You’re all checking in on the Common Weal website every morning, right? Every day we take a key item in the news which is doom and gloom and we do some quick research and draw on our existing policy work to explain it and – crucially – to try and solve it. Today’s has stuck in my mind since this morning.
It has stuck in my mind because it highlights a problem which is absolutely cursing Scotland and which is a key reason we’re constantly asking ourselves ‘why does nothing work?’. It’s the fact that in Scotland, the line between commercial lobbyists and commentators has been erased.
Before I go on, I hope any journalists readings will recognise that I have never been a lazy ‘blame the press, talk about legacy media, don’t offer solutions’ sort. It is important to be critical of the media because it is a critical part of our democracy and goodness knows media ownership in Britain is a perennial problem. But mostly I highlight lack of resource, the ‘not enough journalists’ issue.
One of the outcomes of that is that busy journalists like ‘pre-packaged’ stories where it all comes to them in one go and they don’t have to do much. You know who has a giant advantage when it comes to these kind of pre-pack stories? Commercial lobbyists. They have the time and resource to put them together and are single minded on one thing – making rich patrons richer.
That is why it is so important that, the more powerful the source, the more carefully it is approached. If you are doing journalism and not the ‘pay to play’ corporate crap you used to get in in-flight magazines, you need to not be shilling on behalf of big business all the time. Not if you’re a serious newspaper.
Which brings me back to our briefing this morning. They are short and punchy so it’s worth reading, but this is your basic take-away – since 2019 (that’s six years people), the price of a bed in a hotel in Edinburgh has increased by 82 per cent. To give you a comparison. Over the same time period, London prices have increased by only 26 per cent. Edinburgh is now more expensive to stay in than London.
The short term point to make is that when a lobbyist for price-gouging, piss-ripping corporate hotel chains phones you up and says ‘hi, we’re the tourism industry – the five per cent tourist tax that is being proposed may price Edinburgh out of the tourism market’ a good journalist doesn’t just print it as if its true.
In Scotland, if a landlord says they are there to increase the supply of affordable rental property, the media takes that at face value
Tourism in Edinburgh is already unaffordable. Look at the Edinburgh Festival, at Hogmanay – its mental, insane money. A friend’s dad was quoted over £1k to stay four nights in a Travel Lodge near Niddrie. I mean, what??? How is that affordable in the first place? That is explicable in no other sense than as rent-seeking price-gouging.
So why are the lobbyists fussed about a five per cent levy? Because for them that is price-gouging that doesn’t stuff their pockets but goes back to the city to spend on services and infrastructure. Outrageous! Doesn’t the Council realise that that is going to make it marginally harder for hotel chains to price gouge more money next year? The council has literally taken some of what they think is theirs alone – the ransom that passes for a hotel booking in our capital.
The cynicism of this is unbelievable, but it is par for the course in our media just now. Let me give you more examples. If you want to get an assessment of the financial situation in relation to the North Sea oil industry you would be better talking to anyone at all other than a company operating in the North Sea or a lobbyist acting on their behalf.
There was that period where oil prices were creating the most insane, obscene windfall for oil and gas companies which in turn created an utter bonanza for electricity generators which was then by far the primary legitimate component of the inflation which created the cost of living crisis (although 60 per cent of that was itself corporate price gouging).
So what did the oil industry do during this period where virtually every business and consumer on the planet paid a heavy price for their mad-ass profits? They lobbied against a minor tax rise to recoup some of their windfall for the public. They have never stopped. They were talking about how unhealthy the industry was while it was making all-time record profits.
Let me give you another example; see all that highly-organised, well-funded and always-on campaign against the regulation of short term lets? Do you ever wonder how the motley collection of small-time bed and breakfasts who front these campaigns manage to operate on such a media-saturation level? Might it be because it is actually city-destroying multinational corporation AirBnB paying for and managing the campaign?
Yes, it is. I know this, everyone with an understanding of the media knows this so all the journalists know this. Do you know how many health warnings on their claims I’ve seen? I think I can remember one or two. The same is true of landlords – in Scotland, if a landlord says they are there to increase the supply of affordable rental property, the media takes that at face value.
And if the media wants to know why there is a housing crisis it goes to the lobbyists of big property development corporations. Here’s the hint you need if you’re not piecing this together – the bulk property developers and buy-to-let landlords are only matched by Margaret Thatcher as being responsible for the current housing crisis. Asking them how to solve it is fundamentally mad.
Or here’s another one. I don’t believe that Donald Macaskill, the ever-present voice of ‘care homes’ in the Scottish media, wants to make you poor while ruining your granny’s life. I’m sure he’s lovely. No, making you poor and ruining your granny’s life is just what happens when the commercial companies he shills for (most of the big ones registered in tax havens) do their business.
They are why your wages are stagnant and your public services are failing and your customer services experience is down the pan
Care homes are largely property speculation companies. They buy a premises, knock it up as a care home then charge you a serious sum of money to send an elderly relative there. The fees they take cover their rent, their wages and a generous profit. Then the real business begins. They are not allowed to extract excess profits, but they are allowed to make unsecured, bizarre zero-interest loans to those tax-haven based holding companies.
And see those properties the public has been funding? They can certainly remortgage them every couple of years and take the excess profits out, pushing the rents higher and higher (rather than lower and lower as would be natural when the capital was paid off, for example if these were publicly-owned). It’s a scam.
Yet how often have you seen him challenged over this as he’s brought in as the voice of care. Not a social worker, not a public sector official commissioning care, not a campaign group for care home residents, a commercial lobbyist.
Now let’s have a look back over these stories again. Edinburgh City Council is in a quite petrifying financial crisis. The oil and gas industry is the primary cause of the climate change which is already costing you a fortune. AirBnB is a big part of why no-one under 40 seems able to buy a house and why we’re in a housing crisis. But that is actually mainly the responsibility of developers and landlords, and no-one has done more to extract wealth from the care system than care home owners.
These people are all – all of them – extracting wealth from the common weal, from the money that runs government, the money that builds infrastructure, the money that subsidies poor people so they can live in a house, the money that it costs if your parent or grandparent needs care assistance, the money that pays your wages. They are the (counts them) 437 Horsemen of the Fiscal Apocalypse.
They are the part of the graph of income distribution that shows that, since the financial crisis and even more so since the pandemic, the very rich are taking a massively bigger share of the fruits of our collective economy than at any other time in your life. They are why your wages are stagnant and your public services are failing and your customer services experience is down the pan.
They are engaged not in productive activity but in extractive activity. They’re monopolising beds in Edinburgh as a kind of cartel, they’re the taking oil under Scotland’s land mass and using it to make your heating bill unaffordable, they’re stealing the housing stock and selling it back to you at crazy prices, they’re rationing housebuilding to maximise prices, they’re taking the money that should be caring for your loved ones and using it to give zero-interest loans to tax-haven based parent companies.
They’re the baddies. If only even a sliver of this reality could make it into our newspaper puff pieces. Instead, everyone who didn’t read the Common Weal briefing is away thinking that it is a five per cent tourist tax which is imperilling Edinburgh.
It is not. It is the endless, ever-expanding corporate exploitation of our society, a campaign of larceny which is then laundered by a couple of journalists who like an easy story. And we all pay.