When right-wing British Prime Minister Theresa May announced in April that there would be a snap election in just two months, it was widely assumed that her Conservative Party would trounce its Labour opposition. Media outlets sure helped create this impression.
For the first time in several decades, voters had the possibility of electing a staunch left-wing prime minister, Jeremy Corbyn. The unconventional Labour leader, a longtime anti-war activist and party outsider, pledged to boost public spending, to nationalize utilities and railroads, and to halt imperialist military policies abroad.
Since Corbyn won the Labour leadership contest in a landslide victory in 2015, he has faced an incessant slew of attacks from the neoliberal Blairite wing of his own party—and from the corporate media that so frequently echo it.
Despite the deluge of dishonest media mudslinging, Corbyn’s popularity gradually increased throughout the campaign, while May’s fell. Days before the election, the British corporate media fell into a frenzy. Right-wing outlets went all out, disposing of any pretense of “balance” or “neutrality.”
On election day (6/8/17), the cover of the right-wing Sun depicted Corbyn in a garbage can. “Don’t Chuck Britain in the Cor-Bin,” the tabloid implored voters. “We’ve Had Enough of Jezza’s Rubbish. VOTE TORY.”
The cover smeared Corbyn as “terrorists’ friend,” a “destroyer of jobs” and a “Marxist extremist” who will bring “massive tax hikes,” “nuclear surrender,” “ruinous spending” and “open immigration.”
The right-wing Daily Mail, owned by the Viscount Rothermere, joined in the odious mudslinging. Declaring Corbyn and Labour allies “Apologists for Terror” the day before the election, it urged readers, “VOTE TO SAVE BRITAIN!”
Across the ocean, right-wing US pundits borrowed similar smear tactics. In the pages of Foreign Policy (6/7/17), hard-line war hawk Jamie Kirchick claimed it’s both “dumb” and “dangerous” to vote for Corbyn–whom Kirchick defamed as a “terrorist-loving, Jew-baiting” hatemonger.
More Nuanced Propaganda
More sophisticated anti-Corbyn propaganda appeared in the New York Times. In an article aptly titled “For Britain’s Labour Party, a Mild Defeat May Be Worst of All” (6/3/17), the US newspaper of record expressed its barely concealed hope that Corbyn will lose, and badly.
“Although some Labour moderates privately hoped that a cataclysmic defeat would sweep him away, now it looks as if the party will do well enough to maintain its uneasy status quo, and Mr. Corbyn and his proto-Marxist program will survive,” the Times’ Steven Erlanger wrote.
“But for Labour’s less ideological, more politically ambitious lawmakers, it would be nothing short of disaster, leaving them ‘to the thought of a decade out of power, of a whole career at Westminster without power,’” Erlanger lamented, quoting an expert on—wait for it—the Conservative Party.
The Times article was a case study in how to disguise an op-ed as reporting. It rehashed the hackneyed notion that left-leaning parties can only win elections by “moving to the center,” and made it very clear that it opposed not just Corbyn, but also his socialist policies.
Erlanger quoted another anti-Corbyn academic who mourned that, although Labour will likely lose the election, “I don’t think it will be bad enough…. There will be too many loopholes, so people can say, ‘OK, Jeremy wasn’t popular, but the policies are fine.’”
In the report, the Times quoted eight people: four professors, three voters, and a politician. Not a single person said anything positive about Corbyn. All eight were used to paint a picture of the leftist Labour leader as unelectable and out of touch—a stereotype that simply did not reflect the polls. The lone Labour member of Parliament quoted, Richard Burden, “is no fan of Mr. Corbyn’s,” the Times made clear.
Growing in the Polls
Despite the relentless media attacks, Jeremy Corbyn’s popularity steadily increased throughout the brief campaign. After the Conservative-oriented Daily Telegraph (5/11/17) leaked Labour’s “left-wing manifesto”—leading its news report with “Jeremy Corbyn will take Britain back to the 1970s by nationalizing industries, forcing wage caps on businesses and giving huge power to the unions”—many voters actually responded positively to the party platform’s promises of defending the healthcare system, eliminating college tuition and raising taxes on the wealthy. In the week of the election, polls showed the parties had become neck and neck—dynamiting the hoary media trope that the Conservatives’ victory was “inevitable.”
Corbyn’s popularity even continued to grow despite two attacks claimed by ISIS extremists. In the three weeks before the attacks, dozens of people were killed and injured by Salafi militants in Manchester and London. Corbyn responded to the incidents with criticism that is almost never heard in mainstream politics: He pointed out that imperialist Western foreign policy has fueled violent extremism.
In the end, Corbyn’s Labour Party came within 2 percentage points of the Conservatives in the popular vote, costing May her majority in Parliament and forcing her into an alliance with the far-right Democratic Unionist Party. It’s clear that as corporate media piled on and pilloried Corbyn, more and more average people grew to support him and his socialist policies.
