A Striking Uniformity of Language

On January 9 David Cameron told Sky News that the Scottish people deserve “a fair, clear and decisive question” on independence. On January 30, Ed Miliband told the Scottish Labour Party that a referendum should be “based on one fair question and one clear answer”. It is rather striking that the Prime Minister and the leader of the Opposition are using such similar language to set out an identical position on the issue of the forthcoming referendum. Both of them oppose further devolution. They use different kinds of mood music to justify their opposition, but they are both committed to the union in its existing form.

If Miliband is serious about reforming capitalism, his opposition makes no sense. I explain why over at Al Jazeera.

Learning from the Occupations

It is far too early to make hard and fast claims about what the occupations mean, or where they are heading. They clearly relate to one another in complicated ways. Each national context is different and each occupation is different. But their global nature is significant and it is a kind of professional stupidity on the part of journalists and would-be opinion-formers to swoon at the nobility and bravery of protesters in the Middle East while denouncing occupiers in the West. The Egyptian activist and feminist Nawaal El Saadawi has no doubt that the impulse to occupy space and set about the work of social transformation is something that people around the world have in common. She is better placed to know than any number of sleek defenders of the current, crumbling common sense.

The events of this year are setting up a race between these guardians of the established order and its critics. The former want to lock down the social settlement created in the last generation with a mixture of claims about technocratic competence and the use of tear gas. The latter are learning how the economy works, and sharing this new understanding, as fast possible. The scale of what is being attempted is breathtaking and it is forcing a profound change in the field of publicity. Topics that were ignored or systematically misunderstood are finding their way into the sum of things that people know about, and that elected politicians must at least appear to address.

We are only at the beginning of what can be achieved at this stage, and there is a great deal that is uncertain. There is a long way to go, before the sympathetic noises of politicians give way to a programme of systemic change. Much can go wrong. Everyone has their own views on what should happen next, and on what eventual victory looks like. If 2010 marked the first stirrings of a response to the economic crisis in Britain, and 2011 is when a popular critique of hyper-capitalism begins to find effective articulation, how is 2012 to mark a similar shift in scale?

I leave that conversation for another day.

Right now I just want to highlight something that has struck me in conversations with people involved in the Saint Paul’s occupation. A number of people have said that they found the experience of being in the assembly profoundly beneficial. One young woman who suffers from anxiety said that she spent an hour in Saint Paul’s before she realised that she had been symptom-free the whole time. People have had a chance to talk with others about politics and economics, and so about the shared conditions of life. They have been able to acknowledge their disquiet and to situate it in the social realm, rather than in their autobiography or in their brain chemistry. That in itself has been an enormous relief.

Part of the inhumanity of the current order resides in the widespread insistence that individual, rather than the social order, is the proper object of reform. In what amounts to an attempt to suppress our political nature, we are told that we must make ourselves acceptable to what exists, to what is inevitable. But troubles in our lives are not our individual achievement. The language and images, the built environment, the power relations that shape our experience of life, these all form part of what must be considered when we consider the puzzle of our own troubles. Sadness is not a private property.

Similarly, I spoke with a young man who has been involved with the economics working group at Saint Paul’s. He told me that some people had arrived with classically conspiratorial ideas about how the world worked. But after a while they had become much more interested in learning about the structure of the economic system.

Paranoia, like mental distress, flourishes in the absence of a public culture. When ideas can be discussed freely among equals, we can revise and improve overly simple explanations – just as we can challenge unnecessary complexity and technocratic obfuscation. Individuals can change their minds, or shift the emphasis of their concerns, without feeling humiliated. They don’t have to do what many critics of conspiratorial culture demand and embrace the conventional wisdom about politics and economics, with all its absurdities and obvious failure of logic, evidence and common sense.

I am not starry-eyed about occupations and assemblies. And it is far too early to make confident pronouncements about what they mean – their meaning will only be determined by what happens in the years ahead. But there is one lesson that we can take from them – and it is worth bearing in mind, I think.

Public speech is good for us.

Things I’ve Seen Online Recently

1.) Elizabeth Warren’s 2007 lecture sets out the data on income distribution in the US since the early seventies, ‘The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class’.

2.) Mark Fisher talks about capitalist realism, the privatization of stress and left psychotherapy.

3.) Richard Seymour discusses the future of the media in the wake of the News International scandal.

Ed Miliband and the Political Mainstream

Ed Miliband has just posted an article in which he notices the existence of the occupation of Saint Paul’s, and of ‘hundreds of similar demonstrations in cities across the world’. The piece is a masterclass in political positioning and it deserves a little close reading.

He claims that ‘some are swift to dismiss’ the occupiers ‘for putting forward what is a long list of diverse and often impractical proposals’. There’s no need for him to mention any of these proposals, of course, or to use reason to show that they are impractical. Doing so might force him into the realm of substantive debate, an area he cannot afford to enter. Remember, he is a serious politician.

Miliband goes on to put some distance between the occupiers and the focus of every politicians’ tender consideration, the ordinary, decent men and women of Great Britain:

Certainly, few people struggling to makes ends meet and worried about what the future holds for their children will have either the time or the inclination to camp outside a cathedral. And many people will not agree with the demands or like the methods of the protesters.

Some of the people outside Saint Paul’s are struggling to make ends meet and worry about their children’s future. But Miliband’s division of the world into hardworking home-dwellers and wacky campers can’t find a place for those people. Either you are at home reading Miliband’s wise words over breakfast, or you’re a outdoorsy eccentric without a care in the world.

As for Miliband’s ‘many people’ who don’t agree with the demands of the protesters, they are something of an invention. In a recent poll, 51% of people said that they agreed with the proposition that ‘the protesters are right to want to call time on a system that puts profit before people’.

Still, Miliband concedes that the occupiers ‘still present a challenge: to the church and to business – and also to politics’. Note that Miliband doesn’t think that the occupations are themselves political. Oh, no. The occupiers ‘reflect a crisis of concern for millions of people about the biggest issue of our time: the gap between their values and the way our country is run’. They reflect ‘a crisis of concern’, nothing political about that. It sounds like the sort of unfortunate episode a vicar might go through.

But this ‘crisis of concern’ isn’t the real challenge that the occupations present to conventional politicians like Miliband. They present a challenge because they are staging the debate that the ruling elite have studiously avoided since the financial system – and the governing economic consensus – began to collapse in 2007.

Miliband then pitches for the idea that we need to rein in ‘predatory capitalism’, by means that are left vague. He shows that he’s noticed that the energy market is a racket and that executive pay has run out of control. He also gives a nod to the magic percentages. But while ‘the role of politicians is not to protest, but to find answers’, he offers no hint as to what he proposes to do about the collapse of the country’s economic model.

He says that people are ‘wondering whether politics can make a difference’. Remember, what’s happening in the assemblies and the working groups, all that the effort of coordination and communication in hundreds of cities around the world, isn’t politics.

Politics is about promising to reduce tuition fees before slipping in something about ‘measured spending cuts’. Politics is about complaining that banks won’t lend to entrepreneurs. Politics is talking tough about making welfare reflect ‘the values of hard work, contribution and getting something out when you put something in’.

That’s what politics is. It isn’t open debate between equals about the fundamentals of social, economic and political organization. Everyone clear on that?

The last two paragraphs are worth quoting in full:

Business as usual is not an option. In every generation, there comes a moment when the existing way of doing things is challenged. It happened in 1945. It happened in 1979 and again in 1997. This is another of those moments because the deeper issues raised by the current crisis are too important to be left shivering on the steps of St Paul’s. We cannot leave it to the protesters to lead this debate.

[1997? Really? 1997?]

But we can only win this debate with a movement which stretches beyond politics. That is why in the months and years ahead Labour is determined to construct and to lead a coalition which includes business and civil society to make the case for a responsible economy, fairer society and a more just world.

‘A movement that stretches beyond politics’ is what Miliband says when he means ‘a movement that I can co-opt and disappoint, like Obama did’.

We don’t need a movement that stretches beyond politics, we need a movement that stretches the boundaries of politics so that they include meaningful discussion of things that matter.

We all need to act to secure a public status as political beings.

‘We cannot leave it to the protesters to lead this debate’ says Miliband. But we tried leaving economic and social management to fair-seeming professionals and it led us to the current crisis. Political operators have forfeited their right to pronounce on who and who isn’t going to lead the debate.

We must take a lead for ourselves, join an assembly, start one.

Miliband has said what he has said because the occupations are too big for him to ignore. There is no telling what he will say – and do – if we make them bigger.

More to the point, what will we decide to do, once we’ve had a chance to talk with one another?

Why is the Right Silent on the Scandal of St Paul’s?

A noted Conservative politician and author, Boris Johnson, yesterday invoked demonic powers in a blasphemous outburst against the people camping outside St Paul’s Cathedral. In what can only be described as a Satanic parody of the ritual of exorcism Johnson cried, ‘In the name of God and Mammon, go’.

Mammon, as all sincere Christians know, is a perverted angel, described by the poet John Milton as ‘the least erected spirit that fell from Heaven’:

… for even in Heaven his looks and thoughts

Were always downward bent, admiring more

The riches of Heaven’s pavement, trodden gold,

Then aught divine or holy else enjoyed

In vision beatific …

To yoke the name of Mammon to the name of God is, for Christians, an unforgivable outrage in itself. But there’s more. The artfully disheveled abomination went on to liken the tents at St Pauls and Finsbury Square to ‘boils’ in another disgusting burlesque of Biblical language. I am all in favour of robust debate yet here we have a self-confessed devotee of Mammon and casual blasphemer likening peaceful protesters to pus. Pus is gold, too. Surely not a coincidence. The man is obsessed. Possessed, even.

Yet the authorities at St Paul’s have so far remained silent.

Are they the terrified captives of a Satanic cabal in the heart of our great city, that operates in plain sight? Has it come to this, that a servant of Mammon can spout his monstrous devotions to a false god in the pages of our newspapers without a word of complaint from the ministers of Christ? Surely not.

Why, oh, why, won’t the Church condemn the open invocation of demonic power? And why won’t God-fearing Conservatives raise their voices in support of Judaeo-Christian values, against the rising tide of idolatry, cheap rhetoric and thuggishness in its own ranks?

If they aren’t careful, they’ll start looking a bit, well, hypocritical.

This post is dedicated to Dan Hodges.

“I Demand to Know What You’re Demanding!” Some Remarks on Programme at OccupyLSX

There is something very striking about the occupation in the City of London. From the outset the ordinary dynamics of protest appeared to have been suspended. The form was different, for a start. This wasn’t a march from A to B, with its accompanying sense of an ending. But more than that, the occupiers weren’t trying to stop anything or resist anything. There was no vote in Parliament that acted as a focus for popular outrage. The occupiers weren’t resisting, or trying to stop something. They were making something happen.

This found physical expression in the first Assembly. The crowds were surrounded by police officers, who were attempting an ineffectual kettle of some sort. But rather than confronting the police lines people turned their backs on them. For most of the afternoon, the officers guarding Paternoster Square looked almost forlorn.

This lack of interest in the police and in confrontation is perhaps what is most troubling about the occupation, from the point of view of the government and the larger ruling elite. Confrontation they can cope with, serious discussion of the origins of the financial and economic crisis poses a much more serious problem.

The media sometimes seem desperate to get the occupations to set out a programme and they are quick denounce them for being confused because they won’t. These denunciations of ordinary people for their lack of a comprehensive plan are usually much more strident than criticisms the major political parties have to endure. The Coalition and the Labour party clearly have no idea what is happening or what to do about it, but their consensual cluelessness is treated with great solicitude by their many admirers in the press.

Besides, once protesters set out what they want, the government can simply reject their demands and declare the whole unfortunate affair over. If the protesters are relatively few in number, governments invoke the majesty of the silent millions who implicitly endorse the prevailing order of things. After all, are they not elected? Why should they bow to the will of an unrepresentative few? On the other hand, if there are millions of protesters, governments claim they have secret knowledge and must act in the national interest, even though the untutored people show them no gratitude.

Either way, those who hold power like simple, clear demands. Demands give them an opportunity to look principled and dignified while they press on with their madcap schemes. Demands take the elite seriously, they confer authority; the power to say yes is, after all, also the power to say no. To call on the occupations to issue demands to government is to call for a return to the ordinary dynamics of protest, in which established power is the focus.

It makes more sense for the occupations to address themselves directly to the wider population, and to do so modestly, as citizens seeking to debate with equals. And it makes sense to begin from first principles.

Almost none of us understand the economic system of the country in which we live. A sensible response to the problems in that system will only become clear once we all understand how it operates. The arrangements currently in place rest on faith rather than knowledge. We orbit the dazzling mystery of money and credit. And there’s plenty more we don’t understand, plenty that the media we rely on garble or ignore.

But these mysteries are, to a large degree, contrived. Once they are subjected to properly open debate and deliberation, we can replace them with reasonably certain knowledge. And it is this, I think, that the powers most fear, a public that understands the structural conditions in which we as individuals try to make our lives.

So, the key message of the occupations is the medium of assembly and the knowledge it makes possible.

Each occupation can and should issue declarations and statements, and debate them with one another. As the assemblies become more widespread, this process of developing a programme will become more and more important. But at the moment an assembly could set out in exquisite detail a practical plan for political and economic reform – very few of us would be in a position to know that they had made an announcement, even fewer would be able to grasp its merits.

So the main point to communicate right now is that we must assemble as publics if we want to understand what is happening and what is likely to happen in the future. That doesn’t have to mean occupying landmarks or pitching tents in city parks. Parish halls and civic centres can serve just as well as venues for deliberation between equals.

An once we have assembled as publics we can begin to wield power. A few thousand people in a constituency who have developed a common understanding of how power works in Britain and are no longer entranced by party loyalty can do a lot. They can. for example, call on their councils to make the money they spend on communications available to the citizen body, so that they can decide for themselves what kind of information they need.

They also can invite their elected representative to come and explain themselves. If they are not satisfied with what they hear they can wield the one power that MPs understand, the power to end gratifying careers. To put it another way, a townhall full of informed citizens is the best way to convince an MP that they need to stop recycling neoliberal nonsense and figure out how the economy actually works.

(At the moment MPs mostly deal with constituents who have welfare issues. They don’t often meet large numbers of people who are politely interested in hearing their views on the economic crisis and its social impact. And so they don’t so much fear us as pity us. Oh, they make sympathetic noises, they aren’t fools. But they don’t much care what we think. because we haven’t figured out what we think, in collaboration with others, in a way that is directly threatening.)

The mere fact of assembly unsupervised by established authority has a transformative effect on those who participate and on those who watch, more or less anxiously, from outside.

Don’t get me wrong, we need as many occupations as possible. They are an invaluable way of meeting people who share similar concerns. They help build networks of people who aren’t daunted by the mainstream political culture. Each occupation is pregnant with the eggs of future direct action, occupation and assembly – both UK Uncut and the student movement made the current occupations possible. But occupations are a model to be adapted and employed in different conditions, by people who would no more camp outside St Pauls than fly to moon. Two people involved in Occupy LSX, Naomi Colvin and Kar Wargalia, wrote recently that they ‘want to generalise the idea of the assembly’. And that is surely right. Each assembly will reach its own conclusions. But they will converge on a description of social reality that is better than the one currently on offer.

It is, after all, only a widely shared, coherent and accurate description of current conditions that can provide the basis for an irresistible programme of reform.

So let the media demand to know our demands. We have instead a suggestion – that we all try free deliberation for ourselves and turn our attention back to our rulers when we are ready, on terms we choose.

Media Reform in Britain

Speech at the Rebellious Media Conference, London, 9^th October, 2011

1. Something is Wrong

We are here because we know that there is something profoundly wrong in the communications sector. It has been obvious for a long time that much of the media are incapable of describing the world when doing so would disrupt the interests of powerful institutions and individuals.

Now one could say that the mainstream isn’t at all dysfunctional, that it is doing what it is supposed to do – keeping the great majority ill-informed and therefore open to manipulation. But note what the media themselves say – they say that their job is to report the facts, to provide us with the information we need to engage in political discussion and so on.

And in this respect the media is clearly failing – the evidence from recent years is overwhelming.

We’ve seen it in coverage of US-UK foreign policy, in coverage of the financial markets, and in countless other contexts.

This much is familiar.

The question I want to address this morning is this – what do we do about it?

2. The Current Context

It’s important to appreciate the context in Britain right now. The people who own and run the media have finally become implicated in a wider crisis in the governing order. Finance and the free market flim-flam that underpinned it are now held in deep suspicion. MPs have been badly discredited by the expenses scandal.

The public has become aware of something that the media suppressed for years – that newsgathering in Britain had become a criminal enterprise. People are far more willing to entertain the idea that the media are failing and that the failure matters. We can use this moment to push for changes to the mainstream.

The political class broadly defined, which is to say the party leaders and their crews and the senior managers of the major media, have been forced to great lengths to contain and control the fallout from the Milly Dowler scandal that broke in early July.

They know something that they can’t admit – that they are in danger of losing control. This knowledge is leading them to take the extraordinary risk of discussing the media in public. They are hoping to shape the debate in ways that leave their power unexamined. We don’t have to let them.

3. The Opportunity

This then is the opportunity we have. We can join a conversation about the political economy of the mass media with some reasonable expectation of being heard by our fellow citizens.

Technology enables us to communicate on our own account. If what we say is appealing it becomes increasingly difficult for the mass media to ignore us without losing yet more credibility.

People don’t want to be deceived. They are being deceived. This is an opportunity to talk about how we can all stop being deceived.

4. The Alternative Media – an Alternative to Reform?

Now we might say that there is no need to discuss what to do about the media. An alternative it being built online. Organizations like Wikileaks are making the old media gatekeepers irrelevant.

But while it has never been easier to access alternative reporting and analysis, the major media, the media that most people rely on most of the time, remain substantially impervious to the democratizing energy found elsewhere.

On a recent edition of Any Questions, Radio 4’s flagship political discussion program, three quarters of the panellists were the sons of men who had previously appeared on the programme. The presenter’s father was another famous broadcaster. The format itself – similar to BBC 1’s Question Time, presented by another son of the same famous father – could have been designed to enforce the distinction between those who speak and those who listen.

Indeed, the format that seems natural to broadcasters, where professionals of speech representing a balanced spectrum of opinion dominate discussion, builds into it an assumption that public debate is staged for the benefit of an audience that features only as an audience – a few will ask questions decided on by the producers beforehand, the majority will listen in silence, far from the studio.

Most people – whether they are licensed to speak in public or expected to listen – still don’t understand how the economy works, or the nature of the scam being run on them by the banks and other market operators. Most people still don’t understand the state, or the collusive nature of the political system. We are as poorly informed about our communities as we are about the national scene.

And we have few incentives to discover just how poorly informed we are. In order to join the conversation staged in the major media it all we often have to sign up to a series of claims that are obviously and ludicrously untrue.

5. The Politics of Reform

So the mainstream is the problem. To some extent it can be made subject to pressure from outside. It cannot ignore criticisms of its performance entirely.

But to date it has not had to deal with a programme of reform that escapes its terms of reference. It can promise to try harder, to beef up self-regulation and so on, secure in the knowledge that there is no alternative approach to reform that makes sense to the wider public.

That what I want us to do – to present the outlines of a programme of media reform that will deliver what the established powers always say they want -

Journalism that informs the citizens of a democracy and a plural public sphere in which open debate takes place in a context where all the relevant facts can be made available.

My interest is in changing the mainstream, as a prelude to wider social change.

If you want anything else to change, and if you are democrat, then this must, surely, be the priority.

I am very happy to be sharing a panel with Ruth and Michael – they have both hugely creative and constructive in their proposals for change. My overriding concern is to establish conditions in which their ideas can contend with others in a debate that includes the bulk of the citizens of the country.

I think they are both substantially right – that a just economic and political settlement would be one in which their proposals carried considerable weight. But what I think doesn’t matter very much. What matters is what most people think.

And at the moment most people haven’t heard of either of them.

6. The Points of Decision

So how do we create a media system that allows Michael and Ruth’s ideas to take their chances alongside the nonsense that passes for economic analysis in the mainstream?

How do we create a media system that allows us to secure reliable information about matters that powerful people are keen to keep obscure?

How do we arrange things so that we have a mainstream that provides a factually adequate account of offshore finance, terrorism, famine, the drugs trade and grand corruption? More than that, how do we arrange things so that the general public understands how offshore finance, famine, terrorism, the drugs trade and grand corruption are intimately connected?

That’s the question that I try to answer in The Return of the Public.

The answer in a nutshell is this –

There are two crucial powers that are currently held by employees and owners that should now be made open to democratic deliberation.

The first is the power to fund investigation and research.

The second is the power to give publicity to the results of investigation and research.

7. Maintaining Social Silence

Those who enjoy these powers almost never discuss them. As Walter Karp once wrote, ‘usurped power is only secure as long as it remains unregarded’. So the powerful do all they can to marginalise attempts to discuss their power.

But those who work in the industry know that it is in the editors’ hands that power resides – that editors and ultimately owners are the patrons of journalists, and that the journalism we end up with is the journalism that suits editors, executives and owners. The door-stepping journalist is a figure of contempt. But he or she is an employee. If a journalist refuses to do what they do someone more amenable would replace them.

As Pierre Bourdieu once remarked – journalism is a very powerful profession made up of very vulnerable individuals.

There is a certain squalid symmetry in the fact that the people who know firsthand how the system works have such a pressing interest in keeping quiet.

8. Public Commissioning in Practice

So how to break the monopoly of editors and owners over the agenda?

I propose that we take some of the public money that is currently used to subsidise journalism and we give it to regional holding funds.

These funds would publish proposals from journalists of all kinds. Those proposals that received an agreed level of public support would receive the funds requested.

Once the investigations were complete the results would be published in full by the regional bodies and by anyone else interested in them, be they newspapers, broadcasters, websites, whatever.

Once published, the public would have an opportunity to allocate regional or national air-time to investigations that they considered particularly important.

The agenda of the media on which most people rely would become subject to meaningful oversight by most people. Journalists would no longer have to rely on the goodwill of editors and managers, they could appeal directly to their audience.

9. The Impact

Making this kind of power available to citizens in virtue of their being citizens would encourage the formation of groups dedicated to open and reasoned deliberation. It would generalise the habit of democratic association.

Their power would become visible to them, too. They first build support for an investigation that matters to them, and then they see the investigation conducted and its findings made public. At times they will see that issues that they thought few people cared about are in fact matters of much more general concern.

Journalists – established and new – would have a new patron, a patron who isn’t beholden to a Murdoch or a Desmond. They would look, realistically, to the public to support them when they sought to serve the public interest.

What is currently the career path of the hero or the fool would become something that ordinary working people could choose. The more they were able to achieve, in terms of holding unaccountable power to account and serving their readers, the more renown they would enjoy.

Prestige would no longer be in the hands of a few editors and owners. The temptation to serve unaccountable and indefensible power would no longer be so overwhelming.

And note that the ability to pitch stories to the public would have an effect on the organizational structure of news operations. Those that were hierarchical and undemocratic in their internal practices would risk losing journalists who could calculate that they could flourish on their own. Democratic workplaces, where rewards were shared equitably would have a competitive advantage over tyrannical corporations.

10. Objections

There are objections to the system I propose. Earlier this week an academic told me in no uncertain terms that ‘people will only want stories about Rihanna’.

I think she is wrong – but there’s only one way to find out –

We have to give people the power that well-meaning liberals are frantic to keep from them.

But what about fascism? Won’t fascists hijack the system I propose?

Those who want to promote a hateful vision of society will be subject to factual challenge. Fascists are at a disadvantage because they believe – or pretend to believe – things that aren’t true. That makes them vulnerable in the system I propose.

Fascists will also find it harder to cooperate than groups that commit to, well, to cooperative principles. At the moment much of the popular press peddles quasi-fascistic fantasies. Public commissioning of the sort I propose would provide an effective means to challenge these fantasies.

Of course patterns of support will, at the outset, reflect existing patterns of opinion. But while the media industry tries to sell what people will buy, people will, in the end, prefer truth to lies.

The great reluctance of the media to discuss their own operations sensibly is the best evidence for what might sound like naivete on my part. The owners of tabloid newspapers are desperate that their readers misunderstand them – they strive endlessly to sound like they are on their side, that they are the people’s champion.

When too much daylight enters the crypt, the most profitable newspaper in Britain suddenly closes down.

11. The Principle Re-Stated

There’s a good deal more to say about the mechanics of what I propose. I am sure that there are problems with it, and it can certainly be improved.

But I urge you to at least consider the underlying principle – that public money used to support journalism should be subject to meaningful public control.

We are already patrons of the media on the grand scale. We are compelled to pay a TV licence fee. We give VAT exemptions to book and newspaper publishers. We allow the ITV companies to pay less than the market rate for their franchises in exchange for some public service programming.

It seems incredible that we have no direct say in the media we so handsomely subsidise. Information about public life, debates about that information, definitions of the political, orders of priority, and so on, they all come to us as a fait accompli. The media decide whether even to register their role in determining the field of things deemed worthy of publicity, whether to acknowledge the pressures exerted on them.

I am not suggesting that other forms of editorial decision-making be swept away. Rather, I am suggesting that they become subject to the first time to democratic challenge. At the moment we have to plead with the media to cover our campaigns, to give our ideas a hearing, even to mention the glaringly obvious.

It is time we had an opportunity to make our case to a public of our peers. None of us is infallible, none of us has the right to decide in secret what is and what is not admissible in the public sphere.

Yet that is the situation we have at present. The creation of public opinion is a private affair. At the heart of democratic decision-making there is a zone of unregarded and usurped power.

12. Conclusion

We – those of us in this room right now – can change that. We can begin to have the conversation the powers are desperate for us not to have – a conversation about the location and substance of media power. We can start demanding a media system that gives Michael and Ruth a fair chance of reaching a general audience.

We can demand that power relations change, so that people trying to make a living can also dedicate themselves to informing the general public of the world beyond their direct experience, they can, imperfectly to be sure, become agents of effectual freedom.

If you think that economic democracy is an idea worth trying, if you really want things to change – then ask yourself how you can get Parecon on Newsnight? How you can get the full enormity of the environmental crisis front and centre in the national debate? How you can get corporate tax evasion on the Ten O’Clock News every night?

So, I urge you to take up the cause of media reform along the lines I propose.

It is a simple, mild administrative change – an unassuming collaboration between the BBC and the library service, perhaps – it is also the route to radical social transformation, to economic justice, and to another world.

The stakes are very high. But there has never been a better time.

Thank you.

Talk Amongst Yourselves

Today people are heading into the Square Mile, the centre of the UK’s financial sector, in conscious imitation of Occupy Wall Street and similar actions in Europe and the Middle East. They will join an ongoing occupation in Manchester and others around the country.

Part of the day will be spent setting up a People’s Assembly.

The aim is to create a venue for democratic deliberation and open debate in a place normally associated with secretive privilege. People working in the City of London have played a starring role in creating the global economic crisis. Since our representative institutions have thus far failed to address this crisis in a way that is both sensible and just, it is only fitting that we should use the City as one of the places where we work on solutions ourselves.

The form the assembly takes will be determined by the people who turn up. But there are some general principles that will guide what happens. And previous assemblies in Spain and elsewhere provide us with some hints as to how things might progress. There is now a body of experience on which to draw. Those who say that popular deliberation is impossible are given every courtesy by the major media and they often sound plausible. But recent history has proved them wrong.

In a People’s Assembly everyone will have an opportunity to be heard, and those who participate will be expected to do so in a spirit of equality and mutual respect. Whereas public debate in Britain is dominated by ‘professionals of speech’ and the vast majority are expected to remain altogether silent, the Assembly will seek to break down the distinction between those who speak and those who listen. This is not Question Time. There is not a panel of approved speakers and an audience. We are equals in the Assembly.

Every effort will be made to ensure that those who have most confidence and experience of public action do not monopolize discussion. If those calling for an Assembly have their way then those who are normally excluded or marginalised will have a chance to speak, and so to exercise a share of the power over the actions of the Assembly. Deliberation takes time. Eloquent and confident speakers are not necessarily right. People who have been discouraged from contributing in the past will be encouraged now to make themselves heard. Conditions will not favour the merely quick-witted.

Both the agenda of the Assembly and the details of how it proceeds will be established by consensus. But in other places where a People’s Assembly has convened, the main body breaks up into working groups that debate particular issues in greater detail. These working groups manage the practicalities of an occupation, they communicate with the wider world, network with other assemblies elsewhere, and so on. They also initiate and refine proposals that are then discussed in the main Assembly. Individuals can also bring proposals to the Assembly.

In both the Working Groups and the Assembly itself the emphasis is on consensus. Every attempt will be made to hear and address dissent. The Assembly will seek to proceed by promoting dialogue and finding common ground. The goal is not administrative efficiency or executive convenience. The goal is a collective energy that empowers individuals. It is this experience of this collective energy that will create the impetus towards further Assemblies, and the development of a movement capable of achieving social transformation.

Learning From Spain

[See also 'Text for the Dynamisation of Popular Assemblies' available online here, from which the italic sections below are taken.]

In the Spanish Assemblies consensus was reached when a proposal is accepted by the Assembly as a whole, ie when no one is ‘frontally opposed’ to it.

Proposals followed this format:

1. What is proposed?
2. What is it proposed for?
3. How would this proposal be implemented if it reached consensus?  
 In short, What/What for/How.

The Spanish Assemblies also used a signing system:

1. APPLAUSE /CONSENT: Raising the hands open while moving the wrists.  
2. DISSATISFACTION: Crossing forearms in an X shape over the head.  
3. “IT HAS ALREADY BEEN SAID” / “YOU ARE GOING IN CIRCLES”: Rolling the
arms by turning the hands around themselves in a similar way a change is
requested in sports.   
4. “YOUR SPEECH IS GETTING TOO LONG”: Extending the arms in a cross shape
slowly closing towards the head and finally joining the palms. Similar to the
movement of the hands of a clock.
5. “WE CAN NOT HEAR YOU” Pointing your ears or moving hands from bottom-up
indicating to raise their voice.   

The Role of People’s Assemblies

Britain and the wider world is in a shambles. Our politicians are corrupt and insulated from popular constituencies. Our economies are now quite obviously rackets run for the benefit of rent-seekers and speculators. Collusion between politicians and the media leaves us radically misinformed about the world beyond our immediate experience. The path we are on leads through servitude to annihilation.

No one can deny that a far-reaching transformation is necessary. The People’s Assembly is a crucial device for making what is necessary possible.

Everyone arriving in the City of London on Saturday will have their own views and experiences. They may well find that they have a good deal more in common than the major media would have them believe. We have been starved of opportunities for effectual speech for years. To discover what we have in common will take time. We have time, still, and we have each other.

Further Reading

It is worth looking at the document prepared by the 15 May for more information about the occupations and assemblies in Spain. Mark Barrett, who helped me with this post, wrote a piece in the New Statesman in March of this year advocating Popular Assemblies that remains highly relevant.

You can follow Occupy London on Twitter at @OccupyLSX. There is a Facebook page here.

See you tomorrow.

Submission to the House of Lord Communications Select Committee

The Future of Investigative Journalism

1. Summary

Two kinds of institution have, to a very large extent, funded and directed journalism, including investigative journalism, in Britain; commercial media groups and the publicly funded BBC.

This combination of market and public service provision has failed to keep the general population tolerably well informed about matters of deep common concern for long periods of time. Investigative journalists have tended to concentrate on private or marginal matters and as a result comment and analysis have been starved of relevant information and democratic decision-making has been severely impaired.

It is necessary to introduce another mechanism for directing and funding investigative journalism. I propose that we each – in virtue of our being citizens – are given some power to allocate public money to journalists and some power to determine the publicity afforded to their findings.

This joint power, to commission and to publicise, is currently in the hands of owners, managers and employees of large institutions. They have not been able to use this power responsibly and can no longer claim the exclusive right to direct journalism.

2. The Economics and Politics of Investigative Journalism

In the marketplace investigative journalism is usually a low profit or loss-making proposition. It also carries significant legal, economic and political risks. Market institutions have usually had to cross-subsidise investigative journalism with other kinds of content. Executives and editors at the BBC also keep a careful eye on their investigative journalists, being mindful of their need to maintain the appearance of political impartiality and to avoid attacks from commercial rivals.

Effective investigations can disrupt important external relationships and present significant conflicts of interest. In both commercial media operations and in the BBC, investigations are subject to close supervision by editors and executives who make essentially unaccountable decisions about the level and duration of support given to particular lines of inquiry. Often it seems that newspapers in particular use investigative journalism to prosecute vendettas rather than to serve the public interest.

Journalists are often reluctant to talk about the pressures with which they work and sometimes prefer to insist in public that no such pressures exist. Many of their colleagues would disagree. More importantly, the major media repeatedly fail to describe reality when doing so threatens their own interests or the interests of those who have the power to help or harm them. Their track record should count for more than the arguments of their apologists.

Neither market forces nor the principles of public service have succeeded in delivering adequate investigative journalism in recent years. Governments have presented essentially fictitious rationales for war, banks have misrepresented their financial position, and media companies themselves have been hosts to widespread and prolonged criminality.

The state, the financial sector and the media have operated for long periods without fear of exposure by a free press. Institutional arrangements that have repeatedly failed us must now be changed.

3. Public commissioning – the Democratic Principle

There is another way of directing journalism that has not yet been tried on any significant scale. Money raised from the general public could be distributed to journalists on the basis of a vote. Journalists would post proposals for projects that would be costed according an agreed scale. Each of us would have an opportunity to review these proposals and to vote for the ones we supported.

Once an investigation was complete we would vote to determine how much publicity was afforded to what was discovered. The broadcasters could be required to summarise information from investigations in their news bulletins. They could also provide space in the schedules for stand-alone documentaries written and produced by publicly funded journalists.

Rather than relying on market forces or the principles of public service, we would make decisions for ourselves about what we wanted to know more about. Different voting mechanisms would deliver different outcomes but the principle – that each citizen should have some power to shape the investigative agenda – is clear, and clearly now necessary, given that every other method for securing journalism in the public interest has failed.

This power to shape the content of what is widely known and therefore politically relevant would encourage citizens to engage with one another as citizens; it would provide an effective means for marginalised and excluded groups to speak back to their fellow citizens, to correct stereotypes, and to introduce new perspectives in a media landscape dominated by privilege, complacency and demagoguery.

Most importantly, the system of public commissioning I propose would provide support for journalists who want to investigate those aspects of the social, economic and political settlement that are currently ignored or inadequately described in the media on which most people rely. Vested interests that can, to a considerable extent, shape the ways in which they are described would be subject to effective challenge. Problems that cannot now be sensibly discussed would become available as objects of democratic deliberation. We could discuss the economic crisis, for example, without relying on the dubious expertise of financiers and their favoured economists. Once the general public are able inquire for themselves the mystifications and evasions that pass for economic debate will give way to reasoned debate between civic equals.

4. Establishing the Principle of Public Commissioning

If the Committee wishes to support investigative journalism it should recommend that a series of pilots be run in the devolved nations and the English regions. The pilots would test out various models for public commissioning that use existing municipal resources (libraries, schools and colleges, and so on) that and develop new ones, online in particular. The pilots would enable people to exercise power in their own interests, to discover what is currently hidden, and to take an active part in the public conversation.

These pilots would surely find support among those who campaign against social exclusion, environmental degradation and a host of other ills. Public commissioning would be particularly appealing to the many, sincere supporters of the idea of a ‘Big Society’. The opportunity to collaborate in this way will surely create new forms of political sociability that challenge the deadening control of both state and corporate bureaucracy.

Those who currently control journalism in Britain might object and say that no possible system could perform better than the one over which they preside. They too should welcome and encourage the pilots. If they are right then public commissioning will fail. People will find the power they have been given repellent and will demand that they return to their former state of innocence. Editors, executives and owners will then take back the monopoly they currently enjoy with an easy conscience. If they are wrong, they will surely acknowledge that their loss of unaccountable and indefensible power is outweighed by the vast public benefit.

The money for these pilots could come from existing BBC revenues (perhaps from its marketing and public relations budget) and from lottery funds. It could be taken from new levies on the communications industry that ensure that News International, for example, pays a level of tax comparable with that of other companies. There is no lack of public money for journalism. The BBC’s revenues, for example, are somewhat greater than £3 billion annually.

The next round of quantitative easing might also be worth considering as a source of funds. Scarcely anyone understands how money is created or why it matters. It therefore seems apt that some fraction of the billions that would otherwise be handed over to the banks is used to create a system that allows citizens to understand what is going on in the economy.

5. Note on the author

I worked in book publishing from 1998 to 2009, at Penguin, Constable and Robinson, Duckworth and Random House. In my time as an editor I commissioned a number of books on matters of general concern, including the pharmaceutical industry (The Emperor’s New Drugs by Irving Kirsch), the financial sector (The Gods that Failed by Dan Atkinson and Larry Elliott and Treasure Islands by Nicholas Shaxson) and the US-UK invasion of Iraq (Fuel on the Fire by Greg Muttitt).  I was also responsible for the UK publication of Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, Joel Bakan’s The Corporation and Sheldon Rampton and James Stauber’s Weapons of Mass Deception.

I have written two books, The Threat to Reason (2007) and The Return of the Public (2010). The Return of the Public, an argument for democratic reform of the media, was the winner of this year’s Bristol Festival of Ideas book prize.

I am submitting the above on an individual basis.

Peter Preston on the BBC

In this week’s Observer Peter Preston writes about the issue of plurality. He makes some remarks about the BBC that are relevant to people interested in media reform:

[...] talk, at very elevated levels, to the great and good of the BBC and they will admit that the corporation couldn’t have done the hacking story for itself, could not have followed it every allegation of the way, and couldn’t have investigated it as prober of first resort.

Why not? Because of the statutory thing. Because of the rules on “impartiality”, on fairness and balance. Because the BBC would have been too exposed to counter-attack under those headings. And , since we’re into other stories where the BBC could only follow, we can add in MPs expenses. Why? Because the rules mean you can’t pay for stolen goods.

I’ve written about the BBC over at Our Kingdom. There’s no point talking about media reform unless we are clear-eyed about the strengths and weaknesses of existing public service provision. Given that the BBC controls all revenues from the TV license fee and its senior executives admit it can’t do constitutionally important investigations, it is at least worth asking if some other device for commissioning journalism with public funds might be desirable.

We could call it public commissioning.

Oh, there’s a book about this exact idea.