20.07.2011

Cops, press, and capital

The scandal at News International reveals a few home truths about the corrupt establishment, writes James Turley

Some starry-eyed commentators have, of late, begun comparing the implosion of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire with another spectacular collapse: the Berlin wall.

This is, obviously enough, overstating the case by some considerable margin. Anybody who expects some kind of wholesale social transformation to arise from this affair, as happened for better or worse in the Stalinist countries, is likely to be disappointed. Politicians will continue to squirm and lie; journalists will continue to turn out reams of factually dodgy copy, sometimes from legally dodgy sources.

Yet there is a comparison to be made. The fall of the wall and the closure of The News of the World alike opened up a certain space in public consciousness, whereby crimes that, until that moment, had seemed inevitable suddenly presented themselves as intolerable. Just as the bureaucratic regimes appeared strong enough to grope on forever, with their attendant repression and atrocities, there were home truths in the west that seemed unchallengeable - dogs’ tails wag; media barons enjoy privileged access to politicians; police take bribes; and above all the establishment is based on nepotism and personal favours.

For the moment at least, all these verities (apart from tail-wagging) have been blown apart. If the reactions of establishment figures - from senior officers at Scotland Yard, to No10, to Murdoch himself - have appeared clumsy and reactive, it is at least partly because the actions and practices for which they are suddenly the object of public contempt had for so long been business as usual at the top - so banal that barely anyone bothered to point it out.

Now, however, there is what seems like non-stop coverage on TV and radio of high-profile resignations, parliamentary committee investigations and special sessions in the House of Commons, where David Cameron and Ed Miliband vie with each other to implicate their rival in wrongdoing because of their respective ex-News International employees: while Tom Baldwin is still Miliband’s spin doctor, however, at least he has not been arrested like Andy Coulson, the former communications director at Downing Street.

Cops and Screws

Last week, the spotlight fell increasingly on the Metropolitan Police, and its role in what appears to be a cover-up of the extent to which phone-hacking was employed by The News of the World. A steady drip of new accusations against the Met - in particular, the revelation that long-time NotW deputy editor Neil Wallis was taken on as a PR man by the Yard - led to the double resignation of commissioner Paul Stephenson and his assistant, John Yates.

Wallis’s appointment at the Met would have been bad enough, now that he has joined the swelling ranks of arrested Murdoch luminaries. Then, however, it became known that Stephenson had enjoyed a £12,000 stay at the exclusive Champneys health resort completely gratis. Champneys was another beneficiary of Wallis’s PR consultancy, and much loved by Rebekah Brooks (whose husband provides hokey alternative remedies to its guests).

As for Yates, it emerged that he had apparently given some aid to Wallis’s daughter in obtaining a job at Scotland Yard (Yates insists that he merely passed on her CV, “acting like a postbox” - but not many people have assistant police commissioners on hand to deliver their spec letters).

So, while both insist that their resignations are over their failure to properly vet Wallis before awarding him a £1,000-a-day PR contract, it is clear where the public anger lies - the relations between the police and News International are clearly much cosier than is appropriate when the former is supposed to investigate the crimes of the latter. The bungled 2009 investigation now plays out in the public gallery as a stitch-up between different establishment factions - and why should it not? That is exactly what it is.

Stephenson, like Murdoch and Cameron before him, was reduced to desperate and reactive crisis management - indeed, there are even whispers that the arrest by appointment of Rebekah Brooks on Sunday was a last-ditch attempt to divert attention away from the Champneys affair and other improprieties among London’s finest. If so, it is only amplified speculation - not least because it gave Brooks a ready-made legal defence against answering tough questions in parliament.

That said, the resignations should not be viewed simply as self-serving - precisely because to save one’s own skin in this situation increasingly means to unpick that very stitch-up. Stephenson’s statement of resignation was widely - and if The Guardian’s Scotland Yard sources are to be believed, accurately - viewed as a veiled attack on David Cameron.

By focusing attention on the narrow matter of Wallis’s appointment (pushed through at least in part because it offered direct access to No10), Stephenson was able to draw all manner of comparisons with Cameron’s employment of Andy Coulson. The implication was clear - Stephenson was prepared to fall on his sword over Wallis, who had not even been implicated in the original investigation, unlike Coulson. Was Cameron going to take responsibility for his blunder in like fashion?

Under pressure

This, despite its cryptic nature, is in reality a pretty sensational attack. Stephenson got the top job after the resignation of Ian Blair - the latter was all but pushed out by the then new London mayor, Boris Johnson, and widely viewed in Tory circles (perhaps not unfairly) as a creature of New Labour. Stephenson’s tenure as commissioner is something he owes entirely to the same political party whose prime minister he now targets in his own resignation. That is how fractious and bitter relations have become in the top echelons of society.

Indeed, it is impossible to predict where this whole farrago will end. It has been a rather dispiriting tendency among the British far left to assume that the government is weak, that ‘one big push’ from the streets will send it into full collapse. This paper has consistently argued that this is a dangerous illusion.

That said, the events around the phone-hacking scandal have left the government looking very weak indeed. The Liberal Democrats have swallowed an awful lot of bitter medicine in their time in government: they have seen their popularity collapse and candidates humiliated in local and by-elections as a result. Nick Clegg and his colleagues are reduced to clinging onto their ministerial posts for dear life (just as Cameron planned it, no doubt). The worse things get on the Murdoch front, however, the more a most unpalatable choice poses itself: stay with Cameron and risk going down with him, or break the coalition in the hope of saving some face.

The point may come when bailing out of government will seem like the lesser of two evils; and, indeed, the Lib Dems beat the Tories to taking a firm anti-Murdoch line by some days. Add to that Ed Miliband’s sudden discovery of some kind of political purpose, and the very obvious desire among many on the Tory right to junk the coalition government, and the conditions are there for a vote of no confidence. It is not that the government is weak - it is that even the strongest government would have a hard time batting this scandal away.

Coulson’s resignation from Cameron’s staff has done nothing to stop the latter being sucked into the generalised chaos with each new round of allegations. Not only have Stephenson and Yates alleged before a home office parliamentary committee that a Cameron aide refused to be briefed on Wallis’s appointment, so as not to ‘compromise’ the prime minister, but The Guardian and other sources have repeatedly insisted that they informed Cameron that Coulson was not exactly squeaky clean - in direct contradiction to Cameron’s own statements on the matter.

Apparently, the same aide, Ed Llewellyn, was to blame for blocking those warnings too. His days in politics, it is safe to say, are numbered; but the further revelation that Wallis did some unspecified pro bono work for his old boss, Coulson, in the run-up to the election will cause further headaches to the prime minister.

Despite his repulsively destructive political programme and the outbursts of protest it has engendered, Cameron has found it plain sailing in government so far. Now that he has a real fight on his hands, his performance is pathetic - he stumbles along in the opposition’s wake, his lies and evasions exposed almost as soon as they leave his mouth.

If Cameron survives, he will have to do serious work to rebuild public consent for parliament. If he goes, then whoever replaces him will have to do the same. The more fundamental issue ultimately has little to do with the self-justifications, the little lies and half-truths that he, Stephenson et al indulge in to save their own skins, but rather the big lies: that to the best of their ability politicians build the good society, the police dispense justice without fear or favour, and newspapers tell the truth.

On one level, of course, anyone with half an ounce of cynicism in their bodies knows these statements to be absurdly out of kilter with reality. Cynicism, however, is passive. The exposure of quite shameless degrees of incestuous schmoozing between a media oligarch, cosseted political careerists and bent coppers has left the way open for it to become something active: anger.

So we must ask: why are the police, the political class and the media so corrupt, and so prone to undignified lash-ups amongst each other? In relation to the media, the answer is obvious. They are owned directly by big capitalists, for whom bribes both within and without the letter of the law are an obvious manner of gaining political acquiescence for their businesses.

As for the police and the politicians, to be sure they play very different roles in society. But both are governed by a strict career structure that rests in the last instance on networks of patronage, which in turn ultimately reward mediocrity - it is bureaucrats, yes-men and self-serving careerists that squirm up these greasy poles, and such elements are both prone to corruption and freed from any measure of popular control that might hold them accountable for it.

It follows, then, that popular control is the answer. We advocate, ultimately, the replacement of the police with a popular militia; but in the meantime there must be full trade union rights for police officers, as well as the right to elect - and ditch - their own superiors. Politicians must equally be accountable to their electors - a skewed election every five years certainly does not count. We demand annual parliaments, elected under the party list system of proportional representation, with parties having the right of recall. Bureaucratic and legal barriers to the standing of candidates must be removed. MPs must be paid no more than the average wage of a skilled worker.

This question is certainly not all about one hate-figure, Rupert Murdoch. The scandal is so sensational not because it has badly shaken an iconic corporate behemoth, but because it demonstrates just how seriously capitalism perverts public life. Murdoch and his coterie have given us an opportunity to expose the endemic corruption of capitalist rule, from the provincial police station to the houses of parliament, and articulate meaningful alternatives to it. This opportunity may last a couple of months, or a year. It will not last forever - and we should seize it.