On Writing for The Sun

Keir Starmer has written an op-ed for The Sun. Like most people who pay attention to such things, I can't say I'm surprised. Plenty of his subordinates have tested the water during the last year, so it was only a matter of time before the big cheese took the plunge. Readers recalling the 2020 leadership election will remember his politician's answer on this issue, saying he wouldn't be giving any interviews to The Sun during the course of the campaign. It was slippery but barely noticed then, but now he can shrug his shoulders and say he hasn't broken any promises. Which is more than can be said about his other leadership pledges.

The relationship between The Sun and the labour movement is a vexed one. Throughout the 1980s under Kelvin MacKenzie's leadership, they cheered on Thatcher's destruction of the living standards and ways of life of millions of its own readers, while pumping out powerful and persuasive propaganda. At this time a plurality of the paper's readers still voted Labour, but undoubtedly its toxic framing of issues, the lies it told, and the scare stories about town hall loony lefties were corrosive of the solidarities underpinning our movement. It changed some minds and therefore voting behaviour, but acted as a pacifier for even more. Its influence culminated in their infamous reporting of the Hillsborough tragedy, covering up police negligence and failure, and falsely claiming coppers and paramedics were urinated on by riotous Liverpool supporters. The led to a boycott on Merseyside that remains in place.

Where should Labour politicians stand on engaging with this hateful rag? Labour's history has, on the whole, been one of continued cooperation, if not chummy accommodation. Tony Blair, you will recall, grew so close to Rupert Murdoch that he was made a godparent to the media mogul's young daughter - going somewhat further than having to deal with his papers as a fact of political life. Gordon Brown tried carrying this on, with less success. And in 2010, all of the hopefuls in Labour's leadership contest, yes, even Diane Abbott, paraded themselves through The Sun's pages. Five years later, the left insurgency ruled The Sun out of bounds, not that it stopped the paper from (quietly, admittedly) backing Liz Kendall. Naturally, there was no relationship to speak of in Jeremy Corbyn's time. Nevertheless, the uncomfortable truth is that when Blair, Brown and their ministers were getting their articles published it appeared Labour did not lose votes and therefore seats. Not on Merseyside, not anywhere else.

On the question of should, I've often argued the left needs to be more instrumentalist in its thinking. There is a class interest we share, but too often recoil from, preferring to oppose values to interests as if the two are separate and one doesn't flow from the other. Does this mean Labour politicians should lobby The Sun for their column inches, as Starmer did for the sake of his 300 words? Absolutely not. By way of a demonstration, I turned down a half hour interview with Russia Today about the book. This wasn't just because RT is a mouthpiece for one of the world's greatest grotesques, but also a matter of context. RT is part of the Kremlin's strategy to undermine the feeble democratic institutions we have this country, not renew them, and is happy to platform fools and idiots peddling any old crap to achieve this aim. The argument made in the book is too important to be associated with RT's disinformation efforts, even if it meant selling a few copies extra.

A similar attitude should dictate the left's dealings with the rest of the bourgeois media, and by extension how Labour politicians engage with them too. Reading Starmer's article, he needn't have bothered. It's the usual managerial guff, muttering about "incompetence" and telling the government off for failing to "get a grip". For good measure, the prospect of a Christmas ruined by Boris Johnson is thrown in too. Utterly meaningless twaddle as forgettable as last week's weather forecasts. It won't have won over anyone and it won't have contributed to winning over someone in the longer term. It said nothing, offered nothing, and made the rookie error of saying Labour would happily support the government in dealing with the crisis. Incredible.

In other words, there is no justification for this article from our point of view, nor the banalities Wes Streeting and Bridget Phillipson have also written for them. Contrast this with Ken Livingstone's brief Sun column in the early 90s, where he was dubbed the 'voice from the left' and actually put forward views that challenged the paper's politics. A case could even be made for Rachel Reeves taking to its pages to defend her £28bn/year green infrastructure package because, differently and in their own ways, what Livingstone did and what Reeves might do was and would be in the interests of our people and our movement. This is what socialist instrumentalism looks like, a balance of legitimating an enemy versus using them for our purposes.

Sadly, and underlining the real nature of the Starmerist project, the objectives of his article had nothing to do with reaching out to Labour-curious Sun readers. It was, again, a red topped signal to this country's press barons that he's willing to play by their rules. He's showing the ruling class, and particularly the rich donors he's vainly courting, that the party is safe for their interests. And he's trolling the left knowing stunts of this sort have an attritional effect on its power and reach in the party. That it has the same consequences for party finances is an afterthought. Writing for The Sun then is a matter of evaluation, of balances of benefits and harms. Keir Starmer and his helpers care nothing for this, and shouldn't be shocked, when the time comes, to find millions couldn't care less about them either.

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