The New York Times has featured the Merseyside town of Prescot on its front page, with reporter Peter Goodman telling “A walk through this modest town in the northwest of England amounts to a tour of the casualties of Britain’s age of austerity … The old library building has been sold and refashioned into a glass-fronted luxury home. The leisure center has been razed, eliminating the public swimming pool. The local museum has receded into town history. The police station has been shuttered”.
And as so often recently, the reaction of those out there on the right is not to consider Goodman’s essay, but seek to shout him down. Nowhere has this been more evident than in the outpourings of BBC host and Spectator magazine head man Andrew Neil, who has decreed “Coverage of Britain by @nytimes has become a parody of reporting. Almost as hostile to UK now as it was slavish in its support of Stalinist Russia in 1930s”.
Snowdon justifies being obscenely overpaid by using the web to claim he knows better than someone who actually visited the area. “I haven’t got past the first two paragraphs of this NYT article about British ‘austerity’ but I’m already getting a strong smell of bullshit” he told, thus letting slip his conclusion before presenting any evidence.
“For a start, a brand new police station was opened in Prescot in January, alongside a new fire station” he proudly announces, but Goodman was right - the town’s Police station had indeed been shuttered. Moreover, the fire station replaced two others, and thus was a reduction of one fire station. There would be fewer Police officers in the area, too.
Still, if at first you don’t succeed, suck some more seed, eh? “The museum moved to a new location in 2012 and appears to be still open”. It’s in a rather more modest space in the local shopping centre. Alongside Prescot Pound Store, the Pound Bakery, Home Bargains, Aged UK, and Prescot and Whiston Community Advice. Goodman was right again - it had indeed receded into town history.
On stumbled Snowdon. “Prescot library was tweeting two days ago and I doubt it has closed in the meantime”. It’s in the same shopping centre as the Museum. And its old building has indeed been sold. Goodman correct once more.
But Snowdon is not downhearted. “And I don’t know if an old leisure centre has been ‘razed’ but this is the local leisure centre, fully open with two swimming pools”. Very good. That leisure centre is not even in Prescot - it’s in Huyton. Goodman was right (again).
And to complete his hatchet job, Snowdon aggressively accuses Goodman of lying, which he has not done. But the mission has been accomplished - the NYT has been smeared as somehow peddling “Fake News” by another ideologue pampered by all that money from sources which may include Big Tobacco, but the IEA would rather not disclose.
That Prescot’s local park, a green space used by the whole community, may be the next public asset to be sold off does not get a look in. Goodman has to be shouted down.
As one observer put it, “Absolutely accurate short composite of 'Prescot' which I know well. Is grim. Very grim. Pound shops. Shuttered shops. Life on benefits - zero hours warehousing and carers almost the only work. Life outside the London bubble is not at all the same. UK is in the economic marshes”. There were others.
But for Andrew Neil, endorsing a “fact check” based on a hatchet job from a comfortable Metropolitan ideologue interested only in smearing the opposition, rather than debating the fact of the matter, is all that matters. And he is still there at the BBC, able to supposedly represent the Corporation as an impartial, yet well-informed, ambassador.
Small wonder some do not trust him. Or the Beeb. I’ll just leave that one there.
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