Born to scribble, the attempted journalism of Laurie Penny

After publishing her atrocious article in the Guardian newspaper about why ‘suppression of student protest by the British state’ is at the root of the lack of popular protests against the government’s program of economic austerity, Laurie Penny has shown herself to be even in a free society a strong case for censorship on the charge of crimes against journalism and man slaughter of both reason and prose. Starting her article by comparing herself and fellow anti-cuts campaigners to the victims of European fascism, with the line ‘First they came for the students.’, an act of remarkable bad taste, Penny managed to surpass the tactlessness of Ed Millerand who compared the same group to the civil rights movement of the USA by going one further by flatly trivializing some of the greatest horrors of the 20^th century. Such statements about Penny and her comrades who bare many scars from their twilight existence under the jack boot of the Clegg-Cameron coalition of doom vindicate David Starkey’s spot on description of her as little more than a ’jumped up public schoolgirl’. Penny by becoming such a caricature is a perfect manifestation of Nick Cohen’s criticism of the modern left, in that having their central ideal of socialism so thoroughly trashed, by their own actions it should be noted as much as by anyone else’s, the homeless disco that is modern socialism begins to take on ever more peculiar and often sinister guises as tragedy truly transitions to farce.

Laurie Penny’s scrawling about the anti-cuts protestors isn’t perhaps as insidious in its content and nature, and is a measure more mundane, than Mr. Galloway’s befriending of  genocidal dictators or Tony Benn’s appraisal of Mao Tse Tung, in their Faustian crusade of unconditional, bordering on neurotic, anti-Americanism, who were more accurately the targets of Cohen’s evaluation. However Laurie Penny, along with Owen Jones, represents the more domestically concerned face of this bankrupt community which is furiously attempting to invent new radical causes, searching for supposed injustices to cover their current short fall and in doing so preparing their sails so laxly that they are ballooned and born aloft by whatever gust of bullshit that comes over the horizon. As much as Miss Penny’s attempted journalism probably on its own virtues does not merit the cost of a call to Arthur Koestler’s ‘society for the prevention of the flogging of dead horses’ when one considers that it was published in what is a major newspaper which considered by some to be a serious publication known as the Guardian, one can’t help sparring a thought for the state of left wing journalism. As the voices of any consequence have somewhat jumped ship such as Nick Cohen, Christopher Hitchens and David Aaronovitch they have been succeed by a younger cohort, led by Penny and Jones, who’s only notable virtue is their youth, which is for some peculiar reason incessantly praised in public by voices from all sides of the political spectrum. Which at 26 years old Penny’s is fast loosing without yet having penned anything that one could remotely mark out under the label of ‘for posterity’, not that it has ever been satisfactorily elucidated why this quality in and of itself is such a remarkable and praiseworthy one, but then again when you are scrapping the barrel for compliments it’s not unforgivable that such desperation might have a tendency to take hold.

The most important and major mistake to be made in her article is assuming that it is state oppression, whatever that’s meant to mean, that has stopped students turning out on mass to protest against tuition fees and economic austerity instead of the true culprits of apathy and indifference. Combined with these might also be the wicked thought that some students might actually think austerity is the necessary course of action and that the alteration to university tuition fees wasn’t that bad an idea. These students might not mobilize themselves onto the streets to criminally vandalize property or violently clash with police officers, as might be Laurie Penny’s preferred medium of political expression, but they certainly do exist. This author saw quite a few of them not too long ago at Senate House Library of the University of London who were more than pleased when police finally broke up a long running demonstration at neighboring SOAS which had made doing any studying in the library or any of the surrounding university buildings a somewhat harder task than it otherwise should be. There are those who don’t believe that conveying your opinion over whether university services should be run by private companies entitles you to occupy university property on a self-appointed mandate whilst disrupting other students who might want to use such facilities for the purpose of education. Call them old fashioned but these students believe in the ballot box and the rule of law. Some students have from in front of their own eyes seen that higher education hasn’t collapsed as protestors said it would with the alteration in tuition fees. Some have also acquainted themselves with the figures that prove that students from the most financially worst off backgrounds haven’t been adversely affected under the new system where they find themselves in the atrocious situation of having to nothing at all. We haven’t heard Miss Penny or any of her comrades admit that they were wrong on this point but it’s true to say that it isn’t just Mr. Clegg who should be giving out apologies.

If the youth of this movement which no longer has any credible ideology wishes to find a new cause to fight instead of inventing fatuous substitutes for them, then perhaps they would be wise to listen to the words of Niall Ferguson who is one of the growing number of voices who have been pointing out recently that the great domestic issue of our time is not class conflict but inter-generational conflict. In the mounting up gigantic debts as the results of ever increasing welfare and social security expenditure the baby boomer generation who are set to retire in the coming decades have sold short and mortgaged the future of their children. The Tax Payer’s Alliance as well as the Institute of Economic Affairs have published the grim statistics which explain and reveal just how great these excesses are, which if not counting just the official national debt, which is growing by over £100 billion a year, and instead off balance sheet liabilities such as PFI and the mammoth un-funded liabilities of state pensions are included then the trillions of pounds that youth of today are expected to hand over to be consumed by their elders is nothing but criminal. This certainly seems like an issue that young people should be getting angry over and the reality present in the unforgiving arithmetic mentioned above makes it inevitable that such concerns will have to be addressed sometime in the near future. Perhaps Laurie Penny could reallocate the journalistic resources that she has at her disposal to rally young people and students into the much needed campaign against such financial and fiscal irresponsibility instead of complaining about cuts in government expenditure which are so far non-existent. Or if she doesn’t have the courage to bring herself to turn away from her religious commitments to revolutionary socialism then she perhaps should be good enough to step aside and make room for those who will.

But no matter what happens is it too much to ask for a moratorium on her output of such atrocious articles that give this author the urge to throw up things that he’s forgotten having ever eaten.