What’s not newsworthy about fascists, Islamists, grooming and death threats to journalists?
My latest piece for The Critic.
When we sit at an obvious hinge of history, the tendency of the press is to look in the wrong direction for the events that will define a new era. 106 years ago this month, foreign correspondents were camped in Dublin hotels, waiting for a supposedly inevitable civil war to break out after the final passage of Asquith’s Home Rule Act. Leading world power Britain was a much more commanding story than little-understood and impoverished Bosnia, where Gavrilo Princip’s bullet was about to destroy the world that had existed since the Congress of Vienna.
In today’s Britain, attention is lavished on the anti-racist protests and demands for dethroned statues in urbane, metropolitan centres like Bristol, Manchester, and Oxford. Yet the current protest movement with the capacity to most directly shape Britain’s political future has received no attention from national journalists, with the honourable exception of the Guardian’s North of England correspondent, Helen Pidd, despite the fact it is taking place in the town with the UK’s worst Covid-19 outbreak.
Partly, this reflects the fact that it is taking place in Barrow-in-Furness, as remote a decent sized town as it is possible to find in England. Partly it reveals how uncomfortable a tale involving fascists, Islamists, grooming allegations, collapsed faith in the police, and death threats to journalists is to people of all political persuasions.
