The BBC Trust have admitted that their political editor Laura Kuenssberg created fake news when she misrepresented Jeremy Corbyn's position on shoot-to-kill.
The BBC Trust ruling concluded that Kuenssberg's report was "not duly accurate" because it presented "an answer Mr Corbyn had given to a question about shoot-to-kill as though it were his answer to a question he had not in fact been asked".
The original complaint against Kuenssberg alleged that her sneaky decision to splice a clip of Jeremy Corbyn talking about shoot-to-kill with a question he wasn't even asked was designed to cause "maximum political damage".
Kuenssberg is well known for letting her anti-Corbyn bias interfere with the supposed journalistic impartiality of BBC news reporters, famously orchestrating the resignation of a Labour Party cabinet member live on TV in order to damage Jeremy Corbyn's leadership as much as possible before a Prime Minister's Questions appearance in January 2016.
The role of BBC journalists should be to present the news, not to manufacture the news, nor to just make it up as they go along. Still, despite the evidence that she concocted a fake news hit on Jeremy Corbyn, Kuenssberg looks safe in her job as BBC political editor publicly funded Tory mouthpiece.
Anyone who pays attention will know that the BBC have previous form at chopping and changing the sequence of video clips in order to create highly misleading narratives. The most famous example being the reversal of the footage from the Orgreave miners' protest to make it look like the miners attacked the police, when the reality was that mounted police launched a brutal and unprovoked attack on the miners. Luckily for the BBC the Tories decided not to hold a public inquiry into Orgreave, meaning that the BBC's dodgy conduct on that day wasn't brought back into focus.
Attention-paying members of the public will also be well aware of the academic studies proving a systemic mainstream media propaganda campaign against Jeremy Corbyn that's so extreme that one investigation found that only 11% of all newspaper articles about him presented his actual political views without alteration!
When most of the print media is owned by a small clique of savagely right-wing tax-dodging billionaires, and supposedly impartial BBC journalists like Laura Kuenssberg get off scot-free after inventing fake news controversies, it's pretty obvious that the propaganda war is going to continue, however there are some things we can do about it.
- If fake news producers are allowed to keep their jobs even after getting caught out we need to take all mainstream media stories with a massive pinch of salt. Mainstream media is obviously not all fake news, but we need to engage our critical thinking skills whenever we encounter mainstream media stories because of the possibility that they are.
- Look for reliable alternative media sources and, if you appreciate the content they provide, consider making small donations to help keep them going .
- Boycott appalling hard-right propaganda rags like the Daily Mail, S*n and Express. Don't just avoid buying their newspapers, avoid sharing or otherwise publicising their links on social media.
- If you want to enhance a comment about a particular issue with a link, consider finding an alternative media article rather than linking to the mainstream press. If you can't find an independent source, try rewarding the least savagely right-wing mainstream media sources with the free publicity (Channel 4 News, Independent, Mirror, Huffington Post, Guardian).
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
The growing mainstream media furore over "fake news" is telling. Of course there are loads of dodgy websites out there pushing deliberate misinformation and abject made up nonsense, but the idea that the corporate mainstream press is some kind of bastion of reliability, and somehow not guilty of pushing "fake news" of their own is extraordinarily naive.
The mainstream press has undeniably been guilty of churning out "fake news" for decades. There was the uncritical front-page regurgitation of Tony Blair's Iraq distortions (see image). Before that there were the utterly disgraceful Hillsborough lies on the front page of the S*n. and the deliberate reversal of the Orgreave film footage by the BBC to make it look like it was the miners who attacked the police, rather than the other way around.
Even back in the 1920s the Daily Mail published the forged Zinoviev letter four days before the 1924 General Election as a desperate attempt to secure victory for the Tory party.
Even when the mainstream media isn't just making up the news completely by publishing crudely photoshopped images to smear their political enemies, lying about war heroes, or brazenly misrepresenting survey results in order to provoke anti-Muslim hatred, biases like the anti-NHS agenda of the right-wing tabloids are completely obvious for all to see.
It's clear that the problem of "Fake news" has been with us for decades, the only difference is that these days, thanks to the Internet, the corporate mainstream hacks no longer have such a powerful monopoly on the spreading of misleading and downright dishonest political propaganda. The "fake news" furore is more a demonstration of mainstream media hacks' fury that other people are usurping their ability to use lies and distortions to warp the political agenda, than a genuine concern about accuracy in reporting.
Aside from the erosion of their monopoly on controlling the news agenda with fake stories, another thing that mainstream journalists are struggling to cope with in the social media age is the rise of reliable alternative media.
Mainstream media hacks had become so used to spoon-feeding their political agenda to the public that many of them are now utterly complacent, and don't really know what to do about the upsurge in new alternative media sites that are dedicated to critiquing the manufactured news tropes pushed by the establishment media, and focusing attention on the information the mainstream press ignore.
We shouldn't be surprised if mainstream media hacks begin using "fake news" as a crude synonym for all alternative media, no matter how well researched and evidence based it actually is. Time and again mainstream media hacks have displayed their utter contempt towards alternative media and social media news sites, so sweeping up the whole lot under the pejorative term "fake news" would certainly suit their purposes of making all non-mainstream media sources seem inherently dodgy and unreliable.
Alternative media is also a thorn in the side of the Tory government because independent non-corporate websites tend to hold the government to account for things that mainstream hacks have so often been willing to ignore. So don't be surprised if the Tories decide to collude with the mainstream press by introducing legislation to clamp down on reliable and informative independent news sites under the guise of dealing with the problem of "fake news".
Of course I'm not trying to claim that "fake news" isn't a problem. It absolutely is, and it's clearly a problem that long-predates the Internet and the social media revolution too. What I'm trying to say is that the political establishment and their chums in the mainstream press are likely to try to use the "fake news" furore in order to achieve an unspoken agenda of smearing and obstructing the legitimate (non-fake) alternative news sites that they see as a threat to their own comfortable positions at the top of the news hierarchy.
In my view the only truly effective way to combat "fake news" is through a drive to improve the critical thinking skills of the general public so that people tend to ask questions like "who is telling me this?", "why are they telling me this?", "did the writer get paid for writing this, and by whom?", "is this piece evidence-based or opinion-based?", "what are the underlying assumptions in this article?", "does this article cite reliable sources?" before they decide to accept or reject whatever it is that they're being told, no matter whether the source is an independent blog or a mainstream media outlet.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
A group of Blairite
figures have set up a company called Labour Tomorrow. It was Incorporated by Nicola Murphy on April 1st 2016, which was a good few months before the Anyone But Corbyn coup was launched. It soon appointed David Blunkett
and his fellow unelected House of Lords peer Brenda Dean.
All three of the senior figures behind this Labour Tomorrow project are Blairites. David Blunkett was a Blair loyalist who served in various cabinet positions under Blair, including Home Secretary. Brenda Dean was also a minister in Tony Blair's government between 1997 and 2005. Nicola Murphy is the wife of the Blairite MP and former caretaker shadow chancellor Chris Leslie.*
The Labour Tomorrow website claims that it's some kind of fundraising organisation to support centre-left activities like political blogs, smart campaigns, policy development and debate. The only blog post on the website was written by Blunkett and Dean. After having a few predictable digs at Jeremy Corbyn the article states that the organisation has "already raised funds which will be deployed to back projects in policy development, digital media, campaigning and building activist networks".
This focus on digital media is interesting. It's absolutely clear that the right-wing Blairite faction of the Labour Party are taking a hammering on social media. Back in the 1990s their efforts to carefully stage manage the news agenda were highly successful (Alistair Campbell didn't earn his reputation for being the master of the dark arts of political spin for nothing) but in the social media age these old tactics are inept, if not entirely counter-productive.
These days the news agenda can't be carefully orchestrated by drip-feeding stories to the mainstream press because pesky independent bloggers and social media activists like me keep coming along to rip their narratives apart. Social media isn't yet powerful enough to entirely counter-balance the mainstream media propaganda machine, but as time moves on more and more people are abandoning daily newspapers and seeking information on their smartphones instead. This trend towards diversified news content providers (including independent blogs, voluntary organisations and all kinds of other websites) is making it increasingly impossible for political parties to control the parameters of political debate by drip-feeding propaganda to their mates in the mainstream media echo chamber.
It looks an awful lot like this Labour Tomorrow organisation has been set up in order to shower cash on Blairite approved blogs, social media pages and protest groups in order to create a fake grassroots movement in favour of Blairite centre-right Thatcherism-lite slop in order to try to counter the genuine grassroots movement inspired by Jeremy Corbyn's election as Labour leader.
This kind of fake grassroots campaigning is hardly a new development, in fact it's been going on for years and has even acquired the nickname "astroturfing".
Some people might suggest that it's a conspiracy theory to suggest that Labour Tomorrow could be intent on creating fake social media movements and the like in order to create the illusion that their outdated Blairite ideology is still popular, but the evidence of their attitude is clear from a quick look at their Twitter page.
The Labour Tomorrow Twitter account hasn't posted a single tweet and is only following six accounts (including those of the Blairite thinktank Progress and the Blairite riddled Fabian Society). Despite having posted no content, this account nas somehow amassed over 2,000 followers.
This discrepancy between the lack of content and follows and the significant number of followers is enough to raise the suspicions of anyone who actually understands the basics of how Twitter works.
A look through the accounts following the Labour Tomorrow page make it absolutely clear that it is followed by an army of fake spambot accounts, most of which have been set up in the last week and generally have fewer than 10 followers of their own.
The tiny majority of real people following the Labour Tomorrow account actually seem to be Jeremy Corbyn supporters keeping an eye on it to see what it eventually does!
A look through their contributions of some of the 2,000 odd spambot accounts reveal the exact same retweets over and over and over again.
One of the most commonly retweeted articles by the Labour Tomorrow spambot army is an advert for a company selling chewy sweets in the shape of penises. It seems that whenever Labour Tomorrow kicks into life, their spambot army is going to switch seamlessly from hawking edible cocks to hawking even less palatable Blairite propaganda!
The problem with buying likes from clickfarms is that it only creates a veneer of popularity. One hundred spambot accounts that retweet your content to their tiny audiences of half a dozen or so other accounts is absolutely worthless in comparison to one real person who shares your content with their real audience of real friends, family, work colleagues, neighbours etc.
The fact that Labour Tomorrow have gone in for the same kind of paid-like spambot tactics as disgusting extreme right groups just goes to show how far behind the curve they are on social media. They're so out of touch with recent developments in the political landscape that that they think that social media success is something that can just be bought for cash from some clickfarm in the middle east, rather than something that develops organically because real people like and share the real content provided by real people.
If they're just going to waste the funds they've raised (from as yet unnamed sources) on idiocy like paying spambot clickfarms to follow their Twitter account, the Labour Tomorrow astroturfing campaign looks set to be no threat to anyone.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
Despite the fact that I've made my social media home on Facebook, it's impossible not to recognise that Twitter is a brilliant platform for political discourse.
These days the majority of politicians have Twitter accounts, and a large proportion of politically engaged people are more likely to check the news by scrolling through their Twitter feed, than they are to obtain all of their news from a single online source.
The days of people having their political news drip-fed to them by a particular daily newspaper are gradually coming to an end, and Twitter is one of the best "new media" platforms because it allows people to aggregate political news from all kinds of sources into a concise news feed, from which the most interesting stories can be picked out and followed up.
In my view the biggest danger with Twitter is the way in which many people will follow only the Twitter accounts that they agree with, and neglect accounts that present them with information,analysis or opinion that upsets them or threatens their worldview. In effect, Twitter allows people to create their own bespoke closed ideology echo chamber. I'm not trying to be judgmental here, in fact I know perfectly well that I tend to follow people I agree with a lot more than people I don't.
On my own Twitter account I
tend to follow Green party activists, rebellious "Old Labour" politicians, left-wing political commentators, heterodox economists, protest websites and comedians. I could never follow an obnoxious right-wing hatemonger like Katie Hopkins because she makes my blood boil with her sanctimonious and judgmental bile. Neither could I follow a dishonest-to-the-core Tory politican like Grant Shapps. This means that the right-wing accounts I do follow are generally more moderate right-wingers like Zac Goldsmith or the recent Tory-UKIP defector Mark Reckless.
The fact that my own Twitter news feed is a mirror that reflects back to me the kind of opinions I generally agree with (or at least ones that I don't find horribly offensive) got me wondering how Twitter must appear to people of different political persuasions.
In order to satisfy my own curiosity (and to make a hopefully interesting experiment for you to observe too), I decided to create five separate Twitter lists in order to estimate* what self-selected Twitter feeds might look like to people of various different political persuasions.
Simply click the five images below to see the different ways in which Twitter might appear to the supporters of the five different political persuasions.
PLEASE SIGN IN TO TWITTER FIRST, OTHERWISE THE LINKS WON'T WORK
UPDATE: I have had feedback from numerous people telling me that the above buttons don't work on their Apple products. Here are the basic links.
Note: If enough people find this a useful resource and follow the various lists, I'll consider investing a bit more time in creating lists for other political persuasions too, such as a nationalist list (SNP, Plaid Cymru, Sinn Fein), a radical-left list (Left Unity, Socialists, communists ...) and an extreme-right list (BNP, EDL, Britain First ...)
Another Angry Voice is a not-for-profit page which generates absolutely no revenue from advertising and accepts no money from corporate or political interests. The only sources of income for Another Angry Voice are small donations from people who see some value in my work. If you appreciate my efforts and you could afford to make a donation, it would be massively appreciated.
* This isn't intended to be a scientific experiment so these feeds are only rough estimates. I've included political representatives, self declared supporters and activists by their parties, which is quite uncontroversial. I've also included a few media outlets which align with the parties, for example I've put the Independent in the Labour and Green lists, and the Daily Express in the Tory and UKIP lists. I've also included think tanks, websites and political commentators roughly aligned by their political position.
Despite having been largely unaffected by several of the most malicious and overtly totalitarian pieces of legislation passed by this abomination of a Coalition government, as a Blogger I have spoken out as best I can, in the limited time I have available, about as many of these issues as possible.
I have tried to raise awareness of seriously bad things like secret courts, the "gagging law", retroactive legislation, Stalinist "Workfare" schemes, David Cameron's Chinese style Internet Firewall, the Five Eyes surveillance mass scandal and the like.
I've also tried to keep track of David Cameron's lies (an impossibly large task), George Osborne's blatant economic illiteracy, Michael Gove's ideological vandalism of the education system and Iain Duncan Smith's ignorant contempt for most of humanity. I've worked to expose the ridiculous lies and distortions that underpin so much of modern political and economic discourse and to demonstrate the absurd contortions of the very meaning of words by Tory government ministers.
I believe that people should know what is going on, and that I have some kind of obligation as a writer to ensure as many people as possible are given the wider perspective that is obtained through greater knowledge. I don't try to pretend that I'm imparting any kind of "special" or "secret" information, I just try to present relevant information (with supporting evidence) and analyse it from my own perspective*. If you have any kind of inquiring mind, I encourage you to try to corroborate the things I've written about in order to get a wider understanding of the issues you consider important amongst all those I have raised.
Even though you may not agree with what I say, I'm reasonably sure that you would support my right to speak what is on my mind, in line with Evelyn Beatrice Hall's summation of Voltaire's beliefs on freedom of thought and expression: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it".
What I am going to write about now is a draconian proposal which is due through parliament on Monday the 3rd of February 2014, which looks set to revoke the long established convention that the press must be free to protect their sources. Not only are the Tories planning on revoking this vital component of investigative journalism, they also want to be able to confiscate a journalist's work in secret legalistic proceedings.
Totalitarianism
The Tories want the state to be able to force journalists to give up their sources and to confiscate their materials behind a veil of state secrecy. Essentially, they are demonstrating their totalitarian belief that the state knows best, and that the public has absolutely no right to know how the state is using its powers to silence dissenting voices. That in their view, the privacy of the state trumps the privacy of the press, or the privacy of the individual.
These draconian plans looks like extremely bad news for the tattered, corporatised oligopoly that masquerades as the so-called "free press", but it also looks like it could have a devastating impact on Bloggers too. You don't have to have the greatest understanding of how function creep works in order to understand why independent bloggers like me might feel intimidated by an establishment system that can use secretive legalistic proceedings to confiscate computers, notebooks, recordings, correspondances etc at will, and to force us to betray the people who have contacted us with information.
The idea that the Tories wouldn't use such draconian powers to interfere with the freedom of the press is laughably naive. One only needs to think of David Cameron's decision to send his goons around to the Guardian in July 2013 in order to demand that they hand over or destroy their data relating to the Edward Snowden leaks to understand that the Tories have no compunction about trampling over the freedom of the press.**
It is absolutely beyond doubt that Cameron and the Tories have an attitude towards press freedom that would be more suitable to places like North Korea or Saudi Arabia, than the liberal western democracy that the UK is supposed to be.
Red Tape
One of the most remarkable things about this so-called "Deregulation Bill" is that these draconian revocations of press freedom are buried deep within it next to revocations of ancient laws outlawing the shaking of carpets and the regulation of pigsties - as if the freedom of the press is some quaint outmoded convention that needs to be scrapped in the name of efficiency, rather than a fundamental component of an open and accountable democracy.
The Deregulation Bill contains such a diverse range of amendments across so many disperate government departments that it would be impossible to submit it to proper legislative scrutiny even under normal circumstances, let as it is rushed being rushed through parliament at breakneck pace, as it is.
Aside from their attempt to
revoke the freedom of the press as if it is a quaint outmoded regulatory
burden, there are other horrors buried deep within this legislation,
such as the proposal that in future ministers should be able to revoke
laws whenever they like using statutory instruments, without any kind of
democratic vote on the issue. When Labour tried to do a similar thing in 2006, it was dubbed "The Abolition of Parliament bill".
The Tories that devised this scheme to impose draconian new powers and the ability to revoke whichever laws they like without the scrutiny of parliamentary debate, under the guise of a "red tape" cutting exercise are clearly relying on the vast majority of Coalition MPs voting this through as the whips instruct them, without bothering to even read the documentation, understand the intricacies or even participate in the debate, which is undeniably exactly how our archaic and unrepresentative parliamentary system operates.
The press reaction
The reaction of the mainstream corporate press and especially the right-wing press (the Murdoch Empire, The Express, The Daily Mail and the Telegraph which between them account for around 75% of all newspaper sales) to this Tory grab for draconian new state powers will be very interesting to note. They've kept countless hugely important issues that dramatically affect the freedoms of others relegated to obscurity in their papers and on their websites, so how will they react when sweeping revocations of their own rights are put before parliament? One would expect them to make a lot of noise about it, driven by their own self-interest.
Rational self-interest (which is fundamental to right-wing neoclassical economic pseudo-economic ideology that the right-wing press ceaselessly promotes as unquestionable orthodoxy) says that the corporate
press should react very strongly against these proposals. What makes it even more likely to cause a furious reaction is the provocative way it is being presented as an exercise in cleaning up stupid, unnecessary, burdensome, useless, restrictive "red tape". How will the right-wing gutter press take the use of their own rallying cries against "red tape" being used to tear up thier rights to protect their sources and not have their stories spiked through the intervention of secret legalistic tribunals? Surely they would be furious at Cameron (and their old "friend" Ken Clarke) for such a seemingly deliberate ironic twist far more befitting of Philip K. Dick's dystopian imaginings than George Orwell's sincere warnings of the threat of totalitarianism.
The seemingly deliberate provocative hostility of the Tories towards the press is comparable to other deliberately inflammatory gestures, such as the agenda to deploy
water cannons against hypothetical "anti-austerity protests" we are told
to expect in the summer of 2014.
The really interesting story might be if the right-wing press chooses to ignore the story by relegating it to the obscurest coverage possible, or not mentioning it at all. Such a lack of action against an attack on their own interests would illustrate that they must surely be complicit in a wider agenda. What that agenda might be, I can only speculate, because their reaction (or lack of it) is yet to happen. One plausible scenario is that they fully understand that these are measures designed to be used against independent bloggers and the New Media and not the mainstream orthodox neoliberal press.
Will the corporate press
will rail against revocations of their freedoms as vehemently as they
have propagandised in favour of draconian measures for other people
(austerity, workfare, water cannons and Theresa May's unbelievably callous immigration reforms that end up tearing British families apart or driving them into political exile abroad)? Or will they actually even propagandise in favour of this attack on press freedom dressed up as a simple exercise in getting rid of burdensome "red tape"?
Cognitive Dissonance
These new Tory powers to use secretive legalistic proceedings in order to trash the freedom of the press and undermine democracy rely upon the cognitive dissonance inducing combination of vastly increased secretive state powers and unimaginably massive (and expensive) state surveillance of the public. They state conducts itself behind an ever growing veil of secrecy, whilst simultaneously operating a surveillance system designed to fundamentally destroy the right to privacy of the general public.
It is not even remotely possible to understand how anybody could suport such an underhand effort to fundamentally weaken the freedom of the press. The only possible explanations are complicity (the individual thinks they have something to gain through the destruction of press freedom and democratic accountability), near complete ignorance
of the issues or an incredibly tribalist worldview in which right-wing
governments must be supported, no matter what they do. I find it impossible to empathise with any of these stances because sociopathic greed, contemptible ignorance and unthinking political partisanship are symptoms of grotesque intellectual laziness.
Opening the door to dictatorship
If you chose to ignore the wealth of evidence and refuse to believe that David Cameron and the Tories would use these new powers to control the press and stamp out dissent for their own sociopathic reasons, then at least consider the possibility that they are enabling the possibility of an unimaginably invasive totalitarian regime in the future. One where open justice is abolished, the population permanently monitored for signs of dissent, and dissenters are silenced in secretive Stalinist style legalistic proceedings.
Imagine that a dangerously amoral self-serving sociopath like Franco, Meza, Pinochet, Videla or Menem rises from within right-wing politics (as desperate economic circumstances drive people to support even more radical politicians). By completely wrecking the freedom of the press beforehand, Cameron and the Tories have made the establishment of a grotesque right-wing dictatorship that much easier and more likely.
How about if you are a political tribalist that is so fundamentally averse to left-wing politics that you're not even bothered by the possibility of an extreme right psyschopath (like Franco or Pinochet) rising to inherit these powers of intrusion, intimidation and secrecy? Maybe you could consider the potential scenario that some deranged "leftie" (akin perhaps to Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pol) arises on the political scene and obtains Cameron's secretive powers over what can be written about, or even just known and to rewrite our laws as exactly he pleases without parliamentary scrutiny?
Labour
It is clear that some are still holding onto hope that the Labour party will take a stronger stance against this Tory contempt for freedom and begin campaigning against the blatant totalitarianism of the Coalition government. The narrative that "the Liberal Democrats are part of the most blatantly illiberal government the UK has suffered since our forefathers defeated Naziism" would surely be a big vote winner.
The problem of course is that New Labour had an appalling attitude to freedom and justice during their 13 years in power. Who could forget their efforts to enforce their own draconian curtailments of our freedom and privacy. Has anyone that cares forgotten that their schemes to introduce imprisonment without trial, the national identity database, vicious attacks on legal aid, the revocation of the ancient right to trial by jury their so-called appallingly unjust Digital Economy Bill. Another factor to consider is that much of the mass surveillance infrastructure that Cameron is trying to protect was initiated under the New Labour watch too.
Th big problem for Labour is that in order to come out strongly against the totalitarianism of the Coalition, they would have to admit their own illiberal mistakes of the past and apologise for them. In my view, such an apology would be great for their approval ratings because the public are sick to death of politicians like Iain Duncan Smith, that will never admit their mistakes, even if they caught bang-to-rights time, after time, after time, after time, after time, after time, after time, after time.
Politicians are notoriously averse to admitting their mistakes because they are zealots that contest that they alone have the "correct answers" and the confused conviction that to change one's political stance is to somehow admit weakness.
In my view a mistake admitted and apologised for is a demonstration of strength. A demonstration of the ability to recognise one's own failings, apologise and strive to do better in the future.
I suppose a change of direction from Labour is most dependent upon the tiny minority of decent MPs within the Labour party that have not been replaced by self-serving, orthodox neoliberal Blairite careerist shills. If MPs like Dennis Skinner, John McDonnell, Michael Meacher, Grahame Morris (and perhaps even Dianne Abbott) are incapable of winning the argument for liberty over totalitarianism, Labour seem set to offer nothing but a continuation of illiberal state authoritarianism if they get back into power.
Conclusion
This attempt to rush through draconian curtailments of press freedom under the guise of anti red tape legislation is hardly an isolated example of illiberalism from the Coalition government. In March 2013 they introduced Secret Courts in which defendants can be found guilty in a courtroom they are not allowed to enter, on charges they are not allowed to see, with evidence they are not allowed to see. In just the last month, they have demonstrated their totalitarian tendencies with their efforts to deploy water cannons on our streets to deter political protests and with their Gagging Law designed to exclude the non-profit sector from political discourse. Now they are attempting to award themselves new secretive powers to critically undermine the freedom of the press.
It seems quite obvious that David Cameron and the Tories are ensuring that the UK leads the charge towards crony capitalist totalitarianism and we should all be very alarmed about it indeed. The sad thing is that so few of us know about it, including those Coalition MPs that look set to do as the party whips say and vote in favour of it without having even bothered to understand what they are voting to enable.
Postscript
If independent bloggers like me begin disappearing off the network, if
our Facebook pages, our Twitter accounts or our websites suddenly disappear, then perhaps you'd be
right to suspect that such events are possibly related to these secretive and
repressive new rules.
Another Angry Voice
is a not-for-profit page which generates absolutely no revenue from
advertising and accepts no money from corporate or political interests.
The only source of revenue for Another Angry Voice
is the PayPal donations box (which can be found in the right hand
column, fairly near the top of the page). If you could afford to make a donation to help keep this site going, it would be massively appreciated.
* For the benefit of those that would like to know more about my political leanings I have tried to crudely simplify my perspective into a reasonably short article, which you can read here.
** To put this assault on the freedom of the press into context, the UK is far more willing to attack the free press than the US. In fact, the reason the Guardian complied so willingly with David Cameron's draconian demands is that they knew they had copies of the data safe in the United States.
The main reason I devote so much of my time to writing blog posts and producing infographics is that I believe that the mainstream newspapers are failing in their duty to keep the public informed. Instead of informing the public as they should, the press has become a kind of corporate closed ideology echo-chamber for the promotion of the right-wing neoliberal orthodoxy.
The newspaper market in the UK is absolutely dominated by an oligopoly of seven news groups.
The largest by far is the Murdoch controlled News UK which controls well over a third of the newspaper market and includes the S*n, which is inexplicably still the most widely read "newspaper" in the country, despite the filthy lies they published about the Hillsborogh disaster (if you read the S*n you are clearly not a true football fan) and their unyeilding support for Margaret Thatcher's socially and economically destructive neoliberalisation agenda.
The next largest is the Daily Mail Group which has nearly 20% of the market share (plus the most visited "news" website in the UK). The Daily Mail is owned by the tax-dodger Jonathan Harmsworth and is famed for its long history of supporting the fascist ideology and printing utterly disgusting bile designed to rile the public into supporting ever more right-wing policies.
The third largest newspaper group is the Mirror group, which puts its allegiance behind the New Labour party, but this editorial line against the neoliberal policies of the current government is sure to be softened whenever New Labour get back into power with their appalling ideology of neoliberalism-lite.
The fourth largest is the Northern & Shell Group which is run by the pornographer Richard Desmond, who also owns Channel 5. The largest circulation paper Desmond owns is the Daily Express, which runs the Daily Mail close for the title of most extremely right-wing rag in the UK.
The other three are minnows in comparison. The Telegraph (owned by the reclusive Barclay brothers) preaches the same brand of neoliberalism as Murdoch, Harmsworth and Desmond. It is notable for its core following of delusional right-wing ranters (check the comments section beneath virtually any Telegraph article for all the evidence you need). Where the Telegraph do deserve some credit is their exposure and moralist condemnation of MP's expenses, not that that has stopped them though.
The Guardian used to be a left-wing newspaper, but after 13 years of apologising for the blatant neoliberalism of New Labour, then transferring their allegiance to the Liberal Democrats, it is absolutely clear that they all too often sing from the neoliberal hymn sheet now. The saving grace for the Guardian is the Comment is Free section which occasionally publishes articles that are explicitly critical of the neoliberal orthodoxy (although all credit is revoked again for a ridiculous editorial praising Iain Duncan Smith for his compassion and the tendency for inexperienced Guardian journalists to repeat blatant neoliberal dogma as if it is fact). Another saving grace is their coverage of the Five Eyes spy scandal when many other publications have turned willfully blind eyes.
The smallest of the seven is the Independent, which is controlled by the Russian oligarch Alexander Lebidev and his son Evgeny. It is by far the youngest of the seven having been founded in 1986. The Independent has a history of neutrality at general elections (instead of telling their readership how to vote as the other six do). The Independent has the least neoliberal editorial line of the big seven (for example: Owen Jones' "Agenda for Hope" extols traditional social democratic values) but they have a tiny market share of less than 3%.
The vast majority of newspaper coverage in the UK is presented from a right-wing orthodox neoliberal perspective, which is entirely at odds with the popularity of social democracy amongst the general public.
The majority of British people support social democratic ideas such as the nationalisation of natural monopolies (see graph), but this is neither reflected in the print media, nor in Westminster politics - where all three Establishment parties (the Lib-Lab-Cons) adhere to the same right-wing pseudo-economic ideology of neoliberalism, as promoted by the mainstream press.
There is a Misinformation War going on and the majority of people have been rendered voiceless by it. The majority of people believe in social democracy and fairness, whilst their newspapers and political parties constantly promote the ideology of neoliberalism which leads inevitably to crony capitalism, which results in austerity and wage repression for the majority, whilst the tiny establishment minority enrich themselves via enormous socialism-for-the-rich schemes (bank bailouts, quantitative easing, corporate outsourcing, PFI ...).
The newspapers in the UK barely question the core ideological tenets of neoliberalism, and in fact, most barely even mention neoliberalism by name - even though it is the unquestionable economic orthodoxy of our age. Their tactic is to repeat the Great Neoliberal Lie, that the economic crisis came about because of "excessive welfare spending by the state", rather than the reckless debt fueled financial sector gambling spree that actually caused it.
One example of how the newspaper oligopoly fail in their duty to inform the public what is going on is the appalling lack of coverage devoted to issues of huge national importance. Incredibly important issues such as the ongoing Tory privatisation of the NHS, Michael Gove's ideological destruction of the education system, the introduction of disgracefully illiberal legislation such as Secret Courts, the Gagging Law and Iain Duncan Smith's abuse of the parliamentary process in order to stick two fingers up at the courts have been completely buried under a tide of celebrity gossip and vapid personality politics.
A great example of how wedded the mainstream press are to the neoliberal ideology (that they won't even mention by name in print) is the furious reaction of the right-wing press to Ed Miliband's pseudo-socialist plan to cap energy prices for 20 months. Ed's plan isn't actually socialist at all, if it were, he'd have been promising to renationalise the energy infrastructure of the UK and run it as a democratically administered not-for-profit public service (as the vast majority of British people would actually like him to). The reaction of the Daily Mail was particularly telling. Instead of attempting to defend the cartel like behavior of the energy companies enabled by privatisation, they turned their fire on Ed Miliband's deceased father. It takes a truly breathtaking amount of hypocrisy for a newspaper that is owned by a man who lives abroad for the purposes of dodging tax on the profits, and which openly propagandised for the Nazi party and the British Union of Fascists during the 1930s, to deride as "unpatriotic" a man who fled Europe to escape the Nazis (that Harmsworth's great-grandfather was openly propagandising for), signed up to join the Royal Navy at the first opportunity and lived in the country that adopted him for the rest of his life.
The big question is this: Why should a few press barons be allowed to spread such biased political propaganda and tell people how to vote?
The obvious answer is that they shouldn't, but it suits the agenda of the political establishment to have it that way, because the press barons push the exactly the same neoliberal agenda that the Lib-Lab-Con establishment parties adhere to.
The only ray of hope is that the New Media (comprised of social media and small independent blogs) is providing an ever larger platform for dissent against the neoliberal orthodoxy of the establishment. The potential for the New Media to threaten, or even overthrow, old establishment orders has already been demonstrated time and again in Egypt, Hungary, Italy and Greece. Another great thing about the
New Media is that it is participatory. The New Media allows us to select
the issues we consider important, and to share them with our peers,
instead of passively relying on an oligopoly of newspapers to drip-feed us the
news in their own narrow terms. I believe that it is for precisely these reasons that David Cameron is so keen to introduce censorship of the Internet and of non-profit organisations.
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