Is Britain governed by a big lie?
The malign political influence of the Murdochs poses a fundamental challenge to British democracy. This will not be dealt with by selling off the ownership of their papers, welcome though this might be, or the removal of their influence from BSkyB on the grounds (as I argued last year) that the Murdochs are not fit and proper people. The scandal has now clarified a far more breathtaking question: is Britain governed by a big lie?
The extraordinary importance of the question can be illuminated by comparing it to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, another critical turning point in the collapsing legitimacy of the UK’s political order. Tony Blair willfully misled parliament and voters by claiming that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction that threatened directly the interests of the UK. This was a contrived excuse for the war; known in everyday language as a lie (something the Americans admitted openly). While intensely damaging for our democracy, we were not, however, misled about the actual policy. To this day Blair, David Miliband, David Cameron et al say it was right to support the Americans at the time. Her Majesty’s Government was not pretending not to be doing what it was actually doing - in this sense it was honest. It was only lying about the justification for doing it.
We now face an altogether more profound falsehood: a government that flatly denies doing what it is doing. The Prime Minister told the BBC on its flagship Andrew Marr show that when it came to his government and the Murdochs, "It would be absolutely wrong for there to be any sort of deal and there wasn't... There was no grand deal". This is a big lie. There was a deal. It was indeed wrong. We should not just be talking about the Murdochs, we should focus on the heart of the problem: the government.
The Rubicon: The Murdochs and the Conservatives "shared" the code-name ‘Rubicon’ for the BSkyB bid that would have led to its complete takeover by NewsCorp. In an email of 11 January 2011 that would make a classicist shudder, James Murdoch’s Director of Public Affairs even reports a conversation with Jeremy Hunt’s office about “the Rubicon process”... Read more:
http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/anthony-barnett/murdoch-and-big-lie
The extraordinary importance of the question can be illuminated by comparing it to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, another critical turning point in the collapsing legitimacy of the UK’s political order. Tony Blair willfully misled parliament and voters by claiming that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction that threatened directly the interests of the UK. This was a contrived excuse for the war; known in everyday language as a lie (something the Americans admitted openly). While intensely damaging for our democracy, we were not, however, misled about the actual policy. To this day Blair, David Miliband, David Cameron et al say it was right to support the Americans at the time. Her Majesty’s Government was not pretending not to be doing what it was actually doing - in this sense it was honest. It was only lying about the justification for doing it.
We now face an altogether more profound falsehood: a government that flatly denies doing what it is doing. The Prime Minister told the BBC on its flagship Andrew Marr show that when it came to his government and the Murdochs, "It would be absolutely wrong for there to be any sort of deal and there wasn't... There was no grand deal". This is a big lie. There was a deal. It was indeed wrong. We should not just be talking about the Murdochs, we should focus on the heart of the problem: the government.
The Rubicon: The Murdochs and the Conservatives "shared" the code-name ‘Rubicon’ for the BSkyB bid that would have led to its complete takeover by NewsCorp. In an email of 11 January 2011 that would make a classicist shudder, James Murdoch’s Director of Public Affairs even reports a conversation with Jeremy Hunt’s office about “the Rubicon process”... Read more:
http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/anthony-barnett/murdoch-and-big-lie
