Straw Wars

The crisis that began with the News of the World, and then spread to the whole of News International throughout the World, is now spreading into all the higher echelons of the British Power elite. Not only have politicians – already discredited by the Expenses Scandal – been shown to be in thrall to Murdoch's Evil Empire, but a complex web of interrelations between it, the political and establishment, and the Police is beginning to be revealed to Public gaze.

In the last few days we have seen not only how former top cops at the metropolitan police force, indeed some of those who were responsible for carrying out the investigations into hacking, have landed themselves lucrative jobs with News International, but we have today seen how one of those Executives at NI, Neil Wallace, who was being investigated, was then taken on by the Met themselves at £1,000 a day. Yet, for all the sound and furore, both in the mainstream press and in the left press, the central point is being missed. In reality, News International is fulfilling the role of a straw man to be easily knocked down. The real issue is the fact, that it is not just this particular, powerful media group that had close links with the politicians and police, or even that other such media groups now or in the future could exercise that role, but that these politicians and top police are part of a power elite, in which these kinds of connections between the rich and powerful are commonplace.

They share the same kinds of backgrounds, went to the same kinds of school, have currently the same kind of lifestyles, and consequently share the same basic interests – irrespective of which particular Party, Company or section of the State apparatus they represent. That is an interest in perpetuating the status quo, and defending the interests of Capital against Labour. That is why, as I said in my blog For A Workers Inquiry Into The Police And Media, it is ludicrous to look at a Judge led Inquiry to reveal the true extent of this web of influence and corruption, because the Judiciary itself is a part of that same Power Elite. If we want to properly clean out the shit that litters the corridors of British bourgeois democracy, then we need a Workers Inquiry, set up by the TUC, backed by the entire Labour Movement, and given all the resources it requires to expose the true nature of where power resides, and how it is exercised.

Yet, no one within all the Left groups is calling for such a basic democratic demand to be raised. Indeed, the majority of the Left have been left floundering about how to respond to this situation, because the basic statism and reformism of that Left usually depends on a stock answer to such situations. Either it calls for Workers Control, without setting out exactly how that is to be achieved with the workers owning the means of production, and especially in the conditions of anti-trades unionism prevailing at News International, or else it demands nationalisation of the offending industry.

But, no one on the Left believes that a state owned press in Britain would be a good idea – even though as I pointed out previously it has no problem with a nationalised education industry, which is a far more potent means of indoctrinating future workers. The obvious demand here is to call for workers in the industry to occupy, and set up their own Worker owned Co-ops, and even aside from that for the Labour Movement to put its resources into developing a mass circulation, Labour Movement paper run as a Worker owned Co-op. But, the only group that has come close to calling for that is the CPGB, yet even they shy away from actually explicitly calling for it.

On placards outside Wapping last week, the SWP called for the breaking up of Murdoch's Empire. On their website, they have no real set of demands as to how to deal with the current situation, all we are given is a rehashing of the events, and a sort of moralising about just look how bad Capitalism is.

The Socialist Party's response is nonsensical. It rehashes a review by Peter Taaffe of Nick Davies' – the Guardian journalist who has uncovered the hackings scandal – book, “Flat Earth News”. The Socialist Party's answer,

“The solution ultimately is to create a real alternative. This means creating alternative, democratically controlled sources of information, particularly about the struggles of the oppressed, the activities of the working class, the labour movement and the trade unions. This means independent papers, hopefully in time radio stations, and demands for access to TV.”

But, they don't say independent from what. Does this mean also independent from the working-class? Nor do they say how this independence is to be assured. Later they say,

“This must be accompanied by raising now the need for the nationalisation of the printing presses, television and radio, under popular management and control, as the most democratic means of overcoming the dictatorial stranglehold presently exercised by the press moguls and their acolytes.

This is not to suggest 'state control' of the press. We, the working class and the labour movement, do not want to take over the Sun, the Daily Mail or even the august Guardian. We oppose the state monopoly of news and information as existed in the Stalinist states of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.”

But, this is nonsense. Why should we the workers not here and now wish to take over the Sun, Daily Mail and Guardian? What would workers ownership and control of these papers here and now have in common with state ownership of the press as under Stalinism? Nothing. But, of course, the nationalisation of the means of production in the media industry here and now, would have a very great deal in common with the kind of state controlled media seen under Stalinism or other authoritarian regimes! Moreover, if workers cannot gain or exercise workers control over those means of production when they are in the hands of private Capitalists like Murdoch, there is absolutely no possibility they could gain or exercise that control when they are in the hands of a powerful Capitalist State.

They quote Trotsky in their defence,

"The real tasks of the workers' state do not consist in policing public opinion, but in freeing it from the yoke of capital. This can only be done by placing the means of production - which includes the production of information - in the hands of society in its entirety.

"Once this essential step towards socialism has been taken, all currents of opinion which have not taken up arms against... the proletariat must be able to express themselves freely. It is the duty of the workers' state to put in their hands, to all according to their numeric importance, the technical means necessary for this, printing presses, paper, means of transportation".

But, they seem to have missed one very tiny problem with using this quote, which is that Trotsky is speaking here about a Workers State. It seems to have escaped the attention of the Socialist Party that here and now the British State is a Capitalist State!!!

In fact, Trotsky had not time for the approach put forward by the Socialist Party. In, Nationalisation And Workers Control in Mexico, he wrote,

“It would of course be a disastrous error, an outright deception, to assert that the road to socialism passes, not through the proletarian revolution, but through nationalization by the bourgeois state of various branches of industry and their transfer into the hands of the workers’ organizations.”

And in, Workers Control Of production, Trotsky writes,

“If the participation of the workers in the management of production is to be lasting, stable, “normal,” it must rest upon class collaboration, and not upon class struggle. Such a class collaboration can be realized only through the upper strata of the trade unions and the capitalist associations. There have been not a few such experiments: in Germany (“economic democracy”), in Britain (“Mondism”), etc.

Yet, in all these instances, it was not a case of workers’ control over capital, but of the subserviency of the labour bureaucracy to capital. Such subserviency, as experience shows, can last for a long time: depending on the patience of the proletariat.

The closer it is to production, to the factory, to the shop, the less possible such a regime is, for here it is a matter of the immediate, vital interests of the workers, and the whole process unfolds under their very eyes. workers’ control through factory councils is conceivable only on the basis of sharp class struggle, not collaboration. But this really means dual power in the enterprises, in the trusts, in all the branches of industry, in the whole economy.

What state regime corresponds to workers’ control of production? It is obvious that the power is not yet in the hands of the proletariat, otherwise we would have not workers’ control of production but the control of production by the workers’ state as an introduction to a regime of state production on the foundations of nationalization. What we are talking about is workers’ control under the capitalist regime, under the power of the bourgeoisie. However, a bourgeoisie that feels it is firmly in the saddle will never tolerate dual power in its enterprises. workers’ control consequently, can be carried out only under the condition of an abrupt change in the relationship of forces unfavourable to the bourgeoisie and its state. Control can be imposed only by force upon the bourgeoisie, by a proletariat on the road to the moment of taking power from them, and then also ownership of the means of production.

Thus the regime of workers’ control, a provisional transitional regime by its very essence, can correspond only to the period of the convulsing of the bourgeois state, the proletarian offensive, and the failing back of the bourgeoisie, that is, to the period of the proletarian revolution in the fullest sense of the word.”

So either the Socialist Party want us to believe that we are in a revolutionary or pre-revolutionary situation in Britain, where this dual power in the factories can exist, or else they are demanding not real workers control, but merely the kind of Corporatism and class collaboration that Trotsky describes! And, this kind of reformist approach is adopted by the AWL too, who talk about the restoration of Trades Union power within the media. Yet, both seem to forget that even at its height the power of the Trades Unions in print was able to exercise only a very limited, negative control over the work process, and production. A Marxist should not be surprised by that, because it is wholly consistent with Marx and Engels analysis in relation to the role of Trades Unions.

In The Condition Of The Working Class, Engels writes,

“The history of these Unions is a long series of defeats of the working-men, interrupted by a few isolated victories. All these efforts naturally cannot alter the economic law according to which wages are determined by the relation between supply and demand in the labour market.

Hence the Unions remain powerless against all great forces which influence this relation. In a commercial crisis the Union itself must reduce wages or dissolve wholly; and in a time of considerable increase in the demand for labour, it cannot fix the rate of wages higher than would be reached spontaneously by the competition of the capitalists among themselves.”

And Marx in Value, Price and Profit, Marx says,

“I think I have shown that their struggles for the standard of wages are incidents inseparable from the whole wages system, that in 99 cases out of 100 their efforts at raising wages are only efforts at maintaining the given value of labour...”

Although, Marx sets out why despite this workers continue to have to struggle even for this minimum, the whole emphasis of his argument is on the fact that this can only ever be a limited, and defensive battle, which is why he says,

“At the same time, and quite apart from the general servitude involved in the wages system, the working class ought not to exaggerate to themselves the ultimate working of these everyday struggles.

They ought not to forget that they are fighting with effects, but not with the causes of those effects; that they are retarding the downward movement, but not changing its direction; that they are applying palliatives, not curing the malady. They ought, therefore, not to be exclusively absorbed in these unavoidable guerilla fights incessantly springing up from the never ceasing encroachments of capital or changes of the market. They ought to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economical reconstruction of society.”

The truth of Marx's argument here against Weston is in fact, demonstrated by what happedn in the print industry. Even though the Trades Unions were only ever able to exercise a negative control, preventing to an extent the introduction of new working practices etc., and occasionally refusing to print the odd really obnoxious article, or piece of overt class war propaganda, even that was too much for Capital, which eventually did what Marx said it would.

It introduced new technology that did away with the kind of skilled labour that provided the print unions with their power. It set up new companies such as Eddie Shah's “Today”, which employed workers outside the control of the print unions, and able to use the new technology without the need for the kind of skills that the printers had. Eventually, with the assistance of Thatcher it broke the power of the print unions, but even without that it would have won eventually, by locating production elsewhere, for example overseas. Any socialist that has failed to learn the lesson of that is simply leading workers down a blind alley, if they think that such Trades Union politics, reformism, and syndicalism can provide them with any kind of real solution.

Good Riddance

Socialists cannot be happy that workers employed at the News of the World have lost their jobs, but similarly Socialists should shed no tears over the closure of that disgusting rag either. As Steve Coogan said on Newsnight a few days ago, it is not just the fact of the phone hacking that made the News of the World and other parts of the gutter press a disgrace. It is the fact, of their utterly reactionary politics, their focus on sleaze and tittle tattle to distract workers with “Bread and Circuses” away from the real problems that confront them, and above all their inveterate mysoginism, homophobia and racism that attacks the weakest in society such as minorities, people forced on to Benefits and so on.

The journalists on the paper who wrote those stories cannot divorce themselves from what they wrote, and indeed the National Union of Journalists, which fails to address the question of its members writing such reactionary garbage cannot excuse itself either. Trade Union politics is not Socialist politics, and between the two, socialists always have to prioritise the latter.

As socialists, we do not want to see workers employed at any firm made redundant. We did not want to see workers at Lucas Aerospace, for example, made redundant despite the fact that they were employed in making armaments for the Capitalist State that would be used both by the British State, and sold to other Capitalist States, and reactionary regimes around the globe to suppress workers, and other oppressed groups. Our desire not to see workers lose their jobs could not override our socialist principles, and indeed strategic concern to limit the power of the Capitalist State to oppress workers.

But, the workers at Lucas, themselves, showed that we do not have to simply accept the options, within Capitalism, that Capital presents us with. The Lucas workers drew up their own plans for alternative production, that would have seen their jobs retained, whilst the company ceased producing means of destruction, and instead produced goods that would be socially useful. The limitation of the Lucas Plan was that they thought that they could get the Capitalist owners of the Company to adopt their plans, or that they could impose some kind of meaningful control over the labour process without themselves having ownership of the company.

The vast majority of rank and file soldiers are working-class, economically conscripted from areas of high unemployment and social deprivation. We have no desire for such workers to have to endure unemployment and deprivation, as the alternative to employment in the armed forces. But, that concern cannot override our recognition that those armed forces prime function is the maintenance of the dominance of the Capitalist class, its Social Dictatorship. If the armed forces were to disintegrate, in the same way that News of the World has done, we could shed no tears. But, just as with the Lucas workers, the alternatives are not simply employment in the Army of the Capitalists or the dole queue.

Our alternative is the development of a Workers Militia that could ensure that “Defence” actually was a defence of the majority of the British people, its working-class, and not simply a defence of the interests of the minuscule minority that is the Capitalist Class.

The same is true with the Police Force where our alternative is the establishment of democratically controlled Defence Squads, and the establishment of effective neighbourhood policing implemented by the workers in those communities themselves.

But, shedding no tears over the closure of the News of the World is not at all the same either as the utopian, reformist demands of the SWP, who have called for the breaking up of Murdoch's Evil Empire.

In raising this demand, the SWP have joined with those such as Kautsky – or indeed with the Communist Party that in the past argued for an “anti-monopoly alliance” - who abandoned Marxist politics in favour of a purely Liberal perspective. In “Imperialism – The Highest Stage of Capitalism”, Lenin sets out what is wrong with this perspective. He quotes with approval the statement by Hilferding,

““It is not the business of the proletariat,” writes Hilferding “to contrast the more progressive capitalist policy with that of the now bygone era of free trade and of hostility towards the state. The reply of the proletariat to the economic policy of finance capital, to imperialism, cannot be free trade, but socialism. The aim of proletarian policy cannot today be the ideal of restoring free competition—which has now become a reactionary ideal—but the complete elimination of competition by the abolition of capitalism.””

Before adding in criticism of Kautsky's proposal for breaking up the monopolies,

“ Kautsky broke with Marxism by advocating in the epoch of finance capital a “reactionary ideal”, “peaceful democracy”, “the mere operation of economic factors”, for objectively this ideal drags us back from monopoly to non-monopoly capitalism, and is a reformist swindle...

Kautsky’s argument can have no other meaning; and this “meaning” is meaningless. Let us assume that free competition, without any sort of monopoly, would have developed capitalism and trade more rapidly. But the more rapidly trade and capitalism develop, the greater is the concentration of production and capital which gives rise to monopoly. And monopolies have already arisen—precisely out of free competition! Even if monopolies have now begun to retard progress, it is not an argument in favour of free competition, which has become impossible after it has given rise to monopoly.

Whichever way one turns Kautsky’s argument, one will find nothing in it except reaction and bourgeois reformism.”

But, its not just that in calling for such an approach the SWP adopt a thoroughly utopian, and reformist perspective, their position also explicitly accepts the idea that the media should remain in private Capitalist hands. That it should do so, exposes the real weakness and contradiction within the politics of the statist, reformist Left. In almost every other such situation, the stock response of the SWP would be to call for the industry to be nationalised.

But, even the SWP must realise what such ownership of all the media by the Capitalist State would mean! It would mean effectively arguing for moves towards the establishment of a totalitarian Capitalist regime. That is what State owned and controlled media has implied everywhere throughout the globe where it has existed.

Yet, ironically, and wholly inconsistently, the SWP along with the rest of the statist, reformist Left is not only quite happy to accept, but positively paints up, as progressive, the Monopoly control, by the Capitalist State, of even more powerful ideological levers than the media. It paints up as progressive the Monopoly control, by the Capitalist State, of the schools, colleges and other education factories by which the Capitalist Class directly controls and shapes the minds and ideas of workers in order to reproduce the Labour Power it requires.

It is an acceptance, of that limitation of Trade Union politics, that leaves workers with the choice only of Capitalist alternatives, rather than pointing out that, here and now, alternative socialist solutions are available based on workers themselves taking ownership and control of these functions.

Of course, every day workers are forced to accept such compromises. Every day that workers go to work for a capitalist, and have to accept as a condition of that employment that they have no control over what they produce, or how it is produced, and that they have to hand over a portion of what they produce to the Capitalist for free. But, as socialists we do not paint up such compromises as in any way a lesser-evil, let alone as in some way a victory. On the contrary, we have to describe them honestly for what they are. They are a defeat for the working-class, a defeat we are forced to accept because of our continuing weakness and inability to impose our own alternative.

In Left-Wing Communism, Lenin set this out in relation to the need for Compromises. In 1918 a weak Soviet Union, facing Civil War, and external threats was faced with a demand from Germany for the ceding of territory on Russia's western border. At Brest-Litovsk, Lenin argued that it was necessary to accept the need to accept this compromise, because they were not strong enough to do any other at that time. Engaging in some ultra-left adventure to throw themselves at the Germans, in the hope of the German and other European workers coming to their rescue would have been a terrible tactical move.

“Every proletarian has been through strikes and has experienced "compromises" with the hated oppressors and exploiters, when the workers have had to return to work either without having achieved anything or else agreeing to only a partial satisfaction of their demands. Every proletarian—as a result of the conditions of the mass struggle and the acute intensification of class antagonisms he lives among—sees the difference between a compromise enforced by objective conditions (such as lack of strike funds, no outside support, starvation and exhaustion)—a compromise which in no way minimises the revolutionary devotion and readiness to carry on the struggle on the part of the workers who have agreed to such a compromise..”


The same is true in many other instances. For example, if workers are faced with a large fascist mobilisation, say of the EDL, which outnumbers them, then it would be an ultra-left folly of the kind engaged in by petit-bourgeois dilettantes, seeking publicity for themselves, to try to engage those fascists in the hope that having done so, everything would be alright because the Capitalist police would intervene to rescue them. The Marxist principle is to oppose State bans, and to oppose the intervention of the Capitalist Police in such situations, precisely because our goal is to ensure that the working-class recognises that the Capitalist State is its enemy, that if it intervenes once against the fascists it will do so only to provide it with cover to intervene ten times against the Labour Movement, and also to demonstrate to workers that they can and should organise their own defence.

Our goal here is not at all the limited one of stopping the fascists on this one particular occasion, but of building the working class as an independent political force, and therefore, the intervention of the Capitalist State, in such a situation, is not at all to bring about the same goal we have set for ourselves. If we find ourselves in such a situation, then the Marxist position must be to organise a strategic retreat so that we are not forced into placing ourselves in a position of reliance on our class enemies. Indeed, we should criticise vociferously those petit-bourgeois dilettantes, who instead launch their own adventures against the fascists, having failed to mobilise a majority of workers behind them, because such forces can only, through such tactics, bring further weakness and defeat to the class.

Similarly, now in Libya the Marxist position has to be that we are in favour of an independent working-class solution. We seek to build an independent workers movement in Libya to oppose both Gaddafi and Imperialism, we seek to build an independent, international Labour Movement capable of providing direct, political and military support to the workers in Libya, and throughout the Middle East.

The fact, that we are too weak to bring that about is no reason for us not to argue what we are in favour of, and instead to settle for some “lesser-evil”, still less to paint up that lesser-evil as in some way also achieving our goals, or still less being progressive. We are opposed to the intervention of Imperialism, but we have to accept it, in the same way that Lenin had to accept the terms on offer at Brest-Litovsk, because we are too weak to prevent it. But, we should ensure that we describe that for what it is – a defeat.

But, every time that workers are forced to accept such defeats we have to point out that Capital becomes stronger, and Labour becomes weaker. That is not an argument for workers simply dropping out, like hippies, any more than it would be an argument for workers draft dodging from the army. On the contrary, the fact that, in imposing these defeats on workers, Capital is, at the same time forced, to train workers – both as workers and as soldiers – means that it is also creating its own grave diggers, and in developing the means of production, Capital is also creating the conditions for workers to go beyond Capitalism, and create Socialism. In bringing workers together in collective, co-operative production Capital also shows to Labour where its future lies. As Michael Moore, showed in his film Capitalism - A Love Story, workers in the US, like elsewhere, faced with their factories closing have organised themselves to take over those factories and run them as Co-ops, succesfully.

As he shows workers at a Bakery Co-op were able to operate so succesfully that they were able to pay themselves far better than airline pilots employed by the US Capitalists. Engineering workers were able to succesfully, run a business involved in high-tech production. And, whilst these democratically run Co-ops, did employ Managers, and Executives, they were the employees of the workers not vice versa, and were paid the same as the workers as opposed to the extravagant salaries of the bosses of Capitalist enterprises, which run in the US to as much as 1,000 times the salary of the workers in their firm. Our task is to explain to workers why the logical extension of the fact that every day they produce through such acts of collective, co-operative labour is that they should also own the means of production with which they work, on a collective and co-operative basis i.e. that they should pose, here and now, as an alternative to the choices presented to them by Capital, the creation of worker owned and controlled Co-operative enterprises as a precursor to the establishment of a Co-operative Commonwealth on a national, and international basis.

Our alternative, here and now, to either Monopoly ownership of the media by the Capitalist State, or the utopian and ultimately reactionary demand for the breaking up of the media monopolies, is for the establishment of a mass circulation Labour Movement newspaper, owned and controlled by workers themselves, and run as a Worker Co-operative, along with the establishment of similar online versions, and the establishment of a Worker Owned and Controlled TV service.

For A Workers' Inquiry Into The Police And Media

Two years ago in my blog Open The Books On Bourgeois Democracy, I wrote,

"If the Torygraph have raised a moral panic over the issue of MP’s expenses they have done a great service by opening a Pandora’s box on the whole gamut of abuses that constitute the functioning of bourgeois democracy as a whole. Finding out what MP’s are claiming is only the start. We need to demand the same kind of opening of the books of the whole system of bourgeois democracy that is now being demanded of MP’s.

We should have all of the expenses and other payments to the top Civil Servants, the judges, the Police Chiefs, the Military and all those other Governmental and Quasi-Governmental bodies set out in full detail, for all to see, and checked over by committees of inquiry under the control of Trade Unions. We should see all the payments and claims made by the Royal Family and their hangers-on. Similarly, the head Vicar has come out and criticised MP’s for greed, which is a bit rich from an institution, which for the last 2,000 years has leached off the poor by various means, and whose spokespeople today are wholly dependent upon the income derived from the huge wealth so obtained during that period, and on the current generosity of strangers, as well as a continuing support from the State! Let’s open the books of the various Churches and see how much wealth they have stored up on Earth, and what the expenses claims of ITS top bureaucrats are getting too.

But, more than that workers should be able to see how much of the profit of the companies they work for, are being drained in similar expenses by their top bosses, and the various Board members of those companies too. And bourgeois democracy, is about more than just the people who are elected to Parliaments and Councils, its about the whole structure of the society we live in, including those who provide the information on which the politicians are judged.

Its all well and good journalists shaming MP’s, but we should also have full disclosure of THEIR salaries and expenses too. Certainly, we should know how much these rags are being paid by the bosses in one form or another to run stories, and how much they are paying out to obtain stories.

The Torygraph may have started something it didn’t anticipate. But, workers anger should necessitate a thorough investigation into the functioning and corruption of the bourgeois state as a whole."

The revelations about the extent to which the News of the World was involved in hacking into the phones of hundreds of people shows just how necessary such a deep cleaning of the Augean stables of bourgeois democracy is.

Its not just the fact of hacking into phones, but the other charges that have been levelled, by people like Tom Watson MP, involving connections with the criminal underworld, and what appears to be a routine paying off of police in return for information about innocent individuals, and victims of crimes.

What has been seen in the last almost 10 years, that this affair has been going on, is the extent to which both the police, and politicians have shied away from any kind of real investigation into News International and its companies.

In large part that appears to be because they were both being paid off by the Murdoch Empire, and because they were afraid of upsetting that Empire for fear of not just being given a bad press, but of it organising a campaign against them based upon digging up any kind of dirt, using almost any kind of method, that was necessary.

Under those conditions, Cameron's emphasis on a Police investigation is laughable. Not only is Cameron damaged goods because of his close association with the Murdoch Empire, and the principal players in this affair, but who can trust the Police to investigate what they have clearly failed to investigate for the last ten years, especially given that we do not know which Police have been paid off by News International, and which the Evil Empire has dirt on, to pressure them into keeping quiet.

But, nor can we have any kind of faith in a Public or Judicial Inquiry either. After all, Judges too are part of that ruling elite within society that the Evil Empire has focussed its attention on.

Is it not likely that Darth Murdoch's clone army will have dirt on many of these Judges - after all nearly all of them went to Public Schools with all the kind of practices that go with that environment - and that if they don't now, they would soon dig some up? Moreover, just as the MP's scandal opened a Pandora's Box, its likely that any serious investigation into News International, and the wider Media, would expose further nasty aspects of the way bourgeois democracy really works as a means of the rich and powerful controlling society. Judges, who are thoroughly entrenched within that system, are not going to shit in their own back yard.

If we want a real investigation it has to be a Workers Inquiry. The TUC and LP, and all other Labour Movement organisations, should set one up, and demand that it be given official sanction. It should be made up of experienced Trade Union activists, and Labour Movement politicians from a rank and file level, and be provided with all the necessary legal and technical support required from within the Labour Movement.

It appears that, even now, the Emperor believes that he can play the people for fools. It has been proposed to close down the News of the World. But steps have already been put in place to establish a Sunday Sun in its place!!! What this further demonstrates is the need for a mass circulation Labour Paper owned and controlled by the Labour Movement itself. It should be linked to the development of an online version, and we need the establishment of a Labour Movement TV Channel. New technology has made that possible for many years. If Manchester United can have their own channel then so can the Labour Movement. We have plenty of creative talent within the Labour Movement to produce good quality programmes, films etc., and thereby to challenge the dross put out by the Capitalists.