Outsourcing Power (and its consequences)
For well over a century the British state has relied on its
professional civil service (known as the Establishment and for reasons I
hope that become apparent) to maintain the status quo and
whilst the state has had to make concessions over time (eg, universal
suffrage, legalize trade unions and eventually establish the 'welfare
state') the Establishment's primary function is to preserve the rule of
Capital, regardless of the party in power. Thus continuity is preserved
through the role of a permanent and unelected elite run by the
'Whitehall Mandarins'.
The success in selling the illusion of the Establishment as some kind
of 'neutral' body cannot be under-estimated. But starting with Thatcher
and continued by Blair there has been a concerted effort to demolish an
'interventionist' state. By this I mean that to some degree the state
was obliged to take onboard the demands and the needs of working people
as well as maintain a well regulated state with which to administer an
Empire.
This was what the post-WWII 'social compact' was based on, in
return that is, for preserving our imperial position in the world.
Of course the public service resists its destruction but only through
its trade unions and again it fought, understandably, only to defend
the rights and gains of its members. The larger role of the state in
society is not considered to be a concern of a trade union (hence there
is a law that makes 'political' strikes illegal in the UK).
Policy makers at the highest level were of course quite happy to
'outsource', in other words privatize what had formerly been an
'in-house' function, performed by an army of public servants. The
highest levels of the civil service supplies the various Cabinet
secretaries and under-secretaries who are assigned to all the various
portfolios held by elected MPs; health, the police etc, most ably
portrayed in the TV series 'Yes Minister'. Little of this elite has been
affected by the dismantling of our public services as quite often they
are re-employed at outrageous rates as 'consultants'.
It's at this point that we see the true nature of the Establishment
and why it's called the Establishment. The higher echelons of the civil
service share the same education, belong to the same clubs, they even
marry each other and it's been this way for at least the last 150 years.
They operate as a network because the civil service elite share the
same values and outlook as the elite of the legal profession, the armed
forces, education and the police and finally of course, they share it
with the elite of the capitalist class.
Until Thatcher's revolution was consummated by Blair/Brown's
government, the nefarious actions of the state had always been very well
hidden from public view. Civil servants have always had an intimate
relationship with the corporate/state media. Most 'embarrassing' events
could be hidden from public view with little more than a phone call or a
private meeting between the Establishment and the editors. Failing that
there is always the 'D' Notice',
in place since 1922. Most often it was self-censorship at work: 'it was
'understood' that you didn't write about specific events or mention
names'.
The single most striking aspect of News Corp's corporate
disaster-in-the-making is that along with the MPs expenses scandal, for
the first time, we are able to see how ruling elite actually rules. And
not surprisingly, it's the one aspect that the MSM rarely, if ever
explores.
In a sense the corporate press and the state have been hoisted by their own petard:
by outsourcing propaganda to the corporate media it has exposed the
media as an integral component of state/corporate control but one no longer under the direct control of the Establishment. Ergo, the arrogant bastards who run News Corp.
So the police for example, a state institution that wields immense
power in every sense of the word, has been harnessed by News Corp to
protect both corporate and state power through the way the police chose
or not, to use that power.
A similar process took place between the political class and News
Corp, whereby the support of News Corp's propaganda arms were more
important than prosecuting a criminal empire, thus gazes were averted.
This lack of transparency and accountability explains why, when
ex-assistant Police commissioner Yates decided that two villains were
sufficient to close the case the MSM averted its gaze as well.
The parallels with Watergate are not coincidental as they both flow
from the same belief that the ruling elite and its servants are
invincible given the immense and in some instances ultimate power it
gives individuals. But it's when they start to actually believe
that they are invincible that the trouble begins. Nixon believed
himself to be untouchable. 'What me? I'm the fucking president!'
It ain't rocket science: it took ex-assistant commissioner of the
Metropolitan police Yates exactly eight hours to skim through thousands
of emails and texts to conclude that no further investigation of the News of the World
shenanigans was necessary. The two patsies who did time for News Corp
satisfied the state. It kept the lid on things and gave all the outward
appearance, to a blind person that is, as the right thing to do.
And whilst the BBC and the rest were eulogizing over the (long overdue) demise of the NotW, not a single one of them pointed out that the NotW was a vile piece of gutter press shite.
Whilst the above-mentioned media pundits were holding a wake over the death of the NotW, this was the same paper that had hacked into the phone of the murdered Milly Dowler and then sold these stories in the NotW to the same people who now expressed disgust at what the NotW had done to get them in the first place!
"She [Brooks] came up to me and said, 'Oh, Mr Bryant, it's after dark -- shouldn't you be on Clapham Common?"
"At which point Ross Kemp [the ex-East Enders actor and her then husband] said, 'Shut up, you homophobic cow'." -- 'Quote of the day: "Shut up, you homophobic cow"', News Statesman, 8 July 2011
Rebekah Brooks comment to the outed (by the NotW, the paper she edited at the time) gay MP Chris Bryant. And outed at a critical pre-election period by the NotW with a pic of Bryant in his undies.
What the NotW and others of its ilk reveal is not only how
it exploits its largely working class readership but what the capitalist
class thinks of them! It obviously has nothing but contempt for its
readers and treats their often painful life experiences as vehicles for
advertising revenue and to be used as state-sponsored propaganda (eg
Murdoch's obscene intervention in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, or
its exploitation by supporting 'our boys in Afghanistan' then hacking
the phones of dead soldiers for copy).
The irony of Thatcherism is that it signaled the beginning of the
demolition of an interventionist state but in so doing it has exposed
the way the state works in direct collusion with big capital and how
integral our so-called independent media is to the functioning of the
state.
By outsourcing its functions to the lowest of the low, the
slimiest of the ruling elite, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, the state has
exposed itself for what it really is and whose interests it really
represents.
