Labouring Under Illusions

Britain's Channel 4 documentary "Undercover in New Labour" includes footage from "a reporter wearing hidden cameras who volunteered to work on the party's election campaign and ended up being drafted to work at its national PR headquarters." The documentary shows Labour staff using "party supporters in key professions from medicine and the law to the armed forces and the police, who were prepared to appear on TV and in the papers and lie through their teeth that their support for this or that policy was entirely unsolicited," writes Mark Borkowski. But "is singling out New Labour for criticism reasonable," Borkowski asks, when astroturfing "has been going on for decades in business, especially among the oil, pharmaceutical and tobacco industries?" Undercover reporters were placed with Britain's three main political parties, "but it was decided the strongest story was the way the Labour campaign was run," an anonymous source told the Guardian.