The attempt to drive the left from Britain’s media

In the heyday of New Labour, the project enjoyed the active and enthusiastic support of much of the British media. Even The Daily Express backed the party in the 1997 election; and The Sun remained a cheerleader until 2008. As well as an abundance of support from within the British commentariat, New Labour could rely on overtly sympathetic and supportive news journalists, too. Its spin-doctor Alistair Campbell would feed those journalists stories; those who wrote negative pieces would be frozen out from briefings altogether. Throw in an abundance of supportive MPs — both on the back and front benches — and figures in public life, New Labour could draw on a massive ecosystem of support in the media.

It is, to say the least, a rather different story with Corbyn’s Labour, which enjoys very little press support at all, and indeed overwhelming outright hostility. Despite winning 40% of the popular vote two years ago, the main opposition has very few supporters with a media platform at all, and most of them don’t even have contracts with mainstream media outlets, but rather are freelancers working for new media initiatives such as Novara. And yet all are treated as illegitimate interlopers, as not really journalists who do not belong in the media and who newspapers and TV producers should shun. This leads to relentless behind the scenes attempts by those who oppose the left to lobby newspaper editors and TV producers to stop commissioning them. This “can I see your manager” approach by those who are aware that their faction dominates the British media has one clear objective: to drive any left sympathisers from public life.

On Thursday, the journalist Paul Waugh tweeted about lines allegedly fed to “MPs and ‘outriders’ on media” in response to the Panorama documentary:

He later clarified that these lines were not seen by “journalists or commentators like Ash Sarkar and Owen Jones”:

But the damage by then was done. Amongst the press lobby, numerous commentators, and across social media, it became regarded as smoking gun evidence that left commentators were directly being fed lines to take by Corbyn’s Labour, none of whom had seen these lines, and evidence again about why all of us are actually illegitimate interlopers who really should not have a media platform at all.

That we all criticise Corbyn’s Labour where we disagree is irrelevant. On my account, since the election, I’ve criticised the dismal betrayal of failing to make the case for freedom of movement, the lack of ambition over wealth taxes, the failure not to commit to reversing every single Tory benefit cut, the need for more radicalism on the climate emergency, the bungling over tackling the left’s antisemitic fringe, the cowardly failure to not to end the war on drugs, and so on. But that doesn’t matter, because you are either bitterly opposed to Corbyn’s government, or you are a shill, and there is nothing in between. Where left-wing commentators agree with a left-led Labour party, it is not because, well, they have an obvious political overlap on policies they agitated for long before most people had even heard of Corbyn, but because they are hired guns.

We have returned to the pre-2017 political atmosphere. Corbyn’s Labour again, it is said, is doomed; its opponents scent blood, believing the Brexit culture war in particular has wrecked its chances of ever winning power. But there is something added to that: these opponents have increasingly radicalised, believing that the project is an utter moral disgrace, completely indefensible in any way, and therefore must be driven from public life, along with anyone who ever supported it. The irony is these are the same people who describe the left as ‘Stalinists’, who cheered the New Labour project on when much of the media acted as its cheerleaders, and have nothing to say about the fact most of the press aggressively back the ruling party. They may justify their position on partisan grounds — a visceral contempt for the left. But they surely can’t justify it as a healthy attitude in a democracy.