So routinely hate-filled are the columns of much of the British press that the kind of headlines which appeared in the wake of the London bombings July 2005 – headlines such as ‘Bombers are all spongeing [sic] asylum seekers’ (Express July 27th 2005) and ‘Desperate to die for Islam, the pot smoking mugger with a lust for blondes’ (Mail July 27th 2005) – vile though they are, should really come as no surprise. Many of Britain’s newspapers have long been past masters of Orwell’s ‘Two Minutes Hate’ – ‘an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp’, as the author described it – and, since the end of the Cold War, refugees, asylum seekers, economic migrants, Muslims, black and Asian people, and indeed foreigners in general, have increasingly come to take the place once occupied by the Left in press demonology.

But though the targets may have changed, the mode of attack has remained much the same. This was certainly the conclusion to which I came having researched and written part of Culture Wars: the Media and the British Left (Edinburgh University Press), which, fortuitously, appeared during last summer’s hate-fest. The book, which was co-written with James Curran and Ivor Gaber, examines in detail how the media in general, and the press in particular, have dealt with the Left in London – from the Ken Livingstone-era GLC, through the so-called ‘loony left’ boroughs such as Islington, Haringey and Brent in the late 1980s, to the Greater London Authority, and, more specifically, Mayor Livingstone’s introduction of the congestion charge.

Admittedly, the picture that emerged from our researches was not an entirely straightforward one. For example, James Curran shows how the GLC skilfully managed sections of the media, succeeding even in marshalling a degree of support from those journalists concerned at the implications for democracy of the Council’s threatened abolition, whilst Ivor Gaber demonstrates how BBC London (but not ITV’s London Tonight) resisted an otherwise pervasive anti-congestion charge press agenda which seemed to have been set largely by London’s monopoly evening paper, the Standard. But for the ‘loony left’ boroughs, which I investigated, the treatment was unremittingly hostile in the extreme, and illustrates all too clearly what happens when the political establishment – in which category I would unhesitatingly include most newspapers – decides that a particular group is entirely beyond the political pale, and thus a legitimate target for the ideological flamethrower.

One of the fundamental problems for these boroughs was that they had very little political ‘cover’ at Westminster. Naturally, their politics were anathema to the Tory government, but they were barely more popular with the Labour establishment, which, moreover, was absolutely terrified of being tarred with the ‘loony’ brush by the press. Leading Labour politicians (aided and abetted by the non-Tory Mirror) thus did everything they could to distance themselves from the beleaguered boroughs – while, of course, the press completely ignored them and preached daily that London’s Labour strongholds were a nightmare microcosm of a future Britain governed by Labour. Thus, for example, the Mail November 6th 1986 argued in an article headed ‘Brent lessons’ that: ‘The public are starting to realise that the lunacies of Brent today could be those of all Britain tomorrow – if Labour wins next time’. The boroughs thus found themselves politically isolated at Westminster, from which it was but a short step to rendering them politically ‘illegitimate’ and thus targets of what can only be described as a sustained and ferocious hate campaign, in which most of the press played an absolutely central role.

But what had these boroughs done to bring such vituperation on their heads? In point of fact, they had done little more than the GLC had in taking Labour policy in a modern and progressive left-wing direction, and, in particular, embracing the politics of gender, ethnicity and sexuality. But the councils not only lacked the GLC’s considerable media management skills (and, it has to be said, its political nous), they were also faced by a government utterly determined to drastically reduce the power of all local government and to take over many of its functions. Such a strategy obviously carries the risk of being criticised as authoritarian and overly centralist – unless, of course, local government can be shown to be corrupt, inefficient or in some other ways drastically in need of reform. And so, enter the ‘loony left’ boroughs as exemplars of everything that was allegedly wrong with local government. And enter the press as a key ally, indeed agent, of government strategy.

The overwhelming bias of most of the British press towards the Conservative Party for most of the twentieth century is a well-established fact. As the late Anthony Bevins, who in the course of his career worked as political correspondent for the Sun, Mail, Times and Independent, put it when we interviewed him for a BBC programme about the press and the ‘loony left’: ‘You don’t really have to differentiate between certain newspapers and the Conservative Party. Certain newspapers, from where I stand as an independent journalist, are the Tory party. They serve the functions of the Tory Party. They are what Richard Shepherd called in the House of Commons “the hallelujah chorus”, and he’s a Conservative M.P.’ During the period of the Thatcher governments most of the press became what Bruce Page in The Murdoch Archipelago (Simon and Schuster 2003) aptly describes as ‘grossly servile.’ Indeed, so extreme was its obsequiousness that Lord Gilmour, who was a member of Thatcher’s first cabinet, famously noted in his classic work on Thatcherism, Dancing with Dogma (Simon and Schuster 1992), that the press during the Thatcher era ‘could scarcely have been more fawning if it had been state controlled.’

Similarly, Lord Alport, the former Conservative M.P. and Director of the Conservative Political Centre stated in the Telegraph March 5th 1985 that the press had ‘for the most part gone to extraordinary lengths to support the government’s policies and flatter the Prime Minister.’ And not for nothing did two of Britain’s leading playwrights, Howard Brenton and David Hare, call their 1985 play about the British press Pravda.

This is not, of course, to argue that all journalists in this era were ardent Tories – far from it. But it has to be acknowledged that most of their employers were exactly that, and he who pays the piper … To quote Bevins again: ‘It is daft to suggest that individuals can buck the system, ignore the pre-set “taste” of their newspapers, use their own news-sense in reporting the truth of any event, and survive. Dissident reporters who do not deliver the goods suffer professional death. They are ridden by news desks and backbench executives, they have their stories spiked on a systematic basis, they face the worst form of newspaper punishment – by-line deprivation … It is much easier to pander to what the editors want.’ Especially, it might be added, when your newspaper has de-recognised your union, refuses to countenance a ‘conscience clause’ in your terms of employment, and may well have hired you on a short-term contract.

Of course, it might be argued that Culture Wars mostly charts yesterday’s battles, and that things are different now. But, sadly, they’re not. First of all, the Conservative press is as vicious and atavistic as ever. Papers such as the Telegraph, Mail and Express clearly regard even palest pink New Labour as dangerous extremists who have somehow managed to usurp the ‘rightful’ party of government – in itself a profoundly anti-democratic concept. Meanwhile, New Labour and the Murdoch press have struck up exactly the same self-interested, mutually back-scratching relationship that so disfigured and corrupted the Thatcher era. But, above all, the vast bulk of the British press remains as profoundly illiberal as it was in the days of the GLC and the ‘loony left.’ Such an ideology, and, additionally in the case of the Murdoch papers, such naked collusion with government, make the idea of the British press as a ‘fourth estate’ – an independent, liberal institution holding government to account on behalf of the people – a complete and utter nonsense.

Nowhere is this clearer than in most papers’ attitude to race and ethnicity, which are as Neanderthal now, as they were in the 1980s. Then the target was London Labour Councils, which tried to tackle the inequality, racism and lack of opportunity faced by the ethnic communities within their boroughs. Such initiatives provoked a veritable flood of anti-antiracist outpourings from the most of the press, the Mail of May 3rd 1984, for example, inveighing that: ‘Nowadays racial strife is less likely to be caused by ordinary folk than by the professionals of the race relations industry who in effect go round looking for ways to stir it up.’ But it was when people from these communities began to organise themselves politically, and to elect representatives from among their own number, that the heat of the press flamethrower was turned up to melting point.

Foremost amongst its victims was Bernie Grant, then leader of Haringey council, who had the temerity to speak out in defence of the residents of Broadwater Farm in the wake of the disturbances there. Significantly, he was also the prospective Labour candidate for Tottenham. Thus the Standard October 8th 1985, in a leader addressed to Neil Kinnock and entitled ‘Give Bernie the boot!’ argued that: ‘The only hope of a link between young blacks and the police would have been local community leaders. That this is out of the question in Tottenham is demonstrated by the astonishing attitude of the black leader of Haringey council.’

The Mirror October 11th also inveighed against ‘the ravings of Mr Bernie Grant’, and the same day’s Express declared that ‘Britain’s young blacks need this high priest of race hate like a hole in the head.’ Meanwhile The Times October 8th broadened the attack to take in other representatives of the black community: ‘There has recently been much talk … of communities and community leaders. That often overstates the cohesiveness of the black population and the pinpointed authority of its leadership.’

What was going on here, and in a veritable flood of other articles and political speeches at the time was a concerted attempt to de-legitimise the democratic representatives of a London borough. The underlying message was clear: if people were wilful, stupid or ‘extreme’ enough to elect those deemed to be beyond the political pale by the Tory government and its client press, then they should not expect their representatives to be treated according to the ‘normal’ rules of political engagement. One is irresistibly reminded of Henry Kissinger’s infamous remark about Chile in June 1970 to the effect that: ‘I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people.’ Or as an Express headline put it in July 1986, as the government was rushing through a new Public Order Act as a response to the growing unrest in Britain’s urban areas: ‘Time for the iron fist!’

Having waded through acres of newsprint expressing such thoroughly divisive, inflammatory and enragé sentiments, I came to the conclusion that, in the 1980s, very little had changed since 1974 when Paul Hartman and Charles Husband argued in their classic work Racism and the Mass Media (Davis-Poynter) that: ‘Coloured people have on the whole not been portrayed as an integral part of British society. Instead the press has continued to project an image of Britain as a white society in which the coloured population is seen as some kind of aberration, a problem, or just an oddity, rather than “belonging” to the society.’

But today, the situation is, if anything, even worse, with sections of the Muslim community being represented by the press as virtually an occupying force, or, to use that classic Thatcherite phrase, the ‘enemy within’, the words ‘asylum seeker’ have been turned into a shorthand term of racist abuse, and most of the press has adopted a bizarre, paranoid siege mentality with regard to ‘foreigners’ in general. Meanwhile, any serious attempt to address these issues, all of which in the end boil down to questions of national identity, in a sane and rational fashion – such as the Runnymede Trust’s report The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain (2000) – can expect to be met with a hail of derision and misrepresentation in most newspapers. (For a detailed analysis of how the press, led by the Telegraph, traduced this report see my ‘A Case of Mistaken Identity’ in Index on Censorship, Vol.30, No.3, 2001).

And yet, as Stuart Hall, one of the members of the Commission which produced the report, put it in the Observer October 15th 2000: ‘The question of Britishness is a time-bomb which is ticking away at the centre of this society and it is either faced and confronted or it will explode in our faces in ways which we do not wish.’ This is a task in which a liberal media, a Fourth Estate as generally understood in liberal democracies, might be expected to play a positive role. Unfortunately, in Britain, most of the press, which is more like a Fifth Column of the racist Right, appears to be doing its utmost to precipitate the explosion.