Exposed by the leaks

So I pass my sixtieth birthday and the students are still revolting, taking their protest right up to the House of Commons as it votes to effectively privatise higher education. Great campaigns by the students using occupations and the Internet, and transforming Twitter from a medium through which the world discovers what Stephen Fry had for breakfast to one that is a useful tool in political struggle. Even at 60 no home but the struggle as fantastically under-rated novelist Edward Upward wrote.

Students and wikileaks then were last week’s firing pistons in the motor of British history. The wikileaks saga demonstrates an outrageous abuse of civil rights in what clearly looks like a convoluted plot by the Americans to get their hands on Assange. I can understand the American diplomatic service being miffed at being exposed in their own cables as a bunch of devious, two-faced, calculating manipulators, but what’s new about that. The real exposure in the wikileaks cables is how different the real picture of American foreign policy is from that presented in the mainstream media. In other words how many of our respected journalists swallow without question official government utterances. It’s as if the sort of demented twisted thinking that made the Iraq dossier into a case for invading that country was not so much a one-off act of political desperation by Bush and New Labour, but rather the norm of western diplomatic thinking, and that journalists get embedded into that just as much as they get embedded into jingoistic reporting alongside the troops. Not true of all journalists, but the exceptions, Pilger, Fisk and others seem increasingly marginalised.

Peaceful, now then to be a retired hack, not that, as a sub-editor in the lower echelons of British tabloid driveldom, I was ever near the levers of press political power. I managed to turn down my only offer of promotion up the greasy careerist pole…that was many moons and many bars ago.

So, back to finishing off a disgracefully decadent Euphorium chocolate birthday cake, and watch out for the next anti-extradition demo…