Though Cowards Flinch

The odds on Cameron resigning over Hackgate have narrowed.

Frankly, whether or not he does go is unlikely to be very heavily influenced either by Labour or what passes for the letwing media. Even so, every little helps, and it’s important for Labour to get its broad narrative right as the revelations continue to spill out.

The temptation will be for Labour to go for the Cameron jugular, setting out in ever increasing detail how Cameron and his inner circle (including Osborne) knew perfectly well what they were doing when them employed Coulson, how they’ve deliberately spread misinformation about who they met where and when, and how they’re desperate to see an end to the affairs so that Murdoch can continue on his no-longer-quite-so-merry-way towards total domination of the UK media. Labour’s sniffer dogs and rottweilers are chomping at the bit for a meaty piece of the action.

I’m not so sure that this is the right approach.

I’ve been out and about a lot over the weekend around Bickerstaffe and Skelmersdale, and people are well aware of the growing scandal.  But the people I’ve spoken to are not very aware of the detail, and have no great desire to be. They just think it’s all bloody typical of the political/metropolitan classes.

Trying to pin Cameron on detail is therefore largely irrelevant to most people.  

It’s also simply untrue to claim that Cameron is a knowing villain in all of this.  People do know that the main phone hacking predated Cameron in office, and solely on that score he remains innocent in the eyes of the public at the moment.

The picture Labour does need to paint of Cameron is that of incompetent, upper class dupe, not least because it is true.  

Cameron recruited Coulson to his inner circle – the only working class person to join it – because he didn’t know any better. Cameron met Murdoch dozens of times, even when he should have known better, because he didn’t know any better.

There is now a good respository of evidence to show that Cameron is unfit to govern Britain because his upper-class background means he simply doesn’t understand how things work.  The latest one was his image of GPs at 1950s ‘Private Function’ dinner parties, but there is plenty more where that came from – thinking that his own constituency still has Council houses is just one more in the list.

The image Labour needs to create about Cameron and Coulson’s relationship is something like we see in a 1960s St Trinians’ movie, where the Cockney wide boy invades the upper class world with ’hilarious’ results.

Labour needs to attack Cameron not because he is the main villain of the piece – he isn’t.  They should attack him because he’s an incompetent upper class tosser, unfit for the realities and complexities of modern government.

The answer to this sensible enough question, it appears, is that many right-wingers are too scared shitless to be anything other than stupidly right-wing.

These are at least are the findings (well, alright, I paraphrase) of Hulda Thórisdóttir, of the University of Iceland, and John T Jost of New York University, in their newly published paper for the Political Psychology journal (Vol xx, No. xx).

In the article, ‘Motivated Closed-Mindedness Mediates the Effect of Threat on Political Conservatism’, the authors summarise four controlled experiments with students and political elites, in which they gave scary information to people and see measure they react, both in terms of ‘close mindedness’ and tendency towards conservatism.  This is what they find:

[W]e find in Studies 1a and 1b that putting people into a highly threatened mindset leads them to exhibit an increase in motivated closed-mindedness and to perceive the world as more dangerous.

Furthermore, in Study 2 we demonstrate that a subtle threat manipulation increases selfreported conservatism (or decreases self-reported liberalism), and this effect is mediated by closed-mindedness.

In Study 3, we manipulated closed-mindedness directly and found that high (vs. low) cognitive load results in a greater affinity for the Republican (vs. Democratic) party.

Finally, in Study 4 we conducted an experiment involving political elites in Iceland and found that three different types of threat (to the self, group, and system) all led center-right politicians to score higher on closed-mindedness and issue-based political conservatism.

 The authors conclude:

[T]hese findings provide reasonably strong support for Jost et al.’s (2003) theory of political conservatism as motivated social cognition and contradict the notion that threat increases individuals’ adherence to their own political ideology, even if that ideology happens to be a liberal one.

All that seems intuitively reasonable to me, and suggests, amongst others things, that if Labour keeps on trying to scare the shit out people on things like crime and immigration, as a way of getting Labour votes, it’s making a big mstake; it’s really just doing the Tories’ job for them.

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In May I submitted a Freedom of Information request to Lancashire County Council, seeking publication of the full contract between the Council and BT in respect of its new Joint Venture Company One Connect, which is set to manage much of the County Council (and partnering District Councils’) back office function for the next ten years.

This new company is very similar to Liverpool Direct, about which a great deal of concern has been expressed; there have been substantial accusations that BT have earned million of pounds over the odds because, for example, they have been able to charge higher prices for equipment, and about very poor reporting and monitoring. The Information Commissioner finally ordered full disclosure of the Liverpool Direct contract in December 2010.

In June I received a ‘holding’  reply from Lancashire County Council:

We are currently in the process of conducting a public interest test as we believe the section 43(2) exemption may apply to some or all of the information you have requested. The public interest test entails a public authority deciding whether, in relation to a request for information, it serves the interests of the public either to disclose the information or to maintain an exemption or exception in respect of the information requested.

The next deadline for a response expired on 14th July, so I chased the matter. Yesterday I received that reply, which said no decision had yet been taken because the Council is

currently seeking the views of BT regarding disclosure of the contract. We have chased them for their comments but, unfortunately, they are not yet in a position to respond.

It seems to me that if BT cannot be bothered to offer a view on this matter, then it can’t be too bothered about the contractual information being disclosed, and that the County Council should get on with the completion of its public interest test.

Or maybe, just maybe, the Council and BT know they are going to lose this case, given the Liverpool precedent, and are just playing for time till their working arrangements are well-embedded and it’s harder to challenge them on the basis of the information released.

So, a massive corporate wielding power behind the scenes to get a public agency to hide from the public information which might reveal the motives and workings of said massive corporate.  Now, where have i heard about that kind of thing recently?

Apparently, one of the reasons that care home provider Southern Cross  failed was that occupancy rates were not high enough.

TCF thinks it may have discovered why.

Southern Cross’s website lists 27 care homes under its ownership in Lancashire.  Unfortunately, 12 of them aren’t actually in Lancashire.

Oh,  and Goole isn’t in West Yorkshire, while Newcastle is in Tyne & Wear, not in Northumberland.

So is the main reason for low occupancy that the owners don’t actually know know where their homes are, thus making it difficult for potential customers to know where they are too?

And TCF wonders if this limited geographical understanding has anything to do with the fact that more than half of the care homes on the Southern Cross website are owned by offshore landlords, including these two in Cumbria, owned by firms based on the Isle of Man and Jersey.

Sue Marsh at Liveral Conspiracy has called for tighter regulation/legislation on the editorial lines of newspapers:

I’ve never understood why we allow our print media to support a particular political viewpoint. Why is it that just before an election, our media line up in their separate camps and decide to tell us who to vote for? If there is a point of law I’m unaware of, perhaps someone will enlighten me, but just how is it in the public interest to seek to influence the outcome of general elections? Why do we need them to tell us what to do?

Sue has come in for some predictable flak over this from the rightwing commentators, though a lot of it is based on an assumption that she talks about media bias “just before an election” as an example, rather than – as she later clarifies – the substantive aspect of her call for change. I’ll happily acknowledge that I read it as an example too on first reading.

Even Sue’s narrower call for regulation around what papers can and can’t say, though, misses the point (well my point).

Legislative, or any other, restriction on the editorial line of a newspaper is neither desirable nor practicable, and I think it would be a strategic mistake for the Left to campaign for something that has any hint of press censorship, however well-meaning it is as a means to redress the undoubted power imbalances currently at play in the media.

A better strategic direction for the Left is to start to create alternative business models for media ownership, and thereby editorial line in the ideological space that Newscorp’s crisis (with others to follow?) is now creating. When else, after all, might we have a better opportunity than now, when the interests, the main organs of political and civil society, the general public, ‘decent’ journalists and even some celebrities are so explicitly aligned.

The medium term objective should therefore be nothing less than the establishment of one or more worker-run press organs, set up on a thoroughly professional basis, but in direct challenge to both the current editorial line AND business model of the current rightwing-dominated media set-up.  As a principle, any such newspaper should subscribe to the main ethical stance of the current NUJ around the conduct of journalists, while avoiding the constraining, and fundamentally illogical, commitment formally espoused by much of the journalism community to ‘fair and impartial’ coverage of events.

Of course, the idea of the NUJ joining forces with the new philanthropists Hugh Grant, Steve Coogan, George Michael and a strategically disinvesting  then reinvesting Church of England for a News International takeover bid does have its attractions (and I’m available, should Hugh and Steve want me to put together the business plan and then become editor-in-chief).

More realistically though, we need to acknowledge that the Left is mosty skint, and that it’s not easy to set up a national newspaper from scratch, without fairly massive financial backing, and only be a happy congruence of events of the type envisaged above might make this happen.

More realistically in the short term the NUJ, with the explicit backing and support of our newly energised Labour party leadership, should be putting its energies into the development of local and regional worker-led titles, particularly in areas where such press has either died off completely because of the way the title main owners, principally Trinity Mirror and Johnston Press, have squeezed what are fundamentally profitable ventures till their journalists and other staff squeak, in the pursuit of quick dividends.

The NUJ can’t do this alone, of course, with the resources at its disposal. It will need the help of other unions, whose regional officers should be chomping at the bit to support regional titles sympathetic to their current members concerns and to the idea of union recruitment, and that will need the policy support of Labour to set up.

In addition, bodies like the Media Trust, in alliance with higher education, have already done a lot of good groundwork to establish the latent market for decent quality regional and local journalism, and they should be encouraged and supported to take the next vital steps, which might include raising start-up loan finance from like-minded Trusts and Foundations, as well as ‘alternative equity’ from a range of investors as interested in long-term socially valid products as the are in short-term dividend income.

None of this is impossible. A lot of the stuff about how to develop alternative financing has been around for a while now, and social enterprise/co-operative structures are very well-established.

To date a mixture of journalistic introversion (and a slightly snobby reluctance to get hands dirty with the financial elements), has given a wider sense – despite the evidence to the contrary – that it just can’t happen in the face of rightwing press hegemony.

But it can, especially in this period, when the public would be right behind such ventures, and it should.

ps.  Assiduous TCF readers will note that much of this is cut and pasted from an earlier article which hardly anyone read, because they’re all lazy bastards who don’t deserve a free bleeding press anyway.

Before I studied for my degree (which I took from 2006-2009) I had absolutely no idea of what state the job market would be in when I finished. I started by doing a course in a field I wanted to pursue a career in, but found the course dry, purposeless – and when I began speaking to my lecturers in confidence, they admitted doing this course will not necessarily help me for that career, any more than if I was to study something I enjoyed (which I eventually did) and start from the bottom in a company, working my way up.

When I did finish, I was completely unaware that in order to get into my desired career I would have to work a good deal totally unpaid, which I was only able to do from the savings I had made while working as a Teaching Assistant in my gap year, and couch surfing (which is to sleeping what hitchhiking is to travel).

In order to be able to work for free for a start-up company (which recently nosedived), I had to have not just a degree, but a 2:1 degree at that. From an employer’s perspective, they want to separate the wheat from the chaff, and that will never change, but it’s disturbing that employers offering entry level jobs are under the illusion that what divides a good worker from a bad one is, not just a degree – itself fallacious – but a certain class of degree.

It is my (totally non-controversial) contention that degree educated people are no better placed to do some jobs than non-degree educated people. But some employers expect a degree educated candidate because they can think of no better way of shortlisting the 100s of people who apply for the jobs they offer.

This might be understandable if all people capable of higher study went and did so, but that has never been true; many people are nudged out of the market by being financially unable to study at university. Even when university was free, there are living arrangements to think of, food, and if there is a family involved the chances decrease lower. Now that education can come with a debt of at least £27,000, these chances become even more distant.

But not only has the commercialisation of education dissolved the real purpose of a degree, but young people are being forced to consider higher education only because they will become locked out of the market of their choosing otherwise. The incentive to study is no longer in order to immerse oneself in the traditions of the great thinkers, for whom we owe so much of our own civilisation – but because otherwise the voluntary position one has to work in order to enter at the bottom of the ladder in a company that might eventually offer you a break in the career field you’ve pined for since passing your GCSEs, won’t take you on.

While MPs rally around trying to put the brakes on our nepotistic internocracy, why don’t they also pressure employers into offering entry-level positions to non-degree educated people, while curbing the illusion that university divides people in such a fundamental way.

I’ve only just noticed this piece from Tim Montgomerie at Conservative Home on the failing UK economy. In it, he makes an extraordinary admission:

[T]here’s a prediction that Britain may drop into negative growth again when the latest quarterly statistics are published later this month…… Even sluggish growth numbers will produce fresh questions about George Osborne’s economic strategy. Ed Balls will be on the TV again, urging that Britain abandons the Coalition’s deficit reduction strategy. The government would sink if it did. It would never be believed again on any subject.

The message is crystal clear. 

For this Tory opinion-former at least, the narrow electoral interests of the Conservative party now outweigh the much flaunted “national interest“. However bad things get, advises Montgomerie, the Tories simply cannot afford to change course.

Montgomerie would of course dispute this interpretation by arguing that he then goes on to suggest three policy ‘flaws’ in Osborne’s economic strategy which, if remedied, would make the underlying austerity-based strategy all hunkydory.  However, a quick glance at these three flaw areas soon puts paid to that explanation.

First, Montgomerie says “Osborne has no narrative for his economic policy” and then proceeds to outline what the narrative should look like – basically telling people it’s going to be a lot worse for longer.  

But that’s not economic policy. It’s PR.

Second, he refers to certain “supply side measures” which would improve economic policy.  These are “regulation of the City, tax reform, energy policy, modernisation of trade union laws and red tape.” 

Frankly, I have no idea how he thinks City regulation (increased or decreased?) will drive growth in the shorter term, and no idea what he means about energy policy. 

As for tax reform, I suspect he doesn’t mean making sure tax is collected from the rich. Maybe he means lowering Corporation Tax, but Duncan’s dealt with that one.

And how exactly has existing trade union legislation damaged the economy since the Tories were elected? 

As for red tape, oh never mind…….these are simply vacuous witterings dressed up as policy advice.

Third, Montgomerie thinks that as the Eurozone crisis moment arrives, Britain will be in a position to reap the economic rewards on the basis that it will be able to shout “told you so” at the IMF, because it’s headed by a French woman they don’t like.

Yeah, right.

All in all, then, Montgomerie’s proposals for economic improvement amount to little more than the usual Daily Mail froth. 

The key charge – that Montgomerie and the Tories who follow his line now put party before country – stands.

Early this month, Geoffrey Alderman, for the JC, wrote :

The campaign to persuade the Ramsay MacDonald government to abandon the anti-Zionist policy of its colonial secretary, Sidney Webb, was materially assisted by the deliberate intervention of Zionist groups in the fortuitous Whitechapel by-election of November-December, 1930. (my emphasis).

Sidney Webb (Fabian, founder of the LSE etc), ennobled as Lord Passfield in 1929, issued the Passfield White Paper in 1930, a policy statement for British Palestine. The statement originally set to look at the Arab riots of 1929, and the right for Jews to pray at the Western Wall (Kotel, or wailing wall) in Jerusalem, but ended up concerning a great many Zionists including Chaim Weizmann, the once President of the Zionist organisation, and the first President of the State of Israel – who felt that it represented a U-turn on the commitments set out in the Balfour Declaration.

Ramsay MacDonald was later encouraged to clarify the British Government’s commitments, in a letter addressed to Dr Weizmann explaining that Britain was unquestionably in favour of establishing a national home for Jewish people inside Palestine. In the letter MacDonald notes that the White Paper of October, 1930, had been “the subject of a debate in the House of Commons on Nov. 17, [which also addressed] certain criticisms put forward by the Jewish Agency”.

The criticisms of the Jewish Agency, as well as the Histadrut (General Federation of Labour), concerned policy on Jewish labour in Palestine, which Lord Passfield’s White Paper seemed to level criticism towards. It was the contention of some that in order to bring about peace between Arabs and Jews, who had until 1928 co-existed in relative peace – Jewish immigration be halted. The tone of the White Paper, some have said, demonstrates Lord Passfield buying into this assumption, and that he and his policy statement, were coloured by an anti-Zionism.

However the White Paper did not explicitly state any intention to the contrary of a homeland (Lord Passfield’s main worry was that immigration would exceed whatever may be the economic capacity of the country), in fact quite the opposite – it was in keeping with the consensus at the time that “the development of a Jewish National Home in Palestine is a consideration, which would enjoy continued support”.

That Lord Passfield signed such a statement off should confirm that at the time he and his department were not necessarily anti-Zionist. On September 15, 1929, he also made efforts to reassure a Jewish delegation that the National Home Policy would not be renounced. In a statement from the British Colonial Office, Lord Passfield said “there could be no question of the British government giving up the Palestine Mandate or departing from the policy embodied in the Balfour Declaration of facilitating the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”

Speaking to the Mayor of Tel Aviv, he noted the great achievements made between Arabs and Jews, but “felt bound to point out that the development must depend upon the power of absorption of the country”. The outbreak of Arab violence in August 1929 started “when Haj Amin al-Husseini, Mufti of Jerusalem, fomented Arab hatred by accusing the Jews of endangering the mosques and other sites holy to Islam. Observers heard Husseini issue the call: Itback al-Yahud “Slaughter the Jews!””

There was to be no halting of Jewish immigration to Palestine, but had there been, it might have been to avert violence towards Jews by aggressors, and not through any notion of anti-Zionist temperament.

Was Webb anti-Semitic?

That hasn’t stopped Sidney Webb being referred to as having “racialist leanings” elsewhere. One journalist has written: “In a treatise entitled Industrial Democracy written by Beatrice and her husband, they refer to the Jews in England as “a constant influence for degradation.”” This claim has been copied by a great many bloggers as proof that English socialism is tainted by anti-Semitism, but on perusal of my copy of Industrial Democracy (900 pages in size, I’m ready to admit that the contentious claim may have passed me by), what I can see is not a berating of Jewish workers, but sympathy for them.

The Webb’s talk at length about the disparity in fortunes made by wholesale clothiers, and the workers of what they call “no notion of a definite “Standard of life”” (workers ranging from Polish Jews to unskilled Englishwomen, who will work simply to keep their heads above water, so to speak) (p.687). Of the Jew worker specifically, they say he will work for low wages so as not to be out of work, and that their indefatigability makes them prime targets for capitalist exploiters (p.698).

Though the racial characterising may be slightly crass for the modern reader, their analysis is not one that immediately signals anti-Jewish prejudice. The real controversy of the book is how they describe black workers: “the African Negro … will work … for indefinitely low wages, but cannot be induced to work at all once their primitive wants are satisfied” (p.698, fn. 1).

Another point to note is found in Jeffrey Kaplan’s book Encyclopedia of white power: a sourcebook on the radical racist right. As he notes, Jews made up the early Fabians, and they were sympathetic towards the Bolsheviks. During Sidney Webb’s 1888 lecture tour in the USA, many far right commentators could not help but repeat the conclusion that Socialism was a Jewish project (of course Webb himself was Jewish, and noticeably so – on meeting him for the first time Beatrice Potter noted in her diary, 14 February, 1890, a “little man with a huge head on a very tiny body [and ] a Jewish nose”). Sidney Webb, if anything, was the subject of anti-Semitic abuse, not the perpetrator of it.

In sum

Aside from the fact that Poale Zion, a Marxist Zionist Jewish workers circle – were key allies for Webb and Arthur Henderson when they drafted the War Aims Memorandum, “recognising the ‘right of return’ of Jews to Palestine”, preceding the Balfour Declaration, I don’t think there is much evidence to show Webb was against a homeland for Jews in Palestine, at least while he was working for the British Colonial Office. What his position was later on, when he bestowed uncritical lust upon the Stalinists – whose notion of the “amalgam” sought to blame Zionism for everything from capitalism and imperialism, to Nazism and anti-Semitism, saddling close to what Bebel called the “socialism of fools” – is for another blog post.

On any normal news day, Cameron’s astonishingly cynical and ignorant attack on GPs would surely be headline news.  Here it is, from his Privatise Everything White Paper speech:

People with money can get friendly with their local GP at a dinner party, maybe see them out of hours if there’s an emergency. In this world of restricted choice and freedom it’s the poorest who lose out.

First, there’s the idea that people seek out a GP when they have an “emergency”.  What world is Cameron living in?  The idea of the 19th century personal physician, always at the beck and call of the elite, springs to mind. 

More seriously, Cameron here comes close to accusing GPs of outright corruption, and he certainly suggests that many of them are not following the duty of a doctor set out by the General Medical Council to:

 Never discriminate unfairly against patients or colleagues.

Cameron’s view that a standard GP is part of a ‘dinner paty’ clique is more a reflection of his upper-class background than it is of any kind of reality.  The reality is that the dinner party circuit as envisaged by Cameron is a phenomenon really quite specific to the ‘networking’ ruling class that Cameron inhabits;  in most towns and cities up and down the country, it simply doesn’t exist. 

If there is one statement from the last year that sums up Cameron’s lack of experience of the real world, a lack of experience which makes him fundamentally unfit to govern Britain, then this is surely it.

I’ll leave the last word to a very angry GP on the Pulse Today comments board (grammar and spelling slightly tidied):

Mr Cameron is obviously delusional considering his sense of reality – time to stop sniffing the solvents, Mr PM.  His public school boy background obviously afforded him such great insight into social dynamics!  He thinks he knows more about the average GP’s social calendar than we do.

What a twat! Since when do most GPs attend dinner parties with their patients in attendance? Utter bollocks. He’s just slinging mud at GP’s to deflect the shit storm facing him in the wake of his relasionship with corrupt press officers and ahead of the BMA’s action on pensions.

1.  The fall of the News of the World: comment, challenge, wider opportunity

Of the millions upon millions of words written about the News of the World affair in the last few days, the most interesting have been the ones focused on how we get better newspapers in the future.  Amongst these, three particular articles have stood out:

Reuben at the Third Estate, on why a rush to more regulation is not needed: 

What the likes of Geoffrey Robertson are calling for now, is full and explicit regulation of the press, backed up state power.

This would undoubtedly be a backwards step for our democracy. If we are opposed to censorship, then there is no way we can demand that an external body with officially sanctioned powers be given the general right to haul papers over the coals for what they publish. And as a citizen, I do not want or need a state-backed body to decide what I can and cannot read………..

But perhaps more importantly, the News of The World scandal has shown that, when it comes to checking the worst elements of the British media, state coercion isn’t the only show in town. It was civil society that forced the News of The World to shut down……..

The principle of a free press goes hand-in-hand with our ability as citizens to cast judgements, and to deploy our own civic rights in campaigning against what we despise.

John Lloyd (with Sunder Katwala responding) in the Financial Times on a different type of self-regulation:

[W]e have a dilemma. State-backed regulation is seen as illiberal, and would be opposed (on liberal grounds) by all of the press. Yet self-regulation….has proved self-serving and supine.

Donnacha Delong (NUJ President) at Comment is Free on how unions are best placed to counterbalance NOTW-like excess:

There is no doubt that journalists working in the News of the World at the time were under extreme pressure to produce exclusives and stress was a major factor……It’s no surprise some journalists took short cuts in these circumstances.

The NUJ could have had an impact……. A well-organised union provides a counterbalance to the power of the editors and proprietors that can limit their excesses.

All are good, sensible articles,  as far as they go.  All of them are focused on how we might make things a little less bad in the future, but operate in within the a paradigm that press excess is an inevitability, and that we must set up the best mechanisms we can to restrain it next time around.

So while I think these articles act as a useful starting point, I want to push the boundaries of the possible a little to examine how the Left, if we get our political organisation might seize the opportunity afforded by the new, unexpected toxicity of Murdoch’s media empire, to start to develop new forms of media which do not need regulation because they are not driven by the same motives and culture. 

Moreover, I want to set out how this might be allied to a wider movement to ‘do things different;y when it comes to professional/industrial (self)-organisation.

2.  What Tawney tells us

One of the things that has struck me since the NOTW closure was announced is the way the editor and other journalists speaking to the media about the final edition were so keen to stress their and their colleagues sense of professionalism;  indeed Colin Myler at one point seemed less offended by the whole idea that the paper was being shut down than he was at reports that Sun journalists had been put on hold to cover NOTW journalist absences. 

At first hearing, I thought this seeming loyalty to the paper quite bizarre, but increasingly it seems to me that this professional pride creates a useful starting point for where we go from here.  I was reminded of what RH Tawney had to say about ‘Industry as a Profession’ 90 years ago:

A Profession may be defined most simply as a trade which is organized, incompletely, no doubt, but genuinely, for the performance of function. It is not simply a collection of individuals who get a living for themselves by the same kind of work. Nor is it merely a group which is organized exclusively for the economic protection of its members, though that is normally among its purposes.

It is a body of men who carry on their work in accordance with rules designed to enforce certain standards both for the better protection of its members and for the better service of the public.

The standards which it maintains may be high or low: all professions have some rules which protect the interests of the community and others which are an imposition on it. Its essence is that it assumes certain responsibilities for the competence of its members or the quality of its wares, and that it deliberately prohibits certain kinds of conduct on the ground that, though they may be profitable to the individual, they are calculated to bring into disrepute the organization to which he belongs.

While some of its rules are trade union regulations designed primarily to prevent the economic standards of the profession being lowered by unscrupulous competition, others have as their main object to secure that no member of the profession shall have any but a purely professional interest in his work, by excluding the incentive of speculative profit (The Acquisitive Society, Ch. VII).

This extended definition, it seems to me, captures the essence of what both John Lloyd and Donnacha want for journalism, but in its insistence that all ‘industry; must be geared to socially useful ‘function’ (the key theme of the whole book) it also gives more than a hint about how we might go about achieving it.

For Tawney, no genuinely professionalised service or industry can develop unless it has both this clear function, and is clear from the burden of ‘speculative profit’.  As he goes on to say (in a way which also fits with Reuben’s regulation-by-public-(dis)approval aspiration) :

If industry is to be organized as a profession, two changes are requisite, one negative and one positive. The first, is that it should cease to be conducted by the agents of property-owners for the advantage of property-owners, and should be carried on, instead, for the service of the public.

The second, is that, subject to rigorous public supervision, the responsibility for the maintenance of the service should rest upon the shoulders of those, from organizer and scientist to labourer, by whom, in effect, the work is conducted.

Boiled down to its essence, this means that the public will only be properly served by industry (including the media) when a) it is ’professionally’ run by people who care about their function; b) it is not owned by people like Murdoch. It is not an either/or.  Both elements must be present.

3.  Realising Tawney

But  how do we get from here to a Tawnian there?  It is unlikely, even in the current frenzy, that the Murdoch brand will come to be so toxic that he has no choice but to sell off News International to a hastily put together workers’ buyout (though the idea of the NUJ joining forces with the new philanthropists Hugh Grant, Steve Coogan, George Michael and a strategically disinvesting then reinvesting Church of England for a takeover bid does have its attractions, should they want me to put together a basic business plan). 

More likely, I’d say at this stage, that if Murdoch does go for the rapid sale of NI, it’ll end up in the hands of media barons/speculators who operate by the same basic principles as Murdoch. For every Murdoch there’s a couple of Conrad Blacks.

From the Left’s perspective, there is a slightly longer game to be played , though we should be looking to develop our alternatives in the ideological space that Murdoch’s crisis is now creating.  When else might we have a better opportunity than when the interests of celebrities, the main organs of civil society, the general public are ‘decent’ journalists are so explicitly aligned.

The medium term objective, I suggest, should be nothing less than the establishment of one or more worker-run press organs, set up on a thoroughly professional basis,  but in direct challenge to both the current editorial line AND business model of the current rightwing-dominated media set-up.

As a principle, any such  newspaper should subscribe to the main ethical stance of the current NUJ around the conduct of journalists, while avoiding the constraining, and fundamentally illogical, commitment formally espoused by much of the journalism community to ‘fair and impartial’ coverage of events. 

You don’t have to be Michel Foucault to work out that, in press as in life, there is no such thing as impartiality, and that to kowtow to such a line would be to fight  the rightwing press with a hand behind the back.  ‘Facts can remain sacred, but that doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be fresh, worker-led  interpretation of those facts.

Of course it’s not easy to set up a national newspaper from scratch, without fairly massive financial backing, and it only be a happy congruence of events of the type envisaged above which might make this happen.

More realistically in the short term the NUJ, with the explicit backing and support of our newly energised Labour party leadership, should be putting its energies into the development of local and regional worker-led titles, particularly in areas where such press has either died off completely because of the way the title main owners, principally Trinity Mirror and Johnston Press, have squeezed what are fundamentally profitable ventures till their journalists and other staff squeak, in the pursuit of quick dividends.

The NUJ can’t do this alone, of course, with the resources at its disposal.  It will need the help of other unions, whose regional officers should be chomping at the bit to support regional titles sympathetic to their  current members concerns and to the idea of union recruitment, and that will need the policy support of Labour to set up.   Here there is a direct link to the ‘Modern Trades Council’ project we advocated in TCF’s Refounding Labour submission.

In addition, bodies like the Media Trust, in alliance with higher education, have already done a lot of good groundwork to establish the latent market for decent quality regional and local journalism, and they should be encouraged and supported to take the next vital steps, which might include raising start-up loan finance from like-minded Trusts and Foundations, as well as ‘alternative equity’ from a range of investors as interested in long-term socially valid  products as the are in short-term dividend income.

None of this is impossible.  A lot of the stuff about how to develop alternative financing has been around for a while now, and social enterprise/co-operative structures are very well-established. 

What has been lacking to date has been a mixture of  journalistic introversion (and a slightly snobby reluctance to get hands dirty with the financial elements), and a sense – despite the evidence to the contrary – that it just can’t happen in the face of rightwing press hegemony.  Now, at last, is an opportunity to show that there is an alternative way of doing journalism a way which combines professional integrity and expertise with a commitment to Tawnian ‘function’, which would make the old dead bloke proud.

4.  Beyond journalism

Of course, if the newspaper industry can be re-engineered toward social purpose and function in this way, so can many other industries and public services.

Space here does not permit an extrapolation of Tawnian theory to other areas of the economy, but in a subsequent post I’ll return to the theme, by focusing on the care industry; like the media, the care industry is currently nearing the awful but logical conclusion of its domination by speculative profit-makers, and as with the phone-hacking scandal it has been (and continues to be) plagued by terrible ‘professional’ practice which exploits and abuses those who society should be caring for most carefully because the very concept of professional integrity has become null and void.

Yet there are alternatives, and the Left and Labour needs to be getting its head round the political organisation and commitments which might realise the ideals of 1920 post-guild socialism to a post-Murdoch/Southern Cross 2010s.

And as Cameron starts to finger the self-destruct button, with his panic-stricken, attention-deflecting speech for the sell off to speculators of all public services (the stuff about sale to charities and social enterprises is a fig leaf for this), the timing may again be opportune. 

That’s as long as the Left and Labour are brave enough to take the Right on its own game, with all the difficult but necessary re-conception of what the State actually is, and is for, in a post-welfare state world.

But that’s another post.