There’s an intriguing by-election coming up in Great Britain where former Tory leadership contender and shadow Home Secretary David Davis has resigned his portfolio – and his seat of Haltemprice and Howden – “in order to force a by-election over the 42 day detention issue”. Legislation is currently before the House of Lords enabling terror suspects to be held without charge for that time period. Neither the Labour nor the Liberal Democrat parties are running a candidate, and Davis faces one major opponent – former Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie, whose candidacy was cooked up at a birthday party for Sun editor Rebekah Wade, though some also see the hand of Downing Street in his crusade. Rupert Murdoch was at the party and MacKenzie has already stated that Murdoch would be personally funding his campaign – which would be illegal because Murdoch is not a UK citizen. British politics has been thrown into turmoil as Davis proclaims that his constituents now have a chance to vote to “save Magna Carta”.
Elsewhere: Analysis from Shiraz Socialist.
Re: Murdoch – no one’s fool enough to charge him
Up until last weekend, Davis believed Brown would be defeated on the terrorism Bill in the Commons and was certain he would be defeated in the Lords. He says he began to think again when he saw last-minute polling suggesting that 65 per cent of the public supported it.
Mugs.
This sort of stuff is when I can applaud actual old school conservatism. Sadly far too rarely in this modern age.
Fascinating story Kim, thanks. MacKenzie himself stated that Murdoch had personally promised to fund him, which – as an American citizen – Murdoch cannot legally do in the UK. So is Murdoch now going to take out British citizenship?
Not likely. There are countless business and political channels whereby Murdoch can fund anyone he likes, anywhere in the world, and never be held accountable for it.
The Independent says the idea for MacKenzie’s campaign “apparently … came directly from Rupert Murdoch”. Is it just a ruse to sell papers on the back of another stupid campaign (MacKenzie’s last campaign is ridiculed as “the How-Dare-They-Raise-The-Cost-Of-Parking-At-My-Local-Railway-Station-When-I’m-Barely-Worth £10m ticket”) or is this campaign really designed to undermine David Davis’ credibility and message?
Is it time to boycott News Corp yet, folks?
More from the BBC:
I love the reader’s comment about how Murdoch “is still an Australian no matter how much they try to disown him.”.
And this is from The Age:
ummmm I’m puzzled by this reference to American sources of election funds. Hasn’t Rupert been in Fleet Street for decades? Remember Wapping? Surely he would have purchased one or two UK companies by now?? I think folk in London all those decades ago called him “The Dirty Digger”.
Why We Fight is about to screen on Showcase. I’ve seen bits & pieces. Reckon it’s eye opening on the INVASION
“Legislation is currently before the House of Commons ..”
I think it passed in the Commons already, – only with the support of the Democratic Unionists, and will now go to the Lords.
It’s worth going to that link above to click on the article “Royal Ascot fashion faux pas”
Thanks for the correction, Russell, I’ll fix the post.
Exactly what would this accomplish?
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Murdoch is really stepping over the line here. This by-election appears to be a single issue ritual about habeas corpus and the trend in the Anglosphere of forgetting why it’s there. Murdoch’s support of the Blair, Bush, Howard triumvirate including News Ltd’s sometimes hysterical fear-mongering has been key to this. I personally don’t think this will to roll back democracy has anything to do with terrorism. I think it has to do with increased opposition to the Corporatocracy subversion of liberal-democracy and due process.
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This was borne out well last year at APEC. They turned inner city Sydney into a martial law zone. Result: early morning raids on activists’ homes with attendant gestapo-type bullying yet The Chaser’s War On Everything dresses up as Usama bin Laden in a Canadian diplomat’s limo and gets close enough to Bush to blow him up. They weren’t worried about terrorism, they were worried about protest.
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But a few well-meaning left-liberals refusing to read the Herald-Sun (or watch The Simpsons btw) will accomplish nothing. The issue is the long term survival of democratic institutions and the enforcement of laws against anyone who breaks them no matter how powerful. That would be a worthwhile campaign and would probably include strategic boycotts (against the adevrtisers I’d suggest).
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But it would only be effective if it was very intelligently put together with a lot of thought given to the various means by which such as News Ltd could return fire.
To heck w/ Murdoch & his Machiavellian papers & other media outlets. Let’s STOP linking to his blasted papers if we can help it. I feel like i’m taking a trip to MORDOR everytime I hit a link & it ends up in his camp. It’s hard enuff commenting on Tim Dunlop’s Blogocracy these days…but I do it ’cause Tim fought the good fight for so long. Really annoyed me that I just hit a link above & it took me to one of Murdoch’s rags.
I reckon the Brit Labor Party needs to kick Brown’s butt out & get in someone who has some bleedin’ INTEGRITY.
After watching Why We Fight I’m really stirred up. It put so much evidence & info. together in 2005 that many of us have been talking about for years…mainly because we linked to the sites of so many intelligent, knowledgeable, courageous & hard working individuals on the ground who spoke out against the INVASION & revealed what a CON the build up to it was…brave, gutsy, articulate bloggers & speakers to truth who stood up to the Busheviks & their enabler media & regimes, when so many were hiding under the bed due to the onslaught of BS mainstream news, flames of patriotism, fear-mongering, accusations of being traitors.
I tell ya, if GW Bush, Rumsfeld & Dick Cheney & his wife…& those other war enablers, profiteers & mobsters don’t end up in jail, or at least stripped of their reputations & some moolah, then Democracy has failed miserably & we might as well start looking to other ways to run our societies. And for gawd’s sake, please you Americans out there, chuck the majority of those BUMS in Congress out. The fail-safes need to work.
Go Kucinich.
P.S. I know Why We Fight was on a Foxtel channel. Partially owned by you know who. But I ask the government, what CHOICE do we have? It should be shown on SBS or ABC at a later date if possible. I guess we can always try sites like this:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article8494.htm
Frankly, I wish Murdoch would stand down & open up News Ltd/News Corp to other shareholders so I can feel like visiting them again. I bet I’m not the only one.
When yer time of being Kingmaker is up ya should recognise it before the serfs & servants & nobles that surround you get agro & decide to turf you out. You can FEEL the tension in that camp…for sure.
But of course, so many worry about being smeared these days…or don’t want to burn their bridges w/ the Murdoch press just in case they need a job down the line…understandable…sort of…so we’re unlikely to hear much support for my views.
Hopefully the shareholders will see THE LIGHT. Over MONEY & self-interest. But then, there’s some “poison pill” thing that Murdoch has used to protect his interests. And it is said by some that he & his have full bore INFLUENCE in sections of the political parties…& the ABC…just like the BBC.
Democracy my ar*e.
I hope that we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
- Thomas Jefferson
The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism – ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.
- Franklin D. Roosevelt
I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country . . . corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.
- Abraham Lincoln
(from Ralph Nader’s site)
Nasking -
Trouble is political parties are awash with people who lack, not so much integrity, but adherance to certain basic values that the political game dismisses as ‘naive’. The game makes this happen and ordinaryn people encountering the game are alienated.
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Good quotes. Except FDR isn’t entirely correct.
You’re right, his definition of fascism is lacking for one, if that’s what you’re referring to Adrien. Fascists put the rebirth of the nation or race via unity above that of the individual &/or private power. The state is led by the dear leader. Corporations & privately owned companies are tolerated as a means to an end…an apparatus of the State that serves the nation & acts as an agent sometimes to resist the growth of socialism & worker revolt. Or something like that. Tho, I imagine he was referring to Il Duce. Or perhaps Hitler.
I’m a bit rusty on the political economy stuff these days…:)
Pretty much what I meant Nasking. Altho’ at the time, and for reason, the conventional wisdom was that the Fascists were tools of the ruling classes, industrial and feudal, trying to preserve their status in a crumbling polity with the Communists looming.
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However the reality was pretty much as you say.
The fascists were indeed tools…;) Bit like the Busheviks I imagine. Tho I guess some of them are the industrial strength ruling class. Oily characters mixed w/ private companies providing everything for the conflict zone bar the sanity.
It has been an intersting week over here in the UK.
There are so many interesting issues and side-stories to the Davis resignation. One of the bigguns which Kim has touched on is that in many ways this fight is about rallying grassroots activists against the tabloid MSM. Kelvin Mackenzie is a big enough drop-kick to have walked right into the middle of a fight in which I suspect he will get pounded. What’s more, it seems one of the motivations behind David Cameron distancing himself from Davis has been that the Tories are afraid of losing MSM support.
Also, it’s disheartening to note that Labour is probably not going to stand a candidate in the seat. Labour minister are shouting from the rooftops that Davis’ seat has always been a Tory stronghold so this whole exercise is really a sham.
Of course Labour’s objections are a bit of a furphy and are clearly missing the bigger point that a Tory is running on a liberal issue in a safe conservative seat, which I’m sure he clearly believes he will win. Labour is in a lot of trouble if they sincerely believe that they can’t win this fight and don’t want to even try.
When Kelvin Mackenzie, egged on by a Labour Government, is standing against a Tory, it certainly suggests that the old left right dichotomy is quite moribund.
I’d venture that now in the West, there are only two basic parties, the ones in power and the ones that are not not.
Political ideology is now just the lurid flimsy hat that comes in a Xmas cracker. The real *ahem* dialectic is actually a trialetic – between technocratic centralist elected administrators learning on the job to juggle the demands of nation and culture with how their constituents can thrive in a globalisied economy, transnational operations bestriding the world like T. Rex while constantly treading on their own eggs and wild, whacky and surprisingly effective citizen and vested interest groups springing up all over the place to yank the dialogue and outcomes in unexpected directions.
Meanwhile the MSM, like that fat nerd who turned up to the party with heaps of booze, confident it would him help score one more, is now butting into every conversation he can with truly dopey lines. “Did you know Brad Pitt and Obama are gonna do the wild thing on Big Brother? I heard it from one of my special pundit friends at this great new bistro I really recommend.”
The next few decades are gonna be some of the wildest and wooliest in human history. Anyone attempting to frame what happens next in archaic 20th century political terms is gonna sound like that apocryphal North American mayor who looked forward to the day when every town would have its own telephone.
Nabs – Well I for one am seriously contemplating actively campaigning for Davis. A number of Labour MPs have already come out in support of Davis’ bid.
I don’t know if anything so grand as a total breakdown of 20th century forces is really in effect, but I do suspect that there are new forces that are challenging the status quo politics of the 90s.
UK Labour are really struggling to keep up with this new brand of politics – though to be fair most of the Tories don’t get it either. Labour is so reliant on the old “New Labour” powerbase of whinging middle-class folk that they are missing the boat on a potential new wave of support which has been generated by the intertubes.
On reflection, it makes last year’s Kevin07 campaign and the Obama’s current strategy look all the more effective.
One final point worth noting is that the Tories are being advised by Crosby and Textor now. It makes me wonder whether the leftish side of Ozplogistan shouldn’t be lending the few remaining UK liberals a hand in the coming year or so…
“It makes me wonder whether the leftish side of Ozplogistan shouldn’t be lending the few remaining UK liberals a hand in the coming year or so…”
Any Brit sites you recommend Mick?
“The next few decades are gonna be some of the wildest and wooliest in human history.”
Indeed Nabakov, when vegan, mob resistor & congressman Dennis Kucinish meets 9/11 truther, libertarian rebel, Green doubter, radio patriot Alex Jones…& they agree to assist one another to impeach the Bushevik war-mongers, then you know the world of politics & media is evolving & getting more interesting by the day:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKwaXe-9wwc&eurl=http://www.infowars.com/?p=2685
If Obama wins the Presidency I’d like to see him reach across the political spectrum & bring some different voices into his administration.
In fact the Dems should stop promoting myths & let bygones be bygones if Obama wins…bring Nader into the admin…here’s a worthwhile article from Ralph on ‘The Wall Street Gamblers’:
http://www.votenader.org/blog/2008/06/11/casinos-on-wall-street/
If Brown stands down or is forced out, I wonder if the Labor Party could build a coalition w/ some Lib Dems & disenchanted Tories?
You can smell CHANGE a comin’…
Mick is right – there’s a lot more to this than meets the eye. Davis is trying to engage with civil libertarian issues more broadly, taking on ASBOs, CCTV, the whole box and dice. I’ve tried to scope out some of the bigger issues at my place.