3. The UK Media Can Only be Fought, Not Appeased

The last factor is the most important, and the most pernicious. The reality is that with a fair media, Corbyn could have gotten away with his Brexit compromise. Though many Corbyn-supporters had been rightly sceptical of the idea, a 2nd referendum was not inherently preposterous. Its main drawback was that it allowed a hostile media to mischaracterise it as being ‘against the will of the people’. Again, implementing Brexit without a 2nd Referendum became a matter of national pride, rather than an idea to be considered on its merits.

This is only the case because every major media outlet is anti-Corbyn. Probably Corbyn’s worst enemy was the Guardian. Supposedly a centre-left paper, the broadsheet became an enemy of this centre-left candidate from Day 1. It had the same reaction to him as most of the Parliamentary Labour Party — you do not belong here, this is our turf. It spent endless column space attacking him, smearing him, and undermining him. It gave his critics priority over any response. Being an enormously influential vehicle on the left, it managed to divide his natural base right from the get-go. Corbyn was characterised as being a relic of the past, as being a racist Anti-Semite who was stuck in the 1970’s. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. He was genuinely anti-racist, genuinely pro-peace, and had better policies than any other Labour candidate in any leadership election. Had the Guardian gotten behind him, and realised that he was the man to implement their stated goals, Corbyn could be Prime Minister right now. By consolidating his base and giving his sympathisers a platform to work from, Corbyn’s position would have been much more secure. His energies could have been spent fighting the Tories rather than defending himself.

But they did not do this. Instead, the Guardian joined in with the rest of the mainstream media in lampooning and berating him. Chief among these was the ‘anti-semitism crisis.’ This was a smear campaign that will soon be studied as a case study in propaganda. For over 2 years, Corbyn and his closest allies were embroiled in the baseless narrative that Corbyn is anti-semitic and enables anti-semitism. When a Survation study of 1009 people asked respondents to estimate how many Labour members had been accused of anti-semitism, the average response was 34%.

The reality was less than 0.1%.

Regardless of the facts, the anti-semitism smear campaign was propagated throughout both the ‘left-wing’ and right-wing media. After years of propaganda, people that had barely ever heard Corbyn speak, knew one thing about him — he was racist. Undoubtedly, this campaign was strengthened directly by Israel. As the ground-breaking Al Jazeera documentary series ‘The Lobby’ exposed, the Israeli Embassy was directly involved in undermining Corbyn through secret links with the Labour MP Joan Ryan, and through front groups such as the ‘Jewish Labour Movement.’ The idea was to delegitimise Corbyn as a person, and to specifically delegitimise Corbyn’s views of Palestine. It worked. Joan Ryan was one of the primary MPs to constantly vilify Corbyn as an anti-semite. Many others joined her.

There is no doubt that Corbyn handled this campaign badly. From the beginning, he should have called it out as a smear campaign. But being a good man, he took the early criticisms in good faith. He set up endless committees and processes to deal with complaints. But the more he conceded the more he got shafted. The crisis was used to discredit key supporters like Chris Williamson. At this point, Corbyn was too far down the road — he no longer felt able to call the smear campaign out, and was unwilling to weather the inevitable storm if he did. This is not surprising — Corbyn is after all human, and was already fighting enemies on every front. But had he come out early and turned the narrative around, he could have nipped it in the bud. By going on the offensive and called out the media for cheapening anti-semitism for political purposes, he could have stopped it escalating. Had the Guardian and the PLP been on his side, it would have made all the difference. But none of these things transpired. Corbyn did not counter-attack, and even if he had, he would have had almost no allies.

Meanwhile, the right-wing press presented lie after lie about Corbyn. One day he is a Hamas sympathiser, the next a Czech spy, and the next an insurgent against the royalty itself. The smears were farcical, but utterly damaging. They had one key message — Corbyn is a threat to your national identity, to your national pride. He is a Trojan Horse for the Muslims. Beware of this man. Four years of this, every day, every week, cannot help but get into the head of every voter in Britain.

It is almost impossible to fight this. It is no coincidence that the only Labour leader to be elected in 40 years was Tony Blair, a man who made a pact with Murdoch before his 1997 election and got Murdoch’s newspapers on his side. But Blair made a habit of selling his soul. He sold his soul to the banks and helped massive deregulation; he sold his soul to George Bush and took the lives of over a million Iraqis. He legitimised neoliberal economics and began the internal privatisation of the NHS. He laid the groundwork for Labour’s current problems by promoting financial communities over manufacturing communities. Eventually the public realised that New Labour was Tory-lite, and opted for the real McCoy. Meanwhile Scotland was lost to Labour forever, and we have had ten years of Conservative rule and counting.

With friends like these, Labour doesn’t need enemies.

The man who runs Britain sitting with Tony Blair

For whatever good it did, Blair’s centrism was ultimately fatal for the left. It did the right-wing’s work for it. It is not the right model, and cannot be returned to. His media strategy — ‘sell out to the media’ — is no strategy either. The media must for now be accepted as fundamentally hostile to anyone worth fighting for.

Will this ever change? Many see promise in social media. By using such platforms as Facebook and Twitter, Corbyn and his supporters hoped that they could bypass the mainstream media and get the message to their supporters directly. This happened in both 2017 and 2019. But there is a problem — that content is seen far more by the youth than by the middle-aged and elderly. Moreover, the promise of social media is in serious jeopardy. Year by year, their willingness to support independent creators in a free and fair manner has been waning. Take YouTube. In recent years, it has switched its algorithm to favour corporate news outlets over independent creators. So while previously there was a level playing field between the Indy news provider in his home studio and CNN, now YouTube fills a search result with ‘established’ platforms. It then started demonetizing any videos which have a ‘controversial’ character. This meant that innumerable videos that had ‘Syria’ in the title were generally demonetized. So all the channels providing a counter-narrative to the western story in Syria began losing money if they talked about it. There were similar cases with a variety of different ‘controversial’ topics. So while YouTube remains an enormously powerful platform, it is slowly being corporatised.

Then take Facebook. It is now advised by the Atlantic Council — a group of uber-rich lobbyists and extreme neo-conservatives such as Henry Kissinger. Facebook in recent years has been purging all kinds of online content under the name of fighting ‘disinformation’. It started in a high-profile ban of Alex Jones. The left cheered. Then Facebook cracked down on dozens of anti-establishment left-wing pages. These were pages that documented the crimes of American cops, the Israeli state, and bankers worldwide. Many pages had over a million followers. Naturally, the mainstream media barely bat an eyelid.

While Twitter seems to have done better than other platforms, it has also been embroiled in controversies over ‘shadow-banning’ anti-establishment figures, and removing accounts because they are ‘bots.’ Meanwhile, actual bots are out in full force spreading actual disinformation, as we saw from the latest Conservative campaign.

So while social media is a powerful force, as time goes on its promise will likely diminish. Under the disguise of ‘anti-hate’ they will censor and push back against the promise of the internet. It is difficult to imagine that its enormous potential will ever be completely stifled. But it is easy to imagine that its potential will be stalled, and misused by ever more sophisticated propaganda campaigns.

As for the print and broadcast media, as time goes on its power will wane. This will be a slow process for which the left cannot wait.