Death: at least make it profitable

Occasionally, you see a publicity stunt so inept, so tone-deaf, that you wonder how it got through the planning stage. Here's a humdinger folks.

This morning I got an invitation to the university's Macmillan Cancer Coffee Morning. I decided to  go along, if I'm free. I'm largely against death in general and I've had enough friends and relatives die of cancer in recent years for me to be against the misery and suffering of that particular diseases for me to want to support efforts to prevent or cure it.

Then this Tweet caught my eye:

Isn't that sweet? A massive engineering firm helping its employees contribute to curing cancer in a fun and cute way.

Hold on a minute. BAe Systems Air? I'm sure that rings a bell. I know that 'Systems' is a nice bland word that doesn't give much away but there's something nagging away at the back of my mind.

Ah, yes, that's it. BAe Systems is British Aerospace as was, and BAe Systems Air makes big fast stuff.

What kind of big fast stuff? Well, Typhoon fighter-bombers and Paveway IV bombs, amongst other things. Just for you students of Anglo-Saxon literature there's also a Beowulf all-terrain vehicle, described as 'poetry in motion': Auden apocryphally said that 'poetry makes nothing happen' but the Beowulf can insert heavily-armed killers into any crowd of pesky protestors in minutes.

And they don't just make this stuff: they 'support' their own customers just like football teams have sponsors. BAe Systems has picked the cutest underdogs in the league: the Sultanate of Oman, a violent dictatorship rated by Freedom House as 'not free'.

So that's BAe Systems. I guess their PR department knows that it needs all the love it can get, between the core business of providing mass death to any customer, no questions asked, and the awkward business of all those bribery and corruption allegations and convictions. A coffee morning for charity, heavily promoted on social media is just the ticket.

But what of Macmillan Cancer Care? I know it's hard to say no to eager volunteers, but did nobody at HQ wonder if a charity working hard to prevent suffering, misery and death might look a teensy bit hypocritical hosting an event and taking money from a company whose whole raison d'être is the aforesaid suffering, misery and death. Perhaps they had a big banner hanging above the coffee and cakes: 'Death From Above, Not From Within'. Perhaps they can have a little competition like the Great British Bake-Off?

Ah yes. The Bombe Surprise. It's hard to pick just one winner when your normal method is to kill them all and let God sort them out.

Oh look: double points for this one as it manages to promote the company, grovel to its customers and threaten death from above, all the while polluting the timeline of a cancer charity.

Perhaps there's a perfectly rational way of looking at it. From BAe's perspective, every cancer victim is a potential target lost. It is clearly not against premature and piteous deaths, it just wants to find the profit in it, and quite frankly carpet-bombing is far more efficient than cancer (and besides, quite a few munitions are subsequently carcinogenic to the inhabitants of the unfortunate lands visited by their customers). So if Macmillan cares to open an outlet in say Syria, it's guaranteed some repeat customers. Everyone's a winner!

Joking aside, this is a superb case study for PR students. For Macmillan a nice idea has become appropriated by a major arms manufacturer to whitewash its reputation: for both BAe and Macmillan it's an object lesson in giving a moment's thought to the credibility of your activities. If this story grows, they'll have a representative on the airwaves trying to normalise what it does, and claiming that events like the cancer coffee morning demonstrate what a good corporate citizen it is: we see the same thing when Labour MPs in places like Barrow defend the retention of nuclear weapons because it 'provides employment': in the short term, it does. In the long term, as Keynes put it, we are all dead, and I guess the survivors of a nuclear exchange can find fresh employment burying the remains and decontaminating the scorched earth.

As for me: I think I'll find a cancer charity that doesn't think it's OK to be used as part of a PR campaign. Though weirdly, this happened:

Revealed: Corporate Attacks on Wikileaks

A security company proposed these attacks on Wikileaks to Bank of America. It's not clear whether or not BoA took them up on this offer, but somebody sure has. Either way, it's a fascinating insight into how covert netwar and PR operations work.

Rude management gits

I'd almost forgotten: some months ago, it was announced that the university, despite being several million pounds in deficit, had contracted McCann Erickson (a very expensive advertising/PR firm) to do some promotional work for us, even though we have all the resources to do it ourselves. I mailed the director of communications on April 9th to ask how much it cost - no reply so far.

So I've mailed him again, having heard that he mentioned my mail to his colleagues:

Dear A....., I mailed you several months ago asking you about the McCann Erickson arrangement.

Due, presumably, to an oversight, I appear not to have received any sort of reply from you. Do you think you could address my query?

Yours with thanks and in anticipation of a speedy response,

All my Christmases come at once

Today's greedy porker is Bill Cash MP. I punned about him last week and you all ignored me ('Did Bill Cash in?').

I particularly hate and despise him because he's my parents' MP, and was mine when I lived on the lovely Shropshire/Staffordshire border. He should have been turfed out in 97, but the Tories hurriedly removed the only urban area in the constituency, leaving only subsidy-sucking farmers and feudal barons. When the locals hang shot magpies on trees rather than Christmas lights (yes, they do), you know that they're going to vote Tory even if Fred West stood.

Anyway, Cash is one of the absolute, raving loons who made poor John Major's life a misery. I saw Black Beauty the other day. It's a terrible film, and in it, a bigoted old general shouts 'God, I'd love another crack at the wog'. Bill Cash would consider him a lily-livered liberal. Cash (who made millions from inheriting 'Cash's Name Tapes') wears those horrible, loudly striped blazers and thinks that foreigners think in English really, and pretend not to just to annoy. Though as a Catholic of a particularly rancid variety, I suspect he thinks in Latin. His delightful son William is a dubious 'journalist' famous for anti-semitic articles about 'culturally nihilist' Jews running Hollywood: he's married to one of the revolting rich currently trying to overthrow Chavez's government in Venezuela.

Anyway, the Daily Telegraph has caught him subsidising his delightful daughter.

Despite owning a posh London flat and claiming to live in his 'gentlemen's club', he charged the taxpayer £15,000 per year to rent her London flat - which she subsequently sold for a massive profit - which seems rather odd. Laetitia (I know, we should have some sympathy) is clearly a lovely human being too. Despite being a Conservative councillor for Bridgnorth (about as challenging as standing as a racist in 1980s South Africa), she seems to need a London base, and she's simultaneously standing against Hazel Blears in Salford (the setting for Coronation Street, only it's less pleasant in real life). She has a Facebook page, seemingly packed with Hooray Henrys and the idle rich.

Now, there's a race you wish both of them could lose. I actually didn't think there was anyone less working-class than Blears, especially in Salford - but I do have a mental image of lovely Laetitia turning up dressed in her hunting pinks, shouting 'Hallooo' and treating everybody much as Melchett treats Baldrick. What's her slogan? 'Hello Paupers! How would you like some Cash?' (Though according to Labour Mancunians, she spends a lot of time in posh London nightclubs and rather little in the northern city) and even the Daily Wail thinks she's a waster.

I'm loving this. Lots of rightwing Labour MPs are proving that they're corrupt and greedy - but far more Tories are proving that they haven't changed since the 18th Century: servants, stately homes, assuming that they'll be elected forever whatever they do (as this analysis proves), even hereditary politics. This is why PR or AV is needed: they abolish safe seats, thus making the candidates and sitting MPs work hard and keep their noses clean.

Friday's conundrum (again)

Today's Friday Conundrum is quite simple: who really needs a slap?

My list is obviously endless, with Hazel Blears at the top, but taking in people with hairstyles, Tories, entire categories such as advertising and PR workers, 4x4 drivers, litterbugs, UKIP, anyone who uses their mobile telephone as a music player, Steve Quitterill…

How much are the police snorting?

I meant to rant about this yesterday, but had so much to do that I forgot.

The police and their shady friends were all over the press yesterday proclaiming their amazing success in restricting the flow of cocaine into the country, increasing the wholesale price. Paul Flynn rips this PR bollocks apart over on his site. Also, the Ministry of Defence claimed that they'd seized £50m of heroin from the Taliban a while back: Bad Science's analysis reveals that actually, this was PR-speak (i.e. lies) for $126,000 of opium, or $250,000 of heroin, and so on.

What interested me was that the boys in blue said that the street price hadn't changed because dealers were mixing the coke with any old shit they found lying around.

Well, that's OK then. What a result. Lots of stupid people are being poisoned because they're snorting rat poison, Persil or whatever, as well as a little bit of coke. It seems to me that the cops have got totally the wrong end of the wedge on this one. We're always going on about the NHS becoming a health service rather than a sickness service. In the 'war on drugs', we should be reducing demand for drugs (mostly through education and treating addiction as an illness) rather than by firebombing Peruvian peasants and encouraging dealers to poison their customers.

Never trust a copper, never read The Sun

Do the police lie to us? Of course they do. But most of the time, they merely mislead, dissemble and distort. Why? Because every branch of public service has been encouraged to see itself as a 'player' in the information game. Each agency has an internal PR team - which isn't the same as a communications team - trained to play offence/defence spin rather than to provide accurate, cautious, checkable and honest information. The police have their friendly media contacts and they know which papers (I'm looking at you, The Sun - 'G20 anarchy' indeed, and you Daily Mail) will print whatever they say without bothering to check using boring old journalism - and in the case of Tomlinson, may have added further imaginary details simply to suit their pre-mixed 'story', as Nick Davies points out:

There were six days of substantially false coverage about a man who apparently died of a heart attack as he walked home while a screaming mob of anarchists hurled missiles at the police officers who tried to help him. Any inquiry into this media misinformation will want to find out whether that was simply the hyperbole of ignorant reporters or the product of bad practice at the Metropolitan police, the City of London police or the IPCC.

They got caught this time thanks to citizens ignoring threats to treat filming cops as 'aiding terrorism', but it must make you distrust pretty much every account of any major event prior to this. Nick Davies has a good piece in today's Media Guardian. How's this gem?

when an IPCC investigator came to the Guardian, with a City of London police exhibits officer, he asked for the video to be removed from the website on the grounds that it could prejudice the police inquiry and would upset the family. The deputy editor-in-chief who met him declined and pointed out that the Tomlinson family at that moment were in another part of the building, talking to Paul Lewis, the reporter who had driven the story, and publicly thanking the paper for its help.

But this isn't simply a problem for the rozzers. It's a fundamental journalistic failure brought about by financial concerns (investigative journalism is expensive: transcribing 'sources' and press releases can be done by the office monkey) and by the collapse of a public sphere independent of hegemonic forces: papers have grown dependent on 'authority' and close to power - they'll automatically cite established, discrete power blocs such as police forces and governments rather than test their claims (except for climate stories, in which case they'll print the ravings of any mad liar (Johnny Ball, Bellamy, Lawson, Monckton) rather than the 99% of actual climate scientists who know we're screwed).

La Police Vous Parle

The rozzers have been extremely active on the PR front recently, so I thought I'd show an earlier reaction to authoritarian propaganda, from the 1968 student insurrection.

Ian Tomlinson RIP

I said a few days ago that the G20 riots had descended into the traditional police riot, and the footage of Ian Tomlinson (a man trying to get home from work) being bludgeoned by the police despite the fact that he was walking away with his hands in his pockets vindicates this. Is he our Blair Peach?

There is a cultural problem with the police at the moment, one which reminds me of the 1980s. They're spending an awful lot of time quietly briefing politicians and newspapers that mass violence is coming, and that they'll be going in hard: the very antithesis of their legal duty to FACILITATE protest. The police in this country have always been a reactionary and politicised force - witness the industrial disputes and the weirdo religious pronouncements of the 1980s, and the backlash which greeted Ian Blair's attempts to humanise the Met.

After the facts, their PR people are concentrating on selling a rosy version of events, as though they're working for a washing-powder company rather than a service supposedly existing to serve the public. Public bodies must be held to account, but they also have a duty to take far more care. Police PR mustn't be a marketing exercise, or be seen as an offence-defence role. One appalling example was the police injury list from Kingsnorth's environmental protest. The cops told the media and politicians that 70 officers had been injured during the £5m+ operation. However, a Liberal Democrat Freedom of Information request revealed no injuries sustained by attacks or scuffles with protestors. The 'injuries' ranged from toothache to bee stings, taking in 'officer injured sitting in car'.

This isn't just funny: it's a serious attempt to deceive readers of already pro-police newspapers and legislators. There's a sustained attempt to consolidate the extra powers afforded to the police after September 11th and use them against all forms of protest, as Mark Thomas et al. have repeatedly demonstrated. The National Extremism Tactical Unit is undertaking surveillance of peaceful protestors and journalists as though they are terrorists, and other secretive units are prepared to treat us all as threats to state security, rather than as concerned citizens.

Nor should individual policemen be allowed to escape scrutiny by ordinary citizens or by the courts: the ban on filming cops is an attempt to hide misdeeds, and a recent police brutality court case saw officers refusing to give evidence.

We've all been conditioned to see the police as 'on our side', despite their track record: the West Midlands Serious Crime Squad (aptly named: they committed a lot of serious racist crime), the Miners' Strike, and on and on. I've challenged a police officer for completely over-reacting to some loud kids at Wolverhampton station - a minor but scary event - and I'd recommend you do the same. They work for us and need reminding of this sometimes,

The hectic pace of the suave lecturer-about-town

Another full day. Fencing last night was brutally effective, so I'm feeling the bruises. Today I'm reading lots of third-year project work, and other student writing, going to a seminar on Foucault, PR and concepts of professionalism, then teaching, then coaching, then home for my housemate's 25th birthday party, complete with DJ. As they're all sophisticated continental types, the DJ will go on until 6 a.m - and I have to teach tomorrow. Oh dear, I sound like a tired old man. There's a party for other sophisticated continental types tomorrow as well…