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Call that news?
Jul. 25th, 2007 07:38 pmMy family members are generally reasonably liberal, which they somehow manage to mix with being solidly Tory in their voting habits, something I blame on the Labour governments of the 1970s and the fear that any minute now Gordon Brown will pull off his mask and reveal Arthur Scargill underneath.
In any case this does mean that when people go out for the day's shopping (the nearest shops being five miles away, and me not being able to drive) they tend to come home with the Telegraph, Times and Mail.
I can live with either The Times or the Telegraph. I tend to find the latter more readable, and I can filter out its prejudices more easily (basic right wing fiscally, centre ground on social policy). The Times is more reactionary and its columnists have a tendency to descend into terribly jocular attempts to rubbish Political Correctness, Europe, or any attempts to drag the country kicking and screaming into the 1980s. This tends to set my teeth on edge and cause frantic scrambling for the next page.
The Mail, on the other hand, I feel unclean merely being in the same room as. It's a blatant collection of articles designed to cause people to pull firmly into their shells, terrified of going outside because they might bump into a horrifically violent teenager, and should they defend themselves they'd be instantly locked up for violating an EU directive. Frankly, the people behind it ought to be locked up for causing distress.
I'm innoculating myself by reading Ken Livingstone's 1987 autobiography. So far (page 57) it's too full of the details of individual squabbles and the backdrop of his moves into politics. It's fascinating to watch the Labour Party of 1975 tearing itself apart, and full of all sorts of lessons about how bureacracies don't work if you let the bureacracy part become more important than whatever it was designed to do in the first place. I'm also told that it gets much easier to read once I hit page 120-odd, so I'm looking forward to that. One thing that's most odd about it is that it was written in 1987 and so he talks about a present day that's ten years before the Labour victory that brought Tony Blair to power, a time when Maggie Thatcher was still running the country. I'm certainly enjoying his view of recent history enough that I'm already making notes for further reading when I get home...
In any case this does mean that when people go out for the day's shopping (the nearest shops being five miles away, and me not being able to drive) they tend to come home with the Telegraph, Times and Mail.
I can live with either The Times or the Telegraph. I tend to find the latter more readable, and I can filter out its prejudices more easily (basic right wing fiscally, centre ground on social policy). The Times is more reactionary and its columnists have a tendency to descend into terribly jocular attempts to rubbish Political Correctness, Europe, or any attempts to drag the country kicking and screaming into the 1980s. This tends to set my teeth on edge and cause frantic scrambling for the next page.
The Mail, on the other hand, I feel unclean merely being in the same room as. It's a blatant collection of articles designed to cause people to pull firmly into their shells, terrified of going outside because they might bump into a horrifically violent teenager, and should they defend themselves they'd be instantly locked up for violating an EU directive. Frankly, the people behind it ought to be locked up for causing distress.
I'm innoculating myself by reading Ken Livingstone's 1987 autobiography. So far (page 57) it's too full of the details of individual squabbles and the backdrop of his moves into politics. It's fascinating to watch the Labour Party of 1975 tearing itself apart, and full of all sorts of lessons about how bureacracies don't work if you let the bureacracy part become more important than whatever it was designed to do in the first place. I'm also told that it gets much easier to read once I hit page 120-odd, so I'm looking forward to that. One thing that's most odd about it is that it was written in 1987 and so he talks about a present day that's ten years before the Labour victory that brought Tony Blair to power, a time when Maggie Thatcher was still running the country. I'm certainly enjoying his view of recent history enough that I'm already making notes for further reading when I get home...
