Television Policies of the Labour Party 1951-2001

Des Freedman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135759230
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Des Freedman explores Labour's divided response to the development of commercial television in the 1950s and assesses the impact of Wilson's governments on television in the 1960s. His key argument is that Labour has always been a vigorous but ultimately unreliable advocate of television.

1
Introduction: The ‘Non-Issue’ of Television

For too long the UK’s media have been over-regulated and overprotected from competition. Despite this, the last ten years have seen a dramatic increase in the range of voices in the market place. The draft Bill we have published today will liberalise the market, so removing unnecessary regulatory burdens and cutting red tape, but at the same time retain some key safeguards that will protect the diversity and plurality of our media.¹

These are the words of New Labour culture secretary Tessa Jo well when unveiling the government’s draft communications bill in May 2002. The legislation that follows from this will determine the environment in which British television operates for the foreseeable future. It is a future where any remaining commitment to diversity and pluralism is to be facilitated by structures that privilege principles of efficiency, competition and market value. It is a conception of media policy that is likely to transform British broadcasting into an overwhelmingly commercial proposition in the next few years. Since it was first elected in May 1997, the New Labour government has embraced the possibilities of digital and broadband technologies for use by business, education, government and consumers; it is determined to modernize the UK’s regulatory framework to adapt to and facilitate the convergence of broadcasting, IT and telecommunications.

This activity appears to stand in stark contrast to both the Labour Party’s former opposition to a commercial television system and its indifference or hostility towards innovations in the field of electronic media. With the exception of the Open University, the party has not been directly associated with any of the major developments in communications—the launch of ITV, BBC2 and Channels 4 and 5, the development of commercial radio and the go-ahead for cable, satellite and digital systems—all of which have occurred under Conservative administrations.

This is partly due to the fact that the Conservatives have been in government for 35 of the last 50 years but it has also been argued that Labour has traditionally been less interested in transforming the institutions of the British media. Back in 1968, a Guardian editorial reflected on the lack of debate on communications policy at Labour’s annual conference: ‘The subject [of communications] is one on which the Government has no ideas and the party only wishful thoughts.’² The trade unionist and future Labour MP, Denis MacShane, wrote in 1987 that, although the party did by now have resolutions routinely passed at conference, ‘the Labour Party still has no agreed policy on the media’.³ In the influential history of UK media by James Curran and Jean Seaton, Curran argues that Labour’s instinct is ‘to slap a preservation order on the broadcasting system as it now is even on the eve of digital TV. In this sense, it is more conservative with a small “c” than the Conservative Party.’⁴

While these quotes are, of course, highly selective, they nevertheless express a widely held view that Labour has tended to defend the status quo when it comes to communications policy Labour supporters have provided a number of explanations for their party’s apparent lack of innovative or proactive policy on the media. Mulgan and Worpole attribute it to the economism of its trade union supporters and argue that ‘Labour Party puritanism has failed to understand exactly how liberating…some patterns of consumer spending [on media] have been’.⁵ MacShane blames the influence of Labour-supporting media trade unionists who have consistently prioritized defence of their pay and conditions above programmes for broadcasting reform.⁶ Collins and Murroni can find just two official Labour policy statements on the media and explain this in terms of the party’s traditional hostility to private ownership and competition which, they argue, is ‘fundamentally flawed’.⁷

As this volumes demonstrates, these arguments seriously underestimate the amount of discussion on the media that has taken place at all levels of the Labour Party. Instead of bemoaning the lack of attention that the party has paid to communications policy, the book seeks to highlight and to analyse the wide-ranging debates that have occurred and the numerous policies that have been developed in the past 50 years. What is interesting is not the absence of debate about media policy among Labour supporters but the way in which the many debates on this subject have connected to wider questions about the political aims and objectives of the Labour Party. Communications has never been the most important area of interest for Labour (or indeed Conservative) policymakers but it has illuminated many of the tensions—between left and right, between consolidationists and revisionists, between traditionalists and modernizers and between Old and New Labour—that have proved to be so decisive in the fortunes of the Labour Party.

The object of this volume is not ‘mass media’ or ‘mass communications’ policy as a whole but British television policy in particular. The omission of press policy should in no way imply that it lacked importance for the Labour Party. The role of the press has absorbed the minds of party leaders and ordinary members for many years, from concerns about monopolization and anti-Labour bias to proposals for a sympathetic or in-house daily newspaper. Labour governments have initiated two Royal Commissions on the press and the need for press reform has long been discussed at party conferences.⁸ This book focuses on broadcasting because it is increasingly seen as the most dominant cultural institution; and on television, as opposed to radio, because the two media have traditionally operated under different policy dynamics with television assuming a much more visible place in public policy debates over the past 50 years.

While there is a rich body of literature on British broadcasting history and policy (most notably Asa Briggs’ five-volume history of the BBC quoted throughout this book), there is very little that deals specifically with the impact of political parties on television policy. Existing literature in this area tends to deal either with the relationship between parties and the directly political communications process⁹ or with a conception of television policy in which party political actors are simply one feature of the general policy environment.¹⁰ While these studies seek to provide an admirably holistic view of the development of television in the UK, they are clearly not written with the singular purpose of identifying the dynamics of specific political actors in their approach to television policy. I therefore apologize in advance for the limited scope of this study, in that Labour’s attitude towards particular television programmes, spin doctors, political broadcasts, election campaigning, freedom of information and censorship are almost entirely absent.

E.P.Thompson contends that the historian’s task consists of ‘the close interrogation of texts and contexts’.¹¹ In each chapter, I frame the analysis of specific Labour television policies with a brief consideration of the key political, economic or social conflicts of the particular period. It would be extremely short-sighted to consider Labour’s approach to television in the 1950s without a discussion of revisionism and the ‘embourgoisement’ thesis. It would also paint an incomplete picture to examine the 1960s without acknowledging the importance of the balance-of-payments crisis, the 1970s without tackling the general political shift to the left, or the 1980s and 1990s without focusing on the increasing hegemony of pro-market arguments inside the Labour leadership. There are additionally some general themes and questions on which the book seeks to reflect, for example:

• To what extent has the Labour Party pursued a coherent and consistent approach to television policy since 1951?
• In what ways have Labour’s television policies differed from those of the Conservatives?
• To what extent has communications policy been used as a means of ‘rebranding’ and ‘respositioning’ the party since 1951?
• Which constituencies of interest (i.e. trade unions, parliamentary leadership, intellectuals, the ‘left’ or the ‘right’) have been most influential on the development of the party’s television policies?
• To what extent have Labour’s television policies been conditioned by the party’s relationship with media entrepreneurs?
• To what extent has the Labour Party acted as a vehicle for the transformation of broadcasting institutions and structures?

This book attempts to evaluate the Labour Party’s approach to television policy-making through reflecting on the project of ‘Labourism’ over the last 50 years and, as such, is intended to contribute to an understanding of both British broadcasting and of the possibilities and limitations of the Labour Party It highlights the possibilities of imaginative, socialist approaches to television policy that have been proposed by sections of the Labour Party and the ultimate undoing and neutralization of these approaches. My aim, as a socialist outside the Labour Party, is not at all to pour scorn on the attempts by socialists inside the party to reform and democratize television, but to begin to explain why these valiant attempts have met with such resistance and, in the end, with such little success in implementing radical policies for television. At a time when a Labour government is determined to deploy market forces to shape our social and cultural environment, it is a debate worth having.

NOTES

1. T.Jowell, quoted in Department of Trade and Industry press release, ‘Draft Bill Overhauls Legal Framework for Communications Industry’, 7 May 2002, P/2002/274.

2. Guardian, editorial on Labour Party conference, 3 October 1968.

3. D.MacShane, ‘Media Policy and the Left’, in J.Seaton and B.Pimlott (eds), The Media in British Politics (Aldershot: Avebury, 1987), p. 218.

4. J.Curran and J.Seaton, Power Without Responsibility, 5th edn (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 355.

5. G.Mulgan and K.Worpole, Saturday Night or Sunday Morning: From Arts to Industry—New Forms of Cultural Policy (London: Comedia, 1986), p. 12.

6. MacShane, ‘Media Policy and the Left’, p. 226.

7. R.Collins and C.Murroni, New Media, New Policies (Cambridge: Polity, 1996), p. 5.

8. See, for example, J.Curran (ed.), The British Press: A Manifesto (London: Macmillan, 1978) and T.Baistow, Fourth-Rate Estate (London: Comedia, 1985) for critiques of and proposals for press reform from within the labour movement.

9. Texts on party political communications in the UK include P.Hennessy, D.Walker and M. Cockerell, Sources Close to the Prime Minister (London: Macmillan, 1985), M.Cockerell, Live from Number 10: The Inside Story of Prime Ministers and Television (London: Faber & Faber, 1989) and M.Scammell, Designer Politics (London: Macmillan, 1995).

10. See A.Briggs, Sound and Vision: vol. IV of The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), A.Briggs, Competition, 1955–1974: vol. V of The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), Curran and Seaton, Power Without Responsibility and A.Crisell, An Introductory History of British Broadcasting (London: Routledge, 1997) for general histories of UK broadcasting.

11. E.P.Thompson, Customs in Common (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), p. 431.

2
Labour and the Post-War Boom, 1951–64

LABOUR IN OPPOSITION, 1951–55

The Labour Party entered a long period of opposition that was marked by growing internal division. Labour leaders like Clement Attlee and Herbert Morrison were determined to downplay the importance of public ownership and ‘attempted to throw off their commitments to further nationalisation as gracefully as they were able’.¹ The call for further nationalization would simply be a barrier to the urgent task of repositioning Labour as a national, and not a class, party and undermine its embracing of a mixed economy and social and political consensus.

These views were nourished and developed by writers organized around the journal Socialist Commentary in the late 1940s. Drawn from the...