British Capitalism and Monopolies in Reality

I’ve had enough of Rupert Murdoch. I had actually had enough of Rupert Murdoch before I signed up to his television package eight years ago, and it was only a ‘need’ to have sport programmes for the family that I signed up in the first place.

I regretted it almost instantaneously but at the time, there was no alternative.

And there still is very little alternative.

There is certainly not an excessive amount of choice out there.

Having spent some time considering the alternatives and my general unease about giving Murdoch and his organisation over £70 of my money monthly, I finally decided to take the plunge and move away from Sky to another television package.

As I said, the alternatives are not massive and they too are caught up in a whole vastness of monopolies and capitalism.

Virgin Media is not a co-operative. It is not a ‘not-for-profit’ organisation. It is out there to make as much money and become the alternative force in multimedia to the entire Sky product. But as far as I am aware, Richard Branson has not sunk to the levels of human degradation and total disregard for people in order to make a fast buck in the way that Murdoch and his lackeys have.

So I decided to switch my allegiance to Virgin once they had bombarded me with their adverts for their new TiVo box and multi-media packages.

Not only that, but they were also offering me a great deal on the telephone system and an internet speed that paled the existing service into insignificance.

The notion of being able to download films and get to pages with the blink of an eye, certainly seemed appealing.

I signed on the dotted line and was assured by Virgin that they would contact both BT and Sky to cancel my subscriptions and terminate the existing contracts.

Virgin kindly sent a proforma letter to me that I was to send to Sky, and they contacted BT to say that they were taking over the existing telephone number.

So far so good for a busy woman who does not want to be spending important time on the telephone to people who would be trying to persuade me to stay with their beloved product.

But of course, life is never that simple.

Having sent the letter and trusted Virgin to do the business, I waited to hear from Sky and BT.

Nothing happened.

So I contacted both companies to try and find what was happening.

I shall start with BT, and I managed to get in touch with a wonderful woman who was disappointed that I was leaving BT. She asked why and I explained that it was nothing to do with their product. It was just that the organisation could not offer me the multi-media package that Virgin was offering and I was rather desperate to leave Mr. Murdoch well alone.

She understood and then went on to explain that unfortunately BT did not have the ability to match either Virgin or Sky due to their technological programme being somewhat behind the times.

Perhaps BT should have been a little more forward thinking when these other two organisations got themselves sorted. Perhaps BT, as an established favourite amongst the great British Public and a one-time monopoly organisation should have made contact with another trusted favourite, the BBC, to sort out something that would appeal to the many who did not want to pay vast amounts of money each month to capitalists.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

I explained to the woman at BT, that I did not think I was the only person in the country that wished to leave Sky and that I felt their organisation were being penalised a) for not being progressive enough to offer a viable alternative and b) for the inexcusable and loathsome way in which Murdoch’s empire operated that was leading people to move away from his organisations in droves, and thus leading them away from BT by default.

I suggested that my comments be passed on to management, and I am sure they are already tracking the loss of business due to this very situation.

Of course, there may not be that many people who are leaving Sky but there was reports in the newspapers, at the height of the phone-hacking scandal and the delightful demise of the News of the World, that people were beginning to vote with their feet and veer themselves away from the various products that News International and Murdoch were involved with.

I know of people who have chosen not to buy “The Sun” or “The Times” having spent years of giving allegiance to these newspapers.

Whether there be droves leaving Sky or a few principled people such as myself, there is certainly change and with the excessive pitching in certain newspaper outlets, such as WH Smith, of the free “Times” with every chocolate bar you buy, I am confident that News International are worried enough about the drip effect becoming a cascade of disaffected customers.

So my next phone call was to Sky.

Oh dear, oh dear.

I wasn’t surprised by the jolly Scottish man showing both amazement and capitalist sorrow at my suggestion that I would like to cease my subscription to the service. I fully anticipated the tirade of persuasion that was about to come my way. I had decided I was going to remain resolute and not get into a heated discussion about the whys and wherefores of remaining with Sky.

I had not, however, banked on the excessive persistence and the corporate doggedness in which this person perpetually tried to argue me out of my principled decision.

It was appalling and verging, no not verging – it was intimidating bullying of an aggressive nature, made even worse by the ‘oh so polite’ manner in which it was done.

I started the call by stating that I had written to the organisation to tell them of my plans to terminate my contract with them. The man informed me that they did not accept letters of cancellation and everything had to be done by phone contact; something that my friends at Virgin had not entirely explained to me.

I was then asked for the first time why I had made the decision to terminate my contract.

I explained that I did not wish Murdoch to receive my money.

“Oh is this because of the phone hacking thingy?” was the dismissive response.

I explained that this was part of my reason but my main problem with Murdoch was the monopolisation of the industry and the fact that for many years, there had been no alternative to his services. I now felt as though I had a viable alternative and I was going to use my democratic right to choose what suited me the most.

“You do realise” was the patronising response, “that Rupert Murdoch is no longer the primary share-holder in Sky”.

I explained that I realised this was the case but I did not want to be involved or give my money to any organisation that was influenced by this man and any of his companies.

To cut an extremely tedious story short, the conversation went on for a further twenty minutes with this man constantly trying to persuade me to change my mind, including a time when he offered me £250 discount on my phone line and broadband rental for a year. I explained once more that as I was leaving Sky for ethical reasons, I was not going to be responding to the sort of blackmail of financial incentives to persuade me to stay.

Some people just don’t get it, do they?

He even explained to me, as though I was a complete imbecile, that should I choose to buy a Sky package through Virgin, I was still going to end up paying Murdoch some money, even though he had already stated that he was no longer the primary shareholder, and that if Virgin had really wanted the Sports deal or film packages then they could easily have bought the packages during the bidding process where Sky won their rights.

At this point I laughed at the total lack of understanding that was taking place here. I explained that this was precisely the sort of monopoly that I found so disgusting, and that Virgin or BBC or ITV or any other television/media organisation could not possibly compete with the might of BSkyB, which is precisely why I did not want them to have any more of my money in the hope that with a mass exodus from their indoctrinating business, the bidding playing field might eventually be levelled to the point where other media companies had a fighting chance of competing with BSkyB.

After a prolonged battering, I politely yet assertively pleaded with the man to cease with his tactics and press the button on the computer which finally freed me from the stranglehold of BSkyB.

He did so and we said our goodbyes.

I can be, when the time is right, an assertive human being. I had made my decision and I was not going to be persuaded by any sort of bribe or incentive that this man was going to offer me. Others, however, may have felt that either the incentive was too good to turn down or that they had no fight left in them and would succumb to the bullying methodology of this organisation.

I do not hold the person on the telephone responsible, although he does have a mind of his own and should be a little more socially intelligent to empathise with people and realise when the time is right to persuade and when it most certainly is not.

And here lies another issue with capitalism. Where is the human face? How often does it get subsumed into the cogs and wheels of these grand organisations that respect neither the wishes of their customers nor the humanity of their employees?

This man was a faceless automaton. He was following company rules, but could he honestly have crawled into bed last night with a feeling of purpose and a comfort that he had perpetually battered an unknown woman with his company line on how her life would be a complete misery without his companies influence in her life?

This is an extremely unintelligent way of operating and is indicative of so many organisations the length and breadth of the country and beyond, who are so desperate for our custom to further their own desires without a single consideration of what people are saying and doing in order to say, enough is enough.

Enough is enough. These large organisations need to be told that we, the people, will not be dictated to. We will endeavour to find alternatives and we will not all be bribed with financial incentives to keep their vile companies on an untouchable pedestal.

We will no longer listen to their lies or their deceptive methodology and we will certainly not be bullied into doing things in order to comply with the norm.

If enough people chose to stop buying “The Sun”, if enough organisations stopped funding such rags by taking their advertising business elsewhere, then these large conglomerates would have to look at their ethical business practices.

Has News International learned anything from the recent disclosures? Are they not still desperately trying to protect those people at the top, providing them with enough money to keep their mouths closed?

Did they stop hacking phones and sneaking in peoples’ bins once the y had been caught out, fined and employees sent to prison?

I don’t think so.

It was only when there was such public outcry that actually started to effect the fiscal position of the company that they did anything.

If enough of us turned around and said, “Enough is enough” and walked away from the contracts that BSkyB have tethered around our necks through a distinct lack of alternative, then we could bring these organisations to their knees and prevent the despicable monopoly that enables them to go about their business in their inhumane manner.

I am not suggesting at this point that any of the “Big Boys” are any better than the other. If I find that Branson is doing something as distasteful and despicable as Murdoch, then I may well have to change my provider once more but hopefully, by then, the likes of BT and the BBC will have got their act together and worked out an alternative that might appeal to people such as myself who are even willing to pay a little bit more in order to get services, such as sport and quality reporting, back in the public sector domain where they should be.

Riots and why

In the summer of 1980, I was working as a photographer’s assistant. It was my job to pass her the various lenses as we traipsed around the Midlands taking photos of brides and grooms of all shape and size.

One Saturday morning, I remember a particular wedding so vividly. It was taking place near my school at a small church that I did not even know existed. It resembled a shed; quite a peculiar little place. It was 11am and the bride arrived, as wide as she was tall – a complete ball of a person. Lovely, she was and so excited about her special day but one could hardly call her attractive. I can remember Eileen turning round to me as she passed by, whispering subtly in my ear, “What the bloody hell am I going to do with this one?”
She wasn’t the nicest person I have ever met in my life. I passed her the soft focus lens as she gazed at me in horror.
And then we saw the bridesmaid. She was stunning, all wrapped up in a Laura Ashley dress that was the fashion mode of the moment. It was navy blue with a full bodice front that exaggerated her already slim-line and yet curvaceous figure; such a contrast from the ball-like bride.

Eileen was delighted that she had something or someone to photograph and I swear she took more photos of the brunette bridesmaid than the bride, who had exaggerated her own size by choosing a dress full of horizontal frills of white and apple green!

But of course, the main thing I remember about that morning was that it was the day after the night before. Handsworth had exploded into flames not more than four miles away from us. Toxteth was burning and Brixton was full of flame too. The heat of the summer after a year of a new government had erupted into all sorts of disturbances and looting.

In Birmingham there was the most horrendous attacks on the Bengali community from the Black Caribbean youths who had arrived at this part of the city a decade or so before them. Huge resentment between these two groups emerged and to some extent still remains today, but this warring veiled another truth – that people were terrified about what was happening to the country. Thatcher was here and she was destroying society, only we didn’t even know the half of it one year into her term of office. I suspect that had we been able to look into the future, there would have been far more rioting than the outbreaks in what many deemed to be mere ghettos and annexes of our big cities.

If only we could have stopped her by joint and peaceful rebellion against her reactionary politics at the beginning of her Prime ministry.

Some of us tried, even though we were too young to actually begin to comprehend the damage that she was doing.

And so her predecessor is here now, probably about to start blabbering on about his Big Society and how we should all rough-ride over these trouble makers and develop some community spirit and Blitz stoicism to show what a truly great nation of collective consciousness we are. Not that Cameron could possibly have a clue what collective consciousness is.

I blame Thatcher. I usually do. All this disparate irresponsibility and lack of community collectiveness is a direct outcome of her will to rid people of society and togetherness. Bitch! And I never use that word lightly.

But then I think we are perfectly adept in blaming another ruthless bastard too. I am surprised that nobody has mentioned this but Mr. Murdoch can stand up and take some blame. The Metropolitan police are in turmoil at the moment. There is no clear leadership, and I am not suggesting for one moment that the riots and looting that took place in London over the last few nights would not have happened if there was a definitive Commissioner in charge, but it doesn’t fill you with hope and confidence when you know that there is not really anyone in charge that has the full authority of a substantive post and the experience that goes with such an appointment.

And then there is Murdoch and his papers too. I am sure we can find a way of blaming them too.

What happened in Tottenham on Saturday night was appalling. It was frightening and horrific. In this piece, there is no way that I am going to condone the actions of the mindless but it is also impossible to disregard the cause of such problems, and they are plenty and diverse in their provocation.

99% of times that I drive passed a copper who has pulled a fellow driver off to the side of the road, the man (yes, never a woman) is black. 99% of times I walk along the streets and a policeman or two are talking animatedly at a person they have stopped and searched, the man (yes, infrequently a woman) is black.
Maybe I just happen to be spending my time in areas where this happens but the institutional racism that was so specifically highlighted by the Macpherson Report in 1999, six years after the death of Stephen Lawrence – of which there has still not been a conviction for his murder, is still very present not only in the police but in other institutions in our society.

Add to this the utter despondency of our young people in their inability to get a job or have a purpose in life, you can understand their rage and frustration.

Add to that also the fact that many of these youths have been watching the Arab Spring occurring in places where one could never have imagined the possibility of mass gatherings making change and bringing down dictators and autocrats, then it is hardly a surprise that this has happened.

These people, our youth, our future, are angry and they feel that they have no future. The services where they may have got jobs in the past have been obliterated. Those same services are not even providing them with the welfare to live a life that everybody deserves. There is much frustration and fear, and we all know what happens when fear overtakes one person let alone the same fear being encapsulated by a group who all feel the same way.

Yesterday, it all kicked off in Hackney. Again, I am not condoning this action but it was triggered by yet another Stop and Search where the people felt that the only reason this invasion of privacy had taken place was because the person involved was a little darker than some would like to see on our streets. The violence then erupted because people were angry, and at times such as these, people sadly do take to violence because sometimes reason gets you absolutely nowhere.

I watched as I saw a street that I know relatively well going up in flames. I was suddenly terribly concerned for the owner of the second hand bookshop that hides comfortably in this quiet yet productive road off the main High Street of Hackney. Places need individuality and I am a strong advocate of real shops, independent shops that make a living offering something unique, something different from the big conglomerates who probably have (w)bankers as their best buddies.

Then the rest of London seemed to erupt too. Again, places that I know and that are all too near; Lewisham, Lee, Woolwich – even little suburbia towns like Bromley.
People are angry.

But back to Hackney, there was apparently just cause for this escalation in violence, and it struck me how, once more, our media are prejudice and cower to stereotype when they cover such incidents. Hackney has a bad name. It is a bad borough where bad people live and bad things happen. Ironically, I feel perfectly safe there and there are plenty of reasons for feeling that way.

It is NOT a BAD place, and what Hackney has that possibly other areas do not have, is a sense of community, lots of communities within its borough boundaries. The ironic thing is that people who live in Hackney are somewhat protective of it purely because it has this name of violence and lack of hope. They get riled by being grouped together as this mass of delusion and despondency when really the place is vibrant and wonderful, if you only have the eyes to see.

So the media, go on and on and on about who terrible this place is, how of course violence erupted here but what they do not mention is that there was less looting in this place than other boroughs in the city. Admittedly, there might have been more police present but I like to think that there was some community spirit happening that prevented them from bombarding their own, knowing that there are businesses in Hackney that are not linked or the causal factor of their poverty and inequality. That is what I like to think but the media would never see it as such.

And as I said, there appears to be a cause for the violence in Hackney whereas other outbreaks of violence across the city merely appear to be copycat and mindless. Nobody seems to have pointed this out in the news. The violence in Croydon and Ealing is put as the same violence and the same cause as what happened in Tottenham and Hackney. It is not. There is a subtle difference.

So what next? Where next even?

I am not into violence and I cannot sit here and readily agree with everything that I have seen but Cameron should not sit smug and complacent here. He got away with the student riots in the Spring, sending ludicrous amounts of police officers in to control the situation. The same happened with the riots that took place after the jobs march in London. He got away with that, not just because of the overspend on police hours but because the will of the people to be violent was not there at that point.
But people are restless and with every right to be so. We did not all join in when Thatcher was about to wreak havoc on our society and look what happened. She got away with murder.

We should not let Cameron do the same.

This is not inciting violence, this is merely calling people to consider what should happen next and to also look at places like Egypt where peaceful demonstrations, despite such provocation from the army, took place and made change happen.

Our world is sick and dying at present, and there is part of me that is grateful for that, however bizarre that might seem. The controlling purses of the world bankers need to be exposed, and still they get their bonuses. Our glorious government have reacted to this by chopping the very services that people need, not wish for, NEED, in order to live. And still the bankers earn their squillions.

This is connected. Of course people are fed up. Injustice does this to people and everyone has a breaking point. When the individual’s breaking point combines with others, then this sort of thing happens.

Any government that underestimates the will of the people is a foolish one, especially when they are tentatively part of a coalition that could collapse if the balls of the enlightened few within the Liberal party finally flash in front of the consciousness of their leaders.

Of course I don’t want violence but I do want people to see there is some justification in peoples’ fear. Of course some of what we saw on the television last night was mindless, but if you do nothing to support a rounded education for these people, what the hell do you expect? Constant boredom in the classroom is a direct source for this frustration as is the poverty that people pretend is not happening.

We have so bloody far to go in this country and in others. The dickheads who were looting yesterday are stupid but they are also bored, they are also uneducated in intelligent ways of being, they have knowledge and what knowledge that they have has no relevance to their lives at present. They need channelling, they need excitement, they need some purpose and I fear that I cannot see it coming their way, not even for the next generation either.

There is another way of course, and I just wonder whether anyone in power will ever see what could be.