Media’s Role in the Social Economy

Hilary Wainwright

A diversity of opinion is fundamental to democracy. This makes the distribution of ideas a matter of public interest rather than simply a matter of commerce. In the UK the distribution system is entirely commercial and is dominated by one company, W.H Smith. The right to information is fundamental, and we'd like to emulate the system in France and Italy, where newsagents have to display what's published, with constraints to exclude racist and fascist material. This would mean that the minority press – Red Pepper, Tribune, the Ecologist, New Internationalist - with all its diversity would be available to everyone and able to stand or fall on its own merits. Without this system of distribution, the minority press is very precarious. Red Pepper and other publications could play a vital role in publicising and debating the social economy which in its turn could sustain the minority publications many of whom are part of the social economy.

Hilary Wainwright is Editor of Red Pepper, the magazine of the independent left in the UK. She is also Research Director of the New Politics Project at Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. Red Pepper and the TNI are working with seven magazines across Europe to experiment with the production of a regular European supplement, Eurotopia, to be carried by different national publications. Hilary is a regular contributor to the Guardian and commentator on radio and TV. She has written numerous books on aspects of democratic politics, from `Beyond the Fragments, Socialism and the Making of Socialism’ to `Reclaim the State, Experiments in Popular Democracy’. She is an Associate Fellow of the International Labour Studies Centre at University of Manchester, and the Centre for Global Governance at the London School of Economics.

She describes herself as a socialist feminist and a strong believer in popular democracy combined with parliamentary democracy. She was a founding member of Charter 88 and is on the editorial board of the UK political think tank, The Catalyst Trust.

www.redpepper.org.uk