Was even Gordon Brown hacked by News Corp?

It is a sign of the times that one of the most serious corruption–and–criminality scandals in the British postwar era may be quietly put to rest by an offer of more money by the very organisation at the heart of the scandal. In this post I would like to quote in some length a piece by Henry Porter which appears today in the Observer. The article may give the reader a sense of the extent of the rot which is now shaking the very foundations of British democracy, all that our society reportedly rests on and stands for. It also forces a re-appraisal of traditional critiques of conspiracy theories. The quote is taken from an article titled ‘It is hard to imagine a more dangerous breach of trust by a public corporation’, and is well worth reading, along with the more general coverage of the issue by the Guardian.

It is a measure of James Murdoch’s failure to understand the gravity of the phone-hacking scandal that in answer to a question from the US broadcaster Charlie Rose, he replied: “You talk about a reputation crisis – actually the business is doing really well. It shows what we were able to do is really put this problem into a box.”

One of the most serious post-second world war scandals to affect British public life cannot be placed in quarantine and forgotten simply by means of a late apology and millions in damages. It is already clear that admissions made by News International raise huge questions about the competence and ethics of the company’s management, including James Murdoch, as well as profound doubts about attempts to quash the police’s inquiry into allegations of widespread criminality.

But much more important is that the News of the World operation has penetrated to the heart of the British government and may even have intercepted Gordon Brown’s messages. We know that Labour’s culture secretary, Tessa Jowell, who was the minister overseeing the media, was hacked, as was her husband David Mills; the former deputy prime minister, Lord Prescott, has been told that the News of the World was listening to his messages; and it seems likely that Tony Blair’s communications director Alastair Campbell was also a victim.

Two weeks ago I wrote formally to the former prime minister Gordon Brown to ask if he had received confirmation from the police that his phone was compromised by the News of the World. He has yet to reply..

The stories about Andy Coulson and Mark Thompson may shine a light on Britain’s ‘culture of corruption’

It’s not often that the corporate media’s role in developing and maintaining the UK’s political culture of corruption comes into the limelight. The corporate media are, after all, the people that aim the spotlight. So it is highly unlikely that they will shine the light on their own practices. Alas, this week we were treated to two stories that may involve such ‘shinings’.

The first involved Andy Coulson. For those of you not intimately familiar with British politics, this is the man who David ‘Janus’ Cameron chose to employ as his spinmeister. Cameron did so despite the fact that Coulson was forced to resign from his post as editor of one of the yellowest of Murdoch’s tabloids, The News of the World. The reason for the resignation was that the paper was caught hacking into the royal family’s mobile phones. And just about everybody else’s phones, for that matter.

Coulson always denied that he knew anything about this practice. But he agreed to ‘fall on his sword’, and hey presto, he’s now the press rottweiler–in–chief for Cameron. The Westminster commentariat seems to have sort of accepted this ‘reality’ (no pun intended) until the New York Times came out this week and said what we all pretty much knew. Now the Guardian is running with the story, and maybe, must maybe, Cameron will be shamed into resigning Coulson. (This tells you something about the power of U.S. institutions over their British counterparts.)

Some more thoughts on this scandal: Coulson used to be one of Rupert Murdoch’s men. And Cameron is said to have done a deal with Murdoch ahead of the elections. Oh and Murdoch and his progeny were very unhappy with the BBC. And now the Cameron government is threatening to drastically reduce the budget of the BBC. Which sedges nicely into the next story.

Mark Thompson, the Director-General of the BBC, was caught paying a visit to Downing Street, apparently to discuss how the BBC could help the Conservatives to better ‘contextualise’ the plutonomic cuts that they are planning to impose on the UK. You get a sense of the scandal when even the increasingly docile BBC journalists are making a bit of a fuss about what looks, to this blogger at least, like evidence of a corporate media stitch–up–in–the–making.

This is, by the way, the same Mark Thompson that was caught up in a furore a couple of years ago about BBC bias in favour of Israel.

Perhaps the most sobering aspect of this is that London’s Metropolitan Police (known as ‘the Met’) allegedly knew all about the News of the World’s hacking, but apparently declined to investigate all but the most egregious of the crimes. A group of politicians is now pressing for a judicial review of the Met’s role in all this. Could it possibly be that even Britain’s police have done a deal with Rupert Murdoch? Perish the thought.

Why Assange chose Sweden (and needs to avoid Britain)

Earlier this year, a professor of phonetics at Stockholm University addressed the MPs at the House of Commons. According to the Daily Telegraph,

‘Francisco Lacerda, Professor of Phonetics at Stockholm University, questioned the effectiveness of the voice risk analysis (VRA) system that is being trialled by the Government as part of a crackdown on welfare fraud.

The academic paper was withdrawn by the publisher after legal action was taken by the company behind the technology.

Speaking after he addressed MPs at the House of Commons today, Prof Lacerda said the fear of a writ could lead to important research being suppressed.

”Either we will see cases like mine where something has been published and we have actions or threats after publication, or even worse the challenging research never sees the light of day,” he said.

In 2007 he coauthored a paper entitled ”Charlatanry in Forensic Speech Science” that criticised the technology made by Nemesysco, an Israeli company.

But the paper was withdrawn after lawyers for the company threatened to sue’(1).

I would imagine that Lacerda must have been astonished to discover that it is so easy to engage in what in my opinion amounts to a form of censorship. But Britain’s libel laws mean that virtually all that it takes is a letter from a solicitor threatening legal action. Unless the target of censorship is part of an institution with deep pockets and a determination to defend freedom of speech, anyone seeking to suppress uncomfortable information has to do little more than send an email threatening legal action to a bloghost, a journal, or a book publisher.

As has been noted by journalists in the UK, Britain’s libel laws do not just apply to Britain. According to George Monbiot, ‘Such is the reach and severity of Mr Justice Eady’s [Britain's senior libel judge's] illiberal rulings that four states [in the U.S.] have so far passed what are, in effect, Eady laws, and Congress is currently considering a federal bill whose purpose is to defend US citizens from his judgments, and the English law he interprets. The Eady laws arise from his encouragement of libel tourism: allowing cases with only the most tenuous connection with this country to be heard in London, and using them to stamp on free speech all over the world’(2).

This and other bloggers should know. Last January, four posts in this blog were taken down  (they have subsequently been republished) after the legal department of the University of Liverpool objected to some passages which linked Howard Newby, the university’s vice-chancellor, to a private training firm which went into administration in 2008. In my view, the passages in question for the most part did little more than echo information disseminated by Private Eye in a piece which it had published almost three years earlier, and which generated a scandal at Newby’s former university. (For a full account of what happened, see When the Exchange of Knowledge is Threatened. See also my Financial Scandal, Corruption, and Censorship series). Thanks to Britain’s libel laws, WordPress, which I take to be very keen to defend the freedom of speech of its bloggers, evidently felt that it had no option but to comply with the lawyers’ orders. It was as if the matter had gone to court, and a judgement passed. The lawyers were effectively allowed to act as prosecutors, judge, and jury. Alas, the attempt backfired when it became known in higher education and internet circles that one of Britain’s more reputable universities was effectively trying to stop the publication of posts in an academic blog. Other more widely-read blogs which were also targeted as part of the action generated an even bigger scandal.

These and a growing number of cases like Lacerda’s help to explain why WikiLeaks chose Sweden as the site in which to try to locate at least some of its servers. Swedish publishing laws reportedly go a long way in protecting whistleblowers. The Nordic country’s democratic tradition has made its policy-makers aware of the importance of maintaining a space in which people can speak out against acts of corruption, and presumably all manner of abuses of power by members of public and private institutions. It seems that Swedish legislation would protect Julian Assange and the rest of the people running WikiLeaks from the kind of persecution by ostensibly legal means that they might face if their servers were located elsewhere.

It will be interesting to see, beyond the legal process that Assange might now face, whether Sweden does prove to be a safe bet for WikiLeaks. One interpretation of at least one of the unfounded accusations in Sweden is that the forces of darkness are trying, by any means, to stop Assange from benefiting from Sweden’s freedom of speech. I expect that we will shortly be seeing that this case will take a number of unexpected twists and turns.

Here in Britain, I would note that the Liberal Democrats, and even the Tories made loud noises before and after the elections about addressing our critical deficit in civil liberties. Some steps have been taken, or are supposedly in the process of being taken, at the behest of the Liberal Democrats. I have, however, as yet to hear that our draconian libel laws will be extensively modified, let alone repealed and rewritten, as they need to be. Is this another area in which Dem Tories have had a change of heart? If so, the politicians will not be able to blaim the alleged ‘bond vigilantes’ that have been so conveniently employed to justify the rest of the Liberal Democrats’ u-turns vis-a-vis so-called ‘fiscal austerity’.

By way of a postscript: Craig Murray, a former British ambassador who has himself been the target of censorship, has noted that Assange has been awarded the ‘Sam Adams Award for Integrity’, an award which is judged by ‘a group of retired senior US military and intelligence personnel, and past winners. This year the award to Julian Assange was unanimous.’

References

1) ‘English libel laws threatening freedom of speech, says Swedish scientist’, in Daily Telegraph, 12 March 2010, at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/7422273/English-libel-laws-threatening-freedom-of-speech-says-Swedish-scientist.html, accessed 22 August 2010.

2) G. Monbiot ‘How our senior libel law judge stamps on free speech—all over the world’ in the Guardian, 19 October 2009, at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/oct/19/eady-libel-tourism-free-speech, accessed 22 August 2010.

The arrogance of empire

Am I the only one to be astonished that U.S. senators feel entitled to summon Scottish government officials to their hearings?

The equivalent would for the British government to summon Defence Secretary Robert Gates to the Chilcot Inquiry.

The arrogance is astonishing, and speaks volumes of what at least one part of the U.S. establishment thinks about the alleged ‘special relationship’ between the U.S. and the U.K.

Speaking of the Chilcot Inquiry: if you thought that the new government wouldn’t try to cover up what happened in the build-up to Bush and Blair’s illegal war in Iraq, think again: have a look at what Carne Ross, a UK expert on Iraq for the Foreign Office, is saying about the current Cabinet Office’s efforts to suppress key documents that confirm beyond a shadow of spin what we all already knew: that it was lies all the way down.

Update 30 July 2010: Now the fools are trying to say that they’ll send a delegation to Scotland to interview Scottish officials. (See Salmond snubs plan for Lockerbie delegation to visit UK). They don’t get it, do they?

Financial Scandal, Corruption, and Censorship: Part 6

Conclusions: Financial Scandal and Neoliberalism

…to engage in corruption, and to expect to survive in public life is to have either a generous faith in the mechanisms of secrecy or a confident sense of what one can get away with in the event that activities hitherto hidden are suddenly made visible to others. —John B. Thompson, in Political Scandal

Please note: this is the sixth post in a series; to read the rest of the series, click on any of the following:

Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: When Knowledge Is Exchanged
Part 3: Case Study A: the Beeching ‘Axe’
Part 4: Case Study B: the Newby-Mandelson ‘Axes’
Part 5: Scandal in the Times of the Internet
Part 6: Conclusions: Financial Scandal and Neoliberalism

In this, the final post in the Financial Scandal series, I’d like to return to some of the issues which motivated me to write the series in the first place. What are the implications, both present and future, of my analysis for the relationship between financial scandal, corruption, and censorship in Britain? In particular, what are the implications for the neoliberal politics which this blog has critiqued?

Neoliberalism is a discourse of market fundamentalism: the most zealous advocates of neoliberalism—better known as neo-conservatives—attempt to reduce everything to ‘the economy’, and this on the basis of a model that conceptualizes the economic in terms of a peculiarly idealised marketplace: one in which individuals are at once driven and controlled by greed. In this world of macho predators, competition amongst alleged economic equals results in the fabled ‘invisible hand’ that produces at once ‘free’ and ‘stable’ markets. By this account, such markets are not only the most ‘efficient’ way of conducting business, but if Milton Friedman is to be believed, the markets go hand in hand with democracy. According to Friedman and his many followers, democracy can and must be conceived in ‘free’-market terms: to be free is to be free to buy and sell things in an ostensibly unfettered marketplace, and vice-versa: a democratic economy is one in which individuals are ‘free’ to buy and sell whatever they please. The role of government is paradoxically to police a freedom thus conceived. In Friedman’s now infamous terms, ‘…the scope of government must be limited. Its major function must be to protect our freedom both from the enemies outside our gates and from our fellow-citizens: to preserve law and order, to enforce private contracts, to foster competitive markets.’

Alas, it doesn’t take a degree in sociology or critical theory—the very subjects that are now amongst the first to be threatened with closure by neoliberal managers in some of the UK’s foremost universities(1)—to realise that this discourse is utterly ideological: as many people have discovered, so-called ‘unfettered’ markets are actually those in which the dominant private corporations and their managers—popularly known in Britain as the fat cats—are able dictate terms not just to individuals, but to entire nations (witness what has happened with the financial markets in the case of Greece and Spain, and what happened with Rupert Murdoch in the case of the UK). As Adam Smith himself recognised, an unregulated market is one that eventually results in less competition, not more. Indeed, in so far as some individuals, organisations or social networks become disproportionately powerful, this selfsame power contradicts the other fundamental(ist) tenet of neoliberalism: that the economy is purely economic, in the sense that it is entirely separate from politics and culture.

If the economy is always purely ‘economical’, how can we explain what many believe is a link between Alan Milburn, Capita, and New Labour’s NHS policies? Or indeed, how can we explain any analogous link between David Blunkett, Entrust, and New Labour’s ID card proposals? (In the U.S., the example that comes to mind is that of Dick Cheney, Haliburton and Iraq)

In my view, the answer to these, and countless other questions seems obvious: as certain individuals, corporations, and/or social networks accumulate more and more profits, they are bound to attempt to exchange some of their economic power for political, cultural and symbolic power. In so doing, they are bound to use that power to attempt to modify legal and other market conditions in order to further increase their economic capital. There is, from this perspective, an inexorable link between economic, cultural/political, and symbolic forms of capital. In so far as this link remains unregulated, or is regulated in ways that serve the interests of those with the most capital, then there is likely to be a snow-balling dynamic that eventually spreads throughout more and more social and cultural spheres. This process not only contradicts the very discourse of neoliberalism, but is likely to lead the agents of neoliberalism to transgress moral or legal thresholds that they themselves claim to observe—the boundaries of what counts as morally or indeed legally acceptable behaviour.

It is here that ideology—which I define with John B. Thompson as meaning that serves to develop and then sustain durable relations of domination within and between social groups(2)—may play a key role. On the one hand, a variety of forms of everyday practices—media, DIY, etc.—may serve an ideological role in so far as they help to keep people preoccupied with matters that distract them from the overarching political process, or at least lessen the pain of neoliberalism’s harshest prescriptions. On the other hand, it would be a mistake to assume that we are simply ‘duped’ or ‘distracted’; many of us may realise that there is a fundamentally ‘unfair’, if not corrupt social order, but may still be persuaded that there is ‘something in it for us’, or worse, that there is no alternative. Then again, many take an active part in furthering the ideological relation by demanding lower taxes, rejecting the very principle of public services, expressing their support for expeditionary wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and so forth.

If ideology may work to dissimulate social inequality, financial scandals may work to puncture the ideological ‘spell’, or at least to contradict any easy adherence to the predominant forms of rationalisation. A manager may argue that it is necessary to shut down railway lines or to close university departments, and this for reasons to do with economic scarcity. S/he may also attempt to make the case that such closures further the cause of managerial efficiency, the long term survival of an organisation, etc. Arguments such as these may be greeted with some scepticism, but by and large, are likely to be accepted, however grudgingly, by all but those most directly affected by a proposed closure.

If, however, it is alleged, or indeed it becomes known that the manager stands to benefit personally and financially from such policies, then moral outrage may ensure, and, in more ways than one, the proverbial cat may well and truly come out of the bag: the ‘fat’ cat may be exposed as having a vested interest in pursuing policies to real or alleged problems that might have alternative solutions; and the lion of public opprobrium may be released in so far as localized groups, and social groups at one remove become aware of the arbitrary nature of an ostensibly ‘economic’ form of management. One may have difficulty understanding the complex nature of what I have described as the ‘nocturnal’ connections between politics and the economy, but no critical pedagogy is required to explain a manifest conflict of interest, let alone crude financial corruption of the kind commonly associated with financial scandals.

I further believe that it is in this context that censorship, and indeed Britain’s extraordinary libel laws, come to the fore. In so far as New Labour’s, and before it the Tory’s neoliberalism advanced the kind of market fundamentalism I outlined above, then the risk of financial conflicts of interest, if not of a culture of corruption has arguably increased exponentially. A government that is predisposed to accommodate big business, or a political party whose leading members declare, as Peter Mandelson famously did, that they are intensely relaxed with people becoming ‘filthy rich’ may promote, however inadvertently, corrupt and/or fraudulent practices. When all that matters, or appears to matter is money, then why should social regulations be allowed to stand in the way of making more money?

While some of the media of mass communication may have a vested interest in concealing any ensuing transgressions, others may be keen to expose them. In this series I have suggested that, in the context of Ernest Marples and Richard Beeching’s railways, a ‘quiet word’ was apparently enough to silence the most powerful media; in the context of Peter Mandelson and Howard Newby’s higher education, and in contemporary politics more generally, a growing army of bloggers has proven more difficult to silence. Indeed, unless some legal means may be found that can operate to silence the critics, then moral or legal trangressions, real or alleged, may develop into internet-based forms of mediated scandal. As I suggested in Part 5, this then alters the dynamics of scandal in a variety of complex and far-reaching ways.

It thus comes as no surprise that Jack Straw allowed extraordinarily authoritarian libel laws (by Western standards) to prevail in the UK until the dying days of his tenure as New Labour’s Justice Secretary. These laws meant, amongst other things, that the British Chiropractic Association could sue Simon Singh for critiquing its practitioners’ claims regarding the power of their spinal manipulations (see Simon Singh’s account of how the attempted censorship took place in his case). But they also meant that this blog had four posts temporarily removed simply because they mentioned the possibility of a conflict of interest involving Howard Newby and the private training firm Carter & Carter (see Parts 4 and 5 of this series; see also When the Exchange of Knowledge is Threatened).

As Jack Straw rather belatedly—some might say, cynically—recognised, the political economy of the British libel laws, as reflected in the fees commanded by lawyers, means that they are skewed in favour of the very wealthy. From this perspective alone, far from being just legal instruments to stop defamation, the laws work, in practice if not in principle, as a weapon of mass silencing: unless a critic is very wealthy, or unless s/he is so disempowered (or otherwise empowered) that s/he stands little or nothing to lose from a libel trial, then only a very brave, naïve or foolhardy person (the boundary between these is not always clear) would dare to take on the corrupt minister or the powerful manager. The implications of this state of affairs for Britain’s democracy are difficult to overstate.

Looking towards the future, it seems clear that unless David Cameron’s much vaunted ‘Liberal Conservative’ coalition prevails in its stated aim of rolling back over a decade of New Labour authoritarianism, then it may well be that we will witness, sooner rather than later, a transition from what might be described as the New Labour, to the Chinese model of censorship. It is, in my view, no coincidence that Friedman’s economic model was first tested in Pinochet’s Chile, or indeed that Margaret Thatcher sent her own Cecil Parkinson to Santiago to look and learn from the Pinochet economic team: as Parkinson explained in El Mercurio, Chile’s leading newspaper at the time, the Chilean ‘economic experience’ was ‘very similar to what we are trying to develop now in Great Britain’. Asked about the differences between the two countries, he almost wistfully suggested that ‘Chile could impose a policy and a speed of application of that policy which just isn’t possible in this country’(3).

If or when the mentioned transition occurs, it may be necessary to speak of the ‘early internet’ era, i.e. a period when it was still possible, despite some risks, for individuals to engage in an honest exchange of knowledge, that is to say, to speak up and out against corruption and populist authoritarianism, as well as to communicate about all manner of things both economic, and more–than–economic.

1) At Liverpool, Howard Newby tried to close philosophy, politics and communication. Middlesex is now threatening to close its highly regarded philosophy department.
2) in (1990) Ideology and Modern Culture. Cambridge: Polity Press.
3) Quoted in the Latin America Bureau’s (1983) Chile: the Pinochet Decade. London: LAB, p. 16.