Category: Election Campaigns
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After months of being maligned in Conservative-supporting newspapers over the sale of her former council house, Labour’s deputy leader Angela Rayner has finally been given the all-clear.
Greater Manchester Police say they are taking no further action after a thorough investigation into questions raised about her liability for capital gains tax and electoral registration.
Rayner’s pursuit by the Tory press followed a well-worn path of traducing Labour MPs who have the misfortune to end up in the election firing line.
In a chapter for a new book – General Election 2024: The Media and the Messengers, Nicholas Jones explores the flair and persistence of the Tory commentariat, Labour’s traditional foe:
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Rishi Sunak's cheerleaders in the UK's dominant Conservative supporting newspapers are urging on the government to press ahead faster and further with initiatives to drive wedges between Labour and the Tories ahead of the general election.
A champagne cork popped on The Sun’s front page (23.11.2023) as it applauded a tax cutting autumn statement that fired the starting gun for the 2024 campaign.
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After a lifetime’s interest in the way the news media can shape the outcome of general election campaigns, I am having to come to terms with a sea change in the way politics are reported and rethink so much of what I have written in the past.
Dramatic falls in the daily sales of Conservative-supporting newspapers -- and our near total reliance on smart phones and laptops -- has been transformative.
Increasingly news is communicated in headlines and delivered on social media, reducing the influence of carefully crafted newspaper campaigns and the impact of their front pages and political commentary.
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Keir Starmer’s previous backing for Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party is one of the few lingering lines of attack that can be exploited by Conservatives-supporting newspapers.
Having had to witness the Tories trashing their claim to financial prudence and currently mis-manage a worrying Winter of Discontent, the party’s tabloid cheerleaders are having to scrabble around to produce anti-Labour story lines.
Corbyn lives on as a threat to the country in the minds of Daily Mail headline writers.
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From the start of the Conservative leadership contest there was a bidding war on new policy initiatives with Liz Truss way out in front in offering what her supporters believed was a true Thatcherite agenda.
She promised the party membership she would implement a raft of punitive restraints on workers’ rights – a shopping list that was so far reaching and malevolent that it would have delighted Norman Tebbit.