From across the Pond, Murdoch looks even murkier
Rupert Murdoch has a gambler’s nerve but his luck may now be running out, if a conversation I had with a group of American and British corporate lawyers is anything to go by. Across the pond they see Murdoch’s newspaper empire unravelling like a fraying sleeve.
Certainly it seems that whatever wily move the Dirty Digger makes to salvage his position at his scandal-hit British papers a new revelation pops up to deepen the crisis.
Murdoch first became alarmed when it became clear that his journalists had not merely been listening into celebrities’ mobiles in search of gossip column fodder but had hacked the phone of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler. A wave of public revulsion broke at the disclosure.
Rupert’s dramatic response took everyone by surprise. He closed down the world’s biggest newspaper, withdrew his long-standing bid to take full control of the money-spiining broadcaster BSkyB, and appeared before a parliamentary committee to announce himself “humble”.
But in the States, a US lawyer told me, it was felt Murdoch had not done enough to forestall a revolt by a third of shareholders at the annual meeting of his US holding company, News Corp.
Again it looked here in the UK that Murdoch had acted decisively after Scotland Yard revealed that as many as 5,795 people may have had their phones hacked. He set up an internal Management and Standards Committee which turned over 300 million emails and internal papers to police. It seemed a thoroughgoing response which led to the arrest of ten senior Sun journalists.
And it seemed Murdoch had pulled off a coup in hurriedly launching The Sun on Sunday to replace News of the World. But very next day the Leveson inquiry heard the gravest accusation yet against News International – that it had set up a secret payments system to bribe police and other public officials. He was snookered again.
There was something else. He lifted the suspension earlier imposed on the arrested hacks. By doing so, lawyers suggest, he brought himself within the provisions of the much stricter 2010 Bribery Act 2010 which had just come into force. That has implications back in America thanks to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act which makes it illegal for US companies to bribe officials abroad.
FollowJust before he became Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams stood in his kitchen in Wales, paused halfway through making a cheese sandwich, and said, in a moment of sudden self-awareness: “People are going to be very disappointed in me.” Of course they won’t, I reassured him. “They will, it’s inevitable,” he insisted.
What he foresaw was the heavy burden of conflicting expectations which have characterised his decade at Canterbury.
Those who cheered his appointment saw in him a man of orthodox faith but liberal instincts with the skill to bring Christianity alive to believers and unbelievers alike. What they did not predict was that this formidably deep thinker had weighed the responsibilities of his new office and concluded – at a time when high-octane disputes homosexuality became totems of a conservative/liberal battle for the soul of Anglicanism – that the overarching duty of the Archbishop of Canterbury was keeping its factions in communion with one another.
That was why he said in resigning yesterday: “I think the Church of England is a great treasure. I wish my successor well in the stewardship of it.”
Stewardship – looking after what has been entrusted nd passing it on to the next generation – was the job’s top priority, felt the man who was, significantly, the first Archbishop of Canterbury since the English Reformation to be appointed from outside the Church of England. “I certainly regard it as a real priority,” he said yesterday, “to try and keep people in relationship with each other”.
Many liberals were disappointed. Some even felt betrayed. Yet none of his conciliations could ever be enough to appease hardline conservatives and evangelicals who proved uncompromising, zealous and even vicious in their attitudes towards him.
For most, inside and outside the church, however, Rowan Williams’ personal holiness, massive intellect, pastoral warmth and twinkly personal charm have been a self-evident good.
To see ourselves as others see us. This week I went to a private gathering of lawyers to discuss privacy, the press and other issues central to the Leveson inquiry which, one barrister present assured me, even five months in, is not even halfway done yet. Two interesting things happened. It forced me to lift my head from scrutinising the day-to-day revelations of the inquiry to consider the strategic implications of all the jigsaw pieces Leveson is laying out. And I discovered you never really know exactly what you think until you are cross-examined.
Will the phone hacking revelations destroy good old fashioned red-top investigative journalism, they began by asking me. Many might find it hard to recall, paddling around in the salacious sewage that filled the News of the World, that it also occasionally did stories which were distinctly in the public interest, such as its exposure of how corruption in cricketing lay at the heart of an international betting scandal.
What that reminds us is that we need a different polarity to the one with which the lawyers began. Their starting point was that certain clandestine techniques – like phone-hacking, bribery, or “blagging” confidential information from hospitals or banjks – were always illicit and unacceptable.
That was the wrong place to start I suggested. All those illegal techniques could be morally acceptable in pursuit of the genuine public interest. Stealing medical records might be appropriate if there were indications that, say, a prime minister was disguising a medical condition which impaired his ability to govern. So might hacking the private banks accounts of a company boss suspected of siphoning off his employees pension contributions. Paying a bribe, as the Telegraph did to obtain the data on MPs fiddling their expenses, was a small ill for a greater good. Listening to the private phone messages of detective in a murder case might be right if he was colluding in a cover-up.
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Chris Killip and the unquenchable spirit of life
Chris Killip and I are looking at the same photographs. But we are seeing different things.
They are dense, vivid, solid black-and-white images of working people in the north of England in the Seventies and Eighties. To me they speak of a grim, bleak, alienated breed – unsmiling, ground-down, resigned or even perhaps crushed and defeated. To him they celebrate the resilience of the human spirit.
We agree on one thing. Chris Killip has – unwittingly at first – become, a chronicler of the slow and steady decline of industrial Britain. He is the visual historian of the de-industrial revolution.
That was not how it began. Born in Douglas on the Isle of Man in 1946 he left school at the age of sixteen and became a beach photographer before getting a job in London as the third assistant to an advertising photographer. A visit to his first exhibition of photographs, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1969, made him realise that photography might have a higher purpose than as a service industry.
In the late Sixties the Isle of Man had taken on the status of a tax haven and young Killip decided to return to photograph the old ways of the island which he suspected were about to change for ever. He focused on traditional Manx work and culture. His image of an old Marshall threshing machine illustrates his approach exactly; it records every step of the threshing process but has about it a bucolic feel, harking back to Constable and the 18th century.
But it is people who are his chief concern, as images like his portrait of a Manx spinster seamstress shows. The woman made all her own clothes in her two-roomed cottage but though it is 1971 Miss Cubbon dresses herself like an Edwardian lady. There is something quiet and deeply reflective about her, with her opaque lenses and her inscrutable seriousness.
“I don’t like smiley pictures,” Killip tells me. “A smile is a defence mechanism. It says ‘You can’t have the real me but here’s my smile’. You get closer to the real person when they stop smiling.” That is not all. Killip chooses to work an old plate camera of the kind used in his advertising days. It brings not just a finer resolution but a stillness and a gravity to his work.
Those qualities are there in the next phase of his work during an Arts Council commission to photograph Huddersfield in the Seventies. It was the time that the first wave of immigrants from Pakistan were arriving to work in the Pennine mills but Killip focused on tradition and the past: a man in a battered jacket, contented with his whippets; another brass band man, besuited with his euphonium; a tenement block, deserted save for one lingering resident, the stone, bricks and breezeblocks around him disclosing the passage of time.
Then up to Newcastle upon Tyne, on a two year fellowship jointly financed by Northern Arts and the local Gas Board. “It was as far away from London as you could get in every way,” he recalls, “the strange accent, the coal and iron and steel, and a working people whose fathers and grandfathers had come from Ireland and the same peasant culture that I knew from the Isle of Man.” He was fascinated by the way industry sat cheek-by-jowl with everyday life on the street, a juxtaposition summarised by many pictures in which ships-in-construction loomed over the terraced housing.
The ship he photographed in 1975, the Tyne Pride was the biggest ship ever built on the river, and one of the last. “Even then I had a sense that all this was not going to last,” he says, “though I had no idea how soon it would all be gone.”
His shot, Youth on Wall, Jarrow, has been described as an icon of the working man’s despair at Margaret Thatcher’s ruination of British manufacturing, though in fact it was taken three years before she came to power in 1979. These were days in which the British working class was being confronted, often very brutally, with economic policies which were hostile to their interests.
Killip’s latest book and exhibition contains two photos from the Durham Miners’ Gala, the first at the height of the strike and the second as it was collapsing which depicts an exhausted couple with a child with Down’s Syndrome. “They seemed to me to sum up the selflessness which parents of disabled children routinely demonstrate,” Killip says. But the picture also speaks of how the divisive social and economic policies of the 1980s disempowered many ordinary people.
Even the seacoal for which men on the dole scavenged on the beach at Lynmouth vanished with the strike. Killip and I look at his pictures of them at work and see different things: the seacoalers look valiant to him; they seem desperate to me.
And at the Cleveland village of Skinningrove – once the centre of a small but thriving iron smelting industry – local youths were reduced to hanging round the beach, watching the few of their peers who had found work fishing from cobles from the beach, mend their boats and nets. Again I see listless boredom, but, counters Killip, “some of them do have work, despite it all”. Two demoralised-looking youths stand with nothing to do but wait for spawn-filled salmon to make the run up the shallow beck, and hope they can kick them out of the water in a desperate act of poaching.
This was an era of small pleasures. Fish and chips in a deckchair. An afternoon nap on the sand. But with the Eighties another era was dawning, as the local punks testified. “I was interested in their energy,” Killips recalls. “The kids held a series of illegal ‘happenings’ in venues around Newcastle. No-one seemed to organise it and the bands didn’t get paid. They were doing it for themselves.”
There were other realities. The day in 1981 that the IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands finally starved himself to death Killip went to a North Shields housing estate. “It was the only place where I had seen some Bobby Sands graffiti,” he remembers. BOBBY SANDS, GREEDY IRISH PIG it read. “Shipbuilding was dominated by Protestants and the Orange Order in Newcastle, as it was in Belfast, Glasgow and Liverpool. Several of the flats in the block had been burned out by tenants desperate to get the council to move them somewhere else. But, for others, life went on, as the line of washing shows, and the kids, out to play, who came and stood in the foreground of the picture”. Again he sees resilience, where I see desolation.
There is a section of the exhibition which is more upbeat. Shots taken inside the UK Pirelli tyre factory show the grace and even nobility of highly-skilled manual workers taking a concentrated pride in what they do. But they are the exception, and in any case their jobs have long gone to Russia, Mexico and Indonesia.
As a backdrop to these last days of making things Killip has snapped a woman at a bus stop in Middlesbrough, head bowed by the weight of life. There is a street party for the royal wedding of Charles and Diana, but it is late on; his pic shows the remains of the day, the used paper plates and the curling posh-cut sandwiches. There are children sitting drawing aimlessly in the dirt or staring blankly towards a Destination Nowhere horizon. Killip sees the unquenchable spirit of life; I see people trudging on.
There is one shot which was deemed too nihilistic to be published at the time. It is taken from the same place as the shot of the Tyne Pride. Just six years on the shipyard has done, and so have the children; the houses are half demolished and on the left-standing bricks someone has daubed: “Don’t vote. Prepare for Revolution.”
Chris Killip calls it celebration. In truth it is elegy.
That’s me – at the pinnacle of evolution
When Mozart was my age he’d been dead two years. Or so Tom Lehrer, that great satirical songster of the early Sixties, famously said many years ago. Mind you, he didn’t go to the gym twice a week like I do. Mozart, that is. I’m not so sure about Tom Lehrer, though unlike Wolfgang Amadeus, who died at 35, Lehrer was still with us at 83 last time I checked.
So the pecking order goes like this: Mozart, me, then Tom Lehrer. Agewise that is. All this is important because that makes Mozart young (if dead), me middle-aged and Tom Lehrer old. And a new book has just come out – a proper book, written by a zoologist not some feature writer on a women’s magazine – which says that middle age, which apparently stretches from 40 to 60, represents the human species at the very peak of its powers.
That’s me we’re talking about.
Mozart, of course, had a hard life, with all that partying and notational scribbling. Too many notes, my dear Mozart, too many notes, as the Emperor Joseph II is supposed to have told him. But then everyone had a hard life in the 18th century before middle-age was invented and everyone, by and large, went straight from young to dead often without passing through old.
It’s evolution, you see. The Cambridge zoologist David Bainbridge, in Middle Age: A Natural History, says that humans are the only creatures who have a distinct middle age. Most animals, by contrast, carry on breeding until they die. But since it takes up to 20 years for the next generation to grow up and go to university humans tend to remain healthy for a couple of decades after their childbearing potential expires.
Like killer whales (nice company to keep) we follow the unusual practice, Bainbridge says, of sticking with post-menopausal female partners, rather than continually trying to mate with younger models. This makes middle-aged men, apparently, “the most impressive living things yet produced by natural selection” and “the pinnacle of evolution”. Ahem.
The further aberrations of Cardinal Keith O’Brien
How long is it since Cardinal Keith O’Brien has read Plato’s Euthyphro? Britain’s most senior Roman Catholic has once again been airing his gift for vivid phraseology with an attack on politicians “indulging” the “madness” of gay marriage and decrying it as a “grotesque subversion”. He even compared it to slavery. Outrage followed all round, predictably enough.
So why Euthyphro? Plato’s dialogue too starts with a man outlining a premise which colours irrecoverably everything he has to say thereafter. Euthyphro in his arrogant righteousness admits to Socrates, when asked why he is on his way to court, “you will think me mad when I tell you”. He has decided to prosecute his own father for murder, following the death of a labourer his father had arrested for cutting the throat of a family slave. Euthyphro begins from a position which violated his listeners’ sense of what is right.
However impeccable our logic it fails when we begin from a premise that alienates so many of those we address. The government legislating for gay marriage, the Scots cardinal says, is like it legalising slavery while assuring us that “no one will be forced to keep a slave”. Is it? Will it really be “the thin edge of the wedge” ushering in “further aberrations” with society “degenerating even further than it already has into immorality”? Will it “allow three men or a woman and two men to constitute a marriage,” violate human rights and “shame the United Kingdom in the eyes of the world”?
The cardinal would plead analogy and reductio ad absurdum extrapolation. But when we speak our whole meaning is not merely conveyed in our logic. We also insinuate our message by the vocabulary, images and metaphors we choose.
Cardinal O’Brien has form on this. In the past he has argued that abortion has proved a slippery slope. All the careful caveats of the 1967 Abortion Act were soon cast aside to allow abortion virtually on demand, resulting in the casual ending of seven million unborn lives. Many would agree, but his choice of analogy is what people remember.
How did care became a four-letter word?
Bugger, said the playwright Henry Livings, is only a swear word in the south of England. In the North, he argued, it is a term of endearment. As in you daft bugger, you soft bugger, and so forth.
It’s some time since the late great Henry formulated this thought. It was embodied in a memorandum written 30 years ago to BBC policymakers in London by the esteemed radio drama producers Alfred Bradley and Tony Cliff, who sadly died last month*. The BBC mandarins accepted the logic, and the North was accorded a bigger bugger quotient in the BBC ration of allowable obscenity.
All that came back to me last week when the Commission on Dignity in Care pronounced that one way to improve the care of the elderly was to threaten nurses and others with the sack if they patronised elderly patients by asking, “How are we today, dear?”
Out here in the provinces we are largely inoculated against the intuitions of the language hygienists. The sophisticated urban elite can detect discrimination wherever they wish to see it, but we live in a world where everyday honorifics such as love, chuck, lad, dear, pet, kidder, duck, guv, babes, mate, flower, son, hen, hun or hinny are long-standing parts of the regions’ linguistic heritage.
It is not words but context, of which tone is a vital part, which is the key consideration in the use of language – which is why care has to be taken in places where such terms can be used with the intention of belittling or harassing. The respective ages of the user and recipient are significant too, as are their stations as superior or subordinate.
But if older people are suffering humiliation and degrading treatment daily in our hospitals and care homes we need to look beyond language to find the source of our contemporary lack of respect for human dignity.
“Church sickened by News of the World phone hacking,” the headline read. But the Church in question turned out to be Charlotte, the singer. The Church of England, by contrast, in the shape of the Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, this week endorsed that paper’s successor, the Sun on Sunday, with a weekly column which began: “What a fantastic honour to be given the opportunity to write a column in the first ever Sunday Sun. Today is a new dawn. A fresh start.”. At least one other bishop pronounced himself “astonished” at Dr Sentamu’s involvement in the new Murdoch enterprise.
In the event the new paper was dull and bland. There was a reason for that. It was to allow Rupert Murdoch to say that his journalists had turned over a new leaf or made a new beginning, as Sentamu’s Sunday Service put it.
The next day it became clear why the paper had been launched when it was – and in an enormous hurry its executives privately told the Financial Times. On Monday the Leveson inquiry turned its attention from the press to the police. In the process of exposing the Metropolitan Police cover-up of phone-hacking on the News of the World shocking new allegations of illegal behaviour by Murdoch journalists were laid bare. Senior staff had set up accounting systems to make anonymous payments to police, prison staff, civil servants and others, creating a “network of corrupted officials” to provide salacious stories. One public servant received more than £80,000. US prosecutors will now be looking at Mr Murdoch’s US parent company under their Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
The Archbishop of York sought to justify his involvement by saying that a religion of forgiveness means giving people second chances – though Jesus told the woman caught in adultery to go and sin no more rather than moving in with her. And theologians might debate whether forgiveness can be applied to institutions as well as individuals.
But the scale of the scandal in News International is another matter. We now know that it paid more than £1m to its chief phonehacker and that the Metropolitan Police, years ago, knew there were 829 victims and possibly thousands more. All of which by some way exceeds the gospel benchmark that the number of times that forgiveness should be extended is seventy times seven.
When will bankers learn the difference between the law and morality?
What a wheeze, Barclays’ lawyers must have thought when they came up with two perfectly legal schemes to save £500m in tax. Barclays has long been adept at avoiding tax; with its 300 subsidiaries in tax havens it gave out 30 times more in bonuses than it paid in UK corporation tax in 2009.
Yet that year its chief executive, Bob Diamond, signed the Government’s code of conduct on tax and publicly proclaimed that “rebuilding trust requires banks to be better citizens” by generating tax for the public purse. So alarm bells should have rung when he saw plans for the bank to buy back its own debt and generate tax credits where tax had not been paid in the first place.
Sure enough the authorities have found, to Barclays’ embarrassment, that one scheme is in breach of the code and the other of the spirit of the law. Banks’ inability to distinguish between legal and moral responsibilities was at the root of the global financial crisis. Little, it seems, has really changed.
Occupational hazard – a protest that had run its course
The ending of the camp by outside St Paul’s Cathedral is timely. It was an important protest. It was loud, scruffy and angry. But embedded in the deeply incoherent messages sprayed out by the different factions of the movement was a core truth which spoke directly to the public. It clamoured against the profound unfairness of a world where the price for the hubris of bankers is paid by ordinary people who bore little or no responsibility for the global financial crisis and recession. It was a protest against a world where the rich get bonuses and avoid taxes and the poor lose their jobs and have their benefits cut.
Having said that, the point had been well made and it was difficult to see what was being served by the continued presence of the camp which has cost taxpayers more than £600,000 over the 137 days of the demonstration. By the end the unhappy campers with their cardboard graffiti, cooking stoves and waste disposal problems were merely hampering the daily work of the cathedral rather curbing than the forces of unfettered capitalism which was their original target. The longer it went on the more it seemed merely a self-indulgence for the tented ones and their anarchic philosophy of permanent revolution.
“This is only the beginning,” the protestors cried as their encampment was torn apart. That is right. But the beginning had run its course. If the Occupy movement is to offer anything more than a leftist equivalent to the knee-jerk right-wing activism of the conservative Tea Party movement in the United States it needs to work out how to translate protest into policy. What is needed now is thinking to put in place workable regulatory curbs on the excesses of an uncontrolled free market which has a systemic bias towards the powerful and against the poor.
The debate on how we put in place a more responsible form of capitalism is a vital one to the future of 21st century politics. But it will demand more than slogans shouting down with corporate greed. And it will require a forum a good deal wider than the small pavement between the nation’s cathedral and the shops which surround it. That offers a metaphor. But real change will involve the realpolitik of a politics beyond protest.
Why the West pussyfoots around Assad
Some people are just unlucky. They get born in the wrong place. Like the Syrian city of Homs, where at least 1,770 people have been killed since government troops began their relentless bombardment of the city three long weeks ago. Over the past year the killing machine of President Bashar al-Assad, in a brutal attempt to root out the uprising against him, has taken more than six thousand lives with “merciless disregard” to quote the words of the veteran war correspondent Marie Colvin, speaking just before the Assad regime killed her too.
Those who were born in the Libyan city of Benghazi proved more fortunate. Their dictator was Colonel Gaddafi. When he declared his determination to wipe his political opponents from the face of the earth the West decided to intervene. Nato took out Gaddafi’s air force and tanks to prevent Benghazi being flattened and its people obliterated. Assad in Syria, by contrast, appears to be getting away with his murders. So let’s ask the idiot question: why was it OK to intervene in Libya then but not in Syria now?
The idea that Syria is like Libya, said Hillary Clinton the other day, is a “false analogy”. What then has Libya got that Syria hasn’t? Oil is the obvious answer. But there is more to it than that. Gaddafi was a crazy maverick who had, over the years, alienated just about all his Arab and European neighbours to the extent that there was no-one to weep at his going. He did not have much of an actual track record of mass murder, unlike the Assad dynasty in Syria, but he was an easy target.
Assad is a bigger boy in the international schoolyard. Syria has a standing army of a quarter of a million troops, nerve gas and chemical weapons. And it has even bigger friends in the playground. The foreign ministers of its two biggest allies, Russia and China, went on the phone to one another the other day to “reaffirm” their “joint position”. Both have just sent envoys to Damascus. Both vetoed a UN Security resolution condemning Assad’s human rights violations presumably because they wouldn’t want anyone scrutinising their own record in Chechnya or Tibet.
Racism is fuelled by old enmities
I am a Manchester United fan. That is not a boast, or a confession. It is a declaration of interest which may be crucial to your ability to pick a clear path through the thorny thicket of what I am about to say. My subject is racism and why a force, which was generally assumed to be in decline in the world of football, seems to be undergoing an unpleasant recrudescence.
There has been a lot of it about recently. The then captain of the England team, John Terry, was charged with allegedly abusing a black player on the pitch, a charge Mr Terry denies. There has been a rise in tensions between the supporters of Liverpool and Manchester United over charges, which the football authorities found proven, that the Liverpool striker Luis Suárez racially abused the United defender Patrice Evra. There have been a number of arrests of fans at various grounds for racist shouts and acts recently.
It is clear that racism can lie dormant for literally ages and then reappear from nowhere. Thousands of Muslim, Catholic and Orthodox people in the Balkans can testify to that in a region where decades of peaceful neighbourly co-existence were blown apart by explosions of racist polarisation in the 1990s.
But stamping out racism in football will be harder than in other spheres of life, I suspect, because football actually encourages the same mindset and psychological dynamics on which racism thrives. That is clear from the tribal my-team-right-or-wrong partisanship which football inspires and which is evident in any ground whenever the ref blows his whistle for a penalty.
That is not to offer excuse or attenuation. Part of the process of civilisation involves separating acceptable from unacceptable loyalties. Yet the modern culture of football supporting displays the same warping tendency as racism in projecting onto an individual the supposed characteristics of the group or place to which they belong.
