̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Scott Anthony

'Spin' or be lost: how Corbyn rejected New Labour PR for a more civic vision

Anonymous — Tue, 29 Sep 2015 15:45:05 +0000

Conventional wisdom has it that a lack of guile contributed to Jeremy Corbyn’s shock triumph in the Labour leadership election. He won because he was the anti-spin candidate.

But having been smeared, derided and traduced by the press since winning the election, Corbyn is being urged ahead of today’s party conference speech to get “professional” – in other words time to get spinning or be lost.

But maybe a glance at how PR itself has changed will reveal that what Corbyn is doing has its own merit. It’s not clear that a more “professional” approach, where this is taken simply to mean returning to media relations as usual – of the kind used by Number 10 in the Blair era – would increase the amount of favourable coverage he gets.

Although Corbyn’s speeches might benefit from more rehearsal, it’s also important to think about where Corbyn has been strong. How he has achieved the the biggest-ever mandate for a Labour leader and massively increased party membership.

One of the most interesting aspects about his successful campaign for the Labour leadership was that – unwittingly or not – it revived an older practice of public relations in the UK. Because the idea that public relations is mainly about managing press headlines, or measuring media coverage is actually a relatively new one.

Alistair Campbell – Blair’s former spokesman. ̽��ֱ�� of Salford Press Office, CC BY

It also an idea that plays into a myth that is comforting to journalists, that media opinion is the same as public opinion: that the whole complexity of the public’s relationships can be contained in the media’s representation of them. Or as Campbell put it to the Leveson enquiry with typically astute bluntness: “It’s journalists that are the real spin doctors.”

1930s-style PR

By contrast, Corbyn appears to see public relations as the pioneers of the profession in the UK saw it, as an add-on to civic society not as a container for it. A local mental health charity event was prioritised over an appearance on the Andrew Marr show.

It’s a little-known story that the pioneers of public relations in the UK were the people who promoted the London Tube map and Routemaster buses, who invented “dial 999”, the speaking clock and the Jubilee telephone kiosk. These 1930s innovations were prompted by many of the same types of challenges we face today: economic depression, new technology, and the unpredictable path of mass democracy.

Having come to prominence during the slump, partly as a way of navigating totalitarianism, during the war these pioneers would build the V for Victory campaign, design new towns and plan the Festival of Britain. These initiatives weren’t done to increase media reach, or win the headlines (which they understood were controlled by the newspaper barons and newsreel censors) but they were about building relationships.

People in interwar Britain – from the poor and marginalised to the new consumer classes – were put into contact by these new media pioneers through discussions, films and even telephone debates. They took the electorate seriously. ̽��ֱ��language for making a new nation was taking shape.

When you look at the artwork that David Gentleman did for the Stop the War campaign, which was chaired by Corbyn, or simply the sharply designed logo of his leadership campaign, you can see something of this older visual tradition of public relations in the UK. Good design and media enabled civic connectivity as a conduit for actual social and attitudinal change.

By contrast, an analysis popular with the commentariat is that young Corbyn voters in the election were a regrettable product of an irresponsible age of social media. An age where people want opinions that project a personal image to the world – so-called identity politics – and which signify something about their personality, rather than picking sensible leaders that could win a grown-up election.

Ironically, this is actually quite an old put down; a curmudgeonly dismissal that tends to resurface every time the prospect of political transformation, for example the responses to full votes for women and the working class, rears its anarchic head.

While it wasn’t the change that the pioneers expected, it’s always struck me that it is no coincidence that the biggest economic and political shift that modern Britain has ever seen arguably came in the wake of the new practices of public relations finding their feet in the 1930s.

Sneer if you want but …

̽��ֱ��21st century may once more show the strength of the pioneers' approach to public relations. ̽��ֱ��short-term managing of headlines is an impossible task – in a 24-hour news environment a politician will likely always look on the defensive in times of crisis (real or manufactured). Instead, political parties are forced to play a longer game while shrewd politicians begin to stock up on integrity for the inevitable moments when their judgement goes astray. ̽��ֱ��wheel has turned and approaches that were once dismissed as old hat are starting to look prescient again. Unwittingly or not, this is the approach that Corbyn has taken.

All of which makes it important that being “professional” at the conference in Brighton does not prelude the Labour leadership from continuing to focus on ways to coax the wide network of civic and social relationships that they can call upon (a network far wider than that of the present-day Conservatives) into the media. Bring these groups together – verbally, visually and emotionally – and unpredictable things will happen.

It’s worth remembering that the UK’s news media generally sneered at the many social and political oddities of the “Million” march coalition against the Iraq War in 2003 but it marked a watershed in British politics, let alone new Labour’s electoral fortunes, that few predicted at the time.

Equally, it’s worth remembering that it was at a low ebb in World War II that the “V for Victory” campaign was born. What came out of existential weakness has now by a strange trick of history come to be seen as part of an inevitable triumph. There was little that was “professional” about it.

Scott Anthony, Affiliated Research Scholar , ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

This article was originally published on ̽��ֱ��Conversation. Read the original article.

̽��ֱ��opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author(s) and do not represent the views of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

Scott Anthony, Affiliated Research Scholar in the Faculty of History, discusses Jeremy Corbyn's Labour leadership campaign and the history of political 'spin'.

It strikes me as no coincidence that the biggest economic and political shift that modern Britain has ever seen came in the wake of the new practices of public relations

Scott Anthony

Chris Beckett

Jeremy Corbyn campaigning in Margate, 5 September 2015

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Inside Hitler’s mind

bjb42 — Fri, 04 May 2012 00:01:46 +0000

A secret analysis of Adolf Hitler’s mental state which was drawn up by British Intelligence in April 1942 has been uncovered by a researcher, having apparently lain unread since the war.

̽��ֱ��document was found among a collection of papers belonging to the family of Mark Abrams, a social scientist who worked with the BBC’s Overseas Propaganda Analysis Unit and the Psychological Warfare Branch, during World War II. Written just as the war was starting to turn against Hitler, it shows that British analysts had noticed signs of developing paranoia in his speechmaking and – chillingly – a growing preoccupation with what he called “the Jewish poison”.

̽��ֱ��paper came to light after Dr Scott Anthony, who is working on the history of public relations at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, began tracking down Abrams’ peers and relatives. Abrams, who died in 1994, was a pioneer of market research and opinion polling. He was the man responsible for the ABC1 classification system, famously predicted the rise of the teenager in 1959 and was a key figure in Harold Wilson’s modernisation of the Labour Party.

Marked “Secret”, the analysis was commissioned by Abrams at a time when his analytical talents were needed for the war effort. ̽��ֱ��document itself was written by J. T. MacCurdy, a Cambridge academic working alongside him. Anthony has spoken to experts on both Nazi Germany and the history of psychology, but nobody appears to have known about this report until now.

“At the time that it was written, the tide was starting to turn against Germany,” Anthony said. “In response Hitler began to turn his attentions to the German home front.”

“This document shows that British Intelligence sensed this happening. MacCurdy recognised that, faced with external failure, the Nazi leader was focusing on a perceived ‘enemy within’ instead – namely the Jews. Given that we now know that the Final Solution was commencing, this makes for poignant reading.”

Overseas Propaganda Analysis began in 1939 and was later linked to the Psychological Warfare Division. Each week, its staff produced an analysis of all overseas broadcasts in Germany and occupied Europe.

Abrams, already a world-renowned expert in the analysis of public opinion, believed that transcripts of the broadcasts could be close-read for propaganda and intelligence purposes. In an interview with his grandson, recorded in the 1980s and also included in the materials Anthony has helped the university acquire, he explained that doing so could reveal “latent content” – hidden, and almost subconscious insights into the enemy’s state of mind. By 1942, this highly successful technique was feeding directly into the work of Allied counter-propagandists.

This analysis was one such exercise, covering a radio speech Hitler had given on April 26, 1942. According to its opening lines, the aim was “to reconstruct, if possible, what was in Hitler’s mind when he composed and delivered the speech. Its content would presumably reflect his morbid mental tendencies on the one hand and special knowledge available to him on the other.”

MacCurdy refers to an earlier report in which he had spotted three such “morbid tendencies”, classifying these as “Shamanism”, “Epilepsy” and “Paranoia”. ̽��ֱ��first, a term of MacCurdy seems to have borrowed from anthropology, referred to Hitler’s hysteria and compulsion to feed off the energy of Nuremberg Rally-style audiences. By now it was in decline, and his report refers to the “dull flatness of the delivery”.

̽��ֱ��other two tendencies were, however, developing. “Epilepsy” referred to Hitler’s cold and ruthless streak, but also a tendency to lose heart when his ambitions failed. MacCurdy thought the outcome of Operation Barbarossa, which had stalled the previous winter, had exposed this fatalism, and he wrote that Hitler’s speech betrayed “a man who is seriously contemplating the possibility of utter defeat.”

Most alarming, however, was Hitler’s growing paranoia. By this, MacCurdy meant the Nazi leader’s “Messiah complex”, in which he believed he was leading a chosen people on a crusade against an Evil incarnate in the Jews. He felt that this was starting to become a dominant tendency in Hitler’s mind. ̽��ֱ��paper notes an extension of the “Jew phobia” and says that Hitler now saw them not just as a threat to Germany, but as a “universal diabolical agency”.

̽��ֱ��timing of such an analysis could not have been more prescient. Weeks before the speech, senior Nazis had set plans in motion for the Final Solution – an intensification of the mass extermination of Jews.

Neither MacCurdy nor Abrams could have known the appalling repercussions Hitler’s mental state was to have, but they clearly saw it in development. “Hitler is caught up in a web of religious delusions,” MacCurdy concluded. “ ̽��ֱ��Jews are the incarnation of Evil, while he is the incarnation of the Spirit of Good. He is a god by whose sacrifice victory over Evil may be achieved. He does not say this in so many words, but such a system of ideas would rationalise what he does say that is otherwise obscure."

An archive of documents about Abrams’ life and work is held by the Churchill Archives, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge. Mark Abrams’ family are adding the original copy of the psychoanalysis to this collection, which means that it will be available to researchers for the first time. Anthony has speculated that Abrams, who was of Jewish parentage, might have held on to his copy because of his background.

Anthony’s research will attempt to unravel the contribution Abrams made to the construction of social knowledge. “ ̽��ֱ��story of his life and work reveals something of the changing ways in which public opinion has been weighed and measured, about the methods by which British democracy has tried to aggregate and respond to the demands of the electorate and by doing so has shaped some of the demands they were attempting to reflect,” he said. “This wartime work was obviously for a very specific purpose, but the growth of advertising agencies and market research after the war meant that many of the lessons learnt in the war would be applied, and built on, in the post-war period.”

A secret report, previously unknown to historians, shows how British Intelligence was tracking Hitler’s growing preoccupation with “the enemy within” on the eve of the Final Solution.

British Intelligence sensed this happening. Faced with external failure, the Nazi leader was focusing on a perceived ‘enemy within’ instead – namely the Jews.

Scott Anthony

Dominic Abrams / Churchill Archives, Cambridge.

An extract from the original psychoanalysis.

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