Marc Glendening is Campaign Director of the Democracy Movement.
Never has a newspaper had such a powerful motive to destroy a political party.
Everyone expects The Guardian to back Labour. It is, after all, Britain's pre-eminent left-of-centre broadsheet. Nevertheless, the paper's coverage of the party political skirmishing during this phoney war period is astonishingly partisan. No opportunity to attack and undermine the Conservatives is passed up. No allegation is too crude or unfair to merit an airing. This propagandistic approach has reached its apotheosis with the Ashcroft affair: all papers have dealt with the subject but, even after a week of banner headlines, the Guardian still leads on it this morning, willingly projecting Lord Mandelson's hypocritcal spin across the front page.
Why the hysteria? The answer, I'm afraid, does the Guardian no credit. The motive is money, as an article in the Telegraph last year made starkly clear:
"A change in Government after next year’s general election is likely to be disastrous for the Guardian’s revenue from public sector job adverts, on which it has long depended, as the Conservatives have strongly hinted they will save money by moving much of the advertising online."Senior executives at the Guardian and its parent company, the Scott Trust, have long been aware of this threat to their financial viability. George Osborne made clear his intention to end the disgraceful waste of public money on advertising jobs in newspapers as long ago as 2006.
The Guardian never ceases to point out that Murdoch-owned papers have a commercial interest in undermining the BBC. Perhaps the same health warning should apply to the Guardian's coverage of the Conservative Party.