Page 132 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

ADVER TISING

Benn, the left-wing 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’. Amongst 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 what was described
in Chapter 2 as 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 presentation in politics [i.e., the use of professional
advertising], for very serious reasons: the welfare of human beings,
the care of people and the fact that we want to overcome
unemployment. These are the real tasks before us, not presenting
people as if they were breakfast food or baked beans’ (quoted in
Myers, 1986, p.122).

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