Reclaim the Media - Stop Murdoch - Sign the EU Petition

"Three companies, control 70% of our newspapers here in the UK. One of them, Murdoch, has just been thwarted in his ambition to takeover Time Warner, home of HBO, and it's likely he'll now return to his unfinished business of getting full control of BSkyB (which he had to abandon when the hacking scandal broke).

This level of control over the media prevents debate, provides the media control over our politics and police and is bad for democracy.

Please sign an EU petition to trigger a directive to curb the power of media moguls (it's just got 10 days to run) and it would be great if you could tweet or RT too (@hackinginquiry or @Media_Pluralism)

Hacked Off has just posted a blog http://hackinginquiry.org/comment/murdoch-now-has-his-eyes-fixed-on-europe/"

Hat tip Julianne Marriott 

LAPFF Conference 2011: The Continuing Crisis

Another early start on Thursday to get to the Local Authority Pension Fund Forum (LAPFF) 16th annual conference in Bournemouth from East London for 9am. LAPFF “exists to promote the investment interests of local authority pension funds, and to maximise their influence as shareholders whilst promoting social responsibility and corporate governance at the companies in which they invest....Formed in 1990....combined assets of over £100 billion”.

It is of course quite ironic that this conference took place less than 24 hours after I had been on a (number of) picket lines in the biggest industrial dispute since 1926 over pensions.

Both of the local government pensions schemes I have an “interest” in are members of LAPFF. This year for the first time I was at the conference as a Councillor rather than as a Staff side representative. Which caused some confusion. I’ll try and post on as many of the excellent presentations and debates as possible. If you are a member of a local authority pension committee or panel in any capacity (and any Party or Union) then this is the conference to come to. It is politically non-partisan which in this context I think is very much a good thing.

Tom Watson MP was to be the opening speaker but his mum has fallen ill so he has had to send his apologies. The Chair of LAPFF Cllr Ian Greenwood and PIRC Tom Powdrill instead did a presentation on “The Hacking Scandal: Lessons for Investors”.  

LAPFF have been trying to remove James Murdock (son of Rupert) as Chair of BSkyB not so much with regard to the appalling behaviour of News of the World reporters etc but concern about his independence and the reputational risk to our investments and what this is doing to shareholder value. For example will OFCOM still consider NewsCorp to be a fit and proper shareholder of BSkyB? If they don’t - what impact will this have to Pension fund investments in BSkyB?