Labour's Big Challenge

Labour Leader’s Big Challenge

It strijes me that one of the first priorities in Sir Keir Starmer’s agenda as leader of the Labour Party needs to be a skilled manager of communications. Whatever messages Starmer wants to deliver are going to have to get round the right-wing press, which most of the British public reads, and which can be expected to ignore or distort them. TV news channels will be very important since they can hardly ignore what he, as leader of the Oppositon, says.

It may of course be that some of the right-wing press folds in the economic crisis; it is certainly in danger, as are all newspapers. On the other hand it may be being subsidised by the government to stay afloat. We can’t know whether that is true since the government refuses to say to whom the large grants it is offering are going. That is just the normal government avoidance of scrutiny. However, it would hardly be surprising if Rupert Murdoch’s empire were a beneficiary. Time will tell, if we are ever allowed to know, which we may not be.

I think that Starmer’s sommunications manager’s first priority should be to expose the misinformation in the right-wing press, peferrably on TV news channels. The prime goal must be to make people distrust and question what they read. That can be applied to any publication; they can stand by what they print, or decide not to print, or not. Unforrtunately for the Labour party it doesn’t have a number of lage-circulation press lap dogs so it will be fighting against considerable odds; that is just reality. If all shadow ministers are instructed to expose misinformation (and blatant lies) whenever they occur the campaign could yet succeed. Internet news providers are more various and so the communications battle there is more even but it wouldn’t hurt here again to ensure that misinformation and lies are exposed as such. It shouldn’t be too difficult to expose pro-government postings from people who don’t exist.

I think this campaign should start immediately. It can’t be long before the right-wing press start attacking Starmer so why not take the initiative? Hopefully, the British public haven’t swallowed so much misinformtion and so many lies that they don’t even notice them.