More confirmation arrives that I was right to vote Remain in last week’s referendum last week and 52% of you were wrong. Rupert Murdoch is positively ecstatic. “I think it’s wonderful”, exclaimed the Dirty Digger. “We’ve got to decide in this country who we are. We made a momentous decision last Thursday. It’s a bit like a prison break.”
Pretty well anything and anyone Rupert Murdoch thinks is good plainly isn’t. This is the man who sold Thatcher to the very people who were shafted by her. The man who campaigned to strip workers of their rights and was her main cheerleader as she ripped the heart out of British manufacturing. Oh, and he was there, at her side, whilst she changed the mindset of a nation with a philosophy of look after yourself, sod your neighbour and let the poor starve. Now he is celebrating the decision of the British electorate for taking us out of the European Union, something that will in all likelihood impact far more on the worse off people in the non existent society that he helped Thatcher shape.
But did you not see anything odd about Murdoch’s words? We can ask just why he was so pleased, but read it again: “We’ve got to decide in this country who we are. We made a momentous decision last Thursday.” Now excuse me, but “we”? The last time I looked, Murdoch was an Australian born American citizen. On what basis does he mean “we”?
Unless Murdoch was guilty of electoral fraud – and who would put that past him? – the referendum had nothing whatsoever to do with him. Yet when his newspapers were printing lies and distortions about unelected and out-of-touch people apparently running this country from another country, he seemed to overlook the fact that no unelected dictator tried to influence the result of the referendum than he did.
He should actually have said something like this: “We’ve got to tell our readers how to vote and to tell them who they are. They did exactly what I told them to do last week.”
You can judge whether or not you think that the Sun actually does influence how people vote but since the majority of its readers voted to leave the EU the possibility must surely be there. Maybe it really was the Sun what won it.
It is striking that the same people who attacked President Obama, someone who was elected to office, have not even mentioned the daily interventions in the campaign by someone who has never been elected by anyone to anything. But then, when has Murdoch ever worried about democracy. This is the man who said this: “When I go into Downing Street they do what I say; when I go to Brussels they take no notice.”
Murdoch wanted Brexit to maintain his links to power in the British establishment. His influence in the referendum was for one reason and that would be to protect and develop his business without anyone having the brass neck to question his methods.
The man whose newspapers hacked into a dead girl’s phone and whose journalists lied about the Hillsborough 96 then refers to our country as being his.
Not everyone voted to leave the EU because Rupert Murdoch told them to but on this and on just about everything else, his influence on our society is pernicious and corrosive. More people supported his view on Britain’s future than the majority of politicians at home and abroad and worse than that no one complained about it.
