20130412164339753295_book_an-introduction-to-political-communication

COMMUNICATING POLITICS
Figure 6.5 Labour’s poster campaign, 2005.
Right, and Anthony Wedgwood Benn, better known as Tony Benn, the leftwing
bogeyman of British politics in the 1980s. Together, these two
presented a series of party political broadcasts which, like the Tories’ 1970
ads discussed earlier, used already familiar conventions of British television
to connote authority to their audience. In the manner of broadcast current
affairs presenters, they introduced the issues, Labour’s policies, and criticisms
of the Tories, in a style widely viewed at the time as highly effective.
Benn’s role in this campaign was particularly ironic because it was the
British left – of which he subsequently became the leading figure – which
after 1959 came to view the conscious application of professional marketing
techniques to the political process as a kind of betrayal. As Johnson and
Elebash put it, Labour – with the singular exception of 1959 – approached
campaigning as if it believed that ‘amateurism equalled sincerity in politics’
(1986, p. 299). The party ‘distrusted advertising as a capitalist business’.
Among the Left in general, argues Kathy Myers, advertising was seen as ‘part
of capitalism’s self-justification system, its ideology’ (1986, p. 85), and thus
rejected as a vote-winning device.
In this sense the British Left was subscribing to the normative ideal of
liberal democratic political discourse. Political persuasion, the Labour Left
believed, should be based on objective information and rational debate,
rather than on manipulation and hard sell. To pursue the latter was to
devalue the political process and patronise the people, who could be relied
upon to distinguish right from wrong if given the opportunity to do so by
their political parties. The pursuit of this ideal and the consequent wholesale
rejection of professional, persuasive communication methods deprived
Labour and the Left in general, throughout the 1960s, 1970s and into the
1980s, of an important weapon with which to combat the Conservative
opposition. The pragmatic, and entirely rational goal of achieving political
power was sacrificed in the cause of a romanticised ideological purity of
discourse which television was rapidly making redundant.
As late as 1983, in the midst of another disastrous general election
campaign, the party’s then general secretary Jim Mortimer stated defiantly:
‘I can assure you that the Labour Party will never follow such a line of
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