The big story of the parliamentary inquiries, I suspect, will not be the Murdochs squirming.  It will be the appearance of senior police officers and News International employees who are much more directly exposed in all this.  There is something symmetrical and appropriate about the criminal relationship between the police and the corporate media.  Is it that both are so innately venal and reactionary from top to bottom that it's hard to tell who is corrupting whom?  Is it that the power of both has been sharply enhanced in the era since 1979?  Or is it just that they complement one another in the respective forms of politicised class power that they wield?  Could it be that, as an ideological power, the Murdoch press took it upon itself to engage in moralised coercion?  Or that, as a coercive power, the police and criminal justice system have a clear moral and ideological function - think of the student protests, or 'black on black violence', the Islamophobic crackdowns, and all the way back to the suffragettes, etc.?  Is it that when the police wanted to target someone their evidence can't touch, they turn to the tabloids (remember News of the World's claims about the Koyair brothers); and when News International wanted to get an enemy (Sheridan) they turned to the police?  At any rate, as the scandal rolls on menacingly toward the Prime Minister, claiming scalps along the way, there is an opportunity to look into the usually opaque and secretive world of the ruling class, its forms of cohesion and coordination and, particularly, its ability to impregnate the state with its imperatives and priorities.  So, that's what we'll be doing all week at the Tomb.  Stay tuned.

I'll say it again. The disproportionate focus on the loss of jobs at News International misses the point. The loss of jobs is a story; it's not the story. To begin and end with jobs, to evaluate the closure of News of the World purely on that basis, as the Labour blogger Simon Hewitt does, is an extremely vulgar sort of reductionism. It does not rise to the level of political analysis and, in fact, is its own kind of moralism.

Let's briefly review what's at stake here. We have what is in many ways the vanguard of populist reaction, the Murdoch empire, implicated in a vast network of corruption and blackmail implicating policemen, editors, executives and so on. Front bench politicians are almost all compromised by the Murdoch clan, as they all rush to please the proprietor. The stable has played a prominent role in culture wars and class struggles, with the red-tops forming the sharp end of the wedge. For a number of years, an array of forces have worked to expose some of this, through the courts and parliamentary inquiries, and finally the cracks have coalesced and become a yawning quake at the heart of the Murdoch enterprise. Just when Murdoch thought his power in the British media was about to be further cemented with the BSKYB deal being rushed through by an administration that didn't even risk referring the case to the Competition Commission, a toxic scandal hit News of the World, the empire's flagship UK tabloid. The most profitable brand in UK newspaper market was irreparably tarnished, and advertisers began to flee. With the real risk that the police might be forced to take action, and the BSKYB deal might be permanently halted, Newscorp. acted in a drastic manner, sacrificing the tabloid limb to save the corporate patient. At the same time, it seems, they were busy destroying evidence - so they evidently expected to be hit hard.

That they had to do this certainly constitutes a defeat for Murdoch. And as such, unarguably, it is also a victory for all those forces who campaigned for a long time to bring about such a defeat. It's a victory enjoyed to some extent by the victims of the News of the World and the News International press. It's a victory for those against whom the Murdoch media's culture wars are directed. Perhaps you might argue that this is small beer and will make little difference. The Sun on Sunday will take its place, or Associated Newspapers will just get more readers, or something like that. Simon Hewitt argues, for example: "as long as we live in the kind of society we live in, we will have a pernicious press. Fostering the illusion that things could be otherwise is not worth livelihoods." This reminds one of Hegel's quip about the night in which all cows are black. There are degrees of perniciousness, and these degrees matter. It is not an illusion that things could be different and better even within the present capitalist production relations. More than that, it misses the deeper significance of this moment, which constitutes the beginnings of a comprehensive crisis in the class power of the capitalist media, with News of the World comprising the weak link in the chain.

The concentration of political, ideological and economic power in the Murdoch empire that has been in process has been part of the accumulation of class power by media corporations in the UK and beyond. Its disruption and modest reversal - and it could be much more than a modest reversal if the crisis spreads across the Atlantic - is in general a benefit for the working class, not least for media workers who lost massively from the rise of the Murdoch empire, especially after Wapping which enabled not just the destruction of the union, but also the spatial and technological re-organisation of newspaper work in such a way as to transfer ever more power to management's hands and subordinate labour. In the closure of News of the World is a specific political situation that condenses not just the prevalent antagonisms and crises in the media industry - which, faced with a crisis of profitability has resorted more and more to the sort of methods recently disclosed - but also a generalised crisis of authority for the state, from politicians to the police. All the newspapers who rely on such methods are now looking over their shoulders, however much they publicly crow about News of the World's downfall. The Star's offices have been raided, so both the Murdoch and Desmond group - the most vile, degraded end of the capitalist media - are implicated thus far. I doubt it can stop there. And the relationships between police, politicians and press executives - comprising a potent combination of state, capitalist and ideological power - are under scrutiny now. David Cameron looks in a very precarious position over this. In this light, I think any socialist who sees this purely or mainly as a jobs issue has seriously lost perspective. The situation is rich with materials for socialists to operate on, presenting a set of wide open opportunities. To reduce the political-ideological crisis to liberal hysteria and moral panic, as Hewitt does, is sub-Sp!ked contrarianism - Hewitt even adds the typical boring refrain that hatred for NotW (that uber-bourgeois institution) actually expresses class hatred toward workers, which prolier-than-thou rhetoric is familiar in defences of reactionary institutions of all kinds.

That said, how does one approach the loss of jobs in this circumstance? If what I've said above is true, I think it follows that any resistance on the part of those sacked should be supported. I must say, I think it's vanishingly unlikely that they will occupy or try to take over the means of production, though one may see some interesting graffiti in the last edition of the NotW. This is partly because I intuit that the workers are likely very divided - between the scum (I don't use this term lightly), the professionalised, well-paid journos, the lower paid staff, and the masses of temps who come and go. I would also guess that Newscorp headquarters are, like all major corporate headquarters, heavily securitised and surveilled, and that the police would be there in a flash to hammer any resistance. Still, if they do anything that calls for solidarity, they should get solidarity. This is not just because one should protect jobs at all costs, never cross a picket line, etc., but also centrally because the spread of any sort of militancy within the Murdoch media would accelerate the crisis in the mainstream media. You see, I think the truth is that a lot of newspapers that pose as sensible alternatives are actually surreptitious beneficiaries of what Murdoch has done. Not just because it makes them look half-sensible, not just because it normalised the grotesque, and allowed the broadsheets to latch on in an 'ironic' second-hand way to tittle tattle and eye candy, but because the transformation in the relations of class forces led by Murdoch shaped the whole industry and left all the owners more in control. Anything that looked like a strike or an occupation in the citadels of union-bashing would hit the whole media industry hard. Even if the demands were formally for the restoration of NotW, the process of actually making any gains would seriously abridge Murdoch's control, at a strategically opportune moment as well.

If there is no resistance, though, and if the workers do nothing to ask for solidarity or invite it - in short, if there turns out to be no practical way of expressing solidarity - then calls for solidarity operate purely at a moralistic level. And when Hewitt calls for solidarity (with the NUJ), it is clear that in practise this means little more than lamenting a situation that socialists and media workers should actually be taking advantage of. This could be the best thing that happened to the media in years.

There is a critique of capitalism, popularised by Joel Bakan, which says that it is psychopathic. That is, if corporations were judged as personalities (which in legal terms they are), they would be found to have all the traits of the psychopath. There is a similar critique of the capitalist media, which begins with an institutional analysis of media corporations as necessarily large profit-seeking enterprises that subsist chiefly through advertising revenue (companies selling rich audiences to other companies), and concludes that this media is a propaganda system that contributes to industries of death - imperialism, environmental destruction, capitalist predation, etc. That is, very crudely paraphrased, the Chomsky/Herman critique. One might, as a marxist, have legitimate qualms with 'institutionalist' analyses, especially if they lose sight of the antagonisms within the institutions they're describing, and the wider structuring role of such antagonisms in society as a whole. Nonetheless, these accounts have the advantage of a basic realism about the fact that predatory behaviour is not incidental to capitalism, but immanent to it.

On the face of it, this isn't the worst example of such behaviour. Compare with the torrent of lies that took us into Iraq, abetted by the civilised broadsheets. Compare with the routine publication of racist pulp fiction as news, or the endless propaganda about Haiti, or the Pravdaesque capitalist realism about the urgent need for social devastation in the form of austerity. Perhaps, one might conclude, this is exactly the sort of tale of a tabloid behaving badly story that the more respectable papers like because it makes them appear in a good light. And, however appalling it is, you might say, it's fairly trivial compared to the usual performance of the press. You may even observe that one person who would have good reason to breathe a sigh of relief over this is Johann Hari, whose petty bullshitting now looks sweet by comparison. I don't quite see it that way myself. I consider this story sinister down to the last detail. Not just the hacking of Milly Dowler's voicemails; not just listening in to every word spoken by a distressed relative; not just deleting messages when the inbox was full, to make space for more messages; but actually profiting from the brief moment of false hope when people thought that Milly Dowler must have deleted the messages herself and thus be alive, by sending hacks round to conduct an exclusive interview with the unaware family about their hopes. In a depraved way, they circled around the vulnerable, knowingly, cynically awaiting a moment of weakness, brazenly bleeding them dry when the opportunity presented itself, creating some of the torment that they then exploited.

And Surrey police allowed them to do it. They say they had other priorities, that there was a lot of dirty stuff going on. They couldn't even trust their own mobile phones for fear of being hacked, had evidence of News of the World openly breaking the law, and refused to move a muscle against them. As anyone who has followed the 'hacking' scandal knows, there is a long history of evidence of illegal behaviour by the News of the World which the police have refused to act over - doubtless unrelated to the cosy relationship enjoyed by Newscorps executives with senior police officers. The Metropolitan Police and the Crown Prosecution Service both declined to take up the extensive evidence of criminality. Not only that, but the politicians backed off from any parliamentary inquiry for fear that Murdoch's hacks would delve into their private lives. As a result, this vile organisation continues to be at liberty to not merely pump out toxic propaganda, which would not distinguish it, or defile the senses with endless vulgarisation and degradation, but actually wreck lives in quite a direct way. And the Murdoch empire continues to expand for as long as he doesn't run out of political allies.

It will never stop until there is a comprehensive popular rejection of the Murdoch press, and particularly its two staple tabloids. It will not stop until something like the post-Hillsborough boycott of The Sun in Liverpool is rolled out nationwide. This relevation ought to be the occasion for that.

Tommy Sheridan has been convicted of perjury and will now probably go to jail. The imprisonment of Sheridan was the only plausible result of this perjury trial. It was undoubtedly the one sought by police and by News of the World. It may not have been the result sought by members of the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) who helped to instigate the perjury case. And those who leaked and sold materials to the press may not have had prison in mind. But it is the logical and necessary result of their actions, and their vociferous expressions of relief at the verdict are notable. And it is a setback for the Scottish Left. To speak frankly, I do not see the SSP having much of a role in its repair, for all that it contains some immensely talented, charming and principled people.

The SSP was once the envy of the radical left. A thriving model of socialist unity in action. It was based significantly, perhaps too significantly, on the personal credentials of Tommy Sheridan, whose inspiring lead in resistance to the Poll Tax first gave him the stature he subsequently enjoyed. It was natural that when the tabloid press came after the SSP, they would focus on Sheridan. And as they could not attack him for his politics - or at least if they did it would make little difference - they tried to attack him over his personal life, his sexual conduct. Sheridan's response was to initiate libel proceedings. I think most of his defenders consider that this was a crazy thing to have done - the bourgeois courts are a risky terrain for socialists, in which the odds are almost always stacked against you. Nonetheless, he won the support of the majority of the party for his position, which was that the attack on Sheridan was an attack on the party. But the SSP executive panicked, forced him to resign as national convenor and indicated that they would not support him in his libel case.

As it transpired, not only did they not give him broad backing, they agreed to testify for News of the World. In justification, they claimed that Tommy Sheridan had no right to sue for libel because the allegations were true. They argued that he had no right to expect them to lie for him, and that he was putting his ego and his reputation ahead of the fortunes of the socialist left. But, even assuming that every word of the News of the World's claims were true (an assumption which I am only prepared to entertain for the sake of argument), and even if you believed that Sheridan's libel prosecution was a mistake, to actively assist the News of the World in court was not only unnecessary but self-destructive. It meant that, as witnesses on oath, they had an interest in seeing Sheridan lose and the Murdoch press win. It was always clear that a large part of the Left would consider this unforgiveable behaviour, a form of political scabbing, and that such actions would tear the hitherto united and growing socialist left in twain (twain at the very least). It is also now known, as a result of this perjury trial, that in addition to testifying for Murdoch, leading SSP member Alan McCombes secretly went to the Sunday Herald with a 'sworn affidavit' three days after Sheridan was deposed as party convenor, stating that if Sheridan had not resigned they would have "put certain information into the public domain which would have forced him to resign". This wasn't just comrades put in a difficult position. From the second the anti-Sheridan faction coagulated in the SSP executive, it pursued its quarry ruthlessly - a point that becomes more clear as time goes on.

When Sheridan won his libel case, the News of the World was out for blood. But the anti-Sheridan faction in the SSP was also overwrought. They immediately went on the offensive. In the wake of the case, numerous leading SSP members suddenly publicised their view that sexism had been rife in the SSP - though they had apparently failed to act on this belief until then. A former SSP activist wrote in The Guardian that the issue was about gender rather than class, and that Sheridan's victory was a victory for machismo. She alleged that Sheridan had used misogynistic language about SSP members, describing them as a "cabal of women". This misrepresented, perhaps intentionally, an open letter from Sheridan to members of the SSP which used the phrase "cabal of comrades". But it contributed to a political mythology, which is still propagated to this day, and which casts Sheridan as a misogynist.

And this has remained an important part of the SSP's rationalisations for their methods. The current issue of Scottish Socialist Youth, for example, revels in Sheridan's conviction and depicts him as a "mad shagger", and the sex clubs he allegedly visited as tantamount to brothels - thus he is characterised as a macho prick, availing himself of (what some would see as) some of the worst forms of female oppression. Just one point about this. If it is indeed the case that Sheridan's alleged actions mark him out as a chauvinist, then it is time for SSP members and apologists to stop pretending that the allegations against him were solely to do with personal morality and thus not at all to do with the politics of the SSP. By their own account, the allegations were definitely political, and definitely damaging to the SSP.

But this sort of narrative re-framing would be no more than natural behaviour among people who had allowed personal bitterness to overtake their political judgment and made quite a few angry opponents of former supporters in the process. At this point, with News of the World beaten, Sheridan and his supporters took it as a good time to vacate the remnants of the once great and now greatly reduced SSP. What then happened defies belief. Members of the SSP conspired to instigate a perjury prosecution, by bringing materials to the police and the media (for a considerable sum of money, naturally) that would incriminate Sheridan.

George McNeilage either recorded a private conversation and sold it to News of the World for £200,000, or he participated in a fake intended to implicate Sheridan in perjury, and sold it to News of the World for £200,000. Then Barbara Scott produced a handwritten minute of unusual detail, which many members of the executive of the time don't recall seeing before, from a meeting which purportedly proved that Sheridan lied, and marched down to the local constabulary of the Lothian and Borders police with that minute. The invocation of principle in a case like this can be dangerous. But I like to think that I know an issue of principle when I see it, and I think on principle it is aborrent and reprehensible to make yourself a police informant or sell a former comrade to the newspapers, even for the sake of something as important as a factional vendetta.

A prosecution was initiated. Once again, leading SSP members bore witness, but this time for the prosecution. Of 42 prosecution witnesses, 24 were SSP members, 16 from the original executive. Were it not for this footage, those minutes, and that testimony, Tommy Sheridan would be a free man. Were it not for a this extraordinary factionalism, the News of the World and Lothian and Borders police could not have hounded and persecuted Sheridan and his wife. He is now expected to go to prison.

This is a setback, as I said. Anyone who believes otherwise is not living in the real world. But Scotland also saw one of the biggest protests against the cuts after the comprehensive spending review. It is going to be at the forefront of resistance to Tory austerity. And if the major electoral vehicle for the Scottish radical left now lies in tatters, its former star now heading to jail, there will be ample opportunity to rebuild the Left. And in that future Left, I do see a role for Tommy Sheridan.

It's good to see News of the World get a bit of a leathering over its phone tapping from the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee. It's also good to see that some MPs are being a little bit less slavish toward the Murdoch oligopoly than is usually the case. The Sun is suitably outraged. There is presumably an element of New Labour hitting back after Rupert shifted his support to the Tories. Previously, the government would have gone to all lengths to protect this newspaper. This is a marginally healthy development, since New Labour's snug relationship with the Murdoch press has been one of the more repellent symptoms of its political degeneration. And I do take a small measure of personal satisfaction in this, since News International once threatened to sic the corporation's legal dogs on me.

However, the report also implicates the Metropolitan Police and PCC in a refusal to investigate the evidence. The PCC was predictably receptive to the Murdoch paper's official version of events. It is a body run by establishment figures and dominated by the newspaper industry, and even though its rulings have no legal power, it generally interprets its codes to accomodate the interests of big publishers (as per the case of Jan Moir's inaccurate homophobic tirade). Meanwhile the police simply refused to pursue the evidence on unsatisfactory grounds (a desire to protect politicians implicated from unwelcome public scrutiny, and a wish to pursue the most substantive charges), the effect of which was to support NotW's "rotten apple" story. This looks very much like parts of the establishment looking after one of its own. The remit of the report is also much broader than issues to do with the phone tapping scandal. The problem of vexatious injunctions being sought, and delaying appeals processes being engaged, to protect powerful entities such as Trafigura from scrutiny, is raised. There is also the issue of how papers conducted themselves during the crusade over a missing white girl (Marilyn, was it? Maudie? Maudlin? Something like that), especially in light of the papers repeatedly losing libel suits to the parents of the missing munchkin. Various recommendations, bearing on the interpretation of privacy laws, the avoidance of illegitimate injunctions, the strengthening of the PCC, and the upholding of 'standards' are made, some of them positive, most of them actually deferring the issue to parliament.

One hesitates to endorse any process that might give apear to give credibility to Britain's onerous libel laws. Any strengthening of privacy laws will undoubtedly be used to silence legitimate criticism, or engage in vexatious law suits against minor publications, bloggers, etc. And any power that the PCC accumulates as a result of these findings is unlikely to be used to the disadvantage of the major publishers, since the PCC a) only responds to a very limited number of cases, b) usually refuses to pursue complaints by members of the public unless some principals involved in the story support the complaint, and c) usually finds in favour of the papers it represents and supposedly regulates. But a number of real problems with the rabid conduct of the scum British press are at least identified, and the present situation in which newspapers can break the law often with impunity, bully usually powerless members of the public, defame victims, harrass minorities and print fanciful and scaremongering lies about them (consider the recent Glen Jenvey scandal, which was exposed by Tim Ireland of Bloggerheads) is patently indefensible.