Aug 13 2007
Idiotic name calling, Labour spin and missing the point - the media turns people off politics
Spending part of yesterday at the beck and call of the media reminded me why so many people hate the news programmes and don’t like politics.
The day began with my arrival to appear on the BBC AM news programme. At 9 am they read out their headlines, which included the?? announcement that I had proposed ??14 billion of tax cuts. I thought I had been invited in to discuss the Sunday Telegraph story about ??14 billion of cuts in the costs regulation imposes.
I explained to the Editor that they had got the story entirely wrong, and told him that if they prepared to interview me around the Labour lies about a report they had not seen it would?? be an easy interview for me and a pointless one for the audience.
Peter Sissons did then did give me a sensible interview, testing out the programme of deregulation we had indentified.
ITN arrived at the Oval cricket ground as they apparently could not wait until the evening when I was available and had not taken the precaution of interviewing me prior to the Test match. They gave me a good interview which allowed me to explain how much damage some regulations were doing, and to talk about the need to do much more to generate jobs for some of the 5.4 million people of working age not in employment. I am told by those?? who watched it that most of this interesting discussion??stayed firmly????on the cutting room floor.
Channel 4 invited me in for a live interview. It was meant to be about how deregulation can lift prosperity and increase jobs - along obviously with an opportunity for the interviewer to question whether that is true and desirable. Instead the interviewer mainly wanted me to give the Conservative budget for 2010 or 2011 and got very cross when I declined to do so. It is absurd to think any Opposition party could or should do so so far in advance. She kept asking about tax cuts, which made it a waste of time. I had made it crystal clear in advance that we will discuss taxation on Friday when we launch the Report, and there will be an open news conference that all can attend.??Channel 4 viewers still have little idea about the range, impact or reasons behind the proposals on cutting red tape. It certainly made it easier for me, because the questions were so off beam.
Sky invited me in for a live interview and asked a bit about deregulation, but mainly wanted to do an interview on what the latest opinion poll meant for the general Election - an election which might still be more than two and a half years away!
??I am all for interviewers asking tough quesitons, putting Ministers and MPs on the spot, and trying to make them think. Some??of the current vogue of aggressive interviewing based on juvenile spin doctoring from Labour does the opposite of that. It is predictable, silly, and prevents the public from hearing sensible discussion about genuinely difficult issues like how an enterprise economy can deliver more jobs, how the north-south gap could be narrowed, and how more people might come to own and run businesses of their own.
No wonder so many people do not like politics, when all they see and hear is name calling, savaging the person rather than discussing the policy.
We have punch and judy media trotting out routines that any competent politician knows by heart and can refute?? in his sleep.
??
John Redwood has been the Member of Parliament for Wokingham since 1987. First attending Kent College, Canterbury, he graduated from Magdalen College...
Is part of the problem that your report has not been published yet and so the “NEWS” broadcasters can put whatever interpretation they like to the story? I fear that the overall coverage yesterday was heavily slanted to a pro-Labour position. You were described as being on the extreme right and what you propose, which presumably they have not read, was written off as being ideas that were rejected by the voters in the last two general elections. Your party seems to have difficulty in getting across the results of your detailed policy reviews by prematurely announcing them and allowing Labour and their friends in the broadcasting media to rubbish them before the details have been published.
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It’s about time we had someone looking seriously at deregulation, I have stood as a candidate for UKIP Southampton in the local elections and one thing that was always said to me was that Government, both HMG and EU, were trying to control too much of our lives. Businesses shouldn’t have to waste time and resources trying to comply with unnecessary legislation when they could be using that time and those resources to promote their products and/or services and also investing more in the local economy.
The Partnership for Urban South Hampshire (PUSH) programme was set up by local authorities to improve the South Hampshire economy yet deregulation would do a better job, leave businesses alone and they will become successful. People don’t work that well if they have someone watching them 24/7.
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John is perfectly correct to point to the silliness of the way the media is keen to conduct the debate on tax and spending. The single most damaging charge is that of ‘Tory Cuts’. Sneaking out proposals of tax cuts on the eve of general elections, as the party did in 2001 and 2005, immediately going on the defensive about how the proposals do not involve a single teacher or nurse being made redundant, simply reinforces the effect of this (incorrect) charge. Much of the current debate also appears to be being conducted on the basis of received wisdom from the mid-1990s - namely that after more than a decade of ‘harsh’ Thatcherism, and a few years of equally harsh, but markedly less competent Majorism, all that was needed to make Britain a nicer place to live was a large amount of public money, gladly provided by a public delighted to be asked to make such a selfless gesture. This, if it was ever true, is now seriously out-of-date. In 2007, we have had very many tax rises and new taxes, we have seen an increasingly rapacious government take ever larger sums and shares of GDP to ‘invest’ in public services. We have also seen an increasing amount of failure, an ever larger number of broken promises, and a worrying large incidence of incompetence. Too much of the debate has been conducted through the prism of schools’n'hospitals, more specifically who can spend more on them as an article of faith. There is a large and ever expanding public desire for, even some small modicum of relief form the burden of tax and regulation and if the Conservative Party get behind the issue NOW, the positive, economic and moral case for low taxation can easily be made before the next election and both the party and country can then start to take the necessary steps towards creating a fairer, more enterprising and wealthier Britain.
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Oh - final point.
If your
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I agree about the media. As a person who has voted New Labour at two of the previous elections, even I was surprised to her the BBC news say “Labour has dismised the Conservative ………” etc. They should start with “the Conservatives have announced ……..” etc. Plus, how can the Labour Party dismiss something which has not yet been published?
This is an issue which should go to the Chairman of the BBC - whatever the new group is called.
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It is great for my morale to see someone at last challenging the spread of regulation. It was getting bad enough in the early nineties. The waste of peoles’ lives and energies now is beyond criminal.
The media will try to spin you around John. Don’t let them. That fact that you are seen as such a prime target must be reassuring in some ways - that they fear you at least. Take it as a great compliment, if I were you - although your story shows how bloody tiresome these idiots are. Keep up the good work, please.
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I don’t doubt how disheartening it can be John to have to continually correct interviewers and answer Labour smears rather than explain your own position but at the risk of being cruel surely by now we’ve learned the media environment we’re operating in and adjusted our campaigning tactics accordingly?
Given the state of flux the party is in at the moment you don’t need to be a seasoned political observer to guess how the majority of news outlets would’ve handled yesterday’s announcement. Your pedigree as a minister in previous Conservative governments, a subject matter that touched on taxation and emotive issues like health & saftey and the media fascination with David’s ‘recent troubles’ around his attempts to reform the party - these are all known issues that we’re bound to have a significant impact on the way this issue was picked up.
Despite this it feels as though it was ‘heads down and full speed ahead’ and here we are a day later with the story yet again about alleged ideological tensions within our party and very little attention on the issues you raised - even you’re now posting on the media reaction!
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While delighted to hear of some of your proposals I do rather concur with Brian Tomkinson that the Tories are open to criticism by prematurely announcing reports before the detail is available.
It must surely be more beneficial to come out with the Report and have the details available on the same day
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I think that a list of spending/waste cuts is exactly what we need - so thank you for your contribution. A cumulative total should be maintained by the party. The public can work out for themselves that this will mean lower taxes relative to Labour. We can outline areas of focus for tax cuts (I’d suggest off the incomes of minimum wage earners for a start), but promise more detail in the manifesto and not before.
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I’ve never studied politics, but my GCSE history teacher once drew a horizontal chalk lin eon the board to explain ‘left’ and ‘right’. He put Adolf Hitler at the right extreme and Joseph Stalin at the left extreme. He explained that ‘left’ was the belief that all people are equal and ‘right’ as the belief that some people have more merit than others. He said both extremes were as bad as one another, invariably leading to mass-murder of people based on their beliefs or race. He went onto draw a line just right of centre explaining that this was where the Tories were and a line just left of centre explaining that this represented labour. That these parties were centre-right and centre-left. A symplistic analysis to help a mixed ability group of GCSE students understand what the text-book meant by ‘left-wing’ and ‘right-eing’.
Now that I am older and have read a lot more on politics I do not belive for one minute that having lots of legislation is ‘left’ or ‘right’. It is authoritarian. Cutting regulation is a libertarian proposal in my view.
Britian needs a proper debate about how authoritarian we want to get. How dare the media drown this out with ‘left’ and ‘right’ slurs. This is exactly why I prefer blogs to TV or newspapers!
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As I remarked on Conservativehome, what appalled me was the irrelevant spiteful and possible actionable decision to start the interview with a very very old clip from when you were the welsh Secretary. I dont see how any one bar a dyed in the wool welshman could have joined in with a rendition of the Welsh Anthem!!! This was followed by an extremely biased interview on their part. I do think CCHQ should take it up with them.
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I am sure the comments on the media reaction and their interviews are correct, but it does make me wonder whether our party has got the hang of dealing with them. I am only involved in a very small way with local politics but I try to build relations with the local reporters and whilst one or two have their own view on things, the others are generally balanced, and when the write something that isn’t they at least consider my opinion. I wonder whether this is more the fault of our communications department and our lack of ability to deal effectively with the media?
Reply: I am sure we can improve at handling the media, but I don’t think the BBC can be cuddled in the way you do with your local journalists. They delight in running the story in an anti Tory way - as their leads this week showed when the story was “Labour today criticised etc” rather than “The Conservatives today proposed”
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I absolutely agree about the media - it is a disgrace. I think perhaps we need to have a policy about dealing with them that we have laid out in advance to them - including getting very firm with them as you did on newsnight last night saying they were being educated by Labour on what to interview you on. If they don’t interview on the lines promised, particularly in live interviews, this should be pointed out, if they appear to be biased, this should be pointed out. Perhaps people should be assigned to count bias, cutting and distortion, complain to watchdogs, and send out press releases to their competitors about biased reporting etc.
In other words, I think it is time we tackle this head on - Labour are basically running the broadcast media at the moment.
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All true I fear. Sadly, although as an expat the temptation to try it every now and then is a strong one, I can no longer stomach the overly simplistic and craven interviewing style on R4’s Today programme - whether the fault of Hutton, the editors, or the interviewers, it almost never provides a challenging and interesting interview environment for government ministers.
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Newsnight’s Kwark said that cuts in regulations are, as you say John the equivalent of a cut in txaxes, but she added to that, that they are also a cut in SPENDING!!! I mean , what planet do these people think they’re on??? This debate could be going intergalactic.
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I saw the Channel 4 programme. It was a very poor set of questions and you batted away the questions with ease. Its the press that has the obsession with tax cuts, not the Conservatives. As you say, aggressive questioning of the style we get all too frequently can be refuted with ease. They should hold fire till the report actually comes out. But then again, they would have to stop criticising the Conservatives, and I cant really see that happening.
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Whilst I have considerable sympathy with your position, surely the problem is the Conservative party’s media team. What is the point of “spinning” stories to the “friendly” media ahead of the release of an important policy document. No one has had the chance to read the report properly and the sections of the media not favoured with a leak are bound to take a contrary view just because their news editor wants to have a “story”, and not a rehash on what appeared in the Sunday Telegraph. That is the way the media works. John Redwood is clearly very clever, but this does not make him a media natural which only compounds the problem. By the time the report comes out the media will have lost interest in the real story so the public will never get a clear idea of what the report is about. Far better to stop leaking the stories ahead of publication, and just send out embargoed copies of the report to “serious” journalists the night to provide a sensible basis for interrogation at the following morning’s press conference.
Reply: There are too many stories for that. We have responded to any national newspaper that has wanted a pre launch story, and have sent out press releases generally covering the Pensions, deregulation and Higher Education issues.
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