In terminal decline again?

For those who do not remember Ipswich at the turn of the century, the Ipswich Airport Association reunion at the Transport Museum late last month would have been a powerful reminder. The Labour administration of the eighties and nineties failed to respect or value business so they sought to close the airport that was an important part of the town’s economy for wholly bogus housing need, despite protest marches, letters, petitions, cartoons and even a sleep-in on site (above). The hubris they showed in closing our airport in 1996, right down to the terminal building, was to prove terminal for that administration within eight years.

Just as the dinosaurs who ran Ipswich Borough Council in those days had two crosses painted on the grass, legally prohibiting further aviation, the people of Ipswich wrote thousands of extra crosses beside the candidates of opposition parties on ballot papers in the run-up to 2004, so that numbers were equal by that May and the Labour mayor improperly used her casting vote for a colleague to become her successor. When a Conservative-Liberal democrat coalition did take power that autumn, they discovered that Labour had not only lost our airport and rather a lot of money, but also Charles II, whose effigy had resided in the Ancient House for decades.

Almost twenty-five years on from the above events, we seem to be watching them re-run. Labour have closed a Tourist Information Centre that functioned effectively and could have brought money to Ipswich. Several Labour councillors were defeated in one day this year, although not enough of them so far. Those who remain have shown themselves to have nothing more to offer the people of Ipswich.

The end is in sight. A better future for Ipswich is just around the corner but undoing the damage that Labour have inflicted in the past decade, as in the eighties and nineties, will be less than straightforward.

FROM DIANA TO DOMINIC – FROM DEFERENCE TO INDIFFERENCE

In 1997 following the tragic death of Princess Diana, horrible as it was, the press decided to try to change public opinion against Her Majesty and for about 2 or 3 days, they succeeded. I fell for none of it. But I do remember The Sun screaming on that Monday or Tuesday WHERE IS OUR QUEEN? THE SOLE PURPOSE WAS TO SELL A FEW NEWSPAPERS TO THE EMOTIONAL PUBLIC with unnecessarily sensational headlines.

People prefer to read a particular newspaper brand which matches up with particular way or thinking, but have limited choice when it comes to a particular radio and tv news outlets (BBC, C4 ITV or Sky), and in this day and age online news sites (real or fake) give a wider choice. Unfortunately most of them are now outlets for the left-wing Labour party and it union paymasters and other left-wing pressure groups.

In days gone by, the press (by which I mean newspaper, tv and radio “journalists”) were highly respected and trusted by the British people, but in the ever-increasing desire for 24-hour news and dwindling readers/viewers, they have caused the seeds of their own destruction by changing themselves from news reporters into an attempt at mass-persuasion and “celebrity journalists” who want to become centre of the topic.

And so back to September 1997, the public dutifully doing what their formerly deferential press demanded, agreed and said Where is the Queen, and the press had the impertinence to claim that they were only following public opinion. Utter nonsense!

The Queen and the Royal Family remained in sanctuary in Balmoral looking after Princes William and Harry, who were all shocked and overwhelmed by this tragic loss. But the newspapers wanted to paint a completely different picture, and the subsequent movie The Queen with Michael Sheen in his cringe-worthy replication of Tony Blair and the republican Cherie Booth and the awful Alastair Campbell did nothing to improve that impression.

Thankfully by that Friday, the press’s attempts to damage the reputation of the Monarchy and the Queen herself were doomed, as the Queen came back to London and did that very moving live broadcast from the Palace window.

Spin forward to 2016 to 2020.

We know the liberal-elite journalists have fallen off their perch in being able to influence public opinion when they failed to secure a Remain Win in 2016

and they were shocked when the Conservative Party elected Boris Johnson and he gave the Party its best majority since 1987 and gave the Labour party its worst result in 100 years. So they spend the next 3 months after December 2019 wondering how they could try to destabilise the government.

So the health crisis came along and our elite journalists all teamed up together and have spent the last months attacking and undermining the government every day of the week. Their long term ambition is to try and get an extension to the Brexit transition period. They have failed yet again so they thought “what can we do now?”

They reached a frenzy a few weeks ago with the Dominic Cummings saga and spent nearly a week talking about nothing else, as they know Dominic secured the 2016 referendum and GE 2019 victories, and can’t work out how he did it. So they Created Fake News with an aim to overthrow him and weaken Boris Johnson. They failed spectacularly on both counts.

When there were lots of protests led by left-wing thugs over recent weekends and criminal thuggery and vandalism occurring in London, Bristol and elsewhere, I tried to find the daily Covid-19 stats on the BBC news website, but nothing could be found. So our useless online journalists at the BBC couldn’t be bothered to seek out the actual data from the government’s website and instead not even report coronavirus. They did not want to report the lowest weekend fatality figures of the crisis, as positive and encouraging news is the last thing the TV political editors and their equivalents want to report.

The condescending and patronising attitude of the daily briefing journalists behind the safety of their laptop screens has dishonoured the name of the journalistic profession, and their competing tournament to catch out our elected politicians damages the news business forever. The British people are now indifferent to our news organisations.