Undercover in New Labour PDF Print E-mail
William Dinan, 24 May 2005

Jenny Kleeman, a Dispatches reporter, filmed much of this Channel 4 documentary while working undercover in New Labour's spin machine. Kleeman began working in Labour's London press office dealing with local and regional media early in 2005. She quickly uncovered a series of deceptive tactics used by the party to influence the local media. This was part of a wider New Labour communications strategy to by-pass the (often very critical) national press and attempt to speak directly to the electorate through regional and local media. Kleeman was first tasked to work on media monitoring. In this job she was part of an orchestrated effort to influence the content of local newspaper letters pages. Working from an internal New Labour manual titled 'Making the Media Work for You' the idea was to exploit readers' high trust in the letters pages as a way of pushing New Labour's message. The tactic here was to get 'unobtrusive party members' to put their name to pre-scripted letters defending Labour's policies on the NHS and education. The sample of published letters the research team uncovered, all bearing the same phrases concocted by New Labour's spin doctors, suggests that this cynical exercise met with some success.

The mendacity and spin that is now routinely associated with New Labour was also in evidence during Blair's electioneering tour of the UK. This campaign was not designed for the national dailies, who often complained that they didn't know where the Prime Minister was (unless tipped off by broadcast colleagues), and were not invited to the carefully orchestrated 'meet the people' events whose sole purpose was to generate television pictures and positive publicity in the local press.

Kleeman's efforts on local media were rewarded when she was promoted to the head office in March. There she discovered a wholesale importation of US political campaigning techniques by New Labour. One tactic was to find what are termed 'endorsers' and place them behind Blair as he addressed various rallies across the nation. Endorsers look good on television, and purportedly represent a cross section of the ordinary voting public. Unsurprisingly these people were carefully chosen. They were party members and only selected if their political views match those of the leadership.

This human backdrop for the New Labour campaign was supposedly evidence of Blair meeting the people and hearing public concerns. Sky's Adam Boulton described this as a 'clinically sterile' campaign. Blair's pledge upon re-election that he had listened to the electorate and would act on what he heard during the new Parliament appears as yet another example of deeply cynical spin. This documentary revealed Blair in a bubble, deliberately avoiding the real people and never hearing anything deemed off-message by the New Labour spin machine.

New Labour were also happy to use dirty tricks pioneered in the US. "Astroturf" campaigning (ie fake grass roots) was in evidence during "spontaneous" flash-mob protests at Tory and Lib Dem events. "Home-made" placards and posters, all echoing New Labour slogans, all apparently written by the same hand, using the same black marker, were prominent at many of these sabotage demonstrations. During the last week of the campaign a group of Labour supporters dressed in Grim Reaper costume and wearing Michael Howard masks shadowed the Tory leader's campaign, heckling and disrupting when they could.

A feature of New Labour's campaign was the use of party members to help spin the media. The complicity of members, admittedly often young student types, but also senior and experienced professionals like doctors and police officers, gives the lie to the notion that New Labour's corruption of public communication is simply the product of a few unscrupulous spin doctors. What this film showed is that this cancer in the body politic is spreading.

Dirty tricks were not only confined to the streets - New Labour took the negative campaign into cyber-space too. Kleeman found a document misplaced into her in-tray one morning which revealed details of a website, NewGoldDream registered to New Labour spin doctor Adrian McMenamin, whose contents included material attacking Charles Kennedy for suggesting that prisoners should be allowed a vote. McMenamin has a history of dirty tricks on the net stretching back to the election in 2001 . New Labour refused to comment on this programme before it was broadcast. It will be interesting to see if they try to spin their way out of the series of documented charges contained in this film. My guess is that they ignore it and hope it goes away, much like they did with issues like Iraq, trust and accountability, pensions and climate change during the recent election.

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