Why? Just why?

I said from the beginning that I would give the new Labour Party leader a chance, but that I'm no party political tribalist, so no party should ever assume that they're entitled to my vote. They have to earn it through their policies and their actions.

Watching Keir Starmer allow the Times to hide his first editorial as Labour leader behind a paywall is somewhat of a blow given that I was at least hoping, on the basis of his widely reported intelligence, that he would do quite well.

What's especially galling about this paywall move is the fact that the Times is owned and operated by the billionaire propaganda baron Rupert Murdoch, who is clearly no friend of the labour movement.

The two glaring issues that should occur to anybody are that it makes very little sense for a new leader to hide one of their crucial first statements behind a paywall so that huge numbers of people won't even read it, and that it doesn't make a lot of strategic sense to actively drive traffic and new subscribers towards a publication that is staffed by a bunch of right-wing orthodox neoliberals who will viciously tear you down if you ever dare to propose anything even remotely left-wing or socially progressive.

Beyond the issues of who will actually read this, and the wisdom of actually driving traffic and subscriptions towards a publication that will no doubt be attacking you in the very near future, is the appalling optics of it.

If they wanted to reach out across the political divide (which is a sensible thing), it would have been easily possible for Starmer's team to insist that the paywall was lifted for this particular article, so that everyone could read it.

Failing that they could have pitched to other right-leaning publications with the "no paywall" stipulation.

The most important thing from a communications perspective is that people actually access and read what you're saying, and you do that by making it openly available on the Internet, rather than pitching it almost exclusively to few thousand die hard Tories on their ancient dead tree technology.

Just imagine if Corbyn had released a statement on a massively important public health issue, but hidden it behind a paywall on some left-leaning publication.

The 'sensibles' would have been going absolutely crackers over it, and deriding it as another example of uselessness wouldn't they?

Competent political leaders should ensure that their statements are never hidden behind anyone's paywalls as a matter of course, especially on really important public health issues, and the publications that won't go along with it simply don't get the exclusive editorials, and don't get the clicks.

But they didn't do this. They allowed it to be hidden away behind a Murdoch paywall which sends a very clear message, not from Starmer to the public (most of whom won't even have read what he said below the paywall fade out) but from the Murdoch propaganda empire to the public.

"Starmer is our boy. If you want to know what he's saying, then you come through us. We're in control of the narrative. We're in control of what you see and hear. And look, Starmer is wilfully going along with our way of doing things. There's no hope of ever doing things differently."

Why Starmer would go along with this is anyone's guess.

He knows that he's never going to win over the Murdoch propaganda empire. They absolutely despise him, not just for his involvement in chasing down their phone hacking illegality as Director of Public Prosecutions in the early 2010s, but for standing with the striking Murdoch empire print workers in Wapping, back in the 1980s.

Starmer is supposed to be an intelligent player, but within a day of becoming leader his optics are absolutely hopeless. He's hiding his statements behind paywalls instead of hosting them on open platforms, and he's willing to allow himself to be presented as a Murdoch stooge, even though he knows perfectly well that the Murdoch hacks will never ever accept him!

What on earth is going on? And who approved this hopeless idiocy?

Footnote: You may have noticed that I stopped producing blog posts for several months. The reason is that Facebook has changed their algorithm to make links to my site almost invisible. Even when literally thousands of people share the link, barely anyone actually sees the shares or follows the links. It feels like wasted effort producing articles that virtually nobody reads, when I can still produce infographics and informative posts that are seen by hundreds of thousands.

I'm going to give it another try, but it's unlikely that I'll return to writing blog posts as consistently as I used to.

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