The Siege of Wapping

It's an old story. An entrenched vested interest is faced with a new technology which threatens its livelihood. It reacts by attempting to contain the advance, which is flowing around it like a river around a shopping trolley. Eventually, innovation always prevails, mainly because it refuses to fight the battle with the same weapons or on the same field. It fights with the weapons it has created. History records who were the losers.
The printers of Wapping in 1984 are definitely now seen as the losers in the technology war with Rupert Murdoch. And he is seen as the visionary liberator, whose victory over the unions ensured a golden future...to some.
It is surely one of the most historically monumental ironies that this same Murdoch is now frantically erecting barricades in defence of his own brand of corporate Spanish Practices. The Murdoch of the Siege of Wapping now under siege again from the same forces of progress he once posed as the champion of.
Peter Preston, in today's Observer, compares him with Lear, railing against the storm. That is to grant him too much grandeur. He is not even Orwell's Tolstoy, disillusioned by the failure of ideology to deliver happiness and therefore resentful of happiness in others.
He is simply a gigantic hypocrite, another corporate gangster able to deny anything and believe his own lies. Anything to make money and protect and enlarge his power.
Luckily, he is almost as insane as Lear on the heath, in that he cannot accept the inevitable, and is in hysterical denial about his emasculation.
Murdoch Vs The Internet can only see one winner. In 1985 Murdoch backed progress because he saw an empire to be built. Naturally he opposes the same progress which now threatensto demolish it, but that does not make him sane, only more desperate. And so the BBC can expect an even greater campaign against it than ever.
The BBC is embracing internet technology, having invented vital parts of it, and is committed to free access. The scrap between News Incorporated and the BBC is where the deciding punches will be thrown in the battle for free content, and from a British point of view, the battle for a keystone of our cultural identity. We should know the general outcome by the beginning of June next year. When a closely fought general election is over.
But in the meantime, the BBC might take a leaf from the Murdoch book, and win.
There is nothing to stop any Laundromat millionaire from setting up as an internet service provider. The BBC should do this as soon as possible and market the service globally. The package would include access to all the BBCs growing archive of comedies, documentaries, drama, wildlife etc... This income would subsidise the loyal British license payers who would have access to the service by right. Eventually, with even moderate global take-up (Flickr charges £15 a year) The British member of the corporation would be paying a peppercorn sum for a service which would meet all their needs. The scope for innovation is vast.
Naturally the boardrooms will squeal in horror and outrage, but all are going to have to face the facts that the age of the ownership of information is over. That the source of their profits and lifestyles has dried up. So the sooner they choose sides the better. The sensible will decide to use the new approach to encourage the democratisation of creativity. To enable as many users as possible to find and be stimulated by material produced by people, not the brands marketed and distributed by the usual showbiz/media conveyor belt.
The diehards will try to sue the BBC, and try to charge the public money to read about the drunken antics of the D-list. It's almost sad.

THE SUN SAYS - YOUR COUNTRY NEEDS YOU!

The British army has no conscripts, only volunteers, and the Sun is smart enough to know this. And hypocritical enough to cash in on it. So if the country is under threat from Osama and All His Goats, and the majority are as patriotic as The Sun says, why isn't dying to save it good enough for the children of editors and columnists as well as the children of unemployed ship-builders and miners? In the Red Poppy haze of their patriotic rapture, who will be the first Sun columnist to send their boy off to The Front for Queen and Country?
Why isn't conscription the policy of The Sun? Isn't the glory of this country worth it? After all, history shows that when we fight with volunteers, we generally lose, or never win at least. Which is exactly what AlQaida wants; never-ending war.
As loyal patriots The management and editorial team of The Sun, the Mail and all the other Death-Worshipping rags have no alternative but to call for conscription (1,000,000 young people on the dole!) and urge their sons and daughters in university to do set an example to the lower orders and do their gap year in Helmond.
Unless they want to be seen as the profiteering hypocrites they are, of course. And their sickening abuse of the entire Remembrance industry one of the greatest lies sold to the British people yet - that War is always Glorious and the Dead always sacrifice their lives for a cause called Britain. There is no such cause, there is no such glory.

Willkommen, bienvenue, welcome!

The release of the album 'Coming Home' by a trio of serving British soldiers is being celebrated in various ways. And as all the proceeds are to go to charity, this is inevitable. But the undeniable objective result of this and all the other staged PR events by Vera Lynn and the rest is to glorify war and killing, encouraging more children to become hired killers and get themselves killed. This will, in turn, be seen on the streets as no less morally bankrupt than the average inner city gang defending its territory, and will justify the actions of those who choose to become soldiers in their own armies.
In other words, glorifying war destroys the society that wages it, even if it wins. 'Easy Listening' is how the hero boys categorise their justification of this futile, squalid slaughter. Which says it all, really. They have become so desensitised that they simply cannot relate on any human level with the suffering they cause, even to what they laughingly call their 'comrades'.

Willkommen, bienvenue, welcome!
Fremde, etranger, stranger.
Meine dammen und herren!
Leave your troubles outside!
So - life is disappointing? Forget it!
We have no troubles here!
Here War is beautiful.
Killing is beautiful.
The guns are beautiful.
The bombs are beautiful.
Even the bullets are beautiful!
And we are beautiful.
Because we are Heroes.
Dame Vera Lynn and Kathryn Jenkins told us so.
And if you want to be a hero too, then come with us.
Only 17 years old? Bored with computer games?
Can't get a job?
We don't care.
We will give you a big gun and let you shoot it at real people!
And if you get killed, then people in country towns will stand and watch your coffin on the way home.
When you Come Home they will play Coming Home for you.
And people will say:
"There goes a hero."
And so other boys will want to be like you.
And the war will go on forever.
And that will be beautiful...

(apologies to Fred Ebb)




"Coming home", "The Soldiers". Sgt Maj Gary Chilton, Sgt Richie Maddocks and L/Cpl Ryan Idzi

Griffin Gets Stuffed

Just a few points about last night's grotesque performance by the fascist leader on Question Time.

1) Most of his howling madness was no surprise to some. Take his bonkers 2007 defence of racism on Newsnight when he accused the BBC of "Demonising racism". Bewildered presenter Gavin Estler couldn't help blurting out:
"What? There's a good side to racism?"
To which Griffin, aware of his slip, muttered something incoherent about the word very 'racism' being a fiendish Trotskyite plot to do something or other. The BBC being naturally in league with Trotsky.

2) If it wasn't for YouTube, the panel would have been stymied. Thank god for web2, it may live up to its political promise yet. Most panellists used the online archive of Griffin in more candid times to beat him to the ground. He had no hiding place, and could only grin like a teenager caught wanking.

3) Griffin at least did history a service by forcing an examination of the real Churchill as opposed to the myth. His history as an early enthusiast for enforced eugenic sterilisation, and his ordering troops to open fire on striking Welsh miners, and his determination to keep the disgusting, random, health system which almost lost us the war against fascism should all be forced down the throats of those who idolise him. Churchill's political reality is far nearer to fascism than many would like to admit. And his character much closer to the 'petrified adolescent' of Bevan's famous insult.

4) Why does Griffin single out fundamentalist Islam as the only misogynist religious sect? At that level, most religions are. If he was honest about women's rights, he would lead a secular party which highlighted the obscenities of all Bronze Age cosmologies. Just as if he was honest about Britain's 'ethnicity' he would merely come clean and admit that he doesn't like people who don't have white skin.

5) All racists and fascists are pathologically suppressing their true sexuality, so his reaction to two men kissing is not a surprise.

6) Fascism is always result of capitalism in crisis, not immigrants or any other scapegoat, and not the fault of evil or nasty people. The design faults of the capitalist class-system are why the BNP has seats on local councils and the European Parliament they despise, and is on TV now.
The related question from the audience was:

'Has the BNP benefited from the government's flawed immigration policy?'

A leading question which would be allowed in any court. But ignoring the twisted, 'when-did-you-stop-beating-your-wife' nature of the question, the simple answer is,

No, fascism has always benefited by the lies and hatred it has spread about immigrants, which is its job; and from the support it has garnered from the mainstream media in this campaign of fear. So the Daily Mail and the rest of the gutter press are now, just as they were in the 30's, the handmaidens of fascist thuggery.

7) The BBC can never win. Two weeks ago, the profit-crazed tabloids were demanding the fascists 'Right' to be on QT. When they granted it, they were reviled for seeking an audience. When it got that audience, it was reviled, but if nobody had watched, it would also be in the dock.
This QT has also been attacked by apologists for fascism as not being a 'normal' edition. That it was a Nick Griffin show. A bearpit, designed to humiliate him.
What these people are in fact saying is that fascism is a normal political opinion, and not a sickness. That is the real measure of the depths of Britain's moral degradation.
Fascism isn't normal, it is disgusting and alien to civilised values. If there has been an Aztec High Priest on QT, it would not have been 'normal' either. So when disgusting values are given airtime, as demanded by theBritish media for the last six months, it is entirely proper that they are not treated as normal, but scrutinised and challenged to everyone's satisfaction.
Griffin had plenty of room to defend his sect, he failed. He should now take the hint and get back to his internet bunker with his Nazi memorabilia before making an even bigger fool of himself. And the disturbed sheep who need his leadership should try choosing life.
The trouble with these sheep is that now their shepherd has been shown up as an idiot, and his lies unmasked, they will completely abandon his nicely-nicely approach, and return to their usual thuggery with relish. The PR spin has failed, so there will be reprisals for their defeat on the BBC, organised attacks in sensistive areas, and random attacks by individuals. The amount of race-hate violence will increase. So the price of the BNPs exposure and subsequent humiliation will be paid by ordinary british black and asian people.
The BNP are a sick, frightened little sect with a paranoid fear of difference. Unfortunately, times like these foster such diseases. That is the design flaw in capitalism.
The electoral reality, given the state of the parties in Westminster, and the transparency of Cameron, and the rise of UKIP, is that the suckers prepared to vote BNP out of adolescent spite will be voting for another 5 years of Gordon Brown.
Is that what they want? Then that's what'll happen.

BNP faces reality.

Private Parasites on the NHS

In the light of recent interest in the treatment of NHS staff by private clinics, I have a question which someone might be able to answer, and for which I have been seeking an answer for a long time.
How many of its own staff does the private health industry actually train?
The implications are obvious. Training staff is a very expensive business, especially health staff. If BUPA and the rest are allowed to simply poach staff trained at the taxpayers expense, we are subsidising the Gout'n'Bunion trade to an alarming degree, and the NHS patients are suffering real hardhsip to pay for the luxury and profits of a parasitic, profit-driven, exclusive health hotel chain.
Surely the proper policy would be to impose a training levy on every member of staff trained by the taxpayer.
Whether that would cause BUPA to shrivel back to its cave in Harley Street with its core clientelle of ex-majors and 1930's dowager countesses I really couldn't say. But then I couldn't care either.
But as a taxpayer, I care a lot. and as someone who will get sick one day I care even more.
Strangely, those who make the most noise about tax, the redneck tories and other weirdoes, don't care how much of the decent, hard-earned British tax is lavished on these parasites. Why? Because like all elitists, they are prepared to see the majority suffer to preserve, or even enhance the luxury of the few. Their objective is not to reduce the amount of suffering, but to increase the pleasure for those aty the peak of the hierarchy. It is their so-called Doctrine of Excellence, which is always at the expense of decent standards for everyone else.

Cameron's Sanity. Cause For Concern.

When he attacks the state for causing the 2008 Crunch, as he did in his Manchester Conference speech, Diddy David Cameron is either a crook or an idiot. If he knows the truth, that it was the unfettered greed of the markets and the retreat of the state which caused the damage, he is a crook out to decieve the British public for his own reasons, and plunge the recovering economy into a depression. If he doesn't know this basic truth, agreed by all respectable economists and politicians, and believes that politicians ran the banks, he is an idiot.
Either way he is not fit to run a skateboard, let alone a country. In fact, his inversion of the real life raises serious questions about his sanity.
If this is what tory mentality has shrivelled away to, it is not a real surprise, merely their inevitable historic destiny. In the face of the scrutiny of the global information revolution, and the fury of global financialism, their inbred sham species of politics has finally been revealed as the form of anti-social psychosis it always was. Cameron is as Mad as Markets, which burns crops while millions starve.

The Glorious Bendy Bus

Why do the tories and other fat misanthropists hate the bendy bus? Because it is simply more sociable, more convenient for mothers with prams and other people with burdens to transport, faster, and causes less stress to the people who use it, who are then are less likely to get cars and become part of that atomised, anti-social, polluting sect. People talk to each other on them, which to the Thatcher generation is unthinkable. They might actually start liking each other!
The access and seating arrangements of the articulated bus are far superior to the routemaster, providing speedier stops, and mixing age-groups together face to face, which is why there are very few school fights on them, unlike the upstairs nightmare world of the double decker - reeling from side to side as it attempts to hurl its bulk around London's streets. Which raises the whole question of manoeuvrability. When cornering, the double decker throws all its upstairs load across the turn, and when cutting that corner, endangers any cyclist at the cusp far more than the Bendy, which goes around corners as if on rails, leaving more space alongside the kerb, as it was intended to.
The Bendy Bus is the epitome of social transport. Those who say it 'has no soul' and other imbecilities, are obviously afraid of the human face, which the layout of the Bendy encourages contact with, and don't mind waiting for and queueing and shoving to get on to the bottle-neck Routemaster, with its upstairs ghetto for squabbling schoolkids and greasy chicken remains. Still less have they tried to get a pram or shopping trolley on a bus. In other words, they are a bunch of ignorant idiots, in hock to a sentimental vision of tourist Designer London and willing to make working Londoners pay for their fantasy.
Boris has lied continually about this one, and used fear to gain political advantage.
Despicable. But he won't be around much longer. This fake mayor won't stand for re-election, and will never be prime minister either, having being consigned to history by some characteristic bungle or other before that can happen. In which case the country will be spared London's experience of being merely a step in Johnson's career. A plaything of an idle year or two.
His mad dictator hero, Pericles, needed to resort to war and the suppression of science to maintain his political power. Johnson can only hope he can buy himself a position in a Cameroon Cabinet as defence minister, and send as many British soldiers as he can to their deaths to further his ambitions.
And according to the figures, the Bendy bus will not be scrapped either. If, that is, Johnson is serious about his rigorous spending plans. If, that is, he is around much longer.
This is the pug ugly pretender to the classic, 'On The Buses' Routemaster.
Apart from the pumpkin-jowled village-idiot profile, notice how the only view is of the backs of people's heads. There is no chance for casual social interaction whatsoever. The ultimate alienation-mobile. This could be designed as a way of deterring people from using buses.
And who is going to police the upstairs fare-dodging rumpus-room? The conductor will be chasing up and down those stairs after every junction as scallies try to hop on undetected. The wiseguys who, when they get upstairs, play the innocent as the conductor asks:'Any more fares?'
I know, because I was that Boy.
And it will still take longer to complete its route than the bendy, because there will be only one way of getting on at a stop, without fighting against a tide of bodies. So loading will take just as long as it does for the current DD's.
The only bonus will be the thrill of watching people run in vain for the platform, or fall off it.
Again, nothing which would tend to make people nicer in any way, which good design should, and which, believe it or not, in its small way, the Bendy Bus does.

Photoshop Phascism

I once did some casual imaging for a new magazine targeted at the rapidly emerging hip Asian British middle classes. The worker next me was assiduously transforming a caucasian model into an asian one. Apparently, there were simply not enough Asian models available due to cultural and religious traditions which are not in sympthy with the requirements of the glamour industry. So Photoshop was used to alter the hue and darkness of the skin tone, neatly undermining petty cultural barriers to trade, and possibly even altering those cultural norms by exposure.
The manipulation of images for commercial purposes is nothing new, and neither is the industrial exploitation of women. Photoshop makes the process easier and cheaper than ever, and is used for all kinds of remedial work which once would have been done in the darkroom or on the lightbox or layout table. So the boundaries of manipulation are very blurred. The entire mood of a landscape can be altered by darkening the sky, as many film photographers used to do. So my guess is that any legislation to discourage the promotion of fascistic body ideals will end up entangled in miles of legalistic wrangling.
Far better to legislate that all images in which the dimensions of any part of the model have been altered should be credited as an Artwork rather than a photograph.
Better still to tax all pornographic, degrading images of women off our streets and screens entirely. But that's apparently a gross abuse of the human rights of the advertising industry to make fortunes from the humiliation and abuse of many. And they're generally prepared to go to the european Court of Human Rights to prove it. As they did when Sweden banned junk food ads on children's TV.

Murdoch In Terror

The infantile demand by Rupert Murdoch that the internet play by his rules, and every site charge to read stories of drunken celebrities, is the last gasp in his futile attempt to sabotage the BBC. He realises that sooner or later, the penny will drop among the dimwits at broadcasting house, and they will start charging their overseas audience, just as they charge their British one. When they do that, and make some serious progresses in making their vault of superior content available online, the emperor's clothes of the Sky empire will be obvious.
Murdoch knows that his content is inferior, and that he does not produce any content, unlike the BBC. And that he no longer knows how to make money from newspaper or internet advertising, so mass-subscription is the only model he can think of. He imagines that people will pay to maintain MySpace accounts when there are a dozen other platforms which can do the job as well. He imagines that people will actually pay to read the Sun online... Anyone as deluded as that is clearly agitated about something, and what Murdoch has to be agitated about is the prospect of the BBC beating him at his own game. Namely, by charging a tiny global fee for downloads of all the content it controls. British licence payers would naturally be exempt from this charge, and the revenue would be used to offset and defend the licence fee - which is the cultural bastion Murdoch hates most. It stands between him and total domination by guaranteeing the unprofitable.
Unfortunately, his paranoia is based on a belief that the BBC understands its own power. Sadly, this is still not true. The BBC is still a cowering, weak-kneed cringeing animal, desperate not to offend the Daily Mail, or seem to be treading on the profiteers' toes.

Best Prices for Gold

Hit By The Credit Crunch?
Children Showing Signs of Rickets?
Need a backstreet abortion?
Can't decide between swallowing bleach and jumping in the canal?
SELL US YOUR GOLD
Send your holy wedding band to
POPTHEWEASEL.CON
NOW
and get an assured cash loan.
We even send you a genuine brassite ring to camouflage your shame that's
YOURS TO KEEP!
Turn off the gas oven - Turn the mocking symbol of your shattered dreams into temporary cash relief from your degradation by contacting
POPTHEWEASEL.CON
NOW
(best prices however pathetically slender the item)

Christianity on Trial

In a few minutes, Kenny McAskill, the justice secretary for Scotland. will be bullied into backtracking on the act of forthright Christianity he took in releasing the dying Lockerbie bomber, Al Megrahi.
The advice of all true Christians would be to not give an inch. The Old Testament vengeance demanded by the mass media and the incoherent Mrs Clinton is not appropriate or productive in dealing with crime or terrorism in the C21st century.
As the BBC Scotland poll revealed today, ordinary people are nicer than their leaders. And in spite of its antiquated nationalism, the Scottish justice system has almost conformed to stereotype in its blunt application of christian principles to politics. The fact that the USA and the gutter media demand gratification for un-Christian appetites is their problem, not Scotland's.
The irony of this affair is that it outrages those who should be most welcoming of it, namely, the most vocal Christians. It reveals how little Christianity has actually penetrated in 2,000 years, as most of those who call themselves Christians, and demand its inviolable status as the national British religion, are still behaving according to Leviticus not the Sermon on the Mount.
Al McGrachie is about to suffer a painful death, much to the gratification of some, it seems. It would have been even more amusing to them to think of him in pain and in prison, and being denied that pleasure is painful to them, but that just reveals their depraved lack of Christian charity, I would have thought - speaking as someone who doesn't have an imaginary friend at all, let alone one shared with millions of others.
This is another example of PR Politics Gone Mad. Brown, loathe him or hate him, is being judged on how long it takes to give an opinion which, politically, isn't his to give.
And the line that McAskill's decision outraged some 'silent majority' isn't born out by the response of Scots on BBC Radio Scotland.

"Caller after caller supported MacAskill and were scathing of both the American intervention and the behaviour of the likes of Iain Gray and Jack McConnell."

Which makes this 'scandal' another shameful fabrication built on the commercial need to generate hate over compassion, and nothing to do with offering any kind of support to those who suffered as a result of the Lockerbie bombing. In fact, it is a cynical exploitation of their pain. In spite of this, the Lockerbie families are still able to display a level of humanity beyond the understanding of most polticians and commentators:

But, in fact, many Lockerbie families believe that Megrahi was wrongly convicted. Martin Cadman, who lost a son in the disaster, said the trial was “a farce” and that the release of Megrahi was “just righting a wrong.” Jim Swire, who lost a daughter, said, “As time goes by it will become clear that he had nothing to do with it.”

This hysteria is another triumph for PR politics, hand in hand with the commercial need to generate hate before compassion.
The point of compassion is that you don't demand anything in return, and that if you only extend it to the Mother Teresa of this world, it isn't compassion at all but tax-deductable guilt-relief. So the world of those who cannot understand this New Testament decision is one in which compassion always has a price-tag. One in which the sucker is never given an even break. The kind of world which has created an intractible war in which innocent travellers are blown from the sky, and peasant families disintegrated from 10,000 feet by laser guided bombs powerful enough to have destroyed Jericho in one hit.

* The Scotsman

Afghanistan. The Children's Crusade

There are chilling similarities between the death of Princess Diana and the latest grief campaign by those who support the idea of sending children to die in Afghanistan for the political causes of the old and cynical. In both cases, the mourners abetted the deaths they are celebrating. Diana Spencer was elevated above her capacity to live a normal life by the market for cheap celebrity magazines. Squaddies fresh from the dole queues on their way to squalid roadside deaths in Afghanistan are partly encouraged by the reception their dead colleagues are getting every day. Both sects need the deaths of others for some strange emotional reasons of their own, but the obvious nett effect of all the enforced solemnity and hymn-singing to lowered union jacks is the glorification of war, and more confused, jobless, macho-struck teenagers sent to their graves.
Every day this week, British TV has been draped in the images of dead soldiers, and processions and church services in their memory. The youngest to die, out of the ten who have been sacrificed in the last ten days, was 18 years old. Hardly old enough to vote, yet apparently old enough to have a knowledge of global politics mature enough to make the informed decision to lay down his life for Gordon Brown. No 18 year old can be allowed to make that decision, no matter who is the leader, or how much poverty the potential recruit is escaping from.
If children were prevented, rather than actively encouraged, from making this decision until they were old enough to know what they were doing, wars would be much harder to fight. Whether that would stop them buying the ultimate con of God & Country, only time will tell.

Raining Gold.

During the worst bombing of Vietnam, one folk-tale was that a commander of the Vietcong had told a western reporter that if the Americans had bombed with fridges and TVs they would have won the war.
It was obvious from the launch of the first $30 million Cruise missile in Afghanistan that the best way to eradicate the Taliban was to load a single transporter with especially minted gold coins, and parachute them over the entire country. For the cost of one or two cruise attacks, the entire country could have been carpeted in gold like a scene from tale by Scheherazade.
Apart from instantly destroying the currency system of the taliban state, the massive injection of spending power would instantly elevate may labouring peasants to the level of the aspiring middle class, with hopes which did not need the taliban and their goats and Kalashnikovs. It is hard to imagine mothers and fathers in such a fairytale wanting to send their children to die for the benefit of a few rich and powerful men. Just as it is hard to imagine any but a few slaves in the Alabama cottonfields in 1850 believing that their freedom was anything but a fairytale.
Fairytales sometimes come true.

Wapping-gate Day 2. The Andrew Neil Red Plot

Like the bankers last year, and the politicians last month, News International is today peddling the Rotten Apple theory, but most industry insiders, including Andrew Neil, think it's inconceivable that only a few rogue hacks were involved.
Those with a lot to lose, like Kelvin MacKenzie, think former Sunday Times editor Andrew Neil is at the heart of a dastardly commie plot. Which only goes to show the decrepit state of the former Sun editor's political compass, and how little attention we should therefore pay to his ravings. He thinks everything is a red plot.
Meanwhile, the expected legal action is brewing. The News of the World has spent a long time making and selling enemies. Hard, professional fighters like Vanessa Phelps and Max Clifford. I can't see mercy in their eyes, only the greed and vengeance which is at the heart of the Sun's value-system. Those who live by the sword.... etc etc
The Sun's messageboards does not seem to allow a dedicated thread on the subject. As predicted by other posters, mine was removed at some point before or after the long shut down of the site, which opened again today.
'Wapping-gate Day 2' is now running as a condensed version of this post (nothing blue) on Sun Online. But for how long only the teenagers moderating the board know.

SUN COLLAPSES UNDER WAPPING GATE SCANDAL

Try to have your say about WappingGate on your favourite fabulous soaraway Currant Bun website, and all you get are the words:

SORRY!

MY Sun is temporarily unavailable

We monitor the site 24/7 and an engineer has already been called.

We should be back very shortly.

Thank you for your patience,

No doubt Sun readers overwhelmed the site with their support.

GOTCHA!

'Murdoch Papers Use Criminal Methods to Get Stories'

'Murdoch Papers Use Criminal Methods to Get Stories'

Shame that it won't be Jon Gaunt or Murdoch going to jail. Still, it's a start.
After the bankers and politicians, now it's the the turn of the press to get knocked off its high horse. And who would complain about those tax-avoiding, expenses-inflating fatsos getting a kicking?
As that agent of the Devil, the Guardian reports:

"The evidence also poses difficult questions for:
• David Cameron's director of communications, Andy Coulson, who was deputy editor and then editor of the News of the World when, the suppressed evidence shows, journalists for whom he was responsible were engaging in hundreds of apparently illegal acts
• Murdoch executives who, albeit in good faith, have misled a parliamentary select committee, the Press Complaints Commission and the public
• The Metropolitan police, who did not alert all those whose phones were targeted, and the Crown Prosecution Service, which did not pursue all possible charges against News Group personnel"

There will be a flood of legal action by the likes of John Prescott, who was allegedly spied on for years. This is good news. Not because Murdoch and his Empire of Lies deserve to be torched with lasers and the ground beneath drenched in Nitric acid to prevent any vestiges of its spoor from surviving. And not even because it buys some breathing space for the BBC in its constant battle for civilised decency against the barbarians of Wapping, Teacosy England and the Mary Whitehouse Memorial Society. But because it is the first step in debunking the so-called Fourth Estate. The professional lie machine which has been riding its moral horse pretty high for a long time and which is as much to blame for the mess we're now in as anyone - including bankers and politicians.
The Wapping Spin Machine has to make money. And the way to make money in this primitive competitive economic system we endure is at the expense of others. Greed is good, but not practicable without liberal doses of hate. Too little hate would make us share too much, and there would not be enough greed at work either to run a newspaper like the Sun, or for its relentless message of conflict to be marketable. So it is also in the interest of the gutter press to make us hate each other as much as possible. Naturally, we find it easier to trample on colleagues we dislike than those we feel natural human sympathy for. Hate is a skill which needs constant practice. So every piece of dirt the News of the world and the Daily Mail can unearth, by whatever methods, and use to exercise the hate glands of the nation, is just money in the bank. If their proprietors weren't such gigantic hypocrites, every redtop masthead would brag about how it supplies the capitalist system with the anger and confusion it needs to keep going.
The allegations made yesterday involve thousands of victims. As even Homer Simpson would say; I'm no fancy city lawyer, but that suggests a class action to me.
I wish I was on the News of the World's hack-list, I could do with a cool million or two. But more significantly, in the interest of being 'Fair and Balanced' I would like to know the nett political effect of the entire alleged operation. If the political smears which eventually emerged are all lined up against the stories which were supressed, which side comes out least effected (I wonder)?
In other words, if these allegations are proven, which they will be, just how much do Rupert Murdoch's mouthpieces manipulate the British political system, and just how illegal are their methods? More illegal than the 'scandals' of the politicians on the redtop hitlists, with their scandalous expenses claims for toilet seats and taxi rides? Probably. Which raises the entire question again of the hidden Wapping archive.
If the gutter press has a right (in the public interest) to spy on elected politicians, supermodels and drunken musicians, why shouldn't the nation have a right to know what information Wapping holds on all of us? And to know (in our interest) which information finds its way onto the front pages and which is swiftly hidden in the lead-lined vaults under Fortress Wapping, never to be seen again.
Since media corporations have become unelected fiefdoms with laws of their own, which exert huge political and economic power, and now, it emerges, have the capacity to spy on all of us, it is time they came under the same sort of scrutiny and regulation which other bodies of the same power and influence have to endure. In practise this might well mean disclosing all hidden archives of images and other data under amended Freedom of Information law. Then we might discover how many stories the media have suppressed over the years, what their political implications might have been, and even who killed Blair Peach. 'Public interest' my arse.
Then we would know how 'Fair and Balanced' they have been, and even why.
The price might well be to discover just how widespread this abuse of power has become - because if the hacks at the News of the World can do it, there is no reason why their counterparts in other newspapers can't. We might have to face the systemic sleaze of a profit-driven media market, which will not be a pretty sight. But that would be a price most decent people would be prepared to pay.