Luke Akehurst: 8 things the Left could do to stop unfair media bias

Faced with a national security crisis where it appears that Russia has attacked a British citizen and former intelligence asset with a proscribed nerve agent in a restaurant in Wiltshire, a large segment of the online Hard Left seems oddly preoccupied with a spurious allegation that Jeremy Corbyn’s hat was photoshopped by the BBC for a Newsnight backdrop to make him look more Soviet. 

People will be in a position to complain about being unfairly portrayed as “Soviet” if they make a few changes to their political behaviour and the image they present:

1. Take a zero tolerance stance towards people in their own ranks within the Labour left who self-describe as “Communist” in their social media profiles or promote theories like “fully automated luxury Communism”.
2. Stop employing people from the Stalinist “Straight Left”/CPB tradition in the leader’s office.
3. Stop expressing “solidarity” with vile regimes like Cuba and Venezuela.
4. Provide ideological clarity that they are not seeking to abolish capitalism and replace it with a command economy.
5. Stop apologising for or giving the benefit of the doubt to Russia over its contemporary behaviour regarding assassinations in the UK, the occupation of the Crimea, and its military actions in Syria.
6. Stop promoting and writing for the Morning Star, the former newspaper of the CPGB, and appearing on Russia Today.
7. Show solidarity with Labour’s social democratic sister parties in Europe, not their far-left enemies.
8. Show zero tolerance of antisemitism, much of which derives from Soviet era propaganda that portrayed Jews as “rootless cosmopolitans” who controlled capitalism and politics, and Israel as a state of racists and Nazis.

Until then, the media is going to portray you how you present yourselves, so live with it. 

There are millions of ordinary people in Britain who desperately need a Labour government to end austerity, restore our public services and promote a more socially just and equal society.

They won’t feel able to elect that Labour government until they can trust it to also look after our national security and defend democracy and freedom as being core centre-left values. A government in the tradition of Attlee and Bevin.