Over the past few years there has been an outpouring of progressive proposals for the British economy. From universal basic income (UBI) to a citizen’s wealth fund, it is encouraging that people are trying to find real solutions to the problems of growing inequality, depressed living standards for many, and a generally dysfunctional British economy.

While these ideas have attracted significant debate about their impact on the British economy, there is rarely much discussion about their impact on those living in other parts of the world, namely the global south. When discussing national economic policy, we seem to assume that our economies operate in isolation, and rarely reflect on their place in a global division of labour.

However, putting these national policy options into a global context gives rise to many questions, especially when capitalism is considered as an imperialistic world economic system. To put the key question bluntly: should we support basic incomes or citizen’s wealth funds that might reduce inequality in the UK even if they are at least partly funded through exploitation in the global south?

Globalisation or global imperialism?

It is a strand of Marxian economic theory called dependency theory that has been most dedicated to understanding capitalism as imperialistic. Dependency theory took off in the 1960s and went out of fashion in the 1980s, but now its more useful parts are being revived to explore how imperialism works in the current age – i.e. through globalisation.

Imperialism in this sense doesn’t just refer to formal empires such as those of 19^th century Europe, but describes some countries benefiting from the extraction of resources from other countries. Dependency theorists argue against mainstream development theory, which claims that if developing countries improve productivity and tackle corruption, they will ‘catch up’ to the developed world. Dependency theory argues that, on the contrary, it is impossible for third world countries to ‘catch up’ because the wealth of the first world is achieved at the expense of the underdevelopment of the third world. In other words, our gain is their loss.

While agencies like the IMF claim that globalisation has been a gift to developing countries, dependency theorists argue to the contrary. There are several dimensions along which this sort of domination has been said to take place.

Global production

Transnational corporations make their profits by paying ultra-low wages in the global south – often pushing wages below the cost of living – and selling at much higher prices in the global north. Corporations are big winners in modern-day imperialism, but the GDP of countries in the global north also benefits.

Tony Norfield, author of the acclaimed book The City, tells the story of a T-shirt made in Bangladesh and sold in Germany by H&M for €4.95. H&M pays the Bangladeshi manufacturer €1.35 per shirt. 40 cent of this covers the cost of importing the cotton from the US. Thus only 95 cent of the final sale price remains in Bangladesh, to be shared between the factory owner, the workers, the suppliers of inputs and services and the Bangladeshi government, expanding Bangladesh’s GDP by this amount. 6 cent is spent on shipping costs to Hamburg, and the remaining €3.54 counts towards the GDP of the country where the shirt is consumed: Germany. €1.99 goes towards distribution costs, shop rent, sales force, marketing and administration in Germany. H&M makes 60 cent profit, and the German state captures 79 cent of the sale price through VAT at 19%.

The German state will spend its piece of the pie on its own citizens, military and companies (in the form of ‘corporate welfare’), and it will even give ‘a few pennies to the poor countries in the form of “foreign aid’’ . It is this dynamic that has led some analysts to claim that the way global production is currently organised fundamentally benefits some parts of the world at the expense of others.

Global finance

Norfield has also shown how a country’s financial sector can enable that country to gain privileges in the world market. He argues that out of some 200 countries in the world, only around 20 count as major players in global affairs. He has ranked countries according to an ‘index of power’ in the world economy. The index adds up countries’ nominal GDP, stock of Foreign Direct Investment outstanding, cross-border lending and borrowing by banks, use of currency in international markets, and military expenditure. Because of how vast and international its banking sector is, Britain comes second in the rankings (though dwarfed by the US). Britain’s huge financial sector helps offset its chronic current account deficit. Alongside global production, financialisation is therefore central to present-day imperialism.

Tax havens

Although tax havens may appear marginal to the financial system, Nicholas Shaxson has shown that they have been at the heart of the growth of finance capitalism. Tax havens are key vehicles for modern imperialism. Britain controls a ‘spider’s web’ of offshore centres based in its former colonies.

Moreover, developing countries lose vast sums through the use of tax havens by individuals and, above all, transnational corporations – most of which are headquartered in Western Europe, the US and Japan. The Global Financial Integrity (GFI) programme estimates that developing countries lost $1.2 trillion in illicit financial flows in 2008 alone. This is compared to $100 billion in total foreign aid. In the words of the GFI’s Raymond Baker, “for every dollar we have been generously handing out across the top of the table, we in the West have been taking back some $10 of illicit money under the table”.

Global governance

The global justice movement has long argued that the agencies of economic globalisation – the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the World Bank (WB) and the IMF – have benefited the global north at the expense of the south. The WTO sets the rules for world trade, and these have been accused of favoring rich countries. For example, while all the other WTO agreements formally aim to promote free trade and competition, the agreement on intellectual property (TRIPS) is protectionist, seeking to protect profits on patents – which happen to mainly be registered in rich countries.

When an economic crisis arises, the IMF and WB step in with loans in return for the now infamous ‘structural adjustment’ programmes. These have included privatisation, cuts to public spending, removal of subsidies on basic items, opening up the financial sector to foreign ownership, and labour market reforms to push down wages. It is corporations based in the global north that largely benefit from these reforms.

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How money flows in the global economy, and who benefits, is a complex and hotly contested issue. But this doesn’t mean we should ignore it. We need to start asking where the money for our lovely hypothetical basic incomes and social wealth funds is coming from.

It is vital to develop progressive national economic policies, but do we really want to benefit from policies that come at the expense of people elsewhere? If not, any debate about such policies should be rooted in the ongoing debates about global justice. There are many ideas about how to decolonise the economy, from global taxes and regional minimum wages to tackling tax havens and ‘deglobalisation’ – the replacement of current global governance agencies with regional institutions or a fairer international system. If we are serious about economic justice, debates about UBI and other national economic policies must start taking place alongside these wider global discussions.

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I’ve written previously about the role played by media amnesia in the decade of austerity and general doom we’ve found ourselves in since the 2008 financial crisis. Briefly, after the banking collapse, private debt became public debt as governments saved their banking sectors and the credit crunch led to a deep recession. Concurrently, a dazzling rewrite of the crisis was also taking place in the mainstream media – at the same time that the debt was being transferred from the private to the public sector, so too was the blame being transferred. Public sector waste and Labour overspending became the culprits behind the deficit, as the real reasons for the crisis were forgotten or misremembered. This shifting of blame onto the public sector was a key justification for austerity.

I’ve also written elsewhere about the causes of this media amnesia – from the concentration of media ownership and the crisis in journalism funding, to the ‘Westminster bubble’ and elitism, to news values that prioritise the very latest happenings over context and process.

In this piece, I’d like to put forward some potential remedies for media amnesia. How can we solve the problems with media that have had such serious consequences for the way we have all lived our lives for the past ten years?

Regulation

There are some simple, modest things we can push our government to do about the media. Pressing ahead with part two of the Leveson inquiry, and properly implementing the recommendations of part one, are clear examples. Media activists and some journalists have called for a strengthening of regulation around the right to privacy, the right to reply, the publication of corrections and the process of lodging complaints against media companies. These proposals aim to protect members of the public from having their privacy violated or from being misrepresented in the media. Another demand concerns the transparency of media policy – particularly contacts between senior government officials and media owners or executives. Justin Schlosberg recommends that details of these kinds of interactions should be published on a central register, made available in spreadsheet format and updated at regular intervals. Yet another proposal is to implement plurality safeguards that protect the editorial autonomy of journalists and editors from interference by management, owners or external sources.

Meanwhile, the BBC and public service journalism should be protected and also reformed. The Media Reform Coalition has a proposal for how to make the BBC more independent, democratic and representative. In these ways, selective amnesia, misremembering or all-out blackouts could be curtailed.

Alternative media

What with the proliferation of voices now on offer thanks to the interwebs, we are free to seek out media that we trust and find informative. Supporting your favourite alternative media through sharing, subscribing, donating, or just using, is central to creating a healthier media environment. The recent success of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party at the 2017 general election (well, relative success) has been in part put down to social and alternative media. I would recommend particularly supporting alternative media that are collectively owned and run – that prefigure the kinds of ownership models on which we might hope a future economy will be based.

We also need to start asking ourselves questions about what we actually want from news. Why do we need to frantically keep up with everything reported? Would we rather have less news but better context? Instead of a tsunami of information about certain goings on in certain places, would we prefer to learn about the processes connecting different parts of the world together? The slow news movement, for example, tries to offer less quantity but more quality of news. Understanding how the present connects to the past, and how geographical regions connect to each other through the global economy and geopolitics, are key to beating media amnesia.

Public journalism

There are two problems, though, with focusing only on alternative media. Firstly, alternative media by definition reach a lot fewer people than mainstream media. If we want a more level playing field in public debate, we need to get involved in discussions about the media ecology as a whole – not confine ourselves to just one part of it. Secondly, alternative media often reach us via the mega corporations that have taken over cyberspace. The internet giants like Google and Facebook are part of the problem at the heart of both the 2008 financial crisis and its amnesiac reporting – the consolidation of resources in the hands of a few. It is therefore essential to target ownership structures, and reorganise our media from the bottom up.

Caps could be placed on the share of the market for content provision controlled by individuals or groups, with violations of the threshold remedied through forced divestment if necessary or through shareholder dilution. Tackling the media barons and breaking up media oligopolies is vital if we are to put an end to deliberate amnesia and misremembering in the interests of the uber rich.

At the same time, non-corporate media could be supported through an independently dispersed public fund. The fund could be used to support a whole plurality of media with a public service interest. As well as supporting the production of content, it could facilitate civil society-run social media and community open access and media infrastructure initiatives. Where is the magic money tree to pay for such a fund? Taxes on the mega media corporations of course, who are notorious tax avoiders. There are all kinds of proposals for these kinds of funds and how to pay for them. The crucial thing about them is that a) they aim to achieve media that are independent from both the state and from corporations. And b) that they are funded through progressive taxation.

There have been more ambitious proposals. Back in the 1960s, the late cultural studies scholar Raymond Williams argued that the means of mass communication should be owned by media workers. In this scenario, small scale equipment would belong to media producers themselves. Large scale media infrastructure would be taken into public trusts, and content-producing organisations could make use of it. More recently, Dan Hind proposed the idea of public commissioning. Again, a fund would be set up and members of the public could vote on what investigations they want journalists to do and how to disseminate the results. This would sit alongside the existing media system, but eventually as people got more used to being autonomous it could be expanded. In this way, plurality would be safeguarded and the media would become more democratic – making media amnesia a thing of the (forgotten) past.

Obviously, these bolder solutions are about a million miles away for where we are now. For now, we should celebrate if we manage to prevent the Murdochs from taking over Sky. But it’s important to consider a whole range of options and to think about what kind of media we actually want, not just about what’s ‘realistic’. Who knows, in developing visions for the kinds of media systems (and other societal systems) we want, we could change the parameters of what is considered ‘realistic’ in the first place.

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Remember when the banks created the mac daddy of economic crashes? Back in 2008, you would have had plenty of company if you thought the end was neigh for the economic model producing that crisis. You would have been mistaken. In the UK, the political consensus around this model is only now beginning to be questioned, after Brexit, the tragedy of Grenfell and the Carillion and Capital scandals. How was it maintained through a decade of crisis?

There are many factors, not least the grip of corporations on politics – power that intensified rather than receding after the 2008 financial collapse. The mainstream media have also played a major role, one that shouldn’t be underestimated. In particular, media have suffered from an acute amnesia about the causes of the crisis. As it morphed from a banking meltdown to a public debt crisis, blame shifted from greedy bankers and free market ‘casino capitalism’ onto public sectors, immigrants and people who didn’t have much money. This forgetting and misremembering helped make austerity, privatisation and corporate tax breaks seem like common sense responses to the problems. Understanding media amnesia is therefore vital if we are to find a way out of the neoliberal groundhog day in which it has trapped us. With that in mind, here are five factors causing media amnesia.

1. Media barons

It probably won’t come as a shock that British media is controlled by a handful of media barons and corporations. Three firms control 71 per cent of national newspaper circulation and five companies command 81 per cent of local newspaper titles. Rupert Murdoch’s media empire is probably the most notorious, and is currently trying to take full control of Sky plc. Social media may have led to a proliferation of voices online, but the mainstream brands still dominate the online news space. And don’t forget that the new gatekeepers to news like Google and Facebook are themselves giant corporations.

2. Political partisanship

With journalism in the hands of media barons, it is hardly surprising that the mainstream news landscape is skewed to the right. Whether proprietors intervene directly, whether they hire editors whose values reflect their own, or whether journalists censor themselves to fit in with the culture of their title, make no mistake: content will more than likely reflect the interests of proprietors. The right-wing press deliberately manufactured amnesia about the causes of the crisis to bash Labour and back the Tories, and to promote austerity, the shrinking of the social state and the passing of resources from the public to the private sector.

The liberal sections of the press may not have manufactured media amnesia deliberately, but they often reproduced it passively. Because they backed Labour or the Lib Dems during elections, they often ‘retweeted’ the narratives of these parties, especially close to election times. It wasn’t in the interests of either of these parties to dwell on the role of financialisation or corporate capitalism in causing the problems, as no party had any intention of tackling those roots causes. Labour was in a pickle. It had no choice but to take the blame for the crisis, since it had been in power for the past decade. It could either take blame for deregulating and liberalising the economy or it could take blame for overspending. Since it was planning some level of austerity anyway and wasn’t exactly chomping at the bit to take on the 1%,  Labour was unable to develop a convincing alternative narrative about the crisis.

3. The Westminster bubble

Regardless of which party their paper backs during elections, senior editors of newspapers have close professional and personal ties with politicians. The same goes for the public service broadcasters like the BBC, which are mandated to be politically impartial. They all live in the ‘Westminster bubble’, meaning that the views and narratives of politicians will shape news content. In my media study, 51% of the sources quoted in the content were politicians and other officials. As stated above, the Tory narrative about wasteful public spending was not being successfully challenged by Labour, so the media would have had to look outside the bubble for other explanations. This they often failed to do, and when they did, they turned to people who were giving out similar messages.

The second biggest group of sources in my study were financial services representatives and the fourth biggest category was business representatives (excluding financial services). Together, politicians, business and finance accounted for around 70% of all sources quoted. And so, those responsible for causing the problems were called upon to make sense of them and offer solutions. Those who might have had more accurate explanations for the crisis – for example campaigners and activists, heterodox economists, or trade unions – hardly got a look in (each accounting for less than 2.5%) . As long as the pool of sources remains confined to politicians and business representatives, the range of views will be limited and analysis will be partial.

4. News values

Media scholars have long been studying the professional values and routines that shape journalism. A major news value contributing to media amnesia is an obsession with the very latest events at the expense of historical context, explanation and process. In my sample, 49% of coverage offered no explanation whatsoever for the crisis. In the vacuum created by the absence of other explanations, the inaccurate ‘public sector profligacy’ narrative was able to become dominant. This was the key justification for austerity.

The social values of journalists might also play a role here. Although there are many kinds of journalists and media outlets, it remains the case that those with staff jobs at established media organisations come from among the elite. They might lean left or right but their interpretations of events and ideas about appropriate responses will likely not be too far removed from those of the politicians with whom they studied at university.

5. Churnalism

Journalist Nick Davies coined the term ‘churnalism’ to describe the state of journalism in the current era. Since the 1980s, media companies have been stepping up their cost-cutting and revenue-raising practices. They have done this to maximise profit in a context of both increased competition in the digital era and increased media privatisation, deregulation and conglomeration. This has put enormous pressure on journalists, who are having to fill an ever widening news hole with fewer resources. Unsurprisingly, this has had an effect on the quality of content, and has led to problems of inaccuracy, cannibalisation, and an unwillingness and lack of time to hold the powerful to account and seek out alternative viewpoints. Thus, the neoliberal era of corporate power and profit-seeking that produced the crisis is also partly responsible for its amnesiac media coverage.

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Curing media amnesia

To tackle the causes of media amnesia and develop media systems that are fit for purpose, we will first need to tackle the question of ownership. Media oligopolies should be broken up and non-corporate media should be supported. This goes for the social media giants as well as organisations producing media content. Secondly, if the current political system continues to fail to represent the interests of the majority of people, we should rethink whether politicians should get to have such influence on the media narratives we’re exposed to. Certainly, the pool of sources needs to be much broader than politicians and CEOs. Thirdly, diversity should be increased within journalism itself. Fourthly, we as news consumers should ask ourselves questions about what the purpose of news is and what we actually want from news. And finally, we need to understand that the struggle over media is part of the wider struggle over the control of resources at the heart of the 2008 crisis and the aftermath with which we are still living. We need to have a good think about how we want our societies to be organised and what role we want the media to play in them.

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It hasn’t escaped many people’s attention that, a decade after the biggest economic crash of a generation, the economic model producing that meltdown has not exactly been laid to rest. The crisis in the NHS and the Carillion and Capital scandals are testament to that. Sociologist Colin Crouch wrote a book in 2011 about the ‘strange non-death of neoliberalism’, arguing that the neoliberal model is centred on the needs of corporations and that corporate power actually intensified after the 2008 financial meltdown. This power has been maintained with the help of a robust ideology centred on free markets (though in reality markets are captured by corporations and are maintained by the state) and the superiority of the private sector over the public sector. It advocates privatisation, cuts in public spending, deregulation and tax cuts for businesses and high earners.

This ideology spread through the media from the 1980s, and the media have continued to play a key role in its persistence through a decade of political and economic turmoil since the 2008 crash. They have done this largely via an acute amnesia about the causes of the crisis, an amnesia that helped make policies like austerity, privatisation and corporate tax breaks appear as common sense responses to the problems.

This amnesia struck at dizzying speed. My research carried out at Cardiff University shows that in 2008 at the time of the banking collapse, the main explanations given for the problems were financial misconduct (‘greedy bankers’), systemic problems with the financial sector, and the faulty free-market model. These explanations were given across the media spectrum, with even the Telegraph and Sun complaining about a lack of regulation. Banking reform was advocated across the board.

Fast-forward to April 2009, barely 6 months after the announcement of a £500 billion bank bailout. A media hysteria was now raging around Britain’s deficit. While greedy bankers were still taking some of the blame, the systemic problems in finance and the problems with the free-market model had been forgotten. Instead, public profligacy had become the dominant explanation for the deficit. The timeline of the crisis was being erased and rewritten.

Correspondingly, financial and corporate regulation were forgotten. Instead, austerity became the star of the show, eclipsing all other possible solutions to the crisis. As a response to the deficit, austerity was mentioned 2.5 as many times as the next most covered policy-response option, which was raising taxes on the wealthy. Austerity was mentioned 18 times more frequently than tackling tax avoidance and evasion. Although coverage of austerity was polarized, no media outlet rejected it outright, and even the left-leaning press implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) backed ‘austerity lite’.

In 2010, the Conservative-Lib Dem government announced £99 billion in spending cuts and £29 billion in tax increases per year by 2014-15. Having made these ‘tough choices’, from 2011 the coalition wanted to focus attention away from austerity and towards growth (which was, oops, being stalled by austerity). To do this, they pursued a zealously ‘pro-business’ agenda, including privatisation, deregulation, cutting taxes for the highest earners, and cutting corporation tax in 2011, 2012, 2013, and in 2015 and 2016 under a Conservative government.

These measures were a ramped-up version of the kinds of reforms that had produced the crisis in the first place. This fact, however, was forgotten. These ‘pro-business’ moves were enthusiastically embraced by the media, far more so than austerity. Of the 5 outlets analysed (The BBC, Telegraph, Sun, Guardian and Mirror), only the Guardian rejected them more frequently than endorsing them.

The idea behind these policies is that what’s good for business is good for everyone. If businesses are handed more resources, freed from regulation and handed tax breaks, they will be encouraged to invest in the economy, creating jobs and growth. The rich are therefore ‘job creators’ and ‘wealth creators’.

This is despite the fact that these policies have an impressive fail rate. Business investment and productivity growth remain low, as corporations spend the savings not on training and innovation but on share buy-backs and shareholder dividends. According to the Financial Times, in 2014, the top 500 US companies returned 95 per cent of their profits to shareholders in dividends and buybacks. Meanwhile, inequality is spiralling and in the UK more than a million people are using food banks.

Poverty and inequality, meanwhile, attracted surprising little media attention. Of my sample of 1,133 media items, only 53 had a primary focus on living standards, poverty or inequality. This confirms other research showing a lack of media attention to these issues. Of these 53 items, the large majority were from the Guardian and Mirror. The coverage correctly identified austerity as a primary cause of these problems. However, deeper explanations were rare. Yet again, the link back to the 2008 bank meltdown wasn’t made, let alone the long-term causes of that meltdown. Not only that, the coverage failed even to identify the role of most of the policies pursued since the onset of the crisis in producing inequality – such as the bank bailouts, quantitative easing, and those ‘pro-business’ measures like corporation tax cuts and privatisation.

And so it seems we are living with a hyper-amnesia, in which it is increasingly difficult to reconstruct timelines and distinguish causes from effects. This amnesia has helped trap us in a neoliberal groundhog day. The political consensus around the free market model finally seems to be breaking. If we are to find a way out, we will need to have a lot more conversations about how to organise both our media systems and our economies.

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