There was an interesting comment at the end of yesterday’s post about Hackgate, in which a Slog regular opined quite undertsandably that I am part of the BBC/Guardian axis trying to destroy the Right wing press in Britain. I have a clear provenance going back a long way suggesting that this isn’t the case…most notably my bombardment of Labour MPs (and Alan Rusbridger) with tweets asking why nobody is investigating Trinity Mirror….and persistent harrassment of Piers Moron as a result of his alleged behaviour as a rutting phone-nuisance while editor of the Mirror Red Top.
Media ownership and editorial position bestow enormously dangerous power upon those who, if we’re being frank here, very rarely deserve it. This must come with responsibility. Idiots like Moron, Paul Dacre and Kelvin McFatso rubbish the idea of responsibility with the same arrogance they mete out to public enquiries. In the last few months, they have done themselves no favours at all…and for this I am eternally grateful. But it truly is not a matter of Left and Right: it is a question of those prepared to bow down before the rule of Law – and those who consider themselves to be so exceptionally gifted, they must be made an exception. The latter folks are no different to bankers, Whitehall mandarins, trade unions leaders and Islamic ‘leaders’.
An excellent example of how everything can be twisted beyond all recognition has been apparent at the Maily Telegraph of late. As many of you will know already, the paper is owned by the secretive, manipulative and and entirely non-taxpaying Barclay Brothers. They live on the Channel Island of Sark, generally treating it as their own fiefdom and sending over occasional diktats to the Telegraph staff about what will or will not be written, spiked and featured.
The Barclays are behind the ‘Stop Banker Bashing’ drivel. They were behind all the early attacks upon the Coalition. They are behind the entirely risible ‘Britain is anti-business’ bollocks. And today, they decided to have a go at George Osborne’s 50p rate of tax on the super-rich. (In case you hadn’t noticed from the foregoing description, the Barclay Brothers are super rich). The nature of today’s organised anti-50p tax attack was so obvious, at one point the Telegraph website was running three stories at once about it….none of which added any value to the other two.
But being beyond British law and taxes, they think themselves – probably quite rightly – completely unaccountable to anyone except themselves. I can tell you from personal experience that the Barclays inspire precisely the same fear in Tory Cabinet ministers today as Murdoch, Campbell and Mandelson once did to their creatures in government. Indeed, the only time I have ever seen a senior member of Camerlot hungry for information was when I pronounced the words “Barclay Brothers”.
The Barclay Brothers aided, engineered and then spiked large parts of the ‘Get Vince Cable Out’ campaign. They would love to remove Murdoch from the UK competitive set: but towards the end of the bugging-Cable story, they realised it could evoke sympathy for Murdoch, and so they spiked it. It was left to a disgruntled Telegraph hack to pass it on to another, who then leaked it to Robert Peston at the BBC.
Now, although the Barclays are on ‘the Right’, their control over what we know and don’t know is no different to that of New Labour’s past spin doctors, the grotesque Lord Mandelson, the senior Trinity Mirror management, and the neo-Trot mob that hang around Rusbridger at The Guardian. All these people ruthlessly suppress any and all Truth likely to damage their various causes.
So as I have written many times before, I really care not a fig for the political ‘leanings’ of any of them. What they all have in common is two things: a controlling, censorious nature; and a desire to be one of the arbitrarily privileged in our land.
The aim of The Slog remains exactly the same: to deconstruct bollocks, no matter what its source. But, as it happens, the source of 99% of all bollocks is the people I have described in the foregoing paragraph. Some are in the media, some in Parliament, some in Brussels, some in Beijing, a few in the Kremlin, others in Washington, some working on Wall Street. Attack all bollocks, and one threatens them. We will never get rid of them entirely; but to sit back and leave them there is a recipe for Dystopia.
QED.
The Slog 