Watching Question Time last week was a fascinating experience. The audience spontaneously burst out laughing - not just some sarcastic sniggers, proper belly laughs - when Quentin Letts insisted that the Daily Mail (the paper for which he is a columnist) was an 'anti-establishment' paper. He was visibly shaken by that, almost like he couldn't get his head around it.
I think in their own little mental universe the country really is run by Beeb socialists and pinko trade unionists (whereas in reality these are a dying breed, if they ever existed at all).
It's probably true that Rupert Murdoch, for example, was an outsider to the establishment when he started out (see this brilliant work from Adam Curtis) but he's certainly not now. Times change, often for the worse! But the DM were never in that position at any point in history, as far as I can see.
I'm not a Marxist but when the ol' beardie weirdie is right he's right: "The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force."
The DM may not represent the 'centre ground' of establishment ideology but they do represent its worst excesses, its dregs, its most toxic sludge. They are its gutter. Gutter press in the truest sense.
Showing posts with label question time. Show all posts
Showing posts with label question time. Show all posts
Saturday, 12 October 2013
Friday, 22 June 2012
Carr, Cameron and Question Time
Richard Murphy writes about Jimmy Carr's tax affairs and Cameron's missteps thereover.
There was a pretty good discussion of this issue in the first fifteen minutes or so of Question Time last night. Unite's Len McCluskey was superb -- informed, articulate and seemingly familiar with the Tax Justice Network. Ken Clarke was surly, evasive and clearly uncomfortable with the subject matter. His strategy was simply to avoid the question and dismiss, for instance, the slashing of HMRC budgets as unimportant. Against McCluskey's facts, figures and evidence (for example, that tax collectors bring in far more money than they cost to employ) he just turned his nose up and snorted. I think the audience noticed the difference.
Besides a handful of steam-eared reactionaries the mood was very much suggesting that the Carr case has been overblown, that the government was massively hypocritical and that they should be doing more to enforce the law with regard to tax rather than just complaining about particular cases. In fact, that last point was agreed on fairly unanimously, across the benches, as it were. For that reason it was unfortunate that no one really challenged Clarke's claim that the Tories are implementing a general anti-avoidance rule because, as we know, it is that in name only. They're making noises about cracking down on tax cheats precisely so that they can let ever more of them off the hook.
Andy Burnham came across very well generally, although he had very little to say about the tax issue. It continues to puzzle me why Labour are so reluctant to pile in on this issue more seriously as it's clearly a significant Tory weakness.
Cameron has created a rod for his own back by admitting that tax avoidance, while legal, is immoral. He mustn't be allowed to forget it. I'm confident that the likes of Murphy, the TJN, UK Uncut and so on will ensure that he won't!
There was a pretty good discussion of this issue in the first fifteen minutes or so of Question Time last night. Unite's Len McCluskey was superb -- informed, articulate and seemingly familiar with the Tax Justice Network. Ken Clarke was surly, evasive and clearly uncomfortable with the subject matter. His strategy was simply to avoid the question and dismiss, for instance, the slashing of HMRC budgets as unimportant. Against McCluskey's facts, figures and evidence (for example, that tax collectors bring in far more money than they cost to employ) he just turned his nose up and snorted. I think the audience noticed the difference.
Besides a handful of steam-eared reactionaries the mood was very much suggesting that the Carr case has been overblown, that the government was massively hypocritical and that they should be doing more to enforce the law with regard to tax rather than just complaining about particular cases. In fact, that last point was agreed on fairly unanimously, across the benches, as it were. For that reason it was unfortunate that no one really challenged Clarke's claim that the Tories are implementing a general anti-avoidance rule because, as we know, it is that in name only. They're making noises about cracking down on tax cheats precisely so that they can let ever more of them off the hook.
Andy Burnham came across very well generally, although he had very little to say about the tax issue. It continues to puzzle me why Labour are so reluctant to pile in on this issue more seriously as it's clearly a significant Tory weakness.
Cameron has created a rod for his own back by admitting that tax avoidance, while legal, is immoral. He mustn't be allowed to forget it. I'm confident that the likes of Murphy, the TJN, UK Uncut and so on will ensure that he won't!
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