This review first appeared in the Andersonstown News
NEWSNIGHT (BBC TWO) is a civilized, end-of-day half-hour . Its presenters over the years have almost always been intelligent and incisive, without going in for bruising clashes with their guests. They select a topic or sometimes two from the day’s news and look over them in detail.
Last Friday they looked at globalisation, and whether we’d reached the point where its end was in sight. The battle for the Ukraine seems to be in a stalemate, energy prices are soaring. Britain as an island had been used to looking out to the world, but now it was looking inwards and hoping to become self-sufficient.
Niall Ferguson appeared briefly and suggested that globalisation was already in reverse, and noted (puzzlingly) that there had been other shots at globalisation – for example in the early 1900s. Maybe he was confusing imperialism with globalisation.
They had Energy Minister Greg Hands on. Wearing purple-framed glasses, Greg said little of note, contenting himself with repeating that the British government was doing a great job helping people cope with fuel cost. As to rising prices for food: there were other sources for wheat than the Ukraine – like Canada, for example. Mind you, the cost would be higher, but the British people didn’t want a nanny state (translated: Find ways of getting by without the government).
Then we had Robert Jenrick the Housing Minister, and he assured us that Rishi Sunak had risen to the occasion in the face of Covid and he’d rise again to face the challenge of inflation, global instability etc. The presenter’s question “With inflation and the struggle by many people to make ends meet, is this a return to the 1970s?” went unanswered.
And then Esther of MIT made the point of the night, and it came as news to me: “There is not a global shortage of wheat”. The problem is that it’s not very well distributed – some have plenty, others little or none.
There was a suggestion that this crisis really was an opportunity: that the changes countries had to make because of disruption of supplies, courtesy of the war in the Ukraine, could be the opportunity to move from fossil fuels to renewables.
Which was an excellent point on which to end. The world really has no choice but to sooner or later accept that globalisation is how our world will go. If it doesn’t, the climate crisis will see to it that it’s a globe which has been tormented and looted until it could no longer sustain human life.
If the Tories manage to destroy the BBC, it’s programmes like NEWSNIGHT that we’ll miss.
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