On August 13th 2013 The London Economic was founded as an online newspaper in a bid to offer a genuine alternative to the mainstream press. Back then, indie publishers were less common than they are now and the world had only just started to come to terms with the ramifications of the financial crash and how it would affect our politics. I felt then as I do now that extreme, nationalist viewpoints had started seeping dangerously into everyday life often driven by a select few national newspapers with oligarch owners. We have since split with our closest and biggest trading partner in order to ‘take back control’, freely discuss trafficking asylum seekers to faraway countries and have seen successive prime ministers treat integrity, honesty and the rule of law in a way more suited to dictatorships than democracies. Safe to say, our worst fears are being realised.
If you had told me back in 2013 that the mayor of London, who we use to lampoon for getting stuck up a zip wire with the strap riding high around his crotch as he aimlessly waved a Union Jack flag would become prime minister in just six short years I’d struggle to believe you. If you’d told me his successor would almost bankrupt the country by reviving widely discredited trickle-down economics out of the back door of right-wing think tanks I’d have dispaired and if you’d have said that in 2023, after the pain of austerity, the divisions of Brexit and the cronyism of Covid that the Conservatives would still be in power and continue to enjoy pockets of support I think I’d probably cry.
But then, at the same time, I could believe it, because I know what the media is capable of. The UK is home to one of the cosiest media environments in the world. A 2021 report by the Media Reform Coalition found that 90 per cent of print media is owned and controlled by just three companies, many of whom are trying their hand at broadcasting now too. Their political leanings, therefore, rest in the hands of a small group of middle-aged men who take a sceptical view towards Europe, climate change and have an intrinsic distaste for left-wing ideas. They printed so many myths about the EU in the run-up to the 2016 referendum that the union was forced to create a public archive just to set the record straight. Today, when people scoff at politicians like Jeremy Corbyn, it is probably because press hostility towards him doubled in the run-up to the 2019 election after the mainstream media saw its influence on politics briefly wane in 2017.
The reason we have conversations about leaving the European Convention on Human Rights, sending migrants to Rwanda or just plain telling them to “f**k off back to France” is because those people made it so. As Gary Lineker pointed out, Nazi Germany didn’t just appear out of thin air. Words matter. And it will never not be dispiriting to see people who have been shat on by this government dismiss all that because small boats and the ‘war on woke’ have been dangled in front of their faces to distract them from their soaring bills, stagnant wages, rank cronyism and rampant inequality.
As a newspaper, we’re often asked what we’re about, and the answer is that we are the antitheses of all that. We’re for the workers, not the suits, the people, not the politicians and the planet, not the polluters. We’re the checks and balances, the arguments for and against. We’re for fair and just. We’re Mhairi Black and Rory Stewart, Andy Burnham and Caroline Lucas. We’re Bernie Sanders and Mick Lynch, Gary Lineker and Kathy Burke. We’re the people standing up for the truth. We’re Peter Stefanovic and Femi Oluwole, Marina Purkiss and Carole Vorderman. We’re the issues that matter, not the culture wars that serve to distract you from what matters. And most of all, we’re here to represent you, the people who have carried us through this far. God willing, we might have a few years left in us yet.