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50 | THE PROFESSIONALISM OF POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

In contrast, the Labour Party simply did not have the organisational structure that
would have enabled it to exploit many aspects of modern campaigning. It lacked a
‘first-class public relations department’ that would have allowed it to run a modern
election campaign in the age of television, and it had neither an effective ‘central office
organization,(or) finance’(Abrams,1962,pp. 4–5). 4

These examples illustrate very clearly that political parties draw on a range of skills that
were becoming widely available and recognised (e.g. advertising, public relations,
polling) but that existed outside the parties themselves. Just as advertisers were
beginning to exert their influence on the sale of goods, so politicians were becoming
aware of the application of advertising and, more generally, public relations skills to the
field of politics in the US. Its use in the British political context then comes as no
surprise; if anything, the surprise is that it was used so little in the immediate post-1945
period, something that could be explained by a number of factors that made the British
context different from the US: the short duration of election campaigns; the absence of
a constant series of elections that would permit the development of a profession of
political consultancy; the prohibition against television and radio political advertising
and a certain ideological aversion to anything that either smacked of sale and/or
Americanisation. In such circumstances, it was only the press (and posters) – and to a
much lesser extent the party political broadcasts – that could really be used as media
for political advertising and mass persuasion, although one could clearly become
sophisticated in how they could be used, something that had already been appreciated
when the parties employed experts in communication, either advertisers or those
familiar with the new media. (See Cockett, 1992, for a discussion of the use of
advertisers and those ‘expert’in the use of radio in the inter-war period.)

The Professionalisation of Political Communication
Whilst the use of such experts and professionals,i.e.advertisers and radio and television
producers, to run press and poster campaigns and to help produce the party political
broadcasts was reasonably well established by the late 1950s (Harrison, 1965, pp.
172–179), the use of polling information by political parties – and hence the use of the
now ubiquitous pollsters – to guide electoral activity dates from the late 1950s onwards
(see Abrams, 1963, p. 12). By 1962, for example, the Labour Party’s Director of Publicity
was ‘taking regular advice from a panel of consultants including Dr Mark Abrams and a
number of Labour supporters from leading London advertising agencies’(Windlesham,
1966,p.247).By then,however,the Labour party had moved ahead of the Conservatives
in respect of its organisation and organisational skills.

A number of things help to account for this change.The first was the election defeat of
1959, the third defeat in a row for the Labour Party. The second is the response to that
5
defeat which emphasised the need for change in politics as much as structures. The
third factor was that the Labour party began the process of change soon after the 1959
defeat, so that by 1962 it had created an organisational structure that brought together
advertisers and researchers in order to exploit the lessons of research in the pursuit of
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