I find it disquieting that the performance of the green political movement, which is now the fourth biggest block in the European parliament, has been the littlest story of this past European election in Anglo reporting here, particularly as the Anglo reporting here is British, and particularly as the Green party did remarkably well in Britain. But there it's all fuss over the BNP, BNP, BNP, who only managed to get two little measly European Parliament seats - same as the Greens - but rather more remarkably (since the two seats the Greens got were the same two seats they got in 2004), there's a fuss about the BNP getting three council seats, while the Greens got eighteen - eight up from last time. It was the fourth and fifth biggest party in the two respective elections - comfortably or far ahead of the BNP on both counts - and nobody is fucking talking about it in the papers. If you see any coverage of the green political movement in the limey press, it's about France, where the greens nearly knocked the Socialists into third place.
I was complaining about this to the F-word, and he thought it might have to do with the how headlines about all those people voting Green relative to the BNP might be a little too "Millions Of People Get On With Their Lives!" for the famously trite and sensationalistic British press to bother with. (Was it Alexei Sayle who made that gag? Rik Mayall? Hugh Laurie? Fucked if I can remember.) And he's probably right. But wading through The Making of the English Working Class as I am (thick into the Luddite bit), of course I see conspiracies everywhere, and the 'extremes' of the British press, that are quite open in their support for one or the other of the major parties, all had a little fuss about how not voting properly was going to make the BNP win - a revolting prospect, to be sure, but for fuck's sake, the BNP is just one of several small parties, and despite all the scare-mongering did worse than both the Greens and the single issue UKIP in the last elections . . .
My point is, this is Europe, not the United States, and a vote for the green party, or any other smaller party, isn't a vote flushed down the shitter. And that was clear enough to enough people that the green party did very well, including in Britain, where it gets so little airtime even relative to a bunch of raving racist loonies whose electorate seems to be made up mostly of truck drivers, skinheads, and doddering old brownshirts who can't even get girlfriends in their own ethnic group. What sort of vote could the green movement have got if it was treated seriously in the media; if there was some relationship between its degree of popularity and its degree of coverage? What if people who depend on the Telegraph and the Mirror and all that shit for their news had been informed that this party was a serious contender, that it was polling well enough that one's vote wouldn't be thrown away on it, that it was miles ahead of the BNfuckingP?
My personal hunch is that if they had been given serious coverage, we'd have seen a more seriously good result than we did. And I think the editorial boards of the papers in question probably had the same hunch. Furthermore, I think that means they're burrowing themselves a little deeper into the bin of irrelevance, because the green political movement is continuing to build strength and momentum with the motors of common sense and the new media. And people wonder why newspapers are in trouble . . .
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