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136/TOM O’MALLEY
Tom O'Malley reviews a new book analysing the influences and debates shaping Labour’s broadcasting policies.
DES FREEDMAN’s important book (Television Policies of the Labour Party) tells the story of the key debates over TV policy in the Labour party from 1951-2001. It provides a fascinating account of issues that have dominated CPBF thinking in the last decade. It is both a scholarly and a committed book. Its aim is ‘to refute the notion that nothing can ever change and to encourage readers to help build different models’.Des identifies two important points. Firstly, it is the Tories, not Labour that have been directly associated with the introduction of the major changes in TV since 1951 - from ITV, through BBC2, Channel 4, or the framework governing cable, satellite and digital. He develops an explanation for this. Secondly, he demonstrates that television policy has been the subject of ongoing, acrimonious and creative debate in the party since the 1950s.
CONTRADICTIONS
The underlying feature governing Labour’s relation to TV policy has been contradiction. Labour, in opposition after 1951, formally opposed the introduction of ITV, whilst many key party supporters positioned themselves to bid for TV franchises. Sidney Bernstein, who went on to control Granada, was one of these. While in the 1950s and early 60s criticism of the low standards and profiteering of the ITV abounded in Labour, the leadership, under Hugh Gaitskell supported ITV. They saw ITV as part of a more consumer led future that Labour needed to embrace.
When in 1962 the Conservative appointed Pilkington Commission advocated a ‘root and branch’ restructuring of ITV’s advertising, the left wing Tribune dubbed the ideas ‘brilliant’, but the leadership were less enthusiastic.
As Richard Hoggart, a key member of Pilkington, recalls: ‘Hugh Gaitskell said immedi- ately after the Report appeared that we were unduly anti-commercial TV’ Hoggart responded on TV by calling this ‘a mistaken and patronising view’. A couple of days later Hoggart was taken to lunch by Richard Crossman. Crossman ‘came into our lunch at his house in Smith Square... he was fresh from a Shadow Cabinet. He said “Gaitskell asked me to kick your arse”’.
Des’s point is that television policy in Labour has always been driven from the leadership’s perspective by its wider views on the direction of UK society. Thus Gaitskell rejected criticisms of ITV in the interests of the modernisation of the party. A similar general vision of ‘New Labour’ and its support for competition and profit making has driven Labour’s TV policy under Tony Blair.
WILSON AND TV POLICY
The contradiction emerges from the fact that Labour activists, affiliated media union and Labour MPs have held different perspectives on society and on TV policy. Harold Wilson played a key role in Labour TV policy during his premier-ships (1964-70, 74-76) at a time when major demands for reform were emerging from without and within the party.
He both supported the BBC in the face of Tony Benn’s desire to introduce advertising but helped feed contemporary critiques of the BBC by high profile confrontations. He famously snubbed the BBC by imposing Charles Hill as Chairman in 1967. Hill was a former Conservative minister and at the time was Chair of the Independent Television Authority.
Wilson was prepared to let criticisms of the BBC flourish but deep down was a supporter of public service broadcasting because it chimed with his corporatist view of politics. In spite of the growing calls for reform (more account-ability of the BBC governors, less profiteering by ITV) Wilson was constrained by his pragmatism and so reform was always low down his list of priorities. Labour in the 1960s therefore did not innovate in relation to the main structures of TV. From this position Wilson parried and utilised demands for reform from trade unions, activists in the party, academics and producers. Parried, in that he used the announcement of the Annan inquiry into the future of broadcasting (1974-77) to quieten, divert, and ultimately sideline the radical voices. Utilised, in that he seems to have used Annan to send warning signals to the broadcasters to tread carefully with him and his government.
THE HIGHPOINT OF RADICAL POLICY
During the late 1960s and early 1970s there was a flurry of left wing inspired demands for reform.This was exemplified by the emergence of bodies like the 76 Group, the Free Communications Group and the Standing Conference on Broadcasting.
According to the Free Communications Group ‘newspaper, television and radio should be under the control of all people who produce them’. This activism fed off the wider social and industrial upheavals of the period. Perhaps the most lasting institutional outcome of this was the establishment of Channel 4 in 1982 with a remit to be different to ITV and BBC, and of S4C.
Overall though, Freedman shows how the Labour leadership, and official Labour policy, only ever loosely represented the range and quality of demands being made within the party for reform.
ACCOMMODATION WITH THATCHERISM
During the 1980s Labour was on the defensive. Successive electoral defeats promoted a shift away, by the late 1980s, from an unequivocal opposition to the changes to broadcasting introduced by the Tories.
Just like Gaitskell, Neil Kinnock, worked to distance the party from its associations with organised Labour and socialist policies and laid the groundwork for developments under Tony Blair. While radical ideas (for more devolution, more diversity and accountability) continued to play a part in the motions going to TUC and Labour conference, and whilst some Labour TV spokespeople, in the 80s, listened to radical policy proposals, by the 1990s Labour was fully committed to the deregulatory, neo-liberal policies that underpinned its courting of Rupert Murdoch and the rest of the media industrial establishment.
The contemporary fruit of this is the margin-alisation of policies for democratising TV in the party and the emergence of the market orientated Communications Act (2003). In retrospect the high point of conflict between the reformers and the leaders in Labour was the 1970s. Since then, just as the left has been marginalised in the party, so too has the force of the radical critique of TV.
Freedman has done a service to all interested in TV reform. He has discussed the complex range of factors - economics, ideas, party divisions, trade unions, and corporate forces - that have intervened to frame Labour policy on T V.
Yet his account sits uneasily with his desire ‘to refute the notion that nothing can ever change’. His underlying explanation of why the efforts of two generations of reformers have come to nothing much is that the ‘many demands for television reform expressed inside the Labour Party have fallen victim to the contradictions of a party that seeks to contain and minimise movements for radical change. The party’s poor record in democratising British television reflects its position as a political organisation that is more accountable and responsive to the system it aims to manage that to those constituents on whose behalf if claims to govern.’
He argues that in 2003 the gap between reformers and Labour leaders ‘who see communications as, above all, serving the needs of business and government is growing ever wider’. This suggests that little has changed over the years, even that things have got worse.
IS IT WORTH BOTHERING ?
In a sense the book avoids a key issue. It implies that the efforts of reformers have, largely, been wasted because Labour has never been a proper socialist party. If, however, we are to await the demise of the Labour party and the emergence of a grass roots socialist movement, organised and ready to take on the mass ranks of the media corporations, then we will have to wait a long time before we get our hands dirty.
We will be conceding not just the argument to Blair and Murdoch, but also the possibility of engaging with and fighting over the day-to-day struggles around the media.
The book correctly positions the overall direction of the Labour leadership on issues to do with TV, but it does not provide a workable alternative to dealing with media politics in the here and now with some degree of coherence and organisation. Arguably to have done so would have been to produce a very different book, not an historical survey. But still the book ends pessimistically.
We may not have all the answers to the problems we and others in our tradition have faced in the last five decades. But turning our backs on the party which still attracts the support of the overwhelming majority of organised working people in the UK is not a solution. We, in the Campaign, the trade unions and elsewhere have to deal with the problems the Labour Party poses, unsatisfying as that experience will always be.
This said, nobody who is serious about under-standing the struggles for a better media in this country should miss reading and reflecting on this fine book.
* D.Freedman,Television Policies of the Labour Party 1951-2001 (London, Frank Cass, 2003, £18Last modified: Saturday, December 6, 2003
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