George Monbiot: Secretive thinktanks are crushing our democracy

From The Guardian 12th Sep 2011:

Free-market thinktanks may hide their funders' identities, but they reveal influence-peddling is rife in British politics.

Nadine Dorries won't answer it. Lord Lawson won't answer it. Michael Gove won't answer it. But it's a simple question, and if they don't know it's because they don't want to. Where does the money come from? All are connected to groups whose purpose is to change the direction of public life. None will reveal who funds them.

When she attempted to restrict abortion counselling, Nadine Dorries MP was supported by a group called Right to Know. When other MPs asked her who funds it, she claimed she didn't know. Lord Lawson is chairman of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which casts doubt on climate science. It demands "openness and transparency" from scientists. Yet herefuses to say who pays, on the grounds that the donors "do not wish to be publicly engaged in controversy". Michael Gove was chairman of Policy Exchange, an influential conservative thinktank. When I asked who funded Policy Exchange when he ran it, his office told me "he doesn't have that information and he won't be able to help you".

We know that to understand politics and the peddling of influence we must follow the money. So it's remarkable that the question of who funds the thinktanks has so seldom been asked.

There are dozens of groups in the UK which call themselves free-market or conservative thinktanks, but they have a remarkably consistent agenda. They tend to oppose the laws which protect us from banks and corporations; to demand the privatisation of state assets; to argue that the rich should pay less tax; and to pour scorn on global warming. What the thinktanks call free-market economics looks more like a programme for corporate power.

Some of them have a turnover of several million pounds a year, but in most cases that's about all we know. In the US, groups claiming to be free-market thinktanks have been exposed as sophisticated corporate lobbying outfits, acting in concert to promote the views of the people who fund them. In previous columns, I've shown how such groups, funded by the billionaire Koch brothers, built and directed the Tea Party movement.

The Kochs and the oil company Exxon have also funded a swarm of thinktanks which, by coincidence, all spontaneously decided that manmade climate change is a myth. A study in the journal Environmental Politics found that such groups, funded by economic elites and working through the media, have been "central to the reversal of US support for environmental protection, both domestically and internationally".

Jeff Judson, who has worked for 26 years as a corporate lobbyist in the US, has explained why thinktanks are more effective than other publicrelations agencies. They are, he says, "the source of many of the ideas and facts that appear in countless editorials, news articles, and syndicated columns". They have "considerable influence and close personal relationships with elected officials". They "support and encourage one another, echo and amplify their messages, and can pull together … coalitions on the most important public policy issues." Crucially, they are "virtually immune to retribution … the identity of donors to thinktanks is protected from involuntary disclosure."

The harder you stare at them, the more they look like lobby groupsworking for big business without disclosing their interests. Yet the media treats them as independent sources of expertise. The BBC is particularly culpable. Even when the corporate funding of its contributors has been exposed, it still allows them to masquerade as unbiased commentators.

For the sake of democracy, we should know who funds the organisations that call themselves thinktanks. To this end I contacted 15 groups. Eleven of them could be described as free-market or conservative; four as progressive. I asked them all a simple question: "Could you give me the names of your major donors and the amount they contributed in the last financial year?" I gave their answers a score out of five for transparency and accountability.

Three of the groups I contacted – Right to Know, the International Policy Network, and Nurses for Reform – did not answer my calls or emails. Six others refused to give me any useful information. They are the Institute of Economic Affairs, Policy Exchange, the Adam Smith Institute, theTaxPayers' Alliance, the Global Warming Policy Foundation and theChristian Medical Fellowship. They produced similar excuses, mostly concerning the need to protect the privacy of their donors. My view is that if you pay for influence, you should be accountable for it. Nul points.

Civitas scored 1. Its website names a small number of the donors to its schools, but it would not reveal the amount they had given or the identity of anyone else. The only rightwing thinktank that did well was Reform, which sent me a list of its biggest corporate donors: Lloyds (£50k), Novo Nordisk (£48k), Sky (£42k), General Electric (£41k) and Danone (£40k). Reform lists its other corporate sponsors in its annual review, and earns 4 points. If they can do it, why can't the others?

The progressives were more accountable. Among them, Demos did least well. It sent me a list of its sponsors, but refused to reveal how much they gave. It scores 2.5. The Institute for Public Policy Research listed its donors and, after some stumbling, was able to identify the biggest of them: the European Union (a grant of €800,000) and the Esme Fairburn Foundation (£86k). It scores 3.5. The New Economics Foundation sent me a list of all its donors and the amount each gave over the past year, earning 4 points. The biggest funders are the Network for Social Change (£173k), the Department of Health (£124k) and the Aim Foundation (£100k). Compass had already published a full list in its annual report. The biggest source is the Communication Workers' Union, which gave it £78k in 2009. Compass gets 5 out of 5.

The picture we see, with the striking exception of Reform, is of secrecy among the rightwing groups, creating a powerful impression that they have something to hide. Shockingly, this absence of accountability – and the influence-peddling it doubtless obscures – does not affect their charitable status.

The funding of these groups should not be a matter of voluntary disclosure. As someone remarked in February 2010, "secret corporate lobbying, like the expenses scandal, goes to the heart of why people are so fed up with politics … it's time we shone the light of transparency on lobbying in our country and forced our politics to come clean about who is buying power and influence." Who was this leftwing firebrand? One David Cameron.

I charge that the groups which call themselves free-market thinktanks are nothing of the kind. They are public relations agencies, secretly lobbying for the corporations and multimillionaires who finance them. If they wish to refute this claim, they should disclose their funding. Until then, whenever you hear the term free-market thinktank, think of a tank, crushing democracy, driven by big business.

• A fully referenced version of this article can be found on George Monbiot's website

Charlie Chaplin's 'The Great Dictator' speech.

Joe Glenton. C4 4thought.tv.

Business digest: Britain’s arms exporters ‘cash in’ on Arab Spring | Business | The First Post

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Booming Business: How much does it make us?

Richard Murphy: How is it tax evasion’s no longer a crime but demonstrating about tax avoidance is?

How is it tax evasion’s no longer a crime but demonstrating about tax avoidance is?


There’s a sickening dimension to today’s agreement between the UK and Switzerland that is getting to let thousands of wealthy tax criminals off the hook – without them ever being held to account or even having to admit to their crimes.

At the moment the UK government is turning this deliberate blind eye to massive, large scale, organised looting of the UK’s tax system it is also bringing criminal charges against more than thirty young people who recently took part in a in a wholly peaceful UK Uncut demonstration against tax avoidance.

They are facing criminal charges in the UK for having leaflets condemning tax avoiders when at exactly the same time the government was negotiating a deal to make sure that tax criminals were let off without ever facing the consequences of their crime.

This is a sickening indictment of the UK criminal justice system, our respect for free speech, the values of this government and the fact that we live in a society where it is now a crime to criticise the criminality that did and does pervade much of the financial services sector that deliberately promotes tax havens to facilitate crime of the sort which those using Switzerland have just been excused of.

No wonder people are angry.

They have every right to be.

We are being led by moral cowards who excuse crime whilst prosecuting those who exercise the supposed human right of free speech to criticise those facilitating it.

It’s Cameroon and Osborne who should be in the dock, not the Fortnum and Mason’s protesters from UK Uncut.

Richard Murphy.

From http://ht.ly/6bNfW.

The zombie of neoliberalism can be beaten – through mass direct action.

Phone hacking and police corruption represent neoliberalism's undead status, even as it marches on. Yet change is possible.

David Harvie and Keir Milburn
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 4 August 2011 19.30 BST

Just days after the deal that was supposed to banish it, the eurozone crisis is back. Poor growth figures put a "new" financial collapse back on the cards. The response from politicians, bankers and business leaders is more of the same – more of the same neoliberal policies that got us into this situation in the first place.

Neoliberalism no longer "makes sense", but its logic keeps stumbling on, without conscious direction, like a zombie: ugly, persistent and dangerous. Such is the "unlife" of a zombie, a body stripped of its goals, unable to adjust itself to the future, unable to make plans. It can only act habitually as it pursues a monomaniacal hunger. Unless there is a dramatic recomposition of society, we face the prospect of decades of drift as the crises we face – economic, social, environmental – remain unresolved. But where will that recomposition come from when we are living in the world of zombie-liberalism?

In the midst of such hopelessness the phone-hacking scandal seemed to offer a moment of redemption, but as the news cycle moves on we are left wondering what effect it will really have.

Hackgate cannot be treated in isolation. Since the financial "meltdown" of 2007-08 we have witnessed similar scenes, and similar outrage, around MPs' expenses and bankers' bonuses. We have witnessed not one but two media feeding frenzies around the repression of protest. The first followed the police attack on the G20 protests in 2009 and the death of Ian Tomlinson, with the second erupting around the outing of undercover police officer Mark Kennedy, leading to the unprecedented unmasking of another five undercover police officers acting within the environmental and anti-capitalist movements. The refusal of the Metropolitan police to investigate the full extent of phone hacking is, then, the third scandal revealing the political character of contemporary policing.

The phone-hacking scandal, and particularly the web of complicity revealed in its cover-up, is undoubtedly more significant than some of these other scandals, but positioning it among them allows us to raise a question that has rarely been asked: why now?

The answer is inescapable: we are living through something epochal. These scandals are part of a more general social and economic crisis sparked by the financial crisis. What's less clear is the exact nature of the relationship between crisis and scandals, and therefore the scandals' political significance.

Hackgate reveals the mechanisms of a network of corruption whose broad outlines were already understood. What we see, however, is not a distortion of an otherwise functional system but one element of a system that can only operate through such corrupt mechanisms. What we are seeing, through its moment of decomposition, are the parochial arrangements through which neoliberalism was established in the UK.

Neoliberal governance has common traits across the planet. But its instantiation in each country has been shaped by the peculiarities of that country's history. In each, a different (re)arrangement emerged between sections of the ruling class that would enable the imposition of neoliberal policies on populations that, on the whole, didn't want them.

Rupert Murdoch, and the tabloid culture he helped to establish, was central to this process in the UK, not least with the defeat of the print unions at Wapping. Other elements of that compact include a Thatcherite Conservative party and a neoliberalised Labour party, a highly politicised police force and, especially after 1986's big bang deregulation of the stock market, the dominance of finance capital. It is no coincidence each of these elements has been racked with scandal in the past few years.

Neoliberalism, however, requires more than the internal realignment of a national ruling class. Every semi-stable form of capitalism also needs some sort of settlement with the wider population, or at least a decisive section of it. While the postwar Keynesian settlement contained an explicit deal linking rising real wages to rising productivity, neoliberalism contained an implicit deal based on access to cheap credit. While real wages have stagnated since the late 1970s, the mechanisms of debt have maintained most people's living standards. An additional part of neoliberalism's tacit deal was the abandonment of any pretence to democratic, collective control over the conditions of life: politics has been reduced to technocratic rule. Instead, individuals accepted the promise that, through hard work, shrewd educational and other "life" choices, and a little luck, they – or their children – would reap the benefits of economic growth.

The financial crisis shattered the central component of this deal: access to cheap credit. Living standards can no longer be supported and, for the first time in a century, there is widespread fear that children will lead poorer lives than their parents. With the deal broken, parochial ruling arrangements in the UK have started to lose coherence.

The scandals, therefore, are symptoms not of renewal but rather of neoliberalism's zombie status. The scandals represent the zombie's body decomposing even as it continues its habitual operation. The phone-hacking scandal is not, then, as some have claimed, a British spring, the UK equivalent of the revolutions in the Maghreb or the indignants' movements in Spain and Greece. Unlike these other moments, the role of the "public" in Hackgate has largely been a passive one. But it would also be mistaken to claim this scandal alters nothing. Such a world-weary, sceptical position only reinforces the neoliberal "end of history" doctrine that change is impossible.

The scandals have revealed that which was hidden, yet such revelation is not enough to save us. What we lack is the belief ordinary people can act collectively to get some traction on the world. The only way out of the present impasse is to spark mass political action such as that glimpsed in Greece, Spain and the Maghreb, as well as the student movement in the UK. Any prospect of this reaching the level of social force needed to finish off neoliberalism is predicated on the hope that the embrace of tabloid and celebrity culture is a symptom of the powerless position neoliberalism places us in, and not its cause.

The collapse of neoliberal ideology and the revelation of the corrupt nature of contemporary policing and politics must be taken into account as we craft the political forms that can spark social movements. Left on its own, the indignation caused by Hackgate is just as likely to collapse back into the sense of impotence that pervades our situation.