Culture Wars

by James Curran

  What appears to have happened in this case is that the staff of Beacon Day Nursery really did believe that it was Islington council policy to discourage the rhyme, but because the nursery staff refused to talk to us, we do not know why this was the case. However, given the veritable flood of stories about Baa Baa Black Sheep and other alleged anti-racist initiatives appearing in both national and local papers at the time, a perfectly plausible explanation is that these stories had fuelled and confirmed just such a belief. On the other hand, the council spokesman’s equivocal statement quoted above, and their refusal to issue a forthright denial of any such ban, left the door open, just as in the Hackney examples analysed earlier, for the absolutely inevitable deluge of press stories which followed the Gazette piece.

  The Daily Express (20 February) ran the story on its front page under the headline ‘School bars boy’s Baa-baa Black Sheep “racist” rhyme’. This report was very similar to that of the Islington Gazette, save that the writer, Michael O’Flaherty, failed to report the council’s reaction. That the council had appointed an antiracist adviser for the under-fives is all that we hear about the local authority, thus letting the nursery workers’ entirely mistaken impression of council policy set the framework of the piece. The Telegraph (20 February) did however conclude its article headed ‘Boy’s first rhyme upsets nursery staff’ with the council statement. The same day’s Mirror ran a short piece, ‘Baa Baa blacked’, in which the statement is abbreviated to: ‘If they find it offensive we’re not going to make them teach it’. In the Mail, Ruth Gledhill wrote a piece entitled ‘The little boy who made the mistake of humming Baa Baa Black Sheep’, which at least includes a quote from local Labour councillor Chris King to the effect that:

  There is clearly a problem somewhere, down the line, and we are going to look into it. We have over 6,000 staff and on this occasion someone clearly got hold of the wrong end of the stick. It was an overzealous interpretation of our equal opportunities policy. We have a strong equal opportunities policy, but no member of this council has ever resolved that Baa Baa Black Sheep is to be actively discouraged. We have a lot of staff and we cannot – and nor should we – control everything they do.

  However, the way in which the story is written, and, in particular, laid out, gives the strong impression that the ban was indeed council policy. For example, it includes a photograph of what it calls the offending ‘coldly official comment’ written by a member of the nursery staff, with the entirely erroneous caption: ‘What the council said’. Islington complained to the Press Council about this article, but it rejected the complaint, supporting the contention of the Mail’s associate managing editor that ‘the story was not about Islington Council’s policy but about how one member of its staff interpreted the policy and the actions she took’, and apparently regarding the quotation from Councillor King as an adequate representation of the council’s position, even though it occupied a relatively small space in a long article which was otherwise almost wholly critical of it.

  The Sun’s first report, ‘Baa Baa nursery ban on sad little Dan’ (20 February) began with the words: ‘Handicapped tot Daniel Griffin delighted his mum by reciting Baa Baa Black Sheep but loony leftie teachers banned it – for being racist!’. This prepared the ground for the Sun’s leader the next day, ‘The vile hard left’, which stated that ‘Loony left councils have given us a good laugh over the years. But Islington’s ban on a retarded five year old … is not funny but sick … Islington’s callous treatment of little Daniel and his parents earns them the title of vilest council in this country’.

  Like the remarkably tenacious, press-created myth that the film Child’s Play 3 was responsible for the death of James Bulger,10 the myth that Islington council banned children in its schools from singing Baa Baa Black Sheep has proved quite extraordinarily resilient, and sections of the press have been determined that it remain so. Thus, for example, The Sunday Times (8 February 1998), in an article entitled ‘Champagne socialist toasts family windfall’, claimed that the former leader of Islington council, Margaret Hodge, ‘banned the singing of Baa Baa Black Sheep in nurseries’. On 4 October 1999, the Daily Mail enlivened an article about Hodge’s nursery education policies (she was then Education Minister) by reporting that: ‘Under her ten-year leadership, the north London council became a byword for “loony left” local government, notoriously backing nursery school staff in 1987 who told off a mentally handicapped five-year-old for humming Baa Baa Black Sheep as it was considered “racially derogatory”’. Shortly after Labour had lost control of Islington to the Liberal Democrats, the Standard (6 July 2000) ran an article on the new council’s policies, reminding readers that Islington ‘was once one of the country’s most celebrated loony Labour councils. A place that symbolised the worst excesses of the left, where … Baa Baa Black Sheep was banned for being politically incorrect’. And when Hodge became Children’s Minister, the Sun (14 June 2003) told its readers that her ‘Loony Left council once banned kids from singing Baa Baa Black Sheep’. Later that year, as part of its ‘MPs Rich Report’, the Mail (28 September) spiced up its entry on Hodge by stating that ‘as a councillor [she] helped ban the nursery rhyme Baa Baa Black Sheep in primary education in Islington’.

  ‘Fake news’

  Looking back on these stories from the perspective of 2017 inevitably raises the question of whether or not they constitute what has come to be called ‘fake news’. Of course, the term itself is an oxymoron and has been greatly overused in recent times. As David Mikkelson, the founder of the myth-busting website Snopes, put it: ‘Fake news was a term specifically about people who purposely fabricated stories for clicks and revenue. Now it includes bad reporting, slanted journalism and outright propaganda. And I think we’re doing a disservice to lump all those things together’ (quoted in The New York Times, 25 December 2016). But, however unwieldy and unsatisfactory the term, it’s possible to distinguish four different kinds of journalistic activity which have variously been labelled as ‘fake’, namely:

  • ‘News’ which has been quite deliberately made up for purely commercial purposes (clickbait of the kind emanating from Macedonia, for example).

  • ‘News’ which has been quite deliberately made up for political or ideological purposes.

  • ‘News’ which is not entirely made up but is seriously inaccurate, either through lack of journalistic rigour, or because of deliberate bias, or both

  • ‘News’ which is quite deliberately made up for the purposes of media critique.

  ‘Loony left’ stories of the kind analysed in this chapter and that on Haringey fit largely into the third category, although a few belong firmly in the second. Such kinds of stories are, unfortunately, a major stock in trade of sections of the English national press. As Jim Waterson pointed out on Buzzfeed (24 January 2017) in an article aptly entitled ‘Britain has no fake news industry because our partisan newspapers already do that job’: ‘Fake news sites [of the “Macedonian” variety] have struggled to take hold in the UK political sphere, seemingly because traditional British news outlets are already incredibly adept at filling the market with highly partisan news stories that stretch the truth to its limits’.11 This is not an achievement of which newspapers should be anything but thoroughly ashamed, and ‘loony left’ stories demonstrate just how very damaging such journalism is to the democratic process, since what are at very best half- and quarter-truths about local and, by extension, national politics serve only to poison the wells of political debate and to misinform citizens about the policies and activities of those they have elected or are about to elect. In this case, the motive for publishing such stories is not exactly hard to ascertain: as pointed out in the chapter on Haringey, ‘loony left’ stories were meat and drink to the Conservatives and the client press in the run-ups to the London local elections of May 1986 and the general election of June 1987, and local papers in particular were relentlessly scoured by the nationals for the merest hint of ‘lunacy’ that could be explo
ited on a UK-wide scale.12 In the case of certain papers, such as the vociferously anti-Labour Hornsey Journal and Islington Gazette, the reason for publishing such stories may indeed have been straightforwardly political and ideological, but one should also never underestimate the role of an infantile conception of news values which is ingrained in sections of the British press and which regards these (and similar) stories as simply entertaining and amusing copy without the slightest concern for or awareness of their political consequences.

  What these various stories all too clearly demonstrate is exactly what happens when local and national politicians, aided and abetted by politically supportive newspapers, make a concerted effort to demonise those with different political viewpoints and aspirations from their own. Stories are manufactured out of thin air, or stood up on the flimsiest, most dubious of grounds. Thus, drawing on an already well-stocked reservoir of anti-socialist demonology, certain councils are effectively allotted pariah status: once cast beyond the democratic pale and isolated as politically ‘other’ and alien, they can be relentlessly subjected to sustained campaigns of distortion and vilification. Given the considerable wealth of the newspapers, the financially straitened circumstances of the councils, the financial risks of undertaking legal action, the intimate relations between the Tory government and its press allies, the vicissitudes of defamation law and the utter ineffectiveness of press ‘self-regulation’, there was very little which councils could do when faced with such an onslaught. As John Walker, press officer for Haringey during this period, put it:

  If you create a climate where an authority is seen to be ‘loony’, anything becomes plausible, and therefore journalists feel they have carte blanche to write whatever they want. There’s a whole range of issues where we’ve been at the end of that kind of treatment, simply because if it sounds daft enough therefore we will have done it.

  As we have been at pains to point out, certain local councils stigmatised as ‘loony’ by the press did not, either through ineptitude, inexperience, ideological purity or a combination of all three, help their own cause by the way in which they sometimes dealt with the newspapers attacking them. However, this should not be allowed to obscure the plain fact that, in pursuit of frankly political/ideological goals, a significant number of newspapers had clearly decided to throw their considerable weight behind the Tory campaign to de-legitimise London’s Labour councils, which, like the abolition of the GLC, was part of a wider strategy to wipe socialism off the British political map.13 In such a situation, it is frankly difficult to see how even the most sophisticated of press and PR operations could have prevented or discouraged newspapers from printing stories which they were clearly quite determined to publish, whether true, partly true or wholly false.

  Notes

  1. J. Petley, ‘Podsnappery: or why British newspapers support fagging’, Ethical Space, 3 (2), 2006, pp. 42–50; D. Mead, ‘“You couldn’t make it up”: some narratives of the media’s coverage of human rights’, in K. S. Ziegler, E. Wicks and L. Hodson (eds), The UK and European Human Rights: A Strained Relationship? (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2015), pp. 453–72.

  2. P. Anderson and T. Weymouth, Insulting the Public? The British Press and the European Union (London: Routledge, 1999); D. MacShane, Brexit: How Britain Left Europe (London: I.B. Tauris, 2016); H. Dixon, ‘Facts as newspapers saw them: Ipso’s role – and a weak BBC’, in J. Mair, T. Clark, N. Fowler, R. Snoddy, and R. Tait (eds), Brexit, Trump and the Media (Bury St Edmunds: Abramis, 2017), pp. 107–22. For detailed analyses of all the Euromyths peddled by the English national press since 1992 see http://blogs.ec.europa.eu/ECintheUK/euromyths-a-z-index/. This is an extremely useful resource, but it is absolutely shaming that the European Commission in the UK should have been forced to waste valuable resources constantly correcting falsehoods and distortions circulated by newspapers in their long-running, and ultimately successful, campaign to remove the UK from the EU.

  3. P. Oborne and J. Jones, Muslims under Siege: Alienating Vulnerable Communities (Colchester: Democratic Audit, University of Essex, in association with Channel 4, 2008); H. Muir, J. Petley and L. Smith, ‘Political correctness gone mad’, in J. Petley and R. Richardson (eds), Pointing the Finger: Islam and Muslims in the British Media (Oxford: Oneworld, 2011), pp. 66–99.

  4. In his memoir Exclusive: The Last Days of Fleet Street: My Part in its Downfall (London: Biteback 2017), p. 200, Maurice Chittenden notes that when he was at The Sunday Times in the 1980s, the Murdoch-appointed editor, Andrew Neil,set out to expose the left-wing posturing of Labour councils who were spending their ratepayers’ money on political propaganda rather than much-needed services. It was decided to form the London Boroughs’ Unit (LBU) to look into authorities in the metropolitan area. It was not long before an office wag converted its initials into ‘Leftie Bashing Unit’ and it was a name that stuck with us.Chittenden’s chapter on the LBU is a fascinating insight into how an ideologically committed journalist, one who openly admits to loathing the left (p. 212), routinely attempted to make the news, rather than simply resting content with reporting events that took place of their own accord. For example, Chittenden tells this story of his time at the Sun: ‘I had rented a grotty flat in Dalston and tapped Kelvin MacKenzie for regular payments on expenses to pay the rent while trying to get a grant from Islington Council for my bogus police monitoring group’ (p. 201). The fact that this ploy failed makes it no less reprehensible.

  5. This chapter draws upon research carried out by Chris Bertram, Luke Martell and Brennon Wood, as well as the present author, all of whom were members of the Goldsmiths Media Research Group, which published the report Media Coverage of Local Government in London in June 1987. This was commissioned by the Association of London Authorities.

  6. A. Addison, Mail Men: The Unauthorized Story of the Daily Mail (London: Atlantic Books, 2017).

  7. R. Morris, ‘Gypsies, travellers and the media: press regulation and racism in the UK’, Communications Law, 5 (6), 2000, pp. 213–19; J. Richardson, The Gypsy Debate: Can Discourse Control? (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2006); K. Bhopal and M. Myers (eds) Insiders, Outsiders and Others: Gypsies and Identity (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2010); J. Richardson and R. O’Neill, ‘“Stamp on the camps”: the social construction of Gypsies and Travellers in media and political debate’, in J. Richardson and A. Ryder (eds), Gypsies and Travellers: Empowerment and Inclusion in British Society (Bristol: The Policy Press, 2012), pp. 169–86.

  8. Grant was questioned about this remark at the independent inquiry into the Broadwater Farm disturbances which was chaired by Lord Gifford QC in 1986. As the report, The Broadwater Farm Inquiry (1986), makes clear, Grant ‘explained that he had been putting forward the view not only of young people, but of a substantial section of the community’ (p. 127). The report concluded that:

  Instead of avoiding the problem by distancing himself from Black youths, he tried honestly to articulate their position. In doing so he walked a tightrope, for as an elected leader he represented others also. The words quoted above were not well chosen and should not have been said. He knew as a political leader that the press would seize on an ill-considered phrase; and in this case they did, leading to the impression that Councillor Grant revelled in the defeat of the police. However, we are impressed with the honesty and courage which Councillor Grant showed in trying to articulate the grievances which had led to the disturbances, and in particular the death of Mrs Jarrett, rather than evading the issue with bland statements.

  (p. 128)

  9. A disturbing, but accurate, picture of press practice is provided by Martin Bostock, a former press officer for Hackney:

  There were some particular journalists who would use all manner of tricks to make sure their story ‘stood up’, as they say. In other words, don’t give anyone a chance to prove that it’s not true. The kind of technique that people used were to call very late in the afternoon just before the paper’s going to bed, when they know that the chances of you
being able to research the story and get an authoritative answer and perhaps knock it on the head are remote. You will then get a call five minutes after the first one, often with a very irate journalist, often giving people a very, very bad time. I’ve seen people reduced to tears by browbeating journalists who want a response immediately to a story they’ve probably been working on for a couple of days, or in some cases much more, but they expect the press officer to have chapter and verse immediately at half past six in the evening.

  10. J. Petley, ‘In defence of “video nasties”’, British Journalism Review, 5 (3), 1994, pp. 52–7.

  11. www.buzzfeed.com/jimwaterson/fake-news-sites-cant-compete-with-britains-partisan-newspape?utm_term=.ptLbQGDBqp#.vqRJkagOoy

  12. Local papers generally gave Labour councils in their catchment area a fairer hearing than did the national press (although some, such as the Hornsey Journal and Islington Gazette, were as vehemently anti-Labour as the Sun and Mail). Local papers have to bear in mind that their readers, unlike the far-flung ones of national press, are liable know what is happening in their boroughs and are thus better able to distinguish fact from fiction. Nonetheless, certain journalists on local papers did sell ‘loony left’ stories to the national press, and more than one Fleet Street career was established on such foundations.