I have all but been struck dumb by the monstrous stupidity of my fellow countrymen, much though I expected it. That the overpaid ninnies of England football have also obeyed the popular dictate to leave Europe forthwith merely reminds me of how often we have faced abject failure in the past. To be so severely trounced by a nation 0.5% of our size is probably an earnest of a great deal of what is to come. As our ’defence’ stood by like a bunch of drag queens awaiting a pickup in a cocktail bar whilst Iceland effortlessly threaded their goals through, I realised shame must now become our national raiment.

 

I have never been so ashamed to be English – and I mean English, not British, since Scotland and Northern Ireland weren’t so stupid. Even in the dog days of the Thatcher regime, there were good people doing good things to offset the miseries being visited upon working communities, and social action undertaken to alleviate racial and social disadvantage. When Blair’s religiose paranoia took Britain on his vainglorious adventure in Iraq, two million of us took to the streets to protest the illegal war that is still awaiting Chilcot’s accountancy. But when a Bullingdon Club bust-up irresponsibly initiated a constitutional crisis to settle which faction gets to play boss, both politicians and media disastrously failed to step up to the plate and puncture the cynical mendacity being peddled to a gullible public.

 

As my son – watching from an aghast Norway – observed, among the most appallingly derelict was the BBC. When I first worked for the corporation 45 years ago, news and current affairs were subject to a mechanical calculus of impartiality, which crudely required producers to ‘balance’ honest, insightful truth-tellers with dishonest deniers and liars from opposing viewpoints. We managed, over the years, to evolve a more adult version of objectivity, merely requiring us to represent the range of views over time and the breadth of programming. Emasculated since the Hutton report, and even more risk averse since humiliating failings and compromising settlements with the last two governments, the BBC reverted to that derelict two-dimensional concept of balance during the extended referendum campaign, naively countering every intelligent, informed insight with fact-free denial and vacuous buffoonery from the leave campaign. One buys newspapers to reflect one’s own bias, and regretfully knows that even intelligent editors like Martin Ivens, despite knowing the ineffable superiority of the Remain case, will ally the likes of the Sunday Times to the leave campaign to retain their jobs through pandering to their proprietors and their equally aged demented readers. But we have the right to expect more from the national broadcaster than such shameful pandering.

 

But the roots of this failing go far deeper, with the BBC only one wing of a public world which has failed whole generations in enlightenment. Even when I was a young journalist, I used to observe that people seemed less aware and interested in the wider world than Victorians had been in the Boer War, or my parents’ generation during the Second World War. Despite the limited and controlled resources of newspapers in the former, and radio in the latter, there was a thirst for information and a sense of common purpose which has long since evaporated, to be replaced by an almost perverse popular pleasure in ignorance and indifference. The BBC used to see it as its rule to educate and enlighten the populace, not least so that they could make informed judgements in elections. One of the least remarked, yet most profound, changes of a deeply battered BBC in recent years has been a quiet admission of former elitism and a depressing shift towards vapid populism. Whilst some programmes, Radio 4’s PM for example, make good editorial use of audience input, most pursue a forced bonhomie which contribute little, like the embarrassing uncle pogoing at a party, replacing the authoritative “this is what you need to know” with “what do you want to hear?” What a profoundly disaffected and ill-informed populace wanted to hear was more xenophobic bigotry, blaming immigrants for their disadvantage and reduced services. What they didn’t want to hear, so the media largely obliged, was that it was more to do with their own poor education, government’s misguided austerity economics, and the ruthless value extraction of the rich and powerful. Gary Younge was correct, writing in the Guardian, that you don’t persuade stupid people by calling them stupid, but equally it was the journalists’ job to find ways of communicating hard economic and social truths in terms people could comprehend. Instead, they heard the lies repeated ad nauseam, largely only challenged by ‘the other side’, rather than facts which should have been presented as the objective voice of truth. But the BBC is scared of truth, it smacks too much of elitism.

 

Education has a lot to answer for, although I accept that teachers and schools have also been a political football for far too long, with academies and other such initiatives largely fuelled by the suspect, unchallenged ideology of privatisation, which channels the Thatcherite notion that value only accrues where someone is making a profit, even from schooling children, imprisoning offenders or saving lives. I have never understood why my children would be better educated, public safety more assured, or my health better, if a substantial part of the money allocated for these things goes towards some fat cat’s yacht rather than the activity in question. Children now go through the education system with a very patchy sense of history, British or world, and an equally imperfect understanding of politics. During the first part of the referendum campaign, most people I spoke to said they didn’t know enough to make a decision. During the second, those same people had been seduced by the racist rhetoric of Leave, more easily understood than the economic forecast of the experts, and felt they had joined an easily understood campaign, like supporting England football, ‘putting Britain first’ as the maniac chanted while killing Jo Cox. That even this vile act did not give them pause for thought is one of the many chilling features of this shameful episode.

 

And lest it not be clear enough, our elected representatives, who should never have allowed this to go to the vote in the first place, were inept and inadequate in their understanding of the volcano they had unleashed and unequal to the task of channelling it. Corbyn, despite being elected by the young people who pinned their hopes on his claim to reintroduce principle to politics, disastrously passed the buck and proved his inability at leadership. The only thing about principle Johnson understands is how to spell it, yet people are more attracted to bluster and blarney, wrongly imagining that amounts to fellow feeling. He has no shame, and no sense of honour. My simply invoking that word reminds us of how old-fashioned the very idea of honour now seems. We have sat by as a crass culture of commerce and con-tricks has replaced honour and decency. Shame on us all.