For anyone who cares about the principle democracy, there appears to be a perfect storm looming. The turbulence is heading towards us from several fronts. Stirring it up are the robber barons, Murdoch Snr and Jnr, Lord Ashcroft and the Brothers Barclay. None of them have the slightest interest in the free speech and true popular vote that they claim to champion. They rarely live here; I bet their tax payments are “interesting” and, as the Barclays demonstrated in Sark and Murdoch is now doing in the USA, they see the whole concept of democracy as a bit of a game.
To we mere pawns it is no game, at all. Between them they are attempting to strangle the news media, kill off the BBC and wreck the only real opportunity for a fairer electoral system in Britain. Already, Ashcroft lackeys are talking down the Alternative Voting system by twisting the way it works and scaring the public. Mark Garnier, the Wyre Forest MP, wrote the most distorted piece of disinformation about the way AV would have worked in the last election. He is just one of hundreds of Tories who recognise that AV means having to fight for their jobs, rather than just assuming they will win.
Meanwhile, Murdoch’s non-news channels are pulling the strings of the Tea Party movement that threatens to shatter intelligent political debate in the US. While here, he is running crying to the European Commission because he’s not allowed to buy 100% of BSkyB – a purchase that would give him domination of the British media.
His son is also stirring up a little tornado over the unfairness of the BBC’s funding. What on earth would he know or care about fairness? The BBC is flawed, especially under the watch of the visionless Mark Thompson, but it is one of the finest creations we have. Sky, on the other hand, is anything but. The BBC is a creator and sets standards (sometimes). Sky does neither. If life’s so unfair for Sky, why do the Murdochs want to buy it? Further, the Murdoch’s are trying to persuade Cameron to ditch the official ruling that news channels must be balanced. If they win we will end up with the kind of rabid rabble rousing rubbish that has given America the Tea Party – a movement of moronic, self-destructive idiocy whose success, if it does succeed, threatens the stability of the whole world. Imagine President Sarah Palin? Murdoch seems to think that would be a bit of a laugh.
What we are facing goes far beyond the moral fairy tales of Robin Hood and Citizen Kane. This is the sort of upheaval that required the Magna Carta in 1215. Almost 800 years on, we have learned little if we let these deeply selfish and detached people decide what we are allowed to know and say.
