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Mandelson confuses PR with politics
During my drive to work this morning I listened to BBC Radio 4 and heard Evan Davies interview the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, Peter Mandelson. Of course Mr. Mandelson spent all his time evading and filibustering while Mr. Davies did his best to get a straight answer. Masochists may listen to the interview here
For an excerpt check out Sushiguru’s blog
At the end of the interview Mr. Mandelson said something along the lines of “A pleasure as ever”. This sounded to me very much like he considered that this had been a successful interview. Well, it depends on how you define success.
Mr. Mandelson’s definition appears to be that it is not to answer any questions. If this is the definition, then this was a resounding success. If you think that the interview should have been an honest presentation of the governments record and plans for the future then it was a pathetic failure.
So why is it that Mr. Mandelson is completely incapable of being honest? Why is it that he appears to spend the whole time conniving to present an image rather than actually explaing the governments position?
The answer is that media manipulation is all he knows. Wikipedia gives us an interesting insight into Mr. Mandelson’s background.
Read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at St Catherine’s College, Oxford
Director of the British Youth Council
Three years on Lambeth Borough Council (1979 to 1982)
Worked as a television producer at London Weekend Television on Weekend World
Appointed Labour Party’s Director of Communications in 1985.
Ran Fulham by-election campaign 1986
Managed the Labour Party’s 1987 general election campaign
Do you see any evidence that Mr. Mandelson has ever built a road, for example? Has he ever turned around a failing company? Did he manage a budget? Did he raise funds? Has he ever worked on a factory floor? Has he ever managed a government department? Has he done anything in his entire life that could be deemed useful to the British people?
To my mind the answer is no.
Of course I understand that in the 21st century politicians will employ people to help them “get their message across” but New Labour have allowed these media wonks to take control of the party. When Mr. Mandelson finally pulled off an election victory, Labour supporters were so desperately grateful that they lost there sense of judgement along with their self respect. They allowed Mr. Mandelson to use his contacts to move from an advisor to become a main player in the government itself. Now that he is there it is obvious that he does not have a clue what to do. He merely continues to do what he has always done. Which is to try to convince everyone, by fair means or foul, that New Labour are doing a fantastic job. The activities of new Labour expend the energy of the political establishment while achieving nothing. Mr. Mandelson gives off heat but no light.
In the interview Mr. Evans attempts to get a point across. The point is that new Labour continually make promises and set targets which they fail to achieve but, by the time their failure is apparent, they have moved the agenda on to some new target. Mr. Mandelson ducked and weaved and eventually said:
“Evan, with the greatest love and respect, I think I’m going to have to take some time to answer your questions, would you mind?”
He then launches into a an enormous monologue which I reproduce here:
“Thank you very much indeed. I think it’s very important that the government, where appropriate enacts targets, benchmarks, by which it judges itself, but more importantly, by which the public judges its delivery. That’s why we are providing guarantees for educational entitlements that’s why we’re putting in place national health service guarantees for patients, including the right to see a cancer specialist within two weeks if their GP suspects that they have cancer, that’s why we’re going to lay the foundations for the national care service for the elderly, now, the point I’m trying to make to you is that politics is about spelling out your policies, it’s about spelling out policy differences: what they mean for the public, what they say about the party’s values and beliefs, now that may be all too detailed and too policy wonkish [sic] for the taste and appetite of the BBC, certainly Today, but this is what is important for the public, and whether it be fuel poverty and our ability and determination to drive on and meet our 2010 targets, how we want to enshrine clearer individual guarantees and entitlements, both in our schools and in the national health service, the debate, the very important provision that we have got to talk about in this country, about supporting families who are looking after elderly parents or relatives who need that care, all these things are about politics, they are about policies, they are about what the public is interested in , Even, and what in time they will judge us, and the other parties, by when the election comes.”
Of course Mr. Mandelson is Talking Bollocks. Most of this is just waffle to use up time and distance himself from the question but Mandelson reveals his deeply flawed understanding of politics. He thinks that politics is about getting the message across and he thinks that this is what the public are interested in.
It isn’t and we aren’t.
He has confused public relations with politics and this has been the flaw in New Labour from the very beginning. Politics is not about getting the message across! That is a secondary objective. The job of politics is to set policy and deliver. Endlessly setting new policies and objectives is merely an indication of the failures of past policies.
It’s worth considering the words Mr. Mandelson used to gain some space to waffle:
“Evan, with the greatest love and respect, I think I’m going to have to take some time to answer your questions, would you mind?”
There are all sorts of people in this world with all sorts of opinions. The kind I find most objectionable are the kind who can smile in your face while they stab you in the back. The sort that can lie through their teeth.
Peter, with the greatest love and respect, you are a complete shit who should never have been allowed into British politics.
He doesn't smoke the same cigarettes as me
Tonight the leader of the racist British National Party is to appear on the BBC TV program Question Time. This is a program which has run for many years and involves a group of the great and the good sitting on a panel, currently chaired by David Dimbleby and answering questions from a studio audience.
Having followed Question Time for many years I can attest that the subject to get the British people most riled was not Iraq or the credit crunch but fox hunting.
The news media have been full of controversy regarding whether the leader of the BNP, Nick Griffin, should appear on Question time and the response from the majority of political pundits is that he should not.
From what I can gather The British National Party believe in stopping immigration to the UK and “encouraging” (my emphasis) people of non-Celtic or Anglo-Saxon origin to emigrate to where their ancestors came from immediately before they came to the UK. I hear that their manifesto specifically prohibits people not of these “races” from joining the party.
I’ll state my position clearly up front. I believe that there is only one race of people, the human race. Individuals should not be picked off because of their supposed membership of some fictional race or indeed because of their religion or sexual orientation. I’m a bog standard ant-racist.
Having said that I am against further immigration to The United Kingdom for a couple of reasons: Firstly it’s too bloody crowded here already – Just look up the population density stats for the UK and compare them against other countries.
Secondly I believe that Tory and New Labour politicians in collusion with the controllers of large capitalist corporations are using immigration for cheap labour which, while it may make Gordon Brown’s spreadsheet glow with tax from profits, degrades the living environment of each individual in The United Kingdom. Bigger airports, more buildings, greater living density; all this contributes to making The UK a worse place to live.
By now, any of the people who regularly boast about their anti-racism will be condemning me as a closet racist.
But to the subject in hand. Should Nick Griffin be allowed to speak on Question Time?
I’m a liberal and I believe that free speech is fundamental to a free society and therefore I believe that anyone should be allowed to speak on Question Time. Over the past few days I have watched and listen as Mr. Griffin has appeared on many news programs alongside “regular” politicians to try to make his point. From memory, without exception, the regular politicians and interviewers have shouted him down and shouted abuse at him. These are the people who are supposed to represent the main stream of our free society.
It is easy to believe in freedom of speech when everyone is saying things that your either agree with or do not see as threatening but then we need no laws to allow this. The point of freedom of speech in a democracy is that you allow people to speak who hold opinions with which you strongly disagree and so Mr. Griffin is the test of our tradition of free speech. If we shut him down merely because we hate what he says then we are no better than the racists dictatorial regimes from the past.
Ken Livingstone was on BBC Radio 4 this morning arguing that Mr. Griffin should not be allowed on Question Time firstly because there is a court case which may find against the BNP and secondly because Mr. Livingstone claims that each time Mr. Griffin appears on TV there is a rise in racist violence.
Firstly nobody, including Mr. Griffin, is guilty until they are found guilty and secondly if we prevented all speech (other than incitement to violence) which might lead random individuals to commit violence then we would do better starting with football matches and New Labour Prime Ministers.
The interviewer asked Mr. Livingstone to explain how his view accorded with his views on Jerry Adams being allowed to speak when the last Conservative government had a ban on him appearing on TV. Without a qualm, Mr. Livingstone then amended his rule about banning anyone who may cause an increase in violence and instated a clause allowing them to speak if this would assist in helping the Northern Ireland peace process.
This off the cuff invention of rules was most instructive as it revealed the unprincipled and fascistic tendency of many Labour politicians. They like to draw up rules which people must adhere to even though the rules have not been passed into law but when they want to contravene their own rules they will change them in a moment.
Having said that freedom of speech should be available top everyone this is not the same as saying that every lunatic should be given space on Question Time. The BBC claim that they give space to all UK political parties who have elected representatives and site the Greens and Plaid Cymru. This seems like a reasonable policy.
The British National Party have two European MPs and therefore the support of a small percentage of the UK population. In a democracy their voice should be heard and I think the question time audience are educated enough to see through Mr. Griffin’s fallacious views on race and dismiss them as they deserve.
Did you see what I did there?
I used the standard attack the messenger tactic beloved of the Tories. I refrained from speaking against the idea while denigrating the messenger. I encouraged everyone to feel very pompously that we are all much more intelligent than Mr. Griffin and need not stop him from talking because of that. I was TALKING BOLLOCKS. I have seen no evidence that Mr. Griffin is any stupider than the bunch of incompetents who currently control number 10. His intelligence is not the point, his policies are.
To be fair there is an argument for why we should deny certain individuals from promulgating their views even when they have broken no laws and are not inciting violence. BBC Radio 4 carried a report this morning with a university boffin who had tracked the rise of the French right wing. He claimed that this gained considerable support after it’s leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, appeared on television.
And here we come to the nub of the matter. How strongly do we believe in freedom of speech and democracy? It could be argued that M. Le Pen appearing on television and the consequent rise in support was a natural part of the democratic process. However unedifying the conclusion is that a proportion of the electorate are racists – and they are, we know this.
So the question is: do we argue against racism; do we allow freedom of speech and democracy to work, or do we shut down the BNP and betray our principles?
I tend to feel that the majority of supporters of parties like the BNP are not all out fascists or even racists. They are people who have the shitty end of the stick and whose concerns have not been addressed by the main parties. I believe that the mistake of most supposed anti-racists is to release their own pent up venom on these people rather than trying to understand their perspective. By ignoring their issues and condemning them all as fascists we merely alienate them from conventional politics. You don’t have to be a fascist to be a racist. The soviets were institutionally ant-Semitic yet are rarely condemned as fascists.
There is a subtext in banning Mr. Griffin which is the idea that other people are not quite as sharp as us and might actually believe him and this subtext is condescending to the general population.
We should show courage and trust our ideals and people. We should trust freedom and trust democracy. Let Nick Griffin speak. The case against racism is obvious and his arguments are not difficult to refute.
If Mr. Griffin has any legitimate concerns then let him air them and keep the regular politicians on their toes.
Sadly, though I have faith in people I have very little faith in politicians of all hues and I doubt that many “regular” politicians will contain their hypocritical self riotousness long enough to espouse many coherent arguments. But that’s nothing new.
Tonight I fully expect all the regular politicians to talk absolute bollocks in a desperate effort to distance themselves from the BNP and I expect that a lone member of the audience will get out of hand and need to be removed by officials.
I shall be watching because I expect a bloody good bun fight that, if we’re lucky, will be more fun than the fox hunting debate.
Read Review of the program in The Independent
I’ve been away for two weeks in Rome. Working. Yes it was nice but it was nice to get home and on Saturday afternoon I ate breakfast at a café in Trafalgar street. While I waited I read a Daily Mirror and on page 4 I was flabbergasted to see that two of the headlines implied that the New Labour nightmare may continue for some time to come. The first said “Blair Up for President of Europe.” And the second “Mandy for PM?”
Has the world gone mad?
blair to be president
Perhaps while I was away the whole country has been brain washed and we have forgotten that the the three stooges of Blair, Brown and Mandelson ran down British industry in favour of a speculative bubble while Brown promised “an end to boom and bust”.
As there had been so much publicity over Brown’s disastrous interview with Sky TV I watched it on Youtube. Amazing. He seemed to think that he had avoided global financial meltdown single headedly yet completely ignored his own part in causing the crisis. And let’s get this straight, the crisis may have been world wide but the ideological underpinning behind the speculative bubble can be traced to the disconnect between UK/US spin and the real economy. Blair and Brown believed that if they just spent money and told lies then the lies would come true.
In the interview Brown whinges that the interviewer wants to talk about personalities while Brown wants to talk about policies. This is rich. Just last week Brown had to get his wife to speak up for him at The Labour Conference in Brighton telling us what a good man he is. For God’s sake! Why not get his mum there too? The problem is that the wife’s opinion is merely that Brown’s heart is in the right place. Well great, so he meant well while he made a cock up of the British economy. That’s nice.
The point is not whether he meant well, the point is that he is arrogant and incompetent. A mixture that I personally find particularly unforgivable.
And Blair as president of Europe! Well, I guess the Europeans have not had to suffer the smug, grinning, amoral, imbecile the way the British have. Recall that this man was the peace envoy to the Middle East that couldn’t even bring himself to call for a ceasefire while the Israelis bombed the crap out of Lebanon. Then he went silent when the Israelis bombed the crap out of Gaza. If the only requirement for becoming the peace envoy to the Middle East is keeping your mouth shut then Blair is obviously the man for the job.
Mandy for PM
And Mandelson for PM? Has nobody noticed the reinjection of deception which has accompanied the return of Mandelson?
I guess we should not really be surprised that New Labour care more for media manipulation than they do for action. It’s all they understand. It seems that most of them have a background in public relations or the media. Just today I heard that Brown’s wife worked for a “brand consultancy”.
There seems to be a school of thought that, as bad as New Labour have been, people must vote Labour to stop the Tories getting in.
Why?
In what way have New Labour been better than the Tories? Firstly I suggest that New Labour have got away with more market orientated, hyper capitalist idiocy than the Tories ever could and secondly I ask what is the point of voting for a party whose policies are at odds with your wishes merely because it used to be left wing in the old days?
If Labour were kicked out at the next election and the Tories elected then at least Labour would be forced into a rethink of their media centric approach to politics and might start spending less time on presentation and more time on achievement.
Let us hope that The Daily Mirror is Talking Bollocks.
A couple of weeks ago James Murdoch made a speech condemning the BBC as a state owned organisation which discourages pluralism in journalism by “dumping” free news on the market.
The argument is appealing as conventional market theory would imply that if you are giving something away free then nobody is going to pay for it.
Bush House
Mr. Murdoch’s attack has come in the wake of two factors: The Internet boom and the global recession. Prior to these factors, commercial media organisations were awash with advertising revenues and did not see the BBC as serious competition. But with the rise of The Internet, advertising revenues are now spread more thinly over many more media suppliers. The current recession has put further pressure on commercial organisations.
First seen as a lame duck, the BBC modernised and expanded its services. The modern BBC provides many services online but, as it does not rely on advertising revenue, it is not directly affected by the recession. So it is only now that commercial media companies are struggling that they attack the BBC.
Are they right? Should the BBC be cut back or abolished?
Mr. Murdoch’s argument is predicated on the idea the all things should be left to the market which, through the mechanism of competition, will supply variety. In this case this means a plurality of programming and opinion.
Market theory is real and underpins much of the success of the western world. However, Mr. Murdoch’s claims for market forces are flawed. Market forces can produce a plurality of suppliers but this does not mean a plurality of services or opinion. On the contrary, market forces use competition to evolve a monoculture of services and opinion.
This has happened again and again in history from telephone systems to television. VHS won out over the superior Betamax format and Blue Ray has recently won out over HD DVD for high definition television recording. This is classic free market operation. Multiple ideas emerge and one wins out, sometimes through an innate superiority, but often due to superior management, marketing or any number of other factors. For TV formats this does not matter, but for news, which is essentially the battle of ideas, a monoculture is positively dangerous.
If it were true that a pluralistic news media would emerge from a purely commercial medium then this would have occurred in The United States. It has not. The news media in The United States have many positive qualities but diversity is not their strength. Further, commercial media companies will all have an natural bias in favour of free market capitalism to the detriment of the reporting of other systems.
Mr. Murdoch’s is not attacking the BBC because he favours pluralism. He has no real interest in diversity of opinion and makes the arguments for selfish purposes. News Corporation has always been a rapacious free market company striving to defeat its competition. A monoculture is acceptable for a mature industry that makes widgets but not for an industry that reports events.
BBC TV news reported Mr. Murdoch’s speech and asked the question: If the BBC did not exist, would we consider creating a news service which was owned and run by the state. At first blush this does not sound a good idea and has the resonance of totalitarianism but in the same TV program, Greg Dyke, ex director General of the BBC, made the point that the BBC is not a state run organisation. It is an organisation funded by a license fee and controlled by a trust. This is not the same as state control.
Shareholder capitalism and state ownership are not the only models possible for organisations. The United States savings and loans and the British mutual building societies are other examples of a middle way.
Of course the BBC can be leaned on by the British government and this has happened. But is this very different from the shameful behaviour of the United States media in the wake of 9/11 when they overlooked illegal and ignominious activities of the United States government and armed forces?
The United States is a country with a strong basis in free market capitalism and an understandable mistrust of the state. Great Britain has a long history of laissez-faire capitalism but also a solid foundation in pragmatism. We should use markets when they are useful, not out of an ideological obsession.
The BBC provides a useful counterbalance to commercial organisations and is respected throughout the world. Its lack of reliance on advertising allows greater freedom from lobby groups than its commercial competitors. One only has to watch a few minutes of CNN to realise that commercial organisations rely on BBC reporters throughout the world. Even the leader of the Soviet Union found the BBCs reporting independent enough to rely on during the military coup in 1991.
Mr. Murdoc’s speech has been given great attention because his father, Rupert Murdoch, made a similar speech some years ago but whereas Rupert Murdoh recognised an technological shift that would inevitably force change on a media industry which had stagnated, James Murdoch is appealing for change to protect a vested interest.
Mr. Muroch claims that the BBC is an obstacle to pluralistic media – It isn’t. The BBC has proved itself over the years as a defender of objective journalism and should not be sacrificed to support the profits of the Murdoch empire.
I’ve thought before about taking photos of someone from when they are born to when they die. A big project and maybe it’s a bit late for me to start.
It seems that other people have had similar ideas.
Isn’t it about time to recognise Pythonesque features in Cantona’s feathered friend. Hasn’t his seagull followed its last trawler? Isn’t it appearing decidedly nailed to its perch. Frankly, we have been propping it up for far to long and I’m feeling quite as sick as the hapless Norwegian Blue did before it ‘joined the bleedin’ choir invisible’.
Let’s examine this odd bird. 17 or so years ago Cantona used a simple metaphor. What on earth is going on in philistine Britain that we still want to scratch our heads? Are we ‘bird brains?’ Cantona made a perfectly straightforward, albeit figurative statement to the effect that ‘the press are scavengers’ and we descend into awe at the incomprehensible obscurantism of a Gallic genius. At the time I was reasonably comfortable with the idea that Cantona had said something a little unusual for a man of his profession: that he had risen a little above his fellows in revealing that he could string a sentence together; even, let’s give him his due, a quite entertaining little metaphor about the vagaries of the British tabloid press. But to hold it up as some incomprehensible jewel of deep philosophical profundity is frankly embarrassing.
Seagulls
Lets deconstruct it a little to follow in the footsteps of a Foucault or a Baudrillard.
“when the seagulls follow the trawler, it is because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea”.
The seagulls are the press – the sardines stories, Cantona is the trawler: end of.
How difficult do we think this is? I am truly astonished that perfectly intelligent (one presumes) commentators and journalists continue to resurrect Eric’s quip as if it was drawn from the depths of French intellectual tradition to take its place as an unfathomable mystery of our time. ‘What could he possibly mean?’ our perplexity grows and the mystery deepens.
Perhaps if he had said, ‘the press are like a rats going through my bins’ he may have inspired less awe. Perhaps it was his heavy french accent. Maybe it gave the squawking metaphor something of ‘a lovely plumage’ denied to more home grown breeds. But whatever it was it’s got to stop.
Now, please don’t take this as a criticism of Cantona. Were that everyone expressed themselves with a little elegance and intelligence (I won’t dwell on the karate kick incident that led to Eric’s delusion that he was being hounded). Indeed, I shouldn’t wonder if Eric himself has come to view the seabird as more of an albatross everytime he sets foot in Britain. For my part I am simply ashamed as we cry out to our near neighbours across the channel; ‘look at us, we’re stupid!’ Yes, it was a little bit clever for a footballer judging by the normal post match comments – but not for most of us. We do know what it means, its not that tricky – please stop going on about it because it makes us look like morons. The press followed Eric around because they expected to get a story; doh, doh, doh! We got it at the time and we still get it. We are not a nation of idiots! Stop telling us that we are bewildered, confounded or otherwise perplexed after all this time
by something that never baffled us in the first place. Why do we want to appear stupid?
Throwing sardines to the dead gull should cease, it must go to meet its maker.
I’ll leave you with a proper bit of obscure French philosophising. This one from the pen of Jean-Paul Sartre and I hang my head in shame, in advance, toward all those of you who find these words equally straightforward.
“My position in the midst of the world is defined by the relation between the instrumental utility or adversity in the realities which surround me and my own facticity; that is the discovery of the dangers which I risk in the world, of the obstacles which I can encounter there, the aid which can be offered me, all in the light of a radical nihilation of myself and of a radical, internal negation of the in-itself and all affected from the point of view of a freely posited end. That is what we mean by the situation.”
- Dominic Duckett
There is a good article on Nusak here
“Nuzak is like Muzak. It runs in the background. It’s a New York Times headline on the way out of the house. It’s CNN at the airport. It’s Fox News at home whileJoe is really doing something else. The purpose of Nuzak is to be mildly interesting and possibly entertaining without telling Joe anything that would disturb him personally. Real news has immediacy. It is “actionable intelligence,” the last thing Joe is interested in. The average person basically wants to be left alone and to be told, town-crier fashion, that “All is well.” Elevator news.”
Surealism has globalisation to thank for a story about a matress factory fire in Casablanca being reported inthe British press.
jonesxxx
hildacarmi
Booze and War Memorials equals a story
Tags: Wars, drunken student, drunk student, urinated, war memorial, cenotaph, outraging public decency, The Sun, wreath, drunk, Saturday nights, pissing
Chipstead War Memorial
Back in October here was a great palaver in the press about a drunken student in sheffield who urinated on a war memorial. The nation was horrified and the student was charged with “outraging public decency”.
The Sun reported last week that another man has committed a similar atrocity, this time also donning a wreath and wearing it as a hat. According to The Sun this is the third time this has happened within the space of a few weeks.
All very awful of course but hold on a minute, Great Britain has been involved in numerous wars and consequently has a war memorial in every town and village in the country. And like most warrior nations Britain’s men have a marked tendency to get drunk on Saturday nights. Put the two together and it is a positive certainty that, on any given Saturday night, someone will be pissing on a war memorial.
What should really worry us about the bit of video on The Sun’s web site is the way this latest guy was followed by the CCTV as he walked down the street. From the video it looks as if he did not urinate on the memorial but merely in the surrounding foliage as thousands, if not millions, of men will have done for centuries. OK, the guy did then put a wreath on his head but give him a break, he was drunk. And if the Sun expects us not to get drunk it might consider removing the advert for Strongbow cider on the front of this bit of video.