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Posted by monbiot

https://www.monbiot.com/2025/09/23/the-propaganda-of-power/

https://www.monbiot.com/?p=7467

The mainstream media, with a few exceptions, is a single-issue lobby group, whose purpose is to assert the rights of capital.

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian  20^th September 2025

The BBC I joined on my first day of professional journalism – 40 years ago this week – is unrecognisable today. While, for most of its history, the corporation had largely defended the status quo, under the director general at the time, Alasdair Milne, its journalists were sometimes allowed to stick it to power. This, I believe, is what journalism exists to do – and seldom does.

As a student, I’d hammered on the doors of the BBC’s Natural History Unit, insisting there was a major gap in its coverage: investigative environmental reporting. If they took me on, I argued, I could help them fill it. The phone rang as I was leaving the house for one of my final exams. It was the head of the unit, saying: “You’re so fucking persistent you’ve got the job.”

My immediate boss, the head of radio, instructed me to “get the bastards”. Investigative journalists were much freer then. It was easier to obtain permission to set up a fake company, pose as a buyer and penetrate criminal networks and unethical corporations.

We broke some big stories. On one occasion, we amassed powerful evidence to suggest that a ship leaking oil on a sensitive coastline had been deliberately scuppered. That programme won a Sony award. On another, I had the head of customs in Abidjan, in Ivory Coast, offering to sell me chimpanzees for experiments. It was gripping and felt meaningful: we could see the difference we made. This was all I ever wanted to do, and I thought I was set up for life.

On 29 January 1987, disaster struck. The BBC’s investigations had infuriated the Thatcher government, particularly the Secret Society series, which had exposed clandestine decision-making, and the Panorama programme Maggie’s Militant Tendency, alleging far-right views among senior Conservatives (which they denied). The BBC board forced the resignation of Alasdair Milne. The following day, when my boss came into the office, he told me: “That’s it. No more investigative journalism.” How can you have journalism if it’s not investigative, I countered. “Don’t tell me that. It’s come from the top.”

It wasn’t just my career that hit the buffers: it was my worldview. I had naively believed that humanity’s problem was an information deficit. Shine a light and change would follow. Now, I began to see, while the pen might be mightier than the sword, the wallet is mightier than the pen.

I was recruited at the tail end of the “great compression”: a period of radically lower inequality. The two world wars had destroyed much of the political power of capital, enabling high taxation of the very rich, the creation of a welfare state and a widening spectrum of politics and opinion. Since then, as the money and power of the very rich have multiplied once more, the governments they support have sought to crush dissent.

When Milne was sacked, I had been working on our biggest investigation yet: into the transmigration programme in Indonesia run by the Suharto dictatorship – and funded by the World Bank and the UK and US governments. The policy involved moving hundreds of thousands of people to the country’s outer islands, to displace and corral local populations. It was a brutal, ecocidal and, in West Papua, genocidal scheme. I sold the story to a publisher instead. But I felt unready, so I took a six-month job producing current affairs at the BBC World Service. It was an excellent schooling in global politics, but I realised I could never thrive in a newsroom. On a slow news day, we were debating the lead for our programme among several dull options. Ten minutes before transmission, the editor strode into the studio, clapped his hands and announced: “Great – 110 dead in Sri Lanka!”

I spent the next six years working freelance in the tropics, investigating some extremely dangerous stories, scraping a living by writing books and making occasional radio programmes. When I returned, I found the BBC and other broadcasters had become furiously hostile to environmental programming. I decided to try print.

I entertained another crazily naive belief: that I should work only for the rightwing press, reaching people who would otherwise never see such stories. I managed to place a couple of articles in the Telegraph, though they were severely trimmed and relegated to the back pages. I knew a sympathetic junior editor at the Daily Mail, who commissioned me, across three years, to write 21 articles. All but one were spiked by her seniors. Finally, I had one published, on the impacts of car pollution. Discussing my proposal, an editor had asked me: “So what’s the solution? More research?” No, I answered, “stronger regulation”. Reading the published article, I discovered that the solution was “more research”.

I finally saw the bleeding obvious: you cannot speak truth to power if power controls your words. I was lucky to be taken on by the Guardian. It remains among the very few mainstream outlets, anywhere, in which you can freely criticise the real elite.

Three weeks ago, after a long absence, I appeared on the BBC’s Moral Maze, to discuss media power. I was shocked to discover how far things have gone. The Telegraph columnist Tim Stanley “argued” that the media can’t be predominantly rightwing, because GB News says it has been “captured by the loony left”. The rightwinger Inaya Folarin Iman called the idea that billionaires influence the media they own a “grand conspiracy” and “false consciousness”. Such people are now so dominant that they no longer even have to make sense.

Power is the rock on which truth founders. It will always find willing enforcers: no one ever lost money by telling billionaires what they want to hear. The mainstream media, with a few exceptions, is a single-issue lobby group, whose purpose is to assert the rights of capital.

But perhaps the ground is shifting. Citizen journalism is flowering, through the Bylines network, openDemocracy, Double Down News , Novara, Declassified and DeSmog, and in particular at the local level. Most established local newspapers are a graveyard of good journalism. But they’re being pushed aside by innovative new outlets, such as the Bristol Cable, Glasgow’s Bell, View Digital in Belfast, Manchester’s Mill, the Leicester Gazette, West Country Voices, Birmingham’s Dispatch, the Oxford Clarion, the Hastings Independent, the Waltham Forest Echo, Inside Croydon, the Sheffield Tribune and the Liverpool Post.

Something is stirring; something that could become very big – a citizens’ revolt against the propaganda of power. We fight for the day on which the pen beats the wallet.

www.monbiot.com

https://www.monbiot.com/2025/09/23/the-propaganda-of-power/

https://www.monbiot.com/?p=7467

Posted by monbiot

https://www.monbiot.com/2025/09/16/trussed-up/

https://www.monbiot.com/?p=7457

Astonishingly, the Tufton Street junktanks that shaped Liz Truss’s agenda are still operating at the heart of government.

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 11^th September 2025

Forgive me if I’ve got this wrong, but I seem to recall the country voting the Tories out last year. Part of the reason, if I remember correctly, was their staggering incompetence and insouciance, epitomised by Liz Truss’s mini-budget. That catastrophe was, like Truss’s political career, formed and steered by the neoliberal junktanks of Tufton Street.

But now I begin to doubt my recollections. We booted them out through the front door, right? Yet they still appear to be in the house. Perhaps they came round the back. After taking an interest in the Department for Business and Trade’s “growth school” speaker sessions for civil servants, I sent a freedom of information request. Given that Keir Starmer, like Truss, has placed his growth “mission” at the centre of policy, and that this department is responsible for delivering it, the instruction given to its officials is crucial to the economic and political direction the country takes.

Who, I wondered, would be speaking at these sessions? The answer surpassed my worst fears. Among the external instructors used by the department’s “growth school” so far are no representatives from trade unions, social justice, human rights or environmental groups, and no representatives from left or liberal thinktanks such as the New Economics Foundation or the Institute for Public Policy Research. But there are four who work or have worked for the Tufton Street junktanks that surrounded Truss. They are Samuel Hughes from the Centre for Policy Studies, Ben Southwood, formerly of Policy Exchange and currently a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute, Sam Bowman, also a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute, and Sam Dumitriu, formerly head of research at the Adam Smith Institute and now head of policy at Britain Remade.

Truss delegated key functions of government to the dark-money thinktanks. Among her senior staff were the former head of economic and social policy at Policy Exchange, a former senior researcher at the Centre for Policy Studies and the former head of government affairs at the Adam Smith Institute. These lobby groups are ranked by the transparency campaign Who Funds You? as either opaque or highly opaque.

On the day of her mini-budget, the junktanks lined up to claim responsibility for it. The Centre for Policy Studies wrote: “Great to see so many CPS policies included in today’s announcement by the Chancellor.” These, it said, were “just a few” of its wins.

I found the inclusion of Britain Remade in the department’s grooming sessions particularly dismal. This group, formed after Truss’s ejection from No 10, seems to exert an extraordinary grip on government policy. Alongside Dumitriu, it is run by former special advisers to Boris Johnson and Truss. It has lobbied vigorously for new road building, while attacking environmental groups.

Where is the experience of business and trade that such speakers are, presumably, supposed to bring? It is hard to see what the junktanks have to offer, other than discredited neoliberal theory and a long record of failure. So why might they have been chosen? Well, like Truss, and in the face of powerful evidence, the Starmer administration believes growth will be delivered by deregulation – which happens to be a fundamental tenet of neoliberalism.

Truss, who singularly fails to take responsibility for her decisions, claims her premiership was terminated by the “deep state”: a conspiracy fiction imported from the US. Well, judging by the disturbing continuity between arguably the most extreme Conservative government in modern history and its Labour successor, we could agree with her that entrenched forms of political power persist, regardless of who wins the election. I wouldn’t call it the deep state, but it does make you wonder what we voted for.

Like its Conservative predecessors, Starmer’s is a government beholden, to a shocking degree, to lobbyists. Their influence appears to explain a wide range of policies, from the ban on Palestine Action, to the planned deregulation of the financial sector (as if the 2008 crash never happened) and new private partnerships in the NHS; from the environmentally disastrous planning and infrastructure bill to this week’s decision to allow bottom trawlers to keep ripping up England’s “marine protected areas”.

The work of Ethan Shone, an investigative journalist at openDemocracy, is indispensable in explaining the weird commissions and omissions of this government. He has shown how assiduously commercial interests courted the Labour party before the last election, and how that courtship has turned into policy. Corporate representatives were seconded into political offices and frontbenchers attended “client roundtables”. Rachel Reeves, now the chancellor, told corporate executives just before the election that “I hope you …. see your fingerprints all over” our manifesto. A former Labour minister, Jim Murphy, gleefully predicted that Starmer’s administration would be the “first private-sector government in Labour’s history”.

He wasn’t wrong. The new environment secretary, Emma Reynolds, was a managing director of TheCityUK, a lobby group for banks and other financial services. In January, she became City minister.

Among the current government’s advisers is the City lobbyist Iain Anderson, whom Truss appointed as one of her “business champions”. When she stood for Conservative leader, he tweeted a selfie of the two of them, with the caption “I’ve been a Conservative for almost 4 decades … I’ve worked with Liz on economic reform and boosting opportunity. She has fresh ideas and real energy. She does what she says and is strong and loyal. That’s why I’m backing #LizForLeader.” Now, though he continues to work as a lobbyist, Starmer’s government has appointed him as a non-executive director of the Department for Business and Trade, which hosts those “growth school” talks.

The great political contest, ever since the dawn of the thing we call democracy, is between the public interest and the power of money. Money’s tools include the direct funding of political parties and politicians, bullying by the billionaire media, the misinformation machine of social media and a massive lobbying effort, some of which is conducted by acknowledged lobby companies, some by groups whose affiliations are not disclosed.

The dark-money junktanks have become essential to capital’s assault on democracy. They are the glue that connects the media onslaught to active policy formation, creating a united front. Opaque neoliberal thinktanks are among the unfortunate realities any nominally progressive government has to navigate. But we would not expect such a government to invite them back on to the throne from which they were so recently evicted.

www.monbiot.com

https://www.monbiot.com/2025/09/16/trussed-up/

https://www.monbiot.com/?p=7457