cranks 2 high voltage

To continue: in a way, the media are the biggest cranks of all—able to maintain an absolutely rigid belief in whatever their thing is at the time—it's just that unlike normal cranks, it can change on a dime.

Consider the media narrative that predominated shortly after last month's general election: “Keir Starmer has detoxified the Labour Party and won a stunning victory”. I'd certainly like to quibble with their definition of "detoxify" there, but despite my historical affiliations I’m not going to claim that Jezza would’ve won this election. However, it is possibly instructive to contrast the treatment that the Conservatives got at the 2019 and 2024 elections.

In 2019 Boris Johnson was able to get away with hiding in fridges and snatching phones from reporters without it becoming The Big Thing. Robert Peston uncritically reported a false story that one of Matt Hancock's aides was assaulted by a Labour activist and then walked it back without, iirc, much in the way of significant criticism. This was, to an extent, reported by the media at large, but in general treated as a mild diversion and very much as beside the point.

Columnists, meanwhile, spent most of their time saying how you either reluctantly or enthusiastically had to vote Boris or the world would end. Some of the more excitable ones felt empowered to write lengthy screeds detailing entirely fictitious scenarios in which Corbyn would do The Holocaust 2 were he elected.

In 2024, meanwhile, Rishi Sunak left a D-Day event early and it was everywhere, for days. Columnists were knives out for the Tories and, somehow, openly horny for Keir Starmer. Ministers were asked serious critical questions in interviews! British politics doesn't have a mandate of heaven, but the consensus of the media class might be a close equivalent, and it was pretty transparent that it had been, in this case, withdrawn.

Again: I’m not saying Labour would have won in 2019 either way. They clearly didn't just win in 2024 because they were getting favourable journalistic treatment—another manifestly determining factor was basically “will the ghastly egomaniac decide to run the racism party against the Tories or not?”. They decided to this time, and wouldn’t you know it, it cost a bunch of Tories their seats.

The Labour party’s approach to the election seems to have been the opposite of the Corbyn-era "let's get people excited about real change" thing, instead opting for a “don’t scare the hoes” white-hat version of those campaigns Republicans run where they just try to get ethnic minorities not to vote, but targeted at everyone. (I think of the number of times I've heard variations on phrases like "we don't want to make promises we can't keep".) It is, frankly, enervating to see that it actually kinda worked, and shows that however cynical I might be about politics, the current leadership of the Labour Party are infinitely more so.

Despite Labour's appallingly weak response on Gaza clearly having caused them some losses (and so, so nearly costing some of the most transphobic bellowers in the party around their seats) we’re already seeing briefing about moving “not one inch” to the left. As ever, pressure from the left, based on material circumstance, organised by grassroots groups around concrete issues that might actually affect real things is bad, which pressure from the right, ginned up by media bullshit around ludicrous incoherence, is serious.

And we can see that—very much like the council elections in Brighton recently, actually—Labour scored a stunning victory not really because of their strength but because of their opponents' weakness. That's all well and good once, but unless you can capitalise on your victory (and their constantly saying things like "we're not going to spend any more money" makes me think they mostly won't, however much Stephen Bush insists otherwise) you're going to be hosed the next time. Talk of ten-year projects doesn't make it so!