I do try to listen to broadcasts and podcasts and videos from the MSM, for interest and to make sure that I am not restricting my information to the echo chamber of much alternative media.

For instance, two of my regular ones are BBC Newscast and Guardian Long Read or science reviews. .I will occasionally force myself to listen to the Telegraph's "Ukraine - the Latest" this truly is broadcast from a different planet

The BBC newscast is basically a political journal, for instance Laura Kuenssberg takes part in this. And what you're listening to is akin to a football commentary on a home or away match. The shallowness of the discussion is unbelievable. Politics as a game, a way of life for its participants and for those making a living commentating. The insider jokes and general levity, the silly put-downs, the love of political machination for its own sake, its point scoring, back stabbing and bad-mouthing. They call it the Westminster Bubble, but it's much worse than that just that, it's not even the froth on your beer which at least is an enjoyable and necessary part of the product, it's an intellectual straitjacket, or an ideological prison. Nothing is serious, nothing is real, nothing is rational. So Starmer conjures up a disgruntled Tory nonentity to the Labour ranks, "just like that". Perhaps he should wear a fez, and how the audience's jaws drop and laugh and applaud.......

The outside world will be discussed of course, at times, but only so far as it relates to the happenings inside this prison and how it might win or lose for the participants, the political lags inside it . At one time you might at least had a few politicians who rose in the firmament because they were indeed stars, but now? They rise like the scum on a stagnant pond - indeed that simile is appropriate - political, economic, intellection and moral stagnation now rules us all and has its home in the decaying stones and columns of the Palace of Westminster, where hypocrisy is the noxious exudate eating away at its very foundations.