*** The number of PR staff employed by the British regime has increased from 300 to 3,200 under the leadership of Blair and his inner circle. The regime spends hundreds of millions of pounds of tax-payers' money each year on propaganda, and this "PR" budget has been rising steeply. ***
Taxpayers are funding the wages of spin
The Government's addiction to "spin" - the manipulation of information and publicity to achieve favourable press coverage - has become a distinguishing feature of Labour's tenure of office. One of the most profound sources of disillusionment with New Labour is the belief that its entire approach to governing has been ruled by the priorities of public relations.
This obsession with appearance over reality - with what voters can be made to believe has happened, as opposed to what has actually occurred - has created a degree of distrust and cynicism in the electorate that is quite unprecedented in modern British political history.
While politicians have often been dishonest, especially in revelatory moments of personal scandal or professional incompetence, they have not previously been assumed to be systematically misleading as a matter of course. This is the first government in living memory that has made the capacity to deceive (or at least to distort) a measure of its own professionalism: ministers are actually promoted on the basis of how successfully they have mastered the mysteries of illusion, diversion and concealment that constitute the spin doctor's art.
The disgust and alienation of voters who now tell opinion pollsters that they scarcely believe a word that any government spokesman utters can only be reinforced by the figures that we publish today.
Not only have the numbers of press spokesmen in government departments and quangos hugely increased since Labour came to power, but the cost to the taxpayer of the Government's own publicity operation has trebled since 1997, reaching £322 million last year. This sum covers the funding of the marketing and advertising budgets used to promote government policies and initiatives - which inevitably have a party political advantage for Labour.
In effect, the taxpaying voter, regardless of his own party allegiance, is subsidising the promotional activities of the party in power.
Among the Whitehall departments most heavily fortified with public relations spokesmen are those whose contentious policies might be thought to need assiduous handling: the Ministry of Defence (229 spin doctors), the Department for Work and Pensions (181) and the Home Office (145). The distribution of press staff is, in other words, carefully calculated for political consequences.
This insidious culture of press manipulation has infiltrated virtually every institution in the public sector: museums, cultural institutions and community agencies have all learnt the formula. It will take a dedicated effort by any future government to avoid playing the same game.
SOURCE
Daily Telegraph, "Taxpayers are funding the wages of spin", 30 August 2006.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2006/08/30/dl3001.xml
FURTHER READING
Daily Telegraph, "Spending on spin trebles under Blair", 30 August 2006.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/08/30/nspin30.xml
Spending on Government spin has trebled under Labour and taxpayers are now supporting an army of more than 3,200 press officers.
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When Labour came to power in 1997, just over 300 fully-fledged press officers were working in Whitehall, although that figure excluded a small number of other public relations staff.
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Critics have expressed concern that Government spending on advertisements and public relations tends to peak in election years, prompting suspicions that Labour is using public money to sell its key policies to voters. For instance, the Central Office of Information budget rose from £200 million in 1999-2000 to £295 million in the 12 months before the 2001 election. In 2003-04 a total of £317 million was spent but the figure rose to £343 million in the run-up to last year's election.
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Oliver Heald, the shadow Cabinet Office secretary, said he was astounded that the Ministry of Defence employed 229 press officers and other PR staff. The Home Office has 145 press and information officers, yet it has been unable to avoid a series of PR blunders in recent months over immigration and crime. [These "blunders" may in fact be deliberate, for example feeding public fears about immigration to secure public acceptance of future policy changes, because the regime is known to use "leaks" and other means of creating headlines to influence public opinion.]
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The Tories emphasised that the figures did not include the 77 politically appointed special advisers working for the Prime Minister and his Cabinet colleagues.
Mr Heald said the Government employed 18 press officers in its 24-hour Media Monitoring Unit, which raised further questions about Mr Prescott's decision to obtain a Commons pass for his son, David, a lobbyist.
Mr Prescott defended the decision at the weekend by saying that his son had been employed over the summer to carry out media monitoring.
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Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and their army of quangocrats have bankrolled a bloated army of spin doctors, politicising the Civil Service and creating a corrosive culture of spin in Whitehall."
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