i capture the castle - summary

 https://www.supersummary.com/i-capture-the-castle/summary

I Capture the Castle is a novel by British author Dodie Smith, written during World War II and first published in 1948. Inspired by the author’s longing for home when she and her husband were living abroad in California, it centers on an eccentric family, the Mortmains, and their life in a run-down castle during the 1930s. It is narrated by Cassandra Mortmain, a sharp teenager who tells her family’s story through journal entries as she changes from girl to woman and goes through many key milestones in a girl’s life. A classic example of the coming-of-age story, I Capture the Castle explores themes of love, faith and religion, creativity, and what each person is willing to do to survive. Considered a classic of British literature, it was adapted by Smith into a two-act play with musical elements in 1954, and has since been adapted to the screen in 2003. A 2015 BBC radio drama was produced, and a full musical adaptation debuted at the Watford Palace Theatre in April 2017.

I Capture the Castle takes place over a six-month period, from April to October in an unidentified year in the 2930s. The Mortmain family is genteel and eccentric, but have fallen into severe poverty. Cassandra introduces the reader to the rest of her family. Her father James is a once-successful author who now suffers from severe writer’s block. He hasn’t published anything since his successful first novel, Jacob Wrestling. Although the challenging modernist novel established him as a writer, he has produced nothing since. Ten years before the events of the novel, on the high of his initial success, he took out a forty-year lease on a beautiful but run-down castle. He hoped it would bring him inspiration, but now his family is forced to sell off its trappings to afford food. James is a widower, and his second wife Topaz is an artist’s model who loves spending time in nature. She will often wander around the grounds nearly naked. His older daughter, Rose, is described as a classic beauty who spends most of her time pining away, wishing for a handsome and rich young man to come and sweep her off her feet. She often tells her sister Cassandra that she wishes to live in a Jane Austen novel. Cassandra, who tells the story in her journal, wishes to be a writer herself. She makes the best of her current situation by developing her writing talent and capturing the world around her in her journal. Younger brother Thomas is quiet and helps around the castle. Stephen, the son of the family’s late maid, still lives with them and is in love with Cassandra. She thinks he’s kind and noble, but finds his affection a bit awkward.

The family’s life is upended when the Cottons, a wealthy family from America, inherit the nearby Scoatney Hall. Scoatney is the owner of the castle, which makes the Cottons the Mortmains’ new landlords. They have two sons, both unmarried, named Simon and Neil, and Cassandra and Rose soon become fascinated by them. Neil, raised in California by his father, is a free-spirited young man who wants to return to America to become a rancher. By contrast, Simon was raised in New England by his mother, and is serious and studious. He loves the English countryside and is glad to be home. Simon, the elder brother, stands to inherit the family fortune and is already well-off. Rose, desperate to escape poverty, decides to try to marry him even though she isn’t attracted to him. At the first meeting, the Cottons find the Mortmains amusing, but Rose’s awkward and obvious flirting uts them off. The brothers plan to avoid interacting with the family, but Cassandra conspires to bring them back and convince them to give Rose a second chance. Initial awkwardness past, the two families become close friends and Rose realizes she really is attracted to Simon. Cassandra and Rose scheme to arrange a proposal, and soon enough Rose and Simon are engaged.

As Rose and Topaz go to London to purchase Rose’s wedding dress, Simon and Cassandra spend the evening together. After an intense conversation, they kiss. Cassandra is filled with guilt over this, but at the same time she finds herself becoming obsessed with him. She realizes that she has to find a way to reject Stephen’s affections for her in a way that she doesn’t hurt him too much. She does this by encouraging him to pursue his dream of becoming a model and actor, which will take him away from the castle. She also joins forces with Thomas to try to force her father out of his writer’s block by trapping him in a small tower within the castle until he creates something. She continues to write everything down in her journal, but she misses another drama going on under her nose. Rose and Neil have formed a connection of their own, and their seemingly acrimonious relationship is only a guise for their secret affair. They eventually elope, leaving Simon heartbroken. However, this gives Cassandra new hope. Simon plans to return to the United States, but he comes to see Cassandra first. Despite her feelings for him, Cassandra changes the subject when she thinks he’s about to propose to her, because she’s not sure if he’s over Rose. Her final journal entry ends with Cassandra reminding herself that Simon promised to return, and that she’ll always love him.
Dodie Smith was a British author and playwright, best known for her popular novel The Hundred and One Dalmatians, which was adapted multiple times by Disney into popular American films. She was the author of nine novels, eleven plays, two screenplays, and a four-volume autobiography. Nine movies have been based off her works.

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POST BREXIT ECONOMY

 

Britain’s Post-Brexit Economy Is Running on Empty

Sydney Nash Wednesday, Oct. 13, 2021

Two weeks ago, an altercation broke out at a gas station in London and quickly escalated. One of the men involved drew a knife. The other rammed him with his car. As the driver tried to retreat, the first man kicked at his side mirror, leaving it hanging limply as the car reversed back into the street. 

Fights in a major city like London are not unusual, but the cause of this one was: The two men were arguing over access to gasoline that was suddenly in short supply in many parts of the country. And it was by no means the only fight to break out at a gas station that week. 

This was Britain in October 2021, where fuel shortages resulted in long lines outside hundreds of gas stations, leaving many customers impatient and even desperate. 

Moreover, gasoline is just one of many products in short supply. In recent weeks, McDonald’s ran out of milkshakes, while Nando’s, the peri-peri chicken chain, temporarily closed 10 percent of its restaurants, in part because it was unable to source chicken. The British government has warned of a turkey shortage at Christmas. More immediately, there is a 70 percent shortfall in firework supplies, only weeks before Guy Fawkes Night, an annual festival that is celebrated with large displays across the country. 

This is an extraordinary situation for the world’s fifth-largest economy to be in. The government has tried to blame the shortages on the coronavirus pandemic—something, it has taken pains to emphasize, that no one could have predicted—resulting in a shortage of truck drivers that is afflicting countries across Europe. 

The shortage of truck drivers is real—Poland has a shortfall of approximately 123,000 drivers, France 43,000 and Germany up to 60,000, compared to the U.K.’s shortfall of an estimated 100,000 drivers. 

However, only the U.K. is suffering from acute shortages in consumer goods and the fraying tempers that inevitably result.

Of course, the pandemic is not the only systemic shock that the U.K. has experienced this year. It has also chosen to pursue an economic revolution through the erection of trade barriers with the European Union, its closest and most important economic partner. Brexit, as this revolution is known, is an experiment in reverse liberalization the likes of which no other advanced economy has undertaken. While the U.K.’s decision to carry out such an experiment is unprecedented, the consequences of Brexit were easily predictable. Indeed, they were predicted. 

For decades prior to Brexit, the U.K. economy had relied upon an extensive network of highly efficient supply chains that crisscross the EU. Supported by a deep pool of skilled European labor, from which thousands of truck drivers were recruited, these supply chains delivered everything from food and beverages to chemicals, medicines and components for cars—all on a “just in time” inventory schedule that minimized waste and cost, while keeping shelves full, factories running, and the country fueled and fed. 

The consequences of Brexit were inevitable and predicted, but the government’s failure to properly prepare for it was a choice.

Supporting this logistical miracle was a comprehensive set of rules and standards, complemented by information-sharing between national regulatory authorities, and an agreed framework for redress—in other words, the EU’s single market and customs union. Within this ecosystem, the British economy grew, even as it intertwined itself with those of its European neighbors. When the U.K. voted to leave the EU in 2016, it chose to pull itself out of that ecosystem, sacrificing its place within those supply chains and an increasingly integrated European economy.

Since then, businesses, logistics and customs experts, and specialists in international trade and EU law have set out at length what the consequences of this decision would be. Put simply, they argued that Brexit would inevitably damage the British economy, for multiple reasons. Erecting barriers to trade would make it harder for U.K. firms to do business in the EU. Reinstating customs checks would make it harder to replenish stocks with goods from the EU. And ending free movement of people would make it harder to keep key sectors of the economy, including logistics, operational by recruiting workers from the EU. 

To mitigate against this, the U.K. business sector called on the government to pursue a “soft” Brexit and to allow plenty of time to adjust to the new reality that would result. This would have retained some of the integration between the U.K. and EU economies, and helped minimize the sudden disruption to trade that leaving the EU would cause. However, the British government under Prime Minister Boris Johnson chose to pursue the hardest form of Brexit and to do so as quickly as possible. The results have now become clearly apparent on supermarket shelves and at gasoline pumps around the country.

The British government’s response to this growing crisis has been to relax rules regulating truck driver hours, and to offer short-term visas to drivers from the EU. Neither measure gets to the root of the problem. Moving goods in and out of Britain is now more time-consuming, costly and stressful than it was a year ago because the trade barriers that were the inevitable consequence of the Johnson government’s Brexit have brought to a shuddering halt the free and frictionless movement of goods that the U.K. enjoyed when it was a member of the EU. The way to solve the challenges facing the U.K. is to remove those trade barriers.

The reason the Johnson government won’t do so is because it was and continues to be driven by a singular objective—delivering Brexit. The decision to leave the EU has fundamentally changed the British political landscape. The Conservative Party, once the party of business, is now the party of Brexit. It was reelected with an overwhelming majority under Johnson’s leadership in 2019 to “get Brexit done.” Its MPs are unwavering not only in their support for Brexit, but also in their belief that it will inevitably be a success. 

However, it is this unwavering belief that has led the government first to downplay the scale of the economic challenges that would inevitably result from Brexit, and then to rush the extraction of the U.K. from the European Union, leaving itself—and British businesses—without the time needed to properly prepare for what the U.K. is now experiencing. The consequences of Brexit were inevitable and predicted, but the government’s failure to properly prepare for it was a choice.

So long as these true believers continue to occupy 10 Downing Street and the majority of seats in Parliament, the government will choose to ignore the role that Brexit is playing in weakening the U.K. economy, undermining British businesses, breaking vital supply chains, exacerbating labor shortages and creating the kind of conditions that result in violent exchanges at petrol stations. To do otherwise, they would have to question their own belief in Brexit and acknowledge the flaws in what has become an ideology. This is not an option for them, for the simple reason that the Johnson government is a revolutionary one in which ideology trumps all else, even the economy. 

Sydney Nash is a former civil servant, U.K.-EU negotiator and adviser to the automotive sector on Brexit and international tra

WHERE IS THE WORLD ECONOMY GOING? 22-10-2021

 D

oes anyone really understand what is going on in the world economy? The pandemic has made plenty of observers look clueless. Few predicted $80 oil, let alone fleets of container ships waiting outside Californian and Chinese ports. As covid-19 let rip in 2020, forecasters overestimated how high unemployment would be by the end of the year. Today prices are rising faster than expected and nobody is sure if inflation and wages will spiral upward. For all their equations and theories, economists are often fumbling in the dark, with too little information to pick the policies that would maximise jobs and growth.

Yet, as we report this week, the age of bewilderment is starting to give way to greater enlightenment. The world is on the brink of a real-time revolution in economics, as the quality and timeliness of information are transformed. Big firms from Amazon to Netflix already use instant data to monitor grocery deliveries and how many people are glued to “Squid Game”. The pandemic has led governments and central banks to experiment, from monitoring restaurant bookings to tracking card payments. The results are still rudimentary, but as digital devices, sensors and fast payments become ubiquitous, the ability to observe the economy accurately and speedily will improve. That holds open the promise of better public-sector decision-making—as well as the temptation for governments to meddle.

 WHAT is FOREIGN DEBT ? 

Foreign Debt

By 

WILL KENTON

Reviewed by 

MICHAEL J BOYLE

 

on August 26, 2021

What is Foreign Debt?

Foreign debt is money borrowed by a government, corporation or private household from another country's government or private lenders. Foreign debt also includes obligations to international organizations such as the World Bank, Asian Development Bank (ADB), and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Total foreign debt can be a combination of short-term and long-term liabilities.

Foreign debt, also known as external debt, has been rising steadily in recent decades, with unwelcome side-effects in some borrowing countries. These include slower economic growth, particularly in low-income countries, as well as crippling debt crises, financial market turmoil, and even secondary effects such as a rise in human-rights abuses.

Understanding Foreign Debt

A government or a corporation may borrow from a foreign lender for a range of reasons. For one thing, local debt markets may not be deep enough to meet their borrowing needs, particularly in developing countries. Or foreign lenders might simply offer more attractive terms. For low-income countries especially, borrowing from international organizations like the World Bank is an essential option, as it can provide funding it might not otherwise be able to attain, at attractive rates and with flexible repayment schedules.

The World Bank, in conjunction with the IMF and the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), gathers short-term foreign debt data from the Quarterly External Debt Statistics (QEDS) database. Long-term external debt data compilation is also collectively accomplished by the World Bank, individual countries that carry foreign debt, and multilateral banks and official lending agencies in major creditor countries.

FOR INTERMEDIATE AND FC STS HOW TO TELL A STORY

 HOW TO TELL A STORY

If you have watched the first scene in the video EMPOWER B1 series, you must remember how Annie, and Rachel ,two old friends living in London ,met in the street 

How can you tell your mates about their conversation ? 

You may say : 

Annie and Rachel are walking along the street. Rachel and Annie are old friends but they haven t seen each other for several years now 

All of a suffen, Raches can see a familiar face : It s her old friend Annie who is walking in the opposite direction 

Rachel shouts : Annie !! 

Rachel and Annie meet after so many years They are surprised to see each other in the street. 

Rachel is with ayoung man beside her : her husband . Rachel and MArk have got married . When Annie learns they have married, she is surprised . Rachel says they ve been married for 5 months and March says they ve been married for 8 months. Rachel corrects him and he agrees . He has made a mistake 

Annie is going to the pub in the corner where she is meeting her boyfriend Leo 

, so she invites them to go for a coffee together Racher and Marck agree. 

OR  

You may say : 

Annie and Rachel, two old friends , were walking along the street some time ago when Rachel recognized Annie who was walking in the opposite direction 

Rached shouted : Annie !! 

They were surprised to see each other after several years . They spoke about where they lived and discovered they lived quite near 

Rache was with her husband Mark who introduced himself to Annie , who was really surprised to learn that they were married . 

They disagreed over the date of marriage, but finally Mark admitted to having made a mistake . As Annie was going to the pub round the corner to meet her boyfriend Leo, she invited them to have some coffee together .   Rachel and Mark agreed to go and the four met at the pub 

YOU MAY TELL A STORY BY USING THE PRESENT TENSES OR THE PAST TENSES BUT YOU MUST REMEMBER TO STICK TO ONE TIME FRAME . DON T MIX TENSES 

MONEY, INFLATION AND THE ECONOMY

 M

ost people think economics is the study of money. But there is a paradox in the role of money in economic policy, which is this: the attention actually paid by central banks to money has declined, whereas in fact, price stability is recognised as the central objective of central banks.

2It is no accident that during the “Great Inflation” of the post-war period, money, as a causal factor for inflation, was ignored by much of the economic establishment. In the late 1970s, the counter-revolution in economics – the idea that in the long run money affected the price level and not the level of output – returned money to the centre stage in economic policy. As Milton Friedman put it, “inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon”. If inflation was a monetary phenomenon, then controlling the supply of money was the route to low inflation. Monetary aggregates became central to the conduct of monetary policy. But the passage to low inflation proved painful. Nor did the monetary aggregates respond kindly to the attempts by central banks to control them. As the governor of the Bank of Canada at the time, Gerald Bouey, remarked, “we didn’t abandon the monetary aggregates, they abandoned us”.

3So, as central banks became more and more focussed on achieving price stability, less and less attention was paid to movements in money. Indeed, the decline of interest in money appeared to go hand in hand with success in maintaining low and stable inflation. How do we explain the apparent contradiction that the acceptance of the idea that inflation is a monetary phenomenon has been accompanied by the lack of any reference to money in the conduct of monetary policy during its most successful period? That paradox is the subject of my talk.

4Of course, some central banks, especially the Bundesbank and the Swiss National Bank, always paid a good deal of attention to monetary aggregates. But when the European Central Bank acquired responsibility for monetary policy it adopted a reference value for money growth as only one of its two pillars of monetary policy, with an assessment of the outlook for inflation as the other. And the Swiss National Bank recently replaced its target for the monetary aggregates with one for inflation. In the United States, the Federal Reserve, at its own request, has been relieved of the statutory requirement, imposed in 1978, to report twice a year on its target ranges for the growth of money and credit. As Larry Meyer, a Governor of the Federal Reserve Board explained earlier this year, “money plays no explicit role in today’s consensus macro model, and it plays virtually no role in the conduct of monetary policy.”

5The decline in the importance of money in policy formation can be witnessed by the reduction in the number of references to money in the speeches of central bank governors. So much so that over the past two years, Governor Eddie George, of the Bank of England, has made one reference to money in 29 speeches, Chairman Greenspan, of the Federal Reserve, one in 17, Governor Hayami, of the Bank of Japan, one in 11, and Wim Duisenberg, of the European Central bank, three in 30.

Money and inflation: the evidence

6Let me begin by looking at some of the historical evidence. Chart 1, which extends the results of McCandless and Weber (1995), shows the correlation between the growth of the monetary base and of inflation over different time horizons for a large sample of 116 countries. Countries with faster growth rates of money experience higher inflation. It is clear from CHART 1 that the correlation between money growth and inflation is greater the longer is the time horizon over which both are measured. In the short run, the correlation between monetary growth and inflation is much less apparent. Understanding why this is so is at the heart of monetary economics and still poses problems for economists trying to understand the impact of money on the economy. I shall return to this later.

Chart 1

Few empirical regularities in economics are so well documented as the co-movement of money and inflation. Chart 2 shows that this relationship is true for broad money as well as the monetary base. The other side of the coin to this close relationship between money and prices is the absence of a long-run relationship between money and output growth, shown in Chart 3. Over the thirty year horizon 1968-1998, the correlation coefficient between the growth rates of both narrow and broad money, on the one hand, and inflation, on the other, was 0.99. Correspondingly, the correlation between the growth of narrow money and real output growth was – 0.09 and between broad money growth and output growth was – 0.08.

Chart 2

Chart 3

Correlation, of course, is not causation. The essence of monetary theory is trying to understand the structural relationship between money growth, money demand, output and price movements. Stable structural relationships can give rise to unstable short run correlations between any of these variables. It is, therefore, somewhat surprising that some economists have argued that the instability of observed short run correlations casts doubt on the long run importance of money growth in the inflationary process. Chart 4 shows the behaviour of the price level in the UK and its relationship with the ratio of money to real income over the period from 1885 to 1998. Short-run movements in the velocity of money are apparent, as well as the long-run link between money and inflation.

Chart 4

7The view that money does not matter has been encouraged by those who point to regressions of inflation and output on monetary growth, and find that the influence of money is either insignificant or unstable. But these results tell us little about the significance of money in the transmission mechanism of monetary policy. They are based on what economists call reduced-form equations, the coefficients of which will be complex functions of the true structural parameters of the economy, as well as expectations of future policy responses by the monetary authorities. There is no reason to expect a simple relationship between inflation and output and money growth in reduced form estimates.

8This last point was clearly grasped by Friedman and Schwartz in their classic 1963 study of money in the United States. They took great care to identify periods in which there was an exogenous shock to the money supply, such as moves on to and off the gold standard, and changes in reserve requirements imposed on banks. More recent studies, such as Estrella and Mishkin (1997), Hendry (2001), Gerlach and Svensson (2000) and Stock and Watson (1999) produce conflicting and unstable regression results for the influence of money growth on inflation.

9To understand the true role of money, a clear theoretical model is required and that model must allow for the central role of expectations. The key role of expectations is best illustrated by considering extreme cases of high inflation, known as hyperinflations. In hyperinflations the effect of expectations on money and inflation is amplified relative to other influences, such as the business cycle.

10Chart 5 shows the link between money and prices in four hyperinflations. Two of these are drawn from the inter-war period, namely the hyperinflations in Austria and Hungary, and two are post-war hyperinflations, in Argentina and Israel. At their peak, these hyperinflations involved annual inflation rates of 9,244%, 4,300%, 20,266%, and 486% respectively. All four hyperinflations illustrate the importance of expectations. In the case of the two inter-war hyperinflations, large government deficits were monetised, leading to rapid money growth and inflation. The public tried to economise on money holdings, and so real money demand fell. Announcements of credible fiscal stabilisations changed inflation expectations and led extremely quickly to a rapid fall in inflation. Lower inflation encouraged real money demand to rise again, and so nominal money growth continued to rise for some time after inflation had fallen. Inflation was, therefore, stabilised ahead of the slowdown in money growth, although the causation ran from the credible announcement of monetary contraction to lower inflation. The vertical lines in the charts indicate the announcement dates of stabilisation packages. In Argentina, inflation expectations were stabilised by the convertibility plan of 1991 which established a currency board to back the local currency in terms of the US dollar. Inflation expectations fell and, as in the earlier cases, the fall in inflation preceded the slowdown in money growth. The case of Israel is somewhat different in that the absence of any delay between the announcement and the implementation of the stabilisation programme in 1985 meant that the gap between the fall in inflation and the contraction of monetary growth was shorter than in the other cases shown in Chart 5. Although hyperinflations are extreme examples, they do illustrate the fact that, even when monetary contraction is evidently the cause of a fall in inflation, the rapid response of expectations means that inflation may fall before signs of a slowing of monetary growth itself.

THE MEDIA AND THE PRESS : BIG MIND BENDERS : A POWER GREATER THAN GOVMT

 

A power greater than government?

“The freedom of the press belongs to those who own the presses. And it’s true.” Jonathan Tobin, Editor of the weekly The Jewish Ledger (West Hartfort, USA), quoted in the Jewish Chronicle (London), Aug. 25, 1995, p. 19

According to the theory of democracy, ‘the people’ rule. They elect politicians by their own choice, and if and when those politicians fail to act according to their wishes they can be dismissed by the vote of the people. The pluralism of different political parties provides the people with ‘alternatives’; if one loses their confidence, they can support another. Thus is realised the democratic principle of: government of the people, by the people and for the people.

It would be nice if it were all so simple. But in a medium-to-large modern state things are not quite like that. How do ‘the people’ acquire the information and knowledge necessary for them to use their votes other than by blind guesswork? They cannot possibly witness everything that is happening on the national scene, still less at the level of world events. Only a tiny few of them ever see their political leaders close up and are able to watch and assess their performance of their duties. The vast majority are not students of politics. They don’t really know what is happening, and even if they did they would need guidance as to how to interpret what they knew.

‘The people’ are doctors, lawyers, engineers, clerks, shopkeepers, factory workers, farmworkers, small tradesmen, nurses, secretaries, schoolteachers and a thousand or more other things. They know, or ought to know, something about the occupations in which they are engaged. But only the minutest number can be expected to know the business of politics – one of the most complex of subjects, with its vast range of issues and the many points of view that will be brought to bear on each of these issues. To know what the issues are, and to examine and evaluate these points of view, the people need to have these issues presented to them and the points of view expounded in a form that they can understand.

This is where the ‘mass media’ come in: newspapers; television; radio. And for those with a more studious and enquiring bent there are other media: books; magazines; the internet. The list is growing as information technology advances.

But there is a problem here. ‘The people’ cannot own, control and regulate the media. That can only be done by a small minority – a mere fraction of the population, in fact much fewer than one per cent. And it is this minority which is able to determine which facts the people will be allowed to know about, which events will be reported to them, which points of view they will be able to examine and evaluate, which political parties it is good to vote for and which not, which politicians are decent, upright, honourable and capable citizens and which are disreputable, incompetent, ‘dangerous’ and ‘extreme.’

This invests that minority who control the mass media with enormous power – perhaps even greater power than a prime minister or cabinet. It is this minority which determines the climate of ‘public opinion’ in which politicians have to operate, the ‘public opinion’ to which they have to defer and which they dare not offend if they are to get elected and stay elected.

“Today the film makers are the people who control the most powerful medium in the world, and art that can create ideals, change language or topple governments.” John Baxter in the Daily Mail, 28 December 1995

Even when the mass media consisted mainly of newspapers, and only a small minority read those newspapers, this power was considerable. Today, when it embraces mass-circulation newspapers and television, it is colossal beyond imagination.

And we must not forget another fact about the media. Their political influence extends far beyond newspaper reports and articles, and television programmes, of a direct political nature – connected, that is, with current affairs that bear upon politics. In a much more subtle way, they can influence people’s thought patterns by other means: newspaper stories, pages dealing with entertainment and popular culture, movies, TV ‘soaps,’ ‘educational’ programmes, popular music: all these types of fare help form human values, concepts of good and evil, right and wrong, sense and nonsense and what is ‘fashionable’ and ‘unfashionable.’ These human value systems, in turn, shape people’s attitude to political issues, influence how they vote and therefore determine who holds political power.

“Wide-eyed KGB agents reported back to Moscow on the impact of the movies; how they reached the hearts of millions over a weekend, changing the attitudes of the audience in subtle but profound ways.” Daniel Jeffreys in the Daily Mail, 9.1.99, about the book Hollywood Party

Yet for some strange reason there is very little public discussion in Britain today of who actually exercises media control. The people are encouraged to get tremendously excited about the outcome of a general election, even of local government elections, yet these contests probably have far less a bearing on the question of who wields power over us than the much more crucial one of who regulates ‘public opinion’ and therefore determines the agenda both for the contesting of elections and for what is done in government by whoever wins.

Any study of what is happening on the national scene must therefore today include a study of the workings of the mass media: who the people are who own, control and operate those media, and to what purposes their immense power is being put.

The current affairs ‘discussion’

Discussion programmes on TV and radio dealing with current affairs and topical public issues are presented so as to convey the impression that they are conducted in accordance with the letter and spirit of ‘democracy,’ with various viewpoints given a hearing. However, where the discussion threatens to touch upon issues considered ‘sensitive’ to the liberal establishment which controls TV and radio, it is carefully stage-managed so that ‘dangerous’ viewpoints are excluded. This is particularly noticeable where discussion concerns matters of race or the related and equally ‘sensitive’ “Jewish question.”

One British TV programme some time ago was devoted to the subject of ‘anti-semitism,’ which was presented as being on the increase throughout Europe, including Britain. Various spokesmen, some Jewish and some non-Jewish, appeared on the programme to give their views. After the programme had proceded a little while, it became quite clear that the only differences between the participants lay in their attitudes as to how ‘anti-semitism’ should be treated. Some maintained that it should be rigorously suppressed by the introduction of tighter laws against it; others said that this practice would play into the hands of the ‘anti-semites’ by making them martyrs and that, however much ‘anti-semitism’ was to be deplored, suppressing it by law was not the way to fight it. One member of the discussion panel launched into a lengthy analysis of the mental state of ‘anti-semites,’ implying them to be suffering from a certain kind of insanity.

What was entirely absent from the discussion was any contribution offering an explanation of the viewpoint of the so-called ‘anti-semites.’ Of course, ‘anti-semitism’ itself is a misleading term deliberately adopted by our media-controllers so as to suggest that those thus labelled want to ill-treat Jews, even kill them, for no reason than that they are Jews, whereas the vast majority of people described as ‘anti-semites’ simply oppose what they see as excessive Jewish power. Whether or not they are correct in their assessment of this power is beside the point; if ‘democracy’ is to be more than just an empty phrase, they should be allowed to state their case in public then have that case seriously examined and debated. This, however, is the very last thing our media-controllers want. Therefore, when any programme discussing anti-semitism (i.e. criticism of Jewish power) is broadcast on TV or radio, ‘anti-semites’ (i.e. critics of Jewish power) are deliberately excluded, so that the ‘discussion’ is not really a discussion at all, merely an imitation of one.

Who are the manipulators?

But who is behind it all? Who are the people who determine what is watched on television and printed in the newspapers? This is not so easy a study because a great many of the people concerned operate in the shadows. And even in the case of those whose names are known, what is known about their backgrounds and their connections? Very little.

For this reason, very few people in Britain are aware of the huge influence over the mass media exercised by a certain ethnic minority, namely the Jews.

Straightaway, we can expect that mention of this minority will put many readers on the defensive. Is this ‘anti-semitism’?, some will ask. That, you see, is the first example of the hypnotic effect of media power. The mass media in Britain today have managed to implant into many people’s minds the idea that it is ‘anti-semitic’ even to acknowledge that members of the Jewish community play a large part in controlling our news and opinion and to question whether this is a good thing for Britain. In the uncomfortable feeling provoked in a number of readers of this text by the very mention of the word ‘Jews,’ there is provided the first lesson in media indoctrination and brainwashing!

This text is simply a study of who controls public opinion in Great Britain. We believe that in this study there should be no ‘no-go’ areas, no forbidden avenues of enquiry. We are concerned here with facts. What deductions people make from those facts is their decision. Our intention is that they should be roused from their former ignorance and apathy and persuaded to join our political struggle to achieve, through peaceable and legal means, the change of government which is required as a first step towards reversing the long decline of Britain and the British people.

It is the contention of this study that members of the Jewish community (whether practising or not) exercise a power and influence in Britain’s mass media that are out of all proportion to their numbers in the population. We believe that this is a fact that should not be hidden but should be known – and discussed. No great issue of concern can be properly examined unless all the facts pertaining it are known and are faced – fairly and squarely, with nothing swept under the carpet for fear that some noisy element may object.

Some people may accept the findings of this study as authentic and accurate but then say: “So what?” Isn’t it quite common for certain groups to be found in profusion in certain occupations whether for reasons of natural talent and aptitude, accidents of history, or whatever? Are there not a lot of Irish building workers and writers, Scottish doctors and engineers, Welsh singers, Black sportsmen, French and Italian restaurateurs and Indian and Pakistani textile merchants? Given that Jews are to be found in large numbers in the mass media, is this to be regarded as particularly sinister or dangerous? In other words, what’s the big deal?”

We hope that we have answered these questions in the foregoing part of this introduction. None of the other occupational fields mentioned have anything like the scope for the wielding of real power – political power, power over who governs us and to what purpose, power to shape our society and its values, to determine our destiny and future as a nation, to decide whether we even have any future as a nation.

We cannot therefore say of Jews in the media as some might say of other groups in their respective occupations and lines of business: “Oh well, they’re good at it – let them get on doing it.” What is at stake in respect of control of an institution with such massive power as the media places that institution in a special category of its own, which justifies a very high degree of concern over the matter.

Would we, for instance, feel happy and secure in the knowledge (should such be the case) that a particular ethnic group exercised control over our armed forces? We might wonder, in that case, where the loyalty of such a group would lie in the event of a war. And if we bear in mind that power over the mass media is today as potent in the possibilities it offers as command of a hundred armoured divisions on the battlefield, that mass media power should be a matter of tremendous national concern, and we would be foolish to the point of insanity to dismiss as of little importance a situation in which it lay in the hands of people who in their origins, and possibly in their loyalties, were not British.

And this is not all. As has been said, there is in Britain today a very broad consensus, transcending parties and classes, that much of the influence of the mass media is malignant and socially destructive in its effects. We simply take the question further: if so many believe the influence of the media to be malignant and destructive, we should be examining the nature of the media – not the least important question in which examination is: Who controls the media?

In a way, this study serves a purpose that is supposed to be served by the mass media in any democracy: The purpose of free and unfettered enquiry and of absolutely free expression of facts and opinion. Unfortunately, there is neither free enquiry nor free expression of either facts or opinion in the mass media in Britain today – and least of all on the subject of this study. Just when did you last see an article in a major newspaper examining, in proper depth, Jewish influence and control in Britain’s news and information industry? Just when did you last see a programme on TV dealing with the same topic? The answer to this question proves our point.

One phrase beloved of those who exercise influence in the media is ‘investigative journalism.’ The ‘investigative journalist’ is depicted as the crusading hero whose quest for the truth and whose dedication to the public interest leads him to take up the cudgels against all the forces of would-be suppression and censorship – even when, as is sometimes the case, this leads to a particularly loathsome form of intrusion into people’s private lives. But one form of investigative journalism which the media are most certainly not anxious to encourage is that which enquires into the identity of their own controllers and the underlying agenda to which they operate. Here we hope to remedy this glaring omission.

Naturally, we do not expect the facts which we unearth here to be taken up by the media and examined in the light of day. If there is any comment in the mass media on this study – which we think doubtful – it will that of condemnation, of dismissal out of hand, with liberal use of the term ‘anti-semitism.’ But it will not extend to any analysis of what we say or any attempt, by presentation of facts, to prove us wrong.

From this, dear reader, we leave you to draw your own conclusions.