A letter a day to number 10. No 1,290
Saturday 19 December 2015.
Dear Mr Cameron,
Nice to see that you’ve had to increase the number of your special advisers and spin doctors which cost us £11.1 million last year because if anyone needs them, you do. I am fascinated by the world of PR/spin/propaganda, call it what you will, managing public perception or, more correctly, deception and it takes you a small army to do it.
Here’s the thing though, it really doesn’t matter how many people you spend our money on to deceive us, they might be able to affect perception, but they can’t change reality.
One of the curses of progress, for you, is education. An enquiring, informed public is harder to manage than an ignorant one. Small wonder that Michael Gove as education secretary favoured rote learning over enquiry. Rote learning is one of the keys to success is how he span it, which is absolute nonsense of course. People asking questions and enquiring can be extremely inconvenient. Let’s just examine your war on the poor for a moment. You could never have got away with it unless your legion of spin doctors hadn’t manufactured contempt for the poor. If you can turn compassion into contempt then you can get away with murder. The problem is that compassion is innate so you have you keep pumping out the lies and spin in order to smother people’s innate caring. One of your more egregious lies was accusing the poor of having a culture of entitlement. On its own that would have been laughably insane so the poor had to be rebranded as benefit scroungers, milking the system of hard working people’s cash. As Osborne put it, “Where is the fairness, we ask, for the shift-worker, leaving home in the dark hours of the early morning, who looks up at the closed blinds of their next-door neighbour sleeping off a life on benefits.” Just manufacture up some hate there George.
A lot of stuff got dumped in the Christmas skip on Thursday, 424 documents thrown into the rubbish skip of democracy and accountability, hoping no one would notice, as you all sidle off for a nice little seasonal break. One of the nuggets that was conveniently dumped was the failure of the bedroom tax, from the department of the very man who orchestrated it, the hardship it is causing and its failure to free up housing. The bedroom tax was and is a brutal attack on the poor. The only incentives it imposes are for people to starve themselves and be driven to despair. First you marginalise them then you crush them.
Democracy is the people engaging socially and it frightens the living daylights out of those who oppose it, look at what you and the right wing media are doing to Jeremy Corbyn as he encourages and champions democratic involvement. He’s got you spinners of lies in a real muck sweat, which I have to say is rather pleasing to see, but the hate filled propaganda is as disgusting as it is unforgivable from the enemies of democracy. Readers of Murdoch’s Sun in particular would do well to think about that rather than allowing themselves to be led by the nose.
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/david-cameron-spends-10million-army-7029803
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/9-pieces-bad-news-tories-7031791
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2012/nov/14/michael-gove-backs-learning-by-rote
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/jan/08/strivers-shirkers-language-welfare
Fear and Loathing in Great Britain 