the closure of the News of the World newspaper has brought to the
surface the real state of things within the British establishment. The
rottenness of a regime, that prides itself at being a model of
“democracy,” is out in the open for all to see. What has now been
revealed is that a powerful media empire that for years has played a key
role in British politics, making and unmaking political leaders, has
been buying police officers, using influence with politicians, and all
this peppered with out and out criminal activity.
Murdoch owned The Sun’s take on the closure of the News of the World. Photo: Kat KamThis
is not just any ordinary scandal that after a brief airing can be swept
under the carpet and hidden again from public view. It is part of a
more general crisis of the whole establishment. Millions of ordinary
working people in Britain are angry and disgusted at what has been
revealed in the recent period. But, more importantly, the scandal risks
destroying the authority of important pillars of the state, key
instruments that are used by the ruling class to justify its position in
society.
The media is an important weapon in the armoury of the
establishment, for it is a means of getting across the views and
opinions of the ruling class to the millions of ordinary workers. This
is clear during any important strike. How many times have we seen the
media playing down the real numbers at demonstrations and rallies of the
labour movement? The March 26th trade union demonstration is a clear
example.
However, it is not just the numbers taking part that is
lied about. Striking workers are always presented as greedy and
unreasonable. Especially the gutter press, such as the News of the World
(NoW), have made it their trade to spread stories about so-called
social security scroungers and how the problem is all due to excessive
spending on the part of the state on welfare benefits. All this can have
some effect so long as the media is seen to be a source of objective
“truth.” This scandal has seriously brought that idea into question.
However,
it is not only the media that is now tainted. The police are also being
brought into question, as it has been revealed that several police
officers were being paid by people at the NoW for inside information and
it seems, in some cases, even personal mobile phone numbers were
provided by the police that were then subsequently hacked.
Politicians
have also been discredited – as if the MPs’ expenses scandal were not
enough in itself! Both the present Tory-led government and the previous
Labour administration have been closely linked to the Murdoch empire. In
the case of Cameron, we have the revelations of Rebekah Brooks (chief
executive of Murdoch’s News International) being invited to his
Christmas dinner and Coulson (former editor of the NoW and former
director of communications of the Conservative Party) being classed as
one of his mates. Thus the British Prime Minister is in the
unfortunate position of seeing one of his “friends” spending some time
inside one of Her Majesty’s prisons. No doubt, many people will be
thinking that there are a lot of politicians that should be in Coulson’s
company!
Serious
How serious the situation is from the point of view of the ruling class can be seen from the recent edition of The Economist (July 7th, 2011). One of the Leader articles is entitled, Britain’s phone-hacking scandal – Street of shame. The language and tone of this article is not that of the average editorial comment of The Economist.
It is the language of an extremely concerned capitalist commentator,
issuing a warning to the whole establishment. In their view serious
action must be taken and must be seen to be taken, in order to restore the authority of important institutions.
The
very opening sentence gives an idea of how the editor means to go on:
“Not for nothing is it known as the gutter press.” The article explains
that “journalism is reeking” but then adds very quickly, “So are
Britain’s politicians and especially its police.”
The fact that
the NoW had hacked the phones of some individuals had been known for
some time, but until recently it seemed that this had been limited to
celebrities, actors and so on. So long as the hacking only affected
these types, in the minds of ordinary people there was no big deal, but
once it became apparent that murder victims, families of soldiers who
had died in Iraq and Afghanistan, victims of terrorist attacks and so on
had also had their phones hacked, then the approach of ordinary workers
was very different.
The Economist puts it so: “Until this
week the victims seemed to be celebrities, publicists, politicians and
other journalists—the sort of people who, in the British mind, probably
deserve what they get. But… the families of terrorism victims, dead
soldiers and two other murdered girls are also said to have been
targeted. If true, that is callousness heaped on criminality.”
Methods
However, The Economist
does not limit itself to attacking the NoW newsroom. It goes on to
explain: “It is notable that Britain’s other tabloid newspapers, which
love to kick a rival when it is down, have been disturbingly quiet about
the allegations of phone hacking at the News of the World. It may turn
out that the paper was merely the most enthusiastic, ruthless lawbreaker
among several.”
What is being admitted here is that the methods
used by the NoW are common to many British newspapers. If we take five
of the main UK daily tabloids, The Sun, Daily Mirror, Daily Star, Daily Mail and Daily Express,
we have a powerful instrument of propaganda in the hands of the bosses.
The combined readership of these papers according to some calculations
is over eight million. What we are being told by The Economist is that this huge slice of the British public is being fed news from outfits not much better than the News of the World!
Such
revelations come at a bad time for this government and the class it
represents. Students have been asked to accept massive tuition fees
hikes; school students have had their EMA (student allowences) taken away from them; and
workers are being asked to work longer, retire later and on lower
pensions, while many are facing redundancy in the coming period.
Getting
the workers to accept all this without a fight will take some
convincing! Those eight million who read the tabloids are being told
that there is no other way. Now the credibility of these journals has
been seriously dented.
That explains the severity of the tone of The Economist.
Its editors understand that unless serious measures are taken, unless
the culprits are seen to be severely dealt with, then the credibility of
the media cannot be rebuilt.
The police forces are also tainted.
As the same Editorial states, “Then there are the police. The initial
investigation by the Metropolitan Police into phone hacking was pitiful.
For years the cops sat on a huge sheaf of seized documents and did
nothing. Sloppiness is one thing. But the police tend to be
hand-in-glove with popular newspapers. An implicit deal applies: we give
you stories, you raise the alarm about criminals on the loose. And,
occasionally, put your hand in your pocket too. Files handed over last
month suggest that police received some payments from the News of the
World.”
It is clear now that police officers in important
positions tried to play down the scope of the phone-hacking. Assistant
Commissioner John Yates, a senior Scotland Yard detective, back in 2009
decided not to re-open police inquiries into phone hacking and yet there
were already allegations being made that thousands of people may have
been the victims of such practice.
Now the same detective
“massively” regrets his previous decision. It seems that Assistant
Commissioner Andy Hayman, who led the original inquiry into
phone-hacking, may have been unwilling to proceed further because the
NoW had some information on his private life that he preferred not be
made public. It has also been revealed that Hayman was entertained by
the NoW at the height of the scandal, having had two dinners and three
lunches all paid by the newspaper between 2005 and 2007.
The two
detectives referred to here, at best, can be accused of not pursuing an
investigation vigorously enough. But the latest revelations show that
some officers – we don’t know their names yet – were actually taking
bribes from people at the NoW. So while the police is used to kettle
protesting students, to beat down workers on picket lines, to harass the
poorest sections of society, they are at the same time involved in
corrupt practices. Again, an important institution of the state is being
undermined.
The call is now being made for “a full judicial inquiry.” Again, The Economist
is very blunt on this matter: “If the result of such an inquiry is a
bloodbath in Fleet Street and Scotland Yard, so be it.” This means some
important sacrificial lambs must be presented to the public, the idea
being that the “rotten apples” will have been sifted out and the
institution itself will remain fundamentally healthy. No doubt their
motto is “If you want things to stay as they are, things will have to
change.”
It seems, however, that the Prime Minister of this country has not been reading the same books as the editor of The Economist,
for he has been far less enthusiastic in rooting out the wrong-doers.
Could this be because some of them he considers close friends, such as
Coulson? Here Cameron has put his “friendship” above the interests of
the class he represents, and thus receives the full wrath of The Economist: “Mr Cameron’s refusal to push ahead with this [inquiry] forcefully is incredibly cowardly and shortsighted.”
No
doubt, Cameron – once he has had a full briefing from his capitalist
masters – will be making speeches distancing himself from all this, but
the damage has already been done. In the past few months we have seen
the Liberal-Democrats being seriously damaged by their participation in
this coalition government, while the Tories have picked up some of their
votes. This present scandal is now affecting the Tory party itself, as
they are seen to be very close to some of the people involved.
Democracy
What this whole scandal has done is to undermine the whole regime. The London Evening Standard
editorial comment on July 7th put it very clearly: “…what is most
troubling is the way that the scandal is infecting public faith in the
police, the press and politicians, all of whose basic honesty is central
to democracy.”
What they mean by democracy here is not what
ordinary people conceive it to be. For the bosses “democracy” is a
system where ordinary basic democratic rights exist, such as the right
to vote, to free speech, etc., but where the real power is in the hands
of the big corporations, such as Murdoch’s media empire.
Important
decisions such as who the capitalist class want to govern the country,
what policies they should carry out, and what interests they should
defend are not really in the hands of ordinary working people. We have
no powers within this parliamentary system to decide when we should all
retire, how many hours a week we should work, how much of our money
should be spent on healthcare and education, whether or not to go to
war, such as in the case of Iraq, etc., etc.
The problem is that
the bosses as a class are a very small group of people, numerically
speaking. The vast majority of the population works for a living, gets a
wage from a boss, whether in a factory, on a building site, in a
classroom or at a desk working on a computer. The interests of this huge
majority are diametrically opposed to those of this clique. That is why
the credibility of the media, the police and parliament itself is so
important, so “central to democracy.” This credibility is required to
maintain a grip on the consciousness of millions of working people.
This
government has embarked on a savage attack on everything that makes for
a minimally civilised existence for working people. But this already
provoked a massive student protest in November last year, followed by
the biggest trade union demonstration in the history of Britain on March
26th and June 30th saw huge strike action by teachers, lecturers and
civil servants.
That was merely a taste of even bigger things to
come. In such a situation the establishment needs all its armoury in
place, the media to convince the masses that austerity is necessary, the
police to attack the workers when the media fails to stop them
protesting and the government and parliament with their authority intact
in order to continue pushing forward the austerity measures.
Contradictions
What
this scandal has done has been to weaken all these institutions. This
comes on top of the MPs’ expenses scandal, which seriously undermined
the whole political set up. The banking crisis also revealed the massive
contradictions that have built up. The very bankers who are seen by the
millions as responsible for the crisis have been getting huge bonuses,
while workers are called on to foot the bill. All this is piling up and
will inevitably lead to an explosion of anger on a level that we have
never seen before in this country.
It is therefore not by chance
that we see one scandal after another involving the main institutions of
the state. Methods such as those used by the NoW are not new. They have
been used for years, as is now being amply revealed. But so long as the
system could guarantee what was defined as the “feel good” factor,
ordinary people left the politicians to get on with it. They even
tolerated some of the stench coming from the cesspit. Now, however,
millions of people are being hit very hard and everything is starting to
come out in the open.
Were the Labour leaders up to the task, the
situation Britain is in could be the starting point of a mass movement
against this government and the millionaire class that stands behind it.
Unfortunately the Labour leaders have also fawned on the Murdochs of
this world, transfixed by the power of this corporation. There could not
be a sharper contrast between the conditions faced by millions of
workers and the total lack of fighting spirit on the part of the Labour
leaders.
The task ahead of us is therefore to bring the Labour
organisations into line with the needs of the working class. This must
start in the trade unions and spread to the Labour Party itself. In the
coming struggles a leadership of the labour movement that is up to the
task of actually leading the workers must be forged. Once this is
achieved, we can guarantee that what at the moment is a concern of what
the present crisis can lead to actually becomes reality and the militant
mood brewing among the workers combines with a fighting leadership.