Page 174 - An Introduction to Political Communication Fifth Edition

Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 153

PRESSURE-GROUP POLITICS
by the US politico-military establishment by a combination of pressure-
group and journalistic activity (see Chapter 9). The British Conservative
government’s 1980s retreat on the ‘poll tax’ (the refusal to retreat being an
important factor in Margaret Thatcher’s removal from office and replace-
ment by John Major) was occasioned not least by a groundswell of public
opposition to the policy, focused on pressure groups of greater or lesser
extremism and reported widely in the media (Deacon and Golding, 1994).
The experience of the Major government after its election victory of 1992
was one of constant challenge to its policy content and style, in stark contrast
to the 1980s when ‘Thatcherism’ was presumed to have become consensual.
In Italy, as the tangentopoli scandal emerged in 1993, an entire generation
of politicians from all parties was brought down by popular opinion. Public
opposition to the war in Iraq dented Blair’s popularity after 2003. The UK
MPs’ expenses scandal of 2009, which was broken by the right-of-centre
Telegraph newspaper, overwhelmed the news agenda for weeks, months and
indeed years, with highly negative coverage of Britain’s elected politicians.
The causes of these political shifts, and the contexts in which they
occurred, are of course very different. They all, however, highlight the weak-
nesses of any theoretical framework which asserts the existence of a deep
structural bias on the part of the media towards ‘the powerful’, ‘the estab-
lishment’, or ‘the ruling class’ in modern capitalist societies. Greek sociol-
ogist Nicos Poulantzas long ago rejected, from a Marxist standpoint, the
notion of a ‘ruling class’ as a meaningful political entity, preferring to think
in terms of ‘class fractions’ and alliances of class fractions, whose influence
1
rose and fell as economic and social circumstances changed. Thus, one
could identify the influence of ‘finance capital’ in 1980s Britain and the
relative political impotence of ‘manufacturing capital’. Some observers have
argued that the sudden political demise of Margaret Thatcher in 1990
can be viewed partly in terms of the reassertion of British manufacturing
capital in the context of a government whose opposition to the concept of
European union was endangering future markets and prosperity. The same
Conservative hostility to European union has been cited as one explanation
for the shift in business support to Labour from 1994 onwards (in addition
to the political communication factors discussed already).
If economic classes (in the Marxist sense) can be divided and have con-
tradictory political interests, so too the members of political parties, govern-
ments, business organisations and other collectivities will often be unable to
act coherently and rationally as one body. The existence of such divisions
means that political elites, and others who could in Hall’s terms be described
as potential primary definers, circulate. Their fortunes rise and fall: as one
‘faction’ loses power another takes it on.
Sometimes the removal of one elite member from power, such as occurred
at the end of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership, is a tactical manoeuvre
designed to preserve the power of a wider group, in this case the Conservative

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