Election Unspun: Why Politicians Can't Tell the Truth 

Channel 4, 18 April 2005

This Dispatches programme was billed as ‘reporter Peter Oborne going beneath the surface of the election campaign to look at the state of British democracy - arguing that in 2005 we are witnessing the first fully-fledged anti-democratic General Election’. Actually the programme did nothing of the sort, and was remarkably silent on the 2005 election. Instead, the broadcast relied on archive footage (only some of which was worth watching again), and a selection of pundits and talking heads who interpreted the importance of political marketing and spin for the watching public.

Lord Bell (Tim Bell of Saatchi & Saatchi, and latterly Chime Communications) was given ample space to elaborate his version of recent British political history.  Unsurprisingly Thatcher’s favourite spin doctor offered a rather self-serving account of his re-make of the Iron Lady from ‘Maggie Thatcher Milk Snatcher’ into a ‘cost conscious housewife’, thereby positioning her as a ‘likeable and credible’ candidate for prime minister.  Bell explained that the Tories targeted women (because Thatcher was a woman…my these spin doctors are fiendishly clever), including the disaffected wives of trade unionists (clearly women couldn’t themselves be trade unionists in this worldview) who were fed up after long periods of industrial unrest. The Tories also appealed to C2’s, those skilled and semi-skilled workers who traditionally supported Labour. 

Clearly the tactic was to link Labour to the ‘filthy socialist-communist unions’ as one vox-pop from the archive footage declared. Jim Callaghan was shown vowing that he would ‘not be packaged like cornflakes’ while Bell scoffed at the Labour party’s fear that modern marketing would somehow contaminate their philosophical purity.  Prof. Dennis Kavamagh gave a rather more pithy and accurate account of electioneering in 1979 – it represented the introduction, on a grand scale, of negative campaigning in British elections.

The film then moved on to the 1983 election, and footage from Labour’s sometimes shambolic campaign was used to confirm the thesis that presentation was now all in modern politics. This message was fully embraced by Neil Kinnock and his media advisors, notably Peter Mandelson. The adoption of the Red Rose as the party logo was thought by the then leader to have brought an élan to the campaign in 1987. The party used focus groups for the first time to hone messages and refine the profile of Kinnock. While we were told that all the Labour party shadow marketing group felt this was very effective the British media (especially the press) and the electorate clearly thought otherwise.

Now the analysis suggested that changing the image of the party was not enough – what was required was a change of policy. The Labour party would have to move to the right to attract the swing voters necessary to win power. At this point in the programme the narrative is rudely interrupted by the Poll Tax riots, which demonstrated the existence of real public opinion and reminded the political elite that mass demonstration and mobilization was still possible. Bell insisted that this policy in the ’87 Tory manifesto was never discussed by the pollsters. Naturally.

The pollsters were again confounded when Labour’s ‘slick slick click click’ campaign in 1992, which portrayed Kinnock as the leader-in-waiting, came unstuck against homespun John Major on his soapbox, arguably the least charismatic leader in British politics since the second world war.

At this point ‘Election Unspun’ is building to a rather predictable climax. Blair arrives on the scene: New Labour, new spin, new shifts to the right. New focus groups, new pledges, new administration but same old politics. The programme arrives at the conclusion that the decline in electoral participation in 1997 and 2001 is the result of political marketing designed for floating voters in Middle England. The viewers are encouraged to agree with this notion as images of the anti-war marches of February 2003 fill the screen and remind us that people still do care about principles and politics.  As John Major remarks near the end of the show:

‘I think we should tell more of the marketing men and the focus groups to go and jump in a lake. The political system is going to hell in a hand-cart if it goes down that route. The public will have no truck with it in a few years and that could be immensely damaging. We need politics to get back to some of the central verities that have always been there. Of course you use modern techniques, but keep them in their place – don’t let them take over the system itself’

A central weakness of this programme is that it exists in a policy vacuum. It fails to demonstrate that political marketing is the major problem, or indeed why. It also fails to fully understand the logic of focus groups and why political elites have turned to them: instead of being a mechanism for clarifying the expression of public opinion and making politics more responsive to public wishes (or even making complex issues digestible as argued by many proponents and exponents of spin) it actually distances the political class from the public. These methods are deeply manipulative and distorting.  Compared to recent documentaries like the Century of the Self (especially parts 3 and 4) Election Unspun fails to convince. My sense having watched the programme is that is will add very little to the understanding of a viewing public that was either well versed in spin, or totally unaware of these issues. All in all I think a missed opportunity by Dispatches and Channel 4. Perhaps a re-run of an older and probably forgotten programme like Surviving Lifestyle would compensate.

Added: April 20th 2005
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