FEAR AND LOATHING IN FLEET STREET

There is nothing more odious, to paraphrase a famous quip, than the British press in one of its fits of moral outrage. And it’s true. Nothing can compare. And I’m not just referring to the tabloids . . .

Of course, there is excellent journalism: Duncan Campbell’s investigations, Zoe Heller’s interviews, Hugh McIlvanney’s sports writing, and so on. But you can’t help but notice the spit among the polish.

While most people pick on the Sun and the Mirror and the rest, the so-called quality papers can be equally scurrilous and sensationalist. Longer sentences and more complex syntax do not necessarily guarantee a higher quality of truth.

Take the Sunday Times. (Please!)

One notes in passing an ugly caricature of the editor of this magazine recently penned by Eoghan Harris. The sheer spleen which motivated this grossly inaccurate and unprofessional piece of self-indulgent polemic is dealt with elsewhere in this issue of Hot Press. Suffice to say here that Harris may be an intelligent man – but that doesn’t mean he’s right.

It’s a problem with people, who are utterly convinced that they are more intelligent and perceptive than the herd. Conor Cruise O’Brien had the same trouble.

They apparently cannot understand that principles establish their own logic, that democracy is such a principle, and that you cannot have democracy without freedom of speech. And, in a democracy, you have to respect the rights of all the people, and their decisions.

Now I know it's rather galling for highly opinionated reactionaries, to think that Joe Soap might want to make up his own mind. And so too might Margaret. But that’s democracy.

The same organ of the right has been running a sustained campaign against Hillary Clinton, implying all manner of wrongdoing by Bill’s missus when she was a legal eagle in Arkansas.

Not that the Timber Planks seem to care. Opinion polls suggest that yer average Yank doesn’t give a toss as long as the economy is on the move which, fortunately for Bill’n’Hill, it is.

Not too many Americans read the Sunday Times, and those who do are liable to be the sort of Anglophile Yank that wouldn’t like a youngish redneck upstart like Clinton. So why would they wage such a campaign?

You’ve heard of the Socialist International? Well, welcome to the Conservative International!!

It’s a pity, really, because the same paper has some very fine writers on board as well, and its magazine has long been an excellent (and editorially independent) example of how to chew up and lose the best part of a Sunday morning. If you’re up, that is!

But for now I’m afraid, the reactionary ranting has proven too much.

Of course, computer technology means that papers like the Sunday Times are easily regionalised, and the localised self-promotions do not appear elsewhere in the (er) British Isles. Harumph.

Thus the Scottish copy replaces Eoghan Harris and the Fullbin Bowmen with other (um) expert commentators. But all are united in the belief that there is a God, and he is a Tory. An Irish one, perhaps, or a Scot. But a Tory nonetheless.

God might even be a She, like, say Mary Kenny, once a notorious rebel, or something of the sort, but now the worst kind of Irish emigre, a Tory grandee . . . (or is it grandess?)

Jaze, but we’ve a lot to put up with!

The amusing thing is that the self-styled quality papers and their quality journalists present themselves as so much more caring and responsible and compassionate than their tabloid colleagues. What a joke.

A good example was to be found in the aftermath of the pathetic death of the MP Stephen Milligan, found dead in his flat with a plastic bag over his head, a satsuma in his mouth and a length of flex wrapped around his neck.

Of course, the tabloids hopped to their inevitable conclusion, that this was another example of Tory perversion, that Milligan was gay and had snuffed during a bondage session that had gone disastrously wrong.

That they were mistaken emerged pretty quickly. Nobody knows the exact circumstances of Milligan’s death, but it seems certain that he was alone, and his death was accidental, the result of starving the brain to heighten sexual pleasure. Or whatever. Don’t try this at home, kids: apparently it kills 200 males in the UK every year.

Sad and pathetic. And, since Milligan was, you know, once a successful journalist with the Economist (one of us!), the qualities went to town on those nasty, filthy minded tabloids ...

The same qualities that wouldn’t think very hard about putting together a circumstantial case against Hillary Clinton .....

The savage murder of Dominic McGlinchey offered the same newspapers another chance to indulge themselves. By his own admission, McGlinchey had killed many people, and clearly he lived in a zone of human experience that few of us (thankfully) will ever encounter.

But I wouldn’t wish his death on anyone, even one who had caused so much death himself. Bernadette McAliskey described the dead man as “the finest republican of them all.” Again, I like to think that this was just emotional rhetoric, but such a statement neatly encapsulates the vast gulf between the south and the north.

Killing and dying for “the cause he believed in” is no longer a guarantee of sanctity in the south. Clearly, it still is in parts of the north. The people of the south, corrupt and cynical bastards and traitors that they are, have much more respect for those who live for the cause they espouse.

Life is what is important. We have had enough of the culture of death and martyrdom. What’s the point in dying for some sectarian ideal or even for vengeance itself when you can live and build and contribute?

But we must confront the proponents of violence and destruction at every turn. (On the air: hats off to Pat Kenny) And not just because we all could be next, if they ever succeed in the north.

A friend of mine told me of a BBC radio programme she overheard recently, an early morning farming programme, on which someone was complaining that the price of farm land was rising in the south of Scotland, thereby bucking the trend everywhere else in the UK. And why? Because Ulster Protestant farmers were buying it up.

Could this be true?

If so, it shows that the “ideal” that republicans have been pursuing for the last generation in the north is beginning to be realised, the expulsion of the protestants. And it finds a chilling echo in the recently leaked UDA plan for ethnic cleansing east of the Bann.

They envisage yielding up four counties, and holding all Antrim and Down Catholics hostage for the safe release of Protestants west of the Bann. Presumably their small enclave would associate with Scotland in some way.

Fanciful? Maybe. But maybe not. Look at Bosnia. Some ideal. Some cause.

No, this is not the way forward. The principles and framework so carefully set out in the Downing Street Declaration represent the last best hope. And the priority now is for peace, and persuasion, not by the governments, but by the people who live cheek by jowl up there in the cockpit of conflict.

Forget dying for ideals. Let’s live for practicals for a change.