Ethics and Slavery

Ethics: defined as a system of moral principles and not that different to ‘morality’ which is, in essence, ‘appropriate conduct.’  It is talked at us by self-righteous moralists to berate as opposed to educate, and given to us as an instruction rather than as a choice. This is fascism mixed with a dollop of McCarthyism just for good measure and just in case we think too much.

The world is divided into the West and the rest. Saudi Arabia abolished slavery in 1962 but it needed further legislation in 1990 to reinforce the original law and the reality is that slavery remains celebrated in Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Arab world.  No one should believe, almost 1,400 years after the death of the founder of the Islamic faith that this is a religion of universal peace, justice and mercy; 1,400 years after the death of Muhammad, slavery exists and its greatest supporters remain the Islamic, Arab world.

And the West keeps silent because the West / Rest dichotomy renders the slavery issue an inconvenient distraction and in any case if the focus is turned on them they can always blame it on the Jews or the Zionists.  We engage in dialogue with Islamic fundamentalists whose faith demands we return to inferior status, to a position little better than slavery and to institutionalised, contractually ‘bound’ (dhimmi) inferiority with our rights not even guaranteed if we return to medieval subservience.  And then we have British institutions such as the NUS (national union of students) decreeing that Jews, uniquely, have no rights to self-determination.

In 2007 Slavery was abolished for the fifth (?) time in the Islamic republic of Mauritania (up to 20% of the population are believed to be slaves).

Slavery is subjugation and exploitation and so is prostitution, child labour and female inequality; in Islam it is personified by the burqa covering the female body from head to foot to conceal the shame of their sex. All of these elements are culturally self-inflicted and justified by the benefit of a theologically mandated psychosis which outwardly perceives human beings as being created for the purpose of serving a genocidal God superior to all others (Allah).

In the West we say little or nothing because we fear the accusation of ethnic particularism. France outlawed the veil (niqab) and the burka while we in Britain proudly boast that our freedom is greater than theirs, when in fact it is no more than intellectual cowardice that we celebrate. The undercurrent of violence we too, celebrate.  The ethical should be universal which is why we no longer rejoice in torture as a means of punishing the offender in society.  But we have a moral blindness when it comes to Islam.

Hegel’s idea of morality was the state based on public morality. But if the state is informed by society then who leads in formulating this standard?  During the Inquisition it was the clergy; in Arab society the Imam is often the most racist of the pack of human hyena, using their religious literary patrimony to espouse every evil known to society. A defective psyche does not sadly, preclude flamboyance or charisma. Hatred and violence are intoxicating emotions that are not so difficult to harness; ambition and greed make the rhetoric of demonisation a cheap substitute for compassion, and far more seductive. The language of violence creates its own momentum. The veneer of civilised discourse can easily be erased or with a specific target, create a false narrative. Piety is no guarantee of sobriety. Power is conditional respect which in reality, is not respect but leveraged fear.

To radicalize the youth, create dissent, demand sedition or separation (apartheid), to intimidate secular society through the riots and then bring in the radicals to placate those same rioters, is clever.  It is also what fascism used to bring about the overthrow of the nascent democracy in Russian in 1917 and in Germany in 1933. The emerging mainstream Islamist groups in the so called ‘Arab Spring’ seek ‘respectability’ then power. They censor debate as they did in Iran then they ride to power with the support of their dupes. In Iran it was the Mujahedin (Left wing) and the Tudeh (Communist) alliance.  Here it is the committed Left and their liberal allies. Like Nazism they use a combination of populism and the threat of violence. The Salafi movement of puritanical Islamic zealots are often seen to be synonymous with Wahhabi Islam – the ultra orthodox faction that has ruled Saudi Arabia for two centuries. It is they that are blamed for the murder of Copts and the burning of churches in Egypt. But they are no different to any of the Islamic fundamentalists from Djakarta to Karachi and from Amman to Teheran in their extreme intolerance of difference and their hatred for democracy.  If they account for 5% of the voting public in Egypt, it is best we remember that 10% is regarded as ‘critical mass’ for any movement that wishes to become a serious contender for political power.

In the Babylonian Talmud there is an expression: “The ‘tripartite tongue’ slayeth three parties: It slayeth the speaker, and he that heareth what is said, as well as he that is being spoken about” (Arakhin 15b) - my apologies I cannot find from where I read this. In fact the violence of language has ruled men’s hearts for all of our thinking history and while it is true that it poisons the ‘soul’ it’s impact is usually intended to be much more localised. It is only the person of whom the slander is spoken that damage is intended. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, “It is easier to live with the no-truth or half-truth, but it is tedious to live with the whole truth.”  Can there be Peace with Islam while their world knows only propaganda, lies and demi-lies?

Our ongoing sanitization of the Arab world is not morally justified nor may we hope for securing a stable future if we acquiesce to it. It is an ethical failure that afflicts all our Societies and it is an issue that will need to be ventilated if we are to survive.  The problem is that in so doing we expose the bankruptcy of Muslim regimes not just in the Arab world but across the globe.

I would suggest it is this ethical betrayal that is at the heart of our inexplicable and wretched obsession with Israel and global ambivalence to Jewish self-rule.

Ethnocentricity and the BBC

Ethnocentricity is a word I first heard in The States in the early 1980’s. It means the tendency to view other cultures through a narrow majority perspective. This was usually accompanied by a sincerely felt shame that our hero or heroine expressed for an insufficient display of obeisance or humility before the cultural attributes or behaviours of the minority.  Inevitably it led to demands for the provision of superior rights to the minority as indicative of sincerity by the majority. Examples of this abound at the BBC. Rageh Omaar’s four-part biopic of the Life of Mohammed asked only two serious questions and glossed over the consequences for human history in his reply to both of those questions. Shappi Khorsandi is a Persian Comedienne who presented a documentary on the contribution of foreign food to Britain last week. What she basically stated was that all Asian / Near-Eastern food is Islamic.  Once again the BBC gave a proponent of Muslim cultural colonialism a platform for propaganda that essentially denied the contribution of any one else to the British way of life.

Claudia Roden was interviewed selectively to support this position which is interesting because the history of British cookery writing can be reductively divided between the contribution by British Cookery writers beginning in the early 1940’s with rationing and the foreign born cookery writers who teased Britain out of its provincial culinary mind set in the 1960’s. The two writers most responsible for the latter were Madhur Jaffrey, an Indian actress and Hindu food writer who introduced the Western world to the diverse cuisines of India (and she, unlike the Muslim, Shappi, credits everyone) and similarly, the Jewish Claudia Roden, born in Egypt and best known as the author of ‘Middle Eastern’ cookbooks who again never attempted to compartmentalise cookery as the inheritance of any one people.

How interesting that the BBC could so shamelessly broadcast a solid sixty minutes of documentary propaganda which was clearly an outrageous, prejudiced attempt to define Britain’s acceptance of diverse culinary traditions as solely Islamic.  The stated conclusion was that the weakening of ethnocentricity in Britain is part of the Muslim inheritance that defines its universal contribution to society.

This programme was no less than cultural rape.

The BBC should be ashamed, but it won’t be. I am sure it is patting itself on the back for yet one more obsequious and toadying biopic of historical revisionism.

Capitalism, Socialism & Norway

Any form of extremism is wrong because it creates a state of expectation that can only be realised at someone else’s expense. Extreme atheism on the one side and extreme religion on the other compel the believer to deny the legitimate aspirations of the non-believer. They share a common dysfunction of intolerance.

As pure philosophies, Capitalism and Socialism are the two sides of the same coin; without compassion or respect for the society without which they would not exist.  Capitalism celebrates individual achievement at the expense of the collective; socialism celebrates the collective at the expense of the individual. Both deny us our humanity as they pursue their ends. Capitalism and socialism are self-justifying.  They are reliant on conspiracy and adversity to flourish; both have annihilated the other in the pursuit of power.  They fail to recognise that morality is the public expression of a personal if imperfect belief.

When I look at the collective I see a vision of the master race without a fixed point on the compass – neither left nor right. The masses as automatons, religious & secular fundamentalists wedded to a cause without thought and devoid of empathy.  And as clarity is their greatest strength, it is a paradox that it is also their greatest weakness because they cannot envision compromise.  If society cannot function efficiently without consensus, conflict ultimately debilitates society.

We have prostituted secular culture to the false deity of self abnegation, the indifference to complexity mistaken for diversity but which has created a spiritually impoverished society desperate for the tangible as if a mixture of material delights and sensory experiences negates the need to confront the ethical contradictions in our society. This destitution of the spirit is a product of modern societies desperate for stimulation and possession. The demand for instant gratification and acknowledgement of self worth has left us impatient, dissatisfied and frightened. Instead of creative dissonance we have chaos and fear. 

A return to less complicated simpler times is no more than an illusion for most people because those simpler times, if they did ever exist were times of terror and poverty, without hope and too often with even less purpose. Humanity has lived through centuries of extremism and we have hundreds of millions of human corpses to testify to our failure of compassionate insight.

The capitalist who demands ever greater returns on investment, inbuilt obsolescence that artificially inflates demand and creates privation; the socialist celebrating the social parasite and excusing evil, selectively, to salve his conscience for his intellectual indigence. The Norwegian model with its intellectual Quislings and its celebration of mediocrity is fuelled by hate to keep boredom at bay. The particularity of the individual expressed within the collective is masked as universal values; its facile universalism concealing a particular prejudice.  Without its wealth the Scandinavian nation would be exposed in all of its hypocrisy.

What do I want? Full employment and work for all those who want it. We could begin with a simplified education system that takes the educationally unsuited out of the school yard and into apprenticeship from the start of the teenage years.  A designated non taxable category of industrial non-competitive advantage which recognises that not everyone can be an office worker or an engineer, a scientist or a doctor but that everyone has the right to work even if the same job can be done at a fifth of the cost in a distant country.   Efficiency is not at issue. But in seeking to drive down costs we have sacrificed the labour force to fear and despair; greed and inhumanity.

The social contract, or a version of it states simply that no one is left behind; the state protects the vulnerable and provides an opportunity to everyone seeking it.   The consideration for this contract is that we agree to abide by the rules that govern society. We accept obligations that protect both ourselves and others.  We renounce a degree of freedom for the common good.  The social contract is disintegrating because it is ill-defined and lop sided.   The assumption that responsibility is defined by legality rather than morality has left society without a vision of itself. When a child has money to buy £70 - £100 Nike's but no money for the books he or she needs for his or her education they are simply aping the most visible attributes of our celebrity society.  The solution is to lower our expectations from top to bottom. And that means a return to a more civil society, a more reliable and less materialistic one where we equally respect each others differences and renounce the language of superiority and hate; where expectation is the mother of invention and not the father of fear.

Civil Disorder in England

The riots that tore through England burning down whole blocks of buildings, threatening the lives of its occupants and murdering innocent bystanders came as a shock to social commentators and the chattering classes alike.  Criminal gangs exploited this violence for their own ends – a brilliant move by them.  Why were we surprised?

At the end of the World War II people talked of a new beginning where wealth would cease to be an important predicator of social mobility.  Class would stop positioning people in stratified layers that defined them.  But in the last half century the opposite has been the case.  Income inequality has worsened. The traditional measure of income inequality in society is called the Gini Coefficient (after Corrado Gini, an Italian Statistician who invented the measure in 1912).  While success is the measure of ambition and translates into reward, the theory does not take into account the widening disparity between separate groups based on sex, education, race and other criteria relating to society.  The gap between rich and poor has continued to expand as the lingering perception of what is possible has simultaneously, in our materialistic society, psychically expanded as it has physically receded.

A liberal will see the merits of income equality but put freedom first. But the ultimate test of a person’s personal morality is their pursuit of life’s goals without violating the freedom of others.  A meritocracy without equal opportunity is not a meritocracy but the continuance of Class advantage. Former World Bank chief economist Joseph Stiglitz noted that “markets do not lead to efficient outcomes, let alone outcomes that comport with social justice” but like all things it is because markets are of human design they take on the greed or altruism of the society in which they operate.  And Social Democracy has become inseparable from materialism and the Markets.

Competition can be rationalised and socially engineered to the point of delusion.  Competition without control and ethical guidelines is subject to a free market of ideas that can lead to totalitarianism.  No market can be truly free because absolute freedom becomes the antithesis of respect.

It would be a neat generalisation to condemn News Corp for the climate of aggressive individuality that created the News of the World scandal. The outraged cries for justice fuelled by a lynch mob mentality neatly disguised the partisan commercial considerations that accompanied the toppling of the news print behemoth.  Realistically News Corp is the fall guy that ultimately facilitated a bloodless coup by the BBC.  It allows global and hegemonic conglomerates such as the BBC to exercise control over news and entertainment. I find this even more frightening than mercantile exploitation by Rupert Murdoch’s capitalist empire. The BBC has the political ‘faith’ and unrestricted global power without even the limitations of commerce to restrain it. It is hardwired into the British establishment, into her government, her Foreign office and into the system of Royal patronage.  It is the propaganda arm of the British Treasury.

As I wrote in an earlier blog (“News of the World - a Peculiarly British Conspiracy”): “An unregulated press has dominated our lives and informed our intelligence since the dawn of the electronic age.  The internet and mobile phones have made the dissemination of information ubiquitous as it has prostituted knowledge to fashion and convenience, gratuitously bestowing sanitised nonsense on the believer.”   After the civil disorder in England much has been spoken about respect.  Respect is an idea, not just a word. Our respect is conditional on what we may gain from it.  And because immediacy of gratification is an affliction of our age we have little or no time for respecting that which does not bring an obvious or instant return.

The principle that legitimised intrusion into the private lives of individuals remains wholly supported across the media which in the electronic age has failed to address the issue of responsibility as it has enjoyed unprecedented power to influence society. The ends justifying the means precludes respecting the Individual and the Group.

There are those now arguing for national service as a sop to solving Britain’s social problems.  But in societies that need it, it is argued that the Army can never replace the social worker and those that committed much of the violence are likely to be excluded from national service.  So this is not the answer.

Respect is a contract that defines us at every level of our society but we as a society do not appreciate that it is intrinsic to every thing we do as individuals and as a group.  John McEnroe screaming at the umpire or the UK Guardian Newspaper columnist on a recent TV program constantly interrupting the other speakers are both of them equally guilty in instructing our bad behaviour.  The corrupt politician and the rap artist swearing are both delivering the same message that what is acceptable is defined by the individual and not by rules of behaviour; not by what society calls ‘ethics’.

Calling for a national commission of enquiry is also without purpose because it will be political and therefore unable to look at what society is, let alone what ails it.  Brutality has always been a hallmark of human society, it is not imagination or more money that we need. Until we recognise that it is society that is at fault at every level, we cannot expect respect to be a solution. Perhaps then, we are returning to darker times where respect is fear and control is the Establishment pulling our strings as perhaps it always has.

The USA & China

"If the USA, Europe and other advanced economies fail to shoulder their responsibility and continue their incessant messing around over selfish interests, this will impede stable development of the global economy," the People's Daily, the official Communist party newspaper, warned in a commentary.  This was reported in The Guardian Newspaper today, the 9th of August 2011.

Triumphalism is perhaps the greatest impediment to any nation’s vigor and it is not restricted to superpower states which just fail with greater consequences for the world order. China should lecture the USA less in case its calls for greater responsibility are heeded.

Historically China has been better at exploiting the West than the West has been at exploiting China.  The Opium Wars of the 19th Century were an early attempt at regaining the financial initiative from China.

Unlike China, America does not need greater domestic spending. However the USA does have some 200 foreign bases that it pays for – some, like the Philippines, cost billions of dollars every year to maintain them and even more billions of dollars in rent that is paid into The Philippines government coffers.  It is the calculation that Israel’s critics never fail to forget to make when criticizing the State of Israel for the aid as opposed to the loans that it receives but must spend in the USA.

If the USA withdrew from some of its foreign bases the benefit to its economy would be not insignificant while the commensurate loss to many of those nations would be potentially catastrophic for their local economies.  China has the current cash reserves to step in and the Arab world may exploit its oil revenues for interference but superpower commitment has its price and it is rarely in virtue paid and even more rarely in gratitude repaid.

The USA could begin by encouraging investment in its own economy and not just in infrastructure but crucially in jobs. Every job gained will be a job that China will almost certainly lose and that $3.2 trillion dollars worth of foreign reserves China currently holds may finally begin to be depleted.

The solution is simple. Bring the jobs home and eliminate the tax on companies that do this.  The saving in unemployment benefits alone will more than make up for the loss of taxation income to the government and the social benefit will be qualitatively measurable.

America must look inward to salvation not just ethically but economically. The era of massive profits and obscene wages have fueled false hopes and illogical expectations for almost perpetual growth. Fiscal responsibility in government means managing the public and that in turn means the perception within society at the top has to change. Modesty does not mean that we cannot strive or seek to excel above all others. But while a caring society cannot justify the pain it causes to others the demonstration of this care begins, like charity, at home.

Ego Empathy and Individuality

Without the twentieth century movement towards individualism the women’s liberation movement would have stalled at the first barrier. It freed the feminine ego to contemplate limitless possibilities for self-fulfilment.  And it encouraged the other sex to exert a similarly assertive response to the multiple layers of authority that had discouraged public expressions of self-assertion in the pre-‘post modern’ era. Society has admired individual exemplars but even today, it despises, because it fears, the individual as a concept, that is to say, someone who stands apart from the group.

All individualism is, to an extent, a renunciation of the community because it asserts the pre-eminence of the individual over the community.  One may argue that altruism exists to bind individuals as a community but in as much as altruism fulfils a need within the self can it truly exist separately from the ego?  And if all things spring from the ego, how can individuality and altruism co-exist as anything but a transient connection?

A society with its adult males pursuing a course of individual attainment may have survived because only a few individuals ever distanced themselves from the group but they nearly always remained within the community. However a society in which both sexes reject the cohesion of the group damages the community and must test its sustainability. 

Individuality and ego are entangled. Political and religious extremism are no more than the expression of an uninhibited ego. As such the difference, if it exists, between them and pornography is that the latter is usually private while the former is not.

And this leads us onto ‘respect’ because if respect is not mutual it is a deceit. And individualism at its most nihilistic is the antithesis of respect.   This is where society has failed.  Today we are all of us witness to a society that has no respect for the individual and only conditional respect for the group.  We are spectators to the debilitation of the modern community; or worse, its replacement by ethnic based communalism.

In usurping the role of the community in pursuit of the egotists’ agenda, journalism has succeeded in trivialising debate and marginalising the community.  As a profession it is complicit in returning us to medieval ignorance.

Jeremy Rifkin says that we are soft wired to experience the plight of another person as if we experienced it ourselves; that selfhood goes with empathetic development. There is a line we cross in the pursuit of individual attainment where we lose our empathy for the individual and replace it with a group consciousness.

During the American Civil War it was said that The South loved ‘Black’ people as individuals and hated them as a group while The North loved them as a group but hated them as individuals.  Perhaps the essence of being human is that we are only capable of seeing the other as an individual and that when we attain a group consciousness we immediately compartmentalise those who are not like us into neat stereotypical blocks. As a species we appear to be incapable of transcending our need for labels.  In a competitive world this is religions greatest failure because empathy, predicated on faith, is tribal. We have not evolved to the degree we assumed.  Simon Greer wrote in the Washington Post that we are at our best as a society when we put humankind and the common good first. But it is how we interpret the ‘Common good’ and ‘benefit’ that counts.   And past history teaches us that in most cases, even when we transcend our tribalism, ego trumps empathy.

How all that I have referred to previously matters is that it would be truly naive to believe even for a moment that what happened at the News of the World (NotW) was a peculiarity of News Corp.  Phone Tapping and hacking into the mobile phones of innocent people was not a single news corporations’ aberrant behaviour.  The principle that still legitimises intrusion and snooping to uncover non-conformism or illegality remains wholly supported across the media.  Ethically this is wrong.  And while it would be irrelevant to ascribe revenge against feminism as a motive for bringing Rebekah Brooks to account, the pack mentality has been very selective in targeting News Corp.  Ed Miliband demanded the break up of Saint Rupert’s media empire without any mention of the BBC or any other global hegemon.

This pack mentality legitimises disrespect for the individual as well as the group. It is the Media's legacy and has been concealed from us in any discussion of the nature of the present threat to our freedom.

News of the World – A Peculiarly British Conspiracy?

Go back five years to 2006 and we are told that the police already knew about the phone tapping and not just by a tabloid newspaper which hacked into the mobile phones of celebrities and ordinary folk alike.  We now know that 31 newspapers and 305 journalists were engaged in hacking into private phones. Or so the former Information Commissioner stated when as the scandal broke he was interviewed by the BBC. We learned that competition for the next story had become so fierce; it precipitated violence between journalists from rival newspapers.

So first let us kill a cherished fantasy. Journalism is not about press freedom, it is about fashion, propaganda and prejudice in the pursuit of uniformity and acquiescence.  And it is not a guardian of democracy but rather, its government sanctioned Rottweiler. A ‘Free Press’ to be successful has to be popular.  That should be axiomatic – gone are the days that an elite few wrote for the elite few.  Recognition is as important as truth for without it the ‘truth’ may as well be a lie.  Recognition is legitimacy.  Therefore, to be popular the media must be commercially successful. And newspapers do have massive influence on the way we think and therefore, on the way we behave. We know more about the lives of celebrities and fictitious characters from soap operas than we do about our own neighbours who may be living lives of isolation and poverty. Ethically the media has much to answer for. 

But it is we who choose to read the garbage that is out there and that includes the intellectual sophistry that does our thinking for us.  If people have no shame it is because we find it convenient to not think too much.

On Saturday the 9th of July 2011, the front cover of Britain’s right-of-centre and editorially conservative Spectator stated “They all did it” while the Left-wing Guardian Newspaper elided the obvious by screaming from its front page that Murdoch HQ had destroyed the evidence of its perfidious activities.  So is the News of the World a peculiarly British conspiracy?

An unregulated press has dominated our lives and informed our intelligence since the dawn of the electronic age.  The Internet and mobile phones have made the dissemination of information ubiquitous as it has prostituted knowledge to fashion and convenience, gratuitously bestowing sanitised nonsense on the believer.

We knew that our lives were an open book but for as long as it was our idols whose follies were being publicly exposed, the extensive phone tapping and hacking of mobile phones did not touch on our sensitive psyches. As if we were immune to its corruption. The BBC prognosis is that we are frightened of monopolistic power, that the concentration of too much power in a single news corporation is unwise and undemocratic.  But the BBC is a global powerhouse; it has monopolistic power and almost unlimited resources.  Its recently appointed Chairman, (Baron) Chris Patten is a noted Arabist as well as a former chairman of both the Conservative Party and Medical Aid for Palestine. Of course the response that the BBC is regulated is farcical. The BBC is its own policeman and slavishly follows British Foreign Office policy both in patriotic spirit as well as in its prejudices.  It is a convenient vehicle for controlling society because it is paid with a government mandated Poll Tax; by definition it forces poverty stricken British subjects as well as Her Majesty and the other members of British Royalty to pay exactly the same licence fee. The rat infested hovel and Buckingham palace, with its Rembrandt's and its Jewel encrusted gold baubles, pay equally, for the honour of funding the largest and most wealthy publicly supported news conglomerate on the planet.

The Press Complaints Commission is of course stacked with members of the media and as such has little enthusiasm for ethics, for statutory guidelines or for principled behaviour.  Media plurality means that diversity is permitted but within limits.  McCarthyism informs British society and keeps debate within prescribed limits of acceptability.   A belief that Press self-regulation is workable is not so naive as it is convenient.  Ed Miliband, leader of the Opposition Labour Party, asked what happened to morality in parts of the newspaper industry? But it was Television that gave us Big Brother and it was Television that set itself up as moral arbiter of British as well as Global Society. British television justifies British prejudices rather than dispassionately reporting events.

And while the BBC participated in this populist dance on the grave of what is described as a British institution (the News of the World that is) the reality is that instead of admitting we are all responsible for the situation that permitted the press to be above the law it actively participated in holding the old man down so that he drowned all the more quickly.

People are incentivised by cash. It used to be glory, except that glory does not pay bills.  The BBC’s unlimited access to cash facilitated the debasement of the industry and its sensationalisation of Sports Reporting created this monster by educating both player and spectator as to what could be gained by notoriety and misbehaviour.

The timing of the allegations cannot be coincidental. The final stages of Rupert Murdoch’s acquisition of BSkyB were just a few weeks away.

Control of BSkyB was the jewel in the crown that Murdoch planned for his media empire. He should be satisfied that his empire, at least in the UK, has been rejected but that he still, at least for now, lives. The last foreigner to attempt to hold onto a British newspaper was Conrad Black and he now sits in jail while the media mogul before him was murdered, allegedly by Arab Agents trained by MI6.  One could argue that Murdoch’s assumed demise marks the end of the era of the media mogul, the media autocracy replaced by the electronic media.  But who controls iPlayer in the UK? The BBC of course. The paper based Press is gradually being replaced by its internet partners.  The global names and the minor titles are to be found on the internet; that they are now moving onto a model of paid internet subscriptions is inevitable.  The internet era will eventually make the printed (news) media redundant.

I-Player permits an Orwellian future to be more tightly supervised by our political masters and their acolyte’s in the so called ‘Quality Press’. What scares me most is not the gutter press and its diet of boobs and sport, titillating gossip and frivolous inanity but the purpose driven ‘Quality Press’ with its middle class morality and stereotyped (and therefore acceptable) prejudices, its agenda driven proprietors carefully compliant and subtly sycophantic.

The crucifixion of Saint Rupert of Murdoch is a lesson for those who want to invest in British industry. That they were all of them “doing it” was unimportant.  History has demonstrated that it was who they were that counted.