the brilliantly leaping gazelle

If the media are not presently engaged in a dastardly plot to distract the electorate from the more serious concerns that this country faces, then their fixation on the supposed betting scandal is not to helping to dispel that notion.

The newspapers seemed to be positively obsessed with it and they imagined that the more they reported on it, the more the public would want know. And because they believe this to be so, they are able to convince themselves that they are acting in the public interest. All part of of the usual self-serving justifications that were trotted out by newspaper reporters and editors during the Leveson Inquiry into press standards, in fact

About how a free press, one that was unfettered by any concerns of legislative restrictions, regulatory oversight or some other form of governmental interference was an essential part of a functioning democracy. That only such a press would be to hold the powerful to account, be fearless in its pursuit of the truth and have the resources needed to mount a lengthy and expensive investigation to uncover it.

To listen to them you’d be forgiven for thinking that the press exposed a scandal comparable to the Watergate every few months. As opposed the inquiry having been set up in the wake of the revelation that a newspaper had hacked of the ‘phone of a dead girl, when everyone else, including the police, thought that she was just a missing one. It soon emerged that most newspapers were so fearless in their pursuit of the truth, that they were willing break the law to do it. Even Guardian, which broke the story, had hacked ‘phones.

Anyway, this betting nonsense. Is this really what the media thinks the public want to know about less than two weeks before a general election? Granted, the sums involved were indeed truly staggering. Staggeringly small. As the Daily Telegraph reported, suspicions were first raised when £2,700 was bet on the date of the election prior to it being announced.

Maybe there exists another scandal, hiding in plain sight so successfully that its hardly ever mentioned, that exposes that £2,700 bet as the utter irrelevance it is. One that I can’t remember any politician talking about during the last few years. 

The National debt is currently about £2,690 billions. How and why we’ve accrued this sum is a discussion to be argued about by others better qualified to do so. According to The Office for Budget Responsibility, the interest on the debt will cost some £89 billions this financial year alone.

But what does mean, in the real world where money is spent on paying bills, having a cheeky Nando’s  or going to the cinema? We are forever being assailed by claims that something might cost £x billions to do, or else that savings of £x billions are there to be made, but a billion is just a word to most people and as such, has no functional meaning.

So you’d think therefore that the press might just have an interest in trying to explain not just how and why the debt was accrued. But to also question the affordability of the various spending commitments, promised tax cuts and the other assorted financial unicorns, that all of the political party’s are making, when set against the backdrop in which last year saw 10% of all government spending on national debt interest payments – not the debt itself mind – the interest on it. Which is more than the combined government spending last year on defence, housing and the environment. Or more than the combined spend on law, order and transport.

To at least have a go, to try and live up to the grand claims they made about themselves at Leveson, to make a complicated subject less so. To act in the real public interest, and not the pantomime version of it that the betting irrelevance is. To hold both Plonker and Daddy Bear to account. How the former is going to fund an extra 40,000 NHS appointments a week as he claimed he would on the leaders debate on Thursday night, or for the latter give details about how his plans to clamp down on corporate tax avoidance to pay for better social care will generate anything other than hot air? To fucking well do their jobs and to do them well, not to confuse an embarrassing mistake with with a bona-fide scandal or to peddle tittle-tattle about nonentities.

And even if the national debt stopped growing, we’d still be handing over £120 millions a day in interest payments.

But hey that £2,700!  That’s shocking! And what about Taylor Swift and that selfie of hers with Son of Baldie and the young parasites?  Look over here, don’t look there…