Practical Thinking, Panic & The Riots

The marketing industry has been caught out. Young males respond to messages of defiance and individualism but, when they act out the fantasy presented to them on a plate by clothes and shoes manufacturers to sell their products, we suddenly have a 'PR problem'.

But what is a 'PR problem' when it is at home? It would appear to be that point when fantasy becomes reality, when Levi's young male squaring up to riot police actually does square up to riot police.

We are now in the midst of yet another 'moral panic' where analysis of the long term structural causes of a social phenomenon are ignored in favour of a wave of emotion resulting in gut reactions that only store up problems for the future. No one is thinking.

The current response of the marketing community comes down to a question that is at the heart of the political crisis: does it appeal to the emotional instincts of its customer base or respond to the emotional reaction of a herd-like media and political culture in a state of confusion, ignorance and fear?

I think we have the answer: it joins in the panic and suddenly becomes 'socially responsible', meaning, in fact, conservative in the worst sense, part of the problem of suppressing discontent rather than stating firmly that it is merely responding to the mood of the time as sound business.

If people are discontented, it is not because of moral laxity but because they have reasons for discontent - local policing, lack of opportunity, overcrowding, underemployment, generational lack of respect (from the old to the young), the hypocrisy of the rich and the lack of representation by the Left.

Watch this short segment of an articulate employed black telling it like it is to the Mayor of London. This man is bright, talented and on the right side of the law but he is not happy.

He does not have to look far to see a world where others no better than he is are raking in bonuses despite bringing the country to its economic knees.

Now, for balance, watch this tough black lady taking on the rioters. The tragedy here is that small traders and property owners with little capital are being ruined and threatened by people with no capital.

Both sides have been shoved into the position of the soldiery of the competing powers in 1914. Neither side then asked why they should even be in this position and neither side is asking that question today.

Here is where one has to put in the mantra that all this does not justify the riots. The riots, of course, were not political as we generally understand them but closer to 'carnival' - anarchic, criminal and strangely authentic. People really suffered but not perhaps the people who should have done.

The most admirable reaction to the whole business was that of The (Tory) Lord Harris. He did not pontificate or moralise. He did not even try to analyse (the job of others). He dealt like a practical man with a fact and offered material assistance to the victims and called on the Government to provide jobs.

The mantra of moralistic blame from 'commentators' misses the point. The riots were a fact on the ground. They happened because they were ready to happen. It is like expecting to humiliate Germany in 1919 and not expect another war.

Business is now stuck in the middle. The selling process is an emotional process, a manipulative process, of entering into the consciousness of its targets and tweaking it into an action in the interest of the sellers. It is not much different from the classical view of magicians of their craft.

Politicians are also not much different except that they are 'channellers', responding to the emotions of the voters and seeking to manipulate them for their own ends, raising intermediary demons (the media) who, like all raised demons, are untrustworthy tricksters.

In the end, the only authentic behaviour seems to be that of the people themselves at the hard edge of the crisis - the rioters rioting in a context of their own, the police trying to do their job under difficult conditions, the victims of the rioting and those attempting to clean up afterwards.

The magistrates panicked, the politicians panicked, the media panicked and the marketeers panicked - the only people not panicking were the population at large. Listen to conversations around you and the question was always: why did this happen now? 

But this was a question avoided by the panic-stricken Establishment because it was an inconvenient question, partly because nobody knew the answer although everyone had an opinion, an opinion usually cast in terms of morality and 'oughts' rather than what was actually happening on the ground.

It does not really want to answer that question because it raises more serious questions about what the politicians and the media have been doing for the last three or four decades. It certainly raises questions about whether the political and economic system is more broken that we had all thought.

This is not the first time that the Establishment has failed to predict an event of great importance - we might start with the fall of the Soviet Union or the rise of Islamic terror but failures to predict economic collapse and urban mayhem are less forgivable because there is no excuse about lack of data.

Naturally, we should now be asking questions about the riots and how they came to be, but before jumping into bed with authoritarian moralists who wish to re-introduce the strap, conscription, hanging and all forms of social terror to a free young population, most of whom did not riot, we should ask this.

How is it that the persons we hired to govern us failed to structure a society where everyone feels they have opportunity, where perhaps one in five of the population is now on the economic edge and where policy can be made rationally before a crisis instead of irrationally after one?

We could learn a great deal from Lord Harris' humane, practical approach to the business of recovery and it strikes me as no surprise that an experienced businessman should put the rest of the panicking and hysterical elite to shame.

Libya - Pride & Prejudice

A few weeks ago, London PR agencies were stunned to get an anonymous e-mail from what purported to be the Libyan Government requesting PR support in the current crisis.

It turned out that it was genuine but what is more interesting than the sudden and uncharacteristic discovery of ethics by many in the PR industry in rejecting the offer was the amazing naivete of the Libyans themselves.

One of the first lessons that should be taught to any small country seeking to influence the UK, which is one of the few genuinely powerful centres of soft power in the global community, is that its culture is not one of truth-seeking or even of fairness but one of posturing and the rush to the middle ground.

Libya's population is a little smaller than that of London, even half that depending on how you define London, spread along the coastal strip of a country seven times the size of the UK.

We like to think that of the internal strife inside the country as the rise of Hampstead liberals against some monstrous regime straight out of the pages of Alan Moore's 'V for Vendetta' but the situation on the ground is always going to be far more complex than this.

In this context, some things are appropriate for arguing through on fair and truthful terms and some things are not. The pompous gut reaction of the UK PR industry in its trade journal is not much better ethically than the naive propagandism of a dictatorship beyond its sell-by date.

Western 'group-think' mentality, in which elites rush forward like lemmings to assess every situation as good or bad according to the lights of their own dinner party network, is precisely the blindness that led to a failure to predict the riots, the consequences of other military actions and economic crises.

We might make better decisions as a culture if, instead of posturing, we opened the door to others and listened to what they had to say on matters of context and fact, even if we draw the line at justification of removal of essential freedoms and brutal operations.

Indeed, it goes both ways. A dialogue over facts and context permits a more determined complaint over oppressions and brutalities when justifications based on security and order are no longer viable. We badly need that dialogue in our own country as rank injustices take place in the wake of the riots.

This may be a dreadful thing to say and hear, but oppressive and brutal actions may be the 'lesser evil' because of a reasonable interpretation of facts and context. A discussions of those facts and context may well help create new facts and new contexts that then make oppression and brutality absurd.

It gets better. A dialogue based on honest representation (not that one might trust a malign alliance between government propagandists and our PR industry) might well define facts and contexts that remove the justification for bad things at all - on the facts instead of bar room opinion.

These are some of the issues that do need more serious discussion before we simply takes sides:-

• Have international law and the UN been manipulated by a few dominant powers in order to ensure the use of force?
• What are sovereign rights nowadays and what justification and risks are there for Western liberals in over-turning them on universalist principles when these principles have not been fully debated in the official international community?
• What precisely is the tribal and social construction of Libya and what would be the consequences in terms of sectarian strife of removing the post-colonialist structures of Khaddafi?
• What is the importance of Libya in terms of Western energy policy and strategic control of Africa?
• What are the costs and actual material consequences of what amounts to a civil war where the West is maintaining a deliberate policy of assisting one side?
• What, in the real world, is the most likely outcome in terms of freedom and security (and sovereign independence) of a rebel victory?
• What are we honestly prepared to sacrifice ourselves (given the growing desperation of our own poor) to ensure that a situation partly of our own making in terms of destruction and loss can be rectified?
• And by what right can we (in effect) thieve assets from one place to hand over to another and not risk the very system of trust in international affairs that is at the root of London's cultural and economic power?

These are serious points that cannot be left to a ridiculous war of postures between anti-war beardies, cynical politicians and liberal ideologues. These are questions every subject of the Crown needs to ask of the Crown before giving his or her allegiance in this matter.

They relate to debates about international order, sovereign rights, the rights of peoples, the struggle for resources, the expenditure of national resources, government competence, public accountability and political governance that our elite will do anything rather than have.

That elite desperately fears that if it does so and takes decision-making out of the hands of a very small community of 'experts' who are clearly out of their depth in the world created by international capitalism and the fall of the Soviet Union, then it will not get the 'right answers' for its own survival.

But regardless of these criticisms of our own mode of undertaking policy, the real point here is that Libya is on a hiding to nothing in seeking PR support in the West. Its image is 'bust' because the elites of the West have come to a view based only on a few general principles.

No one who decides policy will speak to them until their Leader is removed. Western Governments will do everything in their power, with the connivance of their own media, to deny them any platform and what they say will not be reported in detail or entirely fairly.

The Governments of the West are investing considerable sums in PR operations against them and any 'one-to-one' meeting with a Western Editor will be structured entirely around a pre-set 'liberal' ideological agenda which the Editor and his readership will consider self-evident (though it may not be).

The Libyans' letter suggested help in commissioning academic studies - actually not a bad idea except that any academic who gets involved will be ignored and will probably be kissing goodbye to his career while any findings will appear far into a future when the regime has probably been crushed.

Similarly, the desire to communicate with Western non-interventionists is tantamount to discrediting a community which contains the usual mixture of highly intelligent critics, obsessive activists and downright loons. The one alternative voice is thus marginalised by its own interlocutor.

That's it, basically. The Libyans have a snowball's chance in the desert of doing anything other than destroying the credibility of the very few people who just might be able to balance things up on facts and context - no wonder those who aren't grandstanding for war are running for cover.

But this is a Western own goal in its way. This urge to exclude all alternative opinion and drive the intellectual establishment into group-think on the basis of general principles means that key facts and context no longer guide policy.

We saw this in Iraq. We are seeing this in Afghanistan. We saw this most egregiously over the succession of recent economic crises. We are seeing this in the primitive and stupid populism coming from Government over the English riots. We will no doubt see this over Syria.

The inability of the British Establishment as a whole and the PR industry as a Uriah Heep-ish component of it to differentiate between the necessary exchange of facts and context in open dialogue through honest representation and a lemming-like need to adopt postures to please their masters is tragic.

The right response to the Libyans would be to courteously point out why they are stuffed and to suggest that, while making facts and context available, they have a simple choice.

Either they simply win their war as quickly as they can, show magnanimity in victory and try to build relations with the West on their own terms until the standard 'Nixon moment' or just get rid of Khaddafi and kneel at the feet of a NATO far superior in resources, if an intellectually challenged opponent.

In short, the honest PR would not laugh at the Libyans or moralise or posture about ethics but simply say that the ethical thing is not to take their money until they have either won the war or come to terms with the West. Wartime situations are not about PR, they are about propaganda.

This Libya whose civil servants have clearly failed to understand how power in the West actually operates, which is lashing around like a dinosaur at sections of its own people and which insists on holding on to the type of personal dictatorship that is now an insult to the aspirations of the young ...

... such a Libya is doomed in the eyes of the 'West' and it may as well save its money for a war thar should never have happened in the first place.

Aftershocks Of The Political Earthquake

Things are beginning to settle down a little after the recent political crisis. The Prime Minister is not going and there are signs, albeit unsure ones, of some sort of recovery in the economy.

Attention is turning to the more immediate political instabilities that might be caused in the short term by business failures and unemployment and, even more important, to the major spending cuts and tax rises required to restore weak public finances.

The Economic Aftershock

The two main parties are trading insults on spending cuts, but the truth is that the Tories are trying to tell some home truths and New Labour is trying to evade them at this difficult time.

Outside the media, very much unconfirmed rumours are already spreading of a 20% VAT rate on January 1st that will affect consumer prices and small business cash flow.

As so often, if you want an honest assessment, you have go to the cold calculations of the Institute for Fiscal Studies – “The real choice is between Labour cuts and Tory cuts". They may as well have said - "and between Labour tax rises and Tory tax rises".

Meanwhile, the City of London and business are becoming increasingly disturbed at the possible effect of weak Government on the ability of the Government to keep its eye on the EU regulatory ball – or indeed on any ball at all.

Gloom amongst business leaders extends to concern that the Tories might not be any more competent. Finance capital is shifting further into the euro-realist camp and is ‘hinting’ (no more) that a soft neo-nationalist option is one that they may prefer when faced by European regulatory pretensions.

This is a self-interested lobby but Mandelson has a rather serious political problem here. He is committed to Europe and the Single Market (and implicitly the Lisbon Treaty and possibly the Euro) but the Franco-German response to the recent economic crisis could have seriously negative implications for London.

The claim here is that London’s financial interests (which, of course, have lost considerable credibility within the UK political system because of their conduct in the run-up to and during the credit crisis) is being forced to lobby against EU regulation through other European subsidiaries.

They are adamant – changes in EU regulation are the biggest current threat to UK ‘competitiveness’, threatening to kill the old if sick goose that lays the taxation golden egg and so enables at least basic service provision. Unfortunately, they have a very strong point ...

The Political Aftershock

As for politics itself, which have descended now into personality as much as policy, the media pick over the power struggles that took place to see who has risen and who has fallen.

Mandelson is jokingly referred within Whitehall as ruling his Raj as he emerges as viceroy over much policy affecting business, while Darling seems more secure than ever at the Treasury. Johnson sits as leader-in-waiting. The losers are the Blairite plotters, New Labour itself and the Prime Minister.

There is some comment that this Government’s tiredness is expressed in the sheer number of unelected, appointed persons in ministerial position. Brown's political reforms are milk-and-water and have scarcely dented public consciousness.

Although the expenses scandal had been largely displaced by the problems within the Government and Labour Party, expenses revelations about MPs, members of the House of Lords and senior quango heads continue to undermine trust in the political class.

Some leading figures who have resigned are being positioned publicly as ‘rats leaving a sinking ship’. It is said that hundreds of business people are looking to enter into politics believing that they can do better than politicians although we take this with a pinch of salt. Politics is nothing like business!

Two minor aftershocks of the political difficulties of the last week include the job prospects of MPs who lose their seats in the next election (classed as minimal) and the aggressive direct action campaign against Nick Griffin and Andrew Brons, the two new BNP MEPs, from direct action leftists.

The first will not elicit any public sympathy while the second is simply having the effect of undermining the more reasoned resistance to BNP views and creating a ‘martyr complex’ for BNP supporters. The BNP is not going to be frightened off now that it has tasted office.

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