The outrage caused by Robert Kilroy Silk’s article on Arab states illustrated nothing so much as how out of touch most of us are with the Daily Mail and the ‘world’s greatest newspaper’, the Daily Express. Kilroy Silk must have wondered why he was singled out for censure when similarly ripe views are the staple of both titles – in the news as well as the comment section.
The Express and the Mail are campaigning newspapers. Day after day they push out a world-view. Their world is declining and decadent, full of predatory foreigners; Britain’s infrastructure and public services are grinding to a halt; Englishness is under threat; your local area is passing out of your control; your home and savings are at risk; your health is under attack. In a word: fear.
In one form or another Labour campaigners will encounter these fears on the doorsteps, or in the letters column of the local paper. Even more than the views of the Mail and Express on individual policies, their world-view is profoundly political. As a council of despair it is anathema to progressive ambitions. And as a world-view – surreptitiously lodged in your mind through emotion rather than reason – it is far more difficult to counter than any series of factual arguments.
The postwar US political thinker Eric Hoffer summed up the link between worldview and politics admirably. ‘The differences between the conservative and the radical seem to spring mainly from their attitude toward the future. Fear of the future causes us to lean against and cling to the present, while faith in the future renders us receptive to change.’
It is almost as though some columnists had been reading Hoffer: ‘There is a great feeling of malaise in Britain. There is an angry belief that decent, kindly people have been betrayed and that the exploitative, the charlatans and the crooks have won,’ wrote Lynda Lee-Potter on 11 February 2004.
These statements are not proven. Instead they work like horoscopes, drawing the reader along with their sentiments. So when in a horoscope you read that others find you sexy that week, you go along with it, enjoying the flattery. Similarly, Lynda Lee-Potter here invites you to join her in her warm bath of bile and wallow in outrage and disgust.
It is only too easy to compile a fuming list of the wild statements Lee-Potter and fellow columnists Simon Heffer, Peter Hitchens and Melanie Phillips make. In their funny way they would like that. They relish feeling under attack and, despite their mass market platform, always talk of themselves as marginalised prophets in a world dominated by liberal elites.
Still, there is nothing new in the Mail. For as long as it has been around it has been a paper with a mission. ‘God made people read so that I could fill their brains with facts, facts, facts – and later tell them whom to love, whom to hate, and what to think.’ So said its founder, Lord Northcliffe.
The Mail in particular gets a lot of criticism for its pro-fascist stance in 1930s. Most often quoted is this line from 1938: ‘The way stateless Jews from Germany are pouring into this country is an outrage.’ Less often is it admitted that this is actually a quote from a magistrate – albeit one the Mail endorses – and even less often that the majority of the press, the Observer equally with the Express, held deeply reprehensible views at the time.
However, Northcliffe was never reticent about his politics: ‘Heaven forbid that I should ever be in Downing Street,’ he said. ‘I believe the independent newspaper to be one of the future forms of government.’
The days of Northcliffe, and fellow press barons Rothermere and Beaverbrook have gone. Proprietors no longer set up British Empire Parties (Beaverbrook), openly run personally fronted campaigns to bring down governments, advancing constructive policy platforms of their own (Beaverbrook and Rothermere), or sack generals (Northcliffe again).
The desire for such influence still exists, but the techniques have become more subtle than those satirised by the Daily Beast of Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. Even big columnist beasts like Lee-Potter are becoming less important.
The burden of the papers’ lament about the world is now increasingly borne by the news reporters, the headline writers and by the selection of news.
Put bluntly, the Mail and Express pursue a separate news agenda to other newspapers. Stories of career women catching cancer, the EU trying to ban the Union Jack, house price shocks, food scares and the end of traditional values all seem to break first and break longest in the mid-market.
In the last three months alone, there have been 105 articles in the Mail and the Express that feed off quotations or information provided by Migrationwatch UK. Migrationwatch UK is little more than a retired ambassador with a fax machine and internet access to government statistics. Yet it competes with the Press Association in providing breaking news stories to both papers.
The news agenda is radically skewed before even a word is written.
Then the writing begins. All journalists are guilty of bias to some degree, but at the Mail and Express it is institutionalised. For example, both have recently spent months exercised about a ‘flood’ of migrants from the eastern states joining the EU. In particular, they fear ‘health tourism’ burdening the NHS with costs. But among the real flood of articles on the subject, I found only one that alluded to a material fact: the putative migrants’ own home government is obliged to pay back the NHS.
Similarly, both papers ran violin-larded pieces on the plight of Elizabeth Winkfield, the Devon council tax ‘martyr’, without revealing that on a basic pension she was not liable to pay, or that she was politically active for the UK Independence party.
That is the point about the Mail and the Express. They are deeply evangelical papers. Instead of shedding light on the world for their readers, it is their settled mission to show the world as a dark and scary place. The trick is not to take them too seriously. There is no way they can ever be confronted or restrained. In fact, sometimes their effects can be beneficial. David Blunkett, for example, seems to have realised that he can never win with them; against their obsession with migration and ethnicity all his efforts to ingratiate were doomed.
Having realised that, Blunkett now talks of there being ‘no obvious upper limit to immigration’ and is setting up the most liberal work permit scheme in Europe.
Instead of confronting them or raging against them, Labour needs to put ever more work into telling its simplest story, one that seems obvious to most members: by working together it is possible to make things better.
If Mail and Express readers continue to live only on the diet of fear served up by the newspapers – unrelieved by any more positive, progressive sentiments – they risk ending up as paranoid as Northcliffe. A visitor who saw him shortly before death reported how he found Northcliffe, having mistaken the shadow of his dressing-gown hanging on the door for an intruder, ‘waving a Colt pistol with seven chambers loaded at the shadow with his right hand and clutching a book of piety with his left’.