Press Regulation and Parliamentary Sovereignty

This article of mine appears in the London Progressive Journal:

Patriotism is meaningless unless it extends to active participation in the fight against each and all of the threats to our sovereignty, to our liberty, and to our parliamentary and municipal democracy. Whether from the Executive or the Judiciary, from the European Union or the US, from Israel or the Gulf monarchs, from China or the Russian oligarchs, from money markets or media moguls, from separatists or communalists, from over-mighty civil servants or over-mighty local government officers, from anything or anyone whatever.

Therefore, you simply cannot, by definition, believe in national and parliamentary sovereignty while having any truck with Rupert Murdoch. The Press in this country has not been free since the day that Murdoch, a kind of state in himself, was first allowed to own any of it. And it may have taken him some 50 years, but, without realising it, he was always going to bring about its statutory regulation in addition to, indeed in an attempt to correct, that erosion of our sovereignty, liberty and democracy which is effected, exemplified and embodied by the simple fact of his ownership of media interests in the United Kingdom.

In any case, the powers that be in this country can only ever be delighted for so long, and one day, they were no longer going to find him amusing. That day has arrived. Ownership was outside Leveson's remit. So he said nothing about the thing that really matters. In that case, let Parliament act instead. It seems to have regrown its spine at last.

Anyone who really believed in the Freedom of the Press would, if eligible, have signed EDM 1334 (look it up, if you have to), and would be supporting Jonathan Ashworth's campaign from the Labour Whips' Office for Departments of State to take this country's original anti-EU newspaper. That newspaper was entirely excluded from David Cameron's post-Leveson paying of court to what looked for all the world like the real Cabinet.

If the members of the Press are only doing what we are all free to do, then they do not need a Press Gallery. They should just have to take their chance at getting into the Public Gallery like everyone else. But they are not, so they do, and they shouldn't. Certain additional conditions therefore apply to what are not their rights, but their privileges. Whichever conditions Parliament chooses to impose, in fact.

Like the registration of newspapers with the Post Office, the Parliamentary Lobby is already a form of the apparently feared "State licensing", which is nothing remotely new in this country in the modern era. The publications granted Parliamentary Lobby access should be required to be balanced among themselves, even if not necessarily within themselves.

Subject to that condition, such access should be enjoyed by all and only those publicly certified for the purpose by one or more seat-taking members of the House of Commons, or possibly of either House, whose staffs would enjoy no less access to the Palace of Westminster than that enjoyed by members of the Lobby. After all, who is in charge? Who is sovereign?

Along with the million pound fines and so on, which proprietors would pay once but not twice, so that editors who repeatedly incurred them would merely render themselves unemployable, let MPs say, entirely correctly, that getting this sort of thing through is what the Parliament Act is for, and that the European Courts can just clear off, exactly as the newspapers in question have been saying for years. Do you believe in the sovereignty of the Parliament of the UK? Or do you not?

Pejorative Labelling – It Matters

As Rod Liddle explains:

Very good report from Channel Four/Telegraph reporter Alex Thomson in Syria. This is about the use of ‘chemical weapons’ by one side in the civil war. Except, it seems, there are not simply two sides in the civil war any more. First the Brit journos stopped calling it an ‘Arab Spring’, given that the rebels in all these Arab countries have been doing unSpringlike things. And now, it seems, there is a brave and noble rebel force – and also something different called ‘Jihadis’. ‘Finger points at Jihadis over chemical attack’ was the Telegraph headline. Who they, ed? The suggestions seems to be that these mysterious ‘jihadis’ are somehow separate from the rebel forces, that the rest of them are not Jihadis at all, but consensual social democrats with a very strong line on hate crimes, especially homophobia. But that’s not how it is, is it? It never has been. The rebels have used ‘chemical weapons’, and there’s an end to it. This nomenclature stuff is important, it is the means by which we delude ourselves.

But then again, to be fair, ‘chemical weapons’? More deceptive nomenclature. What these ‘Jihadis’ used was CL17, a chlorinate swimming pool cleaner. Not VX, not Tabun or Sarin. Not even Yperite or Phosgene. We work ourselves up about ‘chemical weapons’ because they are part of another deluding bit of labelling – ‘weapons of mass destruction’. In this case, the gas attack killed 26 people – which is horrible, of course. But far, far, more could have been killed by the sorts of powerful incendiaries possessed by western armed forces, weapons which are not considered to be of ‘mass destruction’. That, again, was the labelling we used to begin a war against Iraq. And the Iraqis were deemed to possess only the PRECURSORS for these WMD. So do I, in my garden shed. So does my local council, with its swimming pool cleaner. Keep an eye on this sort of stuff, this pejorative labelling – it matters.

Voruyut

Peter Hitchens writes:

What should we think about Boris Berezovsky?

The strange fuss over the death of Boris Berezovsky reminds me that I’m planning to offer a defence of Vladimir Putin to an Oxford student society in late April. This will without doubt be similar to the articles I have written here in the past, that is to say, fully accepting all the criticisms of Mr Putin and his methods, while pointing out that he is by no means unique in these faults, but that Western governments, diplomats and media are surprisingly uninterested in the comparable wickedness of the Oil and Gas states of the former Soviet Empire, such as Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan, and indeed of those countries which have offered us base facilities and other help in the alleged ‘War on Terror’, such as Uzbekistan. As I say so often, selective moral condemnation is not in fact moral condemnation at all, it’s propaganda for the gullible.   If a principle isn’t universal, it’s not a principle. So you’ll have to look for another reason.

But I was struck by the near-assumption that there must be something fishy about Mr Berezovsky’s death. Maybe there was. But given the uninterest of the police in investigating so many deaths, and the blank inability of the media to spot the growing correlation between the taking of so-called ‘antidepressants’ and suicide, a correlation so strong that even doctors and drug firms warn that some of these pills cause suicidal tendencies, the huge concentration of state resources on this one, without any apparent material justification, was striking. I’m always glad of police thoroughness. But when it’s selective, one has to ask why. Anyway, I’ve provided links here to a selection of my past articles on this interesting subject, here, here and here; and, for an examination of the Western media’s skewed and selective reporting of Russian misdeeds, here.

I obviously have no idea how Mr Berezovsky died, and a Christian must regret the death of anyone, all having the chance of repentance and grace up to the very last moment. But I think it fair to say that Mr Berezovsky did a lot of things that really were not very nice. The allegations  published today about his sexual life are, how shall I say, unattractive. Nor can they be said, if true, to have been victimless. But these are not the reason why Mr Berezovsky, and people like him, are unloved in modern Russia, and will be unmourned by most people when they die.

He is closely associated with the riot of theft and corruption which overtook that poor country in the years of Boris Yeltsin. How I now regret being taken in by Mr Yeltsin when he posed as the great foe of corruption and tyranny, one of the sternest lessons of my life. I learned how easy it is to be taken in, if you want to be. Millions of Russians regard Mr Berezovsky as a straightforward thief. I will leave readers to study his obituaries and see if those Russians have a case. Those years are the reason why so many Russians turn the Russian word for ‘Democracy’ (Demokratiya) into a bitter, obscene snarl (Dermokratiya) which translates, unprintably , as ‘The Rule of ****’. The asterisks conceal a word normally used to refer to excrement. They were also the reason why, in 1996, six years after throwing off the Communist yoke, the misgoverned and in many cases impoverished Russian people came very close to electing Gennady Zyuganov, a Communist, as their President.  Mr Berezovsky and his fellow-oligarchs spent huge piles of money to save Boris Yeltsin from defeat by Zyuganov, and of course collected their rewards afterwards.

Yeltsin was grotesquely corrupt. His regime was incompetent and brutal, not least in Chechnya. Unlike the Communist coup plotters of August 1991,  who crumbled rather than actually use serious violence, Yeltsin did in fact order tanks to fire on the Russian parliament building in September 1993. But the Western world, regarding him as a friend, overlooked these problems because he did not assert Russian national pride or sovereignty abroad. It is because Mr Putin has asserted these things, and in fact become the most significant defender of the concept of national sovereignty, that the modern globalist elite loathe him so and work so hard for his overthrow (as achieved in Ukraine and Georgia), probably by a smiley-face mob of manipulated ‘idealistic’ young people, who have no idea whose interests they really serve .

As I wrote more than a year ago:  ‘Nor is Putin’s frosty rule comparable to the gangster chaos of Boris Yeltsin – a drunken, debauched disaster that reduced millions of Russians to selling their personal possessions on the street to stay alive. It is not just me saying this. The distinguished Russian film director Stanislav Govorukhin – whose devastating documentary “We Can’t Go On Living Like This” helped end the communist era – is now working for Putin. He recalls that the Yeltsin era was "a thieving outrage, open plunder. Billions were stolen, factories and whole industry sectors. They destroyed and stole, they ground Russia into dust". But, now, he says, "we have returned to 'normal', 'civilised' corruption." This is, on the face of it, an astonishing thing to say. But most Russians readily understand it. Their country, almost always subject to absolute power, has been corrupt from its beginning. One of the greatest of pre-revolutionary Russian historians, Nikolai Karamzin, asked to sum up the character and story of his country and people, replied with just one word "Voruyut" – "They steal".’

In the light of this, British policy towards Putin’s Russia seems more than a trifle odd. We seem almost to want to pick fights with the Kremlin despite having, as far as I know, no major national conflicts of interest with Russia – rather the contrary, as if we ever do decide to quit the EU, good relations with Russia will be rather important. Not to mention our ever-growing need for imported gas. My old friend Edward Lucas, of The Economist speaks incessantly of a ‘New Cold War’. I might, in retaliation, refer to this belief as ‘a dismaying lapse’ by an otherwise admirable and perceptive commentator, as he once used this phrase to describe an article by me which challenged the ‘New Cold War’ thesis rather directly. Read it here).

But I won’t do that. Russia has many faults, but they don't mean that Russia is our enemy. If we disapprove, rightly, of Russia's lawlessness and lack of freedom, we should show our superiority by fighting to defend the rule of law, and liberty, in our own country, where they are directly threatened and we can by our own actions save them. I just think that, like many conservatives left stranded by the end of the Cold War, like fishing boats in the dried up Aral Sea, he finds the idea of a continuing conflict with the wicked and sinister Kremlin reassuring, and the alternative possibility - that our supposed ‘allies’ may not in fact be our friends at all - very hard to contemplate. I know how he feels, and often hate the conclusions towards which fact and logic drive me. But I still think he’s wrong.

How Can This Be?

In Lebanon, today's Solemnity of the Annunciation is a public holiday, because it unites the Christians and the Muslims, which latter also believe that Jesus was Virgin-born and the Messiah promised by the earlier prophets.

But it is certainly not a public holiday in Nazareth, which is now in a State founded and run by people who, even on the rare occasions when they believe in God, adhere to the Talmudic view that Our Lady was a prostitute.

That State is already firing into Syria in order to support the Islamist invasion and insurrection that have in recent days, more or less directly, brought down a Lebanese Government including Christians and Shi'ites while headed by a decidedly un-Islamist Sunni.

Our Lady of Mount Lebanon, and Saint Maron, pray for them, one and all.

No Confidence

Probably a third, and certainly a quarter, of the members of the ATL will have voted Conservative even in 2010. Half or more would have been open to persuasion in that direction until Michael Gove came along. Few, if any, will do so in 2015, because of Michael Gove, the first Education Secretary in whom it has ever passed a Motion of No Confidence. No militants, they.

Anyone who really believed in "The Blob" would be mentally ill. That would certainly make Gove more interesting than the only other thing that he shows any sign of being: one of Rupert Murdoch's creations ex nihilo, all as thick as two short planks, but utterly convinced of their own brilliance and entitlement, and more than happy, insofar as they understand what is being done, to go along with the fabrication of myths of their rapier-like intellects, their voracious reading, their broad culture, their scintillating conversation, their irresistible charm, their staggering capacity for work, their dazzling originality of thought, and so on.

Margaret Thatcher. Tony Blair. George W Bush (although no one was ever daft enough to believe such things about him, but courtiers such as Andrew Roberts do still try and make these claims for him, even now). Michael Gove. The unutterable decline of British political journalism has never been more apparent than in the rave reviews for Gove's execrable performance on last week's Question Time. He could have read out the telephone directory and his own kind would have hailed him as a genius. Evidently, next to most of them, he is.

But the ATL is wrong to compare Gove's schools policy to the privatisations of the 1980s, disastrous though those have undoubtedly proved, with a cold March threatening to turn off our gas supply at any moment. No, what Gove is doing is creating a network of nationalised schools, answerable only to the Secretary of State. Does it never occur to him or to his supporters the power that that will hand to the next, Labour Secretary of State for Education? No, of course not.

No wonder that the Blairites came up with these schemes in the first place, but could not get them past a party which still had a municipal base, and 50 per cent of the members of which were teachers. The keenness of that Blairite ultra, Stephen Twigg, is, in his own terms, entirely understandable. Meaning that he should no more be in his job than Liam Byrne ought to be in his.

Hold Our Line

9th July 2011, well within the lifetime of the present Parliament, saw the publication of a devastating report into the failed privatisation of the East Coast Main Line.

Away with all talk of repeating the folly.

A New Challenge

Owen Jones writes:

Sometimes it seems as though British politics is one grand cartel, or a gentleman’s agreement, if you like. Certain questions will not be asked; opposition often amounts to quibbling over the finer details or nuances of a policy, or the competence of its delivery.

Austerity is a given, though its speed and scale may be queried; all agree on selling chunks of our public services to private sector vultures, though the extent may be challenged; the fact our workers have some of the worst rights in the Western world, that large corporations sitting on a cash pile worth £750bn are expected to pay less and less, that our banks are bailed out with the public’s dosh but are not under our control – none of this is seriously questioned.

If this cartel is ever disrupted, it is from the right. Ukip has surged in part because of a widespread sense that the political establishment are all in it together, to coin a phrase. Hard-right pressure groups like the Taxpayers Alliance out-flank the Conservatives, and in doing so drive the nation’s political conversation ever rightwards.

With the help of supposed newspaper reporters – in reality, often thinly veiled Government propagandists – the Tories have ruthlessly redirected growing anger at ever-tumbling living standards towards our neighbours: people thrown out of work, people who still have intact pensions, disabled people suspected of inventing their conditions for benefits, and so on. The latest target are immigrants. New arrivals will be barred from joining council housing waiting lists – which most are stuck on for years as it is – for up to five years. We have a scandalous shortage of council housing. Up to five million people languish on waiting lists. But the fault lies squarely with both the Tories and New Labour for selling off stock and failing to replace it. Convenient, then, to conjure up the spectre of the scrounging foreigner instead.

Well, the great British political cartel now faces a new challenge. On Tuesday, I’ll be helping to launch the People’s Assembly with Green MP Caroline Lucas, my fellow Independent columnist Mark Steel, disability rights campaigner Francesca Martinez, Labour MP Katy Clark, and leading trade unionists. The aim of the Assembly is to unite all opponents of the horror show being inflicted on this country. On 22 June, there will be a 3,500-strong meeting at Westminster Central Hall, but in the meantime, I and others will be touring the country, encouraging local groups to be set up in every town and city.

Here’s the rationale for the Assembly. It is unacceptable that – five years on from the near-collapse of the global financial system – there is no broad anti-austerity movement. In a week’s time, the British poor will face the biggest organised mugging in generations, with the bedroom tax, cuts to working people’s tax credits, council tax benefit, housing benefit, and so on. Each year, the average Briton is poorer than the last. “Now is the period when the cost is being paid,” said Mervyn King, and that was two years ago. “I’m surprised the real anger hasn’t been greater than it has.”

There’s actually plenty of anger out there, but there’s something else missing. It was the US politician Harvey Milk who said: “I know that you cannot live on hope alone but, without it, life is not worth living.” Anger without hope tends to amount to despair, frustration and resignation – and that is what has to change.

Inevitably, such an initiative will have to plough through a fair amount of cynicism from both left and right. Put “left” into a sentence including “piss-up” and “brewery”, and few would disagree. But this isn’t going to fall into the trap of being a recruitment exercise for some obscure sect with newspapers to flog. It’s being driven by a formidable coalition of unions such as Unite, Unison and PCS, representing millions of workers in both the private and public sector; Labour activists and the Green Party; campaigners for disabled people, tax justice, women, BME people; and people frankly who are just stranded and without a political home. It’s not the 867th attempt to set up yet another doomed left-wing party, but a movement that will nonetheless fill a chasm in British politics.

This has implications for the Labour leadership, of course. It’s not as if there haven’t been any other determined attempts to challenge austerity: like huge strikes by teachers, health workers, bin collectors and other public-sector workers; two huge TUC-organised demonstrations against austerity; and the efforts of campaigners, such as tax avoidance crusaders UK Uncut. But there has been no sustained, permanent movement to take on the whole austerity consensus. Most pressure on Labour’s leaders comes from the right. But the appetite for a far more confident, courageous voice of opposition to the Tories’ ideological hijacking of the financial crisis exists. It will now be satisfied.

The Tories have counted on opposition being too fragmented to withstand their shock-and-awe offensive. But in doing so they have inadvertently created a potentially formidable coalition. There may be no end in sight for Britain’s depressing icy winter, but it’s springtime for opposition to the nightmare of austerity. The People’s Assembly offers the one thing missing from British politics: hope.