newspapers and Fiction, paranoia and allnewspapers

My late mother looked out at me from the bathroom mirror this morning. When I was young I thought the old girl was stupid, but fast forward a decade or three and now it seems I AM her. I can hear myself saying things she used to say (and sounding quite like her as I do so.)

The constant whinge we�re hearing, which is that the old who voted to leave the EU have ruined the lives of the young who voted to stay, is unpleasant and inaccurate; but even if it weren�t, let�s not forget how cringeworthy most of our own youthful attitudes look, in retrospect. The old may not all be wise, but neither may the young. Especially the ones who are complaining now but didn�t even vote.

Since 24th June, when the country delivered that surprise slap in the BBC�s face, the BBC�s political fraternity have been consistently talking the country down. The financial and business gurus have hugely exaggerated the effect on the pound and the ftse. Britain�s glass is half empty, across the board. Sally Bundock and Ben Thompson were at it earlier today, and Thompson even described what would happen �If we leave the EU� - in fact if I remember correctly he even said �If we vote to Leave the EU�. Eh, what?

funny business

The BBC has a choice. An editorial choice. It can report what it chooses to report and ignore what it chooses to ignore. The most glaring evidence of that is, of course, the MSM�s exclusively negative reporting on Israel. The BBC chooses to ignore multitudes of positive stories about Israel yet ignores mountains of easily accessible examples of the Palestinians� malevolence. 

You know how small children inadvertently reveal what they�re thinking in fantasy and play?

It�s a peculiar characteristic of the Arab world, which followers of the BBC won�t know much about because the BBC doesn�t report it. 

The conspiracy theories and infantile accusations the Israel haters of the Arab world invent could be used as typical psychological case studies of projection.  Like children, they egg each other on, their tales getting wilder and wilder and ever more revealing of their own thought processes and �unconscious impulses�.  This would be almost comical if only the rest of the world saw it for what it is instead of resolutely taking it at face value. The rest of the world lacks a sense of humor. 

Just one recent example of the EU�s gullibility on this score is the speech Mahmoud Abbas gave to a packed auditorium on 24th of this month.

After he had delivered it, fiction, paranoia and all, he received a standing ovation. Thank goodness we voted �Leave�. Any fleeting twinge of buyer�s remorse - dissipated in one fell swoop.

Thanks to Daphne Anson (comment below) I enjoyed reading this piece by Charles Moore,  (Telegraph) particularly:

�.....it is the Labour moderates, with their gloopy admiration for the EU and their uncritical endorsement throughout the Blair/Brown era of the excesses of global capitalism, who are the most out of touch with their natural supporters. �

and the final few paragraphs:

It's as if the BBC wishes the world was falling apart
Funny how Project Fear has been even more strongly pushed by the BBC (and Channel 4 News) after Remain has lost. The poor public are encouraged to believe fantasies, such as that all Poles must now go home or that we shall need visas to visit France. Such tales cannot be authoritatively refuted because poor Messrs Cameron and Osborne dare not admit that most of what they told us the week before is rubbish, and the Leave campaign is not the government of the country. 

Into this vacuum rush the doom-sayers. Yesterday the BBC put at the top of some bulletins the exclusive ("the BBC has learnt") that HSBC will move 1,000 workers to Paris if Britain leaves the single market. The following things were not properly explained � that HSBC was contemplating this, not actually doing it; that we might not leave the single market anyway and certainly won�t for more than two years; that 1,000 workers is only just over two per cent of HSBC�s British workforce; and that most of those sent to Paris would probably be French people currently in London. 

Is there any country in the world � apart from Britain � where the British Broadcasting Corporation would greet the return of parliamentary democracy with terror and dismay? 

  Despite the above, there is one person who should be deported at once. During the campaign, Ken Livingstone said that if Britain were to vote to leave the EU, he would leave Britain. When I last looked, he was still around. He should be put on a plane with a one-way ticket to Venezuela or Iran. 

Libby Purves has some interesting observations in today�s Times:

Hysterical lefties really need to grow upAs the culturati weep into their lattes while demonising the poor, old and insecure, the carry-on has been beyond parody. 

It has been a particularly grim couple of days for a soft-left newsaholic like me with a tenderness for the arts world. To quote one performing artist�s tweet � �Ashamed. Terrified. Shocked. Horrified�. Indeed: but it was not the actual vote that shocked, life having taught me that democracy has rough patches. It was the online squawk of reaction by my timeline, my tribe: cultural icons, colleagues, friends. If they feel �let down, betrayed, distressed� by the result, so did I by the mass response of the liberal media and arts sector to this vote against a 43-year-old administrative arrangement. 

 (That�s the accessible bit) Behind the paywall:

These are directors, actors, critics, cultural titans, intelligent lefties. Yet the carry-on was beyond parody: anguished bunker-mentality tinged with patronising. generalising hauteur about those who voted Leave. There had been nonsense from that general direction in the days before, alarm calls like panicked parakeets about how Brexit meant turning your back on Beethoven, Picasso and foreign cooking.�

Do read it all if you�re a subscriber to the Times online, or buy a copy. I disagree with some of the things she says, but after all, she was a Remain voter, and the obligatory comments about Nigel Farage and �that poster� are par for the course.

My dear departed mother and her generation, (both parents staunch Labour supporters and readers of the pre-historic Manchester Guardian) would be turning in their graves if they could see us now. 

Tom Corbyn. "Palestine campaigner"

newspapers and Referendum night memoriesnewspapers

I feel the hand of history on my shoulder so I suppose I should begin with some insightful comments about the historic events of the past week: Fancy Iceland getting through to the knockout stages of Euro 2016! Who saw that coming?

On the other big Euro-related story of the week, I will continue to stick to my usual, narrow furrow. Never mind what it means, how we've got to where we are, and where we should go from here, I'm going to talk about the BBC. As David Mitchell's Shakespeare in Upstart Crow would say, "It's what I do!"

As I stayed up all night to watch the result of the EU referendum on the BBC I did think about live-blogging it, but decided not to. So thanks to David Preiser for stepping into the breach and giving us such a strong flavour of the night.

All I will say about it is that I found the BBC's election night coverage largely fair up until the moment when the BBC called it for Leave at around 4.40 am. (And I didn't even mind Jeremy Vine's "confusing" graphics.)

One of the two stand-out exceptions, bias-wise, up till that point, was the BBC's economics editor Kamal Ahmed, whose regular pronouncements on the plunging pound and use of that scary-looking graph were delivered in such a tone that he might as well just have gone ahead and announced , "The post-Brexit Apocalypse has begun. Told you so! Why didn't you listen to me?" 

And his reports on the following day's main BBC One news bulletins stuck doggedly to that same plunging pound story - even after, by the time of the BBC One News at Ten on Friday, the pound had already substantially recovered. It was left to newsreader Huw Edwards to point that out, in a few words, just before Kamal's latest overwhelmingly gloomy report.

The other stand-out exception was the way Nigel Farage was repeatedly condemned and sneered at, on and off, throughout. Most of that may have come from their guests but the BBC reporters/presenters kept laughing along with the sneers and never once sought to challenge the criticism of the UKIP leader. UKIP ought to look into those moments very carefully. I'm quite sure my memory isn't playing tricks on me there.

The change in tone after the BBC called it for Leave was so startling that I laughed out loud. It was like something from one of those Chris Morris/Armando Iannucci media-mocking programmes from the 1990s. All traces of remaining jollity vanished. Grim faces and nothing but grim faces arrived from BBC reporter after BBC reporter....

....and so it stayed throughout the following day: 

And for minutes after that announcement the caption across the bottom of the BBC's screen largely stuck to reading, "Pound drops to lowest level since 1985". 

That mood has stuck on the BBC face, like after a changed wind in the old saying, ever since.

newspapers and Personal stuffnewspapers

Where I was

On the subject of the EU referendum...

Despite being on holiday with my family in Devon (and, briefly, in Sue's Cornwall) I couldn't avoid the subject. My family wanted to talk about it. Lots of other people wanted to talk about it too - and, contrary to what some might expect (ahem, some at the BBC), none of them seemed bored to death with the subject - even the one member of my family who's only voted about once in forty years and who won't be voting in this one either, despite being obviously and quite angrily pro-Leave. (Is such interest unusual?)

And, though it's not remotely approaching a poll-worthy sample, I was out-and-out surprised at how pro-Leave they all were...and that's not in any way down to me as (away from the blogosphere) I'm not one for talking politics and didn't even try to persuade any of them. (In fact, curiously, I kept finding myself half-heartedly playing devil's advocate with them given how strongly pro-Leave they were. I've obviously spent too long listening to the BBC).

Some were definitely pro-Leave. Some - as definite as can be - have already sent in their postal votes for Out. And others may say they are still undecided but they had nothing but praise for Andrea, Gisela and Boris and nothing but contempt for Angela, Amber and Nicola on Thursday night. (And me too. Gisela Stuart in particular struck me as an absolute class act)...

...and the ones who have already sent off their postal votes for Leave are young (i.e. the ones meant to be for Remain), and I would have placed a near-certain bet on their voting for Remain. Yes, they felt conflicted about it, but they placed their cross on the postal vote, and off they've gone. 

As much of my extended family falls into the previously-Labour-voting-now-often-UKIP-voting working class (and, I reckon, the others I listened to too), I've been pleased to see - in the few glimpses I've had of it over the last week or so - a fair few BBC reports that haven't denied this intriguing trend. I saw a John Pienaar report on BBC One's News at Six that featured a lot of such people as vox pops, every one of whom was pro-Leave. And Newsnight has been reporting the seemingly ever-widening disconnect between the Labour Party and Labour voters over the issue too. And quite right too.

Before I went on holiday, I tried to work out how my work colleagues would vote by just listening to them. (Laurie Taylor's Thinking Allowed would call the majority of them 'working class'). Two of my friends had completely bought George Osborne's 'Your household will lose �4,300 a year if we leave' scare. They said they couldn't afford to lose that. They intend to vote Remain. (I pointed out it didn't mean what they think it means. Have I changed their minds?). The small-in-number-but-loud-in-voice left-wing post-students at work were initially dismissive of the whole thing but they hate Nigel Farage and the Tories and will vote Remain, duh. Plenty of others, however, are firmly, enthusiastically pro-Leave and seem very firm on the issue. One of them really doesn't like the French. I'd say they are very split but, by my reckoning, tending towards Leave. 

I don't know where this is going. The polls are apparently veering the way my 'polls' are veering. Polls are often wrong. Mine could be wrong. We'll soon know.