GOVERNMENT SPIN CONCEALS CATALOGUE OF WASTAGE AND FAILURE

Monday August 4,2008
By Leo McKinstry

We are all paying for the wages of spin as Gov ern ment propa ganda seeks an ever greater influence over our lives.

The British state used to believe that its role was to protect the public and provide essential services. But today, the hugely expanded State machine is far more ambitious. Like an Eastern European regime of the Seventies, it
ruthlessly aims to manipulate public opinion, promoting correct thinking, boosting its power and organising campaigns of mass deception to hide its own chronic failings.

So eager is the Government to brainwash the public that it is using its muscle – and our money – to control TV programmes. Media regulator Ofcom has announced it is to investigate the Gov­ernment practice of commissioning docu mentaries to show ministerial policies in a favourable light.

It is estimated that £2million of taxpayers’ money has been spent on such programmes.

One of them, ITV1’s Beat: Life On The Street, was a sympathetic portrayal of the activities of Police Community Support Officers, the plastic bobbies who are regarded with widespread contempt. Desperate to change the image of PCSOs, the Home Office provided £800,000 for the series and was even involved in the editing and suggesting changes to the script.

Such behaviour by the State belongs to totalitarian socialism, not a supposed demo cracy. It is hard to imagine a more outrageous misuse of public funds. But then New Labour has always been obsessed with media control. From the moment Tony Blair became Labour leader, spin was the central theme of his project and Brown has continued in the same manner.



One of the disasters of modern public life is that Labour’s fixation with devious propaganda has spread through the civic order. Every State institution, from White hall to the town halls, from Parliament to quangoland, is engaged in this kind of sinister public relations nonsense, usually dressed up as “communication” or “information”. In this climate of deceit, the Government has become one of the biggest advertisers in the country.

This year, 2007/8, the Government’s propaganda arm, the Central Office Of Information, is spending £391million, an increase of almost £75million during the past five years, while direct spending on advertising has gone up from £39million when Labour came to power in 1997 to £168million today.

Much of this money is squandered on Left-wing pros elytising, like the hectoring TV campaign on climate change, featuring tar-stained footprints and a doom-laden voiceover.

In the same vein, the Learn ing And Skills Council, that bloated but ineffectual quango in charge of further education, is spending £20million on its advertising campaign called In Our Hands. It pretends this will encourage us to undertake training but it is just a vast exercise in self-promotion.

Then there are the annual TV campaigns by the Department Of Work And Pensions to promote the take-up of tax credits, with the none too subtle message that we should all be grateful to the Labour Govern ment for widening the generous scope of the welfare system.

This propaganda drive is backed up by a growing army of public sector spin merchants. In recent weeks alone, there has been a deluge of advertisements for such posts, revealing how rapidly the PR contagion is spreading. So Merseyside Police wants a head of comm unications and marketing on £59,000, while the PR team at Camden Council in London is seeking five officers, all on salaries above £32,000.

A classic example of an entirely unnecessary post is the £37,100 communications exec utive at the West Midlands Regional Development Agency, who is being hired “to drive awareness and understanding of our organisation”.

If the West Midlands RDA were genuinely serving the public, there would be no need for this kind of PR.
All the money frittered away on propaganda would be far better spent on direct services. Providing efficiency and value for money is the best PR of all.

But that is not the way Left-wing politicians and bureaucrats think. They are motivated by the desire for control rather than the impulse for service. So rather than tackling crime they twist crime figures. In stead of educating children they debase exam standards. Prattle about the joys of multi-cultural diversity is used to deceive the public into accepting mass immigration and the destruction of national identity.

The more Britain coll apses, the more hysterical the propaganda becomes, just as happens with all tottering socialist regimes.

We can see this trait in the BBC, using its £3billion resources from licence-fee payers to spread the liberal elite’s gospel about environmental awareness, multi-culturalism and the evils of capitalism.

Local authorities are pro ducing propaganda sheets masquerading as weekly newspapers, destroying commercial papers. A Hammer smith and Fulham Council spokesman says unless it produces its free sheet then “we will see large sections of community disconnected and disenfranchised”. But it seems the council wants to undermine the competition so everyone is reliant on the state for local information.

That could be a metaphor for modern Britain, where the Government machine is trying to bully us into accepting its pronouncements. A ministry that truly believed in demo cracy would cut the PR and allow a thousand voices to flourish. But Labour is only interested in one voice: its own.