beyondclicktivism

You are at dinner, feeling self-conscious. You haven’t been out in months – it’s a luxury you cannot afford since you struggle weekly to meet your living expenses – but it’s an old friend’s birthday who you haven’t seen in over a year and you’ve been feeling guilty about this.

But you are already regretting your decision.

She has a good job now, earns a high salary, has flash new friends. The restaurant looks uncomfortably expensive.

You decline a starter, pick the cheapest item on the menu as main – ignoring the thought that you could feed yourself for a week for the amount it costs – and ask for a glass of tap water to drink.

No such austerity for her new friends however! They are clearly determined to enjoy themselves: aperitifs, the best wine, starters, side dishes, dessert, coffee, brandy? Why not! Hell, it’s a shame they don’t sell cigars!

“Oh, I’m not really hungry,” you lie several times when queried about your failure to tuck in.

Towards the end of the meal you hide in the bathroom for a few minutes to get away from your empty place setting. This has been one of the most miserable evenings of your life. To add insult to injury, you’re still really hungry.

You return to the table to find people beginning to stand and putting on their coats talking about continuing the evening in an expensive bar. The bill sits in the middle of the table, already smothered in cash. “Don’t worry about calculating it,” your friend explains over her shoulder as she breezes past. “We couldn’t be bothered to work out who had what. We’re splitting it.”

Does this remind you of austerity Britain?

When the coalition government announced that the party was over and we’d all have to pay the bill, writer Neil Root quipped, “What party? Well nobody invited me.”

The phrase “we’re all in this together” was coined by George Osborne while announcing we’d all have to tighten our belts – then he jetted off to go skiing in Klosters.

We are not and we never have been all in this together.

Conservatives – most of whom have never known and will never know what it is like to live in financial dread – love to take the moral high ground when it comes to debt.

The nation’s debt, they tell us, is a bad thing, like personal debt, and must be paid off in full – like a credit card. The homely metaphors of personal finance are intended to disguise the rabidly ideological nature of their policies.

Reflect for a moment on the paradox that they say this, yet their scheme to pay off the deficit involves increasing the personal debt of every household in this country.

They say this, as though personal debt were a bad thing, yet they refuse to back schemes tackling extortionate lenders of personal credit. Indeed, many of them see fit to endorse companies charging interest rates well in excess of 1000%.

They ignore the economic reality that savage cuts are not going to bolster economic growth. Worst still, so far, everything they have done supposedly in the name of saving money turns out to be more expensive than the systems they replace, such as their devastation of further education.

Only a deluded zealot could look at a country in which people are cutting back on food because they cannot afford to meet their basic needs, where thousands risk dying of cold this winter as millions more are plunged into fuel poverty by rising utility prices – and, seeing all this, continue to insist that market forces ensure the best outcomes.

What kind of a sick individual could look at a country in which millions are priced out of home ownership and private rents are soaring then decide that the appropriate response is to cut support to those in social housing, refuse to regulate private landlords and to criminalize squatting?

Each “reform” proposed in the name of saving money turns out in fact to be just another transfer of public wealth into the hands of the profiteers of private enterprise.

This is not about balancing the books – it’s about using a crisis to keep the rich living in luxury even if it means squeezing every last penny out of the rest of us, seeking profit in areas of life that were once immune to the rapacious demands of the market such as health, education and basic social care.

For the privileged in the cabinet, austerity means perhaps only spending ten days skiing in Klosters rather than two weeks. For the rest of us it means eating less because food costs more, not turning our heaters on over winter until it gets too cold to move, walking miles to work because we cannot afford transport.

This is the context in which the hacking scandal has erupted leading Seumas Milne in the Guardian to warn that it has exposed the scale of elite corruption and Reuter’s Political Risk Correspondent Peter Apps to ask is Britain more corrupt than it thinks?

The events of recent weeks have shown quite clearly how Britain is ruled by a small rich elite who know one another socially and who waltz from one position of power into another, each role paying salaries that are unthinkable to most ordinary Britons. These women and men are forever being given second chances when they are caught out with their hand in the till or in more serious misdoings. Even when the outcry at their breaking the law reaches too loud a pitch to be ignored, they are arrested by appointment and at their own convenience.

Right now the whole rotten edifice of corrupt MPs, corrupt police officers and corrupt media owners appears to be falling apart under its own weight.

The question for those opposed to the current government is this: do we hide in the bathroom and try and duck out of the restaurant without paying – hoping enough people follow us to resist the forces of the state – or do we demand those complacently walking away from the table come back and negotiate a fairer deal?

By Tim Hardy

(Screengrab via latentexistence )

Perhaps those who fell over themselves to condemn Jonnie Marbles’ stunt with a foam pie this afternoon, might want to pause and reflect on the bad news the coalition managed to slip out while they were all distracted: distracted by the select committee itself, not the pie that disrupted it.

Cameron’s team recognised that a first step towards the privatisation of the NHS might prove unpopular, especially as it included opening up for competitive tender the supply of wheelchair services for children – so they slipped out the announcement while two generations of Murdoch, patiently coached by public relations experts, were feigning contrition and claiming ignorance about their own companies’ operations. Never ones to waste a good crisis, the press office also took the opportunity to slip out a few more items of bad news.

Doesn’t that make you think, if just for a moment, that the Conservatives aren’t quite as scared of the select committee as one might expect them to be? Or that we are in danger of seeing systemic corruption being ritualistically condemned but with no lasting consequences for those involved?

Billy Bragg summed up the feelings of many on the left when he tweeted:

On the worse day in News Corp history Jonnie Marbles has given The Sun and Fox News the chance to make Rupert Murdoch look like the victim

I understand the frustration and the fear that the left might lose some degree of moral advantage over this – but how can anyone honestly think the Sun and Fox News would ever have taken any other stance?

Murdoch spent the afternoon pretending to be a man on the brink of dotage, baffled and puzzled like an old Mafia Don in the dock hoping to be judged too senile to stand trial.

This is how the Express covered the news that the Met – a body over whom the stench of corruption grows stronger by the day – were dropping charges against many of the Fortnum & Mason 145: Toff Yobs Walk Free Over £5 Million Fortnum Mason Riot.

Do we really need any proof that the right-wing press doesn’t need a foam pie as an excuse to distort the news, defend their interests and smear their enemies?

All Jonnie has done is given the subs desk a pun – but in doing so he has also exposed as a manipulative ruse the “humble pie” the Murdochs were briefed to eat. The role of the clown is to show the ridiculousness of power. This man to whom politicians have frantically paid court for decades has been shown as a fool.

Most people on the right are not as self-importantly pompous as Telegraph bloggers who open breathlessly: ”I write this with shaving foam still spattered on my face and shirt.” If they are angry about the phone hacking, then they are extremely unlikely to feel that a splat of soap washes the Murdoch empire clean of all sins.

Within hours of Jonnie’s arrest, Brooks was running rings around the committee, playing them round her fingers as she kept up the News International party line that combines outrage with denial, always pretending that nobody in charge had any idea what was going on, avoiding the tricky questions as her partners in crime did before her by hiding behind legality when it suits them.

When questioned by Nick Robinson, Jonnie responded by echoing this strategy drawing attention to just how ludicrous it is:

When I asked him what he said and why he’d done it, he said he was now the subject of a police investigation and therefore could not talk to me.

The corruption story is an avalanche that is only gathering momentum. The latest news is that Neil Wallis advised Andy Coulson while the latter was employed by the PM – bringing the allegations closer and closer to the Prime Minister himself. Hundred of jobs have been sacrificed, the names getting closer and closer to the heart of power with Ed Llewellyn lined up as the next sacrifice to protect Cameron but the avalanche just continues. A foam pie won’t stop it.

Day by day, the rotten heart of the police force, of the media and of parliament is becoming more and more apparent. How did this state of affairs continue for so long? Because everything is hidden under a veneer of pomp and decency, creating a climate where supposed political opponents are quite happy to spend their free time sipping champagne together at exclusive private parties; because whatever cat calls ministers might make across the floor when the House is in session, when it comes to the crunch they’re all in it together – and not with us.

Even the PR agency briefing the Murdochs turns out to be intimately connected to the political establishment:

The Edelman team will be run by Alex Bigg, its managing director for corporate affairs, and James Lundie, its managing director of public affairs. Lundie is the long-term partner of David Laws, the former chief secretary to the treasury.

Those rushing to condemn Jonnie Marbles perhaps have more faith in the willingness of the powerful to regulate themselves than I do. What Jonnie did was crude and disrespectful and childish and silly. It mocked that veneer of pomp and decency behind which crimes are hidden daily – which is exactly why it was needed.

By Tim Hardy

There was a collective intake of breath on social media this afternoon.

The News of the World was dead.

A million tiny sling shots appeared to have brought down Goliath. Clicktivism – as those who like to dismiss online activism call it – had killed a giant.

As the dust settled, doubts began.

What had we done? And was it us who did it?

It was clear from the pressure on News International that someone was going to be sacrificed before the end of the week but I was wrong when I stated that it would be Brooks. Coulson, forced out of his job twice already, is tipped for arrest tomorrow morning.

I had also completely underestimated Murdoch’s ruthlessness.

Two hundred workers, many of whom joined long after the phone hacking era, have lost their jobs. The management – notably Brooks – has walked away scott free.

News of the World is down but the guilty are still at large.

But do we have what it takes to continue the battle?

Many on the left are already feeling qualms about their participation in the campaign because of the redundancies. Good people sometimes have no choice but to work for bad companies. Older people with dependents and financial obligations in particular may prefer to work for a bad newspaper than not to work at all. There are very few jobs out there and if you work in the media, there are very few decent papers. Does that excuse them for working for organisations that have, for example, contributed to the vilification of those on benefits that they may now find themselves joining? Possibly not. But it would be a particular hard-hearted and privileged form of leftist thinking that denied any sympathy for them at all.

If nothing else, now is the time for people on the left to reach out in solidarity and offer suggestions as to how they might organise and fight back as the NUJ are doing. Already the Sun sub-editors have walked out in the kind of wildcat action their paper would have condemned just yesterday to show solidarity with their colleagues.

But this battle was not fought exclusively by the left and my fear now is that if we hesitate Cameron’s propaganda team will be back to their tricks within days.

The outrage at the allegations against News of the World crossed all parties. Before the claim that Milly Dowler’s phone had been hacked and voicemails deleted, this was a story dismissed even by many on the left as irrelevant. Afterwards, even the Telegraph’s Peter Oborne was ready to condemn it, declaring David Cameron is in the sewer for his association with those involved.

This campaign was fuelled by widespread outrage and contained all the hallmarks of the kind of tabloid witch-hunt editors like Brooks have grown rich by inciting: child killers, terrorists and dead soldiers.

That Cameron, normally so shrewd at judging the public mood, failed to take a convincing stand shows how much he is in debt to the Murdoch empire.

It wasn’t just twitter and facebook than brought down the paper. It was old media too, notably the Guardian, and a handful of determined and bloody minded MPs. But online campaigns were essential because they operated in the medium where companies are most vulnerable in our society: the domain of the brand and of brand reputation. A twitter storm of potential and existing customers scared the advertising money away from next weekend’s newspaper.  The final edition will carry no adverts because only a small number of already toxic names like Tescos and Vodafone were still willing to be associated with the paper.

Like a general trying to contain a contagious outbreak, Murdoch has sacrificed the entire organisation in an attempt to quarantine the disease and pin all the blame on that one newspaper even though those responsible for running the editorial desk are still at large.

The danger is that his tactic will work and that many will abandon the campaign now.

Unless we keep the pressure up, the newsagents will be stocking red-topped pages of Two Minute Hate again within days as if nothing had changed.

However hard it is for us on the left, we cannot allow ourselves to be deterred when men like Murdoch use workers as human shields and fall on one another in condemnation for putting people out of work. We did not put these people out of work. Murdoch put them out of work. Our anger should be turned on him, on Brooks, on Cameron, not on each other.

Ed Miliband has finally shown leadership over this issue and rightfully continues to demand that Brooks be fired. But as those wildcat strikers at the Sun and the sacked News of the World employees are discovering, this is more than a question of vile and unforgivable intrusions on the private lives of individuals. Brooks’ head will not be enough either.

News of the World are just one rotten part of a rotten media empire that corrupts debate and promotes an agenda of hatred and ignorance, an empire that is inextricably linked to David Cameron and the Conservative Party, an empire that supports and is supported by a corrupt police force that puts the interests of the rich and powerful before any idea of justice.

We must not let up. This campaign now has momentum. It will take less effort to keep it going than it took to start.

Now is not the time for regrets, for recriminations, for the factionalism for which the left is infamous. Now is not the time to hesitate. Now is the time to escalate.

As in every horror movie you have ever seen, the monster is not dead. We need to shoot it in the head.

By Tim Hardy

By the end of the week, maybe as early as tomorrow, Rebekah Brooks will have resigned and News International and the coalition will hope to draw a line under events.

We cannot let this happen.

The allegation that News of the World hacked and deleted messages from the voicemail of Milly Dowler is so obscene that it has stirred to action even those who found the previous allegations of voicemail hacking a dull, single-issue, minority obsession.

However close the friendship between Cameron and Wade, she will be considered an acceptable sacrifice, as Coulson was before her, if the Conservative strategists think dropping her will allow them to reward Murdoch for his support.

There is a police investigation into hacking allegations … they should investigate this without any fear, without any favour, without any worry about where the evidence should lead them.

They should pursue this in the most vigorous way that they can in order to get to the truth of what happened.

That is the absolute priority as a police investigation.

That a Prime Minister should have to suggest the police carry out their duties without fear of where the evidence should lead, that this would ever need to be stated, speaks volumes about the habitual failure of British justice. It is a coded message that the guilty will no longer be protected.

But the problem goes far, far deeper than News of the World and the Murdoch empire, the Conservative Party and the corruption of the British police – although all are implicated.

Dan Hind sees the problem as that of a media that has failed:

 The British media in their current form can neither regulate themselves or report adequately on their own activities. These failures must be added to their demonstrable inability to describe the broad outlines of the economic system in the run-up to the crisis of 2007-8, and their failure to expose the government’s manipulations and deceits in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The media’s collective failure to describe themselves accurately is of a piece with their failure to describe the wider world of power to which they belong.

The BBC in particular stands revealed as an institution without an investigative function. Though it receives more than £3 billion annually and claims its mission is ‘to enrich people’s lives with programmes and services that inform, educate and entertain’, it has consistently been unable to provide an accurate account of reality when powerful forces are arrayed against it.

Dan Hind, The Limits of Acceptable Controversy

The BBC certainly proved poor value for money on 26 March. Their distorted vision of events has been seized on by the Met, poor journalism standing in for genuine intelligence, because it advances the agenda of a politicised police force that seeks an end to the right to protest and demands, like Joe McCarthy, that we denounce one another.

On 29 March, Lynne Owens, assistant commissioner of the Met, gave oral evidence to the Commons Home Affairs select committee:

Q16 Mr Clappison: I saw a report in a Sunday newspaper, I have to say, about coverage that the BBC had given to UK Uncut before this took place. Do you have any view on that?

Lynne Owens: We have the BBC coverage and it will form part of our case.

Q17 Mr Clappison: I think the comment was BBC giving publicity to UK Uncut in advance of the demonstration and interviewing them about what they intended to do and so forth.

Lynne Owens: I haven’t seen that part of the footage. I did think it was interesting last night that there was a spokesperson for UK Uncut, who appeared on Newsnight, who was not prepared to condemn the violence and indeed suggested that they were, rather than one movement, just a group of individuals. I think that is a different stance from that which we are seeing reported in some media today, and of course as the Metropolitan Police Service we would always condemn violence and would hope that other people who wanted to peacefully protest would do likewise.

Owens ignored MPs repeated concerns that the police had lied to protesters. At present, the police are attempting to deny video evidence of their own dishonesty in arresting UK Uncut protesters at Fortnum & Mason on 26 March.

Contrary to what Lynne Owens claims, the Metropolitan Police Service are pretty slow to condemn violence when it’s by their own – and sections of the press are always too happy to carry their lies to protect them as happened after Ian Tomlinson was murdered at the G20 protests.

What News of the World have done marks a new low.

But every single day, the majority of the press pushes out a torrent of right-wing lies, attacking first the disabled, then people on benefits, then strikers, then the working poor. And they get away with it. And their repeated lies become reality, a consensus of opinion in which most swim making debate too often a matter of stating tribal affiliation not a search for truth. They back the rich and the powerful and enable the daily assault on our lives.

Rebekah Brooks will resign. Someone might go to prison.

The politicians, the police, the media owners will think that this marks the end of it and that we will forget.

We must not let this happen.

By Tim Hardy

Tabloid newspapers have a long history of attacking the most vulnerable.

No wonder David Cameron is proud to count their editors among his closest friends and eager to use their ex-employees to craft his lies.

But the latest accusations against News of the World show a new low even for them.

News of the World journalists intercepted – and deleted – the voicemail messages of Milly Dowler.

The messages were deleted by journalists in the first few days after Milly’s disappearance in order to free up space for more messages. As a result friends and relatives of Milly concluded wrongly that she might still be alive. Police feared evidence may have been destroyed.

Guardian, Missing Milly Dowler’s voicemail was hacked by News of the World

Over the last couple of months, disabled rights groups and activists like Disabled People Against Cuts and the Broken of Britain, benefits claimants vilified by the Daily Mail and others have been looking for a way to fight back against the bullies of the Fourth Estate.

We have discussed the idea of hitting the worst of the red tops where it hurts: in the wallet.

Boycotting a paper is no good if you don’t read it in the first place. But you can still take action that will hurt them financially.

Newspapers engage in vile practices to make money and that money comes from advertising revenue, not the cover price.

Contact the companies that advertise in the News of the World requesting that they withdraw their adverts and you will hurt these disgusting individuals more than stern words from an ombudsman will ever do.

Targeting advertisers works. The Stop Beck campaign in the US managed to convince more than 300 advertisers not to place ads on Glenn Beck’s Fox show, leading to its cancellation.

Sadly none of us have had the time to get this idea off the ground and build a campaign structure.

But it can no longer wait.

People on twitter, some inspired by a tweet from Simon Bradshaw, have already begun identifying and contacting companies that advertise with News of the World including Virgin Wines, PC World, Comet, Cadbury, Halifax and T-Mobile.

As many people as possible need to contact these companies and ask them to reconsider their tacit support through advertising for a newspaper that acts this way. By sharing the names and contact details of companies who advertise in it, we can work together to put a stop to these practices.

At the same time, why not join Avaaz in telling Jeremy Hunt to stop Rupert Murdoch’s power grab? News of the World is just one face of a media empire with a malign influence.

If you’re free on Friday afternoon, join @cantstopanidea and Rage Against The Murdoch. Facebook groups discussing actions include Boycott News Of The World and News Of The World’s treatment of Milly Dowler’s family is sickening.

The gutter press is out of control. Cameron will not do anything against his friends. Labour were happy to collude with them when they were in power. We cannot wait for politicians to tackle this. It’s up to us to stop it.

[Edit: See The campaign for an advertiser boycott of NotW at Liberal Conspiracy for updates on news and ways to get involved.]