Page 179 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

COMMUNICATING POLITICS

secretive, as distinct from the relative openness of the US system.
This is reflected in legislation such as the Official Secrets Act and the
disclosure rules which prevent some official secrets being revealed
to the public for 30, 40, or even 100 years after the event. One of
the key pledges of the new Labour government in 1997 was to
introduce for the first time in Britain, a Freedom of Information Act.

‘Pro-active’ information management
Governmental information management may have a number of
functions. The activities of a body such as the Central Office of
Information are ostensibly about informing the public in a neutral
manner on matters of interest and concern to them, such as civil
defence procedures or the activities of the British Council abroad.
In recent years, however, the COI has been ‘co-opted’ into a
more overtly political role. In the early 1980s the Conservative
government employed it to counteract the activities of the anti-
nuclear protest movement. Later in the decade the COI’s spending
on advertising tripled, largely to publicise the government’s
privatisation campaign. In so far as this communication activity
was intended to inform the British public about the fact of
privatisation, it did not breach the parameters of the COI’s
traditional remit. Much of the material produced was, however,
clearly promotional in function – advertising designed to sell the
ideologically grounded policy of a particular party and government.
In 1988 the head of the COI, himself concerned about the under-
mining of his agency’s neutrality, demanded a public inquiry, which
however was not granted (Harris, 1991).
Other ostensibly neutral state agencies, such as the Government
Information Service, have developed an equally ambiguous
relationship to the political process. The GIS was established in
the 1950s ‘to give prompt and accurate information and give it
objectively about government activities and government policy. It is
quite definitely not the job of the Government Information Service
to try to boost the government and try to persuade the press to’
(Lord Swinton, quoted in Harris, 1991, p. 113). Current guidelines
state that the publicity work of the GIS should be ‘relevant’ to the
activities and responsibilities of the government, that it should be
‘objective and explanatory, not tendentious or polemical’, and
‘should not be party political’ (quoted in Ingham, 1991, p. 368).
That the GIS was accused of flouting these guidelines in recent years
is largely the responsibility of Margaret Thatcher and her mould-

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