Page 184 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

PRESSURE GROUP POLITICS

collectively in pursuit of a limited political objective (sometimes
around a single issue, such as the poll tax of the 1980s) (Simmons
and Mechling, 1981). They emerge as reactions to particular historical
conjunctures, and usually decline or disappear when these conditions
change. Where trade union action focusses on various kinds of
obstruction of the production process, with the media used as a device
for communicating to and negotiating with a variety of constituencies
(union membership, employers, the public, etc.) pressure groups are
more concerned with symbolic demonstrations of concern about, or
opposition to, what are viewed by its members as undesirable social
and political trends. Thus the international peace movement, which
we cite as a case study in this section, emerged in the late 1970s and
early 1980s as a response to what were perceived by many citizens
in the United States and Western Europe as a disturbing deterioration
in the NATO—Warsaw Pact relationship, and a corresponding
increase in the likelihood of nuclear war.
The ‘nuclear issue’, having been high on the political agenda in
the 1950s and early 1960s, lay dormant for many years, reflecting
the period of relatively stable relations between the United States
and its allies, and the Soviet Union, which came to be known as
détente (McNair, 1988). With the rise of the radical right in Britain
and the US at the end of the 1970s, however, and the expanded
military budgets and heightened anti-Soviet rhetoric which
accompanied that rise, the anti-nuclear movement once again began
to grow. In Britain, in the four years from 1979 to 1983, membership
of the British wing of the peace movement, the Campaign for Nuclear
Disarmament (CND), grew nearly thirtyfold, from 3,000 to 80,000.
Like most pressure groups, CND included in its membership a
politically and socially diverse mix of individuals. For some, the
motivation to campaign with CND was religious; others objected
ideologically to NATO’s aggressive (under the leadership of Ronald
Reagan) and moralising approach to the rest of the world, and its
apparent readiness to countenance nuclear war-fighting in Europe;
others simply thought of themselves and their children, and feared
for the future.
Although ‘resource poor’, in Goldenberg’s terms, CND and the
peace movement internationally possessed certain characteristics
which made them more ‘media-friendly’ than some pressure groups.
Being diverse and socially heterogeneous, they were not easily
stereotyped as ‘left-wing’ or ‘subversive’, although many attempts
were made by government to do so. The movement’s chief spokes-
persons (such as Monsignor Bruce Kent and Joan Ruddock in the

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