The corporate media was awash with column inches on Tuesday 19 April, discussing Boris Johnson’s 1,000 days as Prime Minister. But the more crucial question here is, who the fuck cares? Because whoever the PM is, it’s always the same: perpetual class war.
Living obituaries
It seems to be an unwritten rule that as soon as a PM hits some sort of milestone anniversary, the corporate media is duty-bound to dedicate articles to this sort of nonsense. Theresa May had them after 365 days in power. David Cameron had them for certain years and after his first term in office. Gordon Brown even had a book on his first year as chancellor (clearly his first year as PM wasn’t that noteworthy). And Tony Blair had a living obituary (a veritable eulogy) for his first decade as prime minister.
So, now it’s Johnson’s turn.
1,000 days of clusterfucking
The corporate media have been churning out potted history lessons about him as fast as he lies. The Guardian trumpeted that:
From prorogation to partygate: 1,000 days of Boris Johnson as PM
The UK prime minister leaves a trail of scandals, U-turns and law-breaking as he reaches his milestone
National World did a political ‘listicle’, lamenting:
The 14 scandals that define Boris Johnson’s time in office – 1000 days on from becoming Prime Minister
And the Mirror went further, managing a half-century of Johnson’s misdemeanours:
Boris Johnson’s first 1,000 days – his 50 biggest scandals, rows and U-turns as PM
iNews, meanwhile, sat completely on the fence, whimpering:
From Partygate to vaccines: Boris Johnson’s biggest failures and successes in first 1,000 days as PM… Mr Johnson’s premiership has seen him deliver Brexit and preside over a successful Covid vaccine rollout, but it has also been marred by scandal and sleaze.
But what does all this from the corporate media mean? Absolutely fuck all.
Dumbing-down leaders’ crimes
It’s been a standard for years to do these ‘retrospectives’ on sitting leaders. All it serves to do is focus our minds on the individual actions of PMs: like people labelling Johnson the first sitting PM to be a criminal. This ignores Blair’s illegal invasion of Iraq, the UN’s accusations against Cameron’s government of “grave” and “systematic” violations of disabled people’s human rights, and May’s presiding over the Windrush scandal.
The point being that it’s not individual actions that are the problem. It’s the system that every sitting PM has ever presided over which is the real scandal. They’re all as bad as each other. The root cause is a system deliberately designed to create a society where the poorest and most marginalised people’s lives are infinitely dispensable in a perpetual class war. Until we address that root cause, then all the ‘1,000 day’ column inches in the world are just churnalism.
Featured image via Sky News – YouTube
By Steve Topple
This post was originally published on The Canary.
