This week in an article in the Evening Standard David Cameron claimed his government was “waging war against the excessive health and safety culture that has become an albatross around the neck of British businesses.” The figurative Albatross he is referring to is from ‘The Rime of the ancient Mariner’, a bleak poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in which a sailor, having heedlessly shot an innocent albatross, is forced to wear its carcass around his neck by his fellow seamen who believe its killing to be a bad omen.

If the Huffington Post headline “Cameron Vows To Kill Off Health And Safety Culture” didn’t sound as ominous (or omenesque) to you as it did to me then its probably due to the extensive catalogue of negative stories splashed across the tabloid press over the last decade concerning health and safety regulation. Typing the phrase “health and safety” into the Daily Mail search engine results in a list of negative stories spanning 388 webpage’s. This smear campaign means that anything attached to the words “health and safety” can now be dismissed with little consideration and it seems that our prime minister is all to happy to invoke it’s unpopular public image.

“Talk of health and safety can too often sound farcical or marginal. People think of children being given goggles to play conkers, or trainee hairdressers being banned from using scissors. But for British businesses - especially the smaller ones that are so vital to the future of our economy - this is a massively important issue.”

You might think me overly cynical for saying so but what the prime minister neglects to mention is that its also a massively important issue for big businesses. The kind or businesses that help fund the conservative party and are forced to spend a lot of money on lawyers and paper work to prove that they are not only regarding buy held to account for the safety of their operations. Cameron continues.

“Every day they battle against a tide of risk assessment forms and face the fear of being sued for massive sums. The financial cost of this culture runs into the billions each year. Harder to calculate is the cost in terms of attitude: the way it saps personal responsibility and drains enterprise.”

For some reason, be it a sign of how our government is perceived or how I perceive the government, I can’t help but suspect that this ‘war’ as Cameron calls it will be a war waged against the consumer and the worker. After all it’s consumers and workers who, if this war is won, will inevitably have a harder time claiming compensation for injuries or illness and will find themselves in less safe environments for the sake of British business. The Daily Mail may have had hundreds of negative stories regarding Health and safety but it didn’t have more then 600,000. That’s how many people each year, according to The Access To Justice Action Group (AJAG), use ‘no win no fee’ to gain justice involving cases that wouldn’t be viable for a solicitor to take on. If we’re not too careful we could find ourselves supporting a war with the ultimate aim of protecting the rich from the working class, the middle class and from the incapacitated. David Cameron finishes his article on an unnerving note.

“Above all, we need to give British businesses the freedom and discretion they need to grow, create jobs and drive our economy forward.”

What worries me here is the use of the phrase ‘above all’, should the interests and freedom of British Business really be “above all” else? It’s an easy phrase to throw into a populist rant against a tabloid bogyman but I help but suspect that Cameron has exposed his leading priory. It might be a priory you agree with but was it not ‘the freedom and discretion to grow’ that allowed the banks to ruin our economy free from regulation? Surely the ‘freedom to grow’ can justify anything, be it the abolition of our planning laws, the buying of our politicians or the right to pollute the planet with impunity. Anything that doesn’t help business grow could simply be described as an albatross and abolished. AJAG has described the government’s plans as “Robin Hood in reverse” and said “It will effectively exclude many people from gaining the compensation they badly need to pay for treatment and put their life back on track.” For Cameron the freedom of the CEO to disregard the safety of others might override our freedom to a legal and legislative safeguard. Now in the name of freedom he is tilting the scales of justice in favour of wealthy business leaders.

I am now left with one very long but very important question. If the safety of consumers, the safety of workers and the financial security of the injured is an albatross around the neck of a private sector and the political class will comprise our freedom to serve that private sector, will we the British public ever consider our politicians sycophantic fixation with the success of business to be an albatross around our neck? The dejected protagonist in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s epic poem only found himself cursed by a dead albatross because he killed the bird after it had brought good luck back to a lost ship and saved the crew. The ‘health and safety culture’ can be expensive, tedious and time-consuming but it doesn’t take a social historian to tell you that it’s a lot better then what we had when Samuel Taylor Coleridge was alive and all ‘health and safety’ meant was not shooting seabirds.

This article was also published on The Huffington Post

On the 31 October 1958, a celebrated intellectual delivered a speech in Oxford called “The Two Concepts of Liberty” and it has defined our view of freedom ever since.

Isaiah Berlin characterised two separate definitions of liberty; negative and positive. Berlin argued that negative liberty was the freedom to do anything concerning an individual’s own life to pursue happiness, as long as it did not infringe upon the liberty as others. He saw this as far safer then positive liberty, the freedom to act to radically improve society. He preferred negative liberty, believing that the latter always involved deceiving the masses because society would never agree on how to collectively improve in a radical way. Ever since then the western world has embraced negative liberty. Liberty was widely interpreted as the freedom to do anything to make oneself better off. For years, our politicians became less ideological and we began to use consumerism to express ourselves. At the same time, the Arab world stayed within the confines of positive liberty, where a small group of people made decisions for the good of the public. However, in the last 18 months, people in both worlds have simultaneously rebelled against the status quo.

In many ways, the year 2011 was the perfect storm. On an international level, financial uncertainty, mass youth unemployment and the ascent of broadband made insurrection more contagious and effective then any time in history. Globally, young, disenfranchised people set out to change the world around them and achieved remarkable results in doing so. In the Arab world, long-standing dictatorships crumbled while in the US and Europe, the political debate has been dramatically shifted in the long overlooked direction of wealth disparity.

It is for these reasons that ‘the protestor’ won the Time magazine person of the year award. As the celebrated protestors head into 2012 they will be faced with the question of what to do with the influence they have gained. The problem is that, while the world’s new-found interconnectivity combined with near-universal disillusion makes organising and staging demonstrations against the status quo a quick and easy exercise, they offer no way of finding a new political consensus.

It should be said that there is a big difference between protesting an idea and proposing an idea and that the former does not require the latter to be valid. To protest is simply to express disapproval and objection, in the same way that you wouldn’t need to have a pilot’s licence to complain if your transatlantic flight crashed into the Icelandic countryside. The demonstrations all over the world are made up of people who are, foremost, against economic inequality and undemocratic systems of power; they are not obligated to collectively be in favour of anything. However, in terms of progress, this is a double-edged sword because ‘the protestor’ does not really exist because there is no sole set of beliefs among the individual demonstrators in any of the movements anywhere in the world; be it Tahrir Square or Zuccotti Park. So far this has been a strength that has given exposure to the aims and ambitions of the protesters, unobscured by any one personality.

As we move into 2012 we are moving further into a very strange period in which we have lost confidence in the ideas of free-market economics but can think of nothing to replace it with. As Mark Fisher writes in his book Capitalist Realism; “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism”. The politicians seem to have no new ideas, so it seems that if a group of protesters did have a better idea then now would be the best possible time to promote it.

It has been a long time since so many people in so many places have felt so universally dissatisfied. Much of the world is lacking stability, confidence and direction so if a positive movement were to start in the West - and by positive I mean in favour of something instead of simply being against the status quo - now would probably be the perfect time to start it. Even at the risk of undermining and dividing the insurrections of 2011. Concurrently protesters in the Arab world have a chance to propose a fresh system of government on behalf of the greater population. In a curious world where activists in the West march against negative liberty while their Arab counterparts march against its positive counterpart, the individuals within each movement must decide how much influence they want to exert and define the concept of liberty we strive towards in the 21st century. This I believe is the protester’s dilemma in 2012 and beyond.

This article was also published on the Huffington Post

In the last decade the nature of national & international news coverage has been revolutionised by anonymous blogging.  We live in a time when almost anybody can write almost anything they like.  Or at least that’s what we would like to believe.  However many people, in both the developed and developing world   could retain their jobs, or at worse their freedom, if they exercised total freedom of speech?

A freedom that is in our eyes: priceless.  As well as being a brilliant by product of this freedom, all art, literature and poetry stems from the human imagination.  The reason for this vivid imagination is simple. As individuals we make thousands of decisions each and every day, from what to put in a sandwich to taking or rejecting a job offer. Our imaginations allow us to predict the consequences of the choices we make to help us make the best decision possible.   If a society permits all opinions to be expressed and judged on their merits then it allows itself to make the best-informed judgments possible.  To compromise freedom of speech is to deny our own collective imagination and the consequences of narrow-minded autocratic decision-making can be derived from the poor standards of living within fundamentalist totalitarian societies.

It is that most important of freedoms, the freedom of expression that paves the way for justice and progress. It is my fear that freedom of speech has been circumscribed for many of us in hazy and subtle ways.  Many of us would risk losing our livelihoods if we exposed inefficiency or wrongdoing within the organisation we worked. In many corners of the world the picture is much darker, and speaking out openly can be a very dangerous endeavour.

This is why Nicholas Headlong, a fellow media student, and myself are creating Wikispeaks (http://wiki-speaks.org) an online platform where nameless bloggers can write with confidence.  While I’m aware Wikispeaks appears in no way revolutionary after years of anonymous online blogging all over the world, I believe that having a single distinct archive to share such stories has the potential to expand the influence of first hand citizen testimony.

While I’m aware Wikispeaks appears in no way revolutionary after years of anonymous online blogging all over the world, I believe that having a single distinct archive to share such stories has the potential to expand the influence of first hand citizen testimony. After all Jimmy Wales might not have invented online research, but his website, Wikipedia has done more then most universities to advance the way the majority of the human race understands the world around it.

 I’ve worked inside government, businesses, and NGO’s. What has struck me is the collective knowledge of almost every person at every level of every organisation.  Be it right at the bottom or somewhere in the middle, I believe that the people working within organisations know when things are going wrong and what could be done about it.  However, many have lots to loose.  That could mean having a family to support, and bills to pay so they begrudgingly get on with their jobs inside stagnant, wasteful, and sometimes corrupt institutions.

Here in the developed world the press does a fairly decent job of scrutinising governments, corporations, and almost any thing else that influences our way of life.  In the third world however, things are very different and there is much work to be done in the name of justice and transparency. 

Wikispeaks was also conceived with the journalist in mind.  Reporters, whose job it is to prove that sunlight is the best disinfectant, are too often circumscribed by the office politics of the newsroom.  Over the summer, I was lucky enough to (very briefly) meet Ian Hislop, the editor of Private Eye.  He describes his publication as “the dustbin of Fleet Street”, a place where frustrated journalists can write with impunity.  What I want to do with Wikispeaks is not only create a dustbin for every newsroom in the world, but build a resource for investigative journalists in need of a story where each unnamed article is a clue with the potential to be the tip of a massive iceberg.

As it stands Wikispeaks is a university project we are treating as an experiment/protest.  We want to find out how willing people are to speak out against and unmask the unfair aspect of the societies we live in, as well as test the democratic principles of the Internet.   At the moment we don’t really need much money, however, there is something else we want that is much more important.  We want you.  We need as many contributors as possible to help us get the ball rolling.  So whether you have a story to tell that you can’t tell anywhere else, or you simply want to get an opinion off your chest, Wikispeaks wants you. 

Wikispeaks on Tumblr

Wikispeaks on Twitter

This week Sir Alan Sugar attacked what he called “expectancy culture”. In a bid to plug his new series of ‘Young Apprentice’ he said, “There’s too much of what I call an expectancy culture of things being provided. And I’m afraid to say the goody-goody benefits system we have in this country has made it a bit too cushy for people”. So what should young people expect? According to Lord Sugar (the Young Apprentice) “goes to prove that you can make money and stand on your own two feet”, does it? Last time I checked for every winner of the apprentice there are a dozen losers who are driven home in a taxi after being humiliated by Sir Alan just for trying to succeed, not to mention the thousands who spend weeks auditioning. Now that I think about it, if there’s one place with an “expectancy culture” it’s got to be Sir Alan’s own boardroom. Anyone who’s ever watched the first episode in a series of The Apprentice must have realised that almost every candidate expects, with little doubt, that his or her victory to be as definite as the changing of the seasons and the tides of the sea.

However, hypocrisy aside I do have a substantive issue with Sugars tumbrel assumptions. There is a characteristic that many sofa bound benefit claimants share with the vast majority of aspiring entrepreneurs and that is a distinctly nihilistic motivation of self-interest. While I’m sure both groups are victims of lazy stereotyping, I’ve never heard a contestant on the apprentice cite anything other then the inflation of their own wallet and god given brilliance as reasoning for success. Remember that it was not the “expectancy culture” of the disenfranchised working classes of England, most of who do want to work, that lead to today’s remarkable levels of youth unemployment, but the somehow excusable expectancy of those who wanted to work for themselves, those who wanted to work with an ambition not to improving the world, but to improve their own personal situation. However because greed has somehow found itself superior to indolence on our fractured moral compass the ‘scroungers’ are demonised and the ‘aspirant’ idolised.

This sentiment was mirrored in a much more extreme way by Herman Cain, a successful business man turned republican presidential candidate who responded to the Occupy Wall Street protest by saying “if you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself”. Seeing as how 9% of Americans are currently jobless and well over 90% would be considered working or middle class, this can only be viewed as a supercilious insult to the US public. A comment like this suggesting that most people are simply either too stupid or lazy to become wealthy and successful is the turgid swamp at the bottom of Sir Alan Sugar’s slippery slope of sociological arrogance.

It is my belief that the vast majority of people do want to work, because work is not only honest and dignified but one of the few things that validates our existence on earth. It is not an “expectancy culture” that is to blame if people would rather be on a sofa then behind a desk, if anything it’s the very opposite. It is more likely that an ‘unexpectant culture’ alienated and disenfranchised by the disparity between the materialistic values of western society and a life of long hours and fuel poverty at the bottom on minimum wage.

The grand irony is that if Alan Sugar has had an effect on British culture it has been to tarnish the true spirit of entrepreneurship and diminish it to the level of a cheap ego-fueled sackrace.

This article was also published on The Huffington Post

This week, George Osborne bowed to public (and Lib Dem) pressure to put off any definitive decision on the 50p tax rate on high earners. However, The Sunday Times still devoted its front page, a two-page spread and an editorial to trying to convince us that it would be in all of our best interests if the richest 1 per cent paid less tax. The idea is simple: if we want the world’s top businessmen and women to make money in the UK, we must offer them a good price or they will do so elsewhere and we will all be left behind. (Sadly this doesn’t apply to working and middle class people who can’t choose the country they do business in; if we don’t like the price of our gas bill we’re stuck with it, that’s is why Osborne raised our VAT in January.) If more high earners can be tempted to the UK then the country really can make more money by lowering taxes. But does this all sound too good to be true?

This year is the 10th anniversary of something that has distinctively shaped American politics ever since. In 2001, Clinton left the White House with the US running at a surplus that it could only dream of having today. Months later, George Bush unveiled his tax cuts for the richest 1 per cent of Americans who were rebranded as “job creators”. The idea was that more business would come to America and that the earners at the very top would reinvest what they would otherwise have paid in taxes on employing new workers, those new workers would then pay their taxes and spend more so both the government and the economy would be better off.

It all worked perfectly according the Republican Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, John Boenher, who, in May, said that the Bush tax cuts had “created about eight million jobs over the first 10 years that they were in existence”. His claim was soon contested by an independent fact-checking website called PolitiFact.com. They concluded that six million jobs had been created (not due to the tax cuts, but in total). While this contradicts Boehner’s statement, it still appears to be a substantial growth until you remember that under Bill Clinton more than 22 million jobs were created over the same period of time. Even If Boehner believes that without the tax cuts not a single job would have been created in eight years, he still fails to mention that under George Bush the country had simultaneously lost out. Even before the crash in 2008, the jobs market had stagnated. According to the US Department of Labor when the tax cuts were enacted in June 2001, unemployment stood at 4.5 per cent, and, by the time of the crash, it was 6.2 per cent. Some of the “job creators” did reinvest the money from the tax cuts to employ people; the only problem was that they did it overseas and today unemployment in the USA sits at 9 per cent.

So jobs did badly, but how did the nation’s budget do as a whole? Like many countries, America is currently deep in the red. Since the tax cut, the US’s deficit has doubled and the country is facing widespread austerity measures. I’m not an economist, but the facts are that when Clinton raised taxes on high earners the deficit decreased and when Bush lowered those taxes, the deficit ballooned. The cuts were by no means the only factor, but evidence for their success is very hard to find.

While slashing taxes on the super-rich remains largely unpopular on both sides of the Atlantic, there will always be political weight behind them due to high earners like David Koch and Michael Ashcroft, who maintain influence by bankrolling political parties. They can change the minds of politicians and even sway the general public but the facts remain the same. While “coddling the super-rich” might have temporarily helped inflate economic bubbles, it carries no guarantees to raise money or employment.

This article was also published in The Huffington Post

London is currently experiencing the worse outbreak of public dossier in a quarter of a century and while its easy to call for tougher policing and the use of water cannons we must remind ourselves that a failure to address the problems at the route of the ongoing rioting in London will leave us vulnerable to it’s timely repetition.  

It’s becoming clear that the shooting of Mark Duggan is no longer the driving force and that what we are witnessing is an outburst of opportunistic theft and arson.  However there is more to this then meets the eye and while the rioters may not be politically motivated they are a symptom of political failure.  Underprivileged teenagers in London have been driven underground by years of social exclusion; the jobs market is floundering and the prospect of higher education with its overbearing debts have combined to leave the young with little in the way of realistic prospect.   When you don’t have a steak in the game you become detached from the fate of the game and that’s why they don’t care when they see their own communities go up in smoke. 

I know that every opportunity I’ve ever had is a result of the support of my parents.  It’s because of this that I find it impossible to be able to tell you how I would think, feel and behave without them.  I would be a completely different person, the one thing I do know is that I would have a lot less to lose.     

But this has already been said; so here what I believe is an important and overlooked formula as to why these riots are happening

Talk to young people in London and you will quickly realise how many of them define themselves with expensive clothing & jewellery.  Having the right trainers and the right cap is important to them and that is a direct result of good marketing. Estimates suggest that people living in cites are exposed to between 1500 and 3000 adverts every day.  On every mode of public transport, in every newspaper, on every street and on almost every channel we are constantly confronted by cynically devised adverts specifically designed to make us believe that we need specific products.  A well made advert will rob you of your happiness and sell it back to you in the shape of the product they’re selling.   It seems harmless (especially for those of us lucky enough to have disposable incomes) but this has the potential to be subconsciously soul destroying.  Though our culture and its dependence on consumerism we have created a society of people who use material possessions as a way of expressing themselves.   Most of us see things we want but can’t afford and instantly acknowledge the fact that we can’t have them.  Without even thinking about it we know that we can’t break the law to attain them because a criminal record would damage our career, however without the prospect of a career or the anchor of a caring family it is impossible for us to know that we wouldn’t be tempted to join in.   When everything we’re told that we want is behind glass, occasionally that glass is going to get broken.

In the wake of Osama Bin Laden’s death I wanted to ask a question that might upset and depress people.  Did he win?

Back in 1997 ABC news showed a short report about a group that would later become known as Al Qaeda.  The report profiles a then less infamous Bin Laden; “this gorilla warrior operates as a CEO, funding and supporting violence against the west  & its allies. Private planes, Swiss bank accounts, he gives orders via the Internet and is as good a capitalist as he is a terrorist”.

It was clear back then that he was the moneyman, probably because he used his sizable inheritance to fund terrorist projects.   When we think about Bin Laden’s aims we think of mayhem and bloodshed but when he spoke about his motivations he would always talk about finance.  In October 2001 he told Al Jazeera “The losses on Wall Street (after 9/11) amounted to 16% and they said that this was a record loss that had never happened since the markets opened over 130 years ago.  Such a collapse has never happened before.  The capital in circulation within this market amounts to $4 trillion.  If we multiply 16% by $4 trillion to find out the losses that their shares suffered, we find that it is $640 billion.  This is what they lost in one hour.   The gross national income in the US is $20 billion. On the first week (after 9/11) they did not work at all because of the psychological shock.  Even to this very day some people do not go to work because of the enormous shock.”  It is clear from this interview that Bin Laden cares profoundly about money and the financial damage he has done to the USA.  He concludes, “More then $1 trillion in losses resulted from these successful attacks”.    What Bin Laden wanted most was that his actions were as expensive as they could possibly be. 

In 2004 he recorded a video boasting that “We are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy, as for the economic deficit, it has reached astronomical numbers estimated to total more then a trillion dollar. The real loser is you. It’s the American people and their economy.”  Bin Laden did not count body bags; he counted coins.  Since 9/11 the historically high US defence budget has doubled and now amounts to over $1 trillion a year.   America spends more money on weapons then the next 15 biggest military powers combined.    On the morning of September the 11^th 2001 the U.S national debt was just under $6 trillion, it is now well over $14 trillion and rising.  Both the USA and UK, (having gone to war in both Afghanistan & Iraq following 9/11) are now in more debt then at any time in their history and are facing drastic spending cuts to public services as a result, thus giving Bin Laden victory on his own terms.

Osama Bin Laden did not force America to bail out failing banks or cut taxes on high earners but he didn’t force them to start two wars either.  He did not force American to declare an unwinnable war against a six-letter noun.  What could have been an international criminal investigation became long-winded occupations. The killing of Bin Laden by a small group of elite solders in a small 40-minute period perfectly undermined the claim that the invasion of Afghanistan was necessary to protect civilians on US & UK soil.  By ‘going to war’ against a small group of unpopular terrorists we gave them the gift of importance, giving Bin Laden victory on our terms. The toxic legacy of terrorism in the 21^st century was not inspired by Bin Laden’s grainy home videos but by illegal invasions and illegal interrogation techniques adopted by the West in response to 9/11  If you really think we’ve won the ‘war on terror’ ask yourself if a society that’s too scared to allow a drink on a plane or a photo to be taken at a train station, is gripped by something called terror.

However while Bin Laden’s tactics may have helped push America & Britain into unprecedented levels of debt, terrorism has done nothing for Muslims and the Middle East in 15 years compared to what peaceful protest achieved in the first 15 weeks of 2011. Similarly despite the nine-year occupation of Afghanistan, last years shambolic elections proved that western powers could not guarantee   democracy.  The catalogue of uprisings in the Arab world this year has proved that the interests of people in the Middle East are far best served by peaceful protest then they are by extremist violence or western occupation. 

The West now faces a choice as to how it responds to inevitable acts of terrorism. It will always be a tempting option for our leaders to reassert their authority by giving weight to the world’s least sane people.  However if wish to live in a world that is not shaped by the threats of violent zealots we have to learn to carry on.  To treat terrorist like criminals and nothing more because they only really win when an act of terror changes the way we live.   Because the ‘war on terror’ was sold as a war, it ends like one too, with no real winners.

For the sake of this argument I’m going to open my mind.  Its a hypothetical situation so bare with me.  Perhaps the spending cuts are necessary.  Perhaps their really is no other way.  Perhaps its fair that we pay for the greed driven failure of the banking system.  Perhaps it’s only coincidence that fits in perfectly with Thatcherite ideology.  Perhaps David Cameron loves the welfare state is dismantling it reluctantly.  (stay with me)  Perhaps when they say ‘we’re cutting now to cut less later’ they’re right.  The argument says that my cutting the deficit now we hold on to as many of our public services as possible because to do so later would be much more damaging because the deficit would be so much higher.  So we sacrifice now to save (whats left of) our future.  OK so that’s a good argument right? 

The only thing wrong with it is that is seems to be exclusive to our debt.  For decades we’ve been told by politicians, not least the cycling, wind turbine erecting David Cameron, that we most sacrifice economic growth to act on climate change because the consequences to not doing so would be more damaging later.  But as George Osbourne swings the axe (for our future) the green agenda on which David Cameron branded himself on becoming leader of the opposition on 2005 seems to be, just like his bicycle, forgotten.  The environment is an urgent issue, if we fail to act now then we will suffer in the future.  Its funny that when issues that effect our long term future involve government saving we act fast but when they involve government spending we don’t.  Its this lack of consistence that adds weight and credibility claims that these ravage spending cuts have an ulterior motive.

So when Cameron, Clegg or right-wing Taxpayers alliance director Alexander Heath (a man who cares so much about the use of British taxes that he moved to France to avoid paying them) say that we need to ‘cut now to save tomorrow’,  tell them that until they apply that logic to the environment we’re just going to assume that this tory government is taking advantage of the deficit to do what they always wanted, to tear down the welfare state they never had to rely on.

I spent Saturday watching a protest made up of 450,000 peaceful people being overshadowed by about 200 angry anarchists.  A Sky news commentator regretfully announced that “unfortunately this will make the headlines” and of course it did make the headline on his own sensationalist rubber necking network.  At one point Ed Miliband made a speech to the demonstration, but the second he opened his bandwagon-hopping mouth he was cut off as both Sky news and BBC news got distracted by an attack of paint throwing and window breaking on a tax-dodging Topshop.  In the blink of an eye important journalism had descended into the likes of the police videos you’d expect to see on ITV4 at 1am. 

Perhaps the BBC and the rest of the news media took some responsibility for the smashed windows.  Over the last few years rolling news and newspaper editors have made it clear that the best way for a protester to grab attention (something every protester wants) is to cause chaos.  The anarchists running rampage in the West End know that they would make the front pages as well as having their actions broadcast live on two channels for a whole afternoon if they broke things.

While I can’t support rioting on the streets of London its far too easy to write the perpetrators off as idiots and hooligans, even if many of them are.  They probably voted for Nick Clegg who betrayed them by being being complicit with a government happy to ignore the public’s opinion.  When people are ignored and helpless theirs not much else to do other then kick out in anger. So why not?  Martin Luther King said that “a riot is the language of the unheard” and he was probably right.  Nobody cared about Brixton until it was on fire and even the biggest protest in the history of Britain couldn’t stop Blair from invading Iraq.   

So who do we blame?   The news media for providing a one way ticket to the front page to the views of any activist willing to start a fire?   Us for being so interested in rubber necking at the first sign of disorder or politicians for have so little respect for our opinion that the only self expression worth while is destroying a police van?   All I know its that it far too easy and far too lazy to dismiss an angry mob when they’re clearly a symptom of our obviously broken collective mentality.  Now that I’ve written this I’m going to play a video game in which I’ll enjoy killing fictional people for fun because I’m just as flawed as everybody else and theirs no point in pretending over-wise.  Bye

Since the start of their continuing release late last year, a quarter of a million American diplomatic cables have been leaked to the world’s press. In recent months, coverage of their actual content seems to have dwindled; the story of Wikileaks has been vastly overshadowed by the on going soap opera that is Julian Assange.  The Australian cyber-activist, chief executive of the whistle-blowing phenomenon, has recently lost his appeal against extradition to Sweden to stand trial for allegations of rape.  It is thought that this decision will make it easier for US authorities to charge Assange with espionage, and his many supporters fear that this decision is simply a means to expose him to the full wrath of the United States government.  

While cyber attacks on Wikileaks and its online enablers have stopped, so too have to flow of cables.  When the releases began back in late November the Guardian newspaper and website devoted large swathes of their leading pages to the news on a daily basis, before it spilled over to the BBC and other outlets.  Now, however, these scandalous stories are nowhere to be seen, and Wikileaks have published barely 3% of what they have. 

The publishing of confidential political documents online is a symptom of the Internet’s growth and would have happened at some stage, with or without the involvement of Julian Assange.  Now that these online leaks are possible they’re bound to become a recurrent event, through Wikileaks or any other site that takes its place.  Instead of trying to stop the leaks at source, i.e. by correcting their reprehensible conduct, Western powers immediately opted to enter into an ultimately unwinnable game of whack-a-mole by attempting to shoot down Wikileaks and all the sites that mirrored its content.  They failed. Through their actions, the states in question have proved that they have no interest in adapting to the online new world they find themselves in.  For instance, at the time of writing private Bradley Manning has been imprisoned in solitary confinement for 280 days, in conditions Amnesty International describe as ‘”inhumane”, “repressive” and “unnecessarily severe”.  He is charged with leaking the now infamous “collateral murder” video to Wikileaks, showing journalists and Iraqi civilians being machine-gunned from an American military helicopter during the height of the insurgency.  It has been said by Micheal Moore that “he did what the defendants at the Nuremburg were told they should have done”. 

Private Manning’s case is yet to be heard by a judge, but if the charges are upheld are we expected to believe that a whistleblower is too dangerous to walk the streets?  Or even mingle with other prisoners?  It is not hard to reach the conclusion that the American government are using him to set an example, and are using fear to stop the potential Bradley Mannings of the future.  The same is true of Assange, whose status as a non-American should render him automatically exempt from US espionage laws.

Despite the many earth-shattering political changes that have taken place in various parts of the world since the establishment of Wikileaks five years ago, Assange has only become a household name within the last year.  Since then he has done many things to become the public face of his organisation, not least by putting his picture on its homepage.   He has also recently followed Sarah and Bristol Palin by seeking to trademark his name.  By choosing to make himself the public image of his website he has been able to travel the world promoting its values.  However, by allowing his persona to define Wikileaks he has inadvertently allowed the website’s many enemies to undermine it.  Revelations and controversy surrounding his personal life have also left an indelible stain on Wikileaks itself.  Because of his self-made romantic image of the lone hacker without a home taking on the world with his laptop, Wikileaks has suffered the same fate as its increasingly isolated figurehead.Ultimately the character, ideology and even the fate of Julian Assange are almost irrelevant to the bigger picture.  He can be smeared, imprisoned and silenced but the Internet cannot.  When Wikileaks came under cyber-attack, the site and its content was instantly mirrored hundreds of time, another website called OpenLeaks has been created to rival Wikileaks and only yesterday a group calling itself ‘Anonymous 99’ threatened to publish leaked emails from Bank of America.  So if Assange does find himself in a dark American military jail then as sure as anything you can bet that his place as the Internet’s ‘exposer in chief’ will quickly be snapped up by another online activist.  You can spend your life shooting foxes but as long as the bins are open they will always be there to make a mess.  We didn’t get here because Julian Assange invented Wikileaks, we got here because Tim Berners-Lee invented the Internet, and in doing so inadvertently made the online leaking of classified documents inevitable.  All we can hope for is that this new age of unmasked power delivered to us by the World Wide Web forces governments and corporations everywhere to raise their standards of morality.  Because like it or not, they’re all naked now.

On the American cable channel Fox Business an inexplicable whooshing noise accompanies graphics resembling the opening titles of robot wars as a grey middle-aged presenter introduces his boss live on air.  “Chairman thanks very much for joining us we appreciate it sir”, “good afternoon” replies the Australian media baron.   Both men smile and the presenter seems relaxed before saying “The story that is really buzzing all around the country and certainly here in New York is that the News of the World, a News Corporation newspaper in Britain used…”.  Suddenly the presenter is cut off “I’m not talking about that issue at all today, sorry”.  Instead of asking why and pursuing the topic (you know the kind of thing a journalist would do) he smiles awkwardly and apologizes as if he’s a minor Star Wars character scared of being telekinetically strangled for bringing Darth Vader a cold cup of coffee. 

That was back in August, but since then things have gone from bad to worse for the 79 year old Rupert Murdoch and his powerful dynasty, News Corp.   Since then his flagship newspaper the News of the World has come under investigation for phone hacking and his flagship news channel Fox News has been roundly condemned for the use of violent rhetoric against pro-Obama politicians after one was shot though the head.   The last six months have created a perfect storm of controversy that just might rule out the biggest takeover in News Corps history, its bid to take total ownership of BSkyB.  If so then we might be about to witness the decline of the biggest media empire the world has ever seen.

Rupert made his name by acquiring failing newspapers and turning them around by improving efficiency and sensationalising headlines.  He has always judged himself to be somewhat of a populist revolutionary fighting against elitism.  However his competitive streak began to creep into politics when he realised that if his newspapers backed a candidate then, once in power that candidate would make it easier for the Murdoch empire to grow.  The Sun and the News of the Worlds support of Margret Thatcher won Murdoch privilege of being able to buy up The Times & The Sunday Times without the blessings of the Monopolies Commission.    Eleven years later Labour battled the 1992 general election with a policy of introducing a ‘cross-media’ law that would force Murdoch to break up his empire.  On the day of the election The Sun famously ran the headline “If Kinnock wins today will the last person in Britain please turn off the light”.   The next day the same tabloid famously followed up with “It’s the sun wot won it”.   Its clear that Murdoch’s endorsements are born out of convenience, not ideology and theirs certainly no room for loyalty. Tony Blair’s reward for dropping the ‘cross-media’ policy earned him ringing endorsements, running up to the 1997 Labour landslide, from the same newspapers that had bragged about sinking his party five years earlier.

At this point Rupert Murdoch was feared by the political class, but since then things have been changed.  Circulation of all his British newspapers are steadily dropping and since the explosion of the Internet the print media has been slowly fading into the background of the public’s collective conscience.   As a medium its largely lost on young people, more of them look at the trending list on twitter then look at the front page of The Sun. 

Despite of this the Labour found itself sweating back in September 2009 when the Sun switched gears once more and declared that the party had “lost it” and that it was not backing David Cameron.  The Tory leader had previously appointed, old friend and News of the World phone hacking causality Andy Coulson as his communications director. Cameron and Coulson along with his chancellor George Osborne make up what has been called the ‘Chipping Norton set’ and are joined by News Corp executive Rebekah Brooks and heir to the thrown Rupert’s son James Murdoch.   With a friendly Cameron in power Rupert would be able to snap up the rest of BSkyB problem without a visit to that pesky Monopolies Commission and it would be safe bet too with the Tory party ten points ahead in the polls.  So The Sun instantly turned aggressively on Gordon Brown, attacking everything from his hair to his handwriting.  However something was going wrong, instead of maintaining his popularity David Camerons poll numbers were dropping and come May it was looking like the closest election in living memory.  Come the big day The Sun’s front page ran with a David Cameron photohopped into Barack Obama’s famous blue & red poster under the word “change”.  Perhaps the British public felt that the branding of a party called the conservatives with the paradoxical “change” was patronising or perhaps The Sun just couldn’t win them like they could in 1992 but none of their efforts stopped Cameron from crawling over the finish line with a hung parliament.   Not only that but Coulson was soon forced out after his job of communicating with the media on behalf on number 10 began to predominantly consist of answering questions about his own knowledge (or lack of) of phone hacking at his old office.  

That scandal continues to be thorn in Murdoch’s side and despite numerous meeting with the new Prime Minister in Downing Street it has thrown his BSkyB into serious doubt.   Allowing Murdoch free reign would undermine and besmirch the coalition but history tells him that disregarding the media baron is still a dangerous and risky endeavour. 

Stateside the News Corp machine is also failing to deliver.  After Rupert Murdoch made his name as an entrepreneur of print in both Australia and the UK he was able to enter the US market with more then enough respect need to borrow the money to fund new operations in the new world.  He started with the failing New York Post, with his classic and clinical style of enhanced efficiency and sure-fire sensationalism he turned it around. He had worked is magic all over the world and the obvious next step was the moving image.   In 1986 he bought 20^th Century Fox.  At the time it was illegal for a non-American to buy a television channel, so Murdoch simply switched nationality. 

The network struck gold with instant hits like The Simpsons and it was at this point that Rupert befriended another over-weight balding buffoon.  This one was called Roger Ailes, he had been Richard Nixon’s press advisor and done a less then excellent job of making sure that Nixon wasn’t thought of as a crook by the American public.  In spite of his failings Murdoch and Ailes clicked as perfectly likeminded businessmen.  Alies had what he called the ‘orchestra pit theory’; he states “if you have two guys on a stage and one guy says he has a solution to the Middle East problem and the other guy falls in the orchestra pit, who do you thinks going to be on the evening news”.  This outlook completely corresponded with Murdoch’s sensationalism based success, he fell in love and Fox News was conceived.  

Fox News fast became the most popular 24-hour cable news channel in America, between its attractive blond female presenters and sexy graphics it pulled in millions.    All it needed was a man to fall in the orchestra pit and that man was Glenn Beck.   A Mormon by faith and right-wing patriot by ideal, Beck has spent every week of the Obama administration drawing spurious lines between famous names on chalkboards in ill-thought out attempts to undermine the President he calls “a racist”.  Beck went as far as to redefine the entire political spectrum putting Mao, Stalin and Hitler at one end with himself and the founding fathers at the other, with Obama in the middle.   Glenn is aggressively opposed to the current governments attempt at health care reform and in response he along with Sarah Palin started organising anti-big government Tea Party protests from his show on Fox News. 

At his peak this time last year Glenn Beck was getting well over 3 million viewers a day, he kept his show interesting with apocalyptic predictions about Obama’s health care bill turning American in a godless socialist society.   But as his rhetoric spiralled away from reality he started losing advertisers hand over fist and when Obama signed the health care bill and East Manhattan didn’t turn into East Berlin his viewers started to disappear too.  Glenn Beck must have loved falling into that orchestra pit because he made no attempt to re-engage with his lost audience and instead moved further and further from reality.  Unfortunately when a man is encouraged to disregard facts and be as passionately sensationalist as possible it occasionally leads to consequences, especially when he says things like he did last June.  Referring to progressives he said “They believe in communism, they believe and have called for revolution, you’re going to have to shoot them in the head but warning; they might shoot you.”   A few months a gunman who went on to murder six innocent people shot later progressive representative Gabrielle Giffords though the head outside a Tucson Supermarket.   Nobody knows yet if Glenn Becks violent words helped motivate the incident but it shed light on other Fox News contributors like Sarah Palin who used her website to depict Gabrielle Giffords’ constituency thought the crosshairs of a sniper rifle.

Founding chairman of BSkyB and former editor of the Sunday Times, Andrew Neil believes that Rupert Murdoch has “lost control of Fox News”.  The channel serves to many as a warning to what could happen if Sky fell into the hands of News Corp.   The Tea party movement, born of the back of Glenn Beck’s jingoistic ‘9/12’ project was undeniably important in taking control of the senate back to the GOP in the November midterm elections and his propaganda outlets are still capable of rebranding a multi-faith community center in New York as the “ground zero mosque”.   News Corp maintains the profits of some of the biggest television and film studios in the world.   Rupert might be losing his power and influence faster then at any point in his career but he has always proved to be a crafty and intelligent and few have ever succeed by discounting him.  His critics may accuse of being out of touch with a greedy and self-indulgent loyalty to print but they can’t say that he’s often called it wrong.  This 21^st century fox might be looking like 21^st century dinosaur but he can still bite. 

In today’s guardian Dan Hancox describes ‘Lethal Bizzle’s Pow’ as an “anthem for kettled youth”.  As much as I like the track I can’t help feeling disappointed that a group of East London teenagers flattering themselves for 3 minutes is the best we can do.

I was at the December 9th student march and yes Pow and Tempa T’s hilariously over the top ‘Next Hype’ did become the soundtrack and I would be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy hearing them on Parliament Square.  However comparing them to the Sex pistols has to be an indictment of the ‘iPod generation’.  Both Pow and Next Hype were recorded long before David Cameron came to power and student fees became an issue. Neither track has a single lyric that could be interpreted as Political but apparently that doesn’t matter.  “Its not about content, its about energy and aura, the persona I portray gives a voice to those who use it as a way of expression” says Tempa T and he’s half right because Next Hype does that brilliantly.  The problem is that the collective ideals behind the student demo’s were about so much more then just energy. 

‘God Save the Queen’ by the Sex Pistols not only had more energy then anything before it but was also the first experience of counter culture for many young people, including myself.   After it was written John Lydon said “You don’t write a song like God Save the Queen because you hate the English race.  You write a song like that because you love them and you’re fed of seeing them mistreated”.  It was intentionally  recorded as a direct response to the Queens jubilee, a day that was supposed to distract everybody from the rolling blackout’s and rubbish piled high in the street that sadly came to define the late 1970’s.  On the day itself the band were arrested after playing the song life on a boat on the Thames, the single reached number one but the BBC deemed it too offensive to play.  Its more then a unspecific expression of anger, its an alternative national anthem for the disenchanted.  It would be another nine years before anything got close to conveying that message so well.

That batten was passed to a song that also referenced the Royal Family as a personification of England’s broken class system, if you doubt that conscience connection then just try driving prince Charles and his wife though a student protest.  ‘The Queen is Dead’ by the Smiths is a masterclass of young working class conviction.  It came out at time when Thatchers government had turned the north into a post industrial wasteland and the only thing anybody could rely on was a high level of unemployment.  The song was anger conveyed in a sullen and thoughtful manner that still works as a portrait of what its like to feel detached from your nations identity.   Its ghost continues to haunt a student movement representing a lost generation condemned by a lying political class.

If Pow and Next Hype are the best thing we can find to represent ourselves then something’s missing. 

I need to speak out, about an issue that many are too scared to mention.  A culture of silence has developed around it due to the stigma attached to talking about it.  However something has to change, I’m done with being quiet and it has to be said that when I go out I can’t hear shit.  Last weekend I went to hip-hop night in a bar and had to communicate with friends I hadn’t seen in weeks by leaning over and shouting in their ears and I still couldn’t  hear them speak when they shouted back into mine.   It made me very nervous when it looked like a mate was giving me the V until I realised he was signaling that he was going out for a smoke.  Surely its a stain on a night out when you have to communicate with your mates via sign language. 

The worse thing about this is the stigma attached to commenting on it.  The moment you complain about the music in a bar or a club being too loud you might as well draw a line under your youth and start reading the Daily Telegraph and going to bed at 8pm.   If you make a comment like that you automatically make yourself boring.  Its for this reason that nobody says anything, not to mention that nobody would fucking hear them if they did.  It happens because DJ’s have to validate themselves to differentiate their purpose from that of an ipod shuffle and they do that by imposing their myriad tunes as much as they possibly can, but its gone too far.   So far that we’re left in a world where I have to queue up for an overpriced drink to stand in front of friends I’m unable to communicate with, leaving me alone to contemplate the same boring thoughts that made me so desperate to go out in the first place. So we just stand there giving each-other reassuring smiles to remind us that we’re out and therefor not throwing away our youth. 

Obviously its my choice to walk into these bars and clubs in the first place, but what choice do I really have?   If I have to pick between this and spending Friday nights alone in my bedroom playing tetris I’ll go out just so that when I’m having a midlife crisis I can look back and convince myself that I at least tried to enjoy myself while I could, even if that means standing in a bar withstanding an assault on my eardrums while wishing that I was somehow able to be at home playing tetris.