LABOUR leader Miliband, true to form, has spoken up for new media ownership rules to limit Rupert Murdoch’s ‘dangerous’ and ‘unhealthy’ concentration of power.
He is not for ending that power, only for creating the conditions where that power can continue to be exercised on behalf of the ruling class against the working class.
With Cameron, the Prime Minister, seriously damaged by the fact that he was politically joined at the hip to Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks, and proud of it, the ruling class seems to be contemplating passing the baton to the ultra-reformist Labour politician Miliband, who was being depicted just a few weeks ago as being a clown.
The discussion is on replacing the Tory-LibDem coalition with a Labour-led coalition, or even a national government of all of the willing parties, depending on how rapidly the world capitalist crisis develops.
Soldiering on with Cameron is no longer seen as a workable option. Neither is replacing him with the even more enthusiastic pro-Murdoch, Osborne, while replacing Cameron with one of the Thatcherite old guard is out of the question, since Kenneth Clarke has already made a jackass of himself, in this government, on more than one occasion.
So right on cue, Clegg, the LibDem Deputy Prime Minister, has come forward to agree with Miliband that new rules are needed to have more press diversity.
However, the issues that have arisen call for a lot more than press diversity.
So far it has emerged that PM Cameron was being run from News International whose political agenda he was 100 per cent in support of.
The organisation did not limit itself to fraternising with Cameron, it also paid policemen, and wined and dined policemen who were investigating it, who then found that there was no basis for continuing investigating. The Met police chief Sir John Stephenson even employed its discredited ex-editor, Wallis, at a cost of £1,000 a day, and then enjoyed free hospitality worth thousands of pounds at a treatment home with which Wallis was connected.
However, Murdoch has had a long connection with the UK ruling class of which he has become an intrinsic part, and the Tory Party.
He was the Tory hero when he supported Thatcher 100 per cent during the year-long miners strike.
He was the hero of the entire ruling class when he took on and smashed the Feet Street print unions.
From that time, he was reckoned to be a permanently necessary force for capitalism in the UK, always available for the war against workers and trade unions.
Ever since 1984 Murdoch has been unable to do anything wrong, until now. He was wooed just as assiduously by Labour as well as the Tories, since Blair-Brown and the Tories differed only marginally.
How is it that, as the bourgeois media has observed, Murdoch was able to treat the UK like a banana republic, with everything having a price, and integrity being fools gold.
The reason is that it has become a banana republic. it has lost its empire. It has been deindustrialised thanks to Thatcher, and it worships the banks, the get rich quick swindlers. The speculators, and the financial spivs, are now its role models.
In this sea of spivery everyone has his or her price, and the only bourgeois principle is to have none.
The essential issue in the UK is not a futile attempt to make the powerful less powerful, but to get rid of this corrupt and degenerate capitalist society with a socialist revolution. This will smash its corrupt capitalists, bankers and state apparatus and replace its parasitic bourgeoisie with a socialist planned economy.
This will break up the bourgeois media and hand it over to community, specialist, youth and workers groups as part of the new society where the rule will be ‘from each according to his or her ability, to each according to their needs’.
This is the future to be won in the period ahead.
