The Glasgow University Media Group’s work emerged from an interest in conflicting accounts of industrial relations and later turned their attention to the miner’s strike of 1984-5, demonstrating through research how public understanding – of picket lines as inherently violent – was shaped by TV and press reporting. Here PhD student, Gavin Hawkton, discusses how his work builds on this legacy, whilst delivering new insights on the importance of the North-South divide in analyses of media power in Britain.

When I first started my PhD research looking at how and why the miner’s strike had been communicated to the wider public by journalists I knew that there would be parallels to today. What I didn’t expect was to get the insight I have into how the UK press regards areas outside of London and how it reports on them.

With debates over High Speed 2 and the so-called ‘red wall’, or with correspondents being dispatched to Yorkshire and Wearside in the wake of Brexit, the North is back in the media in a way it hasn’t been since the mid 1980s. Back then newspaper readers and viewers in the Home Counties were bombarded with coverage of what was happening at pickets from Derbyshire to Fife, but what I was really interested in was how the reports that appeared mirrored the reality, and to what degree reporters saw themselves as representing the situation on the ground or merely ticking the boxes of what was expected by London-based editorial desks.

Since 2019, ‘Levelling up’ has become a key part of the Conservative Party’s messaging, widely repeated in national news media coverage. The nominal aim, to address regional inequality, comes at a time when the UK remains one of the most regionally unequal countries in the developed world.  Nowhere is this truer than in the areas impacted by the decline of the UK communities that have continued to slide into poverty following the mass pit closures and deindustrialisation of the 1980s and early 90s.

More than three years after Boris Johnson sweet-talked Northern voters with promises of jobs, cash and political attention -a widespread failure to deliver the big infrastructure projects the North needs – have led ‘levelling up’ to be dismissed as little more than a ‘flimsy fantasy’. But the term continues to enjoy buy-in from the press. What struck me as I interviewed journalists who were at the heart of the 1980s strikes was how little had changed.

London-centric views/media

You don’t need to write a PhD to tell that the UK media was largely sceptical about the miners’ strike and the National Union of Mineworkers leader Arthur Scargill. When Scargill chose to move the leadership of the NUM to Sheffield to be closer to its member and the communities it served, he was widely derided as not being politically savvy. One of the unwritten rules of UK politics is that if you want to be taken seriously you have to be in and around Westminster.

As with ‘levelling up’, where London-based reporters take as written Westminster politicians’ words about what will be done, in the miners’ strike we saw a repeated refusal to cover the story from the perspective of those who lived in the areas affected.

A key finding of my PhD , which draws upon the oral testimony of prominent former reporters, is that the orientation of UK media to London – as well as levels of government interference in this highly centralised model of production – led to a remarkable one-sidedness in coverage of mining communities. The reporters I interviewed revealed that through friendly coercion, editorialisation and even the occasional use of statutory D-Notices – official orders designed to be used rarely in issues of national security – influential newspapers consistently stuck to the line being fed to them through the London press scene, and in some cases by government ministers directly. In contrast, the causes of the strike and the disastrous consequences of mass unemployment for industrial communities and regions were rarely engaged with, if at all. 

Disdain for regional voices

My research also revealed the stark divide between national and local reporters about what was going on on the ground. Just as today the Yorkshire Post and Manchester Evening News take a much more cynical view of levelling up and the sincerity of the government’s commitment to the North, during the miners’ strike it was the reporters at regional papers in Yorkshire, Lancashire and the North-East who attempted to ask coal communities how pit closures would impact on them.  Whilst national reporters focused on the key personalities, Arthur Scargill and Margaret Thatcher, local reporters instead emphasised the agency of miners and the community-driven activism that kept the momentum going for months on end. This local perspectives simply do not figure in the way the strike is remembered nationally, and the history of the strike and the wider North in the political imagination has been written largely using dominant narratives spun in London.

Challenge to London-centric media

When government accounts are widely repeatedly echoed through national news media, challenging them is no easy task. On ‘levelling up’ challenges have come through regional media and regional reporters, yet the slow demise of local news media across the UK beyond London makes this increasingly difficult. As my research indicates, local media play a vital role in countering London-centric narratives and perspectives, and ultimately in determining the fault lines and talking points of British democracy.  If ‘levelling up’ is to be more than an election gimmick, we would perhaps do well to let those in Britain’s supposedly left-behind regions and communities dictate the terms of the conversation and give them the media platform to do it.  

First published: 17 February 2023

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