Page 140 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

ADVERTISING

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’.
Among 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).
An illustration of the British Left’s deep-rooted unease with the
concept of advertising – even if one was advertising a ‘good thing’
– was the launch in 1987 of the left-of-centre Sunday tabloid, News
on Sunday. Following the results of expensive market research

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