Public relations
Who speaks for Britain?
Paul Johnson
Nigel Lawson is surely correct in calcu- lating that, even on a narrow financial basis, the nation cannot afford to give way over the coal strike. But this raises another question: would all the admittedly heavy cost of the strike to the public have been Incurred if the government had been will- ing to divert a fraction of it to fighting a really effective PR campaign against Scar- gill and Co? I have written before that the Thatcher administration has the worst PR of any British government I can remember; and old hands in the trade tell me they agree. The coal strike is now emerging as its biggest single PR blunder. The case against the Scargillites is so overwhelming, and many miners are themselves so ambivalent in supporting it, that really aggressive publicity on the Government's part should by now have turned the trickle of miners returning to work into a steady stream. Here was a strike which could have been beaten by good PR. Why was it not forthcoming?
There seem to be to three main reasons. The first is the distrust which many govern- ments, especially British ones, have for any PR activity. They do a bit of it as a matter of course, because it is always done; but they don't really believe in it, any more than old-fashioned businesses believe in advertising. But just as evidence gathered over more than a century proves conclu- sively that professional advertising cam- paigns sell goods, so there is no doubt that that governments can improve the success-
rate of their policies by efficient presenta- tion.
The Reagan administration is a case in Point. Reagan's three predecessors, Lyn- don Johnson, Nixon and Carter, were destroyed by the media. Until Reagan took office, the thrust of the US media, espe- cial!), on the key East Coast, had been overwhelmingly anti-Administration for 15 Years. Reagan's White House staff deter- mined to turn the media round, and by Positive, calculated, offensive-minded and (some would say) ruthless policies, they have succeeded. As Alexander Haig puts it 1.11 his recent memoirs, they have succeeded In transforming the three main TV net- works, the Washington Post and the New York Times into mere 'notice boards' of the Administration. The result has been a huge increase in the morale, effectiveness and self-confidence of US government, now reflected in the sense of well-being among the nation as a whole. All this is in
striking contrast to dismal, self-pitying Britain.
Why cannot Mrs Thatcher learn from Mr Reagan's success? This brings me to the second reason. In addition to the Govern- ment's distrust of PR as such, there is a rooted belief in Whitehall that, if practised at all, it should be reactive rather than creative. It is not that British government has no PR people. On the contrary, it has legions of them. The Central Office of Information alone employs over a thousand people. But Whitehall informa- tion staff tend to be defensive and unenter- prising, and the reason is that they are expected and trained to be officials whose essential task is to answer telephone in- quiries. They react. They do not initiate. They are not encouraged to plan cam- paigns, to make positive and creative efforts to seize hold of public opinion and turn it in the required direction. So they go through the negative motions on a nine-to- five basis and soon become listless, supine, comatose and, in emergencies, inept. The clever ones depart. The dead wood re- mains, floating in placid inertia on the stagnant Whitehall pool.
This negative approach has been rein- forced under the Willie Whitelaw regime. He has always been hopeless at PR, as his record in Northern Ireland showed. He does not believe in it or, rather, he does not believe a gentleman should stoop to it. The notion of using a lot of modern technology, and a bunch of clever, vulgar fellows, to ram your case down people's throats, strikes him as rude, not done, a bit 'off . It is not that Whitelaw lacks the time to do the Government's PR properly (like his overloaded predecessor, John Biffen). He has all the time in the world. It is that he lacks the inclination. So he is all for the
fatal answer-the-telephone approach. Un- fortunately, Whitelaw's lassitude has itself been reinforced by the attitudes of two powerful persons in Mrs Thatcher's entour- age: the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Robert Armstrong, and her own press man, Ber- nard Ingham. For reasons of bureaucratic tidiness and convenience, both prefer the reactive method. They have set their faces obstinately against any special arrange- ments for dealing with Scargill.
So Mrs Thatcher is getting a great deal of bad advice, and is following it. It is of course partly her own fault that, through- out the coal dispute, the Government has adopted such a defensive posture, being bumped about by events rather than con- trolling them. She said at the start that this was not her dispute: it was between the Coal Board and the union. That was and is a quibble, or at the best a tactical ploy. The coal strike, as planned and conducted by Scargill, obviously concerns the nation; it is an assault on the nation. It involves ques- tions of democratic rights, of civil liberties and the rule of law. The idea that the Government can stand aside from such a dispute is preposterous. The fallacy of this policy was brutally exposed when the dockers came out. Had they remained out, the Government's future, and not least Mrs Thatcher's own, would now be in peril; and it, and she, were saved not by wisdom or the triumph of law or by their own skill, but by the violent behaviour and illegal threats of another group of workers — the lorry-drivers — who threatened to tear Dover apart unless the dockers went back. Mrs Thatcher's government was res- cued by the same kind of lawlessness against which it claims to be fighting.
It is time, therefore, that Mrs Thatcher's government abandoned its phony neutral- ity and began to fight Scargillism in ear- nest. Is not that what she means by 'the enemy within'? If there is an enemy in our midst — and who can doubt it? — must not that enemy be fought with all the means at our disposal? Those means include, to give it its real name, propaganda. Having been let down by the dockers, Scargill is now engineering a new general industrial crisis, with the help of left-wing friends such as Jimmy Knapp and Ron Todd. We have about four weeks' warning, ample time to launch a pre-emptive PR offensive, if the will is there.
Previous page
