Dear Councillor Dawkins #2…

So I finally got a reply from Councillor Dawkins from the letter I sent a few weeks ago about the seeming contradictions in his public position on the Kraft takeover of Cadbury and the underlying economic policies of his party…

Dear Dr. McKee,  

You are perhaps being a little harsh on me.   I have been making similar points in various speeches over the last few years in public.  Either one can accept that or one can accuse me of being disingenuous. 

I have to disagree with your assertion regarding the Conservative Party. Like most parties we are a broad church with widely held views.  
I have said often is that we are all for free trade. However the free trade of goods does not necessarily have to translate into the free trade of companies. Selling off our priceless manufacturing and exporting companies to foreign companies in no ways makes us a better country.
There are already rules devised by the takeover panel to control the details of hostile takeovers, so it is not a complete free for all. What I have suggested is that we need to reconsider these rules and to determine if they are currently serving the national interest or should they be made harder. For instance instead of 51% of shareholders needing to agree to a hostile takeover it could be 75% needed (that in itself would have scuppered the Kraft takeover as they only managed a 71% agreement).
Another suggestion perhaps is that only shareholders which have held shares for more than 6 months could vote in such circumstances rather than a company falling prey to hedgefunds whose only interest is in making money.  
It may be that we would only  apply these more stringent rules to our exporting manufacturing companies.  It is these companies which have taken generations to build and are vital to this country's wealth building capacity. When they are taken over that wealth producing capacity invariably leeches away from this country.
There is also the issue of a level playing field. We are the most open economy for such takeovers far more so than our foreign competitors.
I seriously doubt that we would have been permitted to buy a company like Cadbury from the Japanese, the Chinese and even the French.
When people mention the Conservative party I always gently remind them that the first company I ever worked for when I left University was Rolls Royce in Derby; a company nationalised in 1971  by a Conservative government in the national interest rather than letting it go bankrupt. The government still has some golden shares in Rolls Royce which prevents it being taken into foreign ownership. Those golden shares have not prevented Rolls Royce becoming perhaps our greatest engineering company and our second largest exporter.
I hope this has been helpful.
Regards,
Nigel

Though it was nice that he had a go at defending himself, I had problems with his reply right away.  First off – yes, free-trade under the neo-liberal style of free-market economics promoted by the Tories since Thatcher does have to mean the free-trade of companies too if it is to remain a coherent theory.  And secondly – isn’t his Kraft-beating idea of a 75% majority just a little too convenient and arbitrary to hold any water?  Why not 69% or 70%?  With no sustaining argument behind it, any number higher than the 51% we have in the current system is basically just taken at random, and that the 75% mark proposed just so happens to be enough to thwart the takeover at Cadbury seems a little bit easy to me.

Anyway, I sent off the following reply and we’ll see how this thing goes.

Dear Councillor Dawkins,

Thank you for your reply to my previous email regarding your recent comments about Cadbury. Although I appreciate your efforts at explaining to me the perceived contradictions that I see in your public position on the Cabury takeover and your continuing membership in the pro-free-market Conservative Party, I am afraid that your argument remains unconvincing.

Yes the Conservative Party is a “broad church” – but, like any church, there are still certain sacrosanct parameters at which that broadness ends (or else what would be the difference between parties?) and for the Conservative Party one of the core elements of its unifying philosophy, for at least the last thirty years, is a belief in the free-market system.

Though you may wish to pick and choose which bits and pieces of your party’s policy-guiding economic philosophy you as an individual subscribe to, the fact of the matter is that under the terms of the endorsed philosophy of free-market economics synonymous with the Tories since Thatcher (not specifically free-trade, but of the free-market ideal behind it), the Kraft takeover of Cadbury was a text-book case of legitimate free-market acquisition: an independent and profitable company was given an attractive offer to sell, its board recommended it, and its shareholders accepted it.

Now I, as someone who opposes this rapacious economic ideology that puts the profits of the few over the wellbeing of the many, agree with much of what you publically say: it is a disgrace that thousands of Bournville jobs might now be lost because lining the pockets of Cadbury shareholders was deemed of higher social value than the economic well-being of this community. But it is Conservative economic policy – and the continuation of that misguided policy under Labour – that got us here, and so long as you are affiliated with that party your words can only seem, at best, tainted, and, at worst, like shameless opportunism. As those words are so often also wrapped up in the hollow whiff of an ugly flag-waving nationalism, I sincerely have my doubts – the issue is not, as you seem to suggest, whether a company is British-owned or foreign-owned, but whether we have an economic system in place which secures well-paid British jobs regardless of the nationality of a particular company’s owners, and which ensures all businesses – British or otherwise – are properly taxed and incentivised to invest their successes back into the local community and not just into their own private pockets.

I would be much more likely to take your position seriously, Councillor Dawkins, if you were seen less on the front-pages of the local newspaper holding a Union Jack in your hand and blaming the Labour Party for not signing a letter, and more in the fine-print of that newspaper, presenting an intellectually honest and coherent opposition to the economic policies and practices that have guided your party for decades.

As far as I am aware, neither David Cameron nor George Osborne have publically renounced this historically Conservative position of economic theory, and though it strikes a populist chord to talk about saving British jobs and tightening the rules on hostile takeovers in the aftermath of what happened at Cadbury, as long as the framework for those rules remain an economic philosophy which puts the needs of businesses above the needs of people, the only real change you and your party can offer, despite your public posturing, is a slightly different shade of the same colour.

Yours sincerely,

Dr. Daniel McKee

PS… Whilst I thank you for the wistful nostalgia invoked by reminding me of Edward Heath’s nationalization of Rolls Royce in ’71, may I in turn remind you that it was Mrs Thatcher’s Conservative government which ultimately privatized the company again in 1987, and that Rolls Royce was one of the many companies over the past few years to cut hundreds of British jobs during the economic downturn, despite having an order-book worth over £35bn.

In other news, evidently I am not the only person not buying this for-the-people act…

Technorati Tags: Anti-Capitalism,Cadbury,Cadbury Buy-Out,Capitalism,Conservative Party,General Election,Kraft Food,Local Politics,Spin,UK Politics,Nigel Dawkins

Dear Councillor Dawkins…

The following is an email I just sent to a local Tory councillor in my area who keeps trying to campaign for the upcoming election off the back of the Kraft Cadbury takeover…

Dear Councillor Dawkins,

I found your recent newsletter about your efforts to save Cadbury highly disingenuous. 

Whilst I have absolutely no doubt that you wrote your "important letter" to Lord Mandelson and delivered our petition to Downing Street, opposing the hostile takeover of Cadbury, there is no getting away from the fact that, as a member of the Conservative Party - where the ideology of free-market capitalism is sacrosanct - your words and deeds sound inherently hollow. 

The Kraft Foods takeover of Cadbury, though it will likely be devastating for our area, was a direct result of free-market capitalism working absolutely as it should do: a money-making, independent business got an attractive offer from another company, the price was right, and so they decided to sell.  Not only is this loss of Cadbury to Kraft nothing to do with the Labour Party (other than the fact that, to their eternal shame, they have done nothing but continue to pursue Tory economic policies since the day they came to power), it is the underlying economic philosophy that specifically drives your party - the promotion and celebration of unfettered free-market capitalism - which encourages it.  Indeed, one of the central tenets of Conservative economic theory is that it is not the business of government to get involved in the natural functioning of markets, so how you can pretend to be upset that the Labour government did nothing to intervene in the Cadbury decision, when you know full well that it would be ideologically incoherent for a Conservative government to have acted any differently?  It just smacks of opportunistic electioneering and, to me, seems highly cynical.     

According to your newsletter, you said: "We know that the banks, the shareholders, the city whizz kids and Kraft will all make big money out of this takeover but it will be the ordinary residents of Birmingham who will eventually end up paying for this terrible loss."  Your sentiments are entirely right, but coming as they do out of the mouth of a party-member whose party has championed precisely this approach to doing business for over thirty years, you'll excuse me if I remain unconvinced.

Yours sincerely,

Dr. Daniel McKee

I’ll report back if I get a spin-free reply…

Technorati Tags: Cadbury Buy-Out,Cadbury,Capitalism,Anti Capitalism,Conservative Party,General Election,UK Politics,Politics,Local Politics,Kraft Food,Spin

Cadbury and the Chicago School

Naomi Klein would be proud.

This morning, here in Birmingham, as we countdown the final twenty-four hours before we find out if the Cadbury shareholders are going to sell their business to Kraft, the local news gave us some calming advice about the takeover from Chicago Booth Business School Professor, Sanjay Dhar.

Dhar told us that everything would be ok under Kraft, and that nothing would really change. Anything that did change, he told us, would probably have changed under Cadbury ownership anyway, as it would be driven by market forces. Kraft ownership, the message was clear, would be a good thing for Cadbury.

Dhar, a professor of marketing at Booth (a central component of Milton Friedman’s infamous “Chicago School”) is currently head of the Kilts Center for Marketing. The Center is named after, and overseen by, James Kilts who, between 1994 and 1997, as Executive Vice President at Philip Morris was “responsible for integrating Kraft and General Foods worldwide and for shaping the group’s domestic and international strategy and plans”. Kilts also previously served as President of Kraft USA (where he consolidated Kraft and Oscar Meyer into one company), President of Kraft Limited in Canada, and Senior Vice President of Kraft International. He was also Senior Vice President of strategy and development at Kraft.

This year, in the Fall 2009 season at Kilts, under Sanjay Dhar’s headship, Mike Hsu, President of Kraft North America Grocery, has joined the Kilts Steering Committee.

For some reason the BBC News failed to point all this out, and simply referred to him as a business “expert”.

Technorati Tags: Politics,Business,UK Politics,Chicago School,Cadbury Buy-Out,Cadbury,Kraft Food,Sanjay Dhar,Media,Naomi Klein,Capitalism

Throwin’ Out The Trash #1

Late Friday afternoons are traditionally the time that politicians, businesses, celebrities, etc, release bad news to the public in the hope that they won’t see it.  Season 1, episode 13, of The West Wing calls this “Take Out The Trash Day”, and with that in mind I give you the first instalment of a new semi-regular feature on the Blog: Throwin’ Out The Trash.

Each week, there are so many fucked up stories and newsy bits and pieces that cross my path in this 24/7 media blitzkrieg that we’re living in, and I simply do not have the time or inclination to write a full-on commentary piece about all of them.  Throwin’ Out The Trash is my chance each week to clear the decks of all these niggling odds and sods without ignoring them completely…

*

So, multi-millionaire pop mogul, Simon Cowell, has decided to release a charity pop single of REM's classic song, "Everybody Hurts", in order to raise some much needed funds to help the devastated victims of the January 12th Haitian earthquake.  A nice idea, and a lot of people are out there doing what they can to raise money to help with this terrible tragedy.  But when the guy proposing the charity single has a personal fortune of £120m – and just signed a brand new £100m deal to bring his television show, X-Factor, to the United States on the very day that Haiti suffered the earthquake – you have to wonder why he isn’t just putting a hand into his own pocket to help out the aid effort instead of making us, the not-so-wealthy British public, do it for him?

To put this into perspective, whilst Cowell could personally afford to give several million pounds to the Haitian aid effort if he wanted to without the British public spending a single penny, Peter Kay’s 2009 charity single for Children in Need, released last November, raised only £170,000.  Cowell’s own recent charity efforts have done a little better, with last year’s X-Factor single for Great Ormond Street raising at least £200,000 in its first week, and the 2008 single raising over £1m for Help for Heroes and the Royal British Legion.  But the fact remains that Cowell himself could personally contribute the amount of money earned by all three of those charity singles to Haiti combined, plus an extra million, and still have a very comfortable £117m to live off without the generous British public having to give a thing. 

 

*

If anyone out there reading this still thinks that free-market capitalism is a great idea, maybe they can explain to me why I should support an economic mentality that sees stock-prices drop and Wall Street panic when the President finally says that he’s going to do something about the dangerous financial de-regulation that so recently brought the world economy to its knees?

For the majority of Americans, and people all around the world, the last year and a bit has been a hellacious time of recession and unemployment.  Life has become a struggle, work has become scarce, homes have been taken away and dreams have been shattered.  All of this misery and turmoil – every single bit of it – was down to the rapacious greed of an unregulated financial industry who sucked the economy dry and then had the temerity to ask us to bail them out or die. 

This wealthy minority of money-obsessed gamblers and con-men (or “motherfuckers”, if you want the correct term) essentially gang-raped the world’s economy for their own material gain and sent the globe into a depression-risking downspin and yet, yesterday, when the President finally announced his plans – at long last; a dollar short and a year too late – to place some much needed restrictions on the out of control banking industry, they responded by sending a petulant and unrepentant message to the Whitehouse that, if he dare tell them to curb and regulate their greed, there would once again be hell to pay.

The worse thing is, the media actually reported this bullshit tantrum as news.  A bunch of out of control wealth-addicts get told they’re going to have some restrictions placed over their previously unfettered playground of destruction and they throw their toys out of the pram in protest?  Good.  It’s time these fat-cat motherfuckers felt some of the same ramifications from what they’ve done as the rest of us, instead of thinking that cutting their bonuses down to a measly $498,000 per person counts as suffering!

*

David Cameron today cynically used the recent case of two school-aged brothers from Edlington violently torturing a nine year old and eleven year old boy as proof that Britain under Labour has fallen into “social recession”.  The case was horrific – the work of two very disturbed young sadists who left their victims for dead after 90 minutes of reprehensible cruelty – but the argument that this anomalous case of horror is a sign of the times under Labour must be dismissed as spurious when we remember that the equally horrific Jamie Bulger case (in which a much younger boy – a two year old – was actually murdered by his equally sadistic young attackers) happened in 1993, under a Tory government in its fourteenth year of power.

If anything, under Labour, society has gotten better by Cameron’s preposterous argument, because the Edlington victims survived whereas Jamie Bulger did not. 

The use of this meaningless and emotively charged example is hollow opportunism at its most base and ridiculous, and it is a travesty of the highest proportions that the ghastly ordeal of two unfortunate children is being exploited like this by a man who thinks himself suitable to be our next leader. 

 

*

Finally, if you didn’t think that corporations ruled the world already, well…they will do pretty soon.  The US Supreme Court, this week, made a landmark ruling to remove the limits corporations previously faced on how much they could spend to elect and defeat candidates running in US elections.  That’s right – multi-billion dollar corporations can now pay whatever they want to the campaigns of the candidate of their choice to ensure that the “right” guy gets into office.

Oh functioning democracy – we hardly knew ye…

 

Technorati Tags: Throwin' Out The Trash,Simon Cowell,Haiti,Obama,Banks,Edlington,Supreme Court,Capitalism,David Cameron,Links,UK Politics,US Politics

Who’s Responsible? We Fucking Are…

The Cadbury plot thickens further today as it transpires one of the central banks lending Kraft Foods the money to buy out the company is none-other than the Royal Bank of Scotland – you remember, the bank we tax-payers bailed out last year and thus, technically, own?

As Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg, said to Gordon Brown during today’s Prime Minister’s Question Time: “When British taxpayers bailed out the banks, they would never have believed that their money would now be used to put British people out of work. Isn't that just plain wrong?"

I’d like to take that question further – when British tax-payers bailed out the banks, shouldn’t have the government, the opposition, or the Liberal Democrats have ensured that with that money came strict conditions and regulation that the banks were forced to follow?  Shouldn’t our “ownership” have actually meant something, and shouldn’t it still mean something – for instance, shouldn’t we, as RBS owners, be able to refuse to give Kraft Foods the loan?

 

Technorati Tags: Cadbury Buy-Out,Cadbury,Gordon Brown,Kraft Food,Business,Capitalism,Banks,Links,Nick Clegg,UK Politics

Forget the Banker’s Bonuses – Cadbury’s Boss Makes £12m Whilst Workers Fear for Their Jobs…

Don’t worry Cadbury workers – you may all lose your jobs over the next few months, now that the company has been sold off to Kraft Foods, but at least chief executive, Todd Stitzer, will be making £12m from the deal.

“After more than 25 years at the firm, 56-year-old Stitzer is also sitting on a £15m pension pot that promises to pay out £1.5m a year when he retires.” says the Guardian.  This coming after “the group's chairman Roger Carr admitted he had put shareholders first and job losses were inevitable.”

Again - “principled capitalism” anyone?

Technorati Tags: Cadbury Buy-Out,Cadbury,Kraft Food,Capitalism,Anti Capitalism,Bournville,Business,Guardian,Links,UK Politics,Principled Capitalism

Dairy Milked

Today I haven’t been able to get a particular film out of my head: Michael Moore’s debut documentary, Roger and Me.

In that film, Moore attempts to get an explanation from then-General Motors CEO, Roger Smith, as to why he closed down several car manufacturing factories in his hometown of Flint, Michigan – costing over 30,000 jobs and financially ruining the city.  As he does this, he paints a very sad and depressing picture of how the closure of these auto-plants led to the painful collapse of Flint’s economy, community, and pride.  The lesson is simple: once upon a time the GM factories were the economic and cultural heart of the city of Flint; once those factories were destroyed though, so was Flint.

The reason this film keeps on haunting me today, is because this morning I woke up to the news that Cadbury, after four months of allegedly fighting for its independence, finally succumbed to a £12bn take-over bid from American food company, Kraft Food.

The Cadbury factory is within walking distance from my house; a house which was actually built, in the late 1800s, for Cadbury workers to live in.

The local train station around here, is proudly painted a shade of Cadbury’s trademarked purple; the local supermarkets stock special “local deals” on Cadbury’s products; tourists come from far and wide to visit the nearby “Cadbury World”; and a short walk away from where I live, the quaint and idyllic Bournville Village, where I so often take afternoon walks, simply would not exist had not Richard and George Cadbury, the sons of the company’s original owner, not bought up the old Bournbrook estate and created it.

In other words, as with Flint, Michigan and General Motors, the area in which I live is inextricably linked to the industrial goings on at the local factory: Cadbury provides jobs for people in the community, draws visitors to the area, and makes the air around our streets smell distinctly like Dairy Milk chocolate.  The idea of it being sold to the highest bidder therefore, purely for profit, leaves me extremely worried about what the future might bring.

Unlike a lot of other corporations in the world, the Cadbury brand, coming as it did from the strong Quaker traditions of its founders, was theoretically more than just about making money.  Guided by an underlying business philosophy that was driven by something deeper than the usual free-market capitalist dogmas, Cadbury purported to care for its workers, care for the local community, and generally adhere to what chief executive, Todd Stitzer recently called its unique form of “principled capitalism”. 

The ramifications of selling the business to a company who do not share these same ethical principles and underlying philosophies, could well be significant, and damning to the town in which I live.    

That said, one has to question exactly how “principled” Cadbury’s latter-day “principled capitalism” really was?  When Kraft first approached the company in late August/early September last year and began its hostile takeover, a lot of noise was made about the heritage, values, and unique position of the company both in terms of public goodwill and its ethical practices.  If any buy-out were to take place, we were told, it would have to be about more than just money.  Jobs would have to be protected, traditions maintained, ethics adhered to.  “We will continue to execute our strategy as an independent standalone company” said Stitzer, “unless someone comes along with a compelling offer, and I mean compelling.”

What he meant by “compelling”, it turned out, did not mean job protection, or a guarantee that Cadbury’s “principled capitalism” would remain in place.  All “compelling” really meant, it turned out, was Kraft raising its proposed share-price offer up ever-so-slightly, from 770 pence a share, to 850 pence a share.  A difference of eighty pence. 

Once the money was good, and all shareholders would be guaranteed a tidy profit from the sale, all that other stuff – you know, the “principled” capitalism – was thrown out the window.

Truth be told, that isn’t necessarily Cadbury’s fault.  It is more a fundamental problem with capitalism.

Under the current system of capitalism, public companies have a legal obligation to their shareholders to make them as much profit as is possible.  If I am an executive of a company and reject a highly profitable business opportunity that would make my shareholders a lot of money, I will have acted in breach of the law and against the best interests of my shareholders, even if I chose to reject that opportunity based on arguably higher principles of ethics.  Capitalism doesn’t care about rationales like that, and shareholders don’t want to hear that you are saying no to an opportunity to let them double their investment just because you want to ensure silly things like jobs, commitments to Fair-Trade, and the continued health of a particular local community.  So once Kraft increased their offer and the shareholders were offered a 850 pence jackpot, Cadbury legally had no choice but to recommend the sale go through – principled capitalism be damned.

One has to wonder about the value of an economic system like that: one which literally leaves no room for higher principles and reduces everything to the bottom-line.  That’s one of the reasons I’ve been fighting against capitalism ever since I was old enough to understand it – it’s not that its a good system gone bad, its that it is a system which is inherently flawed, and incapable of prioritizing the things that are truly important to a society if they ever get in the way of a tiny minority of people making some money.

So as with Flint, Michigan and General Motors, Cadbury unions now fear that up to 30,000 jobs may be at risk as a result of the proposed deal with Kraft. 

That was the exact number of job-losses it took for Flint to start to crumble.

Because of the amount of money needed to make the deal impossible for Cadbury to refuse, Kraft is going to be about £22bn in debt going into its new operations in Bournville.  In the past, the company have had a savage record for job-slashing and aggressive cost-cutting measures when it needed to reduce its debts: between 2004 and 2008, according to the union, Unite, Kraft shed 19,000 jobs and shut down 35 sites in order to save money and pay the bills.  That jobs at the Cadbury factory are in serious trouble, therefore, is basically beyond a doubt.

For the moment though, the factory remains open, albeit in a state of pre-emptive mourning.  It is unlikely that Kraft will shut down the place immediately, if it shuts it down at all – but what is clear is that the local community is now on edge, not knowing exactly how this story will end.  I went for a walk this afternoon, as I often do during the weekdays, and as I walked past the Cadbury’s buildings there was a look of shock and fear on the faces of workers outside.  Usually, at lunchtime, the grounds surrounding Cadbury’s are full of happily chatting people eating sandwiches and sharing jokes and stories.  Not today.  Today there are just grim smokers and news-teams.  Everywhere I look there are cameras being set up, men running frantically around with tripods, reporters interviewing locals, journalists preparing for their close-ups...  Outside the main offices, someone has attached two tiny Union Jacks to the entranceway in a futile attempt at denying the new American owners their claim.

The superstitious among you might find it interesting to note that, in late January 2009 – about a year ago today, and long after twelfth night had passed – Christmas trees were still up inside these same main offices, shining brightly into the night. 

Keeping Christmas decorations up after Epiphany is supposed to bring you bad luck.  I remember saying to friends and family at the time: if anything bad happens to Cadbury in this recession, it’s those Christmas tree’s fault.

I didn’t really believe that – I still don’t.  It’s just stupid superstition.  But I did find it interesting to note that, this year, the trees disappeared promptly on January 6th: certainly someone at Cadbury must have been thinking about it.

Yet the year they avoided the supposed “bad luck”, thirteen days later, they were sold.

Well, almost.

As yet, there has still been no official “sale”, of course – merely the recommendation of a sale by management to the shareholders: the fucking over of entire communities is not without its formalities.

But anyone who has ever watched capitalism at work, principled or not, will know that the rest is now just a rubber-stamping: it is only ever very rarely that shareholders refuse themselves the chance to make money.  Rarer still are the occasions when shareholders refuse to make money in order to save jobs and preserve a local community.

What do they care?

They got their 80 pence extra per share.

They got their 10 pence dividend.

And so, after a year of already watching one side of my local neighbourhood fall slowly victim to the recession – with once-thriving shops gradually becoming derelict and boarded up, and former restaurants and take-aways shutting their doors one night and never opening them again – I now get to watch the same thing happen all over again on the other side of the canal.

Ain’t capitalism grand?

Ain’t “principled” capitalism even better?

Technorati Tags: UK Politics,Cadbury,Cadbury Buy-Out,Kraft Food,Bournville,Capitalism,Michael Moore,Roger and Me,Flint,Michigan,Business,Corporate,Hostile Takeover

Cut NHS costs to pay off debt, IMF warns Britain | Politics | The Guardian

 

And so it begins: Disaster Capitalism 101. Part 1: Structural Readjustment and Enforced Privatization of Public Services...

Cut NHS costs to pay off debt, IMF warns Britain | Politics | The Guardian

Technorati Tags: Politics,NHS,Healthcare,Capitalism,IMF,Anti-Capitalism,Disaster Capitalism,Naomi Klein,Structural Readjustment,Shock Doctrine

THE SUN STAYS CONSERVATIVE – WHAT A SHOCKER!

Yesterday, here in the United Kingdom, tabloid newspaper, The Sun, caused a huge stir by shifting their allegiance from Gordon Brown’s Labour Party, to David Cameron and his Conservatives.

The Sun is, sadly, Britain’s biggest selling newspaper, and I do not use the word “sadly” here because I fear that this shift in allegiance will therefore sway the majority of the newspaper-reading public into voting for the Tories come the 2010 General Election; I use the word “sadly” because The Sun has long been a knee-jerk, reactionary, and right-leaning organ, and the fact that more people in this country read that garbage than any other newspaper, is just hugely depressing to me.

That The Sun has shifted its support from Labour to Conservative, should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the paper’s owner: Rupert Murdoch.

Murdoch – the man who’s FOX NEWS channel in the United States is the most reprehensible abuse of the concept of journalism in the whole of human history – is an unabashed conservative ideologue, and he has long used his influence and power as head of the all-encompassing media monolith, News Corporation, to spread his right-wing poison all around the world.  Indeed, The Sun, only ever first pledged its support to the Labour Party back in 1997 after the formerly socialist party underwent a cynical values-changing transformation and mutated into the election-winning beast we have come to know as New Labour.

As you may be aware – having lived through the past twelve years of New Labour rule – the Labour party voted into power in May of 1997 was a very different party, ideologically, from the Labour party of old.  Instead of giving workers a better deal, strengthening unions, and further democratizing the nation, it continued the trend of Thatcherite privatization and free-market neo-liberalism that it had previously opposed, continued selling arms to dictators around the world, took benefits away from the poor whilst increasing welfare for the rich, and waged unnecessary and arguably illegal wars in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and, throughout its entire time in office, Iraq (daily bombing of the no-fly zones leftover from the 1991 war, continued under Labour long before the 2003 invasion, not to mention the murderous UN Sanctions the Labour Party endorsed).

In other words – The Sun only supported the Labour Party, when the Labour Party became the new Conservatives. 

Not only were New Labour the new Conservatives in 1997, but the Conservatives themselves, at that time, had become an unelectable mess – much like the Labour Party of today.  As always though, this claim of being “unelectable” was not for any of the appalling policies the Conservative Party had promoted over their eighteen years in power, but for more superficial reasons – a public sick and tired of the same old faces and scandals, allegations of “sleaze” and abuses of power… 

We stuck with the Tories through their Poll Taxes and Falklands War, we let them denationalize British industries, pour bombs down on Iraq and terrorize the miners, we let them smash up the unions and take away our jobs…but when they started having sex with prostitutes, or trading in cash for questions, then we decided it was time for a change.

There were so many sound political reasons to oppose the Tories from 1979 to 1997, but we chose the “Lewinsky Objection” instead; which is exactly what we are doing today with the Labour Party!

Since 1997, New Labour have let down its core supporters in any number of ways.  They’ve broken promises, they’ve committed war-crimes, they’ve marched us into a global recession and they’ve part-privatized nearly every public institution you can think of…but that is not why people are sick of the Labour Party in 2009.

They are sick of them because of the expenses scandal (despite the fact that this scandal involved Conservative MPs too); they are sick of them because they don’t like Gordon Brown (on a purely aesthetic level – not because his economic policies as chancellor got us into this financial crisis and helped bankroll the disgusting war on terror, but because he’s “boring”); they are sick of them because Jacqui Smith’s husband watched a porn film or two, and because, after yet another decade of political disappointment, it is easy to lash out at whoever is in power and hope the grass might be greener on the other side (even if all the evidence points to it only ever getting worse!)

So the same thing that happened to the Tories in 1997 is now happening to New Labour in 2009: we are sick of them, but we don’t really know why; because we never spend the time to stop and think about the real causes for our growing hostility and unease, and let the media tell us why we’re angry instead.

What do I really want from my government?

What is it about the past thirty years of Conservative and Labour Party rule that has really let me down? 

What is it that this country really needs.

Enter Rupert Murdoch – there to answer those questions for you without you having to think about it.  Politics is hard, let’s leave the heavy lifting to the experts…

Once Murdoch starts framing his own ideological position as the people’s ideological position, then that vacuum of ideas and sense of confusion in the public’s perception gets filled: they hate the government because there’s too much bureaucratic red-tape; they hate the government because they’re taking too many taxes; they hate the government because they’re letting all those foreigners in; they hate the government because they’re not putting drug-dealers and petty criminals in jail; they hate the government because they’re not letting billionaires like Rupert Murdoch make as much money as they can…

In 1997, New Labour retreated away from the left of their party, the nation was sick and tired of the Tories, and so The Sun backed Labour – the most electable right-wing choice that was going at the time.

As the years went on, New Labour proved their worth to the people at News Corp; they not only sounded like they had turned over a new leaf politically, they had – UK domestic and foreign policies under Labour differed in no significant way from the Conservative policies of the previous eighteen years. 

The people – The Sun’s readership – however, were happy, because, as New Labour screwed them over financially and sent their children off to die (just as the Tories had done), it was done via a brand new narrative – and with a cast of new faces – that differed from their Tory predecessors in enough ways to make it feel like change.

These weren’t Tory cuts – they were Labour cuts.

These weren’t Tory wars – they were Labour wars.

What’s more, the Labour Party were wise enough to throw the public the odd necessary bone – a bit more money into public services here, a little more support for unions there.  In the good-cop/bad-cop routine of one-party systems masquerading as multi-party systems, the good-cop neoliberals of New Labour had to continue the appearance of change in order to maintain a continuity of right-wing policies in matters of the economy and national security.   

So the right-leaning Sun, supported the newly right-leaning Labour Party until – as had happened before with the Conservatives – they started losing their support with the public.  Once that happened, the paper merely resorted back to its roots and repositioned its unchanging support for right-wing politics by backing the seemingly more electable Conservative Party, now that Labour are on the ropes.

The important thing here is that whilst the name of the party behind which Rupert Murdoch’s mouthpiece has pledged its support has changed a couple of times over the past thirteen years, the policies which he and his paper support have always remained staunchly the same.

Murdoch wants his readers to vote the way that he would: right-wing.  The real question needs to be why the British Public continue to repeatedly buy into it: why do we vote for the same failed and disastrous policies election after election – whichever party is selling them –and put up with the same betrayals and violations decade after decade without ever re-examining our core political values and questioning why our available political choices in this country are so limited?

Perhaps, the answer lies in the fact that The Sun remains our most widely read newspaper? 

With Rupert Murdoch’s propaganda machine shouting loudly at the majority of people each day, is it any wonder that they soon start mistaking the illusion of change for the real thing; and the illusion of a change in the paper’s political allegiance, as real news?

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