Sunday 10 July 2011

Not The End of The World

I very often do not blog on a Sunday. But I could hardly have let today go, could I?

"To give to the poorer classes of society a paper that would suit their means, and to the middle — as well as the rich — a journal which due to its immense circulation would demand their attention."

So the very first edition of the News of the World declared to be that paper's mission. In today's farewell souvenir edition, it is heartbreakingly easy to trace the decline in the writers' educational and cultural expectations of their readers. Murdoch is not solely to blame for this. But he is hardly blameless of it, either.

As the praise for the News of the World from George Orwell on its own back page today indicates, this was a paper of the wider culture of working-class self-improvement underwritten by the full employment that was itself always guaranteed, and very often delivered directly, by central and local government action: the trade unions, the co-operatives, the credit unions, the mutual guarantee societies, the mutual building societies, the Workers' Educational Association, the Miners' Lodge Libraries, the pitmen poets, the pitmen painters, the brass and silver bands, the Secondary Moderns (so much better than what has replaced them, turning out millions of economically and politically active, socially and culturally aware people), and so much else destroyed by the most philistine Prime Minister until Blair, who in her time as Education Secretary had closed so many grammar schools that there were not enough left at the end for her record ever to be equalled.

For the first hundred or more years of its domination of the Sunday market, that domination coincided with a high degree of weekly churchgoing in this country. Its strongly working-class readership must have contained a well above average proportion of what are now called traditional Catholics, but in the days when there was no other kind.

Well, with no more competition from what the News of the World lately allowed itself to become, why not one or more People's Papers again, affordably hooking people in with a bit of entertainment in order to educate and inform them on the premise that they deserve nothing less than the human dignity and respect of education and information? Central and local government, the trade unions, the co-operatives, the credit unions, the mutual guarantee societies, the mutual building societies and the Workers' Educational Association all still exist. Just for a start.

What are they doing to give to the poorer classes of society a paper that would suit their means, and to the middle — as well as the rich — a journal which due to its immense circulation would demand their attention?

1 comment:

  1. I am glad that you have blogged on Sunday for a change. You are on very fine form, even more so considering how unwell you looked at Mass though still immaculately groomed as ever. What a difference a good lunch makes? Or a good course of pain killers? You are going to say both, I know you.

    You should be writing for these People's Papers and I think that that knowledge keeps you going now they stand the best chance since the 60s of coming to pass. Your enemies have had their day along with the politicians they supported and the media moghul who employed them or they wished employed them.

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