We Need a British Equivalent of Samuel L. Jackson's Campaign Video

You may not agree with Jackson's choice of President, but the point is that in this age of infotainment - that hybrid of news and showbiz that has largely taken over the United States and is gaining hold here, too - it's important that we wake up and stay awake.

In Samuel L. Jackson's campaign ad for the 2012 American election, he exhorts the apathetic; the complacent; those who think that all politicians are the same, etc to quite simply: "Wake the fuck up!"

You may not agree with his choice of President, but the point is that in this age of infotainment - that hybrid of news and showbiz that has largely taken over the United States and is gaining hold here, too - it's important that we wake up and stay awake.

The infotainment ethos of newsrooms puts those on air to comment on politics not necessarily because they have anything new to contribute but because they "make good TV". Producers and bookers look for "clashers" and "bashers" - those who often are at the extreme end of an issue. Generating more heat than light, we watch them having a go at one another and think that's what a political debate is. It isn't. But it's what a circus is.

And this is not a trend. We are entering Britain's first Twitter/media election and there could be more comment about Ed Miliband's teeth than his policies. Like it or not, this is where we are.

Meanwhile the mainstream press - largely right of centre - has always had one job to do in the run-up to the general election: get a Conservative majority government elected by any means necessary.

The job is to obfuscate, hide, exaggerate, underreport/overreport. Ignore. For example, most people don't know about the Tory advisor who also happens to have a high editorial position in a major newspaper. We don't notice the obvious campaign being waged against the two people who stand in the way of that Tory majority: Ed Miliband and Nigel Farage.

So the press pillory them and hide away gems like this, for example, on the car-crash that is the NHS. By the way, when I asked a Tory peer recently why Jeremy Hunt was even still in a job after Leveson, the peer replied: "He has 'an air of competence'."

In this desperate-for-a-Tory-win climate we don't get to discuss the hole that Osborne is burying us in, but stand by for more about Labour's "hole" and, yes, the 'Labour Owl'.

We, the electorate (the people who can't be bothered to exercise their right to vote can go stand back on the kerb) don't deserve bamboozle. But that's what we're getting.

We got barely a peep in the press about the biggest defeat that a government has suffered in over a century: the House of Commons vote against going into Syria. That was led by Labour and Ed Miliband. That defeat kept us - arguably - from winding up as mates with Isis.

In the days when a "vote of no confidence" could be called after a major defeat like that, the government could have fallen. Instead, what has fallen is William Hague. He's still talkin' and walkin', but they must have told him over n the FCO that a foreign secretary who cannot carry the House on a major vote loses masses of credibility on the world stage re: foreign policy.

And then there's Michael Gove, the reason to not vote Conservative all rolled up in one package.

His "free" schools (free of local control but we, the taxpayer, pay for them by the way) was Gove's way of defeating his two bête noir: "red" unions and "red" local government.

Problem is that there's very little oversight in his scheme, with the head of Ofsted saying that it was he who wanted what oversight there was to end, not Gove, leaving the community, through its Council - no input pro or con - in "free" schools at all.

Gove's plan to cover his tracks is to promote "British values" even though it was he, in an interview in Prospect magazine in 2007 who said that there was "something rather unBritish about seeking to define Britishness".

Ok, a guy's entitled to change his mind, but his calling shadow education secretary Tristram Hunt "inconsistent" is a bit rich.

Gove's increasingly Interview With the Vampire approach to his opponents is leading the secretary of state for education into even greater heights of rococo.

But he's obviously untouchable, while Andrew Marr states on his show - with Labour maintaining a lead in the polls - that "it's been a bad week for Labour".

Samuel L. Jackson had a message for America .

We need an equivalent one here in the UK.

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