I was interested to read the Daily Mail’s front page headline describing judges as “enemies of the people”. That’s the sort of language you might expect of the president of some tinpot banana republic but that’s the level of discourse we face today. No. Judges are not the enemy of the people: they are safeguarding the law, independent go government influence and the influence from anyone else for that matter. Not least from the real enemies of the people: the owners of the Mail and the Sun.
Lord Rothermere, whose grandfather supported Hitler, and Rupert Murdoch who appears to show many of Hitler’s characteristics, are the real enemies of of the people”. These two billionaire tax dodgers control something like half of British newspapers. In fact, they have turned them from newspapers into propaganda sheets.
I keep hearing how we have a free press in this country, but I am not so sure about that. Of all our national dailies and Sundays, only the Guardian and Observer are not owned by wealthy individuals or institutions. Other than the Guardian, the only left of centre national papers are those from the Mirror stable. The rest are not just centre right, some are far right, out there with Ukip and the BNP. No, I am not joking. They represent not the essence of free speech: they represent a threat to it.
Even with newspaper sales in rapid decline, the hard right papers often set the political agenda. Political leaders from Thatcher to Blair to Brown to Cameron and now to May bend at the knee to Murdoch at the Sun and Rothermere and Dacre at the Mail. They are scared stiff of saying something that might upset the editor and so deliver unfriendly headlines about them to a large audience. And with good reason.
These rags poison the national debate such as it is. Most people with a degree of common sense know that our departure from the EU will be long, complicated, messy and costly. The binary decision to leave the EU was clear enough but everything that followed is as clear as mud. But not if you believe the newspapers, who encourage their readers that it’s simple: all we need to do is leave the EU and everything will take care of itself. Millions of their readers believe what they say, which makes things worse.
I cannot regard our press as a free press. Most editors are tied up closely with their proprietors, most papers like the Sun and Mail ensure that they employ only columnists who speak the party line. What Murdoch and Dacre say goes. So what can we do about it?
Obviously, we don’t have to buy the papers. We can make that choice and not buy them, that’s a start. Secondly, we can stop buying products from the companies who advertise in these papers. This will not be easy, but I note that already social networks have suggested ways to do it.
It would, I suggest, be too complex, too inconvenient and too time-consuming to boycott every single company advertising in the hate papers, but one suggestion is to select certain companies, certain products, perhaps for certain periods. I have no idea whether this would work – it probably wouldn’t! – but it would surely be awful publicity for the companies concerned. Imagine asking them questions like, “Do you support this homophobic/racist article?” (This would cover pretty well all of Katie Hopkins’ columns.) Even a forced no comment would be highly embarrassing.
Last week’s reaction to the court decision about the triggering of Article 50 was hysterical and scary, with pernicious figures like Nigel Farage all but calling for public disorder, when all that happened was the judiciary standing up for British parliamentary sovereignty.
Someday soon, the printed newspaper will be a thing of the past. Given the state of our national newspapers, that day can’t come a day too soon.
