone a sense of belonging and
esteem, they move logically to the streets and crime.
And yet, since 1995, actual crime in England and Wales has fallen by
42 per cent and violent crime by 41 per cent. No matter. The “violence
of youth” is the accredited hysteria. A government led for a decade by a
man whose lawless deceit helped cause the violent deaths of perhaps a
million people in Iraq invented an acronym – Asbo – for a campaign
against British youth, whose prospects and energy and hope were replaced
by the “values” expressed by Keith Vaz and exemplified by Goldman Sachs
and the current imperial adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Take Afghanistan, where the irony is searing. In less than seven
years, the Anglo-American slaughter of countless “Taliban” (people) has
succeeded in spectacularly reviving an almost extinct poppy trade, so
that it now supplies the demand for heroin on Britain’s poorest streets,
where enlightened drug rehabilitation is not considered a government
“value”.
Parallel worlds require other elite forms of exclusion. At the
Edinburgh Television Festival on 24 August, the famous BBC presenter
Jeremy Paxman made a much-hyped speech “attacking” television for
“betray[ing] the people we ought to be serving”. What was revealing
about the speech was the attitude towards ordinary viewers it betrayed.
According to Paxman, “while the media and politicians feel free to
criticise each other, neither has the guts to criticise the public, who
are presumed never to be wrong”.
In fact, ordinary people are treated in much of the media as
invisible or with contempt, or they are patronised. Two honourable
exceptions were the GMTV presenters cited and mocked by Paxman for their
humanity in standing up for an ex-soldier denied proper treatment by
the National Health Service. Paxman called for a more “sophisticated”
and “honest” approach that accepted the public’s approval of low taxes
— taxes that are not rationed when it comes to propping up hugely
profitable private finance initiatives in the Health Service or
squandered on waging war, regardless of the public’s objections.
Not once in his speech did Paxman refer to Iraq, nor did he tell us
why Blair was never seriously challenged on that bloodbath in a
broadcast interview. That the BBC had played a critical role in
amplifying and echoing Blair’s and Bush’s lies was apparently
unmentionable. The coming attack on Iran, led again by propaganda
filtered through broadcasting, is from the same parallel world, also
unmentionable.
