December 16, 2019 "Information
Clearing House" -
This was an election of two illusions.
The first helped persuade much of the
British public to vote for the very epitome
of an Eton toff, a man who not only has
shown utter contempt for most of those who
voted for him but has spent a lifetime
barely bothering to conceal that contempt.
For him, politics is an ego-trip, a game in
which others always pay the price and
suffer, a job he is entitled to through
birth and superior breeding.
The extent to which such illusions now
dominate our political life was highlighted
two days ago with a jaw-dropping comment
from a Grimsby fish market worker. He
said he would vote Tory for the first
time because “Boris seems like a normal
working class guy.”
Johnson is precisely as working class,
and “normal”, as the billionaire-owned Sun
and the billionaire-owned Mail. The Sun
isn’t produced by a bunch of working-class
lads down the pub having a laugh, nor is the
Mail produced by conscientious middle
managers keen to uphold “British values” and
a sense of fair play and decency. Like the
rest of the British media, these outlets are
machines, owned by globe-spanning
corporations that sell us the illusions –
carefully packaged and marketed to our
sectoral interest – needed to make sure
nothing impedes the corporate world’s
ability to make enormous profits at our, and
the planet’s, expense.
The Sun, Mail, Telegraph, Guardian and
BBC have all worked hard to create for
themselves “personalities”. They brand
themselves as different – as friends we the
public might, or might not, choose to invite
into our homes – to win the largest share
possible of the UK audience, to capture
every section of the public as news
consumers, while feeding us a distorted,
fairytale version of reality that is optimal
for business. They are no different to other
corporations in that regard.
Media wot won it
Supermarkets like Tesco, Sainsbury, Lidl
and Waitrose similarly brand themselves to
appeal to different sections of the public.
But all these supermarkets are driven by the
same pathological need to make profits at
all costs. If Sainsbury’s sells fair trade
tea as well as traditionally produced tea,
it is not because it cares more than Lidl
about the treatment of workers and damage to
the environment but because it knows its
section of consumers care more about such
issues. And as long as it makes the same
profits on good and bad tea, why should it
not cater to its share of the market in the
name of choice and freedom?
The media are different from supermarkets
in one way, however. They are not driven
simply by profit. In fact, many media
outlets struggle to make money. They are
better seen as the loss-leader promotion in
a supermarket, or as a business write-off
against tax.
The media’s job is to serve as the
propaganda arm of big business. Even if the
Sun makes an economic loss, it has succeeded
if it gets the business candidate elected,
the candidate who will keep corporation tax,
capital gains tax and all the other taxes
that affect corporate profits as low as
possible without stoking a popular
insurrection.
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The media are there to support the
candidate or candidates who agree to sell
off more and more public services for
short-term profit, allowing the corporate
vultures to pick hungrily at their
carcasses. The media’s job is to back the
candidate who will prioritise the
corporations’ interests over the public’s,
quick profits over the future of the NHS,
the self-destructive logic of capitalism
over the idea – socialist or not – of a
public realm, of the common good. The
corporations behind the Sun or the Guardian
can afford to make a loss as long as their
other business interests are prospering.
It’s not the Sun wot won it, it’s the
entire corporate media industry.
BBC’s role exposed
The real revelation of this election,
however, has been the BBC, the most well
concealed of all those illusion-generating
machines. The BBC is a state broadcaster
that has long used its entertainment
division – from costume dramas to wildlife
documentaries – to charm us and ensure the
vast majority of the public are only too
happy to invite it into their homes. The
BBC’s lack of adverts, the apparent absence
of a grubby, commercial imperative, has been
important in persuading us of the myth that
the British Broadcasting Corporation is
driven by a higher purpose, that it is a
national treasure, that it is on our side.
But the BBC always was the propaganda arm
of the state, of the British establishment.
Once, briefly, in the more politically
divided times of my youth, the state’s
interests were contested. There were
intermittent Labour governments trying to
represent workers’ interests and powerful
trade unions that the British establishment
dared not alienate too strongly. Then,
countervailing popular interests could not
be discounted entirely. The BBC did its best
to look as if it was being even-handed, even
if it wasn’t really. It played by the rules
for fear of the backlash if it did not.
All that has changed, as this election
exposed more starkly than ever before.
The reality is that the corporate class –
the 0.001% – has been in control of our
political life uninterrupted for 40 years.
As in the United States, the corporations
captured our political and economic systems
so successfully that for most of that time
we ended up with a choice between two
parties of capital: the Conservative party
and New Labour.
Hollowed-out society
The corporations used that unbroken rule
to shore up their power. Public utilities
were sold off, the building societies became
corporate banks, the financial industries
were deregulated to make profit the only
measure of value, and the NHS was slowly
cannibalised. The BBC too was affected.
Successive governments more openly
threatened its income from the licence fee.
Union representation, as elsewhere, was
eroded and layoffs became much easier as new
technology was introduced. The BBC’s
managers were drawn ever more narrowly from
the world of big business. And its news
editors were increasingly interchangeable
with the news editors of the
billionaire-owned print media.
To take one of many current examples,
Sarah Sands, editor of the key Radio 4 Today
programme, spent her earlier career at the
Boris Johnson-cheerleading Mail and
Telegraph newspapers.
In this election, the BBC cast off its
public-service skin to reveal the corporate
Terminator-style automaton below. It was
shocking to behold even for a veteran media
critic like myself. This restyled BBC,
carefully constructed over the past four
decades, shows how the patrician British
establishment of my youth – bad as it was –
has gone.
Now the BBC is a mirror of what our
hollowed-out society looks like. It is no
longer there to hold together British
society, to forge shared values, to find
common ground between the business community
and the trade unions, to create a sense –
even if falsely – of mutual interest between
the rich and the workers. No, it is there to
ringfence turbo-charged neoliberal
capitalism, it is there to cannibalise
what’s left of British society, and
ultimately, as we may soon find out, it is
there to generate civil war.
Shrunken moral horizons
The second illusion was held by the left.
We clung to a dream, like a life-raft, that
we still had a public space; that, however
awful our electoral system was, however
biased the red-tops were, we lived in a
democracy where real, meaningful change was
still possible; that the system wasn’t
rigged to stop someone like Jeremy Corbyn
from ever reaching power.
That illusion rested on a lot of false
assumptions. That the BBC was still the
institution of our youth, that it would play
reasonably fair when it came to election
time, giving Corbyn a level playing field
with Johnson for the final few weeks of the
campaign. That social media – despite the
relentless efforts of these new media
corporations to skew their algorithms to
trap us in our own little echo chambers –
would act as a counterweight to the
traditional media.
But most importantly, we turned a blind
eye to the social changes that 40 years of
an unchallenged corporate-sponsored
Thatcherism had wreaked on our imaginations,
on our ideological lives, on our capacity
for compassion.
As public institutions were broken apart
and sold off, the public realm shrank
dramatically, as did our moral horizons. We
stopped caring about a society that Margaret
Thatcher had told us didn’t exist anyway.
Large sections of the older generations
profited from the sell-off of the public
realm, and policies that flagrantly
disregarded the planet’s future. They were
persuaded that this model of short-term
profit, of slash-and-burn economics from
which they had personally benefited, was not
only sustainable but that it was the only
possible, the only good model.
he younger generations have never known
any other reality. The profit motive,
instant gratification, consumer indulgence
are the only yardsticks they have ever been
offered to measure value. A growing number
have started to understand this is a sick
ideology, that we live in an insane, deeply
corrupted society, but they struggle to
imagine another world, one they have no
experience of.
How can they contemplate what the working
class achieved decades ago – how a much
poorer society created medical care for all,
an NHS that our current one is a pale shadow
of – when that history, that story of
struggle is rarely told, and when it is it
is told only through the distorting prism of
the billionaire-owned media?
A rigged political system
We on the left didn’t lose this election.
We lost our last illusions. The system is
rigged – as it always has been – to benefit
those in power. It will never willingly
allow a real socialist, or any politician
deeply committed to the health of society
and the planet, to take power away from the
corporate class. That, after all, is the
very definition of power. That is what the
corporate media is there to uphold.
This is not about being a bad loser, or a
case of sour grapes.
In the extraordinary circumstances that
Corbyn had overcome all these institutional
obstacles, all the smears, and won last
night, I was planning to write a different
post today – and it would not have been
celebratory. It would not have gloated, as
Johnson’s supporters and Corbyn’s opponents
in the Conservative party, large sections of
the Labour parliamentary party, and the
rightwing and liberal media are doing now.
No, I’d have been warning that the real
battle for power was only just beginning.
That however bad the past four years had
been, we had seen nothing yet. That those
generals who
threatened a mutiny as soon as Corbyn
was elected Labour leader were still there
in the shadows. That the media would not
give up on their disinformation, they would
intensify it. That the security services
that have been trying to portray Corbyn as a
Russian spy would move from insinuation into
more explicit action.
Future on our side
Nonetheless, we have the future on our
side, dark as it may be. The planet isn’t
going to heal itself with Johnson, Donald
Trump and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro in charge.
It’s going to get a lot sicker, a lot
quicker. Our economy isn’t going to become
more productive, or more stable, after
Brexit. Britain’s economic fate is going to
be tied even more tightly to the United
States’, as resources run out and
environmental and climate catastrophes
(storms, rising seas levels, flooding,
droughts, crop failures, energy shortages)
mount. The contradictions between endless
growth and a planet with finite resources
will become even starker, the crashes of
2008 more familiar.
The corporate party Johnson’s victory has
unleashed is going to lead, sooner or later,
to a truly terrifying hangover.
The likelihood is that the Blairites will
exploit this defeat to drag Labour back to
being a party of neoliberal capital. We will
once again be offered a “choice” between the
blue and the red Tory parties. If they
succeed, Labour’s mass membership will
desert the party, and it will become once
again an irrelevance, a hollow shell of a
workers’ party, as empty ideologically and
spiritually as it was until Corbyn sought to
reinvent it.
It may be a good thing if this coup
happens quickly rather than being dragged
out over years, keeping us trapped longer in
the illusion that we can fix the system
using the tools the corporate class offers
us.
We must head to the streets – as we have
done before with Occupy, with Extinction
Rebellion, with the schools strikes – to
reclaim the public space, to reinvent and
rediscover it. Society didn’t cease to
exist. It wasn’t snuffed out by Thatcher. We
just forgot what it looked like, that we are
human, not machines. We forgot that we are
all part of society, that we are
precisely what it is.
Now is the time to put away childish
things, and take the future back into our
hands.
Jonathan Cook
is a Nazareth- based
journalist and winner of the Martha Gellhorn
Special Prize for Journalism. No one
pays him to write these blog posts. If you
appreciated it, please consider visiting
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