Why I Stopped Reading the Guardain

I remember being about 14 years old and at school the got us to read One Day in the Life of Ivan Don Denisovich and Animal Farm. Well, I didn’t like communism all that much but the propaganda didn’t completely work on me because I never warmed towards the British ruling class all that much either. There was one lad, though, in my English lesson that would stand up and debate the merits of communism with zeal and passion. Well, that never got me warmed towards communism but I did admire him as he had the whole class against him.

This made me politically aware for the first and I came to the conclusion that I was a socialist and then I found out that the Labour Party was in power and that Harold Wilson was the Prime minister. But it was disastrous time for the Labour Party as the financial sector were behind the scenes trying to destroy the Labour Party in the same way they had previously destroyed Ted Heath’s Conservative government for trying to industrialize Britain a long the lines of Germany. This wasn’t in their interest.

When I left school at 16 years old Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative party had been voted in and I absolutely hated it her. The Daily Mirror was a Labour Party paper so I started buying that. John Pilger say’s it was once the leading campaigning paper of the left and had very good articles in it until Murdoch’s Sun destroyed its sales.

Then one day I was on a train and I saw this discarded broadsheet on a seat so I picked it up and it was The Guardian. Well, it was a big posh looking paper with lots of serious looking articles in it so I naturally assumed that it was a Conservative rag, but when I read it I was amazed because it was full of pro Labour and lefty articles. Another surprise was that I found it surprisingly easy to read, so the next day I bought a copy and from then on I was totally hooked. I loved it.

I was proud to be a Guardian reader and as there was so much to read in it I would have it with most of the time. People naturally like to feel that they belong to group, or an association, etc, and so I felt that I was part of the Guardian club. After that I bought the Guardian for the next 30 odd years and always felt the need to support the newspaper even when it went online for free. Eventually, though, I bought the kindle version which was incredibly good value.

I never did read the online Guardian very much until a few years back when I did started to go online to read the Comment is Free section (CIF)and get the updates. It was then that I found that the CIF section was full of raging right wingers with hardly anyone on the Left fighting back, so I started writing and give them a bit of ‘what for’. I would research the internet and then hit Bulls Eye after Bulls Eye giving out links and putting in extracts from the sites I had referred to. This was okay except the Guardian moderators starting removing my posts, and then eventually I got pre moderated which meant that my posts were being checked before they were allowed to go out on CIF.

For example, there was an advert advertising property in the City of London where it displayed pure opulence. An actor was filmed walking up the steps of a high rise luxury apartments and when he got to the top he walked into his apartment passing an half naked woman on a magnificent bed and then he went towards the window and looked out over the beautiful view below, which was London lit up at night. Pretty lights all twinkled and glistened away in the distance, except this was the Tower Hamlets, one of the poorest parts of London. A voice over said that it might be tough but it was worth it. The guy looked absolutely angst and miserable to me, but he was supposed to look serious and tough.  

The advert caused outrage and was banned, and so the Guardian wrote an article about it from a liberal prospective – all kind of woolly and nothingness. But underneath in the CIF section the right wingers were at it full pelt defending the super rich, saying how they deserved their money and how they were creating jobs for everyone else, and that they were ‘entrepreneurs’ (the new name for robber barons).

The Left on CIF were limp wristed, as usual, and almost non existent, so I searched online and found a blog written by City of London policemen who specialized in financial crime. He said that the City of London was the crime centre of the world. So I copied and pasted some quotes from his blog along with links, and put them out on the Guardian CIF but the moderators removed it is a jiffy, vanishing in a blink of an eyelid, there one minute gone the next.

And this is how it carried on over the months with most of my posts being removed, as well as being locked out for 5 minutes at a time, until I got pre-moderated. Eventually I got so fed up with it that I cancelled my kindle subscription and then gave up on their internet site too. Then a few months later I discovered sites like OffGuardian and Guardian War Propaganda, which was staffed by disgruntled ex Guardian readers who, like me, who were being heavily moderated, and so had started their own sites to publish the real news that the Guardian wasn’t putting out. But it was even worse than that, because some of their own journalists were being censored and cold shouldered out the door, including Nafeez Ahmed’s and Jonathon Cooke. And apparently there is a climate of fear at the Guardian, with its boards staffed by bankers and neoliberals. Maybe the need for advertising has affected them because the physical print has lost sales due of the internet?

The neoliberal takeover is like the Invasion of the Body Snatchers where eventually everywhere you turn even more of society has moved towards the Right. There was always the authoritarian working class, like the guys I used to work with on the shop floor, who, after gaining top wages, good pensions, paid sick leave, and a five weeks paid holiday a year, turned their backs on the unions which had fought hard for them. And they turned their backs on the welfare state which given them a very good education as well as a first class health care system, where many of them might not have not even been alive if it hadn’t have been for the NHS. Eventually, the socialist parties of Europe and the leading newspapers of the left, like the Guardian, became neoliberal too.  Would you believe?  And Paul Craig Roberts says, the US bribed the socialist parties of Europe, and the CIA bribed Western journalists.

Robin Ramsey’s ebook, The Rise of New Labour, is an excellent read rise of neoliberalism.

The Rise of New Labour? How did that happen? As everybody knows, Labour messed up the economy in the 1970s, went too far left, became 'unelectable' and let Mrs Thatcher in. After three General Election defeats Labour modernised, abandoned the left and had successive landslide victories in 1997 and 2001. That's the story they print in newspapers. The only problem is...- New Labour in 2001 got fewer votes than 'old' Labour did in 1992. - It wasn't Labour who messed up the economy in the 1970s but the Tories. - The Labour Party was handed to the left in 1983 by a conspiracy involving the Labour MPs about to defect to the Social Democratic Party. The real story of the rise of New Labour is more complex, and it involves the British and American intelligence services, the Israelis, and elite management groups like the Bilderbergers. Robin Ramsay untangles the myths and shows how it really happened that Gordon Brown sank gratefully into the arms of the bankers, Labour took on board the agenda of the City of London, and that nice Mr Blair embraced his role as the last dribble of Thatcherism down the leg of British politics.