We only have ourselves to blame.

For years we’ve accepted that politicians and celebrities are somehow fair game for the attentions of the tabloid press.  It’s allowed a culture to develop at the arse end of the media that we should never have tolerated.

We despise our politicians.  They have become lobby fodder.  They simply represent sectional interests and vote as their party masters tell them to.   Despite many honourable exceptions they have forgotten who they represent and so we have lost respect for them.  In the process we’ve become immune to their treatment at the hands of the media.

Celebrities fare worse.  To be a celebrity once meant to be someone celebrated for something.  Now, more often than not, they’re celebrated for nothing; desparate, talentless fodder for public titillation, the modern day village idiots and town strumpets that give us all someone to gossip about, rewarded with money and empty adulation.  Do we care if tabloid hirelings rifle through their rubbish and stalk them?  Did our ancestors care about dancing bears and the fowl in the cockpit?

Our prejudices blinded us to the vile practices employed by News Corporation in particular.  Now we know they made victims of people who were victims already; murdered children, victims of terrorism, relatives of our fallen in battle, the scales have finally fallen from our eyes.  Would that it hadn’t taken so long.

Yet still we’re not suffiently irate.  If we’re now furious about phone hacking we should be incandescent that an Australian-turned-American has established himself as the puppet-master who pulls the strings of both our major political parties.

We are at a crossroads.  We have choices to make.  We can continue on this path and see our democracy saddled and ridden by the super-rich.  or we can turn from this road and rid ourselves of Murdoch.  It’s not just about Rebekah Brooks.  Frankly its better she stays as a reminder of the depravity of the Murdoch empire than we allow ourselves to be fooled into believing they’ve changed their ways.  It’s about Murdoch and the fetid many tentacled, bloody mouthed creature he’s made in his own image.

Think on this: if people in public life are not afraid of the press when they have done wrong then the fourth estate has become toothless, but if decent people fear doing good because of the press then it has come to wield too much power.

Murdoch’s empire in Britain must be broken up and he, together with all his minions, banned forever from owning or editing any paper in this country and if we are to do it our moment is now.