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December 2005 Who Runs Britain: BLOGS Who runs Britain? That’s the question we’re asking in this year’s Today Programme Christmas poll. We’ve invited three ‘bloggers’ to follow the arguments. Read their biographies. You can also comment on the blogs on our message boards:  ____________________________________ Tuesday 13 December: JUDY PART II If the press were that powerful ...We would have got out of Europe . Ken Livingstone would not have been Mayor, Peter Mandelson would not have got one of the Plum jobs in Europe and Liam Donaldson would be leader of the Tory Party. That was said by Amada Platell, and it was easily the most cogent and sensible thing anyone had to say on Tuesday's BBC Radio 4's Today programme Who Runs Britain broadcast, which I posted on here and here . However, once past that, the panel of experts, Greg Dyke, Piers Morgan and Amanda Platell did resort to selecting evidence to confirm their prejudices instead of trying to ! disprove them as she had done. Because yes, as I'd predicted, the discussion did take on pretty uncritically the idea of Rupert Murdoch dominating the agenda of Tony Blair. Piers Morgan laboriously dragged out the number of meetings he knew Tony Blair had had with the editor of the Sun. Contrary evidence such as Amanda Platell had quoted above was not considered. Oh, and it became clear that every one of these experts opposed the Iraq war and regarded Gilligan's exposure and sacking as "a disgrace" . So much for a balanced group of experts. Tuesday 13 December: JUDY Good morning, Today programme readers. This is my first experience of blogging away from home. And the Today programme Who Runs Britain web site is quite an appealing alternative soapbox. I've decided to start as I mean to go on. That's by being subversive. I'm not going to wait for the panel before I do this morning's blog. Instead, I'm going to stick my neck out, and have some guesses about who and what I think they might suggest when they're asked t! o discuss if either the media or someone in it runs Britain . Then, I'm going to see if the helpful and long-suffering tech staff of the Today programme will bear with me and allow me to put up a supplementary or update page later on today, when I've had more time to think through what the panel actually says. In any case, I'm going to put updates and another commentary on my own blog, Adloyada , so you can follow up my commentary there if you're minded to. Does the media or someone in it run Britain ? I'd need some convincing that it does. I think a much more interesting question is how it gets to shape debates. If you want to look at that in the context of the Today programme, then you can't do better than to look at who gets invited to do on air discussions. I've posted in my blog in the past about a time when the Today programme invited someone from the tiny, highly unrepresentative -of-Muslims and racist MPACUK on to define what it is that Muslims want politically. And the MPACUK speaker was the only Muslim invited. The people invited for today's Who Runs Britain? panel have impeccable media qualifications. Greg Dyke , no less than the former Director-General of the BBC. Piers Morgan, former editor of the Daily Mirror . Amanda Platell , b! est known as the former Press Secretary to William Hague at the time of the 2001 election. Balanced? Yes, in theory. The Daily Mirror is a left-leaning paper, and Morgan certainly ran it that way. Amanda Platell declared an unswerving loyalty to the Conservative Party. But these folk maybe have much more in common than that. I'd say they have a common anti-Blair agenda. And in the case of Dyke and Morgan, that's fuelled by a quite ferocious venom that follows their both having lost their jobs as a result of very high profile errors they made in pursuit of their opposition to the Iraq War. Dyke famously lost his job after the Hutton enquiry had found that he failed to carry out his duty to check the verac! ity of Andrew Gilligan's notorious account on the Today programme of his meeting with Dr David Kelly. That had been a moment when it looked for as if it might be possible that a report on the Today programme might bring down the premiership of Tony Blair. Dyke has never accepted Hutton. He even claimed that Gilligan's faked story was "essentially true".Since his resignation, he's become increasingly lurid in his claims: In July 2004 Dyke was awarded honorary doctorates from the University of Sunderland and Middlesex University . In his acceptance speech for the latter, he attacked the government over its stance on the Iraq war heavily, and maintained that the Andrew Gilligan story was essentially true, the story government dossier was sexed up and that the government staged a "witch hunt" to deflect from the real issues surrounding the Iraq war. ! On May 2 2005 the former Labour supporter Dyke went public at a Liberal Democrat press conference and said that "Democracy was under threat if Labour was elected for a third term". Morgan is no stranger to controversy . The ferocity of the Daily Mirror's opposition to the Iraq war under his editorship was legendary. But it all came to grief when he published what turned out to be hoax pictures of British soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners, and subsequently had to resign. Like Dyke, he resorts to saying the pictures were "essentially true" ..I don't know the facts about these pictures, but they do seem to illustrate a wid! er truth about British troops abusing Iraqi prisoners.... I think Gilligan was right. It was an absolute farce that the people who have lost their jobs over Iraq are me, Andrew Gilligan, Gavyn Davies and Greg Dyke. If it is MI5 that is behind it they should all get promotions and pay rises. They can't find weapons of mass destruction, but, by God, they can get media people out of their jobs. Amanda Platell is a journalist with much lighter agendas. Since she stopped being Hague's Press Secretary, she has written columns in the Evening Standard and the New Statesman, often involving minor scandals. But she's currently fronting a joint Channel 4 show with... Piers Morgan. So, I'd say, a common anti-Blair agenda. A common anti-Iraq war agenda. It makes me think that one or other of them might centre their discussion on media figures they don't like. And although he's actually pro-Blair, I'd say they might try picking on Rupert Murdoch as a supposed media figure who runs Britain . Because their argument might well be that Murdoch actually controls Blair's agenda . There are plenty of slightly nutty conspiracy-minded web sites like the one I've just linked to which claim that Murdoch controls the US , the oil market, and just about every area of policy you can think of. I found an even nuttier viciously anti-semitic one that claims that Murdoch is actually Jewish, and his whole empire is run by Jews, who anyway control all of the world's media. Both types of claim are based on the same bullshit approach. You just list companies that Murdoch ow! ns (like the controls-the-US) or names of Jews you can find in those companies. Voila! There's no more to be said. You never of course look at contrary evidence. Or even consider that owning a clutch of companies in different sectors might not mean you're running them to pursue a single political agenda. Like Murdoch also owns the Times Educational Supplement, which is rabidly against the Blairite education policies which the rest of his stable tends to favour. Well, maybe our panel today won't even mention Rupert Murdoch, let alone claim he runs Britain by running Tony Blair, who supposedly shapes his policies to fit the editorial preferences of the Sun, which is Murdoch's flagship UK paper. We'll see. And I'll be the first person to admit I was wrong if they don't. Watch this space. I'll be back later to update when I've heard the panel discussion ! and had time to reflect on it. Monday 12 December: OLIVER KAMM 'Money' does not run Britain . You had only to listen to the report and discussion on the Today programme to realise the vacuity of this notion. It was a speculative hypothesis (and in the case of the one panel interviewees, Noreena Herz, a dogmatic assertion) that was left without explanation, let alone substantiation. The link between money and power was once obvious. It was depicted in the political caricatures of James Gillray in the 18 th century (see, for example, the 'The Nabob Rumbled': http://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/collections/hyder/nabob.html ). The commercial giants of that era, the 'nabobs' of the East India Company, amassed huge fortunes from trade, and openly used them to buy political influence. But in the 21 st century it is much less easy to see how the ability to spend translates into power. It is no answer to say that now the process is shielded from public view. Even though people and corporations with large amounts of money do try to obtain influence, they are frequently and conspicuously unsuccessful. To this day, despite having covertly given money to MPs to press his case, Mohammed al-Fayed is not a British citizen. The billionaire Sir James Goldsmith attempted to swing the political debate by founding his own Referendum Party to fight the 1997 election; it disappeared in a blizzard of lost deposits. One reason that businessman, entrepreneurs and the super-rich are thwarted is, as Ken Clarke and Bill Emmott pointed out, that wealth is now more dispersed. In the advanced industrial economies there are of course the super-rich - the equivalents of a Vanderbilt or a Ford - but there are many more of them than in the late 19 th or early 20 th centuries, and wealth is no longer predominantly dynastic. Nor is it true that power has shifted from a moneyed class to institutions. Evan Davis's report cited the Clinton administration official who declared that if reincarnated he would want 'to come back as the bond market, because then you can intimidate everybody'. But this is merely an absurdly hyperbolic way of saying the bond market will charge a premium if it perceives policy to be inflationary. Financial markets will be unable to 'intimidate' a government from carrying out its programme if the policy mix is internally consistent (as was not the case, for example, with sterling's ignominious exit from the exchange rate mechanism of the European Monetary System in 1992). One interviewee in the report - a bond trader - suggested that the Governor of the Bank of England is the most powerful man in the City. This may be true in the sense that the Bank of England has the power to set interest rates (though the Governor is only one member of a nine-person Monetary Policy Committee, and commentators have lately suggested that things may not be going his way). But it is purely an operational independence to carry out a politically-determined objective. The Bank has the task of meeting an inflation target; what inflation target to set is a political decision. The final sense in which money could be said to rule was suggested by Noreena Herz, which is that business is able to pressure governments to adopt or eschew particular legislative measures. This is an entirely unconvincing claim. First, it arbitrarily assumes that 'business' is synonymous with money; secondly, it assumes that business is a homogeneous force tending to a consistent view, whereas there are many competing businesses with differing policy preferences; and thirdly, it doesn't explain how this transmission mechanism from money to power is supposed to work. The one point on which I would agree with Ms Herz is that businesses are a sectional interest (or a lobby), and that government needs to treat their representations critically. But this is true of many types of organisation: pensioners' lobby groups, pressure groups such as Greenpeace or CND, or trade unions. The consistent theme of these organisations' lobbying efforts is that government should adopt their own policy views while someone else (i.e. the taxpayer) should pick up the tab. Lobbying and lobbyists do, in my view, pose a hazard to democratic government, but this has nothing specifically to do with the corporate sector and still less anything to do with an abstraction called 'money'. If you doubt this, consider Prime Ministers' uncomfortable experiences with entrepreneurs. Richard Branson was scarcely dignified by becoming the public face of Mrs Thatcher's campaign against litter. Bernie Ecclestone's donation to New Labour was returned when suspicions were raised that it reflected political favours to do with exemptions from a ban on tobacco advertising (and the issue caused acute political embarrassment for Tony Blair). Britain is a long way from being a plutocracy. It does not even merit the much weaker description of a political system dominated by corporate interests. 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