The ass led by the nose
Why are so many of the tabloids, some of them owned by foreign billionaires, so keen on Brexit? It would be naïve to think that they care a button about unemployed poor people in Middlesborough. They want to sell papers and they can do it by having their extremely skilled journalists whipping up discontent. How easily do raucous headlines and a couple of photos defeat the complex and tortuous arguments of reason. But the publication of Nancy MacLean’s book Democracy in Chains revealing the secretive programmes of mega-rich people in America to undermine and eventually kill democracy by undermining it from within – austerity measures, for example, have as their real motive not balancing the books but permanently rolling back welfare programmes – but always under the cover of other policies designed to fool voters by appearing to adopt policies more acceptable to them, all this makes one wonder whether the real agenda of the tabloids is something else. Could it be to prise the UK out of the EU so that its weakened economy becomes more vulnerable to exploitation by multi-national corporations? They must be already licking their lips at the prospect of privatizing the NHS, for what a fat plum already trembling on the tree is western medicine. How cynical would that be you say. Well yes. But ordinary people are so naïve such a programme, if indeed it exists, would be all too tempting. For all politicians and advertisers know you can always rely on the gullibility of the public. In the last three elections in the UK most people have voted in Tory governments that make most of them poorer and brazenly cut the rich’s taxes to make them richer. The ass led y the nose springs to mind. If Nancy Maclean is right the abyss that is beginning to open under our feet is all too horrifying.
