The Sun
Security, security, security.
It’s the new buzzword from Tory HQ. Spin doctors dreamt it up a year ago and deployed it heavily during the general election to scare voters off a non-existent Labour-SNP pact.
Now they see the politics of fear as the best way to stymie Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. In a fawning double spread interview with Cameron, including glib anecdotes about how much he loves the new Jurassic Park (with added Hollywood-monster sexism!), The Sun uses the word “security” 6 times in the space of 13 sentences.
Another key word apart from “security” was “responsibility”.
Apparently what would constitute “responsible” behaviour is wiping out millions of people in a nuclear holocaust. In a snippet titled ‘My Nuke Duty’, the Sun waxes stoic: ‘Mr Cameron described the “sobering moment” he had to make decisions on pushing the nuclear button… This shows the enormous responsibility.
If you believe in a nuclear deterrent, you have to accept there are circumstances in which its use is justified.’
But perhaps the most tellingly bizarre – and frankly racist – article in today’s Sun (p. 27), was a column about a new British designed prison in Jamaica.
This ‘swansong’ from David Cameron is apparently a win-win, providing jobs in Jamaica (‘local people will build and staff the prison, while local businesses will supply it with goods’).
It’s nothing less than the neocolonial version of Britain exporting the virtues of the rule of law – upgraded for an era where the only way to provide jobs is to lock up those people who the system can no longer support. ‘The only losers are deported Jamaican prisoners who’ll never set foot in the UK again.’
The Mirror
Even The Sun (p. 28) opposes the planned cut to tax credits, launching a campaign ‘to aid low-paid workers’.
Like rival paper The Mirror (p.19), it cites a report by the Resolution Foundation showing that the new minimum wage – which at £7.20 an hour is a long way from a real living wage, despite the Tories’ rebranding exercise – will fail to plug the gap opened up by the cut to working tax credits. According to the ‘Low Pay Britain’ study, a single parent working full time will be £1500 worse off in 2016. These kinds of real term cuts are set to affect over 3 million families.
What the Sun conveniently leaves out of the picture, but The Mirror thankfully does mention, is that the report backs Jeremy Corbyn’s call ‘for a better deal for self-employed workers who have no sick pay or job security.’
The think tank found that the East Midlands is the worst region for poor wages and forecasts that ‘the number of people on less than the living wage will rise to 6.5 million next year.’ So much for Cameron’s mantra of “security” – this is his precarity Britain.
But in case you thought it was turning soft, the paper gives one of its main columns (p. 27) over to bashing Corbyn for being ‘out of date’.
The Mirror trots out the Tory line of Britain’s miracle recovery: ‘We’re living in a country that has made an astonishing recovery from a worldwide crash from which many countries are still reeling.’
It admits the UK is suffering a ‘chronic housing shortage’, and that ‘tragically, some people do still have to use food banks. And many families on low pay still need their wages topped up by benefits.’ But on balance things are rosy, apparently. What the column fails to point out is the connection between these things. Britain’s recovery is built on low wages, housing speculation, and Victorian levels of inequality, never mind the imagined throwback to the 1980s. It’s a recovery for the 20%, if not the 1%.
Oh well, says The Mirror, ‘there’s a definite Feelgood Factor which is encouraging people to spend again.’
But as economist James Meadway has pointed out, very high levels of personal debt are one of the major risk factors for the UK economy: that plus low productivity, due to the historic gutting of the country’s manufacturing base, plus a record current account deficit (we’re spending more on imports than we earn on exports), and our over reliance on a financial sector knee-deep in risky investments such as loans to the volatile Chinese economy. In other words, the government has upped the ante on our debt-bondage economy.
