Naked class warfare in the wake of the UK revolt

22 August 2011. A World to Win News Service. By Geoffrey Scott, London.



Following the four days of rebellion that shook Great Britain last week in the wake of the police killing of a young Black man, Mark Duggan, the British state has unleashed a wave of repression whose severity has not been seen here in many years.



Almost 2,000 people have been arrested, and the police have announced that they hope to grab up as many as a thousand more from surveying CCTV footage. Most of the charges are the kind that would not result in detention, and still less in jail terms, in ordinary times. But the Magistrate's courts have been working 24 hours a day after the upheaval and handing out three and four-month terms and worse in the name of restoring "law and order". About half of those arrested have been sent over to the Crown courts, which alone have the authority to issue sentences of more than six months.



So far 138 youth under age 18 (legally children in England) have been sent to prison. The anonymity usually granted juveniles has been lifted by special order. The average age of those convicted in London is 19, and only one-third are being granted bail, instead of the usual 90 percent in Magistrate's court. Jails and longer-term prisons are full to bursting, with 723 new inmates in the week before 19 August alone.



Some sentences and administrative punishment measures against the families of those convicted have been so extreme that even staunch international law-and-order media like The New York Times have warned the British government about the "long-term impact" of "excessive sentences for minor offences" and "collective punishment" that could discredit it, warning that this might look like a war of the upper classes against the lower.



Some of the more outrageous sentences include: Nicholas Robinson, a 23-year-old Londoner who took a case of bottled water worth 3.5 pounds from a looted store was given six months in jail. Some were sentenced for little more than being present. Three young women from Croydon with no criminal records got six month sentences for "burglary" solely because they entered a store, even though they were not accused of taking anything. Michael Fitzpatrick, an 18-year-old from Manchester, was sentenced to 28 months in jail for going into a store, touching (but not taking) a pair of trainers and sipping from a stolen champagne bottle. The 48-year-old Thomas Downey from the same city was given 18 months for taking doughnuts from a looted chain store. A teenager is to appear for sentencing to custody next week for eating two scoops of ice cream. Another was given nine months for taking a pack of chewing gum.



Even longer sentences are being given to those accused of encouraging others. Jordan Blackshaw and Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan, who allegedly posted calls on Facebook to go out and "riot", were each given four years in prison for "encouraging the commission of a serious offence" – even though no one but the police showed up at the place and time they mentioned. Four years is the average prison term in the UK for sexual assault, and 47 months the average term for kidnapping. The contrast speaks for itself: almost none of those arrested are accused of causing bodily harm, and many are not accused of any kind of violence at all, and yet their "crime" – rebellion against the police and the established order and lack of respect for private property – is considered almost as bad as rape and kidnapping. The British authorities are making this point explicit by announcing that many offenders are to be paraded in their communities in orange jumpsuits, evoking Guantanamo, as if they were "terrorists".



UK Prime Minister David Cameron calls this repression the "fightback". Clearly what is in question is the existing social order. At times like these, when that order is even slightly threatened, the British state, like any other capitalist state, goes a long way towards dropping its usual "democratic" rhetoric. In response to criticism, Cameron denounced "phoney human rights concerns", and the state is purposely displaying the violence on which the capitalist dictatorship rests.



Politicians, authorities and the mainstream media have tried to cut off coverage and discussion of the police killing that set off the rebellion, as if it had no political and social content and could simply be written off as "a shopping riot". But on 17 August the police once again blatantly demonstrated their role as the system's violent enforcers of injustice when they entered the home of the unarmed Dale Burns, a 27 year-old father of two, sprayed him with pepper gas and applied Taser electric shocks to him three times in quick succession, until he died.



What was this rebellion about?



It is undeniable that most of the youth were involved in breaking into shops, particularly chain stores, and taking petty consumer items. But the first building destroyed was not a store, but a police solicitors' office in Tottenham, a conveyor belt in the railroading of the youth into the criminal justice system. The office was located only a few hundred meters from where Mark Duggan was gunned down in cold blood.



Consider the story told by Police Constable Paul Warner, who was on the front lines in Tottenham, when the rebellion first erupted. "They were hurling everything they could at us, bricks, bottles, scaffolding, poles, the lot. I have been in some public order situations before but I have never seen anything like this... This was the first time that I have felt that level of malice towards us. There was real hate." (Evening Standard 12 Aug) The Guardian headlined a two-page spread on the righting in London's Hackney Central area, "What did they want? To fight the police". Everywhere, from Birmingham to Croydon, police told tales of being attacked fiercely every time that they were outnumbered by the youth. Anyone who was in the streets, or even saw the video footage, knows that's true. If all the youth wanted was to loot, why did they risk imprisonment to fight collectively for something that promised such little material gain?



Another side of the anti-police spirit that drove these events is that during the four nights of rebellion there was an almost total end to fighting between local gangs. Gang members spoke openly about how they suddenly felt themselves free to roam into neighbourhoods that had always been off limits to them, as they united in the face of the larger enemy. Locals from Tottenham's Broadwater Farms Estate recounted a meeting held there to declare an ongoing truce between gangs.



The liberal media declaration that this revolt was nothing but "a shopping riot" has been accepted even by some people who consider themselves enlightened. This is hypocritical. After all, the youth were hitting back at a whole set of invisible chains that lock them out of a consumer society where, they are told in a thousand ways, what you own is the only source of status and meaning. Great Britain's great wealth, like that of all the imperialist and monopoly capitalist countries, is rooted in a system that has looted the entire planet, exploiting people everywhere and destroying the environment. Why should taking a bottle of wine or a flat screen TV be considered morally repugnant to the rulers of such a system? Why indeed, except insofar as it threatens an order based on private property, one whose routine “legal” functioning makes the means of producing and extracting the world's wealth the private property of a handful of exploiters who can only use it against the interests of the people and the planet?



Further, how can anyone who cares about a morality in the service of humanity not be nauseated when these youth, who are not running society or anything else and are not responsible for the mess that has been made of the UK and the world, are lectured on values and called all sorts of names by an establishment that over and over again, with the MPs expenses scandal and the Murdoch phone hacking scandal, has been shown to care about nothing but power and profit, and whose highest good is personal gain? Lower level police have been shown to be corrupt by the phone hacking scandal, as they took bribes for turning over confidential information about celebrities, royals and crime victims to the media. But few people have applied the word corruption to the Labour and Conservative Party and police and other top officials whose political and personal intimacy with magnates like Rupert Murdoch are simply considered normal relations of mutual benefit. Yet now they criticize people who have to go out and get their own loot instead of having it delivered. How can these people even talk about "the rule of law" while Great Britain's powerful have shown time and time again that even their own laws mean nothing to them when there is money to be made, political careers to be advanced – and potential threats to that order to be repressed?



These people have shown that they are not fit to rule.



Economic crisis a factor – but not the only one



Government ministers have been denouncing the "rioters" as "parasites" who "live on the taxpayers' money", "refusing to work", and who are now “biting the hand that feeds them”, and they have called for those convicted and even their families to be cut off state benefits. But who's responsible for a million youth being out of work? It wasn't the youth who outsourced the jobs from the working class districts of London, Birmingham, or Liverpool's Merseyside. Even before the smoke had cleared from some of the burned-out sites, the UK Office of national statistics reported a "shocking" rise in unemployment this Spring, which is hitting the youth, minorities and women especially hard, in particular in poor areas like Tottenham. Is this because the youth don't want to work – or because the capitalist system is throwing hundreds of thousands of people out of their jobs and into the streets?



So perhaps the politicians who preside over this system that is tossing the youth onto the jobless rolls might offer them more education instead? On the contrary: a week after the revolt, it was announced that “record numbers of youth” who have applied for university have been turned down this year, as young people struggle to get into higher education before huge rises in tuition fees hit next year.



While the austerity budget adopted by the Tory-led government was undoubtedly one important factor fuelling the revolt, the youth in the streets were going up against an entire system that keeps them locked into the bottom of society – a capitalist consumer society where they can't consume, a society where the great majority get jobs and education, but they are tossed out of school and into the ranks of the permanent jobless, dependent on the dole and benefits, with the ever-present armed enforcers of the system on their backs to be sure they don't step out of line. The tens of thousands of youth who raged out into the country's streets last week didn't just step out of line while protesting for a bit more – they stepped out into the night clad for battle with those hated enforcers of the system, living outside the law and now doing it together with thousands of others like themselves.



In addition to their attempts to deny the anti-police and to some degree anti-establishment sentiment that was at the core of this upheaval, the authorities and their apologists have tried to focus attention on what they condemn as "mindless violence". This, to them, is proof that these youth are "feral" (wild animals), and that therefore "society" needs to protect itself against them by the harshest means possible, as if they were not as much a part of UK society as anyone else. The official response to the rebellion, in fact, is proof that the youth are right about what they are rebelling against: they are not considered or treated as human beings, and the only future the rulers intend to allow them is servile silence or a lock-up.



This "mindless brutality" has been enormously and maliciously exaggerated. Was there such violence? Yes – but consider this: thousands, even tens of thousands of youth were out in the streets of many of Britain's cities, night after night for four nights, many of them with rudimentary arms – and how many sexual assaults took place in all that? Despite an attempt by the tabloid Daily Mail to invent a rape in a front page story (“Rape in the heat of rioting&rdquo, this proved to be a lie, and the tabloid press has failed to find even a single such case to bring against the youth.



But there were wrong and reactionary acts of violence among the people, from rubbishing the establishments of small shopkeepers who are in no way responsible for the people's problems to the car that ran down and killed three youth of Pakistani origin guarding a shop in Birmingham. Those of us who look at this revolt from the point of view that the youth are right not to accept injustice have to point out that such acts reflect an incomplete or simply wrong understanding of the sources of the problems these youth are rebelling against. In fact, they reflect the dog-eat-dog, look-out-for-yourself-and-your family ("me and my mates" or narrowly-conceived "community" outlook that the system itself inculcates into everyone in society from top to bottom.



But once again, it is the height of hypocrisy for the system's authorities to pretend to care about the fate of South Asian or other immigrants who have been the target of the police, government anti-immigrant propaganda and official tolerance of hate campaigns (when white people attack immigrants, we're supposed to "understand" their fears and that the solution is immigration restrictions and deportations). But people of one oppressed ethnicity attacking others, and violence among the people in general, are very much linked to the lack of a revolutionary perspective that can forge unity among the exploited and oppressed and bring about revolutionary change, and not just a shift in the pecking order.



The outrage of these youth is righteous. But they do need to change – they need to understand where their real problems come from. They don't need to change in the way that the power structure demands, to accept the unacceptable (and even if they did they might be ground down further anyway). Those who seek radical social change should greatly value these youth's burning hatred of injustice and the status quo, the fearlessness of those from the bottom of society who sense that they have nothing to lose. Given the desperation of their circumstances and the hopelessness that is a big part of their thinking, in the absence of a revolutionary perspective, it is not surprising that these youth often act according to the same rules and outlook propagated by the people at the top of society and constantly reinforced by the daily workings of the system itself.



The change that's necessary from this point of view can come only as more people understand and fight the system that is the source of their problems, and look for ways to actually bring down that system and replace it with an entirely different one, based on exactly the principles, goals and values that official UK rejects, a society where, as Karl Marx and Frederick Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto, "the free development of each is the condition of the free development of all" and vice versa.



Some "leftists" in the UK such as the Socialist Workers' Party would like to tame the force represented by these youth and turn it into just one more part of a pressure group to reform the system, rather than to find the ways to seize on its potential for a revolutionary uprising against the system. These youth represent a reality that's just too scary for them to face, and one that could lose them their hard-won respectability in the eyes of the establishment. And so, while they at times denounce the capitalist system, they repeatedly reduce the source of the oppression experienced by the youth to Tory PM David Cameron (one of their main slogans related to the revolt is that, “Cameron must go&rdquo and the “Tory cuts”. In their major statement on the revolt (which they repeatedly term a “riot”, just like the mainstream media, opening the door to the official bourgeois line that the essence of the revolt was “mindless violence&rdquo, they argue that, “Just as with the student protests last year, it is the 'lost generation' created by the Tories who are at the centre of these struggles”. A “'lost generation' created by the Tories”!? From these “leftists”, a newcomer to the UK would not have the slightest idea that the Labour Party, headed by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, was the parliamentary party presiding over the British government from 1997 to 2010, for 13 years – in fact, the only party that most youth on the streets would have ever really known in government until just last year. This was a period when intensified inequality ripped through British society – just as it did through the social fabric of most every country, as part of the wave of worldwide capitalist globalisation. This was a reflection not so much of the policies of this or that party as of the fundamental workings of the capitalist system itself, and it is this that the youth need to understand.



This view of the SWP and like-minded reformist “leftists” does not simply miss the revolutionary potential of these youth for the future, although it most definitely does that. Right now this reformist view is abandoning them to the vengeance of the imperialist state. With a view that calculates the potential worth of a campaign to defend the youth that is based not on its potential for revolution, but its potential for gradualist reform, then for these so-called “leftists” defending thousands of youth charged with petty theft and the like isn't a big priority – or is even a burden on more "legitimate" protest.



But things didn't have to wind up in this infuriating state of affairs. It is certainly possible to do more, including to mobilise sentiment from within sections of the middle classes to stand up for the youth. The rebellion from the "lower depths" has caused a lot of soul-searching throughout British society. And many don't like what they see. A letter to a local newspaper in one of London's poshest neighbourhoods argued for looking more deeply at the nature of British society: "What of interminable looting by our pig-greedy banking confraternity, looting by commission-hungry property dealers, by supermarket executives whose prices rise as regularly as we ourselves do every morning?" When Conservative Party Mayor of London Boris Johnson went out to join a couple of hundred young people who were cleaning up their local streets in the aftermath of the street fighting, a group he assumed would be receptive to his hard-line message, he began to run through the ritual denunciation of "mindless thieves and looters", but to his surprise was met by catcalls and jeers, and fled unceremoniously.



The youth rebellion has exposed the lies of progress in dealing with the racism that has been a foundation of British colonialism and the galloping inequalities that characterize contemporary UK society. It has brought to the light of day the grim oppression that afflicts millions whose lives are normally hidden from public view. All this offers possibilities for beginning to forge some kind of broader alliance to stand up for and with the youth.



In a society that is so marked by consumerism and by increasingly high levels of inequality, many even in the middle strata are taking a surprisingly tolerant view of what they perceive as an understandable redistribution of goods. The politicians, on the other hand, are justifying their merciless repression in the name of standing on the side of the middle class, especially small shopkeepers. Their "zero tolerance" of any infringement of the sanctity of private property, in the real world, mainly reflects the interests not of small proprietors but the tiny handful of monopoly capitalists and their representatives – the real criminal class.



And the measures they are taking today may well come back to haunt them. Pauline Pearce is a 45-year old black woman from Hackney, a scene of heavy fighting, who became prominent on YouTube for remonstrating with the youth in the midst of the revolt in opposition to burning a local shop, to “Get it real, Black people, get real. Do it for a cause. If we're fighting for a fucking cause let's fight for a fucking cause”. In reaction to the government's subsequent crackdown on the youth, Pearce told the Guardian, “Right now, I feel there's a nervous calm. Can you hear it? It's a silence. It's a calm before the storm. We're going to end up in two years' time with a lot of people coming out of jail with no qualifications, no jobs – and what's that going to achieve? The government needs to be careful. Otherwise they're going to end up with another right little civil uprising.”

The "free media" and "free elections" – reflections on Murdoch and friends

25 July 2011. A World to Win News Service. A scandal has hounded the entire British political system, exposing much of the dirtiness and the depth of the corruption of a power structure often held up as a shining example of "the free world". The British ruling class's continuing efforts to thwart the widening of that scandal is a further exposure of the ugliness of that system.



After more than five years of suspicions and accusations, it is now certain that the phones of many hundreds and possibly even thousands of people (according to the police some 4,000 phone numbers were on the main hacker's list, but some reports say up to 12,000 may be involved) have been "hacked" (their conversations and messages listened into) in order to obtain and publish embarrassing or otherwise hurtful information about them. Most were celebrities – politicians, actors and models, sports stars and the British royal family. Some were ordinary people who had the misfortune to fall victim to violent crimes and then see the media feast on their misery.



The main organisation caught so far at this trafficking in human suffering is News of the World (NOTW), a British tabloid published on Sundays, the globe's biggest-selling English-language newspaper. NOTW is part of the News International group, along with the Sun (infamous for its combination of soft-core porn and "family values"), the respected Times of London aimed at the better-off crowd and British Sky Broadcasting (the UK's biggest pay TV channel). News International is in turn the British branch of the News Corporation, the second-largest media company in the US (after Disney), owner of Fox television and several influential American dailies, including the Wall Street Journal. The main owner and chairman of News Corp is Rupert Murdoch, sometimes called "the owner of the News" because of his power over media all over the world, especially in the US, UK, Australia and South-east Asia, and now bidding to expand his business in the Middle East.



So far, the UK scandal has brought down two of the country's most powerful police officials, chief UK police officer Sir Paul Stephenson, head of the Metropolitan Police (Scotland Yard), and Assistant Met Police Commissioner John Yates. It has led to the resignation and arrest of Andy Coulson, the Conservative Party's former chief spin doctor and Prime Minister David Cameron's spokesman, along with the resignation and arrest of Rebekah Brooks, News International chief executive, and the arrest and even imprisonment of at least ten of the newspaper's editors and reporters. It has also jeopardised Cameron's position and the future of his coalition government, and may produce more casualties if the ruling class is not able to put an end to it.



At the beginning, there was little sign that the arrest of NOTW editor Clive Goodman and the private detective Glenn Mulcaire for what the police declared was a minor and "isolated" incident would lead to such broad and deep disgrace for so many of the country's leaders and institutions.



Goodman and Mulcaire were listening in on the phone messages of British royal family advisers, looking for hot gossip fodder (unlike some countries, UK defamation law makes it risky for the media to just invent "news"). They were caught in November 2005 when they annoyed the royals by reporting Prince William's knee injury. In January 2007 Goodman was jailed for four months. Mulcaire, after pleading guilty to actually doing the hacking, was jailed for six months.



The affair continued to flare up and then damped down. Rival news organizations revealed that a list of the names of celebrities and other well-known figures whose phones Mulcaire had hacked were found in his home – 3,000 according to a 2009 article in the Guardian. Famous people, including former Labour Party Vice Prime Minister Lord John Prescott and the British-American film star Sienna Miller, complained and/or filed charges. Finally, the police confirmed a few of these cases. The Department of Public Prosecutions refused to widen the investigation, despite an internal report that there was a "vast array" of victims. The DPP head was later hired by Murdoch.



As recently reported by The New York Times, which along with the Guardian eventually brought the facts to light, for years "senior Scotland Yard officials assured Parliament, judges, lawyers, potential hacking victims, the news media and the public that there was no evidence of widespread hacking by the tabloid. They steadfastly maintained that their original inquiry, which led to the conviction of one reporter and one private investigator, had put an end to what they called an isolated incident."



Instead of investigating, the police sat on the evidence. When the investigator Mulcaire was arrested, his home yielded up 11,000 pages of notes listing 4,000 people whose phone lines he had presumably targeted, including top politicians and police officials. They were put in rubbish bags and left in a police locker, uncatalogued, unsorted and out of sight for four years.



The UK's top cop at the time was Sir Ian Blair. Blair was the man in charge when the police, mistaking the Brazilian plumber Jean Charles de Menezes for an Arab after the 2005 London bombings, chose to gun him down while he was seated in an Underground train. Instead of assigning the investigation to the special crimes division, Blair put the counter-terrorism unit in charge. The head of that unit was the now-resigned Yates. Yates proved his mettle as the officer in charge of Scotland Yard’s response to that incident, resulting in the vindication of the police. According to a source quoted by the NYT, it was felt that with Yates the affair was in "safe hands". In defending his decision to ignore the phone hacking evidence, Yates said, "I'm not going to go down and look at bin bags." Even after the 2009 Guardian report, he refused to reopen the investigation.



A parliamentary commission was formed to investigate the issue. After interviewing current and past NOTW editors and journalists, including Prime Minister Cameron's future press secretary Coulson, in February 2010 it published a report accusing the newspaper of "collective negligence" rather than criminal activity, because, the report said, there was no evidence that any of the newspaper's officials, including Coulson, had been aware of the hacking.



This was directly refuted by a former NOTW show-business reporter in September 2010, who told The New York Times that the practice of hacking was widespread at his newspaper and that Coulson actively encouraged his staff to intercept the calls of the targeted people. Coulson "totally and utterly" denied the charges, but the reporter continued to insist on his allegations and provided more details to the BBC and the Guardian until he was found dead in his flat on 18 July 2011, just as the scandal reached its feverish height. The police immediately announced that they were not treating his death as suspicious.



Meanwhile, faced with mounting pressure, the police had relaunched their enquiry in January 2011. All hell broke lose when it was revealed that NOTW had ordered the hacking of the voice mail of Milly Dowler, a 13-year-old girl abducted and murdered in 2002. Not only had the newspaper's private investigator Mulcaire tapped her mobile phone seeking salacious details, he had even deleted messages (he said to make space for new messages, but possibly also to keep other media outlets from following NOTW's example). This misled the girl's parents into thinking that the missing girl was still alive and using her phone.



The resulting storm of outrage – disproving the idea that Murdoch was just giving the public what it wanted – finally led to the resignations and arrests and prompted the formation of two investigating committees in the House of Commons, which questioned the police officials, Rupert Murdoch and his son James, head of the UK division of his father's empire, and others.



The cover-up continues



Now that the issue of phone hacking is no longer merely a matter of the privacy of the royal family, people are increasingly disgusted by the media's practices and even more by the involvement of the government in enabling and then covering up Murdoch's activities. At the same time, there is something of a battle going on between rival political parties, as reflected, among other ways, in the political allegiance of the two newspapers that broke the scandal.



The London-based Guardian is associated with the Labour Party, and The New York Times, itself associated with the Democratic Party in the US, has been a working partner of the Guardian in recent years. They took a joint decision to launch a full-scale crusading investigation into this affair, although they say that each paper carried out its work independently of the other. To some extent this situation is creating opportunities for different political factions to increase their share or influence in government at the expense of their rivals. However this has gone far beyond what they expected, and they are now trying hard to wrap it up and limit the damages to their system.



The ruling class and its representatives, including the Conservative-led government, the Labour Party, Parliament and the media as a whole, including even Murdoch and his corporation, are trying to reduce the issue to whether or not the law was broken by the hacking, and whether or not Coulson and other NOTW editors knew about it or authorised it. The spectre of a media empire like Murdoch's flagrantly and repeatedly flouting the law is already sufficient to outrage many – but this is far from the whole of the matter.



The role of the police in protecting Murdoch's newspaper and helping its snooping can no longer be denied. It has come out that top police and court officials have worked for NOTW and NOTW filled their ranks, that they exchanged information, and that there were long-term and very close personal relations between the leaders of the two organizations. It is now being alleged that Murdoch's editors paid individual police for information – and Rebekah Brooks already admitted as much in previous testimony, at the time she headed NOTW, though she retracted this later. But the relationship seems to have been based more on mutual strategic advantage rather than bribes. Murdoch provided the police with experienced opinion-manipulators and political cover, which they certainly needed, among other reasons because of their unrelenting brutalization and occasionally killing of protesters and other people whose rights they supposedly protect.



The links between the Murdoch family and top government officials and leaders of the Labour and now the Conservative Party have also become plain for all to see. It has been especially startling for people to learn that the Prime Minister had hired Murdoch lieutenant Coulson as his press secretary even after it had been established that at least some hacking had been going on when Coulson was at NOTW. In fact, Coulson had been a mastermind of Cameron's public relations strategy before he became PM, and it has been suggested that Cameron hired him precisely to ensure the Murdoch empire's support for the Conservative Party in the elections.



But Murdoch mud has landed on the faces of politicians of the Conservative and Labour Party leaders alike, although not everyone has taken proper notice. For instance it has come out that NOTW spied on Labour leader Gordon Brown for a decade, both when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer under Tony Blair and when he became Prime Minister himself. Brown suspected it all along, he now says. Murdoch's Sun even made public, to the privacy-minded Brown family's great distress, that their infant son had just been diagnosed with cystic fibrosis. Yet Brown never said a word, and continued to maintain a close social relationship with Rebekah Brooks, who had been in charge of the Sun in 2006 when this incident occurred and who later became News Corp chief executive. He also continued to have close relations with the Murdoch family.



In fact, Brown and Cameron attended Brooks' 2009 wedding, and she attended the Prince of Wales' fiftieth birthday party. Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair also socialized with the Murdochs and their executives. Despite the spying on their private lives, leading figures in the power structure seemed to find Murdoch's role in society legitimate and useful.



The media in general have a very important role in forming the public opinion that the masses can supposedly freely express at election time. All the mainstream media have the financial ability to reach millions of people. By using this power and their expertise at connecting with various strata of society, they can frame the questions and problems of the day in a way that often leads people to think that the solutions posed by the ruling class are the only ones possible. They also train people in a certain mentality – and Murdoch has excelled at encouraging an unhealthy, self-centred, hypocritical and cynically exploitative outlook. In this general way, and sometimes very specifically, the "free press" help dictate to the "free people" what to think and what to do.



But at the same time the media can play an important role in the rivalry between the political representatives of different factions of the ruling class. It is important for these factions to win the support of the tabloids and other media (in the UK the print press is under fewer restrictions than broadcast media) and the business groups that own them, which in turn, of course, are generally owned by top monopoly capitalists like Murdoch.



As has been pointed out, the law, in its majestic even-handedness, permits rich and poor alike to sleep on the streets, and it also gives news peddlers and financial magnates an equal right to own media empires.



In the decades since Murdoch moved in on the British media, no party has won a general election in the UK without his support. Murdoch's support for Tony Blair in 1997 was an important advantage to the Labour Party that year. All the parties and politicians surely wanted to keep or get that support. In fact, the influence of the tabloids is so strongly felt by the politicians that Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock blamed his 1992 defeat, despite the opinion polls in his favour, on the campaign against him that Murdoch's Sun started in the days just before the election.



Tony Blair and his allies in the Labour Party had already established such a close relationship with NOTW and Murdoch with their “New Labour” project that Blair was invited to take part in the News Corporation conference in Australia in 1995. Brown appeared at Murdoch's side at the Davos World Economic Forum in 2007. The story was repeated in 2008 when the Conservatives' Cameron met Murdoch in Greece to win his support. It seemed that they reached some kind of agreement, because a month later the Sun shifted its support to the Tories (Conservatives) once again.



It has been revealed that all recent British prime ministers repeatedly met with Murdoch or one of his chief executives at Downing Street (although through the back door), the Prime Minister's residence or somewhere else. "Cameron admitted meeting Murdoch executives 26 times in 15 months – but it emerges there were more occasions, many others," Polly Toynbee wrote in the Guardian.



If the leadership of both major political parties and Murdoch got along so well together, so much so that the politicians decided to put up with the occasional stab in the back, what does that say about the supposed "choice" that these parties offer the people in the elections that are considered the ultimate definition of "freedom"?



But the relationship between the ruling class political system and the media is not limited to Murdoch. This is where rivalry between different financial and political groups seems to have played a role in this scandal, although policy differences seemed to have been largely absent in this affair despite the public controversies during this period (over the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and domestic cutbacks). Murdoch's News Corporation already owned 39 percent of B-Sky-B television, but he was planning to take complete control. This required government permission, and it would be hard to believe that Cameron and Murdoch and his executives did not discuss this during their meetings. Under questioning at an emergency House of Commons meeting Cameron was forced to admit it, though he insisted the conversations had been "appropriate".



This takeover, the most important move on News Corp's strategic agenda, would have brought Murdoch British media dominance, threatening even the position of BBC. There was opposition to this within ruling circles. Whether this played a role in encouraging the exposure and discrediting of Murdoch and his empire in the UK is not clear. But Murdoch has now withdrawn his bid.



In the end, probably for various different reasons, the British ruling class seems to have decided to try and cool down the issue in the hope of limiting further exposures. The appearance of Murdoch father and son and their top executives before the British Parliament's Culture, Media and Sports Select Committee might well be the final set piece. Contrary to the media description of Murdoch being grilled, in fact this was a tribune to allow Murdoch to deny any wrongdoing and justify his behaviour, portraying himself as a victim betrayed by a much-trusted employee, without being confronted with the more burning questions. There were no questions related to bribery, corruption and blackmail.



Like Murdoch, Cameron has refused to admit that he did anything wrong, which may very well be the case in the narrow legal terms within which both parties and the media are trying to confine the affair. He seems to have survived despite his deep involvement with Murdoch, but he does have the effective defence that all the political parties and many of the system's other pillars have been equally involved.



Opposition leader Ed Milliband might have gone a little bit further than others in his rhetoric, but he too has had to come to terms and led the parliament in taking a soft approach towards Murdoch and his gang, treating them as respected guests rather than criminals. It's worth mentioning that Murdoch supported Ed's brother David Milliband in their rivalry for Labour Party leadership, but Ed had his share of meetings with Murdoch's minions – and got caught failing to include them in his recently-released meeting log.



The House of Commons enquiry was not meant to get at the truth but on the contrary to cover up the crimes of the Murdoch empire and more importantly the complicity of a broad swath of the system's political institutions in pandering to and protecting a media empire that doesn't reflect public opinion but creates it, an empire whose goal is to delude and degrade the people, to dumb them and numb them, to spread the notion that because of elections and competing political parties, the rule of capital over the vast majority of people is somehow not a dictatorship.



This is the real picture that emerges from this scandal, and it gives the lie – or at least should – to the myth of a freely elected government and freely elected parliament, the free and fair media and the free market economy.