Joyce McMillan: Power without real accountability

FOR some reason, this week, as the News of the World phone-hacking scandal began to explode across the headlines, an image from a slightly earlier political era kept reappearing in my mind's eye.

It was a picture taken back in 2004, when Tony and Cherie Blair spent a holiday as guests of the Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. Tony and Cherie were smiling broadly, while Berlusconi - who had just had a hair implant operation - was looking ridiculous in a white headscarf, tied in pirate style.

I remember wondering at the time what in heaven's name a supposedly Labour prime minister and his wife were doing, voluntarily spending time with such a notorious right-wing sleaze-merchant. And I was forced to the conclusion - a good Marxist one - that once people enter into that wealthy global elite, they actually have so much more in common with each other than with any normal person that their supposed political views no longer matter; and they can only really relax in the company of others who share their extraordinarily wealth and privilege.

And now, in this traumatic week, it seems that we have seen David Cameron's "Berlusconi moment"; in that our current Prime Minister now stands revealed as a "personal friend" of Rebekah Brooks, the woman who, in her capacity as a former News of the World and Sun editor - and now chief executive of News International - either authorised the shocking series of phone-hacking incidents now coming to light, or was so incompetent in her role as a senior executive that she failed to notice the main source of many of her paper's most sensational news stories.

It is not news to any thinking person in Britain, of course, that the News of the World - and possibly other papers - have been breaching the law for many years in their efforts to tap in to the telephones of the famous and powerful. Nor, I'm afraid, are we very surprised to learn that they have fended off criminal prosecution for these offences by entering into a thoroughly cosy relationship with the Metropolitan Police, lubricated by tens of thousands of pounds in payments for "information" and tip-offs.

What has changed now, though, is that in their arrogance or desperation, some journalists and editors have crossed a line, and begun to damage groups of people who - according to their own powerful right-wing national narrative - deserve nothing but admiration and support; groups like victims of crime and terror attacks, and the families of soldiers who have died in Afghanistan.To the rage of politicians, public, and advertisers, Brooks and her colleagues have visibly breached even their own distorted code of what is acceptable in British life; to the point where News Corporation boss James Murdoch was forced, yesterday afternoon, to announce that Sunday's issue of the News of the World will be the last, after almost 170 years of rowdy, popular journalism under that title.

The fate of one newspaper, though, should not blind us to the wider implications of this story; for the truth is that for two decades now, powerful business leaders - and particularly those who control significant sections of the media - have effectively been allowed and encouraged, by British governments of all parties, to suborn the legislators to their own needs, demanding obeisance from senior politicians, and threatening to destroy any public figure who seeks to challenge them.

This week, it emerged that Labour members on one parliamentary committee had been warned by their own leaders not to "push too hard" on holding Rebekah Brooks to account in the phone-hacking affair, as they could not afford to invite the wrath of the Murdoch press.

And what has become clear is that this situation is no longer tenable, for any of the major players involved. Left almost free of significant regulation or legal sanction, the News of the World seems to have spiralled down into an internal culture of unlimited cynicism and exploitation, that has now proved its undoing. In the absence of governments prepared to insist that such companies operate within the law, the police, too, allegedly have been vulnerable to the blandishments of those who can afford to buy impunity.

And the politicians - well, so far as public opinion is concerned, they now seem to have entered the last chance saloon.

At the very least, they urgently need to regain some credibility by standing up to Murdoch, denying him the control of BSkyB that he seeks, and tightening British media ownership rules, so that they at least begin to approach the standards prevailing in other western democracies.

They also need to find a new cadre of police officers who are not prepared to tolerate cash-driven sweetheart relationships between the police and the media, and to support them to the hilt in putting a stop to such relations.

If they fail to take these minimum actions to restore the rule of law and the primacy of elected institutions in the UK, they can expect this country - or what is left of it - to be seen as taking a huge and explicit step down towards the status of a decaying rentier state, in which enough money can buy almost anything, including the support of a prime minister.

And beyond that bare minimum, they should also be asking themselves how we reached a place where our political parties have become so entirely ineffectual as mechanisms for representing the interests of the mass of ordinary people, who no longer join them, like them, or believe in them.It is the parties' organisational weakness, their lack of mass membership, and their consequent vulnerability to financial and media pressure from the wealthy, that has led them to the dangerously compromised situation in which they now find themselves.

And if they cannot find a way out of it, starting from this week, then the once-admired democratic institutions of this country face a grim future of decline; marked by the growing contempt and anger of the people whom they once used to represent, and - as their democratic authority dwindles - by increasing marginalisation from the real centres of power, where decision-makers like Rupert Murdoch still sit, shaping the future for us all.