Newspaper Anti-Union Bias Against ‘Red Ed’

The newspapers may have been backing Miliband D, but is it really their place to criticise the fact that hundreds of thousands of the individuals who voted for Miliband E are members of trade unions?

By Elliot Adams

Running through the coverage of the intensely dreary Labour leadership contest between David and Ed Miliband has been a particularly nasty suggestion that somehow the trade union support for Ed Miliband is undesirable and undemocratic – his links to this support base leaving him portrayed as “Red Ed”, a pinko Stalinist to be feared and abhorred. I think this is partly motivated by simple snobbery, partly by an irritation that the public has chosen the ‘wrong’ Miliband, but I think it is mostly motivated by a palpable jealousy of the political power of organised labour – influence which they feel rightfully belongs to our media giants and fleet street’s political pundits. They seem incapable of understanding how and why people who don’t have the ‘right’ friends, the ‘right’ wealth and the ‘right’ Oxbridge PPE degree, can shape political change in Britain.

What’s more, the fleet street figures with all those ‘right’ elements wouldn’t be

The winning Miliband brother has already started to cave under anti-union newspaper pressure in his conference speech, condemning "irresponsible strikes"

the people who should be making this decision anyway. I would step short from fully buying into a Chomskyite propaganda model of the media, but the press really does structure news around an underlying elite consensus, based on the media’s vested interests in supporting the axioms of private and state power. Now that it is trying to shake off the remnants of new labour and the Blairites, the labour party should again be the mass party, the party of collective labour groups – without ordinary members and union affiliates, there would be no NHS, no welfare, no labour party.

Many newspaper proprietors have an anti-union bias and are uncomfortable with union influence in any sphere. So of those who didn’t just lump all voters in favour of Ed Miliband into the category of “trade union votes” criticised the unions for encouraging those individual voters to vote for ‘Red Ed’.

Essentially they’ve managed to both say that about a quarter of a million individual voters should not be allowed a political opinion on the Labour leadership because they joined a union, and that unions shouldn’t be allowed to tell their members that Ed is their preferred candidate – though the same newspapers can say that David is theirs.

Listen fleet street, it’s the ‘Labour’ party, that he has the support of organised labour is a good thing. And on the charisma scale David Miliband was less electable than even Gordon Brown was with his terrifying smile, David Miliband is dull but beneath his passive exterior beats the beige limp heart of a man so boring, scientists are, as we speak, using him to create an ennui-based renewable power source to solve the energy crisis -Whenever he opens his mouth the world visibly greys around him as the vacuum of interest his conversation creates sucks in light from the non-dreary spectrum. He wasn’t your Miliband, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he is the wrong one, get over it.

We Need to Save The Daily Mirror From Extinction

By Elliot Adams

“The Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country, The Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country, The Times is read by people who actually do run the country, The Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country, The Financial Times is read by people who own the country, The Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country and the Daily Telegraph is read by people who think it is.”

These the immortal words of Jim Hacker in Yes, Prime Minister, expose the British national press for what it truly is; an unruly safari park of predators fighting as they hunt their various prey. This morning every man, woman and oddly-snooty child of this nation wakes to an eclectic choice of a dozen national newspapers. It’s a journalism culture of unrivalled biodiversity throughout the world.

However during the last election, only one of these dailies backed the Labour party. Both The Guardian and The Independent supported the Liberal-Democrats, with the rest of the daily wildlife being pro-tory. This left the Daily Mirror alone in usual dogged support of Labour.

It goes without saying that this blind spot in covering political views is bad news for British democracy and is why we should be very concerned that the ‘Mirror is increasingly endangered.

The ‘Mirror is facing brutal editorial cuts that will quarter again the few remaining journalists they have and leave a paltry handful of news reporters left in its Canary Wharf HQ. The ‘Mirror will struggle to continue running campaigns, investigations, interviews and all the other man-hour consuming activities necessary to fill seventy pages every day. The latest round of cuts have been part of one of the largest redundancy programmes by any newspaper publisher. TrinityMirror are pitching it as a move towards a progressive new content management system, but in real terms we’re looking at a pale reflection of the Mirror, filled with wire reports and outsourced subbing.

Ironically the Daily Mirror started out as a conservative rag, like The Daily Fail they supported Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, but for at least the past half-century, the Mirror has uniquely belonged to the Labour working class – the grumpy face of the liberal media pious.

The ‘Mirror has ever played the campaigner, challenging the views of its own readers, as with it’s opposition of the the Falklands War and the Iraq War, and campaigning in support of workers as with it’s campaign for justice for asbestos victims.

These aren’t the sort of cynical circulation boosting campaigns you’d see in the ‘Mail, rather they seem to be motivated by a genuine need to push for fairness in British society. Recently they’ve given much needed coverage to SearchLight’s Hope Not Hate campaign to keep the BNP from gaining a foothold in working class areas, showing a fairness in the treatment of minorities and migrants that many feel is absent from The Sun or The Daily Mail.

It’s had it’s down-sides, especially when shepherded by Little Bo Creep himself, Piers Morgan. There were the libel cases, the apparent complete lack of fact-checking and scandals like the famously faked British prisoner abuse photos. But through it all, the ‘Mirror has uniquely identified with Labour working class political beliefs and also  strongly reflected in it’s reportage the finest of Labour working class values – Fairness, solidarity, and pride.

To save this noble beast of the journalistic plains, chief exec. Sly Bailey must be replaced by someone with a better grasp on the way our media environment is changing, and someone who has the imagination to meet those changes with actions other than the shareholder-pleasing ones of cuts and redundancies. This is of course just my opinion, but that our society would be healthier for saving the Daily Mirror is undeniable fact.