Shortage of Social Workers? What a surprise!

Writing about this article on BBC online.

I find it amazing that the media and Government can stand their scratching their proverbial heads over a crisis that they have been so instrumental in fueling.

As with occasional crocodile tears over the lack of men in nursery and primary education, the lack of applicants willing to undergo the lengthy education and training that its takes to become a social worker is hardly surprising.

Media and Government both shore up their flagging ratings by taking great pleasure in witch hunts and public burnings. While both are impotent to address underlying social and economic shifts in society, whether that's the decline of commercial print and broadcast media or the undermining of Western economies by emerging economic super-powers, they can both stomp their little feet and raise the blood of the mob over a terrible crime - the papers crying out for justice and the Government more than happy to appear to be able to satisfy the mob's blood lust and thus shore up its creaking credibility!

This situation is unlikely to change. For a mass-circulation model newspaper or TV news operation to survive in a world of declining print media circulation and flagging advertising revenues, they can't afford to take anything but the most populist line if they wish to survive. It is no accident that the Daily Mail is the most popular newspaper amongst those who can vaguely read, or that the Sun is the most popular amongst those who cannot. If a newspaper tries to go against this flow of easy, hatefully ignorant, populism then it is going to, at best limp along with a niche readership (The FT or the more champagne-left populist Guardian) go to the wall.

TV news is perhaps even harder up, competing with such instant and banal entertainment as the X-Factor, Big Brother and I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here. stories must be dramatic, simple to understand and above all have good images. No one has time to really discuss or get to grips with the arguments before leaping to an impassioned opinion; even Newsnight has been dumbed down to reach a 'wider', more gleefully ignorant, audience. Radio 4 is perhaps the last bastion of half decent news and current affairs coverage, and that is almost as patchy as it ever was.

Politicians are the same. The man on the street will happily revel in his contempt for the political class, complaining about how they spin and lie, but that same man in the street would choke on his corn flakes if it ever actually came down to voting for a politician that told the truth, who failed to point out easy fixes and had the audacity to expect said-man-in-the-street to take some real responsibility even for the state of the country rather than blame someone else (preferably someone weaker - foreigners, gays, goths, weirdos - anything sufficiently different to be comfortably disliked).

So, ultimately, we can't blame the sad fools trying to justify their existence in Westminster village or the slightly more glitzy world of the media. Ultimately we only have ourselves to blame for failing to take responsibility and insisting on being spoken to by both media and Government as if we were children; it's hardly surprising that Government and media therefore seek to control us by conjuring up images of the bogey man.