|
3. Sir Benard Ingham:
Fight pressure groups on their own terms
Sir Benard Ingham, former press secretary to Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher: Fight pressure groups on their own terms (article in PR Week, 22nd October 1999)
Three mighty cheers for Jonathan Rush, a director of Positive Profile. He’s a man after my own heart. None of your softly, softly, let’s compromise approaches to pressure groups. Let’s tell the truth as we see it and ague our clients’ case as passionately as the campaigners do. If only there were more Rushes around, society wouldn’t get bogged down in fruitless accommodations wasting millions.
In a letter to this newspaper of 7 October, he wrote: “We do them (clients) a disservice by pretending that the only option is to compromise with these groups. Robust opinions and arguments delivered to opinion-forming audiences may well be more effective in the long term.”
I write as one who spent half his working life battling with pressure groups on behalf of governments and is now vice president of one, Country Guardian, fighting the threat of wind farms to our unspoiled hills, and secretary to the recently formed and entirely unconnected Supporters of Nuclear Energy. One of the features of the past 30 years has been the almost exponential growth of single-issue pressure groups, many of which seem to be established in the expectation, not just hope, of a generous dollop of public funds. They have one thing in common: they are primarily PR outfits which, through publicity, aim to distort public policy. Not all are bad by any means – indeed, they represent a healthy democracy in action – but not all are on the side of the angels. Greenpeace’s performance over Shell’s plans to sink the Brent Spar platform in the ocean – widely seen as the best environmental option – was a disgrace. The anti-nuclear campaign has seldom covered itself in glory because of its exploitation of public ignorance. But the merits or demerits of individual campaigns are by the way.
What matters is Mr Rush’s point about the dangers of compromising with pressure groups or, worse still, abdicating the field to them. The worst of them regard compromise as the old-fashioned militant shop steward did: open encouragement to step up their demands. They are at best difficult to satisfy and at worst insatiable. As for ignoring them in the hope that they will go away, let the nuclear industry be a warning to you. It has not entirely ignored what I regard as a largely unprincipled campaign against it. But it never met the campaigners’ arguments vigorously head on. It has, in fact, an aversion to the sordid business of campaigning.
The result is that taxpayers have had to fork out hundreds of millions to reduce discharges which, on independent assessment, would bring unbelievably derisory environmental improvements. And the industry is now saddled with the popular notion that it is uneconomic, even though it is the only practical and tested means of combating global warming. Mr Rush is right: compromise is not the only option. | 
