Ted Verity is editor-in-chief of the Daily Mail. He is one of the most powerful people in British politics, and most of the country would not recognise him in the street.
He was not elected. He answers to one person: Jonathan Harmsworth, Lord Rothermere, the paper’s non-dom billionaire owner. Between them they set a political line that Britain’s right-wing parties follow, and that Labour governments spend their time trying not to provoke.
You do not have to take our word for what that line is. You can simply read it. Here is one editorial page, from Monday’s paper. It covered four subjects.
Climate
The lead editorial attacked the Prime Minister for delaying a decision on the Jackdaw gas field by four weeks. It said he was not a “proper” prime minister, that he held voters in “contempt”, that climate campaigners are “eco-zealots”, and that a four-week delay would damage Britain’s energy security and cost jobs.
Jackdaw would employ 27 full-time staff.
Around three-quarters of the British public say they are concerned about the climate crisis.
Assisted dying
The second editorial attacked the Assisted Dying Bill, which would end the criminalisation of helping a terminally ill person to die without excruciating pain. The bill was “shoddy” and “frightening”, its narrow passage an “indictment” of MPs, and it should be scrapped for good.
Around seven in ten of the British public support assisted dying.
Migration
The third editorial demanded to know what the Prime Minister intended to do about the “migrant crisis”, following a murder committed by an asylum seeker.
Net migration has fallen sharply. Small boat crossings are down. Yet after years of coverage like this, a large proportion of the public believes both are rising, and believes people seeking asylum are responsible for far more crime than they are. That gap between what is true and what people believe is not an accident. It is a product.
Palestine
Alongside the editorials ran a column by Michael Gove, editor of the Spectator and himself an appointee of a billionaire owner, opposing the Government’s sanctions on settlers in the occupied West Bank. He argued that the decision took Britain a step towards a darker place.
Britons support sanctions by roughly two to one.
One page. Four positions. Four majorities on the other side.
Notice what the objection here is not. It is not that an editor holds opinions. Editors are entitled to their opinions and a free press must be free to print them, including opinions we find repellent. We are not proposing that anybody tell the Daily Mail what to write, and the Media Sovereignty Act does not do that.
The objection is structural. One appointee of one non-dom owner can set the terms of national debate on climate, on death, on migration and on foreign policy, on a single page, on a single Monday — and there is no route by which the settled view of the British public ever gets in. No election. No regulator independent of the owners. No obligation to declare who funded the think-tank whose report supplied the argument.
That is not a free press failing. It is a system working exactly as designed, for the people who own it.
The Media Sovereignty Act changes who can own our media, how much of it any one person can own, and who our press answers to when it goes wrong. It leaves editors entirely free to be wrong. It just stops one man’s opinions from being the closest thing this country has to a national policy.
It is time to take back control. 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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