EcoLogics

Updated 24 November 2009 (scroll the bottom of the post to see latest updates)

If you read this article in the Independent, you might come away feeling relieved that the great tide of authoritarianism that has characterised New Labour’s years in power is starting to ebb. Under the headline “Ministers cancel ‘Big Brother’ database”, the paper says that ‘Plans to store information about every phone call, email and internet visit in the United Kingdom have in effect been abandoned by the Government’, and that the decision to postpone further legislation could be ‘to kill off the plans for years.’

If, however, you read the Telegraph (which you really shouldn’t), a rather different picture emerges. Under the headline “State to ’spy’ on every phone call, email and web search’, that paper suggests that

All telecoms companies and internet service providers will be required by law to keep a record of every customer’s personal communications, showing who they have contacted, when and where, as well as the websites they have visited.[...] Despite widespread opposition to the increasing amount of surveillance in Britain, 653 public bodies will be given access to the information, including police, local councils, the Financial Services Authority, the ambulance service, fire authorities and even prison governors.[...] They will not require the permission of a judge or a magistrate to obtain the information, but simply the authorisation of a senior police officer or the equivalent of a deputy head of department at a local authority.

Which version of events is the correct one? EcoLogics suspects that both papers are right. New Labour probably has decided to shelve plans for a single database, reluctantly realising that it’s a vote looser. Senior New Labour politicians must be having quiet talks with Entrust and other digital security corporations, explaining that they’re very sorry but it isn’t feasible to deliver the promised contracts, at least not yet. At the same time, the politicians will be explaining to Britain’s increasingly deliberative security services that the single database isn’t that great a loss because the information will be there, awaiting to be used, in the databases of private corporations like BT or Virgin. Now isn’t that reassuring?

Even as the two papers make headlines on this subject, if you read the BBC news, you will find out that good ‘ole Jack Straw has got his way with New Labour plans to replace public enquiries with secret inquests. The conclusion has to be that, if anything, that tide of New Labour authoritarianism is in full flow.

By the way, the ‘Part II’ in the title of this post is a reference to the earlier The New Labour Modus Operandi.

Update 24 November 2009: The news media are devoting headlines to the fact that a former police officer has denounced the police for deliberately arresting people in order to obtain their DNA, a policy which is not only illegal, but has had the effect of increasing the proportion of DNA samples taken from ethnic minorities, relative to their actual numbers in civil society. For an account of this practice, which would confirm the existence of a New Labour-Police conspiracy to introduce a universal DNA sample by the back door, see this Reuters account.

You can always tell when Rupert Murdoch, or one of his proxies, needs to undermine a view that runs against his/their right-wing ideology. It’s what this blogger describes as rottweiler journalism. For a good example, see the headline below:

Murdoch doesn't like David Nutt

Note how the picture is not only at the top of the article, but actually implies, by way of the caption, that the photo is of Nutt himself, ergo Nutt is a drug user. It doesn’t get less subtle than that, does it? For an analysis of similar tricks over at the Guardian, see The Guardian and Peter Mandelson.

New Labour cannot evade responsibility for the rise in the popularity of the BNP. Amongst New Labour politicians, Jack Straw is perhaps the man who has most blatantly dipped his political spoon into the BNP’s broth of racist and xenophobic hatred; his infamous, easy go at women who wear veils was a textbook example of the kind of intervention that aids and abets ethnocentrism of an extremist kind. Almost overnight, some of the women most likely to be abused in the UK were transformed by Straw into ‘perpetrators’ of multiculturalism.

Straw is also the éminence grise behind Britain’s scandalous libel laws. And as if that weren’t enough, just yesterday it was reported that Straw has been caught out trying to sneak through a new law that makes it possible for the government to conduct secret inquests.

In this context, it was contradictory, to say the least, to hear that New Labour’s most right-handed man would be in charge of ’standing up’ to the neo-nazis during the BBC’s Nick Griffin Comes to Question Time special. Alas, interviewees on this morning’s Radio 4 Today programe reported that Straw looked distinctly uncomfortable in that role; he would do, given his politics.

EcoLogics is happy to point readers in the direction of two excellent pieces by commentators who tell the Jack Straw story like it is.

The first, by Gary Young, sets the scene with a piece that appears, lamentably, in Peter Mandelson’s rag, better known as The Guardian. But a friend has forwarded it and here is an excerpt (perhaps Young might find another paper to write in!):

The issue of whether the BNP should be given this kind of airtime has been debated extensively elsewhere in these pages. But there is little doubt that once the BNP is on Question Time, Jack Straw – or indeed anyone in the New Labour hierarchy – is in no position to take the fight to it. The same is true for most of the rest of the British political establishment that will be represented on the panel – they have either actively colluded or passively acquiesced in the political trajectory of the past decade. [...] But it is no accident that this happened on New Labour’s watch and no small irony that Jack Straw should set himself up as Griffin’s opponent.[...] Economically, its neoliberal policies have resulted in growing insecurity, rising unemployment, child poverty and inequality that have alienated the poor and made the middle class feel vulnerable. Politically, its lies over the war, stewardship of the expenses scandal and internal bickering have produced widespread cynicism with our political culture. The ramifications of its role in the war on terror in general, and Iraq in particular, were to elevate fear of a racialised “other” to a matter of life and death at home. “Terror is first of all the terror of the next attack,” explains Arjun Appadurai, in Fear of Small Numbers. “Terror … opens the possibility that anyone may be a soldier in disguise, a sleeper among us, waiting to strike at the heart of our social slumber.”

From Gary Young’s  ‘When you watch the BNP on TV, just remember: Jack Straw started all this’ in The Guardian.

The one thing we can be sure Mr Straw believes in is Mr Straw. His ambition is unquenchable. When his one serious mistake (deflecting transatlantic glory from Mr Tony Blair by cuddling up to Condi Rice) cost him the Foreign Office, he accepted humiliating demotion just to stay in the game. His transfer of allegiance from Blair to Brown, whose leadership “campaign” he managed (and hats off for winning that one), was comical in its fervency. Even now, be sure that he is scheming to position himself as the Jim Hacker compromise candidate should Labour somehow locate the energy required to ditch the PM.[...]Tragically, there would be worse electoral choices. …he is adept at promoting an image of calmly authoritative blandness, hence his comparative popularity, and a grandmaster of televisual smoothness. He is as slimy as an oil slick, and always quick to move on once he’s coated the vulnerable birdies with filthy tar.

Updated 23 October 2009 (scroll down to see update)

A brief post about the BBC Radio 4’s ‘News at One’ programme, heard yesterday, 20 October 2009. The programme focused on the news that a group of retired British generals have had a go at the BNP (without actually naming it) for ‘seeking to hijack the symbols of the armed forces and their history’. Martha Kearney, the BBC anchor,  interviewed Simon Weston, the renowned Falkland War veteran, who joined the generals in condemning the BNP; and then she interviewed Nick Griffin himself.

Two thoughts: first, it was apparent that the news piece was designed to support the armed forces’ position, and to undermine the BNP’s. This blogger has seldom witnessed such a manifest effort on the part of the BBC to coach one side, and to attack the other. While the BNP is a neo-fascist organisation and deserves to be condemned, the interview threw up into the starkest relief the manner in which the BBC’s alleged codes of impartiality are there to be used and abused, pretty much at will. How to reconcile the mentioned codes (see EcoLogics’ earlier analysis of these codes in The BBC, New Labour & the BNP) with the extraordinarily one-sided interviewing technique?

The point is not to defend the BNP, but to suggest that this has long been a style of interview employed by the BBC against anyone whom its journalists or editors regarded as being an ‘enemy of the state’. The interview showed just how manipulative the claims to impartiality can be, and how easy it is to abuse them.

The second thought concerns Nick Griffin’s performance. On one level, it certainly seemed to live up to the claim that Griffin/BNP have acquired a certain moderation when it comes to expressing racist views. Martha Kearney repeatedly tried to get Griffin to voice the racism for which the BNP is infamous, but more often than not, Griffin managed to side-step the inquisitorial blows. For example, when pressed on the matter of deporting ‘foreign’ members of the armed forces who committed crimes, Griffin appeared to soften the BNP’s stance, suggesting that if criminal behaviour occurred as a result of a lack of support for war veterans, this would have to be ‘taken into account’. Such deft discursive manoeuvres were cleverly interspersed with populist stances, such as the suggestion that Britain should immediately exit the war in Afghanistan, a war that had ‘nothing to do with us’, and involved sending poorly equipped men into battle.

However, when you contrast Griffin’s public stance with the information that has leaked out about the BNP’s views in the privacy of their own meetings (or indeed on the BBC’s own earlier interview on Radio 1), it becomes apparent that, more than having moderated his views,  Griffin has learned to hide the views, and to do so by appealing to a mixture of a perceived common sense, and a ‘centre ground’.

This being true, we can say that Griffin has learned to do what the Tories and New Labour have been doing for decades. No wonder both parties are worried; the fascists are learning, and so becoming a part of, the UK’s political culture.

Update 23 October 2009: after the infamous BBC Question Time

BBC’s handling of the Question Time episode in which Griffin appeared more than confirmed the above analysis. What a travesty of alleged impartiality: one moment the BBC was saying it had to include Griffin in the programme thanks to impartiality rules, and the next it was organising a veritable kangaroo court against Griffin. And today the establishment is congratulating itself….

The following is an excerpt of a post published by George Monbiot about Sir David Eady, a judge of the Queen’s Bench Division, whom Monbiot describes as Britain’s legal censor. EcoLogics publishes it in solidarity with Monbiot and all those—the Murdochs, Rothmeres and other home-grown or imported oligarchs excepted—who are finding themselves on the receiving end of Britain’s extraordinarily repressive libel laws. To read the full blog, go to monbiot.com to ‘The Hanging Judge‘.

“During the libel case brought by Richard Desmond, pornographer and proprietor of Express newspapers, against the investigative author Tom Bower, who had claimed that Desmond acted on grudges, Eady refused to allow the court to hear evidence that he had done just this in another instance. In July, the appeal court found that Eady’s decision was “plainly wrong” and risked “a miscarriage of justice”(5). In 2004, during a case brought by a Saudi businessman, Mohammed Abdul Latif Jameel, against the Wall Street Journal, Eady decided that the newspaper’s story that the Saudi central bank was monitoring the accounts of certain businesses in case they were being used (unwittingly or otherwise) to channel funds to terrorists was not responsible journalism(6). Among his justifications was the fact that the US government hadn’t published this information: Eady appeared to see the interests of the state and the interest of the public as the same thing(7).

The law lords decided that Eady was “hostile to the spirit” of the public interest defence and that he had “rigidly applied the old law” in a way that was “quite unrealistic … unnecessary and positively misleading”. In one amazing passage, Lord Hoffmann compared Eady’s approach to that of the Communist Party censors in the Soviet Union(8).

But perhaps the gravest judgements against the Honourable Mr Justice Eady are those made by legislators in the United States. Such is the reach and severity of his illiberal rulings that four states have so far passed what are, in effect, Eady laws(9), and Congress is currently considering a federal bill whose purpose is to defend US citizens from his judgements, 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.”

Here’s the funny thing about Eady: according to the Daily Telegraph,

Surprising as it may now seem, Mr Justice Eady was once a leading courtroom defender of red-top journalism, much in demand as a barrister who could be relied on to uphold the freedom of the tabloids to expose the private lives of public figures. It was to David Eady that the Sun newspaper turned when the Coronation Street actor Bill Roache sued over taunts that he was “boring”.

This is EcoLogics’ contribution to Monbiot’s denunciation: how extraordinary that, in a country that is almost second to none when it comes to Rottweiler journalism, with oligarchs such as Rupert Murdoch routinely employing their newspapers to attack uncooperative politicians, or simply to make money by publishing pedling celebrity tat, we have the most draconian press law in the so-called ‘free’ world.

It might be argued that this is precisely the reason why we have these laws. In fact, given the nature of British political culture, it is usually only the rich, and apparently especially the rich on the political right, that can use the law to silence newspapers, and defend their interests. This means that, far from being in the public interest, the law as it stands serves to undermine democracy. According to Monbiot, a key defender of the status quo has been Jack Straw, who as Justice Minister has blocked attempts to reform the libel laws.

The worst offender when it comes to rottweiler journalism is Italy—or rather, Berlusconi’s press. Have a look at this press item, published by Reuters, which reveals that Berlusconi is having one of his TV channels shadow and secretly film a judge who has ruled against the prime Minister in a bribery case. ‘Days after Judge Raimondo Mesiano ordered Berlusconi’s holding company to pay 750 million euros in damages to a rival, the media mogul’s Canale 5 channel aired a video of the judge taking a walk, smoking and getting a shave at the barber. Dubbing the judge’s behaviour “eccentric”, a narrator points to him smoking the “umpteenth” cigarette, calls his turquoise socks “strange” and says: “He’s impatient … he can only relax at the barber’s”.

Amid the growing controversy surrounding the possible, indeed likely appearance of the neo-fascist BNP on the BBC’s Question Time this Thursday, two different, but inter-related issues have scarcely been raised by the Westminster commentariat.

The first is New Labour’s role in aiding and abetting the rise in the popularity of the BNP. New Labour, along with the Murdochs and the Rothmeres, is largely to blame for this phenomenon. First, it has so lied to, and deceived its former political base—British working men and women—that it has generated a disillusion and frustration with mainstream politics that is finding an outlet in the hateful BNP. The ‘intense relaxation’ of figures such as Peter Mandelson about the ‘filthy rich’ is in direct proportion to the anger that is being expressed by former Labour voters. Some have responded by going to the BNP; next spring many of the rest will vote for David ‘Janus’ Cameron’s PPP, the new Tory ‘People’s Progressive Party’.

While this aspect is key, it is not enough in itself; the second factor has been the xenophobia which New Labour politicians like Hazel Blears, David Blunkett, Jack Straw and other figures on New Labour’s increasingly far right leadership have promoted by talking up the ‘Islamist threat’ and by promoting anti-immigrant legislation. New Labour has, in this sense, joined the ranks of tabloid papers such as The Sun and the Daily Mail in scapegoating foreigners for Britain’s own social malaise. Even Gordon Brown has dipped his political spoon into this broth, claiming as he did in 2007 that ‘British jobs are for British workers’.

In this context, for New Labour to be suggest that the BNP should be excluded from national television is pathetic. The calls dissimulate the party’s own stance on immigration, and make a mockery of its allegedly progressive social credentials.

The BBC is playing no less sinister a role in the entire process. Let’s be very clear: the corporation has never been unbiased. Talk of impartiality is no more—and no less—than a convenient fiction which has served to maintain a degree aperture in the corporation’s coverage of a variety of events—a whisker of pluralism that, as this blogger has suggested before, is certainly better than the kind of Fox News society achieved in the United States by the Murdoch family. But let us not believe for a moment that this is tantamount to the impartiality that the BBC pretends to adhere to. Anyone who thinks otherwise might want to investigate the role of Mark Thompson, the BBC’s Director General, vis-a-vis the corporation’s coverage of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. In this case we find a useful example of the limits of the liberal model of journalism. (For a more detailed critique, EcoLogics includes below an excerpt of an analysis published in 2007, in the post on the British judge, Stephen Sedley, who tried to support the New Labour government’s plans to introduce a universal DNA database.)

No, what we have to fear is not so much the appearance of the BNP on television, as the fact that it will do so in a broadcasting system which has already shown a predisposition to tolerate both manifest and subtle forms of racism. If you missed the controversy surrounding an earlier appearance of the BNP on Radio 1, then read up on it to find out what is likely to happen, if not now, then in the medium term in a broadcasting system that has become subservient to the forces of neoliberalism—the same ones that have contributed, and still are contributing to the renewal of fascism in the UK, and beyond.

From an earlier post, a critique of the BBC’s claims of impartiality:

‘The BBC’s editorial guidelines suggest that the BBC is committed to impartiality. According to the BBC, this means that, amongst other things, the corporation seeks to provide ‘a properly balanced service consisting of a wide range of subject matter and views broadcast over an appropriate time scale across all our output’; to ‘reflect a wide range of opinion and explore a range and conflict of views so that no significant strand of thought is knowingly unreflected or under represented’; to ‘produce content about any subject, at any point on the spectrum of debate as long as there are good editorial reasons for doing so’; to ‘explore or report on a specific aspect of an issue or provide an opportunity for a single view to be expressed, but in doing so we do not misrepresent opposing views. They may also require a right of reply’. The Corporation aims to ‘ensure [that] we avoid bias or an imbalance of views on controversial subjects’. Indeed, the BBC goes so far as to say that its ‘journalists and presenters, including those in news and current affairs, may provide professional judgments but may not express personal opinions on matters of public policy or political or industrial controversy’ and ‘[o]ur audiences should not be able to tell from BBC programmes or other BBC output the personal views of our journalists and presenters on such matters’(8).

These guidelines reflect the BBC’s commitment to what might be described as a traditional discourse on the nature of journalism. A good journalist, or rather the news that s/he produces, is accurate, balanced, includes where appropriate a diversity of views, and does so in a manner that is not prejudiced by any bias, or by the personal views of the journalist.

While this discourse has been comprehensively critiqued by a number of scholars (see for example, Stuart Allan’s News Culture), there is still much to be said for it; we have only to consider the alternative posed by Fox News (9) to realise how vitally important it is to try to produce impartial, or something like impartial accounts, in news reporting.

The problem is that editorial guidelines such as the BBC’s are of course no guarantee of impartiality—for the BBC, or for any other news organisation. On the one hand, and staying within the logic of the guidelines, journalism is always susceptible to external manipulation, to mistakes or bias incurred thanks to the pressures of time or the limitations of space, and indeed to ‘internal’ manipulation by ‘biased’ journalists. From a more critical perspective, the guidelines are based on relatively naïve understandings of the nature of the production, dissemination, and social reception of knowledge by way of the media of mass communication. Modern societies and the issues that emerge in them tend to be so complex that there may well be far more perspectives than a journalist can ever know, understand, or report in any given case or subject. To be sure, the finite nature of a journalist’s, or indeed of a team of journalists’ knowledge means that s/he/they will necessarily bring to bear a certain perspective to whatever aspects they do manage to cover. Practical constraints to do with generic formulae, the amount of space or time available to produce a piece, the political and economic interests of the news organisations and their bureaucracies are not a matter of exception. On the contrary, they are the structural conditions under which, and with which journalists must work to produce news.

This post is not the place to engage in a detailed critique of journalistic conventions. It must suffice to suggest that, in practice, the aforementioned constraints force journalists to be selective, and thereby reductive with respect to the range and number of points of view that they represent. Those that they do choose will reflect, however indirectly, the ‘biases’ of their own knowledge and/or experience. Put differently, journalists’ representations will always exclude or misrepresent at least some views or perspectives.”

From today’s Independent:

‘Peter Brierley, whose son Lance Corporal Shaun Brierley, 28, was killed in March 2003, refused to shake Mr Blair’s proffered hand and said: “I’m not shaking your hand, you’ve got blood on it.”‘

The former prime minister was ushered away and afterwards Mr Brierley, from Batley, West Yorkshire, said: “I understand soldiers go to war and die but they have to go to war for a good reason and be properly equipped to fight.”

He added: “I believe Tony Blair is a war criminal. I can’t bear to be in the same room as him. I can’t believe he’s been allowed to come to this reception.

“I believe he’s got the blood of my son and all of the other men and women who died out there on his hands.

“It comes back to me every day, every time I see a coffin come off a plane; it reminds me of what happened to Shaun.”

EcoLogics wonders how many fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, friends and extended family would do exactly the same thing to Tony Blair—and of course Peter Mandelson and Gordon Brown—if given half a chance. We can only hope that episodes like this will haunt the New Labour politicians for the rest of their days.

Updated 2 December 2009

With the benefit of hindsight, the only thing that is really remarkable is that Alan Rusbridger and the rest of the people who run the Guardian held out for so long.

Then again, maybe they weren’t ‘holding out’ at all. Maybe they were always fans of Peter Mandelson, and some of us just hadn’t realised this was the case.

To be sure, in the perpetual logic of juncture that is politics, what leader one supports at any given point in time is, in some respects, not really that important. Far more significant, you could argue, are the policies that you fight for and against, and thereby, the specific actions that you support or oppose.

Indeed, after what seems like a century of Murdochian personality politics—with a promise of far more to come, what with David Cameron having struck a deal with old Rupert and his progeny—individuals and especially their personalities should be neither here nor there. When one focuses on personalities, it is easy to lose sight of what the individuals actually stand for. In such a context, the argument descends all too easily to the kind of character assassination that The Sun, the Daily Mail and other right-wing tabloids excel in. Or, to use a more pertinent example, it condescends to the kind of hagiographic articles and videos that the Guardian has been publishing of late about Peter Mandelson.

*    *    *

Just to be clear: large, or even medium-sized media organisations such as the Guardian are complex institutions. News organisations that try to steer a centre-left, or at least a relatively independent course are particularly complex. Their editors and journalists live, far more keenly than their right-wing colleagues,  the daily contradiction of trying to produce money-making truths. If this has always entailed a certain contradiction for journalists, it seems a particularly glaring one in the times we are living in. In a recent op-ed piece in the New York Times, Frank Rich provided withering evidence of the extent to which so-called ‘special interests’ are far from dead in the United States. If someone with the apparent integrity, power, and dignity of Barak Obama is already cutting back room deals with private insurance firms, then what hope is there for journalists working in a comparatively weak news organisation such as the Guardian Media Group, and this in the dying and arguably most corrupt days of the New Labour government?

In fact, it may be exactly the other way around. Against all odds, the Guardian has managed to steer a course that has remained surprisingly critical of what Seumas Milne aptly described as New Labour’s culture of corruption. Three particularly courageous examples of critical journalism come to mind: the paper’s ‘tax gap’ series; its coverage of New Labour’s curtailment of our civil liberties; and the paper’s extraordinary exposé of the Metropolitan Police’s efforts to cover-up the manslaughter of Ian Tomlinson.

These are examples of British journalism at its best. They reveal the continued relevance of a ‘fourth estate’ role for newspapers, and remind us why the robber-barons of the right have been so eager to embrace the Murdoch brand of journalism: a Fox-like, or perhaps we should say Rottweiler-like form of journalism which has, from the perspective of the owning corporations, two functions, and two functions only: to make money by serving up criminality or celebrity tat, and to beat any uncooperative politicians into submission. The combination evidently has worked, if only because the politicians have come to believe that it works; this blogger thinks that the New Labour politicians were protesting too loudly that Murdoch’s return to the Tories—the party he never actually left—would make no difference in the upcoming elections.

So even if one is critical of traditional models of news values, it remains crucially important to have at least some news organisations that still can, and still do engage in ideologically critical reporting that reaches large numbers of people, or at least, large numbers of key decision-makers up and down the country. The alternative is a Fox News Society where having a cousin called John Ellis can mean the difference between winning or losing a presidential election.

*   *   *

Back, then, to Peter Mandelson. As this blog has noted, the Guardian has gone from providing a relatively subtle form of support for Mandelson, to one that can only be described as being emetic: it is so blatantly an instance of propaganda that it makes critical readers vomit. The Guardian is now doing for Peter Mandelson what Fox News did for George Bush.

Perhaps we should simply treat this as a peccadillo that is best ignored in the way that one is forced to ignore, for example, the paper’s advertisements for Mercedes-Benz—a company recently caught out lying about the emissions of its cars—or indeed the many reams that the Guardian devotes to business, or to the promotion of consumption more generally. The contradiction between such coverage and the paper’s allegedly green credentials to one side, it’s probably true that few if any readers are ever 100% happy with everything they find in ‘their’ paper. Some of us have long got used to holding our noses as we’ve scanned the headlines of many a supposedly progressive paper—a good example can be found in Spain’s El País, whose coverage of Latin American affairs now blithely reflects the interests of large Spanish corporations.

Then again, to use a word much liked by post-structuralist scholars in the field of literary studies, news organisations are bound to be heteroglossic, i.e. they’re bound to have a variety of voices, and it’s up to readers to ‘pick and mix’ a menu of views, within the limits of the papers’ more manifest politics, that both echo and inform—or on occasion productively challenge—the own perspectives. The problem with this quintessentially liberal perspective is that Peter Mandelson is one of three New Labour politicians who have done the most to undermine the very conditions that make political pluralism possible in the UK. The New Labour troika achieved, and then kept power for 12 years by besting the Tories at their own game: by concentrating political, economic, and yes informational power in the hands of the few at the expense of the many. The geniality of Mandelson, Brown and Blair is that even as they have played a key role in gutting the social policies of ‘old’ Labour, they have pretended that they were still politically progressive. To this day, Mandelson is president of the Policy Network, a think-tank allegedly devoted to progressive policies.

By rehabilitating the twice-disgraced Mandelson, and by becoming his mouthpiece, the Guardian is saying, in effect, that it’s fine to mislead one’s own political base, and fine to be intensely relaxed about furthering the interests of the Robinsons, Hindujas, Rothschilds and Deripaskas of the world. What makes the volte-face, if it is a volte-face, so frightening is that it at once conforms to the worst tendencies of personality politics—witness how the paper has tried to talk up Mandelson’s humour, his clothes, and his allegedly self-effacing qualities—and moves far beyond them: when you decide to back someone like Mandelson, you effectively ensure that the personal becomes the political in the most dangerous of ways.

*   *   *

It is tempting to speculate what could have led the paper to become Mandelson’s rag.

Was it because the editors were pressured by what some might naively regard as the Labour Party’s base? One can certainly imagine that the New Labour apparatchiks have been keen to have ‘their’ paper promote the man whom they now apparently regard, with the desperation that results from terminal political decline, as the last best hope for a party that will soon be consigned to the oblivion of a Murdoch-Cameron prime ministership.

Then again, when one reads about the person who is the chair of the Guardian Media Group, and when one comes across the kind of grovelling comments offered by the paper’s right-wing (people like Michael White and Andrew Rawnsley), it is difficult not to suspect that the Guardian jefatura has not so much ‘learned to love Peter’ as gone from plain love to infatuation.

Or could it be a purely tactical attempt to milk both the love and the hatred swirling about Mandelson? As noted earlier, it’s not easy to produce money-making truths in this day and age.

Whatever the case, the paper’s overt support for Mandelson means that Guardian is now as much a part of the problem as is Mandelson himself. Anyone who reads the paper is aiding and abetting a news organisation that has started to act as a prosthesis for New Labour’s corruption. Insofar as this is the case, from today this blogger will no longer be frequenting, or indeed referring readers onto, the paper.

For those who live on a daily diet of Guardian news, this may prove to be a bit like leaving chips, beer, or perhaps red meat. In the world of newspapers as in the world of diets, there are, however, many substitutes; admittedly, you may have to go to a greater variety of sites for your news, but that is probably a good thing in its own right. The one thing that will really hit the paper is if a significant number of steady readers leave its digital or paper editions, and head for organisations that are unwilling to sell themselves down the river of neo-liberalism. It’s not for this blogger to recommend other sites, most or all of which will have some of their own issues— but at least, you will not be reading a paper whose editors are now sleeping with the proverbial enemy, that is to say, with the oligarchs’ man in Downing Street. EcoLogics refers as much to the Russian or Indian oligarchs, as to the people that Lord Penrose, the Scottish judge that conducted the enquiry into the Equitable Life scandal, described as a ‘self-perpetuating oligarchy‘ (are oligarchies ever anything else?) i.e. the British bankers, insurance men and women, captains of industry, and highest managers who are the New Labour Party’s patrons, and apparently, the Guardian’s preferred readers.

Updated 2 December 2009 Bounty for Blair!

To give credit where credit is due: a big round of applause to The Guardian for setting up what is, in effect, a bounty for Tony Blair. The paper is offering a reward for anyone who can shed light on Tony Blair’s baroque attempts to avoid paying the taxes that befit a multimillionaire. It is not at all surprising to hear that Blair has the network of paper companies which the Guardian describes. This is, after all, the same man who reportedly used his position as a fake peace envoy in the Middle East in an effort to drum up some extra cash via Tesco supermarkets. What is remarkable is that The Guardian has not only published the information on the opaque network of companies, but is, in effect, inviting anyone with inside knowledge to blow the whistle on the Blairs (the plural is important here because Chery Blair, long regarded as a good liberal, must be involved in this venture.) EcoLogics wonders: will The Guardian do the same with Peter Mandelson and other members of the New Labour nomenklatura who have cashed in on their political privilege?

This post is concerned with a neat ideological inversion: isn’t it fantastic that bona fide protestors now only face the possibility of permanent damage to their hearing, or perhaps a fatal aneurysm?

If this comment makes no sense, you may want to read about the news that U.S. police used sonic cannons, also known euphemistically as ‘Long Range Acoustic Devices’, to disperse a relatively small group of protesters during the G20 meeting in Pittsburgh.

Four thoughts:

First, we see yet again how a technology ostensibly developed for U.S. military purposes is used against that country’s own civilians.

Second, how appropriate that the Obama administration, which must have sanctioned the use of this politically sensitive technology, chose to literally drown out the protests with noise—sheer, deafening noise. EcoLogics is reminded of Obama’s repeated claims that he is all about ‘listening‘. Nothing like listening with sonic cannons.

Third, U.S. police use of the cannons implies that there is little difference between someone protesting in Pittsburgh, Iraqi insurgents, and someone hijacking a ship near Somalia—the sonic cannons have reportedly been used by the U.S. military in Iraq, and by cruise ships against the Somali ‘pirates’ as well.  Note, though, that this technology-based ‘equalization’ has a rather interesting discursive implication: if protesters can be treated like insurgents or pirates, then insurgents and pirates can be treated like protesters. A government that terrorises dissent does so at its own peril.

The fourth and final thought concerns the representation of what EcoLogics describes as technologies of non-death. Weapons such as the sonic cannon, produced by the blandly named American Technology Corporation, and the more and more widely used TASER, are being represented as being somehow ‘responsible’ weapons—in fact, not weapons at all. The TASER Corporation has developed a discourse that neatly dissimulates the offensive nature of its guns, even as it reveals the economic motivation behind the development of the weapons: the ‘About TASER’ section of its website claims that ‘We are committed to protecting life by providing innovative, high quality products and services that exceed customer expectations every time’. ‘TASER technology protects life’.

As if to prove its earnestness, the company suggests that ‘most employees and all of our senior management have taken voluntary exposures with our various TASER ECD devices. This includes Rick Smith, CEO; his brother Tom Smith, Chairman; Kathy Hanrahan, President; and Dan Behrendt, CFO; as well as all vice presidents of TASER Interational’ (quoted verbatim).

EcoLogics wonders if it wouldn’t be more realistic to perform involuntary exposures of senior management?

Lest there be any claim of facetiousness, ideology is defined in much the way that Cambridge sociologist John B. Thompson proposes: as meaning that serves to develop and sustain relations of domination between, and of course also within, social groups. Here’s a rather easy prediction: as the accountability of governments in Western democracies is eroded more and more by the agents of neo-liberalism, we will see increased deployment of sonic cannons and other weapons of mass silencing.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/video/2009/sep/28/peter-mandelson-career-labour-conference

In case you haven’t figured out what’s happening, you may wish to read The Guardian and Peter Mandelson.

This blogger doesn’t know what’s worse: the possibility that Alan Rusbridger et al really believe this ridiculous narrative, or that they simply see it as a way of making money.