With street riots seemingly breaking out in just about every one of our cities, it is easy to understand why journalists and politicians are currently in agreement that right-wing thuggery is one of the greatest threats to our democracy. And since this all started out following the spread of a factually incorrect rumour that the Southport assailant had been an illegal refugee from Syria, one can also understand why the rise of fake news, spread by bad actors, has also been resurrected as a primary threat. These are well-established narratives that our society has come to hold dear. So it is no wonder that bringing the ‘scum’ to justice and clamping down on online misinformation have featured so prominently in the approved response. After all, whenever democracy itself is under threat, the authorities cannot afford to appear weak. So just lock them all up, they say. Throw away the key and fine the internet platforms as heavily as you can. That’ll sort it out.

I don’t wish to play down the importance of the societal unrest we are currently experiencing, and I certainly am not condoning the criminal behaviour we are witnessing. But I would like to offer an alternative perspective on where the real threat lies here. And bear with me, because it is a threat that has much wider ramifications than the excesses of the extreme right-wing or the threat of online misinformation. Furthermore, it is particularly important when reflecting upon Net Zero and the prospect of a peaceful challenge.

To put it simply, democracy is never under greater threat than when journalists and politicians are seemingly in lockstep. For example, both Kier Starmer and Yvette Cooper have been at pains to point out that what we are seeing is not legitimate protest but mindless and opportunistic thuggery. And, apart from a few mutterings, so say all the newspapers. There is very little evidence that journalists are in much of a mood to question what Starmer and Cooper are saying. Nobody, for example, seems to be headlining with the claim that recent events are primarily the inevitable result of years of political failure. Nobody seems to be pointing out that these ‘thugs’ are nevertheless sincere in stating their grievances; that they just happen to prefer to express themselves through the magic of mindless violence. Yes, they are being outrageously non-democratic in their approach, but that does not mean that they have no point to make, no matter how knuckle-scraping they may be. Nor does it excuse a failure to analyse the path of political failure that has led to this horrific situation. Surely, to say that the rioters are just hooligans looking for any excuse to destroy is both simplistic and unhelpful. And yet that is what most of our journalists are letting our politicians get away with.

As a completely different example, what are we to make of the 20 billion pound ‘black hole’ that the incoming government ‘discovered’ when they opened up the spreadsheets on the shiny new PCs presented to them as they entered office? The best we have had from the journalists is a straightforward reporting of the inter-party squabbling that this ‘discovery’ has led to. And yet this is what Paul Johnson, Head of the Institute for Fiscal Studies had to say, four weeks prior to the general election, when he referred to a 20 billion pound financial hole revealed by the Office of Budgetary Responsibility (OBR):

We will be very rude if the new government comes in and says ‘oh look, this is a terrible shock. We’ve opened the books. The OBR have told us something we never expected and that’s why we didn’t tell you about all these tax rises we are going to introduce, or why we didn’t tell you we are going to have an entirely different set of fiscal rules. Or that’s why we didn’t tell you about spending cuts’. I think that would be fundamentally dishonest of them.

So why are not all of the papers now running with the headline ‘Reeves you are a blatant liar’, or ‘Oh how little time we had to wait before the Labour government’s duplicity was exposed’? More to the point, why had the journalists not called out both main parties for completely failing to address this black hole during their election campaigning? There were some, such as Owen Jones, who tried to raise this issue whenever they had the chance, but they tended to be voices in the wilderness. It is almost as if the press had been complicit in the silence back then. If so, that explains why even now they can’t bring themselves to call a lying cheating spade a lying cheating spade.

Whatever the case, this complicity has serious consequences for democracy. In the first example, politicians are being allowed to focus upon the need for an iron-fist approach to policing, rather than conceding that their previous political position had a role in increasing the likelihood of societal unrest. In addition, by framing the problem as a straightforward issue of law and order, they escape any discussion that perhaps their political position needs to change if we are to address the root causes. In the second example, a massive and profound deceit of the electorate is aided and abetted, and subsequently passed off as little more than a bit of creative accountancy that has raised some eyebrows. With such levels of journalistic delinquency the democratic process becomes worthless.

So why is our journalistic profession sleeping on the job? Why are they not prepared to challenge our politicians when it matters? And, most importantly as far as my current readership is concerned, what does this say for our chances of Net Zero being adequately challenged before rioting breaks out on the streets?

One of the problems seems to be the way in which our journalists and politicians interact. Too much of the mainstream political journalism now seems to operate through the auspices of so-called client journalists. It’s the journalism made famous in Yes Prime Minister, in which cosy relationships are established in Westminster watering holes, and where privileged access is courted and protected in quid pro quo relationships. The brutal fact is that most journalists are too interested in the next scoop that would enable them to win an award, and so dare not alienate the political benefactors who can service their needs (albeit for a little bit of tenderness in return). No one dared call out the Labour Party politicians during the election campaign because everyone was too busy fostering healthy client relationships that would see them through the next five years. No one who covets continued access to the corridors of power is now going to jeopardize any of that by calling out Reeves as being the bare-faced liar that she clearly is.

One can assume that similar thinking was behind the strange reluctance of the average hack to force the Labour Party into detailing just what David Milliband had in store for the hapless electorate. During the campaign, no one in the party seemed keen to push him forward, and no one seemed to find that strange. Furthermore, claims that fuel bills will go down, that Great British Energy would save the world, and that everything was fully funded were errant nonsense. Yet, weirdly, no one with a microphone seemed to know what questions to ask.

In fact, as far as Net Zero is concerned, the problem is so much more deep-rooted than that. Not only does your average journalist share Milliband’s delusion’s and failure to grasp basic principles of engineering and economics, there isn’t a great deal they can now do about it anyway because the irreversible damage was actually done during 14 years of client journalism supporting the Conservatives.

No doubt as reality dawns on the great British public, and the laws of physics catch up with Milliband, there will be an increasing level of challenge in the press, particularly the sector that leans to the right. But it is unlikely that journalists will force a U-turn in time to avoid the ‘mindless thuggery’ that will break out in the communities feeling the Net Zero pain first and hardest. No doubt, at that point, pledges to clamp down and restore law and order will feature prominently in the speeches of politicians and the reporting of journalists. After all, there will be democracy at stake. It’s just a shame that, before it got to that stage, the same journalists hadn’t thought to better protect democracy’s integrity by doing their job properly and demanding that politicians face reality.