ABSTRACT
The state through the political orientation of the government of the day, plays an important part in shaping the political environment in which labour journalism is undertaken. Thatcher’s political project concerned the destruction of the framework of the post-war settlement, an end to ‘corporatism’, and the eradication of the political values and ideology which legitimated these arrangements. The arrival of Thatcher in Government meant far more than the severing of the organic relationship between the political elite in Westminster and the Group. The fact that the Secretary of the Group in the early 1990s was compelled to write inviting journalists to join underlines the change in the fortunes of the Group since the late 1970s and the collapse of the strategy of membership restriction. The decline in the numbers of journalists staffing the industrial and labour desks certainly contributed to the sapping of morale.
