The Ire Of The Irate Itinerant (2009)

 From the April 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

Poster Boys (2016)

Book Review from the December 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Mad Men & Bad Men: When British Politics Met Advertising’, by Sam Delaney. Faber & Faber £9.99.

Political advertising is not allowed on radio and TV in the UK, but is permitted on posters, in the press and on-line. Party political broadcasts do not count as advertising, though advertising gurus work on them. Political ads are not subject to the advertising code, so do not need to be honest and truthful. Here Sam Delaney examines the contribution of advertising to politics, based mainly on interviews with admen and a few politicians. A couple of adwomen get brief mentions.

Saatchi & Saatchi are well known for their work on Conservative Party posters and election broadcasts. It worked both ways, though, as the political impact helped make the agency very successful. Delaney opens, however, by recalling an interview that Maurice Saatchi gave when Thatcher died, in which he claimed that the agency had not really done very much, and that presentation was not all that important in politics. Maybe this just illustrates the common adage that the adman should never take credit for the client’s success, since it is all down to the quality of the product (whether shampoo or a political party). Of course sometimes admen do claim that they played a central role. Possibly the truth is that advertising and presentation are crucial in close elections, such as that of 1992, but not otherwise.

The Conservatives have nearly always had far more money to spend on advertising than Labour, and Tory ads have often been rather more brutal than those of Labour. Perhaps the best-known political slogan was ‘Labour isn’t working’ from 1978. Complaints about this led to even more publicity for the Tories and the poster containing it. The ‘Labour’s tax bombshell’ poster from 1992 had a comparable impact, despite being not entirely accurate. Big ad agencies have been reluctant to be associated with Labour, on the grounds that their corporate clients might not approve, so their links have sometimes had to be kept secret.

One of the book’s themes is the way the balance of power between admen and politicians has changed over time. Originally admen were very much in the back seat, and Callaghan only consulted them after making decisions. But gradually they became more central, softening Thatcher’s image, for instance, and influencing which topics were given most importance in campaigns. The emphasis on criticising opponents rather than presenting a party’s own achievements and promises remains, but admen and their agencies now seem to have less of a role.

After reviewing the 2015 General Election campaign, Delaney writes, ‘It is hard to see why or to what end political parties will ever employ ad agencies again.’ This does not mean the end of political advertising, but a big change in how it is carried out. In April 2015 the Conservatives were spending £100,000 a month just on Facebook advertising. The use of social media has now become central, together with ads targeted at specific groups of voters (such as voters in marginal seats, or women who might be thinking of voting UKIP rather than Conservative). A lot of money has been spent in building up a database of actual and potential Tory voters, partly based on the causes people supported in petitions on change.org. Just as all advertising has become slicker and more ‘professional’, the same applies to its political cousin.

There is no mention of admen in Anthony King’s Who Governs Britain?. It can hardly be argued that the admen are among those who govern, but they clearly sway people’s opinions and that shows the influence wielded by money.

Paul Bennett

Political Notes: Images (1982)

The Political Notes column from the February 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Images
The job was not widely advertised but the Conservative Party recently appointed a new Marketing Director (we are not making this up) and he at once got down to a review of the Tories’ advertising and presentation strategy (we are still not making this up).

One likely result of this review is that the famous advertising firm of Saatchi and Saatchi, who took time off from composing lies about things like detergents and breakfast foods to master-mind the Tories’ return to power in 1979, will be sacked.

Of course the dismal record of the Labour government may have had a bit to do with Thatcher's victory but advertising agencies and marketing directors need to believe in their power to influence people or they would resign from their jobs or blow their brains out or something equally useful.

Well the elation of those heady days, when all was going to be put to rights through the beneficient workings of the market, is now looking decidedly drab. Saatchi and Saatchi’s 1979 slogan “Labour Isn’t Working”, under a picture of a long dole queue, has recoiled so that the Tories will forever be stuck with responsibility for three million unemployed.

Not unnaturally many Conservatives, with an eye on the next election, are getting uneasy about the image they present now, as a hidebound, callous bunch of wreckers. And Saatchi and Saatchi, equally nervously, feel it does their image no good with the makers of detergents and corn flakes to be so closely associated with so unpopular a government.

Time too for the voters to reflect on the insulting cynicism of those whose business it is to sell capitalism to them, who wheedle for their support with lengthily constructed campaigns of concealment, evasion and deception.

Capitalism deprives the working class of the full product of their labour. It makes a world of conflict, terror, famine, disease. Its hall mark is exploitation, poverty, the degrading of its people. For them it is the worst possible bargain, which they buy with their sweat, suffering and their blood.


Alliance Split
Some observers of the squabble between the Liberals and the Social Democrats over who shall contest which constituency may have been puzzled by the talk of “gold” seats and “silver” seats. Was this to be some bizarre version of the Olympic Games? Is Roy Jenkins so desperate, that he plans to cut down on the richer foods and heavier wines and get into condition for the Marathon?

If the squabble goes on much longer, will the Alliance even get to the starting blocks? Unable to split on matters of policy, because it hasn’t got one yet (which raises the fascinating question of what will happen when they have) the SDP and Liberals are quarreling over the good, old fashioned issue of power grabbing.

The SDP’s preoccupation in this is well illuminated by Jenkins’ tireless search for a parliamentary seat, in which he now threatens to subject the workers of Glasgow Hillhead to his unguent cynicism. Jenkins’ passion to get into Parliament is very much part of his need to be seen as the undisputed leader of the Alliance, to prevent Owen and Williams becoming too established at the top.

Another shaft of illumination came from the behaviour of Rodgers, who brought his old role of Labour’s parliamentary muscle man into the haggling between the two parties. When matters of political power are under discussion, Rodgers has a famously low level of frustration.

The simple fact is that the SDP/Liberals are nothing new, although their success very much depends on their ability to deceive the working class that they are. A compound of discredited Labourites and disorientated Liberals, the process which they call breaking the mould is really the rehash of the same stale ingredients.

Before long they will be inviting the workers to elect them into power over British capitalism. Time then to remember these fractious days, which revealed them for the power-seeking opportunists that they are.


Town Hall vs. Whitehall
Until the 1950s it was very rare to find a Conservative candidate in a local election. Of Labourites and Liberals there was no lack; but apart from that there were usually only people with descriptions like Ratepayers’ Association or Municipal Reform.

It is true that these same people airily emerged at general elections as active members of the Conservative Party. But they argued that local elections, about matters like keeping the pavements clean and where to erect the street lamps, should not be influenced by national issues. Politics, they said, should be kept out of the Town Hall. The autonomy of local authorities was vital; how could the man in Whitehall know what went on in Little Sodbury?

Well the Tories now openly contest local elections. Even more, as they are showing during Michael Heseltine’s current battle with local authorities over rating and expenditure, they are convinced that Westminster should be able to dictate important policy matters to every Town Hall.

The Labour Party has also changed its line. They once argued, against those phony Ratepayers’ and Municipal Reform candidates, that autonomy for local authorities was wasteful; better to co-ordinate it all under Whitehall’s benevolent eye. Now they stand up (some Labour councillors declare they are ready to defy the law, and go to gaol, on the issue) for what they call local democracy against the encroachments of a hectoring Parliament.

It has always been clear that the machinery of government exists at both national and local levels and that all must be taken over if there is to be a fundamental change in society. The argument between the Labour and Tory parties about state against local council is, like all the other disputes between the parties of capitalism, a sham fight based not on principle but expediency. Anyone concerned with a democratic society needs to look farther than that for the real issues.

Running Commentary : Poland - The Iron Heel (1982)

The Running Commentary column from the November 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Poland: the iron heel

Jaruzelski, the Polish military dictator, has pushed through his Iron Heel Act. Rubber-stamped by the subservient pseudo- Parliament. the Sejm, it made illegal not only Solidarity but all forms of trade union organisation.

This Bismarckian act of repression, backed by the infamous thugs of ZOMO and other security forces, will not solve Poland’s desperate economic crisis, any more than the sacking of several economic ministers will help feed the hungry.

Sympathy for Polish workers is widespread. ranging from the far left to the Foreign Office statement:

The policy of the Polish government is one of confrontation rather than reconciliation. (Daily Telegraph, 9 November 1982)

We go further. The hardships experienced by Polish workers have been extreme. In peace-time Europe there is famine. Capitalism in chaos can — and does — kill. Poland is but one extreme example of this.

In 1981 plant closures and unemployment indicated the continuing decline of the economy. With the economy. the morale of the ruling Party collapsed. The bankrupt Party saw the workers' movement as a political threat. Jaruzelski’s actions in first suspending, and now banning. Solidarity were a reaction to a the movement's assumption of a wider role — "both a trade union and a wider social movement" (Solidarity Programme Resolution. Autumn 1981).

We cannot endorse the demand for a “new social contract" based on cooperation between workers and management in the "national interest". Yet Solidarity was the workers' only defence against the severe erosion of their wagcs and pitiful standard of living.

The class struggle cannot be legislated out of existence. Although this attempt to establish an independent trade union and political movement may have been crushed, we know that there will be others in the future.

We hope that such attempts will benefit from the lesson of the failure of Solidarity — that ultimately every class struggle is a political one.


Court in the act

Magistrates are called (in court, at any rate) Your Worships and their legal advisers are known as Your Learned Clerk and the whole procedure is carried along on a tidal wave of bowing and scraping and forelock-touching, so why they should want any help from On High must be a mystery.

However, there it is. The court in Coventry recently decided that each day's proceedings will open with a ten-minute prayer meeting in which everyone, including the defendants, will be asked to join.

Now this will present some obvious problems because there will be people praying for different things all at the same time which will be very difficult for god who has to hear all and see all and know all.

The police, for example, will be saying a few words in favour of the person in the dock getting the heaviest possible sentence because that is the righteous way of dealing with offenders against the law. But the offenders will be praying to be let off lightly or, if they are pleading not guilty, for the magistrates to believe a perhaps unlikely version of the events.

The magistrates will probably be asking god for some interesting cases, for the court reporter to make a careful note of all their witty asides and to get them in the local rag, for the court to run long enough for them to claim a whole day’s attendance allowance and for lunch time to come around quickly.

But of course it is not all farcical. Courts exist as part of the coercive machinery which enforces the rights and minority privileges of property society. Their job is to assert the fact that there is a class of people in capitalism who own the means of life and whose position must be protected with punishment for anyone who threatens it with breaches of property laws.

Religion is also a prop of this divisive, repressive social system. It teaches the non-owners, the non-privileged, to accept their lot and meekly to consent to their own exploitation. It stands up for the symbols of privilege and repression like the royal family and supports the nastiest aspects of the conflicts of capitalism, like its wars.

So it is entirely appropriate that the two factors — coercive state machine and lick-spittling religion — should come together in such open and unequivocal support for capitalism. In Coventry, the view from the dock could not be clearer.

Adman cometh

Travellers who have booked with British Airways may be having second thoughts since that airline announced that its advertising was being taken over by Saatchi and Saatchi, who masterminded the Tory election campaign in 1979 with the implied promise that unemployment would disappear when Thatcher got to Number Ten. With that record behind them, the new ad agency had better not try any slogans like “We’ll Take More Care of You" or all the passengers will be hastily booking to go by sea.

That famous phrase was followed by the patriotic "Fly The Flag”, which was probably intended to cash in on the Concorde boom which never came. Now more, similar, rubbish is promised; Saatchi and Saatchi have hired one of the advertising industry's (sic) wonder boys just to write the new slogans to persuade people to fly British Airways.

This wonder boy — Geoffrey Seymour — is still in his thirties but is well wise to the cut-throat ways of the advertising world. Seymour’s trade is to spend lengthy periods of time fashioning a few words of dramatic, enduring impact which will result in one product selling more than any others — even if the others are better.

He has already had a lot of success (for such it is called) at this. Products like Hovis bread, Heineken lager and Hamlet cigars are said to have sold better after Seymour's fertile mind had been at work (for such it is called).

Success has come in other ways; Seymour has actually won prizes for his slogans and, probably more to the point, he now gets something like £100,000 a year from the advertising world as reward; This may cause anger and bitterness among, say, Health Service workers who are doing a vital human job and have to struggle to defend an already meagre living standard. But there is another aspect to be considered. We live under a social system which produces its wealth for sale, winch means that the market is all-important.

So salespeople, advertising executives and the like have a very important place in this society. They don’t actually produce anything, their work does not make human life one jot easier or happier; a sane social system will have absolutely no use for what are called their talents. Their gargantuan rewards could happen only under a society in which all values are distorted and crazy, in which profit comes a long, long way ahead of people.

Family party

Margaret Thatcher, it is reported, sent her key ministers and advisers off on their holidays during the parliamentary recess with the instruction to Think About The Family. But protective parents need not worry; it is unlikely that the Prime Minister intended Geoffrey Howe to reflect on the effects of poverty on family relationships, or Norman Tebbitt to write a paper on the degrading frustrations in both employment and unemployment.

What Thatcher wanted from the Tory thinkers was some ideas on how to exploit electorally the concept of the family as a cosy, protective element in social stability. This may be shrewder than it at first appears. The present phase of property society encourages everyone to strive for an ideal in their personal relationships, based on the assumption that the human family must be a private, monogamous, exclusive unit.

 

In fact the style of family — whether monogamous or polygamous, whether nuclear or extended, whether patriarchal or matriarchal — can and does vary according to the basic social arrangements in force at the time. There is no evidence that the contemporary family is ideal, or beneficial, or that it will endure.

What is clear is that the present day family conforms with capitalism, with a social system based on the private ownership of the means of wealth production and distribution and the consequent production of wealth as commodities. This form of family places no obstacles in the way of the organised, widespread wage slavery or the savage conflicts of capitalism. The restraints it imposes are on human freedoms — sexual, social and moral. Its privacy is only extended where a market can be created, where each family unit has its own private home having its own car. washing machine, TV .   .  .  .

A sane society will have a very different family. If the repressions, neuroses and exclusions of the capitalist family are so comforting to those who endure them as to be an electoral asset to some capitalist party, then that is apt comment on this system’s distortion of human relationships.

Editorial: Unacceptable Faces (1986)

Editorial from the January 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Many people acknowledge what a thoroughgoing job Saatchi and Saatchi have done for the Conservative Party. It is widely known that the Tory image-builders have changed Margaret Thatcher's hair and her make-up, have brought a huskiness to her voice, have persuaded her to arrange her head into that irritating slant whenever she is being interviewed for television. We can only guess how effective all this has been, whether it has actually influenced any votes. The entire operation rests on the theory that political leaders need to present themselves to the electors, not as they actually are but in an image, and that no matter what reality lies behind it, the most attractive image will win the most votes.

A corollary to this is that the working class, heedless of their suffering, can be persuaded to vote for a political party under a kind of social anaesthesia which renders them insensible to factual evidence and experience. This would explain why the Tories are now campaigning to convince us that they have not been cutting, but have been increasing, state expenditure on medical and social services; that hospital patients who observe the extra stresses imposed by staff cuts are deluded; that workers who are homeless, or existing in slum conditions in temporary homes, are imagining it all.

And perhaps the Tories have got it right. Perhaps, in spite of all that has gone on during their time in power, when it comes to the next election the workers will return them gratefully to power, in the expectation of another five years of Tory capitalism. One piece of evidence in this direction is that the Labour Party are also turning their attention to the matter of their political image. In fact this has always been a concern of theirs, except that in the past they have tended to rely on the amateur talents of leaders like the late Richard Crossman, who was in psychological warfare during the last war and who brought that experience to bear in planning Labour Party propaganda, or on the spare-time services of sympathisers in the public relations business. But in their present plight, and perhaps impressed by what Saatchi and Saatchi are supposed to have done for the Tories, Labour are giving rather more attention to the matter of public deception.

Their new general secretary, Larry Whitty, has begun a drastic reorganisation of the party administration, part of which has brought a young man — Peter Mandelson — to be head of Labour's Communications and Campaign. Mandelson describes himself as ". . . an extremely talented, bright high flyer" and claims that the next general election will effectively be fought from his desk (public relations people have never been famous for their modesty). Another move has been to sift out Labour’s shadow environment minister, John Cunningham, as the personification of the thrusting dynamism so essential to something called "positive credibility" (which means he's more likely than most other politicians to be able to get away with lies and evasions). The process through which Cunningham was selected for this role is wrapped in the mysteries of the market research teams and the image-makers. But chosen he has been, and soon he will be presented to us. shaped and gilded and packaged, as Labour's new image of dynamism and credibility.

He will have a difficult job. Labour have to persuade the workers that those years when they were the government were not as bad as they actually were; that one Labour government after another did not attempt to hold wages down while goading workers to work harder in the interests of their employers. They will have to obscure the fact that their last Chancellor, Denis Healey, did not have a policy of reducing state expenditure, that unemployment did not double under Labour, that there was no such thing as that final winter of discontent in 1978/9. They must try to convince the voters that any problems in those days were really avoidable mistakes, which Labour has since learned to avoid; the future under Kinnock, with Cunningham at his side to give credibility, is an assured path away from Tory destitution to Labour prosperity.

Well it could be that by the time of the next general election there will be enough workers disillusioned with the Tories to fall for Labour's new image. If so, they will again be ignorant of, or will be side-stepping. the real issue and the genuine alternative. At every election, the Socialist Party campaigns to the limits of our resources. We point out that capitalism cannot solve its problems, that social ailments like poverty — with all that it means — and avoidable disease can only be abolished through social revolution. We argue that war can be ended only by eliminating its cause, by getting rid of capitalism, and that campaigns to ban some weapons, or to make others less destructive, or even to abolish weapons altogether, are a futile waste of time. Our propaganda reaches only a limited field but the substance of it that there is a fundamental fault in modem social organisation which must be put to rights — is evident in every moment of working class life.

Socialists campaign, all the time, not on any spurious image or blown-up personalities to gloss over the harsh realities. We appeal to the working class with solid argument, backed with undeniable fact. We were formed, and we operate, on the principle that socialism will be the democratic act of a majority of politically conscious workers whose understanding of socialism will mean that they do not need leaders, however glamorous, to tell them what to do, how to think, in which square to put their vote — and to deceive them. Socialism will be the end of capitalism's desperate problems; it will be the next, highest, stage in human social evolution. It has a promise which stands in stark contrast to the public relations gimmicks and to the squalid wheedling so characteristic of capitalism.