Brexit and collaborationist journalism
How the British media allows politicians to dictate the agenda
The most disreputable form of journalism for anyone who believes in a free press is collaborationist journalism.
Reporters allow politicians to impose boundaries on their work. If party leaders or other powerful figures decide that they do not want X to be a story, because X is an issue that is too embarrassing or difficult to face, journalists collaborate,
Instead of challenging the powerful, they explain why silence and obfuscation are the smart moves for clever operators to make.
To quote the most glaring instance, neither Labour nor the Conservatives want to talk about Brexit. To which, the only proper journalistic response ought to be “well, that’s just tough, mate. You don’t get to decide what we ask you.”
Instead of a robust defence of democratic debate, we have had writers for the Financial Times opining that:
“A time will come when politicians can tell voters that Brexit was a turkey of an idea, that it makes Britain poorer than it needs to be, that it doesn’t even work as an immigration-cutting retreat from the world. That time isn’t far off. But it isn’t now.”
The job of the collaborator here is not to ask hard questions but to police debate by saying that hard questions, or indeed any questions, are an inopportune tactic
“Don’t jump the gun, old chap. There’s a time and place for everything and it most certainly is not now.”
That such an argument can be made without a blush shows you how successfully the right has shut down the Brexit debate.
Now you might well think Conservatives do little or no practical good. Indeed, that they have done a great deal of harm. But let us be fair. They are absolutely brilliant propagandists – “world-beating” as Boris Johnson used to say.
They and to a lesser extent supporters of Donald Trump in the US have turned legitimate questioning into a form of snobbery.
In their fantasy world, to hold a right-wing politician to account is to insult that politician’s voters.
They maintain that even now, when a clear majority of the actual British people believe Brexit has been bad for the UK economy, has driven up prices in shops, and has hampered government attempts to control immigration, challenging the right on the mess it made of the country is rank elitist snobbery.
Let me explain the manoeuvre step by step.
A politician lies.
A journalist says: “but that’s not true”
Politician: “How dare you insult the honest working-class voters who believed me?”
The journalist backs off.
The politician turns his supporters, “see they think you’re stupid”.
Here is Nigel Farage putting the ploy to work in 2019. By this stage it was already clear that his promises that Brexit would revive the UK were false. (Indeed, that ought to have been clear from the start.)
So can we hold Farage to account?
We most certainly cannot, said Farage. Criticism showed only the class hatred of the liberal elite for the white working class
“They’ve given the impression that those who voted for Brexit didn’t know what they voted for, we’re thick, we’re stupid, we’re ignorant, we’re racist. It’s given people a sense that those who voted Remain feel morally superior to those who voted Leave.”
What a gift for grifters this argument is.
The grift works in part because journalists are now overwhelmingly graduates. Indeed, it is impossible to imagine becoming a journalist if you do not have a degree.
If you are a public-school boy at the BBC, for example, you may fear accusations of snobbery, and overcompensate because you secretly believe that they may well be true.
What benefits Farage also benefits Sunak and Starmer.
The Tories don’t want to talk about Brexit. Of course they don’t. It’s been a disaster. All the promises of “global Britain” breaking the shackles of Brussels have been revealed to be false – and in some instances outright lies.
The Office for Budget Responsibility estimates that Brexit will end up reducing UK GDP by 4%. As Simon Wren-Lewis of Cambridge University says a more realistic prediction is that we will be down minus 5.7 percent of GDP by 2035.
Keir Starmer does not want to talk about Brexit either, for fear of angering a relatively small group of swing voters in marginal seats – a good an example of the tyranny of the minority in democratic politics as you can hope to find.
The collaborationist element lies in journalists going along with the politicians’ agenda without thinking for one moment that the people they betray are the very people Farage and Johnson claim to be protecting against elitist snobbery: leave voters.
They actually believed Farage and Johnson. If journalists took their duties to hold politicians to account seriously, they would have spoken up for them.
A few days ago, the National Centre for Social Research published a notable study of the collapse in trust in politics since Boris Johnson took power in 2019.
The authors Sir John Curtice, Ian Montagu, and Chujan Sivathasan reported that disillusionment was everywhere but nowhere was it felt as keenly as among leave voters.
“Two in five Leave voters (40%) feel that the economy is worse off as a result of Brexit, more than double the 18% who felt that would be the case in 2019. Nearly two-thirds of those who voted for Brexit (64%) now believe that immigration is higher as a result of leaving the EU…Meanwhile, although nearly half (47%) of Leave voters feel that Brexit has strengthened Britain’s ability to make its own laws, that figure is well down on the 85% who expected that to be the case in 2019.”
The result is huge contempt. Leave voters are much more likely than Remain supporters to say they “almost never” trust governments or politicians.
I want to end by showing the decline of British journalism with a comparison between 2024 and the start of the Iraq war in 2003.
As with Brexit, there were serious allegations that the powerful had lied or misled the public.
But the media response could not have been more different.
Today, the right-wing press simply cannot ask hard questions about the UK’s place in the world, and a future outside the single market. It was so committed to leaving the EU that all it can do is publish sub-Faragian rants on how mass migration is a betrayal of Brexit.
Meanwhile, the BBC is trapped by its fears. Since coming to power in 2010, the Conservatives have hammered into submission.
They have cut its budget by 30 per cent in real terms and are threatening its funding formula. The right in the party and in the Tory press constantly threaten to abolish it. The result is frightened BBC journalism.
Labour won’t abolish the BBC and will probably increase its funding. No good deed goes unpunished and, you just watch, the BBC will be far harder on a Labour government after the election than it ever was on the Tories, as it has been in the past.
Compare 2024 with 2003. After the second Gulf war, the media absolutely tore into the then Labour government.
Older readers will remember John Humprhys on the BBC fizzing with rage every morning. Tony Blair had taken the UK to war because he claimed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and Saddam did not possess any worth mentioning.
The dispute became so vicious David Kelly, a government scientist, who had allegedly told the BBC that New Labour had “sexed-up” a dossier that overstated the threat from Saddam’s arsenal, committed suicide
The Conservative party of 2003 did not like questions about Iraq because they had supported the war too – as Tories and Labour support Brexit today.
It didn’t stop the Tory press, which wanted to lay into a Labour government. Or the left-wing press, which was appalled by Blair’s decision to go to war, or the BBC.
With honourable exceptions, of course, today’s interviewers do not challenge Farage or Starmer or Sunak on Brexit. They do not ask if we led out of the EU on a false prospectus or how on earth we will pull ourselves out of our post-2016 decline.
Frightened, compromised and befuddled, they fail to do their job.
I supported Blair and the war in 2003. But at the time I thought the fantastically hostile media coverage was fair enough.
Here is a free press in action, I said to myself.
No one can say the same today.
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Carry on reading
David Kelly, not Andrew. Good piece!
Love the term “collaborationist”. So, great strap line, great essay. Thanks.