Much of the gutter press, along with the increasingly unhinged Guardian, leads today with the story about the UK’s air traffic control system which yesterday went down for *checks notes* 20 minutes, causing the cancellation of hundreds of flights. Of course, this will have been highly disappointing, particularly for holidaymakers jetting off to the sun for their annual holiday. The National Air Traffic Systems (NATS) was privatised in the one of the worst moves of the otherwise excellent Labour government of 1997 and this is the second time this has happened in two years, but isn’t it strange how this seems to attract the attention of the press when what I would consider to be far worse news is being all but ignored.
The Sun reports that “tens of thousands (of people)” will be affected by this computer glitch and The Guardian includes quotes from Ryanair – who else? – demanding that the Nats chief executive, Martin Rolfe, should be sacked. I have no idea whether NATS is hopelessly incompetent but I do know that had it not been flogged off to the vultures in the private sector it would certainly be more accountable and it would be run as a public service and not a vehicle to make profits. But it is the perverse priorities of the media that I find so depressing.
The numbers affected by the glitch at NATS, as reported by The Sun, are considerable, yet we all know that the media in general and newspapers in particular are not even vaguely interested in the simple fact that 21% of the UK population is living in poverty. That’s over 14 million people, of which 4.3 million are children. I don’t doubt that these figures, which have been collected by the government, are correct. As I may have mentioned before (oh, only about a million times – ed), I volunteer at a food bank and the numbers of people we see are mind-blowing. Before I joined three years ago, I knew little about poverty, specifically in this case food poverty, apart from the fact that I was part of a tiny family that endured it as a child, and it’s been a real eye-opener. So, when The Sun leads with “Air We Go Again’ (what a crap ‘joke’ by the way) you are reminded about the priorities of Rupert Murdoch’s drooping organ.
The NATS failing computer system, for all of 20 minutes, is a story. I get that. And some of the individual stories will be quite sad to read, with people scrabbling around trying to book new flights and holidays. It doesn’t take much to conjure up images of distraught children as their all inclusive week in Majorca hangs in the balance. But isn’t it really a story for the inside pages, rather than the front page?
I suppose that’s part of the problem with today’s newspapers, with their circulation in freefall they feel they need to attract readers with louder, more populist stories. The Hate Mail leads with “Starmer Is A Cunt” or words to that effect, accompanied by a large photograph of Sharon Osbourne crying at her husband Ozzy’s funeral and a belter of a story about how Princess Margaret’s life was hell because her mother, the dear old Queen Mother, Gawd Bless Her, was a piss head and permanently shit-faced during her pregnancy. Thinking about it, if you buy the Mail to read stories like that, I would suggest that your mental health is likely to be even worse than mine.
Obviously, I wouldn’t be terribly amused to find that my holiday had been cancelled due to a computer fuck up at NATS, but I would like to think I have some kind of perspective. I’d be disappointed, yes, but I can think of a lot of things that would be much worse, like having no money nor food, being homeless or having a terminal illness.
It’s quite possible to care about more than one thing, so I get why the NATS situation is news, but the media’s obsession with the affluent middle classes – and let’s face it, the majority of peak sun holidaymakers are going to be in and around that category – and not the poor and disenfranchised tells you a lot about our divided country.
I was going to say that the gutter press should really get a grip and concentrate on more serious news, but it seems that the angry pensioners who are the only people who buy newspapers these days prefer relative trivia to the devastation poverty is causing, including, I should add, to over a million pensioners.
Nobody died yesterday because of the 20 minute failure at NATS, but millions went hungry. I think the latter is a far bigger story, but clearly the gutter press – and The Guardian – thinks otherwise.
