One thing I forgot to mention with regards to declining voter turnout and the fact that the most important factor seems to be age is that one of the biggest contributing factors is a declining sense of civic duty.
So, tackling turnout also needs to tackle civic duty. Could this be a task for political communications? And a task that could be aided by new media technology?
Anyway, moving on. I think the best place to find any information on the impact the use of technology might have in engaging people to vote is the USA. We'll see what we can dig up.
Saturday 10 March 2007
Friday 9 March 2007
Back To The Books
Things have gone a bit off track in the last couple of days as the people I’ve been meeting have talked about communications solutions to the problem of turnout rather than analysing the problem itself – if it is a problem that is.
Anyway, it was back to the books today for a bit more background reading. I’ve read odd chapters from all of the books that are listed in the ‘Reading – Current Research’ section on the right hand column. Most of it follows on, or fits in with, the review of the Politics UK book that I posted last Sunday and Monday.
Strangely in the stuff I read today there was no much about people being turned off by politics as such. Rather there seemed to be a greater emphasis on structural issues such as declining class differences and party identification which has resulted in ideological differences between parties becoming more difficult to identify.
The low turn outs of 2001 and 2005 seem generally to have been assigned to a belief that the result was a foregone conclusion in the first case and a desire to punish Labour but without any corresponding desire to elect the Conservatives in the centre.
The statistical analyses seem to indicate that class, education and gender have nothing to do with whether a person votes or not. The most significant factor appears to be age (the younger you are, the less likely to vote). But again this is not an issue of political apathy. Most young people it seems are very concerned about issues. We come back to the belief in the efficacy of the vote, especially in FPTP and to other factors which came up today for the first time. Young people who have moved away from home and have just started renting places are much more likely not to have registered in their new locality.
This notion of how well established a community is and the affect on turnout is of direct significance to inner city areas. These are the areas with the greatest tendency to have mobile populations. When elections come round, many people on the register have moved on and the new arrivals aren’t listed. No wonder official turn out is low.
Rather than turn out being a communications problem, it might just be a symptom of a more mobile, more aware public. Scrapping FPTP to make more votes count would note only encourage more people to turn out, it would also encourage parties to campaign in all constituencies, rather than just targeting the marginal seats. A closer contest in future elections and perhaps the opening up of an ideological gap between the parties however unlikely this may be in an era where most people are firmly in the centre ground of politics, could it is argued, quickly see a return to high turn outs.
Pursuing new communications strategies with the aim of raising voter turnout could very well prove to be a waste of time and effort.
Anyway, it was back to the books today for a bit more background reading. I’ve read odd chapters from all of the books that are listed in the ‘Reading – Current Research’ section on the right hand column. Most of it follows on, or fits in with, the review of the Politics UK book that I posted last Sunday and Monday.
Strangely in the stuff I read today there was no much about people being turned off by politics as such. Rather there seemed to be a greater emphasis on structural issues such as declining class differences and party identification which has resulted in ideological differences between parties becoming more difficult to identify.
The low turn outs of 2001 and 2005 seem generally to have been assigned to a belief that the result was a foregone conclusion in the first case and a desire to punish Labour but without any corresponding desire to elect the Conservatives in the centre.
The statistical analyses seem to indicate that class, education and gender have nothing to do with whether a person votes or not. The most significant factor appears to be age (the younger you are, the less likely to vote). But again this is not an issue of political apathy. Most young people it seems are very concerned about issues. We come back to the belief in the efficacy of the vote, especially in FPTP and to other factors which came up today for the first time. Young people who have moved away from home and have just started renting places are much more likely not to have registered in their new locality.
This notion of how well established a community is and the affect on turnout is of direct significance to inner city areas. These are the areas with the greatest tendency to have mobile populations. When elections come round, many people on the register have moved on and the new arrivals aren’t listed. No wonder official turn out is low.
Rather than turn out being a communications problem, it might just be a symptom of a more mobile, more aware public. Scrapping FPTP to make more votes count would note only encourage more people to turn out, it would also encourage parties to campaign in all constituencies, rather than just targeting the marginal seats. A closer contest in future elections and perhaps the opening up of an ideological gap between the parties however unlikely this may be in an era where most people are firmly in the centre ground of politics, could it is argued, quickly see a return to high turn outs.
Pursuing new communications strategies with the aim of raising voter turnout could very well prove to be a waste of time and effort.
Thursday 8 March 2007
Great Potential
Just got back from meeting up with Kevin Bonavia, an old schoold friend and currently Chair of the Young Laboour Lawyers. As always when we meet up my poor girlfriend had to listen to us drone on about politics for a couple of hours. Obviously we had to talk about last night's vote in the Commons on reforming the House of Lords. We disagree! But I won't go in to that because it's not what this blog is about.
I did, however, run the idea behind the reasearch I want to conduct past him. We talked baout new media technologies and he agreed, unsurprisingly, that they are a fantastic communications tool which undoubtedly will be used by politicians to communicate more directly with voters based on their specific behaviour. What the reaction will be among the public remains a mystery.
What was interesting was the fact that being a true politician Kevin was very concerned about the fact that the Conservatives seem to be ahead of Labour on the new media front. Are politicians more concerned with what their opponents are up to or what their constituents think?
I did, however, run the idea behind the reasearch I want to conduct past him. We talked baout new media technologies and he agreed, unsurprisingly, that they are a fantastic communications tool which undoubtedly will be used by politicians to communicate more directly with voters based on their specific behaviour. What the reaction will be among the public remains a mystery.
What was interesting was the fact that being a true politician Kevin was very concerned about the fact that the Conservatives seem to be ahead of Labour on the new media front. Are politicians more concerned with what their opponents are up to or what their constituents think?
Wednesday 7 March 2007
American Perspectives
Yesterday evening we had a guest lecturer, Nick DeLuca, at our lobbying and public affairs module. The general disuccion focused on lobbying with regards to global issues and international decision making bodies like the EU.
Inevitably though we also spoke about wider issues of politics and democracy. The interesting point regarding the use of new media to engage with people was a reference to the 2004 US Presidential elections in which both candidates were sending daily emails to between 2 and 3 million people.
The problem with this was that the emails tended to be quite general in content, a catch all attempt if you like. Of course three years down the line the technology to specifically target smaller segmented audiences is already much more sophisticated but it's also very expensive.
So are politicians going to be tempted in to finding ways to raise even more money to use these technologies? It's hard to believe they won't.
Anyway, it just seemed to tie in neatly with what I was talking to Karen about yesterday. There are lots of new technologies out there, lots of ways to track what people are interested in. They seem to offer all sorts of great potential to politics.
But will political communicators learn how best to use this potential? Or, at an even basic level, are they a realistic tool with which to try and target those who don't vote?
Inevitably though we also spoke about wider issues of politics and democracy. The interesting point regarding the use of new media to engage with people was a reference to the 2004 US Presidential elections in which both candidates were sending daily emails to between 2 and 3 million people.
The problem with this was that the emails tended to be quite general in content, a catch all attempt if you like. Of course three years down the line the technology to specifically target smaller segmented audiences is already much more sophisticated but it's also very expensive.
So are politicians going to be tempted in to finding ways to raise even more money to use these technologies? It's hard to believe they won't.
Anyway, it just seemed to tie in neatly with what I was talking to Karen about yesterday. There are lots of new technologies out there, lots of ways to track what people are interested in. They seem to offer all sorts of great potential to politics.
But will political communicators learn how best to use this potential? Or, at an even basic level, are they a realistic tool with which to try and target those who don't vote?
Tuesday 6 March 2007
Behavioural Targeting
Last night I met up for a quick beer with an old friend of mine, Karen Casey. She's been working in online marketing for a few years, since we left University I think. Anyway, she's just started a new job with Media Contacts, who happen to be clients of Propeller, the PR company where I work two days a week. As usual we had a rambling chat which took in crime in London, the desperate state of affairs at West Ham, the Picasso museum in Barcelona, and other friends having babies. More relevant to the purpose of this blog was a chat about behavioural targeting, using cookies to track what things people are interested in and then sending 'appropriate messages' to their PCs while they're online.
This provides obvious opportunities for political communications. Will it be something we see being used increasingly? I would imagine so. This despite the fact that there is a strong argument that using marketing and increasingly segmenting the public in to groups of 'customers' has been one of the main contributors to falling trust in politics. This is because the decisions of politicians affect everyone, not just their 'customers' and trying to make everyone your customer ineviatbly leads to confusion, apparent incompetence, and loss of trust.
This provides obvious opportunities for political communications. Will it be something we see being used increasingly? I would imagine so. This despite the fact that there is a strong argument that using marketing and increasingly segmenting the public in to groups of 'customers' has been one of the main contributors to falling trust in politics. This is because the decisions of politicians affect everyone, not just their 'customers' and trying to make everyone your customer ineviatbly leads to confusion, apparent incompetence, and loss of trust.
Monday 5 March 2007
Background Reading - Part Two
Anyway, where was I. Talking about the chapters in Politics UK that deal with the representative process and some general points about why participation in elections has decreased. Some of the themes raised yesterday seemed to have been echoed by John Major in his interview with The Observer which I have just posted.
Moving on from the reasons for declining participation, the Politics UK book goes on to suggest some possible solutions. These include making it physically easier to vote by holding elections over the weekend or on public holidays and increasing postal voting (something which has been done amid increasing controversy). There is also a suggestion of moving ballot boxes to more easily accessible areas such as shopping precincts.
The notion of introducing proportional representation in some form is also raised, thus making Parliament more representative of the nation. This idea has generally been rejected in the past on the basis that it leads to ineffectual and unaccountable government. Conversely though there is a much stronger tradition of consensus building in systems that operate PR potentially resulting in a greater percentage of people feeling that their views count in the legislative process. In a PR system, maybe people have less need to resort to pressure groups and direct action.
State funding for parties could also reduce their dependence on big business and wealthy individuals and therefore lead to a greater focus on the needs of ‘ordinary’ constituents.
All this basically provides a framework in which the research I intend to do can take place. It is just a general overall picture of the arguments surrounding the reasons for declining voter turnout, and whether or not it is something we should be concerned about. Clearly what matters most for the purpose of this project is whether political communication can play appositive role in reversing this trend, especially through new media technologies, or not.
Moving on from the reasons for declining participation, the Politics UK book goes on to suggest some possible solutions. These include making it physically easier to vote by holding elections over the weekend or on public holidays and increasing postal voting (something which has been done amid increasing controversy). There is also a suggestion of moving ballot boxes to more easily accessible areas such as shopping precincts.
The notion of introducing proportional representation in some form is also raised, thus making Parliament more representative of the nation. This idea has generally been rejected in the past on the basis that it leads to ineffectual and unaccountable government. Conversely though there is a much stronger tradition of consensus building in systems that operate PR potentially resulting in a greater percentage of people feeling that their views count in the legislative process. In a PR system, maybe people have less need to resort to pressure groups and direct action.
State funding for parties could also reduce their dependence on big business and wealthy individuals and therefore lead to a greater focus on the needs of ‘ordinary’ constituents.
All this basically provides a framework in which the research I intend to do can take place. It is just a general overall picture of the arguments surrounding the reasons for declining voter turnout, and whether or not it is something we should be concerned about. Clearly what matters most for the purpose of this project is whether political communication can play appositive role in reversing this trend, especially through new media technologies, or not.
Observer Interview With John Major
This is worth reading ...
He suffered at the hands of journalists; now former Prime Minister John Major talks candidly to a distinguished political writer about his fears for the press and his anger at the Blair media machine
Julia Langdon
Sunday March 4, 2007
The Observer
John Major's view of the world these days is stunning. Ten years after he lost office, the former Prime Minister looks down from an apartment that offers a panorama akin to the London Eye's. He makes a practised joke about being able to keep an eye on the Houses of Parliament, MI6, the Archbishop of Canterbury - look, in tiny little Lambeth Palace way down there - and all without having to leave his imposing drawing room. Is his apartment higher than that of his old friend Jeffrey Archer, whose penthouse is also within sight? Yes, he says firmly, with a speed that suggests he has already considered the matter.
So here he is, 10 years out of office, back in his native Lambeth where his political journey started more than 40 years ago. And there does seem to be something of a rather obvious metaphor here, not just about how much he has gone up in the world since he first stood, at 21, on a soapbox in Brixton market, but about how he has risen above all that he used to know and deal with: the machinery of government and state and church, the panoply of powers he once wielded, the grubby business of politics, and, yes, how to handle the media. He has done this largely by steering clear of comment of any kind. He rarely gives interviews and he emphasises several times during our conversation that he is not in politics any more, that he has moved on.
However, he has agreed to talk about the nature of the press during his term of office and as it is today, and although he insists that what he has to say is not prompted by the bruising coverage he has received over the years, there is more than a trace of bitterness in his remarks.
He has an agenda for our interview. I had been asked to propose in advance the questions he might address and he has evidently given considerable thought to his response. He wishes to make a number of points about what he sees as the way forward for newspapers and the broadcast media. He wants the press to accept a voluntary, independently supervised code of conduct, and he wistfully admits mistakes in dealing with the press when he was Prime Minister, showing a previously unseen self-confidence.
'I don't think I handled the press very well,' he says now. 'It's difficult to be clear why. I thought it was fairly improper to get too close. I'm rather a puritan in this respect. I thought it was my job to deal with policy and the press's job to report it, and I blithely assumed it was proper to proceed on that basis.' He thinks it would have been wrong to have used individuals in the press, or personal friendships, to try to influence the way his government's activities were reported, and he did not do so. I can vouch for him on this score: when he was first elected as an MP in 1979 and I was the political correspondent of the Guardian, we spoke often in the corridors. We got to know each other well and talked frankly about politics. When he became Prime Minister I was invited to Sunday lunch at Chequers - I knew he was acknowledging that I had spotted him as a politician who could go places, but our professional friendship did not survive.
He was deeply hurt by the press he received and quite uncomprehending of it. When I was political editor of the Sunday Telegraph I received a call from his then press secretary, the current Cabinet Secretary Sir Gus O'Donnell, asking me to explain why a Conservative newspaper was being so beastly to a Conservative Prime Minister. I had written a front-page story reporting that Margaret Thatcher had been raging about what a mistake she had made in supporting him as her successor - 'He is grey. He has no ideas'. All I could answer was that I was accurately reporting her words.
Now Major agrees - 'absolutely!' - that he read the newspapers too assiduously when he arrived at 10 Downing Street. 'I was wrong. I shouldn't have read the papers so much.' He denies that he regularly stayed up at night, nervously awaiting the arrival of the first editions - 'all that stuff was overdone' - and, in his defence, says that the volatile political situation he inherited, with his government effectively in a minority on the European issue, meant that newspapers had influence on Conservative backbench opinion, to which he had to pay regard. 'The most extraordinary stories were appearing daily and one did need to know what they were. That said, I should have ignored them more than I did.' Defensively, he adds: 'It didn't affect policy.'
He is 63 and doesn't look much older than one recalls him in office. He seems glossier - he is reputed to be earning £30,000 a pop for after-dinner speeches - although when he sits down, the yellow socks don't seem quite right. The big smile is the same, but there is an assurance that he used to lack. He is harder; scrupulously polite, but not interested in political gossip as he once was. When she was Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher had a handshake that discouraged loitering and propelled guests past her at top speed; Major has developed a similar conversational skill. He uses it to get swiftly down to business with his proposal for a code of conduct. The previous week, in a letter he wrote to the Times about the paparazzi pursuit of Prince William's girlfriend, Kate Middleton, he had described the idea that existing legislation could be tightened to protect individuals in such circumstances as 'sheer bunkum'. Proprietors and editors should agree not to publish photographs without the consent of the subject, he wrote, commending Rupert Murdoch for doing so. 'Whatever happened to common decency?' he asked.
Now, he says: 'I have been reading the press more regularly than others over 50 years and it seems to me that there are things that have changed in the press that have changed its character.' He is reading from prepared notes. He believes the existence of too many national newspapers has led to greater competition for sales, which has produced sensationalism and thus reduced their overall standard. I mentioned that there are not more newspapers now, but Major insisted there were still too many.
He thinks 24-hour news channels have made the straightforward reporting of facts into what he calls 'stale buns' for a TV audience that has been listening to the same news for 18 hours, and that consequently newspapers contain less news and more comment. His third point is that newspapers are much more politically labelled than previously, that it is difficult to buy a paper that does not represent a political point of view, and that while this had always been the case in the editorial and comment columns it is now spilling over into news reporting. In his opinion, all of this, plus the internet and the declining readership of newspapers, means a tremendous scramble for sales that ignites a pressure for sensationalism. '"Government gets things right" does not encourage sales. "Government makes another blunder" does encourage sales, so there's a commercial imperative that pushes sensationalism.'
He has other gripes. He doesn't think that journalists check their facts in the manner they once did. He worries about the degree of unattributable comment used as though it were fact. And then there is the harassment of celebrities, people such as Kate Middleton, who are targeted by paparazzi hanging around outside restaurants on the off-chance of a photograph they can sell.
'People are in the public eye but they do have a right to go about their normal business without harassment. This could be stopped by proprietors.' It would, he thinks, do wonders for the prestige of the press. We have an amusing diversion about Neil Kinnock, when Labour Party leader, taking a swipe with a rolled-up newspaper at a diner who had provoked him in an Indian restaurant. 'I rather like Neil Kinnock,' Major says, then collects himself and adds quickly: 'Anyway, he shouldn't hit people over the head in restaurants', and then laughingly refers to John Prescott in Tony Blair's words 'just being John' when he lashed back at a voter who threw an egg at him.
He pays tribute to some photographers - 'thoroughly decent guys' - who would respect his wish not to be pictured but bewails the 'mob mentality' that can take over. He goes on: 'There is something distasteful about those little boxes at the bottom of stories which say: "If you have a story about a celebrity please contact us." What sort of society does that create? Is it in the best traditions of journalism? I think not.'
It is an issue he addressed in government. 'I looked at whether a form of privacy law would be practicable and I reached the conclusion that it wouldn't. I couldn't see how you could frame a law which would protect traditional press freedom and also protect the general public ...' (The public's right to know? I asked. 'Yes'). 'That raises the question of whether self-regulation is working as well as it could, and I don't know that there are many people who think it is.'
The answer, he believes, could lie in a new voluntary code of conduct - setting out, for example, the right to the correction of a newspaper error that occupies the same space and page and uses the same typeface as the mistake - which would be policed by an appointed independent regulator whose remit the press would accept. The Press Complaints Commission, chaired by his own former press secretary, Sir Christopher Meyer, could not do this, he says, because there are too many newspapers represented among the commission's members. He dismisses the ombudsman system that some newspapers have developed.
The relationship between the media, Parliament and the press is a unique one, he says. 'I am trying to make sure that because we all believe in the freedom of the press - and I genuinely do believe in it - we have to protect that freedom from becoming licence. It could be done by agreement if the press agrees a code of conduct and agrees to abide by it - and I would prefer to avoid legislation.'
No, he has not discussed these ideas with his friend Meyer, or anyone else, and no, he is not putting them forward now because of the mauling he underwent from the press, nor even because of the revelation of his love affair with Edwina Currie. Her name is not mentioned, but I allude directly to this. He is aggravated. 'It's 10 years on!' he says. 'My personal experiences were a long way ago. I like the best of the British press. The best of the British press is very good. I dislike the fact that it's let down by the worst of the British press. The press could choose to do this [agree a code of conduct] if the press wished to do so.
'I am assuming that the best of the people in the press wish the press to have a very high reputation and wish to ensure that those who wish to misbehave are not able to do so. I am assuming the press understand the point about commercial imperatives moving them towards sensationalism and wish to protect the reputation of their newspapers. An agreement of this sort to regulate is a step towards doing that.'
So what about Tony Blair's approach to the media? Does he have sympathy with the approach the new government adopted after he was turfed out in 1997? He is incandescent. 'None whatever!' He believes New Labour's policy of replacing career civil servants in the public information service with political partisans was 'entirely improper'.
The Blair government politicised press relations within the government and in such a way that those whose words were previously unquestionably accepted could no longer be believed without corroboration. 'I think that was largely because of the way they spun the news in the late 1990s. It was wrong, completely wrong. It is true that we might have run into less trouble if I had had a press service that was not Civil Service, but it is more important for the integrity of government information to be upheld.'
He is similarly angry about the 'really distasteful' spectacle of MPs with pagers being given a political line to take. 'The sight of allegedly sophisticated politicians parroting complete tripe trivialises and demeans government and it has to be stopped. It's played a significant part in public disillusionment with politics and has led to the absurd situation where more people vote for Strictly Come Dancing than voted in the general election.' (Not quite, but we take the point.) 'It's very bad for democracy. But I'm bound to say I sat back when I saw what they began to do in 1997 and asked myself why the press accepted it. If you were favoured you got stories; if not you were frozen out and, because [Labour] had a big majority, the press accepted what was going on. I was deeply disappointed in that.'
He was horrified at the way New Labour sought to court the newspapers. It would have been 'absolutely inconceivable' that he might have accepted a gold-embossed invitation from News International to fly to any of their conferences. 'I think it's demeaning for elected Prime Ministers to keep in with unelected men who happen to be proprietors.' Surprisingly, he turns out not to be gratified by the negative press that Tony Blair receives now. He doesn't seek to encourage contempt for politicians among the electorate and thinks while the press has now realised that even Labour ministers have feet of clay, criticism of them has nonetheless swung too far.
Does he think there is a difference between the contemporary assessment of a political situation by the press and the historical analysis? OK, it's an easy question and the triumphant answer from a politician whose reputation in office was so tarnished is a resounding positive. He came into office in 1990 with three problems: the Tories had been in office for 11 years and were beginning to be regarded as 'stale' by the press; Europe; and what he calls 'a series of individual incidents'.
'There was a time when the Conservative Party went quite mad over Europe,' he says. Only two disputes in the party's history remotely compared: the reform of the Corn Laws in the 1840s and the row over protectionism in the early 1900s. As for the 'individual incidents', it turns out he is describing the sex scandals that beset his administration, unfortunately timed after he had made an appeal for 'back to basics' at his party's annual conference. The 'basics' he had in mind - education, family values, apple pie, etc - were not the ones for which his MPs became celebrated.
What now of the historical perspective of those drear days? What was the most successful economic period in the last 30 years and which government had the lowest tax proportion in the last 25? You've guessed? The answer, says the former PM (1990-97) and former Chancellor (1989-90) was 1992-1997. Who says so? According to Major's office it was Peter Sinclair, professor of economics at Birmingham University.
The figures? November 1990: interest rates 14 per cent; inflation 9.7 per cent; growth 0.5 per cent and falling. May 1997: interest rates 6 per cent; inflation 2.6 per cent; growth 3.5 per cent and rising. Says the architect of this success: 'When you look at things in perspective, you see reality rather than current dramas. It takes a long time. You need to wait for the academics and the historians.' He says commentators are now beginning to refer to 'the boom that began in the 80s' and that Brown is well aware of the debt he owes.
Major believes that Brown won't be in office for long if he does take over. He is extremely reluctant to be drawn on David Cameron's leadership of the Conservative party beyond saying, somewhat sparingly: 'I think he is very able and I think he will be Prime Minister.' As for New Labour: 'It has lost Labour's soul,' he says. 'It had a soul and a heart. I grew up in Brixton, with "old" Labour in Lambeth. I disagreed with them, but I admired what they stood for.'
He can't see them out of the window though, not now he's come up in the world. Brixton is on the other side of the building and he doesn't have a window facing that way.
• A longer version of this article appears in the British Journalism Review, Vol 18 Number 1, available from SAGE Publications, 1 Oliver's Yard, 55 City Road, London EC1Y 1SP (telephone 020 7324 8703; or email subscription@sagepub.
Major after No 10
John Major is a member of the Conservative Advisory Council, and the European advisory board of Carlyle Group; chairman of the European Advisory Council and Emerson Electric Co; senior adviser to Credit Suisse First Boston; chairman of Ditchley council; member of the InterAction Council, Tokyo; president of the Cricket Charitable Trust and Asthma UK.
Premiers on the press
I read a great number of press reports and find comfort in the fact that they are nearly always conflicting.
Harold Macmillan, 1957-63
As to freedom of the press, why should any man be allowed to buy a printing press and be allowed to disseminate pernicious opinions calculated to embarrass the government?
Winston Churchill, 1940-45, 1951-55
Christianity of course - but why journalism?
AJ Balfour, 1902-5
The press lives on disaster.
Clement Attlee, 1945-51
A lie can be halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on.
James Callaghan, 1976-79
He suffered at the hands of journalists; now former Prime Minister John Major talks candidly to a distinguished political writer about his fears for the press and his anger at the Blair media machine
Julia Langdon
Sunday March 4, 2007
The Observer
John Major's view of the world these days is stunning. Ten years after he lost office, the former Prime Minister looks down from an apartment that offers a panorama akin to the London Eye's. He makes a practised joke about being able to keep an eye on the Houses of Parliament, MI6, the Archbishop of Canterbury - look, in tiny little Lambeth Palace way down there - and all without having to leave his imposing drawing room. Is his apartment higher than that of his old friend Jeffrey Archer, whose penthouse is also within sight? Yes, he says firmly, with a speed that suggests he has already considered the matter.
So here he is, 10 years out of office, back in his native Lambeth where his political journey started more than 40 years ago. And there does seem to be something of a rather obvious metaphor here, not just about how much he has gone up in the world since he first stood, at 21, on a soapbox in Brixton market, but about how he has risen above all that he used to know and deal with: the machinery of government and state and church, the panoply of powers he once wielded, the grubby business of politics, and, yes, how to handle the media. He has done this largely by steering clear of comment of any kind. He rarely gives interviews and he emphasises several times during our conversation that he is not in politics any more, that he has moved on.
However, he has agreed to talk about the nature of the press during his term of office and as it is today, and although he insists that what he has to say is not prompted by the bruising coverage he has received over the years, there is more than a trace of bitterness in his remarks.
He has an agenda for our interview. I had been asked to propose in advance the questions he might address and he has evidently given considerable thought to his response. He wishes to make a number of points about what he sees as the way forward for newspapers and the broadcast media. He wants the press to accept a voluntary, independently supervised code of conduct, and he wistfully admits mistakes in dealing with the press when he was Prime Minister, showing a previously unseen self-confidence.
'I don't think I handled the press very well,' he says now. 'It's difficult to be clear why. I thought it was fairly improper to get too close. I'm rather a puritan in this respect. I thought it was my job to deal with policy and the press's job to report it, and I blithely assumed it was proper to proceed on that basis.' He thinks it would have been wrong to have used individuals in the press, or personal friendships, to try to influence the way his government's activities were reported, and he did not do so. I can vouch for him on this score: when he was first elected as an MP in 1979 and I was the political correspondent of the Guardian, we spoke often in the corridors. We got to know each other well and talked frankly about politics. When he became Prime Minister I was invited to Sunday lunch at Chequers - I knew he was acknowledging that I had spotted him as a politician who could go places, but our professional friendship did not survive.
He was deeply hurt by the press he received and quite uncomprehending of it. When I was political editor of the Sunday Telegraph I received a call from his then press secretary, the current Cabinet Secretary Sir Gus O'Donnell, asking me to explain why a Conservative newspaper was being so beastly to a Conservative Prime Minister. I had written a front-page story reporting that Margaret Thatcher had been raging about what a mistake she had made in supporting him as her successor - 'He is grey. He has no ideas'. All I could answer was that I was accurately reporting her words.
Now Major agrees - 'absolutely!' - that he read the newspapers too assiduously when he arrived at 10 Downing Street. 'I was wrong. I shouldn't have read the papers so much.' He denies that he regularly stayed up at night, nervously awaiting the arrival of the first editions - 'all that stuff was overdone' - and, in his defence, says that the volatile political situation he inherited, with his government effectively in a minority on the European issue, meant that newspapers had influence on Conservative backbench opinion, to which he had to pay regard. 'The most extraordinary stories were appearing daily and one did need to know what they were. That said, I should have ignored them more than I did.' Defensively, he adds: 'It didn't affect policy.'
He is 63 and doesn't look much older than one recalls him in office. He seems glossier - he is reputed to be earning £30,000 a pop for after-dinner speeches - although when he sits down, the yellow socks don't seem quite right. The big smile is the same, but there is an assurance that he used to lack. He is harder; scrupulously polite, but not interested in political gossip as he once was. When she was Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher had a handshake that discouraged loitering and propelled guests past her at top speed; Major has developed a similar conversational skill. He uses it to get swiftly down to business with his proposal for a code of conduct. The previous week, in a letter he wrote to the Times about the paparazzi pursuit of Prince William's girlfriend, Kate Middleton, he had described the idea that existing legislation could be tightened to protect individuals in such circumstances as 'sheer bunkum'. Proprietors and editors should agree not to publish photographs without the consent of the subject, he wrote, commending Rupert Murdoch for doing so. 'Whatever happened to common decency?' he asked.
Now, he says: 'I have been reading the press more regularly than others over 50 years and it seems to me that there are things that have changed in the press that have changed its character.' He is reading from prepared notes. He believes the existence of too many national newspapers has led to greater competition for sales, which has produced sensationalism and thus reduced their overall standard. I mentioned that there are not more newspapers now, but Major insisted there were still too many.
He thinks 24-hour news channels have made the straightforward reporting of facts into what he calls 'stale buns' for a TV audience that has been listening to the same news for 18 hours, and that consequently newspapers contain less news and more comment. His third point is that newspapers are much more politically labelled than previously, that it is difficult to buy a paper that does not represent a political point of view, and that while this had always been the case in the editorial and comment columns it is now spilling over into news reporting. In his opinion, all of this, plus the internet and the declining readership of newspapers, means a tremendous scramble for sales that ignites a pressure for sensationalism. '"Government gets things right" does not encourage sales. "Government makes another blunder" does encourage sales, so there's a commercial imperative that pushes sensationalism.'
He has other gripes. He doesn't think that journalists check their facts in the manner they once did. He worries about the degree of unattributable comment used as though it were fact. And then there is the harassment of celebrities, people such as Kate Middleton, who are targeted by paparazzi hanging around outside restaurants on the off-chance of a photograph they can sell.
'People are in the public eye but they do have a right to go about their normal business without harassment. This could be stopped by proprietors.' It would, he thinks, do wonders for the prestige of the press. We have an amusing diversion about Neil Kinnock, when Labour Party leader, taking a swipe with a rolled-up newspaper at a diner who had provoked him in an Indian restaurant. 'I rather like Neil Kinnock,' Major says, then collects himself and adds quickly: 'Anyway, he shouldn't hit people over the head in restaurants', and then laughingly refers to John Prescott in Tony Blair's words 'just being John' when he lashed back at a voter who threw an egg at him.
He pays tribute to some photographers - 'thoroughly decent guys' - who would respect his wish not to be pictured but bewails the 'mob mentality' that can take over. He goes on: 'There is something distasteful about those little boxes at the bottom of stories which say: "If you have a story about a celebrity please contact us." What sort of society does that create? Is it in the best traditions of journalism? I think not.'
It is an issue he addressed in government. 'I looked at whether a form of privacy law would be practicable and I reached the conclusion that it wouldn't. I couldn't see how you could frame a law which would protect traditional press freedom and also protect the general public ...' (The public's right to know? I asked. 'Yes'). 'That raises the question of whether self-regulation is working as well as it could, and I don't know that there are many people who think it is.'
The answer, he believes, could lie in a new voluntary code of conduct - setting out, for example, the right to the correction of a newspaper error that occupies the same space and page and uses the same typeface as the mistake - which would be policed by an appointed independent regulator whose remit the press would accept. The Press Complaints Commission, chaired by his own former press secretary, Sir Christopher Meyer, could not do this, he says, because there are too many newspapers represented among the commission's members. He dismisses the ombudsman system that some newspapers have developed.
The relationship between the media, Parliament and the press is a unique one, he says. 'I am trying to make sure that because we all believe in the freedom of the press - and I genuinely do believe in it - we have to protect that freedom from becoming licence. It could be done by agreement if the press agrees a code of conduct and agrees to abide by it - and I would prefer to avoid legislation.'
No, he has not discussed these ideas with his friend Meyer, or anyone else, and no, he is not putting them forward now because of the mauling he underwent from the press, nor even because of the revelation of his love affair with Edwina Currie. Her name is not mentioned, but I allude directly to this. He is aggravated. 'It's 10 years on!' he says. 'My personal experiences were a long way ago. I like the best of the British press. The best of the British press is very good. I dislike the fact that it's let down by the worst of the British press. The press could choose to do this [agree a code of conduct] if the press wished to do so.
'I am assuming that the best of the people in the press wish the press to have a very high reputation and wish to ensure that those who wish to misbehave are not able to do so. I am assuming the press understand the point about commercial imperatives moving them towards sensationalism and wish to protect the reputation of their newspapers. An agreement of this sort to regulate is a step towards doing that.'
So what about Tony Blair's approach to the media? Does he have sympathy with the approach the new government adopted after he was turfed out in 1997? He is incandescent. 'None whatever!' He believes New Labour's policy of replacing career civil servants in the public information service with political partisans was 'entirely improper'.
The Blair government politicised press relations within the government and in such a way that those whose words were previously unquestionably accepted could no longer be believed without corroboration. 'I think that was largely because of the way they spun the news in the late 1990s. It was wrong, completely wrong. It is true that we might have run into less trouble if I had had a press service that was not Civil Service, but it is more important for the integrity of government information to be upheld.'
He is similarly angry about the 'really distasteful' spectacle of MPs with pagers being given a political line to take. 'The sight of allegedly sophisticated politicians parroting complete tripe trivialises and demeans government and it has to be stopped. It's played a significant part in public disillusionment with politics and has led to the absurd situation where more people vote for Strictly Come Dancing than voted in the general election.' (Not quite, but we take the point.) 'It's very bad for democracy. But I'm bound to say I sat back when I saw what they began to do in 1997 and asked myself why the press accepted it. If you were favoured you got stories; if not you were frozen out and, because [Labour] had a big majority, the press accepted what was going on. I was deeply disappointed in that.'
He was horrified at the way New Labour sought to court the newspapers. It would have been 'absolutely inconceivable' that he might have accepted a gold-embossed invitation from News International to fly to any of their conferences. 'I think it's demeaning for elected Prime Ministers to keep in with unelected men who happen to be proprietors.' Surprisingly, he turns out not to be gratified by the negative press that Tony Blair receives now. He doesn't seek to encourage contempt for politicians among the electorate and thinks while the press has now realised that even Labour ministers have feet of clay, criticism of them has nonetheless swung too far.
Does he think there is a difference between the contemporary assessment of a political situation by the press and the historical analysis? OK, it's an easy question and the triumphant answer from a politician whose reputation in office was so tarnished is a resounding positive. He came into office in 1990 with three problems: the Tories had been in office for 11 years and were beginning to be regarded as 'stale' by the press; Europe; and what he calls 'a series of individual incidents'.
'There was a time when the Conservative Party went quite mad over Europe,' he says. Only two disputes in the party's history remotely compared: the reform of the Corn Laws in the 1840s and the row over protectionism in the early 1900s. As for the 'individual incidents', it turns out he is describing the sex scandals that beset his administration, unfortunately timed after he had made an appeal for 'back to basics' at his party's annual conference. The 'basics' he had in mind - education, family values, apple pie, etc - were not the ones for which his MPs became celebrated.
What now of the historical perspective of those drear days? What was the most successful economic period in the last 30 years and which government had the lowest tax proportion in the last 25? You've guessed? The answer, says the former PM (1990-97) and former Chancellor (1989-90) was 1992-1997. Who says so? According to Major's office it was Peter Sinclair, professor of economics at Birmingham University.
The figures? November 1990: interest rates 14 per cent; inflation 9.7 per cent; growth 0.5 per cent and falling. May 1997: interest rates 6 per cent; inflation 2.6 per cent; growth 3.5 per cent and rising. Says the architect of this success: 'When you look at things in perspective, you see reality rather than current dramas. It takes a long time. You need to wait for the academics and the historians.' He says commentators are now beginning to refer to 'the boom that began in the 80s' and that Brown is well aware of the debt he owes.
Major believes that Brown won't be in office for long if he does take over. He is extremely reluctant to be drawn on David Cameron's leadership of the Conservative party beyond saying, somewhat sparingly: 'I think he is very able and I think he will be Prime Minister.' As for New Labour: 'It has lost Labour's soul,' he says. 'It had a soul and a heart. I grew up in Brixton, with "old" Labour in Lambeth. I disagreed with them, but I admired what they stood for.'
He can't see them out of the window though, not now he's come up in the world. Brixton is on the other side of the building and he doesn't have a window facing that way.
• A longer version of this article appears in the British Journalism Review, Vol 18 Number 1, available from SAGE Publications, 1 Oliver's Yard, 55 City Road, London EC1Y 1SP (telephone 020 7324 8703; or email subscription@sagepub.
Major after No 10
John Major is a member of the Conservative Advisory Council, and the European advisory board of Carlyle Group; chairman of the European Advisory Council and Emerson Electric Co; senior adviser to Credit Suisse First Boston; chairman of Ditchley council; member of the InterAction Council, Tokyo; president of the Cricket Charitable Trust and Asthma UK.
Premiers on the press
I read a great number of press reports and find comfort in the fact that they are nearly always conflicting.
Harold Macmillan, 1957-63
As to freedom of the press, why should any man be allowed to buy a printing press and be allowed to disseminate pernicious opinions calculated to embarrass the government?
Winston Churchill, 1940-45, 1951-55
Christianity of course - but why journalism?
AJ Balfour, 1902-5
The press lives on disaster.
Clement Attlee, 1945-51
A lie can be halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on.
James Callaghan, 1976-79
Sunday 4 March 2007
Background Reading
Seeing as it was such a lovely day today I decided to spend the afternoon doing a little bit of background reading. I went through the seven chapters dealing with the representative process that are in the fifth edition of ‘Politics UK’, edited by Bill Jones and published by Pearson Longman in 2004.
This is basically an A-level textbook so it’s not the most detailed analysis but I think it’s still a good place to start in terms of setting the context for examining whether new media can help increase participation in voting.
As I said yesterday the first thing to do is gain some understanding of why participation is declining and also why participation in certain urban and economically disadvantaged areas is particularly low.
The fact that it’s a textbook means that Politics UK doesn’t really go into the subject in enough detail to tackle these particular issues. However, it does give us some good general pointers as to why turnout in elections is declining as well as some thoughts on how these might be addressed and whether or not they represent a serious threat to democratic life.
Firstly, some thoughts on why turnout is declining. Increasing complexity of life in general means politics is now a full time profession only open to those who are devoted to it from an early age. This has reduced the variety of backgrounds for MPs making it appear less representative and more remote from voters.
The increasing complexity of society and consequent need to use more sophisticated campaigning tools including professional public relations and advertising agencies requires massive resources. This has made political parties much more dependent on business interests and increased the general suspicion that big companies or wealthy individuals have excessive influence. This book was published in 2004 so there is no reference to the current ‘cash-for-honours’ scandal which would seem to back this point up.
Television has also been singled out as a reason for declining participation. As our most predominant source of information for many years, subject to the current challenge from the internet, it has resulted in a nig squeeze on the number of words being used. Time is short on TV so items have to be dealt with quickly. People are not given enough time to explain their points and there is no time for background information. News is therefore reduced to sound bites and is contextualised according to already existent prejudices. This has made leadership figures central and the local constituency party appear irrelevant thus further increasing the apparent distance between voters and politicians. TV has also contributed to the creation of the ‘permanent campaign’ with politicians trying desperately to set the news agenda. This again has led to a certain amount of fatigue setting in among the public.
Additional problems relating to the media include the fact that it’s now a global business with a primary interest to make money. This has contributed to increasing trivialisation and focus on scandal and crime making politicians seem more corrupt and less effective than may in fact be the case. This is a particularly interesting point as the apparent openness of the internet and the possibility of engaging in direct conversation could in theory lead to a more realistic impression of what politicians get up to being created among the public.
Interestingly in Chapter 10, Bill Jones mentions the advent of digital TV as a potential problem by highlighting the fact that the company that first provides the necessary technology to be able to view digital TV will be able to control what we watch. The recent, and ongoing spat between Sky and Virgin, could be seen as the first stages of this idea coming through to fruition. Increasing commercialisation may mean more channels but it may also mean more mediocrity and less space for divergent views. This also ties in with the issues of political parties being dependent on big business with the relationship between the Murdoch empire and the Labour party under scrutiny especially in view of the current review of the former’s investment in ITV about to get underway. Anyway, the power of television and its commercialisation it seems has trivialised politics and politicians and made the entire political process appear less relevant.
The selection process of MPs and the influence of constituency parties in these selections. As local parties tend to be made up of small numbers of people the candidates end up reflecting their own narrow interests rather than that of the entire community making it difficult for local people to feel any connection with their MP.
Finally, Michael Moran in Chapter 13 makes the argument that decreasing participation in elections may not necessarily be a bad thing. Increasing levels of prosperity and education have led to many people developing more specialised interests. More and more people have also become increasingly aware of other ways in which they can affect the political process particularly through pressure groups and direct action. There is much greater awareness that you do not need to wait for an election to make your point and even politicians themselves are ever more reliant on information from special interest groups, lobbying organisations, focus groups etc in formulating policy. Democracy in the UK it can be argued is actually becoming more sophisticated and the need for voting declining. Moran also argues that we should not be too despondent about falling party memberships. He argues that membership levels in the 1950s were not a result of particular commitment but because life in the UK then was so sad that there was nothing more exciting to do than attend the local conservative party dinner dance. Nowadays we’ve got a lot more things to get involved with and if there is a particular issue which concerns us we can get involved in an organisation that deals specifically with that issue. The huge increase in membership of such organisations is a clear indication that the vast majority of people in the UK are still politically engaged.
Anyway, it looks like I’ve been droning on for a bit so I’ll shut up now and carry on tomorrow (time permitting)
This is basically an A-level textbook so it’s not the most detailed analysis but I think it’s still a good place to start in terms of setting the context for examining whether new media can help increase participation in voting.
As I said yesterday the first thing to do is gain some understanding of why participation is declining and also why participation in certain urban and economically disadvantaged areas is particularly low.
The fact that it’s a textbook means that Politics UK doesn’t really go into the subject in enough detail to tackle these particular issues. However, it does give us some good general pointers as to why turnout in elections is declining as well as some thoughts on how these might be addressed and whether or not they represent a serious threat to democratic life.
Firstly, some thoughts on why turnout is declining. Increasing complexity of life in general means politics is now a full time profession only open to those who are devoted to it from an early age. This has reduced the variety of backgrounds for MPs making it appear less representative and more remote from voters.
The increasing complexity of society and consequent need to use more sophisticated campaigning tools including professional public relations and advertising agencies requires massive resources. This has made political parties much more dependent on business interests and increased the general suspicion that big companies or wealthy individuals have excessive influence. This book was published in 2004 so there is no reference to the current ‘cash-for-honours’ scandal which would seem to back this point up.
Television has also been singled out as a reason for declining participation. As our most predominant source of information for many years, subject to the current challenge from the internet, it has resulted in a nig squeeze on the number of words being used. Time is short on TV so items have to be dealt with quickly. People are not given enough time to explain their points and there is no time for background information. News is therefore reduced to sound bites and is contextualised according to already existent prejudices. This has made leadership figures central and the local constituency party appear irrelevant thus further increasing the apparent distance between voters and politicians. TV has also contributed to the creation of the ‘permanent campaign’ with politicians trying desperately to set the news agenda. This again has led to a certain amount of fatigue setting in among the public.
Additional problems relating to the media include the fact that it’s now a global business with a primary interest to make money. This has contributed to increasing trivialisation and focus on scandal and crime making politicians seem more corrupt and less effective than may in fact be the case. This is a particularly interesting point as the apparent openness of the internet and the possibility of engaging in direct conversation could in theory lead to a more realistic impression of what politicians get up to being created among the public.
Interestingly in Chapter 10, Bill Jones mentions the advent of digital TV as a potential problem by highlighting the fact that the company that first provides the necessary technology to be able to view digital TV will be able to control what we watch. The recent, and ongoing spat between Sky and Virgin, could be seen as the first stages of this idea coming through to fruition. Increasing commercialisation may mean more channels but it may also mean more mediocrity and less space for divergent views. This also ties in with the issues of political parties being dependent on big business with the relationship between the Murdoch empire and the Labour party under scrutiny especially in view of the current review of the former’s investment in ITV about to get underway. Anyway, the power of television and its commercialisation it seems has trivialised politics and politicians and made the entire political process appear less relevant.
The selection process of MPs and the influence of constituency parties in these selections. As local parties tend to be made up of small numbers of people the candidates end up reflecting their own narrow interests rather than that of the entire community making it difficult for local people to feel any connection with their MP.
Finally, Michael Moran in Chapter 13 makes the argument that decreasing participation in elections may not necessarily be a bad thing. Increasing levels of prosperity and education have led to many people developing more specialised interests. More and more people have also become increasingly aware of other ways in which they can affect the political process particularly through pressure groups and direct action. There is much greater awareness that you do not need to wait for an election to make your point and even politicians themselves are ever more reliant on information from special interest groups, lobbying organisations, focus groups etc in formulating policy. Democracy in the UK it can be argued is actually becoming more sophisticated and the need for voting declining. Moran also argues that we should not be too despondent about falling party memberships. He argues that membership levels in the 1950s were not a result of particular commitment but because life in the UK then was so sad that there was nothing more exciting to do than attend the local conservative party dinner dance. Nowadays we’ve got a lot more things to get involved with and if there is a particular issue which concerns us we can get involved in an organisation that deals specifically with that issue. The huge increase in membership of such organisations is a clear indication that the vast majority of people in the UK are still politically engaged.
Anyway, it looks like I’ve been droning on for a bit so I’ll shut up now and carry on tomorrow (time permitting)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
