Good morning. Sadiq Khan was quick to condemn Tory attack adverts against him this week. But is Labour as saintly as it makes out? We have some screenshots that suggest not.
Then, Oxford’s Lisa Klaassen explains how the Russian Wagner mercenary group has taken on a new identity to continue its campaigns in Africa. And Ben unveils a new pre-election tracker.
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A pattern is emerging: one political party releases an attack advert at an angle to the truth; then the target decries a descent into Trumpian politics, before publishing their own montage that mangles reality to trigger fear in the pursuit of votes.
It’s a tit-for-tat online wrestle. Both parties have embraced the memeified derision at which social media excels. Adverts that barely resemble the truth aren’t new. Remember Vote Leave’s warning that Turkey was joining the EU, or the Conservatives’ line that Gordon Brown released 80,000 criminals early.
Digital teams in each party have now dunked themselves in internet culture in order to grab the millions of clicks on offer. Trump’s finely tuned nicknames take the legs out of his opponents, undermining their credibility in a couple of words. British politicians have not yet added derisory nicknames to their rhetorical inventory, but they’ve noticed the potential rewards of dropping the professional tone. The BBC Six O’Clock News gets around four million views. One of the anti-Khan attack ads has received six million views on Twitter in just three days.
The ads depict London as a crime-ridden metropolis that Khan rules as a malicious tyrant. Imagine an Adam Curtis fan producing the opening to a 1970s Batman film. The mock American accent and the footage of New York suggest Conservative campaign headquarters (CCHQ) wasn’t chasing verisimilitude.
And that’s partly why the ads have caused uproar. The video erroneously claims that Khan “seized” London even though he was elected twice. This might be forgiven as an enthusiastic use of metaphor if suggesting Khan was in some way anti-democratic hadn’t become a regular Tory tactic.
Khan was quick to condemn the Conservatives’ attack adverts. But Labour is not as virtuous as it would like to be portrayed. The party isn’t above making adverts that degrade the tenor of the debate. Take a look at this website with the domain name “susanhall.uk”:
At the bottom of the website it says: “Promoted by Pearleen Sangha on behalf of London Labour, both at 57-59 Great Suffolk Street, London, SE1 0BB.”
One London Labour source was unapologetic, calling it a “nonsense comparison… [this website is] simply reporting things that the Tory candidate has herself said, as opposed to lying and making things up which is what they have done in their desperate video.”
It’s true that the website isn’t as untruthful as the Tory attack ads. But it’s hard not to interpret the domain name “susanhall.uk” as an attempt to make people think this is an official website, not least when the party seems to have paid around £4k for the website to sit atop search engine results. Others might raise an eyebrow at conflating Hall’s concerns about crime in the black community, Black Lives Matter and Notting Hill Carnival with prejudice against all black Londoners.
Westminster is usually spared embarrassment by the fact that these adverts are often posted on Facebook and other social media sites politicos rarely use. But when they are posted on Twitter – as CCHQ did with the anti-Khan videos – they quickly attract condemnation.
The truth is that normal people rarely engage with the daily minutiae of Westminster coverage. To use a word forever on editors’ lips, politicians often lack “cut through”. Provoking outrage through memes and provocative websites is a way for them to increase their presence online, and not merely be the object of derision. And that’s why this new approach to campaigning is not going away.
Freddie’s picks
Shiraz Maher writes on the return of Islamic State and what was behind the attack on a Moscow concert hall that killed 139 people.
Rachel charts another woeful week for Rishi Sunak.
David Gauke wades into the securonomics debate. He is sceptical that Rachel Reeves’s flagship economic policy will work.
And, not or – that’s our approach. While today we’re mostly in oil and gas, we increased the proportion of our global annual investment that went into our lower carbon & other transition businesses from around 3% in 2019 to around 23% in 2023. bp.com/AndNotOr
Wagner’s next act in Africa by Lisa Klaassen
“There’s a little Russia growing inside Burkina Faso,” a Burkinabe official told me. “First you put down one settlement, somewhere you can speak safely, where you don’t have any Americans or French. Then you multiply, like mushrooms.”
In the seven months since Yevgeny Prigozhin’s “unclarified” plane crash, a shadowy battle has been playing out to determine the fate of the Wagner Group in Africa. Junta leaders in Mali, Niger and the Central African Republic (CAR) are becoming alarmed about the mercenary group’s atrophy in their countries, not to mention the unclear future of Prigozhin’s commercial empire.
The influence of Prigozhin’s paramilitary force has been steadily rising in central and western Africa since the president of CAR, Faustin-Archange Touadéra, first turned to the “Russian instructors” for security support in 2018. Those plotting coups in the Sahel have welcomed Prigozhin’s offers to prop up shaky regimes with weapons and disinformation in exchange for diamonds and gold. While the West neglected the region, military rulers in Mali, Burkina Faso and, most recently, Niger, have become dependent on “the Company” to remain in power. US government documents leaked last April revealed that Wagner was conspiring with rebels in Chad to overthrow the regime, as part of its scheme to create a “unified ‘confederation’ of African states” stretching over a territorial belt from Guinea to Eritrea.
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