Labour and the Media discussion
May 14, 2003

"The culture of the BBC is anarchic, they are determined always to destroy. I think this is where the real poison lies today" JOE HAINES

Ted Knight, hardleft candidate for Hornsey in 1979, was canvassing a street I an affluent Tory area when he came across a Labour supporter. 'I have always voted Labour and plan to continue,' the householder told Mr Knight, who promptly inquired what the voter did for a living. 'Until recently I was Permanent Secretary to the Treasury,' he replied. Mr Knight's response was: 'We don't want votes from people like you.'

David Hill told this anecdote to illustrate the difficulties modernisers within Labour Party encountered in their bid to make the Party electable. He was speaking at the Labour History Group seminar on the 'Labour and the Media' in May 2003, where he shared the platform with Harold Wilson's Press Secretary Joe Haines and Tim Allen who served as Alastair Campbell's deputy during the first year of the Blair administration.

He said the 'on message' culture, so ridiculed by the press in the 1990s, was a reaction to a time when Labour failed completely to communicate a coherent message to voters. 'Let's remember that the Labour Party and the nation lived in separate and parallel universes. The Labour Party was having a dialogue with itself in which it did not want anyone to intrude,'

Mr Hill, who takes over shortly from Alastair Campbell as the Prime Minister's communications chief has previously worked for Roy Hattersley, Neil Kinnock and John Smith. He recounted how, during the 1980s, Labour suffered a persistent pummelling in the press, internal splits, flat polls and self-reverential policies. 'We had to fight the first half of the '87 election about whether we would become third. It was all about self-inflicted wounds,' he said. It was a struggle to convince the Party that they 'should actually talk to the electorate.' The scars of fighting losing bouts with the media meant that after the 1997 election Labour was all about 'consistency of message.'

'There have been jokes that have gone on over the last few years about being on message and people with pagers,' he said. 'But the fact of the matter is if you are treated the way the Labour Party was treated in the way that it was treated right up to the post-Blair leadership election.' He still believes that the press 'tells lies and pursues vendettas.' But he said it was important for the Party to 'keep your mind on the big picture' and not get distracted into petty scuffles over minor newspaper stories.

The role of the BBC was a recurring theme of the meeting. David Hill's opinion was that the BBC should be subjected to closer scrutiny and 'brought up short' more than it is: 'We do need to keep reminding the BBC that they do have responsibility? not so much to the politicians as to the public. They have got to recognise they have an enormous responsibility because of the position they hold in our society.' He said that because they were so 'revered' by the public, the BBC had a 'very great responsibility' to report government affairs accurately. '60 percent or 70 per cent of the population believe that every thing they see or hear on the BBC is true and accurate. Because of that, the BBC have a very great responsibility in terms of the general public. And therefore what the government should be reminding them of and what agencies set up by the government should be reminding them of is that responsibility.'

Joe Haines, Harold Wilson's press secretary, also launched an onslaught on the BBC which he said was guilty of 'destroying our democracy.' He said the 'vanity' of presenters was 'enormous' and they infiltrated every living room in the country. 'The culture of the BBC is anarchic, they are determined always to destroy. I think this is where the real poison lies today. That is where we should direct our attention.'

Haines, who famously stopped the daily lobby briefings for political journalists while at Number 10, warned against spending too much time worrying about broadsheets and middle-market tabloids. 'Our people read the much-despised tabloid press,' he said. 'If you get the votes of those who read the Daily Mirror and the Sun you don't need anyone else's votes,' he said. 'You win with the kind of majority we have now. You should not worry about what the Mail and the Express.'

He refuted claims that the 'press were responsible for losing general elections' and said the Party must bear some of the blame. Mr Haines chronicled the struggles between the union movement and Harold Wilson, explaining that relations between Transport House and Number 10 were so strained that when the Prime Minister went to speak 'he took his own lectern.'

'Since the war we have lost eight general elections and since the war we have won eight general elections. The truth is in '51, '55 and '59 we were as a Party still rooted in the past, we were rooted in wartime and the pre-war days. That's why we lost. It was nothing to do with the press.' He said it was true that 'Tory Newspapers exploit our mistakes' but scandals and controversy were not created by journalists. 'The press didn't create Bernie Ecclestone, or Peter Mandelson or Geoffrey Robinson or the Hinduja brothers or Keith Vaz, nor Robin Cook nor Clare Short. We presented them with those people and they naturally used it against us,' he said. 'We mustn't complain. The solution is to do better and that we don't give them own goals. If you keep giving own goals away you lose the league.'

His observations were expanded on by Tim Allan who said that the role of spin had been vastly exaggerated both by the Party's supporters and its critics: 'To borrow Neil Kinnock's characterisation of Peter Mandelson, Labour spin doctors were not nearly as sinister as people thought they were and not nearly effective as they thought they were.' He said as soon as Tony Blair took over as leader of the Party he was 'assiduous in making sure he got to know columnists and editors and proprietors'. The strategy of talking to traditional Tory supporting papers, such as the Mail, the Telegraph and the Sun was 'backed up by much tougher monitoring and rebuttal of inaccuracies especially if mistakes were made by broadcasters.' The meeting took place in the wake of Clare Short's resignation from the cabinet and Mr Allan said that she was 'right to say that spin came to dominate political debate in the first term.'

'We became the story and spin doctors became the story. This was due to journalistic navel gazing and self obsession, but ultimately we knew that we were working in the frenzied environment of the lobby and have to accept responsibility for allowing ourselves to obscure many of the government's successes,' he said.

Six years on he said the Government has 'made an active effort to mend its ways' and, consequently, spin is much less of an issue. 'My own view is that the government's changes to be more open, trustworthy and equal with information are very welcome, but probably don't go far enough,' he added. 'I think that the trend over the next few years will be to more formality, less selectivity, and more direct communication.'

Summary by Marie Woolf, Chief Political Correspondent of the Independent.

• Tim Allan (Deputy Press Secretary to Tony Blair 1997-98)
• David Hill (Labour Party Director/Chief Media Spokesman 1991-98 & former advisor to Roy Hattersley)
• Joe Haines (Press Secretary to Harold Wilson 1969-76)