It’s ages since I chuckled so much - admittedly ironically - over a
newspaper article. But last week’s PR Week article on the rebirth of
lobbying under New Labour had me guffawing. New lobbying seems more
corrupt than Old Lobbying since, I gather, it’s not who you know which
may secure access but whether you are politically correct with it.
The new arrogance was summed up by the Communication Group’s Peter
Bingle: ’Those lobbyists who can’t get access talk about strategy’. In
fact, as the article hinted, a more effective way of shifting New Labour
than bending their ear is bending their minds through the media to which
they are incredibly sensitive.
I bend their minds regularly in print and on radio and TV. But my
purpose this week is to state the case for strategists. I am prompted to
do so by Sir Leon Brittan, our senior Commissioner in Brussels, who was
reflecting on Europe’s PR problem in the same issue of this newspaper as
Bingle pronounced his first law of New Lobbying.
Sir Leon proved conclusively that he needs a strategist as much now as
when, 11 years ago, he authorised the Westland leak. This is because he
failed, perhaps because he is incapable, of facing up to two facts:
first, the European Union, as it is pretentiously described, is not all
it is cracked up to be; and second, it is trying to gallop before it can
crawl.
The EC, as I call it, is infinitely better than making war. It has been
astonishingly successful in keeping the peace on a continent still
capable of combining civilisation with appalling barbarity. Witness
Bosnia. But it slept for 30 years until, incredibly, Margaret Thatcher
roused its ambition to advance by handbagging its unfair financing, its
ridiculous common agricultural policy and its claim to be a common
market. She put a bomb behind the completion of the single market and
thereby fed the federalist elite’s cherished ambition to create a Euro
superstate.
There was no stopping Chancellor Kohl when the Berlin wall fell and he
saw the opportunity to go down in history as not just the re-unifier of
Germany but the great unifier of Europe. And so within two years we
shall move to a single currency for some, regardless of the shambles of
its pale ERM predecessor and the problems it will create for the moral
imperative of enlargement to the East. Yet the EC is not yet a
free-trading single market nor an industrial rather than agricultural
community. It is also divisive, bullying towards dissenters, incompetent
in international affairs - witness the Gulf and Bosnia - and utterly
undemocratic.
Until Sir Leon recognises these strategic facts, he will have PR
problems.
Reality counts for more than access.
