Monday 19 December 2016

Never To Ask For Anything?

The biter bit?

Up to a point, yes.

But there have been seven recessions in the United Kingdom since the Second World War.

Five of them have been under Conservative Governments. That party has also presided over all four separate periods of Quarter on Quarter fall in growth during the 2010s.

By contrast, there was no recession on the day of the 2010 General Election.

And now, the Conservatives have more than doubled the National Debt. The Major Government also doubled the National Debt. 

Yet the Conservatives’ undeserved reputation for economic competence endures. They are subjected to absolutely no scrutiny by the fake news detractors of their opponents.

The Murdoch media are among those fake news outlets. But they are far from unique in being so.

Other examples of fake news include the official versions of events in relation to Orgreave, Westland, and Hillsborough.

They include all manner of claims made by, or in support of, the Clintons.  They include the alleged murder of 100,000 military age males in Kosovo.

They include the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and their capacity for deployment within 45 minutes.

They include Saddam Hussein’s feeding of people into a giant paper shredder, and his attempt to obtain uranium from Niger.

They include an imminent genocide in Benghazi, Gaddafi’s feeding of Viagra to his soldiers in order to encourage mass rape, and his intention to flee to Venezuela.

They include an Iranian nuclear weapons programme. And they include Assad’s gassing of Ghouta, as if that were an undisputed fact.

In every case, that was fake news. Or, in plain English, lies.

But only in the case of Hillsborough does the principal guilt lie with a Murdoch enterprise, and even then with only one of them.

In the case of Orgreave, where unlike Hillsborough the obvious truth and the official record remain wildly divergent, the principal guilt for the propagation of falsehood lies squarely with the BBC.

Yes, The Sun is The Bloody Rag of Hillsborough, the hacker of phones, the persecutor of Tom Watson, and the purveyor of pornography from the bottom shelf.

Yes, The Times continues to employ the evil Oliver Kamm.

But does no one on Merseyside have a Sky subscription? If they can tell the difference, then so can everybody else.

There is little or no cause for alarm at Rupert Murdoch’s proposed purchase of the whole of Sky. There is nothing that that purchase would make any worse.

Fox News, by the way, has already been shown in this country for some years.

The suggestion that the BBC is “the Gold Standard” must be rejected as surely as the Gold Standard itself.

The action that is required in order to bring about social justice and economic equality would be impossible under the Gold Standard, just as it is in the eurozone.

The free-floating fiat currencies of sovereign states are necessary, although of course not sufficient, to the true liberty and democracy in which no one is so much richer than anyone else that the latter’s liberties and franchise are effectively meaningless.

Especially, but not exclusively, in the field of news and current affairs, something very similar applies to broadcasters.

Until Jeremy Corbyn emerged as a candidate for Leader of the Labour Party, the BBC ignored all alternatives to neoliberal economic policy and to neoconservative foreign policy.

It still does ignore most of them, while it reports the rest with scorn as part of its fake news agitation for austerity at home and for war abroad.

An important counterweight to that fake news is RT, which is carried by Sky.

Another is George Galloway’s The Mother of All Talk Shows on the talkRADIO that is now owned by Murdoch.

Kevin Maguire has a weekly spot on Sky News.

Murdoch’s newspapers carry regular columns by Matthew Parris and Rod Liddle, whose voices are vital against the New Cold War.

Murdoch needs to give justice in several cases.

And then, he will be able to reach out to the opponents of neoliberalism and neoconservatism on Left and Right as contributors to Sky in general and to Sky News in particular.

Not least, that might be as Independent Directors of Sky News, positions to anything comparable to which they could never aspire at the BBC.

I am not pleased that Donald Trump is going to be President of the United States. But I am very glad that he has prevented Hillary Clinton from becoming President.

Likewise, I would not welcome the domination of this country’s news, current affairs, or indeed entertainment by Rupert Murdoch.

But as Trump is the means whereby a Clinton Presidency has been averted, so Murdoch can be the means whereby domination by the BBC can be rolled back.

In the end, Trump will have been as much to the benefit of the Democratic Party as anything else, and Murdoch will have been as much to the benefit of the BBC as anything else.

3 comments:

  1. Brazen place-seeking by at least one grandee of Corbynism. For how many more are you also speaking?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I have been called some things in my time. But a "grandee of Corbynism" is a new one.

      Delete
    2. And I do look forward to being addressed by Jeremy Corbyn, a Spanish-speaker, as "mi Primo" (my cousin), as all grandees are entitled to be by the monarch.

      Delete