Corbyn Read online

  This practice will likely persist due to the business model of polling organisations. Part of the value of their output derives from the fact that their results can be compared across the decades. A new, more relevant definition of social class would create a break in the results, undermining comparison. However, these figures are ultimately only as powerful as the way in which they are interpreted and used. Had there not been, since the Thatcher era, a determined drive in the political class to declare an end to the class war, and to insist that ‘we are all middle class now’, journalists and academics would be more careful about invoking such trite readings based on social grades.

  Likewise, this melancholic ideology of class, which tends to invoke the working class as an ethnic rump – a tea-towel memory of better days, a nostalgic, left-behind hangover – is the product of ideology, not polls. Since the middle of the New Labour era, there has been a conspicuous effort to identify and console an ageing, patriotic ‘white working class’. They were the excluded remainder of an otherwise benign liberal order. The allegation was that these workers were excluded above all by multiculturalism and mass immigration, a claim floated by New Labour intellectuals like David Goodhart, but taken up with gusto and gratitude by UKIP and the far Right. Absent that vital groundwork, no one today would see fit to classify young, urban, disproportionately poor, multiracial Labour voters, as the ‘liberal metropolitan elite’. And yet, even today, as the election shows the absolute futility of dividing electorates in this way, the Telegraph still felt comfortable characterising the election result as the ‘revenge of the liberal metropolitan elite’, angry about Brexit.10

  Labour’s success in 2017, in destroying the aura of invincibility around the Conservatives, also laid waste to the seeming unilateral command that the nationalist Right hoped to exert on Britain’s future by means of the ‘white working class’. It demonstrated that not everyone who worked for a wage was hypnotised by the abstraction we call ‘nation’. The fizz of angry exuberance after the election celebrated an abrupt widening of the horizons of the thinkable, precisely in part because millions of working-class people refused to reduce their class experiences and aspirations to the demands of angry white men for immigration controls and nuclear megadeath.

  V

  Perhaps the biggest blind spot of the media, however, concerned their own role, and the sudden, sharp diminution of their power. It wasn’t just that they didn’t see it coming; for most of the media, it was a matter of they couldn’t stop it coming. Chapter 6 covers this in more detail, but here it can be said that the British media terrain could not have been more favourable to the Conservatives. The press were divided between newspapers that were institutionally and ideologically loyal to the Tories, and those from the liberal centre whose anti-Corbyn animus was only marginally lesser. The broadcasters tended to cluster around what they perceived the centre to be, but also took their cue about what was newsworthy to a large extent from the newspapers, thus ensuring that the Lynton Crosby spin machine would reach them both directly and indirectly.

  The raw facts of anti-Corbyn bias, vehemently denied by journalists, could hardly be news. A 2016 study by the London School of Economics noted that ‘most newspapers’ had been ‘systematically vilifying the leader of the biggest opposition party, assassinating his character, ridiculing his personality and delegitimising his ideas and politics’. A review of the BBC’s coverage of the 2016 coup by the Media Reform Coalition noted that twice as much airtime had been given to Corbyn’s critics as to his supporters, while the tone of reports about Corbyn was strongly pejorative.

  In a notorious incident which was to play a role in the snap election, the BBC’s political editor Laura Kuenssberg had been found by the BBC Trust to have seriously misrepresented Corbyn’s opposition to shoot-to-kill policies, depicting it as an answer to whether he would be happy for police to ‘pull the trigger in the event of a Paris-style attack’. The BBC News director James Harding simply shrugged off the finding, and the misleading report was left online, becoming one of the most viewed BBC video segments during the election – an attitude bespeaking a sense of regal impunity. This is not because television news is pro-Conservative. The bias of broadcasters, particularly the BBC, tends to be toward a notional ‘consensus’, which tends to boil down to news chiefs’ estimate of where the political centre is. But as ample evidence has shown, they also tend to be ‘press-ganged’ by the newspapers into framing the issues in a way that favours the Tories. Studies by Cardiff University and Loughborough University showed that the same patterns persisted throughout the 2017 election – even during the worst moments for the Conservatives, such as the catastrophic third week of campaigning.11

  And yet all these big guns turned out to be so many misfiring blunderbusses once Labour’s campaign got under way. Why? The annual World Press Trends report shows the big picture. Between 2012 and 2016, advertising revenues for the world’s press shrank from almost $90 billion to $68 billion. A mild increase in audience revenues caused by increasing the cover surcharge or introducing Internet paywalls is nowhere near making up for the loss.12 In Britain, the Pew Research Centre findings are even more stark: only half of those aged sixty-five and over read a daily paper. Under the age of forty-five, less than a quarter read the papers. Under the age of thirty-five, it’s less than a fifth. Only 16 per cent of eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds read a paper.

  Year after year, sales are collapsing. In 2014–15, national newspaper sales fell by half a million, or 7.6 per cent. The losses were as grave among the ‘popular’ press as in the broadsheets, with the Sun readership declining by 10 per cent, and the Guardian falling by 9.5 per cent. In 2016–17, losses continued more slowly for the broadsheets but just as rapidly for the tabloids, with the Mirror losing 11.7 percent, the Sun down by 10.5 per cent and the Guardian and Telegraph losing approximately 3 per cent each.

  As the Guardian’s media columnist Roy Greenslade points out, this is reproducing on a national scale something that has already happened to the regional newspapers. ‘The newspaper industry’s business model is wrecked,’ Greenslade writes. ‘The inevitable result will be cost-cutting on an even greater scale than has been apparent for the past decade.’ As audiences move online, advertisers are increasingly switching to digital rather than print publications. The newspaper magnates know they’re losing out to a new attention economy led by platforms like Facebook and Google, which together claimed 89 per cent of new advertising spending and 64 per cent of total audiences in the platform economy. Last year, the moguls met to agree the terms of a likely ill-fated bid to form a cartel around advertising sales. The broadcasters are also losing out, in some cases faster than the newspapers. The average age of a BBC News viewer rose from fifty-two in 2009 to fifty-nine in 2014. The number of hours of television news watched in a year by sixteen- to twenty-four-year-olds is twenty-five compared to 108 for all adults, and has declined every year since 2010.13

  This is not, however, purely an economic crisis, and it would be a gross mistake to reduce it to that. Insofar as the newspapers have been part of the political establishment, a fourth estate wielding significant influence not just in shaping opinion but also in the making of policy, this crisis is a political and ideological crisis. As World Press Trends points out, the drop in sales is congruent with a crash in trust in the newspapers. Currently, more people globally trust search engines (64 per cent) than traditional media (57 per cent). Online-only media still have the kind of bad reputation that attaches to clickbait or conspiracy websites, but still 51 per cent trust them, which is not much lower than trust in traditional press and broadcasters.

  In the UK, moreover, these trends are more advanced than elsewhere. The number of people who said they trusted the press in Britain has fallen precipitously, year on year. In 2012, trust in red-top journalists was already rock-bottom, at 10 per cent. Comparatively, BBC and ITV news journalists were comparatively well trusted (44 per cent and 41 per cent respectively), as were broad
sheet journalists (38 per cent). But this already reflected a sharp drop for all groups – 37 per cent for BBC journalists, 41 per cent for ITV journalists, and 27 per cent for broadsheet journalists. In 2016, trust in the entire media stood at 36 per cent, and within a year it had fallen to 24 per cent.14

  It is worth pausing to comment specifically on the role of the BBC, which draws a lot of complaint from Corbyn supporters on social media. The BBC, as a globally powerful and respected media organisation, also produces the most widely watched and listened to news programmes in Britain, and is the dominant content provider in the online news market. Its global legitimacy derives from the fact it is a public service broadcaster, nominally independent from the government and advertisers. So, one could argue that Corbynistas are just expecting more of the BBC than other broadcasters, who don’t have the same public legitimacy. But one would be overlooking the evidence. I asked Tom Mills, author of one of the few critical histories of the BBC, about this.15

  ‘All the evidence’, Mills argues, ‘supports the underlying assumption of the Corbyn movement about BBC bias. That doesn’t mean that every single example is right. But the thrust and underlying assumptions of the critique are factually correct. In terms of evidence, I know of no study which has said the BBC tends to reflect marginal or critical perspectives or ignores powerful interests. There is no evidence on that side. The problem is that bias gets discussed as if it reflected a hidden personal political agenda.’

  So what, if not a hidden agenda, would explain systematic bias? Partly, Mills argues, it is a matter of the circulation of powerful milieus between media organisations, consultancies, political parties, and the state. Partly it is a matter of the BBC’s dependency on the government not just to ensure continued funding, uphold its charter and appoint its board members, but also for a great deal of its news content. And partly it is a matter of journalists who have built their expertise and political networks through Oxford PPE degree programmes. But to really understand the current situation, one would need to take into account what happened to the BBC in recent decades.

  ‘The BBC became more integrated into markets. John Birt, hired by Thatcher’s appointees on the Board of Governers, was a neoliberal in a narrow sense. This wasn’t understood at the time. People thought he was just a managerial maniac, some even called him a Leninist. They didn’t understand what was happening, because they thought neoliberalism was about privatisation. It was a more ambitious project to remodel state and society, and this was taking place under the first wave of New Public Management [a neoliberal doctrine that would have the public sector organised on market principles]. The BBC was obliged to commission from the private sector, it was divided into buying and selling units, old correspondents were fired, and new personnel brought in people from the private sector sympathetic to Birt’s managerial ethos.

  ‘There were also changes in the reporting structure. In the seventies, the BBC had correspondents who covered both business and trade union news. The social democratic settlement, reflecting the power of both capital and labour, was built into its reporting structure. After the Miners’ Strike and the Wapping dispute, trade union correspondents became redundant. Editors decided that what unions said didn’t matter any more. Birt brought in Peter Jay, the financial journalist who famously wrote Callaghan’s speech declaring a monetarist policy, and Evan Davis. Their journalistic beat was dry economics reporting. This treated the economy as something which a narrow subset of experts deal with. Then they had more populist business programmes on the Thatcherite model, promoting the idea of a nation of shareholders.

  ‘By the time of the credit crunch and the austerity projects, there was a consensus around neoliberalism. Particular centres of expertise were valued – for example, Jeff Randall had been brought in from the Telegraph to be the first business editor. So that when the crisis hit, the sources they had on television were people from the City, neoliberal think tanks and, of course, politicians who had been won over to neoliberalism. The media academic Mike Berry looked at the Today programme’s coverage of the crisis, and even the Keynesian liberals didn’t get much of a look in. So you end up with an institution which has a very close relationship to official sources from the state and business elites, who have been won over to neoliberalism. This is the BBC that confronted Corbyn in 2015. Corbyn’s political positions are not only alien but, also, he is not of that world. It wasn’t just a matter of hostility. Arguably, the BBC didn’t know what to make of him, because they didn’t think this was how politics worked, and had no sources in that world of left-wing activism.’

  The gulf that has opened up between Corbyn supporters and the BBC, then, is not the result of a single biased agenda. The BBC’s biases emerge from an overlapping and cumulative series of structural pressures and historical changes which had the effect of creating a consensus at the top of British politics and media around neoliberalism. The radicalisation of a new generation has called into question the precepts of that consensus, and this is particularly a problem for the BBC, because – whatever its actual record – it is expected to be impartial and represent a range of views. This raises questions as to whether the BBC will now feel under pressure to broaden its perspectives and reporting.

  At the centre of this collapse is, however, not the state broadcaster but the traditional print empire, driven by the grand ideological designs of a sole proprietor like Rupert Murdoch, or, in Germany, Axel Springer. The idea that such a capitalist success story could be constructed around a hard-right ideological project was forged in the high point of Cold War-era industrial print capitalism, when prohibitively high costs of production favoured monopolies and one-way ideological traffic. This situation also favoured the ‘newspaper of record’ linked to a major governing party, like El Pais, so long the dominant newspaper of post-Franco Spain and fierce guardian of the political centre. Six hundred years of print culture is, if not over, being abruptly displaced by the Internet. Coupled with a crisis of confidence in the political class, this has forced media empires to diversify ideologically. In Germany, the Axel Springer media empire, publisher of the hard-right tabloid Bild, and long the backbone of right-wing populism in the country, has been responding to the crisis by shifting to online investments in single-issue and progressive publications like Mic and Ozy. El Pais, by contrast, has been unable to make this adaptation, is too deeply imbricated with a crisis-ridden Socialist establishment, and finds itself forced to consider liquidating its print edition in a country where 80 per cent of newspaper revenues still come from print.

  This is a giant shift in the edifice of capitalist civilisation with, in all likelihood, much farther-reaching and deeper shifts entailed than has yet been apprehended. But some of the immediate political consequences are becoming increasingly clear. The crisis of representation finds its echo in a crisis of the representation of representation. The same distrust for the political establishment extends to distrust for the media establishment which reflects on their doings. But distrust is only a part of it. If Internet neutrality, the advent of social media, and relatively low online production costs had not come along contemporaneously, there would not be the range of easily accessible alternatives, and the one-way ideological traffic of the old media would still obtain.

  It is difficult to see Corbyn having won the Labour leadership contest, in the absence of a well-organised Left, had he been forced to rely on the coverage given him by the press and broadcasters. Likewise, the general election would have followed a very different course had Corbyn’s campaign team not been able to reach out to social media users with a range of easily digestible and shareable content, bypassing and sometimes challenging the messages of the old media. As it is, pro-Corbyn websites like the Canary were able to beat the BBC, the Mirror and the Telegraph in terms of shares on Facebook, while Another Angry Voice, run by a dedicated individual blogger, beat the Daily Mail and the Express. The most widely shared stories on this platform were pro-Corbyn and anti-Tory, accentuating
Corbyn’s celebrity support and polling improvements, thus undermining the demonisation taking place in the traditional print and broadcast media. Labour understood this advantage and invested more energy in posting and sharing social media content than all of its rivals.16

  Some journalists and centre-right politicians have responded to this change with unavailing moral panic about ‘online abuse’ and ‘fake news’. As with all moral panics, they express real tendencies, but in a way that distorts, exaggerates, and scapegoats. Certainly, the emerging attention economy has allowed sensationalist websites and sources of infotainment to exert influence and claim advertising revenue, but neither sensationalism nor infotainment are original products of online media. Clearly, the dark side of the Internet is populated by trolls, doxxers, bullies, and witch-hunters, but the newspapers involved in Hackgate can hardly have clean consciences about bullying and doxxing. The media which have indulged in what Diane Abbott, herself one of the major targets of online abuse, called the ‘politics of personal destruction’ are in no position to lecture. And all too often, politicians have muddied the waters by qualifying any mildly intemperate political criticism as ‘abuse’, invariably with the wry rider: ‘so much for the new kinder, gentler politics.’

  The moral panic is a substitute for appropriate journalistic curiosity about complex new developments. Particularly striking is the complete lack of interest in learning anything about Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters, who have instead been demonised, condescended to as silly and dangerous fanatics uninterested in wielding real power, and subject to gossip and red-baiting. And, with newspapers once again returning to form with rumours of Corbynite purges and hard-Left ‘bullying’, there is no sign of that changing any time soon.

  VI

  When Corbyn first took the Labour leadership, his critics surmised that it was a return to the discredited, squalid, and angry past: the 1980s. To them, this meant that Corbynism was a project for a permanent opposition, an eternally subaltern protest party rather than a realistic attempt at political and social change. And they began preparing their lines of attack as if this were true. They were wrong. Corbyn’s Labour has demonstrated its ability not just to critique existing failures, not just to protest the limitations of the old governing centre, but to catch the forward motion of technological, cultural, and social change. It has proven to be a modernising project, giving a collective and radical expression to popular ambitions.