We are living in a time when everything seems incredibly complex, politics and the news are awash with information, commentary, opinion, misinformation, distortion and lies. The big deal is how we sort out fact from fiction.
If all we had to go on was all that is reported, we’d be in a world of trouble, which actually often feels the case. Information overload, exhaustion and burnout are very real issues, when it all becomes too much. And if that is all we had, we all might just as well give up, because this flow of communication is inexhaustible going on 24/7 from sources which have the wealth to maintain it, a wealth we do not have access to nor the facilities that wealth provides.
Government has available the great tax pot , our money, with which to run and maintain its communication/propaganda flow and exclusive access to the media which regards government as a major source of news. Media empires, like the Murdoch empire, have almost limitless wealth generated by their media businesses from advertisers, the paying public and investment and doubtless many more revenue streams about which I have no idea.
We do not have access to any of that and are, by and large, merely receivers of this tide of output with a much more modest means of response via social media, blogs, media comments and independent media sites, like Dorset Eye, which has a far broader audience than I can ever achieve through my own efforts. There is a kind of joyful mutuality in my relationship with Dorset Eye, they are personal friends and require input as much as I require a platform, I also trust the integrity of the Cridlands who run it which I also think is mutual and which counts for a lot these days and which brings me very neatly to the point of this article.
We do, in fact, have a measure against which the tsunami of information and disinformation can be judged – reality, on the ground. Like science, information and opinions must be empirically measured against reality.
The measure of government policy, regardless of how they spin it, justify it, or how many talking heads tell us what it is and means, is what happens on the ground.
The easiest example to use is the DWP’s sanctions regime. No matter what the government says or how they attempt to justify it and spin it in a positive way, the reality is that people are being deprived of the means of survival and people are dying. Or sanctions can be compared with the criminal justice system, no court in the land would ever deprive people of the means of survival nor exact a punishment without evidence, or at least the most spurious evidence for spurious rule infractions, or a hearing in which the accused can be present and evidence given. Dr David Webster of the University of Glasgow called the sanctions regime, ‘Britain’s secret penal system’ and he is correct, all the empirical evidence supports his findings. The hard facts exist and they are verifiable, no amount of flannel from Damian Green, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, can change that.
A four week sanction on Jobseekers allowance for someone over 25 is a loss of income of £73.10 a week, there are no checks as to whether a claimant can survive the loss of that income for that period (which is the shortest sanction they can impose). Forget hardship payments (though do apply for them), the entire point is to cause hardship to such a punitive degree as to force compliance to whatever demands the DWP forces on each individual claimant. Given that more than 16 million people in the UK have savings of less than £100, then most claimants have no buffer to this kind of hardship. It is a system designed to be as brutal as possible and challenging a sanction is both complex and, again, punitive, in which income remains stopped throughout the appeal process, which itself has no set time limit.
Another example: If the government freezes public sector wages and yet gives tax breaks to the wealthy and reduces corporation tax then the wage freezes are purely ideological and not driven by necessity. Britain is not broke, just wilfully broken.
Whilst both MPs and the media attempt to bamboozle us with opinions, Question Time springs to mind, it is incumbent upon us to hold what people say against reality. Accessing factual information may take some work on our part, but reality is never found wanting, where opinion, lies and spin almost always are or are just hot air and therefore valueless and meaningless.
There is no such thing as a post truth era, but there are deceivers who exploit and abuse the media for their own deceitful ends, as they have ever done. Where did I hear about post-truth? From the media, whilst I was still calling a lie and lie. Nothing’s changed, except perhaps in the degree of the contempt I hold for those peddling lies for self serving reasons.
Social and independent media are forces to be reckoned with, which might go a long way to explaining why liars are growing more desperate in their attempts to deceive us.
KOG. 28 February 2017
https://www.crimeandjustice.org.uk/resources/benefit-sanctions-britains-secret-penal-system
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-37504449
