The Triumph of Presentation.

As the layers upon layers of falsity, agreed upon lies, incestuous relationships and corrupt practices in the media - political nexus are revealed one glaring fact emerges : all this is a fabricated false world that has been constructed over many years and which has little connection to reality nor does it give any coherent vision of how our debased and distorted society could or should work. It has obscured and twisted real political debate.

The politics of ideas or convictions has been replaced with a politics of presentation, of image, of PR and marketing strategies taken from the world of advertising. Its apotheosis may have been the Blair led government, which seemed to make policy based on phone polls and what the Murdoch press would say rather than having anything that could be called an ideology, but it began during the Thatcher regime, and the defeat of the Michael Foot led Labour Party. It was then that advertising agencies became involved, the execrable Saatchis, who continue to have a huge influence over our cultural life to this day, and the American ideas of ‘ marketing ‘ a political party not based on a historic identity but rather on superficial scripted appearances on television by its leader, one Mrs. Thatcher.

The Labour leader, a great orator and a man of real political understanding and principle, was portrayed by a gullible and manipulated media as inarticulate and absurdly criticised for his choice of overcoat. Here was the beginning of actual political debate being sidelined by an obsession with presentation and personality which would grow to dominate and pervert politics for the next thirty years.

This is still very much the case even at present. All these professional so-called ’ analysts’ that are called upon to comment on political decisions, ex-journalists that are used to present the policies, ( a Mr. A Coulson ) all these people that have no known political convictions, are unelected and are largely operating in a parallel world peopled by their own kind and yet have become the thin controllers of the political debate. It was particularly tragic to see a rare instance on ‘Newsnight’ recently when there was a ‘representative’ selection of so-called ordinary people i.e. the electorate, British Citizens, given a chance to comment on the current situation and yet they could barely articulate a single cogent statement, so used to passively listening to ’ experts’ and commentators from the inside of the journalistic / spin doctor / PR led political world have they become. It is as if the serious part of political debate has been removed from politicians, with their willing acquiescence, as being too difficult for them to speak about and so delegated to a salaried gang of what have been clearly proven to be largely self-interested, amoral, and unelected and unaccountable media apparatchiks. On balance the old world so well satirised in ‘ Yes Minister ‘ where the chief Civil servants were actually running the show was far preferable, given the perhaps over - generous assumption that they had no political axe to grind.

The heinous excesses of the Murdoch press have finally been exposed and is proving to be their undoing. However the craven and supine acceptance of their power must not be forgotten. The simple fact that to watch England play cricket, rugby or football one has had to pay an exorbitant fee to a privately owned television company has been a shame on successive governments that continue to allow such a situation. The monopoly that News International have been allowed to maintain is a disgrace and an insult. Yet it is still broader than that, why when discussing any proposal by the government are the first people given time to air their views commentators from within the media nexus ? It has taken direct action and some civil disobedience to get a handful of other articulate voices on national television, mainly students who are traditionally completely ignored and more often maligned by the mainstream media.

The stables need a real clean, including the apologists and the explainers, those that have maintained this set-up because they could always claim to be to one side of it, while knowing it was dictating the terms. Simon Jenkins and all the public school educated members of the commentating classes that remain beyond criticism yet they now say they knew all along. So what did they do? Not a lot. They just took the money.

Piers Morgan, all these ' well educated' creeps that played along with the whole celebrity culture that puts a meaningless gloss over this increasingly divided and decimated country.

They still sit on the Newsnight programme pretending that its all so ‘over-egged’ and pontificating over what is and is not important. Is it just possible that you are no longer important ? You are part of the problem. Your views that were inflated and promoted by a press machine that is entirely discredited no longer have any special significance. Their failure to speak honestly or to criticise the direction of the mass media with its trivialising and celebrity obsessed stream of nonsense and its reduction of politics to a sort of PR exercise has been just as bad as the obvious illegality and prurience of the News of the World et al.

Let us hear less commentary and so-called analyses by self-appointed experts and tedious political commentators. The media talking to itself is not useful or interesting. The fact is that you are have all been a part and parcel of this revolting stew of self perpetuating nonsense and intrusion into people's private lives at the expense of dealing with real important issues. Its no good saying that is what people want, if that is all that is presented it takes on a life of its own, albeit a false life, a hideous fiction inflated by money and driven by envy.