A private jet operated by Aeropartner, comes in to land at Stansted Airport in Essex
FAIR taxes on private jets and superyachts could have raked in £2 billion last year to help communities devastated by climate change, an Oxfam report revealed today.
Britain has the second-highest number of private jet flights in Europe, trailing only behind France.
Oxfam found that there were 192,052 private jet flights to and from Britain last year, not including those for medical, government, or military purposes.
According to climate charity Possible, flying by private jet can be up to 30 times more polluting than standard flights.
Oxfam also found that Britain is also home to 450 fuel-guzzling superyachts.
Indiana University academics found that a superyacht with a permanent crew, helicopter pad, submarines and pools emits an estimated 7,020 (US) tonnes of CO2 a year. In comparison, petrol cars produce about 1,749kg a year.
Oxfam is calling on Chancellor Rachel Reeves to increase taxes on the super-rich using these modes of transport, and redirect the funds to help tackle the climate emergency, while preventing lower-income families from shouldering the burden.
Until recently, Elon Musk was just a wildly successful electric car tycoon and space pioneer. Sure, he was erratic and outspoken, but his global influence was contained and seemingly under control.
But add the ownership of just one media platform, in the form of Twitter – now X – and the maverick has become a mogul, and the baton of the world’s biggest media bully has passed to a new player.
What we can gauge from watching Musk’s stewardship of X is that he’s unlike former media moguls, making him potentially even more dangerous. He operates under his own rules, often beyond the reach of regulators. He has demonstrated he has no regard for those who try to rein him in.
Under the old regime, press barons, from William Randolph Hearst to Rupert Murdoch, at least pretended they were committed to truth-telling journalism. Never mind that they were simultaneously deploying intimidation and bullying to achieve their commercial and political ends.
Musk has no need, or desire, for such pretence because he’s not required to cloak anything he says in even a wafer-thin veil of journalism. Instead, his driving rationale is free speech, which is often code for don’t dare get in my way.
This means we are in new territory, but it doesn’t mean what went before it is irrelevant.
A big bucket of the proverbial
If you want a comprehensive, up-to-date primer on the behaviour of media moguls over the past century-plus, Eric Beecher has just provided it in his book The Men Who Killed the News.
Alongside accounts of people like Hearst in the United States and Lord Northcliffe in the United Kingdom, Beecher quotes the notorious example of what happened to John Major, the UK prime minister between 1990 and 1997, who baulked at following Murdoch’s resistance to strengthening ties with the European Union.
In a conversation between Major and Kelvin MacKenzie, editor of Murdoch’s best-selling English tabloid newspaper, The Sun, the prime minister was bluntly told: “Well John, let me put it this way. I’ve got a large bucket of shit lying on my desk and tomorrow morning I’m going to pour it all over your head.”
MacKenzie might have thought he was speaking truth to power, but in reality he was doing Murdoch’s bidding, and actually using his master’s voice, as Beecher confirms by recounting an anecdote from early in Murdoch’s career in Australia.
In the 1960s, when Murdoch owned The Sunday Times in Perth, he met Lang Hancock (father of Gina Rinehart) to discuss potentially buying some mineral prospects together in Western Australia. The state government was opposed to the planned deal.
Beecher cites Hancock’s biographer, Robert Duffield, who claimed Murdoch asked the mining magnate, “If I can get a certain politician to negotiate, will you sell me a piece of the cake?” Hancock said yes. Later that night, Murdoch called again to say the deal had been done. How, asked an incredulous Hancock. Murdoch replied: “Simple […] I told him: look you can have a headline a day or a bucket of shit every day. What’s it to be?”
Between Murdoch in the 1960s and MacKenzie in the 1990s came Mario Puzo’s The Godfather with Don Corleone, aided by Luca Brasi holding a gun to a rival’s head, saying “either his brains or his signature would be on the contract”.
Former British Prime Minister John Major fell foul of Rupert Murdoch – and paid the price. Lynne Sladky/AP/AAP
Changing the rules of the game
Media moguls use metaphorical bullets. Those relatively few people who do resist them, like Major, get the proverbial poured over their government. Headlines in The Sun following the Conservatives’ win in the 1992 election included: “Pigmy PM”, “Not up to the job” and “1,001 reasons why you are such a plonker John”.
If media moguls since Hearst and Northcliffe have tap-danced between producing journalism and pursuing their commercial and political aims, they have at least done the former, and some of it has been very good.
The leaders of the social media behemoths, by contrast, don’t claim any fourth estate role. If anything, they seem to hold journalism with tongs as far from their face as possible.
They do possess enormous wealth though. Apple, Microsoft, Google and Meta, formerly known as Facebook, are in the top ten companies globally by market capitalisation. By comparison, News Corporation’s market capitalisation now ranks at 1,173 in the world.
Regulating the online environment may be difficult, as Australia discovered this year when it tried, and failed, to stop X hosting footage of the Wakeley Church stabbing attacks. But limiting transnational media platforms can be done, according to Robert Reich, a former Secretary of Labor in Bill Clinton’s government.
Despite some early wins through Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code, big tech companies habitually resist regulation. They have used their substantial influence to stymie it wherever and whenever nation-states have sought to introduce it.
Meta’s founder and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, has been known to go rogue, as he demonstrated in February 2021 when he protested against the bargaining code by unilaterally closing Facebook sites that carried news. Generally, though, his strategy has been to deploy standard public relations and lobbying methods.
But his rival Musk uses his social media platform, X, like a wrecking ball.
Musk is just about the first thing the average X user sees in their feed, whether they want to or not. He gives everyone the benefit of his thoughts, not to mention his thought bubbles. He proclaims himself a free-speech absolutist, but most of his pronouncements lean hard to the right, providing little space for alternative views.
Kamala wants to destroy your right to free speech under The Constitution https://t.co/oJN5T8nPLn
Some of his tweets have been inflammatory, such as him linking to an article promoting a conspiracy theory about the savage attack on Paul Pelosi, husband of the former US Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, or his tweet that “Civil war is inevitable” following riots that erupted recently in the UK.
As the BBC reported, the riots occurred after the fatal stabbing of three girls in Southport. “The subsequent unrest in towns and cities across England and in parts of Northern Ireland has been fuelled by misinformation online, the far-right and anti-immigration sentiment.”
Nor does Musk bother with niceties when people disagree with him. Late last year, advertisers considered boycotting X because they believed some of Musk’s posts were anti-Semitic. He told them during a live interview to “Go fuck yourself”.
He has welcomed Donald Trump, the Republican Party’s presidential nominee, back onto X after Trump’s account was frozen over his comments surrounding the January 6 2021 attack on the capitol. Since then both men have floated the idea of governing together if Trump wins a second term.
Is the world better off with tech bros like Musk who demand unlimited freedom and assert their influence brazenly, or old-style media moguls who spin fine-sounding rhetoric about freedom of the press and exert influence under the cover of journalism?
That’s a question for our times that we should probably begin grappling with.
The video shows that Rachel Reeves intended to means test winter fuel payments in 2014. Her claims that she was forced to take this action because of the economic position inherited from the Tories is – therefore – very suspect. Labour weren’t forced to do it as she repeatedly claims – she and they intended to do it 10 years ago.
Keir Starmer says pensioners can freeze to death and poor children can starve and be condemned to failure and misery all their lives.
SIR KEIR STARMER has been engulfed in a new cronyism row after it emerged the millionaire TV mogul Waheed Alli was given unrestricted access to No 10 after donating £500,000 to Labour.
Cabinet Office Minister Pat McFadden could not say today why Lord Alli had been granted the pass, which is normally reserved for officials and staff.
…
The Labour government has faced criticism for handing top jobs to some of its most prominent backers.
Others with ties to Labour or Labour-supporting think tanks have also been appointed to Civil Service roles, leading to anger over its politicisation.
In the run-up to the election Lord Alli, a television executive who was ennobled by Tony Blair in 1998, gave Sir Keir tens of thousands of pounds’ worth of personal donations, including £16,200 worth of work clothing, £2,845 worth of glasses and £36,400 for private office costs and accommodation.
He worked as the party’s chief fundraiser for the general election, having been hired by Sir Keir in 2022, having personally donated £500,000 to Labour since 2020.
Record fall in membership despite earlier claims of increases from right-wing figures
Labour has admitted it is only kept afloat by the money of the mega-rich, after yet another massive fall in party membership numbers – to a level lower than its peak under Ed Miliband and far below the almost 600,000 when Jeremy Corbyn was leader.
According to its latest official figures, the party suffered a net loss of 37,000 members, 9% of its total, by the end of 2023 compared to a year earlier – the biggest year-on-year loss since 2003 when Labour haemorrhaged members during Tony Blair’s illegal war in Iraq. Even the claimed latest membership of 370,000 is suspect according to party insiders, as Labour under Keir Starmer has long padded its figures by continuing to count lapsed members – and its records were long in chaos after outsourcing led to a massive hack and the freezing of its membership administration systems.
Leading right-wing Labour figures have repeatedly briefed that members were pouring in and numbers were rising, attributing this to Starmer. In fact, given Starmer’s deep personal unpopularity, it makes far more sense to attribute the collapse in membership to him, his support for Israel’s genocide, his cowardly assault on left-wing MPs and members and his dog-whistle red-Tory ‘policies’.
And the party has inadvertently admitted that it is only propped up by donations from the super-rich. Party general secretary David Evans has said that the party losing less than the expected £2.5m during the general election campaign was because of “an increase in high-value donations”. Under Corbyn, large numbers of ordinary people chipped in what they could afford – so many that Labour’s debts, grown huge under previous leaders, were wiped out.
Now, even kept afloat by billionaires – and clearly beholden to them, given Labour’s atrocious announcements penalising the poor since Starmer was ushered into Downing Street by the fascist Reform ‘party’ – Labour is still losing money, just less than it would have without the huge donors wanting payback for their investment.
Vote For Genocide Vote Labour.Zionist Keir Starmer is quoted “I support Zionism without qualification.” He’s asked whether that means that he supports Zionism under all circumstances, whatever Zionists do.
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