by Sunny Hundal

When Ken Livingstone lost the mayoral elections to Boris Johnson, one of the first acts under the new administration was to axe The Londonder – a freesheet distributed by the Mayor.

Even before the election the Tories attacked it as ‘blatant propaganda’. Conservatives were ecstatic – he had saved £2.9million! (Let’s ignore for a moment how much he spent on ‘transition’ and salaries).

It was dubbed ‘Pravda’ for Livingstone and the Tories were glad to see the end of it.

And why not? The Right is ideologically opposed to state-funded media right? Not exactly….

Yesterday the Media Guardian reported:

MPs today accused local councils of producing “propaganda” publications that could put local newspapers out of business. Hearing evidence from representatives of local authorities, MPs of all parties on the Commons culture, media and sport select committee expressed concerns about the effect of council freesheets on rival privately owned newspapers. They singled out one council-run paper, the fortnightly H&F News produced by the London borough of Hammersmith and Fulham.



Hammersmith & Fulham is of course run by the Conservatives, which includes the enegetic and forthright councillor Harry Phibbs.

Phibbs has previously been forthright in his criticism of Ken Livingstone, and a big supporter of John McCain and capitalism. Bizarrely those ideological tendencies don’t seem to have had much of an impact at his own Council.

The H&F newspaper, branded as “a pretend newspaper”, was defended by Tory councillor Mark Loveday:

The purpose of the [council’s] newspaper is to be a vehicle to communicate with residents and necessarily we are going to communicate messages we need to communicate.

Funny, Conservatives weren’t making the same argument earlier with regards to The Londoner.

I’ll point out that I’m generally against local-council funded newspapers because I think they destroy local media. Council papers are little more than mouth-pieces councillors and, at worse, stop proper scrutiny of local politicians by an independent media.

You may be pleased to know that through an FOI request (courtesy of Gary Dunion) we’ve turned up some interesting information. More on that in the next installement.

It’s worth noting that H&F News is run primarily out of the council’s press office. This means they’re using taxpayer’s money to push their own propaganda. It’s everything that Livingstone’s critics said the Londoner was: misleadingly upbeat, full of spin and one-sided.

I’m sure you’ll understand the implications of this article (PR Week) we unearthed.

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More soon.