[Robin McAlpine Blog] Gilded age solutions

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Gilded age solutions

A hundred thousand Scottish children are in homeless accommodation, an increase of 60,000 in ten years. The world totally failed to come up with even a token strategy for reducing plastic pollution. Amnesty International has assessed Isreal’s actions in Gaza as genocide. Politics in France are collapsing, they already have in Germany, South Korea has imposed martial law and the US still manages to be in a worse state than any of them.

Still, what about that Greg Wallace, eh? Shocking.

Or, to put it another way, as the elites run about in a momentary panic wondering if shooting at them could catch on, perhaps there are some lessons that they could absorb from everything that is happening. Alternatively, perhaps they might ask themselves if day after day of prioritising ‘man a bit rude to powerful women’ might be a symptom of why we’re pissed off with them all.

Greg Wallace is clearly an arsehole. He first appeared on my radar in the very late 1990s when he wrote a column in a cookery magazine I used to get (he was a greengrocer and did a column on seasonal veg). Quite quickly I noticed he was one of those men, the ones who keep dragging conversations back to sex and other suggestive subjects.

You’ll all have come across them before. They keep finding ways to steer a conversation back to sex, or their attractiveness, or their new young girlfriend – but only in female company. It’s like they think presenting themselves as a ‘sexual being’ might spontaneously cause arousal in other women present.

This is pure insecurity – sex-needy men always end up talking about how fruit looks like a fanny or that there was this woman who propositioned them once in exactly the same way as status-needy men talk about their golf club and their sports car. I’m sure we’ve all honed our response to this, and I’m sure like me it is an eye roll and an ‘oh, shut up for god’s sake’.

And make no mistake about what I’m saying here; that poor junior researcher who is lesbian and whose inferior internal status probably mean she had little option but to smile politely at Wallace’s shit should not have to put up with it. I have all the sympathy in the world.

But Kirsty Wark? She is one of the most powerful figures in UK broadcasting and is no shrinking violet. In fact unlike Wallace, her production company has been subject to a number of serious complaints and has been investigated by the police. The idea that she was too cowed by some light entertainment presenter to say ‘shut up’ if she was offended on set is not credible.

This applies to a lot of those driving this story, and performative angst a decade after a fairly minor infringement is unpersuasive. I repeat; Wallace appears to be an arsehole, but ‘someone is a bit of an arsehole at work’ is just not news for most of us, it’s called ‘staff meeting’ or (worst of all) ‘office Christmas party’.

That’s the only problem with the elite, you see – we sometimes don’t understand how much they do for us

When I went to bed last night The Guardian hadn’t covered the Amnesty International report on genocide in Gaza, at breakfast it was there but by lunchtime there was no sign of it again, yet Greg Wallace has been a top story on I think five of the last eight days and has almost never not featured in the selection of ‘most important stories’ on their site for that period.

This is a story by senior media professionals for senior media professionals. It is precisely like me and my friends leading The Guardian with a story about ‘what about Billy turning up reeking of booze on site today and getting fuck all work done while bad mouthing Frank in the office for questioning his sick leave last week’.

It’s solipsistic shit. That’s what it is, self-pleasing, self-obsession. It is part of an empire of unreflective self-serving arrogance which washes over the liberal elites in ways one wonders they can’t see. Let’s just have a wee look, shall we?

Joe Biden pardons his son. Why? Because he can. Because fuck you. Because the law is for little people and he’s got a press team to draft unpersuasive exculpatory statements. But above all he’s doing it because you can’t stop him and he doesn’t want anything from you any more so he’s has no need to keep pretending the elite are on your side.

Yon Suk Yeol declared martial law. Why? Because he was going to lose his job and he’s the kind of person who shouldn’t lose his job. Over at the New York Times they’re wondering in bemusement what a man who ran the US health care insurer with the worst record for declining claims out of all of them might not be popular.

I’m very clearly not advocating violence, but this is a man who ran a corporation whose business plan is ‘deny all claims and hope they die of cancer before their appeal comes through’. If you go and read this thread you’ll understand the anger felt by Americans towards health insurers (sample comment: "Well Americans, I’m amazed. Turns out you can in fact improve health care with unregulated gun laws.")

Meanwhile in France the establishment is engaged in a whole new practice which is ‘come up with reasons why fascism is sort of OK but socialism isn’t’ as a whole load of ‘liberal’ ‘centrists’ find complex reasons to explain why they must do a deal with the far right but under no circumstances the voting block which won the most seats (the left).

In fact this litany of self-serving corruption, narcissistic self-regard, cold disinterest in those outside their elite groups and utter lack of awareness of what they all look like to the rest of us is only briefly interrupted to explain to us that the Democrats in the US didn’t lose because of their arrogant disregard for ordinary people and their pig-in-shit attitude to big money donations but because of ‘misinformation’.

You’re only losing your job because of the rise in Employer National Insurance Contributions, Rachel Reeves has to go on TV and explain i

That’s the only problem with the elite, you see – we sometimes don’t understand how much they do for us. If only we understood the sacrifices they make for us we’d stop our griping and get with the programme. Dear god, Neil Gray is even scaling back his free football and cinema trips and Keir Starmer isn’t going to take any more ludicrously expensive new specs. How much suffering do we expect them to take?

If we can’t see that they are sincere in their crocodile tears for Palestinian children and if we can’t put aside our jarring sense that this is a bit hypocritical if we’re funding the corporations that make the weapons that are killing those children, it just means that Angus Robertson will have to break off from his busy day being Angus Robertson to explain to us that we’re wrong.

It is, after all, a hard life being in the elite. The world would be a happier place if we could just get over our jealously and spare some compassion for the rich and famous then our problems would be put into perspective. You’re only losing your job because of the rise in Employer National Insurance Contributions, Rachel Reeves has to go on TV and explain it. I mean, it’s embarrassing for her. Can’t we empathise?

Greg Wallace is an arsehole. So is Billy. My pals don’t have The Guardian, we’ve got a WhatsApp group. Billy got his books and the whole yard was over the moon ‘cos he was a dick. Seriously media insiders, get yourself a WhatsApp group and keep your petty personal shit to yourself.

We’re really hungry out here, or a lot of us are anyway. Hungry and cold. And scared for our children and what world awaits them. Oh elites, just once could we turn on the TV and could you persuade us you are actually doing anything about all of this. Hint Keir Starmer, if you’re mainly telling journalists your relaunch isn’t a relaunch and you’ve used the words ‘metrics’ and the phrase ‘delivery milestones’ in the same sentence, you’re not achieving what you think you are.

Meanwhile we’re all pissed off and getting angrier. I do not in any sense approve of murder under any circumstances, but when one contributor to that Reddit thread I mentioned above can refer to murder as ‘gilded age solutions to gilded age problems’, those in power really ought to start listening.

*Billy isn’t his real name. It’s Andy.

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