Prime minister Jeremy Corbyn: the first 100 days

Chris Mullin in The Guardian

Thursday 7 May 2020. The polls have closed and, to general astonishment, a BBC exit poll is predicting a narrow victory for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour-Liberal Democrat-Green alliance.

From the outset, it is clear that there has been a huge increase in turnout among the young and the disaffected. As one commentator puts it: “Generation Rent appear to be taking their revenge on middle England.”

As usual, Sunderland South is the first seat to declare, less than an hour after polls close. Unsurprisingly, the Labour candidate is returned, but the swing is modest, causing commentators to suggest that perhaps the exit poll is mistaken.

The first sign that the earth is about to change places with the sky comes just after midnight when Labour begins picking up home counties seats it hasn’t held for a decade. Ipswich, Harwich, Harlow, Dover, the Medway towns and Plymouth Sutton fall in quick succession. Two Brighton seats and one in Bristol go Green, along with the hitherto safe Tory seat of Totnes.

At dawn, the result remains unclear. Most of the traditional Tory strongholds have held firm. In Surrey, Sussex, Hampshire and North Yorkshire, Tory MPs are returned with increased majorities. The outcome hangs on what happens in the 40 seats in which Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens have agreed not to oppose each other.

2am: All eyes are on Islington. Upper Street has been blocked since early evening by crowds chanting “Jeremy, Jeremy” and “Jez we can”. Of the Bearded One, there are only intermittent glimpses: at the declaration of his own result and, later, when he appears on the steps of Islington town hall. His demeanour, as ever, is downbeat and, as is his habit, he joins in the applause. “We must await events,” is all he says, before disappearing back inside. A large screen outside the town hall relays the results. The cheering and the chanting intensify with each new gain. By dawn, a delirious crowd is blocking the entire street from Highbury Corner to the Angel tube station. Large screens relaying the results have been erected at intervals along the entire length of the street. The atmosphere is more Glastonbury than Islington.

Meanwhile, commentators who only hours earlier had been predicting a Labour meltdown are now opining knowledgably on the causes of the earthquake. There is general agreement that the Tories overdid austerity. The collapse of just about all non-statutory services, the outsourcing of parks, the boarded-up theatres and youth clubs and the sporadic outbreaks of inner-city rioting have finally triggered a political backlash beyond the Labour heartlands. That, plus the growing realisation that an entire generation of young people have been priced out of the housing market by overseas investors and ruthless buy-to-let landlords.

There is general agreement, too, that attempts by the Tories and their tabloid friends to paint Corbyn as an agent of Hamas and Hezbollah have spectacularly backfired. Not least as a result of the revelation that MI6, with ministerial approval, has been talking to Hamas all along.

The tabloid press has gone bananas. “BRITAIN VOTES FOR LUNACY”, screams the Sun, without waiting for the final result. “STARK RAVING BONKERS” is the Mail’s considered opinion. The broadsheet press is only mildly less hysterical. The front page of the Telegraph is headed “CIVILISATION AS WE KNOW IT: THE END”. There is much talk of assets being evacuated. Florida seems to be the preferred destination.

From Chelsea to Chorleywood come reports of panic buying. Cue TV cameras panning empty shelves in the King’s Road branch of Waitrose.

Only on Friday morning, when the rural results come in, is the outcome clear. Former Lib-Dem strongholds in Devon, Cornwall and Northumberland have returned to the fold, along with Richmond Park and Twickenham, which declared overnight. Corbyn’s controversial decision not to contest these seats has paid off.

By noon, it has become clear to everyone that Corbyn is in a position to form a government. In Tatton, Cheshire, an ashen-faced George Osborne is shown on TV conceding defeat. “I have just telephoned Mr Corbyn to congratulate him,” he says through gritted teeth. A statement from the Scottish Nationalists, who have retained all but three of their seats, welcomes the outcome and says they look forward to working with the new government.

An hour later, Corbyn, looking cheerful and well-rested makes his way with difficulty by bicycle through the crowds in the Mall to the palace, where he is to be annointed. In deference to the occasion, he is wearing a smart sports jacket with a red-flag lapel button, but no tie. His majesty, unlike many of his courtiers, is said to be not too distressed by the outcome. In fact, say some, he is positively gleeful. Indeed, there are rumours that he has for some months been engaged in private correspondence with the Labour leader on a range of issues.

The sun shines. From all over the country there are reports of impromptu street parties.

Friday, 1pm: Corbyn, hotfoot from the palace, enters Downing Street pushing his bicycle. By now, he has acquired a police escort that, with difficulty, carves a path through the crowds to the door of No 10. “The dark days of austerity are at an end,” Corbyn says, before chaining his bicycle to the railings and disappearing inside.

News of his government trickles out slowly over the weekend. Many of the names are unfamiliar, but there are some surprises. Chuka Umunna is to be chancellor of the exchequer. Immediately the share index, which had been plummeting, stabilises.

Jeremy makes his way through the cheering crowds to his meeting at the palace.

Hilary Benn is to be foreign secretary. Dan Jarvis, a former major in the Parachute Regiment, defence secretary. The Green MP Caroline Lucas will be secretary of state for the environment. Tom Watson becomes deputy prime minister and secretary of state for culture, media and sport. John McDonnell, who two years earlier had been dramatically deposed as shadow chancellor in what came to be known as Corbyn’s night of the long knives, takes education while Diane Abbott gets local government. The ever affable Charlie Falconer, a veteran of the Blair administration, is to lead the Lords.

It is, however, the subsequent non-political appointments that cause the most comment. The US economist and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman is to be governor of the Bank of England. The new head of Ofcom, the media regulator, is to be the former Lib Dem MP Vince Cable.

The name of Jeremy Corbyn appears in the in-tray of President Trump at 8am Washington time. The president at once convenes an emergency meeting of his closest advisers. He is not a happy bunny. “I thought you assholes told me that this couldn’t happen ... So, what’s your advice? Sanctions? Do we send in the marines?”
The head of the CIA replies: “Cool it, Mr President. It’s early days yet.”

This result is the following statement by the White House press secretary: “The United States respects the will of the British people and looks forward to working with Mr Corbyn.” Her facial expression suggests otherwise, however. Later, it emerges that the US ambassador to London has been recalled for urgent consultations.

Having named his cabinet, the new prime minister spends Sunday afternoon tending to his allotment. Monday brings the first trickle of policy announcements and they prove popular with middle England. The proposed high speed railway, HS2, is to be abandoned in favour of investment in existing railway lines and the reopening of some scrapped by Dr Beeching. The expansion of Heathrow and Gatwick airports is also to be abandoned. “Demand management, rather than predict-and-provide, is the future of aviation policy,” says the accompanying statement. Squeals of outrage from the vested interests are largely lost in the accompanying celebrations. Suddenly, Corbyn has friends he didn’t know he had, in deepest Buckinghamshire and parts of Sussex hitherto off-limits to the Labour party.

Week one: In a statement to the House of Commons, the new defence secretary, Major Jarvis (as the press have taken to calling him), announces that plans to renew the Trident missile system are to be scrapped resulting in a saving to the public purse of many billions. Part of the proceeds will be invested in equipping and expanding conventional forces. He is at pains to emphasise that there are no plans to leave Nato. Major Jarvis adds that a modest expansion of the armed forces is to be undertaken in anticipation that British forces will have an increased role to play in UN peacekeeping. Immediately, a retired field marshal and a number of retired generals pop up to say that this represents a long overdue outbreak of common sense. Which largely trumps the howls of outrage from the military wing of the Tory party.

Week two: the King’s speech. Some observers affect to notice a spring in his majesty’s step. Among the highlights is a media diversity bill that places strict limits on the share of the British media owned by any single proprietor. As expected, the railways are to be taken back into public ownership, at no cost to the public purse, as the franchises expire. A state energy company will be established to compete with those in the private sector and a state investment bank will be set up with a mandate to invest only in productive and environmentally friendly activity. Plans to renationalise the energy companies are to be put on hold “for the time being”.

The flagship of the legislative programme is to be a housing bill reintroducing rents controls, and encouraging local authorities to build affordable housing. There is to be an indefinite moratorium on the sale of public housing.

Finally, a bill to enact reform of the House of Lords. Life peerages will be converted to terms of 12 years; likewise, the remaining hereditary peerages will be converted to a fixed term, allowing the hereditaries to die out. To sweeten the pill, former peers are to be allowed life access to the club facilities. Resistance, however, will not be tolerated. If necessary, up to 1,000 new peers will be created to force through the new arrangements.

Week three: the new chancellor’s pre-Budget speech. Words such as “caution” and the phrase “fiscal responsibility” feature frequently. Behind the scenes, there are reported to have been some differences between the prime minister and his chancellor, but come the day they are all smiles.

The new chancellor devotes some time to mocking the efforts of the previous administration to deal with the deficit. “The right honourable gentleman,” says Chancellor Chuka as he points an accusing finger at the former prime minister Osborne, “promised to pay down the deficit in five years, then in nine, then in 10, and all he succeeded in doing is collapsing much of the public sector while leaving half the deficit unpaid.” Osborne shifts uncomfortably. Gone is his trademark perma-smirk.

Then, radiating calm, the chancellor proceeds to announce a “carefully managed” programme of quantitive easing to help revive the main public services. “I am advised that this will result in a small increase in inflation, but – to coin a phrase – that will be a price worth paying in order to repair the damage that the right honourable gentleman and his friends have inflicted on our social fabric.” He goes on: “There will be no more deficit fetishism. The remaining deficit will be ringfenced and paid down over 20 years, as one might repay a mortgage.” At every point, he is careful to announce that he has acted in close consultation with the new governor of the Bank “and other leading economists”.

To the relief of the southern middle classes, the chancellor announces, with a sideways glance at Corbyn, whose expression is studiously neutral, that there is to be no increase in the top rate of taxation. And plans for a mansion tax have been abandoned. Instead, there will be “two and possibly three” new council tax bands, raising much-needed revenue for local government.

The budget is well received in most quarters. In the City, relief is the prevailing sentiment. Share prices remain buoyant. The pound regains some its earlier losses against the dollar. Talk of relocation to the far east has faded. Only the Barclay brothers, following news of a review of their tax arrangements, announce that they will be abandoning their rock in the Channel Islands and relocating to Tuvalu.

As for the Tories, they remain shellshocked. George Osborne has announced his resignation. A long and bloody leadership election is anticipated.

To general astonishment, among the early visitors to Downing Street is a grim-faced Rupert Murdoch. He is closeted with the new prime minister for more than an hour, at the end of which the following announcement is made: “Mr Murdoch has asked the government to allow 21st Century Fox to extend its holdings in Sky PLC. I have agreed to this subject to two conditions. First, that the Broadcasting Acts are amended, requiring Sky to compete on a level playing field with the main terrestrial TV channels. And secondly, that he relinquishes control of all his British newspapers which will, in future, be managed by a trust in which no single shareholder will have a controlling interest. Mr Murdoch has accepted these conditions. Our discussions were amicable.”

And so it came to pass that Jeremy Corbyn, serial dissident, alleged friend of Hamas, scourge of the ruling classes (to say nothing of New Labour), was seamlessly translated into a saintly, much-loved figure. Much to the new prime minister’s embarrassment, mothers began to name their sons after him. Corbyn-style beards became fashionable among men of a certain age and waiting lists for allotments shot up, following a much-praised appearance on Gardeners’ World. How long the honeymoon would last was anyone’s guess, but it was wondrous to behold.

Most astonishing of all, in an interview to celebrate 100 days of the new administration, was this testimony: “I guess I was wrong about Jeremy. Perhaps we all were.” The author? No lesser figure than Tony Blair.

Perhaps the world's conspiracy theorists have been right all along

Alex Proud in The Telegraph
 
We used to laugh at conspiracy theorists, but from Fifa to banking scandals and the Iraq War, it seems they might have been on to something after all, says Alex Proud


'I want to believe': Mulder and Scully (David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson) in The X Files Photo: 20th Century Fox
 

Conspiracy theories used to be so easy.

You’d have your mate who, after a few beers, would tell you that the moon landings were faked or that the Illuminati controlled everything or that the US government was holding alien autopsies in Area 51. And you’d be able to dismiss this because it was all rubbish.

Look, you’d say, we have moon rock samples and pictures and we left laser reflectors on the surface and... basically you still don’t believe me but that’s because you’re mad and no proof on earth (or the moon) would satisfy you.

It’s true that there was always the big one which wasn’t quite so easily dismissed. This was the Kennedy assassination - but here you could be fairly sure that the whole thing was a terrible, impenetrable murky morass. You knew that some things never would be known (or would be released, partially redacted by the CIA, 200 years in the future). And you knew that whatever the truth was it was probably a bit dull compared to your mate’s flights of fantasy involving the KGB, the Mafia and the military-industrial complex. Besides, it all made for a lot of very entertaining films and books.

Photo: Reuters

This nice, cozy state of affairs lasted until the early 2000s. But then something changed. These days conspiracy theories don’t look so crazy and conspiracy theorists don’t look like crackpots. In fact, today’s conspiracy theory is tomorrow’s news headlines. It’s tempting, I suppose, to say we live in a golden age of conspiracy theories, although it’s only really golden for the architects of the conspiracies. From the Iraq war to Fifa to the banking crisis, the truth is not only out there, but it’s more outlandish than anything we could have made up.
 
Of course, our real-life conspiracies aren’t much like The X-Files – they’re disappointingly short on aliens and the supernatural. Rather, they’re more like John Le Carre books. Shady dealings by powerful people who want nothing more than to line their profits at the expense of others. The abuse of power. Crazy ideologues who try and create their own facts for fun and profit. Corporations supplanting governments via regulatory capture.

So, what are some of our biggest conspiracies?

The Iraq War

The most disgusting abuse of power in a generation and a moral quagmire that never ends. America is attacked by terrorists and so, declares war on a country that had nothing whatsoever to do with the attacks, while ignoring an oil rich ally which had everything to do with them. The justification for war is based on some witches’ brew of faulty intelligence, concocted intelligence and ignored good intelligence. Decent people are forced to lie on an international stage. All sensible advice is ignored and rabid neo-con draft dodgers hold sway on military matters. The UK joins this fool’s errand for no good reason. Blood is spilled and treasure is spent.

The result is a disaster that was predicted only by Middle Eastern experts, post-conflict planners and several million members of the public. Thousands of allied troops and hundreds of thousands of blameless Iraqis are killed, although plenty of companies and individuals benefit from the US dollars that were shipped out, literally, by the ton. More recently, Iraq, now in a far worse state than it ever was under any dictator, has become an incubator for more terrorists, which is a special kind of geopolitical irony lost entirely on the war’s supporters.

And yet, we can’t really bring ourselves to hold anyone accountable. Apportioning responsibility would be difficult, painful and inconvenient, so we shrug as the men behind all this enjoy their well-upholstered retirements despite being directly and personally responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths and trillions of wasted dollars. And the slow drip, drip of revelations continues, largely ignored by the public, despite the horrendous costs which (in the UK) could have been spent on things like the NHS or properly equipping our armed forces.

Fifa

The conspiracy du jour. We always knew Fifa was shonky and bribey, but most of us thought the more outlandish claims were just that. Not so. As it turns out, Fifa is a giant corruption machine and it now looks like every World Cup in the last three decades, even the ones we were cool about, like South Africa, could have been fixes.

Photo: AFP

On the plus side, it seems that something may be done, but it’ll be far too late to help honest footballing nations who missed their moment in the sun. For those who say "it’s only a stupid sport", well, recently we’ve heard accusations of arms deals for votes involving... wait for it... Saudi Arabia. The Saudi connection makes me wonder if, soon, we’ll be looking a grand unified conspiracy theory which brings together lots of other conspiracy theories under one corrupt, grubby roof.

The banking crisis

A nice financial counterpoint to Iraq. Virtually destroy the western financial system in the name of greed. Get bailed out by the taxpayers who you’ve been ripping off. And then carry on as if nothing whatsoever has happened. No jail, no meaningful extra regulation, the idea of being too big to fail as much of a joke as it was in 2005. Not even an apology. In fact, since the crisis you caused, things have got much better for you – and worse for everyone else. Much like Iraq, no-one has been held responsible or even acknowledged any wrongdoing. Again, this is partially because it’s so complicated and hard – but mainly because those who caused the crisis are so well represented in the governments of the countries who bailed them out. Oh, and while we’re at it, the banks played a part in the Fifa scandal. As conspiracy theorists will tell you, everything is connected.

Paedophiles

This one seems like a particularly dark and grisly thriller. At first it was just a few rubbish light entertainers. Then it was a lot more entertainers. Then we had people muttering about the political establishment – and others counter-muttering don’t be ridiculous, that’s a conspiracy theory. But it wasn’t. Now,it’s a slow-motion train crash and an endless series of glacial government inquiries. The conspiracy theorists point out that a lot of real stuff only seems to come out after the alleged perpetrators are dead or so senile it no longer matters. It’s hard to disagree with them. It’s also hard to imagine what kind of person would be so in thrall to power that they’d cover up child abuse.

And the rest

Where do you start? We could look at the EU and pick anything from its rarely signed-off accounts to the giant sham that let Greece join the Euro in the first place. We could look at UK defence procurement – and how we get so much less bang for our buck than France. We could peer at the cloying, incestuous relationship between the UK’s political class and its media moguls and how our leaders still fawn over a man whose poisonous control over so much of our media dates back to dodgy deal in 1981 that was denied for 30 years. We could look at the NSA and its intimate/ bullying relationship with tech companies. And we could go on and on and on.

But actually what we should be thinking is that a lot of this is what happens what you dismantle regulatory frameworks. This is what happens when you let money run riot and you allow industries to police themselves. This is what happens when the rich and powerful are endlessly granted special privileges, celebrated and permitted or even encouraged to place themselves above the law. And this is what happens when ordinary people feel bored by and excluded from politics, largely because their voices matter so little for the reasons above. Effectively, we are all living in Italy under Silvio Berlusconi. What’s the point in anything?

But actually, there is some hope. While the number of rich and powerful people who think they can get away with anything has undoubtedly grown, technology has made leaking much easier. Wikileaks may not be perfect, but it’s a lot better than no leaks at all. The other thing that gives me succour is the public’s view of the bankers. We still hate them, which is absolutely as it should be. And slowly this contempt is starting to hurt the masters of the universe. It’s notable that, recently, banking has started tumbling down the down the list of desirable careers. So, I suppose the solution is simple: we need more regulation, we need more transparency and we need more public shame and disgust. We might even get the last two; I’m less hopeful about the first.

In the X-Files, Fox Mulder’s famous catchphrase was, “I want to believe” but that’s because the conspiracy theories he dealt with were rather good fun. Ours, by contrast, tend to involve an endless procession of wealthy old men abusing their power. So I don’t want to believe any more. I want my kids to grow up in a world where conspiracy theories are something you laugh at.

Rupert Murdoch at the Leveson Inquiry

Rupert Murdoch gives away more than planned at Leveson inquiry

The denials never shifted but, under careful questioning from Robert Jay QC, the tycoon made some serious concessions

• 
• • Nick Davies
  • guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 25 April 2012 19.36 BST

Rupert Murdoch often departed from the script in his evidence at the Leveson inquiry. Photograph: Reuters

 

At one point in his evidence, when he was trying to explain how he dealt with politicians, Rupert Murdoch volunteered: "I'm not good at holding my tongue." It must drive his advisers crazy.
The plan clearly was for Castle Murdoch to be defended with well-constructed walls of obdurate denial, reinforced by occasional bouts of forgetfulness. Certainly, the denials never shifted – and these were big, tough denials: "I've never asked a prime minister for anything in my life … We have never pushed our commercial interests in our papers … I don't know many politicians."

However, in the event, Robert Jay QC kept piercing small gaps in Murdoch's defences. This was partly because Jay had gathered up a prodigious supply of facts, which he fired like slingshot at the castle walls – and partly because the old mogul likes to talk. Jay didn't break in and ransack the place, but he did some damage.

Sometimes the wounds were nothing more than dents in Murdoch's standing, as he acknowledged that it might well be true that he had once listened to Ken Livingstone on television denouncing the "lies and smears of the media" and that he had then declared drunkenly to a roomful of people, "That's me!" Or that he might well have qualified his early approval for Tony Blair by adding that they were not yet ready to take their pants down together.

But sometimes, in the detail behind the denial, he conceded substantial ground. His underlying problem was that he was not listening to Jay and failed to see the subtlety of the allegation that faced him.

Murdoch kept denying that he made deals with politicians, ie, that he simply offered them the support of his paper in return for favours to his business. But Jay suggested: "It operates at a far more sophisticated level, doesn't it?" and went on to quote the reported words of the former Australian prime minister Paul Keating: "You can do a deal with him without ever saying a deal is done."
In the case of Murdoch's relationship with Blair, Jay quoted Murdoch's former editor, Andrew Neil, that there had been "an implicit understanding – never openly talked about between the two men – but an understanding nevertheless".

Murdoch duly put up his well-rehearsed denial – "I never asked Mr Blair for anything, nor did I receive any favour" – and then proceeded to volunteer that he had been in the habit of seeing Blair two or three times a year, as though that were an annual average for most voters to see a national leader.

He described how he had once spent an afternoon at Chequers, telling Blair how much he opposed Britain joining the euro, as though the prime minister had nothing better to do.

To this extraordinary degree of access, he boldly added that he does indeed direct the editorial line of the Sun on major issues, including questions about Europe. And, once again failing to hold his tongue, he went right ahead and admitted what this would mean to a man like Blair: "If any politician wanted my views on major issues, they only had to read the Sun." The Sun relentlessly reinforced the anti-EU message.

Murdoch continued to deny that Blair had ever done anything for him, but then conceded that Blair had "gone the extra mile for him" over European policy, to the point where he had acceded to the Sun's demand that the government should agree to hold a referendum before accepting the new EU constitution.

And Blair had done something very similar by ensuring Britain maintained tough anti-union laws and then underlined the point with an article in the Sun, following which the two men had enjoyed dinner together. Murdoch agreed it was possible he had congratulated Blair on his position.

Similarly, Jay quoted Murdoch's former confidant, Woodrow Wyatt, who was close to Margaret Thatcher and who recorded in his diary that he had once told Murdoch: "Margaret is very keen on preserving your position. She knows how much she depends on your support. Likewise, you depend on her." Murdoch produced his standard denial – "I didn't expect any help from her, nor did I ask for any" – and then found himself accepting that, while the Sun supported her, she had delivered a series of decisions which looked really very helpful indeed, including allowing him to buy the Times and the Sunday Times without referring his bid to the Monopolies and Mergers Commission. She also exempted BSkyB from the regulations in the 1990 Broadcasting Act.

With Gordon Brown and David Cameron, he kept closer to the script but, even so, he caused unnecessary trouble.

He denied discussing the BBC licence fee with Cameron. Enough said. Talking to a prime minister about the licence fee might suggest he had some commercial motive. But then his tongue added: "I wasn't interested in the BBC licence fee. I had been through that with previous prime ministers, and it didn't matter. They all hated the BBC, and they all gave it whatever it wanted."

He set the record straight on Kelvin MacKenzie's claim that Brown had reacted to the Sun's endorsement of the Tories in September 2009 by phoning him and roaring down the phone for 20 minutes. That was "a very colourful exaggeration", he said. Enough? No. He went on to quote a version of the call which was highly likely to provoke a response from Brown, who duly issued a statement saying that Murdoch was wholly wrong and should have the good grace to correct his account.

As he left the inquiry for a break, his tongue was still rolling. Dan Sabbagh, the Guardian's head of media, heard him grumble to his advisers about Lord Justice Leveson: "Let's get him to get this fucking thing over with today." If only they could. Murdoch resumes his evidence on Thursday morning.

My Weltanschhaung - 16/02/2012

The EU troika, after shifting the 'austerity' goal posts for Greece are now willing to let Greece quit the Euro. So let's hope that Greece will not have to implement the austerity measures if it quits the Euro. 

Israel and its allies will only be happy after a war with Iran.

What has the world come to - Sun journalists who had hitherto never left an opportunity to criticise the EU, now plan to use the EU human rights law to challenge their benevolent employer Murdoch. With facts like that who needs fiction. What about allowing markets to function freely - you Sunny folks?

I think Arsenal are finished as a team and Wenger will leave at the end of the season. They were not in the reckoning in the game against AC Milan last night. What a shame!

British policemen have a 70 % chance of escaping prosecution on serious charges of misconduct if the investigation is carried out by the IPCC. Shocking but not surprising indeed.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/police-escape-charges-in-70-per-cent-of-ipcc-cases-6953024.html

London Olympic officials refuse to divulge information about how many tickets were sold and at what prices. A scam?

I'm starting to think that the Left might actually be right

 Charles Moore in The Telegraph on 23/7/2011

It has taken me more than 30 years as a journalist to ask myself this question, but this week I find that I must: is the Left right after all? You see, one of the great arguments of the Left is that what the Right calls “the free market” is actually a set-up.

The rich run a global system that allows them to accumulate capital and pay the lowest possible price for labour. The freedom that results applies only to them. The many simply have to work harder, in conditions that grow ever more insecure, to enrich the few. Democratic politics, which purports to enrich the many, is actually in the pocket of those bankers, media barons and other moguls who run and own everything.

In the 1970s and 1980s, it was easy to refute this line of reasoning because it was obvious, particularly in Britain, that it was the trade unions that were holding people back. Bad jobs were protected and good ones could not be created. “Industrial action” did not mean producing goods and services that people wanted to buy, it meant going on strike. The most visible form of worker oppression was picketing. The most important thing about Arthur Scargill’s disastrous miners’ strike was that he always refused to hold a ballot on it.

A key symptom of popular disillusionment with the Left was the moment, in the late 1970s, when the circulation of Rupert Murdoch’s Thatcher-supporting Sun overtook that of the ever-Labour Daily Mirror. Working people wanted to throw off the chains that Karl Marx had claimed were shackling them – and join the bourgeoisie which he hated. Their analysis of their situation was essentially correct. The increasing prosperity and freedom of the ensuing 20 years proved them right.

But as we have surveyed the Murdoch scandal of the past fortnight, few could deny that it has revealed how an international company has bullied and bought its way to control of party leaderships, police forces and regulatory processes. David Cameron, escaping skilfully from the tight corner into which he had got himself, admitted as much. Mr Murdoch himself, like a tired old Godfather, told the House of Commons media committee on Tuesday that he was so often courted by prime ministers that he wished they would leave him alone.

The Left was right that the power of Rupert Murdoch had become an anti-social force. The Right (in which, for these purposes, one must include the New Labour of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown) was too slow to see this, partly because it confused populism and democracy. One of Mr Murdoch’s biggest arguments for getting what he wanted in the expansion of his multi-media empire was the backing of “our readers”. But the News of the World and the Sun went out of the way in recent years to give their readers far too little information to form political judgments. His papers were tools for his power, not for that of his readers. When they learnt at last the methods by which the News of the World operated, they withdrew their support.

It has surprised me to read fellow defenders of the free press saying how sad they are that the News of the World closed. In its stupidity, narrowness and cruelty, and in its methods, the paper was a disgrace to the free press. No one should ever have banned it, of course, but nor should anyone mourn its passing. It is rather as if supporters of parliamentary democracy were to lament the collapse of the BNP. It was a great day for newspapers when, 25 years ago, Mr Murdoch beat the print unions at Wapping, but much of what he chose to print on those presses has been a great disappointment to those of us who believe in free markets because they emancipate people. The Right has done itself harm by covering up for so much brutality.

The credit crunch has exposed a similar process of how emancipation can be hijacked. The greater freedom to borrow which began in the 1980s was good for most people. A society in which credit is very restricted is one in which new people cannot rise. How many small businesses could start or first homes be bought without a loan? But when loans become the means by which millions finance mere consumption, that is different.

And when the banks that look after our money take it away, lose it and then, because of government guarantee, are not punished themselves, something much worse happens. It turns out – as the Left always claims – that a system purporting to advance the many has been perverted in order to enrich the few. The global banking system is an adventure playground for the participants, complete with spongy, health-and-safety approved flooring so that they bounce when they fall off. The role of the rest of us is simply to pay.
This column’s mantra about the credit crunch is that Everything Is Different Now. One thing that is different is that people in general have lost faith in the free-market, Western, democratic order. They have not yet, thank God, transferred their faith, as they did in the 1930s, to totalitarianism. They merely feel gloomy and suspicious. But they ask the simple question, “What's in it for me?”, and they do not hear a good answer.
Last week, I happened to be in America, mainly in the company of intelligent conservatives. Their critique of President Obama’s astonishing spending and record-breaking deficits seemed right. But I was struck by how the optimistic message of the Reagan era has now become a shrill one. On Fox News (another Murdoch property, and one which, while I was there, did not breathe a word of his difficulties), Republicans lined up for hours to threaten to wreck the President’s attempt to raise the debt ceiling. They seemed to take for granted the underlying robustness of their country’s economic and political arrangements. This is a mistake. The greatest capitalist country in history is now dependent on other people’s capital to survive. In such circumstances, Western democracy starts to feel like a threatened luxury. We can wave banners about “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, but they tend to say, in smaller print, “Made in China”.

As for the plight of the eurozone, this could have been designed by a Left-wing propagandist as a satire of how money-power works. A single currency is created. A single bank controls it. No democratic institution with any authority watches over it, and when the zone’s borrowings run into trouble, elected governments must submit to almost any indignity rather than let bankers get hurt. What about the workers? They must lose their jobs in Porto and Piraeus and Punchestown and Poggibonsi so that bankers in Frankfurt and bureaucrats in Brussels may sleep easily in their beds.

When we look at the Arab Spring, we tend complacently to tell ourselves that the people on the streets all want the freedom we have got. Well, our situation is certainly better than theirs. But I doubt if Western leadership looks to a protester in Tahrir Square as it did to someone knocking down the Berlin Wall in 1989. We are bust – both actually and morally.

One must always pray that conservatism will be saved, as has so often been the case in the past, by the stupidity of the Left. The Left’s blind faith in the state makes its remedies worse than useless. But the first step is to realise how much ground we have lost, and that there may not be much time left to make it up.

How the phone-hacking scandal unmasked the British power elite

The close ties between politicians and the media mean that if Murdoch's empire falls, the political establishment will suffer

At 2.30 on Tuesday 19 July, the story that has spread itself over the news for weeks will reach one of its most spectacular moments. An elderly American–Australian billionaire and his 38-year-old son will be transported to the Houses of Parliament, along with a 43-year-old woman from Warrington, long used to the company of the rich and powerful, but freshly departed from her high-powered job and just released from a central-London police station. There, they will face a committee of MPs, from a wide array of backgrounds – among them, a trade unionist's son from Kidderminster; a privately educated chick-lit novelist who has recently married the manager of Metallica and the Red Hot Chili Peppers; and a woman who was once the finance director for the company that makes Mars bars.
Exactly what will happen when Rupert Murdoch, James Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks face the culture, media and sport select committee is anyone's guess. Tom Watson – the Kidderminster-raised Labour MP whose dogged pursuit of News International forms one of the key threads of how the hacking scandal has played out – warned the Guardian against getting too excited. "There is not going to be a killer blow on Tuesday," he said. "Expectations are way too high."
That may be true, but even if the trio hide behind half-answers and obfuscation, there will plenty on which to feast. Body language will be picked apart; pauses will acquire huge significance; the merest slip-up might open up very damaging lines of inquiry. And besides, the event will be defined by one massive piece of symbolism. In the 43 years he has been operating in the UK, Rupert Murdoch has never formally faced British MPs. Why would he, when the most powerful among them would gladly grant him regular audiences, opening the back door of Downing Street so they could check that everything in his world was as perfect as it could possibly be?
Yesterday, in the wake of yet more arrests and resignations, I listened to another media appearance by Steve Hewlett, the Guardian columnist and presenter of Radio 4's Media show – who, in the midst of droves of talking heads coming close to losing theirs, has sounded a dependable note of calm and real insight. As far as I know, he has not talked about the "British Spring". But when he popped up towards the end of the Today programme, he seemed to agree that something absolutely remarkable was afoot.
"It's almost as if the whole establishment – the political-media elite – is in a state of wobble," he said. "Any association with Murdoch and his papers, which quite naturally everybody has had in some form . . . is now so toxic that any mention of it is . . ."
A pause.
"I mean, look: it's carnage. It's almost as if the light has suddenly come on, and everybody has said: 'Good lord – were we doing that?'"
This is an example of what he means. On Saturday 2 July, Rupert Murdoch's daughter Elisabeth and her millionaire PR husband Matthew Freud hosted a party at their 22-bedroom mansion in the Cotswolds. Michael Gove, the education secretary, was there. So was David Cameron's consigliere Steve Hilton, and the culture minister Ed Vaizey. The Labour figures in attendance included Peter Mandelson, the ex-work and pensions secretary James Purnell, the shadow foreign secretary Douglas Alexander - and his shadow cabinet colleague Tessa Jowell, who reportedly arrived with her supposedly estranged husband David Mills. They were joined by David Miliband – who, let us not forget, was supported in his quest for the Labour leadership by the entire Murdoch stable of newspapers.
Robert Peston was glimpsed in deep conversation with Will Lewis, News International's general manager. The BBC's director general Mark Thompson turned up, along with Alan Yentob, Jon Snow from Channel 4 News, Bear Grylls, Mariella Frostrup, Lily Allen and Patrick Kielty. And what a time they had: thanks to Nick Jones, the owner of the members-only Soho House club and husband of Desert Island Discs' Kirsty Young, two marquees had been turned into pop-up versions of his London reaturants, Cecconi's and Pizza East, and drinking and dancing went on until 4am.
Also among the guests was James Murdoch, who spent much of the night talking intently to Rebekah Brooks – whose behaviour that night was said to be somewhat uncharacteristic. "Usually, Rebekah flits around having a word with everyone," one witness told the Daily Mail. "She loves being the centre of attention. But that night, she spent nearly all her time with News International people."
The following Monday, when plenty of the revellers must still have been feeling groggy, the Guardian ran the story by Nick Davies and Amelia Hill about Milly Dowler's phone being hacked. And so began the explosion of revelations that has – for the time being, at least – blown this cosy, cloistered world apart.

A long love affair

Self-evidently, powerful people tend to cluster together. Those who control the media are a particularly strong magnet for the rich and influential, and there is a long history of people from all sides of politics sharing their company. Take note: that great socialist godhead Aneurin Bevan was a friend of Lord Beaverbrook, as was Bevan's protege Michael Foot, who was so enamoured of the proprietor of the two Express titles and the London Evening Standard that he once said this: "I loved him, not merely as a friend, but as a second father."
But the endless scramble to Rupert Murdoch's table, and the powerful milieu that sprouted around him and his children, has been something new. When he decisively began to exercise his grip on British politics in the 1980s, Murdoch was an intimate of Margaret Thatcher, who cleared the way for his move into British television, though to claim that she was under his spell was deeply misplaced. As with so many things, the rot decisively started under New Labour, thanks to obvious enough reasoning: News International had so tortured John Major and Neil Kinnock, that rather than be monstered by people who evidently decided who to target and then pursued them to the point of destruction, it was surely better to get them decisively on side, via whatever means were necessary. So, in July 1995, Tony Blair and his retinue famously made their whistlestop trip to a News Corp conference in Hayman Island, off the coast of Australia.
The Murdoch factor undoubtedly informed swaths of New Labour politics: not least, an ingrained reluctance to embrace the more economically interventionist aspects of the European Union, and a reckless belief that Britain should always support American foreign policy, no matter how dangerous the consequences (never forget: all of Murdoch's newspapers loudly backed the invasion of Iraq). Moreover, even before Blair entered Downing Street, he and his allies' closeness to News Corp seems to have led to very precise manoeuvres on Labour's media policy.
In 1996, for example, the Major government's broadcasting bill was making its way through parliament. There was particular controversy surrounding the question of whether the legislation should force Murdoch to manufacture digital TV boxes that could be used for services provided by other companies – so that, if you chose to buy BSkyB kit but wanted to watch television delivered by another provider, that was possible. The alternative was effective monopoly, as plenty of Labour MPs well knew. But when it came to the vote at committee stage, two Labour members mysteriously went missing, meaning that the vote was tied 11-11, Murdoch got his way – and we began our passage into that brave new TV world where BSkyB has a UK market share of 80%.
If you read Volume One of Alastair Campbell's diaries, you find one possible explanation, not just for this, but other New Labour capitulations to News Corp – such as the 2003 "Murdoch clause" that relaxed the rules on the acquisition of TV companies by newspaper owners, and thus opened the way to a Murdoch buyout of Channel 5 (which didn't happen – though it's this change that allowed in that unseemly sub-Murdoch Richard Desmond). It's there in an account of a meeting between Campbell, Blair and Mandelson, and Les Hinton and one Jane Reed, then News International's director of corporate affairs. "They were clearly worried that party pressure would lead us to adopt positions on the broadcasting bill, and legislation if we got in, that would hit their business interests," Campbell recalls.
Later in the same paragraph, he seems to suggest that in return for Labour's quiescence on these issues, they expected full and consistent support from Murdoch's newspapers: "I emphasised that they had to understand that there would be a big price to pay in the party if we restricted and curbed the natural desires of people to do something about Murdoch, and ultimately the Sun and News of the World really went for us."
When I interviewed Campbell last year, he was at pains to deny that the Blair government had ever offered News International any kind of quid pro quo on anything. Still, I asked him about the broadcasting bill, and suggested that behind his account of meeting Hinton and Reed and that mention of "curbing" the collective Labour desire to somehow move on Murdoch, there had been a whole tangle of intrigue. He nodded. "Mmmm. Mmmm," he said. "I'd forgotten about that."
Power couple: Elisabeth Murdoch and Matthew Freud. Photograph: Richard Young/Rex Features Twelve years later, in the summer of 2008, David Cameron was transported in a private plane – laid on by Freud – to the Greek island of Santorini, from where he was ferried to Rupert Murdoch's 184ft yacht the Rosehearty, for an important meeting. The following year, the Tories began to harden a new antipathy to the BBC, floating the freezing of the licence fee and urging the corporation to do "more with less": messages that were in accord with the chippy anti-BBC lecture James Murdoch gave at that year's Edinburgh TV festival. Just over a month later came achingly predictable news: that the Sun was swinging its support behind the Conservatives, and dumping Labour.
By then, the spell cast by the Murdoch empire on politicians of all parties was endlessly reported as if it was the natural order of things. The next year, when the Sun announced its support for the Tories with the headline "Labour's lost it", even the BBC reported the switch as if it were an enshrined part of the British political process, rarely questioning why its reporters were paying so much attention to the whims of one man, or what it said about the fall of our politics that his manoeuvrings were considered so important.
Meanwhile, the so-called Chipping Norton set – the Camerons, Elisabeth Murdoch and Matthew Freud, Brooks and her husband Charlie, Steve Hilton and his wife Rachel Whetstone, Google's head of communications and public policy – was developing into a hardened clique. News International had long since seduced not just politicians, but police officers. In Sunday's deluge of news about Met commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson, one story was strangely overlooked: that according to the New York Times, his links with News International were sufficiently close for him to have "met for meals 18 times with company executives and editors". All told, British politics was blurring into a mulch largely built around policies the Murdochs could endorse, and their company was apparently so gone on its own power that some of its staff obviously thought they were way beyond the law.

The unpopular press

Which brings us to some of the most important questions of all. Even before the hacking scandal decisively broke, how does anyone suppose all of this was this playing with the public? How did ordinary voters feel, watching every broadcast outlet telling them that Murdoch had swapped from Labour to Tory, and implying that the next election was thereby all but decided, as if their own votes counted for precious little? As they heard about Blair's trip to Australia, or Murdoch and Cameron's tete-a-tete in Greece, what did they think? This is not to suggest that millions of people were anywhere near as hostile to the Murdoch empire as hard-bitten lefties, nor that the politics of his newspapers did not chime with those of millions and millions of people: but rather to point out that if politicians have long gnashed their teeth about "disconnection" and the decline of public trust, the fact that they have increasingly formed a distant, pampered elite – with the Murdochs at its centre – must surely provide some of the explanation.
Right now, as the arrests and resignations pile up, you wonder how dangerous all this is for the amazingly small collection of people who have such a colossal influence on British public life. Comparisons between the fall of News International and the crisis that beset the banks are currently 10-a-penny, but there is one point of comparison that has not yet been mentioned. Just as the entire banking system was almost brought down by the insidious contagion of bad debt, might an entire establishment be horribly damaged by its equally widespread and just as toxic links to News Corp? Each time Andy Coulson crash-lands in the headlines, David Cameron flinches. When Stephenson resigned thanks to the Met's links with the former NoW staffer Neil Wallis, he made explicit reference to Coulson, and thus defined a whole swath of the next day's headlines, as well as jangling Downing Street nerves even further. Now Assistant Commissioner John Yates has gone – and Boris Johnson remains under fire for the London mayoralty's failure to act on the seemingly unhealthy connections between Wapping and Scotland Yard.
On and on it goes. In every report that followed Brooks's resignation and arrest there were potent images of her in the company of Blair, Cameron and others. Ed Miliband may have largely kept his distance from the Murdochs, but there are plenty of senior Labour figures who have been only too happy to pay court, repeatedly. And one other thing worth knowing before the select committee hearing: according to the Independent on Sunday, its chairman, John Whittingdale, has dined with Brooks, met Elisabeth Murdoch on several occasions, and is a good enough friend of Hinton to have been invited to his wedding in 2009 (he didn't go). As you push through the establishment and encounter endless links to News Corp, you start to wonder where it will all end. Questions even started to be asked about whether the prime minister should consider his position. When Stephenson resigned, a friend texted me: "Who's next: the Queen?"
As this whole saga develops, some people's hopes are being raised into the stratosphere. Undoubtedly, it has been great to see a Labour leader so confidently end his party's demeaning relationship with Murdoch, and widen the argument into a discussion about wider irresponsibility at the top and the dangers of large concentrations of power. Yes, we now have the best hope in generations of convincing laws on media ownership. There is a good chance that if Murdoch's shadow recedes, politicians will extend the national debate into at least some of the areas that have been shut off for far too long.
But beware one thing in particular. After the fall of the banks and the scandal of MPs' expenses, the events of the last two weeks are less likely to result in a gleaming new dawn than a deepening of a deadened public scepticism about Britain's elites, and our politicians in particular. We've heard a lot about Watergate lately: it's worth bearing in mind as the full extent of the Nixon administration's transgressions became clear, the main result was not a massed drive to get politics working again, but a drastic hardening of the public cynicism that had initially taken root thanks to the Vietnam war. In 1964, three-quarters of Americans believed the government in Washington could be trusted to do the right thing; in 1974, it was just over a third. Eventually, politics was revived not thanks to the Democrats, but Ronald Reagan and the populist New Right.
In other words, you could be forgiven for looking beyond the hacking scandal and asking a sobering question: rather than marking the point at which Westminster starts to make some kind of recovery and politicians are entrusted to clean things up, might it actually push us into a deadening stand-off between most of those at the top, and a public who now simply trust no one at all?
The Sunday before last, Elisabeth Murdoch was allegedly heard claiming that her brother James and Brooks had "fucked the company". Here's my fear: that as the revelations extend into the distance, they may have done the self-same thing to our politics and public life.

• guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2011

The great Murdoch conspiracy

Peter Oborne in The Telegraph on 15 July 2011

When I went to work in the House of Commons as a lobby correspondent nearly 20 years ago, I assumed that the British constitution worked along the lines we had been taught in textbooks at school and university. Which is to say: Britain was a representative democracy; the police were reasonably honest; and the country was governed under the rule of law. I naively expected MPs to be honest and driven by a sense of duty, and ministers to be public-spirited.

During my first few years at Westminster, I came to appreciate that most of my assumptions were hardly true. In particular, it became clear that power had seeped away from the Commons, which had lost many of its traditional functions. It rarely held ministers to account, and ministers no longer made their announcements to the House, as Erskine May, the rulebook of Parliament, insisted they should; instead they were leaked out through journalists.

For a number of years I was a part of this alternative system of government. We would be fed information confidentially and behind the scenes, and treated as if we were more important than elected MPs. All this was very flattering – and professionally very useful – but I couldn’t help sensing that something was wrong. It wasn’t just that the media had taken over the function of Parliament, it also meant that the traditional checks and balances no longer operated. Above all, information could be put into the public domain privately and therefore unaccountably.

All newspapers were guilty of being part of this new system, but it was exploited in particular by the Murdoch press. I believe that when Rupert Murdoch arrived on the British scene in the 1960s, he was, on balance, a force for good. The deference that still defined a great deal of political culture was challenged by Mr Murdoch, and better still he took on and defeated the print unions, which had all but destroyed the British newspaper industry in the 1970s. But by the 1990s, Murdoch’s newspapers were starting to abuse their power. The best way of demonstrating this is perhaps by examining the career of Rebekah Brooks, the chief executive of News International who is in such trouble this week. Her professional career is, in a number of ways, a parable for the times we have lived through.

One of the greatest adventuresses of her era, she emerged on the scene when New Labour under Tony Blair was on the verge of power. During this time she was married to Ross Kemp, the EastEnders actor who was one of the most powerful defenders of New Labour. They lived in south London, emphasising the faux-proletarian credentials that were such an important, if misleading, part of the New Labour message.

As New Labour’s star waned, Rebekah Brooks changed course. She ceased to be the cool, metropolitan figure favoured by New Labour. She moved to Oxfordshire, took up riding and became the central figure in the now notorious Chipping Norton set. Meanwhile, her titles changed their allegiance. The political editor of the Sun might have been deemed to lack the impeccable social credentials demanded by an incoming Tory government. He was replaced by an Old Marlburian.
The identical transfiguration took place at The Times, where Phil Webster, one of the few remaining journalists in Fleet Street who has come up the hard way, was removed. Webster, who had been a favourite of the Blair government, found himself replaced as political editor by Roly Watson, who had been a member of Pop, the exclusive club at Eton, at the same time as David Cameron. A pattern was clear. Rebekah Brooks (like all the News International insiders) attached herself like glue to whichever political party held the ascendancy.
During the Blair years, News International executives, Mrs Brooks among them, would attend the annual Labour Party conference, but they were scarcely treated as journalists. When Tony Blair gave his leadership speech, they would be awarded seats just behind the cabinet, as if they had been co-opted into the Government. Arguably they had. The first telephone call that Blair made after he had escaped from the conference hall was routinely to Rupert Murdoch himself. And when ministers who had been favoured by the Murdoch press left office, they would be rewarded. David Blunkett and Alastair Campbell were both given columns on News International publications.
A version of this process repeated itself when Gordon Brown became prime minister, with Rebekah Brooks attending Sarah Brown’s cringe-making “pyjama party” at Chequers. It may not suit Mr Brown, who made such a passionate speech in the Commons yesterday, to remember it but he, too, was part of the Murdoch system of government. And so was David Cameron, who last October threw a party for his closest friends to celebrate his 44th birthday. Reportedly everyone present had known the Prime Minister all his adult life – with the exception of Mrs Brooks.
There was a very sinister element to these relationships. At exactly the same time that Mrs Brooks was getting on so famously with the most powerful men and women in Britain, the employees of her newspapers (as we now know) were listening in to their voicemails and illicitly gaining access to deeply personal information.
One News of the World journalist once told me how this information would be gathered into dossiers; sometimes these dossiers were published, sometimes not. The knowledge that News International held such destructive power must have been at the back of everyone’s minds at the apparently cheerful social events where the company’s executives mingled with their client politicians.
Let’s take the case of Tessa Jowell. When she was Culture Secretary five years ago, News International hacked into her phone and spied on her in other ways. What was going on amounted to industrial espionage, since Ms Jowell was then charged with the regulation and supervision of News International, and the media group can scarcely have avoided discovering commercially sensitive information, even though its primary purpose was to discover details about Ms Jowell’s private life.
Yet consider this: Ms Jowell was informed of this intrusion at the time and said nothing. More curious still, she retained her friendship with Rebekah Brooks and other News International figures. Indeed, Ms Jowell appears to have been present at the Cotswolds party thrown by Matthew Freud, son-in-law of Rupert Murdoch, only 10 days ago.
James Murdoch, heir apparent to the Murdoch empire, was also present. These parties were, in effect, a conspiracy between the British media and the political class against the country as a whole. They were the men and women who governed Britain and decided who was up and who was out. Government policy was influenced and sometimes created. I doubt very much whether Britain would have invaded Iraq but for the foolhardy support of the Murdoch press.
The effect on government policy was wretched. Decisions were determined by consideration of the following day’s headlines rather than sound analysis. Furthermore, private favours were dispensed; Blair when prime minister spoke to his Italian counterpart Silvio Berlusconi about one of Murdoch’s business deals in Italy. Of course it was all kept secret, though details did sometimes leak out. All recent prime ministers have insisted that their meetings with Murdoch were confidential and did not need to be disclosed, as if they were somehow private affairs. Mercifully, Cameron – who has partially emerged from the sewer thanks to his Commons statement – has put an end to this concealment.
It has taken the horror of the revelations concerning the targeting by the Murdoch empire of the family of Milly Dowler, terrorist victims and even relatives of British war dead to bring this corrupt, complicit, and conspiratorial system of government to light.
The process of exposure has taken far too long, but there is at last hope. Two years ago, Rebekah Brooks contemptuously turned down an invitation to give evidence to MPs about how she operated. Next week, Rupert Murdoch, his son James and the reluctant Brooks will all be dragged before them.
The system of collaboration between an over-mighty press and timorous politicians is being exposed. There is hope that we can return to a more decent system of government; that Parliament can reassert its rights, and that ministers will make their decisions for the right reasons and not simply to ingratiate themselves with Murdoch and his newspaper editors. Perhaps the sickness that has demeaned and distorted British politics for the last two decades is at last being challenged and confronted.

This media is corrupt – we need a Hippocratic oath for journalists

Our job is to hold power to account. Instead, most of the profession simply ventriloquises the concerns of the elite

• 
• • George Monbiot
  • guardian.co.uk, Monday 11 July 2011 21.30 BST
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Is Murdoch now finished in the UK? As the pursuit of Gordon Brown by the Sunday Times and the Sun blows the hacking scandal into new corners of the old man's empire, this story begins to feel like the crumbling of the Berlin Wall. The naked attempt to destroy Brown by any means, including hacking the medical files of his sick baby son, means that there is no obvious limit to the story's ramifications. Illustration by Daniel Pudles The scandal radically changes public perceptions of how politics works, the danger corporate power presents to democracy, and the extent to which it has compromised and corrupted the Metropolitan police, who have now been dragged in so deep they are beginning to look like Murdoch's private army. It has electrified a dozy parliament and subjected the least accountable and most corrupt profession in Britain – journalism – to belated public scrutiny. The cracks are appearing in the most unexpected places. Look at the remarkable admission by the rightwing columnist Janet Daley in this week's Sunday Telegraph. "British political journalism is basically a club to which politicians and journalists both belong," she wrote. "It is this familiarity, this intimacy, this set of shared assumptions … which is the real corruptor of political life. The self-limiting spectrum of what can and cannot be said … the self-reinforcing cowardice which takes for granted that certain vested interests are too powerful to be worth confronting. All of these things are constant dangers in the political life of any democracy." Most national journalists are embedded, immersed in the society, beliefs and culture of the people they are meant to hold to account. They are fascinated by power struggles among the elite but have little interest in the conflict between the elite and those they dominate. They celebrate those with agency and ignore those without. But this is just part of the problem. Daley stopped short of naming the most persuasive force: the interests of the owner and the corporate class to which he belongs. The proprietor appoints editors in his own image – who impress their views on their staff. Murdoch's editors, like those who work for the other proprietors, insist that they think and act independently. It's a lie exposed by the concurrence of their views (did all 247 News Corp editors just happen to support the invasion of Iraq?), and blown out of the water by Andrew Neil's explosive testimony in 2008 before the Lords select committee on communications. The papers cannot announce that their purpose is to ventriloquise the concerns of multimillionaires; they must present themselves as the voice of the people. The Sun, the Mail and the Express claim to represent the interests of the working man and woman. These interests turn out to be identical to those of the men who own the papers. So the rightwing papers run endless exposures of benefit cheats, yet say scarcely a word about the corporate tax cheats. They savage the trade unions and excoriate the BBC. They lambast the regulations that restrain corporate power. They school us in the extrinsic values – the worship of power, money, image and fame – which advertisers love but which make this a shallower, more selfish country. Most of them deceive their readers about the causes of climate change. These are not the obsessions of working people. They are the obsessions thrust upon them by the multimillionaires who own these papers. The corporate media is a gigantic astroturfing operation: a fake grassroots crusade serving elite interests. In this respect the media companies resemble the Tea Party movement, which claims to be a spontaneous rising of blue-collar Americans against the elite but was founded with the help of the billionaire Koch brothers and promoted by Murdoch's Fox News. Journalism's primary purpose is to hold power to account. This purpose has been perfectly inverted. Columnists and bloggers are employed as the enforcers of corporate power, denouncing people who criticise its interests, stamping on new ideas, bullying the powerless. The press barons allowed governments occasionally to promote the interests of the poor, but never to hamper the interests of the rich. They also sought to discipline the rest of the media. The BBC, over the last 30 years, became a shadow of the gutsy broadcaster it was, and now treats big business with cringing deference. Every morning at 6.15, the Today programme's business report grants executives the kind of unchallenged access otherwise reserved for God on Thought for the Day. The rest of the programme seeks out controversy and sets up discussions between opponents, but these people are not confronted by their critics. So what can be done? Because of the peculiar threat they present to democracy there's a case to be made for breaking up all majority interests in media companies, and for a board of governors, appointed perhaps by Commons committee, to act as a counterweight to the shareholders' business interests. But even if that's a workable idea, it's a long way off. For now, the best hope might be to mobilise readers to demand that journalists answer to them, not just their proprietors. One means of doing this is to lobby journalists to commit themselves to a kind of Hippocratic oath. Here's a rough stab at a first draft. I hope others can improve it. Ideally, I'd like to see the National Union of Journalists building on it and encouraging its members to sign. 'Our primary task is to hold power to account. We will prioritise those stories and issues which expose the interests of power. We will be wary of the relationships we form with the rich and powerful, and ensure that we don't become embedded in their society. We will not curry favour with politicians, businesses or other dominant groups by withholding scrutiny of their affairs, or twisting a story to suit their interests. "We will stand up to the interests of the businesses we work for, and the advertisers which fund them. We will never take money for promulgating a particular opinion, and we will resist attempts to oblige us to adopt one. "We will recognise and understand the power we wield and how it originates. We will challenge ourselves and our perception of the world as much as we challenge other people. When we turn out to be wrong, we will say so." I accept that this doesn't directly address the power relations that govern the papers. But it might help journalists to assert a measure of independence, and readers to hold them to it. Just as voters should lobby their MPs to represent them and not just the whips, readers should seek to drag journalists away from the demands of their editors. The oath is one possible tool that could enhance reader power. If you don't like it, suggest a better idea. Something has to change: never again should a half a dozen oligarchs be allowed to dominate and corrupt the life of this country.

Why I had to leave The Times

Robert Fisk:

When he worked at The Times, Robert Fisk witnessed the curious working practices of the paper's proprietor, Rupert Murdoch. Despite their jocular exchanges, the writer knew he couldn't stay...

Monday, 11 July 2011 in The Independent

He is a caliph, I suppose, almost of the Middle Eastern variety.
You hear all these awful things about Arab dictators and then, when you meet them, they are charm itself. Hafez al-Assad once held my hand in his for a long time with a paternal smile. Surely he can't be that bad, I almost said to myself – this was long before the 1982 Hama massacres. King Hussein would call me "Sir", along with most other journalists. These potentates, in public, would often joke with their ministers. Mistakes could be forgiven.
The "Hitler Diaries" were Murdoch's own mistake, after refusing to countenance his own "expert's" change of heart over the documents hours before The Times and The Sunday Times began printing them. Months later, I was passing by the paper's London office on my way back to Beirut when the foreign editor, Ivan Barnes, held up the Reuters wire copy from Bonn. "Aha!" he thundered. "The diaries are forgeries!" The West German government had proved that they must have been written long after the Führer's death.
So Barnes dispatched me to editor Charles Douglas-Home's office with the Reuters story and I marched in only to find Charlie entertaining Murdoch. "They say they're forgeries, Charlie," I announced, trying not to glance at Murdoch. But I did when he reacted. "Well, there you go," the mogul reflected with a giggle. "Nothing ventured, nothing gained." Much mirth. The man's insouciance was almost catching. Great Story. It only had one problem. It wasn't true.
Oddly, he never appeared the ogre of evil, darkness and poison that he's been made out to be these past few days. Maybe it's because his editors and sub-editors and reporters repeatedly second-guessed what Murdoch would say. Murdoch was owner of The Times when I covered the blood-soaked Israeli invasion and occupation of Lebanon in 1982. Not a line was removed from my reports, however critical they were of Israel. After the invasion, Douglas-Home and Murdoch were invited by the Israelis to take a military helicopter trip into Lebanon. The Israelis tried to rubbish my reporting; Douglas-Home said he stood up for me. On the flight back to London, Douglas-Home and Murdoch sat together. "I knew Rupert was interested in what I was writing," he told me later. "He sort of waited for me to tell him what it was, although he didn't demand it. I didn't show it to him."
But things changed. Before he was editor, Douglas-Home would write for the Arabic-language Al-Majella magazine, often deeply critical of Israel. Now his Times editorials took an optimistic view of the Israeli invasion. He stated that "there is now no worthy Palestinian to whom the world can talk" and – for heaven's sake – that "perhaps at last the Palestinians on the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip will stop hoping that stage-strutters like Mr Arafat can rescue them miraculously from doing business with the Israelis."
All of which, of course, was official Israeli government policy at the time.
Then, in the spring of 1983, another change. I had, with Douglas-Home's full agreement, spent months investigating the death of seven Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners of the Israelis in Sidon. It was obvious, I concluded, that the men had been murdered – the grave-digger even told me that their corpses had been brought to him, hands tied behind their backs, showing marks of bruising. But now Douglas-Home couldn't see how we would be "justified" in running a report "so long after the event".
In other words, the very system of investigative journalism – of fact-checking and months of interviews – became self-defeating. When we got the facts, too much time had passed to print them. I asked the Israelis if they would carry out a military inquiry and, anxious to show how humanitarian they were, they duly told us there would be an official investigation. The Israeli "inquiry" was, I suspected, a fiction. But it was enough to "justify" publishing my long and detailed report. Once the Israelis could look like good guys, Douglas-Home's concerns evaporated.
When he died, of cancer, it was announced that his deputy, Charles Wilson, would edit the paper. Murdoch said that Wilson was "Charlie's choice" and I thought, so, all well and good – until I was chatting to Charlie's widow and she told me that it was the first time she had heard that Wilson's editorship had been her late husband's decision. We all knew Murdoch had signed up to all manner of guarantees of editorial independence, oversight and promises of goodwill when he bought The Times – and had then fired his first editor, Harold Evans. He would deal with the trade unionists later.
Charles Wilson – who much later became, briefly, the editor of The Independent – was a tough, friendly man who could show great kindness, as well as harshness, to his staff. He was kind to me, too. But once, when I was visiting Wilson in London, Murdoch walked into his office. "Hallo, Robert!" Murdoch greeted me, before holding a jocular conversation with Wilson. And, after he had left, Wilson said to me in a hushed voice: "See how he called you by your first name?" This was laughable. It was like the Assad smile or the King Hussein "Sir". It meant nothing. Murdoch was joking with his ministers and courtiers.
A warning sign. Still in west Beirut, where dozens of Westerners were being kidnapped, I opened The Times to discover that a pro-Israeli writer was claiming on our centre page that all journalists in west Beirut, clearly intimidated by "terrorism", could be regarded only as "bloodsuckers". Was the paper claiming that I, too, was a bloodsucker? In all this time, Murdoch had expressed exclusively pro-Israeli views, and had accepted a "Man of the Year" award from a prominent Jewish-American organisation. The Times editorials became more and more pro-Israeli, their use of the word "terrorist" ever more promiscuous.
The end came for me when I flew to Dubai in 1988 after the USS Vincennes had shot down an Iranian passenger airliner over the Gulf. Within 24 hours, I had spoken to the British air traffic controllers at Dubai, discovered that US ships had routinely been threatening British Airways airliners, and that the crew of the Vincennes appeared to have panicked. The foreign desk told me the report was up for the page-one splash. I warned them that American "leaks" that the IranAir pilot was trying to suicide-crash his aircraft on to the Vincennes were rubbish. They agreed.
Next day, my report appeared with all criticism of the Americans deleted, with all my sources ignored. The Times even carried an editorial suggesting the pilot was indeed a suicider. A subsequent US official report and accounts by US naval officers subsequently proved my dispatch correct. Except that Times readers were not allowed to see it. This was when I first made contact with The Independent. I didn't believe in The Times any more – certainly not in Rupert Murdoch.
Months later, a senior night editor who had been on duty on the night my Vincennes report arrived, recalled in a letter that he had promoted my dispatch as the splash, but that Wilson had said: "There's nothing in it. There's not a fact in it. I wouldn't even run this gibberish." Wilson, the night editor said, called it "bollocks" and "waffle". The night editor's diary for that day finished: "Shambles, chaos on Gulf story. [George] Brock [Wilson's foreign editor] rewrites Fisk."
The good news: a few months later, I was Middle East correspondent for The Independent. The bad news: I don't believe Murdoch personally interfered in any of the above events. He didn't need to. He had turned The Times into a tame, pro-Tory, pro-Israeli paper shorn of all editorial independence. If I hadn't been living in the Middle East, of course, it might have taken me longer to grasp all this.
But I worked in a region where almost every Arab journalist knows the importance of self-censorship – or direct censorship – and where kings and dictators do not need to give orders. They have satraps and ministers and senior police officers – and "democratic" governments – who know their wishes, their likes and dislikes. And they do what they believe their master wants. Of course, they all told me this was not true and went on to assert that their king/president was always right.
These past two weeks, I have been thinking of what it was like to work for Murdoch, what was wrong about it, about the use of power by proxy. For Murdoch could never be blamed. Murdoch was more caliph than ever, no more responsible for an editorial or a "news" story than a president of Syria is for a massacre – the latter would be carried out on the orders of governors who could always be tried or sacked or sent off as adviser to a prime minister – and the leader would invariably anoint his son as his successor. Think of Hafez and Bashar Assad or Hosni and Gamal Mubarak or Rupert and James. In the Middle East, Arab journalists knew what their masters wanted, and helped to create a journalistic desert without the water of freedom, an utterly skewed version of reality. So, too, within the Murdoch empire.
In the sterile world of the Murdochs, new technology was used to deprive the people of their freedom of speech and privacy. In the Arab world, surviving potentates had no problem in appointing tame prime ministers. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.