The press
A new Labourpaper?
Paul Johnson
Clive Thornton, the building society tycoon who now runs Mirror Group Newspapers, says he intends to launch a new quality tabloid, which will be pro- Labour, if he can get a sensible manning deal with the unions at a new Manchester Plant. For the Labour Party itself, the is is of some urgency, since there s no guarantee that the Mirror Group (Daily Mirror Scottish Daily Record, Sunday Mir- ror, Sunday Pictorial) will continue to sup- I" the Labour Party when the firm is sold off to the public in July. Labour has always complained that it is under-represented in the press, a view reiterated by Roy Hattersley last week to a meeting of newspaper editors, in a characteristic speech full of threats and bluster. Of course it has the Guardian, which is probably in its own way the most influential newspaper in Britain, especially aniong the 'educated' young. But the Guar- d," is unpredictable and, like Caesar s 'ancient Gaul, is divided into three parts: part sNen,nite part mainstream Labour and part 'r- All the Labour brass read it, but it causes them as much pain and fury as Pleasure. haveThe Mirror papers on the other hand h !Lbeen, over the years, very dependable iPPorters of the Labour leadership — over the broad spectum of policy, that is. When aine Mirror criticises the leadership, it is 11;!,ays a matter of great concern. Harold v.thson, when Prime Minister, would see if he early editions before going to bed, .and he did not like what he saw in the Mirror tw,ould complain loud and long. It is true r.lat Mirror support is not what it was. It .giVes too much space and prominence to `Ivvriters of the John Pilger-Paul Foot type, phose hearts are not really with the Labour Land' at all, but rather with the anarchist 't. More important, however, is the sheer s'ai.ck of enthusiasm the Mirror papers now editors for Labour's cause. Newspaper a'bitors, however willing, cannot enthuse sir„clin men and measures in which they ,"PlY do not believe. The Mirror does not and a leadership too scared to criticise his :ressive, anti-democratic ways. All this whIv,°.ws. But it is part of the same process ich is alienating rank-and-file Labour .nupporters, the pattern of long-term decline which the party has for so long been frozen. 0111;,V!1, en Mirror Group Newspapers goes likelic' i nobody can be quite sure what is to happen. The shares are not likely th Prove very attractive, in my view, despite er,e, group's big stake in Reuters (itself an will - a-singly unknown quantity). There will nothin-
g to prevent interested parties
building up a secret hoard of shares, ready for a coup, or a 'dawn raid' as it is called. The most likely predator is Robert Max- well, and he is the man Mirror executives fear most. I find this difficult to explain. He may not be an easy man to work with and he has of course a much-troubled past. But he saved the British Printing Corporation and he has now established himself, beyond argument, as a successful large-scale publisher. He is the man most likely to give the group a sound and expansive future. Moreover, he is reliably pro-Labour, of ex- actly the old Mirror type.
Any other predator is liable to make the group less political, and certainly cannot be expected to sustain a Kinnock-led Labour Party when things get rough. With a non- political proprietorship, the group in my view will drift into the SDP camp. So if Maxwell is ready, and has the money, I think he should be welcomed, on the simple grounds that it is better to keep a hold of nurse for fear of finding something worse.
However, Clive Thornton himself has come up with the offer of a Labour paper. How serious he is I do not know. Of course there is a clear case for a new printing plant in Manchester. The Mirror needs capacity up there, because Thomson International, which prints its northern editions, is closing down its Manchester plant. At present it employs nearly 3,000 people there, and most of these jobs would go. It may make sense for the Mirror to build a plant of its own, particularly if it gets a good deal from the unions. The print unions up in the north are frightened at present, partly because of the Thomson closure, partly because of the
beating they took at the hands of Eddie Shah. So the moment seems propitious for such a scheme.
Thornton's idea is to use part of the capacity of the new Manchester plant to produce a Labour newspaper. It would be a small-scale quality tabloid, selling perhaps 500,000 copies. Unions such as the TGWU and the AEU would buy shares in the Mir- ror Group and would be, in one form or another, joint owners of the new paper. The manning levels would be negotiated to ensure that it is profitable. The system of political control of the paper would presumably resemble that of the old Daily Herald.
Is all this pink pie in the sky? The Labour Party and the TUC have, severally and jointly, been discussing the launch of a new Labour paper ever since the Herald became the Sun. They have had committees galore, feasibility studies, the most recent being that conducted by Lord McCarthy, the trade union don. That did not impress me, and it evidently did not impress the trade union bosses either, since they have shown no sign to date of putting up the money in anything like the requisite quantity to get the scheme off the ground. It remains to be seen whether Thornton's idea gives it a new impetus.
I suspect that there is no room for a Labour paper in Britain for the simple reason that not enough people will buy it. Labour Party, and especially TUC, direc- tion is the kiss of death editorially. I do not believe that in practice the print unions would give such an enterprise a sufficiently generous manning deal to offset the un- doubted commercial disadvantages of political control. It is supposed that Labour activists will read it. But how many are there today? A hundred thousand, perhaps? Rather fewer would be my guess. Most of those will continue to read the Guardian, which when all is said and done is good fun. The truth is, the ideology which inspires Labour just does not make good reading matter.
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