On the supposed gap in the centre of UK politics, or the alleged powerlessness of the UK median voter

A remarkable feature of the UK political landscape is how powerless what could be called the political centre currently feels it is. By the centre I don’t just mean individuals that call themselves moderates, but also UK business: capital if you like. How did this happen? It is a long story I’m afraid.

The first and most obvious factor is the UK’s first past the post (FPTP) voting system for MPs. In earlier decades this was thought to empower the centre. If any party drifted towards a less central position in the political spectrum (left/right, or in two dimensions with open/closed), the other would quickly capture that centre ground and would be triumphant in elections. The wishes of the median voter were very powerful. But this assumed that the desire for power would always triumph over a left or right political ideology in at least one party.

The theory seemed to work well in the decades before the turn of the century. When Labour drifted to the left in the early 80s, it ensured its defeat at the polls. Although the Conservatives under Thatcher were also moving to the political right by adopting neoliberalism, that was put down to the median voter wanting the power of the unions to be destroyed, wanting privatisation etc. Labour regained power by adopting many of the elements of neoliberalism, but moved back to the median voter by adding a human face to that neoliberalism.

The Conservatives regained power in 2010 by choosing Cameron as Prime Minister, someone who moved the Conservative party in a more liberal direction in one or two areas, and also was more receptive to the growing concern about immigration. So far you could just about believe in the power of the median voter, and the need for parties to capture the centre ground. I am sure anyone reading those last two paragraphs would have already realised that things were a lot more complicated. But this basic model has had a strong influence on how many interpreted and did politics over this period.

Following this theory Labour moved to the right under Miliband by, for example, gradually giving in to the rhetoric of austerity and immigration control. Given how close the result was in 2010 (the Conservatives could only govern as part of a coalition with the LibDems), you might expect Labour to at least do better than they did in 2010. It did not work. The Conservatives won having pursued in coalition a more right wing policy than under Thatcher. The unemployed, the poor and the disabled were denigrated to a far greater extent than under Thatcher, and so called debt crisis had been used to shrink the state in ways that the median voter did not want. Privatisation continued despite its unpopularity. The hostile environment started.

It is 2015, rather than 2010 or 2016, that is in many ways the critical point in the UK political timeline. Why did the median voter theory not work in 2015?

There is a line that Ed Miliband lost because he was not a ‘natural leader’, by which people generally mean he was unpopular in polls. Strangely enough, Kinnock and Brown also had the same problem, as does Corbyn today. The one exception is Blair. Now it is true that Blair did have qualities that these others did not, but he also had these qualities compared to Major or May or even Thatcher. The other key point about Blair is that he did a deal with the press that helped him win in 1997. One study suggests that this deal was not critical for the 1997 victory, but it was big enough to speculate that the withdrawal of support for Labour by Murdoch in 2010 may have been critical to Brown’s loss.

Labour’s response to the 2015 loss was to stick to the theory and reason that the median voter must have moved to the right. It is a good example of a theory influencing the behaviour it seeks to explain. There was talk by senior MPs of adopting Osborn’s position on austerity. Labour members were understandably having none of it, and elected the only credible anti-austerity candidate. Does the Corbyn election mean the median voter now has nowhere to go? Are we stuck in a new equilibrium, where both major parties were pursuing their ideology? This is the line promoted by many. If true under FPTP the best hope for the median voter is the very risky one of hoping the LibDems can gain enough MPs to hold the balance of power.

Most people in the media do not talk about the influence of the media, for obvious reasons. But the blind spot goes well beyond this. I once asked a political scientist why no regression studies have looked at the role of the media in influencing the 2016 Brexit vote, and their response was because it probably would work too well. This is not quite as bad as it sounds, because there is a real problem in distinguishing between a symptom (Brexit type voters like reading the type of papers that support Brexit) and a cause (Brexit readers are influenced by the paper they read). But just because that problem is difficult to solve should not mean the issue is swept under the carpet.

As I have noted many times, the studies that do try to solve that symptom/cause problem typically find a large causal influence. The most recent was a study discussed here which shows how the Sun boycott in Liverpool (because of its coverage of the Hillsborough disaster) increased the Remain vote there in 2016. Obviously the more united the media is on an issue, the more powerful its influence.

That is what happened in 2015. With few exceptions the broadcast and print media decided that the goal of economic policy was no longer economic growth (the slowest recovery for centuries) or personal prosperity (the biggest decline in real wages since WWII) but reducing the deficit. This created the view that Osborne had been more competent in handling the economy than Labour (whereas he had been the most incompetent Chancellor for decades), and this was the only strong card of the Coalition government. The other factor that may have swung it to Cameron in the last few days was the Conservative line that Miliband would be in the SNP’s pocket, and the broadcast media decided to lead on this rather than Labour’s favoured topic of the NHS. (The English nationalism that is such a strong part of Brexit was evident then, and earlier in Cameron announcing English votes for English issues immediately after Labour had prevented Scottish independence.)

The media persuaded the median voter to elect in 2015 the most right wing government since 1945. Critical to the victory (and to some extent the 2010 victory as well) was the adoption of deficit phobia (a key part of what I call mediamacro) by the broadcast media, and particularly the BBC. After 2010 the BBC began to look more like state media, promoting the interests of the Conservative party, because of relentless pressure and threats from the right. The BBC had managed to remain roughly balanced towards the end of the Labour government (deficit phobia aside), but from 2010 onwards things began to change. What made the difference, or why did Labour’s attempts to intimidate the BBC not end their balance? Again the right wing press plays a crucial role, and in addition the Conservatives have a trump card of threatening to abolish the BBC.

Does this leave the centre nowhere to go? Remember the median voter's power in a two party system comes not from voting for a centre party, but in voting either Labour and Conservative, depending on whichever is nearer the centre. The theory only breaks down if both parties are miles from the centre in different directions but roughly equal distances, and that is not the case at present. Opposite a right wing party adopting authoritarian and undemocratic actions we have a Labour party pursuing fairly solid social democratic policies, as their 2017 manifesto made clear. To put it another way, while Labour are mainstream Europe, the Conservatives are now Trump’s USA.

The leaderships’ left wing baggage has had some effect. It made its leadership an easier target for the media, particularly as a result of Corbyn’s strong support for the Palestinian cause. It also created a group within Labour and beyond whose primary aim seems to be to bring Corbyn down. More importantly the leaderships’ historic Lexit position meant it failed to follow its membership on Brexit quickly enough, which in turn allowed the LibDems to return from obscurity. But in substantive terms such as monetary, fiscal and taxation policy Labour would be considered too right wing in the 1970s. Elsewhere, like a National Investment Bank, and support for public transport as part of a Green New Deal, few except the most ideological neoliberal would think this wasn’t essential. Their Brexit policy of unconditional support for a referendum means Brexit would end under a Labour government.

In contrast, the Conservative party has morphed into a Republican party led by our version of Trump. It was heading that way before Brexit, and Brexit has pushed it over the edge. It is as imperative to remove the Conservative party from power as it is to remove Trump, and ensure that it does not return in its current form. Just as the need to remove Trump is not conditional on whether they are opposed by Biden or Sanders or Warren, so the same is true for Johnson. That cannot be done by the Liberal Democrats in 2019 anymore than it could in 2010, and it cannot be done by forcing the Tories to be a minority government. Only a prolonged period in opposition will convince Tory members and MPs that Brexit, extreme neoliberalism and Trumpian authoritarianism have all become toxic. The median voter still has a natural place to go, and that is to Labour’s European social democracy rather than the Conservatives as Republicans and Johnson as Trump..

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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.