TV Review: What’s in a Load of Rubbish? (2001)

Benjamin "the Binman" Pell

TV Review from the February 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

What’s in a Load of Rubbish?

Last month Channel Four screened a documentary called Scandal in the Bins that was the remarkable story of a remarkable man—Benjamin Pell. Until recently very few people had heard of Pell and today, the majority still haven’t. But Pell has been popping up in the pages of Private Eye for quite some time and has recently had some exposure in the national press. Many who have heard of him know him by one of his other names—”Benji the Binman”.

“Benji the Binman” is what some might call “a great British eccentric”. Others might call him a simple thief. But essentially he is a collector. A collector of rubbish—indeed, a freelance collector of rubbish. For the last few years Pell has earned a living of sorts through scrabbling round amongst the refuse of the rich and famous, their agents and solicitors. A staunch Zionist, he began by raiding the bins of pro-Palestinian organisations in London and then moved on from there. The story which really made him—and which turned him into a household name among Fleet Street editors if nobody else—concerned Elton John’s financial difficulties and how they had been brought about through his mammoth and conspicuous consumption.

From that time on Benji has hardly looked back. He claimed in the programme that he is so obsessed with newspapers he used go down to Euston station every Sunday and collect them off the trains but in the last couple of years he has become a key contact for editors and newsroom managers and has had stories that he has ultimately been responsible for printed in almost every national newspaper in Britain. A man with an “anti-establishment” air about him, it is alleged that he has been heavily involved in everything from the Fayed/Hamilton case to the recent leaking of the Philip Gould memos about Blair.

Although his recent successes are reputed to have netted him £100,000 in the last year or so he lives a frugal life at his parents’ modest north London semi, spending a fair proportion of his time in the garden shed where he stores his dozens and dozens of bin bags. Frail and unkempt, his immediate ambition in life is to get a second shed.

Pell’s doctor describes him as an obsessive compulsive and this evidence was used in his favour during some of his many court appearances (whether as a witness, like in the Elton John case, or as a defendant). His interviews for this programme showed that he is certainly eccentric and probably what social workers, years ago, would have called “maladjusted” too. But what the programme also showed— and was at pains to point out—is that whatever he is, he is clearly not mad.

Aware of his eccentricity, Pell will accentuate his unusual behaviour even further to achieve a desired end (such as if and when he gets arrested). In the Elton John case he appeared in court dressed from head to toe in bizarre Elton John memorabilia and took little time convincing the court that he was a harmless nutter who was incapable of being part of any conspiracy of any description. On his late night scavenging forays he will make sure he smells as badly as possible lest he get arrested, as was demonstrated when one of the programme’s hidden cameras showed him being stopped by a police officer who, after a few seconds of questioning, started to search Pell and then hesitated, pulled a face, stopped and then left him to fester in peace.

Rat trap

Scandal in the Bins did a good job showing the human side of Pell—his eccentricity, his very real fear of going to prison and his sheer craftiness. Although Neil and Christine Hamilton were featured saying that Pell had been one of the people who had helped to ruin their lives (as if they hadn’t had a hand in it themselves) Pell showed himself to be at least as hostile to the press as they now find themselves to be. Rightly or wrongly, he sees himself as someone getting as much out of the press as he can by putting his compulsive disorder to use making a living. In the process he causes trouble to the powerful and—more often than not—as a lonely one-man band is the victim of the news corporations’ manipulations, not their primary cause.

Pell claimed that British newspapers are just as corrupt as the people they are allegedly exposing and, naturally enough, he has a ready audience for that view as few outside the British media would disagree with it. Scandal in the Bins had plenty of evidence for it as well. In the most revealing section of the programme two of the most powerful men in the British media—PR guru Max Clifford and Sun political editor Trevor Kavanagh were shown up, with help from Pell, for being the hypocrites they really are.

Clifford’s own PR façade slipped when he walked out of an interview with the programme’s makers shouting and screaming at the film crew for asking him questions about his business methods (even though he didn’t bat an eyelid at their seemingly irrefutable evidence that he had perjured himself in a court case) while Trevor Kavanagh was heard telling an interviewer that the Sun had never paid Pell for a story or for any of his illegal activities. As the tape played, the screen showed copies of News International’s invoices regarding payments to Pell for services rendered. Brilliant television, achieving what few—if any—have previously managed to do.

This is not to give the impression that Pell is an entirely blameless character either—he certainly isn’t. He has done his fair share to upset the lives of those he had otherwise no reason interfering with and has readily accepted payment for doing so. The point is that despite his own clear shortcomings his (partial) co-operation with this documentary did as much to expose the systematic hypocrisy and double-dealing of the British press as anything yet shown. If Channel Four repeat it soon (and no doubt they will) try and catch it if you didn’t see it first time around.

In the meantime, it is worth asking yourself when you next see an eye-catching article in the press—whether it be a “serious” investigation by Insight in the Sunday Times or an expose of some pop star’s business dealings in the tabloids—about where the information for the piece came from and of the unbridled skulduggery that took place to get it into print so more newspapers could be sold and more advertising attracted. And when you’re doing that remember to spare a small thought, at least, for a poor Jewish boy from north London with an obsessive compulsive disorder and a shed full of bin bags.

Dave Perrin

Greasy Pole: Leaks and changes (2000)

The Greasy Pole column from the September 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

New Labour set out to run British capitalism as it had never been run before. Nobody with a memory should have been deceived

With Parliament away on holiday Tony Blair should have had plenty of time to reflect on life and the universe, or rather what has gone wrong with the New Labour dream and will they lose the next election. It may have seemed to him like a marriage, at first idyllic, which goes spectacularly wrong, falling from apparently inexhaustible affection and patience into bitter rancour. May 1997 and that huge majority was not all that long ago, but how things have changed. Like a rotting, doomed ship Labour is leaking.

In 1997 the Tories were exhausted, barren, sleazy. It happens to a lot of governments; simply, their time is up, their impotence has been exposed too often and the voters are ready to try another party. The election was as much a defeat for the Major government as a victory for Blair. None of this prevented the Labour manipulators in Millbank claiming that the result came through their skilful management of mass opinion. It was the culmination of years of “rebranding” the Labour Party, from the days of Michael Foot and his donkey jacket at the Cenotaph into a young, thrusting, thoroughly modern party for which nothing—no principle, no tradition—was sacred. Some disgruntled party members wondered whether this was a denial of what they fondly knew as Labour’s glorious history of struggle—or an abandonment of what they called their political principles. But such antediluvian carping did not impress the whiz kids at Millbank and in any case it only took a few seats to be captured for the grumbles to stifle their doubts.

Stress 

With the rebranding came the promises, which were not new because, in one form or another, we hear them at every election. These were encapsulated in slogans and soundbites—education, education, education, tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime. And there was the nice Mr Blair saying things like “Look, I’m an everyday, down to earth, honest kind of guy. You can trust me.” A New Labour government would be historically different—they would run British capitalism virtually without those unpleasant bits like crime, extreme poverty, homelessness, substandard medical treatment and education. And as the votes came flooding in it seemed to have worked. The fixers at Millbank with their focus groups, their pollsters and spin-doctors celebrated their own estimate that nothing was beyond their powers.

Reality was rather different. As New Labour has failed to live up to its promise and the people who voted for it have come to realise that life under capitalism is essentially unchanged, there have been signs of stress in the government. There has been internal strife—coded messages (some less artfully disguised than others) that this Minister was not up to the job, that that one was mentally unsound . . . Blair has reacted like a man in a panic, trying to impose his will—as in the case of the Welsh First Secretary and the London mayor—on the party. This policy was based on Blair’s self-assessment that he held a uniquely secure place in the voters’ affections—and therefore an unusually powerful role in the government.

 “Honest kind of guy” Blair

That he began to have doubts about this became evident in the spring, when Blair circulated a memo—famously leaked—designed to re-establish his position and influence. First there was his gloomy assessment of New Labour’s problems: on family issues perceived as weak; on crime as soft; on national interest insufficiently assertive. “We need,” he wrote, “a thoroughly worked out strategy, stretching over several months, to regain the initiative in this area.” and part of that strategy was that Blair should benefit; after listing a number of measures, like getting tough on crime, “eye-catching initiatives” on the family, he urged “I should be personally associated with as much of this as possible.”

Leaks 

It may have been a coincidence but this anguished review of the government’s situation was composed in the immediate aftermath of a piece in the Daily Mail on similar lines. It is fair to speculate on the response of Labour voters to a prime minister who is apparently panicked by a piece of typical gutter journalism, aimed at provoking some of the ugliest of prejudices, in one of the most cynical of newspapers. And this from a prime minister who, when it suits him, has asserted that he is immune to pressure from the media.

But then, just as things began to get really interesting, as one leak after another revealed the disarray at the heart of the government, as Blair’s favourite pollster Philip Gould wrote about the government’s strength ebbing away, of them being “powerless to turn foreknowledge into effective preventative action”, of the New Labour brand being “badly contaminated”, Blair underwent an abrupt change of mind. “I think,” he trilled on Sky TV “we are in a stronger position, because in 1997 on the economy we were having to say to people we are just going to have to be very cautious and responsible. We can now say to people we have proved our responsibility.” This upbeat message was given to the nation on 23 July—less than three months after he had told his inner circle (and later, thanks to that leak, the rest of us as well) that they were “out of touch with gut British instincts”.

Panic 

This sudden, extreme change in Blair’s analysis of his government’s prospects was gleefully played up as evidence that when it comes to running the country he doesn’t know his own mind. (He didn’t help himself by also changing his mind over the trivial matter of allowing the press to photograph his family on their holidays.) But such changes—U-turns, broken promises, abandoned “principles”—are not unknown. Political history is littered with examples of them. The only difference, which sometimes influences popular conceptions of what is happening, is how the politicians manage their changes. Some—like Harold Wilson, try to ignore them. Some—like Harold Macmillan—airily dismiss them. Others—like Ted Heath and Blair—aggravate their problems by panicking.

But the basis of it—the inconsistency—is unavoidable. New Labour set out to be different, to run British capitalism as it had never been run before. Nobody with anything like a memory, or with any access to historical reality, should have been deceived. Capitalism will not allow New Labour to succeed where all other governments have failed. No change there then. And no need for leaks to tell us

Ivan

Not in front of the workers (1984)

Illustration by George Meddemmen.

From the May 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Capitalism can never be an open society. Trade rivalries, international competition and battling class interests necessitate secrecy on the part of those who hold power. There is not a single government in the world which does not keep secrets from those it claims to represent. Even the most liberal of so-called constitutional democracies have elaborate mechanisms of secrecy and deception. The minority class which monopolises the means of wealth production and distribution also dominates the means of information. Class-controlled channels of information transform knowledge about society, full and free access to which is vital to democracy, into propaganda which gives a false sense of what is going on around them to those being "informed”.

According to the liberal illusion, which is much cherished by Western political commentators, there exists a fundamental division between totalitarian and "free” states. Under totalitarian governments, it is argued, the state is virtually free from accountability to the working class and the ruling class run the country as they please. "Free states”, on the other hand, are supposed to have rulers who are accountable to “the people". In fact, the supposed division is far less clear. Even the most ruthless dictatorship does not survive long if it fails to spend huge fortunes indoctrinating workers and responding (through violent repression or reform) to workers’ discontent. The “free state” is also a constitutional hallucination: the defence of class privilege and the existence of real democratic freedom are incompatible and, however sincerely governments may adhere to liberal ideology, the state is always a weapon of class rule. Indeed, the very existence of the state which is ultimately the executive committee of the ruling class precludes the possibility of real freedom. This is not to deny that significant differences exist between the position of workers in different parts of capitalism: there are degrees of democracy and we would be foolish not to concede that workers in Britain enjoy more than those in Poland — that a Dutch worker who can join a trade union and vote in an election is in a more politically advantageous position than their counterpart in Chile or China or Turkey. The point is not that workers have no power whatsoever but that as long as the state exists, whatever its form, effective political power, including the right to use violent force, belongs to the capitalist minority in whose interests the state functions.

Consider the activities of the state in Britain in 1984. A “democratic state”, we are told. Police erect road-blocks at county boundaries to stop workers moving from one part of the country to another in order to engage in industrial action. Mine workers are stopped by police and asked how they voted in the last election and how they propose to vote in the next one. The Home Secretary refuses to answer questions in parliament about how many telephones are being tapped. Thousands of workers’ names are filed on police computers. An organisation called The Economic League compiles blacklists of trade union activists which are passed on to employers. The government bans trade unions at its spy centre, telling workers that they must accept a bribe of £1,000 or get out. The next election for the Greater London Council is abolished and unelected councillors are to be appointed to sit on the GLC. A worker in the civil service is sentenced to six months in prison for telling the press about the date of the arrival of weapons which we are told are being installed to defend, among other things, the freedom of the press. A "democratic state”?

The state has always kept secrets from the workers. This is particularly so in relation to its military activities, in which workers are permitted the liberty to slaughter and be slaughtered, but not the right to know what the bosses are negotiating and why. At the Tehran Conference in November 1943 Winston Churchill (addressing his comment to his war-time ally, Stalin) summed up the capitalist attitude to freedom of information when he remarked that “In wartime truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies". Stalin seems to have learnt the lesson, and it does not seem to have been lost on Michael Heseltine and his fellow residents at the Ministry of Truth.

The Official Secrets Act was passed in 1889, largely as a result of the activities of a Foreign Office employee called Charles Marvin who leaked information to the press about the secret negotiations which had surrounded the Treaty of Berlin in 1878. Lord Halsbury, who moved it, stated:

  The Bill provides for the punishment of those persons who either give information to the enemies of the country, or who act as spies, or make or communicate plans or sketches of fortresses and like places, or disclose official secrets.

So if, when you are next on a fortnight’s package tour to sunny Bulgaria and the bouncer in the disco asks you casual questions about where your missile bases are or how many scientists are employed by the British government on developing germ warfare, beware. As a worker, however, you need have no fear, because you are likely to be just as excluded from knowledge about “our” secrets as workers in other countries are left ignorant of "theirs”. National secrets are secrets from the majority of people who live within the nation: the state has an interest in keeping secrets from both the national enemy and the class enemy. That is why the arrival of American nuclear missiles at Greenham Common was supposed to be kept secret from the British workers whose “democratic way of life” the Cruise weapons are alleged to be defending. It is because she tried to tell other people about a matter which she thought concerned us that Sarah Tisdall is now sitting in a “democratic" prison cell. Under capitalism it is often a crime to tell the truth.

In Nazi Germany reports of the atrocities being committed inside the concentration camps were illegal. It is against the law for South African police to speak to the press about the mysterious deaths of political prisoners. The greater the ugliness of the state’s actions in defence of class privilege, the greater is the secrecy surrounding such activities and the more severe is the penalty to be paid by those who commit the crime of telling forbidden tales.

What about the incarceration of Sarah Tisdall? Unlike certain deluded liberals, we do not throw up our hands in horror that so vicious a sentence has been handed out in so democratic a country as Britain. What’s new about British capitalism turning democratic behaviour into a crime? The British ruling class is the oldest in the world and, in its time, has committed some of the dirtiest tricks and enacted some of the most repressive measures. The modern state has tended to maintain a liberal facade, but those of us who know what the state exists for can hardly be shocked when it comes out into the open and exhibits the power of undemocratic oppression. Unlike reformists, socialists will not be pleading with the government to do the decent thing and let the poor girl free. When the prison gates are opened it will not be as a result of the oppressors bowing to the moral pleas of the oppressed. but will be a consequence of the class which is robbed and deceived (all quite legally, of course) realising that the real robbers and frauds are not the inhabitants of the prison cells. Workers have nothing to gain by holding processions to place pressure on the exploiting class to behave with goodwill. Our task is to rip off their democratic masks and to expose the disgusting fraudulence which enables power to belong to a minority in the name of democracy. Socialists could not but admire the courage of Ms Tisdall and those like her, throughout the world, who have defied the assertion that telling the truth is an act of criminality. We may sympathise, but that will not change society — indeed, it will not in itself make any difference if there were a thousand or ten thousand workers with access to secret information who were willing to reveal it unless the working class start to make real use of the knowledge which is available.

Will there be secrets in a socialist society? Without doubt socialism, because of its feature of democratic control, will allow no possibility for secret information to exist in relation to matters of collective social significance. Whatever information society has will be available to everyone, without any administrators or bureaucrats being allowed to keep certain knowledge for their own privileged use. On the assumption that knowledge is power, socialism will not allow social groups to exist whose access to information is greater than that available to all other members of society. Modern communication technology, which is currently used for the perverse purpose of storing secrets, can be used in socialism to make realistic the democratic aim of having the widest dissemination of information which is technologically feasible. Free access to information, which can only happen when there is free access to all goods and services. is a far more realisable and democratic change than the modest demand for limited access to state information which is advocated by the reformist proponents of a Freedom of Information Act.

One of the greatest examples of capitalist hypocrisy is its claim that capitalism provides freedom for the individual, whereas social equality would eradicate such liberty. Those who now dwell in prison cells because they took the pretence of capitalist liberty at its face value would not agree. Those who claim that socialism, with its feature of social equality, will destroy liberty, would do well to read what Marx had to say on the matter:

  We are not among those communists who are out to destroy personal liberty, who wish to turn the world into one huge barrack or into a gigantic work-house. There certainly are some communists who, with an easy conscience, refuse to countenance personal liberty and would like to shuffle it out of the world because they consider that it is a hindrance to complete harmony. But we have no desire to exchange freedom for equality. We are convinced . . . that in no social order will personal freedom be so assured as in a society based upon communal ownership. (Marx, Communist Journal, September 1847)

For a society without secrets, states, elites and prisoners of truth, workers must unite consciously, democratically and without compromise.

Steve Coleman

Official Secrets (1988)

From the August 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

The present Official Secrets Act. with its notorious "catch-all" Section 2, went through all its parliamentary stages in 1911 in just 30 minutes. As a result section 2 has been variously described as "a mess”, "a blunderbuss" and now. in the present White Paper on secrecy laws, as "unsatisfactory" and "in need of reform". The proposed new legislation is likely to be much more carefully drafted and. as a consequence, potentially more of a threat to those who want to find out what the state is up to.

As the Official Secrets Act (amended in 1920) stands, it is a criminal offence to disclose or receive any official information without prior authorisation. The White Paper proposes to legislate more precisely on which kinds of information cannot be disclosed without being subject to criminal sanction. Broadly speaking those areas are defence, security and intelligence; international relations; information obtained in confidence from other governments or international organisations; information useful to criminals; and information relating to telephone tapping and the interception of mail and other communications.

Despite this narrowing down of the categories of information to be covered by the new law, no-one should be under any illusion that this will be a "freedom of information" measure. Leaks of other "less serious" material will be dealt with by means of internal civil service disciplinary measures. In other words civil servants who leak information are likely to be quietly sacked without even having the chance to defend their actions in public. Furthermore, disclosure of certain kinds of information will be subject to an absolute ban — significantly some of those areas which have caused the government embarrassment in recent years. These are telephone tapping (details of which were revealed by former MI5 officer. Cathy Massiter) and the activities of GCHQ; disclosure of any information by serving or former members of the security and intelligence services (such as Peter Wright, author of Spycatcher); and confidential information from foreign governments.

It is also worth remembering that, despite the concentration on the Official Secrets Act, there exist approximately 100 other pieces of legislation that prevent certain categories of information from being disclosed. These range from price-sensitive material to information relating to the nuclear industry and also include information on health and safety matters.

What quickly becomes apparent from a close look at the White Paper is that very little (if any) information not disclosed today is likely to be available as a result of the proposed new legislation. So, far from being the "liberalising" measure that Douglas Hurd, the Home Secretary, has claimed it to be, by tightening up the existing law the current proposals will ensure that successful prosecutions for unauthorised disclosures can be bought more easily. And after the embarrassment caused by Clive Ponting's acquittal and the interminable fiasco over Spycatcher, that is precisely what the government wants to achieve.

For, in addition to the more precise specification of what kinds of information cannot be disclosed, the legislation will seek to outlaw the defence that disclosure is "in the public interest" — successfully used by Ponting in 1985. In other words, no civil servant will, in the future, be able to speak out about official negligence, malpractice or dishonesty without risking imprisonment.

The ending of the "public interest" defence and the abolition of the "prior publication" clause (that is. that a piece of information is already in the public domain) will particularly affect newspapers. They will no longer be able to make such disclosures as those by The Observer in 1984 that MI5 was secretly black-listing certain BBC employees who were deemed subversive, nor would it be able to publish details about the recent Stalker case, on the grounds that it was "in the public interest" to do so.

Furthermore there are other new laws in the pipeline which will require senior civil servants and employees of the security services to sign contracts of employment obliging them to maintain a life-long silence about their activities. Any breach of contract would lead to loss of pension rights and the possibility that they would be sued for damages by the government.

At the same time as official information is becoming more difficult for "us" to obtain, information about individuals' private lives is becoming easier for "them" to get their hands on. partly due to the potential created by new information technology. Currently Home Office. DHSS, Inland Revenue and Customs and Excise computers are being linked together to form the "government data network", which will allow information to be exchanged between government departments' own data banks. This will allow a huge amount of information on all of us to be networked together, enabling the possible construction of comprehensive “personal profiles". Once this happens it is unlikely to be very long before a national system of identity cards is introduced.

Why is this issue of information and access to it of importance to the working class? Increasingly we are subject to a diet of information that is distorted, manipulated and censored. That affects not only what we know about the world but also how we view and understand it. For example, we are frequently told that “we" are all better off now, and yet statistics about the distribution of wealth in this country are no longer available and so we have no means of assessing such statements. Information presented to us as "news" is frequently taken directly from government press releases or “leaked" officially. In other words we are hearing the news that the government wants us to hear.

Information and control over it are about power. Attempts to deprive us of information while at the same time building up data banks on our private lives, constitute a consolidation of class power.

Janie Percy-Smith