I believe in the ‘freedom of the press’, although share many people’s concerns about children’s access to the internet. How to give children the ‘freedom’ to access the huge volume of knowledge and information whilst, at the same time, ‘protect’ them from internet abuse? This is a very serious debate and will only become more serious over time.
I believe that ‘being of interest to the public’ is different from ‘acting in the public interest’ and support recent decisions by the judiciary that all of us, including politicians, have the right to a private life.
However, I cannot abide hypocrites who say (preach) one set of values and act in another. Politicians have been guilty of this in the past.
Throughout my career, I have worked in advertising and the media. It is an exciting and invigorating business sector which is constantly changing.
In my youth, I conceived and founded a music magazine called SFX (industry short-hand for ‘sound effects’). The idea was to take advantage of the Sony Walkman and an amazing new invention called cassette tape.
More recently, I have co-founded Lovereading.co.uk and helped that business evolve into new areas. Unfortunately, for health and financial reasons, I have not been able to contribute as much to this business on a day-to-day level as my talented and hard-working co-founders.
My own company, The Salmon Agency, has evolved into more of an innovations consultancy business than a full-service agency. But I do have some views on the relationship between the media and government.
I have a suggestion which the last may be the most important thought in this manifesto (and possibly of my life).
I believe there is one vitally important area where we are under-using the potential of the media.
It concerns what politicians call ‘Defence’ but recently has been ‘Attack’ (Iraq).
A seminal moment in my life came when I was one of the first European businessmen to visit Vietnam. At the time, I was the General Manager of Ogilvy & Mather in Thailand. Our US clients were embargoed from engaging with Vietnam and our European and Thai clients wanted to find potential business opportunities in the Vietnamese population of 70million before their American competitors were allowed in.
I was told I would have a ‘guide’ but that really he was a Government employee who would report back on all of my movements. A spy.
At the War Museum in Saigon, in rows of glass jars, were the deformed embryos who had been conceived by Vietnamese mothers whose homes had been blanket-bombed by napalm dropped by American airplanes.
During this trip, I was constantly urging my guide that I was European, not American. He told me I did not need to do this. The Vietnamese held nothing against Americans. After all “we won the war” he claimed ”but what we couldn’t understand was that the Americans were bombing us in South Vietnam when our leaders told us they were on our side”.
Of course, the Americans could not tell the difference between a North Vietnamese 'enemy' citizen from a South Vietnamese 'friendly' citizen – so they decided to bomb the lot of them.
And, more recently, I fear this ruthless military strategy may have caused the appalling, and unforgivable, suffering of the children of Fallujah in Iraq.
We are told that we are in Iraq and Afghanistan to win over the ‘hearts and minds of the people’.
Yet when President Obama, who inherited this mess, wanted to win over the hearts and minds of Republican voters to win the US election, did he do it by sending in the troops, by shooting people or by dropping bombs? Of course he didn’t. He used sophisticated ‘new media’ techniques.
Do we, here in cosy Britain, with a General Election looming, know who votes Conservative and who votes Labour? No, of course we don’t. And I don’t think even our ruthless and unprincipled politicians will be blanket bombing us all in the hope that they will mop up the other side.
And now consider what happened when it emerged that thousands of Iranians felt that their election in Iran had been fixed. What did they do?
They used new media channels, especially Twitter, to protest at what was happening. In June 2009, the BBC reported: ‘Although there are signs that the Iranian government is trying to cut some communications with the outside world, citizen journalism appears to be thriving on the web.’
Yet, in that region, when it comes to us communicating to them, we send in the tanks.
Where is the media strategy that we could develop to work alongside our brave Army soldiers?
In Iraq or Afghanistan, how on earth can these brave service men and women tell the Al Qaeda or the Taliban from the rest of the population?
Recently, I heard a radio report that an issue facing our brave servicemen and women in Afghanistan is that the Taliban disguise themselves as local people, enter a village, lay a few bombs, blow up some soldiers and then disappear back into the hills.
What if we provided the villagers (who presumably know who all The Taliban insurgents are but are too scared to say) with the media technology such as laptops and mobile phones to keep our soldiers, or select ‘middle men’ informed as to presence of our real enemies within?
And how differently would our Army be perceived if, instead of firing guns and parading around in tanks and dropping bombs as well, of course, as dying for the cause themselves, they handed out laptops and mobile phones and developed creative messages to help these poor people understand what on earth we are aiming to achieve there (because most of us don't)?
Wouldn’t it help these poor people in these poor countries if we told them more clearly and more often what we are doing there and what we are fighting for – human rights, the difference between right and wrong, the rule of law, the importance of education, respect for others, ‘do as you would be done by’, tolerance, freedom of speech, liberty, democracy?
Quite apart from the lives lost, the BBC have reported that the ultimate size of the bill for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could reach $3 trillion ($3,000bn). That is a lot of second-hand laptops and mobile phones.
So, my proposal is to allocate just a small percentage of these vast costs to develop a media strategy to communicate what we are up to?
If millions of Americans and Europeans cannot understand why we are in Iraq and Afghanistan, how on earth can we expect the indigenous people to have a clue what we are doing there either?
I believe passionately that, as one of the great ‘creative’ countries of the world, we should be developing a more sophisticated approach.
We have the expertise to persuade people to change the way they behave. It is called Behavioural Economics. But I do not believe we use our skills in this area to help overcome the really important things in our society or in the world.
Instead, we have our creative, media and communications experts using meerkats to sell insurance and a gorilla to sell chocolate.
Come on, we can do better than this.
One further thought:
Why is it that the responsibility of countering terrorism within Britain is the responsibility of The Home Office (i.e. the Police), but outside Britain is the responsibility of the Ministry of Defence (i.e. the Military)?
Surely terrorism is an international problem that, like the internet, transcends national borders?
In my experience, expecting two units within one Government Department to communicate with each other is a recipe for disaster, let alone two completely different Departments with different hierarchies and different Ministers.
I reckon this muddled management structure makes us sitting ducks.
