Culture Wars

by James Curran

  TABLE 9.1  References to the ‘loony left’ and ‘Red Ken’ in the national press, January 2002–May 2003

  On 11 September 2001, a Labour spin doctor – Jo Moore – tried to use the cover of the 9/11 terrorist attack on New York to blind-side the media. In an email to colleagues, she advised them that it would be ‘a good day to bury bad news’.45 It was the day when spin became a major negative factor for New Labour. In an article the following year headlined ‘It’s Time to Bury Spin’, Alastair Campbell, after describing how he had been determined that the Blair would not suffer at the hands of the media in the same way as his predecessors, confessed:

  We appeared, and perhaps we were, over-controlling, manipulative. People stopped trusting what we had to say I think what we underestimated was the extent to which the changes we made in our relationships with the media, and in getting our media act together, would itself become an issue and a story That’s in part because we carried on for too long in Government with some of the tactics of opposition.46

  But if things were bad in 2002, they got even worse following the invasion of Iraq in 2003 which had severely negative consequences for New Labour’s relations with the media. In the run-up to the invasion, the media was overwhelmingly supportive of the claim by both London and Washington that Sadaam Hussein’s Iraq had strategic weapons of mass destruction that they were capable of being launched within forty-five minutes. This claim was derived from what came to be known as the Government’s ‘dodgy dossier’ – most of which was not based on intelligence reports but purloined from an American PhD thesis. But the claim was taken up uncritically and enthusiastically by the press. The London Evening Standard’s headline on its front page on the day the dossier was released was ‘45 Minutes from Attack’,47 whilst the following day’s Sun featured a front page headline, ‘He’s Got ’Em’ Let’s Get Him’ – and just in case the message was not quite clear the inside page follow-up was headlined ‘Brits 45 mins from Doom’.48 Not only did this all prove to be totally untrue, but according to one of his senior ministers, Blair knew these claims to be untrue.49 And it wasn’t until well after the invasion that the press began to question their uncritical support for the invasion, but none produced the fulsome mea culpas that both the New York Times 50 and the Washington Post 51 carried apologising for their supine reporting. The whole affair led to Blair and Campbell’s honesty in dealing with the media being widely questioned – questioning that was exacerbated by the death of government weapons’ inspector Dr. David Kelly. The death led to the Hutton Inquiry and the Inquiry’s aftermath, which included the resignation of the Chair and Director General of the BBC. All this came to symbolise New Labour’s unhealthy obsession with image. Spin and the New Labour project became intrinsically and damagingly linked, it seemed to reinforce an image of untrustworthiness that Blair never recovered.

  In 2004, ‘Red Ken’ was re-elected as Mayor of London, this time with the full support of the New Labour Government and the following year Blair was re-elected, on an historically low turnout with just 35% of the vote. In order to counteract the very bad publicity associated with the Iraq war and the subsequent negative ramifications that associated Labour with spin, Blair’s advisors drafted a so-called ‘masochism strategy’ for the Labour leader in the upcoming 2005 election. The strategy would involve Blair accepting that the war had not been popular, being prepared to meet with voters to discuss it, but refusing to apologise for his support for the invasion. During the campaign, Labour adviser Phillip Gould explained how the Party was finding it very frustrating because even though, he argued, things were going well in terms of the economy and other domestic markers, voters were not prepared to give the Government credit for these achievements: ‘They just don’t believe us’ Gould said.52

  Blair stepped down in 2007 and was succeeded by his New Labour co-architect, Gordon Brown, but not before the toxic relationship between the two men had been exposed on an almost daily basis by the media53 Just one example came two years before Blair made way for Brown in a Daily Telegraph article headlined: ‘There is nothing that you could say to me now that I could ever believe’54 based on a book – Brown’s Britain – by journalist Robert Peston in which he put flesh and blood on the rumours about the feud between the two men, the sub-title of the book was ‘this is the biggest political story in Britain today’.55 Four years later, Blair retaliated with his autobiography, which the Daily Telegraph covered in a front-page story headlined: ‘Gordon Brown tried to blackmail me, says Blair’.56

  Notwithstanding, almost immediately Brown took over from Blair Labour’s poll rating rose and it looked like the new Prime Minister could do no wrong as he adeptly handled a series of domestic crises over the summer – including a terrorist attack, flooding and an outbreak of foot and mouth disease. He was clearly tempted to go for a snap poll in the autumn but, following a successful Conservative Party conference, he changed his mind. He denied he had ever considered such a move and tried to convince the public that it had nothing to do with his falling poll numbers. His reputation never recovered as the spectre of Labour spin once more came into public view. A series of other PR disasters followed, including turning up late to sign the Lisbon Treaty because he did not want to be seen as a too avid supporter of the EU. Indicative of his recognition that he needed help, Brown turned to his old adversary, Peter Mandelson, and appointed him to his cabinet in the hope that he could help turn around his receding fortunes.

  Gordon Brown was unfortunate in that the scandal surrounding MPs expenses in 2009, which bore no relation to his time in office, blew up in the pages of the Daily Telegraph under his watch. Cruelly, the very first story the paper ran was a rather weak ‘revelation’ that Brown was legitimately claiming expenses for a cleaner for his Westminster flat. But it didn’t help and from this point on the tabloid press were in full cry against Brown. The Sun, unsurprisingly, announced its withdrawal of support from Brown (and Labour) on the eve of his big speech to the Labour Party conference. Perhaps surprisingly, Brown had established a good personal relationship with the editor of the Daily Mail Paul Dacre (some suggested it was because they shared a Calvinistic background and outlook) but this didn’t stop the paper from launching a series of attacks on Brown. Throughout his time in office, Brown saw off a number of plots by colleagues to unseat him, but his media nadir came towards the end of the 2010 election campaign when a microphone caught Brown calling Labour voter Gillian Duffy, a ‘bigoted woman’ following a conversation with her in Rochdale. Brown lost his majority in the election, but ironically Rochdale was one of only two seats Labour gained. Although following an inconclusive general election result his political career ended in a welter of headlines accusing him of clinging to office – the Mail, over a picture of Brown headlined its front page ‘A Squalid Day for Democracy’57 whilst the Sun, on the same day, had a headline ‘Squatter Holed up in No 10’.58

  Brown resigned and was succeeded not by the crown prince apparent, David Miliband – a former Foreign Secretary, closely aligned with New Labour – but by his younger brother Ed who had campaigned on the platform that it was time to draw a line under the Blair/Brown era.

  Notes

  1. Sun, 11 April 1992.

  2. Guardian, 5 January 1993.

  3. A. Marr, A History of Modern Britain (London, Pan Books, 2007), p. 487.

  4. E. Shaw The Labour Party Since 1945 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), p. 214.

  5. Shaw op cit, p. 206.

  6. Marr op cit, pp. 488–9.

  7. N. Timmins ‘The recall of Parliament: Smith savages ‘devalued government’: Labour MPs roar approval for new leader’ Independent, 24 September 1992.

  8. Personal conversation with Gaber 1996.

  9. P. Hyman One Out of Ten: From Downing Street Vision to Classroom Reality (London: Vintage, 2005), p. 48.

  10. P. Hewitt and P. Gould, in Renewal 1: 1 (1993), p. 47; quoted in Shaw (1994), p. 175.

  11. S. Fielding The Labour Party: continuity and change
in the making of ‘New’ Labour (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 3.

  12. L. Baston in B. Brivati and R. Heffernan The Labour Party: A Centenary History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), p. 468.

  13. C. Hughes and P. Wintour Labour Rebuilt: The New Model Party (London: Fourth Estate, 1990) p. 200.

  14. Guardian, 12 July 1997.

  15. Quoted in D. Mattison The Power of the Focus Group, Total Politics 20 August 2010 www.totalpolitics.com/articles/culture/power-focus-group.

  16. P. Gould The Unfinished Revolution: How the Modernisers Saved the Labour Party (London: Orion,1998), p. 327.

  17. Gould op cit, pp. 51–2.

  18. E. Noelle-Neumann, The Spiral of Silence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974).

  19. Gould op cit, p. 261.

  20. T. Blair A Journey (London: Hutchinson, 2010), p. 298.

  21. Fielding op cit, p. 78.

  22. Blair op cit, p. 47.

  23. Fielding op cit, p. 48.

  24. T. Bale in T. Bale and B. Brivati New Labour in Power: Precedents and Prospects (London: Routledge, 2000), p.49.

  25. Personal conversation with Gaber 1996.

  27. A. Campbell, evidence to the House of Commons Select Committee on Public Administration, 23 June 1998.

  28. Quoted in B. MacArthur The Press in I. Crewe and M. Harrop (eds) Political Communications: The British General Election of 1987 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 101.

  29. MacArthur op cit, p. 102.

  30. A. Campbell It’s time to bury spin British Journalism Review 13(4) 2002, pp. 15–23.

  31. L. Minkin The Blair Supremacy: A Study in the Politics of Labour’s Party Management (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), pp. 353, 355.

  32. Blair op cit, p. 98.

  33. N. Kinnock People, 21 November 1999,

  34. T. Blair Evening Standard, 19 November 1999.

  35. L. Davies Through the Looking Glass: A dissenter inside New Labour (London: Verso, 2001), p. 100.

  36. R. Watson and T. Baldwin ‘Fear and loathing for people’s Ken The Times, 29 October 1999.

  37. This issue is covered in detail in chapter 8 of the first edition of this book – J. Curran, I. Gaber and J. Petley Culture Wars: The Media and the British Left (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005).

  38. B. Amiel ‘Blunkett and Livingstone are planning to run our lives. If we want to keep our dignity, we must fight those who seek to interfere with our property rights, transport system and liberty Daily Telegraph, 8 July 2002.

  39. S. Sands ‘We will forgive our heroes everything except adultery’ Daily Telegraph, 11 July 2002.

  40. S. Sands, ‘Livingstone takes his class war to school run mothers’ Daily Telegraph, 23 January 2003.

  41. S. Heffer, ‘Treachery that’s killing democracy’ Daily Mail, 22 February 2003.

  42. T. Kavanagh, ‘Why we need a jam tax revolt’ Sun, 29 November 2002.

  43. R. Littlejohn, Slow, slow, quick, quick, slow Sun, 4 March 2003.

  44. Using the LexisNexis cuttings database.

  45. A. Sparrow, ‘Sept 11: ‘A good day to bury bad news’ Daily Telegraph, 10 October 2001.

  46. Campbell, op cit.

  47. Evening Standard, 24 January 2002.

  48. Sun, 25 January 2002.

  49. In his memoirs, The Point of Departure (London: Simon & Schuster, 2004), senior cabinet minister Robin Cook wrote: ‘Tony [Blair] did not try to argue me out of the view I expressed that Saddam did not have real weapons of mass destruction that were designed for strategic use against city populations and capable of being delivered with reliability over long distances’, p. 312.

  50. ‘From the editors; the Times and Iraq’ New York Times, 26 May 2004.

  51. ‘The Post on WMDs: An inside story’ Washington Post, 12 August 2004.

  52. Personal conversation with Gaber 2005.

  53. J. Naughtie Rivals: The Intimate Story of a Political Marriage (London: Fourth Estate, 2002).

  54. M. Kite, ‘There is nothing that you could say to me now that I could ever believe’ Daily Telegraph, 10 January 2005.

  55. R. Peston Brown’s Britain (London: Short Books, 2005).

  56. Daily Telegraph, 1 September 2010.

  57. Daily Mail, ‘A squalid day for democracy’, 10 May 2010.

  58. Sun, ‘Squatter holed up in No. 10’, 8 May 2010.

  10

  ‘ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE’

  The press, racism and Labour

  Julian Petley

  ‘Every colour is a good colour’

  In its early years, New Labour sought to emphasise that it saw Britain as a diverse, plural yet unified society, and indeed wished to make it more so. But it did this in a way in which aspirational rhetoric generally played a larger role than specific policy formulations. For example, in his speech to the Labour Party conference in 1995 Tony Blair proclaimed:

  Let’s build a new and young country that can lay aside the old prejudices that dominated our land for a generation. A nation for all the people, built by the people, where old divisions are cast out. A new spirit in the nation based on working together, unity, solidarity, partnership. One Britain. That is the patriotism of the future. Where never again do we fight our politics by appealing to one section of the nation at the expense of another.1

  Or, take this characteristic remark by culture secretary Chris Smith just a few months after Labour had come to power in 1997:

  Culture – or perhaps we should talk rather of cultures – has to be seen on the widest possible canvas. Today Britain embraces cultures from all over the world, as it always has, and the diversity of our society and of our experiences is precisely what makes for the richness of our cultural environment … So when we try to understand how our national culture and sense of identity intertwine, let us remember first and foremost that diversity is one of the key ingredients of both that culture and that identity.2

  Such sentiments also strongly imbued the ‘rebranding Britain’ project undertaken by the Labour-friendly Demos think tank in in the early days of the new government. The key document of this strategy, Britain TM , argued that:

  Britain is a hybrid nation – always mixing diverse elements together into something new. Not a melting pot that moulds disparate ethnicities into a conformist whole, but a country that thrives on diversity and uses it to constantly renew and re-energise itself. Britain’s royal family mixed together German, Danish and, more recently, Greek ancestry. Our most famous retailer (Marks and Spencer) was founded by Russian Jews. Some of our most successful authors, like Salman Rushdie, are drawn from former colonies. Our contemporary cuisine is a fearless hybrid of elements from other nations. Our popular music began by combining American rhythm and blues with the traditions of the English music hall. But it is not just ethnicities that are mixed – Britain is also the world’s capital of ways of living, the home of happily co-existing subcultures – from punks and ravers to freemasons and gentlemen’s clubs. Britain is the least pure if European countries, more mongrel and better prepared for a world that is continually generating new hybrid forms.3

  This stress on specifically ethnic diversity distinguishes the Demos document from many of New Labour’s own pronouncements on diversity, which, as noted above, tend to be couched in very general terms. Thus, in his speech to the Labour Party conference in 1998, Blair briefly looked forward to ‘a country in which every colour is a good colour, and every member of every race able to fulfil their potential’ (quoted in the Independent, 29 September 1998), and in an interview with the New Statesman (19 April 1999), the Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown stated simply that ‘I see Britain as being the first country in the world that can be a multicultural, multi-ethnic and multinational state …. We have a chance to forge a unique pluralist democracy where diversity becomes a source of strength’. Similarly, the Home Secretary David Blunkett argued that ‘today, with cultural globalisation, no culture can simply be isolated from wider
influences. Our society is multicultural, and it is important that our future social and political development results from a genuine cultural interaction’.4

  ‘Bizarre issues’ and ‘peculiar things’

  Two interconnected reasons for the Labour leadership’s relative restraint on the issue of ethnicity suggest themselves. The first takes us back to Philip Gould, who features prominently elsewhere in this book. In The Unfinished Revolution, each time that the issues of ethnicity/minorities/immigration are mentioned, it is in order to sound a warning. Thus, for example, when discussing a presentation given to Labour strategists by an advertising agency in November 1985, he notes that their research findings, which were ‘the most important of any ­presented during the entire period I worked with the Labour Party’, laid bare

  the apparent unbridgeable gap between what Labour had become and what the British electorate now wanted … The minority agenda of the emerging metropolitan left, of militant rights in welfare, race and gender was completely divorced from what the British people wanted from a government.5

  The research showed that the key issues for the voters that Labour wanted to attract ‘were those affecting their own personal and financial security: law and order, health, education, inflation, prices and taxation. Defence and the role of minorities within society, two of Labour’s big preoccupations, were at the bottom of the list’.6 He also quotes Stanley Greenberg, who had worked as a pollster for Bill Clinton in 1992 and also advised Blair from the mid-1990s, as stating that, as far as many voters were concerned: ‘One of the preoccupations of Old Labour was a preoccupation with what the public often saw as “bizarre” issues: homosexuals, immigrants, feminists, lesbians, boroughs putting their money into peculiar things’.7

  The second, and very closely related issue, concerns the absolutely ferocious campaign by Conservative politicians and newspapers to tar Labour with the ‘loony left’ brush during the 1980s, which is discussed elsewhere in this book. Central here were London Labour councils’ alleged policies on sexuality and ethnicity, with Brent and Haringey (the former discussed in more detail in the first edition) being the main targets of the press flamethrowers as far as ethnicity was concerned. However, press hostility to minorities, immigration and anti-racist initiatives has a history that stretches back long before the 1980s, and any Labour politician who was remotely media savvy must have been well aware that New Labour would have to do a great deal more than simply distance itself from ‘loony’ policies on ethnicity if it was to be spared yet more onslaughts by the press. In this it singularly failed.