Slow news

Herald on Sunday, Sunday National, 31st August 2025.

One thing people get wrong about the “24-hour news cycle” is the idea that every story is now just an evanescent thing – here today, gone tomorrow. Even before the advent of social media, today’s headlines were classically tomorrow’s fish and chip paper.

Today, the news churn and clickbait might even look emblematic of a wider wasteful and throwaway culture, where the priority isn’t to educate, inform or entertain, but to quickly gratify an audience assumed to have the attention span of a gnat, the profundity of a puddle, and the superficiality of the Instagram influencer. Hit me with the dopamine. I’m underinformed, impressionable and ready to be furious.

But news stories aren’t like pebbles tossed into a fast-flowing river, swept briskly out to sea. For the want of a better metaphor, they’re sedimentary. Throw enough of them into the steady stream of reported happenings, and slowly, over time, they accumulate as perceptions of social reality. They’re sticky.

Layer on layer of these stories build on one another and gradually reshape how people think about the world they live in and who is responsible. It might not be obvious at any given moment. You might not notice the currents changing immediately. But gradually, the channel begins to bend and snake into new shapes as a result of the accumulated stories our media decides to tell us about our social reality.

While today’s viral story can certainly disappear tomorrow – the shape of the stories we’re told again and again tend to have a lasting impact on how we perceive the world, on everything from income and taxes to housing and immigration. The arguments we’re having today often have long histories, and if you want to seriously challenge the perceptions underpinning them – it can take not just a moment but years of work.

For decades, large parts of the British media have been promoting the idea that stresses and strains on public services and the state of the public domain in Britain can be explained primarily through the lens of immigration. This has also been consistently presented as a “taboo” topic you can’t talk about, while talking about it constantly without any obvious adverse consequences. The vilification of asylum seekers might focus on small boats now, but it has been decades in the making, and many hands in politics and in the press have done their part in making these kind of stories mainstream.  There’s a palpable sense that things have got out of hand.

As a result this weekend, large parts of the British political and media establishment are engaged in a lot of performative confusion, head scratching, and listless casting about in the hopes of solving the impossible mystery of how all the recent unpleasantness might have happened. Recognising any measure of personal responsibility, mysteriously, seems to fall rather low down on the list of priorities.

This point doesn’t rely on any distinction between tabloid and supposedly “quality” publications either. Some of the most toxic talking points in British public affairs have been primarily insulated and promoted by impeccably respectable publications. The respectability of these papers of record have not obviously suffered in consequence. Quite the contrary. One of the key goals of the Starmer regime has been to accommodate the Labour Party to the fickle and reliably ungrateful demands of this feral media, not least in the territory of patriotism and yes, immigration.

This dynamic isn’t new. Take Brexit. For decades, Britain’s press had been telling its readers, day and daily, that tin-pot bureaucratic commissars in Brussels were hatching plots to undermine the UK’s political sovereignty and impose fresh pettifogging regulations on the plain people of the United Kingdom in defiance of common sense and probably Magna Carta.

The backbench “bastards” of John Major’s government, who kept banging on about the evils of the European Union over decades, might not have experienced immediate success or even obvious progress during the 1990s – but Tony Blair’s tenure in Number 10 did nothing to discourage them from peddling intoxicating stories about the bendy banana bans and the sweeping prohibition Brussels had in contemplation for the humble prawn cocktail crisp.

On any objective reckoning, “banging on about Europe” eventually worked for Eurosceptics. Their patience was rewarded. Each story might have been fly-by-night, even frothy and insubstantial on their own – but the accumulated detritus eventually changed the course of British politics.  

So when David Cameron decided to put the European question to a referendum back in 2016, he wasn’t just struggling against the peculiar coalition of characters and interests which came together to form the official Leave campaign. He found himself swimming against the accumulated weight of decades of impressions about Britain’s place in Europe – real, fake and distorted – which presented the most ridiculous, angular and hostile image of the EU conceivable. He won’t be the first or last politician to be drowned by a current he thought he was enjoying swimming in. Starmer faces two rip tides this week: one on asylum hotels, the other on ECHR withdrawal.

It was 14 years ago now that Home Secretary Theresa May told the Tory conference that an illegal immigrant couldn’t be deported from the UK because they had Article 8 rights to a private and family life with their cat, as if the European Convention on Human Rights had established special protection for anyone with a Maine Coon to anchor them to the UK. The story might sound inherently implausible – but combined with a steady stream of similar tall tales from the Eurosceptic press, is it really any surprise how readily the bogus becomes plausible, particularly if the twaddle speaks to my existing biases?

I sometimes think that some of the British ire and snoot aimed at Donald Trump is misplaced. Recent commentary on British politics suggests that Trumpism has finally come to the UK – as if many of its key features weren’t already longstanding features of the British media landscape, long before the 45^th president raised a tiny satsuma fist towards the sky and pledged to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

Unlike Trump, characters like Theresa May may not come off as someone who’s taken Jabba the Hutt as her spirit animal, but shouldn’t this be an aggravating rather than an exculpatory factor? If you come off as taut, mirthless and prim – and use that mask of middle-class propriety to peddle flagrant lies in office – aren’t you engaged in an even more dubious approach to politics than the conscious demagogue and fraud?

It was back in May 2006 that Tony Blair’s letters to various Whitehall departments surfaced, including a missive to Home Secretary John Reid, telling him than among his “most urgent policy tasks” was to consider reviewing the Human Rights Act to give the government new powers to overrule courts who he claimed were taking “barmy” decisions which were preventing the government from ensuring “the law-abiding majority can live without fear.”

Plus ça change. Since it was introduced in 1998, the Human Rights Act has been used as a convenient scapegoat for unrelated administrative failings within government by ministers of every political persuasion, including the New Labour government which introduced it. This week, some of its elderly grandees are now resurfacing to demand its repeal, as if Sir Keir Starmer’s political fortunes are likely to be restored by yet more pandering to people who show every evidence of hating his guts. After all, hasn’t it worked so well thus far?

As events this week have amply demonstrated, social media has the dangerous power to promote junk information to very large audiences with real-world consequences. But almost all of the forces seriously promoting ethnic and religious animus in the UK are the impeccably mainstream.  

At the root of all this is a deep cynicism about ends and means. Some people seem to be stunned to discover anyone was taking their self-serving hokum seriously, as if words in a paper or a parliamentary speech are invariably cheap.

“When we told you that we were at risk of a race war, implied that most sex crime is committed by immigrants, suggested that asylum seekers were living in the lap of luxury in plush hotels funded by your taxes, and claimed British people have been evicted to make way for them by left wing politicians who secretly hate Britain and want it to become the next caliphate – we didn’t think you’d actually do anything about it.”

Blaming social media for popularising these discourses conveniently ignores the fact that they have been consistently promoted and encouraged by people routinely invited to Downing Street media receptions, Spectator garden parties, and BBC debating studios for decades and decades. Playing dumb doesn’t wash.  Social media isn’t the primary engine room of ethnic and religious divisions in the UK. Our feral press is.