George W Bush has joined not a few of the world leaders at a sporting event in Beijing. He takes the opportunity to make a fierce attack on China’s human rights record. Which is bad.

But he does it in the week when the world is wondering not about the human rights record of the China of a few years ago.

They have on the news the results of America’s abuse of human rights at Guanatimo Bay. After several years of detention the US has brought their first case, against the man who is guilty of being Osama bin Laden’s chaffeur.

Although the Americans have been using tortures, like water boarding. As if detention itself were not a sufficient incentive to get people to confess in order to get out of their prision.

I am not a fan of China present, or of much of China past. But America has a substantially good human rights record, which has been soiled by George W Bush.

The present threat from China is not violations of human rights, regrettable though they are.

It is the fact that China, in its imitation of American consumer capitalism, is the biggest threat to global warming.

The cheap consumer items which they produce, which are selling so well in Western democracies, are produced by an economy which creating more smog than any other country.

That is what George W Bush should have been saying this week.

But of course he could not take that line. Because his own supporters are also high on the list of those who are moving the planet to global warming. And they don’t want to change their habits.

Because it will affect their profits.

China today is not the China of the Buddhist philiosophers. Or the Marxists like Mao. It is the China who learnt from Richard Nixon that they could become respectable members of the world community if only they started behaving like American consumer capitalists.

Which lesson they have learnt.

……despite what you read, listen to, or see, on the media. He has simply moved his place of work to a beach in East Anglia, which is British, but as British as roast beef. Not New Labour. Definitely not old labour. Definitely Conservative, with a few Lib Dems.

And, instead of refreshing himself, and doing some serious thinking, he is spending his time planning his relaunch. And, even while on holiday, taking lots of new initiatives.

He is trying to get out of the hole he is in. But by digging. So the more he does, the deeper he gots buried in the mud.

If he was on a real holiday, he would be getting away from it all. And finding some healing from the savage wounds he has suffered from the media, the Labour Party, and increasingly his own colleagues.

Because much of what is happening is not his fault. Both the US, New Labour’s favourite ally, and Britain, are facing a nasty recession. Which harms Labour voters, but much more than those Tory voters, who have bumped up their salaries to astronomical levels, under the rule of Blair and Brown.

Brown needs time for reflection. But he is so charged up, that he is not reflecting.

And is his holiday resort he is not moved to do anything else.

Southwold is a pleasant place. But it is not very exciting. And it is not breath-takingly beautiful.

It is the sort of place the comfortably off middle classes used to holiday in the days before EasyJet.

If Brown had gone to Blackpool, he might have been able to lose himself on the Big Digger.

And he might have met a few Labour voters, who would tell him where he has gone wrong.

Yesterday it rained. This morning there is a thick mist so that I cannot see much further than the end of the drive. I wake from a dream in which I am wondering whether I shall be able to stick another ten years teaching journalism at City University. Which takes me back in time about nineteen years.

Depressed about journalism. Does it really ever find out anything? Remember a lack lustre item on BBC Newsnight last night. Gavin Esler was doing an item about who Barack Obama and John McCain would choose for their Vice President.

As the interviews dragged on it became abundantly clear that sleuths of Newsnight had absoluely no idea of the answers. Reminded me of those days on The Times when I have spent the whole day on the telephone and no-one has told me anything at all interesting. But the deadline is approaching and there is an empty space to fill in tomorrow’s paper.

Esler himself seems pretty depressed, so much so that he moves the discussion to whether it matters who the Vice President is, with some clips of former Vice Presidents, some of whom are forgotten, like Gerald Ford, even though he went on to President himself for a few months. And Richard Nixon, who went on to become the most disgraceful US President of my lifetime.

But Esler did ask one interesting question: Why was Obama only neck and neck in the US polls? Following his recent tour he has attracted a huge following in Europe. He answered the question himself, by noting that most recent elections have been close.

True. But not a very convincing answer. Two months ago, when Hillary Clinton  was still fightingObama for Democratic candidature, the polls were indicating a Democratic landslide.

None of the journalist pundits has explained why the Democratic lead has been whittled away to nothing. Most of the Clinton supporters do appear to have shifted to Obama.

Two months ago there was a lot of discussion about whether America was ready to elect a black President or a female President. These are the kind of questions which neither journalists nor opinion pollsters can get reliable answers to.

Far too many people lie in their answers. Even to themselves.

We shall have to wait until the morning of the fifth of November before we know whether the American electorate is ready to elect a black President. But maybe journalists can make a useful contribution by keeping the discussion going.

The sky is still all grey. But the mist has lifted a bit. I can now see the horizon. The traffic is moving on the A35 and the workman have arrived to work on my drive. So something might be achieved today.

Quite suddenly, in the last few days, David Miliband has become a serious possible contender for the job of leading Labour into the next election. Which according to the pollsters is an election they are likely to lose.

The media coverage has escalated to an astonishing degree, even to me who has spent a lot of his life actually reading the newspapers. Miliband’s article for The Guardian last week, is now deconstructed as a plot by the Blairites of New Labour to overthrow the Brownites.

There is supposed to be a Milibandwagon. But none of the newspapers, working overtime managed to unearth any evidence of that. Most cabinet ministers and most party activists, when telephoned by journalists, warned of the danger of Labour changing its leader.

The Mail on Sunday, however, as I reported in yesterday’s blog, dredged up a Blair memo written nine months ago trashing Brown’s destruction of everything he had done for Britain and the British Labour Party.

The Mail reported that Miliband had had regular telephone conversations with Blair recently. The implication was that Miliband was wanting to overthrow Brown because he was reversing Blairism. The Mail gave no evidence of those conversations, let alone reporting what Blair and Miliband said to each other.

But if you read what Miliband actually said in his Guardian article it was not so much a complaint that Brown was not continuing the Blair path, it was the opposite.

Here is the key quote from The Guardian article.

Every member of the Labour party carries with them a simple guiding mission on the membership card: to put power, wealth and opportunity in the hands of the many, not the few.

Miliband is urging not that Brown be more like Blair. He is urging Labour to remember what it stands for as a politiccal party. His argument against Brown, who had solid Labour roots is not that he is reversing Blair’s policies, but that he is following them.

And Brown, like Blair before him, is totally ignoring the effect of their policies, jointly decided. Their joint rule hugely increased the inequalities of wealth and priviledge. Since Tony Blair came to power in 1997 the personal wealth held by the top 10 per cent of the population has swelled from 47 per cent to 54 per cent. This is a huge increase.

And now Britain, like the US is facing a recession, it is an obscenity for a Labour leader not to make a serious attempt to revserse this trend.

Milband, in his Guardian article, is suggesting Newer Labour needs to address this.

But of course the myth of Blair/Brownism is that Labour can only become electable if it cowtows to the fat cats with their ever increasing salaries. Miliband is challenging that myth.

In doing this he is in a somewhat similar position to Margaret Thatcher, when she ousted Ted Heath as Conservative Party leader. She won, not because of a plot. Although she had some close friends like Sir Keith Joseph and the far right Institute of Economic Affairs, she was essentially going on her own instincts. She refused to believe that Conservatives who embraced the bloody, survival of the fittest, capitalist policies, were unelectable. And she was proved right.

For a few years.

Today, we are faced with a mirror image of the Thatcher era. The notion that Labour is unelectable, unless it allows the greedy to earn huge salaries and get away with not paying tax on them.

Miliband is, maybe, challenging this myth.

I say, maybe, because I have not actually met him.

I cannot be sure that his is challenging what is happening for the right reasons.

But I do know enough to realise that much of the media stuff written about him is tosh.

He got into Oxford, so they say, because of influence. He had two D levels in his A levels.

This says a whole lot about our examination system.

Because it is evident to anyone who has listened to him, or read any of his speeches, that he is far more intelligent than the average.

He was schooled not at Eton, ilke David Cameron, but at Haverstock School, which was supposed to provide a brilliant education for whoever who went there, be they working class Irish immigrants, or sons and daughters of the intellectuals in the neighbourhood.

Since it was in my neighbourhood, I know it well. It was in no sense a bad school, but it was not orchestrated to seeing ‘good’ education as getting the largest percentage into university.

So I am awaiting to see Miliband shapes out. It is obivous to me, that he is vastly more intelligent than the average.

My qualification about him has been that most of what he writes and says is far too cerebal. In the language of the posh folks he met at Oxford.

It is unsurprising that he is cerebal, since his Dad was a noted Marxist philosopher. Not old Labour or new Labour, but someone who had studied Karl Marx and found that some of what he had to say was relevent to the world in which we live now, although Marx died before the Daily Mail’s Northcliffe, and Pulitzer and Hertz in the US had invented the mass media.

So if Miliband does go forward I will be looking at his education policies.

Blair and Brown have been pushing people into Academies dominated by wealthy businessmen. So that they can balance the budget and avoid the unpopular policies af asking for more taxes, from the rich and the not so rich.

Because in the idiot world in which we live, the super rich pay less tax than the middle classes.

According to Toynbee and Walker at least 32 of the UK 54 billionaires paid NO TAX AT ALL.

This is written on the day the Mail on Sunday splashed with the publication of an ‘astonishing secret memo’ written by Tony Blair to close colleagues. Here are the first few paragraphs.

Tony Blair has delivered a savage attack on Gordon Brown in a secret memo accusing him of playing into David Cameron’s hands by his ‘lamentable’ and ‘vacuous’ performance as Prime Minister.

The former Prime Minister boasts that Mr Cameron was ‘in trouble’ before he resigned a year ago.

And he claims Mr Brown’s incompetence has made the Tories look like the party of the future and on course to win the next Election.

No-one has suggested this memo is a forgery, like some of the sensational scoops the Mail has carried in the past. But you do not have to be a journalist to doubt whether this was really worth making the main story.

When you get to paragraph thirteen you discover that the memo was actually written nearly a year ago, shortly after the Labour Party Conference. And the label ’secret’ is clearly un-justified. It was a private memo written to close colleagues, and, even ex-Prime Ministers are entitled to write to close colleagues without being accused of plotting.

But you don’t discover that before you read this paragraph.

The bombshell disclosure comes as it emerged that Mr Blair has had regular talks with his close friend and political ally, Foreign Secretary David Miliband, who challenged Mr Brown’s leadership last week.

All the press agrees that Miliband challenged Brown’s leadership last week. The Mail slant implies that Miliband only jumped after talks with Blair. Entirely likely that Blair talks to Miliband. But no hard evidence about what they talking about.

The Mail has two accompanying stories.

The screaming headline one is:

Can Gordon win? Only 16 of the 22 Cabinet Ministers say yes

The story starts with saying that six cabinet ministers believe he should go. But hey, wait a minute. What about the sixteen who told the Mail that he should stay?

The second story is headlined:

1 in 3 say Brown is worst PM … and half say he must go now

Just how this poll was conducted is not clear, but it is not out of line with many opinion polls in the last few weeks.

In another story the Daily Mail reports that:

Senior ministers rally around PM as government heads towards meltdown

This story reports that three senior ministers, Alastair Darling, Harriett Harman and John Denham, have declared their support for Gordon Brown. It does not say that this news was announced in an article they did for the News of the World, part of the Murdoch press.

But my first point in this article, is that the Daily Mail is giving its readers real news, at the same time as doing its best to sell newspapers, which it has been doing since 1894, but that it also does, what its first proprietor, Lord Northcliffe started, covering the news in a style and language accessible to newly literate masses.

The Daily Mail still subscribes to the myth of journalism, including the split between ‘fact’ and ‘comment’. But the way it presests ‘fact’ is stongly influenced by its ownership and its long history of supporting ‘middle’ England.

Rupert Murdoch has a similar agenda. This morning his serious Sunday paper had a different slant to today’s news. Here, I was going to quote from their poll of Labour chairman which showed them hugely in favour of Brown.

But it has disappeared from the web page.

Maybe Rupert has been making one of his telephone calls.

Times Online has many articles about the Labour leadership battle. Including one from heavy-weight columnist, Daniel Finkelstein, on why the leaked memo matters. And another story which suggests Brown is summoning his ministers to be back from their hols by September 1st.

The sum total of these articles is that The Times thinks there is a leadership crisis. And for Murdoch watchers like myself, Murdoch has not yet made up his mind what to do. So The Times reminds us that Ed Miliband, David’s brother is allegedly a Brownite.

So we should not trust The Times stable, nor the Mail stable.

So how about The Guardian. They were the newspaper which published the article by David Miliband last week, which created the media splurge today. They are owned by a trust but, since real life is never simple, they are managed by a highly successful commercial management. Today, they had a heavy weight article by Andrew Rawnsley in The Observer, which left this reader in no doubt that he thinks Brown is for the high jump. Whereas Michael White, one of The Guardian’s most respected political correspondents, was on the broadcast media, warning against the Labour Party pursuing a probably suicidal leadership battle.

This is just a sample of the press comment, and I have not included the broadcast media, but what they have reported fits in with the following analysis.

Nearly all the journalists reporting for the diversely owned media today treated this story seriously. Although we are in the ’silly season’ of August, when the papers are supposedly full of stories about cats stuck in the roofs of churches, this story is not just about filling the gaps between the adverts.n

There is a crisis in the Labour leadership. And this needs reporting on, although most of the principal characters in the drama have gone on holiday. (But they are still reading their emails, reading the newspapers, watching the tele and talking to their colleagues.)

All of the journalists have to make a story out of what is happening. So much of what has been reported today is skewed to the journalistic convention of finding plots and fitting what is happening now, into the ’story’ of the Blair/Brown rift, which has run throughout Labour’s rule since 1997.

Two points.

Miliband’s article for The Guardian last week, was not an orchestrated plot. Neither was Thatcher’s emergence as Labour Party leader, although some of her friends were right-wing plotters, wanting to vanish Edward Heath.

Second point. The split between the Blairites and Brownites, is yesterday’s story. Today new alliances are forming to meet today’s circumstances.

Milband is mostly characterised as a Blairite. Athough he is the son of a Marxist theorist, unlike Blair, who was the son of a Conservative. He is roughly the same generation as Blair, and like Blair went to Oxford. But he is totally different in personality. His political views are far closer to those espoused by Brown before he assumed power.

He is still a long way from proving that he can do better than Brown in reaching the hearts of the voters, be they Labour Party activists or Daily Mail middle England.

But because he has raised his head above the ramparts, while still holding his position as Foreign Secretary, he has made a difference. Brown should sack him. But I don’t think he will, because Miliband is voicing the thoughts of many Labour Party supporters.

And, my own view, is that he is doing so, because he is trustworthy politician. He may be ambitious, but I don’t think, that his current stance is all about personal ambition.

And, to return to the theme of this article, I don’t think Milband, and most of the other Labour Party politicians, are more, or less trustworthy, than the journalists, be they employed by The Guardian, the Mail or Rupert Murdoch.

The heavy-weight journalists and the politicians have similar skills, and the fact that some of them became journalists and some of them became politicians is an accident of their own personal biographies. At this point in my blog I was about to use William Rees Mogg, the editor of The Times for whom I worked in the the sixties and the seventies.

Mogg, because he is an honest journalist, has been outspoken about his own personal motivations. He has written about how he wanted to be a politician, but after failing to win a seat, realised that it becoming a journalist was a more realistic way of earning a living. I thought I had better check what he had to say about the Labour Party leadership before I wrote anything.

His latest article, in The Times of 28 July, had this headline.

Labour should choose Hillary, not Obama

If Gordon Brown goes, Harriet Harman should take over. Only a woman can change the climate of political debate

The headline makes Mogg seem like an out-of-touch idiot. As if he had not heard by 28th July that Hillary is now ancient history. If you follow the link and read his article, you will see that it is a reasoned argument for Labour to have the courage to support a female leader, namely Harriet Harman.

Although Mogg has been on the Murdoch payroll since shortly after he stepped down as Times editor after Lord Thomson sold The Times to Rupert Murdoch, this is clearly not an article written at the dictation of Rupert Murdoch.

It is vintage Mogg. Blending his powers of analysis with his private passions. And revealing his own personal voyage through life. His mother sent him to Charterhouse to be with the boys, and so learn to be a man. But William, when he was Times editor was prepared to go out on a limb and support women in public life (and rock stars like Mick Jagger).

So this article ends in a way I did not expect.

I asked the wrong question in my title. Perhaps because I am almost as old as Rees Mogg.

My thinking is steeped in the conflicts of the media as in Baldwin’s phrase, ‘power without responsibility’.

But the important question is where does the power lie with today’s media?

Is it with the newspaper groups who employ most of the world’s journalists, who actually write the stuff? And who earn their profits from old-fashioned print.

Or is it with the new media lot, like Google and WordPress?

Today, the old media is pouring shit on both Brown and Miliband. But both of them, as it happens, have been spending time and money trying to get their message over via the new meda.

Their efforts look amateurish. Unsurprsingly because the old media pay the mortgages of most of the experienced journalists.

But the old media is floundering. How long can the reputation of The Times survive, when Times Online puts up the kind of headlines they used today on Rees-Mogg’s effort?

Gordon Brown is the Nero of the twenty-first century. As Prime Minister he has been limiting his ministers to two minutes of his time. While seeking to keep in power by developing his own website.

I discovered this, when I voyaged to Birmingham last weekend for the first UK WordCamp, which was a conference organised by UK users of WordPress, which is the computer program I use for my blog.

Once there I discovered that Brown was relying on WordPress to reverse the dreadful verdict of the opinion polls and the by-elections. This is the sneak preview of the Gordon Brown website.

Poor Gordon has been overtaken by events. So his website connecting him to the electorate is unlikely ever to get under way. His own foreign secretary has diverted the headlines, by saying, what most Labour Party members have been saying for months, Gordon Brown has lost the plot.

But Miliband, who equals in his callow youthfulness, both David Cameron of the Conservatives and Nick Clegg of the Liberal Democrats, is even more fervant in his embrace of WordPress and the internet age.

He pioneered his own blog as Foreign Secrectary. He has yet to learn that it is no substitue for talking to the electorate.

If he does that, he may win the hearts of Labour supporters, because the policies he is arguing for, are in line with Labour thinking.

Unlike Blair and Brown who have sold out to American consumer capitalism. Which is not the only way of running the world. As Barack Obama knows, but may not say too often, because he is not yet President.

Gordon Brown wants to start his blog to get votes. He does not realise that he lost the support of Labour voters, not because of his famed difficulty in dealing with human beings, but because his policies have have been much too kind to the privildged classes.

David Miliband realises this and has put forward an agenda which any Labour voter could adhere to. This is the crux of it.

Every member of the Labour party carries with them a simple guiding mission on the membership card: to put power, wealth and opportunity in the hands of the many, not the few.

That is what Labour voter vote for. And that is what Milband needs to embrace if he wants to lead the Labour Party.

Many of these Labour voters do not have computers.

He needs to talk to them.

This blog reflects my rage about the computer age which has happened during my lifetime.

I totally failed to to get on my website, my video clip of the Riverside Jazzers, who do not have a web site, though they play very decent jazz.

Which is a great pity. Because, jazz was the music of protest, by America’s blacks, born into a country which said any humble citizen could inhabit the White House. (even a black!).

But their daily reality was very different. Most blacks found it not easy to earn enough to live, let alone give their children a decent education. But Louis Armstrong and Ellah Fitzgerald, and many others, showed what the blacks could do.

In August, 2008, this is for the first time a realistic possibility. Barack Obama may become President next November.

But that is by no means certain. And America is not yet sure that it wants to take the risk. Because in America the power is held by whites not blacks.

It should not make a difference.

But it does.

In my new life in the country I did, yesterday, what English country folk have been doing for centuries, paid my respects to the Lord of the Manor at Forde Abbey. And, also of course, taking advantage of the opportunity to roam his estate and goggle at his house and the contents. This being the twenty-first century the Lord did not provide all this largesse for free. The occasion is now called an Open Day and you pay when you go into the car park. The proceeds go to the farmers’ benevolent society, because in 2008 land-owning in the country more likely to yield a loss than a profit. The real money is made in the city and on the web; the farmers are not much richer than the peasants. And in constant danger of going bankrupt if they get their sums wrong.

The present owner of Forde Abbey is not even a Lord. He is plain Mr Roper, but a gentleman, who is concerned to maintain his inheritance and also do his bit for people living in the country. It is not an easy job but we should not weep for him too much, because as you can see from the pic at the top, he is not short of space to put up his relatives and friends and he is living in a pad, which Prince Charles might give his kingdom for. It is built in the style of architects he loves, like Inigo Jones. Much more substantial than Norman Foster with his wobbly bridges.

It was a great day. But, at this point, I should come clean. I went because it was a dreary rainy day, and my concern was to keep the grand-children amused.

Mr Roper delivered. There was Punch and Judy, cut short by a particularly heavy shower, but replayed later. There were lots of dogs and some donkeys. And a display by drum majorettes, for those childern who watch too much US television. There was a brilliant falconer, who is also finding it hard work to adapt to the modern age.

As you can see from my pic, his son, whom he wants to continue the family tradition, looks quite as much at a loss as the owl, which took his father years to train.

The display of old cars by the Taunton lot was a great hit with at least one of the fathers, as you can see from another pic below.

The cream teas, alas, were sadly lacking in cream and the scones tasted more like Macdonalds than Devon, Dorest or Somerset.

But my day was made by the Riverside Jazzers, see video clip below, if it works.

In conclusion, I should give you a few facts.

Forde Abbey was created in the twelth century, not by American consumer capitalism, but by the Cistercian monks, in one of those periods of history when God and Mamon worked together in perfect harmony. At that time the monks owned the whole of Charmouth, including the land on which my bungalow stands.

The British yeoman families who grabbed the lands in the years after Henry VIII had freed us from the Papal yoke lost much of it by supporting the wrong side, when the Duke of Monmouth challenged James II in 1685.

That’s ancient history.

But it lives with us now.

New Labour, which was governed by Tony Blair, whose politics were decided by his wife, a convinced socialist and also a Roman Catholic. Blair soon and very happily made his peace with American consumer capitalism, and later with Roman Catholicism and the Pope.

His successor, Gordon Brown, who was of the Scottish protestant heritage, has made a terrible mess of things. Historically he is on the side of Monmouth, who fought the kingdom of James II, who was a Catholic. But in power, as the main ally and boss of economics for Tony Blair, he befriended American consumer capitalism.

He took power, when Blair reluctantly resigned, just at the time when American consumer capitalism was in dire trouble. The poorish American people who have followed it, and bought their own homes on mortgages which they cannot afford to pay, are in trouble. As is the US economy.

So the US wants a change from George W Bush. The UK wants a change from Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. And the world most definitely wants a change from Bush/Blair/Brown.