Power and People
Posted on December 15, 2007
Filed Under What's New |
Belatedly I picked up on this post by John Burg. it’s a fairly simple statement. Much of what we are striving for today - empowerment, was championed 30 years ago by John Lennon.
I find it utterly fascinating that these themes are reappearing now under the banner of heroes like Lennon.
My first assignment as a journalist was to report on the UK Tory Party’s conference in 1982. This was the height of the Thatcher-Reagan era.
At the conference the Tories decided to break the union power of Britain’s craft engineers - the upper class of the working class. Nobody’s trade, knowledge or reptuation from then on in was sacrosanct. I remember hearing from engineers at the conference (most were Tory supporters) that the end of a high wage economy - they were the best paid and the best educated of the manual workforce - would always haunt the UK. I think we see that now. The country has dire social problems.
What might be less well known is that cultural instututions that we’ve tended to idolise - I’m thinking of Channel 4 television - were responsible for helping Thatcher consolidate and retain power. Shortly afer that conference we were instructed to stop writing/telling stories that glamorised working class viewpoints and to concentrate instead on the new game in town - monetarism and the radical right. But… we objected….
The radical right were the only people saying interesting things, was Channel 4’s answer. It’s taken thirty years for that rubbish finally to be turned back and a more rational and emotionally gratifying way of operating to get a fair look in. People who think Fox news now is bad should be given an insight into the moronic editorial values of Channel 4 back in the early to mid 1980s. Sadly news organisations rarely are open.
But I have to repeat and I guess Burg is saying this - we were there thirty years ago. Conversational media is catch up time.
My biggest grumble is we were taken in by the apparent radicalism of cultural institutions like Channel 4 and BBC 2. They were Thatcher flag wavers and even now you look in vain for cultural institutions to tell this story like it really was. I hope one day we can all reflect on these thirty years not with a sense of regret but at least with some kind of sum-up time - the antagonism in business we’ve experienced - it really didn’t need to happen.
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