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It is widely thought, and indeed the party itself accepts, that Labour lost the 2015 UK general election because voters believed it had crashed the economy in 2008 by spending too much public money, and was not committed enough to tackling the deficit through austerity. In the words of Margaret Beckett, the party could not overcome "the huge myth it was overspending by a Labour government that caused the crisis". This is remarkable, not only because of the historical reality of the global financial crisis but because that crisis was all over the news at the time, only eight years ago. How has history been so quickly rewritten?
Several commentators, including Keynesian economist Simon-Wren Lewis and the Guardian’s economics editor Larry Elliott, have drawn attention to the extraordinary feat of the Conservative Party of focussing attention elsewhere. In the dominant Tory account the deficit is blamed on Labour profligacy and a bloated welfare state rather than the bank bailouts and the recession originating in the financial meltdown and deregulatory policies of the preceding years. But what role has the mainstream media played in all this?
