The Long Eaton Advertiser was owned by Trinity Mirror, the massive media company that recorded profits of £145 million in 2008 and

£50 million in interim results for 2009. That’s the equivalent of £200,000 profit every single day over the past 12 months.

The Long Eaton Advertiser was not a victim of the recession, even though it had seen a huge fall in advertising revenue – it was a victim of a failed corporate business model for news. This is the model that has been encouraged by politicians through deregulation and by turning a blind eye to the effects of mergers, indebtedness and excessive profiteering on citizens’ rights to information.

Trinity Mirror were not the only pigs caught with their snouts in the media trough, their heads in the sand and their arses exposed. The bubble of a decade of soaring profits has also burst for Johnston Press, EMAP, Newsquest, GMG and others. With it, a further 70 newspapers have closed. Almost one in four jobs in local newspapers have disappeared.

Thousands more jobs have been axed across national newspapers and magazines – and not just in old-fashioned print but in shiny new media too. Dozens of local media offices have closed, removing thousands of journalists from the communities they serve. ITV has cut more than 1,000 jobs and halved its regional news services, while 7,000 jobs have gone at the BBC.

A growing number of newspapers have gone from daily to weekly, from evening to overnight, from paid-for to free. Editions are cut, supplements folded, freelances ditched and specialists axed.

Claire Enders, a media analyst, predicts that half the country’s 1,300 local newspapers will close between now and 2013, destroying a further 20,000 media jobs. It is not just readers, viewers and listeners who will suffer the effects of that. Local and national democracy is suffering too. Councils, courts and public bodies are no longer being properly scrutinised. Journalists are stuck in offices rewriting press releases – relying ever more on corporate or celebrity PR.

While the media industry remains fundamentally profitable, the corporate business model is killing quality journalism, cutting away what is perceived to be expensive – investigative, international and original newsgathering. Such corporate vandalism is an affront to media freedom.

At the heart of this debate must be a total rejection of the idea set out by James Murdoch that profit is the best guarantee of media quality and independence. It’s not.

The founders of the free press never thought that press freedom would only belong to those who could afford a press. They would have been horrified at the idea that if rich people determine there is not sufficient commercial value in news, communities should be deprived of quality information and quality journalism.

So we need action to save, build and sustain newsgathering. The National Union of Journalists has called for an economic stimulus plan for journalism, with action aimed at encouraging a variety of voices, across all platforms, a greater plurality, maximised through a combination of different ownership models – commercial, public, mutual, employee, co-operative, for profit and not for profit.

Alternative new media could be stimulated through start-up grants, subsidised technology, office space or training grants, solutions driven by journalists and communities themselves – online radio, broadband tv, print and online. Such moves could be supported by tax breaks for local media who meet clearly defined public purposes, tax credits for individuals subscribing to publications that meet such public purposes.

Companies planning to close titles could be forced to divest them. Action should be taken to break up large corporate media groups that fail to meet clearly defined public purposes.

In government plans for independently financed news consortia we have the potential to explore such new thinking, if instead of just replicating failed business models and concentrated ownership, they bring together a wider array of civil society partners and media. Such local media could support hyper-local initiatives, encouraging partnerships between traditional and non-traditional content providers based on the pursuit of specific public interest goals.

To ensure any public money is used for the public good, for the benefit of the communities media serve – not primarily private businesses and shareholders – clear and enforceable conditions need to be applied. These must safeguard the production of original content in the public interest. There should be reinvestment quotas to ensure the maximum amount of public money invested is used for content rather than profit, along with guaranteed levels of original content and caps on directors’ pay.

Politicians say they like such ideas. They restate their commitment to local and national democracy. They recognise media, news and information is vital to that democracy. But they say the ideas are not affordable.

Even if you could bring the supply of genuinely fair and balanced information down to a simple economic equation, safeguarding the future of the media is not really a question of resources but a question of political will.

Top-slicing the BBC licence fee is not the only way to fund local news. Cutting the BBC down to size is not the only means of ensuring the supply of local news in print and online.

With the right commitment we could levy, as most other countries in Europe already do, those who profit from rebroadcasting public service content but pay nothing towards its creation. For example, news aggregators, exploiting news content for commercial gain, could be made to pay.

As the digital revolution gathers pace, huge revenues are being made by TV operators, internet service providers and consumer hardware manufacturers – all by consumers desiring to watch high quality programmes on new platforms. Added to the advertising income made by non-public service broadcasters, these revenues dwarf those of the public service operators who are responsible for 90 per cent of the UK-originated content available on our screens.

Almost every other European country applies a levy to recording devices. In Germany it raises EUR146 million, in France EUR168 million. Yet we are told it is politically unthinkable here.

Even in pay-TV households, the average viewer spends 80 per cent of their time watching the public service stations. Without the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 on their platforms, pay-TV providers would struggle to make a fraction of the £4.3 billion they earned in 2007. We are almost the only country that does not insist they pay retransmission fees. Applying just a 1 per cent levy could raise more than £70 million for content creation.

Ofcom’s consumer research showed levies to be ‘the most acceptable of the potential new sources of funding’, ‘one of the most appropriate long-term solutions’ and ‘perceived as a fair way to fund PSB [public service broadcasting], by taking money from the industry to reinvest in the industry’.

Funding for news is not about resources – it is about politics. I’m sick of hearing MPs say ‘But can you imagine what Rupert Murdoch would say about that?’ while bemoaning the closure of another newspaper, a scaling back of local or regional TV news or the centralised hubbing of yet another set of radio stations.

Digital media offers us huge opportunities to enhance our democracy through investment in newsgathering. It offers us greater opportunities for participation, collaboration, mutualisation. Yet we are hamstrung by those who cling on to old failed business models.

Can it be done? William Morris said all we need is ‘intelligence enough to conceive, courage enough to will, power enough to compel. If our ideas of a new society are to be anything other than a dream, these three qualities must animate the due effective majority of the working people; and then I say, the thing will be done.’

Jeremy Dear is general secretary of the National Union of Journalists. Read the international Charter for Innovation, Creativity and Access to Knowledge

There is plenty of evidence linking the HMB, an elite force of the Colombian Army, with human rights violations. International groups such as Amnesty have denounced the killing of trade unionists at their hands, while Colombian human rights defenders have documented the gross and systematic violations carried out by the HMB, including the torture, murder and disappearance of numerous civilians. For his part, General Montoya is reported to have collaborated with right-wing paramilitary death squads and drug traffickers, groups which are inextricably linked with the army in the repressive policy of the Colombian regime.

The UK has been a staunch supporter of Uribe, in power since 2002, and currently provides his hard-line regime with secret military aid. While the UK government refuses to disclose the extent of British aid to Colombia, citing ‘national security’, a Guardian investigation has revealed that it includes SAS training, setting up and equipping an intelligence centre and providing military advice to the HMB. The UK government has also admitted giving the Colombian army training and advice on urban warfare techniques, counter-guerrilla strategy and ‘psychiatry’.

As chair of the TUC-backed human rights organisation, Justice for Colombia (JFC), I have attended meetings with the British government at which I and other trade-union leaders have passed on detailed information about the gross human rights violations committed by the British-backed HMB and other units of the Colombian army. We have outlined why British military aid to the Uribe regime, and to these abusive units in particular, is unacceptable. While the UK government doesn’t deny that it assists the HMB or that they are involved in torture, murder and gross human rights violations, it justifies this aid by claiming that the Uribe regime is making ‘significant progress’.

Extra-judicial executions

The reality on the ground is very different. In March this year a report by Colombian human rights groups documented 955 executions of civilians carried out by the Colombian army between July 2002 and June 2007 – a 65 per cent increase on the previous five year period. This overall trend in extra-judicial executions has been confirmed by the UN high commissioner for human rights.

In another worrying development, in April the CUT trade union federation (the Colombian TUC) reported a 77 per cent increase in killings of trade unionists during the first part of this year. These murders formed part of an upsurge in attacks and killings of human rights defenders, trade unionists, and other civil society actors. It came shortly after Uribe’s presidential advisor, Jose Obdulio Gaviria, suggested that civil society groups that had organised a protest on 6 March against state and paramilitary human rights abuses were linked to the left-wing FARC guerrilla group. A letter sent by prominent international human rights defenders denouncing this and accusing the Colombian regime of endangering the lives of activists went largely unreported in the English language press.

In this climate, it is unsurprising that Colombia is the most dangerous place in the world to be a trade unionist. In fact, more trade unionists have been murdered in Colombia during Uribe’s presidency than in the rest of the world over the same period. But it is not just murder. Death threats, forced disappearances and imprisonment without trial are just some of the other attacks suffered by Colombian workers – all, like the murders, carried out in a climate of impunity.

A third major factor that should worry the British government is the reports detailing the close links between outlawed right-wing paramilitary death squads and Uribe, his close friends and supporters and the Colombian state.

Damming connections

A damning article, ‘Colombia political scandal imperilling US ties’ by Indira A R Lakshmanan of the Boston Globe, published widely earlier this year, outlined a number of worrying connections. They include the facts that, first, last year, Uribe’s foreign minister was forced to resign after her brother, a senator, was jailed for colluding with the paramilitaries in a series of murders and kidnappings; second that, in the same month, the head of Colombia’s secret police, who also served as Uribe’s campaign manager, was arrested for ‘giving a hit list of trade unionists and activists to paramilitaries, who then killed them’; and third that 14 of Uribe’s closest congressional allies sit behind bars for colluding with paramilitary death squads. At the time of writing, 62 of Uribe’s political allies are being investigated for allegedly collaborating with these death squads.

As if all this wasn’t bad enough, journalists who have questioned Uribe on his past or present links with paramilitaries have subsequently received death threats and, in many cases, have been forced to leave the country. In October last year, for example, Gonzalo Guillen, a reporter for the Miami Herald’s Spanish language newspaper El Nuevo Herald fled Colombia because of death threats he received after Uribe publicly criticsed him three days earlier. Guillen explained that he was leaving Colombia after receiving 24 death threats in 48 hours. In the light of this, it is not surprising that journalists are reluctant to investigate Uribe’s regime.

Even so, despite the danger to journalists, news of the Uribe regime and its role in Colombia’s human rights crisis does filter out. Last year in the US, Democrat Senators cited General Montoya’s alleged links to the death squads when freezing $50 million of US military aid to Colombia. And Al Gore, the former US vice president, recently refused to share a platform with President Uribe, reportedly because of concerns over allegations linking the Colombian leader to the paramilitaries.

It appears, then, that the political tide in the US is turning against wholehearted support for Uribe’s regime and that if the Democrats win the presidency, the US policy towards Colombia might come under review.

Changing policy

In Britain powerful voices within the Labour party have already called on our own government to change its policy towards Colombia. The campaign to end British military assistance now has the support of more than half of Labour MPs, as well as the entire British trade union movement, every Labour MEP and the majority of Labour’s ruling NEC. Last year, the international human rights organisation Human Rights Watch congratulated Justice for Colombia for publishing a statement during the 2007 Labour conference, calling for a suspension of UK military aid to Colombia on human rights grounds.

It is worrying then that the British government is refusing to listen. A letter of January 2008 from JFC to the foreign secretary, David Miliband, requesting that the government investigate over 30 assassinations carried out in recent months by Colombian soldiers who may have received British military training, remains unanswered.

And in an outrageous twist to the UK’s relationship with Colombia, in March this year Kim Howells accused JFC of supporting the FARC guerrilla group. While Howells was forced to retract his comments after being roundly condemned, with a number of unions calling on Gordon Brown to sack him if he didn’t, such ill-informed remarks could put at risk the lives of those trade unionists, journalists and human rights defenders involved in projects supported by JFC.

Instead of smearing groups working towards peace and social justice in Colombia, the UK government should listen to calls for change and rethink its policy. It should by no means disengage. Rather, instead of funding the perpetrators of the continuing slaughter in Colombia, Britain should start playing a positive role by switching funding from military aid to humanitarian projects. We could begin by joining our EU partners who are already involved in the search for a peaceful solution to Colombia’s conflict. After 60 years of civil war it is clear that only a politically mediated rather than a military solution will bring about peace.

Jeremy Dear is the chair of Justice for Colombia (JFC) www.justiceforcolombia.org

For one of the best analyses of the political complexities of Colombia, see ‘Colombia: Inside the Labyrinth’ by Jenny Pearce (Latin America Bureau, 1990)

By Jeremy Dear

The unions should be at the fucking centre of it, driving the movement for social justice, igniting the connection between global solidarity, trade unions and what goes on in your workplace and community. If we”re not doing that, what are we here for?” Geoff Martin, lead organiser at Battersea and Wandsworth TUC (BWTUC) is always passionate about the fight for social justice – whether it’s in the workplaces of south London, the sweatshops of Bangladesh or the towns and cities of Palestine and Colombia.

Geoff is part of a team that has dared to put its principles into practice, demonstrating a sense of innovation and campaigning zeal that led Britain’s original Thatcherite council, the London borough of Wandsworth, to dub the BWTUC “the real opposition”.

The BWTUC, my local trades council, is different. It established 20 years ago the Workers Beer Company, which mobilises 3,000 young people every year to work behind the bars at festivals like Glastonbury. It owns and runs the Bread and Roses pub in Clapham. It employs union organisers to run its high street organising centre in Tooting. It has worked with the GMB to establish the fair trade clothing brand Ethical Threads. And in the past two years it has launched Glastonbury’s Left Field – an attempt to bring trade unionism to a new audience.

Geoff explains what sets the BWTUC apart. “We have an advantage in that we”ve been able to use money from the Workers Beer Company, but more importantly we have ideas and commitment.

“Our movement is crying out for a way to engage young people, who often see us as dusty and boring. We”re proving there’s a different way.

“If someone has the principles to be buying fair-trade coffee, then surely they ought also to be a member of a trade union and taking those principles into their workplace. Our initiatives are providing a link between solidarity in the workplace, the community and internationally.”

Fellow BWTUC worker Aiden Grimes insists theirs is not a “freak operation”. “If the trade union movement diverted just 2-3 per cent of its resources down to building vibrant local organisations it would reap the benefits. In many ways it is a failure of imagination.”

The BWTUC can point to a long list of successes. It was the BWTUC that forced the council to build more affordable housing in the borough. Currently, it is seeking a judicial review of the failure of developers to provide sufficient affordable homes at the new Battersea Power Station development. It is the trades council that commissioned and publicised a major report into corporate killers (it picketed local employers as part of the campaign). Its Workers Beer server teams at Glastonbury and other festivals are increasingly made up of local activists. Many of these mainly young people go on to become active in other campaigns (such as the recent FBU solidarity group).

As Martin says: “It is not just about coming to Glastonbury but about getting involved. Who else mobilises 3,000 young people every year and exposes them to so many political campaigns? Once people have worked they are on our mailing list and are sent information about industrial disputes, the anti-war movement and so on. By working they have raised £2m for grassroots campaigns. Through all this we can prove the relevance of trade unions to younger people.

“There is a turnaround in the unions, with the election of more left-wingers, which shows we”re winning the industrial arguments, showing we understand it’s not about cutting deals with the bosses or government. But we”re missing a trick if we don”t roll that out into other areas – education, cultural, political activity.

“We are building this trades council into an effective political operation, building an activist base, helping educate people to take on a workplace and community role. We are giving people a sense of their own power to go out and effect change. In that sense anyone can do it.”

Saving Glastonbury from the music industry

By Geoff Martin

We set out to nail the lie that young people aren”t interested in politics and the trade union principles of collective strength and support. We saw ourselves as the heirs to the radical cutting edge of the Glastonbury Festival – an edge some cynics suggested had been lost in recent years.

This year was our second. Last year was about establishing the Left Field, this year about building on it. With the support of the Co-operative Bank and insurance groups and the Workers Beer Company, we were able to pump up the scale of the Left Field.

With Derbyshire offshoot Clause IV in the production hot seat we delivered what many regarded as the best presented area anywhere at Glastonbury. We”re proud we achieved this from within the ranks of the trade union movement.

Anti-Nazi League spin-off Love Music Hate Racism programmed the first night. The Left Field was jammed and got off to a flying start. The next day was filled with debates, visuals, music and the launch of the Roadcrew Provident Syndicate (RPS) – a GMB section designed to represent bands” roadies. The RPS was driven by Billy Bragg and Asian Dub Foundation tour manager Andy James.

Later that evening we screened the first ever showing of The Last Night London Burned, a film celebrating Joe Strummer’s last ever London gig, and a benefit for striking firefighters. Bill Spiers from the STUC and Davey Patton from the FBU came to speak and ended up immersed in the spirit of Glastonbury. Both have offered to come back as stewards next year.

At the base of the War on Want-supported Left Field tower, the union recruitment campaign was generating huge interest. The “My boss is a bastard because…” banner was filling up with workplace horror stories and, in many cases, good old gratuitous abuse at the bosses” expense.

Tony Benn made a triumphant return on Saturday, and was joined by Bianca Jagger for the “Blood for Oil” debate. Tony later performed his musical set – The Writing on the Wall – with Roy Bailey. Mark Thomas, Mark Steele and others helped punch the Left Field message home in fine style.

Mark Thomas homed in on the sex workers’ union banner, saying that he couldn”t wait until it pulled a national strike and the army were called up to stand in for them.

The deadly serious nature of union activity was reinforced by Francisco Ramirez from the Colombian Miners” Union. He spoke about the routine assassination of trade unionists in Colombia by right-wing death squads. And comrades from Justice for Colombia toured the Glasto site in paramilitary gear, explaining what was going down in Colombia.

Come Sunday, Asian Dub Foundation came over from the main stage to DJ for us and Billy Bragg gave it full throttle to the approval of a packed tent and the NUJ crew staffing the bar. The Ethical Threads outlet, selling nothing but shirts from ethical sources, sold out.

So what’s the message? It’s not just that we”re capable of running and programming a main stage at Glastonbury; it’s that there are ways the Labour movement can reach out to the young people that we need to take us forward into the future. We”ve shown it can be done, and there are ready takers who want to get involved. Young members’ sections in a number of unions are already working with us to develop the Left Field idea and spread it wider.

We need resources to take this on to the next level. The demographics of trade union membership are there for all of us to see. We need to address this issue.