One of the difficulties with trying to make sense of what has happened to this country since 2010, when the Tories took office, is the absence of acknowledgment from the right about how much has gone wrong. So tribal, almost Trumpian, has most of the rightwing press become that it prefers to make excuses for the Conservatives or vague complaints about the spread of wokeness rather than seriously investigate and analyse the state of our economy and society.
In some ways, this incuriosity is no surprise. The rightwing papers have always had a propaganda function, not just campaigning for the Tories but also distorting or suppressing inconvenient facts about the distribution of power and resources. Through the emotiveness of their coverage as well, they imply that their readers’ feelings about, say, immigration, matter more than lived experience or statistics. Facts are for wimps.
