Ed Miliband Reveals His Inner Marxist

It’s always nice to be proven right when making a political prediction, and thanks to Ed Miliband, it’s happened to me once again.  For in last week’s article, I predicted that the Murdoch hysteria would be so great that it would open the door for meddling politicians to initiate entirely unnecessary legislation and unconnected governmental interference.

Hey presto, a week later and we are being told by Ed Miliband, along with a whole host of other left-wing politicians, journalists and bloggers that the Murdoch empire needs breaking up.  Miliband has called for drastic new laws governing media ownership, and slammed Mr Murdoch for having “too much power over British public life.”  Ouch!

First of all, this condemnation may or may not be true, but it has nothing to do with phone hacking.  As we have been told repeatedly over the past few weeks, phone hacking can be performed quite easily by those with the knowhow and the will to do so; it matters not what sort of market share that person commands.  Additionally, any corruption by the Met Police is an issue to do with the integrity of the police force, and has little to do with the size of News Inc and/or News Corp.

So as predicted Miliband et al have been using this scandal to promote an agenda that has nothing to do with the phone hacking saga.  It is also interesting to note that neither Miliband nor Harman (who also condemned Murdoch’s structure as “too powerful and too rich) nor Kinnock (who has this week called for a press entirely regulated by the state) didn’t see a problem with all this when The Sun was supporting Labour from 1997 to 2010.

Yet what all this really shows is Labour’s condescending belief in the Marxist concept of “false consciousness” – the idea that the working masses can be duped by big powerful capitalists and will therefore actively fight against what the Marxists say are their real interests.  This get-out clause has been trotted out time and time again when middle class Marxists discover that the proletariat they claim to be fighting for actually don’t want any of their hard left nonsense.

It is this understanding that underpins Miliband’s attack on the power of Murdoch.  For when he calls Murdoch “too powerful” what he actually means is “too successful.”  For all Murdoch has done to become powerful is to provide news sources that people want to read or watch.  For in the free market the only people who are powerful are those who are successful in continuing to meet the needs and wants of the consumers, who have their own free choice whether or not to buy the product in question.

So when I (along with millions of Brits every day) walk into my newsagent and peruse the morning’s papers, I have a choice.  I can certainly choose to read a Murdoch paper like The Sun or The Times, or I can go for The Daily Mail, The Daily Express, The Daily Telegraph, The Daily Mirror, The Daily Star, The Independent, The Observer, The Guardian or The Financial Times, along with a range of other papers that are perhaps not in wide circulation in the UK such as The Morning Star and The Wall Street Journal.  If I don’t like those choices I can shun newspapers altogether, and get my daily fix from online sites, blogs and Twitter.

Unlike the BBC – which forces taxpayers to fund it whether or not they approve of the service it provides or the views that it presents – the Murdoch Empire cannot force a single penny out of your pocket.  I for one have not purchased a Murdoch paper for years – that is the choice I have made.  Similarly, the people who do buy those papers make their own free choice every day whether or not to buy them, and read the views held inside.

Murdoch is therefore not powerful in the same way the BBC or the government are; he cannot force any money out of your pocket without you first giving it to him via the purchase of one of his products.  The only power he holds is due to the fragile and free relationship between business and each individual consumer that chooses to buy their products.  If people don’t like what is being produced, or are disgusted with the way in which they have gone about their business, they can stop buying the product immediately.  There is nothing forced about this relationship; that is, unless you subscribe to the Marxist view that the masses are nothing by mindless “sheeple” who can be brainwashed at the drop of a hat.

If the law has been broken, then the law should investigate and prosecute those involved.  Yet this should not be used by the left as an excuse to promote some pseudo-Marxist critique of the free market.  Murdoch’s power is nothing more than the fruits of success in providing the people with what they want, and in a modern Britain there should be no politicians slamming anyone for being successful in doing that.

Dunblane Syndrome Strikes Again

So, The News of the World is gone. Yet if you think the high-pitched outrage that has been yelled at you over the last week is over, think again. Not only can we be sure of a constant drip of stories over the coming months, there is also too much political capital at stake for this to just be about getting The News of the World shut down.

For by breaching every code (written and unwritten) of decency, The News of the World have created the kind of public outrage that can be very dangerous if political opportunists are allowed to get their hands upon it – and this is exactly what is happening now. It is reminiscent of a phenomenon that can correctly be termed “Dunblane Syndrome.”

The Dunblane massacre in 1996 triggered spontaneous outrage and grief from the British public. The public mood in the months after the tragedy was emotionally sensitive to say the least, drifting between grief, anger and the desire that “something must be done” to prevent another massacre of innocent schoolchildren.

It was this emotionally taut mood that Tony Blair (at that point Leader of the Opposition) used to push forward his drastic anti-gun legislation. In his 1996 speech to the Labour Party conference, he famously responded to Tory criticisms that he was guilty of emotional blackmail with this sickeningly cheap shot,

“Well, if they had been in that gym, if they had talked to those parents, sitting on the tiny chairs where once their children sat, they would have been emotional too.”

The implication was clear; if you opposed Blair’s gun legislation (which would have done little to prevent Dunblane) then you didn’t care about dead children, or were too ignorant to understand – after all, you hadn’t seen the tiny chairs! The fact that Blair’s visit to Dunblane was a bipartisan visit with the Tories, and therefore they had talked to the parents and seen the tiny chairs, wasn’t allowed to get in the way of Blair’s “passionate” speech.

Say what you like about Blair, the fact is he knew how to get things done, and this was no different. The Tories didn’t want to be seen as people who didn’t care about dead children, and so shut up, and in 1997 the legislation was passed. Fourteen years later and the fact that gun crime has almost doubled, and that we have the highest burglary rates in Europe is still irrelevant – anyone who tries to revoke or change any of those laws will be tarred with not caring about Dunblane. Poor legislation described by the Home Affairs Select Committee at that time as “panic legislation” and that would never have been passed under normal circumstances was allowed through as wily, agenda-driven politicians tapped into an emotionally sensitive atmosphere.

Fast forward fourteen years and we have The News of the World scandal; a scandal that appears to be constantly evolving. It seems that the outcry from this will not be a short thing, but will be long lasting as more and more sordid details are drip fed to the public over the next few months. This opens the door for left-wing politicians and journalists with a grudge against Murdoch (“How dare he be successful and mildly right-wing!”) to steer this outrage to implement far reaching restrictions on press freedom that have nothing to do with the News of the World scandal.

The activities The News of the World engaged in are illegal, and therefore they should be investigated and prosecuted by the police. If there are questions of police corruption (as there were in the 2006 investigation) then it is that is a separate matter and should be looked at. As David Cameron correctly stated (over the hoots and jeers of the hyenas that pass for Labour MPs), now is the time for the rule of law to work and to take its course.

But that isn’t enough for the politicians and journalists looking to use this for their own political purposes. We are hearing the constant refrain that “there must be regulation.” Ignoring the fact that there are already press regulations, one should always be cautious when one hears cries for “regulation.” For “regulation” in and of itself is neither a good nor a bad thing; it is a question of what kind of regulations we are looking at, what specific regulations will be implemented, and what problems will it seek to solve that are the important questions.

Yet in this whipped up emotional frenzy, we will not see any of those questions asked nor answered. Instead, those with a long standing grudge against a successful media empire will call for the law to be bypassed with whatever haphazard, half-arsed, over the top legislation some slapdash committee of MP’s with no clue about journalism have come up with. Then, it will be forced through Parliament, with anyone who objects to it being put down as “not caring” about Milly Dowler, the Soham girls, Gordon Brown’s son and the 7/7 victims.

The big victim of all this will be press freedom – the most fragile of all freedoms, and the first to fall on the long road to tyranny. Dunblane Syndrome strikes again.