Culture Wars Page 20
This cumulative academic work has done little to diminish the exaggerated public belief in the ubiquitous power of the media.4 Yet, the conclusions of both effects and reception studies are – in broad terms – correct. They are supported once again in this overview of the consequences of media reporting of municipal radicalism in London. As we shall discover, the popular press did not determine the thinking of its readers. When it appeared to be dictating public policy, this was also sometimes an illusion.
Yet, academic exasperation with public perceptions of media omnipotence should not give rise to an over-reactive understatement of media influence. This chapter points to times when the media affected public attitudes. This, then, raises the question of why significant media influence was exerted on some occasions but not others. The answer, we will suggest, has usually to do with the pre-existing attitudes of audiences and the wider context in which the media operated.
A distinction also needs to be made between the influence of media on elites and the general public. We have already seen how the press influenced the passing of Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988 designed to prevent local authorities from ‘promoting’ homosexuality.5 This chapter also provides evidence that the press had a significant impact on politicians.
Mirage of press power
At first glance, the sequence of events suggests that the press was mainly responsible for the closure of the GLC. Between 1981 and 1983, numerous papers campaigned against the GLC, and mobilised public and political pressure for the council to be closed down. It was seemingly rewarded with a last-minute addition to the Conservative party 1983 general election manifesto, committing the party to abolishing the GLC. This proved to be the council’s death warrant when the Conservatives won the general election.
However, this imputation of press influence is based merely on inference and chronology. This is typical of the way in which media influence is mythologised. Yet, a detailed examination of the evidence in relation to the GLC’s closure puts into perspective the role of the press. It was not as important as it seemed to be.
The assault on the GLC did not originate in the 1980s press but in local, right-wing animosity towards metropolitan government in London that had existed for over a century.6 For a long time, this hostility was neutered politically by the lack of influence of Conservative activists within their own party. However, grassroots opinion found an eloquent champion in the right-wing politician Enoch Powell, who published in 1955 a detailed plan for closing down County Hall. By the 1970s, party activists were becoming a significant force within a changing Conservative Party. Conservative London borough leaders lobbied inside their party in 1973 to such effect that the GLC might well have been abolished if the Conservatives, rather than Labour, had won the 1974 general elections.7
The abolition campaign temporarily lost momentum in the later 1970s when the Conservatives won the 1977 GLC elections, and reversed policies that right-wing activists had found especially objectionable. But opposition to the GLC among numerous London Conservative activists, councillors and MPs remained. It resurfaced with increased intensity when the radical Livingstone administration took charge in 1981.8
By then, the GLC was already a widely criticised, weakened institution.9 Central government had undermined the council’s planning role by reversing key decisions. Local borough councils had obstructed the GLC’s housing programme (which effectively came to an end in 1980 when most of the GLC’s housing stock was transferred). The GLC’s transport policy had fluctuated in the 1960s and 1970s from plans for a massive road-building programme to subsidised public transport, both of which had been abandoned, while traffic congestion in London grew steadily worse.
These failures prompted some people from the political left and centre to join right-wing critics in attacking the GLC. The council was inherently ineffectual, it was argued, because it was squeezed between an interventionist central government and resentful local boroughs, and immobilised by the competing demands of the inner city and the suburbs. Above all, it was claimed, the root cause of the GLC’s deficiency lay in a failed political compromise. The London County Council had been redesigned as the GLC – with a broader electorate, and less power – in order to placate the right. But the right had not been won over, leaving Londoners with a weak institution that lacked legitimacy.
The GLC was further undermined by the deepening political conflict that developed in the Thatcher era.10 Livingstone’s regime redefined the role of the GLC. However, this put the council on a collision course with the government, which was moving towards a different – and fundamentally opposed – understanding of the role of local government. Public choice arguments in favour of a depoliticised, devolved system of local government that was cheap, efficient and more financially accountable had already gained ground in official circles in the early 1980s. Yet, the GLC wastefully propped up, in the government’s view, loss-making companies; it subsidised an anti-business counter-culture; it was a superfluous talking shop with subversive views on defence, peace and Northern Ireland; and its ultimate justification was strategic planning, an ‘illusion’ inherited from the mocked Heath–Wilson era.
The key issue that brought this conflict to a head was public finance. Although the government had been elected in 1979 on a good housekeeping mandate, it had greatly increased public spending. Left-wing metropolitan authorities had contributed to this ‘overspending’ by sidestepping the government’s new grant penalty scheme. Between 1978–9 and 1983–4, the GLC increased its expenditure in real terms (allowing for inflation) by 65% and the Metropolitan County Councils by 22%, compared with a 4% increase among other local authorities in England during the same period.11 The government found itself in a further quandary. Although it had promised in 1979 to abolish the rates, it could not agree (at that time) on what should replace them. Yet, the Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher felt that the control of local government spending was an area where the government had fallen down, and that something had to be done about this. Abolishing profligate local authorities seemed the way forward.
As Patrick Jenkin, the minister charged with abolishing the GLC, recalls:
In the end, the cabinet said, well, if we are going to have a credible local government policy – we can’t abolish the rates – we have got to have rate capping, and we have got to get rid of the GLC and the six Met counties. It was the Prime Minister who led from the front on this one.12
The popular press gave impetus to this decision by making the GLC ‘notorious’, and mobilising support for its abolition. Above all – and this was perhaps its most significant input – the press conveyed the impression that the abolition of the GLC would be easy. According to Patrick Jenkin, the cabinet assumed that the GLC was ‘wildly unpopular’, and that its abolition would present no political difficulty.13
However, the press’s role was secondary. Demands for abolition were initiated not by the press but by right-wing activists, councillors and MPs. Indeed, considerable political momentum had already built up in favour of abolishing the GLC long before right-wing newspapers became belated converts to the cause. This momentum became irresistible when the government, galvanised by a sense of failure, decided to take effective steps to control local spending. Even without the press’s intervention, it is doubtful whether the GLC would have survived. After all, the six metropolitan county authorities – largely ignored by the London-based national press – were also closed down in 1986 because they were judged to be profligate and unnecessary.
The popular press cannot even be credited with winning public support for the GLC’s closure. Despite campaigning against the GLC for almost five years, right-wing popular newspapers persuaded only one in four Londoners that the GLC should be abolished. In fact, they may well have convinced some people of the opposite. Their campaign undermined the government’s administrative case for closure by giving the impression that the council was really being closed down out of political animosity. It also rendered the coun
cil more newsworthy, making it easier for the GLC to secure broadcasting coverage. Indeed, there can be fewer better illustrations of the limits of the popular press’s power than its failure both to bury Livingstone as a politician, and to gain public approval for the GLC’s execution.14
Yet, the popular press was not always so powerless. It was much more effective in its campaign against the ‘loony left’ London borough councils. This highlights the contingent nature of press influence – the way in which press influence depends upon the presence of other factors. It also highlights one further thing: the press had an impact on political institutions, not just on the public.
Press disrupts a divided party
The campaign against ‘loony’ boroughs began with Islington in 1983, intensified in 1985 in response to the Broadwater Farm disturbance and took off in the autumn of 1986 with a press campaign over ‘race commissars’, centred on Brent Council’s suspension of a primary school head teacher, Maureen McGoldrick, for making an allegedly racist remark,15 and over Haringey council’s alleged ‘promotion’ of homosexuality in its schools.16 The press assault on radical London boroughs thus overlapped with its crusade against the GLC but lasted longer.
A number of things made this campaign against the ‘loony left’ boroughs different from the assault on the GLC. Radical borough councils like Lambeth, Haringey, Camden and Brent lacked the resources of the GLC, and were less able to fight back. London regional TV journalists initially ignored most stories about them (privately doubting their veracity) with the paradoxical result that these councils lacked an effective platform to answer back. This benign neglect then turned into attack, when broadcasters framed the McGoldrick story in a way that was similar to the press.17 Television and radio thus did not provide a shield against popular press attacks in the way that they had for County Hall.
What also made the later phase of the ‘loony left’ campaign different were the actions of the Conservative government. In 1983, the government had been taken by surprise by the GLC counter-attack. It was forced onto the back foot, and made to defend its decision to close down the council in the face of public hostility. But the ‘loony’ boroughs were a different matter: the Conservative government sensed that here was an opportunity to take the political initiative. In October 1986, Conservative Central Office sent out the first of its three ‘research briefings’ on the municipal left.18 These reproduced popular newspaper stories about the alleged outrageous actions of radical London councils, and quoted denunciations from leading Conservative politicians. These denunciations were then reported in the popular press in an escalating spiral of opprobrium. Thus, 17 November saw a double-barrelled attack on radical councils by two senior Conservative politicians. Nicholas Ridley, Environment Minister, compared them to the totalitarian regimes of Poland and East Germany (’the knock on the door in the middle of the night’), while Norman Tebbitt, Conservative Party Chairman, linked them to the possibility of a ‘Berlin wall … erected around our country to keep us in’.19
The virulence of these attacks forced a reluctant response from the Labour Leader, Neil Kinnock. The first reaction of his publicity team had been to ignore these attacks. When this became untenable, the Labour leadership distanced itself from ‘loony’ borough councils in contrast to the way it had belatedly rallied behind the GLC. Kinnock’s team was politically hostile to the radical London borough councils; at this time, they did not have lines of communication with them, so did not get their side of the story; they were furious with these councils for undermining their strategy of presenting Labour as a moderate party; and sought to limit, as they saw it, the damage that London’s municipal left was inflicting on the party.20
Kinnock’s attempt to distance himself from the ‘loony left’ produced a series of headlines in which he seemed to tacitly endorse the government’s attack: ‘Kinnock slams town hall wreckers’ (Daily Express, 20 November 1986), ‘Kinnock blast at ‘‘zealots’’ for helping the enemy’ (The Times, 20 November 1986) and the more explicit ‘Loony left told to button up’ (Independent, 23 November 1986).
It was a foretaste of things to come. The right-wing press turned the Greenwich by-election into a public trial of the municipal left. It framed the run-up to the by-election campaign in terms of whether Labour would choose a ‘loony’ candidate or not, followed by news that it had done so (principally on the grounds that Labour’s candidate, Deirdre Wood, had been a member of the Inner London Education Authority, attacked by the press as ‘loony’). This was capped by reports of Kinnock’s dismay over the decision. ‘What a disaster it is for poor Mr. Kinnock’, mocked the Sunday Express (15 February 1987), while the News of the World reported him as saying ‘Oh God, not Deirdre’ (15 February 1987).
The response of Labour managers was to keep Deirdre Wood on a tight rein, and attempt to shift the political agenda to unemployment and welfare. Their efforts were unavailing partly because the ‘loony left’ was constantly featured in the popular press. The Liberal/Social Democrat Alliance and, initially, the Conservative Party also made the ‘loony left’ a central theme of their by-election campaigns. When the Alliance candidate, Rosie Barnes, duly won the Greenwich by-election, not only the right-wing press but also most of the rest of the media hailed her victory as a public repudiation of the new urban left. ‘The sins of the GLC’, declared the BBC’s political editor, John Cole, ‘have been visited upon the Labour Party’.21 ‘The lesson of Greenwich’, according to the pro-Labour Daily Mirror (27 February) was that ‘the voters don’t share the excitement of the zealots’.
In reality, Deirdre Wood’s politics and union involvement made her more typical of the ‘traditional’ left than the new urban left. And although Labour had held Greenwich for forty years, its loss was not quite the bolt out of the blue that it was widely represented to be. Greenwich had become increasingly gentrified, and its politics had consequently changed. Labour had only won the constituency with 38% of the vote in the 1983 general election, making Greenwich one of Labour’s twenty most marginal seats. Labour’s by-election defeat was in fact less due to a decline of its vote (down four percentage points compared with 1983) than to a collapse of the Tory vote (down twenty-four percentage points). Rosie Barnes was an early beneficiary of tactical voting.
However, these complexities were lost in the febrile atmosphere of the contemporary Labour party. On the night the by-election result was announced, right-wing Labour MPs called for ‘desperate remedies to prevent a national disease for the Labour party’.22 Their appeal was taken up the next day by London trade unionists demanding ‘a clean-up’ of the London Labour Party in order, in the words of Brian Nicholson, National Chairman of the Transport and General Workers, ‘to reassure our traditional supporters that Labour is not a party of lunatics’.23 Similar views were expressed by Labour’s former chief Whip, Michael Cocks, in the Sunday Times (21 March 1987), while BBC’s London Plus (22 March 1987) reported ‘an eleventh hour fight back against the hard left’ by party ‘moderates’.
The Labour leader, Neil Kinnock, lent his authority to this growing hue and cry. Speaking on BBC radio, he said that embarrassment was too ‘mild’ a word to describe his reaction to some left-wing activists in his party. In a formal statement of dissociation to the press, Kinnock declared that ‘people at the fringe of our movement will have no influence, and get no influence on the leadership, our policies or the direction of the party’.24
These denunciations were levelled at unidentified left-wing activists. Those whom Kinnock had in mind were pinpointed in a confidential letter written by Patricia Hewitt, Kinnock’s press officer, to Frank Dobson, Chairman of the London Group of Labour MPs, which was leaked to the Sun (6 March 1987). The letter seemed to vindicate the campaign against the ‘loony left’ by implicitly acknowledging that popular newspapers were voicing the concerns of ordinary voters. As Patricia Hewitt put it:
It’s obvious from our own polling, as well as from the doorstep, that the ‘London effect’ is no
w very noticeable. The ‘loony Labour left’ is taking its toll; the gays and lesbians issue is costing us dear amongst the pensioners; and fear of extremism and higher taxes/rates is particularly prominent in the GLC area. Private and public polling is now showing very clearly that, whereas London at the height of the GLC campaign was pulling Labour’s national average support up – London today is pulling Labour down. I think there are many in the London party who still fondly believe they are doing well – they need to be disabused.25
Following a briefing from Kinnock’s office, Labour’s leadership was depicted as being determined to wage war on its lunatic fringe. ‘Kinnock war on lefties’ (Star, 6 March 1987); ‘Kinnock tackles the loony left’ (Daily Mirror, 6 March 1987); ‘Gay left scares Kinnock (Daily Mail, 6 March 1987). ‘A statement from the opposition leader’s office’, reported BBC TV’s Six O’Clock News (6 March 1987), ‘insisted that Mr Kinnock would make it crystal clear to a London Labour meeting that the few whose antics attracted sensational attention – in other words the loony left – had no influence’. Speaking later in the programme, a flustered Neil Kinnock said ‘I won’t tolerate the nonsense that goes wrong – er, on – in and around the edges of the Labour Party’. However, the Sun (6 March 1987) warned that the left would not roll over. ‘Miss Hewitt’s remarks about gays and lesbians will enrage’, it reported, ‘the lunatic fringe of the Labour party, which has adopted homosexuality as a political cause’.
The leaked letter led to an orgy of public recrimination within the Labour Party. The Labour MP, Frank Field, appeared on television that day to say that the party had come close to becoming unelectable and unworthy of being elected. He declared on BBC2’s Newsnight (6 March 1987):