Living in the Truman Show

Written by ‘Norman’

I don’t know about you but the view from out here in Middle England is getting more and more confusing or – as the youngsters say – well, like weird.  Just looking around for some examples it’s more or less impossible to come to any firm conclusion on anything.  It’s as if the population has moved into some TV reality show akin to the old movie the Truman Show, where the main character lived on the movie set, unaware that his whole life was scripted and was really in a world of make believe.

As I write the war in Ukraine is still being reported as if it was some sort of sporting fixture, with writers relishing when soldiers of one side or another are killed or injured, or some real estate is either won or lost. To be honest I’m rather sick of the force-fed propaganda and quite offensive comments reported either by politicians who should know better or media hacks writing for their own glorification as ‘war correspondents’ purporting to be in some war-torn area or another, actually gloating that the side they ‘support’ has killed so many of the opposing side’s soldiers, ignoring the fact that these people, for good or bad, are somebody’s brother, son or father.  If these people want to report on a war situation and see how it was done by real professionals they would do well look at the work of second world war American and British war correspondents such as Walter Cronkite, Ernie Pyle, Iris Carpenter and Richard Dimbleby.  Iris Carpenter landed in Normandy on D Day plus one, which a friend of mine who was there understatedly said was ‘no picnic’.

It’s not reported as one did this week if she found and felt sorry for a dog and brought him back to safety in the UK as she covered the advance through France, Belgium, Holland and Germany, was there when Buchenwald and Dachau were liberated and when they met the Red Army for the first time at Torgau.

But to be fair, for today’s generation of pseudo serious journalists slaving over a hot laptop, that is ancient history and perhaps their media degree didn’t cover the work of Max Hastings during the Falklands war.  Tell me where in his work he writes about rescuing dogs or glorying in the death of Argentinian soldiers.  These journalists need to grow up and start reporting fact not fiction.  If they can’t do that, they should either say why or get another well paid or better paid job as that Tory MP from Redditch told people to do this week, a quote that should go down in media history just as the mis-quoted Norman Tebbit’s ‘get on your bike’ did all those years ago.

Party-gate is back in the news again.  Did it really go away? Obviously not but it allows activists masquerading as journalists to parrot their views in order to either embarrass Boris or to try and bring him down and also allows the usual phalanx of inexperienced MPs chasing their few minutes of fame pontificating about who did what to whom and supporting either the ‘let’s get him out’ faction or ‘let’s keep him in place’ arguments, while not exploring the more important issues of why, for example, were these people allowed to take time off during their working day in their place of work to have some sort of gathering – call it what you will – and more importantly, who allowed it to happen?  I for one would like to know if, as we are told, hundreds of people work in the Cabinet Office, and if all their work is of national importance, why were only a fraction there working these long stressful hours?  Presumably some work of national importance is more important than others.  I’ve been to several office celebrations, promotion and leaving do’s in my time but never on the clock, never with alcohol and always after hours.  When anyone took a celebratory birthday cake into the office, you got a slice with your morning coffee and that was it.

But as I’ve said nobody is investigating the culture in the public services, whether it be in the civil service or local government. As for people refusing to do their job or what they are told to do because they disagree, then do as the private sector would, warn the individuals, suspend them and sack them if necessary and that goes for all levels of management.  But will any of that happen?  Your guess is as good as mine, but my money would be on ‘no’.

We’ve heard this week that the civil service is to lose 90,000 jobs.  Presumably these are the not-so-important jobs of national importance.  I’ll believe that when I see it, because dear reader, I witnessed it last time, the time before that and the time before that.  Senior management will call a meeting of regional and department heads, who will call a meeting with section and team leaders, who will all declare that they will need staff to interview each member of staff and evaluate their performance and job relevance.

A strategy will be prepared, staff will be appointed to new roles and a paper purge will ensue. All this will take time and the end result will be the ‘at risk’ staff apply for either their own existing job or one so similar nobody will tell the difference, and so it goes on.

All this is a distraction from the real ‘events dear boy, events’ that are taking place in a board or committee room in a building near you. It explains why you can’t still get to see a GP, why the NHS waiting list is probably twice as long as we are told, why inflation is called the  ‘cost of living’ , why media hacks decry the standard of Russian military equipment but didn’t investigate why millions of your tax money were wasted on new armoured vehicles that were unusable and made crews ill, or why the Navy has ships that have defective engines (have they been repaired yet?).  Or, at a local level, police who want to work from home and wear rainbow-coloured helmets when they do venture out and why roads are not repaired or even swept.

We are all living in the Truman Show; the only real thing about all this is we are all paying for it.