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

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

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

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

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