“The Right-Wing Press Is Screaming ‘LABOUR DISASTER!’ – But Everyone’s Just Scrolling Past. Monopoly Over.” by Lawson Akhigbe

The right-wing press is back at its usual full-time job: screaming “Labour!” as if it were a fire alarm and hoping everyone runs out of the building without checking where the smoke is coming from. It’s the same routine, the same fonts, the same apocalyptic headlines written as if Karl Marx himself has been spotted nicking teaspoons from Waitrose.

But there’s a small, delicious problem. Information has been democratised. And nothing terrifies a monopoly more than competition.

When was the last time you saw a rolled-up newspaper on the Tube? Not a screenshot. Not a link. An actual newspaper. Folded. Inked. Rustling. Exactly. These days the only people physically reading the Express or the Sun are either doing it ironically, conducting anthropological research, or desperately trying to line the bottom of a cat litter tray.

Once upon a time, a handful of editors decided what Britain thought over breakfast. They set the menu: fear with a side of outrage, and a free refill of “Labour will ruin everything.” You ate what you were served, because there was nothing else on the table. The bloke next to you on the train read the same headline, nodded grimly, and that was democracy done for the day.

Then came social media. Chaos, yes. Nonsense, plenty. But also plurality. Suddenly Dave from Dagenham, Aisha from Acton and Ngozi from Newcastle could all publish their own front pages before the kettle had finished boiling. The press went from gatekeepers to just… loud people shouting from behind the gate.

This is why the right-wing press sounds angrier now. It’s not that Labour exists — Labour has always existed. It’s that the press no longer has the exclusive licence to be miserable about it.

And let’s be honest: the press knows exactly what it lost. Brexit — sorry, Brixit, as it was lovingly misspelled in the fever dream years — was their magnum opus. A masterclass in repetition, distortion and patriotic font choices. “TAKE BACK CONTROL” was printed so many times it might as well have been legally classified as a national anthem.

They won that battle. No question. They played the long game, and the country played along.

But then came the recoil. The national equivalent of touching your own face and leaving your nose behind.

Reality has a nasty habit of turning up uninvited. And when it did, people didn’t need tomorrow’s newspaper to tell them something had gone wrong. Their phones did it instantly. Their bank balances did it monthly. Their passports did it at the airport.

Now when the Express screams “LABOUR DISASTER,” Twitter calmly replies, “Mate, it’s been three weeks.” When the Sun predicts the end of civilisation, TikTok posts a clip of a nurse explaining why her ward still doesn’t have gloves. The old trick — shout louder than everyone else — doesn’t work when everyone has a megaphone.

The real tragedy for the right-wing press is not that people disagree with them. It’s worse. People scroll past them.

You can survive being hated. You cannot survive being ignored.

So they double down. Bigger headlines. Redder ink. More exclamation marks than grammar permits. But the Tube remains silent. No rustling pages. Just thumbs, screens, and the quiet, devastating sound of relevance evaporating.

The irony is rich enough to spread on toast. The very press that once warned us about the dangers of the internet has been undone by it. The same papers that told us “experts are the enemy” now find themselves competing with… everyone.

This is not the death of propaganda. Don’t be naïve. It’s the end of its monopoly. And that, for some editors, feels like tyranny.

So yes, the right-wing press will keep doing what it does best: shouting at Labour, shaking fists at progress, and insisting the past was better when they were in charge of the narrative. But the country has moved on.

The ink has dried. The Tube has Wi-Fi. And the nose is still somewhere on the floor, wondering how it got left behind.