Hackgate: the press wagons form a circle

A funny thing happened on the way from the Forum

When is a Crusader a censor?

 

Some interesting research from the Poll of Polls website on Sunday pointed to the fact that the phone-hacking scandal has really taken root in the public consciousness.

85% of Britons think widespread illegality has taken place, and 60% think that ‘this an important issue the police should spend time investigating’. That may not sound like hysteria, but it’s as worked up as Brits get about anything these days. (It is, for example, far more people than want action about the EU mess).

The media are also fairly sure-footed about this sort of thing. After a slow start, the revelations about who’s been hacked and why have become daily events – today’s new wannabe sympathy recipient being Bob Crowe, although I’m not sure there are that many people feeling sorry for him.

So it struck me as a bit odd that, having posted an interesting story about how the Mailmen who flooded over to the Telegraph last year had probably been at it too, thirty-six hours later the piece has had just 23 referrals from the Telegraph. And guess what? My comment threads relating to that particular story have all been taken down from the forums concerned.

Now this didn’t happen when I first posted about Cameron’s stupidity in hiring Coulson last September. It didn’t happen when I said Coulson was a liability in December, and that the illegal activity was endemic within Newscorp during January.

“What did you expect?” so many will say. And the truth is, I don’t know. But I now feel sure that the piece got home inside the Temple of Barclays. The incoming links and odd addresses crawling all over the site yesterday suggest that – and the subsequent censorship confirms it.

This is a scandal so huge,  widespread and up there at the top, everyone who writes about it can expect the standard lies, line by line in the sand retreats, grubby attempts to shut us up, and smears about everything from political views to mental health. It’s no consolation that New Labour during the Brownonpills saga and Ed Balls during the Secret Courts marathon were every bit as bad.

And this is the worrying part. Because the political and police Establishment will now try and reshape Hackgate as symptoms of a press pack out of control. They’ll be right, of course: but the signs are that they have colluded in this business. And I never trust any governmental class looking for an excuse to bash the media.

For The Slog, the issue remains exactly the same as it’s always been. This country is riddled with unwarranted privilege at all levels of society, in all walks of life, and in all areas of government. Islamists, bankers, civil servants, footballers, senior policemen, judges and media moguls….it makes no difference who or where: they wield more gratuitous power than they should, and it is the job of citizens everywhere to cut them back down to size.

What ties the News of the World and Daily Telegraph case histories together is the existence behind them of unscrupulous men who believe they have the right, without being UK taxpaying residents, to decide – entirely unelected – who we should elect, and what those elected representatives should do.

Equality before the law, freedom of speech and thought, empiricism and self-control are the sworn enemies of controlling Stateists, power-freaks in the media, illiberal polemicists, religious fanatics, bad science and ambitious policemen. It has always been like this, and it always will be.

Footnote: Last night, Financial Times editor Lionel Barber used the Hugh Cudlipp Memorial Lecture to criticise the way Telegraph journalists taped Vince Cable, and the News of the World hacked into VIP phones.

Related: The cesspool in which Cameron fishes

 

 

 

 

BBC bias may be a worry, but Newscorp dominance would be a cultural disaster

Political neutrality in television is too easily lost

Our media are a long way from perfect. The slavish devotion to sales, the persistent dumbing down, the glorification of celebrity….and that’s just the FT. But the very imperfection means we need to keep in mind what the alternatives are to current examples of media behaviour….like, for example, the BBC.

Many fingers are poised above keys on seeing those last five words. But I urge you to weigh the evidence and think about it.

Yesterday (Saturday) I listened to The News Quiz on Radio Four at midday. I like TNQ, it can be very funny – and Sandi Toksvig has one of the fastest comedic minds in Britain. But from start to finish, this edition of the programme was a nonstop political broadcast on behalf of the Right-On Party. Sometimes it was laugh-out-loud funny – but only when it forgot it was a PPB on behalf of the ROP. And like all dated, narrow satire, there was nothing positive on offer: it was all ‘get the Tories and hate the LibDems’. Not a single gag was devoted to the clowns who had helped create the mess in the first place

However, it only lasted thirty minutes. Whereas the hour before it had Kate Adie fronting From our Correspondent, a programme you simply wouldn’t find anywhere other than on the BBC. Scrupulously objective and marvelously informative, the programme made me proud to be British. It unravelled complexity, interrogated propaganda, and coated the whole with wit.

What we have to ask ourselves – as we digest the truly unpleasant practices to which Newscorp in all its forms is clearly addicted – is whether the Murdoch philosophy of television could ever live up to the standards set by the BBC. I know the Friedmanite wing of the Tory Party and the Young Right of the Daily Telegraph lack the intellectual discernment to consider this, but for the rest of us it is a valid question and an important consideration.

The Lord Reith approach insisted that the BBC was there to inform, educate and entertain. The idea that News International exists for any other reason beyond the empowerment of its family ownership dynasty is laughable. (Even Newscorp shareholders would be among the first to observe that they are a long way down the food chain from the Murdoch family).

Much as we all dislike the casually fluffy-liberal nature of so many BBC programmes, can anyone seriously imagine Fox News or Sky coming out with Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse? Morecambe and Wise? The BBC gave us Match of the Day: Sky gave us Andy Gray the sexist yob. Would any Murdoch television Channel tolerate Jeremy Paxman?

But if this doesn’t convince you, why not allow me to ask the question the other way round: could you imagine the BBC – or even ITV at its worst – promoting a bigot like Glenn Beck?

British readers probably don’t know who on earth Glenn Beck is, in which case the only observation I can make is “lucky you”. Beck is the resident far-Right nasty headcase ranter on the Newscorp-owned Fox News in the US. His spot is called The Glenn Beck Program, a title that puts me in mind of a boot-camp sentence handed down by a particularly sadistic judge.

I understand that Glenn is a great personal favourite of Rupert Murdoch, who never misses his show. This isn’t altogether surprising, as the Beck view of life is perilously close to Roop’s.

Above all, before allowing our suspicion of the BBC to let the Barbarians into Rome, we need to try and imagine the circumstances in which an arm of the Corporation would ever collude with the police and Government Ministers to spy on its viewers….or fire an employee in revenge for attempting to bring wrongdoing to justice.

There are antediluvian elements within the Conservative Party who would just love to stick it to the BBC. What we need to remember is that equally braindead tendencies in the Labour Party would do exactly the same given half a chance. Even if Mark ‘armbiter’ Thompson is a complete prat, he is a relatively harmless Birtist: it wouldn’t be that hard to get rid of him.

By contrast, it’s now 43 years since Rupert Murdoch wormed his way into our culture, and began the process of reducing media output to the lowest level of vulgarity – while using his control of public opinion to make and break successive Prime Ministers. Kicking him and his corrupting style out of Britain may no longer be possible without bringing down the Government at a critical time.

That is an inordinately high price to pay – and, with the benefit of hindsight, a needless expense. Many were the voices in 1968 who predicted exactly what the chippy Murdoch would do to The Times. Many were the observers of the man who correctly gave little or no worth to his word.

We mustn’t let this happen to the British Broadcasting Corporation. Part and parcel of removing the monetary element from our politics should be a guarantee of complete freedom from political influence for the BBC. In turn, the obsession of British television companies with ratings brought us Eastenders, Big Brother, The X-Factor and endlessly tedious programmes about property. Whatever arguments may be vomited forth by the Friedmanite nutters, none can hold water in the face of what our television ‘choice’ has become.

If the BSkyB takeover is allowed to go ahead, it will be the end of any aspiration at all to television as an improving medium in the UK. It will mark a victory for grubby political influence, illegality in reporting, and news in the hands of big business. Along with the abandonment of Net neutrality, it will tighten the grip of globalist Establishment selfishness on our ability to see and hear unfiltered news coverage.

We mustn’t let our healthy desire to see an end to pc and the continuation of healthy competition blind us to the Murdoch alternative. The BBC may be imperfect and irritating, but a television market dominated by Newscorp would be impossibly illiberal.

 

 

 

After delusional Davos, it’s back to the real world

Bond yields will panic stock markets soon enough

The high-point of Davos unreality this last week was Tim Geithner pointing out that the US economy “is not in a boom”. He didn’t go on to say “and it’s not heading for double-dip”, because he can’t speak with quite the same certainty on that subject. As veteran Sloggers will know only too well, my view remains that there cannot be a double dip, because such recovery as there was happened thanks to taxpayers and the Treasury. And the same is true in the UK: there has only ever been a natural decline, delayed briefly by Canutist stimulators.

Judging by media posts from the world’s temporary economic brain-centre, there’s been a slightly hysterical atmosphere at Davos all week. The last time this sort of thing happened was the Berlin outburst of 1945. This took place in the Reichschancellery bunker; it involved a lot of champagne and suicide, along with much self-delusion on the subject of miracle weapons which might save the occupants from Gotterdammerung.

Outside the other-world of Davos in 2011, there are no miracle weapons: here too there is only the inexorable progess of globally financed mercantilism towards its end-game. Those with any levers left to pull know full well that they are bunkered: what they lack is the right shape of iron to lift them out of  it.

Once again I’m left writing in the tone of those sandwich men who used to walk up and down when we were kids, advertising ‘The end of the World is Nigh’. What makes it worse is that the bloke walking in between the boards can also be heard muttering, ‘and those in the know agree with me’. This combination of doom and conspiracy theory never sounds terribly credible.

But in point of fact, it’s neither. There is no doom at the inevitable end of this current cycle of species economic development – at least, not for most people. And there is no conspiracy: just the usual super-optimists trying to aquire immortality through money.

The only problem we face, as ever, is denial of the impossibility of that aim. The natural equity boom faded towards the end of 2000, and by 2004 required correction. Unfortunately, so many piglets at the trough wanted it to be The New Paradigm, Alan Greenspan was persuaded to keep lots of liquidity pouring into the US economy – and to hell with the deficit. From 2002 onwards, New Labour took the same view.

When the endlessly inflating credit boom was about to burst in 2007, the major Governments were hastily summoned (like some Monty Pythonic Bicycle Repair Man) to rub talc and elastic glue all over the bursting inner-tube….and then in the end, buy the bike. But three years further down a very bumpy road, the gears are giving up and the rider’s eun out of p0cket money.

Reading most of our ‘leading’ business journalists at the moment, you could be forgiven for thinking that the failing bike was a brand new 750 Kawasaki just waiting to be unleashed onto the growth highways of endlessly fruitful capitalism. Yesterday I listened to Money Box on Radio Four, and heard two smoothly lackadaisical soothsayers talking about ‘a recovering housing market now that the interest rates have remained the same’ and ’2011 may well be a 15% growth year for equities’. It was as though no global deficits, no Chinese overheating, no American QE2, no eurozone meltdown and no doubled UK national debt existed.

But they do, and they aren’t going away. Last week, the Portuguese bond auction was hyped into being a huge vote of confidence. In fact it was a scramble for a scarce amount of free money, so generous were the terms and get-out clauses being offered to investors. Anyone who thinks the EU or the ECB could afford too many of those needs to go back to primary school and resit 11+ maths.

The month before, we were treated to more smoke and mirrors as the UK Government hailed a growth in manufacturing – omitting to point out that the growth areas represented just 5.5% of the economy. Last Wednesday, an early release from the US Fed actually referred to US growth ‘roaring away at last’, until it was hastily withdrawn and replaced by Bernanke saying it was ‘not bad’. The truth is that the growth wasn’t in the export area, although US exports did grow….from a base that would require until roughly 2037 in order to generate a recovery.

But as I say, there won’t be doom – just an acceleration of events some time soon, and then a destitute global economy in which nobody has any money to either supply things to refine, or refine them for export, or import the finished product. Then and only then will some people (although by no means all) realise that all the confident No Alternative talk about decisive markets, big bangs, deregulation and globalised banking we’ve heard for nigh on 25 years was all lightweight bollocks floating up into a stratosphere of thin air.

When that happens, there will be a big conference somewhere, and as the debtor nations have better nuclear weapons than the creditors, debts will be written off in exchange for something dreamed up by smooth-suited spivs….and the whole rodeo will start all over again. Which government institutions, political Parties and economic theories remain intact by then remains to be seen.

In the meantime, all one can do is sit back and ponder what will set off the decisive panic. And to this end, last week I spent three riveting (but depressing) hours talking to Full Circle, a hugely successful and prescient UK-based wealth management company. They manage the meagre remainder of my wealth, and while you have to be patient with them at times, over the long term they spectacularly outperform most rivals.

One Full Circle obsession with which I agree wholeheartedly is that concerning the relationsip between US bonds and the Stock Market. If nothing else, it defines the exact area wherein there is room for jockeying by the Bernankes of this world.

This is how it works: you can’t have the Stock Market and bond yields going in the same direction. A rising stock market = confidence = not much reason for governments to need to borrow money = not much risk in buying government debt = low yields for investors in government debt. It’s safe and certain, but it’s not exciting.

Now take a stock market at peak…even though anyone with over 30% of the brain intact can discern that economic performance suggests it shouldn’t be at that peak. And take a Government so deep in debt, it needs to borrow all the time to keep the show on the road. Yields on that debt are going to rise.

Let’s now for the sake of argument say we’re talking about the US here – because let’s face it guys, we are. And then observe that right now, both the stock market and the bond yields are rising. This can’t continue for long. Not only that, dyed-in-the-wool professionals have what the market calls ‘signals’. As in, buy and sell signals in readiness for that moment when the ”two rising opposites’ thing becomes untenable.

They further have classic products and numbers that trigger these signals. In this instance, it’s the 30-Year US Bond Certificate…and the point when its yield rises to 5%.

As of now, this yield figure is kind of wobbling laterally at 4.53%. But in recent months, it has been rising steadily.

Hitting 5% will have two effects on the big movers in the US stock market. First, it will tell them that there is more to be gained in Government securities. But second, it will suggest to them that if there’s that little confidence in America’s ability to repay debt, then the Stock Market is woefully overpriced. And they’ll be right.

The Stock Market will fall – quite a big early drop – and hit the Dollar’s value. This will in theory reduce the debt and help US exports. Sadly, the market fall will in turn reduce confidence in the US….and cause debt (bond) yields to rise still further. That will inflate the Fed’s debt, because the payback becomes still more expensive. It will also cause more investors to pile into bonds.

At this point, Bernanke is screwed whatever he does. The stock market is falling and thus there is less investment money going into the recovery of US growth. If he whacks in QE3, that increases the debt and raises bond yields – and causes a further stock market fall. If he does nothing, the growth figures suck and so the market falls anyway.

Except that this isn’t quite how it happens. The element I’ve left out here is speed of panic.

Markets recognise end-game moments so quickly now, the very technology to hand accelerates the response. Effectively, if the 30-Year bond yield ups a couple of decimals at any given time (to the point where it is at or exceeds 5%) and then moves just a point or two higher still, the Dow will fall off a cliff. As will the FTSE, and every other major market in the world. Because the assumption of the Masters of the Universe will be that the crazily inflated Dow level has been found out, tested, failed, flunked – or whatever other term you wish to apply.

The FTSE level we’d be talking about in this scenario would be around 2,500*. But if credit-rating confidence in the US and UK repayment ability were to be further eroded by more poor growth figures, the debt yields would go bezerk. Neither country would be able to attract new debt bond purchases at all. They would enter that quicksand in which Greece and Ireland are already sinking, and Portugal must soon tread.

I’m a conservative investor: I try only to bet on sure things, and I’m more than happy to be out early rather than in the nick of time. I’ve been out of the Stock Market for the best part of a year, if only because the plunge I describe could’ve happened at any time – and it’s a mug’s game trying to get it dead right. Compared to some, I lost potential gains in 2010.

But I have piled into gold, and its fall by $80 I can only see as great good fortune, in that the anxieties of others allow me to buy even more of it. And when the stock markets collapse, I will use the gains made in metals to buy solid shares that have been caught up in the panic – and thus grossly undervalued. Believe me, by the close of 2012 this tortoise will be miles ahead of the hare-brained believers in rising stock markets and small downward property market corrections.

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* People I mention this figure to fall about laughing. Well, in 2005 I bet an employee at the London Stock Exchange that by the close of 2008 the FTSE would be at 3500 (It was then at 6,200). I lost the bet by just ten days.

HACKGATE: A murky Mail past the new Telegraph team wants to forget.

Why was the Information Commissioner’s 2006 Report ignored?

Telegraph editor Tony Gallagher: 58 Mail journalists used illegal surveillance services on his watch.

This morning, the Observer (and Guardian website) focus on investor nerves at the way Newscorp’s grip on the phone-hacking is loosening by the hour. The Independent on Sunday has a story strongly suggesting that emails surveyed by the Met Police last week have clearly fingered Ian Edmondson as being in on the practices taking place.

But in the Daily Telegraph, there is (as the police often say) ‘nothing to see’. No story anywhere on the main Home page refers to the scandal. Apart from one small comedic piece, there is nothing under ‘Comment’, and except for a three-day-old guest post about why Brendan O’Neill hates phone-hack complainant Tessa Jowell (don’t we all), the blogs are a Hackgate-free zone.

Last week, The Slog posted about the shadowy Barclay Brothers, their decision to hire, mob-handed, most of the Daily Mail’s former news floor….and the apparent lack of interest shown by their newly down-dumbed Daily Telegraph in the growing discomfort of Rupert Murdoch’s News International.

At the time, my main angle was the suggestion that this was no more than the
Ugly (proprietor) Sisters sticking together. But now I’m not so sure.

There’s an interesting table in the What Price Privacy report from the Privacy Commissioner in May 2006 – following the original Newscorp conviction. It records the use of private investigators of similar ilk to the ghastly Mulchaire by other UK national newspapers.In section 5.7, the ICO report observes that the services supplied to the national media

‘….included details of criminal records, registered keepers of vehicles, driving licence details, ex-directory telephone numbers, itemised telephone billing and mobile phone records, and details of ‘Friends & Family’ telephone numbers.’

Equally clear is that the information was almost always obtained with the help of corrupt policemen.

Way, way ahead at the top of this list is….well I never, The Daily Mail – with no fewer than 952 uses of these reptiles by a staggering 58 journalists.

Even the News of the World (with 228 uses by 23 journalists) lags far behind – although it is surely worth noting that 23 journalists is 22 journalists more than ‘one rogue reporter’.

Why didn’t somebody over the last five years show this ICO report to Prime Minister David Cameron? Even allowing for Dave’s legendary short attention span, it would be hard to escape the conclusion that Coulson’s defence was more waterlogged than watertight.

Anyway, the main point remains very clear to me: does it not strike one as extremely unlikely that, of the 58 Mail journalists partaking of murky electronic surveillance services, not one of them transferred with the gravy-train to the Barclay Bros Telegraph? And does this go any way at all towards explaining the Telegraph’s lack of enthusiasm for the chase re this one?

Footnote. Some more highlights from that Commissioner Table – suggesting that Fleet Street might well be in trouble from end to end. The first figure is the total number of contracts handed out to surveillance companies…the second is the number of hacks fine upstanding journalists involved:

Sunday People 802 50
Daily Mirror 681 45
Mail on Sunday 266 33
Sunday Mirror 143 25
Best Magazine 134 20
Evening Standard 130 1
The Observer 103 4

Does make you wonder who the sole mainliner was at the Standard.

Hackgate analysis: why this time the suffix may well be justified.

Big Beasts should be beaten off by the Newscorp scandal

Murdoch & Son…unwelcome influence

Adding the suffix ‘gate’ to every major scandal has been a lazy form of sub-ed practice throughout the 37 years since the Watergate scandal reached its grisly conclusion for President Nixon. However, the phone-hacking activities of the News of the World – and the attempts at containing the evidence of it – represent the first major media-political scandal since that time to justify the nickname Hackgate.

There will be cries of  ‘you would say that’, given that The Slog has been ahead of the game since early December in predicting that the cover-up would be lifted – and the resultant wriggly worms start running in all directions. But there’s a lot more force to my argument than pointless self-aggrandizement: and anyway, other journalists spent a lot longer than I did yelling in the wilderness about this alleged perversion of justice.

The reasons why this case will be different aren’t hard to enumerate. First and foremost, it is the right scandal at the right time: after Lord Ashton during the General Election, people’s awareness of the privileged and unelected power of shadowy figures has been broadened. The recent obvious control of the banking lobby over Number 10 has in turn sharpened it. And now, it is rapidly becoming clear that an unelected foreign media owner may have been, shall we suggest, manipulating events of one form or another to his own advantage. No wonder Rupert was described this morning as being ‘deeply depressed’ about this blow to his plans.

Second, there were monthly, then weekly, and now almost daily shifts of ground by the perpetrators – retreats that mirror the path of the Nixon scandal inexorably towards first the White House and then the Oval Office itself. The lone reporter stuck to by Newscorp was overshadowed by bribes Courtroom settlements during the ensuing months. Now a cabal has been ‘discovered’ at relatively low level, in turn swamped by the dismissal of one senior journalist and the suspension of another. Involvement at senior level is still being denied, but that cannot hold for long in the light of yesterday’s ‘major lead’  – very quickly picked up by the Met once the investigation had been moved away from the infected territory of former terrorist cop Andy Hayman.

This has enouraged victims to come forward in droves; and that too is feeding the third factor that makes that a real Gate rather than a passing storm in a teacup. The multivariate possible ramifications of what at first looked like just a tabloid behaving unscrupulously (what else is new?) are incalculable: today, Tessa Jowell is leaning on the Met – an altogether heavier hitter than Lord Prescott, albeit only metaphorically.

As a result of this – in the light of the BSkyB takeover and David Cameron’s extremely ill-advised clandestine mettings with top Newscorp managers – the questions are becoming more bold, and the accusations more serious. Have Ministerial phones been tapped to help the Sky takeover cause? Is the Culture Secretary also a Newscorp creature? Was Andy Gray fired in retaliation for his Newscorp phone-hacking action…and what did his colleague mean by ‘dark forces’? Did Newscorp hacking help the Conservative Party when they were in Opposition? And how could Coulson NOT have known about the News of the World hacking?

While in London carrying out more research this week, I spoke to two old beasts of Fleet Street – one a former Sunday paper editor of some note.

“A Sunday paper is more intimate than a Daily,” he told me, “and by definition there are far fewer strories on the go. For an anal retentive like Andy Coulson not to have known what was going on is and always was unbelievable.”

A former middleweight Coulson colleague put it more graphically:

“Listen, you write for Andy Coulson, he knows the colour of your f**king snot. Didn’t know? Don’t make me laugh. He could go to jail if they got something wrong – he’d be a complete f**kwit ‘not to ask’. And Coulson isn’t a f**kwit.”

Again – as with Watergate – if the Howard Hunt parallel knew, did Ehrlichman? The Ehrlichman in this romp is of course Rebekah Wade. And if she knew – a close friend of James Murdoch – surely he knew. And if they both spoke frequently to David Cameron…….?

Further, it goes without saying that once the dam has burst and the time for closing media ranks is over, the feeding frenzy starts among Murdoch rivals. The Guardian/Independent axis were always going to use this to destabilise the Government. At last, even Aidan Barclay’s Telegraph appears to have caught onto the fact that a PM it despises could be helped along in his journey over the cliff. And in New York, it will come as no surpriseto learn that the New York Times is sharpening knives in readiness for the next round.

Last but not least, there is the joy for many (including The Slog) in ending the seemingly malign influence of a hitherto-thought-to-be unassailable man. When Vince Cable announced his intention to “get Murdoch”, he was once again merely giving voice to the feelings of millions of ordinary Britons. Just before Nixon’s sweeping victory in the 1972 US Election, this was indeed how he had seemed – a political colossus, adored by big business, and with global influence on the conduct of political policy.

It is beginning to look like Rupert Murdoch will perhaps illustrate the same historical truism: at the nadir of their power, how soon are the mighty fallen.

 

For The Slog, there is an even bigger picture. My mantra from the start has been ‘it’s the culture, stupid’ – and few people (in my opinion) have done more to dumb down, vulgarise and ethically cleanse the culture of the United Kingdom.

Think for a second or two, for instance, of just how much restorative good might come from the Murdoch dynasty’s influence being entirely removed from the UK, on – say – the grounds of its owners and movers not being British, or indeed paying any tax here. (A rule, before you laugh, that has always existed in France).

The soccer Premiership’s business model would collapse. Overpaid players would become a thing of the past. Most foreign stars would leave the UK. The English game’s grassroots talent-pool would by force majeur by reinvigorated. And once more, England might actually win the World Cup.

Imagine further that – as The Slog has argued strongly for years – all monied influence on UK elections and Party funding was abolished and criminalised. Taxpayers would pick up the bill…but there would be no more Lord Ashtons, no more Unite meddling – and no more rich bankers or media owners with a potential hold over Prime Ministers.

That’s why the phone-hacking scandal derves the ‘Watergate’ soubriquet. And that’s why none of us should let it die until all the miscreants have been neutered by the sharp sword of justice.

UK bailout cost: unlucky 13 for the British taxpayer.

Ignore the bankers’ accountancy spin – they have ruined Britain

After the patronising spin of Eric Daniels (Lloyds) and Bob Diamond (Barclays) the Office for National Statistics this week gave anyone who cared to go to its site the unvarnished truth about what banking idiocy has cost the country – and it’s 13 numbers long.

£1,322,700,000,ooo

(to the nearest billion)

If you took the whole GDP of Britain, and then added another 50% on top, it would still be several billion short of the amount highlighted above. And what it shows quite conclusively is that all the Government guff about ‘making a profit on the shares’ and ‘the purchases only cost £80 billion in all’ is total bollocks. Because the assets purchases, debt liabilities and short-term cash-flow props to stop RBS, Lloyds and others sinking without trace cost over £1.3 trillion – the highest cost per taxpayer of any country in the world.

The comparisons are infinite and shocking. The bank cockup now represents 58% of the total UK national debt. It has given us by far the biggest monthly deficits and debt costs in a thousand years of history. It more than doubled the national debt in four months flat. And not one UK-based banker – absolutely nobody anywhere – is on the streets, dead or in jail as a result of it.

The Labour Government given five separate chances over that period to stick a fiduciary duty charge on those taking the taxpayer shilling failed to do it even once. That and that reason alone is why today the ungrateful recipients – these grotesquely smug clowns – show no remorse, pay themselves fat bonuses again, and once more trot out the spectacularly daft idea that they know best, and all regulation is evil.

Because of Labour naivety, Coalition cowardice and corporate financial greed, libraries and pre-schools are closing, a further 600,000 (at least) have no job, money is being removed from an already hard-pushed hospital service, police numbers are to be cut yet again, the justice system is approaching meltdown, and the UK economy has had an additional strain put upon what was already something of a non-recovery.

Before any more apologists join The Slog’s comment threads to protest that these are unwarranted charges, let me add  few more incontrovertible ONS figures. Each month now, thanks directly to the bailout costs, an average £14 billion is no longer available to spend on British citizens’ welfare. Median-level retired investors using interest-bearing accounts have lost £1.22 billion in income. Britain’s monthly debt repayment bill is on average  in excess of £20 billion. And we could yet lose our Triple A credit status as a sovereign State.

“Every year,” said a senior City gonk the week before last, “British banking puts £140 billion into the Exchequer”. Therefore, he argued, we have to go on paying very high bonuses, or else….

The ‘or else’ is a myth nailed rather well by Simon Jenkins in the Guardian on Monday. And what, pray, is £140 billion in the Exchequer if you just emptied it to the tune of £1.33 trillion?

Obscenely overpaid bank executives display a form of dependency just as sad and ruinously expensive to the country as welfare recipients described as ‘economically inactive’. The difference is, you could double the number of couch-potatoes, and the cost of keeping them would still be under 5% of what the UK financial services sector has cost us since 2008.

It is extremely difficult to forgive reckless, brainless behaviour on that scale. But to lie persistently about the scale, show no remorse about the scale, and then starting behaving in a manner likely to further increase the scale….that is unforgivable, period. And for a Government to allow it is scarcely believable favouritism.

Banker bashing? Revenge? Bollocks: punishment and justice. That’s what the overwhelming majority of citizens want. And they are not getting it.

 

What is it with Conservatives and bikes?

Evening rush-hour in Soho Square

Fresh from fulminating about the cost of petrol, Boris Johnson has taken a sudden turning without signalling (again) and been moaning in the Telegraph about why Londoners don’t make more effort to get on their bikes.

Unlike Lord Tebbit, who built a career on cycling advice, BoJo’s main concern is air quality rather than job-seeking. But in having a whinge, he needs to look first at his own backyard – that is, the City of which he is Mayor.

Despite great advances in the last thirty years, London remains one of the least bike-friendly cities in the world. Not many of the less well-off are going to use a bike for transport and exercise, because bikes are horrendously expensive, and buses (now having whole lanes entirely to themselves) are much safer, drier and cheaper. (Early research bears this out)

The return of the adult push-bike per se has been very much a designer, upmarket trend since it began in the 1980s. I watched non-Bo-Bike users carefully over two days in London recently, and they are almost all delivery oiks (mad and lawless, every one of them), fluffy greens, or supremely kitted out business professionals. Many bike lanes share with buses, whose drivers are not what one could call knights of the road: I used to cycle twelve miles to work every day, but I stopped when a valued colleague was killed doing it….by a bus that pulled out without warning. The same thing had happened to me many times.

In doing the deal with Barclays to sponsor State-supplied rental bikes, Mayor Johnson has made the same mistake that GLC leader Ken Livingstone made many years ago with bus lanes: pushing cars out of the way before the infrastructure was there to make this a sensible thing to do. To alleviate the congestion that Ken caused, he solved his self-made problem by introducing the congestion charge. When this simply moved the jams to the north and south circular roads, he extended the charging scheme. Bicycle lanes were not a priority during this venture.

None of this was good for suburban cyclists, a fact that seems to have eluded Boris. As a result – following an initial novelty period – his pale blue bikes do not seem to be in demand:

West End lunchtime rush-hour

Both the shots in this piece were taken at midday and evening peak hours in places where you’d expect high demand if it existed. Last June, BoJo was warned by ‘experts’ that the scheme would be swamped – and would need seven times more bikes than those being supplied. But by 25th July, Boris’s ‘Cycle Friday’ promotion was scrapped when just five riders took part.

A fortnight ago, Mayor Johnson told a Green Party member at City Hall:

“A cycle hire scheme in Outer London would be a wonderful thing to do. The difficulty is you can’t just have a new, self-contained cycle hire scheme a long way away from the current one without necessitating quite a big set of journeys by the Barclays guys moving the bikes around. It is logistically difficult, for instance, to set one up immediately in Croydon or anywhere else much as I would like to. But we are looking at it….”

The alignment of this answer isn’t awfully close to the truth: the verite is in fact that most of the demand is in the centre….and comes from people, ah, just like Boris.

The scheme cost £140 million to set up and launch, and Tranport for London (TfL) will spend a further £114m over five years on the project. That’s a quarter of a billion quid – and journeys have never been above 6,000 a day.

Basically, the bikes are in the wrong place, and subsidising people who earn over £50,000 a year – while the scheme has inherent problems when expanded to the suburbs. Boris says it’s all about “looking at it”, but it could well be that the blond bombshell is ignoring the white elephant in the room.

To judge, we need to see some up-to-date numbers on this. I think we should be told what they are.

HACKGATE: Andy Gray firing pours petrol on the flames

Soccer pundit sees dismissal as Newscorp revenge

Andy Gray…’furious at Sky tactics’

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Hunt’s ‘obliged to discuss a compromise deal’ dismissed as nonsense by legal sources

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Update 13.40: Miliband asks a pmq at last….about the Met Police….and Cameron defends Met to the hilt….this is turning into the slowest suicide in history

Another terrible day is dawning for both the Coalition and Newscorp. Following the brazen firing of football commentator Andy Gray by Sky News, with the trickle of phone-hacking suits turning into a flood – and new details emerging of clandestine meetings between the Prime Minister and James Murdoch – Hackgate looks like a scandal out of control.

Sky presenter Andy Gray will consult with lawyers this morning after being what he called “stitched up” by his employers over sexist comments – in retaliation for his suit against News of the World phone hacking. Quite why News International took such a risk at such a sensitive time remains open to question, although at least one source last night was claiming that the Murdoch group’s senior management were kept out of the loop about Sky’s plans for Gray.

Meanwhile, the heat continues to be turned up under Number Ten, the Met Police, and the News of the World following Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt’s decision yesterday to defer the referral of Newcorp’s proposed BSkyB takeover.

Yesterday, legal sources contacted by the Slog dismissed the Hunt Spin about the Enterprise Act ‘obliging’ him to refer the proposed deal as ‘nonsense’.

“The 2002 Enterprise Act in fact gives the power to the OFT to refer any deal about which there are doubts,” said one source, “It doesn’t even mention the Culture Secretary’s role, for the simple reason that in 2002 there was no such thing. Even Vince Cable would have had no power under the Act to overrule the OFT should it decide to refer”.

Meanwhile, Taylor Hampton, the London law firm specialising in anti-hack suits against Newscorp, issued a statement late yesterday observing that ‘at least eight other News International staff have been identified as having been potentially involved in the alleged hacking of celebrity mobile phones’. As The Slog predicted last week, these are felt to include both Rebekah Wade/Brooks and Andy Coulson himself.

Both the Home Affairs Committee chaired by Keith Vaz and Labour MP Tom Watson urged DPP boss Keir Starmer to prosecute the case urgently. Starmer himself issued a statement vowing ‘robust’ investigation of what he called ‘substantive new allegations’. This also puts former top security policeman Andy Hayman under the spotlight – a jaundiced light not helped by the fact that he too has been given a columnist job by Newscorp.

But inside News International yesterday afternoon, the mood was dubbed  ‘buoyant’ as senior executives saw Hunt’s deferral as a major victory for their cause. The City held a similar view, piling 6p onto the Newscorp share price.

“How on earth else would one see it?” asked a senior Fleet Street Beast yesterday morning, “the Ofcom Report effectively dictated a referral based on grave doubts about plurality. We suspect Hunt is going to tell the Murdochs what they need to do to avoid referral. That’s like knowing the figure that’s going to win a sealed-bids auction”.

Later yesterday, however, there were shaken heads on the subject of why Sky had chosen now to fire Andy Gray.

In the last week, senior advisers around David Cameron have continued to counsel the appointment of a Coulson successor entirely unconnected to the usual list of Newscorp suspects. But Cameron does face difficulties in finding the right person: freelancer Ian Birrell is said not to want such an onerous task, and Cameron fears that the former BBC reporter Guto Harri is far too close to the real enemy, Boris Johnson. Ben Brogan is emerging as a solid candidate, but many doubt whether he too would want the job at his time of life.

Last night, bookies continued to shorten the odds on Will Lewis, a man steeped in Murdochite contacts who counts both David Cameron and Andy Coulson as personal friends. One Tory MP described such a prospect as “asking for trouble” last night.

This Coalition has always been tainted by the leadership’s close connections to monopolist media moguls and greedy bankers. It’s in danger today of being torpedoed by them. Somebody at Number Ten needs to get a grip, and it isn’t going to be Steve Hilton.

 

REVEALED: THE INCESTUOUS POOL OF INFLUENCE IN WHICH DAVID CAMERON FISHES

Mogul spawn Aidan Barclay

As the evidence mounts this week of the Prime Minister’s close connection to News International, a Slog investigation sheds light upon an exclusive club of souls owned by shadowy proprietors….and David Cameron is an integral part of it.

This morning, the Slog ran a soundly-sourced gossip piece suggesting that the Prime Minister David Cameron is looking in the direction of Will Lewis – a News International senior honcho – as the replacement for Andy Coulson, the disgraced former News of the World editor. Lewis left his Daily Telegraph post last year. He now reports to Rebekah Wade/Brooks. Rebekah Wade/Brooks entertained the Prime Minister over the Christmas break. Today the Independent revealed that she secretly smuggled into her house on that day…..none other than James Murdoch, son of Newscorp mogul Rupert Murdoch. James is a pivotal player in the Newscorp bid to take over the rest of BskyB. This morning, Culture Minister Jeremy Hunt announced he would give the Murdochs ‘further time’ to build a defence against referral of their bid to the MMC. Meanwhile, patriarch Rupert flew in to join the melee.

It sounds like the catch-up to a Dallas-style soap, doesn’t it? Now read on…

Regular Slog readers will be aware of my view that the Telegraph has turned more nasty, more underhand, and more anti-Cameron in the last year or so. In particular, it has led a concerted campaign to destroy Vince Cable by using unwarranted recordings (which clearly broke reporting rules) and giving the Business Secretary a pasting for his views on the banks….views shared by the vast majority of British voters.

What, you might wonder, has this to do with the gradual exposure of News International as a global group widely believed to have been engaged in the illegal tapping of VIP mobile phones?

Just this: Telegraph owners the Barclay Brothers are even more mysteriously will-o-the-wisp than the Newscorp family dynasty. And they are in turn widely suspected of hard-right-wing views and a desire to adopt the extremist tone of Paul Dacre’s mean-spirited Daily Mail at the Telegraph. (Dominic Lawson speaks of them in private as ‘relentlessly interfering’ in editorial comment and policy).

The evidence for this is hard to deny: following the hiring of Associated chief Murdoch McLennan, Tony Gallagher was also signed from the Mail as Daily Telegraph editor. It was he who sanctioned the publication of anti-Murdoch statements by Cable on 26^th November last…comments that led to his removal from a controling influence on the Newscorp BskyB bid. The change in newsroom culture has been cemented by the arrival of a cadre of former Daily Mail executives. Others include the Sunday Telegraph editor, Ian MacGregor, and Chris Evans, the head of news at the Daily Telegraph.

But why would Mail hardmen work with Barclay brothers henchman to save Newscorp’s skin – given that in normal circumstances they are fierce rivals? Because the defence of privilege makes strange bedfellows of us all, perhaps. We might just as well ask why, when there was no place for wunderkind Will Lewis in the new Re-Mailed Telegraph set-up, a place was quickly found for him near the top at Newscorp. Except in that instance, there are clues.

Aidan Barclay – a twins son who chairs the Telegraph Group – is a great admirer of Will Lewis and his internet savvy. The two men phone and confer on a regular basis, and have stayed in touch. Now his man is in the frame for the Communications job at Number Ten.

Aidan Barclay appears to be contemptuous of elected representative power: he turned down four invitations to appear before a House of Lords communications committee investigating media ownership, saying it was not in the “commercial interests” of the Telegraph group. The Committee’s chairman, Lord Fowler, said his non-appearance was “objectionable”.

Further hard evidence of the clubbable nature of this select media-political group can be seen in the guest-list for Will Lewis’s recent 40^th Birthday bash. Chief players included David Cameron, Andy Coulson, and Rebekah Wade/Brooks.

Let’s call a spade a spade: this is a small but hugely powerful oligarchy. A self-styled elite conjoined by money, power, influence, contempt for the ordinary man or woman – and above all, mutual need.

In this morning’s Daily Telegraph, for example, there was no hint of the obvious interconnection of:

*Murdoch support for the Tories before the election ** Newscorp man Andy Coulson getting the top media role in Number Ten *** the cloud of payoffs and private prosecutions following that man **** police lies about evidence relating to the editorial practices of that man ***** the key policeman Andy Hayman winding up as a crime columnist at Newscorp ****** and now another Barclay/Murdoch man in line to replace Coulson ******* who himself is known personally by all the other parties involved.

But that seven-point connection is very obviously there. And the more specific mutual need is equally easy to see:

* The Barclay brothers’ desire to see Cameron dethroned ** The hiring of Mail hunting dogs to see off the likes of Laws and Cable *** The need of the Barclays for a hard-right alliance stretching from lower-middle to upmarket **** the need for Murdoch’s Newscorp to get hold of BSkyB’s huge and invaluable cash flow.

 

These are people made allies by common aims: to influence the composition of the Government in power, and ensure that the key purveyors of upscale and broadcast communication remain in reactionary, monopolist hands.

Not only do Cameron and his entourage depend on the support of News International’s enormous media power, they also face the likelihood of a war on two fronts if they alienate both the Murdoch and Barclay dynasties.

This is particularly important given the venomous loathing for all members both Tory and LibDem among journalists working for the other axis of controlling media reportage – the phalanx we refer to as the Guardia Independentes.

The Slog’s view remains that while the BBC has a fluffy Left/pc bias, it is light years ahead of Sky News when it comes to overall reporting standards. And while the Telegraph has always been Right of Centre, it has become more extreme (and grubby) in its approach since the Monarchs of Sark took it over.

The bottom line is that we have a Governing Party which – along with the previous two regimes since 1979 – has been given invaluable help by a down-dumbing foreign media mogul; and a Coalition whose destruction is the avowed aim of two tax exiles inhabiting a £60million house on a remote Channel Island.

The obvious danger and hypocritical injustice of this situation is yet another reason why we need both a new political line-up in Britain – and an alternative new medium supporting a change from the sterile choice between the delusional pc Left and the ruthlessly monopolist Right.

But in the immediate term, the Cameroon clique needs to wake up: these seamy links leave it open to probably justified charges of caving in to the irresponsible rich…when they should be protecting the innocent victims of financial stupidity and criminal privacy invasion.

David Cameron ‘eyeing Will Lewis for Coulson job’.

Media Wunderkind Will Lewis

In a development which might suggest that David Cameron will never learn, the Slog understands that the Prime Minister is ‘toying with’ the idea of replacing Andy Coulson with Will Lewis.

Will Lewis is currently Group Development Director at…..News International. He is also close to – and greatly admired by – the Telegraph Chairman and Barclay twin son, Aidan Barclay.

This is possibly part of  much bigger story which I hope to post either later today or tomorrow.

In the meantime, Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt is giving News International ‘more time’ to try and avoid a referral of his BSkyB bid to the monopolies commission.

Stay tuned.

The BSkyB takeover: will Miliband NOW ask a PMQ?

TORIES STUNNED AS ‘NEW TAPES’ ALLEGATION IMPLICATES CAMERON FRIEND REBEKAH BROOKS

News International CEO Rebekah Brooks (Wade)

As the scope of the News International hacking scandal continues to leak, MPs from all Parties were asking last night why the Labour leader Ed Miliband isn’t going for the Conservative jugular. Is this a case of glass houses and stones?

The Slog can reveal that growing evidence of David Cameron’s closeness to senior News International executives is evoking great glee in the Left-leaning media – and enormous consternation in the upper echelons of the Tory Party.

On Friday evening, The Slog dropped in a gossipy tidbit towards the end of its post on Coulson: that the hacking contagion has now infected News International CEO Rebekah Brooks. Late last night, the Guardian beat the pack to the explanation as to why: for this very combative lady may well be up to her leather-neck in phone hacking.

The Guardian yarn concerns ageing hack Ray Chapman, and his alcohol-induced inability to remember what other hacks had asked him to do. ‘A friend’ (unnamed) claims that Ray had hundreds of tapes, and everyone in the Murdoch group is hunting for them. (Note the tense ‘had’, not ‘has’).

The problem with the ‘story’ is that it is without any verification on or off the record. It would be ironic to say the least if Chapman had handed them to Wikileaks, but there is no evidence for this either. But I understand that the tapes do indeed exist…and Ms Brooks has a very explicit role in one or two of them. I’m also told that Ian Edmondson has more or less turned Queen’s evidence on the matter – a good scoop for Guido Fawkes this one.

Throughout yesterday – on both Sky and in The Times – the game plan was painfully clear, and obviously being dictated from the top: play down the wider significance of Coulson’s departure…and diffuse the focus by accusing other papers of having been up to precisely the same thing. This is a continuation of Murdoch’s longer-term strategy: to stick unwaveringly to the One Rogue Hacker line – and when that failed, make pay-offs to any litigants. Already, the second string in that bow has cost Newscorp £2.7 million. Silence, it seems, really is golden.

But the silence has been broken. And the Luvvie Plot to keep on suing the News of the World remains, so people close to it insist, unchanged.

So why do I keep harping on about Ed Miliband – the silent movie? Very simple: this is an open goal for any Opposition leader – literally on a par with the Profumo scandal in 1963 – and goes to the heart of Cabinet, Downing Street, the Met Police, the security services and the bankrolling of an election by a media mogul under suspicion of a string of serious criminal offences.

Miliband’s tactic seems to be to make the whole case a question of David Cameron’s judgement. In reality, it is a question of the possible involvement of the Prime Minister in a plot to pervert the course of justice.

That’s not a wild blogosmear accusation: the Prime Minister was Rebekah Wade’s guest for part of the Christmas period. This was a brief time after the much-maligned Vince Cable was taken off the case involving Murdoch’s acquisition of the rest of BSkyB. James Murdoch’s avowed intent is to get that merger through – and during the General Election, Cameron was accused of having ‘done a deal’ with Newscorp to make it the dominant force in UK broadcasting at the expense of the hated BBC.

The country’s most powerful politician finds himself embroiled in what looks like a grubby deal (with the help of top security cop Andy Hayman) to get support from a mass media Group – in return for covering up an open and shut case of criminal privacy invasion and abuse of press power.

You’re the Opposition Leader under attack for being a wimp. And you decide to stick with ‘it’s a question of the Prime Minister’s judgement’? It doesn’t make sense without further explanation.

I don’t know the full explanation; like others on the case, I have only gossip. But one comment – “the previous lot were up to their necks in it as well” – might serve as a summation of the general view.

Another perhaps more scurrilous observation involved the historical closeness of Lord Mandleson, newly installed City investment strategist, to the Newscorp camp….and the large amount of money he received for the serialisation of his memoirs in The Sunday Times. But I can’t comment on that at all.

Stay tuned.

 

 

IN BRIEF: The Times on Coulson

Obscure journalist resigns from political job

There is coverage across several pages of today’s Times about the Coulson affair. These I have audited as follows:

1. Articles mentioning Rupert Murdoch 0

2. Articles mentioning Newscorp 1 (By Matthew Parris, who is not on the staff)

3. Articles mentioning Andy Hayman, former cop and Times columnist 0

4. Articles saying it will soon blow over 3 (Including the Leader)

Just goes to show, doesn’t it: would a weakened BBC and a dominant Newscorp owning all of BSkyB be a good idea?

Probably not. Let’s see what the M&MC have to say about the deal.

Update: Sky News about to break story about phone hacking on other newspapers.

Just fancy that……