AFRAID OF THE BIG BAD RUPERT?
The press: Paul Johnson
suggests that the print unions should
dare to accept Mr Murdoch's offer RUPERT Murdoch had the laugh on his critics last week. In the first place he exposed the approach of his competitors in reporting the dispute by asking them to take paid advertisements setting out his case. Only Eddy Shah's Today and the Mail group accepted without conditions. Robert Maxwell's Mirror papers said they would carry the ads if Murdoch agreed to do the same for them, when and if the need arose. That was fair enough, and a deal was struck. The others refused with a variety of excuses. The Guardian and the Financial Times demanded an indemnity against legal risks, though there was no- thing libellous in the copy so far as I could see. Max Hastings, the new editor of the Daily Telegraph, was at least straightfor- ward: 'I do not want to give space to our principal commercial competition.' The Fleet Street rump comes badly out of this affair, which confirms the view that the public is being misled about the Wapping business, the most important episode in British industry since the coal strike.
Murdoch also put the print unions on the spot by offering to give them the Gray's Inn Road plant where the Times and Sunday Times were published until the dispute began. When Arthur Scargill called the strike against the closure of unecono- mic pits, many newspapers and millions of ordinary people asked: why on earth doesn't the Coal Board give the NUM the pits in dispute and let the miners them- selves run them? No such offer was ever made and no explanation was given why it was ruled out. Now Murdoch has again shown the advantages of private over nationalised industry by making the im- aginative gesture from which the NCB bureaucrats shrank. I have no doubt the offer is sincere. Murdoch has his faults but his great redeeming merit is that he loves newspapers. In this respect he is like Northcliffe. Whereas Beaverbrook pub- lished papers to make propaganda, and Rothermere and Thomson to make money, Murdoch does so because he has a passion for these grubby creations of hu- man ingenuity and wickedness. He has never killed one and he has saved many. He cannot abide the thought of the Gray's Inn Road plant lying idle, nor the accusa- tion that he is stopping over 5,000 men and women from working in the industry. So his response is: 'You won't let me run the place properly, so do it your way.' He remembers that he was given the wreck of the Sun by Hugh Cudlipp, under highly unfavourable circumstances, and turned it into one of the greatest engines of profit in the business. He is making, if you like, an ideological point and saying to the Labour movement — why not match that capitalist success story with a socialist one?
This is not a theoretical fantasy. For the last 20 years I have attended Labour Party conferences and listened to inconclusive debates on starting a Labour Party paper. I heard a lot of similar guff when I served on the last Royal Commission on the Press. It has been all talk and no action for the simple reason that the unions would not put up the money. Now that is no longer necessary. The Left has been offered a complete newspaper publishing operation. The building is freehold: no rent to pay. It includes all the ancillary services. It has 60 first-class modern presses, dating from the 1960s and 1970s, which ought to last another 50 years. It has up-to-date compu- '1 felt so guilty about smoking and drinking I took to drugs.' ter typesetting equipment. The notion that Murdoch has offered the unions a clapped- out plant is false. In all essentials it is the same as the Wapping installation. The offer includes the Guardian printing con- tract, with two years to run and bringing in £1 million a year, which would provide initial working capital. There is no intrinsic reason why this business should not em- ploy thousands of people and generate multi-million profits. It all depends on how efficiently it is run.
There are two snags: management- editorial skills, and manning levels. On the first point, a left-wing team, assembled to publish the proposed News on Sunday, already exists. It consists of Clive Thorn- ton, who ran the Mirror Group until Maxwell bought it, the Australian John Pilger, Bill Keys, former boss of Sogat, and Nicholas Horsley of. Northern Foods, who would be chairman. It is not, in my view, a winning combination. But it could have a go. It could start with a Sunday and broaden into a seven-day operation if the thing worked. Or alternatively Neil Kin- nock could pick a better outfit himself. Despite appearances, there is still a lot of talent in and around the Labour move- ment. After all, Kinnock and his col- leagues are proposing that Labour should govern the country in a couple of years time. Here is an excellent chance to de- monstrate that they can run something.
The real problem is the print unions. Are they prepared, in the interests of the Labour movement, to accept the reason- able work practices and manning levels they have denied to the traditional prop- rietors? If a socialist publishing co- operative were established, would they give it a chance to succeed? Doubts about the answers to these questions were one of the main reasons why the trade unions never seriously considered putting up the money for a Labour paper. Until a few weeks ago, the answers to both would certainly have been 'No'. But it may be that the print unions are losing some of their selfish arrogance. They have taken some hard knocks.
Tony Dubbins and Brenda Dean are both comparatively young. Young enough, one would have thought, to learn the lessons of their recent mistakes and set their unions on a more realistic course, especially if they get some sensible guid- ance from Kinnock himself, another young fellow who has learning capacity. Kinnock, in particular, has the chance to show some leadership. He could seize with both hands what is the best chance Labour has had to secure a big chunk of the media since the heyday of the Daily Herald. He could turn the tables on Murdoch and make him regret his gesture as bitterly as CudliPP cursed his generosity in giving Murdoch the Sun. It could all be a tremendous adventure. But I suspect that Labour will funk it, will show itself, to use Mrs Thatch- er's term, frit.
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