ANOTHER day, another newsstand full of papers blasting the Labour government for every conceivable crime past, present and future, real or imagined.
Over the weekend, national newspaper headlines blamed Keir Starmer for OAP winter deaths (Sunday Express), declared that voters do not trust Labour with their money (Mail on Sunday), called on Starmer to halt the boats instead of letting migrant babies drown (Daily Express), accused Chancellor Rachel Reeves of planning to levy income tax on an extra one million people (Times) as part of a “triple tax whammy” (Daily Telegraph), and plotting “a tax raid on your holidays” (Daily Mail) and higher income tax for millions from 2028 (weekend i).
A bad weekend for Labour, then? Not particularly.
Almost every day since July 4, screaming front-page headlines in these and other “national newspapers” have denounced the new Labour government for insulting “fire and hire” P&O, driving away foreign investors, threatening to bankrupt private schools, failing to deal with Russia’s “mayhem” planned for Britain, wasting public money on security for pop star Taylor Swift, letting petty criminals out of our overcrowded prisons, U-turning on employers’ National Insurance contributions … and that’s before we get to the freebie excesses of the Prime Minister, his wife and his deputy.
The other main component of most newspaper front pages is the usual drivel about “celebrities,” the royal family and the suchlike, with only the Morning Star, the Guardian and — when monopoly capitalist interests are affected — the Financial Times providing daily exceptions to the rule.
Although newspaper sales have slumped across the spectrum, this daily onslaught is neither inconsequential nor unintentional.
These headlines are seen by millions of passers-by. They create or reinforce a popular mood.
This is even more the case when they set much of the news agenda recycled by the broadcasting media for the rest of the day and into the night.
Of course, the Morning Star is rigorously excluded from all television and radio reviews of the daily press because it always departs from the pro-big business, pro-Nato, pro-Western and pro-trivia agenda.
What is the purpose of this agenda on the part of the billionaire and big business owners of Britain’s press? For sure, they hope to influence Labour government policies.
But they also intend to continue driving public debate and opinion remorselessly to the far right. In this aim, they are aided by wealthy and powerful interests, lavishly funded “think tanks” (whose spokespersons pop up frequently on the BBC in particular), and by increasingly influential and anti-democratic elements in the Tory Party and Reform UK.
Their aim and inspiration?
To create the toxic climate now seen in the US, where loyal pro-imperialist but less illiberal politicians such as President Joe Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris are routinely denounced on TV, social media and in the press as socialists and even communists — nonsense now regurgitated by millions of US electors too misinformed and prejudiced to understand any different.
Such poison is already spreading through Britain’s non-social mass media. Only recently, a prominent GB News presenter parroted the lie that presidential candidate Harris favours “open borders” — he then likened such a policy to the one supposedly operated in the old USSR!
The writing is on the wall as well as on the front pages.
Either this Labour government tackles foreign and monopoly ownership of Britain’s newspapers and enforces regulations requiring impartiality and balance in their political coverage, or it allows the gutter press to drag political debate in the public sphere down into the sewer, to the advantage of the far right and fascism.
