A woman looks at e-mails. Photo: NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty Images
Will the right-wing press now concede that Edward Snowden, the American computing contractor who leaked classified US security documents, is not a traitor but a brave whistleblower who performed an enormous service to western democracy? Thanks to the Snowden files, we now know that emails from the BBC, Reuters, Guardian, New York Times, Le Monde, NBC, Washington Post and even the Sun were accessed and retained by GCHQ, which lists investigative journalists as a higher-priority threat than terrorists.
The Mail on Sunday made a great fuss about how police hacked its phone records to identify the sources of stories that led to the conviction of the former cabinet minister Chris Huhne for perverting the course of justice. Such intrusion, the paper argued, “strikes at the heart of one of the bulwarks of a free, independent press”. Indeed, yes. And the systematic trawling of press emails – the Snowden files reveal that GCHQ accessed 70,000 in less than ten minutes on one day in 2008 – would pose a similar threat, making investigative journalism, particularly across national boundaries, all but impossible.
Yet the Daily Mail and its attack dogs, particularly Max Hastings and Stephen Glover – former broadsheet editors who should know better – have persistently criticised Snowden. Hastings launched his latest Exocet after the Charlie Hebdo atrocities, implying that Snowden, Julian Assange and their supporters would have blood on their hands if similar attacks came to Britain. Snowden, he wrote, was “a treacherous fugitive” who “damaged the security of each and every one of us” and issued a stirring call to “acquiesce in electronic surveillance”.
Can Hastings explain how collecting journalists’ emails assists “the security of each and every one of us”?
Page three puts a top on
Why the Sun? Perhaps GCHQ thought it was hiding secret messages in the captions to its page three girls. Whatever the truth, the page three stunner, after 45 years, is no more. Unlike my feminist colleagues, I was never greatly exercised about the feature. If anything, it seemed more offensive in the 1970s, when it represented the vulgarity, raucousness and general celebration of ignorance that Rupert Murdoch brought to the British press. In recent years, against far worse objectification of women on countless internet sites, it seemed harmlessly quaint, a sign that the Sun was an ailing, unfashionable, onanistic newspaper not to be taken seriously. My fear now is that Murdoch’s editors will find worse things to put on page three, such as more rants against “benefit scroungers” and immigrants.
Unequal voices on inequality
A curiosity of the age is that the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, International Monetary Fund and World Bank – gatekeepers of the “Washington consensus” in favour of letting markets rip – have far more to say about inequality than either the US Democrats (at least, until President Obama’s latest speech) or the British Labour Party.
“Lower net inequality,” the IMF reported last year, “is robustly correlated with faster and more durable growth.” To Blairites, the E-word (for equality) is more of an obscenity than either the F- or C-word. As for class war, it was left to the billionaire American investor Warren Buffett to admit that there is one and that his class is winning it.
And now the Davos economic summit, the annual shindig of the top 0.0001 per cent (approximately), has invited the executive director of Oxfam International to be a co-chair. She will tell the assembled plutocrats – as she was presumably expected to do – that “rising inequality is dangerous”.
What is going on? You can choose between two explanations. First, that the elite want to seize the narrative of inequality and initiate minor ameliorations to avoid more serious disturbance of the post-Keynesian, small-state capitalist order. The IMF hinted at this when it reported that, according to some economists, “even if inequality is bad for growth, taxes and transfers may be precisely the wrong remedy”. The second explanation is that the rulers of capitalism have lost faith in their ideology and will
abdicate, as did the rulers of communist Russia and apartheid South Africa. All that is needed, in this scenario, is a Gorbachev or de Klerk. Perhaps Buffett should assume that role and run for the White House.
Sponsor the Queen
Meanwhile, corporate dominance of our public life continues with Coca-Cola’s sponsorship of the London Eye, which, henceforth, will be decorated in the dreadful drink’s garish red. Some national institutions – the monarchy, parliament, Downing Street, the Church of England, for example – continue to resist sponsorship. But for how long? If the Queen lived in Starbucks Palace, MPs debated in the Vodafone Chamber and David Cameron resided in 10 Amazon Street, at least the Treasury would get something from tax-avoiding corporations.
I told you so
I wrote two weeks ago that I don’t normally watch sequels because the plots become contrived. But I didn’t anticipate the extent to which ITV’s Broadchurch would follow this rule. The sequel has featured not just implausible coincidences – the worst of which were highlighted by my colleague Rachel Cooke in her TV review last week – but also numerous events that simply could not happen in an English criminal case.
The family of the boy murdered in the first series would not be allowed to select their own prosecuting barrister when the case came to trial (unless it were a private prosecution, which this isn’t), nor would the prosecutor agree to meet witnesses informally in advance. Nor would the jury remain in court while barristers argued before the judge over whether confession evidence should be excluded.
Just as I feared, Broadchurch has become a second-rate soap opera.
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