Standards in Public Life, Management and the Post-Truth Era. Establishment

Okay, so I left off the last post in 1989.

Common Purpose had been established, Sky News had started and we'd had the Hillsborough disaster and the instantaneaous covering up of the truth of that event.

Another significant event in 1989 that would kick off the post truth era is the imposition of the Community Charge in Scotland. Better known as the Poll Tax.

This and the Poll Tax riots in London the following year would trigger the demise of Margaret Thatcher. Whether she went a bit moonbat and beleived her own hype, whatever; by the beginning of the Nineties her style of government had sunk into caricature.

So also in 1990 we gained a new Prime Minister: John Major.

Almost the reluctant PM, he set about making the UK a better place for people. In his first parliamentary speech as PM he stated an intention to abolish the Poll Tax and eventually in 1992 it was replaced with the Council Tax.

John Major was a well-meaning and relatively honest man. He tried on a number of occasions to try and make the country and politics a better place.

In 1991 he launched the Citizen's Charter, an initiative to make public services better. Like the proverb about the road to good intentions, the charter eventually morphed into the box-ticking target-fixated regime we have now which denigrates the indivudal experience and hoovers up vast amount of resources supplying administration of those tick-boxes.

He also set up the Committee on Standards in Public Life in 1994 chaired initially by Lord Nolan. This was instituted in response to high profile acounts of impropriety or sleaze in politics and public services. This was back when journalists did investigate such things and it was a given that anyone in the public eye or on the public payroll was open for scrutiny. 

Very ironically, as the committee tends to highlight misdeeds and wrongdoing, so truth moves and shifts. The old adage about if you tell a lie it may as well be a big one gains political traction. White becomes the new black in an effort to divert attention.

In 1992 Labour had finally elected a leader; John Smith. He set about doing a proper job of rooting out the extreme left from the party. A job that Neil Kinnock had done so inefectively during his tenure as leader.

So here we have the early 1990s and the stage for the demise of truth.

Primarily the instigator for this is the First Gulf War in 1990-91. Of all events during the 1990s, this is the main thing. All others are preipheral and enabling, but the first Gulf War is when the media starts to turn from investigation to capitulation.

It was the First Gulf War where journalists traded access for freedom, limelight for censorship. The pressure to deliver fresh news for the greedy outlets forced journalists to compromise their principles. This is where investigative journalism more or less died and jingoism, acceptance of media censorship and propagandic reporting became the norm.

The journalistic trade couldn't revert back to the old ways after this, the establishment had learned to barter and trade the truth.

I find it ironic that as I'm writing this series of articles that George HW Bush has died. The instigator of the gung-ho! beginning of the post-truth era.

Back in the UK, John Smith is rooting out the far left of the party, at that time known as "The Millitant Tendency" (which appears to have now reappeared in the Corbyn era as Momentum), unfortunately John had a heart attack and paved the way for Tony Blair. Probably the most post-truth Prime Minister we've ever had.

Around the same time, the Americans got Bill Clinton as their President. Someone who was fast and loose with the truth as the Monica Lewinsky affair showed.

On both sides of the Atlantic truth was on very rocky ground. It was being undermined and subverted to promote a myriad of different issues.

During the Nineties we had the Balkan Conflict, the squabble over the remains of the old Yugoslavia. The Western world did a good job of covering their covert manipulations of this area until it blew up in spectacular fashion and started to cause media attention.

The truth was a victim in this conflict, with the Western media happily investigating atrocities by the "bad guys" of the conflict (the Serbs, "Black Hatted" by the West) but completely missing atrocities perpetrated by the people on "our" side.

In 1997 the BBC join the 24 hour News business. Very quickly they saw the other 24 hour news outlets and how they didn't just report "dry" news. There was always a narrative, a story, a victim, a villain and a hero. News was not simply news.

We even saw the bombing of the Serbian TV station in 1999 during that conflict, the casualties in that action declared acceptable because it removed a communications hub and a propaganda machine for the Serbian side. In that one action you can see the West's determination to own the narrative and exclude all others. By force if necessary. It also ushers in what happens to the truth and how it is reported in the following decades.

The problems in the Ukraine the manipulation of the truth around the political shennannigans, the riots and the eventual annexation of Crimea virtually 15 years after the Serbian TV station got hit shows that the West have not stopped playing the game - in fact they ramp it up to dangerous levels.

Both American and UK governments made their forays into either ignoring the truth, dsiclaiming the truth, subverting the truth or telling little white lies (which are after all, untruths).

Some of this can be explained by the fallout from the Committeee on Public standards and the push to raise standards in public life, public services, the media and other important organisations.

There is a push during the Nineties to homogenise standards for managers and leaders in the public and private sectors. One organisation offering training across all spheres is Common Purpose.  It identifies leaders and trains them to produce a homogenised, unified leadership. It's catchphrase is "Leading Beyond Authority" but you could just as well say they train people to do anything else but the job they are employed to do, loading leaders up with the idea of extended networks, diversity (at all costs) and other workload-increasing objectives. It's my personal recollection you could see it through the Nineties with the rise of so-called "management-speak": the phrases and platitudes that defined a drone. "lessons Learned" meant the organisation had failed spectacularly, no-one would be fired and the organisation would continue as normal.

In the Nineties we had the Satanic Abuse Scandals, which were poorly investigated and produced little real evidence other than anecdotes. That child abuse was occurring at that time I have no doubt, but the Satanic element clouded the issue and enabled those in power and the media to label complainants crackpots. Decades later, the systematic mis-handling of issues of abuse will come to the fore again, this time by gangs of Muslim men. It's instances like this that start to expose the Common Purpose training that began back then and has now infiltrated every form of public service. In the early Nineties from my personal experience it's limited to local councils and local public service providers. By the late Nineties it has started to infiltrate central government alongside the Blair government.

The things that started happening then continues to happen today with the media and those in positions of authority: obfuscation, denial, manipulation of the truth to outright lies and even harassment, villification and in cases incarceration of those making accusations of abuse.

Then we get to the naugties and boy, do we enter the post-truth era in a big way.