What goes around comes around

This chapter seeks to put the relationship between Labour’s left and the media into the context of the major changes that have been taking place in Britain’s political and media landscape. What started as a revolt against the Labour establishment by predominantly young, mainly urban and overwhelmingly left-wing party members, has virtually come full circle. The Labour leadership in the 1970s and 1980s saw as ‘impossibilist’ and electorally suicidal the demands of the ‘loony left’ which had gradually taken hold among Labour’s grassroots (particularly at local government level). In the 1980s, Labour’s hierarchy reacted to the press hostility engendered by the apparent (albeit short-lived) pre-eminence of left-wing policies. By offering some rebuttal of the criticisms of their policies in ways that, they hoped, would not amount to directly confronting the press, nor offending either of the party’s increasingly antagonistic wings. By the mid-1980s, the ‘modernising’ tendency within the Labour Party had gained the ascendancy at Westminster.