The Telegraph death-spiral III
It’s worth noting that the Telegraph’s comment pages are probably the UK’s worst, riven as they are with prejudice, ill-considered yammering and - frankly - grave stupidity.
Exhibit I - Daniel Hannan, an (ex?) Telegraph leader writer and an MEP - around one-tenth as clever as he thinks he is. The Times’ Oliver Kamm and The Guardian’s Michael White have both provided fine demolitions of this tedious peacock, who believes - typically of the Telegraph news pages - that political debate should a liturgy of cant and of old truths rather than, say, evidence. Or reality.
Exhibit II - Alex Singleton, a leader-writer on the paper, whose views are depressingly ridiculous. For example, he thinks (if that is not too strong a word) that the £22bn spectrum auction - in which phone networks bought spectrum rights for as much as they thought the spectrum was worth - was a “stealth tax”. Even though, er, the companies volunteered to pay it. Because they thought it was a money-making opportunity. (The process is outlined here with some of the alternative, awful alternatives set out here). He blames the auction for driving up phone costs, meaning that Orange has particularly bad customer service. The alternative is to give spectrum away cheaply - that is to say, to subsidise mobile phone providers to bring down phone bills, and then make up the difference by taxing everyone else. It is the equivalent of saying that the government should sell any land that it flogs at below market rates to keep the cost of housing down. Mr Singleton is small fry - perhaps it’s unfair to pick on him. But it is important to understand that the Telegraph employs this nakedly stupid man to write its leaders.
Exhibit III - Simon Heffer, a columnist for whom the word “bloviating” could have been invented. Forget the blimpish prose and self-regarding nonsense, what he writes is ill-informed rubbish. The idea that the Tory problem since 1997 has been a lack of right-wingery and insufficent euroscepticism is transparently absurd - and can be disproved thousands of times over by polling results (cf. - every poll in the past 18 months).
Exihibit IV - The Telegraph’s comically ill-informed view on the euro, one provided by its dreadful leader writers (see exhibits I and II) and one provided by Simon Heffer (exhibit III). The dire leader provoked a wonderful response from Oliver Kamm, and Heffer nudged The Economist’s Charlemagne into a rather neat evisceration.
It is striking that, in both articles, the authors are saying what they want to be true. Where the facts do not fit, they bend them.
But that is a key problem that runs from the top of the Telegraph to the bottom.
