The British media essentially decides who is the Prime Minister. A lot of truth here.
One of the main rationales for replacing Starmer with Andy Burnham, we are told, is that Burnham’s greater popularity will earn Labour a “rehearing”. But perhaps we overestimate the extent to which large sections of the public – and an even larger proportion of the media through which the public gets its information – were ever prepared to give them a hearing in the first place.
You can already see these dynamics reassembling under the new presumptive leadership, the determination of the rightwing press and the algorithm to extinguish the new administration before it can even change the letterheads. The onslaught will be vicious, immediate and unashamedly detached from reality.
“Whoever the next chancellor is, they are coming for your home,” screams the Telegraph. “A man with no plan and no proper mandate,” scoffs the Sun.
You didn’t have to agree with everything Starmer did to recognise the hostility of the environment he faced. But his great delusion was to imagine that this malignance could be placated, even brought onside. To this end he threw them lots of red meat: the criminalisation of protest and planned cuts to disability benefits.
But none of it worked in the face of an establishment that does not merely disdain leftwing voters but barely appears to regard them as human.
“Blue-haired city-dwelling Green-adjacent trans-lovers,” went one description by a Sunday Times columnist, who, if pushed, would probably still classify herself as a sensible moderate.
And so it makes no odds to point to the second fastest economic growth in the G7, falling immigration, falling NHS waiting lists. None of this really matters. The average voter will have little idea of what Starmer has actually done, because those with the job of telling them have no interest in doing so.
Which may explain why many people still think immigration is rising, the economy shrinking and that Starmer is a posh paedophile who let Jimmy Savile off the hook.
(Jonathan Liew abdriged)
You can already see these dynamics reassembling under the new presumptive leadership, the determination of the rightwing press and the algorithm to extinguish the new administration before it can even change the letterheads. The onslaught will be vicious, immediate and unashamedly detached from reality.
“Whoever the next chancellor is, they are coming for your home,” screams the Telegraph. “A man with no plan and no proper mandate,” scoffs the Sun.
You didn’t have to agree with everything Starmer did to recognise the hostility of the environment he faced. But his great delusion was to imagine that this malignance could be placated, even brought onside. To this end he threw them lots of red meat: the criminalisation of protest and planned cuts to disability benefits.
But none of it worked in the face of an establishment that does not merely disdain leftwing voters but barely appears to regard them as human.
“Blue-haired city-dwelling Green-adjacent trans-lovers,” went one description by a Sunday Times columnist, who, if pushed, would probably still classify herself as a sensible moderate.
And so it makes no odds to point to the second fastest economic growth in the G7, falling immigration, falling NHS waiting lists. None of this really matters. The average voter will have little idea of what Starmer has actually done, because those with the job of telling them have no interest in doing so.
Which may explain why many people still think immigration is rising, the economy shrinking and that Starmer is a posh paedophile who let Jimmy Savile off the hook.
(Jonathan Liew abdriged)
