Why has nobody taken Policy Exchange to task?

By Tom Miller

We have a lot of people who frequent our site, continuously asking us why we have no criticism of the Government, figures within the Labour Party, or figures within the wider labour movement. The truth is that we tend to publish what people give us. If people don’t give us critical pieces, we can’t publish them. On occasion, we’ve felt that the debate within the party, or at least the media, has been balanced towards a Government which is eager to make its arguments, but absent of spontaneous critical content; so we’ve actually solicited critical pieces, for example on the Heathrow extension. By the same token, we also feel that the Government has a right to make its voice heard, and we’ve published plenty of pieces from ministers. Let a thousand flowers bloom.

The question I have for most of the people raising these issues is this: if you’re looking for criticism of Labour on the internet, why do you spend so much of your time visiting Labour supporting sites like ours? The Conservative Party is very happy to criticise us. Perhaps you should consider reading Conservative Home, if you’re only looking for things you want to hear?

The fact is that Labour is fighting a desperate battle against a media establishment that is hungry for the right to win an election, and protect the short-termist interests of the financial elite that has done so much to mess us all up over the last couple of years. Ken Livingstone couldn’t move a muscle without so called ‘reporter’ Andrew Gilligan chucking some spurious allegation or factually suspect nonsense at him. And Ken was actually pretty pro-city. In contrast, in Boris Johnson we have a mayor who has, in a brief few months, sacked a bunch of the most senior people he employed, proposed an airport in the middle of an estuary full of birds, launched a foul mouthed tirade at an MP when a Parliamentary committee rightly pinned him down for treating its quite legitimate proceedings with utter contempt, and treated the population with a mix of uncalculated hubris and utter incompetence across numerous arenas.

The Evening Standard is still busy having a go at Ken Livingstone.

I have not noticed any of the right wingers in the comments here criticising it for attacking the opposition rather than the incumbent.

The fact is that the whole media establishment, even as far as Martin Kettle, is engaged in a bout of sycophantic genuflection before the organised right.

Sunder Katwala has comprehensively dismantled the ridiculousness of Nick Cohen’s inaccurate and slanted attacks on the Fabian Society. Fair dinkum.

Personally, I think that if Cohen is so serious about being a real commentator of the left, he should be as keen to get stuck into those who promote prejudice against Muslims, the latest cultural ‘other’ for the Maily Dales of this world to rage about. For the record, as a humanist, I should point out that I don’t endorse any particular religion and that I condemn all extremism and fundamentalism. But the whole argument, in a lot of cases, is whether that is what we’re actually talking about. Because, while extremism undoubtedly exists, so does prejudice against Muslims, many of whom have been accused of propagating this extremism, without that actually being the case. As such, the legitimate criticism of extremism is often dulled down by its use as a weapon of prejudice against Muslims generally.

Cohen is undoubtedly aimed at the wrong think tank. Sure, it suits his meme and desired USP to attack the traditional elements of the left, but it’s all so crass, in this case unfounded, and a bad use of time and platform for someone who claims to share a political heritage with left-liberals.

Policy Exchange, an ‘independent’ think tank with some strong links to the Tories (allegedly it is David Cameron’s favourite, though this was refuted when it suggest moving Sunderland), has done far more to outrage liberal values than the characteristically mostly-mild Fabians could imagine doing themselves.
It has done this in two ways.

Firstly, facts, figures and research play an important part on liberal thought. Liberals are children of the enlightenment, born as much of scientific opposition to the logic of ‘keep it the same’ as much as pure politics. I don’t think it needs debating that one of the defining characteristics of the socialist movement as a whole is that it often drifts off into abstract debates about philosophy, but Marx himself spent most of his time in the British Library, studying facts and figures behind the operation of capitalism, giving rise to economic theorems such as the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. You may not agree with the premise, but it can’t be doubted that the research is good and the argument, if not correct in political terms, at least factually valid. Lenin himself famously spent his years in and out of state exile in Siberia studying trends in both Russian and global economics.

If you’re on the left, getting your facts right is the most basic and fundamental of duties.

Secondly, and this is the real dig, the agenda of Policy Exchange seems to be decided before it looks at the Evidence. I write once more, of course, of an anti-Muslim agenda. Wouldn’t it be nice if we were all just more pro-person?

Plenty of people on the left have already covered what appears to have been a poorly executed scramble on the part of Policy Exchange to justify the prejudiced views of its apparatchiks. One of its senior players, Dean Godson, had previously threatened to sue the BBC on the basis of an investigation it conducted into Policy Exchange’s extremely poor research and methodology. However, when some of the organisations that Policy Exchange had publicly misrepresented threatened to sue it on this basis, they went into a humiliating climbdown . This is not quite as embarrassing as their later slight against the whole north of the country , which longtime Policy Exchange chum David Cameron described as ‘insane’ and ‘rubbish from start to finish’.

But though it might not be as embarrassing, it’s certainly pretty bad, and from an anti-prejudice point of view, exposes some pretty nasty, spiteful patterns of behaviour among ‘liberal Conservatives’.

My big question is this: why is the whole of the British media outside of the liberal/left blogosphere colluding in ignoring them? Will nobody do what is clearly the right thing? Is there no courage in modern journalism, Mr Cohen? Where is yours?

Why does the media allow these people to be taken seriously? Why have Tories who have associated themselves with a think-tank (sic) so evidently dedicated to prejudicial academic methods managed to escape their judgement being called into question? Imagine if this had been a Fabian Society report.

Thanks to the sordid genuflection of the British press to the Cameron clique, and those associated with it, these people are getting away with an absolute outrage.