You Ask Us: will Labour stop the culture wars, and does the government control what journalists report?
The New Statesman | UK politics and culture
The New Statesman
4.4 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 25 August 2023
⏱️ 21 minutes
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Summary
The Conservatives seem intent on fighting the next election on "culture wars" issues. A listener asks, would a Labour government put an end to all that?
Also, how does the government control its media messaging? Is there a shadowy office pulling the strings and controlling what journalists report? We look at the concept of "the grid".
Anoosh Chakelian, Rachel Cunliffe and Freddie Hayward answer listener questions.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, I'm Anush, and I'm Rachel. Welcome to the New Statesman podcast. This is an episode |
| 0:12.8 | we'd like to call you Ask Us. |
| 0:18.2 | Hello, I'm Anush Shekelian, Britain editor of the New Statesman and host of this podcast, |
| 0:31.4 | and joining me in the studio I have our associate political editor Rachel Cunliffe and political |
| 0:35.5 | correspondent Freddie Hayward, who have been reading through all your questions and have |
| 0:38.9 | each brought one in for us to discuss. If you'd like to submit a question for a future episode, |
| 0:44.0 | you can fill in our online form at newsstatesman.com forward slash You Ask Us, or if you're listening |
| 0:48.4 | on Spotify, just scroll down on the episode page and leave a reply. Rachel, you're going first. |
| 0:52.9 | What's your question this week? Okay, so this question came via Spotify from a listener named Hermione, |
| 0:58.7 | and she asks, if Labour win the next general election after the Conservatives have done a campaign |
| 1:03.9 | heavily based on the culture wars, will it be the end of those kinds of debates or is there more to come? |
| 1:09.9 | It's a really good question, isn't it, because I suppose if they do run a campaign like that, |
| 1:14.1 | which we're starting to see the shape of at the moment, then that election could be seen by some |
| 1:19.9 | who are critical of these kind of arguments as a litmus test for how far you can get with |
| 1:24.8 | culture wars arguments in campaign mode. Whether that will necessarily, if they lose, mean that they |
| 1:31.4 | stop campaigning on those issues, or it becomes less of a subject in the kind of national discourse, |
| 1:37.6 | I'm very skeptical of when parties lose elections, everyone takes from it the lesson that they |
| 1:43.6 | want to take from it. It's a confirmation bias, so when Labour lost that election catastrophically |
| 1:48.9 | in 2019, it was because of Brexit to colonise. It was because of Corbyn to people who were perhaps |
| 1:56.2 | on the more remains side of the argument. It was because of Boris Johnson for others. It meant |
| 2:00.7 | everything to all people, and I think in an election like the one that we're having coming up, |
| 2:05.6 | where there's all sorts of different issues, then I think it will split the same way. |
... |
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