Labour government backs the media billionaires destroying UK democracy

The allegedly Labour government has issued its response to the 16,000 signature petition calling for a Media Sovereignty Act. And it shows total contempt for ordinary people alongside pathetic submission to media billionaires.

The Media Sovereignty Act’s five measures:

• Ban foreign media ownership.
• Ban the concentration of UK national media ownership by one person or corporation.
• Fund independent and local media with a Social Media Levy.
• Require national media to be under the remit of the statutory regulator.
• Require dark-money-funded thinktanks that are covered by the media to declare donations in real time.

The government stuck two fingers up at all five of the measures in the proposed Act. Instead it:

• Rejected any restrictions on foreign billionaires buying up all of the UK’s media.
• Refused to back reform of the current massive concentration of UK media ownership in a tiny group of largely offshore-based media billionaires.
• Refused to back a Social Media Levy, as they have in Australia. This would recoup some of the £10s of billions being siphoned abroad from UK news producers’ former advertising revenues by the three US social media tech corporations and use the proceeds to fund UK local and independent media.
• Backed the current ludicrous system whereby these foreign media billionaires ‘self-regulate’ their UK media corporations, rather than requiring them to join the post-Leveson press regulator Impress.
• Rejected the proposal to ban foreign oil corporations and billionaires from secretly funding dark-money-funded UK thinktanks that corrupt the UK government’s policy-making process.

The Media Sovereignty Act campaign director, Donnachadh McCarthy, said:

It has been one of Britain’s worst-kept secrets that the Labour and Tory Parties place the wishes of the UK’s media billionaires over the wishes of the people.

But it is hugely important that our petition has finally forced the Labour government to admit as much.

Co-director Caspar Hughes said:

You cannot have a free and fair democracy if almost all our media is dominated by the tiny 0.01%. This response means that ending media billionaireism must be a top issue in the coming Makerfield bye-election.

We need a free and fair press in the UK, free from billionaire capture.

He added:

This extraordinary admission by the Labour government that they are on the side of the media billionaires trashing our democracy spurs us to move forward with the campaign.

We will press on to get the 100,000 signatures that will finally trigger a parliamentary debate on the biggest political issue of our time.

We will now take the campaign out to the country, asking trade unions, NGO’s, student unions, branches of political parties, etc., to endorse this crucial campaign to rescue our broken democracy from the media billionaires destroying it.

Featured image via Getty Images