Bell Pottinger is sleazy, but lobbying can be so much more

Great Read > Bell Pottinger is sleazy, but lobbying can be so much more by @jmulligan http://t.co/wgm0y1cv #PR

go go go jonny 5-0 @jmulligan via @leftfootfwd: Bell Pottinger is sleazy, but lobbying can be so much more http://t.co/OqqWsdzA

Bell Pottinger is sleazy, but lobbying can be so much more: Jonny Mulligan makes the case for positive lobbying,… http://t.co/UG90YzZG

Bell Pottinger is sleazy, but lobbying can be so much more: Jonny Mulligan makes the case for positive lobbying,… http://t.co/mCmW0YWe

Jonny says it like it is http://t.co/AEzuEOqJ

Jonny says it like it is http://t.co/AEzuEOqJ

Jonny says it like it is – bell pottinger fiasco http://t.co/AEzuEOqJ

Jonny says it like it is http://t.co/AEzuEOqJ

“The industry is at a point of transition where the best campaigns and communications strategies are being run by agencies that are truly nimble and integrated. Agencies that can truly integrate the consumer, brand, digital, political and issues in one fit are the ones that give true ROI on client’s budgets. In these uncertain times it is the clever campaigns and working in genuine partnerships with clients that deliver results.”

This is puff couched in rather bad business jargon. Please explain why paid lobbying is not profoundly corrupting of the democratic process.

I see incidentally that Unity describes itself with all the ponderous cheer of a conference of used car salesmen as “an agency that builds brand friendship, brand fans and above all brand love” through “the effective exploitation of three media channels … bought, owned and earned.”

How appalling that you should have been given a platform here.

Bell Pottinger is sleazy, but lobbying can be so much more http://t.co/HBDAl6FN

Bell Pottinger is sleazy, but lobbying can be so much more http://t.co/sHvOVWB1

Nice! RT @leftfootfwd @hello_unity’s Jonny Mulligan on why Bell Pottinger's sleaze shouldn't tar all lobbyists: http://t.co/85HnpsL1

The only thing worthy of a response here is the question around the role/need for lobbying in the democratic system. 

Paid lobbying has a roll in any active democracy. Last time I checked 380 degrees, Avazz and Hacked Off are all paid to represent the views of the public to parliamentarians. Green Peace, Friends of the Earth and Age Concern are paid and run policy and parliamentary lobbying campaigns. Unite and the GMB union have policy and public affairs wing that lobby government. Local groups that campaign against the closing of their local hospital and schools are involved with lobbying. These campaigns and interventions all come with a cost and that is a fact of life. 

The question in this week’s revelations is about the ethics and the transparency behind the lobbying campaigns that are run. There is a Early Day Motion 2261 which was put down by Michael Meacher MP in the house of commons which more MPs should support. 

The people running the Alliance for Transparency in lobbying have run a very good campaign http://www.lobbyingtransparency.org/content/view/2/7/ and they launched a report in 2008 that would help the industry as whole. http://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-archive/public-administration-select-committee/pasc0809pn6/ 

“How appalling that you should have been given a platform here”.   – this is a question for the editor

Best wishes, Jonny Mulligan   

Bell Pottinger is sleazy, but lobbying can be so much more http://t.co/sHvOVWB1

[...] also: • Bell Pottinger is sleazy, but lobbying can be so much more – Jonny Mulligan, December 7th [...]

Nice (in its proper sense of meaning nasty) pic of Peter Bingle, Chairman of Bell Pottinger Public Affairs, to illustrate your story, though he is not mentioned in it, nor, so far as I have seen, any of the coverage of the affair. Clever old Peter. He’s been hiding out behind the souffles I’ll be bound, as well as consuming quite a few of them by the looks of it. Still, you’d have to go back to his pre-school years to get a picture of Peter before he’d had lunch.

Mr Mulligan:

Pursuing brand decontamination, your article takes the Gattopardian line that things must change in order to stay the same. So bad lobbyists (eg Bell Pottinger) are incompetent blowhards who take on nasty clients to whom they can’t deliver. The rest of you are really nice and clever guys. Which doesn’t entirely explain why you yourself (presumably) put up a very unflattering picture of someone not caught by the Bureau sting, labelling it helpfully, for those who place their cursors over the image, ‘Arch-sleazeball, Peter ‘that fat fuck’ Bingle’.

Now isn’t that a bit odd (as well as childish) and not quite so ethically pure?

My highlighting your language wasn’t gratuitous. The lurch into jargon about nimbleness and integration and so forth is the point at which you briefly give up the moral high ground act and start promoting yourself. The phraseology is tinny precisely because the underlying thinking is so shallow. Essentially all you claim at best is that you would do things better, morality as a sort of higher competence, but dressed up in what de Quincey called a ‘vicious obscurity’. The effect, though, is striking. Like Churchill breaking off from knocking Hitler to talk about ‘integrated British ovens’ with ‘extra low carbon footprints’. Which is why I quoted it. As I also quoted the Unity text (a) because it is palpably mendacious in intent and (b) because there is something totalitarian about offering to conjure up cults, whether of personality or (in this case) of client owned brands. Nor does any of this suggess a great enthusiasm on your part for engaging with public opinion in all its autonomous subjectivity, which is what in my view democratic behaviour is about.

You are likewise disingenuous in your subsequent response. Professional lobbying has existed for maybe 150 years, PR since Wilson and Bernays. It has no obvious connection with democracy, unlike (say) the right of electors to impress their views on the elected. (I note incidentally that Move to Amend in the US has just won its first victory over corporate personhood. So that is something perhaps.) Corruption, of course, exists within democracy. So must it too be sacrosanct? And unless all cats are grey, there is patently a difference between cabs-for-hire (which is what professional lobbyists actually are) and groups whose focus is around particular sectional interests or concerns (such as unions or charities for example). Just as there is a difference between covering costs and making a tidy profit out of what you do. In which case if you wish to defend paid lobbyists with any seriousness then you need to do so in these terms (by comparing them to barristers, for example) not by some linguistic sleights of hand.

Finally let me add a note on the conceptual interconnection between PR companies and professional lobbyists on the one hand and Bernays’ ‘public relations’, Strauss’s ‘noble lie’ and Chomsky’s ‘manufacturing consent’ on the other. The activities of the former depend philosophically upon an absolute disdain for the public, who are irrational and stupid (Bernays); who must be deceived for some higher cause (Strauss), and whose consent will be created rather than sought (Chomsky’s point). That disdain is, in my opinion and that of others, deeply undemocratic.

[...] Jonny Mulligan, head of corporate, issues and environment at Unity, put the case that there are decent lobbyists out there, who, unlike the likes of Bell Pottinger, have nothing to [...]