We face a genuine crisis. Not a long-term crisis that we can pretend isn’t happening. Not a manufactured crisis created for political gain. A real, urgent, genuine crisis. In the western world our democracy is now under serious threat. The politicians could do something about it but they won’t.
The threat is obvious – far right billionaires have been set free to use wealth beyond our imagination to control our democratic debate. I don’t just mean Musk. I don’t just mean Zuckerberg (not far right, just happy to do their bidding for money). I don’t just mean Peter Thiel. I don’t just mean Jeff Bezos (who knows his politics, but he gives off far-right vibes). It is a much bigger problem than that.
I mean the super-rich who buy newspaper companies to have their own private propaganda machine. I mean the heads of weapons corporations, of private health corporations, of oil and gas corporations. Take your pick – it now seems there isn’t a billionaire on the planet who doesn’t want to usurp your democratic choices.
It’s petrifying. When Germany’s biggest newspaper is giving Elon Musk a full article to argue in favour of Germans voting for the far-right, actual-Nazi-adjacent AfD, we’re miles over the rainbow into Evil Oz. We can tell ourselves in Scotland that we’re immune, but the rise of Reform isn’t driven by domestic Scottish politics but by the proprietors of London-based newspapers.
It is startling that we are on day four of a ‘debate’ about ‘child rape gangs’ which ‘the left’ has apparently been covering up simply because some unhinged coder-with-money says so. To be clear, I’m on the left and I am being silent about no rape gangs – I just don’t have a shred of evidence that there are any I should be talking about. You give me credible evidence that there are rape gangs of any skin colour operating in Scotland but not being prosecuted and I’m with you.
But I’m not going to make stuff up and dance the dance for Elon Fucking Musk. And those who imply I should be taking this evidence-free crap seriously are just Musk’s little puppets. The media amplifies this stuff and then the liberal media whines about it. There are countless articles about Musk and ‘rape gangs’ in the Guardian and the BBC is all over it.
Musk is all-but editing the UK media and without fail our publications are dancing his dance like they’re not complicit. To some in Britain’s media – there isn’t enough soap in a supermarket to wash your hands clean. This is just the middle phase of this phenomenon and it is about to get much worse.
OK, so far so grim. But I claim there is something we can do about it, so what is my plan? First, I’ve been warning about the inherent danged of letting rich people control the media for as long as I can remember. I really hope you all believe me now – Reform, Trump, Brexit, Austerity, take your pick, these are products of the UK’s media more than they are products of the UK’s democracy.
What we need is ‘freedom of journalism’, every bit as free of influence from corporate owners as from government coercion
In Scotland we can address this. First we can get to the source of the problem. The political classes have simply accepted that Facebook (it’s mostly Facebook) can insert itself between everyone, moderating their conversations. I want to talk about an issue facing us locally but the only forum for discussing it is a Community Facebook Page which I won’t access because I don’t do social media.
There is no democratic structure at the community level to deal with this and no real alternative in existence. That could be changed quickly. First, we need local democracy in Scotland or there is no authority for addressing anything at the local level. Second, we need to stop accepting Facebook as a means of democratic communication.
There are lots of open-source or developable ‘peer to peer communication applications’ which are basically Facebook without advertising or algorithms which you can lift, customise and own. No public body in Scotland should receive public funding if its main means of communication is through Facebook. A public platform should be created and managed in the public interest. Citizens should be told that this is how public discourse will be managed, run and moderated locally on a democratic basis.
We should integrate a short messaging apps (Twitter) for simple messages (like what bin is to go out). All this ought all to be orientated around a person-centred data account. Our data should be owned by us, not by institutions, public or private. On birth we should be getting not a National Insurance Number but a data account. That would be our ‘citizen ID’.
Every data trail we leave in the public realm should be stored in that personal ID. If we want public services we must agree to share the relevant data with the relevant public service. Otherwise, we control it so my health data isn’t being sold to, well, Peter Thiel.
This data-store-messaging-app model would be how government communicates with us and how we communicate with each over for any democratic purpose. That being in place, non-commercial organisations should also get access to the app so that a local charity isn’t left to the mercy of Zuckerberg et al.
Our media isn’t the worst for right-wing ownership but that’s miles shy of what we need. We most certainly do not need ‘freedom of the press’. The ‘press’ is the bit that’s owned by the oligarchs. What we need is ‘freedom of journalism’, every bit as free of influence from corporate owners as from government coercion.
To achieve that I propose a publicly-funded journalism agency, funding many freelance journalists pursuing stories and presented neutrally and available to all via an editorial function overseen by a balanced editorial board.
Part of the above citizen data and communication account would be a news account. Citizens could read the basic news ‘raw’ or they could subscribe to specific news sites hosted on the platform. Those would be able to draw on the raw news and embellish it in different ways (with a non-topsliced subscription if they want). Yes, you could get the Herald or Scotsman there, but Common Weal could restart a news service and present news from our perspective based on the agency reporting. So could centre right think tank Reform Scotland. I’ve explained this idea in more detail here.
Then we need to get the money out of politics. We first need a law banning interference in domestic politics by anyone not resident here or a citizen resident somewhere else. Then we need public funding for elections and political parties, banning all donations other than from party members, and even that heavily capped.
We are condemned to dance like puppets and then one day wake up and notice that we’re living in one of those corporate dystopias we’ve seen on TV
Oh, and we need to stop the utterly inexplicable practice of subsidising billionaires via Scottish Enterprise. Why it gives millions to massive arms manufacturers and companies like Amazon is beyond me. Scottish funding for Scottish business – why not? We’ve explained that ‘inward investment’ is Scotland’s curse because it is really just wealth extraction.
But it’s not just wealth extraction, it’s power extraction. All of this takes our own domestic power and hands it to foreign companies (mostly only by enormous wealth funds which are also in the ‘control politics’ business) whom we then need to cower in the face of.
We should crack down on corporate lobbyists. They will tell you that meetings with politicians are crucial to democracy. Great, have your meetings – but have them audio and video recorded for the public record. If it’s for the sake of democracy (sorry, I’m sniggering here) then you’ll have no worry about transparency.
I could go on. I could give you more examples of immediate, actionable ways in which Scotland could begin a process of insulating itself from global neofascism (never, ever forget that one of fascisms ‘founders’ Benito Mussolini accurately said “Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power”).
For now though I want to explain why this isn’t happening here or anywhere else, and why little if any of the above will happen here or anywhere else. To understand you need to think about the defining feature that people in any given walk of life consider to be the ultimate goal.
As an example, I do music for a hobby. Taylor Swift don’t impress me much because I’m interested in songwriting and while she is competent with a melody, it’s been the same melody (give or take) for a decade. So for me, randomly, Fiona Apple is way more prestigious than Taylor Swift (thinking about who to give as an example the peerless, astoundingly good album Fetch The Bolt Cutters came to mind).
For an economist, however, unit sales beat songwriting prowess. For an economist, Fiona Apple is irrelevant and Taylor Swift is god. There is no inherent value in anything other than what we give it. Which takes us to politicians.
Because the uber-characteristic for politics is only, is never anything other than, power. That’s it. They tack on modifiers (like ‘for a purpose’ or ‘to end child poverty’), but I promise you, they don’t admire people who work at the sharp end of child poverty, they admire other powerful people. They can’t get enough of them.
Why won’t our politicians do anything to reign in the incredibly rich and ludicrously powerful? Sure, because they can make a politician’s life difficult. Sure, they drop lots of money into political parties (oh how I wish I was in politics and could mock ‘straight-talking’ Nigel Farage who’s voice tails away to nothing when Musk is speaking). But that’s not the reason.
If you’ve spent your life telling yourself ‘power first, everything else after’, those with power are your idols. You swoon over the United States of America even as you know it’s bad for you. You run to any social event held by Rupert Murdoch even if his papers are going to monster you. You can’t see past power, what it could do for you, what it could do to you.
A picture of this? Look at how John Swinney swaggers when he thinks Trump doesn’t have any power (‘vote Kamala!’ he stupidly said) yet cowers when he thinks he does. Politicians claim to be brave when roughing up nurses, or immigrants, or pensioners, but their bravery never stretches to challenging the interests of the really rich.
That’s all I want you to take away from this article. Our democracy is in real trouble, we could do lots and lots of things to protect it but we won’t because politicians are always cowardly in the face of power. If they weren’t, a Labour government would have reformed media ownership laws.
Instead, we are condemned to dance like puppets and then one day wake up and notice that we’re living in one of those corporate dystopias we’ve seen on TV so often. On a bad day I worry that we’re nearly there already. I don’t want power; it doesn’t titillate me in the slightest. But there are days I really wish I had it because I increasingly think that only those who genuinely don’t want power will ever have the nerve to face down real power.
And someone needs to face down the malevolent power casting its shadow over the globe right now, or we will wake up in darkness.