Page 187 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

AN INTRODUCTION TO POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

that spaces were occasionally found in current affairs and in-depth
news programmes of the type provided by BBC’s Newsnight and
Channel 4 News, for detailed articulation of the anti-nuclear
perspective.
As the East-West confrontation eased in the late 1980s,
culminating in the ‘end’ of the Cold War and the collapse of the
Soviet Union, the peace movement withered away. In terms of
governmental decision-making, historians will probably judge that
the movement had negligible impact. In the end, cruise missiles
were installed in Europe, Britain commissioned the Trident
submarine system, and the US government pursued its desired
nuclear weapons programmes. There was, however, a public debate
about these crucial issues in the 1980s, where there had been
practically none in the 1960s and 1970s. The communication
strategies and campaigning activities of the international peace
movement can reasonably take the credit for forcing that debate,
and requiring NATO governments to consider public opinion, where
they had not been used to doing so before.

Pressure groups in the 1990s

As the anti-nuclear weapons movement declined in the 1990s, so the
environmental movement came to prominence. Like CND in the
1980s, the rise of the ‘greens’ was a response to growing perceptions
of a new kind of risk—away from the threat of nuclear war and
towards the threat of environmental disaster caused by human
intervention in, and distortion of, the natural order of things. This
was the product of science, as it generated worrying new knowledge
about such problems as the hole in the ozone layer, and then of
politicians who began to incorporate environmental issues into their
policy agendas in a unique and somewhat unexpected way
(exemplified by prime minister Thatcher’s pro-environment speech
of September 1988).
It was also the product of effective source strategies by the
environmental movement itself, which included new political parties
(the Greens) and pressure groups, most successfully Greenpeace and
Friends of the Earth. Using the same non-violent, direct action
techniques as CND a decade before these groups organised visually
spectacular, powerfully symbolic (and thus media-friendly)
demonstrations against such threats to the environment as nuclear
power stations, the destruction of rain forests, and the dumping of
industrial waste in the sea. Celebrities like U2 and Sting were enlisted

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