THE crisis of the capitalist state is rapidly deepening after the just-appointed ex-Director General of the BBC, George Entwistle, was publicly put to the sword by interrogator John Humphrys. This was done on the Today programme, last Saturday morning, when he was made fully responsible for the latest episode of the Jimmy Savile-child abuse scandals, and given little option but to quit.
Newsnight, in early 2012, scrapped a planned ‘exposure’ of Savile’s alleged paedophilia, because it clashed with the memorial programme to him that the BBC planned to put on, and did put on. At the start of this year, Savile was still the nation’s ‘hero’.
Fire was concentrated on Newsnight and the BBC, especially by the Tory Party, once the issue of Savile’s alleged paedophilia was made public.
Newsnight then came back to the fray a fortnight ago by alleging that a senior Conservative Party leader had been involved in the abuse of children at the Bryn Estyn care home in Wrexham during the Thatcher era. The allegation has been denied and now legal actions are threatened, along with a reconstruction of the BBC.
The former Director General, Sir Christopher Bland, has commented: ‘The BBC is like a small country where there has just been regime change.’
That regime change to make the BBC a much more controlled mouthpeice for the government and ruling class, is now to be driven on.
In fact, the whole of the British capitalist state is now in a desperate crisis, the root of which is the economic catastrophe that has underlined that the UK is no longer a major capitalist power.
As this situation began to emerge at the end of the 1970s, we saw how the Thatcher government modified the form of rule, making an alliance with the Murdoch media empire, in order to try to smash the trade unions.
Labour, in 1997 took over this alliance. However by 2010, after it handed over the baton to Cameron, the crisis of this regime came to the fore with the phone hacking scandal; the fact that Cameron hired as his press supremo Coulson, the former News of the World editor; was colluding with Rebekah Brooks, Murdoch’s commander in chief in the UK; was allowing News International people to man the Police media department, and then employing retired police commanders, and was looking kindly on Murdoch’s plan to cut the BBC down to size and privatise it.
This alliance of the government, the Murdoch empire and the police has now broken up, and the state is in disarray.
It is this that has allowed the Jimmy Savile saga to be made public. He was the ruling class’s own Pied Piper providing entertainments and diversions of all kinds. He was rewarded for all of his services – in fact he was showered with awards.
He was given the Order of the British Empire in 1971, knighted by the Queen in 1990, the same year this active and devoted Roman Catholic was made a Knight Commander of St Gregory the Great by the Pope.
These honours are not distributed without the recipients being vetted and double vetted before they are awarded. He led a charmed life as Britain’s Rasputin. He was untouchable.
Now, with all of this crap hitting the fan, at the same time as the working class is fighting the austerity programmes, the ruling class has grasped that it is losing its grip over society, and can be removed. Its response is to seek to impose an even bigger police state – the problem is that the state itself is in disarray and rotting to the core.
Police chiefs agitate against the election of police commissioners to rule over them and condemn the Home Secretary. The army is being reduced to a shadow, and is to make a humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan, while the navy has no aircraft carriers, and the RAF much fewer aircraft – all three condemn the government.
The idea that the recommendations of the Leveson Inquiry can get the government and British capitalism out of the mess of its historical crisis is a joke.
Its days are numbered. It must be removed by a socialist revolution and replaced by a planned socialist economy.
