The Starmer Legacy

To no one's surprise, the local election results have led to the demand, both inside and outside the Labour Party, that Keir Starmer stands down as Prime Minister. While short-lived premierships are not unknown, particularly over the last decade, Starmer's fall is spectacular. A man who arguably rose without a trace is destined for well-deserved obscurity. The first point to make is that his limited popularity started to drop immediately after Labour's general election triumph in 2024 when only 34% of the vote secured the party 63% of the seats in the House of Commons. His performance since then, from the winter fuel allowance fiasco to his support for Israeli war crimes in Gaza, has accelerated this trend, but he was never popular to begin with, even among Labour Party members and supporters who had seen him steadily renege on all the promises he made to win election as party leader. With the end of his ultimately barren political career imminent, the question we have to ask is what was the significance of Starmer? We understand the shenanigans and dumb luck that propelled him into Downing Street, but why him and why now?

Some commentators have taken to wondering if the country has become ungovernable, or if we are cursed by zombie politics, or if the problem is simply that our politics is fundamentally stupid. The common theme here is learned helplessness. The elevation of Starmer as first party leader and then Prime Minister is perhaps evidence that the country didn't think it could do any better, a feeling that persists and means Starmer will probably remain in situ for a while yet. Labour Party members may bemoan that they were deceived, but anyone remotely engaged with politics in 2019 could have told them that this was on the cards. Starmer was the clean-skin of the right, with the backing of shadowy Blairite fixers like Mandelson and McSweeney, and would purge the left as soon as he could. Likewise, the much-ridiculed claim in 2020 by the historian Glen O'Hara that what mattered was managerial competence - "Starmer can chair a meeting. He can draft a minute. He can lead a team. He can hold a press conference" - was quite simply a counsel of despair: a paean to lowered expectations, not an encomium. The irony is that subsequent events, and the anonymous briefings about his indecisiveness and lack of political nous, have shown that initial assessment to have been optimistic.

To understand the meaning of Starmer we have to put him, and this pervasive sense of learned helplessness, in its historical context. Unfortunately, this doesn't suit the fashionable concerns of our media, for whom history is just so much going over old ground and old arguments and so to be avoided. But this ahistoricism is also to be found among those who pride themselves on taking a longer view. For example, Simon Wren-Lewis thinks there was a change in the intellectual rigour of government between 2003 and 2008: "After these years when evidence-based policy making was the ideal, it was a genuine puzzle as to why the Western world had collectively decided to ignore basic macroeconomics and cut government spending in the middle of the worst recession since WWII when interest rates were stuck at their lower bound. Yet from today’s perspective, where everything from harvesting policy-based evidence to simple lying is so endemic, it all seems much less of a puzzle." But you might as well ask why the government adopted similar austerity measures in the 1930s when there was credible advice (notably from John Maynard Keynes) to do otherwise. The answer is: they did it because it was in their class interests to do so, not because of some sudden lapse in character. 

The idea that New Labour was wedded to evidence-based policy-making is obviously a myth (2003 was also the year of the instrumental lying over Iraq), but so too is Wren-Lewis's claim that "Brexit marked the first triumph of populism in the UK." Contemporary rightwing populism is marked by an anti-state fiscal obsession ("We'll make public spending savings and deliver tax cuts"), by xenophobia ("The immigrants are to blame for society's ills"), and by a belief that traitorous "elites" are undermining the nation (often in cahoots with the immigrants). If we're looking for this worldview's first triumph in British politics, surely the place to start is Margaret Thatcher's ascension to the leadership of the Conservative Party. Whatever her preferences in economic or political theory (monetarism, Hayek etc), her rise was founded on the idea that the establishment was rotten (the "wets", the traitorous BBC), had sold out to left-leaning elites (the trade union "barons", the liberal public sector that derided Victorian values), and was cultivating ethnic minorities against the interests of the nation ("people are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture"). Curbing organised labour, restraining "loony left" councils, and imposing the national curriculum in education were all populist measures.

One explanation that Wren-Lewis offers is the role of the press in advocating austerity after the great financial crash: "The media made it hard for opposition Labour voices to argue that the government was going too fast, too hard on cuts, so Labour eventually gave up." But this is inaccurate. Alistair Darling was already promising deep, real-terms spending cuts in 2009. He may not have made a virtue of it, as George Osborne did, but there was unquestionably a political consensus on austerity even before the 2010 general election. Thereafter, Labour's opposition to the cuts was little more than quibbling, which directly led to the election of Jeremy Corbyn in 2015 on a platform of actually opposing the cuts (a point Wren-Lewis is willing to concede in a footnote). The question that should be asked is why there was a cross-party consensus on austerity in 2009. Can it be solely attributed to this country's horrendous media? Again, a comparison with the 1930s suggest that the economic orthodoxy - that budgets must be balanced through spending cuts and/or tax rises during a recession - was hegemonic across the major parties, hence the split in Labour in 1931.

Wren-Lewis continues: "The right wing media is hardly a source of informed and balanced commentary. To some extent that has always been true, but it does seem to have got worse over the last few decades: just look at the Daily Telegraph, or GB news. The transformation of social media, to the extent that it influences political debate and discourse, has been more dramatic, and is now clearly a source of simplistic views that tend to match those of its owners." Again, the British press is no more reprehensible than it has ever been. It hasn't got worse, it simply started out bad amidst the imperialist jingo of the late nineteenth century (when expanded literacy and growing affordability led to a boom in newsprint) and has never got any better. Simon's suggestion that social media reflects only the views of its rightwing owners is bizarre, particularly coming from someone who is quite active online and regularly gets into spats with people whose views are a million miles away from Elon Musk or Rupert Murdoch.

My point in all this is that British politics has been on a populist trajectory since at least the 1970s but one that obscures a much more persistent conservatism. You could see the Major years and New Labour as a countermovement to Thatcherite populism, but in fact continuity was more obvious than change, hence the persistence of the fundamental economic dispensation (shrinking the state's role, protecting investors, restraining organised labour), the running sore of xenophobia (recast in terms of "bogus asylum-seekers"), the general tendency towards authoritarianism (ASBOs), and the  systematic marketisation of the welfare state. That said, there was a discernible shift in the political landscape around the millennium, arising from fundamental changes in political economy and the material base. Keir Starmer's ascension can be seen as emblematic of the way that three specific developments associated with this shift worked themselves out. They are: the intellectual bankruptcy of the political centre; the assisted death of the Labour Party by its own right wing; and the terminal delinquency of the press.

The political centre as a distinctive body of thought (the Third Way) came to prominence in the 1990s first under Bill Clinton in the US and then under Tony Blair in the UK. But it was already crumbling, essentially because the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 marginalised the idea of socialism for a generation. This meant that the premise of a middle way, a grand bargain between social democracy and free markets, was no longer required, which led to the era of liberal triumphalism and ultimately the folly of both Iraq and the dominance of financialisation. With the return of socialism as a viable alternative after 2008, if only rhetorically, centrist politics found itself without any space for manoeuvre - there was no meaningful middle way to plot any longer with social democracy all but gutted - obliging it to make common cause with conservatives in defence of the market. This was a key contributor to the emergence of cartel politics, with its emphases on fiscal orthodoxy, technocracy and the exclusion of the illegitimate fringe. It also compromised the media (the influence is bidirectional) by encouraging the idea that political journalism was about policing the boundaries of the cartel. The result of this in the UK has been the conscious strategy of Labour to replace the Conservatives as the dominant party on the centre-right, pursuing largely the same policies but with an appeal to managerial competence and recourse to the mawkish class sentimentality embodied by Starmer ("My dad was a toolmaker").

This shift explains the purging of the Labour left, a move that Starmer has taken to a level that would have been unthinkable to the likes of Hugh Gaitskell or Neil Kinnock. It's easy to dismiss the Labour right as slaves to factionalism and spite, but while this is a fair assessment of the pyschology of many individuals, the underlying dynamic is a pragmatic realisation that you cannot be a centre-right party and have a socialist leftwing. Fluffy liberals (aka the soft left), yes; Marxists, no. The problem that Labour faces is that while it has defined the left and right "extremes", in the form of the Greens and Reform, it hasn't managed to squeeze the fillings in the political club sandwich: the Liberal Democrats between it and the Greens, and the Conservatives between it and Reform. The reason for this is Starmer's lack of credibility, which is a consequence of his route to power. Many people have longstanding political loyalties (and antipathies), and Labour has been unable to provide a charismatic leader in the mould of Blair capable of reconstructing the party's electoral base. The problem for the Labour right today is that they don't have anyone of that calibre in waiting.

The third development is the economic decline of the press. This has been offset not by recourse to social media, as Simon Wren-Lewis imagines, but by the colonisation of TV. GB News is simply a visual tabloid - somewhere between the Sun and the Daily Mail - while political coverage on the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 has descended to little more than apeing the comment pages of the Times, the Telegraph and the Guardian. With newspapers increasingly consumed online with multimedia content, and with the decline of linear broadcasting leading to TV journalism being chopped up into short videos, and increasingly dominated by longer-form creator content, a merger of the two forms seems inevitable. This gradual process has led the press to become ever more directive about how TV should conduct itself. Whereas once Rupert Murdoch's interests were in breaking up broadcasting monopolies and undermining the state broadcaster, his successors will be far more interested in securing control of those broadcasters' political coverage. Were we to revive the Leveson 2 Inquiry, its scope would have to be considerably widened.

The significance of Starmer is to be found in the Labour Party's demographic challenges. Its skilled working class electoral core had shrunk through the twin pressures of deindustrialisation and embourgeoisement in the 1980s and 90s, leading to the New Labour reconfiguration around totems like "Worcester woman". But this obscured that its actual core vote was increasingly minorities and the educated but economically precarious young clustered in cities. The decision to colonise the centre-right, thereby marginalising both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, required it to adopt an electoral strategy focused on post-industrial small towns and white-coded social conservatives ("Workington man"), along with the comfortable (and multi-ethnic) professional middle class from which its own candidates now largely hail. Purging the left was seen as attractive to both groups. The result of this, as seen in the local elections, has been the erosion of its urban core but no compensation in small towns. The latter is less to do with the success of Reform than the fact that small towns also have young and ethnic minority voters, not to mention more mature "lefties", many of whom are now shifting to the Greens in England and Plaid Cymru and the SNP in Wales and Scotland, allowing Reform to win on low vote shares much as Labour did in the 2024 general election.

The learned helplessness of the current political conjuction arises partly from this conscious attempt to reconfigure the party landscape. The centrist media's obsession with "populism" - i.e. the disparaging frame for emergent demands from outside the cartel for a "new politics" - together with its unwillingness to properly investigate the Labour Party's purging of the left as a political endeavour, rather than the "crisis of antisemitism", means that this strategy of reconfiguration has little salience in political analysis. At best, the attempt to win over social conservatives is described as the recapture of the party's historic core of non-graduate, manual labour (the "white working class"). Likewise, the decline of the Conservative Party is seen chiefly through the prism of the "revolt on the right" and the legacy of Brexit: a failure to resist the seductive powers of Nigel Farage rather than a failure to resist Labour's march onto its traditional territory. Prior to 1995 (i.e. the start of New Labour), no Conservative MP had defected directly to the Labour Party in its history. Since then, seven have, with an acceleration in recent years.

In addition to this increasingly volatile party landscape, the other factor encouraging the learned helplessness of the politico-media caste is the steady decline of state capability following the UK's extensive application of privatisation and outsourcing since the 1980s. This has seen government increasingly adopt the role of a regulator, setting targets and parameters, rather than an author of action. The recent Whitehall farce of the inquiry into Peter Mandelson's appointment as ambassador to the US was an object lesson not only in obfuscation and avoidance but a clear sign that there remains a gulf of understanding between government and the Civil Service. The former is driven by announcements and "resets" - performative actions that achieve little - and remains baffled that there are no levers of power that it can simply pull to get the desired outcome. The latter suffers the delusion that it has control over fragmented processes that long ago breached the boundaries of the state, ironically returning us to the culture of corruption and the promotion of "interests" that marked the era before the Northcote-Trevelyan reforms.

Keir Starmer will likely cling onto office for a while yet, not simply because there are no compelling alternatives among the PLP ranks (Streeting is obviously Marmite, even among that narrow constituency) but because the wider Labour movement is enervated (trade union general secretaries may publish their demands in the Guardian or Daily Mirror but they won't actually do anything) and the soft left remains a disorganised wannabe faction that lacks a coherent ideology ("Manchesterism" is little more than municipal buses - i.e. mitigating market failures). But perhaps I too am indulging in learned helplessness. Perhaps if Andy Burnham returns to Parliament he might recommit Labour to a robust social democracy that defies the financial markets and unwinds the damage done by both New Labour (of which he was a minister) and the Tory misrule of the last decade and a half. Perhaps. Pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will, and all that. But I can't help feeling that the legacy of Keir Starmer, at the controls of a driverless train whose route was set by others, will be a diminished Labour Party that eventually convinces itself the best course of action in a fragmented political landscape will be a coalition with the parties to its right, rather than its left.

Hate and (Class) War

Politicians are usually assessed by the public in two ways: what they have done and what they stand for. The two are not necessarily in harmony. Many people objected to Margaret Thatcher's monetarist policies and disregard for industry in the early 1980s, leading to very poor opinion poll ratings at the time, but voted for her and the Conservatives in 1983 because of what they believed she (very personally) stood for following the successful recapture of the Falkland Islands. More recently, the public came to despise Tony Blair because of what they felt he stood for - duplicity, arrogance, contempt towards the weak - despite agreeing with many (though not all) of his policies on the NHS, education and criminal justice. In some cases, a politician's image - i.e. their symbolism - can outweigh their record, hence Kenneth Clarke's reputation for conviviality, even when reduced to the props of a Havana cigar, a pair of suede Hush Puppies and an evening at Ronnie Scott's, always counted for more than his track record as Health Secretary or Chancellor of the Exchequer.

It's worth bearing this in mind when we turn to the issue that has baffled the best brains in British political commentary over the course of the year: why do so many people hate Keir Starmer? Some think that it is down to what he has done, or failed to do, specifically the bad policy decisions made by the government, such as the removal of the winter fuel allowance. But many of the policies that he has been criticised for from the left, such as the disability benefit reforms and the initial continuation of the two-child benefit cap, are still popular with the wider population. The regular criticism from the commentariat that no one knows what this government's true purpose is suggests a lack of major policy goals. This isn't wholly fair - the government has done a fair bit, if only due to the momentum given by plans laid well before this parliament - but it does suggest that the public's response would more likely be one of boredom rather than visceral dislike. Even the well-publicised u-turns and waterings-down, from environmental policy to Europe, are more likely to stimulate disappointment rather than outright hatred.

The latest attempt to explain this, by the Financial Times Political Editor, George Parker, is fascinating because of the insights it provides not into Starmer and the government but into the commentariat itself. For example, an unnamed polling director says "For a rather dull and inoffensive politician, Starmer does generate remarkable levels of hate", which displays a condescending assumption about the bovine nature of the electorate. The FT piece includes a chart showing Starmer's popularity ratings steadily falling since the general election. What the chart barely shows is that he was unpopular before then: the anomaly is having hit a net approval rating near zero at election time, which clearly reflected the spillover of popular optimism that we might finally be rid of the incompetent Tories. The reality is that the wider population never liked him and a greater exposure has not changed their minds. Luke Tryl, of the uber-centrist More in Common outfit, admits that Starmer was never popular but thinks that this means he, and the rest of the cabinet, haven't been given the benefit of the doubt in office: "People didn’t just think that they were rubbish, they thought they were bad faith actors."

Inevitably, some see the fault not in our political stars but in ourselves, or at least the swinish multitude, thus Tom Baldwin talks of "ungovernability" and fears that "Something is going on with the electorate". Gideon Skinner of Ipsos thinks Starmer & co have simply inherited a wider problem: "There has been entrenched pessimism over the way that government works going on for many years". The key to my mind in all this is Parker's assessment: "Starmer and Reeves have made plenty of mistakes, as even their allies admit, and the change they promised has been slow in coming. But for technocratic, low-key politicians, the level of opprobrium they attract from voters is striking." This reflects a worldview that simply cannot comprehend why anyone would object to dull technocrats. The commentariat spent so long promoting Starmer as the adult in the room, the competent manager, the liberal authoritarian of their dreams, that they failed to see how unpopular this style of centrist managerialism had become. With Reform and the Greens now being characterised as "twin populisms", it is clear that the lesson hasn't been learned.

One obvious reason for this reluctance to face reality, and thus for the continuing air of bewilderment among people paid to understand politics, is the complicity of the commentariat in pushing bullshit and excusing fraud from 2010's austerity onwards through Brexit down to today's partisan battles over Palestine, trans rights and asylum-seekers. It's also worth emphasising that while the bulk of the population have only a superficial understanding of the antisemitism shenanigans that roiled the Labour Party, and limited sympathy for its victims, there is a popular appreciation that the "winners" are unprincipled and untrustworthy, which is certainly one reason why Starmer is regularly accused of being a liar. But the Prime Minister isn't merely the face of an uninspiring and regularly disappointing government. He is also seen as a creature of the media, in much the same way that Boris Johnson was, and therefore symbolic of the entire politico-media class. Or the caste, if you prefer. And we should  really prefer that term in order to distinguish it from class in its proper sense.

What this disingenuous performance of bafflement reflects is a gap in the mental furniture of the caste, and that gap is class. Since the 1980s, if not before, political journalists and opinion columnists have excised the very idea of collective action, and thus of collective responsibility and the motivating power of shared interests, from their worldview. This has been replaced with an emphasis on the individual, the neoliberal monad, hence the greater focus on personal ambition. Even factional struggle has been reduced to personalities, famously in the case of Blair vs Brown. Today, ideology is seen in wholly instrumental terms, thus Wes Streeting can be commended for insincerely changing his tune to win over the "soft left". There has also been a steady normalisation of cupidity among politicians. The theme of the various investigations into expenses scandals over the years, usually led by rightwing newspapers like the Telegraph, has been "they're all at it". The purpose isn't to encourage the public to elect virtuous MPs who will clean the Augean stables but to accept that this is the way of the world.

But while class may rarely feature in newspaper commentary or in political programmes on TV it remains natural for the mass of people to think in class terms, however inchoate. When we look at Parliament, the common interests are those of the classic bourgeois recognisable since the days of Balzac and Thackeray: landlordism, the bribery of public officials, the preferment of friends and relations. But there is also a much more modern aspect to this, and that is the moralising, hectoring language of business leaders that has become the political lingua franca since Thatcher and has given us the stunted vocabulary of "hard choices", "modernisation" and "value for money". And a further layer is added by the contemporary appetite among politicians for the performance of an impossible discipline to appease an imaginary reactionary: impermeable borders, every malefactor punished, every sign of dissent cracked down on. 

This is, above all else, an ugly political culture that reflects an ugly class reality: the dominance of wealth in public policy and the media, the toleration of public squalor, and the hypocrisy of our foreign relations. Starmer is simply the clueless lightening-rod for the entire politico-media caste. The commentariat's bafflement at his unpopularity is an attempt to create some distance between themselves and a doomed individual, to deny all knowledge of his origins and elevation ("success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan"). But this is futile. It is precisely because most people have made the connection that Starmer is hated, and it is because the commentariat cannot acknowledge this that they remain in public denial. Until he is put out of his misery, we will have to suffer more columns wondering why he isn't as good as the writer hoped and more puff-pieces arguing that a more telegenic version, cut from the same managerial cloth, will surely turn round the government's fortunes. 

The End of the BBC

A pivotal figure in the assault on the BBC was Marmaduke Hussey. He was a pillar of the Establishment but also a Tory newspaperman: a former Chief Executive and Managing Director at Times Newspapers. As such, the ultimate call to kill the Corporation - and we shouldn't be in any doubt that what we are withessing is the latest stage in a long drawn out assassination - was made by Margaret Thatcher. She was driven by her belief that the BBC's editorial leadership was not made up of people who could be considered "one of us", like Hussey, and this made them tantamount to traitors in her eyes. Though the then Director General, Alasdair Milne, was also a pillar of the establishment, within months of taking up the role of Chairman Hussey had forced him out. Since then, the Director General has always had a target on his back (there have been no women) and appointments to the role have been deeply politicised. They have also alternated between TV "lifers" and those drawn from the newspaper industry.

As the BBC had always loyally reflected the interests of the state, as mediated by the government of the day, what this antagonism between Hussey and Milne reflected was not some leftwing drift at Broadcasting House but the growing gap between the Conservative Party and Establishment sentiment in the early to mid-1980s (the views of those disparagingly referred to at the time as "wets"). That gap closed over the years, not least because of the "commercial" turn of the Corporation during the regimes of Michael Checkland and John Birt, and because of New Labour's appointment of sympathisers, such as Greg Dyke, who it expected to stay "on side", most notoriously over the David Kelly affair. Since then, the BBC has been beset by repeated "scandals" centring on editorial judgement and the accusation of cover-ups, while the licence fee remains a perennial issue for rightwing newspapers, a fact that has less to do with concerns over the Corporation's funding and more to do with its very existence as a public service broadcaster.

There is an irony in the fact that as the Tory party has fallen apart as a political force since 2015 so its grip on the BBC has tightened, notably with the appointment of Robbie Gibb to the BBC board under Boris Johnson. Farage and his various understrappers have always been happy with the Corporation, though they'd never publicly admit it. They get disproportionate, indulgent coverage and little in the way of probing scrutiny. It's the Tories who remain the BBC's implacable foe, as they have been since the launch of commercial television in the 1950s. You could say that this reflects the reality that the Conservative Party has only ever been a front for the rightwing press and associated commercial interests, but then we have to acknowledge that those powers are waning too under the impact of the Internet, social media and streaming, so why is their grip tightening now? Is this merely the ebbing tide of the politicised appointments of the 2010-24 era?

One plausible answer is that any sign the BBC is becoming popular, particularly with the young, must produce a reaction to force it into becoming more conservative and narrow in its appeal. In other words, this is a defensive manoeuvre in the face of growing calls for the BBC to be genuinely impartial, not just over issues such as Gaza but in its coverage of emerging voices on the left, such as Zack Polanski. The bias that the BBC is encouraged to show, from sneering at trans people to kow-towing to Donald Trump, is less about enforcing a conservative worldview and more about minimising its potential audience. The history of the many calls for impartiality levelled at the Corporation makes it clear that what is really being demanded is silence and thus irrelevance. Just as the BBC should leave sport and entertainment to ITV, so it should recuse itself from any political analysis and leave the exposés of the malignant antisemitism and traitorous indulgence of Islam by the far-left to GB News and others.

According to Polly Toynbee, "Its enemies hate the BBC with the same venom they detest the NHS, as publicly owned and popular social endeavours." But the parallel between the two isn't particularly helpful, and not just because nobody on the right is seriously suggesting the NHS can be converted to an ad-driven model. The Tory ideal is for the BBC to withdraw from popular entertainment and focus on higher culture (albeit of a very conservative stripe, e.g. the Last Night of the Proms) and uncontentious public service broadcasting (essentially middle class programmes like Countryfile and Gardeners' World), leaving the bulk of the linear TV field to commercial broadcasters. In the case of the NHS, the ideal is to reduce it to a basic safety net for the poor. Viewed as positional goods, these are at opposite ends of the wealth/status spectrum: a high culture backwater and the return of pauper wards. Inasmuch as the BBC and the NHS have a similarity, it is in the lack of true democractic accountability, something that doesn't seem to bother Toynbee overly much.

A better way of understadning the animus against the BBC is to consider the role of youth. Political engagement among the young, unless channelled via respectable routes in the traditional parties, is habitually derided as naive or the product of brainwashing. Likewise, and despite her venerable age, Auntie is routinely accused of following fashionable nonsense and of being obsessed with "reaching a younger audience". This isn't without foundation - a steadily ageing audience will inevitably lead to the end of the licence fee model - but it is exaggerated as part of the persistent campaign to undermine the Corporation's claims to represent the entire nation. This is why there is such an emphasis on the idea that the BBC is indulging the radical young over issues such as trans rights and Palestine, and also explains why if any leftwing voices are to be allowed on the channel they must ideally be young and excitable, all the better to be dismissed as young and excitable. Owen Jones and Ash Sarkar probably only have a few more years in the limelight before they are considered worringly "grown-up". 

The elevation of Jeremy Corbyn to the Labour leadership presented a major challenge to the BBC precisely because of his age. He couldn't simply be patronised as a young fool. The initial response, beyond dismissing him as a old fool, was to use his supporters as a proxy, focusing on his success in attracting and energising younger voters, hence the prominence given to Momentum. But this ran into the brick wall of the general election in 2017, which proved that Corbyn's attraction went well beyond the young and clearly included many of the older Labour voters that Westminster opinion was convinced had been lost to the anti-EU right. This led to a switch in focus, first to the old standby of traitorous disloyalty (e.g. the attempt by Newsnight to link him to Moscow after the Salisbury poisoning in 2018), and then to the claims of institutional antisemitism (culminating in the infamous John Ware Panorama report in 2019). 

Just as the liberal press routinely occludes 2017, so the BBC will ignore its role in undermining the Labour Party and indulging the Conservative government under Boris Johnson in 2019, and will insist that it is and always has been politically neutral, despite the abundant evidence to the contrary from the 1926 General Strike through the Battle of Orgreave to today. In comparison, its questionable editing  of Donald Trump's 2021 Capitol Hill speech is a triviality. The real significance of the moment is that the UK's national broadcaster is being threatened by the head of a foreign government, and one with a track record of bullying media companies into agreeing sales to his own backers. The fear from the 1980s onwards was that the BBC would be broken up and replaced by components of the Murdoch empire, or at least placed ever more firmly under the thumb of newspapermen, but it's now more likely that it will be arm-twisted into a subservient relationship with the new media conglomerates centring on Silicon Valley. As in so much of her policy, Margaret Thatcher paved the way for the americanisation of British life.

The Crisis of Representation

Populism, as a style of political rhetoric, reflects the crisis of democratic representation. Centrists would have you believe that it is atavistic bigotry, the product of poor education or the machinations of foreign powers, anything in fact other than what it actually is. This is because centrists imagine populism to be outside the bounds of healthy politics, rather than a style that is opportunistically adopted by all politicians. The standard definition of the word is a politics that presumes an antagonistic divide between a "people" and an "elite". This is trivially true in the sense that all democratic politics involves privileged actors attempting to marshall the popular will. The critique at the heart of the populist style is that this dynamic has gone awry, either because some or all of those privileged actors are deliberately working against the popular interest ("traitors") or because they are sincere but have lost touch with public opinion ("fools"). Contrary to the belief that the populist style is to be found only at the extremes, it has always been central to our politics, particularly around pivotal moments of change. 

For example, the Conservative Party under Harold Macmillan was derided in the early-1960s for being out-of-touch and foolish (the Profumo Affair), an impression reinforced by his replacement as Prime Minister by the aristocrat Alec Douglas-Home. Harold Wilson, as Leader of the Opposition, was not just consciously technocratic in style ("The white heat of technology" etc), but populist: a man of humble origins who understood the people. He had the fabled "common touch", despite being a middle class grammar schoolboy who had become an Oxford don at the age of 21. This populist impression probably made all the difference to what proved a narrow victory in the general election of 1964. A later example was Margaret Thatcher's campaign against "union barons" in the late-1970s, which contributed to the Conservative Party's election victory in 1979. Despite her own obvious wealth and privileged social position, she was able to present herself as the tribune of the ("decent, hardworking") people against an unrepresentative elite who were strangling enterprise and inconveniencing the public.

In contemporary politics, attention focused on those accused of "populism" distracts attention from the rest of the political field. The question to be asked is why they, the anti-populists, aren't adopting the populist style, given that historically it was quite normal to do so. To a certain extent they are, but often in a banal way through clichéd tropes, for example wrapping themselves in Union Jacks, praising "ordinary, hardworking families" or burbling about "legitimate concerns". This often appears to be rote because it stems from a desire to close off avenues of attack by the press (e.g. insufficently patriotic or not mindful of the aspirational working class) rather than arising from any personal sympathy. There has been a sea-change in politics since the 1980s, largely as a result of neoliberalism's importation of business practice to the realm of governance. What this means is a rejection of the very premise of democracy, a form of engagement alien to the vast majority of commercial organisations which are run as dictatorships. This has led to a liberal form of managed democracy, which is not that different to the illiberal forms found in Eastern Europe. The manifestation of this is the crisis of representation.

One example of this is the prominence of what we might call para-politicians in the media, particularly on TV. Though he has finally managed to get elected as an MP, Nigel Farage has been the leading para-politician of his generation, and one who shows no sign of changing his modus operandi now that he has a Westminster pass. Even when the Commons is sitting, it is more likely that he will be "asking questions" on GB News than in the chamber. In contrast, a number of Labour politicians who have been rejected by the electorate have been more prominent on TV recently than the newly-elected MPs who defeated them, for example Jonathan Ashworth and Thangam Debonnaire. Who are they representing? Their claims that their election defeats were somehow unfair is not an attempt to represent the interests of their former constituents but to defend their own sense of entitlement. The fact is that both consider themselves to be members of the political body regardless of the judgement of the electors: the people have squandered their confidence, to paraphrase Bertolt Brecht.

These para-politicians are held up as representative of the public interest, but that is an interest heavily mediated by the press and also by opinion pollsters and focus group facilitators, all of whom are disproportionately represented in TV current affairs, and all of whom have a vested interest in presenting politics in reductive terms. Academics rarely feature unless they are willing to behave like crude polemicists, typically of the right, such as Matthew Goodwin or David Starkey. The traditional symbiosis of politicians and journalists is now moving towards partial endosymbiosis, whereby a large subset of politicians are fully absorbed into the media. A good example of this is Ed Balls, a senior politician rejected by the electorate who has made the transition to TV presenter despite having no obvious talent for the job and possessing a rebarbative, hectoring style that has brought regular complaints from viewers. The politico-media caste have no qualms about presenting themselves publicly in this unflattering way. The Spectator garden party isn't a covert conspiracy, after all.

Part of the appearance of managed democracy is the creation of points of conflict that are wholly artificial but which serve as a distraction. The multifarious "culture wars" are one obvious example of this, but the more fundamental dichotomy is between populism, which doesn't actually exist as an "ism", in the sense of a coherent body of political theory, and anti-populism. Because populism is simply a matter of style, all of our politics can be crammed into these two capacious terms and all para-politicians can line up with one or the other. But this doesn't mean that their allegiances are fixed. Populism can be put on and taken off like a coat. While Keir Starmer performs anti-populism as the head of a government committed to restoring the authority of the state, Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, spent her first few weeks in office loudly declaiming "Look what they've been hiding from us", as if the Treasury was the equivalent of Imelda Marcos's suddenly revealed shoe collection. Some media commentators sardonically rehearsed the Captain Renault gag - "Shocked, shocked" - but none pointed out that this was a populist manoeuvre.

Perhaps the most interesting act of representation occured on Wednesday when huge numbers of people took to the streets in multiple counter-protests against the rioters. These marches and vigils were clearly organised, and the people attending had coherent political views, even if not everybody subscribed to every opinion on every placard, yet at no point did the media seek to define who the attendees were politically or what they wanted beyond the diametric opposite of the rioters supposed demands (so "Refugees welcome here" rather than "Free Palestine"). Ahead of Wednesday, the government asked that people did not turn out, in order to avoid "inflaming" the situation. In the event, it was the large show of support, a visible representation of actual public opinion, that marginalised the far-right. Shorn of opportunistic looters, the knuckleheads were revealed as tiny in number and organisationally clueless. But who is representing that larger, better organised and coherent public opinion in Parliament? When the Prime Minister is reluctant to even use the word Islamophobia, can it be said that they are represented by anyone beyond the handful of independent MPs currently cold-shouldered by the media or sneered at by the likes of Ed Balls?

Though Wednesday's counter-protests showed up the government's lack of political management, it won't lead to any change of tack. If anything, it will simply reinforce Starmer in his belief that the riots must be dealt with as a law and order issue. This is tactically smart in that the political right cannot criticise such a focus even as they attempt to "understand" the rioters' motivations and squeeze immigration into a debate that was triggered, lest we forget, by the murder of three children by a  clearly-deranged young man who is not an immigrant. But it is strategically dumb because it passes up an opportunity for Labour to reconnect with the communities alienated in the run-up to the general election, including those that unseated Jonathan Ashworth and Thangam Debonnaire. The inescapable conclusion is that in a liberal managed democracy what matters is not listening to the actual people at the ballot box, nor their organic representatives in the form of large-scale protests, but rather in divining their true feelings through the media and its auxiliary battalions of pollsters and focus groups. Brecht would have understood.

Algorithmic Outrage

Predictably, the weekend riots across England have prompted press fulminations about the malign role of social media. This has evolved to the point where the far-right is now described as "post-organisational", which I think we can translate as "does not actually exist". If you're looking for some morbid humour in all this, you might recall Margaret Thatcher's famous dictum "There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families." Obviously there has been some loose organisation at work ("kick-off at 3pm"), as is usually the case in a riot, but just as that organic, confused reality was long subsumed under the myth of "outside agitators" and "foreign influence", so the contemporary response is increasingly to portray hooliganism as a property of the technology. The suggestion that the riots may owe more to the machinations of the Kremlin than the relentless propaganda of the rightwing British press is obviously absurd, but it is also internally consistent in that it inflates a foreign bogeyman into an existential threat. The idea that British society is at risk of being undermined by Vladimir Putin is just the liberal equivalent of the conservative idea that it is at risk from asylum-seekers.

The Observer has been at the forefront of this liberal interpretation: "Prof Stephan Lewandowsky of Bristol University, who is an expert in disinformation, said that social media platforms amplified far-right voices. “Facebook is an outrage machine,” he said." The obvious point to make here is that the press has been an outrage machine for a very long time, and insofar as there has been a significant change in the landscape it is in the extension of tabloid outrage first to radio and then more recently to TV. The crowd that gathered in Southport was not made up of dedicated Telegram users. Their worldview will be primarily influenced by "mainstream" media. This is a point the paper is reluctant to concede. Instead, Joe Mulhall of Hope Not Hate is quoted as saying: "Language used by higher-profile figures such as Robinson, the actor Laurence Fox and ex-MP Andrew Bridgen, who spoke at the 27 July rally, as well as the Reform UK leader, Nigel Farage, is often repeated in other social networks such as Telegram and WhatsApp". This avoids naming the platforms that promoted the words of those indivduals, i.e. newspapers and TV, in order to focus attention on social media.

It won't come as a surprise that Carole Cadwalladr has waded in, talking about "our new age of algorithmic outrage". She quotes Maria Ress, the Filipino journalist who won the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize (so is unimpeachably virtuous): "There’s always been propaganda and there’s always been violence. What’s brought violence mainstream is social media. [The US Capitol attack on] January 6 is the perfect example: people wouldn’t have been able to find each other if social media didn’t cluster them together and isolate them to incite them further." I can still can't work out what she means by bringing violence mainstream, when she first concedes that there has always been violence. It's simply a meaningless statement. The claim that the Capitol riot could not have occured without social media is absurd, as is the implication that prior to the arrival of the technology there was no way of coordinating the far-right. Cadwalladr's wider purpose is to convince us that social media is a "polarisation engine" and that this arises from the use of algorithms that reinforce outrage. In describing the dynamic, she emphasises that the movement misinformation takes is from fringe platforms prefered by the far-right - such as Telegram, Bitchute and Parler - towards X and other "mainstream social media platforms". In other words, this is a plea not for the outlawing of those fringe platforms but for the creation of a firewall to protect the mainstream. 

Helpfully, Stephan Lewandowsky makes a similar point: "It’s a serious problem and is easily solved by modifying the algorithms so that they highlight information based on quality rather than outrage." In other words, we need better gate-keepers, the traditional role of the press. Again, there is a reluctance to admit that the majority of the misinformation that we have to deal with comes not from the periphery but from the centre. Amusingly, Cadwalladr notes that "the Daily Mail ran a shocked banner headline this week about a single suspicious account on X, with signs it may be based in Russia, spreading false information, although it is likely that this was only one very small part of the picture." Presented with evidence of mainstream misinformation she takes it simply as proof that the same paper was wrong to criticise her past work about Brexit misinformation ("investigations that were ignored or ridiculed by large sections of the British rightwing media").

One interesting quote in Cadwalladr's article, from Julia Ebner ("the leader of the Violent Extremism Lab at the Centre for the Study of Social Cohesion at Oxford University"), notes an affinity between the far-right and the medium: "It’s very, very similar across the world and in different countries with a rise in far-right politics. No other movement has been able to have their ideologies amplified in the same way. The far right is just really tapping into those really powerful emotions, in terms of algorithmically powerful emotions: anger, outrage, fear, even surprise." The first question to ask here is whether there really has been a rise in the far-right in recent years. The evidence does not suggest it. Much of what gets labelled far-right, e.g. Viktor Orban's "illiberal democracy", is simply conservative nationalism. In India, Modi and the BJP have suffered a setback. In France, Marine Le Pen is no closer to power and anyway her political trajectory has been towards the centre-right, competing with Emmanuel Macron to absorb Les Républicains. In the UK, the right is fragmented and the riots have managed to mobilise only small numbers of people (compare and contrast with the recent pro-Palestine marches).

It may be true to say that the far-right has found social media congenial, but this appears to be true of all political persuasions. To say "No other movement has been able to have their ideologies amplified in the same way" suggests that this ideology is near-hegemonic, but what exactly is it? A belief that asylum-seekers are thieves and rapists, that Islam is a death-cult, or that our statues are a risk from the intolerant left? Ideology seems a generous word to describe a set of prejudices whose prevalence extends well beyond the "far-right". In focusing on anger, outrage and fear, Ebner is echoing the moral foundations theory of Jonathan Haidt, a dubious attempt to justify conservative impulses (you're not racist you're just loyal) and suggest that liberals have blindspots (you don't acknowledge legitimate concerns). The idea that these are "algorithmically powerful emotions" is obviously a nonsense: algorithms don't recognise emotions, they're just shuffling data based on a dynamic taxonomy (you liked that so you might like this). 

The reaction of the British press, both liberal and conservative, to the Internet has always been driven primarily by its material interests. As search engines gobbled up advertising spends, the press went into a tailspin. It only levelled out to the extent that it was able to migrate online. In doing so, it realised that its own interests were better-served by viral contagion than paywalls. This has resulted in a deliberate expansion of the sort of content likely to earn clicks, and that has meant appealing to the emotions, not just anger and fear but envy, amusement and desire. The inevitable coarsening this has given rise to has been blamed on the medium. Where the press have led, other media have followed, hence the explosion of talk radio and now the arrival of partisan TV with GB News. Social media have provided not only the means to disseminate this calculatedly offensive opinion but also a source of original material: the opinions of ordinary people as much as celebrities that can be held up for public censure or ridicule.

In today's Observer, amidst Sonia Sodha insulting the BMA over puberty-blockers and Jane Martinson espying the patriarchy at work in the BBC's handling of Huw Edwards (neither story needed to be written but both will get the clicks), you will find Andrew Rawnsley opining on the riots. "Part of the answer to the violent far right will come from smart and proactive policing. Making the tech giants live up to their moral and legal responsibilities to the rest of society is another must. These are necessary steps, but they are not by themselves all that will be needed. The longer-term challenge for ministers is to find ways to drain the swamps of racism and conspiracism from which the far right recruit." I'm not aware that anyone is actually claiming that the tech giants have not lived up to their legal responsibilities, in contrast to parts of the press who we recently learnt may have destroyed compromising evidence. Likewise, it's hard to take calls for moral responsibility seriously while Leveson 2 remains sidelined. And as for draining the swamps of racism and conspiracism, surely the place to start would be with those wellsprings in the traditional media who keep the swamps watered.

Beyond the Horizon

Most English Premier League football clubs have now introduced digital passes for ticket-holders. There have been teething problems, but the technology is clearly here to stay: a bit like VAR. There are a number of reasons for this, from clamping down on ticket-touting (though the touts are still to be seen - I have no idea how they do it now) to better crowd safety (the long legacy of Hillsborough and the Taylor Report), but another driver for clubs' investment in ticketing technology since the 1980s was fraud at the margin - i.e. gate operators letting people under or over the turnstile, so the counter ratchet didn't click, and pocketing the money. To an extent this had always been tolerated as the cost of prevention was high and the loss to the club marginal, but it became a much bigger issue as entrance prices went up and clubs became more dependent on their matchday income. While wealthy foreign owners have driven inflation in the game since the millennium, financial fair play rules have simply reinforced the need to squeeze every last penny from the gate.

The reason I raise this is that it provides a useful entry-point for discussing what has come to be known as the Post Office scandal. There are two parts to this: the bug-ridden Horizon IT system and the response of the Post Office management to the unfolding debacle. Both were informed by a suspicion that the organisation was being defrauded at the margin, though it's central to the sorry tale that this started out as a belief that benefit claimants were defrauding the state, not just sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses defrauding Post Office Limited. It's also worth emphasising at this point that, with the exception of a handful of Crown Post Offices, those sub-postmasters are independent franchisees - i.e. small business people. This is important because it highlights a discrepancy between the positive rhetoric around self-employment and sub-contractors and the harsh reality of asymmetric commercial relations (it's also worth noting in passing that there are a lot of pseudo-SME arrangements in the public sector, e.g. doctors, as well as in the grey areas of public corporations, e.g. the BBC, and state owned commercial entities such as the Post Office).

While the now-famous (and likely to be awards-laden) ITV drama, Mr Bates vs The Post Office, focused on the human interest of the present, and while much of the subsequent outrage has focused on the perversity of the law and the recent underfunding of the courts, necessitating an act of Parliament to unpick the mess, to do the story justice (sic) you really need to look at the longer history. It might appear unnecessary to start with the origins of the General Post Office in 1635, but we should certainly go back as far as 1838 and the introduction of money orders, which is when the opportunities for fraud at the margin start to proliferate. The need for strict financial controls was reinforced by the creation of the Post Office Savings Bank in 1861 and the gradual expansion of state financial services culminating in the payment of old age pensions in 1909. The GPO has been investigating fraud at the margin for over 300 years, but this has been reported in the context of the scandal as evidence that it had become a law unto itself: that it shouldn't have been pursuing private prosecutions outside the purview of the Crown Prosecution Service. 

But this misses the crucial point that the Post Office has a long data series - a corporate memory, if you will - on fraud at the margin. Why did no one notice the statistical anomaly of a significant rise in fraud prosecutions, estimated to be from an average of 5 a year to 55, after the introduction of the Horizon system? The likely answer is that Post Office management suspected the higher level of fraud was always there but that only now, with the benefit of computer-based accounting, were they able to uncover it. It's also worth noting here the downward secular trend in Post Office revenues and the pressure this exerted on management to reduce losses and thus reliance on state subsidies. What's less understandable is why government ministers weren't (as far as I can tell) asking the obvious question, i.e. is this increase in cases statistically credible?, particularly when you consider how wedded both New Labour and the subsequent coalition were to targets and metrics as part of the culture of New Public Management (NPM). The suspicion must be that politicians who spout about "business rigour" and "evidence-based policy" are mostly clueless when it comes to basic data analysis.

The second historical strand worth looking at is the origin and development of ICL. The business was created under the second Wilson government in 1968 and overseen by Tony Benn, the then Minister for Technology. It was an example of an industry "champion" (what would later be derided as "picking winners") formed by the merger of three UK computer fims. The state would have a 10% stake and would provide funding for research and development. The aim was to build a domestic competitor to IBM that could service both the UK public and private sectors and also develop an export market. Unfortunately, it started out with a 6-bit architecture instead of the by then standard 8-bit byte, as used by IBM and others, making its products a technological dead-end. It ended up marketing Fujitsu mainframes and minis, which were IBM clones. That gave the Japanese a route into the UK public sector, which they consolidated by buying a majority stake in ICL in 1990. The point to note here is that unlike IBM, which reinvented itself around software and services, ICL and Fujitsu were always chiefly hardware businesses. 

The primary political driver for the creation of the Horizon system was the plan, developed under the Major administration, to introduce magnetic swipe-cards for the payment of benefits, which it was thought would reduce fraud. The conversion of other Post Office counter business from a largely paper-based system to an electronic point of sale (EPOS) system was a secondary political consideration, though clearly from the perspective of the Post Office itself this was the commercial priority. The project was an early example of a private finance initiative (PFI), with the developer to recoup their costs and profit via transaction fees. ICL Pathway Limited was set up with the explicit purpose of winning the bid for Fujitsu, which it did in 1996. By 1999, with Labour now in government, the project was already a mess, not least because of doubts about the long-term viability of swipe-cards (chip-and-pin, common in Europe in the 1990s, arrived in the UK in 2003). As a result, the benefits element was ditched and the project scope reduced to the counter business.

Instead of going back to the drawing board, ICL Pathway decided to simply build on top of the already flaky prototype. It is clear from evidence already presented in public inquiries (here, here and here) that Horizon was a badly-run project, with a poor architectural design, that tried to integrate with new third-party technology as it went (e.g. Windows, Oracle, SAP and wide-area networking). There appears to have been no consistent development methodology, no automated test framework, and poor bug management and version control. The smell it gives off is of a second-rate mainframe-centric business circa the mid-80s, which isn't surprising. What this in turn highlights is that there was inadequate IT competence at a senior level within the Post Office, which could have independently assessed ICL Pathway, and equally little technical nous within govenment, despite the public technophilia of the likes of Tony Blair. What is also clear is that the then Trade and Industry Secretary, Peter Mandelson, was pushing ICL Pathway to meet deadlines when the correct course of action would have been to abort the project, re-specify the requirements, and start a fresh tender process on a fixed-cost plus margin basis.

There have been multiple TV dramas about Hillsborough and Grenfell, and yet justice has not been delivered in either case and the prospect of special acts of parliament to deliver it are negligible (though it should be said that the proposed Post Office act may never see light of day given the issues of principle it raises). The difference between those tragedies and the Post Office scandal is that they highlighted the negligence of the state towards ordinary people: the contempt of South Yorkshire police towards football fans in the one, and the disdain of a Conservative borough council towards poorer residents in the other. At Hillsborough, there was no appetite in government to criticise a force that had been central to the defeat of the miners five years earlier. As Thatcher herself said in response to the Taylor report, "The broad thrust is devastating criticism of the police. Is that for us to welcome?" Likewise, in the shadow of Grenfell Tower there was little desire to criticise a borough for cheeseparing when that had been the order of the day in local government for decades and when building safety had been presented as a contraint on enterprise ripe for deregulation. 

Ironically, had the Post Office remained fully in the public sector - i.e. as a public corporation rather than as a state-owned private company - the scandal could have dragged on even longer as there might have been greater political ramifications, but equally it might not have happened in the first place as the imperatives - that combination of a bad technology choice and government pressure to be a PFI success - could have been lacking. I don't imagine post offices would still be run on paper records, but a more thoughtful project might have decided to simply adopt a proven, off-the-shelf EPOS system with standard back-end ERP integration (post offices are just retail outlets, after all). The root problem was that initial demand to handle benefit payments, which in turn arose from the delusion that fraud at the margin could be reduced by a large enough figure to satisfy the critics of welfare. The compounding factor was the insistence of ministers that Post Office Limited should operate at arms-length from the state while being put under pressure by its owner (those same ministers) to be a commercial success.

The foot-dragging by the Post Office after the initial evidence that sub-postmasters were being wrongly convicted was not just the usual arse-covering or desire to minimise costs, it also reflected the history of petty fraud within the business and the fear that a general amnesty and blanket compensation might benefit the guilty as well as the innocent. Over-and-above bad management and poor IT practice, the scandal highlights the gulf that exists between the theory of the small business (incentivised, hard-working, responsible) and the reality (muddling through, sometimes incompetent, dodgy at the margins). What's depressing about the otherwise laudable TV drama and the public response to it is the idea that these people must have been innocent precisely because they were small business operators: that cuddly Toby Jones. In other words, they have been given the benefit of the doubt (albeit there are limits) in a way that the victims of Hillsborough and Grenfell never were.

Between Two Realms

The claim that "the next UK election could be the first at which the Murdoch papers do not back the winning party" is a useful jumping-off point to consider how the relationship of the press and politicial parties has changed since Tony Blair flew half way around the world to pay homage to the Dirty Digger in 1995. According to William Turvill in the New Statesman, "Earlier this week, the Sun’s editorial section shrieked that Starmer’s party was “fully in bed with the eco doom cults” ... Barring some significant changes by Starmer, or a dramatic U-turn by the Sun, it seems unlikely that the red top will call for a Labour government next year." Given that Labour has this week started to row back on its £28 billion anual green commitment, and given Starmer's rejection of activism, I wouldn't be surprised if the distance between the two dramatically narrowed over the next few months, but the underlying question remains. Can Labour win without Murdoch's backing?

The short answer is yes. The track record of Murdoch's papers in picking the winner is largely down to them simply picking the party most likely to win, hence the flip from the Conservatives to Labour in 1997. The crowing of 1992, "It's the Sun wot won it", was relief for having backed the right horse in what looked like a narrow contest, not evidence of the paper's magical powers of persuasion. The role of newspapers in political narrative is largely about salience: determining what is important and what needs to be discussed in the frame of political action ("Something must be done"). In this they act as the agenda-setter for other media, most obviously TV. The technicalities of the media should logically reverse that relationship, with the immediacy of live TV news setting the agenda for the press, as it largely does in the US and other countries. The UK anomaly reflects the continuing dominance of the BBC in television and radio news and its preference for treating newspaper journalists as a shortcut to the appearance of balance, an approach willingly echoed by ITV and Channel 4. 

Attempts to break up this cartel with even more opinionated journalists, such as GB News, have failed because they're offering more of the same rather than something different. Fox News succeeded in the US because it offered a radically different product to NBC and CBS. In the UK, where the main TV channels already privilege journalists and columnists, a new entrant must offer something wildly different, hence GB News has been drawn towards conspiracy theories. The inclusion by the BBC and ITV of voices from new media on the left, such as Ash Sarkar, does not detract from this cosy relationship and if anything helps give the misleading impression that marginal interests are being represented, albeit in their appropriate marginal place. In fact, these new media outlets are increasingly being aborbed into the "club" and are adopting the same modes as traditional media, such as the prominence of "name" columnists and the trenchancy of opinion. I suspect that many are more than happy with this development, viewing a job with one of the established players as the career goal.

The longstanding relationship between the press and political parties was based on the premise that both sides would respect certain limits: that there was a mutual interest in preserving their symbiosis. An individual politician could not expect to be shielded if there was a juicy scandal to report, and the political class as whole understood that it would take periodic kickings as part of the pantomime of faux-populism, but there was a belief that the press would turn a blind eye to the "old Spanish practices" of Westminster. This was upset by the expenses scandal in 2009. The timing of that and the financial crash of 2007-8 was not coincidental. With the shared worldview of neoliberalism suddenly in question, there was an instinctive turn to find scapegoats. Bankers, such as Fred Goodwin, bore the odium initially, but once it became clear that the political system would bail out the banks then attention turned to the politicians. The problem was that the political parties were united in consensus, so the only avenues available to the press were either a populist anti-politics, such as the Tea Party in the US, or the questioning of the virtue of politicians en bloc, as in the UK.

Britain would obviously go on to have its own populist moment in 2016, but the relationship of the press and the political caste was already damaged by the time of the 2010 general election. David Cameron's decision to launch the Leveson Inquiry in 2011 was not simply a response to the phone-hacking scandal but an attempt by politicians as a whole to reassert authority over the fourth estate. The subsequent revival of the expenses scandal around Maria Miller, the then Culture Secretary with responsibility for enacting Leveson's recommendations on press regulation, made the link explicit. Since then we have seen politicians retreat across the board. Leveson II, which would have turned the spotlight on the press-politics relationship, was unceremoniously buried, while tighter regulation of the press has proved illusory. In the years since the post-Leveson truce politicians and media have become so indistinguishable that we ended up with an amoral journalist in Number 10, and the press then proved its continuing power by bringing him down over nothing more substantial than cake.

This has all happened against the background of an economic decline in newspapers since the millennium as advertising has moved online. Paradoxically, this hasn't reduced the role of the press in setting the political weather, rather it has led it to increasingly colonise TV and social media. The borders have become more porous between the press and other media, but they have also become more porous between the media and politics, with the former increasingly commissioning serving politicians to act as opinion-formers rather than simply people whose opinions should be interrogated. There has always been crossover between the two realms, but that tended to be unidirectional: a politician would retire and present cosy documentaries on trains or a journalist might become an MP and never look back. Nowadays, it is not unusual for someone to move repeatedly back and forth between the two. The idea of an independent press that holds politicians to account is being eroded before our eyes. 

The BBC in particular has actively cultivated this through an expansion in its news coverage. While it has conceded that this increase in quantity hasn't resulted in greater quality, at least in the specific area of its coverage of economics, there seems little desire to substitute more domain experts for shallow blowhards, and that in turn has meant promoting the sort of people who see their interests as lying at the intersection between the two realms, from Matthew Goodwin to Alastair Campbell. After the defenestration of Richard Sharp, it might be thought that the BBC is in a weakened state, but this is to ignore its continuing centrality to the politics-media nexus, which was after all the reason why Sharp's apointment as Chairman was both predictable and controversial. Far from being further evidence of the moral delinquency of Boris Johnson, his elevation to the role reflected that ever-growing merging of interests that has occured since 2012.

To return to the jumping off point. Does it matter any longer who Rupert Murdoch (or his editors) supports in the next general election? The answer is still yes. While the Sun's circulation may have fallen from 3.5 million at the millennium to less than a million today, its influence remains significant. But Turvill is looking in the wrong place: "Editors and proprietors might argue that their influence is greater than ever because, owing to the internet, total audiences have grown. But realistically, when the next election falls, it is difficult to imagine millions of readers scrolling through newspaper websites to read editorial endorsements." Even at its commerical height, most people never bothered to read the editorials in the paper either. The vector by which the press influences public opinion has always been through salience: the topics it deems worthy of coverage and the shouty opinions this gives rise to. And the salience of the press itself has grown due to the expansion of TV's political coverage and its appetite for adversarial balance. The problem of the British press is increasingly the problem of the BBC.

Hedging Your Bets

Back in the 1970s, the BBC tended to report on the economy from two contrasting perspectives: that of producers, which meant the profit/wages contest between employers and trade unions; and that of consumers, which meant a focus on household spending, particularly food and clothing (and with a seasonal sideline in package holidays, replaced in the 90s by home improvements). Economics, in the sense of an explanation of competing academic theories, was rarely broached. Even the specialist media coverage, from the Financial Times to the BBC's Money Programme, tended to focus mainly on the financial markets. That focus was a harbinger of a structural shift that would occur during the 1980s as industrial correspondents were replaced by business editors and the pulse of the economy was taken not through indicators such as unemployment or the trade deficit but in house prices and the balance of payments (handily boosted by financial services). 

But while this obviously reflected an ideological watershed - the move from Keynesianism to neoliberalism (and briefly monetarism) - it did not see a lessening in the expertise brought to bear in explaining the economy, merely a shift of the spotlight. City economists might have given the impression that the manufacturing sector was of lesser importance but they clearly understood the financial markets. But there was another shift that occured after 2008. In the face of the failure of academic and City economists to predict, or even initially explain, what was going on as the global banking system seized up, the reporting of economics in the media shifted back towards political journalists. This could be seen as a legitimate recognition of the return of political economy and questions of distributive justice, though the establishment reaction to Thomas Piketty and the pearl-clutching over the revived interest in Marx suggests otherwise. More telling was the implication that this was a judgement on society ("living beyond our means", "maxed out the credit card" etc) that demanded in response a strong political grip and hair-shirts all round. This perspective wouldn't have been out of place in the early 1930s.

Following growing complaints about the poor quality of its coverage of economics since 2010, the BBC has finally got round to addressing the issue in the form of a narrow "thematic" review by "seasoned economics experts and broadcasters" Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot. The chaps have been praised for being quite tough with the Corporation, though much of this is just theatre. The review scope is narrow in time (a matter of months), criticism from both left and right is taken as evidence of balance, and the "external interviewees" reflect a spectrum that streches all the way from centre-right to centre-left. Their key conclusion is that "while the risks to impartiality may look political, we think they need a better explanation, which is that they're really journalistic". This allows the BBC to ignore accusations of structural bias and instead agree that it needs to improve the calibre of its journalism, which in practice will mean a shift back to more specialised reporting by economics editors rather than political editors. There may even be less of a City focus.

One thing that the review doesn't explain is why the BBC allowed the coverage of economics to shift from the specialist realm of the City editor to the political editor after 2008. Consequently, there is no historical dimension to the review (what happened between 2007 and 2010?) and only minimal interest in the sociological (the shared milieu of journalists and politicians and their mutually-reinforcing prejudices). The critical responses to the review have also tended to be soft-ball, with eager hopes that the BBC might take economics more seriously (and so widen its pool of  invitees onto Newsnight or Today). For James Meadway, the key question is "How different might the last decade of British politics have been if the public had been better informed about economics?" To emphasise the point, he asks "Would a public not spoon-fed mush about the supposed perils of government borrowing have been so ready to accept David Cameron and George Osborne’s austerity in the early 2010s? Would Labour’s then leadership have felt so compelled to support spending cuts – a position that helped lay the ground for Jeremy Corbyn’s anti-austerity leadership bid? Might the Brexit vote have gone differently?" 

This is a progression from the dubious to the implausible. It starts with the presumption that the austerity demanded by the Conservatives after 2008 was an argument about economics, when it's not at all clear that it was. The much derided "household budget" analogy made no sense as an economic argument, but it obviously made sense as a parable of morality: neither a lender nor a borrower be. Likewise, the claim that we could "end up like Greece" was an emotional appeal, not a forecast that the world's 6th largest economy could turn overnight into the 54th. It is even less credible that the Labour leadership between 2010-15 felt "compelled" to support spending cuts because of the quality of such arguments, though they no doubt appreciated their emotional resonance, not least when they were being amplified by the BBC. Labour's qualified support for austerity sprang from the PLP's sincere belief that public spending must play a large part in balancing the books. This was the legacy of the 1990s commitment to prudence, not a sudden conversion to Osbornomics, and you could argue that its roots went all the way back to Jim Callaghan's party conference speech in 1976.

This is an example of how the review's failure to engage with the history of the Corporation's coverage of economics has allowed its reception to be similarly ahistorical, or at least to have no working memory beyond the last decade. Likewise, the idea that economics was the decisive factor in Brexit comes close to suggesting that euroscepticism was a niche pursuit before 2008. That economics was a key driver of the 2016 referendum has been disproved by both quantitative and qualitative research. We know that votes to leave the EU were heavily correlated by age. What this means is that younger voters more entwined with the economy - in work, with young families and high housing costs etc - tended to vote remain, while older voters with more limited exposure to the economy - notably pensioners and those with their mortgages paid off - tended to vote leave. Brexit was obviously not just down to one thing, but economics came a long way behind immigration and sovereignty as motivating factors, and where it did arise it was usually in the context of decades of punitive industrial policy and growing inequality, not worries over public debt as a percentage of GDP.

The institutional shift from Keynesianism to neoliberalism at the BBC can, for emblematic convenience, be isolated to the period 1984-6, between the end of the miners' strike and the "big bang" of market deregulation in the City of London. Similarly, the turn to austerity and the defeat of the short-lived post-Keynesian revival can be isolated to the period 2008-10. Both were marked by a step-change in the BBC's coverage of economics. Given that the Corporation now accepts that a further change is called for, the question must be: what underlying shift does this spectacle of self-criticism and commitment to re-education represent? Is it simply a reflection of the "cost of living crisis", with a return to a 70s-style focus on wages and household bills, or does the reappearance of the "wage-price spiral" in the discourse indicate a renewed political belief that inflation, rather than growth or productivity, is the chief economic challenge? 

A major change in finance since the 1970s is the relative clout of banks versus asset managers in defining what is important to the economy and what constitutes economic health. Previously, the banks were dominant and their hatred of inflation (which reduced the cost of debt to borrowers in real terms and so whittled away the lenders' profits) determined policy, notably higher interest rates to offset the falling value of loans. But today it is asset managers who are dominant, or at least the most risky feature in the financial landscape and thus the most indulged (see the Bank of England's intervention to protect pension funds last year after the disastrous Truss/Kwarteng budget, which directly went against their official policy of monetary tightening). For them, it is higher interest rates that are the greater danger because that depresses asset values. Inflation is still a problem, as that can also erode the value of an asset, but after years of freshly-minted speculative capital piling into financial markets, the more immediate worry is that a tight-money regime in response to inflation will reduce liquidity and thus push asset prices down. 

There are two other suggestive developments. One is that the state is beginning to push real resources and financial capital towards productive uses and away from speculation. This is most obvious in the US with the COVID stimulus acts and now the Inflation Reduction Act. In the UK, the shift has been modest and much is currently no more than rhetoric, notably around green energy transition and the "foundational economy". The second development is the growing clamour for price controls, most obviously around fuel but increasingly in other area such as basic foodstuffs, as the twin effects of the pandemic and the invasion of Ukraine continue to work their way through the global system. What this suggests is the weakening grip of finance on the public definition of "economic health" and a popular recognition that price-gouging is driving inflation rather than wage demands (with a corresponding unwillingness to accept that inflation can only be tackled by pushing down on wage rises, suggesting that economics isn't as "over my head" for most people as the BBC report suggests).

What these developments point to is firstly a divergence of interests in haute finance between banks and asset-holders that goes beyond short-term policy: tight money and higher interest rates versus loose money and tax cuts. Though this has produced spectacular political epiphenomena (e.g Liz Truss's ill-fated premiership), the more fundamental issue is how the long-expected post-2008 adjustment (i.e. the downward revaluation of speculative financial assets versus the productive economy) will be handled. This will either be at the expense of fixed incomes, through persistent but controlled inflation, or at the expense of assets, through values depressed by high interest rates. This divergence of interests has relaxed the three-line whip in the media that applied during the era of austerity and the pandemic, when all fractions of capital supported the transfer of funds from the public to the private sector, whether through the Bank of England's quantitative easing or the government's handouts to business and no-strings contracts for cronies. 

This has created a space for a more popular interpretation of what matters in the economy. Thus we've seen a turn away from financialisation, notably the obsession with asset price growth (e.g. house prices). There has instead been a turn towards the "real economy" and in particular the profit-wage share (hence the sympathy for striking workers). Against this background, the BBC is hedging its bets by shifting from a political to a more technical stance in its coverage of the economy, even as it persists in a political approach to industrial relations - e.g. taking it as read that strikes are bad for the country. It's possible the BBC is going to improve it's coverage of economics, but it would be naive to believe that this has come about because of a decade of justified criticism by academics or the derision aimed by the great unwashed at Laura Kuenssberg on social media. Economics is in an apolitical state at the moment because the establishment has yet to reach consensus on how financial assets are to be devalued: abruptly through recession or steadily through inflation. The BBC's reset reflects this, and only this.