Have I Got Ruins For You (II. Complacency & Dishonesty)

(Note: this is one instalment of a multi-part essay.)

In 2003, Have I Got News For You was leaving its peak era. It had just lost its host, Angus Deayton, but the BBC and production company Hat Trick were confident it could thrive without him. The show now began its bizarre second era. This saw an immediate drop in viewing numbers but then a stable plateau which has mostly persisted to the present day. But, over that 20 year period, the show has become ever less “relevant”. It is now a shadow of its 1990s self, with no vitality, labouring under a great weight of hypocrisy, complacency and dishonesty. In this section we will examine how that came to be.

After 2003, the world changed. Ideas which had been the darling children of the New Left now became absolutely enshrined, and enacted at scales hitherto unimaginable because the Establishment - the truly powerful - were the allies of men like Ian Hislop and Paul Merton, not their adversaries. Also, those same New Left ideas now bore hideous fruit, sometimes prompting reactions from the centre and from the right.

The 7/7 terror attacks in London in 2005. The implications of mass immigration have never been questioned on HIGNFY, but anyone opposing it has been demonised.

None of this socio-cultural change, or the events which animated it, or the factors which caused those events, has been addressed by HIGNFY. You would think it was still the world of their heyday, when the worst thing anyone had to worry about was a Conservative politician secretly accepting bribes or harbouring some homophobic beliefs. But that is not the world we live in now. The world today is much more confused, complicated and unstable than that of 1990.

A demonic drag queen reads to small children. The implications of LGBT intruding into children’s lives have never been questioned on HIGNFY, but anyone opposing it has been demonised.

Now, I do understand HIGNFY is supposed to be light-hearted. But that underlines the point: the reason they can’t be light-hearted about the darkness of the world today, is that the darkness was brought about by the very ideas they championed (and continue to champion). Their ideas have borne bad fruit. Rather than admit this, they deny any responsibility for the situation, deny the situation, and pretend their ideas haven’t really been implemented anyway. “Real Champagne Socialism has never been tried.”

With all of that said, let us list chronologically the historical events that took us from the world of 2003 to the world of now: