PUFFS, FLACKS AND THATCHERISM
The media: Paul Johnson
begs the Government to keep politics out of advertising
THE use of public money to advertise the doings of authority first became a major issue in the early 1980s, when 'loony Left' Labour councils, notably the GLC, spent millions to promote blatantly political objectives. In due course the Tory govern- thent produced legislation to tighten the rules. Indeed you might say that Clause 29, designed to stop Labour councils promot- ing sodomy (once a gentlemanly pursuit, now identified with socialism) is a spin-off from the council advertising row. Now, however, it is the Tories who are on the defensive, with claims from Labour's trade Spokesman, Tony Blair, that the amount of 'political' advertising by central govern- ment has sharply increased. Blair is con- centrating his attack on television slots, in an attempt to bully Lord Thomson, chair- Pan of the IBA, into enforcing the 1973 Broadcasting Act more strictly. But con- cern at the growing volume of government advertising throughout the media is not confined to Labour leaders.
The volume is certainly impressive. A survey by MEAL of the 1987 advertising spend, commissioned by Campaign, shows that, if we regard the Government as a holding company, it spent last year £88,102,000, second only to Unilever's £104,126,000 (Batchelors Foods, Birds Eye, Wall's, Oxo, Brooke Bond, Lever Brothers soaps etc), and well ahead of the third runner, Proctor & Gamble, with £57,682,000. In an . editorial on 8 April, Campaign cited these figures as evidence of 'just how deeply Thatcherism is per- meating the social fabric of Britain'. The Government's ad spend, it added, 'makes nonsense of any pretence that government advertising is non-political'. It instanced the £2 million campaign for the new social security legislation as 'right in tune with Thatcherite philosophy', and asked: 'how can the multi-million _pound campaigns to float off the public corporations be any- thing but political?' In its issue of 22 April the magazine drew attention to further government plans to promote the new community charge or poll tax as soon as it becomes law, describing it as 'one of the biggest and most controversial campaigns to date. . . certain to fuel the debate about
the political content of the government's £90 million advertising programme'.
Campaign is an immensely profitable part of the Haymarket Press publishing empire built up by Michael Heseltine, who hopes to be Mrs Thatcher's successor and is certainly her most formidable opponent at present. Actually, if you look in detail at how that £88 million was spent, the budget is not as 'political' as Campaign makes out. The top government spender, only 18th on the list, was the Manpower Services Com- mission, with large-scale advertising on such projects as the Enterprise Allowance Scheme and Job Training. Promoting job training is a highly cost-effective way of reducing unemployment and ought not to be party-political at all. The second biggest government spender is the Department of National Savings, which is entirely uncon- troversial. Some of the big government advertising allocations go on the road- safety campaigns of the Department of Transport, which got £10,466,000 in 1987, or various campaigns (such as Aids) run by the DHSS, which got £6,103,000, the Health Education Authority, and boards to promote Welsh, English and Scottish tourism, overseas exports, anti-crime cam- paigns and the products of the Royal Mint. If government expenditure on advertising is rising, that is because more and more ministers are convinced it works — a conviction now at last shared by the Labour Party and the TUC. Lord Young, at the DTI, is particularly keen on it, and his demand for a £15 million budget for
advertising this year is said to have got him into trouble with the Treasury. But all the government is doing is following in the footsteps of countless successful businesses all over the world, discovering that 'it pays to advertise'. It was Lord Young, after all, who first showed how skilful advertising could cut the dole queues.
Nevertheless, it is essential that the Government should take criticism serious- ly and do everything in its power to meet it. The Thatcher government has always been an activist one, and its present legislative programme is the heaviest since the 1945 parliament. Many of the projects it is putting into law must be fully explained to the public, and it should certainly not be deterred by its critics from making full use of advertising whenever expert advice shows it to be appropriate. At the same time, the actual content and thrust of the campaigns should be subjected to the most rigorous scrutiny to eliminate political, and particularly Thatcherite overtones. I say this because a Labour central government, should one ever contrive to scramble into office again, is likely to try to abuse the ministerial power to advertise on a colossal scale, just as Labour councils did locally. It is essential that the present government's record should be clean. The strictest possi- ble rules should be laid down and observed, so that any future government will be obliged to follow them. The Central Office of Information, which has an excel- lent record of keeping politics even out of controversial campaigns, should be asked to play a bigger part in designing criteria, especially in such tricky areas as privatisa- tion and tax changes. It is not desirable that ministers should have the last word themselves.
Equally, the Government should wel- come any effort by the IBA to interpret its duties under the 1973 Act in the most meticulous manner. The problem with British television in recent years is that neither the IBA nor the Board of Gov- ernors of the BBC has been willing to enforce the impartiality enjoined by the 1973. Act and the I3BC Charter. It is absolutely right that the IBA should ex- amine government television advertising carefully and enforce changes if the letter or indeed spirit of the Act is threatened. It is equally important that the IBA should enforce the Act over political documentary programmes, for instance, which it clearly has not been doing. The last Media Moni- toring Report, for January-June 1987, showed that Granada's World In Action has an appalling record of bias. On 21 of its programmes monitored, 52.4 per cent were biased, all of them to the Left. This is only one of many examples showing that the IBA is not doing its duty in this respect. The government has nothing to lose and everything to gain by efforts to force the broadcasting authorities to carry out the law. But ministers must also ensure they do not infringe it themselves.
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