Last week on Spectator TV Fraser Nelson saluted the ‘intervention’ of the Labour party in the debate about whether the magazine he edits, as well as the Telegraph Media Group, should be sold to a UAE-backed consortium. In an interview, Thangam Debbonaire, the shadow culture secretary said that ‘ownership by a foreign power is incompatible with press freedom, which is essential in a democracy’.
We shouldn’t have been surprised at Labour’s championing of press freedom, even for publications in the Conservative stable. The party’s leader, Keir Starmer, has written more than a dozen columns for the Telegraph. The most recent was last December when he accused the Tories of having betrayed voters on immigration. ‘I stand ready to deliver,’ declared Starmer.
Starmer has understood that to shun the media is an act of self-harm
It was the same message he had delivered to GB News, when he spoke to the broadcaster a couple of months earlier.
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