Journalists’ own pact with the devil

While Dominic Cummings is no genius, he does have a good understanding of how the UK media works, and therefore how to manipulate it. There are many ways to do this, but one of the most obvious is to use privileged access in return for uncritical coverage. This is how it works.

One of the prizes journalists most aspire to is being first with the news. To get an ‘exclusive’ story. In the political world the biggest generator of news stories is the government. This gives the government the potential to act as the devil to which journalists can sell their souls to. The value of access increases when the government reduces the amount of information it supplies for free in other places like parliament. The price journalists pay to be given privileged access to news, or more generally some insight in government strategy, is to report what is fed to them without the critical eye that this same journalist might normally apply to this information if it was released publicly.

Of course not all journalists are prepared to do this. But if their personal views are sympathetic to the government, or more importantly if their employer likes to take lines that are helpful to or supportive of the government, it is much easier to sell your soul in this way. It is a phenomenon that all journalists understand, and it is an art that all governments practice to some extent. What is now clear is that Dominic Cummings is willing to buy as many souls as he can to counter bad news or his own mistakes.

The result is that some journalists that have not sold their souls have begun to speak out about what is going on. One is (not surprisingly) Peter Oborne, who details here (HT Jon) many of the (often false) stories that Cummings has generated which have allowed the press and the BBC to hide bad news for the government. (Short interview version here.) Perhaps more surprising is this from Adam Boulton of Sky News, who effectively supports Oborne and adds another example from the BBC. He writes

“In 25 years as Sky News' political editor I never sought favours and was never given them, perhaps because I worked for challenger companies rather than the legacy duopoly of ITV and BBC. I am expressing a personal view here, not speaking on behalf of Sky News. But I can confirm that I and my Sky News colleagues still work with the same "no favours" impartiality.”

My personal impression that Sky journalists are better in this respect than the BBC in particular is backed up by the latest Ofcom survey (figure 11.5), where Sky News does better than the BBC on being accurate, trustworthy, and particularly unbiased. However such surveys may be distorted by the huge campaign in the Brexit press to suggest the BBC is biased.

That journalists from particular right wing newspapers act as agents for a right wing, pro-Brexit government should hardly be a surprise. You only need to look to the same newspapers' coverage of the Johnson domestic incident earlier this year to see this in operation. But these newspapers power becomes much stronger when the line they take is not contradicted by the broadcast media.

The BBC is who really matters here, as it is watched by far more people for news than Sky, which makes what the BBC does much more important than anything Sky does. The importance of the BBC is underlined by a new report by Dr.Richard Fletcher and Meera Selva for Oxford’s Reuters Institute. It shows that Leavers are less likely to use non-MSM sources than Remainers. Equally, few Leavers rely on their pro-Brexit newspaper alone: they also typically watch the BBC. Indeed 51% of Leavers say the BBC is their main source of news, with just 30% saying their main source comes from online, while the equivalent figures for Remainers is 38% and 45% respectively. This is not too surprising given that Leavers tend to be older and Remain voters younger.

The report interprets the importance of the BBC for Leave voters as implying they get their news from one impartial source. I would dispute that. Of course the BBC is not a shameless propaganda organisation of the kind we see in the Brexit press, but instead it works to support the Leave case in a number of subtle and not so subtle ways. Many of these are detailed by one of the best Brexit commentators around, Chris Grey.

I have argued many times before (see here for example) that during the referendum the BBC acted in a way that was very helpful to Leave by treating their (obvious) lies as opinions, to be balanced against the opinions (which happened to be truths) of the Remain side. The BBC most often excluded experts, and when they were included they were balanced with someone from the Leave side. This is a view shared not only be nearly all economic, trade and legal experts, but also some journalists e.g. Peston quoted here. That continued after the result. Claims made by the Leave side, and by the government, that were at least questionable would often go unquestioned.

Some of this comes from simple ignorance. The BBC has some very good journalists who understand the issues around Brexit, like like Katya Adler who reports on the view from Brussels, but most prime airtime is given to political generalists who at least appear not to understand the issues involved. I remember the moment that Johnson finally got his deal with the EU. Laura Kuenssberg gushed that few people had thought it possible to get a deal, while it was left to Katya Adler to explain that Johnson had essentially just accepted the first proposal put forward by Brussels over a year ago. No one asked why Johnson had effectively accepted a deal that his predecessor had said no UK PM could make.

Some of this apparent ignorance comes from perceived necessity. The pressure from the Brexit press and Leave politicians on the BBC is relentless, and there is little to balance this on the Remain side. The obvious conclusion that too many BBC journalists draw is that keeping out of trouble means not giving Leave politicians a hard time. Some acute media observers like Roy Greenslade conclude that the BBC does a great job standing up to this pressure, and of course given this pressure it could be a lot worse, but I think it does take a toll.

The structural problem can be stated fairly easily. The Leave case is essentially fantasy. Beyond a concern about immigration the Leave side have nothing that can justify the great harm they intend to inflict on the UK economy. Yet when the Leave side talks about taking back control, few BBC journalists ask obvious questions, like what EU law that the UK voted against are the Leave side objecting too, or how can trade with countries we hardly trade with compensate for the trade we will lose with the EU? If the BBC allows the Leave fantasy bubble to remain unpricked, you are in effect giving credibility to that fantasy, which is to support it. Another way of making the same point is that the BBC has allowed the Leave side to control the Brexit narrative for three years.

Unfortunately the BBC’s problem goes beyond being cowed by fear of the Leave side, or the liberal guilt that Grey mentions. There is little doubt that some of those now working in the BBC are, consciously or otherwise, pushing the Leave cause. For example Question Time sometimes has audiences that are clearly unbalanced towards Leave, while its selection process is supposed to produce a more balanced audience. The number of appearances of Nigel Farage has raised questions.

A more specific instance was the BBC’s shameful attempt to first ignore and then attempt to rubbish the evidence on the Leave's referendum spending scandal, discussed in detail by Peter Jukes here. Or the unmediated coverage of Farage’s Brexit party launch that was the last straw for one BBC war reporter. Or Humphries on their flagship political radio programme. Or the reluctance to interview non-politicians involved in successful legal challenges to the government. Or the publicity they gave to recycled 'Economists for Free Trade' nonsense. And so on.

The BBC has an obvious way of refuting these claims. They could explain their behaviour over issues like 2016 referendum spending. They could commission independent research that looks at the kind of issue that I mention here. Just quoting YouGov polls that obviously reflect the Brexit press campaign against the BBC does not remove the evidence that the BBC is shifting its reporting in response to that pressure and in some cases actively supports the Leave side.

Brexit is a denial of economics as knowledge

A well known Brexiters said it was almost worth doing Brexit because of the anger I feel about it. He is right about the anger. The prospect of Brexit has filled me with the same horror as austerity did. The connection between the two is obvious. Both involve subjecting the whole country to a policy that basic economic ideas tell you will do nearly everyone harm.

We have seen nothing like this in my lifetime. The only person to try austerity (by which I mean fiscal consolidation in a recession) was Thatcher, and the policy was reversed (not stopped, but the consolidation was undone) within two years. Every government, and especially Thatchers, has pursued regulatory harmonisation and tariff reductions to increase trade. Now in just one decade we have seen both austerity for seven years and an attempt to dramatically increase trade barriers.

Imagine you were a doctor, and the government had appointed anti-vaxers to key positions who proceeded to reduce the vaccination programme. How would you feel as more children fell ill. Imagine you are a climate scientist and your government says it does not believe in man made climate change and encourages coal production. You don’t have to imagine of course, because exactly that is happening in the US and elsewhere. And you can ask the doctors and the climate scientists how they feel about it.

What we have seen since 2010 in the UK is the equivalent for economics. I would argue that this is no accident, but comes from the same source as climate change denial and anti-vaxers. Some people may not accept that comparison, and argue that economics is not a real science or some-such. And I agree that with austerity they had ammunition from within economics itself. There are still some macro economists around, nowhere near a majority but because they say things right wing politicians like they are ‘prominent in the public debate', who deny the validity of what Keynes wrote after the Great Depression. But we see the proof that Keynes was right today: a Great Recession followed by a limp recovery as the government squeezed demand. A minority of academic economists supporting austerity was no reason to largely exclude the views of the majority of academic economists, and all the evidence is that their views were almost completely excluded from the broadcast media. 

There is no such ambiguity with trade. We know trade between two people benefits those people because otherwise the trade would not happen. The very basis of the economy is trade. Every day we go to work we trade our labour for goods that go to someone else. Our work represents specialisation that allows everyone to benefit. If we had to produce everything we consume ourselves we would be much poorer.

This is why governments try to encourage trade agreements between countries to make trade between them easier. Greater trade is like technical progress, because it allows countries to focus on producing things they are good at producing. Now it is possible that such agreements, although they make the country better off, may not make everyone in the country better off. But every academic trade economist agrees that getting rid of the EU Customs Union and Single Market will make almost everyone in the UK a lot poorer. (Patrick Minford, whose analysis has an uncanny habit of always supporting hard right policies, is not a trade economist.)

Brexiters know this, which is why they came up with the idea of global Britain. It is a farce, which can be refuted in at least two ways. First, every analysis based on academic research I have seen suggests the gains from trade deals with other countries outside the EU come nowhere near the loss due to less trade with the EU. Nowhere near. Second, if you want good trade deals with other countries, the best way to achieve them is to get the EU to negotiate them on your behalf, because the EU is more experienced and has much more clout in any negotiations than the UK. That is why the EU has so many trade agreements with other countries. 

All this knowledge about the impact of trade on productivity and incomes was dismissed by Brexiters with two words: Project Fear. All the knowledge that Keynesians have accumulated for 80 years was dismissed with a few more: the government has maxed out its credit card. Others have dismissed the knowledge of doctors and climate scientists with similar home-spun homilies.

Yet many, including many in the media, still refuse to think of economics as knowledge. People who wouldn’t think twice about saying a fall in the supply of coffee will raise its price say all economics is just dressed up political opinion. People who would not dream of ignoring doctors just because they cannot predict when you get a cold say all economics forecasts are worthless. Of course there are some things, like whether the Euro was a good idea in economic terms, where there are pros and cons and therefore economists’ views may differ or change. But the evidence that making trade substantially more difficult with our immediate neighbours will be harmful is so overwhelming that only 1 in 22 UK economists disagree. I have yet to meet an economist who specialises in trade who disagrees. 

So when a woman on Question Time said we just do not know what will happen after Brexit, she was repeating an idea pushed repeatedly by the Brexit press and implicitly supported by most broadcasters. The BBC accepts that climate change is happening (most of the time) because that knowledge comes from ‘proper scientists’. The BBC does not accept that Brexit will make the UK worse off in economic terms because it is knowledge predicted by economists, and they think economics is not knowledge.

The right in the UK and US are now set on a course where they are prepared to defy science itself for their own interests. But this can only succeed when some of those who think of themselves as in the centre let them. In this case it has been allowed to happen in part because political journalists and those above them at the BBC decided economics where the overwhelming majority of economists agree was not knowledge but just another opinion. As I have spent my working life examining how economics can improve policy choices it is hardly surprising I find that simple ignorance outrageous.

Is this good for Johnson, whether he wins or loses?

I have no idea whether Johnson will get his deal through on Saturday. As the broadcast media is obsessed by headcounts I will leave it to them. What I will say is that the idea that MPs will be taking a decision that has a profound influence on everyone in this country (in which will do such serious economic and political damage to the UK) on the basis of only two days of scrutiny with no assessment of its impact is just absurd, and typifies everything that is wrong about Brexit.

Who knows why Johnson changed strategy during or before his meeting with Varadkar. Maybe it was fears about security in Northern Ireland after No Deal created a border. Maybe he always had the idea in mind of going back to the EU’s original plan to keep Northern Ireland in the Customs Union and Single Market. It seemed to be the obvious thing for Johnson to try, as I suggested in August. Maybe the suggestion came from Varadkar. But whatever it was, there is a huge irony in where we are now.

What Johnson has agreed to is basically the first deal the EU proposed. It is a deal that May said no UK Prime Minister could accept, and the deal condemned by Johnson a year ago. The backstop has now become the deal. No wonder Varadkar looked so pleased after his meeting with Johnson, and no wonder European leaders look so pleased when the deal was finally agreed. Of course the EU could agree to something they had already proposed.

Why has the ERG apparently agreed to this, when they said they could not possibly support it first time round? Unfortunately (or perhaps not) I cannot put myself in ERG shoes and answer that question. What does annoy me is when the BBC’s political editor praises Johnson for having got the EU to drop the backstop, when in reality he has forgotten all ideas of alternative arrangements and made the original backstop the deal. Indeed the BBC in lavishing praise on Johnson, and failing to point out his earlier rejection of almost the same proposal, is doing its bit to get the deal over the line on Saturday.

If Johnson fails on Saturday to get parliament to vote for his deal, he has got himself a very strong Brexit line to take into any General Election. Winning a General Election has always been Johnson’s prime goal. Before that walk among the trees with Leo Varadkar, Johnson’s election strategy had been to formally argue that he could get a deal (to keep Tory MPs on board), but hope a sufficient number of Farage inclined Leavers took this to mean he would leave with no deal.

Johnson's new deal is also a better election strategy. Few English voters care about Northern Ireland, regrettable though that is, and so they will feel no qualms about giving Johnson enough MPs to drop his DUP alliance. For Leavers, the idea of voting to get Brexit over the line will seem irresistible. Of course if Johnson does win and gets his deal through parliament Brexit will continue in the form of negotiating an FTA, but we will be out of the EU.

The risk that Johnson always had in actually finalising but not passing a deal is that Farage would convince enough voters his deal was not true Brexit and that they should therefore vote for him. However I suspect that will be very hard for Farage with this deal. What part of the deal can Farage use to convince Leavers it is not a real Brexit? As I noted above, talking about the EU annexing Northern Ireland is unlikely to impress most voters.

Does it make sense to hold a People’s Vote (PV) on Johnson’s deal vs Remain if Parliament can find the votes for that? Here the calculation is very simple. Unlike the PVs I talked about in earlier posts, which would have almost certainly led to a Johnson boycott, it will be much harder for him to boycott a vote on his own deal. However much he says that a second vote betrays the first, running away from a vote on your own deal just looks bad. So I suspect we would get a proper PV, even if Johnson resists it in many ways beforehand.

The main reason he will eventually agree to it is that he thinks he can win. He may well be right. Remainers should not put too much faith in the small majority in polls of Leave versus Remain. It could well be 2016 all over again.

Alasdair Smith goes through some of the lines that Johnson/Cummings will take. It is classic disinformation of the type that some of us can still remember from 2016. They will claim that the deal ensures that Britain will be free of EU laws and regulations, and now free to strike trade deals of our own. In reality this is true only if the UK does not sign a trade deal with the EU. Trade deals are all about harmonisation of tariffs and regulations, and there is no way the EU is going to harmonise on anything other than their own.

Nor is abandoning a level playing field made real until it comes to negotiating a FTA with the EU. The EU will certainly insist on one if there is tariff alignment, because tariffs are the EUs weapon against a country undercutting the EU by lowering standards. The reality has always been that complete sovereignty, in the sense of having nothing to do with EU laws and regulations, is only true if the UK is prepared to avoid an EU FTA completely. Indeed that possibility remains open to Johnson with this deal. If he does not get any FTA's this deal will morph into No Deal, except that Northern Ireland is safe.  

The alternative to a PV is an election, which parliament is sure to get. If Labour forms a government after that election then it is almost certain Brexit is dead. The Tories will vote against a soft Brexit as not a ‘real’ Brexit, and Remainers will vote for Remain. So the critical variable is the probability of that election outcome. I suspect most people would put the probability of a PV win for Remain as higher than Labour winning the election, simply because in the latter the Remain vote is split by the Liberal Democrats.

If Johnson does get his deal through parliament, or wins a PV, he will enjoy at least a week of media adulation that will be unbearable for Remainers. I had wondered if there might be a sting in the tail for him. With Brexit out of the way, he will have lost his main weapon against his opponents in a General Election. He may suffer the fate of his idol Churchill, and (in leavers eyes) win the war only to lose the peace.

However I can think of countless reasons why winning on Saturday will hand Johnson the election on a plate. There is the adulation from Leavers and the media of course. Remainers will also not quickly forget, and they will be looking for someone to blame, and many will blame Corbyn. That feeling may be intensified if it turns out, as it may well do, that it was Labour MPs who were critical in getting Parliament to approve the deal on Saturady. In short, whether he wins or loses, Johnson is set pretty for the General Election.

There is only one alternative to Prime Minister Boris Johnson

Corbyn may not be a great or even a particularly good leader, but it seems few in the media recognise he is the only viable opposition to the far right we have.

While I have been critical of the Labour leadership’s Brexit stance for some time, and still do not think Corbyn has gone far enough to maximise Labour's chances of General Election victory, he has done enough to ensure one thing: his survival. While his Brexit stance, together with continuing problems with antisemitism, will have lost some members and made others luke warm, there is little appetite to replace him amongst most members. This view will only strengthen as the likelihood of a General Election increases. It is Labour party members who choose the party’s leader.

But what about antisemitism? Could this issue be the downfall of the Labour leadership? The answer is almost certainly no. As the poll discussed here shows, while 66% of Labour members think antisemtism within the party is a genuine problem, 77% think the problem is deliberately exaggerated to damage Labour and Corbyn himself. On the basis of current evidence, and that includes any rebuke from the EHRC investigation, Corbyn’s position among members on this issue is secure.

The only other factor that might raise questions among the membership about their leader is very bad poll ratings. But two factors mean this is not a risk factor for Corbyn’s leadership. First, the new Brexit policy will win some voters back. As Rob Ford notes here, there are signs that the electorate’s flirtation with four party politics is coming to an end, as both Labour and the Conservatives move their own Brexit position. Second, Labour under Corbyn have been there and done that in 2017, such that there will always be the hope of a pre-election surge for Labour.

Could Labour’s continuing antisemitism crisis create another serious split between MPs and the leadership, along the lines of the vote of no confidence in 2016 after the Brexit vote? A split of this kind would only make sense if Labour MPs believed that they had a chance of defeating Corbyn in a ballot of members, and as I have already suggested they would be delusional. MPs may demand this and that in terms of how disciplinary procedures are handled within Labour, but any attempt to unseat Corbyn, or mass defections by Labour Mps, seems unlikely.

The security of the Labour leadership’s position within the party is one of two key factors in which to evaluate the impact of continuing criticism of Labour within the mainstream media and elsewhere. The second is the threat we face from what has become the most far right and dangerous government the UK has experienced for decades if not centuries.

The Conservative party is looking increasingly like the US Republican party, and its likely leader increasingly looks like a UK version of Donald Trump. However the Conservative party has got itself into a far more dangerous position than the Republican’s have ever faced. The Tories have Nigel Farage and a right wing press pushing them to implement a No Deal Brexit that goes way beyond anything Trump might be contemplating with tariffs. Furthermore opposition within the Tory party towards Johnson’s leadership ideas and No Deal looks vanishingly small.

Two recent events have underlined how far the UK government has descended into far right territory. The first was of course Johnson’s failure to stand up for one of our own ambassadors in the Darroch affair. A corrolorary of No Deal is that a trade deal with the US becomes politically essential, and that in turn means that Trump’s not so polite requests become the UK’s actions. This is a President who tells non-white Congresswomen born in the USA to go back to “the crime infested places from which they came”. In practice a US trade deal that UK politicians desperately want will be disastrous for UK agriculture, UK consumers and many more, people already hit hard by the UK leaving the EU with no deal.

The second recent event was Amber Rudd preferring a job in any future Johnson government to her previous opposition to No Deal. It has been an object lesson to those who thought Conservative MPs would always stand up for business and the Union to see how quickly all but a few have chosen political expediency instead. Again parallels with the Republican party in the US are instructive. Just as the right wing media in the US was able to use the Tea Party movement to shift the Republicans to the right, so the right wing press have used Farage to shift the Conservative party in a similar way.

The net result will be the normalisation of a No Deal Brexit over the next few months. Leaving without a deal was not what all of the 52% of Leave voters in 2016 voted for, but virtually no one in the broadcast media will be brave enough to push this point. The lie that the 2016 vote provides a mandate for No Deal will go unchallenged. Broadcasters will balance the nonsense that the impact of No Deal on the UK will be, to quote Johnson, “infinitesimally small” against the truth that it is the biggest act of political and economic self-harm ever inflicted on the UK.

Allowing Johnson to become leader shows that the Conservative party has completely lost its moral compass. All of Johnson’s misdeeds in his past mean nothing, just as Trump’s behaviour means nothing to his supporters and the Republican party. Both individuals lie all the time, but it doesn’t matter to his own side. Johnson encourages a friend to beat up a journalist, but it doesn’t matter. Johnson uses racist language on many occasions, most recently comparing Muslim women wearing the niqab and burqa to letterboxes, but this was deemed acceptable by his party. Johnson gets advice from Steve (“Let them call you racist. Wear it as a badge of honour”) Bannon, and even the BBC does not think Johnson lying about these contacts matters.

And so, as the Conservative party loses its moral compass, the chances are that large sections of the country’s elite will do so as well, and our standing overseas will plummet even further. Although Tory party members may find Johnson’s insults acceptable, don’t expect other countries to take a UK run by Johnson as more than a bad joke. Don’t expect other countries to do business with a UK that proposes to destroy its trade relationship with the EU and many other countries at a stroke. An elite that treats threats to prorogue parliament as acceptable will not be respected by countries that value democracy, although some others will welcome the development.

Yet those who say not in my name need to ask themselves whether they are prepared to make the choice required to stop this happening. There is only one realistic opposition to a Johnson led government. Believing the Liberal Democrats could ever play that role was unrealistic, because Labour has enough loyal voters to ensure that the anti-government vote would be split. Farage along with the LibDems might also take away votes from the government, but it would be foolish to rely on an English vote split four ways just happening to go against a Conservative government.

The awkward truth for those who for whatever reason dislike Corbyn’s Labour party is that Labour is the only party that can defeat this government, and its leader in the next election will be Corbyn. Voting is always a choice between the lesser of two evils. Supporting smaller parties when that lets the Conservatives win, or supporting none, may make those who dislike Corbyn’s Labour feel better, but it is in effect a statement that Corbyn’s Labour party would be just as bad for the country as a whole as out current government, and that is simply not a credible belief. Corbyn is not going to leave the EU with no deal, and in practice will be unable to leave the EU in any way. Corbyn is not threatening to prorogue parliament, is not desperate to do a trade deal with Donald Trump, does not lie all the time, does not get friends to beat up opponents, and does not have a history of using racist language. Whereas Johnson promises tax cuts for the rich, a Corbyn led government would help the many, not the few.

Yet there are few in the mainstream media who seem prepared to recognise the choice we face for what it is. Even wise and perceptive commentators like Martin Wolf, who lament the situation the Conservative government has led us to, often feel it necessary to balance their piece with a derogatory remark about the Labour leadership. Those remarks may or may not be accurate, but a plague on all your houses just allows this Tory government to stay in place.

Worse still are those in the centre or centre-left who refuse to give up hope of getting ‘their party’ back and will do anything that in their view helps that cause. In the first year after Corbyn was elected many MPs and journalists waged a constant war against the left in the media. I said at the time it was utterly futile and self-destructive, and I was right. It led to an attempt to unseat Corbyn that everyone on the left calls a coup, and a clear majority of members saw it the same way. Polls suggest the same is true today. Those in the centre and centre-left need to realise that for all Corbyn’s faults and mistakes he will be Labour’s leader going into the next election, and if they repeatedly attack him they are helping Boris Johnson do terrible damage to our country.

Of course the right wing press will do anything to discredit Labour: that is what their owners pay them to do. But often their task is made easier by the non-partisan media who think they are making choices using simple journalistic criteria, such as going with the story. What we are in danger of seeing with 24/7 criticism of Corbyn is a repetition of what happened to Hilary Clinton in the US elections. As I showed here, the mainstream media spent much more time talking about her email server than any of the sins of Donald Trump, or indeed all those sins combined. In that sense the US media chose Trump over Clinton. It was of course not a thought-through or considered choice, but just the outcome of lots of individual decisions that seemed to make sense in journalistic terms, but were disastrous in political terms.

Of course the constant tunes the media play matter. One of the incredible poll findings of that US election was that more people trusted the serial liar Donald Trump more than Hillary Clinton. That makes no sense unless you note the constant stream of media stories suggesting Clinton had something to hide. No one is suggesting Labour’s failures over antisemitism should not be exposed, just as no one was suggesting that Clinton should not have been criticised for using her own email for government business. What is missing in both cases is a sense of perspective, as here for example, or here. Without that perspective constant attacks on Corbyn will have an impact. The impact will be to keep a destructive far right government in power.

Understanding why right-wing populism succeeds

I have just been rereading “Populism and the People” by Jan-Werner Müller in the London Review of Books (May 2019). It is the most concise and I think perceptive account of the most worrying political development of our time: the rise of the right wing populist. This is Trump and Farage, but also Orbán in Hungary, Erdoğan in Turkey, Kaczyński in Poland,  Modi in India and Bolsonaro in Brazil. What they have in common is a

“populist art of governance ... based on nationalism (often with racist overtones), on hijacking the state for the ends of partisan loyalists and, less obviously, on weaponising the economy to secure political power: a combination of culture war, patronage and mass clientelism.”

But there is one standout paragraph for me, and so I will reproduce it in full.

“But have so many people really been converted to the views of the far right? Contrary to the domino theory propounded by pundits, and by the populists themselves – first Brexit, then Trump, then Le Pen etc – the fact remains that no right-wing populist has yet come to power anywhere in Western Europe or North America without the collaboration of established conservative elites. Farage did not bring Brexit about by himself; he needed Michael Gove, Boris Johnson et al to assure voters that it was a jolly good idea. Trump wasn’t elected as the leader of a spontaneous grassroots movement of – as the cliché has it – angry white working-class males; he was the candidate of the ultimate party of the establishment and needed the support of Chris Christie, Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich – all of whom vouched for him. What happened on 8 November 2016 can in one sense be explained in the most banal terms. Citizens who identify with the Republican Party came out and did what voters do on election day: they cast a ballot for their party. What took place was utterly normal, except that the candidate himself wasn’t quite so normal.”

This process can seem perfectly normal if you take it for granted that the right has to sell out to the far right if it is to survive, and the right has no other choice. But it is not inevitable that the Conservative party sat back and allowed its ranks to be swelled by ex-UKIP members, who promptly started trying to deselect candidates who spoke out against No Deal. It was not inevitable that Cameron pledged to have a referendum on EU membership where he allowed the Leave side not to specify what kind of Brexit they were proposing. And in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the Tory opposition and their backers in the right wing press did not have to start using immigration is a political weapon. It was not inevitable that Osborne chose austerity, which helped create the conditions for Brexit.

As ever, this is about going for short term gains that have the risk of far greater longer term costs. No doubt someone at Conservative party HQ thought that increasing membership had its advantages. The Conservative focus on immigration lead to the rise in UKIP, and in 2010 setting up immigration targets that were never going to be hit strengthened UKIP even further. It was that strength that led Cameron to make his ill-fated pledge. Osborne’s austerity might have embarrassed Labour and shrunk the state but it intensified anti-immigration attitudes.

But I think, in the UK at least, there is something more, and that is the normalisation of the far right by the BBC, coupled with a demonisation of the left by the centre more widely. That the BBC has been pressured by the government and its press into adopting a more favourable stance towards the Conservatives than Labour is well known and beyond dispute, except of course at the BBC. But I think that has also led to the normalisation of the far right, which is equally dangerous. It is made up of a lot of little things: unchallenged coverage of the Brexit party launch, not bothering to highlight links between Bannon and Johnson (here is ITV’s coverage), inviting a far right representative on Newsnight straight after the Christchurch terrorist attack, and so on. It is worse at the BBC, but other broadcasters are not totally innocent. The Brexit party is not a party but an organisation where no one can challenge the leader, a leader who is well versed in 1930s fascist imagery.

Coupled with the centre’s normalisation of the far right is a demonisation of the main opposition to the Conservative party. To quote Gary Young:

“Throughout this time media elites, drawn from the same class as their financial and political counterparts, have mostly been obsessed by the crisis in leadership in an ostensibly “unelectable” Labour party, which has had the same leader for four years – and gained seats and vote share in the last general election. Those media elites have called pretty much every major political event, from Brexit to the last two elections, incorrectly.”

When the democratically elected leader of a party of half a million is considered beyond the pale, you get an environment that inevitably enables the rightward drift of the other main party. Every news organisation worth its salt should be hounding Johnson about his failure to rule out proroguing parliament as a direct attack on democracy. Just as it makes no sense to balance truth with lies, it makes no sense to tolerate attacks on our democracy. Without that kind of defence from our media and politicians, it becomes an easy slide to the populism that Jan-Werner Müller talks so incisively about.

When people warning about incipient fascism are criticised rather than laughed at is the time to worry about incipient fascism

I’m old enough to remember left wing demonstrations in the UK when ‘fascist!’ was a standard chant. On most occasions back then it was a ridiculous accusation, and as such it was rightly laughed away. But times have unfortunately changed. With authoritarian regimes in some East European countries, Trump’s election and subsequent behaviour, and far right parties gaining ground in other countries, fears of a return of something like fascism are no longer a laughing matter.

When Andrew Marr interviewed David Lammy a week ago, he suggested Lammy talking about appeasement of the ERG in the same terms of Hitler or apartheid was “unacceptable”. Not ludicrous but unacceptable, and by implication something Lammy should apologise for. Quite rightly, and so refreshingly for a Labour MP in the glare of TV lights, Lammy was having none of this. He said his comments were not strong enough. When Marr protested that these were elected MPs he was talking about, Lammy reminded him that the National Socialists had elected MPs. In 1932 they were the largest party in the Reichstag.

Nigel Farage is not an MP, but the BBC seem happy not just to give the launch of his new party considerable airtime, but also to do so in an uncritical manner. After the BBC had chosen the soundbite from his speech about putting the fear of god into MPs for what they had done to us, no one was given airtime to warn about how dangerous that kind of speech was, and that one MP had been murdered by the far right, another plot foiled and about many other serious threats to MPs. I think it is fair to say that the launch of the Brexit party was news and had to be covered, but to provide no kind of critical balance whatsoever was a strange decision.

Discussions of incipient fascism go in the wrong direction when direct comparisons are made to fascism in the 1930s. Equally ticking off check lists of signs of fascism just beg the question of how many ticks mean we should be worried. There is no generally accepted definition of fascism. We need to be more analytical, but also to update the analysis to the circumstances of today.

Much of the academic discussion of this issue takes place under the umbrella of studying populism. I think this is a little unfortunate, because the populism umbrella can be spread very wide to include any political party that challenges an existing party political structure. If you are interested in incipient fascism a better conceptualisation of populism is expressed by Jan-Werner Müller. You can tell a populist by whether they claim to represent ‘the people’, which is certainly not all the people, but instead just the ‘real people’. The real people quickly becomes those that support the populist leader. The others, especially immigrants or minority religions or races, just do not count, or worse still are ‘saboteurs’ trying to thwart the ‘will of the people’. Populists of the Müller type will be strong on nationalism, as well as threats from within and without. Intimidation and violence against opponents is never far away. Populists will talk about the elite that has been leading the country astray, and how they as leader has to constantly battle against this elite, even though they themselves are often part of that elite.

I think a critical aspect of Müller’s account is that populists are prepared to overturn the institutions of pluralist democracy if they believe they are frustrating what the populist leader perceives as the will of the people. Authoritarian populist leaders deny the necessity of democratic pluralism, such as an independent judiciary or an independent media. The people, as expressed through the populist leadership, takes precedence over all other elements of pluralist democracy, and these elements must be made to bow before that will or be replaced by those who embody that will.

A clear example of what Müller is talking about is Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. He has pledged to create an illiberal state like Russia or China. Perhaps as a result, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker at a 2015 EU summit dispensed with diplomatic protocol to greet Orbán with a "Hello, dictator." To further this aim he has gone about controlling the media and courts either directly or through placement of allies, with complete success. This together with a lethal combination of extreme nationalism, scaremongering about migrants and antagonism against Muslims and Jews keeps him popular. NGOs have been attacked, which has led to legal proceedings by the European Commission. A host of public bodies like its fiscal council, the central bank, and the national elections commission, have been abolished or their independence limited. An international university in Budapest has been forced to close down.

Yet Hungary is still a democracy in the sense of having reasonably genuine elections. When occasionally the opposition does win a local election, Orbán unleashes the full might of his nationalist, enemies at the door, enemies within narrative at them. With almost total control of the media and civil institutions, he can make life very difficult for the opposition. He won his last election with ease.

I would argue that this is the incipient fascism of today. It is possible that Orbán’s nationalism and control of the media and other parts of the state will allow him to maintain total control for many years. If at some point in the future a unified and effective opposition does arise, we will see if Hungary moves back to democracy or to something worse than the elected dictatorship it now is.

It is also easy to see many of the traits of a Müller populist in Donald Trump. He is impatient with the constraints of the judiciary, and is more than happy to fill vacancies with barely qualified or unqualified individuals who will do what he wants. He plays up threats from within and without. He has a penchant for dictators in other countries. He endlessly criticises the ‘fake news’ that comes from an independent press, and instead favours the Republican/Trump propaganda that comes from Fox News. When asked whether he was concerned about death threats that followed his disgraceful attack on one of only two Muslims in Congress he basically said no. His own Republican party provides no check on his actions.

But in what sense can any of this be applied to the single political project called Brexit? The ERG are a disparate group of MPs, whose common cause is to push for the most extreme form of Brexit. There is no single authoritarian leader among them. So can Müller’s concept of populism still apply to this project and some of those who push it?

Let’s begin with what happened shortly after the 2016 vote. That referendum did not specify how we left or under what circumstances Article 50 should be triggered, but May decided that she uniquely understood what the referendum meant and parliament did not need to be involved. The Prime Minister wanted to start the Article 50 process without consulting parliament. The issue went to court, and when three judges decided parliament did have to approve the decision, the Daily Mail described them on its front page as enemies of the people.

The Brexit press and those promoting Brexit frequently talk about the will of the people, thereby excluding the 48% who did not vote for it. Indeed Remainers are often accused of sabotaging Brexit, and being the elite that those carrying out the will of the people have to defeat. EU citizens living here are effectively ignored, and were not even allowed to vote in the referendum. When the costs of Brexit are mentioned, we will often be reminded of how the British stood alone in WWII and came through the hardship of war. This is nationalist imagery at its most potent and dangerous. At one point the Daily Telegraph managed to find common cause with the authoritarian regime in Hungary and the far right in the US by scapegoating the same wealthy Jew for his ‘plot’ to stop Brexit.

To sum up, Brexit and those that push it have displayed almost every element of Müller style populism. I have not even needed to refer to links between various Brexit politicians and the German AfD, Steve Bannon and various far right groups. Or about law breaking in order to win the vote, and the lack of enthusiasm shown by the police in investigating this. Brexit displays the same populist characteristics that you see in Victor Orban or Donald Trump. Add the violence that Brexit has inspired and the pro-Brexit right encourage with their talk of treason and we have every reason to warn about incipient fascism, as Michael Heseltine pointed out.

It is also naive to imagine that all this will stop if we end up leaving the EU. Steve Bannon is creating a network of far right parties that will use immigration and islamophobia to undermine existing parties and then pluralist democracy. Islamophobia has already been employed by the Conservatives in trying to stop Sadiq Khan becoming mayor of London. Brexit of the kind proposed by May will undermine living standards for working people that have hardly grown for a decade. This stagnation, coupled by unfettered and growing inequality, is the kindling that Bannon and his network hope to set alight.

In my view this has become so dangerous partly because the political centre fails to see it. The Brexiters are appeased by May rather than isolated as John Major did. Those termed political moderates fret about the leader of the Labour party as much if not more than incipient fascism. I cannot quite decide whether the BBC is just blind to all this or elements within actively promote it. A lesson of history is that the far right is at its most dangerous when it is appeased by a centre that is more concerned about the threat from the left.

The right wing partisan media is the elephant in the room in discussions of mainstream politics and far right extremism

Treason used to be a word associated with spies or assassins. Crimes against the state of the utmost severity. Yet, to take just two recent examples, here is an article in the Sun describing how “Treacherous Theresa” has surrendered our freedom. “May's name will rank alongside those of the worst eels in Western history - and she deserves it”. Cross the Atlantic, and here is a presenter at Fox News calling for the "the traitorous treasonous group that accused Donald Trump" to be locked up. “True justice” she calls it.

It seems that the word treason is now being used to describe the actions of a Prime Minister the writer disagrees with, or to describe a legal inquiry that successfully prosecuted a number of individuals who were once close to the President of the United States. How does this escalation of language happen, and does it matter? To understand both questions we need to start with what links these two examples. The are both from media outlets owned by Rupert Murdoch.

As a detailed analysis of the Murdoch dynasty by Mahler and Rutenberg of the New York Times shows, Rupert Murdoch created, and runs with the help of his sons, a supremely successful media empire. Media businesses in particular are subject to regulations, and part of Murdoch’s success has been to get round those regulations. As Mahler and Rutenberg write: “Murdoch’s news empire is a monument to decades’ worth of transactional relationships with elected officials.” These are not always right wing politicians, as his support for Tony Blair showed, but they tend to be, reflecting Murdoch’s own situation and views.

Murdoch is not part of a long-standing establishment but rather the opposite. In that sense he is a particularly influential example of what we could call the neoliberal elite that Aeron Davis describes so well in his book ‘Reckless opportunists: Elites at the end of the Establishment’. But why would someone like Murdoch, and the UK’s other press barons, be happy with people employed by their media organisations using inflammatory language like ‘treasonous’ in their papers?

The standard response of many people in the media to a question like this is that it sells newspapers. Newspapers or radio stations or TV channels like Fox are just expressing the views of their readers. There is no doubt that is partly true, but the reality is that this is a two-way relationship. The media reflects the views of those that read or see it, but it also shapes those views. The excuse that media just reflects their audience’s opinions cannot be used to absolve those media outlets of responsibility for what is said or written there.

There is now overwhelming academic evidence that the media can have a potentially powerful influence on what those who consume it think and do. A particularly interesting and powerful recent study by two economists looked at US cable channels, which remain the main source of news on political campaigns even in the digital age. They isolate viewers who view these channels just because of their place in the channel ordering, rather than because their political preferences seek out particular channels, in order to look at how influential the channel was.

They find that the existence of Fox News boosted the Republican vote share in 2000 by about 0.5%, which fits with another study that used a different method to isolate the influence of Fox. However the growing viewership and increasingly right wing stance of Fox increased its impact on the Republican vote share in 2008 to a huge 6%, which was far bigger than the influence of any other channel. An equally interesting finding is that the political stance of Fox is far to the right of where it should be to maximise viewers. In other words Fox is broadcasting material that maximises its ability to shift its audience to the right, rather than to maximise its profits.

Unfortunately there are no studies yet of Trump’s election, but it seems very likely that the influence of Fox was crucial in his victory over Clinton. In the primaries Fox had a more critical view of Trump, perhaps because Murdoch did not think he was up to the job. Mahler and Rutenberg found three sources who reported Murdoch saying “He’s a [expletive] idiot” about Trump, although Murdoch’s spokesman denies this. It was ironically other broadcasters that gave Trump much more coverage than his opponents, because he was “good TV”. Reporters then talked favourably about Trump, simply because he was gaining vote share. After it was clear he would win, Murdoch saw his chance to form a close relationship to a US President. That influence is now so strong that one recent article in the New Yorker was entitled “The Making of the Fox News White House” (HT @rupertww).

Would this level of influence also apply to the UK press? There is every reason to think so. For example this study found that when Murdoch’s Sun switched support to Labour, it increased Labour’s vote in 1997 by 2%. That was not enough to influence the result, but when the Sun switched back to the Conservatives in 2010 that had a similar impact in the opposite direction, which was enough to influence that result. Newspapers influence attitudes towards austerity, and the best predictor of attitudes on immigration is newspaper readership. I note other studies with a similar message here.

There is no doubt that both Trump and Brexit reflect deep underlying causes. What the media is able to do is help direct those causes in particular ways. To again quote Mahler and Rutenberg: “The Murdoch empire did not cause this [populist] wave. But more than any single media company, it enabled it, promoted it and profited from it.” Given the narrowness of Trump’s victory and the Brexit majority, it is extremely likely that Fox News and the Brexit press were respectively the difference between defeat and victory.

Once we accept that the media can have an influence on mainstream politics, it would be very surprising if it did not also influence the political fringe. We should be shocked at soldiers using a photograph of the leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition for target practice, but we cannot just put this down to soldiers expressing their personal views about Corbyn’s attitude to Nato and his past associations. What legitimises in soldiers’ eyes doing this is the constant demonisation of him in the press. The press both reflects and influences.

More serious than target practice, Corbyn was the intended target of the man responsible for the terrorist attack at Finsbury Park mosque. A Labour MP, Jo Cox, was murdered during the Brexit campaign, and a member of a far right organisation plotted to kill another, and many MPs have received credible death threats. According to Britain’s counter-terrorism chief, the man responsible for the Finsbury Park attack was “driven to an act of terror by far-right messaging he found mostly on mainstream media”. As Gary Younge writes, the threat from far right terrorism is growing alarmingly and while “the violence may come from the fringes, the encouragement comes from the centre.”

If you think the idea of terrorists being inspired by the mainstream media is fanciful, just listen to the extract from Fox I linked to in the first paragraph above. Of course this is an unintended effect of the extreme language the partisan media uses. Whether the rise of far right parties and groups is an unintended consequence is less clear, particularly when the BBC chooses to broadcast an interview with a far right leader straight after 49 people had been murdered in New Zealand. There is academic evidence that media coverage of far right groups like UKIP does increase support for these groups, and as I have already noted this is partly why Trump became the Republican candidate for President.

But the main reason for the language the partisan media is now using is to ‘fire up the base’, who in turn will influence politicians to do what the owners of this media want. This route of influence is well established in the US, which is why David Frum, former George W Bush speechwriter, says “Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us. And now we’re discovering we work for Fox.” We are now seeing it happen over Brexit, as candidates who oppose No Deal are deselected and would-be leaders play to a base which is heavily influenced by the partisan press it reads.

There is one important difference between the UK and US, however. The US retains a widely read independent press that can discuss the influence of the media. In the UK, independent broadcasters would find that more difficult and in any case they mostly do not try. UK journalists tend not to talk about the partisan press as a key political player that can influence a party, perhaps in part because they would be talking about colleagues who work for that press. The myth that the media just reflects and does not influence is too convenient for many, so the media remains the elephant in the room in discussions about politics and political extremism in the UK.