For anyone unclear about how our democracy is manipulated against the public’s will, it is crucial to understand how the media billionaires force their will on the Conservative Party whenever it dares to disagree with them.
It can be demonstrated on three issues at the heart of our politics: Brexit, human rights and the climate crisis.
Brexit
The media billionaires hated the European Union for decades, because it was big enough to regulate corporations like theirs and to threaten the tax-haven practices that take billions out of the public finances.
But the Conservative Party, since Churchill, had been committed to European co-operation.
So the billionaire press did three things. It relentlessly promoted the small minority of Conservative MPs on the hard right who hated the EU. For two decades it pumped out anti-EU propaganda. And when the party refused to abandon its pro-European position, it switched its support to the then-minuscule UKIP.
UKIP soared in the polls and became a serious electoral threat, taking seats off the Conservatives.
The result? The Conservatives caved, called a referendum, and the billionaire media won Brexit. UKIP was dropped, and the press went back to backing a newly obedient Conservative Party.
Human rights
The billionaire media have hated the European Convention on Human Rights for decades, because it constrains their political grip. But the ECHR was another post-war initiative the Conservatives had championed, and successive leaders refused to drop it.
Climate
Then, having won Brexit, the billionaire media adopted the destruction of climate action as their new obsession, demanding an end to every measure protecting the climate and nature.
But climate action had been a Conservative position since Margaret Thatcher — a scientist — issued a clarion call at the UN to save humanity from climate destruction.
So they gave a huge platform to a small group of hard-right Conservative MPs, and, about five years ago, switched their support to Reform, another Farage vehicle, extreme in its hostility to climate protection and the Human Rights Act.
Reform duly soared in the polls.
The surrender
And then the Conservative Party caved, exactly as it did over Brexit.
Almost unnoticed, Kemi Badenoch announced a new purity test for Conservative parliamentary candidates: support climate action based on science, and you are barred from standing.
Think about who that bars.
It bars the roughly 60% of Britons who support climate action. It bars around half of her own party’s members. It bars almost every prime minister and cabinet member since Thatcher — Thatcher herself, who told the world Britain should lead on climate, along with Johnson, May, Sunak and Cameron. It bars almost every Conservative MP who voted for the carbon targets the May government legislated for.
This was not a decision based on the British public, or even on her own members. It was a raw attempt to win back the propaganda support of a press that abandoned the Conservatives five years ago.
That is not democracy. It is oligarchy.
The pattern only breaks one way
Three times now, the same mechanism: promote the insurgent, panic the incumbent, collect the policy.
It works because a handful of proprietors own the microphones. Change the ownership and the mechanism stops working.
That is what the Media Sovereignty Act does. Our petition closes on Friday 18 September.
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Please sign and share our petition to ban foreign media ownership: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/760061
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