Culture Wars

by James Curran

  58. For example, Neil Kinnock interviewed on The London Programme, Thames Television, 18 May 1987; Denis Healey debating with Shirley Williams in World in Politics, Channel 4, 15 May 1987; and Jo Ashton, ‘Nailed – myth that cost votes’, Star, 1 June 1987.

  59. London Borough Council Elections 6 May 1982 (London: Greater London Council, 1982), table 3; London Borough Council Elections 8 May 1986 (London: London Residuary Body, 1986), table 3. The only press-targeted radical London council to experience a swing against Labour was Islington where a large number of Labour councillors had defected to the SDP, establishing for a time a strong SDP presence in the borough splitting the progressive vote.

  60. C. Rawlings and M. Thrasher, ‘London council voters see beyond poll tax’, The Guardian, 29 May 1990.

  61. The three boroughs were Brent, Ealing and Waltham Forest. A number of factors were involved such as a large rate rise in Waltham Forest, producing an adverse reaction (see Waltham Forest Community Consultation, MORI, 1987), and press attacks on Ealing Council for its alleged ‘loony’ policy on sex education.

  62. Public Opinion in Islington, MORI, 1984; Service Provision and Living Standards in Islington, MORI, 1987.

  63. Gallup Political Index, April 1988.

  64. For example, Public Opinion in Camden, MORI, 1985.

  65. Interview with the author.

  66. These were 1980 Housing Act; 1982 Local Government Finance Act; 1984 Rates Act; 1984 Housing and Building Control Act; 1985 Transport Act; 1985 Local Government Act; 1988 Local Government Finance Act; 1988 Housing Act; 1988 Education Reform Act; and 1989 Local Government Act.

  67. K. Young and N. Rao, Local Government Since 1945 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997); G. Stoker, Transforming Local Governance (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2004).

  68. Sunday Times, 22 March 1987.

  69. D. Deacon and P. Golding, Taxation and Representation (London: John Libbey, 1994), table 7.1, p. 190.

  70. Gallup Survey, April 1988.

  71. For example MORI surveys undertaken for Bristol Council (1987) and Nottinghamshire (1988).

  72. B. Gosschalk and J. Curran, ‘A hostile awakening’, Local Government Chronicle, 8 September 1989, p. 18.

  73. Gallup Survey, October 1987; Marplan Survey, February 1988; MORI, November 1988.

  74. Attitudes to Local Authorities, Audit Commission/MORI, 1986.

  75. Ibid.

  76. Attitudes to Local Government, Association of Metropolitan Authorities/MORI, 1981.

  77. I. Crewe, ‘Has the electorate become Thatcherite?’ in R. Skidelsky (ed.) Thatcherism (London: Chatto and Windus, 1988), table 4, pp. 41–3.

  78. Attitudes to Local Authorities and Their Services, Audit Commission/MORI, May 1986.

  79. J. Curtice, ‘One nation?’ in R. Jowell, L. Brook and S. Witherspoon (eds.) British Social Attitudes: The 5th Report (Aldershot: Gower, 1988), table 8.2, p. 147.

  80. Curtice, ‘One nation?’

  81. Crewe, ‘Electorate’, table 4, p. 43.

  82. Cited in B. Gosschalk and C. Game, ‘Mrs. Thatcher’s local revolution’, unpublished ESOMAR Conference paper, February 1989.

  83. The Guardian, 7 May 1990.

  84. A. Watkins, ‘Mr. Kinnock has still to find his big idea’, Observer, 31 December 1989.

  85. Interview with Patricia Hewitt (Kinnock’s Press Secretary) by the author.

  86. Public Opinion in Islington, MORI, 1985.

  87. Public Opinion in Southwark, MORI, 1984.

  88. N. Branson, Poplarism 1919–1925 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1979).

  8

  Slaying the dragon

  Ivor Gaber

  He [Ken Livingstone] praises Mr. Blair for running ‘the government of my dreams’ on issues such as race, female equality and sexual orientation. ‘If you come out [as gay]’ he says ‘it almost guarantees you a junior ministerial post. It’s wonderful’,

  Jackie Ashley, the Guardian 8 April 2004

  Today as an experiment, I have been asked to run a few job advertisements. These are not ordinary jobs. These are some of the nation’s top jobs, none of which has ever been advertised before. So only extremely serious applicants, please … Bogeyman of the Left. This symbolic post fulfils the very important function of giving the British electorate (or at least the British media) someone to fear. The British find it very hard to work out the ideas or aims of the far left (also known as the “far left”, “loony left”, “mad left”, etc.), so they prefer to concentrate on one person, as this fits better into their idea of politics as soap opera. Previous holders of the post have been Tony Benn, Ken Livingstone, Arthur Scargill and (briefly) Derek Hatton, but the post is currently vacant. Candidates should have a strong but well-hidden sense of humour, a gift for oratory, a short name for headlines, and a minimum of one odd hobby, even if it is only newt-keeping or tea-drinking. The post is not paid, but there are considerable fees for broadcasts, interviews, articles, etc., and the incumbent will soon be able to move out of politics and become a well-loved character on telly.

  Miles Kington, the Independent 28 March 1990

  This chapter uses a wide-angled lens to examine the part played by the media in the evolution of the Labour Party under the leaderships of Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock. But it takes as its starting point the sharp increase in the vituperative nature of the press attacks on Labour that coincided with the so-called winter of discontent in 1978–9 (when public sector workers rebelled against the pay limits being set by the then Labour Government). We also analyse two other aspects of press reporting of the Labour left. First, the ongoing narrative that characterised left-wing politicians as ‘mad’ with Tony Benn, in particular, being singled out for such treatment. And second, how the reporting of the winter of discontent, and the leadership of Michael Foot, can be seen as early exemplars of a particular UK variant of fake news. Whilst, as outlined in Chapter 4 and 5, some of the press reports of the left were based on straightforward untruths, some of it was based on the tiniest kernel of truth, which was then vigorously and distortingly spun, either by political campaigners, or the media, into a form which we label ‘extreme spin’ and ended up with the reader gaining a totally false impression of what had actually occurred.

  The treatment of Foot by the press persuaded his successor, Neil Kinnock, to attempt to prevent this demolition from happening again. With the help of Peter Mandelson and Phillip Gould, Kinnock sought to modernise Labour, a process in which shedding the ‘loony left’ label was also seen as a key objective. Kinnock was only half successful – media attacks continued – but he did upgrade the Party’s media and marketing campaigning. This paved the way for the arrival of New Labour in which Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell played key roles. To ensure that the New Labour brand triumphed, it was important for its advocates to create, and then slay, the dragon that Old Labour (and its offspring, the urban left) was perceived to be. It has been argued that ‘old Labour’ never actually existed, except in the minds of those who sought to slay it, but its apparent ‘slaying’, combined with Blair’s courtship of Rupert Murdoch, led to a period (1994–2003) during which Labour’s relations with the media were the least problematic at any time in the past half century.

  As a backdrop to this analysis, this chapter looks at what happened to the ‘loony left’, or more importantly to perceptions of the ‘loony left’, in the period between the demise of the GLC in 1985 until the 1992 General Election and the resignation of Neil Kinnock as party leader. It will describe how Labour’s election defeat in 1987 was interpreted, both by the media and the Labour leadership, as a defeat for the notion of Labour as a left-wing party. This in turn gave impetus to those who were arguing that, although Labour had changed it had not changed enough and needed to travel further toward the political centre to regain power. It will then examine how the Labour leadership set about changing the party and its policies, initially through a process of political realignment known as the Policy Review Process, and then thro
ugh organisational change, to create a party that would not only ‘look different’ from the previous model but would actually be different. The chapter will also analyse how this was achieved by the recruitment of a new cadre of political actors who were themselves, if not communication professionals then, at the very least, highly focussed on the importance of communications as central to the political project. And it will investigate how these professionals, charged with the task of making Labour more ‘marketable’, themselves became a new, powerful tier of leadership which assumed and dispensed, more real power than all but a few of the elected leaders they were supposed to serve.

  However, it is important to indicate at the outset that it is no part of the argument being advanced here that the rise to power and influence by the left of the Labour Party was a media invention, nor would we deny that there were groups, particularly the Militant Tendency, whose ultimate aim was to take over the Party and transform it into a revolutionary organisation. No political party committed to democratic parliamentary politics can afford to ignore such developments. Nonetheless, such groups and their supporters played only a very minor role in the broad sweep of left politics that were characterised by the media as ‘loony’.

  It is commonly assumed that those who led the ‘project’ – the name given to the operation by Labour’s self-styled ‘modernisers’ to capture the party and transform it into an election-winning machine – virtually created a new party, or at least a new brand i.e. New Labour. But in fact, consciously or otherwise, they created not one new party but two – New Labour (about which much has been written) and ‘Old Labour’ an artifice, taking in everyone from left urban activists, through Militant and other ultra-left groupings, to both right and left-wing backbench MPs and the entire trade union movement (in other words, from the ranks of the cynical right to the activist left). Old Labour had to be created because if one is wanting to be seen to be slaying a dragon then it is important to ensure that the dragon appear as terrifying and potentially dangerous as possible in order to make the act of dramatic regime change appear not just necessary but welcome. As Tim Bale notes: ‘just as any improved version of a product must have an old, unimproved one from which it can be distinguished, New Labour needed old Labour’.1

  The importance of this is that when the modernisers – led by Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson – were in the process of creating New Labour it was important for them to not just to be seen to be taking on the existing party and challenging its basic precepts and ways of working, but also for the party – or at least those sections characterised as Old Labour – to be seen to be resisting these changes. In his magisterial account of the Labour Party under Blair, Lewis Minkin attributes this tactic to Peter Mandelson which, he claims, was dubbed ‘blood on the floor’. Minkin writes that this:

  was an attention seeking tactic said to be the brainchild of Mandelson, in which advance publicity heightened the sense of confrontation with unions, the left or the activists in order to lodge in the mind of the recipient the subservience of the targets and the dominance of the leader.2

  It was based on the belief that, without controversy and dissent, the public would not accept that the transformation was either real or complete. Hence, opposition was an essential part of the process, and those doing the opposing had to be perceived as commanding significant support in the Party, or at least having done so in the past. Exaggerating the importance and success of the ‘loony left’ in its earlier supposed capture of the Labour Party was an important sub-text for the modernisers. Thus, supporters of the ‘loony left’, the modernisers and the right-wing press all, bizarrely, had a vested interest in making it appear to have been a far more significant player than was in fact the case, so that its defeat would appear to have a significance way beyond that which it probably deserved.

  Paradoxically, much of the political agenda of the ‘loony left’ came to be accepted, even supported by New Labour, as the quotation from Ken Livingstone at the head of this chapter makes irreverently clear. This agenda included support for the raft of policies associated with the equality agenda – ethnicity, gender and disabilities – it also included other policy areas such as negotiating with Sinn Fein and, strangely enough, the Public Finance Initiative which had its origins in attempts by left Labour local administrations to raise extra cash by selling off unrequired buildings to cover the shortfalls in expenditure caused by the Conservative Government’s policy of rate-capping.

  Contemporary political history is always problematic to document, for the historian is dealing not just with what actually happened but also the perceptions of those involved at the time – perceptions which are frequently clouded by current political arguments and positions. It is also complicated because political actors tend to believe that their own political stances have been constant, and it is the world around them that has changed. As Alan Finlayson has observed: ‘investigation must also focus on how those with power come to forge their own understandings and on what shaped their illusions … They interpret the world for us and then ask us to believe in their interpretation’.3

  It is now commonplace to observe that Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher shared certain personal and political characteristics; in particular, both Blair and Thatcher (and, for them as individuals, read they and the people close to them) embarked on ideological projects to re-make their parties. Both saw the need to push their parties rightwards – Thatcher further to the right of British politics and Blair to the centre and, in the process, pushing the whole centre of gravity of British politics further to the right. In order to achieve these tasks, both leaders had to stake out why their trajectory was the only possible one to follow – the ‘no alternative’ scenario. Finlayson provides a helpful explanation for the dynamics of this process:

  In order to provide a political project with a solid ground to stand on, it is always necessary to clear a space first. Parties, movements and ideologies do this by establishing a crisis to which they have the necessary answers, so that they are the only reasonable response. Thatcherism was part of a New Right reformulation, which posited the crisis of Keynesianism welfare state, blamed failure on socialism and hence advocated that socialism be ‘smashed’ and the state rolled back from the economy. Blair’s established itself firstly within the Labour party, as a response to manifest electoral crisis. It blamed that failure on bad party management, inefficient, in-fighting and unworkable, un-sellable, policies.4

  But Finlayson’s analysis does not confine itself to the political; he goes on to make a persuasive argument as to how the modernisers, steeped as they were in the marketing paradigm, perceived the ‘project’ as something more than just political transformation:

  [the modernisers] also pointed to the inadequate and outdated branding of the party. The emotional connotations of the party were all wrong. The customer base, the electorate, had changed, and the party’s image, structure and product would have to change if there was to be any hope of securing a market position. New Labour saw a shift in the market; it identified a new consumer need and a market opportunity. Through research, it developed a product and a strategy for placing it, found a chief salesman who could embody the company’s values, and oriented itself so as to claim the future.5

  The notion of Blair as Labour’s ‘chief salesman’ is a compelling one, particularly if one thinks of the very determined attempts made by New Labour to market itself in a holistic way, even before Blair. It was under Kinnock that the party changed its trademark colour from the slightly strident traditional red and yellow (resurrected by the Conservatives in 2004 to remind voters of Old Labour) to pastel pink; of how the annual party conference was transformed from a political decision-making body into a sales convention (for Labour’s policies and personalities) and the virtual handing over of the power to direct election campaigns from elected politicians to appointed officials.6

  But the rise of New Labour was not just associated with the rise of the political marketing pa
radigm – a trend in itself that owed much to the privatisation of public life – a paradigm which saw voters as consumers, policies as products and parties as sales organisations. It was also associated with the near total dominance of electioneering via the media; so, as parties shifted from being organisations of volunteer leafleteers and door-knockers to professionalised organisations dedicated to persuading and mobilising the public, the defining of what was ‘politically acceptable’ to the electorate became something that became more and more dominated by the media rather, than as it had been in the past, a process that was the preserve of the political parties and their decision-making processes. In other words, the process of mediatization in which a media logic takes precedence over the formerly dominant political logic.7

  The gradual process in which the Conservative party and their supporters in the press shifted their characterisation of Labour from representing it as their ‘opponents’ to representing it as their ‘enemy’ began in 1974 when Rupert Murdoch switched the Sun – the UK’s largest selling newspaper at the time – from supporting Labour to the Conservatives and gained full momentum during the Winter of Discontent in 1978–9. The ‘Winter’ began with a nationwide lorry drivers’ strike which soon led to stories in the press of the hardship being caused by the lorry drivers’ action, including farm animals dying for lack of feedstuff. An ITN journalist, having been sent out to substantiate this story, reported back that that having visited five farms supposedly affected, she had found just one dead chicken that had died of fright when her camera crew switched on their lights.8 This story did not make it on air but others, following similar unsubstantiated dominant narratives did, particularly in the Conservative-supporting press. For all the talk of people dying as a result of the public sector strikes, the only reported death associated with the action was that of a trade unionist who fell under the wheels of a lorry whilst on picket duty. Derek Jameson, then editor of the Daily Express (and a self-declared Labour supporter), said: ‘We pulled every dirty trick in the book; we made it look like it was general, universal and eternal when it was in reality scattered, here and there, and no great problem’.9