EcoLogics

A short note to say that the news that Peter Mandelson is planning to slash spending on training for young people should come as a surprise to no one. New Labour’s educational policy—which is to say, its ‘skills’ policy, for education has long since become a bad word in New Labour circles—is premised on a species of consequentialism that is particularly susceptible to the wayward fluctuations of neoliberal politics.

Before the banking crisis, companies such as Carter & Carter successfully lobbied New Labour politicians for state ‘donations’ in the form of corporate welfare payments, and money flowed from the state into the bulging coffers of the burgeoning private FE/HE sector. But now that vast sums of state money have disappeared down the sinkholes of banks such as Lloyds and RBS, the claim will increasingly be that there is no money to be had for anything else—not even for projects that were once the darlings of New Labour’s ‘train to gain’ variety of clientelism. (Expeditionary wars such as those of Afghanistan or Iraq will continue to be excluded from the accounting because they make money for the merchants of death, and, like the Trident nuclear subs, have the cover of the sacred for British politicians who still cannot let go of a ‘glorious’ past).

EcoLogics wonders: what will happen in this brave new world of alleged scarcity to stalwart defenders of the New Lab skills faith such as Howard Newby? Will they now be busy stroking the Conservatives, in the hope of securing the continuation of the political conditions required for an on-going spirit of creation in higher and further education?

Whatever the case, the upshot is that a badly misguided, if not corrupt policy will be replaced by a return to good ‘ole Thatcherite slash—and—burnism. And like the Tory grandees who were ousted from power in 1997, Peter Mandelson, Gordon Brown, Alistair Darling and the rest of the New Labour nomenclatura will be voted out, but will also retire to corporate adviserships, the writing of ‘memoirs’, and perhaps the odd bit of TV presenting for the BBC or ITV, à la Michael Portillo.

The future is bright, isn’t it?

This blogger’s first reaction to the news that Mandelson is banging on again about ’student consumers’ and university courses that need to provide ‘economic benefits’  was to stifle a yawn almost as big as Mandelson’s ego. Vision? What vision?

But then this sequence of ideas crossed EcoLogics’ bloggerly mind:

1) Mandelson, like the rest of the British neocons before him, is saying that education is a matter of consumption. Ergo, education is a commodity like any other, and can and should be given a price.

2) If education can be commodified, then so can anything else–including, of course, politics. Politics, and by implication politicians like Mandelson, can and should be given a price.

3) Here’s the deal: What’s your price, Peter? And how should we calculate your exchange value: by way of what lecturers and students would be willing to pay for you, or what oligarchs have been willing, or will be willing to pay for your invaluable services?

The possibilities for corruption, if you really stick to New Labour’s partitura, are endless.

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.”

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.

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.

Who is behind New Labour’s sweeping policies?

It is well known that New Labour won the last elections (in 2005) with a drastically reduced majority: the party won no new seats, and its share of the popular vote fell by 5%. What is less well known is that only about 9.5 million people voted for New Labour (EcoLogics uses the expression ‘New Labour’ deliberately), which means that the party has governed over the last four years with a mandate based on about 22% of all those who could have voted (it is calculated that at 27 million, turnout was about 61%, which means that some 44 million people could have voted).

While the popular mandate for New Labour was not always as low as this, Britain’s extraordinarily undemocratic first-past-the-post parliamentary system means that New Labour has never actually represented a majority of Britons. Yet we have seen the scale of New Labour’s transformation of our everyday lives: beyond getting us involved in two wars, one of which was illegal and the other which is now supported by less than half of the population, New Labour has engaged in a reformist project whose privatising zeal, panoptical logic, and gross economic mismanagement are unmatched by that of any other postwar government.

Privatising zeal: even as New Labour has poured money into certain public services, it has engaged in a far-reaching policy of full or partial, and often covert privatisations. From city academies to foundation hospitals, the selling off of Royal Mail’s most lucrative aspects to the outsourcing of Job Centre Plus activities, New Labour has fatally undermined the old Labour principle that some services must remain in the public sector in order to prevent greedy corporations from exploiting the most vulnerable groups. Even in those cases where some public sector agencies nominally remain under public control, they have been reorganised as de facto private sector businesses if only because their practices have been made to obey markets, and not a public service ethos. The BBC is but one example of this process, and Higher Education is increasingly another. If there is one thing that New Labour has done astutely, it’s the manner in which it has literally poured money, ostensibly for the public sector, into the coffers of private firms: the complaints about millions given to private consultants are only the tip of the iceberg.

Panoptical logic: New Labour’s laws have given virtually all public sector, and part-privatised government agencies the power to spy, almost at will, on any aspect of our private lives. Any of us can now be thrown into jail and kept there for the longest period of time in any industrialised democracy, without charges or due process. As I have explained in a series of posts about New Labour’s Spiral of Terror, the true justification for these extraordinary changes is not, as is widely believed, to be found in 9/11 and subsequent attacks; to name just one example, the RIPA 2000 legislation was developed before 9/11, but it is this legislation, as amended by David Blunkett, that now even gives town councils the right to spy on people who allow their dogs to fowl the country’s streets and parks. Anyone familiar with the history of governance must know that unpopular governments, or governments without a true mandate, have typically resorted to brute force, or at least, some form of policing coercion, and New Labour is no exception to this rule. Perhaps its one claim to innovation is the extent to which it has relied on a panoptical logic to secure its interests. However, as the crisis over the G20 policing demonstrated, it may now be the case that this same logic is being applied against the police by camera-wielding activists. And if the crisis in parliamentary standards revealed anything beyond the expected conflation of public and private interests, it was that MPs own privacy is now under threat. The proverbial chickens have finally come home to roost in Westminster itself.

Gross economic mismanagement: we should be thankful that the Tories are not in power just now, because they would be busy slashing and burning public services as per the older, less astute Thatcherite model, and this at precisely the moment when massive state investment is required to keep us from sliding into an economic depression. But this verity must not allow us to overlook the fact that it was New Labour’s incestuous relationship with London City financiers that got us into the economic pickle in the first place. Blair, Brown and their acolytes have fallen, and are still falling heads over heels to please especially the big financial corporations; little wonder that Blair landed plum jobs as an ‘adviser’ with J P Morgan and with Zurich, and that Gordon Brown (and the Obama administration) have just managed to stop any efforts on the part of France and Germany to cap bankers’ bonuses. Will Brown also cash in when he’s gone? And has Mandelson done so already?

All of this, and much, much more on the basis of an electoral mandate that is nowhere near a majority of the popular vote. Who then, or what, gives New Labour the right to engage in these far-reaching changes?

New Labour’s policies are almost certainly the result of a complex mixture of highly centralised decision-making, and some local input via direct and indirect consultation processes. While there is evidence that some of the policies are the result of long-term planning, others are the result of purely tactical decision-making, frequently in response to a media panic, or a tabloid attack. As always, it would be a mistake to assume that there is one big conspiracy at work. I nevertheless suggest that there are three forces that have more than taken up the slack of meaningful democratic participation in the UK, and are responsible for many aspects of the changes outlined above.

The first of these involves the media, with two groups—Murdoch’s News Corporation, and Jonathan Harmsworth’s (aka the 4th Viscount Rothermere) Daily Mail and General Trust—leading the proverbial pack. The process that began at least as far back as the time when Murdoch bought the Sun and transformed it into a Thatcherite rottweiler has had extraordinarily important implications for politics in the UK. Murdoch—or rather, now the Murdochs—have reached a position of such political power that they may even be king- or queenmakers. Little wonder that prospective party leaders from Blair onwards have been so eager to secure meetings with Rupert Murdoch, frequently in far away places. From European policy to economic practice, from the spying on people (as in the case of the News of the World) to the promotion of the idea of permanent insecurity, the Murdochs and the Rothermeres have doubtless played a huge role in promoting the kind of political culture we have in Britain today.

The second force is made up of other powerful private sector corporations without access to the public forms of pressure brought to bear by the Murdochs or the Rothermeres. Some of these are huge transnational conglomerates like the Royal Bank of Scotland or BAE, companies which have the power quite literally to stop government action in its tracks (as was the case with the Serious Fraud Office’s decision to ‘discontinue’ its investigation into BAE corruption) or to bend it in the direction of one or two directors’ personal interests (Fred Goodwin’s pension agreement comes to mind, despite New Labour’s strenuous efforts to persuade us that its hands were tied).

Many other corporations may engage in less spectacular interventions, but their practices may have equally nefarious consequences for public policy. Here EcoLogics has in mind for example the role that Entrust may have played, and may still be playing via David Blunkett in policy matters involving centralised, all-encompassing databases such as the proposed ID card scheme. Or consider, for another example, what happened to the UK’s adult education policy, thanks in part to the relationship between New Labour and the failed automotive repair company turned adult education provider, Carter & Carter. As EcoLogics has noted in several other posts, Carter & Carter attempted to gain a foothold in higher education by way of a partnership with Howard Newby, the former vice-chancellor of UWE who is now vice-chancellor at Liverpool University and has tried to close down progressive departments such as philosophy and politics.

We might also point to Bridgepoint Capital, the £13 billion private equity firm which has been recently associated with Alan Milburn, a former New Labour hopeful for party leadership who is now widely believed to represent private interests in the context of so-called NHS ‘reform’. And let us not forget Capita, which is perhaps the most infamous of the New Labour corporate darlings. Capita controls the television licence fee (the operation of which has made headlines thanks to Capita’s brutal enforcement procedures); the management of call centres for government initiatives such as the London Congestion Charge; the provision of IT services, including web hosting and helpdesk support, to many county and city councils, many LEAs, as well as the Driving Standards Agency and National Rail; the management of the Criminal Records Bureau for the Home Office;  SIMS.net, the School Information Management Software which is used in virtually all primary and secondary schools across the UK in order to record many aspects of student data… the list goes on and on, and is derived from the Capita Wikipedia entry, which is worth a read. Beyond the scary concentration of private information in the hands of one private corporation, the Capita Wiki illustrates the point made earlier about the not-so-overt privatisation, via the figure of ‘outsourcing’, of a host of public service activities. Lest we forget, Capita first came to public notice when its CEO Rod Aldridge had to resign over the New Labour ‘cash-for-peerages’ affair, a scandal which confirmed the extent to which the New Labour’s party-economic fortunes hinged on political favours. EcoLogics says ‘confirmed’ because of course, the Ecclestone Affair provided the first glimpse of this reality. (By way of an aside, does Aldridge still have a stake in Capita?)

Beyond these especially big fish, it is difficult to know how many additional corporations are involved in what aspects of government on what level, and how many act in concert, or on the contrary, compete with each other for influence. It is also difficult to assess, given the behind-the-scenes nature of their interventions, the extent to which such corporations must vie with more local interests when they attempt to shape New Labour’s policies. We have seen, for example, how easy it will apparently be for Tesco to get around local wishes in Machynlleth.

EcoLogics nonetheless suspects that the group of most influential corporations is actually rather smaller than expected, and involves a great deal of collaboration, to not say economic and political incestuousness. Part of what allowed Carter & Carter to grow in the spectacular way that it did prior to its CEO’s death was an injection of capital from Bridgepoint. At the same time, the skills policy that Carter & Carter would have benefited from was authored by Lord Sandy Leitch, one of the Lloyds Banking Group’s leading directors, who in turn is said to have given money towards Gordon Brown’s virtual leadership campaign. Brown, for his part, looked the other way in regard to questions regarding competition law when Lloyds embarked in its fateful takeover of HBOS. It is, in this sense, not difficult to imagine that, as the title of this post suggests, New Labour’s world is in some respects rather smaller, or at least rather more tightly knit, than one might have thought, and thus perhaps rather more precarious than many might assume. What would happen if any of these players (or one of their employees) were to blow the whistle on the New Labour government?

That said, a third source of policy influence—and support— takes the form of the intervention of foreign governments, with the U.S. doing most of the backseat driving. Few people realise the extent to which U.S. foreign policy, and the interests of its different political and business groups, dictate Britain’s international and even national affairs. Few people know, for example, that the U.S. military would have to both approve, and do the targeting for any use of our much-vaunted Trident missile system. And there can be little doubt that it was the U.S. that forced Tony Blair to walk down the Iraqi War gangplank; this is something that he will of course always deny because it would show his true stature in the world. But how else to explain that a leader of the Labour Party (in fact, New Labour Party) could ignore the extraordinary two-million person march which occurred in London on February 15, 2003? One gets a sense of the sheer scale of the march when one learns that, on that bitterly cold day, people had to queue for hours just to be able to join the massive anti-war march. Hundreds of thousands of people were jammed on bridges and side roads, still trying to begin the march, even as several hundred thousand more were reaching the end of the route. Alas, as we now know, a deal had already been done, and Tony Blair felt powerless to stop it despite the fact that he must have known, as the Bush administration itself already suspected, that it might well finish off his political career.

The above is, without a doubt, an overly simplistic analysis. But it begins to explain why anyone who claims that we have a solid, and healthy democracy in Britain is deceiving themselves. It is, in this sense, richly ironic that the New Labour government recently felt able to institute direct rule in the Turks and Caicos Islands, ostensibly on account of the corruption of the island state’s ’suspended’ government. The UK’s acting prime minister—the man who has had himself called the First Secretary of State, President of the Board of Trade and Lord President of the Council (EcoLogics returns to Wikipedia)—has previously been forced to resign not once, but twice from the UK’s cabinet thanks to conflicts of interest involving British and Indian millionaires (or perhaps it is billionaires). In such a context, one does not accuse other states of corruption. Or perhaps, that is exactly what one does.

News just out: now Mandelson is ‘officially’ ruling himself out of the New Labour leadership race.

Might this blogger have been completely wrong in warning about a Mandelson-Guardian axis?

That might seem to be the case until we remember who is already the de facto leader of the New Labour Party (as always, EcoLogics uses the term ‘New Labour’ quite deliberately). Protesting loudly about the absence of any future prime ministerial ambitions neatly dissimulates the reality of the present. Mandelson is, by all accounts, the acting prime minister (and not just in Brown’s absence). In this context, it makes little difference that he’s ruled out—or apparently ruled out—running for a formal leadership status.

So no, EcoLogics wasn’t wrong—at least not in the sense that the blog criticised the Guardian for giving its backing to a man who continues to have immense power, and indeed, whose power can only grow after his latest, and no doubt shrewdest, of disclaimers.

Updated 30 September 2009

See also the more recent Learning to love Peter—or leaving The Guardian

A newspaper editor has a number of ways in which s/he can attempt to make or break a politician. The editor’s arsenal ranges from utter silence—total censorship of someone’s views—to a Murdochian unleashing of the proverbial hounds of the hunt. In between these two extremes we find a variety of linguistic and para-linguistic instruments, not all of which are readily identified by even relatively expert readers. To mention just a few of the more obvious tools of the trade, there’s the prominence of the headline; the adjectives chosen (or not) for the linguistic account; the size, angle, lighting, framing and expression of any photographs; the framing of the article (or photograph) by other news items; appeals to ‘common sense’… the list could go on and on and on.

The word ‘attempt’ is nonetheless key because there is no guarantee that readers will buy the story: literally or figuratively. On the day that a particular politician’s campaign is to be launched (or destroyed), some other event may explode across the news-scape, redirecting readers’ attentions away from any planned making or unmaking of. Then again, a good (or inconvenient) portion of the readership may simply be on holiday. To be sure, politicians are usually made—or broken—over a much longer period of time.

Equally importantly, in the absence of the aforementioned distractions the editor may fail to persuade a significant number of readers to abandon old prejudices, or indeed, to acquire new ones. To put the matter somewhat academically, any student of mass communication knows (or should know) that bullet theories of media effects are as good as the tacit model that they silently advance: words are no more bullets than bullets are words.

Then again, a reader can be struck by a choice of words, and as Russian politicians and their Chechen henchmen have shown, a journalist can be silenced by a bullet.

This is a long way of saying that on August 10, 2009, The Guardian knew full well what it was doing when it decided to foreground a Decca Aitkenhead interview with Peter Mandelson. Many readers may not have seen the interview, let alone the editorial that accompanied it. Those who did see them were not necessarily persuaded by either. And those who were persuaded may well have been persuaded in different ways about different aspects of the first or the second representation. Few things in the world of mass communication are what they seem at first glance, or even, on second thought.

But that verity does not contradict the fact that the world of the news media is littered with efforts to determine the meanings derived from a first glance, and indeed, from a second or even a third thought. EcoLogics suggests that the editors of The Guardian were trying to determine the nature of both glance and thought where Peter Mandelson is concerned.

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Decca Aitkenhead’s Peter Mandelson interview (‘I had to be the hit man’) was very good, whatever one might say about the Guardian’s ulterior motivations. It was a Machiavellian mirror, if such a thing exists, of Peter Mandelson’s Machiavellianism. Even as it revealed the innumerable ways in which the Prince of Darkness calculates his political relations, it worked quite hard to make these seem funny. As part of this, it attempted to establish an opposition between Mandelson’s aides, who seemed to forever be warning him to keep his mouth shut or to be more careful, and Mandelson himself, who was made to appear to be throwing caution to the wind, and just ‘enjoying himself’.

The article’s stance vis-a-vis this new Mandelson line was remarkably ambiguous; it didn’t quite celebrate it, but it didn’t condemn it either. That said, there was one way in which the interview was anything but ambiguous. It constituted an example of the kind of psychology that may be generated when a journalist is embedded in a military unit pitched in battle. There may have been no incoming mortar shells, but the effect might just as well have been the same: the journalist took us into Mandelson’s unit and made a part of his political war machine. This immersion may well have generated if not a sympathy, then certainly a shared subjectivity of a kind which is least likely to be perceived or understood by readers who don’t have training in media analysis. Again, the point is not to say that this or any other ‘device’ is necessarily effective; but it was rather subtle, and so is less likely to have been noticed by a majority of readers.

Now it might be argued that this was a one-off, a sign of The Guardian’s duty to ‘balance’, that most misleading of all journalistic objectives. In fact, the interview was not only given headline status, but was silently backed up by an editorial that subtly signalled, if not a Guardian volte-face, then certainly a significant change of course. One line in the seemingly even-handed editorial said it all: ‘It is possible – with Mandelson, it sometimes seems anything is possible – that we are now about to meet a man of ideology.’ By saying this, Rusbridger et al dissimulated in principle, if not in effect, the fact that Mandelson has had ideology all along: the ideology of a self-serving neoliberal, one who now, for both tactical and strategic reasons, needs to persuade the mythical, and seemingly gullible centre of the Labour Party that he is really one of ‘us’. It would appear in this sense that the Guardian has become a part of Mandelson’s ultimate public relations campaign.

The Guardian might also try to suggest that it has published critical pieces about Mandelson—for example, the day after the interview appeared, the paper included a piece by Simon Hoggart that did say a few mean things about Mandelson, and included a telling line: ‘Now we have unveiled in the Guardian the latest, newest, shiniest Mandelson, straight from the showroom. He is, he tells us, a pussycat.’ Read in a certain way, this line suggests that the Guardian was in fact unmasking Mandelson’s latest guise; EcoLogics suggest that the combination of ambiguity and embedding analysed above suggests more of an unveiling than an unmasking.

If this analysis is a valid one, we can only guess at The Guardian’s motivations for abandoning their own hitherto admirable political crusade against the sweet stench of corruption that pervades Mandelson’s designer clothes. Perhaps the newspaper is in such dire financial straits that it dares not contradict what it senses to be a groundswell of pro-Mandelsonian opinion amongst those who still buy the paper. Then again, the editors may have persuaded themselves that for Labour itself it’s Mandelson or bust. Whatever the case, this is one Guardian reader who has lost respect for a paper that until now has been something like a lone critical media voice in New Labour’s—and Peter Mandelson’s—neoliberal jungle.

By way of a postscript, have a look at what the Guardian editors did to a CiF comment that pointed out that the Guardian was in no position to be having a go at the City of London after its own support for Mandelson (was the censorship a helpful suggestion on the part of the New Labour media intelligence unit?)  :

What the Guardian does to criticism of its own editorial policies

Here is an image of the way in which the paper headlined Mandelson’s article on 12 August 2009 (Guardian Unlimited, at 8.48am. The printed edition carried an ever bigger headline of Mandelson’s article).

The Guardian supports Peter Mandelson

Have a look also, at the little plug thrown in by the August 13 editorial about unemployment, in which the Guardian both singles out for mention, and agrees with a comment made by Mandelson that things could be ‘much much worse’. Yes indeed; but were it not for Mandelson’s and New Labour’s policies from 1997 onwards, they could be much, much better.

Update September 30:

The paper has gone from a relatively subtle pro-Mandelson stance, to one that is as crass as the videos shown at the height of New Labour’s pathetic final conference (see for example, the emetic http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/video/2009/sep/28/peter-mandelson-career-labour-conference) Here’s a suggestion to Guardian readers: vote with your feet, or rather, with your browser: stop reading the paper in any of its forms. Later this week, EcoLogics will be publishing a post that both explains the need for, and suggests some ways of engaging in, Guardian abstention.