by James Curran
But in the course of 1982–5, the GLC came to be identified repeatedly with ‘crackpot’, ‘loopy’, ‘barmy’, ‘potty’ and ‘fringe’ people, especially in the reporting of its grants policy. Jostling among these epithets were various workings of a single leitmotif: ‘Red Ken and the loony left of the GLC’ (Daily Star, 26 July 1983), ‘a haven for political loons and crackpots’ (Daily Star, 24 July 1984), ‘rate loonies’ (Daily Express, 7 September 1984), ‘loony lefties and fringe groups’ (Sun, 23 February 1984), ‘Greater Loonification Council’ (Keith Waterhouse in the Daily Mirror, 8 April 1985), ‘Labour Loony Left’ (Cummings cartoon, Daily Express, 26 June 1985); ‘the loony left’ (Daily Express, 25 April 1984). This was a time of trial and error when well-paid columnists, cartoonists, sub-editors, feature writers and leader writers experimented with different lexical forms. They only collectively settled for one form in late 1986, after the GLC had been closed down. However, the groundwork for designating – and de-legitimating – a new kind of left had been laid in the preceding five years. The succinct, alliterative phrase, ‘loony left’, merely crystallised an understanding of a new political phenomenon – the rise of a ‘crackpot’ left more concerned with minorities than with class – that had evolved during the course of the anti-GLC crusade.
Political Retribution
Not all papers joined this crusade. The broadsheet press (apart from the Daily Telegraph) largely held back. The pro-Labour Mirror group of popular newspapers also tended to stay on the sidelines (although the Sunday Mirror was one of the first papers to call for the GLC’s abolition, and subsequently ran an editorial urging its abolition to be speeded up).23 It was primarily the right-wing popular newspapers which launched a jihad against the GLC. However, they accounted for 63% of national daily circulation in 1983.24 Their firepower was sustained and relentless. Hardly a week went by between July 1981 and June 1983 when right-wing popular dailies failed to draw attention to a fresh GLC ‘outrage’. Their efforts were reinforced by the capital’s monopoly daily paper, the Evening Standard, which initially campaigned against the GLC, and joined the chorus for it to be closed down.
The opening barrage of press attacks generated in 1981 increased tensions within the GLC Labour administration, and gave rise to a leadership crisis. Some councillors complained that Livingstone’s controversial pronouncements on issues unrelated to the GLC undermined support for the council and deflected attention from its achievements. Others (including some left-wing councillors) felt that the media focus on Livingstone detracted from the principle of collective leadership to which they were committed. In October, this rumble of complaint grew into open rebellion, with twenty councillors circulating a round-robin letter attacking Livingstone. The GLC leader declared subsequently that the absence of an obvious successor helped him to survive. Even so, it was a close-run thing. ‘I might very well have been replaced as leader’, he acknowledged, ‘if the AGM, with its secret ballots, had been due in October 1981 rather than April 1982’.25
The popular press crusade also helped to turn Londoners against their council. An Audience Selection poll in August 1981 found that 51% disapproved of Livingstone as GLC leader compared with only 11% who approved. Still more devastatingly, the poll reported that 38% of those who had voted Labour in the May GLC election now regretted doing so.26 The battering that the GLC received was so relentless, and the loss of public confidence so great, that Ken Livingstone privately concluded in the autumn of 1981 that he had ‘blown it’, and that the GLC administration was damaged beyond repair.27
A mid-term poll in April 1983 offered a glimmer of hope for the beleaguered administration. It indicated that the GLC had regained some lost support, but still remained deeply unpopular. Only 30% of Londoners said that they were satisfied with the GLC, compared with 49% who were dissatisfied. More than twice as many people disapproved of Livingstone as leader of the GLC as approved. Significantly, the poll revealed considerable opposition to those GLC policies which the press had targeted. Fifty-one per cent opposed the giving of ‘financial aid to fringe and minority groups’, with only 24% in favour; the GLC’s police accountability proposals were rejected by 50% and supported only by 27%; and 69% also condemned the GLC’s invitation to Sinn Fein representatives to come to London.28
Meanwhile, the political campaign against the GLC took off. In 1982, right-wing papers began demanding that the GLC be closed down. Their editorials were supplemented by feature articles and news reports, reinforcing the same message.29 A growing number of organisations publicly declared that the GLC should be abolished, including the London Boroughs Association, the Institute of Directors and the Confederation of British Industry. In January 1983, the influential London Conservative Group of MPs joined this hue and cry, arguing that the GLC’s abolition would be a vote-winner. Margaret Thatcher seems to have shared this opinion: she told MPs on 5 May 1983 that ‘there are many people who would find abolition attractive’. After the Conservative General Election manifesto had already been drafted, a late addition was inserted that committed the party to closing down the GLC and the six Metropolitan County Councils.
In its hour of need, the GLC appeared to be without friends. Senior figures in the Labour Party had come to regard County Hall as a political liability. Michael Foot, the Labour Leader, blamed Labour’s poor showing in the 1981 Croydon North-West by-election partly on the GLC.30 Neil Kinnock, who was later to succeed Foot as Leader, complained about the damage caused to Labour by the GLC’s high rates.31 Labour MPs told lobby journalists in 1982 and 1983 that the GLC was alienating ‘ordinary voters’ by turning London ‘into an adventure playground’ for ‘a variety of zany left-wing causes’.32 London’s Labour Mayor, Ken Livingstone, was told not to visit the Labour Party’s national headquarters during the 1983 general election, as a mark of official displeasure.33
Indeed, the Labour Party commissioned a private survey during the general election campaign to see how much damage the GLC was doing to Labour’s chances in the capital (only to find out that it was having no discernible effect). However, the survey also showed again that more people were dissatisfied with the GLC than were satisfied, and that over twice as many people disapproved of Livingstone as GLC leader than approved.34
In short, the GLC had become a pariah among local authorities. Crucified by the press, a source of embarrassment to the Labour Party, seemingly unpopular with its electors, it could be closed down – so it seemed in 1983 – with the minimum of difficulty.
Notes
1. Research for this chapter was supported by a small grant from Goldsmiths, University of London. My thanks to Jane Fountain for her assistance.
2. This coarsening of public debate was partly a response to the breakdown of political consensus during the 1970s, and the rise of new right press controllers. See J. Curran and J. Seaton, Power Without Responsibility, 8th edition (London: Routledge, 2018).
3. For the tabloid pathologising of Tony Benn, see Mark Hollingsworth, The Press and Political Dissent (London: Pluto, 1986).
4. The anger and fear engendered by these disturbances are well anatomised in two studies of media coverage: G. Murdock, ‘Reporting the riots: images and impact’, in J. Benyon (ed.) Scarman and After (Oxford: Pergamon, 1984) and S. Cottle, TV News, Urban Conflicts and the Inner City (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1993). The imagery deployed in reports of these disturbances drew upon the lexicon of outrage developed in response to a succession of moral panics in the preceding two decades.
5. The Gallup voting intention poll first put the Conservatives third in March 1981 (with the Liberals and Social Democrats added together). The Conservative Party stayed third for most of the ensuing twelve months. See D. Butler and G. Butler, Twentieth–Century British Political Facts, 8th edition, (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 274–5.
6. J. Carvel, Citizen Ken (London: Chatto and Windus, 1984), p. 13.
7. Daily Mail, 11 July 1981; Daily Express, 11 July 1981; The Times, 11 July 1981.
>
8. The Brixton Disorders 10–12 April 1981 (HMSO, 8427: London, 1981) [Scarman Report].
9. K. Livingstone, If Voting Changed Anything, They’d Abolish It (London: Harper-Collins, 1987); K. Livingstone, You Can’t Say That (London: Faber and Faber, 2001).
10. K. Livingstone and T. Ali, Who’s Afraid of Margaret Thatcher? Tariq Ali in Conversation with Ken Livingstone (London: Verso, 1984); ‘Local socialism: the way ahead. Interview with Ken Livingstone’, in Martin Body and Colin Fudge, Local Socialism? (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1984).
11. Carvel, Citizen Ken [2nd edition was published in 1986].
12. G. Foote, The Labour Party’s Political Thought, 2nd edition. (London: Croom Helm, 1986).
13. Part of the intellectual parentage of GLEB was social democratic, reflecting an overtly state capitalist conception embodied in S. Holland (ed.) The State as Entrepreneur (London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1972). For an account of the attempt to make it an agency of radical change, see M. Mackintosh and H. Wainwright (eds.) A Taste of Power (London: Verso, 1987); and for an assessment of its ultimate social democratic evolution, drawing on a major internal review, see S. Lansley, S. Goss and C. Wolmar, Councils in Conflict (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989).
14. P. Schlesinger, G. Murdock and P. Elliott, Televising Terrorism (London: Comedia, 1983).
15. Daily Mail, 13 October 1981.
16. Livingstone, If Voting, p. 167.
17. Richard Holliday’s report, in the Daily Mail of 13 October 1981, records Livingstone as saying that the IRA bombers were ‘not ‘‘just criminals, murderers and psychopaths’’’.
18. BBC2 TV, Newsnight, 14 October 1981.
19. Daily Mail, 19 May 1983; Daily Mail, 22 April 1983; Sun, 20 September 1984, et passim.
20. Cited in J. Gyford, The Politics of Local Socialism (London: Allen and Unwin, 1985), p. 55.
21. Conflating different groups into one negative category is a standard rhetorical technique. New Labour supporters (and their press allies) subsequently represented diverse sections of the Labour movement not judged to be fully behind their project, as ‘Old Labour’. See Chapter 8.
22. The Press and the People: 29th/30th Annual Report of the Press Council (London: Press Council), p. 178.
23. Sunday Mirror, 18 October 1981; Sunday Mirror, 15 January 1984.
24. Audit Bureau of Circulation, July–December 1983.
25. Livingstone, If Voting, p. 174.
26. Audience Selection Survey, August 1981.
27. Conversation with the author.
28. Market Opinion Research International [MORI], April 1983.
29. For example, Evening Standard, 23 September 1982; Daily Telegraph, 2 March 1983; Daily Mail, 10 May 1983; Daily Express, 27 December 1982; Evening Standard, 14 January 1983; Daily Express, 21 January 1983; Times 26 January 1983, Evening Standard, 27 January 1981; Daily Express, 6 May 1983; Evening Standard, 23 September 1982; Daily Telegraph, 3 January 1982.
30. Daily Mail, 9 November 1982.
31. Evening Standard, 23 October 1981.
32. Carvel, Citizen Ken, p. 165.
33. New Socialist, 37, 1986, p. 31.
34. B. Worcester and L. Gilbert, MORI, ‘Voters in Greater London’, Confidential Memorandum to the Labour Party (14), 26 May 1983.
4
Press boomerang
James Curran
The decision to abolish the GLC, announced in October 1983, was not greeted with the public enthusiasm that the government had expected. Indeed, shortly after the government’s announcement, 54% of Londoners opposed the GLC’s closure, while only 23% approved.1 Opposition strengthened in early 1984, with many former ‘don’t knows’ siding with the GLC. By April 1984 almost two-thirds of Londoners were against the GLC’s termination, while less than a quarter were in favour. This one-sided distribution of opinion persisted, with occasional fluctuations, until County Hall closed in April 1986.2
How did all this happen? How did a politically isolated, reviled socialist council take on a popular right-wing government, re-elected in 1983 with a landslide majority, and win the propaganda battle? The answer advanced by numerous politicians, journalists and commentators at the time was that the GLC mounted a successful advertising campaign funded by a disgraceful misuse of taxpayers’ money. This much-repeated argument encouraged the government to introduce new legislation that outlawed political advertising by local authorities.
However, the claim that Londoners were only won over by a slick advertising campaign is a myth. The majority of Londoners opposed the abolition of the GLC before its advertising campaign even began. The true explanation is more complicated and also more interesting.
Hidden roots of resilience
The GLC was not as discredited in 1983 as it was widely thought to have been. Although it had been attacked by Fleet Street for two years, and its unpopularity had been recorded in successive opinion polls, it was damaged rather than fatally holed below the water line. This helps to explain why the GLC was able to rally public support behind it.
Opinion polls can be misleading because they can record instant, summary judgements without shedding light on the ambivalences that can sometimes inform opinions. This was true for example of the Labour Party’s private poll in May 1983, mentioned earlier, which reported that 49% of Londoners were dissatisfied with the way the GLC was running London, compared with only 30% who were satisfied. The dissatisfied outnumbered the satisfied in every sub-group apart from those aged between eighteen and twenty-four. The poll also reported widespread disapproval of GLC leader Ken Livingstone. This poll thus recorded, like other polls that preceded it, a seemingly clear-cut public indictment of the GLC.3
However, another survey, which asked more questions during the same month, provided a more complex and insightful picture of Londoners’ attitudes.4 It found that much opinion was clouded by uncertainty: 78% of respondents said that they knew very little or not very much about the GLC, and what it did. This survey also revealed that some people were in two minds. On the one hand, the majority had negative perceptions of the GLC as being ‘too political’ (72%), too bureaucratic (55%) and out of touch (52%). On the other hand, more thought well of the council than the opposite on a number of counts. The GLC was thought to act in the best interests of Londoners by 44%, compared with a dissenting 37%; to have a clear idea of what it was doing by 42%, compared with a critical 37%; and to be go-ahead and progressive by 41%, with 31% taking the opposite view. These results thus indicated that some hostility towards the GLC was ‘soft’. It was conflicted or uncertain, and therefore potentially susceptible to change.
Broadcast shield against the press
Public confusion about the GLC arose partly from the contradictory accounts of the council supplied by rival media. In 1981–3, the tabloid press portrayed the GLC in overwhelmingly negative terms, whereas television and radio were much more inclined to report the GLC in terms of a neutral or implicitly positive news agenda. The national quality press was situated between these two polarities, while the London Evening Standard published an idiosyncratic combination of routine news reports that were often neutral or favourable to the GLC, and a smaller number of feature articles that were strongly critical.
Perhaps the simplest way of conveying the divergent nature of media coverage is to examine news coverage in a single week, 20–26 November 1982. Television and radio broadcast eighteen items about the GLC during this week, of which ten featured the GLC embarking on new initiatives to benefit the community. Thus, regional or national television featured the GLC as trying to save Riverside Studios, staging the Spirit of London Exhibition, planning the opening of the Thames Barrier and campaigning for the low paid, while radio featured the GLC as battling to save a breast cancer clinic, seeking to conserve for posterity the artist William Morris’s home, improving the capital’s sporting facilities, and protecting wildlife in the capital. Only one out of the eighteen broadcasting stories had an overtly anti-GLC theme. By contrast, all nine s
tories about the GLC published in the popular press during this week were negative.5
The contrast between regional television and the popular press was especially significant because both reached large audiences. Almost half of Londoners claimed in 1983 to watch regularly Thames News on ITV, while 29% claimed to regularly watch its BBC rival. 17–18% said that they regularly watched the two weekly TV current affairs programmes, The London Programme and Reporting London (with much larger proportions saying that they watched occasionally). The popular press accounted for about three-quarters of national daily paper readership in London. By contrast, the monopoly evening paper, the Standard, was read only by an estimated 7% of people in the GLC area in 1983.6
The media reported the GLC in divergent ways partly because they were subject to different regulatory regimes. The popular press was unregulated and partisan, whereas broadcasting was required by law to inform and display due impartiality. However, the more important, but related, cause of the divergence arose from differing news values. The popular press, selling nationwide, reported the GLC as an exemplification of a national story – the growing threat posed by the Labour left – and were interested primarily in stories about the council that fitted this agenda. By contrast, ‘local’ radio catered for all of London, while regional television served a region that had London at its centre. They were oriented towards local community stories that were of little interest to the national press.
The GLC deliberately exploited this difference. From July 1981 onwards, County Hall gave preferential access to television, radio and the broadsheets, in terms of interviews and briefings, as part of a conscious strategy of fighting back against hostile popular papers.7 This engendered a relationship of growing reciprocity between County Hall and local broadcasting. Understaffed local radio and regional television news rooms were fed stories by a large GLC public relations department which made it a priority to identify items that would appeal to them. This policy paid off in the sense that the Livingstone administration received very much more broadcasting coverage than the previous Cutler administration had done.8 Individual broadcasters who might easily have been hostile to the GLC were won over. For example, Roger Clarke, a Radio London reporter who described himself as a ‘liberal Conservative’, concluded that the GLC’s leadership was ‘high-powered’, and insisted that the GLC was in reality ‘not an extreme organisation’.9 Similarly, Anne Jones, who was later to report Brent Council in a highly critical way for BBC television, viewed Ken Livingstone as someone who was ‘head and shoulders above most people in local government’.10 Thus, the GLC had developed a shrewd public relations strategy of cultivating metropolitan media as a shield against national media attacks.