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Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 110

COMMUNICATING POLITICS
and homelessness. Aesthetically, they were unsuccessful, being described by
one author as ‘dark, depressing montages’ (Myers, 1986, p. 122).
On a television discussion of political advertising produced in 1989,
presenter Michael Ignatieff and then Labour Director of Communications
Peter Mandelson looked back at the amateurishness and clumsiness of the
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campaign with barely suppressed disbelief and mockery. But the party
leadership’s approach to the agency and the management of its own cam-
paign (see next chapter) were equally lacking in skill.
The transformation in the Labour Party’s approach to advertising, which
by the 1987 election saw them being widely praised for having the best
campaign, was provoked first and most obviously by the uniquely poor
result of the 1983 election. The party in Parliament was reduced to 209 MPs,
with even that number reflecting a significant over-representation of its voting
performance, thanks to the British first-past-the-post electoral system.
There can be little doubt that after the 1983 election Labour was facing
the loss of its post-war status as the junior partner in a two-party system,
and along with it any realistic hope of access to government. Clearly,
something had to be done to halt the decline. A change in approach was
further encouraged by the experience of the Labour-controlled Greater
London Council in its struggle with the Thatcher government.
In 1983 the abolition of the GLC was announced by a government
which detested the thought of this nest of ‘Reds under the beds’ running
the capital city. Led by Ken Livingstone, the GLC was unmistakably ‘hard
Left’, promoting and implementing a wide range of progressive, socialist-
inspired programmes, such as cheap fares on public transport, anti-sexism
and anti-racism in schools, and public services for gay, ethnic and other
minorities. 10 While in these terms ‘Left’, the GLC administration differed
from the traditionalists in the Labour Party in understanding the role
which advertising could play in their campaign against abolition.
London was essentially a Conservative heartland, and the GLC the
archetypal ‘loony Left’. Livingstone and his colleagues appreciated that the
battle with the government could not be won by the Left’s preferred tactics
of public demonstrations and rallies. Consequently, the GLC hired the
agency Boas, Massimi and Pollitt (BMP), who had worked for unions and
local governments but were primarily a commercial organisation. For BMP,
in the words of its accounts director Peter Herd, ‘developing advertising in
a political context is just the same as developing it in a commercial context.
You find out what it is you can reasonably achieve, who you will have to
persuade in order to do that, and then research to find out what is most likely
to affect them. That is the process we went through with the GLC, as we
would with Cadbury’s, Courage or the Guardian [all of whom BMP had
worked for]. It’s the same process’ (quoted in Myers, 1986, p. 111).
BMP’s market research established that Londoners were not especially
concerned with the survival of the GLC as an institution in itself, but were

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