the brilliantly leaping gazelle

Love my brother as I do, one thing that really – and I mean really – annoys me about him is his belief that there is no such thing as a right wing or left wing press in this country. “I don’t know what you even mean by that,’ he will say, despite me citing evidence to support this. He could, of course, just be winding me up, knowing that the more he denies it, the more frustrated and irritated I’ll become.

As I repeatedly have pointed out to him we live in a country where just three companies dominate 83% of the newspaper market in the UK. Here is the report that says this. But it shouldn’t surprise you, as hopefully the reader of this blog might not know the specifics, but will be aware of the more general point and see it as fundamental to our democracy. The specifics are here. Because such a concentration of ownership by rich billionaires, who have only become billionaires in the first place by having a transactional approach to democracy, morals and ethics, are hardly not going to interfere in their newspapers editorial content. And they are certainly not going to allow their newspapers to run stories about a politician who if elected PM would implement policies detrimental to their business and financial interests.

Which is why the press give Jeremy Corbinned such a hard time while conversely acting as cheerleaders for Boris’s Johnson. He doesn’t pose a threat to them, because a proper socialist government would raise corporation tax, close tax loopholes and aggressively pursue tax owed. And hopefully name and shame the obscenely wealthy tax avoiders in the same way their newspapers name and shame those poor sods who do exactly the same thing, but are on the other end of the social spectrum.

Oops, silly me, there I was forgetting ‘there’s no such thing as society’, because we can trust everything Margaret Thatcher said can’t we?