Media musings (2002)

From the June 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

Through the media, the working class is constantly exposed to a significant flow of mind-numbing drivel and misinformation. Important issues of the day are distorted, totally ignored or relegated to the margins of page eleven or broadcast as minor news items on the TV. Sensationalism is used to increase market shares and sell adverts, which thus brings in profits. In this latter regards newspapers can be said to be a means of exposing us to advertisers rather than of telling us what we need to know.. The market for a newspaper is advertisers – other business out to make a profit – and the product us! It would be no bold assertion to say that the editor of a daily tabloid is far more interested in the number of advertisers he attracts than the news he reports – though the latter pulls in the former. Thus the never-ending hunt by tabloid hacks for the latest sex scandal to feed a readership hungry for insignificant gossip and trivia, a readership consequently bare to hundreds of adverts a day.

It is easy to despair at endless streams of workers leaving their newsagents in the morning clutching the Sun or the Daily Star, knowing the news they will be reading during their lunch break will be that regarding the love life of a soap star, instead of a piece on US foreign policy or the situation in Israel. A recent issue of the Sun carried a full page photograph of David Beckham’s injured foot and readers were asked to put their hand on the foot at 12.00 midday and pray for its speedy recovery because the English football team were so dependent upon it. Reportedly many workers did just that in the belief that a concerted countrywide focus on the injury would miraculously heal it. If things were that easy, they could have printed a photo of the Queen Mum and asked for readers to place their hands on it and pray for her resurrection.

The fact that so many workers are prepared to buy such newspapers each day reveals how big the task facing socialists is. All these workers need a real education they will never receive via the press or TV. The capitalists are wonderfully aware of this – an unenlightened working class is hardly going to pose a threat to their interests; the real threat comes from a class conscious majority, hungry for useful information, who don’t give a shit about how many hamsters Freddy Starr eats or how many women Jack-the-lad from Coronation Street has bedded.

Everyday, British people are subject to the media for an estimated 4 hours every day, either via newspapers, radio or TV, so it is important for the master class that they can control and manipulate the media for their own ends. Major media corporations in Britain are enjoying a growing monopoly. Just five companies account for 85 percent of all newspaper sales, with Murdoch’s News Corporation controlling over 60 percent of newspaper circulation. As well as this it also has vast shares in Twentieth Century Fox, Harper Collins publishers, BSkyB and StarTV, which covers most of Asia and the Middle East, numerous newspapers and TV stations in Australia, Stream in Italy and Sky Perfect TV in Japan, giving it access to the minds of almost two-thirds of the global population. AOLTimeWarner – the world’s largest media company – owns CNN, 40 percent of US cable TV, 50 record labels, countless magazines, as well as being the world’s largest Internet Service Provider.

Needless to say, such media corporations and the likes of Rupert Murdoch, the right-wing media mogul, have interests that conflict with those of the workers. Thus it is in their interests that news and important issues we should know about are distorted and kept from us, or presented to us in such a way that we end up with tunnel and distorted vision, unable to make informed decisions or engage in intelligent discussion. Thus the media is very much a part of the indoctrination system, reinforcing the basic social values that ensures the survival of capitalism – passivity and sub-missiveness to authority, the virtue of greed and personal gain, lack of concern for others, fear of real or illusory enemies, a suspicion of anything outlandish or threatening to the status quo and national pride, etc.

Because people are misinformed, they are oblivious to the real nature of the system that exploits them. This then makes it easy for the media to confuse the workers by hiding real power from view. The result is – and this is intentional – is that they blame governments, their allegiance to political parties often switching overnight because of a newspaper’s slanted coverage of certain policies and social conditions. A newspaper like the Sun can make all the difference to a political party’s electoral chances. Hence Tony Blair’s visit to Australia to prostrate himself in front of Rupert Murdoch in 1997, fully aware that the Sun can run post election headlines such as “It was the Sun what won it” (which followed one Tory election victory). The fact that it is the capitalist system that is seriously faltering, creating problems governments just can’t cope with (because it is the system controlling them, not vice versa) would be too dangerous to print or report.

With the arrival and popularity of the internet and the consequent boom in computer use, opportunities for access to real information are now at an unprecedented high, giving anyone interested a chance to find out for themselves the real story behind news that the media otherwise would have us believe is inconsequential. The “information revolution” has placed a wonderful tool at the disposal of the working class. But a tool is only useful if used correctly. If we fail to use this tool to help us pursue our own class interests, then this “revolution” becomes just so much mind-numbing entertainment the masses will get addicted to and which the powers-that-be will eventually use to steer our thoughts away from the pressing matters of the day. Maybe there is more to Tony Blair’s plans to get a computer in every home by 2005 than we think! Would he really promote computer use if he thought the workers would be accessing informative websites in their spare time?

John Bissett

50 Years Ago: The fat of the land (2025)

The 50 Years Ago column from the January 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Even a newspaper like The Sun should be asked to explain itself at times. On 22nd November its editorial said: ‘Britain’s future is bleak, sombre and perilous . . . the British are fat, lazy, complacent — and deeply in debt’.

Who are ‘Britain’ and ‘the British’ in this statement? Clearly, The Sun does not mean everyone. Harold Wilson and Edward Heath are both fat, but they are not deeply in debt with bleak futures. Denis Healey is fat. So is Reginald Maudling. The Houses of Parliament are full of fat people, and they are only outweighed by the Institute of Directors. Nobody supposes, however, that these are the target of The Sun’s unkind words and its sombre warning.

What it means is the working class, and it’s a funny thing how the idea of a working man being fat is equated with national disaster. (…) The Sun was in fact commenting on, and supporting, a report on ‘Britain’s plight’ by the Hudson Institute of America: experts say poverty is on the way. (…)

On 5th December similar forecasts and warnings were given in a review by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research. According to this, in 1975 prices will rise still higher and unemployment will grow. Both teams of ‘experts’ had plans to urge. The National Institute thought import controls would prove necessary; the Hudson Institute would remedy things by ‘a new national six-year economic policy’ run by ‘Britain’s best economists and administrators’.

The latter scheme is presumably to ensure that, whatever happens, the fat and the thin remain distinguishable. How little use it would be otherwise is shown by one of The Sun’s remarks:

‘Leadership—or lack of it—is one element, of course. We are all of us unfortunate to live in an age of political pygmies. But perhaps we are already beyond the stage where we could be rescued by inspired leadership.’

Which is saying that things have come to a crisis under unimpressive dolts, but would be no better under geniuses.

The fallacy of all this is treating the impending crisis as an abnormality. Words like ‘doomsday’, ‘peril’, ‘saving Britain’ and ‘the Dunkirk spirit’ imply it to be a millennial catastrophe; but that is only a way of calling for more sacrifices from the workers. The reality is that the crisis is a normal phenomenon of capitalism.

[From the article, 'The fat of the land', by Robert Barltrop, Socialist Standard, January 1975.]

Cooking the Books: From Marx to Musk (2023)

The Cooking the Books column from the December 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

In his interview with Rishi Sunak on 2 November Elon Musk speculated that the widespread application of AI would usher in an ‘age of abundance where any goods and services that you want, you can have’. People would only need work for ’personal satisfaction’.

Clearly, this wouldn’t be capitalism. It couldn’t be as it would mean the end of working for wages and producing goods and services to be sold. This was understood by, of all people, Jeremy Clarkson in a surprisingly perspicacious passage in his column in the Sun the following day:

‘The fact is, then, that if machines are doing all the jobs, there will be no economy. You won’t be able to buy anything because you won’t be earning anything. And there’s no point going to the government for help because that won’t have any money either. Because machines don’t pay taxes. They just spend all day making stuff. That no one can afford to buy. This means we will need a whole new economy. A whole new system where there’s no such thing as money. And that is the biggest worry of them all because no one has a clue what that might be’.

The last bit is not true. Socialists have long understood that the answer would be a society where productive resources including machines would be commonly owned and democratically controlled and used to produce wealth to directly satisfy people’s needs instead of, as now, to be sold on a market with a view to profit. In such a society there would indeed be no such thing as money.

Clarkson may not have known it but he was describing what has recently been called ‘fully automated luxury communism’. But we don’t have to wait for ‘full’ automation to bring about a society of common ownership, democratic control and production directly for use. The productive forces are already sufficiently developed for this. Making the change is now only a question of political will.

As a matter of fact years ago Marx had anticipated the points made by Musk. Writing in the late 1850s he speculated what would happen if the application of science and machinery to production led to such a high level of productivity that not only the value added by direct human labour to each unit produced was reduced to an insignificant proportion, but so was that transferred to these units from the fixed capital deployed:

‘As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value. (…) With that, production based on exchange value breaks down, and the direct, material production process is stripped of the form of penury and antithesis (‘Contradiction between the foundation of bourgeois production (value as measure) and its development. Machines etc.’, Grundrisse, chapter 14).

In other words, goods and services would be so cheap — each unit would contain so little labour, both new and that transferred by machinery, etc — that the huge amount of them that could be produced could not be priced but might as well be given away or provided free.

Marx did not expect this point to be reached — he expected that the working class would have put an end to capitalism long before — but he realised that, if it were to be, it would mean the end of capitalism. Production for sale would no longer make any sense.

Press Exposure: Sun Stroke (1995)

The Press Exposure column from the March 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nothing was more memorable in Dennis Potter's interview on the South Bank Show, shortly before he died last year, than when he revealed the name he had given to the cancer which was killing him. It was Rupert — after Rupert ("I’d shoot the bugger if I could") Murdoch. I look at the Sun said Potter, warming to his theme and I ask myself is this what we've come to.

Well yes. except that there’s a bit more to it than that. What we’ve "come to" is not just a malignant press baron and a newspaper which will stoop as low as it needs to boost its sales. We've "come to" a situation in which a quarter of the population lives below a Department of Social Security poverty line. A situation in which Shelter are handling a record caseload as more and more people are homeless. A situation in which the publisher of a string of soft porn magazines (the kind of man who is always liable to be "exposed" by the Sun) says he is flooded with requests from women anxious to pose for his publications. Because that's their only way of getting a living.

This situation — its poverty, misery, degradation — is not new. We have not "come to" it because we have lived with it for a very long time, however its details may have changed. How do we cope with it? Well one way is to understand it as the symptoms of a social system which is outworn and sick at its roots and which must be replaced by a fundamentally different way of running the world. Another way (but we would have to be like Rupert Murdoch) is to say we're doing very nicely so we’d like to leave things as they are. Or (if we're among Murdoch's devoted customers) we can defend our sanity with the kind of mental anaesthetic which makes the trivial important and vice versa. Flavour the anaesthetic with a large measure of fantasy and we "come to" the Sun.

Murdoch's odious rag was originally the Daily Herald which, owned 49 percent by the TUC, was the Labour Party’s only reliable supporter — and. in the 1930s, the biggest-selling newspaper in Britain. In the 1950s the Herald fell on hard times and in 1961 it was bought by Cecil King’s IPC group, which guaranteed it another seven years’ publication. In 1964, in an effort to stem falling sales, the paper was revamped as the Sun, with a large orange blob on its masthead. By the end of IPC's guarantee it was seen that the Sun could not survive and it was again up for sale. Robert Maxwell offered to take the paper off IPC's hands for nothing but fell foul of union opposition. This let in Murdoch, who already owned the News Of The World; in 1969 he got the Sun for the knockdown price of £800,000. It now makes him millions every year, the kind of profits which can easily stand expensive libel suits, like the one which made Elton John richer by £1 million and a grudging apology in the Sun.

Regal Pomposity

It takes the breath away now, but Murdoch's Sun promised to be a paper "that cares — passionately — about the truth, beauty and justice". Its editor was Larry Lamb, whose regal pomposity was in sharp contrast to the loud boorish cruelty of the man who succeeded him. Kelvin Mackenzie was diabolically clever at rapidly setting out the shock horror stuff which passes for news in the Sun. And he did not seem greatly troubled about whether what he was setting out with such skill was true or not.

Since then the Sun has been synonymous with the lowest standards of journalism and concern for human society. Page Three girls present a relentless distortion of our sexuality, hyped-up by the kind of puns which are a speciality of the paper. (A recent example was the invitation to readers to give their opinion on Princess Diana's new wet-look hairstyle in a "RefHAIRrendum".)

The sanitised semi-nudity of Page Three girls and cartoons — like a recent example in which a policeman was apparently having oral sex through a car window with a well-known TV actress — do not prevent the Sun sometimes taking a stridently moral stance on sex. Double standards are something the paper takes in its stride. Like the time it invented an interview with the widow of a soldier — Sergeant MacKay — who had been killed winning the Victoria Cross in the Falklands. As "The Paper That Supports Our Boys" the Sun might have been expected to respect Mrs MacKay's wish to be left alone in her grief. Instead they tried every trick in the book to get at her and then simply invented an interview out of information from other people and a rehash of material published by other papers.

We could go on. And on. The headlines (Gotcha; Stick It Up Your Junta; Up Yours Delors). The relentless hounding of vulnerable people like the dying Russell Harty. These are what have made the Sun such a success, with a daily sale of four million and a readership three times as much. For it as an extremely clever and sophisticated newspaper, whose success says a lot about capitalism in the latter part of the twentieth century. A malignant mouthpiece of a cancerous society.

Ivan

News in Review: China's Bomb (1964)

The News in Review column from the November 1964 issue of the Socialist Standard

Abroad

China's Bomb

Sir Alec Douglas-Home always stood up for an independent British nuclear armoury on the grounds that it gave the British capitalist class a place at the top negotiating table.

There may be something in this. The disputes of capitalism are finally settled by force, or by the threat of force—even when the amiable, wise-cracking Lord Home was Foreign Secretary. It is reasonable to suppose that the power with the biggest bomb will be the power with the biggest say in international affairs.

That is why the three first nuclear powers once hoped to keep the Bomb's secret to themselves, so that world capitalism was an orderly affair of just two big power blocs with Britain as a buffer between them.

This was a forlorn hope. Many other nations have been trying to develop their own bomb. The French were the first to succeed and now, in spite of a certain amount of hindrance from Russia, it seems that China has also arrived as a nuclear power.

The top table is getting rather crowded. 

The prospects are that it will get more crowded still. The Indian government, which always reserved the right to reconsider its original decision not to manufacture nuclear weapons, greeted the news that China had the Bomb with the announcement that India could also develop one if it wanted to.

All of this should please those who hold the theory of the deterrent, because the more nations that get the Bomb the more they can all frighten each other into peaceful intentions. Or is the opposite true?

In fact, wars are not caused by armaments, or by the lack of them. Capitalism is like a jungle, with any number of competing nations clawing and savaging each other in the ruthless struggle for advantage.

No humane considerations, no moral concepts, come into this. A government will coldly take the decision to manufacture a weapon which it knows is capable of literally atomising tens of millions of people in the blink of an eye. And having so decided, the members of the government will go home placidly, play with the dog, bath the baby and themselves sleep innocent sleep.

There is no sanity in this. To the requirements of property society, the human race is deliberately making the means of perhaps wiping itself out.

Capitalism marches on. It expands into places where it has not been before. It develops its productive abilities in fantastic leaps and bounds. At the same time it deprives, exploits, degrades and terrorises its people to an undreamt of intensity.

Politics

Immigration

Today the Communist Party is posing as the friend and champion of the interests of the immigrant worker. But, as with most other matters, it has not always taken up this position. Seventeen years ago, for instance, the Communist Party was engaged in an anti-Polish campaign. In 1947 the two Communist members of the House of Commons were continually asking questions about the Poles in Britain. Some of the comments then made by Willie Gallacher indicate the level to which the Communist Party was prepared to stoop. On February 4, 1947, the following exchange took place during question time:

Mr. Lennox Boyd: Is it not a fact that the vast majority of Poles are desperately seeking employment in this country?

Mr. Gallacher: Let them get employment in their own country. (Hansard, Vol. 432, Col. 1555.)

On July 29 again:

Vice-Admiral Taylor: Can the right hon. gentleman give us an assurance that none of them will be forcibly sent back, and can he tell us how many have refused to accept work?

Mr. Bellenger: I cannot give an assurance of that kind, but these Poles cannot remain on British benevolence indefinitely.

Mr. Gallacher: We do not want them. (Hansard, Vol. 441, Col. 251.)

In the same year the Communist Party published a book by their leader, Harry Pollit, under the title Looking Ahead. In here we read:

I ask you, does it make sense that we allow 500,000 of our best young people to put their names down for emigration abroad, when at the same time we employ Poles who ought to be back in their own country, and bring to work to Britain displaced persons who ought also to be sent back to their own countries? We want our own workers to have confidence in their own land, to take a pride in building it up. (p. 72.)

Who was it said, “the working men have no country? ”

Business

Dahlia affair

Could there be anything less offensive than a dedicated dahlia grower?

Just listen to his endless talk of ray and disk florets. Look at those sensitive, earthy hands caressing the prize blooms. A very perfect gentle chap, it seems.

Yet behind that placid exterior lurks a desire to undermine the basis of society. What happened when dahlia growers in the Midlands organised a cheap air trip to the United States?

Why, they invited other dahlia fans to go as well and if that is not subversive, antisocial and plain criminal, what is?

Fortunately, virtue triumphed. The Midland Dahlia Society booked their flight with B.O.A.C. but they broke the rules of the International Air Transport Association (IATA) when they advertised it as open to non-members. Virtue was a spy employed by rival airline Alitalia, who reported the matter to the IATA and so got the trip called off.

But virtue was not unreservedly rewarded. The Alitalia man—their Manchester manager—came back from holiday to a doormat load of poison pen letters, which shows how much people hate a wrecker of dahlia growers' outings.

Nobody seems to have got upset with the real culprit. The IATA does not only lay down rules about economy fares. It also governs all other aspects of flying freight and passengers all over the world, and the charges which are made for this.

In other words, it is an international organisation which tries to regulate the markets in air traffic. Quite often this means that the IATA restricts traffic, as it has in the Dahlia Society affair.

Such carve-ups are quite common under capitalism; they exist in all manner of enterprises and their object is to safeguard the profitability of those enterprises. This—the profit motive which underlies all capitalism's operations—is where the disappointed dahlia growers should vent their frustration.

And so should all those poison pen writers, who perhaps see something particularly mean and degrading in useful men wasting their time spying upon other useful men wasting their time thinking up ways of avoiding commercial restrictions.

At Home

The Sun

The International Publishing Corporation—the Daily Mirror group to most people—are noted for their mastery of the technique of ballyhoo. At one time, no newspaper had its finger so sensitively upon the pulse of public ignorance as did the Mirror—and none exploited that ignorance so cynically nor so remuneratively.

But recently there have been new scents in the wind. Is the Mirror losing its grip, as the IPC gets larger? The group's latest paper—the Sun—is trying, among other things, to prove that the finger is still unerringly there, still knows how fast or how slow beats the reader’s pulse.

“The only newspaper,” claimed the Sun, “born of the age we live in.” Self consciously, the paper detailed the type of person it is confident of attracting. The New Young Men with the Hardy Ames suit, with the open plan bungalow on the new estate, the foot on the second or even the third rung of the ladder. The people with a conscience—and, naturally, with the big buying power.

All of this splurge was really aimed at potential advertisers, to persuade them that space booked in the Sun would pay off. It is the advertising revenue, and not the circulation figures, which now decide whether a paper lives or dies.

The Daily Herald, when International put it to sleep, had a daily sale of well over a million copies, but couldn’t attract enough advertising to pay its way. In contrast, the colour supplement of the Sunday Times, which is virtually given away, is a money-spinner—and is therefore being widely imitated—because it attracts some rich advertising.

What this adds up to is that in the newspaper world it is only the really Big’uns who now stand a chance. This may mean that the Sun, backed by IPC’s massive resources and under the practised and ruthless control of Hugh Cudlipp, may eventually survive.

Which would merely add another mouthpiece of capitalist propaganda to the rest. And if the Sun lives up to its promise to be a “radical” paper, a paper with a “conscience,” a particularly unctuous and nauseating mouthpiece it will be. “The only newspaper born of the age we live in.” Ugh.

The labour army wants YOU! (2023)

From the September 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

An 1890 poem by Rudyard Kipling, Tommy, (from the slang for a soldier, Tommy Atkins), tells of the contempt held toward the working class member of the Army by the civilian population. Until that is, they were required to go off and fight some war on behalf of British capitalism. It’s reasonable to assume that economic circumstances drove a lot of Tommies into the armed forces.

Herbert Kitchener was the Secretary of State for War during the 1914-1918 one (he drowned in 1916). Initially, the armed forces were able to swell their numbers with volunteers, but as time passed and large numbers of young working-class men were being led like lambs to the slaughter on the battlefields of France and beyond it was necessary to introduce conscription in 1916. Probably Kitchener is most well known for the recruiting poster in which he stares out whilst pointing at the viewer: Kitchener Wants You!

The present Conservative Member of Parliament for Chingford and Woodford Green appears to fancy himself as another Kitchener. Iain Duncan Smith’s not exhorting the working class via a poster. He’s aiming at the industrial reserve army of labour, more specifically, those who through disabilities and sickness of various kinds are physically unable to be waged/salaried wage slaves. Smith used an Op-ed in The Sun headlined, ‘We must get thousands of people on long term sickness back into work for the sake of the economy – here’s how’.

Data from the Department of Work and Pensions analysed by the Centre for Social Justice suggests there are some 1.6 million more claimants since 2020, costing the state around £13 billion more in welfare benefits. Reducing this number by getting more people back into work will help the government find the room it needs to invest in public services and reduce the tax burden (tinyurl.com/3etumu43). What Smith wants is to lessen the tax burden for capitalists.

Smith’s predecessor in that constituency, also a Conservative, was a minister in Margaret Thatcher’s government. Norman Tebbit was, in a similar vein, fond of bashing the unemployed. Tebbit said the unemployed should get on their bikes and go look for work and get a job as his father had in the thirties.

Writing in Liverpool’s favourite tabloid, and in a very similar vein, Piers Morgan targeted ‘work-shy wastrels’: ‘Official UK unemployment numbers are at a near-record low of just under 4%. Yet staggeringly, a quarter of the people of working age – that’s over 10 million – don’t currently have a paid job. That includes students and carers, but it also includes vast numbers of people claiming to be sick and disabled and living off government handouts, or who’ve just taken early retirement. Add the enormous number of people on some form of benefits – estimated at over 5 million, many of whom are clearly gaming the easy life system – and Britain’s become a nation of shamefully unhealthy, entitled, couch potatoes. No wonder a recent poll had the UK being No1 in the world for having citizens who would most want to quit their jobs and do nothing if money was no issue.’

Note the ‘gaming’ and its inference that they are perpetuating a fraud of some kind. Has Morgan ever tried living off unemployment pay, or a basic state pension?

‘How the hell has it come to this? We’ve always been a country of ambitious and industrious grafters who’ve taken pride in putting a shift in’ (tinyurl.com/bdwdxsfu). Ha, the delusions of the well-heeled!

And there’s more! In a Bloomberg podcast, on 19 May, with Guy Hands, the billionaire chairman of a large private equity company, said, ‘I look at the UK and see that, in 2030, Poland will be wealthier than we are. In 2040, we will be the poor man in Europe’.

He opines, ‘the UK should not have left the EU, as the country needs rule of law and consistency, but not a single politician is talking about going back.’ He lamented that ‘Brexit has essentially thrown the country back 50 years, to the 1970s, a decade that is widely remembered as a time of crisis, with skyrocketing inflation, high unemployment, strikes and power cuts.’

‘Since the UK left the European Union, it has been competing on the world stage, but the country’s current laws are not suitable for the new environment.’

Now that the UK is out of the EU, the British government could take a radical approach and change some of its laws, Hands said, citing the country’s ‘extraordinarily complex’ labour laws that are a ‘nightmare’ compared to other European countries.

Nightmare labour laws! Perhaps capitalists would prefer a throwback to nineteenth century industrial relations?

We, the majority, would prefer socialism.

Dave Coggan

Press Exposure: Oo dun it? (1995)

The Press Exposure column from the August 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

"It's The Sun Wot Won It" was how Rupert Murdoch’s finest, in a page one full-frontal, analysed John Major's victory in the 1992 general election. This was the latest in the Sun's history of brilliantly impactful headlines—cheeky, in words of one syllable, hitting you in the eye will a roll-your-own, crude concept of something which you might otherwise regards as serious.

That front page said a great deal about how vulnerable the working class are to inducements to grievously abuse their power to make urgent fundamental changes in society. It also contributed to the delusion.So persistent among the press, that it can influence—even decide—the outcome of elections. This delusion must profoundly boost the egos of the press barons and the editors and the cynical hacks who write up those items and compose those artistically misleading headlines. Perhaps that is what encourages people like Murdoch and Conrad Black, and before them Robert Maxwell, to shell out millions to buy the papers.

There are, however, obvious flaws in this concept. To begin with, the press in this country overwhelmingly supports the Conservative Party so if the voters always voted as the papers advised the Tories would never lose any by-elections and there would never have been any Labour governments to pick up where the Conservatives had left off and Winston Churchill may well still be prime minister. Not that it would matter if he were, except to the morticians, because the notion that the lives of people who have to work for their living are affected in any significant way by which party they elect to try to control capitalism is just another of those stories in the papers which should not be believed.

On your bike

The most recent example of the news papers kidding themselves that they control large political issues was in the fight for the leadership of the Tory Party though this time they were primarily attempting to influence the rather small electorate of Tory MPs. The greater— and certainly the more popular—part of the Tory press were firmly opposed to Major. The Sun, wot done it for Major in 1992, has now decided that he "has loser written all over him. He is damaged goods". A screaming page one headline drove home the point that Tebbit had come out against Major: "On Your Bike, John." The front page of the Daily Mail was devoted to a cartoon of a sinking liner—the Torytanic—and the advice: “Time To Ditch the Captain." In what preens itself as the quality press the Times and the Daily Telegraph were keen for a change, with the Telegraph condemning Major as unlikely to alter his policies so "as to give the Tories a realistic prospect of winning a general election". There is no equivalent in elections to the Trades Description Act, but if there were disgruntled voters would have had grounds of complaint about this apparent exposure as an incompetent wimp of the man the press were urging us to vote for so recently.

Only the Daily Star, the Daily Express ("the voice of reason in a cacophony of extremist nonsense") and the Financial Times supported Major but their combined circulation is little more than half that of the Sun by itself. So it turned out that the press campaign had little effect on what is surrealistically known as the most sophisticated electorate in the world. (Anyone who has observed Honourable members prancing and preening before the electoral hoi polloi in the lobby or behaving like empty-headed disruptives in the House must wonder why they call themselves sophisticated, but never mind.). Although the Tories voted to keep Major there were enough who did not support him to make a significant body of irritants which must be eager to exploit his problems in the future, with or without the approval of the press.

Losers

What decides how an MP votes in a leadership election is whether the leader is a vote-winner or a loser. That was why the Tories ditched Heath and then Thatcher. The voters did not reject Thatcher, she had led the Tories to victory in three successive elections but by 1990 enough MPs were convinced that the Iron Lady was corrosive of their majorities to overthrow her. She said it was a funny old world and she wept real tears as she left DowningStreet but someone should have told her that this was politics. If the Tory press had been asked they might well have wanted to keep Thatcher, who had seen off Callaghan and Foot and Kinnock not to mention General Galtieri and a few hundred Argentinean sailors on the Bclgrano. But reality—the Tory confidence that they are the great election winning machine—intruded in the persons of the men in grey suits and, whatever the papers said, her time had come.

However loud the Tory papers screamed, Major won because he was the safer bet while Redwood could not reassure enough Tory MPs that their majorities would endure and flourish with him as leader. It was, in other words, not the papers but the MPs—fearful, ambitious, calculating—wot done it. 

Ivan

Proper Gander: Turning The Page (2020)

The Proper Gander Column from the August 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard 

In 1969, The Sun newspaper was a left-leaning broadsheet, believe it or not, and one which was running at a financial loss for its owners. This all changed when it was bought by Rupert Murdoch and relaunched as a more populist red-top tabloid to directly compete with the Daily Mirror. As part of this revamp, The Sun started to feature photos of topless women, and within 12 months its sales had doubled. Since the 1970s, ‘page three’ has been most associated with The Sun, although such photos have also appeared in other tabloids. A recent documentary on Channel 4, Page Three: The Naked Truth, told the story of this seedy tradition and how it has portrayed and affected women and girls. Unsurprisingly, it’s money which has driven the ‘page three’ industry. Lucrative contracts have drawn people in to being ‘glamour models’, there to make profits for publishers and promoters.

The 1980s was when ‘page three’ was most well-known, especially after Samantha Fox became a household name. When she was aged 16, her mother sent clothed photos of her to the Sunday People for its ‘Girl of the Year’ contest. This led to a photo-shoot, and Fox agreed to topless photos thinking they wouldn’t be published, as she was still at school. She and her family were shocked when they saw one of these pictures plastered on the Sunday People’s front page. Fox remembers being told by a photographer ‘you’ve got the face of a child but the body of a woman’, and only realised how sinister this was in hindsight. Some newspapers had sickening ‘countdowns’ to when their models reached 16 and they could be shown partially naked. All of this was somehow acceptable, or at least just something to put up with. It wasn’t until 2003 that legislation came in to make 18 the minimum age to appear unclothed in print.

The age of models wasn’t the focus of campaigns against ‘page three’ during the 1980s, when attempts were made to ban it entirely. In 1986, MP Clare Short introduced a Private Members Bill which proposed prohibiting newspapers from publishing sexualised pictures of naked or partially naked women. When she raised this in the House of Commons, many male MPs’ reaction was laughter, and presumably they were those whose votes made the bill fail. For The Sun, who branded Short a ‘killjoy’ and ‘fat and jealous’ when she renewed her campaign in 2004, this was decent publicity as much as anything.

As summed up by Clare Short, ‘what page three says is ‘take me, use me, throw me away’’. This isn’t only an attitude towards women which ‘page three’ photos encourage among the public, it also describes how models have been treated. Being groped (i.e. sexually assaulted) on a chat show or being preyed on by drunks at parties were seen as part of the job. A particularly sad example of how women have been treated is what happened to Emma Morgan. In the 1990s, her boyfriend sent a topless photo of her to the Sunday Sport, which printed it without her knowledge. That Morgan (like Fox) wasn’t considered important enough to even be asked if she minded having such an image published highlights the extent to which women have been demeaned. Morgan’s modelling career started by being used and it ended in a similar way, when she says she was set up by an undercover journalist who filmed her taking illegal drugs. The story appeared in the News of the World with the headline ‘Page 3 Girls’ Drugs And Vice Scandal’ and as a result Morgan lost her contracts, spat out by the same industry which had got her into the situation.

An argument in support of ‘page three’ is that women are free to choose their own roles, and if they enjoy being a model, then why not? Some of the models themselves would agree with this, but it rings hollow to those who were tricked into starting a modelling career, often when still a child, or who found this was their only opportunity to escape poverty. The wealth and the celebrity lifestyle came at a price for Emma Morgan and others. Debee Ashby, like Samantha Fox, first had topless pictures published without her consent at the age of 16, and later regretted her subsequent modelling career, as it led to her suffering from bulimia and undergoing therapy.

The decline of ‘page three’ came about not through changes to legislation, but following a grassroots campaign run by author and actor Lucy-Anne Holmes. Her ‘No More Page 3’ crusade began in 2012 when she noticed the disparity between how men and women were depicted in newspapers. She says that men were represented as active and industrious, but photos of women on page three were sending out the message that they have to be ‘pretty and passive’. Holmes said that the campaign wasn’t against pornography as such, just that a ‘family newspaper’ isn’t the place for it. Three years later, The Sun retired ‘page three’, although not on its website until 2017. The Daily Star didn’t stop printing photos of topless women until 2019, and the Sport newspapers still continue the degrading tradition.

Of course, it’s a step forward that fewer people now believe it’s acceptable for women – and girls – to be reduced to ‘page three’ fodder, but the feature’s demise doesn’t seem all that significant considering that far more extreme images can easily be found with a few clicks of a button. It’s likely that ‘page three’ has largely died out more because newspapers can no longer rely on softcore porn to sell copies than due to campaigns. What’s profitable has shifted away from print to online. So, rather than ‘page three’ being brought down, it’s instead been superseded. The market will find new ways to objectify women as long as there’s money to be made.

Mike Foster

Press Exposure: Winners and Losers (1995)

The Press Exposure column from the July 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

What do you want from your newspaper? Do you want a comprehensive, insightful report on what is happening in the world to help you form your opinion on whether we need to run things differently and if so how? Or masses of analysis and policy to help you come to the same conclusions as the writer? Or would you prefer, along with page-after-page of sport (which usually means page-after-page about the off-field foibles of the sportspeople) and dedicated probing of the sexual meanderings of pop stars. politicians and aristocrats, the chance to take part in some sort of competition which promises a chance of making you rich beyond your maddest dreams?

Competitions have been a consistent feature in the press. There is, for example, the humble (although that can depend on which newspaper it is in) crossword which occasionally offers the sort of prize—like a dictionary—which will not make you rich for the rest of your life. In the past there was a peculiar competition called Bullets, giving prizes for constructing apparently meaningful responses to obviously meaningless phrases. It seemed densely indecipherable but was very popular. Some newspapers have run competitions with a car as the prize, or enough petrol to run a car far into the future. Others have offered to pay the mortgage on a house. The so-called quality press has not been immune from this: the Sunday Times has run competitions—one was about post-war test cricketers—which were little more than lotteries and the Times has run one involving the phantom buying of shares. And of course there is good old bingo, which in the newspapers came in different styles. Sometimes the player had to get a card from a newsagent, sometimes the card came through the letterbox with all the other junk mail. All that you had to do then was buy the newspaper which published the numbers to be crossed off the card. It promised big prizes—perhaps a million pounds but there was a loophole. As both cards and numbers were produced by the newspaper and the "game" was not played openly as it is somewhere like a working men’s club, there was nothing to prevent the cards and numbers being designed so that nobody even won the jackpot.

If you think this is farfetched consider the case of Spot-The-Ball. This was another popular, long-running, competition in which the newspaper published an action photograph of a football game, with players leaping and thrashing about—without a ball. Competitors had to mark a cross where they thought the ball was. Addicts of Spot-The-Ball could spend a lot of time with a magnifying glass and a ruler, trying to work out where the players’ eyes were focused and where their boots were aimed at (assuming they were looking at the ball and trying to kick it; which is not always the case) and drawing lines in the hope that the point of intersection would be the winning spot.

In 1990 the Sun ran a Spot-The-Ball competition, in which the photograph was draw up into a grid. The unlikely to prize was £5 million. This desperate venture was quickly copied by the Daily Mirror, then stumbling under the even more desperate ownership of Robert Maxwell. In the Mirror contest readers had to Spot-The-Ball on five consecutive days: the promised top prize was £1 million.

The snag

It all seemed very exciting and enticing but there was a snag. The competition would be judged—that is to say the position of the ball would be decided—after the Mirror had all the entries. This would be done by a panel of judges (on the first occasion chaired by none other than Maxwell himself) who could put the ball in a square which nobody had marked. And that is what happened. Maxwell had instructed his editor "Make sure it doesn’t cost me any money" and, apart from a few "second’’ prizes of £10,000 that is what happened. The whole thing was a fraud on readers of the Mirror who were gullible enough to believe that a newspaper would help them solve their money problems in that way.

When this sort of trickery is exposed—as Maxwell’s Spot-The-Ball was exposed in a subsequent Panorama—we are subjected to a lot of indignation from people who seem to expect the press always to be honest, always to tell the truth. Which brings us back to the original question of what we want from the papers. Imagine for a moment what would happen, if the press suddenly dropped its unwavering support for capitalism and began to publish material which could be sustained by serious argument. What if they stopped treating every pronouncement by political leaders with such grovelling respect? It is difficult to believe that journalists listening to some revered figure churning out yet another discredited placebo for society’s problems do not reflect that that have heard it all before. Difficult to believe that they don't realise that capitalism’s spokespeople have nothing fresh or effective to say and that they should admit to their impotence and advise us to swamp them out in a social revolution.

Fraud

Because capitalism itself is a massive fraud, in which millions of useful people allow themselves to be exploited to sustain a parasite minority and a social system which cannot be organised in the interests of its people. Beside that, a newspaper's bogus bingo, Win-A-Car, or Spot-The-Ball are so trivial that in the history of fraud they won’t rate so much as a column inch.

Ivan

The Crisis: don’t read about it! (2009)

From the May 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Sun newspaper should be no more abhorrent to socialists than any other capitalist propaganda rag. In a spirit of intellectual equanimity I occasionally take the wretched organ along with more sober rags of the ruling elite in order to gainsay and refute the views of supporters of the profit system.

Now, as the world capitalist system moves inexorably towards another catastrophic slump it behoves the class traitor scribblers of the “popular press” to divert our attention from the problems facing us as a consequence of capitalism’s irresolvable internal contradictions.

But don’t worry - the Sun has a “Happy Page”:

“The pound crumbles, the economy tumbles and Gordon Brown finally rumbles that we are heading for the big recession.
So to take your mind off the sad economic tidings there are plenty of cheery stories scattered throughout The Sun.
And for uninterrupted fun turn to Page 20 our new Happy Page.
If you have any stories or photos that will raise British spirits why not send them to us and do your bit in the War against Gloom effort.”

As the “Real Economy” goes into recession and people lose their jobs, homes and belief in the future of their communities we are exhorted by the Sun to turn to page 20 and have a chortle as workers’ lives under capitalism crumble around our ears.

Socialists have long understood the function of the reactionary media in the intellectual conditioning of capitalist society. Workers are bombarded by propaganda on a myriad of fronts. In the last 30 years the Sun has cornered the market in combining “politics”, gambling and tits with criminal and celebrity witch hunts.

Whilst the world working class is entering a period in which there will be a sustained, angry and possibly violent attack upon our meagre living standards and individual rights by the ruling class, we must challenge the “official” media at every turn, the more apparently “learned” daily journals such as the Guardian, Independent or Telegraph as well as the Sun.

At this time the fanciful notion that “taxpayers money” is being used to stave off capitalist crisis is being promulgated by the mainstream media. Whilst, in reality the capitalist class is using State funds generated on the backs of the labour of workers to prop up the profit system and to provide them with a surplus. The capitalist media are also wrestling all their capacity to prepare us for yet another period of belt-tightening.

The reasons for the failings of capitalism, and the potential to resolve the problems caused to people under the grip of the system are often very near to the grasp of workers’ thinking, both individually and collectively. My trajectory towards socialist consciousness began as a very young man witnessing the “shaking out” of staff at R.M. Douglas Construction Ltd of Birmingham in 1992. I saw proud middle-aged, “company” men, some with over 25 years service, cry openly as they were told they were surplus to requirements for the firm.

So, as the reality of capitalist recession imposes itself once more on the already beleaguered working class the last thing we need to do is to read “Happy News” on Page 20 of The Sun newspaper.

Andy P. Davies

Beanos with cheesecake (1979)

From the May 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

  There are now three almost identical tabloid newspapers competing in their efforts to misinform workers in Britain. 

Capitalism — the accumulation of wealth through the exploitation of working-class labour-power—is the inevitable social development of commodity-production to the point where abundance becomes possible; and where only the circumscriptions of the profit-system itself prevent society from freely producing and enjoying wealth.

But where—an innocent inquirer might ask—does all this leave us when we turn our attention to such seemingly useless ephemera as the popular—some would call it ‘gutter’—press? And in particular, Fleet Street’s undistinguished and indistinguishable troika. The Sun, the Daily Mirror and The Star. A cooker, after all, is a cooker; a car is a car; and although these commodities are coming off the production-lines even tinnier and more unreliable than their tinny and unreliable predecessors, they do have their practical uses—their more tangible qualities.

A moment’s reflection, however, should be sufficient to convince us that, despite its tawdry and fleeting characteristics, a tabloid—or a so-called “quality” newspaper— is no less a commodity, produced for sale with a view to profit, than those other more substantial items. (Last year, for instance, The Sun produced a profit of more than £13 million— a considerable figure by any standards).

Here, however, the analogy ends; for a newspaper, unlike the cooker and the car. has little material value. (If, that is to say, we except its undoubted uses as wrapping-paper for fish-and-chips, or as fire-lighting material). Its qualities are self-evidently abstract and representational and, under capitalism, on a par with those of a megaphone in the hands of a political huckster. For what we buy from our newsagent is, after all, merely what the capitalist press-lords think is ‘good’ for us and, of course, for them: their own political opinions, to begin with. And what is ‘good’ for us often includes their idea of the type of material which can most successfully seduce us from the dangerous exercise of thinking for ourselves. Hence, the acreage of easy-on-the-eye illustrations ("We liberated the nipple”, roared The Sun, recently) and the column-miles of trivial rubbish which occupy most of what remains. Those few journalists—and there are some, no doubt—who are allowed to submit meatier copy are either chosen for their relatively uncontentious political and economic views or kept well away from such delicate areas. (When, for example, can we expect to see the likes of Marjorie Proops discussing family or marital distress within its proper context—that of a class-based society in which, given the intolerable pressures to which millions of us are subjected, it is astonishing that many more of us do not succumb to breakdown and despair!)

Ironically enough, some insight as to the true nature and purpose of the tabloid press may be gained by comparing titles with content. The very last qualities one may expect to find within the columns of The Sun, the Daily Mirror and The Star are enlightenment or a reliable reflection of the truth; certainly about those matters which could be of any conceivable value for working-class consciousness—and all three journals claim to reflect or illuminate our aspirations and interests. At best they are shallow and uninformative and. particularly when it comes to news of world affairs, as prone to sins of omission as of commission. At worst they are vicious exploiters of personal grief and human weakness, their editors and reporters trawling for salacious gossip, cheque-books in hand, in the murkiest of waters; always ready, of course, to justify their miserable activities with hypocritical references to ‘the freeflow of information in a democratic society’. In between these two fairly approximate poles we have the more conventional forms of entertainment—pages and pages of it, crammed with sensational trivia masquerading as the truth about showbiz and sports personalities, together with exaggerated accounts of the latest gladiatorial contests in the boxing-ring or on the sports-field. (The Romans had a phrase for it all: “panis et circensis”—bread and circuses!—very useful for keeping the otherwise restless plebians from overturning the patricians’ apple-cart)

Finally, there is the inevitable commercial advertising of a type which is deliberately aimed at what is sometimes revealingly termed the ‘down-market’ consumer.

Naturally the three doughty and almost identical warriors are busily tearing each other’s throats out in the interests of what they would euphemistically describe as ‘healthy competition’. The circulation of The Sun, for example, has now substantially overhauled that of the Daily Mirror which—or so The Observer (8/10/78) would have it—has cheapened (how? one wonders!) its product in its efforts to re-capture its market. The Star seems to be wallowing in the wake, not only of its main competitors, The Sun and the Daily Mirror, but also of its sister-publication, the Daily Express. (This latter newspaper and the Daily Mail constitute the remaining prime sources of mis-information in tabloid form). And this despite a truly heroic effort to outdo them all in journalistic mediocrity. (Perhaps Victor Matthews, its proprietor, was hoping to emulate the remarkable success of The Sun, the title of which had been acquired by Rupert Murdoch in 1969 for £600,000—IPC. from whom he bought it, are still licking their wounds, no doubt!) But there must surely be a limit to the amount of junk-journalism which an already-overloaded market is able to absorb.

However, all newspaper owners do share one overriding interest: the preservation of the political status quo; whether that be under the ‘chairpersonship’ (how appropriate that ambiguous word seems in this context!) of Margaret Thatcher (currently championed by The Sun and The Star) or James Callaghan (favoured by the Daily Mirror). Nobody can accuse Victor Matthews and Rupert Murdoch, or the owners of IPC, of timidity when it comes to the defence of the capitalist system. And it is increasingly apparent that they will go to any lengths in terms of journalistic incontinence in order to succeed.

Given this assumption we can safely draw a veil over that all-too-familiar nonsense we still hear from time to time about so-called editorial independence. By way of confirmation we have on record the words of no less a personage than the editor of The Sun himself, the aptly-named Larry Lamb. He is reported as saying (Observer, 8 October, 1978):

  Mr Murdoch and I had a long discussion about the kind of newspaper we envisaged. It emerged, fortunately, that we had virtually identical concepts. We have never had a prolonged discussion about the policy of the newspaper since that night.
 The venal Larry—self-styled ‘leftist branch secretary of ‘NALGO’ in his youth—has evidently found his true vocation.
  And at shop-floor level? It is reliably reported that the Sun’s sub-editorial and other staff, working under that redoubtable editor, sneeringly dismiss their own product as “The Beano".

Richard Cooper

Political Notes: Union Bashing (1987)

The Political Notes Column from the April 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Union Bashing

The government has recently published a green paper (discussion document) entitled Trade Unions and Their Members which outlines phase four of its union bashing programme. Having whittled away at the rights of trade unions to engage in industrial action, and dictated how they should constitute themselves and run their affairs, the latest proposals are primarily concerned with bolstering the rights of individual trade union members against their unions. The intention is to provide legal protection to trade union members who refuse to take strike action, even though that action has majority support as expressed through a ballot of the whole membership. The Green Paper states:

  Every union member should be free to decide for himself whether or not he wishes to break his contract of employment and run the risk of dismissal without compensation. No union member should be penalised by his trade union for exercising his right to cross a picket line and go to work.

And to ensure that the rights of individual union members are so protected, it is proposed that a special commissioner for trade union affairs be appointed by the government to provide advice to trade unionists wishing to take legal action against their union.

The language of the Green Paper is that of "rights" and "freedoms", but it is individual rights that are to be protected at the expense of the collective rights of the unions themselves. The only strength that unions have comes from their collective strength and ability to remain united when involved in industrial action in defence of wages and conditions of work. The rhetoric of "rights" and "freedoms" disguises the government’s real purpose which is to undermine trade unions by helping to create divisions within them. The fact that some of the proposals contained in the Green Paper are concerned with the democratisation of trade union organisation — such as the proposal for secret ballots for elections of union officials — should not blind us to the fact that this is not the real reason for this latest round of trade union laws. It is up to workers themselves to ensure that their unions are democratic and that governments do not interfere in the internal structure and constitution of trade unions.

Teaching Teachers a Lesson

Another blow was struck against the trade union movement with the passing of the Teachers' Pay and Conditions Act, which completely removes from teaching unions the right to negotiate with their employers (local education authorities) about pay and conditions of work. Instead the Act imposes a pay settlement and contains provision for the appointment of a committee which is to be responsible for advising the Minister for Education on teachers' salaries and conditions of employment. The minister will then decide whether or not to accept the recommendations of the committee.

The teaching unions will play no part in this process since the Act only states that the unions can be consulted on the Advisory Committee's recommendations. So in other words the government, acting on the advice of a body appointed by, and responsible to, itself will be able to decree what teachers should be paid, how long they must work and so on. And this from a government that claims to be committed to the "free market"!

Teachers have once again voted to take strike action in protest at this erosion of their union rights. However, in taking further industrial action they may well run up against other restrictions on the right to strike. The government and the media will undoubtedly try to present teachers as irresponsible, unprofessional and even in breach of the law. The fact that the government, in passing this Act. is itself in breach of the International Labour Conventions is likely to go unnoticed.

Unemployment Tactics

The government offers two tactics for dealing with unemployment: job training schemes and financial support for small businesses. Since the usefulness of the former depends on sufficient jobs being available when people are trained, even the most complacent of government supporters can have very little confidence in this remedy. The president of the Confederation of British Industries in his New Year message for 1987 was certainly not over-optimistic about future trends in employment: he "warned of fewer jobs in manufacturing in 1987" but thought that "demand for labour by service industries should more than offset the loss to bring about a slow but steady fall in unemployment of about 100.000 over the year".

However, the government has shown its determination to support small businesses by making David Trippier the "Minister of Small Firms”. One of his jobs is the encouragement of investment in small firms by insurance companies and the controllers of pension funds. Barely one per cent of their huge financial resources, he claims, are being used to back small companies.

  Given that their total funds were estimated at £170 billion in 1983, and taking account of the 100 per cent rise in the FT share index since 1983 this is a national disgrace. . . . I can't believe that they would be taking too big a risk by investing up to 2 per cent in the smaller companies which are not quoted on the Stock Exchange (The Times 2 February 1987).

Under the present economic system, capital flows to those areas of the economy where the prospect of profit is greatest, for maximising profit is the very basis of our economic system. David Trippier has been given a thankless task indeed, but it could be worth quite a few votes.

To Fit the Crime?

If anything excites the gutter press more than a horrific rape it is a horrific rape for which the rapist receives a comparatively light sentence.

So we should not be impressed when newspapers like the Sun report (they would probably prefer the word expose) sexual offences, in a mixture of relish and indignation. while at the same time they publish girlie pictures with captions like this:

  Sexy Sammy Fox simply shines — as she gets set to make you and your partner BULLIONAIRES.

This merchanting of distorted femininity — superficially inviting but actually unreal and unattainable — is good for sales but not for sexual harmony. Deliberately and cynically, it preys on the repressed and malformed sexuality which is ail too often evident in offences like rape.

The Ealing vicarage rape case — particularly brutal and horrifying — was all the gutter press could ask for. It also gave a few publicity-crazed MPs the opportunity to get themselves a bit more media exposure. Notable among these, seizing his chance like the pro he is, was the local Member Harry Greenway, who annually shows how he rates women by arranging to have himself photographed clutching some haplessly smiling contestants in the Miss World festival of female degradation.

Punishment freaks on the right wing like Peter Bruinvels — who wouldn't mind the job of hangman if capital punishment is ever brought back here — were in sympathy with feminists and left wingers in outrage at the Ealing sentences. It was, they agreed, a simple matter to reduce the incidence of rape — dish out harsher sentences to the rapists. Clearly, there is need for a few words from another point of view.

The Ealing sentences were short only by the standards of the English courts, which are notorious as among the most punitive in Europe. The sentenced men are likely to suffer grievously at the hands of their fellow prisoners. They are unlikely to learn anything about how capitalism with its poverty, its slums, its repression, its cynicism, discourages people from trusting or caring for each other. What sort of attitude does the Sun. for example, encourage men to adopt towards sexy Sammy Fox?

The mock horror in the press at a judge who seemed to set property at a value higher than human beings was particularly sickening for these same newspapers ardently support the capitalist system which operates on exactly that principle. What else was the Sun saying, when it gloated over the slaughter of hundreds of Argentinian workers when the Belgrano was sunk?

The outcry over "inadequate" or "lenient" sentences encourages workers who are afraid or disturbed about what they see of capitalism in the 1980s to think they can leave the remedy to politicians to introduce harsher laws and to the judiciary who will impose them. Crime springs from the roots of capitalism and. contrary to the hysteria of the gutter press and vote-obsessed MPs. it will not be eradicated through punishment.

Business as usual

The Tower Commission's report into the sale of arms to Iran by the United States has left the way open for things to continue pretty much as usual. The Commission concluded that the (unelected) National Security Council. from which the policy apparently emanated. on the whole does a good job; that the decision-making processes are basically sound; and the President, although incompetent. is a good guy at heart. Ronnie has gone on television to put things right with the "American people" by admitting that he goofed and his popularity ratings seem to have recovered as a result. Nancy gave Don Regan the boot and a new Mr Clean has been brought in as the White House Chief of Staff. No doubt, as a consequence of the continuing investigation by Senate and House of Representatives committees, a few other people will be asked to resign. There may even be a few prosecutions and the self-styled Rambo, Oliver North, may, with luck, be certified insane.

What is unlikely to happen is large numbers of people in America asking the question why, in a country where there is a long history of shady deals by politicians, covert activities by those responsible for "national security" and deliberate attempts to conceal what is really going on — and all this in a country which boasts of its democratic political system — why is it that the majority continue to grant power to the minority?

Running Commentary: Property-Owning Democracy? (1987)

The Running Commentary Column from the March 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Property-Owning Democracy?

Remember the Tories' 1983 election promise of turning Britain into a "property-owning democracy"? The prospect of "owning” their own house was undoubtedly an attractive proposition to many workers fed up with the insecurity of renting their homes from unscrupulous landlords or penny-pinching councils. However for many the dream has turned into a nightmare. As fewer council houses are built and fewer properties are available to rent, many people have been forced to "choose" a mortgage, which the building societies have been only too pleased to give them.

But having encouraged people to become home owners, the government has now decided to punish those home-owners who have the misfortune to become unemployed. New rules have just been introduced which will mean that anyone who becomes unemployed will have only half their mortgage interest paid while they are in receipt of Supplementary Benefit and only for the first four months of unemployment. Under the old rules all the interest (but not the capital) was paid. This is bound to increase the rate of repossessions. Already one in ten homeless families are homeless because their home has been repossessed due to mortgage default.

Families faced with the prospect of unemployment and inability to pay their mortgage may decide to sell up to avoid arrears and repossession. If they do, however, the local authority would have no obligation to rehouse them since they would be deemed to be "intentionally homeless”.

For workers in this situation the security promised by the slogan "property-owning democracy" has turned out to be as illusory as it is for those who depend on paying rent in order to keep a roof over their heads.

It Pays to Advertise

It is even more profitable if you can get someone who has nothing to gain to pay you for the privilege of so doing!!

Strange as it may seem, the same person who objects strongly to paying a few pence for a carrier bag printed with the name of a supermarket, will pay pounds to advertise something else.

Guinness started the fashion years ago. In return for a cheque made out to them for the correct amount (something like 20 guineas if memory serves) you would receive a sweater with 'GUINNESS' — not even the toucan —  emblazoned across the front. Today for £18.95 you may buy a plain wool sweater by post; this price is already considerably higher than for a similar garment bought across the counter. However, for only an extra £ 1, you can have' The Times' discreetly embroidered on the left-hand side. Of course, if you don't have the odd £20 to spare, you can go downmarket and buy a Coca Cola — or if you prefer, a Pepsi — T-shirt. Slightly upmarket again, you could, in gold on black, advertise Biba. If you really want to dredge the bottom, feature the Sun with the screaming front page headline 'SID VICIOUS DEAD. Punk Star Killed By Overdose'.

One T-shirt we have not yet seen is the one advertising the fact that we are all being killed by an overdose — of capitalism!


Gorbachev the democrat?

"We need democracy like we need air to breathe", said Gorbachev in a speech to the ruling Central Committee. What he means by "democracy" is that there will be more than one candidate standing for office in elections and a bit more public debate with officials prepared to admit from time to time that things occasionally go wrong, that there are shortages and production quotas aren't always fulfilled.

Well it's better than nothing. But no-one should be conned into believing that the new, reforming Russian leadership is really concerned about giving ordinary Russian workers a voice in decision-making. What Gorbachev is undoubtedly concerned about is the failure of the Russian economy. Giving people a little in relatively unimportant areas is a time-honoured way of getting them to give back a lot more.

If Russian workers are made to feel that they do have a voice, that they are listened to, then it is quite possible they will be conned into working harder and producing more wealth for the Russian ruling class. A little bit of political liberalisation will not affect the fundamental division of Russian society into those with wealth and power and those without, unless Russian workers recognise that fundamental division and then exploit the small window of opportunity that Gorbachev has opened for their own political ends.


Bullets on the beat

Officially Britain has an unarmed police force. Unofficially things are rather different. A curious incident involving a car chase down the M1 which ended when the car being pursued ran out of petrol and shots were fired, led to revelations that for the past eight years traffic police patrolling the Nottinghamshire section of the M1 motorway, the A1 and Nottingham city centre have been carrying guns.

Charles McLachlan, Chief Constable of Nottinghamshire, said at a press conference:

  The vehicles are double-manned and weapons are carried in a locked container in the vehicle. They are two pistols, a pump-action shotgun and body armour. They are not allowed to take these weapons from the container which is permanently locked, without approval from a senior police officer.

No doubt this was meant to reassure people. But these words sound rather hollow given the trigger-happy mentality of certain armed police as shown by a series of tragic incidents over the last six years in which people have been "accidentally” shot by armed police.

One of the most disturbing aspects of the militarisation of the police is that the decision to arm police officers is not taken in public after debate and discussion but instead is made behind closed doors by the police themselves. As such decisions are deemed to be "operational" even the elected police authorities, to whom the police are nominally responsible, do not have to be consulted or even informed.

A Cloud over the Sun (1967)

From the February 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

Pundits, governments, capitalists and fools are always telling us that the world has changed — the system has changed — in these abrasive times of shake-out and redeployment, the whole nature of capitalism isn’t what it used to be.

Not even the Marines could fall for that one: calling unemployment something else makes a fat lot of difference to the families of the men who are out of work.

Capitalism has not changed — not since Marx and Engels first produced the Communist Manifesto in 1848. The first struggles between rival capitalists, the harsh conflict of interests between workers and capitalists, the blind and wasteful way in which worker is set against his brother worker — these things are capitalism, today.

And for the truth about “modern” capitalism, take a look at the newspaper industry, which is so fond of telling other people how their businesses should be run.

The International Publishing Corporation, which owns The Sun, issued a statement about that still struggling newspaper in November last year. The IPC declared that it intended to go on publishing The Sun after its guaranteed life was over in January 1968. This was the guarantee that Cecil King, boss of IPC, gave the Daily Herald when he took that over in 1961.

The Sun is in fact selling fewer copies each day than the Daily Herald — 1,206,000 at time of writing as against the Herald's 1,300,000 when it closed down. But by a rather sophisticated analysis IPC reckon that its new (2½ years old) baby is doing better than the dead newspaper; its readers are younger, more of them are women, more of them live in the “right” areas — all factors that appeal to advertisers.

What the IPC statement did not make explicitly clear was that The Sun’s continued' existence depended upon the unions' helping to cut production costs. That was where IPC showed its deceitful capitalist self.

For as Hugh Cudlipp, right hand man to Cecil King, made clear in a television interview, if the losses on The Sun (at present well over £1 million a year) are not cut in this way, then it will almost certainly not live beyond January 3rd, 1968.

Cecil King's antipathy for trade unions has become pretty clear during the last couple of years. His noisy newspaper the Daily Mirror, and The Sun as well, often attack unions for allowing or encouraging their members to slack, to produce too little, to strike.

Of course, the newspaper bosses are the last who should talk about this kind of thing. It is notorious that their workshops are “over-staffed”, their machines “over-manned”.

After the Second World War, when life seemed full of promise, the press lords gave in to the demands of trade unions on practically everything. The result is now that their packing and printing departments have to employ far more men than the actual production of newspapers warrants.

Cecil King is now trying to change that, in order, he says, to keep The Sun alive. Hugh Cudlipp has promised that whatever production changes may take place at The Sun, they will not be applied to IPC.

Apart from anything else, the unions would be right to mistrust that. Not so very long ago IPC closed down a whole new printing plant at Southwark because the unions would not agree to reduced manning. Only the very innocent can believe that if they had their way in this at The Sun, they would not seek to extend the principle.

The effect of IPC’s statement is typical of life under capitalism. Worker is now set against worker. The journalists, whose department will probably not have staff cuts, begin to murmur against the print and electrical workers, many of whom can expect to lose their jobs.

A.