Time for Dog to Eat Dog

“Dog doesn’t eat dog” is the oldest of media adages. Media proprietors over time avoided at all costs reporting on the corruption and dubious ethics of their rivals. The press did not call out Lord Rothermere’s open anti-semitism in the 1930s. The Daily Mail published the address of the Jew-hating British Union of Fascists on the Kings Road and urged its readers to support Sir Oswald Mosley as he launched violent attacks on the immigrant Jewish community in East London.

Newspapers refused to challenge Rupert Murdoch as he degraded women with sexist pictures of their naked bodies as he sought readers for the Sun. An oafish president of the TUC making his end of Congress vote of thanks to the press at the end of the week’s debate even joked that the “readers of the Sun didn’t care who ran Britain as long as she had big ‘ t..s’.

Women after 1970 were just beginning the long march through trade unions engaged in hand-to-hand combat on issues like equal pay, promotion, maternity leave, abortion, and challenging the open sexism of many male union bosses (as well as Labour MPs) and I watched as an NUJ delegate at the TUC at his crude, stupid sexism from the elderly man at the head of organised labour movement.

When I published an NUJ pamphlet in 1978 “Black and White: Race Reporting in Britain” which pointed out that thirty years after Windrush docked at Tilbury there was still no black face reporting on the BBC and hardly any journalists came from black, or Asian British communities.

In The Times Bernard Levin, then the Andrew Neil of the day, devoted his column to trashing the “noddy language” of my argument in the same patronising manner that the Spectator or Sunday Times columnist today rubbishes any expressions of concern about media coverage of many burning social issues as “woke” – the right’s new adjective of choice to shut down any debate that challenges conformist thinking.

The Guardian did appoint a media correspondent but it required police investigation to expose phone hacking. The toothless Press Council was put out of its misery but the quintessential establishment outfit wrote scores of thousands of words that changed nothing as sexist and racist media stereotypes flourished in the Brexit era of politics when it was permissible to publish open lies about Europe without even the most minor fact checking.

Political journalists and business correspondents don’t hesitate to go for the jugular of any over-weening minister or useless CEO but editors – of national newspapers or broadcast progammes never get put under the same spotlight even though they often weild more direct power over people’s lives and destroy individuals with deformed media attacks.

Radio 4 had a media programme but it was earnest and academic and never discussed the BBC’s growing hostility to Europe in the run up the Brexit plebiscite when Nigel Farage appeared endless on Question Time or the Today programme with no equal space given to those who could tell the truth about how the EU worked.

It is not just on the right. There are left commentator-influencers locked into a pathological dislike of social democracy and all reformist politics who have big followerships. Some MPs and trade union leaders can only find fault with Labour and never acknowledge the real existing difficulties an elected Labour government faces as it tries to apply Aneurin Bevan’s 1949 maxim “The language of priorities is the religion of socialism”. They get picked up and given profile by the BBC and other media always eager to find left voices hostile to Labour in power.

This has helped since in the half century since 1970 give Tories twice as much time in government as Labour – 36 years for Conservatives compared to 18 for Labour.

Newspapers have become almost extinct with the Guardian selling about 60,000 a day (the paper refuses to make public its circulation). 88% of 16–24-year-olds access news online and 82% of that age cohort get news from social media.

More than half (54%) of people aged 55 and over find news online – up from 45% in 2018 – with most navigating directly to news websites. This had created space for new print media like Byline Times or the New European which gets a half a million weekly visitors to its hard paywall website.

The BBC and legacy papers have cut down massively on coverage of Europe. The BBC and Guardian are obsessed with reporting provincial news from America where both British news outlets hope to pick up subscriptions.

Meanwhile the anti-European, anti-immigrant, legacy press has stepped up its policy of replacing traditional fact-checked news by headline grabbing assertion and the promotion of open propagandists for rightist nationalist populist themes.

Two new books examine in depth the new hard-right media landscape and the huge amount of money being spent to promote isolationist arguments and defend hate speech in different forms on TV, radio and social media. They are:

“A Dead Cat on Your Table” By Peter York with illustrations by Martin Rowson )Byline Books £14.99)

“The Populist Right” by Jon Bloomfield and David Edgar. Byline Books £9.99

Peter York is a veteran commentator on cultural politics – best known for coining the phrase “Sloane Ranger” at the start of the Margaret Thatcher era to describe upper-middle class women interested in fashion and indifferent to the social injuries caused by Thatcher’s rightwing attacks on social justice in the workplace and in public spending.

Now he has written an invaluable guide to today’s rightwing culture wars. This is not just a left polemical splutter but a deeply researched well-written catalogue of all the academics, writers, journalists and rich individuals behind this new politics.

His main point is “Follow The Money”. As a journalist or a provincial university lecturer there is so much more money to be made writing for the Daily Mail or Sunday Times, or working for one of the rightist think-tanks like Policy Exchange This was set up at the beginning of the 21^st century century by rightist politicians, wealthy individuals, and journalists concerned that Tony Blair’s New Labour project was proving a success both in picking good progressive policy idea from the global English speaking world and to a lesser extent from Europe and in winning elections.

Policy Exchange is the main bridge across which once left intellectual journalists or academics cross into being anti-state, anti-obligatory social provision propagandists.

Many of them like those associated in younger days with the Revolutionary Communist Party which carried out propaganda work for Slobodan Milosevic in his ten year war of Serb supremacist extermination and ethnic cleansing in post-communist Yugoslavia. But like most ultra-leftists gripped by theoretical discourse at the start of politics they curdled into contempt for the historic compromises of social democracy and found clarity and clear lines to promote in the foetid world of national identity, race, flag, faith, and hostility to modern gender and sex issues.

York’s book is called “A Dead Cat on the Table” – from the famous advice to political communications chieftains when their candidate or party is in trouble to dramatically change the story by making some extravagant claim so outrageous (the dead cat) that everyone forgets the previous story.

York’s book is the best I have read in its patient exposition of all the new(ish) political discourses roughly since post-national era of Davos capitalism began around the time of the end of European state socialism in the Soviet Empire in 1990. It has many scores of names of professors and columnists who feature in the Mail-Telegraph-Times-Spectator pages as they denounce European cooperation, fair taxation, or any criticism of the continuing sexism and racism in modern politics.

It has wonderful accompanying illustrations by Martin Rowson, our modern Gillray. It needs an index as this is a reference book full of the names of modern propagandists.

A second Byline book “The Little Black Book of the Populist Right” is by the Birmingham academic Jon Bloomfield and our greatest living political playwright David Edgar. After outlining a mythical “post-war political settlement (of) a regulated, civilised capitalism with the welfare state and extensive public ownership” they seek “To show how national populists have exploited discontent with the turn towards neo-liberal economics.”

The catch-all phrase “neo-liberal” is sprayed everywhere in the early part of 140 page book (also without an index) as a kind of incantation which if used often enough will persuade all decent people of the good sense of the authors’ dismay at current economic and social arrangements.

I cut my early political and trade union teeth in the same milieu – 1970s Birmingham – as Edgar and Bloomfield. It is utterly ahistorical to paint that era as a nirvana of post-1945 "civilised welfare state capitalism.” In-your-face poverty was visible in most Birmingham wards. Racism was rife with steel and print unions using the closed shop to exclude black or Asian immigrants from getting work.

Globalisation meant low-cost airlines flying scores of thousands of Brummies to holidays to warm beach resorts utterly different from the shivering, chilly summer holidays of English resorts, where hotels were half the price of England, the wine, beer and colourful liquors and food that tasted of something were on offer to the British working class.

The response of the left then was to campaign ferociously against Europe as the avatar of post-national economics which gradually became known as globalisation. The first European community was the 1950 European Coal and Steel Community which placed control of national steel and control industries under a supra-national High Authority with a parliamentary assembly (the forerunner of the European Parliament) and union representation on the boards of companies.

This was rejected by British trade unions with Jack Jones, the dominant trade union leader of the day, denouncing workers on company boards as class collaboration. I attended as a constituency delegate the Special Labour Party conference on entering the European Economic Community or Common Market set up in 1957 which Britain refused to join. The Labour conference was in 1972. It was a high mass of demagogic hate against Europe with right-wingers like Peter Shore combining with the reborn leftist upper class Viscount’s son, Tony Benn, outbidding the rising new young star of the left, Neil Kinnock, in denunciations of Europe.

The generation Bloomfield, Edgar and I come from should have the self-awareness to admit our 1970s national leftism was badly out of tune with the people we assumed we were speaking for who ensured that in the half-century since the great demonstrations in favour of a regime in Vietnam that once it took power in 1974 opened as many concentration camps as Franco or Greek colonels did.

Fast forward to today and are we sure that everything the left denounces is all bad or the worries and concerns of many about the volume and velocity of arrivals of men and women from India, Nigeria, Pakistan or Ghana to work and live in Britain should be dismissed out of hand?

These are just questions that arise after more than half a century of political engagement which I feel the left still prefers not to answer. We have more procedural democracy than ever before – more people can vote in more elections than in any era and there will be even more elections with the arrival of new Mayors as proposed by Angela Rayner.

But the culture of democracy is growing weaker with the new right and their financial backers setting out to divide communities against each other and produce a fragmented Britain where populist nationalism and exclusion of “the other” are not challenged by a democratic culture that has lost self-confidence.

Bloomfield and Edgar have done an important job with their taxonomy of the new right and its spread through universities, think tanks and into the media. Unfortunately Labour’s faltering first steps with unforced errors that politicians with more experience might have avoided has restored confidence to the men and women Bloomfield, Edgar, and York expose.

A decade’s worth of podcasts failed to stop Brexit or win any elections for Labour until 2024 by which time the Tories had auto-destructed and Labour had sidelined Corbynism which for all its charm as a home of lost causes was never a set of ideas or a possible prime minister acceptable to a majority of voters.

Now the far-right are warming up for a final assault on a Labour government with the help of the Owens Jones of the London elite media who still believe despite a century of experience that denigrating and destroying a reformist Labour government opens the door to a successful socialist administration.

Bloomfield and Edgar point out that the English academic, Matthew Goodwin, openly admits that the main thesis of the far right on immigration is an updating of “anti-Semitic conspiracy theory”. Theresa May is not on the far-right but when she told the Tory conference that those who said they were “citizens of the world” she clearly she had no idea that it was Socrates who said "I am neither Athenian nor Greek, but a citizen of the world" and it was Kaiser Wilhelm who called social democrats “men without a fatherland.”

They quote Goodwin saying “Brexit ushered us all into an incredibly exciting and entirely new era in our national history.” This is sheer nonsense. Brexit has not only cut exports and trade and led to a reduction in GDP which vitiates all the claims by Rachel Reeves that Labour is a pro-growth government. Sir Keir Starmer has not, so far, deviated from the Boris Johnson ultra had Brexit is making Britain look like a sad, grumpy little England parody of a nation unaware of its loss of global influence and wealth.

These two book are welcome as they place on record, quote after quote, stat after stat, disguised xenophobia and racism from the legions of journalists and influencers who promote the new Little Englanderism.

How to combat it effectively is another question.

Denis MacShane is a former president of the National Union of Journalists and was a Labour MP and Minister for Europe under Tony Blair. His 2014 book “Brexit. How Britain Will Leave Europe” predicted the 2016 plebiscite result. The BBC refused to interview about his warnings before 2016 that a Leave vote was guaranteed unless politicians, business and influencers took the great of an isolationist vote seriously.