THE LAST TURKEY

So the conference season is over. The politicians are heading back to Westminster and the people of Birmingham and Manchester can rejoice that the streets of their cities are no longer thronging with politicians. Good news for them. Even better news for us is that we will no longer have to listen or watch journalists asking 'people in the street' what they think.

I'll be blunt. The more I watch 'people in the street' being asked their opinion about anything, I realise that I don't give a flying fuck what your average Joe thinks and that the curse of modern communications is that everyone now has a voice. For a horrifying example of the rubbish that people spout, try any of the threads on the BBC's 'Have Your Say'. It's so awful and so overpopulated by (genuine) Nazis that it should be renamed 'Have Your Say Before You Take Your Tranquilizers'. Am I being hypocritical? I don't think so - sure, this blog is a voice for me and my fellow writers but the reader at least has the chance to stop reading, close the window and rejoice that they never have to read the Last Turkey again.

On the radio and TV it's different. Both the BBC and ITV news programmes last night had panels of mindless, moronic undecided voters telling us what they though of the leaders' speeches. And guess what? They came out with exactly the mindless, moronic, clueless, naive and hopelessly stupid sort of trash that you would expect. One woman on ITV said that the current financial mess was 'the Tories' fault' but not in a way that she thought that the free market approach championed by Keith Joseph and Enich Powell and adopted by Margaret Thatcher was responsible for the banks' behaviour (and for which it is perfectly possible to frame an argument) but in a way that suggested she read the Daily Mirror because the Guardian has too many long words in their articles.

No, enough, I say. Time for the media to realise both on the TV and on the internet that allowing vacuous marons with too much time on their hands to comment about things they simply don't understand is dangerous. If people want to comment they can set up their own blogs, TV stations and radio shows. Until then, please, they should leave it the professionals.