Phone hacking saga to run and run

The charging of former News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks with conspiracy to pervert the course of justice in connection with phone hacking at the News of the World can only add to the growing sense of political crisis in Britain.

Prime minister Cameron, a close friend of Brooks and her husband Charlie, must have hoped that the hacking saga would be brought to a close by the Leveson inquiry, which is due to report later this year.

But with serious charges levelled against Brooks, her husband and four other former News International employees over the alleged concealment of evidence, a lengthy trial will figure in the second half of this government’s scheduled life.

Cameron, who used to sign text messages to Brooks “LOL” (intended, apparently, to mean lots of love rather than “laugh out loud”), is due to give evidence before Leveson in the next few weeks.

So is culture secretary Jeremy Hunt, who is fighting for his political life following accusations that his office guided News International as Rupert Murdoch’s corporation sought to buy up remaining shares in the  broadcaster BSkyB.

Their evidence is bound to throw up even more questions about the close relationship between Murdoch’s empire and successive government. Brooks, for example, also regarded the former New Labour prime minister Blair as a friend.

Yesterday, Alastair Campbell, who was Blair’s press secretary, had to explain why Labour changed its policy on media ownership before the 1997 election. He naturally denied it was anything to do with Murdoch’s influence (although the magnate had switched support to Labour from the Tories).

But the 2003 Communications Act was welcomed by Murdoch. It  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.

What is clear in all this is that governments have gone down on bended knees to powerful corporate interests – especially newspaper owners and bankers – and basically saw nothing wrong with doing so. We can only guess why police investigations into phone hacking got nowhere under New Labour.

Labour knighted seven bankers and even had people like RBS chief Fred Goodwin leading government task forces on credit unions (!). Regulation was so “light-touch” as to be non-existent. When the crisis broke in 2008, everyone seemed mightily surprised. Ordinary people, of course, are paying the price for all this, which is the way it is under a corporatocracy.

The ConDem coalition was cobbled together not so much in the “national interest”, as Cameron and Clegg insist, but in the interests of the financial markets and big business. Its growing instability is the result of a resistance to its policies and a general hatred of its public school persona.

The phone hacking scandal has claimed scalps at the highest level of the Metropolitan Police, led to the closure of a newspaper and many arrests. With the Tory right on the rampage and looking for a new leader, who knows where it will all end?

Paul Feldman

Communications editor                           

Politics a commodity for sale

Politics, like most things in our globalised capitalist society, has become a commodity for sale at market prices. The cash-for-access scandal is only the latest case in point.

Bragging by now ex-Tory party treasurer Peter Cruddas that a £250,000 donation would get you a place at David Cameron’s dinner table and a direct line into policy making at No.10 is par for the course.

But the question is, why would anyone want to waste their money when business access to government is guaranteed, whoever is in office?

We’re not talking a lunch or a dinner with a member of the cabinet but an overall stranglehold on what goes in government.

Every government for the last 30 years or so has been “business friendly”, to put it mildly.

Whether it’s shackling the trade unions, driving down wages, privatising or “outsourcing” public services, bailing out bankers, introducing markets in education and health, New Labour, Tories and Lib Dems have been at it.

The corruption of the political system, to the point where it serves the interests of corporations, property companies, financiers and the rich is the real scandal, the real obscenity.

With all the major parties increasingly cut off from their base, they feel they ought to benefit themselves.

Cash-for-access follows cash-for-honours, cash-for-questions, cash-for-amendments, MPs expenses-for-duckponds and other unsavoury episodes that reveal that the parliamentary process is more like a financial clearing house more anything else.

They are all in it together. Labour recently received a £100,000 donation from businessman Assem Allam, who wants the party’s backing for a multi-million-pound property development. Ed Miliband was recently guest of honour at Hull City Football Club, owned by Allam.

With Cameron seen by many traditional Tories as too wet and too friendly with the Lib Dems, the cash-for-access PR disaster could even unravel the government. Former friends like Rupert Murdoch have weighed in, calling – no doubt with tongue in cheek – for an independent inquiry. Murdoch’s Sunday Times broke the story and now the newspaper mogul is backing the Scottish National Party. The Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail, both right-wing papers who detest the Coalition, have joined the assault on the government.

With the economy in deep trouble, and in the wake of a Budget that went down like a lead balloon after favouring the rich as against thrifty pensioners, political instability is growing.

So too is the clamour to change the basis of political funding. Sir Christopher Kelly, chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, says: "It would be wrong to regard [the Cruddas allegations] as an isolated event. Events like it are inevitable as long as the main political parties are dependent for their existence on large donations from rich individuals or, in the case of the Labour party, a small number of trade unions."

Of course, there is no comparison. The trade unions actually founded the Labour Party at the turn of the 20th century and their funding is based on members contributing a small amount to a political fund. Paradoxically, while business types might get access and influence policy, the same cannot be said of the trade unions.

They poured large sums of money into the campaign to get Ed Miliband elected as Labour leader. It has turned out to be money down the drain as Labour spoke out against strikes in defence of pensions, supported a public sector wage freeze, implemented spending cuts at local council level and generally fell in line behind government policy.

The lesson of all these experiences is that the political system is an adjunct of the corporate world. This relationship is symbiotic rather than accidental. A democracy that works for the majority of the people has yet to exist. We must redouble our efforts to create it.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

The political system is part of the problem not the solution

The somewhat contrived outrage by politicians of all parties over the hacking of phones by the News of the World should not blind us to the permanently changed relationship between Parliament and corporations that goes well beyond Murdoch’s News Corp.

Those who talk of a “triumph for democracy” and the “will of the people” as expressed through the House of Commons following Murdoch’s withdrawal of his bid for the rest of BskyB’s shares, are fooling themselves as well as the electorate.

New Labour became infatuated with Murdoch precisely because his was a global corporation, exercising media power on both sides of the Atlantic. He was symbolic of market-driven globalisation that Blair and Brown embraced before they took control of their party in the mid-1990s.

They sought and won Murdoch’s support at the 1997 general election because New Labour actually believed in his free-booting style of capitalism that symbolised the period. Built on debt, Murdoch’s empire was to be admired, notwithstanding the destruction of trade unions at his British papers.

New Labour, according to the author and journalist Peter Oborne (whose book The Triumph of the Political Class foreshadowed what has been revealed), went on to develop a “corrupt, complicit, and conspiratorial system of government” that in essence matched the way the corporations functioned.

During its heyday, Murdoch’s malign influence was matched by a range of other corporate “interests” equally favoured by New Labour:

- the banking and financial sector, further deregulated and freed from any significant supervision by the ever-so-tame Financial Services Authority

- major supermarkets, allowed to take over and destroy high streets (with Sainsbury and Tesco executives sitting on government ‘task forces’)

- energy corporations like British Gas who allowed to drive up fuel prices according to “market conditions”

- rail companies who fleece commuters and charge the most expensive fares in Europe

- big contractors, who were given access to £90 billion of public sector contracts on exceptionally favourable terms through the so-called public-finance initiative

- house builders who were given control over the market for new homes, driving up the cost of land beyond the reach of housing associations

- IT corporations like Microsoft who became partners in education programmes

- Private health firms that provided treatment centres for profit financed out of NHS funds.

The fact that this relationship turned sour when Murdoch switched back to the Tories in 2009 coincided with the collapse of the whole period of corporate-driven globalisation championed by New Labour.

And, as we well know, when the banks went belly-up, prime minister Brown rushed to their support and used taxpayers’ money alongside unlimited state guarantees to prop up a financial system that was no longer sustainable. Parliamentary sovereignty had come to express no more than the power of the banks.

None of the major parties could or would challenge this effective merger between the parliamentary state and corporate power. As a result, the political establishment lied about the spending cuts that inevitably followed last year’s general election campaign. The Coalition that emerged has no democratic mandate for the onslaught on living standards that has taken place over the last year but instead takes its marching orders from financial markets.

The shock and horror at the underhand, criminal methods used by the Murdoch press is an attempt to get people to view Parliament in a better light, as an institution that will stand up to powerful interests. However, it is window dressing because global corporate power is very much alive in the hearts and minds of ministers, opposition leaders and MPs.

As the Real Democracy Now movement in Spain established, the existing political system remains very much part of the problem and not the solution. A deconstruction of the capitalist parliamentary state and its recreation along truly democratic lines, around a system of people’s assemblies, is an alternative way forward.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Media is the message

Lest anyone gets too excited about the impending closure of the News of the World in the wake of the phone-hacking scandal, it’s as well to remember the role and power of the media in society.

From the most liberal to the most reactionary of newspapers, the media is ultimately part of the relay mechanism for the dominant outlook, ideology, philosophy, culture or whatever term you care to use, of the ruling political and economic elites.

How could it be otherwise? Media empires like Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp are run for profit and will never ever challenge the capitalist system and what it stands for.

This conveyor belt assumes many forms but it all adds up to the same thing: the notion of a “free press” is so conditional and restricted that its carries no real meaning for the mass of ordinary people. The media may not be formally part of the state but it sings from the same hymn sheet.

The News of the World, for example, dates back to the Victorian period when scandal-monging dominated the discourse of the landed aristocracy and other idle beings. Gossip and tittle-tattle are among the lowest forms of social intercourse.

Papers like the News of the World took aspects of the frail and vulnerable sides of human behaviour and blow them up to ruin people’s lives and titillate their readers. It won’t be missed.

The use of lies, distortions, omissions, witch-hunts and sensationalism is the stock-in-trade of all the tabloid newspapers as many an activist or striking trade unionist will readily acknowledge. Notoriously, the Daily Mirror launched a ferocious attack on miners’ leader Arthur Scargill in the wake of the 1984-5 strike.

In the recent public sector strikes, virtually all the media slavishly followed the government’s line about the “unaffordability” of existing pensions. This helped to create the impression – and that’s all it is – of a public that was in general against the strike.

This is how “public opinion” is shaped or, more accurately, concocted.

Journalists often try their best to buck the trend but as any hack will tell you, proprietors have editorial control through their appointees who have absolute power over what gets published. If they want to work, journalists have little choice but to comply.

Other newspapers and media outlets are perhaps more subtle, but ultimately the message is the same: the status quo is alright, even if it does need cleaning up a little to make it more presentable.

The “serious” papers swallow official propaganda without too many qualms. Take the invasion of Iraq in 2003. None of them seriously challenged the lies and distortions and the notorious “dodgy dossier” put out by New Labour about so-called weapons of mass destruction. This proved the justification for an invasion with far worse consequences than a bit of phone hacking. Patriotism overcame questioning as normal.

As for the BBC, it sounds more and more like an official state broadcaster every day. ConDem statements are repeated ad nauseam as if they were the gospel, while the language used over Palestine, for example, ensures that Israel’s line predominates.

If there is a rush to purge the “excesses” of the tabloids through tougher regulatory control, it is because the general public – who are denied access to the media – somehow need to be reconnected with the conveyor belt of images, distortions, half-truths and support for the status quo.

The breakdown of this relationship is significant because it runs alongside the cracks in the edifice of the state itself, embracing the police, Parliament and legal system. There is an opening here for susbstantial, revolutionary change and we should seize it.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Hacking shows state's corrupt underbelly

The News of the World phone-hacking scandal shines a spotlight on the sinister side of the tabloid media, the police and Parliament at a time when these institutions are already in crisis and increasingly discredited.

Coinciding as it does with deepening economic and financial problems, the hacking saga sums up all what is rotten and threatening about British capitalist society.

The fact that the News of the World was hacking phones of murdered children, and families of people killed in the London underground bombings or in the Afghan war, is not separate from, but all of a piece with their POLITICAL position.

The paper offer regular doses of jingoism and racism. They support the cuts absolutely, and would like them to go further. They are anti-union to the core, and they supported New Labour on the basis that they were too. When the economic crisis got out of control, they quickly switched back to the Tories.

NoW's circulation is falling by more than 5% year on year, but in spite of that, their revolting agenda has had incredible power over British politics. Members of Parliament have been "gelded" by fear, as Tory Zac Goldsmith put it in Parliament yesterday.

Ed Miliband may have called for a public enquiry - an old political trick to kick an issue into the long grass - but it was a different story on the evening of June 11, when he and his ex-Rupert Murdoch hack adviser Tim Baldwin joined Cameron and leading figures from big business, politics and the state at Murdoch's annual summer party. Champagne and oysters were on the menu.

The police and undoubtedly New Labour knew as long ago as 2005 what was going on. But the police investigation was mysteriously restricted in terms of resources. A nod and wink between ministers and Murdoch, whose papers at that time supported the Blair government, seems a plausible explanation.

Prime minister Cameron is squirming on the hook too, hoping to survive a scandal that couldn't be closer to home. Andy Coulson, NoW's editor during the period under investigation, was his communications advisor. And Cameron is also part of a wealthy social set in Oxfordshire which includes Rebekah Brooks, former editor of NoW, and the odious Jeremy Clarkson. They all have regular drinkies together.

Culture and Media Secretary Jeremy Hunt was due to give the nod for News Corporation, News International's parent company, to buy a majority holding in BskyB tomorrow. Now even some City dealers are asking for a pause - they don't want the sale going through when NC shares fell by more than 3% in the US and Australia yesterday.

The revealing of these corrupt relations continues the unravelling of the credit-fuelled boom, of New Labour's rule and everything that went with it: the obsession with celebrity; vulgar displays of wealth; get-rich-quick fantasies that led to the impoverishment of millions through debt.

There are plenty in the Tory Party itself who would like to see this scandal sink Cameron himself. They want to see coppers focused on beefing up the methods developed during the miners’ strike and indeed at Wapping, when Murdoch smashed the print unions with their help.

Stop bugging models and footballers and start bugging those involved in opposing the state - that's the desire at the top of the state. There are reports that the army is stepping up riot control training. All state forces are being told, get ready for resistance in myriad forms – from riots against supermarkets and food prices to strikes and occupations.

And on the other side, we see the difficulty the state has in operating in secret in the digital age. The new generation don't buy these newspapers, and they don't buy their political line either. They get their news on the net, from their peers on Facebook, on YouTube, Twitter and WikiLeaks.

Using these new methods of communication, with all their problems, the mass of the people bypass the reactionary media and develop their own views and understanding. This is laying the groundwork for bold and independent political initiatives aimed at creating a real people’s democracy based on self-determination in every sphere, to take society forward.

Penny Cole

Tea Party brews up a political crisis

Only in America could a woman like Christine O’Donnell become, in the words of New York Times columnist Frank Rich, “the brightest all-American media meteor since Balloon Boy”.

Rich views “I am not a witch” O’Donnell as a possible godsend for the Republican party as the US mid-term elections loom on November 2. He could not resist adding that the 41-year-old senatorial candidate for the state of Delaware, who is an evangelical Christian, is perhaps best known “for taking a fearless stand against masturbation, the one national pastime with more fans than baseball”.

Laughable as people like O’Donnell and their primitive right wing views might appear, her meteoric rise, like that of Sarah Palin before her, is an indication of the growing hold of the anti-state, anti-government Tea Party movement within the Republican Party (GOP).

O’Donnell provides the GOP with a symbolic figure – a small-town struggler on low-pay with “proletarian cred”. The reality about the Tea Party, though, is that it is bankrolled by the billionaire Koch family who first made their fortune in dealings with the dictator Joseph Stalin. It is making political capital out of the pain being suffered by millions of Americans as unemployment stands at 10% and repossessions leave whole areas of US towns and cities lifeless.

Behind its populist façade, the Tea Party is actually a plaything of massive corporate interests. Amongst its backers are many from the Forbes list of the super-rich. They include oil barons Robert Rowling and Trevor Rees-Jones, and not least, Rupert Murdoch and his News Corporation. Through Fox television, Murdoch provides constant favourable news coverage for the Tea Party. Clearly the interests of these super-rich are nothing to do with the Tea Party’s supposed support for small town and impoverished Americans.

The new breed of Republican leaders also include people such as Nevada candidate Sharron Angle. Angle is another Christian fundamentalist who opposes abortion, no matter what, even for incest and rape. She wants to abolish the following: the Department of Education, Social Security, the Department of Energy, Environmental Protection Agency, National Endowment of the Arts, housing agencies Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and Planned Parenthood funding. Perhaps surprisingly, Angle is standing against a Tea Party backed candidate.

So where does this leave President Barack Obama and the Democratic Party? Despite their success in passing healthcare, financial legislation and the Recovery Act, the administration’s “Big State” efforts to rescue the economy from meltdown have not stopped the jobs and homes haemorrhage.

While things have taken a slight turn for the better in the latest popularity ratings, the administration confronts a massive melt-down of confidence in a presidency. It began with the highest of hopes and tears of joy when the first-ever African-American was elected only two years ago.

But as the recession turns towards another Great Depression, that euphoria has turned into disappointment and shock. Obama admitted in a recent interview with Rolling Stone magazine: “We've seen an increase in poverty, and an increase in unemployment, and people's wages and incomes have stagnated.”

Not only is there a distinct possibility that the Republicans will gain control over both Senate and House of Representatives on November 2. Obama is also weathering a major changeover of White House staff.

Behind these harsh realities facing a president hailed for his skills as the great communicator is the historic weakness of the US economy in the face of ruthless competition from China. What we are seeing is a crisis not only for the Democrats but America’s political system as a whole. Some suggest that America is already “ungovernable” and that is likely to be even more the case after the mid-term elections.

Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward has revealed that last November Obama was virtually threatened with mutiny when he tried to overrule the military brass on withdrawal from Afghanistan. A disgruntled military, a possibly lame-duck president and a populist Tea Party working with big business, is a heady cocktail with unpredictable side-effects.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

The apostles of growth have had their day

Gordon Brown is in big trouble. The financial system he piloted to prominence during his years as Chancellor is in ruins. Rupert Murdoch has turned The Sun against him. The majority of the UK population is in favour of a withdrawal from Afghanistan, and his letter-writing skills have slipped, angering army wives and mothers.

Brown’s plight is a pale reflection of the political crisis engulfing capitalist governments throughout the world as disaffection grips the masses whose lives are being destroyed by attempts to prevent a slump unparalleled in history. Despite trillions of stimulus dollars, pounds, euros, and the lowest interest rates ever set by central banks, unemployment is soaring worldwide.

In an attempt to repair the damage to his reputation as warm-hearted saviour of the global economy, Brown is trying a populist appeal to the massed ranks of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) and the many other well-meaning members of the Stamp Out Poverty Coalition.

At the weekend G20 meeting of finance ministers and central bankers in Scotland, Brown took up Brendan Barber of the TUC’s call for a tax on financial transactions within the UK – something within the powers of the national government, at least in theory.

The chorus of disapproval was almost deafening.

The response from Barack Obama’s Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner gave a clear and succinct voice to the objective force that is capital. Geithner said there was broad agreement that "growth remains the dominant policy imperative across our economies". US unemployment, which hit a 26-year-high at 10.2% in October, highlighted a "very tough economic environment" that will take a period of sustained growth to correct.

"Government policy has to provide a bridge to growth led by the private sector," he said. "We're now in the middle span of that bridge." In an interview with Sky News, Geithner added: “A day-by-day financial transaction tax is not something we are prepared to support."

Geithner, late of Goldman Sachs, insisted that government had to stay cautious (apart from giving bankers untold billions) and warned: “If we put the brakes on too quickly we will weaken the economy and the financial system, unemployment will rise, more businesses will fail, budget deficits will rise, and the ultimate cost of the crisis will be greater." In other words, business as usual is the goal.

Canadian finance minister Jim Flaherty and Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the IMF joined the opposition to a transactions tax. Flaherty said Canada was working out how to reduce taxes, while Strauss-Kahn opted for a politer more diplomatic response – it’s just too difficult to measure international transactions. Unsurprisingly the banks including Barclays and HSBC aren’t in favour either.

All of the voices in this song-fest are united in their blind subservience to the status quo. The chorus against a tax on financial transactions shows two things. Firstly, reform of the global capitalist financial system is out of the question. Secondly the dependent relationship that links the state to the productive and financial components of the capitalist economy has to be shattered before we can move forward.

The world is now ready for a society that places the satisfaction of needs as its primary goal. Rather than attempting to tax the proceeds of gambling in the global casino, the casino should be shut down and the capitalist state deconstructed. Geithner, Brown and the other apostles of capitalist growth have had their day.

Gerry Gold
Economics editor