'There is something really quite worrying happening to Britain. We now have the most draconian state surveillance powers ever devised hanging over the entire population. Just six billionaires now run over 80 percent of the media where true editorial independence simply doesn’t exist and where corporate advertising revenue leads to censorship of their awful behaviour. Internet service providers and search engines now have the power to censor any information at will and given the scale of complaints globally by independent media outlets, they are using that capability to the full. In the meantime, the British government continues its assault on press freedom and by implication – democracy itself. There’s a reason.
We have known for years that the British intelligence services manipulate the press. Roy Greenslade, who has been a media specialist for both the Telegraph and the Guardian, said: “Most tabloid newspapers – or even newspapers in general – are the playthings of MI5.”
What is worse though than blatant propaganda is that press freedom in the UK is plummeting and doing so by design. This is confirmed by the fact that the UK has fallen two places to 40th out of 180 countries, down 12 places in the past five years alone. We lag well behind countries such as Ghana (26th), Namibia (24th) and Surinam (20th). At this rate, Tonga and even Botswana will be ahead of Britain in just two years time! In one example, the Botswana government stands accused of conducting a vicious cyberattack last year against an independent newspaper that destroyed more than a decade’s worth of its archived data. Botswana also remains without access to information laws and press freedom and neither is guaranteed in its constitution. But Botswana will have more press freedom than Britain does soon.'
Read more: Draconian State Surveillance: Britain’s Falling Press Freedom Tells of Another Disturbing Story
