The UK’s biggest bank has so far made around £100 million by providing loans and services to some of the most destructive logging companies in the world, often in violation of its own policies.
Please sign the public petition to HSBC CEO Stuart Gulliver calling for the bank to stop profiting from the disappearing rainforests of Borneo. We can stop this.
Having endured another few days of bleating about 300 y of the ‘free’ press, I’m impelled to ask ‘free’ from what/whom? ‘Free’ from their super-wealthy owners? ‘Free’ from their corporate links? ‘Free’ from the diktats of their advertisers? ‘Free’ from partisan political reporting?
And for whom, are they ‘free’?
We are told that our democracy depends on access to the ‘free’ press … but with notable exceptions, the mainstream media (MSM) just reflects the obvious existing power structures.
Of the 21 national daily and Sunday titles – 62% support the Conservatives; 19%, the Liberal Democrats or centre-left; 14% are social-democratic and only The Morning Star could be said to report a left-wing agenda. Whilst the Mirror group consistently supports the Labour party, the Guardian has always been a Liberal paper with a fair sprinkling of Labour-supporting articles. This spread is hardly a reflection of the opinion polls and there is virtually no representation to the left of what is perceived to be the ‘centre’ ground.
In addition, it seems obvious that rather than inform:
The real mass media are basically trying to divert people. Let them do something else, but don’t bother us (us being the people who run the show)…. Let everybody be crazed about professional sports or sex scandals or the personalities and their problems or something like that. (1)
And who are the journalists feeding their copy into the ‘free’ press? Over 50% were privately educated unlike 93% of the general public … and how many attended the incestuous, hot-house of Oxbridge, being educated and socialising with the very politicians, judges, public ‘intellectuals’ and the super-rich who constitute the ‘power elite’, that they, as journalists, are supposed to hold to account?
Those of you who have been through college know that the educational system is very highly geared to rewarding conformity and obedience; if you don’t do that, you are a troublemaker. So, it is kind of a filtering device which ends up with people who really honestly (they aren’t lying) internalize the framework of belief and attitudes of the surrounding power system in the society….
[Journalists] say, quite correctly, “nobody ever tells me what to write. I write anything I like. All this business about pressures and constraints is nonsense because I’m never under any pressure.” Which is completely true, but the point is that they wouldn’t be there unless they had already demonstrated that nobody has to tell them what to write because they are going say the right thing. … The same is mostly true of university faculty in the more ideological disciplines. They have been through the socialization system. (1)
Moreover, all of the above, presupposes that there is an adequate level of competence, knowledge base and honest intent from journalists and their editors … the questioning of which led to the Leveson judicial review. Chris Dillow at Stumbling and Mumbling highlights this, when he refutes the Daily Mail’s claim, … that benefit spending accounts for 24.2% of “Britain’s total income” is as truthful as we’d expect from the Mail – which is to say ‘utter bollocks.’ (2)
Executive editor and editorial director of Guardian Sustainable Business, Jo Confino asks the question ‘Why are journalists failing to hold firms to account over sustainability?’ He answers himself: ‘Ownership structures and old-fashioned thinking means social and environmental performance is not challenged by the media.’ (3)
However, with a valiant attempt at optimism, he also writes:
One of the reasons I work at the Guardian is because I believe we are different…. The simple truth is that the media sector can be either part of the solution or part of the problem. At the moment, it is largely the latter, overwhelming us with tittle tattle and further embedding a culture of consumption.
What comes to mind is the image of the orchestra playing ragtime and waltzes as the Titanic started to sink.
Those with disability and long-term illness can certainly identify with the description of the Titanic sinking, particularly when faced with the further £10bn of Welfare cuts which is likely to be included in George Osborne’s Autumn Review.
The current negative and scurrilous reporting about benefits and benefit claimants is nothing short of scandalous. Apart from Polly Toynbee in the Guardian, there has been virtually no comprehensive or rigorous analysis of the likely impacts of the Welfare Reform bill and the Universal Benefits programme in the ‘free’ press.
Turn2us commissioned a major academic research study assessing the impact of stigma and other social influences on those applying for benefits. The study’s analysis of media coverage of benefits, in national newspapers (1995 to 2011), found that while newspapers contained both positive and negative representations of claimants, the content of press stories was indeed skewed towards negative representations. Furthermore, they found that both the language and content of ‘negative’ coverage had changed substantially over time.
While fraud remains very important in negative coverage, articles are much more likely now to refer to lack of reciprocity and effort on the part of claimants than they were previously.(4)
In other words, the contents of recent negative press stories were skewed towards the Tory/LD’s agenda which is essentially the Victorian cliché of ‘deserving, hardworking families’ and an ‘undeserving, feckless poor’. It is the ‘fault’ of the unemployed for not having a job. It is suggested that they are lazy, scrounging and taking society for a ‘ride’ whilst those on Disability benefits are portrayed as probably ‘swinging the lead’.
However, it is a simple matter for journalists to determine the reality of these charges. Government’s own figures estimate benefit fraud at less than 0.5%; the numbers seeking work are five times the number of vacancies; most benefit claimants have been employed and paid into the system; and that overwhelmingly people in receipt of housing benefit are in work, albeit low-waged.
Michael Meacher writes that the proper role and rationale of a free press is to maintain a properly functioning democracy:
…its real objectives should be twofold: to keep the electorate fully informed about the key issues that affect Britain and thus to provide a genuine national agenda, and secondly to speak truth to power and thus to lay the foundations for systematically holding the government of the day to account. With some honourable exceptions Britain’s media have fallen far short of these democratic responsibilities. (5)
Clearly, with respect to Benefits and Welfare reform, our so-called ‘free’ press has in large part failed on both counts. Similarly, Jo Confino finds the press failing to hold firms to account over sustainability, and this is seems likely to be representative of criticism across the whole spectrum of political reporting.
Michael Meacher warns:
Prepare for weeks of vilification of Leveson and the lampooning of his position as the voice of censorship. We are already seeing that when it comes to the struggle for power and the capacity for dominance over the State and its ideology, the methods are ruthless, the lies are vicious, the cries of the victims and the mistreated count for very little. (6)
Two things are clear. Firstly, that Cameron believes that it is imperative to back the press barons if he is to stand any chance of winning in 2015. Secondly, that there are very good reason why corporations like News International and super-wealthy individuals like the Barclay brothers, want to own papers in spite of their lack of profitability. The reason has nothing to do with the romance of ‘loving newspapers’ or ‘newspapers being in their blood’. It has everything to do with holding the power to intimidate (and control) politicians, and with their capacity to set the news agenda:
“Even if the [media] does not mold our every opinion, it does mold our opinion visibility; it can frame the perceptual limits around which our opinions take shape. Here may lie the most important effect of the news media: they set the agenda for the rest of us, choosing what to emphasize and what to ignore or suppress, in effect, organizing much of our political world for us. The media may not always be able to tell us what to think, but they are strikingly successful in telling us what to think about … the media teach us tunnel vision conditioning us to perceive the problems of society as isolated particulars, thereby stunting our critical vision. Larger casualties are reduced to immediately distinct events, while the linkages of wealth, power and policy go unreported or are buried under a congestion of surface impressions and personalities.
In sum, the media set the limits on public discourse. They may not always mold opinion, but they do not always have to. It is enough that they create opinion visibility, giving legitimacy to certain views and illegitimacy to others … This power to determine the issue agenda, the information flow, and the parameters of political debate so that it extends from ultra-right to no further than moderate center is, if not total, still totally awesome.”
Inventing Reality Michael Parenti
I have no doubt that Leveson is sincere in wanting a free press in the public interest, and that he was at all times considering the public interest. However, my doubt is that a truly ‘free’ press can be constituted when the crucial issues of ownership and concentration of ownership are ignored (7) – regardless of whether it has statutory underpinning or not. Furthermore, the proposal is that it will be regulated by another committee, which will doubtless comprise ‘the great and the good’, albeit from the non-media power elite… so expect more of the same homogeneity of attitudes and assumptions.
If governments really took the democratic role of the local and national press seriously, it would not rely on a ‘market’ solution as the means of ‘keeping the electorate fully informed about the key issues that affect Britain, providing a genuine national agenda, and to speak truth to power’. It is the ‘market’ which is putting both the MSM and local media under enormous staffing and financial pressures. As Nick Davies writes in his book ‘Flat Earth news’… ‘the average Fleet Street journalist now is filling three times as much space as he or she was in 1985′.
Where once journalists were active gatherers of news, now they have generally become mere passive processors of unchecked, second-hand material, much of it contrived by PR to serve some political or commercial interest. Not journalists, but churnalists. An industry whose primary task is to filter out falsehood has become so vulnerable to manipulation that it is now involved in the mass production of falsehood, distortion and propaganda. (8)
There is, therefore, a good democratic case for some sort of arms-length government funding, particularly of local newspapers… the obvious comparison is with the BBC but given its current inadequacies (9)(10), I would prefer comparison with the World Service which at least offers some background information and a critique of current economic dogma. I would also argue for the political perspective of individual journalists and the newspaper to be indicated at the beginning of every article. This could easily be achieved by using the political compass (11) and would place their writing within its subjective context.
How would we know if the press was moving in the right direction? That’s easy. When we read that there are alternatives to Mrs Thatcher’s neoclassical economics. That climate warming is not some sort of optional faith-based belief system but a reality which needs to be urgently addressed. And that it was a banking crisis, not government spending which increased the national debt and furthermore, we do not need to borrow from private banks to create full employment.
In the meantime, let’s just agree to stop confusing the issue by calling the current state of the press ‘free’.
Nearly 200 governments have gathered in Doha, Qatar, for two weeks of talks aimed at forging an agreement on the climate. Governments have until 2015 to draw up a binding treaty, the first since the 1997 Kyoto protocol, to cut greenhouse gas emissions and avoid dangerous global warming.
In the past few weeks alone, authorities including the World Bank and the International Energy Agency have warned that the world is heading for unprecedented warming – of between 4C and 6C – if current trends are not reversed.
In the UK, we have our own, home-grown disaster capitalists. We are told of the looming energy short-fall which necessitates building nuclear power stations and granting licenses for gas fracking. In the name of ‘creating growth’, there are Beecroft proposals for removing employee protection, ‘no-fault dismissal’ and George Osborne’s plans for an “employee-owner” scheme. The supposed necessity of reducing the so-called structural deficit provides the imperative for privatisation of the NHS and other public services, together with horrifying cuts in benefits to the disabled and chronically sick. And at the same time George Osborne has reduced of corporation tax to 24%, thereby increasing the structural deficit.
The facts are that with current technology, 6 hours of sunlight falling on the world’s deserts could meet global energy needs for an entire year (Desertec). The UK should be a net exporter of electricity with its natural resources of tidal current, wave, wind and solar. So why is George Osborne so opposed to renewable energy? Follow the money!
At 6 am. this morning 10 protestors blockaded access to EDF energy’s nuclear sites at Hinkley Point, preventing the morning shift from starting work. Four people in arm-locks formed a barrier across the main access road at Wick Moor Drove in a bid to prevent further ground clearance work at the planned Hinkley C site and to protest at EDF’s plan to extend the life of ageing reactors at the Hinkley B station.
Sitting beneath a banner saying “Nuclear Power – not worth the risk”, Bristol tree-surgeon Zoe Smith said, “We want the destruction of land at the proposed Hinkley C site to stop. EDF still don’t have planning permission for the new nuclear plant, the governments energy policy is in tatters. With Centrica pulling out and the long awaited Electricity Reform Act delayed, there is not even enough investment to finish the project. If the Tories fix the electricity price for nuclear so that the project can go ahead it will leave a radioactive waste dump here for hundreds of years.” The early morning blockade caused long tailbacks for scores of workers contracted in to perform maintenance work on the the existing reactors at Hinkley B, EDF have signalled their intention to re-licence the reactor again in 2016.
Bridgwater mum Nikki Clark from South West Against Nuclear said, “Not only do we not need new nuclear, we certainly don’t need to extend the life of the existing reactors even further. Just this year alone reactor no 4 in the B station has scrammed at least three times. EDF like to call these emergency shutdowns ‘unplanned outages’ , but this deliberately conceals the fact that these ageing
reactors are now in a dangerous condition. In 2008 the regulators threatened British Energy with closure of the site. The reactors do not have any fewer cracks in the graphite core now than they did then. Do we have to have our own Fukushima here in Somerset before we abandon this insanity and embrace a renewables revolution in the UK?”
Stop Hinkley spokesperson Theo Simon said, “We support this protest. New nuclear is dead in the water. We need public investment in a renewables revolution which could create a million climate jobs and cut energy bills through a programme of home insulation and energy-efficiency. With its massive marine energy resource, West Somerset is perfectly placed to lead the way in renewables, but EDF’s plans would turn it into a toxic waste dump for our grandchildren.”
Campaigns such as this are necessary to alert the public, where mainstream media fails us. Dirty Fossil Fuels and wasteful use of energy is churning out carbon dioxide at levels which is catastrophic for the planet. The scientific evidence is clear. To deny it is foolish, and those responsible for funding the argument against fossil fuels are the most foolish of all. The corporate power is nothing – against the power of nature which they seek to deny. Labour Leader Ed Miliband knows this, and it will be at the forefront of Labour’s manifesto. The Liberal Party have sold out any pretence for green issues, and I am at a loss to understand why the Green Party in my constituency stood down at the General Election in favour of the LibDems who support this government. The Coalition government’s policies are short-sighted and foolish. Like ostriches, they seek to deny the truth, and like headless chickens, they panic but will not address the issue. I believe the Labour Party are committed to addressing Climate Change.
“David Cameron promised that this government would be the greenest government ever. But this government is not up to the task. We now have a Minister for Energy who is against building new wind turbines – and a government that has delayed crucial decisions on the Green Investment Bank and de-carbonisation targets.
“George Osborne is trying to undermine the Climate Change Act, leading the dash for gas, and pandering to the climate sceptics on the back benches. We even had the spectacle of the campaign manager for one of their by-elections conspiring with the anti-wind farm candidate, and undermining their own candidate.
“Already billions of pounds in investment is going elsewhere or being put on hold. Thanks to this government, the investors who want to invest in our green sector are shutting their wallets or going elsewhere. Since this government came to power, investment in renewable energy hasn’t gone up, it hasn’t even stagnated – it has halved.
When we were in government, we passed the Climate Change Act which gave those investors the certainty they needed to invest. We take climate change seriously. We all have a responsibility to act now rather than expect our children to suffer the consequences. Only this week the World Bank talked of catastrophic flooding, droughts, and millions of deaths if climate change is not addressed.
“Other countries around the world are watching to see whether Britain signs up to the 2030 decarbonisation target. We are not getting leadership from this government in Westminster. All we get is dither and delay.
To the current government, if it is not too late to avert global catastrophe, we must insist on alternatives for energy sources than deriving energy from carbon producing fossil fuels – coal, oil, and gas.
Yet the government’s policy:
Suggests CCS (6) as a clean-coal option (when in reality it will release further methane into the atmosphere, and is not feasible anyway)
Plans to build new nuclear power stations despite the dangers of from contamination by waste, of the dangers of nuclear weapon development, and environmental damaged as evidence by Chernobyl (7) and Fukushima. Ironically, they are encouraging support from the Japanese firm Hitachi. (8)
The recent Hurricane Sandy, and floods in the UK (11) in Autumn 2012, may be wake up calls for some. In Devon a canal constructed 200 years ago, broke its banks and may be lost forever – indicators that climate change is a reality. ( some scientific evidence here (12).
The solution is to limit energy use, and to invest in renewable energy, which will provide jobs for many and once installed has minimal maintenance costs compare with nuclear and fossil fuels. Energy requirements can be met by wind, solar, wave, HEP, geothermal and tidal. Germany is rejecting nuclear power (15) , yet the UK lags behind. While on a similar latitude to Germany, the Uk has additional resources Germany does not have. There is an enormous source of tidal power at the mouth of the River Severn, and coasts surrounds our islands which could harness wave power. We need to act, and act now, not procrastinate for future governments and our grandchildren, in order to for some to profit today.
We reject nuclear power as an alternative. A major problem is the disposal of dangerous nuclear waste which remains radioactive for centuries. It is not acceptable that we leave our dirty waste for those yet unborn, potentially exposing future generations to the horrific effects of dangerous radioactive waste.
The issue with nuclear waste is that serves no peaceful purpose, yet remains dangerous for many centuries and continues to emit radiation. No matter how we are reassured of the safety of Nuclear Power, accidents happen, and accidents are more likely happen when costs are cut, where profit is the motive.
Support for nuclear energy on financial grounds is flawed. EU calculations for financing nuclear expansion for mining of Uranium in the Ukraine ignores the cost of disposal of the toxic waste 20). Following Fukushima, the The World Bank estimated the cost of the nuclear crisis at $235bn (£144bn) (17, 18, 19)– making it one of the world’s most expensive disasters.
There is also the risk of further accidents occurring in nuclear power stations whether caused by human error as in Chernobyl, or by natural disasters, as in Fukushima as seen in Japan, which resulted from an earthquake.
Nuclear waste can continue to emit radiation for centuries, and it could potentially become unstable, if handled and stored improperly, setting off a chain reaction which could create a nuclear accident. If it fell into the wrong hands, it could be used to make a dirty bomb, which could spread radiation over an inhabited area. Nuclear waste storage focuses on finding safe and secure ways to store spent nuclear fuel and other forms of nuclear waste, until they have stabilized enough to pose no threat to humans, wildlife, and the environment.
Without doubt, we must halt the damage to the world’s climate by the use of carbon-emitting fuels. But to look from one disaster to another is ludicrous, and unnecessary. That we should risk accidents, from geological disaster or terrorism, a dependence on nuclear energy for the future is madness. The risk to life is so huge it should not be contemplated.
