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Trade Unions – a response: Operation Scapegoat Revisited
143/Dominic Wring
Dominic Wring is the author of The Politics of Marketing the Labour Party (Palgrave)
The last issue of Free Press (‘1979, Trade Unions and journalism’) featured a quote from Alastair Campbell: ‘union leaders have only been able to attract attention if they set themselves in conflict with a point of authority, which recently has usually been the leader of the Labour Party’.
I take issue with this assertion and argue that it was the Labour hierarchy, and spin-doctors like Campbell in particular, who did much to make an already hostile media climate worse for their supposed allies in the unions. Indeed the exploitation of the prejudice that characterises much mainstream journalistic coverage of labour movement affairs became a key rallying point for the self-styled ‘modernisers’. The idea of union leaders controlling the party was one of the myths successfully spun by this cabal, a grouping that can in historically and ideological terms be more appropriately labelled Labour’s ‘new right’. And a defining moment for them was the 1992 general election which not only saw the defeat of the party but also a ‘project’ which had supposedly been designed to make it ‘electable’. Yet an ensuing campaign of distortion and misinformation was able to lay the blame for this setback elsewhere.
Labour’s post-mortem on 1992 was largely conducted through the media (remember this was the campaign that had just popularised the term ‘spin doctor’) and soon developed what Lewis Minkin called an ‘extraordinary fixation’ with the role of the party’s affiliated unions. The resulting coverage was almost entirely hostile and reminiscent of the kind of biased coverage analysed by the Glasgow University Media Group in the 1970s. But this time the inspiration for much of this criticism came from within the Labour fold and the conduits were those agenda-setting newspapers (especially the Guardian, Independent and Campbell’s own Mirror) most associated with the party and read by its membership. In the coming weeks and months the unions were accused of being 'rooted in the past', 'undemocratic', a source of 'extremism', having 'cloth cap' images and their party allegiances ‘constitutionally wrong’. The myth of the monolithic ‘barons’ became a persistent feature of journalistic reports which took no account of a more complex reality in which the affiliated unions were frequently divided over many issues. An honourable exception in the media reporting was Stuart Weir who marvelled at the way the issue raised and quickly abandoned by the Conservatives during the campaign was now being resurrected by certain Labour politicians after it. Tellingly Weir’s New Statesman piece was entitled ‘Operation Scapegoat’.
Highly selective commentaries from Labour’s own private focus groups were used to further the party new right’s anti-union agenda at a time when journalists were increasingly sceptical of traditional polling and its perceived failure to predict the recent election outcome. Yet if anything qualitative based findings were more open to being misinterpreted and distorted than conventional opinion research and this is precisely what happened in this case as columnists like Donald Macintyre of The Independent were passed leaked reports and began concluding: 'Labour lost the election because floating voters saw it as union-dominated and outdated and because they believed voting for it was not in their financial self-interest, according to confidential post-election research circulating in the party's high command’. Similarly Patrick Wintour of The Guardian wrote about 'devastating' feedback which suggested the party was 'too old fashioned, too tied to the past, too linked to minorities and old images of the trades unions'; the latter were blamed for offering 'an old fashioned, bureaucratic image (to) key surburban swing voters'.
In sharp contrast the media failed to seriously address other possible negatives such as the so-called 'Kinnock factor', a notable omission given the presidential nature of modern campaigning and this leader’s widely recognised unpopularity with voters. This self-denial had in fact been unofficial policy as party strategist Philip Gould had consistently suppressed damning research feedback on Kinnock’s performance in order to protect the leader.
The official party report on the election defeat, published in Autumn 1992, drew on conventional polling and was far more judicious and balanced than the highly questionable journalistic analysis that had been based on leaked focus group material. Its publication came too late to correct the distorted debate over the party-union ‘link’ but it did however reveal that only 7% of voters had mentioned unions as a reason for not supporting Labour. The more common explanations were general party image (30%); economic competence and tax (30%); Major and Kinnock (20%) and all of these were comprehensively explored in Labour’s Last Chance?, the official and independent British Election Study’s lengthy inquiry into the 1992 election outcome. Significantly the BES team limited their discussion of the union influence on the result to the longer-term electoral consequences of declining membership. By contrast the mediated post-mortem did much to question and delegitimise the unions as political actors and eventually hasten the installation of a Labour new right-winger like Tony Blair as party leader.
Last modified: Wednesday, January 12, 2005
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Previous stories
Miscellany
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