Why Phone Hacking Could Save Britain From Going Bust

Back in 2007 all was good in the world, or so we thought. But from what I can understand: some American banks had been lending money to some Mexicans to buy houses, and the sub-prime mortgage market was born. Keen not to miss out on this stupidity, British banks then bought those bad debts from the Americans and sold them to each other. Then when the Mexican who was earning about $5 an hour couldn't pay his $500,000 mortgage, the worlds banking system collapsed. Then the prime minister of Britain at the time, Gordon Brown, decided he would make sure all his friends in the City would still get their pensions, and borrowed about £800 million from the Chinese and bailed the banks out. The result was a big fat recession.

Or was it? If you read the papers in 2008 around the time of the Lehman's collapse, they'd have you believing things were going to be about thirty times worse than the great depression of the thirties. Every so called expert in the financial world of London was predicting Armageddon. But it just didn't arrive. Certainly not to anywhere near the extent of what the papers were saying it would.

Before the financial downturn many people in the UK were paying mortgages of between 6-8% on massively overpriced properties. I myself couldn't afford to move to a bigger house. But then the crash that was supposed to end the world came, and the Bank of England slashed it's interest rates. Suddenly homeowners were paying almost half the amount for their mortgage. House prices dropped, which allowed thousands to move home. People were working less hours so they had more time to spend with their families and enjoy some leisure time with the extra money they had in their pockets. Many of the people made redundant that were unhappy in their jobs for years, started their own business. But did the papers report it like this? Of course not. They wrote headlines about national debt and how our grandchildren's grandchildren would still be paying it off.

The media use headlines to scare people all the time. When bird flu was being spread the media reported it in such an extreme way the financial institutes of London had emergency headquarters arranged in the English countyside. Swine flu was the same. That was a classic. Blanket coverage on every 24 hour news channel had the N.H.S set up a help line that people phoned and said they had a headache and felt a bit hot, and the call centre worker on the other end of the phone gave them a week off work! It was amazing how many people got swine flu on a monday morning.

My point is, newspapers and the media in general only get excited over bad news. If B.M.W creates a thousand jobs it'll receive about four lines on page 17 of a paper and be announced just before the weather on the six o'clock news. If Jaguar layoff 200 workers it's front page material and the leading story at 6pm. Which is why the phone hacking story is a god send that may save us from a recession.

Phone hacking, for me, is just not important enough to dominate the news channels for three weeks. It obviously has it's sad and dark elements. Listening to a missing girls voicemails and giving her family false hope that she's alive is beyond contempt. But other than that, I don't care whether Hugh Grant or Gordon Brown had their phones hacked. But because these so called celebrities and politicians are so obsessed with themselves, that's all we've read and heard about. The left wing Labour party have become fixated on destroying Rupert Murdoch, a man who employs over 50,000 people worldwide. Ed Milliband, the leader of the opposition, is determined to make the Prime Minister apologise for remaining loyal to his friend, Andy Coulson, a man who hasn't even been charged with a crime yet, let alone found guilty. And while they concentrate on these important issues, the small matter of Europe ceasing to trade is passing them by.

The Euro as a currency could cease to exist within days. America could miss a debt payment for the first time and go into meltdown. Millions of people in Africa could die of starvation. But what do a 127 MPs want to ask the prime minister about in an emergency session of the House of Commons? Phone hacking of course. That's right. Never in the long history of parliament have so many MP's had a chance to ask a PM a question, and all they talk about is that.

But you see, that's good, because most people in Britain will be walking around blissfully unaware that the western world could be about to go into financial meltdown. Because all they've heard about for three weeks is Rupert Murdoch and his evil empire, and how the nasty man wants to rule the world, and how he personally knew people were hacking into the voicemails of crap actors, singers and politicians. Which is, of course, complete and utter non-sense.

So where usually in this sort financial climate the media would be whipping people into a blind panic that things are going to get so bad and we're all going to be so poor that we'll have to eat our own parents just so we don't starve to death, they are of course concentrating on the breaking news that: The police are corrupt; journalists sometimes tell lies; and politicians sometimes make the wrong decisions. Old news that may just keep us out of a nasty old mess.