POPPING across the road for my Morning Star today I was struck by the front page of the Daily Mail on the rack, the words VOTE FARAGE screaming from the headline.

Was Britain’s biggest-selling daily openly endorsing the far-right rabble rouser? The whole headline read “Vote Farage, Get Them” and the picture showed Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner. 

At first I assumed this was a declaration for Reform UK, interpreting “get them” in a “go get ’em” sense. Then I realised it was a warning (vote Farage and you’ll get them instead) and invited readers to an inside supplement on tactical voting to block Labour.

The insinuation that Farage would be the preferred choice if he had a realistic shot at power came too in the Sun editorial, though this endorsed Labour.

It praised Farage’s manifesto promising “lower taxes, less immigration [and] slashing the size of the bloated state” but concluded that his “one-man band... can win only a handful of MPs.” Combined with previous passages on how the Tories need a spell in opposition to sort themselves out, the Sun’s preference appears to be to let Labour govern to give the Tories time to fully adopt Reform UK’s agenda.

And they wouldn’t be alone in that. Much commentary from the Telegraph has been along similar lines, alternating between plugging Farage or promoting Tories whose pitch is that of the Mail front page (we know you like Farage, we like him too, but he can’t win so vote for us).

More explicitly than the Sun, columnist Allister Heath sees Starmer as “the last hurrah of the failing, neo-Blairite political order” whose government will go down before “a populist tsunami far greater than anything seen in Europe.” The column, illustrated by a grinning Farage, sees Macron’s current humiliation by Le Pen in France as the future facing Labour here — which may well prove correct unless the left can regroup and start asserting itself at a national level.

Given the sheer dysfunction of the Tories, and the complete ideological submission of Labour to the outgoing government’s economic policy, the continued panic-mongering of the Mail, Telegraph and Express over the prospect of a non-Tory government seems bizarre: so too does the adoration of Farage, when both Tories and Labour dance to his tune on immigration anyway.

Durham Miners’ Association general secretary Alan Mardghum, interviewed by this paper last weekend, noted that Farage and his Reform UK vehicle is everywhere in the media — contrasting the endless press attention to the general exclusion of Britain’s “left populist” equivalent, George Galloway’s Workers Party. Farage’s repeated ability to make the political weather from outside the usual two-party system owes a lot to his media treatment.

It’s a reminder of just how far to the right much media discourse is: summed up in an old quip by comic Frankie Boyle: “in the press, ‘public opinion’ is often used interchangeably with ‘media opinion’, as if the public was somehow much the same as a group of radically right-wing billionaire sociopaths.”

If anger at rising poverty and inequality (which this month’s study by the Fairness Foundation points out is guaranteed by Labour’s economic plans as much as the Conservatives’) coalesces around a far-right insurgency in Britain as we see evidence of in France, we know the giants of the British press will be fanning those flames.

The Morning Star is the only daily highlighting the real answer to the endless immiseration caused by a moribund capitalist system. Our election campaign priorities, as agreed at our touring AGM last month, included giving a platform to socialist voices in the election — Labour and non-Labour, and we featured and interviewed a wide range of these, people who are routinely ignored by a media that fawns over the likes of Farage.

They also included a relentless focus on the issues that really matter, not those that Labour and the Tories decide to spar over: the demands workers made at the many union conferences that took place since the election was called, the need for an alternative economic strategy with public ownership and planning at its heart, and above all the cause of peace, especially in Palestine because of the complicity of the British state in the daily atrocities there.

The media doesn’t control elections — a mass movement can advance against it, as Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour proved in 2017 — but it does influence what issues politicians are forced to confront, and ruling-class domination of the media allows them to ignore public support for a Gaza ceasefire or energy nationalisation while promoting small boats to the top of the nation’s supposed concerns.

We need a stronger working-class media that connects and informs insurgent left forces, to promote unity and strategy, so we rather than the radical right can shape the narrative.

If the campaign has brought you into contact with new activists, led you to work with people and organisations you hadn’t before, introduce them to the only socialist daily in the English language — and if you plan to build on the work done during the election through ongoing activity, make the Morning Star part of that and keep us posted.