Category: The press
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Report
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I wish to report a strange man of average height, indeterminate skin colour but a knowing look who sidled into town today wearing an immaculate top hat and shoddy trainers. He said he was searching for a convenient park popular with the townspeople where he could set himself up to sell his famous elixir. …
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Six Truth Works Three Tattoos
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Here in the UK, recent elections and this Summer’s cataclysmic EU referendum have been opportunities for liars, demagogues and PR specialists to practice their skills on the population, in order to sway it to their will. The phenomenon is not unique to the UK, nor of course is it unprecedented. But the pervasive dishonesty, recklessness…
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“The People” is Sovereign. To defraud the sovereign is a capital offence.
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In the UK following its EU referendum, “the People’s Will” is a phrase now often being quoted with reverence as something unarguable, final, almost sacred, however uncomfortable. The phrase is being quoted most often and with greatest reverence by the public figures who helped to secure the Brexit vote by whatever means they could –…
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Let the bird of paradise speak loud from his cage
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I want to recite to camera a long poem, originally by John Skelton. And I want to do so from the top of the Tyndale Monument, a tall tower on a hill near Bristol. William Tyndale and Skelton both lived in the reign of Henry VIIIth but they have more than that in common. The…
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I See Everywhere the False
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I see everywhere the false, the masked, the sleek and hollow, the bought and the creatured. Their words twist the wind tug at my mind and steal from me the hymns of my life the sacred. True words die the moment they pass between these creatures’ teeth. Humanity is on the…
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Lout Language as an Abuse of Power
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This piece was mostly written in the second half of October 2013. The UK Privy Council (quaint relic of a powerful medieval institution, suddenly back on stage) had just turned down a recommendation for a new form of self-regulation put to them by various representatives of the Press, the vast majority of these of a…