Worthless but more powerful than ever – the non-death of Britain’s right-wing media

 

A couple of weeks ago the Financial Times reported that the Sun newspaper, bastion of working class conservatism for nigh on half a century, had been marked down by Rupert Murdoch as a “worthless asset”.

The tabloid, which in the ’90s claimed it alone could sway general elections, had been so denuded by falling sales, legal costs related to the phone hacking scandal, and damages paid to civil claimants, that it made a pre-tax loss of £201 million in 2019-20 and had “zero carrying value”. The management of Murdoch’s News UK expected it “would not return to positive growth”.

Those who lament the Sun’s baleful influence on this country’s political and ethical culture – from smearing dead football fans as hooligans, to hounding gay celebrities, to, with certain Blairite lapses (if lapses they can be called), cheerleading for Thatcher – might indulge in a fully justified bout of schadenfreude.

But if there is such a thing as ‘pyrrhic crowing’ this is it. For, despite its financial woes, the right-wing media is as strong as ever in Britain.

There was a brief period of optimism around the time of the 2017 General Election when it seemed like shoestring news sites like Evolve and the Canary, and even single person blogs (not this one) could go under the radar of the mainstream media and reach millions. But that window was abruptly slammed shut, as traditional media organisations upped their social media game (News UK claims the print version of the Sun and its website reach a total of 36.5 million people), and a Facebook algorithm change meant that alternative sources of news found their ‘shares’ drastically reduced. 

One little appreciated reason for the Conservative victory in 2019 – beyond Brexit and Corbyn’s sullied reputation that is – was the diminished influence of alternative media and the restored power of the mainstream press.

The huge decline in newspaper sales in Britain is not an illusion – they have dropped by two-thirds in 20 years according to one estimate  – but the influence of the press, and the mainstream media more generally, is felt far beyond the number of sales or subscriptions.

As shown by the Hancock surveillance (and the absence of any need to explain how it occurred), the Sun still has wields huge influence and, even if it is a financial dead weight, will not be permitted to go under.

Notwithstanding diminished sales, the right-wing press still commands a palpable physical presence and is basically assured that its leading stories will be amplified by broadcasters or least relayed through regular paper reviews.

In Bad News for Labour: Antisemitism, the Party and Public Belief (the first chapter of which is an eye-opening account of how an invented narrative pushed by the right-wing and liberal media can become firmly lodged in the public mind), one participant who doesn’t read newspapers explains how he came to his belief that 20% of Labour members had been accused of antisemitism:

Headlines I see. I work in Tesco’s. As I walk into the shopping mall I read the headlines every day …. Most of my perception was based on – as I say I don’t read newspapers – my perception was based on the number of headlines and how long it was in the papers. [participant 4 nods in agreement]

And in an era of all-pervasive social media reach, and permanent smartphone connection to the Internet on the part of most of the population, the reach of the press – quite apart from actual newspaper sales – is greater than ever. Web portals, search engines, Facebook and Twitter will all place the output of the mainstream media in front of users so even if you consciously don’t read a newspaper, you will find it hard to avoid knowing what they are saying.

This is reminiscent of Noam Chomsky’s and Edward Herman’s concept of “big news” in 1988’s Manufacturing Consent, except that these “sustained news campaigns” are even more potent than they were three decades ago.

We are reaching a state where news and advertising are converging. This is not necessarily because news is becoming the slave of advertising, though that does occur, but because news is taking on the qualities of advertising. Advertising works through endless repetition so that even if it is incredibly annoying (or perhaps because it is) the brand name becomes ingrained in the observer’s brain and they may choose it if they ever buy that product.

News now – amplified through multiple platforms – works on the same principle. Deliberate censorship is unnecessary because in our information-saturated society unwelcome news can be guaranteed to reach only a small minority if it does not receive the blessing of escalation by powerful interests.

There are many important and validated news stories – for example, the purging of Labour party members by Keir Starmer, falling life expectancy, or the ongoing atrocity of the UK ‘welfare state’ – that fail to make even a ripple on public consciousness because they are not amplified.

In a compulsively busy society such as this one, the attention of most consumers of news is necessarily slight with most relying on snatches of news to form a picture of what is going in on the world. There is, as others have said, “a crying need” for the Left to invest in its own media because a social media presence, however strong, cannot compete with a uniformly hostile mainstream media. But even if new investments are made and TV stations created, the gatekeepers will still do their utmost to ensure the vast majority remain unblissfully unaware.

The Pathological Organisation

It has long been remarked that society has become individualistic to a pathological extent. That it is now populated by selfish monads totally oblivious to the needs of others or any notion of solidarity. But while this is true, I think that over the past few decades individualism has undergone a subtle, though significant, change. It is no longer about individual freedom, however egotistical. Individualism is now primarily concerned with policing and correcting the behaviour of the individual – especially for those at the bottom of society – and positing futile personal solutions for patently social problems.

The former can be seen most vividly in the concept of “zero tolerance” which has spread like wildfire across the world since its birth in New York in the 1990s. In its original incarnation, zero tolerance claimed that violent and serious crime could be reduced by first cracking down on “incivilities” and minor offences, such as graffiti or fare dodging. Though crime did indeed fall concurrently, the role of zero tolerance policing in this is highly dubious. Crime also fell in other American cities that didn’t practice zero tolerance at the time and it was labelled by two criminologists as the “least plausible candidate” for contributing to the decrease in violent crime.

Nonetheless zero tolerance had an unstoppable momentum. Its precepts contributed to a colossal rise in the prison population in the USA. In 1975, there were 240,000 people in US jails. Last year there were 2.12 million with millions more on probation or parole. Prison populations have also risen spectacularly in other countries, though not to the same enormous extent. In Britain, for example, prison numbers have nearly doubled since the mid-1990s. And this is in the context of a significant drop in crime.

The ascendancy of zero tolerance is not limited to swelling prisons. Its basic tenet – no excuses and no justification for adjudged misdemeanours – has been enforced in a variety of different settings. Sanctions for benefit recipients – unheard of before the 21^st century – are routinely dished out for missing appointments, not applying for enough jobs or even attending the birth of your child.

Countless institutions – from pubs to political parties – far beyond any connection to the criminal justice system now proclaim a zero tolerance approach to racism, abuse, harassment or bullying.

 

The blind spot

But this obsession with policing, condemning and penalising individual behaviour has gone hand in hand with boundless tolerance for, and seemingly zero interest in, the wrongdoings of organisations.

Such leniency could be seen in reactions to the financial crisis of more than a decade ago. Common responses to a crisis of the banking system ranged from pinning the blame on geeky savants who designed financial products no-one could understand to spotlighting gullible consumers who borrowed recklessly. We need to regulate ourselves, counselled conservative historian Niall Ferguson.

It is revealing that the UK government responded to the financial crisis – a crisis with systemic causes triggered by the actions of corporate organisations – by intensifying the regulation of individual behaviour (and not even of the individuals who were culpable). Between 2010 and 2013, over a million sanctions were imposed on disabled and poor benefit claimants, a 345% rise on the 2001-8 average.

 

Under the Horizon

That the same mentality still thrives can be seen by the muted reaction to one of the gravest ever miscarriages of justice in Britain – the prosecution, sacking or financial ruination of hundreds of sub-postmasters  by the Post Office. The criminalisation was justified by an IT system, Horizon, that produced non-existent cash shortfalls in Post Office branches. But despite knowing that Horizon was faulty, the Post Office – backed up by IT supplier Fujitsu – blamed and persecuted innocent workers for years. Dozens went to prison, many more were heavily fined and some committed suicide.

The problem with blaming bad people at the top for this horrendous injustice is that those leading the Post Office were, by contemporary standards, exemplars of ethical behaviour. Paula Vennells, CEO from 2012 to 2019, is an Anglican priest and was awarded a CBE two years ago for “services to business and charity”. Tim Parker, chairman of the Post Office since 2015, and charged with overseeing its senior management, is also chair of the National Trust.

Nonetheless, despite, according to Vennells, running a business that “genuinely cares about the people who work for us”, the Post Office was guilty, in the eyes of judges, of “oppressive behaviour” and behaving like a “mid-Victorian factory owner”. An MP described it as “feudal”.

It is only when viewed organisationally that its actions become explicable. According to the Private Eye investigation, under Vennells’ leadership, the Post Office, since its split from the privatised Royal Mail in 2012, was obsessed with the bottom line and achieving financial independence from the government by 2020. Nothing could get in the way of that objective and Horizon’s infallibility had to be upheld at all costs.

This “relentless focus” resulted in a culture of unquestioning loyalty. According to one insider quoted in Private Eye: “If you wanted to belong and fit in, you had to put the future of the Post Office first. If that meant turning a blind eye – or worse – that’s what people would do”.

But as soon as the failings at the Post Office are viewed in this light, the problems become so overwhelming they have to be – from the perspective of a supporter of this corporate capitalist system – deliberately ignored. How many other organisations have a “relentless focus” on the bottom line? How many others reify ‘leadership’ and inculcate a rigid culture of loyalty among their senior management? Notwithstanding the stakeholder rhetoric, these are attributes that all hierarchically-run organisations – be they private, public or ‘voluntary’ – are, after decades of neoliberalism and the tutelage of business schools, expected to have.

Toxic Operations

We have become accustomed to exposés of toxic cultures within organisations. But these invariably apply to the head office, senior staff or vestigial practices among the workforce (individual failings again). They rarely apply to the toxic manner in which an organisation’s management treats its workers or the public in general. This is despite such problems being endemic.

In April, an academic study based on interviews with civil servants found that top-down pressure from management in the Department of Work and Pensions during the Cameron coalition years resulted in the deliberate perpetration of “psychological harm” on claimants. Expectations “from above”, the authors noted, acted as a “moral anaesthetic” and resulted in local targets for sanctions, a process which “made invisible the needs and interests” of the claimants subject to such withdrawals of income.

Since they were bailed out in the financial crisis, banks have colluded to manipulate interest rates, rigged the foreign exchange market, plundered small businesses, laundered money for drug cartels, and helped thousands of wealthy clients evade tax (apologies this list is not exhaustive).

Phone hacking and other forms of harassment by newspapers resulted in a long-drawn out public investigation into ‘press ethics’ a decade ago. But a recommendation for an independent press regulator was rejected by David Cameron and in 2018 the Conservatives scrapped the scheduled second part of the inquiry (Leveson 2) on the grounds that the press “had cleaned up its act”. Presumably, clearing out “all the bad people” was sufficient.

And according to a report leaked last year, the permanent officials of the Labour party viewed members and its elected leadership with withering contempt and undermined the party’s 2017 General Election campaign, conceivably scuppering Labour’s chances of becoming the largest party in the Commons.

If not denied or ignored, these organisational scandals have resulted in, at best, grudging apologies, the removal of miscreants and heartfelt promises that ‘it won’t happen again’. But, strangely, it always does.

Fleeting Obedience

In the 2019 book The Disobedient Society, I attempted to chart the extent to which – despite protests to the contrary – obedience still plays a dominant role in social affairs. Taking a cue from the American psychologist Stanley Milgram, I stressed the importance, for obedience to work, of people freely choosing to follow the instructions of others above them in hierarchical organisations. This is now primarily evident in the employment contract, which lays great weight on its voluntary nature to morally differentiate it from forms of forced labour, such as ‘modern slavery’.

However, the subjects in Milgram’s experiments – and in all subsequent ‘Milgramesque’studies – had a very fleeting relationship with authority. Though many were faultlessly obedient, their actual contact with, in Milgram’s phrase, “the person of higher status”, lasted no more than an hour. Their equivalent in today’s society is probably the ‘on-demand’ worker who carries out tasks in line with instructions, but remains self-employed and does permanently join any organisation.

All the cases above of organisational dereliction were perpetrated by a cadre permanently ensconced within a hierarchical set up. This does not diminish obedience. If anything, it enhances it as obedience becomes strengthened by notions of loyalty, reciprocity, “fitting in” or fear of reprisal if behaviour does not meet expectations.

Given that most people in putatively rich countries have to rent themselves out to hierarchical organisations in order to procure the means of survival, obedience, though widely ignored, is an expected and real form of behaviour. However, the power of entrenched vested interests at the top of organisations is equally palpable.  Whether motivated by profit maximisation, competitive rivalry or other metrics of success, these tight-knit groups can – and do – act pathologically, treating employees or the wider public as if they were insentient obstacles to be overcome or exploited.

It’s just that in a society obsessed with the moral failings of individuals, if the spotlight happens to fall on them it is only for a brief moment.

 

 

 

 

Not So Great Expectations

Recently I was struck by a quote from geographer Danny Dorling on the fact that, in 2020, the UK recorded the highest number of excess deaths since the Second World War.

“All these excess death calculations that are being made, we’re comparing ourselves in 2020 with five truly awful years,” said Dorling last month, “whereas other countries are comparing themselves with the best years they’ve ever had.”

Excess deaths are defined as deaths above what could be expected based on an average of the previous five years. Because of Covid-19, there were nearly 85,000 excess deaths last year. In the first three months of 2021, there were over 32,000 excess deaths.

However, the problem in using excess deaths in the UK as an indicator of the unprecedented nature of the Covid pandemic is that, because of the political choice of austerity, between 2014 and 2019 – the previous five years – excess deaths were already rising. There were, for example, over 32,000 excess deaths in 2015, over 20,000 excess deaths in 2016 and 2017 and over 22,000 excess deaths in 2018.

In other words, because of the preceding “five truly awful years”, the huge rise in excess deaths in 2020 and 2021 was less pronounced than it would otherwise have been. In yet other words, the true extent of the present human catastrophe overseen Conservatives has been masked by the previous human catastrophe overseen by the Conservatives. You might call that ironic.

Lifting the veil

This can happen because a veil of denialism still surrounds austerity. With Covid, the bare facts are generally accepted even if the reasons for the enormous death toll – at the time of writing the sixth highest in the world – are blotted out. Austerity does not even have that chink of light. A cheer-leading consensus has blinded a rational acceptance of its effects. The entire political class was in cahoots – though austerity was carried out by the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition, the pre-Corbyn Labour opposition voiced its support from the sidelines.

Austerity was largely implemented through swingeing cuts to benefits and central government funding to local authorities. A combination of the popular and the invisible.

The ground for the former was prepared by a massive, and effective, propaganda campaign, portraying benefit claimants – especially allegedly sick claimants – as scroungers living off the naive generosity of the taxpayer. In addition to direct cuts in benefits – the benefits cap and freeze – there was a huge increase in the sanctioning (the withdrawal of all financial support) of claimants. Over a million sanctions were imposed in 2013, a 345% rise on their 2001-2008 average (they had been introduced by the previous Labour government).

Local authorities, however, bore the brunt. The central government grant to local councils was cut by 49%. Given that most local government spending (around 60%) goes on social care, this is where the axe fell, with palpable consequences for mortality rates. In 2014, there were a million fewer social care visits to the elderly than there had been five years before.

There is nothing painless about cuts; they don’t just eradicate ‘waste’. “ … the more cuts there have been to public health, social services and benefits – particularly for people in old age – the more earlier deaths there have been in the UK,” says Dorling. “Cuts that prevent visits by social workers to elderly people reduce their chances of being found after a fall. Cuts that make it harder to rehouse someone who is currently in a hospital bed back into the community result in hospital beds not being available for others.”

All this was compounded by what was happening to the NHS. Though formally “protected” from austerity, between 2010 and 2015 health spending rose by an average of 0.5% compared to an annual uprating of 4% since 1950.

In 2017, a study published in the British Medical Journal found that the post-2010 squeeze on public finances was linked to around 120,000 excess deaths in England alone, with the over 60s and care home residents most affected. The researchers estimated there were more than 45,000 excess deaths between 2010 and 2014 and over 152,000 people could die between 2015 and 2020 unless the “mortality gap” was closed by more funding.

Mind the gap

But such was the size of the mortality gap, it was starting to eat into life expectancy. In autumn 2017, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) revised its predictions for life expectancy for both women and men, cutting the estimate for both by about a year – an estimate that had been made just two years previously. Life expectancy was flatlining. After rising consistently for decade after decade, it was now barely creeping upwards. During David Cameron’s time in office it rose by a month a year for men and by just two weeks for women. By contrast, in the 1940s and early 1950s life expectancy rose by a year every three years and accelerated again in the 1970s and ‘80s.

This means, explains Dorling, “that 110 years of improving life expectancy in the UK are now officially over. The implications for this are huge and the reasons the statistics were revised is a tragedy on an enormous scale.”

The evidence kept accruing. In February 2020, the Marmot Review, an investigation into health inequalities originally commissioned by the Brown government, found that overall life expectancy had failed to increase for a decade and had actually declined for the poorest 10% of women. The author, Michael Marmot, blamed austerity for taking a “significant toll” on the nation’s health and being responsible for “flatlining life expectancy”.

And the pension industry believes life expectancy is actually falling. In 2018, The Institute and Faculty of Actuaries cut adult life expectancy by six months in what it said was “a trend as opposed to a blip”. In March 2019, Continuous Mortality Investigation, a company owned by the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, found that the life expectancy of men and women aged 65 had fallen by five months from 2017. According to one group of analysts, the main reason was that deaths in 2018 were “particularly high”.

However, there is a silver lining. In 2017 the Financial Times had reported that the “sharp slowdown” in life expectancy could wipe £310 billion from the deficits of large companies’ final salary pension schemes.

In an irony typical of this economic system, deteriorating public health is actually good for the financial health of big firms.

At present, official life expectancy is stalling, as opposed to actually declining as it is in the US, but further revisions are not unlikely.

For whom the bell tolls

Changes in life expectancy such as these are momentous. Besides the human cost, they signal that something very significant is happening to an economic and social system. The collapse of the Soviet Union was preceded by rising mortality and declining health spending. In 1976, a French demographer – widely ignored at the time – correctly predicted the demise of the Soviet system on the basis of rising infant mortality figures. Coincidentally, since 2014 infant mortality has started increasing in England.

But despite our free institutions and allegedly adversarial media, stagnating life expectancy here and now has created nothing more than a faint murmur. The ONS’s downward revisions referred to earlier were buried in an appendix to a press release. The BBC can claim that Covid “has undone the progress made in the last decade or so” and ignore the pre-Covid rise in excess deaths (that its own graphs show!). Matt Hancock can pontificate about adding five years to life expectancy through healthy eating.

Nothing is being suppressed. All the information contradicting official complacency can be readily collated (I just have). But in the absence of mass exposure and repetition – the secret of news becoming received wisdom – the truth about austerity and life expectancy reaches, at best, a minority who want to hear about it.

And far from the damage being repaired, austerity – as enshrined by Rishi Sunak’s last budget – will continue. With the evidence about the effect of austerity in 2010s now clear, the government is responding by upping the dose.

Meanwhile, the land of make believe strides on, brimming with absolutely unwarranted self-confidence.