Darkness Rising

This week: some notes on the concept of “dark ages”. But first: why do right-wing papers hate their readers?

We’re into the summer silly season which means that, without a leadership contest to focus the minds, politics has largely gone quiet; and my own personal situation anyway means that the part of my brain that normally obsesses about such things cannot, for the moment, be arsed. That, plus my new gig as a regular panellist on Paper Cuts, which I am contractually obligated to refer to as the thrice weekly papers review podcast with a modern yada yada yada, means I’m thinking less about what the media reports on than about how it does it.

And the main thing I’m thinking about is quite how little respect the right-wing press seems to have for its own readers. 

Consider this incredible recent Express splash. The actual meat of the story was ONS data showing that the Consumer Price Index, a measure of inflation, had fallen from an agonising 8.7% in May, to a merely extremely painful 7.9% in June. Separately, the chancellor Jeremy Hunt had said it might be nice if, now “factory gate” prices were coming down on certain, unspecified products, some of this could be reflected in the prices actually charged to consumers. 

All this, though, is a level of nuance with which the paper felt its readers could not be trusted. So it bundled the two only vaguely related stories together and ran with “Shops must drop prices now inflation has fallen, orders Jeremy Hunt” on the online version (even though he had not only ordered no such thing but had no power to actually do so); and splashed on “Prices MUST drop now inflation has fallen” next to about four words of actual text on the front of the actual paper. There is simply no way that the staff of the Express are stupid enough to believe a fall in inflation means a fall in prices, as opposed to a slight reduction in the rate at which they are rising: their readers, though, they apparently believe to be exactly that stupid. 

This was an extreme example, but hardly a unique one. In early May, the Sun conducted a poll, which found, among other things, that a plurality of voters don’t think the Tories can win the next election (39 to 29); that a slimmer plurality think the UK should follow the rulings of the European Court of Human Rights (40 to 37); and that the vast majority think the government is doing a bad job of tackling the small boats in the channel (77 and 12), which raises some questions about why its ministers won’t shut up about them. The paper was forced to break out the figures among 2019 Tory voters specifically in the hope of better results, even though I’m pretty sure they are not the only people who actually get to vote. 

The poll didn’t mention either public services or the cost of living, the issues actually likely to dominate the next election. It did, however, find Rishi Sunak slightly ahead of Keir Starmer in the “best leader” stakes, even though it was a statistical tie (26 to 24). And so, the paper chose to run the poll under a headline beginning “Huge blow to Keir Starmer”. Once again, a right-wing newspaper seems to be assuming that its own readers are functionally innumerate.

I could go on. In fact, what the hell, I will. There was the time another Sun reporter claimed the election was still “up for grabs” on the basis of a poll which showed that, in the “worst-case scenario for Labour”, the Tories would still be 40 seats short of a majority. There was the Spectator’s report on “millennial Millie, the new swing voter”, that managed to create and dissect an entire new sub-category of 30-ish female voters while studiously avoiding mentioning that millennial Millie is not a swing voter at all, but is overwhelmingly saying she will vote for anyone except the Tories. There was the time that magazine’s editor Fraser Nelson’s opened a Telegraph column with the intensely baffling line: “Are you better off than you were 13 years ago? This is the question posed by the latest Labour Party advert and for most people the answer is a firm yes.” (Is Fraser Nelson holding the graph the right way up? For most people the answer is a firm no.)

I was going to do a bit on the Telegraph’s strange belief that the issues that have really mattered to the British people over the last few years were that Big Ben should bong and the late Queen should have got a new yacht, but it turns out I don’t need it, because the point, I hope, is clear: the entire right wing press seems to believe that everyone who reads it is a moron. I can’t help but wonder if it’s a coincidence that many of the biggest UK political substacks¹ – Sam Freedman, Ian Leslie, Ed West – come from people who are either of the right, or at least firmly not of the left, but who are writing in a way that doesn’t talk down to their audience. That to me suggests a hunger for thoughtful non-left-wing takes, which the papers have simply stopped bothering to provide.²

The accusation that some on the liberal left look down on the people they profess to want to help has always bothered me, at least partly because it’s not entirely wrong. (Honestly, read The Road to Wigan Pier, in which Orwell³ writes about the working classes like like an unfamiliar but anthropologically fascinating foreign tribe.) But the corollary of this pushed by the populist right – that the likes of Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Paul Dacre and the tabloid press have a natural hotline to the id of the British people – has always smelt like self-delusion, a fluke of being on the right-side of a couple of elections in a relatively short period. Soon enough, I suspect, they’re going to find out the hard way that the British electorate are not quite as stupid as they think.

Some dark ages (and the problem thereof)

If you ever, for some reason, really wanted a historian to scream in your face, you could do worse than this: use the phrase “dark ages”. Honestly, it works every time.

It’s not just that the term implies a value judgement, it’s that it literally is one. The idea first appeared in the work of the Tuscan scholar Franceso Petrarca – Petrach – in the 1330s, as a way of contrasting the lack of great art and literature of his own time with the glories of the classical era that preceded it. All this was a deliberately contrarian attempt to critique the assumption of a highly religious age that it was actually the pre-Christian era which had been the dark one. “Can I just shock you?” he was saying. “I think the literature of people who didn’t even believe in your god was better than the nonsense produced by the people who do.”