The League of Ugly Gentlemen.

The Time for Populism.

The very suggestion that there is a ruling-class might be dismissed as a "conspiracy theory". It would no doubt be met with rage from some who would unroll the accusation that this is just a backward attempt to take us back to the politics of class. Because apparently we have moved beyond class and into an age where all the old battles have been won. Nothing will ever change for the reason that all the necessary changes have already been accomplished. Even as the British elite hold around £4 trillion in the form of antiques, paintings and pensions, to speak of 'class' is to resurrect flat-earth politics. This huge concentration of wealth in a few hands is not unique to our little island. The total liquid wealth of the global rich (around 10 million people) came to $40 trillion in 2009 and it has been increasing in spite of the crisis. In the advanced capitalism of today, we are led to believe, the class structure has been obliterated and the individual now rises in accordance with their own merit, specifically talents and work ethic.

There was an interesting study covered in the New Scientist on the matter of a global ruling-class. In an analysis of the relations between 43,000 multinational corporations it has become evident that a relatively small group of companies that hold onto a disproportionate amount of power in the global economy. The work revealed a core of 1,318 companies with interlocking ownerships. On average each of these companies had connected to around 20 other companies. These 1,318 companies represented 20% of global operating revenues and it appears that the 1,318 own through shares the majority of the world's large blue chip and manufacturing corporations - representing a further 60% of global revenues. The team went further to untangle the network and found that just less than 150 companies control 40% of the wealth in the entire network. The dominant companies include Barclay's Bank, JP Morgan Chase & Co and Goldman Sachs. In light of all of this can we really maintain that the idea of a ruling-class is so outlandish? 

The British elites still carry some of the remnants of the privileged position that they held in the old feudal power-structure. Consequently, the political class has not yet gotten used to ratifications, not even at the symbolic level which the Americans "enjoy" so much. This is the reason that the Americans have a much stronger Freedom of Information act than Britain. Of course, the US has a sophisticated network of mass-media and public relations which muddies the water to keep a great deal of Americans in the dark. There is a similar network in Britain, except we lack the same formidable free access to information. The consequence is that the insights into the political and ruling-class are much more difficult to come by. Occasionally the information seeps out of the liberal end of the mass-media press, to the chagrin of the reactionary gutter-press who would rather announce the triumph of socialism than acknowledge the bitter truth of class and deplore the horrors of capitalism. The discourse is casually limited by the influences and interests that ensnare the media.

So we know that the Conservative Party received £7.3 million in the campaign for 2010, while Labour received around £5.3 million. Since David Cameron became party leader we know that the Party has received £42 million from financial institutions, over half of the total donations that the Party received altogether. This is chicken feed compared to the US elections where the outcome is always pre-bought, Obama received around $750 million which is $400 million more than his opponent. In 2012 it seems we will see campaign contributions surpass $2 billion thanks to a decision by the US Supreme Court. We should view the corporate circus run-amok in the American government with wary eyes in Britain. The tales of the links between Tories and the private sector should not surprise anyone, nor should the proximity of lobbyists to power even at the highest level in this country. Out of the convergence of interests invested in the state we find policy emerges, there is a potential for political stagnation as well as radical change. Right now the situation is one of stagnancy.

The Labour Party has often been thought incompatible with the Conservative Party for the reason that the former is embedded in the labour movement, whereas the latter has long been the party of business. It has to be noted that the decline of trade unions in this country as a political force has made it possible for Big Business to share the Labour Party with them. As long as the unions are powerless then it is possible for Big Business to dominate the Party, the clashes of interests can be easily managed. It has to be noted that the industries unscathed by union-influence at all are impervious to the decisions of militants and moderates alike in the labour movement. This is the reason that it is perfectly possible for financial institutions to hold out for the Labour Party. The financial colossus cannot be broken by the labour movement and it cannot be stopped from leaping from Labour to Conservative whenever it has to. The commentariat don't like to say that the Con-Dem Coalition could have easily been the Lab-Con Coalition.

As the Institute for Fiscal Studies has found, the overall effect of the Treasury's new plans will be to reduce the incomes of those in the bottom 30% of earners and to benefit those in the top 60%. The top 60% would include the 10% of the population who own £4 trillion in wealth already and this is the primary constituency of the Coalition. It is not that the government is incapable of serving the people, it is that the government has a dual constituency torn between the interests of working-class people and the elites. So any appeal to one has to be made to the other at the same time, often on the terms of the constituents with greater clout and influence. This is the reason that David Cameron will talk of "muscular liberalism" and the "failure" of multiculturalism as an appeal to working-class people riled up by the press about Muslims and immigration. It is perfectly compatible with the austerity measures which are set to destroy what was accomplished in the immediate aftermath of World War II. To put it crudely the economic policies appeal to a particular base while the social policies and political rhetoric appeal to the masses.

A Restless Summer.

Over the summer there seemed to be an endless flow of stories for the media to prepare narratives for and spoon-feed to us. This will come as a shock to those of you who have spent the summer in a masturbation furnace or perhaps on Mars. With everything from neo-fascist killing sprees and economic crisis to phone hacking and celebrity deaths, it was a damn good summer for news and certainly no silly season. Here are a few looks at major events in the summer, which you won't find in the mainstream media.

  
 THE GREEK MYTHS.

The debt crisis in Greece has rocked the Eurozone for months as it looked like German and French banks might be sunk the IMF and the EU moved in to force austerity measures in Greece to secure the interests of bankers in Western Europe. So Greece slashed €700 million more than the IMF and EU demanded of them, even as the country was saddled with yet more debt and the Europeans banks were handed €110 billion. The media so kind to inform us that the crisis was the result of "out-of-control" spending which we shouldn't pick up the bill for. The irony of all this is that the European country that has defaulted more than any other in the last century is Germany. Germany was excused from reparations to the countries that it had invaded, nor did the Germans have to pay back the loans that the Third Reich squeezed out of the countries it occupied in the war and especially not to the Greeks. Germany didn't even pay back the US for the loans that were used to pay the reparations levied on Germany after the First World War.

Even though from 2001 to 2007 the total spending of the EU was equal to 50.7% of GDP, out of the 27 member-states Greece was outspent by 13 states. Over the same time period public spending in Greece amounted to 44.6% of GDP. As the crisis hit Greece there was a jump in spending to 50.4% of GDP in 2009 and that is still the average expenditure in Europe. The relatively high level of public debt in Greece, before the crisis, goes back to the 1980s when the country was still recovering from the military junta. The weakness of the Greek government is in fiscal policy, though not spending but in tax-revenues that have collapsed as a result of anti-government sentiment exacerbated by an explosion of unemployment since the recession began. Sweden has the highest expenditure in Europe and yet there is no debt crisis, the reason being that the Swedish tax system is a lot better. The crisis in Greece was down to a flawed tax system and widespread anti-government sentiments which amounted to widespread tax avoidance and evasion.

Then there is the suspicious line that the Greeks are a "venal" and "lazy" people who have enjoyed a lavish state-expenditure at the expense of the rest of Europe. In actuality Greeks work around 2,120 hours a year compared with about 1,712 hours a year worked in Britain and 1,473 hours by Germans. Out of the OECD countries Koreans are the only people who work longer hours than the Greeks. You may have read of the "Greek Gravy Train", the tales of railway workers paid £60,000 a year and the way that professionals retire at 50 - though the average retirement is 62. There isn't much ink on paper about the huge numbers of Greeks who have received no pay in months and the ever-rising unemployment rate. Rationally, the Germans should bailout Greece in the way that the US bailed out Germany for free after it defaulted just after the Second World War. Instead the EU have been led by Germany into bailing out the banks at the expense of Greek democracy. The Greek people are now facing around 10 to 15 years of economic stagnation complete with a huge decline in the standard of living and in the end the country will still default anyway.

HACKED OFF!

The scandal at News International will probably be never fully said and done. It is much bigger than simply a scandal of hacking the phones of murdered children and soldiers killed in battle. We now know a lot more about the profoundly sordid relationship between the Murdoch media and the Establishment.  It has been common knowledge for a long time that the News International has a right-wing agenda. Out of the 247 editors who work for Rupert Murdoch not one came out in opposition to the Iraq war. The Murdoch media amounts to 40% of British media and has backed Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Tony Blair and David Cameron to electoral victory. We now know that soon after Cameron took office he first met with Rupert Murdoch before going on to meet with Rebekah Brooks when she edited The News of the World and then Dominic Mohan of The Sun for a "general discussion". Cameron attended the News International summer party where he gave an interview to James Harding of The Times and went onto give a speech at the CEO summit of that same newspaper.

Keep in mind that the Prime Minister also met with Paul Dacre, the editor of The Daily Mail, Lord Burns of Channel 4 and Deborah Turness of ITV News in the first month he was in office. Cameron later met with the editor of The Evening Standard for another "general discussion", the Prime Minister also attended the summer parties of The Financial Times and The Spectator. Unfortunately, the level of ingratiation that the political class has met with Murdoch does not end at a Christmas dinner with Rebekah Brooks and James Murdoch. We know that Tony Blair is the Godfather of Murdoch's daughter. We find that the Conservative Party and the police were entangled in the conspiracy ran out of a Murdoch red-top. No surprise here, it was the Thatcherites and the Met who colluded with Murdoch in 1986 to crush the print unions in Wapping. A favour for when The Sun led the media campaign against the Miners Strike of '84. Perhaps an extended favour for the campaign the Murdoch press led against Tony Benn - which went as far as actually fabricating psychiatric reports in order to question Benn's mental health - to prevent him from becoming leader of the Labour Party.


The problem with the dominant narrative in the mainstream media is that it assumes what went on at The News of the World was an aberration. As in All the President's Men we're told that the little guy can uncover a scandal which reaches the very top of power and then can bring down the President in the name of justice. So corruption can reach the very top but because of the democratic features of our society we can find it, root it out and restore greatness in our society. Once again it turns out we want the thing itself without the harsh element of it, just as so many of us want coffee without coffee (decaffeinated coffee), war without war (no casualties on our side) or even a revolution without revolution (no real change). In this case it is as if we want sleaze without sleaze, we need to get back to proper journalism which run without corruption and unscrupulous methods such as phone-hacking. It's the classic feel good story which is used to prevent a serious attempt to ask fundamental questions about the nature of the mass-media and the provision of news through corporate structures to the public.

NORWAY'S 9/11?

The massacre in Norway came out of nowhere seemingly, it took the pundits by surprise and prompted an embarrassing attempt to resurrect the "War on Terror" narrative. The Sun jumped on the opportunity to spin the headline 'Al-Qaeda Massacre: Norway's 9/11'. Clearly the Murdoch press were desperate to lead the public away from the stench of criminality around the papers and lead them by the nose against Muslims once again. It was almost as bad as when the American press looked up Edward Said for an "insight" into international terrorism in the wake of the Oklahoma City Bombing. Even though Said is a Christian, he is a Palestinian and therefore must be an expert on terrorism. After it turned out to be just another angry white man we could still read about the "failure" of multiculturalism that led to the attacks in The New York Times. We might choose to read in The Atlantic about how the massacre was a "mutation of jihad" whereby a white man goes ape as a Muslim fanatic would in order to prevent the coming "Islamization" of Europe. The leader of the English Defence League, a former BNP member, appeared on Newsnight to spin the same line.

In many instances the press came out no better than Robert Brasillach when he conjured up the notion of "reasonable anti-Semitism" during the Nazi occupation of France. Brasillach insisted he had no beef with Charlie Chaplin, Yehudi Menuhin and Marcel Proust, but the rest of Jewry could go hang as far as he was concerned. Similarly Breivik a distinguishes between "loyal" and "disloyal" Jews, who are a threat to the European civilisation, the state of Israel and global capitalism. For Breivik, Hitler was only wrong to exterminate the "loyal" Jews who deserved a homeland. In the same vein of thought we find Jack Straw who attacks Nick Griffin on Question Time as a Fascist before wheeling out Griffin's line that the Pakistani men see our women as "white meat". So there is a "reasonable racism" to be deployed for the protection of women against Pakistani rape gangs and to maintain "Britishness" with a ban on veils. There is nothing more suspect than the insistence that the actions of Anders Behring Breivik represent a current of working-class opinion in Europe which must be acknowledged in order to prevent such violent outbursts. 


In the manifesto Breivik churned out there are references and quotes to columnists Jeremy Clarkson and Melanie Phillips as well as Bernard Lewis, Bat Ye'or, Pamela Geller, Geert Wilders, Daniel Pipes, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the Unabomber. The thought process behind the slaughter in Norway begins the mainstream right-wing discourse on Muslims and immigration in general, but then radiates outwards to the farthest reaches of jingo-lunacy. In one such instance Breivik used extracts of the Unabomber's manifesto and replaced words such as 'blacks' and 'leftists' with 'Muslims' and 'cultural Marxists'. You don't have to look too far to find hysterical noise in the gutter press about political correctness, multiculturalism, secularism, European integration and the "leftist" bias of the media. Interestingly Breivik didn't attack foreigners and turned his gun on his fellow Norwegians who were too tolerant towards the foreigners. As if the problem is not immigrants as such, but the political class that has been "corrupted" by the Left in a bid to subdue the unremitting greatness of the white man.
 

SHOPPING with VIOLENCE.

The riots seen in the UK seemingly came out of nowhere, inexplicable and indiscriminate violence tore through the capital before hurtling across the country. It was a peaceful protest in Tottenham over the death of Mark Duggan at the hands of police officers that descended into violence first. Then came a tidal wave of violence and looting that rushed through the streets of London, Birmingham, Manchester and a lot of other places. The commentariat was soon flailing wildly out of control for a useful narrative with Max Hastings wondering "How do you inculcate values in a child whose only role model is footballer Wayne Rooney - a man who is bereft of the most meagre human graces?" The Evening Standard pinned the blame on the GTA series whilst Melanie Phillips blamed the "liberal intelligentsia", oh and the rise of single-motherhood. As the Left called for a recognition of "legitimate grievances" the Right called for cuts to benefits and the repossession of property to punish the rioters. Then the decadent Starkey emerged to tell us all that it is down to the encroachment of "black culture" into a halcyon vanilla Britannia.

The conservatives were eager to shoot down any liberal nonsense about "legitimate grievances" and "social deprivation". At the same time the only permissible view was outright condemnation of the violence, which is a platitude to say the least as no one condones what happened. Even though the Right wanted to stress that these were the decisions undertaken by free individuals they could not bring itself to admit the exact nature of the riots. In the midst of the riots Kelvin MacKenzie was asked "Should we try to understand this?" and he responded "No, I don't think we should..." As if that wasn't bad enough then Michael Gove popped up to let us know that he's on "the side of order" and there are no excuses for violence. A strange position for Michael Gove to take given that he thinks the Iraq war is justified by the GDP of Iraq at the moment. Incidentally there are 5 million orphans in Iraq with over 1 million people dead as a direct consequence of war, with millions more displaced, deformed and dispossessed.

The violence of the student demonstrations came with a political message whereas the riots had no message at all. The rioters were not a revolutionary subject, in the Marxist sense, but more of a Hegelian 'rabble' who are outside of the organised social space and can only express their discontent through irrational outbursts - a 'lumpen-insurrection' of sorts. The rage and despair of the 'rabble' was expressed in the most impotent forms, the torching of random buildings and pointless thievery for example. Slavoj Žižek was right to call for a rejection of the demand to take a side, either that of a 'disenfranchised youth' or a 'small business owner'. In the riots we saw society attack society, a lot like watching a man slash away aimlessly at his own limbs, as Hunter S Thompson noted of much worse riots in the 60s "the American dream was clubbing itself to death". It was a conflict between people with a stake in community, who had managed to function within the system, and the people with no such stake and nothing to lose.

Zygmunt Bauman was correct to designate the riots as "defective and disqualified consumers" and it is easy to see the mass-looting as consumerism turned violent as it could not be realised in the proper way of shopping. Even the ignominious David Starkey acknowledged this point when he called the riots "shopping with violence". That was before he opted to wheel in the words of Enoch Powell to insulate the prevailing ideology from any damaging self-reflection. In the riots we find that at best "legitimate grievances" are secondary to impotent expression of anger, despair and envy. Ultimately the riots were a clear demonstration of the material force of ideology, it was the barbarous underbelly of consumerism rising to the surface and overflowing for all to see on Sky News. As for the people peddling vengeful answers to the riots, these are the same people who claimed there is no such thing as society. It was they who called for the "liberation" of the individual to pursue their own self-interest at the expense of others.

IRONY in TRIPOLI.

Then the Libyan Civil War resurfaced in the news as the rebels seized the capital to the surprise of Orientalist commentators everywhere, to whom the Arabs are still either incapable of winning a fight or are bloodthirsty animals. It looks as though this is the autumn of the Colonel, for Gaddafi soon disappeared. The great irony of the situation is that the Gaddafi regime was interventionist in foreign policy and had been for a very long time. The regime backed Idi Amin in Uganda, Slobodan Milošević in Serbia and Charles Taylor in Liberia as well as the IRA, the Sandinista movement and the ANC. Gaddafi sought to mediate disputes in African countries such as Mali, specifically between the government and rebels. He has even sent peace keeping missions to countries like Somalia. It has even been suggested that the Libyan government provided millions in investments to support governments in Liberia, Niger, Chad and the Central African Republic. Under Gaddafi the country had been led into armed conflict with Egypt and Chad on multiple occasions.

For years Muammar al-Gaddafi stood as the mirror-image of an American neoconservative as he saw a moral obligation to intervene where necessary on the side of the victim against the oppressors of the world. Of course, the side of the victim can be chosen selectively in accordance with the geopolitical value of fending off a particular oppressor. The same is true of the neoconservatives who wanted to fight the Communists in Afghanistan in the name of "freedom", but quietly supported Ceaușescu in Romania at the same time. We find similar contradictions in Libyan foreign policy, Colonel Gaddafi was on board for war crimes in Sierra Leone but backed the ANC at a time when Nelson Mandela was smeared as a "terrorist" in the US and Britain. The same reasoning was deployed to justify sending Libyan agents across into Egypt with the stated purpose of "subversion", even though Gaddafi was an admirer of General Nasser and wanted to emulate him as a "strong man".

Back in 1971 the CIA and MI6 put together a plot to bring down Gaddafi as part of an all-out-invasion of Libya, which would culminate in the release of political prisoners and the restoration of the monarchy. The plot fell apart as the CIA concluded that the Colonel sufficed as a bulwark to Communism in North Africa. The regime in Tripoli was opposed to Israel and Western imperialism, but  it was also opposed to the Soviet Union and Russian influence in the region. This was good enough for the time being. There has even been the suggestion (which has yet to be verified) that the coup which Gaddafi orchestrated in 1969 had been supported by the US. The regime modeled itself on the example set by Egypt, which had become a worrying example of independence by then. It is plausible that the coup was seen as a way to "buy-off" socialism and create a bulwark to the Soviet Union at the same time. So when tensions in the new regime led to a conspiracy to overthrow Gaddafi in 1975 the CIA immediately warned the Colonel who then steam-rolled over all internal opposition and continued to pursue an interventionist foreign policy.

As Gaddafi's regime became increasingly repressive and began to turn to the Soviet Union for greater support, so it was clear that Libya was going to become a "pariah state". Today commentators like to make reference to the way Gaddafi sponsored terrorism. When the US bombed Libya in 1986 the "reason" was that Gaddafi had sent arms and advisers to the Sandinista government of Nicaragua. Gaddafi mirrored the American support for the Contras, who were at the forefront of a terrorist campaign against the Sandinistas. The US continued to lean on Libya into the 1990s, this went as far as economic sanctions and backing an attempt to assassinate Gaddafi in 1996. A few years later the US made peace with Libya as Gaddafi made a bid to secure a comfortable place in a world that had changed greatly since the Berlin Wall fell. The support lent to Gaddafi was extreme, it went as far as selling him weapons which were later used against his own people. The British and the American governments even saw to it that the attempt to indict Gaddafi for his responsibility for the deaths of 1.2 million people in Sierra Leone.

Sleaze without Sleaze.

Once again it turns out we want the thing itself without the harsh element of it, just as so many of us want coffee without caffeine and Hitler without the Holocaust apparently; in this instance we want the sleaze without sleaze from Murdoch's red-tops. There is a dire need to ask fundamental questions about the nature of the mass-media and the provision of news through corporate structures to the public. The dominant narrative is highly optimistic in that we have managed to ground a beast that was out of control and we can now get back to proper journalism, which will run without corruption and the hacking of phones. It's the classic feel good story. We can still have the tabloids on celebrity sleaze, but without what it takes to deliver the tales to the readers. We have to hold to a radical critique of the mainstream media otherwise we will fall into ideological pitfalls. The problem here is that what has happened at The News of the World was not an aberration, it is an excessive form of what goes on in the mass-media and an outgrowth of the practices prevalent in the press.

As in the case of WikiLeaks there is a potential for the liberal reduction of it to a radical case of investigative journalism, a return to the halcyon days when journalists spoke truth to power and will now restore legitimacy in the media before The News of the World lost it's way. This is often put forth to combat the charge of "terrorism" leveled by the fruit-cakes of the Republican Party. Žižek would point out that the claim that Julian Assange is a "terrorist" in the same sense that Gandhi was a "terrorist" because he tried to stop the normal functioning of the British empire. Assange is trying to stop the normal functioning of information circulation and the way it is monopolised by the corporate media. The characterisation of Assange as the radical journalist is one small step away from the liberal niceties of Hollywood where we find in films such as All the President's Men that the little guy can discover a scandal and force the President to step down. So corruption can reach the very top but because of the democratic features of our society we can find it, root it out and eliminate it.

Whenever we read The Sun we are reading a paper churned out from the presses of News Corporation, a multinational media conglomerate, it is part of a chain of newspapers and media outlets which feature a strong leaning to the Right. We should take into account that the majority of media outlets in the world are large corporations or part of conglomerates. This has the effect of a skewed presentation of facts with respect to particular interests. Especially as the media conglomerates often have exclusive financial interests which may be endangered when certain information is widely publicised. So news items which endanger the financial interests of the media will be subject to greater flak, opposition and even distortion.

The advertising revenue is greater than the sales revenue of newspapers, it is a way of holding down the price of a paper at a level which maintains a high rate of sales and therefore a greater readership than without any advertising. The dependence on advertising revenue differs from the role of sales revenue in that the average reader of The Sun has no way of influencing the content of the newspaper. Even if there is an attempt to build an organised boycott of the newspaper over a particular issue, at best it would lead to a retraction of previous statements and possibly an apology. The advertisers can boycott a particular writer or reporter in a much more effective way, the loss in revenue is much bigger and the message is even clearer than a mass demonstration. This is the reason it took the advertisers to abandon Glenn Beck, the Groucho Marx of the Right, before his show was taken off Fox News. It is important to keep in mind that the advertisements are from businesses in most cases and marketing in general is tied up in its' own industry which caters to business.

In this way the interests and pressures internal to business converge and the reader has no investment in News International and therefore has no real influence on the content of The Sun. The interests that coalesce in media are stacked against the interests of an ordinary person reading a newspaper each morning. This is especially the case if the price of the paper is driven down or even eliminated on the back of advertising revenue and cross-subsidised from other outlets in the same conglomerate. As the pressures of business and the interests mount against the interests of readers, then reporting can be compromised and skewed to a particular set of interests over another. There is a sense then that the end product is composed for the affluent readers who buy the newspaper, while the audience includes the businesses that pay to advertise their goods. News is just the 'filler' to get privileged readers to see the advertisements which are the actual 'content' of the paper. This is true of newspaper that cost money and even more so of free newspapers distributed for people to read on their way home.

As the mass-media is essentially business-run or dominated by the forces of the market there is a constant internal need for a continuous flow of information. A newspaper needs to fill its' pages to maintain a steady flow of advertising revenue and in turn keep sales up. The consumers demand information on numerous worldwide events, some of which unfold simultaneously, which supposedly creates the necessity for major businesses and government sectors to come in where they can provide the material resources needed. The relationship between the media and the government is a contorted one, where we find Andy Coulson jumps from News International to the side of David Cameron and we have also seen John Birt make the leap from the BBC to an advisory position to Tony Blair. According to Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman this includes the Pentagon in the US, with the media commentary on foreign policy being heavily influenced by the military intelligence complex.

These are the reasons that Chomsky once said "Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the US media." The government provides the means by which the journalists are able to gain advance copies of speeches and forthcoming government reports, which means that there is a degree of dependence involved in the relationship. The government can schedule its' press conferences at hours which are conducive to the deadlines set in media organisations, press releases can be made in usable language and photo opportunities can be arranged with ease. So naturally the commentariat responds in a favourable manner. At the same time, a reluctance to run certain articles that will harm the interests which are invested in providing them with the resources needed to compete with rivals and function at a high standard of news provider. You'll find this is the case with the BBC, as 24 hour news is a giant echo-chamber and the fall of Basra was reported 17 times before it did.

We now know that after the General Election David Cameron first met with Rupert Murdoch and then Paul Dacre, the editor of The Daily Mail, later that month he met with Lord Burns of Channel 4 and Deborah Turness of ITV News at his country retreat. After that month David Cameron met with News International officials such as Rebekah Brooks, as well as Dominic Mohan of The Sun for a "general discussion" and Cameron later attended the News International summer party where he gave an interview to James Harding of The Times. Take note of the preference for these newspapers in particular. David Cameron later met with the editor of The Evening Standard for another "general discussion" and attended The Times CEO summit where he gave a speech. The Prime Minister attended the summer parties of The Financial Times and The Spectator. In the first 2 months of his premiership Cameron met with 12 media contacts and half of them were officials of News International. Later that year, David Cameron had Christmas dinner with Rebekah Brooks and James Murdoch.

In 2010 David Cameron met with numerous members of the commentariat, but only a few were invited to his country retreats namely: Lord Burns of Channel 4, Deborah Turness of ITV News, Lord Rothermere of The Daily Mail, Rebekah Brooks and James Murdoch of News International. There is another aspect to this, the way in which the relations between the state and the media is sustained for economic reasons and out of a convergence of interests. As the state can be captured by the economic interests of the ultra-rich then so can the media which falls under the control of private ownership. We found this was the case when Barack Obama apologised to Wall Street for his comments regarding "greedy bankers" and he had to demonstrate his dedication to a free-market in order to keep the business press happy with the Obama administration.

Then there is the flak which could be understood as the simple negative responses to a media statement, an individual or even a specific programme. Though it can take the form of a concerted effort to discredit an organisation or an individual, e.g. when The Sun fabricated psychiatric reports in order to justifiably label Tony Benn as "mentally unstable". A charge that the Murdoch press has reused against leftists continually over the years. It can also be applied to entire media organisations. We can see this whenever The Daily Mail attacks the BBC as left-wing in the same way that was the case when Norman Tebbit labelled the BBC the "Stateless Person's Broadcasting Corporation" because of its' supposedly unpatriotic opposition to the Falklands war. Flak is often an intentional effort to manage public information. The Sun recently dealt some flak against Gordon Brown for statements he made in an interview on phone-hacking. This is a blatant move to influence the discourse over the entire phone-hacking scandal at News International.

As for the independence of public broadcasting it depends on the degree of independence and freedom within the society as a whole. It used to be in Britain and Israel there was only state-television. The BBC remains the agenda-setter of the British media and it functions to limit the scope of the public debate, usually carving out a place for the public as a passive observer in a meaningless discussion over what we should cut and never whether or not we should cut. The coverage of events is usually confined to the centre-right, but it occasionally fluctuates left-wards at which point the reactionary press goes ballistic. The demographics of journalists and reporters at the BBC is predominantly white and middle-class, typically these are Oxbridge liberals. The Board of Governors has always been full of lords, businessmen, former politicians and the archetypal toffs. The principle means of funding for the BBC is the television license, which the Right has railed against because it would prefer the BBC to be ripped apart by private companies.

There was a time when the BBC was a lot more independent than it is today. In the 1980s there were significant attempts by the Thatcherites to undermine the independence of the BBC. The Corporation was labelled the "Bolshevik Broadcasting Corporation" by Peter Bruinvels. The Conservative Party derided the BBC as "uncompetitive" and "over-manned" because of the perceived bias against Margaret Thatcher. In 1980 the Thatcherites appointed the aristocrat George Howard, a pal of Willie Whitelaw, because the idea of Mark Bonham-Carter taking the position was intolerable for the government of the day. After Howard followed Stuart Young in 1983, he was the brother of Thatcher's cabinet ally David Young. In 1986 Marmaduke Hussey, the brother-in-law of yet another cabinet member, emerged from a position working for Rupert Murdoch to the chair of the Board of Governors. Hussey soon made sure that Alasdair Milne was out, under Michael Checkland and John Birt the Corporation was restructured in greater accordance with the market.

When Greg Dyke told the truth about the Iraq dossier he was forced out of the BBC and replaced with Mark Thompson as Director General. Thompson is a man who believes so strongly in free choice (though not in the quality of those choices) that he is for the founding of a Fox News style channel in Britain. You should also keep in mind that Mark Thompson was the first Director General of the BBC to meet Ariel Sharon in 2005. This is the same Director General who refused to broadcast the Palestinian charity appeal in the aftermath of the Gaza massacre in which more than 1,417 Palestinian civilians, one-third of them children, were killed by Israeli bombs and bullets. The Israeli body count stood at 13, with over 500 injured. As of July 2011 124 Israeli children killed by Palestinians and 1,463 Palestinian children killed by Israelis since September 29, 2000, a fact that would make Mark Thompson sweat if it was ever muttered on the BBC. If it ever were said there would no doubt be an outpouring of rage from The Daily Mail and other toilet papers.

The state and the interests invested in the state often exploit widespread fears in order to pursue an agenda, which is where the media come in handy. In the 20th Century it was Communism that posed the primary threat to the West and it was portrayed in the media as endangering freedom and rights etc. This portrayal is often used as a means to shoot down those who are too critical of elite interests and it meshes well with those interests in particular. Most recently it has been resurrected to attack the President of the United States, along with a lot of other kinds of attacks on him. For a long time the grand narrative on which the politics of fear thrives was the Cold War and once the Berlin Wall fell there was a dire need for a new narrative to bring meaning to the world for journalists and politicians everywhere. It has been the narrative of the "War on Terror" for the last 10 years and we may be at a point when the narrative closes only to give way for another.

Hacked Off!

"The journalist's 'lack of convictions', the prostitution of his experiences and beliefs is comprehensible only as the apogee of capitalist reification." - Georg Lukács

The love affair between Rupert Murdoch and the Establishment may have finally come to an end, or at least it has been derailed by the people of this country and not it's owners. Rupert Murdoch walked away from his bid to takeover BSkyB just before it faced a vote in Parliament which would have no doubt opposed News International. Though it would have been interesting to see who exactly stands by Murdoch after all of this. It has been quite a journey, just last week Rupert Murdoch was standing by Rebekah Brooks and he has just nudged her off of the cliff. The difference is that The News of the World is now gone after 168 years, 43 of which have been spent in the claws of Murdoch - at least until it is relaunched as The Sun on Sunday. As I'd like to see burning mountains of The Times and The Sun in the streets of London I have to admit that this is a damn good day. It is even possible that the damage done to News International is enough for yet more closures, this could be the beginning of the end for Murdoch's "animal spirit".

It was clear that the Murdoch press has been out of control for quite some time. The public was disgusted when it turned out that the paper had hacked the phones of a murdered teenage girl, to the extent of actually deleting voice mails in order to receive even more voice mails. This functioned to give the illusion that the girl might be alive to her family. Then it turned out that these journalists also hacked the phones of war widows and the victims of 7/7. Now there is even word of hacking the phones of 9/11 victims. The criminal conspiracy went as far as bribing police officers and even enveloped the Conservative Party as Andy Coulson made the jump from tabloid fuck-monkey to public relations fuck-monkey. But this is not an entirely new dimension to the drama of Murdoch-Tory relations. Let's not forget what happened in Wapping back in 1986 when the collusion between the Conservative government and the Metropolitan police with Rupert Murdoch left the print unions smashed. It was also The Sun that led the media campaign against the Miners in '84 to '85.

In 1988 The News of the World was one of the tabloids that hounded the gay chat-show host Russell Harty and upped the ante as Harty lay dying in a hospital bed from hepatitis. Journalists from all of the tabloids even posed as junior doctors to get a hold of Harty's medical notes and photographers rented a flat just opposite Harty's hotel room. Alan Bennett later said, at Harty's funeral, that "The gutter press finished him." There was an immediate reaction from Murdoch's attack dogs, specifically in The Sun, "Stress did not kill Russell Harty. The truth is that he died from a sexually transmitted disease. the press didn't give it to him. He caught it from his own choice. And by paying young rent boys he broke the law. Some - like ageing bachelor Mr Bennett - can see no harm in that. He has no family. But what if it had been YOUR son Harty had bedded?" It was that same red-top that claimed in the aftermath of the Hillsborough disaster that fans robbed the dead and pissed on "brave cops". Murdoch made Kelvin MacKenzie apologise through his teeth for that one.

This is just the tip of the ice-berg. In the US the Mephistopheles found Roger Ailes to run Fox News as the propaganda wing of the Republican Party. It was Roger Ailes and Lee Atwater who designed the campaign ads for George HW Bush in 1988, the basic message of which was "Vote for George HW Bush or a Black man might rape your girlfriend." So we should not be surprised to find a disgusting band of reactionaries at Fox News, where Glenn Beck was taken off the air because of the huge losses in advertising revenue and a fall in ratings. Now Mr Ailes is bracing himself in case the FBI discovers News Corp has hacked the phones of 9/11 victims and then it will be game over for Fox News. Why the hell did it take the phone-hacking of a dead girl to make us angry about Rupert Murdoch? The man controls around 40% of British media and we only cared once he crossed a clear ethical line. The BBC and the Labour Party are as much at fault here as the Conservative Party. The party-line is still that the system is sound in spite of a few excessive elements, e.g. The News of the World.

Now we can read The Sun and it's reaction to the words of Gordon Brown, if we could tear our eyes away from the delicious news that Rupert Murdoch backed out of the takeover bid to avoid the humiliation of a landslide vote against him in Parliament. It's important to remember that if the scandal had never erupted you could guarantee that the Conservatives and the Labour Party would currently be singing "Hey big spender!" to Rupert Murdoch. No doubt David Cameron and Ed Miliband would have danced around in suspenders and basques for the old dog. Whenever we see Tony Benn today we forget about the media campaign against him led by the Murdoch red-tops to label him as a "loon", going as far as actually putting words in the mouth of a prominent American psychiatrist to try and make out that Benn was mentally unstable. The press went through Benn's rubbish and he was aware that his phone was being tapped, by who we do not know specifically. Murdoch played the exact same tune with Neil Kinnock, who was well to the Right of Tony Benn.

As Conrad Black has pointed out, Rupert Murdoch has no loyalty except to his company and he has betrayed every political leader who ever helped him. The only exceptions to the only is Ronald Reagan and possibly Tony Blair. As Murdoch seeks to rid the world of dignity and respectable institutions out of a so-called "anti-elitism" he kisses the arses of the Chinese Communists. All the while News International runs on a reactionary populist platform in Britain and on a commonsensical conservatism in America. The way he sees public entertainment and civic values is similar to the depiction of both in The Simpsons: all politicians are crooks while the masses are an ignorant lumpenproletariat. The irony being that this man climbed in bed with the police and the political class, whilst railing against them and supposedly 'supporting' the working-classes against the corrupt elite. The liberal commentariat has turned the narrative around and now we find it is those noble journalists who are speaking truth to power once more.

Whether or not the Labour Party has slashed off all remnants of the impact Murdoch has had on the Party is another matter. Ed Miliband has led the way on the motion to ask the Mephistopheles to reconsider the bid, a motion not so hardline as it would seem and just a week ago Miliband was calling for Rebekah Brooks to think about quitting. I bet that one had the Murdoch empire trembling in it's wake. Now that the 'evil ginger' has finally resigned we should keep in mind it was Murdoch who gave her the boot and not Miliband. The same goes for Les Hinton, who has worked with Murdoch for 52years and used to lead the British wing of News Corp before Rebekah Brooks succeeded him. These are "professional" not "personal" moves on the part of Rupert Murdoch to insulate himself and News Corp from the scandal. The basic complaint of the government is that the red-top went too far and that there is a need for discipline and responsibility to be instilled. A radical change in the mainstream media is unimaginable, we just want The News of the World without the phone-hacking of dead children and in that sense we want the sleaze of the tabloids without the sleaze.

We find ourselves embedded in ideology when Miliband calls this a great victory for "people up and down the country", a platitude if there ever was one, we should reject this liberal reduction of the situation to the glorious struggle of the little guy and the investigative journalist against a corrupt media corporation. The adversarial self-image which the BBC holds so dearly to whilst fawning to power and all opposition is conveniently absent from the discussion. There is no alternative to cuts and we can tell because the BBC refuses to air the alternatives! Except when the alternatives can be easily dismissed as 'lunacy'. We should have no illusions, the disgusting 'aberrations' of News International are being rooted out by the system as a form of corruption and no one in their right mind would defend the phone-hacking of dead people. This will not change the fact that the political system is broken, it has been reduced to a form of management in which the 'rabble' of special individuals consent to passivity in the midst of mindless chatter from the middle-class liberals at the BBC.

The Animal Spirit of Rupert Murdoch.

Risk and Reward.

Originally, Rupert Murdoch won the bid to takeover The News of the World in 1968 from old money Sir William Carr and soon cornered the shareholders before shoving Carr out of the picture completely in 1969. Sir William Carr had picked Murdoch over Bob Maxwell because Maxwell was a Czech and he found Rupert Murdoch to be a "gentleman", the Establishment found Murdoch most "ungentlemanly" for giving Carr the boot. Murdoch went on to buy The Sun and drag John Profumo through the mud once again for shagging Christine Keeler back in 1963 when Profumo was Secretary of State for War. The affair had scandalised high society and wrecked a government. The issue for the Establishment was that Profumo had been rehabilitated after his charitable work in the East End, Murdoch was simply out to destroy a man for profit. Now with the public disgusted Rupert Murdoch has slashed off the infected limb of his own media-body, there is no room for sentimentality with this old fart. There are bigger things at stake, as in BSkyB.

Everyone was just so appalled to find that the media empire of Rupert Murdoch is not just limited to a narrow right-wing agenda to prop up his favourite politicians and it has reflexively hacked the phones of not just the rich and powerful but dead soldiers too. We find that the Conservative Party and the police - both of whom have helped Murdoch crush a strike in the past - are entangled in the conspiracy ran out of the Murdoch red-top. It is clear that there is no low that the parasites in the press will not stoop to for a good yawn. Of course, it took the revelation of bugs in the phones of the victims of terrorism, warfare and serial killers as celebrities are fair game and politicians are the scum of the earth to most people. It should be no surprise if we consider that it was the Murdoch press that published vicious lies about the Hillsborough disaster, including the smears that fans robbed the dead, attacked police officers and urinated on paramedics. To some it would seem that Rebekah Brooks has proven that gingers have no soul! But it is Rupert Murdoch who has no soul whilst the lower minions would only be replaced if they were not complicit.

After the most recent revelations in the phone-hacking scandal I wonder if Kelvin MacKenzie is still thanking God for Rupert Murdoch. No doubt the answer from that meat-headed shit sack would be an emphatic "YES!" Murdoch would express no less from a Thatcherite pig he has fed well over the years in his role as editor of The Sun. MacKenzie maintained The Sun as a buffet for the working-class where they were spoon-fed a diet of sex, death and football meshed in a conservative agenda on immigration, gay rights, multiculturalism and welfare. Kelvin MacKenzie once said of his readers "You just don't understand the readers, do you, eh? He's the bloke you see in the pub, a right old fascist, wants to send the wogs back, buy his poxy council house, he's afraid of the unions, afraid of the Russians, hates the queers and the weirdos and drug dealers. He doesn't want to hear about that stuff (serious news)." Whatever pays the mortgage is alright at News International.

The public outrage struck as the Yuppie Mephistopheles was on the verge of the biggest deal of his life and it has been delayed until September, which gives the Mephistopheles some breathing room and some time to do a bit of "spring cleaning" to ensure a smooth deal before the year is out. There is little chance that the Coalition will oppose the demands of the man who threw the support of 40% of British media behind the Conservative Party in 2010 and, as usual, Murdoch's man won the election. This should not be a surprise as Murdoch backed Margaret Thatcher, John Major and Tony Blair. That is the reason we found David Cameron was ever so keen to put Jeremy Hunt on the job after the hilarious outburst from Vince Cable, who would apparently act as a "Gang of One" against Rupert Murdoch. Of course, Vince Fable was not meant to be biased against Murdoch so the government found someone who could ease the deal through in a quiet way. That's where Jez Cunt came in handy!

In his article in The Guardian Kelvin MacKenzie inquired "Cynical eyebrows were raised when Murdoch gave assurances over the independent future of Sky News. Why?" First of all, out of the 247 editors who work for Rupert Murdoch none opposed the Iraq war. It is clear that there is no problem of independence when all the editors are reactionary pigs. Even Rupert Murdoch has admitted that News International supported the foreign policy of the Bush administration on the Middle East in particular. It was Rupert Murdoch who immediately throw Fox behind the Republican Party in the 1980s and even more so in the 1990s, beginning with a fawning tribute to Ronald Reagan at the Republican Convention. There was a cultural shift in emphasis at Fox when Murdoch took over, race issues and AIDS were at the top of the list at the time. The channel became a lot more sophisticated after Roger Ailes, a long-time mudslinger for the GOP, was put in charge of the newly launched Fox News Channel. It was Rupert Murdoch who contributed $1 million to the Republican Party in 2010.

Remember this is the same man who has meant to have taken on the Establishment, it took "guts" and "management skill" to do so according to Kelvin MacKenzie who has nothing but celebratory words for the Murdoch monopoly. News International is a family business which Rupert built up from his inheritance and will no doubt be passed down to young James in a few years. This is not particularly different from the Old Boys' Network of the Establishment, which Murdoch has railed against only as a buccaneer capitalist with no time for tradition and society. It was not "risk" that the Murdoch press was built on, but cold calculations which oiled the wheels and restrained anyone who got in the way of a smooth running operation. Notice as soon as the advertising goes AWOL there is an immediate reaction from Murdoch, we find Glenn Beck has been axed as his rating dwindled and Waitrose boycotted his lunacy. It is the same at The News of the World, Murdoch was "standing by" Rebekah Brooks and the paper until the public disgust was too costly.

Just as Kelvin MacKenzie wishes that there were hundreds of Rupert Murdochs in Britain to "wipe out" unemployment, as if the cure of unemployment is entrepreneurial adventurism, we find that it is the staff at The News of the World who are paying the price for the contemptible practices of a media outlet. Though it must be noted that the individuals who write for the Murdoch press are there because they hold particular beliefs in most cases, otherwise they would be somewhere else and this goes for the BBC crowd too. At the same time, it is not the case that every employee (particularly the lowest of the low) of News International is a right-wing maniac who has enriched themselves at the expense of the political discourse. It is not a concession of the 'trickle-down' variety to be concerned for the jobs that have been destroyed by Murdoch to secure a grubby business deal. This is precisely what the "animal spirit of capitalism" is all about, Rupert Murdoch kills jobs not creates jobs.

As Laurie Penny points out it is imperative that the momentum of rage against News International is allowed to fade away only for the Mephistopheles to assimilate BSkyB. The Conservatives want this all to go away for obvious reasons given the close relationship between government and media, let alone Andy Coulson's role in Cameron's anti-climactic rise. The Labour Party are clearly impotent with Ed Miliband making a pathetic call for Rebekah Brooks to resign, it looks even more pathetic as the entire newspaper is thrown away just a few days later. This means that the media oligarch is at least responsive to public outrage against his odious rags. Perhaps it is time to build a bonfire out of copies of The Sun and The Times, for we cannot allow this man to buy 60% of BSkyB and dominate over 40% of the media in this country. The concentration of such power in the hands of one man is intolerable just from a slight glimpse at his record.

Sign this petition and attend any protests you can!

A Love Story: Rupert Murdoch and the Establishment.

 The Yuppie Mephistopheles.

Over the last five decades Rupert Murdoch has constructed an international media empire, it began with News Ltd which he inherited in 1953 from his father and he soon sought to expanded the family business horizontally. Politicians fear his wrath as a campaign of vilification backed by Rupert Murdoch is practically unstoppable. David Cameron had a private meeting with Murdoch before being elected Prime Minister, with the full support of Murdoch's media interests in Britain. Even Barack Obama met with Murdoch before taking office and has been the subject of a destructive smear campaign run out of Fox News - accusing Obama of being a socialist - and has openly come out in support of the Republicans for 2012. The current scandal over phone hacking at The News of the World (which began back in 2006) is interesting in this context. When Gordon Brown was Prime Minister and the scandal had just erupted, Murdoch had called for New Labour to back off and then sided against Brown in 2009.

As of last year Rupert Murdoch has contributed $1 million to the Republican Party and given the Tea Party enormous support through his media interests. Just like the way James Goldsmith funded the anti-Communist campaign against unions in Britain back in the 70s. The same framework of a fight of the common man against the liberal elite and the political class is applied by Fox News against the White House to further a right-wing agenda. In the last years of New Labour the right-wing press, led by Murdoch, attacked Brown on numerous incidents. Take "Bigotgate" in which Gordon Brown was caught on tape calling Gillian Duffy a "bigot" because of comments she made about immigration. The 40% of British media owned and influenced by Murdoch led the way in the attack on Brown as an out-of-touch elitist. In a similar manner The News of the World strived to uncover the lies and sordid secrets of the Establishment. The sex life of John Prescott is the business of the public according to The News of the World and any call for his right to privacy is just elitism.

Take the case of Russell Harty, who as he lay dying in a hospital bed from hepatitus found himself hounded by The News of the World. There was an intense undercurrent of homophobia to the media frenzy, which culminated in The Sun blaming Harty for his death just after the funeral in 1988. It was in reaction to the recent attack on the Murdoch empire by the liberal elite, it came in the form of Alan Bennett who pointed the finger at the press and said "The gutter press finished him." Even though reporters had been pursuing Harty in the hospital, posing as doctors demanding to see medical notes and photographers who rented a flat opposite Harty's hotel room, it was decided Bennett had made an outrageous statement. The Sun responded "Stress did not kill Russell Harty. The truth is that he died from a sexually transmitted disease. The press didn't give it to him. He caught it from his own choice. And by paying young rent boys he broke the law. Some - like ageing bachelor Mr Bennett - can see no harm in that. He has no family. But what if it had been YOUR son Harty had bedded?"

Every US President since Truman has met Rupert Murdoch and he has helped elect a few along the way through his media empire. It was Fox News which first declared George W Bush the President-elect and the rival news outlets soon fell in line. The Bush tax-cuts that were supposedly drawn-up to benefit the middle-classes and effectively handed over $1.6 trillion to around 1% of the American population. The surplus nurtured in the Clinton years of austere cut-backs was destroyed by this approach and a huge deficit was soon accumulated. The deficit is used to call for even more cuts to welfare, social security and health-care (notice defence is always excluded) in order for another set of tax-cuts. By 2003 out of the 247 editors, who work under Murdoch as part of his media empire, none came out to oppose the Iraq war and these are supposedly "independent" editors. Even Rupert Murdoch himself has admitted that the corporation actively supported the war until it became impossible to do so - given the level of opposition among the public.   

Buccaneer of the Press.

It wasn't until 1968 that Rupert Murdoch took over The News of the World and plucked it from the arms of an old establishment family. Sir William Carr chose Murdoch over Bob Maxwell, whom Carr hated because he was a Czech, as Murdoch had promised that even after the purchase Carr would continue to have a say in the running of the paper. This appealed to the attitudes of the Establishment at the time. Maxwell warned Sir William Carr that if Rupert Murdoch is allowed to takeover the paper "You will be out before your feet touch the ground" and he replied "Bob, Rupert is a gentleman." But as soon as Murdoch had cornered the shareholders in 1969 Carr was forced out. The Establishment decided that Rupert Murdoch was not a gentleman at all, he was a sleazy and destructive buccaneer capitalist. That same year Murdoch bought The Sun, it would be transformed from a replacement to The Daily Herald to the most widely sold newspaper in Britain.

Then Rupert Murdoch announced he was going to publish the memoirs of Christine Keeler in The News of the World. Keeler had an affair with John Profumo, the Secretary of State for War, in 1963 which scandalised high society and wrecked MacMillan's government. Profumo had since been rehabilitated after he worked for a charity in the East End. The British establishment had forgiven him and the way Murdoch had exumed the Profumo affair was a blatantly cynical decision motivated only by profit. The destruction of one of their own, who had made a "mistake" but had been reformed", was intolerable. The commentariat came to the rescue and the BBC made a more probing look at Rupert Murdoch with David Dimbleby as it's tool for doing so. It was after this rejection Murdoch moved to the US where he would continue his media expansion. From where he would contine to rail against old liberal elites, like the Kennedy family. To obscure a new array of elite interests Murdoch crafted a reflexive populism capable of slinging mud at any opponent.


At the time Rupert Murdoch had been mingling with the Mayfair Set, which included James Goldsmith, Jim Slater, Tiny Rowland, David Stirling (the man who founded the SAS), John Aspinall and Lord Lucan. The role the Set played in the shaping of the political trajectory of the late 20th Century has been well documented by Adam Curtis. Just as Murdoch was rejected by the Establishment so was the Mayfair Set. In the economic turmoil caused by the oil crisis, Slater Walker went bust in 1975 and Jim Slater was bankcrupted. Tiny Rowland was condemned by Ted Heath as the "unacceptable face of capitalism" and moved back to Africa. Lord Lucan disappeared without a trace after killing his nanny. James Goldsmith was left to pick up the pieces, but  followed Murdoch after a petty legal dispute with Private Eye. All of these men were disaffected right-wingers, who believed that the Labour Party and the media had been infiltrated by communists determined to undermine and destroy Great Britain.

Ironically these disaffected right-wingers who would undermine Britain as a nation and as a society in "liberating" the forces of the market and globalisation. Stirling had only succeeded in bringing a great deal of oil money to Britain through arms deals. Slater and Goldsmith smashed the family-ran public companies in order to make a short-term profit. The way Rupert Murdoch pursued his right-wing agenda reduced political discourse to a series of cynical exaggerations, moralising rants and politicised fear. The forces of liberal capitalism lead to a socio-economic, as well as a metaphysical, wasteland in which moral relativism (the very idea Murdoch rails against as "elitist") is nurtured. The market rationality is secular and relativistic, not to mention pragmatic, which has a subversive effect on the moral, religious and political order. This contradiction between the economic and the metaphysical is inherent to capitalism, it is inescapable. Murdoch offers a way of managing this tension, he has the power to reassert morality and nationhood that has been wrecked by the market.

At War with Elites.

The way Murdoch narrativised it, he rejected the Establishment out of a deep-seated understanding of the common man and would never "sell out" to become a "bloody press lord". To get revenge Rupert Murdoch returned to Britain in 1981 and bought The Times, to the outrage of the liberal elite and old 'One Nation' Tories. But the Thatcherites gave the take-over the go-ahead without reference to the Monopolies Commission, which was compulsory under the law. Thatcher made an exception for Murdoch on the grounds that neither The Times nor The Sunday Times made any money and he repaid her with dutiful support. In reaction the BBC, that oh so adversial pack of Oxbridge liberals, decided to shine a light on the business and personal life of Rupert Murdoch in a documentary entitled "Who's Afraid of Rupert Murdoch?" on Panorama. It was a much more hard-hitting look at the man behind the media and was followed by another interview conducted by David Dimbleby. As it turns out, the liberal commentariat hates Murdoch as much as the British establishment.


In 1986 Murdoch had moved all of his operations out of Fleet Street to Wapping. The print unions fell into the trap and went on strike, he sacked them and claimed that the unions were part of the decadent elites. The market system had to serve the people, all obstacles to market forces had to be swept away in the name of this cause. Actually the move increased the value of British papers by over 300%. The lay-offs in Britain were used to cross-subsidise the birth of Fox TV. In 1989 he helped write an editorial to celebrate the 20th anniversary of The Sun in which he wrote "The Establishment does not like the Sun. Never has. There is a growing band of people in positions of influence and privilege who want our newspaper to suti their private convenience." By 1991 Murdoch had solidified his position as a global media oligarch and he had the last laugh at Maxwell's expense, who fell off a yacht and drowned. This came after Maxwell had become one of the greatest criminals in the history of business.


As made evident in "Who's Afraid of Rupert Murdoch?" he has been consistently engaged in the take-over of intelligent newspapers only to transform them into cynical right-wing trash. These papers effectively become a propaganda wing for any political party which Murdoch latches onto out of ruthless self-interest. The opposition is immediately subjected to a destructive smear campaign, which abides no rules or moral code. In Britain this helped elect Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Tony Blair and David Cameron. He was also instrumental in the downfalls of Gordon Brown and John Major (among others). The cunning manner in which Murdoch handles politicians, to benefit his own interests, led to him receiving a massive loan from the US government just after he had endorsed Jimmy Carter. Out of a hatred of what he considered to be elitism Murdoch helped conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic undermine old institutions, which were dominated by old money elites, in order to stamp out the network of opposition to him.

Rupert Murdoch supported the Conservatives in 2010 out of the same ruthless self-interest which caused him to attack Labour in 1992 and secure a Tory victory. Kinnock announced that if Labour won the election there would new ownership stipulations introduced to the market. This could have led to the breakdown of News Corporation which would amount to Murdoch's castration. The Oxbridge liberals at the BBC, who have "fought" Murdoch so valiantly for over 40 years, have now offered themselves up on a platter like the pig who wants to be eaten. Perhaps awaiting the Second Coming of Glenn Beck in the form of Richard Littlejohn? All for the sake of free-choice the BBC seems to have caved in to a policy favouring Murdoch's interests. The BBC is the biggest rival in Britain to News Corp, so it must be undermined, weakened and broken down into edible chunks for a smooth digestion. So a freeze of the license fee would be a good start. The only thing Murdoch hates more is Ofcom and that has been highlighted as a quango ready to be cut.