I am afraid that the result of Norwich North by-election has severely dented my appetite for blogging. When I put my views to the electorate and asked for their support, I could hardly have been more comprehensively rejected. I was convinced we could get a respectable vote of 7% in Norwich North and have something to build on.
I am not interested in the smug self-satisfaction of believing I have access to a knowledge or analysis denied to the “ordinary” people. Nor do I think that people in the UK have lost their capacity for sensible judgement, or that political discourse needs to be dumbed down to try to achieve a wide appeal. The fact is that Norwich North showed that no significant minority of the general populace has any interest in what I have to say.
So the urge to give comment and information on the sick farce of the Afghan elections, the extraordinary and cynical charade over the Lockerbie “bomber”, or even the hope destroyed in University admissions this year, has been nullified by an awareness that what I think is of no account.
It is not a case of feeling sorry for myself. It is a long overdue hit of realism. I have frequently complained, for example, that the damning evidence I gave on the British government’s complicity in torture was almost totally ignored by the mainstream media. The reason is that the media is not manipulative, it is merely making a shrewd and correct commercial decision that almost nobody cares.
There are moments that change lives. I was fairly stoic at the Norwich North count. I was then struck by a catharsis. After the declaration of results, the candidates made their speeches from the platform. When it came to my turn, Chloe Smith walked off the platform and stood in front of me and the media pack noisily formed around her. The officials started chatting among themselves about what they were doing at the weekend. I was left in the position of having to make the customary comments to a noisy room in which most backs were turned on me and only a very few were politely pretending to listen.
I cannot get out of my head the idea that my blogging is but the virtual equivalent.
If a Tory bore decided to stop blogging (mentioning no names) I very much doubt he would get this sort of panicked ‘don’t go!’ response. But then a certain Tory bore will never give up or lose hope, because he is not in it to change things or expose corruption or promote a rational society, and has the might of the establishment on his side which he is happily propping up like a useful little Tory idiot.
Take a well-deserved break to re-charge your batteries, and then come back more gobby than ever! You are needed and so very highly thought of Craig, as I hope you realise.
Hi Craig, I’ll give you an anonymous comment this time, since my political party would prefer that… But you may perhaps remember my support in Norwich North, and guess who I am.
As Anne Baird at August 23, 2009 3:33 AM said, it is par for the course that losers in elections get depressed. In my own experience of losing, you go through mood swings.
First comes a strange mood of defiant exuberance. In my own case, I originally put that mood down to the fact that my three fellow candidates had overruled me on campaign strategy, and I had said that what they were insisting we do would be disastrous, and the election result had proved me right about that! However, you seemed from your blog response to be equally defiantly upbeat in the days after the result. Perhaps our similar moods do in fact stem from similar causes.
Second and later comes a counter-swing, an excessive depression when reality bites. This is an over-reaction. Things are not as bad as they seem to be. Don’t over-react to the pessimistic mood. Don’t do anything silly. Wait for your feelings to balance out.
I suspect a good psychiatrist would be able to explain the sequence of emotions – rather as they do explain the sequence of emotions that people go through when they experience real bereavement. Losing an election is, I guess, a milder form of bereavement.
Well, you know, this is just the start of Internet driven radical politics. Just look at Ron Paul in the US. Said a lot of true stuff which doesn’t conform to mainstream opinion. Attracted a lot of smart and creative people on the net, but it didn’t translate into, for example, winning the New Hampshire primary, where he only got a small percentage of Republican voters. It’s gonna be a long battle. I don’t know, I’ve heard that the political tipping point is only 10% of elites who need to be convinced of something before change occurs. Hang in there.
Craig,
A follow-up comment about the Norwich North campaign. I’ve commented previously about the campaigning errors which I knew the big parties would not have made, because they do have a lot of experience, and they have been able to learn from it. Now I want to comment about campaign mistakes which I have only recognised with the great benefit of hindsight!
First, that slogan “put an honest man into Parliament”. I originally thought it was a brilliant slogan. I now think I was quite wrong about that.
There’s an American maxim in politics, “When you’re explaining, you’re losing.” What it means is, Tell the voter something he/she can immediately connect with and agree with. Don’t try to force the voter to follow any sort of analytical thought process. Most voters won’t be prepared to do that for you.
So let’s look at your pitch. It was basically as follows:
“You probably won’t remember my name, because I’m not a celebrity at the level of a Martin Bell or an Esther Rantzen. However, I do have a long story to tell you, about torture and sacrifice, and when you have listened to it, you might believe that I am more honest than the average MP. If you do believe that, despite never having met me, and despite some bad stories about my private life, then perhaps you might trust me enough to vote for me, to clean up Parliament.”
Now let’s try an alternative pitch. This goes:
“Ban the Bung! That’s my slogan, that is why I am standing in this election. I am an independent, I have never been an MP, I am disgusted with what those guys are doing, and if you elect me, I will promise to do everything I can, to clean up Parliament.”
Now, your own pitch made big claims about your own character, which the voter could not easily take on trust. So, you had to be explaining. So, you were losing.
The alternative “Ban the Bung” pitch makes much lesser claims, but they are instantly credible claims. The voter does not need to believe that a “Ban the Bung” candidate is personally a saint. He/she only has to accept that the “Ban the Bung” candidate is a reasonably serious guy, who will probably do more or less what he says he intends to do. In hindsight, the simple “Ban the Bung” pitch would have worked better!
Respect to you as ever.
May I suggest you make contact with others who have rent the film of lies?
http://www.peterdalescott.net/q.html
We require an holistic approach to the machinations of the lie factory…
Keep smiling!
Re “Ban the Bung”:
anon – I think that’s a good slogan but I doubt Craig would have been elected with it. It takes *time* to get the kind of name recognition that Craig needed, and the electorate of NN were not in the mood at that election to choose an independent, unknown, candidate.
Craig might have stood a better chance, perhaps, if the outgoing MP had not been as well-regarded locally. The vote had the characteristics of a protest vote – voters decided the best way to hurt the Labour Party was to vote for their arch-rival.
Sometimes that’s the way it works out. But never mind, there will always be another day.
Craig,
You’re a student of history. Name three people who succeeded in any significant way without at some stage of their lives experiencing disappointment, failure or loss.
Now dust yourself off and continue what you do so well.
Craig,
Although I do not subscribe to the ethos..it is money and power that run the election game…and Craig….do you have…sorry…did you have ….either?
CB
Free information leads to freedom itself. Without knowledgeable people like yourself providing information and analysis we’re stuck with the same farcical machine that shut you out of the democratic process.
You have a distributed community of people like myself looking forward to your updates. Don’t let the narrow constituency that didn’t know you deter your efforts to get information to the people of the world. Maybe they’ll come here in a year or two once they manage to remove head from arse and find something true instead of merely commercially viable.
Please don’t give up. Who else is so wonderfully rude about people who deserve it? And who else can we rely on for the truth?
Getting involved in the Norwich election was a mistake IMHO, as the old saying goes ” Whoever you vote for the government gets in”. I don’t think you need to get mixed up in this.
You are giving us a view from outside having once been inside. This is invaluable. Who else can give us that?
I look at you every day – I missed yesterday becausde of the cricket ( strange priorities?), but I’d love to hear your views on the Lockerbie affair ( everyone knows that the Afghanistan elections are a farce, but we don’t have the inside info that you have) . Come to think of it, your views on the Ashes wouldn’t come amiss. Sometimes when I hear the news I want to scream. Accuracy, honesty and humour keep us going. So please , please keep going
Love
Janet
Craig, do you get it yet? 130 comments later and you can count the negatives on one hand, even with a missing finger!
Let me add my voice. Your opinions and insights are valued and trusted. Your courage is inspirational. Your candidness is refreshing and sometimes astonishing. This blog is my first stop for understanding current events; it is a rallying point; it is a safe haven for truth; it is badly needed, and would be sorely missed. My suggestion is take a break until the passion comes back–which it surely shall. It probably won’t take long. Meantime just enjoy your family, do what you must to get by, and keep in touch.
Craig,
People follow your blog because they want to – there’s no electoral leaflets through their doors, no posters on lamp-posts. That alone should show you that people want to hear what you have to say.
In elections, people vote (or don’t bother) for all kinds of reasons (habit, tactical voting, prejudice); the beliefs and policies of the candidates are sadly often a minor factor.
The two audiences could hardly be more different.
Wow, where to start? Well, firstly, with a handful of unpleasant people pitted against 100-and-something voices of positive encouragement, I think a decisive answer is coming through!
I listen to BBC Radio 4’s morning news broadcast most days, and the no-go questions that are avoided have me screaming in the car, as does the joviality with which their faux worshipping-big-money news is presented. The corporatised mainstream news lost the plot, I suspect, well before I became politicised – and the Beeb despite its responsibility as a public service has followed suit (specifically including the farce of board resignations following the basically true story that the government was knowingly lying over the WMD/Iraq issue).
So, I come here, as do many others. I visit every day and am heartened when you post. I, like the other commenters on this thread, are after some insight that the MSM is lacking, and here we get it in droves. I’d love to hear the MSM comment about the drugs explosion tolerated in Afghanistan, or an analysis as to why the legalisation of all drugs would be the least-worst option, or to hear the view that armed “drones” over Pakistan represent declarations of war on that country, or commentators invited onto news programmes who will call for Blair and Bush to be tried for war crimes. But alas, these things are rarely touched, even with a barge-pole.
I disagree with your assertion, and Charles Crawford’s, that the people of Norwich North took a distinct view on your candidacy. They did not. The media quite wrongly got in your way, just in the same way as they failed to report en masse on your Parliamentary evidence, which should have been front-page news on most papers.
And most of the people in NN are just like the majority of people in Britain: selfish, amoral, parochial, ill-educated and herd-following. So, I am not sure quite where you got the idea that “people in the UK have [not] lost their capacity for sensible judgement”! I am certainly not applying these negative adjectives, incidentally, to people just because they did not vote for you. But in the main, people are self-serving at most things, and lazy too, and they vote to better their own comfortable lives, and they say that everyone else can go hang, because it is a “dog eat dog world”, etc. Selfishness, as I say, rules.
On the issue of popularity: Glen is right on this. If the newspapers we bought determined our political environment, we’d have a substantially racist government, and we might even be in an anti-Muslim purge now. And the BBC would have been broken up and sold. We’d quadruple our military expenditure, spend even more on replacing our nuclear weapons, and be nodding at US/Israel to bomb Iran. But the politics of tolerance are never going to be as attractive as the politics of hate; accordingly you and we your supporters are unlikely to be popular for our political views. We will just have to get used to it, I think!
So, please keep blogging. Your voice is precious mainly because you’ve come from the Establishment, and you have solid experience of where it is corrupt. I too would be interested in your analysis of the Lockerbie “bomber”: I have yet to read “Cover-up of Convenience”, sitting on my bookshelf, but perhaps now would be a good time to do so.
Keep blogging, you have knowledge and experience of “realpolitik” that most of us will never have.
I learn from and am buoyed by your postings. I don’t vote in the UK but there’s more to the universe of political discourse than measuring by elections or by media coverage. To accept that your words are read and that they are sustaining is a leap of faith on your part, of course, but that’s the pith of life — keeping at it.
What’s that Gandhi quote?
“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
So you’ve been ignored, keep it up they are going to laugh at you next.
“What’s that Gandhi quote?”
“This is the beginning of a new day. You have been given this day to use as you will. You can waste it or use it for good. What you do today is important because you are exchanging a day of your life for it. When tomorrow comes, this day will be gone forever, in its place is something that you left behind let it be something good.”
Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)
True. We are beyond the stage now where they have to conspire in their silence, we are now at the point where people are so utterly empty-headed and careless that they are not capable of listening.
It can only lead to disaster.
What’s that Churchill quote?
“This is not the end…”
Hold tight folks.
“Norwich North showed that no significant minority of the general populace has any interest in what I have to say”
I am convinced your vote in NN could have been substantially higher with a better run campaign. The only exposure most voters had to you was your first leaflet which I am afraid was pretty poor.
But even so it was always unlikely you could make a breakthrough as an independent. People always hold up Martin Bell as a successful independent but he only won because both Labour and LibDems declined to field a candidate.
You must of course do what is best for yourself and your family, but I would miss your insights if you gave up blogging completely.
And it is not true to say no one pays attention to what you have to say. I remember for example the incident in 2007 when the Royal Navy personnel were detained by Iran and the newspapers were full of righteous fury about how dare Iran detain our boys in “our” waters.
It was Craig Murray who pointed out on his blog that the maps the MOD were showing on the news were wrong and the border had never been agreed. The national newspapers then started repeating the same story (without attribution of course).
“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.”
The media ignore you because you tell the truth, and that challenges their cosy self-consistent world view that basically the UK government and foreign policy is a noble force for good and justice.
People love being subservient to power, it’s been programmed into our brains from the second we go to school. Anyone who is brave enough to challenge power is dismissed as a crackpot – put down by smears and dismissals rather than engagement with arguments.
But there are people out there who are brave enough to think for themselves, who actually care whether people are being tortured in foreign countries, and who are prepared to challenge the consensus.
Please don’t stop blogging – it’s the best on the internet.
The closing image you describe is a painful one, a powerful one.
I can add my tiny voice and say that I am listening, along with many others and that your ideas and thoughts to educate many and enable us to spread ideas and debate.
Mr Murray,
you start my online day. You offer hope and insight, wit and humour. The knowledge you bring to the table is invaluable. The people above are surely testament to the effect you have.
Now is the time to push forward, not retreat. Politics is an interesting word appearing to consist of ‘many’ and ‘blood sucking insects’. It is a busted flush and certainly should not be the altar upon which to sacrifice your efforts. Their world is a dying one. What comes next is of supreme importance to all of us. Now is the time to fight and shout for what is right.
>I cannot get out of my head the idea that my blogging is but the virtual equivalent.
Firstly, that doesn’t necessarily devalue it.
Secondly, things do feed out to the wider society from blogs – even when not acknowledged or noticed. The work that you have been doing in e.g., working for “defamation reformation” is important.
The most important things I’ve helped do with my blog would be unlikely to register much in the media even if they knew about them (example). In one way that matters, in another it doesn’t.
Bah. Links are stripped.
The example is on my name in this comment.
Yes it’s both exhilurating and earth shattering –having been involved on and off with first the ecology party (we too thought that 4%/7% would be something to build on until the SDP happened)and later the greens-it’s the case I’m afraid that people only want to hear at most 3 speeches-I usually used to drift away with everyone else having come 4th in local council elections-how many times can you thank the local plods– the time I had to speak for our Euro candidate in 1994 -I too was barracked by sickened Lib Dems.
By the way it is also dispiriting to see how these besuited tie-wearing lot have taken over some parts of the Green Party- I agree-which is why I devote my energy to Cafe Diplo.
Best
Anny
You give us hope Mr Murray.
“I cannot get out of my head the idea that my blogging is but the virtual equivalent.”
It is not, and you know it.
Craig,
Keep on blogging. You speak as a man of conscience. I like that.
MR. Murray-the british elelction process is farce and has alwys been. the third party let alone an individual has hardly any chance unelss in a bye lelction when media needs another circus to amuse peasants and amass circulation.
so please donot give too much value to the electorate fradulent process.
what you write is more -much more important and life changing for others than what most of the 100 MPs do combine! belive me.
britian has never been a democractic country it ofcourse always has used the word “democracy” to postitute the word and then loot other countries through sacntions and propaganda.
your wirting is more imortant than sitting and airing in that useless isntutution called the british parliament-a fradu isntitution.
most of the chicago school of fraudulent economics have bnever stood for elelction but have manipulated power through fraudulent writing to destroy so many poor countries. so yes elcltoral power is not that imoportant than tyuour ablitiy to convince people about perception of reality.
remebr in this fraudulent anglosaxon jewish looters’ world the perception and not reality is what matters.
so please keep blogging sir.