Current Affairs

Everyday arguments meant that politicians popularised arguments, which they pushed through by deposing those who could not communicate in the same manner as the law makers. Laws became entrenched by government edicts and the main pusher of these arguments were broadcasters -especially the BBC, which moved from being a News outlet into being a great aunt that grabbed the political lexicon and moved the argument on how a law should be seen, argued and put through.

The 99 year prison sentence was one of these instances that the press were fed a narrative that was set up to bring about change to persistent offenders. There was very little push-back against a law that originated in America and was focussed on crime and the persistent offender. The elements that made this law so coercive is the amount of time that a criminal would spend incarcerated, even for stealing a cigarette. The reasoning behind the length of duration in prison was the crime itself and the duration of the tariff. Those imprisoned, had to prove to a parole board that they could accomplish a life without committing another criminal offence. Unfortunately, a lot of those convicted by this law have not been able to prove they can change because they cannot get on courses, which gives them a profession or an education.

Barriers of mental health have also walled the prisoner in, and though originally the prisoner was given a tariff of a few months, this has led to prisoners serving eighteen years, because the prisoner is not fit to leave the system due to their mental health being affected by the time they have spent in prison. Others have committed suicide because of the hopelessness of their situation, even the originator of the system (Lord Blunkett) has argued that this law is unjust and has rallied against the law he introduced.

But the law for an indefinite tariff received very little scrutiny in Parliament, and those that did challenge the law were shouted down by the majority who argued for stronger tariffs against prisoners who were persistent offenders. But it was in the way that the government were doing business that was crucial to the law being passed in Parliament. Criminals who were persistent were highlighted in the media in an attempt to boost the ability of the ruling party to get the law through. Persistent headlines in newspapers and on television news identified the need for the law and it was passed with very little scrutiny or opposition by Parliamentarians, who stood on a platform that pushed through the law.

Deals between the government and news moguls are struck before the government gets into power. The most powerful of these moguls was Rupert Murdoch who ran The Times, Sunday Times, the Sun and Sky. Other news outlets such as the Guardian, Mirror and the BBC fell into line with Blair, so the government controlled the media space, which they used to formulate policy and arguments for government. In-depth reporting came to a halt against the government, and when a crisis broke out the government controlled the media space, so much so, that questions about the governments arguments and direction were very much fawned over by a compliant press. This proved disastrous when the government was trying to construct a foreign policy and a role for Britain. The idea of Britain policing the world was pushed by a Prime Minister in his ascendency and led to critical mistakes, which should have been challenged in Parliament.

The government decided to push through a role for the armed forces, who had proven successful in the Balkans and West Africa, to act as a police force around the world. The disaster lay in the Middle East and without listening to the larger public, Britain found itself embroiled in not just a war against terrorism, but a battle in a nation that was under UN and international sanctions. Those that opposed the war were branded by the press as non compliant and had very little airtime however relevant their argument was. The control of the media by the government had blindsided other arguments, and those that opposed were branded by the government as being the remnants of past battles against colonialism.

There are other arguments, and that was the 2007 conflict between Israel and Hamas  led government in Gaza. The BBC had an embedded journalist in the strip and his reporting was friendly to Hamas, but ultimately it reflected the bias of the BBC and government, which was trying to bring peace to the Middle East at the time. The journalist’s kidnapping led to an argument of whether the Israelis were responsible due to the nature of the journalist’s reporting. This led to an approach by the BBC and foreign office that was not impartial and anti-Semitic in its inception. BBC journalists tried to control the narrative without evidence or proof of what they were arguing and the little they did know of the Gaza strip became a confused narrative that muddied the waters. The reality was that the journalist was freed and spent tax payers money on a biography that was neither believed or held as being plausible. It was very much a political argument that held sway with those in government and in the control room of the BBC, which managed the narrative and termed it news.

Heavily criticised for being anti-Semitic, the BBC and the government at the time were very much under the scrutiny of the public. The failure of arguments put across by the government led to arrests of those who challenged the state in large anti-war demonstrations before the invasion of Iraq. The questions that should have been asked in parliament were quashed and the lies that the government told were challenged by civil servants who were also smashed by select committees. This led to the death of Dr David Kelly, who was harassed by a commons select committee and a press that challenged the veracity of the evidence that he gave. It became a question of the state and the resources of the state being challenged by a media savvy government that ignored the immediacy of the intelligence put forward by a civil service that was under pressure.

I have given an instance under Blairism that placed Britain in a war that it neither wanted or could afford. America is in this predicament, the brightest and the best are demonstrating against the war in Gaza, but the reality is that the ruling class are under the cosh and cannot afford to challenge a press that is unable or unwilling to report the facts accurately. The media are very much embedded with the Israeli government and the reports coming from Gaza are wholly from a news source dependent on freelancers who have acted as witnesses to the aggression of the Israeli state against the civilians of Gaza.

(Fatima Bhutto, writing in Zeteo, looks at the campus protests in America, and reflects on her own experience of being a student during the second intifada. She argues that the colleges did not stop the students demonstrating their support for the Palestinians in the West Bank. She argues that even though she was a college student during the period when the “Patriot Act [was enacted] and there was anti-Muslim surveillance and policing, she never felt unsafe at any of the protests.” She argues that it was a time that allowed and enabled students to demonstrate and placed importance on “academic freedom.”)

The figures for the casualties in this war are dependent on hospitals and the United Nations. The reality is that there have been directives from news organisation to their journalists how they report the war. There have also been directives by the Israeli state on journalists embedded in the state, and the propaganda machine has led to some questioning the veracity of the Israeli state and its propaganda machine. News agencies such as the BBC, Sky and CNN have strict editorial guidelines in Israel, which has led to an under reporting of the war and its cost to civilians living in Gaza. The distinction between the news coming from Gaza and newspapers like the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times is immense, but the students who are more tech savvy have found their own source of information and have created a direct argument that challenges the censorship that has been self-imposed by the giants of the conventional news world.       

In a report in Le Monde Diplomatique, they argue that Israel is one of the ten worst countries for imprisoning journalists. Al Jazeera are still smarting about the assassination of  Shrieen Abu Akleh, a journalist who was used to the violence in the West Bank, and very capable of taking decisions that kept her and her team safe. On the 11^th May 2022 the IDF claimed that she had been caught in the cross fire of a street battle between the IDF and gunmen in Jenin refugee camp. It took the IDF a further two weeks to admit that she had been killed by an IDF sniper who fired five bullets in her direction. There are so many cases in the West Bank of the IDF killing unarmed civilians and journalists, but Abu Akleh was different, she was an American.

Mostly the narrative coming from the Israeli government is believed, but in 2023, Israel was recognised as one of the ten worst places to be a journalist. It is level pegging with Iran according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. So why is the Israeli government not recognised along with Iran that it has repressive mechanisms that suppresses the wide range of voices that can be found in Israel and the Palestinian Legislator. Israel is a migrant country and has a wide range of resources that it can use to manage the news cycle, which means they can communicate their propaganda in the languages of the states that make the most difference to the worlds understanding of an event. But it is the resources of the media that makes reporting from Israel so difficult, America is fed a different story to the rest of the world by sources such as CNN, where they tailor their language and depend on an Israeli censor who manages the narrative coming from Gaza.

Words become difficult to manage if you are a journalist working in Israel. The Israeli censors manage the dialogue emanating from the war zone, so if you upset the censor with language from a previous article, you are likely to be out of the loop in a highly controlled and media savvy propaganda machine, that does not hesitate to show its displeasure with your narrative. However horrific an event is, the inability of the media to use words such as war crime or genocide digs deeply into the Israeli psyche, but companies such as CNN, NBC and CNBC have sanctioned the language their reporters can use. In a Le Monde article the journalist Alan Gresh speaking to a CNN journalist argued that the words “genocide” and “War crime” are “taboo words” in their reporting. It becomes even more cynical when Israeli narratives are widely believed and Palestinian narratives are heavily scrutinised.   

To a degree the Israeli propaganda machine has come to a halt. But the reality is that the Israeli government is rudderless and the reporting of the events has moved towards looking to the government to find a narrative that works. Instead of arguments of the hostages, images of the extreme right wing destroying aid coming into Gaza has been broadcast, and the nastiness of Ben Gvir has been highlighted. Israel is in a bind, it is also rudderless because the government do not want to negotiate with Hamas and at the same time cannot formulate a policy for the day after in Gaza.

America has made itself clear about the war and are demanding that Israel must not enter Rafah. The Israeli government is paralysed as the fighting has moved back to northern Gaza. News wise it is quiet and the voices that fought the war through the mouth pieces of the Western worlds media are silent, but the reality is that the government are unable to make a decision on what happens next.

Blair in the end was given an opportunity to find peace in the Middle East, instead he became a pawn to the mouthpieces that shaped arguments. His self publicising ended with the world aghast at the little he did to manage a conflict that has been on the world stage for the past seventy years. The publicity machine that was so prevalent then has been shut off from the originator of murky deals being done and a fawning editorial have ended. But the cult that became Blairism continues to this day, and the deals politicians do to publicise their arguments have been transformed by their inability to manage laws that will be deemed illegal in the future.