The Information Cartel: How Britain’s Richest Shape What You Think

British politics increasingly feels less like a contest of ideas and more like a managed information environment. The elected part of the system still matters, but the stories people hear, the frames they adopt and the villains they are encouraged to fear are set further upstream by a small number of proprietors and platforms.

The latest report from the Equality Trust, Money, Media and Lords, tries to quantify this. It builds a concentration of power index from three elements that sit largely outside public control. These are unelected legislative appointments, large scale political donations and the growing domination of news by a few media conglomerates and global platforms. When the index is plotted against the wealth of the top one percent, the two lines move together over the last twenty years.

The numbers are not perfect proof of causation. They do not need to be. They describe a structural arrangement in which those who own the largest pools of assets also control much of the information climate in which elections are fought and policies judged.

Who really owns the news in Britain

The starting point is simple. If almost all the national newspapers sit inside a handful of corporate groups, then the range of acceptable opinion is constrained long before a reader opens a website or taps a news app.

Media research finds that three national newspaper groups now control about ninety percent of print circulation in the United Kingdom, up from roughly seventy percent a decade ago. The same groups hold a large share of online reach among the top news brands. At local level two chains dominate more than half of all local newspapers and news sites, with many towns reduced to a single corporate voice covering public life.

These ownership stakes are not evenly spread across society. They tend to sit with individuals and families at the very top of the wealth distribution or with investment structures that ultimately answer to them. That ownership does not mean every article is dictated from a boardroom. It does mean editorial lines evolve within boundaries that are rarely hostile to the interests of those who sign the cheques.

A similar concentration now shapes the way people discover news in the first place. Digital audiences reach stories through search, social feeds and recommendation engines. Regulators and industry studies agree that a small cluster of global platforms commands nearly all of that traffic.

The platform skin that wraps the public sphere

Competition authorities describe a distribution layer dominated by a few foreign technology companies. One search engine handles well over ninety percent of online searches in the United Kingdom. A pair of social media conglomerates control most of the main social and messaging apps through which people encounter links, clips and fragments of news. Together these firms take most of the digital advertising market, the revenue stream on which many newsrooms depend.

This gives them three kinds of leverage. They can set the rules for how news appears in feeds and search results. They can reward engagement patterns that favour outrage and tribal identity over slow explanation. And they can squeeze or favour particular outlets when commercial disputes arise over the share of advertising income.

For readers, the effect is subtle. They may feel they are choosing between many outlets and perspectives. In practice most roads run through the same short list of intermediaries. The result is a kind of outsourced consciousness. The filters that decide what appears on your phone are designed by engineers and executives whose incentives revolve around advertising yield and shareholder value, not civic balance.

From wealth concentration to power concentration

The Equality Trust report argues that ownership patterns in media and the dominance of a few platforms cannot be separated from wider trends in inequality. It builds a composite index that tracks unelected power in three domains: the unelected upper chamber, the flow of large private money into political parties and the concentration of media ownership. It then compares that index with measures of wealth held by the top one percent of households.

Over the period from the early two thousands to the early twenty twenties the index and the wealth share of the richest one percent move in tandem. The correlation is strong enough to be statistically significant and becomes stronger when extreme outlier years are removed. The report is careful to state that correlation is not proof of direct causation. Yet the simplest reading is that as very large fortunes have accumulated at the top, those fortunes have also bought more structural influence.

The language the authors use is blunt. They describe this as structural corruption. Not in the sense of cash in envelopes or direct bribes, but in the slower legal sense. Institutions adapt their rules, appointments and agendas to protect the interests of those who already control capital, influence and channels of communication.

How narratives are built: selection, repetition, framing

The power that flows from this structure does not need to rely on outright falsehoods. It is exercised through three quieter mechanisms that most readers will recognise from daily experience.

The first is selection. With three national groups controlling almost all front pages, they decide which topics become national obsessions and which barely register. Migration, minor benefit fraud and small episodes of street protest can receive weeks of saturation attention. Long term structural questions about wealth taxation, corporate lobbying or regional poverty rarely receive the same treatment.

The second is repetition. Even where ownership differs, outlets that share advertisers, social circles and sources of political gossip tend to converge on similar frames. When nearly all widely read titles under commercial pressure cluster around the same line on public spending, foreign policy or the role of trade unions, the repeated message begins to sound like common sense rather than one viewpoint among many.

The third is framing. A set of choices about language can tilt an entire public conversation. The same protestors can be presented as campaigners or as mobs. An attempt to claw back wealth from the very top can be described as justice or as punishment of success. Those choices are not random. They echo the interests and instincts of owners, senior editors and political allies.

On the platform side, similar dynamics are encoded in software. Recommendation algorithms give priority to content that keeps users scrolling, clicking and arguing. Experiments and internal research at those companies show that emotionally charged material, especially fear and anger, spreads further and faster than sober analysis. When news outlets depend on those algorithms for reach, many adapt their headlines and framing accordingly.

Lords, donors and the quiet commerce of access

The information system does not float above formal politics. It is fused to it. The same decades that saw media and platform concentration also saw a growth in unelected and donor linked power at Westminster.

The House of Lords remains one of the largest unelected chambers in the democratic world, with membership now well above eight hundred. Equality Trust analysis notes that the number of members has risen markedly over the last twenty years, even as successive governments promised restraint. Appointment patronage has been used to reward party donors, advisers and loyalists. That includes figures with significant stakes in media and public affairs.

Alongside this sits the commerce of large donations and government contracts. Work by the think tank Autonomy on so called giver and taker companies identifies hundreds of firms that both donate to parties and receive public contracts. Over recent decades those firms donated tens of millions of pounds and in return secured public work measured in tens of billions. The research does not claim a direct purchase of contracts. It does show a structure in which those with spare capital to deploy in politics sit closer to the executive than those without it.

In the background runs the constant presence of advisers, lobbyists and communications professionals who move between parties, large donors, media outlets and corporate boards. For the small circle at the top of this network, politics, information and business form a single career environment. For the average citizen, they appear as separate spheres only briefly visible on a screen.

Why reform is so difficult

The remedies proposed by the Equality Trust and allied organisations are familiar. They include caps on private donations, stronger limits on media ownership, public investment in independent and local journalism and measures to curb the revolving door between politics, business and lobbying. Some go further and call for a wealth tax on very large fortunes, with part of the proceeds used to rebuild civic media and oversight.

Each of these proposals runs into the same structural obstacle. The laws that would be needed to weaken the grip of concentrated wealth on media and politics must be passed by politicians who owe much of their visibility and campaign finance to that very structure. Senior figures in the major parties have learned over time how to live within this ecology. They receive endorsement or at least tolerance from dominant outlets, rely on donors to fund campaigns and often look to the same set of lobbyists and public affairs partners for post ministerial careers.

It is therefore unsurprising that reform efforts tend to focus on transparency and codes rather than hard limits. More disclosure for lobbying registers, more guidance for appointments, more consultation with regulators. All of these have value. None of them change the basic fact that decisions about what voters see and hear are largely made in corporate offices and technical departments that are themselves shielded from direct democratic pressure.

What this means for the reader

None of this implies a grand secret plot in which a room of magnates scripts the evening news. The reality is more ordinary and more durable. A small, wealthy and socially connected group of owners and executives have the structural ability to decide which issues receive oxygen and which starve. A narrow set of digital platforms acts as the main gateway to that material. Political parties live inside that environment and respond to its incentives.

For readers the most important step is to recognise that the frame itself is owned. When an argument appears everywhere at once, ask who benefits from that framing and who owns the outlets repeating it. When a subject feels mysteriously absent from coverage, ask whether it conflicts with the interests of those who hold both economic and informational power.

Britain did not wake up one morning to find its information system captured. The capture came slowly, through mergers signed off as ordinary business decisions and through digital systems designed for engagement rather than democratic health. The question is whether citizens are willing to treat this as an unavoidable background fact of modern life or as a choice that can still be unmade.

References