Once in every generation the Labour party gets tired of losing elections and prepares for power by neutralising potential sources of opposition.
Today’s Labour’s offensive is advancing on all fronts. Rachel Reeves nurses glasses of warm white wine through dozens of receptions for finance and business leaders. Keir Starmer withdraws the whip from Jeremy Corbyn and makes certain that no one can claim now that Labour is an anti-Semitic and anti-patriotic movement. The CBI reacts to Boris Johnson’s cry of ‘F—k business’ and of Liz Truss turning his words into deeds, by saying that it welcomes ‘Labour’s pledge to establish a modern industrial strategy’.
Starmer is lining up all the ducks – except one.
In the 1990s Tony Blair and Gordon Brown wooed the Conservative press. They did not necessarily expect Tory newspapers to support Labour, although the Sun came out for Blair. Rather they wanted to blunt the ferocity of the right’s attacks.
I suspect the Tory press would give Starmer a hearing today. He’s the next prime minister in all but name and all but the most prejudiced journalists should want to meet him. In any case, you only need to read the Tory opinion pages to feel the anger at their leaders’ failure after 12 years in power. Taxes at the highest level since the end of the second world war. Wages stagnating for 20-years. Brexit, their great project, amounting to less than nothing. The woke culture they deplore marching on regardless of what their ministers say or do. In Britain’s fin de regime atmosphere the factions on the right hate each other far more than they hate the Labour party.
The left will never give him credit for it, but not only is Starmer not following Blair by becoming chummy with his party’s enemies, he is also proposing a deeply dangerous restriction on press freedom by reviving the recommendations of the Leveson inquiry into phone hacking.
To explain why this is dangerous, you must clear away a mountain of rubbish. No one defending press freedom is defending phone hacking or the journalistic standards of newspaper X or the bigotry of magazine Y. Journalists who hacked phones in the early 2000s have faced trial under the existing criminal law, and their news organisations have paid out hundreds of millions of pounds in court settlements. Those defending press freedom are instead resisting the possibility of state direction of the media, if the government gives regulators the power to punish content that is not illegal.
Practically, Labour has supported implementing Section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act 2013, which is far more offensive than its bland bureaucratic title suggests. Section 40, which has never come into force, would allow anyone making a claim against a publisher of ‘news-related material’, who has refused to join a state-approved regulator, to recoup all their costs, even if they lose. I wish Labour and their supporters could grasp that left-wing and centrist newspapers – the FT, the Guardian – have refused on principle to cooperate with state regulators for the same reason right-leaning publishers have. They fear the chilling effect.
Britain is not a dictatorship and is not becoming one either. But you need only look at how the Conservative government has used its power to diminish and intimidate the BBC to see how state pressure works in a democracy.
If news organisations stand firm, then a Labour government will have to watch as, in the words of Index on Censorship, the ‘corrupt and conniving’ (and I would add the simply malicious) silence journalists with vexatious law suits. Why should they care if they don’t have a case, their targets must pay their costs regardless. Small publications, including popular Substacks, would back off – so would many larger media outfits.
These attacks on the press (and on the BBC and Channel 4) are coming when the web has destroyed their business models. No one has money to burn. Special interest investigative news outlets and investigative teams on general news platforms would end up shying away from exposing wrongdoing because they know they would be forced to pay their target’s legal costs regardless of the merits of the case.
The very journalists Labour MPs admire in opposition would be silenced. But then which stories politicians appreciate when they are in opposition and which they appreciate when they are in government are entirely different matters.
I cannot see how this proposal, which would prejudice fair trials, would be lawful under the Human Rights Act. But the Conservatives keep promising to make Labour’s life easier by repealing the act, so perhaps that problem will vanish.
Labour has made one argument though that shows they have no understanding of basic liberties. Shadow Culture Secretary Lucy Powell has said that because big tech will pay the costs of online regulation ‘it’s only fair to say there has to be a level playing field when it comes to [Press] regulation as well.’ Leaving aside that the web means that anyone can run an online news site now and the belief that big news corporations are rich and powerful is stuck in the 20th century, Powell is making a category error.
Tech sites hold no one to account. Facebook, Twitter and Instagram don’t investigate or report. Press freedom is a special case, and I make no apologies for saying that, and has been recognised as such since the 18th century. Attempts by governments to stifle it must be viewed with the utmost caution because the press investigates the government.
Finally and depressingly, underlying all arguments about the media is a lazy excuse for failure. The right (or parts of it) believes that the reason why the world is moving away from its values is because the BBC, school teachers, university lecturers, and anyone and everyone is brainwashing the young. Therefore the job of conservatives is to hammer them.
The left (or the worst of it) has always thought that the Tory press stopped the working class from seeing its true interests. The effects of propaganda are always hard to measure. No one has been able to show that the Sun in its pomp could make its readers vote as it pleased. But surely in our age of information super abundance when consumers are saturated with alternatives to newspapers (and indeed the BBC) the only thing the Tory press has a hope of influencing is the Tory party.
Rather than accept the obvious, authoritarian elements on left and right prefer to wreck our broadcast culture and restrict our liberties than recognise – if only for a moment – that their failures may be their fault.
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