Dancing to the tune of the far right

Prime Minister David Cameron has chosen the pages of the Sun newspaper to launch a crackdown on immigrants. In what the tabloid calls his “manifesto”, he claims that “Frankly this country became a soft touch”.

Whilst saying that immigration has benefited Britain, his words are a clear bid to win back those voters who have been migrating to the anti-immigration, anti-Europe UK Independence party.

The manifesto is Cameron’s attempt to outflank Ukip leader Nigel Farage, who recently met with the Sun’s owner, Rupert Murdoch for the first time. The PM’s attack on welfare for immigrants mimics proposals put forward by Ukip.

Cameron announced that immigrants would no longer receive benefits if they did not find a job after six months. They would only qualify to be on the waiting list (let alone be given) council homes when they have lived in the UK for up to five years. He said they would not be able to receive free treatment in the NHS.

The entire basis for his attack was that immigrants are an overall drain on the UK economy in general and on housing benefits and the health service.

But on BBC Radio 4 this morning, Jonathan Portes, director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR), put the record straight. He said that the Institute’s research for the Migration Advisory Committee of the UK Border Agency has shown that migrants “make a substantial net contribution to UK finance”.

This is because migrants are mostly young people who come to the UK to work and who pay taxes, he explained. They are far less of a burden on the welfare state than the average British citizen. The overwhelming part of UK benefits go to older people who need long-term health care.

While there obviously were some cases of abuse, “the figures tell us that the people from outside the UK are a miniscule cost to the NHS”.

The NIESR is not the only organisation challenging the increasingly shrill anti-immigration rhetoric. On Saturday, the Bishop of Dudley, David Walker, said the tone of the debate was “wholly disproportionate”. Walker, who has served on the board of the National Housing Federation pricked the “fear” bubble. 

“Public fears around immigration are like fears around crime,” he said.  “They bear little relationship to the actual reality. The true threats to our national wellbeing lie not with those who come to visit or make their lives here but with the increasing gap between the rich and poor among us."

It’s clear that Cameron is dancing to the tune of Ukip and the far right, is using the pages of the right wing press to whip up anti-immigrant sentiment based on a fictional scenario.

His stance, however, still fails to match up to that of Labour. Not long ago, Blairite Dan Hodges noted that Labour leader Ed Miliband “laid out some of the hardest policy lines ever drawn on the issue by a Labour leader”. And Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper's agenda involved “arrest, incarceration and deportation. Not One Nation, but a one-way ticket out of Britain”. She called for greater powers to be given to the UK Borders Agency.

But that very same agency is guilty of repeatedly breaking the law in its attempts to deport those legally seeking leave to remain in the UK.

UKBA’s monstrous behaviour has led to the deaths of a number of asylum seekers whilst in custody (some whilst in the “care” of global security giant G4S), the separation of children from parents, wives from husbands and many other human rights infringements.

The continuing shift to ever more anti-immigration policies is a bankrupt racist attempt by all the main political parties to make immigrants into scapegoats as the economic crisis deepens. Former immigration lawyer Francis Webber’s call for “a braver alternative vision” in her new book Borderline Justice is spot on. It can help to inspire the development of a new constitution for the 21^st century.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win Secretary

Murdoch and the Met uncut

The Leveson media ethics inquiry, now in its fourth month, is unravelling an increasingly sinister web of corruption between the Murdoch media and the Met. It stretches from criminal elements in south east London right up to hacking the phones of politicians and the Royal Family.

Successive governments and the Metropolitan police not only failed to properly investigate phone hacking and corrupt relationships between the News of the World and Met police officers. They also failed to investigate connections to a brutal murder in London in 1987.

Daniel Morgan was joint owner with Jonathan Rees of detective agency Southern Investigations. Amongst its activities, it was a go-between for Murdoch journalists and London coppers.

Morgan was axed to death in a pub car park in Sydenham, south-east London. His family believes he was planning to expose corruption and possibly other crimes. He and Rees were together in a pub just before the murder, and notes Morgan was seen writing were missing from his torn trouser pocket.

Detective Sergeant Sid Fillery, stationed at Catford police station, was assigned to the case. It transpired he was one of the coppers on Southern Investigations' payroll. Eventually Fillery, Rees and four others were arrested on suspicion of Morgan's murder but none were ever charged. More investigations turned up more evidence, but the Crown Prosecution Service declined to prosecute.

A total of five Met police investigations failed to nail Morgan's killer, the most recent led by Detective Superintendent David Cook. Cook has said the murder was "one of the worst-kept secrets in south-east London" and that "a whole cabal of people" knew the identities of those involved

Cook's enquiry was established with unprecedented secrecy; everyone working on it made to swear they were not freemasons. But a matter of weeks after it opened, the News of the World paid for close surveillance of DCS Cook and his wife Jacqui Hames. She told Leveson she believes "suspects in the Daniel Morgan murder inquiry were using their association with a powerful and well-resourced newspaper to intimidate us and try to attempt to subvert the investigation". The Morgan case proves corruption is not some new phenomenon.

DAC Sue Akers, now leading the Met's phone hacking enquiry, told Leveson of "multiple payments amounting to thousands of pounds" to police and other public servants. One public official received in excess of £80,000 and one journalist spent over £150,000 in cash on sources in a couple of years. But, she added, the disclosures led mostly to "salacious gossip" nothing in the public interest.

She said the Met knew in 2006 that not only members of the royal family, politicians, actors, and sportspersons were under surveillance, but apparently also "state securities" - whatever that means! If this is true, then successive Home Secretaries would have known as well.

The reality is that police officers and politicians were terrified of the Murdoch press – and often greedy for its hand-outs. And it was not because they were scared of their sex lives being exposed. Sex scandals are the half-chewed 'bones' thrown to the press pack in return for not exposing real crimes.

Imagine if Murdoch journalists had used all this bribe money and all these contacts to expose the inner workings of the British State? They could have written about the lies behind the decision to invade Iraq, the background to the 'dirty dossier', the pressure put on MPs to vote for war, the death of weapons expert David Kelly. But of course, Murdoch supported Blair and the war on Iraq, so that was never going to happen.

This unravelling is exposing waves of corruption involving key elements that make up the British state - the Met Police, the tabloid press and politicians. It's not just that they all have their hands in the till - it is also that they are terrified that we, the people, might learn the truth about the worm at the very heart of our so-called democracy.

Penny Cole
A World to Win editorial collective

When the sky was the limit for Murdoch

While the attention of most people was focused on the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003, legislation was making its way through Parliament that would open up media ownership and create the conditions for Rupert Murdoch’s empire to flourish in Britain.

The Communications Act 2003 received Royal Assent on 17 July 2003 and represented New Labour thinking about globalisation, markets and ownership. It allowed cross-media ownership – newspapers owning TV stations – and opened up the market to non-British companies.

“Ownership rules must reflect the reality of a global marketplace,” the then culture secretary Tessa Jowell told MPs.

Many of the media specific rules in force that prohibited particular accumulations of broadcast licences, or combinations of press and broadcasting interests were abolished. Media concentration was primarily to be dealt with on a case by case basis.

The secretary of state was given power to block any deals that might threaten “plurality” in any sector, although this measure was forced on the government by a revolt in the Lords led by Labour peer Lord Puttnam. The real clout went to a non-government body, the regulator Ofcom which itself was there to champion competition and the market as its first priority.

In his acute analysis about the political elite and its relationship to the media, and Murdoch in particular, John Harris notes how Margaret Thatcher cleared the way for his move into British television. But he adds that “as with so many things, the rot decisively started under New Labour”, saying:

“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).”

He relates how two Labour MPs as far back as 1996 had mysteriously disappeared during a crucial vote on a clause in a Tory bill that gave Murdoch monopoly over the equipment required to watch BskyB. 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%.”

Harris suggest that the price of cosying up to Murdoch was an electoral quid quo pro. He cites Blair’s press secretary Alastair Campbell who in his diaries refers to a meeting with senior News International figures: "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.”

After Blair resigned in 2007, Murdoch’s papers began their shift away from New Labour and plumped for the Tories in 2009. David Cameron was feted and courted by Murdoch and took on Andy Coulson, first at the Tory Party and then in Downing Street. The rest, as they say, is history.

The British political regime is imploding and not just because some phones were hacked by unscrupulous journalists and investigations. It’s a case of one scandal too many because it follows the banking collapse, involving financiers close to and admired by New Labour, the MPs expenses scandal that undermined any residual trust in Parliament and attempts to offload the economic crisis on to the backs of ordinary people.

Harris is worried that the crisis might “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”. He is right to be concerned. This is a profound moment for a political system that few have any faith in to sort out pressing problems. A plan for a truly democratic alternative to a corrupt, market state in thrall to corporate power is more urgent than ever.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

How New Labour sat on its hands over Murdoch

Although former prime minister Gordon Brown is rightly upset about the underhand not to say criminal methods used by the Murdoch press to obtain sensitive medical details about his son, the fact remains that New Labour did nothing to upset the applecart while they were in power.

The use of “blagging” by journalists or people working for them as a means of securing information is not exactly a new practice. Pretending to be someone else – in this case Brown himself – to obtain confidential information was actually identified as illegal in the Data Protection Act in 1998.

But the punishment was considered too weak. So the last Labour government led by Brown himself made changes to the law. However, Christopher Graham, the information commissioner who is responsible for checking compliance with the law, said today:

“We really need to get a serious penalty in place to stop this happening ... Frankly, we need to say to people 'You will go to prison if you do this'. The serious penalty that is needed has been on the statute book since 2008 - Section 77 of the 2008 Criminal Justice Act provides for a custodial sentence of up to two years in the Crown Court, but it has been suspended for three years because of a stand-off between the Press and the politicians.”

Inaction was the byword, even though phone hacking was known to be taking place in the early years of the Blair government. In his autobiography, Blair’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, confirms that the cabinet discussed the “failed relationship” between the media and politics as far back as 2002.

He adds: “We discussed the issue back and forth for the next three years, but Tony never felt the moment was right to speak out…Gordon, who was courting the press, had no intention of agreeing to anything that might upset them.”

When the original Metropolitan Police inquiry into phone hacking unexpectedly petered out, many were suspicious why this had happened. Did the government pursue this? To ask the question is to answer it.

Today, Alan Johnson, the former Labour home secretary, told Sky News that the government did not set up an inquiry into phone hacking because ministers would have been accused of exploiting the issue for party political gain! He said:

“If I'd have ordered a public inquiry at the time, I'd have probably been castigated because in the run-up to a general election people would have said it was an attempt to get at Andy Coulson who'd been appointed by Cameron. So you can't take today's knowledge and just apply it retrospectively, you have to look at the information that was available at the time.”

Despite the despicable invasion of his privacy by The Sun in 2006, Brown himself continued to lend his name to Murdoch’s publications. In March 2008, explaining the government’s action during the financial meltdown, he told Sun readers: “My pledge to the British people - to homeowners, to businesses, to households everywhere - is that I will do nothing that puts the stability of the economy at risk.”

A year later, News International’s papers withdrew their support for New Labour after more than a decade and switched their support to David Cameron. It wasn’t long before Cameron too was drawn into the Murdoch web, bringing former News of the World editor Coulson into Downing Street.

After just 14 months in office, the Coalition is staggering from pillar to post, buffeted not just by the scandal but by innumerable economic problems and a widespread hostility to everything it stands for. With the lid now blown off the incestuous relationships between police, Murdoch, New Labour and the Tories, a full-blown political, not to say constitutional crisis, is gathering steam.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

The emperors have lost their clothes

Nick Clegg’s statement that "the pillars of the British establishment are tumbling one after the other," should be taken seriously. The question is why now? What is driving the break-up of the institutions that rule Britain? And what follows?

The deputy prime minister has no intention of seriously upsetting the apple cart of British politics, but he has put his finger on an important insight. But the News of the World scandal is part of a wider, systemic crisis.

For prime minister Cameron, his connections with disgraced former News of the World editor Andy Coulson and through him to Rupert Murdoch, have rocked his already unstable government. Peter Oborne’s account of Cameron was drawn into Murdoch’s embrace – after some initial reluctance – is worth reading because it shows how fragile the political establishment is.

Whilst there are separate and independent reasons for flashpoints in the “parts” – the media, financial system, the police and parliament – together they constitute a “whole” which is also known as the capitalist system in Britain (and its relationships globally).

The unravelling of the unsavoury networks which constitute the power structures sheds a powerful light on this interconnectedness. And, crucially, the ruling class’s ability to rule relies on these connections remaining as secret as possible.

Trust - not only in the news media but in politicians and the venal connivance of the police (who had their own fingers deep in Murdoch’s pie) - is sinking at an unprecedented rate.

Murdoch’s chief executive Rebeka Brooks, who now faces questioning by the police, was not only a neighbour and family friend of the Camerons, but she is a crucial link in the spider’s web that embraces the Royal Family, the Blairs, and major corporations like the De Beers diamond dynasty and, of course, the media empire that is News Corp.

In the first years of the last decade, while the credit boom was in full swing, the phone hacking was put on the back burner by the police and the New Labour government. It must have seemed secondary to the mountains of “wealth” generated by the financial sector.

The crash of 2008 not only devastated the economy but it also shattered ordinary people’s faith in the market economy. This in turn led to a loss of confidence in ruling circles. The system was shaken and the skeletons fell out of the cupboard at the News of the World in the wake of the MPs’ expenses scandal, bankers’ bail-outs and bonuses and the resulting stalemate election of 2010.

And while many in ruling political and media circles are working feverishly to restore a modicum of confidence in the British state, the global economy and its financial system is heading for another meltdown.

Still reeling from the near default of Greece, the Eurozone is now staring into a new abyss: the spreading of “fiscal contagion” to Italy, the world’s seventh biggest economy. As one economics writer says: “It’s just too big to bail out. While the Eurozone could perhaps survive a Greek default, an Italian debt failure would mean all bets are off”. In the United States, a $4 trillion cuts package is seen as the only way to avoid a dollar default.

Separating out the political crisis in Britain from the continuing and worsening global debt crisis would be to ignore the reinforcing interactions which characterise the deep crisis of an entire system. That’s why stuffing the ugly genie that the News of the World scandal has revealed back into the bottle could be impossible.

The least we can do is to understand how fragile – ideologically speaking – the arrogant façade that the ruling classes deploy to intimidate those below them actually is. Each side of the crisis – political, economic, ecological – are parts of a rapidly changing whole reacting upon each other to create something quite new.

The rapidly-developing political crisis at the top cannot be patched up, not least because the economy is staggering from bad to worse. Down in society itself, a massive social upheaval, driven by a lack of confidence in the ruling classes, is brewing for which there is no obvious outlet. A heady mix indeed.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

Uncovering the “dark arts”

It has taken an American newspaper, The New York Times, to ferret out the corrupt relationship between Scotland Yard and the Murdoch-owned media empire.

You could be forgiven for not considering ex-deputy Prime Minister Lord John Prescott an object of sympathy when he grumbles about the News of the World’s hacking his phone back in 2006.

Or for seeing New York Times’ sordid story (now taken up by the British media) as just opposition New Labour politicians trying to pull one over on Cameron, who appointed ex-News of the World editor Coulson as his head of communications in May.

But the truth is that Murdoch’s journalists’ snooping is only the tip of a gigantic spider’s web. The New York Times’ detailed 6,100-word investigation provides an inside view of the connivance between the police and the News International media empire which should be required reading for all state-watchers.

Just like last-year’s MPs expenses scandal, this glimpse is thanks to the determined efforts of non-British news hounds. They have revealed “industrial scale” eavesdropping which according to MP Tom Watson says, goes “to the heart of the British establishment”.

Watson is a member of the Parliamentary committee appointed to investigate the phone hacking scandal. The committee, headed by Tory MP John Whittingdale, released its findings last February.

Whittingdale said he felt misled when News International executives testified that two of its employees, royals reporter Clive Goodman and phone-hacker Glenn Mulcaire, had acted alone when they listened in to Prince Harry’s voicemails.

Goodman and Mulcaire were arrested in August 2006 and convicted to several months in prison. They soon got compensation for their spell inside, however. News International paid Mulcaire £80,000 for wrongful dismissal and Goodman received an undisclosed amount.

The NYT’s investigation shows beyond a shadow of doubt that Scotland Yard’s inquiry “focussed almost exclusively on the royals case, which culminated with the imprisonment of Mulcaire and Goodman”. Several investigators said that “Scotland Yard was reluctant to conduct a wider inquiry in part because of its close relationship with the News of the World”.

Coulson, who became NoW editor in 2005, maintained that he had been unaware of illegal activities, “Nor do I have any recollection of incidences where phone hacking too place”, he claimed at new parliamentary hearings in July 2009.

The new hearings took place after Guardian journalists discovered that News of the World paid £1m to settle a lawsuit pursued by Football Association’s executive Gordon Taylor and two of his associates whose phones had been tapped. At this point, the Commons committee criticised Scotland Yard’s investigation and accused NoW executives of “deliberate obfuscation”.

In a further (and lucrative) twist, PR executive Max Clifford took on the News of the World in March this year, he extracted another cool £1m from Murdoch’s company in exchange for feeding the paper exclusive stories for several years. Clifford dropped his lawsuit against the paper after a lunch with its then editor, Rebakah Brooks.

The New York Times reporters say that “Scotland Yard only notified a small fraction of the hundreds of people whose messages may have been illegally accessed – effectively shielding the News of the World from a barrage of civil lawsuits”.

The anti-Murdoch media is performing a good service in exposing the shenanigans of the gutter press and the web of connections that work to strengthen the status quo. But the whole degrading spectacle is much more serious than it may appear. We have been told about the snooping on the “great and the good”, the Royals and the Lord Prescotts of this world.

But, by implication, equally illicit methods are used to obtain information – the dark arts – on anyone who seeks to change the status quo. We have been warned.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary