Whilst neither the couple nor the case are discussed directly,
a new book by Peter Oborne fleshes out a political context for quantum McCannics
and makes at least one thing very clear: the unprecedented level of support
the couple were offered is unlikely to have come from any one camp in particular
- but from the closing ranks of Britain's new ruling caste: the Political and
Media Classes. The traditional boundaries that existed between the parties are
no longer valid. There is now little point in asking if Gerry, Lori Campbell,
or Fiona Philips is 'New Labour' - only if they have been quietly enrolled into
a powerful new social elite. This post concludes our look
at the forces of 'manipulative populism' that helped shape the McCann lobby.
WE'RE IN THE SELF-PRESERVATION SOCIETY: OLIVER'S ARMY CLAIMS VITAL NEW TERRITORIES
Anybody who doubts that such an ostensible whitewash as the McCann investigation
could ever arise out of the bipartisan efforts of both the Conservative Party
and New Labour should urgently acquire a copy of Peter Oborne's 'The
Triumph of the Political Class'. It covers everything I have wanted to
say on this blog (only more succinctly) and provides a credible context for
much of its speculation. The old dichotomy between the Conservatives, New Labour
and the Liberal Democrats is no longer valid. A new ruling class, crossing all
political divides, has emerged: Oborne calls it the ‘Political Class’ - and
it takes its rank and file from the self-preserving marriages that exist between
charities, the media, professional lobbyists, career politicians and 'hereditary
mpeers'. Characterised by a bizarre and often paradoxical conflation of impunity
and moral righteousness, these new elites quietly excuse themselves from the
usual discipline of common decency expected of the rest of civil society. They
are of our world but not in it: immanent and transcendent in a style more befitting
characters in a Thomas Pynchon novel or Gnostic deities:
"At the start of the twenty-first century British Public life is once again
dominated by a tight political elite, which pursues its own sectional interest
oblivious to the public good. The rhetoric of public virtue persists – indeed,
has rarely been more emphatic – but the old barriers against factionalism, patronage
and corruption have been for the most part broken … “
Oborne argues that whilst this new Political Class has little historical connection
with the old landed aristocracy, it does share ‘important structural features’
with these pre-modern elites. Oborne also illustrates how this new ruling class
has acquired one of the defining characteristics of a social class: a common
economic base.
“Politicians are now fundamentally dependent for funding and prestige upon
the British state. Indeed many members of the Political Class abuse their financial
and other privileges, then collaborate with each other, even across traditional
party lines, to prevent themselves being found out. The real divide in British
life is no longer between the main political parties, but between the Political
Class and the rest .. … all this means that the Political Class is not merely
separated from the ordinary people … it is actively hostile. It is in the nature
of special interest groups to seek influence at the expense of the rest of the
community … British Politicians have sought to govern in a novel way, obliterating
the organisations and methods of a representative democracy and instead using
the press and the broadcast media as the key method of communication between
ruler and the ruled. In post-Modern political society the media can be most
usefully understood as instrument of power. The fusion between the media and
political domains defines British politics today: a new system of government
beautifully christened ‘manipulative populism’. The destruction of mediating
institutions (like the press and the broadcast media) means that swathes of
ordinary people and whole sections of civil society have been excluded from
meaningful democratic participation ...
Most large chairities have become arms of the state in recent years, pursuing
politically determined objectives in return for funding from central government
...
... the print and broadcasting media have come to play a similar role for
the political class. Theoretically independent of government, in Britian the
media is in fundamental respects an ancillary arm of the political class ...
"
With a relentless Puritan zeal rivalled only by self-styled leaders like Oliver
Cromwell, the new Political Class (and their ancillary arm, the Media Class)
has betrayed its common roots and the fundamental behaviour of modern democracy.
It's one law for us and one law for them. They are the new nomenklatura. The
'untouchables'. And of course, when an otherwise civilised society has been
excluded from meaningful democratic participation, it is likely to be forced
to engage in more violent and uncivilsed forms of expression in an attempt to
have its voice recognised and message felt.
SWEETENING THE BITTEREST PILL (YOU EVER HAD TO SWALLOW)
Using Madeleine’s abduction as a moral pretext for pushing a broad and controversial
range of pan-European policies and radical humanitarian schemes fits neatly
within the framework of manipulative populism. Whether we are talking about
extending and ratifying the hugely divisive Prüm Agreement to all 27-member
states (which was actioned in June 2007), or whether we are talking about a
multilateral system as the one envisaged by the EU-Wide Child Alert, we are
dealing with a multifarious elite whose executive decisions exploit a rich seam
of panic and uncertainty. Oborne says of the early modernisers, ‘it was
a progressive ideology which embodied a profound belief in the ability of a
benign ruling caste to make life better for ordinary people’ - whether
they liked it or not.
The ‘abduction event’ was seized on immediately to ‘do some good’ – a benign
alchemy of sorts - turning tragedy into a triumph, yet successfully eclipsing
the gross and appalling selfishness that was ultimately responsible for the
child going missing in the first place. In stark contrast to the case of Karen
Matthews who was accused of ‘pure evil’ for failing to put the welfare and security
of her child ahead of her own, the McCanns were quietly praised for their ‘brave’
and ‘progressive’ parenting. Their own indulgence was portrayed as a tragic
virtue; they were victims of their own success, their own broad-mindedness.
Both sets of parents had ostensibly taken ‘social liberalism’ to an extreme,
but only one set of parents were pilloried for it. Naturally, it’s okay to leave
your children alone in an unlocked apartment to go out and get pissed as long
as you are drinking chardonnay and not cheap cider. The economics of disappearing
are obviously class-sensitive too. Whilst the surprisingly well-managed Find
Madeleine fund raised in excess of £3 million in reward money and public
donations, only £50,000 was raised for Shannon.
RETURN OF THE MAC: ADDRESSING EXECUTIVE FRICTIONS
The vitriolic response of a small minority of the public to the couple is likely
to have arisen as a response to these double-standards: we were aware of the
manipulation but were unnable to either quantify it or rationalize it adequately.
It was the 'return of the repressed' on a civic scale. The inchoate and largely
unconscious thoughts and feelings of civil society pressed for access to the
‘executive fictions of the mind’ and the ruling class have done their best to
suppress them. But the problem with keeping things hidden is that there is one
side of the brain that has to be on constant alert to prevent the direct expression
of the ‘secret’ – and the failure of the two sides of the brain to reach an
agreement results in neurotic symptoms.
I think the same thing can be applied to Al-Qaeda and Britian's homegrown radical
threat. Neurotic Britain is the result of a similar process: the covert operations
of the intelligence community, and its complicity in allowing itself to become
a politicised force, obliges neurotic and radical responses elsewhere. The Islamic
Extremist is merely a symptom of our over-politicised and deeply divided security
agencies, the result of our abject failure to acknowledge the impact of ‘secret
politics’ on the mind of the individual and of the abuses of policy abroad.
Likewise, our often irrational response to advances in science is simply the
result of misinformation and its failure to be performed in an open and accessible
fashion.
The ‘return of the repressed’: it comes back to bite you squarely on the arse
every time. The Hindus and the Buddhists had all this sussed with ‘karma’. The
Christians too. What was that quote again? “If you bring forth what is within
you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within
you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” They can’t all be talking
boll*cks.
Take the War in Iraq, not the result or expression of flawed intelligence but
of a hugely eclectic cartel. We didn’t enter the War in Iraq because it posed
a direct threat to our National Security, but because of an effluence of economic
and ideological imperatives being heaped on the intelligence services. We had
the pro-Israeli lobby on one side and the pro-Saudis, the neo-conservatives,
the oil barons, the investment bankers on the other – plus a thousand-and-one
unnecessary evils inbetween. How do the public respond to such lies? It becomes
confused, it becomes divided. Eventually there’s an entire register of inconsistencies
and contradictions that they are not able to resolve satisfactorily. The pretexts
provided just didn’t make sense - and so we were forced to draw our own conclusions,
provide our own expressions. It's all a consequence of ‘secret politics’. And
it’s the job of the intelligence services to mop it up when it expresses itself
as resistance – just like it was the job of the intelligence services to make
the shoe fit in the first place – the ‘executive fictions’ of Mi5 and Mi6. An
inevitable consequence of all this is that the intelligence community has an
even bigger job on its hand opposing the threat that builds up at home. And
it is forced to respond not just aggressively but politically, which only pours
more oil on the fire and creates even more problems to fix.
Al-Qaeda is the inevitable conclusion of pro-Western intelligence services
applying self-determination to an unpredictable broad-spectrum menace: better
to have your enemies identify themselves in ways you understand than to have
them lurking around in the shadows, adopting wildly non-uniform hostilities.
Willing them to power was just one way of establishing a quantifiable conflict
order.
It's been said before: the modern states invites subversion the better to
contain it. It's the 'War on Semiotics'. The battle over signs.
IT'S EVERYWHERE AND NOWHERE BABY .. THAT'S WHERE IT'S AT
Of course the McCann lobby (if there is such a thing) is likely to be a very
loose and ad hoc coalition of individuals and organisations; not a single, unified
pressure group with a central figurehead but a diverse and overlapping (and
sometimes diametrically opposing) network of opportunists trading on the ‘abduction
event’ for a broad range of commercial and political outcomes. There will be
no defined membership as such and no centralized hierarchy, just everyone in
it for themselves. And it is left to the rest of us to figure it out, which
will inevitably give rise to no end of so-called 'conspiracy theories' - half-grasped
truths grasped through half-grasped field-glasses.
But where do all these stories come from? Manifestations of our barely suppressed
horror that have somehow leaked into conscious form? A semi-conscious grasp
of some underlying pattern?
What makes them so believable?
As one valued blog contributor once observed: the theories we attach to events
are not believable by virtue of any inherent truthfulness but because we are
able to pull 'many disparate events together into the outline of a plausible
and entertaining narrative.' And it's a very valid point to make. Like a
circle in a spiral, a wheel within a wheel. One might extend the analogy
to a book like The Library of Babel.Borges' book tells the story
of a man who describes his own private universe as an ever-expanding network
of hexagonal rooms surrounded by very low railings and airshafts. From each
of the rooms on the lower level, all higher levels can be observed. But whilst
the order of the books is random and rather meaningless, those who browse its
shelves and read the gibberish in the books therein are convinced that they
must contain (collectively at least) every coherent book ever written. They
convince themselves that the random sequences of punctuation marks and spaces
must ultimately comprise the entire repository of human knowledge and all knowledge
that is yet to be, with every possible variation, every typo, every error and
every possible translation possible.
There's simply no real way of knowing where these ideas come from. The best
that you can say is that they are seldom plucked out of a hat, instead they
behave in an almost viral fashion, spores dispersing on the wind, multiplying
and dividing in a less than tidy fashion, taking root in the smallest of crevices
and upon the most unlikely of hosts. As Umberto Eco points out in his novel,
The Name Of The Rose, 'books always speak of other books, and every story
tells a story that has already been told.' Books are not the manifestation of
the personal reality of the author but a patchwork of things; texts refer to
other texts, and those texts to other texts until tracing the germ of an idea,
or the source of an original story becomes more like trying to isolate the source
of an epidemic spanning hundreds if not thousands of years.
In true Post Modern style, Eco's hero solves the mystery 'by mistake', he thought
there was a pattern but it turned out to be accidental. We might look for the
end of the rainbow but it's seldom there. We lunge after certainty, make complete
fools of ourselves in the pursuit of closure but we are only ever chasing shadows;
and shadows which are, moreover, likely to have no observable source of their
own. Even the novel's title is without meaning, Eco saying in the Postscript
he chose the title 'because the rose is a symbolic figure so rich in meanings
that by now it hardly has any meaning left.”
And much the same thing could be said of Madeleine; she's become a changeling,
a Tam Lin - all that remains of her now are semiotics. Jouissance has dissolved
all meaning, the sign has moved away from the signifier, the flesh replaced
almost entirely by fiction.
Until her return at least, she is a girl by any other name.
Interestingly, one of the few modern politicians Oborne exempts from the new
Political Class is John
Redwood, who readers might remember was one of the few commentators to openly
criticize the McCanns. In his blog
of 2007, Redwood accused the couple of being more interested in spinning
to the media than finding their daughter. The senior adviser to David Cameron
was later forced to retract his statements. One can only surmise his retraction
was ordered by the Prime Minister-elect, David Cameron - who comes in for some
stinging criticism from Oborne (its generally regarded that the new Political
Class collude on most levels and are more likely to regard the prying eyes of
the public as a more clear and present danger than any of those residual party
boundaries - boundaries which now exist only in the minds of the press and the
confused electorate).
"Ye must also deal better with us concerning the Lords, than
you have done. Ye only are chosen by us the People, and therefore in you only
is the power of binding the whole nation, by making, altering or abolishing
of laws ... What is the power of the House of Lords but to blind our eyes, that
we should not know where our power is lodged, nor to whom to apply ourselves
for the use thereof ...
We must therefore pray you to make a law against all kinds of arbitrary government,
as the highest capital offence against the commonwealth, and to reduce all conditions
of men to a certainty, that none henceforward may presume or plead anything
in way of excuse, and that ye will leave no favour or scruple of tyrannical
power over us in any whatsoever ...
We must deal plainly with you, ye have long time acted more like the House of
Peers than the House of Commons: we can scarcely approach your door with a request
or motion, though by way of petition, but ye hold long debates, whether we break
not your privileges; the King's or the Lords' pretended prerogatives never made
a greater noise, nor was made more dreadful than the name of privilege of the
House of Commons."
