ABSTRACT
In understanding public beliefs about politics we must analyse how political parties have used the media. The crucial issue is how successful they have been in establishing strands of political belief which make sense and ‘work’ with voters. Of course, the media can distort political ideas and report stories in a way which is partial or simply untrue. But I want to suggest that the dominance of the New Right in the 1980s and Labour’s electoral failures cannot be adequately explained in such terms. Rather, Labour was much less efficient than the Conservatives in developing coherent political ideas and making them into a form of popular consciousness. If we think back over this period, it is not hard to make up a list of popular political phrases which explained Conservative political thinking: ‘there is no alternative’, ‘a shareowning/homeowning democracy’, ‘popular capitalism’, ‘enterprise culture’, ‘the miracle economy’, ‘one-sided disarmament’.
