REPORTING OF ECONOMIC AND LABOUR ISSUES

Having given vent to "My Inner Yahoo" - a creature of Swiftian satire rather than the new media kind - in my previous post, readers should be warned that I shall be writing in a highly serious vein today. Nevertheless, my critique of Britain's ruling classes - the media, bankers, bureaucrats and politicians et al - will continue.

Last weekend brought media coverage of two symbolically important events, the near demise of "The Work Foundation", due to pensions obligations, and the discovery of Roma children working in the spring onion fields of Worcestershire during a spell of particularly cold autumn weather. The Work Foundation has, as it happens, been rescued by the University of Lancaster, and the young Romanians by the Gangmaster's Licensing Association in conjunction with West Mercia Police.

However, the wider economic and labour context which has thrown these two disparate events into relief has not, and almost certainly will not, receive the receive the media coverage that it merits. The reasons for this are complex: journalism which tackles economic and labour issues in a comprehensive way has been in retreat since the 1980s; people's lifestyles rather than their employment tend to be the focus of media attention; most people are no longer part of an organised labour movement.

Yet there are very good reasons why a more traditional approach to the reporting of economic and labour issues is called for at the present time. For Britain, and England in particular, is not only recovering from a financial crisis induced recession, but also from a period of government under New Labour when is was extremely difficult in matters of the economy, and political economy more specifically, to distinguish facts from fictions, and truth from ideological distortions. Moreover, the British media for much of the decade between 1997-2007 colluded in this process.

Unfortunately, there are strong indications that some within the present Government regard themselves as the "Heir to Blair", and the media management school of political economy as practiced by New Labour but with a somewhat different ideological emphasis, has already sprung back into action. Whether the Secretary of State for Business, Skills and Innovation, and others of a more objective outlook within the Coalition, can steer the nation onto a more broadly-based path to economic regeneration, as distinct from from another financially engineered spurt of growth, remains to be seen.

In the meantime, the media - and indeed the Coalition Government - should pay close attention to "labour issues". Perhaps an analogy with New Labour's attention to matters of property, normally the focus of Conservative policy, is appropriate here, if David Cameron really wants to claim the "Heir to Blair" legacy.