Are You Being Served?
Peter Jukes and Hardeep Matharu on why Byline Times plans to hold Keir Starmer's Government to account for his promise of a new politics of service
The following editorial is taken from the upcoming print edition of Byline Times, featuring more exclusive reports and columns by Sangita Myska, Peter Oborne, Sonia Purnell, Rosie Holt, Russ Jones, Bonnie Greer, Mic Wright, Josiah Mortimer, Adam Bienkov and much more. You can get your copy by subscribing below, or picking up a copy in all good supermarkets and newsagents from next Tuesday.
“My Government will govern in service to the country,” said King Charles as he opened the new Parliament, underscoring Keir Starmer’s promise the morning after the General Election – to make ‘service’ the central mission of his administration.
Though Byline Times never saw its role as endorsing any candidate or party – and, in doing so, telling our readers what to think – we applaud this emphasis on service.
As the Prime Minister reiterated, service includes “accountability and justice”, when announcing a new ‘duty of candour’ law for public servants, following long campaigns by the families of the Hillsborough victims, the murdered private detective Daniel Morgan, Stephen Lawrence, and those who died in the Grenfell Tower Fire.
If any one strand has united the investigations and stories we have broken of corruption, law-breaking, and lies in our first five years, it has been the lack of candour and naked self-interest and self-service of members of the Conservative Party, its. donors, and media acolytes.
Not only has this been disastrous for our public finances, it has severely eroded trust – already at a record low – in politics and the democratic system. Too many people, understandably, believe that politicians are ‘all the same and in it for themselves’.
When exposing another element of the PPE scandal, Russian interference, or examples of deliberate media manipulation by politicians, we have been told ‘nothing will happen’. Well, it did: those self-serving tendencies were turfed out by the voters.
This matters.
But while Byline Times has never been partisan towards any party, clique, or faction – we have been passionately partisan about the truth, accountability, transparency, fairness, the reconciliation of social divisions, and the rule of law. When any party, clique, or faction forsakes these principles, we believe it is our duty to our readers to inform them.
Funded by our subscribers and outside of the system, Byline Times has never been part of the media-political class, enabling this newspaper to hold power to account without conflicts of personal interest. Our approach will not change with this new Government. We will continue to scrutinise how well it delivers on its promises of better housing, infrastructure, economic stability, and national security, and even make some suggestions on how to improve our democracy where our work shows us this is necessary.
But we will not fall into knee-jerk ‘oppositionalism’. To accept that ‘all politicians are equally as bad’ is an abnegation of our moral duty to distinguish between better and worse, as well as good and bad. We will be sceptical but not cynical; our journalism proportional to the wrongs we perceive and the rights upheld. The benchmarks may be different from the last Conservative Government but the outcomes promised – not just in tangible changes but a transformational shift in our political culture and its creaking constitutional monarchy – will be checked against delivery. Why? Because the stakes couldn’t be higher.
Five years is a short time in the long march of real politics. Our analysis tells us that the rise of authoritarian populism on both sides of the Atlantic, and across the Channel, is a result of the perceived stagnation, socially and economically, of the quality of life for millions of people.
A century ago, the economic depression of the 1930s gave rise to fascist, xenophobic movements that blamed minorities or foreigners for their malaise. Similar forces are looming now.
We can see the dangers in France (although the recent election result was much more of a moment of hope than mainstream news narratives would have us believe, with the far-right finishing in third-place); and, perhaps most disturbingly, in the United States, where Trump came within an inch of losing his life in an assassination attempt.
The threat of political violence, of an existential struggle between opposing ideologies, is always appealing to those who want stark violent clarity rather than the complicated compromises of democratic politics. These threats may have been held at bay in the UK, but for how long?
Byline Times’ analysis of these apocalyptic narratives – whether of Muslims, migrants, or any other minority – is that the media has played a key role, acting with impunity and protesting false innocence. It remains the core founding mission of this newspaper to tear away this mask: to scrutinise the established press as the power structure that it denies it is and its influence on distorting our politics.
There may be signs that the ‘revolving door’ between media and politics is slowing down. The Sun newspaper did not endorse Starmer outright, but he also does not seem as reliant on Rupert Murdoch’s goodwill as Blair. But the right-wing, conspiracist, ‘anti-woke’ ecosystem of the traditional papers, such as the Mail and the Telegraph, alongside GB News and the likes of UnHerd, are still there, with Big Tech media platforms fracturing our world in innovative new ways.
So our work continues. Information is the lifeblood of democracy – if that immune system of journalism is infected, the prognosis for the entire body politic is poor. If the remedies are not administered quickly, the next election will not be about public service but the survival of democracy.
But hope powers all of our work.
Watching over the last five years as our readership has grown, asserting their values of truth and accountability, and the way this has forced more public discussion of how to fix our politics and political culture, that experience has told us to be cautiously optimistic.
There is so much more decency and honesty in the people of this country than depicted by the media and politicians in these difficult years. We remain vigilant but also committed to the belief that, together, something better can be created.
It is our job to help achieve it.