There’s no point for Starmer trying to appease the right wing lügenpresse, so why bother?

With the next election still five years away, Labour is facing an unyielding enemy: the Tory press. They're not going to give an inch, no matter what Labour does. If there's one thing Labour can bank on, it's that the Daily Mail, the Sun, and all the other right wing mouthpieces will never let the government catch a break. They’ll find a way to twist every Labour initiative into an outrage, frame every success as a failure, and spin every setback into a national disaster. So why bother playing nice with them?

Labour knows the score by now. There’s no use in hoping the Murdoch owned rags will suddenly see reason. It’s time to stop trying to win over the unwinable. Labour’s real power doesn’t lie in newspaper headlines or primetime interviews with sympathetic journalists, because those journalists don’t exist. It’s about connecting with the British working class, those who’ve been getting the short end of the stick for the past decade of austerity, trickle-down nonsense, and hollow promises.

Just look at the state of the Tories right now. A party funded by fossil fuel lobbyists. A party of Thatcher who gutted the working class communities. But instead of standing up for the people, Tories are fronting for the very industries that screwed them over. The Tory press? They’ll spin it as a working-class hero fighting for common sense. They won’t tell us that Tories are out there pocketing donations from the people wrecking the planet.

Labour needs to forget about these Tory shills. The Tory press and their spokespeople aren’t interested in honest debate or policy solutions, they’re here for the spectacle, the headline that gets clicks, the outrage that keeps their readers frothing at the mouth over immigration, woke culture, or whatever the day’s manufactured crisis is. Their interest isn’t in solving Britain’s problems. It’s in keeping everyone distracted from the real issues: wages stagnating, the NHS on its knees, and inequality widening by the day.

And, it looks like Starmer and his Labour party are absolutely not obsessed with looking “electable” through the lens of the right wing lügenpresse. Electability isn’t about appeasing the people who will never vote for you anyway. It’s about speaking to the people who’ve been let down by the system the nurses, the teachers, the factory workers who’ve seen their lives get harder year after year while the papers tell them it’s all the fault of some imagined enemy.

Labour doesn’t need the Sun’s approval to win. It needs to reach those disillusioned voters who’ve been left behind, the ones who see through the media’s lies but feel like they’ve got no other choice. Forget about respectability politics. Starmer doesn't need worrying if the Telegraph will call him a socialist or if the Times will accuse him of being too soft on crime. Those readers were never going to vote Labour in the first place.

The next election won’t be won in the pages of the Sun or the Telegraph. It will be won by engaging directly with the people who’ve been let down by the past fourteen years of Tory rule.