IT was put to Rupert Murdoch, at the Leveson Inquiry yesterday, that Thatcher could not have done without him and that he could not have done without Thatcher.
Murdoch would not agree, but to everybody who was listening to the exchange, their recognition of the aptness of this description of this relationship would have been immediate.
It was also put to Murdoch that in 1981, one year before the Malvinas war, he had dinner with Thatcher at Chequers, where he wanted to show her that he had the will to take on the trade unions to further his bid, at that time, for the Times newspapers.
He replied: ‘I did not have the will to crush the unions in 1981. I might have had the desire, but that took several years.’
Murdoch did take over the Times newspapers and then worked hand in glove with Thatcher to win support for the Malvinas war, cementing her relationship with the military. He continued to back Thatcher’s year-long war with the miners to the hilt, and then received a pay-back in kind, when Thatcher and the Met police provided the muscle to fight his year-long war, in 1986-87 to smash the Fleet Street printing unions, so as to produce scab newspapers.
This was how the Murdoch, Thatcher, Tory Party alliance was established.
‘It was the Sun that won it’ was the banner headline after John major won the 1992 general election.
After 18 years of Thatcher and Major, with Tory rule coming to an end, the Murdoch empire with all of its connections with the state, moved to support Brown-Blair backing their wars in Bosnia, Kosovo, the attack on Yugoslavia and the assault on Iraq in 2003.
After Blair quit, and a return of the Tories loomed, Murdoch switched his support to Cameron.
It was a seamless operation, despite the emergence of the capitalist crisis and the hacking scandal. The ex-News of the World editor Coulson, who presided over hacking, took over the job of Downing Street media chief, and was defended to the very end by Cameron.
The met police media office and the News International press team became interchangeable, and the police decided there was no need to carry the hacking investigation forward.
Police chiefs however were forced to resign, finding their true home, as did ‘Yates of the Yard’ now happily pledging to authorise the use of live rounds against pro-democracy demonstrators in Bahrain.
Cameron was forced to sack Coulson.
Now he is fighting a desperate action to protect his Culture Secretary, Hunt, who functioned as a cheerleader for the Murdoch bid to take over BskyB, after the anti-Murdoch LibDem Cable was shunted out of the way.
Hunt has thrown his media adviser overboard. The PM is determined to keep Hunt in his job for the simple reason that if Hunt goes, Cameron who has had countless meetings with the Murdoch family will go next. His government is now fighting for its life.
The source of this political crisis is the deepening economic crisis of the capitalist system, and the savage cuts policy that the government has adopted.
This crisis has completely undermined the government and created the conditions where people are able to see that its alliance with the Murdoch empire is part of its drive against the working class.
Cameron fears for his government, the bankers fear for their system, while the working class fears that if this system is allowed to remain in existence, it and its children and their children will be ruined.
Workers are becoming more and more angry with capitalism. In the period ahead they will be driven to overthrow it with socialist revolutions. Now is the time to build the revolutionary leadership of the WRP to make sure these revolutions succeed.