NO2ID

Article => A good month to bury bad news
Shelved by whom, and on what legal basis...?


Article also referenced by => Independent : Howard joins critics of Home Office 'gimmick'

It could be that Martin Notvery of the New Statesman is wrong and that the long handover period, from Tony Blair to whoever, is precisely the opportunity we want for the media to examine every aspect of policy, including ID cards in particular and the erosion of civil liberties in general.

That sort of sneering at Mr Bright, who is a political journalist and a Labour insider (and therefore understands how both media and ministers work), is not merely not very bright. It is dimwitted in the extreme.

What grounds have you for thinking that media (catering for an audience with no interest in detailed policy) will suddenly and completely change their news-values at some point in the next month - and that the audience will suddenly and completely change its interests, and watch/listen/read this outpouring of unheralded analysis? Are you prehaps privy to massive new expenditure in the press on recruiting Home Affairs journalists with technical backgrounds in computer security? Have privacy and civil liberties organisations been bombarded with requests for briefing on the subject in prepration for newspaper campaigns and documentary films?

If so, I think the forum should be told, so that NO2ID is in a position to take advantage. Names of those new journalists please, and contact details for the production companies, since they might be able to squeeze some footage in at the last minute even though they must have been planning such programmes since Christmas.

Surely all David Moss is doing is questioning the inherent assumption by Martin Bright that Nu Labor will be able to get away with burying bad news at the time of Blair's ignominious exit? I agree that at this time there will be at least some serious analysis of the mounting evidence for policy failure in many areas, and Blair might not get away scot free.



Is this sarcasm justified? Media does not equal television, thankfully.

Cast your mind back to 11 September 2001. Two planes crashed into the World Trade Center and one into the Pentagon, a fourth was bravely brought down by its passengers before it could hit its target and 3,000 innocent people died. That was the background to Jo Moore's crass good-day-to-bury-bad-news email to PR staff in the Transport Dept.

And those are the events which the New Statesman's good-month-to-bury-bad-news article seeks to equate with Tony Blair voluntarily standing down from his premiership after 10 years in power. Even under the extremely dim light cast by my wits, Guest@07:08:01, it looks like an inept and tasteless comparison to make.

You will agree with my post, surely, that it is at least logically possible that Mr Bright be wrong. Just because a political journalist and toi-disant "Labour insider" writes something does not mean that it is true.

According to you, the media are catering for an audience "with no interest in detailed policy". This attitude of sneering disdain for the public may be right. In that case why would a political journalist bother to write? Why waste pearls cast before swine?

I hope that you are just as wrong about the public as you are about the news values of the media, for whom you seem to hold equal contempt. It's a curate's egg. The media are good in parts. There are several excellent home affairs correspondents and political columnists, they have already spent years in many cases covering the erosion of civil liberties in general and the introduction of ID cards in particular and it is short-sighted of you to suggest that they will all go into death-of-Diana intellectual meltdown when Tony Blair finally departs.

The privacy and civil liberties organisations may or may not have been bombarded with requests for briefings. It doesn't always work like that, as I am sure that anyone who "understands how both media and ministers work" could tell you. More often, one job of a campaigning organisation is to lobby. It takes years. And No2ID have done that job, for years, professionally and with growing success in the press, in the broadcast media and in Parliament. They are not waiting passively for the wind to change. They are working actively to change it.

And if they succeed, it is not they who will gain an advantage. No2ID will be out of a job. The UK, meanwhile, will be saved from wasting £20bn or so on an ID card scheme which cannot possibly deliver the benefits claimed for it. And the government will be able to stop playing this ridiculous game of charades, pretending that it will work when they know that it can't. Instead, they will be able to wake up every morning and concentrate on how genuinely to detect and prevent crime, to counter terrorism and to deliver services efficiently.

The issue is not whether people are interested in the isues. It is rather the fact that reading about the issues only disturbes peoplke further and adds to their frustration with the government and their perseived inability individualy to do anything to stop the ever growing government. The media do not help stop the government, they just make people feel more and more trapped.

The best way for the government to counter the terrorist threats we read about every day in the papers is to stop making them up.

Justin.

You confuse the media in general with the political weeklies (for which Bright is writing), and the general public with the audience of those political weeklies (who are more interested in policy, but still follow politics like soap).

And you miss the timing point. Bright is writing this now because he is offering an explanation for what is not happening now and a prediction about the future (for an audience of political junkies). He probably won't be writing about it in the interregnum, and he probably knows he won't. He'll be churning out yards of Gordonology like everyone else.

As for the 'taste' point. The bad was successfully buried. Lots more people who would never have heard of her know how cute Jo Moore is, but only because she forgot about the retransmissibility of email in making a smartalec comment. You need to be a very considerable policy wonk to know what she was trying to hide or why it was important to do so.

Had she written with a bit more subtlety and irony: 'We ought to make the following policy announcements in a low-key way now to avoid distracting the media from this terrible incident,' it would actually have made a better joke for us cynical PPOs, you would never have heard of her, and Blair might stand a minuscule amount better in public estimation. Of such 'black swans' is politics made.