This interview is based on Maximillian Guarini’s articles, “Visualising the ‘British Red Scare’ Through Media Coverage of Jeremy Corbyn” and “A three-step manual for creating a political villain: the case of Jeremy Corbyn”.
Guarini, M. (2025). Visualising the ‘British Red Scare’ Through Media Coverage of Jeremy Corbyn. Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 54(1), 108-146. https://doi.org/10.1177/03058298251381987
Guarini, M. (2025). A three-step manual for creating a political villain: the case of Jeremy Corbyn. Visual Communication, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/14703572251335858
This interview was conducted by Alex Yates.
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Images are often neglected by those studying political discourse. Why is it important to look at visuals when investigating how political actors are demonised in both social and legacy media?
I think one of the reasons is that we often take images at face value, we don’t really question why and how an image was chosen to accompany a particular news story, a meme, a post, tweet etc. I think especially when it comes to legacy media, the cloak of ‘objectivity’ is used to hide the ideological character of images. This is when images can be especially powerful, because they can make something deeply ideological seem natural, apolitical and beyond doubt: seeing is believing, the camera doesn’t lie and other common expressions come to mind here.
Another reason is that we are exposed to a vast array of images on a daily basis, probably more so today than at any point in history. Our attention is one of the most highly prized commodities. In a crowded and noisy media landscape, images are like cognitive beacons. They can be the difference between us stopping to read a news story or a social media post or scrolling onto something else.
Images can also engage us emotionally in a really effective way. That ability to engage us, to push our emotional buttons if you like, is fundamental to the business models of social media platforms, and, increasingly so in my view, of the legacy media which have to compete with those platforms in what has become a hybrid media landscape. Hybrid in the sense that old and new media logics have co-evolved, as Andrew Chadwick argues, but also hybrid in terms of the porous boundaries between news and entertainment.
You discuss how opponents of Jeremy Corbyn’s left-wing programme claimed he would drag the UK back into a dark past. At the same time, opponents of Corbyn in the centre often seemed nostalgic for Blairism and ‘cool Britania’, whilst those on the right hankered for a return to Thatcherism and ‘Empire 2.0’ in the form of (hard) Brexit. How did opposition to Corbyn interact with these complex temporalities?
The slogan from the Party in Orwell’s 1984 comes to mind here: ‘who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past’. The way we talk about the past is really important for the futures we can imagine. Once Thatcher came to power, the social-democratic consensus of the post-war era was constructed in hindsight as backward, misguided and unsustainable. Once New Labour was established, this particular construction, this version if you like, of the past, was used by Blairites to distance ‘New’ Labour from ‘Old’ Labour. What we see is basically a continuation of the Thatcherite narrative. So, to answer your question, in many respects Blairism is largely a continuation of Thatcherism. The PR labels are different, ‘cool Britannia’ vs. ‘Empire 2.0’, but they are part of the same narrative which basically sees Corbyn and his ideas, or anything on the left for that matter, as something which we should have moved on from.
The New Labour narrative, which the Blairism and ‘cool Britannia’ ideas you refer to are an integral part of, is one which masks neo-liberal choices – political choices – as common-sensical, pragmatic and necessary choices devoid of any ideology. The reality of the matter is that they are ideologically driven, political choices. In this sense, Thatcherism has really never left us: the neoliberal dogma which her reign ushered in has become the common-sense of our present.
Of course, the last few years have demonstrated how this political common sense is not fixed; or to put it another way: the political centre ground of today will not be the same political centre ground of tomorrow. We have seen this with the recent mainstreaming of the far-right, through the work of Aurelien Mondon and Aaron Winter, amongst others. A process which, as I argue in a forthcoming article, is particularly discernible through some of the visual media coverage Corbyn received.
Corbyn’s critics often accused him of being part of the ‘loony left.’ What can this tell us about the epistemic politics of anti-Corbynism and conservative constructions of ‘rationality,’ more widely?
I think this ties in with my previous answer, insofar as anything which deviates from the dominant neoliberal dogma of the last 40 years is perceived as lying beyond the bounds of rationality, or common-sense (rationality and common-sense for me are pretty much interchangeable here). The far-right does not fundamentally critique neoliberalism (it’s far too busy demonising migrants and minorities), so the only challenge to neoliberalism comes from the left of the political spectrum. This, combined with the overall shift to the right in Britain and more globally, means that it’s primarily the left that is accused of being ‘loony’.
Relatively small tweaks to the system, such as what we see with the present Labour Party, are seen as acceptable, as lying within those narrow parameters of acceptable political ideas; anything more radical than that (and the Labour party under Corbyn was not proposing anything particularly radical by the way) and suddenly we see how epistemic gatekeeping in politics, media and even academia works to demonise, ridicule and discredit.
Jonathan Dean, Peter Allen, Bice Maiguashca and David Moon identified this gatekeeping in academia when they wrote about the ‘Corbyn problem’ as early as 2016. They described this as the uncritical importing of hostile media narratives on Corbyn and his supporters into academic thinking. So, the epistemic politics you reference in your question go way beyond the narrowly defined political realm. Overall, they support the long standing, deep and widespread hostility towards the left in Britain, which I have hopefully helped to draw some attention to.
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Maximillian Guarini is broadly interested in visual politics, and more recently in the visual aspect of transnational radical right populism. He is also passionate about widening participation and impact beyond academia.
Alex Yates a final-year PhD student at the University of Bath with a research focus on anti-populism: discourses which seek to defend the status quo from contestation by demonising challenges to it as irresponsibly “populist”.
Maximillian and Alex are members of the RPRN.
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