Friday, 2 March 2012

The Sun, The Tories and the Police - why so close?

Is it entirely surprising that the Conservative Party, the Sun and the police developed such a sickly, incestuous relationship?
From Rebekah Wade's loan horse to job offers to former Met Commissioners at Tory HQ or within the Murdoch empire, the trickle evidence illustrating the increasingly sordid and unhealthy triumvirate has turned into a flood in recent days.
Possibly the most harmful outcome of this relationship was the perversion of the course of the Daniel Morgan murder trial - this particularly murky affair is yet to sink into the public consciousness in the way the Milly Dowler phone hacking story did.
It seems that cash and favours were routinely paid to police officers by Sun-hired private investigators and journalists. It's almost as if the force was the paper's only reliable fall-back on a slow news day.
But should this be such a surprise to us, given the origins of this relationship?
During the year-long Wapping Dispute of 1986-1987, the Metropolitan Police effectively acted as a kind of SS Liebstandarte Rupert Murdoch - a personal bodyguard would do anything to protect their glorious leader.
For a year, they beat, kicked, locked up and lied against 6,000 sacked printers and their supporters outside their new fortress.
During the Leveson Inquiry, corrupt policeman after corrupt policeman has trotted out the line that the force had more important things to do than investigate phone hacking. But in 1986-87, thousands of police were ordered onto the streets, not to protect anyone from terrorism, but to enforce a minor aspect of the law relating to the number of people allowed on a picket line.
But the origins of this fellowship of felons is to be found in the year before Wapping - 1984-1985, when the Sun, the police and the Tories joined forces to defeat the miners. Part of a war against the unions, this campaign forged an alliance that only now is beginning to unravel. At the behest of the Tories, driven by a need to solve a chronic crisis of capitalism, the police, cheerled by the Sun, were sent in to assault and illegally arrest and imprison thousands of miners and their supporters.
The collateral damage was incalculable - miners' wives driven to prostitution, miners' kids went hungry, the men driven to danger scrabbling for spare coal off slag heaps, the collapse of British industry, the destruction of communities and even the idea of community itself as Thatcher declared society's non-existence.
The shift of power left a cabal of ruthless criminals to savage the world economy in their own short-term interest - at the helm of the banks, they drove us all to the brink of bankruptcy.
But to the victor, the spoils, as they say: Murdoch's reward for his support of union-busting was a year-long loan of a police force given carte-blanche to defend Fortress Wapping and the Murdoch Empire.
In such times are true friendships formed - and enemies made. Sun journalists found that if no-one else would talk to them, there was always a willing Tory MP or yet another bent copper who could be bribed or paid to tell lies, printed as fact in The Sun.
With this lot in charge, it is no wonder that such dire levels of corruption, malpractice and criminality were allowed to go on? There was one law for most of us and a get-out-of-jail-free card for the trio of trash who made up the biggest gang in Britain.
With yet more revelations to emerge, it is only to be hoped that revolutionary sentiment grows in Britain, and with it the desire to put people in charge of every workplace, town and country in the world who have the interest of humanity at heart, and throw out those who have the heart of humanity for their daily diet.

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