The trade unions' decision not to invest significantly in media production (in contrast to the 30s-40s, when it owned 49% of the UK's biggest newspaper) is a disastrous strategic miscalculation. Same goes for the cooperative movement.

This was meant to be a retweet-with-comment of this, but my tech dept managed to bungle that somehow. https://twitter.com/pmillerinfo/status/1290252800874749952

There is an emerging socialist account of political economy and response to ecological crisis that is more persuasive and more interesting than anything the capitalist press can afford to engage with seriously. Yet it is visible only on the margins of the Guardian's coverage.

New technology makes it practical to develop and distribute entirely new *genres* that develop and publicise the capacity of 'ordinary people' to govern themselves on the basis of sophisticated collective reasoning. Again, capitalist media can't engage seriously with this.

Modest investments in digital content, working in partnership with left institutions could give the trade union movement the means to hollow out the Conservative thought-world. If we don't do that, Starmer goes full Kinnock and we might as well all go home.

But it always comes back to the memberships of these organisations. If they don't put pressure on their leaders to act in a strategically astute, and tactically competent, way then they will continue to do what they have always done.

The fact that socialist politicians and officials occasionally muse about creating a left-wing newspaper demonstrates how little pressure they are under to think seriously about the media-communications system, and how to intervene effectively in it.