Page 195 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

COMMUNICATING POLITICS

unseasonally mild. These factors were undoubtedly important,
though they constituted only some elements among others in an
overall environment which was much more hostile to organised
labour than had been the case ten years earlier. After the Falklands
conflict and its landslide election victory in 1983, the Thatcher
government was near invincible, as the miners found to their cost.
Nevertheless, the public relations strategies employed by Scargill
and the NUM leadership demonstrated that even the ‘hard Left’ of
British politics could, and should, engage in persuasive political
communication. Weakened by mass unemployment and draconian
anti-labour laws, the NUM and its partners in the trade union
movement were drawn more closely into the battle for public
opinion.
In the years following the miners’ strike, while Conservative
dominance of government and continuing high levels of unemploy-
ment kept the unions very much subordinate parties in industrial
relations, skilled use of the media produced many symbolic, if rarely
actual, defeats for the government and private employees. Disputes
by ambulance drivers and nurses in the National Health Service
were characterised by the participation in media coverage of
eminently reasonable, sympathy-inducing public spokespersons,
with government ministers frequently being made to appear miserly
and brutal. On the other hand, the violent picketing by print
workers at Rupert Murdoch’s Wapping newspaper plant in 1986
(much of it provoked by the police) produced media images which
were less than helpful in building public support for the printers’
cause.
The impact of media management on the outcome of an
industrial dispute will never be as great as the environmental factors
already referred to, such as the level of unemployment, the political
strength of a government and the nature of legal constraints on
unions’ collective action. However, in so far as governments and
employers must take public opinion into account when pursuing
such disputes (and that will depend on a range of factors) unions
have learnt that there is much to gain, and little to lose, by playing
the media game. 2

PRESSURE GROUPS

Trade unions may be viewed as ‘subordinate’ political actors in
capitalist societies, because it is their duty and function to represent

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