MATT KENNARD
Matt Kennard is an investigative journalist, author and head of investigations at website Declassified UK. While still a student journalist, Kennard exposed one of his university lecturers as a white supremacist, sparking an international story and leading to the lecturer’s early retirement. After receiving the Guardian’s top student-journalism prize, Kennard went on to gain a masters at the Columbia University School of Journalism in New York, and spent three years working as a staff writer for the Financial Times. His first book, Irregular Army, investigated the recruitment practices of the US military. His second, The Racket, was an exposé of the instruments used by the US government to apply economic and military control across the world. His third, Stealing the World, is an investigation of the mechanisms through which transnational corporations run the world, and is scheduled for release in 2021.
Interview by Masoud Golsorkhi
Masoud Golsorkhi We were really interested in your take on the position of the left following the election of Biden. It seems like there’s been a tragic collapse in the left’s confidence and ambition from three years ago.
Matt Kennard Through my whole youth, when I was becoming politicised, I always looked to Latin America to get my political kicks, because there was a much clearer dividing line: the left was on the whole a lot more anti-imperialist, not scared to talk about nationalisation and cancelling exploitative contracts. It was a very clear dividing line and there were successes – there are still successes – in Latin America; it’s really the home of the left. Obviously with Corbyn that all changed. I don’t know where we stand now, after the devastating defeat of 2019. I don’t think that the left can get anywhere; I am quite pessimistic about it because of the structure of our society, the establishment we have, which is even more established than probably any other country in the world. We’ve never really had a proper revolution to displace them, so we are talking about hundreds and hundreds of years of power, and they all have titles and own land. Our country is not in a place where someone like Corbyn can get democratically elected. I think that people misunderstand the UK. I don’t think we’re a democracy – and I’m not just saying that – I think we are an oligarchy. And that oligarchy will allow for certain liberal leaders, like Keir Starmer or Blair, but they are not going to touch the fundamentals of how our society is structured. If that is the context then you wouldn’t call that a democracy. A democracy is a place where if people vote and want a certain route to be taken by people in power that can happen – that can’t happen in the UK. If you see how far Corbyn was destroyed while he had essentially no, or very little, power, imagine what would have happened if he had actually won. He would have been dealt with very, very quickly. We actually have precedent for these things: there was an MI5 plot to take down Harold Wilson – who was nowhere near as left as Corbyn – with the Americans. That’s not a conspiracy theory; it came out in the Spycatcher [book and trial] in the 1980s. Imagine what would have happened if Corbyn was in power; he was much more of a threat than Wilson ever was. In that sense, they can put it back in the box. It will probably be like it was with Michael Foot, right? He was defeated in 1983, and then Corbyn won the leadership in 2015. So, you’re talking decades. The problem is that the reaction to that means the far right will gain. You’re seeing that in the States. This is a lesson from history. The liberal establishment prefers, effectively, structurally, fascism to socialism. What they like best is someone like Keir Starmer or Tony Blair, who is nice to immigrants and gay people, which obviously I agree with, but doesn’t tamper with the social order, so they can feel good about themselves and good about their existence, but their power is never touched. If they had to make a choice between a fascist who lets them keep all their assets and isn’t nice to immigrants and gay people, and a socialist who might take them away, they’ll choose the fascist. You’re seeing that in the US. I think Biden was lucky to win and he probably wouldn’t have won without Covid. But Bernie would have won in 2016 and 2020 – I really do believe that. The point about our political systems now is that they are collapsing and anyone who is seen as establishment has a real problem getting elected. That’s why Trump won, because he ran against the establishment, even though he was the establishment, because he ran against it in terminology and how he presented himself. Boris Johnson did the same thing and Brexit gave him that tool. It’s the good stuff if you want to get elected. If the left won’t do that – and a critique of Corbynism that I would have is that it wasn’t left-populist enough; I think Bernie was much better at that – then the right’s going to get in, because people are going to extremes. The centre is collapsing.
MG What are some of the structural reasons for the centre collapsing?
MK What you’re seeing is an extreme version of capitalism emerging. It’s not that anyone is in control of it, it’s just the way that the structural forces sit right now. You’re having increasing concentrations of wealth, increasing concentrations of power in corporate interest – and people are desperate. Trade unions are destroyed, so they don’t have the power they used to have. People are suffering and there isn’t an organised working class, so where do you go? You see people go to conspiracy theories or to demagogues blaming the EU or immigrants, but my view is that it is a result of an economic structure that is becoming more and more extreme, and there is no vocabulary to take this on that is rational or progressive. Balance of forces-wise, the left is nowhere. The right has much more potent terminology and ways of discussing these issues. Part of this is in the nature of the distinction between the left and the right itself. The right doesn’t mind crystallising a problem down to immigrants, but the left… a lot of these problems are complex and we don’t have time to explain them in our political system. So, I’m quite pessimistic. If you look around the world the right is on the rise and except for Latin America, the left is pretty weak. I wouldn’t even put China on the left. It’s important that their rise is happening, whatever you think of the regime; it’s good in the global south for countries to have different poles to organise around; it gives them a certain freedom. In terms of the West, I don’t think we’re in a good position, though. I don’t know if you’ve seen Corbyn’s Peace and Justice organisation – that looks promising – but again it’s not really going to do anything in terms of the left taking control of the state. Those days are probably gone for a while.
MG If corporate media has been totally taken over, social media is out of bounds, what are the options, what are the strategies for independent media?
MK It’s hard. The internet is the great emancipation tool of our age, and it has such potential, but as with all these things, there’s going to be a fightback from states and corporations because it’s a threat to their power if people have the free flow of information, especially things that contradict the narratives that they put out. I think we can do it, but we have to build a whole new media. We take quite an absolutist position on the mainstream media at Declassified, which makes us unpopular. It’s not gratuitous, but we don’t want to collaborate with the mainstream media. Not because we have some aversion to the mainstream media as an idea; it’s just that for us they are part of the problem. All the stuff that we’re writing about, our government gets away with because the mainstream media doesn’t reveal what they are actually doing, or if it does, contextualises it in a way that doesn’t pin the blame on them. So, for example, the war in Yemen, which remains the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. The situation there is unbelievable. Britain is hugely complicit in terms of maintaining the Typhoon jets that fly there, servicing them; there are 10 UK soldiers embedded in the personal protection force of the house of Saud. We’re literally in bed with Saudis and their war effort. If we had a functioning democratic media, this would be the biggest issue of the day, more than anything. We’re talking about millions of children on the brink of starvation – and we are complicit. It should be on the front page, but it was hardly spoken about in the election and during the Conservative leadership contest, which involved individuals who should be in prison because of their role in facilitating the Saudi war in Yemen. It wasn’t mentioned once; it wasn’t an issue. A media that just distracts from the stuff that we should be focusing on if we are moral people who want to seek truth, should be ignored. What you see with people who come from an independent space and start collaborating with or getting promoted by these kinds of institutions, are inevitable changes. It’s not a conscious thing. I felt it myself when I went to the FT. It’s very fricking hard not to change if everyone around you is different from you and basically says you’re nuts when you say anything. This must happen to people who are promoted by the corporate media, they end up being in situations where people are telling them they don’t know what they’re talking about, and that has an impact over time. The downside is that it makes it easy for us to be marginalised. But that’s how the system works; you can’t really avoid that. You either become part of it or you stay out of it and become marginalised. We don’t live in a dictatorship, so they’re not going to shoot you, but the way they keep these truths suppressed is just to ignore you. Working at Declassified, you see it all in a very literal way. For example, we were blacklisted by the Ministry of Defence. They made an internal decision not to deal with us as a publication because they didn’t like what we were writing. That came out, and there was a Council of Europe level-two press freedom alert put out. That got in the Independent actually – which has been our only foray into the mainstream. It was a bit of a palaver, and Ben Wallace, the secretary of state, ordered a parliamentary inquiry into what had happened. It was a pretty amazing report, done by Tony Blair’s former press spokesman, and it basically said that they didn’t like what we were saying, that we were a hostile service, a military officer, who was unnamed said, “We should put them on a list where we don’t deal with them” – which sounds like something out of Pinochet’s Chile! It was a long, official report, published on a government website – and not one newspaper wrote about it. Just suppressed it completely. Even though I know they don’t cover stuff, I thought that the fact that it was on a government website and an official report might mean perhaps one journalist would pick it up. Didn’t happen. You see that all the time with our stories. With a colleague I did a story about MI5 and MI6 training senior spies from Saudi, UAE and Egypt, three of the most repressive dictatorships in the world – didn’t get picked up in one newspaper. That’s how it works. If it was about Russia, I’d be winning Orwell Prizes as we speak. There’s an incentive system, there’s a reward system, which is easy to discern. It rewards you for focusing on the crimes of official enemies. Of course, I don’t hold a flame for Putin or the Russian regime or the Iranian regime, but if you start looking into that, then all the rewards, funding, prizes, nice write-ups in the corporate media all start coming. If you focus on your own government, you’ll be completely ignored. ◉