George Monbiot;' After urging land reform I now know the brute power of our billionaire press
All billionaires want
the same thing – a world that works for them. For many, this means a world in
which they are scarcely taxed and scarcely regulated; where labour is cheap and
the planet can be used as a dustbin; where they can flit between tax havens and
secrecy regimes, using the Earth’s surface as a speculative gaming board,
extracting profits and dumping costs. The world that works for them works
against us.
So how, in nominal
democracies, do they get what they want? They fund political parties and lobby
groups, set up fake grassroots (Astroturf) campaigns and finance social media ads. But above all,
they buy newspapers and television stations. The widespread hope and
expectation a few years ago was that, in the internet age, news controlled by
billionaires would be replaced by news controlled by the people: social media
would break their grip. But social media is instead dominated by stories the
billionaire press generates. As their crucial role in promoting Nigel Farage,
Brexit and Boris Johnson suggests, the newspapers are as powerful as ever.
They use this power
not only to promote the billionaires’ favoured people and ideas, but also to
shut down change before it happens. They deploy their attack dogs to take down
anyone who challenges the programme. It is one thing to know this. It is
another to experience it. A month ago I and six others published a report
commissioned by the Labour party called Land for the Many. It proposed
a set of policies that would be of immense benefit to the great
majority of Britain’s people: ensuring that everyone has a good, affordable
home; improving public amenities; shifting tax from ordinary people towards the
immensely rich; protecting the living world; and enhancing public control over
the decisions that affect our lives. We showed how the billionaires and other
oligarchs could be put back in their boxes.
The result has
been four extraordinary weeks of attacks in the Mail, Express,
Sun, Times and Telegraph. Our contention that oligarchic power is rooted in the
ownership and control of land has been amply vindicated by the response of
oligarchic power. Some of these reports
peddle flat-out falsehoods... read more:
