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The British public is in danger of being crushed under an avalanche of political gossip. The faces of big-name pundits — most prominently Andrew Marr and Piers Morgan — stare out from the sides of buses. A dozen national newspapers splash the latest revelations about “party-gate†or “curry-gate†on their front pages as if they are matters of war and peace. The BBC’s quest for a new political editor became a news story in its own right when the corporation took the controversial step of appointing a man, Chris Mason, to the job.
If good political coverage is the life blood of good government, political gossip is a blood cancer. It blows up minor stories into all-consuming events. How can we have time to think about things that matter — like China’s evolving relationship with Russia — when we are bombarded with news about Keir Starmer’s chicken korma? It creates a debilitating sense of crisis as one breaking story gobbles up another. And it puffs up journalists’ egos as they regurgitate the latest so-called revelation.
Brand-name hacks not only earn far more than the people they cover but also hang around at the top of the tree for far longer, not having to test talk against action. No wonder they treat politicians with contempt — as when the BBC’s Nick Robinson told Boris Johnson to “stop talking†during an interview.
But in many ways the most important reason the obsession with politics is so unhealthy is that it crowds out serious news about business. The mainstream British press almost never put business stories on its front page (the exceptions are the Financial Times and The Economist, which are now as much global products as British ones). Business is relegated to the back of the paper along with sport and horoscopes.
Yet most of the political news Britain obsesses about is small change at best and irrelevant at worse. It is intriguing to debate whether Johnson will survive or whether he will be replaced by Liz Truss or the new favourite, Defence Secretary Ben Wallace. But whoever lives in Downing Street will be confronted by soaring inflation, a destabilising cost-of-living crisis and an underlying productivity problem that, if unaddressed, will make the country’s welfare commitments unaffordable.
By contrast, business is changing the world at breakneck speed. Many of the world’s most consequential companies are much younger than the current generation of leading politicians: Amazon.com Inc was founded in 1994, Google (now Alphabet Inc) in 1998 and Tesla Inc
in 2003.
New technologies such as artificial intelligence and gene therapy will change it even faster in the future. And giant new companies from Asia will shift the balance of global economic (and therefore political) power inexorably from the West to the East, leaving “global Britain†an irrelevance unless it can improve
its game.
You would think that this would arouse some interest in the BBC, which has a duty to explain the world to its license payers. How did the business corporation become the major building block of the modern economy? Why is the US so much better at producing high-growth companies than Europe?
—Bloomberg