Laura Kuenssberg‘s State of Chaos aired on BBC2 on Monday 11 September. However, it was far from a revelatory account of recent events in British politics. Instead, the programme told most of us what we knew already – and failed to tell us what it really should have done.
State of Chaos: Kuenssberg, Tories, and Brexit
The BBC marketed State of Chaos as follows:
Summer 2016, and the Brexit referendum result cuts Britain down the middle – stunning Westminster and the world. It is the starting point of a series that will explore the consequences and reasons behind some of the most dramatic and chaotic political events seen in a generation. It will examine how close our political system came to breaking and if it will ever be normal again.
Essentially, if you didn’t watch episode one, the Guardian summed it up. It said that Kuenssberg:
uses her insider knowledge and chunky address book to examine why we have had five prime ministers in 10 years, and why this is “a norm-busting, convention-defying” period of political history. The programme starts in 2016, in the immediate aftermath of the Brexit vote, and this episode, the first of three, ends with the arrival and early impact of Boris Johnson – and Dominic Cummings – at Number 10.
A televised political gossip column
Overall, State of Chaos was an unintended profiling of what many of us knew about most British politicians already: that they’re narcissistic, gratuitously self-serving, and willing to thrown their colleagues (and the rest of us) under the nearest lie-adorned Brexit bus to advance their own interests.
This wasn’t lost on viewers:
https://twitter.com/Tim_Hoy63/status/1701334223628444078
Kuenssberg playing the role of cheerleader, trying to humanise the psychopaths. #StateOfChaos
— Stormageddon (@lawks1) September 11, 2023
Of course – as many people pointed out – the programme failed to analyse Kuenssberg, the BBC, and the wider corporate media‘s complicity in the chaos:
@bbclaurak wanting to ride two horses with #stateofchaos. It’s not the place of an Account Manager for the @conservatives to carry out an investigation of subsequent shit show of 2016-23. I’d like to see a documentary about the dodgy links between the Tory Party and BBC top brass
— Captain Sir Lester Stype KBE FRS BA (Joint Hons) (@pstymail) September 11, 2023
Laura Kuenssberg: “It was my job to make sense of what was going on”
By forensically analysing & fact checking, yeah?
Nah, by repeating, verbatim mistruths and dishonesty from the most dishonest MPs to ever grace Parliament#StateOfChaos
— David (@Zero_4) September 11, 2023
The programme explicitly stated its damning role as well – before briskly moving on. The obnoxious Steve Baker – a politician with such an unwarranted yet overly-inflated opinion of himself that he makes Johnson look genuinely coy – admitted planting stories with journalists:
So a man who just claimed he was planting stories with journalists and amplifying tweets in order to bring down a sitting Prime Minister, was calling other people traitors#StateOfChaos pic.twitter.com/Dp5Wl2hqPt
— David (@Zero_4) September 11, 2023
It’s highly likely that he fed Kuenssberg plenty of those stories. Not that the programme was ever going to say that out loud – because that wasn’t State of Chaos‘s point. The point was to chart the past seven years through the eyes of the people who were at the heart of it.
Of course, the fundamental problem with this premise is that all you end up with is a group of people giving their highly subjective opinions (or ‘lies’, if you prefer) on things. So, State of Chaos was little more than a televised version of a political gossip column.
However, the programme did inadvertently reveal several wider truths – and none of them were about the Tories or Brexit.
The problem’s not the Tories or Brexit
Overall, what episode one unintentionally showed was that we’re not in this mess just because of bad Brexit policy making. We’re in this mess because all the politicians featured, the onanistic journalists involved, and a sizeable chunk of the viewing public truly believe that Brexit and it’s aftermath was the most dramatic and disastrous thing to happen to British politics in a generation. When actually, the problem is – of course – the focus of British politics itself.
If you happen to be poor and from a minoritised community, then its likely Brexit wasn’t the worst political thing that’s happened to you in the past few decades. Most people reliant on social security would probably agree that Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) policy making in the years prior to, and after, the EU referendum has been far more catastrophic for them. The Windrush scandal, where the government deported countless Black British citizens whose parents came from the Commonwealth, began in 2012. For many working-class minoritised communities, life in the UK has always been hell.
That’s not to say the chaos depicted in the programme didn’t compound the horror for minoritised communities further. However, politicians had cast the dice well before all that – from welfare reforms, to Windrush, and the Prevent programme. Of course, this was lost on State of Chaos – with Kuenssberg describing Brexiteers and Remainers shouting across placards at each other during protest as ‘not looking or feeling like Britain’: a laughable statement to anyone who isn’t white, non-disabled, or straight.
State of Chaos: political porn for the middle classes
Of course, State of Chaos couldn’t acknowledge any of this either – as it’s target audience wasn’t those people. The producers clearly designed it for the middle and political classes, for whom the perpetual Tory internal psychodrama has gone from being titillating to actually damaging their lives. That’s exactly why the BBC made the show. The middle classes are now feeling the strain – and State of Chaos puts the perpetrators of this in full sight.
Moreover, in episode one the overall narrative arc already became apparent. Kuenssberg described events as leading to a “new, radical ugliness [beginning] to emerge” in British politics. So, only a return to the “normal“, calm, measured terrain of the centre-right ground will do: the terrain that has never worked for the poorest people in the UK.
State of Chaos‘s polite contempt for both right-wing libertarian Dominic Cummings and socialist Jeremy Corbyn encapsulated this, as did Kuenssberg’s loaded phrasing of “Remainer rage”:
“Remainer rage and brexit frustration” – that bias just creeps through, doesn’t it? #StateOfChaos
— Dave Parish (@paz_parish) September 11, 2023
Moreover, Theresa May came off as a victim: the ultimate embodiment of centre-right politics in the UK, where Brexit isn’t good – but it “means Brexit” ‘coz democracy’. The likely denouement of State of Chaos will be a subtle advocation of a Keir Starmer-led Labour government – given that Rishi Sunak’s far-right mob will probably also come under fire.
So, if you were looking to immerse yourself in some explicit Westminster bubble pornography, then yes – State of Chaos was a highly arousing hour of gossip-column journalism dressed up as heavyweight political programming. For the rest of us, it perfectly encapsulated the chaos of UK politics – just not in the way Kuenssberg and the BBC intended it to.
Featured image via BBC iPlayer – screengrab
