Bel is thinking

Three stories from the Daily Mail today:

• a Cabinet minister who turned up late for a hospital function was photoshopped (by the hospital, and allegedly with his knowledge) into a picture taken earlier, so as to give the impression that he had arrived and posed with the other MPs there;
• allegations that the X-factor contest has been fixed, and the finalists have already been chosen, even at this early stage in the contest; and
• Nigella Lawson is accused of faking a bus trip on her television programme.

So what’s going on here? Every day, someone is accused of faking something, and these days it tends to be people whom one would assume, should have known better. (I must reiterate here that the X-factor and Nigella stories are merely allegations, at this stage.)

Together with the recent television phone-in scandals, there seems to be something interesting happening to our morals as a society. It would appear that it is  no longer important to get the facts right, so long as the bigger ’story’ or narrative, is in place. (I touched on this last week in my post about Miranda Grell.)

Earlier tonight, I watched the newspaper review on Sky News, featuring Iain Dale and Baroness Billingham, a Labour peer. Iain quite reasonably suggested that James Purnell, the Cabinet minister referred to above, should apologise for his part in the photoshop affair. The Sky News presenter (most likely playing devil’s advocate) wondered whether it was a big deal at all, because James Purnell did actually go to the hospital, even if a little later than the other MPs. The Baroness eagerly jumped on this, agreeing heartily. In her view, the photoshopped picture didn’t matter, because James Purnell derived no personal benefit (I dispute that: for a politician, publicity is a ‘personal benefit’; but let that pass), and that this was for a good cause, namely helping the hospital.

There is this whole idea that deliberate inaccuracies do not matter, as long as the objective, or the story, is valid, or for a good cause. I find that troubling. We saw that a few years ago in the case of the Mirror newspaper and the faked torture pictures. When the pictures were discovered to be fake, the defence used by the newspaper was along the lines of, ‘the pictures might have been fake, but the stories of abuse which they were highlighting, were true.’ That is a very dangerous line of reasoning, and one that has crept into social and political discourse. If even a hospital now sees nothing wrong in faking photographs, I wonder where we are headed as a country.

Is it also any wonder that exam standards are falling? A few months ago, Civitas published a report about how political correctness has corrupted the school curriculum. According to the report, teachers had ceased to teach the basics in some subjects, substituting fashionable theories for plain old facts. Such a state of affairs can only thrive in an environment where facts are not respected. For political correctness to reign in the classroom, there would first have to have been a downgrading of facts. Historical facts that are deemed ‘inconvenient’ would have to be disregarded, and then supplanted with fashionable doctrines. The same with any geographical or even biological facts that do not fit in with the new morality.

So it is that there is a disregard for facts, even in the classroom. A school, especially at elementary level, should be a place free of agenda, full of questioning, and with more than a passing regard for basic facts. That this is not the case is highlighted by news this week that a father has applied to court for an order to stop Al Gore’s climate change movie being shown in the classrooms. Gore’s movie is by no means the last word on climate change, its science has actually been challenged in places by serious scholars of the subject. For the Government to allow it to be shown in schools without giving room for a counter-view is just more evidence of the prevailing disregard for facts.

And let us not even get into the Iraq dossier. There is a view in some quarters that it mattered not that the evidence was blatantly falsified, so long as it fulfilled the noble aim of dislodging Saddam Hussein from power.

Back to James Purnell. The Conservative Party has called for his resignation. However, I don’t think he will resign. He will probably not even bother to apologise. In his mind, he probably feels that he has done no wrong. In typical New Labour fashion, he has already put all the blame on the hospital. In any case, he will probably spring for the ‘Baroness Billingham defence’: this was all in aid of a good cause, so what’s a little untruth here or there?