Politicians and the press are complicit in providing simplistic solutions to complex problems. The public sector should offer an alternative approach by shutting down PR departments, eschewing spin-friendly press releases and, instead, telling the unvarnished truth
The Roman poet Juvenal said that the most effective way to gain power in Rome was to give the people 'beer and circuses'. What with hungry lions, wailing Christians and angry gladiators, circuses were probably a lot more interesting then than they are now, but I think his basic premise holds true.
Give the people 'immigration controls and euro scepticism'. Or 'bonus taxes and infrastructure spending', or any other two-word combination of one-word policies that promise to make everything better and the chances are you will make serous electoral inroads.
There is too much ‘stuff’ to process in modern life so we want simple answers to binary problems. We don’t want complexity or ambiguity, we want big stuff pulped down to 10-minute fairy tales with heroes, villains and happy endings.
My point can be easily illustrated with an example from last week’s Question Time. To paraphrase Business Secretary Vince Cable, the recession is all the fault of the bankers, and a mansion tax will make all of this nasty austerity stuff go away. This is, of course, nonsense and can be demolished with two minutes of Googling.
The UK deficit is £1.3trn and a mansion tax will raise at most about £1bn per annum. So we have a policy advocated by serious politicians and uncritically reported by the press that will cover five days worth of interest on the national debt or about three hours of government spending.
The less palatable truth is that there is pretty much nothing we can do in this generation to make the debt or deficit go away and how we live now is how things are going to be for a very long time. But my bigger point is that lots of people don’t know this and they don’t care that they don’t know this because they would rather have the fairy tale ending of a single easily levied tax on faceless rich people in big houses all things considered thanks very much.
You may snort at this point, but do a quick straw poll in your office and ask people if they can name to the nearest ten billion what the UK national debt is? I bet not many people can but they will still have pretty trenchant views on how to solve it. Say 'tax the rich with a mansion tax' on Question Time and you will get a big round of whoops and applause. Say that this is a futile gesture akin to using a small teaspoon to dig a big hole in the sea and you will get shouted down by the other panellists and probably not be asked back.
In the long run, of course, this yearning for simplicity makes us all unhappier. We vote for policies that promise a quick route to the sunny uplands. We never get there so we stay in the dark and dank lowlands feeling cheated by the loss of something wonderful we thought we were entitled to. Another politician comes along, says we will get there if we follow his route which is even easier and so on and so on.
Meanwhile the press amplify our unhappiness by a combative approach that starts from the premise that all politicians are basically lying to us, there is truly a sunny place if only somebody told honestly us the way to get there and it is the noble duty of the press to uncover this. Think of how the newspapers self style themselves The Sun (ie the light), the Guardian (of what?), and the Independent (of whom?).
This creates a parallel industry in public relations, taking complex issues and boiling them down to spin-friendly press releases. A bit like taking a complex organism like a chicken and turning it into bite-sized snacks. It’s still sort of the same thing, but you would be hard pushed to know much about poultry by studying a chicken nugget.
So what does this means for the public sector? Although since the demise of New Labour, expenditure on PR is massively down, the government still spends about £1m per day on ‘Marcomms’ as the trade calls it or lots of shouty Malcolm Tuckers to you and I.
Local government and health figures are harder to come by but a conservative estimate is that collectively the public sector as a whole will spend £1bn plus this year telling us how well things are going, not long now till the sunny uplands come into view, nearly there etc. This is roughly £3m per day and, coincidentally, this is the same amount as would be raised by the mansion tax.
And, of course, most of this expenditure is a waste of time but it forms a self-perpetuating spiral. The sunny uplands never come into view so people and the media distrust the public sector who, in turn, spend more money on PR and ever simpler messages trying to keep their increasingly sceptical believers on the politician’s chosen path.
If you think I am being too cynical, ask yourself when a mainstream UK politician last admitted to making a policy mistake. Or not knowing the answer. Or saying that actually we don’t have a policy on that issue because we know there is no policy that will work.
And when was the last time that your council or health authority said that unfortunately these things are complex, there are no easy solutions and it really is a choice between the lesser of two evils.
Nobody says any of these things because they know that they would be replaced by somebody offering a more pappy, easily digestible, no chewing required alternative. So we continue with a public sector that is riven with contradictory expectations. The electorate want US levels of personal taxation and Scandinavian levels of public service, and woe betide anybody who tells them they can’t have this.
I want good schools, clean streets, free health care, a state pension until I am 90, friendly bobbies on the beat and low personal tax. Is that really too much to ask ? Yes it is, but nobody is telling me that. Nobody is standing on a platform of pay more now for less forever.
So my plea to the public sector is to stop feeding your customers the feel-good baby food of press releases. Be brave enough to be judged by your actions not words. Shut down your PR department, scrap your in-house newspaper and give the public the unvarnished truth.
Save £3m per day of taxpayers' money by trusting people with complexity, trusting people not to have to believe in fairy tales and, above all, trusting your staff to be able to communicate with the public without the rose-tinted prism of public relations.
You may not stay in your job for very long but in the interim you will feel very much better about yourself and for what its worth, I for one will be whooping and cheering you along (albeit from the safety of the private sector sidelines).
Michael Ware is corporate finance partner at BDO. @michaelware13
