Socialist Appeal - the Marxist voice of Labour and youth.

Buried on page 11 of the Guardian on 1st November is an article, extremely enlightening in its simplicity, reporting the ‘news’ that during office Blair was only too happy to do Rupert Murdoch’s bidding. According to Lance Price, former Downing Street spin doctor, Murdoch was ‘one of the four most influential people in the administration’. Never mind that he was totally unelected, not actually a part of any ‘administration’, or that he is a US citizen whose company (News Corp.) pays no net tax.

Buried on page 11 of the Guardian on 1st November is an article, extremely enlightening in its simplicity, reporting the ‘news’ that during office Blair was only too happy to do Rupert Murdoch’s bidding. According to Lance Price, former Downing Street spin doctor, Murdoch was ‘one of the four most influential people in the administration’. Never mind that he was totally unelected, not actually a part of any ‘administration’, or that he is a US citizen whose company (News Corp.) pays no net tax.

The Guardian reports that, “Tony Blair helped Murdoch overcome an official investigation which was jeopardising one of his big investments...Blair, while prime minister, immediately ordered his top officials to help the tycoon.” One wonders why his big investment was being jeopardised by an ‘official investigation’, and whether it crossed Blair’s mind that perhaps it was being investigated for a reason. But apparently he was blinded by sympathy. “Blair told the media magnet he was ‘instinctively sympathetic to what Murdoch was aiming to achieve.” Clearly Blair’s instincts have been finely honed to the interests of the highest bidder. He felt that “it was important that the UK remained at the cutting edge of developing this kind of media product.” Indeed. The product, which enabled Sky Digital viewers to bank whilst watching TV, was so ‘cutting edge’ that it collapsed by 2001, overtaken by internet banking!

Here we have a fine example of how politics is ‘concentrated economics’. Lenin explained how bourgeois democracy is a sham, since 9/10s of all forms of communication are owned and controlled by a small minority. Murdoch, who makes Citizen Kane look like the local gazette’s leading shareholder, uses his media might to influence elections, and then demands that his government carry out policies that allow him to expand his power, thus in turn influencing more elections. No wonder he was (and no doubt still is) amongst the four most influential people over the government. One has to ask the question, where do the millions of voters who elected the government come on the list of most influential?