“Men do not stumble over mountains, but over molehills.”
Confucius
There's a lot of big issues confronting us at the moment. Just to mention a few: huge economic transitions, major stand-offs over Ukraine and Taiwan, and the pandemic is far from over. Yet what does the British media focus on? An endless debate over whether or not a Christmas party took place in 10 Downing St a year ago, and continually battering Boris's unconventional approach and style.
The first time I met Boris was at a retail stockbrokers’ conference in Paris about 20 years ago. His after-dinner speech was the same mix of candour and flamboyance that we've all got used to now, but at the same time his intelligence and ability to engage with people shone through. It was not hard to detect that notwithstanding all the things he gets wrong - many of which he freely admits to - his heart was in the right place.
So in this commentary we ask that the UK media look behind parochial goading and start addressing those big issues.
BBC television is one of the worst culprits when it comes to focusing on the parochial. Through most of the pandemic’s first year, health issues swallowed up almost all the time available on BBC News. Increasingly, it was necessary to turn to CNN to find out what was going on in the world beyond our borders. The pandemic has now taken second place to No. 10 shenanigans, so we still have to turn to CNN for that wider news perspective.
From the economic point of view, a careful and focused path needs to be steered through the next - and hopefully last - stage of the pandemic. The Omicron variant may well put the lid on rising inflation, thus ensuring borrowing costs stay under control. That's important for both public and private sectors - we are all aware of the huge rise in national debt which has been almost entirely funded by Quantitative Easing, but in a piece headed ‘Age of the Mammoth Mortgage’ in Saturday’s Times, attention was drawn to the extent of massive over-gearing in the property market: it’s also the main focus for This Is Money this week. So, steering a steady transition to higher interest rates is key to avoiding shocks.
Our relationship with the European Union may not command the headlines either, but it continues to require a firm but steady transition. There continues to be substantial instability within the single currency, with a debt to GDP ratio in Italy far higher than the United Kingdom. Meanwhile there's a new German administration, and a presidential election coming up in France in 2022.
Tensions are rising swiftly in Ukraine and on the Polish border and negotiations with Iran are reaching a critical point. The Chinese are flexing their muscles over Taiwan, and huge tracts of the world population, especially in Africa, remain unvaccinated against Covid-19.
Meanwhile, all the British press can talk about is whether there was a party in 10 Downing St a year ago.
Of course, there are major issues of truth and trust being tested here; but in so many walks of life which affect us all, there is no ‘black or white’ but only shades of grey. You therefore have to look beyond political mischief-making to determine whether all this is warranted, whether we should be concentrating on the big issues facing humanity.
The two biggest of these are climate change and the intense polarisation of wealth. In both of these, Boris is trying to do his best - closely engaging with the COP26 conference and setting challenging goals for carbon reduction in the UK, and maintaining his continual focus on levelling-up.
There is much progress to be made in bringing hope and opportunity, in particular for disadvantaged young people. The government has a long way to go in this area, and The Share Foundation continues to demonstrate why it's necessary to maintain a long-term resolve to tackle this challenge.
It's therefore vitally important that Government is not unnecessarily distracted from these big issues.
Fortunately, Boris and his team of ministers are a robust lot - they know how to take the rough with the smooth, and there's plenty of the former at present. Let's hope that, after the Christmas break, the media themselves will lift their horizons, and start engaging with the bigger picture.
Gavin Oldham OBE
Share Radio