Private Eye as essential resource: of opposition snark, KPMG and “the creatures outside….”

If you want to have a tolerably accurate picture of what is going on in the UK, well, it’s a big job but I would start with a) Private Eye (fortnightly investigative journalism/satire/snark) b) the Financial Times (business newspaper, but not knuckle-dragging ideologues – try Times or Telegraph or the Hate Mail for that) and c) the Morning Star.

All have their blind spots, of course, and this would only be the beginning of the necessary triangulation. If you want to know about the no-longer-Pending-but-actually-here Ecological Debacle, I suppose also Nature Climate Change and a few other publications, Twitter feeds etc (1). Anyhoo, I have a gift subscription to PE (thanks Meg!) and am going to (intermittently – I’d rather underpromise and overdeliver for once) blog choice bits of issues. At some point I will also write a “how to read Private Eye” blog post. Here’s a link to the subscribe page.

For now, this from the latest issue (1632, September 13) is the first thing I want to big up. It’s in the first news page, i.e. they think it really matters, and it speaks to

a) how easy it is to do crowd–pleasing/headline-seeking snark when you’re in opposition

b) the enormous power of the consultancies, the new priesthood (various books out recently on this, including one co-authored by economist Marianna Mazzucato, called The Big Con).

The Commons Business and Enterprise Committee is here.

Its meeting was, I think, on February 21 2018, and the “fridge” jibe is not an attack on Boris Johnson because he hadn’t hidden in a fridge yet – that was 18 months away… What is fascinating is that you basically can’t find the minutes of the meeting (and trust me, I have experience of trying to track down documents). It’s not ‘deliberate’ about this particular meeting, just a general unwillingness to allow the ruled to see what is going on. “Beware of the leopard” and all that…

Here’s an account of the meeting in the UtterlyDependent.

And that Orwell quote, which one day (after hell freezes over) I will decide I’ve used too often.

“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

Footnotes

(1) That’s actually a good point. Where DO I get accurate info about the PED as it relates to the UK? Grauniad? General “vibes”? Where should I be getting it?