The Sun newspaper, ‘witless prolefeed’

• I AGREE with Marigold Saul (Alert a sleep walking nation to threat from Tory press, May 26) and Justin Schlosberg (Biased Tory press undermines democracy, May 19), but would point out that similar things have been said all my adult life yet people of modest means go on choosing to buy newspapers which exist to defend the interests of the rich.

Moreover, when I was young The Sun did not exist and the paper with the largest circulation was the usually pro-Labour Mirror, which actually contained news.

I do not know why the Mirror was displaced by The Sun which, to judge from the front pages I see in newsagents, is witless prolefeed, unless it was the help that Page 3, now I believe discontinued, gave to practitioners of the solitary vice.

Rather than complaining about the content of these newspapers, a more promising line of attack would be to make their readers aware that most of their proprietors are keener on exerting a malign influence on this country’s affairs than on contributing to its finances.

Rupert Murdoch, Lord Rothermere and the Barclay twins pay no UK taxes, save for council tax, on any properties they own here and, like the benefit claimants their papers defame, VAT on purchases made here.

Mr Murdoch has a defence. He has never been British but is an American who used to be an Australian.

That does not stop him pretending to be British when it suits him. I recall him speaking to journalists as he walked to Downing Street to meet Tony Blair at a time when there was talk of us joining the Euro.

“I am very worried about our sovereignty,” quoth Citizen Cane Toad to the respectfully silent journos, not one of whom, although they cannot all have been his employees, protested the impertinence.

Citizen Cane Toad became an American to get round that country’s laws restricting foreign ownership of the mass media.

While normally the huddled masses wanting American citizenship must pass a test and take the oath of allegiance in a public ceremony, so eager was the Reagan administration to add its country to Citizen Cane Toad’s empire of lies that it had him made a citizen by an act passed through both houses of Congress in an afternoon, so sparing him the distress of having to rub shoulders with people neither rich nor powerful.

We have since copied the citizenship test nonsense but not, of course, the restrictions on foreign media ownership.

The Barclay twins are domiciled for tax purposes in Monaco and may only spend a limited number of days of each year in this country.

My favourite is Lord Rothermere, a British citizen born in London and living in a mansion in Wiltshire but for tax purposes a non-dom so only liable for tax on income or capital gains arising in this country.

He has ensured, by perfectly legal means, that they are small or non-existent. This scandal was tolerated by the Blair and Brown governments.

All this is well known to readers of publications like The Guardian or, especially, Private Eye, but not to those outside this minority.

I suggest it is in the interest of opposition politicians to make these facts more widely known because, while the nastiness of the Tory press clearly does not trouble its readers, the idea that they are paying hard-earned money to millionaire freeloaders might.

STEPHEN HORNE
Romilly Road, N4