Right motives, wrong targets.
As New Labour decides whether or not to overthrow the leader it only installed this time last year, the good ship Cameron continues to sail on with the sea calm and nary a cloud on the horizon. While any half-decent historian will tell you that the notion that history repeats is a fallacy, it's difficult not to see the Conservatives if not repeating New Labour's pre-1997 detoxification of the "brand" then certainly following it closely.
A case in point is Michael Gove's speech today to the left-wing IPPR think-tank. First, confront the "enemy", or at least an organisation that has traditionally been either critical or exercised undue influence, head-on. Labour did it with clause 4 and then the unions, and while Cameron's Conservatives have so far not achieved a similar high-publicity example of themselves either repudiating their past or moving on from it, it's certainly happening in a much more guarded fashion. Second, while in front of this organisation, make clear you're not going to repeat the "mistakes" of the past, or openly criticise past policy. Gove therefore highlights past Conservative hostility to homosexuality as indulging prejudice and missing the point. It has to be said that the party could hardly do otherwise when a good proportion of it recently celebrated Alan Duncan's civil partnership, but it's still making the separation point. Next is to rehabilitate single mothers - those of Peter Lilley's "little list", whom far from being sponging layabouts getting knocked up to get council houses are in fact mainly being abandoned by the fathers.
So far, so good - Gove might be angering the Melanie Phillips' of this world, but few others. This being modern politics however, and certainly the modern Conservatives, something has to be attacked for the speech to get noticed. Hence we look for something that is politically acceptable to attack and which can't bite the party back in any meaningful fashion - the notion that magazines such as Nuts and Zoo influence young men to not take their responsibilities seriously - and Gove sets about them. Headlines follow, everyone tuts about how awful the lads' mags are, and who, after all, except for their editors and publishers can pretend otherwise, and Gove's job is done.
This covers the fact that Gove doesn't really offer any substantial policy difference whatsoever to the government's, except on the bung of up to £20 a week to families that live up to the nuclear idyll. Some will doubtless welcome this as the Conservatives turning over a new leaf, accepting that society has changed, that blaming the most vulnerable doesn't achieve much in the end except raising the blood pressure of the good burghers of middle England, but it doesn't do much to disprove the accusations of vacuity. That moaning about modern politics being vacuous has become almost akin to moaning about all Status Quo songs sounding the same doesn't alter the fact that it's true - and even politicians themselves have got in on the act, Miliband's vacuous article last week apparently the response to a vacuous George Osborne Grauniad article, Tony Blair having the temerity to accuse Gordon Brown's policies of being vacuous - next we'll have John McCain comparing Obama to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton.
It also conveniently covers up for this remarkably hilarious line from Gove which follows his denunciation of Nuts and Zoo:
The contrast with the work done by women's magazines, and their publishers, to address their readers in a mature and responsible fashion, is striking.
I'm sorry, what? What women's magazines is Gove talking about? It can't be Cosmopolitan and these other equally cerebral titles, informing their readers of the "latest" blowjob techniques, 50 ways to the best orgasm and all the latest things to waste their money on while worrying endlessly about the effects of ageing. It can't be those almost exclusively marketed to women celebrity titles like Heat and Closer, which can't make up their minds which celebrities are fat and which are skinny and which hate and don't hate their bodies, which promote instant self-fulfilment just as much as the likes of Nuts and Zoo, and are similarly obsessed with cosmetic surgery. It also surely can't be the likes of Take a Break, Love it! and all those others, which combine horror stories of abusive boyfriends, murdering husbands and deformed children, with again, continually uplifting stories about how cosmetic surgery has substantially improved someone's life. How about those teenage girl magazines, Cosmo Girl etc, which not so long ago were horrifying politicians with their tales of promiscuity and open sex advice?
Attacks on the above, with the exception perhaps of Heat etc are strictly off limits mainly because the Take a Break reader was recently identified as the latest substrata voter who can be made more malleable through touchy-feely sessions with the leader, and Cosmopolitan and others have on occasion also featured articles on Cameron and how, like Blair before him, he sets the bar in being both personable, reasonably pleasing to the eye and of course, well-dressed. It's also apparent now that young women aren't the enemy, but perhaps young men are. They're probably the least likely to vote in any case, and going by past impressions with Cameron, they don't seem to impressed by him. The most easily disposable demographic therefore gets it in the neck. It's also worth noting that Gove attacks only Nuts and Zoo and not the more "up-market" men's titles, like GQ, with their positive coverage of Cameron.
Gove could, if he or his party had the guts, have extended the argument even further. It's not just the men and women's magazines, it's the tabloid newspapers too. After all, they increasingly resemble a daily edition of Heat, and the Star and Sport are lads' mags dressed up in daily newspaper clothing. Don't they too "reinforce a very narrow conception of beauty and a shallow approach towards women" and "celebrate thrill-seeking and instant gratification without ever allowing any thought of responsibility towards others, or commitment, to intrude"? Shouldn't Gove be asking Rebekah Wade, Paul Dacre, Rupert Murdoch and Lord Northcliffe what they think they're doing "revelling in, or encouraging, selfish irresponsibility among young men" (and women) seeing they too profit out of it? Considering Gove was formerly a hack on the Times he might be more likely than others to get an answer out of Red Rupert. Reply? "Rack off and mind your own business," most likely.
The very last thing Gove and his party could afford to do, obviously, is to annoy either the Mail or Murdoch too much. The biggest irony is that those that have long professed to be public barometers of morality have abandoned it in pursuit of profits outside of editorials, columns and self-justification for their exposure of sex scandals. They are far, far more widely read than any of the lads' or women's magazines and have a far more corrosive effect on our culture, yet their power means they are almost unimpeachable outside of the courts.
This is why the idea that the Conservatives will be less authoritarian than New Labour runs so hollow, as the usually excellent Jenni Russell believes. The current sops to more locally devolved power, the abolition of ID cards etc are window dressing until the party is once again in power. No one seems to have noticed that on prisons, on welfare, the Conservatives are still to the right of New Labour, and the abiding impression is that they intend to out-Blairite the ultra-Blairites, and unless you haven't noticed, they don't tend to be either liberal or believers in the idea of local autonomy. The exceptions, such as parents being allowed to set up their own schools, is to defuse the row over grammars, while the emphasis on the private and voluntary sector over the public is because it's cheaper. On the things that matters, the Tories will be just as right-wing and managerial as New Labour, and just as bad in selecting what needs to be criticised as Gove is today.
Labels: authoritarianism, Conservatives, lads mags, media anaylsis, Michael Gove, politics
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