The BBC debacle is just part of a much wider malaise

Another week passes by and another debacle for the BBC to deal with. Now, the BBC Director General, George Entwistle, has resigned after Newsnight alleged that a 'top Tory' was involved in child abuse in a children's home in North Wales. The allegation, made on Newsnight by Steve Messham, who was abused whilst in care, wasn't properly researched, and it turned out that Messham hadn't even been shown a photo of the man he thought was his abuser. He was wrong, and he apologised. So far so bad, a sloppy piece of journalism which should never have been aired, and coming on top of the Saville affair it has rocked the BBC from top to bottom.

The BBC has an enduring and important role in our society - Plaque at Alexandra Palace

 
No doubt the enemies of the BBC, including Rupert Murdoch. will be rubbing their hands at the pickle the BBC is in. There are plenty of people who would like to see the end of public broadcasting in the UK. These people are essentially asset-strippers, who seek the privatisation of public services such as the NHS, so that private sector vultures can grab hold of public sector infrastructure and assets, and make easy money from delivering services on long term contracts without any competition - see here. The end of the BBC would mean a bonanza for private sector broadcasters like Rupert Murdoch's Sky.

What has happened at the BBC looks like part of a much wider malaise which includes the Parliamentary expenses scandal, the Libor banking scandal, widespread tax avoidance and tax evasion, and the economic crisis we are in itself. In all these cases people in positions of power, either by virtue of high position or wealth have either failed to maintain expected standards or abused the system for their own benefit. What this indicates is a widespread failure in the system brought about by a toxic mixture of incompetence, corruption, and sheer criminality. What is the cause of this? Well, there will always be people who try to get their fingers in the till, but I believe the main cause is the corrosive and malign influence of neoliberal 'free' market capitalism. This is a get rich quick, devil take the hindmost, beggar my neighbour ideology, which puts profit before people and seeks to destroy collective provision for private gain. We had a wonderful example of this recently when it transpired that a group of GPs had made millions by hiving off NHS services to the private sector. 

If you are wondering what this ideology has to do with institutions that are still wholly in the public domain I can assure you that marketisation and 'free' market ideology is all pervasive in the public sector, thanks to the 'influence' of New Labour and the Coalition. But we need our BBC, and  for all its faults and failures, it still provides far better value for money than its private sector rivals, and acts as a bulwark against the rabid and poisonous propaganda pumped out by private 'news'  stations like Fox - its well worth watching this attack on Owen Jones.  What we need to to do is understand the dangers of this insidious 'free' market political project and work to protect our public services. We also need to re-discover that old fashioned and oft forgotten concept of public service, which some of us still remember, and value.

Footnote: the day after I posted this, an interesting article by Simon Caulkin appeared in the Observer. What Caulkin, who is an award winning commentator on management issues, is arguing is that management has been taken over by 'free' market ideology - worth a read.

While Cameron schmoozes Murdoch, Greeks and Spaniards are fighting austerity

There are thousands of Spanish and Greek workers fighting to defend their jobs against the dead hand of austerity which is threatening to wreck Europe's economies. You would hardly know about this if you followed the mainstream media, which is instead fascinated by David Cameron's schmoozing of the Murdoch empire, and Simon Cowell's string of girlfriends.

Meanwhile, in Spain thousands of miners have been on strike since the end of May, defending their jobs and communities. In time-honoured fashion the Spanish government have unleashed the police who have been given a free hand to break up the strikes and protests leading to violent clashes. In Greece, striking steelworkers have stopped work for 228 days in their fight to protect their jobs.

So why doesn't this make the headlines? Because it doesn't fit with the media agenda which is the modern equivalent of bread and circuses, designed to distract and manipulate us, whilst pandering to the 'free' market neoliberalism of the corporations and their tame politicians. Its OK to report such clashes in the middle east, in places like Egypt,  because that is considered safe, but in Europe such events are not considered to be "newsworthy".

The big event this weekend is the Greek election and its looking like the Eurocrats have managed to turn the screws enough on the electorate to ensure a government which will support the 'memorandum' which is killing the Greek economy, and causing great pain to the Greek people. If New Democracy and its pro-bailout allies can form a government the Greeks will be ground down even further to protect the banks and the Euro vanity project. We can only hope that SYRIZA and its allies can gain enough votes to prevent this from happening. Since the bailout cannot work, a victory for the pro-bailout parties would be based on fear and ultimately fruitless. Either the terms of the bailout must be renegotiated and the debts written off or Greece will have to default anyway. Whatever happens the European Union has been badly damaged by this attempt to make its people pay for the blunders of the ruling 'free' market elite, who are wholly responsible for the current crisis.

Now we know for sure – Britain is a turnip republic

This week we discovered that Rupert Murdoch and his son James knew nothing about the criminal activities that took place in News International, the company they controlled, even though their chief protégé Rebekah Brooks had admitted to a parliamentary select committee as long ago as 2003 that the News of the World (NotW) had paid money to police officers. In fact, in a day of questioning by MPs for the Murdochs, and for ex-senior figures from the Metropolitan Police, Sir Paul Stephenson, and John Yates, we learnt that not one of the people who appeared before the select committees was to blame for the failure to deal with the NotW phone hacking scandal – so that’s all right then.

But it isn’t all right. What we really learnt on Tuesday, including from David Cameron’s flapping speech in Nigeria, is that Britain is run by a collusive class of chums who are well paid to run things but don’t really appear to know what is going on - or is it rather that they choose not to know about certain goings on? Of course, not knowing about wrongdoing may be a defence against criminality but it isn’t a defence against incompetence, complacency, negligence and poor management.

These are the same people, the media moguls who have a corrupting influence on our democracy, the policemen who have lost their moral compass, and the spineless politicians, the very same people who meet at parties in Oxfordshire and posh restaurants in London. The hearings at the parliamentary select committees served to confirm what we already suspected, that Britain is a corrupt society, a turnip republic where people are on the make, driven by power and profit, a society dominated by banks and other capitalist corporations.

But hang on, that’s how it supposed to be isn’t it? This is UK Plc after all, go getting, ‘free’ market Britain, where private gain is good, the market is to be worshiped  and public welfare is old fashioned nonsense. A place where you are meant to trample over others to get to the top, where paying your fair share of taxes makes you some kind of sucker. This neoliberal enslavement of our society to the market, which is  being driven by our ruling capitalist class, and their tame politicians in the mainstream parties, is leading to inevitable economic decline. In other words -  the very people who tell us they can make us all richer are really making us all poorer. And, as we continue to become poorer our society will become more brutal, repressive, corrupt and unequal. As I said in a recent post about Thatcherism and the Arab Spring – as Egypt struggles to become more like us, we are becoming daily more like Egypt’

If we want to live a fair and more equal society we have to tame the market and make everyone pay their fair contribution to our common welfare. We can do this by re-asserting democracy and putting our people at the heart of our economy. To do the latter we need a strong public sector, and a mixed economy where capitalism has largely been replaced by a sustainable social market. The alternative is decline; morally, socially and economically. We have reached a moment in history which is akin to the time when the Roman Empire declined and collapsed. Then, as now, almost no one believed that the collapse was possible but the warning signs were there for all to see.

The phone hacking scandal exposes our sham democracy

I blogged a while ago about our sham democracy, the cosy carve up which means that whoever gets elected, the policies pursued by governments are always the same. The economic crisis caused by the collapse of the banks illustrated this really well, because that crisis lead directly to the sovereign debt crisis, and we have seen that successive governments in countries like Greece and Ireland have toed the party line, and swallowed the neoliberal medicine, to the detriment of the people who elected them. How ironic it is that the electorate in Greece should boot out an incredibly unpopular conservative government, only to replace it with a 'socialist' government which then proves to be even more unpopular, by kow-towing to the IMF and the ECB and introducing yet greater austerity.

So that's how it goes. You have an incredibly unpopular government, you boot it out and elect another government which then goes on to do exactly the same thing. There is only one way to break this cycle - vote for a party which is not neoliberal and has different policies. If that means voting socialist or green - do it!

So what has this all got to do with phone hacking? The essence is that the problems with the banks and Murdoch's media empire are the same - capitalist corporations which have too much power and are out of democratic control. Just as our politicians have ceded power to the banks, they have also ceded it to moguls like Murdoch. News International should never have been allowed to control 40% of the UK press. Sky should never have been allowed to build up a monopoly of satellite TV through exclusive rights to Premier League football. But it was allowed to happen, and in the process our democracy has been undermined and our body politic corrupted. This is what happens when you have unregulated capitalism and 'free' market fanatics in government. The sad reality is that there is no change in sight. Murdoch may have his wings clipped for a while, but the neoliberal juggernaut moves on, crushing decency, democracy and freedom in its path.

I'd just like to finish this post with two pertinent quotes from an article in today's Telegraph (my italics):

"There were those who believed that Murdoch had debased and debauched British public life, and there is indeed great evidence that this was the case. For example, the News of the World was a respectable – if racy – family newspaper before Murdoch brought it under his ownership. As we now know, it converted into a flourishing criminal concern that took an evil pleasure in destroying people’s lives."

"The bitter truth is that no major figure in British public life was prepared to take on and expose the Murdoch newspaper empire. Rival proprietors were silent. Senior public figures did not dare to speak out for fear of exposure and attack in the Murdoch newspapers. This is why, for more than a generation, Rupert Murdoch’s empire has been a spider at the heart of an intricate web that has poisoned British public life. "

Strange it is though that a paper which can see the shortcomings of Cameron and speak with loathing about Rupert Murdoch will be trumpeting the wonders of the 'free' market which is the real engine of inequality, poverty and the corruption it so rightly condemns.